SyFeed RSS Reader - add sources and read your favorite news.

Tools

Change country:

vox.com

Hundreds of “Freedom Convoy” supporters march in downtown Ottawa on Canada Day, July 1, 2022, in Ottawa, Canada. | Dave Chan/AFP via Getty Images Justin Trudeau’s true dough plans to fight populism with policy. Canada has a growing populism problem. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thinks so. Like many other countries — including the United States — Canadians have spent the last several years dealing with pandemic restrictions, a rise in immigration, and a housing affordability crisis (among much, much else). And like many other countries, that’s showing up in a host of ways: Trust in institutions like the government and media is down. Sentiment on immigration is becoming more negative. “Well, first of all, it’s a global trend,” Trudeau told Sean Rameswaram in an exclusive interview on Today, Explained. “In every democracy, we’re seeing a rise of populists with easy answers that don’t necessarily hold up to any expert scrutiny. But a big part of populism is condemning and ignoring experts and expertise. So it sort of feeds on itself.” As Trudeau points out, Canada is not alone. But our northern neighbor’s struggle is notable because the country has long been seen as resistant to the kind of anti-immigrant, anti-establishment rhetoric sweeping the globe in recent years — in part because multiculturalism is enshrined in federal law. It goes back to the 1960s, when French Canadian nationalist groups started to gain power in Quebec. They called for the province’s independence from Canada proper. The federal government, led then by nepo daddy Pierre Trudeau, stepped in. Rather than validating one cultural identity over the other, the elder Trudeau’s government established a national policy of bilingualism, requiring all federal institutions to provide services in both English and French. (This is why — if you ever watch Canadian parliamentary proceedings, as I did for this story — politicians are constantly flipping back and forth between the two languages.) Canada also adopted a formal multiculturalism policy in 1971, affirming Canadians’ multicultural heritage. The multiculturalism policy has undergone both challenge and expansion in the half-century since its introduction. But Pierre Trudeau’s decision to root Canadian identity in diversity has had lasting impacts: Canadians have historically been much more open to immigration — despite having a greater proportion of immigrants in their population — than their other Western counterparts. But in more recent years, that’s begun to change rapidly as large numbers of immigrants have entered the country amid a housing affordability crisis. An Environics Institute survey showed that in 2023, 44 percent of Canadians felt there was too much immigration — an increase from 27 percent the year before. That’s where Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre comes in. Known as a “soft” populist, he’s started calling on Canada to cut immigration levels (so far, without demonizing immigrants, as we’ve seen from his populist counterparts elsewhere in the West). That said, he looks like a traditional populist in a lot of other ways: Poilievre embraced Canada’s 2022 Freedom Convoy protests, opposed vaccine and mask requirements, voted against marriage equality, has proposed defunding the Canadian Broadcasting Service, wants schools to leave LGBTQ issues to parents, and has talked about repealing a litany of government regulations — from the country’s carbon tax to internet regulations. Basically, he’s against any “gatekeepers” to Canadians’ “freedom.” And that message? It seems to be resonating with voters, including young ones. The plan: Fight populism with policy Enter: Trudeau’s half-trillion-Canadian-dollar plan for “generational fairness,” also known as the “Gen Z budget” for its focus on younger generations feeling the economic squeeze most acutely. “People are facing an anxiety that the economy doesn’t work for them anymore. That the deck is stacked against young people in a way that is different from previous generations,” Trudeau said on Today, Explained. “And that’s a problem because it leads to a sense of uncertainty about the future and a sense of, ‘Okay, the institutions and society and government can’t actually help.’ And that sort of feeds into populism.” To demonstrate that government can work for young people, Trudeau has allocated C$6 billion to help Canadian provinces build new housing — if they agree to certain conditions, like building denser neighborhoods and more climate-friendly housing. It also includes provisions to expand child care, provide school lunches, and invest in the Canadian AI sector. To pay for it, the country plans to increase capital gains taxes on the wealthiest Canadians — C$19 billion over the next five years. “I know there will be many voices raised in protest. No one likes paying more tax, even — or perhaps particularly — those who can afford it the most,” Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said. “But before they complain too bitterly, I would like Canada’s 1 percent — Canada’s 0.1 percent — to consider this: What kind of Canada do you want to live in?” Though the Conservatives will oppose the plan, it’s likely to pass. Arlyn McAdorey/Bloomberg via Getty Images Trudeau speaks in April about the government’s proposal to provide low-cost leases of public land to developers and push factory construction of homes as part of a “historic” plan to alleviate Canada’s housing crisis. Can it work? The bet Trudeau is making is this: The best counterpoint to anti-establishment rhetoric is … using the establishment to make people’s lives better. “The biggest difference between me and the Conservatives right now is: They don’t think government has a role to play in solving for these problems,” Trudeau told Today, Explained. “I think government can’t solve everything, nor should it try. But it can make sure that if the system isn’t working for young people, that we rebalance the system. Market forces are not going to do that.” A key challenge will be demonstrating progress by the time elections roll around. Housing and real estate experts generally cheered the announcement — but noted that it might be years before people on the ground see any real change. Elections, on the other hand, aren’t yet scheduled but have to happen by October 2025 (parliamentary systems, man). In the meantime, Conservatives are still ahead in the polls, though there’s some evidence that their lead is starting to diminish after the Liberals spent a month previewing their budget. If he’s successful, Trudeau argues that his strategy could be a blueprint for other nations confronting similar trends — particularly during an election year in which we expect populist rhetoric to play a significant role. “There’s no question that democracies remain a lot more advantageous to human beings than any other structures, but it’s not as obvious as it used to be,” Trudeau told Today, Explained. “We have to remember: Democracies didn’t happen by accident, and they don’t continue without effort.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

The “feminist” case against having sex for fun

12 h

vox.com

Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images American conservatives are cozying up to British feminists who argue that the sexual revolution has hurt women. In February, America’s most prominent conservative activist declared his opposition to having sex for fun. In a post on X, the “anti-woke” crusader Christopher Rufo wrote, “‘Recreational sex’ is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households, which drives poverty, crime, and dysfunction. The point of sex is to create children—this is natural, normal, and good.” Much gawking at Rufo’s grimly utilitarian take on sex ensued. Yet the firestorm largely ignored the woman whose anti-birth-control tirade had ignited it. Rufo’s remarks were sparked by a video of a 2023 Heritage Foundation panel. In that clip, a bespectacled British woman details the supposed ravages of both oral contraception and the sexual culture that it birthed. She claims that the normalization of birth control has condemned women to higher rates of mental illness while offering them little in recompense beyond the freedom to endure “loveless and sometimes extremely degrading” sex. Therefore, she continues, the world needs “a feminist movement” that is “against the Pill” and for “returning the consequentiality to sex.” That woman, the writer Mary Harrington, is an unlikely spokesperson for fundamentalist Christian morality. A onetime leftist, Harrington remains a fierce critic of free-market economics and an opponent of abortion bans. Yet her 2023 book, Feminism Against Progress, won her an avid following among American social conservatives, receiving adulatory notices in the Federalist and the National Review and earning her bylines at the conservative Catholic journal First Things. Harrington’s appeal to these institutions isn’t hard to discern. She is a proponent of “reactionary feminism,” an ideology that shares Christian conservatism’s hostility toward permissive sex norms, birth control, rights for transgender people, and mainstream feminism. But instead of indicting social liberalism on theological grounds, Harrington does so on entirely secular and avowedly feminist ones. Her complaint with birth control is threefold: First, Harrington argues that the Pill undermined sexual norms that had previously protected women from the hazards of single motherhood and exploitation. Second, she insists that the advent of oral contraception led the feminist movement to embrace an excessively individualistic vision of women’s liberation. Before birth control, according to Harrington, the movement aimed to challenge the values of capitalism, insisting that familial caregiving was socially indispensable even if it had no market price. But once they gained control over their fertility, feminists no longer felt compelled to defend the value of caregiving. Their critique of capitalism ceased to be that it valued what was profitable over what was socially valuable and became that it merely didn’t pay women equal wages. Third, by dramatically reducing women’s vulnerability to unplanned pregnancy, the Pill led feminists to indulge in the fantasy that there were no innate differences between the sexes that couldn’t be transcended through social reform and biotechnology. In sum, for Harrington, feminism is now defined by the quixotic pursuit of women’s freedom from all social and biological constraints. And this anti-social, utopian quest has served most women poorly, condemning them to a sexually exploitative dating market, alienating them from their own bodies, leaving them vulnerable to the predations of Big Biotech, and exacerbating their caregiving burdens by promoting social atomization and male irresponsibility. Harrington is not alone in staking out this ideological turf. Louise Perry, a fellow British feminist, championed a similar vision in her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Like Harrington, Perry evinces opposition to free markets and blanket bans on abortion yet has nonetheless received a warm welcome from US conservatives. The American Christian right’s enthusiasm for sex-negative British feminists may reflect the conservative movement’s present challenges. As the reaction to Rufo’s condemnation of “recreational sex” demonstrated, the moral intuitions of religious conservatives have become deeply alien to an increasingly secular American public. With religiosity and church attendance in sharp decline, conservatives need nonscriptural arguments for traditional social mores. Reactionary feminism offers them precisely this. And the ideology appears to have some potential appeal among young women alienated by online dating, pornography, and birth control’s side effects. In recent months, Harrington-esque diatribes against contraception, online dating, and porn have trended on TikTok, a social media platform dominated by Gen Z. Reactionary feminism therefore warrants liberals’ attention — and our critique. Harrington and Perry are both strong writers whose work speaks to some genuinely problematic aspects of sexual modernity. But there are (at least) three broad problems with their worldview. First, where reactionary feminism speaks to genuine social problems, it offers few compelling answers for addressing them. Second, contrary to Harrington’s theorizing, there is no sharp trade-off between increasing women’s individual freedom and meeting society’s caregiving needs. Finally, this brand of feminism is reactionary in the pejorative sense: Many of Harrington’s and Perry’s complaints with sexual modernity are rooted less in careful reasoning than in a reflexive skepticism of change. Why reactionary feminists want you to have less casual sex Reactionary feminism is built atop one fundamental premise: There are unalterable differences between the sexes, and mainstream feminism has ignored them at women’s expense. This idea is at the core of Harrington’s indictment of casual sex. In her telling, the Pill may have reduced women’s susceptibility to pregnancy, but it did not erase the psychological predispositions that males and females inherited from millennia of evolution. By downplaying or denying the persistence of these differences, Harrington argues, feminists abetted the emergence of sexual norms that harm women and benefit predatory men. (Her analysis of modern sexual relations is focused exclusively on straight, cisgender relationships. Beyond her opposition to trans rights, she has little to say about the sexual revolution’s implications for LGBTQ people). Here, Harrington’s analysis converges with that of Louise Perry. In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Perry notes that psychologists have consistently found large sex-based differences in “sociosexuality” — a measure of an individual’s interest in sexual variety and adventure. In every culture psychologists have studied, men tend to express a higher degree of interest in having lots of commitment-free sex than women do. This does not mean that every man is more interested in sexual variety than every woman. But in the aggregate, Perry argues, the divergence is clear. She further insists that these patterns are rooted in evolutionary biology. Males can pass on their genes merely by orgasming inside a female, while women cannot reproduce without enduring an extensive pregnancy and risky labor. This gives women a greater incentive to be selective in their choice of partners and men a greater interest in sowing their wild oats. Over millennia, she says, evolution translated these disparate incentives into distinct psychological tendencies. Alas, in Perry’s view, modern sexual culture ignores these distinctions. According to her, most women prefer a committed relationship to casual hookups. But the existence of oral contraception and legal abortion — combined with feminism’s insistence on male and female interchangeability — has left them without an excuse for withholding sex until commitment is offered. More crucially, such women face a collective action problem: Perry argues that in a culture where casual sex is normative, refusing to placate male desire puts a woman at a competitive disadvantage in the race for desirable men. Online dating exacerbates these problems. According to Harrington, natural selection has also bequeathed to modern women a preference for men with high social status (in addition to various coveted physical traits). Combine that predisposition with men’s taste for sexual variety and a norm of casual sex, and you end up with a highly dysfunctional dating market. Harrington and Perry note that on the dating app Hinge, 10 percent of men receive 58 percent of all women’s “likes.” From this, they extrapolate that predatory high-status men are each stringing along several women at a time, exploiting them for degrading and unfulfilling sex (only 10 percent of women orgasm in first-time hookups) before assembling new harems. Meanwhile, legions of mediocre men go sexless and mutate into misogynistic incels. Mutual hostility between the sexes festers. In the reactionary feminist narrative, all of this translates into fewer marriages, a collapsing birth rate, and, within Gen Z, a widespread, porn-addled celibacy. At the same time, partly because oral contraception is not always effective (especially when imperfectly used), the normalization of casual sex has yielded an increase in single motherhood. And although such mothers should not be stigmatized, Harrington and Perry argue, it’s nevertheless true that both mothers and children tend to fare better with a partner in the picture. Thus, reactionary feminists validate the Christian right’s deep-seated conviction that birth control is lamentable and that women have suffered from the decline of traditional sexual morality. And this is far from the only place where heterodox British feminists and fundamentalist American theocrats see eye to eye. As one might expect, reactionary feminists also share the right’s opposition to pornography, sex work, BDSM, and health care and inclusion for trans people. Even on reproductive rights, Harrington and Perry aid the conservative project. Although both oppose the legal prohibition of abortion, they also maintain that modern feminism favors personal autonomy over social responsibility to a pathological extent and see the normalization of abortion as a case in point. Harrington writes that “as long as we uphold women’s right to end a pregnancy, we conclusively favour the Hobbesian vision of selfhood over one that makes room for dependency and care.” Perry has suggested that the trivialization of abortion puts us on a slippery slope to normalizing a sexual culture on par with ancient Rome, up to and including infanticide. Modern sexual culture does fail some women Reactionary feminists get a few things right. Harrington and Perry aren’t entirely wrong about human sexual psychology, and they speak to some genuine flaws in contemporary gender relations. But their inattention to public policy and their warped political priorities leave them ill equipped to provide solutions to the real problems they identify. That cis men have, on average, a greater appetite for casual sex than cis women has been exhaustively documented. As the evolutionary psychologists David Michael Buss and David P. Schmitt noted in a 2011 journal article, a long list of studies have found that men are more likely than women to 1) seek one-night stands, 2) consent to sex with a stranger, 3) agree to have sex with a partner after knowing them for only a brief period of time, 4) and express positive attitudes about casual sex, among myriad other behaviors indicative of high sociosexuality. A large-scale survey of 52 different nations — spread across six different continents — found that in every single culture surveyed, male respondents expressed more interest in sexual variety than female respondents. It is theoretically possible that these disparities are entirely the product of social conditioning. But their presence across cultures lends credence to the notion that biology plays some role. Evolutionary psychology can be put to ill use. But Harrington and Perry are certainly right that we are all products of evolution, and it’s doubtlessly true that ejaculating requires orders of magnitude less time and energy than carrying a pregnancy to term. Given the centrality of sex to natural selection, it would be surprising if this fundamental asymmetry between what it takes for a cis man to pass on his genes and what it takes for a cis woman to do so left no imprint whatsoever on their respective average predispositions. It does not follow, however, that the collapse of taboos against casual sex has been a disaster for women. Men may be more likely to desire casual sex than women. But plenty of women appreciate the prerogative to have a little fun (or, at least, to know whether they have sexual chemistry with a person before marrying them). This said, there is a little evidence to back up the reactionary feminist claim that modern dating is serving men better than women, if only slightly. In a 2022 Pew Research survey, 57 percent of men who used online dating platforms reported primarily positive experiences with the apps, while 48 percent of women did. Men were also more than twice as likely as women to say that they were using online dating to “have casual sex,” with 31 percent of the former saying it was a “major reason” they used the apps and only 13 percent of the latter said the same. But this data paints a far less dystopian portrait of modern dating than reactionary feminists do: Nearly half of women using online dating have had largely positive experiences, and a plurality of male daters (42 percent) are looking for a committed relationship, according to the Pew survey. Nevertheless, it appears to be true that some number of heterosexual women are having a rough time on the dating market, partly because their male dates tend to be more interested in commitment-free hookups than they are. Some of reactionary feminists’ other complaints with sexual modernity are more indisputably well founded. There is no question that the percentage of children growing up in single-parent households has increased in the US since the arrival of the sexual revolution, rising from 9 percent in the 1960s to 23 percent in 2019. It is also clear that the overwhelming majority of single parents are women, that children of married parents tend to fare better than those of single parents (all else equal), and that single mothers suffer exceptionally high rates of poverty. Reactionary feminists have few answers for what we should do about this But reactionary feminists offer little insight into what, precisely, we should do about any of this. Harrington and Perry both recognize that there is no going back to a world before the Pill (and grudgingly acknowledge that doing so would have significant downsides, in any case). In their prescriptive content, both Feminism Against Progress and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution more closely resemble self-help guides than political manifestos. Harrington’s book encourages women to reclaim their “sexual self-discipline” by going off birth control, thereby ensuring that they only go to bed with men whom they trust enough to wear a condom or pull out. Perry’s book, meanwhile, concludes with a chapter titled “Listen to Your Mother,” in which she advises young women to (among other things) love themselves, trust their moral intuitions, and hold off on having sex with a new boyfriend “for at least a few months” to discover whether he’s serious about them. It’s plausible that some young women will find this advice helpful. But given that — in reactionary feminists’ own telling — so-called hookup culture is a downstream consequence of reproductive technology, it is unclear how Perry’s call for chastity is supposed to produce social change. Meanwhile, if one’s aim is to reduce single motherhood, encouraging women to abandon the Pill in favor of “cycle tracking” and the pull-out method for pregnancy prevention seems unwise. Perry’s and Harrington’s books both evince disdain for free-market economics. And in an email to Vox, Harrington described American social policy as “frankly barbarous” in its failure to provide universal access to “perinatal healthcare or federally mandated maternity leave.” And yet if reactionary feminists support economic reforms that would ease the poverty of single mothers and support family formation, they devote little time or space to advocating for such measures. Indeed, the only political activity that Feminism Against Progress endorses at length is the struggle against trans rights. Rather than trying to elect parties that support expansions of family-centric social welfare policies, Harrington implores reactionary feminists to focus on capturing NGOs and educational institutions so as to push back against gender-neutral restrooms and policies on the use of trans students’ correct pronouns in schools. This seems like a difficult set of priorities to justify, even if one were to accept all of Harrington’s own trans-exclusionary premises. Whatever one’s opinion on sex-segregated spaces or public schools’ pronoun policies, it seems obvious that these measures have less material impact on the welfare of cis women writ large than, say, whether the state guarantees them enough income to take maternity leave or keep their children out of poverty. Giving women control over their fertility makes it easier to care for our society’s vulnerable, not harder Harrington’s concern that mainstream feminism has grown excessively individualistic — and inadequately attuned to the interests of working-class women — is not entirely unfounded. Certainly, upper-middle-class women have dominated the feminist movement since its inception. And, at least in the United States, that movement has had greater success in dismantling barriers to women’s full participation in market commerce than in fundamentally remaking economic institutions. Nevertheless, the belief that there is a sharp trade-off between increasing women’s individual autonomy and economic agency on the one hand and meeting our society’s collective needs for caregiving on the other is mistaken. Women’s rising labor-force participation may have entailed a reduction in the number of hours that mothers spent with their own small children or older relatives. Yet the half century since the sexual revolution has also witnessed declines in poverty among both children and older adults. In material terms, the United States is taking much better care of its most vulnerable residents today than it did in the mid-20th century. We have achieved this by funding social welfare programs that transfer income from the working-age population to those who are older, younger, and poorer. And women’s full participation in the economy makes it easier to fund such programs. If our economies could not draw on the productive capacities of one-half of all adults, there would be much less income to redistribute. Of course, children need more from their caregivers than material resources. And Harrington is doubtlessly correct when she writes that many professional-class women can only escape the burdens of domesticity by “outsourcing chores” and child care to a mostly female “servant class.” She is also surely right that some nannies and child care workers would prefer to be at home with their own children if they were not economically compelled to nurture someone else’s instead. But her book leaves the upshot of this observation unclear. By email, she clarified that she would like all public child care programs to include a cash benefit for stay-at-home parents. This is a reasonable idea. But it is also one with a long pedigree in progressive feminism — left-wing feminists have been demanding “wages for housework” since the 1970s. Finally, Harrington and Perry’s notion that the push for legal abortion epitomizes mainstream feminism’s prioritization of personal freedom over obligation to others is highly tendentious. Their argument only holds if one accepts the metaphysical premise that a fetus is a person; if one rejects that notion, then getting an abortion can actually be an affirmation of one’s sense of obligation to other people. After all, the typical person having an abortion is already a parent, and parents often choose to terminate a pregnancy out of a desire to concentrate more energy and resources on their existing children. Reactionary feminism’s case against biotechnology and BDSM is rooted in superstition Harrington casts herself as a clear-eyed realist who learned to see through her progressive milieu’s unthinking dogmas. Ultimately, though, like her sympathizers on the Christian right, she tends to substitute mere intuition (if not superstition) for facts or reasoned argument. This habit is best exemplified by her indictments of BDSM and biotechnology. Harrington sees the rise of “kink” as a scourge, and one inextricable from the advent of contraception. She posits that people have gravitated toward BDSM as a way of compensating for the drab safety of protected sex, writing that eliminating the risk of pregnancy “takes much of the dark, dangerous and profoundly intimate joy out of sex” and that men and women seek to recapture that “darkness and danger” through “depraved fetishes and sexual violence.” She provides approximately zero evidence for this theory. And although I am extremely ill positioned to speak to the unconscious motivations of masochistic women on hormonal birth control, it seems doubtful to me that the majority turn to BDSM in an attempt to recapture the lost “thrill” of worrying midcoitus that a condom just broke. Meanwhile, Harrington’s hostility toward both contraception and gender-affirming medicine is rooted partly in a superstitious aversion to biotechnology. Harrington says that she felt alienated from her female body as an adolescent but came to find comfort and joy in it later in life. She is therefore understandably concerned that young women going through a similar period of pubescent angst today might be misdirected toward unnecessary medical treatments with significant side effects. But her concerns about trans-inclusive health care are scarcely confined to questions of pediatric gender medicine’s diagnostic protocols or the limitations of existing research on patient outcomes. Rather, she’s skeptical of all attempts to bring our bodies into closer alignment with our conscious needs and desires. As she put the point to me, “The significance of the contraceptive revolution, as I see it, is that it breaks with millennia of medical tradition in seeking not to fix something that’s working abnormally, in the name of health, but to break something that’s working normally (female fertility) in the name of individual freedom.” Harrington regards the latter endeavor as inherently hubristic and liable to be corrupted by amoral profit seeking. Yet her book also demonizes medical innovations aimed at preventing a patient’s imminent death. In Feminism Against Progress, she cites attempts to develop lab-grown organs — a line of research aimed at saving the lives of very ill people — as one of the nightmarish consequences of the contraceptive revolution. Her book’s only actual argument against the practice, however, is that it is “unnatural.” But nature is not our friend. Evolution didn’t shape our bodies and brains with an eye to our welfare as conscious beings or our morality as social ones. Rather, it shaped us for survival and reproduction under a set of ecological and social conditions that our species long ago outgrew. For this reason, the “normal” functioning of our bodies can be quite antithetical to our well-being. “Natural” bodily processes leave many of us susceptible to clinical depression, cancer, and gender dysphoria. For the bulk of our species’ history, meanwhile, the natural functioning of human fertility condemned many human communities to cyclical famines as population growth outpaced gains in economic productivity. Of course, we should have humility when messing with biological systems that we do not fully understand, and novel interventions that radically disrupt bodily processes should be subjected to clinical scrutiny. But the idea that contraception and gender-affirming care are inherently bad because they “break” our “natural biology” — and open the door to further enhancements of the human body — is a quasi-religious argument, not a rational one. If we should not reflexively venerate nature, the same is true of the sexual revolution. Any social transformation is liable to have some negative consequences. Reactionary feminists aren’t wrong to ask pointed questions about how well contemporary sex norms are serving women. But they’re wrong to provide regressive and misleading answers. Focusing one’s public commentary on making a contrarian case for traditional sexual morality — and against trans rights — is a sound way of carving out a niche in a crowded culture war discourse and earning the patronage of American conservatives. But it is a poor approach to actually improving women’s lives.

Compassion is making a comeback in America

13 h

vox.com

A new study found that empathy among young Americans is rebounding after having reached worrying lows a decade ago. | Getty Images/iStockphoto A decade ago, research showed a troubling dip in empathy. A new study provides more hope. Think back to the United States as it was a year ago, a decade ago, a generation ago. Is the US a more caring or less caring nation now than it was back then? If you think Americans have lost their compassion, the data would be on your side — until recently. Since the late 1970s, psychologists have measured empathy by asking millions of people how much they agreed with statements such as “I feel tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” In 2011, a landmark study led by researcher Sara Konrath examined the trends in those surveys. The analysis revealed that American empathy had plummeted: The average US college student in 2009 reported feeling less empathic than 75 percent of students three decades earlier. The study launched a thousand think pieces agonizing over what had gone wrong. There were plenty of theories: We were too lonely to care about each other, or too stressed, or too siloed, or too tech-addled. Younger generations took the most fire, labeled as too self-obsessed and too hyper-online to connect. Most of all, the research provided new fuel for old fears that American morality was on the decline. As Jennifer Rubin wrote for the Washington Post, “The empathy decline has manifested itself in an erosion of civility, decency and compassion in our society and our politics.” But the decline also revealed something else: Empathy is not a fixed trait. It’s easy to assume that each of us is born with a given level of care, and stuck there for life. But that’s not true; our experiences can grow or shrink our empathy. That’s true of individuals’ lives and across generations. Sara Konrath emphasized this back in 2011, telling me, “The fact that empathy is declining means that there’s more fluidity to it than previously thought. It means that empathy can change. It can go up.” By now, Konrath’s optimism might seem quaint. The news bludgeons us with stories of callousness and cruelty. If empathy indeed changes, these examples encourage us to think it’s taking a one-way trip downward. And yet, Konrath’s hopes from over a decade ago have turned out to be prescient. A few months ago, she and her colleagues published an update to their work: They found that empathy among young Americans is rebounding, reaching levels indistinguishable from the highs of the 1970s. Why aren’t we celebrating an increase in compassion? As with the decline, we might grasp for explanations for this rise. One possibility is collective suffering. Since the empathic lows of 2009, we have faced the Great Recession and a once-a-century pandemic. For all their horrors, hard times can bring people together. In her beautiful book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit chronicles disasters including San Francisco’s 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11. In the wake of these catastrophes, kindness ticked up, strangers stepping over lines of race and class to help one another. More recently, researchers chronicled a “pandemic of kindness,” as donations to charity and volunteering increased in the face of COVID-19. Still, history is not a science experiment, and it’s impossible to know exactly why American empathy has risen, just like we can’t isolate with certainty why it fell. But we might ask another question: Will people react to this good news as strongly as they did to the bad news that preceded it? Human beings pay more attention to negative news compared to positive events. This makes evolutionary sense: It’s safe to ignore a sunset, but not a tsunami. But a bias toward badness can also give us the wrong idea about our world and the people in it. We judge people more readily based on the worst things they’ve done, rather than their best, and routinely underestimate how kind, caring, and open-minded others are. Humans are prone to seeing the worst side of each other, and to imagine things are getting worse, even when they’re not. Researchers recently amassed surveys in which nearly 600,000 people were asked how humanity in the modern era compared to years past. Across dozens of countries and several decades, people agreed: Human beings were less honest, kind, and moral than they had been before. This decline is almost certainly an illusion. In other surveys, people reported on kindness and morality as they actually experience it — for instance, how they were treated by strangers, coworkers, and friends. Answers to these questions remained steady over the years. And across the decades, even as people complained about society’s collapsing morals, some major trends like decreases in violent crime pointed in the opposite direction. Our biased minds tempt us to see the worst in people. The empathy decline reported 13 years ago fit that narrative and went viral. The comeback of American compassion, I worry, might instead fly under the radar. Konrath tells me that reporters still regularly contact her about her 2011 paper on empathy decline. She tells each one about the more optimistic update on this work, yet articles on this new work appear to be much scarcer than ones about the gloomier, earlier science. At least some of this is up to us. We can keep paying attention to callousness, cruelty, and immorality. There’s certainly plenty of it to occupy us. But we can also balance that perspective by looking for kindness and care in the people around us. The data is clear: There’s plenty of that, too.

Ukraine aid and a potential TikTok ban: What’s in the House’s new $95 billion bill

1 d

vox.com

House Speaker Mike Johnson talks with members of the media following passage of a series of foreign aid bills at the Capitol on April 20, in Washington, DC. | Nathan Howard/Getty Images It heads to the Senate this week, and could soon be law. After months of uncertainty, the House has greenlit a $95 billion package with substantial aid for Ukraine, as well as funds for Israel and US allies in the Indo-Pacific region. It now heads to the Senate, which is expected to pass it later this week. This move is one of the most significant bills to pass the House in months, and follows weeks of intense GOP infighting about the wisdom of sending more money to Ukraine as its war with Russia enters its third year. Ukraine is heavily dependent on US aid, and its leaders have argued that American money will be critical to break the impasse the country is in amid tenacious Russian attacks. The bill is also a strong signal of support for Israel as global and domestic outcry has grown regarding the country’s attacks in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there. And, it contains two elements meant to target China’s power: military funding for Asian allies — in support of Taiwan — as well as a measure banning TikTok in the US if the app’s China-based owner, ByteDance, does not divest it. All four measures advanced with the help of significant Democratic support, since many Republicans have maintained vocal opposition to more Ukraine funding. The votes for the package also point to a new reality: Due to fracturing in the GOP conference, and the party’s narrow majority, House Speaker Mike Johnson has increasingly had to seek help from Democrats, risking threats to his job in the process. What’s in this package In total, the package contains four bills meant to assist key allies with their military efforts, while also deterring China and Russia. Ukraine aid: The bulk of this aid package — $61 billion — is dedicated to helping Ukraine counter Russia’s ongoing military offensive. These funds include $14 billion aimed at replenishing Ukraine’s weapons and ammunition, $13 billion to restock US military supplies that have previously been sent over, and $9 billion in forgivable loans for other rebuilding efforts, including infrastructure. This measure passed 311-112, with only Republicans voting against it, and provides long awaited funds to Ukraine as Russia has made territorial gains. This bill prompted backlash from far-right Republicans, who argue these funds would be better spent domestically. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has threatened to call for Johnson’s removal as a result of this vote. Israel aid: There’s $26 billion in the measure dedicated to aid related to the Israel-Gaza conflict, including $13 billion to bolster Israel’s military capabilities and US stockpiles that have been depleted due to material transfers, and $9 billion for humanitarian aid for Gaza and other places around the world. This measure passed 366-58, and signals that the US will continue to boost Israel’s military resources despite the Biden administration’s occasional criticism of the country’s bombings of Gaza. More than 30 progressive Democrats opposed this bill and a handful of far-right Republicans did the same. Progressives have been vocal about the need for an immediate ceasefire and have spoken out against sending more money to arm Israel. Aid to Indo-Pacific allies: About $8 billion in the aid package is focused on helping US allies in the Indo-Pacific region boost their military capabilities and better support Taiwan. That includes roughly $6 billion for deterrence, which includes building out stronger submarine infrastructure in the region. This measure passed 385-34 and comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put a new spotlight on Taiwan and the question of whether the Chinese government would one day invade it. Of the three aid bills, this one received the most bipartisan support, with just roughly three dozen Republicans voting against it. REPO Act and sanctions: A fourth bill, which contains provisions of the REPO Act, would allow the US to transfer seized Russian assets to Ukraine, which it could use for reconstruction. It also imposes harsher sanctions on Russia, Iran, and China. TikTok bill:A TikTok “ban” is also included in this fourth bill. That measure requires ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within nine months or risk getting banned from operations in the US. This fourth bill passed 360-58 and had about 30 progressives and 20 far-right Republicans opposed. The REPO Act and TikTok measures were an attempt to add some concessions for Republicans reluctant to back Ukraine aid. Why this is such a big deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enthusiastically welcomed the House’s actions, calling them “vital” and claiming they will save “thousands and thousands of lives.” Military leaders and foreign policy experts have emphasized that US aid to Ukraine has been central to its ability to hold off Russia and will be critical if Ukraine is to counter a potential summer offensive. Since the war began, the US has sent Ukraine roughly $111 billion in aid. In recent months, Ukraine has been running low on ammunition and materiel needed for its air defenses, as Russia has made more inroads. “Make no mistake: without US aid, Ukraine is likely to lose the war,” Max Boot, a military historian and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written. The Ukraine bill was a sharp reminder of the divides in the Republican Party, with more moderate and classically conservative members supporting aid and some far-right members calling for a more isolationist stance. Because of his support of Ukraine aid, and caucus rules allowing any member to trigger ouster proceedings, Johnson is now in a more precarious position. After the House returns from its current recess, he could face additional calls to vacate from those on the right, though some Democrats have signaled that they could save him. Should Johnson lose his gavel, the House would, once again, have to navigate the chaos of another speaker’s race as it did last year. The aid to Israel is notable in that the Democratic-led White House has offered critiques of the country’s offensive while simultaneously encouraging funding for it. The money comes as more than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza and as experts warn of famine and a deepening humanitarian crisis in the region. The humanitarian crisis, as well as some members’ backing for a ceasefire, led to the measure being sharply debated among Democrats. Overall, Israel aid remains an enduring flash point for Democrats, with progressives calling out the Biden administration’s ongoing willingness to provide this support without strings attached. “To give Netanyahu more offensive weapons at this stage, I believe, is to condone the destruction of Gaza that we’ve seen in the last six months. And it’s also a green light for an invasion of Rafah,” Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), a Jewish lawmaker who has called for a ceasefire, told the New York Times last week. Many of the issues raised by this package are enduring ones. Ukraine will need more support from the US down the line as Russia maintains its attacks, and Republican divides are expected to persist. It’s possible Israel could seek more funding too, as its war continues, and the bill doesn’t resolve the tensions inherent in the US’s current stance toward the country. And the TikTok measure isn’t necessarily the end of the dispute over what to do about the app. As Vox’s Nicole Narea has explained, TikTok intends to challenge the policy in court on the grounds that it threatens people’s free speech.

The Supreme Court doesn’t seem eager to get involved with homelessness policy

1 d

vox.com

A homeless man takes a break from clearing his belongings along the Santa Ana River Trail in Anaheim, California, on January 29, 2018. | Paul Bersebach/Orange County Register via Getty Images Grants Pass v. Johnson is probably going to end badly for homeless people, but it’s not yet clear how broad the Court’s decision will be. The Supreme Court’s ultimate decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson probably isn’t going to end well for homeless people. The case, which asks whether a city in Oregon may enact so many restrictions on sleeping in public and similar behavior that it amounts to an effective ban on being unhoused, drew many questions from justices skeptical that the federal judiciary should play much of a role at all in addressing homelessness. That said, there is an off chance that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett might join with the Court’s three Democratic appointees to permit a very narrow injunction blocking the web of anti-homelessness ordinances at issue in this case. Barrett, in particular, seemed concerned by the fact that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, “criminalizes sleeping with a blanket” while outside. The bulk of the Court’s questions, however, and especially the questions from the Court’s Republican appointees, focused on the difficult “line-drawing” questions that arise once the Supreme Court says that there are constitutional limits on what the government can do to criminalize behaviors that are associated with homelessness. If a city cannot criminalize sleeping in a public park with a blanket, for example, can it criminalize public urination or defecation by someone who does not have access to a toilet? Can it criminalize lighting a fire in public to stay warm? And does the answer change if the person who lights the fire needs to do so in order to cook? Given these difficult questions, many of the justices — and especially Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, and Justice Neil Gorsuch — suggested that maybe the courts should stay away from homelessness policy altogether and let local governments sort out how they want to deal with this issue. Meanwhile, at least three justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — floated the possibility that the federal judiciary may lack jurisdiction to hear this case to begin with. Such a decision would allow the Court to punt on the broader question of whether the Constitution permits the government to effectively criminalize homelessness. Given the morass of competing concerns raised by different justices, it is difficult to predict what the Court’s opinion will ultimately say — although, again, it is unlikely that Grants Pass will end in a significant victory for people who lack shelter. Grants Pass turns on the difference between “status” and “action” This case asks how the Court should apply its decision in Robinson v. California (1962), which struck down a California law making it a crime to “be addicted to the use of narcotics.” Robinson reasoned that the government may not make it a crime simply to be something — what the Court called a “status” crime — so a state cannot arrest someone simply for being a person with a drug addiction. That said, Robinson does permit a state to punish “a person for the use of narcotics, for their purchase, sale or possession, or for antisocial or disorderly behavior resulting from their administration.” So it is constitutional to punish someone for actions that are closely tied to their status as an addict, even if the addiction itself cannot be a crime. The issue in Grants Pass is that the city enacted a web of ordinances that do not explicitly ban being homeless within the city’s borders — that is, they do not actually say that someone can be charged with a crime simply for existing without a permanent address. But the plaintiffs in this case, unhoused residents of Grants Pass, Oregon, argue that the city enacted so many restrictions that it is inevitable that any homeless person in that city will eventually violate one, and thus these ordinances amount to an effective ban on the status of being homeless. Among other things, the city forbids so much as wrapping yourself in a blanket while sitting or lying down in public. Because it is often very cold in Grants Pass, that means that an unhoused individual in that city has nowhere to sleep. At least some of the justices appeared unconcerned with the fact that Grants Pass is effectively criminalizing an activity that every unsheltered person in the city will have to do eventually: sleeping. Gorsuch, for example, accused Edwin Kneedler, the Justice Department lawyer who argued that Robinson should give some protection to homeless people in this case, of trying to “extend Robinson.” In Gorsuch’s view, Robinson was strictly focused on explicit bans on living with a particular status. So, just as the government cannot criminalize addiction itself but can prohibit activities commonly associated with addiction (such as drug use), it also is free to criminalize any activity associated with homelessness — even if it is inevitable that a particular homeless person will engage in that activity. Roberts, meanwhile, tossed out various competing theories for why he might rule in favor of the city in this case. At one point, he warned that a too-broad definition of what constitutes a status crime could prevent the government from criminalizing the “status” of being a bank robber. At another point, he suggested that the status of being homeless is too transient to qualify for protection under Robinson, pointing out that someone may gain or lose access to shelter on any particular day. The Chief’s overarching concern, however, appeared to be that courts are just not well-suited to address homelessness policy. Why would someone think that “these nine people,” meaning himself and his colleagues, are better suited to decide whether a city should focus its limited resources on addressing homelessness and not, say, replacing lead pipes or some other important problem? Not every justice was as skeptical of the plaintiffs’ arguments as Roberts and Gorsuch, but even some of the more sympathetic justices worried about the courts getting too involved in addressing homelessness. Barrett, for example, pointed out that Grants Pass is a “pre-enforcement” case — meaning that the lower courts forbade the city from enforcing its ordinance against anyone experiencing “involuntary” homelessness, regardless of that person’s individual circumstances. Barrett suggested that a better approach might be a narrow Supreme Court decision holding that Robinson may still protect some unhoused individuals, but also holding that individual homeless people must wait until they are charged with violating the law and then raise Robinson as a defense against those charges. The advantage of this approach is that it would mean that a court could determine whether this particular individual was truly unable to exist in Grants Pass without violating the city’s ordinances. And there’s also a possibility that the Court might make this case go away without deciding it at all. The federal courts may not have jurisdiction over this case No one is allowed to file a federal lawsuit challenging a particular law unless they can show that they’ve been injured in some way by the law they are challenging, a requirement known as “standing.” Federal courts also typically lose jurisdiction over a case challenging a particular law if that law ceases to operate against the plaintiffs, rendering the case “moot.” As at least three justices noted at oral argument, there are plausible arguments that the plaintiffs in this case either lack standing or that their case has become moot. Thomas and Sotomayor raised a potential standing problem. Robinson says it is unconstitutional to make it a crime to have a particular status, but it’s less clear whether Robinson prohibits civil lawsuits arising out of an individual’s status. As Thomas noted, it’s not clear whether any of the plaintiffs named in this suit have actually been hit with a criminal sanction (as opposed to a civil fine), so they may lack standing to assert their claims under Robinson. Meanwhile, Jackson flagged a potential mootness problem. The state of Oregon, she noted, has passed a law that limits Grants Pass’s (or any other municipality in Oregon’s) authority to target homeless individuals with ordinances like the ones in this case. So there may no longer be a live conflict between the plaintiffs in Grants Pass and the city because state law now forbids the city from enforcing its ordinances against those plaintiffs. A decision on standing or mootness grounds would most likely delay a reckoning on whether the law can criminalize homelessness, but it is unlikely to put that dispute off altogether. That’s because a 2018 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the Constitution “bars a city from prosecuting people criminally for sleeping outside on public property when those people have no home or other shelter to go to.” That decision will remain in effect unless the Supreme Court modifies it or tosses it out, so another jurisdiction in the Ninth Circuit (which encompasses nine western states) could raise the same question presented by Grants Pass in some future case. But the justices did appear uncertain how they want to resolve the difficult line-drawing questions raised by Grants Pass. A decision punting the case on standing or mootness grounds would, at the very least, buy them more time to think about those questions.

On Earth Day, Vox Releases Home Planet, A Project Highlighting the Personal Dimensions of Climate Change in our Daily Lives

1 d

vox.com

Rachel Hillis for Vox Highlighting the unexpected ways our lives are connected with the natural world and how humans can deepen that connection and preserve our shared planet. Today, on Earth Day, Vox launches a new editorial project, Home Planet, from the Climate, Even Better, and Future Perfect teams. Home Planet is a collection of feature stories that celebrate the unexpected ways our lives intertwine with the natural world and how humans can adapt to preserve our planet and deepen our connection to Earth. “The climate crisis is such a huge, abstract problem. Considering our human timescales, it is this slow-motion horror that often feels disconnected from daily life. We wanted to create something that illuminated the opposite, so Home Planet was born,” says climate editor Paige Vega. “The package includes eight stories exploring life and living on planet Earth as a shared home, exploring how we all grapple with climate change in our own lives, homes, and relationships.” Contributors to the package include Tracy Ross, who provides an intimate exploration of parenting Generation Alpha as her preteen daughter comes of age during a time of climate acceleration; Benji Jones, who explores the underground NYC wildlife-rehabber community; Allie Volpe and Benji Jones, who provide a relatable guide that helps connect readers to the outdoors; and artist Christine Mi and Marina Bolotnikova, whose graphic essay teaches readers how to incorporate a plant-based diet into their lives. Additionally, Brian Resnick sits down in conversation with Ferris Jabr, author of the forthcoming book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life; Umair Irfan explores the efficiency wars and our fraught relationships with our household appliances; Keren Landman dives deep into how a quirky census of squirrels helped her find community; and Paige Vega explores how the climate crisis has disrupted our sense of home and belonging. Taken together, these stories give readers new frameworks and ideas for solving problems and help them make more informed decisions in their daily lives. Even the smallest shifts, the most subtle changes in our orientation, can make a huge difference in how we exist on our planet. As humans on Earth in 2024, there’s still much to be hopeful about.

Do you need to worry about “forever chemicals”?

1 d

vox.com

Water being sampled for PFAS testing in Salindres, France, in April 2024. | Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty Images A roadmap for PFAS risk, testing, and more. In 1992, Sandy Wynn-Stelt and her husband Joel bought a house they loved in a wooded area near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Twenty-four years later, Joel abruptly died of liver cancer; the year after that, state authorities knocked on Sandy’s door to ask if they could test the private well that supplied her home’s drinking water. That water, it turned out, had 38,000 parts per trillion of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS. And the results were even higher on repeat testing. The chemicals had leached into her and her neighbors’ wells from the surrounding aquifer, into which the Wolverine Worldwide shoe company had been dumping its tannery waste for years. The attorney Wynn-Stelt hired suggested she get her blood checked for PFAS, and when her stratospherically high levels came back, “everybody’s jaw hit the floor,” she says. Her doctor, initially flummoxed, knew of a study that had found high cancer and disease risks in thousands exposed to PFAS over the course of a half-century near a West Virginia DuPont plant (an event that received renewed attention after the 2019 release of the film Dark Waters). Soon after, Wynn-Stelt was diagnosed with thyroid cancer — a very treatable condition with an excellent prognosis, but still a shock. Wynn-Stelt feels lucky her doctor took her seriously and responded proactively. She’s since helped create a medical education video aimed at clinicians, but realizes many patients and providers still struggle to find a way forward when PFAS exposure is on the list of health concerns. “How do we get doctors to pay attention to that along with the 3,000 other things?” she says. PFAS isn’t just one chemical, but thousands of different chemicals used in a range of industrial processes, many of which involve making products slick, nonstick, or waterproof. Unlike some other synthetic chemicals, they’re extraordinarily hard to break apart: They degrade especially slowly in the environment and in human bodies, leading to the moniker “forever chemicals.” For decades, companies dumped PFAS directly into the natural environment, including rivers and aquifers, contaminating drinking water in many parts of the US. Additionally, consumer products shed the chemicals onto surfaces in our homes and into the food we eat. As a consequence, experts believe most people have some quantity of PFAS in their bodies. In early April, the Environmental Protection Agency set the first national limits for six PFAS chemicals in drinking water; water purveyors will have five years to comply. While that’s an important step, it doesn’t address the broader problem of the US’s broken policy regulating the chemical industry’s safety practices — policies made even more favorable to industry under the Trump administration. “The number of PFAS that are going out into our environment under the aegis of trade secrecy is very substantial,” says Alan Ducatman, a retired physician who led several PFAS research projects at West Virginia University and now consults for consumer health advocacy groups. In a world where our environment’s safety is so closely tethered to capitalist interests, understanding how to manage and make decisions about environmental risks rests on patients and providers — even though it shouldn’t. Here’s what you need to know about assessing your PFAS exposure risk, getting tested, and working with a health care provider to find a way forward. Do I need to worry about PFAS? High PFAS levels are associated with a range of health problems, including high cholesterol, some cancers, and immune system disorders; some health consequences linked with the chemicals also appear to be present with low blood PFAS levels. While their health risks are concerning — and scientists still have a lot to learn about them — it can be helpful to think of PFAS in the context of some other common toxins, says Ducatman. If you had “the choice between smoking a pack [of cigarettes] a day or being in one of those high-PFAS populations,” he says, “high-PFAS population is way safer.” However, health-minded people can avoid cigarettes, while they don’t have the option of not drinking water — and the more experts understand about PFAS’s links to human disease, the more concerned they get. A reasonable first step toward understanding your own PFAS risk is looking into the safety of your drinking water over the years and reviewing your employment history. That’s because people with high PFAS levels typically get them either by drinking contaminated water on a frequent basis or through extended on-the-job exposure, said Jamie DeWitt, a PFAS researcher who directs Oregon State University’s Environmental Health Sciences Center. It’s not as straightforward as it should be to get information about the PFAS levels in your drinking water. The Environmental Working Group maintains a map of tap water levels from all over the US, but its data is far from complete — for example, no data from New York City is included. Several experts told me that for people in metropolitan areas, the best way to get information about your local water source is by contacting your water purveyor directly. Your mileage may vary: Although my local paper reported recent monitoring (mandated by the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule of the Safe Drinking Water Act) showed PFAS in Atlanta drinking water, details were not readily available from the Atlanta Department of Watershed Management on the website or over the phone. Smaller water utilities not covered by that rule might not gather this data, and if you get your water from a private well, you’d need to get it tested to know if its water contains PFAS, says DeWitt. “If you’re exposed to less than four parts per trillion” — the level set by the EPA in the latest regulations — “you can generally anticipate that your health risks are relatively low. Not nonexistent, but relatively low,” DeWitt says. People whose drinking water has higher levels and hasn’t been filtered (more on that later) may be at increased risk. When it comes to assessing your occupational risk, you can start with the PFAS exposure history on the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry website. At highest risk are people who work in facilities that produce PFAS chemicals, and people whose jobs use products that contain lots of PFAS, including firefighters, carpet installers, ski waxers, and people in hospitality who handle a lot of food packaging. You can also ask your doctor to help you assess your risk. Even if they don’t have expertise in environmental health, lots of information and training is available to get them up to speed: Several experts recommended the resources on the clinician section of the PFAS REACH (Research, Education, and Action for Community Health) website, and the lengthy but well-organized document published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). What does PFAS testing look like? If you or your provider determines you’re likely to have been exposed to a relatively high amount of PFAS, the next step is getting your levels tested. Insurance companies don’t typically cover these tests, and it costs between $300 and $500 out of pocket. Although tests aren’t done by most hospital labs, Quest Diagnostics recently began offering a PFAS test. Usually, the test is done on blood obtained through a routine blood draw, although some tests can also be conducted on urine. Ducatman cautions that testing is somewhat limited in what it can tell you. “What people want to know is two things: ‘What’s my PFAS levels,’” he says, “and ‘What are my risks from that,’ which the test doesn’t interpret for you.” That’s partly because the levels testing labs define as normal are sometimes based on old data — and partly because the industries that produce PFAS are constantly creating chemicals to replace the ones restricted by regulation, he said. To explain what makes PFAS testing so complicated, says Courtney Carignan, an environmental exposure scientist at Michigan State University, it’s worth comparing the chemicals to another well-described environmental toxin: lead. It’s much simpler to identify in the environment and in people, partly because it’s just one substance. “The thing that makes PFAS more difficult is that there’s so many of them,” she says, “so we are playing this whack-a-mole game.” While commercially available PFAS tests might not yield data on all of the thousands of PFAS chemicals that could be in a person’s body, it’s still a reasonable place to start when it comes to understanding the individual risk of health outcomes related to these chemicals. How can I minimize the negative consequences of high PFAS levels? When a patient comes to a health care provider with abnormal results from a PFAS test, there’s a non-zero chance they’ll get a blank stare. “That’s the way health care practitioners are educated — toxicology is just a really small piece of their education,” says DeWitt. Again, patients can point their providers to resources published by PFAS REACH and NASEM to help guide the way forward. These organizations differ slightly in their approaches to medical monitoring for PFAS effects, but both recommend that people with high blood levels of the chemicals get blood and urine tests on a regular basis to check for high cholesterol and abnormal liver, kidney, and thyroid function. They also recommend regular urine tests to check for certain kidney conditions, regular screening for testicular cancer and ulcerative colitis (which usually starts with a physical exam and may involve some testing), and screening for breast cancer (which may mean getting more mammograms than otherwise recommended). Experts also recommend providers speak with patients about the likelihood of PFAS transmission to newborns through pregnancy and breastfeeding, and inform them that high levels of the chemicals may inhibit responses to vaccines. There’s no Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment to lower PFAS levels. What everyone can do to prevent PFAS exposure to begin with Although it’s almost impossible to completely avoid contact with PFAS, you can take some steps to reduce your exposure. Filtering your drinking water can help lower its PFAS levels, whether you do it with the first-line (but pricey) reverse osmosis under-sink filters or the cheaper (but still pretty good) carbon filters in pitchers, sinks, and refrigerators. It can also help to avoid waterproofing and stain-resistance treatments for carpet and upholstery, and to minimize eating food that’s touched take-out containers and wrapping, whose nonstick surfaces may contain PFAS. Many other consumer products contain these chemicals; referring to a list of PFAS-free products can help consumers make decisions that limit exposure. Whatever decisions you make, be aware there’s some uncertainty that’s unavoidable when it comes to these extraordinarily common chemicals. Wynn-Stelt tries to minimize her risk but really wants to see industry take more responsibility for reducing consumers’ exposure, both by reducing PFAS use and clearly labeling products that contain the chemicals. “Knowledge is power,” she says, “and consumers really can drive the economy.”

Donald Trump already won the only Supreme Court fight that mattered

1 d

vox.com

Former President Donald Trump greets Justices Neil Gorsuch (R) and Brett Kavanaugh (L), both of whom owe their jobs to him. | Al Drago/Getty Images This case is about delaying his trial, and the GOP-controlled Supreme Court has given him everything he could reasonably hope for and more. On Thursday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the case where former President Donald Trump claims that he is immune from prosecution for any “official acts” that he committed while in office. It is, frankly, very difficult to care about this case or to spend mental energy teasing out what the justices may say in their opinions. That’s because Trump has already won. Trump’s arguments in this case are exceedingly weak, and it is unlikely that even this Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican supermajority, will hold that Trump was allowed to do crimes while he was president. Trump’s immunity argument is so broad that his lawyer told a lower court that it would apply even if he ordered the military to kill one of his rivals. (Though Trump does concede that he could be prosecuted if he were first impeached and convicted.) But this case was never actually about whether the Constitution allows a sitting president to avoid prosecution if he uses the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. Trump’s goal is not to win an improbable Supreme Court order holding that he can assassinate his political adversaries. It is to delay his criminal trial for attempting to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election for as long as possible — and ideally, from Trump’s perspective, until after the 2024 election. And the Supreme Court has been his willing patsy. As a general rule, federal courts only permit one court to have jurisdiction over a case at a time. So once Trump appealed trial Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling that, no, presidents are not allowed to do crimes, Chutkan lost her authority to move forward with Trump’s criminal trial until after that appeal was resolved. Special prosecutor Jack Smith understands this problem as well as anyone, which is why he wanted the Supreme Court to bypass an intermediate appeals court and rule immediately on Trump’s immunity claim last December. The justices denied that request. After the appeals court ruled, they also denied Smith’s request to resolve the case on an much more expedited schedule. So that’s months of delays, all for the ostensible purpose of allowing the justices to take their time pondering the question of whether Trump could have ordered the military to kill Joe Biden while Trump was still president. Even if Chutkan hits the gas on this case as soon as it is returned to her, it is far from clear whether she could try the case to a verdict before this November’s election. The legal arguments in the Trump v. US case, explained in case anyone actually cares Trump’s lawyers seek to blur the line between civil lawsuits — the president actually is immune from being sued for official actions taken while in office — and criminal prosecutions. Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, all government officials, from a rookie beat cop all the way up to the president, enjoy some degree of immunity from federal lawsuits filed by private citizens. If you follow debates about police reform, you’ve no doubt heard the term “qualified immunity.” This is a legal doctrine that often allows police officers (and most other government officials) to avoid liability when they violate a private citizen’s rights. As the Supreme Court held in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), “government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” The purpose of this immunity is to protect government officials from the kind of liability that might deter them from performing their jobs well. Harlow argued that qualified immunity ensures that the stresses of litigation won’t divert “official energy from pressing public issues.” It prevents lawsuits from deterring “able citizens from acceptance of public office.” And the Court in Harlow also warned about “the danger that fear of being sued will ‘dampen the ardor of all but the most resolute, or the most irresponsible [public officials], in the unflinching discharge of their duties.’” Yet, while qualified immunity often prevents civil lawsuits against police and other government officials from moving forward, it’s never been understood as a shield against criminal prosecution. Just ask Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd. The Supreme Court has also ruled that a short list of government officials — prosecutors, judges, and the president — have “absolute immunity” from civil suits. This is because people who hold these three jobs are unusually vulnerable to harassment suits filed by private litigants. Prosecutors perform duties that require them to antagonize potential litigants: criminal defendants. And judges’ duties necessarily require them to rule in favor of some parties and against others — who might then turn around and sue the judge. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court warned in Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982) that the president “would be an easily identifiable target for suits for civil damages” because of “the visibility of his office and the effect of his actions on countless people.” The Court feared that civil lawsuits “could distract a President from his public duties, to the detriment of not only the President and his office but also the Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve.” But even this “absolute” immunity afforded to presidents isn’t entirely absolute. The Supreme Court held in Clinton v. Jones (1997) that presidents could still be sued for alleged misconduct unrelated to their official duties, for example. And, absolute immunity has never been understood as a shield against criminal prosecution. While Trump is the only US president to actually be criminally indicted, there are numerous examples of judges or prosecutors facing criminal charges after they took a bribe or otherwise violated the criminal law. And the Office of Legal Counsel, an office in the Justice Department that interprets the Constitution for the executive branch of government, has said since at least the 1970s that a former president may “be subject to criminal process … after he leaves office or is removed therefrom through the impeachment process.” Then-President Gerald Ford also famously pardoned former President Richard Nixon for Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. Neither Ford’s decision to issue such a pardon, nor Nixon’s decision to accept it, would make any sense if Nixon were immune from prosecution. Finally, the Court’s reasoning in Nixon doesn’t really map onto a criminal prosecution. In that case, the Court feared that presidents or former presidents might be overwhelmed by civil litigation, in large part because literally anyone can file a civil lawsuit. But federal criminal proceedings do not work that way. Only the Department of Justice may initiate such a prosecution, and then only after it presents its evidence to a grand jury and the grand jury signs off on an indictment. These procedural safeguards obviously do not preclude the possibility of a meritless prosecution — sometimes criminal defendants are acquitted. But they do obviate the concern that a president will be bombarded by nuance suits filed by thousands of private citizens. So Trump is seeking an entirely novel form of immunity, one that has never been recognized by any court, and one that would strip away the consequences of violating the criminal law if a president decides to wield his authority like a tyrant. The best defense of the Supreme Court’s behavior in this case The Court’s decision to delay Trump’s trial for months, rather than expediting this case as Smith requested, cannot be defended. That said, in an op-ed published in the New York Times shortly after the Supreme Court decided to delay Trump’s trial, University of Texas law professor Lee Kovarsky made the strongest possible argument for giving the justices at least some time to come up with a nuanced approach to the question of whether a former president is sometimes immune from criminal prosecution. Trump, Kovarsky argues, should not be given immunity from prosecution for attempting to overturn an election. But he warns that “American democracy is entering a perilous period of extreme polarization — one in which less malfeasant presidents may face frivolous, politicized prosecutions when they leave office.” For this reason, Kovarsky argues that “the Supreme Court should seize this opportunity to develop a narrow presidential immunity in criminal cases” that would prevent a future president from, say, prosecuting President Biden for the crime of being a Democrat. The problem with this argument, however, is that even if the current Supreme Court could come up with a legal framework that would allow Smith’s prosecution of Trump to move forward, while also screening out any future case where a president was prosecuted for improper reasons, there’s no reason to think that a future Supreme Court would hew to this framework. Kovarsky is arguing that the Court should use the Trump case to establish a precedent that can guide its future decisions. A precedent like Roe v. Wade. Or like Lemon v. Kurtzman. Or like Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Or like United States v. Miller. Or like any other precedent that this Supreme Court has tossed out after that decision fell out of favor with the Republican Party. One thing that the current Supreme Court has made absolutely clear is that, at least in the most politically charged cases, an existing Supreme Court precedent will survive only as long as there are five justices who personally agree with that decision. And presidents will select new justices who are vetted to ensure they will overrule any precedent that the president’s party is eager to overrule. So a decision creating the “narrow presidential immunity” that Kovarsky envisions will be worthless unless there are five justices sitting on the Supreme Court, at the very moment when a future administration brings a malicious prosecution against a former president, who agree that such a prosecution should not move forward. There is nothing to be gained by giving the current Supreme Court more time to deliberate over what broad legal framework should apply when a former president is charged with a crime. If Biden is someday arrested on trumped-up charges, the only thing that will matter is who sits on the Supreme Court when that happens.

Climate change is disrupting our sense of home

2 d

vox.com

Jordan Ruidas, of Lahaina Strong, an organization focusing on helping families affected by Lahaina wildfire, poses for a portrait with her children, La’iku and Waiaulia, in front of a temporary housing encampment in Lahaina, Hawaii, in December 2023. | Mengshin Lin/Washington Post via Getty Images As disasters displace more people around the world, our connection to place becomes more tenuous. Climate change is personal. It is not abstract. The warming climate impacts our economies, influences our politics and culture, threatens the food we eat and the water we drink; it even affects our love lives. As climate change accelerates and extreme heat and climate disasters displace more people around the world, the crisis is increasingly disrupting our fundamental sense of where we belong and what we consider home. We saw that last summer, in Maui, Hawaii, when the deadliest wildfire in the US in more than a century leveled the historic town of Lahaina, killed more than 100 people, and displaced thousands of residents from their homes. In the immediate wake of the disaster, many families sheltered in hotels and resorts along the fringes of the burn zone, all to be displaced again a few months later when tourists returned to the city. We’re nearly a year out from the devastating fire and the recovery has intersected with an ongoing housing crisis that still leaves many Maui residents without stable housing. Millions more have experienced the same over the last two decades. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, an annual average of 21.5 million people have been forcibly displaced, on average, each year since 2008 by weather-related events such as floods, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures. “Each of these statistics is a man, woman, or child whose life has been destroyed, who has lost home, family, and friends. Said goodbye — perhaps forever — to relatives who are too old or sick to make an arduous journey to safer locations,” said UN commissioner Filippo Grandi in late October. Those numbers are only expected to grow. According to the international think tank the Institute for Economics & Peace, as many as 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050 due to climate change and natural disasters. In sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the World Bank estimates that climate change will displace more than 140 million people within their home countries by 2050. For example, more than 1 million Somalis were displaced by drought over a short period of a few months in 2022. The dire drying of the country, combined with devastating floods and ongoing conflict in the region, caused many families to be uprooted from their villages. “These are alarming figures of some of the most vulnerable people forced to abandon the little that they had to head for the unknown,” the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Somalia Country Director, Mohamed Abdi, told the UN Refugee Agency. All around the world, the climate crisis is disrupting our connection to place, our sense of home. All of our lives are intertwined with the natural world, but the changing climate’s effects are not felt equally Currently, an extreme drought has enveloped much of southern Africa. More than 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe are, according to aid groups in the region, facing food scarcity and many families are going hungry. Ongoing drought has “scorched crops that tens of millions of people grow themselves and rely on to survive, helped by what should be the rainy season,” the AP reported. “They can rely on their crops and the weather less and less.” The southern Africa drought has reached Botswana and Angola, Cambia and Malawi, where in 2023 Cyclone Freddy displaced thousands of people in the small country. These back-to-back crises highlight a stark contrast between the people moving in front-line nations most vulnerable to rising seas, climate disasters, and displacement and those who move for amenities such as sunny days and warm winters. Particularly in the United States, there’s a lot of sun-drenched magical thinking that continues to drive the movement of people searching for their ideal homes and climate while betting against the odds of climate change and access to water. A few years ago, The fastest-growing region in the country was Maricopa County in Arizona, home to Phoenix, a desert metropolis that averages more than 110 days per year with temperatures exceeding 100°F. Maricopa County reported 645 heat-related deaths in 2023, a 700 percent increase from a decade ago. Those losses disproportionately hit low-income families, communities of color, and workers with inadequate protections from their employers. Despite even worse to come, the population in Maricopa increased by 14 percent over the last decade to nearly 4.5 million people. You see a similar trend in Florida, where many people are moving to areas vulnerable to hurricanes, rising seas, and flooding, or in the Western United States where much of the region faces extreme wildfire risk. According to the real-estate site Redfin, nearly half of Americans who plan to move say natural disasters factored into their decision, and 27 percent of those surveyed said recent natural disasters such as floods or wildfires have made them reconsider where they want to live. But affinity to a place can trump even the most jaw-dropping statistics. The shared unmooring In a previous analysis from Redfin, which my colleague Bryan Walsh reported on at the time, the 50 US counties with the largest share of homes facing high climate and extreme weather risk all experienced positive net migration on average between 2016 and 2020. I was born in Colorado in the late 1980s, and much of my identity is inseparable from the place where I live in the Southwestern United States. Because of the lifestyle my hometown affords me — a routine where I can regularly get out in nature, move my body, and hike — I accept the trade-offs: frequent smoke from wildfires, aridity, and heat. I’m a person of and a part of this place. I’m happy here. I have a community here. I’m connected here. This is my home. Yet climate change has already begun to fray those connections: Our winters are changing — becoming, on average, less snowy; our summers are wracked by episodes of triple-digit heat and our mid-century neighborhood is filled with houses (mine included) that don’t have air conditioning. According to a recent report from the Colorado Climate Center, heat waves are projected to increase in frequency by as much as tenfold by the middle of the 21st century. Wildfires are expected to be more extreme and to occur more often — even during the winter and spring. The Colorado River, which some 40 million people, including myself, depend on for drinking water, hydropower, and agriculture, remains in the grip of a 1,200-year megadrought. I’m reminded of a story from a few years ago by Cally Carswell in which she writes about Santa Fe, New Mexico, a city she loved and one in which she convinced her family to take root. But she began to worry that she chose a place without reckoning with the particulars of its future. “How likely is this place to become barren? How soon? Will we have the tools to endure it?” And, perhaps most strikingly: “What are we doing here?” These are deeply personal questions that reach into the future. What do we do? Should we stay? Where can we go? While the climate crisis widens inequities and hits some communities more severely than others, this shattering concept of home is a unifier. The relative pain, regardless of where you are, is destabilizing. We are all, no matter where we are on Earth, unsettled, in solidarity in our unmooring. Climate change causes literal displacement and spiritual displacement, too. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

The unexpected joy of the Squirrel Census

2 d

vox.com

Danielle Kroll for Vox How a neighborhood project to count squirrels bound me to my wild kin. In September of 2012, when the internet was still mostly good and housing was still mostly affordable, a social media site served me a notice about something called “the Inman Park Squirrel Census Data Presentation and Spectacle.” The flyer, in tidy mid-century fonts overlaying a vintage illustration of a beaming man carpeted in woodland creatures, announced that the event — including a contest, a squirrel dance, and squirrel art — would take place around the corner from the Atlanta apartment I’d recently rented. My first thought was: Is this real? It was a few months after I’d moved back to town, fresh off a series of questionable professional choices and a few wildly unpleasant years in the company of Boston’s meanest doctors, hoping to pivot to a (then) less unpleasant career in public health. I was ambivalent about being in Atlanta: I grew up in this city’s pleasant but bland suburbs, and as a chubby, ethnic, melancholy teen with no interest in youth soccer or Christian fellowshipping, I couldn’t wait to get out. When I escaped in the late 1990s, I swore I’d never come back. Nearly 20 years later, however, the city had changed, and I was strongly starting to suspect I might not hate it. At festivals and parades and restaurants and galleries, the ocean of pale preppies I’d fled had been replaced with kaleidoscopic ambition, people and languages from all over sprouting ideas and hustle. A massive pedestrian connector now linked many of the neighborhoods my family’s yellow Chevy Malibu used to speed through on the way to the zoo, and they bloomed with improvised stages and open mics and mural art. Atlanta in the early 2010s nourished a brand of quirk I liked; this squirrel-counting thing just meant it was that much closer to my doorstep. Plus, it promised to put a little sizzle on an area of epidemiology not all that different from mine, if you squinted. So I went, alone, to see what story the spectacle would tell. Under strings of twinkling lights in the backyard of what was then an offbeat home decor shop (now a Ben and Jerry’s), I watched as a series of earnest nerds presented the results of a project they’d begun a year earlier: A count, a proper epidemiological census, of the eastern gray squirrels inhabiting my neighborhood. I sat in the crowd, surrounded by onlookers wide-eyed with a blend of awe and bewildered delight, and felt something inside me simultaneously thrill and calm. These people had gathered to celebrate what looked like a community science project, and indeed, plenty of math and methodology flashed before us that night. But there was more to this odd little pageant, something warm and generous. I wasn’t a part of it, but somehow I felt invited to be. These were my kind of weirdos. Maybe I would like it here, after all. The Squirrel Census changed over the next 10 years: It expanded, went to the moon (or, at least, New York City), and then, abruptly, ended — sort of. I changed, too. But it left on me the mark of a wild sort of magic, a permanently reoriented gaze on the literal nature of imagination and human connection. This is why, for me, its music will never die. How the Squirrel Census got its start That night in 2012 was my first run-in with Jamie Allen, the project’s earnest nerd-in-chief, then a 40-something bespectacled dad with a skater-boy flop of brown hair. Allen worked days as an advertising copywriter and wrote short fiction in his free time; it was his dog’s squirrel obsession that had first sparked an idea for a story about a squirrel horde attacking a golden retriever, which then led him to wonder: How many squirrels were out there, anyway? For Allen, who got his start making digital news at CNN, satisfying even aimless curiosity was a vocation. The people answering the phones at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Humane Society thought it was a funny question; Allen thought it was funny they didn’t know the answer. A week later, over beers on the back deck of his Inman Park rental with his best friend, programmer Stewart Haddock, he brooded over the lack of data to answer his question, and in the way people do when they’re a little loaded, suggested they figure out how to count all the squirrels in Atlanta. “Maybe you should limit it to Inman Park,” said Haddock, “because you live in it.” Most normal people would’ve given up at this point. Allen couldn’t. He talked about squirrels and the putative counting of them to friends and strangers, at bars and at convenience stores, and over ping-pong, which he played a lot of, also mostly at bars. And the strange thing was, like the kind of uncannily selective magnet that inexorably sucks together the parts of a Voltron or assembles Avengers, the idea drew the right people together into what would eventually, serendipitously become the volunteer Squirrel Census team. If the project were a cartoon, its origin story would make an ideal opening-credits montage, with blazing light arcs trailing each member as they’re raptured out of their quotidian lives as professional mapmakers, actual squirrel epidemiologists, and Department of the Interior forestry mavens. Each one is slammed by a gust of wind into a seat at the long pine table at Allen’s house (code-named Tom Clancy for the twin sets of dark front windows framing the entryway like a pair of aviators), and as kiddie stadium rock plays, they — on three! — vow to actually do it, to count the squirrels in Allen’s neighborhood. And to do it right. Is the Squirrel Census science? Yes … but also, no. That might be why the project initially appealed to me: It was the kind of science I’d moved to Atlanta to learn to do, focused not only on understanding the natural world, but on making its invisible mechanics legible to its inhabitants. To be clear, counting squirrels is a totally legitimate scientific pursuit. Scientists survey them to stay ahead of threats that invasive species pose to shared habitats, and to investigate diseases that spread at the seams where human and animal life entwine. They also count squirrels to better understand the health of the environment that sustains them; like other wild animals, squirrels function as sentinels of ecological health. Humans have been tracking squirrel migrations for at least two centuries. The most recent — the Great Squirrel Migration of 1968, in which swarms of starving eastern gray squirrels crisscrossed the eastern US, probably in search of food — was chronicled by the Danish-American wildlife biologist Vagn Flyger, who sometimes trapped the animals in his backyard using a combination of peanut butter and crushed Valium. Flyger’s work also forms the basis of the Squirrel Census’s method for estimating a squirrel population based on point-in-time counts. In 2012, based on methods Flyger published in 1959, the team overlaid a map of the Inman Park neighborhood with a hectare grid. They assigned each hectare to a few volunteer sighters, many recruited from among family and friends. In April 2012, they recorded squirrel counts and other activity, twice in each hectare, for 20 minutes at a time. The team later used Flyger’s validated formula — which includes an adjustable factor to account for trees and other squirrel-obscuring miscellany — to estimate the neighborhood’s overall squirrel abundance. It would be easy to confuse the Squirrel Census with science. It used validated, evidence-based, scientific methods for achieving the central goals of the project, and presented its findings in the kind of precise visual language that communicates close examination of a subject along multiple axes. And after all, most animal counts are science. The difference, which was apparent as soon as Jamie Allen opened his mouth that night in 2012, was that the Squirrel Census’s chief purpose was to produce not science but story. I hunted down my own copy of a squirrel heat map I’d seen mounted on the wall under the string lights that night in September. Against a spare rendering of my neighborhood’s streets, buildings, and parks in grayscale and mint green, its accounted-for squirrels clustered in overlapping bubbles of pale peach; it was the first piece of art I ever got professionally framed. I hung it in my living room. When I invited people for dinners or parties or drinks on the covered front porch, I’d often find at least one person standing in front of the map for many minutes, staring, or looking for their house, or sometimes just murmuring, “Is this real?” A new mythology of home As a kid, I always felt mismatched with Atlanta, like an alien whose spaceship had taken a wrong turn on the way to its real hometown. In short order, the city would transform itself into a Summer Olympics host, then become hip-hop’s center of gravity, then blossom into something sneeringly but accurately called Y’allywood — but back then, it felt to me like a backwater, sleepy and stifling under its famous tree canopy. When I came back in 2012, I’d had other options — which meant that now, I was an adult who had chosen to come back to the place where I’d grown up. Atlanta had changed, but the story I told myself about it had not. At the exact moment I was looking for a new way to understand my hometown, the Squirrel Census was spinning a contemporary mythology set against its backdrop. In this new lore, we, like the ancient Greeks, looked upward to find our heroes, outlaws, tricksters, and lovers — but they were in the treetops, not the heavens, and the new Mount Olympus was just outside my door. Who were we, the humans, in this story? What was this city I now lived in? I was no longer an awkward, undesirable teen, and Atlanta was no longer a backwater. As the Squirrel Census told it, we were a bunch of sweet, bumbling dorks bewitched by our creature kin, who themselves dwelt in a complicated world filled with good and evil, lust and subterfuge, power struggles and self-sacrifice. That this tangle of buckled sidewalks and forests and creaky old Victorian houses was the setting for their dramas cast magic dust over every branch and leaf. Imagining these creatures’ interiority made us better people, too. Not in the sense that it was a badge of hipster honor to have perceived something through a Wes Andersonian lens, but in the sense that creating stories about these animals bonded us to them. The way Rochester felt like there was a string tied under his left ribs that connected him to Jane Eyre, a thin thread now connected us with these beasties we used to simply ignore. When they foraged, tussled, attacked, or gave chase, it tugged a little at our ribcages, and those pangs made us — made me — care more about the place where they lived. It led me to see my neighborhood through the eyes of a squirrel, as a haven rich with resources and hiding places — and myself as a steward of their home, accountable for keeping it safe, quiet, and green. Sharing a corner of the forest with our mythical versions of these beings expanded our hearts, and we were better for it. In which I count squirrels Six years after I first heard about the Squirrel Census, I finally got to be part of it. By late 2018, when the team counted the squirrels in New York City’s Central Park, I’d backed even further away from medicine and was barreling headfirst into a journalism career — which, refreshingly, felt like a good fit. I’d planned a visit to New York that happened to coincide with the count, and signed up to spend a perfect, sunny Saturday afternoon listening for chitters and watching for flashes of cinnamon fur in a section of the park across from the American Museum of Natural History. The experience was analog by design, with pencils and printed packets of thick paper for all our navigation and record-keeping. For a decade, I had been spoiled by the blue dot on my phone’s map that always told me where I was relative to my surroundings, and I’d forgotten the squirt of dopamine that accompanies matching an actual statue or bridge or shrubbery with landmarks on a map. I lurked near a newlywed couple in the Shakespeare Garden, watching not them but a twitch of chestnut fluff foraging near a cluster of shrubs. As joggers and cyclists whizzed by, I trained my eyes upward, looking for bushy telltales in the massive American elms bordering Central Park West. New York has historically had a fraught relationship with squirrels, alternately hunting them into vanishing rarity and coddling them as pets; now, they’re everywhere. My packet had spaces for me to note not only squirrel number, size, color, activity, and location but also the abundance of human and other-animal drama playing out around me and my own reactions to the theatrics. I’d also been instructed to listen for squirrel vocalizations, including kuks, quaas, and various moans. I strained my ears to disentangle critter-kibitzing from the usual park cacophony. I felt sneaky, special, a little feral. That night, amid the tusked and taxidermied furnishings of the Explorer’s Club — the project’s New York City headquarters for the duration of the Central Park count’s planning, execution, and reveal — I schmoozed with fellow squirrel sighters. I marveled with them at how much bigger and brighter the world seemed when we saw it through a woodland animal’s eyes. We basked in our widened gaze on the world: We were a whole new kind of alive, suddenly aware of the sheer mass of life in our surroundings and overwhelmed by the sanctity of existence, of having the privilege to care about any of it. An older volunteer, one of 10 awarded an “alpha-alpha sighter” designation for extraordinary commitment to the cause, delivered an a cappella rendition of “Count Your Blessings,” only instead of “blessings,” he sang — what else? — “squirrels.” The end (for now) In March 2021, a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, I got a very long email announcing that at least for the moment, the Squirrel Census was disassembling, sort of. I was in Florida, watching my partner’s mother die in hospice, and was weirdly shattered by the news. At a time when it felt like all the goodness had been drained out of the earth, when we most needed ways to connect with each other and to be reminded what it was we shared, the Squirrel Census seemed like just one more casualty of the new world’s unbreathable air. Another realization came into relief as the news sank in, related to the very specific way the pandemic kept us from museums, concerts, and parties: There’s a difference between experiencing joy and awe alone and experiencing it with others. The Squirrel Census had knotted a thread that tethered me not only to the fast-beating hearts of the wildlife in my backyard, but to the people who’d stood beside me as we squinted into the trees, or at a poster, or just at the thought of such an absurd thing as a census of squirrels. Our politics, and then the pandemic, made those moments scarce and precious; I wasn’t yet sure if and when we would reclaim them. Still, I understood: The Squirrel Census team was tired. Maybe they were also broke. Clearly, they needed a change. Jamie Allen liked to say people either got the Squirrel Census or they didn’t, and the people who did were special — “Life Poets,” according to that farewell note. If we were lucky, life would go on. But we would need to find its poetry somewhere else. Eventually, the pandemic’s urgency diminished. Various team members had long since moved away to live out other dreams when Jamie, his kids now out of the house, moved to Los Angeles in 2023. After all, he said in a way that kind of broke my heart, he’d never planned to spend the rest of his life in Atlanta. Over the holidays, a Squirrel Census email turned up in my inbox with links to two peculiar, perfect little songs. In February, Allen told me the project is still on an extended hiatus. “We’re a band that’s in between albums, and we’re not really writing a current album,” he said. “But when we do, we’ll get the band back together.” That makes sense, I think. It does feel like, all this time, I’ve been following a pied piper of sorts, if not a band. His tune did convince me there was something out there that was worth following, and following it made me better, and maybe a little weirder. It was real.

I gave up meat and gained so much more

Christine Mi for Vox The delightful abundance of going vegan. Marina Bolotnikova is a deputy editor for Vox’s Future Perfect section. Before joining Vox, she reported on factory farming for national outlets including the Guardian, the Intercept, and elsewhere. Christine Mi is a cartoonist, writer, and game designer focused on telling stories in an

2 d

vox.com

Home Planet

2 d

vox.com

Rachel Victoria Hillis for Vox Stories that celebrate life on Earth and deeper ways of connecting with our shared home. The news we get about the planet is often pretty depressing. The warming climate impacts our economies, influences our politics and culture, threatens the food we eat and the water we drink; it even affects our love lives and the education of our children. The climate crisis is increasingly disrupting our fundamental sense of where we belong and what we consider home as extreme heat and climate disasters displace more people around the world. We’re faced with difficult questions every day about how to ethically exist on our planet, often navigating these challenges in our lives from moment to moment. Confronted with alarming headlines, it’s easy to lose sight of the dynamic and interesting — dare I even say beautiful — ways the planet is changing and how we’re changing right along with it. It starts in our homes. We believe there should be some space to explore that. Home Planet is a collection of stories that celebrates life on Earth: It shows the meaningful ways our lives are entwined with the natural world and how humans can adapt to preserve our planet and deepen our connection to our shared home. Some of these stories unfold within the literal four walls of home, such as our feature on our fraught relationships with our household appliances or our story on the New York City apartments teeming with the city’s most despised pests. Others explore the theme of community and the unexpected places to find it, be it among a troupe of squirrel-obsessives or through the comfort and spiritual nourishment of plant-based foods. These stories delve into some of the most intimate aspects of our lives, too, like this refreshing and heartbreaking tale about one mother’s struggle to raise her preteen daughter, a member of Generation Alpha, amid climate-change acceleration and the pervasive distractions of social media and tech. While each will play out in a personal way or within the ecosystems of our homes, all of these stories tap into bigger questions about how climate change will impact our daily lives and what we can do to make life better. Even the smallest shifts, the most subtle changes in our orientation, can make a huge difference in how we exist on our planet. As humans on Earth in 2024, there’s still a lot to be hopeful about. This package illuminates many paths to begin forging a more attuned, sustainable, and ecological relationship with our home planet. —Paige Vega, climate editor CREDITS Editorial Lead: Paige Vega | Project Manager: Lauren Katz | Editors: Alanna Okun, Izzie Ramirez, Lavanya Ramanathan | Reporters: Marina Bolotnikova, Umair Irfan, Benji Jones, Keren Landman, Brian Resnick, Tracy Ross, Allie Volpe | Style & Standards/Fact-checkers: Elizabeth Crane, Anouck Dussaud, Kim Eggleston, Sarah Schweppe, Madeleine Vasaly | Art Director: Paige Vickers | Illustrators: Rachel Victoria Hillis, Christine Mi, Danielle Kroll, Mary Kirkpatrick | Audience: Shira Tarlo, Gabby Fernandez | Editorial Director: Bryan Walsh | Special Thanks: Bill Carey, Nisha Chittal, Jorge Just, Swati Sharma, Elbert Ventura

The indoorsy person’s guide to the great outdoors

2 d

vox.com

Mary Kirkpatrick for Vox Nature is for everyone. Here’s how to enjoy it, no matter where you live. As a dog walker in Southern California, Rubén Arteaga spends a lot of time outside — at nearby parks, the beach, and on mountain trails. Yet with all his attention on the dogs and his mileage tracker, he never really looked at his surroundings. “My whole life,” he says, “I’ve spent my time looking down.” But something shifted in him one day this winter. In the hills above Laguna Beach, Arteaga lifted his head and looked — really looked — at the clouds above, at the trees. He noticed the wildflowers. “I just saw the world was so much brighter, and that there were so many more colors,” he says. “It just made my gray, dim world feel a little brighter.” Now that he pays more attention to his environment, being outdoors brings him a sense of serenity, he says, grounding him in the moment and pushing away thoughts of his to-do list. Arteaga’s experience, though simple, is powerful — and measurable. Spending time outside in green spaces is linked to a number of positive mental and physical health outcomes. People who live in urban areas with greater exposure to green spaces, such as parks or gardens, have better mental health, according to a recent study. Indeed, living near parks, lakes, and beaches is associated with reduced risk of mental health disorders like anxiety and depression, research shows. Further research suggests that people who live near parks age more slowly than those who don’t. Nature is, in a literal sense, healing. Whether or not we recognize these benefits, many people face hurdles to getting outside. Racism, colonialism, and segregation — past and present — have long excluded or displaced Indigenous, nonwhite, and queer people from safely accessing green spaces. People with marginalized backgrounds often feel unsafe in parks. (Look no further than the 2020 incident where a white woman called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man who was birding in Central Park, because he asked that she leash her dog.) What’s more, a growing majority of the country lives in urban areas and may lack the time or resources to travel to what are traditionally thought of as “natural” environments — parks, forests, rivers, lakes, and oceans. People with physical disabilities may also have difficulty navigating these spaces. Then there are those of us who just don’t consider ourselves outdoorsy: Camping, dirt, and mosquitos don’t sound like a good time. Yet experiencing time in nature and reaping all of its benefits is actually really easy. And it doesn’t matter where you live. From moss on neighborhood trees to the birds outside your window, the natural world is all around us and full of surprises — you just have to start paying attention. “Nature, in my opinion, is deeply embedded around us,” says Yvette Stewart, the community outreach coordinator at Audubon Texas, a nonprofit environmental conservation group. “If people want to start tuning into it, the best thing to do is just pause outside.” Here’s how to find a version of nature that works for you — and some suggestions on how to spend your time there. How to find your place in nature First things first: What does it actually mean to be “in nature”? Nature is not just some faraway landscape full of trees. Any time we’re outside of a building, we are in nature, according to Katrina Clark, a board member of the Philadelphia-based In Color Birding Club: “That is true regardless of whether you live in the country, the suburbs, or the city.” If you hike through the woods or simply stop to admire flowers near the curb, you’re engaging with nature. Humans are an inherent part of nature, Clark says, though for the purpose of this story, we use “nature” to refer to plants, wildlife, and ecosystems. To have a positive experience with the wild world, it can be helpful to first decide what you’re looking for and what kind of restrictions you might have: Do you want to get exercise? To engage your kids? Do you have limited time or no access to a car? These questions will help guide you toward an accessible setting you’ll enjoy. For example, if you love plants, pay attention to how the trees bloom throughout the year, Stewart says. For a kid-friendly weekend activity, try starting a garden with your family (or just planting basil, mint, and other herbs in pots on your windowsill). Maybe you’re looking for a social activity instead: Search for local birding clubs or guided hikes. Consider the time of year, too. You may want to pay close attention to the sky in the spring and fall when birds migrate. (Bird migration forecast maps can help you figure out the best time and places to see them.) Similarly, think of experiences you want to avoid. If you really hate mosquitos, try spending time outside when it’s still chilly, such as in late fall or early spring. People from communities that have been historically excluded from green spaces will have different considerations. “Coming back to those areas for people of color can be scary and be risky,” says Marc Chavez, the founder and director of Native Like Water, a nonprofit focusing on water. “You have to use precaution. You have to also help get over psychological trauma based on those areas.” To help overcome these personal emotional wounds, Chavez says it can be helpful to remember that any land, mountains, or rivers existed for thousands of years before they became a neighborhood, a national park, or a colonized territory. How to access nature Start small. One of the most universal pieces of advice we received from experts is to spend more time observing plant and animal life in your immediate surroundings. That could be a tree in your backyard, birds on top of buildings, or a neighborhood garden. “It could be something as simple as seeing the grass that is growing between the cracks [in the sidewalk] after a rain,” says He Sung Im, the public programs manager at Audubon Center at Debs Park. If you’re feeling more adventurous, look for nearby city and state parks — they’re often a great place to start. If you live in a city and don’t have a car, check out where public transit can bring you. Even if you live in a place as urban as Manhattan, you can still hike within the city. “Take the A-train and go to Inwood Hill Park,” says Georgina Cullman, an ecologist for the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation. If you want a longer hike, just take the Metro-North train to the Hudson Valley, she says. (Pro tip: Wear long pants, use bug spray, and check your body — and your pet’s — for ticks when you get home. Shower, too.) For help finding appropriate hiking trails, check out websites like TrailLink and AllTrails, which list hikes by difficulty level. AllTrails also maintains a list of over 8,000 wheelchair-friendly trails nationwide. Similarly, the National Park Service has a list of accessibility features online for the country’s parks and monuments. Living near a park is a privilege. Across the country, 100 million people do not have a park within a 10-minute walk from their homes. Parks primarily serving people of color are, on average, half the size of those in predominantly white neighborhoods. For those who don’t have access to reliable transportation and who don’t live near a park, try reaching out to nearby community groups (of birders, hikers, swimmers, etc.) — they may be able to help. For instance, Chavez founded Native Like Water in order to provide Native Americans who no longer had access to the ocean a comfortable, safe space to reconnect to the coastal environment. Initiatives include a 10-day youth program where participants explore the San Diego coastline while learning about the Indigenous peoples of the area, the ecology, and how to surf. Historic barriers to accessibility remain for members of marginalized communities; take the Audubon Society, named after John James Audubon, a naturalist who enslaved others. Despite this history, younger and more diverse populations are reclaiming these spaces and activities — and making them more welcoming to all. What to do outdoors So you’ve figured out where to go. What do you do once you’re there? The easiest thing is, essentially, nothing. Just wander. “There should be no rush,” Chavez says. What’s most important is slowing down and observing what’s in front of you, no matter where you are, even on a five-minute walk outside your office. Pay attention to the creatures around you, the way the sun or the wind feels on your skin, the smell of moist soil. If you feel like engaging a bit more with the space, check to see if there are any community groups or other organizations that oversee it. Places like gardens, arboretums, and nature centers often host tours and other events that will introduce you to the space and get you mingling with the community. Similarly, Facebook groups or “friends of” websites list community-led events and initiatives. Several experts also recommended bringing a friend, especially someone who likes the outdoors more than you. Then, you can determine which aspects of the environment most interest you and what you should keep an eye on next time. You don’t even need to move at all. Clark suggests hanging out at outdoor beer gardens with plants and greenery if you want to socialize in the open air (yes, even that is time in nature!). Or instead of walking up steep trails to look for birds, try a “bird sit,” Im said. Find a nice spot with trees, stay quiet, and observe the birds around you. “We started doing bird sits because we realized a lot of city people are not really comfortable doing hikes,” Im says. To make it even easier, download an app called Merlin, which is essentially Shazam for bird calls; it will listen to and identify the birds around you. “The beautiful thing about birds is they’re literally found everywhere,” Stewart said. If birds aren’t your thing, you could also try insect watching. Hear us out: When flowers are in bloom, dozens of insects may visit them in a single day to slurp up nectar or gather pollen, including butterflies, beetles, and bees. Sit next to some flowers and just watch. It’s relaxing — we swear! If there’s a lake or stream at your destination, consider getting in the water — or even just being next to water. Research shows that looking at bodies of water can lower your heart rate and blood pressure and help you feel relaxed. Consider picnicking by a local reservoir or, better yet, renting a kayak or canoe. Some cities lend them out for free. “One of my favorite things that I get to do for my job,” Cullman says, “is getting to go out on a kayak and see different parts of the city.” If you do, indeed, want to go camping, there are plenty of options short of trekking into the woods with your own gear. Some state parks run programs for a fee that will take you out camping for a night, even if you don’t have much experience or own your own gear. We’re also big fans of low-maintenance car camping. Instead of pitching a tent, you can sleep in your car near a trailhead that allows overnight parking. Then high tail it to the nearest diner for breakfast in the morning. You can even bring an air mattress out to your backyard. No planning required. One very important note: No matter where you go, always be respectful to wildlife and other people. Pick up trash and dog poop, which can pollute streams and spread disease, even if it’s not yours. Do not police people’s behaviors. If you’re in a state park and there are loud children nearby, perhaps walk to another section of the park. Green spaces should be for everyone. On the flip side, if you see people trying to observe birds or other animals, use a quieter voice. What gear and tools you’ll need The good news is that you don’t really need anything. That said, you’ll be more comfortable outside with a good hat, large water bottle (Stewart recommends CamelBak), and sturdy shoes. Even if you’re looking for birds, binoculars aren’t a necessity. You can use the zoom feature on your phone camera, Im suggests. Some stores also rent binoculars or even provide them for free. The best tools to enjoy time outside are free apps and websites. On platforms like iNaturalist, eBird, and PlantNet, you can browse nearby sightings of plants and animals and upload your own photos. A tool called BirdCast shows real-time maps and forecasts of bird migration, so you know where and when to look. A number of different apps, like Seek, will help you identify plants and even animals by just taking photos of them. And again, Merlin is a great platform for IDing birds by their calls alone. Ultimately, a lot of what will make experiencing nature easier and more enjoyable is a shift in perspective — a shift in the way we view what nature is. “If you acknowledge [nature] as being any space that’s outside, where you can feel the wind and you can see the sun and you can get wet from a rainstorm, then it starts to bring nature back into your tangible world,” Stewart said. “Nature is all around us even in the most urban places in the world.” (function() { var d = document, s = d.createElement('script'); s.src = 'https://vox.coral.coralproject.net/assets/js/embed.js'; s.async = false; s.defer = true; s.onload = function() { Coral.createStreamEmbed({ id: "coral_thread", autoRender: true, rootURL: 'https://vox.coral.coralproject.net', // Uncomment these lines and replace with the ID of the // story's ID and URL from your CMS to provide the // tightest integration. Refer to our documentation at // https://docs.coralproject.net for all the configuration // options. // storyID: '${storyID}', // storyURL: '${storyURL}', }); }; (d.head || d.body).appendChild(s); })();

Our appliances are more efficient than ever. Why doesn’t it feel like it?

2 d

vox.com

Rachel Victoria Hillis for Vox You actually can use less energy and have more convenience in your home. Are you ready to defend the honor of your dishwasher? Are you prepared to fight for your stove? Are you stockpiling light bulbs? Because according to many Republicans, your kitchen, your laundry room, your bathroom, and more are now battlefronts in the Biden administration’s “war on appliances.” “First it was gas stoves and then it was water heaters and now it’s icemakers,” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on the floor of the House last year. “Overreaching, burdensome regulations from the Energy Department, like those on gas stoves, ceiling fans, and refrigerators, force our job creators to play defense and take time away from their core mission,” said Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), who chairs the House Committee on Small Business. In the past year, House Republicans introduced bills to limit the government’s ability to set new efficiency standards and block a ban on gas stoves. Fox News even made a custom splash screen for its ongoing conflict coverage. Where is this coming from? The Department of Energy does set efficiency standards for more than 60 categories of appliances ranging from home ceiling fans to commercial vending machines. It has also been raising the bar for things like stoves and refrigerators in recent months as part of a suite of new, climate-friendly regulations (the agency also said claims that it was banning gas stoves are “absurd”). But a war? Of all the things that get people worked up, it is a bit surprising at first glance that home appliances and fixtures can get people so heated. But it makes sense: These are the devices and products we encounter every day. They make a direct impact on our lives, saving us time and effort when they work well — and causing grief and frustration when they don’t. And when the government gets involved, suddenly laundry day has political stakes. At the same time, appliances and fixtures are a direct way individuals encounter policies to address climate change. Our domestic tools contribute to a significant share of world energy use. Residential appliances account for about 15 percent of global electricity demand, and that doesn’t include furnaces and air conditioners, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The energy intensity — the amount of energy used per device — has grown on average by more than 10 percent between 2000 and 2018 in the 31 IEA member countries. And globally, that need is growing as more parts of the world seek out essential functions like cooling and conveniences like cleaning. In the US, about half of household energy use on average goes toward heating and cooling while roughly a quarter powers things like microwaves, televisions, and personal electronics. The average US family also uses 300 gallons of water per day at home, more than half through bathroom fixtures like toilets, faucets, and showerheads. But the flip side is that small improvements in electricity and water consumption across home appliances can add up to big benefits for the environment. Doing more with less is one of the most important and cheapest tactics for limiting climate change, but it’s easily overlooked. Energy efficiency across the economy — not just in appliances, but in vehicles, factories, and grid infrastructure — could get the US halfway to its climate goals by 2050, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit research group. But the pace has to speed up. The IEA estimates that in order to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the rate of energy efficiency improvement must triple this decade compared to the rate over the past 20 years. So it makes sense that having appliances use less water and electricity is a key plank in the White House’s strategy to limit global warming through the Inflation Reduction Act, including up to $8.8 billion in rebates to help families buy more efficient appliances. There are lasting benefits for buyers too: Efficiency also saves money, for businesses, governments, and individuals. Since 1980, the energy intensity of the US economy has been cut in half because of increasing efficiency, delivering more than $2,000 in savings per person. The Energy Department said the regulations it announced last year will save Americans $652 million per year when they go into effect. “At the end of the day, something that’s more energy efficient is more efficient for your wallet,” said Shanika Whitehurst, associate director for product sustainability, research, and testing at Consumer Reports. So on paper, the case for more efficiency is compelling. Yet in practice, it can be a tough sell, especially when manufacturers overpromise and underdeliver. There are definite trade-offs in some cases, and some new machines have indeed been letdowns, which is why some people are reluctant to let go of their old showerheads, toilets, and stoves. That’s what makes it so personal. It’s one thing to impose tougher pollution limits on a power plant miles away, but if your dishwasher takes longer than you’d like or the compressor in your fridge breaks down, it can feel like quite the intrusion. Is it then possible to live in a more comfortable, cost-effective home that’s also better for the environment? Yes, but it requires thinking carefully about priorities and sorting out what’s an upgrade and what’s just another thing that can break. In a world where lots of things are getting worse, we’re living in a Golden Age of efficiency The products we encounter like clothes and electronics have generally become more affordable over time, but in many cases quality has declined as the companies that make them look to cut costs and turn around new product lines. However, appliances and home fixtures have become measurably better in key metrics as technologies have advanced and regulations have tightened. The LED light bulb, for example, uses 90 percent less electricity and lasts 25 times longer than the incandescent bulbs that reigned for a century prior. The size of the average washing machine tub has increased by almost 50 percent since the 1980s, yet the machines use a quarter of the electricity and water per cycle. Heat pumps are more than four times as efficient as gas heaters. In the 1970s, refrigerators used 75 percent more electricity to cool 20 percent less storage space than those in showrooms today. The US government has been advancing its efficiency goals through mandatory regulations, which affect every product on the market, as well as voluntary certifications, like the Energy Star program launched by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1992 to highlight top performers. For instance, a new dishwasher with an Energy Star certification uses half the energy of washing dishes by hand and saves 8,400 gallons of water per year. Many of these appliances are also doing their jobs better. More efficient clothes washers tend to be better at cleaning and less damaging to apparel. That has helped drive down costs too. “We also find that much of the price index decline can be attributed to standards-induced innovation,” wrote the authors of a 2019 study on the impact of efficiency standards published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. “What we’ve seen over time is that as products have gotten more efficient, product performance has generally stayed the same or improved as manufacturers continue to offer new features to consumers,” said Joanna Mauer, deputy director at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. Take air conditioners, for example. “The vast majority of Energy Star-certified room air conditioner models now feature a variable speed compressor, which means they are not only much more efficient, but much quieter,” EPA spokesperson Remmington Belford said in an email. The program recently raised its benchmarks so ACs with the Energy Star label are up to 35 percent more efficient than those without the certification. “This means Energy Star models for sale this summer will provide double or triple the energy and cost savings from Energy Star room air conditioners that were available last summer,” Belford said. As technology advances, these devices are poised to consume even less electricity and water. There are trade-offs, however Changing how devices use electricity and water does require changing how they work, and that’s where some homeowners and apartment dwellers have run into trouble. Tim Carll, owner and head technician of Presidential Appliance Repair in Northern Virginia, noted that the new generation of appliances has become more affordable, making them more common, but that in his experience, washing machines, refrigerators, and stoves break down more often, don’t last as long, and are often more complicated to repair because of all the electronics needed to optimize energy and water use. Older devices were much simpler, using mechanical timers and switches that were more durable as well as easier to diagnose and repair. “I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone say, ‘Oh God, I just love this new energy-efficient appliance that I got,’” Carll said. “It’s usually like, ‘This washer doesn’t use enough water, some of my clothes come out, and they’re not even wet’ or ‘My dishwasher runs for three or four hours now.’” Add to that features like touchscreen interfaces on refrigerators or Bluetooth connectivity in stoves and you have more things that can go wrong. It isn’t uncommon to see devices that once lasted 20 to 30 years start to break down in less than 10 due to these small problems rather than something catastrophic. “It’s all these breaks throughout the years. I think in the first 10 years it’s pretty normal to have at least three repairs on almost any appliance you buy. At $200 or $300 minimum for repair, you’re putting several hundred dollars into a machine in the lifespan of it.” And when new efficiency regulations go into effect, appliance repair technicians start getting ready for more repair calls. Carll said he’s part of a closed Facebook group where repair pros chat (the question you have to answer to join: “What appliances use 220VAC and what is the part number for the most popular dryer belt ever?”), and whenever someone posts an article about new efficiency standards, the replies are filled with eye-rolling emojis as they anticipate more breakdowns in newer devices. “From our professional standpoint, most of us just look at it like [appliances] are going to get worse,” Carll said. For owners, there’s also often a learning and expectation curve. Using less water and electricity often means machine cycles take longer, but it also means they need a lot less detergent to do their work. Many users often add too much to high-efficiency washing machines and dishwashers, which can clog ports and impair cleaning performance. They might not realize that they don’t need to pre-rinse their dishes, or that garments will come out just as clean in cooler water. With electric stoves, manufacturers are trying to counter decades of advertising that extolled the virtues of cooking with gas. “From 2008 to 2013, I owned and operated an appliance retail store, and I can’t count the number of times a customer would purchase a high-efficiency washing machine only to return a week later to complain that the drum would not fill to the top with water,” Dustin Steward, global industry director in the appliances, HVAC and lighting group at UL Solutions, which tests and certifies products for safety and performance, said in an email. “They were skeptical that their clothes could be cleaned with such a small amount of water.” Users are also demanding more from their devices. It’s not enough for a refrigerator to cool your food; it must also dispense water and ice, defrost itself, and not make too much noise. Price is another factor. Appliances have generally fallen in price over the decades, and efficiency regulations are part of why. The IEA notes that countries with energy efficiency regulations generally see the average prices of appliances fall 2 to 3 percent per year. But the laws of supply and demand are at work too. The supply chain snarls during the Covid-19 pandemic caused major appliance prices to spike and made it harder to find more affordable machines. Higher-end refrigerators and washing machines often use less water and power, but it takes longer for those savings to offset the higher upfront costs. Yet because of their shorter lifecycles, people can end up paying more over time for cheaper appliances. As for the benefits, people can easily see how clean their clothes get or how long a wash cycle lasts. It’s harder to pick up on the benefits of efficiency. A more fuel-efficient car flexes every time you fill up its gas tank or juice up its battery, but the dividends from fans and lights that use less power are buried in your monthly bills. More efficient appliances can also have a rebound effect. If an AC is cheaper to run, you might run it longer or at a higher setting. Devices like refrigerators and washers have grown in size too, eating into their performance gains. Manufacturers also appear to be cutting corners, not due to efficiency, but competition and a business strategy that favors replacement over repair. So the calculation behind the decision to switch to a newer, leaner device isn’t always straightforward. How to smooth the transition to a more comfortable, efficient home It’s normal for newer technologies to hit some bumps on the road to widespread adoption and that goes for devices trying to hit new efficiency goalposts. Still, few homeowners scout appliance showrooms with their electricity and water bills as the highest priority. “Most people do not buy technology for technology’s sake; they are looking to solve a problem,” Steward said. “Thinking about reducing energy, saving water, or minimizing gas usage may or may not be a priority in every household.” But there are good options out there that deliver more convenience and comfort at a lower cost to the climate. One strategy is to look for devices that deliver the most measurable benefits over their lifetime, often labeled on a sticker on showroom models. Look for more durable materials, a robust warranty, and simpler interfaces. There are also tools to help sort the worst and best performers, like Consumer Reports’ recently updated appliance reliability guide, ranking brands in different categories based on their testing and surveys. Often, the more feature-packed device isn’t the better one over the long term. The Energy Department, for instance, advises consumers to pick refrigerators with fewer doors and the freezer on top, and to not necessarily spring for the biggest model in the budget. Efficiency and comfort in the home aren’t just about machines either. Better insulation, improved door seals, adequate ventilation, and sufficient plumbing bring out the best in appliances and make homes more livable, efficient, and better for the environment. But it’s also important to be realistic about what we can accomplish just with what we buy for our kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms. Even the most efficient appliance still needs energy, and the sources of that energy need to zero out their greenhouse gas emissions. “There’s a lot of reports on the decarbonization of the home and full electrification in the home, [but] we have to get these electrical grids right,” Whitehurst said. Particularly with the shift away from gas appliances toward those that run on electricity, there are mounting demands on power networks. It will take careful planning to ensure there’s enough power and policies to make sure the new capacity doesn’t make climate change any worse. It’s only when all these parts fit together that we’ll stay at a comfortable temperature on our home planet.

My adult kids found themselves in nature. Will my youngest lose herself in her phone?

2 d

vox.com

Hollis Edmondson, age 7. | Paige Vickers/Vox; photos courtesy of Tracy Ross My 12-year-old daughter will inherit a warmer world — and, I fear, a lonelier one. When my son Hatcher and I started our hike down Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River during the fall of 2023, we feared what we might see. We were backpacking through our favorite place, the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness. It’s almost 2.4 million acres of central Idaho that shelters wolves, black bears, river otters, and lynx; the Salmon River threads through it for 200 breathtaking miles. One of America’s longest free-flowing rivers, the Salmon is so fierce that in spots it cuts a chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon. And even though its tributary, the Middle Fork, is stacked with whitewater rapids that can flip your boat and suck you under, most drop into forgiving pools that let you recover. The main fork of the Salmon stretches across hundreds of miles and two time zones, existing as a dividing line between Mountain Time and Pacific. This means that for as long as you are on it, you are between time. Anthropologists call zones like this “ambiguous.” To the Irish, they are “thin places.” To my husband, Shawn, and me, anywhere on the Salmon has always been the best place to raise our children. Salmon Time gave Scout, our oldest child, a reverence for wilderness and taught him that he can survive anywhere with the right skills and the right friends. He has since become an accomplished adventurer, outdoor writer, and justice seeker, a defender of wild places. Courtesy of Tracy Ross Growing up throughout the years: Scout Edmondson as a boy (top left); Hatcher Edmondson pictured with a classmate in South America (bottom left); Hatcher posing on a high point above the Middle Fork River in the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness (top right); Scout (left) and Hatcher (right) on the San Juan River when they were preteens (bottom right). It gave Hatcher a taste of independence he’d never known, introduced him to kayaking, and started him on a journey that would make him one of the youngest licensed guides working multiday trips on this wild river. But this place, where both of my sons gained such reverence for the natural world, would also soon confront them with the environmental toll that the climate crisis exacts. During Hatcher’s first year of guiding, in 2021, fires torched 87,000 acres along the upper Middle Fork corridor. No one was hurt, but several groups, including a few of Hatcher’s, had to row through smoke and past flames raging just off the river banks. The next summer, torrential rains released tons of mud laden with rocks, boulders, bushes, and hundreds of Douglas fir and lodgepole pine trees into the river. I imagine it sounding like a freight train crashing through the wilderness. That’s one of the reasons Hatcher and I were here: to witness how fire had altered the river we consider a kind of home away from home. But here’s the other reason: I was working through some serious anxiety over the state of the world and my children’s places in it. Scout will be 23 this spring, Hatcher is 21, and their little sister, Hollis, a member of Generation Alpha, is 12. If you lay their births out on a timeline of climate-change acceleration, you will understand why I lie awake at night worrying about their futures. The dividing line between my low(er) anxiety and high is the year Hollis was born: 2011. That’s the year the World Meteorological Service says we entered the “decade of [global warming] acceleration.” The “acceleration” was caused by an unprecedented rise in greenhouse gas emissions that fueled record land and ocean temperature increases and turbocharged a dramatic acceleration in ice melt and sea-level rise from 2011 to 2020 and beyond. And, indeed, it does feel as though we’ve entered a new chapter of the climate crisis. Where I live, chronic overuse of water resources coupled with a 20-year, climate-change-spurred drought has sucked more than 10 trillion gallons out of the Colorado River Basin, threatening supply to more than 40 million people. This February, the Atlantic Ocean was warmer than it had ever been, causing whales to move north following plankton in search of cooler temps and foreshadowing another devastating hurricane season this summer. Over the same span of time, I’ve also witnessed the way technology’s grip on our children has tightened. The average 12-year-old spends 5.3 hours a day staring into their cellphone, according to Sapien Labs, a nonprofit organization that runs an ongoing survey into global mental health. Kids’ eyes are even elongating to “adapt” to their addiction. And “technology overload” is creating symptoms in kids that look a lot like ADHD, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. I see the signs in Hollis: She doesn’t want to go outside anymore. She barely looks up from her screen. Like most parents I know, I want to grab Hollis’s phone and throw it in the nearest toilet. But she’d immediately start begging me for a new one because her “entire life” is on it. When I think back to Scout’s and Hatcher’s childhoods, only a decade before Hollis’s, they seem like a relative Eden. Climate change still seemed a distant and abstract threat, and they didn’t have cellphones. Lucky kids, they grew up believing in Arctic sea ice and that play dates only occurred in person. And I believe the time they spent outside, in nature, gave them some skills to help them find their way in a more complicated world. Courtesy of Tracy Ross Tracy Ross, pictured with her daughter, Hollis, when she was 7. A trail pierces through the remnants of a burn in the Frank. Rafts edge up to the shoreline of the Middle Fork during the same trip that Hollis found herself alone on the raft. Hollis is coming of age during an age of disaster. The childhood I want to give her, one immersed in nature, is changing, becoming more dangerous. All the while, the lure of her cellphone threatens to disconnect her even more. As her mother, I want to help her navigate this new world, but I’m not entirely sure how. I hoped days hiking along the Middle Fork with Hatcher might help me sort it out. Our home, in the woods outside of Boulder, Colorado, lies within the Roosevelt National Forest. At any given time, moose, deer, bobcats, mountain lions, black bears, and coyotes walk through our property. Sometimes they do more than walk. The moose trap us indoors while they lick salt off our truck and the bears know how to open car doors, especially when there’s a week-old burrito heel, wadded up in tinfoil, inside. And because the early aughts were still the dial-up age for the average consumer, 5G hadn’t been invented, and Elon Musk hadn’t littered the night sky with his snaking chain of satellites, the boys had zero access (yes, literally) to that sort of technology. So when they cried boredom inside, we shooed them outside. Out on our forested property with a seasonal stream running through it, they hunted Bigfoot and convinced themselves that they saw him in every shaded space between the lodgepole pine trees. They built entire worlds out of rocks and dirt — Trolls Town and Bombs Berg, over which “Scout was a dwarf guy armed with pine cones for bombs,” says Hatcher, and where both boys could disappear for hours — with The Lord of The Rings looping in their imaginations. Their outside play imbued them with the skills we believed they needed to become well-adjusted adults. Scout and Hatcher sometimes moaned about going out when they wanted to stay in and play their Nintendos and later Xbox (we let them have those; we weren’t monsters!). Yet they loved the camaraderie of doing outdoor adventures with like-minded families, of non-school-approved vacations, and of snacks with no end. But rafting was a different story altogether, a different level of nature immersion and freedom. On a multiday raft trip on a river that limits crowds by requiring a permit, all the parents needed to do was row, set up camps, know how to negotiate the rapids, and keep the kids in life jackets, sun-screened, hydrated, fed, and safe from falling overboard, poison ivy, scorpions, and snakes. Courtesy of Tracy Ross Hatcher Edmondson guides a tour group in 2022 along the Middle Fork River. The Salmon’s waters were emerald green and primordial, coursing over Volkswagen Beetle-size boulders. We were awestruck by the evidence of the Indigenous Sheepeater people, a Shoshone band, that could be found in depressions on the river banks where they camped. The bright red salmon swimming toward their ancestral homes to spawn were cool as hell and spooky. We all felt held and nurtured by things you could only find out there, in that wilderness. Those trips imprinted Scout and Hatcher with some of the most important lessons they would ever learn, including self-reliance, respect for nature, and the value of a tight-knit community. And the power of rivers. As Scout and Hatcher grew from children to teens, Hollis grew up, too, eventually into the 7-year-old singing along to Frozen playing on my iPad as we drove across Idaho for a family trip to the Middle Fork. Like millions of caregivers, we weren’t immune to the lull of sleek devices, sometimes letting our iPhones babysit our children. We did it even though we knew it was a terrible way to rear them. We did it even as CEOs of the most powerful tech companies were starting to admit they’d never let their own children have a cellphone. And we did it knowing the lithium batteries that power cellphones — and the phones themselves — are a major contributor to climate change through the mining of the raw materials they’re made of, the energy it takes to build and distribute them, and our habit of tossing millions of them each year for new ones, our dopamine levels spiking with the transaction. But during the first week of July in 2019, I was so excited to finally introduce Hollis to the river. I couldn’t wait to be unreachable for six days, to hold her tight on the boat while Shawn rowed us through rapids, to swim with her in the deep, clear eddies, and to trace constellations in the stars from our sleeping bags laid next to the Salmon. But as humans are sometimes like to do, we made a mistake. Our desire to raft the Middle Fork with our daughter eclipsed our instinct that it was too dangerous to bring her. A series of misjudgments led us into a situation where Hollis was alone, on our boat, headed for a treacherous rapid. We’d slowed to pull our boat to the shoreline, before a blind corner. Approaching the shore, Shawn and I jumped out, leaving Hollis alone, and tried to pull the raft in with a bowline, a rope rigged to the boat. But it was too heavy, and the raft — and Hollis — headed for the bend and, somewhere below it, the rapid. As I stood on the shore screaming and Shawn tried to pull himself back into the boat, a kayaker in our group saw what was happening, paddled over, climbed on, and saved Hollis. When I finally reached her, she scrambled into my lap crying and said, “I thought I was never going to see Scout again. I thought I would never see Boone” — that’s our Chesapeake Bay Retriever — “again.” Throughout the rest of the trip, we stuck together. I piggybacked her a mile to a storied hot spring. We made s’mores, spread our sleeping bags next to the river, counted shooting stars, wished on them, and slept cozied up together. But when the trip was over and we were driving away, she stared at the Salmon out of our truck window, squeezed my hand so hard it left tiny fingernail marks, and said she never wanted to see the Middle Fork again. We went home and in six months, Covid was upon us. Before it arrived, we could coax Hollis outside to ride bikes, play in our stream, or do campouts in our woods: no screens. When it hit, I could still get her to gear up, go outside, and ski laps on the hill across from our house. At first, I was the mom I’d always wanted to be: baking homemade whoopie pies while she licked the bowl, lazing in bed reading her The Wind in the Willows, cheering her on as we skipped down our deserted road. But as the weeks wore on, I wore out, and the pull of our screens was stronger than ever. I know I’m no different from millions of other parents who’ve been plugging in their kids while they worked or cleaned or “took a break.” It’s no wonder, then, that by 2019 more than half of American children owned a cellphone by age 11 and a third of TikTok users were 14 or younger. I remember loosening my parental controls on social media during Covid because I wanted Hollis to “stay connected” to her friends during the forced absence. I saw how quickly that lifeline became a reason for her to stay on her iPad longer and longer each day, as warnings about the dangers of letting kids access social media increased. There’s still much we don’t understand about the long-term effects, and some recent studies have cast doubt that media use behavior is altering our kids’ cognition, underlying neurological function, or neurobiological processes. We need more data. Courtesy of the Ross and Edmondson family Hollis, over the years, embracing the outdoors — away from any WiFi connection. But I can confirm changes I saw in Hollis’s happiness and self-confidence when, as a grade-schooler, she got into a conflict with a former friend. Hollis said her friend began controlling her, laying on guilt — usually through text and social media messages — whenever she didn’t do what the friend demanded. Hollis is a “normal” kid — pleasant, kind, fun to be around. But between fourth grade through sixth, I started hearing from other parents that their daughters said she was crying in the school bathroom. She stopped confiding in me, for fear of letting details slip, because I would tell the friend’s mom and the friend would retaliate. After asking her to “be brave” in a situation that was clearly wearing her down, Shawn and I decided to take her out of school. What followed was a disastrous second half of self-guided sixth grade — guess where — on screens. But even when she tried to start a new life as a seventh grader at a new school, Hollis still faced pressure from the same friend group on her social media. We pulled her out again. Watching a bright, goofy, formerly confident kid dissolve into one wracked with anxiety upset me. But the thing that saddens me about Hollis’s phone now is how it turns her into Gollum to Sauron’s ring. Even when I can get her outside — which I still can, if we go skiing — she’s so distracted by the rectangle in her hand or pinging constantly in her jacket pocket, she can’t notice the beauty around her. Here, you’re supposed to say: “Parent. You’re in charge. Do something.” Give me a minute. Back on the Middle Fork, Hatcher and I saw no one. It was just us and the Frank. Normally that would be perfect, but under the circumstances, it was ominous. On our first night, we huddled in our tents and listened to thunder that sounded like moaning aliens as a storm blew in. On day two, we entered a section of trail where all of the trees had been torched to blackened husks, evidence of the fires that had recently ripped through. “It’s Mordor,” I said to Hatcher. “Is it?” he asked. “Look around,” I answered. “But there’s fireweed,” he said, pointing to one of the beautiful, purple-flowered plants. “That’s hope.” Later that evening, we found our second camp, along the river. As we sat on the bank watching the current, a slick, brown creature swam past us. “Look, Hatch! An otter!” I yelled. “My favorite!” “Oh my god!” he shouted. “It’s huge!” We continued marveling over our luck. It was only when the “otter” slapped its big, flat tail on the water that we realized it was really a beaver. But it didn’t matter. We were in our favorite place. And apparently the beaver wanted to hang out. It swam upstream past us, and then floated back down toward us. “An otter would never do that!” Hatcher said, and we laughed. Courtesy of Tracy Ross Tracy Ross catches a fish in her home state, Colorado (left). Hatcher during their 2023 trip on the Middle Fork River (right). During rare stretches when he and I were talked out, I thought about ways nature had helped Hatcher when he was in trouble. As a young teen, he was lured by the escape of marijuana. One evening during his first year of high school, I found a significant amount of it in his jacket and admitted to myself that if I didn’t step in and do something to help him, I’d be partially to blame if he continued down a bad path. That year, I helped him apply for a Youth Conservation Corps job in Denali National Park in Alaska. I figured plunging him into a 6-million-acre wilderness could only help — and I believe it did. That summer kicked off a new trajectory that would eventually set him up for his guide job in Idaho. But now, back in the Frank together, we were getting close to the damage we’d come to see on the Salmon. We made camp at the toe of one of the biggest rock slides I’d ever seen. It was at a small unnamed creek and had stripped the drainage it ran through down to bedrock. Tons of loose dirt and rocks spread across the river bar and into the river. But that didn’t prepare us for what we’d see next. The inundation of tons of mud, boulders, bushes, flowers, and dozens of trees from a landslide in the aftermath of the Boundary Creek Fire had completely dammed parts of the Middle Fork. As in, you could walk on the bottom. As in, there was no water. Miles farther downstream, we were stunned by more damage. Debris at a rapid called Hell’s Half Mile had blocked the river to the point that a large, unstirring lake now sat above it. When we saw the lake, we knew two of our favorite things had been forever altered by fires. There was the Middle Fork itself, and then the salmon that swam there. A lake shouldn’t sit in a free-flowing river, and salmon can’t live for very long in water that sluggish. Because they are a vital part of the food chain, when salmon die in large numbers, a cascade of other deaths follows. We stayed at the narrowing of the river and the lake above it for a long time. And then, with heavy hearts, we started hiking back the way we’d come. Post-wildfire, the Salmon River and the forest kept on doing their thing: adapting. Wildfires have recently gotten bigger, hotter, and more out of control in a forest of desperately dry trees, other flora, and soils. Only a month or so before my trip with Hatcher, another 26,000 acres burned on the Main Salmon, in what the incident report called “the perfectly wrong alignment of fuels, terrain and weather” and the 90-mile-per-hour wind “blowing from all directions.” It was terrifying to imagine. Yet I still had hope. Our path back to the trailhead took us along the most beautiful spot on the Middle Fork, where Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s and ’40s carved a trail out of rock. At one spot, it’s big enough that a not-too-tall person can lie down on their stomach and stare into the river. I did that when we got there, and I saw the Middle Fork as it had always been to me: cool, refreshing, and free-flowing, with fish lingering along the shaded banks. It was a perfect autumn day, with the sun shining, the temperature cool, and the mineral smell of the river rising around me. Everything felt right. I wished Hollis was with us. I imagined her wanting to find an eddy, take off her shoes, and slip her toes into the water. When Hatcher had been at his worst in high school, we tried everything to keep him from succumbing to the lure of drugs by transporting him to a new place — Denali, and later South America — with no technology, no cellphone. We didn’t think about it, we just did it, and he healed and started thriving. In the years since, I’ve thought a lot about why that is. Why Shawn and I kept being drawn back to the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness with our kids. Why we were drawn to nature in the first place. And why we think it’s important for our children to connect with the outdoor world, too. Courtesy of Tracy Ross The Middle Fork flows away from a valley in the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness. Hollis, wearing a matching PJ set and a protective floatation device, with her feet in the river. For our family, nature has been a fix, an antidote; the Frank, a vital and healing part of our story. But there’s something deeper to that, which extends beyond my own family, beyond a far-away wilderness in Idaho. In 35 states, nature has been recognized as an effective therapeutic approach to integrative health care in the US. Time spent outside is being prescribed for many conditions, including anxiety and depression. I think of the times I’ve spent in green space, even in the middle of a bustling city, and the way the fresh air slowed my thoughts and relaxed my tightly coiled mind. In our increasingly technological society, more aspects of our lives are becoming digitized — separating us from the literal dirt of the Earth. In a world where cellphones reign, time in nature grounds us. Hollis is 12. She’s preoccupied with makeup tutorials and candy salad recipes on YouTube and TikTok. I want to let her be 12. And so we haven’t yet talked about the ways the climate crisis will impact her future. I can’t bring myself to bring it up. Even though I know someday soon we’ll have to have that talk. Scientists predict that by 2060, 10 extreme heat waves will hit Colorado each year (compared to just one on average between 1970 and 2000). Wildfires, too, will be substantially worse, as additional warming further increases fuel dryness and enhances fire ignition and spread. It isn’t a stretch to imagine our personal Eden gone. When I went back to the Frank with Hatcher last year, I was afraid that, destroyed by fire, it could no longer be a place for our family. But by returning with him under less-than-ideal circumstances, investigating our favorite place with curiosity, and letting ourselves laugh and sing as well as tear up, our bond grew stronger. As we navigate the climate crisis, you reach for what matters most to you, what your soul understands. For my family, I’ve chosen to confront the state of the world as it is, not try to change it or run away from it, but to get close. The world will continue to adapt. Climate change is an existential human problem. If I want to give Hollis half of what I’ve been able to give Scout and Hatcher, despite the wilderness most certainly continuing to burn, I need to bring her back. The nature I show 12-year-old Hollis may be more hostile than the world my sons grew up in, but I still believe in its power to provide a respite. That’s why I’m planning a trip back to the Salmon River this summer. There’s a sweet spot, usually, in early summer after the spring runoff has subsided, before the fires start to ramp up. It’s a place on the Main Salmon, with big pools, sandy beaches, emerald green water, and more forgiving rapids. A place out of time, without technology, where a kid can learn to be a kid again.

The pests next door

2 d

vox.com

Amina Martin rehabilitates pigeons and other birds in a small apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. | Benji Jones/Vox In NYC, many wildlife rehabbers see pests as part of a thriving urban ecosystem. BAY RIDGE, New York City — One sunny afternoon in March, Amina Martin answered the phone in her small Brooklyn apartment. On the line was a taxi driver, who told her he had a pigeon in his backseat and was heading her way. The bird needed Martin’s help. In New York, you never really know who your neighbors are. You might worry they have bedbugs or hoard cats. Maybe they’re celebrities. Or perhaps their apartments are filled with opossums, squirrels, and birds, all rescued from the streets of NYC. Martin, a Russian immigrant, is that neighbor. Her studio is full of pigeons, morning doves, and a handful of other stray birds including an African gray parrot named Elmoar. The animals are in cages that line the wall in front of her bed. Some of the birds have broken wings, trouble walking, or are partially blind. Others are abandoned pets with little chance of survival in the wild. At least twice a week, Martin lets each pigeon out of its cage to fly around her apartment. It was loud in her apartment when I met her that afternoon — a racket of coos and cheeps and the occasional interjection from Elmoar. “He’s teaching me English,” Martin jokes, adding that he says words like “whatsoever” that she’s had to look up. Martin let out a couple of pigeons who flew around her apartment, including her favorite bird, named Anfisa. The animal had ombré gray plumage with pops of iridescent purple and green (i.e., she looked like a pigeon). “She’s in love with my husband,” Martin told me. “She lays eggs on his pillow because she thinks he’s her boyfriend.” Martin is among a small number of people across the New York City boroughs who rehabilitate injured creatures that many other people label as pests. The driver who called Martin had brought birds to her before; an acquaintance of hers finds injured pigeons on the street and calls the same one or two taxi drivers to deliver them. (Sending birds via taxi? “It’s a common thing,” Martin says.) Over several weeks this spring, I met more than a dozen licensed wildlife rehabilitators (aka, “rehabbers”) in New York. Many of them, like Martin, care for animals at home, turning their living rooms into makeshift wildlife hospitals. I visited a duplex in Staten Island full of squirrels and rats; a room in the Upper West Side with a box of baby opossums; and a small park on Roosevelt Island with injured Canada geese, adult opossums, and house cats, all living together and in some cases sleeping side-by-side. One rehabber in Manhattan told me she converted her balcony into an atrium for injured birds. Top left: A four-week-old opossum getting ready to be fed. Top right: Rehabber Amanda Lullo holds a friendly wild rat she’s caring for. Bottom left: A young squirrel sucking down animal infant formula. Bottom right: A baby opossum in a furry sack. New York’s rehabber community is small; the opossum, pigeon, and squirrel people tend to know each other. Some of them, like Martin, document their work on Instagram, amassing a hefty following. But many of them operate under the radar to avoid unwanted attention from the Department of Health, or their landlords. (A bedroom full of squirrels is typically beyond a building’s pet policy.) You might be thinking: What are they thinking? People are commonly disgusted by the animals that have adapted to live alongside us — to eat our garbage, to sleep in our streets. We typically want them out of our homes, not in. Wild animals, no matter the species, can also be noisy, dirty, and sometimes diseased. (One of Martin’s pigeons pooped on her bed, and of course, I sat right in it.) “I’m so broke right now. All of my money goes to the animals.” What’s even more puzzling is that most of these rehabbers work for free, often around the clock, to care for these animals until they’ve healed. They often spend what little money they have on feed, specialized equipment including syringes and IV bags, and medicine. One rehabber told me that she can’t afford to buy herself new clothes. “I’m so broke right now,” they said. “All of my money goes to the animals.” As I spent time with rehabbers, I began to see their perspective. They view these species not as pests but as part of nature — as part of the New York City ecosystem. As part of their home. These animals belong here, rehabbers told me, just as much as we do. And they don’t deserve the harm that humans so often inflict on them, whether deliberately or not. By showing these animals some respect and helping them survive, rehabbers appear to feel more connected with their environment, with what they see as nature. That enriches their lives and makes them feel less alone. Maybe they’re onto something. A common sight in NYC and a food source for many of its critters: A pile of trash on the street, shot in the East Village. Nearly every inch of New York, the nation’s largest and densest city, has been transformed by humans. Even its parks are largely artificial: The ponds, streams, and waterfalls in Manhattan’s Central Park, for example, are fed by city drinking water. Yet the city is brimming with non-human life. On a warm evening in March, I strolled through Central Park and saw a few dozen raccoons, several of which were eating a large pile of spaghetti. I put a motion-sensing camera in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery (where conductor and pianist Leonard Bernstein, among other icons, is buried) and it captured videos of groundhogs, skunks, opossums, and stray cats. The city’s ponds are full of turtles. There are even seahorses in the Hudson River, once a dumping ground for chemicals and dead bodies. “I see nature everywhere in New York City,” says Dustin Partridge, director of conservation and science at NYC Audubon, one of the leading environmental groups in the city. Raccoons, some of the most common wild animals in NYC, prowl Central Park after dark. They helped themselves to a large pile of pasta someone had dumped. Some of the city’s animals are native to the region and have found ways to survive, even as developers chop up and pave over their habitats. Staten Island is still home to a rare amphibian called the Atlantic coast leopard frog, once common in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island. Around full and new moons in late spring, horseshoe crabs — ancient creatures that have been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years — still come ashore on NYC beaches to find mates and lay eggs. Islands in the harbor are home to loads of water birds like black-crowned night herons and egrets. Many other species, meanwhile, are here in New York, in large part, because of us — or because they tolerate us. The wild ancestors of pigeons, which are domestic birds, lived on cliffsides. These days they’re happy to nest on the sides of buildings. Of the several million tons of trash the city produces each year, the occasional overflowing receptacle or torn trash bag provides ample food for rats and raccoons. Images captured by a motion-sensing camera installed on a trail in Green-Wood Cemetery, in South Brooklyn. These furry city slickers don’t fit neatly into any of our categories for animals, says Seth Magle, who runs the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. They exist somewhere between domesticated pets, like cats and dogs, and wildlife, like wolves and bears. “They occupy this invisible space in peoples’ heads,” Magle told me. And that many of New York’s most common critters are not native to the region further complicates our feelings toward them. The pigeons evolved in Europe and North Africa, and the rats are from Asia. House sparrows and European starlings are native to the eastern hemisphere. Even the squirrels, which technically are native to New York, were artificially introduced to the city in the 1870s, after hunting and deforestation wiped out their resident population. The plight of these common city animals is that they are so widely unloved. We treat them as if they don’t belong here, in our home. Even if they’re native to New York, we don’t want them in our city. Cities are for humans. Distant forests — environments that we can visit at our leisure, on our own terms — are for them. In Green-Wood Cemetery, a colony of monk parakeets, birds native to South America, have built a giant nest atop the main gate. In reality, we’ve already taken most of the planet for ourselves. Only a fraction of those distant forests remain. That’s why an estimated one million plant and animal species are now slipping toward extinction. The animals that are plentiful in cities like New York, these “pests,” are “winners on a planet full of loss,” as environmental author Bethany Brookshire wrote in her 2022 book Pests. Their abundance is, in a way, a success story. To be clear, building a home for humans in New York has heavily degraded the natural ecosystem; the city has, for example, lost 99 percent of its freshwater wetlands. From another perspective, however, cities like New York have created a new ecosystem — a new web of life. On any given day in late spring or summer, Arina Hinzen might be wearing a scarf around her neck full of baby opossums. Just as these marsupials cling to their mothers in the wild, the babies — some no larger than a ping-pong ball — cling to the fabric, like an animal print come to life. The animals seem to enjoy riding with Hinzen as she moves about. If they smell something delicious, she told me, the babies poke their snouts out for a whiff. Hinzen, a licensed rehabber who runs a wildlife welfare group in the city called Urban Wildlife Alliance, is what you might call Manhattan’s premier opossum godmother. In the last decade, the German native has rehabbed roughly 1,500 animals, including hundreds of baby opossums, she said. A single female opossum can give birth to more than a dozen infants, each no larger than a jelly bean. If just one mother gets hit by a car, as is common in NYC, they’ll all be in need of life support. Often, when people find them, Hinzen is who they call. Arina Hinzen, one of NYC’s most trusted opossum rehabbers, feeds a four-week-old baby by inserting a thin tube into its stomach. Raising baby opossums — which differ from possums, an entirely different marsupial native to Australia — was not always her life. Nor has it been her most unusual vocation. As a young adult in Germany, Hinzen spent more than a decade judging skydiving competitions. Parachuters would hurl themselves from planes, sometimes do tricks in the air, and then try to land on a target. (She, herself, has jumped from a plane close to 500 times.) From there, Hinzen pursued a career in viticulture, got married, and built a wine importing company in NYC with her then-husband. Years later — now more than a decade ago — Hinzen’s marriage and her company fell apart, she told me, as we shared a bottle of wine on a bench in Central Park. Her world crumbled. It was around that time, Hinzen says, that she came across an injured pigeon in the Upper West Side. The bird was puffed up on the steps of a church and looked emaciated. Hinzen felt an urge to help. “It seemed like she had already checked out and given up on life,” Hinzen told me. “I think that’s what drew my attention, because I felt almost the same.” Hinzen prepares a baby opossum for feeding. She uses a specialized animal infant formula. At this age, Hinzen feeds the baby opossums five times a day. Each feeding takes about an hour and a half, she told me. Hinzen brought home the debilitated bird and with help from a local rehab center, nursed it back to health. She released the pigeon — Richard — a few months later. “To see that you can bring something back from the edge of death that has lost all hope ignited my passion,” she told me. Hinzen, a Buddhist, rescued more pigeons in the months that followed, eventually graduating to infant squirrels and opossums. They have become her specialty. In the spring, Hinzen told me that she might have 40 babies at one time and be tending to them 18 or 19 hours a day. “It has completely taken over my life,” she says. In these creatures, Hinzen, like other rehabbers, sees something that many of us don’t: something relatable. “I’m absolutely convinced that these animals have an emotional life,” she says. “At the end of the day, all they want is to live, to bring up their families, and to eat. They want the same as we want.” “At the end of the day, all they want is to live. They want the same as we want.” Feeling a connection with these animals, and compassion for them, has enriched her life in the city, she says. Even just noticing them more — their quirky behaviors, their bizarre features — can inspire awe, she says. “We are conditioned to see ourselves as different from other living beings,” Hinzen told me. “We have lost a feeling of connection to them. We have forgotten that we are part of nature and part of an ecosystem as much as they are.” Amanda Lullo, a rehabber in Staten Island, prepares to feed a handful of orphaned baby squirrels. Amanda Lullo, a squirrel rehabber on Staten Island, echoes some of that thinking. “Everything serves a purpose,” she told me. Rats are “nature’s garbage disposals,” she says, and squirrels are “nature’s gardeners,” since they bury seeds that grow into trees — at least when they don’t retrieve them to eat later. “We need these animals,” she says. I visited Lullo’s home on two separate occasions this spring. It’s a modest duplex that looks pretty ordinary. Until you walk inside. About two dozen cages, filled with squirrels, rats, and a couple of ferrets, were stacked up against the walls. An IV hung from the ceiling. A handful of pet cats and a rescued pit bull roamed around — and, in one case, slept on top of — the cages, remarkably disinterested in the animals inside. As we walked around her home, Lullo, who grew up in Brooklyn, introduced me to the animals. There was Pistachio, a.k.a. Fat Boy, a pudgy squirrel who fell from a tree as a baby. The fall broke his arm and cracked his tooth, she said, as the animal (now mostly healed) crawled around Lullo’s body. Lullo also showed me several baby squirrels including a five-week-old; she feeds them a special animal infant formula with a dash of heavy cream using a syringe. Lullo feeds a blueberry to one of the young squirrels she’s caring for. An array of clean syringes that Lullo uses to feed the baby squirrels. I also met a couple of wild rats, most named after fruits, including Strawberry and Blueberry. (Lullo raised them from infancy. Sometimes when people kill rats they find out that they have babies, Lullo said. They feel bad and call a rehabber.) Though common, these animals are deserving of care, Lullo says. “Humans kill and destroy everything they touch,” she says. The animals of New York City, she explains, are mostly harmless and they just want to live. Once rehabbers start caring for injured wildlife, they also just find it hard to stop. These people see critters in need everywhere. Rehabber Mary Beth Artz throws food pellets into a lake in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to try and attract a domestic duck in need of rescue. “Once you know, you can’t unknow,” said Mary Beth Artz, a rehabber and stage actor who rescues ducks and other birds from Prospect Park in Brooklyn. (She’s currently rehabbing a jumbo Pekin named Freddie at her home. Last fall, the duck, which may have been purchased as a pet, was abandoned in a Queens parking lot, she said.) “I say it all the time — ‘I’m not going to do this anymore’ — but then something else happens,” Artz told me one afternoon in Prospect Park, while she was trying to rescue a domestic khaki Campbell duck that was dumped in the lake. “If we don’t do it, who’s going to do it?” An uncomfortable answer to that question might be, well, perhaps no one should. Indeed, there are some good reasons to limit the numbers of certain urban critters. Raccoons and skunks can carry rabies and other diseases. Rodent infestations, meanwhile, are particularly harmful to people experiencing homelessness, Brookshire writes in Pests. Their constant squeaks can make it impossible to sleep. (I couldn’t find anyone, aside from Lullo, who is rehabbing rats in the city. Lullo doesn’t plan to release them. Similarly, rehabbers seldom rescue raccoons, which require a more advanced license.) “Disease is always a risk with wildlife,” said Myles Davis, a city wildlife expert who manages NYC Audubon’s green infrastructure program. (That said, “You are never at risk of getting rabies from a raccoon,” he added, if you only observe it from afar.) A red-tailed hawk in Green-Wood Cemetery rips apart a pigeon, an abundant food source in NYC. An overabundance of these animals can also interfere with efforts to protect the city’s rarer species — stoking longstanding tensions between animal welfare and conservation. Pigeons may be an important food source for native raptors, including the once near-extinct peregrine falcon, but raccoons and opossums eat the eggs and chicks of native birds, according to Partridge. This complicates the question of what belongs in an urbanized environment. I raised these tensions with Catherine Quayle, a spokesperson for the Wild Bird Fund, the city’s most well-known and largest rehab center, mostly focused on birds. “Wildlife rehab is not a practice of conservation,” she told me. “It’s a practice of compassion.” To tell the public that some animals matter and other ones don’t “defeats our mission,” she said, “which is to teach people about wildlife.” As Quayle sees it, showing compassion for any wild creature, whether it’s a pigeon pecking at a slice of pizza or a songbird flying through during spring migration, can engender more respect for the wild world at large. It can help erode the dividing line between humans and pests, ultimately making us better stewards of our environment. We really need to be better stewards. Many features of the NYC built environment harm all animals, rare and common alike. Building windows are too reflective, causing birds to crash into them. Rat poison not only makes rodents suffer but harms the rodent-eating raptors. Flaco, a famous owl that escaped last year from the Central Park Zoo (with the help of a miscreant), died recently after colliding with a building. An autopsy revealed that he had four kinds of rat poison in his body (as well as a form of herpes found in pigeons). This doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and welcome these animals in with open arms. But maybe — just maybe — NYC could find a way to, you know, not place trash on the street in flimsy plastic bags. (The city says it’s working on it.) You may think urban animals are gross, but we are the ones filling the city with trash. After warm weekend days, trash cans in Prospect Park are overflowing with animal-attracting garbage. Two of NYC’s most common (and most reviled) wild creatures. I still struggle with my own feelings toward these creatures. I happen to live on a rat-ridden street in Brooklyn. On a walk the other night, my dog lunged for a stray cat which then lunged for a large rat (and successfully snatched it). I’ve dealt with mice and bugs in my apartment. Last fall, I had to move because of a roach infestation. If this is the New York City ecosystem, I’m not sure how close to nature I want to be. What is clear to me is the simple power of connecting with animals as individuals, of pausing even briefly to observe their lives. Watching house sparrows bathe in a grimy fountain or squirrels chase each other around a tree can, I’d argue, inspire awe. And to see them suffering can be incredibly painful. That much was clear to me back in Bay Ridge, where I was waiting with Martin, the bird rehabber, for the pigeon delivery. A white SUV pulled up, and the driver retrieved a cat carrier from the backseat. Martin took the carrier and set it down on a nearby bench. The pigeon inside was still and its eyes glossy; I could see its breast faintly rise and fall. It wasn’t doing well, Martin said. The bird was about to die. We sat there in silence, Martin lightly petting the pigeon’s back. And a moment later, the animal was completely still. It had passed away, Martin told me. “You never get used to it,” she said, quietly. Frankly, I was devastated. I’ve rarely given pigeons much thought, but at that moment — after witnessing life vanish — I was comforted knowing that these birds, and that so many other unloved creatures across the city, have people looking out for them.

Is the Earth itself a giant living creature?

2 d

vox.com

Rachel Victoria Hillis for Vox An old, much-ridiculed hypothesis said yes. It’s time to take it seriously. In the 1970s, chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis put forth a bold theory: The Earth is a giant living organism. When a mammal is hot, it sweats to cool itself off. If you nick your skin with a knife, the skin will scab and heal. Lovelock and Margulis argued that our planet has similar processes of self-regulation, which arguably, make it seem like the Earth itself is alive. The idea wasn’t unprecedented in human history. “The fundamental concept of a living world is ancient,” says Ferris Jabr, a science journalist and author of the upcoming book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. The book explores all the ways life has shaped our physical world and, in doing so, inevitably revisits the question “Is the Earth alive?” Lovelock and Margulis called the idea “the Gaia Hypothesis” — named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. It was openly mocked by many in mainstream Western science. “For many decades, the Gaia hypothesis was considered kind of this fringe sort of woo-woo idea,” Jabr says. “Because for biologists,” Jabr says, life is a specific thing. “It is typically thought of as an organism that is a product of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. And Earth as a planet does not meet those criteria.” It didn’t help that the original articulation of Gaia granted Earth a certain degree of sentience. The hypothesis argued “all of the living organisms on Earth are collaborating to deliberately create a climate that is suitable for life,” as Jabr says. But yet, this idea has persisted, for a few reasons. Scientists have never been able to precisely define what life is. So, it’s been hard to dismiss Gaia completely. The Gaia hypothesis has also evolved over the years. Later iterations deemphasized that life was “collaborating” to transform the Earth, Jabr explains. Which still leaves a lot to be explored: Certainly living things don’t need to be thought of as conscious, or have agency, to be considered alive. Consider the clam, which lacks a central nervous system. Jabr found in the years since Gaia was first introduced, scientists have uncovered more connections between biology, ecology, and geology, which make the boundaries between these disciplines appear even more fuzzy. The Amazon rainforest essentially “summons” its own rain, as Jabr explains in his book. They learned how life is involved in the process that generated the continents. Life plays a role in regulating Earth’s temperature. They’ve learned that just about everywhere you look on Earth, you find life influencing the physical properties of our planet. In reporting his book, Jabr comes to the conclusion that not only is the Earth indeed a living creature, but thinking about it in such a way might help inspire action in dealing with the climate crisis. Brian Resnick spoke to Jabr for an episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast that explores scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown. You can listen to the full conversation here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Brian Resnick Do you think the Earth is alive? Ferris Jabr I do. I think Earth is alive. We can think of Earth as a genuine living entity, in a meaningful sense, and in a scientific sense. There are four parts to the argument that substantiate that statement. Brian Resnick What’s the first? Ferris Jabr Life isn’t just on Earth. It literally came out of Earth. It is literally part of Earth. It is Earth. All of the matter that we refer to as life is Earth animated — that’s how I come to think about it. If you accept that, then at a bare minimum, you have to accept as a scientific fact that the surface of the planet is genuinely alive, because it is matter that has become animated. Brian Resnick Earth animated? What do you mean by that? Ferris Jabr Every single living organism is literally made of Earth. All of its constituent elements and components are parts of the planet. We all come from the planet. We all return to the planet. It’s just a big cycle. And so life, the biological matter on the planet, is literally the matter of the planet, animated. It is living matter. Imagine a vast beach and sandcastles and other sculptures spontaneously emerge from the sand. They are still made of sand, right? They’re not suddenly divorced from the beach just because they’ve arisen from the beach. Those castles and sculptures are still literally the beach. And I think it’s the same with life and Earth. Brian Resnick So, the physical components of Earth are the material of life. And so distinguishing these two — Earth and life — seems silly because they comprise each other? Ferris Jabr The more you think about this, the more the boundaries dissolve. Every layer of the planet that we’ve been able to access, we find life there. And in the deepest mines that we have dug, we continue to find microbes and sometimes even more complex organisms like nematodes, these tiny, worm-like creatures. Brian Resnick So all life contains Earth, and Earth contains life? Ferris Jabr There are components of the Earth that are not alive in any way. The center of the planet, it’s all molten rock and there might be some solid metal in the core. But think about a redwood tree: It is mostly dead wood in terms of its volume and mass. It is mostly nonliving tissue. And then a little bit of tissue that is laced with living cells. So, you know, most complex multicellular living entities are a jumble of the animate and inanimate. Earth is not unusual in that way. Brian Resnick What is part two of your argument? Ferris Jabr All these organisms [on Earth], they give Earth a kind of anatomy and physiology. Life dramatically increases the planet’s capacity to absorb, store, and transform energy, to exchange gases, and to perform complex chemical reactions. Brian Resnick What’s a good example of this? Ferris Jabr You can think of all of the photosynthetic life on the planet acting in concert. It’s not that they’re deliberately collaborating to do something, but they’re all doing their own thing at the same time. NASA has made these amazing videos and animations and they’ve literally called them “Earth breathing,” because you can see how the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere fluctuate with the seasons. The amount of vegetation that rings the continents, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, in the mid-latitudes, it changes dramatically with the seasons. It has a sinuous rhythm. It looks like a pulse or like breathing. Brian Resnick So, are you saying something like all of the algae or plankton in the ocean are generating this together? … Is that kind of like how all of the cells in my lungs are working together to exchange gases? Or is that not quite the right way to think about it? Ferris Jabr I think we have to be careful with making too direct a comparison. You as an organism are a product of evolution by natural selection. Your structure, your anatomy is something that was written into your genome. That’s not how the Earth system formed. Brian Resnick I’m realizing a key to this conversation is what you just corrected me on. When we’re discussing this notion about the “Earth being alive,” we’re not suggesting it’s not alive in the same way you and I are. But there’s these equivalent processes that look very similar to the way my body maintains homeostasis, for example. It’s not like the Earth is exchanging gases and doing metabolism-like things in the way I’ve been evolved to. It’s not achieving homeostasis the way you or I do. But yet it is doing something that seems analogous. Is that the kind of thing that you’re arguing here, overall? Ferris Jabr Absolutely. When we’re looking at the planet, we see life-like qualities, things that resemble the characteristics of the organism, which is the most familiar life form to us. But it is not exactly the same. It is still genuinely alive, in my opinion, but is not exactly an organism. Life is a phenomenon that occurs at multiple scales. The way I think of it is that it’s not identical at all of those scales, but it rhymes and there are analogies between each of those scales. I like to think of a leaf on a tree in a forest on a planet. There’s no disagreement whatsoever within science that the cells that compose that leaf are alive. The tissues that those cells form are alive. The leaf as a whole is a living tissue. The tree we consider an organism that is also alive. We consider each of those layers to be alive. There’s no debate or controversy about that. Once we go above the scale of the organism, this is where the debate begins. Can we think of the forest, the ecosystem, as alive as well? And then one more level higher. Can we think of the planet as alive? My argument is, yes, that each of those levels, each of those scales is equally alive but not identical. And there are analogous processes that happen at each. But they’re not exactly the same. Brian Resnick What is the next plank of your argument? Ferris Jabr Life is also an engine of planetary evolution. The planet evolves over time dramatically. It is not exactly the same as standard Darwinian evolution through natural selection, but it is very much a type of evolution. Organisms and their environments continually co-evolve. Each is profoundly changing the other. This reciprocal transformation is responsible for many of the planet’s defining features: for our breathable atmosphere, our blue sky, our bountiful oceans, our fertile soils. This is all because of life and because of the way that life has changed the planetary environments. These are not default features of the planet. Life has created them over time. Brian Resnick What is the most stunning example of how life has actually changed the planet? Ferris Jabr In the beginning, Earth had essentially no free oxygen in its atmosphere, and the sky was probably a hazy orange. And when cyanobacteria began to oxygenate the atmosphere through the innovation of photosynthesis, the sky probably started shifting toward the blue part of the spectrum. The entire chemistry of the planet changed. I mean, you suddenly had an oxygen-rich environment, whereas before it was an oxygen-poor environment. That changes absolutely everything. Brian Resnick Okay, so to get back to what you were saying before, it’s not that Earth evolves in the same way that organisms evolve. But it evolves with a different mechanism, is that right? Ferris Jabr Evolutionary biologists will say a planet cannot evolve because it doesn’t have a cohesive genome. There’s no genetic inheritance going on; there’s no sexual reproduction going on. But there are analogous processes by which changes are passed down from generation to generation that are not genetically encoded. If we think about a bunch of large mammals, they’re transforming their landscape by walking through it with their immense hefts. They’re tearing down vegetation. They’re digging in, uprooting things. They’re changing the landscape. Those changes persist. And so their descendants now are evolving in a new environment changed by their predecessors. These environmental changes are not themselves genetically encoded, but they are being passed from generation to generation, and they are inevitably influencing the evolution that follows. Brian Resnick If a fundamental part of life is that it changes the world in which it exists, how are we different for accelerating the climate crisis? Because you look at the history of the Earth and you say, well, life has powerfully changed it. Who’s to say what we’re doing is necessarily not a natural process? Ferris Jabr It’s simultaneously humbling and empowering to recognize ourselves as simply the latest chapter in this long evolutionary saga of life changing the planet. It is a basic property of life to change its environment, and we’re not an exception to that. But I do think there’s a major distinction between what our species has done and what has happened before in terms of the combined scale and speed and the variety of our changes to the planet. I don’t think there’s any species or creature before us that has changed the planet on such a large scale so quickly and in so many different ways simultaneously. We have radically altered the atmosphere, the oceans, and the continents. We’ve done it in a couple of centuries. That’s a huge part of the reason for why the crisis we’re going through right now is a crisis. It has so much to do with the scale and the speed of it. Brian Resnick What’s part four of your argument? Ferris Jabr This co-evolution, on the whole, has amplified the planet’s capacity for self-regulation and enhanced Earth’s resilience. Earth has remained alive for, you know, around 4 billion years, despite repeated catastrophes of unfathomable scale, unlike anything that we have ever experienced in human history. We have to account for that resilience, for that incredible persistence through time. It is not a deliberate thing. You know, it is not a conscious or collaborative thing. It is simply an inevitable physical process, just as evolution by natural selection is an inevitable physical process. Even in the mass extinctions in Earth’s history, life recedes to its most fundamental and most resilient forms: microbes. And then life sprouts from there. Brian Resnick Are you sure you’re right about all this? Is the scientific community coming around to accept this notion that Earth is indeed alive? Ferris Jabr I mean, this book is my personal synthesis, an argument. You know, this is my viewpoint. This is how I have come to see the Earth. There are scientists who agree with me, but I would not say that this is the consensus of modern mainstream science. I think the statement that Earth is alive remains quite controversial and provocative. However, everything else we’ve been talking about, the co-evolution of life and environment, the fact that life has profoundly changed the planet. These are all well-accepted points. Brian Resnick Which part are you most likely wrong about? Or which part do you feel like has the most room for doubt? Ferris Jabr We do not have a precise, universally accepted definition of life. We haven’t explained it on the most fundamental level. Like 100 years from now, will we have a fundamental explanation for life that we’re missing right now? And if we do, will that make thinking of planets as alive defunct? And so, I think open-mindedness is fundamental to any scientific thinking or scientific process. And we have to be open to the idea that a century from now, or even sooner, all of this will be wrong. And that’s part of what I find thrilling: We don’t have all of the answers yet. Right? These are incredibly challenging ideas and concepts that we are still working out. If we had figured it out, then we wouldn’t be talking about the Gaia hypothesis anymore. The Gaia would have been officially dead a long time ago. But I think the reason that it remains relevant and continues to be debated means that we just haven’t figured it out yet. Brian Resnick Why is it useful to think of the Earth as alive? Ferris Jabr There’s a massive difference between thinking of ourselves as living creatures that simply reside on a planet, that simply inhabit a planet, versus being a component of a much larger living entity. When we properly understand our role within the living Earth system, I think the moral urgency of the climate crisis really comes into focus. All of a sudden it’s not just that, oh, the bad humans have harmed the environment and we need to do something about it. It’s that each of us is literally Earth animated, and we are one part of this much larger, living entity. It’s a realization that everything that we are all doing moment to moment, day to day, is affecting this larger living entity in some way. Brian Resnick So, the simple point that you’re making is that we are Earth, and don’t self-harm. Ferris Jabr Right, exactly.