Humpback Whales Are Interrupting Orca Hunts to Rescue Completely Different Species

It’s not a story anyone would have believed if it weren’t so thoroughly documented. A pod of killer whales in Antarctica is chasing a Weddell seal that’s taken refuge on a small ice floe. The orcas swim shoulder to shoulder to create a wave that washes the seal off the ice and into the water. Death looks certain. And then, without warning, a pair of humpback whales arrives. The seal, panicking, swims towards them. A wave tosses it onto the chest of the closer humpback, which is by this point rolling belly-up at the surface. The humpback arches its chest out of the water to keep the seal high and dry, above the reach of the frustrated killer whales circling below. When the seal starts to slip off, the humpback gently pushes it back onto its chest with a flipper. The seal eventually escapes onto another ice floe. The orcas, denied their meal, swim off.

The marine ecologist who watched this happen in 2009 was, on his own subsequent account, so bewildered that it took him years to work out what he’d actually seen. And what he ended up finding, once he started asking other researchers whether they’d witnessed anything similar, was that it wasn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. And it involves species the humpbacks have no obvious reason to help.

What the researchers actually documented

According to a 2017 review paper by Dr Robert Pitman of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, with Volker Deecke, Christine Gabriele and eleven other co-authors from research institutions around the world, published in Marine Mammal Science under the title “Humpback whales interfering when mammal-eating killer whales attack other species: Mobbing behavior and interspecific altruism?”, the team compiled 115 documented interactions between humpback whales and killer whales over a sixty-two-year period from 1951 to 2012. The interactions came from researchers, whale-watch operators and wildlife photographers across multiple ocean basins.

The numbers, once you sit with them, don’t quite behave the way you’d expect. In 57 per cent of the interactions, the humpbacks were the ones who started it. They swam towards the killer whales, not away. Ninety-five per cent of the orcas involved were mammal-eating forms rather than fish-eating ones, meaning the humpbacks were reliably distinguishing between the two ecological populations and only intervening when the killer whales were hunting warm-blooded prey. And in the interactions where humpbacks approached killer whales that were actively attacking something, 87 per cent involved a kill or a hunt in progress.

The bit that made the paper genuinely surprising is what happened next. When the humpbacks arrived at the scene of an attack, only 11 per cent of the time was the prey another humpback. The other 89 per cent of the time, the killer whales were hunting something else entirely. A seal. A sea lion. A porpoise. A grey whale calf. A minke whale. A sunfish. Across the full data set, humpbacks were documented interfering with orca attacks on ten different species, including six kinds of pinniped, three other cetacean species, and one bony fish.

The interventions weren’t casual. Humpbacks travelled up to two kilometres to reach an ongoing attack. They approached bellowing and trumpeting. They positioned themselves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flippers, which on a fourteen-metre humpback are capable of doing real damage. They stayed for hours in some cases, refusing to leave until the killer whales gave up. In one incident in Monterey Bay in May 2012, described in reporting by National Geographic on the specific case, at least fourteen humpbacks converged on a group of killer whales that had killed a grey whale calf, and spent hours preventing the orcas from feeding on the carcass. One humpback stationed itself directly next to the dead calf, head pointed at it, tail slashing every time a killer whale approached.

None of this makes obvious sense.

by Kiran Journals, Space Daily | Read more:
Image: via

Bosco Verticale: Vertical Forest in Milan ~ Milan (Year Unknown) by Macenzo — Residential skyscrapers integrated with abundant plant life

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The Ordinary Sublime of the American Diner

We had our first taste of pecan pie. Good lord. Do the Americans know how lucky they are to live with these everyday indulgences? Pecan pie is part of the ordinary sublime of American life. It knocks English apple crumble into a cocked hat. Apple crumble can be superb, with a crunchy topping, preferably with the sort of spice mix one associates with Christmas, mince pies, and mulled wine (and a pinch of cumin to go with the cinnamon), and perhaps some pear to balance the apple and squares of dark chocolate, but it is still the old world’s idea of a good time.

Pecan pie, served hot, à la mode, in a diner that looks older than my grandmother—that’s luxury, that’s life in the movies, that’s America. Apple crumble is for weekends, Sunday lunch, something you make at home. Whoever heard of a restaurant serving apple crumble like the ladies of the village used to make it? By contrast, pecan pie is for everyone, every day, whenever you feel like it. No Englishman ever asked a friend if they wanted to go for a serving of crumble the way Americans go out for coffee and a slice of pie.

We were in a diner in Bethesda, complete with the original fixtures and fittings, surrounded by people eating country fried steak, chicken tenders, and pancakes for lunch, with a jukebox at the table that no longer plays, and those Maxwell House coffee pots that are found in the old diners that have seen generations come and go. The wooden booths are reminiscent of the origins of fast food and diners: the railway carriage restaurant. They are reminiscent, too, of church pews. All along 16th Street NW, which you drive out of DC to get up to this corner of Maryland, there are the sort of churches that made America: large, level, open, well-lit, from the Protestant tradition where everyone is on a level. Diners are still, just about, America’s secular churches. Every man is a success in a diner: equal among eaters.

When I went to New York for work, and regretted the lack of time to do anything real, I got up early, went to a quiet diner run by a wizened old man on Second Avenue, and read the New York Times with my refill. In Boston, more than a decade ago, we walked through the ice-cold air to find the diner we were recommended. Police officers were eating muffins and everyone had those characteristic blue-and-white coffee cups. In Wisconsin, I travelled from Milwaukee to Madison to Taliesin, and whenever I could, I went to a diner. Whatever else we remember of America, we will always remember the Gettysburg Family Restaurant.

If there is a “real America” (though why Manhattan and the DMV are not always considered to be the “real America” is beyond me: if these are not the heart of a certain idea of America, with their (what?) twenty-million people, I cannot think what is), you will find it in these diners. Blue jeans, tattoos, happy children, friendly-busy waiters and waitresses, laminated menus, eggs any way you like ’em, a waffle on the side, families out for lunch, locals, road trippers, everything all day, the dignity of a booth no matter how little you have to spend, coffee you don’t have to wait for, period crockery, the hum of conversation and the clang of the kitchen, paying the cashier at the register, blueberry pie, peanut soup, maple bacon, the good old American hamburger, side salads, fried cheese, baked chicken, any combination you want, daily specials, and everything just like mother used to make it. America the way we remember her, the way we imagine her, the way she still sometimes can be.

And hot pecan pie, à la mode: a small plate of delight for anyone with $4.

by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader |  Read more:

Image: Lee Cartledge on Unsplash

The Deep Sea

The Deep Sea
by Neal Agarwal

[ed. Fun and informative (scroll down to different depths to see the various creatures that have been recorded there). For example, I had no idea thick-billed murres could dive that deep.]

Why So Quiet?

In May 2024, when then-Congresswoman Mary Peltola introduced a Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act and Bottom Trawl Clarity Act, the bills drew immediate backlash.

Peltola, a Democrat, received a letter signed by 53 trawl interests and nationwide fishery stakeholders urging her to withdraw the proposed legislation saying, “These new federal mandates and timelines are utterly unworkable.”

Fast forward to 2026.

In her current campaign to unseat 12-year incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, Peltola introduced a similar “Fighting for Alaska Fisheries” platform to no reaction from the trawl sector. Sullivan quickly followed by proposing a Bycatch Reduction Act, a revamped version of a 2022 Alaska Salmon Research Task Force bill that produced a report recommending more research. Again, no trawler reaction.

What’s the difference?

This time around, Peltola’s push is a campaign policy platform, not a proposed congressional bill. While Sullivan’s Act fits that description, the trawl sector apparently views him as its strategic shield against Peltola. If they aggressively attack his bill, they could politically weaken their strongest ally in Washington.

There are fundamental differences between the two bills.

Peltola’s approach leans toward statutory restrictions that would force the government to draw hard lines on where trawling is allowed — the goal is to stop “multi-species collapse.” It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.” Her proposal would remove “to the extent practicable” as it is widely regarded as the phrase that allows trawlers to declare under the law that they “are doing the best they can” to reduce bycatch. It has been included in management decisions for decades as a way for the trawl sector to avoid more stringent bycatch rules. Peltola’s approach calls for restructuring the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to dilute trawler influence, and adding seats for subsistence and small-boat fishermen. It calls for investment in Alaska seafood processing innovation, fish by-product utilization and seaweed and shellfish mariculture.

Sullivan’s bill offers industrialized trawlers a heavily subsidized pathway to compliance rather than an eviction notice. It requires stricter operational rules like mandatory salmon excluders — devices built into trawl nets that can allow salmon to escape — and tougher seafloor contact accountability. It focuses heavily on using advanced data, real-time technology and gear innovations to mitigate bycatch and ecosystem impacts without adding regulatory burdens. Crucially, it includes massive federal carrots: funding for a flume tank, electronic monitoring upgrades and streamlined Exempted Fishing Permits that allow vessels to conduct experimental fishing activities that would otherwise be prohibited.

Instead of resorting to angry rebuttals, the trawl sector has outsourced its messaging to new advocacy fronts like The Truth Alaska, Sustaining Alaska’s Future and the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. One originates in Texas; the others are fronted by former state directors for Republican Congressional delegates Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III.

This strategy lets the trawl sector counter anti-trawl sentiment without making it look like they are fighting a sitting US Senator. They reframe the debate as “supporting science and Alaska jobs,” allowing Sullivan to position himself as the reasonable middle ground.

During his tenure, Sullivan has been one of Big Trawl’s top recipients of campaign contributions. He obfuscates the fact that those cash cows all are homeported in Seattle or Oregon.

In recent social media ads, for example, he calls for reining in chum salmon bycatch by “holding foreign fleets accountable,” knowing full well that foreign fleets have been banned from Alaska waters out to 200 miles since the mid-1970s.

by Laine Welch, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: David Csepp/National Marine Fisheries Service
[ed. Politics in a nutshell (and GOP politicians) - and the natural environment continues to get screwed. I don't think Republican politicians hate the environment per se, but if the choice is between protection and unfettered development, no contest. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres) here and here, and Big Bend National Park (Texas) under threat (here and here).]

***

"Donald Trump once bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters’ faith. In the Big Bend region, the Trump administration has been figuratively shooting Texans in the face while the state’s leaders do virtually nothing. In recent weeks, bulldozers began ripping up Texas’s last, best wilderness—the one place that still honors the state’s mythology of wide-open spaces and endless frontier. Even with the federal boot heel (for now) off the neck of Big Bend National Park, it’s preparing to press down on the rest of the vast region with a mix of thirty-foot border walls, vehicle barriers, and new patrol roads. Hundreds of private landowners between El Paso and Del Rio may soon face eminent domain, their land seized by the feds for a project that few in the region think will do anything to secure a part of the border that sees vanishingly few illegal crossings.

In the face of all this, a spirited, bipartisan coalition of Big Bend enthusiasts—from crunchy river rats to MAGA border sheriffs—have been fighting back. Early in the summer, they managed to get the Trump administration to scrap plans for a thirty-foot wall in the park. This week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott agreed to pause construction there while he visits the region. Governor Greg Abbott, after months of silence on the matter, has attempted to take credit for the pause."

Feds Implement Temporary Water Sharing Agreement in Western States

Arizona, California and Nevada will be required to curb their use of the water from the Colorado River by about 20 percent over the next two years — and could ultimately face even larger cuts — according to three officials familiar with negotiations over a long-awaited federal plan to rescue the depleted river.

The plan, part of which the Bureau of Reclamation is expected to describe in an Environmental Impact Statement on Friday, comes at a time of escalating crisis for the Colorado, a crucial water source for seven states, 30 Native tribes and a swath of northwestern Mexico. But experts say it will not be sufficient to resolve a political standoff among the river’s many users or prevent the beleaguered waterway from teetering toward collapse.

The cuts proposed for the next two years resemble what the three states offered in a proposal this spring, and represent the first phase of a broader 10-year framework for operating the river’s dams and reservoirs, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations.

That framework is expected to call for operating plans to be developed every two years and outline a wide range of possible measures those plans could include — including reducing the amount of water released to the Lower Basin by as much as 40 percent.

The framework is not expected to consider mandatory cuts to water use from the four states in the upper part of the basin: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Arizona, California and Nevada make up the Lower Basin. [...]

The current operating rules, which expire at the end of September, have not prevented chronic overuse of the river amid a decades-long drought worsened by climate change.

After a historically meager winter snowfall and a scorching spring, the amount of water flowing into the river this year is less than a quarter of average annual demand, and levels in its major reservoirs have dropped to record lows. Scientists warn that one or two more dry years could crash the entire system, disrupting hydropower production, drinking water supplies and irrigation for some 5 million acres of farmland. [...]

The likely operating plan for 2027 and 2028, based on a May proposal from the Lower Basin states, is projected to save about 3.2 million acre feet of water — enough to fill roughly 1.5 million Olympic swimming pools. The plan will require significant “belt tightening,” particularly in Arizona, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, but states have indicated they can tolerate the reductions.

Yet those measures are only half of what studies suggest is needed to bring water demand in line with the dwindling supply, Porter cautioned, increasing the likelihood of even steeper cuts down the road. [...]

The 330-mile system of canals and aqueducts, which supplies water to the most populated parts of Arizona, is poised to see the biggest cut in its history under the bureau’s operating plan for the next two years. If the agency chooses to implement some of the deeper reductions considered in the 10-year framework, CAP’s entire water allocation could be wiped out. [...]

Fraught negotiations

Experts say the rising tensions on the river result from a chaotic combination of bad weather, poor planning, intransigent state officials and federal missteps under the Trump and Biden administrations.

At the heart of the conflict is an impasse between the Upper and Lower Basin states over who should shoulder the burden of necessary cuts.

In the Upper Basin, home to the snowcapped mountains and winding tributaries that feed the river, there are few reservoirs to provide long-term water storage, leaving users reliant on natural flows. That means the Upper Basin takes an automatic cut during dry years, officials argue. They say responsibility for restoring water to Lakes Powell and Mead should fall on the Lower Basin states that use them.

Yet about three-quarters of the people who depend on the Colorado live in the Lower Basin. The region is also home to major cities and sprawling farms that provide most of the nation’s winter vegetable supply. Officials from these states say they have already curbed their water consumption by millions of acre feet in recent years. Overuse of the river is universal, they argue, and so too is responsibility for saving it.

The situation is complicated by the arcane legal framework governing the river, which prioritizes users chronologically. Without agreements among the states, major cuts would fall entirely on junior users, including huge cities such as Phoenix and Tucson, before more senior rights-holders such as the farmers in California’s Imperial Valley see any reductions.
Last summer, it looked like states might agree on a new method of apportioning the river based on actual flow, rather than historical averages and legal agreements. But those negotiations broke down over familiar disagreements about who should be subjected to mandatory cuts. [...]

A vanishing river

Brad Udall, a climate scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, describes the tensions over the river as a “big collision of 19th-century water law, 20th-century infrastructure and 21st-century climate change and population growth.”

The Colorado has almost never contained enough water to satisfy everyone who has legal rights to it, Udall said, and human-caused warming has made the situation even worse. Since 2000, high temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns linked to climate change have diminished the amount of water flowing through the river by about 20 percent, compared to the 20th-century average.

The deficits have forced repeated negotiations over how to manage shortages. Past deals have helped curb consumption somewhat, but they were never stringent enough to reverse the inexorable decline of reservoirs that are intended to provide a buffer during bad years.

Lake Mead, the site of the Hoover Dam, is mere inches from its lowest level on record. A few hundred miles upstream, Lake Powell is approaching the point at which water can no longer flow through the turbines of the Glen Canyon Dam. That raises the risk of a phenomenon called cavitation, in which air bubbles form then implode in fast-moving water, releasing energy that can damage the dam itself.

“The reservoirs are depleted so low they’re really at the end of their capability,” Castle said. “We’re in such a precarious situation.”

by Sarah Caplan, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Caroline Brehman/Reuters
[ed. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Friday unveiled the framework that will guide operations on the Colorado River through 2036. See also: Lake Powell's Dying Days (CCG):]

***

The L.A. Times’ Ian James reported that Trump’s Interior Department would accept a proposal submitted by California, Arizona and Nevada — the Lower Basin states — to slash their water use by 12%, 31% and 28%, respectively, through 2028. They’ll receive $350 million from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to support water conservation.

The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — will get $100 million in conservation funding. But unlike their downstream neighbors, they won’t face mandatory water cuts. However much water they end up saving, that will be good enough. [...]

If Powell’s water levels sink much lower, water won’t be able to pass through the dam’s hydropower turbines, which generate cheap electricity for communities across the West. That wouldn’t be a “dead pool” situation; water could still flow downstream to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead through bypass tubes lower in the dam. But the bypass tubes are surprisingly frail and could break with sustained use.

Translation: We are frighteningly close to “de facto dead pool.” That’s why the Trump administration is ordering everyone to use less water.

Well, not everyone. California, Arizona and Nevada are willing to cut back dramatically, and federal officials seem happy to make them do it. The Upper Basin states — the ones upstream of Lake Powell — say they shouldn’t have to commit to mandatory reductions, in part because they already consume a lot less.

In a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year, I argued that the Upper Basin states need to do more. Podmore agreed.

“It’s a tricky situation, because the Lower Basin has always used more water, and that’s a convenient argument for the Upper Basin,” he said. “But also, there’s more people in the Lower Basin. And the most productive agricultural land that’s irrigated with Colorado River water is located in the Lower Basin.”

“Even with the cuts that the Lower Basin has offered, we still have a long way to go to balance the water budget,” he added. “Everyone needs to pitch in.”

[ed. But not everyone is agreeing to pitch in: California’s Biggest AI Data Center Is Suing for Colorado River Water (Yahoo News):]

***

The developer behind California's biggest planned AI data center publicly swore it would never touch Colorado River water. It would run on recycled wastewater — clean, virtuous, zero environmental impact. That pledge held right up until the cities of Imperial and El Centro said no thanks. Now Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM) has sued the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) for access to the very river it promised to leave alone. The facility would sit in a desert valley where 180,000 people share exactly one freshwater source.

The Farm-to-Cloud Gambit

IVCM's legal strategy treats 160 acres of fallowed farmland as a water entitlement for a nearly million-square-foot AI campus.

The developer's playbook relies on a tactic called "buy and dry" — purchasing irrigated farmland, retiring it from production, then claiming its water allocation for industrial use.

China Now Uses 80% Artificial Sand

The world is running out of sand.

About 50 billion tons of sand and gravel are extracted annually, most of which is used for construction activities. This is a problem for two reasons. First of all, it’s not sustainable. Secondly, if we continue to extract sand at this rate, it will end up causing irreversible damage to the environment.

 

For instance, loss of sand from oceans, rivers, and beaches can lead to excessive flooding and degradation of marine ecosystems. It threatens coastal communities, and infrastructure. Plus, sand mining near aquifers can lower water tables, affecting water availability for humans, land animals, and agriculture.

And no, you can’t just use sand from the desert. Desert sands are typically rounded and smooth, which makes them less effective for construction purposes. For concrete, the rougher texture of river or beach sand is essential as it helps bind the materials together. Desert sand, with its finer and more uniform grains, lacks the necessary angularity to bond effectively with cement.

“The issue of sand comes as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t. We cannot extract 50 billion tonnes per year of any material without leading to massive impacts on the planet and thus on people’s lives.” Pascal Peduzzi, a researcher at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), told BBC.

A 2024 study suggests China may have found a solution to the sand mining problem. The Chinese have been using artificial sand made by crushing rocks and leftover materials from mining for many of their construction projects. This simple technique has allowed them to drastically reduce their dependence on natural sand without slowing down their massive construction projects. [...]

The study authors developed a monitoring system that allowed them to examine the sand use pattern in China from 1995 to 2020. Their analysis revealed many surprising facts. For example, the Chinese have been producing artificial sand since the early 2000s, but it became popular in 2010.

2010 was also the year when the supply of natural sand in China reached its highest level. However, the next year’s supply of manufactured sand overtook that of natural sand, becoming the primary sand type used for construction activities.

In the following years, production of artificial sand continued to increase by 13 percent annually. In 2020, the use of natural sand reduced to the extent that it accounted for only 21 percent of the total sand supply, witnessing an 80 percent decline compared to 2010.

“China’s overall sand supply surged by approximately 400% over the study period, yet the proportion of natural sand dropped from ≈80% to ≈21% due to the increasing use of manufactured sand,” the study authors note.

“The percentage of manufactured sand in the Chinese market could now be close to 90 percent. The shift from natural sand to manufactured sand is a miracle for a country that has completed such massive infrastructure construction,” Song Shaomin, a professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, told SCMP.

by Rupendra Brahambhatt, ZME Science |  Read more:

Image: Nathan Cowley/Pexels

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[ed. Unexpected fun:  Dust devils.]

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Paradise Revisited

The Galápagos Islands owe their place on rich travelers’ bucket lists to the vision of them as an unfallen Eden, touted as “the laboratory of evolution” that inspired Charles Darwin to write On the Origin of Species. When he visited, humans’ presence here was limited to whalers, buccaneers, and political prisoners. Today, more than 300,000 people visit the archipelago each year. Every tourist desperate to see an untouched paradise is part of a constant influx that risks despoiling the very thing they came to see.

On his arrival, in 1835, Darwin marveled at the lack of fear shown by all the animals, thanks to their limited exposure to humans. “Met an immense Turpin: took little notice of me,” he wrote in his field notebook about encountering a tortoise on September 21. Perhaps the poor turpin should have been more wary: By October 12, Darwin was recording that he had been “eating Tortoise meat / By the way delicious in Soup.” Soon he was trying to ride them. “I frequently got on their backs,” he wrote in the published version of his diaries, “and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”

On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.

Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee—­up from $100 just two years ago—­and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.

The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands—­discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example—­as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.

Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.

The mythology of blinding-­inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story—­the one that drove me here—­is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”

All of that should make him any writer’s hero.

The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s—Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on—­although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a bio­security declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.

I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”

One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a direction­less youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.

During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ ­mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”

In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahren­heit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.

On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-­prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.

Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names—­York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory—and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.

In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.” [...]

Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve—­in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se—­he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.

No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.

After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)

by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Air Conditioners to Anchovies

China keeps the U.S. and Japan Cool. And most other places. The Chinese make more than 80% of the world’s air-conditioners. And they could… stop. 

The world’s biggest fan clubs for air-conditioning are the United States, and two Asian allies/ vassals, Japan and South Korea. In these three places, 88% to 91% of homes have such devices (IEA estimates). 

The demand for Chinese air-cons is rising world-wide, as heatwaves proliferate. Viral videos this week show customers fighting over the devices at shops in Europe. 

Is there any risk of China halting exports, in the way the US might do? Thankfully not, at the moment, analysts say. China keeps the industry entirely politics-free: We build, you buy, at a price that benefits both sides. 

The 'Assembled In...' Trick

The world has 2.4 billion air conditioners, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency. But few people around the planet are aware that their aircons come from China, because of branding techniques.

by Nury Vittachi, X | Read more:

***

One of the world’s current hottest commodities is in the midst of a huge disruption. It may sound like I’m talking about oil and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but this is even more severe. The supply shock is far greater — and so is the price response: Global production has plunged as much as 40% from a year ago; prices are up 80% over the same period to an all-time high. The commodity in question? The humble anchovy.

The tiny fish may sound utterly mundane, but its importance to the global economy is far larger than just foodies’ craving for the umami taste. The anchovy sits at the bottom of a crucial supply chain that sustains the $500-billion-a-year global aquaculture industry. Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, and without enough of it, global production of salmon, seabass, shrimp, oysters and other seafood will suffer, pushing up supermarket prices. Soon, the shortage could catch the attention of Wall Street and central banks. 

Peru is the Saudi Arabia of anchovies — its annual catch, after drying and milling, accounts for about 20% of the world’s supply of fishmeal. Add the catches of neighboring Ecuador and Chile and you have nearly a third of global output. And therein lies the problem.

Because the South American anchoveta species has a relatively short lifecycle, its population can rise and fall substantially every year depending on environmental variables. The key one is El Niño, the weather event that regularly warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator, reducing the stock of nutrients and, therefore, of fish. [...]

In mid-May, Peru imposed a 15-day ban on anchovy fishing; the moratorium was later extended until June 10. Then, the government in Lima shocked the fishing business with an indefinite ban. The South American anchoveta is the world’s largest single-species fishery. The ban has triggered a dramatic drop in global fishmeal production, which industry executives estimate to be down 30% to 40% from a year ago.

With demand from the aquaculture industry still strong, the cost of fishmeal in the wholesale market has nearly doubled over the last year to an all-time high of $2,990 per metric ton in late June. Further increases are likely. As feed prices rise, aquaculture companies will respond by trimming output, and the cost of cultivated fish and seafood will climb over the next year. [...]

Once upon a time, this would have been a first world problem. Not anymore. Back in 1997-1998, the last time the world faced a very strong El Nino and, as a result, a fishmeal shortage, the aquaculture business accounted for less than a quarter of the world’s fish supply. Since then, the size of the industry has exploded, and today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

If the industry’s fears are confirmed, salmon prices are likely to rise to an all-time high by 2027. Salmon is the highest-value farmed fish worldwide. The rise of the aquaculture industry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday supermarket purchase, with its price dropping from about $8 per kilogram in the early 1980s to an all-time low of $2.50 per kilogram in the early 2000s. Since then, it’s risen above $10 per kilogram. Industry executives are tight lipped about how much prices could increase, but 20% to 25% seems like a reasonable expectation.

by Javier Blas, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: REDA/Universal Images Group Editorial

[ed. Globalization and supply chain logistics.]

Careening Toward a Breaking Point

Lake Powell, a vital reservoir, plunges toward unprecedented low levels as water crisis deepens in US west (The Guardian)

Image: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Denver Post/Getty Images

Beating the Heat

Long before air-conditioning, people around the world came up with ingenious ways to beat the heat. But, really — wear dark, billowing robes? And drink tea?

The science can be surprising. As big chunks of the United States and Canada roast through the weekend, some of these ideas might be worth a closer look.

Water That Sidewalk

In Japan’s sweltering summer months, you might see storekeepers with a bucket of cold water, dousing hot pavement outside their stores.

The practice, called uchimizu, grew out of Japan’s tea ceremony tradition. It was originally a purifying ritual and an act of welcome for guests. But uchimizu also has an effect on temperature thanks to what’s known as evaporative cooling — when water evaporates, it pulls heat out of the hot ground.

A 2018 study in the journal Water found that uchimizu caused air temperatures to drop by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit near the ground, even with small amounts of water.

According to Shigenori Asai, director of the Japan Water Forum, the more neighbors join in and douse the pavement, the more effective it is. “You might even feel a cooling breeze,” he said. His group is sponsoring a global Uchimizu Day on Aug. 1.

Hang Screens of Fragrant Grass

Before air-conditioning, people in some of the hottest parts of India survived intense heat waves by weaving screens made from the spongy roots of a sorghumlike grass called vetiver.

The screens are kept wet and hung over doors and windows facing the wind for another version of evaporative cooling. Hot air blowing through is stripped of some of its heat. The grasses also smell good.

The process works so well, especially in dry environments, that some modern data centers are turning to a variation of this idea called indirect evaporative cooling.

If old-fashioned technologies like this can make a dent in the expected surge in air-conditioning use in India and other countries, that would bring great benefits, said Liza Raju Subhadra, an architect in Kerala, India, who works with alternative materials.

“It’s not just energy-intensive — when a neighbor uses an air-conditioner, the hot air gets passed onto me,” she said. “It makes a big difference if we can passively cool our homes.”

Wear Dark, Flowing Robes (or Seersucker)

It may seem counterintuitive to wear heavy, dark clothing in the desert, but communities in the Middle East and North Africa have done so for centuries.

A study published in Nature in 1980 found that dark robes can indeed create a cooling effect when worn in loosefitting ways. The robe absorbs heat and warms the air inside the garment, but as that hot air expands and rises rapidly, it escapes through the top. The upward flow acts like a pump, drawing cooler air from the bottom of the robe.

“The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin,” the authors concluded.

For a different look, try seersucker. In the hot, humid summers of the American South, linen and seersucker, the thin, puckered cotton fabric, are staples.

Seersucker is woven in a way that causes some threads to bunch together, giving the fabric its distinct wrinkled texture. That prevents it from flattening and sticking to sweaty skin. It also creates tiny pockets that aid air circulation and cooling.

by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press
[ed. And there are other options too, from architectural to personal/practical. My buddy Jerry was telling me about folks in Texas who used to, maybe still do, dig small pit caverns (like root cellars) a few feet below ground with an attached conduit routed upward into their house. The cool air from just a few feet below ground is enough. Another option would be design features that encourage air flow and ventilation, see also: How Old Dubai's historic streets beat extreme heat (BBC).]

'We Are Screwed'

Data Center Alley is facing a climate test.

Searing temperatures this week could push energy demand to record levels on the mid-Atlantic’s electric grid, which fuels the country’s data center boom in Virginia.

To relieve some of the pressure, the Department of Energy granted permission Tuesday to the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to potentially force data centers to use backup diesel generators.

The move highlights the growing challenge of meeting rising electricity demand from data centers as the grid strains to keep the region cool during a period of extreme heat.

Many data centers rely on backup diesel generators, which release planet-warming emissions and lack air pollution controls designed to safeguard public health. The challenge is particularly acute in Virginia, the epicenter of the nation’s data center boom. State regulators have permitted more than 8,000 diesel generators at data centers in recent years, according to data from the state Department of Environmental Quality.

DOE’s order would allow data centers to run generators beyond limits for emissions that EPA has categorized as a “possible human carcinogen.”

Meeting higher electricity demand from air conditioning use during heat waves was already a challenge, said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University. Adding data centers to the equation makes it harder.

“This is exactly what we expect in a warming world,” she said. “Even a modest increase in baseline temperature causes an exponential increase in heat extremes. You find yourself crossing these heat extremes much more frequently.” [...]

PJM has sufficient generating reserves to withstand intense summer heat waves, according to a recent assessment by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. But it is anticipating electricity demand far in excess of what it was expecting when it issued its summer reliability assessment in May.

Demand is projected to peak around 166 gigawatts on Thursday afternoon, exceeding the all-time record of 165 GW set in 2006. PJM predicted that summer demand would hit 156 GW this year, though it also included an “unlikely but plausible” scenario where electricity demand crests around 169 GW.

“It’s scary. It worries everyone when you see those kind of numbers,” said Abe Silverman, a former New Jersey utility regulator.

The grid should have enough generation to satisfy that power consumption, but the combination of higher temperatures, increased demand from data centers and a regulatory system straining to keep pace with skyrocketing electricity use is a worrisome dynamic, Silverman said.

The future looks even scarier. “The projections for data center loads dwarf the amount of data center load we have now,” he said. [...]

A DOE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright blamed the tight grid conditions on the Biden administration. [ed. Of course.]

“We are reversing those failures and using every available tool ensuring Americans in the Mid-Atlantic have continued access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power and cool their homes,” Wright said in a statement accompanying the order on diesel generators.

Communities are caught in the middle. In Virginia, one-third of data centers are located within 500 feet of residential areas or schools, according to state auditors.

Some neighbors are bracing to see if their Fourth of July celebrations will be affected by unhealthy air.

“Nothing says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness like breathing in diesel fumes,” said Elena Schlossberg, who runs a grassroots organization opposing data centers in Prince William County, which has 33 completed data centers and 31 more on the way.

No one wants the grid to collapse, she said, but she argued it’s not fair when neighborhoods pay for Virginia’s data center boom with their health.

“Either way, we are screwed,” Schlossberg said. “Either our lights go out or we get to breathe in this pollution.” [...]

“Last summer it was like, is everyone seeing what we are seeing?” said Ann Bennett, who oversees data center issues at the Sierra Club of Virginia. “This time around people are already emailing us asking if they should expect more diesel and how to protect themselves from the fumes during this heat wave.”

The number of diesel generators in the state has grown since then. Bennett, who has tracked DEQ permits for the machines, found that the agency allowed 3,790 additional diesel generators in 2025.

“This time, we are all anxiously anticipating what is going to happen, and we have thousands more generators to worry about,” she said.

by Ariel Wittenberg and Benjamin Storrow, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Francis Chung/Politico

[ed. Water issues, too. Number of data centers in Virginia: 749. Providers: 109.]

How the Himalayan Blackberry Took Over the Pacific Northwest

The tangled history of an invasive plant and a scientist’s troubling quest to engineer a more efficient natural world.

There is no summer in the Pacific Northwest without the blackberry. Across Washington and Oregon, jagged walls of blackberry brambles choke out nearly every hiking trail, highway shoulder, and vacant lot in the region. Come August, dense thickets beckon berry-pickers to stain their fingers with the juice of the sweet purple fruits, promising the potential of a fresh-baked blackberry pie after a long day’s harvest. But despite the strong association between the region and the fruit, the species of blackberry that most locals have come to enjoy is anything but native.

The story of how the Himalayan blackberry came to swallow the West Coast is a monument to late nineteenth-century industrial ambition. In the late 1800s, transcontinental rail travel revolutionized the United States’ approach to agriculture. A rapidly growing, urbanizing populace demanded a constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. To meet this demand, the market required crops engineered for this new era, encouraging innovation that produced plants sturdy enough for cross-country travel and aggressive enough to thrive in any backyard soil.

At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.

In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.

Impressed by the size and strength of the Himalayan Giant, Luther Burbank marketed the plant to growers in the damp, temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest in a targeted flyer in 1894, promising a plant of extreme utility. The marketing push was met with a large wave of orders from the region, and according to Burbank, “the plants could not be multiplied fast enough to meet the demand.” Over a century later, the Himalayan blackberry has spread far beyond the modest backyard bounds its importers envisioned, opting instead to take over indiscriminately and displace the native trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus) in the process.

Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.

The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.

Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.

The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”

While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]

Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.

Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.

by Kari Traylor, JSTOR |  Read more:

Images: Getty/Wikimedia Commons

[ed. When I went to school in Oregon, I couldn't believe the berry bushes everywhere, and subsisted on many of them.]

Non-Technological Constraints to AI

Market manias have patterns. The most powerful ones are genuine technological revolutions pushed far beyond rational limits by crowd psychology.

By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.

The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.

We are nearing the same point today with AI, although this time for a different and overwhelming reason. The $20tn (£15tn) valuation of hyperscalers, chipmakers and the larger AI complex, has wildly outpaced the electrical infrastructure needed to run data centres and sustain the technology on anything like the projected scale.

The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.

The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.

A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.

“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”

There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.

Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.

Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.

Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.

Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]

Hyperscalers can try to leapfrog the grid bottleneck by building their own power plants, but that will not solve the problem either, at least not in time to alleviate the burden of fast-mounting and opaque AI debt.

It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.

Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]

The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.

But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.

Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible. 

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]

Cadillac Desert

CADILLAC DESERT: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. By Marc Reisner. Illustrated. 582 pp. New York: Viking.

It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read ''Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,'' but they should. It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going.

The money has gone into Federal water projects in the Western states - some of the projects awesome, some scandalous but all with an uncertain future. More than a century ago John Wesley Powell, the nation's pioneer hydrographer and an explorer of the Grand Canyon, concluded that so much of the West was virtually desert that if all the flowing water in the region were applied to it, the water would spread too thin to make much difference.

But that didn't daunt several generations of pioneers, who believed the selective harnessing of available water could yield miracles. And it did. It virtually created modern California, making it the nation's most populous state and one of the world's prime agricultural areas. On a smaller scale, similar marvels were wrought in other states - Arizona, Utah, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana and even Nevada.

It all came about less through engineering skill than through political prestidigitation. There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable. President Carter tried to challenge it with his ''hit list'' of questionable water projects and came out of Congress's threshing machine too battered to swing a second term.

The taxpayers' problem is that the chronicle of this hocus-pocus normally emerges in inconclusive bits and pieces, in reports based on sanctimonious handouts from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers that are heavy on how they are saving the world, light on what it's costing - and often opaque about the justification for the projects.

Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the respected newsletter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has put the story together in trenchant form. He details the Machiavellian competition between the bureau and the engineers, recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead.

Parts of his account are oft-told stories, such as Los Angeles's snaffling of water from farmers 300 miles away. But much of his material is fresh and powerful, taken from such previously unplumbed sources as the bureau's ''blue envelope'' (secret correspondence) files and a marvelous, hair-down interview with Floyd Dominy, its free-swinging former commissioner. The 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho - an instance of a structure that never should have been built - is detailed for the first time, with all its implications of carelessness and incompetence. Mr. Reisner also makes clear that much Western irrigation has been based on reckless ''mining'' of water in the great Ogallala Aquifer, which extends into seven states, from Texas to South Dakota. The severe depletion of this eons-old unrenewable resource, he says, has been matched in other areas by a reckless indifference to the accumulation of salts in soils. This has killed farmland and caused drainage crises like the current mess at California's Kesterson Reservoir, where pollution has poisoned the wildlife.

''None of this,'' Mr. Reisner writes, ''is to say that we shouldn't have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves.'' He maintains: ''What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere. . . . Its worst critics have to acknowledge its positive side. . . . The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. . . . Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? . . . Somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and . . . it will be a miracle if they can pay it.''

by Gladwin Hill, NY Times |  Read more:

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[ed. A classic, and the bill's about to come due.]