I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person

I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person.

Let me give you an example. Last quarter, I led a team of engineers on an initiative to grow my company’s artificial intelligence data centers, which use millions of gallons of water per day. My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am.

Does the leadership at my company promote a xenophobic agenda and use the wealth I help them acquire to donate directly to bigoted causes and politicians I find despicable? Yeah, sure. Did I celebrate my last birthday at Drag Brunch? Also yes. I even tipped with five-dollar bills. I contain multitudes, and would appreciate it if you focused on the brunch one.

Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should. And when you do, you’ll find that my ratio of evil hours to not evil hours is much more even, numerically.

I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans.

And besides, I don’t plan to stay at this job forever, just for my prime working years, until I can install a new state-of-the-art infinity pool in my country home. The problem is that whenever I think I’m going to leave, there’s always the potential for a promotion, and also a new upgrade for the pool, like underwater disco lights. Time really flies when you’re not thinking about the effect you have on others.

But I absolutely intend to leave at some point. And when I do, you should define me by whatever I do next, unless it’s also evil, in which case, define me by how I ultimately spend my retirement.

Because here’s the thing: It’s not me committing these acts of evil. I’m just following orders (until I get promoted; then I’ll get to give them). But until then, I do whatever my supervisor tells me to do, and that’s just how work works. Sure, I chose to be here, and yes, I could almost certainly find a job elsewhere, but redoing my résumé would take time. Also, I don’t feel like it. Besides, once a year, my company mandates all employees to help clean up a local beach, and I almost always go.

Speaking of the good we do at work, sometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact. There’s something so silly about discussing opportunities to increase profits for international arms dealers while wearing a purple button-down covered in bright hibiscus blossoms.

And when it comes to making things even, I put my money where my mouth is. I might make more than 99 percent of all Americans, but I also make sure to donate almost 1 percent of my salary to nonprofits. This way, I can wear their company tote bag to my local food coop. Did I mention I shop at a local food coop? It’s quite literally the least I could do.

by Emily Bressler, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Golden Line at Twilight. 5:15 to 5:45 am. 60° F. September 10, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
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Unsolicited Advice to the Sierra Club

After the 2020 George Floyd murder, the Sierra Club called for defunding police and reparations for slavery. It touched off an internal battle that tore the organization apart, leading to the ouster of two consecutive executive directors, employee layoffs, office closings, loss of members, and financial freefall. It also invited some unsolicited advice — from me.

My column, during the worst of the club’s turmoil, strongly advised its leaders to “stay in your lane.” “Stick to what you are known for, and good at, and you will remain effective and relevant,” I advised. You may be shocked to learn that they did not heed that advice. Perhaps they considered it unfriendly?

Psychology Today just published suggested responses to shut down unsolicited advice. Say something like, “That’s useful, but I prefer to handle it this way,” or “I appreciate your input, but already have a plan.” I didn’t even get such platitudes for suggesting the Sierra Club stick to environmental issues.

Instead, the group doubled down on woke social activism, its director, Michael Brune, trashing the reputation of Sierra Club founder and conservation hero John Muir. Brune claimed the club had played a “substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.” It was an outrageous assertion, motivated by political correctness and based on the obscure fact that a young Muir had written some unflattering views after his travels among native American tribes. I hate judging people of the past by today’s standards. Muir was a product of the 19th century, who thought like most 19th century Americans. He said some things modern leaders would not say. But he played no role whatsoever in perpetuating any notion of white supremacy, much less a “substantial role.” He was not a Klansman, was never governor of Arkansas, managed no bus system in Montgomery, nor sanitation department in Memphis. He was a Wisconsin-bred northern Republican, an advocate of voting rights, an early progressive, a friend and ally of Theodore Roosevelt.

Brune’s attempt to demonize and “cancel” John Muir from Sierra Club history, and other “social justice” campaigns ultimately cost him his job and led to two years of infighting. The board then hired Ben Jealous, a former head of the NAACP and president of People for the American Way, the extremist lefty group founded by Norman Lear. The board put political correctness above its historic mission, and it didn’t work. Jealous was ultimately fired, too, but the direction has not changed. When the club was rich and influential beyond Muir’s wildest dreams, its leaders continually reached beyond environment issues into other left-wing causes, including labor unions, race relations, LGBT rights, Palestine v. Israel, and illegal immigration. Its “equity language guide,” suggested the word “Americans” was offensive.

The effect on its membership, funding, and influence can readily be seen in this week’s headlines: “Sierra Club Went Woke and Now is Going Broke;” “Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice and Then Tore Itself Apart;” “Sierra Club Faces Uncertainty;” and “Sierra Club Deviated from Environmental Mission to Embrace Far-Left Projects. It Ripped Itself to Shreds.”

It still calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But in fact, it has lost 60% of the four million members and supporters it claimed just five years ago. Its new director, Loren Blackford, faces a $40 million budget shortfall, and employees remain up in arms about a mission that has morphed beyond anything familiar.

A Colorado-based volunteer reported being criticized for lobbying for more protection for wolves. She says a Sierra Club staffer asked, “What do wolves have to do with equity, justice, and inclusion?” The correct response would have been, “What do equity, justice, and inclusion have to do with the environment, which I thought was our mission?”

Former Board Chairman Aaron Mair was censured for asking “Do we want to still be the Sierra Club?” It’s the right question. Digital marketing pioneer Gary Vaynerchuk says, “I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know... I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.” It’s not even that the Sierra Club was necessarily wrong on social issues — reasonable people may debate that. It’s that these are not the issues the club is known for, and more to the point, not the reason people join, donate, and support it.

by Greg Walcher, The Daily Sentinel | Read more:
Image: Sierra Club/uncredited via

The Trillion-Dollar Space Race

Check-in on NASA (1:28)

The Chinese tend to do what they say they’re going to do on the timeline that they say they’re going to do it. That said, they haven’t gone to the moon . . . It’s really hard.

Pethokoukis: As someone — and I’m speaking about myself — who wants to get America back to the moon as soon as possible, get cooking on getting humans to Mars for the first time, what should I make of what’s happening at NASA right now?

They don’t have a lander. I’m not sure the rocket itself is ready to go all the way, we’ll find out some more fairly soon with Artemis II. We have flux with leadership, maybe it’s going to not be an independent-like agency anymore, it’s going to join the Department of Transportation.

It all seems a little chaotic. I’m a little worried. Should I be?

Davenport: Yes, I think you should be. And I think a lot of the American public isn’t paying attention and they’re going to see the Artemis II mission, which you mentioned, and that’s that mission to send a crew of astronauts around the moon. It won’t land on the moon, but it’ll go around, and I think if that goes well, NASA’s going to take a victory leap. But as you correctly point out, that is a far cry from getting astronauts back on the lunar surface.

The lander isn’t ready. SpaceX, as acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy just said, is far behind, reversing himself from like a month earlier when he said no, they appear to be on track, but everybody knew that they were well behind because they’ve had 11 test flights, and they still haven’t made it to orbit with their Starship rocket.

The rocket itself that’s going to launch them into the vicinity of the moon, the SLS, launches about once every two years. It’s incredibly expensive, it’s not reusable, and there are problems within the agency itself. There are deep cuts to it. A lot of expertise is taking early retirements. It doesn’t have a full-time leader. It hasn’t had a full-time leader since Trump won the election. At the same time, they’re sort of beating the drum saying we’re going to beat the Chinese back to the lunar surface, but I think a lot of people are increasingly looking at that with some serious concern and doubt. 

For what it’s worth, when I looked at the betting markets, it gave the Chinese a two-to-one edge. It said that it was about a 65 percent chance they were going to get there first. Does that sound about right to you?

I’m not much of a betting man, but I do think there’s a very good chance. The Chinese tend to do what they say they’re going to do on the timeline that they say they’re going to do it. That said, they haven’t gone to the moon, they haven’t done this. It’s really hard. They’re much more secretive, if they have setbacks and delays, we don’t necessarily know about them. But they’ve shown over the last 10, 20 years how capable they are. They have a space station in low earth orbit. They’ve operated a rover on Mars. They’ve gone to the far side of the moon twice, which nobody has done, and brought back a sample return. They’ve shown the ability to keep people alive in space for extended periods of times on the space station.

The moon seems within their capabilities and they’re saying they’re going to do it by 2030, and they don’t have the nettlesome problem of democracy where you’ve got one party come in and changing the budget, changing the direction for NASA, changing leadership. They’ve just set the moon — and, by the way, the south pole of the moon, which is where we want to go as well — as the destination and have been beating a path toward that for several years now.

Losing the Space Race (5:49)

. . . the American flags that the Apollo astronauts planted, they’re basically no longer there anymore. . . There are, however, two Chinese flags on the moon

Have you thought about what it will look like the day after, in this country, if China gets to the moon first and we have not returned there yet?

Actually, that’s a scenario I kind of paint out. I’ve got this new book called Rocket Dreams and we talk about the geopolitical tensions in there. Not to give too much of a spoiler, but NASA has said that the first person to return to the moon, for the US, is going to be a woman. And there’s a lot of people thinking, who could that be? It could be Jessica Meir, who is a mother and posted a picture of herself pregnant and saying, “This is what an astronaut looks like.” But it could very well be someone like Wang Yaping, who’s also a mother, and she came back from one of her stays on the International Space Station and had a message for her daughter that said, “I come back bringing all the stars for you.” So I think that I could see China doing it and sending a woman, and that moment where that would be a huge coup for them, and that would obviously be symbolic.

But when you’re talking about space as a tool of soft power and diplomacy, I think it would attract a lot of other nations to their side who are sort of waiting on the sidelines or who frankly aren’t on the sidelines, who have signed on to go to the United States, but are going to say, “Well, they’re there and you’re not, so that’s who we’re going to go with.”

I think about the wonderful alt-history show For All Mankind, which begins with the Soviets beating the US to the moon, and instead of Neil Armstrong giving the “one small step for man,” basically the Russian cosmonaut gives, “Its one small step for Marxism-Leninism,” and it was a bummer. And I really imagine that day, if China beats us, it is going to be not just, “Oh, I guess now we have to share the moon with someone else,” but it’s going to cause some national soul searching.

And there are clues to this, and actually I detail these two anecdotes in the book, that all of the flags, the American flags that the Apollo astronauts planted, they’re basically no longer there anymore. We know from Buzz Aldrin‘s memoir that the flag that he and Neil Armstrong planted in the lunar soil in 1969, Buzz said that he saw it get knocked over by the thrust in the exhaust of the module lifting off from the lunar surface. Even if that hadn’t happened, just the radiation environment would’ve bleached the flag white, as scientists believe it has to all the other flags that are on there. So there are essentially really no trace of the Apollo flags.

There are, however, two Chinese flags on the moon, and the first one, which was planted a couple of years ago, or unveiled a couple of years ago, was made not of cloth, but their scientists and engineers spent a year building a composite material flag designed specifically to withstand the harsh environment of the moon. When they went back last summer for their farside sample return mission, they built a flag, — and this is pretty amazing — out of basalt, like volcanic rock, which you find on Earth. And they use basalt from earth, but of course basalt is common on the moon. They were able to take the rock, turn it into lava, extract threads from the lava and weave this flag, which is now near the south pole of the moon. The significance of that is they are showing that they can use the resources of the moon, the basalt, to build flags. It’s called ISR: in situ resource utilization. So to me, nothing symbolizes their intentions more than that. (...)

SpaceX and the Falcon 9, the reusable rocket, has dropped launches down. It used to be if you got 10, 12 orbital rocket launches in a year, that was a good year. SpaceX is launching about every 48 hours now. It’s unprecedented what they’ve done. You’re seeing a lot of new players — Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, others — driving down the cost of launch.

That said, the main anchor tenant customer, the force driving all of this is still the government, it’s still NASA, it’s still the Pentagon. There is not a self-sustaining space economy that exists in addition or above and beyond the government. You’re starting to see bits of that, but really it’s the government that’s driving it.

by James Pethokoukis and Christian Davenport, Faster, Please | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Weaving lava on the moon?! Launches every 48 hrs?!]

Clam Control

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Wilderness As 'Tactical Infrastructure'?

In June, when Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee moved to force a sell-off of up to 3.2 million acres of public land, he insisted he was solely interested in combatting America’s housing crunch and that the bill only targeted “unused, garden-variety” federal parcels — not national parks, wilderness areas and other “crown jewel” lands.

Few bought what Lee was trying to sell.

Now, just a few months after being forced to pull the plug on his land-sale scheme amid sweeping bipartisan backlash, Lee is leaning into new issues to further his well-documented anti-public lands agenda: border security and disability access.

On Oct. 2, Lee introduced legislation aimed at opening millions of federal acres along both U.S. borders, including national parks and wilderness areas, to road construction, timber harvest, surveillance systems and any other “tactical infrastructure” deemed necessary to protect those lands from what he describes as “environmental destruction” resulting from “the Biden Administration’s open-border policies.”

“Biden’s open-border chaos is destroying America’s crown jewels,” Lee said in a statement announcing his bill, dubbed the Border Lands Conservation Act. “This bill gives land managers and border agents the tools to restore order and protect these places for the people they were meant to serve.”

While Lee pitches the legislation as an immigration enforcement bill, it would encompass federal lands far from the U.S.-Mexico border — including a huge swath along the U.S.-Canada border. The legislation defines “covered federal land” as any federal land “located in a unit, or in a portion of a unit, or within 1 or more parcels of land that shares an exterior boundary with the southern border or northern border.”

In other words, if a “unit” — a national park, forest, monument or any other designated area — touches a border, the entire unit is covered, regardless of how far it extends from a border. That would encompass all of Joshua Tree National Park in California, Big Bend National Park in Texas, Glacier National Park in Montana, North Cascades National Park in Washington and Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, to name a few. One of the more extreme examples Public Domain identified is Flathead National Forest, located in northwestern Montana, which spans 2.4 million acres, extends approximately 120 miles from the U.S.-Canada border, and includes 1 million acres of wilderness.

“The big picture is Mike Lee will use any pretext to undermine public lands and conservation,” Neal Clark, wildlands director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, told Public Domain. “It was housing six months ago, now it’s border security.”

The legislation would amend the 1964 Wilderness Act, which protects more than 110 million acres of designated wilderness areas from development, to allow for DHS to conduct patrols using motorized vehicles, including cars, airplanes and boats, and “deploy tactical infrastructure,” which the bill defines as “infrastructure for the detection of illegal southern border and northern border crossing, including observation points, remote video surveillance systems, motion sensors, vehicle barriers, fences, roads, bridges, drainage and detection devices.”

It would also give the Department of Homeland Security unfettered authority to conduct immigration, terrorism and drug enforcement activities across all federal land within 100 miles of either border, barring land management agencies from restricting DHS’s work. And it would create a “Border Fuels Management Initiative” to combat the risk of wildfires on federal border lands, one of several environmental impacts that Lee and other sponsors of the bill say have been exacerbated by illegal immigration.

The bill comes despite a steep decline in the number of unauthorized migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Border Patrol is on track to finish the year with fewer than 250,000 apprehensions at the southern border. That figure is down from 1.5 million last year and may become the lowest number of southern border arrests recorded since 1970. (...)

Along with his attempt to weaken environmental protections across federal borderlands, Lee introduced a trio of bills on Oct. 6 that would open national parks and other federal lands to increased off-road vehicle use. The goal, he says, is to “ensure that Americans with disabilities can access and enjoy the nation’s public lands.”

“The mountains, canyons, and forests managed by the federal government are part of our shared heritage, and access to them should not depend on whether someone can hike ten miles or climb a ridge,” Lee said in a statement about his “Outdoor Americans with Disabilities Act.”

Lee’s press release touts support from several off-road vehicle associations and enthusiasts. But Syren Nagakyrie, the founder and director of Disabled Hikers, a nonprofit that supports disabled people in the outdoors, called the legislation a “shameful” attempt to “use the disability community in his ongoing attempts to dismantle public lands, build and prioritize roads, and sell lands to the highest bidder.”

“People with disabilities are not political pawns to be used while catering to special interests,” Nagakyrie said in a statement.

by Chris D’Angelo, High Country News | Read more:
Image: Jerry Glaser/U.S. Customs and Border Protection

[ed. What a piece of work.  See also: One small glimmer of hope re: Senate Stewardship Caucus (Re:Public).]

What To Know About Data Centers

As the use of AI increases, data centers are popping up across the country. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the controversial facilities.

Q: What do data centers need to run?

A: Water, electricity, air conditioning, and other resources typically wasted on schools and hospitals.

Q: Do data centers use a lot of water?

A: What are you, a fish? Don’t worry about it.

Q: How are data centers regulated?

A: Next month, Congress will hear about data centers for the very first time.

Q: Do I need to worry about one coming to my town?

A: Only if your town is built on land.

Q: How long does it take to build a new data center?

A: Approximately one closed-door city council vote.

Q: What’s Wi-Fi?

A: Not right now, big guy.

Q: What will most data centers house in the future?

A: Raccoons.

Image: uncredited

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Tough Rocks

Eliminating the Chinese Rare Earth Chokepoint

Last Thursday, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) announced a series of new export controls (translation), including a new regime governing the “export” of rare earth elements (REEs) any time they are used to make advanced semiconductors or any technology that is “used for, or that could possibly be used for… military use or for improving potential military capabilities.”

The controls apply to any manufactured good made anywhere in the world whose value is comprised of 0.1% or more Chinese-mined or processed REEs. Say, for example, that a German factory makes a military drone using an entirely European supply chain, except for the use of Chinese rare earths in the onboard motors and compute. If this rule were enforced by the Chinese government to its maximum extent, this almost entirely German drone would be export controlled by the Chinese government.

REEs are enabling components of many modern technologies, including vehicles, semiconductors, robotics of all kinds, drones, satellites, fighter jets, and much, much else. The controls apply to any seven REEs (samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium). China controls the significant majority of the world’s mining capacity for these materials, and an even higher share of the refining and processing capacity.

The public debate quickly devolved into arguments about who provoked whom (“who really started this?”), whether it is China or the US that has miscalculated, and abundant species of whataboutism. Like too many foreign policy debates, these arguments are primarily about narrative setting in service of mostly orthogonal political agendas rather than the actions demanded in light of the concrete underlying reality.

But make no mistake, this is a big deal. China is expressing a willingness to exploit a weakness held in common by virtually every country on Earth. Even if China chooses to implement this policy modestly at first, the vulnerability they are exposing has significant long-term implications for both the manufacturing of AI compute and that of key AI-enabled products (self-driving cars and trucks, drones, robots, etc.). That alone makes it a relevant topic for Hyperdimensional, where I have covered manufacturing-related issues before. The topics of rare earths and critical minerals have also long been on my radar, and I wrote reports for various think tanks early this year.

What follows, then, is a “how we got here”-style analysis followed by some concrete proposals for what the United States—and any other country concerned with controlling its own economic destiny—should do next.

A note: this post is going to concentrate mostly on REEs, which is a chemical-industrial category, rather than “critical minerals,” which is a policy designation made (in the US context) by the US Geological Survey. All REEs are considered critical minerals by the federal government, but so are many other things with very different geological, scientific, technological, and economic dynamics affecting them.

How We Got Here

If you have heard one thing about rare earths, it is probably the quip that they are not, in fact, rare. They’re abundant in the Earth’s crust, but they’re not densely distributed in many places because their chemical properties typically result in them being mixed with many other elements instead of accumulating in homogeneous deposits (like, say, gold).

Rare earths have been in industrial use for a long time, but their utility increased considerably with the simultaneous and independent invention in 1983 of the Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnet by General Motors and Japanese firm Sumitomo. This single materials breakthrough is upstream of a huge range of microelectronic innovations that followed.

Economically useful deposits of REEs require a rare confluence of factors such as unusual magma compositions or weathering patterns. The world’s largest deposit is known as Bayan Obo, located in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, though other regions of China also have substantial quantities.

The second largest deposit is in Mountain Pass, California, which used to be the world’s largest production center for rare earth magnets and related goods. It went dormant twenty years ago due to environmental concerns and is now being restarted by a firm called MP Materials, in which the US government took an equity position this past July. Another very large and entirely undeveloped deposit—possibly the largest in the world—is in Greenland. Anyone who buys the line that the Trump administration was “caught off guard” by Chinese moves on rare Earths is paying insufficient attention.

Rare earths are an enabling part of many pieces of modern technology you touch daily, but they command very little value as raw or even processed goods. Indeed, the economics of the rare earth industry are positively brutal. There are many reasons this is true, but two bear mentioning here. First, the industry suffers from dramatic price volatility, in part because China strategically dumps supply onto the global market to deter other countries from developing domestic rare earth supply chains.

Second, for precisely the same reasons that rare earth minerals do not tend to cluster homogeneously (they are mixed with many other elements), the processing required to separate REEs from raw ore is exceptionally complex, expensive, and time-consuming. A related challenge is that separation of the most valuable REEs entails the separation of numerous, less valuable elements—including other REEs.

In addition to challenging economics, the REE processing business is often environmentally expensive. In modern US policy discourse, we are used to environmental regulations being deployed to hinder construction that we few people really believe is environmentally harmful. But these facilities come with genuine environmental costs of a kind Western societies have largely not seen in decades; indeed, the nastiness of the industry is part of why we were comfortable with it being offshored in the first place.

China observed these trends and dynamics in the early 1990s and made rare earth mining and processing a major part of its industrial strategy. This strategy led to these elements being made in such abundance that it may well have had a “but-for” effect on the history of technology. Absent Chinese development of this industry, it seems quite likely to me that advanced capitalist democracies would have settled on a qualitatively different approach to the rare earths industry and the technologies it enables.

In any case, that is how we arrived to this point: a legacy of American dominance in the field, followed by willful ceding of the territory to wildly successful Chinese industrial strategists. Now this unilateral American surrender is being exploited against us, and indeed the entire world. Here is what I think we should do next.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Think the stable genius and minions will have the intelligence to craft a well thought out plan (especially if someone else down the road gets credit)? Lol. See also: What It's Like to Work at the White House.]

China Has Overtaken America

In 1957 the Soviet Union put the first man-made satellite — Sputnik — into orbit. The U.S. response was close to panic: The Cold War was at its coldest, and there were widespread fears that the Soviets were taking the lead in science and technology.

In retrospect those fears were overblown. When Communism fell, we learned that the Soviet economy was far less advanced than many had believed. Still, the effects of the “Sputnik moment” were salutary: America poured resources into science and higher education, helping to lay the foundations for enduring leadership.

Today American leadership is once again being challenged by an authoritarian regime. And in terms of economic might, China is a much more serious rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Some readers were skeptical when I pointed out Monday that China’s economy is, in real terms, already substantially larger than ours. The truth is that GDP at purchasing power parity is a very useful measure, but if it seems too technical, how about just looking at electricity generation, which is strongly correlated with economic development? As the chart at the top of this post shows, China now generates well over twice as much electricity as we do.

Yet, rather than having another Sputnik moment, we are now trapped in a reverse Sputnik moment. Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want.

The most obvious example of Trump’s war on a critical sector, and the most consequential for the next decade, is his vendetta against renewable energy. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolled back Biden’s tax incentives for renewable energy. The administration is currently trying to kill a huge, nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as cancel $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. It appears to have succeeded in killing a huge solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes. It has canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more. (...)

In his rambling speech at the United Nations, Donald Trump insisted that China isn’t making use of wind power: “They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind.” I don’t know where Trump gets his misinformation — maybe the same sources telling him that Portland is in flames. But here’s the reality:

Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, says that solar power is unreliable: “You have to have power when the sun goes behind a cloud and when the sun sets, which it does almost every night.” So the energy secretary of the most technologically advanced nation on earth is unaware of the energy revolution being propelled by dramatic technological progress in batteries. And the revolution is happening now in the U.S., in places like California. Here’s what electricity supply looked like during an average day in California back in June: 

Special interests and Trump’s pettiness aside, my sense is that there’s something more visceral going on. A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. As evidence, consider the extraordinary collapse in Republican support for higher education over the past decade:

Yet the truth is that hostility to science and expertise have always been part of the American tradition. Remember your history lesson on the Scopes Monkey Trial? It took a Supreme Court ruling, as recently as 2007, to stop politicians from forcing public schools to teach creationism. And with the current Supreme Court, who can be sure creationism won’t return?

Anti-scientism is a widespread attitude on the religious right, which forms a key component of MAGA. In past decades, however, the forces of humanism and scientific inquiry were able to prevail against anti-scientism. In part this was due to the recognition that American science was essential for national security as well as national prosperity. But now we have an administration that claims to be protecting national security by imposing tariffs on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, while gutting the CDC and the EPA.

Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over. Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up.

by Paul Krugman |  Read more:

Images: OurWorldInData/FT

[ed. See also: Losing Touch With Reality; Civil Resistance Confronts the Autocracy; and, An Autocracy of Dunces (Krugman).]

David Littschwager, Seawater sample
via:

In Praise of the Faroe Islands

In praise of the Faroe Islands 

Due to its small size and limited variation, I wouldn’t say it’s the singular most beautiful nation on earth (I’d give that to New Zealand), but it’s certainly at the very top tier of the most beautiful places on earth. What stands out about the Faroe Islands’ beauty is that every single place you set foot will be beautiful. There is no real need to go to any specific destinations (there aren’t even national parks or “nature zones” in the Faroe Islands), as there is incredible beauty at every point. And no matter where you go, you will always be in nature, surrounded by a quiet that feels completely removed from the modern world. (...)

In many places, “culture” feels like an aesthetic layer—a set of foods, clothing styles, or historical anecdotes. But in the Faroes, it feels deeper, like a shared operating system. When you speak to any person there, it’s immediately clear they are all operating from the same framework—a worldview that is both deeply felt and meaningfully distinct from the rest of the world.

Conservative intellectuals on Twitter and Substack are constantly sketching out their ideal society: a high-trust community rooted in family (fertility rates are high), self-sufficiency, and continuity with the past. They dream of a life lived closer to the land, with a strong sense of personal responsibility. By almost any of their metrics, the Faroe Islands is the most successful conservative nation on earth. And yet, it is also a profoundly liberal place. It’s cosmopolitan and highly educated. There is a massive social safety net and great equality, a deep belief in the collective over the individual, and a culture where economic aspiration doesn’t dominate life. It is, in many ways, the idyllic left-wing society. The Faroe Islands seems to have achieved the goals of both political tribes simultaneously, without any of the ideological warfare.

What makes the Faroe Islands special in my opinion is not that it’s so nice, but that it’s so nice yet has no desire to optimize or make more efficient (or exploit) anything to become even “nicer.” This is unusual, as most successful places reached their status by climbing a cutthroat ladder, trading off nearly everything in pursuit of greater efficiency.

To give the simplest example: the Faroe Islands are a series of islands, some of which have fewer than 10 people living on them, and are otherwise quite isolated from each other. No worry—the Faroe Islands, with a “we are all one” ethos, have power and internet going to every corner of their nation, with subsidized helicopter rides and ferries to even the smallest islands to make sure life can feel connected for all Faroese people. More well known, the Faroe Islands have built impressive and incredibly expensive undersea tunnels connecting all of the major and proximate islands to each other.

They spend this money not to make the islands more productive or efficient, but simply because they believe all Faroese people should be connected. The infrastructure exists for solidarity, not optimization. A consultant would call the tunnels and helicopter subsidies a spectacular misallocation of capital. But this misses the point entirely—they’re treating infrastructure as as a kind of social infrastructure, not economic.

by Daniel Frank, not not Talmud |  Read more:

Images: Daniel Frank

[ed. At first I thought this was about the Falkland Islands (off the tip of South America). Then realized I didn't know where the Faroes were at all.]

Monsters From the Deep

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA ~ Rebecca R. Helm

***

"From the darkness of the deep, the mother rose slowly, her great body pulsing with effort, while the calf clung close to her side. The faint shimmer of the surface light caught on something twisting in her jaws—long pale arms, still trembling, a giant calamari dragged from the black abyss.

The calf pressed its head against the mother’s flank, curious, its small eye turning toward the strange, sprawling catch. Around them, the other whales gathered, a circle of giants, each click and creak of their voices carrying through the water like an ancient council.

The mother released a cloud of ink the squid had left behind, now dissipating in ghostly ribbons. She let the prey dangle for a moment before tearing a piece free with a practiced shake of her head. The calf tried to imitate, nudging the slack arms of the squid, but only managed to tangle its mouth in the trailing suckers. The adults rumbled with what could only be described as laughter.

High above, a shaft of sunlight pierced the water, illuminating the drifting arms of the squid like banners in the deep. The feast had begun, but it was also a lesson—the calf’s first glimpse of the abyss’s hidden monsters, and of the power its mother carried up from the dark world below."

via: here and here

Plastic-Eating Fungus

A fungus from the Amazon rainforest can break down polyurethane plastic without oxygen. It's the first organism discovered with this capability, and it can survive using plastic as its only food source.

Most plastic waste ends up deep in landfills where oxygen doesn't reach, precisely where this fungus thrives. Polyurethane persists for centuries in these environments. It's everywhere: mattresses, insulation foam, shoe soles, adhesives, car parts. Annual global plastic production exceeds 400 million tons. Less than 10% gets recycled.

Pestalotiopsis microspora was discovered in 2011 in Ecuador's Yasuní National Forest, isolated from plant stems. The endophytic fungus lives inside plant tissues without harming its host. Laboratory testing revealed its remarkable ability: it degrades plastic equally well with or without oxygen present.

The fungus secretes an enzyme that breaks apart the chemical bonds holding polyurethane together. In laboratory tests, concentrated enzyme extracts can completely break down polyurethane polymer in under an hour. The fungus also produces a second enzyme that degrades PET plastic, splitting it into simpler compounds the fungus then consumes as food.

What makes this significant? Other plastic-degrading organisms need oxygen to function. When tested without oxygen, fungi like Lasiodiplodia and Pleosporales slowed down or stopped working. P. microspora maintained the same performance. This ability to work without oxygen directly addresses the actual problem—plastic buried in oxygen-depleted landfill depths.

The enzyme production is adaptive. When the fungus grows in a basic environment with only plastic available, it ramps up enzyme output. These enzymes spread through the surrounding material, breaking down plastic well beyond where the fungus itself is growing. The enzyme breakdown converts long-lasting polymer into simple compounds the fungus uses as food.

This fungus offers a biological solution that works precisely where the problem exists, in oxygen-depleted landfills where an ever-increasing amount our plastic waste collects.

by Sam Knowlton, The Confluence |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Always a good reason to preserve natural habitats - who knows what other plants have undiscovered special properties? See also: A fungus that eats polyurethane (Yale Magazine).]

***

AI Overview:

Q. How long does it take Pestalotiopsis microspora to eat plastic?

Pestalotiopsis microspora can degrade plastic in a matter of weeks to months, with experiments showing significant degradation in as little as two weeks and over 60% breakdown in six weeks under ideal conditions. The specific timeframe varies, with some sources noting a few months for complete digestion in certain projects.

Marc Lester, Anchorage, Alaska
via: Anchorage Daily News

Do Coconuts Go With Oysters? For Saving the Delaware Shore, Yes.

For the past 50 years, Gary Berti has watched as a stretch of Delaware’s coastline slowly disappeared. Rising tides stripped the shoreline, leaving behind mud and a few tree stumps.

“Year after year, it gradually went from wild to deteriorated,” said Mr. Berti, whose parents moved to Angola by the Bay, a private community in Lewes, Del., in 1977, where he now lives with his wife, Debbie.

But in 2023, an extensive restoration effort converted a half-mile of shoreline from barren to verdant. A perimeter of logs and rolls of coconut husk held new sand in place. Lush beds of spartina, commonly known as cordgrass, grew, inviting wading birds and blue crabs.

Together, these elements have created a living shoreline, a nature-based way of stabilizing the coast, to absorb energy from the waves and protect the land from washing away. 

Mr. Berti had never seen the waterfront like this before. “The change has just been spectacular,” he said.

Before

After

The practice of using natural materials to prevent erosion has been around for decades. But as sea levels rise and ever-intensifying storms pound coastlines, more places are building them.

The U.S. government counts at least 150 living shorelines nationwide, with East Coast states like Maryland, South Carolina and Florida remediating thousands of feet of tidal areas. Thanks to the efforts of the Delaware Living Shorelines Committee, a state-supported working group, Delaware has led the charge for years. (...)

“The living component is key,” said Alison Rogerson, an environmental scientist for the state’s natural resources department and chair of the living shoreline committee.

The natural materials, she said, provide a permeable buffer. As waves pass through, they leave the mud and sand they were carrying on the side of the barrier closer to the shore. This sediment builds up over time, creating a stable surface for plants. As the plants grow, their roots reinforce the barrier by holding everything in place. The goal is not necessarily return the land to how it was before, but to create new, stronger habitat.

More traditional rigid structures, like concrete sea walls, steel bulkheads and piles of stone known as riprap, can provide instant protection but inevitably get weaker over time. Bulkheads can also backfire by eroding at the base or trapping floodwaters from storms. And because hardened structures are designed to deflect energy, not absorb it, they can actually worsen erosion in nearby areas.

Though living shorelines need initial care while they start to grow, scientists have found they can outperform rigid structures in storms and can repair themselves naturally. And as sea levels rise, living shorelines naturally inch inland with the coastline, providing continuous protection, whereas sea walls have to be rebuilt.

When the engineers leave after creating a gray rigid structure, like a sea wall, “that’s the strongest that structure is ever going to be, and at some point, it will fail,” said David Burdick, an associate professor of coastal ecology at the University of New Hampshire. “When we install living shorelines, it’s the weakest it’s going to be. And it will get stronger over time.”

And just as coastal areas come in all shapes and sizes, so do living shorelines. In other places that the committee has supported projects, like Angola by the Bay and the Delaware Botanical Garden, brackish water meant that oysters wouldn’t grow. Instead, the private community opted for large timber logs while the botanical garden built a unique crisscross fence from dead tree branches found on site. (...)

Sometimes, an area’s waves and wind are too powerful for a living shoreline to survive on its own, Mr. Janiec said. In these situations, a hybrid approach that combines hard structures can create a protected zone for plants and oysters to grow. And these don’t need to be traditional sea walls or riprap. Scientists can also use concrete reef structures and oyster castles to break up waves while allowing wildlife to thrive.

Gregg Moore, an associate professor of coastal restoration at the University of New Hampshire, said homeowners often choose rigid structures because they don’t act on erosion until the situation is urgent. When it comes to a person’s home, “you can’t blame somebody for wanting to put whatever they think is the fastest, most permanent solution possible,” he said. (...)

“Living shorelines are easier than people think, but they take a little time,” Mrs. Allread said. “You have to trust the process. Nature can do its own thing if you let it.”

by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Erin Schaff

[ed. Streambank and coastal restoration/rehabilitation using bioengineering techniques has been standard practice in Alaska for decades (in fact, my former gf wrote the book on it - literally). I myself received a grant to rehabilitate 12 state park public use sites on the Kenai River (see here and here) that were heavily damaged and eroding from constant foot traffic and boat wakes. Won a National Coastal America Award for innovation. As noted here, most people want a quick fix, but this is a better, long-term solution.]

Scientists Unlock Secret to Venus Flytrap’s Hair-Trigger Response

To trap its prey, the Venus flytrap sends rapid electrical impulses, which are generated in response to touch or stress. But the molecular identity of the touch sensor has remained unclear. Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that triggers that response and have published their work in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

As previously reported, the Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

In 2016, Rainer Hedrich, a biophysicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, led the team that discovered that the Venus flytrap could actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The plant detects the first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes. But the Venus flytrap doesn't close all the way and produce digestive enzymes to consume the prey until the hairs are triggered three more times (for a total of five stimuli).

And in 2023, scientists developed a bioelectronic device to better understand the Venus flytrap's complex signaling mechanism by mapping how those signals propagate. They confirmed that the electrical signal starts in the plant's sensory hairs and then spreads radially outward with no clear preferred direction. And sometimes the signals were spontaneous, originating in sensory hairs that had not been stimulated.

Glowing green

This latest research is an outgrowth of a 2020 paper detailing how the Japanese authors genetically altered a Venus flytrap to gain important clues about how the plant's short-term "memory" works. They introduced a gene for a calcium sensor protein called GCaMP6, which glows green whenever it binds to calcium. That green fluorescence allowed the team to visually track the changes in calcium concentrations in response to stimulating the plant's sensitive hairs with a needle. They concluded that the waxing and waning of calcium concentrations in the leaf cells seem to serve as a kind of short-term memory for the Venus flytrap, though precisely how calcium concentrations work with the plant's electrical network remained unclear.

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Naturfoto Honal|Getty

No Public Comment Allowed

No public comment or hearings on environmental review of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is cutting out a public comment process, citing a Trump administration policy aimed at ‘streamlining’ development.

Federal regulators will accept no public comments on a pending environmental study of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, a U.S. Department of the Interior agency announced through a Federal Register notice published Thursday.

There will be no public comment period and no public hearing on a draft supplemental environmental impact statement for a Cook Inlet lease sale that was held in 2022 but found to be legally flawed, said U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which manages oil and gas development in federal offshore areas.

The rejection of public comments is in accordance with Trump administration changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, the 55-year-old law that guides federal decisions about activities that may have environmental impacts. The changes are aimed at speeding up environmental reviews and developing infrastructure projects.

BOEM is following the administration’s updated NEPA regulations and a new department handbook on the law, which went into effect on July 3, said Elizabeth Pearce, a U.S. Department of the Interior senior public affairs specialist.

“This Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement is narrowly focused on addressing the court’s concerns, without a separate public-comment round – streamlining what is typically a protracted, multi-year process down to a few months.” Pearce said by email on Thursday.

Although no public comments will be accepted, the public will be able to read the new environmental impact statement when it is finished, Pearce added. “The completed Supplemental EIS will be posted online so Alaskans and other stakeholders can see exactly how we addressed the court’s limited concerns,” she said. [ed. How nice. God forbid the government would want us to know what it's doing.]

The Cook Inlet environmental study stems from a federal lease sale that was held on Dec. 30, 2022. It drew only one bid. (...)

BOEM’s announcement about the lack of public comment opportunities was blasted by environmental plaintiffs in the case.

“BOEM’s decision to exclude the public from its supplemental environmental statement is unacceptable. Public participation is not a box to check — it is the heart of NEPA,” Loren Barrett, co-executive director the water conservation non-profit Cook Inletkeeper, said in an emailed statement. (...)

“This secrecy around exploiting public waters for fossil fuels is completely unacceptable. It would only take one oil spill to devastate Cook Inlet and its beluga whales, which is why the law requires transparency for these dangerous sales,” Monsell said in a statement. 

by Yereth Rosen, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: Yereth Rosen

[ed. This is what I did (among other things) during my career. Never in my 30+ years overseeing oil and gas leasing in Alaska was the public ever excluded from commenting on lease sales or any other major federal action. Presumably this recent edict applies to the State of Alaska, as well. It isn't legal, but it's not surprising either. What happened to state's rights?]

Decades of Public-Lands Planning, Overturned in a Day

On the sagebrush plains of eastern Montana, cattle graze alongside mule deer, and pumpjacks rise from coal seams. For nearly a decade, the future of this landscape was hammered out in the Miles City Resource Management Plan, a compromise shaped by ranchers, tribes, hunters, energy companies and conservationists. Now, with one vote in Washington, Congress has thrown that bargain into doubt, and with it, decades of public-lands decisions across the West.

Finalized in November 2024 after years of debate and litigation, the Miles City plan is one of the nation’s largest, governing 12 million acres of BLM land and 55 million acres of federal mineral estate across eastern Montana.

But on Sept. 3, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to overturn three Bureau of Land Management plans, including Miles City, under the Congressional Review Act, the first time the law has ever been applied to land-use planning. Legal experts and conservation groups warn that the consequences could be far-reaching, enabling Congress to unravel decades of environmental protections and management decisions on public lands.

Resource management plans serve as guidelines for how the BLM manages the public lands it oversees. The plans are developed through a lengthy process that combines local and tribal input with environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The goal is to create a blueprint for “multiple use” management, balancing economic activities such as grazing and oil and gas development with other concerns, including wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation and conservation.

In Montana, the disappearance of that blueprint will have immediate consequences. Ranchers face uncertainty on how many cattle they can run, when their permits will be renewed, and what will happen during a serious drought. Tribal cultural sites are likely to be left unprotected and years of tribal consultation overridden. Conservation groups warn that congressional vetoes could sideline science-based safeguards for vulnerable habitats. In Miles City, the resource management plan would have reformed coal seam leases near the Powder River Basin; without those reforms, habitat for elk, mule deer, sharp-tailed grouse and pheasants could be fragmented by new energy development.

The Miles City plan drew input from ranchers, tribes, energy companies, hunters, outdoor recreation groups and conservation groups, and its supporters argue that undoing it sets a dangerous precedent.

“It’s disregarding all the conversations that have happened on the ground,” said Land Tawney of American Hunters and Anglers. “That balance sometimes isn’t perfect for anybody, but it’s a path forward for all.” (...)

The 1996 Congressional Review Act allows Congress to overturn agency rules within a 60-day window using only a simple majority, bypassing the filibuster. This is the first time resource management plans have ever been treated as “rules.”

“That’s why we’re at an inflection point,” said Chris Winter, director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School. (Disclosure: Winter serves on High Country News’ board of directors.) Resource management plans, he said, have never been submitted to Congress for review. “Applying it now could unravel decades of land-use planning practice,” he said.

The CRA was employed only once before 2017, but the first Trump administration dramatically expanded its use. If this resolution stands, it would subject all RMPs to possible congressional approval, throwing every element of the planning process into doubt. According to Michael Blumm, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, this reinterpretation “calls into question the legitimacy” of the more than 100 plans finalized since the Congressional Review Act became law.

by Zoë Rom, High Country News | Read more:
Image: Luna Anna Archey

[ed. See also: Trump looks to suffocate public lands; and, How to comment on the planned roadless rule rollback (HCN).]

Hawaiʻi Loves ‘Genki Balls’. New Studies Say They Don’t Work

A new two-year research project found the balls not only were ineffective, they might make water quality worse. Supporters of the effort don’t believe it.

In the past six years, several thousand elementary school students and other volunteers have tossed over a quarter million tennis ball-sized globs of soil, molasses and rice bran into the Ala Wai Canal in a valiant effort to help clean Hawaiʻi’s most notoriously polluted urban waterway.

The goal is to get those globs, known as “genki balls,” to release special sludge-eating microbes into the Waikīkī canal’s murky depths and boost its water quality. Since the effort started, canoe paddlers and others have at times observed clearer water and more fish. They’ve even spotted the occasional monk seal and an eagle ray.

But new research from Hawaiʻi Pacific University done on Oʻahu’s Windward side casts doubt on whether the genki balls actually led to any of that improvement — or if the novel approach that inspired the community is too good to be true. (...)

The balls, according to HPU Associate Professor Olivia Nigro and Assistant Professor Carmella Vizza, did nothing to improve water quality in the marsh canal. And in the aquarium tanks, the microbes the balls were supposed to release failed to appear in any meaningful way, the researchers said, plus the water quality actually got worse.

Specifically, phosphate levels were almost 20 times higher in the tanks with the balls than in tanks without them, Vizza said, and oxygen levels in the tanks with the balls fell by about 50%.

The nonprofit that organizes those cleanups, Genki Ala Wai Ball Project, is firmly pushing back against the research, saying insufficient genki material was used and its ball tosses into the Ala Wai remain effective. Yet one of the project’s leaders sold the balls used in the HPU study and recommended how the researchers should use them.

The HPU ecologists who completed the study don’t want to dampen any of the community enthusiasm. But far more rigorous study of the Ala Wai is needed, they say, to know exactly how the genki balls are impacting water quality there, if at all. (...)

If We Do This, We Can Do Anything

The Ala Wai, a 1.5-mile canal that developers carved across Waikīkī in the 1920s to sell real estate, has long been a stark symbol of how much urban runoff is affecting Hawaiʻi’s fragile watersheds. (...)

It now bears the brunt of storm debris from Hawaiʻi’s densest and most heavily populated watershed, in the heart of Honolulu. For decades, state officials have prohibited anyone from fishing or swimming in its waters.

In one high-profile 2006 incident, an Oʻahu man who fell in the Ala Wai died of “massive bacterial infection” following weeks of heavy rain across the state. Canoe clubs and high school teams regularly paddle up and down the canal and do their best not to huli, or flip over, into its murky waters.

... the Genki Ball Ala Wai Project launched with a goal of making the canal safe for swimming and fishing within seven years by deploying 300,000 balls. Genki translates to “health” or “energy” in English.

The key ingredient baked into every dry, cured ball tossed in the water is a trademarked substance called “EM,” short for “effective microorganisms.”

It was pioneered in the early 1980s by a horticulture professor in Okinawa, Japan, who combined naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria to help boost farm crop yields. Since then, people also found that they could take it to improve digestion and gut health.

by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: David Croxford

[ed. Ouch.]

Can This Tree Still Save Us?

ʻUlu, bia, uru, mā: Breadfruit has been lauded as a climate-resilient solution to world food security. That’s not proving true in the Marshall Islands, where some have relied on it for centuries.

A breadfruit tree stands in the middle of Randon Jother’s property, its lanky trunks feeding a network of sinewy limbs. The remnants of this season’s harvest weigh heavy on its branches. Its vibrant leaves and football-sized fruit may appear enormous to the untrained eye, but Jother is concerned.

They used to be longer than his hand and forearm combined. He points to his bicep, to show how fat they once were. Now they’re small and malformed by most people’s standards here in the Marshall Islands. Mā, the Marshallese term for breadfruit, used to ripen in May. Now they come in June, sometimes July.

 

It’s been headed this way for the past seven years, Jother says as he toes the tree’s abundant leaf litter. It’s a concerning development on this uniquely agricultural and fertile part of Majuro Atoll, home to the country’s highest point: eight feet above sea level.

“I think it’s the salt,” Jother says. His home is less than 100 yards from Majuro lagoon, a body of seawater that threatens to overflow onto the land during a storm or king tide, which over the past decade years has happened several times in Majuro and across the islands. The Pacific Ocean also threatens to salt the island’s ever precious groundwater, which Jother says is already happening. When he showers, he can feel it in his hair, on his skin.

The record heat waves, massive droughts and an increasing number of unpredicted and intense weather events don’t help his trees either.

Most assume the assailant is climate change, to which researchers and experts have said the Indigenous Pacific crop would be almost immune — a potential salve for the world’s imperiled food system. For places like Hawaiʻi, they have predicted breadfruit growing conditions may even get better.

But here, on Majuro and throughout the Marshall Islands, the future appears bleak for a crop that has helped sustain populations for more than 2,000 years.

 

Rice has overtaken the fruit’s status as the preferred staple over the past century, along with other ultraprocessed imports, a change that feeds myriad health complications, including outsized rates of diabetes, making non-communicable diseases the leading cause of death across these islands.

The diseases are a Pacific-wide issue, one Marshall Islands health and agriculture officials are eager to counter with a return to a traditional diet. Climate change is working against them. (...)

Mā is part of an important trinity for the Marshall Islands, which also includes coconut (ni) and pandanus (bōb), that made their way to the islands’ shores on Micronesian seafarers’ boats somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago.

Six varieties are most common in the Marshall Islands, though at least 20 are found throughout the islands. Hundreds more breadfruit types can be found in the Pacific, tracing back to the breadnut, a tree endemic to the southwestern Pacific island of New Guinea.

The tree provided security for island populations, requiring little upkeep to offer abundant harvests. Each tree produces anywhere from 350 to 1,100 pounds of breadfruit a year, with two harvest seasons. Every tree produces half a million calories in protein and carbohydrates.

 

Like many Pacific island countries, the mā tree’s historic uses were diverse. Its coarse leaves sanded and smoothed vessels made with the tree’s buoyant wood. Its roots were part of traditional medicine. The fruit was cooked underground and roasted black over coals. And it was preserved, to make bwiro, a tradition that survives through people like Angelina Mathusla.

For Mathusla, who lives just over a mile from farmer Jother, making bwiro is a process that comes with every harvest.

The process begins with a pile of petaaktak, a variety of breadfruit common around Majuro and valued for its size and lack of seeds. On this occasion, a relative rhythmically cleaves the football-sized mā in half with a machete, then into smaller pieces, before tossing them into a pile next to a group of women. Some wear gloves to avoid the sticky white latex that seeps from the fruit’s dense, white flesh, used by their forebears to seal canoes or catch birds.

Mā trees use that latex to help heal or protect themselves against diseases and insects. The tree’s adaptation to the atolls and their soils has traditionally been partly thanks to symbiotic relationships with other flora. (...)

A Shallow Body Of Research

Four framed photographs hang on a whitewashed wall of Diane Ragone’s Kauaʻi home. Two black-and-white photos, taken by her late videographer husband, show Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia playing guitar on stage. The other two are of breadfruit.

Now in the throes of writing a memoir, of sorts, Ragone is revisiting almost 40 years of records — photos and videos, and journal entries, some of which leave her asking “Damn, why was I so cryptic?”

But Ragone’s research, since her arrival to Hawaiʻi from Virginia in 1979, forms the bedrock of most modern research into the tree’s history and its survival throughout the Pacific. The most obvious example spans 10 acres in Hāna, on Maui, where more than 150 cultivars of the fruit Ragone collected thrive at the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s Kahanu Garden.

Less obvious is how her work has helped researchers like Noa Kekuewa Lincoln track the plant’s place in global history and the environment. Lincoln, who says “Diane’s kind of considered the Queen of Breadfruit,” has been central to more recent research into how the plant will survive in the future.

Together with others, they act as breadfruit evangelists, promoting the crop as a poverty panacea and global warming warrior — a touchstone for Pacific islanders not only to their past but a more sustainable future.

Ragone, as the founding director of the 22-year-old Breadfruit Institute, helped distribute more than 100,000 trees around the world, to equatorial nations with poverty issues and suitable climes, like Liberia, Zambia and Haiti. But it all started in Hawaiʻi with just over 10,000 young breadfruit.

 

In some places, rising temperatures and changes in rainfall will actually help breadfruit, according to research from Lincoln and his Indigenous Cropping Systems Laboratory, which assessed the trees’ performance under different climate change projections through 2070.

Running climate change scenarios on 1,200 trees across 56 sites in Hawaiʻi, Lincoln’s lab found breadfruit production would largely remain the same for the next 45 years.

“Nowhere in Hawaiʻi gets too hot for it,” Lincoln says. “Pretty much as soon as you leave the coast, you start getting declining yields because it’s too cold.”

Compare breadfruit to other traditional staples — rice, wheat, soybeans, corn. The plant grows deep roots and lives for decades, requires little upkeep or annual planting, resists most environmental stressors and can withstand high temperatures.

Few nations know the urgency of climate change better than the Marshall Islands, its islands and atolls a bellwether for how heat, drought, intense and sporadic natural disasters and sea level rise can upend lives.

The trees can even survive some saltwater intrusion, according to Lincoln’s research. But a consistent presence of salt is another matter, attacking the roots and making trees unable to absorb freshwater and nutrients. As roots rot, leaves and fruit die.

“The salinity,” Ragone says, before letting out a sigh. “How do you even address the salinity issue?”.

Marshall Islands government officials have turned to the International Atomic Energy Association for help, asking its experts about using nuclear radiation to create mutant hybrids of the nation’s most important crops — giant swamp taro, sweet potatoes and, of course, breadfruit.

The technique has been used for almost a century by the atomic association and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, predominantly on rice and barley, never on breadfruit or for a Pacific nation.

They have their work cut out for them. To find a viable candidate, immune to salty soils and heat, about 2,000 plants would need to be irradiated, according to Cinthya Zorrilla of the atomic energy association’s Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture. One of those plants, once mutated, might exhibit the desired traits. (...)

Even if those obstacles were overcome, it wouldn’t be a quick fix. Hybridizing plants through radiation can take about 10 years, Zorrilla says, with a need to compare, contrast and correlate results from labs and field plots and laboratories. For breadfruit, the timeframe may be even longer.

“It’s really complicated,” Zorilla says. “All this is a huge investment, in monetary terms and also in time.”

by Thomas Heaton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Images: Thomas Heaton/Chewy Lin