California State Route 190 near Death Valley National Park.
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On “Simple Solutions” to the Western Water Problem

Spoiler: There is no such thing.

It seems like every time the Colorado River and other Western water woes make national headlines, some pundit — usually from the East Coast — weighs in with their “simple” or “obvious” solution. And I get mad and start throwing things around the room, then type out some blistering rant riddled with epithets and insults.

Well, the Colorado River is in the news again, and with it have come the usual swarm of oversimplified hot-takes. The one that really got my goat this time is from Matthew Yglesias, who wrote a piece headlined: The Western water crisis has a simple solution: Stop giving the majority of the water away to farmers for almost nothing!

These things piss me off so much not because they’re wrong, but because there is no “simple” solution to the Western water crisis. That’s because the crisis itself isn’t simple, and saying that it has simple fixes implies that the folks who have spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem are a bunch of idiots, since they hadn’t come up with this solution already. It seems as if Yglesias and his ilk assume that the West is not only monolithic, but that we Westerners are a bunch of backwoods bumpkins who don’t understand the region’s own problems.

Who cares what these bozos believe, right? Right. But judging by the comments on Yglesias’ social media posts, a lot of other people are similarly deluded. So I figured his piece provides a nice opportunity to clear some things up.

In fact, there is no single “Western water crisis.” The West is huge and is geographically, hydrographically, and ecologically diverse. While most, but not all, of the Western U.S. is in some stage of drought currently, not all of those places are experiencing a water crisis, per se. There is a Colorado River water crisis and a Rio Grande water crisis and a San Joaquin Valley water crisis, but those crises are not all the same.

The Colorado River crisis is multifaceted and manifests in different ways in different places and on different levels. The river itself is in crisis, in that stretches of the mainstem and its tributaries virtually dry up during summers like this one. Its users are facing a potential crisis, i.e. looming shortages, as in some of them are getting less water from the river than they did in the past. And the vast and complex plumbing system and legal framework that has been built up to harness and govern the river is perhaps facing the most immediate crisis: It is collapsing under its own weight and in many ways has become obsolete. Each of these is a distinct calamity, with its own twists, turns, causes, and bevy of potential solutions.

From his perch in the Northeast, however, Yglesias sees just one dimension, writing in the “nut graf” of his piece:

Even worse, the whole Western water conflict has an incredibly simple solution: End federal law’s current stipulation that a huge share of the available water must be sold at very low prices exclusively for the purpose of agriculture.

The issue here is well known, well understood, and not particularly controversial. It’s just that nobody seems to want to actually fix it.

Uh, not quite.

Yes, irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption and 74% of direct human consumption. And yes, agricultural users typically and notoriously pay less for the water than municipal users. No, this is not dictated by federal law.

Agricultural users were among the first entities in the colonial-settler era to put large quantities of water to beneficial use, giving them the most senior rights to the largest quantities of water. The Imperial Irrigation District, for example, has senior rights to about 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water, most of which is used for agriculture.

These water rights holders have a legal right to use a set amount of water each year. They are not leasing or purchasing the water from the federal government or anyone else. It’s essentially theirs, for free, as long as they are able to divert it from the river and put it to beneficial use.

Usually the water rights are held by irrigation districts, ditch companies, municipalities, corporations, or, in some cases, very large individual landholders. In the late 1800s, these entities built their own diversions, canals, and delivery systems. Construction was often financed by private investors and the individual irrigators, who held stocks, or shares, in the ditch company. Each share would entitle its holder to a set amount of water from the canal. The shareholder would pay an annual fee for each share to cover construction, maintenance, and operating costs.

The Bureau of Reclamation was established in 1902 to build larger scale dams, diversions, and canals to deliver water to users and to spur agricultural development in the arid West. [...] 

One of the Bureau’s big projects was the 80-mile-long All-American Canal, built in the 1930s to ferry Colorado River water to the Imperial Irrigation District and other users. The IID entered into a 50-year payback contract, which ended in 1994. The Bureau still owns the canal, but the IID operates and maintains it and other infrastructure that delivers Colorado River water to nine cities and some 500,000 acres of farmland. [...]

Similar setups exist across the Colorado River Basin. But each system is distinct, and each has its own mix of federal and private funding and operational scenarios and rates.

And here’s one of the main flaws of Yglesias’s argument: He assumes that there’s some all powerful actor out there that sets rates and standards for water from the Colorado River, although he himself clearly doesn’t know who or what that actor is (he always uses the passive voice, or the all-encompassing “you” in these cases). That’s because that entity doesn’t exist. While the feds could stop subsidizing agriculture, and should not build any more water projects, they don’t have the authority to step in and adjust water rates. States probably could set rates for groundwater, but they can’t charge the IID for exercising their water rights on the Colorado River.

Next, Yglesias pivots to pillorying alfalfa, because that’s in vogue these days. I’m not going to get into that too much, because I’ve written about it so many times here before, but this little bit is pretty funny:

“The whole crisis is because of alfalfa” sounds ridiculous, in part because alfalfa is a funny word. But also because it’s so random. Wheat? That’s in bread and pasta. Everyone loves wheat. Cotton? That’s my shirt, I get why we need cotton.

But alfalfa?

Alfalfa is grown as animal feed.

Now, I’m no alfalfa apologist (nor am I an alfalfaphobe), but I feel like I should point out that most of the alfalfa grown with Colorado River water is used to feed dairy cows, which in turn produce milk and cheese and ice cream. Unless Yglesias is a vegan, he might want to consider that. He then argues that since alfalfa is relatively low-value (money wise) compared to Las Vegas casinos, Phoenix microchip factories, or housing, the water should be going to casinos, factories, and housing, not farms, which would presumably happen if farmers had to pay more for water (i.e. they’d go broke and be forced to sell).

In recent weeks I’ve written a piece or two about alfalfa. My thesis: As the biggest single water user in the Colorado River Basin, the crop must play an equally large role in contributing to the cuts necessary to keep the river from drying out. I know, it doesn’t seem like a hot-button topic. I mean, it’s just hay, after all.
Read full story

He continues:

The real point here, though, isn’t that the farmers are living high on the hog and need to be taken down a peg. You could easily let them keep their windfall water rights but turn those rights into property that they’re able to sell. Then existing cities or industrial users or real estate developers looking to build new housing or whoever else could just buy out the alfalfa farmers. The land currently under cultivation could shift to less water-intensive uses. Even a golf course uses significantly less water per acre than an alfalfa farm. Much of the land would, of course, turn into housing, but some could become non-irrigated parks with native vegetation.

First off, there is nothing novel or groundbreaking about this idea. Sprawl has been gobbling up farmland, and water rights, for decades in the West. Phoenix didn’t just grow into the desert, it also grew into citrus orchards and alfalfa fields, and will probably continue to build housing and data centers on what ag land remains. A different version of this concept, where a city or developer purchases a farmer’s water rights, but uses them somewhere else — a practice known as buy and dry — is also not uncommon.

This does not solve the water crisis. Instead of cutting consumption, which is what’s needed, it merely shifts the consumption from one use — agriculture — to other ones, such as housing and golf courses and chip manufacturing and data centers. This may wring more cash out of each acre-foot of water, but it doesn’t lower consumption. An acre-foot is an acre-foot, whether it’s going to alfalfa, a golf course, a neighborhood’s lawns, a data center or a swimming pool.

Besides, transitioning land out of agriculture comes with its own problems. We can argue forever about whether farming alfalfa or any other crop in the desert is appropriate, or of adequately high value, or whatever. We can argue that the Bureau of Reclamation should never have existed, and that irrigating the arid West should have been left to private entities operating in a free market. But the fact is, there is farming in the desert, those projects did end up subsidizing the agriculture industry, and communities, economies, cultures, and even new landscapes have emerged from and formed around those farms.

Taking vast swaths of land out of farming, whether to build houses or solar panels or to buy the water rights and use them somewhere else, has myriad consequences, many of them negative. Fields can become noxious-weed-clogged dust pits, the wildlife and ecosystems that have come to rely on irrigation runoff dry up, farm workers and families and the businesses that rely on them are displaced, communities’ economies are upended. As Madeline Wilson, an agricultural systems specialist for Colorado State University’s extension office pointed out at a 2024 panel on dust-on-snow, every field fallowed in the San Luis Valley for conservation purposes also represents a family. “We’re not just talking about drying up lands,” she said, “but the drying up of our economy.”

In no way does this mean that farms should be immune from curtailment. Indeed, because agriculture is the biggest user of Colorado River water, it will have to take the largest cuts in consumption. There is simply nowhere else from which the 4 million acre-feet or more of reductions per year needed to bring demand into line with dwindling supplies can come. But forcing farmers into bankruptcy by jacking up water rates (if there was a mechanism to do so), or prescribing “incredibly simple” policy solutions that don’t consider the complexities of the situation and its myriad moving parts or the on-the-ground impacts, isn’t the way to do it.

The “root cause” of the Colorado River crises is not alfalfa or pecans or cotton or cattle, it’s not the prior appropriation doctrine or the low price of water, it’s not overpopulation, it’s not data centers or golf courses or lawns or bad forest management or lack of or too many reservoirs. The root cause is twofold. First, there’s scarcity. The Southwest is an arid place, and climate change-exacerbated warming is drying it out more: there is less precipitation; the precipitation we do get is falling as rain, not snow; the snow we get is melting faster; and evapotranspiration is happening at a higher rate. This all leads to less water in the streams, reservoirs, rivers, and even aquifers. Secondly, there’s the chronic and long-term failure to acknowledge the scarcity, and the stubborn refusal to adapt to it and adjust consumption accordingly. [...]

There is one simple solution to the Colorado River crises: Everyone on the river has to use less water. Period. 

by Jonathan P. Thompson, The Land Desk | Read more:
Image: the author

Annie Dillard, Meditative Author of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’ Dies at 81

Annie Dillard, who as a young American writer walked into the woods and came out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the wonders and horrors of creation, the modern classic “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” died Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She was 81.

Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson. No further details were given.

With the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1974, Dillard, just 28, was recognized as a major new voice in American letters. It was only the beginning of her career: In the years to come, she would publish essays, meditations on religion, poems, a theory of literature, two novels, journalism, a bestselling autobiography and another bestseller, “The Writing Life,” about what it takes to put words into a world that has more than enough of them.

Reviewers of “Tinker Creek” were quick to understand it as a 20th-century analogue to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” This was no coincidence: Dillard had chosen Thoreau as the subject of her master’s thesis at Hollins University, the women’s liberal arts college in Roanoke, Virginia.

Like Thoreau, she found an unremarkable body of water to be as good a place as any for deep thoughts — particularly about how to reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with nature’s cruelty.

Unlike Thoreau, Dillard didn’t build a cabin in the woods and live there through the seasons of a year. Though her writing could convey the sense of a solitary life in the wilderness, she was mostly a day-tripper. After her forays into the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains — which was, after all, her neighborhood — she would return home to the suburban house she shared with Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor she had married at the end of her sophomore year at Hollins.

That she was a photogenic young woman coming to grips with raw nature — a business that had been almost exclusively the province of men with beards — was undeniably part of the Dillard mystique. So was her insistence that, in spite of her patient, unflinching observations on flora and fauna, she wasn’t a nature writer, but rather a theologian looking high and low for God. [...]

“Tinker Creek” won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1975, and Dillard was overwhelmed by requests for speeches, interviews and television appearances. Her looks were thought by many media outlets to be as newsworthy as her writing — so much so that she was ridiculed in some circles as “Cheesecake at Tinker Creek.”

Repelled by the consequences of her success, she moved to Washington state and began dividing her time between the city of Bellingham and the islands Waldron and Lummi. Her marriage to Richard Dillard had ended in amicable divorce, and in the Pacific Northwest, she found privacy enough to regain the concentration essential to her work.

“The Cascade Range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water,” she wrote. “There is only a narrow strip, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide, between the snowy mountains and the sea.”

 

by Daniel Lewis, NY Times via Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Rollie McKenna
[ed. Just learned about Annie's death this morning. One of my all-time favorite books is The Living (a fictional depiction of the evolution of Whatcom county, the area around Bellingham, WA). See also: Annie Dillard brought poetry into prose, pioneering a mystical form of creative nonfiction (The Conversation):]

***

Not all writing is the same. Prose typically features continuous sentences arranged in paragraphs. Poetry tends to be differentiated from prose by a deliberate organization of language that’s not determined by the page itself.

Prose poetry, the lyric essay and other hybrid forms of literature play at the intersection of genre, which usually defines these separate categories of writing. Creative nonfiction likewise aims to accurately convey reality while emphasizing literary style. The literary features of creative nonfiction are often drawn from fiction, with devices such as dialogue, scene and flashback.

But one of the distinctions of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction is how much her prose owes to poetry.

Poetry can be defined in many ways, but it tends to be characterized by honed, heightened language. Poems are often noted for their memorable images, rich sounds and foregrounding of emotion. Dillard’s nonfiction is shot through with images that arrest readers with their beauty or confront readers with their terror – as in her Harper’s essay “The Death of a Moth,” where the insect is drawn to a candle flame, becomes stuck in the wax and is transformed into a burning wick. In Dillard’s words:

“She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

It’s no accident that Dillard describes herself as reading the work of French poet Arthur Rimbaud by the light of the moth. She previously wrote that she loved how language sounds in French symbolist poetry, and Rimbaud was known to combine prose with his poetry in a way Dillard herself does.

The Incredible Journey of a Migratory Shorebird

On a sunny June morning, in a bog outside Beluga, Alaska, I met a Hudsonian godwit. She had inky eyes and a long, slightly upturned beak that was pinkish-orange at its base and brownish-black at its tip. The feathers on her back were of mottled sepia tones, and those on her belly were rusty brown and painterly white. Her legs reminded me of the slender inserts of spring-loaded ballpoint pens, and her feet were refined pterodactyl claws. Her name (among humans) was A34, and she was about the size of a city pigeon. She was in the hands of Nathan Senner, a conservation biologist, who removed and replaced her geotag; measured her head, beak, wing, and leg; weighed her; and took two tail feathers and a sample of her blood. From that small number of data points, he can deduce where she’s been, how her feathers have grown, what genetic subgroup she belongs to, and her degree of exposure to mercury.

Senner leads a research laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that is largely focussed on how migratory shorebirds, such as godwits, respond to environmental change. He grew up in Anchorage, where school loudspeakers announced the street corners on which moose had been sighted. In high school, he wrote an occasional “Birding with Nathan” column for the Anchorage Daily News. Senner’s father, Stanley, has devoted more than five decades to the conservation of migratory shorebirds. Starting in the nineteen-seventies, Stanley and his colleagues have been sounding the alarm on the vulnerability of shorebirds and working to protect key habitats, such as Alaska’s Copper River Delta. “Back then, no one was even talking about climate change,” he told me recently. Since 1980, roughly half of migratory shorebird species’ populations have declined by more than fifty per cent.

Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love. [...]

Migratory birds in captivity develop Zugunruhe, an agitated fitfulness, at certain times of year. Scientists don’t know precisely what provoked A34 to set off northward one spring afternoon, with a flock of her fellows, though, if they did, they might better know how her species will be affected by the shifting seasons of our changing climate. Godwits cannot soar like hawks or glide like albatrosses. They migrate by continuously flapping their wings. They must navigate crosswinds and headwinds, storms and maybe an occasional hurricane, continuing on day after day, night after night. As best as we can tell, they do not, while flying, eat or drink or sleep (at least not with more than one hemisphere of their brain at a time). After a journey of hundreds of hours and thousands of miles, they descend on a snow-covered shore at the Cook Inlet of southern Alaska or another favored breeding ground. They land considerably lighter than when they took off. “Many arriving shorebirds seem to be tired,” the ornithologist and conservationist Joseph Archibald Hagar wrote, in his foundational monograph, “Nesting of the Hudsonian Godwit at Churchill, Manitoba,” from 1966. In a field-diary entry, Hagar describes a group of birds that “within a minute or two dropped into some sunny spot out of the wind, tucked heads into scapulars, and went to sleep, not to move again for as long as we watched.”

In 1976, the young ornithologist Robert Gill took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage. He was dispatched to the Alaska Peninsula to do biological inventories on public land that was up for lease to private companies. During those long-lit Alaskan summer days, walking across salt marshes and through the foothills of the mountains, Gill encountered thousands upon thousands of migratory shorebirds. He told me, “In Alaska, where the seasons are so prominent, it’s very dramatic. It feels like all the birds turn up over the course of one weekend in May.” Along with godwits, the peninsula was a summer home to yellowlegs, dowitchers, sandpipers, Arctic terns, and other species. But almost no one was aware that so many birds relied on this land. How the birds managed their journeys, where they might stop along the way, even how many of them there were—no one knew for sure. “In the vast expanses of wetlands and coastal tundra, you could see why,” Gill said.

The extinction of the once common passenger pigeon, famously described by the naturalist John Muir in his memoir (“I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour, like a mighty river in the sky”), was part of the impetus behind the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Godwits are protected under the act, so killing them or holding them captive, even for scientific purposes, is highly regulated. Also, they’re difficult to capture. Gill’s means of learning more about them was limited, he said, to “the kind of observational work done by old-school naturalists.”

In October of 1987, Gill received a call about nine bar-tailed godwits that had crashed into a radar dome near Cold Bay, Alaska, and died. “They were greaseballs,” he recalled. “They made any Christmas goose look lean.” The carcasses were sent to a lab to be analyzed. Fifty-five per cent of their body mass turned out to be fat. Gill suspected that these chubby godwits were preparing to fly non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand, where this species wintered. However, at that time, the longest known non-stop migration flight was barely half that long. “But, if they were going to stop in French Polynesia, why carry all that baggage?” Gill reasoned.

The lab also measured the birds’ internal organs. Gill’s collaborator, Theunis Piersma, noticed something peculiar: the guts, gizzard, liver, and kidneys of these birds were very small—it was like cutting open a lion and encountering digestive organs the size of a house cat’s. Then, in March of 1992, some forty godwit carcasses were seized from a poacher in New Zealand. These were birds in a very different part of their migratory cycle, and their digestive organs, when analyzed, were of more normal proportions. In 1998, Piersma and Gill published their findings in a paper titled “Guts Don’t Fly: Small Digestive Organs in Obese Bar-Tailed Godwits,” concluding that the birds shrank their digestive organs to reduce their weight and their metabolic demands during a non-stop migration. And then, somehow, regrew them. [...]

A female godwit, E7, took off on March 17, 2007, from near the Piako River, on New Zealand’s North Island. She flew more than six thousand miles non-stop to a nature preserve on the Yalu River, near the China-North Korea border; she stayed there for a little more than a month; she arrived at her nesting area in Alaska on May 15th and spent the summer there. The tracker was still working on August 29th, when E7 started flying southeast, over the Pacific. Gill’s team was doing field work in western Alaska and had only spotty internet service; the team would gather around a laptop, waiting for the updates on E7’s location to come through. North of Kauai, she took a slight right turn and continued flying. On September 7th, after more than two hundred hours aloft, she landed at the mouth of the Piako River, back on the North Island of New Zealand, where Gill had first met her.

Before E7, the longest documented non-stop migratory-bird flight was that of a Far Eastern curlew who had flown about four thousand miles. E7 flew some seven thousand without a break. The flight defied reason. “I had an engineering professor at M.I.T. call me up and say he gave his students an assignment to compare the size and flight range of E7 to a 747 jet,” Gill said. 

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ash Adams
[ed. Stan Senner was a friend and collegue. Didn't know Bob Gill personally but used his work frequently in my habitat protection efforts.]

Cloudy With a Chance of Controversy

Somebody messed with Alaska’s weather last month. Before anybody checks the skies for black helicopters, relax.

On Aug. 23, a California company called Rainmaker Technology Corporation launched a drone near the head of Kachemak Bay and flew it into clouds cold enough to contain supercooled water. The drone released less than 1 pound of silver iodide. Rainmaker says the experiment coaxed about 19 million gallons of additional precipitation from those clouds over three hours.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn’t. Spread over roughly 100 square miles, 19 million gallons amounts to about one-hundredth of an inch of rain. If you had been standing underneath it, you might have noticed a drizzle. You also might have continued mowing the lawn.

Given the collective social media freakout, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rainmaker had pointed a weather-controlling laser beam right at Homer and hit “deploy” from a top-secret mission control bunker.

The experiment produced an impressive online meltdown after residents and local elected officials discovered it had happened without much advance notice. State Rep. Sarah Vance called on Rainmaker to cease operations in her district. Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche raised questions about why local residents weren’t informed. Social media did what social media does whenever the words “weather modification” appear together. Cue the chemtrail conspiracy theorists.

Cloud seeding isn’t science fiction, and it certainly isn’t a secret government plot. Scientists have experimented with it since the 1940s. The basic idea isn’t especially difficult to understand.

Some cold clouds contain tiny droplets of water that remain liquid even below freezing. Introduce particles such as silver iodide, whose structure helps ice crystals form, and some of those droplets freeze, grow and become heavy enough to fall as snow or rain. Some. That is the key word there.

Cloud seeding can’t manufacture a thunderstorm over a cloudless desert; it can’t steer hurricanes; and it can’t turn a passing cloud into Noah’s flood. It can, however, give the right kind of existing cloud a little nudge of inclement encouragement.

Research has become considerably more sophisticated, too. The 2017 SNOWIE experiment in Idaho demonstrated that scientists could detect and measure precipitation produced by silver iodide seeding under the right conditions.

Now, that doesn’t mean every question has been answered. A 2024 Government Accountability Office review found that studies estimated cloud seeding can increase precipitation anywhere from zero to 20%, depending on conditions, and said more research is needed to understand when it works best. The GAO also found that existing research suggests the amounts of silver iodide currently used do not pose an environmental or human health concern, while noting that the effects of much more widespread use aren’t as well understood.

In other words: We need to do more science, and Alaska is a pretty good place to do it.

Rainmaker came here because cloud seeding requires particular atmospheric conditions, including clouds cold enough for the process to work, which Alaska has. The potential applications extend far beyond producing an August drizzle near Homer.

Western states are staring at increasingly serious water problems. Reservoirs and rivers supplying farms, cities and hydroelectric projects are under pressure. Snowpack is, in effect, nature’s water-storage system. Even squeezing a few additional percentage points of precipitation from suitable clouds could matter enormously when repeated across the right watersheds.

Cloud seeding won’t solve climate change or replace conservation efforts, but if better engineering can help put more snow on mountains and more water into reservoirs, we should be rooting for the scientists trying to figure out how.

That brings us to the one part that beckons reasonable criticism.

Rainmaker says it notified the Alaska Department of Natural Resources before the test. DNR determined the drone research was a generally allowed use of state land, but the department says it has no jurisdiction over cloud seeding itself. The Department of Environmental Conservation is now reviewing what happened.

That’s a little bit of an awkward gap but despite the naive handwringing by elected officials, we shouldn’t be falling all over ourselves to make new laws here. Alaska doesn’t need to construct a regulatory fortress around every weather balloon, drone or scientific experiment, nor should every experiment become subject to the whims of pitchfork-carrying mobs at a town hall. Scientific questions aren’t settled by whoever draws the angriest crowd, and that needs to be balanced with residents knowing what’s happening in their communities — or, in this case, over their communities.

The state should consider a simple notification and oversight process. Tell local governments when these types of experiments are planned, and make information about the chemicals, quantities and science readily available. But any public process must not be allowed to be hijacked by petty naysayers.

Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant — even when we’re talking about making clouds. Then let the scientists do their science-y thing. Too often, good projects or experiments are derailed by irrational conspiracy theories shouted at public meetings (or by elected officials) and the result is that we don’t move forward. That’s a bad outcome any way you slice it.

by Editorial Board, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Anne Raup/ADN

[ed. Another example of artifical intelligence gone awry.]

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

via:

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

via:

[ed. Unexpected fun:  Dust devils.]

via:

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:

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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.]