Best All-Around Caliber for Alaska Big-Game Hunting? Can There Be Just One?

I suspect that the argument of what rifle cartridge is the best "all-around" caliber for Alaska big game hunting has burned as many calories in heated debate as what truck is better, Ford or Chevy. Forests have been decimated to publish various opinions.

When we moved to Alaska in 1971, I went back through old magazines my dad had and read everything I could find on the subject. I never experienced Nirvana, nothing seemed conclusive.

But it was entertaining. I spent my first Alaska summer cutting and installing spruce logs for septic tanks (yes, we did that) and was rewarded with a Winchester M70 in .300 Winchester Magnum for my efforts. That rifle instantly became my "all-around" rifle, largely because it was the only one I had.

Holy grail of hunting cartridges

After all this time, it seems that no malignancies have put the argument to death. New calibers appear routinely, providing the opportunity to revisit the argument and find the holy grail of Alaska hunting cartridges.

First, though, we have to acknowledge that a large share of hunters hunt for meat with rifles chambered for calibers that never make the list. There is ample evidence that more big game has been taken by those using the .30-30 Winchester or 30-06 Springfield than just about all others combined.

The requirements for a successful big game cartridge are not steeped in rocket science, as some of us gun folks would suggest. The caliber must be able to drive a projectile into the vitals of the animal and create enough damage to cause, if not instantaneous death, at least a fairly rapid demise. With the exception of some of the smaller .22 caliber center-fires, virtually all of them will accomplish the task. AR-15s and Mini-14s in .223 have become quite popular with western Alaska subsistence caribou hunters, although I have no idea how effective they find them to be.

Regardless of cartridge selection, the real issue rests on the shoulders of the hunter. Do they understand the capabilities of the cartridge and are they willing to accept the limitations? It really comes down to the effective range of the chosen round and the hunter's ability to shoot accurately regardless of the gun used. The hunter who is patient, who is willing to take the time to stalk the animal to get in range and to pass up shots that the cartridge cannot be expected to perform well on will do just fine with whatever caliber they choose to use.

A fair number of hunters don't have much interest in guns and shooting beyond bringing home winter meat. They will find all of this of little interest. They hunt with what they have and don't consider the details of it all.

Those of us who love it all — the hunting, the guns, and the shooting — find it a fascinating subject. We can and do blabber on for hours about velocity and energy, in-flight ballistics, terminal bullet performance, stopping power, and on and on. The first time Christine asked me a question about calibers, her eyes rolled back in her head a few minutes into my response. Small doses, she suggested.

A few suggestions

But here is the rub: Those of us who love to talk about it want nothing to do with an all-around rifle/cartridge. That means we only have one rifle — for us, a ridiculous concept. It is so much more interesting and fun to discuss a multitude of rifle/cartridge combinations tailored specifically for certain tasks and then, of course, get them. Most of us reload, which opens an entire world of custom loads with premium bullets at a fraction of the cost of shelf ammunition for our beloved rifles. Thus, some thoughts that are neither right or wrong, they're just mine.

*For Alaska's open-country game — Dall sheep, barren-ground caribou, and mountain goat — a flat shooting cartridge is desirable. While, in truth, most of the time these are taken within 200 yards, like most everything else in Alaska, there are times, like the last day of a 10-day hunt, when the only opportunity for a shot might be 400 yards. A plethora of cartridges, such as the .25-06, .270 Winchester, 7mm Remington Magnum, to name a few, fill the bill. My personal choice would be the 6.5-.300 Weatherby.

*Larger herbivores, moose and bison, seem to demand yet another rifle and for more than just the joy of having one. The bison is the only Alaska big-game animal that has a specific requirement as to the bullet weight and downrange energy of the cartridge used to hunt them. The bullet must weigh at least 200 grains and the retained energy of the bullet at 100 yards must be at least 2,000 foot-pounds. The 30-06 is the practical minimum for the task. Moose aren't particularly hard to kill. Having shot them with the 6mm/.284, .264 Winchester, .270 Winchester, .300 Winchester, .375 H&H and the .458 Winchester, none ever moved out of their tracks. The closest was 20 feet with a .458, the furthest, a bit over 400 yards with a .300 Winchester. They are, however, large animals and a heavier bullet for shots that might require deep penetration from a variety of angles is advantageous. Hoping to someday draw a bison permit, my choice for the "medium" rifle is the .300 Winchester. It makes a nice deer rifle in areas inhabited by brown bears as well.

*Then there is the big bear rifle. Brown bears can and have been taken with everything from the .223 Remington to the .460 Weatherby. They aren't bulletproof but do show more tenacity when wounded than other Alaska big game. Except those taken in "predator control" measures and the relatively rare case of being taken as food, brown bears are a trophy animal. The real allure is that they are considered dangerous. In order to be really dangerous they should be hunted up close and personal, halitosis distance if you will. That plays right into the justification to have a "heavy" rifle like a .375 H&H, .416 Rigby, .45/70, .450 Alaskan, or a .458 Winchester. My desire to hunt for trophies faded years ago, but you never know when an opportunity to help find a wounded bear might arise, and for such work I've always wanted a .470 Nitro Express in a double rifle of the British persuasion that has served on the Dark Continent. It's a piece of art and history that might never again see employment but what a terrific conversation piece around the campfire or fireplace.

The conversation is sort of like picking the best gun dog or the best partner. No matter your choice, the one you bring better be the right one.

by Steve Meyer, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:
Image: Steve Meyer

Ed van der Elsken, "Paris, 1950"
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Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets

Abstract 

As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the change in employment and wages on the change in exposure to robots in each local labor market—defined from the national penetration of robots into each industry and the local distribution of employment across industries. Using this approach, we estimate large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages. We show that commuting zones most affected by robots in the post-1990 era were on similar trends to others before 1990, and that the impact of robots is distinct and only weakly correlated with the prevalence of routine jobs, the impact of imports from China, and overall capital utilization. According to our estimates, each additional robot reduces employment by about seven workers, and one new robot per thousand workers reduces wages by 1.2 to 1.6 percent.

Introduction

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted the rapid technological progress of the next 100 years, but also conjectured that this would translate into widespread “technological unemployment:” 

“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come — namely, technological unemployment.” 

More than two decades later, Wassily Leontief would foretell of similar problems for workers: 

“Labor will become less and less important. . . More and more workers will be replaced by machines. I do not see that new industries can employ everybody who wants a job”(Leontief, 1952). 

Though these predictions did not come true in the decades that followed, there is renewed concern that with the striking advances in automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence, we are on the verge of —or perhaps we are already— seeing them realized (e.g., Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2012; Ford, 2016). The mounting evidence that the automation of a range of low-skill and medium-skill occupations has contributed to wage inequality and employment polarization (e.g., Autor, Levy and Murnane, 2003; Goos and Manning, 2007; Michaels, Natraj and Van Reenen, 2014) adds to these worries. 

These concerns notwithstanding, we have little systematic evidence of the equilibrium impact of these new technologies, and especially of robots, on employment and wages. One line of research (exemplified by Frey and Osbourne, 2013) investigates how feasible it is to automate existing jobs given current and presumed technological advances. Based on the tasks that workers perform, Frey and Osborne (2013) classify 702 occupations by how susceptible they are to automation. They conclude that over the next two decades, 47 percent of US workers are at the risk of automation. Using a related methodology, McKinsey puts the same number at 45 percent, while the World Bank estimates that 57 percen of the jobs in the OECD could be automated over the next two decades (World Development Report, 2016). Even if these studies were on target on what can be technologically feasible,1 these numbers do not correspond to the equilibrium impact of automation on employment and wages. First, even if the presumed technological advances materialize, there is no guarantee that firms would choose to automate; that would depend on the costs of substituting machines for labor and how much wages change in response to this threat. Second, the labor market impacts of new technologies depend not only on where they hit but also on the adjustment in other parts of the economy. For example, other sectors and occupations might expand to soak up the labor freed from the tasks that are now performed by machines and productivity improvements due to new machines may even expand employment in affected industries (Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2016). 

In this paper we move beyond these feasibility studies and estimate the equilibrium impact of one type of automation technology, industrial robots, on US labor markets. The International Federation of Robotics—IFR for short—defines an industrial robot as “an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, and multipurpose [machine]” (IFR, 2014). That is, industrial robots are machines that do not need a human operator and that can be programmed to perform several manual tasks such as welding, painting, assembling, handling materials, or packaging. Textile looms, elevators, cranes, transportation bands or coffee makers are not industrial robots as they have a unique purpose, cannot be reprogrammed to perform other tasks, and/or require a human operator. Although this definition excludes other types of capital that may also replace labor—most notably software and human-operated machines—it enables an internationally and temporally comparable measurement of industrial robots, which are argued to have already deeply impacted the labor market and expected to transform it in the decades to come.

by Daron Acemoglu, MIT and Pascual Restrepo, Yale and Boston University |  Read more: (pdf)

The Case Against Contemporary Feminism

It’s the same with feminism as it is with women in general: there are always, seemingly, infinite ways to fail. On the one hand, feminism has never been more widely proclaimed or marketable than it is now. On the other hand, its last ten years of mainstream prominence and acceptability culminated in the election of President Donald Trump. (The Times published an essay at the end of December under the headline “Feminism Lost. Now What?”) Since November 9th, the two main arguments against contemporary feminism have emerged in near-exact opposition to each other: either feminism has become too strict an ideology or it has softened to the point of uselessness. On one side, there is, for instance, Kellyanne Conway, who, in her apparent dislike of words that denote principles, has labelled herself a “post-feminist.” Among those on the other side is the writer Jessa Crispin, who believes that the push to make feminism universally palatable has negated the meaning of the ideology writ large.

Crispin has written a new book-length polemic on the subject, called “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” in which she offers definitions of feminism that are considerably more barbed than the earnest, cheeky slogans that have become de rigueur—“The future is female,” for example, as Hillary Clinton declared in her first video statement since the election, or “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights,” or “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” The dissidence at the root of these catchphrases has been obscured by their ubiquity on tote bags and T-shirts, and for Crispin the decline of feminism is visible in how easy the label is to claim. Feminism, she tells us, has become a self-serving brand popularized by C.E.O.s and beauty companies, a “fight to allow women to participate equally in the oppression of the powerless and the poor.” It’s a “narcissistic reflexive thought process: I define myself as feminist and so everything I do is a feminist act.” It’s an “attack dog posing as a kitten,” and—in what might be Crispin’s most biting entry—a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show.” (...)

Crispin’s argument is bracing, and a rare counterbalance; where feminism is concerned, broad acceptability is almost always framed as an unquestioned good. “Somewhere along the way toward female liberation, it was decided that the most effective method was for feminism to become universal,” Crispin writes. And the people who decided this “forgot that for something to be universally accepted, it must become as banal, as non-threatening and ineffective as possible.” Another, and perhaps less fatalistic, way of framing the matter: feminism is a political argument of such obvious reason and power that it has been co-opted as an aesthetic and transformed into merchandise by a series of influential profiteers. (...)

Here, and in some other places where Crispin’s argument requires her to take a precise measure of contemporary feminism, she—or this book’s production schedule—can’t quite account for the complexity of the times. From 2014 to 2016, I worked as an editor at Jezebel, a site that, when it was founded, in 2007, helped to define online feminism—and served ever afterward as a somewhat abstracted target for women who criticized contemporary feminism from the left. These critics didn’t usually recognize how quickly the center is always moving, and Crispin has the same problem. Much of what she denounces—“outrage culture,” empowerment marketing, the stranglehold that white women have on the public conversation—has already been critiqued at length by the young feminist mainstream. Her imagined Dworkin-hating dilettante, discussing the politics of bikini waxing and “giving blow jobs like it’s missionary work,” has long been passé. It’s far more common these days for young feminists to adopt a radical veneer. Lena Dunham’s newsletter sells “Dismantle the Patriarchy” patches; last fall, a Dior runway show included a T-shirt reading, “We Should All Be Feminists.” (The shirt is not yet on sale in the United States; it reportedly costs five hundred and fifty euros in France.) The inside threat to feminism in 2017 is less a disavowal of radical ideas than an empty co-option of radical appearances—a superficial, market-based alignment that is more likely to make a woman feel good and righteous than lead her to the political action that feminism is meant to spur.

The most vital strain of thought in “Why I Am Not a Feminist” is Crispin’s unforgiving indictment of individualism and capitalism, value systems that she argues have severely warped feminism, encouraging women to think of the movement only insofar as it leads to individual gains. We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”

That this line of argument seems like a plausible next step for contemporary feminism reflects the recent and rapid leftward turn of liberal politics. Socialism and anti-capitalism, as foils to Donald Trump’s me-first ideology, have taken an accelerated path into the mainstream. “Why I Am Not a Feminist” comes at a time when some portion of liberal women in America might be ready for a major shift—inclined, suddenly, toward a belief system that does not hallow the “markers of success in patriarchal capitalism . . . money and power,” as Crispin puts it. There is, it seems, a growing hunger for a feminism concerned more with the lives of low-income women than with the number of female C.E.O.s.

The opposing view—that feminism is not just broadly compatible with capitalism but actually served by it—has certainly enjoyed its share of prominence. This is the message that has been passed down by the vast majority of self-styled feminist role models over the past ten years: that feminism is what you call it when an individual woman gets enough money to do whatever she wants. Crispin is ruthless in dissecting this brand of feminism. It means simply buying one’s way out of oppression and then perpetuating it, she argues; it embraces the patriarchal model of happiness, which depends on “having someone else subject to your will.” Women, exploited for centuries, have grown subconsciously eager to exploit others, Crispin believes. “Once we are a part of the system and benefiting from it on the same level that men are, we won’t care, as a group, about whose turn it is to get hurt.”

by Jia Tolentino, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Liang Sen Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux

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Gold Dust Day Geckos Are Only the Latest Moʻo to Make Maui Home

[ed. There's some new type of gecko in Hawaii that everyone seems familiar with - one that's bolder and more intrusive than the little pale guys you normally see up in the corners of rooms. I don't think it's the gold dust day gecko because it's more of a dusky green color and a bit smaller. I had one saunter out into the middle of the living room floor one night while I was watching tv. Even with a little gentle nudging it didn't want to move. Just kind of looked at me like "eh... knock it off" before slowly moving along.] 

Geckos are ubiquitous throughout the Hawaiian Islands today, but that was not always the case. Though lizards can colonize islands by clinging to drifting trees and plant material, the Hawaiian archipelago’s extreme isolation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean likely prevented any terrestrial reptiles from reaching our shores. It was only after humans arrived in Hawaiʻi that reptiles and amphibians found passage aboard canoes, ships, and eventually planes. Thus began the waves of introduced geckos, skinks, frogs, and chamelons that came and spread throughout the Islands.

The first lizards stowed away with Polynesians in large oceangoing canoes. Mourning geckos, stump-toed geckos, tree geckos, Indo-Pacific geckos, snake-eyed skinks, moth skinks, copper-tailed skinks, and the now-extinct azure-tailed skinks were already established in Hawaiʻi when Captain Cook arrived.

Though it may be impossible to measure the impact these small lizards had, the arrival of voracious, insect-eaters in an ecosystem that evolved over millennia without lizards or amphibians would inevitably result in a decline in native insects. This is problematic for Hawaiʻi, which has tens of thousands of unique invertebrates—many of which exist nowhere else on Earth and have yet to be described by science.

The eight Polynesian-introduced geckos and skinks are still present in Hawaiʻi, but a few recent introductions have stolen the spotlight. Common house geckos only showed up in the last 60 years or so. They most likely hitchhiked to Hawaiʻi in the 1940s in cargo moved around the Pacific. Aggressive and territorial, they’ve outcompeted mourning geckos and others for the prized perch near the porch light.

An even newer arrival seems to be outcompeting the house gecko: the gold dust day gecko. This exotic, 5-inch long lizard is hard to miss: it appears to be dressed for Mardi Gras in brilliant green with bright blue eye shadow, red markings across its nose and at the base of the tail, and a sprinkling of gold spots dusted along back of its neck. Active primarily during the day, this gecko is native to Madagascar and small islands off the coast of East Africa.

Rather than arriving as a stowaway as other geckos and skinks have, the gold dust day gecko was illegally smuggled in and released. The entire Hawaiian population stems from only eight lizards a University of Hawaiʻi student released near the Mānoa campus in 1974. Shortsighted lizard enthusiasts intentionally dispersed the geckos, which then colonized new areas on their own. Maui residents began seeing gold dust day geckos creeping around Kīhei in the mid 90s. The lizards now populate landscaped yards throughout South and Central Maui and are becoming common Upcountry.

Gold dust day geckos eat insects: cockroaches, ants, flies, beetles, and spiders, but they also have a sweet tooth and lap up nectar from flowers or juice from ripe fruit. To date, they occupy roughly the same areas as other geckos, but the newcomer’s impact isn’t entirely understood. Their omnivorous diet may give them an advantage. While the colorful lizards seem harmless, they could be pressuring native ecosystems in ways not yet identified.

While it’s too late to address the gold dust day gecko on Maui, there are two more species of day geckos to look out for. Both were illegally imported, and are only found in a few places on O’ahu. The orange-spotted day gecko and the Madagascar giant day gecko are both green with red markings, but lack the gold dusting. The orange spotted day gecko is slightly bigger than its gold-dusted cousin, reaching 7 inches in length, and the giant day gecko is a whopping 10-12 inches including tail.

by Maui Invasive Species Committee | Read more:
Image:Eric Sonstroem, Flikr

Dieter Krehbiel, Balthazar New York
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Tal Bright, Blue Circles
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Christian Schloe, Every Night She Steals a Heart

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'Nevertheless, She Persisted' and the Age of the Weaponized Meme

There are many ways that American culture tells women to be quiet—many ways they are reminded that they would really be so much more pleasing if they would just smile a little more, or talk a little less, or work a little harder to be pliant and agreeable. Women are, in general, extremely attuned to these messages; we have, after all, heard them all our lives.

And so: When presiding Senate chair Steve Daines, of Montana, interrupted his colleague, Elizabeth Warren, as she was reading the words of Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor on Tuesday evening—and, then, when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell intervened to prevent her from finishing the speech—many women, regardless of their politics or place, felt that silencing, viscerally. And when McConnell, later, remarked of Warren, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” many women, regardless of their politics or place, felt it again. Because, regardless of their politics or place, those women have heard the same thing, or a version of it, many times before.

All of that helps to explain why, today, “Silencing Liz Warren” and #LetLizSpeak are currently trending on social media platforms—and why, along with them, “She Persisted” has become a meme that is already “an instant classic.” It also helps to explain why you can now buy a “Nevertheless, She Persisted” T-shirt, or hoodie, or smartphone case, or mug, each item featuring McConnell’s full explanation—warned, explanation, persisted—scrawled, in dainty cursive, on its surface. As the feminist writer Rebecca Traister noted of the majority leader’s words: “‘Nevertheless, she persisted’ is likely showing up on a lot of protest signs this weekend.” And it’s likely to keep showing up—a testament to another thing American culture has told its women: that “silence” doesn’t have to equal silence.

It started like this: On Tuesday evening, during a late-night Senate session debating President Trump’s nomination of Jeff Sessions to become attorney general, Warren used her time at the podium to read a letter that Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., had written about Sessions in 1986. King, a civil rights leader in her own right, was opposing Sessions’s potential (and, later, realized) elevation from U.S. attorney to federal judge. Warren began reading the words King had written (to then-Senator Strom Thurmond): “It has been a long uphill struggle to keep alive the vital legislation that protects the most fundamental right to vote. A person who has exhibited so much hostility to the enforcement of those laws”—

At this point, Daines, the senator presiding over the session, interrupted Warren, citing Senate Rule XIX and its stipulation that “no Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” The matter was put to a vote; it went down party lines; Warren was not permitted to continue. After this, McConnell was asked to explain himself and his party’s silencing of his Senate colleague.

And then: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” And with it, as the Chicago Tribune put it: “Mitch McConnell, bless his heart, has coined a new feminist rally cry.” Indeed: On the internet, “Nevertheless, she persisted” was applied to images not just of Warren and King, but also of Harriet Tubman, and Malala Yousafzai, and Beyoncé, and Emmeline Pankhurst, and Gabby Giffords, and Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton, and Princess Leia. It accompanied tags that celebrated #TheResistance.

The meme is, as of Wednesday morning, still going strong. It hit a nerve—the same nerve, roughly, that had been hit by “binders full of women” and “such a nasty woman” before it.

But it hit something else, too: all the notes that allow shared words to swell into shared emotion. You couldn’t have designed better fodder for a meme had you tried. “Nevertheless, she persisted” has, on the one hand, the impish irony of a powerful person’s words being used against him. It has, on the other, words that are elegant in their brevity, making them especially fit for tweets and slogans and mugs. And it has, too, words that are particularly poetic, rendered in near-iambic pentameter, with the key verb of their accusation—“persisted”—neatly rhyming with that other key verb: “resisted.” The whole thing was, for Warren, a perfect storm. It was, for McConnell, a decidedly imperfect one.

But it was also a small object lesson in the way of the politics of the current moment—which, yes, play out within sessions and Sessions, but which also play out on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. Here was politics as a series of messy, behind-the-scenes negotiations among the powerful colliding, once again, with politics as theater. The dustup between Warren and McConnell may have been, at its core, about the interpretation of Senate rules; for the public, though—or, at any rate, for the people who took to the internet to express their solidarity with Warren and her fellow “silenced women”—it was a matter, more simply, of emotion. It was that most classic of things: a woman (sharing the words, no less, of another woman) told by a man to shut up.

by Megan Garber, The Atlantic |  Read more:
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Making Sense of Our Compulsions

Checking our smartphones every few minutes. Making sure every spice jar is in the exact right place in the rack. Shopping. Stealing. Working nonstop. Hoarding. “Compulsions come from a need so desperate, burning, and tortured it makes us feel like a vessel filling with steam, saturating us with a hot urgency that demands relief,” Sharon Begley writes in her new book, Can’t Just Stop. “Suffused and overwhelmed by anxiety, we grab hold of any behavior that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control.”

In a time of extreme anxiety for many of us, Begley’s book feels particularly relevant. In chapters that run the gamut from obsessive-compulsive disorder to compulsive do-gooding, Begley—a senior science writer for STAT, whose previous books include The Emotional Life of Your Brain and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain—explores how behaviors that range widely in both character and extremity can come from a common root. “Venturing inside the heads and the worlds of people who behave compulsively not only shatters the smug superiority many of us feel when confronted with others’ extreme behavior,” she writes. “It also reveals elements of our shared humanity.” Begley and I spoke by phone about what anxiety is, exactly; her own compulsions; and whether it’s possible to have no compulsions (not likely).

What is the definition of “compulsion,” as compared to addiction and impulsive behaviors?

This was the first thing that I had to grapple with. The first thing I did was go around to psychologists and psychiatrists and start asking, “What is the difference between these three things?” To make a long story as short as possible, they really didn’t have a clue, or at least they were not very good at explaining it—to the extent that the same disorder would be described in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the American Psychiatric Association, using “compulsive” one time and “impulsive” the next.

So where I finally came down, after finding people who had really thought about this, is as follows. Impulsive behaviors are ones that go from some unconscious part of your brain right to a motor action. There is very little emotion except for that feeling of impulsivity. There’s certainly little to no thought involved.

Behavioral addictions—and this is where I thought it started to get interesting—are born in something pleasurable. If you’re addicted to gambling, it probably is because, at least when you started, it was a whole lot of fun. You loved it. You got a hedonic hit, a pulse of enjoyment. And certainly as things go along, a behavioral addiction like gambling can cause you all sorts of distress and destroy your life. But at least at the beginning, it brings you extreme pleasure.

Compulsions are very different. They come from this desperate, desperate need to alleviate anxiety. They’re an outlet valve. The anxiety makes you want to jump out of your skin, or it makes you feel like your skin is crawling with fire ants. And what compulsions do is bring relief only after you have executed the compulsion, whether it is to exercise, or to check your texts, or to shop, or to keep something if you’re a hoarder. And crucially, compulsions, although they bring relief, bring almost no enjoyment except in the sense that if you stop banging your head against a wall, then it feels good to stop.

Why, when you started to decipher this taxonomy, did you decide to focus on compulsions in particular?

The behaviors that I found most interesting turned out to be compulsions. I mean, sometimes the same behavior can fall into different categories. But for most of the things that I was looking at, especially behavior having to do with electronic media, those turned out to be compulsions.

I also thought it fit in with the way we all live these days. That anxiety just seems to be built into so many of the lives we lead. And therefore, I was interested in how this anxiety manifests itself, and how people deal with it. The prevalence of anxiety diagnoses is much higher these days than depression, even among college students, who have long been suffering in great numbers from depression. Just a couple of years ago, anxiety surpassed depression as the most commonly diagnosed mental health diagnosis in college students. Something about the way we live is ratcheting up anxiety in a whole lot of us. And that seems to be why compulsive behaviors are becoming more common, something that we all go to in order to survive.

Everyone knows when they’re feeling anxiety, but what is it, exactly?

It’s a feeling that you are under threat, that you are at risk. Sometimes you know exactly what it is. If you’re walking on a dark, deserted street, then the anxiety you feel is probably because you understand that something bad can happen to you. But in many cases the source of the anxiety is not at all clear.

So I’ll give you just one example. Now that online shopping is ubiquitous, if you’re in a brick-and-mortar store, the number of choices is finite and not that large. But if you’re shopping for shoes on Zappos, you may be on page 19, and there’s a little voice in your head saying, “Well, wait a minute, don’t press buy, what if page 20 or 21 or 73 or 119 has an amazing pair?” You never really feel that you have settled in a safe place, that you have made the right choice, that you can stop. So again, that’s not as severe a threat as you’re walking down a street and could be mugged, but it still triggers a sense of anxiety: “What if I’m not making the right choice?”

In large part, the book has to do with taxonomies and classifications. It seems to me that there is, in your view, a vital reason to understand what behaviors fall into what disorder categories: to understand the treatments that might work. But you also grapple with the line between pathological and non-pathological behaviors. It seems to me that you come to the understanding that we all have compulsions of one kind or another. It’s a gradient, and if it’s not really destructive to your life, they serve a therapeutic purpose in helping to relieve anxiety. Is that right?

Yes. I’ve been a science writer for a very long time and I’ve written about, among other things, neuroscience and psychology. Psychology and psychiatry have, over the years, tended to medicalize a lot of behaviors—to say that something is a mental disorder. The most infamous example was that psychiatry, until the ’70s, decided that homosexuality was a mental illness. Even before there was much of an organized psychiatric field of psychiatry, psychiatrists in the 1800s decided that slaves who ran away from their masters in the South must have a mental disorder, because no slave in his right mind would do that. So psychiatry has a very, very problematic history of slapping this label, mental illness, on behaviors that the powers that be just don’t like.

That was in the back of my mind as I started to explore these issues. And as I talked to people who were receiving treatment, but also people who just had mild compulsions, I absolutely came away with the conclusion that compulsions exist along a spectrum. Definitely, at one extreme of the spectrum, it is a mental illness. It is devastating to people, they deserve help and treatment and it is not to be minimized. But there are gradations. There is no way that everybody in the newsroom who’s constantly checking her iPhone to see if a source has gotten back to her is mentally ill. You cannot say that a huge fraction of the population is mentally ill. That doesn’t work.

I have a chapter on OCPD, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, for which I talked to a lot of people who in no way have a disorder but are a little bit compulsive. One reason this interested me was because even their slight compulsivity arose from the same source as extreme compulsivity: anxiety. One woman, who I think is in her sixties now, came to this country from Switzerland. She’s a piano tuner and mostly a homemaker. And she is compulsive about having everything in her house in exactly the right place. I mean, every bottle of spices in her kitchen, every mug, the stuff in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, the way the towels are draped—everything has to be just so.

I asked her about how she grew up and her childhood. She told me her mother was very unpredictable emotionally. Some days she was warm and caring, other days she was cold and distant, and so this little girl never knew what kind of mother she was going to have. One day, the family is going to a summer cottage, and they get there and things are a mess and the mother is tearing at her hair, “Oh, we can’t fix it up quickly enough for the children to go to sleep, what are we going to do?” So the little girl says, “Even if we can’t get the whole house cleaned and perfect and the beds made, let’s just take this little place on the grass and brush away the sticks and put out some chairs and have a little picnic.” She told me that from that moment on, she began to think that even though many, many, many things in her life were unpredictable, there were a few things that she could control. And knowing that there were a few such things made her feel less on edge, less anxious. As an adult, she still feels the world is a crazy uncontrollable, unpredictable place, but by God, her mugs are going to be in the right place. That’s one little thing that she can control, and it makes her feel better. No one would call her mentally ill. She’s perfectly functional, she has great self-insight, but this is why she does what she does.

I think there are a lot of us who feel the same way. We can’t control what’s going to happen to the economy, we can’t control what’s going to happen in politics, but there is this one little area of our lives that we can carve out and we can control, and we do so compulsively. And thank goodness there are compulsive people in the world, people who just can’t sit still when something is bothering them, and they get up and they go out into the world and they do something.

There’s also this idea that disordered behaviors not only emerged from a place of trying to adapt to childhood circumstances, but also that they can be marshaled as strengths, which I really like. But to play devil’s advocate for a second: I recognize that compulsively maintaining order over your small corner of the world, like the woman you described, is not a sign of severe mental illness. She’s functional and it’s not hugely detrimental to her life, but at the same time, this behavior is symptomatic of a response to this unstable feeling she had throughout her childhood. So what do you think of the benefits of therapy for someone like that?

The simplest answer is that people can benefit from therapy even if they don’t have a mental illness. So I’m using mental illness in the very strict terms of the American Psychiatric Association. All the diagnoses in the DSM meet two crucial criteria: whatever the feelings or behaviors are, they have to cause distress and impairment. If they don’t, then the conversation is over, this person is not mentally ill. That actually came out of psychiatry’s unfortunate history with homosexuality.

Bianca, the woman we’re talking about, clearly is not mentally ill. She doesn’t feel like keeping her house in this state of extreme order is taking time away from things that she would be better off doing. Would she perhaps be more content with her life and have even more self-insight if she talked to a professional? Very likely. So again, I would just go back to saying, you can benefit from therapy even if you don’t have a mental illness. And many of the people I described don’t have mental illnesses, but they do have issues. So, you know, it’s up to them whether they want to get help for them.

Does anyone not have compulsions? Is that possible?

[Laughter] I think if you scratch the surface even a little bit, almost everyone will turn out to have at least a little something. I have no empirical basis for saying that, but once I started this research, I started seeing compulsions everywhere. And I, of course, have some of my own. So I think it would be hard to find someone who does not have at least mild compulsiveness, but again, that’s just a guess.

Can you talk about some of your own compulsions?

Yeah. I would describe myself as a non-hoarder, as in I really like to get rid of stuff in my house. I never really thought about it in psychological terms before: I just wanted to declutter. But once I started the book, it started to seem to me that when I have less stuff, I feel less tied down. The more stuff I have, I look around and think, “God, I will never be able to move,” or “I’ll never be able to make a change in my life.” So one of my mild compulsions is to get rid of things, and through the book and talking to people, both experts and civilians, I got that little teeny piece of insight into why I have that feeling.

by Sharon Begley, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Amazon

The Demand for Applause

I was reminded today of the story recounted by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago about how the great leader demanded applause:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). … For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter…

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution |  Read more:

The Perils of Eating Polar Bear

Throughout 8,000 years of shared history, humans have regarded the polar bear with wonder, terror and fascination. It has been spirit guide and fanged enemy, trade good and moral metaphor, symbol of ecological crisis and food source. The bear's meat itself is rich with associations that speak of the fraught relationships between our two species.

Paraphrasing the French analyst of totemism, Claude Lévi-Strauss, one could claim that the North's Native peoples are taken with polar bears not only because they are spiritually potent — "good to think" — but also because they are physically potent — "good to eat."

Throughout Arctic history the bear has served as food, though in most indigenous societies, whales, walrus, seals, caribou or reindeer provided the bulk of the diet. Unfamiliar dishes or ingredients like bear meat strike Western palates as surreal or exotic and, in the case of endangered species, might also be seen as politically incorrect — but from our births onward, the culture that surrounds us shapes our food preferences and what we consider normal or acceptable.

Food can be a marker of belonging, contributing to a group's self-image and coherence. Food taken directly from one's surroundings is symbolic of place, forming a link with a people's history. This is why even in countries that banned polar bear hunting, such as the United States, Native groups with a tradition of hunting polar bears are permitted to keep hunting them — and other animals covered by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Together with the bear's humanlike appearance, the richness of bear meat and its rarity in modern diets seem to account for non-Native people's rejection of it. But our culinary preferences have changed. In 19th-century North America, bear meat (though not that of polar bears) was standard fare. Settlers also used bear fat to fry other foods, preferring it to butter.

Unlike medieval royalty who kept polar bears in menageries — or later, zoos — which pampered rare collectibles, explorers and whalers, always near starvation, treated the white bears as survival rations.

For months, "bear-beef" was often the only course on these men's menu. The meat is much greasier, however, than beef. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen's captain, Otto Sverdrup, called it a "royal dish" and the explorer himself judged breast of polar bear cub to be delicious. Of course, hunger always has been the best sauce and could have swayed culinary opinions.

"Heaven had sent us succor at a time of utter distress," one castaway recalled of a polar bear windfall, "and our gratitude for this miraculous gift was apparent in our overflowing happiness."

Having run out of provisions on one of the numerous searches the British launched after Sir John Franklin went missing in the Arctic, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane ate raw, frozen meat from a polar bear head that he had saved as a specimen and called it a godsend. He described the meat of lean bears as "the most palatable food" and "rather sweet and tender," but he warned against well-fed bears, which were made nearly inedible by "the impregnation of fatty oil throughout the cellular tissue."

Would-be connoisseurs should keep in mind the possibility of negative side effects.

"I did not care to try how it tasted," the English explorer and scientist William Scoresby wrote, "for I was afraid that my hair would turn grey before its time, for the seamen are of opinion that if they eat of it, it makes their hair grey."

More serious is hypervitaminosis A, an excess of the vitamin that can be contracted from eating the liver of polar bears, seals and walrus. Affecting the central nervous system, it can cause hair loss, extreme peeling of the skin, birth defects, liver problems, vomiting, blurred vision and even death. One officer swore never again to eat bear liver, no matter how much it might tempt him, after his crew showed symptoms akin to carbon monoxide poisoning. Native peoples have long been aware of this danger, as have explorers, though some felt no worse after eating the liver.

Research has shown that a healthy adult person can tolerate 10,000 units of vitamin A. Trouble, if it comes, comes between 25,000 and 33,000 units. One pound of polar bear liver — a fist-sized chunk and barely a meal — can contain 9 million units of vitamin A. The occasional lack of liver toxicity that some explorers reported can be explained by differences in the age, hibernation and feeding habits of the bear.

Equally bad is trichinosis, a parasitic disease contracted by eating the raw or undercooked flesh of pigs or wild game, including bear. Symptoms can include fever, muscle pain and fatigue, as well as inflammation of the heart muscle, lungs or brain, which have led to a few deaths.

Native peoples avoided polar bear liver because of its vitamin A concentration, and, like explorers and whalers, fed it only to their dogs. Modern Inuit and Inupiat value the flavor nuances of different bears or parts of a bear. Some prefer den polar bears, instead of bears caught in the open, because they taste better. The Cree consider the front and back paws (tukiq) the best eating.

For many Inupiat, polar bear meat remains a favorite meal and a prestigious gift. Nowadays, when a polar bear has been killed, a call goes out on a village radio channel, asking people to get some. The hunter normally keeps the skin, a trophy and commodity. The rest of a bear still is widely shared, a token of group identity and solidarity, a kind of Arctic communion. Unlike the whalers and explorers, who saw it as staple or last resort, indigenous peoples have always considered eating polar bear a reaffirmation of community as much as an act of physical nourishment.

Like the widespread idea that animal parts such as the blood, heart or testicles give power to those who ingest them, the human craving for novelty and the desire to understand the unknown by tasting it have shaped human culinary exploration from the beginning. It is not surprising that, in a world of potentially lethal pufferfish entrées and coffee ennobled in civet intestines, polar bear meat has found a place in fine dining.

by Michael Engelhard, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Library of Congress

Lucile
photo: markk

Sweet Bitter Blues

The curling streets and alleyways of Shimokitazawa, a scrappy neighborhood on the western edge of Tokyo, are too narrow to comfortably accommodate an actual automobile. But on foot, a person can easily lose an afternoon wandering its attenuated paths, browsing racks of crinkled vintage t-shirts and shelves of enamel cookware, supping complicated, multi-ingredient cocktails. Tourist guides describe the area as “endearingly haphazard” and “meticulously inelegant.” It is, perhaps, a Japanese approximation of Brooklyn’s approximation of some bohemian European enclave. Young people congregate in its bars and cafés, fiddling with devices, smoking, looking stylishly aggrieved.

I was in Shimokitazawa to see Steve Gardner, a singer and blues guitarist from Pocahontas, Mississippi, play a tiny club called Lown. American blues performers—purveyors of “black music,” as it is known colloquially here—can find good work in Tokyo and its immediate environs. I’d first gleaned something about the Japanese appreciation for specific tributaries of American vernacular music several years ago, when I was reporting a book about collectors of exceptionally rare 78 rpm records. Artifacts of a certain era tended to drift peaceably but steadily across the Pacific—coaxed east, I was told, by affluent and eager bidders.

I couldn’t quite figure out why Japanese listeners had come to appreciate and savor the blues in the way that they seemed to—lavishly, devotedly. Blues is still an outlier genre in Japan, but it’s revered, topical, present. I’d spent my first couple of days in Tokyo hungrily trawling the city’s many excellent record stores, marveling at the stock. I had shuffled into the nine-story Tower Records in Shibuya (NO MUSIC NO LIFE, a giant sign on its exterior read), past a K-pop band called CLC, an abbreviation for Crystal Clear—seven very-young-looking women in matching outfits, limply performing a synchronized dance, waving their slender arms back and forth before a hypnotized crowd—and ridden an elevator to a floor housing more shrink-wrapped blues CDs than I have ever seen gathered in a single place of retail. I had been to a tiny, quiet bar—JBS, or Jazz, Blues, and Soul—with floor-to-ceiling shelves housing owner Kobayashi Kazuhiro’s eleven thousand LPs, from which he studiously selected each evening’s soundtrack. I had seen more than one person wearing a Sonny Boy Williamson t-shirt. I had heard about audiophiles installing their own utility poles to get “more electricity” straight from the grid to power elaborate sound systems. What I didn’t know was what about this music made sense in Japan—how and why it had come to occupy the collective imagination, what it could offer.

A few hours before Gardner’s set, I ducked into a subterranean restaurant called the Village Vanguard (its name was presumably an homage to the famed New York City jazz club, though I could not discern any literal or even spiritual link between the two establishments). A sign on the door identified it as an “almost hamburger shop.” I ordered the hamburger. Norman Rockwell prints were nailed to the walls, alongside framed pages from Life magazine. “Paradise City” bleated from overhead speakers. The décor evoked the interior of the roadhouse from Thelma and Louise, except the bar itself was tiki-themed, bedecked with lights and plastic tropical flowers. I was trying to develop some richer understanding of how the Japanese metabolize and reiterate notions of Americana, but the cumulative effect was dizzying—an incongruous amalgamation of signifiers. (I am certain that many Japanese-style restaurants in America feel just as insane to the Japanese.) I nibbled a French fry. There were license plates from Illinois and Montana hung above my table.

I’d made arrangements to meet up with the expat writer Michael Pronko, who was born in Kansas City but has lived in Tokyo for the past fifteen years, teaching American literature, culture, film, music, and art at Meiji Gakuin University. Pronko writes and edits for a website called Jazz in Japan, which features reviews, interviews, and essays about Western music in Asia. I eventually found him waiting outside the Shimokitazawa subway station, wearing the hat, glasses, and beard of a man who has traveled extensively—the grizzled-yet-refined comportment of a war correspondent. We repaired to a bar.

I figured Pronko might have ideas about why American blues resonates so strongly for some Japanese audiences. I already knew the rote sociohistorical explanation—how African-American soldiers stationed in Japan during and after World War II had brought their record collections with them, and how an appreciation for those sounds (which were unfamiliar and, for many Japanese listeners, intoxicating) took root, flourished. This, of course, is also the story of every musical diaspora: a song or style travels, via commercially pressed records or sheet music or radio broadcasts or the performers themselves, and we are reminded anew that art transcends geography and that some expressions are so universally human as to be undeniable.

I was curious, though, about how this particular transmigration might be more complicated; blues, after all, is especially indebted to its place of provenance (the Deep South—specifically northwestern Mississippi and parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas). To my ears, it is the most essentially American of all the great American idioms, and contains a more literal retelling of its originating landscape than any other genre I can think of—there is a saturation and a heaviness to early blues, a doused but crackling heat, a flatness. This is one reason blues tourism continues to flourish in the Mississippi Delta. Fans share a pervasive belief that this music is perhaps best deciphered by more closely examining its wellspring, by coming to know the earth there, by steering the family sedan to the so-called Devil’s Crossroads in Clarksdale, where Highways 61 and 49 intersect, and where, in the most apocryphal of all the great and concupiscent blues myths, Robert Johnson sold his soul to Satan so he could finger some hotter licks. Dazed-looking blues fans pull over, climb out of their cars, draw a lungful of soggy Southern air, and, maybe, unlock some part of themselves. I’ve done it, is all I’m saying—I’ve gone there looking for answers. I found some.

Pronko and I ordered a round of beers. My theories were rickety, but I charged ahead nonetheless. I asked him about what I understood as a compelling tension between Japanese humility—a pervasive, unwavering stoicism—and the more unfettered spirit of the blues. These were grand, maybe irresponsible generalizations, but even despite my broad strokes, a disconnection felt palpable. “Blues is raw. There’s no filter—[blues musicians] are often saying that they’re angry, they’re depressed,” Pronko agreed. “In Japanese culture, you tend to notexpress those things. To say, ‘Oh, I feel terrible’ is a burden on the other person, because then they’re obligated to listen to you and take care of you. It’s the same in America, maybe, but that obligation is stronger here,” he continued. “When I play blues to students, I tell them to not listen to the words, but to listen to the feeling of it—to the gut-punch. Do that first, then we’ll get into the words. I think that kind of direct, emotional, uninhibited expression is really appealing to the Japanese, because things are so restrained in Japanese society.” 

by Amanda Petrusich, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: Eleanor Davis

State of the Species

The problem with environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to do with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century—she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria).

Until Margulis’s death last year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are you still all worked up about protecting endangered species?

Margulis was no apologist for unthinking destruction. Still, she couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms and viruses, she liked to point out. Heck, the number of bacterial cells in our body is ten times more than the number of human cells!

Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.

Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we special at all?

This was just chitchat on the street, so I didn’t write anything down. But as I recall it, she answered that Homo sapiens actually might be interesting—for a mammal, anyway. For one thing, she said, we’re unusually successful.

Seeing my face brighten, she added: Of course, the fate of every successful species is to wipe itself out.

Why and how did humankind become “unusually successful”? And what, to an evolutionary biologist, does “success” mean, if self-destruction is part of the definition? Does that self-destruction include the rest of the biosphere? What are human beings in the grand scheme of things anyway, and where are we headed? What is human nature, if there is such a thing, and how did we acquire it? What does that nature portend for our interactions with the environment? With 7 billion of us crowding the planet, it’s hard to imagine more vital questions.

by Charles C. Mann, Orion |  Read more:

Image: Jim Toia and Kim Foster Gallery, New York City

Chart House
photo: markk

via:

Republicans Move to Sell off 3.3m Acres of National Land

[ed. Update: Republicans back off public lands bill after outcry.]

Now that Republicans have quietly drawn a path to give away much of Americans’ public land, US representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah has introduced what the Wilderness Society is calling “step two” in the GOP’s plan to offload federal property.

The new piece of legislation would direct the interior secretary to immediately sell off an area of public land the size of Connecticut. In a press release for House Bill 621, Chaffetz, a Tea Party Republican, claimed that the 3.3m acres of national land, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), served “no purpose for taxpayers”.

But many in the 10 states that would lose federal land in the bill disagree, and public land rallies in opposition are bringing together environmentalists and sportsmen across the west.

Set aside for mixed use, BLM land is leased for oil, gas and timber, but is also open to campers, cyclists and other outdoor enthusiasts. As well as providing corridors for gray wolves and grizzly bears, low-lying BLM land often makes up the winter pasture for big game species, such as elk, pronghorn and big-horned sheep.

Jason Amaro, who represents the south-west chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, describes the move as a land grab.

“Last I checked, hunters and fishermen were taxpayers,” said Amaro, who lives in a New Mexico county where 70,000 acres of federal lands are singled out. In total, his state, which sees $650m in economic activity from hunting and fishing, stands to lose 800,000 acres of BLM land, or more than the state of Rhode Island.

“That word ‘disposal’ is scary. It’s not ‘disposable’ for an outdoorsman,” he said.

Scott Groene, a Utah conservationist, said the state’s elected officials were trying to “seize public lands any way they can”, without providing Americans a chance to weigh in. If residents knew their local BLM land was being threatened, said Groene, “I’m sure the communities would be shocked”.

Chaffetz introduced the bill alongside a second piece of legislation that would strip the BLM and the US Forest Service of law enforcement capabilities, a move in line with the Utah delegation’s opposition to all federal land management.

“The other bill hamstrings our ability to manage and ensure that our public lands are being kept safe,” said Bobby McEnaney of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “When you have those two combined, it’s a fairly cynical approach to how public lands can be managed.”

The 10 states affected are Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming. Residents can see how much acreage is earmarked for “disposal” in their counties by checking a PDF on Chaffetz’s website.

Due to a controversial change this month to the House of Representatives’ rules, the sale does not have to make money for the federal government. A representative for the interior department, Mike Pool, who weighed in on a version of the bill in 2011, said selling those 3.3m acres “would be unlikely to generate revenue”.

A Republican conservation group in Utah likened it at the time to “selling the house to pay the light bill”.

by Caty Enders, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Vince Bradley

The Detective of Northern Oddities

When they captured her off Cohen Island in the summer of 2007, she weighed 58 pounds and was the size of a collie. The growth rings in a tooth they pulled revealed her age—eight years, a mature female sea otter.

They anesthetized her and placed tags on her flippers. They assigned her a number: LCI013, or 13 for short. They installed a transmitter in her belly and gave her a VHF radio frequency: 165.155 megahertz. Then they released her. The otter was now, in ­effect, her own small-wattage Alaskan ­radio station. If you had the right kind of ­antenna and a receiver, you could launch a skiff into Kachemak Bay, lift the antenna, and hunt the air for the music of her existence: an ­occasional ping in high C that was both solitary and reassuring amid the static of the wide world.

Otter 13, they soon learned, preferred the sheltered waters on the south side of Kachemak Bay. In Kasitsna Bay and Jakolof Bay, she whelped pups and clutched clams in her strong paws. She chewed off her tags. Some days, if you stood on the sand in Homer, you could glimpse her just beyond Bishop’s Beach, her head as slick as a greaser’s ducktail, wrapped in the bull kelp with other ­females and their pups.

“They’re so cute, aren’t they?” said the woman in the gold-rimmed eyeglasses. She was leaning over 13 as she said this, measuring a right forepaw with a small ruler. The otter’s paw was raised to her head as if in greeting, or perhaps surrender. “They’re one of the few animals that are cute even when they’re dead.”

Two weeks earlier, salmon set-netters had found the otter on the beach on the far side of Barbara Point. The dying creature was too weak to remove a stone lodged in her jaws. Local officials gathered her up, and a quick look inside revealed the transmitter: 13 was a wild animal with a history. This made her rare. She was placed on a fast ferry and then put in cold storage to await the attention of veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek, who now paused over her with a sympathetic voice and a scalpel of the size usually seen in human morgues.

Burek worked with short, sure draws of the knife. The otter opened. “Wow, that’s pretty interesting,” Burek said. “Very marked ­edema over the right tarsus. But I don’t see any fractures.” The room filled with the smell of low tide on a hot day, of past-­expiration sirloin. A visiting observer wobbled in his rubber clamming boots. “The only shame is if you pass out where we can’t find you,” Burek said without looking up. She continued her ­exploration. “This animal has such dense fur. You can really miss something.” She made several confident strokes until the pelt came away in her hands, as if she were a host gently helping a dinner guest out of her coat. The only fur left on 13 was a small pair of mittens and the cap on her head, resembling a Russian trooper’s flap-eared ushanka.

It had been nearly a year since Burek’s ­inbox pinged with notice of a different dead sea otter. Then her e-mail sounded again, and again after that. In 2015, 304 otters would be found dead or dying, ­mostly around Homer and Kachemak Bay, on Alaska’s ­Kenai Peninsula. The number was nearly five times higher than in recent years. On one day alone, four otters arrived for necropsy. Burek had to drag an extra table into her lab so that she and a colleague could keep pace—slicing open furry dead animals, two at a time, for hours on end.

As they worked, an enormous patch of unusually warm water sat stubbornly in the eastern North Pacific. The patch was so persistent that scientists christened it the Blob. Researchers caught sunfish off Icy Point. An unprecedented toxic algal bloom, fueled by the Blob, reached from Southern California to Alaska. Whales had begun to die in worrisome numbers off the coast of Alaska and British Columbia—45 whales that year in the western Gulf of Alaska alone, mostly humpbacks and fins. Federal officials had labeled this, with an abstruseness that would please Don DeLillo, an Unusual Mortality Event. By winter, dead murres lay thick on ­beaches. The Blob would eventually dissipate, but scientists feared that the warming and its effects were a glimpse into the future under climate change.

What, if anything, did all this have to do with the death of 13? Burek wasn’t sure yet. When sea otters first began perishing in large numbers around Homer several years ago, she identified a culprit: a strain of streptococcus bacteria that was also an emerging pathogen affecting humans. But lately things hadn’t been quite so simple. While the infection again killed otters during the Blob’s appearance, Burek found other problems as well. Many of the otters that died of strep also had low levels of toxins from the Blob’s massive algal bloom, a clue that the animals possibly had even more of the quick-moving poison in their systems before researchers got to them. They must be somehow interacting. Perhaps several problems now were gang-tackling the animals, each landing its own enervating blow. (...)

Burek often spends her days cutting up the wildest, largest, smallest, most charis­matic, and most ferocious creatures in Alaska, looking for what killed them. She’s been on the job for more than 20 years, self-­employed and working with just about every organization that oversees wildlife in ­Alaska. Until recently, she was the only board-­certified anatomic pathologist in a state that’s more than twice the size of ­Texas. (There’s now one other, at the University of Alaska.) She’s still the only one who regularly heads into the field with her flensing knives and vials, harvesting samples that she’ll later squint at under a microscope.

Nowhere in North America is this work more important than in the wilds of Alaska. The year 2015 was the planet’s hottest on record; 2016 is expected to have been hotter still. As human-generated greenhouse gases continue to trap heat in the world’s oceans, air, and ice at the rate of four Hiroshima bomb explosions every second, and carbon dioxide reaches its greatest atmospheric concentration in 800,000 years, the highest latitudes are warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Alaska was so warm last winter that organizers of the Iditarod had to haul in snow from Fairbanks, 360 miles to the north, for the traditional start in Anchorage. The waters of the high Arctic may be nearly free of summertime ice in little more than two decades, something human eyes have never seen.

If Americans think about the defrosting northern icebox, they picture dog-­paddling polar bears. This obscures much bigger changes at work. A great unraveling is underway as nature gropes for a new equilibrium. Some species are finding that their traditional homes are disappearing, even while the north becomes more hospitable to new arrivals. On both sides of the Brooks Range—the spine of peaks that runs 600 miles east to west across northern ­Alaska—the land is greening but also browning as tundra becomes shrub­land and trees die off. With these shifts in climate and vegetation, birds, rodents, and other animals are on the march. Parasites and pathogens are hitching rides with these newcomers.

“The old saying was that our cold kept away the riffraff,” one scientist told me. “That’s not so true anymore.”

During this epic reshuffle, strange events are the new normal. In Alaska’s Arctic in summertime, tens of thousands of walruses haul out on shore, their usual ice floes gone. North of Canada, where the fabled Northwest Passage now melts out every year, satellite-tagged bowhead whales from the Atlantic and Pacific recently met for the first time since the start of the Holocene.

These changes are openings for contagion. “Anytime you get an introduction of a new species to a new area, we always think of disease,” Burek told me. “Is there going to be new disease that comes because there’s new species there?”

A lot of research worldwide has focused on how climate change will increase disease transmission in tropical and even temperate climates, as with dengue fever in the American South. Far less attention has been paid to what will happen—indeed, is already happening—in the world’s highest latitudes, and to the people who live there.

by Christopher Solomon, Outside |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Corbett