Love Letter To A Vanishing World

1.

Of all the places I’ve never been, Borneo is my favorite.

I have several times been within spitting distance: to the Philippines—as far south as Panay; to the court cities of central Java and to the highlands of Sulawesi, in Indonesia. I’ve spent many happy days on Peninsular Malaysia. Have lived in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Kaoshiung~~~But as they say, “Close, but no cigar!”

My college boyfriend was a great fan of Joseph Conrad. He wanted to follow in the great man’s footsteps. He planned it all out. We’d go up the Mahakam River. “More than a river, it’s like a huge muddy snake,” his eyes danced with excitement, “Slithering through the dense forest.” We talked about Borneo endlessly. He promised I would see Borneo’s great hornbills, wearing their bright orange helmets– with bills to match. And primates: maybe we would see a gibbon in the tangle of thick foliage –or an orangutan. There would be noisy parrots in the trees and huge butterflies with indigo wings like peacock feathers, fluttering figments of our imagination. He told me that nothing would make him happier than to see the forests of Borneo.

A cruel young woman, I vetoed Borneo –and dragged him off to Kashmir instead. And to make matters worse, a year later, Gavin Young came out with his highly acclaimed book, In Search of Conrad, in which he does just what my boyfriend had wanted to do: follow Conrad to that famed trading post up “an Eastern river.”

2.

Recently, I re-read Eric Hansen’s travel classic, Stranger in the Forest. The book came out in the mid-80s. This was about ten years before I vetoed our trip to Borneo. It was also a time before the Internet and GPS. To prepare for his trip, Hansen had to go to a university library and read books, flip through journals, and consult maps—and to his great delight, he discovered there were still uncharted areas. And these were the very spots he wanted to see! Beginning his journey on the Malaysian side of Borneo, in Kuching, he traveled upriver on the Rajang (every bit as legendary as the Mahakam), and made his way inland toward the Highlands, where the indigenous Dayak peoples lived.

Did I mention he was mainly going on foot?

His trip occurred just a few years before Bruno Manser’s legendary ramble across Borneo. You’ve heard the expression “Fact is stranger than fiction?” Well, that term was invented for Swiss environmentalist, Bruno Manser’s life story. Arriving in Borneo in the mid-80s, within a year, he was living with one of the most elusive tribes in the highlands, the Penan. Carl Hoffman (who wrote the best seller, Savage Harvest) has just come out with a double biography called The Last Wild Men of Borneo about Bruno Manser and American tribal art dealer Michael Palmieri. The cover of the book has a photograph of Manser that I did not realize was a white man until I was nearly finished reading. Dressed in a loincloth and carrying a poison arrow quiver and blowpipe, his hair has been cut in the Dayak fashion, and he is shown squatting on a rock near the river’s edge. It is a touching photograph of a man who gave his life to fight for the rights of the indigenous peoples of the highlands.

For those who want to see what walking in the forest is actually like, they can take a look at the fourth documentary, “Dream Wanderers of Borneo,” in Lorne and Lawrence Blair’s Ring of Fire films. The book came out in 1988 and the book in 2003, based on their several month-long journey in the early 80s to find and stay with the nomadic Punan Dayaks. The brothers were themselves following in the footsteps of the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in his Malay Archipelago, who had discovered over 2,000 species of insects in the region. This is well shown in the brother’s video, as the insects are relentless. One of the brothers wonders if that is not the reason why Borneo was left alone for so long, for who could tolerate the bugs? At one point Lorne becomes temporarily blind for a half hour when something stings the back of his neck.

Even as early as 1980, logging was already a huge issue. In Japan, especially, environmentalists rightly bemoaned the destruction being caused by the timber industry—so much of that wood being imported into Japan (The majority is now being imported into China). Logging was pushing the indigenous Dayak peoples of the highland into greater and greater peril as the land they considered to be theirs was being destroyed. Water was contaminated and animals were dying in great numbers. Manser realized that a people who had lived harmoniously in the interior of the island for thousands of years were now in grave danger of being pushed out–all in the name of corporate greed.

And so he fought valiantly to bring their plight to the attention of the world—including climbing up a 30-foot-tall London lamppost outside of the media center covering the 1991 G7 Summit and unfurling a banner about Dayak rights and then the following year, paragliding into a crowded stadium during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In 1992, after meeting Manser, Vice-President Al Gore introduced a resolution into the senate calling upon the government of Malaysia to protect the rights of the indigenous peoples and for Japan to look into its logging companies’ practices. By the mid-90s, Manser had become a serious headache to the huge logging industry in Malaysia and an embarrassment to the government. Manser was to disappear in 2000 and was officially pronounced dead in 2005 (though his body was never found).

3.

It is a tragic story, with the only possible silver-lining being that at least Manser was not around to see what happened next, when the palm oil industry came to town. I had began wondering how much of that Borneo my boyfriend dreamt of was left? So, I picked up The Wasting of Borneo, by Alex Shoumatoff (2017) and quickly realized the situation was far worse than I was imagining. A staff writer for the New Yorker, Shoumatoff has been a contributing editor at Vanity fair and Conde Nast traveler among others. A travel writer and environmentalist, he has been to Borneo several times. In this latest book, he begins his Borneo journey with a visit to Birute Galdikas at her Orangutan Care Center near the Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan.

Have you heard of Leakey’s Angels?

by Leanne Ogasawara, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Images: uncredited

La Caravana del Diablo

La Caravana del Diablo: a migrant caravan in Mexico (The Guardian)

Image: Ada Trillo
[ed. Photo essay.]

The Fully Industrialized Modern Chicken

A century ago, Americans would not recognise our modern hunger for chicken. The year-long market for tender but relatively bland chicken meat is a newish phenomenon, and without it the idea of chicken cutlets, $5 rotisseries, or the McNugget would be a fantasy.

How did America go from thinking of chicken as an “alternative” meat to consuming it more than any other meat?

The story starts with corn.

How American corn fueled a taste for chicken

At the turn of the 20th century, chicken was almost always eaten in the spring. The priority for chicken raisers at the time was egg production, so after the eggs hatched, all the male birds would be fed up and then quickly harvested as “spring chickens” – young, tender birds that were sold whole for roasting or broiling (hence the term “broilers”). Outside the spring rush, you might be buying a bigger, fatter fryer or an old hen for stewing.

“Farmers were sending chickens of all sorts of ages, different feather colours, and tremendous variety to the marketplace in the early 20th century,” says Roger Horowitz, food historian and author of Putting Meat on the American Table. But almost all chickens in the market were simply surplus to egg production, making them relatively uncommon – even rare. Tender spring chickens in particular could fetch a good price. But it is worth noting, Horowitz says, that the higher price wasn’t necessarily coming from pent-up demand.

“It’s not as if consumers were clamoring for broilers,” he says. Though there was some consumer demand for chickens, the relatively high price for broilers likely had more to do with the limited, seasonal supply than a passion for poultry.

During the second world war, however, red meat was rationed, and a national campaign encouraged the consumption of poultry and fish to save “meat” (beef, pork and lamb) for “the army and our allies”. Eating chicken became more common, but the preference for young broilers, and white breast meat, persisted.

As the war drew to a close, feed millers, which buy and grind corn and other grains to feed livestock, saw a big opportunity to spur that demand for meat chickens, which consume large amounts of corn. When traditional banks refused to finance new-fangled “chicken farms”, the feed companies themselves offered farmers loans to buy feed and equipment, putting the pieces of the modern contract poultry system in place.

Consumer acceptance of broilers out of season was not automatic. In the 1930s, the average American ate 10lbs (4.5kg) or less of chicken annually; by 2017 that had risen to 64lbs (29kg), according to the Economic Research Service at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). For decades chicken battled to be seen as a “meat”, and did not surpass its most expensive competitor, beef, in terms of overall consumption until 2010. A strong USDA-funded marketing campaign helped out.

“In the 50s and 60s, you see where these agricultural extension operations start pushing out recipes very aggressively about broilers,” Horowitz says, and as feed companies and hatcheries (most of which would eventually become so-called “integrators”, which own several of the businesses involved in chicken production) continued to consolidate the industry, they were able to more carefully calibrate the chicken itself to what would sell most profitably, focusing on lowering costs and raising proportions of the highest-demand cuts, namely breast meat.

Don Tyson, the late president of Tyson Foods, famously said: “If breast meat is worth two dollars a pound and dark meat is worth one dollar, which would I rather have?” But for generations, the idea of buying just the most coveted cuts of chicken was foreign to most consumers. It wasn’t until the 1980s that preferences began to switch to cuts of meat over the whole bird.

These companies owned and understood their chickens from egg to table and were able to exert unprecedented control over the biology of their flocks. Now, not only are they able to fine tune the birds’ characteristics with incredible accuracy, they can also map interactions with feed, environment, and processing to maximise profits.

For integrators and corn farmers alike, the investment paid off. In 2019, 9.2 billion 6lb (2.7kg) broiler chickens were harvested in the US, consuming about 1.8lbs (820g) of grain for every pound of chicken.

But the impact on chickens from the changes in production is troubling.

The modern industrial chicken

Over the past 70 years, the poultry industry has measured its success in terms of how many pounds of meat a chicken can produce for a given amount of feed. Modern chickens are more efficient than ever, with producers able to calculate to the ounce how much “input” of food, water, air and time are required to get a set amount of white and dark meat.

The modern chicken is fully industrialised.

With more than 500 chicken breeds existing on Earth, it might surprise you to learn that every nugget, breast, and cup of chicken noodle soup you’ve ever eaten likely came from one breed, a specialised cross between a Cornish and a white rock.

by Sarah Mock, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Glowimages/Getty

What's Up With the USPS

Donald Trump has never hidden his intention to destroy the United States Postal Service (USPS) as we know it. The administration released plans openly declaring that its long-term aim was to privatize the USPS, enriching private investors by handing them a valuable public asset. Now, Trump’s postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is under fire for internal changes that are hindering the USPS’s ability to deliver mail efficiently, and Trump himself has implied that he is reluctant to fund the USPS due to his longstanding opposition to mail-in voting.

DeJoy is a prototypical “political crony” appointee, a Republican party donor who never worked for the postal service and has financial interest in private delivery competitors to the USPS. The Intercept discovered that when DeJoy was in the private sector, he had a long history of overseeing labor violations. DeJoy has admitted that his changes to the USPS have caused delays to service, though he insists it has been unintentional. Trump has targeted the USPS for years, threatening to jack up prices and treating it as in need of an overhaul, one that DeJoy is now ruthlessly implementing.

The postal service has long been a target for Republicans, in part because a successful USPS is a threat to Republican ideology. After all, the conservative argument is that efficient public services are essentially impossible, that most government functions should be handed over to the private sector. A popular socialized mail service threatens to severely undercut this case. After all, if people are satisfied with the government delivering their mail, they might turn out to be satisfied with the government providing their health insurance. It could be a slippery slope toward socialism. A number of other countries have privatized their postal services.

Trump did not actually start the war on the USPS. Barack Obama actually pushed austerity measures, including a plan to eliminate Saturday delivery and cut the service’s budget. Obama’s former Office of Management and Budget director, Peter Orszag, endorsed full privatization. The ideology that government should be “lean” and “run like a business”, and that the private sector is inherently superior to the public sector, is a bipartisan delusion.

The postal service’s infamous financial woes are not actually hard to fix. While Trump tries to suggest it is all a result of inefficiency and mismanagement, we know that it mostly boils down to an absurdly unnecessary requirement imposed on the USPS which required it to put away billions of dollars each year for future retirement benefits. It would be easy to get the USPS shipshape again, but it would require a commitment to building an excellent public service, one that Obama didn’t really show and Trump certainly doesn’t have.

We should also remember, though, that talk of the USPS “losing money” is inherently a bit misleading and strange. Public services do not “lose money”, because they’re not designed to make money. If people said that the public library, or the school system, or the fire department was “losing money”, it would be very strange. Of course they are: they don’t take in revenue, because their purpose is to give everyone a free service, paid for out of government funds. It’s not like that money just goes into a pit or is frittered away. The money pays for a service that we then all get to enjoy. So even though we should point out that the USPS’s financial distress is in an important way politically manufactured, we should also be careful about embracing the logic that a government agency needs to “break even”. That’s not what the government is for. (...)

A very clever Republican tactic is to mismanage the government, and then point to government mismanagement as a case for privatization. (Hence hobbling the USPS with absurd budgetary requirements and then pointing out holes in its budget.) To counter that, it’s very important to make the general public aware of whose fault the problem is. If people see their mail delayed, and become frustrated, they need to understand that it’s Trump, not their local letter carrier, who is at fault. Trump is going to try to turn the agency into the villain of the story, because the USPS’s popularity is one of the reasons it has been relatively safe.

by Nathan J. Robinson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Rob Latour/Rex/Shutterstock
[ed. When I first moved to Washington state a few years ago and got to vote by mail I wondered, why haven't we been doing this forever? It's so simple and easy. You get a ballot in the mail along with a detailed brochure providing both pro and con arguments by advocates on either sides of the issues, fill in your votes, sign it and send it off (no postage necessary), or drop off at libraries, postal and county offices, etc. Easy peasy. Sure beats standing in long lines after work. See also:

Almost every citizen is at least inconvenienced. I’ve been corresponding throughout the day with readers from around the country who have gotten mail delivery half of the days this week, who are waiting for overdue prescriptions, waiting on packages who are two weeks overdue, Social Security checks which are sole sources of income. For many life saving prescriptions are delayed or lost. Critical medical tests are being invalidated because they spend to line in the mail. Businesses already battered by COVID are imperiled because shipments are late. These all apply to citizens from the far right to the far left.

The Post Office isn’t some newfangled federal responsibility. It is one of very few federal responsibilities and agencies of government explicitly referenced in the federal constitution.

President Trump is far from the first corrupt American President. But it is genuinely hard to think of a case in almost a quarter millennium of US history in which a chief executive has inconvenienced, damaged and imperiled so many citizens so directly for the sole purpose of corruptly maintaining power in defiance of the constitutional order. There’s really nothing comparable.

Make Him Own It. (Talking Points Memo).]

The Unraveling of America

Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.

In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.

Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.

Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival. (...)

In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.

But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

by Wade Davis, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
[ed. Let's note again: "President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

See also:                                                        ---

When you’re in a pessimistic cast of mind, which developments of the COVID era do you find yourself dwelling on, and what grim scenarios do you imagine them portending? And then, when you’re in better spirits, what causes for optimism do you see?

I do think that the American project, the American experiment, is on the rack right now. We don’t know how things are going to go in the next 90 days. We really need to know whether this electoral process will go smoothly and whether it will deliver what it is supposed to, which is a decisive vote of the American public that confirms somebody to the presidency and thereby demonstrates the capacity of this place to govern itself.

And there is a very distinct possibility that that won’t happen. Or that the decision will fall in favor of the candidate and party that has demonstrated its incapacity to govern — and has in fact demonstrated its capacity to drive this country to ever-greater degrees of ungovernability. I never thought I would live under curfew. I’ve lived under curfew now in New York. It was insane. It made me indignant and outraged, and I didn’t think I would ever experience that.

The counterpart to the American election, globally, is obviously Hong Kong. They, too, have elections. And the brutality Beijing is capable of is shocking. For all of my advocacy for détente — in fact, because of my advocacy for détente — I’m haunted by memories of the 1930s and 1940s and the naïveté of many people who advocated for collective security and Popular Front collaboration with the Soviet Union, all for very good reasons that I would have certainly endorsed. We have to reckon with what we now know about the violence of which the Soviet Union was capable. And we have to reckon with what the Chinese Communist regime is capable of too. So those are the two advanced economy problems that are most on my mind.

I recently had the chance to be involved in conversations with a bunch of colleagues in South Africa. If COVID were to become yet another devastating shock to the developmental possibilities of sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of the humanitarian crisis, that has the makings of a truly catastrophic drama. Already, the economic and social news out of South Africa is biblically bad. They started the year with a 30 percent unemployment rate. They think they will have a 50 percent unemployment rate in the townships by the end of the year. Coming of age when I did, the end of apartheid and the advent of multiracial democracy in South Africa stood out as one of the great triumphs of humanity. And if South Africa becomes a basket case, then this is a disaster of traumatic proportions.

But the good news is … (?)

Oh, right. Hopeful signs. Well, let me try. At the risk of sounding trite, I actually do still marvel at the lockdown. And this actually goes back to our earlier discussion — to the question of the extent to which history is determined by the capitalist pursuit of profit. I’m enough of an economic historian to think that it’s a hugely important variable. But there was something really extraordinary that happened in March, in which nearly the entire world — individually and collectively — made this decision to shut down the economy to preserve human life. Politicians and businesses and citizens and trade unions — the whole mass of collective actors — made this decision. The vast majority of humanity was subject to it.

And it may have been a catastrophic mistake. I don’t think we can rule that possibility out. We can’t run it again. We don’t know what the consequences would have been. We’ve ended up with what we’ve ended up with. But part of what we ended up with was this collective decision — and as costly and painful as it was, there’s something truly spectacular about that moment.

And then, of course, all hell breaks loose. Inequalities make themselves dramatically felt. We can’t hold it together. It’s a shitshow. None of that struck me as surprising. But March was a different story.

How Will the Covid 19 Pandemic Change World History (NY Mag/Intelligencer).]

Office Noise Simulators

During the first few days of quarantine, many displaced office workers likely enjoyed the peace and quiet of working from home. Now enough time has passed for them to miss the typing, chatter, and other background noises they would have complained about less than two months ago. If you're feeling nostalgic for the bustle of your workplace, this website, designed by Reichenbergerstr 121, can keep you company.

This tool, spotted by Lifehacker, simulates the ordinary, sometimes distracting noises of office life. When you visit imisstheoffice.eu and press the play button in the bottom left corner, a track of soft typing and muffled conversations fills your speakers. To adjust the number of colleagues sharing your space, toggle the tool in the bottom right corner.

Clicking the objects animating the page will add more sounds to the mix. A scanner, a water cooler, and a ping pong table are just a few of the office noise-makers you can activate to make your home feel less empty (or maybe remind you that working in silence isn't that bad).

People used to working outside an office before quarantine may be missing other sounds right now, like those of public spaces. This tool recreates the ambient noises of cafés around the globe.

by Michele Debczak, Lifehacker | Read more:
Image: Oli Scarff

[ed. Pretty cool. Here are the sites: Sounds of Collegues; Hipster Sound; and I Miss the Office.]

Last Decade Was Earth's Hottest on Record, Exposing Grim Reality of Climate Change

A new report released Wednesday details how 2019 was another year of extremes for Earth's climate, adding to a litany of evidence exposing the grim reality of our warming world.

Last year saw devastating wildfires burn through Australia; large regions including Europe, Japan, Pakistan, and India experienced deadly heat waves; almost 100 tropical cyclones created havoc; glaciers and sea ice continued to melt at worrying levels; and drought and floods destroyed vital crops and infrastructure.

Among the key findings of the State of the Climate in 2019, published by the American Meteorological Society, was that 2019 was among the warmest years on record, that greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are at their highest recorded levels and this decade is the hottest since records began in the mid-1800s.

"Each decade since 1980 has been successively warmer than the preceding decade, with the most recent (2010-1019) being around 0.2°C warmer than the previous (2000-2009)," the report said. "As a primary driver for our changing climate, the abundance of many long-lived greenhouse gases continues to increase."

The study also reported other key findings:

• The six warmest years on record have all occurred in the past six years, since 2014.

• 2019 was among the three hottest years since records began in the mid-1800s. Only 2016, and for some datasets 2015, were warmer than 2019.

• Average sea surface temperatures in 2019 was the second highest on record, surpassed only by 2016.

• Sea levels rose to a new record high for the eighth consecutive year.

• Surface air temperatures for the Arctic were the second highest in 120 years of records, trailing only 2016. In the Antarctic, 2019 was the second warmest year for the continent since 1979.

• Glaciers continue to melt at a concerning rate for the 32nd straight year.

The warming influence of the major greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere -- including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide -- was 45% higher than in 1990, the researchers found. The burning of fossil fuels in our cars, airplanes, and factories releases heat-trapping pollution into the air, warming up our planet.

Global carbon dioxide concentrations, which represent the bulk of the gases' warming power, rose during 2010 to a record 409.8 parts per million, the study found. That was the "highest in the modern 61-year measurement record as well as the highest ever measured in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years," the report said.

The report was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Centers for Environmental Information and was based on contributions from more than 520 scientists from 60 countries. The annual report is often described by meteorologists as the "annual physical of the climate system."

Robert Dunn, one of the report's lead editors from the UK Met Office, said in a statement that, "The view for 2019 is that climate indicators and observations show that the global climate is continuing to change rapidly."

"A number of extreme events, such as wildfires, heatwaves and droughts, have at least part of their root linked to the rise in global temperature. And of course the rise in global temperature is linked to another climate indicator: the ongoing rise in emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon-dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane," Dunn said.

by Helen Regan, CNN | Read more:
Image: NOAA NCEI Climate

What Does the Kamala Harris Pick Signal to the Sanders-Warren Wing of the Party?

In one of the least surprising moments of what has so far been an uncommonly anticlimactic race, Joe Biden on Tuesday did what everyone was already expecting him to do: he chose Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate.

The pick comes on the heels of a slew of leaks and on- and off-the-record comments from Biden allies wishing to trash Harris and downplay her chances in the press. The Florida Democratic donor John Morgan lamented to CNBC that Harris “would be running for president the day of the inauguration”. Former Senator Chris Dodd complained that Harris showed “no remorse” after attacking Biden based on his racial justice record. In retrospect, these comments in the media read less like realistic dispatches from within the VP vetting process than attempts to influence it from the outside, perhaps from Biden allies still angry at Harris over the primary. That anger, evidently isn’t shared by the candidate himself.

But more than evidence of mended fences between Biden and Harris, the pick reflects a strategic decision over which sections of voters, and which factions of the Democratic party, the Biden team feels it needs to prioritize in order to win in November. And with the Harris pick, they are resoundingly signaling that it is the centrist and pragmatic voters – particularly older Black voters – and not the younger progressive left, that they feel they have the most to gain from appealing to.

Harris was the early frontrunner for the VP slot in part precisely because her political record reveals only spotty and inconsistent ideological commitments. During her own presidential bid in the primary cycle, she moved left on Medicare for All, Bernie Sanders’ signature issue, but then backtracked right. She claimed to have evolved her thinking on law enforcement and incarceration in one instance, then touted her record as a prosecutor in another. Harris was by no means alone in this ideological shape shifting: she was no more willing to alter her positions for the sake of convenience than, say Mayor Pete Buttigieg. But the shifts signaled that what Harris was selling to the American people was not so much an ideological commitment, like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to her left, or Amy Klobuchar to her right. What Harris was running on was more cultural and affective. She was not selling a policy platform. She was selling her character; namely, the carefully projected impression that she was thick-skinned, intelligent and unwilling to suffer fools.

For Biden, himself light on policy and heavy on appeals to his own affable familiarity, presumed competence and promises to return the country to a pre-Trump “normal”, this made Harris a good fit. But after a heated, if not especially close, last few months of the primary contest against the party’s progressive standard bearer, Bernie Sanders, there was one line of thinking that posited that a Harris vice-presidential nomination would be risky. As a noncommittal but generally center-left contender, Harris would potentially alienate and certainly fail to excite the younger, more progressive voters who had backed Sanders. Could Biden afford to turn off Bernie’s base by not picking a progressive?

Evidently, he thinks he can, and there is some evidence that he’s right. Though the left raised huge amounts of money for the Sanders campaign, they couldn’t drum up votes: after a long and contentious primary season, Biden won overwhelmingly, in spite of Sanders’ superior fundraising. Bernie’s failure – namely, his campaign’s inability to transform money and significant online enthusiasm into actual voter turnout – may have undercut the left’s ability to build leverage more broadly. It didn’t help matters that Bernie’s base, though enthusiastic, was hostile to overtures from other candidates: when Elizabeth Warren made gestures to Sanders voters, she was met with vitriol, derision and misogynist contempt. Democratic strategists may have begun to understand the Sanders base as an unreliable voting block, one that doesn’t deliver turnout and can’t take yes for an answer. From that perspective, the Biden campaign had few incentives to pick a progressive running mate or to make many policy overtures to the party’s left wing.

But perhaps the more morally grievous downside to the Harris pick lies in her potential to alienate the emergent movement against police brutality that has gained traction this summer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The filmed killing ignited protests that the New York Times says were likely the largest popular demonstrations in American history. Under the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter, these uprisings crystallized a growing distrust of the police and a consensus around racial justice issues that is emerging in a large and surprisingly multiracial contingent of the country. The choice of Harris – a former prosecutor and attorney general whose career has included uncomfortably collegial relationships with the police and a comfort with incarceration as a punishment for even non-violent crimes – risks appearing to dismiss this movement’s righteous and morally urgent demands. But here, too, is a place where the Biden team may feel comfortable taking the left for granted: in a contest against the sadistic and racist Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter protesters have no meaningful choice except to support him.

And yet in spite of a policy history that places her in opposition to the policy demands of the country’s largest and most energetic movements for racial justice, Harris’ vice-presidential nomination is also seen as an acknowledgment of the outsized role played by Black voters, and particularly Black women voters, in Democratic electoral victories.

Despite pat political punditry that says otherwise, the Black vote is not monolithic, and nor is the progressive wing of the party uniformly white. Within the Democratic party, ideological differences fall much more neatly along generational lines than racial ones, and younger Black voters often have very different political instincts than their parents and grandparents. To understand the factional divide within the Democratic party as being between progressive voters, on the one hand, and Black voters, on the other, would be to fundamentally misdiagnose the issue.

But the Harris pick is part of a growing consensus among establishment Democratic strategists that many Democrats owe their electoral victories to the party’s most reliable constituency: the older Black voter, and specifically, the older Black woman voter. It is turnout among such voters that has propelled Democratic candidates to victory in many recent contests, but for too long the party has seemed to take them for granted, relying on the growing racism of the Republican party as a guarantee of Black votes they presumed they did not have to earn. The Harris pick can be seen as an attempt, if a relatively symbolic and shortsighted one, to correct that neglect by putting a Black woman at the center of a party they have long helped to maintain.

Tactically, it’s not hard to see why the Biden team thought that attempting to appeal to Black voters would be a winning strategy. Older Black voters in particular have been reliably loyal to the Democratic party, and are crucially much more likely to vote than younger people of all races. Perhaps this is because, given America’s long history of state-sanctioned racist violence and state-enacted racist neglect, these voters feel they have more on the line. With much to lose, some older Black voters find themselves picking candidates for tactical reasons more so than ideological ones. In the primary, Biden won them by promising them that he could win. It was their support that gave him the nomination.

by Moira Donegan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Bebeto Matthews/AP
[ed. Same as it ever was.]

Dolly Parton: 'Of Course Black Lives Matter!'

US country music star Dolly Parton has come out in support of Black Lives Matter, in a rare comment on politics.

She told Billboard Magazine: "Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!"

With a broad fan base that spans the right and the left, the singer generally eschews political subjects.

Her comments come amid a nationwide reckoning on race that has impacted all of US society, including country music.

Although Ms Parton has not attended Black Lives Matter marches, she said she supported anti-racism activists' right to protest.

"I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen," she told the music magazine.

What did Dolly say about Dixie?

The entertainment mogul - who owns Dollywood amusement park in her home state of Tennessee as well as other attractions - also spoke about her decision in 2018 to drop the "Dixie" from her Dixie Stampede attraction.

A 2017 article in Slate critiqued Ms Parton's attraction, calling it a "lily-white kitsch extravaganza".

"Dixie" was often used as a nickname for the southern states that made up the Confederate States of America during the US Civil War era.

"There's such a thing as innocent ignorance, and so many of us are guilty of that," she told Billboard. "When they said 'Dixie' was an offensive word, I thought, 'Well, I don't want to offend anybody. This is a business. We'll just call it The Stampede.'

"As soon as you realise that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don't be a dumbass. That's where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose."

by BBC |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. How refreshing to see someone say "I would never dream of hurting someone on purpose". How many people can honestly say that about themselves these days.]

via: lost

Let Russ Cook

Russell Wilson didn’t don an apron and a chef’s hat for his first Zoom news conference since training camp began. But the Seahawks’ quarterback didn’t exactly slam shut the oven door on the Twitter sentiment that boiled throughout the offseason:

Let Russ Cook.

For the uninitiated, that phrase, preceded by a hashtag, is a plea to Pete Carroll to take the shackles off Wilson. To lessen the coach’s long-standing reliance on the running game in order to accentuate the team’s best asset — Wilson with the ball in his hands.

Wilson, of course, is far too much the diplomat to ever state that so directly. In response to the question of whether he ever retweeted a #LetRussCook missive, Wilson laughed and said, “No, I never retweeted it.”

But when asked Thursday if he agreed with the sentiment that he needed to be involved sooner, and at a higher pace, in the Seahawks’ offense, Wilson clicked the metaphorical “like” button.

“Yeah, I definitely think so,’’ he said. “I mean, rather than us having to be in the fourth quarter to be able to make stuff happen. I think we have a crazy stat of 56 and 0 when we have the lead by halftime. I think getting ahead is the key.”

The stat is actually that the Seahawks are 57-0 when leading by four or more points at halftime since Wilson took over as starting quarterback in 2012. Last year in many ways was a historical outlier; they won six games when trailing at halftime — tied for the second-highest total of any team since the 1970 merger.

Many of those wins were achieved by finally turning Wilson loose in the fourth quarter, when the situation got dire. In many of their close losses, they failed to execute a similar blueprint — including the one that ended their season, a 28-23 playoff defeat to Green Bay in which the Seahawks trailed 28-10 midway through the third quarter before Wilson was unleashed.

Logic and a decades-long body of statistical evidence in the NFL says that there’s going to be a regression to the mean when it comes to second-half rallies to victory. As legendary as Wilson has become in fourth quarter and overtime comebacks, it would behoove them to stop relying so heavily on his late magic.

All the #LetRussCook movement is saying, if I’m interpreting it correctly, is let him weave some magic early, too. And then you might not need him to pull a win out of his hat.

by Larry Stone, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: John Froschauer/AP
[ed. It's understandable management would want to protect their (very large) investment, but every Seahawks fan has been saying this for years. Russ is probably the best running quarterback in the league, let him use all his talents.]

Small Town Colleges May Pose a Public Health Threat

There's a lot riding on a kickoff set for 6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 12.

The Sterling College Warriors are scheduled to take on the McPherson College Bulldogs at home. If that familiar thud of shoe against football and cheer from the stands doesn't happen, the college that keeps the central Kansas town's economy humming, that gives it cultural vitality, and that separates Sterling from the hollowing out that defines so many other small Midwestern towns, might not survive.

The school, after 133 years, could die and doom the town that takes such pride in the football squad and embraces the student body like family.

"If COVID defeats the athletic season this year, it will probably defeat a lot of small colleges," said Jeb Miller, a non-traditional senior at Sterling College. "And, as a result, harm a lot of small towns. Badly."

Small town institutions

Hundreds of small colleges dotting the country rely on students paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in exchange for a distinctive, personal, high-touch college experience.

Many of those colleges hung on year-to-year even before the pandemic. Now COVID-19 threatens to cut off the oxygen sustaining these schools, and the sports programs that drive enrollment.

But the very thing small colleges need to stay afloat — students coming in, spending money, playing sports — also poses a major risk to relatively isolated little towns that, so far, have dodged major coronavirus outbreaks.

Only about 2,200 people live in Sterling out on the flat, flat plains of south-central Kansas. But this small city boasts an almost idyllic downtown. New office buildings. Two good coffee shops. A nice grocery store, a bowling alley, you name it.

Sterling has good schools, competitive sports teams. Locals say school plays, games and concerts draw big crowds. Without the college, the money, diversity and energy that defines life in Sterling could evaporate quickly.

"There is just so much overlap," said Kyler Comley, a Sterling College senior who's lived in the town all his life. "The community supports the college. The college supports the community. You know, you just see how everything's intertwined and how people are just so overly giving and involved."

Every student attending Sterling College gets paired with a family in town. Those families speak endearingly about their adopted scholars.

The students left in March. Most haven't come back. Like many people here, Sterling criminal justice professor Mark Tremaine said that starting classes up again in person this month is make or break for Sterling College.

"The bottom line is, we've got to get students back to campus. If we're going to survive," he said."We have to accept whatever the risks are and do it."

And that's the plan. Sterling doesn't have much of a choice.

by Frank Morris, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Frank Morris

Hundreds of Sea Lions to be Killed on Columbia River in Effort to Save Endangered Fish

Approval to kill up to 840 sea lions in a portion of the Columbia River and its tributaries over the next five years to boost the survival of salmon and steelhead at risk of extinction is expected from federal officials Friday.

The kill program has been in the works since Congress approved a change in the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 2018, allowing sea lions to be killed to reduce predation on salmon and other species.

The legislation for the first time allows the killing of Steller’s sea lions, in addition to California sea lions, and makes any of the marine mammals fair game within a nearly 200 mile stretch of the mainstem Columbia and its tributaries, between Bonneville and McNary dams. Previously, only California sea lions that had been determined to be problematic predators of salmon were allowed to be killed to benefit fish recovery.

The program is sure to be controversial; nearly 22,000 comments received during public review of the program were opposed and fewer than 200 were for it. But a task force in May overwhelmingly recommended approval of a kill program. Barry Thom, regional administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the West Coast Region, is expected to approve an application to implement the program, which was submitted in June of last year from state and tribal fisheries managers.

Kill operations could begin at Bonneville Dam as soon as this fall.

Kessina Lee, regional director for Southwest Washington for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is a member of the task force that voted yes. While work is ongoing to improve hatcheries, habitat, hydropower operations and reduce fishing impacts to benefit 13 runs of fish at risk of extinction in the Columbia and Snake Rivers, sea lions also are having an impact, she said.

In the highly altered Columbia and Snake, managers today find themselves killing protected marine mammals eating endangered salmon that in turn are crucial food for critically endangered southern resident killer whales.

“It is a wicked conservation problem,” Lee said.

by Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Don Ryan
[ed. No, it is a wicked dam problem.]

Neil Young

How Can Wall Street Be So Healthy When Main Street Isn’t?

The stock market is not the economy.

Rarely has that adage been as clear as it is now. An amazing, monthslong rally means the S&P 500 is roughly back to where it was before the coronavirus slammed the U.S, even though millions of workers are still getting unemployment benefits and businesses continue to shutter across the country.

The S&P 500, which is the benchmark index for stock funds at the heart of many 401(k) accounts, ended Wednesday at 3,380.35 after briefly topping its closing record of 3,386.15 set on Feb. 19. It’s erased nearly all of the 34% plunge from February into March in less time than it takes a baby to learn how to crawl.

The U.S. and global economies have shown some improvements since the spring, when business lockdowns were widespread, but they are nowhere close to fully healed. The number of virus cases continues to rise across much of the United States, and federal and local politicians for the most part lack a strategy to contain it. Many industries, such as airlines, hotels and dining, could take years to recover from the damage.

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government get a lot of the credit for the rally after pouring trillions of dollars into the economy. Profits also remained incredibly resilient for the stock market’s most influential companies, such as Apple and Amazon. Rising hopes for a potential vaccine to halt the pandemic, meanwhile, have encouraged investors to look past the current dreary statistics.

Here’s a look at how Wall Street has flourished while Main Street struggles:

THE MARKET’S BIG GUNS

The corner bars, the family restaurants, the hair salons and other small businesses across the U.S. that are teetering or closing for good aren’t listed on the stock market. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google’s parent company are, and movements in their stocks alone are dictating the action in the S&P 500 more than ever before.

The pandemic has accelerated work-at-home and other trends that have boosted Big Tech, and their profits are piling up. The five big tech-oriented giants are now worth a combined $7.6 trillion, and by themselves account for more than 22% of the S&P 500′s total value.

Because stocks with the biggest market values carry the most weight in the S&P 500, the movements of Big Tech matter much more than what airlines, cruise-ship operators or other still-struggling companies are doing. American Airlines is down more than 50% for 2020 so far, but its much smaller market value means it doesn’t move the needle like Big Tech. It would take 280 American Airlines to have the heft of one Apple.

The stock market has seen some broadening out of gains recently, with stocks of smaller companies doing better. But Big Tech has done the heaviest lifting in the S&P 500′s rally.

HELP FROM WASHINGTON

A famous saying on Wall Street is: Don’t fight the Fed. The central bank is doing everything it can to support the economy, from cutting interest rates to nearly zero to the unprecedented promise to buy even riskier corporate debt. It’s all aimed at ensuring lending markets have enough cash to run smoothly and to prevent prices from going haywire. Economists say the moves have helped avoid a 2008-09 style meltdown of the financial system.

The Fed has signaled that it will keep its benchmark short-term interest rate at nearly zero through at least 2022, and low rates are often like steroids for stocks. With Treasurys and other bonds paying relatively little in interest, some investors are turning instead to stocks, gold and other investments, boosting their prices.

Congress also approved an unprecedented amount of aid for the economy. Some portions of that aid have already expired, and another economic relief package is tied up in partisan rancor on Capitol Hill. But many investors seem to expect Washington to eventually come to a compromise and throw another lifeline to the economy.

Meanwhile, the economy is recovering but at a much slower pace than its rapid collapse in the spring. After shrinking at an annual pace of 32.9% in the April-June quarter, economists forecast it will rebound at a 20% annual pace in the July-September period. The unemployment rate is 10.2% and is expected to remain in the high single-digits through at least the end of this year.

by Stan Choe, Alex Veiga and Christopher Rugaber, AP | Read more:
Image: Mark Lennihan/AP
[ed. See also: A Quick Guide To What Is Going On With The Economy (Current Affairs).]

How Live Music Is Coping, And What The Near Future Will Bring

Colin Pate was toiling away at his North Philadelphia recording studio in late June when he received an unbelievable text message: "Secret show at Johnny Brenda's tonight, 6:30."

Like so many places, the beloved Philly music venue has been shuttered since the Covid-19 pandemic first flared up in March. The 250-person venue, a staple of the local music scene that served as an early stage for Philly acts like Kurt Vile and The War on Drugs, used to host shows almost every night. While locals can still order take-out food and drinks from the bar, nobody expected a band to play there — or anywhere else for that matter — until sometime next year.

"At first, I thought it was a joke," says Pate, a local musician and recording engineer who has spent the pandemic bouncing between at-home isolation, recording solo in the studio and working at local bars to cover his rent. Like every other musician in town, Pate's hopes of playing any shows were dashed by the outbreak months earlier. By late June, the prospect of attending one seemed just as unlikely.

But this show was different. Rather than switch the upstairs stage lights back on, the venue's staff hauled a PA system onto the roof of the building. Pat Finnerty and the Full Band, an impromptu group of local musicians led by guitarist and singer Pat Finnerty, set up their gear, did a sound check, and proceeded to tear through covers of David Bowie, Marvin Gaye, Neil Young and, appropriately enough given the rooftop perch, The Beatles.

As music filled the streets below, so too did a gathering of mask-wearing locals, eager to experience their first concert in months. Some watched from apartment balconies. Others honked their car horns as they drove by. Most stood on the sidewalks and trolley platform below, maintaining a cautious, pandemic-friendly distance from one another.

"We weren't sure what to expect, but we really pulled it off," says Marley McNamara, a talent buyer at Johnny Brenda's who helped organize the show. "I was happy with the way people were all masked up and being respectful of those around them. It even sounded good, which I was surprised about."

For residents of the city's Fishtown neighborhood, the surprise performance seemed to offer a much-needed distraction after months of social isolation, followed by citywide protests and racial tension that had boiled over in front of the police precinct down the street from Johnny Brenda's just a few weeks earlier. The vibe on the street was decidedly less intense as Finnerty and his friends closed out with the "Ghostbusters" theme song against a multi-colored sunset.

Shows like this are a rare, if imperfect, bright spot for the independent live music industry, which currently sits, like so many, on the brink of catastrophe. Since March, thousands of independent venues across the U.S. have remained closed in response to the coronavirus outbreak. As the pandemic drags on, it has created an existential crisis for these venues and the critical role they play in music scenes and communities across the U.S. The Barracuda in Austin, The Satellite in Los Angeles and Portland's Port City Music Hall are just a few of the venues that have closed for good in recent weeks, with many more at risk of going under.

"It's a really surreal and scary time for everyone, but especially for the music industry," says McNamara. "We can't lose places like Johnny Brenda's."

Without federal intervention, as many as 90% of indie music venues could disappear, according to the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). To that end, the newly formed advocacy organization is lobbying hard for legislation like the Restart Act or Save Our Stages Act, which would provide large-scale financial assistance to these endangered institutions. (...)

The impact of such a collapse could be culturally devastating. Unlike restaurants or shops, a small or medium-sized music venue is more than just a business serving its customers. They are living, breathing mini-institutions in their own right, each one with its own unique capacity to incubate local bands and artists, host touring ones, and connect them all to the communities of like-minded show attendees that these spaces attract.

For artists, who tend to make the bulk of their income performing live, this could jeopardize their ability to plan successful tours once the pandemic is over. "You can't get on a bus and play at a boarded-up building," Schaefer points out.

As the live music industry awaits an economic lifeline and an eventual vaccine, some are using the standstill to creatively rethink the functionality and economics of live music. While nobody expects new formats like socially distanced, limited capacity shows to address the industry's bigger, more systemic threat, the experimentation may yield clues as to how to safely experience live shows before a full reopening is possible. Crucially, it's also a chance to build more future-proof models for live entertainment.

by John Paul Titlow, NPR |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: Can Neil Young Block Trump From Using His Songs? It’s Complicated (NYT).]

Super Cub
via: lost

via:

How Personal Victimhood Will Doom The Left

Reaction to the innuendo against Alex Morse perfectly demonstrates how some progressives and all liberals have come to put feelings, symbols and personal self-actualization over any project of real political change.

[ed. I don't know anything about Alex Morse but it's nice to hear someone distill the whole cancel culture bullshit down to its basic essence, especially in politics.]

The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks

Consider the cherry. Consider this cherry, actually, this one here, hanging off the tree at the very end of a long, deep green row. Look at how its red and gold skin shines in the bright sun. It’s a famous hybrid variety, a Rainier, which means it has sweet yellow flesh and that you’ll have to pay a premium price to eat it. If you do, it will be delicious, the very taste of summer. But first it will have to get to you.

So far, this cherry has been mostly lucky. No disease has come for its tree, though there’s a bad one, little-cherry disease, stalking nearby orchards. No frost kept its springtime blossoms from giving way to fruit. No excessive rain has fallen in the short time since it ripened.

That could have been a disaster, because water likes to pool in the little divot by the stem. There it seeps into the flesh, making the cherry swell. Too much, and the cherry will burst through its own skin, causing splits; whole harvests can be lost this way. So dangerous is poorly timed water that cherry growers rely on fans, wind machines and even low-flying helicopters to dry ripe fruit before it is lost. Yet wind presents its own peril: It can knock cherries against one another or into branches, bruising them so that they’re rejected on the packing line, where fruit is sorted for size and quality with high-tech optical scanners. Rainiers, because of their color, are particularly prone to showing their past with telltale “wind marks,” tiny incursions of brownness on that golden skin. This cherry has just a few.

But it’s not to market yet. The window in which a sweet cherry can be picked for sale is excruciatingly narrow. Cherries don’t continue to ripen once they’re off the tree, the way a peach does, and once picked they don’t store for very long, even when refrigerated. If they’re too ripe, they won’t make it to the packing house, the truck or the airplane, the grocery-store display, your summery dessert. The sugar content must be Goldilocksian — neither too high nor too low. Wait even a couple of days too many, and it may be too late.

Paige Hake, the second generation of her family to farm this orchard, considered the cherry. Then she considered its neighbors, with their own wind marks, in the lambent heat of a June afternoon. She looked down the long green row of trees, lined with its strip of white plastic fabric, meant to reflect sunlight onto the undersides of the cherries, helping them color evenly. She consulted with her father, Orlin Knutson, who has been growing fruit on this stretch of dry sagebrush steppe near Mattawa, Wash., for 41 years, the last 31 of them organically. There was a refrigerated truck waiting by the gate, with a growing stack of full bins next to it. There was rain in the forecast, as well as more heat, and sugar levels in the cherries were rising as they spoke. They wanted to get these cherries harvested today; they were far enough along that it was probably now or never, a whole year of investment and work leading to this one afternoon. But it was getting late, and there were a lot of other cherries that needed to be picked, and today the crew of people available to pick them was smaller than they would have liked. She turned to me and pointed to the wind-marked cherry, still unsure whether it would be worth the cost of trying to get it to market. “Would you buy that at Whole Foods?” she asked.

The yellow cherry was one of a great many across the orchards of Washington State that were just beginning to ripen. Karen Lewis, who works with growers as a tree-fruit specialist for the agricultural extension service of Washington State University, has tried to calculate exactly how many individual cherries need to be picked during a whirlwind season that Jon DeVaney, the president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, calls “eight weeks of craziness.” Multiplying all the millions of boxes by the number of cherries they can hold, Lewis determined that as many as 24 billion individual cherries must be plucked, separately, from their trees and placed carefully into bags and buckets and bins, each and every one of them by human hands.

Lewis thinks that people who aren’t used to thinking much about the source of their food, or who assume that the food system is as mechanized and smoothly calibrated as a factory, spitting out produce like so many sticks of gum, ought to spend some time contemplating that figure and what it means. “I’m here to tell you that people do not think we harvest everything by hand,” she says. But hands, belonging to highly skilled workers, are needed for every last cherry. During the harvest, many thousands of people are out picking by dawn, nearly every day, their fingers flying as they watch out for rattlesnakes under dark trees. (Compounding the labor crunch, this is also the time when workers in the region must hand-thin more than 100 million apple trees, so that the remaining fruit can grow larger.) Later in the season, many of the same hands will pick and place each peach and plum and apricot, every single apple — five and a half billion pounds, just of apples, just in Washington, just last year. “I think those numbers are staggering,” Lewis said.

The cherry industry has done everything it can to squeeze every possible bit of extra time into the season. Growers plant at a range of different elevations: Every 100 feet above sea level, one orchard manager says, buys you an extra day until maturity. And they choose different varietals that ripen at slightly different speeds — most red cherries are marketed to the public simply as “dark sweets” but are actually a genetically distinct array, whose different sizes and tastes and unique horticultural personalities are intimately known by growers and pickers. If everything bloomed and matured all at once, Lewis said, there’s no way there would be enough bees, enough trucks, enough bins, to make the scale of the current cherry harvest possible. Most of all, there wouldn’t be enough people. There already aren’t.

For years, the tree-fruit industry in Washington — like the salad industry in California, the blueberry industry in New Jersey, the tomato industry in Florida and countless other sources of the things that we eat — has been struggling to find the workers it needs to keep producing food. Across the country, the number of farmworkers is dwindling. Current workers, who are often immigrants without legal permission to work in the industries that are reliant on them, are getting older; those who are able to are leaving an industry that’s poorly paid and physically damaging and often exploitative; and crackdowns at the border mean that there are fewer new arrivals to take their place. To cope, some growers have turned to a ballooning visa-based “guest worker” program, which comes with its own significant problems, while many others have simply buckled under debt and rising costs, going under or selling their orchards to ever-bigger companies. “Everyone’s squeezed pretty much to the limit,” Knutson said, surveying the dark leaves, the shining fruit, the clear blue sky. “It’s kind of an ugly time.”

Such was the state of things before the coronavirus pandemic arrived, bringing with it a host of new troubles. When I called Lewis early in this year’s cherry harvest, she had just sent out a newsletter that, along with the latest updates on cherry disease and apple varieties, included information on suicide prevention. Piled on top of everything else, she said, “this is enough to take people to their knees.”

In March, when the United States began to lock down to slow the spread of the new virus, some workers noticed a change in how the government talked about them. As leaders planned for closures, it became clear that many of the lowest-paid and least-respected jobs in America were, in fact, the most important: the ones that could not be paused or interrupted or bypassed if society was to keep functioning. You could not, as Knutson put it, simply close the door to a farm for a month and then reopen it. People who had regularly been called illegal suddenly found themselves rebranded as essential.

Harvest seasons were underway or rapidly approaching across the country; without enough workers, the nation’s food would not be produced. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it would “temporarily adjust its enforcement posture,” narrowing its focus to people involved in criminal activity rather than arresting anyone who was undocumented. In California, where labor-intensive fruit-and-vegetable crops account for about 85 percent of the state’s crop sales, farmers handed out letters that workers who feared attracting the attention of law enforcement by going to work during lockdowns could carry with them: not papers by the usual definition, but a paper to show that they were, informally, and just for now, legitimate by virtue of being indispensable.

by Brooke Jarvis, NY Times Magazine| Read more:
Image:Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times