Island Press' 2023 Excerpts

www.islandpress.org Phone: (202) 232-7933 Fax: (202) 234-1328 Island Press 2000 M Street NW Suite 650 Washington, DC 20036

CAN FASHION BE BOTH BEAUTIFUL AND SUSTAINABLE? Sundressed Natural Fabrics and the Future of Clothing Lucianne Tonti

Hardcover | $29.00 216 pages PUBLISHED: January 2023 ISBN: 9781642832716

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or conscious consumers, buying clothes has never been more complicated. Even as fashion brands tout their sustainability, the industry is plagued by pollution, waste, and poor working conditions. If our clothes reflect our values, is it possible to be

truly well-dressed?

Sustainable fashion journalist Lucianne Tonti answers with a resounding yes. Beautiful clothes made from natural fabrics including cotton, wool, flax, and cashmere can support rural communities and regenerate landscapes. They can also reduce waste–but only if we invest in garments that stand the test of time rather than chasing fast fashion trends.

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Sundressed is an exploration of a revolution taking place in fashion.

And it is a love letter to clothing that embodies beauty and value, from farm to closet.

Lucianne Tonti

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ucianne Tonti has worked in fashion in Melbourne, Sydney, London, and Paris since 2008. In 2020 she launched the sustainable fashion site Prelude, profiled in Vogue.

Lucianne holds a Bachelor of Communication, a Juris Doctorate, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Political Science. She is the fashion editor of The Saturday Paper, a regular contributor to The Guardian and her writing appears in Australian Vogue.

Also available: The Blue Revolution Hunting, Harvesting, and Farming Seafood in the Information Age Nicholas P. Sullivan A good-news story about the ways that new technology and better policies are making fishing more sustainable HARDCOVER | $30.00 | 272 PAGES 2022 | 9781642832174

Tech to Table 25 Innovators Reimagining Food Richard Munson These profiles of 25 exciting entrepreneurs take the reader through the major innovations that are changing the way we grow and eat food

HARDCOVER | $32.00 | 224 PAGES 2021 | 9781642831900

A Good Drink

Where Our Food Comes From

In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits

Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine

Shanna Farrell A fun and eye-opening exploration into the world of sustainable spirits HARDCOVER | $29.00 | 200 PAGES 2021 | 9781642831436

Gary Paul Nabhan Two explorers and the fate of the world’s food

PAPERBACK | $29.00 | 264 PAGES 2011 | 9781610910033

Phone: 202.232.7933 Fax: 202.234.1328 Island Press 2000 M Street NW Suite 480-B Washington, DC 20036

About Island Press

Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

Island Press designs and executes educational campaigns, in conjunction with our authors, to communicate their critical messages in print, in person, and online using the latest technologies, innovative programs, and the media. Our goal is to reach targeted audiences—scientists, policy makers, environmental advocates, urban planners, the media, and concerned citizens—with information that can be used to create the framework for long-term ecological health and human well-being.

Island Press gratefully acknowledges major support from The Bobolink Foundation, Caldera Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Forrest C. and Frances H. Lattner Foundation, The JPB Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Summit Charitable Foundation, Inc., and many other generous organizations and individuals.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of our supporters.

Sundressed

Sundressed NATURAL FABRICS AND THE FUTURE OF CLOTHING

Lucianne Tonti

© 2023 Lucianne Tonti All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022941569

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keywords: carbon footprint, circular economy, clothes recycling, fast fashion, hemp, microfiber, modal, natural fabrics, organic cotton, organic farming, polyester, regenerative agriculture, secondhand clothing, silk, sustainable fashion, synthetic fabrics

For my Dad

Contents Introduction

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Chapter 1. There Is No Such Thing as Sustainable Fashion

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Chapter 2. Fashion that Doesn’t Cost the Earth

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Chapter 3. A Shirt Made of Flowers

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Chapter 4. La Dolce Vita and the Australian Merino

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Chapter 5. Cut on the Bias

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Chapter 6. Resort Wear from the Edge of the North Sea

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Chapter 7. A Cashmere Coat Is the First Refuge

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Chapter 8. The Endangered Forest

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Chapter 9. Patagonia and the Ingenuity of Hemp

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Chapter 10. True-blue Recycled Denim and the Isle of Wight

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Acknowledgments

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About the Author

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Introduction I love my clothes. It’s what I say anytime someone tells me they don’t want to be seen in the same thing twice. I love my clothes. On a good day, they make me feel beautiful. On a bad day, at the very least, they help me feel composed.

I love the way a pair of pants can feel empowering. I love the way a mid-length skirt with a slit feels when I walk. I love the flash of leg from a certain angle on the street or sitting in a chair. I love the way a well-­tailored suit provides balance across the shoulders, through the waist, hips, and sleeves. I love styling: the right coat with the right dress. Something sexy with something boyish. Something pretty with something tough. I love the softness of silk layered with the softness of cashmere. The crispness of a good cotton shirt against a pair of jeans. I love throwing an oversized coat over athletic gear, a cocktail dress, pajamas. I love the theatre of dressing, the play of it. The way an outfit can make a night feel exciting. The way an outfit adds color to memories, to the energy of a moment, to how it felt on that street corner, in that restaurant, at that hotel bar.

I’m not interested in clothes I can only wear once. I want clothes to carry me through the seasons of a year, of my life. I want clothes 1

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that see me through job interviews, the end of relationships that never even began, dinner parties with new friends, birthdays with old friends, weddings, funerals, dancing. Our clothes are some of our most intimate companions: how do you get to know them if you only wear them once?

How do you know that a particular jacket will get too hot if the sun comes out? Or that the rub of that waistline will be uncomfortable through a long dinner? How do you know that a dress will make you feel so wonderful you don’t have to think about it, aside from when you’re receiving compliments? How do you know that putting things in certain pockets will upset the line of the hip, so you do need to carry a bag? Or in that knit dress, you can get away with not taking a jacket. And in that skirt, you can walk fast, but you can’t run. That those shoes hurt when you’re dancing. That those pants will crease if you sit down for too long.

That you can rescue your white blouse from red wine because it’s been spilled on before. That while you can zip yourself into the bodysuit, you need a friend to help take it off. How do you know which dresses, shirts, and pants are comfortable enough, beautiful enough, and resilient enough to see you through an entire day, from meetings to dinner?

A world where you don’t know your clothes sounds awfully risky. It sounds like a recipe for days with itchy necklines, clammy armpits, and having to carry your too-warm jacket. And of course, it’s risky for the planet too, although risky is an understatement. A world where we don’t know our clothes, where we wear them a handful of times before we throw them away, is more than risky. It’s disastrous.

Fashion’s carbon footprint and environmental offenses have been thoroughly documented by academics, reported on by the biggest management consulting companies in the world, and investigated by very talented journalists. The latest reports suggest fashion is responsible for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, although some estimates place it as high as ten percent, not to mention the pollution of waterways, the harm to workers along its supply chains, and the

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insurmountable levels of textile waste generated every second by clothes we have thrown away or donated to charity. The clothes we never got to know. The clothes we didn’t fall in love with.

For several years now, the fashion industry has been on a mission to become more sustainable – or at least to convince people that it is. The use of the word sustainable and its counterparts – conscious, eco, natural, positive impact, zero waste – have become so ubiquitous, so overused in PR and marketing campaigns, that they have come to lose their meaning. Or in fact, their meaning is so deliberately vague that the truth about a garment’s impact is successfully obscured.

That’s not to say there aren’t innovations. Sustainable “solutions” are arriving hard and fast: biological and technical inventions; recycling; renewable technologies; closed-loop production systems that recycle water and chemicals; waste management and circularity; increased transparency to allow for greater traceability, visibility, and accountability. The pace is exciting, but that list is exhausting not least because scratching the surface of most of these solutions can prove extremely unsatisfying. Transparency is no good without standardized language and proper accountability. Closed-loop production can refer to just one part of the production process. Circularity and recycling technology are in their infancy: without large-scale infrastructure to capture, sort, and process textile waste, most garments will not be recycled – and by most, I mean ninety-nine perent, no matter what the PR copy claims.

Aside from this, it is impossible for the fashion industry to reduce its carbon emissions while rates of consumption and production continue to climb, and despite the posturing and the summits, the voluntary codes of conduct and the coalitions, neither show any signs of slowing down. At least not while current systems and thinking remain in place. It’s not just the industry that needs to change. Our understanding of clothes needs to change too. We have lost sight of the origins of these garments and materials that have kept us warm and made us feel

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beautiful for centuries. We have lost sight of the people who make them, who have the knowledge and skill to pleat, stitch, and tailor. Production was outsourced decades ago, prices dropped, marketing infiltrated our lives, and the amount of clothes we bought increased – some estimates suggest by double.

That’s all without considering that polyester, a plastic made from fossil fuels, represented 52 percent of the global fiber market in 2020.1 And it has somehow received such great publicity that writers of life cycle assessments are convinced it is one of the most sustainable materials, because they classify it a by-product of fossil fuels. The logic of this is so skewed it’s hard to believe, especially since we have been denouncing plastic for clogging up oceans and strangling fish for the last decade.

Polyester sheds microfibers of plastic pollution into waterways every time it’s washed – microfibers that end up in the bellies of sea creatures and in our soils – and the implementation of technology to prevent this is extremely slow. Right now, anything labeled recycled polyester is actually just downcycled plastic, so degraded that its next stop is landfill.

And besides, polyester is uncomfortable. It has a complicated relationship with oil, by which I mean it attracts it, absorbs it, and won’t let it go. It also has a complicated relationship with sweat and body odor, for much the same reason – that is to say, polyester smells and that smell is impossible to wash away. We shouldn’t be wearing it. It doesn’t belong against our skin. But my clothes that are made of natural fibers – cotton, linen, silk or wool – I would take them with me to the ends of the earth.

In April 2018, I was in Milan for a week for work. At the time, I was living in Paris and working for an Italian designer, and our small team had piled onto the train to set up an exhibition and pop-up shop at the Salone del Mobile, a design fair. It was a particularly warm spring.

The sky was a faultless blue – perfect weather for the designer’s clothes.

Each morning, I pulled on one of her shirtdresses or kaftans and slid my feet into leather sandals. Over the course of the day, I felt the light

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fabric wick moisture from my skin as I ran between our temporary store and various exhibitions or aperitifs on the sprawling terraces Milan is famous for. The dresses had deep pockets and long, wide sleeves that could be rolled up or down, depending on the breeze. They were both utilitarian and sophisticated, which meant they could be worn from breakfast to dinner. They were soft and airy, and so comfortable I felt present, in my body, and relaxed, like I was on holiday.

The Italian designer was also a stylist. She worked out of a light-filled atelier in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, and I worked there with her for two years. Together with her partner (a photographer) and her talented protégé, she created clothes made exclusively of natural fibers. She had an intense obsession with savoir faire – and the ability to contextualize the wearer of her clothes within a landscape. The consideration of sun and wind, heat and movement, meant she created clothes that felt alive against the body. They were made in limited runs, a tactic designed to instill in her customers the value of scarcity, to unlearn years of conditioning that encouraged everyone to consume more, to wait for sales, to follow trends.

It is to our detriment that mass production and the abundant supply of cheap clothing has desensitized us to the connection between our clothes and their origins, between our clothes and the land. Take the example of the dresses I was wearing in Milan; they were made of cotton. When you see cotton growing in a field, it is completely mesmerizing. It is a fluffy white ball that grows like a flower on a bush, and can be plucked from the plant, bright white, clean, and practically ready to be spun into yarn and woven into a garment. The reason the dresses in Milan were so comfortable is because on the body, cotton reacts to temperature. It breathes when you are hot and provides warmth when you are cold. It is durable and supple. This flexibility makes sense when you consider that the particles in a cotton shirt once belonged to a plant photosynthesizing energy from the sun. Another natural fiber, wool,

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is similarly alive. Its complex molecular structure makes it resistant to wrinkles, stains, and water. It is elastic, soft on the skin, and breathable.

It is warm, comfortable, and protective. Linen is lightweight and gets softer and smoother with each wear; the flax plant from which it is derived turns fields across France and Belgium pale blue for just a few weeks every year. Silk is drawn from a cocoon; it shimmers like water, but a single filament is stronger than steel.

These fabrics are some of nature’s most incredible creations. But in our highly convenient world, where we have optimized our lives for next-day delivery to benefit from global trade and created a hierarchy that ranks working at a desk above working on the land, we’ve completely lost sight of the fact that our clothes come from the soil. They are the product of the natural world, and we’re lucky to get to wear them. Unfortunately, like most parts of fashion’s production, farming natural fibers on an industrial scale can be harmful to the environment.

But there is another way. These fibers, these precious materials that can make you fall in love with your clothes, can be farmed in ways that heal and regenerate the earth.

This type of fiber farming is often referred to as regenerative agriculture.

Broadly speaking, regenerative agriculture is derived from Indigenous land management practices and can be thought of as a kind of “beyond organic” farming. Like organic, it shirks the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, but then goes further, aiming to improve ecosystems, soil health, and water cycles. A variety of techniques can be implemented, such as multi-species planting and integration of livestock, and the soil is never tilled. The farm is not simply a group of paddocks with an output of crops; it is part of the natural world and managed using principles of holistic stewardship, so the health of the landscape is always actively improving. Some of the obvious metrics include the return of native trees, grasses, insects, and animals, and an increase in the organic matter of the soil so that it is soft, fluffy, and dark brown, like chocolate

introduction

cake. This indicates the soil has a healthy biological life, with micro-­ organisms exchanging nutrients including nitrogen and carbon through photosynthesis and building mycorrhizal fungi – which are important for substantial crop yields. Another metric is improved water cycles so that the soil retains more moisture, meaning the farm is less vulnerable to droughts. Extensive research shows that restoring soil health through this type of agriculture is an efficient way of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and returning it to the ground. This is exciting because, of the earth’s natural carbon sinks – plants, sea, soil, and sky, soil is one of the safest places to store carbon.

For the imperiled fashion industry, regenerative agriculture presents an intriguing solution. By using it to farm cotton, flax (linen), silk, wool, cashmere, and hemp, the industry could theoretically move beyond merely mitigating harm to supporting healthy landscapes in regions the industry has typically used and abused. Farmers who have switched to these techniques say they are happier and more relaxed, that they have a sense their land is coming back to life. What’s more, some of the biggest players in the fashion industry are early adopters. Patagonia and Kering (whose brand empire includes Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Saint Laurent) are already training cotton farmers across their supply chains in the principles of regenerative farming.

Of course, the issues within the fashion industry are too complex to be solved by simply changing the way its raw materials are farmed.

There also needs to be a return to localized production; more investment in renewable energies to run the factories that convert raw materials from fleece to yarn to textile; and significant analysis of the chemicals used along the supply chain to dye, smooth, and make our clothes shine. But starting with the source, with a sheep’s fleece or a cotton boll, can enhance our connection to and appreciation of our clothes. This is important if we are to subvert the cycle of buy-and-dispose and transform our relationship with them – while still getting to wear beautiful

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things. Importantly, it means we can wear clothes that have improved the health of landscapes, and the lives of the animals and people that live on them.

In the following pages, we’ll look at both the way fibers are farmed and the way they are transformed into garments. We’ll visit rangelands in Mongolia where cashmere goats are herded from highlands to desert, American fields where collectives of farmers are growing cotton beneath the heat of the Californian sun, and small villages in China where mothers and daughters weave buttons by hand. We’ll uncover the layers of ingenuity and resources embedded in each t-shirt, coat, or dress. Through this exploration, we can reorient our understanding of each garment we buy, each garment we wear, around the valuable resources it contains, and wonder at the ability of a flower on a plant to become a shirt, or the fluffy fleece on a sheep to be cleaned and spun into a turtleneck. Hopefully this shift in understanding will mean we take better care of our clothes and enjoy wearing them for longer so we can reduce our appetite for newness.

It’s a seductive proposition, one with the potential to resolve the tensions between our desire to wear beautiful clothes and our desire to have a truly sustainable fashion industry. It’s a vision for a hopeful future, one that promises rewilding of fields, pastures, rangelands, and meadows while offering farmers and communities more sustainable livelihoods – a future in which we understand the value of our clothes and get to know them, so that we can confidently say, I love my clothes.

CHAPTER 1

There Is No Such Thing as Sustainable Fashion I have a black dress that swings through the skirt down to the mid-calf.

It has a slight slit on one side that shows a little leg while you’re walking and a little more at a run. It is sleeveless. The waist is slightly dropped and sits just above my hips. It is cut on the bias. I can wear a jacket over it when there is a nip in the air. It is the perfect length for my long coats.

I wear it with brogues and boots, with sandals and heels. I love to wear it on dates. It is effortless in the best sense, by which I mean it is both comfortable and flattering. I could name several important events in my life that I have worn it to. Job interviews. Dinners with new friends in new cities, when I was anxious and unsure of leaving the house. I could tell you about nights I abandoned it on a beach in a town I didn’t live in so I could run into the water, knowing I could shake the sand out later. I have worn it backstage at Burberry runway shows in London. I have worn it on press trips to Tokyo, Dubai, Marrakech and Milan. It has recovered from splashed olive oil, anxiously sponged out in restaurant bathrooms.

It has pockets. It is made of viscose so before it was a dress, it was a tree.

Most of our clothes are products of nature. Linen trousers begin as a flax plant largely sustained by rainwater. Silk is a protein secreted by the 9

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silkworm and spun into its surrounding cocoon as a continuous double filament thread. The cotton in your shirt grows like a flower turning sunlight into sugar to feed the soil.

Most of our clothes are products of nature and when we’re talking about sustainable fashion, we should hold this knowledge close. Especially now, when the term is so overused in PR and marketing campaigns, its meaning has become profoundly confused. Long before brands began to send out emails promoting recycled materials and organic cotton, or promising net-zero emission denim and positive-impact shirts, Professor Sandy Black described sustainable fashion as an oxymoron in The Sustainable Fashion Handbook, which was published way back in 2012.

The term has not gained greater clarity in the decade since.

Between 2018 and 2020, the amount of clothing described as sustainable on websites from the United States and the United Kingdom more than doubled.1 This reflects growing consumer awareness of the threat of climate change: in a recent McKinsey & Company poll, more than three in five consumers cited sustainable materials as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. But unfortunately, the description alone doesn’t mean much: in the fashion industry the term sustainable can be applied by anyone to almost anything.

Can fashion ever be sustainable? This is a question often posed to me at dinner parties. For a long time, I thought the answer was no – that true sustainability meant wearing and repairing what you already owned, buying new clothes and vintage pieces sparingly. I advised the designers I worked with that the best way to minimize the impact of their collections was to make only pieces of the highest quality from natural fibers, that could be loved, cherished, and worn for at least ten years.

These conversations about design were often centered on how beauty and desire are essential to sustainability, because it’s the clothes we love – the black dress that makes us feel confident, the coat that makes us feel composed – that we take the best care of, that we keep forever.

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If buying clothes for a ten-year time frame sounds expensive, that’s because it is. But it doesn’t mean you need to spend more money on clothes; it’s about apportioning the money you already spend differently.

Take for example, a pair of pants: instead of buying four or five pairs of pants a year, you take the total amount you would normally spend on all those pairs and buy one beautiful pair. This can be described as a prerogative only available to the middle class and above, which is a fair criticism. But price and quality are the simplest ways to make people buy less and value what they already own more. And while fast fashion may seem like a democratization of style, the communities being harmed further down the supply chain shouldn’t be forgotten. Most garment workers are women who exist on the margins and don’t get paid a living wage. Purchasing clothes with a higher price doesn’t guarantee that the people who made your clothes are being paid fairly, but generally, the price tag reflects what it cost to make the garment, a percentage of which should have been paid to the makers.

When we’re talking about price and inequity in fashion from the perspective of a consumer, it’s worth remembering that before fast fashion, clothes were made to last. They were worn, re-worn, and repaired.

Now, clothes are often so poorly made they fall apart, stain easily, and start to smell, so they have to be constantly replaced. This means that anyone who buys fast fashion because it is all they can afford ends up worse off. A better solution to the expense of sustainable fashion is to learn what good quality craftsmanship and fabrics feel like and buy secondhand. Long term, the hope is that as sustainable fashion becomes more widespread, economies of scale will make it more affordable. But unfortunately, the path to an accessible sustainable-fashion system is a long and winding (sometimes treacherous) road.

To begin with, among all the promises and posturing, there are two essential things to understand about sustainable fashion. The first is that the sheer volume of clothes being made, bought, and thrown away is at

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the heart of fashion’s carbon footprint. The second is that it’s extremely difficult to ascertain what sustainable fashion actually is: the experts argue about everything from the direction of big structural changes to the merits of recycled polyester, organic cotton, and vegan leather.

That first point is just about the only thing sustainable fashion advocates and industry leading researchers do agree on: there will be no significant mitigation of the industry’s carbon footprint while rates of production and consumption continue to rise. Recent projections suggest global clothing consumption will rise by sixty-three percent between now and 2030, the equivalent of approximately five hundred billion t-shirts.2 These projections wipe out any of the industry’s progress toward sustainability or carbon neutrality, with the 2019 Pulse of the Fashion Industry report declaring that “fashion companies are not implementing sustainable solutions fast enough to counterbalance the negative environmental and social impacts of the rapidly growing fashion industry.”3 Rates of production and consumption began to climb when the free trade agreements of the late 1990s and early 2000s slashed protections for the clothing and footwear industries, meaning businesses could move production to less-developed countries where labor and materials were cheaper and there were fewer environmental regulations. A 2016 study by McKinsey & Company revealed that the average person buys sixty percent more clothing than they did before these changes occurred and keeps each item for about half as long.4 Take, for example, this statistic: the average American woman owns seven pairs of jeans.5 The cotton in those jeans was likely grown using an unimaginable amount of water, which may have been irrigated from waterways needed by local communities. Estimates of the exact amount vary widely, with the UN putting the number at 7,500 liters per pair, while Levi’s says it’s roughly 2,565. The cotton was also likely sprayed with pesticides that destroy soil health and biodiversity. It then could have been picked by Uyghur slaves in China and was likely spun into yarn

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and woven into fabric in mills that release carbon into the atmosphere because they are powered by coal. Finally, it may have been dyed with toxic chemicals that were released into waterways, poisoning workers and those living nearby. This might all seem hyperbolic or simply the price we pay in a capitalist society for comfort and convenience, but to make matters worse, those jeans are likely to be thrown away after a few years.

When you are trying to determine the ecological impact of a specific garment, the fashion system is complicated and convoluted. There are several steps along the production line of the jeans I just described that could have been more sustainable – like using organic cotton which, according to a 2014 report, produces forty-six percent less CO2 than the conventional variety.6 But if the cotton was shipped from India to China, where it was processed in factories with poor environmental and humanitarian standards only to be manufactured into jeans that were worn a mere seven times before being discarded, the good generated by them being made from organic cotton is pretty futile.7 To make matters worse, in 2022 the journalist Alden Wicker revealed that much of the “certified” organic cotton on the market may not be organic at all, thanks to an opaque and corrupt certification system.8 The wider system operates in a more linear way that is easier to understand: take, pollute, discard. Huge quantities of resources or raw materials are extracted from the earth to produce clothes. This production requires lots of electricity and chemicals that burn even more fossil fuels, and at the end of a garment’s life, if it doesn’t biodegrade, like plastic, it will sit in landfill. According to a 2017 report, one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned every second.9 The textile industry uses ninety-eight million tons of non-renewable resources per year to produce synthetic fibers, fertilizers to grow cotton, and chemicals to make, dye, and finish fibers and textiles.10 McKinsey & Company estimates that seventy percent of fashion’s greenhouse gas emissions come from raw material production, preparation, and processing.11

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One of the reasons we find it so difficult to grasp the environmental cost of fashion is because we outsourced production decades ago. Now, Western countries produce very little: in 1990, half of all clothing worn in the United States was made here, but local manufacturing currently accounts for just two percent of all clothing sold in America. In Australia, it’s six percent, and most clothing sold in the United Kingdom is made elsewhere.12 This offshoring means we don’t see fields ravaged by pesticides or plumes of thick gray smoke being chugged into the air by factories. We have no idea that the magenta hue of our favorite dress will cause the river in our town to run a deep shade of pink because of the wastewater from the dyeing process.

Maybe we were never really conscious that the cotton in our t-shirts was grown in a field, that the sheep roaming the hills produce the soft fleece in our knitwear. Certainly, the rise of polyester further distanced us from the idea that the natural world had been the source of our clothes for centuries. This should be cause for alarm because polyester is a plastic derived from fossil fuels, and the greenhouse gases emitted while extracting it and processing it into a fiber are very hard to quantify. Scientists estimate that half a million tons of plastic microfibers are released from synthetic clothing like polyester and nylon into our oceans, mountains, rivers, and soil every year, which is equivalent to more than fifty billion plastic bottles.13 Horrifyingly, polyester is now ubiquitous, largely because it has always been cheap and easy to produce at scale. It has caused a race to the bottom on price and quality, as natural fibers have been forced to compete with synthetic counterparts that were billed as fibers of the future. Alongside this, consumer attitudes shifted and, in a few short decades, value systems that once placed quality over quantity, natural over artificial, and local production over cheap prices disappeared.

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The first time I wore the black dress was to a party in a run-down mansion on the beach in Melbourne. It was a party that happened every summer. The weekend before Christmas, the boys who lived in the house would put on Hawaiian shirts and string fairy lights across the backyard. Over the course of the evening, guests would disappear across the sand and come back with damp bottoms and dripping hair. After sunset, the DJ would relocate upstairs and we would keep dancing, the party spilling out onto a balcony overlooked by an enormous palm tree, the straight line of the water stretching out behind it. I’d bought the dress secondhand that afternoon and hadn’t thought twice about its fabric composition or carbon footprint. Sitting on the balcony, beneath the branches of this grand old palm, waiting for the sun to appear over the horizon, it didn’t occur to me that the viscose dress I was wearing had also begun as a tree sprouting from the earth.

The debate around viscose illustrates a fundamental problem within the fashion industry and is a good example of how the word sustainable can be misleading. The viscose in my dress would have been made from a fast-growing tree like pine or eucalypt. Two hundred million of these trees are logged every year to make viscose, which is a type of rayon (rayon being the umbrella term for manufactured cellulose fibers that largely come from trees, including modal and lyocell). Viscose sourcing has been linked to the destruction of endangered and ancient forests.14 This is devastating, as trees help guard against the warming of the planet because they pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Scientists estimate better management of tropical forests, mangroves, and peatlands could provide twenty-three percent of the climate mitigation needed to meet the objectives outlined in the Paris Agreement.15 To add insult to serious injury, more than half of each tree is wasted during the next stage of production – the process of turning the tree into fiber or yarn. This involves dissolving wood pulp in a chemical solution to create a thick substance, which is then extracted into strands that are

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spun into fibers and woven into fabric. The chemicals used in viscose production are highly toxic, and exposure has been linked to higher levels of disease in the people who work in the factories and those who live nearby, including coronary heart disease and blindness, as well as psychological and neurobehavioral disorders.16 The process also results in the toxic pollution of air and waterways. Manufacturing rayon is so toxic that in 2013, the United States Environmental Protection Agency banned its production. Even so, global use of rayon doubled between 2005 and 2015.17 Despite this, the fashion industry and many sustainable fashion advocates consider cellulose fibers like viscose and rayon to be ecofriendly because they are derived from renewable sources (trees), they are less toxic than polyester and, unlike polyester, they can biodegrade and re-enter the biocycle. Canopy, a non-profit that works to ensure large-scale forest conservation, has done its best to prevent trees from being sourced from ancient and endangered forests, and to ensure manufacturing is carried out using a closed-loop system that protects workers and the environment, but the systems are far from perfect. Sustainable fashion pioneer and designer Stella McCartney sources all the viscose in her supply chain from forests in Sweden that are managed in a way that mimics nature’s patterns of disturbance and regeneration, protecting their productivity and biodiversity for generations to come.

But as author and environmentalist Rebecca Burgess writes in her book Fibershed, “The primary issue remains – using tree pulp for clothing is a land- and fossil-fuel-intensive process that puts our precious global forests at risk.”18 Given how complicated these issues are, it should come as no surprise that there is no real consensus about what constitutes best practice.

Because fashion supply chains are so convoluted, it can be really tough to understand what has happened at each stage of production. This is why a lot of brands claiming to be eco-friendly will shout about transparent

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supply chains and traceability, and though both assist with accountability, without agreed-upon industry standards and specific language, visibility into a supply chain doesn’t guarantee anything. The industry is also awash with certifications that cover everything from organic farming to carbon neutrality, but because these programs are voluntary, they often lack independent oversight and the resulting certifications can be tantamount to greenwashing. This lack of clarity extends to statistics that are commonly thrown around in conversations between experts and in news reports about the industry, like “The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world.” It’s more accurate to say that fashion is responsible for between two and ten percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Taking into account variances across years and in credible reports, it places somewhere between the fourth or tenth most polluting industry.

In addition to all these challenges – the convoluted supply chains, resource use, pollution, and untenable rates of production and consumption – it’s worth considering the end goal. Given that we are already witnessing the severe impacts of one degree of warming—the wildfires, flash floods, heatwaves, droughts, and biodiversity loss—what exactly we are trying to sustain? The world has no use for sustainable fashion, we need something more. We have to go beyond processes that merely mitigate the harm caused by reducing emissions and switch to techniques that heal landscapes and regenerate the earth.

One of the first collections I watched the Italian stylist create in Paris was inspired by Anafi, a tiny, wild island a thirteen-hour ferry ride from Athens. The four of us traveled there together, late in the summer, to shoot the campaign. The rooms of our hotel opened onto expanses of sea and sky. The island was just remote enough to deter the crowds, creating a meaningful sense of escape from the real world. It had rolling

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hills so high and steep that, driving down them, you felt you might topple into the ocean.

Before we left, the designer gifted me a twinset from that collection.

It was made of a beautiful mustard cotton that had delicate light- and navy-blue pinstripes running vertically through the fabric. The pants were wide-legged and high-waisted with double front-facing pleats and deep side pockets; the matching shirt was oversized, with long sleeves and a mandarin collar. The fabric had a specific weight; it was thick and stiff and lightly coated so it had a soft sheen. It was heavy enough to wear on a warm night without a jacket and light enough for the heat of the high summer sun. The first time I wore it was to dinner on the island. We sat on the balcony of a family-run tavern that looked straight out to the Aegean Sea. We drank local wine and ate octopus, a yellow split pea dish called fava, and horta – a plate of wild greens. As we walked back to the hotel after dinner, the designer commented, “We are wearing Anafi, in Anafi.”

I have worn that outfit so much and so often; in the first year I owned it, I must have worn it once a week. I’ve worn it to drinks at the Ritz in Paris and to the beach in Palermo. I’ve worn it under big knits and heavy coats in London. It was what I wore when I caught the train to Munich to meet my brother and his girlfriend, who had moved there from Oslo.

I wore it to greet my other brother and his boyfriend when they arrived at the Grand Hotel Amour in Paris. I have worn it so much that once, at a dinner in Milan, an old friend of the stylist remarked he’d never seen me in anything else.

In a 2011 interview with British newspaper The Independent, the American designer Marc Jacobs declared, “What survives the whole process is what people wear … I’m interested in clothes people want, covet, desire, wear, use, love, tear, soil. Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.”19 Clothes make up the details of our lives, and understanding why we love some clothes and wear them more than others is

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key to reversing the patterns of consumption and disposal that are at the heart of fashion’s carbon footprint.

A 2018 study revealed that we don’t wear at least fifty percent of our wardrobes.20 According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in the United States, clothes are worn for a quarter of the global average, and in China, clothing utilization has decreased by seventy percent in fifteen years.21 The founder of Fashion Revolution, Orsola de Castro, writes in her book Loved Clothes Last, “The average British woman hoards approximately 285 pounds worth of unused clothing.”22 One of the most meaningful things we can do to make fashion more sustainable is to keep our clothes for longer and to wear them more often, thereby reducing the need for replacement consumption.

The year before I moved to London, I worked for an Australian designer with fastidious attention to detail. He lived in a house built into the side of a sun-drenched hill that overlooked Tamarama beach with his girlfriend, who was the fashion editor of Australian Vogue.

His clothes were made in Australia from beautiful fabrics he imported from Europe. His stores were made of concrete and glass, and from every corner you could see an element of nature. The flagship store on Oxford Street in Sydney stretched long and dark toward a counter that sat beneath a roof that opened via a mechanism onto the sky.

I wore a coat from my last season with him for years. It was a thick boiled wool with wide leather sleeves and a dropped shoulder. The collar was broad and, because the lapels dived deep into a double breast with a single line of buttons, the collar could be popped, and the coat wrapped around the body against the weather. It had pockets inside and out, a single pleat that ran down between my shoulder blades, and a solid, low-hanging half-belt that was fixed to the back. It was lined with a heavy satin viscose. It was long, it fell well below my knees, and hung across my shoulders with such weight that whenever I was in it, I felt ready.

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I wore it to a dinner party when I first arrived in Paris over black jeans and a turtleneck. The host asked me to leave my shoes at the door and, without the coat and the heel of my brogues, the outfit felt flat. Halfway through the aperitif, the door opened to a guest the sight of whom made me curse my lack of footwear even more. It was the best, oldest friend of someone I had fallen out with in London and was very much hoping to forget. We smiled and small-talked our way through dinner, while I desperately hoped she wouldn’t recount tales of my bad behavior to my new Parisian friends. We happened to leave the party at the same time, and when she and her girlfriend said goodbye to me under the yellow streetlamps, I felt suddenly self-conscious of my aloneness and embarrassed of my vulnerability, trying to build something in this new city. But when I turned my back on them, I felt the coat move around me. I knew the two inches the brogues added to my height made the coat swing and as I walked away and heard the clip of my heels on the cobblestones, I felt sure that everything was going to be all right.

What the coat gave me in that moment was some emotional resilience and a kind of protection. Not like the physical protection we get from clothes – warmth or shelter – but protection, nonetheless. It was the type of protection the late fashion photographer Bill Cunningham described when he said, “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.” If all we needed from our clothes was insulation or reinforcement, we could simply and efficiently meet those needs. But what we get from clothing is so much more – belonging, self-expression, comfort – and the volume of resources we consume to satiate these is incredible. Professor and author Kate Fletcher describes how, “In the context of fashion, the resource intensity of our need for identity formation, communication, and creativity as expressed through our dressed bodies is also the chief challenge for durability.”23 We now buy more clothes than we ever have before, and we wear them less – sometimes we don’t even wear them at all before we discard them. Fletcher goes on to

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say, “No industry has better perfected the cycle of invention-acceptancedissatisfaction-­invention than fashion; and has so successfully de-linked it from physical need or function.” I think this is because we are always searching for a garment that makes us feel stronger, calmer, more beautiful. Fashion has captured our imagination by making us believe it can change something fundamental about our lives, about ourselves. I’m inclined to believe the right outfit can.

Sure, this has some insidious implications: fashion plays on our insecurities and acts as a signal for status and wealth in a world where income inequality means the super-rich have perverse amounts of political influence. It operates using a deeply sexist paradigm that profits off women as both consumers and workers; it reinforces unhealthy body image, whiteness, ableism, and has a troubling obsession with youth. But dismissing it as frivolous and superficial, acting like it’s not something worth serious analysis, distracts from our ability to understand it. Like it or not, we all participate in the industry every day, every time we put on clothes.

As Miuccia Prada said in a New Yorker interview in 1994, “Everybody makes a choice when he or she gets dressed … It’s not true when people say, ‘I don’t care what I have on.’ Your way of dressing is something you can go to the psychoanalyst to find out about, because there are so many personal things involved.”24 If we could understand why some items of clothing inspire us to feel a certain way, we would be closer to understanding how to make all our clothes endure. We would be closer to subverting the cycle of invention-acceptance-dissatisfaction-invention.

Another time I wore the coat was to a job interview at a café in Pimlico on a cold but sunny Sunday morning. I was meeting a creative consultant for Burberry who needed an office manager and PA; I was running out of money fast and needed a job. The interview posed a challenge to dress for: the consultant worked in high fashion, split her time between

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London and New York and, from her Instagram, I could see she was friends with models like Anja Rubik and movie stars like Sienna Miller.

I wanted to impress her, and it felt like a meeting to which I should wear high heels and a good dress, but it was a Sunday morning and I didn’t want to look desperate. I settled on a soft black sleeveless shirt, tucked into high-waisted tailored pants with a cigarette leg and trainers. The coat made the outfit; I knew it elevated the pants and shirt – it was a piece – and this knowledge helped ease my nerves.

Working for this woman gave me an insight into a totally different part of the fashion industry: luxury. The size and scale of the operations at Burberry dwarfed any designers I’ve worked with before or since. Luxury brands are behemoths, churning out such a volume of product that the word luxury has lost its meaning. What used to be signified by artisanal craft, workmanship, and expertise has been substituted by mass-produced premium products. According to Orsola de Castro, “We started to believe in the shine and not the substance, in designer logos over human hand-print.”25 In the last decade, the luxury goods industry has been totally transformed by realizing huge growth, aided significantly by expansion into Asia. Before COVID-19 hit, the value of the personal luxury goods market was €281 billion.26 This reflects the sheer volume of product sold, most of which has come to be mass-produced in much the same way as fast fashion – a side effect of which is over-production. In 2018, the BBC reported that in a fiveyear period, Burberry had destroyed unsold clothes and perfume to the value of £90 billion.27 The rationale offered by the company was that they didn’t want the stock devalued by selling it at a discount or on the ‘gray market’.

This gets to the heart of one of fashion’s biggest issues, and an issue with manufacturing more broadly. The more units produced in a single production run, the cheaper the price per unit. This is because fabric can be bought in bulk, lowering the price per yard, and cutting fabric

t h e r e i s n o s u c h t h i n g a s s u s ta i n a b l e fa s h i o n

can be done en masse, saving the factories time. The result is a system that incentivizes brands to order more so they can sell each garment at a better margin. Meanwhile, capitalism has seen companies relentlessly pursue growth for decades.

The industry has created systems to sustain these endless cycles of more, like the never-ending global fashion market, which moves between the four fashion capitals: New York, Milan, London, Paris.

These markets and their runways, showrooms, and parties occur four times a year, each spanning an entire month. In the last ten years, they have been propelled into front-row view by the rise of social media, influencer culture, and our insatiable fascination with celebrities. Of course, COVID-19 brought all of this to a grinding halt and gave the entire industry the opportunity to finally pause and reflect on what we had been doing, rather than trying to discuss it through our jetlag over warm prosecco and the too-loud music of yet another magazine launch in the Marais.

But the truth is, the damage has already been done. The endless treadmill we had been running on, always looking to the next collection, one line-sheet and look-book away from burnout, fed the system we call fast fashion (which Orsola de Castro thinks is not so distinguishable from fast luxury), and it has fundamentally changed our psychological relationship with clothes. The boom of social media and camera phones meant images of runway shows (once exclusive events that were never photographed) could be beamed around the world for immediate consumption, and fast fashion companies such as Zara and H&M perfected the art of knocking off next season’s designs and getting them onto the shop floor in a matter of weeks. The temporal nature of each trend and their perpetually moving goalposts instilled the idea that newness is integral to fashion, creating a consumer mindset that could only be satisfied by the gratification of another purchase. Various reports describe how members of Gen Z refuse to re-wear an outfit

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once they’ve posted a photo of themselves in it on social media – the terrifying amalgamation of free market and toxic psychological forces.

Kate Fletcher describes this as psychological obsolescence: “In order for the prevailing business model’s bottom line to keep showing growth, garments have to become obsolete, at least in psychological terms.”28 Of course, with declining quality, fabrics, and craftsmanship, they often become obsolete physically too.

In my very early twenties, I found a pair of men’s Comme des Garçons suit pants at a thrift store. I had them slightly tailored and wore them everywhere and to everything for almost ten years. They had a single pleat at the front and sat just above my hips; the wool was firm but soft and withstood being treated terribly on grimy dancefloors and in university pubs. I was late for a meeting the first time I tore them. I slipped on the pavement when I was running to get the train and they ripped across my right knee. I was so upset I couldn’t listen to a single thing my editor had to say. Instead, the refrain “I tore my pants” bounced around my head while the graze on my knee stung. I got a tailor to do a crude repair and went on wearing them. The second time they tore was years later, in Paris. I was writing in my kitchen. I tucked my knees up under my chin, leaned my shins against my dining table, and heard them split along the bottom. This time, I was too broke and unsure of my French to take them to a tailor, so I begged a skilled friend to repair them for me. When he gave them back, he warned, “That fabric is so old, beautiful but old, you’re literally wearing it out.” A few weeks later, they tore again, and I didn’t have the heart to let them go. Right now, they are trapped in storage with my coat in my friend’s basement: there are oceans between us and I think about them at least once a week.

Had these pants meant less to me, I might not have repaired them.

Had they been less comfortable or stopped working with the rest of my wardrobe, I might not have repaired them. Had they been made with less skill, had the fabric been cheaper, had the zip broke, I might not

t h e r e i s n o s u c h t h i n g a s s u s ta i n a b l e fa s h i o n

have repaired them. But they were made to last, and I was determined to make them last. It was Joan Crawford who advised we “care for our clothes, like the good friends they are.” Durability and sustainability go hand in hand: every time we lengthen a product’s lifespan by repairing it so that we refrain from buying something new, we are curbing our carbon footprint. Fletcher believes we also benefit psychologically from behaviors that extend the life of our garments, that taking steps to care for and mend objects that are important to us “may contribute to feelings of well-being as they help satisfy inherent psychological needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy.”29 Of course, getting our clothes repaired is a labor of love, driven by the value we place on each item. It helps if the item is one of substance, designed with durability and utility in mind, with craftsmanship that makes repairs possible. I believe it helps if we spent enough on the piece to bring its monetary value front and center in our minds, so that we are invested in its longevity. The low cost of fast fashion is constantly given as a rationale for the thoughtless disposal of clothing, and it has conditioned us to believe that these intricate garments, made by someone sitting behind a sewing machine, made from precious resources and someone’s creativity, cost nothing to create. Fashion should be expensive, or at least, more expensive than it currently is. But really, I point to price as a way to capture something greater, to capture why we might care enough about an item of clothing so that we bother to get it repaired, to continue wearing it. To desire something enough that, time and time again, we reach for it in our wardrobes – fashion is, after all, a game of hearts and minds.

Above everything else, the mustard twinset was both comfortable (which is why I wore it so often) and durable (which meant I could wear it frequently without fear of damaging it). It was made of a very

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special woven cotton. As I’ve mentioned, cotton has unique properties on the body, one of which is its ability to provide insulation and protect the wearer against the heat or the cold. This is because the fabric traps air between its fibers, creating a layer of protection. Cotton is also strengthened by water, meaning it can be washed repeatedly. The wool in my overcoat had been boiled so the fibers had shrunk and wrapped around each other tightly, which meant the air had been removed; the result was a thick, felt-like fabric. It didn’t let heat out or the cold in; its density and width repelled water but it also had a lightness that made it a pleasure to wear. The compressed and interlocked fibers meant the coat was resistant to friction, so even after years of wear, it was still beautiful.

Designing clothes with materials that last is one of the most practical ways to extend the life of a garment; the benefits of selecting fabrics to enhance durability and desirability are enormous. Material choice is also one of the simplest ways to lessen a garment’s environmental impact and, by highlighting this, we can bring the origins of our clothes back into focus. Fashion is inextricably bound to nature, and this shouldn’t be lost on us as we try to navigate the complex questions of how to lessen the industry’s carbon footprint.

Appreciating the beauty of the natural world offers hope for the fashion industry in two different ways. The first is about enjoyment.

Clothes made of natural fibers are more comfortable against our skin and more beautiful in form and drape, which should mean we enjoy wearing them and value them more than synthetic fibers. We become more attached to our clothing when we remember the precious resources from which they are made—the goat or the paddock or the ecosystem that produced them. The second is if we change the way we farm fibers, they can drive positive outcomes for nature, from the sheep on the hillside to the native birds in the fields where cotton is grown, from the wildlife across degraded rangelands to the waterways in the mountains in China where hemp is farmed. In all these places, on all these farms

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along fashion’s convoluted supply chains, we can regenerate landscapes, waterways, soil health, and biodynamic ecosystems. The combination of these two forces – a love of clothes and a love of nature – could subvert the take-make-waste model that is driving fashion’s enormous environmental footprint.

27

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BOLDLY ENVISIONS A NEW, SOCIALLY JUST, AND SUSTAINABLE APPROACH TO ECONOMICS

The Progress Illusion Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics Paperback | : $32.00 | 232 PUBLISHED: December 2022 ISBN: 9781642832525

Jon D. Erickson

W

e live under the illusion of progress: as long as GDP is going up and prices stay low, we accept poverty and pollution as unfortunate but inevitable byproducts of a successful economy. How did we all get duped into believing the fairytale

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of economics?

In The Progress Illusion, Jon Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything.

Drawing on his experience as a young economist inoculated in the go-go 1980’s era of “greed is good,” Erickson shows how flawed economic thinking shaped our politics and determined the course of American public policy.

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While the history of economics is dismal indeed, Erickson is part of a vigorous reform effort grounded in the realities of life on a finite planet.

Crafting a new economic story, he shows, is the first step toward turning away from endless growth and towards enduring prosperity.

Jon D. Erickson

J

on D. Erickson is the Blittersdorf Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy at the University of Vermont, faculty member of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment.

His previous co-authored and edited books

include Sustainable Wellbeing Futures, The Great Experiment in Conservation, Ecological Economics of Sustainable Watershed Management, Frontiers in Ecological Economic Theory and Application, and Ecological Economics: A Workbook for Problem-Based Learning.

Also available: The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, Revised Edition Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein A follow-up to the popular first edition PAPERBACK | $29.00 | (224. 2022 | .

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The Case for a Carbon Tax Getting Past Our Hang-ups to Effective Climate Policy Shi-Ling Hsu Incisive analysis of climate change policy HARDCOVER 74.00 (248 2011. 9781597265317.)

Ecological Economics, Second Edition Principles and Applications Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley A brand new edition of the leading textbook in the field HARDCOVER(544 2010. 9781597266819.)

Environmental Economics for Tree Huggers and Other Skeptics William K. Jaeger HARDCOVER 63.00 (304 2005. 9781559636643.)

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THE

PROGR E SS

IILLLLU USSIIO ON N Reclaiming Our Future from the Fair ytale of Economics

JON D. ERICKSON

More Praise for The Progress Illusion “Given that the Arctic has mostly melted, it seems axiomatic that our planet’s economic system is not working very well. But Jon Erickson explains—in simple and powerful terms—just why that is, and just what would need to change if we were to actually build a world that worked much better. It’s a real gift to all of us!”

—BILL MCKIBBEN author of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

“In accessible language filled with stories, ecological economist Jon Erickson shows how growth-driven economies, worsening inequities, and greenhouse gas emissions are interconnected, and thus it is possible to envision alternate paths forward which address all three.”

—PATRICIA (ELLIE) PERKINS Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University; editor of The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics

“This book is a must-read for those who wish to understand how a promising discipline strayed inexorably from a more humane path to one that extols unbridled materialism, inequity, and environmental destruction. Economics can be rescued from its self-destructive path by having more courageous, assertive, and iconoclastic scholars like Erickson.”

—STEVE ONYEIWU Andrew Wells Robertson Professor of Economics, Allegheny College; author of Emerging Issues in Contemporary African Economies

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THE PROGRESS ILLUSION

THE PROGRESS ILLUSION Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics

Jon D. Erickson

© 2022 Jon D. Erickson All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931806 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: Adam Smith, capitalism, carbon tax, classical economics, climate change, ecological economics, economic inequality, environmental economics, feminist economics, Freakonomics, free market, GDP, Herman Daly, Keynesian economics, laissez-faire economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, natural resource economics, neoclassical economics, Occupy Wall Street, supply-side economics, The Limits to Growth

to Louis and Jon­ my inspiration to be a good ancestor

Contents

Foreword by Herman Daly

xiii

Preface: Promises of an Ecological Economics

xvii

Chapter 1 The Education of an Economist

1

Chapter 2 Ascension of the Queen

27

Chapter 3 Growing a Market Society

55

Chapter 4 Coming of Age in the Econocene

85

Chapter 5 A New Story

125

Chapter 6 A New Economics

155

xi

xii

contents

Chapter 7 A New Economy

173

Acknowledgments

195

Notes

199

Bibliography

217

Index

241

About the Author

251

Foreword

So what kind of economist are you?

Jon Erickson’s answer to that common question is that he is an ecological economist. He explains what led him from standard training in neoclassical economics at an elite university to this rebel faction that seeks to reconstruct economics from a new foundational paradigm. Ecological economics is based on a new preanalytic vision of the economy as a dependent subsystem of an ecosystem that is finite, nongrowing, and subject to the biophysical laws of thermodynamics and ecology. Such a revisioning is quite unfriendly to the ideology of growthism that rules the politics and economics of our time. It is not the glide path to professional advancement, much less to the profitable Wall Street career in finance that many of his Ivy League contemporaries chose.

That makes this book sound rather theoretical and abstract, but the story is told as a personal narrative by someone born in 1969 and experiencing the social, economic, and political history of his generation, all the way from his student days to his current position as a distinguished professor and leader in ecological economics. The narrative includes instructive retellings of the political and economic struggles of xiii

xiv

foreword

his generation, which overlaps the generations of us readers so we can personally identify with his story. It helps that Jon is a good storyteller, a talent that carries over from his work as a documentary filmmaker. He describes and explains his increasing dissatisfaction with the unwillingness and inability of today’s leading economists to seriously confront the related catastrophes of ecological destruction and economic breakdown that we are experiencing.

What were the specific conflicts and anomalies that brought him to ecological economics? I will leave that for him to tell, but one big one I will mention is the belief that ecological economics should be the cornerstone for economics as a whole rather than a minor subcategory. In the Journal of Economic Literature classification of over seven hundred subject areas, ecological economics is indexed way down the list as Q57.

The idea that the 720th brick should be removed and refashioned to replace the cornerstone of the whole edifice is not an easy idea to sell, especially to the original builders who still live in that structure and control entry into it.

As should be expected, the same independent mind that was not satisfied with neoclassical economics will not uncritically accept everything written in the name of ecological economics. In particular, Erickson rightly urges stronger emphasis on distributive justice, as well as on sustainable scale, and cautions against empty empiricism, such as pricing nature by econometric estimates of individual willingness to pay for environmental benefit or to accept payment for environmental loss. On the latter he quotes Keynes’s caution that such economistic numerology is “like those puzzles for children where you write down your age, multiply, add this and that, subtract something else, and eventually end up with the number of the Beast in Revelation.”

In addition to Keynes, Erickson’s critique of the mainstream neoclassical growthists draws on the forgotten classical economists, as well as more recent economists unjustly ignored, such as Henry George, Karl

foreword

Polanyi, and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Careful attention is given to the history of economic thought, with appreciation for good ideas regardless of their ideological origins.

I strongly recommend this insightful book to all citizens because the errors of economists are disastrous, and we are currently suffering from them. In addition, I especially recommend it to university students who are struggling, as Jon Erickson did, to choose a worthy and sustainable path for their studies and future work. They will be instructed and inspired by his example.

Finally, in an age of online university courses, I cannot resist pointing to some ecological economic virtues secondary to high intellectual content: This book requires no access to computers, smartphones, or internet connections, uses no electricity, is easily portable, and can be reused often by different people at different times. You will be glad you bought it!

Herman Daly Emeritus Professor School of Public Policy University of Maryland

xv

Preface Promises of an Ecological Economics

“I’m not that kind of economist.”

This is a defense I’ve retreated to on many occasions, often when trying to explain that my profession has no magic answers to intractable questions. What’s the value of the climate to the economy? What’s the tradeoff between jobs and the environment? What’s the worth of a songbird?1 Economics is often used to sidestep moral judgments about what we value. It’s not us who’s choosing winners and losers; it’s simply the market. But putting a price on everything presumes people and planet are disposable, tradable, and otherwise here to serve the invention we call the economy.

In other settings, my qualification has been a rejoinder to the old joke about economists, lawyers, and politicians alike: “What do you call a thousand economists at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.” When attacked by those who vilify economics as arrogant, ahistorical, and narrow, I wholeheartedly agree, but then I argue for a more modest, reflective, interdisciplinary economics. An economics that can contribute to, not replace, democratic decision making. An economics that learns from, not ignores, its own history. An economics that partners with, not dominates, other disciplines. xvii

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In essence, this book is an answer to the question, “So what kind of economist are you?” My long-winded response begins with unpacking the term itself. Economics is derived from the Greek word oikonomia, “the management of the household.” In ancient Greece, oikos referred to the family, the basic unit of Greek society. But oiko-nomists today study households of all shapes and sizes. Microeconomists study the resources that make things, the people who consume things, and the things themselves. Macroeconomists study the whole, the sum of the parts that make up local, regional, and national economies, as well as the systems of money, law, governance, and trade that stitch the parts together.

Beyond these two broad distinctions, economics splinters into many specialties. There are labor, business, agricultural, consumer, behavioral, and even neuro economists. There are microeconomists who study the sports economy, tourism economy, forest economy, transportation economy, and on and on. There are macroeconomists who specialize in specific countries, time periods, or even other economists. If there is an activity, resource, place, or person connected to the economy, there’s probably an economist who has claimed it as the household of their specialization. In all, the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification is broken into twenty categories with over seven hundred subject areas.

From A10 to Z39, the domain of today’s oikonomia is the entirety of humanity.

My own affinity has been with Q57, ecological economics. Early in my education I discovered ecological economics as a scientific understanding of the economy that is guided by sustainability, inclusiveness, and fairness. Tellingly, economics and ecology share the Greek root, oikos, together the management and study of the household. Ecology’s household has historically been focused on nature separate from humans, and economics has focused on humans separate from nature. Ecological economics was intended to embed the human system within the ecosystem, blurring the lines between the natural and social sciences. The

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formalization of this transdiscipline in the late 1980s challenged a growing economic imperialism that defined humans as consumers, society’s purpose as growth, and our relationship with the Earth as overlord.

Among the JEL codes, Q57 is a more recent addition, lumped in with agricultural, natural resource, and environmental economics. In some respects, an official code represents a maturing of the field, a legitimization of ecological economics as a worthy subject area. However, the JEL designation also implies a specialization within economics, not a reframing of economics. Q57 has come to represent the mainstreaming of ecological economics, most prominently the idea that nature’s services should be assigned an economic value and lumped in with all other economic consumption. When I joined the ecological economics tribe nearly three decades ago, I thought I was signing on to a revolution to upend the economization of everything. More recently, I fear we have succumbed to a worldview we were meant to challenge and replace.

In articulating the kind of economics (and economists!) I think the world needs, I have revisited some of the original aspirations of ecological economics. Books such as For the Common Good (1989) by Herman Daly and John Cobb inspired a generation to question the dominant economic worldview and work toward a vision expressed in their own subtitle, “Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future.” They provided another link in a long chain of thought that asks for humility in the face of uncertainty, reverence for the majesty of life, and courage to fight for justice.

But today we are long past the need for merely “redirecting.” Interdependent economic and environmental systems are unraveling worldwide. Neocolonial empires built on the exploitation of people and planet have run their course. Climate instability, mass extinction, and unprecedented inequality are the results. In response, the mainstream of economics has doubled down on an illusion of progress with the fate of humanity and life on Earth in the balance.

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But preparations to reclaim our future are under way. A new story is emerging that unpacks the human-centered narrative of modernity, reveals the ecocidal pact of the status quo, and advocates for a less trodden path of compassion and care. A new economics is being forged from a critical look at history, renewed alliances with the natural sciences, and a new social contract for education. A new economy is evolving from the diversity of voices and life experiences beyond the failures of a winner-takes-all society and the ashes of mainstream ideology.

We have the will. I hope sharing my own journey can help illuminate the way. Thanks for sharing the ride.

CHAPTER 1

The Education of an Economist

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for a lack of a better word, is good.

—Gordon Gekko, Wall Street I graduated from high school in 1987, the Year of the Gekko. My classmates and I set aside our boyhood dreams of becoming the adventurous Michael Douglas who won the heart of Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone and turned our teenage idolatry toward his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a role that defined the go-go ’80s. The “greed is good” speech impaled our teenage brains, and every young man in my graduating class was encouraged to do the same thing: Study economics, major in business, and make lots of money.

Reporting from the New York Stock Exchange in a 1987 special for NBC News on “Money, Greed, Power,” Tom Brokaw reflected on the turning point in America when greed became an asset and morality a liability. When Michael Lewis published Liar’s Poker two years later, a best-selling exposé of the excesses and culture of Wall Street, a generation of twenty-somethings had already drunk the Kool-Aid. More money was the goal, and the gateway to enlightenment was Econ 101.

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Business programs and degrees exploded in the ’80s, with freshman economics at the base of the boom. Nearly 60 percent of the high school class of 1982 who went on to college registered for principles of micro and macroeconomics, surpassed only by enrollment in freshman composition and general psychology, the only courses over the 50 percent mark.1 My guess is the class of ’87 was north of 70 percent. Economics had become essential to degrees in business and engineering but also core to a liberal arts and science education. By the end of the decade, millions of young minds were armed and ready to conquer the world.

My own decision about what to study in college went something like this: “Pop, what should I study in college?” “Son, if you want to make money, study business and economics.” “Thanks, Pop.” It was all so appealing to our hormone-induced, ignorance-is-bliss modus operandi, especially among young men. Econ 101 presented a world order with a singular objective: Consume. The individual was king, and money was the object of our desire. The rules were laid out in straightforward equations. At the intersection of the “laws” of supply and demand, X always marked the spot.

Economics also fit an American patriotism under which we were raised: our pledge of allegiance to free markets to win the Cold War. Throughout our childhood, we imagined long bread lines behind a mysterious Berlin Wall. Doctors and janitors working for the same menial wages. A Soviet Union draped in gray and black. In America, you could buy anything, anywhere, at any time. Our duty to country was to be good consumers. Gone were motivations beyond the self. Community was a marketplace, and votes were in dollars. My high school army recruiter’s pitch comes to mind, as I was implored to join the military not to serve my country but to earn some money to “buy a black Trans Am.” Principles of economics were seen as foundational to ordered, logical, rational thinking. For the business student, micro and macro was the prerequisite to marketing, accounting, and finance. How do we get

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more people to consume? Marketing. How do we tally our efforts?

Accounting. How do we pay for it all? Finance. And for the English or biology or political science or any other liberal arts and science major, economics became the social science elective to make sense of our side in the Cold War. Econ 101 tells a story of the unlimited wants of individuals, in a world of limited means owned by the same. On the supply side, people are atomized as production units (L for labor), and all other means of production are reduced to capital (K, a never spoken tribute to Das Kapital by Marx). L and K combine in a mathematical equation to produce Q (output). Simple. On the demand side, what is produced is unimportant as long as it meets demand and provides an amorphous pleasure called “utility.” Because we can’t measure utility directly, it’s equated with consumption of all that Q, weighted by market prices (P ). The joy of consumption does not distinguish between needs and wants. We need only concern ourselves with anonymous Qs, produced by Ls and Ks, valued by Ps, by the owners of the Ls and Ks. This circular economics worldview was built on a persona that has come to be known as Homo economicus, a caricature of human behavior that describes a self-maximizing, isolated individual at a point in time— what Thorstein Veblen described in 1898 as a “homogeneous globule of desire.” In a free society, the globules own their own L. In a capitalist society, some also own their own K. The consumption choices of one globule aren’t to be compared with those of another. And because the wants of each glob are assumed insatiable, the world will always need more Q (at least for those with the willingness and ability to pay the P).

To make more Q, we’d better have more L and K, or, better yet, squeeze every last drop of Q from our resources through technology. If K can do it better than L, so be it. After all, K doesn’t demand raises, sleep at night, get a virus, or whine about healthcare. K can also be hired and fired without a hint of guilty conscience. To keep this system growing

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only requires new investment in K (L sold separately). Where does investment come from? Savings. Who saves the most? Rich people. The conclusion: We’d better make sure the wealthy globules keep those hardwon dollars, especially the ones who own the K. In the education of the economist, each step of abstraction into a world of Ps, Qs, Ls, and Ks removes us further and further from the context of societies of people, cooperating under mutual interest, entirely dependent on each other and our environment. In an economic worldview, the social and eco spheres are deemphasized with the goal— to quote Grover Norquist, one of the architects of today’s conservative movement—to shrink government “down to a size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Who knows better what to do with your labor and capital: you or the government?

So the logical conclusion is to shrink government and cut taxes, especially on the wealthy capital owners (a.k.a. the job creators). As the story goes, it’s the rich who will take care of everyone—not out of any benevolence for the commoners but simply as a side effect of pursuing their own self-interest. As Adam Smith put it, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

In the go-go ’80s, the baker became the banker, and we were told that cutting taxes on capital gains would bring a rising tide to lift all boats (fortified yachts and leaky life rafts alike). It was Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations on steroids, without the ethical constraint of his forgotten 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments. Gone was the inspiration of my parents’ youth, when President Kennedy was inaugurated on a call to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” As we went off to college in the Year of the Gekko, the Reagan revolution told us, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

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What about ethics? Law? Science? Surely my generation learned more than economics, marketing, and finance. Surely other disciplines challenged economic hegemony. Surely institutions of “higher” learning were chartered to do more than produce new consumers. All true, but a truly “world” view accounts for all challengers.

With ethics, an economic worldview provides an internal framework where it’s ethical to be greedy. After all, one person’s greed to consume is another’s paycheck to produce. Prosperity for all, by posterity of none.

Under an ethic of avarice, any restriction on the right to more stuff was an assault on our basic liberties. Citizen was consumer. Obligation was to self. Laws in defense of our constitutional right to private property were tolerated. Others were branded “regulations” to be drowned in Norquist’s bathtub. If consumers want clean air and clear water, fine, let them demand it in the marketplace. Producers will follow the dollar.

Entrepreneurs will save the world.

There could be no losers in a truly free market because everyone was permitted to vote with their wallet. No bread lines because the natural state of free markets was equilibrium. The part of the demand curve where people couldn’t afford to buy was never discussed. The quite explicit assumption was that free markets lead to lopsided outcomes only because of lopsided effort. Gekko’s “greed for life, for money, for love” was what our founding fathers must have meant by “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Democratic freedom was code for free markets, and the price of entry was hard work and entrepreneurship by red-blooded, self-made Americans.

With an internal ethic and legal scaffolding that feigned first principles of constitutional democracy, economics departments and business programs could elbow out any dissent from other “humanistic” pursuits of knowledge. But the success of economics also lay in its claim to be the “most scientific of the social sciences,” to quote the majority view of a survey of economics graduate students.2 An economic worldview could

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beat back competition from ethics, law, and political science through a game of “my theory is more popular than yours.” However, to take on the sciences would require camouflage, not competition.

And so economics draped itself in mathematics, claiming an adherence to the scientific method through elegant proofs. The education of the economist is a journey into the depths of abstraction. It starts in such innocence, with linear graphs of demand and supply curves settling into predictable market equilibrium. After Econ 101, add a little calculus to get your smart on. Same story, but now we can solve for X in what seems more and more like hard science.

The ultimate prize for the professional economist is the PhD, where only the most mathematically dogmatic ascend to the heights of abstraction. Qualifying examinations in graduate school are like Catholic catechism: Memorize, regurgitate, repeat. Only the faithful shall pass and ultimately defend dissertations judged by the high priests of the Econ tribe. Intelligence is measured by publishing proofs with the full force of the Greek alphabet, backed by the faith in market equilibrium sketched by hand on the very first quiz in Econ 101.

The education of an economist is soup to nuts, and the PhD degree is the key to power and glory. Since 1946, it has been credentialed economists who sit at the right hand of the US president on the Council of Economic Advisers. Since 1969, credentialed economists have been given Nobel prizes (well, sort of ), a “memorial” prize added outside the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, bought and paid for by the central bank of Sweden.3 And since the Reagan revolution, economics as a worldview has dominated our politics, our communities, and our sense of self.

Stanford economist Edward Lazear, chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers at the onset of the Great Recession, concluded in his article “Economic Imperialism” that economics is “not only a social science, it is a genuine science.”4 Professor Lazear finds his brethren’s use of the “construct of rational individuals who engage in

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maximizing behavior,” models that “adhere strictly to the importance of equilibrium,” and a “focus on efficiency” to be the “ingredients” that “have allowed economics to invade intellectual territory that was previously deemed to be outside the discipline’s realm.” Translation: Greed is good, markets are the path to societal perfection, and economists have an objective truth rule of efficiency by which all decisions can be judged.

This “Superiority of Economists,” as described with tongue in cheek

by Berkeley sociologist Marion Fourcade, who has studied our academic species, is reinforced by established hierarchy within the field and a “high market demand for services, particularly from powerful and wealthy parties.”5 Fourcade points to evidence that 40 percent of the income of economists publishing in finance and industrial organizations comes from consulting activities with business and government.6 To defend this privileged position in society, the caretakers of the field come largely from the top-ranked economics departments (based on citations of each other’s work), where they vote themselves onto boards of academic journals and associations and hire each other’s graduate students.7 This study of economists explains much of what I experienced in my graduate economics classes at Cornell University, an Ivy League department with the big five (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Chicago, and Stanford) in its crosshairs. This position of superiority was clear from the swagger and contempt from my professors for competing views of the world, fostering an isolationism unlike any other field. In a survey of “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” economics stands out as the only field where a majority (57.3 percent) disagree with the statement, “In general, interdisciplinary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained by a single discipline.”8 We were taught not to question authority, which for a field built on the ideology of “free” markets is more than a bit ironic. Acceptance was the secret to passing economics examinations. Classes in history, ethics, and (especially) natural science were often at odds with economic theory,

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so we were taught to not bother with collaboration because we are the superior race. More than in any other field, economists largely cite other economists.9 Authors in prestigious journals (measured by the number of citations) cite articles from the same prestigious journals. Any cross-disciplinary research is inevitably dominated by the “superior” view of the “collaborating” economist; otherwise, it wouldn’t get published and cited in a prestigious journal (with an editorial board culled from the top few departments). In economics, academic incest is always and everywhere rewarded.

Our elite forces of PhD-wielding economists are then taught to spread the love. Parts of sociology, political science, and psychology have been colonized by economics, especially through rational choice theory. How should we model the sociology of family relations, child rearing, or marriage choice? Utility maximization. How should we judge the merits of political structures, rules, and regulations? Cost–benefit analysis. How do individuals behave when faced with choices? Rationally, weighing the next cost with the next benefit of each action.

Even fields outside the social sciences have succumbed to this economic worldview. Today a conservation biologist is likely to argue for species and habitat protection in terms of dollars and cents rather than endangerment and extinction. To be taken seriously, a climate scientist must make the economic case for reducing greenhouse gas emissions alongside physical models of the Earth system. Economics can even tally what the Earth is worth to humans: $33 trillion and change according to a 1997 study published in the leading science journal Nature.10 There really is no boundary recognized by economists to “thinking like an economist.” The discipline’s self-confidence hit new highs in 1992 when the University of Chicago’s Gary Becker landed a Nobel “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.”11 Professor Becker pushed the rational actor model into inquiry on

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discrimination, family organization, crime, and drug addiction. Popular trade books followed, from The Armchair Economist (1993) to Freakonomics (2005), promoting economic puzzle solving from the ordinary to the outrageous. Best-selling textbooks for Econ 101 promoted “economic naturalism” to explain the world.12 As the freakonomists claim, “If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.”13 When any decision can be lumped into costs and benefits, measured by dollars and cents, there’s no stopping economic logic. The Earth is K, people are L, and making more Q is the game. As Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling describe in a law review article on “Pricing the Priceless,” the extension of economic cost–benefit analysis into public policy undermines “the fundamental equality of all citizens.”14 They cite a study on “Cigarette Taxation and the Social Consequences of Smoking,” by Harvard professor Kip Viscusi, that concludes smoking will save states money because smokers die younger, suggesting that “cigarette smoking should be subsidized rather than taxed.” Considering the high cost of caring for an aging population, the “economic” logic is impeccable.

Why stop with valuing the life of a smoker? In a study published in the Southern Economic Journal, economists Paul Carlin and Robert Sandy use estimates of time saved by mothers when improperly fastening their children into car seats for “Estimating the Implicit Value of a Young Child’s Life.”15 Time saved multiplied by a mother’s presumed wage rate yields a “willingness to pay” estimate of a “statistical child’s life” of about $500,000 at the time. Other economists have asked similar questions, using the cost of raising a child or discounted lifetime earnings to measure the economic benefits of regulating air pollution to reduce deaths from asthma or banning lead in our water to protect against mental retardation.

In the end, the education of the economist is complete when all ethical or scientific qualms are set aside. What’s left is a carefully molded, rational,

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dispassionate, objective truth seeker to rationally appraise the economic costs and benefits of each new action (the past is of no consequence), to dispassionately consider the preferences of each individual as worthy and right (no judgment on necessity vs. luxury allowed), and to objectively seek the preordained truth that only markets can allocate resources efficiently (those without buying power need only work harder).

This is what generations of economists have preached and practiced, reinforced by a self-confidence that echoes throughout our consumer society. Most PhDs, are men, shaping collaborations that are inevitably influenced by patterns of gender difference and power relations in society.16 White men in black suits line the halls of Congress, forge political campaigns, direct public policy decisions, advise titans of industry, expound opinions on editorial pages, parachute into the Global South to spread the good word, and teach the next generation of followers.

Thousands of credentialed economists, lording over millions inoculated with Econ 101, build global acceptance of a singular worldview.

v The deeper I dug, the more I questioned, pushed back, and felt like a round peg in a square hole. Although my father’s seemingly practical advice to go forth and make money certainly fit the world around me, in my heart of hearts I was my mother’s child. My mom raised my two younger brothers and me in a single-parent home on a preschool teacher’s salary. My sense of justice came from watching her struggle to make ends meet while always looking out for those less fortunate. Our social circle included families living in economic chaos, including abused women sleeping on our couch and childhood friends born into generational poverty. Struggling families were some of the hardest-working people I knew, but the promise of economic freedom through the “just work harder” motto always seemed to be out of reach.

My mother also nurtured a deep reverence for our natural world.

We fished, hiked, biked, sledded, skied, and otherwise spent our lives

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outdoors. My boyhood was spent building forts in the forest and fields known as “the trails” at the edge of our working-class suburb. Boy Scouts followed Cub Scouts. Summer weeks at YMCA camp. Winter months skiing on local hills. My brothers and I learned that we were not separate from the natural world but born of the very soil, rock, water, and air around us. These lessons from my mother haunted me during the economics classes recommended by my father.

I remember distinctly, as a junior at Cornell, sitting in Professor Will Provine’s evolutionary biology class in the afternoon, trying to come to terms with Professor Robert Frank’s microeconomics theory class from that morning. Over breakfast, I flexed my math muscles, assuming the role of Veblen’s unhuman “lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift about the area, but leave him intact.”

After lunch, I was confronted with a rich history of humanity rooted in biology, interacting with other species, and dependent on the environment and each other, our morality evolving through the social interactions of our primate branch of the family tree.

In Professor Provine’s class I learned that Charles Darwin was a contemporary of the “classical” economists (men like Malthus, Mill, and Ricardo), and they borrowed ideas from one another back in the day. The only economist we ever heard of across campus was a prophet named Adam Smith who published the biblical Wealth of Nations in 1776, the same year our founding fathers (who must have been economists, right?) signed the Declaration of Independence. It turns out Smith wasn’t called an “economist” in his day. He was a “moral philosopher.” Blasphemy.

I didn’t learn this in my economics classes because much of economics was taught ahistorically. Why learn about past ideas, debates, or schools of thought when the mathematical perfection of the neoclassical model was before us? But Professor Provine, teaching with joint appointments in history and ecology, got me thinking. When I stumbled across John

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Kenneth Galbraith’s Economics in Perspective in a used-book sale, I couldn’t resist. Here was a Harvard professor and advisor to presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, who outright rejected the abstraction from reality of his profession. As I thumbed through his work, I read that “economic ideas are always and intimately a product of their own time and place; they cannot be seen apart from the world they interpret.”

Hmmm. Perhaps economic theory in an age of cheap and abundant fossil fuels need not concern itself with the environment. Perhaps a model that atomized people would predictably promote policies that, well, atomized people. Perhaps a society with an ethic of consumption would grow to accept a measure of a statistical life as the hypothetical wage of a mother’s saved time while improperly buckling up her kid.

In reading economic history, I discovered that the classical economists of the 1700s and 1800s were careful to separate out land in their production function, alongside capital and labor. In the time and place of cleric-turned-economist Thomas Malthus, economic value was thought to come from labor working the land with capital. Inputs into a production process were viewed as complements to one another, always and everywhere used together. Sure, better technology could substitute for land and labor, but only to a point. Smith’s baker could bake more bread with a better oven, but he’d always need more wheat for flour and fuel for heat. It was the agricultural surplus—all the extra food from farmers—that made all other economic activity and trade possible. In his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population” Malthus lamented, “The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

Hmmm. The core of “neo”-classical economics had stripped out land as a factor of production. A Malthusian tragedy simply wasn’t possible on paper. At the heights of the US environmental movement, the

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American Economic Association’s 1969 reader on welfare economics by Stanford professors Kenneth Arrow and Tibor Scitovsky had no reference to the environment or the capacity of the Earth “to produce subsistence for man.” As the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire (again) in 1969, economists pointed to side notes in textbooks that recognized “Pigouvian externalities,” exceptions to the rule of market efficiency that could be “corrected” in supply curves through technology or demand curves through changing consumer tastes. In the 1973 Ely Lecture of the American Economic Association, Nobel laureate and MIT growth theorist Robert Solow, speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek about the power of technical substitution in the neoclassical model, noted, “The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe.”

By the 1970s, labor was also hard pressed for attention as a capital theory of growth prevailed. Even the focus on capital diminished into the ’80s under the Chicago School. Attention was turned instead to getting the conditions right for a general equilibrium model: a web of markets all brought into balance through rational actors reacting to free-floating prices. University of Chicago economists asked, “How do we get the real world to match the conditions of our models?” Stripped away from regulations and government, free markets could take care of themselves. And what’s true in the physical realm of widgets must hold for the financial realm of money. By 1990, the Nobel prize was shared by three financial economists: Professor Markowitz on “micro theory of portfolio management for individual wealth holders,” Professor Miller on “contributions in the field of corporate finance,” and Professor Sharpe on “a general theory for the pricing of financial assets.”

The econ superheroes had figured out how to make something from nothing—financial asset valuation—and the class of ’87 from the Year of the Gekko took notice. I enrolled in finance classes at Cornell and played stock trading games with real-time tickers from Wall Street, just

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like in the movie. We were bused from College Street to Wall Street to take in the full majesty of the trading floor. I wiggled my way into MBA classes and learned to write business plans and compete in case competitions. I watched graduating seniors land six-figure offers. Go forth, young man, study economics, major in business, make lots of money.

My dad was right.

Yet my mom’s voice lingered in my subconscious, and that damn evolutionary biology class gnawed at my sense of a real world out of reach of economists. I couldn’t help but wonder who else was thinking about the implications of magical production functions with no matter and no energy to run the economy. Easy-bake cash ovens with no resources and no waste. An economy sketched as a circular flow diagram with firms on one side, households on the other, and the sum of exchange in dollars as the goal. An isolated economic system with its own set of rules in direct conflict with the biophysical world and outright hostile to the social.

At Cornell, economic education was everywhere. Consumer economics in the College of Human Ecology, labor economics in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, business economics in the School of Business Administration, agricultural economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and, of course, straight-up economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. No matter the subdiscipline, we were inoculated with economic theory in the economics department, but there were many choices of subject matter to which to apply our new craft.

Back when I applied to Cornell, the decision of which economics flavor to study had been easy. The Department of Agricultural Economics was housed on the public side of the university and so was much, much cheaper. Sold. So when I found myself struggling to build bridges between the life sciences and social sciences, I had a somewhat sympathetic support group in my home department. These were economists who had to at least consider soil and water. Some actually grew up on farms and now shared a corner of campus with plant scientists, forest

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ecologists, and climatologists. And there was even a class called “natural resource and environmental economics,” which seemed to be just the bridge I was searching for.

v Professor Duane Chapman didn’t look like an economist. Unkempt hair, untrimmed beard, and a quiet demeanor that conveyed anything but the “superiority of economists” I had experienced across campus.

His research and writing centered on problems, not theories, such as air pollution, acid rain legislation, nuclear waste management, mining impacts, and oil depletion. Economics was presented more as a tool and less a worldview. Insights from economic models were held up against physics, chemistry, and biology. The influence of power, politics, and privilege on economic function and form were the undertones of the world according to Duane. He had studied economics at Berkeley in the ’60s, and his inner hippie often shone through.

Dispassionate reason was still an aspiration in Duane’s world, but the boundaries were expanded beyond the circular flow diagram of dollars for widgets. In natural resource economics, I discovered a line of inquiry that reached back to classical economics, reinserting land into the production function, along with coal, oil, minerals, timber, fish, crops, and other natural resources that fed the economic machine. The economy was sustained by flows from the Earth and sun, and the resource economist’s job was to keep the engine tuned and well fed.

At the other end was the tailpipe, and in “environmental” economics I found a newer focus on the externalities of the free market system. Economists had dusted off Arthur Pigou’s Economics of Welfare, first published in 1920, to make the obvious case that markets left unchecked would consider only private costs and benefits. Costs such as pollution were imposed on the public at large, not tallied in the ledgers of a company, and should therefore be estimated and included in the price of goods and services through—dare I say it—government

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regulation. Environmental economics was born on the heels of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, and scrambled to catch up with new laws to clean our water and air, protect endangered species, and balance development with conservation.

Duane’s class situated the economy as an intermediary between resource extraction and pollution emission, a bridge I sought between the natural sciences and social sciences. Questions over limits to growth now arose as we read reports from the Club of Rome and ran simulations with the World3 computer model. We learned of long-held criticisms of gross domestic product as a measure of society’s welfare (the holy grail in our macroeconomics classes). We were introduced to the Brundtland Report, the 1987 publication of the World Commission on Environment and Development that popularized the concept “sustainable development.”

Most classes left me with more questions than answers. A sustainable economy, designed with the UN Commission’s goal to “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” called into question an allegiance to consumption, a morality of greed, and a limitless frontier. Shit, now what? I could feel my teenage dreams of a career in high finance slip away.

I must have made an impression through my endless questions.

Duane asked if I ever thought about graduate school, probably just to get me out the door one day. Sure, I’d work a few years after graduation, get some business chops, then do my MBA and head to Wall Street— my go-to answer since high school. Had I thought about a master’s of science instead, a degree with a research thesis that would pay my way?

My thought process went something like this: “Go to school for free, are you kidding me? Where do I sign up?”

The summer between BS and MS I was hired to read, think, and write—the first time I had earned a paycheck outside flipping burgers or mowing laws. My research project was the economics of climate

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change. This was the perfect project for a morally conflicted twentyone-year-old: a charge to unpack the mysterious equations under the hood of coupled climate–economy models. The central conclusion of economists studying climate change in the ’80s and ’90s was that global warming was good (or at least not too bad) for the economy. Unlike my economics courses to date, Duane coached me to accept nothing at face value, especially from economists.

So I set aside Liar’s Poker and dove into The End of Nature, the first book by a Harvard-educated twenty-something named Bill McKibben who was all the rage. Writing for a general audience, McKibben made the eye-popping claim that nature was dead. With the pen of a poet and insight of an atmospheric scientist, he argued that nature as pristine, separate from human interference, no longer existed on a planet where we were transforming the global climate system. The world was indeed our oyster, and we were boiling it.

McKibben had authored my generation’s Silent Spring, a renewed call to pay attention to science and act with haste. Rachel Carson’s writing ushered in a decade of sweeping environmental policy, from the 1963 Clean Air Act to the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The environmental movement for McKibben was now global, and NASA’s James Hansen had rung the alarm bells in his historic testimony to the US Senate in 1988. By the 1992 publication of Senator Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, politics was catching up to science, and twelve years of profits over planet under Reaganomics was under assault. In a heated presidential election year, the Bush administration had just exempted itself from our Endangered Species Act in the notorious “God Squad” hearings over spotted owl habitat, and a US delegation was met with global disdain at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

As I peeled back the layers of how economists were considering climate change, the disconnect between the science of Earth systems and a religion of economic systems came into focus. Economists such as Yale

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University’s William Nordhaus treated climate change as a cost–benefit analysis at a global scale. His Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model (a.k.a. DICE) was a simple utility maximization problem centered around a representative agent, a single human representing the consumer preferences for all humanity. This particular homogenous globule got pleasure from consumption and pain from paying to reduce greenhouse gases. A perfectly predictable warming climate system hurt the global production of more things to consume. Technology was modeled as manna from Heaven, an automatic bonus of a growing economy that would make more and more stuff with less and less waste. To “optimize” pollution reduction, the hypothetical utility maximizer evaluated sacrificing more consumption today against an investment that might pay off tomorrow, all assuming an annual “discount rate” that made the future much, much less valuable than the present.

The conclusion from “rolling the DICE,” as Nordhaus was apt to describe model runs, was simple: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions had known costs today and unknown benefits in the future. If industrialized countries were to do anything, it should be small reductions that made sense for other reasons, such as saving money on your energy bill (what came to be known as a “no regrets” climate change policy under the Bush administration). And most of the smoothly increasing, perfectly predictable impacts were assumed to happen to agriculture. In a National Academy of Sciences study, Professor Nordhaus concluded, “Agriculture, the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change, accounts for just 3 percent of national output. This means there is no way to get a very large effect on the US economy.”17 As with any other economic output, food was valued at the margin. The United States could just substitute less food for more of something else, or perhaps import food in trade for something else. This sort of economic logic could get you a Nobel! In fact, it did in 2018.

The superiority of economists was at play, and their political advisees liked what they heard. Scientists were deemed “irrational” under an

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economic worldview. They didn’t account for faith in markets to forever improve technology, belief in human ingenuity to adapt to a changing climate, and reliance on infinite economic growth to pay for it all. Economic models included clairvoyant farmers who would adopt new cultivars, shift crop mixes, or simply sell the farm and do something else with their L and K under a new climate. And the representative utility maximizer averaged out the Manhattanites safe behind a new seawall with the Bangladeshi refugees fleeing a flooded nation.

My master’s thesis research ended up challenging this reigning economic dogma on climate change on both scientific and ethical fronts.

I worked with plant scientists to call into question climate–economy models that assumed higher levels of carbon dioxide would accelerate plant growth, so-called CO2 fertilization. This was certainly true in controlled greenhouse experiments, behind the glass where water, nutrients, and temperature were optimized. However, take away these assumptions under in-field conditions of drought, pests, heat, and weather variability, and model outputs turn from pretty good to really bad for agriculture.

Certainly more honest science could build more realistic models to inform better decisions. Climate–economy models were improving all the time, but there was a party line that seemed baked into model conclusions. Statistician George Box was often quoted in my modeling classes: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” But I started to ask, “Useful for whom, and for what purpose?”

I published “From Ecology to Economics: The Case against CO2 Fertilization,” in an up-and-coming journal called Ecological Economics, my first publication.18 The first sentence of the conclusion laid out my chicken-and-egg hypothesis: “Funding from the US Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Energy has clearly pushed for modeling the maximum benefits from CO2 fertilization.” Then I got a bit snarky further down the page: “Relying on CO2 fertilization to fertilize the world’s agriculture is analogous

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to relying on your car’s exhaust to fertilize your home garden.” Why weren’t the confounding factors of pests, water and nutrient availability, and the plant-killing pollutants that came along with CO2 considered?

My concluding paragraph was completely off script from the economist-in-training handbook: Concluding on a moral note, CO2 fertilization is more of a justification for fossil fuel dependence than an interpretation of ecological reality. The profile of this dependence reveals one-fourth of the world’s population consuming three-fourths of the world’s energy.

The fires of fossil fuels have left the few with the riches of industrialization, and the many with the externalities of their use. Glorifying the emissions of CO2 as benefiting the world’s agriculture supports the status quo of vast inequalities between nations, avoids pertinent policy decisions on mitigation and adaptation, and hampers efforts for global commitment to preservation and sustainability. Misinterpreting the risks of tomorrow can only devalue the prevention efforts of today.

A peer-reviewed journal with “economics” in its title actually published this drivel. Who were these peers? I didn’t know it at the time, but I had discovered a like-minded community of economists who didn’t let their training get in the way of science fact and moral reason.

v I defended my master’s thesis the month the Clinton/Gore team won the White House. My foray into climate–economy models left me disenchanted with all flavors of economics, environmental or otherwise.

Integration of the environment into economics had seemed promising.

But the dominant economic worldview still, well, dominated. Economy was the mother, environment the daughter. All seemed upside down.

How could environment be born of—embedded within—economy?

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Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Was anyone thinking about economics as a life science, built on an edifice of physics, chemistry, and biology? Was an economic worldview somehow more deeply flawed, not to be rescued by simply drawing boundaries around the system a bit wider? Now what?

Duane offered me a shot at redemption: funding for a PhD in . . . more economics. My wife had just been accepted into Cornell’s veterinary college (yes, I was married with kids at twenty-one), and we were committed to Ithaca for another four years. She had a plan. I had Duane. Get paid to learn and defer my student loans a bit longer. Sure, where do I sign up?

The PhD was a different animal all together. The first year was pure economic theory and abstract mathematics in the economics department, followed by a comprehensive examination. The prize for passing was to continue in your home department. Fail, and a master’s degree was the end of the road. In my crop, half got the booby prize.

I survived through a newfound talent: a photographic memory. Not perfect, but enough to memorize math proofs and regurgitate equations to mind-numbing questions. If you imagined real people with real struggles behind the alphas and betas, symbols and signs, you wouldn’t survive. Abstraction was both the tool and goal of the education of an economist. In hindsight, we were dumbed down by being made to feel brilliant.

The grand plan had the opposite effect on me. The more mathematics I mastered, the more stupid I felt. I went in search of ammunition, not from without but from within. Many had attacked the economics armada from outside the profession, including scientists such as Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich, Dartmouth’s Donella Meadows, and Cornell’s David Pimentel, to name a few. But who was mounting a mutiny from onboard?

With eyes wide open, it’s amazing what you find. In a free book pile in Warren Hall, I stumbled across Economics, Ecology, Ethics: Essays Toward

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a Steady-State Economy, edited by Herman Daly. Working from within the heart of the mainstream, a senior economist at the World Bank had published a collection of essays pushing for a properly sized and justly shared economy. The laws of physics were cast as central to the economic problem. Theologians framed economic choice with moral ends.

And Daly himself made the case for “Economics as a Life Science” in a reprint from his Journal of Political Economy article from 1968. Apparently, he had been inciting the mutiny for some time.

In Daly, I discovered a member of the high priesthood turned mutineer. He had studied with Romanian economist Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen, whose 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process was heralded as a masterpiece by apostles and traitors alike. With theologian John Cobb, Daly wrote For the Common Good in 1989, a book that helped frame an “ecological” economics formalized with colleagues that same year through a new professional society and academic journal. His stint at the World Bank from 1988 to 1994 helped institutionalize sustainability and began to wean the development agenda away from GDP growth as the singular metric of success.

In a fit of rebellion, I declared myself an ecological economist. Academics like to split hairs over names, but the significance of an “ecological” economics to me was its overt challenge to the mainstream.

My graduate classes in environmental and natural resource economics seemed like mere servants to the master, where the market could be fixed simply by getting the prices right. With ecological economics, it felt like I was joining an insurgence that was finally coming of age.

As good mentors are apt to do, Duane insisted I make the case. He was writing a new textbook on environmental economics and challenged me to write a concluding chapter that would cast doubt on the previous eighteen. I accepted, and my doctoral dissertation was now teed up, as were my job talks for the interviews to come. When I saw an ad recruiting an ecological economist in the Department of Economics

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at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), perhaps the first such opening at a university anywhere in the world, the door opened wide for me to join fellow conscientious objectors to economic rule.

At RPI we set out to build the world’s first doctoral program in the field. I joined John Gowdy (also a student of Georgescu-Roegen) and Sabine O’Hara (a German economist with roots in the growing European ecological economics movement). Our aim was to topple the mainstream from the halls of America’s oldest engineering college. In subsequent years I helped found the US Society for Ecological Economics; served on the board of our international society; authored and co-authored the requisite number of papers and books to get tenure and then a full professorship; worked with some of the pioneers in our field, including Herman Daly; and went on to manage the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.

Mine is not an extraordinary career by any stretch of the imagination but rather the intentional outcome of renegades who seeded a new path for the education of an economist. When ecological economics was formalized, new grads like me were supposed to be hatched. This book is ultimately a reflection on my own successes and failures during this stage of a broader movement to educate a new generation of economists.

Like others before me, I followed the bandwagon at the advice of my father but got disillusioned along the way with the good sense of my mother. A teenager of the ’80s, student of the ’90s, and teacher of millennials today, I’m of a generation now coming to terms with the mantra of “greed is good” in our family, work, community, and political lives.

We were not an aberration in our faith in economics to illuminate the way but the beginning of a current wave. The power and stature of economics have only grown, particularly as the dominant worldview of a growing financial sector. By 2006, the size of the financial industry as a share of the US economy had more than doubled since the Year of the Gekko, hitting the too-big-to-fail heights of over 8 percent just before

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the Great Recession. The sector’s share of all US profits grew to as high as 40 percent—yes, 40 percent of all profits from 8 percent of the economy. Between 1980 and 2006, the US GDP increased fivefold while financial sector profits increased sixteen times over.19 The higher education boot camp was all too happy to produce soldiers of finance. The Ivy League to Wall Street pipeline grew leaps and bounds. By 2006, 46 percent of jobs landed by Princeton grads were in the financial services. Yale and Harvard placed one in four of their 2006 class in finance.20 By 2012, the most popular bachelor’s degree nationwide was business, more than twice the number of graduates in the other social sciences and humanities combined, each with Econ 101 at the base of their learning pyramid.21 Business is now the most popular master’s degree in the United States, surpassing education for the title.22 Millions of magical thinkers, wielding business and economics degrees, are now among us. And Econ 101 features prominently on the freshman transcripts of millions more. In USA Today ’s June 2014 “Surviving College” section, the headline read, “5 classes every college student should take (no matter what your major).” At the top of the list is the finance– accounting–business management triad, with principles of economics serving as the prerequisite gatekeeper. Surviving college for many, now, requires an economics inoculation.

Today I see the conflict in my own students’ eyes, a struggle similar to my own with social norms of consumer over citizen, market over community, growth over development, and discipline over unity. Our entire consumer society has come of age in the Anthropocene, the term many scientists now call our human-dominated geological epoch. Naming the Anthropocene could be yet another sign of human hubris, a false sense of planetary domination achieved by destroying the only home we’ve ever known. Or this could be the beginning of a grand reconciliation project, between each other and all forms of life with whom we share the Earth.

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I’m convinced that economics as currently taught and practiced throughout the world is a planetary path to ruin, but there are obvious cracks in the castle walls. I’m certainly not the first to see the economic fortress straining under its own weight and delusions, and I won’t be the last. But perhaps my own awakening to the tragic myths of economics can deliver on the promise of my mentors and obligation to my children to be good ancestors and leave the world a bit better than we found it.

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EMBARK ON A JOURNEY THROUGH THE NATURAL AND HUMAN HISTORY OF THE WHITE PINE

White Pine The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree

Paperback | : $30.00 | 276 pages PUBLISHED: January 2023 ISBN: 9781642831412

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merica was built on white pine. From the 1600s through the Civil War and beyond, it was used to build the nation’s ships and houses, barns, and bridges. It became a symbol of independence, adorning the Americans’ flag at Bunker Hill,

and an economic engine, generating three times more wealth than the

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California gold rush. Yet this popularity came at a cost: by the end of the 19th century, clear-cutting had decimated much of America’s white pine forests. In White Pine: The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree, ecologist and writer John Pastor takes readers on walk through history, connecting the white pine forests

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that remain today to a legacy of destruction and renewal. Weaving together cultural and natural history with a keen naturalist’s eye, Pastor celebrates the way humans are connected to the forest–and to the larger natural world.

John Pastor

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ohn Pastor is an ecologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, where his teaching and research focused on the natural history and ecology of northern ecosystems. He is the author of What Should a Clever Moose Eat? and Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems, is co-editor of Large Mammalian

Herbivores, Ecosystem Dynamics, and Conservation, and has authored or coauthored 22 book chapters and over 120 papers, mostly about the North Woods. He is a past co-chair of the Natural History Section of the Ecological Society of America and founding editor of “The Scientific Naturalist” series in the journal Ecology.

Also available: What Should a Clever Moose Eat? Natural History, Ecology, and the North Woods John Pastor An evocative and innovative way to understand the natural world

Rainforest Dispatches from Earth’s Most Vital Frontlines Tony Juniper PAPERBACK(456 2019. 9781642830729.)

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Naturalist A Graphic Adaptation Edward O. Wilson, Adapted by Jim Ottaviani, Illustrated by C.M. Butzer E.O. Wilson’s bestselling memoir comes to life in a beautifully illustrated graphic adaptation.

Nature’s Allies Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World Larry A. Nielsen Eight illuminating biographies that inspire passion, persistence, and partnerships HARDCOVER 32.00 (272 2017. 9781610917957.)

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White Pine The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree

John Pastor

About Island Press

Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

Island Press designs and executes educational campaigns, in conjunction with our authors, to communicate their critical messages in print, in person, and online using the latest technologies, innovative programs, and the media. Our goal is to reach targeted audiences—scientists, policy makers, environmental advocates, urban planners, the media, and concerned citizens—with information that can be used to create the framework for long-term ecological health and human well-being.

Island Press gratefully acknowledges major support from The Bobolink Foundation, Caldera Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Forrest C. and Frances H. Lattner Foundation, The JPB Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Summit Charitable Foundation, Inc., and many other generous organizations and individuals.

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White Pine

White Pine THE NATURAL AND HUMAN HISTORY OF A FOUNDATIONAL AMERICAN TREE

John Pastor

© 2023 John Pastor All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934387

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keywords: Adirondack Forest Preserve, Algonquin, American Revolution, Bernard Fernow, blister rust, climate change, Civilian Conservation Corps, eastern white pine, ecology, evolution, fire ecology, forest, forest ecology, foundation species, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Perkins Marsh, George Washington National Forest, Gifford Pinchot, Henry David Thoreau, Hudson River School, Iroquois, John Muir, logging, lumber, Maine, Minnesota, mycorrhizae, natural history, Nature Conservancy, North Woods, red squirrel, resources management, silviculture, Smokey Bear, spruce, timber, United States Forest Service, Volney Spaulding, watershed, white pine, Wisconsin

For my granddaughter, Linnea Pastor

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.

John Muir

Contents Introduction

1

Chapter 1. The Evolution and Arrival of White Pine

9

Chapter 2. “A Great Store of Wood and Above All of Pines”

23

Chapter 3. A Logger’s Paradise

37

Chapter 4. Thoreau, the Maine Woods, Forest Succession, and Faith in a Seed

51

Chapter 5. The Watershed

67

Chapter 6. A Scientific Foundation of White Pine Ecology and Management

81

Chapter 7. Rusty Pines and Gooseberries

99

Chapter 8. Roosevelt’s Tree Army

111

Chapter 9. Rebirth by Fire

127

Chapter 10. Restoring the White Pine

143

Chapter 11. Climate Change and the Future of White Pine

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xii

contents

Afterword

167

Bibliography

171

Notes

189

About the Author

205

Index

207

CHAPTER 1

The Evolution and Arrival of White Pine There is a small old-growth stand of eastern white pine not far from my home in Duluth, Minnesota. It is just off Forest Highway 15 in the Superior National Forest, one of the oldest of our national forests. In the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness north of this stand, the Superior has many thousands more acres of old-growth white pine forests, but this particular stand encapsulates the history and characteristics of numerous remnant virgin pine forests scattered throughout the North Woods from here to Maine.

I walk into this stand and immediately my eyes travel up and up the straight, clear trunks of colossal trees, pillars touching the sky. Eighty or more feet above me, thick branches extend outward and flare gracefully upward at their tips. The hissing of the needles in the slight breeze makes a soft blanket of sound floating high overhead. A red squirrel perches on one of the branches and screeches sharp, staccato notes. A pileated woodpecker chisels large square holes, twice the size of a playing card, in a massive dead snag; it is foraging for carpenter ants quietly carving their galleries beneath the thick, corrugated, slate-gray bark. Down near the ground, the air enveloping me is soft and scented with needles, resin, 9

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and decaying humus. If smells can have a color, this forest smells deep, deep green. Light pours through gaps in the canopy and pools on the forest floor, where white pine seedlings soak it up. It is May, and bunchberry, twinflower, wintergreen, wild lily of the valley, wood anemone, rose twisted-stalk, and pipsissewa bloom profusely.

In a stand like this, there are many generations of pines, some living and some dead. Several generations of large trees, many of them centuries old, shade seedlings and saplings that have been growing a few years to decades. Some dead snags, perhaps even older than the oldest live trees, still stand. Massive trunks of down trees lie on the forest floor; as they slowly decay, they support soft gardens of mosses, lichens, and balsam fir seedlings. These ancient logs may have been rotting for centuries more than many of the live trees have been growing. Altogether, these generations of white pines may span a thousand years or more.

During the past thousand years, the changing climate of the earth has molded the character of this forest. Each generation of pines was born in a different climate. The trees now rotting into the forest floor lived out most of their lives during the Little Ice Age that ended 150 years ago.

The giants whose crowns graze the sky today were seedlings when the Little Ice Age ended in the early 1800s. Then the climate began to warm as the Industrial Revolution, fueled by coal and oil, started spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than the world’s forests, prairies, and oceans could take it up. Consequently, today’s seedlings will mature in a much different climate than that of their parents. During the coming decades, individuals with traits to survive heat and drought stress will transmit the genes for those traits to future generations; individuals without those traits will die.

Just as a changing climate over the past thousand years has shaped the development of this white pine stand, so have changes in the earth’s

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climate since the time of the last dinosaurs shaped the evolution of all pines. This particular stand is just one stage in the long journey of white pine to northern Minnesota, spanning over a hundred million years of evolution shaped by a changing climate and shifting tectonic plates.

The best definition of climate I have read is by Kate Marvel, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies: “a mess of air and water moving together and apart on a rotating sphere.”1 Air and water move together and apart because of the uneven distribution of heat on this rotating sphere we call Earth. Water separates from air when it condenses into raindrops or freezes into snow, sleet, or hail. It recombines with air when it evaporates or sublimates into water vapor. Air and water, in turn, move over the continents and oceans, which exchange water and heat with the atmosphere. The distributions and topographies of continents change as the plates that hold them drift across the earth and crash together to form mountains or separate to form oceans, all the while taking their inhabitants with them.2 These changes in the continents and oceans, in turn, affect climate.

The interlocking dynamics of continents, oceans, and climate constrain all of life and its evolution. Of particular interest for us, the distribution of water and heat across the earth determines where different plant species can live. The movement of air partly determines the dispersal of pollen and seeds across the land and therefore the migrations of future generations of plants, including trees, across that land. And the changing distribution and topography of the land determine where species can potentially migrate as the climate warms or cools or becomes wetter or drier.

Before we trace the evolutionary journey of pines, especially of white pine, in response to climate change and plate tectonics, we need to review how evolution works. Evolution is the cumulative change in the frequencies of traits in populations (groups of organisms that live in

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the same area and can breed with one another and produce viable offspring). The frequencies of traits in a population change down through many generations in response to the environment. It is important to remember that individuals do not evolve; populations evolve. Natural selection, a process first theorized by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, drives the long-term evolution and diversification of populations and ultimately species. A species is at least one population but more usually a collection of them, some separated from the others by geographic, behavioral, or other barriers yet still able to interbreed if the barriers were to be removed. The area that these populations occupy is known as the species’ range.

Natural selection relies on three things: First, individuals vary in the traits that allow them to survive and reproduce. Second, each generation inherits those traits from its parents. Third, some individuals possess traits that allow them to survive longer and pass more of their traits down to their offspring, so the frequency of their traits increases in future generations while the frequencies of traits of other individuals less well adapted to the environment they find themselves in decline.

Variability and heritability of traits that result in differential survival and reproduction is natural selection in a nutshell. Individuals of the next generation might mate with other individuals with other traits that also allow them to survive and reproduce better. As a consequence, generation by generation, a population becomes increasingly better adapted to its environment by accumulating traits beneficial to survival and reproduction, so long as the environment doesn’t change. If elements of the environment (such as the climate) do change, then other traits may be better for survival and reproduction. The population then evolves in a different direction.

An individual’s traits are controlled by its genes, units that are passed down from one generation to the next. Mutation of those genes provides the variability that is the raw material for natural selection to work

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on. A mutation spreads through the population as the traits it controls are selected. New mutations can spread most rapidly in small, isolated populations where they will not be swamped by the more common genes in a larger population. The longer populations are isolated from one another, the more their traits will diverge. Populations are isolated from one another by many mechanisms, but as we shall shortly see, geographic barriers such as mountain ranges, oceans, ice sheets, and other uninhabitable environments have been particularly important to the evolution of pines.

If and when isolated populations reunite, their gene pools will mix.

One of four things can then happen. One of the populations can cause the other to go extinct because it is a better competitor for resources.

Or the populations may no longer be able to interbreed because their traits have become so different that successful mating and reproduction are inhibited: they have effectively become two species. Or else, the two populations can hybridize. If the hybrids do not have viable offspring or have fewer offspring than their parents, then their genes will not spread and eventually they will go extinct. In other cases, especially in plants, the hybrids can survive better and produce more descendants than their parents. Those hybrids have become, or are at least on their way to becoming, a new species.

Each of these processes has guided the evolution of pines in response to changing climates and continents during the past 150 million years, resulting in more than 120 species worldwide today.

Before pines evolved, all landmasses were fused into one supercontinent, known as Pangaea. About 175 million years ago, Pangaea began to break apart into huge chunks that eventually became the continents we know today. The southern continents (South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica) broke away first, leaving North America and Eurasia still

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connected in a smaller but still enormous continent known as Laurasia.

Then, just before the Jurassic period, North America and Eurasia started separating from each other, unzipping slowly from south to north and opening the Atlantic Ocean. Each continent took its resident plant and animal populations with it, isolating them from populations on other continents and allowing new genes and traits to arise by mutations that were then preserved by natural selection.

The oldest known pine, Pinus mundayi, lived 133 to 140 million years ago in what is now Nova Scotia during the Early Cretaceous—a warmer period than ours and long before Tyrannosaurus rex flourished.3 North America and Europe were still connected along their northern fringe, allowing the descendants of this first pine species to spread east into Eurasia and west into North America. By this time, the southern continents were far from North America and Eurasia, which is why pines occur throughout the Northern Hemisphere in North America and Eurasia but are absent in the Southern Hemisphere.4 Soon thereafter, large basins formed as the final connection between North America and Eurasia was just starting to split. The fossil needles and twigs of P. mundayi were encased in the sandstones of the Chaswood Formation that were deposited in these basins.5 The fossil needles of P. mundayi are grouped two to a bundle, called a fascicle, which is attached to twigs that have resin ducts. On modern pines, the ducts exude terpenes and other flammable resins. The charred fossil twigs of this particular P. mundayi suggest that it died in a crown fire, perhaps fueled partly by such resins. It seems that pines were intimately associated with fires from their beginning.6 In a later chapter of this book, we look at how fires today are still shaping the ecology and evolution of white pine and other pine species.

Approximately twenty million years later, the Pinus genus evolved into two main branches, the yellow or “hard” pines and the white or “soft” pines. These two branches of Pinus are actually subgenera, designated

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white pine

as Pinus and Strobus, respectively.7 The yellow pines include jack pine (P. banksiana) and red pine (P. resinosa), which currently coexist with white pine in the North Woods. In Eurasia, Scots pine (P. sylvestris), another member of the yellow pine branch, is the most abundant pine from the British Isles, through Scandinavia and the Baltic states, and east across all of Siberia. The yellow wood of these pines has a strong turpentine smell from high concentrations of resins. The rather stout and stiff needles of most yellow pines are grouped two or three to a fascicle encased by a small sheath attached to the twig, similar to those of the ancient P. mundayi. The sheath is deciduous, and the tree sheds the fascicles with their needles after two to four years.

In contrast to the yellow pines, the wood of the white or “soft” pines has a lighter, almost creamy color. Because the wood of white pines contains less resin than that of yellow pines, it has a softer and more pleasant scent. Modern-day eastern white pine (P. strobus) is the defining (or “type”) species of this branch, hence the application of the term strobus to both the species name of eastern white pine and the subgenus it typifies. Like most of its relatives, eastern white pine has five soft, flexible needles in a fascicle, which falls from the twigs after two to three years.

The rubbing of those soft and flexible needles in the breeze creates the gentle whispers that we hear when walking through white pine stands, a sound distinctly different from that produced by the stiffer red and jack pine needles.

The branching of the genus Pinus into the yellow and white pines was one of the two most significant events in the evolution of pines. As we shall see throughout this book, the differing susceptibilities of the yellow and white pine branches to diseases and other environmental factors determined their ecology, and the different properties of their wood dictated how the timber industry used them. During the ensuing 120 million years or so since the split between the branches, both the yellow and white pines spread east and west across North America

t h e e v o lu t i o n a n d a r r i va l o f w h i t e p i n e

and Eurasia while the continents were still (barely) connected along their northern fringe. Once North America completely separated from Europe, populations and species on each continent evolved into different assemblages of pines.

Beginning about sixty million years ago, at the beginning of the Eocene, the yellow and white pines rapidly radiated into many new species. This was the second important event in the evolution of pines.

Constance Millar, a conifer biologist with the US Forest Service, proposed that periodic global swings between warm tropical and cooler temperate climates during the Eocene drove this rapid diversification of pines in North America.8 Millar’s theory of the roles of climate fluctuations has since been verified by the discovery of more fossils and by DNA analyses of modern species, and today it remains the most widely accepted theory of pine biogeography and evolution.9 Millar proposed that, when tropical climates were widespread in the Eocene, North America’s pine populations contracted into isolated refugia at higher and cooler elevations in the Rocky Mountains. At the time, the Rockies were in the last phases of rising as the now almost completely buried Farallon Plate slid eastward under the westward moving North American Plate.10 The complex terrain of different mountain ranges and valleys isolated the populations from one another and prevented cross-pollination. Genes mutated in each population. Some of these mutations made the individuals possessing them better adapted to the local environment. Over time, these mutations spread throughout each population.

Later, during relatively cooler temperate climates, the populations expanded out of their mountain refugia onto the plains to the east.

Many previously isolated populations could no longer interbreed successfully and had therefore become separate species, while others interbred and formed new hybrids. Some of the hybrids were less able to compete with their parent species and went extinct, but others

17

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white pine

outcompeted their parent species and drove their parents to extinction or into marginal habitats.

Still later, when the climate entered another warm tropical period, the populations retreated again into mountain refugia. This time, though, the hybrids brought new genes acquired by interbreeding with other populations. Another round of mutation and natural selection in isolated populations followed. Back and forth, back and forth, each expansion and contraction of the populations in response to climate change shuffled their gene pools, selecting for some genes and the traits they control and discarding others across the diversity of microclimates, soils, and habitats in the mountainous terrain. This repeated sifting, winnowing, and recombining of genes of the ancestors of the modern pines made the Rocky Mountains one of the world’s centers of pine evolution and diversification.11 Today, there are forty species of pines in North America. Almost all came from ancestors that spread across the continent after emerging from their Rocky Mountain refugia.

Seven million or so years ago, the climate began a long period of cooling, leading eventually to the formation, expansions, and retreats of the great Pleistocene continental ice sheets. The ice sheets extended from the Arctic southward to the Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states. The cold episodes of glacial advances during the Pleistocene forced pines once again into refugia, only this time, the refugia were in more southerly temperate climates rather than in cooler high-elevation climates in the Rockies. The expansions, contractions and fragmentations, and reunification of the pine populations were now in a more north–south direction as the ice sheets waxed and waned rather than in an east–west direction into and out of the Rockies as in earlier times.12 Out of these new scramblings of the pine gene pool, the modern eastern white pine, Pinus strobus, finally emerged.

t h e e v o lu t i o n a n d a r r i va l o f w h i t e p i n e

The last great Pleistocene ice sheet, known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, stretched from Long Island through Pennsylvania and south of the Great Lakes, and finally into Wisconsin, Minnesota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The Laurentide Ice Sheet reached its maximum extent approximately eighteen thousand years ago. Soon after that, the climate began to warm, and the margin of the ice sheet began to retreat northward.

As the ice sheet withdrew, a landscape emerged that was pitted with basins filled with water. Every spring, those lakes and ponds collected the pollen that rained upon them from pines and other trees. Pine pollen grains look like squashed footballs with two air sacs attached to them that help keep them aloft in the wind as they travel from one tree to another, often drifting quite a distance. On June 21, 1860, Thoreau wrote in his journal about the film of pine pollen on Walden Pond and nearby lakes and concluded, “As chemists detect the presence of ozone in the atmosphere by exposing it to a delicately prepared paper, so the lakes detect for us the presence of pine pollen in the atmosphere. They are our pollinometers.”13 Year after year, spring after spring, a new layer of pollen drifted through the water column into the sediment. By taking cores from the sediments of a lake, painstakingly sifting through them layer by layer, and recording the relative abundance of the pollen from each species, it’s possible to reconstruct how the forest surrounding a lake assembled itself as the climate warmed.

Over the past fifty years or so, palynologists (scientists who study plant pollen and spores) have sampled enough lakes that a picture of the spread of species out of their glacial refuges has begun to develop. Margaret Davis, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota, had the brilliant insight that the dates of first appearance of a species in the pollen record of a region’s lakes recorded the arrival of each species to that region as it spread out of its glacial refuge. Davis plotted those dates onto a map of eastern North America and then drew lines known as isochrons that connect points with similar dates of first arrival for each species.14

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white pine

Davis realized that the lines depicted the leading edge of each species as it recolonized the land emerging from the grip of glacial climates.

During the maximum extent of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, white pine had retreated to the Atlantic coast of North Carolina and Virginia. The actual range of white pine at this time probably extended farther east onto the continental shelf, which was exposed during the full glacial maximum, when much of the earth’s water was locked up into the great ice sheets and sea level was lower. The fossil evidence for this is now buried in the ocean sediments, however. About eleven thousand years ago, white pine spread out of its North Carolina–Virginia refugium by two routes.15 One route took white pines up the Atlantic Seaboard and then forked into two branches somewhere in southeastern New York State and Western Connecticut. One branch continued northeastward into New England and the Maritime Provinces while the other bent northwestward into Quebec and Eastern Ontario, north of the Great Lakes.16 Other white pines spread from the North Carolina–Virginia refugium along a route south of the Great Lakes into Michigan and Wisconsin, entering northern Minnesota and far northwestern Ontario seven thousand years ago, and finally reaching the border of the prairies of northwestern Minnesota only two thousand years ago. The Great Lakes formed a barrier that isolated the white pines traveling along the two routes, just as the different valleys and ranges in the cooler Rocky Mountains isolated different populations of the ancestral pines during the climate fluctuations of the Eocene.

The pine populations that migrated along these two routes evolved separately from each other and from the population that remained behind in North Carolina and Virginia. As the pine populations spread northward into colder climates, they evolved adaptations that help the trees survive the shorter summers and the cold and snow of winter, such as buds that break later in spring, seeds that germinate faster, twigs that

t h e e v o lu t i o n a n d a r r i va l o f w h i t e p i n e

stop growing sooner in fall, and shorter needles that can better survive heavy winter snow.17 The descendants of the white pines that left North Carolina and Virginia now tower over me as I walk through the old-growth stand near my home in northern Minnesota, where we began this chapter. I wonder whether the shorter needles of Minnesota pines have different hissing sounds than their longer-needled relatives that remained behind in North Carolina and whether they smell different. It’s wonderful to think about how the pines’ look, smell, and even sound are the result of shifts and recombinations over millions of years from their origins in the Early Cretaceous to the retreat of the last great ice sheet. Today, the genus Pinus is the most species-rich of all conifers. Ever since Pinus

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white pine

mundayi first evolved in what is now Nova Scotia, tectonic, climatic, and glacial episodes were the dominant forces controlling the speciation, growth, and geographic distribution of all pines throughout the Northern Hemisphere, white pine included. But humans would become a new force shaping the future of white pine, first as Indigenous peoples followed the migrations of game animals into the deglaciated parts of northeastern North America, and then later, as Europeans arrived and brought their insatiable drive for white pine timber with them.

The Good Garden How to Nurture Pollinators, Soil, Native Wildlife, and Healthy Food—All in Your Own Backyard

CHR IS M c L AUGHLIN

Island Press’s mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems. Click here to get our newsletter for the latest news on authors, events, and free book giveaways.

The Good Garden

The Good Garden How to Nurture Pollinators, Soil, Native Wildlife, and Healthy Food—All in Your Own Backyard

CHRIS McLAUGHLIN

| WASHINGTON | COVELO

© 2023 Chris McLaughlin All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953417

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Book interior design and layout by Maureen Gately, gatelystudio.com

Keywords: Bee keeping; Biodynamic gardening; Carbon gardening; Cold frames; Compost; Domestic animals; Eco-friendly gardening; Flower gardening; French intensive gardening; Gardening tools; Greenhouse; Growing zones; Healthy soil; Heirloom plants; Hoop houses; Integrated Pest Management; Microclimates; Mulch; Native plants; Natural fertilizer; No-till; Open-pollinated; Organic; Permaculture; Pest control; Plant swap; Pollinators; Regenerative gardening; Row covers; Seed library; Vegetable gardening; Vertical gardening; Watering practices; Weed control

This book is dedicated to the gardens and farms in my life.

You have been my patient teachers, a sanctuary to millions, and a home to us.

It has been an honor to collaborate with you and a joy to love you.

Contents

Introduction: What Makes a Good Garden? chapter 1. chapter 2. chapter 3. chapter 4. chapter 5. chapter 6. chapter 7. chapter 8. chapter 9.

Choose and Combine Sustainable Gardening Styles Know Your Ecosystem

Welcome Pollinators and Wildlife Control Weeds Naturally

Keep the Bad Bugs at Bay Nourish Healthy Soil

Cultivate Healthy Food

Enlist Domestic Critters Build Community

Resources: Down the Sustainable Rabbit Hole

Photo Credits

Acknowledgments

About the Author Index

1 7 21 41 89 107 133 175 217 241 271 285 291 293 295

Photo by Bob McLaughlin

Introduction What Makes a Good Garden?

G

arden seed sales hit record highs in 2021, growing even from the huge spikes

seen in 2020 after the emergence of COVID-19. There is plenty of speculation about why. Part of the reason may be more people working from home or simple boredom after months spent cooped up alone.

But I think something more fundamental is going on. In this turbulent time of a worldwide pandemic, climate change, economic disparity, and culture wars, self-sufficiency is making a comeback. We all saw the vulnerabilities of our food system as meat-processing plants became disease hot spots and food banks struggled to feed the hungry. Those weaknesses led to questions about how our food is produced, and they reinvigorated calls for Big Ag to adopt sustainable farming practices on a massive scale. We can put pressure on the industry to reform by supporting the

multitudes of small farms that are already using these practices successfully. But we can also take a more hands-on approach, grow some of our own food, and enjoy taking control of our food security.

1

1

2

Introduction

2

The Good Garden

Introduction

3

Planting some blueberry bushes won’t change the fact that the United States imports nearly two-thirds of its fruit, but it will reduce your personal food miles, not to mention the plastic you truck home from the store. And while you can’t live solely off the tomatoes in your garden, it’s nice to know they weren’t sprayed with a pesticide that could affect your health or contribute to pollinator decline.

Beyond even feeding ourselves, home gardening fills a hunger to be part of something larger. Digging around in the earth reminds us that we depend on it for our survival. I feel that connection each time I close my eyes to smell the nuances of free-

sias, roses, carnations, and lilies; or watch a monarch butterfly land on milkweed; or pat the bunny whose manure is going to enrich my compost.

Those moments make me want to restore and replenish the land that is restoring and replenishing me. And they make me realize that nature knows best, and old-world farmers often knew better than we do. Sometimes chicken poop is a better fertilizer than chemicals bought at the store. Sometimes the sun kills weeds just as dead as an herbicide. Sometimes grass clippings and leaves make richer mulch than the bagged stuff. When you foster a garden that mimics nature, sooner or later, it will strike a balance. You may not always get a perfectly manicured, Instagram-worthy lawn, but you will cultivate a regenerative garden that gives back.

As conscientious gardeners, we can improve the air, water, and soil in our own backyards. We can reduce runoff from herbicides and pesticides. We can create habitat for pollinators and other wildlife. And we can form friendships and share knowledge with neighbors, ultimately building the village it will take to make bigger changes than any of us can make alone. Joining a community garden or starting a seed library might seem like a small thing, but it connects us with others who care about protecting our planet.

In the upcoming chapters, I’ll share the techniques that I have used to grow my Good Garden. But I want to acknowledge that every gardener, farmer, conservationist, naturalist, and biologist will have different points of view about every topic in this book. Despite the varied (and valid) opinions, I have made every effort to bring facts, consensus, my own decades of experience, and that of my fellow gardeners and farmers to these pages. It’s important to me that I keep things real. As with everything we do, gardening requires putting things in context—in this case, considering both your own environment and your personal views. There is never a one-size-fits-all

4

The Good Garden

solution. However, understanding how your little patch of Earth fits into the bigger ecosystem, and using sustainable techniques, common sense, and patience will have you on the right path to creating a garden that’s truly good.

For goodness sakes, slow down. Too often, we conclude that something doesn’t work when, indeed, it would have worked if we had only given it time. Most of us spend our entire adult lives with the misunderstanding that “doing our best” means “doing it fast.” Faster than we did it before, faster than our friends and neighbors.

Have you noticed that nature isn’t in a race with time the way people are? Ancient Chinese philosopher and writer, Lao Tzu, observed, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

One last thing: Please include children. Your kids, your grandkids, or neighborhood kids. Children are instinctively drawn to the natural world and find wonder, exploration, solace, and friendship through plants and animals. There isn’t a better way to introduce the next generation to good stewardship than allowing them to become a part of your backyard’s journey to sustainability.

There are some of the most incredible written works out there on the wisdom of respecting ecosystems as we work in our gardens. Yet they are often deeply scientific and can feel like an information overload, which leaves the everyday gardener wondering how they can make a difference in their family backyard. Where do you start?

You start here.

Introduction

5

1

Choose and Combine Sustainable Gardening Styles S

o, you know you want to grow a Good Garden. Where to begin? Fortunately,

many gardeners, farmers, conser­vationists, botanists, and others have developed effective approaches to guide us. Gardeners interested in sustain­able practices tend to combine any number of these styles, as opposed to adhering to one strict code—as it should be. My goal is to encourage you to grow the garden of your heart, a love child conceived of nature’s needs and your wants. Applying a blend of good gardening practices will get you from here to there.

Organic gardening methods are a great place to start. The central tenets of organic are to avoid harmful pesticides and herbicides and to choose natural fertilizers derived from plants or animals over synthetic ones derived from chemicals. The organic movement began in the early 1900s in response to the growing industrialization of agriculture.

It gained popularity in the 1970s as the environmental and health problems created by chemical “inputs” became more known. Today, the National Organic Standards Board sets rules that farmers must follow for their products to be labeled organic. For our purposes, the main takeaway is to avoid chemicals and use natural methods for managing weeds and pests. “First, do no harm” could be organic gardening’s tagline.

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The Good Garden

There’s no denying that organic practices are key to maintaining a healthy eco-

Permaculture is based

system. But today, many sustainable farming advocates have adopted the term regen-

on regenerative and

erative agriculture to emphasize practices that not only avoid harm but also replenish

ecological designs that

natural systems. Unlike organic farming, there’s no legal definition of regenerative

support both the earth

farming or gardening, but the idea is to take conservation to a whole other level. The

and people.

focus is on building up sustainable ecosystems by replenishing soils, protecting watersheds, and expanding biodiversity.

Beyond organic and regenerative, many terms are used to describe various farming and gardening frameworks for improving environmental health. These approaches are not mutually exclusive—in fact, there is a ton of overlap, so feel free to mix and match.

Let’s delve into a few of the most popular sustainable gardening styles.

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Permaculture Gardening As a philosophy, permaculture embraces living in harmony with nature. It’s like a big sustainable umbrella that touches every aspect of human existence, including water and energy use, architecture and design, engineering and construction. The concept of permaculture (permanent + culture) showed up in the 1970s courtesy of Australian researchers, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. It’s a big, broad topic and one that deserves your attention through further digging. However, for the purpose of this book, we’ll focus on permaculture in terms of sustainable gardening in our own backyards.

Permaculture gardening practices support a healthy ecosystem by integrating native plantings, wildlife gardening, and edible landscaping. Rather than serving a single purpose such as growing vegetables and fruits for the table, these systems may provide flowers, botanicals for crafts, herbal medicines, fibers, natural dyes, meditation spaces, health sanctuaries, and wildlife habitats.

To be clear, permaculture is complex, and mastering it takes years of practice.

Because the approach is multifaceted, it’s wise to start small and focus on one or two projects at a time. Start by thinking in terms of “systems.” Systems are a bunch of elements that are arranged so that they function together for a purpose or to get something done. With any system (i.e., engineering system, school system, etc.), the idea is to consider each part and how it works in relation to the whole. Garden systems include soil, bacteria, plants, wildlife, energy, water, and so on. The following are several ways to begin your permaculture garden journey: •

Focus on planting more perennial plants in your food garden. Perennials are planted once and offer a delicious return year after year. Think in terms of fruit trees, berry shrubs, canes, and veggies. Some plants will take several years to become established (I’m looking at you, asparagus), but they’re well worth it.

Choose and Combine Sustainable Gardening Styles

9

•

Put healthy soil at the top of your sustainability list. Healthy soil is the key to everything. Make composting a knee-jerk habit. Have a compost pile going all year, all the time.

•

Give your garden a leg up by utilizing nature’s beneficial insects and wildlife. Create wildlife habitats and grow plants for pollinators. (More on wildlife habitats in chapter 3.)

•

Don’t underestimate the usefulness of domestic animals. Chickens, rabbits, bees, and others can all help create a well-rounded permaculture system. (More on this in chapter 8.)

•

Mimicking nature, permaculture favors polyculture over monoculture.

In other words, diversity is key for a Good Garden. Mix it up out there!

(I tend to thump the diversity bible throughout this book).

One of my favorite permaculture practices is to plant a food forest, which is distinct from growing in a forest or agroforestry. Rather, the gardener builds a forest of food by planting a variety of edible plants that mimic natural ecosystems. Forest gardening creates a polyculture that maximizes your real estate through the strategic layering of plants. Although the same general, seven-layer frame is used, each one is unique to the garden and its environment. All said and done, food forests become wonderful habitats for critters. Here’s an example of how one is constructed in seven layers: 1. Canopy/tall tree layer Include shade, full-sized fruit, timber, and nut trees. Deciduous trees will create a leaf layer in the fall.

2. Subcanopy/large shrub layer Many other fruit trees can be planted in this layer, including dwarf varieties, such as apple, peach, plum, apricot, pomegranate, persimmon, and fig.

3. Shrub layer This is the place for woody plants and shrubs, such as raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, blueberries, blackcurrant, guava, and chokeberries.

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The Good Garden

4. Herbaceous layer Herbaceous (nonwoody) perennial plants go here.

This might include vegetables, herbs, flowers, and plants that attract pollinators.

5. Groundcover/creeper layer Food plants will help control erosion, and mulch will retain moisture. This is the right spot for things like borage, yarrow, oregano, lemon balm, valerian, strawberries, ramps, viola, sweet woodruff, and white clover.

6. Underground layer Underground crops come next, such as garlic, sweet potatoes, onion, horseradish, carrots, and mushrooms.

7. Vertical/climber layer While trees can offer support for the climbers, it’s recommended to add secure climbing structures for plants such as grapes, kiwi, hops, passionflower, runner beans, cucumbers, nasturtium, and squash.

The plant species listed are merely examples of what you can grow in your food forest. Plant what you love and what thrives in your zone!

What is the first thing you should do when you notice that something is eating your plants?

Celebrate!

Your garden is officially part of the ecosystem.

Choose and Combine Sustainable Gardening Styles

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The Good Garden

Biodynamic Gardening The biodynamic system is unique. While the philosophy’s inclusion of spirituality might be a little esoteric for some, like other sustainable farming and gardening approaches, it emphasizes the interconnectedness of all living things. It was developed in 1924 by scientist and philosopher Rudolph Steiner (1861–1925) who was convinced that modern farming techniques would put the health of humans, animals, and the planet at risk. Indeed, it’s interesting to note that in 1923 he predicted that the honeybee population would collapse in 80 to 100 years.

This approach teaches us to think of the garden or farm as an organism unto itself, and beyond that, Earth also as a living organism. In fact, this concept extends to the sun, moon, stars, planets—the entire solar system. The biodynamic method calls for using natural fertilizers, crop rotation, cover crops, biodynamic preparations, as well as moon cycles.

In particular, the method includes nine preparations composed of animal manures, minerals, and herbs—specifically, cow manure, quartz, common horsetail, nettle, chamomile, dandelion, oak bark, valerian, and yarrow. These preparations are eventually used as compost or sprays to perform any number of functions, including fostering beneficial bacteria and fungi, stabilizing nitrogen, and supporting microbial diversity. Some preparations offer pest, disease, and climate resistance. Nature’s seasonal cycles and natural rhythms, including the effect of the moon on growing plants, play a big role in biodynamic gardening. This might be a new idea for some, and perhaps it may even seem a little odd, but partnering with nature in these ways is also fascinating and amazingly effective.

(Opposite) It’s exciting to

see biodynamics in school gardens.

Choose and Combine Sustainable Gardening Styles

13

Invite Your Garden to Tea Adding decomposed organic matter to your soil with compost is certainly the best way to go. However, you can help spread the wealth by making compost, manure, and herbal/plant teas. These liquid teas and fermented plant extracts utilized by biodynamic farmers and gardeners can deliver (depending on the tea recipe) beneficial micro-organisms and nutrients to your garden when you don’t have shovelfuls of compost available. There are recipes for disease suppression, biological support, and general plant nutrition. The following is an all-around biodynamic compost-plant tea recipe: •

1 large, netted bag (or 3 smaller netted bags)

•

Finished compost (2 lb.)

•

Nettles (big handfuls)

•

Comfrey (big handfuls)

•

5-gallon bucket filled half to two-thirds of the way up with spring water (untreated)

•

Heavy fabric or burlap as a bucket cover

•

Dowel or branch (longer than the circumference of the bucket) (optional)

•

Aquarium air pump and tubing (optional)

Place the compost into the large, netted bag (or one smaller bag). Add the nettles and comfrey to the bag or separately in their own if you’re using a smaller-sized bag. Place the bag (or all bags) into the water bucket. If you have a dowl or stick, you can attach the bag(s) to it for easy removal.

Cover the bucket with the fabric or burlap.

If you’re using an aquarium air pump, connect the tubing to the pump and let it aerate the bucket of tea for 24 hours. If you’re not using a pump, lift the cover and stir the tea three times a day for a week. Dilute tea with water (10 parts water to 1 part tea) and use in the garden immediately.

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The Good Garden

Crowding out weeds is one of intensive gardening’s greatest attributes.

Choose and Combine Sustainable Gardening Styles

15

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The Good Garden

All sustainable gardening practices benefit from interplanting vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruit.

Choose and Combine Sustainable Gardening Styles

17

French Intensive Gardening French intensive gardening, also known as the biointensive method, produces loads of vegetables and is perfectly suited for backyard gardens. This method includes most of the key components that are practiced with all sustainable gardening styles. French intensive gardening is usually done in raised beds, where a generous amount of compost is mixed with the native soil. Of course, the raised beds keep the mixture right where it belongs. You want to avoid having your feet compact the garden soil, so most raised garden beds are narrow enough that you can reach from one side of the bed to the middle (i.e., about 4 feet wide). French intensive gardening veers off from traditional vegetable gardening in that the veggies are intensively planted. The “normal” spacing advice is tossed out the window, and crops are planted up to five times closer than what is recommended. Basically, you want the leaves from the individual plants to touch each other at maturity (think, “no bare soil showing”). Close spacing prevents weed seeds from getting any sun and vegetable plants crowd them out. Plus, soil that’s protected from the sun (no bare soil) helps with moisture retention. Planting so tightly may seem counterintuitive, but I tend to plant intensively by nature, and it works extremely well.

Each of these styles is natural for incorporating individual regenerative practices, such as no-till gardening or carbon farming. No-till (or no-dig) gardening is the practice of nurturing soil microbiology by avoiding intentional soil disruption.

Carbon farming is the practice of sequestering atmospheric carbon into the soil through a variety of practices. Read more about it in chapter 6.

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The Good Garden

A Starting Point Whether you begin with permaculture, biodynamics, French intensive gardening, or another sustainable practice, each of these frameworks offers gardeners a starting point to understand how their little plot of land fits into the larger ecosystem. You may find that the language or techniques of one resonate more strongly with you than another.

The gardening styles described in this chapter are a few examples to explore. But the truth is that most sustainable gardeners don’t adhere to a single practice. Most will take pieces of each and combine them with any number of sustainable practices (such as no-till gardening or carbon farming). Throughout this book, we’ll talk about creating a healthy backyard ecosystem, including how to create loamy, friable soil, eco-friendly pest control, wildlife habitats, interplanting crops, vertical vegetable gardening, succession planting, crop rotation, carbon farming, gardening as a community, and much more.

My goal is to borrow from these frameworks, combine that knowledge with my own, and guide you to create the garden that is right for both your specific environment and you as an individual.

After all, sustainable gardening isn’t a purely selfless act as our own health is improved along with the environment’s. Through regenerative farming practices, our soils are infused with nutrients, as are the foods we harvest. In the following chapters, we’ll dig into the specifics so you can support a biodiverse ecosystem that, in turn, supports you.

Choose and Combine Sustainable Gardening Styles

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NOTHING HAS BEEN LEFT OUT OF THIS INDISPENSABLE GARDENING BIBLE

Paperback | $32.00 | 272 pages PUBLISHED: April 2023 ISBN: 9781642832990

A Northern Gardener’s Guide to Native Plants and Pollinators Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla

W

ith many pollinators threatened, gardeners can make a real difference by planting native species that support these amazing creatures. If you’re a gardener (or aspiring gardener) in the northern US, this beautiful

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4-color guide will become your go-to reference to the most beneficial plants in your area.

Through profiles of more than 300 native plants, featuring lovely illustrations and photos, you’ll discover everything you need to know about blooming periods, exposure, soil moisture, and good plant companions. You’ll also find helpful tips about how to prepare your site and sample garden designs, whether you’re growing black-eyed Susans on your balcony or a mix of native grasses, trees, shrubs, and vines in a community garden.

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Throughout, you’ll discover the power of plants to not only enrich your personal environment but to support the pollinators necessary for a thriving planet.

Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla

L

orraine Johnson has been researching and writing about environmental issues

S

heila Colla is a Conservation Scientist working to conserve wildlife including

for three decades. Johnson is the author native pollinators. She is part of York or editor of fourteen books, including 100 Easy- University’s Bee Research Organization BeeC, to-Grow Native Plants for American Gardens in which aims to address pollinator health and Temperate Zones and Grow Wild! sustainable agriculture from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Also available: The Good Garden How to Nurture Pollinators, Soil, Native Wildlife, and Healthy Food—All in Your Own Backyard Chris McLaughlin A fun, detailed guide to making your patch of Earth healthy, happy, and sustainable.

PAPERBACK | $35.00 312 PAGES | 2023 | 9781642832150

Protecting Pollinators How to Save the Creatures that Feed Our World Jodi Helmer Shares the science behind pollinators and why they’re threatened, along with real stories of the efforts to save them PAPERBACK | $29.00 232 PAGES | 2019 | 9781610919364

Wild By Design Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes Margie Ruddick Renowned sustainable landscape designer shares innovative ideas PAPERBACK | $50.00 264 PAGES | 2016 | 9781610915984

Principles of Ecological Landscape Design Travis Beck A groundbreaking guide to greening landscape architecture HARDCOVER | $84.00 296 PAGES | 2013 | 9781597267014

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Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide.

With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

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Also by Lorraine Johnson (A Selected List) 100 Easy-to-Grow Native Plants for American Gardens in Temperate Zones Grow Wild! Low Maintenance, Sure Success, Distinctive Gardening with Native Plants Tending the Earth: A Gardener’s Manifesto City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing The Real Dirt: The Complete Guide to Backyard, Balcony and Apartment Composting (co-authored with Mark Cullen) Green Future: How to Make a World of Difference The Natural Treasures of Carolinian Canada [ed.]

The Ontario Naturalized Garden The New Ontario Naturalized Garden

Also by Sheila Colla Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide by Paul H. Williams, Robbin W. Thorp, Leif L. Richardson, and Sheila R. Colla

Also illustrated by Ann Sanderson Canada’s Arctic Marine Atlas Bees of Toronto: A Guide to Their Remarkable World

A Northern Gardener’s Guide to

Native Plants and

Pollinators Creating Habitat in the Northeast, Great Lakes, and Upper Midwest

Lorraine Johnson & Sheila Colla Illustrations by Ann Sanderson Foreword by Douglas W. Tallamy

Text Copyright © 2023 Lorraine Johnson & Sheila Colla Illustrations Copyright © 2023 Ann Sanderson All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480‑B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948612 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Book interior design and layout by Libris Simas Ferraz.

Keywords: blooming periods, climate change, community gardens, conservation, container gardening, ecological diversity, endangered pollinators, flowering plants, garden designs, native grasses, rain and pond gardens, regenerating habitat, rusty-patched bumblebee

vii

Introduction Pollinators Bring Life

1

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators 2 A Primer on the Pollination of Flowering Plants The Scoop on Honeybees 8

2

5

Native Plants Matter Native Plants 14 But Don’t Non-Native Plants Attract Pollinators, Too? All Green Is Not Green! 17 What About Cultivars of Native Plants? 18 Where to Find Native Plants 20 The Climate Change Connection 22 Diversity, Diversity, Diversity 23

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12 15

Starting Your Garden for Native Pollinators Site Preparation 24 Designing Your Pollinator Patch 27 Native Plants for Containers 29 Turning Lawns into Gardens 30 Planting Your Patch 31 Maintaining Your Patch 31 Native Herbaceous Plants for Pollen Specialists 35 As Your Garden Grows 36 Adding Native Plants to an Existing Garden Bed 36 From Plants…to Plant Communities 39 Beyond the Patch 40 Nesting Sites and Overwintering Habitat for Native Bees 44 Checklist for Creating a Pollinator-Friendly Yard and Garden 45

24

Contents

1

Foreword By Douglas Tallamy

4

Profiles of Native Plants Spring-Blooming Native Plants 48 Summer-Blooming Native Plants 88 Fall-Blooming Native Plants 148 Native Grasses and Sedges 150 Trees, Shrubs and Woody Vines 162 Rain Gardens 224 Pond and Bog Gardens 225 Ask for Me—and Grow the Native Plant Movement Boulevard (a.k.a. “hell-strip”) Gardens 228 Concerns…and Reassurances 229 Great Combinations of Native Perennials for a Pollinator-Friendly Garden 231

5

Sample Garden Designs

46

226

235

Balcony Garden 235 Community Garden 236 Public Patch 237 High-Density Residential 238 Residential Garden 239

6

Resources 241 Native Plant Ranges 241 Native Plant Groups 242 Native Plant Nurseries 243 Selected Books 243

Acknowledgments 245 Index 246 About the Authors Confusing bumblebee (Bombus perplexus) and marsh marigold (Caltha palustris)

256

You’ve all heard the expression “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” But this does not apply to our yards! From an ecological perspective, what happens in our yards does not stay in our yards. Everything we plant, or don’t plant, or apply to our yards, impacts the greater ecosystem and everything that depends on the ecosystem around us. For example, when we plant invasive plants, we are harboring ecological tumors whose offspring escape our landscapes, impacting our neighbors and the surrounding natural spaces. By pushing out the native plants that run our local ecosystems, invasive ornamentals drastically and negatively affect the ability of those ecosystems to supply the life support on which we all depend. When we manicure acres of lawn, we diminish the ability of that land to reduce stormwater runoff, compromising the watershed of everyone in the immediate area, as well as that of communities tens or hundreds of miles downstream. Large swaths of lawn also waste an opportunity to fight climate change; filling our yards with turf grass species notorious for their inability to sequester carbon is a lost opportunity— made worse every time we mow, which adds carbon to the atmosphere. “Lawn care” also pollutes local waterways with the fertilizers and pesticides we routinely apply to grass, and when we overuse turf grass, we eschew our responsibility to support the food web that supports local animals. Finally, what prompts me to invoke the Vegas metaphor here is that our plant choices, both in terms of species and amounts, determine how well our landscapes support the diverse communities of native bees required to pollinate the plants that comprise high-functioning ecosystems.

I shudder every time I hear the media justify concern for bees by claiming they pollinate one-third of our crops. May Berenbaum, Chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois and one of the most respected entomologists in the country, recently wondered where the one-third statistic came from. After considerable sleuthing, May was unable to track down any study that supports the one-third claim. So she made her own estimates. By Dr. Berenbaum’s calculations, only one-seventh of our crops depend on animal pollination, and in the typical American diet, which is based heavily on corn and wheat (both wind-pollinated crops), only one-twelfth of our crops are pollinator-dependent.

What bothers me, though, is not that the media has inflated the importance of pollinators to agriculture, but that they imply that the only value of species such as pollinators is how they directly serve humans. That level of anthropocentrism misses the real impact of pollinators, not just on humans but on most other earthlings as well. Regardless of their importance to our crops, pollinators are essential

Foreword

By Douglas Tallamy

vii

Rusty-patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis)

viii

Foreword

to life as we know it: they pollinate 80 percent of all plants and 90 percent of all flowering plants, the very plants that turn the sun’s energy into the food that supports all animal life on terrestrial earth. If we recklessly landscape in ways that do not support pollinators, we will lose the species that support 80 to 90 percent of all plant species. That is not even close to an option if we humans plan to continue inhabiting Planet Earth.

Fortunately, the Las Vegas metaphor works both ways. The way we landscape our yards can just as easily export ecological benefits instead of costs. We can liberally use plants that support the highest numbers of species of pollinators, both specialists and generalists, as well as the caterpillars, grasshoppers, and other insects that feed our hungry birds. We can reduce our lawn to cover only the areas on which we regularly walk, or in strips that serve as cues for care, demonstrating to our neighbors that we are actively and purposefully gardening, even if our aesthetic choices are not mainstream.

We can add dense plantings of woody and herbaceous plants that hold rainwater on site and sequester tons of carbon while doing so, and we can control mosquitoes with benign biocontrol of larvae rather than through the wide-scale carnage wrought by mosquito fogging.

Private landowners hold enormous conservation potential because there are so many of them. In the United States, 135 million acres are now in residential landscapes. The good news is that hundreds of millions of people live in, and thus manage, those landscapes. With a little education, all of us can come to realize that sustainable earth stewardship is not something we can ignore or practice only if we feel like it. It is essential. And the care of life around us is a responsibility we all hold. I say that with certainty, because each one us depends on the quality of local ecosystems for our continued well-being. Landscaping in ways that eliminate nature is a fool’s errand, and we can do better. And that is what Lorraine and Sheila will help you do. Protecting and enhancing pollinator populations is one of the best ways to ensure our future, and the future of the life around us. There is no better resource for this noble task than the book you now hold.

It’s not unusual, when gardeners talk about insects, for the word “problem” to be the next word uttered. The idea that most insects are “pests” to be eradicated is so deeply entrenched in the gardening world that it takes hard work—a basic rethink of approaches and assumptions—to break free of this notion and, instead, to see insects as members of a hugely intricate and intimate community, in relationship with all else.

Yes, we love butterflies! But caterpillars eating our garden plants? Probably not so much. We’re starting to value bees—but wasps, ants, aphids, beetles, plant bugs and flies? It’s much harder for us to rally around them and to encourage them to visit—and make use of—the gardens we plant and work to protect. And as for celebrating the death and decay that are fundamental to the life of the garden—the dead leaves, dead plant stalks, dead wood and, indeed, the dead plants that result from any failed attempts to grow them—well, that’s something we try to sweep away, out of sight, as quickly as possible.

This book calls on all of us to garden from an entirely different starting point.

We are advocating for gardens that actively participate in the natural processes that make all life on earth possible—to see our role as stewards of biodiversity.

What are our personal responsibilities to the land we tend? This question connects inextricably, profoundly, with climate change. The science is clear: habitat loss and fragmentation cause species loss and worsen the effects of climate change. We need to protect remaining habitat, but we also need to create and regenerate it in places where we have green-paved it with lawns and non-native species.

In the face of climate change, we need landscapes of resilience: in other words, creating and regenerating habitat is a climate action.

In this book, we’re focusing on bees and other pollinators (without them, there would be no life), but there’s more to it than that. We want to encourage all of us to see our place in the garden as a place of complexity and questioning, action and inaction, learning and unlearning, honoring and wondering, watching and listening, hoping and trying and maybe failing…and then hoping again.

“Hope”—something so many of us hold onto for dear life—is a messy, unfinished word, incomplete without action. We hope you will take the words in this book to heart and into action—to create and regenerate the spaces in our communities, in our lives, in the places we tend and care for, where pollinators can thrive and bring life to all.

Introduction

Pollinators Bring Life

1

1

Rusty-patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis)

2

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators Native, or “wild” bees—that is, bees that occur naturally within a region— are some of the most misunderstood creatures around. Popular misconceptions are that they all make honey, they’re all black and yellow, they all sting and they all live in hives. But the majority of the region’s native bees don’t live in hives (they are solitary), are not black and yellow (they are a variety of colors, including blue and green!), do not sting—and none of them make honey.

There are more than 4,000 different bee species in North America. Types of native bees include bumblebees, sweat bees, mining bees, cuckoo bees, leafcutter bees and cellophane bees, among others. And there are more to discover. In 2007, bee expert John Ascher found a species—in New York City—that had never before been described to science: Lasioglossum gotham. Consider that for a moment: a bee species found…in the middle of the largest city in the country…described to science and named for the first time…just over a decade ago. Urban habitats are, in many ways, quite hospitable for bees, with a diversity of plants for nectar and pollen and an array of habitats for nesting, mating and shelter. Anywhere we live can provide habitat, whether it’s in a big city, a small town or a suburb or on a farm. But some species of native bees are in trouble. Take the rusty-patched bumblebee, for example. As recently as the 1980s, it was abundant—one of the most common bumblebee species in its range. Its extensive historical range spans from the eastern United States west to the Dakotas, north to southern Ontario and south to Georgia. However, by the early 2000s, it had all but disappeared from Canada and much of the United States.

The rusty-patched bumblebee had the unfortunate distinction of being the first native bee to be officially designated as endangered in both the United States and Canada. One of the authors of this book, Sheila Colla, was the last person in Canada to identify this bee in the wild, in 2009, by the side of a road in Pinery Provincial Park. Sheila had spent every summer since 2005 searching for the rusty-patched bumblebee in places where they had previously been recorded. On that summer day in 2009, she had found none and was on her way out of the park when, from the passenger window of the car, she

Planting gardens full of a diverse range of native plants helps to support pollinators throughout their life cycle. © Mathis Natvik

Rusty-patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis) and common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)

spotted the distinctive rusty patch of a lone specimen.

This sighting was the last known in Canada.

The causes of this bee’s rapid and catastrophic decline have not yet been confirmed, but speculation centers on several negative factors: loss and fragmentation of habitat, including nesting and foraging opportunities; disease and competition from non-native honeybees and managed bumblebees in greenhouse and field crops; pesticides; and climate change.

Given the dramatic speed and geographic extent of bee loss, conservation scientists believe a new disease brought in by managed bees is the main driver of decline. In the United States, some recent populations have been found in the Midwest and in the Appalachians, but the species seems to have declined from most of the northeastern and central parts of its historic range.

The widespread loss of a formerly common species is a phenomenon echoing around the world. In Europe, approximately half of bumblebee species are in The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

3

What Pollinators Need • • • • •

Areas with diverse flowering plants, from spring to fall, with accessible pollen and nectar Plants on which to lay their eggs, or nesting areas in which to lay their eggs Areas that are free of pesticides Patches of bare ground in which to burrow and build their nests A diverse array of plant and landscape features, such as rocks, dead wood, dead stems, leaves, mud, oils and resins that support the various habitat and nesting needs of diverse pollinator species

This community pollinator garden in a public park was designed and built by volunteers from the group Blooming Boulevards. Resilient native plants such as asters and goldenrods, planted in raised beds, flourish in this public site. © Jeanne McRight

decline, and only a few are increasing. Of the 25 known bumblebee species in the United Kingdom, three are considered extinct, and at least seven have undergone significant declines. In North America, IUCN Red List assessments suggest at least one-quarter of the 46 native bumblebee species are at risk of extinction. For example, the relative abundance of the American bumblebee, a once-common species, has fallen dramatically—by 89 percent between 2007–2016 and 1907–2006. Other once-common bee species now rarely seen through much of their historic ranges 4

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

Pollinators need habitat. A diversity of native plants and natural features such as old logs, dead leaves and rocks ensure that gardens support the insects that support all life. This woodland planting restores and celebrates engagement with the natural world of which we are a part and the relationships between all creatures. © Shawn McKnight, Return the Landscape

in the United States and Canada include the yellow-banded bumblebee, the yellow bumblebee and the bohemian cuckoo bumblebee. Reversing this trend, and ensuring that common species remain common, will take committed action at all levels of government and by everyone. And one important place for individuals to start is by creating and regenerating habitat gardens—connected landscapes full of diverse native plants known to provide nectar, pollen and habitat for native bees, maintained using practices that support the pollinators necessary for all life on Earth.

A Primer on the Pollination of Flowering Plants For many flowering plants to reproduce, pollen (the plant equivalent of sperm) must move from the “male” part to the “female” part of the flower. Some plants have the male and female parts within the same flower; some have separate male flowers and female flowers on the same plant; and some have male flowers and female flowers on separate plants entirely. Some can fertilize themselves, while others need another mate nearby for cross-pollination. Some plants that have both male and female flowers on the same plant have features that ensure cross-pollination (for example, the females are receptive to pollen only

Lemon cuckoo bumblebee (Bombus citrinus) and fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium)

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

5

Buzz Pollination Bumblebees, along with some mining, sweat and leafcutter bees, practice buzz pollination. Inserting its head into a flower and grasping the anthers (the part of the flower that contains pollen), or simply holding on to parts of the flower, the bee vibrates its flight muscles and shakes the pollen free. In this way, buzz pollination is a very efficient and effective way for bees to release large amounts of pollen from flowers, which have evolved to ensure that their preferred pollinator accesses their flowers. The native lowbush blueberry is an example of a plant that has evolved this system and depends on native insects capable of buzz pollination in order to release its pollen. Honeybees are used in industrial agriculture to pollinate crops, but in addition to blueberries there are many foods, such as tomatoes, melons, squashes, apples, cranberries, eggplants and peppers, that are best (and, in some cases, only) pollinated by native bumblebees and other types of bees, not honeybees.

after the males have already released their pollen). In other words, there’s lots of variation and specificity.

When fertilized, the female part produces fruits or nuts containing seeds, which, after dispersal, germinate to produce new plants.

Some plants (conifers and grasses, for example) are wind-pollinated—that is, the pollen moves from the male part to the female part by wind. The pollen-like structures in moss may be transferred in water. But most plants—approximately 80 percent—have pollen that is transported by animal pollinators, including insects, hummingbirds, bats and others.

Bees are the main pollinators of many flowering plants in North America and other temperate regions, though wasps, flies, beetles, hummingbirds, butterflies and moths are also pollinators. The pollination “services” that insects provide are in fact a by-product of an entirely different intention. These insects are visiting flowers most often to feed on nectar and pollen (though sometimes, they may be collecting resin or scents to attract mates) and, in the process, pollen sticks to their bodies and is transferred to other plants they visit. It is important to note that diverse wild bee communities are more efficient and effective pollinators than non-native honeybees, due to native bees’ hairiness and often electrostatic charges.

As well, native bees exhibit a trait known as floral constancy, which means that they tend to repeatedly visit a particular species of plant on their individual foraging trips and, hence, efficiently cross-pollinate that species.

6

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

Allergic to Stings?

Only female bees are capable of stinging. Native bees rarely sting humans—non-native species of wasps are usually the culprits. However, bumblebees and non-native honeybees will sting if they are trapped or stepped on or if their nest is disturbed. When bees are foraging in flowers, it’s safe to enjoy watching them without fear.

If you are allergic to bee stings, you can still create a pollinator garden. Simply exercise caution around bees, the majority of which are gentle creatures that aren’t capable of stinging.

Most native wasp species are solitary and specialize on certain insect prey. You likely have not even noticed them, as they tend to stay away from humans.

There’s lots in the news about “Africanized honeybees” (a hybrid, non-native species) and “murder hornets” (an introduced species). Africanized honeybees are in a few US southern states and murder hornets have been found on the west coast—so there’s no need to fear being stung by them in the northeast, Midwest or Great Lakes regions.

Although some male bees feed on pollen, it is only the female bee that gathers pollen in order to take it back to provision her nest, where she lays her eggs and where the developing larvae will feed on the pollen. Many female bees have a “pollen basket” on their hind legs, abdomens or stomachs in which they store pollen before transporting it back to the nest. If you watch bees closely, you’ll be able to see, without need of a magnifying device, pollen grains on their bodies, giving them a colorful glow.

Female bees mix pollen and nectar into a loaf called “bee bread,” which the larval bees eat.

While a particular bee species might depend on the pollen of a particular plant species, genus or family, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the plants themselves depend on that bee species for pollination.

Other, generalist bee species (polylectic bees)—those that collect pollen from a broad range of species—can also pollinate the plant.

Bees utilize a wider variety of plant species for nectar than they do for pollen. However, the physical traits of various bee species (the length of their

Black and gold bumblebee (Bombus auricomus) and apple (Malus domestica)

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

7

mouthparts, for example) do affect their ability to extract nectar from certain flower shapes, such as deep flowers.

The Scoop on Honeybees There’s lots in the news about the loss of honeybees, Colony Collapse Disorder, Varroa mites and the dire consequences for the food we eat. Industrial agriculture— the system of large, mechanized monoculture farms—depends on the pollination services of non-native and managed honeybees, trucked long distances across the continent to pollinate crops.

When we hear about the mysterious deaths of honeybee colonies from unknown causes, a trend that shows no signs of abating, it’s easy to feel that we are in the midst of a crisis. And we are.

We need to find out why honeybees are dying—to continue to investigate what is wrong with our industrial agriculture system and any other factors that are causing honeybee colonies to die in massive numbers—but it’s important to note that honeybees are not an endangered species at risk of extinction. They are among the most common species in the world, introduced to many countries outside of their natural ranges. (There are no native honeybee species in North America.) When a honeybee colony dies, a new colony can be started with a new queen, readily available for purchase. This does not diminish the seriousness of The Native Ecology Learning Garden at the Equinox Holistic Alternative and Roden Public schools (shown here before and after planting) is a place where students, staff and parents build their relationships with the land and give back to the earth.

Planted by students and tended by families and neighbors, the garden helps to create a sense of community centered around experiences with nature and natural processes. © Carrie Klassen

8

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

Attracting Pollinators Plants have evolved to attract pollinators in a number of different ways. Some plants have bright-colored flowers. Some have landing platforms. Still others produce fragrance, in effect advertising their nectar reward to insect visitors. Some plants have nectar guides—radiating lines, for example—that direct insects to the nectar source. These guides may be visible to the human eye or, in some cases, are visible only to bees, flies or other insects that can see color in the ultraviolet spectrum.

Native bees, in all their diversity, are the main pollinators in this region, but other insects including flies, wasps, butterflies (such as Milbert’s tortoiseshell, shown here), moths and beetles are also pollinators, as are hummingbirds.

honeybee deaths, the economic consequences of honeybee deaths for the industrial agriculture system or the beekeeper, or the impacts on the bees themselves and their genetic diversity and conservation where they are native.

However, the focus on managed honeybee hive losses has eclipsed the fact that many native bees, such as the rustypatched bumblebee, the American bumblebee, the yellow-banded bumblebee, the Macropis cuckoo bee and others, are in serious trouble. And when native bees disappear, they disappear forever.

There has been a lot of interest in keeping honeybee hives as a way to help pollinators. However, starting a honeybee hive does not help save wild bees any more than keeping backyard hens helps save wild birds, or throwing non-native invasive carp into one of the Great Lakes will help native fish populations. A growing body of science documents that non-native honeybees are negatively affecting native bees. Current research finds that increases in honeybee foraging adversely

Fernald’s cuckoo bumblebee (Bombus flavidus) and aster (Symphyotrichum sp.)

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

9

The Benefits of Insects

Syrphid flies not only pollinate plants when they visit flowers for pollen and nectar, but the larvae of many syrphid species also control aphids and other softbodied insects considered to be agricultural pests.

The eastern calligrapher fly (shown here), like many syrphids, is a bee and wasp mimic, but without a stinger.

Yellow bumblebee (Bombus fervidus) and blue flag iris (Iris versicolor)

10

For too long, many gardeners have treated all insects as “foe” rather than friend. And yet the majority of insects that visit plants in your garden are beneficial, carrying out important, useful functions that contribute to ecological health. Pollination is one obvious, crucial “service,” but there are many others, some we are only at the beginning stages of understanding. For example, syrphid flies (hoverflies, a.k.a. flower flies) actually control pests in the garden: adults lay their eggs on plants with aphids, and then when the syrphid fly egg hatches, the developing caterpillar-like maggot kills the aphids, sucking them dry. Other pest-controlling insects—tachinid flies and some types of wasps—are parasitic, laying their eggs directly inside aphids and caterpillars. The eggs hatch into larvae that eat and kill their hosts. Creating a habitat garden that welcomes pollinators will ensure that you are participating in the natural cycles that keep ecosystems in balance.

impact native bumblebee foraging and that native bumblebees are not as likely to return to a foraging site for a second time if honeybees are competing for floral resources at the site. Some research even suggests that the presence of honeybees negatively affects the reproductive and developmental success of native bees. As well, there is concern that diseases and pests of managed honeybees are spreading to native wild bees, and new exotic diseases might be introduced to native species that have not co-evolved with them. A 2019 study found that two viruses infecting honeybees are transferring to wild bumblebees, particularly those bumblebees foraging near apiaries. The research suggests that honeybees shed the viruses on flowers while foraging, and that the pathogens are then picked up by wild bees.

Ironically, the flowers become “hotspots for disease transmission,” as the study puts it. As well, honeybees can “taxi” diseases that infect wild bees, hoverflies and other insects, potentially leading to drastic declines, such as

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

Wasps Wasps are important pollinators, though they are less well studied than bees. While a few species, such as yellow jackets and paper wasps, are familiar, the diversity of wasp species is much less well known, perhaps because they tend to avoid human contact. Wasps are predators (feeding on insects and spiders) and parasitoids (laying their eggs in or on their prey). As adults, wasps visit plants to feed on nectar, fruit and sap and, less often, on pollen. Like bees, the habitat requirements of solitary wasps include nesting sites below ground, in vegetation, in cavities, under rocks. Wasps have floral preferences and many have specific relationships with a narrow range of prey species. These relationships demonstrate fascinating webs of connection and symbiosis. For example, not only do wasps protect plants from herbivorous insects (by consuming them!), but wasps are rewarded by some plant species for this pest-control service: some plants with extrafloral nectaries (away from the flower) produce more nectar in these nectaries when they’re being eaten by caterpillars, and this attracts wasps, which in turn eat the caterpillars. Your habitat garden will support the crucial role that wasps have within ecosystems. To learn more about these diverse and fascinating, under-appreciated insects, Heather Holm’s book Wasps is fantastic, as are the fact sheets on her website, www.pollinatorsnativeplants.com.

The relationships between species are complex, fascinating and unique. Ichneumonid wasps, such as the Megarhyssa species shown here, use their long ovipositors to lay their eggs into their host (horntails, a treeburrowing and -eating sawfly), which the wasps can detect through the bark of trees!

we saw with the rusty-patched bumblebee. On the plant side of things, honeybees might pollinate introduced, weedy species they’ve co-evolved with and disrupt the native pollinator-plant relationships of native species.

Although the peer-reviewed literature is clear, it is poorly studied in situ; hence, there are knowledge gaps in this growing field of study. However, following the precautionary principle, we recommend that if you want to help native bees and protect endangered pollinators, instead of starting an urban honeybee hive, plant native plants and create habitat in your yard, on your balcony, on the grounds of your apartment building or in a public space such as a community garden, local school or boulevard.

The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Other Native Pollinators

11

www.islandpress.org Phone: (202) 232-7933 Fax: (202) 234-1328 Island Press 2000 M St NW, Suite 480-B Washington, DC20036-3307

AN ECOLOGIST REVEALS THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF THE NATURAL WORLD THROUGH THE OVERLOOKED LIVES OF MOTHS

The Jewel Box How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules

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plastic box with a lightbulb attached may seem like an odd birthday present. But for ecologist Tim Blackburn, a moth trap is a captivating window into the world beyond the roof of his London flat. With names like the Dingy Footman, Jersey Tiger, Pale Mottled Willow, and Uncertain, and at least 140,000 identified species, moths are fascinating in their own right. But no moth is an island—they are vital links in the web of life. In The Jewel Box, Blackburn introduces a landscape of unseen connections, showing us how contents of one small box can illuminate the workings of all nature.

Tim Blackburn

T

im Blackburn is Professor of Invasion Biology at University College London.

Previously, he was the Director of the Institute of Zoology, the research arm of the Zoological Society of London, where he still has a research affiliation. His writing has appeared in The Biologist and The

Conversation, and his findings have been covered by (amongst others) PBS, the BBC’s Inside Science and Countryfile, The Guardian, Telegraph, and Evening Standard, Metro, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Publimetro (Mexico), Irish Times, and ABC (Australia).

Also available: 30 Animals That Made Us Smarter

Protecting Pollinators

Stories of the Natural World That Inspired Human Ingenuity

How to Save the Creatures that Feed Our World

Patrick Aryee Full of fascinating stories and infectious enthusiasm about the ways animals have inspired human innovation

Jodi Helmer Shares the science behind pollinators and why they’re threatened, along with real stories of the efforts to save them

PAPERBACK | $25.00 384 PAGES | 2022 | 9781642832679

The Forgotten Pollinators

Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan An exploration of the vital but littleappreciated relationship between plants and the animals they depend on for reproduction PAPERBACK | $35.00 312 PAGES | 1997 | 9781559633536

PAPERBACK | $32.00 232 PAGES | 2019 | 9781610919364

Naturalist A Graphic Adaptation Edward O. Wilson, Adapted by Jim Ottaviani, Illustrated by C.M. Butzer E.O. Wilson’s bestselling memoir comes to life in a beautifully illustrated graphic adaptation.

HARDCOVER | $28.00 240 PAGES | 2020 | 9781610919586

Phone: 202.232.7933 Fax: 202.234.1328 Island Press 2000 M St NW Suite 480-B Washington, DC 20036-3307

Introduction The Moth Trap

True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world, it only becomes more intricate and excellent.

— Neal Stephenson

The moth trap, on holiday in Devon.

1

2

I

The Jewel Box

n July of 2018, for my fifty-second birthday, my wife bought me a black plastic box, two Plexiglass sheets, and a light fixture with a 20-Watt fluorescent bulb. The box came flat-packed, which meant that I had to draw on my limited practical skills to intersect the tabs with their corresponding slots, resulting in an open-topped cube about fifty centimeters on each vertex. I screwed the electrics to a bar that ran across the top, setting the socket above the box but sheltered under a wide, white plastic disk. The light bulb bayoneted into the socket, and hung down. The Perspex sheets slotted at a forty-five-degree angle from the rim, forming a wide, transparent slide down into the interior, ending at an opening the size and shape of a letterbox.

A black plastic box with a light on top might seem like an odd choice for a birthday present, but it was what I wanted. It sounds dourly functional. But it is also a box of enchantment, one that can conjure life out of thin air. I put it outside that July evening as dusk was beginning to fall, plugged it in, and watched the glow from the light start slowly to build. Then I went to bed, already excited, hoping the conjuring trick would work. I woke early and expectantly the next morning, and went outside to see. The box had indeed performed its magic, and there, inside, was the reveal—a scattering of jewels. A moth trap, festooned with moths.

I’d first got into moth trapping while leading undergraduate field courses to the Kindrogan FSC (Field Studies Council) center in Scotland (now sadly closed to such trips). As a university academic, one of the joys of my job is that I get to interact with young people eager to learn. Yet, it’s not only student minds that come away from field courses changed—they can be a revelatory experience for teacher and taught alike. Even students who are interested in biodiversity aren’t nearly close to knowing all the different forms of life with which they share their surroundings.

We always set pitfall traps—plastic cups sunk into the soil like golf holes—to catch ground-dwelling invertebrates, and every year I have to encourage the students not just to pick through the harvest with the naked eye, but also to use a dissecting microscope, and to turn the magnification up high. Without this, they wouldn’t see the tiny springtails that inevitably fall in. These animals are in the order Collembola, and are among the closest relatives of the insects; indeed,

Introduction

3

when I was a student, they were considered to be insects. Taxonomic orthodoxy has changed since then, and now they tend to be classified as the earliest divergent branch from the part of the tree of life that is the subphylum Hexapoda, of which insects are the most familiar manifestation. Like insects, springtails have three body sections—head, thorax, abdomen—with six legs attached to the thorax. Unlike insects, their mouthparts are hidden inside the head capsule. Most springtails have an organ known as the furcula folded underneath the abdomen, which is responsible for their name. When triggered, this sprung fork can catapult the springtail into the air and away from its enemies.

The springtails caught at Kindrogan pack all of this structure into an animal barely a couple of millimeters (a tenth of an inch) in length.

This miniaturization, combined with their unassuming habit of hiding in the leaf litter and soil, means that most students don’t know that these organisms even exist. The feeling of offering someone the revelation of an animal they’d never even dreamt of never gets old.

There was a moth trap at Kindrogan, and one summer I asked their staff to run it. This one was a Robinson trap—a large, bucket-like container with a ring-shaped lid and a powerful mercury-vapor bulb.

Moths are attracted to its light and drop into the container below to await identification and release in the morning. The trap was sited in a purpose-built shed on a grassy bank looking east over the River Ardle. On that first June morning, the students and I were torn between crowding in to examine what the trap had caught, and hanging back for fear of crushing the delicate insects underfoot—many moths are lured to a moth trap but don’t quite make it inside. Most species sport the colors of camouflage, and it takes some time to train one’s eye to spot them in long grass.

For some moths, greens predominate for a background of summer leaves. Others are mainly brown for wood and stone. The lemon yellow of a Brimstone Moth blends surprisingly well into darker tones of grass, especially given the brown patches that dot the leading edges of its wings to break up its shape. Clouded-bordered Brindles have a similar strategy to disrupt their outline, and their shades of brown render them shadows between the stems. Even the monochromes of the Clouded Border are hard to spot among sparkling drops of dew.

4

The Jewel Box

The shed itself was dotted with insects, too. The long white wings of a male Ghost Moth were aligned with the grain of a board. A Coxcomb Prominent sat in a gap between walls and roof, looking like a sycamore key that had become lodged as it fell. A Gold Swift stood out boldly against the gray planking. And then when we opened the trap—a cornucopia inside. Buff-tips, Hawks, Carpets, Waves, and more. I couldn’t identify them all—not then—but I could see what a proliferation of species we’d summoned. The trap had given us all a glimpse of unexpected biodiversity in a country I thought I knew well.

Arriving back at King’s Cross after a week out with a group of students is always a time of mixed feelings. Home is just a handful of tube stops away, with a weekend of much needed rest, sleep, and family time awaiting. Fully immersive teaching with long days in the field is exhausting. But being back in London is always accompanied by an ineffable feeling of loss.

After a week spent in the pine forest and mountains surrounding Kindrogan, the city is an impossible accretion of brick and people, of air and noise pollution. Senses that have come alive in the highlands have to be dialed back down to cope with the urban environment.

The journey from Scotland to London takes one through decades of biodiversity loss in a single day, and feeling that loss takes a toll.

If you live and work in a city, it’s easy to feel detached from nature— but it’s still there if you look. Hampstead Heath is a short walk from my London flat, and the diversity of life it supports is surprising. It often helps to adopt the viewpoint of a five-year-old, getting down on hands and knees, face close to the ground. Even the areas manicured for sport are home to more than just grass. Broad-leaved Plantain and Knotgrass make a living there, lying too low for the blades of the mower. Just a few feet away, where the Heath rangers leave the field uncut, the grass grows tall enough to flower, resolving the stems into Fescue, Cocksfoot, and Foxtail. Yellow buttons of Creeping and Meadow Buttercup mix with the white of Clover. Common Vetch drapes itself across the grass, and

Introduction

5

Creeping Thistles lie low, if not yet flagged by their flowering spikes.

Picnics in the long grass here need care. And of course, the plants themselves are al fresco dining for a variety of animals. When it isn’t raining, butterflies transect the field, and bumblebees and honeybees make beelines from flower to flower. Caterpillars and grubs chew on the leaves, burrow their way into grass stems and thistle buds, and even mine their way between leaf surfaces. Look up and you may see a bird of prey overhead—a Kestrel frequently hovers over the slope here, but Common Buzzard, Red Kite, Sparrowhawk, Peregrine, and Hobby all hunt over the Heath. An early morning visit might produce a Red Fox trotting away to cover. More likely mammal sightings are Brown Rats, or their arboreal cousins, the Gray Squirrels.

Even a short walk can be hard to snatch, though, against a backdrop of work and family. I miss those opportunities for escape. It was something I was feeling especially keenly at the end of that last trip to Kindrogan when the obvious hit me: I could make nature come to me. Why wait a year to run a moth trap again?

My birthday trap was a lightweight Skinner, entry-level, with an actinic bulb as light source, running off mains electricity. It was sited in our only outside space: thirty feet off the ground, on the roof terrace of our flat in the London Borough of Camden. The terrace overlooks some mature gardens, facing a line of tall limes, with large cherry and pear trees in sight. Yet this is very much an urban location in an area with no shortage of other light sources. Before that first morning, I wondered whether this restricted patch of green would house any species of moths, and, if it did, whether any would find their way into the trap. Happily, the answer to both questions was yes.

Experience in science tells us that answers to questions simply lead to more questions: as the sphere of knowledge expands, so does the area of interface between known and unknown. So it was, too, with the moth trap. The most pressing new question that first morning was: What were the identities of all the species that had appeared in the box overnight? This was not a trivial task—there were more than eighty moths to pick out and identify. Giving things names matters. It is how we begin to quantify our experience of the natural world. The moths

6

The Jewel Box

themselves aren’t knowledge yet. The first step is to resolve them into their constituent species.i As we will see, our knowledge of most groups of species in most parts of the world is decidedly poor—we are just beginning to describe the diversity of organisms with which we share the planet. Yet there are some notable exceptions, one of which is British moths. Britain is blessed with some excellent field guides to these insects, beautifully and expertly illustrated with paintings and photographs that depict almost all the species found here. Even with these guides, though, it takes time to get one’s eye in. Different species prefer different habitats and fly at different times of year, and these ecological details are not apparent simply from looking at pictures in a book. The field guides have this information, but there are hundreds of pages of text to leaf through.

It’s a slow process. Fortunately, again, the UK moth trapper is blessed with additional support. Type “What’s flying tonight?” into an internet search engine and it will link you to a web page that uses your location and the date to produce a list of the species most often recorded there and then. Each comes with photographs and a calendar bar showing when in the year the adults are on the wing. It’s based on millions of moth records logged by the charity Butterfly Conservation through their National Moth Recording Scheme, a wonderful application of accumulated scientific data to the public appreciation of biodiversity.

Still stumped, one can go to social media, where experts are happy to help you identify all sorts of animals from photographs; moth novices can ask @UKMothID for assistance (but please consider a contribution for this service if you can). Even with all this help, though, some moths cannot be specifically named without dissecting their genitals, and must simply be logged as a part of an “agg.” to denote that they belong to an aggregate of species that are indistinguishable without the skills of the specialist. I am obsessive about identifying animals, but (so far) I draw the line at killing them to satisfy my obsession.

That first morning on my terrace, I began, slowly, to match species to i. If you’re wondering what I mean by a “species,” that will become clearer before this chapter is out.

Introduction

7

their names. The Dun-bar and Knot Grass. Tree-lichen Beauty, Gypsy, Jersey Tiger. Pale Mottled Willow and Dingy Footman. And most aptly, the Uncertain—most of the moths started with this label, but only two finished with it. (Adults of this species are very similar to others that fly at the same time of year. More of this anon.) Finally, after a good chunk of the morning, I’d assigned eighty-two individual moths to twentyeight different species.ii All these animals had appeared as if by magic on a small roof terrace in urban London. The entomologist and writer E. O. Wilson, who coined the term biophilia to describe the innate affinity people have with the natural world, noted that “Every kid has a bug period. . . . I never grew out of mine.” That morning, I grew back into mine.

We have given names to more than a million different animal species, but this is certainly only a fraction of the total. Estimates of global animal species numbers range from three million to one hundred million, depending on the method used to extrapolate from those species that are currently known to science, but the actual number seems most likely to be nearer the lower end of this range. One credible recent study calculates just shy of eight million species. This is phenomenal diversity, when, as far as we know, the presence of even one living species sets our planet apart from all others. Yet, of all animal species so far named, roughly one in ten is a moth—around 140,000 species in the order Lepidoptera. One in nine, really—another 20,000 or so Lepidoptera are butterflies, which we distinguish colloquially, but which are just a subgroup of moths that have taken to flying by day. The true number of moth species worldwide is likely to be far higher—most species are found in tropical forests, which remain poorly explored in comparison to the temperate latitudes in which most scientists and taxonomists live and work. Why then, given all this diversity, had my trap pulled twenty-eight species of moth out of the London undergrowth? What ii. A few more individuals had been lured in but escaped during my clumsy attempts to extract them from the trap.

8

The Jewel Box

was it that determined twenty-eight? Was there anything that could be done to increase that number? And what would happen if we tried to bring more species into the local environment—would I end up with a richer catch, or would present incumbents simply be squeezed out?

What about if we took some species away—would other species move in, or would our local moth community just be the poorer?

There were twenty-eight species in my trap, but eighty-two individual moths. Almost a third of the catch comprised just two species—the Tree-lichen Beauty was the most numerous, with thirteen individuals, but the Jersey Tiger was close behind with twelve. Add in the Dun-bar (eight), Riband Wave, and Codling Moth (six of each), and five of the twenty-eight species accounted for more than half of the moths caught.

Most species were represented by ones or twos. Is that typical?

Could the species I caught live elsewhere—indeed, do they? The two most common species in the trap that morning were ones I’d not seen in Kindrogan, which suggested that something was different between these two locations. The habitats around the trap—Camden and Kindrogan—were obviously quite distinct, but perhaps it was just down to geography—do we expect to get the same set of moths in the trap if we shift it 700 kilometers, or not? And what does it tell us if we do? The different sets of moths in Kindrogan and London could also be just an issue of the time of year—spring and summer come later to Scotland than to southeast England, so maybe the Kindrogan trap would be full of Tree-lichen Beauties and Jersey Tigers come August?

No species is an island, entire of itself. All animals must consume to survive, so the presence of food is important. Moths are holometabolous insects, which means that they develop through a life cycle of egg, larva (the caterpillar stage, which is split into a variable number of instars,iii punctuated by shedding of the hard chitinous exoskeleton to create room for expansion of the body and allow onward growth), pupa (or chrysalis, in which the miraculous transformation from caterpillar to iii. Caterpillar skins can only stretch so far as they grow, and every so often they need to molt. It’s their equivalent of us moving through shoe and clothing sizes. Each molt takes them up an instar. Some moths need to molt more times than others, generally because they are growing to larger sizes. (See chapter 5 for an example of just how much some caterpillars can grow.)

Introduction

9

moth takes place), and finally adult. Most consumption is done by the caterpillar; this must start out being able to fit inside a tiny egg, but then accumulate enough raw material to effect the metamorphosis to an adult capable of laying eggs of its own (up to 20,000 in some cases).

Most caterpillars are vegetarians, but their tastes vary enormously. The Lesser Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing has a mouthful of a name, but the list of plants its caterpillars will eat is much longer—from Deadnettles, Docks and Mayweeds, to Sallow, Hawthorn, and Blackthorn.

The Marbled Beauty, on the other hand, develops on lichens, which provide slimmer pickings and do not do well in polluted areas. Both species were on my Inner London roof terrace that first morning of trapping.

Moths are consumers, but are also often the consumed. They are links in the web of life, parts of the habitats they occupy, and habitats themselves, for communities of predators and parasites. The moth trap can illustrate this. It sometimes attracts wasps—the colloquial yellowjackets—especially in autumn, which can bring tension to the morning’s proceedings. Yellowjackets are important predators of other insects, doing a largely unheralded service as pest controllers in gardens and crops. They often buzz in to try their luck with the moths resting around the trap. Other wasps are also drawn to it, too—parasitoids that lay eggs in the bodies of caterpillars, hatching to eat the host alive from the inside. Sometimes moths are both consumers and consumed: those Dun-bars I caught grew up as omnivores, feeding on leaves but sometimes also on the caterpillars of other moths. What effects do all of these interactions have on the populations of the moths I was catching?

Are moth numbers determined by what they eat, or by what eats them?

There is an extensive and venerable branch of science essentially devoted to these questions. This is the science of ecology, which has been my career for the past three decades. I’m deeply interested in questions relating to the abundance, distribution, and richness of species, which I mainly research using information on a group of animals that has always been my first love—birds. My familiarity with this sort of question, and with birds, has certainly not bred contempt, but often it takes the contrast of new experiences for us suddenly to see the familiar

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The Jewel Box

in a different light. We take our surroundings for granted. My moth trap had given me a new perspective.

Ecology was first defined in its modern form—as Öekologie, in his native German—in the 1860s by the biologist Ernst Haeckel. The etymological roots of ecology combine the ancient Greek words oikos, from which we get “eco-,” and logos, for the principle of order and knowledge. Oikos does not have a single meaning; it refers to the family, the family’s property, or the house. Why it prefixes economy is clear. For the study of the interactions between organisms and their environment—which is one definition of ecology we might use—“eco” relates to the third meaning, and we often give it a more personal interpretation. Literally, ecology is the study of our home. The relevance and logic of this to an ecologist is obvious: we are organisms, and our environment matters fundamentally to us. Haeckel’s formal definition was “the comprehensive science of the relationship of the organism to the environment.”1 Haeckel was a keen disciple of Charles Darwin, and so it seems appropriate that the definition of ecology has evolved over the years.

Although Haeckel identified the essence of the subject, he codified it in a form that was arguably too general, and too vague. What isn’t ecology, under his definition? What, exactly, is ecology trying to explain?

It was not until almost a century later that we got a clear answer to this second question, thanks to the Australian ecologist Herbert Andrewartha. He revised the definition of ecology to “the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organisms”2—the crux is to try to understand where organisms are found, how many are found there, and why. With minor tweaks (Canadian Charles Krebs advocated for the addition of “the interactions that determine,”3 for example), this is the definition that most ecologists use today. It identifies why ecology is key to understanding the contents of a moth trap.

A moth trap may be a source of wonder for the biophiliac, but it is also an effective scientific tool. The animals that it conjures out of thin air are samples of the wider moth community in the immediate

Introduction

11

area, or, in some cases, of the moths that are passing through it. They are a snapshot, a fragment of the wider panorama. By piecing together snapshots we can begin to see the bigger picture.

For moths the number of snapshots available is huge, at least in the UK. These islands are home to an extended community of amateur trappers who write up their nightly catch and submit details to regional or national record schemes. Since 1968, a countrywide network of moth traps has been coordinated by the agricultural research station at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire. Historical records that antedate the existence of these schemes can in some cases be extracted from old notebooks and added to the picture. The high-resolution image that results means that we can start to pick out details, and individual moth trappers can see where the pixels they provide fit into the broader patterns that emerge. These patterns become the basis for ideas about how the natural world works, which we can then put to the test by further observations—or better, by experimentation. Are we seeing a random set of individual animals of a random set of species thrown together by chance—or are there rules? And if there are rules, what sort of rules are they? Gradually, our understanding of the world around us improves. But the scale of the task should not be underestimated. The natural world is fiendishly complex.

Imagine that you had the technology that would allow you to scan our planet with such detail that you could map the identity and location of every individual animal, plant, fungus, bacteria, archaean, and virus.iv What sort of picture would this give you?

Each of the individuals scanned would belong to a species. On top of the eight million or so animal species, estimates suggest about a further million other eukaryotes (roughly 30 percent plants, 60 percent fungi, and the rest protozoa and algae). In comparison, estimates of prokaryote (bacteria and archaea) species numbers range from the surprisingly low (a minimum of around 10,000) to the surprisingly high (perhaps 1 trillion).v iv. These are the major kingdoms across which we currently consider life to be distributed, although the number of kingdoms we consider there to be has increased over the history of biological science, and no doubt will continue to change. v. This enormous uncertainty is partly because we have trouble understanding what

12

The Jewel Box

These are numbers of species, though. We sometimes know the number of individuals for a given species very well, but only when that species is so rare that we are worried for its future—the 209 individuals of Kakapo, the large, flightless New Zealand parrot, for example.vi Mostly, we have to estimate numbers of individuals based on very small samples of our world—snapshots of the kind provided by moth traps. We have good estimates only for the very best-known groups of organisms. A few years back, my colleague Kevin Gaston and I tried to estimate how many individual birds there were in the world.

Birds are undoubtedly the best-known major group of species—they are generally quite conspicuous animals, detected relatively easily by sight and/or sound, with a global network of keen (not to say fanatical) birders who aim to find as many as possible. There are many recording schemes, and numerous estimates of the abundance of birds at different scales, from the density of individuals in small patches of habitat to national population estimates. For example, the latest work suggests that the breeding population of British birds is 161,211,593 individuals— though this precision belies a substantial margin of error, and excludes nonbreeding individuals, the numbers of which are harder to assess.

Pulling together data from a range of sources, Kevin and I estimated a global breeding population in the range of 100–400 billion birds, though we later revised this estimate down to a best guess of around 87 billion (which would have been around one 110 billion before humans began the process of converting natural habitats for our own use). This seems plausible; a recent study using different methods comes up with essentially the same answer, and the number is unlikely to be ten times smaller or ten times greater, at least. To “within an order of magnitude” (a multiple of ten) is often a reasonable approximation in ecology. the term species means for a prokaryote, given our own eukaryotic perspective (and we still argue about the definition for eukaryotes). The number of prokaryote species may be in the rounding error of the number of eukaryote species, or perhaps the reverse is true. As viruses are parasites of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the number of virus species is likely to depend on how many species of hosts there are, combined with how specific to any given host any given virus turns out to be (which will itself be variable). It seems barely worth attempting to calculate viral species richness, given the circumstances. vi. This is the number reported at the time of writing.

Introduction

13

In the case of other organisms, it’s much harder to be sure even of the order of magnitude of estimates. According to the Smithsonian BugInfo website, the number of insects alive at any one time has been estimated to be around ten quintillion (one followed by nineteen zeroes). Where this estimate comes from, and whether it’s reasonable or not, are hard to say. It suggests that there are more than a hundred million insects per breeding bird, which is perhaps plausible. For scale, both Great Tits and Blue Tits (European relatives of the chickadees) may deliver a caterpillar every minute to their broods at the height of the breeding season (an exhausting sixteen-hour day). Given that there are around 2.7 million pairs of these two species in Britain alone, that adds up to more than two billion caterpillars fed to nestlings of just these two species in just one day. Many of these will be the progeny of two species of moth—Winter Moth and Green Tortrix—which are key food items for the tits. Insectivory is a common diet for birds, and so supporting them and their hungry broods certainly requires a lot of insects. Insects are also a key food for many mammal species—a bat may catch 500 insects an hour—not to mention reptiles, amphibians, fish, spiders, and so on. Ten quintillion starts to seem ballpark. Even this number shrinks in comparison to estimates for microorganisms, of which a billion may be found in a teaspoon of soil. The estimated number of viruses worldwide is 1 × 1031, or well over a billion for every one of those quintillion insects. Laid end to end, they would measure out a hundred million light years. Again, these estimates come with caveats over accuracy, but changing the numbers by even several orders of magnitude doesn’t alter the message: this planet is home to a stunning abundance and diversity of life.

Of course, the second it’s complete, any scan of our planet is out of date. New individuals will have been born, and others will have died.

If those deaths involved the last of their kind, populations will have disappeared, and maybe species, too. Perhaps the births will have led to the gain of new species, although the nature of speciation is such that it is much harder to pinpoint the moment of appearance, versus loss. Regardless of births and deaths, individual organisms will have moved—huge numbers of them will have changed location. In absolute terms, these movements may not amount to much from second to

14

The Jewel Box

second, but as time accrues, they will lead to areas being vacated or colonized by increments, and new species arising. A second later and the scene has changed again. This is a play that has been running since the first organisms appeared on earth. After almost four billion years, it has given us the planet we look out onto now.

None of these changes happens in isolation. Every individual organism needs resources to survive and reproduce—energy, water, and nutrients. Some will satisfy those needs directly from the environment, but for the majority, sustenance will come from other organisms, through consumption, depredation, or parasitism. These are the interactions that some consider a defining feature of ecology, and they mean that no organism plays out its time independent of others. They set species against each other, with the profits of some gained at the expense of others. Still others will have to work together for the mutual benefit of both. As a result, all of those billions of billions of organisms are locked in a dance, their mind-boggling numbers dwarfed by the numbers of potential and actual threads connecting them. The threads pull the organisms in myriad directions as they chase their needs across the environment, or try to evade the needs of others. All of these interactions happen against a backdrop of an environment that is itself constantly on the move, as geology and climate (and occasionally astrophysics) work together to alter the stage on which life plays.

It is not only the stage that changes—the species acting on it do, too. What even is a species? Many definitions have been proposed, and indeed there are several different philosophical approaches to the problem, but for practical purposes we usually consider a species as a group of organisms that can potentially (if of the right sexes) breed together in the wild to produce fertile offspring. The reason that defining species is hard is that they are dynamic. They respond to changes in the pressures imposed by their environment and from the other species with which they interact, with incremental changes of their own—that is, evolution. Species adapt and persist, but different pressures in different locations mean that some groups—populations— can head off on different trajectories, leading to splits, and, ultimately, to new species arising. How far populations have progressed down this road determines whether their members can still interbreed with

Introduction

15

other populations, muddying the waters about whether the different populations are really different species. The Deep Brown Dart and Northern Deep Brown Dart both breed in Britain, and as their names imply they are very similar. But are these moths different species? Even the experts cannot agree. Nevertheless, for the most part, it is clear to which species an organism belongs (with the caveat that we think most species are yet undescribed).

The process of gradual change and separation has, over some 3.7 billion years, given us the millions (or perhaps billions) of species that exist today. Each one has followed its own route across the everchanging environment of Earth in an unbroken chain of descent from an ancestor common to all. The unique routes mean that each species is itself also unique in both its history and outcome: every species has devised a different solution to the challenges of surviving and reproducing, resulting in the characteristics they now display. Some species live at a rapid pace, growing quickly, reproducing as much and as often as they can, buying thousands of tickets in the lottery of life in the hope that some of the numbers will be winners. As we’ll see later, if conditions are right, they can win big. Other species play a long game, taking their time to mature, putting a lot of time and effort into raising a few offspring to carry on the family line and potentially increase the species’ representation in the global inventory of life. This is the approach we take as humans, showing that a long game can still lead to big wins. Many species run strategies somewhere in between. All individuals, however, make (unconscious) choices about how to allocate the resources they acquire to best ensure the persistence of the genes they carry through future generations. These choices are reflected in what the species look like, and how, in the broadest sense, they behave.

Individuals, populations, and species, their needs, interactions, movements, characteristics, and the ways they change—entities and events numbered in the quintillions—these are the purlieu of ecology.

Ecology is sometimes criticized as a science for its lack of immutable laws and solid predictions, but the complexity of what it has to explain is truly mind-boggling. Charles Darwin used the analogy of “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling

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The Jewel Box

through the damp earth . . . produced by laws acting around us,”4 and for much of its lifetime, ecology has focused on trying to tease apart mechanisms at the scale he described. But an entangled bank is not separate from the wider environment in which it is set, and its plants and animals are affected by processes operating at the scales of continents and millennia. The moths that appeared in my trap that July morning, their numbers, identities, and characteristics, represent the denouement of one plot line in a play of daunting complication. How does one even begin to approach the question of how they ended up there?

The answer to this question at least is clear—by breaking the problem down into more manageable parts. All science works this way. The origins of physics, chemistry, and biology were responses to complexities too great to be tackled as a whole. We have continued to subdivide science as the expanding sphere of knowledge has stretched the boundaries of these traditional disciplines to the breaking point.

Biology spawned ecology, but also evolutionary biology, genetics, cell biology, molecular biology, and other subfields too numerous to list.

These are subdivided too, although our ultimate goal is to bring them back together into a holistic understanding of life.

At least for the moth trap, and for the science of ecology that helps us to understand the magic that it conjures, bringing some of the divisions together is what I will try in part to do here. Ecology is already a gigantic field, and while I’ve been studying it for around thirty years now, I make no claim to understand more than a tiny part. Nevertheless, some of that understanding does bear on questions of why, on any given day, my moth trap turns up the species it does, and in the numbers it does.

The moth trap and its catch set me reflecting on these questions, and indeed on what we know about the natural world of which we are a part.

This book is the result of that reflection. I want to explain how we think the natural world works, or at least offer my take on those workings, through the window that the moth trap provides into a hidden world.

There have been lots of books about particular animals, by scientists and by nature writers, and they are often wonderful. But The Jewel Box isn’t a book about moths—or isn’t only a book about moths. Rather, I want to use moths and my love of them as a tool to reveal the workings of nature.

Introduction

17

Just as Michael Faraday’s iron filings arranged themselves to illustrate a magnetic field that would otherwise have been invisible, I want to show you that when we pay proper attention to these tiny animals, their relationships with one another, and their connections to the wider web of life, a larger truth about the world gradually emerges into focus.

A single line of dialogue does not make sense without the rest of the play, and one cannot understand the contents of a moth trap without considering the complete environmental narrative. The contents of one small box depend on—and can illuminate—the workings of all of nature.

I start out simply, by thinking about a group of individuals belonging to just one species. The two fundamentals in the life of each one of these individuals—they are born, and then they die—contain within their interaction the capacity for populations to grow. This growth is the basis for understanding all of ecology, and indeed all of life’s incredible diversity. But this growth happens on a finite planet, where resources are ultimately limited. This really matters.

Populations do not exist in a vacuum, of course, and no species plays out its lifespan independent of others. How these interactions modify the capacity for populations to grow informs the next two chapters.

Competition between species for vital resources. And predation, when one species becomes the vital resource, consumed by a consumer. These processes help us to understand why populations do not grow out of control.

Birth and death bookend the life of every organism, but it is what they do in between that makes them the species they are. How they funnel those vital resources into growth, survival, and reproduction determines their life history—whether they will live fast and die young, or experience old age. The choices they make are driven by how and when death finds them, and lead to the diversity of forms the moth trap reveals. They help explain why there is no one right way to be a moth.

Having considered the processes that affect the ebb and flow of populations, and how those same processes help dictate life histories, I then step up a level of complexity to think about multiple populations living together, hence forming ecological communities. This starts to get at the key questions of how many species—and how many individuals

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of each—coexist. It’s an open question whether interactions are king here, or whether communities are just random sets of species assembled by chance. I’ll argue that the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle—members playing by rules, but membership depending also on a heavy pinch of luck.

Thinking about the structure of ecological communities highlights the importance of migration. My trap catches moths born in neighboring gardens and neighboring countries. Life depends on these movements.

Migrants can colonize new areas and rescue dwindling populations from extinction. Much of the world would be a barren wasteland without them, and all of it less diverse.

The set of species that coexist in any given community is a subset of those in the wider environment. But the more species there are in that wider environment, the more species will tend to coexist. Not all parts of our planet are created equal when it comes to species, and I will discuss why. This brings us back to the inevitable bookends of birth and death, but now at the level of the species: speciation and extinction. Millions of years of this (with a bit of migration thrown in) have given us more moths in some regions than others, and more moths in some taxonomic groups than others. We cannot understand why a moth trap reveals the diversity it does without these widest of perspectives.

This is not quite the end of the story, as our tale has a final twist. A new actor has recently appeared on the scene, and is insinuating itself into every thread of our plot. That actor is an increasingly important driver of the processes that determine the workings of ecological systems, from the dynamics of single populations to the structure of communities and the diversity of whole regions. Its machinations threaten to send the whole story of life in a new and unwelcome direction, and I cannot finish without mention of its impacts—or to be precise, our impacts, for that new actor is us.

I hope this book will show that we cannot understand what goes on in our gardens, or on our roof terraces, in isolation. We can spend a lifetime describing in minute detail the environment, the organisms, and the interactions happening on an entangled bank, but this hard labor will be for nothing without context. All of nature is linked. The processes that determine the numbers and kinds of moths in my trap

Introduction

19

can depend on what my neighbors did last week, but can also span continents and eons. One cannot fence off a piece of nature and expect it to thrive, or even to survive. This realization has never mattered more. We are increasingly fashioning the world in our own image, remaking it into one where nature is limited to ever smaller pockets, set in landscapes dominated by humans and the processes we impose. If we care about our local nature, we need to think and act globally. The moth trap is a jewel box in which we can find Emeralds, Pearls, Rubies, and Gems. But the jewels are also pixels in a much larger picture. I hope I can convey something of what this picture looks like, and how it came to hold its current form. It is beautiful.

Chapter 1

The Gypsy Moth

The Power of Reproduction All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

— Samuel Butler

Gypsy Moth, Camden, London.

21

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T

he first night I ran the trap on my roof terrace in London, it turned up some exquisite moths. A Tree-lichen Beauty with a vivid turquoise stole draped across its shoulders. Jersey Tigers, their black-and-white-striped upperwings concealing rich orange underwings spotted with black. A self-explanatory Small Purple-andGold. Not everything in the trap that morning could reasonably be described as beautiful, though. One moth in particular had clearly seen better days.

Lepidoptera as a group are characterized by the microscopic scales that cover their wings (their name literally translates from the Greek as “scale wing”), which are the source of the incredible range of colors and patterns that moths display. The scales can easily be rubbed off, however.

The wings of this moth had been scraped virtually bare, leaving blank canvas-like planes latticed with prominent, ridged veins. Lepidopteran scales can also be modified into hairs, and it is these that give many species the appearance of being wrapped in fur coats. This moth was virtually naked, its body hairs having been rubbed away to the extent that its thorax and abdomen were nearly smooth. Many moths are relatable through their resemblance to tiny flying birds or mammals.

This one was a reminder that hidden beneath their fur is the hard chitinous exoskeleton possessed by all insects.

Stripped of most of its colors and pattern, the naked moth would have been difficult to put a name to had it not been for one highly distinctive feature that remained: a pair of broad, feathery antennae on its head, like tatty rabbit’s ears. They were drooped and battered, but they pointed clearly to an identification. This was a Gypsy Moth. Scientific name Lymantria dispar, meaning “separate destroyer.”i A male. i. Throughout the book I call species by their “common” English names, but all also have a two-part scientific name. The first part denotes the genus (i.e., group of closely related species) to which the species belongs, while the second is unique to the species within the genus. The genus name is capitalized, the species name not, and both are italicized. Humans are no exception to these rules—science names us Homo sapiens.

There are other species recognised within the genus Homo—our closest relatives, now sadly all extinct. A species can have many “common” names in a language (and there are moves to rename the Gypsy as the Spongy Moth because of the offense that “Gypsy” might cause to people of Romani origin), or none at all (such as Enicospilus inflexus,

The Gypsy Moth

23

The Gypsy Moth is a species that is naturally distributed widely across Europe and Asia, but one that has had a checkered history in Britain.

Until the early years of the twentieth century, a small population clung on in a restricted area of the East Anglian Fens, where its caterpillars fed on a couple of shrubby plant species, Bog Myrtle and Creeping Willow. Unfortunately for the Gypsy, the Fens have deep and fertile soil, and have long been coveted as farmland. Today, almost all of the original marshy habitat there has been drained and put to growing food, including the areas where the last surviving English Gypsy Moths lived.

Now, satellite images show a grid of fields, the straight edges so typical of human influence on the environment. The Gypsy Moth was last seen in its Fenland refuge in 1907.

As it turns out, this was not the end of the story for the Gypsy Moth in England. In the summer of 1995, the species was discovered in Epping Forest, one of London’s green lungs, to the northeast of the city. This was not an outpost of the original population being unearthed, but a new population based on colonists from the continent.

We know this in part because, while the Fenland Gypsys were rather picky eaters, the Epping Forest caterpillars are much more catholic in their diets—technically, polyphagous. Exactly where the colonists came from, and when they first arrived, is unknown, but they almost certainly hitchhiked into the country on imported wood products such as timber or packaging material. The female Gypsy Moth is largely flightless, and so tends not to move far once it has eclosed from its pupa. They lay eggs in large yellow clumps (called plaques), normally on trees, but in modern times also on fences, walls, and other solid surfaces. Eggs laid on trees or wood subsequently cut for timber or pallets could easily ride the ferry or Eurostar from the continent to hatch out across the Channel in southeast England. The fact that the new population is mainly found in economically active London is consistent with the idea that the moths arrived inadvertently on cargo, rather than being natural colonists. Either way, since that first sighting the population which we will meet later), but it only ever has one valid scientific name. Scientific names can get changed, though (the Gypsy Moth started out as Phalaena dispar, for example), which is a pain.

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has grown and spread. It is now found throughout the London area, and beyond. More than a century after the last individuals disappeared from the East Anglian Fens, Gypsy Moths are back again in England, and (the males at least) appearing on my roof terrace in Camden.

While the precise origin of the Gypsy Moth population in London is uncertain, that isn’t the case for the population in the United States.

They came from 27 Myrtle Street, Medford, Massachusetts—the house of Mr. Léopold Trouvelot—in either 1868 or 1869.

Gypsy Moths do not occur naturally in North America.ii They were taken there by Léopold after a trip to Europe as part of his experiments on the production of moth silk, a valuable commodity then and now.

Léopold was himself a native of Europe, described in the 1890s as an artist, naturalist, and astronomer of note, but now mainly remembered for his role in the Gypsy Moth saga. He probably imported the moths as eggs, and then either some of those eggs or the caterpillars that hatched from them were accidentally blown out of the window of the room where they were being kept. Realizing that the consequences of this could potentially be severe, and unable to put the worms back into the can himself, Léopold apparently gave public notice of the escape.

Exactly what is meant by that is unclear. In the circumstances, it doesn’t really matter.

The genus to which the Gypsy Moth is assigned has changed over the last 150 years, but a common theme of its name in translation is destroyer or ravager. The polyphagous form can feed on a wide variety of tree and shrub species, and can cause significant damage to individual plants if population numbers get high. Hence Léopold Trouvelot’s apparent consternation at having some of his stock escape. However, for the next decade it seemed as though it would turn out to be an accident of little consequence. Léopold evidently saw Gypsy Moths, ii. Species that are moved by humans to places beyond the normal limits of their distributions, and that are released or escape into the wild in those places, are termed “aliens.” The Gypsy Moth in Medford is a classic example, but we will hear much more about them later.

The Gypsy Moth

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presumably in or around his garden, but hardly anyone else did. That started to change as the moth entered its second decade in Medford.

In 1879, a gentleman by the name of William Taylor moved into 27 Myrtle Street, Trouvelot having moved on by that point. The following spring, Taylor “found the shed in the rear of his house swarming with caterpillars.” They were such a nuisance that he got permission to sell the shed, thereby presumably moving some of the caterpillars to a new location.

Within a couple of years, neighbors of no. 27 were starting to feel the effects of the moth, too. There were caterpillars all over the outside of no.

29, and their apple and pear trees were entirely stripped of leaves. Gypsy Moths continued to spread along Myrtle Street and into natural areas to the south, but it wasn’t until 1889 that the full extent of their capabilities became apparent. The outbreak of Gypsy Moths in Medford that year was so devastating that the locals wondered how on earth the species could have gone largely unnoticed for almost two decades.

In our times of diminished nature, it may be hard for many of us to conceive of the abundance of the Gypsy Moth in the outbreak of 1889.

Yet testimony to the fact is itself abundant, as documented in a report on the problem to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts published in 1896.

It tells how some trees were so covered with the egg plaques that they appeared spongy, and yellow in color. The eggs produced caterpillars in millions. One Mrs. Belcher reported that “My sister cried out one day, ‘They [the caterpillars] are marching up the street.’ I went to the front door, and sure enough, the street was black with them, coming across from my neighbor’s, Mrs. Clifford’s, and heading straight for our yard.

They had stripped her trees.”

The caterpillars were nicknamed “army-worms,” and for good reason.

Mrs. S. J. Follansbee related that “the walks, trees, and fences in my yard and the sides of the house were covered with caterpillars. I used to sweep them off with a broom and burn them with kerosene, and in half an hour they would be just as bad as ever. There were literally pecks of them.iii There was not a leaf on my trees.” Mrs. Snowdon: “I have seen the end of Mrs. Spinney’s house so black with caterpillars that you iii. One peck is around nine liters.

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could hardly have told what color the paint was.” Mrs. Ransom: “In the evening we could hear the caterpillars eating in the trees. It sounded like the clipping of scissors.” Mr. Daly had a similar experience: “At nighttime we could hear the caterpillars eating in the trees and their excrement dropping to the ground.” Walking around town at this time was distinctly unpleasant, while hanging out washing to dry simply risked having to wash it again—it would often come off the line dirty with frass. The army-worms did not stop at trees, either: “When the supply of leaves in the trees fell short (and oftentimes before) they attacked the gardens. Little was spared but the horse-chestnut trees and the grass in the fields, though even these were eaten to some extent.”

Dealing with the problem was a significant undertaking, as noted by Mrs. Hamlin: “For six weeks a great deal of our time was devoted to killing these caterpillars.”5 If the authorities had not been alert to the presence of the Gypsy Moth before, they certainly were now. Before 1889 was out, state politicians were being urged to act against a species that was clearly a threat to both forestry and agriculture, not only in Massachusetts but countrywide. The state government moved quickly, and by March 1890 the first funds for the eradication of the Gypsy Moth had been approved. Unfortunately, assessments that year found that around fifty square miles were already infested. Control within that area was quite successful in reducing Gypsy Moth numbers through manual destruction of eggs and spraying of affected trees with Paris green, a highly toxic compound of copper and arsenic. Nevertheless, the infested area continued to grow. While initial extermination events had focused on trees, masses of eggs had also been laid on fences, under boardwalks, under steps and in cellars. Searching these and other areas turned up more than 750,000 plaques in just the first six weeks of 1891, or on the order of 300–500 million eggs.

The army-worms were well and truly out of the can. Starting from Léopold Trouvelot’s garden, the Gypsy Moth has now spread to occupy more than 400,000 square miles of northeastern North America. Its population size varies, and in some years numbers are low. In the outbreak year of 1990, though, around 100,000 square miles of American forest was defoliated by its voracious caterpillars. Ravager indeed.

The Gypsy Moth

27

One rather tatty moth in my first night of trapping, but so many questions. What was the Gypsy Moth doing in Medford for the decade when it passed largely unnoticed? What happened after two decades to cause the population there to explode? Could that happen in London? Why has it done so well in North America—a part of the world that it didn’t evolve to inhabit? And why does its North American population seem to have good years and bad—why are there years when its abundance reaches plague proportions?

At first sight, these are daunting questions. Consider all the factors that could be affecting Gypsy Moth populations. There are all the vagaries of the environment. Temperature and rainfall—their highs and lows, variation across the day and year, and the effects of unexpected extremes. Geology (which affects soil) and edaphology (how soils interact with living organisms) vary, too—does that even matter for moths? Then there are all the other organisms with which the moths are sharing the environment—species that they may consume or that may consume them, competitors for resources, species that help or hinder their growth and reproduction. Features of the moths themselves may matter, and can change through evolution or phenotypic plasticity (changes in response to an environment that do not require evolutionary change).iv All of these possibilities and more may drive Gypsy Moth numbers up and down. How do we pick this all apart?

Some of these questions are the subject for later chapters, and I will try to answer them then. However, before we can begin to come up with those answers, we need to understand how populations change in size—how populations grow, and how they decline. We also need to understand what we mean by a “population.” Fortunately, the answers to these questions are relatively simple. The consequences of the answers can be less so, but let’s start with the simple bits.

For an ecologist, a population is simply a set of individuals, all of iv. For example, caterpillars of the American Emerald Moth Nemoria arizonaria mimic the oak catkins they feed on in the spring, but twigs when they feed on oak leaves in the summer. Their diet determines which sort of mimic they grow up to be, and the different caterpillar morphs were originally thought to be different species.

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the same species, living in a defined area, at a given point in time. I say “simply,” but that definition already presents difficulties.

In some cases, it can be surprisingly hard to distinguish one individual from another—two flowering stems might be shoots from the same root stock, or they might be neighbors. This can make counting the individuals difficult when we want to measure the number of individuals in the population—population size (which we will). For moths, at least, individuals are quite easy to define, at any stage in their life cycle. But they can still be hard to count.

The area delineating a population can be more difficult to define, as the commission established by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to deal with their Gypsy Moth problem quickly found. Generally, we can sidestep the issue of precise boundaries and define it arbitrarily, for the convenience of the researcher—the area is the area that we’re interested in, which, in general, it is (though this does have consequences, as we will see in a moment). We do need to be careful about our choice, however. Too small an area, and the numbers of individuals there will be too small to say much about the population and its workings.

Too large, and there will be too much information to process— counting all the individuals, or even estimating the number, becomes a headache.

How we think about a “point in time” is largely determined by the population we are studying. Time moves differently for people and moths, while ecologists following bacterial populations in petri dishes will work on different timescales than their colleagues monitoring elephants in the national park down the road. What matters here is that we follow populations over periods that allow us to understand what might be determining population size, and for that, we need to pick time steps that allow us to track changes in that size.

Once we have defined our population, we can then try to understand if and why the number of individuals comprising it changes. This is the study of population dynamics. For this, we first need to count or estimate how many individuals there are in the population. We then need to do this many times, so that we can follow change. We don’t need to census the elephant population every day for this. We probably do need to for the bacteria. Studying bacterial populations in petri

The Gypsy Moth

29

dishes will obviously give us data to explore population dynamics more quickly. Whatever our population, though, we need to understand how it changes in size. And there is a huge diversity of processes that can affect this—environmental, ecological, and evolutionary—making it a daunting proposition at first glance.

Luckily, despite all the different processes that can affect population size, ultimately it changes through the action of just four basic processes: birth, death, immigration, and emigration.

Take the Gypsy Moth population in Léopold Trouvelot’s garden as an example. It could get larger because more Gypsy Moths are being born (eggs being laid, caterpillars hatching, and adults eclosing, depending on which life stage you’re counting). It could also get larger because Gypsy Moths from elsewhere are moving into the garden— this was how the population started, in fact—through immigration from the house. However, the population could also get smaller because moths are dying—this is the fate of all members of all populations eventually, and was soon a major objective in the garden of 27 Myrtle Street and its environs. Finally, the Gypsy Moth population in Léopold’s garden could decrease because moths are moving out. Such emigration certainly happened in the 1880s, and likely before that, too—and how!

One garden’s emigrants are another’s immigrants.

Year on year (as an appropriate time scale), then, the Gypsy Moth population in Léopold Trouvelot’s garden could have increased through births and immigration, and decreased through deaths and emigration.

I’m now going to write this information in the form of an equation. I am no mathematician, and the equations that follow will involve no more than addition, subtraction, and multiplication (there will be one Greek letter). So: If we assume that 1869 was “Year zero” for this population, then by the following year: N1870 = N1869 + B − D + I − E In this equation, N is the number of individuals in the population (at the end of 1869 and the end of 1870, as denoted by the subscripts); B is the number of individuals born into the population present in 1869; D is the number of individuals in the 1869 population (or added to it in

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The Jewel Box

1870) that then died before 1870 was out; I is the number of individuals that immigrated into the 1869 population from elsewhere; and E is the number of individuals that emigrated out of the 1869 population for pastures new. The change in the population size between 1869 and 1870 depends straightforwardly on the numbers of births and deaths, immigrants and emigrants. We can generalize the equation above by replacing the specific years for general time steps (t and t + 1): Nt + 1 = Nt + B − D + I − E This equation is quite a simple one, though not as simple as it could be. We are actually distinguishing different types of process going on in it—two that are fundamental to all life (birth and death, B and D) and two that are not, but that relate to movement between different populations (immigration and emigration, I and E). If we assume that our population is closed—that is, individuals neither enter nor leave it— then we can dispense with the movement part. In that case: Nt + 1 = Nt + B − D This equation would apply to the size of the Massachusetts Gypsy Moth population in 1870—only births and deaths matter. (With the caveats that we are assuming that no more individuals escaped through Léopold’s windows, and that we would soon be having to expand our area of interest beyond Massachusetts to continue to ignore emigration.)

The equation for the change in the size of the population between time steps (i.e., the difference in size between Nt and Nt + 1) is simpler still: ΔN = B − D Here, the triangle is the Greek letter delta, the symbol ecologists use to mean “the change in.” So the change in the size of a population between time steps—Gypsy Moths in Massachusetts between 1869 and 1870, say—is simply the number of births minus the number of deaths.

If there are more Gypsy Moths born in Massachusetts in 1870 than die, then the population will increase (ΔN will be a positive number).

If more die than are born, then it will decrease (ΔN will be a negative number).

The Gypsy Moth

31

I am going to persist with the algebra through a couple more steps, because they are baby steps, and because the outcome is fundamental in biology. I also think the result will be of interest, at least at the time of writing, so please bear with me a little longer.

B and D are the number of births and deaths in a population. What is going to influence the magnitude of those numbers for any given population? The most obvious factor is how many individuals there are in the population. Larger populations (bigger N ) will generally have more births and more deaths, all else being equal. More people are born and die each year in the United States than in the United Kingdom, just because the population of the United States is much larger. The same is (now) true of the Gypsy Moth populations in these two countries.

What we can do, then, is rewrite B in terms of the size of the population (N ) and the average number of offspring per individual in that population, or the birth rate, which we denote by lowercase b.

Thus, B = bN (which means b multiplied by N—we don’t write the “times” sign to avoid confusion with the letter x). We can do the same for the number of deaths, D, which is then the product of the size of the population and the average number of deaths per individuals in that population (or, less confusingly, the proportion of individuals in that population that die—the death rate), d: D = dN. This gives us: ΔN = bN − dN

The change in the size of a population between time steps (ΔN ) thus depends on the size of the population (N ), and the difference between the birth rate (b) and the death rate (d ) in that population.

If an individual is more likely to die than to produce an offspring, the population will shrink. The fact that bN − dN is mathematically the same as (b − d )N emphasizes the point: b has to be greater than d for the population to grow. For the Gypsy Moths of Massachusetts, this was very much the case.

The final edit we make to our equation is to give (b − d ) its own designation, r: ΔN = rN If r is a positive number (the birth rate is higher than the death rate), the population will grow. If r is negative (the death rate is higher

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than the birth rate), it will shrink (ΔN is a negative number, so we are subtracting individuals from the population). An r of zero, and the population stays constant. We call r the intrinsic rate of increase of the population. It’s sometimes called the Malthusian parameter, after the eighteenth-century cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus, who famously wrote on questions of population growth, and whose work influenced the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin.

And that is the end of the equations for this book.v

Perhaps the concept of a population “r” number rings a bell? In the spring of 2020, this letter was in the news in a way that I could not have imagined when I had lectured to students on this theory of population change a few months earlier. The capital R that is so important to the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic is not quite the same quantity as the Malthusian parameter (for R, 1 is the critical value, not 0), but it is the equivalent for the population of viral hosts (determining changes in how many of us humans are infected). And the outcome of a constant value of r above 0, or R above 1, is the same in each case— exponential population growth. This is a concept that strikes fear into the heart of epidemiologists, or pest managers, because it essentially means unconstrained population growth. Growth out of control. The consequences of this process can be staggering.

The power of exponential growth is illustrated by the well-known legend of the Indian king and chess enthusiast challenged to a game by a sage, who was actually the god Shiva in disguise. The price of the inevitable defeat for the king was some grains of rice—he had to place one grain on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the next, four grains on the third square, and so on, doubling the number of grains on each square up to the total of sixty-four on the 8 × 8 board. The small numbers on the first few squares belie the power of doubling in this way. The square at the end of the third row already requires more than eight million grains of rice from the king. The sixty-fourth square v. Except for footnotes! Feel free to skip them.

The Gypsy Moth

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needs more than nine quintillion (that’s 9,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 9 × 1018). The board as a whole requires somewhere in the range of 400–500 billion tonnes of rice, many times the annual global harvest.

The scientist and blogger David Colquhoun prefers the analogy of a leaking pipe in Wembley Stadium. The pipe leaks one drop of water as the cup final kicks off, two drops after 1 minute, four drops after two minutes, and so on. The entire stadium overflows before halftime.6 In terms of our last equation above, the population of rice grains is changing from square to square (ΔN ) with r = 1: the next square gets an extra rN (i.e., N ) grains, where N is the number of grains on the previous square (1 + 1 = 2; 2 + 2 = 4; etc).vi For a population of living organisms, this is equivalent to a situation where, before it dies, each individual in the population on average gives birth to two offspring that themselves survive to reproduce. That doesn’t seem to be all that many.

The fecundity of a female Gypsy Moth depends on its size, but an adult can typically lay hundreds of eggs. The scaling from number of plaques to number of eggs made by the scientists studying the early outbreaks in Medford works out at an average of around 400 eggs per plaque. Not all of the eggs will produce caterpillars, not all of those caterpillars will survive to pupate, and not all of the pupae will hatch into healthy adult moths. Not all adults will themselves reproduce. Yet, if only 1 percent of those eggs becomes a reproductive adult, that implies an r of 1 (assuming that half of the offspring are males, which don’t lay eggs). Clearly, r for the Medford Gypsy Moths in those early days of its population growth could have been much greater than 1, and the population more than doubling each generation. Even with r less than 1, though, population growth would have been inevitable (as long as r was greater than 0), just slower. vi. In fact, this is not strictly correct. On the chessboard, the individual squares are discrete entities, and the increases in numbers of rice grains happen in a series of separate steps from square to square. Our equation for exponential growth is continuous—even though we think about total changes from year to year, say, population growth can happen every day (or hour, minute, second). This means that r is not exactly 1 for the chessboard analogy. The precise numbers matter less than the general concept, though, so we can let it slide. There is in fact an equivalent equation for discrete exponential growth: Nt + 1 = lNt. In the example here, l = 2.

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Exponential growth is our basic model of how a population grows (or declines) in ecology. It’s simple, but its implications are clear. It describes why a population grows, and why that growth can lead to populations of plague proportions. It may also explain why population growth can appear to creep up on us—for example, why it took a decade or so before Gypsy Moths came to be noticed outside of Léopold Trouvelot’s garden at 27 Myrtle Street. At first, a population growing exponentially can appear to be growing quite slowly, especially if r is not very high. Think about the king’s chessboard—the last square on the first row needs only 128 grains of rice to be deposited. That is seven steps from square one, which you could equate to seven generations of a biological population with an r of 1. If the rice were moths, a population of just 128 would barely register. This feature of exponential growth can explain why populations like the Gypsy Moth in Massachusetts are easily overlooked at first—this “lag phase,” when numbers remain quite low. A further seven generations at the same growth rate, though, and the population would be just over 16,000. This many moths would certainly get noticed. Seven generations more and the number is more than two million. Trees in the neighborhood would already be taking a pounding.

We rarely get to see unconstrained growth in biological populations, and the early years of the Gypsy Moth in America provide us with as good an illustration of the phenomenon as we could hope for. (Not that it was appreciated by the good folk of Medford.) Another prime example followed the release of twenty-four European Rabbits in Victoria, Australia, in 1859 for hunting. By the 1920s, the Australian rabbit population was estimated to be of the order of ten billion animals.

This is why epidemiologists were getting worried early in 2020 when Covid-19 case numbers still looked low—they knew the power of exponential growth. The direction of travel of the pandemic mattered more than the numbers infected at that point. Those numbers were growing exponentially. The capacity for this sort of increase is intrinsic to all populations. The more important question is: Why do we see it so rarely?

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The answer to this question is also simple—we rarely see unconstrained growth because, eventually, growth does become constrained.

The exponential model assumes that the value of r never changes: however large the population gets, it continues to grow at an everincreasing rate (because change, our ΔN, is determined by r and N, and N gets ever larger). In the legend, the unfortunate king has to keep adding more and more rice to squares on the chessboard, until the last square, which needs more rice than the annual worldwide harvest. And this of course is where the exponential model falls down—eventually growth becomes limited by some other factor than the availability of individuals to reproduce. We live on a finite planet. The king runs out of rice. Caterpillars run out of leaves. Population growth hits the buffers.

What this means in practice is that as a population grows—the Gypsy Moths in America, say, or the Gypsy Moths in their nineteenthcentury Fenland refuges—r changes. This happens because one or both of its component parts changes with population size. Either the birth rate of the population goes down, or the death rate goes up. We can illustrate the effect straightforwardly. Let’s say that d = 1, so every year all the adults die, but that each individual has on average two offspring (b = 2). Then, r is b − d, or 1, and the population grows. As the population grows, though, food becomes harder to find, and adults can’t reproduce as much as before. The birth rate falls. Eventually, food becomes scarce enough that each individual can only find enough spare food to fuel the production of one offspring per year on average. Now b and d both equal 1, and so r has fallen to 0. The population stops growing. (It’s easy to imagine conditions where this happens because the death rate increases instead.)

If we were to plot a graph showing how population size changes over time, exponential growth would look not unlike an italic J, with the upstroke getting ever steeper. A graph of the distance that Gypsy Moths were recorded from Léopold Trouvelot’s garden (as a proxy for population size) versus time shows exactly this shape, albeit with a long lag phase. But if r decreases as the population grows, then eventually population growth stops, and the population levels out. On a graph, this growth curve would look not unlike an elongated S. We call population growth of this sort logistic. It flattens out when the population reaches the point at which the birth rate and the death rate are equal. We call

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this point the carrying capacity of the environment for that species. It is the size of the population that can be maintained given the finite resources available.

In ecology, we describe logistic growth as density-dependent. As the population gets larger, its density, which is the number of individuals divided by area, also increases (remember: we define a population on the basis of a specified area of interest). But as density increases, so r decreases—the value of r depends on density. This contrasts with exponential growth, where r is independent of density. The contrast between density-dependent and density-independent processes is a common theme in ecology. Density-dependent processes are typically how the brakes are put on population growth, because the pressure they exert increases as the population does, too.

Another way of thinking about logistic growth is as modified exponential growth. Initially, the two forms of growth are more or less identical, because small population sizes (or low densities) have little impact on r. It is only once the population gets large enough to have a noticeable impact on birth or death rates that growth starts to deviate from its ever-increasing exponential form, beginning to slow, and eventually flattening off.

The Gypsy Moth exploded into the consciousness of the residents of Medford in the 1880s, beginning its march across Massachusetts and eventually most of northeastern North America. Yet New Englanders have never been knee-deep in Gypsy Moths—although they may have been at least toe-deep in Medford in those early years. In most years now, Gypsy Moth populations are stable and low. Clearly, something has modified their exponential growth, and it is certainly plausible that their populations should have some sort of density-dependent control.

There is indeed evidence of this, from observations and experiments in the field. Years or sites with higher densities of Gypsy Moths also tend to see lower birth rates and higher death rates in those populations.

Females tend to lay fewer eggs when caterpillar densities are higher.

Attrition rates are higher in the caterpillars, fewer of which survive to pupate.

The key cause of density-dependent die-off in Gypsy Moth caterpillars is disease—they get infected by nuclear polyhedrosis virus,

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or NPV. This is a species of baculovirus, a group primarily known to cause diseases in insects, and especially moths. It’s thought that some caterpillars catch it young by eating the shells of the eggs they hatch from, which are coated with virus particles. Others catch it by eating contaminated vegetation. The virus moves into gut cells, and then into the cell nucleus. Here it reproduces, with the new virus particles spreading from cell to cell. Eventually the cells rupture, and the infected caterpillar dies as a bag of virus-packed fluid. The dead become a source of particles to infect others. Infectious diseases make hay in large and densely packed populations, where they can easily spread from host to host. As long as each host infects more than one additional host, the disease will spread, potentially exponentially. (Unless you spent 2020 and 2021 living completely off the grid, you will probably know this.) NPV is not the only killer of Gypsy Moths, but I’ll talk more about predatory and pathogenic interactions between different species in a later chapter. Suffice to say here that it’s not uncommon for a population of one species to encounter difficulties when it butts up against a population of another.

Whether the Gypsy Moths of North America have any lessons for their relatives in London is unclear. At present, the London population is slowly growing and spreading, but it is not a notifiable pest: we are not (yet) scraping them off our buildings with brooms and burning them by the peck. Presumably, something is keeping this population largely in check. In the real world, no population exhibits pure exponential growth. It will always be checked by some force. That said, nor does any population trace a smooth logistic “S” to a flat carrying capacity defined by density dependence in growth rates. The real world is far more complicated than these simple models portray.

Nevertheless, it’s a well-known maxim in statistics that while all models are wrong, some are useful. I’ve been telling undergraduates this for years now, but the Gypsy Moth in my trap that first night prompted me to think more about these processes than I have since I first lectured on the topic. That tatty moth and the history of its relatives made me realize just how useful those models are. They underpin ecology. I have spent so much time on them—and even risked alienating you with equations—for that reason. Much of the rest of ecology consists of

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attempts to understand how species try to game the numbers between the inevitable births and deaths of their constituent individuals in order to do the best job of upping their abundance or their distribution. As we saw in the introduction, this is the very definition of the field.

This game also underpins evolution. Charles Darwin realized that it is the enormous capacity for life to reproduce that provides the pieces with which natural selection plays. Species will exploit their environment by turning usable resources into as many offspring as they can. Yet resources are finite, and inevitably times of feast will turn into times of famine. Some individuals will survive, but many will not. Any characteristic that allows an individual to leave more offspring than its fellow strugglers will be favored, and spread through the population.

This process has the power to transform populations, but also to cause them to diverge in their traits when conditions differ. New species form.

The interplay of birth and death rates gives populations the capability to grow out of control, but it is also the driving force for life’s diversity.

The Gypsy Moths that escaped through Léopold Trouvelot’s window got lucky. They reached a New World full of opportunities, and seized them. Just how lucky they were, though, needs an appreciation of just how precarious life can be.

So far, we have been thinking about population growth as deterministic.

What that means is that the destiny of a population depends entirely on its r number. If r is greater than zero, a population grows—indefinitely in exponential growth, and up to the point where r dwindles to zero for logistic growth. Once r is zero, the population stays steady. If you know N and r, then you can calculate the change in population size over the next time period with certainty. The number of grains of rice on the next square of the chessboard is a given. But the real world does not behave like that. In reality, there is a major role for chance. A population that, on average, leaves more offspring in a given time period than it suffers deaths (i.e., its r is greater than 0) can still die out if a random event impacts either of those numbers.

Randomness (which, technically, we refer to as stochasticity) can

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take a variety of forms, but at this point, I’ll focus on randomness in the environment—environmental stochasticity. We all know how variable the environment can be. I’m a Brit, so the weather is my main conversational gambit, and where I live we can experience its vagaries on a day-to-day basis. Yesterday was a lovely November day for a walk on Hampstead Heath, today very much one for coat and umbrella. Tomorrow has sleet in the forecast. The local flora and fauna are well adapted to this typical variation, which is one of the driving forces underpinning their distributions. However, it isn’t the normal fluctuations that matter, but the extremes. A bad storm, a cold snap, a prolonged drought—these can easily interfere with breeding seasons, or increase mortality, to the extent that populations disappear. On average, a population might be able to grow happily in a certain environment, but not across the full spread of conditions there. (As an aside, this is why 2°C [3.6°F] of climate warming might not sound like much, but it greatly worries scientists. That’s the average warming—the extremes will get much worse, everywhere. Heatwaves kill.)

Environmental stochasticity is a particular issue for small populations.

When a population is starting out in a new area—when its numbers are low, and it hasn’t yet spread far—it is much more susceptible to extreme events. A few extra deaths (a small increase in d ) would make little difference to the current Gypsy Moth population of North America, but back in 1868 or 1869, when there were only a few moths in Léopold Trouvelot’s garden, a bit of bad weather could easily have done for them.

We know from similar introductions of birds around the world that an unusually large storm in the years immediately following their escape or release significantly increases the likelihood that the population will fail. A cold snap or a bad winter, or just a bit of extra effort at insect control by Monsieur Trouvelot, and this chapter could have been very different.

Environmental stochasticity is easy to picture in terms of the weather, but other unusual events can also eradicate populations. Random losses of key patches of habitat will do the job, for example through fire or flood. The precarious toehold that the Gypsy Moths had in Medford in those early years is illustrated by their long-lost family in the English Fens. The fussier eating habits of the moths in this population apparently

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limited them to just a few small patches of habitat that had survived the draining of the rest of the Fens, starting in the seventeenth century and accelerating through the eighteenth and nineteenth. Whatever the typical birth and death rates of the moths in this population, they could never survive the massive increase in death rate imposed by the loss of their habitat. This sort of impact is very much not dependent on population density.

Usually, random periods of bad weather, or accidental losses of patches of habitat, do not result in extinction. Populations tend to be large enough to absorb the hit and rebound. (Or, as we will see later, there are enough interconnected populations for immigration to come into play.) However, stochasticity is the reason why conservation biologists worry about very small populations of threatened species. A bit of environmental bad luck can easily drive a small population to extinction, no matter how carefully we try to look after it. And for a threatened species, that might be its only population. The last Fenland Gypsy Moths finally disappeared as the twentieth century dawned.

Natural fluctuations in the environment are a fact of life, and they cause fluctuations in populations of organisms in response. However, we can also get fluctuations without any element of stochasticity—when population growth is entirely deterministic. Some classic examples of this arise from the basic model of logistic growth.

All models come with a set of assumptions underpinning them— essentially, a set of more or less credible beliefs that we accept as true for the purposes of the maths. For example, the exponential and logistic models assume that populations are closed (there is no migration), which may often be true. They also assume that all individuals are identical, parthenogenetic (capable of virgin birth), and able to start reproducing as soon as they’re born, which obviously is not true for most real organisms. I’ve glossed over these less credible assumptions because they don’t affect the key insights from the models: populations have the power to grow out of control, but control eventually comes to them.

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Logistic growth happens when adding individuals to a population causes r to decrease, either through a decrease in birth rate or an increase in death rate. In theory, eventually r reaches zero, and the population stops growing: it stabilizes at its carrying capacity. An additional assumption of the logistic model, though, is that the response of r to each new individual added to the population is instant. Each extra organism slows the birth rate and/or increases the death rate as soon as it comes into existence. This seems unlikely to be true, perhaps for any real population, but certainly for most. More plausible is that a response in terms of births or deaths would be delayed to some extent.

Eventually the extra population would feed back into these vital rates, through a shortage of food, for example. The population growth rate would slow, but not instantly. There would in fact be a time lag in its response.

Time lags are built into the dynamics of many populations because of the seasons, especially in higher-latitude ecosystems where the year alternates between periods of plenty and periods of hardship.

Population growth is not continuous over time. Individuals are added to the population all at once (more or less) in the spring and summer breeding season, but can die at any time. The annual flush of births means that r cannot react instantly to population size—the population size in any given year depends on what happened the previous year. The Gypsy Moth is an example of a species that lives this way.

Time lags have some interesting consequences for the logistic growth model. A delayed decrease in r following population growth can lead to the population overshooting its carrying capacity, ending up with more individuals than the environment can support. In this case, the population must decrease to carrying capacity—and the time lag can now lead to it decreasing too far. We start to get fluctuations in population size around the carrying capacity.

Exactly what these fluctuations look like depends on a combination of how long the time lag is, and how large is r. If the combined effects are small, then the fluctuations eventually dampen out. The population does not grow too fast or far beyond its limit, higher or lower, and soon settles down at its carrying capacity. If the combined effects are larger, though, the population can settle down into regular cycles. It overshoots

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carrying capacity far enough that it is then forced to undershoot when it declines. Overshoot follows undershoot again and again, ad infinitum.

Good and bad years for the Gypsy Moth could, in theory, be driven entirely by the species’ own behavior.

A population may establish regular cycles around carrying capacity, undershooting and overshooting by the same amount every time, but under certain conditions, those cycles can shift into chaos. The population continues to overshoot and undershoot carrying capacity, but to a different amount each time. The pattern of fluctuations doesn’t repeat, and the size of the population each year looks completely unpredictable.

This unpredictability is illusory. The chaos here is entirely deterministic—if the starting conditions (r, N, carrying capacity) are the same, the population will always follow the same, apparently random, pattern of fluctuations. Yet a slight difference in the parameters—r is 2.91 instead of 2.9, say—and the population fluctuations follow a slightly different pattern. They would start out almost the same, but over time, any tiny differences in population parameters would eventually lead to large differences in population sizes. Even if the real world perfectly followed our logistic models, we would still not be able to predict the size of a population in, say, twenty years’ time if we could not also calculate r or N perfectly. There is no margin for error.

As I mentioned earlier, the North American Gypsy Moth population is not stable, even allowing for the fact that it continues to spread across the continent. The population naturally varies from year to year, typically at low levels. Sometimes Gypsy Moths can be hard to find in the forests. This has some of the appearances of fluctuations around a carrying capacity, as expected from logistic growth. The reality, of course, is more complicated. Occasionally, the Gypsy Moth recapitulates its early history in Medford, and explodes to plague levels across large areas of its new range. Massachusetts saw around a million hectares of forest (almost 2.5 million acres) defoliated by this insect in 1981, with Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire similarly hit. These outbreaks are unpredictable in their size and extent. So, chaos?

Probably not. We certainly are poor at predicting variation in ecological populations, but this is hardly surprising. Deterministic chaos

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shows us that even in predictable systems, small differences in where we start off lead to big differences in where we end up. We couldn’t measure the necessary features of populations well enough to predict their fluctuations even given complete determinism. It is a salutary lesson that we would not be able to predict population dynamics even if they were completely predictable! Of course, the environment is inherently stochastic, and this random element just adds to our problems. It is testament to the determination of ecologists that they still work to identify order in the chaos.vii

A moth trap is a great way to lure out representatives of some of the populations that live lurking and unseen in the trees and undergrowth around you. Moths are adept at going unnoticed, until attracted by a light. I had no idea that there were Gypsy Moths where I lived until one materialized in my trap. People have been using lights to attract and catch moths at least since Augustus was emperor of Rome, but the kind of light-plus-box trap that I run on my roof terrace has only been around since the early twentieth century. I do wonder what Léopold Trouvelet would have caught had he been able to run one in his Medford garden in the 1870s, or indeed whether he had Gypsy Moths fluttering in through his windows on warm summer nights. Would his catches have tracked an increasing population? If so, perhaps he would have been more forceful in bringing their escape to public notice. Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing. Ecologists monitor populations—including through networks of moth traps—among other reasons, for just this sort of early warning. Of populations increasing or decreasing in ways that might flag a need for us to worry.

Populations grow when births outnumber deaths. The difference doesn’t have to be great for the population to grow, although the longer it spends at low numbers, the more at risk it is at from the vagaries of vii. In fact, they have found some evidence that the Gypsy Moth outbreaks follow a ten- or eleven-year cycle. I will return to the question of what might be causing that in a later chapter.

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chance. As long as the birth rate and death rate stay the same, that growth will be exponential. Eventually exponential growth can lead to very large populations indeed. The residents of Medford witnessed that, literally. Yet, all biological populations have this power. Trouvelet’s Gypsy Moths were only unusual in getting to express it so dramatically.

The population of their London cousins, fortunately, has been more controlled in its growth.

The fact that we are not knee-deep in Gypsy Moths, or indeed in any species, shows us that growth rates do not stay the same forever. All populations eventually experience control. Either their birth rates fall, or their death rates rise, or both. When they reach equality, the population flattens out at a (more or less) stable size. Imperfect feedback from population size to growth rate can cause fluctuations as they overshoot and undershoot the level that the environment can support. Chaotic variation can result, even before the random environmental element is added. Stochasticity can easily take populations to extinction, as demonstrated by the Gypsy Moths of the English Fenlands. That tiny group of Gypsy Moths in Medford in 1868 or 1869 really got lucky.

Léopold Trouvelet, and the people of Massachusetts, less so. As the moth population has grown and spread, it has defoliated millions of acres of New England forests, at huge financial cost. Almost $200 million was spent on monitoring and managing the “separate destroyer” between 1985 and 2004 alone.

There are huge elements of chance in the story of the Gypsy Moth in North America, but also much that follows basic ecological principles.

The capacity for populations to grow exponentially underpins the field. A substantial portion of ecology involves us trying to understand the myriad ways in which they are prevented from doing so, and why population growth flattens off at higher abundances in some species than in others. In the broadest of terms, populations can be influenced from below by variation in the environment, but also by interactions with the species on which they depend for resources. Alternatively, they can be influenced from above, by interactions with the species for which they are themselves a resource.

It is to influences from below—to the importance of resources—that we turn in the next chapter.

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emergency unfolding in real time. But this is not a lament for a lost world. It is an inspiring reminder that human history is an endless tug-ofwar for social justice in which each of us play a part. Humanity’s Moment is a climate scientist’s guide to rekindling hope, and a call to action to restore our relationship with ourselves, each other, and our planet.

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Joëlle Gergis

r. Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University. She served as a lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and is

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Humanity’s Moment

Humanity’s Moment A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope

© 2023 Joëlle Gergis First published in Australia in 2022 by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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1 kilometer = about 0.62 mile 1 meter = about 1.10 yards 1 kilogram = about 2.2 pounds 1 Australian Dollar = about 0.78 US Dollar 1 tonne = 2204.6 pounds Keywords: activism, atmosphere, Australia, biodiversity, carbon cycle, clean energy, climate anxiety, climate change, climate policies, climate science, CO2, extreme weather, feedback loops, greenhouse effect, ice sheets, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, nitrogen, Paris Agreement, sea level rise, social movements, tipping points

Prologue Life on the frontline 1 Part 1 The Head Chapter 1 Elemental Earth 25 Chapter 2 The age of consequences 37 Chapter 3 Fork in the road 64 Chapter 4 Gradually, then suddenly 86 Part 2 The Heart Chapter 5 Where the battle has been lost 103 Chapter 6 Sea of humanity 128 Chapter 7 Lost worlds 145 Chapter 8 A thousand generations 161 Part 3 The Whole Chapter 9 In all darkness, there is light 179 Chapter 10 A new kind of politics 195 Chapter 11 Life imitating art 210 Chapter 12 Revolutions seem impossible until they become inevitable 234 Epilogue Homecoming 263 Acknowledgments 283 References 287 Permissions 313 Index 315 vii

For Josh; your light keeps me here . . .

Prologue

Life on the frontline

It’s pitch black as I slip out of bed, trying not to wake my husband. It’s 5:15 a.m. on a Saturday in the dead of winter 2020; the last thing I feel like doing is leaving my downy cocoon to talk about our destabilizing world.

As one of the dozen or so Australian lead authors involved in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, it’s my job to review thousands of peer-­ reviewed scientific studies and distill their key findings. Our task in Working Group 1 is to provide the scientific foundation for understanding the risk of human-­induced climate change, its potential impacts, and options for adapting to and avoiding dangerous levels of climate change. The cycle typically takes around six years to complete, from initial scoping to final government approval. Despite the outbreak of a deadly pandemic, work continues on, as the stakes are now so high.

Our assessment forms the technical foundation for trying to achieve the Paris Agreement targets of keeping global warming to well below 2°C above pre-­industrial levels, and as close to 1.5°C as possible. It’s the information that helps us figure out how to keep our planetary conditions safe for humanity.

The first volume of this global climate assessment report is due out in mid-­2021, and this morning’s meeting is one of many since the 1

humanity’s moment

process started back in June 2018. Our second draft has just come back from government and expert review; we now have 51,387 technical comments to address ahead of the Final Government Draft that will go to the UN for approval. Today’s task is to come up with a strategy for responding to each comment assigned to our chapter and revising our text to meet our deadline.

Before embarking on the IPCC process, I had managed to remain emotionally detached from the work that I do. I could focus on my research, reporting findings, and not allow their implications to sink in too deeply. I was okay as long as I didn’t look at images of scorched animals, distressed farmers and ravaged landscapes long enough to feel the sting of it. My work felt clean, clinical, safely partitioned from my emotions. But being involved in a UN process reconfigures your world­view; it forces you to zoom out and take in the world as a whole.

My chapter team alone spans scientists from Colombia to France, Russia to Cameroon, Israel to India. I’m lucky to form part of our team’s trans-­Tasman contingent; the Australia–New Zealand alliance, solid as always.

As I roll out of bed on this dark winter’s morning, my nerves are shot: it’s been a hell of a year. But if I don’t get up, I’ll miss the opportunity to represent Australia’s scientific community in this global process. At the rate we’re going, by the time the next IPCC report comes out – likely around 2030 – the world will have blown the carbon budget required to achieve the Paris Agreement targets. In my darker moments, I fear that we may have already crossed an invisible thres­ hold, pushing the planetary system past the point of no return. So as much as I need the rest, it’s time to haul myself out of bed and take one for the team. *

*

2

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prologue

As I jot down my task list in the notepad on my desk, I listen to the pre-­ dawn chorus – first the kookaburras, then the lorikeets, followed by the plaintive currawongs. By the time the meeting ends, my usual alarm clock – a huge flock of noisy corellas – has screeched overhead, heralding the start of a new day. Although I sometimes feel aggrieved by the terrible time zones of these meetings, more often than not I feel lucky to live in a landscape that still feels so alive, still part of a thriving ecosystem. Over 200 bird species make this pocket of northern New South Wales, Australia, their home. At these ungodly hours, nature thrives, reminding me that so much hangs in the balance in a country like mine.

We are one of the planet’s most biodiverse, with more unique plant and animal species than anywhere else on Earth. Like Brazil, Papua New Guinea and Madagascar, Australia is a global biodiversity hotspot. As David Attenborough recently reminded us: “You are the keepers of an extraordinary section of the surface of this planet . . . what you say, what you do, really, really matters.”

United Nations member countries put forward nominations for 911 regional experts to compile the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, all of us assessed by our contribution to published scientific research.

From these nominations, 234 scientists from sixty-­six countries were selected to serve as lead authors on the Working Group 1 report to provide the necessary expertise to conduct the assessment across a range of disciplines. Just over a quarter of us are women, with the southwest Pacific – which includes Australia – accounting for only 9 percent of the voices at the table.

But no matter where we are from, all of us volunteer our time, working thousands of unpaid hours over the course of three relentlessly intense years, drafting technical summaries of complex topics including the causes of chronic drought, modeling sea level rise and changes in tropical monsoons. Our work goes out for two rounds of expert and government review – alongside countless internal checks – after which we 3

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face the epic task of responding to tens of thousands of reviewer comments and attending meetings across several time zones to make sure the revisions get done. In the end, our group will respond to 78,007 technical queries throughout the review process – all made publicly available in a database alongside the final report for complete transparency.

All of this happens against the background of our day jobs – generally, positions as research scientists and university lecturers in world-­leading institutions – and the immovable challenges of domestic life. In Australia, the only funding is a small federal government travel allowance to cover economy flights, standard accommodation and basic meals associated with attending four compulsory in-­person lead author meetings.

The first three involve long-­haul flights to China, Canada and France for incredibly intense five-­day meetings. The last session done, I catch the first evening flight to begin the long journey home, often through multiple international airports, while trying to make a dent in the mountain of non-­IPCC email that accumulated during the week.

On the way home from our third meeting in France, a mix of anxiety and fatigue has my mind racing. I can’t sleep; I’m too overstimulated.

I pull out my journal to capture the rush of ideas, page after page. The last thing I write that night still haunts me: It’s extraordinary to realize that we are witnessing the great unraveling; the beginning of the end of things. I honestly never thought I’d live to see the start of what sometimes feels like the apocalypse. The Earth is struggling to maintain its equilibrium. It’s possible that we are now seeing a cascade of tipping points lurching into action as the momentum of instability takes hold and things start to come apart.

I honestly don’t know what the future will bring.

When complete exhaustion sets in, I stare out the window, weeping at the enormity of the challenge we face. It’s a battle between 4

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despair and belief in the power of true global citizenry that I’ve just experienced. *

*

*

When COVID-­19 strikes, our fourth in-­person meeting – slated for June 2020 in Chile – is canceled and rapidly adapted into virtual form.

Part of me welcomes the opportunity not to put my body through the punishment. But the gathering is replaced by more than a dozen online meetings over several months, often involving brutal time differences – all while I am teaching a new climatology course for 120 students that is suddenly forced to shift online as my university campus shuts down.

During one meeting, Cyclone Nisarga slams into western India – the strongest tropical cyclone to strike the Indian state of Maharashtra since 1891. Despite this, an author based there manages to log in, apologizing for being late: Hello everyone – sorry for the delay. The internet and electricity was totally down due to a cyclone that passed over Pune just now. I am trying to reconnect using mobile hot spot. The connection is weak and intermittent.

In light of the lived immediacy of these struggles, my own challenges feel insignificant.

The dedication shown by my fellow scientists is truly the stuff of legend. During the Australian summer of 2020–2021, as most people enjoy their Christmas holiday, climate scientists across the world work around the clock to complete this monumental climate change assessment during a global pandemic. For those of us from the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the third year in a row we’ve worked through our summer break. The fatigue that sets in is bone-­deep. Sometimes I doze off in the middle of the day, waking fitfully from vivid dreams that leave 5

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me feeling trapped in a perpetual state of jet lag. Often, I slip into bed before sunset, wrecked, unable to do anything other than sleep.

Grueling workloads aside, we all enjoy the cultural exchange that comes with being part of a team of scientists gathered from so many countries, working to compile the most comprehensive global stocktake of climate change humanly possible. My favorite lunch buddy is the lone delegate from Iceland with a name so unpronounceable that she graciously offers up a nickname. We communicate warmly with our eyes when words fail us. We figure out that we live about as far away from each other as is physically possible. Our mealtime chats revolve around melting glaciers, the complexities of modeling sea level rise and if Australia really has a proper winter.

Back in formal meetings, we spend hours listening to how the climate crisis is escalating all over the world. Warming deep in our oceans. Melting glaciers in densely populated lands. Rainfall patterns drifting away from continents, slipping towards the poles. We talk non-­stop about real-­ time examples of accelerating warming already observed in our unique parts of the world. We worry about how quickly things are playing out, orders of magnitude faster than the natural processes of geologic and evolutionary time. The more I hear, the more I realize that the situation is far worse than most people can imagine. In truth, it’s also hard for me to fathom that our generation is likely to witness the destabilization of the Earth’s climate; that we will be the last to see the world as it is today.

That’s what really keeps me up at night. I wonder if we may have already pushed the planetary system too far, unleashing a cascade of irreversible changes that have built such momentum we can now only watch as they unfold. All the latest models assessed in the IPCC report see us sail through the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target in the early 2030s; that’s now just ten years away. *

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It was impossible to imagine what would unfold after our third lead author meeting in France in August 2019. After sweltering through an extreme European summer heatwave, I returned home to find much of Australia’s eastern seaboard engulfed in an unprecedented bushfire crisis, scarcely a week out of winter. The catastrophic conditions were the result of the hottest and driest year on record – the first time both national records were broken in the same year. Rainfall was a staggering 40 percent below average across the entire country, with temperatures running 1.5°C warmer than the historical mean.

Close to 150 fires were raging as 98 percent of New South Wales and 65 percent of Queensland baked through one of the most punishing droughts in Australian history. Fire maps of the east coast lit up like a grotesque Christmas tree. Many were burning out of control as the relentlessly gusty winds grounded the firefighting aircraft needed to try and contain the blazes. Some regional towns that were already trucking in water to cope with the relentless drought now had fires bearing down on them.

For me, the worst were the wildfires in the World Heritage–listed rainforests of Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland of Queensland and Nightcap National Park on the north coast of New South Wales. These regions are part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, an area that contains the largest remaining stands of subtropical rainforest in the world, as well as the most significant areas of warm temperate rainforest in the country. These usually moss-­drenched forests are packed with the oldest elements of the world’s ferns and primitive plant families, dating back to the Jurassic era, some 200 million years ago. They are indescribably precious. Although these remarkable ecosystems have clung on since the age of the dinosaurs, searing heat and bone-­dry conditions saw these usually lush forests turn into fuel.

These areas are close to my heart. The rainforests of northern New South Wales are where my husband spent much of his time growing up.

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Since we met over twenty years ago, he’s taken me to explore remnant patches of these primordial places he played in as a boy. Whenever we get a chance, we head for these relic forests, a reminder of a time when the Earth was still young. The blockades to protect the Terania Creek basin in Nightcap National Park from logging in 1979 were the first of their kind in the Western world. They went on to inspire the protests that saved the Franklin River in the Tasmanian wilderness during the early 1980s, which in turn led to the development of the first Green political party in the world. These extraordinary forests deep in the Australian rainforest helped birth the global environmental movement.

It’s where I go when I am burnt out and heartsick. They help me remember that the Earth is still alive, that there are areas worth saving.

Perhaps more importantly, they remind me that these places still exist because humans cared enough to protect them. They reconnect me with what feels like the very best of humanity; something deeply profound, intergenerational.

By the time Australia’s Black Summer finally came to its horrific end, fire had torn through Terania Creek, along with 53 percent of the last of these ancient Gondwana rainforests. When that news came through, I sat at my desk sobbing, knowing that these areas are likely to be lost forever. Something inside me broke.

That horrendous summer saw more than 3 billion animals inci­ nerated or displaced by an unimaginable path of destruction, ripping through globally significant biodiversity hotspots across the country. Around 23 percent of Australia’s forests burnt in a single bushfire season. The world saw images of terrified animals fleeing with their fur on fire, their bodies turned to ash. Those that survived faced starvation in the charred remains of their obliterated homes. The koala, Australia’s most emblematic species, lost so much of its habitat that it now faces extinction in the country’s most populous state of New South Wales as early as 2050. In February 2022, koalas in eastern Australia 8

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were officially added to the endangered species list, something I never imagined I’d witness in my lifetime.

But what really scares me is what Australia’s Black Summer says about things yet to come. In the aftermath, scientists analyzed the conditions observed during the 2019–2020 fire season, concluding that “under a scenario where emissions continue to grow, such a year would be average by 2040 and exceptionally cool by 2060.” That is, the most extreme statistical outliers in today’s climate will become average conditions in just twenty years. Soon, searing temperatures over 50°C will become a regular feature of summer in Sydney and Melbourne, where around 40 percent of the nation’s population lives.

Australians won’t be the only ones forced to endure searing heat: beyond 2°C of global warming, maximum summer temperatures will reach 50°C across all continents, with projected temperatures above 60°C in hotspots like Pakistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. By 2050, Madrid’s climate will resemble Marrakech’s climate today, London will feel like Barcelona, and Seattle more like San Francisco.

The latest climate models show that under a very high emissions pathway, global average temperatures warm as much as 3.3–5.7°C above pre-­industrial levels by the end of this century, with a central estimate of 4.4°C. But because the planet is mostly covered in ocean that absorbs excess heat, thinking about global averages doesn’t give you a true sense of the warming that will occur over land, where people actually live. Most continental areas will warm well above the global mean. For example, under a worst-­case scenario, average land temperatures along the eastern seaboard of North America are projected to rise by 6.5°C above pre-­industrial levels by the end of the century, with all models simulating a range of 4.7–8.7°C. In northern European regions like the United Kingdom, average temperatures warm by 6.3°C, with projected temperatures ranging between 4.3 and 9.0°C by 2100.

Even under an optimistic intermediate emissions scenario, average 9

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warming in both these areas, which house the great cities of New York and London, is 4.0°C by the end of the century. And these are just averages: extreme temperatures are far more pronounced, often changing twice as fast as the long-­term mean.

Under a fossil fuel–­intensive scenario, land areas of Australia are projected to warm between 4.0 and 7.0°C above pre-­industrial levels by 2100, with a central estimate of 5.3°C. This level of heat will render large parts of the country uninhabitable. Such high levels of warming will profoundly alter not only Australia, but all life on Earth. Although Australians wear our badge of resilience with a hefty dose of national pride, scientists understand that some things in life, once gone, can never be replaced. There is only so much the system can take. If the new models are right, there is no way we can adapt to such catastrophic levels of warming. *

*

*

As someone on the frontline of research on the climate crisis, I try to help people make sense of the latest results coming out of the scientific community. But when the new climate projections were published, I found it impossible to focus.

So, I wrote my way through it, and published a long-form essay in July 2020. I’d been afraid to publish such a personal piece, fearing my colleagues would think less of me for sharing my emotional response to our work. But I took heart from a quote by Rachel Carson, ecologist and author of the seminal book Silent Spring, first published in 1962: It is not half so important to know as to feel . . . once the emotions have been aroused – a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love – then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning.

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In other words, there is power and wisdom in our emotional response to our world. Until we are prepared to be moved by the profoundly tragic ways we treat the planet – and each other – our behavior will never change.

As scientists, we are often quick to reach for more facts rather than grapple with the complexity of our emotions. Science can seem cold and complicated; scientists, detached and dull. But as the long history of humanity’s inability to respond to the climate crisis has shown us, processing information on a purely intellectual level just isn’t enough. I’ve come to realize that no amount of extra data or technical graphs is going to help people actually feel the grief of what we are facing. Although it’s not the accepted practice in our field, I felt compelled to share the immense loss I felt – not just as a scientist, but as a human being. Perhaps if I am honest about my own emotional response to our work, it might help others feel something too. In the words of American civil-­rights activist Rosa Parks: “Knowing what must be done does away with fear.”

When my article was published, I received an email from an IPCC colleague in a far-­flung corner of the world: I’ve been deeply depressed since the meeting in Singapore . . . I almost lost my position here at the university because I could not care less about work knowing that we seem to be doomed. I just wanted to sleep and do nothing . . . I then realized I was depressed and . . . on a kind of autopilot, just doing the mere essential (of course that also included fulfilling the IPCC deadline in January) but everything looks black and void . . . and then I read your article, and I realize that I am not the only one in despair given how little time we have to make radical changes, and realizing that people are not keen at all to do so. I still worry, it’s still on my mind most of the time, but I can function somewhat normally now. I wonder how many of us feel like that, and are able to actually say it?

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It’s a long-­held myth that a credible scientist should be devoid of human emotion, presenting our work rationally, without commentary.

Perhaps it’s part of the reason why the public discussion around climate change has been so dominated by the political right across the developed world – the environmental, social and cultural costs of capitalism have been dismissed in the name of economic progress for far, far too long. Given that humanity is now facing an existential threat of planetary proportions, and scientists are the people who really know exactly what’s at stake, shouldn’t that logically include acknowledging our sense of despair, anger, grief and frustration? Why are medical doctors praised for a good bedside manner, while climate scientists are dismissed as “alarmist” if we express our deep concern about the state of the world? Would anyone ridicule an intensive care nurse for feeling distressed if someone in their care died on their watch? Is it possible to witness the death of the Great Barrier Reef – the largest living organism on the planet – and not feel wild with desperation at the thought of it all? *

*

*

My involvement in the IPCC process has been life changing. It’s been overwhelming to get a complete sense of how the planet’s climate is changing – on all levels, at all timescales, all over the world. The scientists I work with are aware that we might only know we’ve crossed critical thresholds in hindsight. The warning signs of tipping points are all there: the rapid melting of polar regions, the freshening of the North Atlantic Ocean, and widespread fires in the Amazon. Now, more than ever, we need more scientists on the frontline to sound the alarm, no matter how uncomfortable we may feel.

We know from the geologic record that 1.5 to 2°C of warming is enough to seriously reconfigure the Earth’s climate. In the past, such 12

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changes triggered substantial long-­term melting in Greenland and Antarctica, unleashing 6–13 meters of global sea level rise lasting thousands of years. With the 1.2°C of global warming we’ve experienced so far, an alarming proportion of the world’s coral reefs have already experienced large-­ scale die-­ off. Between 2016 and 2017, the Great Barrier Reef lost approximately 50 percent of its shallow water corals following unprecedented back-­ to-­ back mass bleaching events. As there are long gaps in reef-­wide monitoring, it is still unknown exactly how much more died during the mass bleaching that struck the reef again in March 2020, the most widespread event ever recorded in the region. And then, to the horror of the scientific community, in March 2022 yet another mass bleaching engulfed the beleaguered reef – the fourth since 2016. It is clear that the largest living organism on the planet is in terminal decline. It’s truly the stuff of nightmares.

Even if it were still geophysically possible to achieve the most ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C, we will still see the destruction of 70–90 percent of coral reefs that exist today. With 2°C of warming, 99 percent of tropical coral reefs disappear. An entire component of the Earth’s biosphere – our planetary life-­support system – will be destroyed. The domino effect on the 25 percent of all marine life that depends on these areas will be profound and immeasurable.

Right now, current policies in place today will lead to 1.9–3.7°C of warming by the end of the century, with a best estimate of 2.6°C. This represents a catastrophic overshooting of the Paris Agreement targets, which were specifically developed to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” If countries fully implement their long-­term net-­zero emissions targets, this best-­case scenario could see global warming stabilize between 1.4 and 2.8°C by 2100, with 2°C considered most likely. The problem is there are no guarantees that countries will honor their commitments, as only fourteen of 13

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the 196 parties have formalized net-­zero targets into legislation, meaning the majority of pledges are still not legally enforceable. To have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C by 2100, global emissions need to halve by 2030. This means the world needs to more than double its current emissions-­reduction pledges to restrict warming to 1.5°C. We have a hell of a job ahead of us. *

*

*

Sometimes I’m unsure of how best to live my life in the face of the catastrophe that is currently unfolding. Between IPCC, research, teaching, and grieving for our planet, sometimes I feel I have nothing more to give.

As coronavirus lockdowns lift and national parks reopen, the first thing we do is pack the car and head for the rainforest. Driving up the windy access road of the Border Ranges National Park feels like going to check in with family after a disaster – we’re afraid of what we might find. As we stand at our favorite lookout, I find it hard to see through tears. My husband pulls me in close and whispers, “It’s still here. It’s still here.” This immense valley drenched in brilliant green; the rain­ forest we love so much.

These magnificent forests have survived for millions of years. My hope is that they can hang on, that the cavalry is on its way. As a climate scientist, I am doing everything I possibly can to respond to the distress signals from our natural world. If I live to look back at this troubled time, I want to say that I did all that I could, that I was on the right side of history. *

*

*

After reading David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, his moving “witness statement” of observing the decline of the natural world for 14

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nearly seventy years as a documentary filmmaker, I realized that climate scientists also have an important story to tell. This extraordinary 96-­year-­old, a man who has probably seen more of the planet than anyone who has ever lived, someone who has inspired generations of people to connect with the wonders of nature, is using the time he has left to bring the urgency of the climate emergency to the public. He cannot be silent knowing what he knows is at stake.

It’s hard to care about things you cannot see.

So I’m writing this book to provide you with an insider’s account of the latest research and what it is like being a scientist involved in the IPCC; the UN’s peak body responsible for assessing global climate change. When IPCC reports are released, they are often filtered through the media and a range of other non-­expert commentators. We might get a short quote in a news article or, if we are lucky, some airtime on the radio or television, but scientists very rarely get a chance to tell our stories, in our own words. Some of us try to write technical explainers or media releases to share our latest research with the public as quickly as possible, but usually we are so tied up doing the actual science, and we don’t often have the training or the time to communicate the implications of our research. Fewer still have the courage to publicly confess the emotional toll our work is increasingly having on our lives.

But after contributing to the latest IPCC assessment report, it became alarmingly clear that people outside of the scientific community honestly don’t appreciate the scale of the crisis that is currently unfolding. Our science is not translated accurately or quickly enough to reflect just how serious the situation has become. There are many reasons for this, but I’ll outline just a few. Because IPCC assessments must be as objective and thorough as possible, our key messages are often buried deep in technical detail that we agonize over endlessly (trust me, I never want to hear about the role of aerosols in cloud 15

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microphysics ever again). As a result, it’s often hard for people to grasp the true extent of the problem, or they end up with a skewed version of reality when our results are inadvertently misinterpreted or actively misconstrued.

Very often the IPCC’s most important messages are lost in translation. Our science can be dense and is written with so much nuance that it’s sometimes hard to understand what we are trying to say. This is because the science itself is incredibly complex, and we need to phrase our findings using “uncertainty language” that must remain solidly anchored in the evidence base. Each sentence that appears in the final report is made up of qualitative “confidence statements” that take into account the type, quality, amount and consistency of evidence, and the overall agreement, or consensus, that can be reached based on the best available science. So if a research area is still emerging as new observations or theoretical developments come to hand, an IPCC assessment may report a statement as “low confidence” even if there is a high level of agreement based on the available evidence to date, simply because there may only be a few studies published on a particular topic. It doesn’t mean that the underlying science isn’t solid, it just means that it’s an active research area on the cutting edge of the field.

To further complicate things, alongside our confidence ratings, the IPCC also provides “likelihood statements,” which are quantitative assessments based on statistical analyzes or model results. Essentially this process assigns a probability of a given statement being true. For example, the IPCC considers something to be “unlikely” if it corresponds to a probability range of 0–33 percent, calculated from the best available data. For a statement to be considered “very likely” we are looking for a probability of 90–100 percent – something that sits well outside the realm of being a statistical fluke. And because we are a group of obsessive perfectionists, of course there are ten tiers of likelihood statements to cover all bases.

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It’s important to understand that low-­ likelihood scenarios still pose a very real threat – it’s just that the risks can’t be predicted clearly based on currently available evidence. These scenarios may include well-­understood physical processes, like a large volcanic eruption or ocean dynamics, but might be statistically rare or unprecedented in short observational records, or difficult to model. The IPCC classifies these as “low-­likelihood, high-­impact” scenarios based on what we understand about the science right now. But if things play out consistently with what we know so far about, for example, the speed of abrupt climate change seen in geological records, the impacts on society could be catastrophic. For the first time, this IPCC assessment goes to great lengths to explain that these high-­risk scenarios cannot be ruled out. It clearly states that there is an increased chance of substantially larger global or regional changes than the “very likely” range reported for future projections, particularly under higher levels of global warming.

As you can see, understanding climate change is a little bit like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces available.

Everyone is working incredibly hard to place the pieces we do have, but science takes time. Its measured pace is in direct conflict with the relentless speed of the news cycle. This means that the loudest voices – which are not necessarily the most informed, or even sane – often dominate public commentary. Our work becomes politicized by those not constrained by the professional ethics and rigor of our discipline, resulting in speculative discussions on complex topics that many scientists aren’t comfortable covering. Hence our use of carefully crafted uncertainty language, which is at odds with the fast and loose approach others are willing to take. Sensational clickbait always seems to win.

We live in an era when reliable information matters more than ever.

As I see it, our messages are ignored by the public not because people don’t care, but because most people don’t have a science background, or find it challenging to stay engaged in a technical debate that feels so far 17

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removed from the reality of their lives. The discussion around climate change has become so divisive that it’s hard for most people to feel like they can be part of the conversation. It’s hard to know what’s true or who to trust, and eventually it all becomes too overwhelming, so we switch off. Meanwhile, all over the world, elected politicians are making fateful decisions right now that will shape the entire course of humanity’s future.

In the end, even those with political and economic power aren’t even aware of how bad things have become. When we tune out, we squander the most powerful thing we have to influence the system – our vote.

During my time working on the Sixth Assessment Report, it dawned on me that this IPCC assessment is probably the scientific community’s last chance to really make a difference. If our work doesn’t convince this generation of political leaders that we must stabilize the Earth’s climate immediately, we will lock in an irreversibly apocalyptic future. I realized that the most important thing I can do right now is not write another research paper, apply for more funding or teach another climatology course – the most important thing I can do right now is share everything I’ve learned as far and as widely as I possibly can. I’ve distilled our key findings down as simply as possible so you can clearly see that what we fear is now on the horizon. I want you to understand that the extreme conditions you have been experiencing in your part of the world are not only happening where you live, but are part of a global trend that has experts very, very worried.

Climate change is real and it is here, and it’s not going away. We need your help.

Just like a doctor diagnosing a critically ill patient, as a climate scientist I face the terrible task of being the bearer of bad news. It is akin to asking each person to sit with the horror and grief of the prospect of losing the very life force that miraculously sustains us all. I need to take you by the hand and gently ask you to stay with the gravity of what’s at stake and what it means for your future. But just like a serious health 18

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condition, if symptoms are caught early enough, appropriate treatment can avoid a condition progressing into a terminal situation. If we intervene before it is too late, there are things that can be done to lessen the impacts. Tumors can be removed, lifestyles can be changed, lives can be saved.

When it comes to the planet, we need to understand that what we do collectively right now will shape the future course of humanity. You only have to hear a statistic like 90 percent of seabirds alive today contain plastic – a by-­product of the fossil fuel industry – in their guts to know that humanity has lost the way. It’s fair to say that we have completely overrun the Earth; it desperately needs our active protection to stay alive. We have urgent choices to make about how much will be lost to future generations. We must choose what we are willing to save. *

*

*

I’m guessing you’ve picked up this book because you already know that our world is changing. Maybe you are trying to come to terms with what climate change means for your life right now. Perhaps you’ve lived through a traumatic event that impacted you in a personal way: your house burnt down, your family was displaced by floodwaters, or a place you love is disappearing before your eyes. Maybe you grew up loving summer, but these days, the heat outside scares you – you know a shift in the wind can destroy everything you hold dear. The world needs your resilience and insight to help guide us through loss.

You might be a parent and want to understand the future your kids are now facing. Maybe you, too, find yourself weeping watching David Attenborough documentaries because you realize the little ones in your life will never experience the world the way you did when you were growing up. You want to know what you can do to protect their future, to try and save what’s left. You know that generational change 19

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starts at home. We need your love and compassion to remind us why we cannot fail.

Or perhaps you are a young person who already understands how serious this is. You’ve taken to the streets in solidarity with millions from your generation, fueling the social movement sweeping the world. You want to connect with others who care about the future of our planet, and arm yourself with enough accurate science to pass on wherever you can. You probably feel angry with the people who let things get so bad; trust me, I do too. The world needs your spirit and drive to help redirect the course of our future.

Maybe you’ve been on board for decades – you might be a business leader, an environmentalist, a community activist, a politician or a media professional – and you just want someone to clearly step you through the highlights of the latest IPCC report. You are wondering if this will be the moment when things really change, when the momentum you’ve been building for so long will finally tip the system. Maybe you need a reminder that all the transformational struggles throughout human history have passed through the gates of despair on the way to victory. That all revolutions seem impossible until they become inevitable. We need your wisdom and inspiration to help us hold on.

Or maybe you are a creative, someone who feels things so deeply that it hurts. You care but are overwhelmed by how hard everything feels sometimes. You don’t know what you can do as a musician, an artist or a writer to stop climate change, but you know how to express yourself in ways that help other people feel things too. You remind the rest of us that there is still so much beauty in the world, that we must allow ourselves to be moved enough to save it. We need your sensitivity and imagination to help us reclaim our soul. Promise you will stay with me until the end.

If you are a scientist, a researcher or a teacher trying to make sense of how you’ve been feeling about work lately, it might seem like you are trying to hold back the tide in your personal and professional life. Some 20

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days you sense you’re fighting a losing battle. Other times, you know you are changing the world, one careful step at a time. My hope is that you find solace in these pages – a reminder that the work you do is not invisible. What you care about really, really matters, even if others can’t see that yet. Your dedication and vision will be valued by generations to come.

No matter who you are, above all, you are ready to connect your head with your heart. You are devastated by what you see and can no longer turn away. You want to do what you can, where you can, with the time you have left. This book is an invitation to reclaim our shared humanity at this transformative time in history, wherever you are in the world. You want to survive the journey through the heartland of your grief and create a meaningful life on the other side. You want to be a part of the group of people who cared enough to try.

Wherever you are on this path, I want to offer you my company, to let you know that you are not alone. I am sharing my personal response to facing this unimaginable dilemma, and how I’ve tried to navigate my own despair. I want you to know that the fear you feel is rational.

So is your pain. I understand the science can often be complicated and intimidating; I’ll do my best to make it digestible for you. I will shine a light into my world and provide insights I’ve gained from being among a group of the world’s leading climate scientists trying to avert disaster at this critical moment in human history.

I definitely don’t have all of the answers – I’m navigating this radical transformation of the world just like you – but I’ll draw together everything I’ve found helpful to contribute to your conversations.

You’ll see that the solutions we need to live sustainably on our planet already exist right now – we just need the social movement and the political will to create a better world. I hope that this book will transform your feelings of grief and anger into action and a genuine sense of hope. I want you to see how you can contribute your talents to help 21

humanity’s moment

create our new world, no matter your circumstances, or how small your efforts might feel. All any of us can ever do is show up and do what we can with what we’ve got.

Like all great social movements, everyone, everywhere, is needed.

It’s time for our business leaders, our musicians, our filmmakers, our politicians, our teachers, our families – all fellow humans – to step up and help reimagine a future where beauty and heartbreak strike a tolerable balance. It’s time to get behind leaders who will act with courage and vision that future generations will be proud of. There have always been people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and succeeded against all odds. The question is, do you want to be part of the legacy that restores our faith in humanity?

Although some of what I have to say will sometimes be hard to hear, I want you to know that all is not lost – there is still so much worth saving.

How bad we let things get is still up to us – the apocalypse is not a done deal.

22

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SEE THE WORLD THROUGH A BEE’S EYES What a Bee Knows Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees Stephen Buchmann

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he next time you hear the low buzzing sound of an approaching bee, look closer: the bee has navigated to this particular spot for a reason using a fascinating set of tools. She might be responding to scents on the breeze as her olfactory organs provide a 3D map of an

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What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees invites us to follow bees’ mysterious pathways and experience their complex and alien world.

Although their brains are incredibly small—just one million neurons

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compared to humans’ 100 billion—bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee’s way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible. What a Bee Knows will

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challenge your idea of a bee’s place in the world—and perhaps our own.

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tephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees and their flowers.

Buchmann is an adjunct professor with the departments of Entomology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

A Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he has published nearly 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and eleven books, including The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives, and The Forgotten Pollinators with Gary Paul Nabhan.

Buchmann is a frequent guest on many public media venues including NPR’s All Things Considered and Science Friday. Reviews of his books have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Discover, and other national publications. He is an engaging public speaker on topics of flowers, pollinators, and the natural world. His many awards include the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award and an NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book.

Also available: Protecting Pollinators How to Save the Creatures that Feed Our World Jodi Helmer Shares the science behind pollinators and why they’re threatened, along with real stories of the efforts to save them.

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What a Bee Knows

What a Bee Knows

Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees

Stephen Buchmann

© 2023 Stephen L. Buchmann All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number 2022946104 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: angiosperms, animal communication, animal intelligence, arthropods, bee, beehive, beeswax, bumblebees, cognition, consciousness, cuckoo bees, Charles Darwin, dreaming, emotions, eusocial, flowering plants, foraging, hearing, honey, honey bees, honeycomb, Hymenoptera, learning, magnetoreception, memory, mosaic vision, mutualism, navigation, nectar, neurons, pain, pollen, pollinators, self-awareness, sentience, sexual selection, sleep, smell, social bees, social brain, solitary bees, sun compass, superorganisms, taste, tool use, UV vision, vulture bees, waggle dance

Dedicated to my entomological mentors:

Phillip A. Adams (CSUF), John Alcock (ASU),

Earle Gorton Linsley (UCB), and Robbin W. Thorp (UCD)

Contents Preface

xi

Chapter 1. A Bee’s Life

1

Chapter 2. The Remarkable Bee Brain

17

Chapter 3. Bees Living Together

29

Chapter 4. What Bees Sense and Perceive

47

Chapter 5. Bees and Flowers: Love Story or Arms Race?

75

Chapter 6. Finding Many Lovers

105

Chapter 7. Bee Smart

129

Chapter 8. Master Builders and Memory

143

Chapter 9. Sleep and Dreaming in Bees

159

Chapter 10. What Do Bees Feel?

171

Chapter 11. Self-Awareness, Consciousness, and Cognition

185

Epilogue

207

Acknowledgments

217

Appendix. What We Can All Do to Help Pollinators and Their Plants

221

Notes

225

Art Credits

269

Index

271

About the Author

278

Preface The sight and sound of a bumblebee or a honey bee buzzing from flower to flower in an alpine meadow or a roadside planting is calming to many, yet it invokes outright panic in others. This happens frequently in Western cultures, where we usually reach for a spray can of insecticide or swat at any flying insect rather than pause to admire its beauty or reflect upon its captivating and intelligent behaviors. We delight in the viscous sweetness of honey on the palate, direct from the jar or slathered across a piece of toast. We savor the distinctive and flavorful honeys ripened from floral nectars but don’t care for confronting the winged honey makers.

Do you remember the last time you took a break and watched the passing escapades of a brightly colored bee, wasp, or butterfly? In the West, entomophobia—trepidation and anxiety around insects—is well developed, perhaps as strong as our apparently inborn dread of venomous snakes. We’re convinced that every bee is hell-bent on stinging us and that a single sting will be lethal. Not surprisingly, these largely unwarranted fears and irrational phobias support a thriving global pest control industry based upon deadly yet nonspecific chemicals.

In the United States, there are at least 28,000 mostly sole-proprietorship pest control businesses employing more than 137,000 people, a rapidly growing industry valued at $17 billion annually.1 Over 1 billion pounds of insecticides are used in the United States each year.

This is almost three times the amount of neuroactive chemicals (350 million pounds, including 63 million pounds of DDT) that were applied during 1962, the year Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, her revolutionary environmental science book.2 Apparently, we haven’t changed our actions or our ever-increasing chemical assaults against pollinating insects, and indirectly against ourselves, in the six decades since Carson’s prescient warning.

In my scientific travels, I’ve noticed strong cultural contrasts in people’s attitudes toward insects, especially toward aculeates, those xi

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insects—such as ants, bees, and wasps—that bear a defensive stinger capable of delivering potent and painful venom. In many Asian cultures, there is more appreciation of bees and other insects in art, poetry, and everyday life than in the United States. In Japan and China, for more than a thousand years, various cricket species have been kept as pets in bamboo or molded gourd cages.3 These pets are revered for the repetitive chirps of their mate-calling songs. The Chinese also have a long tradition of gambling on the outcome of cricket fights. The insect gladiators are kept in special cages, cared for, and fed special, often secret, diets or allowed to engage in sexual congress before a bout. The latter is thought to enhance their fighting skills. In America, a cricket on the hearth is more likely to elicit a shoe thrown at the little songster.

I ask you to consider bees in a different way, perhaps for the very first time in your life. Come along with me on a global journey of discovery, shock, and awe into the minds and lives of bees. Give bees a chance.

Discover them for yourself, examining their ways, their senses, how they learn, remember, think, and decide. Along the way, I hope your fight-or-flight reaction to a flying bee will change once you know bees a little better and that you may appreciate their engaging behaviors as much as I do.

Around the world live some twenty-one thousand distinctly different species of bees.4 They are typically solitary females digging their own nest tunnels in the ground or in dead wood without any help. Others are truly social, living among tens of thousands of their sisters and hive mates and their queen mother. Whether social or solitary, bees are individuals. They have distinct personalities. They learn and memorize important details of their world.

Bees also have a time sense and return to the same flowers at just the right time when the flowers are actively producing nectar. Most bees find their flowers, or other bee larvae as prey, by individual initiative. Others use chemical signposts or an elaborate “waggle dance” to recruit nestmates, informing them about the direction and distance to rewarding patches of flowers.

Most bees are gentle vegans, subsisting upon the pollen and nectar made by flowering plants. Certain “cuckoo bees” sneak their eggs into the open brood cells of unrelated bees. Upon hatching, their larvae stab and

Preface

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kill the host bees’ eggs or young larvae with their ice tong–like jaws. A few kinds, the “vulture bees” from Panama and Brazil, make their living by locating vertebrate carrion, ingesting it, and turning those carcasses into a substance similar to royal jelly to feed their young.5 Where did this incredible diversity begin? About 130 million years ago, the world’s earliest known bee evolved from its wasp ancestors, which likely hunted tiny insects called thrips.6 One example of this earliest bee was found nicely preserved in golden amber, fossilized plant resin, from Myanmar (Burma). Flowering plants evolved a bit earlier, around 140 million years ago. These earliest angiosperms were likely first pollinated by flies and beetles. But with the evolution of bees and their transition to herbivory, bees started to nearly exclusively visit flowers for their food. By the Eocene epoch, some 56–34 million years ago, bees were mostly highly faithful and dependable visitors of the world’s flowering plants.

From this humble beginning, the long and important relationship between bees and flowers has developed. Usually, we consider them to be mutualists, with each one helping the other. Flowers are living billboards, displaying their beguiling scents and colors as advertisements for sexual favors. More than that, flowers are unabashedly plant genitals exposed on a stem for all to see. Your expensive florist’s bouquet should be X-rated. Stalked anthers house thousands of pollen grains, themselves containers for gametes, the male sex cells of flowering plants.

Think of pollen as plant sperm cells. Centrally placed in most flowers is the style, with its sticky receptive end. This is where pollen grains land, sending their pollen tubes and gametes down into the heart of the flower to fuse and fertilize its ovules, like tiny peas inside their pod.

The ovules become seeds within fruits. Although many plants can and do self-pollinate, thereby producing seeds, the best and most favorable genetic solution is for a distant and unrelated plant to father the seeds of a mother plant. This gives them the best chance of passing along their genes to healthy, fit offspring.

This is where bees and other vagile, or mobile, pollinators come into play. They can fly and plants cannot. They do the plants’ traveling for them. Think of bees as travel agents on scouting missions. About 85 percent of the world’s approximately 369,000 species of angiosperms

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(flowering plants) rely upon animal pollinators, their sexual go-betweens.7 In temperate zone regions, bees pollinate about 80 percent of flowering plants. Rooted and immobile—except for leaf and stem movements or their fruits or seeds hitching a ride upon or inside birds, mammals, and even one type of seed-dispersing bee—plants don’t get around much. To go on a date, a flower must either be a prom corsage or enlist surrogate aid from the wings and legs of a passing bee. Tiny desert bees might fly only 50 meters (about 150 feet) from their nest to a flower.

Other bees might travel vastly greater distances, 3.2–6.4 kilometers (2–4 miles) or even 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) in the case of a honey bee.8 Bees can move pollen over great distances.

Bees aren’t purposefully doing favors by moving flowering plant sex cells around. No, bees visit flowers for their own purely selfish reasons.

Pollen and nectar are floral rewards that bring bees to flowers and hold their attention. Bees collect pollen and nectar as food for themselves and their immature brood, their blind, grublike larvae within carefully formed underground brood cells. Bees’ daily hunt for food is a life-anddeath matter. Depending on floral resources and the weather, a bee might pollinate as many as ten thousand flowers in a day.

Because of the branched hairs on their fuzzy bodies, the oily, sticky pollen grains, and often a little help from electrostatics, when bees brush against anthers, pollen sticks to them. Pollen grains also lodge in “safe sites” where bees can’t remove them—just as we can’t easily scratch between our shoulder blades. This tiny fraction of unreachable pollen grains that isn’t brought home and eaten by the bees makes possible the pollination of wild plants and crops alike. When bees move from flower to flower, they accidentally deposit viable pollen grains onto floral stigmas. Later, fertilization occurs, and seeds ripen inside fruits.

This is indeed a lucky accident for fruit- and seed-eating wild animals and for humans. We should thank bees and other pollinators for every third bite, about 35 percent, of the world’s food supply that isn’t derived from wind-pollinated cereal crops.9 Through the food gathering and pollination accidents of bees and other pollinators, the world’s most nutritious and tastiest fruits and vegetables are brought to the tables of the world’s 8 billion people. Indirectly, bees keep us well-fed.

Rice, corn, and wheat are okay, but personally I prefer to eat the myriad

Preface

xv

colorful and nutrient-dense plant foods brought to us on the wings of bees. Annually, the value of these pollination services, mostly due to bees, is $235–$577 billion globally and $6–$14 billion in the United States.10 We truly need to be thankful to bees for our bountiful harvests.

Bees prefer flowers that are blue or yellow and have sweet scents, which offer nectar containing 30–50 percent sugar.11 Think your child has a sweet tooth? Not compared with bees. Coca-Cola Classic is only 10 percent sugar and 90 percent water. Bees are sugar junkies. Nectar fuels bees’ flight and warms them, allowing them to rev up their thoracic flight motors preflight and enabling a queen bumblebee to incubate her brood just like a mother hen.

But as we will discover, flowering plants and bees are not strict mutualists. Flowering plants don’t want to give up all their precious pollen to undesirable pollinators or even to generally dependable pollinating bees.

A small fraction of a flower’s pollen grains must make their way to other flowers to ultimately produce seeds and foster new generations of plants.

Bees, on the other hand, would like to collect all the pollen and not give any of it up. This leads to cheaters in the system. Some nectar-robbing bees cut slits or holes at the bases of tubular flowers and never deposit pollen on stigmas. They are anti-pollinators. Orchids and a few other flowering plants offer no food to bee pollinators. Instead, they dupe male bees into thinking a particular orchid flower is a receptive, ready, and waiting female of their species. Why not? They produce the same chemical scents and even sort of look like those female bees—at least to the eyes of a myopic male bee.

This trick works because bees have developed a diverse and intriguing array of adaptations when it comes to sex. Together, we’ll explore their interesting and mostly hidden sex lives. Many male bees are highly territorial and defend clumps of flowers from other males. There, they hope to mate with a female of their species. Carpenter bees in Arizona seek out prominent hilltops. In small groups, they display their presence by releasing a rose-scented sex pheromone. Females follow the scent uphill and decide which male to mate with. This is called a lek mating system, just like those in some birds.12 Honey bee drones fly high above the ground in drone congregation areas, following the scent of virgin queens, with which they mate in midair.13 Certain desert bees in the

xvi

Preface

genus Centris have two types of males. Larger males are diggers and warriors. These so-called metanders can smell virgin females waiting underground. After battling with other metanders, digger males excavate their partners and fly them to a nearby bush on which to mate.

Smaller males adopt a less successful strategy of patrolling nearby plants in search of potential mates.14 Most remarkably, we now know that bees are sentient, they may exhibit self-awareness, and they possibly have a basic form of consciousness. Bees can feel pain and likely suffer. Some bees plan for the future by cutting resin mines into fresh bark, to which they return again and again.

Others cut small holes in leaves, causing those plants to flower as much as a month earlier, to the benefit of the bees. They think and may form mental maps of their foraging routes. Bees remember the characteristic scents and shapes of their preferred flowers for several days. They make choices and can be easily trained to select and remember various colors or odors. They can navigate complex mazes and intuit other challenges as swiftly and efficiently as any rat or mouse. When presented with certain flowers, many bees innately know to use their powerful flight muscles to vibrate pored anthers, instantly releasing protein-rich pollen, which will be inaccessible to other bees or pollinators.

Bees can also learn to do highly unusual things such as pulling a string or rolling a ball to receive a sugar water reward. Maybe you’ve seen that YouTube video of bumblebees playing soccer.15 These are tasks they would never do in nature, but they might be surprising from a creature with a tiny brain housing just one million neurons (humans have at least eighty billion). Bees spend a good deal of time sleeping, during which memories are formed and stored in long-term memory just as in us. It may be impossible to ever know, but bees may even dream.

Bees do not perceive the world as we do. Their sensory systems would be entirely alien, and perhaps horrifying, to us if we could for but a moment jump inside their skins and experience their world. What would it be like to see polarized light patterns in the sky, or to see the invisible ultraviolet light patterns on flower petals, or to see electrostatic patterns left on flowers from earlier bee visits? What if we couldn’t see flowers unless we were a few inches from them? A bee’s vision is sixty times less sharp than our own. On the other hand, bees detect the microscopic

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textures and patterns on flower petals, much as a blind person can read the tiny bumps in a printed Braille book.

Humans have been associated with bees and cared for them for millennia. By 3000 BCE, Old Kingdom Egyptians were keeping honey bees.16 Egyptian beekeepers navigated papyrus-and-wood barges up and down the Nile River containing mobile apiaries of honey bees in ceramic hives. They effectively followed the onshore bloom, and their bees made bountiful crops of honey. These were the world’s first migratory beekeepers. Atop the porous limestone of tropical forests in the southern Mexican states of Yucatán and Quintana Roo live social bees and their keepers. The ancient Maya tended these stingless Melipona bees, especially the royal or lady bee, as do the modern Maya.17 Here, highly social colonies of bees living inside log hives called jobones have been carefully tended for almost four thousand years. These stingless bees affix reflective white sand to their nest entrances as ultraviolet signposts to guide them home in their deeply shaded forests. Melipona worker bees also communicate with their nestmates using brief buzzes, sound pulses about floral resources.

Following in the footsteps of naturalists and scientists of the past, we’ll go into the field to locations around the world and into the laboratories of noted bee biologists and pollination ecologists. You’ll be introduced to the observations and experiments of innovative scientists who have unraveled the mysteries of bee vision, olfaction, taste, touch, learning, and memory, and bees’ astounding mental abilities.

My own first encounters with bees were as a high school student in Placentia, California, in the late 1960s. One important lesson learned was to work my honey bee hives only on sunny days and with proper personal protective equipment. Using a crowbar to tear into the walls of an old shed to remove honeycombs from a feral colony did not go well.

The morning was a dreary gray, and a light drizzle had begun to fall, which I mistakenly hoped would mean a cooler, more relaxing experience. In painful hindsight, it must have been something about wearing trousers that didn’t cover my thin black socks, using a flimsy veil, and the fact that the bad weather had kept the ill-tempered guard bees indoors.

They, however, were fully ready to explode, defending their sweet honey stores, as I cracked open the first board. My ankles received more than

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one hundred stings, swelling to the size of footballs, and they itched for days. I discovered a lot about stimuli and bee behavior that fateful day.

As a college sophomore, a first trip into the Costa Rican dry deciduous forest of Guanacaste Province was my personal adventure, my biological Voyage of the Beagle. Later, I became a professional pollination ecologist with graduate degrees from California State University, Fullerton, and the University of California, Davis. Today, as a faculty member of the University of Arizona, I continue my research into buzz pollination, oil-collecting bees, and, most recently, the microbiomes living inside bees’ brood cells. It turns out that many solitary bees are getting as much nutrition, or more, by consuming microbes as by eating pollen.

Every day spent in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico presents unique opportunities to explore the minds and behaviors of bees. It is highly pleasurable and enlightening to watch bees interact with desert blooms and to mentor University of Arizona students and interact with faculty colleagues around the world.

I’ve trained bees to visit artificial and real flowers within indoor flight arenas. I’ve pointed a shotgun microphone at bees while they buzz pollinated roadside nightshade flowers in southeastern Arizona, and then analyzed their buzzes in terms of frequency, duration, and amplitude.

I’ve watched bees stick out their tongues at me (the widely used proboscis extension response test) as my colleagues and I puffed test flower scents at them. In every possible way, my life has been a wonderful and fascinating journey into the private lives of bees while discovering some of their innermost mysteries.

We’ll now begin our journey of discovery into the minds, sensations, and experiences of bees both familiar and strange. Along the way, we’ll meet foraging, nesting, mating, and thinking bees of all types. Let’s fly with them.

Chapter 1

A Bee’s Life

T

he fuzzy brown bee awakens inside a dark underground burrow.

She’s completed her nest, a den of open urn-shaped brood cells that will become the precious nurseries for her grublike larvae. She is a single mom with a family to feed. Our bee gets no assistance from her long-dead mate or from her sisters or other relatives. She isn’t part of a social collective, nor does she live within a compact wooden hive bursting with thousands of other bees. Her life is a brief, solitary existence, a few intense weeks spent foraging at flower patches, gathering food and provisions that will ensure her young will mature. Each morning, she flies from her earthen nest to locate distant flowers, which are like one-stop bee supermarkets. Bees need this hidden pollen and nectar, the food rewards that flowers offer in return for pollination services.

It’s a difficult and busy life. Her brain, though no larger than a poppy seed, can handle the complex thoughts and challenging celestial and landmark navigation that daily foraging requires. Every trip to a flower is a new learning experience, and she easily memorizes the flowers’ locations, colors, scents, and rewards. The bee navigates and actively chooses the kinds of flowers she visits, making use of her past 1

2

What a Bee Knows

experiences and memories. She thinks, makes quick decisions, and learns for herself from her complex and ever-changing interactions with the environment.

On this typical morning, the mother bee scrambles up from the bottom of her deep nest to the soil surface, aided by little “kneepads” on all six legs. She pauses just below the surface, not daring to show even the tip of one antenna. There are many potential dangers outside the safety of her nest. There may be hungry wolf spiders, lizards, birds, or ferocious predatory insects such as robber flies nearby. Other insects, including parasitic bee flies, velvet ants (a kind of wasp), and parasitic blister beetles, are potent natural enemies waiting to enter a bee’s nest, to lay their own eggs while the owner is away.

She waits several minutes until the rays of the bright morning sun strike her face and warm her. Our female is about to fly. She inches forward and tests the air, both antennae waving frantically like stout fishing rods. Thousands of finely tuned microscopic sensory cells are embedded within each of the ten flexible segments (flagellomeres) of her antennae.

Everything seems fine. Her sensory cells and the two mushroom body regions (areas that process complex information) within her brain signal an all clear. She doesn’t see or smell any nearby predator or parasite making a stealthy approach toward her burrow.

The female bee briefly shivers the powerful flight muscles within her thorax to warm up. Ready, she launches herself skyward and hovers in midair. Performing an aerial pirouette, she flies left, then back to the center, and then to the right of her nest. She repeats these back-and-forth, ever-wider zigzags, all while facing her nest and flying higher with each pass. In fact, she is memorizing the locations of the physical landmarks around her nest. These could be small stones, live or dead plants, bits of wood, or similar debris. She quickly creates a mental map of her home terrain. In less than a minute, she has memorized all the visual imagery, the spatial geometry, and the smells of her immediate surroundings. All sorts of solitary and social bees perform this instinctive behavior when leaving their nests, forming detailed mental maps of their homesite and nearby landmarks.1 Soon, our female turns and flies away from her nest at about 24 kilometers per hour (15 miles per hour) in search of flowers.2 Fragrant

A Bee’s Life 3

blooms will provide her with the crucial pollen and nectar resources she needs to survive and provision her underground nursery. While she is foraging, the bee’s compound eyes detect and analyze the plane of polarization of sunlight spreading across the sky, even if the sun is partially hidden behind clouds. She knows the time of day by observing the relative position of the sun as it moves across the sky. This is the so-called sun compass. It is used by bees, ants, and wasps to keep time and navigate within complex spatial environments while walking or flying to and from their nests.3 Once our mother bee locates a promising flower—perhaps one she remembers from previous visits—she probes it for nectar, accidentally brushing against the flower’s plump anthers. She is dusted with gritty microscopic pollen, which contains large amounts of nutritious proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals. And, like the blades of a Swiss Army knife, her special rake-like leg combs collect pollen from her body to transport home. She packs thousands of the powdery pollen grains onto the branched hairs of her hind legs. Once gathered there, they look like fluffy little orange saddlebags.

Now laden with pollen safely stored on her hind legs, and nectar inside her nectar stomach (the crop), she flies home using celestial cues including the polarization of sunlight and the sun’s position, along with her flight and wind speed. Her flying skills are all performed with a “navigational computer” inside her brain honed by evolution during millions of generations of ancestral bees before her. Putting on the air brakes at the last second, she searches for those previously memorized landmark cues, the bee signposts like colored airport runway lights guiding her safely back home. It’s quite an accomplishment for a bee only one centimeter (about one-half inch) long to make such long flights to distant fields of flowers.

Back inside her nest, the bee mixes the sweet nectar and pollen using her legs and mouthparts and then shapes a moist pea-size ball of “bee bread.” Turning away, she lays an egg from the tip of her abdomen, attaching the sausagelike translucent white egg to the food ball. The bee’s egg is smaller than a slender white rice grain. It won’t hatch into a tiny, slender larva for another three days. The pollen ball contains all the meals in one that the mother bee provides for each developing larva. In

4

What a Bee Knows

fact, this is all the food she will provide to each offspring, everything they will require to grow from the egg into an adult bee.

Her work finished, the mother bee will soon die, never seeing or interacting with any of her offspring. Her progeny will be left to survive and defend themselves against destructive fungi, pathogenic microbes, predators, parasites, and the weather. The fat grubs will grow quickly and then transform into pupae. A few lucky grubs will emerge from their underground cells as healthy adults the following spring. These next-generation females will mate, forage, dig and provision nests, then ultimately die, linking endless bee generations that have been repeated over millions of years.

The belowground nest of a typical solitary ground-nesting bee (e.g., Melis­ sodes). Off the main tunnel are side branches leading to larval cells. These brood cells contain pollen-plus-nectar, the food provision, upon which a single egg is laid. The bee larvae develop through four or five molts and eventually pupate. The next generation of bees typically remain underground until they emerge as adults the following spring.

A Bee’s Life 5

The bee’s life I’ve just described is not unique. In fact, solitary ground- or twig-nesting bees are the rule, not the exception. Honey-­ making, or social, bees in huge colonies are rare. Digging a nest and foraging at flowers for food are just two of the many behaviors that make bees incredibly fascinating creatures, like alien life-forms right here on planet Earth.

But one must wonder, what do bees and humans share in terms of behaviors, anxiety, and self-awareness? We can still see Aristotle’s lasting influence in some recent writing claiming that humans are unique among animals—that only we can think or reason, make and use tools, form abstract ideas, communicate with language, have self-awareness, dream, grieve lost family members, or contemplate our own mortality.

Fortunately, these claims are being overturned as animal behaviorists, ethologists, and comparative psychologists expand their knowledge of the nonhuman world. Today, biologists understand that humans are not completely different from other animals. Especially in relation to cognition, sentience, and learning, we are enmeshed within a broad animal continuum, not better than or somehow set apart from the rest of the animate world.

In the pages that follow, we will find out about the many behaviors, both inborn and learned, that make bees an endlessly intriguing part of this animal continuum. At the same time, we will find out how the mere one million nerve cells in a bee’s brain respond to the sensory input of their world, how they learn, remember, and make decisions.

Bees, Ants, Wasps: What Is a Bee? Before we get inside bees’ minds, we need to understand a little bit about their family tree. Bees, along with sawflies, ants, and wasps, are grouped by entomologists into one large insect order, the Hymenoptera, named for their membranous wings. There are more than 117,000 Hymenoptera species in total, originating in the Triassic period.4 Their closest relatives are the true flies, butterflies, and moths. Most Hymenoptera lead solitary lives, although some, such as ants, are entirely social. Colonies of social insects can be massive, including underground fungus gardens of South American leaf-cutter ants (Atta) or African driver ants (Dorylus),

6

What a Bee Knows

whose swarming colonies may contain over twenty million individuals.5 The Hymenoptera share several evolutionary characteristics. They have four wings joined together in flight by a series of small hooks; thus, the wings beat as a single, broad unit. Hymenopterans have three body segments: the head, thorax, and abdomen. Typically, the forward part of the abdomen is narrowed, often dramatically into a “wasp waist.” Some might recognize these flying insects from a past close encounter of the stinging kind. They possess a sharp sting that is used either to inject venom to paralyze prey for larval food or as a painful defensive weapon against vertebrates or other insects.6 Bees have an internal storage organ, the honey stomach, used for transporting nectar back home. They are also fuzzier than most wasps and have shaggy hind legs. The single defining feature that separates bees from wasps is the branched, almost featherlike, hairs on bees’ bodies.

Wasps have simple, straight hairs that are unbranched. Bees’ branched hairs evolved to catch, hold, and transport pollen grains. Dense tufts of these plumose hairs on their hind legs, abdomens, and other body regions allow bees to efficiently collect and transport pollen back to their nests.

Bee Origins Bees are mainly herbivores, mostly vegans. They don’t munch green leaves as do grasshoppers, caterpillars, or roaming herds of African antelopes, but they do eat plant materials: pollen, nectar, and sometimes floral oils. (About 10 percent of living bee species do eat a bit of meat on the side, and we will explore their lifestyles later.)7 But bees have a secret past. The ancestors of the world’s bees and their closest relatives are supremely adapted carnivorous predatory wasps. Most wasps chase down prey (spiders, flies, beetles, caterpillars) and paralyze them to provide always-fresh living food for their offspring.

How did the earliest bees switch from being waspish carnivores to their present-day mild-mannered herbivorous lifestyles? Although it may seem like a simple question, it was a mystery until recently. To answer, we need to go back to the Mesozoic era, 252–66 million years ago (mya). The Mesozoic was a time of dinosaurs, giant flying pterosaurs,

A Bee’s Life 7

and toothy marine reptiles, along with diminutive early mammals. It was also a verdant world clothed in strange plant groups—now mostly extinct—that we likely would not recognize today. Soon, flowering plants (the angiosperms) would add swaths of vibrant color to mostly brown and green terrestrial landscapes. Their new sexual invention, flowers, would also provide unique and welcome food to the world’s earliest pollinating animals.

Gymnosperms—plants bearing naked seeds shed from cones (think of pine and fir trees)—were among the early and dominant land plants before the appearance of the angiosperms. These early gymnosperms produced male cones and lots of pollen but only small amounts of nectar.

Still, the pollen and early nectarlike secretions provided food for some of the earliest pollinators, including beetles, flies, and small wasps.

Tiny fringe-winged insects with piercing, sucking mouthparts known as thrips (about six thousand species in the order Thysanoptera) also arose during this time. These millimeter-long winged adults entered flowers and fed on petals or directly upon pollen grains, sucking them dry as if they were fat ripe grapes. Thrips are extremely common insects even today and are familiar to gardeners as nuisance pests. It is almost impossible to shake out a flower anywhere without thrips also tumbling out along with the pollen.

In Cretaceous habitats, small predatory wasps hid and hunted inside flowers for even tinier prey animals. These long, slender black wasps were only 2–4 millimeters (0.08–0.16 inch) long. Members of the Crabronidae family, like the “sand wasps” along shorelines or the so-called bee wolves that hunt and eat bees (Philanthus), they belonged to the Ammoplanina group, also called pemphredonine wasps. In the Cretaceous period as today, the ammoplanines made their living by visiting flowers and hunting their favorite food: thrips. We know this to be an ancient relationship because fossilized thrips are associated with fossilized cycads, early seed plants. Some of these individual fossilized thrips carried up to 140 cycad pollen grains on their bodies.8 There are also pemphredonine wasps exquisitely preserved in amber from Burma (Myanmar).

German scientist Manuela Sann and her colleagues proposed that the early Cretaceous proto bees likely fed on thrips and that the thrips’

8

What a Bee Knows

bodies were coated in pollen, giving the early bees an extra protein snack.

These earliest bees gave up chasing difficult-to-catch flying prey and visited flowers instead. Eventually, they switched entirely to a diet of pollen and nectar. This elegant idea built upon a theory first proposed by Russian entomologist S. I. Malyshev almost fifty years ago and is now widely accepted.9 Oldest Fossil Bees Bees are an ancient animal lineage. They first appeared in geological history during the early Cretaceous, about 130 mya.10 Their close ecological associations (mutualisms) with flowering plants are also ancient, although flowering plants evolved a bit earlier, perhaps 140 mya.11 Fossilization is nature’s lottery. It is estimated that as many as one hundred million animal and plant species may have lived since life originated on Earth. All organisms die, but the rarest fraction (perhaps as few as 0.001 percent of all species that have ever lived) have, by chance, been preserved for the ages as fossils in mostly sedimentary deposits. When an animal or plant dies, it typically completely disintegrates and is therefore lost from what is a very spotty and incomplete record of life on Earth.

If, however, an organism dies and falls into the muck at the bottom of a pond or becomes trapped inside globs of tree resin, that organism might just be “lucky” enough to be entombed as a fossil for millions of years. Then, after eons of wind or water eroding away upper stratigraphic layers, someone—perhaps an amateur collector or a professional university paleontologist—might discover and study the fossil. Such is the case with a limited number of bee fossils that have been discovered and named by paleontologists.

Designation of the first true bee comes from just such a unique and solitary find, a bee preserved in gemlike amber, the fossilized resin of ancient conifer trees. The oldest bee known to science is Cretotrigona prisca. On an unknown day and year during the 1920s or 1930s, Alfred Hawkins found the fossilized bee in a clay pit quarry for brickmaking near Kinkora, New Jersey. Small pieces of amber containing fossil insect and plant inclusions have been found in this area, including the first Cretaceous ant (Sphecomyrma). The piece of amber was given to Columbia

A Bee’s Life 9

Line drawing of the first true fossil bee, a stingless bee worker (Creto­ trigona prisca) in Cretaceous amber about 65–70 million years old, from Kinkora, New Jersey.

University and transferred to the amber collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it was carefully studied for the first time in the 1980s.

This oldest fossil bee was originally described in 1988 and named Trigona prisca by the late Charles Michener of the University of Kansas and David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History. The yellow piece of amber containing the bee is about one centimeter in size and has lignite coal attached to one side. Michener and Grimaldi estimated the age of the fossil to be as young as 74 million years or possibly as old as 96 million years, making this the oldest fossil bee known, tens of millions of years older than the other known bee fossils.12 The Kinkora specimen is a female with a small abdomen and a distinctive pollen-transporting apparatus called the corbiculum, or pollen

10

What a Bee Knows

basket. She is a member of the widespread tropical group of truly social bees, the honey-making stingless bees, or meliponines, in the honey bee family Apidae. The fossil bee is unusual in many respects. First, she is a social bee, one of about four hundred species of stingless bees worldwide that today live in large colonies inside rot cavities within living trees. The problem for our Cretotrigona fossil in amber is that evolutionary biologists believe that solitary ground- and twig-nesting bees evolved first, and large-scale sociality and big colonies followed.

Instead, here was a full-blown social honey-making bee as our earliest known specimen.

It was an unlucky accident for the Kinkora bee to become fatally trapped in sticky amber resin but extremely lucky for paleontologists.

Generally, stingless bees are masters at handling sticky resins and don’t become entombed. Small flies and other insects are weaker and more likely to become ensnared. Worker stingless bees will often return day after day to the same “resin mine” gash on a tree, harvesting the resins and using them as essential building materials within their nests. The bees form pillars and sheets of wax plus resin (cerumen) and construct their brood cells and honey and pollen storage pots of the waxy resinous mixture. Stingless bees are master animal architects, sculptors using the wax they secrete and resins from forest trees to create their amazing living spaces. The resins also afford a chemical barrier against pathogenic bacteria and fungi that might spoil their stored food or attack vulnerable larvae.

When the Kinkora specimen was restudied by paleontologist Michael Engel in 2000, he described it as a new genus (Cretotrigona), and the age of the amber was revised upward to 65–70 million years.

Still, Cretotrigona is currently the only specimen of a true bee from the age of dinosaurs. A lucky collector may yet locate additional fossil bees in Cretaceous amber deposits from New Jersey, Lebanon, or Myanmar.13 Since the discovery of the Kinkora bee, we’ve found one older proto bee from a different Cretaceous amber deposit. In 2006, researchers George Poinar and Bryan Danforth published their description of an early bee relative in amber dating to the early Cretaceous period (approximately 100 mya) from Myanmar.14 They named the unique fossil Melittosphex burmensis. The genus name indicates a mixture of

A Bee’s Life 11

bee and wasp characteristics. Interestingly, the fossil bee is a male but has branched featherlike hairs on his head and hind legs, just like those found on female bees today. The little Melittosphex, 3 millimeters (0.12 inch) long, has some wasplike characteristics, including thin hind legs without the spines bees have. Thus, Melittosphex burmensis appears in the same clade (a group of organisms evolved from a common ancestor) of bees. But it is a proto bee rather than a true bee. Unfortunately, there are no female specimens, so we do not know whether Melittosphex bees carried pollen back to their nests.

Bee Sex, Reproduction, and Life Cycles Bees, ants, and wasps have a peculiar form of sex determination, different from most other animals. A honey bee worker is the sterile female offspring of the queen. A male bee, a drone, is also the offspring of the queen but has an entirely different genetic makeup. Male honey bees have a mother but not a father. Furthermore, they have a maternal grandfather and grandmother but do not have paternal grandparents, and males cannot have a son. Sounds confusing, right? Well, it is. The genetic sex determination system in bees, ants, and wasps is called haplodiploidy. It has developed in some insects, mites, nematodes, and rotifers, in about 12 percent of all animal species.

Female offspring are produced from the fertilized eggs laid by queen bees. They have a normal diploid complement of a double set of chromosomes, one set from each parent. Males, however, result from the queen laying an unfertilized egg that has only her set of chromosomes.

They are haploid, N instead of 2N like you and me. This is true for the males of all the world’s bee species, not just the eleven or so species of true honey bees in the genus Apis. Haploid males also produce identical sperm containing 100 percent of the father’s genes. Haplodiploidy isn’t always a precursor for the evolution of social lifestyles, but it seems to have played a major role in social species arising in bees, ants, and wasps.

Sponge shrimp, naked mole rats, and all termites have evolved sociality and have normal (diplodiploid) sexual determination.

There are genetic advantages to haplodiploidy. Male bees are related to one another by 50 percent. The average relatedness among sisters in

12

What a Bee Knows

haplodiploid species is 75 percent, meaning that sisters are more closely related to one another than to their mothers or daughters. According to kin selection theory, it may be easier for altruism to develop in animals with a haplodiploid sexual system. Individuals should be more willing to lay down their life for a close relative, such that they may die but their genes will spread in future generations.

Let’s now explore the biology of bees and how they make their living. This forms the basis for everything that happens inside a bee brain, along with the environmental forces that have shaped bee intelligence over the past 130 million years. The life cycle of all bees includes four developmental stages in what is known as complete metamorphosis.

These stages are egg, larva, pupa, and winged adult. The egg hatches into a small wormlike grub in about three days. The larva feeds voraciously upon the pollen mixture the mother provides. At the end of the larval feeding stage, the larva defecates and may or may not spin a silken cocoon. Then the larva stiffens and becomes a prepupa. Finally, there is a dramatic transformation into the pupal phase. This is the overwintering phase of the life cycle. It isn’t until the following spring that the prepupa becomes a pupa and the legs and wing pads of the adult bee can be clearly seen. The pupa darkens in color from white to black, and the adult bee emerges from within the pupal skin. The new adult usually remains inside its cell for several days before chewing its way out. It digs upward through the loose soil in the tunnel and exits the nest. Male bees typically emerge before females and begin to feed and to look for virgin females as mates, often on the surface of the emergence site or by patrolling at nearby flowers.

As we learned from the female bee that introduced this chapter, most of the world’s bees are solitary females, nesting and provisioning their nests without any help. They excavate mostly earthen nests that are vertical tunnels with side branches leading to rounded brood cells. Females spend a lot of time creating these cells and polishing them before placing a pollen-nectar ball in each one and laying an egg. Each female bee instinctively knows how to dig her nest and form brood cells. She does not have to learn this complex behavior. The nest architecture is uniform within a species and similar within the same genus of bees. She excavates, shapes, and provisions about one cell per day. Depending upon the

A Bee’s Life 13

kind of bee, the nest may contain one or more than a dozen cells. During her lifetime, a female may construct several nests.

Bee Diversity and Lifestyles Diggers, carders, leaf cutters, masons, carpenters, cellophane makers, and more: these are just some of the nesting and lifestyle choices made by the world’s bees, an incredibly speciose and diverse group of animals.

Females of most solitary bees are ground nesting. Their nests may be as shallow as a few inches or deeper than a human grave. These bees excavate burrows and shape and polish the urn-shaped brood cells that will hold a play-dough-like mixture of pollen and sweet nectar, and one precious egg.

Although nest making and cell building are instinctual behaviors, there is tremendous diversity in the architecture of bees’ underground nests.15 They can branch off in side tunnels, can conceal hidden chambers, and may contain one to dozens of larval cells. The brood cell chambers are often distinctively shaped but always—a bee group trait—have a characteristic roof, a spiral closure fashioned from moistened soil particles.

Occasionally, you may have noticed pieces of green leaves stuffed inside nail holes in wooden planks or fence posts around your home.

These holes are the telltale handiwork of female leafcutter bees, in the family Megachilidae. Gardeners know them, too. In less than a second, a female leafcutter can snip an oval piece from the edge of the leaf of a prize rosebush or another tender-leaved plant and fly off with it. Once the bee is back inside her rented tunnel nest (an abandoned tunnel left by wood-boring beetles), she uses these leaf pieces as wallpaper to line the burrow. They form the cells in which the larvae develop. The chemicals inside the leaves may provide protection from fungi and other microbes that might otherwise attack the growing immature bees. Most leafcutter bees are known as renters, since they don’t create their own nests.

Leafcutters may even use the supple and colorful petals from large flowers. This makes their brood cells quite attractive, even artistic. We don’t know whether bees have artistic sensibilities, although some are known to “decorate” their nest entrances with pollen or sticky seeds, the latter of which may offer chemical protection from ants. Certain

14

What a Bee Knows

mason bees carefully select empty snail shells as handy bee homes. Some tropical stingless bees (Melipona) collect brilliant white sand and add it to their funnel-like nest entrances. The sand serves as a reflective ultraviolet light beacon, guiding foragers home in the dim light of the forest understory. Other bees in the megachilid family return home with sticky resins, sand, and small pebbles as handy building materials. Mason bees visit the edges of ponds and gather up little mud balls. They fashion these into the walls and roofs of their nests, not forgetting to make spiral closures at the top end.16 And carder bees use their specialized mandibles to rake through and snip off delicate white plant hairs (plant wool known as trichomes) and bring this material home. There, they smooth and shape the plant fuzz into the cells of their nests.

Arizona carpenter bees, true to their name, excavate wide tunnels inside dead but not rotted wood of century plant (Agave), yucca (Yucca), or sotol (Dasylirion) stalks or dead branches or tree trunks. They use their massive mandibles like sharpened wood chisels to carve out their wooden abodes. Once the linear tunnels are lengthened and smoothed, the female bees add waferlike partitions between the individual cells.

These bees use their excavated waste sawdust particles to form their cell partitions. In effect, they are creating concave particleboard walls separating their larvae from one another. Bees invented particleboard long before humans did.

Along with their skills in construction and design, many bees are impressive chemists. Cellophane bees (in the family Colletidae) secrete chemicals called lactones that are enzymatically zipped together into powerful interlocking water-resistant molecules, like their own retro polyester leisure suits. Their cell linings are cellophane-like not only because of their thin transparent nature but also because their chemistry is identical to that of man-made cellophane! In many instances, bees have created certain types of molecules long before human chemists ever thought of doing so. Certain so-called digger bees often line their burrows and cells with waxy secretions that waterproof them.17 Bees are also artists in wax. They may not create encaustic paintings, but they did evolve wax-secreting glands millions of years ago. Today, honey bees, stingless bees, and bumblebees secrete pure white beeswax from specialized glands underneath their abdomens. Worker bees

A Bee’s Life 15

fashion these tiny wax scales together by adding saliva and perhaps other secretions to the wax. They shape the wax into elaborate pollen- and nectar-containing storage pots, egg shaped in the case of bumblebees and stingless bees or the famous double-sided hexagons of honey bee combs. Bees don’t get out their protractors and compasses to produce the exact angles within their famous hexagonal combs. We’ll discover what really happens in another chapter.

All social bees biochemically convert the sugars in floral nectar into wax inside their bodies. For honey bees, these waxen combs become storage pantry, dance floor, and nursery, forming the architectural room dividers of their nests. Wax is precious and energetically expensive for bees to make. They recycle every bit of it. Wax is white when first secreted but browns with age, becoming almost black as a result of contaminants including pollen, feces, and the silk from many bee cocoons. Beekeepers simply cut off the tops of sealed honey combs, spin out the honey, and then recycle the waxen frames back to their bees for them to use again.

A secret ingredient of famous Stradivarius violins comes from the waxand-resin mixture originally gathered by stingless bee colonies living in the Amazon rain forest.18 Although they are fascinating examples, wax sculptors and comb makers aren’t the norm in the bee world. As we’ve learned so far, most bees dig earthen nests and live solitary lives. They eat mostly pollen and nectar, navigate using landmarks and solar clues, and have adopted a wide array of remarkable behaviors, both instinctual and learned. But what guides these behaviors in the world’s bees? And how do they do so much with so little?

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AN URBAN EXPERT EXAMINES THE QUESTION: CAN CITIES LEARN TO THRIVE WHEN GROWTH IS NO LONGER THE NORM?

Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World Learning to Thrive Without Growth

Hardcover | $35.00 | 324 pages PUBLISHED: June 2023 ISBN: 9781642832273

Alan Mallach

O

ver the past hundred years, the global motto has been “more, more, more” in terms of growth–of population, of

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the population boom of the 1960s and 1970s, as the earth’s population slows down and heads toward decline.

In Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World, urban policy expert Alan Mallach explains how declining population and economic growth, coupled with the other forces that will influence their fates, particularly climate change, will affect the world’s cities over the coming decades.

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Mallach has woven together his vast experience, research, and analysis in this fascinating, realistic-yet-hopeful look at how smaller, shrinking cities can thrive, despite the daunting challenges they face.

Alan Mallach

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lan Mallach, author of The Divided housing, economic development, and City, is a city planner, urbanist, urban revitalization, and for his handsadvocate, scholar, and writer. A on engagement with local governments senior fellow at the Center for Community and organizations trying to rebuild their Progress in Washington, DC, he is nationally communities. known for his research and writing on

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Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class Patrick M. Condon PAPERBACK | $39.00 240 PAGES | 2020 | 9781610919609

America’s Urban Future Lessons from North of the Border Ray Tomalty and Alan Mallach Lessons from Canada on fostering healthier urban centers and smarter gowth.

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smaller cities in a shrinking world

SMALLER CITIES IN A SHRINKING WORLD Learning to Thrive without Growth Alan Mallach

© 2023 Alan Mallach All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

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Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Generous support for the publication of this book was provided by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Keywords: capitalism; climate change; community ecosystem; demographic change; Eastern Europe; economic conditions; economic stability; fertility rate; geopolitical risk; Germany; green infrastructure; immigration; industrial base; Japan; land use; local economy; localized resilience; migration; networked localism; political instability; The Population Bomb; population decline; social stability; sustainability; technological change; urban greening; vacant property; White flight

contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The End of Growth

1

The Past, Present, and Future Shrinking City: A Historical Overview

12

2.

Demography as Destiny: Beyond the Demographic Transition

31

3.

A Restless Species: Migration and the Fate of Cities

49

4.

Land and Buildings in the Shrinking City: Households, Vacant Properties, and the Urban Prairie

72

Social and Economic Conditions in the Shrinking City: The Effects of Population Decline

100

A Difficult Future: Three Global Challenges for the World’s Shrinking Cities

121

Embracing the End of Growth: Rethinking Cities in a Shrinking World

154

8.

Thinner, Greener Cities: Greening the Urban Environment

174

9.

Cities Are People: Building a Sustainable Social and Economic Environment

203

The Future of American Shrinking Cities: Can the United States Learn to Be a Smaller Country, and Can Cities Learn to Change?

236

Learning to Thrive in a Shrinking World: How Do We Get There?

262

Notes About the Author Index

281 313 315

1.

5.

6.

7.

10.

11.

preface and acknowledgments

I have spent much of the last thirty or more years of my life working in, looking at, and thinking and writing about shrinking cities. It has been a journey that has taken me from Trenton, New Jersey, where I was director of housing and economic development for eight years in the 1990s, to American cities like Detroit, Flint, and St. Louis, and from there to Europe and Japan. For most of that time, for all their fascinating features and challenges, I—and almost everyone else—tended to think of shrinking cities as anomalies. They were outliers in a world in which growth, of population, of GDP, of everything, was unquestioned as the normal state of twenty-first-century humankind.

Yet at some point I became aware that that was no longer the case. Economic and, especially, population growth were slowing down and were likely to do so even more in the future as the effects of climate change become more and more destructive. Like the valves and pistons of a huge, old-fashioned engine gradually running out of steam, the machinery of global growth was moving ever more slowly and haltingly. Growth will not end any time soon, but in a few decades, the only parts of the world where populations are still growing will be Africa and the Middle East, both regions at risk of devastation from climate change. The great age of growth is ending.

In a world of ever-slower growth, I realized, where one country after another is moving toward negative population growth, shrinking cities are no longer anomalies or outliers. In some countries, mostly in Eastern Europe and East Asia, they are increasingly becoming the norm. I found myself wondering about what this was likely to mean. After all, as I had learned over many years, shrinking was not simply a matter of arithmetic, especially in a world where growth was considered the cure for almost any social or economic ill.

Population decline triggers a host of occasionally good but mostly problematic social, economic, and environmental consequences. What then will it mean to have a world full of shrinking cities? And does it mean that they are doomed to decline in more ways than simply population numbers, or can we uncouple population decline from economy decay and impoverishment?

These questions led me to decide to write this book. Other people are beginning to think about the effects of the leveling-off of global population, and the slowing—and eventual end—of growth. Some people have written cogent ix

x

Preface and Acknowledgments

analyses of the emerging trends, while others with more ambitious streaks have begun to design new economic systems to replace capitalism, which they hope or expect to be relegated to Leon Trotsky’s dustbin of history. But people don’t live in the world, they live in places. And more and more of those places are going to be shrinking cities and their surrounding hinterlands. I wanted to zoom down from the global picture to the specific, to look at how cities would be affected by the larger changes around them and what they could do about it. For if there is one principle I believe in deeply it is that the people of the world’s cities are not simply pawns in the hands of larger forces but have more power than they may realize to shape their futures.

The past two years have been an adventure. As I started, I came to realize how much I needed to learn before I could even begin to do justice to this subject. I have immersed myself in demographics, migration, climate change, geopolitics, decentralized manufacturing technology, and a host of other subjects about which I knew just enough to realize how little I knew. But in the course of that exploration, as all of these pieces came together, I came to realize that cities and their regions could learn how to thrive and build a sustainable future without growth. That is the central message of this book.

Over the years, I have been blessed to have come to know and often become friends with many people who share my passion for cities, from whom I have learned far more than I can ever repay. I cannot list them all, but would like to single out, among many others equally worthy, Lavea Brachman, Michael Braverman, Charles Buki, John Gallagher, Bill Gilchrist, Marcia Nedland, Diane Sterner, and Todd Swanstrom. I am deeply grateful to Akilah Watkins and my colleagues at the Center for Community Progress for their encouragement and support, and to my many European colleagues, including Annegret Haase, Katrin Grossman, Thorsten Wiechmann, Susanna Frank, Jörg Plöger, Bogdan Nadolu, Gratian Mihailescu, Ewa Korcelli-Olejniczak, Gintarė Pociūtė, and many others. They have been my guides to important parts of the world with which few American scholars, or Americans of any stripe, can claim any familiarity.

I particularly want to thank friends who allowed me to use them as guinea pigs, either to test ideas I was thinking through or to read chapters of the book as they emerged, including Robert Adler, David Greene, David Herrstrom, John Shapiro, and above all Sarah Sieloff, who actually read and offered thoughtful, timely comments on every chapter. Thanks also to my editor, Heather Boyer, for her unflagging support and engagement. I know she had hoped I would finish the book sooner, but now that it is done, I hope that she will be pleased with the results.

Introduction The End of Growth

For many of us who came of age between the 1960s and the 1990s, the population explosion and the future of the world were inseparable. And for many, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, an impassioned jeremiad that opened with “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” was the defining work of the time. “In the 1970s and 1980s,” he wrote, “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”1 To Ehrlich and many of his contemporaries, rapid population growth threatened not only the quality of life on the planet but the survival of human civilization.

Ehrlich’s starting point was a simple graph (figure I.1). Freed by modern medicine, sanitation, and technology from the restraints imposed by the famines, plagues, and endemic infant and child mortality that had limited world populations for thousands of years, humanity was reproducing out of control. Ehrlich was the most prominent of many observers who concluded that Malthus’s prophecies had finally come true and that if humanity was to survive, the exponential curve of population growth needed to be flattened, as he put it, “hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”2 Despite some dissenting voices, that conclusion set in motion a crusade, 1

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smaller cities in a shrinking world

Figure I.1. World population, 1300 to 2000 c.e.

led by the United Nations, the World Bank, and a host of other governmental and nongovernmental bodies, to control population by whatever means necessary. The outcome was not only voluntary population control programs around the world but millions of forced sterilizations in 1970s India and the coercive one-child policy introduced by China in 1979.

As the world was going, so were its cities. Cities were growing even faster, particularly in the Global South, as rural migrants flooded into the cities, and once-small cities exploded into megacities, surrounded by belts of struggling informal settlements where millions lived in crowded and unhealthy conditions. Cities like Lagos and Kinshasa, small cities of 200,000 and 300,000 in 1950, grew to four and five million, respectively, by 1990. Jakarta and Manila, already larger than one million in 1950, each held more than eight million people by 1990. To be a city was to grow, and to be a city in the Global South was to grow exponentially.

There is nothing factually incorrect about this picture. The world’s population was growing rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, and millions were flocking to cities like New Delhi and São Paulo and forming vast shantytowns around

Introduction 3

those cities, albeit more often for economic than demographic reasons. But it was a fundamentally wrong picture, not because the facts were wrong but because of the way people understood and interpreted them. Rather than seeing this metastatic growth as a transitional moment, contingent on a host of social, economic, and other factors, they interpreted it as being the inevitable course of a humanity hell-bent on reproduction, relieved of the limiting factors that had once held back population growth. Without what Ehrlich called “conscious regulation of human numbers,”3 this course was all but universally seen as leading to disaster.

That way of defining our planet’s reality remains central to our thinking.

That is not to fault the thinking of many intelligent, well-intended people in the 1960s and 1970s; after all, it is not easy to identify a transition when one is in the middle of it. But reality is changing in front of our eyes, and we are still largely caught up in ways of thinking that were instilled in us fifty or more years ago.

What has changed most fundamentally is that world population growth has slowed to a crawl and that according to the most sophisticated demographic analysts, the earth’s population will begin to decline, not hundreds of years from now but within the lifetime of many of the people now living on the planet. The only major part of the world in which this is not largely true is sub-Saharan Africa, which for various reasons is likely to continue to grow for many years even as most of the rest of the world’s population growth slows and eventually ends. And population growth has slowed for reasons that have little or nothing to do with any of the measures, coercive or otherwise, put in place by national governments and international agencies to control population. For reasons I discuss in chapter 2, this is not likely to be a transitional moment.

Yet we have a hard time acknowledging it. As Christopher Murray, one of those sophisticated analysts, who heads the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, puts it, “People are so caught up in the 1960s view of the population explosion, the threat of unbridled population growth, that I have found in the last couple of years, in talking to people, [outside a few countries] others just laugh this off. It couldn’t possibly be true, [they say] because they’ve been educated that they should be worried about the population explosion.”4 The slowing of population growth and its impending reversal should not make anyone complacent about the existential risks posed to human society as we know it by climate change, desertification, sea level rise, and other anthropogenic changes to our world. They are real. But they are only in part

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smaller cities in a shrinking world

a problem of population and in larger part a problem of consumption and extraction. Clearly, no one but a few technophiles and economists believes the earth’s carrying capacity is infinite, but that is not really at issue. Numerous experts agree that the earth is capable of more than adequately feeding, clothing, and housing the eight billion who live on our planet today, or the nine to ten billion who are likely to be here when global population peaks. As those same experts point out, however, that will not be possible if we continue to act the way we do today, with vast inequalities in access to resources and unsustainable levels of consumption, use of fossil fuels, and release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. But that is a very different matter from the number of people on the earth.

Life on a shrinking planet calls for ways of thinking that are likely to be very different from those we are used to. For more than a hundred years, the global motto has been “more, more, more.” Economists, planners, public officials, and corporation executives have all looked at the world through a lens that assumes that growth—of population, of the built environment, of human and financial capital, and of all manner of worldly goods—is the natural and, leaving aside population numbers, desirable trajectory of humankind.

That will change. Economic models and corporate strategies that assume continued population growth will have to be reconsidered. Fewer children will mean older populations and radical changes in the demand for goods and services. Although declining populations may make it easier to tackle some of our pressing environmental issues, they may also make it harder, if decline means increasing scarcity of financial resources and intensified struggles over a shrinking pie.

That the pie will shrink over the coming decades seems all but certain.

Declining and aging populations will reduce demand and consumption. The effects of higher temperatures, sea level rise, and desertification, along with shrinking workforces in Europe and East Asia, will reduce productivity, nowhere more than in China, which will face traumatic social and demographic change over the next few decades. Continued geopolitical instability and the rise of nationalist and neofascist regimes around the world will undermine the global trade system on which the world’s prosperity has depended for decades.

The likelihood that any of this could be significantly reversed by magical new technologies, Elon Musk notwithstanding, is remote.

But my intention in this book is not to explore global population and economic decline as such, except to set the stage for my real purpose, which is twofold.5 First, I describe how declining population and economic growth,

Introduction 5

coupled with the other forces that will influence their fates, particularly climate change, will affect the world’s cities, particularly its smaller cities, over the coming decades. Not only will cities’ populations decline along with everyplace else, but powerful migration trends will make declines highly uneven.

Many cities will decline faster than their nations, while a smaller number of cities, mainly the largest ones, may keep growing, even where their nation’s population is in decline. We can already see this in Eastern Europe, where capital cities like Sofia in Bulgaria and Minsk in Belarus are growing even as their countries, and most of both countries’ smaller cities, are losing population. Second, I suggest a path by which smaller, shrinking cities can thrive in the future, despite population decline and its attendant challenges.

How we understand cities will change. We have long thought of cities and growth as inseparable, seeing cities as “growth machines,” in Harvey Molotch’s memorable formulation.6 Shrinking cities, especially in the United States, have been treated as outliers, perverse deviations from the norm of growth.

Their decline has drawn attention from a gaggle of scholars, journalists, and filmmakers, a phenomenon dubbed “ruin porn” by some uncharitable observers. Over the coming decades, more cities will shrink and fewer will continue to grow. By 2100, most cities around the world will be shrinking cities. That will not yet be true in 2050, this book’s time horizon, but shrinking cities will no longer be deviations from the norm. They will increasingly be the norm.

Cities are important for many reasons. Over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and with continuing urbanization, that percentage will steadily rise over the coming decades. Cities have long been, and will continue to be, the economic and social engines of their nations and the world, generating economic activity, innovation, social ferment, and cultural creativity well beyond their share of the population. Since antiquity, they have also been the locus of opportunity and upward mobility for millions of people, a role they still play, for the tech-minded Millennial moving to a loft in Brooklyn or the struggling Indian farmer moving to a slum in Mumbai. These features are uniquely urban; in many respects, one could say that cities have evolved to be the means by which human beings could realize their capabilities. As go cities, so goes the world.

Thus, whether and how well cities thrive and continue to play their role in an era of declining population and whether and how they can remain sustainable, healthy entities in the midst of the climate change shocks of the coming decades is essential in terms of understanding how humanity can weather those shocks and adapt to new realities. By looking at how cities will be affected and

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smaller cities in a shrinking world

can respond, we can move beyond the inevitable vagueness of conversations about how “the world” will respond, as if it were possible to envision the world as a single, organized, coherent entity in that sense. How the world fares over the coming decades will be the sum of how innumerable discrete entities rise or fail to rise to the challenge. Among the most important—perhaps the most important—are the world’s cities.

It is going to be a difficult proposition. Although shrinking cities have up to now been outliers from a global perspective, there have been and are more than enough, primarily in the United States and parts of Europe, to enable us to learn valuable lessons for the future. Those lessons should give us pause.

Shrinkage is not simply a numerical adjustment. On the contrary. Although the dynamics of shrinkage vary widely from city to city and country to country, shrinkage triggers profound social, economic, physical, and behavioral damage, which affects a city’s vitality and its resilience in the face of future challenges. We need to understand those changes, and how they are likely to play out in the many cities that will lose population over the coming decades, if we are to learn how to build future resilience. To argue, as many environmentalists do, that population shrinkage is nothing more than a blessing that can easily be harnessed to facilitate the transition to a more environmentally sustainable world is pure wishful thinking.

This subject fits well with my own predilections as both scholar and activist. Throughout my career, while always interested in the big picture, I cannot stay there for long before feeling starved of intellectual oxygen. I am drawn to the specific and granular. I would like to know what is going on, say, in Pleven, a mid-sized Bulgarian city that has lost over a quarter of its population since 1992, or Siauliai, a Lithuanian city that has lost 30 percent of its people over the same period, to pick two of hundreds of possible examples. I would like to know what that loss of population has meant to those cities’ social, economic, and physical fabric, how they are likely to fare in the coming decades, and why local leaders in Siauliai are trying to figure out how to become a vital smaller city but those in Pleven are not.

This granularity also makes this subject infinitely more complicated. Trying to anticipate how global change will reverberate locally, at the level of geography where people live their lives, is both important and irresistibly fascinating. The cultural, political, and economic context and the physical form of Siauliai are vastly different from those of Pleven, even though they both share a post-Communist and European identity. They have more in common with each other, though, than either does with cities like Youngstown or Akron in

Introduction 7

the United States, or their shrinking counterparts in Japan, China, or Thailand. And yet all of these cities are facing similar challenges, and all can learn from one another’s achievements, missteps, and outright failures.

These cities’ futures will not be determined solely by what local actors do, however. What happens in their region, in their country, in the European Union, and in important ways, across the globe, will affect their ability to forge a successful path to a smaller, sustainable future. And yet, as I will discuss in these pages, local actors have an extraordinary opportunity to shape their cities’ futures and carve a path to remain vital in the midst of global decline.

The first three chapters of the book lay out the conditions and trends that provide the setting for my exploration of the future of shrinking cities. Chapter 1 opens with an overview of the history of shrinking cities and then provides a picture of the changes that are taking place and that will turn urban shrinkage into a global phenomenon, describing the scale and distribution of shrinking countries and cities, with illustrations from around the world. Chapter 2 looks at the demographic drivers of population change. I look at the reasons for and the effects of the global decline in fertility, changes in age structure, and other demographic shifts driving population decline and urban shrinkage, including the long-term global population prospects, the relationship between urbanization and demographic change, and why the trends driving lower fertility and shrinking populations are unlikely to be reversed.

Chapter 3 then looks at migration, the second principal driver of urban change. I look at migration within countries as well as international emigration and immigration, in order to understand how all of these trends affect different cities, regions, and countries and how these changes interact with the demographic shifts taking place at the same time. I also look at how different types of cities are affected differently and why certain cities, particularly small cities, are shrinking faster than others.

The next two chapters focus on the implications of population decline for cities, based on the experience of shrinking cities around the world up to now, and how shrinkage plays out differently in different countries with different physical, social, and economic environments. Chapter 4 looks at the physical and environmental consequences of shrinkage. I explore how sustained population loss can lead to fundamental changes in the physical and natural environments of cities, including vacant buildings and vacant land, changes to the urban infrastructure, and the reversion of built land to natural or seminatural conditions. In chapter 5, I then look at the effect shrinkage can have on economic and social conditions, including poverty and economic decline,

8

smaller cities in a shrinking world

increased fiscal constraints on local governments, and the effects of the growth of the older adult population and the decline in school-age populations.

Chapter 6 then shifts back to a global perspective to examine the challenges that the world, and within it, its cities, will face in the coming decades, from now until about 2050. I move from largely describing what is or has been to looking at what may come, laying out the challenges that the world is most likely to face over that period. These include, most prominently, climate change and its many associated effects, but also other concerns such as shifts in the nature of work, technological change, and the rise of nationalism and neofascism and increasing geopolitical instability. Placing all these challenges in the context of national, regional, and global population decline, I explore how they can potentially affect the future sustainability of shrinking cities.

Chapter 7 moves from the largely descriptive chapters that precede it to form a transition to the more prescriptive ones that follow. Stepping back from the specific issues laid out in the preceding chapters, I look at the underlying challenge, namely, that any serious effort to address population decline demands a fundamental change to the growth paradigm that has been so firmly embedded in public policy and economic thinking throughout the world for so long. I offer a new model for cities to replace today’s global growth model, which I call networked localism. It is a radical strategy, but one firmly grounded in reality, by which shrinking cities can escape the globalization trap in which they currently find themselves and put themselves on a path for future vitality and sustainability in a world of declining growth.

In the last four chapters, I lay out the key elements of that path. Chapter 8 focuses on the environmental effects of shrinkage and the opportunities that exist to remake the built and natural environments of shrinking cities. I look at how cities can take advantage of vacant land and buildings for such areas as stormwater management, greening, and the creation of localized food systems, and how these transformations can enhance their residents’ quality of life and build resilience in the face of climate change.

Chapter 9 tackles the challenges that flow from the demographic, economic, and social changes linked to declining urban populations. I explore how shrinking cities can take advantage of today’s technology to build localized economies and distributed energy systems and address the needs of their changing populations without the growth that has historically driven them. I stress, here and elsewhere, that building a sustainable economy is as much a social and political process as it is economic, deeply dependent on the ability of cities to build inclusive and participatory governance and social structures,

Introduction 9

engaging the community’s institutions and people as a whole in the process of building the new economy.

In chapter 10, I narrow my focus to the United States. Showing that the United States is likely to begin losing population much sooner than widely expected, I look at how population decline will affect cities across the country, from the Northeast to the desert Southwest, and focus on how American cities can address the daunting challenges that stand in the way of a future as smaller yet still strong and vibrant cities. Finally, in chapter 11, after summing up the key themes of the preceding chapters, I suggest how governmental partnerships at the national, state, and local level can help overcome the barriers to change and put smaller, shrinking cities on the path to a vital future.

As some wise person once said, prediction is difficult, especially when it’s about the future.7 Futurism, as futurist Alvin Toffler has said, is not about prediction in the literal sense; its purpose instead is to “open up the questions of what’s possible. Not necessarily what will be, but what’s possible.”8 Rather than predict, I want to suggest where many of the world’s cities are likely to be heading and what it may take to maintain them as vital, resilient entities in an increasingly difficult world. I believe my predictions and prescriptions are credible and well grounded, but in the final analysis, I have no idea whether they will indeed come true.

Many of the broad outlines of where the world is heading over the next few decades are already becoming clear. Climate change, with all of its consequences, is a reality. It will continue. One may well argue about the pace and intensity of its effects, and how much future global action can mitigate them, but for anyone who accepts science, those arguments will take place within increasingly well-defined parameters. The same is true of population decline.

The demographic trends driving the slowdown and ultimate decline in the world’s population are powerful ones with deep economic and social roots.

The likelihood that so-called pro-natalist policies, to get people to have more children, will do more than at most modestly slow those trends is exceedingly small.

Beyond that, things become more uncertain. It is one thing to project temperature changes or sea level rise; it is another to predict the economic effects of those changes, although it is likely that they will be more negative than positive. Similarly, though it is reasonably safe to assume that the march of innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics will continue over the coming decades, it is far harder to predict the extent to which innovations will actually be adopted and the effect they will have on the number and type of jobs that

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smaller cities in a shrinking world

will be left for human beings. The coronavirus pandemic has begun to trigger changes in work and its relationship to where people live. Those changes have only begun to be felt.

The experience of the past provides little direction from which one can extrapolate with confidence. Indeed, people have been making confident predictions on these issues at least since the 1950s, with terrible batting averages.9 It is well past 2000, and we are little closer to getting around in flying cars and taking vacations on the moon. Whether with respect to vacations on the moon or changes to human society closer to home, I am deeply skeptical of the gee-whiz school of futurism that sees awesome technological breakthroughs over every horizon. I am equally skeptical of the catastrophists who expect the collapse of civilization as we know it imminently. The world of 2050 will be different, probably worse in many respects but still recognizably the same.

All futurism begins with extrapolation, which can be defined as the application of various techniques to interpret already visible trends and phenomena and the likelihood of their continuing, shifting, or ending over the coming years. It can never be literal or dogmatic, of course. There will always be what Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously calls “black swans,” or “large-scale unpredictable and irregular events of massive consequence.”10 Many experts suggested that a global pandemic was likely to arrive sooner or later, and a few that a war might erupt in Eastern Europe. Just the same, the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted the world in 2020 was a black swan, as was the Russian invasion of Ukraine early in 2022. The outcomes of the pandemic are still uncertain and those of the Ukraine war equally so, although all foreseeable outcomes appear to be horribly bad. One could not predict either event, nor can one predict their long-term consequences, but now that they have happened, one can explore their possible outcomes.

The likelihood of additional black swans over the course of the next thirty years, including but certainly not limited to future wars or pandemics, is extraordinarily high. Since we do not know either their nature or their frequency, we cannot incorporate them into our analysis, but we must recognize the likelihood of their taking place as part and parcel of the great uncertainty inherent in the complex global system. More importantly, we can learn to anticipate uncertainty and try to become not only resilient but, in Taleb’s term, “antifragile,” growing stronger as a result of shocks.

Around the world thousands of cities are already shrinking, or will be shrinking over the next three decades. Most are smaller cities, although some are large metropolitan centers. Their futures, while not solely theirs to

Introduction 11

determine, to a large extent lie in their hands. I believe, despite the overwhelming challenges that the world will face over those decades, that those futures can be bright ones. Even as growth slows and eventually grinds to a halt, people, communities, and regions can learn to thrive as growth slows and eventually ends.

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A REVELATORY INQUIRY INTO CANCER PREVENTION A New War on Cancer The Unlikely Heroes Revolutionizing Prevention Kristina Marusic

Hardcover | $28.00 224 pages PUBLISHED: May 2023 ISBN: 9781642832198

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f we can stop cancer before it begins, why don’t we? Fifty years into the war on cancer, nearly twenty percent of all Americans die from the disease. Astonishingly, up to two-thirds of all cancer cases are linked to preventable environmental causes.

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In searching for answers, Kristina Marusic met remarkable doctors, scientists, and advocates who are upending our understanding of cancer and how to fight it. They recognize that we will never reduce cancer rates without ridding our lives of the chemicals that increasingly trigger this deadly disease. For Berry, a young woman whose battle with breast cancer is woven throughout these pages, the fight has become personal.

Marusic shows that, collectively, we have the power to prevent many

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cases like Berry’s. The war on cancer is winnable–if we revolutionize the way we fight.

Kristina Marusic

K

ristina Marusic is an award-winning published by outlets including CNN, Slate, journalist who covers environmental Vice, Women’s Health, the Washington Post, health and justice. She holds an MTV News, The Advocate, and Bustle, among MFA in nonfiction writing from the University others. She lives in Pittsburgh with her of San Francisco and her personal essays partner of ten years, Michael, and the cutest and reporting on topics ranging from the dog in the world, Mochi. You can visit her environment, LGBTQ+ equality, and politics online at KristinaMarusic.com. to feminism, food, and travel have been

Also available: Toms River A Story of Science and Salvation Dan Fagin 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner now in paperback PAPERBACK | $25.00 576 PAGES | 2015 | 9781610915915

Whitewash The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science Carey Gillam A renowned journalist reveals new evidence of industry efforts to manipulate science

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Lake Effect Two Sisters and a Town’s Toxic Legacy Nancy A. Nichols How a deathbed promise saved a life HARDCOVER | $42.00 192 PAGES | 2008 | 9781597260848

Love Canal and the Birth of the Environmental Health Movement Lois Marie Gibbs An updated edition of the groundbreaking case responsible for bringing environmental health to national attention PAPERBACK | 37.00 248 PAGES | 2010 | 9781597267922

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About Island Press

Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

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A New War on Cancer

A New War on Cancer THE UNLIKELY HEROES REVOLUTIONIZING PREVENTION

Kristina Marusic

© 2023 Kristina Marusic All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946105

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keywords: BPA (bisphenol A), breast cancer, carcinogens, chemical exposure, childhood cancer, community health, environmental justice, green building, pesticide exposure, pollution, public health, race for the cure, The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), toxic chemicals, women in science and medicine

For my family, both given and chosen

Contents Foreword by Philip J. Landrigan

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Introduction

1

Chapter 1 Laurel: Safer Nourishment through Science

15

Chapter 2 Ami: Safer Beauty through Racial Justice

37

Chapter 3 Nse: Safer Little Ones through Politics

63

Chapter 4 Bill: Safer Homes and Offices through Market Pressure 87 Chapter 5 B. Braun: Safer Medical Treatment through Innovation 121 Chapter 6 Melanie: Safer Neighborhoods through Activism

147

Epilogue Moving Beyond Survival

175

Acknowledgments

185

Appendix

187

Notes

193

Index

203

About the Author

210

Foreword Many types of cancer are on the rise in the United States. From 1975 to 2019, the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 Americans—the incidence rate—increased for multiple cancers. Incidence of multiple myeloma rose by 46%, incidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma by 76%, and incidence of testicular cancer by 70%. In the same years, incidence of childhood leukemia increased by 35% and incidence of childhood brain cancer by 33%. These increases are far too rapid to be of genetic origin. They cannot be explained by better diagnosis.

In the same years, cancer death rates dropped and survival improved— in some cases dramatically. These gains are the result of screening, early detection, and better treatments. They are major victories in the war on cancer. But the rise in cancer incidence threatens to undo those gains.

The explanation for the increasing incidence of cancer lies in our world of chemicals. Since the dawn of the chemical era in the early twentieth century, more than 300,000 new chemicals have been invented.

These are novel materials that never before existed on Earth. Many are made from oil and natural gas. They are manufactured in enormous quantities, and global production is on track to double by 2030. xi

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foreword

Some manufactured chemicals have greatly benefited human health.

Disinfectants have brought safe drinking water to millions and reduced deaths from dysentery. Antibiotics prevent deaths from once fatal infections. New chemotherapies cure cancers.

But manufactured chemicals have also caused great harm. They pollute every corner of the planet from the deepest ocean trenches to the high Arctic. They kill bees, birds, fish, and mammals. The chlorofluoro­ carbon chemicals used widely as refrigerants came close to destroying the stratospheric ozone layer that protects all life on Earth against solar radiation. Manufactured chemicals enter people’s bodies through our air, our water, and our food, and several hundred of them can be found today in the bodies of almost all persons on Earth, including infants and children. Some will persist for centuries. Chemical pollution has become so widespread and complex that in 2022, an expert body at the Stockholm Environmental Institute concluded that chemical pollution now exceeds our ability to monitor and contain it and thus threatens the sustainability of human societies.

Many manufactured chemicals cause cancer. Benzene, 1,3-butadiene, and ethylene oxide cause lymphoma and leukemia. Formaldehyde causes lymphoma and respiratory cancers. Vinyl chloride causes cancer of the liver. Benzidine causes bladder cancer. Exposure to the pesticide DDT in infancy is associated with increased risk for breast cancer in women in middle age. The World Health Organization has determined that more than 100 manufactured chemicals can cause cancer in humans.

The root causes of this chemical crisis are the repeated failure of chemical manufacturers to take responsibility for the materials they produce and the systematic failure of governments, including our own, to regulate toxic chemicals.

Scores of new chemicals are brought to market every year with great enthusiasm but with almost no assessment as to their possible dangers.

Unlike prescription drugs and vaccines, which are carefully screened

foreword

for safety, most widely used chemicals have never been tested for safety or toxicity, and fewer than 20% have ever been examined for their potential to harm fetuses, infants, and children. Most of the manufactured chemicals that are known to be human carcinogens are still sold today, and only five hazardous chemicals have been removed from US markets in the past fifty years. Chemical policy in this country is broken.

This powerful book by Kristina Marusic tells in stark yet very human terms how chemical pollution has silently infiltrated our lives and become a major threat to our health and the health of our children. But rather than dwelling on the enormity of the problem, this book details the lives and work of people who are advancing solutions, giving readers reasons to stay hopeful and new ways to push for progress.

Drawing on her skills as a reporter, Ms. Marusic renders thoughtful portraits of heroes across America who have devoted their lives to preventing cancers caused by chemicals: An Indian American researcher who grew up in the rural South and now fights racial injustice in toxic cosmetics through her work in New York; a Nigerian American children’s health advocate making daycares and playgrounds across the nation safer through her work in Washington, D.C.; a California-­based lawyer-turned-rabble-rouser driving the proliferation of carcinogen-­ free buildings through a nonprofit; and an activist living on the fence line of a Pennsylvania steel plant fighting to defend her community from toxic pollution, among others. Their stories are interwoven with that of a young woman who developed cancer after having lived most of her life surrounded by oil fields and petrochemical plants, highlighting the motivation behind all this work—protecting people from the hardships that accompany diagnosis of this deadly but preventable disease.

As Ms. Marusic says, it is time to launch a new war on cancer. The goal of this new war must be to not only treat and cure cancer, as we

xiii

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have done until now, but to prevent cancer by preventing exposures to the toxic chemicals that are its causes. We know how to do this, and we have done it before. It is time to act.

—Philip J. Landrigan, MD, MSc, FAAP

Introduction Madelina DeLuca was diagnosed with leukemia about a month before her second birthday.

“She had some bruising and we couldn’t figure out where it came from,” her mom, Kristin DeLuca, told me in 2019 when I interviewed her for a story about environmental exposures and cancer.

Madelina’s doctors ran a bevy of tests, but they didn’t reveal any answers. Then Madelina developed inexplicable stomach pain, and the dark blue and purple blooms on her skin multiplied. After several months of uncertainty, a blood test came back showing too many white blood cells. In November 2014, her doctor ordered a bone marrow biopsy. “She got a fever after the biopsy, so they kept her in the hospital as a precaution,” Kristin said. “Then it all happened really fast. Her test results came back the next day, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, and within two days she had a port in her chest and had started chemo. It was very overwhelming.”

In 2015, while Madelina was undergoing treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, a photo of her embracing another young cancer patient went viral. The image of the little girls—one dark-skinned, one 1

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pale, both wearing jammies, their nearly bald heads touching while they held each other and gazed out a hospital window at the city skyline— was shared around the world and garnered national media attention.

The other girl in the photo was five-year-old Maliya Jones. Her mother, Tazz Jones, captured the candid shot and captioned it, “This is the perfect example of love,” in a Facebook post. In media interviews at the time, Tazz expressed hope that the girls would stay friends as they got older and would have the photo to commemorate the difficulties they had both overcome.

Maliya died a year later at the age of six.

Kristin told me, “Throughout the course of Madelina’s treatment, she made a lot of friends who weren’t able to defeat it.”

Climbing Cancer Rates The United States is more than fifty years into its “war on cancer,” but the disease is still prevalent. Half of all American men and one in three women can expect to get some type of cancer diagnosis in their lifetimes. We’re better than we’ve ever been at curing and treating the disease, but cancer still claims the lives of one in every five American men and one in every six women. Rates of some types of cancer have fallen over time, but others continue to increase.

Childhood cancer rates are particularly striking. While cancer is still relatively rare among childhood diseases, Maliya and Madelina are far from alone. One in every 285 American children receives a cancer diagnosis before the age of twenty, and cancer rates for children and teens across the US have increased steadily over the last fifty years. Rates of childhood leukemia have increased by 35%, and rates of childhood brain cancer have gone up by 33% since researchers started tracking the disease in the early 1970s. Cancer rates in children and teens across the globe have followed a similar upward trajectory.

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This increase is too rapid to be the result of genetic changes alone, which would happen over centuries, not decades. Rapid increases in disease rates are sometimes explained by improvements in diagnostic capabilities. When our ability to detect a disease improves, we start finding more of it. This might account for some of the increase in childhood cancers, but it doesn’t fully explain what’s happening here. While many new tests enable us to learn more about cancer subtypes and make more accurate diagnoses, the fundamental diagnostic tools for the most common types of childhood cancers haven’t changed. So if increasing childhood cancer rates aren’t explained by genetic changes or better diagnostic tools, what’s been causing such a rapid increase for the last fifty years?

Dr. Margaret Kripke, a leading expert in the immunology of skin cancers and professor emerita of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, served multiple terms on the US President’s Cancer Panel—a three-person panel that advises the president of the United States on high-priority issues related to cancer and oversees the development and implementation of the National Cancer Program.

In 2008, when she learned that the President’s Cancer Panel would investigate environmental causes of cancer, Kripke bristled at the idea. A single study from the 1980s indicated that pollution and chemical exposures caused just 6% of all cancers, and that statistic had been widely accepted ever since. Kripke had never questioned the findings, so she thought the group’s time would be better spent researching other aspects of cancer. But what they found during their two-year investigation left her stunned.

The panel determined that up to two-thirds of all cancer cases are linked to preventable environmental exposures (a category that includes any factor originating outside the body and our own DNA like smoking, pollution, and chemical exposures). They also learned that while around 80,000 chemicals are used in products sold to American consumers,

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fewer than 1% have ever been tested for toxicity or safety, and existing regulations on cancer-causing chemicals in consumer products are rarely enforced. “I had a set of assumptions that most people have, that chemicals are tested before they’re put on the market, that things known to be carcinogenic are regulated, and that if regulations exist, they’re enforced,” Kripke said. “It turned out none of that is true. It was a completely eye-opening experience for me.”

In 2010, the Panel released its report on environmental exposures as causes of cancer, marking the first time the subject had been covered in the organization’s forty-year history.1 Kripke explained that while individual cases of cancer cannot be traced to harmful exposures, a substantial body of research has shown that among groups of people, less exposure equals fewer instances of cancer. Fewer cancer cases occur in communities where there is reduced exposure to cancer-­ causing chemicals.

“Many of the researchers who came to testify before the President’s Cancer Panel were incredibly frustrated because they had been saying this for a very long time, but nobody had been listening,” Kripke said.

“That was very moving to me, and it struck me as something that was quite amiss with the field.”

The report was controversial at the time. Because of the difficulty of linking any one person’s cancer to chemicals, some of Kripke’s colleagues wanted to continue to focus exclusively on changing individual behaviors, such as diet and exercise, which she referred to as a “blamethe-victim approach to cancer prevention.”

“I heard from a young man who was just completely outraged that he’d gotten cancer despite having a perfectly healthy lifestyle,” she said.

“He exercised, he never smoked, never drank, but he still developed bladder cancer. He felt like he’d been lied to. Having a healthy lifestyle is important, but it’s misleading to let people think they can control whether or not they get cancer just by having healthy lifestyles.”

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Awareness about environmental exposures and cancer risk has increased since the report came out in 2010, but the fundamental problem persists. “There’s still a lot to be concerned about in the way we do business in the US, where we use a reactionary principle rather than a precautionary one—meaning we wait until there’s evidence that chemicals are causing harm before trying to regulate them,” Kripke said.

In other parts of the world, including the EU, Denmark, and Sweden, regulators evaluate potentially harmful substances before approving their use, at least in theory. In the US, Kripke said, class action lawsuits seeking compensation for people who’ve been sickened or killed by chemicals often precede regulations, or even stand in for them.

Lawsuits are often reserved for extreme cases of exposure, but in fact, we’re all regularly exposed to low doses of cancer-causing compounds in food and water, personal care products, and air pollution. We consume chemicals in the things we eat and drink, absorb them through our skin, and inhale them in the air we breathe.

Kids and teens are much more vulnerable to these constant, low-dose exposures than adults, according to Dr. Phil Landrigan, a pediatrician, public health physician, and epidemiologist who serves as director of the Global Observatory on Pollution and Health at Boston College. Kids breathe more air, eat more food, and drink more water per pound of body weight than adults, so carcinogens in their air, food, and water wind up in their bodies at higher concentrations. Because kids’ defense mechanisms aren’t yet mature, Landrigan explained, their bodies also have less ability than adults’ bodies to remove things that shouldn’t be there. And they’re still undergoing complex development processes in their brains, immune systems, and reproductive systems that make those bodily systems more vulnerable. Thousands of steps must occur in precise sequence for healthy human development; if something gets into a child’s body that disrupts those processes, even at a very low dose, it can initiate the development of disease, making kids the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.

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Alarmingly, research also indicates that parents’ exposures to cancer-­ causing chemicals—even before a child is conceived—may increase children’s cancer risk.2 After accidents, cancer is the second leading cause of death in American children ages one to fourteen today. At the beginning of 2022, the American Cancer Society estimated that about 10,470 American children under the age of fifteen would be diagnosed with cancer the following year, and that 1,050 children would die from the disease.3 Meanwhile, rates of several types of cancer strongly linked to chemical exposures have also been on the rise in adults, as has the share of lung cancer cases showing up in people who’ve never smoked. And during the same time period, people of increasingly younger ages have started getting cancers typically seen in adults.

An Ounce of Prevention From 1988 to 1992, American scientists engaged in a fierce debate about how to prevent hundreds of babies from dying suddenly and inexplicably each year. In 1985, a groundbreaking study had revealed that sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) was rare in Hong Kong, where cultural norms had babies sleeping almost exclusively on their backs.

In 1987, the Netherlands had started a public health campaign urging parents to do the same with their infants, which had resulted in a steep decline in SIDS cases, and the UK was considering following suit. Some American researchers felt strongly that the United States should do the same. Others felt just as strongly that it should not.

The reason for their opposition? The evidence was limited, and no one in the research community had been able to determine why putting babies to sleep on their stomachs made SIDS more likely, despite a flood of funding and an influx of research aimed at figuring it out.

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“Some scientists felt it was irresponsible not to wait on launching a public health campaign until we knew the exact mechanism by which stomach sleeping causes SIDS,” explained Mark Miller, coinvestigator with the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment at UC Berkeley and associate clinical professor and codirector of the Western States Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).

“Thankfully though, the ‘Back to Sleep’ camp won, and in the decades since the campaign was launched in 1994, the United States has seen a reduction in SIDS of about 50%.” More than twenty-five years later, scientists still don’t completely understand why stomach sleeping makes SIDS more likely.

Similarly, some scientists today think it’s important to wait until we know exactly how, at a cellular level, exposure to certain chemicals causes cancer before we focus resources on preventing widespread exposure to them. But we have much more evidence about environmental risk factors for childhood leukemia now than we had on SIDS when Back to Sleep was launched, and Miller, who specializes in childhood leukemia research, believes there’s a lesson to be learned there.

“Once we have identified a risk factor for cancer, do we really need to wait decades for all of the mechanisms to be fully understood before we take action?” he asked. “We know that fewer exposures to risk factors mean fewer cancer cases, and we also know we should be doing these things anyway—pesticides, air pollution, and carcinogenic chemicals in personal care products have all kinds of other risks too, especially for children, including asthma, hormone disruption, and impaired neurodevelopment.”

While many cancer experts believe the old adage holds true—that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—that’s not how we’ve tackled fighting cancer to date. It’s estimated that only 7%–9% of all

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global funding goes toward prevention.4 The rest of the billions of dollars funneled into the war on cancer goes toward pursuing cures and treatment.

While research on cures and treatments is critical, this imbalance is problematic. If the “war” was an actual military conflict, this would be like spending 93% of our resources to treat wounded soldiers and civilians, and spending only 7% on offensive or defensive measures that could prevent them from getting hurt in the first place.

Even when cancer prevention initiatives are funded and carried out, most focus on individual choices that can reduce risk, like not smoking, not drinking too much, eating healthy foods, and exercising. Those lifestyle choices certainly matter, but many, many people who make all the right lifestyle choices still get cancer, including increasing numbers of children, who generally aren’t smoking or drinking. Their parents’ lifestyle choices play a role, of course, but while rates of drinking and smoking during pregnancy have steadily declined, childhood cancer rates have continued to skyrocket.

Today, very little cancer funding is allocated to reducing our exposure to cancer-causing chemicals in our air, water, food, or personal care products—something that affects every single one of us, no matter how smart our lifestyle choices are.

Chemicals of Concern New research suggests that traditional methods of screening chemicals are inadequate because they overlook the fact that humans are perpetually exposed to “acceptable” doses of many carcinogens simultaneously.

They also fail to account for the chemical mixtures we’re exposed to, which can interact to create even greater cancer risk than the sum of each individual chemical exposure. And traditional screening methods

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miss many chemicals that raise cancer risk indirectly in a number of ways, including by disrupting our natural hormonal processes.5 These “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” are widespread, and a growing body of research links them to hormone-related cancers. Some of these cancers, including multiple myeloma and testicular cancer, have risen dramatically since the US started tracking national cancer rates in 1975, even as other types of cancer have declined in adults.6 Endocrine disruptors’ association with breast cancer risk has been particularly well documented, and researchers have found that women bear a disproportionate burden of chemical exposure. A 2021 study identified almost 300 endocrine-disrupting chemicals in everything from hair dye, lipstick, and lotion to food additives that can increase levels of breast cancer–contributing hormones.7 Endocrine-disrupting chemicals also contribute to obesity, which is cited as a primary risk factor for cancer.8 Even more troubling, when it comes to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, our exposures aren’t just our own—they can increase cancer risk over multiple generations. For example, a 2021 study linked exposure to DDT, an endocrine-disrupting pesticide, to obesity and early menstruation, both breast cancer risk factors, for at least two generations.

DDT was banned in the US in 1972, but this means your mother’s exposures before the ban could increase not only her breast cancer risk, but also yours and your daughters’.9 Diethylstilbestrol (DES) is another example. The endocrine-disrupting drug was widely and ineffectively used to prevent miscarriages from 1940 to 1971, but DES was banned after scientists learned that women who took it during pregnancy had daughters with a significantly higher risk of developing rare vaginal and cervical cancers.10 We all encounter cancer-causing chemicals in our everyday lives, but research shows that some communities face higher exposures than others. Low-income communities tend to experience higher levels of

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air pollution than wealthier ones, for example, but research has also shown that across all income levels, Americans of color are exposed to higher levels of harmful air pollution than their white counterparts.11 These disparities, which are the result of decades of segregation and racist housing policies, are further exacerbated by other forms of racial and environmental injustice. For example, personal care products marketed to Black and Hispanic communities contain higher levels of endocrine-­ disrupting chemicals than products marketed to white communities.

And because of the inequities in the US medical system, people of color often have worse cancer outcomes—for instance, Black women are 41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women.

A New Story I first learned Madelina’s story and started researching environmental causes of cancer while working as the Pittsburgh correspondent for Environmental Health News, a national nonprofit news outlet focused on how changes in the environment affect human health. I’d taken the job because the organization’s mission resonated with me on a personal level.

My own family has had its share of health problems. My dad, who grew up in Pittsburgh, survived a benign but difficult-to-remove brain tumor a decade ago. My younger sister, who has lived in Pittsburgh for nearly two decades, is in remission from thyroid cancer after being diagnosed at the age of twenty-five. My husband, who grew up in the region, has a rare autoimmune disorder, and his family has also struggled with various diseases, including cancer. I couldn’t help but wonder whether all of their illnesses might have a common thread— especially given the area’s industrial past and ongoing problems with air pollution.

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Through the course of my reporting, I learned that while it’s not yet possible to determine the exact causes of one person’s cancer, scientists have identified eight “cancer hallmarks”—or specific changes to cells— that need to happen for cancer to develop.12 Each of these hallmarks happens through complex interactions between genetic and external factors, including exposure to carcinogenic chemicals.

I also learned that cancer isn’t typically caused by a single event or environmental exposure, but a unique set of conditions and events that produces cancer in an individual person. One emerging theory is that cancer risk is like a pie chart with a different cancer cause in each slice— things like inherited genetics and gene mutations, your parents’ and grandparents’ chemical exposures, and your various potential exposures to things like cigarette smoke, air pollution, or cancer-causing chemicals in food or drinking water. Everyone’s pie looks a little different, but if just one piece goes missing, cancer won’t develop in that person.

This made me wonder—are there slices of my loved ones’ pie charts that wouldn’t be there if their childhood zip codes had been different?

If they hadn’t lived in the shadow of steel mills and coal-fired power plants, would they have remained healthy? I don’t smoke, and I try to eat healthily and exercise, but what about factors beyond my control?

What slices had started filling in since I’d moved to Pittsburgh, or while I was living in Taiwan, or New York, or San Francisco?

As I continued learning about all the ways Americans are exposed to cancer-causing chemicals in our air, food, water, and personal care products, I found myself frequently overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. Yes, I could take some steps to reduce my exposure—shopping organic when I could, paying attention to the ingredients in my shampoo and lotion and makeup, using a water filter—but I couldn’t wall myself off from most chemicals. It was a realization that prompted feelings of powerlessness.

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But then I discovered a national network of brilliant people working diligently to solve this problem. They are researchers, scientists, physicians, policy wonks, and concerned parents. Their numbers are still small, but their efforts are ambitious, broad in scale, and focused on systemic change—because we as individuals cannot simply shop our way out of a problem this pervasive.

Many of these efforts are being undertaken by a national coalition dubbed the Cancer Free Economy Network, which has the lofty goal of drastically reducing cancer rates by shifting the economy away from the widespread use of carcinogenic chemicals and toward safe alternatives.

Since its founding in 2014, more than sixty groups and individuals have joined the Cancer Free Economy Network, including a host of health advocacy, academic, labor, environmental, and business groups, along with prominent physicians, entrepreneurs, and policy experts.

One of the network’s prime directives is changing the way Americans think and talk about cancer. Progress on prevention has been slowed by pervasive cultural myths about cancer, like the notion that cancer risk is only about genetics or luck (“My grandma smoked three packs a day for forty years and never got sick.”), or the idea that “everything causes cancer” so it’s pointless to worry about trying to minimize exposure. In truth, it’s well proven that reducing a community’s exposure to carcinogens consistently reduces its number of cancer cases over time, and that focusing on prevention in ways that go beyond personal lifestyle choices can save many lives. There are also researchers, doctors, and advocates working on this issue separately from the Cancer Free Economy Network. Collectively, they form a national movement aimed at waging a new war on cancer—one that prioritizes offense and defense in addition to improving treatments for those wounded by the disease, with an emphasis on racial and environmental justice.

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In the course of my reporting, I’ve learned the stories of both people battling cancer and people leading this movement, some of which I’m sharing in these pages. These stories aren’t just about treatments or research, they’re also personal histories: the familial threads and formative memories that created the reserves from which these unlikely heroes draw their resilience and ambition. Getting to know these people has given me strength to go beyond worrying about my personal consumption habits to join others pushing for change that will make the world healthier for all of us. I hope this book will do the same for you.

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“THE PRESCRIPTION TO TREAT WHAT AILS US: GRAND LOOPS AND TOWN WALKS!” - MARK FENTON, HOST OF THE PBS AMERICA’S WALKING SERIES

Beyond Greenways The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes Robert M. Searns

W

Paperback | $35.00 246 pages PUBLISHED: July 2023 ISBN: 9781642832631

ould you experience your city differently if your doorstep were a trailhead? Many people don’t have close-by, safe places to walk, despite walking’s known benefits.

In Beyond Greenways: The Next Step for City Trails and

Walking Routes, greenways expert Robert Searns introduces a new

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generation of more accessible pathways that stitch together urban and suburban areas.

Searns introduces two models–grand loop trails and town walks. Grand loop trails are 20 to 350-mile systems that encircle metro areas. Town walks are shorter–2 to 6-mile routes in cities. He then lays out how to plan, design, and build support for them, drawing inspiration from trails in the US and abroad.

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Planners, trail advocates, and community leaders will find the tools here to develop successful and affordable trails. Now is the time to pursue accessible pedestrian routes for this, and future, generations.

Robert M. Searns

R

obert Searns has a four-decade trails an International Movement, and has written and greenways history of visualizing for Planning, Landscape Architecture, LA concepts, writing effective plans, China, and American Trails Magazines. and getting projects built. He was Project Bob also served as Editor-in-Chief of Trails Director of Denver’s Platte River and Mary and Beyond Magazine, chaired American Carter Greenways–national-award-winning Trails, and was a founder of The World Trails projects. He co-authored Greenways: A Network. Bob is a trail enthusiast, walking, Guide to Planning Design and Development, hiking, and biking whenever he can. contributed to Greenways: The Beginning of

Also available: Designing Greenways Sustainable Landscapes for Nature and People, Second Edition Paul Cawood Hellmund and Daniel Somers Smith HARDCOVER | $84.00 288 PAGES | 2006 | 9781559633291

Walkable City Rules 101 Steps to Making Better Places Jeff Speck Visual and easy-to-read steps that make walkability achievable PAPERBACK | $32.00 312 PAGES | 2018 | 9781610918985

Within Walking Distance Creating Livable Communities for All Philip Langdon Practical, real-world examples of how cities and towns can save and revive their Main Streets PAPERBACK | $46.00 280 PAGES | 2017 | 9781610917711

Creating Vibrant Public Spaces Streetscape Design in Commercial and Historic Districts

By Ned Crankshaw How to strengthen and revitalize our historic commercial districts and suburban centers, too HARDCOVER | $74.00 238 PAGES | 2008 | 9781597264822

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Beyond Greenways

Beyond Greenways THE NEXT STEP FOR CITY TRAILS AND WALKING ROUTES

Robert Searns Illustrations by Bill Neumann, PLA, ASLA

© 2023 Robert M. Searns All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Sketches in this book are by Bill Neumann, PLA, ASLA. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949364 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: 11th Street Bridge Park; 5280 Trail; accessibility; Buffalo, New York; buffering; conservation; Denver, Colorado; grand loop trail; green­ way; guiding principles; hiking; Jeju Olle Trail; Maricopa Trail; master plan; mixed-use trail; pedestrian infrastructure; Phoenix, Arizona; points of access; rights of way; running; Sarasota, Florida; service nodes; Toronto, Ontario; tourism; town walk; trail depots; trail maintenance; trail management; trail running; trekking; urban shaping; Vegas Valley Rim Trail; walking; wayfinding; Wolf River Greenway

To PK and Miles May you have as least as good an outdoors future as my outdoors past!

Contents Prologue

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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Chapter 1 The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes

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Chapter 2 Grand Loop Trails: Configurations and Themes

37

Chapter 3 Town Walks: Configurations and Themes

55

Chapter 4 Guiding Principles and Attributes

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Chapter 5 Laying Out a Route

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Chapter 6 Making a Plan

123

Chapter 7 Building Support, Engaging the Public, and Motivating Trail Users

155

Chapter 8 Plans, Visions, and Thought Experiments

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Notes

205

Helpful Resources

221

About the Author

225

Prologue “It’s a beautiful day and nature here is so delightful that I’m of a mind to take my time . . . at a leisurely pace, rediscovering the joys of progressing slowly, and strong bursts of endorphins soon have me on a hiker’s high.”

—Bernard Ollivier, Winds of the Steppe1 I’ve been planning and developing greenways and urban trails for five decades. Most are paved hike/bike paths running along river and stream corridors. I’m delighted and humbled to see their proliferation worldwide and so many people enjoying them! A few years back, contemplating the projects I’d worked on, I wondered, “What’s next?” Are there new ways to shape these kinds of spaces that offer expanded opportunities for outdoors enjoyment and ways to move more freely about on the landscape?” While contemplating this, I had two epiphanous experiences that got me thinking about a new perspective.

The first occurred on an overnight journey to an international trails conference on Jeju Island, South Korea. On the final segment from xi

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Seoul to Jeju, I slipped into the bulkhead row to curl up in the window seat and get some sleep. As I squeezed past an older gentleman in the aisle seat, he nodded, and I extended a greeting. Detecting a French accent, I attempted some niceties, and we began to converse as best we could between the two languages. Bernard Ollivier was also en route to the conference. Turns out he was the keynote speaker. He had been a journalist in Paris, and he said that some time earlier, when turning sixty-two, he faced a double life crisis. Per protocol in France, he was obliged to retire, and his wife and companion of many years had recently died. On the brink, he left Paris and walked the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route in Spain. Inspired by that journey, he decided to embark on a much more ambitious trek: a 7,000mile solo walk across Asia along the ancient Silk Road from Istanbul to Xi’an, China.

Bernard said his journey was incredible—a healing and consciousness-expanding experience. He has since documented his trek in a three-volume series titled Longue Marche (Long Walk). He also went on to found the Seuil Threshold Association, a healing-through-­walking program offering trekking as an alternative to jail time for troubled youth offenders. Hearing that, and later reading the English translation of Bernard’s epic tale, I saw walking in a new light, struck by its healing and spiritual message as well as his metaphysical way of looking at a journey on foot.

When I reached Jeju, other events and people fed into my emerging perspective, including meeting Suh Myung-sook (“Suki”). Like Bernard, Suki was a journalist, and she too, after a lengthy career, felt adrift and sought solace. She too hiked the Camino de Santiago. After her healing journey she returned with a new mission: to create the Jeju Olle, a world class trail built mostly for walking that now encircles the entire island along its edges—a 271-mile loop with the wildness of the sea on one side and towns and countryside on the other. I walked segments

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of this spectacular trail, and in addition to the magnificent seascapes I saw verdant rural lands, crossed stream valleys, and passed through villages, some quaint and some more developed but all interesting. I saw historic sites, heard stories about the people who lived there, and witnessed the rich culture revealed by walking the trail. I also learned about its recreational, economic, and healing benefits. Though proximate to urban areas, much of the Olle is soft surfaced, with trail treads narrower than the typical hike/bike trails found along many greenways. Although bikes are not categorically excluded, the Olle seemed more optimal for foot travel.

This new emphasis on walking I gleaned from Bernard’s trek and Suki’s grand loop trail stayed with me. (And by “walking” I mean foot travel in its myriad forms, including strolling, hiking, running, long-­ distance trekking, and even endurance training.) I left South Korea with a new perspective beyond the paved hike/bike greenway paths I’d been planning and building for decades. Also, there was something really nice about the experience of the slower pace of walking—a certain sense of freedom of not needing a bike, of just moving along step by step, no pedals, chain, or tires needed. The natural pace of walking also gave a better sense of connection—of feet to the trail, to the surrounding spaces, sounds, aromas, trees, rocks, flowers, and meeting people along the way.

It was also nice to not have to be on alert for faster-moving cyclists.

In addition to the walking emphasis, the beautifully designed Jeju Olle confirmed for me the notion of a grand loop trail. It was a different kind of geometry, circular, not linear, like most greenways. Could loop trails build on the greenways notion, a significant new kind of trail infrastructure? Although I had proposed them on several plans I’ve written in the past, with this Jeju Olle model I felt moved to embrace the loop concept more enthusiastically. As I looked further, I saw numerous other examples. Although the Jeju Olle is one of the best, it turns out there are similar grand loops in other places, including the Maricopa

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Trail around Phoenix and the Vegas Valley Rim Trail around greater Las Vegas, and Louisville, Kentucky, is building one. Interestingly, the Olmsted Brothers also planned the 40-Mile Loop for Portland over a century ago. Note that although many of these trails are hike/bike routes, I am focusing more on foot travel in this book, inspired by both Bernard and Suki.

When I returned home, the concept of the Jeju Olle stayed in my thoughts. Could we envision similar trails that run along the edges of our urban areas, where city meets countryside? They go along the edges of the wilder areas and rural places, but they are readily accessible. Like the Jeju Olle, they could offer experiences at the slower pace of walking with colorful mixes of landscapes and peoplescapes along the way. Trekking these routes could feel solitary but not isolating. You could go for an afternoon outing or do a continuous multiday trek walking on your own terms and at your own pace. Because they go through towns and village along city edges, these routes also would offer more convenient places to eat, drink, and spend the night, so no need to carry a backpack.

This too is liberating. You could load essentials in a daypack and set out.

The second part of the epiphany—building shorter loop walks closer to home—came while I was working on a trail plan for Commerce City, Colorado, a working-class suburb of Denver. That project, funded largely by a local health agency, emphasized readily accessible facilities that would promote widespread routine physical activity, reducing obesity and promoting better cardiovascular fitness and overall health. In a series of neighborhood meetings two older ladies came up, and one said, “We just need places to walk, nice places, close to home.” The other said, “Yeah, I just want to be able to go out my door and simply go for a walk, but the sidewalks, when they’re there, are narrow and many streets are scary to cross. I just want a route, easy to get to on foot, that feels safe and pleasant!” They also expressed concern about dodging bikes on the local trails—not the first time I’d heard that concern. We

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seriously considered this question and recommended upgraded walking corridors with better sidewalks, safer street crossings, and other amenities such as tree medians. But the Commerce City ladies’ comments lingered with me. Indeed, could we create an in-town version of the grand loops—shorter, readily accessible, pleasant walking pathways closer to people’s doorsteps?

Thinking about this aspect, I decided to test the hypotheses, starting with a 6-mile walk out the front door of our apartment in a mixeduse community on the east side of Denver. I followed sidewalks and alleyways through a variety of neighborhoods, passing houses, business, parks, shops, schools, coffee places, and other elements of the urban scene. Several times, because of the lack of adequate sidewalks, I walked in the streets, the residential ones that had sparse automobile traffic.

Often, I saw the locals also walking in the street, including mothers pushing strollers. I saw people, dogs, and yards, some attractively landscaped with lawns, trees, and flowers and some derelict. At no time did I feel unsafe or unwelcome except for maybe an occasional angry hound growling and gnawing on the other side of a flimsy fence. Just doing his job, I guess. Not far from home, I passed through a neighborhood of immigrants predominantly from Asia and North Africa, enjoyed the exotic dress and aromas, and discovered ethnic restaurants and grocery stores. What an experience! I never would have guessed the diversity and the sheer joy of that journey.

After that first walk, with a city map, I looked for other potential loops to sample, particularly in areas with parks, open spaces, and neighborhood shopping districts. I also realized that these loop walks could take multiple forms: tailored to communities, to employment centers, featuring civic areas and tourist destinations and ultimately offering enjoyable places to walk at every doorstep. You could even have branded loops that circle out from transit stops where anyone could ride the line, disembark at an interesting place, and walk an intriguing route.

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Encouraged by the in-town walks, I decided to go big and trek around the entire edge of Greater Denver, more than 120 miles through the foothills and prairie that surround the city. I recruited a group of fellow trekkers including willing friends, family, and two dogs. I sketched out a series of 10- to 12-mile segments in Google Maps, and we met on weekends, walking one segment per outing. At the conclusion of each hike, we’d find a local restaurant, and dining with impunity because we had walked off the calories, we’d discuss our day’s adventure. It was always amazing to discover the myriad rich landscapes and places on a route so close to town. We enjoyed the state parks and scenic open spaces along the way, but we also delighted in the links in between. All along the way, there were views of the mountains and expansive prairie landscapes, but you could also see the city skyline. There were intimate sights as well: barns and pastures, grazing cattle, wildlife, old plows, tractors, and even horses that came up to greet us. There were hidden streams and ponds to cool our feet and for a quick dip for the dogs, flowery meadows, old cabins, and mining artifacts, and each season had its own character and color. Occasionally, we had to make peace with an irritable canine in a yard or recalculate a route to cross a gap, but the expedition was very doable.

After we field tested the grand loop trails and in-town walk concepts, the vision of this next iteration became clearer and the potentials evident. They could be a more readily accessible alternative to more distant, harder-to-access, and increasingly crowded outdoors places like national parks and forests. Easier to reach, they could so more equitably serve diverse populations. Indeed, they can become a new kind of overlay park—places to get fit, find solace, or just get away. And in the face of increasing barriers posed by urbanization and privatization, these trails and walks would help sustain a precious right to roam so people can continue to move about freely on foot.

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Trekking the edge where city meets countryside. (Credit: Robert Searns)

I also learned that walking is about more than getting from here to there; it is about being in a place, in a moment—about the joy of the journey. This book sets out to make the case that these new modes have a place, are affordable to build, and will dramatically improve the livability of our cities and the quality of our lives.

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Acknowledgments At least fifty souls helped with this book: planners, designers, engineers, advocates, health experts, and writers as well as friends, family members, and the people I met out walking. Without exception they were generous with their time, candid with their advice, and kind in sharing their thoughts, their stories, and their know-how.

I want to particularly acknowledge my wife, Sally Preston, who labored through my drafts with her pen, gave me guidance, and kept me on course. I could not have done it without her!

A special note of gratitude to Bill Neumann, PLA, ASLA, and his crew at DHM Design for preparing the illustrations that so enjoyably communicate the ideas in this book. Bill is a highly talented, creative landscape architect. Besides his project design skills, he is a top-notch illustrator and a wry cartoonist. He and I have collaborated for four decades on greenway and trail projects around the nation. I am eternally grateful to have had his skilled hand in this book!

I also thank my two editors at Island Press, Annie Byrnes and Heather Boyer, for having faith in the grand loops and town walks concept and for their invaluable wordsmithing skills and guidance. No small task! xix

Introduction “We frequently walk with the sole purpose of getting from one place to another. But where are we in between? With every step we can feel the miracle of walking on solid ground. We can arrive in the present moment with every step.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh1 If I were to use a single word to express the current times, the stress, the pressure, the constant barrage of “breaking news,” pending doom and gloom from pandemics to climate change, I would say “confined.”

Maybe “trapped” is a better word. Sedentary behavior and screen time increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the US National Institute of Health, 51 percent of adults and 67 percent of children reported increases in total screen time, and 52 percent of adults and 60 percent of children reported increases in leisure screen time.2 Although for many the illusion of a “get-away” is there, we need more.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 42 percent of the people in the United States are 1

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obese and are increasingly suffering from the associated health impacts, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And although this problem is widespread across all peoples, minority communities and lower-­ income populations are particularly prone with rates at least 14 percent higher.3 Given that very troubling health concern, it’s not surprising that the CDC specifically cites the need for “safe, convenient, places to walk . . . places to move about . . . protected from traffic and safe from crime and hazards.” Routine walking has myriad health benefits, including preventing and managing health conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes, increasing energy levels, and strengthening the immune system.4 Sometimes you must go out the door, just walk, nothing programmed or highly structured, be in nature, and walk pleasurably without trepidation or conflict.

Getting out on trails and walking routes was one of the few ways to break the confinement of COVID lockdowns. The Outdoor Industry Association reported that in the United States, what they refer to as “day hiking” increased by over 8 percent during the first year of the pandemic.5 With a reasonable modicum of safety and comfort, you could get outdoors, enjoy nature, and to some extent socialize. For many this was a godsend, and for planners it was a lesson learned. Walking is a simple activity that practically anyone can do. The challenge for many is finding those places and being able to access them easily. Although we have existing parks, greenways, and urban trails, in these times those are not enough—people need more places to walk.

Tied to this is the need to have more places to freely enjoy the outdoors, especially rights of way for walking on the land. A right to roam addresses a core human need. Although in many places throughout the world there is a welcoming view of roaming in the outdoors, attitudes toward this kind of travel and connectivity in the United States increasingly lean toward exclusion. There is distrust and downright fear of outsiders, even disdain for the public, especially on or even near one’s

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property. Yet there is simultaneously an exploding demand for trails and outdoor places. Overcrowding and overuse of both existing urban trails and more remote backcountry places such as national forests, national parks, and state parks is a growing problem. Add climate change to the mix along with concerns about wildfires, invasive species, and infestations like the bark beetle, and it gets even worse. No doubt, more restrictions and even access rationing is coming—no more spontaneous visits but access by reservation only, if at all. There is also the question of equitable access to these places by diverse populations. These growing limitations tie, in a significantly worsening way, to the sense of confinement and feeling trapped.

And many of us live in places where its unsafe or unpleasant just to take a walk from the front door. If I were to use a single word to describe the challenge to walkability, it would be “disconnected.” Although there are multiple factors that fragment our spaces, none is as profound as the impact of the automobile. Our contemporary landscape is the result of more than a century of expanding automobile infrastructure.

Motor vehicles create noise and fumes including dangerous levels of air pollution, and they are a major cause of serious pedestrian injuries and deaths—according to the CDC, over 104,000 injuries and over 7,000 fatalities in the United States annually.6 There is also the very deleterious impact of barriers to foot travel created by highways and arterial streets as well as inadequate and unpleasant walking environments. In addition to the barriers created by the freeways and arterials, there are other impediments such as cul-de-sacs and poor sidewalks, or none at all, in many residential and commercial areas. Figure 0.1 illustrates a daunting intersection.

We not only need more places to walk, but we also need more people to want to use them. Walking, running, and hiking are the first, second, and third most popular activities in the United States, with more than 145 million people (6 in 10) participating. That’s the good news. The

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Figure 0.1. Difficult intersections pose barriers to safe and pleasant travel. (Credit: Robert Searns)

challenge is that there are tens of millions who don’t participate, with dire health and wellbeing consequences.7 The Next Generation of Urban Trails Although greenways and backcountry trails have helped address these needs, we need more trails, and we need more of those trails to be accessible and inviting to a greater percentage of the population in the United States. In this book I suggest a new generation of trails, which fall into two categories: grand loop trails and town walks.

Grand loop trails are longer-distance routes that encircle cities running along the parameters where city meets countryside. In effect, grand loop trails are a closer-in alternative to backcountry routes. They could

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be from 20 miles to 300 miles or more in length, laid out around cities along the urban–rural edge to offer a backcountry-like or bucolic experience. Being closer in, they are more reachable than more remote hiking trails by a shorter car trip, local transit, or a rideshare service. One could take an afternoon hike or plan a multiday trek.

Town walks are 2- to 6-mile loops built in neighborhoods, downtowns, or other urban and suburban places. Depending on where they are located and how they are laid out, town walks have a range of functions. Some may be tourist-oriented draws that showcase a city’s special civic spaces and iconic attractions. Others would serve more localized needs such as neighborhood walking routes that could be easily enjoyed after work or on a lunch hour. These would promote routine enjoyment and exercise. They can also serve as practical routes to walking distance destinations, although the primary purpose is recreation and fitness.

Ideally, one day, they will be convenient to every doorstep. Eventually these loops, along with greenways and other trails, could form metro-­ wide, green overlay networks that enhance urban landscapes.

In a number of places, this exciting new generation of trails and walking routes is already being built. In 2004, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved a plan for the Maricopa Trail,8 a 315-mile trail along the edges of greater Phoenix, Arizona, linking county parks and other treasured landscapes together. Around the same time, Suh Myungsook, a journalist looking for a new direction, envisioned the Jeju Olle,9 an incredible 271-mile pathway—a grand loop—that would completely encircle Jeju, a Maui-like island off the coast of South Korea. The Phoenix and Jeju trails are both now built, and there are similar metro-edge trails in the works that will encircle Las Vegas, Nevada,10 Louisville, Kentucky,11 and Denver, Colorado.12 Toronto, Ontario,13 also has a trail program in place that envisions a spectacular grand loop. Interestingly, Toronto’s city edge project goes hand in hand with a robust greenbelt system where one promotes the other.

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In 2006, Gayle Hartman and Marjorie Cunningham, both history buffs, envisioned a 2½-mile walking loop around Tucson’s historic district that would connect and reveal its iconic civic buildings, the old barrios, ethnic restaurants, and other places. They took the idea to the Presidio Museum Trust, procured some leftover paint from the city, and laid out the Turquoise Trail.14 Today, thousands visit, including history buffs, tourists, and locals just wanting to enjoy a pleasant, informative walk. It’s the best way to experience the “authentic” Tucson! Like the Turquoise Trail, there are several other notable similar projects. Ashville, North Carolina, boasts its 1.7-mile Urban Trail,15 with sculptures and historic sites, and in 2021, Denver voters approved a bond initiative kicking off development of the 5280 Trail,16 a world-class 5-mile loop around the edges of that city’s downtown area.

These projects represent how greenways—along with other urban trails and walking routes—can evolve to offer more opportunities to recreate and to make these places more readily accessible. They suggest the potential for an intriguing new iteration beyond the typical linear greenway that follows established corridors such as rivers or repurposed rail routes. Instead, these are loops, not confined to preexisting corridors as many greenways are. The pathways envisioned in this book embrace characteristics of greenways but go a step further to include walkable streetscapes in the city and comfortable hiking path loops running through fields and forests on the edges of cities.

In building on the greenway concept, there are four important differences when considering grand loops and town walks: They have a different geometry, they are more adaptable and easier to build, they are more accessible, and as presented here, there is an emphasis on walking.

Starting with geometry, they represent a new green overlay shape that goes from linear to loop. Whereas traditional greenways typically follow existing corridors in the landscape such as rivers, streams, and old railroad track routes, grand loops and town walks cut across the grain of

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the terrain. The potential trail corridors expand from being down by the river or along a rail line to more ubiquitous routes. In effect the entire metroscape becomes the canvas on which we can lay them out. They can reach more places and be accessed by more people and thus offer more equitably and widely available outdoor experiences. They also provide alternative outdoor destinations to increasingly crowded and remote places such as national forests and national parks.

There is more flexibility in the ways they can be built because they are envisioned primarily as walking routes—not the typical engineered, paved hike and bike paths built along greenways. This means more adaptability. Properly planned and designed, not only can they follow what we typically think of as trail routes, but, where conditions are right, they can be overlaid on existing infrastructure including low-traffic roads, local streets, and sidewalks. Not having to accommodate bikes—at least not road bikes—these trails are much simpler and less costly to build and maintain. They can even be established at the rudimentary level with just some signs or paint on the sidewalk, like the Turquoise Trail in Tucson.

The emphasis on walking—as opposed to bicycling—might be a little controversial for some but, based on my experiences of successful walking-oriented routes such as the Jeju Olle, where on-foot travel is so popular, and from the input of many public meetings where participants repeatedly asked for tranquil places to walk where they didn’t have to frequently jump out of the way of faster-moving bikes, I saw the need for a travel-on-foot emphasis. (Note that for purposes of this book, the term “walking” includes its myriad variations—hiking, running, wheelchair travel, and, in places, even horseback riding.) Does this mean you can’t visualize grand loops and town walks as bike paths? Of course not! Certainly, almost any of the types of paths proposed in this book could be designed to accommodate bicycles, especially mountain bikes, that don’t require pavement, if the advocates so wish. And several

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of the projects mentioned as examples in this book, including the loops around Las Vegas and Louisville, have shared-use hike/bike paths. So designing them for biking is always an option.

This book introduces these routes as a next step for envisioning close-in, readily accessible green places to recreate. It builds on the successes of the greenway movement as a new breed of high-quality, readily accessible outdoor spaces in and around cities. The chapters that follow further define these routes and provide guidance on how to plan, design, and implement them. We will see how they can be a new kind of park that can be integrated into, and shape, city landscapes, strengthening connectivity and helping to preserve and create high-quality public places. We’ll also see how they can offer more widely and equitably accessible routes to roam, giving more people the opportunity to enjoy the act of moving through the outdoors under their own power. Grand loops and town walks not only offer close-in ways to enjoy the outdoors, but they can create a layer of affordable green infrastructure. They can welcome and enable a broader and more culturally diverse cross-section of peoples and promote health and fitness. The concepts laid out here envision a new kind of pathway tailored for twenty-first-century needs and conditions. Like the traditional hierarchy of parks—regional, community, and neighborhood parks—grand loops and town walks have levels that define them. A grand loop that completely encircles metro areas can be seen as a regional park. A town walk can be seen as a kind of neighborhood, community, or even a citywide park overlay.

Along with emphasizing the joys and benefits of walking as a mode of outdoor engagement, there is an emphasis on traveling with just a daypack. A walker could go on a multiday trip on a grand loop trail, traveling light, around the edges of the city. Someone on a day outing could easily find places to dine and get provisions. On longer trek, a hiker could stay at an inn, campground. or other close-in lodging.

When we look at more recent trends in the ways that traditional

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parks are built and used, we see other opportunities for grand loops and town walks as places to exercise and find solace. Many traditional parks have increasingly become places for organized sports, with playfields, basketball, and tennis courts. As one scholarly paper puts it, “A city park no longer works in the same ways it did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is (now) rarely a place for . . . experiencing a pastoral contrast to the dense city or contemplating nature—the purposes for which it was originally intended.”17 The authors go on to say that “a vital neighborhood needs to no longer maintain an area isolated as a ‘park’ in proportion to population. Rather, it should be one that brings green pathways through the streets.”18 Grand loops and town walks could fit this alternative model better, meeting a range of contemporary needs.

This book also has an implicit message about resilience. Increasingly, when experts and advocates talk about addressing the profound problems of the day, such as climate change and other formidable issues, they talk about resilience. Grand loops and town walks are not all-­ encompassing solutions, but they have a place. Ideally, by providing closer-in, safe, and accessible walking paths we can offer green places in and around the edges of town, which will lead to less automobile-­ oriented travel to more distant places as people seek refuge from cities.

There are also opportunities to set aside special conservation areas along trails. The Appalachian Trail epitomizes this with a spin-off of the Appalachian Conservation Trust that, through its landscape conservation initiatives, has protected tens of thousands of acres along the trail route.19 Another environmental organization, Ecosystem Restoration Camps, is already doing this with more than forty such places where visitors work on reforestation and other landscape rehabilitation projects, on six continents. There is an opportunity to have these as a regular feature of grand loop trails.20 This book aims to build on the legacy of parks, parkways, greenways, and urban trails by offering a consistent, practical guide to promoting

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and implementing them as new outdoor opportunities and solutions to number of contemporary challenges. The goals are also to serve and motivate practitioners and academicians; open space, city planning, and park agencies; and civic and business leaders, conveying the notion that building high-quality walking corridors and urban edge trails can bring myriad benefits and reach “everyday people,” not only outdoors and fitness enthusiasts but also those who are looking for ways to be more active, both at home and when traveling.

In beginning to formulate the ideas in this book, I wondered whether communities and officials would want to invest in them. At first there was some trepidation because it was something new, maybe just crazy.

Then I began to see news articles about the Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Louisville projects and learned about the Turquoise and 5280 trails. In the Phoenix case, Maricopa County committed $5 million up front to build that grand loop. In Denver, the loop will be a $100 million effort with a profound reshaping and beautification of the streetscapes along the 5-mile route. It turns out that voters okayed millions in startup dollars. People are not only thinking about these new kinds of trails but also approving the funds to build them. Some places are building grand loops and town walks, but promoting more of them requires not only introducing the idea but making the case. Here are some key talking points: They meet a fundamental human need. Walking is in our genes. It is a pillar of what makes us human, the most primitive and the longest-­ enduring mode of human travel, the ability—and necessity—to move about, under our own power. It is an essential need for all of us, a universal aspect in our daily lives that permeates nearly all cultures. We can look at trails and pathways not only as routes of travel but also as transcendent places.

They offer more and safer walkability. In an era dominated by the automobile and barriers that automobile infrastructure imposes, they can offer a counterpoint: enjoyable, safe places to walk. Though not the

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total answer, with better sidewalks and safer street crossings, they can help reduce the staggering toll of pedestrian accidents.

They can be an alternative to more crowded outdoor destinations.

With more crowding and difficulty of accessing outdoor places, they offer a closer-in, more widely and equitably accessible recreational alternative.

They bring health and wellbeing benefits. With increasing problems of obesity and other serious health problems including mental health problems and stress, they can promote fitness—and solace—by enabling and encouraging more frequent walking and moving about in the outdoors.

They promote a better environment. They can promote better environmental stewardship and address urban sprawl by defining green spaces along the city edges and revitalizing neighborhoods by creating attractive places to walk in town. They address climate change, reducing emissions by promoting less driving with closer-in places to recreate.

Motor vehicles account for nearly a third of carbon emissions.21 Increasingly the notion of resilience fits into this discussion. Taking practical, doable interim steps to adapt and adjust pending more encompassing solutions to massive problems such as climate change promotes resilience.

They bring economic benefits. They promote economic development by encouraging people to patronize restaurants, convenience stores, coffee shops, lodging, and other support services and by improving the character and property value of neighborhoods with new parklike overlays.

They help ensure a future with places to roam. They will establish and preserve walking routes and connectivity in the face of increasing urban sprawl, more barriers, and overcrowded outdoor destinations.

They are places for people who just want to have fun. They are simply a fun thing to do—a new mode of leisure activity at home and when traveling.

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The book sets out to introduce a new concept and ways to realize results. It has three parts. The first section defines grand loops and town walks and makes the case for building them. Next comes practical advice on how to plan and design them and how to secure rights of way. The third part lays out how to go from vision to reality, to garner support, assemble resources, get them built, and motivate people to use them. This section wraps up with a series of thought experiments where the grand loops and town walks are conceptually tested out in several different cities across a range of climate conditions, terrains, and cultural values.

Please note that this is not a technical trail design manual. There are already many excellent resources, some of which are referenced at the end of the book, that already do this. Rather, this is a guide to envisioning, laying out, and promoting these routes and, in so doing, realizing the benefits they offer—to facilitate, encourage, and enable more close-in walking, hiking, running, and trekking and to significantly improve the quality of the places where we live and visit by creating these routes. Because this is a somewhat novel concept that is still evolving, each reader is encouraged to use the ideas and guidance in the chapters. It is a starting place you can build on, adding in your own approaches to planning and design. At the end of the day, the goal is about offering readily accessible, high-quality trails and walking places to anyone who wants to enjoy them, motivating and enabling more people to engage in this kind of outdoor activity, and improving our cities with a new layer of parklike green infrastructure so that, one day, every doorstep is a trailhead.

CHAPTER 1

The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes “As rights of way determined and sustained by use, they constitute a labyrinth of liberty.”

—Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways1 Recently, our daughter set out on a weekend backpacking trip to a national forest outside Denver, Colorado, that used to be an hour away.

Later that same day, she and her husband, and their dog, showed up at our door. I asked her what happened, and she said, “Dad, we turned back, it was bumper to bumper, and we didn’t know if we could find a place to camp or even a place to park at a trailhead.” They just wanted to get away, out of the city, to enjoy some green space and hike a trail.

Colorado, where we live, was once the backyard of the nation. Now, with the state’s population headed toward 6 million, one faces a gauntlet of traffic, permit requirements, and crowds. There are impediments not only to accessing the backcountry but also to accessing local outdoor destinations.

Compounding this problem is the further privatization of the 13

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commons. One particularly disturbing example is the growing trend of “amenity ranches” where the rich buy up open lands either individually or as a group to ensure that they will have a place to hike, hunt, fish, or just enjoy being in nature. Increasingly, developers are buying large tracts of open land, particularly along rivers or other scenic places. They then sell off lots to buyers, who put up houses. Many times, they put up fences and no trespassing signs, giving the message that the public is not welcome. According to a 2022 New York Times article, rising numbers of ranches purchased as country escapes have “brought new attitudes toward strangers pursuing activities like hiking . . . on land that may have previously been public or treated as such.”2 Ken Ilgunas, a journalist and author of the book Trespassing Across America, writes that “even where there aren’t signs, Americans know they don’t have the implicit permission to visit their town’s neighboring woods, fields, and coastlines. Long gone are the days when we could.” He raises the question of who has the right to roam, to move freely about the landscape, safely and pleasantly on foot along high-quality routes of travel. Ilgunas adds that we need to reconsider what he calls the “right to exclude.” In many ways its seems that unless you drive a car, pay a fee, or have a reservation, you don’t have the ability to enjoy the outdoors easily and spontaneously.3 This sense of exclusion is further compounded when we consider people who don’t fit the accepted racial, ethnic, or gender profiles. As a Trust for Public Lands study puts it, more than 100 million Americans “don’t have a park close to home and are vying for the same patch of outdoor space as many of [their] neighbors . . . [and] too often this is the case for low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.” The study suggests that a solution would be to “energize and accelerate the efforts of historically marginalized communities” in order to help close the park equity gap.4

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The Sierra Club in its Outdoors for All program also highlights this concern, recommending not curtailing access to outdoor space but rather increasing it by conserving more land and removing barriers to entry from those who feel excluded or unable to access the outdoors.5 Over recent decades there have been trends and movements to establish trails and other outdoor corridors, particularly greenways, as places to recreate in and near cities. This trend has helped, but alone it has not been enough. There is a need for a more comprehensive approach to outdoor places that are more easily and spontaneously accessible.

Since the times when people first left the countryside to settle in cities, there has been a desire for green urban infrastructure, for places of refuge from the harsher aspects of city life. Indeed, creating and setting aside pleasurable green spaces accessible to urban dwellers is a centuries-old form of landscape adaptation.6 Parks, commons, civic squares, tree-lined boulevards, and parkways have long been a counterpoint to the loss of access to natural landscapes and the solace these places have provided. These green spaces, carved out in cities, have helped mitigate crowded living conditions, oppressive factories, and other bleak conditions urban dwellers face. More recently, greenways have evolved from the more traditional parks and parkways as places of respite. In the case of greenways, they were also a response to automobile-dominated living conditions. On a greenway you escape from the noise of traffic and a enjoy a quieter tree-lined trail. Greenway planners have also strived to preserve and restore valued natural corridors such as rivers and streams.

Inspired by the greenway concept, grand loops and town walks go a step further in alleviating the ills of urbanization as a new iteration of adaptive green infrastructure. They evolve from the legacy of boulevards, parks, parkways, and greenways. To understand how grand loops and town walks fit into this process, let’s take a closer look at that legacy.

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The Evolution of Adaptive Green Infrastructure We consider three generations of parklike corridors that form the foundation of the grand loop trails and town walks concept: the ancestral axes and boulevards, parkways, and greenways. These three predecessors, along with grand loops and town walks, share the commonality that they offer routes of travel, not so much for getting from point A to point B, but for recreation, solace, and enjoyment.

The First Generation: Axes and Boulevards

To start, we look back over 3,000 years, to China, to find these ancestral routes. Sometimes called axes, these were attractive, specially defined corridors, typically connecting important buildings, markets, and other places in cities. They were for gathering and daily travel and were often celebratory elements of civic life for special events and processions. They were a counterpoint to the drudgery of daily life and crowded living conditions. Often, they were integrated into networks. According to noted landscape architect John Ormsbee Simonds, axes were “directional, orderly and dominating” routes of travel.7 They became unifying and city-shaping landscape elements.

Over the subsequent millennia, axes evolved into boulevards, the most famous prototypes appearing in the seventeenth century at the Versailles Palace of Louis XIV. And, of course, the Champs-Élysées of Paris is a prototypical boulevard. These routes were majestic, tree lined, and deliberately laid out not only to connect and celebrate important places but also to provide a spectacular civic space experience both for grand events and for those just strolling these routes daily. While they served royalty and other high officials, they were also intended as places for the people—impressive, public garden spaces.

This “grand avenues” concept was adopted by urban planners such

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as Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who laid out Washington, DC, and they became the unifying elements of many of the world’s great cities from Paris to Buenos Aires. Even Las Vegas has its unifying celebratory axis, the Strip, although that route could use more shade. Many are, or were, for walking. In more current times, automobiles have claimed the dominant portion of many of these spaces.

The Second Generation: Parkways

In the late nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmsted, considered the father of landscape architecture, inspired in part by the boulevards, went one step further and envisioned parkways. Beginning in pre-automobile times, Olmsted’s parkways were a new kind of roadway for both carriages and pedestrians. He saw them as “picturesque in character” and “bordered by a small belt of trees and shrubbery.”8 In so doing, he combined the functions of movement, use, views, and experience with a goal of introducing nature back into the city. These corridors focused on linking parks and other green spaces rather than palaces, government buildings, or granite edifices. Obsessed with health, wellbeing, and spiritual solace, Olmsted sought to create readily accessible outdoor places of refuge and recovery as a counterpoint to the oppressive factories and bleak industrial settings.

In 1866, after the war as he finished the Central Park Plan for New York, he proposed a parkway for Brooklyn. The main feature was a 55-foot-wide, central roadway that also served as a pleasure drive. Traffic was reserved for carriages and other light vehicles. On either side of the road were 35-foot-wide “malls” where residents could play, stroll, and relax. This is what became Eastern Parkway.9 Along with his partner, Calvert Vaux, they saw this as the catalyst of what could become a vast chain of parks and landscaped pleasure drives, forming a continuous leafy route, or a “shaded green ribbon,” running throughout

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the New York metropolitan area. Civic leaders saw these routes as outdoor places of refuge from “noxious or offensive” businesses, including slaughterhouses, foundries, and glue factories. “With the wide planting area afforded in the parkways . . . and robust trees, these ‘boulevards,’” according to road historian Dan Marriott, would be places with “thriving, large canopies growing to their true and beautiful form . . . a green space, with mature trees, nice shadow patterns, cooling breezes, rustling leaves, and shady walks less of a street and more of a park, hence the term ‘parkway.’”10 Today the Eastern Parkway runs for several miles through central Brooklyn from Prospect Park almost to Highland Park, featuring pedestrian and bike lanes and about twenty-five species of trees.11 Olmsted and Vaux soon moved on to other places, including the industrial city of Buffalo, New York. In the 1870s, they planned what many consider to be the nation’s first linear park system, where parks were expressed as green corridors rather than as a single area. Indeed, building that unifying network of beautiful park nodes and parkways defined the character of, and linked together, many of Buffalo’s residential districts. Much of the system is still in place today, although parts of it now lay under a freeway. Similar plans were drawn up for Boston, Chicago, Louisville, and other North American cities.12 The Third Generation: Greenways

In the late 1960s, the next iteration of the linear green corridors emerged: greenways. By the mid-twentieth century, the automobile had become the new “industrial age nemesis.” Now, instead of bleak industrial landscapes of Olmsted’s time, cars, trucks, and buses took over almost “total domination of North American cityscapes.”13 They were noisy, smelly, and hazardous, not only to the people in the vehicles but also to folks on foot. Busy roadways, especially arterials and freeways,

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become formidable barriers. Urban advocates and planners looked for alternatives to the auto-dominated roadways. According to Charles Little, urbanist William Holly Whyte probably first coined the word greenway in a 1959 monograph titled Securing Open Space for America, although Little also credits urban planner Edmund Bacon with early use of the term when he proposed a greenway network for a development northwest of Philadelphia. Whyte further defined greenways in the late 1960s when he wrote, “There are all sorts of opportunities to link separated spaces together,” and “ingenuity can accomplish a great deal. Our metropolitan areas are crisscrossed with connective strips. Many are no longer in use. But they are there if we only look.”14,15 A decade later, in the early 1970s, some US cities began to envision greenways as a new iteration of parkways. Whereas parkways primarily followed street and automobile corridors, greenways were seen as pedestrian- and bicycle-oriented routes designed to run primarily along natural systems such as rivers or steams, although some also followed canals and rail routes.

In 1974, Denver was one of the first places to adapt greenways as urban green corridors. Raleigh, North Carolina, also initiated a greenway program that same year. In Denver civic leaders proposed a 10-mile linear park along the length of the long-abused South Platte River through the heart of the city. Planners there adopted the name greenway, and it stuck. Coincidently, Raleigh embraced the same moniker.

Like Olmsted’s parkways, the Platte River Greenway linked parks, plazas, and other features, with an 8-foot-wide warm tone concrete hike/ bike path being single unifying element—besides the river itself. By the early 1980s, the Platte River Greenway ran the length of the city. And following that, the greenway system expanded along the river and its tributaries into the wider metro region. In less than two decades, greater Denver had a trail and greenway network extending for hundreds of miles. Raleigh’s system similarly grew. Over the subsequent decades, the

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greenway idea spread and took hold with projects in cities across North America and worldwide.16 In Greenways for America, Charles Little describes the burgeoning greenway phenomenon as it was emerging in the 1980s and 1990s.

This movement brought forth a whole new genre of trails, particularly urban trails. In his definitions, Little emphasizes their linear character as mostly following ingrained corridors such as rivers, railroads, and sometimes a ridgeline. Most greenways have been built for bicycling as well as walking.

Little defines a greenway as 1. “A linear open space established along either a narrow corridor, such as a riverfront, stream valley, or ridgeline, or overland along a railroad right-of-way converted to recreational use, a canal, a scenic road, or other route. 2. Any natural or landscaped course for pedestrian or bicycle passage. 3. An open space connector linking parks, nature reserves, cultural facilities, or historic sites with each other and populated areas. 4. Locally, certain strip or linear parks designated as a parkway or greenbelt.”17 The greenway moniker expanded to include concepts of larger, interconnected metropolitan-wide trail and greenway networks and even mega greenways, which span nations. This larger vision, inspired in part by earlier long-distance routes such as the Appalachian Trail, led to a number of projects including the East Coast Greenway, which runs between Key West, Florida and Calais, Maine, and a Czech Greenway that connects Prague to Vienna. Though not labeled a greenway, the 15,000-mile coastto-coast Trans Canada Trail extends from St. Johns, Newfoundland, to Victoria, British Columbia. The original greenway concept further evolved to incorporate riparian restoration, better floodplain management, wildlife connectivity corridors, and places for ecological interpretation and education as well as historical and cultural preservation.

Since their introduction, greenways have been enhancing communities and the ways people recreate worldwide. Today, greenways are a

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worldwide movement, and they’re found practically everywhere, reshaping cities and expanding the ways people recreate. They’ve been a wonderful addition, with trails and naturalistic corridors, to our recreational and environmental infrastructure. However, after nearly five decades of planning and developing greenways, I began to wonder whether they were enough. In both my professional and personal outdoor life, I noticed unsolved challenges such as lack of easy access to facilities, overcrowding, and conflicts between users. I asked myself, What could be the next step?

Grand Loops and Town Walks: The Next Step

With this context of adaptive green places in mind, we look to grand loop trails and town walks, the next step beyond greenways. Like their predecessors, boulevards, parkways, and greenways, grand loops and town walks offer a new layer and mode of green infrastructure that is also an adaptive counterbalance to the urban living adversities and impediments of the times. In an era of more crowded open spaces and impeded mobility, they can lessen the difficulty of accessing outdoor places.

Greenways are generally linear. The grand loops and town walks have a new geometry, primarily loops. Rather than following geological features dictated by the terrain, loops typically cut across the grain of the urbanscape. In so doing, loops are not confined to established corridors such as rivers or rail routes. By being more flexible, they can connect more places and landscapes together and reach more people. Loops can also link linear trail elements such as greenways together. In fact, the greenways can serve as spokes connecting neighborhoods and city centers to loops, enabling broader, more diverse access by urban dwellers.

Let’s start here with an overall definition of grand loop trails and town walks.

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Grand loop trails encircle cities along the edges where city meets countryside.

Town walks are shorter loop pathways located in cities. There are three subcategories of town walks, and their characteristics depend on their locations and planning objectives: • Destination walks: routes that highlight, connect, or feature civic spaces, tourist destinations, and other major urban attractions.

• Community walks: branded, high-quality walking loops readily accessible from neighborhoods and places of employment.

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• Doorstep walks: readily and spontaneously accessible walking routes at each doorstep. These aren’t defined routes. Rather, each person finds their own way. Establishing these routes involves promoting policies that lead to widespread, ultimately ubiquitous urban walking infrastructure.

Together, these route types form a palette of options to choose from in creating exciting new systems of trails and walking amenities. They can also interconnect, form networks, and complement each other. We could also view these as a new form of overlay parks, giving people a range of choices. The surfaces can vary from dirt to gravel, to paved paths and sidewalks. We also can include country lanes and any street where traffic volumes and speeds are low enough to provide a safe, pleasant walking experience. In some instances, they might even be delineated by painted pedestrian lane markings, the walking version of a bike lane. The variety of potential surfaces adds flexibility to building these trails, often at a lower cost than paved hike/bike pathways.

This book emphasizes walking. However, we don’t want to exclude bikes and other mechanical devices, such as scooters, from the planning process. In many instances project advocates will want a multiuse trail. This was certainly the case with the Las Vegas Valley Rim Trail, the Louisville Loop Trail, and the Denver 5280 Trail. In some instances, primarily in the case of town walks, plans include paved surfaces for road bikes. In other cases, such as the Maricopa Trail around Phoenix, mountain biking is popular. The path is not paved but has a

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dirt surface that accommodates these types of bikes. Increasingly, electric powered e-bikes will come into the picture on both grand loop and town walk projects.

Where bikes or other nonmotorized mechanical devices are a necessary part of the picture, the goal is to facilitate a safe, enjoyable experience for all participants and to minimize conflicts. An important element of this is the notion of flow. The term, coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes a state where flow is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue . . . for the sheer sake of doing it.”18 Ideally, a person walking does not want to have to be vigilant for bikes, and most bikers probably do not want to have to stop the flow of their ride experience to brake for slow-moving walkers. Although most polite bikers and hikers accommodate each other, typically there is a visceral difference in the ways that riders and walkers want to enjoy their experiences. Trail expert Tony Boone suggests that riding is a kinesthetic awareness activity, whereas walking and hiking are aesthetic awareness activities. Not placing a value judgement, Tony says, “There are different sensory parts engaged.” “Kinesthetic is more in your joints and ear canals. The aesthetic is more in the ‘the heart and soul.’” It’s about the “rush versus the wildflowers,” as he puts it.19 In wrapping up the thoughts here about bikes, it is useful to note that whereas the Las Vegas and Louisville examples suggest a paved multiuse (hike/bike) trail surface, Phoenix’s Maricopa Trail was built as primarily four-wide “earthen surface not designed for street bikes,” as parks agency director RJ Cardin puts it. He adds, though, that “it is suitable for mountain and hybrid bikes and there is often that kind of use.”20 Although the emphasis is still on walking, bikes will undoubtedly enter the picture, so it’s important to be ready to thoughtfully address this potential use.

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There are no simple answers when planning and designing for mixed use. It’s probably best done on a case-by-case basis. For each user group’s needs and preferences to work, the key is to minimize conflicts between mechanized and nonmechanized recreationalists. This might mean shared-use, dual trails with foot and bike travel on separate treads or side loops designed for bikes. Designing for shared uses is addressed further in Chapter 5.

Having laid out the basic concepts, let’s now look at the characteristics of each type in more detail. Note that the subsequent chapters will go into greater depth regarding different characteristics, themes, layouts, design, and specific alignments of grand loops and town walks.

Grand Loop Trails Built on the outskirts of town in the woods, hills, and fields, these are more appropriately called trails. Ideally, they have an earthen or crushed gravel surface wide enough for two people to walk side by side (4–6 feet), although this is not always the case. Depending on conditions and resources, the trail width and surface will probably vary, and in places the trail may even follow low-traffic backroads and country lanes. They are carefully planned to run through attractive settings, emphasizing vistas and having vegetated buffered edges to create a backcountry feel whenever possible. In many instances a grand loop trail will link larger city edge open spaces such as regional preserves or state parks.

Portland Oregon’s 40-Mile Loop is the granddaddy of grand loops.

First proposed in 1904 by the Olmsted brothers, it was seen as an interconnected system of “scenic reservations and parkways.” Although it was initially slow in its implementation, advocates, led by the 40-Mile Loop Land Trust, picked up the idea in the 1970s. They pursued not only the original 40 miles, but also a larger 140-mile loop following ridge lines,

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rivers, and other natural features connecting more than thirty parks. In 2022, the network was nearly complete.21 The other great example is the Maricopa Trail, a 315-mile grand loop that runs entirely around the edges of Metropolitan Phoenix (figure 1.1).

It was envisioned as a pedestrian beltway by the Maricopa County Parks and Recreation Department in 1997 and was completed in 2018. One of the reasons for building the trail was to highlight public awareness of the system of open spaces and regional parks along the outer edges of the greater Phoenix area. Portions of the trail, particularly where it runs

Figure 1.1. The Maricopa Trail, linking regional open spaces and parks surrounding Phoenix. (Credit: Courtesy of Arizona Highways Magazine)

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through the larger open space preserves, are more rudimentary dirt-surfaced footpaths, with other sections following more formalized, paved canal maintenance paths. In some places where the loop trail passes through more urbanized areas, the trail follows sidewalks.22 Another example is the Vegas Valley Rim Trail, a 113-mile loop encircling greater Las Vegas (figure 1.2). Advocates envisioned it as “loop of trails and open space around our valley creating a buffer of recreation and protection of our spectacular Valley.”23 The idea grew out of the

Figure 1.2. The Vegas Valley Rim Trail. (Credit: Courtesy of Get Outdoors Nevada)

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2006 Regional Open Space Plan and has been pursued as a joint effort of the Outside Las Vegas Foundation and Southern Nevada Regional Planning Commission. As of 2022, this hiking and biking trail was more than 60 percent complete.24 Perhaps one of the most ambitious and extensive programs is the Carolina Thread Trail, a vast network of interconnected trails that will overlay fifteen counties and serve nearly three million people in two states (figure 1.3). That system envisions over 1,600 miles of trails, with

Figure 1.3. The Carolina Thread Trail in 2022. (Courtesy of the Carolina Thread Trail)

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over 350 miles completed. The system includes several sections that could be called grand loop trails.

And finally, we look at the Transcarioca Trail in Rio de Janeiro.

Though not yet an actual loop, this rim trail forms a 110-mile semicircular route that goes two thirds of the way around the city through wooded hills and jungle overlooking Rio de Janeiro. It connects seven of the city’s parks along the way. It’s touted as a place where you can “spend the day in the rainforest and be back in the concrete jungle for sunset beers.” Built over a twenty-year period by volunteers, the project was the idea of Pedro Menezes, a flight attendant who on regular flights in and out of Rio noticed the line of green spaces, parks, and preserves and thought it would be easy to connect them.25 Town Walks In most instances town walks consist largely of paved sidewalks, although other surfaces may be used, such as low-traffic walkable streets. Length can range from less than 2 miles to 6 miles or more. They are readily accessible and, ideally, branded with catchy and descriptive names including logos and prominently placed wayfinding “mile markers.”

There is a predictable level of quality to the route. Town walks offer a safe, pleasant experience, including smooth surfaces and adequate width for two people to walk side by side, and accommodate strollers and wheelchairs. They provide shade, lighting for night use, comfortable street crossings, and buffering from the street. Typically, they are landscaped with tree medians and have rest spots and other amenities. Town walks are not primarily utilitarian walking-as-transportation corridors, although many may be used that way. They are mostly for enjoyment.

Although these pathways are predominantly loops, linear out-and-back routes are not categorically excluded.

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Next, we look at the three subcategories of town walks.

Destination Walks

Destination walks are featured routes in cities. They are special corridors, primarily for walking, that offer more iconic experiences, cultural elements, historic spots, and other attractions that draw people from around the city and the region as well as tourists from other places. In some instances, they trace an important historic route. Some include bike paths on a separate tread.

There are several examples of destination trails, although they are not branded as such. These include the Indianapolis Cultural Trail and Boston’s Freedom Trail. Asheville, North Carolina, also boasts its Urban Trail, a 1.7-mile walking loop through downtown with historic sites, intriguing architecture, shops and restaurants, and public art. And when completed, Denver’s 5280 Trail (figure 1.4) will not only be a high-quality walking (and biking) route around central Denver, it will also become a major new overlay linear park transforming a 5-mile corridor in to a vibrant urban green space.26, 27 Community Walks

Community walks are attractive, typically branded, safe routes primarily for walking or running. They are strategically located to serve multiple neighborhoods and workplaces. They might be 2 to 6 miles in length to fit daily walking needs. Ultimately, like community parks, they should be prominent and easy to reach, within 1 to 3 miles of homes or workplaces.

In actuality, there are probably thousands of local walks that meet some or all of the characteristics defined here as community walks. One example is a fitness-through-walking program in the city of Matsumoto, Japan. In a 2014 AARP Bulletin article, Kirk Spitzer writes, “In

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Figure 1.4. Denver’s 5280 Trail map. (Credit: Courtesy of Civitas)

Matsumoto, officials have developed a network of more than 100 walking routes. . . . Even in winter clusters of residents can be seen walking along streets, parks, canals and around historic sites.”28 Matsumoto was a great starting point, but there wasn’t much more information about the actual routes, so I also looked for examples closer

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to home. Charlie Blosten, former public works director with the City of Littleton, Colorado, and I decided to go out and walk a couple of trails we had worked on together a few years back. We started out on a walking path along the historic City Ditch, a nineteenth-century aqueduct that runs through the heart of the city. We then turned and walked through downtown before picking up the greenway trail along the South Platte River. We returned to our starting point by following another connecting trail along a creek that linked back to the City Ditch path.

Looking at a map, we noticed that you could easily link these segments together into a very walkable 3-mile loop. Not only did our route go through the attractive historic downtown, it passed by a senior residential complex, connected to a recreation center, and had conveniently spaced restaurants and coffee shops along the way. It followed a very pleasantly landscaped corridor with shade trees, rest stops with benches, and flowing water in the river, the tributary creek, and the ditch. Along the way there were two attractive public gardens and an old cemetery with beautiful lawns and trees. Being close in, the route is readily available to hundreds of residences and businesses along its edges. Indeed, this trail checked every box except one. It was not branded or publicly mapped as a community walk and didn’t have wayfinding signage. Yes, Charlie and I “created” this loop that day, but with little more than some direction signs and maybe a map posted online, it would become an ideal community walk for all.

Doorstep Walks

Doorstep walks are attractive neighborhood routes that anyone can enjoy daily, right outside the door, from home or the workplace. These too should be high-quality routes with good sidewalks, rest areas, landscaping, shade, and other amenities, easily reachable by residents.

These are not specific branded routes. Rather, people can plot and vary

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their own routes. Although the length and layout are up to each person to determine, the goal is to encourage, broadly, at least twenty minutes of daily routine exercise. By implementing this class of walks, communities can adopt programs and policies that ultimately lead to widespread walkability everywhere, with an abundance of high-quality walking spaces.

This book does not focus on designing doorstep walk infrastructure.

Walks out the door can be infinitely varied. But it advocates for the goal that, one day, walkability will be practically everywhere accomplished though effective policies. To that end, we can look at places that, by circumstance or intentional design, have great walkability. Rating services such as walkscore.com evaluate locales with set criteria that measure both the ability to access amenities such as shopping and streetscape conditions such as block length and pedestrian crossings. In North America, cities including New York, Vancouver, and San Francisco rank among the most walkable.29 In addition, there are a number of planned communities where walkability has been written into the layout and design, with good sidewalks, landscaped tree medians, trails, and safe, easy-to-use street crossings (figure 1.5).

Besides looking at existing places with high walkability scores for lessons learned, we can also glean useful information from many places that are pursuing policies aimed at increasing their walkability. Several organizations host sites with resources, including Smart Growth America and the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center. At the forefront of policymaking are “complete streets” where communities pursue design standards that consider not only the movement of automobiles but also pedestrian and bicycle travel. According to Smart Growth America, more than 1,400 communities in the United States have adopted complete street policies, with Cleveland Heights, Ohio; Des Moines, Iowa; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, leading the way.30 So in thinking about doorstep walks, we can advocate for them by promoting

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Figure 1.5. High-quality walk in a planned community. (Credit: Robert Searns)

the implementation of walkability policies and solutions such as complete street design.

Think of Them as a New Way of Walking When we think about grand loops and town walks, we are talking about a new type of trail functionality. They are close-in places where people can primarily walk, run, hike, and trek (or ride a horse where appropriate). They bring increased access to outdoor places both in neighborhoods and in the hinterlands and invite visitors of varied genders, ages, and abilities. Cities can promote more routine use by planning them in ways in which people are encouraged, enabled, and motivated to enjoy them. Above all, the experience is key: what you see, smell, hear and feel along the way. When laying out routes there is particular attention to

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taking users through attractive environments in a pleasurable and safe way. We also want people to be able to afford to be there and feel welcomed there, regardless of economic means, race, or ethnicity. Finally, there is the goal of people being able to “travel light” with a daypack, not a heavy backpack. The chapters that follow will delve deeper into the types of grand loops and town walks and how to take them from concept to reality.

35

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PETER ANNIN HELPS READERS OVERCOME THE “YUCK FACTOR” AND PROVES RECYCLED SEWAGE IS THE WATER OF THE FUTURE

Purified How Recycled Sewage Is Transforming Our Water Paperback | $28.00 | 256 pages.

PUBLISHED: November 2023 ISBN: 9781642832815

Peter Annin

W

ater shortages are plaguing communities from coast to coast, and recycled water could help close that gap. In Purified: How Recycled Sewage Is Transforming Our Water, veteran journalist Peter Annin shows

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that wastewater has become a surprising weapon in America’s war against water scarcity. In five water-strapped states–California, Texas, Virginia, Nevada, and Florida–current filtration technology is transforming sewage into something akin to distilled water, free of chemicals and safe to drink. But sensationalist media coverage has repeatedly crippled water recycling efforts. Can public opinion turn in

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Purified’s fast-paced narrative cuts through the fearmongering and misinformation to make the case that recycled water is direly needed in the climate-change era. Water cannot be taken for granted anymore–and that includes sewage.

Peter Annin

P

eter Annin is a veteran investigative journalist whose work the past twenty years has focused on water issues, most recently on the water crisis in the West.

Before that, Annin spent more than a decade at Newsweek magazine where he specialized in breaking news stories. He is author of the

award-winning The Great Lakes Water Wars and regularly publishes op-eds on water topics in outlets such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. He is the director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College.

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Purified

Purified HOW RECYCLED SEWAGE IS TRANSFORMING OUR WATER

Peter Annin

© 2023 Peter Annin All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938136

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: climate change, Colorado River, dead pool, de facto indirect potable reuse, direct potable reuse, drought, Hyperion 2035, indirect potable reuse, Operation NEXT, Orange County Water District, Pure Water San Diego, Pure Water Southern California, purified effluent, purified sewage, purified wastewater, purple pipe, sewage recycling, toilet to tap, water diversion, Water Factory 21, water purification, water recycling, water reuse, water scarcity

Contents

Author’s Note

ix

Prologue: “Do You Drink Beer?”

xi

1. Dead Pool

1

2. “Gulp!”

12

3. Orange County Sets the Bar

30

4. San Diego Bounces Back

46

5. Future Water in Virginia

57

6. Running Dry (Almost) in Texas

79

7. El Paso’s Quiet Leadership

93

8. Hot Tempers in Tampa

106

9. Going Beyond Purple Pipe in Florida

126

10. LA Goes All In

135

11. Pure Water SoCal and Operation NEXT

149

12. Water Diversion, or Water Reuse?

166

Epilogue

187

Acknowledgments

190

Notes

194

About the Author

226

Index

227

Author’s Note

I have been writing about water for decades. From droughts in the Southwest to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico and water tension in the Great Lakes, I have seen firsthand how visceral, fraught, and life-changing water issues can be. But few water topics have fascinated me more than the one covered in this book: turning sewage into drinking water.

Like all things water, the history of purifying sewage is rife with controversy and dissent, but increasingly that dissent has morphed into acceptance, even enthusiasm. This shift is driven in part by utter desperation—large swaths of the United States are running out of water options. But it is also driven by an evolving faith in technology, especially among younger generations. As a result, water recycling is in the midst of a boom that stretches far beyond parched landscapes, and it is changing the national conversation about what we drink.

What surprised me most in reporting and researching Purified is how quickly water recycling is spreading around the country, yet most people are remarkably unaware of what’s happening behind the scenes. This book is designed to fill that gap. As we leave what I call the century of oil ix

x

author’s note

and increasingly work our way into the century of water, it is incumbent upon all engaged citizens to understand and embrace the complex issues that define the water debate. The rapid ascent of the water recycling movement shows that in the climate change era, water cannot be taken for granted anymore—and that includes sewage.

—Peter Annin

PROLOGUE

“Do You Drink Beer?”

Greg Wetterau knows water. An expert on desalination and water recycling, he has helped build more than fifty high-tech water treatment plants around the world. His specialty is creating potable water by using “unconventional approaches,” which means he’s a master at turning saltwater—and sewage—into drinking water. He has overseen the construction of water plants on every continent but Antarctica. When it comes to the global water crisis, he sees things that the rest of us don’t. Wetterau is a quietly charismatic vice president at CDM Smith, the global engineering giant, but he’s a water warrior too. He is driven, professionally and personally, to help the world confront the water crisis head-on.

On a recent sunny California afternoon, he and I embarked on a wide-ranging conversation about the idea that we now have the technology to turn wastewater from showers, sinks—and, yes, even toilets— into drinking water. Our discussion quickly zeroed in on a California law that required perfectly drinkable recycled sewage to be blended with groundwater before it could be processed into drinking water. Never mind, Wetterau said, that the purified wastewater is often cleaner than xi

xii

pr ologue

the groundwater with which it is being mixed. To Wetterau there was something ironic about pumping perfectly drinkable recycled water underground just because people didn’t trust it.

“Do you drink beer?” he asked suddenly.

“Sure,” I said.

He whipped out a bottle from his backpack.

“FAT Californian,” the label read. “American Oatmeal Porter.” The beer was brewed by Wetterau’s company—from purified sewage.

I was intrigued.

The techy lingo on the bottle read “California’s full advanced treatment process has become the gold standard in potable reuse, converting wastewater flows into safe drinking water supplies for the water-stressed state.”

The label boasted that the beer was brewed with water that was “cleaner than the most pristine drinking water supplies.” Wetterau told me that the porter was made from recycled wastewater that had not been mixed with groundwater. The purified sewage went straight from a treatment facility into the beer, without being blended in a so-called environmental buffer like an aquifer. That sounded like toilet to tap, I thought, a phrase that some have used to disparage sewage recycling.

While I’ve always found the expression to be blunt and descriptive, the water reuse community reviles the term as inaccurate, pejorative, and simplistic. Wetterau said that California regulators gave his company special permission to brew the beer with the 100 percent unblended purified sewage as long as CDM Smith didn’t sell it. It was fine to give it away to people like me to help make the case that so-called direct potable recycled water was safe to drink.

“Would you drink it,” he asked?

“Of course.”

That evening I snagged Wetterau’s beer from my hotel minifridge and poured a tall frothy glass of brown porter. Licking the tan foam

pr ologue

Figure P-1. CDM Smith’s American Oatmeal Porter, brewed with purified sewage.

(Photo by Peter Annin)

from my lips, I couldn’t help wondering how many bladders and bowels some of those water molecules had passed through before gracing my gullet. That mental image was easier to concoct given the brown color of the beverage. But the beer tasted great. I couldn’t tell it was brewed with recycled water.

So yes, I did drink it, and given the rapid growth in the nation’s water recycling movement, increasingly the question will be whether millions of Americans are willing to do so as well.

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Dead Pool

The Colorado River 1

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Perched just outside Las Vegas, Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States. Sprawling for more than one hundred miles behind Hoover Dam, it stores water for twenty-five million people in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico. It is the lifeblood of the Southwest’s thriving cities, farms, and factories. When Hoover Dam was built on the Colorado River in the 1930s, the deep canyons behind the dam took years to fill. By the 1980s, Lake Mead was brimming and the Southwest was booming.

Then, in 2000, a transformative climate-driven “megadrought” swept over the Colorado River and stayed—for decades.1 But the Southwest’s boom carried on. Lake Mead’s water level plunged, rimming the reservoir with a fourteen-story white bathtub ring that boldly marks how far the water has fallen. The ring is taller than the Statue of Liberty.2 By the early 2020s, Lake Mead had entered a new and alarming phase. In what seemed like a dystopian race to the bottom, the reservoir began regularly breaking record lows, prompting painful water cutbacks and sending a shudder of water insecurity from the Southwest to Washington, DC. In 1971, Las Vegas began pulling 90 percent of its water from Lake Mead via a twelve-foot-wide intake pipe. In 2000, officials spent millions on a backup intake located fifty feet farther down the underwater canyon wall.3 It wasn’t far enough. Just five years later, rattled Vegas officials made a bold climate-prepper move: investing $1.35 billion on the mother of all intakes, tunneling down six hundred feet to tap the lake’s deepest depths. This so-called Third Straw ensures that if, or when, a climate-change nightmare strikes the Nevada desert—and Lake Mead plunges to disastrous lows—2.2 million people in southern Nevada will still have something to drink.4 That’s dead pool—when Lake Mead’s level drops so far that water no longer flows past Hoover Dam.5 There’s still water in the reservoir, just not enough to pass through Hoover’s mighty hydroelectric turbines or even slip by the dam. That would be a water catastrophe. But if Hoover’s

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Figure 1-1. By the early 2020s Lake Mead had reached a new and alarming phase, repeatedly breaking low-water records. (Photo by Peter Annin)

turbines fall silent, an electricity emergency would cascade from the Rockies to the Pacific. The dam provides power to 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona, and California.6 If the river stops flowing past the dam, millions of acres of farmland in California and Arizona would dry up, cratering produce deliveries throughout North America and dramatically increasing water tensions with Mexico. Much of the United States’ vegetables are produced by Lake Mead’s water, especially in the winter. So, if dead pool ever arrives at Hoover Dam, it will be a triple-whammy—water, power, and food emergency—the likes of which the United States has never seen.

For decades, dead pool seemed like a far-fetched notion. Then came the summer of 2021. Not only did Lake Mead break a record low in June of that year, but in July, Lake Powell—the equally massive Colorado River reservoir farther upstream—also broke an all-time low.

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Never before had the nation’s two largest reservoirs been so low at the same time. Suddenly, these enormous artificial lakes—which together provide a crucial water supply to forty million people—seemed shockingly vulnerable. Things grew even worse in 2022. In a sobering historical moment, in April of that year, Lake Mead fell so far that the original water intake pipe—that Las Vegas installed back in 1971—began poking awkwardly out of the water.7 The following month, a body was found in a barrel that had emerged from the receding reservoir—captivating the nation.8 A gun turned up too.9 Officials said it looked like a 1970s mob hit.10 As the Colorado River struggled through the worst drought in twelve hundred years11 and water officials scrambled to respond, Lake Mead began revealing some of its darkest secrets, making the situation seem even more surreal.

John Entsminger is one of several key southwestern officials who worry about the river. As general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, he is responsible for providing water to the 2.2 million people in the Las Vegas metro area. He told me that he is “extremely concerned” that dead pool may soon be upon us. It could happen in two years, or ten, but his tone made it seem more like a “when” than an “if.” We both agreed that most people don’t realize just how tough things have become on the river. Given that, I asked him to describe what dead pool would look like. “If Mead gets to dead pool, that means twenty-five million Americans downstream of Hoover Dam lose access to the Colorado River. The states of Arizona and California and the country of Mexico have no access.… There’s no law that can be passed, there’s no political speech that can be given, that will change the laws of physics when you can’t pass water through Hoover Dam—that’s what’s at stake.”

The long-term scientific projections for precipitation and runoff in the Colorado River watershed are depressing. In 2012 the US Bureau of Reclamation estimated that by 2060 the river could face an annual shortfall of a trillion gallons,12 or roughly half of what Arizona uses per

dead pool

Figure 1-2. If the level of Lake Mead falls below minimum power pool, the mighty turbines ensconced in Hoover Dam will fall silent, impacting the electrical grid from the Rockies to the Pacific. Dead pool occurs when the level of the reservoir falls so far that water no longer flows past the dam.

year.13 That prediction was for a river that is already so overtapped that it regularly no longer flows to the Sea of Cortez.14 But in the climate change era, sometimes the bad news comes early. In 2022 the river’s situation had become so dire that the federal government told the seven Colorado River states to come up with a plan to conserve an additional 652 billion to 1.3 trillion gallons per year—four decades sooner than the 2012 report anticipated.15 When the states failed to act, in 2023 the

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federal government helped broker a temporary deal creating almost a trillion gallons in water cuts for Arizona, California, and Nevada over three years.16 But those reductions were not even close to the annual cuts the federal government originally requested. What’s more, it took $1.2 billion in taxpayer money to coax farmers and others to relinquish that water. The deal immediately raised questions about whether it would be enough to “stave off disaster.”17 Yes, there have been a few wet years—like the atmospheric rivers that hit the Southwest in 2023. But the overall trend for the Colorado River is clear: the watershed is getting drier. One report said Lake Powell’s water level had fallen so far that it would take fifteen consecutive years of above-average precipitation to return the reservoir to its pre-­megadrought level.18 Things have gotten so bad that the word drought doesn’t cut it anymore. Scientists have started using new terms like megadrought (a drought lasting two or more decades) or aridification—droughts come and go, but aridification is a new normal. In coming years, the Colorado River may only supply enough water to maintain levels in just one massive reservoir, not two.19 Dead pool could become normal, threatening long-term capital investment throughout the Southwest.

Nevada is running out of water options. Arizona and California are too.

In the face of a relentlessly changing climate, all three states in the Lower Colorado River Basin are scrambling to diversify their water portfolios.

They are particularly concerned about the reliability of the Colorado as a primary source of supply. What other water options do they have?

The era of environmentally disastrous long-range, large-scale water diversions is over—or at least it should be—so piping in rescue water from elsewhere isn’t an option. Arizona has stored more than a trillion gallons of backup water underground.20 Nevada has banned grass in many areas.21 California has built twelve desalination plants22—others

dead pool

are on the way 23—but none of that will be enough. All three states have banked years of extra water in Lake Mead, but that doesn’t help California and Arizona if dead pool hits because then their backup water can’t get past the dam. The long-standing practice of buying heirloom water rights from farmers remains an option, but most farmers with the best rights don’t want to sell. Nevertheless, pressure for more ag-to-urban water transfers is ever present, especially if the long-term viability of rural communities can be protected. Yes, huge strides can still be made with water conservation—especially in the agriculture sector—but the Southwest’s water situation is so dire that full-throttled conservation alone won’t replace the loss of a trillion gallons per year.

Something else must be done.

Enter purified sewage. Thanks to climate change, never before has something so foul looked so good. Wastewater has become one of the most popular new water options in the Southwest’s scramble for additional supplies. Nevada, California, and Arizona cumulatively are investing billions in water recycling. Las Vegas currently recycles 99 percent of water used indoors. Los Angeles has pledged to recycle 100 percent of its effluent by 2035. Scottsdale, Arizona, has built a cutting-edge potable water recycling plant. The water crisis has become so acute that in many parts of the United States there are only two realistic options left for new water supplies: the ocean and the toilet.

Ocean desalination is an important option, but it is often more expensive than water recycling and has more negative environmental impacts.

Those impacts include a much larger carbon footprint and a more heavily concentrated brine by-product that is dumped back into the sea.

There are also concerns about fish mortality due to the entrainment that occurs when juvenile and larval fish get sucked up through screens that cover the opening of a desalination plant’s large seawater intake pipes. Water recycling produces a brine by-product too, but much less so. (Only about 15 percent of recycled water ends up as brine, whereas

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a desalination plant discharges at least a gallon of brine for every gallon of freshwater produced.) And since no ocean intake pipes are involved with water recycling, fish entrainment is not an issue.

Water recycling is usually cheaper than ocean desalination, and its cost has become increasingly competitive with imported water from places like the Colorado River. But unlike the Colorado River, recycled water is reliable—there will always be sewage—which is why officials increasingly see any additional cost as being worth the added security of a drought-resistant supply. What’s more, recycled water is available to everyone, including landlocked cities that are hundreds of miles from the ocean, where seawater desalination is not an option. “Unless we move into a new era of thinking about water, we’re not going to solve our water problems,” warned Peter Gleick, senior fellow and cofounder of the Pacific Institute and one of the nation’s leading water experts. “We can no longer ignore these nontraditional solutions like water reuse.”

The nation’s water recycling boom stretches far beyond the Southwest. Texas hosts an arc of water tension that starts in El Paso—home to seven hundred thousand people—and stretches through the West Texas oil patch, brushes over the panhandle’s depleted Ogallala Aquifer, and ends at Wichita Falls, near the Oklahoma border. Water recycling is thriving throughout this parched region.

In the Southeast, Florida has designated almost 70 percent of its landmass as a Water Resource Caution Area,24 highlighting those portions of the state that already have water shortage problems or are expected to in coming years. State projections show that officials will need to find another billion gallons of water, per day, by 2040.25 The state has long used recycled water on golf courses and lawns, but it also overhauled statutes in the early 2020s to make it easier for cities like Jacksonville and Tampa to produce drinking water from sewage.26 Farther up the eastern seaboard, Virginia has long been a quiet leader in water recycling. That is particularly true in parts of suburban

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Washington, DC, which have depended on recycled water for decades.

But now, in southeast Virginia, officials plan to pump one hundred million gallons of recycled water underground daily to replenish the troubled Potomac Aquifer ,27 one of the most important drinking water sources on the East Coast.

These efforts in Florida and Virginia show that the water-reuse boom is not just limited to “dry” states. It’s happening in “wet” states too. “I think eventually, in America, water recycling will be considered normal everywhere,” predicted Greg Wetterau of CDM Smith, the global engineering firm. “It’s happening in California, Texas, and Florida—anywhere that is water-stressed. But we’re already seeing it in Wisconsin and Ohio, so it’s not just the places that you might expect,” he told me. Although some communities have depended on recycled water for decades, the trend is going national quickly, reaching a long-anticipated moment in water management history where reuse is seen as a much more sustainable water supply option than the environmentally damaging long-range water diversions that have been a hallmark of the American West for more than a century. Robert Glennon, a University of Arizona water expert, said that the recycling boom “signals an end to the era of addressing water shortages by importing water from far-flung places and initiates a long-anticipated era of reusing locally available supplies.”28 Water reuse is expanding globally as well. Singapore has been an international leader in water recycling for years. Namibia, Australia, and South Africa have too. In Israel more than 85 percent of the nation’s water is reused, most of it going to agricultural irrigation.29 In 2020 the European Parliament endorsed a major expansion of water reuse, potentially more than quintupling the amount of recycled water on the continent—to 1.7 trillion gallons per year.30 “Israel is definitely the leader in non-potable reuse,” Wetterau told me, but when it comes to drinkable recycled water, “globally, it’s the US who is the leader—by far.” California leads the United States in potable water recycling, and

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Orange County leads California, making it a global leader in potable water reuse.

Even though water reuse technology has been around for years, it has long struggled with public acceptance. But the combination of extreme drought, climate anxiety, major investments in public relations, and technological advances have softened opposition to water recycling in key states. The treatment process in Orange County, for example, is extensive, and multitiered. The water is first pushed through high-tech filters that screen out microscopic protozoa, bacteria, and viruses and then it is purified with reverse osmosis, which removes any remaining viruses. Also removed at this step are any “forever chemicals,” such as per- and polyfluorinated substances, or PFAS. In the next step, the water—which is already purified—is treated with hydrogen peroxide and zapped with ultraviolet light to purify it even further. The ultimate product is akin to distilled water, so pure, in fact, that elements need to be added back into the water so that it doesn’t leach minerals from municipal plumbing systems on the way to people’s homes. As climate change continues to disrupt the national water balance, Rabia Chaudhry, a water reuse expert at the Environmental Protection Agency, predicts that “we should be anticipating that climate-intensified events will shape public opinion about water reuse.” She said, “Water reuse will increasingly no longer be optional.”31 It will become necessary. For millions.

So here we sit at a time when climate change has transitioned from a complicated and much-debated scientific theory to a sobering, baldfaced reality that threatens the national water supply. Sewage is coming to the rescue. Throughout human history we have worked tirelessly to distance ourselves from wastewater, and for good reason: it’s dangerous and disgusting. But thanks to climate-driven water scarcity—and impressive advances in treatment technology—purified effluent has emerged as a leading weapon in the war against water scarcity. Recycling

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can’t solve all the world’s water woes. But in the United States—especially in the Sun Belt—it is seen as the right technology, at the right time, to give officials water-planning breathing room as they contemplate what the next fifty years of climate change might bring.

In short, wastewater is just too precious to waste anymore.

11

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Academics call it maladaptation; in simple terms, it’s about solutions that backfire. Over the Seawall tells the stories behind these unintended consequences and the fixes that do more harm than good. From seawalls in coastal Japan, to reengineered waters in the Ganges River Delta, to the ribbon of water supporting both farms and cities in parched Arizona, we

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OVER THE SEAWALL

OVER THE SEAWALL Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature

Stephen Robert Miller

© 2023 Stephen Robert Miller All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

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Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: adaptation, aridity, Arizona, Bangladesh, climate change, climate solution, colonialism, Colorado River, desalination, development, disaster, embankments, extreme heat, farmer, foreign aid, geoengineering, Green Revolution, infrastructure, Japan, maladaptation, nature-based solutions, seawalls, technosolution, traditional knowledge, urban growth

For Emily, wherever I may find her

“Our misery is the work of man.”

—GEORGE SWANK Survivor of the Johnstown flood, 1889 1

Contents

Introduction

1

Part I Soutei-Gai—Northeastern Japan

11

Part II Pagal, by Any Other Name—Southwest Bangladesh

67

Part III The Audacity of Desert Living—Central Arizona

135

Acknowledgments

219

Notes

223

About the Author

245

Index

247

xi

Introduction

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the lost city of Ys. As the story goes, it was an ancient settlement in a bay on the northwest tip of France.

Its lord was the pious king Gradlan, who had a sinful degenerate of a daughter named Dahut. Ys had been built on wetland reclaimed from the sea. Its people encircled their city with a dike to protect it from the ocean. Gradlan kept the dike locked tight, except to drain the land at low tide, and wore its key on a chain around his neck. In this way, Ys became a wealthy city with a marble palace, a vibrant arts scene, and plenty of wine. Perhaps too much wine.

Disgusted with the drunken wickedness of its people, God decided to smite Ys. He sent a demon disguised as a red-bearded prince to call on Dahut and convince her to open the gate so he could enter. One night while Gradlan slept, Dahut tiptoed to her father’s bedside and slipped the key over his head. Then she ran through the quiet streets to her mysterious suitor. But in her love-drunk state, Dahut made a fatal error: She opened the gate at high tide. In a near instant, the Celtic Sea poured in, and Ys was wiped clean off the map.

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French fishermen say they’ve caught glimpses of a sunken city in the Bay of Douarnenez, and historians reckon Ys probably existed. Some versions of the story place it on what had once been fertile land, perhaps on the now submerged flat that stood above the water during the Last Glacial Maximum, when global sea levels were lower and Europe extended farther into the Atlantic. If so, Ys had probably battled the encroaching ocean for years, generations even, as the planet’s ice caps melted and its beaches receded.

What gets me is that these ancient Bretons had such an advanced system for coastal water management. They must have been at work on it for some time, because you don’t add a lock until you’ve tried a door without one, and you don’t cut a door before first building a wall. Perhaps their ultimate demise was simply a result of living in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe it was blasphemy, in the form of believing they could control the sea. We should take note.

Not too long ago, adaptation to climate change was something of a fringe idea, resisted by people who worried it would distract from the more pressing need to the mitigate greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Now that ship has sailed. Environmental catastrophes that we had never thought possible—or that some of us weren’t used to seeing so close to home—have become common. Some combination of erratic weather, late-season wildfire, catastrophic tropical storms, blistering drought, rising seas, and ecosystem collapse affects every inch of the globe. And knowing this, people the world over are pushing for what had once seemed like surrender: They are adapting.

On farms and along coasts, in busy metropolises and quiet villages, they are digging canals, erecting seawalls, dredging rivers, wiring microgrids, desalinating water, planting trees, piling embankments, banking

introduction

seeds, manipulating DNA, and seeding clouds. Our species has adapted to its environments forever, but never have so many of us undertaken such a widespread, coordinated, and hurried attempt to remake our world. We’re living through the first wave of climate adaptation; there will be mistakes.

This is a book about unintended consequences, about fixes that do more harm than good and the folly of overconfidence. Academics call it maladaptation; in simple terms, it’s about solutions that backfire.

In 2009, Jon Barnett and Saffron O’Neill, geographers at the University of Melbourne, published the definitive explanation of the phenomenon. They also laid out some criteria for its identification.1 Adaptation to climate change goes bad, they reasoned, when it increases greenhouse gas emissions, saddles vulnerable people with a disproportionate burden, forces us to give up on other options, reduces our incentive to adapt, or sets us on a path with fewer choices. From what I’ve seen, a calling card of maladaptation is that it makes people feel safe in harm’s way.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we blunder around with adaptation. After all, we’re doing it backwards. Consider the horned lizard. It didn’t foresee a tough life in the desert and opt for a thick skin to keep from drying out; it adapted the trait over eons in response to its environment. Adaptation makes sense only in retrospect. We’re striking out into new territory by trying to anticipate what’s coming, and we can’t be absolutely sure of what the future holds. When we rely on faulty or partial predictions, we risk not only making the wrong choice but closing ourselves off from better options. As the years pass, the effects of our decisions become so entangled with the changes to our environment that we can’t tell whether we’re adapting to climate change or to our own past choices.

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Americans out West already are familiar with this. Each year, we breathe in the result of the US Forest Service’s decades-long commitment to the 10 am policy.2 This Depression-era order sought to stamp out any wildfire, no matter how large or far from where people were living, by 10 am the morning after it was discovered. In the years before the policy was put in place, a series of devastating blazes had consumed millions of acres across Western states. In their smoldering wake, they left a mandate to do something, and fast. Since then, the policy and the antagonistic sentiment toward fire that it embodied have resulted in huge and unbroken tracts of forest with an unnatural abundance of fuel. An effort to protect the economic value of Western forests inadvertently created infernos that are larger and harder to fight.

When I set out to write this book, New York City was still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. They were debating a particularly audacious method for protecting themselves from sea-level rise. Among other options, the Army Corps of Engineers had proposed a 6-mile-long wall spanning Hudson Bay from Queens to New Jersey.3 Critics warned that its construction could lead to a slew of new problems, especially in low-income neighborhoods where people already suffered from storm flooding. In the bay, the wall risked altering or blocking the flow of Hudson River sediment and impeding migratory marine life. On land, models showed that when the wall’s massive gates were shut, wastewater would back up into the city. So the decision facing many New Yorkers was whether they were willing to stew in their own filth behind a barrier that, because of the rate of sea-level rise, would probably be inadequate by the time it was finished.

New York risked shelling out an estimated $119 billion on a solution that could easily make things worse. And in that, it was not alone.

introduction

Similarly treacherous coastal protections have been proposed in Miami, Florida, and Galveston, Texas, and seawalls already cause problems in Orange County, California.4,5 Across the country’s parched interior, there are calls for desalination plants that generate huge amounts of greenhouse gases. In Colorado, there are experiments with cloud seeding, which hope to bring rain in one place but risk causing floods or drought in others.6 There are also insurance schemes that invisibly soften the economic losses of hazards, leaving people less concerned with the dangers of living at the edge of a tinderbox forest or on the sinking coast. And there are subsidies that encourage farmers to stick with crops that can’t handle the heat.

If implemented properly, any of these reactions might be tools in a successful adaptive strategy, but they often aren’t done well. Their plans are shortsighted and ill-conceived. They get shortchanged by governments with fleeting priorities and co-opted by businesses focused on making a buck. Even under the best intentions, they shove on like bulldozers with blinders, detached from the nuances of the people and places they’re supposedly helping. Under those circumstances, adaptations don’t lift the burden; they shift it onto people of another class, place, or time.

Often enough, though, the shortcoming isn’t so nefarious. We all know how hard it can be to break a habit; once a system is in place, the easiest thing to do is to keep using it. As I saw time and again while researching this book, bad habits result in technological lock-in, where new hardware and software are built to plug into existing infrastructure. The same is true of our mindset: Our current perspectives and expectations determine our future decisions.

I got a whiff of this happening long ago in the Arizona desert where I grew up, but I didn’t have a word for it. Millions of people like my

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family were moving to an environment with obvious limitations. They were lured by development boosters and industries that promised safety and wealth even as headlines reported critical resources running dangerously short. Something was giving us all the confidence to settle someplace where access to life’s most basic need was a legitimate concern. I chalked it up to good old American grit, tenacity, and determination.

Then, years later, I came across the story of a coastal Japanese city where people had stood atop a seawall to watch the approach of the tsunami that killed them. They believed—wholeheartedly—that the huge concrete barrier would save them.

Here it was in a nutshell: people harmed by the very thing built to protect them. Although their story was not directly connected to climate change, I recognized it as a cautionary tale for that arena. As compared to the creeping onset of sea-level rise or drought, the immediacy of a tsunami helped me wrap my head around this wonky concept. Then, when I made my first visit to Bangladesh in 2019, I stared down its most impressive incarnation and uncovered the often unseen influences of race, religion, and money.

v The three stories that follow come from disparate locales, widely varying cultures, and wholly unique circumstances, but each explores an adaptation gone awry. In trying to understand how that happened, I discovered that they have plenty in common. To start with, the people behind them were myopic in their predictions and overconfident in their designs.

Some were downright corrupt, others just woefully ignorant. They often confused their goals, conflating profit with success, and in each case they ignored warnings.

introduction

Many small-scale adaptive efforts and government policies flop; we must be willing to fail on some scale to find what works. I’ve chosen to focus on three glitzy techno-infrastructural solutions, because they cost a fortune and require bureaucratic mobilization on a warlike scale. As a result, they typically form the centerpiece of political legacies and so fall prey to ambition. Large-scale infrastructure also tends to erase the past, which we need in order to tell where our progress is trending. And it confines our future by imposing its will on our choices, like bumpers in a bowling lane.

The stories in this book trace the histories of engineering marvels that were once deemed too smart and too big to fail. If that were true, they wouldn’t be here.

Concrete and steel, copper and rebar, computer models and simulations—there are plenty of those things in the following pages, but what has interested me most are the people. Behind every wall or canal are rich cultures with fraught histories and complex allegiances. In trying to understand the nuances of local economics, colonialism, religion, and societies of which I had been (and still am) embarrassingly ignorant, I found stories of people trying to solve problems. That’s why I’ve been thinking about the lost city of Ys. Adaptation is not a solution; it’s a practice over time. Although we may find ourselves closer to the mark, we will never arrive, because something is always in flux. Some of the decisions I discuss in this book were made outside the context of climate change, and so it’s unlikely that the people who made them thought of what they were doing as adaptation. More likely, they were only fixing a problem. But isn’t that all we’ve ever done? Not to downplay the flagrant greed of corporate executives or the abject failure of politicians who have known for too long that

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burning huge quantities of fossil fuels damages the lives of many while catastrophically altering the planet for all, but the fact is that no one set out to cause global warming. It’s been a consequence of each generation seeking solutions to everyday challenges: how to move faster, how to grow more food, how to do more with less. Each has tried to improve its lot, and the compounding results have led us here. If anything, I hope this book will rattle our thinking to break that habit.

In that vein, you’ll find that this book shies from championing solutions. It seems antithetical for someone criticizing simple fixes to complex problems to offer more of the same. My aim is to elucidate the problem and to show how it has played out in varying contexts so that we might recognize it at home, before we commit to a path we later regret. Because despite all we know about how climate change will affect our world, there’s still plenty we can’t yet imagine. The limits of our understanding mean that tradeoffs are inevitable. There are no futures without regret. In a climate of such intense uncertainty, we wager the future against the present.

I used to write sentences like that last one from a comfortable distance. And then, partway through working on this book, I found out that I was going to be a father. The news has challenged my cynical bent and has caused me to think about the risks I’m willing to take, because they aren’t just mine anymore. As cribs and car seats and diaper pails have materialized in my home, I’ve also been thinking about where I’d like to raise my family. I live in Colorado now but have fond memories of the many years I spent in Tucson, Arizona. The landscape is astonishing, the food is great, housing is affordable, and taxes are low. Given all I know about the threats bearing down on the desert, though, I hesitate to move home, let alone establish my family there. In fact, I doubt I’d even

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consider it if not for a slender line of concrete that carries precious river water across hundreds of miles to the center of the drought-ridden desert. That’s the effect these bad adaptations can have: They turn suspect options into safe bets.

In the end, it comes down to choice, which is still the most powerful adaptation available to any of us. For an expecting parent, this choice about where to settle presents a new moral hazard. Do I heed the warnings? Or, like those at Ys, do I accept the risk, build a wall, and hope that it is never opened?

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Part I Soutei-Gai Northeastern Japan

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After a tsunami flooded the small fishing community at Shibitachi Bay in northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, government engineers proposed to build a 32-foot-high seawall along the waterfront. Locals worried that the proposed infrastructure, which would cover the generations-old port in concrete, would cut fishermen off from the sea and damage the community’s way of life. They begged officials to keep the new wall no higher than 16 feet. In July 2022, my guides, Takaharu Saito and Ulala Tanaka, walk past the construction of the seawall, which will be 28 feet high.

“The world of science is not a world of reality, it is an abstract world of force.”

—Sir Rabindranath Tagore1

The first of the wooden Buddhas fell from its shelf at quarter to three that afternoon. Then a heavy bronze candlestick rolled off the altar and hit the floor with a thud. A porcelain vase toppled, shattering into pieces and shedding flower petals across the new tatami mats. Gold-leafed curtains and bright prayer flags jerked violently from the ceiling. Faded paintings slapped their walls. Paper doors rattled their wooden frames.

In his office down the hall, a clean-shaven and bald priest grabbed the edges of his desk. He held tightly as the shaking went on and on and on.

Paper lamps swayed like lanterns on a rough sea. A hammered bronze bowl tumbled from its perch. Outside the ancient temple, bells rang erratically. Clay tiles shook loose and slid down the roof ’s steep vault until they shattered on the lawn. Below the steep hill where the temple perched, screams floated up from Ishinomaki.

On March 11, 2011, the ground shook for six minutes, far longer and more powerfully than anything the priest had ever experienced. It bucked fiercely, angrily, like some restless dog shaking dirt from its fur.

Six minutes was long to understand what was happening, long enough to brew a pot of coffee and wonder whether the world would ever be still again.

When at last the shaking settled, the priest bolted from his study toward the temple’s main hall, where he found the once solemn retreat 13

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in shambles. Its ornaments and artifacts were strewn about as if a bull had been let loose. He stepped carefully around the wreckage, feeling shards of pottery crack under his weight, and headed for the Dogenin Temple’s most sacred possession, a gilded statue of the Buddha that had been gifted many years ago. Amazingly, it survived, and the priest felt a moment of relief. But only a moment, because anyone who lived on the coast of Japan knew that an earthquake was just the beginning.

Outside the temple, the world was coming undone. Forty-five miles off Japan’s eastern coast and 15 miles under the surface of the sea, there is a trench where the Pacific plate grinds under the Eurasian plate carrying the Japanese islands. Here, centuries of geologic tension had just been released.2 In that sudden moment of relaxation, Earth’s crust let loose enough energy to power Los Angeles for a year. The planet’s axis shifted, shortening our days by 1.8 microseconds.3 Japan’s main island, Honshu, jolted 8 feet east, while a 250-mile stretch of its coastline dropped 2 feet. Onshore, land slid and soil liquefied. Offshore, a 110-mile-wide section of seabed shot upward 26 feet, sending a tsunami barreling toward the coast.

Despite what the vibrant, traditional woodcuts would have us believe, a tsunami is not one enormous, foaming wave but a succession of swells that build upon each other. The first of these took thirty to forty minutes to reach land, depending on location. This agonizing wait challenged Japan’s state-of-the-art alert system, tested the patience of millions of coastal residents, and sealed the fates of thousands.

The quake’s epicenter was just northeast of Sendai, the largest city in Tohoku. This oft-overlooked region of northeastern Japan stretches from gently sloping plains in the south to the sawtooth coves and cliff-walled bays of northern Sanriku. Waves bore down on the flat lower coastline in miles-long, white-capped curtains of death. They spilled over wide beaches, sweeping up thousands of wind-twisted black pines whose roots has been loosened during the shaking and drove them like battering rams 6 miles inland. Along the way, this barrage of debris caught up

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with terrified people in flight. In cars and on foot, they were gathered into a thick gray sludge that tore through wooden barns, greenhouses, roads, airports, schools, and neighborhoods, blending the human with the inhuman until there was no telling them apart. Waves breached the fortifications at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing a reactor meltdown that sent radioactive material floating on the wind and the Pacific Ocean. The narrow inlets of northern towns funneled the water, concentrating its impact as if through a hose on the limited flat land between mountains and sea. Here, waves ran up to heights of 130 feet and took their greatest toll as residents drowned in desperate flight up slippery hillsides.4 As thousands fled Ishinomaki, their cars backed up in total gridlock. Some jumped out and attempted to run. Others remained in their seats as their vehicles were swept up and committed to the churning dark mass that pummeled forward.

The Dogenin Temple had stood on its hill for 950 years. Hundreds of parishioners prayed there regularly. The priest, Hidemichi Onosaki, and his wife, Miki, held funerals, festivals, and potluck dinners. At about half past 3 pm, with the power out and water faucets dry, Miki was on her knees in the main hall, collecting sand spilled from an incense holder, when the first survivors arrived.

“Many had been swallowed by the tsunami and were dazed. Some were carried in on stretchers,” she recalls. “There were a number of people who were soaking wet. I gave them all my clothes—all the ones that fit.” Then she walked outside to see what they were fleeing from.

This far north, the island was still locked in winter’s grip, and she looked toward the mayhem unfolding below through the bare limbs of an oak tree. “You could see it right in front of your eyes. The tsunami did not look like anything in this world. It was like watching an action movie. The sound was a great rattling sound, crunching and crunching. It sounded like the whole town was breaking down.” Fat snowflakes began to fall. They glinted in the light of fires roaring on floating piles

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of debris. Aftershocks tormented the city even as waves returned mercilessly. All through the late afternoon and early evening, people climbed the slippery drive to Dogenin, shivering and traumatized. As the sun set, Miki hurried too cook for them in the fading light.

At least one hundred people fled up the hill to Dogenin Temple that first night. The priest recognized many, but most were strangers to him.

More bedraggled survivors came the next day, and the next, until by March 14, some 400 people had taken shelter there. They slept side by side on tatami mats in every room but the bathroom. They ate rice and miso soup cooked over propane stoves, and as the fuel dwindled they descended into the obliterated town to pick through the remnants of their own lives for firewood.

Hidemichi Onosaki never turned anyone away, but as the days passed, he knew they needed some method of maintaining order amid the grief.

He led morning prayers and group calisthenics. Everyone was given a task, a responsibility to keep them engaged, even if all they could offer was thanks. And he laid out a set of rules. Mostly, these required that everyone treat each other kindly and help out as they could, but his most important rule was the seventh: Always remain grateful.

“Grateful?” one survivor asked Miki. “Listen to me, ma’am. I’ve lost my wife. I’ve lost my house; I have absolutely nothing left now. All that’s left for me is to die.”

Grief in the moment was eclipsed only by the horror and bewilderment about what had happened, and from the years she had spent leading grieving families through funeral rites, Miki knew what a salve work could be. With all those needing help and all that had to be done, she thought, “We have no place for a debris of a man.” And she assigned him the task of serving the morning tea.

In the years after 2011, people who sheltered here recalled it with mixed emotions. It was the worst time anyone could remember, and yet the temple, many of the children said, was bright and felt like home. This brings Miki to tears. Eventually, the people left, moving into new homes

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they built themselves or into the government’s temporary housing. But many returned to Dogenin for months afterward. They said the sense of purpose got them through. They said they were helpless during the disaster, but they could control what happened after.

v By the time I arrive at Ishinomaki, eleven years have passed since one of the most horrific catastrophes in modern history. Like millions of others around the globe, I had watched and rewatched hundreds of witness videos, spending hours descending down a rabbit hole of some foreign grief. I had read the news reports and books, listened to recordings of survivors’ stories, mined the academic literature, and spoken with dozens of experts. There was nothing that could have prepared me for what I hear and see here.

Now, I sit cross-legged amid the earthy scent of tatami mats in the Dogenin Temple, drinking iced yellow tea and listening as the softspoken Miki tells of how the last of the survivors left in August 2011. It’s a clear, hot day in what has been an oppressively muggy summer, and I’m happy to be sitting out of the sun while her Japanese washes over me.

During my visit, which occurs while the country remains largely locked down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I will be aided by a small army of interpreters who not only translate the words through dozens of interviews but also fill me in on the backstories and cultural nuances that can be so hard to glean secondhand. Today, I’m traveling with Sébastien Penmellen Boret, a French anthropologist who studies death, grief, and burial rituals. While I take in the serenity of the temple’s inner hondo, he talks with Miki and the priest about the hundreds of Buddhist ceremonies they’ve held for the 19,747 confirmed victims and 2,500 others who are still recorded as missing after an eleven-year absence.

My eyes wander along the gilded altar, the intricately carved statues and the hanging banners. If not for the photos of children sleeping on

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this very floor, bundled in dirty winter coats, I couldn’t tell anything out of the ordinary had ever happened. Through sliding paper doors, past a garden, and under a tall wooden shrine gate, Ishinomaki spreads beside a glistening bay. Fishing boats slide into port and sailboats cut white lines through the silver water. This is the same vantage from which Miki gazed upon the mayhem unfolding eleven years and five months before.

Where she saw the water rise between the homes, lift them up, and crush them together like dollhouses. Where, as night fell, she watched fires flare on islands of floating debris while she received refugees.

Ishinomaki lost 3,173 souls that day, more than any other city in Japan, but not because it was uncommonly vulnerable.5 The port was well developed, with breakwaters out in the bay to limit erosion and slow waves before they reached shore. A concrete seawall skirted the coast to resist surges and king tides. Its flat face was pockmarked from decades of abrasive tides and rose straight up to about 20 feet in some places. It was no match for the wave that came in 2011, but nothing was. No country was better prepared for a tsunami than Japan, and yet its leaders later admitted to being caught by surprise. Tens of thousands perished. I’m still wrapping my head around it. I’m not the only one.

The disaster lured swarms of journalists, civil engineers, anthropologists, and even tourists, who found stories of immense sorrow and unexpected hope. Fishermen who escaped by sailing into the wave and daughters who were lost while searching for their parents. Forests wiped away and towns rallying to rebuild. A journalist who covers climate change and adaptation, I found myself caught up in the story of a people harmed by the very efforts made to protect them.

Climate change is often discussed as a monolithic crush bearing down on all of us at once, but what we experience is a series of familiar hazards—though more intense, more frequent, and certainly more erratic than we’re used to. A tsunami might not be a climate-driven phenomenon, but it carries the hallmarks of one: the breadth and severity of

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harm. If Japan could fall victim to adaptations built to protect them from a hazard it has known for eons, so could we all.

Early in trying to understand how it had happened, I spoke with a Japanese anthropologist named Shuhei Kimura, who was asking many of the same questions. He told me of a fifty-two-year-old man whom he called Konno-san,6 who was not home when the tsunami struck but whose wife was. Of the 2,500 residents in their coastal village, she was one of only thirty who perished. Between bouts of unhinged grief, Konno worried that her death had been “embarrassing.” Shameful might be a better word. The Japanese have a rich vocabulary to describe shades of guilt, and, as I will learn, it’s impossible to understand the full complexity of a survivor’s feelings. An elder in the community and the head of a respected household, Konno felt ashamed that he had not saved his wife. He worried about how it must have looked to his neighbors. He also wondered why his wife had not led the way to safety, because he expected his family to set an example. Why had she remained while all around her alarms whirred and neighbors fled in panic? He blamed the seawall; the numbers back him up.

In the months after the disaster, a team of anthropologists from Oxford University discovered that the death toll had been highest in communities where the government had recently invested heavily in coastal protections, such as seawalls and levees, and where people had little experience with such waves.7 They reasoned that, in many cases, Tohoku’s seawalls had been maladaptive. Investment in protective infrastructure had not only stimulated settlement in areas that were known to be vulnerable to flooding but also imparted a false sense of security that delayed victims like Konno’s wife from fleeing.

Subsequent research showed that despite Japan’s long relationship with tsunamis, education campaigns, and regular evacuation drills, coastal residents were as much as 60 percent more likely to stay put when they lived behind a seawall that rose above height estimates for an incoming

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wave.8 On March 11, 2011, initial alerts predicted a 9.8-foot tsunami, and many towns were already protected by 13-foot seawalls. In Ishinomaki, the wave reached 22 feet.

Miles north, residents of the Taro district of Miyako City suffered the worst of this bad adaptation. They had constructed a concrete barrier so robust locals dubbed it the Great Wall of Japan.9 “It was the pride and symbol of Taro. I had never imagined that this seawall could be breached,” said one survivor.10 X-shaped to offer double protection, the Taro wall reached 34 feet high and stretched along 1.5 miles of coastline.

It was the largest of its time, and in 2011, people were so confident in its strength that they stood atop it recording images of the wave until the very moment they were washed away forever.

The unique design turned out to be a terrible mistake. The 57-foot wave’s energy focused on the center of the X, where it shot up and over the wall onto the town that had settled in its shadow. At Taro, residents had put their faith in technology developed by one of the most advanced societies on Earth. One-hundred-sixty-one victims discovered too late that their trust had been misplaced. So it struck me that in the wake of such catastrophic failure, the city responded by building a new wall, 14 feet taller than the last and yet still more than 8 feet shorter than the 2011 wave.11 Seawalls undoubtedly saved untold lives and property in 2011, and since then, Japan has doubled down. Knowing that another tsunami is inevitable, the country has raised roads, elevated and relocated entire towns, planted coastal forests, and rethought its evacuation routes. Some of these were novel measures, but the centerpiece of reconstruction is an old idea: encasing the coast in concrete fortifications. Today, construction has nearly finished on some 400 miles of breakwaters, river levees, and seawalls as tall as 50 feet, at a cost of about $255 billion.12 As the walls go up and the memory of Tohoku’s devastation fades further into the past, people rebuild their homes and settle on raised land in areas that were obliterated by the wave.

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That the new walls are so much mightier is encouraging, but I also discovered a growing sense of disillusion toward them. It manifests in heated community planning hearings, protests over the flippant use of concrete on natural coastlines, and the embarrassment that a 52-yearold man feels about his wife’s final moments.

I came to Tohoku to learn what had happened and to find what, if anything, the past decade could teach the rest of us about how—or how not—to adapt to this increasingly unforgiving planet. Tsunamis may not be caused by climate change, but, like climate disaster, they are collections of hazards capable of consuming huge areas and countless lives.

Each can be explained with math and physics. Mostly, though, they both confront us with the enormous challenge of understanding ourselves. Sitting in Dogenin, I can picture the hundreds of people dragging themselves up the steep approach in the thick, wet snow of a distant March. When all the engineering marvels, techno-wizardry, and gadgets had failed them, victims of a horrific tragedy came seeking the only salvation they could think of: They went to a centuries-old temple upon a hill. Given the threats bearing down on all of us across the world today, the uncountable risks and inconceivable uncertainties, and the comparative frailty of our grandest inventions, I’m left thinking that sooner or later we’re all going to find religion.

Life and Death in a Name In Japan, 125 million people live on 145,937 square miles.13 The State of California today has a total area of 163,696 square miles and a population of just under 40 million. Unlike in California, of which some 43 percent is used for agriculture, a full 80 percent of Japan’s total landmass is covered in steep, forested volcanic mountains. This leaves a paltry supply of flat land to be shared between industries, houses, and farms. Sendai, the Tohoku region’s largest city, squats on an agricultural plain about

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30 miles south of Ishinomaki, between the mountains and the mouth of a large, crescent-shaped bay. It was settled long ago and once ruled by a powerful samurai whose seventeenth-century castle still haunts a nearby hill. Today Sendai is an industrialized metropolis, home to one of the country’s largest fishing ports and most advanced tsunami laboratories, the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) at Tohoku University.

One of the first things I learn is that the existing walls and breakers had not failed to protect the northeastern coast from the tsunami; they had never been expected to withstand such a wave at all. Nothing had been built to withstand a 130-foot tsunami. Masataka Shimizu, then president of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, said afterward that there was no way they could have predicted even a 50-foot wave. “I hope that a thorough examination of the effects and cause of the unprecedented tsunami will be done in the future,” he said. Then, he and many other talking heads went on Japanese media repeating a single pernicious phrase: soutei-gai.14 The phrase means “beyond expectation” or “beyond all conceivable hypothetical possibilities,” which was an apt term for shirking responsibility. Surely, something that existed outside the realm of possibility couldn’t have been predicted and therefore couldn’t be prevented. This was the phrase TEPCO used to explain the meltdown at the nuclear plant it built beside the sea. Later, citizens of Fukushima discovered that while preparing for future risks, the company had purposefully collected data only on “reasonably expectable and manageable” events while omitting those that seemed unlikely or unmanageable, to avoid the costs of addressing them. Also inherent in soutei-gai is a notion held by the country’s political and scientific leaders that nothing could destroy their designs. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t imagine such a large wave; it’s that they couldn’t imagine anything stronger than what they’d built.

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Soutei-gai immediately caught my ear, because it reminded me of another term I’d been hearing so much lately: the no-analog future.

Reporters and academics use this phrase when referring to the uncertainties surrounding climate change. It implies that we are entering a world unlike the one we’re coming from, but it’s not so simple. Our past records may look woefully out of date amid unprecedented heat waves and storms, but we have a long history with our planet’s wrath and plenty of analogs for adaptation along the way.

I visit IRIDeS because the school is located in the disaster zone and because it’s home to researchers who study everything from engineering and ocean bathymetry to folklore and memorialization of the dead.

Yuichi Ebina is a stocky and exuberant associate professor who wears black-rimmed glasses and talks with his hands spread wide apart. He specializes in Japan’s historic record of disasters, and he recently made a discovery that undermines one of 2011’s greatest myths.

In Japan, before 2011, the largest wave in a generation had come in 1960 as a result of the strongest earthquake ever recorded, a 9.5-magnitude shock off the coast of Chile. It took twenty-four hours to cross the Pacific and crested just under 20 feet in some parts. The Chilean Earthquake Tsunami claimed 140 lives and became the standard to which the Japanese government built many of the protections that were in place fifty-one years later.15 However, as coastal towns undertook the arduous process of cleaning up after the more recent disaster, they discovered clues that exposed the limitations of their expectations.

I trade my shoes for slippers at the door of Ebina’s laboratory in Sendai and cross into an open, white-walled room lit by fluorescent bulbs and packed with cardboard boxes. Ebina collects and restores old documents. Sometimes, these are official records from government buildings, but more often lately they come from regular people who find receipts, letters, journals, logbooks, and accounts of all kinds while moving or refurbishing their homes. He receives truckloads of crusty, wilted parchments—wedding notices like dried leaves, ship logs streaked with black

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mold—often bound with faded ribbon. Writing craft is a big deal in Japan, and family hoarding is a boon for Ebina, who uses these seemingly benign treasures to peer into what he calls “real history,” the lives behind the official records.

Japan’s Edo period spanned the uncharacteristically peaceful years between 1603 and 1867. Finally united under a samurai-led shogunate after near-constant internal warfare, the country closed its borders to the outside world. Granted isolation and quiet, scholars had time to write, and peasants became literate. The result is a vast compendium of accounts from nearly all aspects of life. As there has never been a shortage of disaster in Japan, records from this time are rife with accounts of misfortune, floods, storms, and famine. After 2011, Ebina focused on one particular event: a tsunami that had occurred exactly four hundred years earlier.16 Historians call this wave Keicho Sanriku: keicho for the time period and sanriku for the stretch of far northern coastline where its impacts were thought to have been contained. Ebina was searching the weathered pages of a centuries-old copy of a diary that had been written in 1612 when he came across one of the earliest known examples of the word tsunami. Written in vibrant calligraphy on fine parchment, or washi, it references Tohoku’s storied daimyo, or feudal lord, Date Masamune and tells the story of two samurai who survived a freak wave: Masamune wants fish. Two samurai receive the order. They round up fishermen. The fishermen balk because the sea has a strange color and the skies look ominous. One of the samurai insists on obeying the daimyo’s order. All set out in a boat. Soon it meets the tsunami, which drives it inland into the crown of a pine tree. The waves also sweep away entire villages along the shore. Later, after the water recedes, the men clamber down from the tree. Scanning the shore, they realize that they too would have been swept away had they not gone fishing for Masamune.17

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Ebina was confused. The diary had been written by a shogunate aide traveling around Sendai, far south of where the Sanriku wave was thought to have hit. He checked its account against log entries from an armada captained by the Spaniard Sebastián Vizcaíno, who, several years after naming San Diego Bay, happened to be sailing past Japan. Vizcaíno’s account also reported a great wave off Sendai. Then, in 2013, a reconstruction crew digging through debris on the Sendai plain exposed a cross-section of earth that clearly showed a layer of sand deposited between similar bands known to have been laid down by two other massive tsunamis: the Jogan tsunami of 869 and the Great East Japan tsunami of 2011.

Taken together, this evidence points to the Keicho Sanriku tsunami being an order of magnitude larger and more destructive than previously imagined. Now, Ebina wants to change its name to Keicho Oshu—Oshu being an old term used for the entire Tohoku region—to acknowledge how much of the coast had been affected. When it comes time to build, rebuild, and protect ourselves from what threats lurk on the horizon, he says, “We cannot just depend on scientific data.” He passes me a bundle of decayed, hand-brushed tax ledgers. “We need to respect these old records. Disaster science needs to value history. A modern society becomes vulnerable when it forgets its past.”

Based on records of the Jogan Earthquake in 869 and the Meiji Sanriku tsunami of 1896, which killed some 22,000 people, seismologists warned in 2001 that Tohoku was probably due for a once-in-a-thousandyears event. But there’s something debilitating about a millennium-wide timeframe, and no one had acted on the information. Ebina believes that if they had known the interval between such disasters was a mere 400 years, people might have thought differently about building in the footprint of past disasters. As it happened, in the decades preceding 2011, they constructed homes, oil refineries, nuclear plants, and elementary schools atop the wreckage of the 1611 event, only to realize the error when they had to dig out again.

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“At the moment, when there’s a project of rebuilding a community, there’s not necessarily references made to long-term plans, how people adapted to these risks in the past,” Ebina tells me. This represents a remarkable blind spot for a country with so much history and so much to lose by ignoring it. The omission not only influenced how coastal cities were built before 2011 but colored decisions made in the immediate aftermath. Doubting the likelihood of such an event, the government had no plan in place should one arise, and so, when the time came to rebuild, it fell back on old ideas, even if its people were ready for something new.

Mental Ninjutsu Nothing that was revealed on March 12, 2011, lent itself to careful reading of decayed family documents. The waves had wrought devastation along 1,242 miles of coastline, an extent just shy of the US seaboard from Tijuana to Neah Bay. Half of those who perished were in Miyagi Prefecture, which stretches from Fukushima to Kesennuma, including Sendai and Ishinomaki, and across from the central Echigo Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. This, Tohoku’s most populous prefecture, lost 20 percent of its population.

Afterward, 320,000 survivors needed somewhere to stay.18 Power, gas, and water lines were cut off, and telephone coverage was limited.

Five hospitals and 1,014 schools had been destroyed. More than 300 culturally significant properties had been lost. One hundred thirty-six kids had become orphans. Nine hundred twenty-one had lost a parent.

There were 3,312 nonfunctioning traffic lights and 10 million tons of debris, which is fourteen times more than what Miyagi generates in a year. More than one tenth of the farmland had been inundated, and all 142 fishing ports had been seriously damaged. Refrigerated storehouses had split open, spilling tons of frozen fish that thawed and rotted in the open for weeks. Aftershocks riddled Miyagi for months, while