This year, nearly 100,000 people in Bangladesh have contracted dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease common in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The number of infected patients is overwhelming the fragile hospital system there. More than 450 people have died so far, the deadliest dengue outbreak in the nation of approximately 170 million since record keeping began in 2000. Sri Lanka, nearby, is also experiencing a sharp spike — more than 40,000 cases of dengue this year alone.
In the United States, five cases of locally acquired dengue have been reported in Florida this month alone, prompting local health officials to put Miami-Dade and Broward counties on alert. The state has reported a total of 11 cases of locally transmitted dengue so far in 2023.
Workers from the Florida Keys’ mosquito-control department load a drone to spread BTI larvicide in an effort to eradicate dengue-carrying mosquitos on July 8, 2020, on Key Largo. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
These outbreaks are concerning, but they’re not particularly surprising to experts who have been tracking dengue for the past several decades. Cases of dengue — which can cause fever, rashes, vomiting, and, in severe instances, internal bleeding, organ failure, and death — have been rising for years.
Since the beginning of the century, global cases of the disease, carried by the Aedes genus of mosquitoes, have skyrocketed, from roughly 500,000 in 2000 to more than 5 millionin 2019. In the first seven months of 2023, worldwide cases spiked to more than 3 million, and over 1,500 deaths have been reported — numbers that are expected to rise as the summer continues.
There are likely hundreds of millions more unreported incidents each year, as dengue produces mild or no symptoms in most people. But as more people get infected, the percentage who end up developing the severe form of the disease will increase, too. Experts say a tangled web of factors is driving the surge, but one culprit stands out: climate change.
Dengue patients, protected under mosquito nets, receive treatment at the Dengue Corner of Sylhet MAG Osmani Medical College & Hospital in Bangladesh. Md Rafayat Haque Khan / Eyepix Gr / Future Publishing via Getty Images
In the 1970s, global cases of dengue fever, or break-bone fever as it’s also commonly known, were low. Dengue had been more prevalent 20 years prior, but an aggressive campaign to eradicate Aedes aegypti mosquitoes using the now-banned insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, lowered rates. The campaign was particularly successful in the Americas, where dengue and yellow fever, both carried by A. aegypti, were an omnipresent threat.
But spraying DDT, a known carcinogen, into the environment quickly became an unsustainable mosquito-control measure. By the 1980s, as DDT was being phased out and a century of rampant fossil fuel use began to significantly influence the global climate, the disease began to spread again, and fast. In the next couple of decades, dengue would be found in 100 countries, up from just a handful of countries in the 1960s. Today, it’s been detected in more than 140 nations.
“This is the [mosquito-borne] disease that has grown most substantially in the past 10 years,” Felipe J Colón-González, a climate and health researcher who works at the global charitable foundation the Wellcome Trust, told Grist. “There are many factors that are related to climate.”
In order to gauge the influence of global warming on the spread of dengue, researchers look at three interconnected clues: where mosquitoes move, how quickly they develop, and how often they reproduce.
Like any creature on earth, mosquitoes thrive within a specific temperature range. The insects can’t withstand temperatures that are too dry or cold. Anywhere below 57 degrees Fahrenheit, particularly when there’s low humidity, is unlivable. But most mosquitoes can’t withstand temperatures that are too wet or hot, either — large rainstorms wash them out and they tend to die off at 90 degrees F and above.
Human industrial activity has warmed the planet by about 2 degrees F, on average, a seemingly small change that has had enormous implications for the spread of infectious disease — and life on earth writ large.
Nepal, a mountainous country in South Asia, is a perfect example of how even a slight temperature change can open up a Pandora’s box of disease. Dengue wasn’t present in Nepal until 2004, when the first case was recorded. Less than two decades later, in 2022, the country, which is warming more than 1 degree F every decade, experienced its largest outbreak ever — 54,232 cases and 67 deaths. Researchers in Nepal noted that the nation’s mountains are undergoing “unusually large” fluctuations in temperature. Snow cover on those mountains is melting away as climate change accelerates, inviting pests into new, higher territories. Afghanistan, also long considered too mountainous for Aedes mosquitoes, is witnessing a similar trend.
A child infected with dengue at a hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on August 14, 2023. Xinhua via Getty Images
Climate change isn’t just inspiring mosquitoes to move to higher elevations — it’s prompting the bugs to mature more quickly and produce more generations of offspring in a single season.
Warmer temperatures increase both mosquitoes’ rate of survival and development, and the rate at which they feed. Female mosquitoes, the ones that bite humans, digest blood more quickly when it’s warm and humid out. That leads to more disease. “Because the metabolism is faster, they have to feed many more times in a life cycle so there’s more probability of an infection,” said Colón-González.
Even temperatures that should be too hot for mosquitoes don’t always kill them off. The insects hide in cool corners and under couch cushions to escape the heat, seeking shade much like humans do. “Mosquitoes are annoyingly intelligent creatures,” Colón-González said.
It’s clear that climate change is helping mosquitoes, and the diseases they carry, extend their reach across much of the planet. Roughly half the globe is now at risk for dengue, Raman Velayudhan, who leads the WHO’s program for the control of neglected tropical diseases, said recently. But mosquitoes are not invincible. Researchers have had success artificially infecting Aedes mosquitoes with a bacterium that prevents the transmission of dengue from mosquitoes to humans. Pilot studies in South America and Southeast Asia have shown that the bacterium, called Wolbachia, can be incredibly effective: Cases of dengue in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, went down 77 percent following the release of Wolbachia mosquitoes.
And other, more dependable and scalable methods of curbing dengue transmission exist. As is the case with many climate-driven illnesses, keeping communities safe from dengue ultimately comes down to resources and access.
In the U.S., climate projections indicate that the atmospheric conditions for dengue will be ideal throughout much of the country by the end of the century. But it’s unlikely that dengue will become as widespread an issue as it is in underdeveloped countries. That’s because most American homes have window screens that keep bugs out, and a large portion of the population has access to air conditioners that keep humidity low inside. Houses in the U.S. are spaced further apart than elsewhere in the world, which means a mosquito that breeds in one house won’t necessarily bite people in the house next door. Americans also have widespread access to mosquito repellant. And in most areas, drinking water containers and sanitation systems are stored underground, which means mosquitoes can’t breed in them. That’s why in Texas, dengue is a rare disease while as many as 20 percent of all dengue deaths in the Americas occur in Mexico. Two places that share a border and the same environmental conditions can have two completely different health outcomes.
“It’s true that the climate is going to become more suitable for dengue,” Colón-González said, pointing to rising temperatures and cases all over the globe. But the built environment, human behavior, and the quality of public health systems also play important roles — and point at potential silver linings that could help mitigate the dengue burden in countries with fewer resources. “It’s not just the climate,” he said.
Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park is home to one of the most biodiverse concentrations of plant and animal life on Earth. In an historic vote of nearly 60 percent in favor, Ecuadorian citizens chose to stop the development of new oil wells in the park, the country’s National Electoral Commission said.
Approval of the referendum means about 726 million barrels of oil will stay in the ground, reported The Guardian.
The park is also the home of three of the last “uncontacted” Indigenous communities on the planet, the Taromenane, Tagaeri and Dugakaeri people, who live in voluntary isolation, Reuters reported.
By passing the referendum, Ecuador became one of the first nations to vote to restrict the extraction of resources. The measure was passed during the first round of the country’s presidential elections.
“Today is a historic day! As a Waorani woman and mother, I feel overjoyed with Ecuadorians’ resounding decision to stop oil drilling in my people’s sacred homeland,” said Nemonte Nenquimo, an Indigenous Waorani leader and Goldman Environmental Prize winner, as reported by The Guardian. “Finally, we are going to kick oil companies out of our territory! This is a major victory for all Indigenous Peoples, for the animals, the plants, the spirits of the forest and our climate!”
Yasuní National Park became a UNESCO world biosphere reserve in 1989. The biodiversity hotspot consists of 2.5 million acres that are home to 121 reptile species, 139 amphibian species and 610 bird species.
Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park is a world biosphere reserve and biodiversity hotspot. Alan & Flora Botting / CC BY-SA 2.0
Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment and Water said 2.5 acres in Yasuní contains 650 tree species and hundreds of animal species, Reuters reported.
“This referendum presents a huge opportunity for us to create change in a tangible way,” Helena Gualinga, an Indigenous rights advocate, told CNN.
Citizens of Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, voted in another referendum to stop gold mining in the highland biosphere of Chocó Andino, located nearby.
“This victory shows that we humans are taking action to save our planet during these times of climate crisis,” said Leonidas Iza, president of Conaie, Ecuador’s umbrella Indigenous federation, reported The Guardian.
Passage of the referendum to protect Yasuní means state oil company Petroecuador has one year to stop production and will mean the loss of approximately 12 percent of the country’s output of crude oil, Reuters reported.
In a social media post, Petroecuador said it would comply with the decision of the voters.
“We will follow up to make sure the government respects the decision of the Ecuadorean people,” said Juan Bay, president of the Waorani Indigenous community, at a press conference in Quito, as reported by Reuters. “We have saved the greatest biodiversity and we have saved the communities in voluntary isolation.”
Presidential hopeful Luisa González, who was in the lead after the first round of votes, said on a local radio show that by banning oil extraction in Yasuní, not only will income be lost, but indemnity payments will have to be made to companies.
“Those indemnifications could cost $15 billion,” said González, as Reuters reported. “We need to review to see how we’ll get out, what contracts there are, how they will close. It’s a complicated scenario.”
Last year, mining brought in $2.8 billion and was Ecuador’s fourth biggest income source after bananas, oil and shrimp.
Waorani leader Ene Nenquimo said the victory represented years of suffering by Indigenous communities.
“The fight is not just today but years-long,” Nenquimo said, as reported by Reuters.
Forests managed by Indigenous nations are severely underfunded. To reach per-acre parity with forests managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, the federal government would need to increase funding by nearly $96 million every year. That’s according to a new report from the Intertribal Timber Council, a nonprofit consortium consisting primarily of tribes and Alaska Native Corporations.
In 2019, the base year for the study, tribal forests represented nearly 19 million acres in the United States, including approximately 10.2 million acres of commercial forests and woodlands. A total of 345 tribal forests are managed across the nation, with 316 of those forests being held in federal trust.
“It seems like a fairly straightforward answer that when we look at the disparity in funding between other federal agencies and tribes, that [Congress] would just increase appropriations,” said Cody Desautel, President of the Intertribal Timber Council and member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. “But that hasn’t been the case.”
According to the report, non-timber forest products are essential to many tribal communities. Traditional herbaceous plants are found within forested areas while fish, wildlife, roots, fungi and edible tree components such as sap, seeds and nuts, are harvested by communities for medicinal purposes and provide connection to lands.
“Indian forestlands are quite diverse across the country. But all have one thing in common, they are a lifeline for the tribes that live on these lands,” wrote the authors. “The tribal needs from their forests are diverse: forests provide everything from stumpage revenue to employment to harvesting game for subsistence, to being cultural and religious sanctuaries.”
Since 2013, Tribal Priority Allocations, or TPA, that provide federal funding for basic Tribal services, like ecosystem and landscape conservation, have been relatively stagnant despite rising costs for forestry management at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Coupled with sub-par funding for other services, like law enforcement and healthcare, Desautel says much of that TPA funding is often dispersed to different departments, like education.
“Because of that lack of funding and staffing, we’ve got significant backlogs in work that should have been done over the previous decades,” said Desautel. “That puts our forests at worse health and higher risk or disturbance.”
The lack of funding has created limited staffing and issues around workforce capacity which have impacted tribal forest management. “Neither the BIA nor tribes have adequate funds to pay for staffing,” said the authors of the study. “In multiple visits the team was told that the annual funding from the Bureau has not increased in 20 or more years and is no longer a sufficient amount to pay salaries it was originally designed to.”
For tribes such as the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, timber revenue made up a large fraction of their revenue, at one point providing 80 percent of their yearly budget. “It paid for that tribal council, it paid for a police force, it paid for 80 percent of our staff,” said Desautel “It was hands down the most important resource we had to ensure that we had money to function as a tribal government.” However, he adds that a transition is being made by many tribes to find funding and revenue in other places.
The study’s authors also found that climate change, wildfires, and catastrophic natural events are causing unprecedented destruction at a massive scale, making the need for forest protection and conservation even more dire.
Carbon sequestration is gaining popularity across Indian Country as well, projects such as Fond Du Lac Band Of Lake Superior Chippewa, Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and Lower Brule have been embraced among tribes and have been used in commercial forest lands as sequester options. Indigenous forests, particularly in the Amazon rainforest are helping curb climate change. The world’s forests, which cover about 30% of Earth’s land, absorbed approximately 7.2 billion more tonnes of CO2 per year than they emitted between 2001 and 2021.
However, despite world leaders spending billions of dollars to protect forests, only 17 percent of global funding actually goes to Indigenous communities, like those in the United States. Desautel said government leaders must work with Indigenous peoples to provide better funding for tribal forestry.
“Tribes are vastly underfunded compared to other federal agencies, and we don’t think that should be the case,” said Desautel. “We also know that because of that lack of funding and staffing that we’ve got significant backlogs in work that should have been done over the previous decades. That puts our forests in worse health and higher risk of disturbance.”
Japan announced Tuesday that it would begin releasing treated, diluted radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as early as Aug. 24. The plan is to release the water into the Pacific Ocean over the course of 30 years.
As Reuters reported, the first release set for Thursday will include about 7,800 cubic meters of water and will take course over about 17 days.
“I expect the water release to start on August 24, weather conditions permitting,” Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida said, as Reuters reported.
Japan and The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plant operator, will test the ocean water and marine life and share results online, The Associated Press reported. The first results are expected sometime in September.
The plan was first approved two years ago, and the government has said that the water release is necessary in decommissioning the nuclear power plant. But the plan has come with a lot of opposition from nearby countries and the local fishing industry. According to The Associated Press, Hong Kong and Macau have banned products from 10 prefectures following the announcement to begin the water release. China has increased radiation testing on products from fisheries in Japan.
Even with filtering the water, the BBC reported that the water still contains radioactive substances, including tritium and carbon-14. The plan received a greenlight from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in July. TEPCO said that the water will contain about 190 becquerels of tritium per liter, which is within the 10,000 becquerels per liter limit set by the World Health Organization.
While some scientists say the plan to treat and dilute the water is safe, others say there needs to be more consideration of long-term impacts of the planned release.
“As long as the discharge is carried out as planned, radiation doses to people will be vanishingly small — more than a thousand times less than doses we all get from natural radiation every year,” Jim Smith, a professor of environmental science at the University of Portsmouth, told the BBC.
In 2019, then-environmental minister Shinjiro Koizumi called for a shutdown of all nuclear reactors in Japan following the Fukushima disaster. But opponents have said nuclear energy is needed to meet the country’s energy and climate goals.
The power plant, which was destroyed in 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami, has around 1.34 million metric tons of water to be released. The contaminated water was used to cool the nuclear reactors amid the disaster, but former environmental minister for Japan Yoshiaki Harada said in 2019 that the plant’s operator had run out of space to store the water.
For Jasmin Estrada, nature has always meant more than one thing. It was the summer camp in New England, where she lived, and bathing in sunlight on plastic chairs in her abuela’s hot backyard in Guatemala, waiting for food to be cooked. It was also the scorching sun over a family member’s head as they hid in the back of a truck entering the United States. Nature can be very harsh, she says, but “there’s [also] a harmony and beauty that we all deserve to connect with.”
So when she started studying adventure education at Green Mountain College in Vermont, Estrada couldn’t help but notice how “wilderness” was treated as something untouched and pure. She felt uneasy when her classes “cut folks off by telling them that they have to go through this ‘white explorer’ model to be connected.” This un-nuanced understanding of how race, culture, gender, and class affect how people engage with public lands has contributed to a landscape where most visitors to public lands are white.
Closing the “nature gap”—as some have called the lack of outdoor access people of color and other marginalized groups experience—led Estrada to her current position as community support and training manager at the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts. When The Wilderness Society knocked on the Appalachian Mountain Club door with a new public lands curriculum in 2018, Estrada was elated. It was the first time she’d seen this kind of nuanced understanding of public lands in a curriculum, she said.
The educational material, divided into six modules, incorporates important historical context for conservation efforts, highlighting the stories that are often left out, including from conservationists of color and queer communities, and the segregation and discrimination that have informed national conservation policy. It also includes lessons in climate change and how to advocate for public lands.
“If we are not telling a story about public lands where people feel seen, where people’s experiences are validated, and where we’re being authentic—and just acknowledging some of the atrocious things that happened with regards to how land has been conserved in this country—then people are going to continue to feel alienated by the conservation movement,” says Liz Vogel, education and youth engagement director with The Wilderness Society.
Since its launch, TWS’ curriculum has reached all corners of the United States, reshaping how universities, outdoor-advocacy organizations, public schools, and youth-advocacy organizations teach about public lands. About 3,500 people have downloaded the free, publicly available document, and 15 organizations have undergone personalized training with The Wilderness Society.
Filling the gaps in public lands history
Around a century after the National Park Service was established, the conservation community started self-reflecting on their achievements and shortcomings. A study found that 95% of national forest visitors and 77% of national park visitors were white—even in parks and forests close to communities of color. Only 112 out of 460 national parks and monuments recognized or were dedicated to diverse peoples and cultures. In a country where the majority of the population will not be white by 2044, it was indispensable to create a representative connection between people and public lands.
In 2016, Vogel says TWS decided to take action to change that. “If we are advocating for these places, and advocating for more land to be conserved,” Vogel says, “we need to be honest with how things happened in conservation history. Often, that history isn’t pretty.”
The Wilderness Society worked for a year alongside curriculum writing consultants, The Avarna Group, to create a curriculum that laid out the different types of public lands that span over 640 million acres in the U.S. The lessons dig into the history before the arrival of settlers, recognizing the deep ecological, cultural, and spiritual ties Indigenous communities had—and still have—with the land. It also details the violent policies—including acts of genocide—that often were put in place to create national parks and forests. The program discusses everyday environmentalists shadowed by the mythologized figures of John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. And it introduces a look into the future of conservation in the era of climate and biodiversity crises.
TWS ran a pilot of the curriculum with three long-time allies: The Boys and Girls Outdoor Leadership Development program at the YMCA; a community-based organization in New Mexico called Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions, which introduced the curriculum in public schools; and the Appalachian Mountain Club, which worked with both kids and educators in the Northeast of the country. Since then, The Wilderness Society has constantly updated the curriculum using the feedback of those who use it. “It’s a living document,” Vogel explains. “We really wanted to create this resource that was responsive and useful anywhere.”
Students learn about the natural history of New Mexico as part of the public lands curriculum. Mason Cummings
Evelyn Hatem, a rising senior in environmental studies and public policy at Dartmouth College, was one of the students in the first iterations of the program in 2018. Hiking on the ridges of the Pemigewasset Wilderness, the largest wilderness area at the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, Hatem learned for the first time about the history of the 45,000 acres of forest surrounding her. The ridge lines covered in trees, which had looked pristine when she arrived, suddenly transformed. Learning that the timber companies had left the mountains barren in the 19th century, and that it was not until 1911 that the government bought the land and decided to conserve the second-growth forest she now contemplated, “was definitely sobering,” she says.
Going through the curriculum left Hatem wanting to learn more. She has subsequently taken several classes on Native American history, and has tried to share this information in her role leading outdoor field trips for Dartmouth’s freshmen. “[Since taking the course], I have thought a lot about equity and inclusion and [the] outdoors. It was definitely a catalyst.”
Hatem’s not the only one deeply affected by the material. Estrada says after she taught the curriculum with the Appalachian Mountain Club, one girl ended up writing her college essay about public lands and their history. Another participant got involved with a local youth center.
Estrada said the curriculum encouraged understanding simultaneous truths. Rather than dwelling on atrocities, considering public lands’ complicated past can help acknowledge people’s complex mix of feelings, including respect, gratitude, and grievance. She says it’s an opportunity to ask, “How can you find the joy in advocacy?”
The Wilderness Society has compiled an educational curriculum that incorporates important historical context for conservation efforts, highlighting the stories of Black and Indigenous conservationists and diving into the violent practices that have informed American conservation policy. Its goal is to teach a more authentic and holistic story to students of all ages.
Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of Record High. I’m Jake Bittle, and today, we’re going to explore why a key heat solution often goes unused.
Back in the summer of 2021, as Seattle recovered from a Pacific Northwest heat dome that left more than 150 people dead in Washington state, emergency managers zeroed in on a big reason for the city’s vulnerability to heat. Not only did most households in Seattle not have air conditioning, but the city also had few public cooling centers where people could escape from high temperatures. Because Seattle’s climate is typically so mild, many schools and libraries don’t have A/C, so they couldn’t serve as refuges the way they might have in other regions of the country.
In the two years since the heat dome, Seattle has installed A/C units in a few more libraries and recreational centers, and applied for federal grant money to expand cooling in other buildings. But even as they work to add more public cooling centers, emergency managers are running into another obstacle that hotter cities have been dealing with for years: Even if a local government sets up cooling centers, people often don’t go to them.
Part of the reason is economic. It’s one thing to know that there’s a library with A/C downtown, but it’s another thing to get there. If you don’t have a car, you either have to walk or wait at a bus stop in sweltering heat, which might be more dangerous than staying where you are. In the South, where most homes and apartments have A/C, cooling centers are designed to provide shelter to low-income and unhoused people, but these populations are often the ones that have the most difficulty making a crosstown trip.
“Cooling centers need to be more than just a cold space. They need to be [places] that people have other incentives or reasons to go to.”
Kate Hutton, Seattle’s emergency planning coordinator
The city of Tampa, Florida, encountered this problem when it opened three cooling centers during a recent heat wave. Over the course of a week, around a dozen people visited each center per day, according to the Tampa Bay Times, which quoted a woman who was too afraid to walk to the nearest center two miles away. The facilities could have accommodated several times more visitors. In other cases, people might just not know what their options are: A CDC study of two Arizona counties last year found that “barriers to cooling center access among older adults include awareness of location and transportation.”
But even when people have easy access to cooling centers, they still don’t go, says Kate Hutton, an emergency planning coordinator for the city of Seattle.
When Hutton’s department interviewed Seattleites after the 2021 heat dome, many people said they wouldn’t be interested in a public cooling center even if it were right down the road. They gave several reasons for their reluctance: Some parents were worried about bringing their children around strangers, for instance, and some elderly people balked at the thought of sitting in a gym for hours surrounded by screaming children. And many people who were experiencing homelessness said they were wary of encountering stigma from wealthier people if they showed up at a public facility.
Perhaps the most common objection city officials heard was that being at a cooling center sounded boring. If a government building didn’t have food, or internet access, or activities of any kind, it was hard for many people to imagine spending hours there at a time, regardless of how excruciatingly hot it got outside.
Portland residents in a cooling center during a record-breaking heat wave in June. Nathan Howard / Getty Images
“I think what we got from those conversations was that cooling centers need to be more than just a cold space,” said Hutton. “They need to be [places] that people have other incentives or reasons to go to.” But making the city’s cooling centers more attractive would require spending extra money on food and staff, and buying more A/C units is hard enough.
This reluctance to visit cooling centers is a particular challenge for temperate cities like Seattle, where most people still don’t have residential air conditioning and where public buildings are some of the only places to chill out. The city government can reach out to unhoused people and offer them transportation to libraries and schools, but that still leaves thousands of residents who choose to stay at home because it’s more private and more fun, and thus put their own health at risk.
“If you ask the average person if they want to upend their day and their schedule and their plans just to go be cool in a specific place, they’re going to say that’s not ideal for them,” Hutton told Grist. “They’re going to want cooling options that are part of their normal routine.”
By the numbers
Air conditioning is almost universal in the fast-growing cities of the South and Southwest, but it’s far less common in the more temperate Northwest. That’s begun to change, however, after a heat-dome disaster struck that region in 2021.
Should Biden declare a “climate emergency”? Amid a sweltering summer, activists have been urging Biden to declare climate change a national emergency. My colleague Akielly Hu reports that declaring a heat disaster might be a better course of action, since it would unlock federal money to keep people cool.
Heat linked to prison suicide-watch incidents: A new study from Emory University found that suicide-watch incidents in Louisiana prisons increased by more than 30 percent on extreme heat days. Gina Jiménez broke down the harrowing new data for Inside Climate News.
Back to school in a heat dome: Chicago students went back to class this year during a searing Midwest heat dome, and the Chicago Tribune’s Sarah Macaraeg reports that many of the city’s public schools aren’t ready to deal with high temperatures. Many classrooms and cafeterias lack working A/C, which has parents and teachers worried.
There is no interest group for heat: Even though heat kills more people than any other climate disaster, politicians don’t give the issue much attention or money, writes Alexander Nieves for Politico. That’s because heat doesn’t have a political constituency, unlike the issue of drought in California, which has aroused the attention and activism of the state’s powerful agriculture industry.
How extreme heat threatens contraception: Over at The 19th, Shefali Luthra writes that high temperatures can make almost every form of contraception less effective. Condoms, emergency contraception pills, and pregnancy tests all need to be stored in temperatures of 86 degrees Fahrenheit or below, or else they’re liable to break or stop working.
A recent campaign ad targeting West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin shows the centrist Democrat standing alongside President Biden, applauding the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Ominous music plays as the words, attributed to Biden, “I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuel” splash across the screen. The spot, from a dark money group aligned with Republicans, paints Manchin as a flaming liberal happy to eliminate 100,000 West Virginia jobs in a ruthless pursuit of clean energy.
Manchin probably wouldn’t define himself as particularly liberal, nor would he consider himself an enemy of fossil fuels. The Mountain State’s senior senator has shown no reluctance to withhold votes on important legislation like the Build Back Better Act or demand concessions to support Democratic priorities like the Inflation Reduction Act. His ability to thwart President Biden’s agenda has given him, and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, outsize importance in Washington.
It’s in keeping with a path he’s walked throughout his political career, which included two stints as governor. Manchin embraces deep-blue labor interests and conservative business interests alike while beating his chest at environmental regulators, vowing to protect the state’s economy from those who would shut down Big Coal. He’s observing the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act in a typically two-sided manner. On one hand, he celebrated the law’s extension of benefits for disabled coal miners and its reduction of medical costs for seniors. On the other, he promised an “unrelenting fight against the Biden Administration’s efforts to implement the IRA as a radical climate agenda instead of implementing the IRA that was passed into law.”
Manchin is keenly aware that his political adversaries want West Virginians to see him as a liberal, and that he cannot allow them to succeed. He finds himself under threat by West Virginia’s sitting governor, Jim Justice, a Republican who is running for the seat Manchin has held since 2010. Justice, the state’s richest man, made his fortune as a coal executive and one of the nation’s largest grain producers, though he’s probably more well known nationally as a culture war populist who has patterned himself after Donald Trump. He loves to rail against political correctness and “wokeism,” he’s promised to deliver the biggest state tax cut in history, and he’s mastered the art of using levity to cut down opponents. He has no qualms about bringing out Babydog, his media-friendly canine, and inviting critics to “kiss her hiney.”
“Anybody that would hold up a bulldog’s behind to the camera at the State of the State,” Justice has said, “absolutely will just about do anything.”
Though Justice’s candid demeanor and populism may give him some appeal with voters, his honesty in business dealings and his commitment to worker safety is deeply suspect. He’s been sued more than 600 times by the Justice Department, business partners, vendors, government agencies, and others for millions of dollars in unpaid taxes, fines, and loans. Environmental groups have come for Justice over and over again for safety violations throughout central Appalachia and problems at his unreclaimed mines, including repeated floods and landslides that have long plagued a community in Pike County, Kentucky. Over the past five years, regulators have cited Justice’s companies for 130 environmental and workplace safety violations, and ordered them to cease all activity until about $8 million in fines are paid. Justice has ignored them.
Manchin does not appear to consider Justice much of a threat. “Make no mistake,” he has boasted repeatedly (including in a statement to Grist). “I will win any race I enter.”
Manchin has managed to walk a fine line, taking conservative stances on environmental regulations while pushing for miners’ rights and benefits.
Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
His confidence may prove unfounded. Machin’s popularity has waned as his once blue state has turned bright red. After winning three consecutive races by at least 30 percentage points, he squeaked through his latest by only 3 points. Worse, he’s polling poorly against Justice, whose approval rating is at 57 percent to Manchin’s 29 percent. Justice looks likely to beat his primary opponent, Alex Mooney, and challenge Manchin in 2024. The threat he poses to the seasoned Democrat underscores how the decline of coal and the rise of anti-environment, hardline Republicans has changed politics in West Virginia — and could reshape the last years of President Biden’s administration and the future of Democratic priorities.
“The West Virginia seat is Republicans’ best chance to flip a seat,” said political commentator Jessica Cook of The Cook Report. That could give the GOP a reasonable shot at a Senate majority, paving the way for more right-wing legislation, particularly in the climate arena.
A small but vocal contingent of West Virginia voters are outspoken in their frustration with this choice. They aren’t unaware of coal’s increasingly shaky future, or its impact on the climate. They feel trapped by what they see as a false dichotomy between candidates that regardless of party have kept the state in a holding pattern. The political movement WV Can’t Wait, which recruits and trains progressive-leaning candidates in hopes of turning West Virginia leftward, says many voters feel disempowered and equally fed up with Democrats and Republicans whose concern for their interests is limited at best.
“In West Virginia, we know that politics isn’t Democrat v. Republican, it’s the Good Old Boys Club v. Everyone Else,” the organization said in a statement to Grist. “In West Virginia, we know that the fight isn’t pro-Coal versus anti-Coal, it’s Coal Company versus Coal Miner.”
Mariah Clay, a young environmental activist from the coalfields community of Mingo County, calls the likelihood of a Manchin-Justice race “a slap in the face.” The way she sees it, the political power of both men stems from industries that have cost West Virginians their health and their safety.
“I’m sick and tired of it, having to choose the lesser of two evils,” she said. “Our land, and the well-being of our communities, are continuously sacrificed over and over and over again, for these cash cow projects that have nothing to do with us.”
One can see the effects of a mountaintop coal-removal operation on the land near Beckley, West Virginia. Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Like Justice, Manchin has amassed a fortune from coal. His family owns Enersystems, a company that sells a form of coal waste called gob that power plants burn for energy. His background has made him adept at walking the narrow bridge between playing nicely with miners while pleasing the industry they work for. Even as he took conservative stances on environmental regulations as governor, Manchin pushed for miners’ access to health care and a pension and allied with other Democrats to support measures that would prevent black lung, a deadly disease contracted through coal and silica dust exposure. But he also took the controversial step of privatizing the state workers’ comp system.
“Senator Manchin is probably the best example of someone who was able to sort of thread that needle, so to speak, about coal production,” West Virginia University historian Hal Gorby told Grist.
But the political environment in West Virginia that allowed him to do that has changed. Although the state has supported Republican presidential candidates since 2000, Democrats largely had a lock on the governorship and the statehouse from 1993 through 2015. It has since become a GOP stronghold. This shift followed the emergence, in the early 1990s, of its stronger, more patriotic party line on the state’s most famous export, one conveyed in a campaign called “Friends of Coal.” The fossil fuel became part and parcel with faith, freedom, and firearms. The movement, and the party, gained greater support during the Obama administration, an era the industry and its political allies called the “war on coal.”
Still, the industry has seen its fortunes wane. Mechanization increased production for a time while slashing jobs, reducing the number of coal miners in West Virginia to fewer than 12,000. Production peaked in 2008 and has steadily declined ever since — by as much as 64 percent in Appalachia alone — as states retire their coal-fired power plants. This trend is one of the biggest reasons for West Virginia’s rightward tilt.Though some miners and their communities have spoken out against the environmental damage the industry wreaks, others embraced the party that continues promising to keep the mines open.
“It’s sort of framed as like, We’re going to either have a clean environment, or we’re going to have this sort of vibrant economy that’s, you know, going to pollute,” Gorby said.
All the while, national Democrats showed little interest in maintaining their foothold in West Virginia, instead focusing on urban centers and suburban voters.
It is against this backdrop that Justice emerged. The irony is he won his first governorship, in 2016, as a Democrat. He switched parties seven months into his term (during an appearance with President Trump), telling voters, “I can’t help you anymore being a Democrat.” His administration has taken to following the party line, criminalizing protests against fossil fuels, passing strict anti-abortion laws, opposing gun control, and more.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with West Virginia Governor Jim Justice at the 2017 rally where Justice announced he would switch parties from Democrat to Republican. SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images
Though his role as culture warrior draws comparisons to Trump (whom Justice recently endorsed), former Massey Energy chief executive Don Blankenship may be the better analogue. Blankenship, a major player in the Friends of Coal campaign who contributed mightily to many conservative, anti-environment West Virginia candidates, ran for the Senate in 2018. He failed to survive the primary, undone by widespread condemnation of the lax safety measures that contributed to a deadly explosion at a Massey Energy mine in 2010. An investigation found that “Massey Energy used the leverage of the jobs it provided to attempt to control West Virginia’s political system.”
And that, ultimately, may be the clearest reflection of West Virginia politics, an arena in which politicians of both parties must be mindful of the state’s flagship industry, even if its best days are behind it.
Though some voters consider Manchin the lesser evil, Clay and others see both men more or less as the same result of the disenfranchisement and disenchantment of West Virginia’s voters and the continuing power of the coal industry and coal propaganda. Commentators often scrutinize the state’s politics, asking why so many of its residents appear to vote against their own best interests, and they often consider its elections a curiosity confined to the Mountain State. But what happens there often has national implications. And while some people argue that progressivism lies in wait, little will come of that until Democrats develop a strategy to improve the day-to-day conditions of West Virginians’ lives.
If Manchin stays in office, any deals the Biden administration makes to win his vote will be tempered with concessions to the fossil fuel industry. If Justice wins, though, there will be no deals at all. Justice’s comment about the best response to COVID-19 is equally apt here: “You’re dadgummed if you do and dadgummed if you don’t.”
Nobody really knows how the fungus Bipolaris maydis got into the cornfields of the United States. But by summer of 1970, it was there with a vengeance, inflicting a disease called southern corn leaf blight, which causes stalks to wither and die. The South got hit first, then the disease spread through Tennessee and Kentucky before heading up into Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa — the heart of the Corn Belt.
The destruction was unprecedented. All told, the corn harvest of 1970 was reduced by about 15 percent. Collectively, farmers lost almost 700 bushels of corn that could have fed livestock and humans, at an economic cost of a billion dollars. More calories were lost than during Ireland’s Great Famine in the 1840s, when disease decimated potato fields.
Really, the problem with southern corn leaf blight started years before the 1970 outbreak, when scientists in the 1930s developed a strain of corn with a genetic quirk that made it a breeze for seed companies to crank out. Farmers liked the strain’s high yields. By the 1970s, that particular variety formed the genetic basis for up to 90 percent of the corn grown around the country, compared to the thousands of varieties farmers had grown previously.
That particular strain of corn — known as cms-T — proved highly susceptible to southern corn leaf blight. So, when an unusually warm, wet spring favored the fungus, it had an overabundance of corn plants to burn through.
At the time, scientists hoped a lesson had been learned.
“Never again should a major cultivated species be molded into such uniformity that it is so universally vulnerable to attack by a pathogen,” wrote plant pathologist Arnold John Ullstrup in a review of the matter published in 1972.
And yet, today, genetic uniformity is one of the main features of most large-scale agricultural systems, leading some scientists to warn that conditions are ripe for more major outbreaks of plant disease.
There are several strains of corn blight, which can affect crops. Southern corn blight was blamed for the corn shortfall of 1970. Northern corn blight, seen here, produces different markings on the diseased leaves. Getty Images
“I think we have all the conditions for a pandemic in agricultural systems to occur,” said agricologist Miguel Altieri, a professor emeritus from the University of California, Berkeley. Hunger and economic hardship would likely ensue.
Climate change adds to the danger — shifting weather patterns are on track to shake up the distributions of pathogens and bring them into contact with new plant species, potentially making crop disease much worse, said Brajesh Singh, an expert in soil science at Western Sydney University in Australia.
Incorporating biodiversity into large-scale farming could move agriculture away from this crisis. Here and there, some farmers are taking steps in this direction. But will their efforts become widespread — and what will happen if they don’t?
Farms cover close to 40 percent of the planet’s land, according to a 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Almost 50 percent of those systems are made up of just four crops: wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans. Disease is commonplace — globally, $30 billion worth of food is lost to pathogens every year.
Things were not always this way. As the 1900s dawned in the United States, for instance, food was produced by humans, not machines — more than 40 percent of the American workforce was employed on a multitude of small farms growing a wide range of crop varieties. The British Empire sparked the shift toward today’s industrialized food system, said historian Lizzie Collingham, who wrote the book Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food.
By the early 1900s, the British Empire had learned that it could “basically treat the whole planet as a resource for its population,” Collingham said. It acquired cocoa from West Africa, meat from Argentina, and sugar from the Caribbean, for example. Suddenly, food was not something to be bought from the farmer down the street, but a global commodity, subject to economies of scale.
America grabbed hold of this idea and ran with it, according to Collingham. First came the New Deal — President Roosevelt’s plan for pulling the country out of the Great Depression included raising the standard of living for farmers, partly by bringing electricity to rural life. In 1933, farm country was characterized by outhouses, iceboxes, and a complete lack of street lights. By 1945, all that had changed.
An 1805 botanical illustration from London that depicts corn blight.
Sepia Times / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Once they were on the power grid, farmers could buy equipment such as electric milk coolers and feed grinders that let them scale up their operations, but such things are expensive — only by expanding could farmers afford them. “It all makes sense if you rationalize it for economies of scale and make your farm into a factory,” Collingham said.
Then World War II hit, and much of agriculture’s workforce had to go off to fight. At the same time, the government had an army to feed and the general public to keep happy, so it really needed to keep the food supply coming. Machines were the answer — the war era solidified the shift from humans to tractors. And machines do best when they only perform one job, like harvesting a single crop, acre after acre.
Monocultures can be very efficient when they’re not contracting diseases, and that efficiency is part of what got the United States through the war. In fact, the system worked so well that “soldiers doing their training in America got fatter,” Collingham said. “A lot of them had never eaten so well in their lives.”
A botanical illustration that shows wheat rust on the left and corn blight on the right.
DeAgostini / Getty Images
Soon, small-scale farms growing diverse crops had largely retreated into the past in the Midwestern U.S. It’s not that anyone intended for the practice to be lost. It was simply “in many people’s minds, rendered obsolete,” said agronomist Matt Liebman, who recently retired from Iowa State University.
One might think the realization that biodiversity protects plant health is a new one, given that it wasn’t that long ago that biodiverse farming became a rare practice. But in fact, scientists and farmers have recognized this connection for at least centuries, and probably longer, said evolutionary biologist Amanda Gibson from the University of Virginia.
The basic concept is simple enough: A typical pathogen can only infect certain plant species. When that pathogen ends up on a species it can’t infect, that plant acts like a sinkhole. The pathogen can’t reproduce, so it’s neutralized, and nearby plants are spared.
Disease-resistant plants can also alter airflow in ways that keep plants dry and healthy and create physical barriers that block pathogen movement. Especially if they’re tall, resistant plants can act like fences that diseases have to hop over. “Somebody did a nice experiment taking dead corn stalks and just plopping them in the bean field,” said plant pathologist Gregory Gilbert from the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And that works, too, because it’s just keeping things from moving around.”
In nature, this dynamic between plants and pathogens can be part of healthy ecosystems. Pathogens spread easily between stands of the same species, killing off plants that are too close to their relatives and making sure landscapes have a healthy degree of biodiversity. As “social distancing” is restored between susceptible hosts, the disease dies down.
In monocultures, there are no sinkholes or natural fences to stem the spread of pathogens. Instead, when a disease takes hold in a crop field, it’s poised to burn through the entire thing. “We create amplification rather than dilution,” said Altieri.
New technology has driven home these old lessons: Over the last decade, it’s become possible for scientists to isolate a broad swath of the microbes found within a particular niche — like an ear of corn or a stalk of wheat — and use DNA sequencing to create a censuslike list of everything that lives there.
The results have been unsettling, but not always unexpected. Plants in cultivated lands carry a significantly larger variety of viruses than those in adjacent biodiversity hotspots, plant and microbial ecologist Carolyn Malmstrom from Michigan State University and her colleagues found in one study.
Conversely, they later found that some fields of barley and wheatwere largely devoid of viruses, but that could also be a sign of problems to come. Pesticides may be keeping virus levels low: “So we might think, OK, yay, we’re protecting our crops,” Malmstrom said. But not all microbes are bad.
Wheat grows in a field along Mertz Road in Maxatawny Township, Pennsylvania.
Ben Hasty / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images
“By pulling our crop systems out into a virus-free situation, we may also be removing them from some of the richness of the biodiversity of microbes that’s beneficial,” she added.
The bigger the farm, the more serious the disease problems, at least in the case of a pathogen called Potato virus Y,which leads to low potato yields. When researchers looked at the amount of simplified cropland surrounding a potato plant, they found that the prevalence of the pathogen went up steadily as the percentage of surrounding area covered in cropland increased. Unmanaged fields and forests, on the other hand — carrying wild mixes of plants — seemed to have a protective effect.
In natural landscapes, increasing biodiversity lowers the number of virus species present. But increasing biodiversity along the edges of crop fields doesn’t seem to have the same effect, plant ecologist Hanna Susi from the University of Helsinki found.
Fertilizers and other chemicals leached from the crops might affect the susceptibility of nearby plants to infection, she and her coauthor postulated. Beneficial microbes found on wild plants may be keeping many of these viruses from causing disease, but if the same viruses get into crops that lack that protection, “We don’t know what may happen,” she said. Farmers could find themselves dealing with new kinds of crop diseases.
On Altieri’s farm in the Colombian state of Antioquia, he mixes many plants — corn with squash, pineapples with legumes — and said, “We don’t have the diseases that neighbors have, that have monocultures.”
The results of recent DNA-sequencing experiments are familiar to him because traditional Latin American farmers have long used biodiversity to protect their crops. “These papers are good ecological research,” he said. “But actually, they’re basically reinventing the wheel.”
This old wheel does have to get over a new hill, however. Climate change is redistributing pathogens, bringing them into contact with new crops, and changing weather patterns in ways that foster disease.
Already, Liebman has seen the effects of climate change firsthand in Iowa, where tar spot disease — an infection that kills the leaves on corn plants — is on the rise. “We have warmer nights and more humid days,” he said. The tar spot pathogen loves the new weather.
Predicting exactly how much climate change will increase crop disease is difficult, said Singh. But there are some general conclusions he can draw.
Rising temperatures will likely favor certain pathogens that cause disease in major crops. A wheat-infecting fungus called Fusarium culmorum, for example, is likely to be replaced by its more aggressive and heat-tolerant relative, Fusarium graminearum. That could spell bad news for Nordic countries, where wheat crops could suffer.
Hotter temperatures will likely knock back other pathogens. A fungus that infects the herb meadowsweet, for example, has already begun dying out on islands off the coast of Sweden. In general, however, Singh thinks regions that are currently cold or temperate will likely see increases in crop disease as they warm.
For regions that are already warm, rising humidity could cause trouble. For example, parts of Africa and South America are among the regions that will probably see increases in funguslike pathogens called Phytophthora. Food insecurity is already prevalent in some of these areas, and if nothing’s done to stop disease spread, that’s likely to get worse. “We need a lot more information,” Singh said. “But I agree that that is one of the scenarios that is a possibility.”
Jason Mauck farms “every which way,” in his words. The head of Constant Canopy Farm likes experimenting, seeing what works and what doesn’t. And on about 100 out of the 3,000 acres he tends to in Gaston, Indiana, one of his experiments involves a strategy called intercropping.
Intercropping with rows of corn planted alongside coffee at a farm in Brazil.
Lena Trindade / Brazil Photos / LightRocket via Getty Images
Intercropping means growing two or more crops in the same field, by alternating rows or mixing the crops within the same rows — it’s a modern reimagining of age-old techniques like those Altieri uses, and one way of introducing biodiversity into large-scale agriculture. In Mauck’s case, he’s planting wheat with soybeans. The wheat seeds go into the ground in October, and by February, the plants are poking up through the soil. Then in April, he adds soybeans between the rows. The two crops grow together until the harvest, right around July 1.
Unlike the wheat Mauck grows in a monoculture, he doesn’t spray the intercropped wheat with fungicides at all — they simply don’t need the help to stay healthy. The combination of crops likely encourages airflow that dries moisture and prevents fungus from growing, Mauck said. With climate change bringing more extreme storms to the region, he welcomes the help.
Mauck’s experiences are far from unique. When biologist Mark Boudreau from Penn State Brandywine reviewed 206 studies on intercropping across a wide variety of plants and pathogens, he found that disease was reduced in 73 percent of the studies.
In China, farmers have been experimenting with intercropping for decades, and it’s catching on in Europe and the Middle East, Boudreau said. But in the American Midwest, Mauck said intercropping makes him “kind of a weirdo.” He speaks at about 20 conventions every year to spread the word about this and other sustainable farming practices, plus he has a lively social media following. He’s convinced some of his fellow farmers to try intercropping, but progress is slow.
Lack of equipment is a big part of the problem, said extension agronomist Clair Keene from North Dakota State University. Farm equipment companies haven’t invented the machine that will let farmers harvest mixed crops separately, and farmers usually don’t have the time to do multiple harvests. That would be an easy enough problem for farm equipment companies to solve, Boudreau thinks, if farmers put a bit of pressure on them.
In North Dakota, the humble chickpea might just provide the motivation farmers and farm equipment companies need. In recent years, the profit margin on chickpeas has been two to three times that of spring wheat — a common crop for the region. But there’s a problem: Chickpeas are very susceptible to a disease called Ascochyta leaf blight. “It can just wipe out the field. Like, there will be no chickpeas left to harvest,” Keene said. To avoid this fate, farmers spray their chickpeas with fungicides between two and five times a year, and the cost of the fungicides really cuts into the profit margin.
Intercropping could be an affordable alternative. Keene and others have found that Ascochyta leaf blight drops by at least 50 percent when chickpeas are grown along with flax. Like in Mauck’s fields, Keene thinks flax promotes airflow around the chickpeas, reducing moisture and preventing the blight-causing fungus from growing.
When Keene looks across the expansive crop fields that characterize her home state of North Dakota, she sees two sides to modern agriculture. On the one hand, monocultures have given many people a vital source of calories. “We as Americans — we’re using our landscape to provide a quality of life that, at least writ large, wasn’t ever dreamed of by generations before us,” she said. “And who’s making that happen? Farmers. We owe them a lot.”
But the same agricultural system has impacted the landscape dramatically, from the native plants that used to thrive in Midwestern prairies to the microbes that populate the soil. Changes are brewing in Earth’s climate, and a system we’ve come to rely on may start to falter. Modern agriculture has offered humans comfort: “But,” Keene asked, “at what ecological cost?”
