Kimmie Gordon remembers the many parents who worked in the steel mills. They were folks like her stepfather, who drove each day to the eastern side of Chicago or to Burns Harbor, Indiana where they toiled in the heat of massive furnaces, burning coal and iron ore to produce steel. The jobs paid well but the work was dirty. A fine layer of black soot seemed to coat everything they owned, even the insides of their lungs.
Gordon didn’t know it when she was growing up in the 1980s, but the pollutants that gathered in the folds of the workers’ clothing was in the air all over Gary, the majority-Black city in northern Indiana where she was raised. Today, the stretch of towns along the state’s border with Illinois is home to four of the country’s highest-polluting steel mills, which together account for 90 percent of the industry’s emissions, dumping hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic heavy metals like lead and chromium into the air each year.
Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed new rules for steel mills, aiming to cut toxic emissions by 79 tons per year, a 15 percent reduction from current levels, and requiring that U.S. Steel and Cleveland Cliffs, the only two companies operating the country’s 11 steel mills, measure concentrations of cancer-causing chromium along the borders of their sites. The EPA estimates that the new rules would also cut particulate pollution by 500 tons per year.
It’s the first step that the agency has ever taken to reduce emissions from leaks and equipment malfunctions at steel mills and comes after three separate lawsuits over 20 years. Local advocates that Grist spoke to said that the proposed measures, while welcome, are not nearly enough to keep their communities safe. Gary leads the nation in the amount of toxic industrial emissions per square mile.
“The EPA could have done better because we’re in a crisis,” said Gordon, who serves as the director of Brown Faces Green Spaces, a local environmental organization. “This 15 percent reduction means nothing to the people of Gary. Our needle is all the way past the red.”
The city of Gary was built around the steel industry. Once a quiet stretch of dunes on the lower rim of Lake Michigan, the area was transformed over the course of the early 20th century into a bustling mill town. U.S. Steel was the engine of this transformation, leveling hundreds of square miles of dunes and woods to erect mazes of furnaces and industrial ovens that belched black smoke into the air. After the Second World War, many white families moved to the suburbs and factory jobs declined, sowing the seeds of the city’s decline. Today, the population of Gary is 68,000, less than half its 1960 high of 178,000, and nearly a third of residents live in poverty, according to U.S. Census data. The toxic emissions remain.
Producing steel is a highly polluting enterprise that involves burning coal and combining the product, known as coke, with iron ore in a furnace before melting it all down into liquid steel. The chemicals released from this process include heavy metals like lead and arsenic, as well as fine particles that can get lodged inside lungs when inhaled. These pollutants have been linked to different cancers and chronic diseases, and numerousstudies have made connections between steel mill emissions and impaired heart and lung function.
Advocates sued the agency after it proposed the first standards for steel mills in 2003, arguing that those rules failed to control the release of carcinogens from several highly polluting types of equipment in facilities. In response, the agency agreed to revisit its proposal, but after years went by without any sign of a revised rule, advocates sued again in 2015. When the EPA produced a new rule in 2020, many residents were disappointed to find that it still did not control for many of the cancer-causing pollutants released by steel mills. They filed a third lawsuit later that year. James Pew, a senior attorney at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice who litigated all three of these cases, told Grist in an interview that the successive delays in regulation have enabled pollution to pile up in communities near mills, since heavy metals released into the air fall to the earth and accumulate in the soil, exposing residents, generation after generation.
“Their neglect over the last two to three decades has caused enormous harm,” Pew said. “Gary, Indiana has 100 years of lead buildup because the EPA has never done anything about it.”
The EPA previously said it’s not required to develop new emissions standards for unregulated steel mill pollutants, an assertion that was shot down by a federal circuit court in 2020. In an email, an agency spokesperson, Shayla Powell, told Grist that the newly proposed amendments would address regulatory gaps exposed by that court decision.
A man operates a furnace at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works plant in January, 1945
Otto Bettmann via Getty Images
The rule that the agency proposed on July 12 would limit pollution from five previously unregulated sources within steel mills, like the open pits where the toxic by-products of smelting ore are dumped and the valves through which contaminated air is released to depressurize equipment. Once implemented, the regulations are projected to reduce toxic emissions by 15 percent, from 520 tons per year to 440 tons per year. Pew told Grist that this figure is particularly disappointing because the EPA’s own research indicates that much larger emissions reductions are possible, at a minimal cost to operators.
The EPA projects that the toxic emissions reductions in the proposed rule will cost these two corporations approximately $2.8 million each year to implement, an amount local advocates like Gordon consider paltry. U.S. Steel and Cleveland Cliffs made a combined $44 billion in sales last year.
Amanda Malkowski, a spokesperson for U.S. Steel told Grist in an email that the company was disappointed with the proposal, which would have “exorbitant costs for implementation and provide very little, if any, environmental benefit,” she said. “U.S. Steel is committed to environmental compliance and working with EPA to have regulations that are technologically and economically feasible, while providing an environmental benefit.”
Cleveland Cliffs did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Roughly half of the emissions from steel production are directed into tall industrial chimneys, while the rest are released at the ground level through pressure valves and cracks in equipment. In a 2019 memo, the EPA estimated that operators could slash 65 percent of this latter set of emissions—190 tons per year in total—simply by implementing more stringent work practice standards. For example, the document cited a century-old protocol that could be used to prevent “slips,” a term referring to the situation in which raw materials fail to descend smoothly into furnaces, leading to high pressure conditions that cause valves to fly open, releasing toxic “dust clouds” into the air. Although the agency determined that slips should not occur more than four times every month, data submitted by mill operators indicates that some plants are averaging more than double that amount.
The proposed rule would require mill operators to set up monitors to measure levels of the toxic heavy metal chromium on the borders of their sites. If concentrations exceed the regulatory “action level,” operations would be required to submit an analysis identifying the cause. Advocates from mill towns told Grist that they appreciated the data collection requirement, but pointed out that steel mills emit over a dozen different toxic chemicals, principally lead, and wondered why the agency was limiting its monitoring efforts to one metal.
“There’s a bunch of things [in the proposal] where it’s like, ‘Oh, you guys did great,’ but there’s so many more chemicals that we’re being exposed to,” said Qiyam Ansari, an environmental advocate in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a small city in the Monongahela River Valley where U.S. Steel operates a mill and a separate coke plant. Since he moved to the valley, he said he’s suffered from asthma attacks that make it difficult to spend time outdoors.
Powell, the EPA spokesperson, told Grist that the agency had collected air samples at four steel mills over a six-month period, and found that lead concentrations were well below the national standard of 0.15 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
The EPA’s own analysis indicates that 27 percent of people living within 3 miles of the country’s operating steel mills are Black, making the pollution an issue of environmental justice, a term that refers to the disproportionate pollution borne by low income people and communities of color across the country. The proportion of Black residents in Gary and Clairton are 78 percent and 41 percent, respectively, much higher than the roughly 14 percent share of the U.S. population.
It could take years before the proposed rule takes effect. Once it’s posted in the Federal Register, the EPA will accept written comments from the public for 60 days. The agency is then required to consider the comments and update the rules based on feedback before finalizing them. Along the way, it may face legal challenges from advocates or industry groups.
In May, Adam Ortiz, the EPA administrator for the mid-Atlantic region, which includes Pennsylvania, traveled to Clairton to listen to residents’ concerns about pollution from steel production. Ansari said that after reviewing the details of the agency’s newly proposed standards, he believes that little will come of Ortiz’s visit.
“I’m continuously disappointed and lose my faith in our regulators the more I do this work,” he said.
These U.S. cities are setting an example for how people-powered transportation can look. PeopleforBikes evaluates cities for their bikeability based on how many people ride bikes, the ease and safety of biking, the breadth of neighborhoods serviced by bike infrastructure, and how quickly the bike network is expanding. These ratings change a bit every year, but there are a few that consistently jostle for top positions.
If you’re looking to plan a vacation somewhere where you can see the sights via bike, or choosing your next dwelling place based on bikeability, here are a few of the most bike-friendly cities in the United States.
Boulder, Colorado
A cyclist in Boulder rides along the second phase of the US 36 Bikeway, which opened in 2016 and extends for 18 miles from Table Mesa Dr. to 88th St. Andy Cross / The Denver Post
Take in views of the Rocky Mountains from a bicycle in Boulder. This city of over 100,000 took first place in PeopleForBikes’s 2019 ratings of the most bike-friendly cities in the U.S., and riding down its 300 miles of bikeway, it’s easy to see why — not to mention that Boulder sees 300 days of sunshine a year. Across the city you’ll see multi-use paths that are separate from car traffic, and designated underpasses for cyclists and pedestrians. People in Boulder are 20 times more likely to bike to work than the average American, but if you get caught in the rain and need to hop on a local bus, the whole fleet is equipped with bike racks. Dozens of self-service kiosks across the city rent out bikes, courtesy of Boulder Bcycle.
Eugene, Oregon
A cyclist passes by University of Oregon’s Hayward Field on April 14, 2023 in Eugene, Oregon. Wesley Lapointe for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Biking has a long history in Eugene. The city started putting together bikeways in 1972 at the urging of the mayor (who was a cyclist himself). Now, it consistently ranks highly in surveys of bikeable cities, and was named a Certified Gold Level Bicycle Friendly Community by the League of American Bicyclists. The city has a strong bike culture — aided by decades-old community organizations like The Greater Eugene Area Riders — and boasts 46 miles of shared-use paths, 187 miles of on-street bicycle lanes, and 71 miles of signed bikeways/neighborhood greenways. Their Safe Routes to Schools program is also making improvements to walking/bicycling infrastructure used by students getting to and from school, like adding better bike lanes and having safer crossing areas for cyclists and pedestrians.
Davis, California
An exceptionally wide bike lane in Davis, California. kate mccarthy / Flickr
Davis opened its first bike lane in 1967 and never looked back. Now, 98% of main streets in the city have some kind of bicycle infrastructure — including wide paths removed from the street and air pumps placed throughout the city’s major corridors — and with its great weather and relatively flat terrain, the high bike-commuting rate of 13.8% comes as no surprise. The modal share for cycling in the city is around 20%, nearing the iconically-bike-friendly Netherlands’ 25%. If you need further proof of these high cycling rates, the Third Street Bike Counter displays a digital reading of how many cyclists passed that day, the day before, and the total for the year so far.
Davis is even home to the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame, and the nonprofit Davis Bike Collective houses a public DIY shop with tools for repairing bikes. Residents can register their bike with the city through Bike Index, which helps identify bikes that have been lost or stolen.
Portland, Oregon
People commute to work on bicycles in Portland, Oregon. David Papazian / The Image Bank / Getty Images
In 2017, 6.3% of Portlanders (over 22,000 people) commuted by bike, which is the highest percentage of bike commuters of any large American city. Compared with the national percentage of 0.5%, it’s clear Portland values bikeability. Their bike network is 385 miles in total — which includes greenways, bike lanes, paths, and shared roadways — with nearly 100 more miles to be installed within the next few years. In total, the city’s bicycling infrastructure is valued at $60 million, and it’s among the five U.S. cities to receive the Platinum Level Bicycle Friendly Community certification by the League of American Bicyclists, its highest designation.
Madison, Wisconsin
A cyclist on a lakeside bike path in Madison, Wisconsin. filo / E+ / Getty Images
The unofficial bike capital of the Midwest, Madison touts that the city has more bikes than cars. It was named one of the healthiest cities in the country in 2015 by Livability, in part due to its walk- and bikeability. About 5% of residents commute by bicycle, and Madison BCycle makes it possible for visitors to check out bikes at over 40 locations around the city.
Brooklyn, New York
A cyclist rides on a bike path along Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. lechatnoir / E+ / Getty Images
You might not expect a bustling, high-density city of 2.6 million to rank among the most bike-friendly of cities, but PeopleForBikes ranks Brooklyn over all other New York City boroughs, and 10th overall in the country.
On Hoyt Street in Downtown Brooklyn — one of the busiest commuter streets in the borough — bikes now outnumber cars, according to The New York Times. The popular rentable Citi Bikes are now ubiquitous, and every day sees 450,000 bike trips across the city, 20% of which are made by commuters. Brooklyn itself has more than 300 miles of bike paths, lanes, and greenways — more than any other borough — and claims to be home to the original bike path circa 1894: the Ocean Parkway Bike Path, which stretches from Coney Island to Prospect Park.
Fort Collins, Colorado
Mountain bikers enjoy a double track trail in Fort Collins, Colorado. Jordan Siemens / Stone / Getty Images
This mid-sized city in Northern Colorado is often neck-in-neck with Boulder in national ratings of bike-friendly cities. With 200 miles of dedicated bike lanes, multi use trails, bikeways, and shared roadways criss-cross over practically the whole city — all against a backdrop of the Rocky Mountain foothills — it is another recipient of the coveted Platinum Level Bicycle Friendly Community certification. The city’s trails, however, are the real star of the show. The Poudre River trail is 12 miles long and runs along the Cache La Poudre River (a National Heritage Area), which cuts right through downtown and then connects with another 22-mile section of trail — and in typical Colorado fashion, the trail heads right towards some of the city’s many craft breweries. Mark your calendar for the city’s Bike To Work (or Wherever) Day every year, where bikers can pick up free breakfast from local businesses and organizations all over town.
San Francisco, California
A cyclist’s point of view on a commuting journey across the Golden Gate Bridge. georgeclerk / E+ / Getty Images
Consistently named one of the country’s most bike-friendly cities, San Francisco is home to beautiful, scenic bike paths like the Golden Gate Bridge Bike Trail, as well as robust biking infrastructure throughout the city. An average of 128,000 bicycle trips are taken daily on 463 miles of bikeway, and 16% of San Franciscans are “frequent cyclists,” meaning they bike two or more days a week. SFMTA has a trip planner on their website where residents and visitors can type in their start and end locations to find the best biking route there, and rent a bike from one of the 280 bikeshare stations across the city.
The naturally occurring hormone melatonin, known to help with sleep, has been found to have another unrelated benefit: It can extend the freshness of fruits and vegetables.
Melatonin is produced by the brain, and is also present in many plants, including bananas, cherries, tomatoes, rice, wheat and olive oil.
When fruits and vegetables are transported in refrigerated trucks or stored at temperatures that are too cold, they can get “chilling injury,” reported Food Ingredients First. Researchers have recently found that melatonin can prevent this common postharvest issue.
Horticultural scientists from Edith Cowan University (ECU) have spent the past year compiling research from across the globe on melatonin’s benefits for keeping fruits and vegetables fresher for longer, a press release from ECU said.
“You will often see abnormal ripening, sunken spots, pitting, hardening of flesh and browning of peel and pulp in cold-stored fruits, while browning of tissues, translucency and water-soaked lesions in the vegetables, that is what we call chilling injury,” said Zora Singh, Foundation Professor of Horticultural Science in ECU’s School of Science and lead researcher of the study, in the press release.
The study, “Insight into the Role of Melatonin in Mitigating Chilling Injury and Maintaining the Quality of Cold-Stored Fruits and Vegetables,” was published in the journal Food Reviews International.
According to Singh, 44 percent of fresh produce goes bad between harvest and consumption, with chilling injury a major cause.
Berries can be kept fresh in the refrigerator for a week to 12 days, while fruits like apples can stay fresh in storage for as long as nine months. Fruits that grow in tropical and subtropical climates are most at risk for chilling injury.
“The average storage temperature for subtropical fruits and vegetables usually range[s] from 4–8°C while 10–20°C is optimum temperature to avoid chilling injury in tropical horticultural produce,” Singh said.
Singh and the research team said melatonin has been shown to reduce or prevent chilling injury’s effects on fruits and vegetables, and that it can be used instead of chemicals.
“Melatonin is a natural sleeping hormone in living organisms, and it is also helpful in reducing chilling injury symptoms and membrane leakage by maintaining higher levels of antioxidants and freshness of horticultural produce,” explained researcher and Ph.D. student Shoaib Shah in the press release. “Melatonin is a safe alternative to hazardous chemical treatments, without any adverse effects on consumer health.”
As annual food losses mount worldwide, preserving more produce without the use of dangerous chemicals could help with global food security.
Each year, an estimated $400 billion worth of food, that’s 13.2 percent, is lost from harvest to market, while 17 percent of food is wasted by the food service industry, retail and households. Food waste and loss are responsible for an estimated eight to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
Fresh produce production is declining due to several factors, like reduced water supplies, soil degradation, climate change and chilling injury.
“When it comes to grains and other produce for harvest, they are more resilient than fresh horticultural produce,” Singh said in the press release. “Fruit and vegetables are not only challenging to grow, preserving them is immensely difficult and this is a crisis affecting nations all over the world, so we need to find the solution to keep producing food from the earth in a sustainable way.”
There’s something about taking the train. The slow pace, the observation car where you are treated to a panoramic view of trees, hilly fields and rivers while reading and munching on a snack. Taking the train allows you to see the countryside connecting where you left to where you’re going, not just getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible.
It’s a journey, and it saves on carbon emissions, big time. Walking, biking and taking the train are the most environmentally-friendly ways to travel. Going by rail instead of flying can reduce your emissions by approximately 84 percent for domestic trips, according to Our World in Data.
A new Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe study has found that people looking for travel options in Europe are being encouraged to fly instead of taking the train because of “an unfair competitive advantage” for the airlines, a press release from Greenpeace said.
The Greenpeace report looked at the costs of tickets for trains and airlines on 112 European routes at nine different times. It found that, on average, train tickets were twice as expensive as those for flights, with some routes astronomically higher. For example, the cost of a train ticket from London to Barcelona was 30 times higher than a plane ticket.
“One of the reasons people choose to fly rather than travel by train is price: why would anyone take the train from London to Barcelona and pay up to €384 when air tickets are available for the ridiculously low price of €12.99? Citizens deserve to have access to a clean, efficient and affordable transport system that does not harm the climate, people and our planet,” the report said.
Even though flying is so much worse for the planet than traveling by train, airlines don’t have to pay tax on kerosene, the main component of jet fuel, the press release said. There is no equivalent exemption for railways.
“Airlines benefit from outrageous fiscal advantages. Planes pollute far more than trains, so why are people being encouraged to fly? Low-cost airlines, in particular, have exploited every loophole and trick in the book. €10 airline tickets are only possible because others, like workers and taxpayers, pay the true cost,” said Lorelei Limousin, Greenpeace EU senior climate campaigner, in the press release.
Of the routes looked at for the study, 18 were domestic and 94 crossed country borders. On 71 percent of the routes, flights were cheaper than train tickets. Just 23 routes were “almost always” less expensive to make by train rather than flying.
Of the routes studied, 79 percent were operated by low-cost airlines, which “are in most cases cheaper than rail thanks to their unfair and aggressive pricing strategies,” the press release said.
“In short: if you fly, you are subsidised; if you take the train, you are punished by higher prices – as well as the fact that the journey is often longer,” said Stefan Gössling, a professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who has studied flight emissions, as The Guardian reported.
In Europe, aviation as a producer of greenhouse gas emissions grew 29 percent from 2009 to 2019, the fastest-growing source in Europe in recent decades, according to the press release.
Greenpeace encourages European governments to introduce affordable, long-term climate tickets to be used for all public transportation means in a country or designated region, adding that they should be compatible with a climate ticket for international use. Revenues for climate tickets could be funded by the phasing out of airline subsidies, a “fair taxation system based on CO2 emissions” and taxes on windfall profits.
“For the planet and people’s sake, politicians must act to turn this situation around and make taking the train the more affordable option, or else we’re only going to see more and more heatwaves like the one currently wreaking total havoc in Spain, Italy, Greece and elsewhere,” Limousin said in the press release.
The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords of the UK has published a new report that highlights harmful health impacts from artificial light pollution and noise pollution. It recommends increased research and policies for these “neglected pollutants” that lack regulation and have impacts that are not well understood.
The report, titled “The neglected pollutants: the effects of artificial light and noise on human health,” shows how these pollutants negatively impact human health, which can also lead to poor economic and social outcomes.
“Not only can they cause annoyance, impacting quality of life, but through the disruption of sleep and circadian rhythms, both noise and light pollution can contribute to heart disease and premature death,” Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge and chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, said in a statement. “Whilst the increased risk to an individual may be low, the exposure of millions of people results in a significant aggregate health burden.”
The World Health Organization has reported that traffic noise impacts about 40% of people in the European Union, and about one in five people in this region are exposed to dangerous levels of noise at night.
Further, the UK Health Security Agency suggests that traffic noise alone led to a loss of about 130,000 healthy life years in the UK. in 2018. Light pollution has been harder to track, but research suggests the rise of LEDs has also led to growing light pollution, according to the report.
In a separate review published in 2021, researchers analyzing studies on noise and light pollution found that these pollutants may have an impact on microbiomes, which could further impact human health. However, many studies on this topic are small or dated, so additional research is needed.
The Science and Technology Committee has come to a similar conclusion, noting that the UK’s 25 Year Environment Plan barely touches on these pollutants and doesn’t set any regulations on reducing noise or light pollution.
The committee advises that the UK should set up a specific advisory group on noise pollution and that the UK Health Security Agency should create a group dedicated to studying light pollution, similar to the established advisory group for air pollution, to assess health impacts. It suggests that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) do more lab and field studies on the health impacts of these pollutants and create a method of tracking, monitoring and reporting light pollution. The committee also recommends policies that target the pollutants.
“The Government should focus on quantifying the health effects of noise and light pollution, set targets and a framework for regulation to reduce the overall burden of disease,” King said. “It should do this by the time of the next five-year Environmental Improvement Plan cycle. It must also strengthen coordination between departments and between central and local government, to ensure meaningful improvements in public health and quality of life in the UK for the benefit of all.”
It’s been nearly a year since Democratic lawmakers pushed the first new climate spending legislation in more than a decade over the congressional finish line. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, or IRA, includes $369 billion in clean-energy tax credits and funding for climate and energy programs, money that is already trickling into the economy as federal agencies begin to distribute it.
The Biden administration said the bill will help deliver on the president’s pledge to cut the United States’ emissions in half by 2030, and independent analyses estimated that it would help slash domestic emissions by 43 to 48 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. Now, researchers have made an updated prediction. The Rhodium Group, an independent analytics firm that tracks greenhouse gas emissions produced by the U.S. economy, published a report on Thursday that shows just how much climate progress the IRA will usher in — and where the legislation will fall flat.
“Nearly one year after it passed, the IRA’s effects are coming into clearer focus,” a spokesperson for Rhodium Group said.
The report, the ninth edition of Rhodium’s annual emissions assessment, found that the IRA and state-level climate bills that have been signed into law by governors across the country in recent years will drive emissions down between 29 and 42 percent in 2030, compared to 2005 levels. By 2035, greenhouse gas emissions will decrease between 32 and 51 percent. Prior to the IRA’s passage, the nation was on track to cut emissions by 26 to 41 percent by 2035, according to Rhodium’s estimate from 2022. Rhodium called the overall reductions “a meaningful departure from previous years’ expectations for the U.S. emissions trajectory.”
Thanks to the IRA’s subsidies, solar and wind energy are already becoming a lot cheaper: solar by nearly 40 percent and wind by 55 percent. The legislation will also influence the speed with which electric vehicles replace gas-powered cars. In 2035, electric vehicles will comprise between one-third and two-thirds of all passenger car sales, the report said. That’s meaningful progress, but the emissions reductions aren’t steep enough to get the U.S. fully on track to meet its pledge to reduce emissions 50 to 52 percent by 2030 under the Paris Agreement, the 2015 international treaty on climate change that aims to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
That’s because federal policy levers are only one piece of the decarbonization puzzle. A number of other factors could influence the speed and extent to which renewable energy technologies replace oil, coal, and gas, including how the industrial sector behaves and whether states continue to pass ambitious climate policies.
And because the IRA revolves around incentives for clean energy, rather than penalties for fossil fuel use, some of the factors impacting the speed with which the economy decarbonizes won’t be influenced by the federal legislation.
For example, Rhodium projects that natural gas, which made up roughly 36 percent of the nation’s power mix in 2022, will comprise 6 to 29 percent of the power supply by 2035, depending on whether utilities take advantage of the incentives in the bill and what types of renewable energies are feasible in their markets. Natural gas, a cheap source of energy, surpassed coal as the nation’s leading source of electricity in 2016. Despite the incentives in the IRA, gas is still abundant, affordable, and here to stay for the foreseeable future.
In New York City, a city that has positioned itself as a leader in the green transition and has vowed to reduce fossil fuel use 80 percent by 2050, environmental activists successfully lobbied for the closure of the nearby Indian Point Nuclear plant, which prompted the city to temporarily rely on natural gas-powered plants as it works to build infrastructure that can funnel hydropower from Canada to Queens.
Over the course of the next decade, policymakers, regulators, and utility executives will weigh similar trade-offs between cost, climate impact, and public opinion across the country, and they won’t all choose the same path. That will result in a patchy network of green and dirty electricity. The ranges presented in the new Rhodium report account for that patchiness.
But they also show that the IRA is making a difference. “Though there’s uncertainty on just how fast the U.S. scales up renewable energy on the grid or EVs on the road, those levels of deployment would be meaningfully lower than what we’re estimating in our modeling under otherwise the same conditions absent the IRA,” Ben King, lead author of the report, told Grist.
In order to continue making progress on climate change, Congress will likely need to pass additional climate laws, including legislation directed at hastening the permitting process for new large-scale renewable energy projects, beefing up the green energy workforce, and resolving kinks in the supply chain that are hamstringing green technology deployment. That has become harder to do since Republicans retook control of the House of Representatives in January.
The goals of the Paris Agreement are still within reach, the report reads, “but getting there won’t be easy.”
Climate Connections is a collaboration between Grist and the Associated Press that explores how a changing climate is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases around the world, and how mitigation efforts demand a collective, global response. Read more here.
As the planet warms, mosquitoes are slowly migrating to higher places — and bringing malaria to populations not used to dealing with the potentially deadly disease.
Researchers have documented the insects making their homes in higher places that are typically too cool for them, from the tropical highlands of South America to the mountainous but populous regions of eastern Africa. A recent Georgetown University study found them moving upward in sub-Saharan Africa at the rate of 21 feet per year.
“The link between climate change and expansion or change in mosquito distributions is real,” said Doug Norris, a specialist in mosquitoes at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
It’s difficult to pinpoint how these shifting mosquito populations will affect specific populations, Norris said, in part because people have gotten better at fighting malaria.
Global deaths from the disease declined by 27 percent between 2002 and 2021, as countries have adopted insecticide-treated nets, antimalarial drugs, and tests. Eighteen million doses of a new malaria vaccine are set to be distributed across Africa in the next two years.
But the world faces new threats: U.S. health officials say the first malaria cases in the United States since 2003 were found in Florida and Texas in May and June, and an invasive mosquito species is likely behind spikes in malaria in Djibouti and Ethiopia. Climate change presents another emerging threat, World Health Organization officials wrote in their latest global malaria report.
One study published in 2016 found the habitat for malaria-carrying mosquitoes had expanded on the higher elevations of Kilimanjaro by hundreds of square kilometers in just 10 years. The densely populated region faces new risks from malaria as a result, the research found, especially considering the population has not faced much exposure before. Meanwhile, the study found fewer mosquitoes at warming lower elevations.
“As it gets warmer at higher altitudes with climate change and all of these other environmental changes, then mosquitoes can survive higher up the mountain,” said Manisha Kulkarni, a professor and researcher studying malaria in sub-Saharan Africa at the University of Ottawa.
The region Kulkarni studied, which is growing in population, is close to the border of Tanzania and Kenya. Together, the two countries accounted for 6 percent of global malaria deaths in 2021.
Jeremy Herren, who studies malaria at the Nairobi-based International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, said there is evidence that warming temperatures influence where mosquito populations choose to live. But it’s challenging to make sweeping predictions about how that will affect the spread of malaria, he said.
For example, Herren noted the long-dominant mosquito species in Kenya fell off in the mid-2000s, around the same time that insecticide-treated nets were widely distributed. The species is now nearly impossible to find, he said, a shift that is likely not attributable to climate change.
Mosquitoes are also picky about their habitat, Norris said. The different malaria-carrying species have various preferences in temperature, humidity, and amount of rainfall. In general, however, mosquito larvae grow faster in warmer conditions, he said.
Rising temperatures are also not the only way a changing climate gives mosquitoes the upper hand. The bugs tend to thrive in the kind of extremes that are happening more frequently because of human-caused climate change.
Mosquitoes tend to thrive in the kind of extremes that are happening more frequently because of human-caused climate change.
Longer rainy seasons can create better habitats for mosquitoes, which breed in water. But conversely, while droughts can dry up those habitats, they also encourage people to store water in containers, creating perfect breeding sites. An outbreak of chikungunya, another mosquito-borne disease, between 2004 and 2005 was linked to drought in coastal Kenya for these reasons.
Researchers found malaria cases in the highlands of Ethiopia fell in the early 2000s in tandem with a decline in temperatures as global warming temporarily stalled.
Pamela Martinez, a researcher at the University of Illinois, said her team’s findings on malaria trends in Ethiopia, published in 2021 in the journal Nature, lent more confidence to the idea that malaria and temperature — and therefore climate change — are linked.
“We see that when temperature goes down, the overall trend of cases also goes down, even in the absence of intervention,” Martinez said. “That proves the case that temperature has an impact on transmission.”
Ethiopia’s temperatures began to warm again in the mid-2000s, but public health officials also ramped up efforts to control malaria in the highlands around that time, which has contributed to a sustained decline in cases. But even as the Ethiopian Ministry of Health drafted a plan to eliminate malaria by 2030, its authors laid out the threats to that goal: population shifts, a lack of funding, the invasion of a new mosquito species, and climate change.
After years of criticism for its outsize use of plastic, the world’s largest retailer appears to be making progress to reduce its plastic footprint.
Amazon announced in its latest sustainability report on Tuesday that orders shipped from its fulfillment centers used 85,916 metric tons of single-use plastic in 2022 — an 11.6 percent decrease from the amount used in 2021.
The company attributed this decline to its expanded use of paper-based packaging, as well as an increased effort to ship items in their original containers — without adding any Amazon-branded packaging. Amazon has also stopped using nonrecyclable bags made of mixed materials, and on Tuesday it said it was “phasing out” padded plastic mailers — those ubiquitous blue and white envelopes studded with the Amazon logo — in favor of “recyclable alternatives.”
Eliminating padded plastic mailers is a “big, big deal,” said Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president for strategic initiatives for the nonprofit Oceana, although he called on the company to set a concrete timeline for doing so. He called Amazon’s sustainability report “good news for the oceans,” since plastic film like the kind used in Amazon’s packaging is one of the most common forms of marine plastic litter and is the deadliest type of plastic to marine animals.
Plastics have other impacts, too: They’re made of fossil fuels and are a major source of climate pollution, and they cause toxic chemical pollution at every stage of their life cycle. Meanwhile, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics is just 5 percent, meaning the vast majority of plastics are littered, burned, or sent to a landfill.
Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report is the first to include a quantitative estimate of the company’s single-use plastics footprint; previously, the company’s only other estimate came from a blog post last December. Before that, organizations like Oceana had to publish their own estimates and had called for greater transparency — sometimes through investor pressure. Over the past three years, shareholder advocacy groups have repeatedly filed resolutions demanding that Amazon disclose the amount of plastic it uses and reduce it by one-third by 2030. One resolution, co-filed in December 2021 by Green Century Capital Management and As You Sow, was supported by nearly half of Amazon shareholders.
Now, environmental advocates say Amazon appears to be on the right path — in contrast to many other major plastic users. Even companies that have signed onto a prominent pledge to reduce virgin plastic use have moved in the wrong direction: Over the past several years, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mars, and many others have reported an increasein the weight of their virgin plastic packaging.
Still, the 86,000 metric tons of plastic used in Amazon fulfillment centers is a lot, and Douglass Guernsey, a shareholder advocate for Green Century Capital Management, said Amazon must move much faster to replace other types of plastic packaging — like non-padded plastic mailers — with reusable alternatives or packaging made from recycled paper. He called for third-party verification of Amazon’s single-use plastic reductions, and for the company to disclose more information about its plastics use: “What type of plastic is Amazon using?” Guernsey asked. “How much is designed to be recyclable?”
Guernsey also criticized Amazon for failing to make a forward-looking, time-bound commitment to reduce its plastics use. “I would like them to make a statement saying, ‘We’re phasing out single-use plastic. We’re Amazon, we can do that,’” he said.
Littlejohn said Amazon should ensure that its plastic reductions manifest throughout the company’s supply chains. Although the numbers cited in Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report likely apply to the majority of Amazon orders — those shipped from the company’s fulfillment centers — they don’t cover those that are shipped from third-party sellers’ doorsteps. Amazon doesn’t disclose what fraction of its sales are shipped from third-party sellers.
Amazon declined to respond to a series of questions about its plastic use, but a spokesperson for the company said they “continue to prioritize materials that are recyclable and to find alternatives to plastic.” The spokesperson noted some of Amazon’s previously published progress, including the elimination of single-use plastic air pillows in Europe and Australia.
Both Guernsey and Littlejohn vowed to keep campaigning for stronger action from Amazon. “Investors care about this,” Guernsey said. “The shareholder process has been incredibly important … and we’re going to continue to use it to pressure the company to reduce its environmental footprint.”
Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction initiative, publishes stories that envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, imagining intersectional worlds of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope.
Wake from a passing barge nearly throws me over the edge of Nelson’s flat bottom boat. He is winching in his gill nets and I am wondering if it is a bad idea for me to try and help him with the day’s catch. It can get dicey, gill netting silver, bighead, and common carp. The silvers and bigheads like to bask in the calmer pockets of water where your nets can get snagged and the common carp prefer to skirt the bank where it’s two or three feet deep, foraging for worms, insects, and whatever else they can find. Losing a net is a big deal too because you can get fined for “ghost fishing,” or catching and killing fish in an accidentally lost net. The electric engine is whining with the weight of the catch though and Nelson keeps saying, “It’s a good day, Benjamin! It’s a good day!”
Nelson let me borrow his Grundens, which are two sizes too big, but he doesn’t want me to wear his dad’s old gear. He’s the only person who gets that privilege.
“Fishing coming up,” Nelson shouts. I see it, a bighead, probably twenty pounds. I grab the tail, free its head with the fish pick, and toss it in the front of the boat. It smacks its tail on the deck. “That’s the sound of money,” Nelson yells. He’s one of a dozen or so commercial fishermen who gill net carp on the Missouri River. When the water was dirty, the carp were a constant source of hand-wringing and injury. The silvers have a bad habit of jumping out of the water when scared and colliding with the faces of unfortunate boaters. The Big Muddy is clean now, and Nelson can market his carp in the new KC port. Ramen spots in Westport serve Missouri local fish cakes, a local cajun place uses the meat to make smoked fish dip, and what doesn’t get sold to the food market gets used for fertilizer.
Another bighead surfaces as Nelson pulls in more net. This one is bigger, thirty pounds maybe. I stick its body under my arm like a football, slip the net off with the pick, and heave it into the hold. It goes that way until there are at least fifty fish piled in the bottom of the boat. We’ve nearly pulled in all the net, the marker buoy bobbing towards us, when I see a huge white shape roll at the surface. The tail is a foot tall at least and I recognize the gray and cream coloration.
“Sturgeon!” I shout. Nelson positions himself to keep the winch going and help me, but then the marker buoy bobs underneath the water and the boat lurches sideways. I hold on to the gunwale, trying to steady myself, and Nelson hits the emergency stop on the winch.
“Fuck,” he mutters, tugging on the net. “It’s snagged. How is that even possible? We need to get that fish out of the net.” The marker buoy bobs back up then disappears as Nelson gives the net a tug. Neither one of us want to see the sturgeon die, but if we can’t get the net unstuck, it’s a real possibility. I pull with him, but the only thing we manage is to inch the boat backwards.
“Ben, grab an oar. We’re just going to have to swing around and grab it. I can’t risk getting the prop tangled in that net.” He cuts the engine right when I grab an oar. I rush to the helm, slip through the piles of fish, and paddle furiously on port side. I look over my shoulder and Nelson is leaning over the gunwale, a knife in one hand, straining to reach the entangled sturgeon as we turn and drift towards it. Then, he plunges headfirst into the river, the soles of his boots skyward. I scramble back to the stern just in time to see his head pop up above the surface. He takes a deep breath and then starts cutting through the net. His life jacket is barely keeping him afloat and I know that as soon as he severs the connection between the boat and the gill net, he and the sturgeon are going to start drifting down current.
“A fish this size can be a hundred years old, older than the last great flood.”
“Take it in!” he shouts as he cuts the last part of the net. I flip the winch on to take up the last of the net and hit the red button to start the outboard. It sputters, but doesn’t turn over. Nelson is holding on to the sturgeon like a floaty and the two are already going downriver.
“Blue button then the red button!” he shouts. This time the outboard starts and I circle the boat around. The end of the gill net is still snagged beneath the surface so Nelson and the sturgeon are now being buried by the current. I pull up and engage the spot lock so the boat will hold next to him. I lean over the edge, grab the back of Nelson’s collar, and pull him to the boat. The current is pushing his head forward, but he manages to grab the gunwale and I help pull him onto the deck. He lays on his back for a minute, laughing, water pouring off his clothes. He’s missing a shoe.
With shaky arms, I pilot the boat within arm’s reach of the sturgeon. Nelson rolls over and slaps me on the back.
“Thanks Ben,” he says. “Thanks.” Together, we pull the sturgeon up next to the boat and I use the fish pick to free it from the net. It’s a six footer, with a dark gray back.
“Everyone thought these were going to go extinct,” Nelson says breathlessly. I cradle its head in my arms and dip it in the water, facing the current so it can revive. A fish this size can be a hundred years old, older than the last great flood. I feel it start to kick, strength returning to it, and I lift the slate-colored head for one last look. Then, we release it back into the river and it disappears into the murky water. Nelson pulls us to the marker buoy and we break it off the snag. We ride in silence to the port at the flooded west bottoms.
The port flooded back when it was a stockyard in 1951, over a hundred and fifty years ago. They rebuilt it only to have the same flood that swept away KC United Power wipe it out a second time. Now it’s a shallow bayou full of long piers, frog giggers, and houseboats. It floods every year, but people are used to it. We’ve learned to live with the river.
When we unload the last fish to the processor, Nelson turns to me and shakes his head. He’s still soaked and there’s a scrape on his hand from a fish barb.
“I thought I was in trouble there for a second. My foot was wrapped up in the net.” He points to his shoeless foot. “My own river damn near killed me.”
“That’s why you love it though, right?” I say. He pulls his shirt off and wrings the water out of it.
“True words. Maybe you only love rivers that kill you.”
* * *
Nelson is sipping a beer, splayed out on the gravel bar, watching the drip of the bulkhead across the river. I’m sizing up the ten-pound grass carp he’s tasked me with filleting, which I’ve never done before. I tell people I’m an apostate of vegetarianism, but you’re never supposed to take the word of an apostate. We’re there to eat the inaugural carp celebrating that the Blue River is finally clean enough to eat from. We’re also there because Nelson’s dad died the day before and Nelson said he needed the river.
“My granddad never told me what that is,” he says, pointing towards it. The bulkhead is a cracked steel door, like in a submarine, but big enough to drive a truck through. Next to it is the remodeled Prospect bridge, and we’re sitting on part of the riverbank that used to be chain-linked riprap. Metal warehouse roofs, lit by LED spotlights, just peak above the old stone wall of the Bannister Federal Complex, a nuclear manufacturing facility that leaked toxic waste into the river in the early 2000s. That was a hundred years ago though. Now, its spongy, erosion-protective grounds store biodegradable straws. Poetry.
“It’s where they tossed out the dead bodies,” I say. Nelson laughs. He’s wearing his granddad’s muck boots, which have at least six visible holes in them. “You think I’m joking, but what else is an eight-foot-tall cement bulkhead for if not filling up with bodies to be dumped in the river when it floods? Wouldn’t have been the first time they dumped stuff here.”
“You still working on that fish?” he asks. He looks over his shoulder at the uncut carp, nods, and looks back at the river. “Scale it first, then start at the head, right where the scales would start. Slip the knife between one, flat along the spine.” I do as he says. I slide the back of the knife against the scales, knocking them off. They are quarter sized, like plate armor. I slide the knife down the back bone, crunching through the y-bones that run the length of the fillet.
I’m Nelson’s protege. In exchange for help running his carp nets on the Missouri I soak up his knowledge of Kansas City. His family is from east of Troost and they know the metro better than anyone. His great granddad was a Black business tycoon and spent all his money buying up the private land on the Blue River. He willed it to the Department of Conservation after his death. His granddad was the river, breathed it, worked next to it, was poisoned by the Bannister Federal Complex. His father was a wildlife biologist, a guerrilla conservationist who snuck into the park to remove invasive honeysuckle when Jackson County couldn’t get their shit together.
Nelson’s a search engine for the Blue River’s fauna: beavers, deer, mink, you name it. He knows where they live, what they eat, when they fuck for God’s sake. He knows all the other stuff too, wild grapes, how to tell the difference between a blackberry and a dewberry. We pick the chanterelles and other wild mushrooms that hide in the woods, but most often, we’re at the river. I’m his friend now too, which is pretty much unavoidable when you share the river together.
“His granddad was the river, breathed it, worked next to it … “
“You’re getting there,” he says, looking over his shoulder again. He hops up. “This is a special carp, you know?”
I nod. They used to call them ditch salmon, polychlorinated biphenyls spiderwebbed in their fillets. Every nosing carp that rolled in the Blue River flats was a swimming public health catastrophe. Think melanoma, gall bladder disorders, Chernobyl-style shit. People hated them for it too, like the fish were PCBaholics, eagerly sucking the chemical despite intervention, rehab. There was a whole pamphlet about it, a warning. Grass and common carp, ALL SIZES, don’t eat more than one a month. It wasn’t the fishes’ fault though.
“Goddamnit,” Nelson says under his breath. “I wish…”
His face twists. His dad should’ve been here to see it. They’d tried to make it happen, but there was no way he could travel.
“You know, Dad told me today that these boots were all granddad had left when he died. Cancer ate up all the rest of his goddamn life because of this place. I always thought he’d left my dad a little bit of money, but nope. Just these old ass boots.”
“Did your dad go peacefully?”
Nelson shakes his head. He has a rod stuck in the bank, a live blue-gill on the other end, hoping to catch a flathead. “Dad wasn’t ever gonna go easy.”
I want to say I’m sorry, but I just nod. His eyes are fixed on the bulkhead. My grandpa had told me about the river too, but not like Nelson. He had grown up in Kansas City, west of Troost, and to them it was a distant catastrophe. He existed outside the redlined Black neighborhoods, floating above the city’s history like it was a documentary and not part of his hometown. When the Troost divide started to melt, the runoff of local memory made its way west, into the white neighborhoods that’d tried to forget. West KC was forced to remember.
At one time, the Bannister Federal Complex had been the Kansas City Speedway, then a manufacturing facility in the Second World War, an office for the IRS. Before it was shut down, its final iteration was a nuclear manufacturing plant. Airborne toxins started to poison the workers in the active part of the facility, then the office staff, until the administration couldn’t hide behind fudged reports anymore. My granddad heard it on the news, wrote a letter to the city. By that time though, Nelson’s granddad was coughing blood.
I throw the fish head in the river. Sometimes we keep it for soup, but it’s early summer. Too hot for that. The crayfish will find it, scuttle out from beneath the rocks and recycle it back into the riverbed.
Nelson walks over and crouches above the electric camp stove we brought down to help us fry the fish. He pulls a bag of cornmeal from his backpack, a pot, a glass bottle of oil, a metal camping bowl, and a plate. I score the fillets so he can rub cornmeal in between the gaps to fry the y bones soft.
The little beep of the burner reminds me of the old propane camp stove my dad still used when I was growing up. The whooshing of natural gas being ignited is nostalgic, but my dad was an ironic hold-out when the natural gas industry shut down. Gasoline and propane disappeared when I was in elementary school. Now, it’s all batteries.
He puts the pot on the burner and pours an inch of oil in. I stare at the pot as he gently places the fillets in to fry. The sizzling and bubbling of fish mixes with the trickle of the river and the droning of bullfrogs.
“You really think it’s safe to eat?” I ask. Nelson flips a carp fillet with his fork.
“You know, when dad found out he was dying, he started coming down here all the time and eating fish. Every day he had the energy he was frying up carp. He said he could feel the river had recovered, heard turkeys again, saw beaver sign. They hadn’t announced the end of the pollution advisory. I just thought he didn’t care anymore since he was going to die anyways.”
“He wasn’t too far off though,” I say. “Fourth of July, two years ago, he talked me and my dad’s ears off about it. I thought it was just talk.”
Nelson grins. “One day, son, it’ll be so clean you can drink it!” he says, shaking his finger at me. “Don’t you stop believing that.”
“My dad tried that after talking to him.”
“No shit,” Nelson says. I laugh and nod. My dad, with his ridiculous panama jack hat, sipping the Blue River on his hands and knees, saying he wanted to reconnect to nature.
“He got giardia. Puked his guts out. I told him to boil his water next time and he told me to mind my own damn business.”
“Rightly so. It’s a man’s inalienable right to give himself waterborne parasites,” Nelson says. He lifts the fillets from the oil and sets them on the plate. I fish around in my backpack for the spice shaker. A semi silently glides across the Prospect bridge above us, autopilot lights pulsing blue, and I stop to watch it pass. It backlights the box elders and sycamores that separate the road from the riparian forest below. I think back to being a ten year old, clambering through cathedrals of invasive honeysuckle before they figured out how to eradicate it. That world feels thousands of years away.
I pull my canteen from my pack, dip it in the river, and screw the cap on. Everyone has portable filters now. The water is cold even though it’s June. I offer it to Nelson.
“To life,” I say. He takes it from me, steps into the river, and stares again at the bulkhead door. He raises the canteen then puts it to his lips. To life.
* * *
The ANGELINA’shull is only visible in winter, when the mouth of the Blue River runs low at its entrance point into the Missouri. Last year’s floods unearthed the bridge, which Nelson and I had seen just peak above the water’s surface in the fall. We are floating down the Blue River, intending to be the first to search the long abandoned vessel.
Nelson and I dig our paddles into the flow so that we’ll beach on the sandbar where we think we can climb into the control deck. KC United Power used to own the mouth of the Blue, until a hundred year flood destroyed the station, buried Bayer’s Crop Science institute in a foot of silt and deadfall, and created an oxbow lake between Blue River and Rock Creek. Most of the old floodplain is now public land or Department of Conservation-leased crop fields.
Duck hunters call in the distance and I hear the whistle of gliding waterfowl above me. Nelson puts a hand to his ear, nods, and we hear one, two, three shotgun blasts in quick succession. It’s probably Stuart Mills and his friends. They are the most faithful congregants around the backwaters near downtown. Stuart is in his seventies, grew up east of Troost, before the flood, and used to drive three hours to try to find waterfowl. We met him at the boat ramp upstream two years ago. It’s a yearly event to ride with Stuart in his busted up jon boat and watch him hobble to the duck blind with his equally ancient black lab. They always come home with ducks. Everyone does now.
After the flood, the Missouri finally chewed up enough wing dikes to slow and widen. It was a renaissance for wildlife and the Corps of Engineers decided that their sonar mapping was good enough to let the river breathe again. Now, the urban core who’d lived generations disconnected from the cottonwood bottoms and marshes that the first humans would’ve found alongside the Big Muddy have rediscovered the river.
* * *
Nelson and I slip out of our kayaks and haul them onto the sandbar. It’s the kind of sand that you only find in rivers, the kind you can sink into, that finds its way between your fingers and behind your ears. Nelson reaches the rusted sides of the barge first.
“It’s bigger than I thought,” he says. The deck is a good fifteen feet in the air and the hull angles slightly away from us. I uncoil a ratchet strap and toss it onto the ship. Careful does it. I pull it back until the hook end of the strap catches one of the portside cleats.
“You wanna test it?” I ask Nelson, handing him the strap. He shrugs and gives it a sharp pull. “If I break my leg, you have to tow me back, you know.”
“Tow you my ass. You paddle with your arms, not your legs,” I say, grinning. Nelson grabs the strap and starts climbing. He’s got those farmer hands from running his commercial gill nets. Most everyone does something with their hands these days though. My specialty is lion’s mane mushrooms.
Once Nelson clambers over the gunwale, he unhooks the strap and wraps it around the cleat so there’s no way it’ll slip off. I give him a thumbs up and grab the rope. River barges are shaped like big tubs and normally there’d be another fifteen foot drop off the other side of the gunwale, but it’s mostly filled up with sand. We follow the steel frame to the bridge.
The ANGELINA was the last of the old barges and a rare model. It was one of only a few manufactured with an inboard tug. When we reach the rusted stairs, Nelson says after you and steps aside. The stairs lead up to the main deck of the tug. The crew quarters and navigation room are more or less a metal shipping container on top of another shipping container that holds the engine.
“I want to break the lock, see what’s inside, but there’s a feeling, like I’m trespassing.”
“Thanks,” I murmur. I test my weight on the first step and it holds. The whole frame groans and creaks under my weight, but I make it to the top. My hands are caked red with rust from the railing. Nelson follows and we peek our heads into the door. There’s otter poop everywhere, and frozen, half-eaten fish carcasses.
“Amazing that the sonar screens aren’t cracked,” Nelson says. He tries to turn the faded silver steering wheel, but it won’t budge. Time and water have eroded the paint off the control buttons. I open a few cabinets next to the crew bunks. There’s a sealed plastic bag with a phone in it, the kind that my grandpa used to have. I turn it over in my hands and then put it back in the cabinet.
“Got something juicy here,” Nelson calls out. There’s a cabinet with a padlock on it. He gives it a tug, but it won’t open. “Damn. Should we try to break it?”
I want to break the lock, see what’s inside, but there’s a feeling, like I’m trespassing. Nelson must feel the same because he gives it up and after we rummage around, he shrugs and says, “I’d say, let’s take some pictures and head out. Nothing much here unless you want to see what’s in the engine room.
“Worth checking out,” I say. We open the door, but it’s mostly filled with sand. I turn to leave, but catch the shape of something sticking out of the silt underneath one of the engine room stairs. I pull it out and bring it to the front of the tug where I can get a good look at it.
“Is that a Hot Wheels?” Nelson asks, looking over my shoulder. I turn it over in my hands. It’s a truck, a Ford I think. I look at the bottom of it and F-150 Electric 2024 is embossed on the cast metal underside.
“Holy shit,” I say. “This is from when my grandpa was a kid. Looks like a first edition too, right when everyone went electric.”
“That might be worth something,” Nelson says. “Why do you get to find the cool stuff? Goddamnit. Maybe I will break that lock.” I walk out onto the deck while Nelson looks around more. The silhouettes of migrating mallards break the horizon and I hear a few more shots from where Stuart and his arthritic dog are undoubtedly huddled behind the cattails. I slip the toy truck in my pocket and sit on the starboard edge of the deck.
“Yes!” Nelson shouts from inside the tug. I turn and see him come out with a broken padlock.
“You couldn’t resist,” I laugh.
“You can’t find all the cool stuff. Come look,” he says. I hop up and we both crouch in front of the cabinet. It’s rusted shut and Nelson has to grab the handle with both hands and press against the wall with his feet. It pops open and the hinges snap, leaving Nelson flat on his back with the door in his hands. Nelson tosses the door to the side. A tattered, canvas backpack is shoved inside. He slowly works it out, but even being careful the fabric rips a bit. When he tries to unzip it, the bag rips more.
“You’re a top notch archeologist,” I say. He grimaces and after some more unintentional ripping, opens the bag. Inside it is another half gallon plastic bag.
“Why did everyone on this boat put their stuff in plastic bags? It’s like they knew it would sink.” He opens the plastic and inside is a buck knife, a yellowed copy of Sand County Almanac, and a duck call. Nelson looks up and smiles at me.
“Don’t even say anything,” I say.
“Oh, I won’t. You just keep that Hot Wheels of yours.” He puts the bag and the busted lock back in the cabinet, shoves the door in, and walks out onto the deck. I follow, wishing I had opened the lock first. He puts the duck call to his mouth, cups the end of it with his hand, and rips out the loudest mallard quack he can muster. We wait and after a minute we hear a distant quack return.
“That’s probably Stuart,” Nelson says. He gives the call one more go, then we climb down the stairs, rappel off the barge, and walk back to our kayaks. Nelson gathers washed up wood and we build a small fire. Close to dark we stomp it out and paddle back upstream in the dark, treasures in tow, the low glow lights of downtown KC sparkling like distant fireflies.
Gilbert Randolph (he/him) lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and works in social and digital media. His writing has appeared in The Preserve Journal, Northland Lifestyle, New Letters, and others. When he’s not writing, he’s exploring wild places and connecting with his ecosystem through hunting, foraging, fishing, and trapping.
Christian Blaza (he/him) is a freelance illustrator based in New Jersey.
