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.
In the 1990s, two hurricanes devastated Samoa in the South Pacific Ocean, wiping entire communities off the map and killing dozens of people. “Everything was just decimated,” Malama Tafuna’i, a primary care physician in Apia, the territory’s capital, said. “It looked like a bomb had gone off.”
A young girl at the time, Tafuna’i watched as her father, a doctor, would go out to treat patients while her household navigated the aftermath of the storms.
“He still had to go to work and the rest of us had to figure out, you know, how do we make sure that we’ve got a shelter for tonight or where are we going to get food from?’” she said.
Tafuna’i’s early experiences help her navigate the impacts of climate change, both as a physician and as a citizen of Samoa, where extreme weather events frequently upend daily life. She uses the knowledge she has accumulated to help other doctors consider climate impacts when treating patients.
Tafuna’i, who has practiced medicine in Samoa for the better part of two decades, knows that once the hurricane-force winds die down and the flood waters recede, public health disasters — vector-borne disease outbreaks, bacterial infections, malnutrition due to crop loss — soon follow. People lose their homes in these storms and spend days exposed to mosquitoes and other pathogen-carrying insects. Decaying sanitation systems overflow and spread E. coli and other dangerous bacteria through communities. Entire fields of crops are wiped out by flooding, and families already struggling with food insecurity go hungry.
Tafuna’i can spot these links between extreme weather events and disease, but actually treating the effects of rising temperatures on the Samoan population can be tricky. It’s exceedingly difficult to assess a sick patient and determine that climate change itself is the main driver of that patient’s illness, Tafuna’i said. What she does see, however, is that climate change compounds and exacerbates existing health inequities in Samoa.
“Once a disaster hits, it sets back the whole system big time,” said Tafuna’i, adding that then “we have to figure out a way back up to wherever the starting point was at the time.”
As the planet warms, Samoans and millions of other people around the globe will increasingly see their health affected by warming. Climate change, the World Health Organization says, is the “single biggest health threat facing humanity.”
Climate-driven malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress are projected to kill an additional 250,000 people worldwide every year, which will come with an annual cost of between $2 and $4 billion. And those are just a few of the leading causes of climate-related mortality. There are countless other ways in which our changing planet affects human health, some of them still beyond our understanding.
Samoa only has two hospitals, one of which is a 20-bed facility staffed by junior doctors. Ten health clinics staffed primarily by nurses serve Samoa’s rural population. The Samoan medical system, severely underfunded and understaffed, is far less prepared to shoulder the burden of rising temperatures than developed countries in the West. Nevertheless, doctors like Tafuna’i, who have long worked on the front lines of the crisis, have been among the first in the world to recognize the importance of arming doctors with the tools they need to both recognize how climate change will affect human health and to properly treat patients experiencing the health ramifications of a rapidly changing environment.
For many years, Tafuna’i was the only clinical lecturer at the National University of Samoa, a tiny medical school on the island of Upolu. She noticed that the school wasn’t teaching students about climate change — an omnipresent issue on an island that is experiencing some of the most severe sea-level rise on the planet.
“You can definitely see that climate change has a huge impact on health, but it wasn’t in our curriculum at the time, and it wasn’t something we spoke about,” Tafuna’i said. So she invited colleagues from other universities, along with climate and related experts, to come speak to her students about the crisis. She also developed a climate-and-health curriculum that sent fourth-year students into remote parts of the island to analyze how climate change affects the well-being of rural communities.
In recent years, as rising temperatures have triggered public health emergencies of growing magnitude all over the globe, medical professionals and research institutions in the West have begun to catch on.
Renee Salas, a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, remembers a time climate change walked into her emergency room. It was 2019, and Boston was in the throes of a record-breaking heat wave. A team of emergency medical technicians arrived in an ambulance carrying an elderly gentleman suffering from heatstroke, the deadliest form of heat-related illness. The patient’s rectal temperature was 106 degrees Fahrenheit, which meant death was imminent. The emergency workers told Salas that when they climbed up the stairs and opened the door to the man’s apartment, it felt like they were being “hit with heat from the Sahara desert.” The patient and his wife, who both lived in the apartment, didn’t have air conditioning. Just one window was cracked open.
Salas and her team managed to save the man’s life, but the incident still weighs on her. “I often think about that patient’s wife who still remained in that same apartment,” she said. “We know from data that more than one-third of heat-related deaths are due to climate change, and that is making that disease more likely.”
A year after that incident, in 2020, the Lancet, a premier medical journal, published a frightening assessment of the latest research and data on the intersection of warming and health — its “most worrying” outlook since the journal began publishing the assessments in 2016. Almost every indicator of health tracked by the dozens of interdisciplinary researchers who compiled the report, such as excess morbidity and mortality, showed evidence of climate stress (extreme weather events, vector-borne disease, wildfire smoke, the list of stressors goes on). Two-thirds of the cities surveyed by the report said they “expected climate change to seriously compromise their public health assets and infrastructure.”
Salas, who had been reading the Lancet’s reports for years, saw that climate change was threatening “the very mission” of why she went into medicine in the first place. She decided to dedicate her career to the climate-and-health overlap. But at the time, no one in her circles was thinking about how climate change was going to affect medicine. In the United States, lawmakers were still arguing over whether climate change was even happening.
In the years since, however, Salas has seen a marked shift in the way the public, especially the medical community, thinks about climate change. “This has become mainstream medicine,” she said. Climate change has infiltrated the zeitgeist at hospitals across the U.S. for one key reason: “Fundamentally,” Salas said, “climate change makes our job harder as doctors.”
In the U.S., networks and groups such as ClimateRx, the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, and Climate MD have cropped up with the aim to bring “climate solutions to the bedside.” Those efforts — which include teaching doctors how to recognize climate-related illnesses, such as tick-borne diseases and heatstroke, in patients and communicating about climate change with patients in a hospital setting — haven’t been immune to typical growing pains. The disparate initiatives within the larger climate-and-health movement are disorganized, and there’s no easy way for the various sects to share data and know-how. But that’s starting to change.
In May, the National Institutes of Health funded a first-of-its-kind national Research Coordination Center on Climate and Health, based jointly at Harvard and Boston University. The research center, described as a “clearinghouse to facilitate data exchange and share best practices,” provides a blueprint for what needs to happen on a global scale.
Climate Connections: A warming planet, pathogens, and diseases
How climate change is making us sick: Animals, bugs, algae, and even fungi are shifting to accommodate an ever-hotter planet — and they’re bringing dangerous diseases with them.
Meanwhile, doctors like Tafuna’i are sitting on years of knowledge about global warming’s unbound potential to erode public health and stress health systems. Tafuna’i’s experiences teaching students and treating patients in Samoa could serve to inform and educate countries that are just beginning to confront these challenges. But, thus far, there’s been no indication that the West is looking to Samoa and other nations on the front lines of climate change for guidance.
“You can’t share your wisdom if you’re not at the table,” said Sheila Davis, chief executive officer at Partners In Health, an international public health nonprofit that helped devise a COVID-19 response in the U.S. based on prior efforts to eradicate HIV in Haiti and Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia. “Raising the voices of those who have the true expertise, it’s going to take all of us to push for that to happen.”
COVID-19 taught the world a valuable lesson: Pandemics can’t be defeated piecemeal. Studies indicate that the next pandemic may be fueled by climate change. The logical next step is to prepare — not individually, as siloed nations, but as a network of human beings around the world.
“How do you put a program in play that can be sustainable and then be something that’s shared?” Tafuna’i asked. “We have to decide what the priorities are for adapting to climate change.”
This story is part of the Grist arts and culture seriesRemember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds.
The camera pans slowly across a close-up of crispy, golden McDonald’s fries, standing tall like ears of corn. “We used to think this was the best thing a plant could grow into,” a deep voice proclaims during the commercial. “And then we made this.” Into view emerges a glistening cheeseburger topped with lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles. “Introducing the new McPlant,” the narrator continues, “made with the first plant-based patty worthy of being called a McDonald’s burger.”
The ad, from early 2022, seemed like a sign that plant burgers had made it big. Six years after they arrived on the market, America’s biggest restaurant chain had endorsed them. The news garnered cautious praise from some environmental advocates: Not only could meatless meat patties reduce animal cruelty, but they also promised to ease climate change. They looked, tasted, and bled like beef but had none of the drawbacks — no cows that burp methane, no butchered animals, and barely any cholesterol.
An advertisement for the McPlant burger, a plant-based vegetarian alternative to more traditional meat burgers by fast food giant McDonalds, stands next to a steakhouse in July 2022.
Mike Kemp / In Pictures via Getty Images
By most metrics, plant-based meat has been a resounding success. Brands like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Gardein are sold in thousands of grocery stores and restaurants across the country. Dollar sales in the U.S. have tripled over the past decade. Ten years ago, you couldn’t buy fake-blood burgers anywhere. Today, they’re on the grill at Burger King, Carl’s Jr., and other restaurants all over the world. When Beyond Meat went public in 2019, its stock climbed more than 700 percent. The buzz was compared to that of Bitcoin.
Yet a tour of recent headlines suggests that something has gone awry. Last year, Forbes described a “lifeless market for meatless meat.” The Guardian asserted that “plant-based meat’s sizzle fizzled in the U.S.” A Bloomberg headline in January went further, declaring that fake meat was “just another fad.” As for the McPlant, McDonald’s erased it from its menu in the U.S. last August, less than a year after it started a trial run.
The industry had hit its first big stumbling block. In 2022, U.S. plant-based meat sales declined for the first time — 8 percent by volume. Beyond Meat, a behemoth in the sector and the supplier of McPlant patties, saw its stock price plummet 94 percent from its peak in 2020 as sales slid more than 20 percent last year. The company laid off one-fifth of its employees last fall. Impossible Foods — Beyond’s biggest rival — has fared better, but it also ended up laying off roughly 16 percent of its workforce this spring. The layoffs were intended to bring costs “more in line” with revenue and to position the company for “sustainable, balanced growth over the long term,” according to a statement from Impossible.
“Today, basically, we’re in a little bit of this trough of disillusionment,” said T.K. Pillan, co-founder and chairman of Veggie Grill, one of the country’s biggest plant-based food chains and the first to sell the Beyond Burger. “Expectations and hype got fueled really high.”
Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown, center, celebrates with guests after ringing the opening bell at Nasdaq MarketSite, May 2, 2019 in New York City. Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods said their inventions could do something earlier brands — Tofurky, Boca, Gardenburger — couldn’t. Although the two companies make discrete products with different ingredients and characteristics, they are often talked about in one breath because they share a novel and uncanny resemblance to meat. Impossible’s plant burger could compete with beef even among “uncompromising meat consumers,” Pat Brown, the founder of the company, claimed during a TED Talk in 2015.
“People around the world love to eat meat. And who can blame them? It’s delicious,” Brown said. “The problem isn’t that people love meat. The problem is how we produce it.”
As Brown described a “wildlife holocaust” caused by clearing forests around the world for agriculture, a woman behind him flipped an Impossible Burger on a griddle. “Cows aren’t getting any better at turning plants into meat,” Brown said. “And they never will. We’re getting better at it every day. And we’re going to keep getting better.”
A plate of Impossible Burgers sits on a platter during a 2019 convention. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Image
Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown holds up an Impossible Burger 2.0, the new and improved version of the company’s plant-based vegan burger that tastes like real beef, at a 2019 press event in Las Vegas, Nevada. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Image
Climate advocates hoped that this new class of faux meat could lure people away from cow meat. Livestock contribute roughly 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and factory-farmed cattle are the worst offenders. “I know it sounds insane to replace a deeply entrenched trillion-dollar-a-year global industry that’s been a part of human culture since the dawn of human civilization,” Brown said in the TED Talk. “But it has to be done.” When he was interviewed by the New Yorker in 2019, Brown said Impossible could help end animal agriculture by 2035.
Today, that ambitious goal sounds even more ambitious. Plant-based patties haven’t displaced real meat yet — the vast majority of people who buy plant burgers also buy animal protein, and they don’t seem to be buying less of it. According to a survey last year by the consulting firm Deloitte, half of U.S. shoppers have already purchased plant-based meat, but the market has reached a “saturation point.” The report found that people don’t view the food as favorably as they once did. So what happened?
There’s no shortage of theories. For starters, the burgers are made by machines. While they’ve been fine-tuned to include less fat and cholesterol than real beef, early products were full of sodium and used additives for taste and texture, like sugar and carrageenan — an extract from seaweed that’s the subject of health concerns among some scientists and nutritionists. Companies like Beyond and Impossible have tinkered with recipes to get rid of additives and make fake meat more nutritious, but the fact remains that their burgers are lab creatures.
“The big problem with plant-based meats is they fall into the category of ultra-processed,” said Marion Nestle, a longtime food studies professor at New York University. Even though plant-based meat might be healthier than red meat on a nutritional basis, it’s still part of a broader class of processed foods, including cereal and sodas, that have been linked to poor health outcomes. “There’s just tons of evidence that these are the kinds of foods to avoid,” Nestle said. “The ingredient list is lengthy and very impressive, and that has been the basis of attack by the meat industry.”
Soon after Beyond and Impossible burgers took off, the Center for Consumer Freedom — a corporate-backed advocacy group perhaps best known for defending the tobacco industry — launched a campaign targeting plant-based meats. “Fake meat or dog food?” read a full-page ad the group placed in the Los Angeles Times in 2019. One of the organization’s main tactics has been to highlight that plant burgers come from factories, not farms.
A grocery store in Queens, New York, displays plant-based meat products.
Lindsey Nicholson / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
“The meat industry really made a concerted effort to make people think [plant-based meat] is not healthy,” Pillan said. “They do a great job. They’re good marketers. They’re good lobbyists.”
The industry’s push came at a convenient moment: Around the same time, a health movement promoting “clean” foods — meat and vegetables that aren’t processed — entered the mainstream. “The meat alternatives have run up against this other trend,” said Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. Lusk often hears the refrain: “If I wanted plants, I’d just eat plants.”
Plant-based meat now finds itself in a strange spot, simultaneously seen as healthy and unhealthy, with attitudes starting to tip toward the “junk food” designation. “Healthfulness” was the top reason people bought plant-based meat in 2021, according to an International Food Information Council survey. That same year, a Deloitte survey found that 68 percent of buyers thought the novel burgers were healthier than beef. In 2022, that figure slipped to 60 percent.
Even more than health perceptions, “Taste and price are the two main reasons people don’t buy” plant patties, said Tessa Hale, director of corporate engagement at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes alternative meats. “They don’t want to try it because they just have this idea that it’s going to taste bad,” Hale said.
Or they simply can’t afford to shell out for a pricier product, made even more expensive by inflation. Plant-based meats often cost two or three times more than their cow-based counterparts at the grocery store. In 2019, the average retail price of meat alternatives was $9.87 per pound, while that of conventional meat was $3.53. Today, Walmart sells Beyond Burgers at $9.68 per pound and beef patties for as little as $3.94 per pound. Some compare the cost gap to that between electric and gas-powered vehicles: Until prices come down, the premium, climate-friendly option won’t be widely adopted.
For each of the top concerns — price, health, and taste — proponents say there’s reason to be optimistic. They observe that inflation has been worse for real meat than the products that imitate it. As production scales up and new technologies get perfected, the price curve for plant-based foods “is expected to keep on coming down,” said Chris Bryant, an alternative proteins researcher in the United Kingdom.
Impossible Foods cut sale prices by 20 percent in 2021, and Beyond Meat has said it plans to sell at least one of its products for less than the going price of meat by 2024. In the Netherlands, growing demand and government support for faux meat reportedly have helped fake burgers achieve price parity with real ones. “We seem to be at the tipping point,” Bryant said.
As for the health question, Pillan acknowledged that plant-based burgers aren’t always the healthiest option — next to, say, a salad or lentils. But he said what matters is that they’re healthier than beef. They have less cholesterol and fat, and some research suggests they lower risk of heart disease compared to red meat.
A Beyond Meat spokesperson cited a similar case made by the company’s chief executive, Ethan Brown, on an earnings call in February. Brown criticized the “drummed up misperception that our products are overly processed and utilize complex ingredients” and pointed to a study suggesting that eating Beyond’s products instead of animal meat could lead to lower cholesterol levels.
A view of the Beyond Meat Booth during 2023 REVOLVE Festival in Thermal, California.
Vivien Killilea / Getty Images for REVOLVE
Veggie Grill, for its part, has closed several locations in recent months, but also plans to launch a franchise program. In the company’s early days, “The West Coast was really where we could put multiple Veggie Grills and make the concept work,” Pillan said. “Now we could put multiple Veggie Grills in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami.”
Meanwhile, producers aren’t done fiddling with the recipes for fake meat. Scientists are honing techniques like precision and biomass fermentation to reduce the number of ingredients needed to turn plants into meat. One company, Meati, is marketing steak and chicken products made almost entirely from mushrooms, touting it as being simultaneously low in fats and high in protein, vitamins, and minerals.
All in all, the industry’s supporters aren’t that worried about the dire tone of the recent media coverage. “I still believe there is a lot of hype,” Hale said. “It’s a very nascent category, all things considered.” There remains a sense among proponents, much as there was 10 years ago, that meat made from plants could one day make a meaningful dent in the market for animal meat, living up to its many promises.
Consider the assurance that Brown, Impossible’s founder, offered to a group of kids four years ago when they toured his startup’s office to learn about his team’s invention: “I promise that by the time you are adults, the meat you eat will not come from dead animals,” Brown told the kids, who had donned white lab coats for the occasion. “You can come find me and beat me up if I’m wrong.”
*This piece has been updated to include a response from Beyond Meat.
It might be time to throw your preconceptions about recycling in the garbage. A decades-long effort to educate people about recycling has mostly backfired, according to new research.
The study, published last week in Nature Sustainability, found that an overemphasis on recycling has distracted us from better options for preventing waste. In open-ended surveys, Americans overwhelmingly named recycling as the most effective thing they could do to reduce trash in landfills, overlooking more successful strategies — such as generating less waste in the first place.
“Because we have a really hard time imagining what a different, non-disposal-focused system could look like, recycling seems like the best option, right?” said Michaela Barnett, an author of the study and a former civil engineering researcher at the University of Virginia. “And it is better than landfilling, than incinerating, than littering. But people really are defaulting to that over better options, because I think they really don’t see a way out of this system that creates so much trash.”
The study revealed widespread confusion about the relative usefulness of recycling. When asked to rank the Three Rs — “reduce, reuse, recycle” — in order of effectiveness, nearly half of people got the answer wrong. (The phrase is already in the correct order.) They fared better when asked to choose between just two options, waste prevention and recycling, with 80 percent understanding that prevention was more beneficial.
Though Barnett has been “obsessed with trash” her whole life — growing up, she visited recycling centers and made impromptu stops to inspect roadside trash with her mom — she was also once afflicted with “recycling bias,” she says. She attributes the phenomenon to a long-running messaging campaign aimed at getting Americans to take responsibility for their trash. For decades, Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit backed by corporations including Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, has been running anti-litter and pro-recycling advertisements. The campaign had the effect of shifting the blame for trash pollution to individuals, rather than the companies that designed products to be disposable.
“This has been something that’s really been hammered into us by these corporations for 50 years,” Barnett said. “It’s a very convenient out for them to continue producing and for us to continue consuming without a lot of guilt.”
While Barnett’s study showed that people thought recycling was important, they didn’t necessarily know how to do it correctly. Many people placed plastic bags, disposable coffee cups, and light bulbs into virtual recycling bins — all items that can’t be recycled. It’s not really their fault: Recycling rules are confusing and vary based on where you live. Yogurt containers, for example, aren’t accepted by most municipal recycling programs — and even centers that do take them rarely actually recycle them.
Starting in 1989, oil and gas companies lobbied for state laws mandating that the “chasing arrows” symbol appear on all plastic products, despite serious doubts that the widespread recycling of these products would ever be economically viable. Many items adorned with the chasing arrows can’t be recycled at all. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency recommended that the Federal Trade Commission ditch the logo because it was deceiving consumers.
People might slowly be catching on: Barnett’s study found that Americans weren’t confident the system was working. Less than 10 percent of all plastic produced globally gets recycled; survey respondents thought that the number was closer to 25 percent, correctly reasoning that most of what goes into the blue bin eventually ends up in the landfill.
So how should we think about recycling? For Barnett, it’s a useful tool, but its usefulness has been blown out of proportion. “Recycling is not a scam, but also not a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” she said. “We really need to be a lot more intentional with the goods we consume and the actions we take, while also putting that onus back on the producers for whom it really belongs.”
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.
Breakfast is interrupted by a crash that shakes the house to its foundations. Out the window, the wet coastal view is obscured by a spray of dust and foam. Another house has slid into the sea.
The silence that floods back in its wake is emptier, the gulls have fled. I wait a minute to see if the drama has roused Nyx, but it is 7 a.m. and she is a teenager, it takes more than the decline of empires to get her up this early. Alone, I step out onto the porch to see the damage.
On our side of Caldwell Street, tight fences enclose narrow two-story townhouses. The remaining houses across the street are shells — condemned and then burnt out by vagrants, eroding into the sea below. A fresh gap has opened up in the row, giving us a view of the rain-speckled waves sucking away tile and plasterboard.
A bell tinkles, drawing my attention to a figure cycling through the long shadows of the condemned homes. She’s a delivery girl, with flat-cap and all, and although it has been at least twenty-five years since the news went online, something in me still responds to the arc of her arm and the thud as a newspaper bounces end-over-end into our porch. Flashbacks to smoothing out the front pages in the dappled sunlight of my parent’s kitchen table. The girl cycles away down the coast road. I rotate the cylinder at my feet with a foot until the masthead comes into view. THE PAST TIMES, bracketed by dodos statant.
“Nyx!” I shout. “It’s for you!”
No reply, unsurprisingly. I hold the bundle to my face and take a nostalgic sniff of newsprint, then deposit it in front of Nyx’s bedroom door, where a poster of a glowering James Dean guards against forceful entry. I return to my breakfast and am scrolling through news about power-failures in India when a scream peals out from upstairs.
Parenting instincts kick in, and I’ve burst past James before I’ve fully registered the situation. Nyx is sitting at the edge of her bed with her arms clasped protectively around her torso. “No, no,” she moans. At her feet is the unfolded PAST TIMES. ‘President’s Death Mourned by World’ reads the headline, above a photograph of the square jaw and Ken-Doll haircut.
Nyx is fourteen, hugging has become complicated. I settle for an awkward arm about her shoulders, side by side so we don’t have to make eye contact. Instead I look around the room — this isn’t a place I’m often allowed these days. Last time I was here there was a bedside table photo frame of Nyx, me, and her mum, but it’s gone now, replaced by a rotary dial phone and a stack of yellow paperbacks with crumbling covers.
Nyx grabs a clunky remote from her bedside table and points it at the boxy screen in the corner. A white line cuts horizontally across the glass then expands into monochrome television footage, darkened at the corners like a fishbowl. A newscaster in a narrow tie is fiddling with his heavy-rimmed glasses as he recounts the news. “ … Dead of an assassin’s bullet, in the 46th year of his life, and in the third year of his, uh, administration as President of the United States.”
“I can’t believe it,” Nyx says, hand over her mouth.
“Surely you knew about this?”
“How would I know about this?” she snaps, shrugging off my arm.
By picking up a book, I think, but have the self-preservation not to say. She’s weeping now. I’m not clear the extent to which this is a joke, I feel like the straight man in a black comedy. But that’s how single parenting has felt like for years.
“Nyxie, this is ridiculous. You never knew him.”
“You never knew Barack Obama, that didn’t stop you crying when all those kids danced at his funeral.”
“That’s different, he’d actually just died.”
“No, he’d died days before. You’d only just found out.”
“…shot apparently from a, uh, warehouse building,” says the dazed newscaster, recounting the President’s final moments. I want to turn the television off, but I’ve forgotten how to operate anything that isn’t voice activated. “Okay, this is stupid,” I say, rising to go. “Breakfast is downstairs when you’re ready.”
“You’re a robot,” Nyx yells. “Don’t you get what it feels like? He was our last hope!”
I close the door behind me to deprive her the option of slamming it, then go into the front garden to call Emily, my colleague at Sustenance Logistics. I’ve known Emily since college and she has her own teenager, so she gets the situation.
Emily answers from her kitchen bench, where she is squeezing vitaworm powder onto a green salad. In the background, I can see her daughter Maeve trudge through the kitchen in a beige dress and pillbox hat, tears glistening on her cheek. Maeve studies drama.
“Ask not what your daughter can do for you, but what you can do for your daughter,” says Emily by way of greetings.
“You too?” I say.
“Apparently it’s Kennedy Day, she says. “What can you do? Just ride it out.”
“Adolescence or history?”
“Both.”
* * *
1969
Winter brings drought, and we lose a lot of the spring wheat harvest. That means we’re competing with the Europeans for the southern hemisphere crop, and I spend my days trying to find out what bribes the French are offering the Australians so that we can match them. The best thing you can say about this summer is that at least the music blaring out from Nyx’s room is good — she’s discovered Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell.
After a bruising six-hour meeting about marketing plankton burgers — ‘give the whole family a whale of a time’ — I come home to find the living room stinking of burnt honey, which is fitting since Nyx has her hair up in a beehive. Nyx is always redecorating the house to keep up with the times. Today she’s commandeered the 3D printer to make retro egg chairs out of cornstarch and hasn’t bothered to open the windows.
“I’m having a moon landing party on Sunday,” she says by way of greeting.
“Is that a request or are you just informing me?” I ask. She doesn’t deign to answer.
I try sitting in one of the egg chairs. It’s still warm, and strands of plastic stick to the back of my pants. “How are you already up to the moon landing?” I ask, trying to show an interest.
“We don’t go literally day-by-day. We fast forward through the slow bits.”
“Who decides what’s slow?”
“The Pacesetters,” she says impatiently, as if it’s obvious.
On Sunday, Nyx is wearing a short red polka-dot dress that I recognised from her mum’s closet — and it had been a vintage item when we bought it. Beneath her back-combed bouffant, she’s starting to look so much like her mum it makes my heart ache.
Nyx isn’t the only one accelerating through time. They come as promised, half a dozen awkward young men and women who were children only yesterday. Now their spotty faces are framed by bowl cuts or hair flips and their skinny ankles stick out from bell-bottom jeans. Maeve is there, and there’s a new face too, a gaunt boy called Kaiden who apparently joined Nyx’s recap group after they used a hunger strike to win the right to attend school assemblies in period dress. It’s abundantly clear from his mournful stares that he wants to have sex with my daughter, less clear whether she realizes, and least clear at all whether I should make some comment to her about it.
The teens gather in the kitchen, windows open to let in the salt air. Outside the street looks like some kind of before-and-after picture of urban renewal, or decay, depending which way you look at it, but the kids aren’t looking at it at all. They’re bent over an old cookery book, laughing over a recipe for meatloaf. The microwave and smart speaker have been politely packed away, replaced with a transistor radio that alternates between rock and roll and crackling updates of Apollo 11’s journey through space.
I’ve invited Emily for moral support, and I raid the fridge to get us drinks. “Do you guys want a couple of beers?” I ask the teens, playing the cool dad. They stare back at me in horror and shake their heads. “Sorry about my dad,” Nyx says as I beat a hasty retreat to the office.
“How did our children turn into our parents?” I say, sitting back down and handing Emily a beer across the table.
“We banned screen-time and told them not to make the same mistakes that we did,” says Emily. “I guess they took it to heart.”
Emily and I are working overtime to finish a policy proposal for the new Minister for Food Security. We discuss the practicalities of commandeering urban roof-gardens as vegetable patches while the kids twist and shout on the linoleum they’ve laid over my Baltic pine floor. When I return for refills, Nyx and Maeve have gone to the bathroom and left Kaiden loitering awkwardly at the kitchen counter. When I was sixteen I would have buried my attention into a smartphone, but of course he doesn’t have one, so he just makes a close study of the fruit bowl.
I look him up and down. He’s done his best with flared jeans and a plaid shirt. I’d say he’s missed the target date by a couple of years, but who am I to judge? I wonder whether to treat him as a boy or an adult, and settle for a conspiratorial man-to-man tone.
“You really into this, then? Recapping?”
“It’s cool I guess,” he says, bending all his attention to fiddling with a pear. “Nyx really cares.”
“It’s been a tough few years for our family,” I say. “It makes sense she wants to live in the past.” I have a sudden urge to unburden myself to this nervous youth, the only other person in the world who rates my daughter as highly as she deserves, but he avoids eye contact as he bends over the grapes. Nyx comes into the room and freezes as she sees us in conversation. “Dad, do you want to come watch the moon landing?” she asks, hastily.
“No, don’t worry about us,” I say automatically, but Emily shouts from the next room, “of course we do!”
“Groovy. But no spoilers!”
We assemble in front of the boxy television. “Let the old folks through,” Emily calls, we cram ourselves into the misshapen egg chairs and accept plates of quivering gelatin. Most of the kids are sitting or kneeling on the floor, reverting to the habits of prepubescence.
I’d vaguely remembered the moon landing as something that occurred in black and white, but the newscaster is in wavering color this time, against a painted backdrop of stars. Between his comments the footage cuts to shots of people watching around the world. With the low picture quality, I can’t tell if the hundreds of New Yorkers standing in a wet Times Square are ghosts from sixty years ago or recappers mimicking them right now.
The kids are tense. “The module’s going to blow up,” Kaiden is saying. “They made an old movie about it, with Tom Hanks.” A wave of silent disapproval emanates from the others. As I’ve learned after many tellings off, it’s taboo to be a “Cassie” and reference anything that happened in the past, now that they’ve decided it’s the future.
The camera cuts to an aluminum and gold spacecraft lander on a gray pockmarked desert, men’s voices crackle incomprehensibly to each other. A figure in a bulky spacesuit kneels at the top of the launcher ladder, like a kid struggling to force herself off a diving board. The picture quality seems too good to be from the 1960s.
“This isn’t real, it’s a simulation,” I say.
Nyx groans. “Oh my God, Dad, you really think this is being faked?”
“No, I mean this footage isn’t from the moon. The programme is demonstrating what is happening in a studio, matched to the audio feed.”
The Neil Armstrong who is not Neil Armstrong is descending the ladder now, a tether being played out for him. The kids look confused.
“So they’re recreating what’s happening at the same time it’s really happening?” asks Maeve.
“Yes. Well no, because there’s nothing really happening on the Moon right now,” I point out.
“You mean the two second time lag?”
“I mean the seventy year time lag.”
“What difference does it make if it’s simulated, it’s real enough for right now,” says Emily, ending the discussion.
Real or not, I’ve never watched this before and my hands start to clench with excitement as the monotonous voice of Mission Control guides Armstrong out of the lander. At the moment the studio footage cuts to a black and white smear with LIVE FROM THE SURFACE OF THE MOON emblazoned below, I join the room in a gasp and glance involuntarily out the window, where a subtle daylight crescent can be seen hanging low in the sky.
“There’s a foot going down, there’s a foot coming down the steps!” cries the newsreader. “If he’s testing that first step, he must be stepping down on the moon at this point.”
“I’m at the foot of the ladder … ” crackles Armstrong. We might as well be looking at smoke, but we all lean forward, straining to make out Armstrong’s boot. He drops to the surface.
“Armstrong is on the moon!” says the off-camera newsreader. “A thirty-eight year old American, standing on the surface of the moon, on this July twentieth,nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-nine.”
The room erupts in cheers and drowns his next words, Emily squeezes my hand. The kids are embracing each other, they don’t care that the man they’re watching is long in his grave, only that we’ve achieved something magnificent. “We’re going to remember this for the rest of our lives,” says Maeve, tears in her eyes. As the tumult dies, Kaiden tries to kiss Nyx on the cheek, she recoils, and the two flounder in awkwardness. The newscaster is saying, “Was that ‘one small step for man?’ I didn’t get the second phrase.”
The coverage rolls on, and for a few minutes I forget about plankton burgers and bushfires, I am overwhelmed by the wonder of something that, up until now, I have always taken for granted. I squeeze Nyx’s shoulder. “Thank you,” I say, and she flashes me a grin.
“Time just stopped for me, and I think it stopped for everybody,” says someone on the television. The coverage is back in the television studio, where the newscaster is speaking to some old science-fiction writer with a combover called Clarke. I tune into what he is saying: “This is the beginning. In the next ten years you’re going to have the establishment of manned orbiting stations, space labs and factories, and simultaneously the development of the first semi-permanent and permanent bases on the moon. Both these things are going to happen in the next ten years, probably the next five.”
“Dad, are you alright?” Nyx asks. Everyone is looking at me, and I realize I am crying. I remember being not much older than Nyx, watching the Mars Curiosity mission unfold on my laptop and thinking that ‘this was the beginning’ of a new era of hope.
It wasn’t, of course.
* * *
1972
There are anti-war roleplayers holding up traffic in the street outside the State House. The air is heady with the smell of weed — the teens are lucky that the police aren’t re-enacting primitive drug laws. “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” shouts a kohl-eyed girl from the steps, fist raised.
I get off my bike and try push it through the crowd, but the press of bodies gradually forces me back. Propelled to the edge of the street, I recognise Kaiden in the crowd. He’s shrugged off any remnants of the 21st century and he sports his kaftan as just another outfit now, not a costume. He’s wearing a peace patch on his arm.
“Who is this for? There’s no goddamn war in Vietnam.”
“It’s a metaphor!” he shouts back.
“For what?”
He shrugs, makes a half-gesture that takes in the barbed wire around the state capitol, the dead trees in the municipal gardens, the police drones hovering overhead. “Everything!” he says.
The teens on the steps are arm in arm now, singing “A Change is Gonna Come.” “Get a job, hippies!” I snarl in my best Richard Nixon impression, then turn my bike around. I guess I’ll be working from home today.
I can’t bear the living room, since Nyx redecorated it in orange and umber shades, so I set up my workstation at the kitchen counter and flip through a glossy government report about fish stocks in the Gulf of Mexico. Its findings, wrapped in soothingly neutral language like cotton wool, make me feel like my ribs are crushing my heart. To distract myself, I brood on the rally. I realize that it’s been months since I’ve seen a teenager not dressed in the fashions of yesteryear. How far has this game spread?
Nyx’s friends feigned ignorance whenever the Internet was mentioned, but their little subculture couldn’t exist without it. A few clicks take me to an ASCII-text bulletin board that looks as primitive as can be without sacrificing all functionality. A clock at the top of the screen informs me that today is April 22, 1972.
The jargon is a mix of archaic and contemporary slang and I don’t understand the acronyms, but what’s clear is the scale of the operation. Hundreds of thousands of discussions, overseen by a global network of ‘Pacesetters’ who massage the calendar.
> March ’75 is bones, can we jump straight to Fall of Saigon, or problems for ILK? 10-4.
Adolescents exulting in their creativity. They’re so damn smart, and they’re wasting their lives.
It makes me so angry.
I’m not surprised when Nyx comes in at lunchtime. She’s wearing one of my green jackets that hangs down to her thighs, a blue badge pinned to the lapel reading McGovern ’72, and it’s clear she hasn’t been to class. She gives me the most cursory of greetings and starts burrowing through the pantry.
“There’s no real food,” she says petulantly. “Your whole job is the acquisition of food. Why don’t we have food?”
“There’s plenty of food.”
She sifts through potatoes with a world-weary expression. “Why can’t we have hamburgers for once? I could cook them.”
“Because beef costs $40 a pound. Why aren’t you at school?”
“School’s full of spoilers. Besides, don’t you know there’s a war on?”
“You realize we have a cousin in Vietnam? Stephen, he runs a brewery on the Mekong. I promise you nobody is dropping bombs on him.”
She’s munching a biscuit now, she doesn’t respond.
“So you’re just skipping classes now? Have you thought about college?”
“It stresses me out, thinking about the future,” she says, not making eye contact. “Anyway, not to be a Cassie, but personal computers will be coming in the ’80s, so maybe I’ll just teach myself programming and catch the wave.”
“You can’t get a job for a world that doesn’t exist.”
“Big words from the guy with a philosophy degree,” she says, and tries to edge past me to the living room.
“OK boomer,” I say, standing up and ready for a fight. I bar her way and tap the McGovern badge. “How long are you going to live like this? Do you even know who the President is?”
“Tricky Dick,” she says defiantly. Her shoulders are hunched forward now, her breathing quickening.
I rustle through my workstation, grab A REPORT ON A SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF ADULT FISH STOCKS IN THE GULF OF MEXICO and thrust it under her nose. “Do you know what’s happening in the real world? 45% of fish, gone in a decade.”
“Spoilers,” she says, closing her eyes.
“It’s not spoilers, it’s spoiled!”
“What do you want me to say about this?” she says in a cold, choked voice that I’ve never heard from her before. “I can’t do anything about the fish. Why does it bother you so much that we’re trying to have some fun?”
I slam the table. “Because these people you worship, they’re the ones who fucked it up! They made great music and great movies and then they set fire to the planet. I’m going to spend the rest of my life picking up the mess they dumped on us, and you’re checking out on me?”
“So why didn’t you fix it when you had the chance? You can’t blame me for the world!” she shouts, slipping under my arm. Fisheries pamphlets raised like the tablets of Moses, I pursue her across the shag carpet of the living room and up the stairs, aware of how absurd I must look and too angry to care. She slams James Dean in my face, but I’m not having it this time. I force the door open again as she is scrabbling with the lock and she stumbles back towards her bed, shocked at the violence of my incursion.
“You can’t spend the rest of your life hiding … ” I shout, pressing forward.
I stop, suddenly dizzy. My perception feels off, like I’m ten feet tall. I lean against the door jamb in confusion and take in what I am seeing.
We’re standing in my childhood bedroom.
There’s my Lego pirate ship on the windowsill. The lampshade ringed with dancing clowns. My name, spelled out in luminescent plastic stars stuck to the walls, which are painted in the pastel green I remember. The only anachronisms are the 3D printer in the corner and the photo of me, Nyx, and her mum, returned to its place by the bed. Otherwise, it’s exactly as I remember at the moment I moved away when I was 12. I’ve never seen it from an adult height before.
“I wasn’t going to show it to you until your birthday,” says Nyx. “I mean your actual birthday, in 1986.”
I finger a poster of Britney Spears on the wall, as glossy as if it were torn from Rolling Stone yesterday. “Where did you get all this stuff?”
“Printed it,” she says. “I recreated it from those old movies you have in the attic. We’re not supposed to use camcorders yet, but I needed to get a head start.”
I open the shutters, half-expecting to see the swing my father made, hanging from a branch of the peppercorn tree. Instead there is the ocean view, the stumps of coastal houses like broken teeth. I sink onto my Simpsons comforter, overwhelmed by the flow of time. When I close my eyes, I can almost hear the comforting sound of my parents laughing from the end of the hall.
I can hear them. Nyx is playing some ambient sound sample — looping dialogue from my parents, pitched at a nearly inaudible murmur, as if they were hosting a party downstairs. I scrunch the sheets in my hand and fall through memories.
“You’re so stressed all the time.” Nyx’s voice floats to me from the real world. “I’ve never known anyone as stressed as you. I thought this could be, like, a safe place for you.”
“I don’t want this, Nyx.”
“I don’t understand what you do want. You, Maeve’s mum, my teachers, you’re just counting crumbs all the time. I don’t want that. I don’t want to live like that.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, as my leg starts to tremble. “I’m sorry we made a world you don’t want to live in. I’m sorry we weren’t able to fix it. We tried.”
She comes over and, for the first time in two years, wraps her arms around me. For a moment we sit and hold each other on the Simpson’s bed, my dead mother’s laugh echoing down the hall.
“Please don’t leave me in this century alone,” I whisper into her hair.
* * *
1981
CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 1981 reads the banner hanging in the sports hall. The school has completely given up on any kind of temporal dress code and there isn’t a student on the stage who isn’t rocking their grandparent’s stylings as they accept their diploma.
Emily and I clap with bemusement, we clap with confusion, but most of all we clap with love and pride. The valedictorian says her greatest wish is that her generation might grow up without fear of the Bomb and then fixes the audience with a meaningful look. I wonder if it’s a metaphor, but I’ve long learned the futility of trying to penetrate the kayfabe of the recappers.
After the ceremony, Emily and I bite back our laughter as we congratulate our anachronistic offspring. To our surprise, they ask if we want to join them for a victory lap of the town. We walk in the sun together along the beach, strolling after our shadows. Maeve is in a bridal gown defaced by her classmates signatures, Nyx has feathered her hair and squeezed herself into a pair of high-waisted white jeans. Kaiden’s there too, as he usually is these days, arm slung around Nyx. His shoulders are not quite big enough for the musty-smelling sports blazer he’s dug out of some charity bin.
“So, how’s morning in Reagan’s America?” I ask.
The kids exchange glances and laugh. “Reagan?” asks Nyx. “He’s a has-been. Carter smashed him.”
I nod automatically, then start. “Wait, what? Carter didn’t win the 1980 election.”
“Well, we all voted, and Carter swept every state,” says Maeve. “If you wanted Reagan so bad you should have voted for him.”
“That’s not how it happened!” Emily says.
“Things were starting to get pretty grim there after the oil crisis,” says Nyx. “I guess we just kind of discussed it on the boards, and the Pacesetters decided it was okay to make some changes. Just because it went wrong once, doesn’t mean it has to always be wrong.”
I want to press them, but the kids are not interested in this conversation. Federal politics are far away and this is their day of freedom. They demand ‘real food,’ and we buy them the biggest, most expensive ice creams in town. “So, what are you gonna do with your life?” I ask, once we are all licking our cones.
Kaiden and Nyx exchange glances, open their mouths at the same time, then falter with a laugh. He gestures to her, and she says, “Actually, we’re planning to take a ship to China next year. A whole bunch of us have been invited as foreign reps to the 12th National Party Congress in 1982.”
I laugh, then realize that they’re not joking. “What do you mean? What government do you represent? You don’t represent anything.”
“It’s a recap conference. The Soviets will be there too. Acid rain and the Greenhouse Effect are becoming a legit problem, you know, Dad? So we’re going to sort it.”
Her eyes twinkle at me, but she doesn’t break character.
I’m stunned. “Wait, who’s paying for this ‘trip to China?’” I say.
But Nyx, Kaiden, and Maeve have lost interest, they’re taking Polaroid shots of each other in “thoughtful” poses, white photos fluttering down to white sand. They run into the surf, fully clothed, and shriek as the waves wash against their knees. Above them the patrolling drones buzz across the sky, guarding against sharks and refugees, but the kids only have eyes for each other.
They’ve left their pocket radio in the sand, and from its little speaker Cyndi Lauper’s breathless vocals burst out onto the beach. Nyx runs back from the surf, grabs me round the shoulders, blinds us with a Polaroid shot, and all the while the radio sings that “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
“I’m sure this song didn’t come out until 1983 at least,” I protest.
“So?”
“Well what about the, I don’t know, space-time continuum?”
“My God, you sound old,” my daughter says, and takes a lick of my pistachio ice cream.
Jack Nicholls is a British-Australian writer based in Melbourne. Their speculative fiction has been published in a variety of anthologies and internet corners, including at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Aurealis and Tor.com.
Mikyung Lee is an illustrator and animator in Seoul, South Korea. Her poetic and emotional visual essays focus on the relationships between people and objects, situations, and space.
California is known for its consistently sunny weather, progressive politics, movie making and the gigantic, rolling waves that crash against its iconic coastline.
According to a new study, however, the climate crisis is making those waves even bigger.
The study, conducted by Peter Bromirski — University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher emeritus — showed that, on average, California’s colossal winter waves have gotten bigger due to climate change, a press release from UCSD said.
“Waves ride on top of the sea level, which is rising due to climate change,” said Bromirski in the press release.
Bromirski used data collected over almost a century to demonstrate the winter wave height increases. The changes will affect coastal communities, infrastructure and biosystems, the study said.
“As sea level rise progresses, the impacts of wave activity will be aggravated, resulting in increased coastal erosion and flooding of low lying regions. These issues are particularly problematic along the California coast, where vulnerable sea cliffs will experience increasing wave impacts. Because of sea level rise, projections at the end of the twenty-first century indicate that even moderate waves will produce coastal impacts comparable to recent extreme winter wave events,” Bromirski wrote in the study.
The study, “Climate-Induced Decadal Ocean Wave Height Variability From Microseisms: 1931–2021,” was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
Previous research suggests that climate change has caused an increase in North Pacific Ocean storm activity, according to the press release. Bromirski looked at seismic records from 1931 to 2021 in order to infer the height of waves, a technique Bromirski developed.
The acceleration of global warming and increasing winter wave heights could significantly impact erosion and flooding along coastal California, which is already facing rising sea levels.
Bromirski said that as waves reach waters along the coast, some of their energy goes back out to sea. When this energy meets approaching waves, downward pressure created by their interaction becomes seismic energy on the ocean floor. This energy makes its way inland as seismic waves that can be picked up by seismographs. How strong these seismic signals are directly reflects wave height, which Bromirski was able to calculate from decades of data.
“When sea levels are elevated even further during storms, more wave energy can potentially reach vulnerable sea cliffs, flood low-lying regions, or damage coastal infrastructure,” Bromirski said.
In the calculations, Bromirski filtered out the seismic activity of actual earthquakes, which usually don’t last nearly as long as storm-induced ocean waves.
Wave height-measuring buoys along the California coast have only been around since about 1980, but Bromirski was interested in the decades before 1970, which was when global warming started to really speed up.
Bromirski used seismograph readings from UC Berkeley digitized from analog sheets by graduate students in order to look for patterns across decades.
Bromirski’s analysis of the data showed that, after 1970, the average California winter wave height increased by 13 percent — about one foot — as compared to the average height from 1931 to 1969. Bromirski also discovered that about twice as many storms with waves taller than 13 feet occurred along the California coast from 1996 to 2016 as compared to the period from 1949 to 1969.
“After 1970, there is a consistently higher rate of large wave events,” Bromirski said in the press release. “It’s not uncommon to have a winter with high wave activity, but those winters occurred less frequently prior to 1970. Now, there are few winters with particularly low wave activity. And the fact that this change coincides with the acceleration of global warming near 1970 is consistent with increased storm activity over the North Pacific resulting from climate change.”
If the average winter wave heights along the coast of California keep getting bigger with climate change, it could increase the impacts of sea-level rise.
Bromirski compared the results of the study with North Pacific atmospheric patterns, since that is where winter storms and waves usually originate. Bromirski wanted to know if the Aleutian Low — a semi-permanent winter low pressure system near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands — had gotten stronger in modern times, since an intensified Aleutian Low usually means an increase in storm intensity and activity. The results were that the Aleutian Low had generally intensified since 1970.
“That intensification is a good confirmation that what we are seeing in the wave record derived from seismic data is consistent with increased storm activity,” Bromirski said in the press release. “If Pacific storms and the waves they produce keep intensifying as climate change progresses and sea level rises, it creates a new dimension that needs to be considered in terms of trying to anticipate coastal impacts in California.”
The largest wildlife corridor in the world — the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the Highway 101 freeway at Liberty Canyon, California — is currently being constructed, and is expected to be completed in 2025.
It is estimated that one to two million motor vehicles get into collisions with large animals like deer in the U.S. each year.
A 2018 Center for American Progress study found that just 12 percent of land in America had been conserved as protected areas like national parks and wildlife refuges.
One of the largest collections of wildlife crossings in the U.S. stretches across 56 miles of Montana’s U.S. Highway 93 North, where there are 41 wildlife and fish crossings, including overpasses and underpasses with fencing to direct animals like deer, grizzly bears, elk and cougars to the safe passageways.
The top 10 U.S. States most at risk for wildlife-vehicle collisions are West Virginia; Montana; Pennsylvania; South Dakota; Michigan; Wisconsin; Iowa; Mississippi; Minnesota and Wyoming.
More than 24 million acres of natural lands were lost to human developments like cities, roads and farms in the contiguous 48 U.S. states from 2001 to 2017.
Eighty percent or more of the habitat of about half of all endangered and threatened species is located on private lands.
A collaboration between Canada and the U.S., the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has a goal of protecting connected habitat along a 2,000-mile stretch of North America’s Rocky Mountains for wild species like black bears and pronghorns.
What Are ‘Wildlife Corridors’?
A wildlife corridor is a strip of native habitat — either natural or human-made — connecting two or more natural habitats that have been disrupted by highways, cities or dams.
Habitats of wild animals can span smaller areas like a riverbank or stretch thousands of miles across an entire continent. The routes they take to find food, water and mates are called natural wildlife corridors. Wildlife refuges are essential for maintaining these expanses that mammals, birds and fish need to complete their life cycles. This is especially true as humans increasingly encroach on their domains, bisecting and cutting off their natural corridors with roads and development.
When roads have already cut through habitats, disrupting natural ranges and creating barriers to migration, human-made corridors may be constructed to provide the opportunity for safe passage for wildlife. Large mammals like elk can travel hundreds of miles between their summer and winter ranges, and fence breaks called “elk jumps” allow them to enter the western boundary of Wyoming’s National Elk Refuge, but limit their ability to leap out of the protected area near highways.
Landowners living next to wildlife preserves can work with the preserves to help provide safe passage for migrating animals on the many stretches of private land that lie between the patchwork of public lands and wildlife refuges across the country.
Why Are Wildlife Corridors Important?
The wildlife who share our planet with us have had their habitats systematically destroyed and overtaken by human development. Their natural ranges often span much larger areas than national parks, state parks or wildlife preserves can provide. Some mammals like caribou, wolves, birds, salmon and pumas travel hundreds or even thousands of miles throughout their lives, and maintaining safe, consistent pathways for them to migrate has become increasingly rare and difficult.
Wildlife corridors provide the space animals need to migrate to find food and water and reproduce so that they can thrive in their natural environments.
Types of Wildlife Corridors
Natural Wildlife Corridors
Natural wildlife corridors are strips of land that act as pathways for animals to travel between areas of fragmented habitat. These natural avenues offer refuge for traveling species and can increase their survival rates by providing access to food sources, as well as important escape cover or shelter.
The corridors can be established and developed through the cultivation of natural vegetation such as trees, shrubs or other herbaceous cover next to a stream or as a roadside buffer. No matter what the corridor is made of, its purpose is to provide safe passage so that wildlife may be able to access larger surrounding areas of habitat.
The types of habitat the corridor may be connecting can include wetlands, grasslands, fields, woods or other types of open terrain. The corridor should be at least 50 feet to 200 feet wide in order to provide a spacious enough lane for animals to travel, nest, find food or take cover.
Some of the species that will use wildlife corridors to move between larger areas of habitat include fox, deer, turtles, reptiles and raccoon. Species that use field buffers and corridors to nest and forage include turkeys, pheasant, quail, songbirds, cottontail rabbits and insects. The insects that use field borders are an essential food source for many of these animals.
Human-Made Wildlife Corridors
A wildlife crossing built at South Fraser Perimeter Road, British Columbia, Canada. B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure /
Human-made wildlife corridors are most commonly those that are built as overpasses or underpasses to provide a passageway for animals who need to cross busy roads in order to access their natural habitat or to migrate within their range. Typically, animals using human-made crossings have had their habitat diminished or destroyed by agricultural, housing or commercial developments.
The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over Highway 101 in California is an example of the complexity of natural habitats and the human-made wildlife corridors that try to emulate them. The crossing will be covered with soil and an acre of native plants that will allow it to blend in with the natural habitat on either side. The impressive corridor will be equipped with sound walls covered in vegetation to create a buffer for nocturnal animals against urban light and noise pollution. The green bridge will provide safe passage for animals like mountain lions, coyotes, reptiles and amphibians.
Which Species of Animals Use Wildlife Corridors?
Mammals
Large mammals can have extensive ranges, some spanning hundreds of miles and crossing many different types of terrain, including the human urban landscape.
Animals like elk, pronghorn and mule deer travel long distances between their wintering lowlands and the higher elevations where they spend their summers. As time has passed, new roads and developments have begun to crisscross and, in some cases, destroy the habitats of these majestic creatures.
Wildlife corridors help to soften the clash between wildlife habitat and human development by providing animals with a way to maneuver through urban landscapes and cross roads without encountering humans or their dangerous vehicles.
There are only two populations of endangered ocelots left in the U.S., most of their habitat having been destroyed by farming and residential development. This is why the 14 underpasses built by the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge are essential to their survival in this country. Other animals caught on camera using them have been bobcats, possums, raccoons and coyotes. Two more wildlife bridges are slated for completion this year.
Amphibians & Reptiles
Roads have a high impact on amphibian and reptile species — including frogs, toads, turtles, salamanders, snakes and lizards — as they must cross them in order to get to essential foraging and breeding grounds. This can be especially true if roads bisect annual migration routes between habitats where the animals mate and hibernate.
These creatures move slowly and are often too small for drivers to spot and avoid in time. Lizards and snakes can also be drawn to paved roads, which usually absorb heat and retain it.
Types of aids for crossing roads and highways for reptiles and amphibians include underpasses, wildlife pipes, culverts or barrier fencing that guides amphibians in the direction of tunnels.
Some species like the California red-legged frog, the desert tortoise, the red diamond rattlesnake, the sierra newt and others have been highly ranked for being negatively impacted by roadways.
Birds
The long annual migrations of birds — sometimes thousands of miles — is well known. Many of them sleep during flight, resting half of their brains at a time, but they also land at known stopover sites to eat and sleep in a safe location, free of predators.
Wildlife refuges support all types of birds on their migration journeys — from waterfowl to songbirds — by being strategically spaced to provide havens for those migrating along the four main flyways that run north to south in the U.S. The refuges are a combination of state conservation areas and privately owned land. The four routes on the American Flyways cross the entire U.S. and include the Atlantic, Mississippi, Central and Pacific Flyways.
These havens for traveling birds are increasingly important as more and more wild bird habitats are swallowed up by agricultural land and urban and energy development.
Insects
Pollinators and other insects migrate, too, and they need a network of connected stopovers to rest and feed as they make their journeys.
Monarch butterflies travel as far as 3,000 miles between their northern breeding grounds and their overwintering sites in California and Mexico each fall and spring. On the southern route, they rest to feed on milkweed and other nectar-producing plants. In the northern parts of their territory, their larvae eat only milkweed, which is becoming harder to find due to increased use of pesticides, development and mowing. The planting of milkweed by private individuals and national wildlife refuges is essential to monarchs as they make their way along their ancient migration routes.
The “bee highway” in Oslo, Norway, was created in 2015 and includes meadows, rooftop gardens and potted flowering plants across the city to help the essential pollinators be able to breed, feed and migrate. Individuals and businesses worked along with the government to save the city’s bees and help them thrive through this unique wildlife corridor.
Fish
Wildlife corridors aren’t just for mammals and birds. Fish need to be able to swim freely through the rivers and streams that are part of their habitat.
There are approximately six million human-made fish barriers in the U.S., like dams and culverts, blocking the ability of fish to have clear passage through waterways to complete their natural life cycles.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been replacing or removing some of these barriers, and nearly 4,500 miles of streams and more than 15,000 acres of wetlands have been reopened to fish passage, including many on wildlife refuges.
Benefits of Wildlife Corridors
Safe Passage
For millennia, North America was the undisturbed habitat of many majestic creatures who lived in harmony with the land and Indigenous Peoples. Wildlife corridors allow these animals to cross highways and roads safely as they migrate along ancient routes. This is especially important for species that travel long distances like elk, wolves, caribou and other species.
Prevent Habitat Fragmentation
Habitat fragmentation due primarily to agricultural, residential and commercial expansion has destroyed or cut off the habitats of many species, isolating them and leading some of them to become endangered. One important function of wildlife corridors is to connect these patchworks of wild domains so that species are able to access enough food, rest, find mates and reproduce. These passageways can also offer animals refuge if their habitat is shared with predators.
Help Plants Thrive
The protected environment of wildlife corridors can benefit a variety of native plant species, allowing them to flourish and provide nourishment and cover for wildlife passing through, nesting, giving birth or making long-term homes in corridors.
Prevent Vehicle-Wildlife Collisions
Elk stand by the road with a large underground crossing structure that allows animals to pass under US 285 south of Buena Vista, Colorado on Sept. 17, 2019. Matthew Staver / For The Washington Post via Getty Images
As many as two million large mammals are killed in wildlife-vehicle collisions each year, as well as many smaller animals. Wildlife crossings are essential for animals to be able to cross the increasing number of roadways blocking their movements. Crossings can be underpasses or bridges built especially for animals ranging from elephants to land crabs.
Minimize Wildlife-Human Interactions
By helping animals have access to adequate habitat, wildlife corridors can help keep them from feeling the need to venture into areas where humans live in search of food or to escape predators, thus minimizing wildlife-human interactions. This is important for both, as it keeps them safe from possible harms they could cause each other, and helps keep wildlife from becoming too familiar with humans and their food.
One study showed that the gut microbiome of wild black bears in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula became less diverse when they consumed human junk food.
Help Animals Have Access to Adequate Food and Water
The quest to find fresh water and food often leads animals on migrations of hundreds of miles. Different seasons bring different challenges for animals in meeting their basic needs, including drought, seasonal changes, flooding and human encroachment on their habitats.
Zebras, for instance, migrate hundreds of miles each year in order to find vegetation and water. The natural range for wolves can lead them to move as much as 30 miles each day in search of prey. In the U.S., elk have been migrating along the same routes for thousands of years.
Without wildlife corridors and adaptations to fencing on private land, many of these animals would not be able to find adequate food and water, greatly impairing their chance of survival in the wild.
A zebra passes through the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway animal passage near the Tsavo National Park in Kenya on Feb. 22, 2017. Sun Ruibo / Xinhua via Getty Images
Help Wildlife Species Find Mates and Promote Genetic Diversity
In order to maintain the genetic diversity that keeps populations healthy, animals need to be able to travel freely to find suitable mates. Metropolitan areas, roads, fencing and other barriers can block their movements. When animals are stuck in a particular habitat without freedom to roam, they are prone to inbreeding and unhealthy genetic isolation. This can leave them more susceptible to diseases and birth defects, lower their reproductive success and ultimately lead to population decline.
The expanded freedom of movement wildlife corridors give species promotes their genetic diversity, helping them to avoid the genetic disorders that can result from inbreeding.
Alleviate Wildlife Encroachment During Natural Disasters
If a natural disaster like a flood or a wildfire occurs, wildlife corridors can provide the escape route animals need to find safety rather than fleeing into a nearby town or city. This can help prevent human-animal conflicts, protecting both species.
Help Animals Adapt to Changes in Their Environment Due to Climate Change
As the planet warms, the vegetation or lack thereof that defines terrain either perishes or adjusts by adapting to the warmer temperatures or slowly shifting to higher elevations. Small animals may also shift their habitats with the changing climate.
As vegetation and prey species change or move, animals may need to explore new territory to find the sustenance they need.
During a drought, animals may need to go farther afield in search of fresh water. As snow lines move farther north, Canada lynx and other alpine species that rely on snowpack for making dens and to hunt may be forced to move northward or seek higher elevations.
Wildlife corridors can offer animals refuge and help them move safely from one pocket of habitat to another as they try and find ways to adapt to our rapidly warming world.
Promote Biodiversity
A 2019 study found that the linking together of habitats through wildlife corridors enhances biodiversity. The researchers discovered that, after 18 years, the habitats of South Carolina pine savanna that were connected with corridors had 14 percent higher levels of biodiversity, as well as an average of 24 more plant species, than the habitats that were not connected.
The support corridors offer pollinators means more pollen and seeds are spread, which strengthens the resilience of the ecosystem and boosts biodiversity. It also means more crops are pollinated, which in turn prevents soil erosion, sequesters carbon and helps keep flooding at bay.
Challenges Facing Wildlife Corridors
Funding
Wildlife corridors are desperately needed to mitigate the impacts of human development on wildlife populations, but one of the biggest obstacles to expanding the network of wildlife corridors is a lack of financial support.
For example, an Oregon State report from 2020 indicated that $22 to $35 billion was needed in “immediate” funding for statewide wildlife crossing projects. Funding is necessary not just for construction of wildlife corridors, but also for maintenance of existing structures.
Funding for conservation, including wildlife corridors, can come from local, state and federal agencies through legislation and appropriation, such as allocated funds from the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. Through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, $350 million became available to Native American Tribes and state and local governments throughout the country to build wildlife corridors.
Research
Wildlife crossings and corridors must be tailored to the specific needs — such as types of vegetation and migration patterns — of the animals who inhabit the land they are being built upon. This requires studies to be conducted to make sure they are meeting the needs of particular species.
What Can We Do to Support Wildlife Corridors?
As a Society?
As a society, we can become more educated about ecosystems, biodiversity, conservation and the wildlife corridors that connect our protected areas. We can vote to elect officials who support the construction of wildlife bridges, underpasses and corridors, the restoration of wild spaces, rewilding and economic incentives for wildlife projects on private lands.
Rural landowners can turn parts of their property into wildlife corridors by partnering with public agencies that are working on corridor projects. They can modify their property with fencing that is conducive to wildlife migration and add buffer zones for animals. Areas that are not being used for agriculture can be planted with trees to create more habitat for a variety of species.
We can support nonprofit land trusts and work with them to make sure they are including wildlife corridors in their land management plans.
Urban planners can design wildlife crossings and make integrating them into municipal planning standard practice. One wildlife crossing can save as much as $443,000 each year by reducing animal-vehicle collisions.
Researchers can benefit society by studying the many climate benefits wildlife corridors provide, including providing shade to combat the effect of urban heat islands, carbon sequestration and minimizing the risk of flooding.
Another thing we can do as a society is to recognize Indigenous land rights and support the creation of wildlife corridors on Tribal lands. We can work with local and Indigenous communities, recognizing the cultural and spiritual connections they may have with the animals that migrate across their lands. By doing so we can gain valuable knowledge of the animals and their migratory patterns.
Animals have no political boundaries, so we can protect wildlife corridors that cross borders between countries by implementing international agreements to safeguard them, as well as work with global organizations that help coordinate corridor protections.
In Our Own Lives?
Depending on where you live, it may seem like wildlife corridors are far removed, but we can actually help them from our own backyards. Each green space is an opportunity to help create refuge, habitat and stepping stones for the wildlife who share our environment. You never know who will be passing through on their epic migrations to stop and rest, find food, make a new home and even bear young.
The more diversity of plant life we nurture in our gardens, the more animals will feel welcome to stop there — trees and nesting boxes for birds, grass for rabbits, flowering plants for pollinators, all free of pesticides and prohibitive fencing.
Think of your garden as a network, rather than an enclosed space. What animals are native to your area, and is there anything you could plant or modify that would help nurture and build the ecosystem you share? What are the wild spaces surrounding where you live like? Are they forest, orchard, grassland? These wild spaces are often where the animals that pass through your garden are headed to or coming from, so they can give you some clues as to what might help those animals on their journeys.
Other ways to help include learning more about wildlife corridors, volunteering with a local rewilding project or starting a pollinator garden or corridor in your neighborhood. Collaborate with neighbors on what native grass, flower and tree species would be most beneficial for animals in your region, stop or reduce mowing and either remove fencing or cut holes to allow animals like hedgehogs and rabbits to travel safely from garden to garden without having to veer onto sidewalks or roads.
Individuals can also speak up through public comments, sign petitions, attend community meetings and encourage government officials to support wildlife corridor projects.
By creating havens for biodiversity within areas where humans live, we can make transitions between landscapes more seamless, safe and nurturing for wildlife.
Takeaway
Human development, whether it be agricultural, residential or commercial, has replaced natural, balanced environments with concrete, steel and glass. Roads and highways have bisected ancient migration routes and cut off species from their known habitats, leaving them with no choice but to attempt to cross human-modified landscapes to find food, shelter and suitable mates.
Wildlife corridors are essential to provide safe passage to wildlife as they make the journeys that are part of their natural life cycle. Corridors have been shown to be effective, in some cases dramatically increasing the survival rates of species and the biodiversity of landscapes.
Humans must keep adding to the network of wildlife crossings, passageways and corridors, but also always be on the lookout for novel ways to restructure and rewild our environments. By doing so we can create environments that are more seamless with the natural landscape, as well as more inviting, secure and supportive of the animals with whom we share our planet.
The York Fire burning across the desert of southeastern California and Nevada is California’s biggest fire yet this year. It started Friday in the Mojave National Preserve and crossed into Nevada over the weekend as winds picked up over the dry landscape.
“Given an exceptionally wet winter and cool spring, larger fires in sparsely vegetated areas that are typically ‘fuel limited’ should be expected due to the extra vegetation growth such conditions foster,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at University of California, Los Angeles, as The New York Times reported.
In addition to the added growth of native vegetation, invasive plants are increasing the likelihood of wildfires in the region, according to the Incident Information System of the U.S. government.
“A combination of a wet winter combined with increasing levels of invasive grasses and mustards expanding across the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, the Mojave National Preserve is seeing an increase in fire frequency over the past decade. This is a departure from historic norms, as Joshua Trees and other desert adapted plants have limited natural defenses or propagation techniques when fires occur around them,” the Incident Information System website said.
The York Fire is one of dozens burning across the U.S. and is creating unique “fire whirls” that form when hot air rises and cooler air rushes in to replace it, resulting in what is sometimes called a “fire tornado,” reported CNN.
“These fire whirls are similar to dust devils but are specifically associated with the heat and energy released by a wildfire,” according to the Mojave National Preserve, as CNN reported. “They can range in size from a few feet to several hundred feet in height, and their rotational speed can vary widely.”
The national preserve said the region’s characteristic Joshua Trees have been suffering in the extreme heat of the past several years, reported USA Today, and the ongoing York wildfire will likely make matters worse.
“If an area with Joshua trees burns through, most will not survive and reproduction in that area is made more difficult. Wildfires could also result in the loss of irreplaceable resources in the park, like historic structures and cultural artifacts,” the Joshua Tree National Park website said.
“Joshua Tree National Park has been getting hotter and drier over the past century in large part due to human-caused climate change. … The changing climate also affects many of our animal species. Most evolved to survive in a hot, arid environment. However, they will now be forced to adapt, migrate, or perish,” the website said. “Desert bighorn sheep will lose lower elevation habitat and will need to migrate to higher and higher elevations. This will likely cause more genetic isolation than bighorn populations already face and could lead to them not being able to live in the park. The desert tortoise population has already plummeted due to habitat loss, disease, raven predation, and climate change.”
Overall, the changing climate and its extreme conditions, like heat waves, drought and wildfires affects everyone.
“Smoke from regional, climate-fueled wildfires adds to poor air quality and creates a health hazard. Excessive heat contributes to heat-related illnesses and dehydration,” the website said. “With a hotter, drier climate, the changes to our biodiversity could lead to less wildlife sightings, fewer annual wildflowers, and far fewer Joshua trees dotting the landscape.”
