The swarms were so thick they obscured the sun. Mohammed Adan, a farmer in northeastern Kenya, watched the horde of desert locusts first descend in late 2019. He’s been grappling with their legacy ever since.

Adan and 61 other farmers grow tomatoes, mangoes, watermelon, and other crops on Taleh Farm, a 309-acre property outside Garissa, a remote town not far from the Somali border. When the locusts first touched down, Garissa’s villagers resorted to traditional mitigation methods like drumming and banging pots and pans together — anything to make loud noise that might disperse the swarm. Women and children shouted at the descending crush, but their endeavors were largely fruitless. 

Billions of ravenous, short-horned grasshoppers alighted, devouring every bit of living plant matter in their path. Between February and June 2020, Taleh Farm was eaten to the ground. Adan’s son, Abubakar Mohamed, who goes by Abu, estimated that the locusts caused $2,000 worth of damage that season — a devastating sum in an area where the average annual salary is below $300. 

“We’ve heard about locusts from our fathers and grandfathers,” Adan, who is in his mid-50s, recalled. “But we’ve never had to deal with anything like this ourselves.”

While locust swarms spread across 10 countries over the course of early 2020, Kenya was particularly hard hit — one of the swarms feeding off the country stretched to three times the size of New York City. Three million people across the country, many of them small-scale farmers, were at risk of losing their entire season’s harvest. A legion of international organizations, including the United Nations’ World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, marshaled support in collaboration with Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture. Throughout the locust invasion, the FAO raised more than $230 million, which allowed it to acquire 155,600 liters of synthetic pesticides that were used to treat nearly 500,000 acres.

To handle ground-spraying operations, the Kenyan government enlisted both its army as well as members of the National Youth Service, a voluntary, government-funded vocational and training organization for young Kenyans. Meanwhile, the FAO contracted charter airline companies to conduct aerial spraying. An issue of apocalyptic scale required all hands on deck. 

Farmers like Adan were relieved that the government and aid organizations were stepping in to help. “We wanted those pesticides,” he told Grist. “Otherwise, we would have lost everything.”

But Adan didn’t know at the time that the FAO and other humanitarian groups had procured pesticides that were either already banned in the U.S. and Europe or soon would be. The synthetic pesticides in question — part of a chemical class known as organophosphates that includes chlorpyrifos, fenitrothion, malathion, and fipronil — have been known to cause dizziness, nausea, vomiting, watery eyes, and loss of appetite in humans who come into contact with them. Long-term exposure has been linked to cognitive impairment, psychiatric disorders, and infertility in men.

Subsistence farmers in Garissa believe they were accidentally poisoned while using these chemicals — and they’re still dealing with the ramifications. Adan has been suffering from a host of health maladies since 2020, including infertility and incontinence, and he has undergone five surgeries in the last few years. 

Internal FAO documents show that the agency was aware of widespread environmental and public health problems that resulted from its distribution of pesticides. The agency’s own assessment found that the toxic chemicals were handed to farmers without any protective equipment, such as gloves and coveralls, or adequate training on how to use them safely. Christian Pantenius, a former FAO staff member who worked as an independent expert adviser to help the agency coordinate its 2020 spraying campaign in Kenya and Ethiopia, said he saw hundreds of FAO-recruited National Youth Service members handling toxic chemicals in northern Kenya without sufficient training or protective equipment.

“I was shocked,” he told Grist. “I was furious about it. Can you imagine this happening in Europe?”

In April 2020, at the height of the locust upsurge, the Taleh farmers attended an emergency training hosted by staff of the Ministry of Agriculture’s Garissa County office. During an informal three-day demonstration, Adan said they were briefed on pesticide-spraying techniques. (Ahmed Sirat, a retired agricultural extension officer who worked with the Taleh farmers at the time, confirmed the training took place.)

After receiving their allotted chemicals, the farmers set off to salvage their crops. Adan said they were warned during the training that the pesticides are dangerous to humans, but they were not provided with specific chemical profiles or protective equipment.

The farmers burned through the first round of pesticides within a matter of days. This fenitrothion-heavy batch came in 500-milliliter bottles, which Sirat had shown them how to mix with water. Fenitrothion is an inexpensive, hazardous pesticide widely used in countries like Brazil, Japan, and Australia. However, it has not been approved for use in the U.S. because it can cause nausea, dizziness, and confusion at low exposures — and respiratory paralysis and even death at high exposures. The pesticide was so strong that some of the locusts died upon contact, falling right off the fruit trees. Clearly, the chemicals were working. But the farmers needed more.

On behalf of his farming committee, Adan requested more pesticides from the county agricultural extension officers. This time, they came in 20-liter cans. “There was a picture of an airplane on the can,” Adan recalled. In retrospect, he believes they were given chemicals meant for aerial spraying, rather than ground operations.

The farmers agreed to spray as a team, moving in sync. Adan remembers crouching as he mixed the chemicals with water, as instructed. He then poured the pesticide into a knapsack sprayer, a device consisting of a pressurized container that disperses liquid through a hand-held nozzle. As he was preparing to hoist the sprayer on his back, Adan accidentally hit the nozzle, spilling its contents across his stomach and back and down his groin and legs. He didn’t think much of it; the immediacy of the locust hordes captured his full attention. Adan repeated the operation and only washed the chemical off his body with water after attending to his crops.

The farmers’ efforts eventually paid off. They were able to protect some of their crops and sold them after harvest. But the farmers have since been suffering from a range of health effects that they attribute to pesticide exposure. For months after spilling chemicals on himself, Adan felt sick. A year later, in April 2021, the malaise culminated in an inability to pass urine. His muscles grew weak, and he often found himself easily fatigued. 

Hussein Abdi and Adan Hussein Yusuf, who also work on Taleh Farm, were exposed to milky clouds of the pesticide when they were spraying their mango trees in 2020. The chemicals irritated their eyes, and both farmers have since had eye surgeries at hospitals in Garissa. Abdi still struggles with light sensitivity and wears shades nearly all the time, even on overcast days. 

In response to Grist’s questions about the Taleh farmers’ health issues, Garissa County officials denied issuing pesticides to farmers. Ben Gachiri, an officer with the Garissa County communications office, said that it was “impossible that the farmers could have been instructed to do this themselves.” In a written statement, he claimed that no farmer or volunteer was ever issued locust-control pesticides or lodged complaints about pesticide exposure. 

The FAO’s assessment, however, tells a different story.

Massive locust surges have threatened farmers throughout the ages, but the swarms have been escalating in recent decades. Desert locust outbreaks require the perfect brew of weather, moist soil, and vegetation conditions. Researchers have found that increases in temperature and rainfall in desert regions, as well as high wind speeds during tropical cyclones, create an ideal environment for locusts to breed and migrate. The fact that many of these conditions have been amplified by climate change has only made locust outbreaks more likely.

The FAO has supported synthetic pesticides as the primary method of locust control since their popularization in the 1980s. A 2021 analysis of FAO pesticide purchase data by the environmental news website Mongabay found that more than 95 percent of the pesticides the agency delivered to East African nations during the locust outbreaks were proven to cause harm to humans and animals. Chlorpyrifos, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had already determined to have no safe level of exposure, made up more than half of the haul. (Scientific evidence linking chlorpyrifos to a slew of neurodevelopmental harms ultimately led the U.S. agency to ban its domestic use in 2021.)

The FAO is well aware of the harmful health effects of chlorpyrifos and other organophosphate pesticides, which it categorizes as “extremely hazardous.” According to an internal 2020 FAO report, which Grist obtained through an officer at Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, FAO staff and consultants observed spray sites across 18 counties in Kenya from July to September of that year. (The FAO has not replied to queries about why the document is not publicly available.)

The report found the agency failed to conduct a full environmental and social impact assessment as required under Kenya’s environmental laws, given the state of emergency produced by the massive locust outbreak. Most of the decisions made with regard to locust mitigation efforts remained opaque to the communities most affected, who received little to no guidance on the pesticides’ toxicity and were not briefed on their health or environmental effects. At several operation sites in Kenya’s far north, “communities complained of lack of information and communication” during locust control operations within their vicinity, the report noted. 

In Samburu County, northwest of Garissa in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, FAO monitoring found that “non-trained personnel” took the lead on ground-spraying operations, leading to rampant user errors. The Locust Pesticide Referee Group, an independent body of experts that advises the FAO on pesticide use, recommends that knapsack-sprayers distribute 1 liter per hectare of land, which is roughly 0.11 gallons per acre. But the report noted that the untrained volunteers had sprayed about 3.63 gallons per acre — more than 30 times the recommended amount — on a rainy day when pesticides are likely to run off and pollute soil and water sources.

In Lodwar, northwestern Kenya’s largest town, the FAO had trained a crew of 106 National Youth Service members on pesticide management and safety. Still, some crew members “complained of itchiness on skin during spraying,” the report noted. FAO monitoring staff noted that young children were seen playing next to carelessly disposed gloves, masks, gumboots, overalls, safety goggles, and uncollected pesticide drums.

The scathing report found that farmers and community members weren’t properly informed about when spraying occurred, how long it would last, or what the chemicals’ effects were on human and animal health. As a result, around Oldonyiro, a heavily sprayed area in Isiolo County a few hundred miles northwest of Garissa, local Ministry of Agriculture authorities did not collect accounts of cow, camel, and goat mortalities that came from community members.

Less harmful alternatives to synthetic pesticides exist and have proven their efficacy, but they are not yet in widespread global use. Biopesticides developed from Metarhizium acridum fungal spores were first tested in 1989 under a private research program, after a particularly vicious three-year locust plague in East Africa. After years of painstaking testing, a commercial product finally hit the market in 2005. The FAO first used a version of the biopesticide on an operational scale in Tanzania in 2009, and later in Madagascar and Central Asia.

In 2020, Metarhizium-derived biopesticides were used on a large scale with great success in Somalia. The effectiveness was comparable to that of synthetic pesticides: 60 percent mortality after 10 days, increasing to 83 percent after 14 days. Though biopesticides have a higher initial cost than synthetics, researchers found that this was quickly offset by low environmental damage and the elimination of disposal costs. As a bonus, biopesticides can boost honey production, a common livelihood in East Africa, since they are far gentler on pollinators than synthetic chemicals. 

Despite their proven track record, companies have largely been unwilling to invest in such biopesticides. That’s because the products are highly targeted and cannot be used on as wide a range of pests. And because they are derived from nature, producing identical batches has proven tricky.

“Economically it’s not as viable, and therefore not of interest to governments –– or companies,” said Pantenius.

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FAO representatives declined to speak directly with Grist about the agency’s pesticide procurement procedure, or to elaborate on how decisions were made concerning its locust campaign in Kenya. To this day, the FAO has declined to publicly release reports about documented user error and exactly how much of each pesticide was sprayed.

But in an emailed statement from the FAO’s East Africa regional office, the agency emphasized that it was up to individual countries to select which pesticides they would authorize for use, and that locust control measures were “closely monitored to minimize risks to people and communities.” The FAO denied that farmers or any other untrained community members participated in spraying. The statement added that the FAO encouraged countries to use biopesticides, but that limited production of these alternatives made them insufficient for the scale of the outbreak.

Pantenius said that the FAO has worked to protect crops from being devoured by locusts in cost-effective ways while also considering environmental damage. However, he believes that it and other international humanitarian organizations must put more pressure on governments to make better-informed decisions. “It’s time that we get to a point where we draw a line and say, ‘We’re willing to help you, but won’t provide chemical pesticides,’” he said.

“By the time locusts cross over the crops, it’s already too late [to consider alternatives],” Pantenius added. “Once the plague is over, everyone quickly moves on to more pressing issues.”

Three years after the locusts first arrived, Adan has realized that he could be dealing with effects from pesticide exposure for the rest of his life.

“I’m a lot better now, but it still hurts to stand up,” he explained, lightly pounding the muscles around his thighs. Until recently, he had also been struggling with incontinence.

To date, Adan has undergone five surgeries, inserting and removing catheters, in an attempt to address a series of urinary tract complications from the accident. He estimates that the hospital bills have racked up to nearly $10,000 — he was forced to sell 14 camels at approximately $400 each to help cover the costs, and neighbors and relatives pitched in. 

Adan’s infertility — a known ramification from exposure to synthetic organophosphates such as chlorpyrifos — has been an even greater blow, given local cultural expectations. “When one stops procreating, one’s life is effectively over,” his son Abu explained.

As of early this year, Adan’s health had deteriorated. He started having trouble passing urine again and may need a sixth surgery. Abu said that they are considering applying for a medical visa to India, with the hopes that overseas expertise might solve his lingering urinary tract issue.

On a sweltering day under the equatorial sun late last November, Adan stood beneath the shade of overgrown mango trees with his friends Abdi and Yusuf. He recalled a local saying about locusts, revealing the enduring nuisance that the pests have been in the region — existing as mere folklore for some generations, a living nightmare for others.

“Anyone, even a cow, who eats too much, you’re said to be eating like an ayah — a locust.”

Adan remains concerned about future outbreaks. If a better preparedness plan is not put in place, “It will cause more damage than this,” he said. “This is something that comes with God’s plan — that can’t be predicted by a human being.”

Anthony Langat contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a UN-led fight against locusts took a toxic toll on Kenyan farmers on Aug 23, 2023.

This year, nearly 100,000 people in Bangladesh have contracted dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease common in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The number of infected patients is overwhelming the fragile hospital system there. More than 450 people have died so far, the deadliest dengue outbreak in the nation of approximately 170 million since record keeping began in 2000. Sri Lanka, nearby, is also experiencing a sharp spike — more than 40,000 cases of dengue this year alone.

Similar dengue-driven crises are unfolding in other parts of the globe. The Americas are in a “public health emergency,” according to the World Health Organization, or WHO: Peru experienced its largest dengue outbreak ever this summer; Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina are also reporting alarmingly high numbers of cases. 

In the United States, five cases of locally acquired dengue have been reported in Florida this month alone, prompting local health officials to put Miami-Dade and Broward counties on alert. The state has reported a total of 11 cases of locally transmitted dengue so far in 2023. 

These outbreaks are concerning, but they’re not particularly surprising to experts who have been tracking dengue for the past several decades. Cases of dengue — which can cause fever, rashes, vomiting, and, in severe instances, internal bleeding, organ failure, and death — have been rising for years. 

Since the beginning of the century, global cases of the disease, carried by the Aedes genus of mosquitoes, have skyrocketed, from roughly 500,000 in 2000 to more than 5 million in 2019. In the first seven months of 2023, worldwide cases spiked to more than 3 million, and over 1,500 deaths have been reported — numbers that are expected to rise as the summer continues. 

There are likely hundreds of millions more unreported incidents each year, as dengue produces mild or no symptoms in most people. But as more people get infected, the percentage who end up developing the severe form of the disease will increase, too. Experts say a tangled web of factors is driving the surge, but one culprit stands out: climate change. 

In the 1970s, global cases of dengue fever, or break-bone fever as it’s also commonly known, were low. Dengue had been more prevalent 20 years prior, but an aggressive campaign to eradicate Aedes aegypti mosquitoes using the now-banned insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, lowered rates. The campaign was particularly successful in the Americas, where dengue and yellow fever, both carried by A. aegypti, were an omnipresent threat. 

But spraying DDT, a known carcinogen, into the environment quickly became an unsustainable mosquito-control measure. By the 1980s, as DDT was being phased out and a century of rampant fossil fuel use began to significantly influence the global climate, the disease began to spread again, and fast. In the next couple of decades, dengue would be found in 100 countries, up from just a handful of countries in the 1960s. Today, it’s been detected in more than 140 nations. 

“This is the [mosquito-borne] disease that has grown most substantially in the past 10 years,” Felipe J Colón-González, a climate and health researcher who works at the global charitable foundation the Wellcome Trust, told Grist. “There are many factors that are related to climate.” 

In order to gauge the influence of global warming on the spread of dengue, researchers look at three interconnected clues: where mosquitoes move, how quickly they develop, and how often they reproduce. 

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Like any creature on earth, mosquitoes thrive within a specific temperature range. The insects can’t withstand temperatures that are too dry or cold. Anywhere below 57 degrees Fahrenheit, particularly when there’s low humidity, is unlivable. But most mosquitoes can’t withstand temperatures that are too wet or hot, either — large rainstorms wash them out and they tend to die off at 90 degrees F and above. 

Human industrial activity has warmed the planet by about 2 degrees F, on average, a seemingly small change that has had enormous implications for the spread of infectious disease — and life on earth writ large. 

Nepal, a mountainous country in South Asia, is a perfect example of how even a slight temperature change can open up a Pandora’s box of disease. Dengue wasn’t present in Nepal until 2004, when the first case was recorded. Less than two decades later, in 2022, the country, which is warming more than 1 degree F every decade, experienced its largest outbreak ever — 54,232 cases and 67 deaths. Researchers in Nepal noted that the nation’s mountains are undergoing “unusually large” fluctuations in temperature. Snow cover on those mountains is melting away as climate change accelerates, inviting pests into new, higher territories. Afghanistan, also long considered too mountainous for Aedes mosquitoes, is witnessing a similar trend. 

Climate change isn’t just inspiring mosquitoes to move to higher elevations — it’s prompting the bugs to mature more quickly and produce more generations of offspring in a single season. 

Warmer temperatures increase both mosquitoes’ rate of survival and development, and the rate at which they feed. Female mosquitoes, the ones that bite humans, digest blood more quickly when it’s warm and humid out. That leads to more disease. “Because the metabolism is faster, they have to feed many more times in a life cycle so there’s more probability of an infection,” said Colón-González. 

Even temperatures that should be too hot for mosquitoes don’t always kill them off. The insects hide in cool corners and under couch cushions to escape the heat, seeking shade much like humans do. “Mosquitoes are annoyingly intelligent creatures,” Colón-González said. 

It’s clear that climate change is helping mosquitoes, and the diseases they carry, extend their reach across much of the planet. Roughly half the globe is now at risk for dengue, Raman Velayudhan, who leads the WHO’s program for the control of neglected tropical diseases, said recently. But mosquitoes are not invincible. Researchers have had success artificially infecting Aedes mosquitoes with a bacterium that prevents the transmission of dengue from mosquitoes to humans. Pilot studies in South America and Southeast Asia have shown that the bacterium, called Wolbachia, can be incredibly effective: Cases of dengue in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, went down 77 percent following the release of Wolbachia mosquitoes. 

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And other, more dependable and scalable methods of curbing dengue transmission exist. As is the case with many climate-driven illnesses, keeping communities safe from dengue ultimately comes down to resources and access. 

In the U.S., climate projections indicate that the atmospheric conditions for dengue will be ideal throughout much of the country by the end of the century. But it’s unlikely that dengue will become as widespread an issue as it is in underdeveloped countries. That’s because most American homes have window screens that keep bugs out, and a large portion of the population has access to air conditioners that keep humidity low inside. Houses in the U.S. are spaced further apart than elsewhere in the world, which means a mosquito that breeds in one house won’t necessarily bite people in the house next door. Americans also have widespread access to mosquito repellant. And in most areas, drinking water containers and sanitation systems are stored underground, which means mosquitoes can’t breed in them. That’s why in Texas, dengue is a rare disease while as many as 20 percent of all dengue deaths in the Americas occur in Mexico. Two places that share a border and the same environmental conditions can have two completely different health outcomes. 

“It’s true that the climate is going to become more suitable for dengue,” Colón-González said, pointing to rising temperatures and cases all over the globe. But the built environment, human behavior, and the quality of public health systems also play important roles — and point at potential silver linings that could help mitigate the dengue burden in countries with fewer resources. “It’s not just the climate,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Dengue fever cases surge as temperatures rise on Aug 23, 2023.

Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park is home to one of the most biodiverse concentrations of plant and animal life on Earth. In an historic vote of nearly 60 percent in favor, Ecuadorian citizens chose to stop the development of new oil wells in the park, the country’s National Electoral Commission said.

Approval of the referendum means about 726 million barrels of oil will stay in the ground, reported The Guardian.

The park is also the home of three of the last “uncontacted” Indigenous communities on the planet, the Taromenane, Tagaeri and Dugakaeri people, who live in voluntary isolation, Reuters reported.

By passing the referendum, Ecuador became one of the first nations to vote to restrict the extraction of resources. The measure was passed during the first round of the country’s presidential elections.

“Today is a historic day! As a Waorani woman and mother, I feel overjoyed with Ecuadorians’ resounding decision to stop oil drilling in my people’s sacred homeland,” said Nemonte Nenquimo, an Indigenous Waorani leader and Goldman Environmental Prize winner, as reported by The Guardian. “Finally, we are going to kick oil companies out of our territory! This is a major victory for all Indigenous Peoples, for the animals, the plants, the spirits of the forest and our climate!”

Yasuní National Park became a UNESCO world biosphere reserve in 1989. The biodiversity hotspot consists of 2.5 million acres that are home to 121 reptile species, 139 amphibian species and 610 bird species.

Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment and Water said 2.5 acres in Yasuní contains 650 tree species and hundreds of animal species, Reuters reported.

“This referendum presents a huge opportunity for us to create change in a tangible way,” Helena Gualinga, an Indigenous rights advocate, told CNN.

Citizens of Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, voted in another referendum to stop gold mining in the highland biosphere of Chocó Andino, located nearby.

“This victory shows that we humans are taking action to save our planet during these times of climate crisis,” said Leonidas Iza, president of Conaie, Ecuador’s umbrella Indigenous federation, reported The Guardian.

Passage of the referendum to protect Yasuní means state oil company Petroecuador has one year to stop production and will mean the loss of approximately 12 percent of the country’s output of crude oil, Reuters reported.

In a social media post, Petroecuador said it would comply with the decision of the voters.

“We will follow up to make sure the government respects the decision of the Ecuadorean people,” said Juan Bay, president of the Waorani Indigenous community, at a press conference in Quito, as reported by Reuters. “We have saved the greatest biodiversity and we have saved the communities in voluntary isolation.”

Presidential hopeful Luisa González, who was in the lead after the first round of votes, said on a local radio show that by banning oil extraction in Yasuní, not only will income be lost, but indemnity payments will have to be made to companies.

“Those indemnifications could cost $15 billion,” said González, as Reuters reported. “We need to review to see how we’ll get out, what contracts there are, how they will close. It’s a complicated scenario.”

Last year, mining brought in $2.8 billion and was Ecuador’s fourth biggest income source after bananas, oil and shrimp.

Waorani leader Ene Nenquimo said the victory represented years of suffering by Indigenous communities.

“The fight is not just today but years-long,” Nenquimo said, as reported by Reuters.

The post Ecuador’s Citizens Vote to Stop All Oil Drilling in Biodiverse Amazonian National Park appeared first on EcoWatch.

For Jasmin Estrada, nature has always meant more than one thing. It was the summer camp in New England, where she lived, and bathing in sunlight on plastic chairs in her abuela’s hot backyard in Guatemala, waiting for food to be cooked. It was also the scorching sun over a family member’s head as they hid in the back of a truck entering the United States. Nature can be very harsh, she says, but “there’s [also] a harmony and beauty that we all deserve to connect with.”

So when she started studying adventure education at Green Mountain College in Vermont, Estrada couldn’t help but notice how “wilderness” was treated as something untouched and pure. She felt uneasy when her classes “cut folks off by telling them that they have to go through this ‘white explorer’ model to be connected.” This un-nuanced understanding of how race, culture, gender, and class affect how people engage with public lands has contributed to a landscape where most visitors to public lands are white.

Closing the “nature gap”—as some have called the lack of outdoor access people of color and other marginalized groups experience—led Estrada to her current position as community support and training manager at the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts. When The Wilderness Society knocked on the Appalachian Mountain Club door with a new public lands curriculum in 2018, Estrada was elated. It was the first time she’d seen this kind of nuanced understanding of public lands in a curriculum, she said.

The educational material, divided into six modules, incorporates important historical context for conservation efforts, highlighting the stories that are often left out, including from conservationists of color and queer communities, and the segregation and discrimination that have informed national conservation policy. It also includes lessons in climate change and how to advocate for public lands.

“If we are not telling a story about public lands where people feel seen, where people’s experiences are validated, and where we’re being authentic—and just acknowledging some of the atrocious things that happened with regards to how land has been conserved in this country—then people are going to continue to feel alienated by the conservation movement,” says Liz Vogel, education and youth engagement director with The Wilderness Society. 

Since its launch, TWS’ curriculum has reached all corners of the United States, reshaping how universities, outdoor-advocacy organizations, public schools, and youth-advocacy organizations teach about public lands. About 3,500 people have downloaded the free, publicly available document, and 15 organizations have undergone personalized training with The Wilderness Society. 

Filling the gaps in public lands history

Around a century after the National Park Service was established, the conservation community started self-reflecting on their achievements and shortcomings. A study found that 95% of national forest visitors and 77% of national park visitors were white—even in parks and forests close to communities of color. Only 112 out of 460 national parks and monuments recognized or were dedicated to diverse peoples and cultures. In a country where the majority of the population will not be white by 2044, it was indispensable to create a representative connection between people and public lands.

In 2016, Vogel says TWS decided to take action to change that. “If we are advocating for these places, and advocating for more land to be conserved,” Vogel says, “we need to be honest with how things happened in conservation history. Often, that history isn’t pretty.”

The Wilderness Society worked for a year alongside curriculum writing consultants, The Avarna Group, to create a curriculum that laid out the different types of public lands that span over 640 million acres in the U.S. The lessons dig into the history before the arrival of settlers, recognizing the deep ecological, cultural, and spiritual ties Indigenous communities had—and still have—with the land. It also details the violent policies—including acts of genocide—that often were put in place to create national parks and forests. The program discusses everyday environmentalists shadowed by the mythologized figures of John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. And it introduces a look into the future of conservation in the era of climate and biodiversity crises.

TWS ran a pilot of the curriculum with three long-time allies: The Boys and Girls Outdoor Leadership Development program at the YMCA; a community-based organization in New Mexico called Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions, which introduced the curriculum in public schools; and the Appalachian Mountain Club, which worked with both kids and educators in the Northeast of the country. Since then, The Wilderness Society has constantly updated the curriculum using the feedback of those who use it. “It’s a living document,” Vogel explains. “We really wanted to create this resource that was responsive and useful anywhere.” 

Evelyn Hatem, a rising senior in environmental studies and public policy at Dartmouth College, was one of the students in the first iterations of the program in 2018. Hiking on the ridges of the Pemigewasset Wilderness, the largest wilderness area at the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, Hatem learned for the first time about the history of the 45,000 acres of forest surrounding her. The ridge lines covered in trees, which had looked pristine when she arrived, suddenly transformed. Learning that the timber companies had left the mountains barren in the 19th century, and that it was not until 1911 that the government bought the land and decided to conserve the second-growth forest she now contemplated, “was definitely sobering,” she says.

Going through the curriculum left Hatem wanting to learn more. She has subsequently taken several classes on Native American history, and has tried to share this information in her role leading outdoor field trips for Dartmouth’s freshmen. “[Since taking the course], I have thought a lot about equity and inclusion and [the] outdoors. It was definitely a catalyst.”

Hatem’s not the only one deeply affected by the material. Estrada says after she taught the curriculum with the Appalachian Mountain Club, one girl ended up writing her college essay about public lands and their history. Another participant got involved with a local youth center. 

Estrada said the curriculum encouraged understanding simultaneous truths. Rather than dwelling on atrocities, considering public lands’ complicated past can help acknowledge people’s complex mix of feelings, including respect, gratitude, and grievance. She says it’s an opportunity to ask, “How can you find the joy in advocacy?”

The Wilderness Society has compiled an educational curriculum that incorporates important historical context for conservation efforts, highlighting the stories of Black and Indigenous conservationists and diving into the violent practices that have informed American conservation policy. Its goal is to teach a more authentic and holistic story to students of all ages.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Teaching the full story of public lands on Aug 22, 2023.

Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of Record High. I’m Jake Bittle, and today, we’re going to explore why a key heat solution often goes unused.

Back in the summer of 2021, as Seattle recovered from a Pacific Northwest heat dome that left more than 150 people dead in Washington state, emergency managers zeroed in on a big reason for the city’s vulnerability to heat. Not only did most households in Seattle not have air conditioning, but the city also had few public cooling centers where people could escape from high temperatures. Because Seattle’s climate is typically so mild, many schools and libraries don’t have A/C, so they couldn’t serve as refuges the way they might have in other regions of the country.

In the two years since the heat dome, Seattle has installed A/C units in a few more libraries and recreational centers, and applied for federal grant money to expand cooling in other buildings. But even as they work to add more public cooling centers, emergency managers are running into another obstacle that hotter cities have been dealing with for years: Even if a local government sets up cooling centers, people often don’t go to them.

Part of the reason is economic. It’s one thing to know that there’s a library with A/C downtown, but it’s another thing to get there. If you don’t have a car, you either have to walk or wait at a bus stop in sweltering heat, which might be more dangerous than staying where you are. In the South, where most homes and apartments have A/C, cooling centers are designed to provide shelter to low-income and unhoused people, but these populations are often the ones that have the most difficulty making a crosstown trip.

The city of Tampa, Florida, encountered this problem when it opened three cooling centers during a recent heat wave. Over the course of a week, around a dozen people visited each center per day, according to the Tampa Bay Times, which quoted a woman who was too afraid to walk to the nearest center two miles away. The facilities could have accommodated several times more visitors. In other cases, people might just not know what their options are: A CDC study of two Arizona counties last year found that “barriers to cooling center access among older adults include awareness of location and transportation.” 

But even when people have easy access to cooling centers, they still don’t go, says Kate Hutton, an emergency planning coordinator for the city of Seattle. 

When Hutton’s department interviewed Seattleites after the 2021 heat dome, many people said they wouldn’t be interested in a public cooling center even if it were right down the road. They gave several reasons for their reluctance: Some parents were worried about bringing their children around strangers, for instance, and some elderly people balked at the thought of sitting in a gym for hours surrounded by screaming children. And many people who were experiencing homelessness said they were wary of encountering stigma from wealthier people if they showed up at a public facility.

Perhaps the most common objection city officials heard was that being at a cooling center sounded boring. If a government building didn’t have food, or internet access, or activities of any kind, it was hard for many people to imagine spending hours there at a time, regardless of how excruciatingly hot it got outside.

“I think what we got from those conversations was that cooling centers need to be more than just a cold space,” said Hutton. “They need to be [places] that people have other incentives or reasons to go to.” But making the city’s cooling centers more attractive would require spending extra money on food and staff, and buying more A/C units is hard enough.

This reluctance to visit cooling centers is a particular challenge for temperate cities like Seattle, where most people still don’t have residential air conditioning and where public buildings are some of the only places to chill out. The city government can reach out to unhoused people and offer them transportation to libraries and schools, but that still leaves thousands of residents who choose to stay at home because it’s more private and more fun, and thus put their own health at risk.

“If you ask the average person if they want to upend their day and their schedule and their plans just to go be cool in a specific place, they’re going to say that’s not ideal for them,” Hutton told Grist. “They’re going to want cooling options that are part of their normal routine.”

By the numbers

Air conditioning is almost universal in the fast-growing cities of the South and Southwest, but it’s far less common in the more temperate Northwest. That’s begun to change, however, after a heat-dome disaster struck that region in 2021.

Data Visualization by Clayton Aldern

What we’re reading

Should Biden declare a “climate emergency”? Amid a sweltering summer, activists have been urging Biden to declare climate change a national emergency. My colleague Akielly Hu reports that declaring a heat disaster might be a better course of action, since it would unlock federal money to keep people cool.

Read more

Heat linked to prison suicide-watch incidents: A new study from Emory University found that suicide-watch incidents in Louisiana prisons increased by more than 30 percent on extreme heat days. Gina Jiménez broke down the harrowing new data for Inside Climate News.

Read more 

Back to school in a heat dome: Chicago students went back to class this year during a searing Midwest heat dome, and the Chicago Tribune’s Sarah Macaraeg reports that many of the city’s public schools aren’t ready to deal with high temperatures. Many classrooms and cafeterias lack working A/C, which has parents and teachers worried.

Read more 

There is no interest group for heat: Even though heat kills more people than any other climate disaster, politicians don’t give the issue much attention or money, writes Alexander Nieves for Politico. That’s because heat doesn’t have a political constituency, unlike the issue of drought in California, which has aroused the attention and activism of the state’s powerful agriculture industry.

Read more 

How extreme heat threatens contraception: Over at The 19th, Shefali Luthra writes that high temperatures can make almost every form of contraception less effective. Condoms, emergency contraception pills, and pregnancy tests all need to be stored in temperatures of 86 degrees Fahrenheit or below, or else they’re liable to break or stop working.

Read more 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why cooling centers sit empty on Aug 22, 2023.

A recent campaign ad targeting West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin shows the centrist Democrat standing alongside President Biden, applauding the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Ominous music plays as the words, attributed to Biden, “I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuel” splash across the screen. The spot, from a dark money group aligned with Republicans, paints Manchin as a flaming liberal happy to eliminate 100,000 West Virginia jobs in a ruthless pursuit of clean energy.

Manchin probably wouldn’t define himself as particularly liberal, nor would he consider himself an enemy of fossil fuels. The Mountain State’s senior senator has shown no reluctance to withhold votes on important legislation like the Build Back Better Act or demand concessions to support Democratic priorities like the Inflation Reduction Act. His ability to thwart President Biden’s agenda has given him, and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, outsize importance in Washington.

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It’s in keeping with a path he’s walked throughout his political career, which included two stints as governor. Manchin embraces deep-blue labor interests and conservative business interests alike while beating his chest at environmental regulators, vowing to protect the state’s economy from those who would shut down Big Coal. He’s observing the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act in a typically two-sided manner. On one hand, he celebrated the law’s extension of benefits for disabled coal miners and its reduction of medical costs for seniors. On the other, he promised an “unrelenting fight against the Biden Administration’s efforts to implement the IRA as a radical climate agenda instead of implementing the IRA that was passed into law.” 

Manchin is keenly aware that his political adversaries want West Virginians to see him as a liberal, and that he cannot allow them to succeed. He finds himself under threat by West Virginia’s sitting governor, Jim Justice, a Republican who is running for the seat Manchin has held since 2010. Justice, the state’s richest man, made his fortune as a coal executive and one of the nation’s largest grain producers, though he’s probably more well known nationally as a culture war populist who has patterned himself after Donald Trump. He loves to rail against political correctness and “wokeism,” he’s promised to deliver the biggest state tax cut in history, and he’s mastered the art of using levity to cut down opponents. He has no qualms about bringing out Babydog, his media-friendly canine, and inviting critics to “kiss her hiney.”

“Anybody that would hold up a bulldog’s behind to the camera at the State of the State,” Justice has said, “absolutely will just about do anything.”

Though Justice’s candid demeanor and populism may give him some appeal with voters, his honesty in business dealings and his commitment to worker safety is deeply suspect. He’s been sued more than 600 times by the Justice Department, business partners, vendors, government agencies, and others for millions of dollars in unpaid taxes, fines, and loans. Environmental groups have come for Justice over and over again for safety violations throughout central Appalachia and problems at his unreclaimed mines, including repeated floods and landslides that have long plagued a community in Pike County, Kentucky. Over the past five years, regulators have cited Justice’s companies for 130 environmental and workplace safety violations, and ordered them to cease all activity until about $8 million in fines are paid. Justice has ignored them.

Manchin does not appear to consider Justice much of a threat. “Make no mistake,” he has boasted repeatedly (including in a statement to Grist). “I will win any race I enter.”

His confidence may prove unfounded. Machin’s popularity has waned as his once blue state has turned bright red. After winning three consecutive races by at least 30 percentage points, he squeaked through his latest by only 3 points. Worse, he’s polling poorly against Justice, whose approval rating is at 57 percent to Manchin’s 29 percent. Justice looks likely to beat his primary opponent, Alex Mooney, and challenge Manchin in 2024. The threat he poses to the seasoned Democrat underscores how the decline of coal and the rise of anti-environment, hardline Republicans has changed politics in West Virginia — and could reshape the last years of President Biden’s administration and the future of Democratic priorities. 

“The West Virginia seat is Republicans’ best chance to flip a seat,” said political commentator Jessica Cook of The Cook Report. That could give the GOP a reasonable shot at a Senate majority, paving the way for more right-wing legislation, particularly in the climate arena. 

A small but vocal contingent of West Virginia voters are outspoken in their frustration with this choice. They aren’t unaware of coal’s increasingly shaky future, or its impact on the climate. They feel trapped by what they see as a false dichotomy between candidates that regardless of party have kept the state in a holding pattern. The political movement WV Can’t Wait, which recruits and trains progressive-leaning candidates in hopes of turning West Virginia leftward, says many voters feel disempowered and equally fed up with Democrats and Republicans whose concern for their interests is limited at best. 

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“In West Virginia, we know that politics isn’t Democrat v. Republican, it’s the Good Old Boys Club v. Everyone Else,” the organization said in a statement to Grist. “In West Virginia, we know that the fight isn’t pro-Coal versus anti-Coal, it’s Coal Company versus Coal Miner.”

Mariah Clay, a young environmental activist from the coalfields community of Mingo County, calls the likelihood of a Manchin-Justice race “a slap in the face.” The way she sees it, the political power of both men stems from industries that have cost West Virginians their health and their safety.

“I’m sick and tired of it, having to choose the lesser of two evils,” she said. “Our land, and the well-being of our communities, are continuously sacrificed over and over and over again, for these cash cow projects that have nothing to do with us.”

Like Justice, Manchin has amassed a fortune from coal. His family owns Enersystems, a company that sells a form of coal waste called gob that power plants burn for energy. His background has made him adept at walking the narrow bridge between playing nicely with miners while pleasing the industry they work for. Even as he took conservative stances on environmental regulations as governor, Manchin pushed for miners’ access to health care and a pension and allied with other Democrats to support measures that would prevent black lung, a deadly disease contracted through coal and silica dust exposure. But he also took the controversial step of privatizing the state workers’ comp system.

“Senator Manchin is probably the best example of someone who was able to sort of thread that needle, so to speak, about coal production,” West Virginia University historian Hal Gorby told Grist.

But the political environment in West Virginia that allowed him to do that has changed. Although the state has supported Republican presidential candidates since 2000, Democrats largely had a lock on the governorship and the statehouse from 1993 through 2015. It has since become a GOP stronghold. This shift followed the emergence, in the early 1990s, of its stronger, more patriotic party line on the state’s most famous export, one conveyed in a campaign called “Friends of Coal.” The fossil fuel became part and parcel with faith, freedom, and firearms. The movement, and the party, gained greater support during the Obama administration, an era the industry and its political allies called the “war on coal.” 

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Still, the industry has seen its fortunes wane. Mechanization increased production for a time while slashing jobs, reducing the number of coal miners in West Virginia to fewer than 12,000. Production peaked in 2008 and has steadily declined ever since — by as much as 64 percent in Appalachia alone — as states retire their coal-fired power plants. This trend is one of the biggest reasons for West Virginia’s rightward tilt. Though some miners and their communities have spoken out against the environmental damage the industry wreaks, others embraced the party that continues promising to keep the mines open.

“It’s sort of framed as like, We’re going to either have a clean environment, or we’re going to have this sort of vibrant economy that’s, you know, going to pollute,” Gorby said.

All the while, national Democrats showed little interest in maintaining their foothold in West Virginia, instead focusing on urban centers and suburban voters. 

It is against this backdrop that Justice emerged. The irony is he won his first governorship, in 2016, as a Democrat. He switched parties seven months into his term (during an appearance with President Trump), telling voters, “I can’t help you anymore being a Democrat.” His administration has taken to following the party line, criminalizing protests against fossil fuels, passing strict anti-abortion laws, opposing gun control, and more.

Though his role as culture warrior draws comparisons to Trump (whom Justice recently endorsed), former Massey Energy chief executive Don Blankenship may be the better analogue. Blankenship, a major player in the Friends of Coal campaign who contributed mightily to many conservative, anti-environment West Virginia candidates, ran for the Senate in 2018. He failed to survive the primary, undone by widespread condemnation of the lax safety measures that contributed to a deadly explosion at a Massey Energy mine in 2010. An investigation found that “Massey Energy used the leverage of the jobs it provided to attempt to control West Virginia’s political system.”

And that, ultimately, may be the clearest reflection of West Virginia politics, an arena in which politicians of both parties must be mindful of the state’s flagship industry, even if its best days are behind it. 

Though some voters consider Manchin the lesser evil, Clay and others see both men more or less as the same result of the disenfranchisement and disenchantment of West Virginia’s voters and the continuing power of the coal industry and coal propaganda. Commentators often scrutinize the state’s politics, asking why so many of its residents appear to vote against their own best interests, and they often consider its elections a curiosity confined to the Mountain State. But what happens there often has national implications. And while some people argue that progressivism lies in wait, little will come of that until Democrats develop a strategy to improve the day-to-day conditions of West Virginians’ lives.

If Manchin stays in office, any deals the Biden administration makes to win his vote will be tempered with concessions to the fossil fuel industry. If Justice wins, though, there will be no deals at all. Justice’s comment about the best response to COVID-19 is equally apt here: “You’re dadgummed if you do and dadgummed if you don’t.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Joe Manchin could lose his pivotal Senate seat — to another coal baron on Aug 22, 2023.