Thomas Van Dyck on Fossil Fuel Divestment and the Logical Clean Energy Revolution

“It’s coming,” insists Thomas Van Dyck. “You can see it coming as you could with Polaroid and Kodak, with the transition to digital. You can see the inevitability of what’s happening.”

He’s referring to the global—and U.S.—trend toward sustainability and renewable energy. Not only are scientists, economists, and politicians more aware than ever that this shift is necessary to avoid total climate catastrophe, he says, but supporting renewables is by far the most financially viable choice—for investors as well as consumers.

Van Dyck has the right qualifications to make claims about financial viability. As managing director and financial advisor with the SRI Wealth Management Group at RBC Wealth Management, he has been a leader in socially responsible investing for 30+ years. Van Dyck consults on $1.8 billion in institutional and individual client assets, incorporating environmental, social and governance factors in investment decisions. Tom also founded the shareholder advocacy As You Sow Foundation in 1992 and is active in the “Divest Invest” movement.

Bioneers talked to Van Dyck about on how investors, businesses, and social leaders can make decisions that open doors to a more sustainable, equitable future.

We’re excited to welcome Thomas Van Dyck to the Bioneers Conference at the end of this month, where he’ll be speaking about the clean energy revolution.

Tom Van Dyck

What’s the number one thing regular people can do to make sure their investments are in line with their morals?

They can make sure that they’re not owning companies that are destroying the climate and exploiting workers. Generally, they can do it by understanding what they own. A good way to do that is to go to fossilfreefunds.org, where they can put in the ticker of their mutual funds and see what companies may be in them that violate their environmental leanings. If they own things that they find counter to their life’s purpose or political beliefs, then they should change their investments to reflect their values.

A good thing to know is that for the last ten years, the carbon-based energy sector of the S&P 500 was the worst-performing sector in terms of giving money back to shareholders. So if you’re an investor, don’t mix up this ESG sector with bad returns. If you’re investing the old-fashioned way, which is risk-and-return, you shouldn’t be investing in the fossil fuel industry. The return doesn’t warrant the risk. Today, it’s also the most overpriced industry. If you haven’t divested from fossil fuels, the next question would be: What’s inspiring you to underperform?

What’s the number one thing business leaders can do to help turn the tides of corporate economic corruption?

Business leaders can actually do a lot. They can make sure the energy they use is 100 percent renewable, as many corporations—and not just the tech guys—have done already. Second, every company should push to be carbon-neutral through their scope 1 and 2, if not carbon-negative by 2030. They should shoot for carbon neutrality within their businesses but also in who they do business with.

Businesses have a lot of control when there is a political environment like we have now, where science isn’t respected. They know the economic advantage as well as the brand advantage of being green and using renewable energy. Businesses can act independently—and collectively, they become more powerful than the government.

What’s the number one thing politicians can do to make economic stability accessible for as many people as possible?

Politicians can accelerate the transition from burning the carbon molecule to run our electrical system and transportation to using renewable sources. They can use the tools available to them to accelerate what is already happening economically. Politicians should be leading that transition, whether it’s passing renewable portfolio standards on all states through the utilities or encouraging more solar and wind development.

Hurricane Harvey is a classic example of why we need to do that immediately. The taxpayer picks up the consequences of the disaster, just like they do with tobacco and health care. The taxpayer picks up the consequences of burning too much carbon. It’s not borne by the companies that are producing the pollution.

Local governments, specifically, have a lot of power. California is a classic example. For every dollar of GDP we produce in California, we do so with half the carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions of the rest of the country. Our economy is growing faster than the U.S. economy. We’re the sixth largest economy in the world, and we continue to grow. This idea of regulating pollution as having an economic cost is folly.

If every state did what California’s doing, who cares about the Fed? All politics is local. So go take over the utility commissions. Go take over your state and local governments. Because in moving in this direction, you save more taxpayer money. It’s like nature’s already shown us what we should be doing, you just have to be smart enough to see it.

If moving toward and supporting renewables is so logical, why are politicians so slow to support them?

That comes down to the other problem in our society: We need to get money out of politics. When a politician makes a decision that isn’t based in logic, we know they’re being bought by an industry that’s trying to lengthen its existence in the face of an economic deluge that’s going to swamp it. It’s like putting your finger in a dyke. It’s not going to stop the economic reality that’s going to take place with many industries in our economy. They’re merely temporarily trying to stop the inevitable. We need to rapidly continue to push for an energy revolution.

But it’s coming. You can see it coming as you could with Polaroid and Kodak, with the transition to digital. You can see the inevitability of what’s happening. We need to get involved in our local governments so that people who have economic interests in maintaining dying industries are not disproportionately represented.

What’s the number one thing the media can do to shine a light on economic and corporate corruption within the U.S.?

The media has a responsibility to tell the truth. It needs to present facts of both sides. There’s no “both sides” in climate change. What you have with certain members of the media is a disinformation campaign that is not dissimilar to what occurred during Nazi Germany and other parts of the dark history of mankind. We have to be very careful here with media because in many ways, they’re a reflection of protecting an industry and a point of view that is not based on economics, not based on science, but merely based on an interest in protecting a wealthy elite—an elite that, in this case, is exploitative of the commons rather than additive. We need to get that changed. The way to do that is to take money out of politics and take over your state.

Climate change is the most obvious thing that we should be prepared to deal with. This problem should be handled. This is not a complicated issue. Ignoring climate change is against science, nature and economics. So what’s taking so long? This is industries fighting to survive. And they won’t survive. The question is, how quickly will the tides turn?

Find out more about Thomas Van Dyck and how you can engage with his campaigns and efforts by visiting the SRI Wealth Management Group at RBC.

Starhawk: Lessons From The Fires

(This article is reposted with permission from Starhawk.org)

Sacred fire, that shapes this land,
Summer teacher, winter friend.
Protect us as we learn anew,
To work, to heal, to live with you.

This is the chant we sing each summer as part of the fire protection ritual we do on my land in Western Sonoma County. As the fires rage, as I worry for our land and ache for our neighbors who have lost homes and even lives, I want to honor fire for the great teacher she is. Those of us who live in places where wildfire is a constant summer threat learn some deep lessons—the very lessons we all need to navigate a world where climate change has intensified the dryness and the winds.

Nature is more powerful than we are. If you doubt it, look at the pictures of the devastated neighborhoods of Santa Rosa, or for that matter, the flattened towns of the Caribbean or the flooded neighborhoods of Houston. We are part of nature, but we exist within her constraints, and we ignore them to our peril.

The indigenous people of California understood fire. They regularly burned the land to keep the underbrush down and reduce pests and diseases. The fires remained low and relatively cool, the forests open and parklike, perfect habitat for game. But conditions are so different today, and human settlement so much more dense, we find it hard to apply those lessons.

There are many things we can do to reduce the threat of fire—and we do them! Thinning, grazing, keeping a defensible perimeter around our structures, cleaning up, trimming the grass. But in the end, in a firestorm like we’ve just seen, none of that may avail. Nature is more powerful than we are.

Possessions are impermanent. We may enjoy them, even cherish them, but we cannot be defined by them. In fire country we know that they are on loan. If they go, we will mourn, but we will not be surprised. Lives are more important.

We survive by the grace of our neighbors. Our homes are protected by those brave and honorable folks who join the volunteer fire department. They go through hours and hours of training—which also require long hours of driving, and meetings, and more and more trainings. In fire season they are on call day and night, responding also to medical emergencies, and do their best to save homes and lives without judging. We are dependent on their generosity and courage.

Even more than that, we are dependent on our neighbors’ vigilance, their care of their land, their caution with candles and cigarettes, their alertness to report smoke or the glow of fire. We depend on their help in times of emergency, and their company in times of celebration.

Anyone who thinks they are entirely self-reliant does not live in fire country. Fire does not discriminate—it will not spare you because of your skin color or your prosperity or your affiliation for power, or even because of your virtue. Loss comes to those that deserve better, and luck comes to the undeserving.

Hope lies in the good will, the courage, skills and selflessness of your neighbors, and the sheer common sense of strangers to guard their cigarette butts. We are all in this together, and the conditions of life here demand that we recognize that truth and help one another.

If the land goes up in flames, there are many possessions I will miss. I will mourn the loss of structures we have built and money we’ve invested. But the greatest loss—once lives are safe—will be the trees we’ve planted, the food forests, the hedgerows of lavender and rosemary, the hours and hours of work gone into the land. We know, when we plant, that everything we do is on sufferance, yet we plant anyway. In that lies our faith—that there is value in the planting, the work, the vision.

After destruction comes regeneration.

Redwoods push out new needles; Doug fir seeds sprout. Bees return, and wildflowers bloom. Fire is the destroyer, but also the great renewer. What comes after will be different, but it may thrive in a new way.

In an impermanent world, I remain grateful for what I have, for each day when the land remains green, for each drop of rain that falls, for the help and stalwart courage of the firefighters and the devotion of the medics, for the friendship of those that surround me. I remain grateful to fire, our comfort in winter, our harsh teacher in these dry and windy autumn days. Despite the worry, the losses, the fear in these lessons, I am grateful to live in a web of relationships forged by fire.

This article is reposted with permission from Starhawk.org. To learn more about her work, visit her website and join the conversation on the post.

Tutwiler: “Agrobiodiversity holds the key to future food security”

By Brian Frederick

This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

Bioversity International released a new report analyzing how agrobiodiversity, or the biological diversity of food, can improve food system resilience, sustainability, and nutrition. Titled “Mainstreaming Agrobiodiversity in Sustainable Food Systems,” the 200-page report outlines how biodiversity can help us produce foods that are both nutritious and sustainable.

“Agrobiodiversity—the edible plant and animal species that feed each and every one of us—holds the key to future food security,” said Ann Tutwiler, Director General of Bioversity International, “But we are failing to protect it, and tap into its potential to transform our food system for the better.”

Bioversity International is a research-for-development organization focused on preserving agricultural and tree biodiversity as a means of improving nutrition security, promoting sustainable agriculture, and adapting to climate change. They are a CGIAR Research Center, part of a global food security research partnership. Bioversity works with partners in low-income countries to disseminate scientific evidence, management practices, and policies that protect biodiversity. The report focuses on healthy diets (nutrition), production (sustainability), seed systems (food security), and conservation (resilience).

Food Tank had the opportunity to discuss the report and agrobiodiversity with Ann Tutwiler, Director General of Bioversity International.

Food Tank (FT): What has led to a global decrease in agrobiodiversity?

Ann Tutwiler (AT): Many factors. From the production side, a focus on ‘feeding the world’ rather than ‘nourishing the world’ has led to a focus on a handful of starchy staples that has contributed to an increase in land planted with maize, wheat, and rice from 66 percent to 79 percent of all cereal area between 1961 and 2013.

On the consumption side, there is a growing global tendency towards Western diets and processed convenience foods. Diets are based more and more on major cereals, plus sugar and oil. So these now dominate our agricultural production. Of the 30,000-ish plant species that can be used as food, today only three—rice, wheat, and maize—provide half the world’s plant-derived calories and intakes of pulses, fruits, and vegetables are low.

At the same time, the same pressures that are driving the sixth mass extinction of wild biodiversity are also affecting agricultural biodiversity—habitat transformation, deforestation, invasive species, and climate change. They also lead to disruption in pollinators and natural pest control. Loss of wild biodiversity can lead to erosion of genetic diversity (like the wild relatives of crops, which are a valuable source of traits for breeding), which reduces options for breeding new plant varieties better adapted to climate change.

Factor in the policy environment in some countries. When farmers are not allowed to trade local seeds, it also suppresses demand for these seeds. And when farmers and other natural resource managers stop using local materials, we also lose the local knowledge about those species and varieties. Once that knowledge is lost, a vicious cycle of loss is started as the seeds and breeds cannot be optimally used.

Policies for conserving seeds in genebanks and making them available for breeding programmes have tended to focus on staple cereals. Only two percent of global collections are of crop wild relatives and less well-known species.

We should point out though that there is no way yet to accurately measure the decrease in agricultural biodiversity. It is notoriously difficult to measure the exact status of crop and animal genetic diversity. A study in 2014 classified 58 percent of domesticated animal breeds as of unknown risk status. Also for crops, there are huge data gaps—number and distribution of species and their genetic diversity—so it is difficult to determine genetic erosion. One challenge is the richness of the diversity—even if we consider only the 150 to 200 crops commercially cultivated, it is hard to identify, monitor, and conserve it all.

This is one reason why Bioversity is working on an Agrobiodiversity Index and suggests ways to measure the agricultural biodiversity on plates and in markets, in fields, the wild, and genebanks worldwide and track changes in it.

FT: There is a global paradox, where millions go hungry while billions are obese and both groups can suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. What has led to this paradox and how can agrobiodiversity address it?

AT: One of the main drivers of malnutrition is poor diet. Diet-related factors are now the number-one risk factor of morbidity and mortality globally, more than tobacco smoke and air pollution. If people ate more plants, in line with standard dietary guidelines, it would have a positive effect on diets and on the environment, reducing global mortality by 6 to 10 percent and food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29 to 70 percent.

Tapping into the planetary wealth of diverse fruits, vegetables, pulses, and grains, particularly nutrient-dense varieties, can address both overweight and micronutrient deficiencies. We eat food, not micronutrients! For example:

  • More healthy options within food groups—expanding the range of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, pulses. Biodiversity is recognized as a fundamental principle in recent dietary guidelines like the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid, the Nordic guidelines, and the Brazilian guidelines.
  • Important and significant nutritional differences between species. For example, in Bangladesh, although people started eating more fish, their nutritional intake decreased from eating exotic farmed fish rather than nutrient-dense local fish. Then there are species many people have never heard of—Gac, for example, is a fruit from South East Asia with extremely high levels of beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A.
  • Important and significant nutritional differences within species. For example, some bananas are orange and contain very high levels of beta-carotene; others are white and contain none. Different varieties of potato can contain between 6 mg and 37 mg of vitamin C.
  • Since many less well-known plants, fish, animal, and trees are well adapted to local environments, they can be more tolerant to low inputs or climate fluctuations and so can be selected to provide a portfolio of nutritious foods all year round, integrating small animals, green vegetables, and fruit trees.
  • Food has to be accessible, affordable, acceptable, and available. Food biodiversity is often all four.

To address it, food, health, and agriculture policies need to be linked to one another. Policies for food and seeds need to expand the focus on maximizing yield and profit to also include considerations of diets and nutrition. Brazil is a great example of this. Brazil has recently targeted several policies to promote local and indigenous biodiversity for food and nutrition as part of its Zero Hunger campaign. Actions taken in Brazil include promoting diverse, healthy native foods in dietary guidelines, supporting production of food biodiversity through public procurement strategies (e.g. for food in schools), and prioritizing food biodiversity in relevant national strategies, action plans, agriculture, and nutrition policies.

FT: Increasing agrobiodiversity, for instance growing more varieties of wheat, would seem difficult to implement in places like the United States that rely on mass agricultural production and distribution. What can be done to encourage agrobiodiversity in these types of systems?

AT: The general rule is that larger farms are more specialist and this is consistent with the way that intensified, industrial farming has gone over the last 50 years in much of the Western world. There will always be a need for large-scale farms that produce commodities for massive consumption, this is also a part of food security. But there is a risk that using a single variety across vast areas leaves such crops open to attacks by pests and diseases. To counter this, the industry and farmer response is often to use large quantities of pesticides, fungicides, and so on, which is expensive as an input, has a negative impact on environmental factors such as water quality and (wild) biodiversity, and has high fossil fuel inputs. Moving to a more diverse system (and this could be different crops in different seasons, not necessarily different crops in different physical areas) can reduce risks of total loss and reduce risk of pest and disease damage. This can then lead to reduced input costs, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced environmental impacts.

Now, how does this happen in these kinds of systems? A great deal would need to happen in order to allow this to happen, not least in the increase in extension services (agroecology tends to be knowledge-intensive). To do so would potentially kick-start a revolution in agricultural employment in rich countries. What might drive this? A demand for greater diversity in diets from the public, increased concern over food safety and environmental health, and a general rise in what is being termed ‘sustainable intensification’ (increasing production whilst reducing environmental impacts, in its most simplistic definition). Such approaches might be ideal for incentivization through farmer payments, preferential markets, and tax incentives, for instance.

Twenty or so years ago, approaches like organic agriculture were considered a bit whacky, but now supermarkets are embracing organic, and consumers are asking for more diversity in supermarkets, school lunches, and retail outlets. People want to know more about where their food comes from, lowering food miles, local farmers’ markets, heritage varieties, and so on.

For businesses, diversity makes sense as a strategy to reduce risk. Left unchecked, degraded agrobiodiversity can cause direct production losses that might even be catastrophic. The Irish potato blight, which decimated the two dominant potato varieties in the mid-1800s, is one example. In the 1970s, U.S. maize crop was severely threatened by corn blight, which destroyed almost US$1 billion worth of maize and reduced yields by up to 50 percent in 1978. The crisis was addressed by using blight-resistant genes from wild types of Mexican maize.

Even in and around mass agricultural production, there are many ways to encourage agrobiodiversity, such as encouraging pollinators, natural pest predators, soil biodiversity, and green manure. In Californian rice production near Sacromento, a change to flooding stubble instead of burning it ended up doubling winter wetland habitat at the peak of waterfowl migration. These fields now provide habitat resources for 203 species of wildlife and 9 million migratory waterfowl, with no drop in rice yields.

The USDA Conservation Reserve Program is an example of practices that can work with mass agricultural production. For example, using buffer strips to encourage wild–cultivated interactions on farms, or adding copses of trees within cropping systems.

FT: You bring up quinoa in one of your examples. According to the Whole Grains Council, there are more than 100 types of quinoa, but only three have been commercialized, leading to a loss of biodiversity. In a global market, how can this type of trend be reversed? How can all strains be commercialized and preserved?

AT: Actually, there are thousands, not hundreds! Those that have been commercialized so far tend to satisfy a market for pearly white grains (Quinoa Real). And there are perhaps 15 to 20 varieties that one finds in the national and international markets (not three).

How can the trend be reversed? In Bioversity’s research we use a kind of triage—categorizing grains as marketable, potentially marketable, and non-marketable. The first category takes care of itself. The second category needs market development, and we can explore other product options besides just grains, like the experience we have had making and marketing a milk from a hardy quinoa variety called ‘chullpi.’ For the third category, we have had success with an approach called Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services (PACS), which is based on the Payments for Ecosystem Services approach. Farmers receive a non-monetary reward for conserving varieties that are disappearing from farms. Rewards can be things like agricultural inputs, machinery, school buildings, and materials. The communities themselves decide which priority species or varieties they are interested in, the conditions for their participation, and how they will share the rewards within the group and among other community members.

Certainly not all kinds can be commercialized, which is why other mechanisms (like PACS) are needed to preserve them. In order to decide which varieties to invite communities to preserve, we use prioritization methodologies, based on genetic analyses and mathematical models, so as to make sure that for a given budget the widest possible genetic diversity is conserved.

A complementary way to preserve species and varieties that don’t have a clear commercial value in the present, is to collect them in genebanks, some of which can be seedbanks managed at the community level or community seedbanks.

FT: How does intercropping, growing multiple types of crops in close proximity, effect harvest efficiency? Can it be implemented at a large scale and how?

AT: The first thing to be aware of is that intercropping is a pretty broad church. It can take many forms and occurs in a multitude of production systems. For instance, systems can include annual cropping, perennial crops, agroforestry, and aquaculture. Approaches to intercropping can be very diverse, from legumes and green manure (offering a very direct nitrogen application to the soil and other crops, as well as nutrition through the intercropped species, to pollination through habitat provision for pollinators), to mixed polycultures such as rice-fish systems (increased nutrition, natural pest control, organic fertilizer).

In terms of harvesting, if we are talking about different crops in different seasons, then this is unlikely to present a physical or technological obstacle. If they are in the same field, then you have to have a different structure, tall plants and short plants for example. Or they can be in adjacent fields. Bioversity’s research into using bean diversity to reduce pest damage found that having different varieties of bean in adjacent fields reduced pest damage, and of course would be easy to harvest.

So, yes it can be implemented at scale. It’s a question of choosing the right intercropping form that works for what you need.

FT: What is the Agrobiodiversity Index and how do you hope it will make a difference?

AT: World hunger is on the rise again. There is likely to be an understandable push towards increasing food production, but we cannot afford a ‘produce at all costs’ mentality. We need to grow food in ways that are sustainable—lower pesticide and fertilizer use, rebuilding soils, providing habitat for pollinators and pest predators. Also we need to make sure that the ‘Produce More’ mentality doesn’t just churn out more empty carbs. We are already in the midst of a malnutrition epidemic.

Solutions are needed that combine consideration of producing more nutritious foods, while reducing environmental impacts, and conserving our natural resources. Food is the connector. Current food systems drive environmental degradation and obesity, so changes in them could drive environmental good health and human health.

The Index is unique because it looks across consumption and production and conservation. The book pulls together the science behind the index, not looking at diets or production or conservation but diets and production and conservation, which is why we refer to the triple win. Many indicators have been developed in each of the domains of agrobiodiversity—measuring diet diversity, on-farm diversity, supply diversity, and so on—but they usually remain separate and so the potential synergies and trade-offs are invisible.

Starting from the scientific evidence base in the four dimensions described in this book, the Agrobiodiversity Index will bring together agrobiodiversity data in innovative ways to give novel insights, which can help countries and companies identify policy and business levers, and guide public and private investments. It will be launched in mid-2018.

To learn more about the Agrobiodiversity Index, please click here. To read the report ‘Mainstreaming Agrobiodiversity in Sustainable Food Systems,’ please click here.

This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

Bioneers Statement on North Bay Fires

 

As the annual Bioneers conference fast approaches, we’ll be gathering in the shadow of the calamitous California fires. The Bay Area is Bioneers headquarters, and our roots are deep and wide with so many of you in the region. Our hearts mourn for the loss that’s happening so rapidly and painfully to loved ones, and communities,  throughout Northern California. As so many of us have beloved family and friends in the evacuated or damaged areas, this crisis is hitting home for us all, deeply. We send love and light to all of you.

To pitch in, either in person or financially, a list of organizations, funds and opportunities to support those impacted by the fires is here.

Sadly, it will take more than love and light to make the region and the world whole again. This is the living truth of what the climate crisis looks like. It’s exactly the reason we gather each fall at Bioneers to fast-forward the solutions coming from our Bioneers Community to co-create a habitable, just and joyous world.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton recently coined the phrase “climate swerve” to describe the massive climate awakening that’s finally happening here in the US. These kinds of tragedies across the nation and world are creating unprecedented receptivity as people search for solutions. Now is our time to reach more people than ever and actually build the political power to change the current systems, which are intrinsically a “strategy of tragedy,” as architect Bill McDonough calls it.

Although we can be highly adaptable, we are reeling from the impacts of fires that are wreaking havoc on the land, on homes, farms and animals, and on life itself. There is so much loss and upheaval  happening so fast, so frighteningly – The Caribbean, Houston, Florida, Mexico, Las Vegas, the ongoing devastation in Puerto Rico (and that’s strictly a short list from the US and our immediate neighbors).

As the annual Bioneers conference approaches next weekend, we need each other now more than ever. We need to remember that we are defined by our relationships and all our relations. Our true wealth lies in our circle of loved ones, and in our capacity to show up in caring generosity to support each other through difficult times. Painful as it is that so many homes and so much life, land and beauty is going up in flames, we need the comfort and vision of each other now more than ever. We need to hold it, together.

This is about nothing less than fundamentally changing our way of living on Earth and with each other. It’s about building resilience for a predictably unpredictable future of shocks and disaster preparedness.

Communities that get through crises are ones where people build strong relationships, hold shared values across difference and keep coming back to the table to get the job done for the sake of the common good. That’s just what the Bioneers community has been practicing and doing for nearly 30 years.

This disaster is still unfolding on an hourly basis and the impact of these fires will be felt for months and years. This region is our home base and Bioneers will be involved for the long haul as our community collectively rebuilds.

At this now-more-than-ever moment, we look forward to hosting this community at the upcoming Bioneers Conference to hold and comfort each other and to be inspired by the clear visions of the future that we’re collectively building towards. They say the best way to predict the future is to create it. That’s what we’ll be doing together.

With All Our Love, Compassion and Gratitude –

Kenny Ausubel, Nina Simons, Joshua Fouts and All of Us at Bioneers

A Glimpse Through the Eye of the Albatross

While the albatross has achieved fame through literature—perhaps most notably as a majestic and tragic character in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—the species has been a veritable mystery to scientists throughout much of human history. Capable of covering incredible distances and living mostly at sea, albatross tracking and study present obvious challenges.

Amelia is one such hard-to-track albatross. By joining a research team that attached a transmitter to her feathers, Carl Safina was able to take part in following and recording her adventures. In the introduction to his book about the experience, Eye of the Albatross (Holt Paperbacks, 2003), Safina writes:

“Amelia’s transmitter battery eventually died, so we don’t know where Amelia is now. That
matters less to her than it does to us. She doesn’t need us in order to be an albatross; albatrosses knew what they were doing millions of years before people appeared. But because people were born into a world that included albatrosses, we need them—to prove to ourselves that we can be fully human.”

The following is an excerpt from Eye of the Albatross.

Bioneers is thrilled to welcome Carl Safina to the 2017 Bioneers conference where he’ll speak about how humans can learn from the natural world.

The breeze in my bedroom is the first sign that this morning is different. After prior days of dead calm, newly moving air has passed its kinetic energy along to the heat-stressed birds. You can feel their excitement in their increased activity.

Patty is doing the day’s first round of her nest checks, looking for any mates of transmittered albatrosses that may have arrived and switched incubation duties. We walk among the incubating birds like grape growers among vineyards. So far all the incubating birds in the study area are the same; Amelia and the others. No new arrivals. But one premature departure, probably forced by the just-ended heat-wave; its abandoned egg now cool to the touch.

Patty, several yards ahead, suddenly calls and waves.

Has one of the transmittered adults departed? No. But when we walk up, Patty gestures to a Black-footed Albatross standing over an eggshell with a gaping hole at one end and a downy chick beside it. Karen arrives eagerly, and immediately volunteers to guard the chick as we give its parent a transmitter.

She gushes, “Oh my God. It’s so cute!” Its head is wobbly. Its little black decurved bill seems proportionally larger than an adult’s. The little wing stubs offer scant hint of the flying power that may come. The chick’s black down, frosted light-gray at the tips, is so thick and long and matted that the nestling looks rather oddly like a large fluffy pine cone. It probably weighs about seven ounces. “Oh my gosh, look at its fat little legs!”

The chick stands shakily and stretches its wings, pulling all heart strings within ten meters. Before the mind had a name for beauty, the heart had a response. The chick instinctively starts digging a scrape for itself with its back legs. When it yawns a teetering little yawn. Karen’s hand goes to her face in delight and astonishment. To the chick she says, “I’ll take care of you anytime.”

Her job right now—a tough job if ever there was one—is protecting this chick from possible frigatebird attack and the sun. Karen is concerned the chick is too exposed. “It’s not used to being out in the sun,” she says. I offer her my hat to shade it, but she’s transfixed.

The chick begins preening, nibbling at it’s down. The effort seems to tire it and it rests its head and closes its eyes. When the chick begins to shiver, Karen takes off her sweatshirt and lightly covers it, saying tenderly, “It’s a rough life.”

That, it is. But with luck and all odds vanquished, this unsteady little new life may go forward—and outlive us.

A Laysan Albatross walks by like a pedestrian, pausing to stare at the chick like an admiring passerby. A nearby nester stands up, looks at its own egg, and starts talking to it. As hatching nears, parents commonly vocalize to their upcoming offspring. And as soon as a chick holes or “pips” the egg, it begins talking back. As Dr. Seuss might summarize: Horton finally hears a Who. Parent and child keep the conversation going through the hole in the eggshell during the many hours it takes for the chick inside to painstakingly chisel out.

When our crew has affixed the transmitter, we take the adult back toward Karen and its chick. We place the bird near its nest. It stands there until the chick begins calling, then suddenly runs to it. Laura turns to Karen and says, “Well, Karen, anytime you’d like to help out—.”

With what might be termed enthusiasm, Karen interrupts, “I would love to help.”

By our fourth day, ten albatrosses wear transmitters. Now, oddly, the field work is largely done, and most of the data accrual will happen almost passively as technology takes over, reporting the birds’ positions. (So far the data are less than interesting, because none of the birds has moved.) Now, we ourselves will also wait faithfully like Horton the Elephant, attached by effort and scientific curiosity to the patiently sitting birds. Each day we check.

Each day, the faithful birds at their nests remain.

<•)>< <•)>< <•)><

Patty is excited. Halfway through a new day’s morning nest check, she’s just discovered the mate of one of our birds sitting on the nest. The transmitter-bearing bird is gone!

Dave comes riding up slowly on his bicycle. Even though it arrived just last night from weeks at sea, the new bird sits here as though nothing is unusual. Amelia and her neighbors, sitting as always, appear equally indifferent.

But Patty is stoked. “Now,” Patty says, “we’ll be getting some data.” Somewhere between the vast Pacific and outer space, albatross, satellites, and Dave’s North Carolina laboratory are already corresponding. Each day the satellites will interrogate the transmitter, and the bird’s location will be beamed to Earth.

Amelia couldn’t care less; she’s still here on her nest near the porch, still broody and dozing.

Patty and Dave set up a laptop computer on a picnic table on the barracks’ back porch, and using a solar panel to power it, they link to a communications satellite to download e-mail. With noddies lined up on the porch rail and the computer set up near the laundry lines, information flows into the laptop from outer space. The transmitter data has already been beamed via another satellite to a facility in France, then sent from France to Dave’s North Carolina lab, and a student has e-mailed it. Result: we discover that our outbound bird is sixty miles north of Tern Island.

Dave, munching from a bowl of cereal, says, “It’s nice to see everything working. It’s really remarkable how all this technology is being coordinated to solve this question of where they go.”

And while most university research data is eventually published years later only in obscurely specialized technical journals, Dave’s approach to this albatross work is very different. Every morning when the satellite data from traveling albatrosses arrives, Dave will e-mail it to over 500 teachers in classrooms in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Estonia, Japan, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere who have subscribed to Dave’s Albatross Project. Students will map the albatrosses’ travel tracks as they unfold. “I realized early on,” Dave says, “that kids from kindergarten through high school could be discovering what’s happening with the birds at the very same time we ourselves are discovering it.” He adds, “I’m trying to find ways to communicate effectively about science.” Dave believes freedom and democracy require a public that can think critically. “If a scientist has a new idea, his or her first task is to challenge it against everything else that’s known, seeing whether it can be disproved. In most other endeavors, everyone is pushing their own ideas and their own narrow interests. I think that when you teach science, you’re teaching people a way of thinking that can help them stay free.”

During the night of January 17-18 another transmittered albatross has left Tern Island. But the albatross I call Amelia resides, remains, and rests upon her nest next to the porch steps. We pause. She waits. We watch. She stands, talks in low tones to her egg, flares her brood patch and sits back down. For now, that has to count as action.

By the following day, two more of the birds are outbound over the ocean. Things are happening. Patty and Dave are departing too, headed home. Patty will leave her birds and begin the hard work of her Master’s project in earnest from thousands of miles away.

Getting here has been neither likely nor easy for any of us, biologist or bird. The planning, the traveling, the personal and professional toil, the resolute routes and sheer luck that have led us here—the convergence is quite an improbable one. All of us differ in every detail. All have one thing in common: whether seeking to succeed or striving to breed, we’ve arrived here as survivors of earlier struggles. Hoping our efforts will meet continued luck, we now stand poised for payoff, ready to see our labors produce.

Mark is checking to make sure the cargo and passengers don’t exceed the plane’s weight limits. He weighs all the bags, then calls across the room, “Patty, how much do you weigh?” Patty yells back “One thirty-four,” then says to me, “Now everybody knows.”

I say our time has shot by. Dave looks at his watch to remind himself what month it is.

Waving, waving, waving, they are gone. They leave over the ocean, like everything else.

<•)>< <•)>< <•)><

When Amelia stands for her next nest-check, her egg is gone. Between her massive webbed feet sits a gray ball of spiky fluff. By this time, the sixth of February, many of the other albatross nests already harbor chicks.

Amelia broods her baby three days, providing shade and shelter from heat and high winds. When her mate arrives to relieve her in the early morning of February 9, Dad immediately feeds the little chick. Or tries to.

He crouches so far forward toward the chicklet that his breast is touching the nest’s low rim. The hungry chick is eager, pecking shakily at its parent’s bill, peeping a shrill call that sounds like, “Me, me, me.” Dad is trying so hard to begin regurgitating that the effort seems to force his wings partly open. At the same time, he is trying to make contact with the chick’s little bill, but the uncoordinated hatchling keeps swinging away at the critical moment.

Eventually, with the kind of persistence that precedes all earned rewards, the male practically swallows the chick’s head. In the cavern of its father’s gape, the chick opens its wobbly little bill. Dad squirts a concentrated stream of gooey, nutritious, liquefied oil into the chick’s throat. Unlike most other birds, albatrosses and their tube-nosed relatives store oil extracted from their food. Albatross stomach oil is so energy rich its mean caloric value rates just below that of commercial diesel oil.

After wiping its beak, the chick half-stands and waves it’s little wings, then sits back down contentedly. For the moment, all’s right with the world.

And so a new phase kicks in. Amelia and her mate must now no longer simply share incubation shifts; the chick’s arrival begins a period of increasing strain in an already strenuous life. Bodily reserves will be taxed to the max. Now, food is the issue.

Somewhere out on the sea, these birds are finding a food supply that is not at all obvious when you look at the surface of that vast ocean. But find it they do. All together, the seabirds of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands require an estimated 800 million pounds of prey annually, largely fishes, crustaceans, and squids—perhaps two-fifths of the annual production of those animals in the ocean region. Of the amount consumed, Albatrosses take probably half. Laysan and Black-footed Albatrosses eat mostly various species of squid, fishes, fish eggs, crustaceans, and anything else living or formerly living that they can hook their bills into. Albatrosses in general eat everything from small fishes to dead seabirds to squid to krill to gelatinous drifting tunicates to jellyfish (including the famously sting-infested Portuguese Man-o’-war). If they find a dead whale, their diet will include whale meat. Sometimes they feed on scraps of skin and blubber of whales killed by Killer Whales, or by people. What they eat depends on where they happen to be and what they find. Many albatrosses follow ships because even kitchen scraps can make an albatross happy. They are inveterate scavengers and opportunists. When it comes to eating, albatrosses’ motto seems to be, “Better full than fussy.”

But in practice almost all albatrosses almost everywhere eat mostly squid. It’s even been suggested that albatross evolution and radiation around the world has corresponded to squid evolution as the birds became skilled squid finders. Squids are highly evolved, unusually successful predators in their own right. The Cretaceous mass extinction wiped away not only dinosaurs but also many kinds of marine life that had flourished for an enormity of time. As disappearance of dinosaurs opened the land to opportunities for birds and mammals, extinction of marine faunas opened the seas to the radiation and proliferation of modern-style fishes and squids, with new monarchies of predators. The rapidly spreading new jet-propulsion-bodied animals we know as squids evolved complex behavior, excellent eyesight, and surprising smarts (they have been called “the soft intelligence” and “honorary vertebrates”). Squids have proliferated into over 700 species moving throughout the world’s seas, from sunlit reefs to the black abyss, from the size of your little finger to the Giant Squid measuring almost sixty feet.

Enter albatrosses. Albatrosses eat about 70 species of squid. At times the birds catch them live and vigorous. But they also exploit the fact that many kinds of squid die en masse after spawning. About a day after dying in the chilly deep, the carcasses of many species of squid float to the surface, buoyed by increasing ammonia resulting from chemical changes in their livers. Albatrosses rely heavily on this phenomenon to make deep food available. In the western Tasman Sea off New South Wales, Australia, a spectacular post-nuptial appearance of dead and dying 10-pound Giant Cuttlefish prompts a remarkable convergence of albatrosses. Birds from half a world away—from the South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and New Zealand—find it worth their while each year to come for the funeral feast. In sum: Albatrosses eat a lot of squid. People also eat a lot of squid, and fishing boats remove enormous quantities of food albatrosses have for millennia relied on. In much of the world, squid fishing is done at night, using bright lights to attract squid to the boat as moths are attracted to porch lights. So great is the fishing pressure now that the lights of squid fishing fleets are visible to astronauts in space, appearing like cities in the sea.

With Dad now nest-bound, it’s Amelia’s turn to face the vicissitudes of the ocean, but she’s an experienced pro. So far, she has survived all trials of weather, threats of starvation, and hazards of humanity. She launches herself from the runway and strikes immediately northward.

Amelia sails past the island’s shore, skims across the lagoon, and rises above the towering breakers beyond the reef, setting her course upon an open ocean, striking out into the wide trance of the sea.

Belly to the sideways breeze, catching the wind for levitation, she climbs. Then turning her back to that same breeze, she uses the wind differently—and adds gravity—to accelerate her forward and downward toward the surface of the ocean. She brushes the water and shifts her body again, transferring the downward momentum to help lift her; exploiting the force of gravity to take her upward. Having used the wind to take her up, she uses it to take her down; having used gravity to take her down, she uses it to take her up. This gives her a smoothly undulating, rocking flight; each wing alternately pointing skyward, then pointing toward the water’s surface, showing you now her dark back, now her bright belly. Wings fixed, she seems magically propelled.

Only as you watch her nearing the vanishing point—only then—do you begin seeing and feeling that these birds muster all their distance-eating achievement with their own effort and the skillful exploitation of their exquisite design. Keep watching as she shrinks to a pinpoint, swooping up and down, swiveling side to side, bounding onward into the boundless Pacific. Just this way, she starts steadily accumulating the great span of a great ocean, mile after mile after mile.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Eye of the Albatross by Carl Safina, published by Holt Paperbacks, 2003.

Read an excerpt from another Carl Safina book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.

Celebrate Autumn’s Harvest With Food Tank’s Fall Reading List

By Sean Alexander

This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

For fall, Food Tank has compiled a list of 17 books we hope will educate, inform, and inspire. As the weather cools and we turn to more savory foods, learn about the history of butter, duck season in France, and the life of Patience Gray, the visionary behind the modern slow food culture. For reflecting during the turning of the seasons, read about how antibiotics changed our food, how to combat a hot and hungry planet, and the food truck movement. Or, in the spirit of the fall harvest, learn about migrant workers in California. There is something for all tastes, so take advantage of the lengthening nights to read a few.

  1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
    The conventional teaching is that, in order to create civilization, humans moved from hunting and gathering toward sedentary communities that cultivated cereal grains and domesticated livestock. In his newest work, James C. Scott, Professor and co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, challenges that narrative. In Against the Grain, Scott argues that the transition to sedentary livelihoods was born not of a need for secure living, but a desire to control reproduction in several spheres of human life.
  2. The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth about Healthy Eating (available now in the UK; forthcoming January 4, 2018) by Anthony Warner
    Each year, new diets and food fads become popular—some have value while others fall short, or may even be harmful. So why do consumers buy them in the first place? In The Angry Chef: Bad Science and The Truth About Healthy Eating, Anthony Warner, with other experts, explains why intelligent people bite on the latest food fads. By the end, Warner hopes readers will have the tools necessary to set healthier food habits and a course for a healthier life.
  3. Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna
    Each day, what we choose to eat affects ourselves and the world around us: that is the core idea that drives Maryn McKenna’s new book, Big Chicken. One part history and one part investigative journalism, Big Chicken traces the history of modern chicken production and antibiotics in agriculture, and how this history fits into a larger narrative about our food habits. Drawing on the tradition set by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, McKenna’s Big Chicken aims to encourage better food consumers through a more holistic view of modern agriculture and the issues embedded within it.
  4. Butter: A Rich History (re-issue forthcoming October 17, 2017) by Elaine Khosrova
    In her cultural and culinary history, former pastry chef and acclaimed food writer Elaine Khosrova tells the story of a modern staple: butter. Tracing butter’s history across three continents, Khosrova’s work carries the reader into a deeper understanding of the role of butter in political economy, nutrition, and art. As an added benefit, Khosrova includes a few butter recipes taken from her travels. One part history, one part cookbook, Khosrova aims to give meaning to an overlooked culinary staple.
  5. This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of An American Family Farm (forthcoming September 19, 2017) by Ted Genoways
    In his new book, This Blessed Earth, Ted Genoways explores the history and future of America’s family farm. Situated at the crossroad of isolation and change, the modern family farm is valued through the past and faced with challenges in the future. Living with the Hammond family of York County, Nebraska, from harvest to harvest, Genoways maps the changing landscape that surrounds the family farm. In doing so, This Blessed Earth hopes to convey an intimate portrait of an American experience.
  6. Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture by Gabriel Thompson
    In 1939, John Steinbeck released The Grapes of Wrath, a realist novel that follows the Joad family out of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and to California. The book aimed to make the public more attuned to the conditions of Californian migrant farmers. In the 1970s and 80s, Cesar Chavez and the Salad Bowl strike affected the public in much the same way. Drawing on—and combining—these traditions, Gabriel Thompson’s Chasing the Harvest seeks to give voice to the nearly 800,000 people working on California’s farms and the conditions they face.
  7. Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are by Sophie Egan
    Sophie Egan’s Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are reflects on how the food emerging from traditional American values makes for a simultaneously unhealthy and trailblazing food culture. Blending the non-fiction traditions of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Freakonomics, Egan’s work is an in-depth analysis of the nature and effects of American food habits.
  8. Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony—France’s Last Best Place by David McAninch
    For nearly eight months, David McAninch lived as a Gascon of Gascony, a rural region in southwestern France and famous for its influence on French cuisine. As a Gascon, McAninch worked to change the way he thought about food: herding sheep, harvesting grapes, and eating—a lot. Exploring a local culture through agricultural and cooking traditions, Duck Season describes McAninch’s transformation as a result of this journey, providing a few recipes to try at home, as well.
  9. Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray (forthcoming September 6, 2017) by Adam Federman
    When Patience Gray passed away in 2005, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) called her an “almost forgotten culinary star.” Gray lead a life of relative isolation in an impoverished region of southern Italy, without electricity or telephone. And yet, Federman argues, contemporary food movements like Slow Food, committed to regional cuisine, can trace their foundational missions to Grey’s writing and life. Recognizing her importance to modern food culture, Fasting and Feasting aims to change the common conception—or lack thereof—of Patience Gray, celebrating her life and her legacy.
  10. Fishing: How Sea Fed Civilization by Brian Fagan
    In his new book, Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization, Brian Fagan presents the history of aquaculture as an important and often overlooked topic. Drawing on archaeological information, Fagan argues that—in contrast to the land-bound practices of agriculture—the technologies and cuisine that fishing enabled helped to empower humans to explore the globe, both as conquering armies and recreational travelers. Conveying the histories of archaeological sites from across the oceans, Fagan’s Fishing endeavors to explain how fishing fits into the larger human narrative.
  11. Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love edited by Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel
    In cities across America, food trucks are gaining popularity; but do food trucks help or hinder other societal goals? Examining the food truck phenomena in North America through the lens of social justice, the contributors in Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice investigate the topics ranging from discrimination, gentrification, and community development. The editors hope that everyone interested in food trucks, be it their criminalization in Los Angeles or celebration in Vancouver, will learn something new from this unique anthology.
  12. Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by Michael Ruhlman
    Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America takes a deeper look at a routine task: grocery shopping. Ruhlman takes readers from the family-operated Heinen’s grocery chain in the Midwest to the opaque structure of modern supermarkets. Between the stories and insights, readers will also learn of Ruhlman’s ideas to renew the modern food shopping experience: a few tips intended to help readers consume food more wisely.
  13. Give a Girl a Knife: A Memoir by Amy Thielen
    After a career as a chef in New York City, Amy Thielen moved back to Minnesota and into a cabin deep in the woods, rediscovering her culinary and personal roots. Recounting this experience in Give a Girl a Knife, Thielen conveys a coming-of-age story that connects her rural upbringing to life in kitchens of New York’s most famous chefs.
  14. Hot, Hungry Planet: The Fight to Stop a Global Food Crisis in the Face of Climate Change by Lisa Palmer
    By the year 2050, the United Nations projects that the world population will reach nearly 9.8 billion people. Meanwhile, increasingly extreme weather patterns are affecting vulnerable societies around the globe. Following these two trends, Lisa Palmer’s journalistic career has focused on how our global food system can do right by future generations both in terms of food security and climate policy. In her new book, Hot, Hungry Planet, Palmer outlines three policy levers that can play a part in our global response.
  15. Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression by David Leite
    In Notes on a Banana, celebrated food writer David Leite describes the role that food and family played in his struggle with sexual identity and mental illness. Tracing his own life from Fall River, Massachusetts, to his present life as a James Beard Foundation Award-winning food writer, Leite’s Notes on a Banana is a reminder that beneath the surface, what we eat is both a reflection of who we are and something that shapes us.
  16. A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression (re-issue) by Andrew Cole and Jane Ziegelman
    The Great Depression affected America’s political and economic institutions, but how did it transform American cuisine? In their James Beard Foundation Award-winning book, A Square Meal (a re-issue), Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe explore how the Great Depression shifted American perceptions of government-sponsored food charity, nutritional guidelines, the dinner time menu itself, and more. A Square Meal considers the impact of economic and environmental disasters on how Americans ate, and how we eat today.
  17. What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro
    Although what we choose to eat is an important part of our lives, it is seldom thought of as a central element of biography. But in What She Ate, Lauren Shapiro tells the stories of six prominent women—Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym, and Helen Gurley Brown—and their food. In doing so, Shapiro’s What She Ate tries to nuance readers’ understanding of six extraordinary lives.

Continue with good food reads every month through Real Food Media’s Book Club, or download the monthly book club podcast to listen on your commute.

This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

Bioneers Recognizes Indigenous Peoples Day

In recent years, I have been thrilled to witness more and more cities ban Columbus Day. To see how widespread this movement has become, check out this awesome interactive map created by the Zinn Education Project has made an. At Bioneers, we honor Indigenous Peoples Day. Our San Francisco Office is closed today, and many of us are thinking about those who have fought for Indigenous rights and a more inclusive America. Now, more than ever, it is critical that we bring our voices together to speak out against the parts of American society that condone and promote intolerance against North America’s First peoples.

Cities, States and Institutions that have banned Columbus Day.

It wasn’t that long ago that our relatives were forced into Indian Boarding Schools. Program Director, Cara Romero and I both grew up with grandmothers who were sent off to them as young girls, and our families have been personally affected by the trauma of this experience.

When my mother was born in Alaska, the territory exercised “Jim Crowe” policies against Native Alaskans. Just like the deep south, Natives were not permitted to ride in the front of the bus, sit in the front of the movie theater, or dine in white establishments.

The girls at Chemawa Indian Boarding School in my grandmother’s time.

So for me, growing up in a society that celebrates the genocidal foundation of the United States of America, has always been beyond hurtful. Columbus Day is essentially state-sanctioned bigotry. However, I also recognize that many Americans are not exposed to the truth through the public education system or mainstream media. That’s why we are committed to providing programming and educational materials to help the public to understand the truth in America.

For Indigenous Peoples Day, I’ll be thinking about some of my heroes in my adopted home of California, people like Sage LaPena (Northern Wintu), who is keeping traditional plant knowledge alive for the healing of all peoples; Chiitaanibah Johnson (Maidu/Diné) who spoke out against her racist history professor at Sacramento State University, and Valentin Lopez, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, all of whom are speaking at the 2017 Annual Bioneers Conference.

Indigenous Peoples Day is a good day to get involved.

When we celebrate Columbus Day, we actively take part in a world that condones genocide. So to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, my plan is to get involved and to do something about the ongoing destruction of Indigenous homelands that was begun in 1492.

Chances are, right now there is something in your backyard that you can support. For me, it is protecting Juristaic, a holy place for the Amah Mutsun people, the descendants of the Central California California Indians who survived the Missions San Juan Bautista and Santa Cruz. I was surprised and shocked to learn a few months ago about the Sargeant Quarry “Project,” a proposed sand and gravel mine on 320 acres at Juristaic (four miles south of Gilroy, California, at a place now called Sargeant Ranch), a spiritually significant site for the Amah Mutsun tribal people from Central California (to understand the importance of Juristaic, tribal members describe it akin to Jerusalem for Jews, Christians and Muslims). In addition to irreparable harm to the tribe’s religious and spiritual integrity, the 30 years of proposed mining will cause significant adverse environmental impacts to the water, wildlife, plants, and other natural and cultural resources in the area forever.

It was my honor and privilege to learn about the significance of village sites and traditional lifeways from Amah Mutsun Tribal Chairperson, Val Lopez, a few weeks ago. To witness the reclamation of traditional ecological knowledge alongside the restoration of these sites within the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, only strengthened my commitment to help protect this special place for generations to come.

I have only lived in Monterey, CA for seven years, but it is my responsibility to help protect this region for future generations. I felt even more connected to this resolve after I had the special opportunity to visit the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, a few miles north of Santa Cruz a few weeks ago, where I learned about the amazing collaborations between the Amah Mutsun Tribe, UC Santa Cruz and other institutions to reclaim the Indigenous knowledge of the very site where Europeans first encountered California’s central coast peoples.

The Sargeant Ranch Program is my region’s “Standing Rock” and it seems like nobody knows about it. So today, I’ll be drafting letters in opposition to the Sargeant Ranch project. You can learn more about the proposed mine threatening this sacred site here or here.

Other things you might do today, this week, or going forward might be to 1) learn about the Indigenous Peoples where you live; 2) get involved with environmental threats to the place you live (because odds are, if you are living in America, you live on occupied Indigenous territory); and, 3) connect with your ancestors. Learn where they came from, and the tides of history that displaced them.

At the annual Bioneers Conference coming up October 20-22, you will have many opportunities to learn about California Indian history, and how to get involved with several other Indigenous-led and other initiatives in California and around the world to take care of our planet. Check out this blog I wrote a few months ago about our amazing Indigenous Forum line up.

Sincerely,

The Bioneers Indigeneity Team,

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Program Director

Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik), Program Manager

 

Updates From The First Biomimicry Accelerator Team Cohort

From Bioneers to boardrooms, these biomimicry entrepreneurs are getting ever closer to bringing their food system solutions to market.

A year ago this October, Camila Hernandez and Camila Gratacós stood in front of 2,000 people on the National Bioneers Conference main stage and accepted the first-ever Ray of Hope Prize® for their nature-inspired soil restoration solution called BioPatch. The BioPatch, inspired by hardy “nurse” plants that survive in harsh conditions and pave the way for new plant species to grow, was created as a way to grow and protect new plants while restoring health back to the soil.

With the $100,000 grand prize in hand, the team got the chance to make their goals for BioPatch a reality. Today, they and the rest of their team are working hard to bring their design to market, engaging manufacturing and sourcing partners, rigorously testing prototypes, and linking up with business networks that promote circular economy business models. “Daring to participate in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge was the first step to lose the fear of starting something new and start to believe that our ideas could be realized,” said BioPatch co-founder Camila Hernandez. “Life can be full of problems or full of solutions, depending on your point of view. This experience has helped me declare my love for solutions that are friendly to the environment and society.”

The six other teams who were part of the inaugural Biomimicry Accelerator cohort are also forging ahead with their nature-inspired food system solutions. From winning prestigious spots in international business incubators to speaking at conferences around the world to scoring additional funding, it’s been a busy year for these biomimicry entrepreneurs. Read on to find out what they’ve been up to and where they are now. Oasis Aquaponic Food Production System Shortly after winning second place funding in the Biomimicry Accelerator for their aquaponic

Oasis Aquaponic Food Production System

Shortly after winning second place funding in the Biomimicry Accelerator for their aquaponic growing system, Team Oasis was one of ten winning teams in the Blue Economy Challenge, a program that funds sustainable aquaculture innovations. With this combined funding, the team was able to rent a manufacturing space, purchase equipment, and travel to Uganda and Tanzania to establish community organization partners to test the Oasis design. They have manufactured and shipped 13 demo systems to East Africa for these partner organizations to test for six months. At the same time, the team is working on honing their design by improving the aesthetics of the Oasis and making manufacturing more efficient.

Shortly after winning second place funding in the Biomimicry Accelerator for their aquaponic growing system, Team Oasis was one of ten winning teams in the Blue Economy Challenge, a program that funds sustainable aquaculture innovations. With this combined funding, the team was able to rent a manufacturing space, purchase equipment, and travel to Uganda and Tanzania to establish community organization partners to test the Oasis design. They have manufactured and shipped 13 demo systems to East Africa for these partner organizations to test for six months. At the same time, the team is working on honing their design by improving the aesthetics of the Oasis and making manufacturing more efficient.

Jube

This team, with members from Thailand and the U.S., developed a bio-inspired chamber for capturing edible insects, a more earth-friendly source of edible protein. After winning third-place funding in the Biomimicry Accelerator, they created and shipped their first prototypes to the U.S. in April. They are planning on hosting their own biomimicry challenge in Thailand, asking the public to help improve on the existing Jube concept. Jube team leader Pat Pataranutaporn was invited to give a TEDx talk at Arizona State University where he is currently a student and spent the summer interning for IBM’s Watson group in New York City. Pat is looking forward to combining what he learned during his internship to develop biomimetic algorithms to apply to various software development solutions.

Hexagro

Over the past year, this international team has won multiple awards and coveted spots in start-up programs worldwide. Hexagro Urban Farming’s Living Farming Tree is a modular aeroponic growing system that enables people to grow healthy, fresh food in urban areas. After forming a for-benefit corporation in Italy, Hexagro won the Switch to Product contest sponsored by the Politecnico di Milano and earned a spot in the school’s startup incubator. They have also displayed their designs at conferences all over the world, including at a technology display in Lyon, Milan Design Week, Seeds and Chips in Milan (where Barack Obama gave the keynote address), Tech Open Air in Berlin, and at universities in Costa Rica and Slovenia. They were one of 20 teams chosen to attend the Thought for Food Summit in Amsterdam. They also participated in the Katana Bootcamp in Stuttgart, Germany, where they were selected as the #1 pitch out of 100 teams participating in the bootcamp. Most recently, the team was invited to be part of the Kickstart Accelerator program in Switzerland, where they will compete for a $25k prize. They have also been selected as a semi-finalist for the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan competition in Singapore this fall.\

Mangrove Still

This Italian team created the Mangrove Still, a desalinating still inspired by how coastal plants process seawater that costs five times less than traditional solar stills. The Mangrove Still teamhas been busy expanding their design from individual units to a complete system that is adaptable to regional climates and locally available materials. Their goal is to develop communities of practice that will incorporate the Mangrove Still design into their local context. They were awarded a grant from Dubai Expo 2020 and are using those funds to run a design hackathon to hone the Mangrove Still system and test the system in Egypt, India, Namibia, Cape Verde, and Cyprus. The team is also working on setting up a crowdfunding campaign and has been presenting their design at conferences, including the European Biomimicry Summit in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Living Filtration System

The Living Filtration System team developed a biomimetic drainage system that keeps nutrients in the soil rather than leaving the field in runoff and was inspired by earthworms and the human digestive system. Members of this University of Oregon team have graduated and are currently pursuing careers. They are all actively working to incorporate biomimicry into their career plans.

BioCultivator

The BioCultivator team from Slovakia developed its lizard-inspired, self-sustaining growing system to encourage more urban dwellers to grow fresh food. The team was invited to take part in Startup Awards Slovakia’s bootcamp and was chosen as a finalist in the Art and Design category. This award event was broadcast on national television and was attended by Andrej Kiska, the President of the Slovak Republic. The team was also invited to be part of a mission of Slovak businesses to the Republic of Croatia this past June, was selected to be part of the Women in Tech Forum at PIONEERS 2017 in Austria, and participated at the first CEE Founders’ Summit in December. The team has manufactured 11 prototypes to date and is looking to finish a proof-of- concept in late fall 2017. Team members are working to make connections with potential investors and business partners in order to create BioCultivator 2.0, based on lessons learned from the first round of prototype testing.

 

The second Biomimicry Accelerator cohort will be coming to Bioneers on October 21, 2017, for the second annual Ray of Hope Prize® award event. Stay tuned to find out which of these
teams will win the Ray C. Anderson Foundation’s $100,000 prize to take their biomimetic innovations to the next level.You can get a sneak peek at the second cohort’s innovations ahead of the big Ray of Hope

You can get a sneak peek at the second cohort’s innovations ahead of the big Ray of Hope Prize announcement at the Biomimicry Pitch Event and Technology Showcase on October 20, 2017 at the Autodesk Atrium. Watch as the six teams from the 2016-17 Biomimicry Accelerator take the stage to pitch their innovations to a VIP panel, including Biomimicry Institute co-founder Janine Benyus, Green Biz Executive Editor Joel Makower, venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, and Singularity University’s Robert Suarez.

Plus, a brand-new round of the Challenge—along with the chance to join the fourth cohort of the Biomimicry Accelerator—will open this fall. To learn more, go to challenge.biomimicry.org.

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez: A New Chapter in My Life

As brilliant thinkers and leaders work to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity today, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez has been making sure that young people are represented in moving toward a more equitable tomorrow. An influential and outspoken teenager, Martinez has been speaking to audiences about environmental justice and youth activism since he was 6. Presently, he is the youth director of Earth Guardians, a “tribe of young activists, artists, and musicians from across the globe stepping up as leaders to co-create the future we know is possible.”

Martinez’s new book, We Rise (Rodale Books, 2017), is an empowering call to activists—young and old—to fight to restore our planet. The following is an excerpt from the book’s prologue.

Attend the 2017 Bioneers Conference in October to see Xiuhtezcatl Martinez speak in person, and read to the end of this post to watch a video of his talk at a previous conference.

There are moments in our lives that help shape the way we see our world. They shift our perspectives and help us understand our immense potential to define our future. The first 17 years of my life have led me to believe that everything happens for a reason. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel at all phased as I looked out into the audience of world leaders from more than 100 nations. I’d been given a stage at a pivotal moment in history, and I saw the world needed fresh perspectives if we wanted to make real progress on climate solutions. We’ve spent the last 20 years pointing the finger and passing off responsibility. We are in a place where we can’t afford to wait for others to solve this problem for us. We have all the tools we need…the only thing missing is the will to help us get there.

My name is Xiuhtezcatl (pronounced ‘Shoe-Tez-Caht’). I am 17 years old, and I’m doing everything I can to fight for change in a collapsing world. In 2015, I had just finished middle school, and the state of the climate was descending into chaos. That year, global temperatures were the hottest in recorded history, sea levels had reached an all-time high, and greenhouse gases had never been more present in our atmosphere. Climate scientists worldwide were alarmed by how much faster the ice caps were melting than previously projected.

In response, world leaders were preparing to meet in Paris for the most important conversation on climate in our history. This was the COP 21 United Nations Climate Change Conference, and we weren’t about to let our voices be excluded from this pivotal moment in history. In the climate movement, we talk a lot about tipping points, and we know that we’re running out of time to act before climate change becomes irreversible.

Earlier that year, on Earth Day, I was featured in a short film called Kid Warrior. This was a documentary telling the story of my life and my work as the Youth Director for Earth Guardians, a global movement working to empower the younger generation to use our voices and create positive solutions. The film was meant to inspire other young people to get involved, connect, and engage in climate action and other important social issues of our time. I also wanted to show the world that my story is more than just activism . . . that I’m just a regular kid chasing big dreams in a crazy world.

After the Kid Warrior short hit the Internet, e-mails from young people flooded Earth Guardians, asking how they could get involved and start Earth Guardian crews of their own. I was swamped with interviews, speaking invitations, and media opportunities. One of those invites came from Susan Alzner, head of the United Nations Non-Government Liaison Service and by far my favorite person working at the UN. She’s helping build bridges to connect the UN General Assembly and voices of the people, by identifying civil society attendees and speakers for high-level events, conferences, and summits. One of her topics of interest was climate change, and she got wind of Kid Warrior and the Earth Guardians movement, leading to me.

While I was kind of surprised that the UN heard about me through social media, it was pretty remarkable to get an invite to address the general assembly. My intention was to plant the seeds and lay the foundation of hope for the upcoming Paris climate change conference, while representing the many youth voices that won’t be heard by the UN. I was only the second nongovernment person to address the general assembly.

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner was first. She addressed the United Nations in 2014. At the time, she was a 26-year-old woman from the Marshall Islands, a small island nation that sits about 6 feet above sea level and is already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Rising sea levels and severe storms have come extremely close to destroying these beautiful islands.

In her speech, Kathy indicated that, no matter how hard it might be, we have to solve the issue of climate change. In a truly emotional and beautiful moment, she recited a poem to her infant daughter, promising the little girl that she would do everything she could to protect her from rising seas. She entitled the poem “Dear Matefele Peinam,” and here are the first few verses:

dear matafele peinam,
you are a seven month old sunrise of gummy smiles
you are bald as an egg and bald as the buddha
you are thunder thighs and lightning shrieks so excited for bananas, hugs and
our morning walks past the lagoon

dear matafele peinam,
i want to tell you about that lagoon that lucid, sleepy lagoon lounging
against the sunrise
some men say that one day that lagoon will devour you

they say it will gnaw at the shoreline
chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees
gulp down rows of your seawalls
and crunch your island’s shattered bones

they say you, your daughter
and your granddaughter, too
will wander rootless
with only a passport to call home

dear matafele peinam,
don’t cry
mommy promises you
no one
will come and devour you
no greedy whale of a company
sharking through political seas
no backwater bullying of businesses with broken morals no blindfolded
bureaucracies gonna push
this mother ocean over the edge …

She concluded to a standing ovation, leaving many attendees in tears. The beauty of her poem is that it wasn’t just about facts and figures, it told a relatable story about a mother’s love for her child and an unwavering will to protect her in the face of big challenges. I knew I had big shoes to fill after learning about her speech and just how deeply she touched the world leaders in attendance. I was excited to be the second person and youngest ever to address the United Nations General Assembly. The voices of the people needed to be heard, and I was up for the challenge.

It seems like the majority of people are disconnected from what actually occurs at the UN. With more than 20 years of world leaders talking to each other about climate change, nothing had been solved. For the UN, climate change is topic of bureaucratic debate, whereas for many communities, it’s a life-or-death situation. I felt like I had the opportunity to offer my perspective from the front lines of watching climate change decimate our planet. Whether it was feeling the tremendous impact of fracking on the water and air in my hometown of Boulder, or traveling to North Dakota to stand in solidarity at Standing Rock, or protesting against the Keystone XL Pipeline, or visiting damaged rain forests, oceans, and glacier melting sites, I have learned about the impact of climate change one powerful experience at a time.

Looking back, I now know that that speech was the culmination of an incredible period of growth in my life. My voice had just dropped, I was sprouting up, and I was taking my fight to a much bigger stage. I usually don’t memorize speeches; most of the time, I just speak from the heart. But, this was no ordinary speech. The UN wanted me to write out every word I was going to say. I have always viewed the words on the page as more of a road map to the places I might go.

The night before I boarded the flight to New York, I finished a draft of the speech. My badass mom, Tamara Rose, came with me on this journey. She’s endlessly supportive and my partner in crime in this movement. She does a great job of keeping the pressure out of it, always looking out for my best interests. I know she is proud of me, but she doesn’t add any expectations to the moment. She did want me to memorize the speech while I was on the plane though. As we began our ascent into the clouds, I reviewed my speech a few times, but after about 30 minutes or so, I figured I should just relax. I fell asleep, and I didn’t wake up until the captain came over the intercom system, indicating our initial descent into New York City.

As we got off the plane, my friend Vanessa Black, who made Kid Warrior, and her camera crew were there to film my journey to the UN. Vanessa took us directly to Manhattan, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and to this small suit tailor in the city. It was a pretty funky place. A tailor met me and started taking my measurements. That was the first time in my life that I had ever put on a suit. The tailor shuffled jackets on and off of me and fit me for a shirt and shoes to match my suit. To that point, most of my activism was very grass roots, community-driven, and localized for the most part. This was an entirely different kind of thing than I was used to.

I was both pretty tired and hungry at this point, and I wanted to enjoy some of NYC’s best eats. My mom was stressing a little that I didn’t have my speech memorized, and I could appreciate her concern, but I was just chilling, knowing that I was ready for the moment. I think my exact words to her were, “Mom, don’t worry. I got this.” I can only imagine how reassuring that might sound coming from a 15-year-old kid who had just put on his first button-down shirt that wasn’t plaid.

June 29, 2015, arrived. As we approached the front entrance to the UN, there was a ridiculous amount of security. We were issued a number of clearance badges, and were eventually connected with Susan Alzner, who greeted us and showed us around. We took our seats in the audience, and I remember sitting through a number of different speakers who took the stage before me. It wasn’t engaging at all—the room was lifeless. I tried to sit up straight, so as to not wrinkle my suit or mess up my long hair. I was a little nervous; this was bigger than anything I’d done before.

About 20 minutes before I was scheduled to speak, we were ushered to the side of the stage. We continued to wait, and I surveyed the room filled with chairs, each with a different little placard in front of it, designating the country represented by that seat. The room went silent, and I heard a UN representative start to introduce me. He wasn’t the first to mess up the pronunciation of my name. To his credit, he tried a couple of times, but it just wasn’t happening for him. As I approached the podium, I looked out into the audience. The atmosphere still felt stale and stuffy. I knew I needed to bring some life into the room.

I unrolled my written speech, took a deep breath, and started off with a prayer in my native language. As you can imagine, not everyone in the room spoke the same language, so there was a booth set up with translators repeating everything for the diplomats in various dialects. Because my prayer was in Nahuatl and it isn’t a spoken language, it totally threw everyone off. I could just imagine what the interpreters were saying. Probably something like, “What the hell is happening right now? Nobody recognizes this language.” The UN required strict preparation for its speakers, and, in the first 30 seconds, I was already breaking the rules and going off script. Classic.

It only took the audience a few moments to realize that a 15-yearold kid was standing in front of them. I had their attention now—all eyes were on me.

I left the written words behind and spoke what I needed to say from my heart. I used the speech as an outline to freestyle the content. Looking out at the audience and recognizing the importance of this moment, I knew I had an opportunity to say more than what was on the page. By the end, I was totally off- script, and I was flowing with it. It felt perfect. My friend Paul Basis tells me that the power in your words is in the space between them. I took my time so people could feel everything I said. By the time I said what I came there to say, I had gone 3 minutes over the time I was given.

Getting off the stage after you speak to a bunch of people in suits is always a strange feeling. I felt like I said what I Xiuhtezcatl at the United Nations wanted to. Besides, the people in that room weren’t the ones I was really speaking to. Speeches don’t change the world, movements do, but the words and the messages that come through can spark a flame to ignite a movement.

Following the speech I felt the tremendous potential of what this moment could be. While this felt like a powerful culmination of 10 years of passion and dedication, I knew it was just the beginning of a nextlevel journey—to fulfill the promise of my words would take many more years of hard work. So often people compromise themselves in order to accomplish their political objectives. The goal of my speech was to defy that. I don’t ever want to have to be something that I’m not to make a difference in the world. I gave that speech because I wanted to show the world that a kid with a passion and a voice could make a difference, regardless of who he is or where he comes from.

I was able to show up in a fully authentic way, in a place where such blunt honesty is rare. Whether or not my words sunk into the people in the room, my message would resonate to those frustrated by a bureaucracy that had failed to meet the needs of the people. In my speech, I told the audience: “Don’t be afraid to dream big.” The failure of global leaders to solve this crisis is direct result of their lack of imagination. If we want a sane climate policy, we the people have to push them beyond what they see as politically possible.

Sadly, the UN didn’t dream big enough with the Paris Climate Conference that followed my speech several months later. Their efforts fell short of the concrete actions needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions substantially. What progress was made in Paris many fear will be thwarted by a Trump administration, which says they plan to cancel the agreement.

For many of us, waking up on November 9th felt as if we were entering a national nightmare. But I’ve learned that big dreams often come from total nightmares. The UN was formed in response to the tragedies that occurred during World War II. So I can only imagine that we are primed and ready for something larger than previously imagined. I know that change occurs through each of us. It is the manifestation of our collective efforts. This book is a resource to transform a broken system and build a new one in its place. It will help to paint the picture, demonstrate the struggle, and then outline a solution.

We’re up against a lot, but together we’ve got this. Movements can begin with one idea, one spark of inspiration, and one action. They catch fire when we unite around them. Each of us has a part to play, no matter how small. The solutions we create in our communities are the foundation for something bigger than us all.

Every generation leaves a legacy. The tools to create one are in your hands. Think of this book as a map to help you find your way when you get lost. The ending remains unwritten, because the actions we take will shape the world that the next generation inherits. This book is for the frontline fighters, the people who won’t take no for an answer, and for those who believe in change and are seeking guidance to create it. This book is for the straight-A students, the high-school dropouts, the single moms, the rebels, the farmers, the architects, the healers, the poets, the entrepreneurs, the leaders, and those who have not yet found their voice. My faith lies in the amazing people I’ve met along this journey who won’t stop fighting for what we believe in. Another world is possible.

Together we can do this if we just put boots on the ground and pool our time and energy to heal the world one leaf on one tree in one forest in one city in one state in one country at a time. It isn’t going to happen overnight, but it can happen if we make the most of each day. Every little bit helps. Local efforts can create global waves. Throughout this book, you’ll find helpful conversations about the most important social issues of our time. At the end of the conversations, I will outline steps and resources you can take and use to join in and make a difference.

So keep this book by your side as you navigate the road ahead. Keep it in your backpack, near your bed stand, or in your hybrid. Write in it, highlight it, even rip out the pages and give them to your friends. Please pass it around, and share the guidance and suggestions in the pages ahead. I want you to love reading this book as much as I loved writing it. This is my way of spreading the word as quickly as possible. This book is just the beginning of the movement for change, but I know there are difference-making resources in the words to come. It means the world to me that I have the opportunity to outline my plan to save the Earth that has given so much to each of us. I am one of the many. And so are you. I look at you as my teammate and partner in this battle. We got this if we just work together.

So with that said, please dream big and read on.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from We Rise by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, published by Rodale Books, 2017.

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez speaks at the 2016 Bioneers Conference:

Celebrity Chef Jose Andrés Is Feeding More Than 5,000 Victims of Hurricane Maria

By Michael Peñuelas

This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

Celebrity chef Jose Andrés, best known for his restaurants Jaleo, minibar, and Zaytinya, is working alongside local Puerto Rican chefs to feed more than 5,000 Puerto Ricans per day in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

Andrés and his team at the World Central Kitchen (WCK) are coordinating a large network of volunteer chefs and food service workers to collect donations from around the country, transport them daily to Puerto Rico, and prepare thousands of meals in borrowed kitchens and food trucks on the island.

In addition to feeding some of most vulnerable residents of Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, the WCK network is making a concentrated effort to feed the staff of hospitals and elderly homes, who are working long hours in increasingly desperate conditions, according to WCK Communication Director Kevin Holst.

Dubbed “Operation #ChefsForPuertoRico,” the campaign seeks to draw attention and resources to the plight of the island’s 3.4 million residents, most of whom are citizens of the United States and remain without water, electricity, or food, according to the Pentagon. Hurricane Maria was the strongest storm to hit Puerto Rico in more than 80 years.

In addition to wiping out power to the entire island and disabling 90 percent of cellphone towers, the storm also decimated Puerto Rico’s food systems. Before the hurricane, Puerto Rico already imported about 85 percent of its food, though the island’s agricultural industry had been growing steadily, according to Carlos Flores Ortega, Puerto Rico’s secretary of the Department of Agriculture. In a matter of hours, Ortega reports, the hurricane destroyed more than 80 percent of the island’s existing crop value. Residents will now be forced to rely almost exclusively on imports until they are able to rebuild their food systems, a process which will take years.

WCK’s response follows the network’s recent work in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which impacted the region surrounding the city of Houston, Texas in August of 2017. After Harvey, the WCK network coordinated donations of over 1 million pounds of food and served 20,000 meals for Houston residents.

Follow Jose Andrés’ Twitter feed for further updates.

Click here to donate to ongoing relief efforts by Jose Andrés and the World Central Kitchen.

This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

Sex in the Sea: How Sex-Changing Fish Are Biologically Advantaged

As our society becomes more accustomed to conversations about sex and gender—in terms of biology, psychology, and justice—it is becoming clear just how complex and nuanced these topics can be. While we strive to understand the details of human sexuality, many of us don’t stop to consider the bigger picture: Gender and sexual fluidity isn’t a human-specific concept. Species that walk, swim, and fly about the Earth have fascinating sex lives, some of which we’re just beginning to understand.

Dr. Marah Hardt’s research is bringing us closer to understanding the bigger picture, specifically in relation to sea life. The research director of Future of Fish—a nonprofit incubator working to solve oceanic challenges—Hardt is currently engaging with organizations to find solutions to global overfishing problems. Having spent much of her career studying life among coral reefs, she became an expert in the sex lives of certain fish and ocean creatures, eventually writing the book Sex in the Sea (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), a humorous and captivating examination of the underwater mating rituals most of us have never seen. The following excerpt dives into the world of sex-changing fish, and is from the book’s chapter “Flex Your Sex: Sex Change in the Sea.”

…

Once Upon a Time there was a King and Queen who ruled over a peaceful kingdom. The peace came from order, and that order was imposed through fierce intimidation. No one dared rise up to challenge their reign. Beautiful and standing a full foot taller than the King, it was no secret that the Queen was in command. It was even rumored that she bullied her King, just as he bullied his court.

Then, one night, the Queen died. Within moments, a strange new force began to swirl within the castle walls. As if released from some spell the King felt a change deep within himself, a blossoming of something new, something different, something . . . feminine. For the next few weeks this inner transformation progressed until finally he stepped forth as a new and powerful Queen, equally as beautiful, fertile, and commanding as the former had been.

The King-now-Queen took as her mate a spirited youth who had, under the same spell, developed into a strapping, virile male. Under the new Queen’s hard-hearted watch, the new King embraced his role and began a new reign of intimidation—and the two lived and laid many successful clutches of eggs, Happily Ever After.

The End.

Or so a fairy tale might go, had the Brothers Grimm known anything about clownfish. Yes, clownfish. Sorry folks, but Pixar got it wrong. Way wrong.

When it comes to relationship dynamics of clownfish, the true adventure tale reads more like the Greek tragedy Oedipus than it does Finding Nemo. As Nature writes the story, by the time Nemo hatched out of the egg, his dad, Marlin, an unpartnered male head of household, would have already morphed into Marlene. For clownfish, when the leading lady dies, the top dog promotes to bitch.

Rather than chasing after a kidnapped Nemo, Marlin-now-Marlene would stay at home and welcome the next largest male around to join her as her chosen mate inside her spacious anemone abode. A mature, ready, and waiting female occupying a decent anemone would not remain lonely. Nemo, if he ever did escape and make it back home, would find the anemone filled with other male clownfish. He would have to wait his turn to meet (and mate with) his father-turned-mother, delaying the happy reunion of son-as-lover with mother-who-was-father.

Though lacking the sharks, jellyfish forest, and surfing sea turtles, when it comes to personal growth and triumph sagas, the real Nemo story offers a far more colorful tale that hinges on the ability of a clownfish to change sex during its lifetime. It’s a strategy deployed by many species of fish and invertebrates—species that never have to wonder what shagging is like for the opposite sex . . . they know.

A Brief Sojourn into Sex-Change Strategies

Under the sea, the boundary between male and female is far more fluid than on land. A little midlife sex swapping is part of the natural lifecycle of everyone from Nemo to the shrimp in your shrimp cocktail. In fact, start naming all the sex-changing animals in the sea, and the list looks like a recipe for bouillabaisse: mussels, clams, shrimp, and a whole slew of fish. There are others, too, such as worms and some sea stars (formerly known as starfish), that don’t lend themselves as readily to a chowder but do exhibit some serious flex in their sex.

Though energy intensive, the ability to alter one’s sex is a strategic way to boost babies per reproductive bonk. Here’s why: in some situations, one sex will make more babies when they are bigger (or older) than when smaller. In human terms, a woman’s fertility peaks in her twenties and declines later in life. But the same doesn’t go for a guy. Instead, he can continue to make babies by hooking up with younger women far into his fifties, sixties, and beyond.

Now imagine that younger guys, with their overeager sex drive and lack of experience, weren’t likely to get much action from discerning females who wished to have their babes sired by only the strongest, wisest, best providers. Under these circumstances, if people wanted to maximize the number of children they could produce, and if we could change sex, it would make sense to start life as a female, making babies by reproducing with older men while you are young and fit. Then, as conception and baby carrying success diminished around thirty-five years old, you would switch to being a male, and kick up your offspring output by finding a pretty young thing to mate with. Voila! You’ve just increased your human production potential.

Of course, you also would have to endure the pangs of puberty twice. In reality, human biology is too prudishly rigid to allow for this kind of flexibility with our sex. The same holds for other mammals, including species such as elephant seals, which would certainly benefit from that kind of flexible strategy: all those small males kicked off the beach by the big alphas could instead start off as females and then morph to males when big and ready to do battle. Alas, it is not an option for most vertebrates.

Fish are an exception. Along with many invertebrates, they aren’t nearly so limited. For them, the cost of sex change is a small price to pay in return for some serious reproductive advantage.

Li l’ Males and Big Ol’ Fat Fecund Female Fish: Protandrous Hermaphrodites

To understand why the real Nemo story reads more like Greek legend than it does Pixar, first you need to wrap your head around the fact the bigger a female fish grows, the more eggs she can make. This “bigger equals more eggs” concept is completely foreign to humans. Our females are born with roughly the same number of eggs—about one million. No matter her height, weight, ethnicity, et cetera, a woman has all the eggs she will ever have before she is born—by about twelve weeks in utero. As she ages, the number of eggs she carries goes down. By the time she hits puberty, only about half of her lifetime egg pool remains (most of these never fully develop and are reabsorbed into the body—only about three hundred to five hundred eggs ever fully mature).

This is not the case in fish (and many other marine species, too). For them, eggs are produced over the course of their female lives, and size matters. The bigger a female is, the more eggs she can fit, and as long as she is healthy, the more eggs she can make. For example, a fourteen-inch-long vermillion snapper will make about 150,000 eggs. A twenty-two-inch female of the same species will make 1,700,000 eggs. That’s over ten times more eggs before the fish doubles in size. So big, old, fat, fecund female fish (affectionately known as “BOFFFFs”) can pump out far more eggs than their younger sisters a few notches down the size scale.

There may be other advantages to BOFFFFs besides sheer increases in number too. Older (and wiser?) females may release eggs over a longer spawning period and more diverse spawning habitats than younger females. This helps them hedge their bets in terms of hitting favorable conditions for larval survival. These factors indicate that BOFFFFs are disproportionately beneficial and perhaps even critical to long-term survival of populations.

That bigger females can carry more eggs is not a trick specific to sex changers. Any large female fish—whether she was born female and stayed that way or started as a male and transitioned to female—contributes significantly more to future generations than a smaller female. But this feature becomes something sex-changing species can exploit, especially for those species that engage in the abnormal behavior of pairing up one-on-one for the season. Such is the case with clownfish, male-to-female sex changers that join seahorses in the minority club of species forming monogamous couples.

As a candy-colored bite-sized fish on a predator-filled reef, clownfish (also known as anemonefish) tend to stick within the confines and safety of their anemone homes. Distant cousins of jellyfish, anemones have a soft body surrounded by rings of stinging tentacles that present a perfect fortress of protection for clownfish, which hide within their waving tendrils. But a good anemone can be hard to find. If you’re an adult clownfish who decides to go looking for a new home, other clownfish will likely chase you away from their already-occupied abodes. No room at the inn for you. But as a juvenile, you’re pretty innocent and pose no competition to the ruling adults, so unless an anemone is particularly crowded, odds are you can stick around. So, young clownfish use their sense of smell to find their way to a good anemone, and once allowed to join a group, they stay.

Confined to an anemone, these fish are stuck with whoever else lives there. It’s kind of like being forced to date only the girl or boy next door. But although there may be four to six individuals living around one anemone, only the two largest individuals will mate: the one and only female with the largest male. And here’s where being a BOFFFF comes in handy. Generally speaking, even a small male has enough sperm to fertilize all of a female’s eggs. The more eggs the female can make, then, the more offspring the couple can produce. So a bigger female benefits them both. By starting off as a male, an individual that hooks up with a big female can produce lots of offspring when small, and then, when his older, bigger partner dies, he can then grow into the female role, get a new mate, and continue the high-level offspring output. This is what clownfish do, and this is why the real Nemo tale doesn’t look anything like the movie.

The trick to an individual clownfish’s sexual success, though, isn’t sex change as much as preventing other adult clownfish from sneaking sex with their mate. Both the top-ranking male and the female engage in some psychological warfare, bullying the other resident clownfish and stressing them out so much that their sexual development ceases. It’s a delicate art form, really. The female torments the largest male just enough to keep him from growing too big (and risk turning into a competing female) but not too much intimidation, so as to which would suppress his manliness. Whipped as he is by the female, the male then takes out his aggression on the next largest individual, but he goes all the way, intimidating that male into suspended maturation. The intimidated then becomes the intimidator, turning to dominate the next biggest, and so on down the line, ensuring that each individual knows his place in the pecking order and remains in pre-pubescent limbo.

Life may not be easy for young, stunted clownfish, but there are advantages to all that torment. When the female dies, the ranking male can quickly convert to female and reap the reproductive rewards: the next juvenile in line simply rises up, grows a pair, and the new couple gets on with the show. Nobody has to venture outside the green zone of the anemone to find a mate.

Clownfish are not alone in their protandrous lifestyle; many oysters also know sex—in the biblical sense—from both sides of the bed. The most popularly consumed species, including those Bluepoints and Belons, Sweetwaters and Wellfleets, Kumamotos and Pemaquids, in all their wondrous, buttery, salty, smoky, earthy, fruity merroir—all have the potential to morph from male to female. Such a talent is also beneficial when you’re an animal that’s stuck in the muck for life.

Glued together as a living rock wall, oyster reefs or “beds” are made up of generations of individual oysters that, as tiny free-swimming larvae, sink down from the surface to attach and grow on the backs of their ancestors. During a season of summer lovin’, oysters contract the two halves of their shelled house, forcefully ejecting enormous numbers of sperm or eggs into the water, where they mix with the gametes of other neighboring oysters. As we will discuss in a few chapters, animals such as oysters that can’t move instead set their gametes free in the open blue to find their complement and fuse. To help increase the odds that fertilization will occur, these animals pump out spectacular numbers of eggs and sperm. Bigger females are advantageous because they can significantly up their egg output—just like BOFFFFs. An adult female oyster may release over a million eggs in one go, and they often have multiple spawning events in a year. Smaller males, with fewer energy reserves, can still make lots of cheap sperm, but it is difficult to make lots of fat-rich eggs and still have energy left over to grow. So, protandry makes sense, with bigger oysters able to divert more energy to female reproduction, which helps everyone.

While size does matter, it is not the only factor controlling sex change. Social cues are also important. As Dr. Juliana Harding, an oyster expert at Coastal Carolina University, notes, “What’s the point of spawning as a male if everyone around you is a male?” Or equally important: why bother changing sex if your neighbor already has? Harding explains that oysters use chemical cues to determine who else is around and of what sex in order to calculate when and if sex change makes sense. “Both size and social cues influence the end product.”

Actual sex change happens after spawning, when the overflowing gonads are finally spent. But in contrast to many sex changers that can make the leap from male to female (or vice versa) in a manner of days, oysters take a bit more time in swapping sex. Harding explains: “It is like phasing out one set of equipment and bringing a new set on line and testing it before getting rid of the old. From an evolutionary standpoint, you always want to be able to spawn as something so as to not miss opportunities to contribute to future generations.” This is also why oysters “trickle spawn,” releasing some eggs or sperm over an extended time frame.

Not all individual oysters change sex, though. In some species, oysters born male stay male while others born male will transition to female after a few years. The difference in the two paths seems to be mostly genetic, with some environmental influence. In the Pacific oyster, for example, it is likely that males born with a genotype MF are true males (similar to male human XY genotype); those oysters with an FF combination (similar to female human XX genotype), however, are protandrous—born male, they may sex-change into female after one or two years. There isn’t a hard deadline for when sex change occurs. Instead both age and the environment can influence the timing: if food supplies are low, or the conditions otherwise harsh, an individual may delay the switch. On the other hand, disease or fishing pressure that targets older and larger individuals may trigger an earlier transition to female—to ensure they pump out a few rounds of eggs before being knocked off. This kind of variable sex change is one example of how external forces can fundamentally affect the sex lives of a species.

The male-to-female transformation is but the tip of the sex-change iceberg, however. The far more dominant strategy (at least in marine fish) for boosting sexual success via sex swapping is the female-to-male route— that’s the pathway of choice for species where big males can effectively rule the school.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Sex in the Sea by Marah J. Hardt, published by St. Martin’s Press, 2016.

Rethinking the ‘Infrastructure’ Discussion Amid a Blitz of Hurricanes

 

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Written by Andrew Revkin.

The wonky words infrastructure and resilience have circulated widely of late, particularly since Hurricanes Harvey and Irma struck paralyzing, costly blows in two of America’s fastest-growing states.

Resilience is a property traditionally defined as the ability to bounce back. A host of engineers and urban planners have long warned this trait is sorely lacking in America’s brittle infrastructure.

Many such experts say the disasters in the sprawling suburban and petro-industrial landscape around Houston and along the crowded coasts of Florida reinforce the urgent idea that resilient infrastructure is needed more than ever, particularly as human-driven climate change helps drive extreme weather.

The challenge in prompting change — broadening the classic definition of “infrastructure,” and investing in initiatives aimed at adapting to a turbulent planet — is heightened by partisan divisions over climate policy and development.

Of course, there’s also the question of money. The country’s infrastructure is ailing already. A national civil engineering group has surveyed the nation’s bridges, roads, dams, transit systems and more and awarded a string of D or D+ grades since 1998. The same group has estimated that the country will be several trillion dollars short of what’s needed to harden and rebuild and modernize our infrastructure over the next decade.

For fresh or underappreciated ideas, ProPublica reached out to a handful of engineers, economists and policy analysts focused on reducing risk on a fast-changing planet.

Alice Hill, who directed resilience policy for the National Security Council in the Obama administration, said the wider debate over cutting climate-warming emissions may have distracted people from promptly pursuing ways to reduce risks and economic and societal costs from natural disasters.

She and several other experts said a first step is getting past the old definition of resilience as bouncing back from a hit, which presumes a community needs simply to recover.

“I don’t think of resilience in the traditional sense, in cutting how long it takes to turn the lights back on,” said Brian Bledsoe, the director of the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems at the University of Georgia. “Resilience is seizing an opportunity to move into a state of greater adaptability and preparedness — not just going back to the status quo.”

In thinking about improving the country’s infrastructure, and provoking real action, Bledsoe and others say, language matters.

Bledsoe, for instance, is exploring new ways to communicate flood risk in words and maps. His institute is testing replacements for the tired language of 1-in-100 or 1-in-500-year floods. A 100-year flood has a 1 in 4 chance of occurring in the 30-year span of a typical home mortgage, he said, adding that’s the kind of time scale that gets people’s attention.

Visual cues matter, too, he said. On conventional maps, simple lines marking a floodplain boundary often are interpreted as separating safe zones and those at risk, Bledsoe said. But existing models of water flows don’t provide the full range of possible outcomes: “A 50-year rain can produce a 100-year flood if it falls on a watershed that’s already soaked or on snowpack or if it coincides with a storm surge.”

“The bright line on a map is an illusion,” he said, particularly in flat places like Houston, where a slight change in flood waters can result in far more widespread inundation. Risk maps should reflect that uncertainty, and wider threat.

Nicholas Pinter, a University of California, Davis, geoscientist who studies flood risk and water management, said that Florida is well-situated to build more wisely after this disaster because it already has a statewide post-disaster redevelopment plan and requires coastal communities to have their own.

It’s more typical to have short-term recovery plans — for digging out and getting the lights back on, as 20,000 utility workers are scurrying to do right now.

The advantage of having an established protocol for redevelopment, he said, is it trims delays.

“Draw up plans when the skies are blue and pull them off the shelf,” he said of how having rebuilding protocols in place can limit repeating mistakes. “That fast response cuts down on the horrible lag time in which people typically rebuild in place.”

In a warming climate, scientists see increasing potential for epic deluges like the one that swamped Houston and last year’s devastating rains around Baton Rouge, Louisiana. How can the federal government more responsibly manage such environmental threats?

Many people point to the National Flood Insurance Program, which was created to boost financial resilience in flood zones, but has been criticized from just about every political and technical vantage point as too often working to subsidize, instead of mitigate, vulnerability.

As has happened periodically before, pressure is building on Congress to get serious about fixing the program (a reauthorization deadline was just pushed from this month toward the end of the year).

How this debate plays out will have an important impact on infrastructure resilience, said Pinter of the University of California, Davis. If incentives remain skewed in favor of dangerous and sprawling development, he said, that just expands where roads, wires, pipelines and other connecting systems have to be built. “Public infrastructure is there in service of populations,” he said.

He also said the lack of federal guidance has led to deeply uneven enforcement of floodplain building at the state level, with enormous disparities around the country resulting in more resilient states, in essence, subsidizing disaster-prone development in others.

“Why should California, Wyoming or Utah be paying the price for Houston, Mississippi or Alabama failing to enforce the National Flood Insurance Program? ” he said.

Bledsoe, at the University of Georgia, said there’s no need to wait for big changes in the program to start making progress. He said the National Flood Insurance Program has a longstanding division, the Community Rating System, that could swiftly be expanded, cutting both flood risk and budget-breaking payouts. It’s a voluntary program that reduces flood insurance rates for communities that take additional efforts beyond minimum standards to reduce flood damage to insurable property.

Despite the clear benefits, he said, only one municipality, Roseville, California, has achieved the top level of nine rankings and gotten the biggest insurance savings — 45 percent. Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fort Collins, Colorado, King County, Washington, and Pierce County, Washington, are at the second ranking and get a 40 percent rate cut. Hundreds of other municipalities are at much lower levels of preparedness.

“Boosting participation is low-hanging fruit,” Bledsoe said.

Some see signs that the recent blitz of hurricanes is reshaping strategies in the Trump White House. President Donald Trump’s infrastructure agenda, unveiled on August 15, centered on rescinding Obama-era plans to require consideration of flood risk and climate change in any federal spending for infrastructure or housing and the like. The argument was built around limiting perceived red tape.

After the flooding of Houston less than two weeks later, Trump appointees, including Tom Bossert, the president’s homeland security adviser, said a new plan was being developed to insure federal money would not increase flood risks.

On Monday, as Irma weakened over Georgia, Bossert used a White House briefing to offer more hints of an emerging climate resilience policy, while notably avoiding accepting climate change science: “What President Trump is committed to is making sure that federal dollars aren’t used to rebuild things that will be in harm’s way later or that won’t be hardened against the future predictable floods that we see. And that has to do with engineering analysis and changing conditions along eroding shorelines but also in inland water and flood-control projects.”

Robert R.M. Verchick, a Loyola University law professor who worked on climate change adaptation policy at the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama, said federal leadership is essential.

If Federal Emergency Management Agency flood maps incorporated future climate conditions, that move would send a ripple effect into real estate and insurance markets, forcing people to pay attention, he said. If the federal government required projected climate conditions to be considered when spending on infrastructure in flood-prone areas, construction practices would change, he added, noting the same pressures would drive chemical plants or other industries to have a wider margin of safety.

“None of these things will change without some form of government intervention. That’s because those who make decisions on the front end (buying property, building bridges) do not bear all the costs when things go wrong on the back end,” he wrote in an email. “And on top of that, human beings tend to discount small but important risks when it seems advantageous in the short-run.”

After a terrible storm, he said, most Americans are willing to cheer a government that helps communities recuperate. But people should also embrace the side of government that establishes rules to avoid risk and make us safer. That’s harder, he said, because such edicts can be perceived by some as impinging on personal freedom.

“But viewed correctly, sensible safeguards are part of freedom, not a retreat from it,” he said. “Freedom is having a home you can return to after the storm. Freedom is having a bridge high enough to get you to the hospital across the river. Freedom is not having your house surrounded by contaminated mud because the berm at the neighboring chemical plant failed overnight.”

Thaddeus R. Miller, an Arizona State University scientist who helps lead a national research network focused on “Urban Resilience to Extreme Events,” said in an email that boosting the capacity of cities to stay safe and prosperous in a turbulent climate requires a culture shift as much as hardening physical systems:

“Fundamentally, we must abandon the idea that there is a specific standard to which we can control nature and instead understand that we are creating complex and increasingly difficult-to-control systems that are part social, part ecological and part technological. These mean not just redesigning the infrastructure, but redesigning institutions and their knowledge systems.”

After the destruction and disruption from Hurricane Sandy, New York City didn’t just upgrade its power substations and subway entrances, Miller said in a subsequent phone call. The city also rebooted its agencies’ protocols and even job descriptions. “Every time a maintenance crew opens a sewer cover, fixes or installs a pipe, whether new or retrofitting, you’re thinking how to enhance its resilience,” Miller said.

Miller said another key to progress, particularly when federal action is limited or stalled, is cooperation between cities or regions. Heat was not an issue in Oregon historically, Miller said, but it’s becoming one. The light rail system around Portland was designed to work with a few 90-degree days a year, he said. “The last couple of summers have seen 20-plus 90-degree days,” he said, causing copper wires carrying power for the trains to sag and steel rails to expand in ways that have disrupted train schedules. Similar rail systems in the Southwest deal with such heat routinely, said Miller, who has worked in both regions. The more crosstalk, the better the outcome, he said.

“At the broadest level, we need to think about risks and how infrastructure is built to withstand them at a landscape level,” Miller added. “We can longer commit to evaluating the impacts and risks of a single project in isolation against a retrospective, stationary understanding of risk (e.g., the 100-year flood we’ve been hearing so much about.)”

He said that an emerging alternative, “safe-to-fail” design, is more suited to situations where factors contributing to extreme floods or other storm impacts can’t be fully anticipated. “Safe-to-fail infrastructure might allow flooding, but in ways that are designed for,” he said.

(With an Arizona State colleague, Mikhail Chester, Miller offered more details in a commentary published last week by The Conversation website, laying out “six rules for rebuilding infrastructure in an era of ‘unprecedented’ weather events.”)

Deborah Brosnan, an environmental and disaster risk consultant, said the challenge in making a shift to integrating changing risks into planning and investments is enormous, even when a community has a devastating shock such as a hurricane or flood or both:

“It requires a radical shift in how we incorporate variability in our planning and regulations,” she said. “This can and will be politically difficult. New regulations like California fire and earthquake codes and Florida’s building codes are typically enacted after an event, and from a reactive ‘make sure this doesn’t happen again’ perspective. The past event creates a ‘standard’ against which to regulate. Regulations and codes require a standard that can be upheld, otherwise decisions can be arbitrary and capricious. For climate change, non-stationarity would involve creating regulations that take account of many different factors and where variability has to be included. Variability (uncertainy) is the big challenge for these kinds of approaches.”

Stephane Hallegatte, the lead economist at the Word Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, has written or co-written a host of reports on strategies for limiting impacts of climate change and disasters, particularly on the poor. When asked in an email exchange what success would look like, he said the World Bank, in various recent reports, has stressed the importance of managing disaster risks along two tracks: both designing and investing to limit the most frequent hard knocks and then making sure the tools and services are available to help communities recover when a worst-case disaster strikes.

He added: “Facing a problem, people tend to do one thing to manage it, and then forget about it. (‘I face floods; I build a dike; I’m safe.’) We are trying to work against this, by having risk prevention and contingent planning done together.”

This piece was originally published by ProPublica.