It’s Not Just COVID19: The Trump Agenda for Killing More Americans

Growth industry.

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

On the perpetual campaign trail, Donald Trump likes to brag that his regulatory rollbacks will save Americans from having to depend on the latest energy-saving light bulbs. (“To me, most importantly, the light’s no good. I always look orange.”) He promises to get rid of water-efficiency standards because toilets require too much flushing. (“Ten times, right?… Not me. But you. Him.”) The aim is to find a homey way to put across the message that regulations — especially environmental regulations — inconvenience the average American. They hurt the economy. They cost jobs.

But of course, these regulations almost always have corresponding benefits: They create jobs, they save human lives. They make life better and healthier for the tens of millions of Americans living downstream from polluting industries that were once unregulated.

That’s the reality Trump wants to shout down, cover up, make go away. The irony is that, even as the U.S. toll in the coronavirus pandemic is now at 74,000 deaths, he is aggressively pursuing a regulatory rollback that will kill far more Americans, and continue to kill them for years into the future.  To rub in the irony, Trump is pursuing this agenda as

How to Prevent the Pandemic Next Time

Nipah virus

This is a piece I published in 2013, and–surprise!–major governments did not institute the preventive measures suggested by the experts here. In fact, not much has changed, except that half the world is now under lock-down in a desperate, last-ditch bid to stop the spread of COVID-19. The recommendations here still matter. The challenge is to remember and finally act, after the all-clear.

by Richard Conniff

In 2007, in a rural district in northwestern Bangladesh, a man fell ill with fever, followed by fatigue, headache, and coughing. His wife tended to him at home over the next four days, feeding him and wiping froth and saliva from around his mouth. When he began to have trouble breathing, a cousin and a friend rode to the doctor’s office with the patient sandwiched between them on a motorcycle. The next day, they transported him via microbus to the nearest hospital, where he quickly died. All five people in close contact with the patient in his final days soon came down with the disease, known as Nipah virus, and the wife and cousin also died.

It was a small tragedy at the other end of the Earth, and in the grand scheme of things hardly worth noting.

But a new [2013] article in the journal Antiviral Research argues that we ought to pay close attention, and not just for philanthropic reasons. Without intervention by the developed world, says Stephen P. Luby, M.D., of Stanford University, a case like this is how the next great plague could leap from wildlife and quickly turn up in our own homes. “Bring out the dead” could become the catch phrase of 2020, or 2025.

Bangladesh is among the poorest and most densely populated nations in the world, says Luby, who worked there for eight years before returning to the United States in 2012. But when he talks with people back home about poor clinical care there, and the absence of basic infection-control measures, “they see it as an issue only for Bangladesh.” Luby wrote his article to show just how deadly that sort of thinking could be.

Indian flying foxes in Madhya Pradesh (Photo: Charles J. Sharp)

Nipah virus was first discovered in 1998, and outbreaks now occur almost every year in Bangladesh and just across the border in India. As with SARS, Ebola fever, and a dismaying variety of other emerging diseases, Nipah virus comes from bats—in particular, the Indian flying fox, Pteropus giganteus. Luby was part of the team that figured out how the disease gets from bats to humans.

In Bangladesh, date palm sap is a favorite treat. Collectors climb to the top of a date palm tree, shave the bark, and set a clay pot underneath to catch the sap. The bats can’t ordinarily penetrate the bark, but they’re quick to adapt to a new food source and, in the course of feeding on the sap, they often leave bat urine and droppings in the clay pot. People relish the sap as a seasonal delicacy, preferably fresh and raw, and they are generally unaware of the hazard of Nipah virus until symptoms begin.

About 70 percent of victims die. But so far, says Luby, the virus is not highly contagious. It spreads via the saliva mainly to people who care for a victim. So how realistic is the threat? That is, could Nipah virus cause a pandemic?

RNA viruses like Nipah “have the highest rate of mutation of any virus or living organism,” Luby writes, enabling them to adapt readily to new environments. He likens the possibility of a pandemic to what happened with another virus in the same family: Until about a thousand years ago, an early form of rinderpest was a problem only for cattle, buffalo, giraffes, and certain other ungulates. Then a mutation occurred and the new virus jumped from domestic livestock to humans. It also became fiercely contagious. Measles, as this terrifying new disease became known, went on to kill tens—if not hundreds—of millions of people worldwide, until a vaccine brought it under control in the 1960s.

To avoid a replay of that scenario, Luby wants the governments of the United States and the European Union to invest in infection control and other preventive measures in undeveloped countries like Bangladesh.  For instance, bringing a powdered detergent and proper hand-washing protocols to healthcare workers can cost less

Cheer Up, Folks: It Ain’t So Bad

by Richard Conniff

For all of you who need cheering up in the time of plague (and apologies to those who have lost family or friends and are beyond cheering): I was randomly listening to Spotify when I heard someone named John Craigie singing, and this lyric leapt out, from the song “Dissect the Bird.”

It fits the moment:

So when the candle flickers, when the days get dark
They call them first world problems but they still break your heart
When the universe feels like it’s against you
Just take a minute to realize all it took to make you
Your parents had to meet, as random as that was
And hang out long enough at least, to make some love
And make a baby, and give it your name
And all your ancestors had to do the same
Exponentially backwards to the start of life
So much had to happen just exactly right
Sparks had to catch, oceans had to freeze
Billions of cells had to survive endless disease
Civilizations had to crumble, wars had to be fought

Did the Illegal Pangolin Trade Spark this Pandemic?

 

Early on, the rumor circulated that SARS-CoV-2 may have made the leap to humans via pangolins sold for food in wild animal marketplaces in China, Vietnam, and other countries. Scientists instead linked the pandemic to bats, like previous coronavirus outbreaks (SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012). Now, though, a study in the journal Nature has identified a SARS-CoV-2-related virus in Malayan pangolins seized in anti-smuggling operations in southern China. Other new research has also swung to the idea that the virus originated in bats, then jumped to humans via the illegal pangolin trade. With that in mind, here’s some information about the state of the pangolin trade, from past articles I have written.

by Richard Conniff

Pangolins are among the oddest and least-familiar animals on Earth. They’re mammals, but they’re armor-plated. Their chief defensive posture is to tuck their heads under their tails and roll up, like a basketball crossed with an artichoke. (It works: Even lions generally can’t get a grip.) They have tongues that are not only coated with a sticky, fly paper-like substance but can also extend up to 16 inches to probe into nests and snag ants for dinner. They’re shy, nocturnal and live either high up trees or deep underground.

Lisa Hywood has discovered just how charismatic these obscure creatures can be. At the Tikki Hywood Trust, her rescue center in Zimbabwe, one of her current guests, named Chaminuka, recognizes Hywood and makes a soft chuffing noise when she comes home. Then he stands up to hold her hand and greet her, she tells me. (Bit of a snob, though: He doesn’t deign to recognize her assistants.) Hywood finds working with pangolins even more emotionally powerful than working with elephants.

It’s also more urgent: Pangolins, she says, are “the new rhinos,” with illegal trade now raging across Asia and Africa. They are routinely served up as a status symbol on the dinner plates of the nouveaux riches in China and Vietnam. Their scales are ground up, like rhino horn, into traditional medicines. Pangolin scales, like rhino horn, are made from keratin and about as medicinally useful as eating fingernail clippings. When poachers get caught with live pangolins, Hywood rehabilitates the animals for reintroduction to the wild.

But a lot of pangolins aren’t that lucky. By one estimate, poachers  killed and took to market as many as 182,000 pangolins just between 2011 and 2013.  In one case in northeastern India, for instance, authorities nabbed a smuggler with 550 pounds of pangolin scales. Something like that happens almost every week. Many more shipments make it through. And the trade seems only to be growing bigger.

There is little prospect that this trade will stop, short of extinction for the eight pangolin species. Three of the eight species are currently listed as endangered and another three are critically endangered status. As pangolins have vanished from much of Asia, demand has shifted to Africa, which has four species. The price for a single animal there was at one point up to $7,000, according to Darren Pietersen, who tracked radio-tagged pangolins for his doctoral research at the University of Pretoria.

Hunters use dogs to locate arboreal pangolins or set snares outside the burrows of ground-dwelling species. That rolled-up defensive posture, which works so well against lions, just makes it easier for human hunters to pick them up and bag them, says Dan Challender, co-chair of the Pangolin Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. His research has taken him to a restaurant in Vietnam where, by chance, he witnessed a pangolin being presented live to a diner, then killed to be eaten. At such restaurants, stewed pangolin fetus is a special treat.

The trade is already illegal in many countries, and it is also banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. But enforcement is minimal, and even poachers seized with tons of smuggled animals often get away with a wrist slap. Authorities sometimes dispose of these shipments by auction, cashing in on the illegal market.

It could be worse than what’s happening to elephants and rhinos.

Zoos at least know how to breed those species in captivity, says Hywood. But so far, no one has managed to captive-breed any of the eight pangolin species. That means that if Chaminuka and his ilk go extinct in the wild before scientists can figure that out, these curious creatures will be gone forever.

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And here’s a related article I wrote on the pangolin trade for Yale Environment 360.

 

 

Pandemic Pastimes in the Natural World

Today’s photos of wildlife in my own Connecticut neighborhood are all by Kristofer Rowe.

 

Yes, the times are incredibly stressful.  But getting outdoors will help, and watching wildlife is one place where social distancing works just fine. Not only can you do it on your own, but the animals don’t want you in their faces, and you’ll see a lot more of them if you keep your distance. 

 I wrote this piece a while ago to introduce newcomers to birdwatching and other quiet joys of the natural world. I’m deleting the lead, which was about new year’s resolutions back in that peaceful time. But most of the ideas that follow still make sense in the face of COVID19.

by Richard Conniff

Instead of resolving to exercise more, lose weight, and spend more time outdoors, try giving yourself a motive to do all three. Set out to see something new at least once a day among the beautiful and often dramatic wildlife that lives all around you. Birds are the easiest way to start, and good binoculars help. But insects, spiders, mammals, plants, mushrooms, and even rocks will do. (And note: Being in the city shouldn’t be an impediment.  Matthew Wills of @backyardbeyond, seems lately to see more copulating by kestrels on chimney pots and antennas around his Brooklyn apartment than locked-down millennials even want to think about right now.)

Here are a baker’s dozen ideas to get you in the swing of things:

Gray squirrel (Photo: Kristofer Rowe)

1. Learn to identify 10 species in your neighborhood. Go for the easy stuff—house sparrows, mourning doves, cardinals, blue jays, gray squirrels, chipmunks. Then move on to 20, 50, 100 species. Do it on the golf course, to distract your pals from your lousy swing or to remind them that birdies can matter in more ways than one. If you’re a college student stuck back at home with your parents and cursing those birds that dare to wake you up at 10 a.m., demonstrate your romantic side by learning to identify their songs. (Try here for help.  You’ll also find good stuff here.

2. Hold still and just watch a wild animal for a while, even if you don’t know its name: a cormorant diving for fish, a seagull smashing open shellfish on the rocks, a squirrel burying seeds, birds mating, a snapping turtle laying her eggs. Just look. And don’t get too close. Wild things deserve a little respect.

3. You use your smartphone to help you get started.  Try not to let it distract you from the experience, but, sure, take a picture, or record a song. When you get home, you can

Good God! The Way We Talk to Each Other Sure Has Changed!

(Illustration: William Bramhall)

 

I happened to run across this piece this morning. It’s an “On Language” column I wrote for the September 18 1983 New York Times Magazine, and, holy crap, how much our culture has changed since then! It’s about a time, long, long ago, when Americans were excessively nice to one another. The headline was “The Case for Malediction,” and, America, I take it back.

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times Magazine

Apple Computer ran an advertisement in various magazines early this year about the writing of a tricky business letter. The first draft of the letter began with the promising salutation ”Dear Mush-for-Brains.” But by the final version, the magic of word processing had transformed it, in effect, to ”Dear Valued Colleague.” The change may be good for business, but it is bad for the language, not to mention the blood.

Why not just come right out with something really wicked? It is the only healthy response to the terribly friendly times in which we live. The sharp word and the cutting retort are, moreover, commodities badly needed just now in American speech, which is becoming bloated and lazy with smile-button platitudes.

There are at least two ways to approach what might be termed the nice-nice crisis. It is possible, on the one hand, to take a sort of perverse sporting interest in the question of how much farther we can push back the boundaries of our national capacity for vapidness. Not long ago, I heard a television newscaster conclude her roundup of the usual atrocities with the earnest plea, ”Remember, you can make tomorrow a nicer day.”

Or, on the other hand, we can rebel. Tomorrow is almost certainly not going to be a nicer day, and what you’re going to need when you go out there is

Farmers Are Abandoning Land. It Could Save the Planet

Castro Laboreiro, Portugal

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

With apologies for my recent absence, I have been focusing on a book project lately and will continue to do so most of this year. But this is one I wrote in December.

People have lived in Castro Laboreiro, where northern Portugal borders Spain, long enough to have built megaliths in the mountainous countryside and a pre-Romanesque church, from 1,100 years ago, in the village itself. But the old rural population has dwindled away, leaving behind mostly elders yearning for their vanishing culture.

Roughly half the area once grazed by sheep, goats, and cattle is now unused and reverting to nature, meaning that wolves, bears, wild boars, and other species have rebounded in their old habit. Iberian ibex and griffon vultures thrive where they were extinct, or nearly so, as recently as the 1990s. So what feels like loss to some village residents, looks to others like a great recovery.

Places like Castro Laboreiro are of course everywhere. Abandonment of rural lands has become one of the most dramatic planet-wide changes of our time, affecting millions of square miles of land. Partly it’s a product of rural flight, and the economic, social, and educational appeal of cities. Partly it’s about larger forces like climate change and globalization of the food supply chain. But the result, according to a new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution, is that the global footprint of agriculture has “started decreasing in size during the past two decades, with more land now being abandoned

Now Is Our Time to End Polio Forever

What it looks like when the vaccines don’t get there. (Photo: Unknown)

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

In January 2014 an American public health worker was visiting northern Nigeria to observe a polio prevention campaign by local health workers. It was a big, festive event with a marching band to bring out parents and children for their immunizations. But the American visitor and the local program manager soon found themselves being drawn away from the action, down deserted streets to an area still under construction. They were being led by a young girl.

“And what was happening was that she was

Was Our Ancestral Homeland in Botswana–not East Africa?

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Anyone lucky enough to have visited the Okavango Delta in the southern African nation of Botswana will recall the comforting and oddly familiar sensation of looking out from the shelter of a stand of trees at the panorama of wildlife—from elephants and African wild dogs to lilac-breasted rollers—moving across the lush surrounding floodplains. That sense of familiarity may run deeper than we imagine, a new study suggests—back to a time when early modern humans also wandered there.

The study, appearing Monday in the journal Nature, uses genetic, archaeological, linguistic and climatic evidence to argue that the ancestral homeland of everyone alive today was in northern Botswana—not in East Africa, as previously thought. Based on mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mother to daughter, the paper’s co-authors argue that we are all descended from a small community of Khoisan hunter-gatherers who lived 200,000 years ago in vast wetlands encompassing Botswana’s Okavango Delta and the Makgadikgadi regions.

Much of that place is now a dry salt pan—and inhabited by modern Khoisan people, sometimes called Bushmen. But back then, it was a vast wetland covering an area the size of Switzerland. The community that lived there was

Eeeek! There’s a Dinosaur in The Living Room

by Richard Conniff/National Geographic

Sitting poolside at a motel in the middle of Tucson, Arizona, a head-and-neck surgeon in cowboy boots and blue jeans is rhapsodizing about skulls. He has brought one along in his carry-on luggage on the flight into town, and he’s plainly thrilled by the perfect state of the brain case and the openings where cranial nerves once ran.

“I can see the ophthalmic nerve that gave vision,” he says, as if the former occupant of this skull still lives. “I can see the abducens nerve which allowed lateral eye motion, and the trigeminal nerve, which gave sensation to the skin of the face.”

The surgeon has asked not be identified in this article. Owning a collection of fossil skulls makes him both gleefully happy and nervously private, like many other collectors in town for the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. At the moment, the surgeon is building an underground room to house the skulls, and he grins at the thought of displaying them in chronological order: the 36-inch-long Allosaurus skull, the toothy sea monster Elasmosaurus, the most complete skull of a Pteranodon ever found.

Private fossil collectors are pretty common these days. Some, like the surgeon, are serious enough about it to pass for professional paleontologists. He buys unprepared fossils and spends much of his free time meticulously extricating them from their stone prisons. Other collectors seem mainly to be indulging a boyish taste for big, scary—and expensive—monsters. (“The things that sell are jaws, claws, and horns,” one dealer confides.)

A few collectors rank among the world’s mega-rich, like the Chinese real estate developer haggling in Tucson for a slab fossil of an Ichthyosaurus, a large marine reptile, being offered at $750,000. More nervous privacy: The developer interrupts a question to his translator by loudly clearing his throat and marching off grimly in the direction of a $3 million Stegosaurus.