Richard Conniff's Blog, page 4

Time to Make City Street Pop-Ups Permanent

Yes, there are people in those cars, but not many for the space they occupy.

This is a piece I published in 2018. Since then, #COVID19 has led to widespread re-thinking of streets, to return public space from automotive traffic to the people who live, walk, and bike around a given neighborhood. With vaccination promising to re-open our public lives, it’s time to make these people-oriented streetscapes permanent.

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

In many of the major cities of the world, it has begun to dawn even on public officials that walking is a highly efficient means of transit, as well as one of the great underrated pleasures in life. A few major cities have even tentatively begun to take back their streets for pedestrians.

Denver, for instance, is proposing a plan to invest $1.2 billion in sidewalks, and, at far greater cost, bring frequent public transit within a quarter-mile of most of its residents. In Europe, where clean, safe, punctual public transit is already widely available, Oslo plans to ban all cars from its city center beginning next year. Madrid is banning cars owned by nonresidents, and is also redesigning 24 major downtown avenues to take them back for pedestrians. Paris has banned vehicles from a road along the Seine, and plans to rebuild it for bicycle and pedestrian use.

Yes, car owners are furious. That’s because they have mistaken their century-long domination over pedestrians for a right rather than a privilege. The truth is that cities are not doing nearly enough to restore streets for pedestrian use, and it’s the pedestrians who should be furious.

Many American cities still rely on “level of service” (LOS) design models developed in the 1960s that focus single-mindedly on keeping vehicle traffic moving, according to Elizabeth Macdonald, an urban design specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Hence improvements for other modes (walking, cycling, transit) that might increase vehicle delay are characterized as LOS. impediments,” she and her co-authors write in The Journal of Urban Design. The idea of pedestrians as “impediments” is of course perverse, especially given the word’s original meaning: An impediment was something that functioned as a shackle for the feet — unlimited vehicle traffic, say.

The emphasis on vehicle traffic flow is also a perversion of basic social equity, and the costs show up in ways large and small. Vehicles in cities contribute a major portion of small-particle pollution, the kind that penetrates deep into the lungs. (The percentage can reach as high as 49 percent in Phoenix and 55 percent in Los Angeles. It’s just 6 percent in Beijing, but that’s because there are so many other pollution sources.) People living close to busy roads, particularly infants and older people in lower-income households, pay most of the cost in respiratory, cardiovascular and other problems. A 2013 M.I.T. study estimated that vehicle emissions cause 53,000 early deaths a year in the United States, and a study just last month from Lancaster University in Britain found that children with intellectual disabilities are far more likely to live in areas with high levels of vehicle pollution.

Among the smaller costs: Most people in cities from Bangalore to Brooklyn cannot afford to keep a car, and yet our cities routinely turn over the majority of public thoroughfares to those who can. They allow parked cars to eat up 350 square feet apiece, often at no charge, in cities where private parking spaces rent for as much as $700 a month. And they devote most of what’s left of the street to the uninterrupted flow of motor vehicles.

But that’s not really such a small cost, after all: It means that we often cannot afford room for parks or shade trees, which other studies have repeatedly shown to be an important factor in the health and mental well-being of residents. Even when car-mad cities leave enough room on the side to squeeze in trees, they tend to be miniaturized, lollipop versions of what street trees used to be. Hardly anyone plants the towering oaks or maples that used to intertwine their branches overhead and make the sidewalks feel like a leafy grove in the heart of the city.

Urban walking has thus deteriorated from a civilized pleasure to an overheated, unshaded, traffic-harried race to a destination. It’s like what the art historian Vincent Scully once said about the demolition of the old Penn Station and its replacement by the commuter hell squeezed beneath Madison Square Garden: “One entered the city like a god; now one scuttles in like a rat.”

Copenhagen (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Happily, some urban planners are waking up to the idea that we can, in fact, do better. Copenhagen has already largely accomplished the shift in focus from vehicles to human beings, thanks considerably to a 40-year campaign by the architect and urban thinker Jan Gehl. I was stunned during a recent visit to the city center when an armada of bicycles actually came to a stop at a red light and waited patiently for pedestrians to cross. I was accustomed to the United States, where cyclists often pay no attention to traffic laws, and cars turn right on red with little regard for either cyclists or pedestrians. Stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks that are not controlled by traffic lights is a legal requirement in only nine states and the District of Columbia.

Maybe we can’t turn every street into a pedestrian paradise. Urban planners in London now follow a sort of zoning plan, with some streets developed primarily for moving vehicles, and others focused on the richer (and more retail-friendly) urban life of the pedestrian. In this country, Berkeley’s Professor Macdonald and her co-authors have recently published a simple system for urban planners to identify — and presumably prioritize — factors that make streets pedestrian-friendly. For instance, on large arterial roadways, walkers feel comfortable only if the sidewalks are at least 15 feet wide.

But we don’t have to wait for governments to wake up to the idea that a street without pedestrians is, as Mr. Gehl put it, “like an empty theater: Something must be wrong with the production since there is no audience.” City residents can stage their own lessons in livability. The “Walk Your City” movement, for instance, provides a tool kit for neighborhood organizations to post signs giving the distance on foot or by bike (with directions via scannable QR code) to local attractions: “It’s just a 10-minute walk to …” a nice park, a sunset viewpoint, a great art museum. Since its start in 2012 in Raleigh, N.C., “Walk Your City” has spread to more than 400 communities in 55 countries.

Likewise, the Better Block Foundation helps neighborhoods stage pop-up events to demonstrate their potential to become more livable, with bike lanes and curb extensions (known as “bump-outs”) in place of parking spaces, and lots of benches, bus stop shelters, kiosks, sidewalk cafes and playgrounds. Sadly, pop-ups aren’t permanent. These temporary displays come down again after a few days. But seeing the possibilities sometimes leads city leaders to make the vision a reality.

This is the fundamental common sense rule: Cities and their streets are about people, not cars, and all urban design should think first about the only transit equipment that comes factory-standard for the average human being — our feet.

END

Richard Conniff (@RichardConniff) is the author of “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties and the Story of Life on Earth” and a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times. He is now at work on a book about the fight against epidemic disease.

An efficient transport system is about how many people it moves. Traffic jams might seem “busy”, but they move no one. pic.twitter.com/2AopxcffOp

— 21st Century Urban Planning & Mobility (@urbanthoughts11) March 15, 2021

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

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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 the nation marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most beneficial environmental laws of our time. The Clean Air Act of 1970 cost $523 billion just in the first 20 years after passage.  But in that same period, it produced $22.2 trillion in benefits for public health and the economy–mostly in sick days avoided and American lives saved.

In reality, even industry has often ended up benefiting from environmental regulation, after initially opposing regulations to avoid short-term costs and disruption. Laws requiring a deposit on returnable cans, for instance, have enabled manufacturers to produce finished products at significantly lower cost: Using recycled aluminum consumes less than 10 percent of the energy needed to produce virgin aluminum with bauxite ore from a mine, according to an industry estimate. Likewise, industry at first fiercely opposed “toxic release inventory” rules, which require companies to report the toxics they emit. But under regulatory pressure, companies developed better monitoring and control measures to prevent billions of tons of costly raw material — and profits — from being lost up the smokestack. Conversely, manufacturers who managed to avoid regulation by concealing the risk of PFAS (used in Teflon) and related pollutants now face huge cleanup and liability costs, a story detailed in the new book The Triumph of Doubt by David Michaels. Barron’s recently reported that four such companies, DuPont and 3M among them, have lagged in the stock market because of potential liability representing almost a quarter of their total worth.

Pushing regulatory rollbacks without regard for benefits has been Trump administration policy from the start. In an executive order in January 2017, Trump ordered agencies to identify two regulations to repeal for every one being proposed and limited the total increase in cost to “no more than zero.” In fact, that order used the word “cost” 18 times, and “benefit” only once — and that was to assert that the order did not create any. Since then, the administration has rolled back, or is in the process of rolling back, 95 environmental regulations.

A 2019 analysis from New York University put the cost of one such rollback, of the Obama-era Clean Power Plant rules aimed at limiting climate emissions, at an additional 1,630 premature deaths and 48,000 lost working days per year. Another attempted rollback — allowing rebuilt truck engines with emissions 40 to 55 times above current standards — would have caused 41,000 premature deaths per decade, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. That rollback ultimately failed, with Volvo and other truck manufacturers pointing out that, environmental benefits aside, the existing regulation creates new manufacturing jobs.

Emphasizing regulatory costs was originally a Republican idea — though with benefits included. An executive order by President Ronald Reagan in February 1981 centralized cost-benefit analysis in the White House and blocked any economically significant regulation “unless the potential benefits to society… outweigh the potential costs to society.” The intent, The New York Times reported, was to “stem the tide of unnecessary and excessive regulations that [administration officials and business executives] say have been a severe and growing burden to the nation’s economy.”

“It’s only in recent years that we see this backlash against cost-benefit analysis by many of the organizations who supported it originally,” says Jack Lienke, of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “And that’s because, as we’ve gotten more sophisticated about quantifying benefits, it’s become very clear that most of these environmental regulations are hugely net-beneficial for society. If we don’t put these regulations in place, we as a society are leaving money on the table.”

The move to discredit benefits began as a result of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 targeting acid rain emissions from coal-burning power plants, mostly located in the Midwest. As usual, industry predicted a regulatory apocalypse, with the Business Roundtable estimating that cutting these emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides would cost $104 billion a year, and one utility foreseeing “the potential economic destruction of the Midwest economy.”

In fact, the cost came in far lower than anyone expected — just $500 million to $2 billion a year, by current estimates. But the real surprise was that the benefits were so large, between $59-$116 billion a year. Moreover, these benefits had far less to do with reduced acid rain than with unpredicted corollary effects on human health from reducing air pollution. At the time, the paradigm was that “like politics, all pollution is local,” says Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who helped write the original legislation as an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. The soot and other pollution that made a difference for human health was thought to come from nearby sources.

But as the new law went into effect, it was “a major discovery” that “what you and I breathe… is determined every bit as much by pollutants that are transported over long distances from remote sources.” Pollutants from Midwest power plants were drifting with the wind, not just causing acid rain for forests and water bodies, but also sickness and death for residents across the Northeastern states. According to the current EPA estimate, the health benefits from regulating that pollution include 2.4 million fewer cases of aggravated asthma, 200,000 fewer heart attacks, 5.4 million fewer lost school days, 17 million fewer lost workdays, and 237,000 fewer premature deaths — every year. Benefits have exceeded costs by a ratio of 30 to one, adding up to a total economic gain through 2020 of $2 trillion.

In response, the Trump administration has tried multiple tactics to skew cost-benefit calculations back in favor of deregulation. Caitlin McCoy, also an attorney in the Environmental and Energy Law Program, lists a few such tactics:

The administration has stopped counting corollary benefits, focusing instead only on benefits from reducing the pollutant directly targeted by a regulation — and not other pollutants reduced at the same time. The proposed repeal of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (or MATS) for power plants, for instance, disregards the incidental reduction in small particle (or PM2.5) pollution — and thus subtracts most of the 11,000 premature deaths and 540,000 missed workdays MATS is thought to prevent annually. Utilities, on the other hand, have acknowledged the benefits of the regulation, with Exelon Corp. recently calling repeal “unnecessary, unreasonable, and universally opposed by the power generation sector.”
When regulations lead to benefits beyond the minimum set by the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards, the administration no longer counts those benefits.
To justify rolling back climate change regulations, the administration has stopped counting potential worldwide benefits (at $42 a ton) and focused exclusively on benefits for the United States (at $7 a ton), ignoring the reality that climate change is a global phenomenon.
Where climate change regulations have led to energy efficiency savings (for instance, when a utility switches from coal to gas), the Obama administration classified that as a reduction on the cost side of the balance sheet. But to make these regulations appear more costly, the Trump administration subtracted a lot of other benefits, and then moved savings from increased energy efficiency over to the benefits side of the equation. “We’re talking about cooking the books here,” says McCoy.
And of course, the administration has repeatedly sidelined scientists and pushed rules that would severely limit reliance on major scientific studies to assess and reduce risks to human health.

Companies and their investors have increasingly come to acknowledge that environmental regulations can yield bottom-line benefits.

Economists have for the most part rolled their eyes at the administration’s convoluted and sometimes wildly improbable maneuvers to make regulatory benefits vanish. (At one point, to justify rolling back the Obama-era car fuel efficiency standards, the administration magically converted an estimated $88-billion benefit into a $230 billion cost.)

Companies and their investors, meanwhile, have increasingly come to acknowledge that environmental regulations can yield bottom-line benefits. Even if some continue to predict the apocalypse, what they really want are rational, carefully thought-out regulations. They want to know the rules of the game so they can plan long-term investments. They want to play on a level field, and not compete with cheaper products from companies that don’t meet the same pollution and worker safety standards. They want regulations that help them become more competitive in the global marketplace. They want to be able to assure the public that they work to high environmental standards.

Smart companies, says Daniel Esty, of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, learn to use regulatory change to think about new ways of doing business. “They can use that opportunity to drive innovation, and to produce breakthroughs in cost control or product design, that will give them a chance to be more profitable, or to get greater market share.” He saw it firsthand, he says, working in 1990 as a senior official in the Environmental Protection Agency. He and EPA Administrator William K. Reilly were in London negotiating amendments to the Montreal Protocol to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the refrigerants implicated in the depletion of Earth’s protective ozone layer.

“And, literally, our delegation instructions were not to agree to a full phaseout until we got a call from the White House,” he recalls. Esty picked up when that call came in. The voice on the other end said, “The CEO of DuPont was in the office today and says, you know, ‘no problem.’ Let’s go with a full phaseout.” DuPont then had a $500 million business in CFCs. But in the face of intense pressure for regulation, someone at the company did some calculations and realized that DuPont could become an even larger player in the market for a CFC substitute.

“It was the most clear and extreme example of a company coming to understand its business would be better with a regulatory framework,” says Esty.

The full phaseout went forward, and today, 30 years later, the ozone hole over Antarctica has begun to close and the predicted catastrophic effects of ozone depletion have been avoided.

 

How to Prevent the Pandemic Next Time

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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.

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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 than $1,000 a year per clinic, he says. And if that keeps a more contagious form of Nipah virus from getting on a plane bound for JFK International Airport, that’s not charity. It’s an investment in the health of our own citizens.

Keeping emerging diseases under control also means working closely with conservationists, says Luby. Bats are already demonized in many places, and it doesn’t help their image when they turn out to be the host species for such deadly diseases as SARS, Nipah and Hendra viruses, Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fevers, and the Middle Eastern respiratory virus called MERS.

Why bats? It’s partly because they are such a diverse group, with 1,250 species, comprising about 20 percent of all mammals, says Jon Epstein, a veterinary disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance in New York. Some researchers theorize that immune systems or other physiological differences might make bats more likely to carry viruses. But so far that’s only a theory.

The bat lifestyle of roosting together in dense colonies may also encourage viruses. These colonies often occur in and around human habitations, and the ability of bats to fly means any virus can get dispersed across a wide geographic area. But when you see an emerging disease come from wildlife, says Epstein, “it’s generally triggered by something people have done to manipulate the environment,” meaning agricultural expansion or intensification, or urbanization, coupled with the modern tendency to move plants, animals, and people all over the world.  “It’s really human activities that are driving spillover.”

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Date palm with bamboo skirt (Photo: Unknown)

Modifying human behavior also generally turns out to be the easiest and most practical way to prevent disease. In the case of Nipah virus, the simplest solution is a sort of skirt woven from bamboo and wrapped around the tree trunk, to keep the bats away from the area where the sap is being collected. As the January-February season for date palm sap approaches, the government of Bangladesh mounts a campaign to alert people to the danger. Epstein tells a story about why these preventive measures matter. In Australia, Hendra virus, a cousin of the Nipah virus, also spreads from fruit-eating bats and frequently infects horses. Seven human cases have occurred there, with four deaths. A few years ago, a young veterinarian in Queensland was called to treat a horse with respiratory symptoms. When the veterinarian was hospitalized soon after with Hendra virus, he recalled that he had thought about going back to the truck to get his gloves and other safety equipment. “I just wish I’d gone back,” he said.

Instead, he soon died.

“It’s one of those things where it’s never a problem,” says Epstein, “until it’s a problem.”

END

 

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

Bad presidents had to get elected, good presidents had to get shot

People had to leave, hearts had to get broken

People had to die so your eyes could open

The universe is not against you

The universe is not against you

It went through a lot just to give you a chance

It must have wanted you pretty bad

No pressure, though

No pressure, though

The universe went through a lot but no pressure, bro

You don’t gotta be perfect

You don’t gotta be a saint

Just don’t waste it

This was not a mistake

Did the Illegal Pangolin Trade Spark this Pandemic?

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Pangolin in rehab (Photo: Sukree Sukplang/Reuters)

 

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.

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False hope for medicine

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.

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In a handful of trouble

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.

##

And here’s a related article I wrote in 2013 for Yale Environment 360.

 

Pandemic Pastimes in the Natural World

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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 dayamong 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 Willis 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:

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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. Don’t take pictures. Just look. And don’t get too close. Wild things deserve a little respect.

3. You use your smartphone to help you get started.  If you see something interesting, try taking a picture, or recording a song.  Later on, you can try out some useful apps for identifying species. I tend to report sightings, identify species I don’t know, and see what others have spotted in my neighborhood with an app called iNaturalist.  It’s free, and experts often come back to your with an answer in minutes.  If you bring your phone, though, remember to get your face out of it and start seeing, smelling, and listening to the world around you.

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Monarch butterfly (Kristofer Rowe)

4. Know what can be done with four or five local species, like harvesting ramps and using them to make a spectacular pizza.  It’s getting to be the season where I live.  Digging clams to make chowder, or chiseling a cherry boll into a salad bowl. Build a fire, and light it Stone Age style (that’s without matches or lighters).

5. Climb a tree. It was fun when you were a kid. Why not now? I ran across a photo last summer of a guy named Jason Lalla, who works for a prosthetics company in Manchester, N.H., climbing a tree with his kids. Lalla has an artificial leg. So what’s your excuse? Sure, there are risks. The eccentric 19th-century British naturalist Charles Waterton died falling out of a tree. But he was 80-something, and it was an honorable death. Still nervous? Everybody starts on the lower branches, and staying there is perfectly fine too.

6. Track an animal. Start by learning to recognize your dog’s footprints at the beach; then move on to the neighbors’ dogs. See if you can tell which one was running, which walking, or whose tracks came first and whose crossed over. Sound impossible? !Kung San bush kids in Namibia start out tracking the footprints of ants for fun.

7. Rescue an animal. Maybe it just means reporting cruelty or phoning up the local animal shelter to help with an injury. Now and then, I’ve run into a wild animal in distress I felt comfortable handling. One time, my dog started swimming toward a seagull out by some rocks, and I was alarmed when the gull failed to fly away. Fortunately, my dog was alarmed too and changed course. It turned out the bird was tangled in fishing line. I covered its head with a towel, which sometimes helps calm a bird, and carried it to a nearby house, where an elderly neighbor named Hooker Judson helped me untangle the line. Then we set it free. I think even the dog was a little thrilled.

8. Learn to hunt. Maybe you just want to get close enough for a good photograph or to see how animals behave when they don’t know you’re there. Or maybe, after a lifetime of eating packaged meat from the store, you want to know what it means to hunt and kill your own meal. There are plenty of invasive animals worth hunting—like wild pigs in Texas or Burmese pythons in the Everglades—if only to reduce the damage they do to native species. But learn to do it right, and follow the rules. If that takes more time than you’re willing to commit, move on.

9. Sleep alone somewhere in the wild. Yes, the backyard is an OK place to start.

10. Maintain a bird feeder. It’s a good way to start separating the nuthatches from the titmice and the chickadees. Just make sure the neighbor’s cat doesn’t use your feeder as a bird buffet. Build a bluebird house or an osprey nest stand, and see what comes to live there.

11. Read a book about wildlife for laughs and inspiration. Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals is a hilarious introduction. Other favorites abound, from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and Call of the Wild by Jack London to Birds of Heaven by Peter Matthiessen and The Raven in Winter by Bernd Heinrich.

12. Volunteer with your local land trust. You’ll find out about little pockets of protected land you didn’t know about, meet curious people (at a safe social distance), and probably get dirtier than you meant to. But it will feel good.

13. Plan a trip to see future wildlife you’ve never seen. You may find that this involves getting up at ungodly hours of the morning or exercising a little more than you planned to, but bear in mind what the poet William Carlos Williams once said: “I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them.”

Have fun, and when someone next asks, “So how was your day?,” you will be surprised how often you can answer, “I saw the coolest thing.”

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Snowy egret (Photo: Kristofer Rowe)

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

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(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

the ability to state the awful truth with panache. I am thinking of a farmer I met once while wandering through the desolate countryside in the west of Ireland. He greeted me with the single word: ”Tourists!” He let the word hang by itself for a moment, then added, ”The Egyptians had the locusts and in the Middle Ages there was the Black Death with the rats, but tourists are the plague of our century and we’ll not survive this one.”

We got along splendidly, after a brief exchange of fire. Indeed, I would have been slaughtered in my tracks, reduced to a quivering mass of tourist treacle, if the man had urged me to have a nice day.

William Butler Yeats called this sort of verbal ambush ”audacious speech.” It can range from mild word play (I know an author who refers to his New York publisher as Slimy and Shyster) on up to the blunderbuss curse (for instance, Hilaire Belloc’s famous Christmas greeting: ”May all my enemies go to hell/Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!”). My list of best-loved 19th-century poems includes an epitaph on the London publisher John Camden Hotten, which runs, in its entirety: ”Hotten/ Rotten/ Forgotten.” Audacious speech can be recognized in all cases by a malicious glee in the power of strong language.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing does not come easily to Americans, despite Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Dorothy Parker. I grew up with a strong feeling for two cultures, American and Irish, and am myself badly split in the matter. The American in me will mouth any cheerful platitude to preserve the peace. ”What a cute baby!” I’ll say, when the Irish part of me is thinking, ”This kid has a face like a plateful of mortal sins.” As an editor, I must often tell writers that their story ideas ”do not fit our present needs.” But there are times when I want to reply: ”Sir: I would not trust you to write a ransom note.”

Americans prefer to be nice, I think, because it is quick, clean and inoffensive – even impersonal. The Irish, on the other hand, still cultivate individuality and they show it with words. Their casual talk celebrates, and often aggravates, the differences between people. The farmer in the west of Ireland suggested that Americans were also too literal for audacious speech. We tend to think people mean everything they say.

Thus when Mary McCarthy declared of Lillian Hellman that ”every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,’ ” it was merely true to our plodding national form for Miss Hellman to reply with a $2.25 million lawsuit. And when Billy Martin remarked, of Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner, that ”one’s a born liar, the other’s convicted,” it was ludicrous, but all-American, to reply that Steinbrenner was an admitted felon, not a convicted one. How much more fun it would have been if Steinbrenner had replied ad hominem – for instance, that Billy Martin’s personality would shame a cornered rat, or that Martin could pick a fight during a two-floor elevator ride with Mr. Rogers.

In this country, audacious speech has flourished in at least one place: the rural South, where a farmer might say of a neighbor, ”He’s the kind of peckerwood who couldn’t grow kudzu.” George Steinbrenner to the contrary, major-league baseball has also inexplicably shown flashes of brilliance in the art of verbal aggression. I will always admire Mickey Rivers for his put-down of Reggie Jackson. Jackson was once boasting that he had an I.Q. of 148 when Rivers looked up innocently and inquired, ”Out of what, 1,000?” There is, then, hope for a verbally aggressive America.

How can the average fellow shuck off his insipid ways and advance into the world of high vitriol? Start with politicians. They are a sort of test for the imagination in that anything bad you can say of them will probably be true, making exaggeration, which is one of the hallmarks of audacious speech, nearly impossible. But the real advantage of politicians for the beginner is that they seldom hit back. After practicing on them, you can advance to close relatives, hotel clerks and so on.

In the matter of style, racial and religious epithets and references to your adversary’s mother all indicate lack of imagination and may, incidentally, get you killed. At all costs, avoid the obvious. Teen-agers who call each other ”zitface” belong in the Don Rickles School of Insult, or worse.

Never attempt to vent your spleen on strangers in the street. For the more timid, it is worth considering the advantages of written communication. The difference between telling someone he is nutsy-bobo to his face or in, say, an anonymous note is not insignificant. If you’re going to insult someone to his face (which is the only decent thing to do, and God bless you), remember that you can still get away with almost anything if you say it with a smile, and you might as well use your front teeth while you still have them.

You’ll also have an advantage during your first few outings because everyone will be expecting the usual pleasantries and nobody will be listening. But what a happy day when that stunned look begins to appear on bored faces, and what a really nice day when people begin to reply in kind. After that, if some slow- witted clod boxes your ears or slaps you with a lawsuit, you can comfort yourself with this thought, which Maledicta, the journal of audacious speech, attributes rather loosely to Sigmund Freud: ”The first human being who hurled a curse instead of a weapon . . . was the founder of civilization.”

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Richard Conniff was then a senior editor at Geo Magazine, and author of an anthology, ”The Devil’s Book of Verse.”

Farmers Are Abandoning Land. It Could Save the Planet

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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 from agriculture than converted to it, especially in Western Europe and North America.” (This change doesn’t appear to have affected global food supply, at least not yet, because the land lost was marginal to start with, and farming elsewhere has become more productive.)

The study, led by researchers from the University of Minnesota, found that abandoned lands can take decades or even centuries to recover their original biodiversity and productivity. But it termed land abandonment “an unprecedented opportunity for ecological restoration efforts to help to mitigate a sixth mass extinction and its consequences for human wellbeing.” Indeed, by some accounts, a more aggressive—and evidence-based — approach to restoring abandoned lands could bring about major progress in both the climate and extinction emergencies.

A study earlier this year in Science calculated the potential tree cover on “degraded” lands worldwide and found, according to senior author Thomas Crowther of ETH Zurich, that a massive program to plant trees and grow them to maturity “could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere … to levels last seen almost a century ago.” That study, which elicited sharp criticism from other researchers, called for planting at least 6.6 million square miles of degraded land not currently used for urban or agricultural purposes. More than half the planting would take place in six countries that are, conveniently, also major contributors to climate change: Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and China.

Crowther calls it “the best climate change solution available today,” with the potential to remove 25 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions humans have added to the atmosphere. But critics have characterized the proposal as a distraction from the immediate priority of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They also questioned the suitability of land in the study for reforestation.

“These plans have been developed by scientists who do a lot of remote sensing and don’t understand the social context of why these lands are in transition, or if they are in transition,” says Mark Ashton, a forest ecologist at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “This is much more complex than looking at a map and thinking you can plant trees, without understanding the human context around that land.”

The study came with major caveats of its own: The authors could not determine whether the available land is publicly or privately owned. Moreover, some lands that are now suitable for regeneration could become much less so as climate change advances.

The biggest caveat, though, is that current government initiatives on degraded lands typically lack even rudimentary planning. For instance, of the 48 nations that have committed to restore forests under the Bonn Challenge — an international reforestation initiative — about 10 percent have committed to restore more forest than they have land to grow forests on. Many other countries have committed to restore an area that’s less than half the abandoned land they have available.

This haphazard approach persists even though the estimated scale of land abandonment is massive. China has reported losing about 7,700 square miles of agricultural land each year. The United States has lost almost 98,000 square miles of farmland just from 1997 through 2018. And according to one recent estimate, the European Union could have up to 82,000 square miles of abandoned farm land by 2040, or roughly 11 percent of the area that was being farmed at the start of the century.

Worldwide, a 2011 study in the journal Climatic Change put the current area of “recovering secondary vegetation,” including old fields, pastures, and recovering forests, at 11.2 million square miles of land — roughly triple the entire land area of the United States — and rising. But that number included lands used and abandoned at any point over the past 600 years. It was also based on computer models. Measurements of actual landscapes are still surprisingly difficult to make, according to Robin Chazdon, a tropical forest ecologist now retired from the University of Connecticut. Satellites and other remote monitoring technologies cannot readily distinguish, for instance, between a naturally regenerating forest and a tree plantation.

The current chaotic approach to abandoned lands often pushes land managers in directions that do nothing for either wildlife or climate change, says Chazdon. For instance, many tropical nations, such as Costa Rica, Peru, and the Philippines, have well-intended laws that strictly ban harvesting of native trees, including the trees that regenerate naturally on abandoned fields. “But if you document that you planted the trees, they become yours,” she says. “This has created a perverse incentive to prevent farmers from turning their land back into natural forest, and to plant tree plantations instead.”

Elsewhere, climate and biodiversity initiatives often compete instead of supporting each other, says Frans Schepers, managing director of Rewilding Europe, a nonprofit group working to re-establish native landscapes across Europe. “The mainstream response to abandoned lands is, ‘We have to put windmills and solar out there, or we need to use biomass and burn materials from our forests.’” Even tree planting can become “a technological solution, a numbers game, planting the wrong species, in a straight line, and in areas where they wouldn’t actually grow back on their own,” resulting in “a huge waste of money.” It makes more sense, he says, to regenerate natural forests as functioning ecosystems, including large herbivores to reduce fuel accumulation on the forest floor and prevent wildfires.

Likewise, says Schepers, converting abandoned pastures to forests based on the simplistic notion that this will automatically improve carbon storage can end up harming species and climate alike. Not only do many plant and wildlife species require open habitat, but under certain circumstances, grasslands and rangelands can prove more resilient than forests for carbon storage, according to a 2018 study from the University of California at Davis. That’s because they store carbon largely underground, where it is less vulnerable in drought- and wildfire-prone areas than the above-ground carbon stored in trees.

The bottom line is that putting abandoned lands to work again for a livable planet will require considerable nuance. For instance, instead of simply paying rural people to do the things that made sense in the past — graze livestock on marginal lands — those subsidies may need to be targeted to address different concerns in different places. It might make sense to pay subsidies, as the European Union now does, to preserve the traditional way of life in areas with a rich cultural heritage, like Castro Laboreiro, says Emma van der Zanden of VU University Amsterdam. But it could also make sense to stimulate abandonment, for instance, by subsidizing green projects in other areas where environmental values predominate.

In Australia, many marginal and abandoned areas could become more productive if converted to forests for carbon storage, paid for by fossil fuel-intensive industries, says David Lindenmayer, a landscape ecologist at Australian National University, Canberra. Farm income could come partly from grazing, partly from cropping, and partly from regeneration, which would incidentally improve water retention in those areas. “If you want people to stay on that land you have to pay them for the asset, and the asset clearly has to be carbon storage,” he says. “But our government refuses to create a mechanism for paying farmers to store carbon.”

As he speaks, Lindenmayer looks out his window at the evidence of Australia’s latest prolonged drought, combined with a deadly heatwave, and massive wildfires that have darkened skies across much of the country. Australia, he warns, is merely “at the leading edge of the kind of challenges that are going to arise” for other nations as warmer and less predictable climate conditions become more common. Abandoned lands could help minimize or even prevent the likely damage. But that will only happen if scientists and policymakers come together quickly on the smartest ways to put those lands back to work.

 

Now Is Our Time to End Polio Forever

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

This is a piece I published on October 23 but, with apologies, I forgot to post it here. Now is a good time to re-visit the topic, though, because on Tuesday many nations and non-profit organizations will be meeting in Abu Dhabi to announce their pledge amounts for the final push to eradicate polio from the Earth. It’s an incredible opportunity, to go from the introduction of the first effective vaccine in 1955 to the eradication of the disease in a single lifetime.  But if we fail, we could be back to 200,000 cases a year–kids looking like the photo above–within a decade.

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 bringing us to her house,” recalls John Vertefeuille, now chief of the polio eradication branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “She had a baby brother born the night before, and the father brought out the baby, and we were able to vaccinate him. She was so excited to be able to give her new brother that gift. She probably didn’t comprehend it, but she had given that child the possibility of a life without polio. What an incredible thing it will be when we can do that for every child, from here until the end of time.”

The international effort to achieve this goal passed a major milestone this week with the worldwide eradication of wild poliovirus type 3. The announcement, due Thursday from the Global Commission for the Certification of the Eradication of Poliomyelitis comes just four years after eradication of wild poliovirus type 2. It leaves only a single strain, wild poliovirus type 1, on the loose. Type 1 is now holed up in the smallest area in the history of the disease—though that area comprises politically and geographically fraught regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The current target for worldwide eradication is 2023, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), a multinational partnership that has been pursuing this goal since 1988. Polio would be only the second human disease to be wiped out globally, after smallpox in 1980.

The 2023 target is ambitious. It would mean seeing the world’s last cases of wild poliovirus sometime next year—down from 88 cases so far in 2019—followed by a minimum of three years of intensive monitoring to certify eradication. But the antipolio effort has a recent history of success against long odds. India, where polio was paralyzing 500 to 1,000 children per day in the 1990s, eliminated the disease in 2014. The wrenching spectacle of child polio victims begging in that nation’s streets, with their twiglike legs folded beneath them, is now history.

Nigeria, where antigovernment gunmen assassinated nine women polio vaccinators in 2013, has now gone three years without any evidence of wild poliovirus—and seven years without type 3—largely through the heroic persistence of community health workers. Success there, says Carol Pandak of Rotary International, means the entire African continent could be certified free of all three strains of wild poliovirus sometime next year.

As the last two countries reporting wild poliovirus, Pakistan and Afghanistan are now feeling “tremendous global pressure to get the job done,” Pandak says. The Taliban had suspended the vaccination campaign early this year in parts of Afghanistan under its control, but last month it reversed itself and allowed polio immunizations to resume in clinics—though not in mosques or door-to-door. In neighboring Pakistan the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan recently made eradication its top priority, with Khan to assume leadership of the campaign starting next month.

But GPEI, led by the World Health Organization, the CDC, the United Nations Children’s Fund, Rotary International and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also faces daunting obstacles. The most alarming of them is the emergence and spread of vaccine-derived type 2 poliovirus, mainly in Africa. Public health workers have recognized the problem since 2000, according to Walter Orenstein, an infectious disease and polio specialist at the Emory University School of Medicine. The live but attenuated, or weakened, virus used in the Sabin oral vaccine (which is the mainstay of eradication campaigns) can sometimes spread from a vaccinated child to someone who is still susceptible to polio.

This transmission most commonly happens, Orenstein says, when a vaccine recipient is shedding the weakened virus in feces and inadvertently passes it to a susceptible person via interpersonal contact or a drinking-water source. In the subsequent chain of infection from person to person, the virus may mutate in the human body into more virulent and transmissible forms—and begin to circulate like a wild poliovirus among unvaccinated children. Last year vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks caused 105 cases of paralysis in children, according to GPEI.

So far, though, there has not been any way around reliance on the oral vaccine in eradication efforts, Orenstein says. The inactivated vaccine administered by injection is highly effective at protecting individuals by inducing humoral immunity (in the blood and other bodily fluids), he says, but it is not so good at inducing intestinal immunity. That makes it less useful in areas with poor sanitation, where accidentally ingesting fecal matter from drinking water is a hazard. The oral vaccine is not only easier and less costly to use in large-scale door-to-door campaigns; it also confers stronger intestinal immunity and, in the vast majority of cases, helps protect the community by reducing the amount of the virus shed in human waste.

Researchers have now identified the key points on the oral vaccine’s genome where mutations can cause it to revert to a more virulent form. That achievement has made it possible to introduce genetic modifications at those points to prevent reversion, says Jay Wenger of the Gates Foundation, which has funded the effort. Two new oral vaccine candidates with these modifications have advanced to testing for emergency-use regulatory approval by the World Health Organization and the affected countries, and they could be available as early as June. That timeline still leaves a critical eight-month window, however, in which a vaccine-derived outbreak could occur.

Another potential obstacle is fatigue at the international donor level. “We know that the last mile has proved to be the toughest phase of eradication,” says Michel Zaffran, director of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. People tend to become complacent as the success of a vaccine leads them to forget just how dreadful the disease can be. GPEI is now seeking $3.27 billion for its next four years of work, with a donor “pledging moment” scheduled for November 19 in Abu Dhabi.

“It’s always a challenge to ask for more money—especially for a disease that, for many people, no longer exists,” Zaffran says. “People ask, ‘Why is it costing so much to eradicate polio when you have so few cases left?’ But eradicating polio and stopping these outbreaks means we have to vaccinate 400 million children every year”—and then continue to vaccinate children for at least another 10 years—“to ensure there is no reemergence of the disease.” It also requires a sophisticated network to check samples from individual patients, sewage systems and open water bodies for any sign of the virus.

Fatigue at the levels of the community and individual parents could be an even greater challenge. In areas with poor sanitation, children sometimes need eight to 10 doses of vaccine to achieve immunity. Polio vaccinators have continued working to reach those children, despite recent assassinations in Pakistan. But parents naturally wonder why public health workers keep coming back to them with polio vaccine when families still lack clean water, basic sanitation or access to general health care. That situation has required the polio eradication effort to broaden its focus to other community needs and to persuade local political and religious figures to become leaders of the campaign.

Would it be more practical just to back off from the difficult goal of eradication and instead focus on merely controlling the spread of the disease? Zaffran cites a 2007 study calculating that the switch from eradication to control would cost $3.5 billion annually—and result in 200,000 cases of polio every year. “If we stop,” he says, “the disease will come back. It will rapidly spread into the Middle East, into Africa and maybe even into Europe and the United States, as we have seen with measles. I truly believe that now is the time to finish the job—and we have all the tools to do it.”

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          You can donate to the Gobal Polio Eradication Initiative here.

Richard Conniff is an award-winning writer. His books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W. W. Norton, 2011). He’s now at work on a history of the fight against epidemic disease. You can support his work here.

Was Our Ancestral Homeland in Botswana–not East Africa?

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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 unusually stable, thriving almost unchanged for 70,000 years in a habitat closely resembling the modern Okavango Delta, according to senior author Vanessa M. Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia.

The new study looks at the mitogenomes, or mitochondrial genomes, of 1,217 individuals from multiple southern African ethnic identities, and focuses on a “rare deep-rooting” lineage called L0, or L zero. It’s the oldest known mitochondrial lineage, passed down intact from mother to daughter across the generations, though mutations can sometimes occur and may be associated with important evolutionary changes. Hayes became interested in that lineage as a result of her work with the South African Genome Project, which found evidence of L0 ancestry distributed across southern Africa. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, descended mainly from Bantu groups who migrated into southern Africa 1,500 years ago, was among those identified as having Khoisan ancestry, a connection he said left him feeling “very privileged and blessed.”

Tracking the accumulation of mutations in the L0 lineage across the eons provides geneticists with a time stamp for evolutionary changes. The co-authors of the Nature paper identify and date changes in the L0 lineage. They also correlate these “branching” events with evidence of climatic shifts, as well as with archaeological evidence of human migrations. During the initial 70,000 years of stable habitation, says co-author Axel Timmermann, a climate scientist at Pusan National University in South Korea, migration was probably constrained by harsh, dry conditions in the surrounding landscape. But about 130,000 years ago, a period of increased rainfall opened a green corridor for migrations to the northeast. Then, about 110,000 years ago, drying conditions within the homeland and opening of a green corridor to the southwest led to further migrations down to the southern tip of Africa. Evidence of both events survives, according to the study, in subgroups of the L0 lineage found in living descendants of those migrations.

The new research fits with other recent genetic evidence of human origin in southern Africa, including a study earlier this year suggesting that a migration from that region to East Africa, and the resulting mixture with populations there, might have been a key turning point in the evolution of modern humans and their migration out of Africa. Another paper this year also argues that a migration from southern Africa to East Africa immediately preceded a major out-of-Africa migration 100,000 to 70,000 years ago. The alternative pan-African, or “polycentric,” viewpoint holds that multiple interlinked populations evolved across the continent, sometimes in isolation and sometimes together.

James Cole, an archaeologist at the University of Brighton in England, who was not involved in the new study, praises Hayes and her colleagues for their cross-disciplinary approach to understanding mitochondrial evolution. But he also notes that their paper overlooks major archaeological evidence, such as the 315,000-year-old skeletal remains of an anatomically modern human recently found in Morocco. Hayes replies that her study focuses only on the population of direct ancestors of “people walking around today,” and in the absence of genetic evidence from the Morocco specimens, the connection to living humans is unknown.

Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan who also was not involved in the new work, similarly argues that the evidence its authors present is too narrow. Reliance solely on mitochondrial evidence leads to misinterpretation, he says, and risks overlooking important evolutionary information in the separate DNA of the cell nucleus. Our widespread inheritance of Neandertal genes shows up, for instance, only in the nuclear DNA, and it is completely absent from the mitogenome. Likewise, Wolpoff says, “the nuclear genome, with three billion base pairs, might tell an entirely different story about the African origin of modern humans from what the mitogenome’s 16,000 base pairs” suggest.

“We’re dealing with a puzzle of a million pieces,” Cole says, “and we’ve probably got the first 100 in place.” Paleogenetics has “ramped up the scale of complexity exponentially,” he adds. “From the paleontological and archeological record, it was a 1,000-piece puzzle.” But instead of providing a grand answer to the story of human origin, Cole suggests, so far, genetics is mainly showing us just how complex that story really is.