Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 346

The largest wind farm in the U.S. is growing in Oklahoma. It’s a sign of the times

Brazos Wind Farm, Texas (Credit: Brazos Wind Farm, Texas, via Wikipedia)

A new wind farm that could become the largest in the U.S. will be taking shape across the blustery plains of the Oklahoma Panhandle over the next three years, helping to wean four Southern states off of electricity produced with climate-polluting coal.

American Electric Power (AEP) and wind developer Invenergy plan to complete a $4.5 billion wind farm called the Wind Catcher Energy Connection by 2020, along with a 350-mile electric power line. The project, announced this week, will supply Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas with 9 million megawatt hours of wind power, enough electricity for about 800,000 homes.

AEP’s announcement is a sign that electric companies are gaining greater confidence in the future of renewables, even as the Trump administration casts doubt on established climate science and works to reverse many of the Obama administration’s energy and climate goals.

The Trump administration has aimed to slash or defund most federal support for wind, solar and other renewable energy. But energy experts say there is too much momentum behind the rise of renewables for those pro-coal policies to slow wind and solar farm development.

“It shows that the president’s cramped view of energy does not and cannot defeat economics and the public’s desire for clean energy and clean energy’s symbolism as progress,” said Jeremy Firestone, director of the Center for Carbon-free Power Integration at the University of Delaware.

Many states have set climate goals requiring a certain amount of their electricity to come from renewables by 2030. To succeed in those efforts, a Berkeley Lab report published this week shows that those states will have to increase the amount of clean energy they produce by 50 percent over the next 13 years.

New wind, solar and other renewables are being built at a fast enough rate in those states that they may easily meet those targets, said Galen Barbose, a Berkeley Lab research scientist and the report’s author.

AEP is investing billions of dollars in Wind Catcher in order to own the wind farm outright. Until recently, most electric companies would buy electricity from wind farms owned by a different company without investing much in the farm itself.

AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry said the company sees a substantial return on equity investments, so it makes more sense for AEP to own the entire wind farm rather than just purchase electricity from it.

She said a federal tax credit available for wind energy production makes wind power cost competitive with electricity generated using coal and natural gas.

“We’re increasingly hearing from customers large and small that they want additional clean energy resources,” McHenry said. “We’ve largely been a coal-fired utility. Now, we have additional resources proving to be cost effective so we’re investing in those resources.”

Mark Z. Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineering professor specializing in renewables at Stanford University, said AEP’s plan to purchase Wind Catcher shows that wind power costs have dropped so low that utilities realize they can make more money owning the wind farm outright.

Wind Catcher’s claim to fame as the largest single wind farm in the U.S. comes with an asterisk, however.

Another project of similar size is being developed in Iowa, but it will be composed of multiple separate wind farms. A 3,000-megawatt wind project on two sites is being proposed in Wyoming, and its developers call it the biggest in the world.

“We will have to see which is the largest in the end,” Firestone said. “If it is two adjacent wind projects, each 1.3 gigawatts each, are they individually smaller or together the largest?”

Green card marriage: I paid a man to marry me for U.S. citizenship

(Credit: Getty/nurdanst)

For every person you ever meet, you’re bound to develop at least three first impressions. If you were to meet me? British, over-polite, affable. And you’d be right. Three things you definitely wouldn’t guess? Fraudster, federal law-offender, illegal immigrant.

As with most crimes, my motive was admittedly selfish. I had fled a troubled phase in London for a second chance in New York, fallen in love with the city, overstayed my tourist visa, and couldn’t bear to drag myself home.

“You have two options, Miss,” said the shifty lawyer I randomly selected to advise me on my immigration prognosis. “Leave the country and be banned from re-entry for ten years. Or get married.”

There was a company willing to employ me and I had an American relative who was willing to sponsor me, I pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter,” the lawyer affirmed. “You’ve already broken the law. Falling in love and getting married is the only way the U.S. government will pardon you.”

Squinting skeptically, I paid for my consultation and left. As it transpired, he was right. As tough as the immigration laws are in this country, marriage is indeed the golden loop hole, no matter your good or bad credentials.

A few months later, I was sitting before the same sketchy lawyer with my grinning fiancé in tow. Now it was his turn to be skeptical.

“Is this a marriage of convenience, or a marriage of love?” he inquired.

“Love,” we chimed. “Definitely.”

After a brief but frantic search, I had enlisted the services of Joe, an out of work actor with a blatant disregard for the law and an earnest desperation for his next sizable pay check. Joe was short, classically handsome, and not at all my type. We’d met through friends, and when I mentioned my predicament, he’d stepped in without hesitation — for the going rate of $12,000 (a massive sum for me, but I figured that if I could convince a stranger to marry me, I’d find a way to afford it).

If Joe and I could pass the notoriously grueling marriage interview, I would have my Green Card and he would have a big chunk of cash. If we failed, I would be deported and he would spend a few years in prison.

Joe and I agreed upon the particulars of our deal in a near-empty Brooklyn beer garden one spring afternoon, the sun poking through an arching blossom tree as we shook hands. I will never forget that day. It would have been romantic, had it not been so deeply unromantic.

“Congratulations,” said my lawyer, enthusiasm halfhearted. With a wink, he added, “Make sure your families come to the wedding. Take lots of pictures. Merge your assets. You need as much documentation to prove that you’re a genuine couple as possible. You wouldn’t believe how many people try to get away with false marriages for a Green Card.”

Laughing nervously while taking thorough mental notes, Joe and I bid the man farewell and set off to prove ourselves on paper.

Over the next few months, Joe and I actually became good friends. We chatted about our pasts, our futures and our love lives in between snapping evidentiary photos of ourselves hanging out. We had fun trying to look the part of a duo deeply in love.

We opened joint accounts for banking, phone service and various utilities. I paid the bills.

I even ordered myself an engagement ring from Amazon. The day it arrived, Joe and I contrived a detailed story about the proposal, and Joe’s arduous quest for the perfect (cubic zirconia) rock.

The wedding took place on a blissful summer day at my aunt’s house. I borrowed a friend’s wildly inappropriate, low cut (but white, at least) prom dress.

We wrote joke vows, and cried with laughter while reading them out loud to each other at the altar. In our wedding photos, it looks as if we’re weeping with joy.

The only time our lips ever met was that afternoon, shortly after the priest — a vague, loosely religious friend — uttered the words “You may now kiss the bride,” while rolling his eyes of course.

My beloved mother, the most morally staunch human I know, gamely flew from England to corroborate our elaborate scheme. She wasn’t secretly hoping that Joe and I would actually fall in love because she knew me better than that. And yet, a wedding’s a wedding (even if it’s a ruse wedding), so tears inevitably rolled down her cheeks.

If this had been a film, the script would have dictated that Joe and I soon fall in love. It wasn’t, and we didn’t. But we did like and respect one another, and we did then eerily follow the path of so many doomed married folks.

Shortly after our nuptials, Joe met someone — someone who didn’t exactly approve of our whole plan — and fell in love with her. As quickly as he’d waltzed into my life, Joe suddenly wanted out.

Unfortunately, our final interview loomed in the not-too-distant future. To secure my Green Card, I needed Joe to sit alongside me in an interrogation room so we could be cross-examined about the validity of our marriage by government experts trained in the art of sniffing out liars.

Joe had already pocketed his $12,000 fee, and he didn’t have the means to pay me back. Still, he’d made a mistake, he said. Suddenly, he didn’t want to risk his balls and fail the interview. It was hardly as though I could sue him for damages.

A huge row ensued and our picture perfect fake marriage crumbled. Both our futures were now at stake and our heated exchanges grew profoundly ugly.

The night before the interview, Joe disappeared — refusing to return my frantic text messages and phone calls. In the early hours of the morning, however, driven by guilt, Joe showed up at my apartment and agreed to accompany me after all. We despised one another by this point, but we downed a few pre-noon shots of whiskey, put on our game faces, and rehearsed our act once more. We had both written down our respective life stories — schools, childhood pets, vacations, you name it — swapped them, and learnt them by heart.

Nearly convulsing with nerves, we sat down before the stern immigration official charged with determining our fates. Wearing a floral tea dress (my most wifely outfit, I’d reasoned), I held Joe’s limp hand with simmering revulsion.

“Documents . . . ” barked the officer.

I plonked my carefully curated stack of fabrications down on his desk.

The man flipped through our wedding album, scoured our bank statements, and then quizzed us: “Who takes out the trash?”…”What side of the bed do you each sleep on?” . . . ”Where’d you eat dinner last Friday night?” A string of surprisingly tricky queries, though nothing we hadn’t prepared for.

Finally, he leaned back in his chair, and, with a penetrating look, spoke directly to Joe. “So how are you finding this?”

“Finding what?”

“Marriage. How are you finding married life?”

“Honestly,” Joe said, voice strained, as if a fist were stuck in his throat, “it’s not as easy as I thought it would be.”

The officer reached for a large rubber stamp and hovered it ominously above our file.

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “People who are faking it never say that. Marriage is hard. Welcome to America!”

We had ultimately convinced the officer, it seemed, on the single shred of honesty we’d offered.

Joe and I left the immigration office together, then strode off in separate directions even though we were heading to the same Brooklyn neighborhood. We haven’t spoken since and I highly doubt we ever will again.

These days, I’m the fraudulent holder of a Green Card and a newspaper reporter by trade — a professional spin artist, if you will.

My single shred of honesty? Some day, I hope to enjoy a real white wedding of my own. My dress will be modest, Mom will cry (again), and my marriage will be for love rather than convenience.

Please stop breaking up with my girlfriend

(Credit: Getty/123ducu)

Looking up from my drink and across the room, I watched my girlfriend and my roommate kiss for the first time.

It was her 21st birthday, five days into the spring of our junior year. Heads swiveled toward Elizabeth and Jamie as their kiss deepened. Quiet rippled out through the din of the party. In the background, Beyoncé continued to serenade us with “Drunk in Love.”

Jealousy welled up in me: I was the one who wanted an open relationship, not Elizabeth.

Crushes have always sprouted in me, independent of my will, like I live in an endless springtime. One blossoms for someone who feels right in my arms at a blues dance, another bursts for a classmate who writes achingly beautiful poetry — all the time, people pop up and make me dizzy.

But every time a crush budded, I felt like I’d betrayed Elizabeth. When I snipped it before it could fully bloom, I felt like I’d betrayed myself. I didn’t want to leave her, but I craved freedom to explore.

Several months before, I’d confessed this desire to her. “I want to give that to you,” she whispered — but the idea made her seethe with anxiety. Our time together was already a constant negotiation. She had to micromanage her schedule to balance a Mathematics major with ADHD, while my distaste for clocks and Google Calendar verged on phobia. We lived in glimpses and embraces between class; love slipped into the little spaces we had left over. She feared we’d have no time left at all if we were entangled with other people.

So as her mouth moved against Jamie’s in one of the loveliest kisses I’d ever seen, I felt a lot of things. Jealousy, yes, at the bitter irony that she had what I wanted. Confusion: Had she changed her mind, or was this just a drunken birthday kiss? Happiness, too — what some polyamorous people call “compersion” — that two people I loved were sharing this intimacy. And also a little private hope: that Elizabeth would understand me better now. Under my breath, I whispered, “Finally.”

As the night progressed, time warped around Jamie and Elizabeth’s kiss. It never stopped. I got drunker than I’d ever been. For the first time, I spent my night retching into a toilet. Elizabeth, after holding my hair, spent her first night in Jamie’s bed.

There was no privacy in our room; closeness was the way of our student-housing cooperative. The stairwells resounded with mandolin music. The walls of the gender-neutral shower room were sheened with orange grime. Nobody locked their doors, ever.

The third time I walked in on Jamie and Elizabeth kissing, we decided it was time to talk about it.

We spoke for hours. Softly, carefully. Elizabeth held my gaze. Jamie averted it. “We need each other,” Elizabeth confessed.

“Okay,” I said.

They glanced at each other. “Okay? Really?”

“I never want to keep you from what you need,” I said. “Need is sacred.”

“Thank you,” Jamie told me, over and over. And, “I don’t deserve this.”

Maybe they didn’t. Jamie hadn’t yet told Sophie, their long-distance high school sweetheart and maybe-someday-fiancée, about kissing Elizabeth. “She’ll definitely be okay with it,” Jamie assured us.

I had my doubts that Sophie — who rarely used gender-neutral pronouns for Jamie and wanted them to be her husband, not her androgynous partner — would be a fan of polyamory.

But Elizabeth was beaming at me, moon-eyed. “I feel a hundred times lighter right now,” she said, “than I can remember having felt in I-don’t-know-how-many-months.”

We weren’t sure how we’d make it work, but we knew we’d figure it out. We had to. At dusk we walked to a campus café through swirling snow, arm-in-arm and arm-in-arm, giddy with laughter, embarking on this strange journey together.

The walk sticks out in my memory, because I think it was the last time all three of us were happy at once.

Later that night, Jamie called Sophie. Sure enough, they returned to the room and murmured, almost inaudibly, “This can’t happen anymore.”

But it kept happening.

Maybe I should’ve told Jamie and Elizabeth to stop. But watching them fall in love felt like falling in love myself. I liked when Jamie, half-asleep, would murmur, “I’m crazy about her,” and I would reply, “Right?!” I liked how Elizabeth told me little secrets and snippets of dialogue — and I liked the mystery of what she’d keep to herself. I liked waking up curled against her some mornings, and on others watching her stretch from Jamie’s bed, and waving to her.

But I hated how, wracked with guilt after Skyping with Sophie, Jamie would wrench themself away from Elizabeth.

It was a vicious cycle. Jamie couldn’t kiss Elizabeth without confessing the infidelity to Sophie, who insisted that this couldn’t continue. Jamie couldn’t help but agree and tell Elizabeth they had to break it off. Which left me stroking Elizabeth’s hair through the night as she wept and pined for all of the things they couldn’t do. Next week, they would find themselves alone together, and the cycle would begin again.

Jamie’s cheating sucked. I was complicit in it. But I felt Jamie deserved to be with someone who fully embraced their gender. Someone like Elizabeth.

So I began to root for my roommate to break up with the woman they planned to marry so they could stop breaking up with my girlfriend. For all our sakes.

Selfishly, what I liked most about our situation was clear proof that Elizabeth and I needed an open relationship. I liked trusting each other that much. I’d lost the guilt I felt when I held someone else’s eye contact in the library, or their hand on a walk, or their name in my mouth at night.

Until, that is, Elizabeth voiced her continued doubts about “outsiders” interfering in our relationship. People we both already knew and loved, like Jamie, were one thing. But interweaving the fickle needs of strangers into our life patterns? Weren’t we having enough trouble untangling the mess we were in already?

The double standard dug at me, made everything harder. Made it harder to hear about how wonderful Jamie was, how cruel Jamie was. Made it harder even when it was just me and her — because it was just me and her.

By mid-March, we were all looking for distractions. Elizabeth chose math. Jamie chose drugs. I decided to scrub every inch of mold from the co-op shower walls. Without a mask. The ensuing asthma attack landed me briefly in the hospital. After I was discharged, every time I stepped into our co-op, I felt my lungs seize up. I exiled myself for a week, sleeping alone in Elizabeth’s room across campus, while she and Jamie continued living in “our” room.

I lay alone in my girlfriend’s bed.

Without me there as a buffer, the tides of their relationship rose higher and broke harder. In panicked midnight walks and phone calls, Elizabeth insisted, “I can’t do this, Nick. I can’t. I’m not a polyamorous person.”

“But you’re in love with two people,” I protested.

“Exactly. That’s the problem.”

To Elizabeth, polyamory was an experimental structure for our relationship — one that wasn’t working. To me, polyamory was, is, a matter of identity. To me, loving two people at once is… loving two people at once. Three is three, twelve is twelve, one is one. Nothing about love should exclude, or possess, or covet. To me, it’s Time that is the great divider, limiter, and dissector of what could otherwise be infinitely expansive love.

And I will never stop wishing for more time.

I finally grew truly jealous of Jamie, as Elizabeth’s time and energy was consumed with their presence or siphoned by their absence. Grew resentful of their perpetual indecision, of how they kept hurting both Elizabeth and Sophie, of how the state of my relationship with Elizabeth depended entirely on theirs. Jamie had, at their core, a great restless emptiness that I couldn’t comprehend. They tried to fill it with drugs, with lovers, with an endless string of hobbies and talents that they inevitably soured on. Nothing sated. In the past I’d been concerned about Jamie’s patterns, but it was their life. Now everything they did with their time impacted how I spent my own.

Everyone just wanted everyone to be happy, but nobody was allowed to be.

Toward the end of April, Jamie left Elizabeth for good. Finally swallowed by guilt, they told Elizabeth, “I don’t love you anymore. You’ve hurt me too much.”

Elizabeth sobbed in my arms with wind whipping her hair as she repeated, “I am fucking up their life. I am fucking up their life.”

“Elizabeth,” I murmured. “I don’t think you’re doing anything to them that they’re not already doing to themself.”

At the end of the semester, I helped Jamie move out. That morning I was wearing a thin, floral-patterned shirt that had mysteriously appeared on my pillow. I tossed the last suitcase into the trunk of Jamie’s car, and we hugged farewell. I turned to head back upstairs.

“Thank you, Nick,” Jamie said quietly, their eyes briefly meeting mine. “For everything.”

I smiled back at them. “No problem,” I lied.

Later, Elizabeth called. She wanted to kiss me goodbye before she, too, drove away for the summer. I excused myself from my meeting and walked quickly from the library. I was startled as air rushed past me — I was running. Asthma and all, I was sprinting. As I flew down an alley toward the street, I heard a car door slam and a loud, fast pair of feet approaching.

Elizabeth careened around the corner and into my arms. The air was thick with birdsong. We kissed, still breathing hard from running to each other. Then her hands tugged at my new shirt.

“Why are you wearing Jamie’s shirt?” she giggled.

“I found it on my pillow,” I said, cocking my head. “I wonder why Jamie didn’t say anything about it.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. “I left it there by accident. I was wearing it last night.”

And we laughed the way we had at the beginning of the semester, walking through snowfall, when everything was untarnished. Nothing was healed, nothing was saved, nothing made sense — but we were laughing again.

Scope maker Olympus hit with $6.6 million verdict in superbug outbreak case

This illustration made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the Shigella bacteria. On Thursday, April 2, 2015, the CDC said a drug-resistant strain of a stomach bug made its way into the U.S. and spread, causing more than 200 illnesses since last May. Many cases were traced to people who had recently traveled to the Dominican Republic, India or other countries. (AP Photo/CDC) (Credit: AP)

A jury ordered the giant medical scope maker Olympus Corp. to pay a Seattle hospital $6.6 million in damages tied to a deadly superbug outbreak — and told the hospital to pay $1 million to a deceased patient’s family.

But jurors on Monday also handed the Tokyo-based manufacturer a key win, rejecting claims that its flagship duodenoscope was unsafe as designed.

The decision follows an eight-week trial, the first in the U.S. related to gastrointestinal scopes causing outbreaks of drug-resistant infections.

The case was filed by Theresa Bigler, 61, and her four children in connection with the August 2013 death of Richard Bigler, a pancreatic cancer patient who contracted an infection linked to a contaminated Olympus scope. The hospital, Virginia Mason Medical Center, later joined in the suit against Olympus, but the jury found it shared some blame in the case.

An Olympus official offered condolences to the Bigler family in a statement and praised the jury’s decision.

“We are appreciative that the jury recognized that Olympus’ duodenoscope design was not unsafe and did not contribute to Mr. Bigler’s unfortunate passing in 2013,” said Sam Tarry, an attorney for the company.

But the jury also said Olympus failed to provide adequate warnings about the scope or instructions for its use after it was manufactured. The jury said that failure harmed Virginia Mason Medical Center.

Theresa Bigler’s attorneys cast the decision as a win for patient safety.

“Olympus hasn’t been playing by the rules for some time and this verdict holds them accountable,” lawyer David Beninger said in a statement.

He said the case should send a broad signal to Olympus and other device manufacturers.

They “must make patient safety a priority and not just a sales pitch,” Beninger’s statement said. “As Olympus’ own expert admitted at trial, lawsuits can change behavior and big lawsuits can make big changes. Hopefully this verdict will convince Olympus and others to listen.”

Medical and legal experts said they were surprised at how well Olympus fared in this case, which was closely watched by other plaintiffs’ lawyers who are waging similar suits against the company.

“In the jury’s opinion, the hospital shared some of the blame,” said Lawrence Muscarella, a hospital-safety consultant in Montgomeryville, Pa.

Muscarella said each case is different and plaintiffs’ attorneys can learn from the evidence presented at this trial. “It remains to be seen what this portends for other cases on the docket,” he said.

More than 25 patients and families, from Pennsylvania to California, have sued Olympus alleging wrongful death, negligence or fraud. Federal prosecutors also are investigating Olympus and two smaller manufacturers over their potential roles in patient infections.

Richard Bigler was one of at least 35 patients in American hospitals to have died since 2013 after developing infections tied to Olympus duodenoscopes — snake-like tubes threaded down a patient’s throat. Doctors use the scope to diagnose and treat problems in the digestive tract, such as gallstones, cancers and blockages in the bile duct. About 700,000 such ERCP procedures are performed annually in the U.S.

Last year, Olympus recalled all 4,400 of its TJF-Q180V duodenoscopes — the model used in Bigler’s case — and made repairs to reduce the risk of bacteria becoming trapped inside after cleaning.

Bigler’s attorneys said Olympus had acted recklessly by not warning U.S. hospitals about previous outbreaks and failing to fix a design flaw that hindered cleaning and allowed dangerous bacteria to become trapped inside these reusable scopes.

Olympus had said its gastrointestinal scopes were safe and effective with proper cleaning and disinfection. At trial, the company said Virginia Mason was to blame for Bigler’s infection because the hospital didn’t follow the company’s cleaning instructions.

Olympus criticized Virginia Mason for not telling Bigler and other families about the scope-related infections, forcing them to find out from a newspaper account about the outbreak.

In his closing argument, Olympus attorney Mark Anderson told the jury that the Seattle outbreak would have occurred regardless of whether Olympus’ or another company’s scopes had been used.

“The proof in this case, from their witnesses, is there is no increased risk with the [Olympus scope],” Anderson told the jury.

Hospital officials said the faulty Olympus scopes were the cause of Bigler’s infection and others, and they implemented an expensive test-and-hold protocol for cleaning the devices that halted the spread.

“We’re sorry for the grief and anguish experienced by the Bigler family,” the hospital said in a brief statement. “This was a complicated trial that lasted more than eight weeks. The verdict includes multiple decisions and we will continue reviewing them over the next few days.”

Theresa Bigler was not available for comment, lawyers said.

Olympus is the industry leader for these devices and other specialty endoscopes, with an 85 percent share of the U.S. market.

One of the largest superbug outbreaks in the nation occurred at Virginia Mason, where 39 people’s infections were linked to Olympus scopes. Eighteen patients died. The Seattle hospital said the patients who died, including Richard Bigler, had other underlying illnesses.

The 12-member jury, which had begun deliberating July 18, said the damages to Virginia Mason amounted to $25.4 million. But jurors agreed the hospital had been negligent, so they sharply reduced the damages owed to Virginia Mason.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys repeatedly reminded jurors that three key Olympus executives declined to testify at trial and instead invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The three executives who declined to testify were Susumu Nishina, Hisao Yabe and Hiroki Moriyama. They hold top roles in regulatory affairs, quality assurance or medical manufacturing. All three have declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

Several of Nishina’s internal company emails were introduced as evidence. In one email exchange in February 2013, Nishina told the company’s U.S. managers not to issue a broad warning to American hospitals despite reports of scope-related infections in Dutch, French and U.S. hospitals, court records show.

In addition to Olympus, device makers Pentax and Fujifilm sell these sorts of duodenoscopes, which can cost up to $40,000 apiece. Overall, as many as 350 patients at 41 medical centers worldwide were infected or exposed to contaminated scopes made by those three manufacturers from 2010 to 2015, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The unsustainable whiteness of green

(Credit: Getty/ Sandy Huffaker)

Aaron Mair’s story starts out all too familiar to people of color who have encountered any of the big green groups: He asked one for help dealing with an issue of critical importance to the health of his family and community — and was turned away.

This was back in the 1990s, when — as has been well-documented — large environmental organizations were mostly run by well-off white people concerned about conserving critters and our country’s natural beauty, not the health and welfare of its people.

After his initial setback, Mair became one of the leaders in an effort to change that paradigm. (Spoiler: It’s been a slow process.) His story started with a choice between raising his daughters in the suburbs of Albany, New York, or in the city, and his decision to go with the latter — while building his house next to an urban nature preserve. He thought he had gotten the best of both worlds.

But then he started to notice the soot. Black flakes coated his car, the house, “everything,” he remembers. The air was acrid. Paint peeled from outside surfaces, like street signs and his deck door. Five or more years of chronic exposure caused both his daughters to develop asthma symptoms.

His dream home was in the prevailing wind pattern of a state-run garbage incinerator.

Mair worked in social services for the state government. “I had to sue my boss, so you can imagine how I was received by my coworkers,” he recalls. “When your children are injured, you have no choice.”

A coworker, Roger Gray, thought the Sierra Club could help. Gray was president of the local outpost of the green group, but directed Mair to the deeper pockets of the Atlantic Chapter based in New York City. The two drove to a meeting in New York, where Mair — a 6-foot-7-inch-tall black man — presented his case.

“One of the questions was, ‘Did you check with the NAACP?’” Mair remembers. “Right then and there, it was clear that the perception of race mattered. We were voted down.”

Gray was appalled. So he took up a collection among his local chapter and, several weeks later, presented Mair with a check to the “Arbor Hill Environmental Justice Fund.” Mair went on to win his battle with the state, shutting down the incinerator.

Then he decided to become a double agent, joining the Sierra Club in 1999, assuming leadership roles and, in 2015, being elected its first black president. All the while, he remained active in environmental justice causes. His friends in the grassroots would often ask why he bothered with what they considered an out-of-touch mainstream environmental group.

“That’s where the internalized racism and oppression is, and if I can help shift that Mount Everest and change its direction,” Mair would say, “it becomes harder for other environmental organizations to maintain their way.”

According to the latest research from the advocacy group Green 2.0, however, Mount Everest hasn’t moved much. (The recent report follows up on a significant study done by Green 2.0 in 2014, which put firm numbers behind an already obvious problem.) Simply put, NGOs and foundations in the green space are still overwhelmingly white at all levels, especially top leadership — and that’s limiting their effectiveness, especially in addressing issues that affect frontline communities.

Most large environmental organizations started in conservation, which left them largely tone deaf to the concerns of communities that live in the shadow of chemical and power plants, don’t have access to clean drinking water, and live compromised lives due to the impacts and aftereffects of industrialization.

Green groups traditionally saw those plights as issues for social justice warriors. They also labored under a misconception that communities of color don’t care about the environment. But according to Vien Truong, director of Green for All, a 2015 survey done by her organization suggests exactly the opposite.

“Communities of color overwhelmingly care about the environment — more than their white counterparts,” Truong says. “They’re willing to pay more for the cost of the energy. They know that they will save costs later on in health care and in improved quality of life.”

At a time when the nation’s leadership seeks to gut and abandon all forms of environmental protection, there are very real drawbacks to the fact that mainstream environmentalists and grassroots community activists still operate largely in separate worlds, rather than creating a united front.

“We aren’t keeping up with climate change because the environmental movement is allowing a legacy of implicit bias to constrict its leadership and strategy,” wrote Green 2.0 Executive Director Whitney Tome in a recent piece for Fusion. “It silences the very people who often feel the greatest impact of a warming planet, even though activists of color could make or break success for this work.”

Lost in translation

The new Green 2.0 report, titled “Beyond Diversity,” indicates that environmental groups seem to grok the need for inclusive staffs, but many have failed to transform.

Derived from interviews and surveys of close to 100 high-ranking officials at NGOs and foundations, the study shows that more than 70 percent of respondents said increasing diversity would widen their reach, allow them to address green issues on multiple fronts, and bring a greater focus on environmental justice.

Still, nearly three-quarters of staffers are white. And the numbers indicate less inclusiveness as you move to higher rungs in those outfits: Only 15 percent of the leaders are people of color. That’s a slight uptick since the 2014 Green 2.0 report, but given that the U.S. population is more than 36 percent people of color, the sector continues to lag.

(Although not included among the groups researched for the report, many nonprofit environmental media outlets, including Grist, face similar issues. New CEO Brady Piñero Walkinshaw says increasing diversity is vital to Grist’s journalistic mission. “We’re taking steps to embrace diversity as part and parcel to our work — from our hiring practices to the stories, communities, and sources we cover as a news organization.”)

One issue that sociologist Maya Beasley, a diversity consultant and the new report’s author, says kept popping up in her interviews was concern that a more diverse staff would lead to cultural misunderstandings in the workplace. She has no patience for that excuse.

“Your cultural discomfort or concerns about misunderstandings isn’t a reason to not hire people of color,” Beasley says. “It’s something for you to suck up or maybe get more therapy about.”

Instead, green groups should worry about cultural misunderstandings when they’re working in the field, says Margaret Gordon, cofounder of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. “My reality is that there’s always been this problem,” she says.

Green groups regularly parachute into her community, Gordon says — West Oakland abuts a busy port and is rife with respiratory illnesses thanks to fumes from shipping, trucks servicing the area, and highway traffic — but the partnerships aren’t always fruitful. The outside organizations seem to have different goals.

Miscommunications often arise because green groups and their associates want to come in, collect data, and move on, she said, while her community members are looking for meaningful change. She points to a recent project where an environmental group, a major tech firm, and a research university mapped her neighborhood’s air pollution block by block. The scientists got the data they wanted and released a highly publicized paper earlier this month. But the people of West Oakland didn’t get what Gordon calls “liberation” from the pollution problems.

“After the community went through all the trials and tribulations with you, you should be supporting me to make local changes,” she says. “You can’t keep doing documentation without actualization.”

Success stories

For organizations that truly want a more inclusive workforce, creating a diversity plan is one of the strongest first steps, says Beasley, who cofounded a diversity consulting firm called The T10 Group. Such efforts require an audit, clearly defined benefits, goal setting, and mechanisms to monitor progress.

In researching the new Green 2.0 report, Beasley discovered that fewer than 40 percent of green groups had a diversity plan in place.

“To make a good one, it requires really taking time and taking stock,” Beasley says. “And it tells possible job candidates that you’re serious about diversity.”

Hiring can be tricky, because organizations in all sectors rely heavily on referrals and recruiting through established networks. In the environmental sector, those networks are largely white.

That’s been an issue for River Network, a small NGO advocacy group with 17 full-time employees that’s slightly ahead of its peers — people of color make up one-third of its senior staff.

The organization has been taking concrete steps toward being more inclusive for years, and its leaders believe that doing so is imperative for it to remain relevant as people of color become the majority in the United States.

“Our ultimate goal at some point of time is to look like the society we’re a part of — to have that diversity of culture and, frankly, skin color on staff,” says River Network President Nicole Silk. “It is an aspiration.”

To show its commitment, River Network has revamped its employee handbook and gone beyond traditional recruiting tactics to ensure talented folks aren’t being excluded. It also hires staff members who aren’t afraid to discuss aspects of race and work with people who look different from them.

Among the big greens, Earthjustice is often considered a leader in addressing diversity. Over the past six years, its staff went from 20 percent people of color to nearly 40 percent. Chas Lopez is determined to keep that percentage climbing; he joined the organization in September 2015 as its first vice president of diversity and inclusion.

Speaking one-on-one with his colleagues during a listening tour of Earthjustice outposts across the country, several themes emerged, Lopez says. Some of those went into the development of a three-pronged rubric for identifying future Earthjustice hires: All of them would need to have functional skill, emotional intelligence, and cultural competency.

Those attributes allow candidates to sidestep the whole cultural misunderstanding bugaboo, Lopez says, both inside the Earthjustice office, and — just as importantly — in the outside world when the organization’s lawyers are representing clients, a large percentage of whom come from environmental justice communities.

“When we’re representing people,” Lopez explains, “we need to make sure we’re mindful and respectful and acknowledge that history of a lack of trust — based on the way that these organizations or communities feel like they’d been treated in the past.”

For Aaron Mair, who has led one of those distrustful communities and also served as president of the biggest environmental organization in the country, he hopes his tenure as Sierra Club president showed green groups that they could serve their traditional missions while broadening their mandates to address the needs of vulnerable communities.

“White privilege and racism within the broader environmental movement is existent and pervasive,” Mair says. “The current is not maintainable — we’re becoming a brown nation.

“It’s not about a one-off,” he adds. “It’s about sustainability.”

Dunkirk survivors’ terror didn’t end when they were rescued

Fionn Whitehead as Tommy in "Dunkirk" (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/Melinda Sue Gordon)

In late May 1940, Vic Viner was one of the 338,000 Allied troops on the beaches around the French port of Dunkirk hoping for rescue as the German Army neared and the Luftwaffe circled above.

At age 99, Viner met with Christopher Nolan, writer and director of a new movie about the evacuation, and tried to give the filmmaker some sense of what it was like to be trapped on those beaches. But, he insisted, “You can’t tell anybody what it was like. You had to have been there.”

Nolan and his collaborators certainly do their best to bring experiences like Viner’s to life for moviegoers. The film “Dunkirk” portrays a sequence of terrors: the horrible vulnerability of being prey to a swooping dive bomber; the helplessness of watching a ship list and hurry under the waves; the bitter necessity of pushing desperate men away from an overburdened lifeboat.

In one scene, the film follows the crew of a small civilian boat as it lifts survivors from the sea off of Dunkirk. One, a Royal Navy sailor whose ship has been torpedoed by a U-boat, huddles on the boat unresponsive.

“Is he a coward?” one of the boat’s crew asks its skipper, played by Mark Rylance.

“He’s shell-shocked, George,” the captain replies. “He’s not himself. He may never be himself again.” It’s a foretelling of the reality for many of those who returned, changed from Dunkirk.

Preserving the voices of survivors

Documenting the reality of those shell-shocked survivors is what London’s Imperial War Museum had in mind when it recorded interviews of scores of veterans in the 1990s and early 2000s. Those interviews show that the horror stayed with many of them long after they were freed from a deathtrap between the German Army, the Luftwaffe and the sea.

As a WWII historian, I’ve found those tapes – many free to stream – substantiate the film’s depictions of anguish. But, even more, they add the dimension of time and the long echoes of that anguish which the film can’t capture.

On his 1999 recording, Will Harvey tells how shrapnel from a German bomb tore through his legs as he waited for his chance to board a ship. In the pain and confusion, he mistakenly thought his legs were gone. “You lost a bit of your senses.”

His voice cracks, but he covers it up with an out-of-place laugh. These are commonplace in the tapes, along with obvious restraint and overall evasion of grim details.

Asked about his recovery, Harvey says, “I used to get aggressive, at times, with the blokes, you know. I’d try to control it. I used to get very aggressive.”

He tried to return to his unit but, suffering from a series of breakdowns from then on, he was soon discharged from the Army. After that, he tried and failed to reenlist in the Marines.

As a 21-year-old, Al Tyers found himself directing men onto awaiting ships at Dunkirk, ordered to give priority to the Army and male refugees of fighting age over the many civilians who were also trying get away from the oncoming Germans. “As many as could go on a ship…they packed you in like cattle,” he says. But then, “they put that siren on, that screaming siren,” just before the German dive bombers would rush over the treetops aiming for the departing ships. Moments like this are depicted with hair-raising effect in the film.

“A ship would get loaded up – I don’t know, a thousand or so… and get half a mile out. And the next thing, you’d see the ship going down.” Tyers fails to hide the emotion in his voice at that; like other interviewees, he diverts from the terrible scene quickly.

Back in Britain, Tyers suffered from debilitating claustrophobia. He spent three months in psychiatric hospital, but even afterwards newsreels depicting war scenes would send him rushing outside to the open air. Back home, he couldn’t sit shoulder to shoulder with people at meals.

“I don’t know whether they understood or not.”

Other voices from the archive speak of trouble reintegrating into civilian life. William Machin, Charles Mandeville and Harry Garrett tell of being hounded by nightmares. Ernest Leggett describes how he still saw French and Belgian refugees being shattered by German bombers and fighters in his dreams decades later.

Treating the ‘sufferers’

There’s plenty of evidence of Dunkirk survivors being institutionalized. Doctors documented that many evacuees inundating hospitals in Britain were “suffering,” in the words of one psychiatrist, “from acute hysteria, reactive depression, functional loss of memory or the use of their limbs.” But the wartime government didn’t keep track of the numbers. It wasn’t in its interest to report on it. They also didn’t track veteran suicides, an epidemic among today’s combat veterans. But there’s evidence of them.

Suicides on the beaches around Dunkirk were also uncounted, but some are documented. Christopher Nolan’s depiction of a soldier striding into the waves, apparently intending to “walk home,” is based on more than one real incident. Many others wandered off, senseless, to unknown fates. Others shot themselves.

And there are official records of lingering and often debilitating anxiety among the Dover-based crews who braved repeated crossings of the channel with evacuees. A secret memo produced two months afterward reported a spike in anxiety problems, with more than one in seven sailors on the station affected.

Indelible memories

For those evacuees, eventually shifting to civilian life was hard. “Started having psychological problems, you know.… Almost passing out every now and again. … Suddenly you’re dropped off a cliff… You’ve come unhinged,” Reg Dance says on his 1999 tape. “It took an awful long time for that to go. But it did in the end, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

Fred Walton made it off the beach, but the paddle steamer he was on was bombed while he was on the upper deck. A man nearby had both legs blown off. The man next to Walton was cut by shrapnel and almost leaped into the sea, panicked. Walton had to pin him down.

“How do you forget those sorts of things?” he asked his Imperial War Museum interviewer. “Don’t think you can ever be the same, can you?” He breaks off with another of those awkward laughs.

At the time Walton was interviewed in 2008 tape, 4,000 British troops were still in Iraq.

“It’s showing itself again, isn’t it?” says Walton. “The lads who are coming home now?”

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

Boomers vs. millennials, Fyre Fest edition: Kids today don’t know how to enjoy a failed festival

Author circa 1970 (Credit: Courtesy of the author)

Don’t young people know how to enjoy a failed rock festival anymore? The doomed Fyre Festival is not the first music festival to be canceled at the last minute. As a child of the ’60s, I attended another “disaster” — the Powder Ridge Rock Festival — scheduled over a three-day weekend in the summer of 1970.

By that time, rock festivals had played an important role in forming the countercultural identity. Is it any wonder that we baby boomers have been given the label “Woodstock Generation,” after one of the most significant music festivals of that era?

After Woodstock, failed festivals became common, often due to eleventh-hour changes resulting from local opposition. The Powder Ridge event, which booked Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor and Janis Joplin, among other music icons, was banned because of an injunction brought by neighboring residents who feared that hordes of long-haired concert-goers would decimate their community. But 30,000 of us arrived anyway, many camping out days before the banning of the festival, to find a lack of food, plumbing and music. Yet we stayed the weekend on that ski slope in Middlefield, Connecticut, and made the most out of our escapade.

This was a sharp contrast with how the upwardly mobile millennials handled the situation at this year’s aborted Fyre Festival in the Bahamas. The opulent music event promised big-name acts such as Blink 182 and Major Lazer, as well as gourmet food, luxury accommodations and famous models and social media “influencers” like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid. When the reversal occurred on the morning of the event, near panic conditions ensued, resulting in the evacuation of the 400 festival-goers who’d arrived, out of the 8,000 actual ticket-holders.

Instead of the top contemporary musical artists expected at Fyre, a few local bands played on an undeveloped gravel pit. Powder Ridge, on the other hand, featured popular folk-singer Melanie, the only scheduled act to risk arrest by performing on a makeshift stage powered by a Mr. Softee ice cream truck.

Twitter and Instagram postings from Fyre complained about disappointing food rations — processed cheese sandwiches and a side of salad. Free alcohol was available, at reportedly understocked bars, to appease the guests waiting for accommodations. When we headed off to Powder Ridge, my three friends and I packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a couple of bottles of cheap Chianti and a few Alice B. Toklas brownies.

Lodging at Fyre was in disaster-relief tents with damp mattresses, conditions that seem lavish by comparison to Powder Ridge. Whether coincidence or karma, soon after arriving at our prohibited music gathering, we ran into three good friends who had already set up a pup-tent and had a supply of food and beverages. We unrolled our sleeping bags on the ground next to them, combined our provisions, and had a home base for the duration.

Chartered planes to and from the tropical island fest were eventually grounded, causing festival-goers to be holed up for hours without food or water waiting for their return flight. We Powder Ridge attendees had our own transportation hazards. As my friends and I drove from our campus in the Bronx into rural Connecticut, at one point being stopped and searched by the police, we encountered a posted sign stating, “Festival Canceled. Turn Back.” That didn’t stop us. As the Woody Guthrie song goes, “But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,” so we persevered. After all, Woodstock, the summer before, had nearly been halted too.

At Fyre, the island was reportedly surrounded by shark-infested waters (which the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism has denied). We had our own perils of nature — the pond many of us went skinny-dipping in was later declared polluted and off limits by the authorities. As I hiked above the crowds, attempting to be at one with the local fauna by passing through some bushes and trees to an adjacent cow pasture, I was repeatedly shocked by a hidden electric fence before figuring out what was happening.

How to account for the differences in how millennials today and boomers back then dealt with ill-fated music festivals? The large sum of money ponied up in advance might cause one to feel a greater sense of loss and resentment. Fyre was supposed to be an exclusive, high-end festival — a Woodstock for the wealthy — costing $1,500 to $12,000 and even upwards of $250,000 for deluxe packages. We hippies had put up $20 for the entire weekend at Powder Ridge. When rich millennials shell out that much money, their expectations become raised and the stakes become higher. They take a bigger hit when reality sets in.

We youthful boomers saw music gatherings as a pilgrimage, and as such, we anticipated a certain amount of hardship and sacrifice. On our way to Woodstock, the New York State Thruway and other roads were closed down, jammed with cars. My boyfriend and I were left to hitchhike and walk 10 miles to the celebration, riding part of the way on the hood of a car going 5 mph, unsure if we’d even get in. The police search endured on my way to the terminated Powder Ridge concert the following summer seemed a necessary penance to pay, and luckily set us back only a short time.

The author, circa 1970

Just as other pilgrimages have a spiritual purpose, the journeys we took to these music festivals did too — to worship the god Rock. But at Powder Ridge there was minimal music, no focal point, as there had been at Woodstock. When Melanie played, it was a religious experience. We saw ourselves as a movement of young people congregating not only to pay homage to the music, but for the energy and excitement of a shared experience. Having come of age in the time of be-ins and happenings, we had a “Be Here Now” mentality that drew us to these rock festivals, whether they took place or not.

Concert-goers at Fyre got upset when reality didn’t measure up to their exorbitant expectations. At Powder Ridge we created our own reality. Our aborted music festival became an adventure and a time to celebrate. The deluge of selfie-Instagram reports coming out of Fyre took concert-goers out of the experience of the moment. In today’s world, even Woodstock might be considered a failure: “What, no Wi-Fi?”

The number of lawsuits filed against the organizers of Fyre Festival is a dozen and counting, many of them class actions on behalf of ticket purchasers and patrons. The number of lawsuits against the Powder Ridge promoters (not including the initial injunction) was zero — and we had a good time. This is how we did a failed festival: We didn’t spend a fortune, and we didn’t need to sue.

Despite summer snow, Greenland is still melting

(Credit: (Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory))

Recent summers on the vast, white expanse of the Greenland ice sheet have featured some spectacular ice melt, including an alarming period in 2012 when nearly the whole surface showed signs of melt. But this summer has instead seen several bouts of snow, staving off a big summer melt. So what gives?

While it may seem contradictory, those snows are actually something Greenland may see more of with global warming, as the atmosphere becomes primed to dump more heavy precipitation. And while that snow may insulate the ice sheet against major melt this year, focusing on one summer risks missing the forest for the trees. Because make no mistake, Greenland is still melting, dumping water into the ocean and causing global sea levels to steadily rise.

“We’re still pumping a lot of ice” out to sea, Marco Tedesco, who studies Greenland at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said.

As Arctic temperatures rise at about double the rate of the planet as a whole, Greenland’s surface has been melting at a steady clip, contributing about 30 percent of the foot of global sea level rise since 1900. And summer is prime melt season, when the sun’s rays beat down on the ice, causing meltwater to pool on the surface and drain down through the ice sheet and out to sea.

Those rising seas will slowly inundate coastal cities; many already see more so-called sunny day flooding, impeding traffic and flooding basements. The surging waters pushed ashore by hurricanes and other storms is also getting higher and causing more costly damage.

Several recent summers have seen particularly stark ice loss: At the peak of the 2012 melt season, about 97 percent of the ice sheet surface was melting — that melt season alone contributed 1 millimeter of global sea level rise. Last year, the melt season started two months early thanks to high temperatures across parts of the island.

But this year has been noticeably different. It all started in October, when big snowstorms “really loaded Greenland up,” Jason Box, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said. “That really preconditioned this year for low melt because it thermally insulates the darker ice below.”

Essentially, it takes a lot more solar energy to get rid of that layer of bright, white snow, which reflects more solar rays back to space than darker layers of ice or meltwater.

While there were some bouts of melting earlier in the summer, the weather has since shifted. In recent weeks, summer snows have topped up that already unusually high snow load. Right now, the ice sheet’s surface has about 1.2 times the amount of mass than normal; at the same point in 2012, it had 1.2 times less than normal, Box said.

Also inhibiting summer melt this year is the unusually southerly position of the jet stream, caused by a climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation. “That’s keeping Greenland relatively cold,” Box said.

While snowy weather may seem at odds with a warming world, Greenland could actually see more of it as temperatures rise. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which means that when storms pass through, they drop more precipitation. When temperatures are below freezing, as they are for much of Greenland through most of the year, that means more snowfall. (Rain has been falling at the expense of snow in the lower third of the island as temperatures rise above freezing, though.)

Previous research by Box using ice cores — long cylinders drilled out of the ice sheet that let scientists sample hundreds of years of ice layers — showed that in the past, snowfall has increased over the ice sheet as temperatures have risen.

For the first decade or so of this century, there were more clear skies over Greenland, and so increased melt. But atmospheric patterns seem to have flipped around in recent years, and Tedesco and others are still working on figuring out how changing atmospheric patterns might be influencing snowfall and melt on the ice sheet to better predict how it will progress with future warming.

This year’s excess snowfall doesn’t mean that melt isn’t still happening, though. Melt has already picked back up since the last summer snow earlier this month, Box said. In fact, he expects that that snow will now be a layer of slush he’ll have to trudge through when he arrives on the ice sheet this week to check on a network of weather stations.

The snow could, however, balance out the year’s melt, Box said, with the ice sheet ending up with no net loss of ice for the year — the first year that will have happened in two decades.

One year without a net loss also doesn’t buck the long-term trend of Greenland losing ice, both from surface melt and from ocean waters eating away at glaciers that flow out to sea.

The increase in snowfall “is about four or five times smaller than the increase in surface melting,” Box said. So “the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass overall.”

“He stabbed a fork into my hand”: Dave Davies on The Kinks’ brotherly love

Dave Davies of the Kinks (Credit: Getty/Frazer Harrison)

Ray Davies is seen as the face of The Kinks, but the band wouldn’t have existed without Dave Davies, the youngest of the eight Davies children. Quite literally! He started the band before allowing Ray to join. There’s also the fact that Dave’s distinct guitar work and edgy vibe were as much a part of The Kinks’ DNA as Ray’s sardonic wit or spry melodicism.

We sat down with Dave Davies recently to discuss which records influenced that signature sound early on, realizing that music is hard, and the offense that caused his brother to stab him with a fork.

You’ve spent decades working with your brother, and you just recently did another album with your son Russ. Music is a family affair for you, but did it start that way? Was it always a familial thing?

There was so much music in our household, with six older sisters and an older brother. I was the eighth kid in a big working class family. My sisters were always playing everything from Perry Como to Doris Day to Frank Sinatra. Of course when it really started to get interesting was when I heard Hank Williams and Slim Whitman. One of my sisters was a big Slim Whitman fan.

The first record I ever bought was “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” by Johnny Cash. I got the record home, and I was excited to play the first record I bought with my own money, and I flipped it over and “Big River” was on the B-side! I heard that guitar, what a great riff! I thought, “What is this? They’ve got this on the B-side?!” That got me into B-sides. I would get Ventures records, and the first thing I would do is flip it and see what they were doing on the other side. I was a big B-side freak.

At what point did you decide that you wanted to do more than just listen to music, that you wanted to play it?

Eddie Cochran. He had the pose, he was fashionable, and he was quite ahead of the game as a guitar player. If you play “Something Else” by Eddie Cochran now (gasps) — it comes to life instantly. Chuck Berry changed the whole thing again with his poetry and his lyrical playing. It was momentous as a young boy trying to learn a few riffs. It was the pure, utter enjoyment of learning things I liked from other people. Most of them were American records. American records were important in England.

I’ve heard so many British rock bands from that era say, “We were just trying to play blues music, but we didn’t know how since we weren’t American.”

It’s kind of true in a way. I don’t think people realize how important the blues was to people like us young Englishmen. We’d never heard anything like it! They were the prime influence along with skiffle, which sort of bridged that gap between blues and rock.

Hank Williams was also really important. I regarded him a rock and roller, even though the instrumentation was different. The emotions, the grit, the subject matter, the pain, and the humor was early rock and roll. Look at the type of songs that Hank Williams was writing about. It was happening in north London in work class families. They were suffering pain and social injustice. It was an incredible influence on us young English guys growing up, trying to grapple with the blues.

Was there a moment where you were learning guitar? … I’m assuming your brother was doing —

The same thing, just in a different room!

Yeah, so learning these things separately, how did it come about that you guys said, “Hey, let’s play music together?”

I don’t know! We just sort of grew together with the playing. We loved The Ventures and Johnny and the Hurricanes, so Ray and I used to play a lot of instrumental duo stuff together. Then there was Chet Atkins, with those weird chord inversions he used which he picked up from those country players. We didn’t know what they were, so we were trying to copy them with our fingers stretched all over the fretboard!

How old were you when you started doing more than just copying and tried to write your own riffs?

It came right around about 14. Ray is three years older. We’d play some Ventures tunes in my dad’s pub, but then we mess around with writing songs. When you’re starting out, you borrow a bit from there and a bit from there. I thought, “It can’t be that hard!” We didn’t know, but it is!

It’s interesting that you say “it can’t be that hard.” I’ve found that when a lot of people first start making music, it’s not that hard. Because you think it’s not. Then the more you learn, the harder it gets.

It’s true! I remember the first five chords and the first few riffs I learned from Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran. I thought we knew it all. I said, “Music? Got it!” But then we got in the studio, and you learn about phrasing. “What is that? I don’t know how to do that!” You’d try to do solos, and it’s like, “What the hell do I do?” Sometimes you get lucky. How many wrong notes do you play? What is a wrong note? Sometimes when you don’t know what you’re doing, you do know in some strange way.

That’s one of the things I love about your early work. It sounds so visceral.

We didn’t have time to think about it. We had to do it in a few hours, otherwise it didn’t get done. We wanted to make records, and we wanted to get stuff out. The quickness of it helped me and Ray, because if we sat down and had the time to think about it … God knows where it would’ve ended up (laughs). The more you think about things sometimes, the worse it gets.

How do you feel about the records where you had more time? Eventually The Kinks didn’t have to just go in the studio and bang out a single.

The early singles, you had three hours for the A-side and the B-side. There’d be an EP if you’re lucky. It was a good way to learn, to craft what was to come next. So when albums like [“The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society”] and “Arthur” came along, it was great. That was such an interesting time. The craft of how to record a song suddenly emerged on the horizon. When the record companies started taking The Kinks more seriously, we could make proper albums. You have to learn how to record rather than just make music. It’s very different.

As that progressed, how did that affect your relationship with your brother?

Oh, things were always up and down. I don’t know if you’ve got brothers, but … it’s just life. Even things like coming home from school and having lunch. I stole a french fry off his plate, and he stabbed a fork into my hand. It’s just what happens with people who grew up in those days. You’re always so close, getting on each others nerves. “Leave me alone! Go away!” In another respect, I learned so much from listening to people like The Everly Brothers. It couldn’t have been much fun for them either, but their music was immense.

You hear people talk about family and say, “I love my family; everything is great!” But some of the best music from families came from —

Problems — like difficulties Ray and I had just growing up together. Even him cheating at tennis; everything! But then when you think through the history of Kinks music, so much of it is drawn from that family. The characters! Though the names might be changed, the people we drew inspiration from were family. “Muswell Hillbillies” and “Village Green,” it’s very family-oriented.

A big, big thing was the humor. The Kinks’ sense of humor really did open up the music to a bigger vista. Humor makes you think differently, and it can highlight something in a more poignant way. Humor has always been a central part of Kinks music. Ray and I are so different, even growing up. Totally different ways of looking at the world, yet there was a telepathy. With humor, we’d just have to look at each other and burst out laughing. It would just be someone’s funny shoes.

There’s themes that have always been very important to The Kinks music, like love and loss and isolation and abandonment. There are these things we all go through, and we tried to explore it. Ray is a great observer of people, and he always had this uncanny knack for being able to say the right thing at the right time. There are so many elements involved.

When you started writing music, when you started a band — did you think there was a chance it would last longer than a few months?

Absolutely not! I thought, “Do it now while we think of it, because it might not be there in a year’s time.” I kind of still think like that. I get an idea, and I write it down. I’ve always had that feeling like you never know what can happen. Especially in The Kinks’ career, the up and down thing. You get incredible success, and two years later nobody wants to know you. What a fickle world we live in. So you just keep bashing away, doing what seems natural to do. Once you start losing that feeling of emotional connectedness to music, you should give up.

WATCH: Where this journalism legend finds his stories

What is the future of American journalism?

The best stories won’t come from an interview with lawmakers in the Beltway or by way of a soundbite on cable news, according to legendary journalist Gay Talese. With six decades of experience as a writer and author who built his career on spending extended time with his interview subjects, Talese knows a thing or two about good storytelling.

When Talese visited Salon’s studios this winter to speak with Amanda Marcotte about his book “High Notes: Selected Writings of Gay Talese,” he spoke about representation in mainstream media and the role of the journalist.

This summer at Salon, we’re reminded of Talese’s wisdom as we launch the Young Americans Project, an initiative in which 30 journalist students from states that voted Republican in the 2016 presidential election tell stories from their corner of America.

The first two stories in the series are from a cattle farming family in Nebraska and the patrons of a gun range in Kansas.

As Talese put it, “even those who are not in the newspapers, not on the magazines, and not considered newsworthy, have something to say.”

On why Donald Trump’s victory was a surprise to mainstream media

What caught them by surprise is that they were not used to talking to people who might not have been educated on the level they are, the underclass, if you will. They might be in smaller cities. They might be in places that are not considered centers of power and privilege. They are people whose voices, even if it’s not articulate, should be heard.

On the journalists being the “foot soldiers” of history

The journalist is the first person to give a kind of mood on a daily basis of what is going on in the country, the thinking, as well as the actions of a country.

On journalism today

Journalists in the early Trump era are still unaware of how vast and varied the American experience is because they talk too often to the people in power. If I were running a newspaper today or running a network, I would break up the bureaus and have those people not clustered as you see them every day, at the presidential news conference jammed together in Washington. I’d have them around covering the country from the level of state capitals or from smaller cities.



Watch Talese’s interview with Salon, above, on why traveling to communities beyond New York and Los Angeles and telling those stories is important in understanding how national policies play out. Watch the full interview here.