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More than 28 million children across the US are now eligible to receive Covid-19 vaccinations, a step that could relieve anxiety for families, bring more kids back to schools, and slow the spread of the disease.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for kids between the ages of 5 and 11 after an advisory committee voted 14-0 to recommend the shots. The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration last week granted an emergency use authorization to the vaccine, concluding that its benefits outweigh the risks in young kids.
Distribution of these vaccines has already begun, and the CDC expects to reach “full capacity” for pediatric vaccines by the week of November 8.
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Immunizing young children against Covid-19 would make it more difficult for the coronavirus to spread and protect kids from falling ill. It’s big news for parents and kids, in part because the vaccine could ease the return to in-person schooling. “Vaccinating younger children against Covid-19 will bring us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy,” said acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, in a statement.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine currently has full FDA approval for people ages 16 and older and a separate emergency use authorization for adolescents between 12 and 16. The emergency-use designation allows health workers to administer new vaccines during a public health emergency based on data from clinical trials. Full approval requires more clinical data and allows manufacturers to market vaccines and continue selling them after the public health emergency ends.
While children are generally at much lower risk of severe illness from Covid-19 than older adults, at least 690 children from birth to the age of 18 have died from the disease in the US so far. About 8,300 5- to 11-year-olds have been hospitalized for Covid-19, and at least 146 have died. Vaccines will drastically lower the chances of that happening, while also whittling down the risk that children will pass on the virus to others.
Although vaccines are the most effective tool for containing Covid-19, the experiences of older adults show that they’re not always enough. Infections after vaccination, known as breakthrough infections, are usually mild, but they have sickened and killed some people. The protection offered by vaccines can also wane over time. Changes in the virus itself have created variants like delta, which spreads more readily and can evade immune protection. That’s why health officials have recommended that vaccinated people continue to wear masks and maintain social distance in high-risk situations, like crowded indoor environments.
It’s not clear yet how much longer such measures will remain in place in schools, but as more kids get their shots, the odds rise that students can go to class without masks.
Why Covid-19 vaccines for kids took so long to be approved
In the early days of the pandemic, doctors reported that adults were most vulnerable to severe illness from Covid-19, particularly older adults and those with preexisting health conditions like high blood pressure and other heart conditions. That trend has continued, and unvaccinated adults continue to experience the largest number of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease.
By contrast, children appeared to be at far lower risk of contracting the disease and seemed to have less severe outcomes, so young people became a lower priority for vaccinations than adults. However, as the vaccines rolled out and more adults gained immune protection, the relatively small number of infections in children started making up a larger proportion of Covid-19 cases.
“The focus was to get a vaccine for adults first,” said Kawsar Talaat, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who led a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trial in children. “Once the trial in adults was finished, then it started going down in age.”
The initial clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, also known by the brand name Comirnaty, included participants aged 16 and up. Then the companies conducted further trials with the same vaccine formulation in kids as young as 12, which led experimenters to reconsider what dose of the vaccine was needed in young children.
“The incredibly robust immune response in the 12 to 15-year-olds made them think that maybe they didn’t need that high of a dose,” Talaat said. “There was a new study that started to look at the vaccine specifically in kids under 12, and we decided to test different doses.”
Researchers repeated the clinical trials in 5- to 11-year-olds, but with about one-third of the dose of vaccine that’s used in adults. The lower dose aims to minimize side effects and account for the fact that young children are both physically smaller and tend to have more robust immune systems than adults.
“Kids are not just little adults,” said Jennifer Nayak, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “Their size is different, but their immune systems are also different.”
Children who received the low-dose Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, 10 micrograms, experienced an immune response comparable to adults who got the higher dose, according to the Pfizer/BioNTech trial. After the second injection, the trial showed, the vaccine was 90.7 percent effective at preventing symptomatic cases of Covid-19.
The trials, however, included just 4,600 children, compared to the trial in adults that included 44,000 participants. The pool of children in the trial was smaller because the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has already been administered to hundreds of millions of people around the world with a strong safety record.
However, some complications did emerge. For instance, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is not recommended for people who are severely allergic to any vaccine ingredient, or who had an allergic reaction to the first dose. Researchers have also found that some recipients of mRNA vaccines, like the one from Pfizer/BioNTech, may be linked to rare cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle.
The trials in children showed no serious side effects, but some reported symptoms like pain at the injection site, redness, swelling, chills, and fever, with more side effects reported after the second dose.
While the wait for Covid-19 vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds has been agonizing for kids and adults alike, this is still a record-breaking pace for vaccine approval. The previous record for a pediatric vaccine was held by the mumps shot, which took four years to develop.
Only 18 months have passed since the World Health Organization declared the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 11 months have passed since the FDA granted its first emergency use authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine.
What vaccinating children means for the US epidemic
It’s clear that children have suffered greatly from the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the kids who have been sickened and killed by the disease, millions more have lost caregivers and family members or struggled to keep up with their education as schools shifted to remote learning. The pandemic has also taken an enormous toll on mental health.
And though almost all children survive coronavirus infections, they can still infect others who are more vulnerable to some degree. That not only threatens to make other people sick, but also increases the chances that the virus will acquire dangerous mutations. So vaccinating children is likely important not just to protect them individually, but to limit the further spread of Covid-19.
Yet the current stage of the US epidemic is different from when Covid-19 vaccines began distribution to adults in December 2020. At that time, there were critical limitations on US supplies of the vaccine, so health officials debated exactly who should be at the front of the line.
Now, the US has stockpiled lots of Covid-19 vaccines, and some adults have become eligible for booster doses. Young children do remain at a lower risk of severe Covid-19 than adults, so health officials recommend that children receive their first injections at doctor’s offices rather than mass-vaccination sites.
“As a mom, I encourage parents with questions to talk to their pediatrician, school nurse or local pharmacist to learn more about the vaccine and the importance of getting their children vaccinated,” said CDC director Rochelle Walensky in a statement.
One concern, however, is that families will decide whether to vaccinate their children, likely along the same fault lines that have defined Covid-19 vaccinations for adults. Age, income, ethnicity, and political beliefs are key variables shaping whether Americans get vaccinated, and some families seem especially hesitant about vaccinating young kids. (Having only an emergency-use vaccine authorization for young kids may contribute to hesitancy, despite safety data backing it.) School districts around the US will also come to different conclusions about whether to mandate, encourage, or remain indifferent about children getting their shots.
“I imagine there is going to be a huge amount of geographic variability on this,” said Nayak.
So far, vaccination rates are highest in older people and lowest in younger people, and if the pattern holds, it’s likely that 5- to 11-year-old children will have some of the lowest rates of vaccine uptake. Getting those numbers up will take time.
Another hurdle is that not every child has good access to medical professionals and can easily get to a doctor to receive a shot. Misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, like the myth that they cause reproductive harm, could interfere with the rollout as well, according to Nayak.
Still, the more people who are vaccinated against Covid-19, the harder it is for the virus to spread. As more children head back to schools in person and more people gather indoors, having 5- to 11-year-olds vaccinated could blunt another winter spike in infections across the whole population. “We’re seeing that in places with high vaccination rates, transmission is lower than in places with low vaccination rates,” Talaat said. “I’m really excited about vaccinating my 10-year-old.”
Researchers are still planning to keep an eye on the children who participated in clinical trials for more than two years, to keep track of their level of protection and to monitor for any potential long-term complications. Some fraction of vaccinated children are also likely to experience breakthrough infections, and over time, protection from the vaccine may wane.
There are also Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials underway in children as young as 6 months old, so even more kids in the future may be eligible to get these shots. But again, even if they gain approval, the vaccines will only make a big difference if kids actually get them.
Every year, thousands of whales strand — meaning that they wind up trapped on beaches or in shallow waters — and it’s really hard to figure out why.
It’s not for lack of trying. Teams of forensic researchers investigate stranded whales, studying organs, analyzing body parts with CT scanners, digging through stomach contents, and checking skin for scarring. But these meticulous whale detectives still often don’t find any answers.
“We can only about 50 percent of the time, if that much, give you a solid answer of why that animal died and why it’s stranded,” says Darlene Ketten, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who refers to her work as “CSI: The Beach.”
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One reason it’s hard to figure out how whales die is that scientists don’t know that much about how they live, Ketten explains on the latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about mysteries in science. They range widely across the planet and dive deeply. There are many things about their complicated bodies we don’t yet understand. And these researchers are often working with whale carcasses that have been decaying for days, which can distort the evidence left behind.
Some beached whales are even more difficult to study because they’re really, really old. In 2011, Nick Pyenson, the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, took on a cold case that had gone unsolved for a long time — seven to nine million years, to be precise.
Pyenson, who is also the author of Spying on Whales, was on a research trip in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a beautiful expanse of rock and sand that’s flecked with orange, beige, and purple because of the presence of iron and other minerals. He was there to research the origins of a nearby ocean current — but along the way, he got distracted.
“There’s all these whale skeletons by the side of this hill,” Pyenson says one of his colleagues, Mario Suarez, told him one day. “You need to check it out! It’s amazing!”
The hill was known locally as “Cerro Ballena,” or “Whale Hill,” because fossilized whale bones had been found there in the past. Bulldozers had just come through to cut a path for a new highway, and they exposed more skeletons. When Pyenson went to look, he was completely overwhelmed.
“It was whale skeleton after whale skeleton after whale skeleton, complete from nose to tail. Some of them stretched out almost like snow angels the kids make,” Pyenson recalls. “It’s as if they had died and their skeletons were not disturbed.”
This was almost unheard of: full, beautifully preserved skeletons, stretching out for 40 feet in every direction. “In the field, you spend a lot of time searching, and often times you just find a boulder with a few bits of bone — and that is a good day,” Pyenson says. “A really good day is finding more than just a few bits of bone, or a partial skeleton. If you find a head with that skeleton, that’s a home run.”
Once he’d processed what he was seeing, Pyenson realized that he was going to have to start a whole new research project to figure out what exactly had happened to these whales. It seemed like an ancient stranding — possibly one of the best-preserved ones — but it wasn’t going to be easy to solve. There were no tissues to study, so he couldn’t analyze organs or skin, as Ketten and her fellow researchers do with modern whales. Fossilization also changes the minerals in the bones, and rock layers compress them into new shapes, so the bones were somewhat unreliable witnesses.
Pyenson and his colleagues used 3D-scanning technology to make models of the whale skeletons to study them back home. They carefully analyzed the soil and layout of the surrounding area, and finally landed on three big clues.
First, the skeletons were entangled in each other and almost entirely unscavenged, which suggested that these animals had died suddenly. Second, there were many species at this ancient graveyard — whales, but also other adult and juvenile animals, which told Pyenson that the die-off was not limited to whales.
The third big clue came from a close study of the local geology, which suggested these creatures had died in four separate events over the course of around 10,000 years. So whatever was killing the whales had happened several times. That essentially ruled out an infrequent natural disaster like a volcanic eruption.
Pyenson began thinking about cyclical changes to the ocean that could kill off lots of different animals, and fast. “I started moving towards the idea of harmful algal blooms being a cause,” he says. Algal blooms, or red tides, are troublesome to this day. They occur when populations of microorganisms explode in a body of water — sometimes when agricultural runoff floods a lake or ocean with nutrients like nitrogen. These tiny organisms can produce toxins that can prove very deadly, very quickly.
Pyenson theorized that runoff from mineral-rich surrounding areas — minerals that still lend the sands of the Atacama their vibrant colors — could have periodically caused algal blooms in the ocean that once covered this area. But he wanted evidence that would hold up in the court of scientific opinion.
If this were a fresh crime scene, he could have rooted around in the whale’s guts, found a bunch of toxins, and caught the red tide red-handed. But because his crime scene was millions of years old, he could only study his photographic models instead. Those kept showing that the whale skeletons were surrounded by rings of orange sediment — mats of iron oxide, which Pyenson interprets as possible algae in the fossil record. “I kept on wondering, is this the algae of death?” Pyenson says with a laugh.
His team brought samples of this orange sediment back to the US and examined them under an electron microscope. The images included tiny spheres that were the right size to be an algae of death, Pyenson says, but all their distinguishing features had been wiped away by millions of years.
“We are so close to a smoking gun,” he says. “It’s tantalizing. But that’s how a lot of historical science goes. You struggle with it and you want to get at the answer. But sometimes the evidence you’re able to find to answer your questions is not entirely satisfying.”
Jeremy Goldbogen, a marine biologist at Stanford University, read Pyenson’s paper in 2014 and told the journal Science that the positions of the various skeletons seemed consistent with a stranding.
David Caron, who has researched algal blooms at the University of Southern California, was also asked about Pyenson’s research in 2014 and told National Geographic that present-day algal blooms also wipe out a wide range of marine animals. “There’s certainly thousands of sea lion deaths, dozens to hundreds of dolphins, untold hundreds of pelicans that all have been wiped out with the same toxic event,” he told the magazine.
According to Pyenson, these parallels between the past and the present flow in both directions. “I find studying past worlds to be a kind of time travel,” he says. “You get to go these past worlds that almost seem like alien worlds.”
Even if he’s never able to definitively pinpoint what happened at Cerro Ballena, Pyenson says the site suggests that whale strandings were occurring millions of years before modern humans evolved. That’s helpful context for researchers who are trying to prevent strandings in the present day.
For example, a large proportion of the fossils come from baleen whales, even though baleen whales make up only a small fraction of whale strandings today. So what’s changed between then and now? For one thing, centuries of whaling have decimated populations of baleen whales, Pyenson says.
These strandings have been happening “ever since there were whales,” says Ketten. But humans are now contributing to the problem, whether through whaling, plastic pollution, or climate change. “What we have to be responsible for is actions that we take in the ocean that may be … causing animals to become less fit, to be less healthy, to be less able to reproduce, to mate, to find food.”
Whale fossils like the ones Pyenson studied in the Atacama Desert can serve as a sort of snapshot or baseline, revealing how whale strandings looked before humans ever came along. And more researchers can establish about the distant past, the more they may know about the effects that humans are having on these majestic mammals.
When SpaceX launches its first all-civilian crew into space later this fall and takes a multi-day trip circling the Earth, humanity can follow along online thanks to an exclusive documentary deal Netflix sealed with Elon Musk’s private space company.
The first two installments of the five-episode miniseries, Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, will debut on the streaming platform September 6 and will be the closest Netflix has come yet to covering an event in “near-real time,” the company said on Tuesday. Over the course of September, a team of videographers will follow the civilian astronauts, including billionaire Jared Isaacman, who will be piloting the spacecraft, as they prepare for the journey and eventually launch into space. If all goes as planned, Netflix will release two more episodes September 13; it will film the actual launch on September 15 and then stream it as a “feature-length finale” at the end of the month.
Netflix is making it clear that it wants us to think the mission, which will also raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, is really for everyone. One promotional poster for the show declares, “This September, we’re all going to space.” The streaming platform is even releasing a live-action/animated show to explain the mission to kids and their families.
But SpaceX and Netflix are hardly the only companies hoping to capitalize on the historic shift to commercial space travel. The Inspiration4 mission and its streaming special mark a new era of live broadcasting from space. The rise of space tourism also seems ripe for the streaming age, a time when people can watch these events almost anywhere, and the entertainment industry has already started turning billionaires’ joyrides in zero gravity into massive media events.
“Shooting something into space, that’s something that’s going to bring in subscribers globally,” Julia Alexander, a senior strategy analyst at Parrot Analytics, told Recode. Alexander added that growing demand and “the fact that they’re relatively cheap to produce compared to the high-profile prestigious dramas with the big Hollywood talent” means we’ll see many more space-bound reality shows in the future.
The space-focused science series Nova was the eighth-most popular documentary series in the United States between June 2020 and July 2021; last year, the Cosmos: Possible Worlds featuring Neil deGrasse-Tyson saw 18 times the average demand for science and nature documentary content, according to Alexander. And let’s not forget that the data-driven nature of platforms can steer viewers to specific types of shows.
“Netflix and other streaming platforms are able to create niche content like this because they are able to use their customer data to match the content to the interests of their consumers,” Michael Smith, an information technology and marketing professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told Recode in an email.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are also acutely aware that their launches can act as advertising for their brands, affiliated companies, and commercial space tourism in general. Accordingly, they’ve invested heavily into incorporating expert commentators, live updates, and streaming coverage of launches. Virgin Galactic has even recruited a TikTok influencer for an upcoming flight.
Millions tuned into Blue Origin’s YouTube channel for the July 20 launch that carried Jeff Bezos on a suborbital flight along with the oldest and youngest person to ever visit space, pilot Wally Funk and Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen.
“We also wanted to show this is a true rocket ride experience. There are fewer than 600 people who have ever been to space,” Linda Mills, Blue Origin’s vice president of communications, told PR Week of the event. “To demonstrate that specialness and uniqueness of the flight was something we were trying to get across to future customers.”
Bezos’s flight was also the first — and for now, the only — rocket launch that Amazon customers could watch live on Prime Video.
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More reality shows filmed from space are planned for the near future. An American production company called Space Hero is working on a contest-based show that will have average people train and compete for the chance to win a very expensive trip to the International Space Station. Like Netflix, the company says it’s focusing on “opening space up to everyone” while offering the first-ever truly off-planet experience.” Space Hero even signed a contractor agreement with NASA in April.
Of course, rocket launches as blockbuster media events predate the streaming era. From the early days of the space program, NASA missions were live demonstrations of national achievement, and humanity’s journey to the final frontier was the stuff of national news broadcasts. An estimated 600 million people watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. While enthusiasm for broadcasting space events in real time dwindled after the Challenger explosion in 1986, private space companies are once again trying to market launches as something everyone on Earth can watch live.
That messaging has the convenient effect of distracting viewers from the fact that commercial space tourism, at least for now, is an environmentally questionable hobby for the ultrarich that won’t immediately accomplish much in terms of advancing our scientific understanding of space. But while criticism of billionaires’ space dreams surged following Bezos’s launch, that same narrative may not pop up with Netflix’s latest SpaceX show, says Alexander from Parrot Analytics.
“I imagine SpaceX has some form of say in what is going on,” she told Recode. “Netflix just wants to carry it and make the best docu-series possible.”
In 2017, an evolutionary biologist named R. Alexander Pyron ignited controversy with a Washington Post commentary titled “We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.” He wrote: “Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.”
Pyron’s take challenged the decades-old idea that biodiversity is a good thing — that humans should strive to preserve all forms of life on Earth and their interconnectedness across ecosystems. It prompted scientist and writer Carl Safina to mount a passionate defense of biodiversity, calling Pyron’s stance “conceptually confused” and containing “jarring assertions.” Safina’s most cutting rebuke was that belittling biodiversity derails environmental conversations. “It’s like answering ‘Black lives matter’ with ‘All lives matter,’” he wrote. “It’s a way of intentionally missing the point.”
Nobel Prize winners co-signed more rebuttals. Professors blogged long meditations on why endangered species need to be saved. There were scientists who had previously questioned a hyperfocus on saving species, to be sure, though none had done so in such a public and broad-sweeping manner as Pyron. Josh Schimel, an ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, wrote: “Remember, you are a scientist — it is not your job to be right. It is your job to be thoughtful, careful, and analytical.” Pyron declined a request for comment for this story.
Ginger Allington, a landscape ecologist and professor at George Washington University who tracks the scientific debate around “biodiversity,” says this scientific back-and-forth reflects increasing conflict about the importance of biodiversity and species loss.
The most common way to measure biodiversity is to count the number of species in a certain place, also known as “species richness.” But critics question the usefulness of this number and argue that the concept has always been fuzzy, even to scientists, akin to a “new linguistic bottle for the wine of old ideas.”
A handful of scientists want to do away with the term biodiversity altogether — and have been trying to do so since the late 1990s. The concept, they say, is hard to quantify, hard to track globally over time, and actually isn’t an indication of what people commonly picture as a “healthy” ecosystem. (Scientists are generally reluctant to describe ecosystems in terms of “healthy” or “unhealthy,” which are value judgments.)
Last year, the United Nations reported that the world has failed to reach even one of the major biodiversity conservation targets it had set for itself in 2010. In the face of accelerating species and habitat loss, countries are now committing to protecting 30 percent of land and water by 2030. This fall, 193 nations are set to attend the virtual Convention on Biological Diversity to hash out a plan to stop biodiversity loss. (A draft of that plan was published last month.) In the US, the Biden administration has proposed its own game-changing approach to nature conservation. Meanwhile, a coronavirus pandemic that may have begun in animals reminds us that we are fundamentally linked to the animals in these critical habitats.
Against this backdrop, a new generation of scientists is taking up the debate about what to do about “biodiversity” itself — the scientific concept, its popular understanding, and indeed the very word. As Allington told Vox: “There’s just a lot of drama.”
The backstory of biodiversity
Before there was biodiversity, there was BioDiversity. A key moment in the evolution of the word came at the National Forum on BioDiversity, held at the Smithsonian Institution and National Academy of Sciences, in 1986. Speakers included Jared Diamond, who later authored Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the biologist E.O. Wilson, who most recently popularized the idea of protecting half the planet.
Diamond and Wilson — along with seven other white male scientists in attendance — dubbed themselves the “Club of Earth” and held a press conference, telling reporters that biodiversity loss was the second-biggest “threat to civilization.” The first? Thermonuclear war.
Few women scientists or non-Western experts were featured. And not everyone felt comfortable crowning biodiversity as a scientific silver bullet, for that matter. One news report from the time quoted biologist Dan Janzen, who said at the forum that “one shouldn’t use the number of species as the only criterion for earmarking an area for conservation.” Janzen would later call the forum “an explicit political event” and said that the word biodiversity got “punched into that system at that point [in time] deliberately.”
Still, the forum drew 14,000 in-person attendees. Another 10,000 watched a live “teleconference” of key panelists beamed around the world. “BioDiversity: The Videotape,” a campy VHS recording of the teleconference spliced with wildlife footage, sold out. The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Time all covered the event, marking “the first time that biological diversity … had received such a broad public airing,” a December 1986 article in the journal BioScience noted. The forum not only streamlined the term — thanks to a suggestion by biologist Walter Rosen — but brought the buzzword to the forefront, as the growing rate of global species extinctions was given both a name and an urgency. “The biodiversity crisis,” Wilson said at the forum, “is a real crisis.”
Against the odds, the idea of biodiversity spread outside of science and around the world. “I’d compare the market penetration of ‘biodiversity’ to Madonna,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University.
Pimm witnessed the word’s use rise suddenly in the 1980s as a young associate professor. Before then, Pimm had no simple name for the kind of research he was doing — now called conservation biology — and, more problematically, no term for what he was measuring out in the field. And so biodiversity “hit several things simultaneously,” he said. “It’s easy to popularize, it captures people’s imagination, and it’s scientifically credible.”
Three ecologists shaped “biodiversity” into the kind of science that goes mainstream, according to Pimm. Thomas Lovejoy coined the term “biological diversity” in the 1980s. Elliott Norse defined it as the variety of genes, species, and ecosystems in a given area. And Wilson, who initially deemed the contraction biodiversity “too glitzy,” ultimately popularized the word. In 1992, the UN codified the word biodiversity — and Norse’s definition — into the Convention on Biological Diversity, a multilateral treaty.
Biodiversity was thus conceived to capture two notions: a world teeming with wildlife, and the political problem of stopping extinctions. The idea had become “a force” capable of influencing global society, as climate and environmental law expert David Takacs wrote in his 1996 book The Idea of Biodiversity. “It is difficult to distinguish biodiversity, a socially constructed idea, from biodiversity, some concrete phenomena,” Takacs wrote.
But over the years, biodiversity has come to mean many things to different people — from “local species” to “wildness” to “natural balance” to just “a fancy word for nature,” according to a study of public opinion in Scotland. Researcher R.A. Lautenschlager, in a 1997 scientific article titled “Biodiversity is dead,” put it more bluntly: “Biodiversity has become so all-inclusive that it has become meaningless.”
“We need to be careful about what we are saying”
A practical question flows from this history: Does saving every species still matter?
Allington has seen colleagues try to address this kind of question publicly, and their answers, she says, tend to get misinterpreted. “We need to be careful about what we are saying,” she said.
To unpack this question in her college courses, Allington — who considers biodiversity to be “multifaceted” — passes out bags of mixed candy to her students, illustrating a key point: “The bags show that not all species play the same role in the ecosystem,” she said. Some species, like oysters, make key contributions to the ecosystem, and their disappearance would threaten all the rest. “The problem is that we still don’t know what functions the majority of species actually provide,” she said.
Scientists in today’s save-all-species debate disagree about where the science ends, and where the subjective idea of right and wrong begins. In this sense, debates about biodiversity may ultimately be debates about ethics, implicit human values, and whose ecological knowledge matters.
“Does every species matter?” asked Mark Vellend, a plant ecologist at University of Sherbrooke in Canada. “You cannot even give an answer unless you say, matter for what?”
How to measure “goodness”
The late biologist Michael Soulé, the “father of conservation biology,” was unequivocal that biodiversity is good — though its goodness, he wrote, “cannot be tested or proven.”
But in specific places, biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake is not necessarily good. On islands, for example, plant diversity is generally increasing because non-native species are arriving; some rare island plant species may go extinct as a result, but not always. Biodiversity might also be the wrong lens in ecosystems that weren’t diverse to begin with, like boreal forests close to the Arctic, which have low numbers of species that rarely face extinction even in the face of logging.
Many scientists recognize biodiversity as an imperfect yardstick. The total number of species, and how it changes, doesn’t capture all the ways that humans and other forces alter landscapes. “‘More biodiversity’ is not a universal prescription for conservation,” journalist Michelle Nijhuis writes in Beloved Beasts, a history of the conservation movement.
It also doesn’t capture the human experience of nature. A 2013 study — “Is biodiversity attractive?” — found that when it comes to outdoor recreation, visitors don’t actually prefer species-rich urban spaces. “Especially during the pandemic people [are] flocking to natural, wild spaces,” said Vellend. “Whether in those spaces there are 1,000 species or 100, to me that’s a pretty small part of the overall story.”
For many people, the on-ramp to nature is not through science. “Their point of entry is aesthetic,” Barry Lopez, the nature writer and Arctic Dreams author, said in a 2001 interview. “It’s not that they don’t know what biodiversity is, but it doesn’t have the pull,” he added. “The door for them lies elsewhere.”
A more measurable dimension of a place’s “goodness” within the human story, some scientists think, is ecosystem function. Forget the number of species, in other words, and focus on what each does for keeping an ecosystem enjoyable and humming, like the life-supporting role of oak trees — which support hundreds of species of caterpillars, a mainstay in most songbird diets — in North American hardwood forests. Using this framework, land managers would focus their conservation efforts on species that appear to play the most crucial role in a given ecosystem. (An 80-page US National Park Service report, called “Resist-Accept-Direct,” recently called for this triage approach.)
Pimm, for his part, thinks this framework is “total bullshit” — and he is not alone in that sentiment. It’s hard to develop a conservation plan around the emerging concept of ecosystem function, according to Pimm, precisely because we still know so little about the role of any given species in a place. “What does one even mean by ecosystem function?” he asked. “It doesn’t have any operational meaning.”
The concept of biodiversity is becoming even more influential in the realm of climate policy: In June, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first-ever joint report with the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Yet one of its authors, the Paris-Saclay University ecologist Paul Leadley, said while introducing the report that current on-the-ground approaches to saving species are essentially outdated. “We have to really rethink biodiversity conservation,” he said.
There is a broader movement to expand the meaning of “biodiversity”
So if the idea that saving every species saves the planet is imperfect, should we now abandon biodiversity?
“A concept can’t truly die until it’s got a replacement,” said Vellend. He says that the 1980s version of biodiversity should be seen as a starting point, with plenty of room for improvement. “Until somebody comes up with something better, we’re stuck with it.”
Even R. Alexander Pyron, the author of the explosive Post piece, cautioned against dropping “biodiversity” in a mea culpa he posted on his Facebook page after blowback from his peers. “I succumbed to a temptation to sensationalize parts of my argument,” Pyron wrote.
But others see an opportunity to expand the notion of biodiversity into something more inclusive and more just. Campaigns like #BiodiversityRevisited have created virtual dialogues and in-person workshops where an array of voices discuss ways of breathing new life into “biodiversity.” These discussions have pushed out possible replacement terms, like “fabric of life,” that might better capture the full range of life on Earth, from thriving trees to prospering pandas to healthy people.
One starting point might be to broaden the biodiversity concept to include humans, breaking down the barrier between our species and other animals. “My well-educated scientist colleagues will often slip and say ‘mammals and humans.’ Every time, I get a chill down my spine,” said Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist and curator at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Humans are mammals, after all. That even experts make these slips of the tongue “just highlights that there is still something to overcome there,” Hoekstra said.
Conservationists could also gain from a broadened notion of biodiversity that centers Indigenous and traditional knowledge, which has long been diminished by establishment science. Research shows that lands managed by Indigenous people are home to much of the world’s biodiversity, and that biodiversity tends to decline more slowly on those lands.
“Many of these Westernized concepts, we don’t see ourselves in them,” Andrea Reid, a fisheries scientist at University of British Columbia and a citizen of the Nisga’a nation, said. Indigenous concepts of conservation “include people within the system,” said Reid, who monitors diversity in British Columbia’s coldwater streams by counting species in ways that have cultural meaning to Indigenous people.
Reid has been working with Indigenous “knowledge keepers” who will go to a stream and look for certain species of dragonfly — for them, a “cultural indicator” that marks a healthy ecosystem. Other scientists might go to the same place and tally all insect species to measure local species richness. These measures can be used together, Reid says, to assess the overall condition of the stream over time.
This kind of “pluralistic” perspective, as some scientists call it, aligns with what Reid calls “two-eyed seeing” — a way of bringing together Indigenous and Western understandings. “It’s not about throwing something out, or just walking away from ‘biodiversity’ and its metrics,” Reid said. “It’s about enriching our understanding by bringing multiple perspectives to bear.”
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Michael Miranda had been fully vaccinated for over four months when he tested positive for the coronavirus. “I stared at my phone for a few moments, wondering if this was a death sentence,” said Miranda, who works as a probation officer in Hawaii. After flying home from a trip to the West Coast, Miranda had experienced chills, sneezes, and a fever of 102 degrees Fahrenheit. “I immediately began blaming all the unmasked people,” he said.
Daniele Selby, a writer in New York City, grappled with similar feelings when she started to experience exhaustion, significant congestion, headaches, and a loss of smell and taste. “I was pretty shocked to learn I’d tested positive,” she said. “I am fully vaccinated and have continued to wear masks … so to do all that and still get Covid-19 and feel ill has been pretty upsetting.”
The stories of vaccinated people with “breakthrough” cases of Covid-19, which are increasingly making news, affecting policy, and spreading on social media, have some common threads. A dozen vaccinated people told Vox that testing positive brought up feelings of shock, anger, fear, and even shame. Many said they’re finding themselves at the center of heated debates about vaccines, masks, and the future of the pandemic.
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“There have definitely been some that have tried to use [my] experience to discount the efficacy of the vaccines or to push unfounded cures on social media,” said André Gonzales, who traveled from Washington, DC, to New Mexico for a funeral in early June, and tested positive along with other vaccinated members of his family. Gonzales said he had grappled with “a lot of guilt” that he may have exposed “high-risk” family members and unvaccinated children to the virus.
“Patients definitely put a lot of emphasis on signaling to us that they had ‘done everything right’ before they got sick,” says David Putrino, a neuroscientist and rehabilitation expert at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who has treated a few people with breakthrough Covid-19. “I think that unfortunately there is an element of shame [or] guilt associated with getting Covid at this stage.”
People with breakthrough infections are not the first Covid-19 patients to have their stories politicized, or the first to feel guilt or shame after testing positive. But their experiences highlight some of the persistent fault lines in American attitudes toward the coronavirus right now. These cases are yet another example of the emotional toll of the pandemic, and are a frustrating reminder that the crisis isn’t over for anyone.
Patient experiences also show that while breakthrough infections are very unlikely to cause new waves of infection or overwhelm health care systems, they can still have significant ramifications for individuals, their families, and their communities — impacts that are often more difficult because they are unexpected.
There’s more to learn about breakthrough Covid-19
Breakthrough infections refer to positive tests for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in people who were fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Severe breakthrough cases are uncommon: More than 166 million people have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 7,525 breakthrough cases that led to hospitalization or death.
“The incidence is relatively low,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist. “But whatever we know as breakthrough data is absolutely an undercount.” The CDC says as much on its website, because reporting from health providers is voluntary and isn’t comprehensive.
“We still need more data on how common breakthrough infections are — and the CDC should be reporting this data,” added Julia Raifman, an assistant professor of health policy at Boston University. The CDC is not currently counting mild breakthrough cases of Covid-19, and Raifman suggested this absence of data could be contributing to public confusion about the level of risk facing vaccinated individuals.
As Katherine J. Wu has written in the Atlantic, the ability to develop Covid-19 is not what separates vaccinated and unvaccinated people. “The choice isn’t about getting vaccinated or getting infected,” Wu wrote. “It’s about bolstering our defenses so that we are ready to fight an infection from the best position possible.” If public health guidance suggests otherwise, it could run the risk of creating false expectations and even stigmatizing the experience of testing positive while vaccinated.
“Vaccinated people should know that their chances of infection are lower than those of unvaccinated people,” Raifman said. “But … infection will not be rare when there is uncontrolled transmission of Covid like we currently face.”
The stories of patients are being politicized
While stories of breakthrough Covid-19 are not representative of the majority of Covid-19 cases — they may be amplified precisely because they’re seen as surprising — many have gone viral on social media, and some have become fodder for commenters making inaccurate arguments against vaccines. Tweets from people with breakthrough infections garner thousands of likes and retweets, and responses range from supportive to skeptical. It can be overwhelming for patients who were not expecting a heated backlash.
“I could not believe how my post blew up,” said Melinda Simmons, a biology professor in Florida whose tweet about her case prompted more than 1,000 comments. “I tried to block the trolls and people using my post as an argument against vaccination, but I gave up after a while. I was sick, and dealing with the responses was exhausting.”
People who have been vaccinated respond with a wide range of reactions, too. “Some vaccinated people seem to respond with very high anxiety and fear, and talk about completely locking down,” said Mike McHargue, a Los Angeles-based author and media founder who tweeted about his breakthrough case of Covid-19 in early July. “Other vaccinated people say my case is a fluke, and they won’t tolerate masks, distancing, or other mitigations.”
Miranda said one person told him his illness was a consequence of “taking risks along with enjoying our freedom.” He felt this comment was political, and declined to respond. “I strongly believe that public health matters should never be politicized,” he said.
There’s still a gap between expectation and experience
Breakthrough infections encompass a wide variety of different experiences. Some are asymptomatic, as Vox’s Dylan Scott has reported. Most will not result in hospitalization. Non-hospitalized cases may be considered either mild or moderate depending on a patient’s symptoms, according to the National Institutes of Health.
However, cases that are defined as mild sometimes do not feel mild to patients, especially for vaccinated people who may be surprised to develop Covid-19 at all. “Medically, I had a ‘mild’ case, but nothing felt mild about it,” said McHargue. A month after the onset of his symptoms, he is still experiencing fatigue and tinnitus. A recent study in Israel found that some vaccinated health care workers with breakthrough infections developed symptoms that lasted for more than six weeks.
“Even if a symptomatic individual does not get hospitalized, [they] can still experience ‘long hauler’ symptoms and be affected in the long run,” Erik Blutinger, an emergency physician at Mount Sinai Queens, told Vox. He said it’s important to analyze all breakthrough cases, regardless of their severity, at least until scientists learn more.
Gonzales and his mother are also both dealing with lingering symptoms, including fatigue, body aches, and a cough. Gonzales had to delay his start date at his new job as a result. Like other Covid-19 patients with lasting symptoms, he and McHargue said that their illness had impaired their ability to work.
“Covid-19 took away 10 days of my life — 10 days of experiences that I’ll never get back,” Miranda said. “But most importantly, I missed the moment of saying goodbye to my uncle before he passed.” Because Miranda was sick with Covid-19, he was unable to visit the hospital where his uncle was being treated for a cardiac event. Other patients described difficulties quarantining from unvaccinated children in their households.
Recommendations for vaccinated people may continue to evolve as scientists and policymakers learn more about breakthrough infections. Rivera, the epidemiologist, echoed CDC guidance that most vaccinated people can avoid routine testing if they have not been exposed to the virus. She and Raifman, of Boston University, both agreed with the CDC in saying that vaccinated people in the US should wear masks indoors.
But Rivera voiced some uncertainty about the CDC’s current recommendation on exposures — that vaccinated people who come into contact with someone who has Covid-19 do not need to quarantine if they don’t exhibit symptoms. This is arguably too lax, she said. “I don’t think that it makes sense for people who have had a confirmed exposure to not pre-emptively … stay home.”
People with breakthrough infections remain grateful for vaccines
Because SARS-CoV-2 is still a novel virus, those infected are sometimes the first to report new experiences, and being first can exacerbate feelings of anxiety or shame. Covid-19 patients seem especially likely to be met with surprise or disbelief when their experiences are new or understood to be uncommon.
When Selby first became symptomatic, she took a rapid test, which came back negative. When her illness persisted, she asked family, friends, and health care workers for advice. “Everyone kind of had the same response: ‘I’m sure you’re fine, you’re vaccinated,’” Selby said. “The physician’s assistant seemed to imply I was overreacting, asking for another test.”
When Selby tested again and the result was positive, even she was surprised: “I had let myself be convinced I was overreacting.”
Four of the people with breakthrough cases who spoke to Vox said they had received surprised reactions from health care workers, and some spoke of conflicting advice. “The staff at the doctor’s office did seem spooked by us, mRNA-vaccinated people with Covid,” said McHargue. Gonzales said he sought care for his symptoms at an emergency room, where he was told he did not need to be tested because he was vaccinated. He later heard from his state health department, which disagreed and told him he needed to be added to the contact tracing database.
Since confirming her breakthrough infection, Selby has used social media to spread awareness about her experience. She thinks the message that breakthrough cases are “super rare” contributed to the doubt and disbelief she encountered from others.
In the process of sharing her story, Selby learned of other breakthrough cases in her wider network, and the knowledge has affirmed her own experience. “Obviously, it’s upsetting to hear other people were sick,” Selby explained. “But it was reassuring, in a twisted way … I kind of felt like my worries were validated.”
Selby is glad she got vaccinated, and the doctor who treated her breakthrough case thanked her for doing so. Other people with breakthrough infections echoed this sentiment.
“I think it’s possible … that I would be on a ventilator right now without the vaccine,” said McHargue. From the moment he tested positive, he was confident that he and his family would be okay, thanks to their vaccination status.
Gonzales was similarly grateful. “Being vaccinated is what saved not only my life, but the lives of my family as well,” he said. “What I went through, and what I saw my family go through, was difficult enough. I don’t want to imagine what it would have looked like had any of us been unvaccinated.”
Correction, August 11, 4:20 pm: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Michael Miranda is a parole officer. He is a probation officer.
There’s a cliché that has popped up for years in discussions of climate and weather disasters: You can’t blame any individual event on climate change. Climate is all about trends and statistics, the reasoning goes, so you can’t necessarily draw meaningful conclusions from a single data point, be it a heat wave, a hurricane, or a drought.
But in recent years, climate scientists have been pushing back against this notion: Bolstered with better data and even clearer trends, they’re no longer reluctant to point the finger back at humanity for worsening these calamities. In the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a team of leading researchers convened by the United Nations presented some of the most robust research that connects the dots. It shows how some greater weather extremes can be traced back to rising average temperatures, which in turn stem from emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from countries and corporations burning fossil fuels.
“On a case-by-case basis, scientists can now quantify the contribution of human influences to the magnitude and probability of many extreme events,” according to the report.
Scientists are not just confident that humans are warming the climate — that much is “unequivocal.” Now they’ve concluded it’s “an established fact” that signals of this warming shine bright in events like the severe heat and torrential rainfall that we’re seeing now, increasing their frequency, severity, or both. That’s why scientists only needed a few days to implicate climate change in recent Pacific Northwest heat waves, for example.
The field of extreme weather attribution has made enormous strides since the last major IPCC assessment in 2013, and it’s one of the most significant components of the new report. “What’s new in this report is that we can now attribute many more changes at the global and regional level to human influence — and better project future changes we will see from different amounts of emissions,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, during a press conference.
At the same time, the stunning, record-breaking disasters of recent memory have again forced a public discussion about the role of climate change. This year alone, the world has seen extreme fires in California, Siberia, Greece, and Turkey; devastating flooding in China and Germany; and heat waves and record drought across the US West, to name just a few.
The question is not whether these individual events were “caused” by climate change — such disasters arise from a confluence of factors and could still happen even if humans weren’t spewing heat-trapping gases into the sky. The question is: How has human-caused climate change altered their likelihood and their severity?
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a shift in the ways scientists answer that question,” said Kevin Reed, an associate professor at Stony Brook University who studies climate attribution but was not involved in the IPCC report. Rather than invoking general trends, scientists are now keen to quantify climate change’s role in specific events, and increasingly coming up with estimates while a given disaster is still fresh in people’s minds.
The revolution in attribution research highlights that climate change is not just a problem for the future; it’s being felt right now. As humanity’s role becomes increasingly clear, it could have far-reaching consequences for how we prepare for the future and for the countries and corporations that will shoulder the blame for climate disasters.
The science linking weather extremes to climate change is stronger than ever
The planet has warmed by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius on average, the first installment of the new IPCC report concludes, and the effects are visible now. The report dedicates a whole chapter just to attributing elements of extreme weather to humanity’s actions.
Here are some of the findings in how human influence is playing out now:
- It is “virtually certain” that the frequency and intensity of heat waves has shot up globally since the 1950s due to greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
- The report says there is “high confidence” that tropical cyclones like hurricanes are dishing out more rainfall due to climate change.
- There is “medium confidence” that warming is leading to less water availability over most land areas as it increases evaporation.
- Fire weather conditions — hot, dry, windy — have become more probable in some regions, scientists can say with “medium confidence.”
“Evidence of observed changes and attribution to human influence has strengthened for several types of extremes … in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes,” including fires, the IPCC report says. Much of this is due to emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, and gas, but changes in land use and aerosol pollutants play a role as well. And as average global temperatures continue to rise, the magnitude of these impacts will grow.
There are also aspects of extreme weather that don’t exhibit human influence, or haven’t been studied enough to yield conclusions. For example, there does not appear to be a distinct global or regional trend in the number of tropical cyclones, also known as hurricanes and typhoons. However, scientists do expect a trend toward higher wind speeds in these storms over the coming century.
Drought is another complicated phenomenon with different mechanisms at play, so it’s hard to make general conclusions about how climate change is influencing them. But scientists have found droughts that overlap with heat waves have become more frequent, and looking ahead, they have “high confidence” that drought will get more frequent and more severe in many parts of the world.
Some scientists have taken this research further by calculating the degree of human influence in specific events, often soon after they occur. The World Weather Attribution initiative, an international research consortium founded in 2014, examined the June 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Within a week, they concluded that the searing heat in the region “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
There are other examples of how scientists have traced the influence of climate change in extreme weather in the past few years:
- The WWA team looked at Australia’s massive bushfires in 2020 and found the likelihood of the severe heat, dryness, and winds that fueled the blazes has increased by at least 30 percent.
- The June 2020 heat wave in Siberia, in which temperatures north of the Arctic Circle topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38°C), was “almost impossible” without climate change.
- Since 1900, a storm like 2019’s Tropical Storm Imelda, which struck Texas with heavy floods, is now 1.6 to 2.6 times more likely and between 9 and 17 percent more intense.
- Another research team examined the 2017 record-breaking fire season in British Columbia. They determined that climate change increased the likelihood of fire conditions two- to fourfold and expanded the burned area between seven- and 11-fold.
- Warming since 1980 increased the record rainfall of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey by about 20 percent.
With more disasters looming on the horizon, scientists are preparing to conduct even more assessments and aim to come up with more precise attributions at a faster pace.
How climate change attribution science works, and how it’s improved
When a storm, heat wave, or flood strikes, scientists ask counterfactual questions: What would this event have looked like if humans didn’t change the climate? Or how often would you see an event like this in a world that hadn’t warmed?
There are several reasons scientists are better able to answer these questions now. For one thing, scientists have been able to observe climate change in real time. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from 400 parts per million in 2013 to almost 420 ppm this year. Computer models of the global climate system have been refined, and the computers themselves have gotten faster.
“The level of simulation and analysis we can do has improved,” said Reed. “Related to that, we have, in some cases, 10 years more of observations, which means we can build better models.”
The tricky thing is that climate change doesn’t just alter extreme weather — it changes everything. Every sunny day and rainstorm that’s occurring now is happening in a world that’s been warmed up. “Climate change is changing the characteristics of the weather we experience on a day-to-day basis,” Reed said. “Every storm is different because of climate change, because the underlying states are different.”
So to figure out how climate change has influenced a given disaster, scientists have to compare it to a baseline without climate change. One way to do this is to look at historical climate records prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, before humans started spewing gargantuan amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. Another way is to construct computer models that show what would have happened if people didn’t emit greenhouse gases.
The difference in the likelihood or severity of the disaster between what’s observed and what’s calculated without human influence tells scientists just how much climate change influenced the event.
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Attribution of extreme weather has real-world consequences
The more researchers know about the impacts of climate change, the more prepared people can be — not only to survive heat waves and hurricanes, but also to implement new climate policies and hold the worst contributors accountable for their actions.
For example, when a hurricane sends a storm surge inland, researchers can compare the flooding to the expected flood levels in a world where warming had not occurred. The First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that studies climate risks, did such an analysis of the flooding following Hurricane Florence’s landfall in the Carolinas in 2018. They found that sea level rise since the 1980s flooded over 11,000 additional homes than would have been inundated if water levels held steady. Findings like this could help planners identify new climate risks and prepare for them.
Extreme weather attribution could also play a role in lawsuits. “As confidence levels grow in the findings that scientists are making, it’s quite possible that it will have legal implications in the courtroom and elsewhere,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “That’s the sort of scientific conclusion that can have direct impacts on the outcome of litigation.”
There’s already a wave of climate change litigation in the US and in several other countries. Some cities have filed suit against oil companies for selling products that contribute to climate change while misleading the public about their harms. Several groups of youth activists are making the case that governments are not doing an adequate job of protecting against worsening climate change, thereby depriving them of a safe climate.
Will the improvements in extreme weather attribution help plaintiffs win these lawsuits? It’s not clear yet. “We haven’t really seen a battle of the experts in the courtroom as to whether an individual event can be attributed to climate change, and if so, what the legal repercussions of that would be,” Burger said.
On the other hand, the limiting factor in these lawsuits may not be the science but the law itself. For the most part, courts in the US have largely accepted the fundamentals of climate change and the conclusions of the IPCC in particular. The main hang-ups in many cases are whether the plaintiffs have standing to sue, and whether courts are actually the proper venue for directing climate policy. Some courts that have agreed climate change is an urgent threat say entirely new laws are needed to properly limit emissions.
But it doesn’t take a judge to rule on what the science now clearly shows. When it comes to climate change and the ensuing turmoil, humanity is guilty as hell.
There’s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We’ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, infecting people and, hopefully only in rare cases, getting them seriously ill. The realistic goal is to defang the virus — make it less deadly — not eliminate it entirely.
This is not a surrender to the virus. For a long time, we’ve lived with the seasonal flu, a family of viruses that kills up to tens of thousands of Americans each year. While we can and should take steps to mitigate the risks of the flu (including getting vaccinated for it every year), we’ve never been willing to shut down society or close in-person schooling to fully eradicate it. Americans have accepted some level of risk to continue living normally.
The same will likely be true with Covid-19. The highly transmissible delta variant appears to have cemented this possibility, showing the coronavirus will continue to spread even in states and countries with higher vaccination rates.
If you go back to the earlier days of the pandemic, the original hope with vaccines was more modest. Previously, the Food and Drug Administration set the standard for an acceptable Covid-19 vaccine at 50 percent efficacy. The expectation was that the vaccine wouldn’t stop all cases of Covid-19, but would at least reduce the severity of the disease. As Baylor College’s Peter Hotez put it at the time, “Even if it’s not the best vaccine, it still could prevent me from going to the hospital or worse.”
Yet somewhere along the way — perhaps with the news the vaccines were far more effective than expected — that message has been lost. And now anything short of perfection is perceived as a failure.
Consider the recent study, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The initial headlines about the study focused on the fact that three-fourths of cases tracked in the study were among vaccinated people, showing the virus spread in a very vaccinated community. The implication, propped up by the CDC’s new guidance that vaccinated people should wear masks indoors in public, was that the delta variant can spread at a high level among even the people who got their shots.
But if you dig into the details of the outbreak, they revealed some very good news for vaccinated people. Among the more than 1,000 cases so far linked to Provincetown, there have only been seven reported hospitalizations (some unvaccinated) and no deaths.
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If this was 2020, given overall hospitalization and death rates, the outbreak would have likely produced roughly 100 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.
The Provincetown outbreak, then, showed that the vaccines had worked to defang the coronavirus — to make it more like the flu.
“We should cheer,” Amesh Adalja at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told me. “The Provincetown outbreak, contrary to what the press reported, was evidence not of the vaccines’ failure but of their smashing success.”
In short: Pay attention to hospitalizations and deaths, not just cases.
There are concerns about “long Covid” — lingering effects in those infected, like overwhelming fatigue. Still, experts say serious long-term symptoms after a Covid-19 infection seem to be fairly rare (though this issue is still being studied). And, at any rate, these kinds of long-term symptoms aren’t unique to the coronavirus; they happen, for one, with seasonal flu.
While we still have to get more people vaccinated, at a certain point we’ll have to acknowledge we’ve done what we can. It might not be ideal, but we can learn to live with a vaccine-weakened version of Covid-19 — hopefully not too unlike how we’ve long dealt with the flu.
Last month, at the start of a fourth Covid-19 wave in the US, a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twitter. “No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,” she wrote. “I can’t continue to live with the toll on my body and mind. Even weekly therapy has not been enough to dilute the horrors I carry with me from this past year and a half.”
The nurse, Sara, who asked to be identified by her first name so she could speak freely about her experiences at work, told Vox that she’s been offered incredible bonuses in exchange for extra hours. She said she could make an entire month’s mortgage payment just by working one extra shift, but has declined. “We’re not soldiers,” Sara said. “We’re not the saviors of humanity. We’re humans who have families and the need to take care of ourselves.”
In June, Julia Belluz wrote for Vox about the many structural barriers that prevent physicians from getting mental health treatment. It led to an outpouring of support, and a question: What about the nurses?
The roughly 3 million registered nurses (RNs) currently employed in the United States are, in Sara’s words, “the eyes and the ears and hands and feet of providing health care.” But nurses are leaving the profession at a staggering rate. According to a 2021 report from Nursing Solutions, the turnover rate for registered nurses last year was close to 20 percent. This leaves hospitals understaffed: About 10 percent of hospital RN positions were vacant last year, the same report found, perpetuating a cycle of burnout and likely worsening the quality of care for patients.
As an ICU nurse, Sara said the pressure and strain have felt unbearable. When Covid-19 arrived, she was often the only health care provider in the room with a critically ill patient, “feeling like this person’s life was completely in my hands, and it was up to me,” she told Vox. She said her own symptoms now mirror some of those of post-traumatic stress disorder: traumatic flashbacks, nightmares, uncontrolled moods, and crying.
Sara was able to carve out time to find a therapist and join a virtual support group, but she worries that many nurses don’t have the capacity to seek support on their own. “It feels like everybody’s running on fumes,” she said. “We need to make the barriers to accessing [mental health support] quite a bit lower because people are just so exhausted.”
The mental health of nurses was taxed even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Female nurses in particular were at twice the risk of dying by suicide as women in the general population, according to research published earlier this year. And that’s only “the tip of the iceberg,” said Christopher Friese, a professor of nursing at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the study. “What I worry about is the large number of nurses that we can’t even quantify, that are suffering in silence.”
Friese, who has practiced as a registered nurse for 27 years, spoke with Vox about the toll nursing can take on mental health, and what has to change for nurses to get the support they need. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
“There’s real consequences for our nation’s health”
What have been some of the biggest strains on nurses, before the pandemic, that might put them at these greater risks for mental health challenges?
I think there are a couple of buckets to think about. The first bucket is their personal experience. Nurses are not only delivering care to the patients and their communities, but they’re also caring for their children, their family members, and loved ones. They take on an added caregiving role beyond their job. So I think we need to understand that better.
The second bucket is the workplace. The health care workplace has not been healthy for nurses for some time. We’ve known for over a decade that nurses have been concerned about their workloads. They’ve been concerned about the resources that they have to take care of patients or communities. And they are often the group that we add new tasks on to. So adding the electronic health record has placed that very heavy burden on nurses because nurses are sort of a catchall for all of that work. And we haven’t taken anything away from nurses. The only thing we’ve done is continued to pile on to their work.
And I think the final point that we need to be aware of, and I’ve certainly seen, is increased hostility in the workplace. Nurses more frequently are bearing the brunt of verbal and physical abuse from patients, patients’ family members, and some staff. And we have not created a safe environment to work.
Have you experienced some of these strains firsthand in your time as a clinical nurse?
Nursing is a very rewarding profession, but there are times when it can be very draining. I’m deeply worried by what I’m seeing. Despite all my experience, it is definitely harder work than it was when I started. It was getting harder before the pandemic, and the pandemic only exposed those fault lines where the system has not served nurses well.
Could you talk more about how Covid-19 might have impacted nurses’ mental health?
In our data, we had over 700 nurses die from suicide in the 2017-2018 period. That was an all-time high. So we were trending up, and then Covid-19 hits. They were dealing with these really risky clinical scenarios where we don’t have good information, early on in the pandemic. How do we protect people? Do people have the right protective gear?
There is also a unique combination of their personal health at risk, their loved ones’ safety, and then the societal split in our approach to this public health crisis, which you’re seeing right now. We have really good tools to protect our population — we have really effective and very safe vaccines. We’ve learned in this pandemic that masking and staying out of crowds is effective. And yet we have a swath of the population who is not doing that. And they’re in our ICU and they’re in our hospital beds, and nurses have to live with that duality.
The other thing we’re observing is staff shortage — either people have left the workforce, or they’re ill themselves, or their loved ones are ill and they’re caring for family members. Everybody’s picking up more work. That just perpetuates the cycle. We’re on a hamster wheel here, where nurses just can’t get off.
Are you worried about attrition from the nursing profession, especially from the added strain of the pandemic?
I’m deeply worried. I’m already aware of particularly experienced nurses who have left their clinical position, and you can’t really replace them, their decades of experience. Those are the folks who train our next generation and help support physicians and others. So it’s a real brain drain.
Then it creates this cyclical problem where you’re always running short. We have very clear evidence: when you don’t have enough nurses, patients have more complications, they’re more at risk of dying, etc. So there’s a direct connection to a healthy, fully staffed nursing workforce and public health. There’s real consequences for our nation’s health if we do not curb this crisis.
Access to mental health care isn’t just about health insurance
Do you find nurses tend to have good access to mental health care?
Most employed nurses have relatively good health insurance, so they probably have access on paper. But it’s very difficult for health care professionals — and especially nurses — to seek out mental health services because of the stigma we have in place. Nurses might be concerned that if they seek out mental health services and undergo treatment, that might jeopardize their employment.
There are numerous examples. As nurses are applying for positions and interviewing and going under intake questioning, they might disclose that they have a mental health condition or they’re taking medication. And leadership is questioning whether they’re suitable for those positions: Can they handle the pressure of that work? So that only makes it more likely that you’re not going to disclose and you’re not going to access services.
We need a really different kind of model for nurses. We all need mental health services that are safe, accessible, and confidential.
The final piece of that is the disciplinary process for nurses. Right now, if a nurse makes what is assessed to be a clinical error, we quickly go down the disciplinary route, and we don’t realize that there might be someone in trouble, a human being in front of us who needs care. Is this person well? Do they need help? And what kind of help? These should be the first questions we ask, and then we can get to the other things.
As my colleague Julia Belluz reported earlier this year, physicians often seem reluctant to get mental health treatment because in some states, and in some cases, they are worried it could jeopardize their medical license. Do nurses have similar disclosure requirements or licensing concerns?
I don’t know of boards of nursing that formally ask if you have a mental health diagnosis or you’re taking medication. But in a lot of the boards, you have these statements about “moral character.” Assessing one’s character can get wrapped into mental health very quickly in our country. So I think we really want to separate that out. We want people to feel comfortable knowing you can be an excellent nurse and also have a mental health condition. And we want to make sure that you’re getting the recommended treatment you need. It’s just like having diabetes or some other condition. We need to get that stigma out of mental health.
I appreciate there are many nurses who are very public about their struggles, but they’re the exception. And there’s nothing magical that would exempt nurses from having the same underlying health conditions — mental or otherwise — [as] the rest of the population.
Are you comfortable disclosing whether you’ve ever struggled with mental health issues as a registered nurse?
I wouldn’t say that I’ve had a crisis situation. I’ve certainly had stressful moments. I can vividly remember days on the unit even decades later. The work nurses do is physically demanding, and it can be emotionally taxing. It can also be very rewarding. But the kind of work we’re doing, with people’s lives in our hands in very fragile emotional states, you can’t just walk away from that. It sticks with you. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to navigate that, but there are certain events in my career that I will never forget and come back to haunt me.
Do you see your findings about suicide as a potential indicator for the risk of mental health challenges overall?
Below the surface of this is a much larger group of nurses who are, day-to-day, struggling with these issues. We may not even know they are in trouble or they are struggling, and we have no way to know whether they’re getting the help they need. The challenge is to make sure that we can keep them safe before they’re even contemplating suicide.
We have the tools to take better care of nurses
It seems like physicians and their struggles may get more attention than nurses, even though there are so many more nurses in the country. Why do you think that is?
First, we have better data collected on physicians, so it’s a bit easier to track them over time. Their professional organizations have a fairly robust data set. It’s been a little harder to track nurses over time. We only do surveys of nurses. I think, too, the medical profession has done a better job of understanding this risk and developing unique programs for physicians.
One of the areas to think about is the power differential. Physicians tend to enjoy a relatively privileged place, particularly in the US, relative to other health care workers. So their concerns and issues more often reach prominence. We don’t have a lot of information about other demographic factors, such as gender or sexual identity, etc., but you could imagine that groups that are historically disadvantaged are going to be less likely to be heard on this issue.
There’s a ton of other health care professionals — respiratory therapists, pharmacists — who have been strained, too. And the challenge is to get good data on them. This is only the surface of what the problem may be. We don’t have the fundamental research to help us understand why these things are occurring.
Are there other barriers you see standing in the way of nurses getting mental health care?
We need a different model that is specific to nurses. I think that’s the missing piece. We have specific programs for veterans. We have specific programs for rural residents and adolescents. We don’t really have that for nurses, despite the really alarming data we presented.
We also don’t know the sequence of events. Is it the workplace that’s triggering this? The family environment? Unless we do some really basic registry work, we’ll never know the answer to that. So it limits our ability to help, without research, and that adds to the stigma. If we don’t know what we’re dealing with, then we can’t even let nurses know that there are greater risks and maybe they need to reach out.
How can we take better care of nurses?
We all have a family member or a loved one who’s a nurse. And I think oftentimes we don’t necessarily check in with them and ask them how they’re doing, how their day was. We know their work is difficult. Sometimes they’re not able to tell us a lot for privacy reasons. But checking in with loved ones who are nurses, making sure they know they’re valued. If a family member is struggling, making sure they know that is a normal thing and that seeking help is perfectly okay.
I think we also need to have a conversation as a nation about how we value nurses — and how we structure health care so that they can actually be the best nurse they can be for our patients and for our loved ones. Right now, it’s very transactional. We really need to think carefully, particularly after this pandemic: Can we redesign their work so that we take full advantage of their clinical skill? I think right now we’re not doing that.
The last thing would be to advocate for research on nurses. That has not been valued. Just like we want better understanding of diabetes and cancer, we want to have a better understanding of: Are nurses at risk, and what can we do to help them? We have the tools to do this.
Do we as a society want to put value on this? Do we want to try to better understand how we can have a healthy, safe nursing workforce? I think, for our loved ones, that’s the question. Because if we don’t, we’re going to be in big trouble.
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Vera Rubin didn’t “discover” dark matter, but she put it on the map.
Dark matter is a wild concept. It’s the idea that some mind-boggling percentage of all the matter in the universe may be invisible, and wholly unlike the matter that makes up Earth. Rubin is celebrated because she forced much of the astronomy community to take it seriously.
That reckoning moment came in 1985, when she stood in front of the International Astronomical Union and walked the audience through some of the data she had collected.
Her data showed that stars at the edges of multiple galaxies were moving in ways that didn’t make sense, according to the rules of physics. One possible explanation for this strange phenomenon, Rubin suggested, was the existence of a mysterious “dark matter” at the edges of the galaxy. In the decades since that talk, research into dark matter has exploded, revolutionizing astronomy.
In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond, a new biography of Rubin, science journalist Ashley Yeager explains how Rubin, who died in 2016, grew from a young researcher whose bold ideas were initially ignored into the kind of scientist who could change an entire field. In 2020, we interviewed Yeager for an episode of the Unexplainable podcast about dark matter. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Noam Hassenfeld
When did Vera Rubin first get interested in astronomy? What’s her origin story?
Ashley Yeager
About the age of 11 is when she started to look at the stars. Vera and her sister, Ruth, shared a bedroom in their Washington, DC, townhouse. And Ruth remembers Vera constantly crawling over her at night to be able to open the windows and look out at the night sky and start to track the stars. So clearly, Vera was captivated by the night sky. And that stuck with her.
She then went to Vassar, where she studied astronomy. [While at Vassar, she met a mathematician named Robert Rubin.] They ended up getting married. And that drove one of the biggest decisions in Vera’s life, because she wanted to go to graduate school for astronomy.
She’d gotten into Harvard, but Robert Rubin was at Cornell. He was well into his graduate studies. They had to make a choice, and Vera said, “Let’s stay together. I’ll come to Cornell with you and I’ll do my master’s in astronomy while you finish your PhD in physics.”
Noam Hassenfeld
Isn’t that kind of a wild choice? To choose Cornell based on a husband?
Ashley Yeager
It’s the late 1940s. And Vera, in some ways, was very traditional, even though she was nontraditional in other ways. She felt that she was expected to get married by the end of her four years at Vassar. That was still something that was societally kind of expected.
And I actually think it set her up to be more successful than maybe she would have been, had she gone to Harvard or Princeton or somewhere else, just because of the exposure that she got. There was intellectual freedom she had at Cornell, to be able to probe into different questions in astronomy that she probably would have been pushed away from, had she been in a more structured graduate program.
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Noam Hassenfeld
So she’s at Cornell. She’s probing into questions. She’s got a lot of intellectual freedom. What are the big questions that are occupying her mind?
Ashley Yeager
The biggest one, which becomes her master’s thesis, is really the idea of “Does the universe rotate?”
Noam Hassenfeld
Wait, does the universe rotate?
Ashley Yeager
So, probably no. This was a question posed by a very eccentric astronomer named George Gamow. Vera’s husband actually showed Vera this paper that George Gamow had written about this idea. And she thought, “Well, why would we not try to answer that question?”
Noam Hassenfeld
The kind of question that, if she were at another university, maybe she wouldn’t have had the freedom to dive into?
Ashley Yeager
I think so. I get the sense, reading through the literature and looking through the history, that she probably would have been guided to a more traditional question.
And as she started to look through the data, the numbers started to suggest that there was this odd, sideways motion that perhaps could be interpreted as a universal rotation. She presented her idea to her master’s thesis adviser, William Shaw.
He says, “Your conclusion is really good. I want to present it under my name at this upcoming astronomy conference.”
And Vera is like, “No! I might not be a member of this society yet. But you’re not presenting my data for me. I’m going to present it under my own name, come hell or high water.”
Noam Hassenfeld
So does she?
Ashley Yeager
Yes. She goes to this meeting. Apparently, the drive from New York to Pennsylvania, where the meeting was, was harrowing. It was the winter, snowy. They had a newborn in the car. Her dad was actually driving because he was the only one with a car at the time.
But she gives the presentation, and the reaction is less than great. There are some heavy critics in the room. A lot of scoffing. She does have one person, Martin Schwarzschild, who encourages her. He says, “This is really interesting. But we need more data to be able to make this conclusion.”
And that’s a criticism that really sticks with her throughout her career. Later on, she really tries to have or collect as much data as possible to support her conclusions, just because of that experience.
Noam Hassenfeld
What happens next?
Ashley Yeager
She takes a little bit of a break, because she really has this strong sense of wanting to set up a home and start a family. There’s this moment in the early 1950s, when she’s at the playground with her son. She had been reading astrophysical journals to stay connected with what was going on in astronomy.
So her son’s playing in the sandbox and she’s reading the journal, and she just breaks into tears because she misses doing research so much. She misses that curiosity of asking questions and searching for data, and really trying to figure out the answers to how the universe works.
It’s at that point that her husband says, “You need to go back to school. It’s time. We’ll figure out child care. We’ll figure out how to get dinners made. But let’s do it.”
Noam Hassenfeld
So she goes back into astronomy. And eventually she starts doing research at Kitt Peak National Observatory, right? What’s that like?
Ashley Yeager
We’re talking late 1960s. This is a 84-inch telescope, very large. Vera is at the telescope with Kent Ford, her collaborator. They’re looking at this galaxy called Andromeda, which is our nearest neighbor. They’re looking at these really young, hot stars on the edge of the galaxy, and they’re trying to get the speeds of these stars — how fast are these stars going around Andromeda?
So they’re looking at the data, and they’re going, “Oh my gosh, this is not what we expected.” The assumption was that the stars closer in would fly around the sun fast, and the stars farther out would go super slow. But these stars were moving faster than they expected.
The only way for those stars far out in the galaxy to move that fast is [that] there’s got to be something happening out there that we don’t understand.
Noam Hassenfeld
What does she think is going on?
Ashley Yeager
Well, she’s not really sure. And again, she doesn’t like to make assumptions or speak without data. So she and Kent Ford, and a couple other people, they really start to do a systematic study of galaxies.
She does 20 galaxies, and then 40, and then 60. And they all show this bizarre behavior of stars, these stars out far in the galaxy, moving way, way too fast. So at that point, you know, the astronomy community is like, “Okay, we have to deal with this.”
In 1985, Vera Rubin gives this talk at the IAU. She says, “Nature has played a trick on us. That we have been studying matter that makes up only a small fraction of the universe. The rest of the universe is stuff that we don’t understand, and we can’t see it.”
And I think because she did this in so many galaxies — we’re talking 60 galaxies — there was really no denying it. It was really her work that pushed the community over the edge, to say we have to accept the idea that dark matter exists.
Noam Hassenfeld
It sounds like if you really want to upend our entire conception of the universe, you have to come with some data.
Ashley Yeager
Yeah, absolutely. Because she held onto that criticism of her master’s and PhD work — she would just go after the data, and really make sure that the story she told from that data rang true.
One of the things that made her a remarkable scientist is her perseverance. She did face a lot of roadblocks, especially because she was a woman in science in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. She had to really persevere. Unfortunately, she will never get to see or know what dark matter is. But I don’t know that she had a problem with that. She would take pride in the fact that she opened a whole new realm of astronomy and physics.
She basically created more questions than answers, and I think that’s the mark of a remarkable scientist: when you open up these questions that no one ever thought of before. When you create a whole new generation of scientists who can go and answer them.
Every several years — sometimes just once a decade — when the rains come in just the right amounts and at just the right times, rare flowers speckle the Mojave Desert in California. Some, like the Barstow woolly sunflower, emerge from plants no larger than a thumbnail. They spring forth from seeds that have persisted in the dry soil for years, waiting for just such a sporadic event.
In these brief “super-blooms,” the desert floor looks “like a carpet of wildflowers unfurled across the landscape,” said Karen Tanner, a researcher at University of California, Santa Cruz. The quick flash of flora helps replenish the seeds for future generations.
At other times, large sections of this deceptively fragile ecosystem look “like the moon,” Tanner said. Which, under the punishing sun, makes it seem like an ideal place to build large solar installations. Swaths of the desert, which spans four states, have already been converted to solar facilities, and more are on the way — in the Mojave and across the US. More than 4,600 square miles of land is projected to be covered by solar installations by 2030.
A massive expansion of solar electricity is a crucial part of US plans to reach 80 percent renewable energy by the beginning of the next decade. This is essential to cutting carbon emissions and slowing catastrophic climate change — which poses a dire threat to plants and animals the world over, humans included.
But the race to erect large-scale, maximally efficient solar operations could hurt local ecosystems if operators aren’t careful. Based on her research, Tanner suspects many of these solar projects as they are traditionally executed are causing more local harm than some realize. She has spent nearly a decade closely studying — often on hands and knees with a magnifying glass — experimental solar plots in the Mojave, all located within six miles of four large solar installations. Her most recent findings, published earlier this year, have noted that solar panels changed the immediate microhabitat and had a detrimental impact on rarer plants, such as the Barstow woolly sunflower.
One thing is clear to her: “It’s just not enough to do one survey in one year and be like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s nothing here. Go ahead and install the infrastructure,’” she said.
Solar doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game that prioritizes either clean energy or biodiversity, scientists told Vox. Many projects and studies are currently looking for ways that solar installations can better protect — and potentially even improve — local ecosystems, along with the bottom lines of operators and even nearby landholders like farmers. These solutions can be as simple as prioritizing native plants or picking a location that’s already been disturbed by humans.
The darker side of solar
Solar installations, on the scale needed to supply power grids, are massive by necessity, transforming the lands where they’re located into a new kind of built environment. They can alter everything from sun exposure to moisture to surface temperatures. This can have unintended and unexpected impacts on local plants, animals, and even the area’s microbiome.
Photovoltaic panels shade the land while blocking some areas from rainfall and dousing others with heavy runoff. This changes the growing conditions for plants, with implications for other connected species. The other prominent form of solar, concentrating solar — in which mirrors focus the sun’s rays — generates so much heat that it “can incinerate insects and burn the feathers of birds that fly through,” Jeffrey Lovich, a research ecologist with the US Geological Survey who studies the environmental impacts of these installations, wrote to Vox.
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In areas like the US Southwest, solar installations appear to contribute to bird mortality. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why this is, but one prevailing idea, known as the “lake-effect” hypothesis, is that migrating waterfowl making their way through the arid landscape mistake the installations for bodies of water and crash into them.
Large solar facilities in particular can also fragment important wildlife habitat or migration corridors via fences and landscape alteration, and can restrict gene flow for animal as well as plant populations.
Operators of these installations are generally keen to cut the costs of construction and maintenance, so most solar facilities replace the existing land cover with graded packed dirt, gravel, or mowed grass, further harming local biodiversity. “‘Blade-and-grade’ site prep that removes all vegetation clearly has a negative effect on biodiversity,” Lovich said. He expects mowed grass would “stress plant communities and the animals that use them.”
Many of the impacts remain unknown. It’s often difficult for researchers to gain access to solar facilities and the environmental data they collect — “even though the majority of facilities are situated on publicly owned lands,” Lovich and colleagues noted in a 2017 paper.
But it’s possible to dial down the potential harms of big solar farms. The type of solar infrastructure — whether concentrated solar or photovoltaic, and whether panels are fixed or rotating, high, or low — affects the potential downsides of large-scale installations. So does the nature of the landscape itself.
How solar can help native plants and crucial pollinators
Some solar operators are reimagining their facilities as prime protected habitats for native plants, bringing back key local species and potentially improving lands that humans have already disturbed. “Solar can be a net benefit in terms of restoring a native habitat and improving ecosystem services, like storm water control and carbon storage and sequestration,” said Leroy Walston, a landscape ecologist with Argonne National Laboratory who studies the relationship between renewable energy and the environment.
One in-vogue mitigation measure is pollinator-friendly foliage. At one experimental solar installation in Minnesota, pollinator-friendly plants helped boost energy yields a tad (by making the microclimate a touch cooler) and slightly reduced long-term maintenance costs (due to less-frequent mowing), according to a 2019 analysis from the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale University. The report also noted bigger wins: The plants helped reduce erosion, increasing groundwater stores and bolstering crop yields.
Experts have brought up concerns that solar operators will use a few flowers to green the image, but not the substance, of their operations. To help prevent this, some 15 states now have pollinator-friendly solar scorecards that aim to measure the actual impact of solar projects on the crucial creatures that carry pollen from plant to plant.
“They are voluntary, but they do help solar facilities to attain an objective certification that they’re pollinator-friendly, that’s been helpful to encourage some use of pollinator habitat at solar facilities,” said Heidi Hartmann, a colleague of Walston who works as a program manager for land resources and energy policy at Argonne. For example, the California renewable electricity provider MCE is now asking its facilities on arable land to use “reasonable efforts” to hit a certain score on these pollinator tallies.
Walston calls for an even broader approach to solar — one that focuses not only on bees and butterflies, but on native habitat restoration overall. Native plants are keenly tuned to the local environment, thriving in specific climate conditions, improving soil retention, and often benefiting the widest range of other area species, in ways non-native, flashy pollinator species might not.
Hartmann and Walston have modeled the impact of switching from maintained grass to native plantings. They found that in the US Midwest, native plants would bring in three times the number of pollinators. They’d also boost the carbon storage potential of the soil by 65 percent and would be more effective, once established, at keeping weeds at bay, which could reduce the need for harmful herbicide use.
“The equation is complex,” said Alyssa Edwards, vice president of environmental affairs at solar producer Lightsource BP, about the company’s impact on local habitats. Lightsource advertises itself as protecting ecosystems and boosting biodiversity. “Pollinator habitat, considerations of seed availability, vegetation height, insurance requirements, fire risk, and cost all come into play. Not to mention that pollinator habitat may not be the right choice for all sites, as other initiatives may be more valuable contributions to sustainability.” The company, a joint venture with the oil and gas giant BP, says it’s working on various solar projects that incorporate pollinator habitat, conservation of short-grass prairie land, and even animal grazing.
Wildlife corridors are another way solar installations could help support biodiversity. But for large sites to become a part of corridors, they may require substantial adjustments to fencing and other built infrastructure (and even then, they’d probably pose barriers to some larger species).
As more sites incorporate biodiversity as a benchmark, the devil is in the details. Tanner and others have found that solar panels can actually increase the number of plant species that grow beneath them, especially in harsh environments like the desert. However, some of these additional species are invasive or threaten to outcompete the smaller, rarer native ones that could tolerate such extreme desert conditions.
These kinds of wrinkles make it all the more important that scientists and operators actually measure their impact on ecosystems — that they’re “pausing for a moment and considering what sort of species we are considering that are making up the diversity,” Tanner said.
Build solar on lands that humans have already messed with, one expert says
Solar operators tend to look for new sites based on sun and climate conditions, but also proximity to the existing power grid — and a utility company in the market for their energy. Scientists told Vox that firms should also look for places that humans have disturbed, because the local ecosystem may have less to lose.
Lovich suggests siting more solar farms on “brown fields, roof tops, abandoned agricultural fields, dry lakes, and even airports — where wildlife are unwanted.” They’re also well-suited for canals and human-made reservoirs, where they’re sometimes called “floatovoltaics,” not least because they can slow water loss by evaporation. These less-conventional arrangements may have higher up-front costs, but the eventual environmental costs will be lower.
Building on an ecologically sensitive site can also be costly. Take for example BrightSource Energy, which spent at least $56 million relocating threatened desert tortoises from its Ivanpah solar development site in the Mojave Desert. Although these efforts allowed the project to go through, scientists are still learning about the consequences. An early study found that the relocated tortoises needed more time and effort to settle into normal movement patterns, potentially exposing them to additional threats. But as Lovich pointed out, “since tortoises are long-lived, results for the long term are not yet available.”
Such experiences have not deterred other desert sun-seeking operations. “Solar farms are operating or planned in excellent tortoise habitat affecting hundreds to thousands of tortoises,” Lovich said. Simply moving the tortoises — pricey as it may be — is not a sure cure. “Translocation has a checkered history of success,” he said.
Lovich is currently studying the impact of the Gemini Solar Project in Nevada, which would cover 11 square miles of publicly owned tortoise habitat and is home to hundreds of these long-lived, vanishing animals. For this project, the plan is to capture the animals, place them in a holding center for up to two years during construction, and then release them into the facility grounds “to see how they fare,” Lovich said.
“All energy sources will come with a cost to some wildlife,” Lovich and his colleagues noted in a 2020 paper. “The best mitigation strategy is to avoid developing sensitive and pristine areas.”
Other landscapes would not only tolerate solar farms, but could benefit from them. For example, a pollinator-friendly solar installation could add yield for farmers whose soy, citrus, almonds, cotton, or alfalfa needs some pollination help. More than 500 solar facilities already exist within easy buzzing-distance — less than a mile — from these crops in California, Massachusetts, and North Carolina, respectively, according to a 2018 study by Walston, Hartmann, and their colleagues. Nationally, more than 1,350 square miles of cropland would benefit if existing solar installations added pollinator-friendly plants, they concluded.
As solar has moved into lands that could otherwise be farmed, it has caused some tension with local residents. But solar farms and actual farms don’t necessarily need to be in opposition. It’s possible to co-locate solar and crops into “agrivoltaic systems,” which can feature grazing grass, corn grown for biogas, and even lettuce and tomatoes that may flourish under solar panels. Other crops could even be grown under semi-transparent solar panels.
Solar can protect plants and animals while it helps the planet
Redesigning solar developments — and steering them to the places where they won’t cause harm — isn’t easy. Maximizing energy output means finding locations with the right combinations of sun, temperature, wind, and humidity (one study pegged the best spots as croplands, grasslands, and wetlands) and packing solar-harvesting devices as densely as possible. All of these often work at cross-purposes with supporting a diverse range of plant and animal species.
Additionally, permits for these facilities are typically done at a very local level. (President Barack Obama had instructed these sorts of projects on federal lands to have a mitigation strategy — an order that President Donald Trump struck down his second month in office.) So it’s a patchwork of different levels of regulations and approval processes, some of which are more in tune with thoughtful evaluation of sites and long-term impacts. There is “more education that can be done at local government levels,” Hartmann said.
Without more thorough before-and-after research, we may remain in the dark about how these large facilities are changing the landscapes they cover. If site evaluations are performed over a relatively brief period of time — such as a single season in the run-up to the construction of a solar farm — operators could easily miss key aspects of biodiversity, like the Barstow woolly sunflower, which waits for just the right pattern of rare desert rain to emerge.
“We’re just starting to scratch the surface and determine how different organisms are likely to respond” to solar, said Tanner, the UC Santa Cruz researcher. For now, it behooves us to mess with their environment as little as possible, she noted, and to preserve as much as we can. “Especially in a context of climate change, we don’t know what species are going to be able to pass through that aperture in the future.”
As the world barrels toward climate catastrophe, scaling up carbon-neutral energy production as quickly as possible couldn’t be more urgent. “We need all the help we can get, and we need to move quickly,” Tanner said. On a planetary scale, clean electricity can help safeguard all species, and could arguably be worth the trade-off if it harms a few local species in the process.
But maybe there doesn’t need to be a trade-off, Tanner suggested. “I’m not sure it’s an either-or question,” she said.