FERN’s Friday Feed: Our well without water
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
A man is pushed to the edge by his obsession with water and climate change
Longreads
“It was easier to fret about the ongoing climate tragedy … than to let my attention lie fallow, occupied only by a hyperawareness of myself, in prison,” writes Michael Fischer. “I read about food waste and fracking, mountaintop removal, and the annual death toll from air pollution …. I read about animal agriculture and its impact on land use, animal welfare, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria …. But proximity is powerful, and of all the environmental crises that could serve as the poster child for the Anthropocene, the crisis I couldn’t shake … was that bathroom faucet. I always returned to water, the numbers looping in my head: more than 220,000 gallons of raw sewage from the California Men’s Colony dumped into a creek, 800,000 gallons unloaded by a prison in Alabama. More than 30 gallons of water to produce a glass of wine, 1,800 for a pair of blue jeans, 40,000 for a car. And then the day came and I was released on parole, my mind broken and obsessed, the faucet still running, still close.”
Starved in jail
The New Yorker
“During the past year, I found it hard to explain, to family and friends, a strange truth,” writes Sarah Stillman. “I was reporting on places where starvation and dehydration deaths had unfolded across a span of weeks or months—but these were not overseas famine zones or traditional theatres of war. Instead, they were sites of domestic lawlessness: American county jails. After meeting Carlin and Karina, I identified and scrutinized more than fifty cases of individuals who, in recent years, had starved to death, died of dehydration, or lost their lives to related medical crises in county jails. In some cases, hundreds of hours of abusive neglect were captured on video, relevant portions of which I reviewed. One lawyer, before sharing a confidential jail-death video, warned me, ‘It will stain your brain.’ It did.”
Ghost forests are growing as sea levels rise
Knowable Magazine
“Like giant bones planted in the earth, clusters of tree trunks, stripped clean of bark, are appearing along the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’ mid-Atlantic coast. They are ghost forests: the haunting remains of what were once stands of cedar and pine …. These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United States’ east coast, in pockets of the west coast and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody skeletons typically surrounded by marsh,” writes Jude Coleman. “As these dead forests transition, some will become marshes that maintain vital ecosystem services, such as buffering against storms and storing carbon. Others may become home to invasive plants or support no plant life at all …. Researchers are working to understand how this growing shift toward marshes and ghost forests will, on balance, affect coastal ecosystems.”
How CRISPR is changing the way we grow food
NPR/TED Radio Hour (audio)
“What if we could farm without any net greenhouse gas emissions? A world where we could grow all the food we need, even in the face of a changing climate, and be part of the global climate solution. I’m here today to talk to you about CRISPR, and how it can help do exactly that,” says Brad Ringeisen, executive director of the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley. “CRISPR is the genome editing tool that scientists use to cut and paste DNA …. In short, it allows you to change the function of living cells …. Our plan is to enable a net-zero farm, and it breaks it down into three areas of impact. First, we’re going to use CRISPR to help develop plants that are resistant to climate disasters, helping to improve food security. We’re also going to use CRISPR to help eliminate agricultural emissions … and at the same time we’re also going to develop and use CRISPR to enhance plants’ and microbes’ natural ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.”
The looming food-bank crisis
Newsweek
“America’s food banks are facing a looming crisis under President Donald Trump’s administration as proposed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits get closer to becoming a reality. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, food banks have already experienced a surge in demand as Americans grapple with rising living costs. Despite low unemployment, inflation has outpaced wage growth, and grocery prices have surged nearly 28 percent over five years, straining household budgets,” writes Aliss Higham. “SNAP is facing myriad changes under the current administration, including state-levied restrictions on what can be bought using the anti-poverty benefit, and looming budget cuts ordered by Congress that could also push up the number of people facing reliance on charity to feed themselves and their families.”