FERN’s Friday Feed: Screwed
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The ‘man-eater’ screwworm is coming
The Atlantic
“The United States has, for 70 years, been fighting a continuous aerial war against the New World screwworm, a parasite that eats animals alive: cow, pig, deer, dog, even human. (Its scientific name, C. hominivorax, translates to “man-eater.”) … But in the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture laid the groundwork for a continent-wide assault. Workers raised screwworms in factories, blasted them with radiation until they were sterile, and dropped the sterile adult screwworms by the millions—even hundreds of millions—weekly over the U.S., then farther south in Mexico, and eventually in the rest of North America. The sterile flies proceeded to, well, screw the continent’s wild populations into oblivion, and in 2006, an invisible barrier was established at the Darién Gap, the jungle that straddles the Panama-Colombia border, to cordon the screwworm-free north off from the south,” writes Sarah Zhang. “But in 2022, the barrier was breached.”
Along the Gulf Coast, solar farms are replacing fields of rice
Texas Monthly
“Rainfall, or the lack thereof, is a perpetual source of anxiety for Texas rice farmers. But it wasn’t the only thing weighing heavily on the Rauns’ minds that day. President Donald Trump’s trade war was still in its early days when I visited the couple in March, but Canada, a major importer of American rice, had just slapped a retaliatory 25 percent tariff on the grain—a problem, given that U.S. farmers export around 40 percent of the rice they grow,” writes Sasha von Oldershausen. “For the Rauns, this political drama is just the latest setback to befall Texas rice farmers. In the industry’s heyday, around sixty years ago, the state’s rice belt boasted some 600,000 acres of the crop. Today that number is around 142,000 acres. It’s bound to drop further, thanks to competition for land and water resources, increased production costs, and depressed rice prices. And now a different industry, solar power, has infiltrated the central Texas coast, supplanting agriculture and prompting some longtime residents to worry that they’re witnessing not just the decline of an industry but the disappearance of a way of life.”
In Appalachia, restoring a forest economy built on herbs and tradition
The New York Times
“For centuries, these forest plants have been a part of Appalachian cultural heritage, used by local people for food, traditional medicine and extra income. But the market has long been poorly regulated, which has led to low prices and overharvesting,” writes Austyn Gaffney. “‘The trade of forest botanicals has been going on for the past 300 years in the Appalachian Mountains,’ said Katie Commender, director of the agroforestry program at a local nonprofit organization called the Appalachian Harvest Herb Hub. ‘When we talk to ginseng dealers and root buyers, a lot of the concern we hear is that tradition is dying out and not necessarily being passed on to the next generation.’ Now, that’s changing. Since 2017, Herb Hub has been building guardrails for this backdoor economy.”
The curious tale of Hitler’s food-tasters
The Guardian
“The story is almost too compelling to be true: a group of war-weary young women, long deprived of sufficient food, are herded together to dine on abundant vegetarian delicacies three times a day. The only price: risking their lives with each bite as they may have consumed deadly poison intended for Adolf Hitler,” writes Deborah Cole. “The extraordinary account by then 95-year-old Margot Wölk created a sensation when it first appeared in a Berlin tabloid more than a decade ago. Her decision to break what she called decades of silence about her wartime experiences captured the imagination of German reporters, then global media, finally inspiring a documentary, two novels and a play. This month, a movie ‘based on a true story,’ will be released in German cinemas, reviving fascination with the curious tale of Wölk and her ‘colleagues,’ as she called them.”
The ‘green’ aviation fuel that would increase carbon emissions
Yale Environment 360
The ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ that Republicans are pushing under President Trump would roll back almost all the clean energy incentives that Democrats enacted under President Biden, shredding federal support for solar, wind, nuclear, electric vehicles, and other climate-friendly technologies. But it would make a lavish exception for one supposedly green form of energy that isn’t green at all: farm-grown jet fuels. Aviation, which generated about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonize, and the U.S. aviation industry has committed to using so-called ‘sustainable aviation fuels’ to reach its net-zero climate goals,” writes Michael Grunwald. “But using crops like corn and soybeans to produce fuel instead of food not only increases food prices and global hunger, it spurs farmers around the world to tear down more forests and plow up more grasslands to create new farmland to replace the lost food.”