FERN’s Friday Feed: The worm charmers
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The worm charmers
Oxford American
“A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico,” writes Michael Adno. “…[A]fter about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a ‘stob,’ into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.”
Who decides where climate mitigation projects are tested?
Hakai Magazine
“Senara Wilson Hodges was nervous. It was April 2023 and she had shown up early to a meeting of the local council in St. Ives, a bucolic seaside community of some 10,000 souls in southwest England,” writes Yannic Rack. “Wilson Hodges, a keen surfer and lifelong environmental campaigner, had joined the council several months earlier to influence some of the issues facing her home: the old town center, once home to fishermen, was being hollowed out by tourism, and development was running rampant. But that night, she had something else on her mind. Wilson Hodges had been researching a Canadian start-up called Planetary Technologies and was concerned about their activities in St. Ives Bay. Like many of her neighbors, she had only learned about the company a few weeks earlier, when an article in The Times detailed how, over several days during the previous fall, Planetary had added a slurry of magnesium hydroxide to the local water company’s sewage pipe and pumped it into the sea off St. Ives Bay. The experiment was meant to test a potential solution to climate change called ocean alkalinity enhancement.”
Restaurant workers are steamed – and organizing
Grist
“Stories of working under heat stress are common in the restaurant and food service industry, where back-of-house workers stationed ‘on the line’ must stay on their feet for hours, cooking and prepping next to hot stoves, ovens, fryers, and more,” writes Frida Garza. “But increasingly, this workforce must contend with an additional source of heat exposure: the record-breaking summer temperatures and heat waves taking place outside the kitchen. The confluence of indoor and outdoor heat has inspired some workers to unionize and fight for stronger safeguards at work. Employees at a Seattle-based sandwich chain recently secured historic protections against extreme heat in their first union contract. Labor organizers say they expect more food service workers to organize and bargain around heat in the years to come.”
Pilgrim Pride’s people
Mountain State Spotlight
“On a rainy afternoon in 2020, Pilgrim’s Pride’s West Virginia chicken factory was dirty. The slaughterhouse has sharp metal hooks, deboning knives and conveyor belts. The machinery butchers over a million live birds every week and is constantly covered with animal grime,” writes Allen Siegler. “That day, dozens of sanitation workers, many of them Hispanic and many of them immigrants, were washing the machines in the plant owned by Hardy County’s largest employer. A Puerto Rican man was kneeling to clean a conveyor belt when it unexpectedly turned on. The machine latched on to his work jacket, and pulled. The man cried out in agony. ‘It was really bad, something ugly,’ said Marco, a man from Mexico also cleaning the slaughterhouse that day. As he walked past an office away from the line, Marco got a clear look at what remained underneath bloody towels. ‘The arm was left hanging by the skin,’ he said.”
Queen of the bar
Eater
“At 55 years old and counting, Milwaukee’s This Is It! is the oldest queer bar in Wisconsin. Affectionately referred to as ‘Tits,’ it’s like the bar from Cheers for the working-class LGBTQ folks of the city, the kind of place that’s open on Christmas for customers who can’t go home for the holidays,” writes Dan Clapson. “The bar came to life in 1968 under business partners June Brehm and Michael Laton. The duo never set out to open a queer watering hole, but Brehm wanted the business to be accepting of people from all walks of life, inadvertently creating a safe space for LGBTQIA+ customers. The area of Milwaukee was particularly desolate at the time, and many short-lived queer bars that preceded Tits in the two decades prior had closed. But This Is It! found its audience — and permanent status as a cornerstone of the community — in a newly formed gay neighborhood nearby.”