The best american scienc.., p.1
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
Climate-Linked Ills Threaten Humanity by Annie Gowen
The Grand Canyon, a Cathedral to Time, Is Losing Its River by Raymond Zhong
Solving Climate Change Will Have Side Effects. Get Over It. by Sammy Roth
Buried Under the Ice by Sarah Kaplan
Rogues of the Rainforest by Douglas Fox
Has the Amazon Reached Its “Tipping Point”? by Alex Cuadros
What Plants Are Saying About Us by Amanda Gefter
A Good Prospect by Nick Bowlin
Hot Air by Heidi Blake
Why Maui Burned by Carolyn Kormann
Deep in the Wilderness, the World’s Largest Beaver Dam Endures by Ian Frazier
City of Glass by Ben Goldfarb
Journey Under the Ice by Douglas Fox
Five Hours from Someplace Beautiful by Brendan Egan
Lolita Floats Still in Miami by B. M. Owens
Nathan by Dan Musgrave
Talk to Me by Elizabeth Kolbert
Homeward Bound by Isobel Whitcomb
The Lonely Battle to Save Species on a Tiny Speck in the Pacific by Joe Spring
The Sea Eagles That Returned to Mull by Emma Marris
How Do I Make Sense of My Mother’s Decision to Die? by Lindsay Ryan
The White Oak Tree at McLean: A Case of Recovery by Rachel May
Be Tenacious on Behalf of Life on Earth by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Contributors’ Notes
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2023
About the Editors
Guest Editors of The Best American Science and Nature Writing
About Mariner Books
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
Every fall, I collect a list of recommendations for the incoming guest editor (this year, the wonderful Bill McKibben), a starting point for their readings and selections for the book. This year was the first time I found myself wondering whether all the publications whose work we’re honoring would still exist by the time the book comes out.
It is essentially luck that every piece in this collection comes from a publication still extant at the time of my writing. Among the notable essays listed at the back of the book—almost a hundred excellent pieces—are pieces from publications that have essentially shuttered, magazines that laid off their science desks or their entire staff of writers. There are journalists who luckily avoided a wave of layoffs, and surely more who worry what the next year might bring. It’s impossible to look back on the past year of science and nature writing without this sense of absence and eulogy.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen such cullings. Pacific Standard, which covered social and environmental justice with tenacity and elegance, stopped publication in 2019. Pacific Standard was even a nonprofit, a hopeful alternative to business models that leave magazines subject to market whims. But that meant it was subject to the whims of its funder. The winds changed, the funder withdrew, the magazine shut down. We have to consider ourselves lucky that the archives—which include several pieces featured in past issues of this collection—are still online at all, after Grist acquired the magazine.
We thought for a long time that the internet would kill journalism. In plenty of ways, it hasn’t helped: Google’s monopoly on search funnels and ads, Facebook’s inflated stats that led the doomed pivot to video, the death of classifieds and other newsprint revenue sources. Readers often now expect to access journalism for free and balk at paywalls, seeking workarounds rather than paying for what they read, and websites are so clogged with ads as to be almost unreadable. Writers are still consistently paid far less for work published online than in print, even at the same publication, which seems to come down to little more than prestige and what publications can get away with.
We thought the internet would kill journalism. We didn’t see the vultures coming.
They came for local newspapers first. The hedge fund Alden Global Capital innovated a model that McKay Coppins, writing in The Atlantic in 2021, called “strip-mining local-news outfits.” He elaborated: “The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.” It didn’t matter if a newspaper was struggling or stable when Alden bought it, the vicious playbook was the same.
As of 2019, Alden was running over a hundred newspapers, and they’d cut two of every three jobs. It’s a model known as “vulture capitalism,” though a former Chicago Tribune reporter who’d seen Alden’s impact firsthand told Coppins the name didn’t quite fit. “A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory.”
The predators have come for online news, too. Gawker Media is a classic example, first undermined by Peter Thiel’s vindictive, opportunistic funding of the lawsuit that would bankrupt the company. After a few years owned by Univision, the group of websites now called Gizmodo Media Group was sold to private equity firm Great Hill Partners. Megan Greenwell was editor-in-chief of Deadspin, GMG’s sports and culture website. In 2019, upon her resignation, she wrote, “A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires.”
Newspapers and magazines have been reduced to figures on a spreadsheet. A business is a business—that part’s not new—but the men who run Alden Global Capital never even pretend to care about journalism. When they bought the Chicago Tribune in 2021, Coppins writes, “The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.” Greenwell wrote of GMG’s owners: “They want a quick cash-out rather than the growth that comes from a well-run business.” It’s impossible to know how much science writing has been lost at the hundreds of local papers now owned by financial firms, by Alden and those aping their mercenary model.
But here’s some of what we do know: 2023 was a bloodbath year for science journalism. National Geographic, owned by Disney, laid off its last staff writers; Gizmodo laid off its last climate writer (so we know what Great Hill Partners did there); CNBC disbanded its climate desk; and Wired laid off around twenty employees. According to SFGate, “The Wired layoffs hit reporters who covered labor, health, artificial intelligence, space and science and had written about such topics as AI regulation, autoworker organizing, new vaccine developments and more. Several editors also received pink slips, including those in the features and science divisions.” Writers, editors, production staff—gone. And with perhaps the most dramatic sign of the state of the industry, Popular Science, which had just celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2022, ceased publication. Popular Science was bought by the private equity firm Recurrent Ventures in 2021.
I grew up reading science magazines. My grandfather subscribed to Scientific American, and I pored over the small print and elegant diagrams trying to access the rarefied knowledge I knew they held. I subscribed, myself, to Discover, a more accessible but just as expansive and exciting magazine. But, as Sabrina Imbler writes in Defector, “The loss of Popular Science also means one less major publication where emerging science journalists can learn the craft and build their careers.” Midcareer writers lost an outlet paying decent rates, and new writers lost an internship opportunity. And, a former social media editor at Popular Science who was laid off amid the closure told Imbler, scientists lost a prominent venue to have their work featured. “Where are the scientists going to get public investment in their research?”
I grew up reading science magazines because I loved the world and its wonder, but science is much more than awe. Imbler writes, “Science journalism has arguably never been more important, as the harsh impacts of climate change are hitting the planet faster than many scientists expected and the biodiversity crisis threatens all corners of life on Earth.” Climate change, pandemics, reproductive rights—there is no untangling science from the urgent issues in our lives. There is also, though, still the ineffable value of art, of beautiful writing, of knowledge, of joy. All of that, the urgent and the ornamental—the vultures have their claws in it all.
I wish I had a good way to end this foreword. I wish I had a call to action, a rousing plan, a sense of hope. If you’re a billionaire, go buy a local paper, steward it with care, trust that the editors who run it know how to do their jobs. There’s hope in worker-owned publications, like Imbler’s own Defector, an employee-owned publication founded by former Deadspin staffers, or The Sick Times, a newer, scrappier, independent news site covering the Long Covid crisis, founded by two journalists and supported by donations and nonprofit funds. This may be the way forward. This may be the growing pains of a new kind of news industry being born. Popular Science was 150 years old, after all. One hundred fifty years ago the telephone and lightbulb were new technologies, and the germ theory of disease was newborn. Popular Science was once new, and there are still new things to be made, new ways of telling stories, reaching audiences, and thinking and writing about what science means in the world. But that doesn’t make living through what feels like a mass extinction any easier.
Jaime Green
And now for a post-script with a whiplash ton
Introduction
This volume is called The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024, because that’s the year it comes out, but of course that means the writing is from 2023. I know this is a familiar concept—you’ve watched the Oscars, after all—and I bring it up simply to emphasize that, in this case, the year really matters: 2023 was the most anomalous year (so far) in human history, the year in which the relationship between people and planet showed its most dramatic signs yet of unraveling.
To review: As the year began, oceanographers started pointing out—with increasing urgency—that sea surface temperatures were higher than they’d ever measured, in pretty much every ocean basin, and by margins that far exceeded what they’d seen before. As the months rolled on, the numbers became increasingly ludicrous, until by late spring they were not just off the chart, but off the wall the chart was tacked to. In June, buoys off the Florida Keys registered ocean temperatures in excess of 101 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what you set your hot tub to. (But you don’t keep a coral reef in your hot tub.)
The seas are where most of the planet’s extra heat is stored (if they didn’t exist, the carbon and methane we’ve poured into the atmosphere would have already raised the planet’s average temperature above 120 Fahrenheit), and as they warm, many things happen. Ice melts, for one, especially at the poles. And when the Arctic Ocean opens, it leads to, again among many other things, earlier snowmelt at higher latitudes. Northern Canada, in other words, dried out a lot sooner than usual in 2023, and then—as land temperatures began to soar—it caught on fire. Caught on fire in ways we’ve never seen before: vast fires were raging in every province before long. By the time snow finally put them out in late autumn, those fires had produced several times more carbon than all the cooking and heating and cooling and driving and flying done by all the people in Canada, which is what we call a feedback loop. But it had also produced something else equally important: a huge cloud of smoke that drifted south across the border and soon was choking the cities of perhaps the world’s most powerful corridor, from Boston and New York south to Washington. As it happens, I was sitting in front of the White House, part of a protest against a gas pipeline, on the day that Washington recorded its worst air quality in recent history; we could barely make out the building we were protesting, though it was a few hundred yards away. It was, I think, useful that the men and women who have allowed America to become the biggest fossil fuel exporter on earth got even a temporary taste of what so many have to deal with day in and day out.
If nothing else, it provided a bit of context for what came next: literally, the hottest day on planet earth in at least 125,000 years. A global chain of satellites and thermometers and ocean buoys offer up a global average temperature each day; the hottest days of the earth year cluster around our summer solstice, because the northern hemisphere has most of the planet’s land mass. And this year the numbers beat—by large margins—any day for which we have records. Thermometer data only goes back a couple of centuries, but scientists are masterful at figuring out proxies (ice cores, lake sediments) that extend that record far into paleohistory, which is how we know the true extent of this remarkable stretch of days. They were hotter not than any day in human history, but than any day in much of human prehistory. No members of our species with societies anything like the ones we know have ever lived on an earth so hot.
And, as it turns out, it’s not enormous fun living on a world tending toward the hellish. For instance, warm air holds more water vapor than cold, which is my nominee for basic physical fact of the century. That means more evaporation—and hence more drought and fire—in dry places. But once that water is up in the atmosphere, it’s going to come down, increasingly in buckets. New England, where I live, is one of those wet places—we’ve had a huge increase in gully-washer storms over the past few decades, and this summer in my state of Vermont, it seemed never to stop. Our capital city, Montpelier, was basically closed for months after water surged through most of the town’s businesses; there’s active talk about somehow relocating the center of the city to higher ground. I live on higher ground, in a tiny town on the spine of the Green Mountains, which got more rain than anywhere else in the course of the summer—a home a mile away was lost in a landslide, and the roads east and west out of town were closed for weeks. And we were lucky—we’re a relatively prosperous place. Libya had the biggest rainstorm in its history as summer came to an end, and there the deluge washed away two dams, and then washed away ten thousand people in a single city. They were swept out to sea and drowned.
In case this seems anecdotal to you, the tally at year’s end was forty-two weather disasters across the globe that did more than a billion dollars in damage—that’s $360 billion dollars total, and less than 40 percent of it covered by insurance. It was the second costliest year on record for drought; flooding in Pakistan did damage equivalent to 9 percent of its GDP. We know that forty thousand people died in Europe from the epic heatwaves that kept sweeping across the continent, but that’s because Europe can afford to keep good records of excess mortality. Who knows how many people died because Pakistan had to spend all that money on flood relief and had less left for immunization or education or women’s health? Who knows how many people fled their homes for good because there wasn’t grass enough left to keep goats alive? We can’t count, save by stories, and some of them are in this volume.
We don’t know for certain all the reasons the temperature jumped so jaggedly in 2023. An El Niño warming current developed in the Pacific in midyear, and ships kept switching to cleaner fuels, which ironically meant less smoke to reflect the sun’s heat back to space. But these paled next to the main trigger: the ongoing accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane, and a few other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The project of heating the earth—by far the largest project humans ever contrived—continued its uninterrupted advance. We poured more carbon into the air than ever before, and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere ratcheted past 420 parts per million, another grim milestone. Worse, it felt more than ever as if the most basic physical systems of the planet were starting to strain. If you think about our earth, there are a few overwhelming features: the poles, which are now melting fast (and new data from the Antarctic and Greenland this past year emphasized how much we’ve underestimated that rate of loss); the great rainforest of South America, where we seem on the brink of savannafication as drought starts to entrench across the Amazon; the boreal forest of the north (which was burning not just in Canada but in Siberia); and the jet stream and the great ocean currents like the Gulf Stream. The jet stream in 2023 was clearly behaving very oddly—driven by the temperature differences between pole and equator, it now gets stuck for long stretches, and oscillates at a greater amplitude, surging heat and cold into unlikely places. And the ocean currents, driven by density differences between saltier and fresher water, seem clearly to be flickering as that same polar ice disappears.
We are rapidly wrecking the earth that has supported us. Not wrecking “the planet,” since the third rock from the sun will be there till the sun, in a few billion years, enters its violent dotage. But wrecking the world that we, and all other humans, have known. I want to say once again: In 2023 it got hotter on this earth than it’s gotten in at least 125,000 years, roughly the same time as the first evidence of humans etching symbols onto bone. As 2024 began, the researchers were predicting that this year could quite possibly break last year’s record.
And yet. And yet. Something else happened in 2023, with the kind of dramatic congruence that strains credulity. In midsummer, in the same stretch of weeks that our instruments were recording those never-seen temperatures, energy analysts were reporting that we had crossed another barrier: we were now installing a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels around the world each day. That is to say, we were installing the rough equivalent of a nuclear power plant every single day, but the nuclear power was coming from that giant reactor 93 million miles up in the sky. That’s an extraordinary feat—the rapid scaling of this most basic technology for the survival of our species. Solar power has always been seen as “alternative” energy, but now, alongside its sturdy partner Wind, and supported by their companion Battery, the Sun was ready for . . . it’s place in the sun? I guess.
