Arizona’s water crisis is manageable – if we actually do these 3 things
Grady Gammage, Jr. – December 22, 2022
Those of us who talk about Arizona’s water situation often point out that the challenge we face is less daunting than other dilemmas of climate change like sea level rise or an increasing frequency of hurricanes. A dramatic decline in water resources, we say, is manageable, and Arizona has a strong history of water management.
But there’s a catch: We have to actually manage it.
There are a lot of seemingly disconnected ideas floating around. It is important to fit these ideas into a context, and to give Arizonans a way to talk about how we will manage our way through.
Here are some thoughts on such a framework.
Conservation is a small yet critical need
We cannot conserve our way out of the looming shortages. Reducing turf, limiting lot sizes and increasing use of effluent are all good and important things. The reality is we could shut off all municipal use and not solve the problem.
Conservation is an important piece of reminding everyone how critical water is, and of making a statement that we are serious and we are all in this together. Conservation would involve some mandates (like prohibiting winter overseeding); incentives (paying to remove turf) and a lot of education.
The best way to achieve conservation is to create targets for municipal reductions in per-capita consumption. The best way of reaching those targets is to carefully raise water prices on amounts beyond a minimum quantity per household.
This represents action we can take immediately.
Shift water from agriculture to urban use
Arizona must incentivize farmers to increase efficiency and be more flexible in crop choices.
The biggest water use in Arizona by far is irrigated agriculture. Encouraging farming was the goal of public policy to settle the West. That worked, but today the policy should be to first preserve western economies and urban growth.
Agriculture does not need to disappear. But it needs to dramatically curtail use when there is not enough water to go around.
We must compensate farmers for such changes, and incentivize them to increase efficiency and be more flexible in crop choices. Farmers in Yuma have offered such a proposal, which can become the basis for negotiation. This should be the primary use of state dollars through the newly enhanced Water Infrastructure Financing Authority (WIFA). The Legislature put a billion dollars into WIFA in 2022. A good start, but there needs to be an ongoing revenue stream for these purposes.
Just as an example, a $500 surcharge per acre foot of municipal water use in Maricopa County would raise about half a billion dollars every year. That amounts to $.0015 per gallon. Carefully shifting water from farming to urban use can get us through the next 30-40 years.
Invest in new, long-term water sources
It is important to start working now on solutions in the distant horizon. This likely means ocean desalinization, but there may be other alternatives. What is important is that a plan for 50-plus years into the future begins to unfold.
The price tag will be high. The recent Build Back Better bill has about $4 billion earmarked for Western water projects. This is great, and we should thank our congressional delegation.
Federal participation in dealing with the cost of natural disasters is a bedrock purpose of the national government. It is a way of spreading the risk of hurricanes, floods and fires over a larger revenue base. It is also a way of protecting interstate commerce. New York City alone got $4 billion in federal money after “Superstorm” Sandy.
The federal government has averaged more than $30 billion per year in hurricane relief since 2000. Drought and aridification in the West are the same sort of challenge.
The Colorado River basin states should band together to make this point in Washington. Federal reclamation policy settled the West. That policy is now needed to sustain what reclamation built.
Confronting the challenge of a drying climate at different scales and in different time frames will help Arizona reassert its storied history of leadership in water management.
Grady Gammage, Jr. is a practicing lawyer and author.
Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm
Darsha Dodge – December 22, 2022
With a twinge of cold in her toes and a tone of concern tinted by exhaustion, Anna Halverson relayed the message: “We’re in a really extreme emergency down here.
Winter Storm Diaz blanketed the Pine Ridge Reservation in more than 30 inches of snow – incredible enough on its own – but it was amplified by intense winds that brought the area to a standstill under drifts of snow several feet high.
A semi truck and trailer blocking a major highway on the Pine Ridge Reservation during Winter Storm Diaz.
Halverson, who represents the Pass Creek District on the Pine Ridge Reservation, described their harrowing situation to the Journal on Thursday.
“It’s been really tough,” she said. “We don’t have the proper equipment here to handle what’s been going on. We have drifts as high as some houses that stretch 60, 70 yards at a time.”
More than 10 days since the storm began, Diaz has moved on and the skies have started to clear, but the recovery process is just beginning. Halverson didn’t get dug out of her house until eight days after the storm. Others are still trapped, reachable only by snowmobile.
It seems like every time we open the road, the snow just drifts it back over,” she said.
It’s an incredibly scary situation, she explained, as many of those snowed-in are missing dialysis treatments or dealing with other medical emergencies. One family ran out of infant formula, and spent four days drifted in before attempting to leave, Halverson said.
“We even talked about using drone drops to get the baby some Enfamil, because the baby was starving,” she said.
But Mother Nature wasn’t done yet.
If being trapped by formidable walls of ice and snow wasn’t enough, subzero temperatures, brought down by an Arctic front, took an already struggling region by the neck. Temperatures dropped into the negative teens and 20s this week, and the unkind Midwest wind shredded those figures with wind chills in the negative 40s and negative 50s.
Total snow reports from Dec. 13 – 16 in Western South Dakota
Cold like that is deadly, just another blow to a reservation already crippled by conditions, Halverson said.
“Most of our members use wood stoves,” she said. “We’re not able to get them with deliveries because of the roads. A lot of our members across the reservation have no propane, because the propane companies can’t reach their tanks to fill. Even right now in my district, we haven’t had anybody able to deliver out to these members that have no propane since the storm started.”
Oglala-based service organization Re-Member provides firewood to families on all corners of the reservation, but the drifts of snow have rendered their wood stockpile inaccessible still – and it’ll be that way for the foreseeable future.
“Our wood pile remains inaccessible,” read a Facebook post on Dec. 20. “Our skid steer and plow are out-of-service. Given the conditions, it would be near impossible to operate our equipment and unsafe for our staff to work in the conditions we are facing. We appreciate the efforts being made by many to keep the Oyate safe during these challenging times.”
Those that can try to use electric heaters, which Halverson said isn’t keeping houses warm. Even her own furnace went out, blowing cold air in an already frigid atmosphere. She was able to travel to her mother’s house to keep her family warm.
Power went out in some places, once for 18 hours, she said. People with cars tried to use them to stay warm.
Reservation residents are resorting to last-ditch efforts to ward off the unimaginable cold.
“I’ve seen across the reservation some members were burning clothes in their wood stove because they couldn’t get access to wood,” Halverson said.
The conditions got so bad so quickly that Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out penned a proclamation declaring a state of emergency.
“These current blizzard conditions have caused closure of all BIA and tribal secondary roads on the reservation due to falling snow, high winds and snow drifts,” Star Comes Out wrote. “Such blizzard conditions pose an imminent threat to tribal government operations, to public safety and the health of tribal members who currently do not have access to medical care, such as dialysis, ambulance service for crisis intervention medical care such as heart attacks and delivering babies, and private transportation to secure food and other necessities of life.”
Halverson praised his efforts in trying to get help for the people of Pine Ridge. The exhaustion in her voice dissipated – for a brief second – calling her people “survivors.”
“We don’t live on our reservation,” she said. “We survive on our reservation. We’re in serious need of some help.”
Thinking About Trying the Zone Diet? Here’s Everything You Need to Know Before You Hop on Board
Nicole Pajer – December 20, 2022
From what you can and can’t eat on it to what the benefits entail, we’ve got you covered.
Among the diet plans that have been trending in recent years is the Zone Diet, right up there with keto and Whole30. This way of eating is generated towards reducing inflammation, slowing down aging, and keeping you properly satiated in between meals. And the lifestyle has been said to help with weight loss, body fat, improving mental clarity and overall wellness. We went straight to the source and asked Zone Diet Creator Dr. Barry Sears to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about the Zone Diet. Want to go deeper? Check out his latest book, The Resolution Zone, which gives readers an overview on how to help reverse the damage done by past inflammation and promote the ability of the body to repair.
Below, you’ll find everything you need to know about what the zone diet actually is, how it works, benefits, how to make it easier, and more.
What Is the Zone Diet?
The Zone Diet is an anti-inflammatory diet created by Dr. Sears, a dietary hormone response expert, in 1998. It involves structuring your meals to include a specific balance of carbohydrates, protein and fats, and can be combined with many other traditional dietary programs. The Zone Diet is considered a long-term eating plan, not a quick-fix diet.
“It’s going back to the original Greek root of the word diet, which means way of life,” Sears says.
According to Sears, this specific way of eating is geared at keeping inflammation “in a zone” that’s not too high, but not too low. Sears explains that we need some level of inflammation to be able to fight off microbiome invasions and to allow any physical injuries sustained heal. But if we have too much, it begins to attack our body. “So keeping inflammation in that zone is really the key toward treating chronic disease,” he adds.
How Does the Zone Diet Work?
All you need to do the diet, per Sears, is “one hand, one eye, and one watch.” The first step is to visually balance your plate: one-third should contain a lean protein (no larger than the palm of your hand); two-thirds should be colorful fruits and vegetables (good carbs). Then, add add a dash of heart-healthy monounsaturated fat—ideally olive oil, “because it’s rich in polyphenols (antioxidant-rich micronutrients) that basically will add to the polyphenol mix of the diet,” Sears says. “It’s that simple!”
If you like tracking your foods in an app like MyFitnessPal that calculates nutrients, here are the numbers you are looking for: 40% of your calories coming from carbohydrates, a.k.a fruits and vegetables, 30% coming from protein and 30% from fat.
“At one meal, if you have 25 grams of protein, about half of that should be fat, monounsaturated fat, maybe 12 grams and maybe about 30 to 35 grams of carbohydrates, primarily non-starchy vegetables,” Sears says.
If you’re using carbohydrates as your fruits and vegetables, with the emphasis on vegetables, the number of calories you’re consuming is very low. “Those meals should be about the 400 calories, but there are very large meals in terms of size,” he says.
Sears says that the trendy concept of intermittent fasting is essentially a bookkeeping way of trying to reduce calories. But by doing the Zone Diet, you end up automatically reducing calories by balancing your plate “because it’s the hormones that those proteins and carbohydrates generate that keep you satiated so you aren’t hungry. And if you aren’t hungry, you eat less calories. If you eat less calories, you live longer,” Sears explains.
How Do I know If the Zone Diet Is Working for Me?
You look at your watch. “If you have no hunger five hours later, that meal was a hormonal winner for you,” says Sears.
What Are the benefits of the Zone Diet?
Reduction in inflammation
“Why is that important? That’s the driver of chronic disease,” he says.
Longevity
“There was a recent study that demonstrated that if you eat 10 servings of fruits and vegetables per day—that’s two kilograms of raw fruits and vegetables—that your likelihood of death decreases by about 31% decrease. Your likelihood of getting dying from cardiovascular disease decreases by 25% and dying of stroke also decreases by about 25%,” he says, adding that this is due to the polyphenols found inside these foods.
“Even though it’s a calorie-restricted program, it’s virtually impossible to eat all the food because on the Zone program, you’re eating about 10 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. That’s a lot of fruit. That’s a lot of vegetables. And so what your consuming for the average female is about maybe 1,200 calories per day and 1,500 for the average male,” he says. What you’re looking to do with your meals, says Sears, is to say, ‘I’m controlling the hormones so I can maintain enough adequate protein coming in so I can maintain my muscle mass. But basically balancing that protein with the right type of carbohydrates. So I don’t overproduce the hormone insulin.”
All These Numbers Sound Complicated. Any tips to Make the Zone Diet Easier?
The secret, Sears says, is finding the low-fat protein, fruits, and vegetables that you like to eat, and learning how to balance that plate. Then put together about 10 different meals, which you can rotate around. “People rarely eat more than 10 different meals at home. They’ll eat two different breakfasts, three different lunches and five different dinners. And if they go out to eat they might go to the same restaurants over and over again eating the same meals,” he says. So you don’t have to drive yourself crazy trying to perfect hundreds of recipes to make at home.
What Foods Can You Eat On the Zone Diet?
Remembering that the proper balance is key, here are some good Zone Diet foods:
Tomatoes
Kale
Spinach
Arugula
Celery
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Carrots
Brussels sprouts
Cucumbers
Green Beans
Eggplant
Zucchini
Squash
Onions
Chicken
Shrimp
Tuna
Tofu
Eggs
Turkey
Salmon
Apples
Oranges
Avocados
Nuts
Olive oil
What Foods Should You Limit On the Zone Diet?
High-glycemic carbohydrates. “They enter the bloodstream very quickly as glucose. And then will basically pump up insulin,” he says. “In terms of what we call ‘whole grains,’ whole grains are whole because they contain polyphenols. But the rate of entry of the carbohydrates in the blood is no different than a piece of Wonder bread,” he adds. So Sears says to keep the amount of starches that you eat to a maximum of around one serving per day. “We want about eight servings of vegetables, two servings of fruit, one at most and and ideally zero of the grains and starches.”
What Are Some Zone Diet Meals?
Breakfast
Greek yogurt with some almonds as a healthy fat source. Another option is slow-cooked oatmeal and an egg white omelet. “You’re balancing protein to carbohydrate and then add some guacamole to the top of the egg white omelet.” Both of these should keep you full for five hours.
Lunch
A chicken Caesar salad. “You get the 25 grams of protein with the chicken breast and the salad. But the salad doesn’t have carbohydrates. So with that, you’d have another two to three servings of vegetables on the side.”
Dinner
Think three servings of non-starchy vegetables, things like broccoli, artichokes, asparagus, cauliflowers. And then for protein, salmon or chicken.
Yes. Both groups eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. So, according to Sears, 2/3 of their plate is already completed. Vegetarians can add in eggs and dairy products for their protein sources and vegans can opt for a soybean protein product.
No.This way of eating doesn’t place its focus on fruits and vegetables, Sears says, which he deems as being key for gut health. He also says people following a Ketogenic diet plan need to make sure that they are getting enough beneficial bacteria-feeding fiber, which can be tough to do. A Mediterranean diet is good pairing with the Zone diet.
What Can You Eat At a Restaurant On the Zone Diet?
If you’re big on eating out, have a restaurant modify a dish until it works for you on this plan. People tend to go to the same 5 to 10 restaurants on repeat, which is a benefit to those doing this program. “They might have a menu with hundreds of meals, but you eat the same one every time. So you keep telling them to adjust the meal, take off some of the grains and starches, add some more vegetables until you find what’s the right meal for you at that restaurant.” Then you can keep including that into your weekly repertoire.
Why do some people get Alzheimer’s and others don’t? How a new UM tool checks your risk
Michelle Marchante – December 20, 2022
Why do some people develop Alzheimer’s disease and others don’t? What makes one person’s brain healthier than another’s? And what can be done to improve, or at least slow, a brain’s deterioration?
Researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine have developed a new tool they say will help fill in the blanks.
The Brain Health Platform provides a snapshot of how healthy a patient’s brain is and how much risk the patient has of developing Alzheimer’s and related disorders. Using the collected data, doctors will be able to create a personalized care plan to help reduce the disease’s onset, said Dr. James Galvin, the director of UM’s Comprehensive Center for Brain Health and the senior author on the paper, which was recently published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s disease.
“I think we spend way too much time talking about disease and disability and death — that’s what doctors always do,” Galvin said. “I think we need to spend more time talking about health and vitality and capabilities. And so we can change the tone of the conversation to prevention, instead of reaction.”
Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia. The disease affects about one in nine people 65 and older, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Younger people can also get Alzheimer’s, although that’s less common.
Certain factors, such as age, genetics and family history can increase a person’s risk of Alzheimer’s. There’s also growing evidence that healthy behaviors, such as getting enough sleep, not smoking and staying active can reduce a person’s cognitive decline.
“It’s one thing to say, physical activity is good for you, and mental activity is good for you, and using your brain is good for you. But if you don’t know how to measure these things, then how can you study them?” Galvin said.
“I jokingly say, this is how I spent my pandemic — we spent a lot of time trying to think about how we could measure these things,” he said. “So we created scales and we validated these scales. And then we realized that these scales were telling us really important pieces of information.”
The Alzheimer’s Association says the disease ”begins 20 years or more before the onset of symptoms.” This makes it difficult to effectively treat and prevent Alzheimer’s, though it also “implies that there is a substantial window of time in which we can intervene in the progression of the disease,” according to the association.
No cure exists yet for Alzheimer’s, although treatments can help with symptoms. One of the challenges doctors face is identifying at-risk people before the prevention window closes. That’s what led UM researchers to create the Brain Health Platform.
In the study, researchers evaluated 230 participants: 71 healthy controls; 71 with mild cognitive impairment and 88 with diagnosed dementia. The team found that participants with abnormal scores on the platform had a greater than 95% probability of being impaired. The platforms results will make it easier for doctors to assess a patient’s brain health and decide on a treatment plan.
Dr. James Galvin, the director of UM’s Comprehensive Center for Brain Health, examines a patient.
How does new UM tool identify Alzheimer’s risk?
The screening tool is already being used by UHealth patients and research participants at the Comprehensive Center for Brain Health, and relies on the following assessments to determine someone’s brain health and future risk:
▪ Resilience index, which tells doctors how “well we built our brain over the course of our lifetime.” It looks at lifestyle, such as your diet, exercise and the type of cognitive and leisure activities you do.
▪ The vulnerability index considers risk factors that can be found in medical records, such as age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, and conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or depression.
▪ TheNumber-Symbol Coding Task uses numbers and symbols to test a patient’s “executive functions” such as problem-solving and decision-making.
Dr. James Galvin, the director of UM’s Comprehensive Center for Brain Health, examines a patient.
Once the 15- to 20-minute assessment is completed, doctors can look at the results to rate a person’s brain health and determine if it’s a healthy brain, a healthy brain with some risks or a brain that is deteriorating. Then the doctor can create a treatment plan. Sometimes, it might not even involve medicine.
Instead, patients might get an exercise routine or a diet change prescribed. A patient that reads books, for example, might get told to join a book club to increase their brain stimulation by adding a social activity, Galvin said. It’s more of a “healthy body, healthy mind, healthy spirit leads to a healthy brain approach.”
“This doesn’t take away from taking medicines when you need medicines. But this is a way of empowering people to take charge of their health, and giving them actionable data, that they can have a personalized care plan that’s built for them,” Galvin said.
“It’s not a one size fits all approach,” he said. “It’s a plan that fits me as an individual. And that’s going to make it much more likely to be adhered to.”
What’s the coldest spot on Earth? NASA has pinpointed it — and the nights are deadly
Mark Price – December 19, 2022
NASA image
If you think a little cold air and snow might bolster your holiday spirits, NASA says it knows the perfect destination for frigid Christmas and New Year’s celebrations.
“Looking for the coldest place to spend the holiday season?” the space agency asked in a Facebook post.
“You won’t find anyone else there, but the coldest place we’ve found on Earth (with the help of NASA Earth satellites) is a high ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau.”
Just be sure to bundle up. Temperatures on the ridge “can drop to 135 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero” on winter nights, NASA says.
NASA first reported finding the planet’s coldest spot in 2013, and the plateau has continued to hold the dubious honor every year since.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center concluded the East Antarctic Plateau was the coldest place in the world after analyzing 32 years of data from several satellites, NASA says. The hollows on the plateau are considered the coldest spots.
“Near a high ridge that runs from Dome Arugs to Dome Fuji, the scientists found clusters of pockets that have plummeted to record low temperatures dozens of times,” officials reported. “The lowest temperature the satellites detected – minus 136° F (minus 93.2° C), on Aug. 10, 2010.”
Scientists attribute the plateau’s dangerous temperatures to a combination of air that is “stationary for extended periods, while continuing to radiate more heat away into space.”
However, the plateau is not “the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth,” experts say. That’s located in northeast Siberia, “where temperatures dropped to a bone-chilling 90 degrees below zero F (minus 67.8° C) in the towns of Verkhoyansk (in 1892) and Oimekon (in 1933).”
NASA first reported finding the planet’s coldest spot in 2013, and the plateau has continued to hold the dubious honor every year since.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center concluded the East Antarctic Plateau was the coldest place in the world after analyzing 32 years of data from several satellites, NASA says. The hollows on the plateau are considered the coldest spots.
“Near a high ridge that runs from Dome Arugs to Dome Fuji, the scientists found clusters of pockets that have plummeted to record low temperatures dozens of times,” officials reported. “The lowest temperature the satellites detected – minus 136° F (minus 93.2° C), on Aug. 10, 2010.”
Scientists attribute the plateau’s dangerous temperatures to a combination of air that is “stationary for extended periods, while continuing to radiate more heat away into space.”
However, the plateau is not “the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth,” experts say. That’s located in northeast Siberia, “where temperatures dropped to a bone-chilling 90 degrees below zero F (minus 67.8° C) in the towns of Verkhoyansk (in 1892) and Oimekon (in 1933).”
‘It could happen tomorrow’: Experts know disaster upon disaster looms for West Coast
Joel Shannon, USA TODAY – December 19, 2022
It’s the elevators that worry earthquake engineering expert Keith Porter the most.
Scientists say a massive quake could strike the San Francisco Bay Area at any moment. And when it does, the city can expect to be slammed with a force equal to hundreds of atomic bombs.
To escape, the survivors of the initial quake will need the help of firefighters with specialized training and tools.
But their rescuers won’t come – at least not right away. Firefighters will be battling infernos that could outnumber the region’s fire engines.
Brown pelicans fly in front of the San Francisco skyline Aug 17, 2018.
Running water will be in short supply. Cellphone service may not work at all. The aftershocks will keep coming.
And the electricity could remain off for weeks.
“That means people are dead in those elevators,” Porter said.
‘Problems on the horizon’
The situation Porter described comes from his work on the HayWired Scenario, a detailed look at the cascading calamities that will occur when a major earthquake strikes the Bay Area’s Hayward Fault, including the possibility of widespread power outages that will strand elevators.
The disaster remains theoretical for now. But the United States Geological Survey estimates a 51% chance that a quake as big as the one described in HayWired will occur in the region within three decades.
It’s one of several West Coast disasters so likely that researchers have prepared painstakingly detailed scenarios in an attempt to ready themselves.
The experts who worked on the projects are highly confident the West Coast could at any moment face disasters with the destructive power to kill hundreds or thousands of people and forever change the lives of millions more. They also say there’s more that can be done to keep individuals – and society – safer.
“We’re trying to have an earthquake without having one,” Anne Wein told USA TODAY. Wein is a USGS researcher who co-leads the HayWired earthquake scenario and has worked on several other similar projects.
Such disaster scenarios are massive undertakings that bring together experts from various fields who otherwise would have little reason to work together – seismologists, engineers, emergency responders and social scientists.
That’s important because “it’s difficult to make new relationships in a crisis,” Wein said.
Similar projects aimed at simulating a future disaster have turned out to be hauntingly accurate.
The Hurricane Pam scenario foretold many of the devastating consequences of a major hurricane striking New Orleans well before Hurricane Katrina hit the city.
More recently, in 2017, the authors of “The SPARS Pandemic” called their disaster scenario “futuristic.” But now the project now reads like a prophecy of COVID-19. Johns Hopkins University even issued a statement saying the 89-page document was not intended as a prediction of COVID-19.
“The SPARS Pandemic” imagined a future where a deadly novel coronavirus spread around the world, often without symptoms, as disinformation and vaccine hesitancy constantly confounded experts’ efforts to keep people safe.
The “SPARS scenario, which is fiction, was meant to give public health communicators a leg up … Think through problems on the horizon,” author Monica Schoch-Spana told USA TODAY.
At the time that SPARS was written, a global pandemic was thought of in much the same way experts currently describe the HayWired earthquake: an imminent catastrophe that could arrive at any time.
‘It could happen tomorrow’
Disaster scenario researchers each have their own way of describing how likely the apocalyptic futures they foresee are.
“The probability (of) this earthquake is 100%, if you give me enough time,” seismologist Lucy Jones will often say.
Earthquakes occurring along major faults are a certainty, but scientists can’t predict exactly when earthquakes will happen – the underground forces that create them are too random and chaotic. But researchers know a lot about what will happen once the earth begins to shake.
Earthquakes like HayWired are “worth planning for,” Porter said. Because “it could happen tomorrow.”
“We don’t know when,” Porter said. But “it will happen.”
Wein says we’re “overdue for preparedness.” You might say we’re also overdue for a major West Coast disaster.
The kind of earthquake described in HayWired historically occurs every 100-220 years. And it’s been more than 153 years since the last one.
Farther south in California, it’s difficult to pin down exactly how at risk Los Angeles is for The Big One – the infamous theoretical earthquake along the San Andreas fault that will devastate the city. But a massive magnitude 7.5 earthquake has about a 1 in 3 chance of striking the Los Angeles area in the next 30 years, the United States Geological Survey estimates.
Another scenario warns that a stretch of coast in Oregon and Washington state is capable of producing an earthquake much more powerful than the ones California is bracing for. Parts of coastline would suddenly drop 6 feet, shattering critical bridges, destroying undersea communication cables and producing a tsunami.
It too “could happen at any time,” the scenario says.
Earthquake scenarios often focus on major coastal cities, but West Coast residents farther inland also have yet another disaster to brace for.
“Megastorms are California’s other Big One,” the ARkStorm scenario says. It warns of a statewide flood that will cause more than a million evacuations and devastate California’s agriculture.
Massive storms that dump rain on California for weeks on end historically happen every few hundred years. The last one hit around the time of the Civil War, when weeks of rain turned portions of the state “into an inland sea.”
‘Decades to rebuild’
Whether the next disaster to strike the West Coast is a flood, an earthquake or something else, scenario experts warn that the impacts will reverberate for years or longer.
“It takes decades to rebuild,” Wein said. “You have to think about a decade at least.”
A major West Coast earthquake isn’t just damaged buildings and cracked roads.
It’s weeks or months without running water in areas with millions of people. It’s mass migrations away from ruined communities. It’s thousands of uninhabitable homes.
Depending on the scenario, thousands of people are expected to die. Hundreds of thousands more could be left without shelter. And those impacts will be a disproportionately felt.
California already has a housing and homelessness crisis, and Nnenia Campbell said the next disaster is set to magnify inequalities. Campbell is the deputy director of the William Averette Anderson Fund, which works to mitigate disasters for minority communities.
Campbell doesn’t talk about “natural disasters” because there’s nothing natural about the way a major earthquake will harm vulnerable communities more than wealthy ones.
Human decisions such as redlining have led to many of the inequities in our society, she said. But humans can make decisions that will help make the response to the next disaster more equitable.
Many of those choices need to be made by local leaders and emergency management planners. Investing in infrastructure programs that will make homes in minority communities less vulnerable to earthquakes. Understanding how important a library is to unhoused people. Making sure all schools are built to withstand a disaster. Keeping public spaces open, even during an emergency.
But individuals can make a difference as well, Campbell said. You can complete training that will prepare you to help your community in the event of an emergency. Or you can join a mutual aid network, a group where community members work together to help each other.
Community support is a common theme among disaster experts: One of the best ways to prepare is to know and care about your neighbors.
If everyone only looks out for themselves in the next disaster, “we are going to have social breakdown,” Jones said.
What you can do
Experts acknowledge you’ll want to make sure you and your family are safe before being able to help others. Fortunately, many disaster preparedness precautions are inexpensive and will help in a wide range of emergency situations.
Be prepared to have your access to electricity or water cut off for days or weeks.
For electricity, you’ll at least want a flashlight and a way to charge your phone.
While cell service will be jammed immediately after a major earthquake, communications will likely slowly come back online faster than other services, Wein said. (And when trying to use your phone, text – don’t call. In a disaster, text messages are more reliable and strain cell networks less.)
To power your phone, you can cheaply buy a combination weather radio, flashlight and hand-crank charger to keep your cell running even without power for days.
A cash reserve is good to have, too, Jones said. You’ll want to be able to buy things, even if your credit card doesn’t work for a time.
Preparing for earthquakes specifically is important along the West Coast, too, experts said. Simple things like securing bookshelves can save lives. Downloading an early warning app can give you precious moments to protect yourself in the event of a big quake. Buying earthquake insurance can protect homeowners. And taking part in a yearly drill can help remind you about other easy steps you can take to prepare.
There’s even more you could do to ready yourself for a catastrophe, but many disaster experts are hesitant to rely on individuals’ ability to prepare themselves.
Just as health experts have begged Americans to use masks and vaccines to help keep others safe during the pandemic, disaster scenario experts believe community members will need to look out for one another when the next disaster strikes.
Telling people to prepare as if “nobody is coming to help you” is a self-fulfilling prophesy, Jones said.
For now, policymakers hold the real power in how prepared society will be for the next disaster. And there are many problems to fix, according to Porter, including upgrading city plumbing, because many aging and brittle water pipes will shatter in a major earthquake, cutting off water to communities for weeks or months.
Barbara Hiebel carries 137 pounds on her 5-foot-11 frame. Most of her life she weighed 200 pounds more.
For decades she tried every diet that came along. With each failure to lose the extra weight or keep it off, her shame magnified.
In 2009, Hiebel opted for gastric bypass surgery because she had “nothing left in the gas tank” to keep fighting. She quickly dropped 200 pounds and felt better than she had in ages.
Over the next eight years though, 70 pounds crept back, and the shame returned.
“I knew everything to do to lose weight. I could teach the classes,” said Hiebel, 65, a retired marketing professional from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She asked to be identified by her first and maiden name because of the sensitivity and judgment surrounding obesity. “I’m not a stupid person. I just couldn’t do it.”
Barbara Hiebel has tried every diet, surgery and now medication; she’s down 200 pounds from her heaviest.
The vast majority of people find it almost impossible to lose substantial weight and keep it off.
Medicine no longer sees this as a personal failing. In recent years, faced with reams of scientific evidence, the medical community has begun to stop blaming patients for not losing excess pounds.
Still, there’s a lot at stake.
Rethinking Obesity
Despite decades fighting America’s obesity epidemic, it’s only gotten worse. To try to understand why, USA TODAY spoke with more than 50 experts for this six-part series, which explores emerging science and evolving attitudes toward excess weight.
Obesity increases the risk for about 200 diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, asthma, hypertension, arthritis, sleep apnea and many types of cancer. Obesity was a risk factor in nearly 12% of U.S. deaths in 2019.
Early in the pandemic, pictures from intensive care units repeatedly showed large people fighting for their lives. At Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City, the average age for ICU patients was 72 if their weight was in the “normal” range and just 58 if they fit the medical definition for having obesity, said Dr. Louis Aronne, an obesity medicine specialist there.
As fat cells expand, the body produces inflammatory hormones. Combined with COVID-19, the inflammation creates a biological storm that damages people’s organs and leads to uncontrolled blood clotting, Aronne said.
The link between obesity and severe COVID-19 is surprisingly strong, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has dedicated his life to combating infectious diseases.
“The data were so strong,” Fauci said of a recent government study. Even for children, every increase in body mass index led to a greater risk of infection with COVID-19 and for a dangerous case of the viral illness.
“The more you learn about the deleterious consequences of obesity, the more reason and impetus you have to seriously address the problem,” Fauci said.
But despite more than 40 years of diets and workouts, billions of dollars spent on weight loss programs and medical care, and tens of millions of personal struggles like Hiebel’s, the obesity epidemic has only gotten worse. Nearly three-quarters of Americans are now considered overweight, and more than 4 in 10 meet the criteria for having obesity.
To try to understand why, USA TODAY spoke with more than 50 nutrition and obesity experts, endocrinologists, pediatricians, social scientists, activists and people who have fought extra pounds. The reporting resulted in a six-part series, which explores emerging science and evolving attitudes toward excess weight.
The experts pointed to an array of compounding forces. Social stigma. Economics. Stress. Ultra-processed food. The biological challenges of losing weight.
They agree people need to take responsibility for eating as well as they can, for staying fit, for sleeping enough. But simply promoting individual change won’t end the obesity epidemic – just as it hasn’t for decades.
It’s time to rethink obesity, they said.
Experts offered different ideas to change the trajectory.
Subsidize healthy food. Make ultra-processed foods healthier or scarcer. Teach kids to better care for their bodies. Provide insurance for prevention instead of just the consequences. Personalize weight loss programsto support, not stigmatize. Learn what makes fat unhealthy in some people and not in others.
Dr. Sarah Kim
For real progress to come, they agreed, society must stop blaming people for a medical condition that is beyond their control. And people must stop blaming themselves.
“There’s a lot of misperception among patients that they can somehow ‘behavior’ their way out of this – if they just had enough willpower and they just decided they were finally going to change their ways, they could do it,” said Dr. Sarah Kim, an endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
For the vast majority, trying to will or work themselves to thinness is just a prescription for misery, she said.
“There’s so much suffering associated with weight that is just so unnecessary.”
Origin story
Like many people who struggle with weight, Hiebel has a family tree that includes others with extra pounds. Her mother was heavy, as were other female relatives.
In childhood, Hiebel simply loved food. It gave her pleasure. A buzz.
In fourth grade, her mother brought up her weight with the pediatrician. He prescribed amphetamines.
“I was a fat kid who always wanted to be skinny,” Hiebel said. “My whole life. I wanted to be healthy. Thinner.”
She blamed herself. For not pushing away from the table sooner. For enjoying what she ate. For the thoughts about food that popped into her head every 30 seconds all day long. For not being able to throw away the plate of cake until she had devoured every bite.
Even though she was trained as a nurse, Hiebel, was petrified of getting medical care. “I spent 50 years largely avoiding doctors because they’re going to weigh me,” she said.
People who experience and internalize weight stigma are more likely to avoid health care and report lower quality of medical care, research shows.
Many fear the waiting room won’t have chairs strong enough to support their weight. They won’t fit on the examining table. The doctor will mock or criticize them for being overweight without offering realistic advice for how to lose their extra pounds.
Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford
“We treat them as if we obviously don’t care because obesity must be their fault,” said Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We just tell them to eat less and exercise more, and when that fails, as it does 95% of the time, we don’t do anything about it.”
And people with obesity continue to punish themselves. Stanford tells a story about a patient whose weight kept climbing even after being prescribed medications that are usually effective.
The woman confessed she wasn’t taking the prescription because she hadn’t tried hard enough to lose weight on her own and didn’t deserve it. “I only do 15,000 steps a day,” the woman told Stanford. “I feel like I should be doing 20,000.”
Stanford ended up persuading her to take the medication. She explained that if someone had a disability weakening their legs, it wouldn’t be a failure for them to use a wheelchair.
Compassionate care
Hiebel had excellent insurance coverage, but she remembers overhearing her internist arguing with the insurance company to get her weight loss surgery covered. She was required to try Weight Watchers for at least six months and a second weight loss program for another six months, although data shows the vast majority of people can’t lose substantial weight and keep it off.
It felt as if the whole insurance industry was telling her she was guilty for being fat.
Shame and embarrassment led Hiebel to avoid seeking help when she started regaining weight after the surgery. “People did all this work on you. You spent all this time and energy and you’re failing yet again,” she said.
But she didn’t want to let all her progress fall apart. She eventually went back to her surgeon.
He told her to make an appointment with Dr. Katherine Saunders at Weill Cornell – and to wait as long as was necessary to see her.
When Hiebel eventually found herself in Saunders’ office, she heard for the first time in her life the words: “This is not your fault.”
“In my head, I’m going, ‘Of course it’s my fault. I’m weak. I’ve got no willpower,'” Hiebel said.
Saunders told her weight loss would take hard work. Her body was conspiring against her to keep on the pounds. The free snacks in her office break room would be a constant temptation.
She offered Hiebel some new tools, including medication to address metabolic issues and her mental state.
With other weight loss doctors, Hiebel felt embarrassed to return for another appointment until she had lost 10 pounds. That often meant never going back. But Saunders told Hiebel to call immediately if she started to struggle.
“She was inoculating me against that from the beginning,” Hiebel said. “‘This isn’t your fault. I can help. And if you get into trouble, don’t do what you would normally do and actually call me.'”
The medication gave Hiebel some stomach problems. Saunders warned her that might happen and told her to tough it out for a few weeks. They would adjust the dosage or prescription if it got too bad.
Hiebel’s pounds started melting off. She felt great.
Then, for two days, Hiebel found herself repeatedly standing in front of her pantry. “Just looking,” she said. “I’d grab a cracker or shut the door. But you keep going back.”
Without noticing, she had missed two daily doses of Contrave, a prescription weight loss pill that also helps with mood disorders. Hiebel resumed taking the pills, and her pantry-gazing ended. “I went back to my normal habits almost overnight. Literally.”
That’s when she realized the power of the medications – and of the drive she carried within her.
“I always felt controlled by food,” she said. “Everything was about not eating.”
But the metabolic changes from the surgery and the boost from the medications finally changed that dynamic. Raw cookie dough, once her “fifth major food group,” lost its grip on her mind. “I kind of don’t really want it,” she said.
She can throw away a piece of cake after just a few bites, even leaving behind the icing. “Now I’m that person,” Hiebel said, “not because I somehow have the willpower, but because I don’t really want it.
“I feel liberated around food.”
Easy to gain, hard to lose
Weight gain may be as simple as consuming more calories than you burn, but weight loss isn’t as simple as burning more calories than you eat.
The human body evolved over tens of thousands of years to hold on to excess calories through fat.
“The default is to promote eating. It’s very simple, very logical. If it were not this way, you would die after you’re born,” said Tamas Horvath, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine. “When you live out in the wild, you need to be driven to find food, otherwise you’re going to miss out on life.”
Severe calorie restriction is dangerous, said Horvath, who, with his colleague Joseph Schlessinger, has been studying the brain wiring that drives hunger.
In a study of mice whose calories were severely restricted, one-third lost weight and lived longer, as the experiment set out to prove, Horvath said. But nothing happened to another third. The remainder died young.
“When you engage in such behavior, you are basically playing Russian roulette,” he said.
Restricting calories seems to slow metabolism, meaning the body needs less fuel. “You have to keep restricting more and more to keep losing weight,” said Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. “This is a battle between mind and metabolism that most people don’t win.”
Genetics play a role, too. Some people seem destined from birth to be thin, like everyone else in their family.
Only about a quarter of the population, those with a genetic gift for thinness, seem to escape extra pounds in today’s food climate. Even these lucky few can develop the same metabolic problems seen with obesity, becoming “thin outside, fat inside,” according to Jose Ordovas, a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.
And everybody doesn’t gain the same amount of weight from overeating.
A 1990 study showed that a group of identical twin men fed an additional 1,000 calories a day for three months led some to gain roughly 10 pounds and others to gain 30. The twin pairs varied substantially from each other in how much weight they gained and where, but each twin responded nearly the same as his brother.
Overeating can distort the nerves in the brain that receive signals from hormones, said Aronne, at Weill Cornell.
“As you get more damage there, fewer hormonal signals are able to get through and tell your brain how much you’ve eaten and how much fat is stored,” he said. “As a result, your body keeps expanding your fat mass.”
Exercise doesn’t lead to weight loss either. “You can’t easily exercise off obesity,” said Marion Nestle, an emerita professor of nutrition and food science at New York University.
Still, experts agree that regular exercise is crucial to health at any size. And it may help prevent weight gain and regain.
“The Biggest Loser” TV show ran on NBC for 17 seasons, following participants as they lost weight through diet and exercise. In 2016, Kevin Hall, a National Institutes of Health researcher, examined what had happened to 14 of the 16 contestants from the 2009 season.
All but one regained some or all of their lost weight, Hall found. But the contestants who remained the most physically active kept off the most weight, he reported in a 2017 analysis of the results.
“The benefits of exercise when it comes to weight don’t seem to show up so much while people are actively losing weight,” he said, “but in keeping weight off over the long term.”
Adequate sleep also is essential for maintaining a healthy body weight and can help with weight loss, studies show.
To accomplish everything she wanted to do in a day, Hiebel often limited her sleep to five to six hours a night. Her solution to the resulting exhaustion was to snack. She remembers frequent coffee and cookie breaks, “as self-defeating as that is.”
Many people make the same decision to sleep less – and end up eating more.
In a study published earlier this year, people who had extra weight but not obesity were encouraged to sleep 1.2 hours more a night for two weeks. They ended up consuming 270 calories less a day than the volunteers who slept their typical 6½ hours or less a night.
“It’s about sufficient sleep making you feel less hungry, making you want to consume fewer calories,” said Dr. Esra Tasali, who led the study and directs the UChicago Sleep Center. “Basically not eating the extra chocolate bar.”
Growing hope
Even though she knows how to work the system from her years in the insurance industry, Hiebel is struggling again to get her medication covered by insurance.
She may have to switch to two low-cost generics, provided at the wrong dose. “I’m going to have to cut a pill into fourths with a razor blade,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”
But Heibel will do what she must to keep off the extra weight.
She feels healthier without those pounds. She used to dread the hills she faced on hikes with her husband. After losing weight, she barely notices them.
Barbara Hiebel wants to share her story of weight loss, so others know there’s hope.
“We’re not talking about Everest,” she said. “I’m not running marathons, but I can do this stuff and I don’t huff and puff.”
Before she started weight loss medications, she was heading into pre-diabetes. She had borderline high cholesterol and was managing hypertension. Now, her LDL and HDL hover around 70; 60 to 100 is considered optimal.
Just knowing it was possible to break food’s grip on her life, that there was hope, was transformative.
Hiebel wants to talk publicly about her story, about the shame she endured for decades, because she wants others to know it’s not their fault and help is out there.
The incident with the Contrave made her realize she’ll probably need to take a constellation of medications forever. And they still give her a rumbly tummy sometimes.
It’s a small price to pay, she said, “to do something that for 50 years I wasn’t able to do.”
“I’m happy as a clam, and I’m not looking back.”
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
Which Virus Is It This Time? New Yorkers Are Sick of Being Sick.
Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura and Nate Schweber – December 16, 2022
Lester Sykes, who said New Yorkers are hyperaware of their health right now, in Brooklyn, Dec. 15, 2022. (Ahmed Gaber/The New York Times)
NEW YORK — For almost a month now, Sean Merriam has been walking around town with a stuffy nose and a mysterious cough that keeps clattering in his lungs. He knows it’s not COVID-19, because he tests regularly, and it’s not the flu, which he recovered from a few weeks ago.
The culprit may be the respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, that has been surging this season, but he’s not sure. It could be anything, really.
“I go through periods when I think it’s gone, and then I cough, and I’m like, yeah, it’s still there,” said Merriam, 55, a video editor who wheezed his way through McCarren Park in Brooklyn on Thursday. “It just won’t go away.”
His mystery virus is among a swirl of diseases assailing New Yorkers this winter with bewildering and miserable symptoms — a toxic cocktail made worse by cramped apartments, subway cars and classrooms, where masks are now optional.
In the face of such a relentless onslaught, New Yorkers appear to have mixed emotions, feeling apprehensive, weary and resigned to a new “new normal.” They are living not just among the coronavirus and its seemingly endless variants, but a bunch of other viruses too. Infectious disease experts have noted that other respiratory illnesses, such as rhinoviruses and adenoviruses, are also circulating.
“There’s always a sickness going on,” said Lester Sykes, 35, who lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn and who was out walking Raja, his Pharaoh hound. “Everyone is hyperaware of their health now,” he said.
“It’s all about the feels until you get sick,” he said. “Then when you get sick, you’ve got to deal with it.”
According to city data, the number of COVID cases has jumped about 31% since Thanksgiving and now stands at about 3,600 per day. The actual total caseload is much higher, though, because that number does not include at-home testing, which is now prevalent. Meanwhile, flu cases have skyrocketed over the last two weeks and are at levels higher than at any point since 2018. A spot of good news: RSV appears to have peaked in mid-November and is on the decline, though its levels are also still high.
Although city officials have been recommending that New Yorkers wear masks in indoor public spaces, few are heeding that call. School attendance remains relatively high too, though it dipped a little recently. Restaurants and coffee shops are busy, and offices show no signs of closing. People are still going out to movies, music venues and cocktail bars.
Still, parents are worried, especially those of toddlers who were born at the start of, or during, the pandemic, when the lockdown protected them from germs and might have made them more vulnerable to the current crop of viruses
Merriam’s two daughters, 10 and 13, have had both the coronavirus and the flu. He never really worried about strep throat, but now that it is in the news — following fatal cases in Britain where nearly 20 children have died from strep A, a bacterial infection that causes strep throat — he is more attentive.
Dr. Matthew Harris, a Northwell Health physician who specializes in pediatric emergency medicine at the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Queens, said that influenza and RSV appeared earlier than expected in the fall, and at higher volume and severity. RSV historically begins to peak in mid-to-late November and stays until the spring, he said, but this year, the virus arrived a month earlier.
RSV was the predominant viral cause of admission at Cohen followed by the flu, he said, while COVID was not a significant contributor. In the last seven days, he said, the hospital has averaged about 260 children in the emergency department daily and is operating at between 105% and 120% capacity.
He added that many children came with multiple viruses at the same time, for example, a combination of the flu and the coronavirus.
“Probably some of this has to do with the fact that children are now being exposed to viruses that they had not had any immunological exposure to over the past two years because of masking and social distancing and so forth,” Harris said. “The very nature of these viral illnesses has changed because of sort of the mitigation strategies that were taken.”
At Cohen, staff members are “overwhelmed,” he said, by the surge in visits and emergency room admissions and have to deal with a shortage of pediatricians, a nationwide trend.
“The percentage of kids requiring an admission to the ICU is not substantially higher than it’s been in the past,” he added, “but the total number of children presenting is far beyond anything I’ve ever seen. I can tell you that if you look back at the past 10 years of our children’s hospital, the seven busiest days have been in the last month.”
Judith Cabanas, 28, a mother of two who lives in Astoria, Queens, said she is anxious because her 5-year-old son, Benjamin, has been sick repeatedly for months.
“Every week or two weeks he’s been getting sick, fever, cough, runny nose,” she said. “I get scared.”
Cabanas has had to keep Benjamin home from school and said that she has to look for children’s Tylenol on Facebook, because stores have sold out. Although she is relieved that her 2-year-old daughter, Lily, seems to be healthy so far, she expects the season to get worse.
Catrin Einhorn and Lauren Leatherby – December 16, 2022
Animals Are Running Out of Places to Live
Wildlife is disappearing around the world, in the oceans and on land. The main cause on land is perhaps the most straightforward: Humans are taking over too much of the planet, erasing what was there before. Climate change and other pressures make survival harder.
This week and next, nations are meeting in Montreal to negotiate a new agreement to address staggering declines in biodiversity. The future of many species hangs in the balance.
“If the forest disappears, they will disappear,” said Walter Jetz, a professor of biodiversity science at Yale University who leads Map of Life, a platform that combines satellite imaging with ecological data to determine how species ranges are changing around the world. Map of Life shared data with The New York Times.
Biodiversity — or all the variety of life on the planet, including plants, invertebrates and ocean species — is declining at rates unprecedented in human history, according to the leading intergovernmental scientific panel on the subject. The group’s projections suggest that 1 million species are threatened with extinction, many within decades.
The meeting in Montreal is intended to chart a different path. Delayed two years because of the pandemic, delegations are working to land a new, 10-year agreement to tackle biodiversity loss under a United Nations treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity.
“With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in his opening remarks last week in Montreal.
The last global biodiversity agreement failed to meet a single target at the global level, according to the Convention on Biological Diversity itself, and wildlife populations continue to plummet.
Take the Honduran white bat.
At first glance, they resemble a cluster of cotton balls stuck under a leaf. But each tiny mound of fluff possesses an even tinier yellow snout and ears. Honduran white bats work together to fashion leaves into tent homes and are known to nurse one another’s young. At night, they fly out in search of a specific species of fig, dispersing its seeds in return.
These bats offer potential benefits to people. Their cuteness makes them an ecotourism draw, and they have an ability that’s rare in mammals to store carotenoids in their skin, which could hold promise for unlocking treatment for conditions such as macular degeneration.
But in the past 20 years, Honduran white bats have lost about half their range in Central America as people clear rainforest for pasture, crops and homes. Not yet considered endangered, they are nevertheless in steep decline, one of countless examples in this worsening global crisis.
It’s not only wildlife that will suffer as a result. Biodiversity loss can trigger ecosystem collapse, scientists say, threatening humanity’s food and water supplies. Alarm is growing that the threat is comparable in significance to the climate crisis.
“Climate change presents a nearer-term threat to the future of human civilization,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a prominent climate change researcher who also focuses on biodiversity as chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “The biodiversity crisis presents a longer-term threat to the viability of the human species.”
Scientists emphasize that one can’t be solved without the other because they are interconnected.
What Is Driving the Loss
The human population has doubled since 1970. Although the rate of population growth is slowing, the sheer number of people continues to rise. Consumption levels in different parts of the world mean some people put more pressure on nature. In the United States, for example, each person uses the equivalent of 8 global hectares on average, according to the Global Footprint Network, a nonprofit research group. In Nigeria, it’s about 1 hectare per person.
All that is related to the causes of biodiversity loss, which scientists have ranked. First are changes in land and sea use. Then comes the direct taking of species via, for example, hunting, fishing and wildlife trafficking. Climate change is next, followed by pollution and invasive species. Unfortunately for wildlife, these pressures build on one another.
In the future, scientists expect climate change to become the main driver of biodiversity loss as changes in temperature, rainfall and other conditions continue to transform ecosystems. That shift is expected “some decades down the road,” Jetz said. “But we might already be looking at a much-reduced set of species at that point.”
For the best chance at adapting to climate change, plants and animals need robust populations and room to migrate. Instead, they are depleted and hemmed in.
Why are people taking over so much land? Mostly for agriculture. In many parts of the world, that means exports driven by booming global trade. In recent decades, for example, Southeast Asia has become a major supplier of coffee, timber, rice, palm oil, rubber and fish to the rest of the world.
“All of that economic expansion has come at the cost of biodiverse habitat,” said Pamela McElwee, an environmental anthropologist at Rutgers University who studies the region.
Some momentum is building for companies to ensure that their products are deforestation-free. Reducing meat consumption and food waste are key to freeing up land for other species, McElwee said.
In many places, poverty, powerful interests and a lack of law enforcement make habitat loss especially hard to address.
In Central America, illegal cattle ranching drives deforestation on protected state and Indigenous lands, said Jeremy Radachowsky, director for Mesoamerica and the Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Wealthy individuals, often affiliated with drug cartels, grab land, sometimes through illegal payments. They raise beef, some of which ends up in the United States, he said.
Elsewhere in the region and beyond, desperation sometimes pushes people to find remote areas with little government presence where they can simply take land to make a living.
“They need land in order to feed their families,” said David López-Carr, a professor of geography at the University of California Santa Barbara who studies how people interact with tropical forests in Latin America.
Rainforest countries such as Brazil and Congo are known for widespread deforestation. But the species that have lost the largest portions of their habitats tend to be concentrated in places that are geographically isolated in some way, such as the isthmus of Central America and Madagascar. Because animals there often have smaller ranges to begin with, habitat loss hits them especially hard.
For example, 98% of lemurs, primates that only exist in Madagascar, are threatened. Almost one-third are on the brink of extinction. “I don’t want to lose my hope,” said Jonah Ratsimbazafy, a primatologist who leads a nonprofit group on the island that seeks to save lemurs while helping people. Madagascar is among the poorest countries in the world.
Recognition is growing that stanching biodiversity loss requires addressing the needs of local communities.
“There needs to be a way that the people that live close to the forests benefit from the intact forests, rather than clearing the forest for short term gain,” said Julia Patricia Gordon Jones, a professor of conservation science at Bangor University in Wales. “That’s the ultimate challenge of forest conservation globally.”
The High Cost of Inaction
While countries in the global south are experiencing the most dramatic biodiversity losses right now, Europe and the United States went through their own severe declines hundreds of years ago.
“We lost pretty much 100% of primary forest in most parts of Europe,” Jetz said.
Now, with negotiations underway in Montreal, countries that are poor economically but rich in biodiversity argue that they need help from wealthier countries if they’re going to take a different route.
Overall, the financial need is daunting: hundreds of billions per year to help poorer countries develop and implement national biodiversity plans, which would include actions such as creating protected areas; restoring degraded lands; reforming harmful agricultural, fishing and forestry practices; managing invasive species; and improving urban water quality.
On the other hand, failing to address biodiversity loss carries enormous financial risk. A report by the World Economic Forum found that $44 trillion of economic value generation is “moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services and is therefore exposed to nature loss.”
A vast source of funding could come from redirecting subsidies that presently support fossil fuels and harmful agricultural practices, said David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
“Currently, most governments spend far more on subsidies that actually are destroying nature than they do on financing conservation,” Cooper said. “So, certainly a change in that will be critical.”
The United States is the only country besides the Holy See that isn’t a party to the convention, so although the United States will attend the meeting, it will be participating from the sidelines.
“We can play a very constructive role from the outside,” said Monica Medina, an assistant secretary of state who is also special envoy for biodiversity and water resources. But she acknowledged that being a member would be better. “I hope that someday we will be,” she said.
Of the many targets being negotiated, the one that has gotten the most attention seeks to address habitat loss head on. Known as 30×30, it’s a plan to safeguard at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. More than 100 countries back the proposal. Although some Indigenous groups fear it will lead to their displacement, others support the plan as a means to secure stronger land rights.
But experts emphasize that action will have to go further than lines on a map.
“You can set up a protected area, but you’ve not dealt with the fact that the whole reason you had habitat loss in the first place is because of demand for land,” McElwee said. “You have to tackle the underlying drivers. Otherwise, you’re only dealing with like half the problem.”
Methodology
All estimates on habitat loss come from Map of Life and its Species Habitat Index. Habitat loss estimates since 2001 run through 2021 and are approximations, based on models of geographic range that incorporate remote sensing and expert research. Map of Life shared data for terrestrial vertebrate species for which the group’s methods can confidently ascertain habitat loss. The researchers estimate many more species are experiencing significant habitat loss than are in the group’s data.
Common names for species used in this article come from Map of Life. Data used in the accompanying graphics showing habitat loss also comes from Map of Life.
Map of Life is led by Walter Jetz, professor of ecology at Yale University and scientific chair at the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. Other Map of Life contributors to the research shown in this story include Kalkidan Fekadu Chefira, John Wilshire, Ajay Ranipeta, Yanina Sica and Rohan Simkin.
‘It could happen tomorrow’: Experts know disaster upon disaster looms for West Coast
Joel Shannon, USA TODAY – December 16, 2022
Brown pelicans fly in front of the San Francisco skyline Aug 17, 2018.
It’s the elevators that worry earthquake engineering expert Keith Porter the most.
Scientists say a massive quake could strike the San Francisco Bay Area at any moment. And when it does, the city can expect to be slammed with a force equal to hundreds of atomic bombs.
To escape, the survivors of the initial quake will need the help of firefighters with specialized training and tools.
But their rescuers won’t come – at least not right away. Firefighters will be battling infernos that could outnumber the region’s fire engines.
Running water will be in short supply. Cellphone service may not work at all. The aftershocks will keep coming.
And the electricity could remain off for weeks.
“That means people are dead in those elevators,” Porter said.
‘Problems on the horizon’
The situation Porter described comes from his work on the HayWired Scenario, a detailed look at the cascading calamities that will occur when a major earthquake strikes the Bay Area’s Hayward Fault, including the possibility of widespread power outages that will strand elevators.
The disaster remains theoretical for now. But the United States Geological Survey estimates a 51% chance that a quake as big as the one described in HayWired will occur in the region within three decades.
It’s one of several West Coast disasters so likely that researchers have prepared painstakingly detailed scenarios in an attempt to ready themselves.
The experts who worked on the projects are highly confident the West Coast could at any moment face disasters with the destructive power to kill hundreds or thousands of people and forever change the lives of millions more. They also say there’s more that can be done to keep individuals – and society – safer.
“We’re trying to have an earthquake without having one,” Anne Wein told USA TODAY. Wein is a USGS researcher who co-leads the HayWired earthquake scenario and has worked on several other similar projects.
Such disaster scenarios are massive undertakings that bring together experts from various fields who otherwise would have little reason to work together – seismologists, engineers, emergency responders and social scientists.
That’s important because “it’s difficult to make new relationships in a crisis,” Wein said.
Similar projects aimed at simulating a future disaster have turned out to be hauntingly accurate.
The Hurricane Pam scenario foretold many of the devastating consequences of a major hurricane striking New Orleans well before Hurricane Katrina hit the city.
More recently, in 2017, the authors of “The SPARS Pandemic” called their disaster scenario “futuristic.” But now the project now reads like a prophecy of COVID-19. Johns Hopkins University even issued a statement saying the 89-page document was not intended as a prediction of COVID-19.
“The SPARS Pandemic” imagined a future where a deadly novel coronavirus spread around the world, often without symptoms, as disinformation and vaccine hesitancy constantly confounded experts’ efforts to keep people safe.
The “SPARS scenario, which is fiction, was meant to give public health communicators a leg up … Think through problems on the horizon,” author Monica Schoch-Spana told USA TODAY.
At the time that SPARS was written, a global pandemic was thought of in much the same way experts currently describe the HayWired earthquake: an imminent catastrophe that could arrive at any time.
‘It could happen tomorrow’
Disaster scenario researchers each have their own way of describing how likely the apocalyptic futures they foresee are.
“The probability (of) this earthquake is 100%, if you give me enough time,” seismologist Lucy Jones will often say.
Earthquakes occurring along major faults are a certainty, but scientists can’t predict exactly when earthquakes will happen – the underground forces that create them are too random and chaotic. But researchers know a lot about what will happen once the earth begins to shake.
Earthquakes like HayWired are “worth planning for,” Porter said. Because “it could happen tomorrow.”
“We don’t know when,” Porter said. But “it will happen.”
Wein says we’re “overdue for preparedness.” You might say we’re also overdue for a major West Coast disaster.
The kind of earthquake described in HayWired historically occurs every 100-220 years. And it’s been more than 153 years since the last one.
Farther south in California, it’s difficult to pin down exactly how at risk Los Angeles is for The Big One – the infamous theoretical earthquake along the San Andreas fault that will devastate the city. But a massive magnitude 7.5 earthquake has about a 1 in 3 chance of striking the Los Angeles area in the next 30 years, the United States Geological Survey estimates.
Another scenario warns that a stretch of coast in Oregon and Washington state is capable of producing an earthquake much more powerful than the ones California is bracing for. Parts of coastline would suddenly drop 6 feet, shattering critical bridges, destroying undersea communication cables and producing a tsunami.
It too “could happen at any time,” the scenario says.
Earthquake scenarios often focus on major coastal cities, but West Coast residents farther inland also have yet another disaster to brace for.
“Megastorms are California’s other Big One,” the ARkStorm scenario says. It warns of a statewide flood that will cause more than a million evacuations and devastate California’s agriculture.
Massive storms that dump rain on California for weeks on end historically happen every few hundred years. The last one hit around the time of the Civil War, when weeks of rain turned portions of the state “into an inland sea.”
‘Decades to rebuild’
Whether the next disaster to strike the West Coast is a flood, an earthquake or something else, scenario experts warn that the impacts will reverberate for years or longer.
“It takes decades to rebuild,” Wein said. “You have to think about a decade at least.”
A major West Coast earthquake isn’t just damaged buildings and cracked roads.
It’s weeks or months without running water in areas with millions of people. It’s mass migrations away from ruined communities. It’s thousands of uninhabitable homes.
Depending on the scenario, thousands of people are expected to die. Hundreds of thousands more could be left without shelter. And those impacts will be a disproportionately felt.
California already has a housing and homelessness crisis, and Nnenia Campbell said the next disaster is set to magnify inequalities. Campbell is the deputy director of the William Averette Anderson Fund, which works to mitigate disasters for minority communities.
Campbell doesn’t talk about “natural disasters” because there’s nothing natural about the way a major earthquake will harm vulnerable communities more than wealthy ones.
Human decisions such as redlining have led to many of the inequities in our society, she said. But humans can make decisions that will help make the response to the next disaster more equitable.
Many of those choices need to be made by local leaders and emergency management planners. Investing in infrastructure programs that will make homes in minority communities less vulnerable to earthquakes. Understanding how important a library is to unhoused people. Making sure all schools are built to withstand a disaster. Keeping public spaces open, even during an emergency.
But individuals can make a difference as well, Campbell said. You can complete training that will prepare you to help your community in the event of an emergency. Or you can join a mutual aid network, a group where community members work together to help each other.
Community support is a common theme among disaster experts: One of the best ways to prepare is to know and care about your neighbors.
If everyone only looks out for themselves in the next disaster, “we are going to have social breakdown,” Jones said.
What you can do
Experts acknowledge you’ll want to make sure you and your family are safe before being able to help others. Fortunately, many disaster preparedness precautions are inexpensive and will help in a wide range of emergency situations.
Be prepared to have your access to electricity or water cut off for days or weeks.
For electricity, you’ll at least want a flashlight and a way to charge your phone.
While cell service will be jammed immediately after a major earthquake, communications will likely slowly come back online faster than other services, Wein said. (And when trying to use your phone, text – don’t call. In a disaster, text messages are more reliable and strain cell networks less.)
To power your phone, you can cheaply buy a combination weather radio, flashlight and hand-crank charger to keep your cell running even without power for days.
A cash reserve is good to have, too, Jones said. You’ll want to be able to buy things, even if your credit card doesn’t work for a time.
Preparing for earthquakes specifically is important along the West Coast, too, experts said. Simple things like securing bookshelves can save lives. Downloading an early warning app can give you precious moments to protect yourself in the event of a big quake. Buying earthquake insurance can protect homeowners. And taking part in a yearly drill can help remind you about other easy steps you can take to prepare.
There’s even more you could do to ready yourself for a catastrophe, but many disaster experts are hesitant to rely on individuals’ ability to prepare themselves.
Just as health experts have begged Americans to use masks and vaccines to help keep others safe during the pandemic, disaster scenario experts believe community members will need to look out for one another when the next disaster strikes.
Telling people to prepare as if “nobody is coming to help you” is a self-fulfilling prophesy, Jones said.
For now, policymakers hold the real power in how prepared society will be for the next disaster. And there are many problems to fix, according to Porter, including upgrading city plumbing, because many aging and brittle water pipes will shatter in a major earthquake, cutting off water to communities for weeks or months.
