A version of this story first appeared in The Last Word on Nothing.

As the parent of a 3-year-old, I spend a lot of time reading kids’ books. Some are wonderful, a lot are so-so, and a few are so frigging annoying that — I confess — I hide them. As a science writer, I always expect to like science-themed books — this is my kind of brainwashing, I think — but lately, I’ve even packed a few of them off to the thrift store.

In uncharitable moments, I might gripe about these books’ bad artwork or mixed meters. But my real problem is with the way they present science. According to them, science is not, as my colleagues and I humbly remind you, The Last Word on Nothing. It’s an intimidating institution filled with intimidating grownups, all of whom have The Last Word on Pretty Much Everything. “Putting a dinosaur skeleton together takes hard work — and lots of special knowledge and skill,” one book intones.

If we’re not careful, we’ll end up living in a world that looks like this — and that is a truly scary prospect.

I was well into an undergraduate biology major before I grasped that science is not a pile of interesting facts, but a process — not the only way to learn about the world, but a very powerful one. I’d like my daughter to arrive at that realization a little sooner than I did. I’d also like her to know that she doesn’t need a Ph.D. to start thinking like a scientist.

Yes, in the official world of science, credentials do count, and in most cases they should. But kids should know that anyone can make observations, form hypotheses, and figure out how to test them. Anyone can have a eureka moment. Anyone can go on a voyage of discovery, even if it begins and ends in the town park.

I’ve started to think that the best books for budding scientists don’t lecture, teach, or even talk much about science. Instead, they find other ways to celebrate the crooked, fascinating path that is the scientific life. Below are a half dozen that get unanimous approval in my household.

Tuesday by David Weisner. Late one Tuesday evening, a mob of frogs flies through town on lilypads, disappearing as quickly as it came. Why? This almost-wordless story doesn’t say, leaving kids free to form their own theories about spontaneous frog flight.

Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. A classic story about a backyard adventure, in which a young girl goes owling with her father. The great horned owl they finally see, unlike most animals in kids’ books, isn’t particularly friendly — it occupies a world apart. “For one minute, three minutes, maybe even a hundred minutes, we stared at one another,” the girl writes. One of the best introductions I know of to the mysteries of nature.

Thirteen Words by Maira Kalman and Lemony Snicket. Not your usual word-power book: The 13 words include not only “dog” and “bird,” but also “despondent” and “haberdashery,” and they’re eventually strung together to form a story and a song. Perfect practice in discovering the sense in seemingly nonsensical data. (And besides, it’s fun to hear your toddler say “panache.”)

Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. Though this book puts me on a mild invasive-species alert (a concern shared by my friend and fellow journalist Virginia Gewin), this is a lovely story of an adventurous life well lived. I especially like Miss Rumphius because — almost uniquely among female characters in kids’ books — she’s unmarried, has no children, and seems perfectly satisfied. Small investigators, particularly girls, should know that life comes with all kinds of options.

Bones: Skeletons and How they Work by Steve Jenkins. The text of Bones is a bit advanced for my daughter, but the illustrations are so good that she likes to look at it anyway. She loves comparing the bones in her own hand to those in a bat’s wing, and hearing that her ancestors had not just tailbones but tails. Bones is also great for inspiring hands-on research (dominant methods are pinching and tickling).

Far From Shore: Chronicles of an Open Ocean Voyage by Sophie Webb. Again, the text of this book is too complicated for my daughter, but she loves to look at the illustrations, which were painted by the author during a four-month-long Pacific research voyage. Webb describes her work in some depth, but she emphasizes not the results but the experience: the starlit nights on deck, the sightings of dolphins and whales and seabirds, and daily life with her fellow scientists. (She also includes details of high kid interest: “Since our toilets are flushed with seawater, if I flush the toilet in the dark it too will glitter with bioluminescent plankton.”)

Now, I’m looking forward to your reading recommendations. After all, my daughter is going to get suspicious about all those gaps on her bookshelf.

Photo by Kate Mereand-Sinha.

A version of this post first appeared in The Last Word on Nothing.

Late last year, I wrote about the dominance of the tragic “Lorax narrative” in environmental reporting. It made me wonder: How would Dr. Seuss himself tackle climate change? After all, the story of climate change is muddy and complex, and its real drama is both geographically distant (if you’re lucky) and years in the future (ditto) — in other words, it lacks most of the ingredients that make any narrative memorable.

My guess is that the good doctor wouldn’t try to hide these problems. He wrote for kids, but he wasn’t afraid of complexity. He might even put the scientific, political, and personal knottiness of climate change at the heart of his story.

With apologies to the master, it might sound something like this.

In the suburbs of Phoenix
Where the yellow dust blows
And rain only falls
When hell’s fully froze
The houses have crumbled
Under red tile roofs
‘Cept one stucco mansion
Which stands as grim proof
Of the plans we once had
To grow! Grow! Grow! Grow!
Regardless of limits on rainfall and snow.

Beside that great castle
Sit three aged guys
Stirring their drinks and watching the skies
And arguing loudly over who gets the blame
For sending our climate to circle the drain
The senator, the oilman, and the regular gent
Can’t ever agree on who should repent
Let’s listen to them as they each tell the tale
Of how we arrived at the big carbon fail.

About the beginning, the guys can agree
It all started one day at a quarter to three
When they heard the politest and quietest sneeze
And a gentle voice saying, “Excuse me, if you please …
We’re the IPCC, and we speak for the data
The climate’s warm now, but you just wait till later
We’re not totally sure but we seriously think
What you’re doing is draining the world’s carbon sink
And warming the planet a bit at a time
Even though the weather outside looks just fine
So may we suggest
That you take a deep breath
Stop your flying and driving and heating and cooling
‘Cause we’re 99 percent sure that the climate’s unspooling.”

Said the senator, “Well, I listened to that
And I thought, it’s quite scary, but it’s kind of old hat
These eggheads have sure got a habit of saying
That anything fun is no good to be playing
Besides, how could I vote for a new carbon tax?
I’d surely be subject to vicious attacks
From left and from right and from up and from down
From you two,” he said, pointing, “and from all over town
You’d have said, ‘What a sorehead! What a grumpy old pet!
I’m kicking him out just the next chance I get!’
And then where would I be? I’d be out of a job
Even worse off than most of the other old slobs
I said no, let’s ignore this new round of bad news
And let everyone have just one more little snooze
At least no one will fault me if I’m quiet and meek
And practice the art of realpolitik.”

Said the oilman, “I heard what those scientists said
And I must admit, it got into my head
I worried about it. I swear I did so
But my customers wanted their cars to go! Go!
So I hired some people to say that these changes
Were definitely within our historical ranges
A bit of new carbon didn’t matter one whit
And was not any reason to get into a snit
It protected my earnings, and gave some good cover
To you, Mr. Senator, beneath which to hover
But it was what you wanted,” he said, and turned to the gent.
“Admit it. You wouldn’t spend one extra cent.”

Said the gent, “Well, look here. That’s a big load of bull&*#$
You two never gave me the chance to help cool it
Besides, only twice every year did I get on a plane
I recycled my plastics. I traveled by train
There was also a chance that the science was hooey
And there were always 10 years before things went kablooey
We heard bears were a-drowning and birds were confused
But they weren’t around here, so I must be excused
For my flying and driving and heating and cooling
Uncertainty allowed me to think y’all were fooling.”

The three sat at their pool bar and sipped at their drinks
And each one quietly had a few private dark thinks
While dust blew in their eyes and into their ears
And they coughed and then squeezed out a few salty tears.

Dear reader, they never did know who to blame
But they knew, in the end, that they all lost the game
So it’s your turn, it seems, to contribute a line
To the yarn of our climate in gradual decline
Unless someone like you writes an end to the tale
In which science and good sense at last come to prevail
We’ll stay locked in this slugfest for eons to come
And nothing will ever, ever get done.

This interview originally appeared in the Last Word on Nothing.

Dearest readers, we hope you had a gluttonous, slothful, greedy, and lustful holiday, with only the tiniest touches of wrath. My compatriots and I at the Last Word on Nothing are celebrating the season with a series of posts on the Seven Deadly Sins. I got things started with a conversation with conservation biologist Michael Soule, the founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and The Wildlands Network and a professor emeritus of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In recent years, in pursuit of an ultimate explanation for human reluctance to protect biodiversity, Soule has turned his attention to the seven deadlies, examining their history and evolution as both a scientist and a longtime Buddhist practitioner. I spoke with Soule at his home in western Colorado.

Q. From a biologist’s perspective, what is sin?

A. Sin is about the most primitive emotional elements of survival and reproduction. If you look at the seven deadly sins, you see that each of them concerns a major component of fitness — how we survive, and how we succeed in courtship and reproduction.

So in that sense, there’s nothing biologically bad about any of the sins. All of them are necessary for survival and reproduction.

Q. So the reproductive purpose of lust is obvious. What about the other sins?

A. Well, let’s start with greed, which evolutionarily is by far the oldest sin — as old as life itself. All organisms have to seek resources, and in our species this desire for energy leads to the sin of greed, because our awareness of selfishness lets us choose to be greedy or not. Competition for resources is also ancient, and with competition comes aversion, or anger, toward one’s competitors. So the second-oldest vice is anger.

Then you have the ancient visceral impulses, those that arise from the animal needs to sleep, eat, and mate: In humans these become sloth, gluttony, and lust. Gluttony is just the inherited desire to eat when food is available, because it’s never certain when the next meal is going to show up. Sloth is simply the need to rest. Lust is clearly essential for sexual reproduction. These five sins are all in the limbic system — they’re primitive.

The two remaining sins are envy and pride, the only so-called sins that are nearly uniquely human. They’re by far the most recent ones, located in the young neocortex, according to functional MRI scans. They require theory of mind — the capacity to understand that other people have minds — and they can only exist in highly social animals. Envy motivates a person to get more stuff, status, or sex. Pride is based on ego, which can be attractive to potential mates and friends.

Q. Does every culture have a concept of sin?

A. Every major spiritual tradition does. The Torah, the five books of Moses, doesn’t talk about sins, but it talks about behaviors and impulses that are bad for the group. It’s a different typology, but it overlaps a lot with sin. As far as I know, sin — the concept of the seven deadly sins — was invented by Horace. The seven sins were adopted by the early Christians as a typology for explaining the obstacles to becoming one with Jesus.

In Buddhism, you have the three poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. So different spiritual traditions have different typologies of sin, but they all end up being about self: too much self, too much me and my cognition.

Q. Have these concepts changed over millennia?

A. The emphasis has changed. For example, the major sin in early Christianity was greed. Then Pope Gregory — St. Gregory, the fifth Pope in the Roman tradition — decided that pride was the mother of all sins. He decided that self-centeredness, self-bias,
was the root of all of our sins, just as the Buddha had believed. It’s a wonderful convergence.

Q. Do you see us shifting that emphasis once again, or even developing new sins or a new set of sins?

A. In the modern world, I think the ranking of the sins is shifting again. Greed is such an overt factor in the destruction of the world. I mean, greed is killing nature, and causing global warming. It’s bringing us down, that’s essentially what Occupy Wall Street is about. So I think that over time, we will shift the ranking of greed and pride again. On the other hand, greed has of course
come to be perceived as a virtue. We certainly reward people who are conspicuous consumers in this society.

Q. We’re all really good at justifying our sins, right?

A. Yes. And that gets back to your other question about modern sins, whether there are any sins that are left out of the old typology. I think there are a lot of them, but my favorite is denial, which in a way is a form of mental sloth.

Denial is really an example of an immature mind. We’re the youngest species of mammal I know about, and we’re just so capable of deluding ourselves, so good at not thinking about things that make us a bit uncomfortable.

When I go to a restaurant with people, I often say, “There’s not much I can eat here,” because it’s all factory-farmed meat, or kinds of seafood that are ecologically problematic. So my companions say, “Well, why don’t you get the shrimp?” I say, “Do you want to know why?” and I go into this elaborate story about all the ecological harm caused by shrimp collecting. I’m a professor, so of course I go on and on. And I get about halfway through my lecture, and people say, “Okay, that’s enough.”

And then they tell the server, “I’ll have the shrimp.”

Q. Is that denial, or rebellion?

A. I don’t know. But rebellion is also denial, I think. We’re capable of infinite levels and degrees of denial.

Q. You said earlier that from a biologist’s perspective there’s nothing wrong with sin, but of course we’ve evolved all these ways to help people resist sin — systems of confessing, systems of making people feel ashamed. Why do cultures try to control our sinful behavior if there’s nothing particularly wrong with it biologically?

A. Everything changed with civilization. Instincts and impulses that were adaptive for an individual or a family have, when expressed on a large scale, become highly nonadaptive for the world, the climate, and even civilization as a whole. Anger, for instance, comes out of the need to compete and reproduce. But anger, when it’s magnified by civilization and war and the kinds of weapons we have now, destroys the planet.

Also, excessive self-bias is harmful to the group, and we’re a social species. The efficient functioning of a social group, whether it’s a war party, a Girl Scout troop, or a town, requires a certain amount of self-control. It’s often believed, and quite often true, that religion is a way of limiting the harm people do to the group.

Q. You’ve said that neuroscience is changing the way we understand sin. Can you tell me about that?

A. Sin was kind of a mystery behaviorally and biologically until about the last 20 years, when people started looking at human behavior under the lens of functional magnetic resonance and electroencephalography and other forms of visualizing what the brain is doing when it is feeling or thinking about certain things, or when the person is behaving in certain ways.

Almost all of the sins have been looked at and been located in the brain. It’s pretty crude at the moment. But still, we know the sins are in the brain, which means that the biological basis is clear. We’re hard-wired to behave in self-biased ways.

Over the last several hundred thousand years, we’ve also become hard-wired to behave in a social way. Which means that the self has to submit to the group in some way, to subordinate its greed and envy and gluttony and so forth to what the group needs to survive. Because we depend on our groups to survive and prosper.

Q. I want to ask you about E.O. Wilson’s recent comment about virtue and sin in The Atlantic. He says that group selection brings about virtue, and individual selection creates sin, and that in a nutshell is an explanation of the human condition. How do you respond to that?

A. I think he’s more or less correct about sin, that sins are self-biased behaviors. But the virtues are also probably sexually selected. That is, they’re about looking good in the context of a highly social group, or actually elevating your status in the group.
Patience, tolerance, and compassion are things that make you attractive as a mate. So the virtues are not just good for the group, they’re good for the individual, too, indirectly.

The virtues, to me, are no different than the sins. They’re just another way of benefiting the individual.

Q. Okay, so where does that leave us? If we’re so hard-wired for self-bias, but yet self-bias is causing other people and other things so much suffering, is there a solution?

A. We’re in deep doo-doo. That’s why we’re destroying the world. That’s why we’re wiping out life on this planet, and why we can’t deal with big problems like climate change. Our self-interest gets in the way. That’s why I’m so pessimistic.

But like all human beings, I’m an optimist at the same time. I just started this new initiative through the Wildlands Network, a National Corridors Campaign, to protect corridors between wildlife habitats and create potential for movement of flora and fauna as the climate changes from Mexico to Canada.

Q. So where did your motivation for that initiative come from?

A. (Laughs) From being an alpha male. Being an alpha-type person, I want recognition, I want to be known as somebody with vision and big ideas, so there’s greed and all that stuff wrapped up in my work. But religious and spiritual practice helps me dampen those motivations a little bit, helps me identify them so you can buffer and moderate them. People on spiritual paths generally know when they’re fucking up.

Q. How else has thinking about sin helped you, on a personal level, contend with your own sins?

A. A lot. It’s subtle, but understanding yourself is the key to growth. The spiritual path, to me, has been really important in tempering and moderating my sinfulness, and reminding me to focus on what is needed for the world, for society, not just for me. Unless you are truly a saint, you really can’t overcome your greed and anger and ignorance. But you can file off the sharp edges, and focus your ambition on projects that are good for society and the world. You can change ambition into aspiration — sometimes.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past year thinking and writing about extinction, which means I’ve also spent a lot of time drinking thinking about the tragic narrative in environmental journalism.

There’s a lot of genuine tragedy on the environmental beat, and it doesn’t take a partisan to see it. There’s not a whole lot to like about water pollution, or crop failures, or mass extinction. A lot of these stories lend themselves to the Lorax narrative. You know how it goes: The Lorax speaks for the trees, the rest of us keep buying thneeds, and for hope all we get is the Once-ler’s last seed. Though the new Lorax movie might try to fake a sunny face, the story is a tragedy.

But the best environmental journalism uses all the tools of the storytelling trade. With Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots as a field guide, I’ve been searching for examples of environmental journalism with other-than-tragic narratives — archetypal frameworks that still fit the facts, but startle us out of our mournful stupor. I’ve found some good ones, and I’d love to hear about more.

The Overcoming the Monster narrative often shows up in invasive-species stories. For one recent and hilarious example, check out this story from Esquire about Argentine ants. (“They’re not in your underwear by accident. They’re nation-building.”) For a different kind of struggle against a very different kind of monster, listen to “Just Another Fish Story,” a gem of a radio piece about a small Maine town’s attempt to cope with a beached whale.

A wonderful example of the Rags to Riches narrative at work in an environmental story is “Wild Eyes,” a Radiolab piece about big-cat conservationist Alan Rabinowitz and his lifelong connection with animals. (Rabinowitz told the story himself in this performance on the Moth stage.)

The Quest narrative is common in science stories: Scientist sets out on a journey of discovery, faces fearsome obstacles, and ultimately overcomes them (or not). I’ve been on a John McPhee binge lately, so for a Quest example I’ll cite “Atchafalaya,” the colossal New Yorker story that’s also the first chapter of his book The Control of Nature. Here, the earnest but short-sighted hero is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and its quest — to keep the wandering Mississippi on its current course — is surely doomed.

The Voyage and Return narrative is similar to the Quest, except that the hero returns home with the wisdom earned from his or her adventure. For an unusual example, read Edwin Dobb’s personal story about his love of open-water swimming, and what he’s learned about wilderness from his progressively longer, colder swims.

Finding the Comedy narrative in environmental journalism isn’t as tough as it sounds: As psychologist John Fraser points out, environmental stories are full of comedies of errors. (The problem is that most are missing their happy endings.) Earlier this year, I wrote an appreciation of Ian Frazier’s genius story “Hogs Wild,” in which humans and feral hogs play the comedic leads in an essentially tragic tale.

Environmental journalists occasionally get to dig out the Rebirth narrative, though we often find its dark side. I recently edited Brad Tyer’s poignant High Country News story about Opportunity, Mont., a small town destined to be the victim of a much-celebrated Superfund cleanup. The Rebirth story of the cleanup has been told many times; Tyer flipped the archetype and found what lay forgotten underneath.

Last but not least is our old friend Tragedy. I’ll spare you countless possible examples and leave you with one especially memorable story: “Tuna’s End,” an excerpt from Paul Greenberg’s book Four Fish. “Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor,” Greenberg writes. “Literally they are one of the last big public supplies of wild fish left in the world. Metaphorically they are the terminus of an idea: that the ocean is an endless resource where new fish can always be found.”

Sometimes, the Lorax is just the fastest way to the truth.

Modern homesteading can be particularly maddening for the ladies.

Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing.

There are a lot of ways to shrink a carbon footprint. Bike instead of drive. Eat low on the food chain. You know the drill. Where I live, in the boondocks of Colorado, a lot of people — myself included, but I’ll get to that in a minute — go on a carbon diet by purchasing some cheap land, rigging up a few solar panels, and getting off the grid.

Most of these people are well-educated, well-meaning, and idealistic, determined to build and garden their way toward some version of a better future. But after living here for more than a decade, I’ve noticed a disturbing susceptibility among these modern homesteaders. I’ll call this recurring disease Not One More Winter In The Tipi, Honey (NOMWITTH).

Here’s what happens: A couple arrives in our valley, young, strong, in love, and full of plans to build an ultra-energy-efficient house out of straw bales, rammed earth, adobe bricks, or, heck, used bottlecaps. They set to work with equal enthusiasm, buying land and setting up temporary quarters in a yurt or a tipi. The weather’s good, the views are great, and the new house is humming along.

But at some point, the weather turns, or the project slows. Or a baby arrives, and everything gets more complicated. For whatever reason, their brio fades, NOMWITTH sets in, and what was once a joint project becomes a battlefield, XX vs. XY. In mild cases, help is hired, the house gets a roof, and all ends well. In more serious cases, one person — inevitably XX — splits town for a fully furnished condo with central heating, leaving XY alone with the low-carbon dream.

I’ve seen many couples, and carbon budgets, fall prey to NOMWITTH, and the predictability of its gender roles has always bothered me. Women may have different strengths than men, but we don’t lack for toughness — we demonstrate that in feats ranging from mountain climbing to childbirth. So why does NOMWITTH always seem to strike women first? 

Of course, every household is different, and I don’t presume to know exactly what goes on in anyone else’s. But I do wonder if this predisposition to NOMWITTH has historical and cultural roots.

Many scholars — notably Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in her classic book More Work for Mother — have pointed out that the early-20th century revolution in household technology, despite its many promises, didn’t actually save middle-class women any time. Washing machines meant that people hired fewer servants, had larger wardrobes, and washed their clothes more frequently. Vacuum cleaners led to higher standards of carpet cleanliness. Yet these inventions did change the nature of household work, rescuing women of all classes from at least some of its sweaty, undervalued drudgery.

Too often, modern homesteading asks women to return to the toil so many of their grandmothers left behind. No matter how progressive the homesteading couple, the unfamiliarity and the physical demands of DIY living make it easy to fall into traditional gender roles — to retreat to the stereotypically masculine and feminine skills most of us still learn first and best. The result is that in many modern homesteads, despite highly evolved intentions, men build the houses, and women, like their pioneer-era counterparts, cook over the wood stove. Or scrub the floors. Or care for the babies.

This old-fashioned division of labor means that women are often the first to encounter the worst realities of homesteading. While their partners are outside, impressing the neighborhood with their construction skills, women are inside, confronting the cultural invisibility of domestic work and the social isolation of rural life. Both are working hard, but one gets more public props than the other. Put another way, it doesn’t take too many solo rounds of hand-washing dirty diapers to kill the romance of modern homesteading, and bring on critical NOMWITTH.

I’d advise NOMWITTH sufferers and their partners to strictly moderate their expectations of themselves and others, and monitor their personal ideologies for signs of calcification. Except for a constant watch on domestic divides, though, I don’t think there’s any reliable way to avoid NOMWITTH — but for dumb luck and good timing, I, too, might have fallen victim to a terminal case.

When I met my husband-to-be here in Colorado, he had, conveniently, just finished work on a 600-square-foot house insulated by straw bales, powered by solar panels, and equipped with a healthy supply of rainwater for hot showers. When we moved in together, I got to enjoy the genuine fun of modern homesteading (dining under the stars, living dirt-cheap) with very little of the drudgery (don’t get me started on the composting toilet, okay?). Because our basic needs — for, say, a roof — were already met, I got to keep the professional career that my feminist mother and my suburban childhood had raised me to expect.

When we had our daughter, we chose cloth diapers, but we also enlisted some help from technology — we bought a low-water washing machine compatible with our power system. And while we bicker about laundry duties like any other couple, it’s assumed that both of us, with roughly equal frequency, will wash the damn diapers.

Begone, NOMWITTH.

Photo: duluoz cats

Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing.

A few years ago, I interviewed author and social critic James Kunstler about his novel World Made By Hand, his latest portrayal of a post-peak oil future. Kunstler, as one might expect, had plenty of complaints — about suburbs, Cheez Doodles, Walmart, the American road trip. But when I mentioned that I’d grown up in the Hudson River town of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., he perked up.

“Oh!” he said, sounding as if he’d almost cracked a smile.

People from Poughkeepsie are not, to say the least, used to this kind of reaction. Depending on your generation, you may know my hometown from Gene Hackman’s “Pickin’ your feet in Poughkeepsie” rant in The French Connection; from The Lemonheads song; or from the Friends episode “The One with the Girl from Poughkeepsie” (“How great can she be if she’s from Poughkeepsie?”).

If you know Poughkeepsie at all, chances are you don’t ache to return. The name is Wappinger for “the reed-covered lodge by the little-water place,” though a friend of mine translates it as “place of many strip malls.” Poughkeepsie once made a decent living making hats, brewing beer, and shipping stuff up and down the Hudson, but those glory days are long over. (One of our most successful industries was whale rendering.) With a chronically lackluster downtown and boring ‘burbs, we have neither urban sophistication nor rural charm. As Hudson Valley folkie Bill Ring puts it, “It’s bigger than a village, but it ain’t quite a city/ and it’s not a place a lot of folks are itching to go.” I love a lot of people in Poughkeepsie, but honestly, I prefer to meet them elsewhere.

Kunstler — clearly an incurable contrarian — likes Poughkeepsie. He lives in the Hudson Valley himself, in a far cuter but similarly sized town, and he predicts that such neither-village-nor-city places will one day be just right. “We’ll see people moving to places that are scaled appropriately to our energy diet,” he said — towns small enough to walk across, but big enough to pool their resources for, say, a hydropower plant. And with good farmland on one side and a great big river on the other, Poughkeepsie is ideally placed for local food production and carbon-free transportation. “Towns like Poughkeepsie are at their nadir now,” he conceded, “but they have a lot of virtues that are going to become apparent in the years ahead.”

I don’t necessarily buy Kunstler’s vision of the future, but years of covering climate change have given me the chance to contemplate a lot of grim scenarios. And I had to admit — with a silent groan — that in a hotter, droughtier, less climatically stable world, my current home on the edge of the Colorado Plateau wouldn’t be such a good bet. Poughkeepsie would.

The Poughkeepsie railroad bridge has been restored as a pedestrian and bike path.Photo: Russ Nelson

Last fall, while visiting family, I walked across the Poughkeepsie railroad bridge for the first time in my life. Built in 1888, it was damaged in a fire and shut down in 1974, and all through my childhood its ugly black steel skeleton loomed above the river. Two years ago, thanks to local fundraising heroics, it reopened as a busy pedestrian and bike trail, giving Poughkeepsie its first real vantage point on the Hudson.

I stood in the middle of the bridge and looked east toward my hometown, which appears just about as dingy from above as it does at street level. Then I looked down the river toward Manhattan, down the mile-wide channel that once fed this town — and, if Kunstler is right, will one day do so again. The fall foliage glowed on the riverbank bluffs, and hundreds of feet below my toes, in the sweet, salty water of the Hudson estuary, gravity fought the tides.

It was almost enough to charm a prodigal daughter.

It’s not easy being green.

Environmentalists, Fraser says, often aren’t aware of the emotional toll of their work. “Talking to environmentalists can be like talking to a bunch of macho cowboys,” he says. “A lot of people will say, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re really not looking healthy.’” The result, he says, is that many environmentalists unconsciously express their stress in meetings or classrooms — sometimes sabotaging their own mission.

Fraser’s varied research interests include U.S. attitudes toward bison conservation, training programs for teachers living in Central American jaguar habitat, and the effect of literature and poetry on conservation thinking. He spoke with Grist about the under-recognized emotional trauma of environmental work — and how environmentalists can and should recapture their sense of humor.

Q. How did you get interested in the emotional health of conservationists?

A. I had been working in conservation organizations like the Wildlife Conservation Society for many years, and I was starting to realize how aggressive people were in meetings, and how emotional meetings became. People were very, very committed to the environmental issues, but when they got into a conversation in a meeting, it could become quite heated over very petty and minor issues. Outside the conservation community, I’d never seen that level of passion around minor topics.

So I was becoming aware of this, and I was also working on finishing my Ph.D. in environmental studies with a focus on conservation psychology. One day, I was describing these conditions in meetings to one of my dissertation advisors, Vic Pantesco, who is a clinical psychologist. He looked at me and said, “What you’re describing is something that would almost fall into a clinical definition of distress.”

Q. You and Pantesco surveyed more than 140 professional conservationists. What patterns did you find when you asked them to talk about the emotional toll of their work?

A. We asked them to describe environmental damage that they had witnessed. Some of the experiences were big, and some were little. Some people had seen hurricane damage and knew that the damage was much worse because the mangrove swamps had been removed. Others had seen fisheries workers catching endangered species in driftnets and just tossing them aside.

Then we said, “How would you describe your feelings after those experiences, and how long did these feelings last?” Some people described crying that recurred over a few days, not feeling they could get out of bed, feeling listless and helpless. Definitely anger was a very, very, important part of their descriptions. They all felt angry.

Then we asked people, “Do you feel your family shares your environmental values? Do the people you work with every day share your environmental values?” What we found was that the people who did not feel they had family or work support were significantly more likely to have emotional distress that lasted longer than what would be considered healthful and that would fall within the definition of traumatic distress.

Q. You’ve said that conservationists who don’t process this kind of trauma privately may unconsciously process it publicly.

A. When someone experiences a trauma, they may be able to manage their own care most of the time, but there may be certain triggers which bring them back to that feeling of distress. For example, let’s take the case of a rape victim. If the person was raped in a park, parks might be a trigger. If the perpetrator had some distinguishing features, seeing other people who have those same features might be triggers.

Well, in the conservation business, everything you see can be a trigger. There’s roadwork happening? Trigger. They’re cutting down a tree because somebody felt like putting in a new bench for a café? Trigger.

Vic and I recognized that what we were describing didn’t fit the traditional definitions of acute trauma. In the conservation business, we believe what’s happening is that people are developing knowledge over time, and that knowledge allows them to see environmental problems in the world around them.

For example, when I first moved to Oregon, I drove through a park with an animal behaviorist. I said, “It’s so nice to see such a big flourishing forest.” She said, “Yeah, but it’s sad, because we’re looking at a dead forest.” She knew the system and knew that the understory had been overtaken by blackberries and ivy — shallow-rooted, invasive plants that were choking out the trees. So where I saw a flourishing forest, she saw a system in collapse. And as she explained it to me, she had to surface and process her own experience of that little bit of traumatic knowledge.

Q. You’ve pointed out that it’s not only researchers who experience this — anyone involved with environmental issues might be vulnerable to it. How might an environmental educator, for instance, process these traumatic experiences?

A. Well, we often hear environmental educators talking about building an emotional connection. Students get to climb trees and play with them and hug them and watch them grow over time, and in that way they come to know nature.

But I’m suggesting that sometimes environmental educators — in looking for that emotional reaction — may also seek to validate their own emotional experience, their own sense of loss about what’s happening to nature. Frequently, that’s because we tell the story of nature as a tragedy. When that happens, the student can react in two ways — they can take in this new knowledge and use the emotions to feel a sense of passion to go forward and do something to change the situation, or they can say, “You know what? I just don’t like crying that much. It’s not fun, and I don’t really want to do it again. This person is a downer.” They may run the other way.

We don’t have the processes in place for environmental educators to recognize their own emotional state. They often don’t have the chance to be in a safe place with other environmentalists and talk about what’s really upsetting them. Instead we’re seeing little bits of their traumatic experience surface in overly emotional behavior, and in burnout — in people saying, “I just want to retire and go back to my own little garden.”

Q. But for environmentalists, is there an alternative to the tragic narrative?

A. It’s comedy, absolutely. The whole way we’ve created our cities is really a comedy of errors. We think we have the power to build a levy that can hold back all of the Gulf of Mexico? OK, really? Aren’t we awfully proud little monkeys? I think that we can start to realize how pride and our own good intentions have led us to live with blinders — and have created conditions that allow for not only ironic humor but
quite frankly very absurdist humor. It may be shocking to say that when people are dying, but it can translate into absurdist humor too.

If we want to move to a new place, we have to think the way comedians think. In our society, comedians have permission to mention the unmentionable — to talk about things that are disturbing and morally challenging. Sometimes they go too far, but most often they point out our society’s hubris. I think we can go there in the environmental movement. We can start to look for the humor in what we see around us, find the irony and the absurdity and start to let it out.

Q. When you raise this issue with environmentalists, how do they respond?

A. I would say they’re not willing to acknowledge it — well, some are. The first time Vic and I presented our work at the Society for Conservation Biology, I think we were the third talk in a panel about midway through a daylong series of talks. The usual pattern was, you give a talk, there’s some applause, there are a couple of questions, there’s some more applause, and it’s all very polite. We presented our talk, we finished, and we had dead silence. After a minute or two, people started saying things like, “Oh my, I hadn’t thought about it that way, gee,” and their voices were cracking.

We’re asking people to accept that something they have always believed is their passion is also something that’s hurting them. That’s really hard. So the reception it’s received has been — I wouldn’t say it has been ignored, but I would say it’s difficult for people to listen to.

Q. What are your suggestions for environmentalists who read this interview and say, “Oh, that’s me”? How should they deal with what they’re experiencing?

A. As Mr. Rogers says, if it’s mentionable, it’s manageable. I think the important thing is to ask yourself, “How am I experiencing environmental loss? What am I seeing around me that causes me to have these feelings?” Think about that very consciously — ask yourself, “Does that upset me?” If it does, talk about it with a friend or colleague who you think shares your values. It doesn’t have to be concealed. In fact, the less concealed the better. But don’t take it out on those who don’t share your values, and certainly be aware of those feelings if you’re in the role of teaching others.

I’m not a clinical psychologist, but if you’re waking up and feeling really, really listless about something for more than a day or two — that’s an OK experience to have, but it’s not OK to live with. That’s when you need to think about finding someone to talk to about your feelings, to start to process them and develop some strategies with professionals.

I was at a high-level conservation conference recently, and someone who was transferring into the field looked at me and said, “Boy, people here drink a lot.” I said, “Yeah, they do.” That’s a symptom of what’s going on — it’s a way of escaping, but it’s not a healthful way of escaping. I’m not saying environmentalists shouldn’t drink liquor. What I’m suggesting is that within the community, there’s probably a higher level of self-medication than is really helpful.

I would love to see environmentalists create a place for talking about sadness. When an editor responds to one of my papers with, “Gee, this is kind of downer,” I think, “Exactly, so we have to talk about this.” It’s perfectly reasonable to have conversation about our own sadness and how to accept it.

Also check out: Does caring about the environment make you crazy?

We enviros are all on the same team, remember — pushing for a cleaner, greener, saner, kinder world. We should be fighting apathy and pollutocrats, not each other. Let’s all of us green-minded people support each other’s choices and get each other’s backs.

To that end, Michelle — a Grist contributor and mom — suggested that we collaborate to come up with some cross-cultural communication tips for both GINKs and green parents. 

What we can all quietly think to ourselves

“Thank God that’s not me.”

Marion Nestle with Fantom.Photo: Larry CohenNestle delved into the roots of the recall in Canada, China, and the United States, even examining rumors that a Canadian woman had developed kidney disease after eating contaminated cat food (apparently false). Though Nestle is convinced of the need for regulatory reform and consumer vigilance in the worldwide pet-food production system, she emphasizes that most commercial pet food — fancy label or not — is safe and healthy. “I know people who feed their pets on the cheapest possible garbage food, and their pets do just fine,” she says.

But what does the pet-food contamination scare say about the safety of people food? Earlier this month, news broke that infant formula manufactured by the Sanlu Group and other Chinese companies was tainted with the protein-mimic melamine — the same industrial chemical found in the recalled pet food. The contamination, which is now thought to have killed four infants and sickened thousands of babies in China, has also turned up in liquid milk and other dairy products. Grist spoke with Nestle — who has “grandpets,” but no pets of her own — to learn more about the unexpected culinary connections between pets and people.

You investigated who knew what, and when, in this recall saga. Who bears the bulk of the blame?

The blame started with some unscrupulous manufacturers in China who laced wheat flour with melamine — an industrial chemical — and sold it as wheat gluten. That was clearly fraudulent; a reporter for The New York Times interviewed farm-feed producers, and lots of people told him that they did this sort of thing all the time. They would have used urea, which was less toxic, except it was easier to detect. It was just a completely open secret in China that this kind of thing was being done.

Let’s give everybody the benefit of the doubt: I don’t think the Chinese realized how toxic [melamine] was. Probably they’ve been doing this for a very, very long time, and it never caused any problems before. But in this particular batch, the concentration of melamine was exceptionally high, and because of that, its byproduct (cyanuric acid) was also present. Those two chemicals together, at very low concentrations, can form crystals that block the kidneys of cats and dogs.

Then it unfolded that people in America didn’t know where their [pet-food] ingredients were coming from — which is understandable, because there were so many intermediates. The companies bought it from an American supplier, who bought it from a distributor, who got it from an importer who imported it from China. Wheat gluten is no longer produced in the United States, because it’s too expensive to make here. Everyone was looking for the cheapest possible ingredients and getting them from China, just like we get so many other things from China.

What else has changed in recent decades about how we make and distribute pet food?

The big shock in all this was the consolidation and centralization of the industry. Canned pet food is quite complicated to make, so once a factory is set up to make it, it’s easier to contract with that factory to make your recipe. The shock was that this one company in Canada, that nobody had ever heard of, had a factory in the United States that was making pet foods sold under 100 different brands — ranging from the least expensive to some of the priciest. They were all made at the same place with the same ingredients.

You write that contaminated pet foods are an early warning of the safety hazards of globalization.

We saw that right away in this case with [the blood thinner] heparin. It was exactly the same situation: A fraudulent ingredient was put in that tested like heparin but was not heparin, just like the fraudulent ingredient melamine was put into pet food because it tested like protein. That happened within just a few months [of the pet-food recall] — and it killed people.

There were photographs of the backyard factories [in China] that were making heparin that were just absolutely shocking. There was a photograph in The New York Times of this operation that was in this dirty room with pig guts hanging out of buckets. It was amazing — “Oh my God, injecting that into my body? I don’t think so.”

Are problems in the pet-food supply system also a direct threat to human food?

It’s impossible to separate the food supplies for pets, people, and farm animals. We already knew that from [genetically engineered foods], when things destined for animals got into the human-food supply.

The pet-food supply is linked to the human-food supply in two very important ways: One is that pet foods provide an outlet for the byproducts of human-food production, things that would otherwise have to be wasted or go into landfills or be burned. The other way is that surplus pet foods are fed to pigs and chickens. Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

In this case, melamine was fed to pigs, and pigs were found to be excreting melamine in their urine. The meat from pigs on that farm had already been sold and consumed. If [melamine] caused any problems [for humans], nobody knows anything about them. [If it didn't], it was because of what the FDA charmingly refers to as the “dilution effect” — since nobody eats just pig meat, [the melamine] would be so diluted that it would be below the level that would be toxic.

What are some of the key changes you’d like to see in pet-food regulation?

I think [companies] need to have much more transparent labeling. They need to have calories on the label. Companies really need to be very clear about where their ingredients are sourced — they need to know, and they need to inform their customers. And they need to be paying very, very close attention. They need to test for foreign toxins; in the case of dry foods, they need to test for bacterial and biological contamination. They all should be produced under [Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point] plans, standard food-safety plans.

Are these things companies could effectively do voluntarily?

Some companies are doing them voluntarily, but I think much greater national regulation is needed. The pet-food companies complain that the rules are different depending on what state they’re in. Well, that is a silly way of doing things; national regulation is absolutely essential. And it’s not fair to ask companies [to act voluntarily] because it sets up an unequal playing field: One company is going to go to all the trouble of doing this kind of thing, and it’s going to cost them, and everyone else is going to behave badly. Although in this instance, the companies that really behaved well — and let their customers know about it — did not suffer the same hit in sales.

[My colleague and I] heard a food-safety official who consults with pet-food companies speak at a meeting, and he talked about the kinds of reasons that people in these companies gave him for not following standard food-safety procedures. They said it was too much trouble, that it wasn’t necessary, that nobody told them to do it — these were dog-ate-my-homework kind of excuses. So unless these procedures are in place and diligently enforced, problems are going to occur. We know this from the human food-safety issue — voluntary doesn’t work, desultory doesn’t work, casual doesn’t work.

Are these reforms similar to those you’d suggest for human-food safety?

For human-food safety, we need a farm-to-table, universal, federally administered food-safety system — preferably with one agency in charge. We don’t have anything like that. We have a piecemeal food-safety system that’s divided largely between two agencies, [the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration]. There are shocking overlaps and gaps that people have known about for years and have been complaining about — we need a single food agency that will impose federal regulations farm to table. It would be very good for the food business, but food companies don’t see that.

Did the scope of the pet-food recall draw attention to problems with human-food safety?

Oh yes, definitely, everybody drew the parallel — and if they didn’t, there was immediately the heparin problem, and then there were tomatoes, or jalapeño peppers, or cilantro, or whatever came next.

So has any progress been made?

No. We’re in the wrong election cycle.

Elizabeth Royte.Photo: Rod Morrison

With her refillable water bottle in hand, Royte travels to Fryeburg, Maine, where a water-pumping operation for Nestle’s Poland Spring label divides the town. In the course of her research, she also tastes fancy bottled waters with a water connoisseur, monitors her eight-year-old daughter’s water intake, and conducts an informal poll of friends and acquaintances, asking whether they know where their tap water comes from. “Most people, even those who knew exactly how many miles the arugula on their plate had traveled, had no idea,” she writes. Royte’s own tap water comes from the famously high-quality New York City system — a network of reservoirs that, with the blessing of the U.S. EPA, makes up the largest unfiltered water supply in the nation.

Grist recently caught up with Royte to talk about hydration myths, anti-bottle mayors, and water snobbery.

Twenty years ago, you write, bottled water was a niche market in the U.S. Today, it’s a more than $10 billion business. What the heck happened? Why did Americans start drinking so much bottled water?

The simplest reason is marketing. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on advertising that either told us explicitly or implied that bottled water was better. [Bottled-water companies] used words like pure and natural, and used images of athletes and models and celebrities — the advertisements were aspirational, they told us we’d be more like these people if we drank this product.

While this marketing juggernaut was going on, there was also, until quite recently, a total absence of criticism. There was no competition from tap water, because utilities don’t have their own marketing budgets or ad budgets to tell us, “Tap water is great! Drink more tap water, and you’ll be thin, and look more beautiful, and do better yoga poses.”

Some of the ads criticized the quality of tap water.

Yes, they’d let us know that this was the same water used to flush toilets.

But I have to say that there are places where bottled water makes sense to many people. It doesn’t help that there are hundreds of thousands of [municipal] water-main breaks a year [in the United States], and whenever a water main breaks you get a boil-water alert. In today’s day and age, “boil water” means “buy water.”

Do we really need as much water as the ads claim — should we conscientiously be drinking eight eight-ounce glasses every day?

That was another part of the marketing. It was very clever of advertisers to tell us to drink more water — Pepsi actually spent $20 million on an award-winning campaign for Aquafina that just said, “Drink more water.” No one has found the definitive source [for the eight-glasses advice]. Some people point to a report from the National Research Council in the 1940s that said that the average adult needs to drink what works out to 64 ounces of water a day — but in the next sentence, it said that most of that water can come through the foods that we eat. Fruits and vegetables contain a lot of water, and I was told recently by [nutritionist] Marion Nestle that meat contains 40 percent water. Pasta and rice are two-thirds or more water by weight. But the bottled-water campaigns just told us to drink more water, and that’s why portability became so important. If you’re going to drink all that water, having it in a nice, neat plastic bottle is crucial.

You spent a lot of time in the small town of Fryeburg, Maine, where Nestle gets much of the water for its Poland Spring label. The company’s presence is hugely controversial there — what’s the crux of the disagreement?

First of all, the company came in, and in backroom, quiet deals, decided to buy water from a middleman, who was actually the son of the [local] water company’s principal owner. People didn’t know water was being pumped, and they didn’t know it was being sold to Poland Springs. Once they started paying attention to the trucks and counting them, they got worried about what was happening to the Wards Brook aquifer.

So there was some environmental concern, and then there was economic concern, people saying, “Hey, they’re taking our water and they’re selling it for a lot of money — where’s the benefit to the town? We’re dealing with all these trucks.” Then, when Nestle wanted to take water from an adjacent town called Denmark, and pump it through a pipeline to a tanker station on the state highway which happens to be in Fryeburg, the people who lived near the proposed station were horrified to learn that their quiet rural neighborhood would have 50 trucks in and 50 trucks out a day.

So you had some people concerned about the aquifer, some concerned about money, some concerned about trucks, and some people just concerned with principle of the thing, whether water is something to be commodifed, put into plastic bottles and moved around the country.

There’s been a backlash against bottled water, not only in small towns affected by the business, but among consumers in general. What’s behind the turnaround?

I think what’s behind it is the global-warming movement — a few pressure groups have been very successful at educating people about the bottled-water carbon footprint, and how much oil it takes to make, transport, and collect the bottles. They’ve had a lot of success with various mayors, first Gavin Newsom in San Francisco and then Rocky Anderson in Salt Lake City. [Last month], at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, there was a resolution passed to stop the spending of taxpayer money on bottled water at town hall and city council meetings.

For the mayors, I think it gave them eco-cred to say, “Well, you’re right, we’re spending millions of dollars on public water supplies, and we’re also spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for bottled water for our employees, and that doesn’t make sense.” They were also spending a lot of money collecting empty bottles, picking up litter.

These groups also go to college campuses and do blind taste tests — they’re trying to show people that in most cases, you can’t tell the difference between bottled water and tap water. It’s worked — many campuses are removing bottled water from vending machines and improving or putting in more public water fountains.

You also mention that there’s a little snobbery going on here — that there was no backlash when it was this exclusive product that only a few people drank.

Yeah, as it became more popular and everyone could buy bottled water — Dasani and Aquafina and the Nestle brands were the affordable ones — it diluted the exclusivity of it.

But I don’t think the backlash is based on this snobbery, I think the backlash is because of rising awareness — people want to appear to care about the environment. I say in the book that it’s the same people who latched on to bottled water in first place. People who were looking inward, thinking about their health, doing yoga, exercising more, were drinking what they thought was better water. Now, instead of looking inward, they’re looking outward and saying, “Wow, let’s take care of the planet.” The bottle has become the mark of the devil, the equivalent of driving a Hummer.

Where do you see the bottled water business going in the future? Who’s going to be drinking the stuff, and why?

While I see the backlash growing, I also see bottled water sales going up — the rate of growth has slowed, but there is still growth. I think that some people are so afraid of their water, for good reasons or bad, that they’re going to stick with bottled water. I think that in the developing world, as people become wealthier, they’re going to go through the same steps that we went through in [the United States]. It would be great if they would leapfrog to the backlash stage, but bottled-water sales are growing enormously in China and India.

If we continue to ignore our municipal water supplies, and we don’t fix our infrastructure, more people will have to turn to bottled water. That’s the tragedy of it, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we don’t fight for our public water supplies — for watershed protection, more money for advanced treatment technology, stopping polluters — the more we’re going to have to drink bottled water, and then we’ll have this horrible two-tiered system where only those who can afford to drink good water will have access to it — in bottles.