A batch of new attempts by scientists to skewer what they call the “man the hunter myth” arrived this year. One paper argued that women were as capable as men at hunting, another that the archaeological record showed signs that women hunted, and a third demonstrated that women hunted to some extent in almost 80% of the contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in the study. 

These papers have been much discussed in the wider anthropological community, though researchers are pointing out various caveats and uncertainties. They don’t know exactly what people did during the hundreds of millennia of prehistory. What they do have are artifacts and fossils and genetic records, and they’ve inferred much about the past by embedding themselves with the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups around the world. 

What they see there is complicated. In some of those groups, women and men hunt together. In others, men do all the hunting. In still others, men and women hunt different game with different techniques. Several anthropologists told me that when asked whose work is more important, people either say it’s women’s work or that the question makes no sense. It’s like asking whether the heart or the lungs are more vital. Both are needed. 

Patriarchy probably didn’t emerge until the advent of agriculture, as the anthropologist Ruth Mace wrote in The Conversation: “Contrary to common belief, research shows that patriarchy isn’t some kind of ‘natural order of things.’ … Hunter-gatherer communities may have been relatively egalitarian.”

A male-dominated structure is associated with ownership of land and control of wealth, which came from surplus crops. These were often inherited through male lines, but hunter-gatherers didn’t own land, and nomadic communities usually didn’t even retain more possessions than they could transport from one camp to the next. 

That’s what many anthropologists observe in contemporary hunter-gatherers. Barry Hewlett of Washington State University, who studies the Aka hunter-gatherers of Africa, said egalitarianism is a core value. Couples treat each other as equals and children roam freely, he said, while nearby farming communities expect women to obey their husbands, children to obey their elders and people in general to show deference to those deemed to be of superior status. 

Other anthropologists say the hunter-gatherers they study rarely tell each other what to do, and the power to make decisions for a group falls to those men or women who are most articulate and wise. 

Despite the fact that scientists have understood this for decades, popular myths still feed into stereotypes. “I took a business class once and the instructor said something along the lines of — ‘men are individualistic because they’re hunters, and women are cooperative because they’re gatherers,’” said Sheina Lew-Levy, a psychologist and anthropologist at Durham University in the U.K. She’s lived among several hunter-gatherer groups in Africa, where she’s seen cooperative hunting and a lot of individualistic gathering. 

The phrase “man the hunter” was never the name of an official scientific theory, though some anthropologists in the mid-20th century did believe men had always been the primary breadwinners. And it was the title of a symposium held in 1966 in Chicago, which brought together anthropologists who’d been living with contemporary hunter-gatherers. One of the things they concluded was that women usually provided as much or more food as men, mostly from gathering.

Another revelation of the conference was that people generally spent fewer than 40 hours a week working. They had time to sleep, to socialize, to gossip and to play. And the work tended to be stimulating, unlike labor often is at a farm or factory — perhaps not as “nasty, brutish and short” as Thomas Hobbes long ago speculated. Books such as “Sapiens” and “The Dawn of Everything” have made prehistoric life look almost utopian. 

Our past can give people a way to understand ourselves and our changing culture in a wider context. There’s a great deal of confusion about gender — what it means to be male or female and how men and women are supposed to relate to each other and the world around us. 

The surge in popularity of people like psychologist Jordan Peterson or podcaster Joe Rogan testify to the confusion many men feel. “Women know what they have to do, men have to figure out what they have to do,” Peterson said in one of his wildly popular videos aimed at helping men find their way. Recently, The Washington Post ran an opinion article under the headline, “Men are lost. Here’s a map of the wilderness.” It detailed a litany of problems some men face as they struggle to find meaningful work and relationships. 

The emerging understanding of female hunters and egalitarian societies shouldn’t count as a loss for men in a battle of the sexes. Images of a male-ruled past might provide solace for some, but those myths could also seed resentment with the false impression that feminists were interfering with some sort of primordial world order in which men were the dominant and primary breadwinners. 

Hunter-gatherer life, while a good clue of what being human was like in the past, isn’t necessarily a model for how we should be living in the present. But it can show what’s possible. 

It would be easier to put together a coherent origin story for humanity if there was only one way to be a hunter-gatherer. But there is no single, cohesive origin story for humanity — no defined roles for males or females that exist across communities and societies. But there are patterns. 

The University of Utah Professor Polly Wiessner has spent more than 40 years living with hunter-gatherer groups like the Enga of Papua New Guinea and the Kalahari San in Africa. “Women provide the bulk of the food from gathering,” she told me. “And then men supplement that with animal protein. But it’s the women who decide where you go, where you’re going to live — because it’s the plant resources that sustain the group.” The “myth” of “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” is, to her, not a myth — it’s just one way people did (and still do) things. 

Though they’re mostly the hunters, men also know how to gather, Wiessner went on. Their hunts can fail, she said, so they often gather something on the way home — “they’re ashamed of returning empty-handed.”

Likewise, anthropologists have observed that women often learn how to hunt and are quite capable, even if they prefer getting food closer to home. As Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy argue in a paper published this year, women are physically as capable of hunting as men — mostly because they are equal to or better than men at extremely long-distance running, a vital trait for persistence hunting. 

Most other mammals, even the fleetest ones, will become exhausted and overheat if they have to run more than 6-10 miles in the heat of the day. Humans can eventually outrun them thanks to our unique hips, legs, waist and gluteus maximus, and especially our ability to sweat. The longer the distance, the more women excel compared to men. In mixed-sex competitions, women are winning and setting new records in 100- and 200-mile ultramarathons. 

One of the big questions anthropologists want to solve is not just how we used to live but how we became human. What factors pushed our species to become so different from our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas? Back in the 1950s and 60s, some thought it came down to hunting, which was so challenging that it drove our transformation into the intelligent, technological beings we are today. 

But today scientists point to a variety of factors that pushed our evolution toward our current state — everything from cooking food to grandparenting to a form of “self-domestication,” where females choose less aggressive, more caring males for mates.

We are not just smarter and more technological than our great ape relatives — we are also more cooperative and less violent. Human males are much more likely than male apes to form pair bonds and participate in the care of children. Gorilla and chimpanzee babies can grab food for themselves while still riding on their mothers’ backs, but human children are unable to feed themselves for years, and in hunter-gatherer groups, they need more food than what one parent alone can provide. 

But who brings in the extra food? Most argue that it’s the fathers, but Kristen Hawkes, another anthropologist at the University of Utah, says it’s the grandmothers. Men may bring in some food from their hunts, but she believes showing off is their primary motive. In her view, mothers and grandmothers do the essential work of gathering plants and trapping small game, and men go after big game to impress the women. Hunting in that view is like a peacock’s tail — showy, good for attracting mates, but perhaps less helpful for survival. 

Hawkes says the role of older women is vital in the groups she studies and believes grandmothers’ hunting and gathering was so important in our past that it drove the evolution of menopause in the human lineage after we split off from other apes. This early, programmed end of fertility is extremely rare in mammals — most reproduce until they are near death, and only humans, orcas and short-finned pilot whales are known to lose fertility in mid-life. Menopause allows women a long period of time when they’re still strong and vigorous but free from the need to care for their own infants.

Competition is also less fierce in animals that form bonds and work together to care for their offspring. And there’s data showing that in most groups, hunter-gatherer men do form pair bonds and bring home food for their families. Many contribute directly to caring for children. When men become fathers, their testosterone plummets and they get a boost in the hormone oxytocin, which is associated with bonding. 

Kim Hill, an anthropologist who has spent almost half a century studying hunter-gatherers around the world, told me that in the groups he’s studied, between 2% and 5% of biological males in hunter-gatherer groups are effectively transgender. He’s observed them in groups he’s studied — the Aché of South America, the Kuna of Panama and hunter-gatherers in the Philippines.

“They dressed and did their hair like women, and adopted female body language, postures, etc.,” he said. They were mainly involved in gathering plant resources, helping with childcare and tending to the sick. “They were generally accepted and even appreciated. … They were definitely not social outcasts,” he said. Their role was considered a natural one. 

I asked the evolutionary anthropologist Edward Hagen of Washington State University what traits are valued in men in the hunter-gatherer groups he studies. For both men and women, he said, sharing is critical. “When you get food, you share it. If you get tobacco, you share it. If you get money, you share it. If you get clothing, you share it. Share, share, share.” 

Some societies have almost no gender-based division of labor. Among the Aka in Africa, men and women hunt equally, usually together, using massive nets to ensnare antelope and other game. It’s a system that lets both parents stay close to home. 

Not all men are great hunters. Across different groups, the anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman of the University of Calgary told me, there are men who focus their energies in other pursuits like trading and bartering or climbing trees to get honey. 

Lew-Levy emphasized that “There is no human nature, there’s just human flexibility.” Hagen similarly warned against the naturalistic fallacy — that there’s a natural way for humans to live. Scientists shouldn’t have to prove that women hunted in the past in order to argue that it’s a good idea to have equality between women and men in society today. 

But there are lessons that can help both men and women navigate a world undergoing dramatic changes. “Today in Africa and other developing countries,” said Wiessner, “a lot of emphasis is on development for women — getting women into business and earning their own income. But, she went on, “It’s been shown that when you have development programs for both men and women together, it greatly takes the burden off of women.” 

In traditional hunter-gatherer groups, women sometimes take on certain roles, like ensuring reliable access to plants and small game, because their children’s survival depended on it — even if they have the physiological and psychological attributes to hunt big game. Though that doesn’t give us a complete picture of how men and women structured their societies in the prehistoric past, it does make clear that there have never been strictly defined roles for the different sexes across time, geography and civilization. What we do with that information now and in the future is up to us. 

The post The ‘Man The Hunter’ Myth Won’t Go Away appeared first on NOEMA.

If so, you likely caught me holding a dollar-store happy birthday banner rearranged into the phrase “HAPPY DEATH DAY.” Or you might’ve seen my second poster, “THIS IS THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY.” But what you didn’t see was the third poster, “MINING STOLEN LAND FOR INSTAGRAM PHOTOS.” And you definitely didn’t hear the song I sang to the crowd that day:

You didn’t see that other poster or hear that song because every news crew that filmed me out there cut that part of my protest. In a short video segment, Reuters journalists captured the gist of what I was doing — trying to convey that any celebration of our overheating world is grossly offensive in the face of the climate disasters already devastating the planet. But they and the other reporters chose not to air footage of what happened the second day, when I spent an hour singing “Happy Death Day” to 50 or so tourists and park rangers, was nearly arrested by two armed National Park Service officers, and argued (while singing) with a gang of climate deniers, one of whom tried to fight me. 

So, I’m here today to fill in some of the gaps, to talk about what would inspire a performance artist turned writer to squash any semblance of journalistic impartiality and revolt.

I have a deep love for Death Valley — its vastness, its sublime juxtapositions of ice-cream-colored hills hugging vast stretches of white, hot alkali, its sand-dune sunrises and volcanic-crater sunsets. I first fell for this place watching Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” and the feeling grew once I finally saw it for myself. 

Every winter while living in L.A., I would strap my mountain bike to the back of my car and head to Death Valley. Given how vast the park is, it’s easy to find yourself completely alone and enwrapped in near silence — so silent that, if you listen closely, you can hear the blood pulsing through your ear drums. 

When my partner and I moved across the country to New York, I was so distraught that the first thing I did was try to buy land near the park. I knew I didn’t have the money, but I was desperate for a way to return. 

I instead chose to write about it, finding inspiration in the pioneering film director George Kuchar’s “Weather Diary 1.” In the video, Kuchar goes to Oklahoma at the height of tornado season. Armed with just a camcorder, he documents the experience of himself and everyone around him living their lives while awaiting total destruction. I became obsessed by Kuchar’s unrefined blend of diary and documentary and cooked up a plan: go to the hottest place in the world (Death Valley) at the hottest time of the year (July).

The idea was not to create a story in the park but to search for narratives and events that could only exist in such an extreme place. The story would revolve around heat — what it feels, looks, smells and tastes like, how the body responds to it, how the mind contorts under it. I wanted to know what drives people to visit a place experiencing temperatures as high as 130 degrees Fahrenheit, let alone live there. 

My process would be open to much improvisation and many unknowns. It would be an attempt at textual documentation, of rendering a present, a reality, into language. I knew my material would be a mess, like life itself: fickle, subjective, transformational, a patchwork. What I didn’t know was that it would turn into a protest.

From previous trips, I knew the basics: that Death Valley National Park is “the size of Connecticut” or “two Rhode Islands” (for some reason everyone compares it to New England); that it includes the vast basin of Death Valley as well as the Amargosa and Panamint Mountains; that the incredible landscape diversity inside the park, from sand dunes to salt flats to DayGlo mountains, was the result of volcanic explosions, an ancient inland sea and millennia of tectonic jolts; that the natives of the land, the Timbisha Shoshone, had lived in the valley for, in their words, “time immoral”; that the first white settlers, now known as “the Death Valley 49ers,” were nearly decimated by the valley’s harsh climate when they attempted a shortcut on their way to find gold. 

But I’d only been to Death Valley in the winter, when temperatures max out around 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Spending seven days under some of the strongest solar radiation in the world could easily barbeque a human body. 

So I started doing research and gathering gear. I pieced together a sunsuit that would cover me completely. Desert dwellers and serious heat tourists (of which there are few) don’t wear shorts and T-shirts. They cover themselves head to toe. I procured pants, hoodies, hats and blankets — all high on the ultraviolet protection factor (UPF) scale, which measures the sun-blocking properties of clothing. I even bought UPF gloves. Dressed in full, I looked like a cross between Julianne Moore in “Safe” and a Star Wars cosplayer.

Then I turned to my devices. Apple lists the iPhone’s heat maximum at 95 degrees. Even the best consumer voice recorders apparently quit at around 105. Same with video cameras. It seemed extreme heat created a documentary dead zone — at least for the finest and most modern consumer devices — where nothing that could record could operate. Perhaps only the ancient forms of writing, drawing or verbal storytelling reliably functioned here. 

Having few options, I leaned into these constraints. I would still bring my devices, but if they conked out, so be it. I procured a small arsenal of audio recorders, including a cassette recorder, which my research suggested could endure the dead zone. A classic Walkman doesn’t contain a minicomputer that can overheat — they’re completely mechanical. According to multiple studies, the tapes themselves are capable of handling far worse than Death Valley temperatures; only at 140 degrees does their magnetism disappear. This brought me inordinate delight: A solution to a global warming problem might come in the form of a vintage, nearly forgotten technology.

I did other, perhaps more important, homework on how to not die: drink two gallons of water per day, monitor myself for signs of heat exhaustion like heavy sweating and dizziness, take electrolyte tablets every 15 minutes when outside. I read several books, including Richard Lingenfelter’s 600-page, highly annotated history, “Death Valley and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion,” which became my guide. 

Lingenfelter’s book helped me develop a hypothesis — perhaps one that’s not really in doubt — that the history of white settlement in Death Valley is a history of greed and absolute idiocy. Just about all the early prospectors were punished by the valley’s harsh climate in their quest for gold. It wasn’t until borax, a form of salt still used in pesticides and laundry detergent, was discovered that any white settlers managed to strike a profit. Even then, death and disaster abounded. And yet, the miners’ efforts brought hotels, train tracks and roads, literally paving the way for the establishment of the National Park, an environmentalist “success” that would ensure the displacement of the Timbisha Shoshone.

When I finally arrived at the Ranch at Death Valley — a hotel in Furnace Creek, where the park headquarters and museum are located — it was 3 a.m. on Saturday, July 8, and the temperature was a mild 100 degrees. I stepped out of my car and was immediately hit by a form of wind I’d never felt before: a wind that did not cool but blew like a hair dryer. 

For the first two days, I made regular temperature notes as the heat increased. I walked around the hotel grounds, asking tourists and employees about the heat, why they’d come to such a hot place, how they were coping with it. 

Then I got bored. Yes, it was fucking hot. And yes, I had never felt anything like it before. But people’s answers to my questions were predictable. What does heat feel like? “An oven.” “A furnace.” “A sauna.” When I asked tourists why they were here and why now, the responses were even duller: Almost everyone was either checking off national parks in their great American road trip or en route to Las Vegas. 

Some visitors had come specifically for the extreme heat, but when I asked them why, no one gave an answer beyond “I just like it” or “I can’t explain it” no matter how much I pestered. It got more depressing when I asked people how to survive this kind of heat: stay in air conditioning. That’s it. If you don’t want to die from heat exhaustion or heat stroke, you stay inside. 

And so, my gonzo project to document life in a warming world had come to the grand revelation that the antidote to extreme heat was human refrigeration. Here we all were in one of the most beautiful places on the planet and all anyone could do was experience it in hasty jaunts between the safety of their cars or hotel rooms. Either that or risk death: A few days before I arrived, in 123-degree heat, a tourist’s car A/C cut out; suffering heat stroke, he passed out, drove his car off the road and died. This happens several times every year.

The effects of extreme heat seemed particularly troubling for those living there year-round. The only member of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe that I was able to meet said that while some members of the tribe have air conditioning, she made do with a swamp cooler. At the height of summer, to cool off, she would lay in bed and blow as many fans her way as possible. 

Worker conditions at the Ranch turned out to be similarly unbearable. Owned by the ominously named Xanterra, the Ranch does not equip its employees with head-to-toe UPF gear to shield them from the sun, and many employees have to work outside in 110+ temperatures for hours. Many of them are international students on summer break; they do not have access to company vehicles, which made it difficult to see the beauty of the park that hotel guests witness. While I was there, one of the workers was fired for gifting a coworker a scoop of ice cream while on the job. She was abruptly kicked out of staff lodging and denied any assistance to return to Las Vegas to fly home. It’s hard to quantify how cruel this is: to be made homeless in the hottest place in the world at the hottest time of the year, to fend for yourself while tourists wallow in a strange heat fetish.

For millennia before the 49ers and their descendants, the National Park Service and Xanterra, rolled in, the Timbisha Shoshone and other tribes living in the valley would head to the mountains for the summer. For the Timbisha Shoshone, that meant Wildrose Canyon, up in the Panamint Range. I decided I would follow in their footsteps.

On day three, at the hottest point in the afternoon, I drove down to the lowest place in the U.S., Badwater Basin — 280 feet below sea level — and checked the thermometer: 120 degrees. Then I started up Badwater Road toward the top of Wildrose (8,200 feet), checking the temperature along the way. It took nearly an hour before my car thermometer registered any significant temperature drop — somewhere around 1,500 feet above sea level.

Winding up Emigrant Canyon Road, I started to see why the Timbisha Shoshone had come this way: Unlike the famed barrenness of the valley below, up here the land was full of particolored bushes of pastel pink and neon green. The land was still dry, but there were flowers and even a few Joshua Trees. The views were just as sublime: vast basins and rolling hills. And there were wild burros. Lots of them.

On my drive up into the hills, I became convinced that the park was designed completely wrong. The Park Service and the hotels had created a place that encouraged people to risk their lives in the summer, funneling them into the smoldering valley of death while a peaceful, bucolic, temperate land lay just a few miles away. Up here in Wildrose Canyon lay the simple solution that the Timbisha Shoshone had known for millennia: When it gets hot, you go to where it’s cooler. That’s it. No climate-crushing A/C required.

And yet, the Timbisha Shoshone have no land in Wildrose Canyon today. The tribe’s wise way of life was cut short by the establishment of the national monument (which preceded the national park) in 1933. At that time, the federal government conveniently declared the area uninhabited, rendering the tribe landless; to make it worse, the U.S. then took children from the tribe and “re-educated” them in white-run boarding schools. Then in the late 50s, while members of the tribe were summering up in Wildrose Canyon, the Park Service created yet another convenient rule: Any unoccupied buildings could be demolished. When the tribe returned to the valley after the weather had cooled, they found their homes destroyed.

This is of course just a fragment of a long and fraught history. Eventually, in 2000, the Timbisha Shoshone received several parcels of land — none of it up in the mountains. I tried multiple times to speak with official representatives of the tribe to learn more about current living conditions and potential further land cession, but I either reached disconnected phone numbers or wrote emails that went unreturned. I learned from “The Women in the Sand” (2017), a documentary about the tribe’s history, that younger members of the tribe have moved out of the area, many to the nearby city of Bishop, where the tribal offices are located. According to the film, the tribe had tried to build its own hotel in the valley but lacked sufficient investment. 

By the time I arrived at the Mahogany Flats campground, the head of Wildrose Canyon, it was nearly sunset and my car’s thermometer measured 80 degrees. (At that very moment, it was 115 in Death Valley proper.) I got out of my car and saw it right away: The landscape’s greens and blues were just starting to dip into purples. Birds swung in the setting sun. Evergreens and grasses swayed in the breeze. And just beyond the hills was the Amargosa Range and the dim, red wasteland of the valley. Here was calm and coolness, down below was a smoldering inferno begging tourists to test their luck.

In the following days, I returned to Wildrose Canyon three more times, finding myself increasingly allergic to my hotel and everything that the Park Service-designed park was suggesting I do: sit in air-conditioned rooms or drive around in my air-conditioned car. My conversations with tourists, hotel employees and park rangers began to veer toward the canyon. Instead of talking about the weather, I asked people if they’d ever heard of it or the story of what happened to the Timbisha Shoshone when they were away for the summer. Only a few had.

At the same time, news began to spread that the following Sunday, July 16, might be the hottest day in world history, breaking the previous (and contested) record of 134 degrees Fahrenheit. The internet was abuzz with heat tourists boasting about flying out to witness this purportedly monumental occasion. I started to wonder if I’d have to extend my stay.

On what was supposed to be the last day of my weeklong trip, I requested a formal interview with the National Park Service. It seemed they were waiting for the news media to arrive; in minutes, I had an appointment with the park’s acting PR representative. Waiting for my meeting, I overheard two rangers speaking excitedly about not only the upcoming possible heat record, but also about a 5k race they’d planned for the same day. When the PR representative appeared, she too seemed giddy. She guided me to a small conference room, set her ranger hat on the table and laid out a series of talking points.

It’s hard to say which part of the interview set me off. Was it that she had no problem with the 5k? That the Park Service had made no plans to use Sunday’s bleak milestone to educate visitors about the dangers of climate change and what we can all do to try to combat them? That instead they were encouraging people to risk their lives in what might be record-breaking heat? Or was it the fact that she’d never heard of what the Park Service had done to the Timbisha Shoshone while they were away for the summer? She had only been on the job for six months; maybe her bosses were to blame for not ensuring the staff knew the history of the park. Still, she seemed more interested in talking about preserving historic ranger housing and mining sites than the park’s historical and contemporary problems.

By the end of the conversation, I was convinced that the Park Service had turned Death Valley into a kind of junk food for heat tourists. Their mission to be stewards of the land seemed like a joke in the face of the slow violence of all the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere from the park’s air-conditioned cars and hotel rooms each summer. (Note: Only 30% of the power for Xanterra’s properties in Death Valley, possibly the sunniest place in the world, comes from solar energy.) It also didn’t help that when I left the interview, an ambulance wailed by, presumably racing to save yet another unnecessary victim of heat stroke. 

This is when I started to plan my protest. I was certain that the news media would show up for the heat record, so I decided to attempt to infiltrate their narrative, to take a stand for reason in the face of mounting absurdities. 

But I hesitated — what was I doing here? Was I a reporter? A novelist? An artist? Would protesting mean the essay I was working on would be rejected? Was my editor going to be pissed? (It also wasn’t lost on me that I too had participated in burning fossil fuels by coming here, and that buying carbon offsets was a weak attempt to redeem myself.) 

In the end, I thought of my one-year-old child. I tried to imagine what she would be proud of me for doing years from now if I told her about this. Fuck reporting about global warming. I decided to make some signs. 

At the Family Dollar in Pahrump, Nevada, I strolled past the usual display of posters, colored makers, plastic trinkets, greeting cards and birthday supplies until something clicked. In an instant, a plan came together: I’d make it a party. Happy Death Day. 

I bought party hats and noisemakers, Sharpies and five different versions of the “Happy Birthday” banner. I drove back to my hotel and spent the rest of the night cutting, pasting and writing in all caps.

The next day — the day before what was forecast to be the hottest day on record — I drove back to Badwater Basin and parked my car. I covered my face in sunscreen, made sure I had enough water and electrolyte tablets, grabbed my posters and noise makers, and froze. I choked. Looking out the window, I watched tourists getting out of their cars, strolling around, taking selfies before the smoking alkali. I understood their type at this point. They were mostly from abroad, here for a taste of the extreme and the bizarre. There were kids. Who was I to get in their faces? To make a scene and disrupt their vacations? 

I almost gave it up right there. But then a two-person news crew walked by. One held a clipboard, the other a TV camera. I knew I had to go. 

I opened the door, stepped out into the 125-degree heat and made my way to the alkali. I pulled a noisemaker out of my pocket, held up my signs — “HAPPY DEATH DAY” and “THIS IS THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY” — and began blowing. The noisemaker was sharp, it was annoying. It sounded like a dying animal. The party had begun.

Eventually, the TV crew came my way. They introduced themselves as journalists from Reuters, and I happily gave them an interview. I voiced my severe disappointment with the Park Service and tourists’ excitement over this grim world record. I talked about Wildrose Canyon and the Park’s treatment of the Timbisha Shoshone. I even offered a climate-change reading list.

After the reporters got their bit, I blew on my noisemaker for another half hour, then made my way across the park to the Furnace Creek Visitors Center where I continued my noisemaking beside the Park’s famed thermometer — a tourist attraction designed for snapping pics and the focal point of all activity in Death Valley in the summer. I raised my third sign, “MINING STOLEN LAND FOR INSTAGRAM PHOTOS,” and continued to blow my dying horn.

Not long after, the visitor’s center closed. I had already checked out of my hotel and packed my car, intending to return to L.A. and fly home. My partner had been caring for our one-year-old for a week straight, and I needed to get back. But on the way to the airport, I stopped the car three times. I was convinced I wasn’t finished with my protest. It was the day before what was supposed to be the hottest day on record. How could I get this close but miss it? 

I called my partner. She wasn’t happy, but agreed. I turned the car around. Happy Death Day 2, here we go.

To mix things up, I decided day two would be something of a guerilla opera: I’d sing for a full hour at the hottest time of the day, offering educational information about climate change — the same information I felt the Park Service should be providing to visitors — set to the tune of “Happy Birthday.”

When I arrived back at the Furnace Creek Visitor’s Center the next day, it was 2:45 p.m. and my car marked 126 degrees. The place was swarming with people watching the thermometer tick up and up, hoping for that record to break. 

At 3 p.m., I downed a bottle of water, grabbed my signs and noise makers, and made my way to the thermometer. I propped my iPhone on a rock and hit record. 

It did admirably well in the heat, but it didn’t survive long enough to capture my confrontation with the climate deniers. Soon after that video cut out, the guy who had been challenging my climate science got a little bolder and louder. Other climate deniers banded together with him. For about 10 minutes, things stayed reasonable, with them mockingly quizzing me about climate solutions, and me firing back (with vibrato) everything I’d learned from books like “The Uninhabitable Earth” and “How to Prepare for Climate Change.” 

At some point, things escalated. The Park Service representative who I’d interviewed two days before asked me to move to a “free speech area” far away from the thermometer. In my best tenor, I told her I could not, that my protest only made sense next to this thermometer. Five minutes later, two armed Park Service officers approached me, telling me to leave or I would be arrested. 

I kept singing, chanting about how the Park Service was encouraging daredevil behavior and failing to educate people on how to live safely and more sustainably in the cooler parts of the park during the summer months — or, better yet, shutting down completely for the summer. I sang about how Wildrose Canyon and much more land should be ceded back to the Timbisha Shoshone and Indigenous peoples all over the U.S., and about how worker conditions at the Ranch are abysmal. 

Eventually the climate denier bros had had enough. To protect the unalienable right to take selfies in peace, they crowded in front of me to block me from the tourists. I hopped around, still singing. At some point, I must have said something offensive — was it that I called them fascists? — and one of the bros raised his fist. Two of his pals grabbed him to hold him back. Deciding, perhaps, that I wasn’t worth the sweat, he backed off, and one of his buddies loudly declared they were off to eat a big, juicy steak — a retort to my suggestion that eating less meat is good for the environment.

When 4 p.m. hit, I thanked the crowd and did a bow. No one clapped. Nonplussed, I gathered up my posters and got back in my car. It seemed that that would just about do it for me here in Death Valley, but then half a mile down the road, I spotted someone dressed all in black jogging through the desert. The 5k!

I drove ahead and parked my car, watching as the figure lumbered through the sunbaked landscape. Peering closer, I wondered: Is that person in a Darth Vader costume? Yes, I answered, yes — that person is most definitely wearing a Darth Vader costume. I checked the thermometer: 128 degrees. Eventually, he approached me, the Sith lord panting and wheezing in white running shoes and ill-fitting gear. He gave a friendly wave and hobbled on.

The post Happy Death Day To You appeared first on NOEMA.

It was December 2018. Nearly nine years had passed since the disaster that gave birth to this place: a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that killed between 46,000 and 316,000 people — exactly how many, nobody knows. Haiti’s government estimates some 1.5 million people — one out of every seven Haitians — were displaced. 

A few weeks later, the U.N. and international NGOs started relocating some of the displaced to an empty plot of land north of the capital, an area known locally as Canaan. Soon, many more followed. They slept in tents and ramshackle shelters and, in time, began claiming small plots of land and building houses of their own. Numbers grew from the hundreds into the thousands, then the tens of thousands, then the hundreds of thousands. Nearly a decade after the earthquake, some 300,000 people called Canaan home.

There was just one problem: This city had no government. By the time I visited, residents had spread across multiple existing municipalities, but none had established any formal presence. There was no way to get a formal title to a plot of land — no forms to sign, no office to go to, no bureaucrat to beseech. No government department was responsible for digging wells or building parks or bus stations. There were no police. 

One man promised to change that: Rony Colin, the mayor of the city next door, Croix-des-Bouquets. Rightly or wrongly, Colin decided Canaan was his domain. 

Colin is a rags-to-riches guy. I heard his founding legend from a driver who hailed from his hometown on the sea: A young Colin, down on his luck, went into a forest to meet a fortune teller. The man conjured Colin’s three lucky numbers and told Colin to go buy a lottery ticket on each. Colin walked out of the forest, bought the three tickets, and won — twice. Won 7.5 million Haitian gourdes, the equivalent of more than $2 million. “That’s how Rony got rich,” the driver said.

Later, when I recounted this to Colin, he laughed, asking how I’d possibly learned it. “It’s a mystique thing,” he emphasized — superstition, not Vodou, a religion that draws on traditions from West Africa and is practiced widely by Haitians. But the story was true. “I made so much so much so much! They’re not even finished paying me.”

Decades before the earthquake, Colin used his winnings to open a construction company, buying machinery from Canada, shipping it to the Dominican Republic, then trucking it across the border to Haiti. After the quake, Haiti desperately needed to reconstruct the hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings that had been damaged or destroyed. Construction requires concrete and concrete requires sand. Luckily for Colin, sand had been his most lucrative investment of all — 1,650 acres of sand mines on the northern edge of Canaan. Each day, dozens of dump trucks ferry the sand to Port-au-Prince and other cities. It’s a stream of revenue that’s unlikely to dry up until the mountains are mined flat. 

“All those are mine,” Colin told me, pointing to the depleted hillsides. “I can make a lot of money from the mines.”

In a short time, Colin entered politics, opened a radio station, staffed it with political pundits and, in 2015, was elected mayor of Croix-des-Bouquets. Colin rose to power in tandem with the flood of international aid that followed the quake. Charities like the Red Cross had raised billions of dollars to help Haiti recover, and they needed someone with authority to green-light construction. Colin was their man. He approved projects and legitimized NGOs, which in turn legitimized him. One by one, most NGOs spent their money and left, leaving the city’s residents to contend with Mayor Colin alone.

Some of Canaan’s residents saw him as an opportunity. They yearned for things that a government should bring: paved roads, security, electricity. They wanted to be able to vote, they wanted security. Gangs were beginning to infiltrate and extort residents, just like they were in Port-au-Prince — one of the realities of life in the capital that Canaan’s residents had come here to avoid. 

That’s what the new police station was for. 

At last, on that hot day in December, there arrived an entourage of SUVs flanked by half a dozen police officers with semiautomatic rifles. Colin got out, but something wasn’t right: The lamppost that was supposed to light up the building at night was on the ground. Colin couldn’t have that. A group of men hurriedly began digging a hole for it. After a few minutes, someone came over and told them to dig elsewhere instead, so they moved and started again.

Colin waited, sweating in a dark suit in the shade of a narrow alley behind the building. He leaned against a concrete wall, picking dirt from his nails. His assistant announced that he needed to relieve himself. “Where can I take a pee? Behind here?” he asked. He noticed my camera. “I don’t want photos on Facebook,” he joked with a grin.  

After 20 more minutes, the diggers gave up on the lamppost and Colin stepped forward to deliver his speech. Hundreds of pairs of eyes fixated on him. One of the people in the audience was a middle-aged man with a sleepy expression named Salma Simeus. He was the community leader of a neighborhood called Onaville, at Canaan’s far-eastern edge. Simeus wondered: Would Colin be a benefactor, bringing legitimacy, prosperity and security? Or would Colin be a politician with his own personal interests and get in the way?

“Today has great importance for us when it comes to the question of security,” said Colin. “It’s true that it wasn’t the state that built this place.” Gesturing at the crowd, he said: “It was they themselves who put their heads together. But now, it’s up to the local authority to accompany them.”

By local authority, he meant himself. Haiti’s federal government had, by that point, accomplished little in Canaan. NGOs paid bribes to bureaucrats and bought gas for underpaid staffers to venture out to Canaan and do assessments for projects and surveys of land. Everywhere I went in Canaan, people told me that their new city had yet to flourish because the state had yet to govern. Now, Colin might be their last chance.  

After his speech, dozens of supporters surrounded him, cheering “10 years! 15 years!”, a promise to vote to reelect him many times over. Colin smiled, pulled out a wad of banknotes from his pocket and started handing them out as if they were pieces of candy. Men squabbled over the money while Colin climbed into an SUV adorned with a gaudy, faux-gold license plate that read Mayor Rony Colin.

Colin looked out through the car window, and we locked eyes. He beckoned me over and invited me to attend a meeting the next day between him and the community leaders of Canaan. Gesturing to the police post, the first of six that he promised would soon dot the city, he assured me that “We’re going to put officers in every one — and quick.” 

The next morning on my way to the meeting, I passed the police post. There was a fence around it and the gate was locked shut, not an officer in sight.  

Colin’s modestly furnished mansion was on a large parcel of land with a guard and a metal gate. When I got there, I found him inspecting a front loader while Canaan’s community leaders began to arrive. Each neighborhood had nominated a leader to represent them — they were almost all men. 

After what felt like hours, we were let into the mayor’s living room and seated on plastic chairs. Some of the neighborhood leaders wore black dress shoes, freshly polished. Lounging in a recliner with his shoes off, Colin wore a white undershirt that had a small rip in the side, accenting his belly. 

He lamented Canaan’s overcrowded conditions: “Every little piece of land has someone who wants to claim it,” he said. “We can’t live in a society where everyone is afraid of each other. I am a man of the state. I am here for you, and you are here for me.” So long, that is, as nobody interfered with his “interests” — his mines. 

There were just two problems with Colin’s plan. The first was that Canaan had no electoral office, which meant people could not register there to vote for him, or for anyone. And the second was that Colin was a political opponent of the president and his cabinet, who have enormous sway over the electoral process. Haiti’s leaders might want to keep Canaan off the electoral map because every vote for Colin was a vote against them. 

At the time, Haiti was led by President Jovenel Moïse. During his campaign, Moïse described himself as a hardworking banana farmer — a man of the people. In reality, by the time of his candidacy, he was a wealthy owner of construction companies and a big-ag investor whose export-driven banana plantation evicted hundreds of farmers. 

Moïse didn’t have much of a mandate. His 2015 election was later overturned due to irregularities, and he won a re-do election the following year with an abysmal turnout estimated at around 21%. By 2017, he was embroiled in a corruption scandal and facing down widespread protests, to which his administration responded by arming the notorious gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier. In late 2018, Chérizier and his thugs entered a Port-au-Prince neighborhood where there had been major protests against Moïse, and they massacred some 71 people, including children, raped at least 11 women and looted some 150 homes. 

But Colin had another problem, one far closer to home.

Jean Adler Corriélus, better known by the nom de guerre Bob Anel, was a powerbroker who spent his days holding court like a king. Each morning, his backyard filled with people waiting for their chance to ask him for a favor or try to sell him something. 

“You see all these people?” he said to me on the day I visited, gesturing around. “They’re all here to ask me for things — a little money, security. Maybe they had a problem with police. Everyone has something.” As Anel told it, Colin entered politics out of ambition, but Anel decided to throw his hat in the ring out of obligation. “I’ve never liked politics,” he said. “But it’s because of what’s happening to my people. We are victims.”

“We have a great dream for Canaan,” Anel told me. “My dream is for people to have electricity in their houses. For their kids to go to a good school. So they can have a pretty cemetery to bury their loved ones who die.” His goals were no different from Colin’s, no different from the residents’.

But Canaan was languishing, he alleged, because of Colin’s greed. Colin wanted to tax Canaan’s settlers without offering them anything in return, Anel said. Anel wasn’t the only person to raise eyebrows over what Mayor Colin was doing with his municipality’s tax money. “Maybe he will use that money to buy a house in Florida,” the head of a federal government land office in Port-au-Prince speculated to me. 

“Many people say he’s a millionaire. But I think he’s a poor man. A man who robs stuff from poor people,” said Anel. He described Colin as a land baron — occupying land that isn’t his, then renting it or selling it to the highest bidder. In fact, Anel told me, that’s what Colin did to him. Anel claimed Colin appropriated a large swatch of land that was gifted to Anel’s grandfather for his military service long ago. 

The conflict between the two went beyond politics and once spiraled into violence. According to Colin, Anel’s gunmen on motorcycles attacked his radio station. He showed me a grainy video of men with guns firing at the building. “It’s a whole army,” Colin remarked as we watched. The onslaught was filmed by the shaky hands of one of the station’s employees cowering on the upper floor. Vehicles circled the area, providing cover for the gunmen and a means of escape. Those same vehicles, Colin assured me, have been seen entering and leaving Bob Anel’s home. “He’s an assassin,” said Colin. “I’m going to arrest him and bring him to justice.”  

But Haiti’s judiciary was in shambles. Judges and attorneys had been shot, kidnapped, killed. Men tried to abduct and kidnap two clerks at a court where the corruption case involving Moïse was underway. Two judges tasked with investigating the scandal fled the country after receiving death threats. In 2020, the head of the Port-au-Prince bar association was shot and killed on his way home, hours after going on the radio to rail against an array of Haitian politicians ranging from parliament to the presidential palace.

By early 2020, as Covid consumed the globe, the pandemic barely registered among Haiti’s problems. But that March, Colin’s 21-year-old son, who was living in Florida, died in his sleep; the cause is still unclear. To Colin, it must have seemed like a curse. Eminently superstitious, the man who had won the lottery twice decided his luck had run out. Another one of his kids was kidnapped on the way to school shortly after — by this time, kidnappings were rife, an easy way for gangs to extort money. Colin subsequently announced he would no longer seek reelection, even if the election went forward, and that he’d stop governing at the end of his term. 

On June 26, 2021, Colin did what many of his countrymen dream of, some attempt, and few succeed: He left Canaan to find safety in the United States, boarding a flight to Florida. 

The man who had tried to govern Haiti’s ungoverned city washed his hands of the place. He left without having earned Canaan formal recognition, leaving residents no clear path toward someday electing a leader of their own.

Eleven days later, on the evening of July 7, 2021, President Moïse was assassinated in his home by Colombian mercenaries. They were hired by, among others, a businessman who was sentenced this June in Florida to life in prison for his role in the plot. Security in Haiti has since deteriorated even further, with gangs raping and brutalizing women and children, shooting and killing with impunity. One of the most notorious gangs, 400 Mawozo, established its stronghold on the outskirts of Canaan. The gang attacked Colin’s radio station after one of his pundits criticized the gang for terrorizing the population. Colin said two of his employees were shot and a police officer he’d known was killed. The next month, the station shut down for good. 

Today, the people left behind — Simeus and Canaan’s other residents who moved there hoping for peace and opportunity — have instead been extorted by gangs at gunpoint or had to duck and cover with their children as shootouts unfold outside their homes. The security that Colin promised never materialized. The grand hopes of the residents and Colin’s promises seem sanguine in retrospect. 

In recent months, gang activity — muggings, burglary, shootings — has intensified, and many Canaan residents have left. Some moved in with relatives in the countryside. Others began squatting in parks and churches — even outside the U.S. embassy, lacking anywhere else to go. Last Saturday, a pastor persuaded hundreds of congregants to march through Canaan to rid it of the gang that has been terrorizing the town. Some carried rocks and machetes. When police at a station they passed refused to intervene, the gang responded by opening fire on the crowd. Residents are still counting the dead.

Haiti, to the extent it is being ruled at all, is led by an unelected interim prime minister, Ariel Henry — a man with ties to one of the suspects in his predecessor’s murder. Henry has called for the U.S. and other Western powers to send a military force to get the gangs under control — a popular but controversial demand in a country occupied for long periods by the U.S. military as well as by a U.N. peacekeeping force that killed civilians and whose soldiers raped women and children and introduced a cholera epidemic that left more than 10,000 people dead. 

In August, Kenya — a nation whose soldiers and police have a reputation for torture and massacres — volunteered to send a stabilization force to bolster Haiti’s police in their fight against the gangs. The U.S. said it would submit a U.N. resolution in support of the plan for Kenya to lead a “multinational” stabilization force of 1,000 Kenyan soldiers. Haiti’s gangs have already threatened to fight back. 

I recently called Colin in Florida, and he said he hopes to return to Haiti someday — if it ever becomes safe. But he said he’s through with politics, that he’ll never run for office again. “We need elections,” he said, raising his voice in exasperation. “We don’t have a president. We don’t have a parliament. We don’t have mayors. We don’t have a country.” 

But when pressed, he had no clue what could be done to fix the collapse of governance in Haiti, placing the burden on the shoulders of the countrymen he left behind: “All Haitians can put their heads together to come up with an amenable solution,” he said.

The post The City With No Government appeared first on NOEMA.

But something felt off.

“I felt so disconnected from nature and people,” Loïc, 38, said. “I wanted to live in alignment with my values.”

In Tokyo, the couple tried to make their lives more eco-friendly. Loic quit his job in the automobile industry to work in renewables; Emmy, 36, tried incorporating teachings on the environment into her classroom at the Lycée Français International de Tokyo. Yet every time the couple bought plastic-wrapped food at the grocery store or found themselves stuck in a sea of people, they felt like their efforts to reconnect with nature were in vain. 

In 2019, the couple decided they needed a break. One evening, Emmy searched for nature holidays online and stumbled upon a week-long sustainability event organized by an ashram in northern France, where participants share their knowledge about everything from how to build an energy-efficient home to how to cook wild plants. “I booked it without expectation,” she said. “I just knew that we needed something different.”

That summer, the family traveled to the ashram, located in a medieval fortified farmhouse in northern, rural France. Over the course of the week, the couple sat in circles with other visitors who wanted to learn about permaculture and sustainable architecture; their daughters climbed trees and visited the apiary. When Emmy overheard that followers of the ashram were building an ecovillage next door, she knew immediately that she wanted to be a part of it. 

“We were seduced by this place, by the people and the values,” said Loïc. “We wanted to live in connection to nature.”

Less than a year later, the Leruste family packed up their Tokyo life, leaving their skyscraper apartment to build a small house on a wheat field in Eure-et-Loir county, northern France. Their home is made of wood and insulated with straw. It is the ultimate ecologically friendly house, running on renewable energy, dry toilets and phytodepuration, and a natural water treatment system.

Outside the house, the Lerustes are surrounded by 25 other families who have also upended their lives to build the eco-hamlet known as Plessis. The families hope it will be an oasis for others also wishing to take their climate commitments to the next level. 

Those commitments mean trying to live off the land, building sustainable homes and incorporating eco-friendly behavior into every facet of daily life, from consumption to children’s education. But the community’s goal is not simply to be energy efficient: They want to reimagine community life entirely, building new democratic models, childcare systems and a spiritual orientation that aligns people with each other and nature. 

“I love being surrounded by people who have an awareness that this Earth is so much bigger than us,” said Emmy. “It is so much easier to live sustainably when you are part of a community.”

The Rise Of Ecovillages

An increasing number of people around the world are joining or creating ecovillages, spurred by concerns about climate change to reconsider their way of life.

Today, there are more than 10,000 ecovillages globally, mainly in rural areas, where people are building societies that are socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. These ecovillages are extremely diverse: they can be secular or spiritual, traditional or intentional, on or off the grid. While some ecovillages are quite radical in their politics, sharing everything from financial resources to bedrooms, others are rather mainstream, with people still living in separate homes, working day jobs but also sharing garden spaces and utilities. Despite these differences, ecovillages typically share the worldview that capitalism and industrialization have disconnected us from ourselves, each other and, especially, nature. Ecovillages are an attempt to restore these links. 

“Most people leave mainstream society for ecovillages to escape neoliberalism and capitalism that dominate their daily lives,” said Nadine Brühwiler, a doctoral student studying the rise of ecovillages at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “Although they are all vastly different, most ecovillages ask themselves: What do we want to sustain?”

Ecovillages have existed for decades. Some of the biggest and most famous ecovillages in the world today, such as Findhorn in Scotland and Auroville in India, were founded in the 1960s when rural hippie communes were on the rise. At the time, ecovillages were emerging independently of one another with little conversation or coordination occurring among them.

This changed in 1995 when the Findhorn ecovillage organized a conference that brought together ecovillages worldwide for the first time. The conference was an unexpected success. Over 400 people from 40 countries attended, with many more turned away due to lack of space. It became clear to the organizers that there was an appetite for alternative, ecological ways of living but that the movement needed more structure. 

Following the conference, 20 people from different ecovillages around the world met to create the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), an association of communities dedicated to finding ways to live more communally and sustainably. GEN’s primary focus is connecting existing ecovillages with one another and providing training and resources for those wanting to join or sustain an ecovillage.

Since its founding nearly 30 years ago, GEN has blossomed from a small, niche network of grassroots projects to an established international organization. Today, the network is home to intentional communities where people opt to live together, as well as existing, traditional villages looking to transition toward solely using renewables. While GEN used to be brushed aside as a hippie project, today the network is taken much more seriously: GEN has consultative status at the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council, and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mentions ecovillages in their report and features one of GEN’s founding members on its cover.

“When we used to go to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in the early 2000s, politicians would walk by and laugh at us,” said Martina Grosse Burlage, a UN representative for GEN who goes by the name “Macaco.” “Now, when the ministers walk by, they stop at our booth.” 

The number of people wanting to join ecovillages has also grown in recent years, according to Francesca Whitlock, GEN’s communications director. In France alone, the number has grown considerably: Since the country’s national ecovillage network Cooperative Oasis began in 2014, over 1,000 ecovillages have registered with the organization.

Mathieu Labonne, the network’s director and founder of the Plessis ecovillage, estimates that roughly 100 new villages are created in France annually. There is even a quarterly magazine for French ecovillages called Passerelle Eco, which over the course of its 81 editions, has featured the latest news about ecovillages around France. “We are seeing an emergence of these villages,” said Christophe Monnot, an expert on eco-spirituality and an assistant professor on the sociology of religion at the University of Strasbourg. “It’s not a tsunami but it’s a movement.”

Brühwiler believes that climate change is the main reason ecovillages have experienced a sudden wave of interest and are becoming more mainstream. “The values in our society at large are changing, and everyone is looking for solutions,” she said.

The demographic of people interested in joining ecovillages today looks different from the hippies who created intentional communities in the 1960s. At the ecovillage of the Plessis, residents include engineers wearing golf shirts and Parisians looking to gain practical gardening skills. 

“Ecovillages have always attracted young idealists and older people with money and new-age sensibilities,” Whitlock said. “But now you have a lot of families living mainstream lives who are looking for something different.”

Loïc and Emmy see themselves as part of this new wave. While environmentalism has always been important to the couple, they were never dogmatic about their values. 

“It was climate change that made me want to move faster,” said Loïc. “It made me feel that this life isn’t so radical. I started asking myself, if someone like me who claims to have convictions about the environment doesn’t make this change, who will?”

Sustainability Becomes Spirituality

When Loïc and Emmy arrived in the ecovillage of the Plessis, their lives changed dramatically. The couple, who had spent years anonymously roaming the streets of Tokyo, suddenly knew everyone they passed on these country roads. Loïc went from being an engineer working a desk job in a sterile high-rise building to a man who spent his days in the dirt planting vegetables. At their front door, leather shoes were now replaced by rubber boots. 

But one of the biggest changes was the sudden presence of eco-spirituality — a modern belief system that brings together humans and the environment — in their everyday lives. Taking inspiration from cultures worldwide, including Buddhism and Indigenous traditions, eco-spirituality aims to reconnect people with nature.

While the exact value system changes depending on the community or individual, eco-spiritualists typically reject the human/nature divide and disavow the capitalist system, believing that the only way to change our world is to change our spiritual and emotional mindset.

Early iterations of eco-spirituality emerged in 17th century and later in the 19th century, with the rise of environmentalism but boomed during the counterculture movements of the 1960s, in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Julia Itel, an expert on eco-spirituality, says this was a time when people began expressing disenchantment with modernity, believing that not all of capitalism’s promises would be kept and that not all forms of progress should be celebrated.

“Eco-spirituality is a demythologization of modernity whereby people are falling out of love with the utopias promised by neoliberalism,” said Itel, who authored a book on “Spirituality and Sustainable Society.” “They are turning toward more ancient traditions, such as pagan beliefs, to restore links with our planet”.

Around the world, eco-spirituality is on the rise, which experts attribute to a growing consciousness about our ecological crisis. Eco-spirituality can take many different forms: some create forest rituals; others revive neo-pagan practices. People’s level of engagement can also vary, from casual participation in eco-spiritual rituals to making the radical move of living full-time in an ecovillage.

“Though not all ecovillages are spiritual, many of the people drawn to these places want to reconsider every aspect of their life, from their lifestyle to their spirituality,” Brühwiler said.  

In the Plessis ecovillage, various forms of eco-spirituality are at play. The village was created by a group of people who wanted to live next to the local ashram, a center dedicated to the spiritual Hindu leader Amma, revered as the “hugging saint” by her following of globetrotting devotees. Amma is neither prescriptive nor dogmatic in what she preaches. She speaks in broad terms about the need for greater selflessness, interreligious harmony and critically, environmental protection in our society.

While the ashram was created for Amma in 2002, today it serves as a kind of eco-spirituality laboratory where people can come to reimagine their belief systems. Though some members of the Plessis ecovillage are followers of Amma — participating in morning meditations and evening chants — others like Loïc and Emmy are not, but want to reimagine their spirituality within the context of the climate crisis. 

“I personally don’t connect with Hinduism or Amma,” Loïc said. “I’m here because I want to be surrounded by people who want to be connected to the environment.”

Loïc and Emily were both raised Catholic but they have experimented with how they live out their spirituality in their adult lives. For example, the couple had a Catholic marriage ceremony in a Japanese temple. “What I like here is the spiritual openness and willingness to question the values that govern mainstream society,” Emmy said. “It’s a chance to reimagine a new belief system.”

Commune Or Cult?

When Loïc and Emmy told their parents they were leaving city life for an ecovillage, their parents were concerned: “They thought we had joined a cult,” Emmy said.

Ecovillages are often accused of being cults and improperly linked to the new-age communes of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s; those famously included Jonestown, an American cult in Guyana where 918 people engaged in mass suicide/murder and Rajneeshpuram, a religious intentional community in Oregon that deliberately contaminated food at local restaurants and plotted to assassinate Charles Turner, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon. In France today, ecovillages are regularly characterized as sects in the press. 

“There is a tendency to immediately dismiss ecological communities as being cults,” said Frédéric Rognon, a professor of religion at the University of Strasbourg. “Sure, some people who are interested in these villages may have sectarian characteristics but that isn’t the norm. The real issue is that environmentalism still seems radical to many people.” 

As the Plessis ecovillage project gained momentum in 2017, many people from the nearby village of Pontgouin protested. Locals were concerned that it would impose on their way of life — from their spiritual practices to their sustainability habits — forcing residents to change their cultural practices

“The [ecovillage] has a different way of living,” said Jean-Claude Friesse, mayor of Pontgouin. “People thought it was a cult.”

But as the ecovillage has established itself in the greater community, locals have started to embrace it. 

Like many ecovillages worldwide, the Plessis ecovillage is a diverse community where individuals and families make different choices about their lifestyles, spirituality and environmental engagement. While some people like Loïc have given up city jobs to work the land, others work remotely, traveling to Paris a few times a month for meetings.

Unlike cults, the ecovillage is home to a diversity of belief systems, where people constantly negotiate what it means to live sustainably and collectively. “I think people saw that this wasn’t a group of fanatics,” Friesse said. “They realized that much like their community, it was simply a group of people trying to learn to live together.”

Since the project began, the ecovillage has brought in young families to the neighboring aging village of less than 2,000 people. Today, a host of locally grown vegetables are available to locals. New shops and services have popped up in the town square: Emmy has started her own Montessori school committed to teaching children how to protect nature.

“This project has rejuvenated the village,” Friesse said. “It has been a really positive thing for everyone.” While not all locals share the ecovillagers’ ecological or spiritual convictions, they do value the intangible thing these villagers are trying to build: community. 

As France has become more urbanized, the country’s rural areas have seen its residents flock to cities. In rural France today, there are abandoned towns and plots of land, where previously central community spaces — from bakeries to local churches — have shut down as an aging population is left to fend for itself.

“People here used to be together, there was a community,” Friesse said. “The ecovillage has brought this back.” 

The more time locals spend with their new neighbors, the more they realize that they are re-creating what locals have yearned for — a place thought lost to modernity, where parents can leave their kids with their neighbors; where elders can rely on others for a helping hand.

Aurore Delemotte, 32, who lives in Plessis with her husband, a newborn and toddler, said parenting has been easier since the move. In the ecovillage, she has found “what people are missing in other places,” she said. “It’s a place where people can find meaning in things other than money or jobs.”

Eveline Bertrand, 77, plans to move into the elderly home being built in the Plessis ecovillage. “I like chopping the vegetables with everyone around the picnic table and being around people who are young and vibrant,” she said. “Plus, when I move here, there will be no more solo dinners.”

Researchers who study the motivations of people joining ecovillages say that loneliness is often a driving factor. After Covid forced many people into extended periods of isolation, GEN received a record number of inquiries, according to Whitlock. One ecovillage in Switzerland has seen its population grow by nearly 30% since Covid. “It wasn’t just an ecological consciousness growing but a social one,” said Brühwiler. “Covid got people thinking about how they want to live.”

For many people, Covid highlighted how lonely our society has become. Even before the pandemic, experts were decrying our “loneliness crisis”. Around the world, people are reporting unprecedented levels of loneliness. In Europe, 18% of people—the equivalent of 75 million people — are socially isolated, according to a 2019 European Social Survey. A 2021 report indicated that 61% of young Americans feel “serious loneliness” and lack community. While the pandemic exacerbated this trend, the systematic closing of public spaces due to fiscal cuts, as well as the proliferation of technology, has made people more alone — physically, emotionally and spiritually — than ever before. Ecovillages are helping fill this existential, and growing, gap in our society.

“It isn’t always just the climate-minded people who join,” said Burlage. “These villages can respond to a very human impulse of not wanting to be alone.”

Expectations Meet Reality

Like all utopic dreams, the romantic expectations people have of ecovillages are rarely matched by reality. Conflict can often erupt over small, mundane things: someone’s dog pooping on the shared lawn or a teenager making too much noise in the middle of the night.

In the Plessis ecovillage, two neighbors are already arguing over how to share land situated between their two homes. “We’re not used to living with so many people, or sharing everything,” Itel said. “It’s a form of cultural organization that we were not educated on.”

But arguments are also often ideological. Because each ecovillage defines its own values, there can be friction and disputes over how much personal freedom should be sacrificed for communal well-being.

“There are always bigger conflicts: conflicts about power, about anarchy, about consumerism and materialism,” Yves Michel, an ecovillage scholar who lives in Éourres, an ecovillage in the lower Alps, told me. “People come with amazing dreams but after a while, they realize it’s not paradise and that you need to hustle: you need to build a life.”

For many people in these ecovillages, environmentalism is their shared culture — with many believing that it can supersede other markers of identity bound by geography, ethnicity or political orientation.

Yet most aspiring ecovillages fail. Around 90% of projects never see the light of day, either due to external constraints, like the inability to get building permits, or more often because of internal disagreements over how a community should live.

When ecovillages do succeed, there is often huge turnover among residents. “There is a nomadism of ecovillages,” Rognon, the religion professor, told me. “There are people who will never stop searching for their utopia.”

This reality raises larger questions about ecovillages as chosen communities: Can communities we create be as strong as those we are born into? Can rituals we invent be passed down as easily as those we inherit? 

These questions poke holes into the worldview that belies the ecovillage project. “People always ask us how long we will stay here,” Emmy said. “But no one asks this (of) people living in ‘traditional’ communities.”

But, she added in the same breath, “for now we are happy; and if that changes, we can always move.”

Insular To Influencer

As climate change has become a more pressing issue, the ecovillage movement has increasingly taken steps to influence mainstream society.

On nearly every continent, there are ecovillages serving as “living and learning centers,” where people can learn about sustainable and communal living. From the Institute of Permaculture and Ecovillage of the Cerrado in Brazil to the Sarvodaya center in Sri Lanka, ecovillages are opening their doors to the wider public, offering exchange programs to young people. 

There are also many examples of ecovillages supporting vulnerable people: In Ukraine, ecovillages have welcomed people fleeing the country’s war-stricken cities; in Germany, ecovillages have invited environmental activists to come rest and recharge.

But despite a growing interest in ecovillages, many in the movement feel that change is not happening quickly enough given the ongoing ecological crisis. Part of the challenge is getting people interested. In the global north, there remains a deep skepticism about these communities, which many regard as cults by a different name. In the global south, the concerns are different; many feel the European ecovillage model is for the privileged, not the poor. 

“In the global south, people still have these social bonds that ecovillages in the global north are trying to revive,” said Ousmane Pame, the president of REDES, the ecovillage network of Senegal. “People here are not ‘trying to live in accordance with their ecological values’. They are trying to survive.”

Some communities in the global south already live in an ecologically friendly way, making it hard for them to grasp why it’s necessary to brand village life as “eco-friendly”. For GEN, this is one challenge of creating a global ecovillage movement that speaks to the needs and desires of diverse communities. Labonne believes the key is to decentralize efforts, with each community demonstrating what’s possible through their cultural and economic context. 

“In an ideal world, everyone would have an ecovillage in their backyard,” he said. “This would make people realize, the idea isn’t that radical.”

In early July, I traveled to the Plessis ecovillage during their sustainability week, the nature holiday that Loïc and Emmy attended years ago, to better understand the event that inspired them to change their lives. 

When I arrived on an early, summer morning, I found groups of people scattered across the grass, talking about everything from spirituality to sustainability. By the apiary, a dozen people were learning how to listen to nature. Next to the garden, children were making toys out of recycled materials. The event, which draws crowds from across France, was understated: there were no flashy signs, no caterers, no stringent rules to follow. At dawn, those who wanted to prayed and chanted. At dusk, people slept alongside each other on thin mattresses on the floor.

“The goal is not to be prescriptive or preachy,” said Labonne. “It’s about generating ideas and showing people what’s possible.”

Although the participants had different motivations for attending, the majority expressed a desire to reconnect: with nature and with a community.

“I’m here to get inspired,” said Severine Lefebvre, 46, a Parisian who wants to start her own ecovillage. “When I see places like this, I think, maybe there is hope.”

It’s been four years since the Leruste family attended this event and decided to change their lives dramatically, leaving behind everything to start anew. The journey has not been straightforward: both Emmy and Loïc say they now work more than they ever have, not only to earn an income but to help build their ecovillage.

“There is always something that needs to be done, always something new we don’t yet know how to do,” said Loïc, who is training to be a vegetable farmer. “There is inevitably a mental charge that comes with trying to reimagine how you want to live and build community.”

Yet despite the work, the couple says they feel less stressed than they did living in Tokyo. Although life there was easier, for years they struggled with feelings of restlessness and the guilt of living a life that failed to align with their values. 

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m exhausted at the end of every day,” Emmy said. “But I’m also energized by the feeling that I’m living out what I believe in.”

Halfway through our conversation, Emmy looked up and waved at a group of local women from nearby Pontgouin as they walked in equipped in hairnets and gloves: They had come to help the ecovillage make lunch for everyone. To her right, a few picnic benches over, her two daughters playing with a group of other kids, searching for bugs in the grass.

“Living sustainably and communally isn’t a radical idea,” Emmy said, pausing to survey the scene. “Just look around you.”

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That morning, over 53,000 gallons of bunker fuel spilled into San Francisco Bay. It spread quickly: northeast to Richmond, to the beaches of San Francisco, to the rugged coasts of the Marin Headlands and then out to the Pacific and up and down the coast. In an urban area known for its natural beauty, over 50 public beaches across multiple counties were soon closed. The oil killed thousands of shoreline birds, damaged fish populations and contaminated shellfish. It derailed local fisheries for years. 

In San Francisco, a woman named Lisa Gaultier had been preparing for a disaster like this. Lisa is the founder of a nonprofit called Matter of Trust that promotes sustainable living through recycling, reuse and the repurposing of surplus. Since the early 2000s, she had partnered with a retired hairdresser from Alabama named Phil McCrory who had invented an unusual technique for getting oil out of water using discarded hair. The hair technically adsorbs oil, attracting it to the surface like a magnet. (This is why our hair gets oily if we don’t wash it.) Matter of Trust began collecting discarded hair from salons and dog groomers and felting it by machine into large mats that were stored in a warehouse next to the nonprofit’s headquarters in San Francisco. After the spill, people spontaneously showed up at the beach wanting to help clean up, and Lisa was there with the hair mats.

Paul Stamets, a successful businessman, author and spokesman for the expanding world of do-it-yourself mycology, happened to be in town just a few days after the spill to headline the Green Festival, an expo for “sustainable and green living.” Stamets promoted relatively accessible techniques for cleaning up the environment using mushrooms — including oil spills. Lisa had heard about Stamets’s work and had already been in touch with him “about our hair project.” Lisa called him from the beach where, she recalled, “there were 80 surfers out there using our hair mats, trying to clean up the oil washing up onto the shore.” Stamets told her that if she could find a place to put the oily hair, he would donate $10,000 worth of mycelium.

As the days wore on, a range of government entities moved in, from the Coast Guard to the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to private companies contracted to clean up the spill, all vying for funds. Meanwhile, law enforcement and legal teams began their investigation into the spill’s causes. 

After a flurry of phone calls to city and state officials, Lisa got permission to put what she called a “mountain” of hair and oil next to a composting facility at Presidio Park. But then, the oil-soaked hair mats were impounded by authorities: The oil was evidence in a criminal investigation. (In the end, the shipping company paid $10 million in fines and restitution and the captain was sent to federal prison for 10 months.)

Undeterred, Lisa found a local freighter company that would give her some fresh bunker fuel, which a crew of volunteers mixed with used motor oil and then sopped up into new hair mats. Stamets trucked down the promised blocks of mycelium from Washington; several hundred more were donated by Far West Fungi, a local mushroom farm. About 30 volunteers layered it lasagna-style: straw (a common mushroom substrate), blocks of mycelium, hair mats soaked in oil. Photos of the stack show a mound about 30 feet by 12 feet. 

Some weeks later, mushrooms had sprouted from the top of the pile. A few news sites picked up the story. In one photograph, Lisa holds a clump of soil and straw, mushrooms popping out the side, over a caption that describes: “Mushrooms grown out of toxic oil, themselves now containing no toxins.” 

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what happened. As Ken Litchfield, a local cultivation teacher who helped organize the installation, explained, “The mushrooms were growing on the top where there’s enough oxygen, but underneath, nothing was growing except anaerobic bacteria.” Lisa told me that months later, when they returned, “literally the smell was so bad when we actually brought the stuff out, I almost vomited.” As for the fungi, it never touched the oil-soaked hair mats. 

About a year after the spill, Lisa found a UC Berkeley graduate student named Thomas Azwell who was looking for a project as part of his dissertation research. Azwell, now the director of the Disaster X-Lab at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, told me that, initially, he had been “worried we were going to create an even worse mess, and it’s going to turn into this kind of parachuting-cats-into-Borneo story, where it just gets worse and worse.” 

In short order, Thomas found an article that showed that fungi can’t degrade bunker fuel on their own; the molecules in the heavy fuel are too complex. He proposed something simpler: composting. Take the hair mat lasagna, blend in plant waste, aerate regularly. And it worked. The pile began to naturally decompose. After a few months, they brought in earthworms to finish the job. Lab tests showed that the most toxic chemicals had broken down. “It took 18 months and a lot of manual labor, and it was really a mess,” Lisa told me. But in the end, they had usable (“freeway grade”) compost. Matter of Trust even got a grant from Patagonia to sell the final product at Costco.

This adventure was one of the first large-scale, high-profile attempts at mycoremediation — a scientific method that enlists fungus to restore and clean the industrial waste of modern society. Mushrooms famously thrive on all that is dead, decaying and toxic. Myco-remediation evangelists believe they can tackle everything from chemical spills to household trash. 

But the Cosco Busan spill wasn’t exactly a success story. It was, at best, a “feasibility study,” as Lisa put it, or in Thomas’s words: a “poorly designed prototype.” The fungi alone did not biodegrade the bunker fuel, and on the whole, the process had been labor-intensive, bulky, messy, variable and slow. Moreover, it did not fit into existing bureaucratic and legal processes, and whatever money was earned back by selling the compost was not enough to provide a financial incentive. 

In short, mycoremediation was a hard sell in a system that values efficiency and standardization above all else. But the enthusiasm for the technique was undiminished. A movement was growing, one focused on that almost archetypal image of the mushroom fruiting from a clump of oil-soaked earth, transforming toxin into life.  

Although the idea of using fungi to break down pollutants has been around for some time, the popularization of mycoremediation as a grassroots, citizen-science initiative owes much to Stamets, arguably the founding figure of DIY mycology. Before the burst of mycophilic media in the last five years and going back some four decades, Stamets was the person who best conveyed the awe-inspiring potential of fungi. His books grounded the fungal enthusiasm of counterculture in actual scientific knowledge and skills — first with two canonical cultivation manuals, and then with “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.”

Equal parts scientific textbook, instructional manual and spiritual manifesto, “Mycelium Running” is focused on relatively low-tech, ecologically beneficial applications for fungi, interwoven with what can only be described as a mycological view of life and the universe. Stamets is gifted at waxing lyrical about mycelium, which he describes as “vast sentient cellular membranes” that we walk on in every “lawn, field or forest floor.” In the opening chapter, he posits that mycelium is “the living network that manifests the natural intelligence imagined by Gaia theorists.” (“Gaia’s internet,” he calls it.) Even the fabric of the universe looks like mycelium. He writes:

Stamets was and still is something of a circus barker for the fungal kingdom, standing outside the big top, inviting passersby to see the wonders within. The new Star Trek named a character after him — an “astromycologist” and expert in the fleet’s “spore drive propulsion system.” His writing and lectures (many of which are online) crystallized the mystical view of mycelium as conscious and beneficent and the idea of fungi as “allies,” all delivered with a beguiling mixture of scientific language and spiritual reverence.

“Mycelium Running,” published in 2005, inspired countless readers with its descriptions of how to use fungi for ecological restoration. In the years after the hair-mat experiment, groups of mushroom enthusiasts began forming to experiment with these methods. An American in Ecuador even founded a shoestring nonprofit, the Amazon MycoRenewal Project, to clean up oil spills left behind by Texaco there. 

In 2014, as a graduate student in anthropology, I joined one of these groups in the Bay Area — an informal organization that I’ll call the Fungal Alliance of the Bay (FAB), a pseudonym — as part of my fieldwork. Almost everyone in FAB had been inspired by Stamets and the promise of mycoremediation. As one FAB member told me, “Mycelium Running” “blew his mind,” especially “the remediative potentials.” Groups like FAB were keen to bring mycological know-how to the masses, for both personal and communal use. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and in the spirit of participant observation, I became one of them.

Over time, a cottage industry of classes on mycoremediation cropped up, taught by people like Tradd Cotter, the author of a book called “Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation,” and Peter McCoy, co-founder of a far-left collective called Radical Mycology, based in the Pacific Northwest, and author of his own book called “Radical Mycology.” The curriculum in these classes was as much about the philosophy and possibilities of DIY mycology as it was about technical instruction. This message of possibility, wonder and hope mixed with hard science felt like a distinct rhetorical form. I began to see these teachers as “myco-vangelists,” preaching the good word about mushrooms. They found sympathetic audiences in a national circuit of mycological festivals, a network of permaculture farms and centers and other like-minded hosts.

For many people in FAB and similar groups, learning how to cultivate mushrooms was just the first step toward learning how to “train” a specific fungus to consume toxins. FAB’s makeshift lab, at a local biohacker space, has been home to a few attempts to get Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), famously voracious, to eat motor oil. I remember one day finding petri dishes of agar half-soaked in motor oil on the shelves — an oil spill in miniature — with a small square of fungal tissue (a clump of the interior of a stem or cap) off to the side, beginning to put out its first tendrils. The lab even had a culture of Pestalotiopsis microspora, the fungus that can break down polyurethane; someone had gotten it in the mail after contributing to a Kickstarter campaign. 

Throughout my fieldwork, mycoremediation was a puzzle to me. In spite of all the books and classes and excitement, there were few cases in which it had been documented as a measurable, consistent and (most importantly) replicable process. And yet, it continued to be celebrated as a potentially game-changing “myco-technology.” Why wasn’t it being applied at all the polluted sites around us? 

In the “hands-on” workshops that I took in that time, the targets for remediation tended to be rather pedestrian, like the motor oil that drips off car engines in parking lots or the cigarette butts collected in an ashtray. These projects felt miniscule relative to the scale of toxic waste on our planet. This is not to say that such small-scale remediation projects were not worthwhile, or not meaningful, but they did not seem to match the enthusiasm that the method aroused in people. 

Nearly a decade later, the idea of mycoremediation has echoed far and wide. It is often mentioned in books and articles about fungi, usually in a catalog of potential applications. Less often mentioned are the difficulties and limitations that have also emerged alongside it. 

In fact, just a few months into my fieldwork, I found to my surprise that some FAB members quietly doubted the technique worked at all. Glen, a retired engineer, told me that he had suspected from the beginning that “using mushrooms for remediation was likely to be a flop.” He noted dryly that even Stamets was not working on mycoremediation and had quietly moved on to other projects. Andy, a widely respected taxonomist, told me that he “used to believe in it” until John, an old-timer in the local amateur mycology scene, told him (as he recounted in a stage whisper), “‘Don’t ever tell anyone this, but it’s a bunch of bullshit!’” 

When it comes to biochemistry, the rift between something that “works” and something that’s “a bunch of bullshit” is usually stark. If not self-evident, the difference between these two categories is usually discernable on some level of material, evidence-based reality. The thing was, mycoremediation did “work” in petri dishes and garden-sized projects; it was at large scales, like oil spills or superfund sites, where it seemed to falter or couldn’t get off the ground at all. 

Over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I spent hours peering into the sealed environment of petri dishes and mason jars while exclaiming in wonder at the snow-white threads of mycelium growing within. In its first stages, mycelium radiates outward like a slow-motion starburst, explosions of cellular growth. It has an ambiguous beauty, strikingly symmetrical, organic and otherworldly at the same time. Most enthralling was when the radial growth broke out and sprouted fleshy tendrils (primordia, otherwise known as baby mushrooms), a process called “pinning,” as they often look like tiny pins emerging from a two-dimensional surface — or, in the case of a species like Lion’s Mane, they curl in all directions like some kind of albino sea creature. 

Like all the FAB members, I too became weirdly attached to my jars, in which a fungal culture slowly colonized the substrate (usually a grain mixture), turning dense and white with mycelium. I once brought a “burrito” of corrugated cardboard inoculated with wild Oyster mushrooms that I’d harvested in the Oakland hills on a road trip with me, storing it in a plastic bin in the trunk of my car. I opened the lid to mist it with water twice a day and check its growth. I wanted to see if I could get it to fruit (produce mushrooms), but sadly, I composted it in Colorado.

FAB members and I would stand around each other’s makeshift labs, in kitchens and garages or in the converted utility closet at the local biohacker space, wondering over petri dishes and mason jars and plastic bags filled with myceliated substrate. My interviews with them (about their life stories and ideas about mushrooms, nature, science) were littered with exclamations of awe — many variations on “and then I was like, ‘whoa!!’” These jolts of wonder were embedded in a sustained enthusiasm for fungal lifeforms. The cognitive-affective pleasures of curiosity and fascination carried moral and aesthetic meanings too: Fungi epitomized interconnection, interspecies symbiosis, nonhuman intelligence and the cycles of decomposition and generation that characterize healthy ecosystems. They resonated as models of how to live sustainably on this planet. 

Much of their interest in applied mycology had to do with waste: making less of it and using fungi to break down what had already been produced, both toxic and benign. “Waste streams” was a key term in the vocabulary of DIY mycology. An ideal scenario was to use some kind of waste stream as substrate to grow mushrooms, thereby sending less trash to landfills.

Most of the DIY mycologists that I met during my fieldwork were committed to ecological lifestyles and social and economic justice. Fungi was at the intersection of their political, environmental and personal concerns: It could fortify soil and lower the use of pesticides, provide a model of connection for our increasingly fragmented and lonely society, heal psychological trauma and chronic illness, remediate the toxins of industrial society and much more. Their wonder and excitement were animated by anxieties, hopes and dreams about what was possible for human society as we moved away from fossil fuels, over-consumption and environmental pollution and toward sustainable lifestyles in balance with our surrounding ecosystems. 

Or at least, that was the vision.

Today, we can see clearly the destruction wrought by industrial modernity: the climate crisis, mass biodiversity and habitat loss, widespread pollution, economic disparities, political instability, ethno-nationalism. The whole system seems to be in crisis. The anthropologist Kim Fortun calls this stage of global capitalism, with its omnipresent disasters, “late industrialism.” 

Fortun notes that one of the defining characteristics of late industrialism is a focus on production, property and boundaries while ignoring the way manmade products “migrate and trespass” — into the air, water, soil and our bodies. The plastic bottle doesn’t remain a plastic bottle; the components of production don’t remain in the factories. Along with the products we produce — the measured, quantifiable, documented commodity — comes the remnants of everything used to create them. As the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman put it, two trucks leave the factory: One carries the products going to the marketplace, the other carries the trash going to landfill. But we only count the first truck, not the second — and certainly not the smokestack, the chemical flows. The result is a form of “slow violence” (as Rob Nixon describes it), where damage, like the gradual rise in rates of cancer, is not immediately obvious, making it much easier for the perpetrator to avoid accountability.

Something that has fulfilled its intended use and is discarded doesn’t vanish into thin air. It moves out of sight — to a landfill, a garbage patch in the ocean, perhaps burned. These afterlives, distributed across ecosystems and interrelated lifecycles (including our own), are seemingly impossible for the logic of industrial capitalism to grasp. 

Fungi — with their delicate, wisp-like threads of mycelium and their hobbit-home fruit bodies — offer another perspective. They embody an ecological paradigm of objects and phenomena in relationship with their surroundings, as part of feedback loops and lifecycles, in which diversity is critical to a system’s robustness. 

This embodiment is key to understanding the affective experiences of wonder and enthusiasm that fungi generate. The fungal form illustrates the interwovenness of ecosystems and the realization that nothing, nor any process, can be disconnected from and unaffected by the whole. Fungi materialize such complex systems. We see this most clearly in the conceptual and practical relationship between fungi and waste. They stand as a countermodel to the inability of our present system to make sense of (to digest, so to speak) the entirety of its products. 

It is precisely their proximity to death and decay that affords fungi their charismatic power today. Across cultures, they are often associated with otherworldly forces — gods, stars, witches, fairies, ghosts and other nonhuman spirits. In this association, mushrooms recall the philosophical concept of the pharmakon, something that is dangerous and powerful in its indeterminacy, its latent potential to be destructive or beneficial. 

Today, this ambiguous association is slanted toward hope. As McCoy writes in “Radical Mycology”: “From the mycelium we have come, to its web shall we return to be embraced, dissolved and recomposed.” Fungus’s vast, benevolent, delicate, living web mingles with death and decay and can both destroy and revitalize; in this sense, fungi seem to possess the ultimate transformative power. 

Fungi are inherently involved in what the scholar William Ian Miller called “life soup”: the unavoidably interrelated processes of decomposition and fertility, of death and life. In their phallic form, occasional sliminess and stinkiness (like the species that spread their spores by emitting an odor of carrion to attracts flies), and their sudden appearance and rapid decomposition, mushrooms often inhabit an uncanny valley between obscene, gross and alien, between the natural and the supernatural. As the crucial, mediating link between mortality and fecundity, fungi somehow embody and transcend both. 

It is this positionality that gives fungi their power, be it auspicious or nefarious. Oscar, one of my interlocutors from FAB, described them eloquently as “the pallbearers of nature”: They carry out the dead from the world of the living. They “deal with death,” as he put it, and with those aspects of modern life that are normally shunted aside, separated out, sent away.

In short, the aura of potential surrounding fungi, so closely intertwined with the capacity for transformation, is not solely about psilocybin or biomaterials or remediation. It is a reflection of fungi’s underlying power. Some can kill you in a few days, some can cause debilitating diseases (as Emily Monosson documents in her recent book “Blight”), and some can generate life-changing experiences of divinity.

Thus the power of fungi — to transform, destroy, deconstruct and resurrect — holds an almost sacred allure as industrial modernity falls apart at the seams and we are left to face its mess.

By the end of my fieldwork, mycoremediation’s original sheen of promise had worn off but a patina of wondrousness remained. The Amazon MycoRenewal Project had changed its name and shifted away from a focus on fungi to other means of ecological restoration; similarly, teachers on the DIY mycology circuit began to introduce mycoremediation with careful caveats before diving into its myriad possibilities. 

People were realizing that fungi require other organisms (bacteria, worms, plants) to be able to biodegrade toxins, and that this was done best by professional scientists who had the time, resources and knowledge to hypothesize, calibrate, test and measure. Even then, buy-in from authorities remained difficult — but not impossible. Environmental scientists, bioengineers and remediation specialists continue to experiment with fungi in their arsenal of bioremediative agents, while new start-ups continue to search for ways to make mycoremediation a viable business model. 

Similarly, DIY mycologists have over the years implemented a seemingly endless series of prototypes and simple installations to demonstrate that fungi can, in fact, consume toxins. Undeterred by the difficulties in scale, replication and economic feasibility, many still see the method as promising — a means, as Stamets put it, to use fungi to “offset the environmental damage inflicted by humans.” And their work, despite its limitations, captures the imagination much more than thermophilic composting or those meal worms that eat Styrofoam. 

In 2015, I took Tradd’s mycoremediation workshop at the Telluride Mushroom Festival. Under the placid gaze of three giant elks’ heads hanging on wood-paneled walls in a local lodge, Cotter helped me realize that part of the method’s appeal was its innate ecological drama — it enacts a wondrous, hopeful and empowering process. In these small, clearly delineated, closed environments — so unlike complex, large-scale, real-world scenarios — the petri dish, mason jar or barrel acted like a stage, making us an audience to amazing displays. 

Tradd spent much of the workshop explaining how you can train a fungus to eat chemicals that it would not usually consume, using elaborate metaphors (often involving pizza) and self-effacing jokes to explain what causes fungi to produce enzymes that can break down carbon-rich molecules. He included many photos of mushrooms growing out of odd substrates (like an old bowling ball) that he harvested and cultured for future use, as well as photos of his own in vitro lab experiments, in which he mixed fungal cultures with pesticides, motor oil or bacteria. He said:

He showed us a slide with a petri dish with a bacterial culture on one side and an Oyster mushroom culture on the other. “Three days later, you have all the bacteria fleeing the scene. You dropped the tiger in the room.” The tiger in this case: the hyphal threads of the Oyster mushroom mycelium radiating outward. In another slide, a puddle of the pesticide Atrazine sat on one side of the agar and on the other side, the fungus. A series of time-lapse photos showed the fungus growing until it stopped in front of the liquid like a line in the sand. 

“All right,” Tradd narrated, “it’s been eating pizza. Now comes the nasty stuff. It gets a whiff of it, it stops. That’s the moment where … it’s saying, ‘If I’m going to stay alive, I need to adapt.’” 

The fungus stayed that way for two days, Tradd said, so he gave up on it. “I said, enough is enough. It’s not going to eat it.” He had plans to try a new plate with less Atrazine to see if it was an issue of ratio. “I left the [old] plate in the incubator and just by chance I came back two days later. Bam.”

There were audible gasps in the lodge. The new photo showed the mycelium expanding into the tiny chemical spill and consuming it. “That gives me goosebumps,” said Tradd. “It just needed time to figure it out.” He had made an animated gif of the fungus devouring the Atrazine in the petri dish. We watched it a few times.

The animated gif was a nice touch, although by that point, I had seen some version of this story multiple times. Each time, it was awesome: It seemed momentous and promising. And each time, it was framed as a prototype, an illustration of a possibility, a suggestion for future experimentation. 

We seemed stuck in a state of latent potential. After Tradd’s workshop, I began to wonder if this seemingly secondary aspect of mycoremediation — how cool it was to look at, how entertaining it is to watch — was not secondary at all. Rather than a realistic method for widescale remediation, it was, in practice, a kind of theater. Not in any trivial sense, but quite the contrary — as a medium of mythic truth. 

Like those terrible spectacles of the ancient world that Tradd referenced, these “gladiator matches” were both entertainment and displays of power. They staged a hyperreal enactment of justice and fate, with an audience looking on through the translucent walls of a petri dish or mason jar, a kind of Persian miniature depicting the heroic ability of fungi to slay the monsters of our time.

It’s no wonder that so much of the art made with mushrooms explores this very capacity. “Fungal Futures,” a 2016 exhibit that was perhaps the first major event to showcase fungal art and design, featured many pieces that were grown on some kind of waste or that incorporated biodegradation into the art itself. Katharina Unger’s artwork “Fungi Mutarium,” a domed incubator with tiny pods made from agar that house fungal cultures, was described as “a prototype that grows edible fungal biomass” on plastic waste. And then there was Jae Rhim Lee’s “mushroom burial suit”: a full-body garment embroidered with undulating white lines resembling mycelium and inoculated with fungi bred to decompose corpses as well as the environmental pollutants that accrue in the human body itself. 

Amateurs and artists are not beholden to the norms of objectivity that characterize science as a social institution. Their awe-inspiring rhetoric and invocations of possibility are a different kind of performance, more akin to a preacher who inspires feelings of wonder, grace and fervor in their audience. As Stamets wrote in “Mycelium Running,” “We felt we had witnessed a mycomiracle: Life was flowering upon a dead, toxic landscape.” 

This “witnessing” is essential to understanding the appeal of mycoremediation. Mycovangelists stage what the philosopher of science Andrew Pickering called, in his book on cybernetics, “ontological theater”: using science and technology to showcase the possibility of another reality, another way of being. Prototypes, then, are not simply technical, but almost incantory in nature. Although mycoremediation may have failed to achieve large-scale applications, it still works as an inspiring display of the power of fungi — its capacity for transformation, its ability to turn death into life.

Only days before Tradd’s workshop, a tailings pond at a decommissioned gold mine just 10 miles from Telluride was accidentally unplugged (by EPA workers, ironically). Three million gallons of mine waste, mostly heavy metals, poured into Cement Creek and then the Animas River, turning the water an opaque yellow for days. Travis, a local DIY mycologist who co-taught the workshop with Tradd, was visibly depressed over the spill. He told me later that he knew the river well and often spent time there with his son. In truth, it was only a matter of time before the mine waste escaped its holding container, either through accident or neglect. This is simply a result of the way the system is designed. 

In most industries today, “remediation” usually means removing industrial waste to somewhere else, pushing it to the margins or dispersing it somehow into air or water — “out of sight and mind,” as Fortun puts it. Another approach is to simply abandon the waste where it is and move on — onto the next mine, the next factory, the next oil field — as was the case with Texaco in Ecuador. Often, the communities that end up dealing with the waste don’t have the political or economic power to fight the commercial interests behind these plans. They, too, are deemed “marginal,” negligible, a rounding error on the corporate budget. 

Fortun and other scholars observe that this form of displacement is not only endemic to our system, it is essential to its functioning — a feature, not a bug. The toxicity of industrial modernity cannot be denied, only ignored. “The strategy,” writes Fortun, “is one of disavowal.” 

“Disavowal” is a term that Fortun borrowed from Freudian psychoanalysis. For Freud, disavowal is the rejection of an aspect of reality whose acknowledgment would be too traumatic or emotionally difficult to face. The disavowed is not unknown nor actively discredited; rather, it is perceived but not acknowledged. It is a willed blindness, something placed outside the frame. In a state of disavowal, “things in reality connected are kept separate. Disavowal operates through disjunction, and refusal to connect.” It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of psychosis as defined by Freudian psychoanalysis. And disavowal, writes Fortun, “is a key corporate tactic of late industrialism.” 

Everyone who takes part in industrial modernity employs some degree of disavowal when it comes to waste. One might even say it is required to navigate our late industrial lives. If we spent every minute thinking about the environmental catastrophe of our society, it would be hard to function. But, of course, it is easier for some than others. The effects of waste and pollution might be everywhere now, but their effects are still unevenly distributed. 

Disavowal, though, is not only about waste. The disavowal of dark truths is arguably a theme of modernity itself. Modern practices around death are revealing in this regard: In many traditional societies, a corpse is kept in the family space until its burial; in most modern societies, the dead body is carted off immediately. Embalming is common to halt (and hide) the process of decay. It is precisely this approach that Lee’s mushroom burial suit is critiquing.

From a fungal vantage point, this system is indeed psychotic. Mycoremediation may not be the systemic intervention that was hoped for, but as an expression of one’s personal concern for our toxified landscape, it is far from insignificant. Rather, it is a tangible way for people without much institutional power to engage in the ongoing fight against environmental damage, to try to contain the disasters seeping around us. As a domestic intervention, mycoremediation is modest but culturally meaningful — a method of repair and reconnection. 

The power of fungi comes from the proximity they have with dark truths: the abject, the mess we need to face, mortality, vitality, kinship. In other contexts, this proximity elicits wariness, but in our current crisis, it holds the possibility of a healing power — a pharmacological power. Fungi can take on the mess and the junk, break it down and transform and incorporate it rather than ignore it. 

True, fungi need a host of other lifeforms to complete their task; they are not the only actors in this drama. But they are emblematic of the process. As one DIY mycologist put it succinctly: “There is no waste in nature, you know. Everything can be reused and everything can be seen as a potential source for someone else.” 

I thought about this often when I spent time with Oscar, a permaculture gardener, and Celeste, an arborist, who were regulars at FAB meetings and events. Their Oakland home was decorated with old posters from punk shows, stencil prints (one of an Amanita phalloides, a beautiful and lethal mushroom) and found art, a Ganoderma shelf mushroom nailed to the wall, a small jungle of plants. In a corner, a series of repurposed window screens hung vertically from the ceiling over a big circular floor fan—a homemade dehydrator. Every time I visited, it was full of mushrooms, plants and flowers: remnants of their wanderings.

One Sunday morning, I showed up to join them on a foray in the local hills. They were still puttering around, thinking about breakfast. Oscar hadn’t slept much — he told me he had been up late reading online mushroom forums. We went out into their backyard where he showed me a gigantic shaggy parasol he had spotted that morning, bigger than his head, its cap so heavy that the weight of it broke the stem. I took a picture of him: goofy face, hair askew, a tattered sweater, gold tooth glinting in the morning sunlight. 

Oscar and Celeste’s backyard was home to many mycological experiments. The shaggy parasol went into a cooler full of ice water, where Oscar broke it up and stirred it in, making an impromptu slurry to reinoculate the garden. A source of awe and delight just a second ago, the mushroom disappeared into a whirl of organic fragments. It was the lifecycle that mattered, not the fruit itself, and Oscar was on to the next thing. 

Among Oscar and Celeste’s projects was a “junk mail digester”: a plastic bin filled with Oyster mushroom spawn, into which they incorporated the constant stream of useless junk mail that arrived at the house — Safeway coupons, catalogs addressed to old roommates, glossy fliers for pizza delivery. Like everyone, they hated junk mail but never knew what to do with it. Before, it would just go in the recycling. Now it sprouted mushrooms.

The post Finding Hope In The Dark Power Of Fungus appeared first on NOEMA.

Descend further still — down, down, down, past luminous sea butterflies, fangtooth fish and species of nearly blind octopi — and soon enough you’ll hit the sea floor. If you’re lucky, you might touch down next to an ancient sea sponge. Researchers estimate that the oldest sponges have been alive for perhaps 10,000 years, predating the oldest human civilizations by around five millennia.  

But the inhabitants of some parts of the gloomy ocean deep face an existential threat. The seabed contains vast deposits of precious metals, an untapped resource that mining companies and others claim could turbocharge the renewable energy transition. In July, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) — the body tasked with governing seabed mining — met to hammer out extraction regulations. After three weeks of intense debate, the meeting concluded without a clear agreement. The future of the seabed is uncertain.

Clinging to rocks and other hard surfaces that jut out from the sea floor, a sponge — no matter how ancient — might not look like much of a reason to halt a hugely lucrative endeavor, especially one that might fuel the green transition to a more sustainable world above. But probe a little deeper and this strange animal invites us to think about how we might live in harmony with each other on our planet — and what is at stake if we do not.

An Underwater Rainforest And Its Mineral Wealth

What’s caught the eye of intrepid mining companies looking at the seafloor are billions of tons of polymetallic nodules. These lumpy, potato-sized nuggets are formed through complex and agonizingly slow biochemical processes — over a million years, they expand at a rate of just 1-3 millimeters — and are packed with nickel, cobalt, manganese and other rare metals. Since 2001, the International Seabed Authority has issued 31 permits to private companies and state-owned enterprises trying to explore the ocean floor with a view to eventually exploiting these reserves. 

As the world becomes increasingly reliant on battery technology to fuel the green transition, the race to the depths of the sea is heating up. In 2021, the tiny island nation of Nauru announced its intention to dig up nodules within a 1.7 million square mile region of the Pacific known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The country’s declaration triggered what’s known as the “two-year rule,” giving the ISA just 24 months to finalize an environmental rulebook for mining. 

The deadline was July 9 this year — but after weeks of heated negotiations, the ISA pushed it back to at least July 2025. The outcome disappointed companies eager to commence operations. But it wasn’t a straightforward victory for conservationists: Several countries called for a temporary pause on all deep-sea mining, but China blocked the debate from reaching the ISA floor. 

The debate has turned bitter. Both the conservationists and the mining advocates claim they are fighting to save the planet. Who should we believe?

Threats To The Ecosystem

The deep sea teems with life, up to 90% of which remains unnamed and undiscovered. Less than 0.01% of the deep-sea floor has been sampled and studied in detail. This pristine ecosystem may contain millions of species — a biodiversity comparable to that of tropical rainforests. Scientists discover new species almost every time they dive down there. 

The unusually stylistic flair of some researchers studying this realm — “bizarre,” “mysterious,” “spectacular” — is a testament to the utter strangeness of these sci-fi-esque creatures. Glass squid float elegantly, bioluminescent light organs disguising their silhouettes from would-be predators. The goblin shark, the last living member of a lineage stretching back 125 million years, sniffs out prey using a special organ on its long snout to detect the weak electrical fields produced by other animals. Barreleye fish gaze upward from eyes situated within translucent heads. Iron-armored snails cling onto searing hydrothermal vents, harvesting toxic chemicals that symbiotic microbes living on them break down for sustenance.

Our ancient sea sponge is somewhere down here, too, filtering 20,000 times its volume in water every single day.

An extraction operation could dredge up thousands of square miles of seabed. Violent strip mining would crush and tear out complex sea flora and choke filter feeders in vast plumes of sediment that stretch for hundreds of miles. Major sound pollution would also occur. Other methods of sea mining — like stripping away the mineral-rich outer layer of seamounts, many of which are underwater mountains formed by volcanic activity — would decimate millennia-old coral and sponges. 

Scientists also argue that mining could also disrupt the ocean’s role as a carbon sink. Since the onset of the industrial era, the oceans have absorbed about a quarter of all human-generated CO2 emissions. Deep-sea mining would loosen ocean-floor sediment, potentially reinjecting carbon stored there back into the ocean, potentially accelerating ocean acidification and global warming.  

Citing such threats, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining. So too has the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council — the continent’s top science panel — and various national governments from France to Fiji. In an open letter, more than 700 marine science and policy experts from over 44 countries have urged the ISA to temporarily ban the practice. “The sheer importance of the ocean to our planet and people, and the risk of large-scale and permanent loss of biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem functions, necessitates a pause of all efforts to begin mining of the deep sea,” the letter warned.

Green Transition Miracle?

Not everyone agrees. Advocates of deep-sea mining see it as the solution to the climate crisis, not the opposite. 

Electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels rely on vital metals like cobalt, manganese, nickel and copper. Transitioning the global economy to renewables is going to require a vast amount of these precious minerals.

In 2019, the anthropologist Jason Hickel estimated what it will take to decarbonize the global economy: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million metric tons of lead, 50 million metric tons of zinc, 162 million metric tons of aluminum and 4.8 billion metric tons of iron. In 2030, the global demand for lithium will likely surpass two million metric tons, doubling the demand forecast for 2025. A swelling fleet of electric cars will further exacerbate the metal deficit.

Plundering the ocean floor is the least harmful route to decarbonization, would-be deep-sea miners claim — including The Metals Company, Nauru’s proposed mining partner. The alternative is to ramp up production on land, polluting soil, devastating wildlife and contributing to human rights abuses. 

Underwater mining means “no disruption to Indigenous communities, no deforestation and no child labor during the mining phase,” The Metals Company’s website declares.

So is deep-sea mining the lesser evil? Surely the green transition is more important than some sea slug. Surely Indigenous communities should take priority over the deep, dark ocean where no human lives. Who would honestly argue that a goblin shark, ancient lineage or not, deserves more protection than a child toiling in a cobalt mine in Congo?

We have to mine, the miners say. Do you want to mine the ocean deep or mine on land? Hit a switch and prevent land degradation and ecosystem devastation. If a few ancient corals get crushed, so be it. 

The Circular Economy

The comparison between land and sea mining is something aspiring ocean mining companies lean heavily on. But “you cannot compare apples and oranges,” Duncan Currie, an environmental lawyer working with the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, told me. “We do not know the extent or nature of biodiversity loss in the deep sea, so cannot compare it.”  

Mining the deep sea also won’t necessarily lead to the closure of terrestrial mines, he said. “It is not logical to assume opening deep-sea mining in the ocean will lead to the closure of land-based mines. They would be in addition.”

There are other options, and there might also be new discoveries or advancements in materials and technologies that lessen the need for minerals. Promising battery alternatives like graphene aluminum-ion, iron-flow and solid-state technologies are being developed, as well as no-impact extraction directly from seawater. Indeed, many electric vehicle manufacturers like BMW, Volvo, Volkswagen and Renault, support the deep-sea mining moratorium.

These developments have their own problems — aluminum production, for example, can spew chemicals into groundwater — but the impacts are more quantifiable (and therefore manageable) than mining the deep. 

More crucially, we need to shift from a linear economy — in which single use is the norm — to a circular economy where recycling and re-use play a key role. The deep sea isn’t the only untapped reservoir of precious minerals. Much of the vast amount of e-waste consumers produce annually is available to be reclaimed. In a scenario developed by the International Energy Agency to achieve net zero emissions globally by 2050, demand for critical minerals will increase six-fold compared to today. But a 2022 report commissioned by the World Wildlife Foundation found that scaling up recycling can reduce cumulative demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, rare earth elements, platinum and copper by more than half.

“The path forward includes a mix of technological innovation and changes to our current patterns of consumption and waste,” then-WWF director general Marco Lambertini wrote in the report. He added: “With human ingenuity and an enlightened sense of self-preservation, this task is well within our collective capacity to achieve.”

In 2022, researchers estimated that 5.3 billion mobile phones were thrown away. Most no longer work, sometimes by design. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Indeed, regulatory solutions already exist. 

Earlier this year, the EU proposed “right to repair” legislation requiring manufacturers to make their products easier to fix. The Paris public prosecutor recently opened an investigation into Apple for preventing consumers from mending their phones with third-party components. And around the world, “repair cafes” and “libraries of things” are springing up to collectivize ownership and fight unnecessary waste. Mandating the provision of extended warranties requires companies to replace defective products, disincentivizing inbuilt flaws. In Sweden, for example, customers have the right to make a guarantee claim up to three years after the point of purchase.

Lessons From A Sea Sponge

In the deep-sea mining debate, the real question is not whether companies should plunder on land versus sea. The question is about how humans look at the natural world: as a naked resource, nothing more than an agglomeration of resources that exist to be ruthlessly exploited? As our home, a place we must protect at all costs or face the consequences? 

At the bottom of the ocean, faceless sea sponges are silently sucking up vast quantities of water. They provide vital services to ocean floor ecosystems, filtering water, recycling waste and producing valuable nutrients for other marine organisms. 

Some specimens are 20 times older than industrial capitalism. They have survived for so long by working with their environment, not against it.

The post Does The Ocean Floor Hold The Key To The Green Energy Transition? appeared first on NOEMA.

Her youngest son, Brian, 3, also had eczema as a baby and subsequently developed allergies to peanuts and barley, though Elizabeth fears there could be more. Her middle daughter, five-year-old Amelia, had a dairy allergy as an infant, but is now just lactose intolerant. She’s the easiest of the three, at least in terms of allergy.

By the time I hear her story, Elizabeth is already a veteran at dealing with her children’s irritated immune systems. She began a support group for parents of children with corn allergies and is heavily involved in trying to educate other parents about food allergies.

The parents share their theories about why their children have allergies. Her own is that Viola and Brian both went to the emergency room with high fevers as babies and were given precautionary antibiotics. She blames the antibiotics for altering her children’s gut microbiome and herself for agreeing to the treatment in the first place.

Part of Elizabeth’s rationale is that no one else in her family has allergies. In fact, it’s so rare that her parents initially didn’t believe the diagnoses. They argued that “back in their day,” everyone ate everything and was fine; food allergy was made-up nonsense. But when both Viola and Brian landed in the ER repeatedly for food-related anaphylaxis, her parents realized these allergies were indeed “real.”

Elizabeth’s family’s routines have been upended. “My life revolves around cooking for them,” she explains. “We don’t eat out. We don’t trust people preparing their food.” Instead, Elizabeth gets up daily at 6:30 a.m. to cook a breakfast that avoids allergens for all three kids. Then she cooks and packs their lunches, preparing everything from scratch because most packaged foods contain at least one ingredient that one of her children will react to.

On a recent vacation with four other families, Brian ended up in the ER with anaphylaxis due to cross-contamination. Elizabeth says she will never share a house again if she’s not the “cleaning boss,” which basically means being not only continuously vigilant about the foods prepared in the kitchen but also thoroughly cleaning and wiping down anything that an allergy-inducing food touches. It’s a labor of love and worry in equal measure.

Brian’s allergies are the most severe. Though only a toddler, he knows some foods are dangerous. “I’ll ask him, ‘Do you know why you can’t have that?’” Elizabeth said. “And he’ll say, ‘Yes, Brian allergic. Makes me owie. Mommy give me shot and we go to hospital.’ He remembers the EpiPen. He remembers it because those things hurt. It’s an inch and a half needle jabbed into you.”

Brian runs away whenever he sees Elizabeth pack an EpiPen, a potentially life-saving device for allergy sufferers, into one of their bags. She says it makes her feel like she’s the biggest monster in the world. Not only because of her son’s reaction, but also because she ultimately feels responsible for his allergy.

Although allergy researchers may disagree on definitions, symptoms and methodology, all agree on one thing: Allergies have grown worse over the last few decades, and the staggering numbers of allergy sufferers worldwide is likely to continue growing. An estimated 235 million people worldwide have asthma, and anywhere from 240 to 550 million people globally may suffer from food allergies. Drug allergy may affect up to 10% of the world’s population.

There’s a consensus, looking at the last century’s data, that U.S. hay fever rates increased in the mid-20th century. Data suggests that the incidence of asthma increased beginning in the 1960s, peaking sometime in the 1990s. Since then, asthma rates have remained fairly constant. Respiratory allergic diseases and atopic sensitization (or skin allergy) have likely increased over the last few decades. But the most dramatic and visible increase has been the rise in global incidence rates for food allergies, which began in earnest in the 1990s and has grown steadily ever since.

There are, unsurprisingly, multiple theories about the cause. The hygiene hypothesis is one front-runner, positing that people who are “too clean” develop allergies. Many others think it’s our diet, that changes in the way we grow and prepare food have altered our gut microbiome, fueling allergies. Still others argue that manmade chemicals and plastics we encounter daily are making our immune systems more irritable.

What everyone agrees on is that the environment’s influence on our genes, or epigenetics, has played a large role in the rise of allergies, as does the makeup of our nose, gut and skin microbiomes. In the end, it appears, we are at least partially doing this to ourselves. Modern living is likely at the root of the recent rise in allergies.

Our Changing Microbiomes

If you want to better understand how our modern lifestyles might be behind some of our biggest problems with allergy, you will end up talking to a diminutive, deeply intelligent, empathetic woman named Cathryn Nagler, who is one of the best immunologists in the world. Her decades of research primarily focuses on the role our gut microbiome plays in the development of children’s food allergy. She remembers when food allergy rates first began climbing in the late 1980s.

“I saw it myself,” Nagler said, loading graphs onto her computer in her University of Chicago office on a sunny spring afternoon. “I have kids that are 23 and 27, so I followed this in real-time because cupcakes were excluded from the classrooms as my kids went through school. Right around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when food allergy rates were starting to increase, the American Academy of Pediatrics said to withhold peanuts and allergenic foods from pregnant mothers, from nursing mothers and from children with risk of allergy until they’re four years old. That was exactly the wrong advice, and that fueled the fire and caused even more increase. Now all of the push is for early introduction.”

Nagler is referencing the now-famous Learning Early about Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study, conducted by researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States, led by Dr. Gideon Lack at King’s College in London and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015. The study found that decades of erroneous advice to parents to avoid giving children younger than three years old anything containing peanuts had likely led to a massive increase in the incidence and severity of peanut allergy.

Infants enrolled in the study (four to 11 months old) were randomly assigned to two groups: parents in one group would continue to avoid peanuts; parents in the other would introduce peanuts to their children right away. Infants in both groups were given skin-prick tests for peanut sensitivities. Among those who tested negative, the prevalence of peanut allergy at 60 months of age was 13.7% in the peanut avoidance group and merely 1.9% in the peanut consumption group. Among those who had tested positive for sensitivity to peanuts, the prevalence of peanut allergy was 35.3% in the avoidance group and 10.6% in the consumption group.

A recent study in Melbourne, Australia, found that changes to dietary advice on peanuts in 2016, following the success of the initial LEAP study, had led to a 16% decrease in peanut allergy among infants. It’s perfectly clear that introducing peanuts to infants has a protective effect.

Nagler understands why parents might be hesitant, however, to introduce allergens into the diet early. After all, why would anyone trust the same people who gave them incorrect advice just a few years prior? Plus, she doesn’t think there’s definitive evidence that early introduction is good.

“You can be sensitized even before the first introduction of solid food,” Nagler explains. “Kids get allergic responses within the first month of life. That means they could have been sensitized by breast milk or by the skin. If you give early introduction to a kid like that, that kid is going to have an allergic response. So early introduction is risky, but now we know withholding is not good either.”

So how does the body learn to tolerate some foods and begin to react negatively to others? Nagler is convinced that food allergy as a phenomenon is part of a generational change.

“People will tell you that there is no history in their family of this,” she explains. “From parents with no family history of allergy to kids that have life-threatening responses to a crumb. You can be allergic to any food. Your allergy can develop at any point in your life. It used to appear between the ages of two and five. Now we’re getting a lot more adult-onset food allergy. It used to be that milk, eggs, wheat allergy were outgrown. Now they’re lasting into adulthood.”

In other words, food allergies signal a larger problem.

Nagler stops on a slide showing what is likely contributing to our immune system’s malaise: diet, C-sections, changes in food production, breastfeeding.

“The idea is that modern industrialized lifestyle factors have triggered shifts in the commensal bacteria,” Nagler says, referencing the so-called friendly bacteria that exist within and alongside us. “Inflammatory bowel disease, allergies, obesity, autism — all non-communicable chronic diseases. They’ve all been linked to the microbiome.”

And there it is: Nagler’s answer to the all-important question of why allergies are rising. Changes to the makeup of our gut microbiome — or all the bacteria, fungi and viruses that help process our food into useable fuel for our cells — are driving immune function changes.

Recent studies have highlighted the connection between our diet, use of antibiotics and our gut bacteria in the development of allergies. A 2019 study led by Nagler showed that the gut of healthy infants harbored a specific class of allergy-protective bacteria not found in infants with cow’s milk allergy. This was followed by a study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that found that five or six specific strains of gut bacteria in infants seem to be protective of developing food allergies. A lead researcher on that study, Dr. Lynn Bry, surmised that our lifestyles are, for better or for worse, capable of “resetting the immune system.”

Another study found that higher levels of cheese in our diet may accidentally worsen allergy symptoms because bacteria in some cheeses produce histamine — the naturally-occurring compound that helps trigger an effective immune response. University of California, San Francisco researchers led a study that discovered a link between three species of gut bacteria and the production of a fatty molecule called 12,13-diHOME. That molecule lowers the number of T-reg cells in our gut, cells crucial for keeping inflammation at bay. The researchers found that babies with higher levels of these three bacteria had an elevated risk for developing allergy and asthma.

Ultimately, most of us living in the 21st century have changed our microbiome makeup. Our diets are the real culprit, according to Nagler. When we go from eating foods with lots of fiber to highly processed foods loaded with sugar and fat, we end up starving beneficial bacteria in our gut.

“We’ve co-evolved with our microbes,” Nagler says. But “they can’t live without their food.”

There’s also the use of antibiotics that kill off not only the bacteria that cause strep throat and sinus infections, but our gut bacteria. And we eat meat from animals that have been given low-dose antibiotics to make them fat. We’re experimenting on ourselves and our microbiomes, Nagler says, to deleterious effect.

Nagler has developed the “barrier regulation” hypothesis, which theorizes that our gut and skin microbiomes regulate what is and isn’t allowed into the body. Commensal bacteria on the skin and in the gut are integral to maintaining barrier function. Nagler explains that a single layer of epithelial cells is all that stands between us and our environment, making sure that what enters our bodies is either inhaled or ingested.

Indeed, in 2018 researchers discovered a link between a gene coding for an antiviral protein in the gut, changes in the gut microbiota, and greater intestinal permeability and severe allergic skin reactions in mice. Gut microbiomes are an intricately balanced mix of different species of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Mice lacking the gene for the antiviral protein had a changed microbiome — or the amounts and types of different bacteria and viruses.

This suggests that our immune systems have developed ways of coping with microbes in our gut and maintaining balance. When the composition of the microbiota changes, the immune components’ responses shift, making us more miserable in the process. This is evidence of how our genes and the environment (changes to the gut microbiota) interact to produce allergy; it also proves Nagler’s larger point that altered gut microbiota can have a direct effect on allergy.

Avery August, an immunologist at Cornell University, describes human immune cells as curators of the human body — constantly sensing everything we encounter and making millions of micro-decisions about what should become a part of the human body or coexist with us and what should not.

The barrier regulation theory dovetails nicely with the conception of our entire immune system — microbiome included — as curators of what can and cannot be part of us. Without the regulation that those barrier cells provide, entire proteins can pass through our skin or gut into the bloodstream, where they encounter our immune cells.

The allergic person’s immune system is wholly functional; it is doing what it was meant to do. For Nagler, the problem is that it’s performing a job different from the one it was initially trained to do. From this perspective, allergic disease is a barrier problem, not necessarily an immune system problem.

All creatures, even invertebrates, have an associated microbiota, Nagler explains, which performs vital physiological functions. Without microbiota, there would be no life at all. The human gut encounters antigens from a hundred trillion — or 100,000,000,000,000 — commensal microbes and more than 30 kilograms — or 66 pounds — of food proteins per year. Cells making up the gut barrier must discern between what is harmful — pathogens like harmful outside bacteria or viruses — and what are harmless antigens.

To Nagler, Elizabeth’s theory blaming antibiotics for her children’s food allergies isn’t so far-fetched. Changes in the gut microbiome in infants and children can lead to a greater risk of developing allergic responses as children age. And our children’s earliest environments are likely the most crucial.

The microbiome has been shown to be incredibly stable by age three. Alterations before this age seem to be critical to whether allergies ultimately develop. A study led by France’s Pasteur Institute found evidence in mouse models for the role of gut microbiota in the development of a healthy immune system in as young as three to six months of age, around when most human babies are first introduced to solid foods.

Bacteria in the gut increased 10- to 100-fold after solid foods were introduced. This stage of rapid microbiome growth and development, called “pathogenic imprinting,” seems to determine one’s susceptibility to inflammatory disorders like allergy and autoimmune disorders in adulthood. Antibiotics could theoretically disrupt this developmental stage, producing a greater risk of allergic diseases.

So far, scientific evidence appears to back this up. Research by Rutgers University and the Mayo Clinic found that children under age two who are given antibiotics are at greater risk for asthma, respiratory allergies, eczema, celiac disease, obesity and ADHD. The study looked at 14,572 children born in Olmsted County, Minnesota, between 2003 and 2011. If antibiotics were given in their first six months, the risk increased dramatically. 

Researchers found that 70% of the children in the study had been prescribed at least one antibiotic in the first 48 months of their lives (typically for respiratory or ear infections). Another study found that antibiotics can allow for the growth of non-pathogenic fungus in the human gut, which may make respiratory allergies more severe. Finally, related studies of Finnish and New York babies found that C-sections and antibiotics correlated with altered gut microbiomes and a greater risk of allergies in childhood.

These findings don’t surprise Nagler. Vaginal births give infants what are known as “founder bacteria,” she tells me. As the baby moves through the vaginal canal, it is exposed to its mother’s friendly bacteria. Breastfeeding introduces more helpful bacteria into the infant’s gut.

“If you skip over both of those processes, which many people have done, you’ve disordered the microbiome,” Nagler explains. “The first 100 -1,000 days of life are absolutely critical for the development of the immune system.”

Research has shown that babies born by C-section not only haven’t been exposed to the correct, harmless vaginal founder bacteria, but they have also been exposed to potentially harmful hospital bacteria. One recent review found that lactobacillus containing probiotics — the same bacilli found in breast milk — lowered SCORAD (Scoring Atopic Dermatitis) scores for children under age three who had moderate to severe atopic dermatitis, or more severe eczema.

Breastfeeding for the first three months of life has also been linked with a lower risk of respiratory allergies and asthma. In a study of 1,177 mother/child pairs, breastfed babies had a 23% lower relative risk of allergies by age six and a 34% lower relative risk of asthma if there was no family history of asthma.

But for children whose mothers supplemented breast milk with formula, the protective effect seemed to have mostly disappeared. (Important aside: If you’re a mother and you’re panicking a bit right now, please don’t. There are many valid reasons to have C-sections and to choose formula over breastmilk. A lot of this is complicated and there’s a lot that we still don’t know about these interactions.)

Nagler reminds me that the cattle industry has been giving cows low doses of antibiotics for years to make them fatter and more commercially viable. We also eat highly processed food that’s low in fiber, with added sugars and fats. That means that the food we’re introducing into our guts is different from what our ancestors ate for millennia. That, of course, affects the types of bacteria that can flourish inside us.

Even simply changing bedsheets can change our microbiomes. Researchers in Denmark and the U.K. looked at samples from 577 six-month-old infants’ beds and compared them to respiratory samples taken from 542 of those infants at age three months old). Researchers found 930 different types of bacteria and 103 genera of fungi.

A correlation was found between bacteria in bed dust and those found in the associated children; while the two populations of bacteria were not exactly synonymous, they did seem to directly affect each other. An increase or decrease in respiratory bacteria mirrored an increase or decrease in the bacteria in the infants’ beds. The research suggests that less frequent changing of bed linens may benefit the health of all our nasal and airway microbiomes.

Many of the researchers I spoke to longed to return to a simple, less technologically driven way of life mostly centered on the foods we consume and how we produce them. One top allergist dreamt of performing the ultimate control study to prove that our modern lifestyle and habits negatively affect our immune systems.

“Imagine,” he said, “if we could get a group of people to revert back to a much older way of life. Eat foods grown without pesticides. Eat whole foods and a wide variety. Don’t use dishwashers or detergents. Do you know what would happen? No more allergies. I just wish I could prove it.”

The Canaries In Our Coal Mines

The most compelling evidence that our 21st-century lifestyles and manmade environmental changes have spurred our allergies is this: Our companion species of thousands of years — dogs, cats, birds and horses — all get allergies regularly. Other species — those that do not live in our homes or alongside us — do not.

Our pets’ symptoms are very similar to ours: sneezing, snoring, asthma, vomiting and over-grooming in cats; skin eruptions, persistent scratching and grooming in dogs; coughing and wheezing in horses. And they likely have allergies for the same reasons we do. After all, their immune systems are exposed to the same panoply of natural and chemical substances. The top allergen in dogs? Dust mites. The top allergen in horses? Their human-packaged feed. Cats are often allergic to grass, trees, and weed pollen. Cats and dogs can also be allergic to human dander, since we shed skin, too. Sound familiar?

Many owners spend lots of time and money trying to eradicate allergy symptoms in their pets. The most common methods are the same as for humans: pets either take antihistamines and steroids or undergo immunotherapy shots. The problem is that we don’t know just how big the problem is because we don’t have good data on pet allergies or their incidence. We don’t know if rates are increasing, or if vets and pet owners are just getting better at recognizing the signs.

To better understand how and why allergies affect our pets, I traveled to Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine to speak with Elia Tait Wojno, who started her career doing work on parasitic worms and immune responses.

She explains that the immune response to parasitic worms is like the immune response during allergic responses in both humans and in dogs. (Of course, in the case of worms, those responses are protective and, in the case of allergies, the responses are the ones causing the miserable symptoms.) By studying the immune response to helminths (a type of parasitic worm) in dogs, we can learn a lot about the basic immune functions involved in allergy.

Working with dogs allows us to observe how allergies function in something other than mouse models. For decades, mice have been the dominant research organism in the field of immunology. But mice aren’t humans, and mouse models aren’t always the best predictors of what will happen in a human body. That is why there’s growing interest among allergy researchers to move beyond mouse models. Since some larger animals have natural allergic diseases, like cats and dogs, they might be good models for learning about basic immunology across species as well as doing drug testing for allergic conditions.

Unlike mice, which are confined to the lab, usually inbred and live in very controlled environments, the dogs that Tait Wojno works with are born the old-fashioned way. She works with breeders to enroll dogs into her studies and the dogs are treated like pets because they are. These aren’t lab animals; they live at home with their owners. This is an important detail, since that allows researchers to ponder which components of our shared, lived environments, habits and medical practices might be affecting our companion species as well as us.

Allergies in our pets offer potential clues to solving the mystery of allergies. If we can understand early immune response in animals, then we might be able to better understand it in humans. And that’s one of the things we really don’t understand in any mammals — the immune system’s initial reaction to something it encounters and the subsequent set of events that follow. Ultimately, my visit to Cornell convinced me of one thing: Our pets are the literal canaries in our figurative allergy coal mines. The fact that our intimate companions have allergies is a sign that something humans are doing is irritating the immune systems of us all.

The Dirt On Cleanliness

You’re likely already familiar with the most espoused theory of allergy causation, the idea that being “too clean,” or overly hygienic, is not good for childhood development of a properly functioning immune system. Maybe you’ve heard that it’s good to let children play in the dirt, get a little messy and slobber on each other. So goes the basic idea behind the hygiene hypothesis, first posited to try to explain the explosion of asthma, eczema and food allergies in the last half of the 20th century.

In 1989, epidemiologist David Strachan published a short article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), entitled “Hay fever, hygiene, and household size.” Using data from a national sample of over 17,000 British children born during the same week in March 1958, he looked at three things: How many of the study participants self-reported symptoms of hay fever at age 23; How many of their parents had reported hay fever in them at age 11; and when participants were seven, whether the parents remembered if their child had eczema in their first year of life.

Strachan found that younger siblings seemed most protected from developing hay fever or eczema, despite differences in socioeconomic class. Strachan posited that the lowered allergy rates might be explained, “if allergic diseases were prevented by infection in early childhood, transmitted by unhygienic contact with older siblings, or acquired prenatally from a mother infected by contact with her older children.”

Smaller family sizes, improvements in housing, and higher cleanliness standards might have combined to reduce the opportunity for children’s exposure to a wide variety of microbes. In other words, Strachan’s findings suggested that mild childhood infections might be beneficial to a developing immune system.

At first this idea was rejected. Many immunologists still believed that bad infections could trigger allergy, especially asthma. But Strachan’s ideas were eventually adopted and popularized after researchers discovered that IgE-mediated (or antibody-driven allergic) immune responses were driving many allergic conditions. It seemed plausible that a lack of early exposure to certain germs was the underlying problem, leaving the immune system “untrained” and hyper-responsive in later life.

Early work on the microbiome and friendly commensal bacteria, Nagler co-wrote in a 2019 review, “led to a reformulation of the hygiene hypothesis as the ‘old friends’ or the ‘biodiversity’ hypotheses of allergy, which proposed that changes in the environment, diet and lifestyle associated with Westernized, industrialized countries have altered the diversity of the gut and skin microbiomes.”⁸

The “old friends” hypothesis posits that humans are more at risk of chronic inflammatory diseases, like allergies or autoimmune disorders, because we no longer regularly encounter some of the microorganisms that we evolved alongside for millennia. These “old friends,” the theory goes, helped regulate our immune function. Their risk to human health was minimal, and a healthy immune system could easily keep them in check. This trained the developing human immune system, making it more robust and adaptive to its normal environment.

In the absence of these old friends, our immune system lacks the early training it needs to better self-regulate and overreacts to otherwise harmless stimuli, like pollen or dust mites.

Nagler explained to me how the hygiene hypothesis and the idea of microbes as old friends combine to produce an almost idyllic conception of farm life and the “farmhouse effect.” Farmhouses, with their tilled soil, muddy barns and stables, and fertile fields, come with a lot of bacteria, viruses and parasites.

But if you alter the environment, you alter the microbiota. If you have better sanitation, move away from farms and have fewer children, then you cut off your supply of a richly diverse microbiota. You become, in essence, less intimate with microbes in your day-to-day life. And intimacy with friendly germs, especially in the first few years of life, does seem to be protective of a wide variety of immune disorders — but not all of them.

Recent studies have suggested that there is a measurable “farmhouse effect,” but researchers are uncertain about which exposures are protective and what mechanisms they might be triggering to produce that protective effect. What seems certain is that exposure to livestock from early childhood dramatically lowers the risk of developing allergic conditions later in life.

In particular, exposure to stable dust seems to prevent most allergic responses. Something in “farm dust” is effective — bacteria, viruses, fungi or even more allergens themselves — but it’s not entirely clear which components of the dust are protective, and which aren’t. Another study of rural areas in Austria, Germany and Switzerland showed that a farming environment was more protective against hay fever, atopic sensitization and asthma.

If infants spent a lot of time in stables and drank cow’s milk in the first year of their lives, then their rates of allergic diseases dramatically lowered even if their IgE results showed sensitization. In other words, they might have an underlying sensitivity to some allergens, but that sensitivity did not become full-blown allergic responses.

In a different study that looked at the immune function of lab-raised mice versus those in a farm’s barn, the “farmhouse effect” was strongly supported. The results of studies in mice are, in fact, one of the key supports for this theory. August explained to me that pathogen-free mice bred for laboratory studies have dramatically different immune systems compared to their “unclean” peers; the lab mice have immune systems that resemble a human newborn’s immune system. When you place those “clean” mice in a “dirty” environment — like the mice study did to simulate farm life — their immune systems change to look more like that of an adult human.

This tracks with research in humans that suggests that germ-ridden environments can also protect against allergies. Children and adults who live with dogs have lower rates of asthma and obesity, in part due to more indirect exposure to bacteria that dogs carry and track into the home. A 2017 NIH-sponsored study showed that exposing children in the first three years of life to high indoor levels of pet and pest allergens, like cockroach, mouse and cat allergens, lowers their risk of developing asthma by age seven. But whether exposure is protective, depends on the bacteria.

Enter the fascinating case of Helicobacter pylori, or H. pylori, a common gut microbe that’s the culprit behind gastrointestinal ulcers, chronic gastritis and even some forms of cancer.

Although scientists discovered the species H. pylori in 1982, there is speculation that our colonization by the bacteria took place circa 60,000 years ago and that it depended on repeated contact in small, close-knit groups, i.e. the way humans typically lived until fairly recently. There are many different strains of H. pylori, and their prevalence in humans was estimated to hover around 80% until after World War II, when the introduction of antibiotics like penicillin to treat common infections led H. pylori to begin to disappear from the human gut. Today, it is estimated that around 50% of humans are infected with H. pylori, with rates hovering as high as 88% in one African nation and as low as 19% in a European one.

This is in line with the hygiene hypothesis, since transmission of microbes is far easier in large, crowded households with many siblings. H. pylori is usually acquired in early childhood, after the first year, and is transmitted via the ingestion of feces, saliva or vomit (and if you just physically recoiled, I apologize). In the absence of antibiotics, H. pylori, once acquired, can persist in the gut for decades, often for the entire life of its human host. Most people living with H. pylori have no symptoms or ill effects.

The stomachs of people with and without H. pylori are immunologically different and there is speculation that people with H. pylori have a larger gut population of regulatory T cells (Tregs). That’s important because Tregs are crucial for tamping down inflammatory immune responses. Although infection with H. pylori is associated with having more immune cells in the gut, some researchers have proposed that it may be a normal, rather than a pathological, response to the bacteria.

In other words, H. pylori may be beneficial in some situations. In fact, people who lack the bacteria are much more likely to suffer from gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), or acid reflux, and there is evidence that H. pylori plays a protective role against childhood-onset asthma.

All this gives credence to the basic premise of the hygiene hypothesis: We need regular exposure to friendly bacteria to train our immune systems. But also, simply living with more diverse microbial populations likely does not automatically produce improved immune system functionality. Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, director of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, believes the hygiene hypothesis cannot possibly explain the rise of allergies, at least not by itself. His argument relies upon our more recent history of “cleanliness.”

Throughout the 20th century, hygiene standards were adopted more widely. Improved sewage systems and potable drinking water meant human exposure to microbes through ingestion was far less frequent. Regular infection by helminths, or intestinal parasites, had decreased due to food and water quality controls and the increased use of shoes.

During this time people moved from rural farms into urban centers, so the general population also saw lower exposure levels to farm animals and decreased diversity of the bacterial populations they encountered. Family size also decreased, perhaps exposing children to fewer germs. Platts-Mills notes, however, that all these changes were completed by the 1920s, which leaves the dramatic rise of asthma and allergic rhinitis, from the 1940s into the 1950s, unexplained.

Platts-Mills argues that the best explanation for the rise of hay fever and asthma is more likely “an increase in sensitization to indoor allergens and the loss of a lung-specific protective effect of regular deep inspiration.” In other words, outdoor play and recreation were likely more protective against allergies than spending hours playing Minecraft or Fortnite.

If the hygiene hypothesis or farmhouse effect were correct, one would also expect to see a marked decrease in allergy rates in rural, farming communities. Yet Dr. Jill Poole, the University of Nebraska Medical Center division chief of allergy and immunology, found that around 30% of Midwestern farmers suffer from allergic disease directly linked to their agricultural lifestyle. Dust from grain elevators and animal barns, pesticide exposures and grain rot from flooding causes so-called Farmer’s Lung. So while some farm exposures seem beneficial, others are clearly not.

And if family size, rural life and socioeconomic status are linked in the original hypothesis theory, then one might expect that countries with larger family size, more rural populations and lower socioeconomic status would have fewer allergic diseases. Yet their allergies are also steadily increasing.

A 2019 study found that half of Ugandans living in the capital of Kampala have some form of allergy. It found that allergies are on the rise in rural areas, although more urban dwellers have access to hospitals where they can report symptoms of asthma, nasal congestion or skin rash. Many Ugandans self-treat with over-the-counter antihistamines, steroids, and antibiotics. Dr. Bruce Kirenga, a Ugandan allergy expert, said he thinks environmental pressures like air pollution are to blame.

These findings suggest that the farmhouse effect or hygiene hypothesis might not be the smoking gun we’re searching for. The theory makes intuitive sense, but we don’t have enough scientific evidence to definitively say that rural life, with its “dirty” or microbially rich environments, can fully protect us from allergic disease.

And yet, the basic idea that something about our interactions with the microbial world around us has shifted because of our lifestyles and daily habits is compelling. The hygiene hypothesis, then, is likely partially correct. There is growing evidence that some of our habits (particularly in relation to our diets and food production) might be behind the recent rise of allergies — especially food allergy.

Barrier Warfare

In a 1950s pamphlet on allergy, Dr. Samuel Feinberg, a leading allergist and the first president of the now-named American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, wrote: “Man’s progress creates problems.” Feinberg pointed the finger at human ingenuity as a significant cause of the developed world’s increasing allergies. All our tinctures and dyes, our synthetic fabrics and new plastics, our lotions and eyeliner and lipsticks and shampoos were beginning to wreak havoc on our immune systems.

Dr. Donald Leung, an immunologist who is head of allergy and immunology at Denver’s National Jewish Health is also one of the world’s leading researchers on atopic dermatitis. Leung told me that we overuse soap, detergents and products containing alcohol.

We routinely use harsh antimicrobial products to clean our hands and homes, instead of soap and water; a fact exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. All of this can negatively affect our skin barrier, making it more likely we’ll develop an allergic condition.

Furthermore, exposure to food proteins through a weakened skin barrier along with early ingestion of higher doses of food proteins can lead to full-blown food allergy. In layman’s terms, that means if you make a peanut butter sandwich and don’t wash your hands and then you pick up your baby, you may be depositing trace amounts of peanut protein onto their skin. If their skin is “leaky,” or more permeable than normal skin due to a possible genetic mutation or a disruption (or irritation) of the skin’s normal microbiome, then that protein could seep into the baby’s skin and when the baby eats peanuts, it can trigger a peanut allergy.

“All the things we’re putting on our skin, or the things we’re putting on our babies’ butts, are probably not good for our barriers,” Robert Schleimer, former chief of allergy and immunology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told me.

Schleimer said his first job in the 1960s was collecting used cotton diapers for the Tidee Didee Diaper Service for $1.70 an hour. He would bring them back to the laundry facility to be cleaned and repackaged for delivery. As he reflected on the barrier hypothesis, he noted that cotton is a natural fabric. Now we use plastic diapers with antimicrobial properties and apply creams to babies’ skin to prevent rashes from those materials. And that’s just one of the changes that might be exposing our children to more irritants.

“You have these very tough detergents made of rough chemicals that break things down,” said Dr. Kari Nadeau, director of Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research. “And initially that was seen as positive. Then they started to see that, wait a minute, all these people working in the plants that are making those detergents have breathing issues.”

In our discussion, Nadeau is adamant about the downsides of modern living, especially when it comes to daily chemical exposure. She points to the recent rise in severe eczema. In the 1940s and 1950s, the image of a “squeaky clean” home was heavily promoted by the same companies making these new detergents (like Dow Chemicals).

“It turns out that the way my grandmother lived on the farm was probably the right way to do things: not using a lot of detergents, not bathing every day, making sure you were exposed to a little bit of dirt, being exposed to the outdoors,” Nadeau said.

In one recent study, Canadian university researchers found that infants less than four months old living in a home where household cleaning products were used more frequently were more likely to develop wheezing and asthma by age three. Researchers noted that most of the infants spent between 80-90% of their time indoors — heavily increasing their exposure to these products.

Study co-author Dr. Anne Ellis noted that children take more frequent breaths than adults and, unlike adults, breathe mostly through their mouths — bypassing the nose’s natural filtration system and allowing anything in the air to more easily penetrate the lungs. The researchers hypothesized that fumes from cleaning products inflamed their respiratory tracts, activating the babies’ innate immune systems. The frequent use of household products such as air fresheners, deodorizers, antimicrobial hand sanitizers, oven cleaners and dusting sprays seemed particularly harmful.

Exposure to problematic chemicals in gestation can be equally harmful to developing immune systems. One study found that higher concentrations of plasticizers, or solvents used to make materials more flexible, equated to a greater risk of developing allergies. Researchers measured levels of Benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), a common plasticizer used to make Polyvinyl chloride (PVC or vinyl), in the urine of pregnant women and new mothers. They found that exposure to these phthalates during pregnancy and breastfeeding caused epigenetic changes to specific repressors for Th2 immune cells responsible for generating inflammation.

Our Dark Sedentary Lives

Changes to our work and leisure habits may also be contributing to the rise in allergies. We live much of our lives in the shade, Dr. Pamela Guerrerio at the NIH told me. The lack of the sun’s UVB rays on our skin, means our cells produce less vitamin D. It’s unclear how protective vitamin D is against allergies, but the ongoing debate over the evidence shows how little we know about the ill effects of our move indoors.

Dr. Scott Sicherer, director of Mount Sinai’s Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Food Allergy Institute in New York, told me that both autoimmune and allergy diseases tend to occur at higher rates when a person lives farther from the equator. That fact made immunologists consider whether vitamin D was involved in immune disorders, since people are exposed to less sunlight at higher latitudes.

But Sicherer also noted, “there might be fewer people engaged in farming lifestyles at those latitudes. There might be different exposures to different things in different regions of the globe. It’s so complex that we just don’t know.”

Guerrerio agreed, remarking that people around the globe have different diets, which, along with less sunlight, might compound immune system impacts. Guerrerio said it’s likely several factors cause allergies — including our indoor-prone lifestyles — and that several interventions will be necessary to reverse the effects on our immune systems.

As for Elizabeth and her children, Elizabeth’s misplaced sense of guilt is intimately tied to her desire to provide them with the best care. But her decision to allow her very ill babies to receive antibiotics was almost certainly the correct one, given the likelihood of more dangerous outcomes without treatment. Still, her sense of regret lingers — and she is most certainly not alone.

We are regularly bombarded with advice about how to keep ourselves and our children healthy and happy. You can try to “game the immune system,” but I don’t recommend it. As we learn more from experts about how our immune systems react and respond to our ever-changing environments, it’s best to come to terms with the fact that it’s highly unlikely that we can directly cause our own or someone else’s allergies. Reality is almost always more complicated than that.

The post How Modernity Made Us Allergic appeared first on NOEMA.

Flamini is an extreme athlete known for climbing and mountaineering — forever on the lookout for “experiences very few human beings have had.” But for chronobiologists at the universities of Granada, Almería and Murcia, her expedition was an opportunity to monitor the human body unprompted by the usual signals that give structure to our days.

It can often feel like daily life’s alarm clocks, work schedules and appointments are a rigid imposition on an otherwise free-flowing natural world. Yet biology is suffused with similar clocks.

In the 4th century B.C. a ship’s captain under Alexander the Great reported seeing tamarind leaves which closed at night and started to open at sunrise, unfurling themselves toward midday. The 13th century “Noon and Midnight Manual” describes a principle of Chinese traditional medicine whereby qi — the body’s vital force — flows to different organs across twelve two-hour increments, repeating every 24 hours.

In 1729, French scientist Jean-Jacques d’Ortuous de Mairan studied the daily movements of Mimosa pudica leaves, observing that they continued even in complete darkness. Two hundred years later, the German ethologist Ingeborg Beling reported similar cycles in the animal kingdom. Her paper, “On the Time Memory of Bees,” describes the punctuality of swarm behaviors which can be trained to different times of day.

Today we know that the master timekeeper in the human body is in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN, a cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus that receives input from cells in the retina that are responsive to visible blue light from the sun. That light suppresses melatonin, the sleep hormone, and times the cascade of energizing chemistry that helps us wake up in the morning and kickstart our day.

There is more than one clock, however. Various systems in your body, including the cardiovascular, metabolic, immune and reproductive systems have their own “peripheral clocks,” which cycle through active and resting phases. In fact, the same is true for the trillions of cells and hitchhiking microbes that make us who we are.

The Circadian Revolution

Over the last few years, there has been a groundswell of podcasts, wellness apps and self-improvement social media videos alerting a mass audience to the potential of applying circadian science. It was a slightly non-PC meme in which an anxious party attendee plans to head home “to protect my circadian rhythm” that made me think new, younger audiences were taking note.

We’ve progressed from what was really fringe science in the 1980s “to a truly exquisite mechanistic understanding of how these rhythms are generated,” Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, tells me. Foster’s book “Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health,” has been a surprise best seller. “It’s very satisfying for me to see how it’s exploded,” he says.

For example, a viral YouTube video entitled “The Optimal Morning Routine – Andrew Huberman” by After Skool animates advice from the wildly popular Stanford professor, who recommends viewing outdoor light within an hour after waking, even if it’s cloudy. This is because light exposure is by far the most powerful way to “entrain” the cybernetic complex of clocks within our bodies.

To borrow an analogy from biochemist Urs Albrecht and colleagues’ “orchestra” model, the SCN is like a musical conductor: when the symphony is playing in unison, the harmonious uplift in focus, memorization, physical performance, immunity and restful sleep is profound.

“In five years of training most medical students won’t hear anything about circadian rhythms or sleep,” Foster tells me. Meanwhile, “if I came up with a drug that halved my chances of stroke, cancer, over a five-year period [just some of the potential benefits of a synchronized circadian system], I’d be off to Stockholm to pick up my Nobel Prize.”

The word circadian — meaning approximately (circa) a day (diem) — was coined by the Romanian-born scientist Franz Halberg, whose laboratory at the University of Minnesota proved that humans operate according to various cycles. There are not just day-long cycles, but also shorter, “ultradian,” and longer, “infradian” cycles.

Halberg showed that human circadian rhythms were endogenous — meaning internally produced — but could be kept in line by what the German biologist Jürgen Aschoff called zeitgeber, literally time-givers, or cues in the environment.

All life on Earth evolved with the influence of the planet’s rotation: around 21 hours when complex life emerged 600 million years ago, slowing gradually — due to gravitational friction from the moon — to 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds today. Every time we fly across the planet, party until dawn, or spend the morning scrolling with the blinds down, we misalign ourselves with what our various organs, hormones and neurophysical processes are preparing for. 

Perils associated with desynchronization may include poor sleep, indigestion, depression and anxiety, lowered fertility, increased risk of injury, heart attack, stroke and heightened vulnerability to germs and viruses. A disrupted circadian rhythm impairs executive function in the brain (things like selective attention, working memory and self-control). It exaggerates glucose intolerance and increases the odds of metabolic syndrome, obesity and Type 2 diabetes, each of which in turn worsens health outcomes. Chronic disruption, as with shift work, may even produce epigenetic changes that may be passed between generations.

Nurses are one of the best-studied professional groups and may have greater risk of breast, endometrial and colorectal cancer. Many cancer-related genes oscillate, switching off and on, under circadian control. As Foster notes in “Life Time,” multiple studies have linked a disrupted circadian system to “an increased susceptibility to cancer development in all key organ systems in humans, including breast, ovarian, lung, pancreatic, prostate, colorectal and endometrial cancers, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), osteosarcoma, acute myeloid leukemia (AML), head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and hepatocellular carcinoma.” 

There are drugs in development that can “drive” the clock in cancer cells, where circadian disruption has been shown to increase the pace of tumor growth. In cases of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia, the strong links between circadian sleep disorder suggest to Foster that the restoration of sleep-wake circadian rhythm will hopefully slow the diseases’ progression if not ward off their arrival to begin with.

“Because SCRD (Sleep and circadian rhythm disruption) can exacerbate the symptoms of dementia and PD (Parkinson’s disease), it is important to think of SCRD stabilization as a therapeutic target,” he writes.

From the start, chronobiologist Franz Halberg was interested in how heart surgery and cancer treatment received at different times of day might influence outcomes. In other words, he was considering the ways that time — or rather timing — might be thought of as an aspect of healing, a “fourth dimension”, as some refer to it, fundamental to medicine, wellness and peak performance.

Stop All The Clocks

“We’re all so interested in sleep now, but sleep is an output of the circadian clock, and it’s one thing,” says Mickey Beyer-Clausen, cofounder and CEO of Timeshifter, a technology platform that offers personalized behavioral plans to reduce the impact of jet lag and shift work.

“People with jetlag think ‘Oh, I just feel off for a couple of days.’ No. You’ve disrupted every single organ in your body. You’re going to get sick more easily because your immune function is weak, and you’re going to have an upset stomach because you’re eating a steak when it’s 2 a.m. in your biology.”

Timeshifter’s goal is to provide access to advice once reserved for performance athletes and astronauts in the form of apps and partnerships with organizations such as United Airlines and Axiom Space.

You can think about space like “the ultimate business trip,” Beyer-Clausen says. Astronauts “need to hit the ground running. They can’t wait four or five days to get over jet lag.”

Spacewalks, which last up to eight hours, involve seeing sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes, totally disorienting the body’s clocks. That’s why there’s an LED light system that mimics dawn, day and dusk on the ISS.

Timeshifter’s apps suggest windows during which users should sleep, view light, reduce it, ingest caffeine or melatonin, with additional “practicality filters” for unshakeable commitments. In the case of long-haul flights, you “shift” your circadian clock gradually in the days before departure. This is how top-tier athletes, for example, show up ready to compete.

Formula 1 support teams are known to join the drivers in shifting their rhythms days before the race to the time zone of the race. Mars rover crews live on Martian time throughout their missions, with days almost 40 minutes longer than Earth’s, slipping gradually out of kilter with the environment around them. Speaking to reporters after exiting the cave, Beatriz Flamini claimed timelessness was a wonderful experience. “I’m still grieving for the cave,” she told the BBC in a story in June.

Strange findings have emerged from interventions in the mechanics of the body clock. In fact, it’s long been observed that extended wakefulness can temporarily lift depression, and “darkness retreats” are trending, according to the magazine, Glamour. In the absence of external cues, internal synchrony is achieved, though most of us are not extreme mountaineers, and a body out of sync with the world around it is unlikely to thrive.

In 2019 the writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun took part in a trial of “triple chronotherapy,” an experimental treatment focused on individuals with drug-resistant bipolar disorder. According to the doctor who prescribed it, the treatment’s origins can be traced to the 19th century when a German schoolteacher reported she could temporarily cure depression by riding her bike all night. In 1976, Dr. Burkhard Pflug at the University of Tübingen published an experiment with patients undergoing sleep deprivation to alleviate depression. The treatment showed a “marked improvement” in the short term — but relapse was high.

Decades later, a protocol named “triple chronotherapy” was developed by staff at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, and included lithium, sleep deprivation and timed light exposure. When the regimen was trialed in London in 2019, there was no lithium involved. Instead, patients were required to stay awake all night — under supervision — before sleeping at 5pm the following day.

According to the timetable, in the four days that follow, bedtime is advanced by two hours each evening until it settles into an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. rhythm. Every morning, at 7 a.m., patients must view bright light. They must wear amber glasses for two hours before bed. This is then followed up with morning bright-light therapy between 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. for six months.

It’s “like Ctrl-Alt-Delete and resets your internal clock,” writes David Veale, the doctor who led the trial in which Colquhoun took part, on his website.

Coloquin wrote in a blog post immediately after treatment: “I have not felt this good in two years and it has transformed every part of my life almost immediately.” When I checked in with them recently, they told me they had not repeated the protocol because “though it worked wonders for me and was very useful in the controlled environment of the trial, to play with my own sleeping patterns unsupervised is something I’ve been reluctant to do, in case it all goes wrong!”

The Great Healer

A 2016 randomized double-blind study found that viewing sunlight for 30 minutes each morning was a more effective treatment for major depression than Prozac alone during the same period. When combined, the treatment was most effective. Outdoor light can range in intensity from 1,000 lux on a cloudy winter day to 100,000 lux in the summer.

By comparison, indoor lights tend to max out in the hundreds. Even the most obscenely over-lit supermarket is unlikely to exceed 1,000 lux. All this means the amount of time we spend outdoors should increase, not decrease, as the days grow shorter in the autumn. 

It’s not just our psychology that is best served by organizing our days, where possible, in alignment with the daily rhythms for which our bodies are primed. There’s increasing evidence that the time of day when we take medicines has a notable influence on their effect.

“We already know of at least two drugs whose administration should be timed,” says Elizabeth Klerman, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who uses mathematical analysis to understand the interplay between time of day, sleep-wake cycles and biological clocks. “Statins should be given at night and steroids should be given in the morning.”

Cholesterol normally increases at night, between midnight and 6 a.m., so short-acting statins (in the four- to six-hour range) should be taken before bed to align with the night-time production of cholesterol. Cortisol meanwhile rises between 38 and 75 percent within the first hour after waking. Taking Aspirin before bedtime reduces the chance of platelets clumping together to form unwanted blood clots and helps prevent heart attacks and stroke, which are more common in the morning as temperature and blood pressure rise to kick start the day.

After 27 years at Bringham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Klerman began a new role at Massachusetts General Hospital where she works to apply sleep and circadian science across neurology, psychiatry, substance abuse, pediatrics and anesthesia.

When the hospital first began giving staff Covid vaccines in 2021, the hospital recorded the time of day and collected feedback on reported side effects. Two papers she co-authored found antibody production increased when vaccination took place in the afternoon while non-allergic side effects increased between 6 and 11 a.m.

“It’s way more important for people to get vaccinated than to worry about time-of-day effects,” she says, “but maybe these results will be encouraging for those who are worried about side effects or who need to care for a loved one the same day.”

This type of research has huge implications for drug development. Consider the use of rodents as test subjects. Pre-clinical studies use mice for their anatomical, physiological and genetic (99%) similarity to humans. But mice are nocturnal.

A 2020 study described the use of medicines that reduce nerve death in the event of a stroke. It found the treatment most effective when mice were in their sleep phase — which is when labs are open. The results failed to translate to humans until they were given at night. 

“There may be drugs or interventions out there that didn’t work because they were studied at the wrong circadian time,” Klerman tells me. “If you’re a drug company and you can show there’s a time-of-day effect then you only have to test when there’s the biggest effect or smallest side effect.”

In 2017, three scientists, Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young, won the Nobel Prize for their work uncovering the molecular mechanisms that power the circadian clock, a beautiful feedback loop that causes genes to switch on and off as proteins are produced and move around the cell.

Mutations in clock-controlled genes are known to cause enormous problems with appetite, sleep and hormonal regulation. Migraines are often reported at the same time of day and even at the same time of year. Any medicine or remedy must be designed to act when symptoms or risks are likely to be highest.

The skin is our largest organ — an essential weapon in our immune defense — and behaves differently in the daytime when it is braced against UV, bacteria, viruses and pollutants. During the night the skin becomes porous as it undergoes shedding and renewal, making us more vulnerable to invaders.

Another potentially enormous area for application is timed chemotherapy. Because nearly all cells in the human body are driven by 24-hour molecular clocks and control things like detoxification and DNA repair, treatments should be administered at times of day that allow non-cancerous host tissue cells the best chance at recovery. Multiple studies have found that the timing of chemotherapy treatment influences its necessitated dosage, the severity of side effects and the likelihood of relapse.

Yet with healthcare systems already under strain, the needs of doctors and nurses — for example, bright lights for their intricate work — won’t necessarily align with the circadian rhythms of the patients who rely on them. One way around this might be to alter patients’ internal clocks by using plans like those offered by Timeshifter. Another could be timed pumps that automate chemotherapy delivery. 

Chronodesign

At present, most high schools in the U.S., Singapore and Germany commence before 8:30 a.m. despite evidence that later start times increase sleep duration, reduce daytime sleepiness, alleviate depression and improve exam results. Hospitals and nursing homes often require patients to stay indoors without regard for the many ways that timed light exposure and exercise can aid sleep and improve health, especially in patients with dementia.

Yet, despite the wealth of data in the scientific literature suggesting the importance of circadian cycles for human health, one issue, in particular, makes me skeptical of our ability for radical change in line with this new knowledge: daylight saving time.

“We circadian biologists are of a person unanimous that no we shouldn’t have it,” says Russell Foster. Daylight saving time (or DST) has been associated with daytime fatigue, mental health problems and less sleep. More heart attacks, strokes, workplace injuries and even fatal car crashes are reported in the week following the clock’s spring leap forward. 

Even worse, we spend the next six months of the year out of whack with the position of the sun. The argument that this saves energy was disproven long ago, and despite unanimity within science, many countries trundle on without the means to fix this mistake.

Nations that have abolished DST include Iceland, Argentina, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Russia. The EU held a consultation in 2018 which saw the vast majority of its 4.6 million participants vote to end daylight saving time but has yet to implement the change.

Alarmingly, in the U.S., a bill called the “Sunshine Protection Act of 2023” has been proposed that would permanently enshrine daylight saving time rather than standard time, keeping citizens out of step with the sun year-round.

Meanwhile, China remains committed to using a single time zone despite its five geographical time zones spanning 3,100 miles east to west. This means much of the country’s social clock (used to coordinate daily life) corresponds to Beijing’s natural clock — where the sun is at its highest around noon. As a result, in Kashgar, the country’s westernmost city, the sun rises two-and-a-half hours later than it does in Beijing.

Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich associated with the concept of “social jet lag,” has studied the single European time zone, which stretches from eastern Poland to western Spain. Until the German occupation of Luxembourg, Belgium and France during World War II, each nation ran on Greenwich Mean Time, a time zone with which they are more closely aligned.

The same is true for Nazi-allied Spain, much of which lies to the west of the UK. Roenneberg found that peoples’ chronotypes — colloquially referred to as the difference between morning larks and night owls — would shift across the countries that employ Central European Time in accordance with the time at which they see dawn light.

In Dan Beuttner’s Blue Zones project, which looks at the places on Earth where people live longest, Beuttner focuses primarily on the positive impact of diet, community and exercise. But it’s also true that people in places like Sardinia, Italy, and Japan’s Okinawa rise with the sun and go to bed not too long after it sets. “They have a very similar schedule every day,” says Timeshifter’s Clausen-Meyer. “There’s no doubt in my mind that diet, exercise and circadian stability are the three pillars of longevity and health.”

It is the morning’s specific wavelength of visible blue light upon which performance, digestion, sleep, mental clarity and longevity hangs (interestingly, the middle hours of the day are considered a circadian “dead zone” without the same power to shift the clock).

If those in authority grasp the power of circadian science to improve our lives, we might expect to see changes in how we design buildings to encourage or block light at different times of day, or labor laws that mandate health-oriented benefits and appropriate compensation for valuable shift workers.

“Tonight I’m on a call to Singapore at 11 p.m. for two hours,” says Clausen-Beyer. “But I know how to deal with it: I’ll wake up at the same time and view sunlight then take a nap later. The world has moved on. We need shift workers. We just need to be aware of the time, it is in our biology, and deal with our circumstances in the best way.”

Because viewing morning light is the most powerful way to entrain our circadian system, Clausen-Beyer ensures his internal clocks remain aligned, despite being temporarily sleep-deprived. A short nap can help and is better than slipping into a new time zone without having gone anywhere.

Over 270 years ago the Swedish botanist Carl Linneas proposed a “flower clock” in which different species would be arranged according to the time of day at which they opened, closed and released their unique scents. Though the plan remains unrealized, various horticulturists have tried to revive it over the years, lured by the dream of ecological synchrony.

This fall Apple Watch users will see the number of hours they spend in daylight incorporated into their health app. Meanwhile, trends suggest that people of all ages are shifting social activities to earlier in the day. As with Linneas’s imagined garden, principles of chronodesign, chronotherapy and chronoethics applied in hospitals, schools, homes and workplaces could offer a universal baseline, more in tune with our biology, to help us orient ourselves.

It’s safe to assume that life will find ways to knock us off schedule — and there are plenty of worthwhile reasons to get a poor night’s sleep — but it will be far easier to get back on track when the built and natural world both know the time.

The post The Rediscovery Of Circadian Rhythms appeared first on NOEMA.

Throughout Europe, one small step at a time, critical links between natural ecosystems that have been eroded by the infrastructure of human society are being intentionally re-naturalized and restored so they can operate freely once again. It’s a process that is often invisible unless you know where to look.

In the middle of the pandemic in 2020, after the European Parliament voted to support the European Green Deal — a landmark piece of legislation that will allocate billions of euros to lower emissions and support biodiversity — I set off from the Netherlands on the first of several journeys by motorbike to explore how nature can be better connected on a continent crowded with human activity. I focused on “eco-corridors” and “ecoducts” — passages and areas that allow animals and natural ecosystems to navigate a changing climate and human infrastructure — in Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Italy.

There is no explicit connection between the European Green Deal and eco-corridors. There should be. From grand protected areas like natural parks to humble tunnels below roads, these spaces are crucial for a myriad of species, many of which are endangered.

These photos document what I saw of humans taking a step back to allow nature to flourish anew — but also, in some places, of humans constructing infrastructure specifically for nonhuman use. Focusing on the fringes of nature and civilization — on the borders between humans and nonhumans — the images evoke mixed feelings about our relationship with nature. I was saddened by how fragmented nature is, but also struck by the beauty of humans building complex structures to support nature.

Most of all, I wanted to investigate how our fragmented continent might look if connected by natural corridors, and what role EU policies might play in establishing these links now and in the future.

The post Linking The Green Veins Of Europe appeared first on NOEMA.

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