By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 23, 2010
I try not to fall into a rut, but every December I give out Sidney Awards for the best magazine essays of the year, and every year it seems I give one to Michael Lewis. It would be more impressive if I was discovering obscure geniuses, but Lewis keeps churning out the masterpieces.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
David Brooks
Previous Sidney Awards Columns by David Brooks: December 28, 2009 | December 24, 2009
Sidney Awards: The Sidney Hillman Foundation
This year it was a Vanity Fair piece called “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds.” His large subject is the tsunami of cheap credit that swept over the world and “offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.”
His specific subject is Greece, a country that plundered its public institutions while spoiling and atomizing itself. The Greek national railroad earned 100 million euros (about $131.4 million) in revenues each year, but had a wage bill of 400 million euros plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The country reported a budget deficit of 3.7 percent a year, but that was inaccurate. It was really about 14 percent of G.D.P.
Lewis’s genius was to show how the moral breakdown spread into one of the most remote institutions on earth, a 1,000-year-old monastery cut off by water, culture and theology that, nonetheless, managed to put itself at the center of the great plundering.
If you go to a college classroom you’ll likely notice that the women tend to dominate the conversation. In an essay called “The End of Men” in The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin gathers the evidence, showing how women are beginning to dominate the information age.
At one clinic where parents are able to choose the sex of their babies, 75 percent choose girls. Three women earn college degrees for every two earned by men. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are predominantly filled by women.
Rosin describes studies showing that corporations that have women in senior management perform better than male-dominated competitors. She visits admissions officers who are hunting for qualified boys. At a support group for men behind on their child support, the leader writes “$85,000” on the board. “That’s her salary,” he barks. Then he writes “$12,000” and shouts: “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?”
In Fortune, Beth Kowitt had an eye-popping piece called “Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe’s.” The funky, gourmet grocery chain is actually owned by the secretive Albrecht family from Germany. Many of the products are made by large corporations — the pita chips are made by a division of PepsiCo and the yogurt is actually made by Danone Stonyfield Farm.
The company has brilliantly seized on the growing sophistication of American food tastes. It offers a much more limited selection than its rivals, thus reducing the anxiety of choice. It has an efficient supply chain (the Tasty Bite Punjab Eggplant that sold for $3.39 at Whole Foods in Manhattan sold for more than a dollar less at the Trader Joe’s in Stamford, Conn.). It fosters community and makes shopping a form of belonging.
You may know James Franco as the actor who played Peter Parker’s best friend in the Spider-Man movies, or the lead character in the mountain-climbing movie, “127 Hours.” While pursuing a full-time acting career, he earned a bachelor’s degree at U.C.L.A. and then enrolled simultaneously in four graduate programs — New York University for film, Columbia for writing, Brooklyn College for writing and Warren Wilson College for poetry. He’s also pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Yale and taking classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. His fiction has been published in Esquire (his first book-length collection was published by Scribner). His first solo art show was at the Clocktower Gallery in New York City.
Sam Anderson superbly captures the everythingness of Franco’s life in a New York Magazine piece called “The James Franco Project.” It is a story of manic labor masking the man’s enigmatic core.
Last year, William Deresiewicz delivered a countercultural lecture at West Point. He told the cadets how to combat the frenetic, achievement-obsessed system in which they were raised. That speech was subsequently published in The American Scholar as “Solitude and Leadership.” It’s about how to be a leader, not an organization man.
Darin Wolfe wrote a piece in American Scientist, called “To See for One’s Self,” about the decline of the autopsy. Autopsies frequently reveal major diagnostic errors and undiscovered illnesses, yet the number of autopsies performed each year is plummeting. Medical training no longer relies on this hands-on exercise. Doctors are afraid of information that might lead to malpractice suits. Medicare won’t pay for them. A form of practical inquiry is being lost.
Everybody’s worried about the future of print journalism, but this has been an outstanding year for magazines. On Tuesday, I’ll offer more suggestions for holiday reading.
05 May 2011
Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism
By Conor Friedersdorf
May 4 2011, 1:50 AM ET 3
These must-reads are my personal picks for the best nonfiction of 2010
best of J.jpg
Awards season in journalism is almost over: David Brooks has long since handed out the Sidneys, the Pulitzer Prizes have been issued, and the National Magazine Award finalists find out who won next week.
Throughout 2010, I kept my own running list of exceptional nonfiction for the Best of Journalism newsletter I publish. The result is my third annual Best Of Journalism Awards - America's only nonfiction writing prize judged entirely by me. I couldn't read every worthy piece published last year. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention. Thanks to Byliner, a promising new site dedicated to publishing and sharing feature-length nonfiction, my annual awards dating back to 2008 are soon going to have a permanent home. I am indebted to its founder, John Tayman, for including me in an enterprise well worth checking out - and for his encouragement as I assembled this list.
It was put together before I began my current gig at The Atlantic. The pieces I've selected represent only my own judgment, and do not reflect the opinions of my colleagues, whose lists would surely be wonderful and different.
The Art Of Storytelling
campfire.jpg
WASHINGTON MONTHLY
Dirty Medicine by Mariah Blake
Thomas Shaw invents breakthrough medical devices. In America's hospitals they'd save lives and money. But the dysfunctional industry that supplies doctors and nurses prevents these wares from getting to the patients who need them. And health care reform hasn't changed a thing.
THE TEXAS MONTHLY
Last Days Of The Comanches by S.C. Gwynne
"By the autumn of 1871, the Western frontier was rolling backward, retreating in the face of savage Indian attacks. When a ragtag army of federal soldiers arrived on the Llano Estacado to crush the hostile natives once and for all, they had numbers and firepower on their side. What they didn't know was that their enemies were led by Quanah Parker, a half-white war chief who may have been the greatest fighter of his time."
THE NEW YORKER
Pandora's Briefcase by Malcolm Gladwell
During World War II, the British pulled off one of the most successful acts of espionage in history. In its details, however, even this fascinating tale of Allied trickery suggests that spying might not be worthwhile.
THE NEW YORKER
The Hunted by Jeffrey Goldberg
In a remote corner of Africa, two American conservationists did their utmost to prevent poachers from destroying an endangered species of elephant. In their zealousness, did they go too far?
THE MORNING NEWS
The High Is Always The Pain And The Pain Is Always The High by Jay Kang
After living the ups and downs of life as a professional poker player, the author observes that "gambling narratives tend to glamorize the upswing." In his own story, however, the romance is wrapped up in the losses.
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
Patriot Games by Ben Calhoun
An unsurpassed case study in how idealistic people who enter professional politics wind up compromising their values.
ESQUIRE
The Gun by CJ Chivers
Shortly after President Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, an unholy alliance of defense contractors and military brass conspired to cover up the fact that they put American troops into combat with a defective gun.
JOE BLOGS
The Promise by Joe Posnanski
The story of Bruce Springsteen's most moving song, how it got recorded, and the way it captures certain truths about working class life better than anything else.
VANITY FAIR
The Case Of The Vanishing Blonde by Mark Bowden
Private investigator Ken Brennan was given a mystery: who raped, beat and left for dead a 21-year-old blonde woman? She couldn't remember her attacker. The police gave up on the case. This is the story of the man who broke it open, and the steps that led him to a perpetrator no one else suspected.
OUTSIDE
The Killer In The Pool by Tim Zimmerman
The story of a killer whale's life - one that ends with a Sea World trainer's tragic killing. Or was it murder?
THE NEW YORKER
The Mark Of A Masterpiece by David Grann
A painting done by a famous artist can be worth many millions of dollars. An imitation is basically worthless. Art historians used their expertise to differentiate between the two - until recently, when Peter Paul Biro began using fingerprints on canvases to authenticate works scientifically.
Crime & Punishment
prison fulll.jpg
WIRED
Art Of The Steal by Joshua Bearman
Gerard Blanchard has been compared to a criminal Rain Man. His story is like every larger than life heist film you've ever seen - but this scourge of the world's bank managers is a real person.
OUTSIDE
The Ballad Of Colton Harris-Moore by Bob Friel
"In the Northwest's San Juan Islands, best known for killer whales and Microsoft retirees, a teen fugitive has made a mockery of local authorities, allegedly stealing cars, taking planes for joyÂrides, and breaking into vacation homes. His ability to elude the police and survive in the woods has earned him folk-hero status. But some wonder if the 18-year-old will make it out of the hunt alive."
THE ATLANTIC
Prison Without Walls by Graeme Wood
What if America replaced much of its broken prison system by tracking convicted lawbreakers with ankle bracelets? Early studies show a benevolent twist on Big Brother might be better at reducing incarceration costs and cut crime.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Rape Of American Prisoners by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stanow
The most shocking thing about this piece isn't the alarming frequency with which juvenile offenders are raped while in custody - it's how seldom their abusers are charged with crimes even when they are caught.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out Of Prison by Sean Gardiner
A high school dropout educates himself in a law library, sues for access to records from his trial, confronts witnesses who testified against him, and proves the corruption of the prosecutor who wrongfully convicted him.
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
Is That A Tape Recorder In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Happy To See Me
(based on a five part Village Voice story by Graham Rayman)
What happens when an NYPD officer spends months carrying a tape recorder in his front pocket? He documents how one precinct really works, captures numerous illegal acts by police, and is nearly committed against his will by superiors eager to intimidate him.
THE ATLANTIC
The Wrong Man by David Freed
Falsely accused of perpetrating a series of anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, Dr. Steven J. Hatfield tells his story for the first time.
SLATE
The Chemist's War by Deborah Blum
The strangely forgotten story of "how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition," ultimately killing perhaps 10,000 Americans.
GQ
Hope. Change. Reality. by Wil S. Hylton
When Barack Obama won the White House, campaigning in part against the lawlessness of the Bush Administration, he tapped Eric Holder as Attorney General. Two years later, the man charged with cleaning up the Justice Department and closing down Gitmo has been stymied at every turn.
THE NEW YORKER
In The Name Of The Law by William Finnegan
In Tijuana, where endemic police corruption prevented anyone from opposing the drug cartels, an uncompromising new law enforcement official is finally fighting back against organized crime. Is he reasserting the rule of law or undermining it in a different way?
GOVERNING
Mississippi's Corrections Reform by John Buntin
In the most notorious prison system in America, that rarest of things happened - a push for reform that actually worked.
Sports & Leisure
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TABLET
Smash by Howard Jacobsen
Was he the best ping pong player ever? Marty Reisman says that's how he'd be remembered if the game wouldn't have been taken over by whippersnappers with new-fangled paddles. So late in life, he began challenging some of the best in the sport with only one condition: old school equipment.
ESPN: OUTSIDE THE LINES
Believeland by Wright Thompson
A profile of Cleveland, Ohio, told through the lens of its sports fans and their latest heartbreak.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Chess Master And The Supercomputer by Garry Kasparov
One of the world's most accomplished chess champions reflects on how CPUs changed his game.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
What Is I.B.M.'s Watson? by Clive Thompson
A generation ago, an I.B.M. computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Now the company has made a machine that plays Jeopardy. Can it win?
THE OBSERVER
Video Games: The Addiction by Tom Bissell
What hobby took over Tom Bissell's world even more than his cocaine habit? Playing Grand Theft Auto.
THE STRANGER
The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine by Brendan Kiley
A five part series on a dangerous substance that's poisoning the world's cocaine supply, how to avoid it, and the human suffering caused by drug prohibition.
EDIBLE GEOGRAPHY
A Cocktail Party In The Street: An Interview With Alan Stillman by Nicola Twilley and Krista
Ninivaggi
How T.G.I. Fridays became the first singles bar in New York City and changed American happy hour culture forever.
SLATE
You Should Worship Kelly Slater by Matt Feeney
The best surfer in the world, why he should be a bigger star, and the reasons he isn't.
Science, Religion & Human Nature
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THE NATION
Postcard From Palestine by Christopher Hayes
A dispatch from Hebron - a Palestinian city with an Israeli settlement in its midst.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In Chile, The Lessons Of Isolation by Theodore Dalrymple
A meditation on social pressure, and how it can be conducive to virtue as well as vice.
THE OBSERVER
The Little Pill That Could Cure Alcoholism by James Medd
Is alcoholism "a physical condition with a spiritual solution," as Alcoholics Anonymous has long insisted? Dr Olivier Ameisen no longer thinks so - having successfully ended his own debilitating addiction, he thinks he's found a revolutionary cure for the disease in the form of a widely available pill.
TEXAS OBSERVER
He Who Casts The First Stone by Forrest Wilder
In Amarillo, a militant Christian group is targeting the city's swingers with a campaign of constant harassment - and they say that the gay bars, strip clubs and porn shops may be next.
ESQUIRE
Invasion by Tom Junod
The subject is ants: "If you think the numbers sound like abstractions, if you wonder what deranged census-taker came to the conclusion that in the shadow of each and every human being there lives a hidden host of 1.6 million, well, that only means you haven't attempted the experiment of peacefully coexisting with them."
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
Solitude And Leadership by William Deresiewicz
What America lacks is leaders who are capable of deep, original thinking.
THE AMERICAN INTEREST
Understanding Corruption by Lawrence Rosen
In the United States, the norms that influence how we conceive of corruption are far different than what prevails in the Middle East - and our efforts in the region are doomed to failure until we understand that.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Should We Clone Neanderthals? by Zach Zorich
As scientists decode their genome, a look at the scientific, legal, and ethical obstacles to bringing them back from extinction.
MILITARY HISTORY QUARTERLY
Holy Terror: The Rise Of The Order Of The Assassins by Jefferson Gray
For almost two centuries, The Order Of The Assassins "played a singular and sinister role in the Middle East," terrifying enemies through their own brand of asymmetric warfare.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Night by Tony Judt
A man with Lou Gehrig's disease explains why getting through it is so trying.
VANITY FAIR
The Genesis 2.0 Project by Kurt Anderson
The Large Haldron Collider "exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless." A look at the secrets physicists hope it will unlock.
THE ATLANTIC
Autism's First Child by John Donvan and Karen Zucker
The life story of the first person ever diagnosed with autism - and the hope his long, happy life holds for the one in 110 children who suffer from the condition.
On Birth, Death, & The Afterlife
graveyard.jpg
MOTHER JONES
Inside India's Rent-A-Womb Business by Scott Carney
Wealthy Western couples are flocking to India, where the medical tourism industry is offering the best deal on a vital commodity: wombs.
THE ATLANTIC
Letting Go of My Father by Jonathan Rauch
"The author found himself utterly unprepared for one of life's near certainties--the decline of a parent." And then he discovered that he wasn't alone.
THE NEW YORKER
Letting Go by Atul Gawande
"Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions--and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left."
GQ
Are You Sure You Want To Quit The World? by Nadya Labi
On an Internet message board, an anonymous figure was befriending people contemplating suicide - and pushing them to go through with it.
VANITY FAIR
The Distant Executioner by William Langewiesche
Inside the spooky world of America's warrior sharpshooters, "the sniper's special talents and torments," and how they cope.
AMERICAN SCIENTIST
To See For One's Self by Darin L. Wolfe
The case for cutting more people open after they die, so that we can continue benefiting from a medical procedure that has taught us more about the human body than anything else.
n+1
The Frozen Ladder by Julia Grønnevet
A personal essay.
THE TIMES OF LONDON
The British POW Who Broke Into Auschwitz - And Survived by Jake Wallis Simons
A 91-year-old veteran of World War II reflects on one of the most audacious acts of that conflict - and why he risked his life to bear witness to history.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Until Cryonics Do Us Part by Kerry Howley
Men who want to freeze themselves when they die in hopes of being brought back when technology permits it are provoking a backlash from an unexpected quarter: their wives.
Multimedia Matters
the press.jpg
THE GUARDIAN
On Taking Comic Novels Seriously by Howard Jacobson
"The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect."
THE PARIS REVIEW
The Art Of Non-Fiction Number 3: John McPhee by Peter Hessler
The aged master, arguably the world's best non-fiction writer, reflects on his career and his method.
THE AWL
Seven Years As A Freelance Writer by Richard Morgan
An insider's look at what it's like to write for glossy magazines. You'll envy and pity the writer by the end.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Bully Finds A Pulpit On The Web by David Segal
The ultimate consumer affairs article about what is perhaps the worst customer service in the history of humankind.
CONELRAD ADJACENT
Hiroshima: This Is Your Life by Bill Geerhart
On May 11, 1955, before an audience of millions of viewers, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing was shocked to receive a handshake from the co-pilot who flew the mission to destroy his city.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Generation Why by Zadie Smith
A review of The Social Network. And a meditation on the ways that technology can shape and change how we think and behave toward one another.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Beck Revelation by Mark Lilla
By taking Glenn Beck's ideas seriously, the author gets as close as anyone has to teasing out what motivates the Fox News host and his bizarre brand of cable tv and talk radio.
ESQUIRE
TV's Crowning Moment Of Awesome by Chris Jones
(If you enjoy the piece, also listen to Act Four in this episode of This American Life.)
Terry Kniess performed better than anyone in the long history of The Price Is Right - so well that producers freaked out backstage as he racked up winnings. Was it luck? Skill? Or did he cheat?
The Innovative & Creative
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THE SAN FRANCISCO PANORAMA
Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From Foreclosure is a 28-Year-Old Pakistani American Playright-slash-Attorney who Learned Bankruptcy Law on the Internet? Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You by Wajahat Ali
One of the most fun pieces of the year, despite its subject - a newly minted lawyer trying to help a family save their home.
DEFUNCT
Long Live The Jart by Ander Monson
The avant garde remembrance of a beloved lawn dart.
RADIOLAB
Limits
An investigation into the outer limits of the human body. How far can we push ourselves?
SLATE
Kanye West Has A Goblet by Jonah Weiner
Rather than tell us how the celebrity profile might evolve in the age of Twitter, the author shows us - and gives Gay Talese a run for his money.
SLATE
Please Allow Me To Correct A Few Things by Bill Wyman
An imagined response by Mick Jagger to the recently released Keith Richards memoir. This is Slate at its best: inventive, smart, and spot on in its cultural analysis.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Anosognosic's Dilemma (Parts 1 through 5) by Errol Morris
On the intractable problem of not knowing what you don't know.
THE GUARDIAN
This Is A News Website Article About A Scientific Paper by Martin Robbins
A spot on parody.
Food
food.jpg
TEXAS MONTHLY
Consider The Oyster by Gary Cartwright
An unparalleled ode to the oyster - and a regretful premonition of its possible demise.
FORTUNE
Inside The Secret World Of Trader Joes by Beth Kowitt
Everything you ever wanted to know about the innovative grocery store chain and its uncanny ability to deliver tasty, original fare at bargain prices.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The 36-Hour Dinner Party by Michael Pollan
Friends. Food. And the ultimate backyard cookout.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Tuna's End by Paul Greenberg
Blue fin tuna can swim as fast as 40 miles per hour, navigate journeys thousands of miles long, and thrive anywhere from the tropics to frigid subarctic seas. Unfortunately, they may not survive long enough to be seen by your grandkids.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Keeping It Kosher by Frank Bruni
An Italian restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn is trying to do something every other institution in that neighborhood has failed at - bringing Hasidic Jews, blacks, and white secular liberals together in one place.
GOURMET LIVE
The Guiltless Pleasure by Rick Bragg
The definitive ode to mayonnaise.
Profiles
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NEW YORK MAGAZINE
The James Franco Project by Sam Anderson
That most rare of magazine features - a celebrity profile with an unfamiliar narrative.
DETAILS
Everything You Know About Mike Tyson Is Wrong by Ivan Solotaroff
Few interviews so adeptly force the reader to confront the fact that our complicity in the fame industry is indefensible.
SLATE
Big Breitbart by Christopher Beam
In a year that saw several profiles of Andrew Breitbart this one was the standout - a look at the man behind the bombast and bullshit.
ESQUIRE
Roger Ebert: The Essential Man by Chris Jones
The defining portrait of America's most famous movie critic, the cancer that cost him his jaw, and the unexpected turn his career has taken after all these years.
THE NEW YORKER
Frat House For Jesus by Peter J. Boyer
The secretive religious organization that ministers to many of Washington DC's most powerful people.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
The Jihadist Next Door by Andrea Elliott
As a 15-year-old, Omar Hammami had just been elected president of his sophomore class at an Alabama high school. A decade later, he was on the eastern edge of Africa leading a brutal Islamist insurgency. Why?
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
The Man The White House Wakes Up To by Mark Leibovich
In Washington DC, an obscure publication by a quirky man is widely read among the ruling class.
GQ
The Comedian's Comedian's Comedian By Amy Wallace
An inquiry into Gary Shandling as comic innovator: it hints at what humor might look like if our cultural obsession with irony makes space for an earnest but sophisticated avant garde.
THE GUARDIAN
Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy by Jon Ronson
Behind the nasty lyrics, the profane antics, and the clown makeup, a Detroit rap duo reveals a two-decade long plot to trick their fans into accepting Jesus as their savior.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD
The Boy From Yazoo City by Andrew Ferguson
If you only read the passage that caused its subject, Haley Barbour, so much trouble, you missed out on the fascinating life story of "Mississippi's favorite son."
This Is A Business
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PLANET MONEY
Dreaming of Plastic Crates in Haiti by Caitlin Kenney
It should have been a simple project: if Haitian mango farmers would just put their fruit in plastic crates they could double their income. In international development, however, nothing is ever that simple.
TEXAS MONTHLY
The Lost Girls by Mimi Swartz
The sex trade is thriving in Houston - and many of the people working in it are little better off than slaves.
NEW YORK
Rachel Uchitel Is Not A Madam by Lisa Taddeo
A peek inside New York City clubs where bottle girls play the role of 21st-century courtesans.
THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY
The Closing Of The Marijuana Frontier by John Gravois
In Mendocino County, California, pot is king - and its cultivators face complications unlike any other American farmers.
THE AWL
My Summer On The Content Farm by Jessanne Collins
How the Web's content farms produce the empty-calorie content that clutters up your Google results.
DESIGN OBSERVER
All Those Numbers: Logistics, Territory and Walmart by Jesse Lecavelier
What the discount retailer - the largest private employer in the United States - can teach us about design and efficiency.
VANITY FAIR
Beware Of Greeks Bearing Bonds by Michael Lewis
"How on earth do monks wind up as Greece's best shot at a Harvard Business School case study?" Michael Lewis descends on the country to find out, and discovers a peculiar brand of fiscal madness.
THE ATLANTIC
God Help You. You're On Dialysis. by Robin Fields
The dirty secret of America's dialysis centers, where kidney patients are needlessly dying.
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
NUMMI by Frank Langfitt
In the mid 1980s, one of Japan's most successful auto-makers willingly shared all the secrets of its success with GM. This is the story of why the company failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Pirates Are Winning! by Jeffrey Gettleman
The celebrity outlaws of Somalia and their brazen, violent, largely successful plunder of global commerce.
THE BELIEVER
Sweatpants in Paradise by Molly Young
A close look at the peculiar environments where we shop.
THE ATLANTIC
Gentrification And Its Discontents by Benjamin Schwartz
Why the Manhattan neighborhoods you love can never last forever.
THE POINT
Predatory Habits by Etay Zwick
A jeremiad against Wall Street and its out-sized place in American life.
CITY JOURNAL
Start-Up City by Ed Glaeser
If you want your city to succeed it's not huge employers you want - it's lots of small entrepreneurs.
SLATE
Tokyo Hooters Girls by Paige Ferrari
"In Japan, food portions are small, women's shoulders are modestly covered, and Pamela Anderson's breasts are not a certified national obsession. This makes Hooters' innuendo-heavy version of family dining an odd fit that the chain's Japan team had to coach into reality."
BLOGGERS OF THE YEAR
- In lively, exquisitely crafted prose, Will Wilkinson offered posts at Democracy In America that managed a rare trifecta: they were provocative, logically sound, and infused with razor sharp wit.
- Glenn Greenwald, Julian Sanchez, Radley Balko and Adam Serwer for their vital work on civil liberties.
- Joe Posnanski for his delightful sports blog.
* * *
This list has improved every year thanks to reader support. If you value this effort - or if you're just a lover of nonfiction - I encourage you to sign up for The Best Of Journalism newsletter. For $1.99 per month, you'll get my recommendations on what to read every week, and occasional editorial treats too. My subscribers include some of the most accomplished writers and editors in American journalism. Finally, congratulations to all the writers and editors who produced this year's winning entries.
May 4 2011, 1:50 AM ET 3
These must-reads are my personal picks for the best nonfiction of 2010
best of J.jpg
Awards season in journalism is almost over: David Brooks has long since handed out the Sidneys, the Pulitzer Prizes have been issued, and the National Magazine Award finalists find out who won next week.
Throughout 2010, I kept my own running list of exceptional nonfiction for the Best of Journalism newsletter I publish. The result is my third annual Best Of Journalism Awards - America's only nonfiction writing prize judged entirely by me. I couldn't read every worthy piece published last year. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention. Thanks to Byliner, a promising new site dedicated to publishing and sharing feature-length nonfiction, my annual awards dating back to 2008 are soon going to have a permanent home. I am indebted to its founder, John Tayman, for including me in an enterprise well worth checking out - and for his encouragement as I assembled this list.
It was put together before I began my current gig at The Atlantic. The pieces I've selected represent only my own judgment, and do not reflect the opinions of my colleagues, whose lists would surely be wonderful and different.
The Art Of Storytelling
campfire.jpg
WASHINGTON MONTHLY
Dirty Medicine by Mariah Blake
Thomas Shaw invents breakthrough medical devices. In America's hospitals they'd save lives and money. But the dysfunctional industry that supplies doctors and nurses prevents these wares from getting to the patients who need them. And health care reform hasn't changed a thing.
THE TEXAS MONTHLY
Last Days Of The Comanches by S.C. Gwynne
"By the autumn of 1871, the Western frontier was rolling backward, retreating in the face of savage Indian attacks. When a ragtag army of federal soldiers arrived on the Llano Estacado to crush the hostile natives once and for all, they had numbers and firepower on their side. What they didn't know was that their enemies were led by Quanah Parker, a half-white war chief who may have been the greatest fighter of his time."
THE NEW YORKER
Pandora's Briefcase by Malcolm Gladwell
During World War II, the British pulled off one of the most successful acts of espionage in history. In its details, however, even this fascinating tale of Allied trickery suggests that spying might not be worthwhile.
THE NEW YORKER
The Hunted by Jeffrey Goldberg
In a remote corner of Africa, two American conservationists did their utmost to prevent poachers from destroying an endangered species of elephant. In their zealousness, did they go too far?
THE MORNING NEWS
The High Is Always The Pain And The Pain Is Always The High by Jay Kang
After living the ups and downs of life as a professional poker player, the author observes that "gambling narratives tend to glamorize the upswing." In his own story, however, the romance is wrapped up in the losses.
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
Patriot Games by Ben Calhoun
An unsurpassed case study in how idealistic people who enter professional politics wind up compromising their values.
ESQUIRE
The Gun by CJ Chivers
Shortly after President Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, an unholy alliance of defense contractors and military brass conspired to cover up the fact that they put American troops into combat with a defective gun.
JOE BLOGS
The Promise by Joe Posnanski
The story of Bruce Springsteen's most moving song, how it got recorded, and the way it captures certain truths about working class life better than anything else.
VANITY FAIR
The Case Of The Vanishing Blonde by Mark Bowden
Private investigator Ken Brennan was given a mystery: who raped, beat and left for dead a 21-year-old blonde woman? She couldn't remember her attacker. The police gave up on the case. This is the story of the man who broke it open, and the steps that led him to a perpetrator no one else suspected.
OUTSIDE
The Killer In The Pool by Tim Zimmerman
The story of a killer whale's life - one that ends with a Sea World trainer's tragic killing. Or was it murder?
THE NEW YORKER
The Mark Of A Masterpiece by David Grann
A painting done by a famous artist can be worth many millions of dollars. An imitation is basically worthless. Art historians used their expertise to differentiate between the two - until recently, when Peter Paul Biro began using fingerprints on canvases to authenticate works scientifically.
Crime & Punishment
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WIRED
Art Of The Steal by Joshua Bearman
Gerard Blanchard has been compared to a criminal Rain Man. His story is like every larger than life heist film you've ever seen - but this scourge of the world's bank managers is a real person.
OUTSIDE
The Ballad Of Colton Harris-Moore by Bob Friel
"In the Northwest's San Juan Islands, best known for killer whales and Microsoft retirees, a teen fugitive has made a mockery of local authorities, allegedly stealing cars, taking planes for joyÂrides, and breaking into vacation homes. His ability to elude the police and survive in the woods has earned him folk-hero status. But some wonder if the 18-year-old will make it out of the hunt alive."
THE ATLANTIC
Prison Without Walls by Graeme Wood
What if America replaced much of its broken prison system by tracking convicted lawbreakers with ankle bracelets? Early studies show a benevolent twist on Big Brother might be better at reducing incarceration costs and cut crime.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Rape Of American Prisoners by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stanow
The most shocking thing about this piece isn't the alarming frequency with which juvenile offenders are raped while in custody - it's how seldom their abusers are charged with crimes even when they are caught.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out Of Prison by Sean Gardiner
A high school dropout educates himself in a law library, sues for access to records from his trial, confronts witnesses who testified against him, and proves the corruption of the prosecutor who wrongfully convicted him.
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
Is That A Tape Recorder In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Happy To See Me
(based on a five part Village Voice story by Graham Rayman)
What happens when an NYPD officer spends months carrying a tape recorder in his front pocket? He documents how one precinct really works, captures numerous illegal acts by police, and is nearly committed against his will by superiors eager to intimidate him.
THE ATLANTIC
The Wrong Man by David Freed
Falsely accused of perpetrating a series of anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, Dr. Steven J. Hatfield tells his story for the first time.
SLATE
The Chemist's War by Deborah Blum
The strangely forgotten story of "how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition," ultimately killing perhaps 10,000 Americans.
GQ
Hope. Change. Reality. by Wil S. Hylton
When Barack Obama won the White House, campaigning in part against the lawlessness of the Bush Administration, he tapped Eric Holder as Attorney General. Two years later, the man charged with cleaning up the Justice Department and closing down Gitmo has been stymied at every turn.
THE NEW YORKER
In The Name Of The Law by William Finnegan
In Tijuana, where endemic police corruption prevented anyone from opposing the drug cartels, an uncompromising new law enforcement official is finally fighting back against organized crime. Is he reasserting the rule of law or undermining it in a different way?
GOVERNING
Mississippi's Corrections Reform by John Buntin
In the most notorious prison system in America, that rarest of things happened - a push for reform that actually worked.
Sports & Leisure
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TABLET
Smash by Howard Jacobsen
Was he the best ping pong player ever? Marty Reisman says that's how he'd be remembered if the game wouldn't have been taken over by whippersnappers with new-fangled paddles. So late in life, he began challenging some of the best in the sport with only one condition: old school equipment.
ESPN: OUTSIDE THE LINES
Believeland by Wright Thompson
A profile of Cleveland, Ohio, told through the lens of its sports fans and their latest heartbreak.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Chess Master And The Supercomputer by Garry Kasparov
One of the world's most accomplished chess champions reflects on how CPUs changed his game.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
What Is I.B.M.'s Watson? by Clive Thompson
A generation ago, an I.B.M. computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Now the company has made a machine that plays Jeopardy. Can it win?
THE OBSERVER
Video Games: The Addiction by Tom Bissell
What hobby took over Tom Bissell's world even more than his cocaine habit? Playing Grand Theft Auto.
THE STRANGER
The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine by Brendan Kiley
A five part series on a dangerous substance that's poisoning the world's cocaine supply, how to avoid it, and the human suffering caused by drug prohibition.
EDIBLE GEOGRAPHY
A Cocktail Party In The Street: An Interview With Alan Stillman by Nicola Twilley and Krista
Ninivaggi
How T.G.I. Fridays became the first singles bar in New York City and changed American happy hour culture forever.
SLATE
You Should Worship Kelly Slater by Matt Feeney
The best surfer in the world, why he should be a bigger star, and the reasons he isn't.
Science, Religion & Human Nature
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THE NATION
Postcard From Palestine by Christopher Hayes
A dispatch from Hebron - a Palestinian city with an Israeli settlement in its midst.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In Chile, The Lessons Of Isolation by Theodore Dalrymple
A meditation on social pressure, and how it can be conducive to virtue as well as vice.
THE OBSERVER
The Little Pill That Could Cure Alcoholism by James Medd
Is alcoholism "a physical condition with a spiritual solution," as Alcoholics Anonymous has long insisted? Dr Olivier Ameisen no longer thinks so - having successfully ended his own debilitating addiction, he thinks he's found a revolutionary cure for the disease in the form of a widely available pill.
TEXAS OBSERVER
He Who Casts The First Stone by Forrest Wilder
In Amarillo, a militant Christian group is targeting the city's swingers with a campaign of constant harassment - and they say that the gay bars, strip clubs and porn shops may be next.
ESQUIRE
Invasion by Tom Junod
The subject is ants: "If you think the numbers sound like abstractions, if you wonder what deranged census-taker came to the conclusion that in the shadow of each and every human being there lives a hidden host of 1.6 million, well, that only means you haven't attempted the experiment of peacefully coexisting with them."
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
Solitude And Leadership by William Deresiewicz
What America lacks is leaders who are capable of deep, original thinking.
THE AMERICAN INTEREST
Understanding Corruption by Lawrence Rosen
In the United States, the norms that influence how we conceive of corruption are far different than what prevails in the Middle East - and our efforts in the region are doomed to failure until we understand that.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Should We Clone Neanderthals? by Zach Zorich
As scientists decode their genome, a look at the scientific, legal, and ethical obstacles to bringing them back from extinction.
MILITARY HISTORY QUARTERLY
Holy Terror: The Rise Of The Order Of The Assassins by Jefferson Gray
For almost two centuries, The Order Of The Assassins "played a singular and sinister role in the Middle East," terrifying enemies through their own brand of asymmetric warfare.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Night by Tony Judt
A man with Lou Gehrig's disease explains why getting through it is so trying.
VANITY FAIR
The Genesis 2.0 Project by Kurt Anderson
The Large Haldron Collider "exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless." A look at the secrets physicists hope it will unlock.
THE ATLANTIC
Autism's First Child by John Donvan and Karen Zucker
The life story of the first person ever diagnosed with autism - and the hope his long, happy life holds for the one in 110 children who suffer from the condition.
On Birth, Death, & The Afterlife
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MOTHER JONES
Inside India's Rent-A-Womb Business by Scott Carney
Wealthy Western couples are flocking to India, where the medical tourism industry is offering the best deal on a vital commodity: wombs.
THE ATLANTIC
Letting Go of My Father by Jonathan Rauch
"The author found himself utterly unprepared for one of life's near certainties--the decline of a parent." And then he discovered that he wasn't alone.
THE NEW YORKER
Letting Go by Atul Gawande
"Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions--and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left."
GQ
Are You Sure You Want To Quit The World? by Nadya Labi
On an Internet message board, an anonymous figure was befriending people contemplating suicide - and pushing them to go through with it.
VANITY FAIR
The Distant Executioner by William Langewiesche
Inside the spooky world of America's warrior sharpshooters, "the sniper's special talents and torments," and how they cope.
AMERICAN SCIENTIST
To See For One's Self by Darin L. Wolfe
The case for cutting more people open after they die, so that we can continue benefiting from a medical procedure that has taught us more about the human body than anything else.
n+1
The Frozen Ladder by Julia Grønnevet
A personal essay.
THE TIMES OF LONDON
The British POW Who Broke Into Auschwitz - And Survived by Jake Wallis Simons
A 91-year-old veteran of World War II reflects on one of the most audacious acts of that conflict - and why he risked his life to bear witness to history.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Until Cryonics Do Us Part by Kerry Howley
Men who want to freeze themselves when they die in hopes of being brought back when technology permits it are provoking a backlash from an unexpected quarter: their wives.
Multimedia Matters
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THE GUARDIAN
On Taking Comic Novels Seriously by Howard Jacobson
"The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect."
THE PARIS REVIEW
The Art Of Non-Fiction Number 3: John McPhee by Peter Hessler
The aged master, arguably the world's best non-fiction writer, reflects on his career and his method.
THE AWL
Seven Years As A Freelance Writer by Richard Morgan
An insider's look at what it's like to write for glossy magazines. You'll envy and pity the writer by the end.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Bully Finds A Pulpit On The Web by David Segal
The ultimate consumer affairs article about what is perhaps the worst customer service in the history of humankind.
CONELRAD ADJACENT
Hiroshima: This Is Your Life by Bill Geerhart
On May 11, 1955, before an audience of millions of viewers, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing was shocked to receive a handshake from the co-pilot who flew the mission to destroy his city.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Generation Why by Zadie Smith
A review of The Social Network. And a meditation on the ways that technology can shape and change how we think and behave toward one another.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Beck Revelation by Mark Lilla
By taking Glenn Beck's ideas seriously, the author gets as close as anyone has to teasing out what motivates the Fox News host and his bizarre brand of cable tv and talk radio.
ESQUIRE
TV's Crowning Moment Of Awesome by Chris Jones
(If you enjoy the piece, also listen to Act Four in this episode of This American Life.)
Terry Kniess performed better than anyone in the long history of The Price Is Right - so well that producers freaked out backstage as he racked up winnings. Was it luck? Skill? Or did he cheat?
The Innovative & Creative
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THE SAN FRANCISCO PANORAMA
Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From Foreclosure is a 28-Year-Old Pakistani American Playright-slash-Attorney who Learned Bankruptcy Law on the Internet? Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You by Wajahat Ali
One of the most fun pieces of the year, despite its subject - a newly minted lawyer trying to help a family save their home.
DEFUNCT
Long Live The Jart by Ander Monson
The avant garde remembrance of a beloved lawn dart.
RADIOLAB
Limits
An investigation into the outer limits of the human body. How far can we push ourselves?
SLATE
Kanye West Has A Goblet by Jonah Weiner
Rather than tell us how the celebrity profile might evolve in the age of Twitter, the author shows us - and gives Gay Talese a run for his money.
SLATE
Please Allow Me To Correct A Few Things by Bill Wyman
An imagined response by Mick Jagger to the recently released Keith Richards memoir. This is Slate at its best: inventive, smart, and spot on in its cultural analysis.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Anosognosic's Dilemma (Parts 1 through 5) by Errol Morris
On the intractable problem of not knowing what you don't know.
THE GUARDIAN
This Is A News Website Article About A Scientific Paper by Martin Robbins
A spot on parody.
Food
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TEXAS MONTHLY
Consider The Oyster by Gary Cartwright
An unparalleled ode to the oyster - and a regretful premonition of its possible demise.
FORTUNE
Inside The Secret World Of Trader Joes by Beth Kowitt
Everything you ever wanted to know about the innovative grocery store chain and its uncanny ability to deliver tasty, original fare at bargain prices.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The 36-Hour Dinner Party by Michael Pollan
Friends. Food. And the ultimate backyard cookout.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Tuna's End by Paul Greenberg
Blue fin tuna can swim as fast as 40 miles per hour, navigate journeys thousands of miles long, and thrive anywhere from the tropics to frigid subarctic seas. Unfortunately, they may not survive long enough to be seen by your grandkids.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Keeping It Kosher by Frank Bruni
An Italian restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn is trying to do something every other institution in that neighborhood has failed at - bringing Hasidic Jews, blacks, and white secular liberals together in one place.
GOURMET LIVE
The Guiltless Pleasure by Rick Bragg
The definitive ode to mayonnaise.
Profiles
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NEW YORK MAGAZINE
The James Franco Project by Sam Anderson
That most rare of magazine features - a celebrity profile with an unfamiliar narrative.
DETAILS
Everything You Know About Mike Tyson Is Wrong by Ivan Solotaroff
Few interviews so adeptly force the reader to confront the fact that our complicity in the fame industry is indefensible.
SLATE
Big Breitbart by Christopher Beam
In a year that saw several profiles of Andrew Breitbart this one was the standout - a look at the man behind the bombast and bullshit.
ESQUIRE
Roger Ebert: The Essential Man by Chris Jones
The defining portrait of America's most famous movie critic, the cancer that cost him his jaw, and the unexpected turn his career has taken after all these years.
THE NEW YORKER
Frat House For Jesus by Peter J. Boyer
The secretive religious organization that ministers to many of Washington DC's most powerful people.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
The Jihadist Next Door by Andrea Elliott
As a 15-year-old, Omar Hammami had just been elected president of his sophomore class at an Alabama high school. A decade later, he was on the eastern edge of Africa leading a brutal Islamist insurgency. Why?
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
The Man The White House Wakes Up To by Mark Leibovich
In Washington DC, an obscure publication by a quirky man is widely read among the ruling class.
GQ
The Comedian's Comedian's Comedian By Amy Wallace
An inquiry into Gary Shandling as comic innovator: it hints at what humor might look like if our cultural obsession with irony makes space for an earnest but sophisticated avant garde.
THE GUARDIAN
Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy by Jon Ronson
Behind the nasty lyrics, the profane antics, and the clown makeup, a Detroit rap duo reveals a two-decade long plot to trick their fans into accepting Jesus as their savior.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD
The Boy From Yazoo City by Andrew Ferguson
If you only read the passage that caused its subject, Haley Barbour, so much trouble, you missed out on the fascinating life story of "Mississippi's favorite son."
This Is A Business
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PLANET MONEY
Dreaming of Plastic Crates in Haiti by Caitlin Kenney
It should have been a simple project: if Haitian mango farmers would just put their fruit in plastic crates they could double their income. In international development, however, nothing is ever that simple.
TEXAS MONTHLY
The Lost Girls by Mimi Swartz
The sex trade is thriving in Houston - and many of the people working in it are little better off than slaves.
NEW YORK
Rachel Uchitel Is Not A Madam by Lisa Taddeo
A peek inside New York City clubs where bottle girls play the role of 21st-century courtesans.
THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY
The Closing Of The Marijuana Frontier by John Gravois
In Mendocino County, California, pot is king - and its cultivators face complications unlike any other American farmers.
THE AWL
My Summer On The Content Farm by Jessanne Collins
How the Web's content farms produce the empty-calorie content that clutters up your Google results.
DESIGN OBSERVER
All Those Numbers: Logistics, Territory and Walmart by Jesse Lecavelier
What the discount retailer - the largest private employer in the United States - can teach us about design and efficiency.
VANITY FAIR
Beware Of Greeks Bearing Bonds by Michael Lewis
"How on earth do monks wind up as Greece's best shot at a Harvard Business School case study?" Michael Lewis descends on the country to find out, and discovers a peculiar brand of fiscal madness.
THE ATLANTIC
God Help You. You're On Dialysis. by Robin Fields
The dirty secret of America's dialysis centers, where kidney patients are needlessly dying.
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
NUMMI by Frank Langfitt
In the mid 1980s, one of Japan's most successful auto-makers willingly shared all the secrets of its success with GM. This is the story of why the company failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Pirates Are Winning! by Jeffrey Gettleman
The celebrity outlaws of Somalia and their brazen, violent, largely successful plunder of global commerce.
THE BELIEVER
Sweatpants in Paradise by Molly Young
A close look at the peculiar environments where we shop.
THE ATLANTIC
Gentrification And Its Discontents by Benjamin Schwartz
Why the Manhattan neighborhoods you love can never last forever.
THE POINT
Predatory Habits by Etay Zwick
A jeremiad against Wall Street and its out-sized place in American life.
CITY JOURNAL
Start-Up City by Ed Glaeser
If you want your city to succeed it's not huge employers you want - it's lots of small entrepreneurs.
SLATE
Tokyo Hooters Girls by Paige Ferrari
"In Japan, food portions are small, women's shoulders are modestly covered, and Pamela Anderson's breasts are not a certified national obsession. This makes Hooters' innuendo-heavy version of family dining an odd fit that the chain's Japan team had to coach into reality."
BLOGGERS OF THE YEAR
- In lively, exquisitely crafted prose, Will Wilkinson offered posts at Democracy In America that managed a rare trifecta: they were provocative, logically sound, and infused with razor sharp wit.
- Glenn Greenwald, Julian Sanchez, Radley Balko and Adam Serwer for their vital work on civil liberties.
- Joe Posnanski for his delightful sports blog.
* * *
This list has improved every year thanks to reader support. If you value this effort - or if you're just a lover of nonfiction - I encourage you to sign up for The Best Of Journalism newsletter. For $1.99 per month, you'll get my recommendations on what to read every week, and occasional editorial treats too. My subscribers include some of the most accomplished writers and editors in American journalism. Finally, congratulations to all the writers and editors who produced this year's winning entries.
27 April 2011
On Private Education
I believe it is beyond important to get off the privatization merry-go-round of higher education now. If economic stability is a national security issue, then we are flirting with something way worse than a terrorist attack or another obscure war. As the great piece by Malcolm Harris in n+1 tells the story - massive, government-guaranteed debt with little or no value being accumulated at an alarming rate by young people who are all ready saddled with the mistakes and profligacy of my generation. “The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it” writes Harris, and quite frankly much of that debt supports inflated administration salaries, corporate stock prices, and profiteering on the ubiquitously marketed fear that anyone without a four year degree is doomed to compete with low wage workers in India and China. Everyone from Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman at the NY Times to the admission shills at University of Phoenix® (NASDAQ APOL) are at least indirectly complicit in convincing us to be afraid.
I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately though. Which job is more likely to be shipped overseas - a junior software engineer or a plumber? A paralegal or an electrician? A financial analyst or carpenter? If my child takes on $200,000 in debt to major in business at a private university and majors in economics is he more likely to get a job than if he becomes a cabinet maker or a master auto mechanic? And when he can’t find a job as an economist, that $200,000 follows him to the grave - federal law does not allow the discharge of education debt under any circumstances (another of the no-banker-left-behind bills that Congress is fond of passing). And even if that degree is from a public university - my alma mater UC Berkeley for example - that is still in excess of $40,000 now just for tuition. Twenty five years ago I paid perhaps $3000 for all four years - no debt when I left. What do you get for 10+ times more now? A multi tens of millions remodel of a football stadium that gets used perhaps ten times a year (and sits atop an earthquake fault judged most likely to rupture first), a multi tens of millions of dollars athletic training center for the exclusive use of “student-athletes” (not physics majors who play volleyball though), and probably the highest paid employee of the State of California’s payroll, football coach Jeff Tedford at close to $3 million per year. Oh, and indebted graduate students teaching most undergraduate classes who had to turn to the UAW to unionize for decent wages and working conditions.
We need the restoration of functional, practical, low-cost public education now. Debt free, tax-payer supported, lightly administered, classroom and research rich education. And we need English majors, Philosophy majors, Art History majors along with engineers, biologists and mathematicians. We don’t need more government guaranteed and supported feeding trough programs for investment bankers and corporate investors.
I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately though. Which job is more likely to be shipped overseas - a junior software engineer or a plumber? A paralegal or an electrician? A financial analyst or carpenter? If my child takes on $200,000 in debt to major in business at a private university and majors in economics is he more likely to get a job than if he becomes a cabinet maker or a master auto mechanic? And when he can’t find a job as an economist, that $200,000 follows him to the grave - federal law does not allow the discharge of education debt under any circumstances (another of the no-banker-left-behind bills that Congress is fond of passing). And even if that degree is from a public university - my alma mater UC Berkeley for example - that is still in excess of $40,000 now just for tuition. Twenty five years ago I paid perhaps $3000 for all four years - no debt when I left. What do you get for 10+ times more now? A multi tens of millions remodel of a football stadium that gets used perhaps ten times a year (and sits atop an earthquake fault judged most likely to rupture first), a multi tens of millions of dollars athletic training center for the exclusive use of “student-athletes” (not physics majors who play volleyball though), and probably the highest paid employee of the State of California’s payroll, football coach Jeff Tedford at close to $3 million per year. Oh, and indebted graduate students teaching most undergraduate classes who had to turn to the UAW to unionize for decent wages and working conditions.
We need the restoration of functional, practical, low-cost public education now. Debt free, tax-payer supported, lightly administered, classroom and research rich education. And we need English majors, Philosophy majors, Art History majors along with engineers, biologists and mathematicians. We don’t need more government guaranteed and supported feeding trough programs for investment bankers and corporate investors.
18 April 2011
The Ghost Park
Eighty percent of Yellowstone's signature whitebark pines are dead, like these, or close to it.
If you think global warming is some distant threat, come visit Yellowstone, our most beloved national park. Acres of trees are dying, trout runs are disappearing, and starving bears are attacking campers. It’s an ecosystem in collapse, and things are only getting worse.
by Paul Solotaroff // photographs by Christopher LaMarca
Before that heartbreaking night at the end of July, she was a ghost bear tramping the backwoods shade, a scared specter at her wit’s end. She and her three cubs, all woefully thin and eking out a diet from grass and shoots, were so unwell that they wore their winter coats through the full, high heat of summer. In a lean year for grizzlies, they stood last in line, going without a solid meal of deer or elk or the staple of Yellowstone’s bears, whitebark pine seeds. Those seeds, rich and fleshy, had grown for centuries on the crowns of the staunchest trees in North America: gnarled, obdurate pines that survived 50-below winters and laughed off killing winds on western peaks. Nothing could slay those trees, neither fire nor ice, until the region started warming around 1980. Now 80 percent of the Rockies’ whitebark pine groves stand dead or dying in ghost-gray swaths, and the bears who ate their fruit and kept out of harm’s way have bumbled down the hills in search of food. Among their number was the sow with three cubs and teats running dry of milk. With winter two months off, she had to somehow bulk up fast or watch her yearlings starve.
To her credit, she hadn’t become a “problem bear,” the park officials’ term for hundreds of hungry grizzlies who venture into town prowling for food. Though Yellowstone’s 600 bears aren’t confined to the park itself — they’re given free run of the greater ecosystem, an area that stretches from central Wyoming to the forests of northern Montana — there simply wasn’t enough alternative food to see all of them through the summer. And while full-grown males have the brawn and bravado to venture off the range in search of meat, a mother grizzly rarely leaves the safety of her turf, lest a wolf pack or another bear kill her cubs. Timidity had its virtues: She wasn’t one of the 80 or so bears shot last year while picking apples off a tree or nosing through trash in someone’s backyard, or given a lethal injection by U.S. Fish and Wildlife vets for grazing on the bluegrass near a school.
Six weeks before, the first shoe dropped. On June 17, an adult male bear (or boar, as they’re called by biologists) killed a veteran hiker who had the wretched luck to cross his path. Erwin Evert, a botanist and and retired science teacher, had spent most of his career studying Yellowstone’s flora and had just brought out his life’s masterwork, the first comprehensive catalog of plants in the area in more than a hundred years. On his daily hike near Wyoming’s Kitty Creek, the easternmost of the park’s gateways, he wandered into a copse where a team of federal researchers had trapped and sedated a bear. Alas, they hadn’t posted warning signs or waited until the boar was sufficiently roused to pad back into the brush. Dazed and in pain (he’d been darted three times with a chemical cognate of PCP, then had blood, teeth, and hair pulled for study reasons), the bear bit Evert through the skull and skittered off; he was shot two days later by marksmen in a chopper who tracked his radio signal. There hadn’t been a bear-caused fatality in the park in 24 years, though given the grim developments of the prior decade — a 10-year run of extreme drought and heat, and a glut of famished grizzlies — the screw was bound to turn. On July 28, it turned again, and this time it wasn’t about human error or the caprices of nature’s law. This time, it was a taste of things to come.
Sometime after midnight on a streamside slope near the northeast end of the park, the sow and her three cubs entered Soda Butte Campground, drawn by the lingering smell of broiled fish. After trying in vain to pry the tamper-proof lids off food bins and garbage cans, the sow poked her nose under the fly of a tent. She bit the leg of its occupant, Ronald Singer, who managed to drive her off with panicked blows. A short while later, around 2:15 am, Deborah Freele awoke in her tent at No. 11 to find the sow gnawing on her arm. She shrieked and fought back, but the bear bit down harder, snapping bones. By now, there was tumult in adjacent sites, people dashing around and honking car horns in warning, and the sow let go of Freele and ran away. A couple of hours later, rangers and deputies scoured the pitch-dark camp. Near the western end, 600 yards from Freele’s tent, they came upon the gnawed remains of a man named Kevin Kammer. Kammer, a medic from Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose lifelong dream was to fish Yellowstone’s streams, had been dragged from his tent, killed by several bites, then consumed from chest to groin. There were several sets of prints on his flattened tent — the sow’s and at least one of her cubs’.
Over the next days and weeks, all manner of havoc ensued. The media descended from as far away as Finland, asking pointed questions about “killer bears” and the safety of the park’s guests. Park Service wardens, who trapped the sow and dispatched her via lethal injection, denounced her as a rogue whose “predatory” act was indefensible but rare. (Her cubs were transported across the state for permanent residence in a zoo.) Test after test was conducted, post-mortem, to establish her motivation. Was she rabid? No. Exotic diseases? None. Maddened by injury or wounds? The federal Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, which took charge of the investigation, needed a month to conclude that there was “no clear explanation for the behavior of this bear,” though a lucid possibility fairly leaped off her chart. Her weight at the time of death was 216 pounds, or about 80 pounds less than average for a full-grown sow. Like her cubs, called malnourished by the zoo’s curator, and countless other bears forced downhill by hunger, she was a forerunner of the turmoil that awaits us all: species pushed to breaking by climate change.
—-
The numbers come at you in a solid wall, wave after wave of peer-reviewed findings, each set worse than the last. The planet, heating steadily since the Industrial Revolution and growing warmer by leaps from 1980 onward, has suffered through 12 of the hottest years in history over the past 20. The decade just completed was the hottest on record, in which worldwide temperatures shot up a half degree. (For comparison, 1 degree was the total gain amassed during the entire 20th century.) The cause is well settled and the consensus broad; only a handful of crackpots and political opportunists deny that heat-trapping gases from fossil fuel burn-off are to blame for the bulk of the warming or insist that the spike is a statistical deviation brought on by cosmic rays and rogue currents.
The sharpest rebuke to the junk-science shills is the disaster now unfolding in the American West. States from the Dakotas on down to Nevada weathered devastating jumps of almost 2 degrees, or roughly double the rate of the planet’s rise. The northern Rocky winters got radically milder, the summers started sooner and were drier and longer, and wildfires burned through vast tracts of timber weeks after the usual fire year ended. The damage to natural resources has outstripped the worst predictions of climate scientists everywhere: Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest reservoirs in the States and the lifeblood of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, respectively, stand half- empty and notching record lows, thanks to shrinking snowmelt. The country’s greatest trout streams have been closed to anglers during parts of eight of the past 10 years, and the keystone trees of the interior West — the aspen, whitebark, and lodgepole pines — are dropping dead in holocaust numbers, felled directly by the surge of heat or by insect infestations spawned by it. And this is a mere prelude to the hellfire that’s coming: a regional warming of as much as seven to 10 degrees by the end of this century, bringing permanent drought plains, coastal tsunamis, and widespread human dispersal. “Without a countershift the equal of the Industrial Revolution, we’ll see mass migrations in our grandkids’ lifetimes,” says Steve Running, a renowned ecologist at the University of Montana and a lead author of the United Nations report on global warming in 2007. “Major cities in the West, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, may have to be abandoned as badlands.”
Running is scarcely an outlier voice. “What we’ve seen out here is like nothing on record, and our tree-ring studies go back a thousand years,” says Jonathan Overpeck, the co-director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona and one of the go-to climate scientists in the country. “The winters are shorter, the snowpacks melt early, and the drying seasons are longer and hotter, which leads to terrible wildfires and tree death. One of the many things that worry me, as the heat increases, is that this region becomes a second Outback. Already, our water supply is severely strained, and with decade-long droughts like the one we’re in now, it’s hard to see how we’ll avoid it.”
If the West is ground zero for the unholy experiment being conducted on weather shifts, then Yellowstone is first up on the blasting range. The oldest and most magical of our national parks, its 2 million acres stretch to three states, boast a spectacular chain of rivers, lakes, and creeks, and sit, a vast chunk of them, on a supervolcano that spawns half the world’s geysers and hot springs. Among the last menageries of charismatic wildlife in the northern temperate zone, its grasslands feed herds of wapiti, moose, and bison, which in turn feed grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions — a matchless array of sovereign predators. Four million people visit the park each year to fish its waters, run its trails, and climb its summits; to get anywhere near the top of the Gallatin Mountains and look down on those silver-backed buttes and falls is to know, in your bones, what beauty is. There is grandeur on all sides of you, but graveyards, too: mile after mile of zombified forests, dead from the roots but still standing.
One very warm week in early October, I took a four-day tour of Yellowstone’s peaks and ravines with people who love the park dearly. My principal guide, an attorney named Matt Skoglund, was a rising star at a law firm in Chicago until he shucked it, in ’08, to become a wildlife advocate, taking a job in Montana with the Natural Resources Defense Council at a fraction of his former wages. The NRDC, along with partner nonprofits like Earthjustice and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, has led the fight against climate change and its collateral damage. It has sued the federal government on behalf of bears, funded a landmark study on the collapse of alpine woods, and released a report on the warm-up in the West that reads like slasher sci-fi but isn’t.
Matt Skoglund finds evidence of beetles, once killed by freeze, that are destroying the trees.
Skoglund, a supremely fit Ironman entrant who fell hard for the area on college fishing trips, has learned this landscape the honest way: by power-hiking its hills and rowing its rapids. Giving me a day to reset my lungs to the air at elevation (Yellowstone’s low point is a mile above sea level; its mountains can reach 11,000 feet), he arranged for a bird’s-eye view of the park, flying in a pilot from Colorado. The wind was flapping hard when we boarded a Cessna at an airfield near the town of West Yellowstone. Bruce Gordon, who’s flown and photographed the West to document the damage done over the course of the past two decades, punched through thermal gusts as we banked and wobbled over the park’s western rim. Below us were tracts of aspens framing Hebgen Lake, their gold crowns bending in the breeze. I started to praise their beauty, but Gordon stopped me: “Those are dead trees that rusted out. The drought and heat stressed them; then the bugs and spores killed them. From here to Colorado, there’s miles of aspens gone, and for all we know, they’ll never grow back again.”
Indeed, in five years, more than half a million acres of young and old aspens in the Rockies have been nuked. The phenomenon is so new that it’s inspired an acronym (SAD, or Sudden Aspen Death) but no clear means of reversal. Beetles and borer larvae, rarely seen at these elevations, have moved up the Rockies as the winters have warmed and feasted on the pulp of these regal trees. “Strip the bark,” said Skoglund, “and you’ll see tracks and channels where they’ve set up shop by the thousands. Then fungi enter through the holes the beetles carve and finish off the trees through infections.”
Flying north, over the foothills of the Madison Range, we passed lodgepole pines whose evergreen crowns were the color of undercooked lamb. Shaped like closed umbrellas at a hundred feet tall, these, too, were desecrated by beetles, who carry in their mouths a vicious bacteria that drains the trees of sap and nutrients. Beyond the sick lodgepoles were legions of dead ones, their gray trunks tinder for trouble. Though Yellowstone’s fire season used to end in September, three big blazes raged that morning, having burned through the weekend unchecked. “With winters ending early and summers stretching longer, you’re getting bone-dry conditions that last for months,” says Gordon, who, as founder of the nonprofit EcoFlight, flew arborists over Yellowstone dozens of times to compile the data on whitebark-pine death for the NRDC. “With all this deadwood, a couple of lightning strikes and there go thousands of acres.”
In years of normal climate, or what used to pass for normal, summer fires served as reset buttons, purging old trees to make way for young ones and clearing new groves for herds to graze. But the decade of high heat here has set the stage for cataclysm: superfires that leap past all containment. Montanans speak grimly of the summer of 2000, when the Bitterroot National Forest lost a fifth of its acres to 100 new fires a day, and of 1988, when a third of Yellowstone’s trees were devoured in a months-long inferno. Dire though those were, things could have been worse. “The Big Blowup of 1910 basically leveled Montana, burning everything in sight, including towns,” said Skoglund. “Everything’s in place for another fire-of-the-century event. All we’ve lacked — so far — is gale winds.”
Past the town of Gardiner, we crossed the Gallatin Mountains, their brown pates glinting like copper pots. Twenty years ago, these peaks were crowned with snow no later than mid-October and, packing drifts up to 10 feet, were closed to hikers. Now people climb them in shorts and Tevas clear through Columbus Day. Gordon swooped in closer, to a couple hundred yards of the tree line; there, as ragged as week-old stubble, stood vistas of whitebark pine. Even in health, they are queer-shaped things — tall, gnarled stalks screwed into the hill, with crowns like Druids’ hoods. These were far from well, though, either draped in red (dying) or the end-stage gray of rigor mortis. “Seven years ago, this was solid green. Now it’s all deadfall and ashes,” muttered Gordon. “It’s like the roof’s blown off and the animals have fled. But where do they go — where do any of us go — when it’s all this gray down there?”
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The roof’s blown off. There’s a hole in the ceiling. In the course of my reporting, I heard versions of those tropes from half a dozen eco-literate people. It’s a resonant image but precisely wrong: The roof isn’t porous. It’s padded.
Suspended over the Earth, like the bolt of cheap foam that underlies a living-room rug, are trillions of gas molecules that shake when light hits them, creating heat and sending it earthward. Those molecules, produced by natural activities like plant respiration and volcanoes, have hung there since the planet became livable, post–Ice Age; absent carbon dioxide, methane, and other dense vapors, Palm Springs would still be permafrost. And as we’ve learned by drilling holes into Arctic ice sheets to read their chemical profiles, the ratio of those particles had held remarkably firm for 10,000 years or so, balancing the energy retained from the sun with the amount sent back into space. But since the construction, in 1750, of the first coal-fired factories (and the invention, a century later, of the internal-combustion engine), the density of greenhouse gases has increased by a third, holding in much of the solar radiation that bounces off sidewalks and snowcaps. This set up a vicious feedback loop, in which the extra heat was reflected down into the soil or got stored in those giant holding vats, our oceans. “If we could somehow scale back carbon, we’d still stay hot for centuries, manifesting the energy trapped in seas,” says Running, the University of Montana ecologist. “But if we don’t scale it back, we’ll soon cross a threshold where all of the sea ice melts — and then there’s no telling how high the oceans will get or any known way to make it stop.”
For eons, nature balanced its own emissions by capturing some of the gases in carbon sinks like marshes, soil, and forests. Trees are particularly deft sponges of carbon: Their leaves or needles convert it to sugars that feed them from crown to root, and they go on sopping up noxious particles until they rot, burn down, or get logged. But when clear-cutting commenced on a massive scale in the middle of the 19th century, the planet doubled down on its carbon load, making much more and trapping less. Roughly half the world’s woodlands have vanished since then. There’s a net loss the size of Greece each year — and no effort under way to start replanting.
I was thinking about that when I stopped on a knoll halfway up the spine of the Gallatin Mountains. It was a masterpiece day, the sky spit-shined of haze, the air so clear it crackled. We’d hiked all morning up trails of steep scree and toeholds of bone-dry sage, and now, looking up from 8,000 feet, Skoglund pointed to the carpet of forest rising from our ledge. “Listen,” he said. “Do you hear what I hear?”
I craned my ear but heard nothing.
“Exactly,” he said. “It’s peak time for wildlife, and nothing’s stirring up here. These woods should be packed with birds and squirrels filling their larders for winter, and loads of bear scat as the grizzlies come up and scour for seeds before denning. Instead, they’re still down there looking for food, and here it’s just pin-drop quiet.”
We’d been told, hours earlier, about low-ranging bears when we drove to the B Bar Ranch in Tom Miner Basin. “Seen a bunch of ’em in the meadows,” warned Mark Waite, the manager, before we began our ascent through the hills behind his spread. “Have your bear spray out, ready to rock and roll. It’s crazy around here these days.”
On the hard trek up, we’d encountered no bears, though a mound of recent droppings at 7,000 feet suggested we’d missed one within the day. Now, as we knocked off lunch on the knoll and pushed toward 9,000 feet, the woods closed in again, walling off light and cloaking us in noonday gloom. We’d entered whitebark country, a cathedral of stern shapes that starts at elevations of 8,500 feet. In front of us, stripped of their bark and cones, were ash-gray corpses of centuries-old pines, their trunks contorted like petrified demons fleeing from the wind. Further on were clumps of newly killed trees, their dull bark dotted by purulent holes where beetles bored in to attack. The white stains signified attempts by the trees to save themselves from bugs; when beset by invaders, they exude a pasty resin to try to flush them out. But they were overmatched by the scope of the onslaught: thousands of bore holes on every trunk, where adult and larval insects arrived in swarms to eat their way down to the heartwood.
Hatchet in hand, Skoglund chipped at the bark. It broke off easily, in two-foot strips, and there, in the pinkish pulp of the tree, was a series of trenches, called galleries, that the beetles had furrowed as their base of operations. Devouring the sap-rich tissue of the trunk, they had bled these pines of the carbon-based sugars that fed them from the needles down and infected the trees with a microbe called blue-stain fungus that choked off circulation. It took 60 to 80 years for these slow-growing giants to sprout their first cones and reproduce — and all of five days for the winged marauders to suck the life from them. With the tip of my pinkie, I dug one out of its quarter-inch-wide trench. Though dead at least a year, it stuck to my nail, a speck of black malevolence in a dusty shell.
“Mountain beetles have been here forever, but they could never stick it out at this elevation,” said Skoglund. “Every winter would have cold snaps of 50 below, which wiped out any bugs inside the trunks. But now it only drops to 20 below, max, and beetles can easily live through that — their larvae produce a kind of antifreeze that protects them to 30 below.”
We hiked another hour toward Packsaddle Peak, the split-rock summit high above tree line on the humpbacked mountain. The farther we went, though, the bleaker things got: stand after stand of rust-colored pine, the red hue both a last sign of life and a coating of bug-shit and sawdust. Equally distressing was the absence of birds — most important, Clark’s nutcrackers, who built these woods. Unlike other pines, whitebarks can’t spread their seeds, which are locked inside tightly woven cones. For that they need nutcrackers to pierce the cones, then bury the seeds under the rocky soil to eat at a later time. It’s an arrangement that’s served everyone well for eons: The birds get a store of food for the winter, new pines are born from the seeds they forget, and at the end of every summer, so many new cones have sprouted that bears swarm up here to raid the stashes that red squirrels hide in the dirt. But the few healthy trees now were far too young to produce and drop their seeds, and the only cones we saw were decomposed husks that lay on the ground like mulch. “We’ve lost lots of pine before in abnormally hot spells like the 1930s and ’70s,” says Jesse Logan, a retired Forest Service scientist who’s one of the world’s foremost whitebark experts, “but it always came back when the weather cooled because the nutcrackers stuck around. This time it’s different, because we won’t be cooling down, and with no seeds to eat, they’ll find other places to live. That’ll be the final knell for whitebark.”
Logan, in tandem with other top-shelf arborists, is trying very hard to stave that off. He’s lent his legwork and expertise to an NRDC petition to get whitebark protected under the Endangered Species Act. If the plea is granted, a federal recovery plan will be drafted and funded to try to salvage these forests. Not that anyone knows how to do that or whether it’s still feasible. “Whitebark evolved to fight cold, not beetles, and there’s nothing we can spray or rub on pines to drive the beetles out,” says Logan. “We could maybe breed these trees on north-facing slopes, which stay colder because there’s no direct sun, or see if there’s potential in a small group of whitebark whose resin is truly toxic to beetles. But either of those projects would be very expensive and take political vision, and I’m not sure that we’ve got either.”
Indeed, if the fight to save bears is any model, it’s going to be a hard sell for whitebark. In 2007, Fish and Wildlife decided, by fiat, to take Yellowstone’s grizzlies off the endangered species list, saying it had met its recovery goals by more than doubling their population in 30 years. Only a swift lawsuit by Earthjustice and NRDC prevented trophy hunters in Wyoming and Montana from immediately shooting bears in the park. The case slogged through federal court, where, in 2009, a district judge dealt the feds an emphatic drubbing, saying their scientists had misread their own studies and that the bears were endangered — by whitebark loss. That relisting incensed Fish and Wildlife and its big-game backers, who appealed. A decision on grizzlies is expected this summer, but what’s clear already is the derision in which government officials hold the ESA. “It costs them billions to protect and count the bears and prevents them from building subdivisions or drilling for gas where bears roam for food,” says naturalist Doug Peacock, who spent most of two decades living with Yellowstone’s bears and wrote the now classic Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness. “Whether it’s Bush or Obama or the state game commission, they hate having their hands tied from doing business as usual, and no animal or stupid pine tree is going to stop them.”
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In the end, of course, there won’t be a national day of mourning if or when the whitebark dies out. It’s a commercially useless tree, too far up to interest loggers or summon camera-snapping tourists from Dallas. Furthermore, those forests won’t remain bare long; at some point, firs and spruces will move up to replace them, chased higher by the ever-building heat. Much like the grizzly bears that its seeds support, whitebark registers as a low-end worry in an age of uppercase dread. Why would anyone underwater on his mortgage in Tucson expend a moment’s thought on the matter?
Well, for starters, that house in Tucson (and Denver and San Diego) will be worthless when the spigots run dry. Among its unsung virtues, whitebark shelters the shrinking snowpack that feeds the water table in the West. Without the deep shade of its wide-armed canopy, the high snow would melt in torrents each spring, causing floods and mud slides in April and May and hellacious drought each summer. “In hydrology, when is as crucial as how much; you need slow, regular runoff that lasts you through August, when reservoirs are drained and farms need water,” says Running. “An inch of snow is worth five of rain, because snow soaks deeper and evaporates slower. But with temperatures rising, we’ll get less and less snow — to the point where it’ll only stick in the high mountains.”
With low levels, rivers are often closed to anglers.
Second, whitebark matters to the millions of people who fish the gin-clear waters of the Rockies. Early, heavy snowmelt makes for raging spring rapids — and streams too thin to fly-fish by mid-August. On a daylong boat float down the Yellowstone River with Skoglund and Laura Ziemer, an attorney who directs the Montana Water Project — an initiative of the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, which preserves and restores fisheries — I learned firsthand about the impact of warming on the region’s signature species, the cutthroat trout. “We’ve seen massive fish-kills since the serious heat-up started a decade ago,” said Ziemer. “As cold-water fish who’ve spent centuries here in 50- or 60-degree streams, the cuts can’t adapt to late-summer waters that hit 80 degrees and higher.” Rivers have been closed to anglers for weeks, trout populations have taken a staggering hit, and the thousands of outfitters who depend on fish “got kicked in the teeth,” said Ziemer. Her organization has teamed with ranchers and Forest Service officials to offset some of the damage, resuscitating streams where cutthroats lay their eggs and modernizing water use on farms. But the changes in the environment are too systemic to be rolled back by grassroots groups alone. Says Craig Matthews, owner of the world-famous Blue Ribbon Flies, the go-to hook-and-bait shop in West Yellowstone: “We used to have 30 frost-free nights a year. Now it’s 70, so the water gets hot and doesn’t drop down after dark. Everywhere you look, these fish are pushed to the edge — and you can go right on up the line with other species.”
One of those species is the grizzly. The park’s bears used to fish for trout at the end of summer before heading up the hills to gorge on pine seeds. Now they’re reduced to squirrels and berries and the occasional road-kill deer. A hundred years ago, there were roughly 50,000 bears living west of the Mississippi River. These days, there are maybe 1,500, and it’s hard to imagine how Yellowstone’s bruins will make it to the end of this century. So desperate have they become that they run toward gunfire, having learned that hunters leave gut piles after a kill. Their main chance may lie in one day quitting the park and heading north toward the Yukon Territory. There’s a consensus building among wildlife groups to try to carve out a corridor to western Canada, in which bears, wolves, and lynx could come and go freely, roaming where there’s food and cover. It’s a plan fraught with peril — they’d have to cross three states, four superhighways, and two Canadian provinces — and opposed by a formidable cast of lobbies, primarily big ranchers and mining firms. But the winters there are arctic, the forests are robust, and the glacier-fed lakes teem with fighting trout and pike the size of beagles. We owe our bears nothing less than safe passage there, after trashing their habitat here. They’d better start now, though, to beat the rush. We’ll all be heading north soon enough.
If you think global warming is some distant threat, come visit Yellowstone, our most beloved national park. Acres of trees are dying, trout runs are disappearing, and starving bears are attacking campers. It’s an ecosystem in collapse, and things are only getting worse.
by Paul Solotaroff // photographs by Christopher LaMarca
Before that heartbreaking night at the end of July, she was a ghost bear tramping the backwoods shade, a scared specter at her wit’s end. She and her three cubs, all woefully thin and eking out a diet from grass and shoots, were so unwell that they wore their winter coats through the full, high heat of summer. In a lean year for grizzlies, they stood last in line, going without a solid meal of deer or elk or the staple of Yellowstone’s bears, whitebark pine seeds. Those seeds, rich and fleshy, had grown for centuries on the crowns of the staunchest trees in North America: gnarled, obdurate pines that survived 50-below winters and laughed off killing winds on western peaks. Nothing could slay those trees, neither fire nor ice, until the region started warming around 1980. Now 80 percent of the Rockies’ whitebark pine groves stand dead or dying in ghost-gray swaths, and the bears who ate their fruit and kept out of harm’s way have bumbled down the hills in search of food. Among their number was the sow with three cubs and teats running dry of milk. With winter two months off, she had to somehow bulk up fast or watch her yearlings starve.
To her credit, she hadn’t become a “problem bear,” the park officials’ term for hundreds of hungry grizzlies who venture into town prowling for food. Though Yellowstone’s 600 bears aren’t confined to the park itself — they’re given free run of the greater ecosystem, an area that stretches from central Wyoming to the forests of northern Montana — there simply wasn’t enough alternative food to see all of them through the summer. And while full-grown males have the brawn and bravado to venture off the range in search of meat, a mother grizzly rarely leaves the safety of her turf, lest a wolf pack or another bear kill her cubs. Timidity had its virtues: She wasn’t one of the 80 or so bears shot last year while picking apples off a tree or nosing through trash in someone’s backyard, or given a lethal injection by U.S. Fish and Wildlife vets for grazing on the bluegrass near a school.
Six weeks before, the first shoe dropped. On June 17, an adult male bear (or boar, as they’re called by biologists) killed a veteran hiker who had the wretched luck to cross his path. Erwin Evert, a botanist and and retired science teacher, had spent most of his career studying Yellowstone’s flora and had just brought out his life’s masterwork, the first comprehensive catalog of plants in the area in more than a hundred years. On his daily hike near Wyoming’s Kitty Creek, the easternmost of the park’s gateways, he wandered into a copse where a team of federal researchers had trapped and sedated a bear. Alas, they hadn’t posted warning signs or waited until the boar was sufficiently roused to pad back into the brush. Dazed and in pain (he’d been darted three times with a chemical cognate of PCP, then had blood, teeth, and hair pulled for study reasons), the bear bit Evert through the skull and skittered off; he was shot two days later by marksmen in a chopper who tracked his radio signal. There hadn’t been a bear-caused fatality in the park in 24 years, though given the grim developments of the prior decade — a 10-year run of extreme drought and heat, and a glut of famished grizzlies — the screw was bound to turn. On July 28, it turned again, and this time it wasn’t about human error or the caprices of nature’s law. This time, it was a taste of things to come.
Sometime after midnight on a streamside slope near the northeast end of the park, the sow and her three cubs entered Soda Butte Campground, drawn by the lingering smell of broiled fish. After trying in vain to pry the tamper-proof lids off food bins and garbage cans, the sow poked her nose under the fly of a tent. She bit the leg of its occupant, Ronald Singer, who managed to drive her off with panicked blows. A short while later, around 2:15 am, Deborah Freele awoke in her tent at No. 11 to find the sow gnawing on her arm. She shrieked and fought back, but the bear bit down harder, snapping bones. By now, there was tumult in adjacent sites, people dashing around and honking car horns in warning, and the sow let go of Freele and ran away. A couple of hours later, rangers and deputies scoured the pitch-dark camp. Near the western end, 600 yards from Freele’s tent, they came upon the gnawed remains of a man named Kevin Kammer. Kammer, a medic from Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose lifelong dream was to fish Yellowstone’s streams, had been dragged from his tent, killed by several bites, then consumed from chest to groin. There were several sets of prints on his flattened tent — the sow’s and at least one of her cubs’.
Over the next days and weeks, all manner of havoc ensued. The media descended from as far away as Finland, asking pointed questions about “killer bears” and the safety of the park’s guests. Park Service wardens, who trapped the sow and dispatched her via lethal injection, denounced her as a rogue whose “predatory” act was indefensible but rare. (Her cubs were transported across the state for permanent residence in a zoo.) Test after test was conducted, post-mortem, to establish her motivation. Was she rabid? No. Exotic diseases? None. Maddened by injury or wounds? The federal Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, which took charge of the investigation, needed a month to conclude that there was “no clear explanation for the behavior of this bear,” though a lucid possibility fairly leaped off her chart. Her weight at the time of death was 216 pounds, or about 80 pounds less than average for a full-grown sow. Like her cubs, called malnourished by the zoo’s curator, and countless other bears forced downhill by hunger, she was a forerunner of the turmoil that awaits us all: species pushed to breaking by climate change.
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The numbers come at you in a solid wall, wave after wave of peer-reviewed findings, each set worse than the last. The planet, heating steadily since the Industrial Revolution and growing warmer by leaps from 1980 onward, has suffered through 12 of the hottest years in history over the past 20. The decade just completed was the hottest on record, in which worldwide temperatures shot up a half degree. (For comparison, 1 degree was the total gain amassed during the entire 20th century.) The cause is well settled and the consensus broad; only a handful of crackpots and political opportunists deny that heat-trapping gases from fossil fuel burn-off are to blame for the bulk of the warming or insist that the spike is a statistical deviation brought on by cosmic rays and rogue currents.
The sharpest rebuke to the junk-science shills is the disaster now unfolding in the American West. States from the Dakotas on down to Nevada weathered devastating jumps of almost 2 degrees, or roughly double the rate of the planet’s rise. The northern Rocky winters got radically milder, the summers started sooner and were drier and longer, and wildfires burned through vast tracts of timber weeks after the usual fire year ended. The damage to natural resources has outstripped the worst predictions of climate scientists everywhere: Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest reservoirs in the States and the lifeblood of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, respectively, stand half- empty and notching record lows, thanks to shrinking snowmelt. The country’s greatest trout streams have been closed to anglers during parts of eight of the past 10 years, and the keystone trees of the interior West — the aspen, whitebark, and lodgepole pines — are dropping dead in holocaust numbers, felled directly by the surge of heat or by insect infestations spawned by it. And this is a mere prelude to the hellfire that’s coming: a regional warming of as much as seven to 10 degrees by the end of this century, bringing permanent drought plains, coastal tsunamis, and widespread human dispersal. “Without a countershift the equal of the Industrial Revolution, we’ll see mass migrations in our grandkids’ lifetimes,” says Steve Running, a renowned ecologist at the University of Montana and a lead author of the United Nations report on global warming in 2007. “Major cities in the West, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, may have to be abandoned as badlands.”
Running is scarcely an outlier voice. “What we’ve seen out here is like nothing on record, and our tree-ring studies go back a thousand years,” says Jonathan Overpeck, the co-director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona and one of the go-to climate scientists in the country. “The winters are shorter, the snowpacks melt early, and the drying seasons are longer and hotter, which leads to terrible wildfires and tree death. One of the many things that worry me, as the heat increases, is that this region becomes a second Outback. Already, our water supply is severely strained, and with decade-long droughts like the one we’re in now, it’s hard to see how we’ll avoid it.”
If the West is ground zero for the unholy experiment being conducted on weather shifts, then Yellowstone is first up on the blasting range. The oldest and most magical of our national parks, its 2 million acres stretch to three states, boast a spectacular chain of rivers, lakes, and creeks, and sit, a vast chunk of them, on a supervolcano that spawns half the world’s geysers and hot springs. Among the last menageries of charismatic wildlife in the northern temperate zone, its grasslands feed herds of wapiti, moose, and bison, which in turn feed grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions — a matchless array of sovereign predators. Four million people visit the park each year to fish its waters, run its trails, and climb its summits; to get anywhere near the top of the Gallatin Mountains and look down on those silver-backed buttes and falls is to know, in your bones, what beauty is. There is grandeur on all sides of you, but graveyards, too: mile after mile of zombified forests, dead from the roots but still standing.
One very warm week in early October, I took a four-day tour of Yellowstone’s peaks and ravines with people who love the park dearly. My principal guide, an attorney named Matt Skoglund, was a rising star at a law firm in Chicago until he shucked it, in ’08, to become a wildlife advocate, taking a job in Montana with the Natural Resources Defense Council at a fraction of his former wages. The NRDC, along with partner nonprofits like Earthjustice and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, has led the fight against climate change and its collateral damage. It has sued the federal government on behalf of bears, funded a landmark study on the collapse of alpine woods, and released a report on the warm-up in the West that reads like slasher sci-fi but isn’t.
Matt Skoglund finds evidence of beetles, once killed by freeze, that are destroying the trees.
Skoglund, a supremely fit Ironman entrant who fell hard for the area on college fishing trips, has learned this landscape the honest way: by power-hiking its hills and rowing its rapids. Giving me a day to reset my lungs to the air at elevation (Yellowstone’s low point is a mile above sea level; its mountains can reach 11,000 feet), he arranged for a bird’s-eye view of the park, flying in a pilot from Colorado. The wind was flapping hard when we boarded a Cessna at an airfield near the town of West Yellowstone. Bruce Gordon, who’s flown and photographed the West to document the damage done over the course of the past two decades, punched through thermal gusts as we banked and wobbled over the park’s western rim. Below us were tracts of aspens framing Hebgen Lake, their gold crowns bending in the breeze. I started to praise their beauty, but Gordon stopped me: “Those are dead trees that rusted out. The drought and heat stressed them; then the bugs and spores killed them. From here to Colorado, there’s miles of aspens gone, and for all we know, they’ll never grow back again.”
Indeed, in five years, more than half a million acres of young and old aspens in the Rockies have been nuked. The phenomenon is so new that it’s inspired an acronym (SAD, or Sudden Aspen Death) but no clear means of reversal. Beetles and borer larvae, rarely seen at these elevations, have moved up the Rockies as the winters have warmed and feasted on the pulp of these regal trees. “Strip the bark,” said Skoglund, “and you’ll see tracks and channels where they’ve set up shop by the thousands. Then fungi enter through the holes the beetles carve and finish off the trees through infections.”
Flying north, over the foothills of the Madison Range, we passed lodgepole pines whose evergreen crowns were the color of undercooked lamb. Shaped like closed umbrellas at a hundred feet tall, these, too, were desecrated by beetles, who carry in their mouths a vicious bacteria that drains the trees of sap and nutrients. Beyond the sick lodgepoles were legions of dead ones, their gray trunks tinder for trouble. Though Yellowstone’s fire season used to end in September, three big blazes raged that morning, having burned through the weekend unchecked. “With winters ending early and summers stretching longer, you’re getting bone-dry conditions that last for months,” says Gordon, who, as founder of the nonprofit EcoFlight, flew arborists over Yellowstone dozens of times to compile the data on whitebark-pine death for the NRDC. “With all this deadwood, a couple of lightning strikes and there go thousands of acres.”
In years of normal climate, or what used to pass for normal, summer fires served as reset buttons, purging old trees to make way for young ones and clearing new groves for herds to graze. But the decade of high heat here has set the stage for cataclysm: superfires that leap past all containment. Montanans speak grimly of the summer of 2000, when the Bitterroot National Forest lost a fifth of its acres to 100 new fires a day, and of 1988, when a third of Yellowstone’s trees were devoured in a months-long inferno. Dire though those were, things could have been worse. “The Big Blowup of 1910 basically leveled Montana, burning everything in sight, including towns,” said Skoglund. “Everything’s in place for another fire-of-the-century event. All we’ve lacked — so far — is gale winds.”
Past the town of Gardiner, we crossed the Gallatin Mountains, their brown pates glinting like copper pots. Twenty years ago, these peaks were crowned with snow no later than mid-October and, packing drifts up to 10 feet, were closed to hikers. Now people climb them in shorts and Tevas clear through Columbus Day. Gordon swooped in closer, to a couple hundred yards of the tree line; there, as ragged as week-old stubble, stood vistas of whitebark pine. Even in health, they are queer-shaped things — tall, gnarled stalks screwed into the hill, with crowns like Druids’ hoods. These were far from well, though, either draped in red (dying) or the end-stage gray of rigor mortis. “Seven years ago, this was solid green. Now it’s all deadfall and ashes,” muttered Gordon. “It’s like the roof’s blown off and the animals have fled. But where do they go — where do any of us go — when it’s all this gray down there?”
—-
The roof’s blown off. There’s a hole in the ceiling. In the course of my reporting, I heard versions of those tropes from half a dozen eco-literate people. It’s a resonant image but precisely wrong: The roof isn’t porous. It’s padded.
Suspended over the Earth, like the bolt of cheap foam that underlies a living-room rug, are trillions of gas molecules that shake when light hits them, creating heat and sending it earthward. Those molecules, produced by natural activities like plant respiration and volcanoes, have hung there since the planet became livable, post–Ice Age; absent carbon dioxide, methane, and other dense vapors, Palm Springs would still be permafrost. And as we’ve learned by drilling holes into Arctic ice sheets to read their chemical profiles, the ratio of those particles had held remarkably firm for 10,000 years or so, balancing the energy retained from the sun with the amount sent back into space. But since the construction, in 1750, of the first coal-fired factories (and the invention, a century later, of the internal-combustion engine), the density of greenhouse gases has increased by a third, holding in much of the solar radiation that bounces off sidewalks and snowcaps. This set up a vicious feedback loop, in which the extra heat was reflected down into the soil or got stored in those giant holding vats, our oceans. “If we could somehow scale back carbon, we’d still stay hot for centuries, manifesting the energy trapped in seas,” says Running, the University of Montana ecologist. “But if we don’t scale it back, we’ll soon cross a threshold where all of the sea ice melts — and then there’s no telling how high the oceans will get or any known way to make it stop.”
For eons, nature balanced its own emissions by capturing some of the gases in carbon sinks like marshes, soil, and forests. Trees are particularly deft sponges of carbon: Their leaves or needles convert it to sugars that feed them from crown to root, and they go on sopping up noxious particles until they rot, burn down, or get logged. But when clear-cutting commenced on a massive scale in the middle of the 19th century, the planet doubled down on its carbon load, making much more and trapping less. Roughly half the world’s woodlands have vanished since then. There’s a net loss the size of Greece each year — and no effort under way to start replanting.
I was thinking about that when I stopped on a knoll halfway up the spine of the Gallatin Mountains. It was a masterpiece day, the sky spit-shined of haze, the air so clear it crackled. We’d hiked all morning up trails of steep scree and toeholds of bone-dry sage, and now, looking up from 8,000 feet, Skoglund pointed to the carpet of forest rising from our ledge. “Listen,” he said. “Do you hear what I hear?”
I craned my ear but heard nothing.
“Exactly,” he said. “It’s peak time for wildlife, and nothing’s stirring up here. These woods should be packed with birds and squirrels filling their larders for winter, and loads of bear scat as the grizzlies come up and scour for seeds before denning. Instead, they’re still down there looking for food, and here it’s just pin-drop quiet.”
We’d been told, hours earlier, about low-ranging bears when we drove to the B Bar Ranch in Tom Miner Basin. “Seen a bunch of ’em in the meadows,” warned Mark Waite, the manager, before we began our ascent through the hills behind his spread. “Have your bear spray out, ready to rock and roll. It’s crazy around here these days.”
On the hard trek up, we’d encountered no bears, though a mound of recent droppings at 7,000 feet suggested we’d missed one within the day. Now, as we knocked off lunch on the knoll and pushed toward 9,000 feet, the woods closed in again, walling off light and cloaking us in noonday gloom. We’d entered whitebark country, a cathedral of stern shapes that starts at elevations of 8,500 feet. In front of us, stripped of their bark and cones, were ash-gray corpses of centuries-old pines, their trunks contorted like petrified demons fleeing from the wind. Further on were clumps of newly killed trees, their dull bark dotted by purulent holes where beetles bored in to attack. The white stains signified attempts by the trees to save themselves from bugs; when beset by invaders, they exude a pasty resin to try to flush them out. But they were overmatched by the scope of the onslaught: thousands of bore holes on every trunk, where adult and larval insects arrived in swarms to eat their way down to the heartwood.
Hatchet in hand, Skoglund chipped at the bark. It broke off easily, in two-foot strips, and there, in the pinkish pulp of the tree, was a series of trenches, called galleries, that the beetles had furrowed as their base of operations. Devouring the sap-rich tissue of the trunk, they had bled these pines of the carbon-based sugars that fed them from the needles down and infected the trees with a microbe called blue-stain fungus that choked off circulation. It took 60 to 80 years for these slow-growing giants to sprout their first cones and reproduce — and all of five days for the winged marauders to suck the life from them. With the tip of my pinkie, I dug one out of its quarter-inch-wide trench. Though dead at least a year, it stuck to my nail, a speck of black malevolence in a dusty shell.
“Mountain beetles have been here forever, but they could never stick it out at this elevation,” said Skoglund. “Every winter would have cold snaps of 50 below, which wiped out any bugs inside the trunks. But now it only drops to 20 below, max, and beetles can easily live through that — their larvae produce a kind of antifreeze that protects them to 30 below.”
We hiked another hour toward Packsaddle Peak, the split-rock summit high above tree line on the humpbacked mountain. The farther we went, though, the bleaker things got: stand after stand of rust-colored pine, the red hue both a last sign of life and a coating of bug-shit and sawdust. Equally distressing was the absence of birds — most important, Clark’s nutcrackers, who built these woods. Unlike other pines, whitebarks can’t spread their seeds, which are locked inside tightly woven cones. For that they need nutcrackers to pierce the cones, then bury the seeds under the rocky soil to eat at a later time. It’s an arrangement that’s served everyone well for eons: The birds get a store of food for the winter, new pines are born from the seeds they forget, and at the end of every summer, so many new cones have sprouted that bears swarm up here to raid the stashes that red squirrels hide in the dirt. But the few healthy trees now were far too young to produce and drop their seeds, and the only cones we saw were decomposed husks that lay on the ground like mulch. “We’ve lost lots of pine before in abnormally hot spells like the 1930s and ’70s,” says Jesse Logan, a retired Forest Service scientist who’s one of the world’s foremost whitebark experts, “but it always came back when the weather cooled because the nutcrackers stuck around. This time it’s different, because we won’t be cooling down, and with no seeds to eat, they’ll find other places to live. That’ll be the final knell for whitebark.”
Logan, in tandem with other top-shelf arborists, is trying very hard to stave that off. He’s lent his legwork and expertise to an NRDC petition to get whitebark protected under the Endangered Species Act. If the plea is granted, a federal recovery plan will be drafted and funded to try to salvage these forests. Not that anyone knows how to do that or whether it’s still feasible. “Whitebark evolved to fight cold, not beetles, and there’s nothing we can spray or rub on pines to drive the beetles out,” says Logan. “We could maybe breed these trees on north-facing slopes, which stay colder because there’s no direct sun, or see if there’s potential in a small group of whitebark whose resin is truly toxic to beetles. But either of those projects would be very expensive and take political vision, and I’m not sure that we’ve got either.”
Indeed, if the fight to save bears is any model, it’s going to be a hard sell for whitebark. In 2007, Fish and Wildlife decided, by fiat, to take Yellowstone’s grizzlies off the endangered species list, saying it had met its recovery goals by more than doubling their population in 30 years. Only a swift lawsuit by Earthjustice and NRDC prevented trophy hunters in Wyoming and Montana from immediately shooting bears in the park. The case slogged through federal court, where, in 2009, a district judge dealt the feds an emphatic drubbing, saying their scientists had misread their own studies and that the bears were endangered — by whitebark loss. That relisting incensed Fish and Wildlife and its big-game backers, who appealed. A decision on grizzlies is expected this summer, but what’s clear already is the derision in which government officials hold the ESA. “It costs them billions to protect and count the bears and prevents them from building subdivisions or drilling for gas where bears roam for food,” says naturalist Doug Peacock, who spent most of two decades living with Yellowstone’s bears and wrote the now classic Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness. “Whether it’s Bush or Obama or the state game commission, they hate having their hands tied from doing business as usual, and no animal or stupid pine tree is going to stop them.”
—-
In the end, of course, there won’t be a national day of mourning if or when the whitebark dies out. It’s a commercially useless tree, too far up to interest loggers or summon camera-snapping tourists from Dallas. Furthermore, those forests won’t remain bare long; at some point, firs and spruces will move up to replace them, chased higher by the ever-building heat. Much like the grizzly bears that its seeds support, whitebark registers as a low-end worry in an age of uppercase dread. Why would anyone underwater on his mortgage in Tucson expend a moment’s thought on the matter?
Well, for starters, that house in Tucson (and Denver and San Diego) will be worthless when the spigots run dry. Among its unsung virtues, whitebark shelters the shrinking snowpack that feeds the water table in the West. Without the deep shade of its wide-armed canopy, the high snow would melt in torrents each spring, causing floods and mud slides in April and May and hellacious drought each summer. “In hydrology, when is as crucial as how much; you need slow, regular runoff that lasts you through August, when reservoirs are drained and farms need water,” says Running. “An inch of snow is worth five of rain, because snow soaks deeper and evaporates slower. But with temperatures rising, we’ll get less and less snow — to the point where it’ll only stick in the high mountains.”
With low levels, rivers are often closed to anglers.
Second, whitebark matters to the millions of people who fish the gin-clear waters of the Rockies. Early, heavy snowmelt makes for raging spring rapids — and streams too thin to fly-fish by mid-August. On a daylong boat float down the Yellowstone River with Skoglund and Laura Ziemer, an attorney who directs the Montana Water Project — an initiative of the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, which preserves and restores fisheries — I learned firsthand about the impact of warming on the region’s signature species, the cutthroat trout. “We’ve seen massive fish-kills since the serious heat-up started a decade ago,” said Ziemer. “As cold-water fish who’ve spent centuries here in 50- or 60-degree streams, the cuts can’t adapt to late-summer waters that hit 80 degrees and higher.” Rivers have been closed to anglers for weeks, trout populations have taken a staggering hit, and the thousands of outfitters who depend on fish “got kicked in the teeth,” said Ziemer. Her organization has teamed with ranchers and Forest Service officials to offset some of the damage, resuscitating streams where cutthroats lay their eggs and modernizing water use on farms. But the changes in the environment are too systemic to be rolled back by grassroots groups alone. Says Craig Matthews, owner of the world-famous Blue Ribbon Flies, the go-to hook-and-bait shop in West Yellowstone: “We used to have 30 frost-free nights a year. Now it’s 70, so the water gets hot and doesn’t drop down after dark. Everywhere you look, these fish are pushed to the edge — and you can go right on up the line with other species.”
One of those species is the grizzly. The park’s bears used to fish for trout at the end of summer before heading up the hills to gorge on pine seeds. Now they’re reduced to squirrels and berries and the occasional road-kill deer. A hundred years ago, there were roughly 50,000 bears living west of the Mississippi River. These days, there are maybe 1,500, and it’s hard to imagine how Yellowstone’s bruins will make it to the end of this century. So desperate have they become that they run toward gunfire, having learned that hunters leave gut piles after a kill. Their main chance may lie in one day quitting the park and heading north toward the Yukon Territory. There’s a consensus building among wildlife groups to try to carve out a corridor to western Canada, in which bears, wolves, and lynx could come and go freely, roaming where there’s food and cover. It’s a plan fraught with peril — they’d have to cross three states, four superhighways, and two Canadian provinces — and opposed by a formidable cast of lobbies, primarily big ranchers and mining firms. But the winters there are arctic, the forests are robust, and the glacier-fed lakes teem with fighting trout and pike the size of beagles. We owe our bears nothing less than safe passage there, after trashing their habitat here. They’d better start now, though, to beat the rush. We’ll all be heading north soon enough.
02 April 2011
The Sahara, the Arab chief, my estranged father and me
See also http://register.heritage.wa.gov.au/PDF_Files/U-Z%20-%20A-D/16654%20Wtrmrk%20Kilns%28I-AD%29.PDF -- they ended up in Western Australia
Published on Thursday 24 March 2011 04:03
AS a young woman, Jackie Smart had a taste for adventure.
But when she had to be rescued from an ill-fated African safari led by her estranged father, she made national headlines.
During the group trip, Jackie had already watched a bullfight in Madrid, smoked opium in a Kasbah and caught the eye of an Arab chief who wanted to buy her for nine camels and five goats.
But it was a foolhardy attempt by her father to cross the Sahara in an old Army truck that spelled the end of her adventure.
Jackie now lives in New Zealand. Her daughter, Lesley Eden, who lives in Australia, told the News her mother’s incredible tale.
A 20-year-old typist from Birstall, Jackie had heard about the possibility of a Safari adventure from her then boyfriend, Frank. He had wanted to travel to Africa and had seen a trip advertised.
It was offering places on a six-week drive through Europe and Africa for people who wanted to move to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
When they arrived at the Birstall address given, they discovered the organiser was Jackie’s estranged father, Joseph Russell Smart.
Lesley said: “Russell was very charming and Jackie quite liked him at that time. Russell told them that unfortunately there was only one place left on the trip so Frank insisted Jackie should take the place and spend time with her father.”
The fee was £75, but Mr Smart waived it for his daughter. Also going on the trip were his new wife, Lorna, and their two young children, Gloria, aged nine, and Jack, aged six. The family were hoping to start up a farming business in Rhodesia. Passengers also included 15 ex-servicemen who had all served overseas and had jobs to go back to in Africa.
Lesley said: “Jackie’s mother, Alice, wasn’t happy when she was told but apart from saying she didn’t think it was a good idea, Jackie did end up going. Nothing was said about Russell, so off Jackie went on her safari expedition. She does wonder if her mother had shared her views with her of what Russell was really like, whether she would still have decided to go or not – but then when one is young, we believe we are invincible, and the adventure was the attraction.”
Jackie, now 84, said: “I know I broke my mother’s heart – I was leaving home to go with someone she knew was no good.
“Indeed, I thought he was a charming man, who wanted to try and make up for the fact that he had deserted my mother and left her with two children to provide for and raise.”
The group of 22 adventurers set off from Yorkshire on May 23 1947, aboard an Army truck.
They took a ferry to Calais, toured Paris and traveled down to Spain, visiting Gibraltar on the way.
They arrived in Madrid on June 21, where they watched a bullfight, a spectacle which was too bloodthirsty for Jackie.
The expedition then carried on through Portugal and Morocco.
Lesley said: “Jackie remembers Morocco being very exciting and very different – she recalls that she and some of the group went to a Kasbah, which was an experience unlike anything else she had ever seen. Everyone was smoking cigarettes, hashish and drinking coffee.
“Someone offered her some opium and, even though she was a cigarette smoker and knew that she had an addictive personality, she thought she would be okay to try it.
“However, she knew straight away that it wasn’t for her as she liked it too much and knew how harmful it could be – never again!”
Eleven of the travellers decided to drop out in North Africa, but the rest of the expedition travelled down through French-owned West Africa, which was manned by French troops.
At one outpost they reached, the group decided to speak to a nomadic tribe camped nearby.
Lesley said: “The Arab chief asked everyone to have tea with them which was a social custom; they couldn’t refuse, otherwise it would be taken as bad manners. They sat around the usual low tables and enjoyed their tea and sweetmeats; the conversation was mostly in Arabic so Jackie wasn’t really aware of what was being said, apart from occasional translations from their guide.
“However, she does remember the amosphere changed a little and then got quite frosty.
“Jackie was told later that the Arab chief had taken quite a liking to her and had offered the guide several camels and goats for her to stay and be his wife.”
The last French outpost before the desert began was Fort Trinquet, which they reached on August 1.
Picking up the tale, the Daily Express reported: “A French Lieutenant Colonel gave them a permit to cross the Sahara by the route even the Arabs shun – Tindouf, Fort Trinquet, Fort Gouraud, Atar to Dakar. This route is swept by sudden and violent sandstorms. So dangerous that the French West African authorities will not permit an ‘unconvoyed’ lorry to risk it.
“But the Russell party went on – most unaware of this. They got to Fort Trinquet and were told by the French Commandant, ‘Here you wait until further orders.’ They waited 28 days. Then an officer arrived and said they must return to Agadir at their own expense.”
q In the next Past Times, find out what happened when the group pressed on into the desert regardless of the soldiers’ warnings.
Published on Thursday 24 March 2011 04:03
AS a young woman, Jackie Smart had a taste for adventure.
But when she had to be rescued from an ill-fated African safari led by her estranged father, she made national headlines.
During the group trip, Jackie had already watched a bullfight in Madrid, smoked opium in a Kasbah and caught the eye of an Arab chief who wanted to buy her for nine camels and five goats.
But it was a foolhardy attempt by her father to cross the Sahara in an old Army truck that spelled the end of her adventure.
Jackie now lives in New Zealand. Her daughter, Lesley Eden, who lives in Australia, told the News her mother’s incredible tale.
A 20-year-old typist from Birstall, Jackie had heard about the possibility of a Safari adventure from her then boyfriend, Frank. He had wanted to travel to Africa and had seen a trip advertised.
It was offering places on a six-week drive through Europe and Africa for people who wanted to move to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
When they arrived at the Birstall address given, they discovered the organiser was Jackie’s estranged father, Joseph Russell Smart.
Lesley said: “Russell was very charming and Jackie quite liked him at that time. Russell told them that unfortunately there was only one place left on the trip so Frank insisted Jackie should take the place and spend time with her father.”
The fee was £75, but Mr Smart waived it for his daughter. Also going on the trip were his new wife, Lorna, and their two young children, Gloria, aged nine, and Jack, aged six. The family were hoping to start up a farming business in Rhodesia. Passengers also included 15 ex-servicemen who had all served overseas and had jobs to go back to in Africa.
Lesley said: “Jackie’s mother, Alice, wasn’t happy when she was told but apart from saying she didn’t think it was a good idea, Jackie did end up going. Nothing was said about Russell, so off Jackie went on her safari expedition. She does wonder if her mother had shared her views with her of what Russell was really like, whether she would still have decided to go or not – but then when one is young, we believe we are invincible, and the adventure was the attraction.”
Jackie, now 84, said: “I know I broke my mother’s heart – I was leaving home to go with someone she knew was no good.
“Indeed, I thought he was a charming man, who wanted to try and make up for the fact that he had deserted my mother and left her with two children to provide for and raise.”
The group of 22 adventurers set off from Yorkshire on May 23 1947, aboard an Army truck.
They took a ferry to Calais, toured Paris and traveled down to Spain, visiting Gibraltar on the way.
They arrived in Madrid on June 21, where they watched a bullfight, a spectacle which was too bloodthirsty for Jackie.
The expedition then carried on through Portugal and Morocco.
Lesley said: “Jackie remembers Morocco being very exciting and very different – she recalls that she and some of the group went to a Kasbah, which was an experience unlike anything else she had ever seen. Everyone was smoking cigarettes, hashish and drinking coffee.
“Someone offered her some opium and, even though she was a cigarette smoker and knew that she had an addictive personality, she thought she would be okay to try it.
“However, she knew straight away that it wasn’t for her as she liked it too much and knew how harmful it could be – never again!”
Eleven of the travellers decided to drop out in North Africa, but the rest of the expedition travelled down through French-owned West Africa, which was manned by French troops.
At one outpost they reached, the group decided to speak to a nomadic tribe camped nearby.
Lesley said: “The Arab chief asked everyone to have tea with them which was a social custom; they couldn’t refuse, otherwise it would be taken as bad manners. They sat around the usual low tables and enjoyed their tea and sweetmeats; the conversation was mostly in Arabic so Jackie wasn’t really aware of what was being said, apart from occasional translations from their guide.
“However, she does remember the amosphere changed a little and then got quite frosty.
“Jackie was told later that the Arab chief had taken quite a liking to her and had offered the guide several camels and goats for her to stay and be his wife.”
The last French outpost before the desert began was Fort Trinquet, which they reached on August 1.
Picking up the tale, the Daily Express reported: “A French Lieutenant Colonel gave them a permit to cross the Sahara by the route even the Arabs shun – Tindouf, Fort Trinquet, Fort Gouraud, Atar to Dakar. This route is swept by sudden and violent sandstorms. So dangerous that the French West African authorities will not permit an ‘unconvoyed’ lorry to risk it.
“But the Russell party went on – most unaware of this. They got to Fort Trinquet and were told by the French Commandant, ‘Here you wait until further orders.’ They waited 28 days. Then an officer arrived and said they must return to Agadir at their own expense.”
q In the next Past Times, find out what happened when the group pressed on into the desert regardless of the soldiers’ warnings.
Stranded in the Sahara
Published on Thursday 31 March 2011 02:37
A PARTY of adventurers had driven all the way from Birstall to the Sahara in an old Army truck, only to be detained by French soldiers for their own safety.
Last week we began a tale about an ill-fated road trip to Africa in 1947, in which 22 people had set off in search of a better life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
One of those on board was Jackie Smart, a 20-year-old typist from Birstall, who had answered an advert for the six-week trip.
When she had turned up at the address given, she had discovered that the safari was being led by her estranged father, Joseph Russell Smart, and his new family – wife Lorna, and their two young children, Gloria, aged nine, and Jack, aged six.
She decided to go on the trip to get to know the father who had abandoned her mother years ago.
Jackie now lives in New Zealand. Her daughter, Lesley Eden, who lives in Australia, has been telling the News her mother’s incredible tale, which made national headlines at the time back in the UK.
The party set off on May 23, but it soon became clear they would take longer than six weeks to reach Rhodesia as they drove through France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
Eleven of the passengers dropped out in North Africa, and the rest of the expedition travelled down through French-owned West Africa, which was then manned by French troops.
The last French outpost before the desert began was Fort Trinquet, which they reached on August 1.
Picking up the tale, the Daily Express reported that the party was trying to cross the Sahara by the route even the Arabs shun – a route swept by sudden and violent sandstorms. It was deemed so dangerous that the French West African authorities would not permit an ‘unconvoyed’ lorry to risk it.
They were detained at the French outpost of Fort Trinquet for 28 days. Then an officer arrived and said they must go back the way they came, at their own expense.
The Express reported that Mr Smart refused to go back. He told his party to load the lorry and be ready to leave at dusk, but the French commandant put a guard of 12 armed men around their vehicle.
Mr Smart agreed to put in a request for a convoy to the next French outpost, Fort Gouraud, and the armed guard was lifted. But the group decided to make a break for it instead of waiting for the convoy.
Speaking to the Express, Mr Smart said: “That night - our 25th at Fort Trinquet – we left lights burning in our quarters and moved off while the others were at dinner.
“We bounced along the iron hard sand at full speed – 40mph. We were 15 miles on when we saw we were being pursued. We bumped along for another 20 miles with the moon over my left eyebrow as my only guide before they got within striking distance of us. The commandant, his sergeant major and 10 native soldiers drew alongside in their lorry and the commandant shouted, ‘I’ll shoot your tyres if you don’t stop’.
“Then the soldiers pointed their rifles at us. Then the commandant got ahead and pulled his lorry across our path. He came towards us waving his hand. I swerved around him. The chase was on again. We had bad luck and ran into soft sand. This time the commandant jumped into my cabin.
“‘Come out’, he said. I said, ‘You’ll only get me back to your fort on a stretcher’. We had a fight. Then the Sergeant Major joined in.
“But I used to be a boxer and they had their hands full.
“Mind you, I don’t blame them, they were nice fellows and were only obeying orders.
“Then the soldiers tried to pull my wife out but my daughter, Gloria, (she’s nine) bit their hands.
“The rest of the party rushed at the soldiers and it became a free-for-all. At last the commandant gave up trying to stop us, saying, ‘All you English are mad!’
“Off we went alone, sleeping by day, travelling by night. It took us two days and nights to get to Fort Gouraud and everyone there seemed amazed that we made it.”
At this point, the party, now dubbed the Overlanders by the press, had travelled more than 4,000 miles. The trip had cost £120 a head, much more than the £75 Mr Smart had charged for each place.
Lesley said: “The next day the commandant spoke to the group, strongly suggesting that women and children could leave on a plane if they wished. Jackie decided to leave but had to wait a few days before they were able to be flown to Dakar. They took her to see the British Consul and she stayed with them, until a flight back to the UK could be arranged.”
Jackie had lost a stone and a half in the desert, and was flown back to the UK with another member of the group, clerk Arnold Heppelthwaite.
The rest of the party were determined to continue, as the Express reported: “The others say they are going on to Southern Rhodesia - or bust! Already they have travelled 3,800 miles – 1,500 of them across open desert – in a six-wheeled lorry. They have been held up 52 days on their desert journey. Their money is almost gone.
“But these matter-of-fact Yorkshire people all make light of their troubles.”
n In the next Past Times, find out how the remaining adventurers fared in the Sahara as they continued their epic journey.
A PARTY of adventurers had driven all the way from Birstall to the Sahara in an old Army truck, only to be detained by French soldiers for their own safety.
Last week we began a tale about an ill-fated road trip to Africa in 1947, in which 22 people had set off in search of a better life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
One of those on board was Jackie Smart, a 20-year-old typist from Birstall, who had answered an advert for the six-week trip.
When she had turned up at the address given, she had discovered that the safari was being led by her estranged father, Joseph Russell Smart, and his new family – wife Lorna, and their two young children, Gloria, aged nine, and Jack, aged six.
She decided to go on the trip to get to know the father who had abandoned her mother years ago.
Jackie now lives in New Zealand. Her daughter, Lesley Eden, who lives in Australia, has been telling the News her mother’s incredible tale, which made national headlines at the time back in the UK.
The party set off on May 23, but it soon became clear they would take longer than six weeks to reach Rhodesia as they drove through France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
Eleven of the passengers dropped out in North Africa, and the rest of the expedition travelled down through French-owned West Africa, which was then manned by French troops.
The last French outpost before the desert began was Fort Trinquet, which they reached on August 1.
Picking up the tale, the Daily Express reported that the party was trying to cross the Sahara by the route even the Arabs shun – a route swept by sudden and violent sandstorms. It was deemed so dangerous that the French West African authorities would not permit an ‘unconvoyed’ lorry to risk it.
They were detained at the French outpost of Fort Trinquet for 28 days. Then an officer arrived and said they must go back the way they came, at their own expense.
The Express reported that Mr Smart refused to go back. He told his party to load the lorry and be ready to leave at dusk, but the French commandant put a guard of 12 armed men around their vehicle.
Mr Smart agreed to put in a request for a convoy to the next French outpost, Fort Gouraud, and the armed guard was lifted. But the group decided to make a break for it instead of waiting for the convoy.
Speaking to the Express, Mr Smart said: “That night - our 25th at Fort Trinquet – we left lights burning in our quarters and moved off while the others were at dinner.
“We bounced along the iron hard sand at full speed – 40mph. We were 15 miles on when we saw we were being pursued. We bumped along for another 20 miles with the moon over my left eyebrow as my only guide before they got within striking distance of us. The commandant, his sergeant major and 10 native soldiers drew alongside in their lorry and the commandant shouted, ‘I’ll shoot your tyres if you don’t stop’.
“Then the soldiers pointed their rifles at us. Then the commandant got ahead and pulled his lorry across our path. He came towards us waving his hand. I swerved around him. The chase was on again. We had bad luck and ran into soft sand. This time the commandant jumped into my cabin.
“‘Come out’, he said. I said, ‘You’ll only get me back to your fort on a stretcher’. We had a fight. Then the Sergeant Major joined in.
“But I used to be a boxer and they had their hands full.
“Mind you, I don’t blame them, they were nice fellows and were only obeying orders.
“Then the soldiers tried to pull my wife out but my daughter, Gloria, (she’s nine) bit their hands.
“The rest of the party rushed at the soldiers and it became a free-for-all. At last the commandant gave up trying to stop us, saying, ‘All you English are mad!’
“Off we went alone, sleeping by day, travelling by night. It took us two days and nights to get to Fort Gouraud and everyone there seemed amazed that we made it.”
At this point, the party, now dubbed the Overlanders by the press, had travelled more than 4,000 miles. The trip had cost £120 a head, much more than the £75 Mr Smart had charged for each place.
Lesley said: “The next day the commandant spoke to the group, strongly suggesting that women and children could leave on a plane if they wished. Jackie decided to leave but had to wait a few days before they were able to be flown to Dakar. They took her to see the British Consul and she stayed with them, until a flight back to the UK could be arranged.”
Jackie had lost a stone and a half in the desert, and was flown back to the UK with another member of the group, clerk Arnold Heppelthwaite.
The rest of the party were determined to continue, as the Express reported: “The others say they are going on to Southern Rhodesia - or bust! Already they have travelled 3,800 miles – 1,500 of them across open desert – in a six-wheeled lorry. They have been held up 52 days on their desert journey. Their money is almost gone.
“But these matter-of-fact Yorkshire people all make light of their troubles.”
n In the next Past Times, find out how the remaining adventurers fared in the Sahara as they continued their epic journey.
21 March 2011
Cats on Birds
While public attention has focused on wind turbines as a menace to birds, a new study shows that a far greater threat may be posed by a more familiar antagonist: the pet house cat.
A new study in The Journal of Ornithology on the mortality of baby gray catbirds in the Washington suburbs found that cats were the No. 1 killer in the area, by a large margin.
Nearly 80 percent of the birds were killed by predators, and cats were responsible for 47 percent of those deaths, according to the researchers, from the Smithsonian Institution and Towson University in Maryland. Death rates were particularly high in neighborhoods with large cat populations.
Predation was so serious in some areas that the catbirds could not replace their numbers for the next generation, according to the researchers, who affixed tiny radio transmitters to the birds to follow them. It is the first scientific study to calculate what fraction of bird deaths during the vulnerable fledgling stage can be attributed to cats.
“Cats are way up there in terms of threats to birds — they are a formidable force in driving out native species,” said Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, one of the authors of the study.
The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines. “I hope we can now stop minimizing and trivializing the impacts that outdoor cats have on the environment and start addressing the serious problem of cat predation,” said Darin Schroeder, the group’s vice president for conservation advocacy.
By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, although that number is expected to exceed one million by 2030 as the number of wind farms grows to meet increased demand.
The American Bird Conservancy generally supports the development of wind energy, but it argues that wind farms should be “bird smart” — for example, positioned so that they do not interfere with major migration paths or disturb breeding grounds, with their power lines buried to prevent collisions.
“I’m excited about wind; we just have to be careful where and how we put the turbines,” said Dr. Marra, who studies threats to birds, including from climate change and habitat loss. He said the leading cause of bird deaths over all, as opposed to the catbird fledglings in the study, remained collisions with buildings, windows and towers, followed by predators.
Yet wind turbines often provoke greater outrage than cats do, said Gavin Shire, vice president of the Bird Conservancy. “The idea of a man-made machine chopping a bird in half creates a visceral reaction,” he said, “while the idea of a predator with its prey in its mouth — well we’ve seen that on the Nature Channel. People’s reaction is that it is normal for cats to kill birds.”
Household cats were introduced in North America by European colonists; they are regarded as an invasive species and have few natural enemies to check their numbers. “They are like gypsy moths and kudzu — they cause major ecological disruption,” Dr. Marra said.
A new study in The Journal of Ornithology on the mortality of baby gray catbirds in the Washington suburbs found that cats were the No. 1 killer in the area, by a large margin.
Nearly 80 percent of the birds were killed by predators, and cats were responsible for 47 percent of those deaths, according to the researchers, from the Smithsonian Institution and Towson University in Maryland. Death rates were particularly high in neighborhoods with large cat populations.
Predation was so serious in some areas that the catbirds could not replace their numbers for the next generation, according to the researchers, who affixed tiny radio transmitters to the birds to follow them. It is the first scientific study to calculate what fraction of bird deaths during the vulnerable fledgling stage can be attributed to cats.
“Cats are way up there in terms of threats to birds — they are a formidable force in driving out native species,” said Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, one of the authors of the study.
The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines. “I hope we can now stop minimizing and trivializing the impacts that outdoor cats have on the environment and start addressing the serious problem of cat predation,” said Darin Schroeder, the group’s vice president for conservation advocacy.
By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, although that number is expected to exceed one million by 2030 as the number of wind farms grows to meet increased demand.
The American Bird Conservancy generally supports the development of wind energy, but it argues that wind farms should be “bird smart” — for example, positioned so that they do not interfere with major migration paths or disturb breeding grounds, with their power lines buried to prevent collisions.
“I’m excited about wind; we just have to be careful where and how we put the turbines,” said Dr. Marra, who studies threats to birds, including from climate change and habitat loss. He said the leading cause of bird deaths over all, as opposed to the catbird fledglings in the study, remained collisions with buildings, windows and towers, followed by predators.
Yet wind turbines often provoke greater outrage than cats do, said Gavin Shire, vice president of the Bird Conservancy. “The idea of a man-made machine chopping a bird in half creates a visceral reaction,” he said, “while the idea of a predator with its prey in its mouth — well we’ve seen that on the Nature Channel. People’s reaction is that it is normal for cats to kill birds.”
Household cats were introduced in North America by European colonists; they are regarded as an invasive species and have few natural enemies to check their numbers. “They are like gypsy moths and kudzu — they cause major ecological disruption,” Dr. Marra said.
20 March 2011
MARCH/APRIL 2011
Small Changes, Big Results
Behavioral Economics at Work in Poor Countries Rachel Glennerster and Michael Kremer
This article is part of Small Changes, Big Results, a forum on applying behavioral economics to global development.
According to a standard economic model, a fourteen-year-old girl in Kenya will go to school if doing so will enable her to earn more than she spent on her education. A family will buy dilute-chlorine solution, measure out capfuls to treat their water, and wait for the chlorine to disinfect their water if the health benefits exceed the cost of the chlorine. Since a school uniform that lasts a year or two costs only six dollars, and a month’s supply of chlorine runs about $0.30, these costs should be fairly minor factors. Influenced in part by these arguments, many governments in the developing world and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with development have maintained small charges for education and preventative health care.
However, in recent decades economists have increasingly come to recognize what most of us have long known: human beings don’t always make the best decisions.
A new type of economics, dubbed “behavioral economics,” seeks to understand deviations from the simple “rational agent” model that has dominated economics for most of its history—why people procrastinate, say, or why Americans don’t exercise or save enough.
In the developed world, these ideas are beginning to affect policy. For instance, the Pension Protection Act of 2006 encourages U.S. employers to establish automatic enrollment for retirement plans. Could such approaches help alleviate poverty in developing countries? If policies based on behavioral economics can help Americans save more, could they also help Indian children get vaccinated or Kenyan children get cleaner water?
Evidence from randomized evaluations in the developing world suggests they might. Randomized evaluations, which have been common in medicine for decades, seek to distinguish causes from the myriad other factors that can create correlations among variables. In the development case, researchers implement a program in a few areas and compare the outcomes for participants and non-participants.
Randomized trials have been used to study social and economic conditions in the developed world for some time. In the 1970s the U.S. government conducted large-scale evaluations of a negative income tax and of health insurance. But, while these evaluations were useful, they tended to be expensive one-offs, designed to measure the impact of a single policy with many components, making it difficult to learn in a cumulative way over time.
In 1995 International Child Support, an NGO I (Kremer) was working with, began what became a new wave of smaller-scale evaluations that allowed many different approaches to be compared in one context. NGOs, in contrast to governments, proved to be highly flexible and open to experimenting with new ideas. The new breed of randomized evaluations shed light not just on whether a program worked, but how and why people behave the way they do. Academics and NGOs are now using the lessons of previous evaluations to develop and rigorously test new approaches to development challenges, creating an iterative process of continuous improvement.
In a field that has promoted a great many “big-think” fads, the experimental approach is something different and potentially transformative: it not only produces relatively clear-cut evidence that is hard to ignore, but also forces economists to engage development problems where they play out. On-the-ground experience shows us the realities that might otherwise have been left out of our models.
Randomized evaluation is not without its critics, who say that there is little benefit in learning rigorously about one context because the lessons will not translate into other contexts. In effect, the critics ask, can we generalize about human behavior across countries?
That is an empirical question, and the growing body of evidence is helping us answer it scientifically. Hundreds of randomized evaluations of anti-poverty programs are now being conducted all over the world. While each evaluation is carefully crafted to describe one part of the development puzzle, many pieces are starting to come together.
Like students in the United States writing papers, farmers in Kenya choose to have fewer options.
And we are finding certain patterns that seem consistent across contexts and cultures. For example, even small fees for education or preventative health care appear to reduce adoption. Some of these patterns pose a challenge for conventional economic models and an opportunity for policy innovation. For example, in the rational model, having more time and more options can’t make you worse off: more choice does not reduce your welfare. But it turns out that if you are a procrastinator, you may be better off with a deadline and may prefer to impose a deadline on yourself. In one study, students in the United States and farmers in Kenya both chose to restrict their options. With greater understanding, we might harness these behaviors to improve people’s lives.
Incentivizing Education
A quiet revolution has been going on in education across the developing world. In the 40 years between 1960 and 2000, the portion of secondary school–aged children enrolled in school rose from 14 to 54 percent. Some of the poorest countries have seen the most dramatic changes. According to surveys by the Institutional Reform & Capacity Building Project, only 23 percent of household heads in Sierra Leone in 1990 had any schooling; another study found that, by 2004, 66 percent of the primary school–aged population were in school.
Despite this important progress, there are still 100 million children of primary-school age not enrolled in school and many millions more do not attend regularly. Fortunately this is an area where we have learned a lot about how to design successful and cost-effective programs.
The challenge of getting more children, and particularly more girls, into school can appear a daunting battle against complex local cultural barriers. But it turns out that, in much of the world, simple economics has a powerful and consistent effect. Incentives can make a huge difference.
In 1997 the Mexican government instituted a “conditional cash transfer” program, which provided substantial amounts of money to poor families if they kept their children in school and got them regular health check ups. Pilot communities were picked at random from a list of those in need. The evaluation compared school attendance in participating and non-participating communities and found the program was effective in increasing school enrollment. With a cash transfer of $20 per month to the families of adolescent girls, enrollment of girls in secondary school increased by 14.8 percentage points. Similar programs have been rigorously evaluated in many countries around the world, and school enrollment has risen in every case.
Just understanding the economic benefits of schooling can increase attendance. Informing families about the returns of education increased student enrolment in the Dominican Republic and Madagascar. Providing information is cheap, so this is a highly cost-effective way of increasing school participation in contexts where most families underestimate the benefits of going to school. A study in India suggests that long-held patterns of under-investing in the human capital of girls can change rapidly when the potential economic returns of education for girls change. After recruiters for call centers and similar jobs went to randomly selected villages outside Delhi, families started sending girls to school more, and nutrition of young girls improved, suggesting that development of a white-collar sector may be a powerful driver for greater education and health equality for women in developing countries, just as economic historians have argued it was in the United States.
That people respond to the relative costs and returns of schooling might imply that the poor are optimizing the amount of school they invest in, as predicted in a simple economic model. But evidence suggests that reality is more complex.
Even small incentives and costs have a surprisingly large impact on behavior. In Malawi, where different magnitudes of conditional cash transfers were tried, the smallest incentive was sufficient to achieve the average effect. An evaluation in Kenya found that providing a free school uniform could increase attendance of young children by 6.4 percentage points. There is evidence that covering the cost of school uniforms for adolescent girls not only reduces dropout rates, but also reduces rates of teen pregnancy. Conditional cash transfers can be used to get larger sums of money into the hands of the poor, but if the goal is simply to get children in school, providing smaller transfers to more people in the poorest countries may be the most effective use of resources.
Many economists believe those who most need a product are more likely to pay for it. They’re wrong.
In addition, the timing of costs matters more than would be expected in a simple model. This has been found in education, health, and agriculture in Latin America and Africa. Cash-transfer programs that set aside resources and pay them out when school fees are due induce much higher rates of attendance than do programs that pay out earlier. This also leads to better attendance than scenarios in which the poor cannot borrow and take cash whenever they can get it.
Children are also highly influenced by their peers. Evidence from Mexico and Colombia shows that when conditional cash transfers induce the poor to go to school more, the slightly better off, who are not eligible for the program, also go more, presumably because it’s not much fun being out of school if all your playmates are there. Similarly, in Kenya, when the best-performing girls were offered scholarships, they worked harder and attended school more, as one might expect. But so did boys, teachers, and girls who had no hope of winning the scholarship.
While there is much yet to learn about the relative effects of different pressures and incentives, the broader lesson—that adjustments to timing and small adjustments to costs can have surprisingly large impacts on the effectiveness of a program—appears sound. But does it apply outside the education context?
[Click on chart to enlarge.]
Healthy Choices
As with education, poor countries have made significant gains in health. Life expectancy in virtually every country is higher now than it was in the United States in 1900, even though per capita income in many is a fraction of U.S. per capita income in that year. The invention of health technologies such as vaccines is likely part of the reason. Indeed, randomized trials in medicine have found many health interventions that can improve health at extremely low cost.
But while millions are benefiting from these technologies, their adoption is far from universal. Diarrhea kills 1.8 million children each year. Point-of-use chlorination of drinking water results in a 29 percent reduction in reported cases of diarrhea, yet less than 10 percent of households in sub-Saharan Africa use home chlorination. At least 27 million children and 40 million pregnant women worldwide do not receive basic immunizations. Mosquito nets reduce child mortality by up to 38 percent, but only 19 percent of children in areas where malaria is endemic in Africa sleep under a net. Treatment for parasitic worms, which infect 400 million school-aged children worldwide, cut school absenteeism in Kenya by a quarter, and, in the longer term, generate 20–29 percent higher earnings among those who leave subsistence agriculture for paid employment. But only 10 percent of those at risk of infection are treated.
Strikingly similar patterns of behavior seem to govern the hesitancy to adopt useful health interventions. Many consumers are influenced by small costs—both in cash and in convenience—in their decisions to invest in non-acute care.
Whether soap in India or chlorine for sanitizing drinking water in Kenya, demand for a range of non-acute treatments drops precipitously when a small price is charged. Given how cheap these products are to manufacture and how large the public health benefits of breaking the cycle of disease transmission are, why would anyone consider charging for them? One concern is that free mosquito nets will not be hung up, and free chlorine will never be added to drinking water. Some psychologists and social entrepreneurs have suggested, “If you don’t pay for it, you won’t value it.”
But there is little evidence to support this theory. Studies of demand for non-acute care as a function of price show nothing to suggest that the act of paying for something makes a person more likely to use it. Nor is it the case that those who most need a product are more likely to pay for it: those who purchase mosquito nets are no more likely to be sick at the time of purchase; families with small children, who are most likely to die from diarrhea, are no more likely to buy chlorine. But are those more likely to hang mosquito nets or remember to add chlorine to their water also the ones more likely to pay for it, thus helping avoid waste? There is some evidence in the case of chlorine but none in the case of mosquito nets.
Why are people so sensitive to the prices of non-acute health products? One possibility is that much of the health benefit flows to neighbors as transmission of communicable disease is reduced. As a result, individuals invest less than is desirable for the community as a whole. But the private benefits of chlorination or de-worming pills, for example, seem to exceed the modest costs.
One factor surely at work is lack of ready cash. In a study in Kenya, demand for mosquito nets fell less steeply with price when households were given more time to raise the funds to purchase them.
But lack of funds does not explain why adoption also drops off sharply with small changes in convenience. Researchers, again in Kenya, found that people were, on average, only willing to walk 3.5 minutes longer (round trip) to collect water from a protected spring. Similar observations have been made with regard to iron-fortified flour and HIV test results.
In some cases potential users may lack experience with a product. When offered mosquito nets at a subsidized price, Kenyans who had previously been offered free nets—and their neighbors—were more likely to pay than were those who had previously been offered them at a less-subsidized rate. Most likely, those who took free mosquito nets had a positive experience with them and were therefore more willing to pay for an additional net. This is contrary to the conventional wisdom among development workers that free distribution undermines people’s willingness to pay later.
Giving rural Rajasthani mothers lentils and a set of plates raised full immunization rates from 5% to 38%.
There are many questions remaining about user fees. In particular, we don’t know the impact of fees on the supply side. There are potential downsides to abolishing fees. Small payments can be a source of flexible funding to clinics when governments fail to provide it, and they may motivate workers—who often pocket them—to show up. A key challenge is to test the impact of fees on education and health workers, and to devise approaches to motivating them in a way that prevents consumers engaging in counterproductive behavior. (A number of studies are now focused on this problem.)
We also don’t know enough about how to abolish user fees: many countries have abolished them on paper only to see informal fees creep back. But the significant effect of user fees on rates of adoption is clear.
[Click on chart to enlarge.]
Putting Research To Use These results, from both education and health studies, fit with an emerging consensus from behavioral economics: people are not good at making even small upfront investments in order to obtain a steady stream of modest future benefits. Perhaps the tough decision, however, is not whether to take action, but when. If people place particular weight on costs and benefits today, investing tomorrow always looks preferable—the benefits will still be there in the long run, but the costs will be delayed. The catch is that when tomorrow comes it is again tempting to delay, and yet people fail to anticipate this.
Fortunately, these behavioral theories also suggest a possible solution: small upfront incentives should be effective at changing behavior. Experience bears this out. A program that provided rural Rajasthani mothers a kilogram of lentils each time their children received one stage of an immunization course and a set of plates when the full course was completed raised full immunization rates from 5 percent to 38 percent. Similarly, small payments were enough to increase the percentage of people collecting their HIV test results.
And, as with education, there are examples where information about the costs and benefits of health behaviors can have a big impact. In Kenya, teenagers were given information about the relative likelihood of HIV infection by age—in particular that older men were much more likely to be infected with HIV than younger men. The result was a 65 percent reduction in teen pregnancies by older men (and no increase by younger men). In other cases, providing information is not effective. Teaching children how to prevent worm infections did not change their behavior.
A number of programs have been developed based on our improved understanding of consumer demand for health and education and have themselves undergone rigorous evaluation. The immunization incentive program is one example. This program also included incentives for providers, responding to what we have learned about the supply side of education and health.
Another program inspired by our increasing knowledge of consumer behavior sought to provide clean drinking water to households that collect water from contaminated sources. Despite widespread social marketing, few households buy chlorine for home treatment. This is due in large part to the price, which reflects not just the minimal cost of the chlorine itself, but also the larger costs of packaging and distribution.
A new approach places chlorine dispensers at communal water sources. Using larger, community-level containers substantially reduces packaging costs, making it easier for governments or donors to provide the chlorine for free. The dispensers deliver the right quantity for the standard water-collection container, so the dispenser is convenient to use. The dispenser itself provides a visual reminder of the need to treat water, and combining the steps of water collection and treatment builds good habits. The public placement of the dispenser is designed to facilitate peer pressure and social-norm formation around chlorine use.
Whereas less than 10 percent of people treated their water under the social-marketing approach, most people did so in communities with a chlorine dispenser. Moreover, in contrast to cases in which prevention campaigns generate an initial burst of enthusiasm that wanes over time, most people continued to treat their water two and a half years after the evaluation, perhaps because of the peer-pressure mechanism that was built into the design.
We estimate that it costs less than two dollars to avert a case of diarrhea using this approach. In rural areas where many families share communal water sources, it is the most cost-effective way to reduce diarrhea and among the most cost-effective health interventions of any kind.
More Alike Than Different
All over the world, the poor weigh economic factors and make decisions about whether and how to invest in education and health. But their decisions are not always optimal for them or for society. Sometimes the poor do not invest because they are cash constrained, lack information, or there is insufficient incentive because much of the benefit of a product accrues to others. Often, like Americans who put off retirement savings, the poor procrastinate or don’t save enough for important lump-sum investments, such as school fees or uniforms. And just as nurses in one Swiss improved their hygiene practices when sanitizer was made more readily available, so convenience matters to the poor. Across a range of programs, small incentives can help alleviate procrastination.
The large body of behavioral study shows similar results across different sectors, products, and continents. Does this mean that the development mantra “context is everything” is wrong? Clearly programs do need to be adapted to local context—lentils are a great incentive to encourage immunization in India, but you probably would not use them to promote preventative medicine in Boston. It would be foolish to say that every result generalizes to every part of the world. In particular, randomized evaluations of supply-side health and education reforms suggest that while some results generalize, the details of institutional circumstance can matter a lot. Even in the case of consumer behavior, we have not done enough rigorous studies in enough countries to assert that observed patterns are truly universal, and much of our evidence comes from only two (albeit very different) countries, Kenya and India.
Yet several conclusions of behavioral economics—that small inconveniences and charges can prevent important health and education investments and that small incentives can yield large changes in behavior—appear to hold widely. Current research indicates that, despite our striking surface differences, there are strong similarities in how people make decisions about investments in health and education across contexts. We would be wise, then, to consider the words of Janell Cannons’ classic children’s story, Stellaluna: “How can we feel so different and be so much alike?”
Behavioral Economics at Work in Poor Countries Rachel Glennerster and Michael Kremer
This article is part of Small Changes, Big Results, a forum on applying behavioral economics to global development.
According to a standard economic model, a fourteen-year-old girl in Kenya will go to school if doing so will enable her to earn more than she spent on her education. A family will buy dilute-chlorine solution, measure out capfuls to treat their water, and wait for the chlorine to disinfect their water if the health benefits exceed the cost of the chlorine. Since a school uniform that lasts a year or two costs only six dollars, and a month’s supply of chlorine runs about $0.30, these costs should be fairly minor factors. Influenced in part by these arguments, many governments in the developing world and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with development have maintained small charges for education and preventative health care.
However, in recent decades economists have increasingly come to recognize what most of us have long known: human beings don’t always make the best decisions.
A new type of economics, dubbed “behavioral economics,” seeks to understand deviations from the simple “rational agent” model that has dominated economics for most of its history—why people procrastinate, say, or why Americans don’t exercise or save enough.
In the developed world, these ideas are beginning to affect policy. For instance, the Pension Protection Act of 2006 encourages U.S. employers to establish automatic enrollment for retirement plans. Could such approaches help alleviate poverty in developing countries? If policies based on behavioral economics can help Americans save more, could they also help Indian children get vaccinated or Kenyan children get cleaner water?
Evidence from randomized evaluations in the developing world suggests they might. Randomized evaluations, which have been common in medicine for decades, seek to distinguish causes from the myriad other factors that can create correlations among variables. In the development case, researchers implement a program in a few areas and compare the outcomes for participants and non-participants.
Randomized trials have been used to study social and economic conditions in the developed world for some time. In the 1970s the U.S. government conducted large-scale evaluations of a negative income tax and of health insurance. But, while these evaluations were useful, they tended to be expensive one-offs, designed to measure the impact of a single policy with many components, making it difficult to learn in a cumulative way over time.
In 1995 International Child Support, an NGO I (Kremer) was working with, began what became a new wave of smaller-scale evaluations that allowed many different approaches to be compared in one context. NGOs, in contrast to governments, proved to be highly flexible and open to experimenting with new ideas. The new breed of randomized evaluations shed light not just on whether a program worked, but how and why people behave the way they do. Academics and NGOs are now using the lessons of previous evaluations to develop and rigorously test new approaches to development challenges, creating an iterative process of continuous improvement.
In a field that has promoted a great many “big-think” fads, the experimental approach is something different and potentially transformative: it not only produces relatively clear-cut evidence that is hard to ignore, but also forces economists to engage development problems where they play out. On-the-ground experience shows us the realities that might otherwise have been left out of our models.
Randomized evaluation is not without its critics, who say that there is little benefit in learning rigorously about one context because the lessons will not translate into other contexts. In effect, the critics ask, can we generalize about human behavior across countries?
That is an empirical question, and the growing body of evidence is helping us answer it scientifically. Hundreds of randomized evaluations of anti-poverty programs are now being conducted all over the world. While each evaluation is carefully crafted to describe one part of the development puzzle, many pieces are starting to come together.
Like students in the United States writing papers, farmers in Kenya choose to have fewer options.
And we are finding certain patterns that seem consistent across contexts and cultures. For example, even small fees for education or preventative health care appear to reduce adoption. Some of these patterns pose a challenge for conventional economic models and an opportunity for policy innovation. For example, in the rational model, having more time and more options can’t make you worse off: more choice does not reduce your welfare. But it turns out that if you are a procrastinator, you may be better off with a deadline and may prefer to impose a deadline on yourself. In one study, students in the United States and farmers in Kenya both chose to restrict their options. With greater understanding, we might harness these behaviors to improve people’s lives.
Incentivizing Education
A quiet revolution has been going on in education across the developing world. In the 40 years between 1960 and 2000, the portion of secondary school–aged children enrolled in school rose from 14 to 54 percent. Some of the poorest countries have seen the most dramatic changes. According to surveys by the Institutional Reform & Capacity Building Project, only 23 percent of household heads in Sierra Leone in 1990 had any schooling; another study found that, by 2004, 66 percent of the primary school–aged population were in school.
Despite this important progress, there are still 100 million children of primary-school age not enrolled in school and many millions more do not attend regularly. Fortunately this is an area where we have learned a lot about how to design successful and cost-effective programs.
The challenge of getting more children, and particularly more girls, into school can appear a daunting battle against complex local cultural barriers. But it turns out that, in much of the world, simple economics has a powerful and consistent effect. Incentives can make a huge difference.
In 1997 the Mexican government instituted a “conditional cash transfer” program, which provided substantial amounts of money to poor families if they kept their children in school and got them regular health check ups. Pilot communities were picked at random from a list of those in need. The evaluation compared school attendance in participating and non-participating communities and found the program was effective in increasing school enrollment. With a cash transfer of $20 per month to the families of adolescent girls, enrollment of girls in secondary school increased by 14.8 percentage points. Similar programs have been rigorously evaluated in many countries around the world, and school enrollment has risen in every case.
Just understanding the economic benefits of schooling can increase attendance. Informing families about the returns of education increased student enrolment in the Dominican Republic and Madagascar. Providing information is cheap, so this is a highly cost-effective way of increasing school participation in contexts where most families underestimate the benefits of going to school. A study in India suggests that long-held patterns of under-investing in the human capital of girls can change rapidly when the potential economic returns of education for girls change. After recruiters for call centers and similar jobs went to randomly selected villages outside Delhi, families started sending girls to school more, and nutrition of young girls improved, suggesting that development of a white-collar sector may be a powerful driver for greater education and health equality for women in developing countries, just as economic historians have argued it was in the United States.
That people respond to the relative costs and returns of schooling might imply that the poor are optimizing the amount of school they invest in, as predicted in a simple economic model. But evidence suggests that reality is more complex.
Even small incentives and costs have a surprisingly large impact on behavior. In Malawi, where different magnitudes of conditional cash transfers were tried, the smallest incentive was sufficient to achieve the average effect. An evaluation in Kenya found that providing a free school uniform could increase attendance of young children by 6.4 percentage points. There is evidence that covering the cost of school uniforms for adolescent girls not only reduces dropout rates, but also reduces rates of teen pregnancy. Conditional cash transfers can be used to get larger sums of money into the hands of the poor, but if the goal is simply to get children in school, providing smaller transfers to more people in the poorest countries may be the most effective use of resources.
Many economists believe those who most need a product are more likely to pay for it. They’re wrong.
In addition, the timing of costs matters more than would be expected in a simple model. This has been found in education, health, and agriculture in Latin America and Africa. Cash-transfer programs that set aside resources and pay them out when school fees are due induce much higher rates of attendance than do programs that pay out earlier. This also leads to better attendance than scenarios in which the poor cannot borrow and take cash whenever they can get it.
Children are also highly influenced by their peers. Evidence from Mexico and Colombia shows that when conditional cash transfers induce the poor to go to school more, the slightly better off, who are not eligible for the program, also go more, presumably because it’s not much fun being out of school if all your playmates are there. Similarly, in Kenya, when the best-performing girls were offered scholarships, they worked harder and attended school more, as one might expect. But so did boys, teachers, and girls who had no hope of winning the scholarship.
While there is much yet to learn about the relative effects of different pressures and incentives, the broader lesson—that adjustments to timing and small adjustments to costs can have surprisingly large impacts on the effectiveness of a program—appears sound. But does it apply outside the education context?
[Click on chart to enlarge.]
Healthy Choices
As with education, poor countries have made significant gains in health. Life expectancy in virtually every country is higher now than it was in the United States in 1900, even though per capita income in many is a fraction of U.S. per capita income in that year. The invention of health technologies such as vaccines is likely part of the reason. Indeed, randomized trials in medicine have found many health interventions that can improve health at extremely low cost.
But while millions are benefiting from these technologies, their adoption is far from universal. Diarrhea kills 1.8 million children each year. Point-of-use chlorination of drinking water results in a 29 percent reduction in reported cases of diarrhea, yet less than 10 percent of households in sub-Saharan Africa use home chlorination. At least 27 million children and 40 million pregnant women worldwide do not receive basic immunizations. Mosquito nets reduce child mortality by up to 38 percent, but only 19 percent of children in areas where malaria is endemic in Africa sleep under a net. Treatment for parasitic worms, which infect 400 million school-aged children worldwide, cut school absenteeism in Kenya by a quarter, and, in the longer term, generate 20–29 percent higher earnings among those who leave subsistence agriculture for paid employment. But only 10 percent of those at risk of infection are treated.
Strikingly similar patterns of behavior seem to govern the hesitancy to adopt useful health interventions. Many consumers are influenced by small costs—both in cash and in convenience—in their decisions to invest in non-acute care.
Whether soap in India or chlorine for sanitizing drinking water in Kenya, demand for a range of non-acute treatments drops precipitously when a small price is charged. Given how cheap these products are to manufacture and how large the public health benefits of breaking the cycle of disease transmission are, why would anyone consider charging for them? One concern is that free mosquito nets will not be hung up, and free chlorine will never be added to drinking water. Some psychologists and social entrepreneurs have suggested, “If you don’t pay for it, you won’t value it.”
But there is little evidence to support this theory. Studies of demand for non-acute care as a function of price show nothing to suggest that the act of paying for something makes a person more likely to use it. Nor is it the case that those who most need a product are more likely to pay for it: those who purchase mosquito nets are no more likely to be sick at the time of purchase; families with small children, who are most likely to die from diarrhea, are no more likely to buy chlorine. But are those more likely to hang mosquito nets or remember to add chlorine to their water also the ones more likely to pay for it, thus helping avoid waste? There is some evidence in the case of chlorine but none in the case of mosquito nets.
Why are people so sensitive to the prices of non-acute health products? One possibility is that much of the health benefit flows to neighbors as transmission of communicable disease is reduced. As a result, individuals invest less than is desirable for the community as a whole. But the private benefits of chlorination or de-worming pills, for example, seem to exceed the modest costs.
One factor surely at work is lack of ready cash. In a study in Kenya, demand for mosquito nets fell less steeply with price when households were given more time to raise the funds to purchase them.
But lack of funds does not explain why adoption also drops off sharply with small changes in convenience. Researchers, again in Kenya, found that people were, on average, only willing to walk 3.5 minutes longer (round trip) to collect water from a protected spring. Similar observations have been made with regard to iron-fortified flour and HIV test results.
In some cases potential users may lack experience with a product. When offered mosquito nets at a subsidized price, Kenyans who had previously been offered free nets—and their neighbors—were more likely to pay than were those who had previously been offered them at a less-subsidized rate. Most likely, those who took free mosquito nets had a positive experience with them and were therefore more willing to pay for an additional net. This is contrary to the conventional wisdom among development workers that free distribution undermines people’s willingness to pay later.
Giving rural Rajasthani mothers lentils and a set of plates raised full immunization rates from 5% to 38%.
There are many questions remaining about user fees. In particular, we don’t know the impact of fees on the supply side. There are potential downsides to abolishing fees. Small payments can be a source of flexible funding to clinics when governments fail to provide it, and they may motivate workers—who often pocket them—to show up. A key challenge is to test the impact of fees on education and health workers, and to devise approaches to motivating them in a way that prevents consumers engaging in counterproductive behavior. (A number of studies are now focused on this problem.)
We also don’t know enough about how to abolish user fees: many countries have abolished them on paper only to see informal fees creep back. But the significant effect of user fees on rates of adoption is clear.
[Click on chart to enlarge.]
Putting Research To Use These results, from both education and health studies, fit with an emerging consensus from behavioral economics: people are not good at making even small upfront investments in order to obtain a steady stream of modest future benefits. Perhaps the tough decision, however, is not whether to take action, but when. If people place particular weight on costs and benefits today, investing tomorrow always looks preferable—the benefits will still be there in the long run, but the costs will be delayed. The catch is that when tomorrow comes it is again tempting to delay, and yet people fail to anticipate this.
Fortunately, these behavioral theories also suggest a possible solution: small upfront incentives should be effective at changing behavior. Experience bears this out. A program that provided rural Rajasthani mothers a kilogram of lentils each time their children received one stage of an immunization course and a set of plates when the full course was completed raised full immunization rates from 5 percent to 38 percent. Similarly, small payments were enough to increase the percentage of people collecting their HIV test results.
And, as with education, there are examples where information about the costs and benefits of health behaviors can have a big impact. In Kenya, teenagers were given information about the relative likelihood of HIV infection by age—in particular that older men were much more likely to be infected with HIV than younger men. The result was a 65 percent reduction in teen pregnancies by older men (and no increase by younger men). In other cases, providing information is not effective. Teaching children how to prevent worm infections did not change their behavior.
A number of programs have been developed based on our improved understanding of consumer demand for health and education and have themselves undergone rigorous evaluation. The immunization incentive program is one example. This program also included incentives for providers, responding to what we have learned about the supply side of education and health.
Another program inspired by our increasing knowledge of consumer behavior sought to provide clean drinking water to households that collect water from contaminated sources. Despite widespread social marketing, few households buy chlorine for home treatment. This is due in large part to the price, which reflects not just the minimal cost of the chlorine itself, but also the larger costs of packaging and distribution.
A new approach places chlorine dispensers at communal water sources. Using larger, community-level containers substantially reduces packaging costs, making it easier for governments or donors to provide the chlorine for free. The dispensers deliver the right quantity for the standard water-collection container, so the dispenser is convenient to use. The dispenser itself provides a visual reminder of the need to treat water, and combining the steps of water collection and treatment builds good habits. The public placement of the dispenser is designed to facilitate peer pressure and social-norm formation around chlorine use.
Whereas less than 10 percent of people treated their water under the social-marketing approach, most people did so in communities with a chlorine dispenser. Moreover, in contrast to cases in which prevention campaigns generate an initial burst of enthusiasm that wanes over time, most people continued to treat their water two and a half years after the evaluation, perhaps because of the peer-pressure mechanism that was built into the design.
We estimate that it costs less than two dollars to avert a case of diarrhea using this approach. In rural areas where many families share communal water sources, it is the most cost-effective way to reduce diarrhea and among the most cost-effective health interventions of any kind.
More Alike Than Different
All over the world, the poor weigh economic factors and make decisions about whether and how to invest in education and health. But their decisions are not always optimal for them or for society. Sometimes the poor do not invest because they are cash constrained, lack information, or there is insufficient incentive because much of the benefit of a product accrues to others. Often, like Americans who put off retirement savings, the poor procrastinate or don’t save enough for important lump-sum investments, such as school fees or uniforms. And just as nurses in one Swiss improved their hygiene practices when sanitizer was made more readily available, so convenience matters to the poor. Across a range of programs, small incentives can help alleviate procrastination.
The large body of behavioral study shows similar results across different sectors, products, and continents. Does this mean that the development mantra “context is everything” is wrong? Clearly programs do need to be adapted to local context—lentils are a great incentive to encourage immunization in India, but you probably would not use them to promote preventative medicine in Boston. It would be foolish to say that every result generalizes to every part of the world. In particular, randomized evaluations of supply-side health and education reforms suggest that while some results generalize, the details of institutional circumstance can matter a lot. Even in the case of consumer behavior, we have not done enough rigorous studies in enough countries to assert that observed patterns are truly universal, and much of our evidence comes from only two (albeit very different) countries, Kenya and India.
Yet several conclusions of behavioral economics—that small inconveniences and charges can prevent important health and education investments and that small incentives can yield large changes in behavior—appear to hold widely. Current research indicates that, despite our striking surface differences, there are strong similarities in how people make decisions about investments in health and education across contexts. We would be wise, then, to consider the words of Janell Cannons’ classic children’s story, Stellaluna: “How can we feel so different and be so much alike?”
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