On Assignment in Heart City

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: June 25, 2011

Nebraska sandhills--not a bad place for fieldwork

I’ve been in Valentine, Nebraska all week with a group of Harvard evolutionary biologists, being repeatedly reminded that 1) my job is awesome and 2) I’d never cut it as a scientist. These guys are in the field from before 7 am til after 9 pm, day after day. Right now, for instance, I’m typing away while three of them are processing samples in the garage and another two are out in the blazing-hot prairie sun wielding shovels and hauling bags of concrete. Okay, there are sometimes margaritas involved. But still.

Neither rain nor rattlesnakes nor the threat of hantavirus nor mishaps requiring emergency-room visits keeps these enthusiastic researchers from their appointed rounds. The only things I’ve seen slow them down are bad coffee and overly chatty locals (especially those bearing gifts: rhubarb cake, homemade pickles, beaver pelts). They’re fired up by repetitive tasks–whether tagging mice or making egg sandwiches–and seem happiest when confronting the biggest potential setbacks. Oh, these huge structures I just spent two weeks building have structural flaws? Let’s jerry-rig a solution! Crank up the techno tunes and hand me a shovel!

Of course, reporting is a repetitive task, too, and sometimes you simply have to do that final interview even if you can’t stand to listen to one more person talk about the topic. At a Nieman Conference a couple of years ago, Jon Lee Anderson told of interviewing scores of mid-level bureaucrats in the hope of trying to uncover one small but key piece of information for his book on Che Guevara. He had a final interview scheduled and almost canceled it, burned out and certain that this guy would prove just as useless as the rest. But he soldiered on–and the guy turned out to be the guy, instrumental to the reporting.

Still, in general the beauty of reporting is that it’s so variable. Here in Valentine, I can observe the local environment while walking along the Cowboy Trail, a 195-mile bike path that winds across the state. I’d be remiss in my attempt to gather local color if I didn’t wander down the street to the Cherry County Historical Society Museum, which among other things holds an impressive collection of spittoons and a truly garish beauty parlor device from the 1920s, made of dozens of metal binder clips dangling from fabric-coated electrical wires. (You had to really want curly hair.) They’ve even got teeth and bones from mammoths and rhinoceroses, discovered locally–a clear evolutionary biology connection! And I better pop into the western store–who knows what I might learn in there.

Unlike the biologists, though, my work will yield results in a flash. In this case, I’ll write a story next week. I don’t think I could stick it out for the months and years required to produce solid results in a field study like the one in Valentine. That project (which you can read about soon in the NYT) will require site visits every couple months for potentially years to come, and an overwhelming (to me, not the scientists) amount of painstaking data collection and analysis. My job seems a bit cushy by comparison: I can show up, shadow them in the field, delve into the backstory over tacos and beer, and transcribe my interviews indoors during the hottest part of the day.

Not that my job is cushy. I’ve gotten dirty and sunburned and bitten by a red ant—causing me to more or less drop my pants in the middle of an alfalfa field, my generous contribution to the lab’s field-lore canon. All in a day’s work.

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Masai Mara’s Vanishing Animals

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: May 31, 2011

In April, I visited Kenya’s Masai Mara reserve and wrote about my concern that it was being loved to death. Now, unfortunately, a new study seems to back up my fear that wildlife in the park are faring badly–though according to the research, the culprit isn’t tourism but expansive livestock grazing in the larger Mara ecosystem.

Joseph O. Ogutu of the University of Hohenheim and colleagues from Kenya and South Africa analyzed aerial data that the Kenyan government collected from 1977 through 2009 in the Masai Mara reserve and the surrounding areas, which are home mainly to Maasai cattle-grazing communities. Overall, wildlife numbers plummeted by at least 70 percent during that period–with giraffes, zebras, warthogs, Thompson’s gazelles, impalas and more than a half dozen others all in decline.

Animals inside the park appeared to be no better off than those outside its boundaries (which aren’t fenced)–which calls into question a decade’s worth of beefed-up conservation efforts inside the reserve.

Here’s a sample from the paper, from the Journal of Zoology:

Most wildlife species have declined toward a third or less of their previous abundance within the overall Mara region between 1977 and 2009, with these decreases being almost as severe within the reserve as in the adjoining ranches. Hence, the earlier downward population trends of most wildlife species (Broten & Said, 1995; Ogutu, 2000; Ottichilo et al., 2000, 2001; Serneels & Lambin, 2001) have continued. Not only have resident populations decreased, but the numbers of migratory wildebeest and zebra entering the Mara region during the dry season have also shrunk, although no change in the source populations in the Serengeti ecosystems has been recorded (Sinclair et al., 2007). The biomass of livestock as a per cent of total livestock and wildlife biomass recorded within the reserve boundaries increased from an average of 2% in the 1970s to 23% in the 2000s and now greatly exceeds that of any resident wildlife species, except buffalo.

Ogutu told the BBC he was stunned by what he found, and that he’d expected to discover wildlife numbers in the park were on the rise. ”But to our great surprise, the extreme wildlife declines have continued unabated in the Mara,” he said.

In the paper, the researchers finger “expanding human population” and “livestock influences” in the neighboring areas. But in the BBC interview, Ogutu was more specific, saying cattle numbers have tripled inside the reserve. He also said poaching is a constant problem.

When I visited the Mara, a Maasai warrior I met told me his friends often graze their animals inside the park boundaries. (He also revealed that they regularly hunt lions.)

In the Journal of Zoology paper, the scientists conclude that the future of the whole Mara region’s wildlife now rests on the success of conservation efforts outside the park–a worrisome state of affairs. This is increasingly true of protected areas around the world, including the U.S.: take, for instance, Yellowstone National Park, where the fate of the West’s iconic bison hinges on what happens to them when they roam across borders invisible to them. (I wrote about this last spring.) As difficult as it is to protect species and ecosystems on official conservation land (from, for instance, the off-road tourism I witnessed), it’s even harder to do so outside those arbitrary lines.

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Reality Bites

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: May 16, 2011

I’ve turned in a feature, scheduled lunches with editors, emailed to say I still exist. I’ve panicked, at 4 am, about whether I can line up enough work to pay the bills. I’ve fretted over health insurance and worried about how I’ll access journal articles. I’ve weighed the pros and cons of a conference in Mexico—just how much airfare are those geneticists’ PowerPoints worth?—and another in Oklahoma. I’ve used packing as an excuse to put off pitching.

I can’t hide from the truth anymore. The writing on the wall is as clear as a Chauvet Cave bison painting in Herzog-narrated 3-D: I’m officially a freelancer again. My lovely, once-in-a-lifetime year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow is over, and now I’ll have to earn my living like everyone else. It feels a bit like I’m emerging from the past, from a time when journalism was a thriving profession, back into the present and its harsher realities.

I don’t mean that journalism fellowships are stuck in the past. The Knight fellowship offered training in every aspect of multimedia reporting, from audio and video production to data visualization. Surrounded by MIT’s future-makers, we had access to all areas of cutting-edge science. The emphasis was very much on looking ahead.

But let’s face it: Journalism fellowships are a bit of an anachronism, and an irony-laced one at that. As newspapers across the country scramble to make ends meet, foundations built by newspaper empires are thriving. Fellows are doted on, pampered, given access to vast university resources—yet our overriding concern is how we’ll make use of these gifts in the real world given shrinking newsrooms, shrinking word counts, shrinking salaries. A growing proportion of applicants for journalism fellowships are freelancers, a telling sign of the times. (Is it pure math, a reflection of freelancers’ growing ranks? Or are staff reporters worried their jobs aren’t secure enough to withstand a nine-month leave? A little of both, I think.)

These fellowships, though, have always been opportunities for mid-career reflection. Am I proud of the work I’m doing? (Sometimes.) How can I make it better? (Data-driven reporting, for one.) Am I happy in my job? (Yes, if you call it a “job.”) Should I be doing a different kind of reporting? (Don’t think so.) Or a different kind of work entirely? (Heavens, no!) Many fellows change jobs or beats or media afterward. Others return to their lives reinvigorated. I fall into that latter group. After nine months away from freelance journalism, I miss it. So the good news is I’m doing what I love. The bad news, of course, is that I can’t pay my mortgage with happiness tokens.

So I’m also rattled. What if I can no longer earn enough money? In my early years as a freelancer, there was always a safety net—at least a mental one. If I couldn’t make it work, I could always get a staff job someplace. But now that safety net seems full of very large holes. So here I go, back at it. I’m available for work, starting June 3.

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So You Want “overall good karma”? Try Paying for It.

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: April 19, 2011

I know, you’re all sick of hearing about how The Huffington Post got rich by stiffing its writers, and how now that Arianna scored the big deal she’s still asking journalists to write for free. You’re sick of hearing us writers whine about it. But the thing is, it’s not just HuffPo. Not by a long shot. You’d be shocked–SHOCKED–at how many outlets are asking professional journalists to write for free. And not just asking, but making it sound like it’s the greatest opportunity ever, ZOMG!

These offers to write for no pay come from companies large and small, established and scrappy. The other day, a friend politely declined an offer to pen a story sans compensation for the web site of a highly influential and well-read monthly magazine that pays its print writers upwards of $2 a word.

But more often, these flattering offers come from web sites we’ve never heard of and wouldn’t consider writing for even if they were throwing money at us. This is one of my favorites, received yesterday by a freelance science writer friend. Who, by the way, does not have a blog. Or a “message.”

Hey XXXX-
My name is XXXX and I am the assistant producer of a television show called XXXXX. I am following you on Twitter and I am thoroughly impressed by your blog. I find your articles to be very knowledgeable and your writing style is unique and offers a great perspective on green issues.

We are in the process of redesigning the website for XXXX, and are looking to create a community of worldwide leaders who are making a difference in for our planet. We are very interested in sustainability, green issues, the environment and creating overall good karma! My production staff here is in the process of contacting people from all over the world, who we think have a voice that needs to be heard. I have really enjoyed your message and what you stand for, and would like to include you as one of our professional contributors on our redesigned site.

We would be looking for you to contribute a couple of content pieces per month (articles, vlogs, blogs, podcasts…..whatever you would like to contribute). In return, we would give you a professional profile page on our site, and note you as one of our professional contributors. This would provide you with a place that you can expose you personal/business online presence.

Let me know if you are interested. And if so, I will send you over the professional contributor guidelines. We would love to have you on board!

Thanks!

OMFG, I LOVE good karma!

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The Curse of Masai Mara

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: April 10, 2011


I just returned from Masai Mara, one of Africa’s most iconic reserves. Sitting outside my tent on the edge of the Talek river, watching evening creep in and listening to the mingling sounds of daytime birds and nighttime creepy-crawly things, I felt awestruck and blissed-out and kind of devastated, all at the same time. “Dream of Africa,” my Lonely Planet guide book says, “and you dream of the Masai Mara.”

It’s true—up to a point. I’ve tromped through rainforests on three continents, but I’d never seen African wildlife outside of a zoo. Fields of impala and gazelles grazing among wildebeest and warthogs, elephants and zebras and giraffes; a pride of lazing lions; a leopard surveying his terrain from atop a boulder: I did dream of these, I almost can’t believe that I really saw them. But the cheetah sleeping off the hot Kenyan sun beneath a bush? I bet he really wished the safari vans would leave him alone.


My driver saw them from across the savannah—three white vans parked together. He took a hard right off the dirt track and drove straight across the grass, not wanting to miss the chance to show me whatever it was they were looking at. All around us you could see car tracks in the grass—not ruts, yet, but clearly visible tracks. We reached the cluster of vans, with their tops popped just like ours and tourists standing up like prom-night revelers with the limo moonroof open. Fifteen feet away, the cheetah was trying to nap. New vans arrived, the drivers jostling for space so the passengers could glimpse their quarry. Each time an engine stopped or started, the cheetah lifted his head, flicked his ears, and then lay back down determined to get some rest. A British woman in the van next to mine whistled at the animal. “Here, beautiful, just look over here for a moment, you gorgeous thing.”

In my mind I saw a New Yorker-style cartoon, with this cheetah telling his buddy, “I liked it better when they’d just come and shoot us.”

Where once there were distinct dirt tracks through the park, now there are rows of them, sometimes several car lengths wide, all going roughly the same place. Tire tracks cut through the savannah everywhere, and many of them are rutted. Safari guides avoid the ruts and instead drive around them, carving new tracks which will soon become rutted too. On a delicate hillside covered in rocks and low, spindly trees, at least eight vans forged their own paths to reach the snoozing lionesses—which one driver had somehow spotted and then broadcast over the radio. There was no road, nor even any well-worn tracks, nearby, so each van crushed untold acres of plants. Those plants are the foundation of the fragile Mara ecosystem; they’re what feeds the herbivores on which those lions rely. But no one seems to be making that connection.

In South Africa’s Kruger National Park, rules prevent more than two vans at a time from viewing certain animals in close proximity. After a few minutes, the van must give way to someone else. I’m not sure how effective they are at policing this; in Masai Mara, though, there seemed to be no one on watch at all. The only rangers I saw at all were stationed along the Mara river to take tourists on a hippo-watching walk. I watched Maasai graze herds of several hundred cattle within the park (which used to belong to them until the government evicted them to form the reserve); why not, if no one is watching?

It’s the low season in the Mara. In my tent camp, only three of 18 tents were occupied (until the final night, when a dozen Russians descended, downing champagne and rum by the bottle); there were just seven guests around, including me. During an all-day safari, we drove for what seemed like hours, skirting the Tanzania border, without passing more than a handful of cars. Yet you could see them on every road and rise during an evening drive in the park—safari rush hour. During the high season, which runs nearly half the year, 5,000 visitors sometimes crowd the park in a single day; at four people per van, that’s more than 1200 vehicles each day.

I’m used to feeling that mix of euphoria and sadness when I visit places chock full of charismatic megafauna. It’s news to no one that the world’s most spectacular ecosystems are increasingly under threat. But usually the threat is development: rainforests slashed and burned to grow palm oil, river valleys flooded for hydropower. In Masai Mara, the threat is people like me. And all I can think about, now that I’ve returned to the chaos of Nairobi, is how to get back to the Mara.

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On Having a Field Day–and Taking Notes

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: March 13, 2011

There’s something about being “in the field” that’s exhilarating beyond any other experience. It’s why many scientists do what they do. For certain types of science, it’s where the data collection happens, and what makes all those countless hours spent churning out grant proposals worthwhile.

It also has an analog in journalism: being “on assignment.” This is different than being “on deadline,” which merely means someone is waiting for you to turn in copy. Being on assignment is about leaving your desk and discovering the world. It’s what produces the best stories, what makes all the other hassles of the job melt away, what’s most in danger of succumbing to shrinking budgets. Like going to the field, being on assignment carries an aura of mystique and possibility; trust me, nothing makes a journalist feel cooler than starting a sentence, “Once, when I was on assignment in Mozambique.…”

What is it about this amorphous non-place that scientists and journalists go? What is “the field,” exactly? “The field has no geographical or physical bounds, but is defined by those who go there to investigate, study, or commune with nature,” writes Michael R. Canfield, a lecturer in Harvard’s department of organismic and evolutionary biology, in the introduction to his upcoming book, Field Notes on Science and Nature. Canfield convinced an assortment of eminent field scientists to open their notebooks and reveal how they keep notes in the field—about birds, bugs, mammals, fossils–and why.

To a young naturalist, the field may come to life with unbounded imagination in an undeveloped lot. Others may find the field after long hours in a dugout canoe, dangerous river crossings, or battles with tropical diseases. Given the diversity of people and concepts of the field, there is no rigid formula for documenting the discoveries and adventures that happen there. However, a genre of record keeping—field notes—exists as a critical component of the study and experience of the field.

When Canfield spoke at our Knight Fellows seminar at MIT earlier this week, I was struck by this common preoccupation of both scientists and journalists, to record what we observe. Canfield wants to understand what encourages good observation. Does drawing a plant or animal while you’re watching it etch it in your mind better than photographing it? He argues that it does. It’s not necessarily a question of high- versus low-tech. It’s more about the amount and type of attention you pay. To sketch a lizard you have to really look at it, notice its shape and texture and shading. Good photography requires its own type of attention and is obviously important for all kinds of other reasons. But for a scientist in the field, snapping a photo of a flower or beetle just isn’t the same as rendering it in pencil on paper.

Reporting from the field requires the same sort of presence in the moment. You want to record with all your senses: What does this place, at this particular point in time, look like, feel like, smell like? Even if we’re on assignment in someone’s bland corporate office, we’re observing it like E.O. Wilson watching ants in a forest. What’s on this person’s desk? What is she wearing? What’s the view from the window that doesn’t open? You, the interview subject, might be chattering away, not noticing that you’ve digressed far from the matter at hand because I’m still furiously taking notes; and I might be indulging you because it gives me a chance to describe the contents of your bookcase.

So I’m left wondering: How different are the types of things that scientists and journalists write down? What would we find if we compared their field notes from the same expedition? How do Wildlife Conservation Society biologist and National Geographic Explorer Mike Fay’s notes from his Africa “mega-transect” (a 2,000-km walk across the Congo Basin) differ from those of David Quammen, the writer who accompanied him? (Fay, it turns out, published his field notes from the journey; Amazon has them for sale, used versions only, for $48.35. I haven’t seen Quammen’s available anywhere.) Anyone want to volunteer their notebooks so we can find out?

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Covering Alternative Energy–Now at CJR

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: February 28, 2011

Alex Jones of the Shorenstein Center, Beth Daley of The Boston Globe, Elisabeth Rosenthal of The New York Times, and Henry Lee of the Belfer Center

Two recent panel discussions put on by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government looked at mainstream media coverage of energy issues–specifically wind power and electric cars. My post-game write-up is up at The Observatory, Columbia Journalism Review’s science desk. Here’s a teaser. Hop over there to read the rest!

Is today’s media up to the task of covering renewable energy issues? That was the broad topic explored during two panel discussions held in February at the Harvard Kennedy School’s “Clean Energy and the Media” series. And despite the solid work the four journalists who spoke are producing, it feels like the answer is leaning toward no. Budget cuts, ever-shrinking story lengths, and a fundamental disconnect between what makes a good story and what makes a well-informed public are the three main obstacles.

The next third panel in the series, “The Politics of Nuclear Power: Media Coverage and Public Conflict,” takes place on March 23.

Photo credit: Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School

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Protecting the Journalism Ecosystem

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: February 22, 2011

UPDATE: Here’s an example of first-rate reporting from AAAS, in which Time’s Bryan Walsh places research in the larger context and shows the disconnect between scientific facts and politicized decisionmaking. Read his story “Environmentalists Warn of Natural Debt as Budget Cuts Loom.”
—

I just returned from the annual meeting of AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science), where I had the huge honor of receiving a AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for a story I wrote for High Country News. As I said at the ceremony, the award felt to me like a validation of long-form narrative nonfiction. I won for the small newspaper category (circulation under 100,000), which—somewhat unfairly, perhaps—puts HCN, a biweekly that’s more like a magazine in tabloid newspaper format, in competition with scores of small daily newspapers that might be less inclined to devote space to a 4,000-word article because they need to cover local news, politics, sports, and community events.

That said, I don’t think it’s an accident that HCN, a nonprofit based in rural Paonia, Colorado, consistently wins journalism awards. They’re committed to publishing narrative journalism, and to giving writers the space to do it right. My story was about the razorback sucker, an endangered fish native to the Colorado River: about the science being mobilized to save the fish, the complex ecological and sociological causes of its demise, the scientists who toil to rescue it despite the seeming futility, and the crucial larger questions about biodiversity conservation we need to begin to ask. I don’t think many other newspapers would’ve given me 4,000 words in which to tell the story—and it’s a shame, because I think there’s a hunger for long-form narrative journalism that’s only increasing as the outlets for it decline.

At a lunch for the AAAS Kavli award winners, fellow PLoS blogger Steve Silberman, who won the magazine award for his Wired story The Placebo Problem,” mentioned that he’d had the luxury of spending several months on his story—a state of affairs that’s as endangered today as the razorback sucker. (Indeed, William Saletan, who won the online category, pointed out that the razorback sucker was a good metaphor for journalists in general.) That led a journalist in the audience to bemoan the fact that he sometimes had to produce as many as 40 stories in a week. (That sounds even more insane to me now than it did at the time; did I get that right? Please correct me if I’ve overly inflated the number. But regardless, it was astonishingly high.)

That, of course, is the AOL-style churn-it-out-as-quickly-as-possible-for-maximum-hits model that’s been lamented to death everywhere, and which I certainly don’t need to rehash here. The main point I wanted to make is that there’s a place for speedy, quick-turnaround news coverage of science, but when it’s overused you’re left with journalists making mistakes—for instance, as they try to crash out stories pegged to the publication of a journal article, and don’t even have time to make sense of the data. (John Rennie has eloquently railed against this, so you should read him here if you haven’t already.) I saw this over and over again at the Knight Science Journalism Medical Evidence Boot Camp last fall, where several speakers walked through the actual findings of medical journal articles and then showed the news stories that sometimes got it 180 degrees wrong. Leaving the public misunderstanding the outcome of scientific research is worse than not telling them about it in the first place.

In his coverage of the AAAS meeting coverage, Charlie Petit at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker worried about declining numbers of reporters from mainstream news outlets attending and filing daily stories from the conference.

Let’s put a few true but statistically furry numbers on a transition now fully in place. That is the abandonment of daily science reporting. esp. when it requires expense account, by all but a handful of US newspapers. These outlets once had dozens of correspondents in the annual pressrooms of the AAAS meeting. The Wa Post is here, NYTimes has a presence, I saw an LA Times guy yesterday, but all in all, zilch.

I agree about the general trend. But I’m not sure I agree that there’s anything bad about fewer reports from a conference where scientists are often presenting general findings as opposed to new research. Just because a scientist says something at a session or at a news conference doesn’t make it news. (And while I’m not a daily-news kind of journalist, I like to think I still have a sense of what’s newsworthy.)

Science journalism needs a mix of really well-done daily deadline reporting and longer, thought-out, exhaustively reported narrative stories. The two are completely different beasts occupying different niches, and we should make every effort to protect them both, by ensuring that there’s habitat to sustain them. That’s one reason I’m so enthusiastic about The Atavist, a new publishing company that’s producing exceptional long-form journalism—longer than a standard magazine article but much shorter than a book—on an ebook model. Browsing Amazon yesterday, I noticed that Evan Ratliff’s Lifted, one of the first two offerings they published, is number four on the nonfiction bestseller list. Not the ebook list: the whole list. That’s pretty astonishing for a new format. And gives me some hope that perhaps, unlike the poor razorback sucker, narrative journalism will make it off the endangered list someday soon.

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Drying Out in the West

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: February 14, 2011

Lake Mead by BrotherMagneto, http://www.flickr.com/photos/brothermagneto/4263702906/In the southwestern U.S., where water supplies come from the Colorado River, which in turn is fed by snowfall in the Rockies, people use more water each year than the amount that falls from the sky. It’s an unsustainable situation, one whose increasing precariousness can be seen in the giant bathtub ring visible where Lake Mead’s water used to be. (The reservoir is currently at 1,093 feet, 32 feet below “drought” level.) A report released last week by the U.S. branch of the Stockholm Environment Institute shows just how serious the situation is, and how much of it is due to human folly—theoretically easy to fix, except for that pesky little issue of changing people’s behavior.

According to the report,

In the U.S. Southwest – Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah – there is less rain and snowfall each year than the amount of water used in homes, businesses, farms, and for environmental purposes. Today that shortfall is made up for by pumping groundwater, and in at least two states, Arizona and California, the stock of groundwater is falling every year. Add the higher water use that comes with growing population and incomes, and the Southwest is expected to face a major water crisis in the coming decades. As the century progresses, groundwater reserves will run dry, and current trends in water use cannot possibly be continued.

Part of the problem stems from a mistake made back in 1922, when the parties to the Colorado River Compact—the agreement that divided up the river’s flow between seven Western states (and left the barest trickle for Mexico)—misjudged the amount of water normally in the river. While scientists now put the average yearly flow at between 9 and 14 million acre feet (one acre foot is the amount of water that would cover an acre to a depth of one foot), the compact was based on an estimate of 17 million acre feet. All told, 16.5 million acre feet are spoken for. Oops.

Climate change will only make the situation worse, of course. But the region’s growing population and its thirst for lawns, swimming pools, and asphalt parking lots don’t help either. Nor does the fact that vast amounts of water are going to types of farming that would be unprofitable if the true cost of water were factored in. As the report put it, “The sale of agricultural products for less than the price of the water used to grow them may seem counterintuitive and, indeed, it could not happen if there were a free market for water.” Municipal water prices in the U.S. are based only on the cost of the delivery system and not on the value of the actual water.

Here’s one example of the problem, from the SEI report:

…two-thirds of Nevada’s water currently goes to the agricultural sector, and 97 percent of that water is used to grow hay. The value per acre foot of water of Nevada’s hay is just $76 per acre foot…. Even the value per acre foot of dairy and cattle is low in Nevada, at $149. Other crops grown in the state are far more valuable: greenhouse and nursery crops, $4,865 per acre foot; vegetables and melons, $1,933; and wheat, $415. Nonetheless, the dairy industry accounts for more than half (55 percent) of total agricultural sales in Nevada.

The sad fact is, every few years, a report like this comes out, with excellent scientific and economic analysis showing that water use in the American West is unsustainable and that climate change will only make it worse. And it gets a lot of buzz–and then nothing much happens. And when the next report comes out, the only difference is that we’ve inched closer to crisis.

Continuing along the current path will eventually cost a lot, monetarily and otherwise. As Time’s Bryan Walsh wrote:

Based on the price of adding reservoir capacity in California, meeting the baseline water shortage could cost $2.3 trillion—yes, that’s “trillion” with a “t”—plus $353 billion to $549 billion if climate change is factored in. Higher water prices would make adaptation even more expensive—assuming additional water could be found at all in a drier future.

Some innovative small-scale solutions are starting to appear. In southern Nevada, the water utility pays residents $1.50 per square yard to replace their thirsty green lawns with more desert-appropriate plants. But that alone isn’t going to cut it—as Pat Mulroy of the Southern Nevada Water Authority acknowledged at the Aspen Environment Forum last summer. “There have to be bigger solutions,” she said. Especially because, as the SEI report notes, “Nevada has the highest per capita domestic use in the nation, followed by Utah.” Banning bluegrass lawns in the desert is apparently un-American—but what about charging people the true cost of maintaining them, rather than just paying them to change their ways?

As former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt put it in Aspen, turning water conservation into a “rational economic choice” is worth a try. “What farmer in his right mind will use drip irrigation when he’s getting water delivered free?”

Photo via Flickr / BrotherMagneto

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Of Bad Odors and Good Yarns

By Hillary Rosner
Posted: February 7, 2011


I never liked science. In fifth grade, the dissections started: starfish, earthworm, frog, pig. These creatures, so beautiful in life, did nothing but depress me in their formaldehyde-soaked death. You could smell it in the stairwell, where the chemical stench of science mingled with the scent of stewed meat wafting from the cafeteria. I hated the lab notebooks, with their tiny graph-paper squares that seemed designed to make you hold the pencil so tight your hand would ache, and I despised the formulaic monotony of writing up lab notes—documenting the materials used, the hypothesis, the exact steps involved in testing it, the conclusions. I dreaded working with a lab partner; the mere sight of a Bunsen burner and its murky yellow rubber tubing could send me running to the school nurse with a stomachache.

My senior year of high school, I’d finished the required three years of science. I opted for an extra English course in lieu of chemistry. Finally, I was free! In college, I had a vague sense that there were science labs on the far side of campus, but mostly I steered clear. One year I took an introductory genetics class (“genes for jocks”), just to confirm that science still sucked, and when I earned a C+ I retreated, satisfied, to the comfort of literature, politics, and cultural theory.

And then a strange thing happened. Several years into my journalism career, I became captivated by stories about the environment. I couldn’t read enough of them. The climate was changing, rainforests were burning, species were vanishing, water supplies were drying up. Fascinating, disturbing things were afoot in nature, and I wanted to write about them. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. Eventually, I went back to school. I studied ecology, accompanied scientists on field expeditions, learned how nutrients cycle around the planet. I was hooked.

Still, I found it mildly amusing that anyone would award me a master of science degree. Didn’t they know? It seemed absurd that the National Science Foundation would fund my studies. Hadn’t they seen my college transcript? I scoffed at suggestions that I join the National Association of Science Writers. I wasn’t a science writer! I was just a journalist who thought it was neat that bug skulls buried in ancient lake sediment can tell a story about global warming.

Eventually, of course, I relented. I’ll say it, okay? Science is cool! Are you happy now?

I was sitting in on a class at Harvard the other day, taught somewhere in the ancient warrens of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, listening to a lecture on molecular evolution. The professor, a tenured Harvard biologist and museum curator, was talking about a particular group of genes in Drosophila. But first he said something surprising: he never liked biology as a kid. “It was always about Drosophila,” he told the class. “I just couldn’t get excited about flies.”

So before he got into the topic at hand, he put on some classical Chinese music. The mood thus set, he recounted the myth of Jingwei, about a Chinese princess who drowned in a rowboat and then came back as a bird to exact revenge upon the sea. Her plan was to fill in the sea with twigs and rocks so that no one else could drown. Jingwei, he went on, is the namesake of a Drosophila gene once thought to be useless but “reincarnated” after a University of Chicago scientist named Manyuan Long discovered its purpose. (It’s involved in regulating hormone metabolism.) There’s no real romance in fly genes. But now that this one was linked to emperors and reincarnation and revenge fantasies, I paid attention. I learned something about genetics. I cared because the genes had a story.

Science is important. It’s newsworthy. And it makes for compelling journalism. It’s worth remembering, though, that not everyone inherently cares about it. Now that I’ve become a science nerd, I’m trying my best to keep that in mind.

Photo via Cultural China

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Category: Journalism, Tooth and Claw | Tagged , , , , | 13 Comments