The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012

by Dan Ariely

  The Walmart trial took place during six very hot days in July 2010, in a courtroom in the Jacob Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan. Four Walmart employees, who had been at the entrance of the vestibule with Jdimytai Damour, testified. Justin Rice, who had been promoted to department manager before Black Friday 2008 and who was still working at the store, said that the doors had broken on Blitz Day in 2007, and he had been nicked by broken glass. (Another employee said that the doors came off the hinges in 2005 and 2006 as well.) All the men said that they had never had any training in crowd management before being placed in the vestibule on November 28, 2008, except for “slip, trip, and fall” guidelines—if a customer slips, you help him up—and the “ten-foot rule”: if a customer gets within ten feet you are supposed to greet her with “Welcome to Walmart.”

  One particularly damning bit of evidence was a video that students from the New York Institute of Technology had chanced to make of a management meeting two days before the Blitz Day event. Rice can be heard raising the matter of the 2007 melee with Steve Sooknanan, the Walmart manager, and saying that people had to be kept away from the doors this year. He says, “Last year was crazy, a lot of people fell, little babies out there and it was cold, I just don’t want that this year.” Sooknanan tells him that this year “we’re going to do it a little differently.” He explains that he had arranged for construction barriers to be placed farther from the entrance and to have additional staff at the door.

  Jason Schwartz, the lead trial attorney for Walmart, wasted no time in attacking Paul Wertheimer’s qualifications as a crowd expert—“the dubiously monikered ‘marshal of the mosh pit’”:

  J.S.: What do you do when you’re in a crowd, Mr. Wertheimer, in order to enhance your expertise?

  P.W.: I observe the crowd, the crowd dynamics, the crowd behavior, and people in the crowd and talk to people in the crowd to see how they’re feeling, see what’s going on.

  J.S.: If I did that, would I have the same level of experience in crowds as you do?

  P.W.: No.

  J.S.: Why not?

  P.W.: You’re not an expert in the area of crowd management.

  J.S.: I see. . . . Your Honor, I would submit that this expert’s qualifications are the same qualifications that everyone standing in this courtroom has.

  Judge Rooney responded, “But he has more experience in crowds than I do. I don’t take subways, so I have no idea what it’s like to be in a crowd. Well, I could say, back in my days of college, I took the subway here in New York, and I was very claustrophobic. So I do believe that there is some assistance that, or some value that, is going to be elicited from this case.”

  Wertheimer was allowed to continue, and during two days of testimony detailed many crowd measures that Walmart could have taken. He was particularly effective in showing why the construction barriers wouldn’t control the crowd: they were too low to keep people out, and they were flared at the bottom, so that people who got pushed up against the sides fell in.

  At the end of six days, Judge Rooney had 1,200 pages of testimony to deliberate over, which she has done, at a stately pace, for the past six months. Both sides eagerly await the verdict, which is expected soon. If OSHA wins, Walmart will almost certainly appeal—all the way to the US Court of Appeals, if necessary. Still, a decision for OSHA will have enormous symbolic value, because it would be a victory for the crowd.

  In the past thirty years, safety officials and designers have learned a lot about crowd management. After the Hillsborough disaster, Britain banned standing terraces in its top two soccer divisions and introduced “all-seater” stadiums. Some people argued that this changed the atmosphere of the games profoundly, but it also made them safer. An international team of experts, including Keith Still, a professor of crowd dynamics, made recommendations for the redesign of the Jamarat Bridge in Mecca and for directing the movement and flow of people. The structure has been altered to provide pilgrims with multiple entrance and exit points, to ease congestion. In Times Square on New Year’s Eve, the police use lightweight metal container pens so that people revel inside a series of small enclaves rather than as one big mass. Crowd managers use elevated viewing platforms to see over the crowd and, if necessary, to communicate with people in the back. Paul Wertheimer has written a booklet, You and the Festival Crowd, which has been widely distributed. (Among his recommendations: Keep your elbows akimbo to protect your chest and give yourself enough breathing room. Don’t fight against the flow of the crowd if you’re trying to get out of it; rather, go with it, and during lulls try to work your way diagonally through the crowd to the perimeter. If you feel faint, grab on to someone, and if you do fall, try to protect your head.)

  And yet almost anywhere, you can be trapped in a crowd: on a subway platform, at the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, on the ramps leading down from the upper tiers at Yankee Stadium, in the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. One reason last summer’s Love Parade disaster in Germany was so shocking is that it occurred in a country known for efficient crowd management, and yet the early evidence suggests that the organizers and the police made a series of elementary mistakes, including underestimating the number of attendees, using the railway tunnel as both the main entrance to and the main exit from the event, and blocking the flow of concert-goers at pinch points, which allowed the crowd force to build. A full-scale investigation is under way.

  A light rain was falling over the parking lot at the Green Acres Mall when I pulled in at three in the morning on Black Friday, 2010. The longest line was at Best Buy—it stretched the length of the building and halfway down the other side. The people in front had been waiting for twenty-eight hours. “Wii Bundles,” one man said, when I asked why, as though the answer was obvious. Target also had a long line outside, and there were smaller lines outside Kohl’s and Macy’s. But outside Walmart there was no line at all.

  After Black Friday, 2008, Walmart dropped the term Blitz Day and rebranded its post–Thanksgiving Day sale the Event. In keeping with the terms of its agreement with the Nassau County DA’s office, the company employed a crowd-management plan at all its New York stores. In Valley Stream, there were more staff, security, and crowd managers outside the store than there were customers. I snaked through the barricades—metal, chest high, with open bottoms—that had been arranged in a series of tight S curves, passing two viewing platforms, with a man on each holding a bullhorn welcoming me. I entered the vestibule where Damour died, remembering the images of chaos I had seen in the videos of that night. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of those videos is the sound inside the vestibule: cries of pain, fear, terror, mayhem. But now it was eerily quiet.

  This year, like last, the waiting took place inside the store, which remained open all night. Beginning at midnight, the store began distributing tickets for the steeply discounted electronic items, and by three-fifteen they had all been given out. People arriving when I did weren’t happy. “You said the sale starts at five. That’s false advertising,” one irate customer said to a manager. “It’s not me, it’s them,” the manager said, gesturing toward the ceiling. People were lining up anyway for the ordinary sale-priced items, but there was no joy of the hunt in the line. It was just a line.

  DAVID KIRBY

  Ill Wind

  FROM Discover

  “THERE IS NO PLACE called away.” It is a statement worthy of Gertrude Stein, but the University of Washington atmospheric chemist Dan Jaffe says it with conviction: none of the contamination we pump into the air just disappears. It might get diluted, blended, or chemically transformed, but it has to go somewhere. And when it comes to pollutants produced by the booming economies of East Asia, that somewhere often means right here, the mainland of the United States.

  Jaffe and a new breed of global air detectives are delivering a sobering message to policymakers everywhere: carbon dioxide, the predominant driver of global warming, is not the only industrial byproduct whose effects can be felt aroun
d the world. Prevailing winds across the Pacific are pushing thousands of tons of other contaminants—including mercury, sulfates, ozone, black carbon, and desert dust—over the ocean each year. Some of this atmospheric junk settles into the cold waters of the North Pacific, but much of it eventually merges with the global air-pollution pool that circumnavigates the planet.

  These contaminants are implicated in a long list of health problems, including neurodegenerative disease, cancer, emphysema, and perhaps even pandemics like avian flu. And when wind and weather conditions are right, they reach North America within days. Dust, ozone, and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins, and mercury can be pulled to Earth through atmospheric sinks that deposit it across large swaths of land.

  Pollution and production have gone hand in hand at least since the industrial revolution, and it is not unusual for a developing nation to value economic growth over environmental regulation. “Pollute first, clean up later” can be the general attitude, says Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The intensity of the current change is truly new, however.

  China in particular stands out because of its sudden role as the world’s factory, its enormous population, and the mass migration of that population to urban centers; 350 million people, equivalent to the entire US population, will be moving to its cities over the next ten years. China now emits more mercury than the United States, India, and Europe combined. “What’s different about China is the scale and speed of pollution and environmental degradation,” Turner says. “It’s like nothing the world has ever seen.”

  Development there is racing far ahead of environmental regulation. “Standards in the United States have gotten tighter because we’ve learned that ever-lower levels of air pollution affect health, especially in babies and the elderly,” Jaffe says. As pollutants coming from Asia increase, though, it becomes harder to meet the stricter standards that our new laws impose.

  The incoming pollution has sparked a fractious international debate. Officials in the United States and Europe have embraced the warnings of the soft-spoken Jaffe, who, with flecks of red and gray in his trim beard, looks every bit the part of a sober environmental watchdog. In China, where economic expansion has run to 8 to 14 percent a year since 2001, the same facts are seen through a different lens.

  China’s smog-filled cities are ringed with heavy industry, metal smelters, and coal-fired power plants, all crucial to that fast-growing economy even as they spew tons of carbon, metals, gases, and soot into the air. China’s highways are crawling with the newly acquired cars of a burgeoning middle class. Still, “it’s unfair to put all the blame on China or Asia,” says Xinbin Feng of the Institute of Geochemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government-associated research facility. All regions of the world contribute pollutants, he notes. And much of the emissions are generated in making products consumed by the West.

  Our economic link with China makes all the headlines, but Jaffe’s work shows that we are environmentally bound to the world’s fastest-rising nation as well.

  Dan Jaffe has been worrying about air pollution since childhood. Growing up near Boston, he liked to fish in local wetlands, where he first learned about acid rain. “I had a great science teacher, and we did a project in the Blue Hills area. We found that the acidity of the lake was rising,” he recalls. The fledgling environmental investigator began chatting with fishermen around New England. “All these old-timers kept telling me the lakes had been full of fish that were now gone. That mobilized me to think about when we burn fossil fuels or dump garbage, there is no way it just goes somewhere else.”

  By 1997 Jaffe was living in Seattle, and his interest had taken a slant: Could pollution reaching his city be blowing in from somewhere else? “We had a hunch that pollutants could be carried across the ocean, and we had satellite imagery to show that,” Jaffe says. “And we noticed our upstream neighbors in Asia were developing very rapidly. I asked the question: Could we see those pollutants coming over to the United States?”

  Jaffe’s colleagues considered it improbable that a concentration of pollutants high enough to significantly impact American air quality could travel thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean; they expected he would find just insignificant traces. Despite their skepticism, Jaffe set out to find the proof. First he gathered the necessary equipment. Devices to measure carbon monoxide, aerosols, sulfur dioxide, and hydrocarbons could all be bought off the shelf. He loaded the equipment into some university trucks and set out for the school’s weather observatory at Cheeka Peak. The little mountain was an arduous five-hour drive northwest of Seattle, but it was also known for the cleanest air in the Northern Hemisphere. He reckoned that if he tested this reputedly pristine air when a westerly wind was blowing in from the Pacific, the Asian pollutants might show up.

  Jaffe’s monitors quickly captured evidence of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone, hydrocarbons, radon, and particulates. Since air from North America could not have contaminated Cheeka Peak with winds blowing from the west, the next step was identifying the true source of the pollutants. Jaffe found his answer in atmospheric circulation models, created with the help of data from Earth-imaging satellites, which allowed him to trace the pollutants’ path backward in time. A paper he published two years later summarized his conclusions succinctly. The pollutants “were all statistically elevated . . . when the trajectory originated over Asia.”

  Officials at the US Environmental Protection Agency took note, and by 1999 they were calling Jaffe to talk. They were not calling about aerosols or hydrocarbons, however, as concerning as those pollutants might be. Instead, they were interested in a pollutant that Jaffe had not looked for in his air samples: mercury.

  Mercury is a common heavy metal, ubiquitous in solid material on Earth’s surface. While it is trapped it is of little consequence to human health. But whenever metal is smelted or coal is burned, some mercury is released. It gets into the food chain and diffuses deep into the ocean. It eventually finds its way into fish, rice, vegetables, and fruit.

  When inorganic mercury (whether from industry or nature) gets into wet soil or a waterway, sulfate-reducing bacteria begin incorporating it into an organic and far more absorbable compound called methylmercury. As microorganisms consume the methylmercury, the metal accumulates and migrates up the food chain; that is why the largest predator fish (sharks and swordfish, for example) typically have the highest concentrations. Nine-tenths of the mercury found in Americans’ blood is the methyl form, and most comes from fish, especially Pacific fish. About 40 percent of all mercury exposure in the United States comes from Pacific tuna that has been touched by pollution.

  In pregnant women, methylmercury can cross the placenta and negatively affect fetal brain development. Other pollutants that the fetus is exposed to can also cause toxic effects, “potentially leading to neurological, immunological, and other disorders,” says the Harvard epidemiologist Philippe Grandjean, a leading authority on the risks associated with chemical exposure during early development. Prenatal exposure to mercury and other pollutants can lead to lower IQ in children—even at today’s lower levels, achieved in the United States after lead paint and leaded gasoline were banned.

  Among adults, the University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscience researcher Dan Laks has identified an alarming rise in mercury exposure. He analyzed data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on 6,000 American women and found that concentrations of mercury in the human population had increased over time. Especially notable was that Laks detected inorganic mercury (the kind that doesn’t come from seafood) in the blood of 30 percent of the women tested in 2005–2006, up from just 2 percent of women tested six years earlier. “Mercury’s neurotoxicity is irrefutable, and there is strong evidence for an association with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” Laks adds.

  Circumstantial evidence strongly po
inted to China as the primary origin of the mercury; the industrial processes that produce the kinds of pollutants Jaffe was seeing on Cheeka Peak should release mercury as well. Still, he could not prove it from his data. To confirm the China connection and to understand the exact sources of the pollution, researchers had to get snapshots of what was happening inside that country.

  One of the first scientists with feet on the ground in China was David Streets, a senior energy and environmental policy scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. In the 1980s he was at the forefront of the study of acid rain, and in the 1990s he turned his attention to carbon dioxide and global warming as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Streets began focusing on emissions from China about fifteen years ago and has since become such a noted expert that he helped the Chinese government clean up the smoke-clogged skies over Beijing before the Olympics in 2008.

  In 2004, spurred by increased attention to mercury in the atmosphere, Streets decided to create an inventory of China’s mercury emissions. It was a formidable undertaking. Nobody had ever come up with a precise estimate, and the Chinese government was not exactly known for its transparency.