The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017

by Hope Jahren

  Though Hayhoe has always been serious about her faith, connecting with groups of fellow Christians about climate change was not something she did before moving to Texas. In 2006 she and her husband, Andrew Farley, relocated from South Bend, Indiana, to Lubbock, one of the most conservative cities in the country, so that they could both take jobs at Texas Tech, he as a linguistics professor, she as a researcher. He also became the pastor at a small nondenominational church on the southwest side of town, now called Church Without Religion. People were surprised when they learned what the pastor’s wife did, and Farley started getting lots of questions about it. And at Texas Tech the invitations for Hayhoe to speak about climate change started rolling in. The volume of these questions and the lack of resources to point people to spurred her and Farley to write a book together, A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. The questions they tackle in the book were familiar territory for the couple, who had met through a Christian organization while in graduate school. A few months into their marriage, Hayhoe realized that Farley, who had grown up in a conservative household in Virginia, did not think climate change was real, and they began vigorously debating the topic. “It took about two years, but now we’re on the same side,” she said.

  But beyond just speaking to Christian groups, Hayhoe prides herself on being able to talk to anyone with an open mind about the reality of climate change. She bemoans the fact that global warming has come to be viewed as a niche environmental issue. “To care about climate change, all you have to be, pretty much, is a human living on planet Earth. You can be exactly who you are with exactly the values you have, and I can show you how those values connect to climate change,” Hayhoe told me.

  Hayhoe’s first step is always to “genuinely bond over a shared value,” with an emphasis on that shared value’s being genuine. “The key is not to pretend; we can all smell someone who is not genuine a mile away,” she said. “If I’m talking to farmers or ranchers or water managers, I start off by talking about what we all care about, which is making sure we have water. And that, for many Texans, is almost as strong of a value as whatever it says in the Bible.” Her next step is to connect that issue to climate change. So when talking about water, she describes how climate change is changing rainfall patterns. “We’re getting these heavy downpours, and then we’re getting longer dry periods in between, and our droughts are getting stronger because the warmer it is, the more water evaporates out of our lakes and rivers and our soil,” she said. She tries to end her talks with solutions that inspire people, ranging from the personal (measuring your carbon footprint and installing energy-efficient light bulbs) to the large-scale (putting a tax on carbon). Hayhoe herself is most excited by the efforts of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and founder of SpaceX. “If I had to pick one person to save the world—and I don’t think any one person will, but if I had to pick one—it would be him.” She is excited about the battery packs that Tesla is developing, declaring energy storage the “single technology that will make the most difference.”

  Ultimately she does not care whether people agree with the science, so long as they take action. She compares this to a battle waged in the mid-1800s, before the germ theory of disease gained widespread acceptance, when a Hungarian physician urged other doctors to wash their hands and instruments before delivering babies. As doctors changed their habits, fewer and fewer women died from “childbed fever.” “I don’t care if they thought germs are imaginary, so long as they washed their hands,” she said. The same is true for climate change, in Hayhoe’s mind. If people start using more efficient light bulbs or driving more-fuel-friendly cars, it doesn’t matter what they think about the science.

  Hayhoe is coy about her own personal politics, and this air of mystery is useful to her. When I asked her about another Canadian-born Texan, climate-change skeptic and senator Ted Cruz, she demurred. She’s a U.S. permanent resident but not a citizen, so she can’t vote in the presidential election, and she seems to enjoy the level of remove this gives her from American politics. “It helps me not to pick sides, because people always ask if you’re Democrat or Republican, and I’m neither. I can’t be,” she told me. “I appreciate the solutions that some Republicans are starting to advance, and I appreciate the fact that Democrats accept the science. But it’s become so polarized that the good people on both sides are being marginalized.” Whoever the next president is, Hayhoe hopes he or she will honor the commitments made at the climate summit in Paris last year and also put a price on carbon.

  Hayhoe’s religious background led NOVA’s Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers to dub her a “climate-change evangelist” in 2011, and the label has stuck, though she is lukewarm on it. “An evangelist is someone who spreads good news, and I feel like I’m not really evangelizing. I feel more like a Cassandra, or an Old Testament prophet spreading bad news, saying, ‘If thou dost not change from thy wicked ways and repent, thou shalt reap the harvest of thy deeds.’ ” But when Hayhoe talks, she doesn’t sound so pessimistic. That’s a strategic choice, as she realizes that doom and despair won’t motivate others to act. For that, you need hope. “You have to offer people a vision of what the world could look like if we could wean ourselves off fossil fuels, if we could have a clean-energy economy,” she said. “We would all want to live in that world.”

  Lyndon Baines Johnson was at his ranch outside Johnson City recuperating from gallbladder surgery on November 5, 1965, when his science advisers published a 317-page report warning about the dangers of air pollution. Tucked away in an appendix were 23 pages about atmospheric carbon dioxide. “Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment,” the report states. “Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years.” This additional carbon in the atmosphere would, over time, raise the earth’s temperature, slowly melt the Antarctic ice cap, and lead to increased ocean acidity, the report proclaimed. “The climate changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of human beings,” the report concluded.

  Fifty years later Hayhoe gave the capstone presentation at a daylong symposium in Washington commemorating the first time a president was warned about the danger of climate change. “As several have already said today, we are conducting an experiment with our planet on a scale that has never before been attempted,” she said, echoing the words of the report. The climate models that scientists now use churn out petabytes of data—which is something like, in Hayhoe’s words, “twenty million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text”—that then need to be analyzed to see how these changes will manifest in particular locales. “What’s the point of doing all of that modeling and all of that analysis if we don’t understand how it’s going to affect the system right here that we care about?”

  Would LBJ even recognize the future Texas predicted by these models? In the past 50 years temperatures in Texas have risen half a degree per decade and are set to rise at least 3.5 degrees by midcentury if global emissions aren’t slashed. “Our average summer could look like 2011 within my lifetime if we continue on our current pathway,” Hayhoe told an audience in October, referencing that scorching summer when much of Texas saw more than one hundred 100-degree days. Austin could feel more like Scottsdale, Arizona. Rainfall patterns are shifting, so the state will face longer dry spells punctuated by more bouts of heavy rain. In West Texas, farming and ranching communities have thrived in the semiarid environment by pulling water from aquifers. But as the aquifers dry up, these communities are relying more on rainfall, just as that rainfall is becoming less likely and droughts are getting more intense, Hayhoe said. In LBJ’s beloved Hill Country, this means increased risk of fire. Humans are the ones igniting the fires, but climate change is making them worse by providing the ideal dry conditions they need to spread. On the Gulf Coast, where a quarter of the state’s 27 million people live, sea levels
are already eight inches higher than they were a hundred years ago and are set to rise an additional one to four feet by the end of the century. And then there’s the danger from stronger hurricanes fueled by record-breaking ocean temperatures.

  Texas leaders, however, seem unwilling to tackle the problem or even admit that it exists. Governor Greg Abbott has long voiced skepticism about the science of climate change, telling the editorial board of the San Antonio Express-News during his gubernatorial campaign that the climate has always changed over time and further study was needed. “We must be good guardians of our earth, but we must base our decisions on peer-reviewed scientific inquiry, free from political demagogues using climate change as an excuse to remake the American economy,” he told the newspaper. As attorney general, Abbott made a habit of suing the Obama administration, oftentimes over regulatory issues relating to climate change. His successor, Ken Paxton, is continuing that tradition, joining a lawsuit in October over the administration’s Clean Power Plan, which calls on states to curb emissions by phasing out coal plants and shifting to natural gas and renewables. The plan would require Texas to decrease its coal power capacity by 4,000 megawatts, or 25 percent, and Paxton has likened this to the EPA’s mounting a “war on coal and fossil fuels.”

  In such a milieu, efforts to incorporate climate change into planning at the state level have fallen flat, and bills that attempt to address it have gone nowhere in recent years in the legislature. “At the state level, in some circles, climate change is still a taboo subject,” John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist, told me. This leaves cities to do their own resilience planning. Meanwhile entities such as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the operator of the state’s electric grid, are not taking climate change into account when developing their projections for load growth, which could lead to problems as the mercury creeps upward.

  In Congress, Texans are some of the most vocal climate-change skeptics. Congressman Lamar Smith, a Republican from San Antonio, has used his chairmanship of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to tussle with federal agencies over their climate-change research, going so far as to subpoena the scientists who conducted a study with a conclusion he disagreed with and demand their emails. (Smith, it is worth noting, has received more than $600,000 in campaign donations from the fossil-fuel industry over his 29 years in Congress.) And then there’s Cruz, who in December held a three-hour Senate hearing titled “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate Over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate,” at which he claimed that there was a lack of scientific consensus on global warming.

  Hayhoe is hopeful that as green energy gets cheaper, more people will begin using it. “Texas is unique, in that it is one of the states that have the most to lose economically from climate-change impacts, but Texas also has the most to gain by transitioning to a clean-energy economy,” Hayhoe told me one day in her office on campus, a cluttered, windowless space. The room’s sole decorative flair, a papier-mâché arctic fox that was a Christmas present from her young son, sat perched on a shelf.

  If Texas were its own country, it would be the seventh most prolific emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. As it stands, Texas is the number one emitter in the U.S.; it released some 641 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2013, almost double that of California.

  But the state also has a seemingly boundless potential for green energy. Texas leads the nation in wind generation; turbines produced a full 10 percent of the state’s power in 2015. By 2030 that number is forecast to jump to 37 percent. One night last September, supply of wind power was so plentiful and demand was so low that the spot price of electricity went negative for a few hours. Solar installation has lagged behind, but when it ramps up, there’s enough capacity just in the hundred-square-mile area between Plainview and Amarillo to light the entire United States, as Hayhoe likes to point out. In Pecos County alone companies have plans to invest $1 billion in large-scale solar energy farms. “Texas understands energy. Energy is a Texas thing,” Hayhoe told me. “We have the land we need to do this, as well as the technology and entrepreneurial spirit. I wish that the whole state could see that this is an opportunity for a better future.”

  EMILY TEMPLE-WOOD

  It’s Time These Ancient Women Scientists Get Their Due

  FROM Nautilus

  Women are woven deeply into the history of science, stretching back to ancient Egypt, over 4,000 years ago. But because their contributions often go unacknowledged, they fade into obscurity—and the threads of their influence today aren’t as apparent as they ought to be.

  As a Wikipedia editor, I have tried to make women’s contributions more apparent by writing entries on figures whose lives haven’t been completely lost, such as Agnodike and Aglaonike, two ancient Greek women, one a brave physician, the other a beguiling astronomer. And fortunately, information about other remarkable women of science has survived too, thanks in part to pop culture.

  Although it wasn’t a big hit, Agora, a 2009 film, spotlighted an important female astronomer and mathematician in late-4th-century CE Roman Egypt: Hypatia (portrayed by Rachel Weisz). Hypatia’s written work was lost in the Library of Alexandria’s destruction, but “all our sources agree,” says Maria Dzielska, a scholar of the Roman Empire, “that she was a model of ethical courage, righteousness, veracity, civic devotion, and intellectual prowess.” Due to her brilliance, her father, Theon, raised Hypatia as Greeks would traditionally raise a son—he taught her his craft, mathematics, and eventually she became the head of a Neo-Platonist school in Alexandria, something only men had previously done. Before she was brutally murdered by a Christian brotherhood, she built medical and astronomical devices as well as an apparatus for distilling water.

  Though Hypatia was in many ways an exemplary female figure of science and philosophy, she wasn’t a singular figure. Women made strides in the major fields of ancient science.

  Medicine and Chemistry

  The first recorded woman physician, who was possibly the first woman scientist, was Merit Ptah, an Egyptian living in the 28th century BCE. She was the chief physician of the pharaoh’s court during the Second Dynasty, a time when Egyptian women regularly became physicians and midwives, studying at both coed and all-women medical schools. Centuries later, during the Fourth Dynasty (26th–24th century BCE), Peseshet, the administrator of Sais, one such medical school for women, oversaw all women physicians in the empire.

  In 13th-century BCE Babylon, intelligent women in the cradle of civilization were able to hold positions of authority. While overseeing the royal palace, a perfumer named Tapputi invented the still, used for purifying substances like alcohol, and perhaps became the world’s first chemist.

  Artemisia of Caria II, another woman of science, is mainly remembered for her husband, Mausolus (a recurring theme). She’s known today for ordering the construction of the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, built between 353 and 351 BCE, as a memorial to her husband (and brother), who she loved so much that she is said to have, on occasion, mixed his ashes in with her drinks. But she was also a botanist and medical researcher. She discovered the myriad uses of the genus Artemisia (wormwoods), which is named after her. The herb can stimulate pelvic and uterine blood flow, induce abortion, expel retained placentas, and prevent miscarriage. (In a happy connection, Tu Youyou was co-awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery of a malaria treatment, artemisinin, derived from one species of wormwood.)

  Probably the most famous ancient Greek woman physician was Agnodike, a possible contemporary of Artemisia’s. In the 4th century BCE she pretended to be a man to study with Herophilus, the first anatomist. She was motivated to study because of women who died unnecessarily in childbirth, or of reproductive diseases because they did not want to see a male physician. Apparently out of jealousy, the men of Athens decried her because they thought she was seducing women, but they discovered her true identity, and she was put on trial for practicing me
dicine illegally. Agnodike could have been sentenced to death were it not for the women of Athens, who protested at her trial. As a result a new law was passed allowing women to be physicians.

  Metrodora, who lived sometime during the 3rd to 5th century CE, became the first woman medical scholar by authoring a treatise on, among other topics, gynecology, called On the Diseases and Cures of Women. It contained herbal remedies found nowhere else in ancient Greek writing, discussed the causes of various types of vaginal discharge, and went on to be widely referenced by succeeding practitioners in ancient Greece and Rome.

  Astronomy and Mathematics

  Egypt wasn’t the only place in antiquity where women flourished in the sciences. In the 23rd century BCE, Akkadian astronomer-priestess En Hedu-Anna perhaps became the world’s first known woman astronomer, since her position required her to make detailed astronomical calculations and observations—no small feat, given that writing was only a few centuries old. She served Inanna, goddess of the moon, and is best known for her sweeping sacred poetry that survives to this day. After her death she was elevated to demigoddess status and worshipped by the local Sumerian citizenry. Last year a crater on Mercury was named after her.

  Another woman undeservedly overshadowed by her famous male paramour was Theano, typically remembered as Pythagoras’s wife. She was an accomplished astronomer and mathematician who led the Pythagoreans after her husband died. Like Theano, Aglaonike—a 1st- or 2nd-century CE Greek astronomer—was intellectually gifted. It was thought that since she could predict the times of lunar eclipses, she was capable of making the moon disappear on demand. She was not shy about her abilities of observation and calculation and was vilified for bragging. The women astronomers who associated themselves with Aglaonike during her life and after her death were called the “witches of Thessaly” because, as Plutarch wrote, Aglaonike “imposed upon the women, and made them all believe that she was drawing down the moon.”