The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

by Amy Stewart

  Issa claimed he was merely a lookout, not a poacher. He wasn’t contrite. In a public square in Am Timan, shortly before his trial, he shouted, “I know who betrayed me! I will escape from your jail, and I will kill him.” He did escape, and a rumor in Zakouma is that he fled south to CAR.

  “We’ve heard he went to Seleka,” Idriss Adoum’s son Issa tells me, referring to the violent rebel coalition that overthrew the CAR government on March 24, 2013. If true, Soumaine Issa will find poachers working with Seleka. Seleka and its rival, anti-Balaka, have set fire to people, thrown them off bridges, and murdered people wantonly, turning CAR into a lawless state—the kind of place where Kony’s group and other terrorist organizations thrive. In May 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai, an elephant oasis in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park of southwest CAR, killing 26 elephants. Dzanga Bai—also known as the village of elephants—is a mineral-rich mudhole where the animals congregate.

  Earlier this year Kony suffered the defection of his commander of operations, Dominic Ongwen, who told African Union forces that Kony’s desire for ivory was reinforced by Seleka. “Seleka rebels had a stock of about 300 ivory tusks that they sold, which enabled them to get the supplies that helped them overthrow President François Bozizé in CAR,” Ongwen told African Union forces, according to his debriefing. Ongwen said Kony’s plan is to obtain as much ivory as possible “for his future survival should he not be able to overthrow the government of Uganda.”

  Ongwen also said that Kony intends to form a squad to establish contact with Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group responsible for widespread killings and the kidnappings of hundreds of Nigerian women and schoolgirls. Boko Haram also uses the bush as a base—Nigeria’s Sambisa Forest, a game reserve south of Lake Chad. In March 2015 Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, pledged allegiance to ISIS, and his group was renamed Islamic State’s West Africa Province, giving that Middle East terrorist group a foothold in West Africa.

  Where Next?

  As of this writing, my artificial tusks sent out their last communication from a Sudanese town called Ed Daein, 500 miles southwest of Khartoum. I know which house they’re in: Using Google Earth, I see its light-blue roof on my screen. They’re in a place 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient temperature, so perhaps they’ve been buried in the backyard. So far they’ve traveled 600 miles from jungle to desert in just under two months. Their path is consistent with the route Kony’s defectors tell me ivory takes on the way to the warlord’s Kafia Kingi base. By the time you read this, my tusks might have gone to Khartoum. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivory’s biggest consuming country: China.

  Meanwhile, as leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States strategize about how to stop the ever-expanding network of international terrorist organizations, somewhere in Africa a park ranger stands his post, holding an AK-47 and a handful of bullets, manning the frontline for all of us.

  HELENE COOPER

  They Helped Erase Ebola in Liberia. Now Liberia Is Erasing Them.

  FROM The New York Times

  IT WAS AROUND 3:00 in the afternoon when Sherdrick Koffa spotted, in neatly written script, the name on the body bag that he was preparing to set ablaze.

  It was the name of a classmate. The two grew up together, had played together as children. Now, only a few days into his job burning the Ebola dead, work that had already estranged Mr. Koffa from his family, he was expected to burn the body of his friend.

  He did it. First he sprayed the body with oil to help it catch fire. Then he carefully laid the body, along with several others, upon the kindling on the altar of the crematory. He stacked more kindling on top. Finally, as the kindling was lit with a torch, Mr. Koffa stripped off his protective gear and stalked off the field, away from the acrid smell of burning flesh.

  He did not stop walking until he got home, and once there, he opened first one bottle, then two, of cane juice, the highly potent Liberian equivalent of moonshine. He drank all night, until he passed out.

  Fifteen months later, Mr. Koffa is still drinking heavily.

  It has been more than a year since this deeply religious country embraced one of its biggest taboos—cremating bodies—to rein in a rampaging Ebola pandemic. In that time, the majority of Liberians have started to move on.

  But such is not the case for some 30 young men who were called upon during the height of the crisis last year.

  As bodies were piling up in the streets and global health officials were warning that the country’s ages-old traditions for funerals and burials were spreading the disease, these men did what few Liberians had done before: set fire to the dead. And for four months they did so repeatedly, burning close to 2,000 bodies.

  Villagers protested near the site, hurling abuse and epithets at the men they called “those Ebola burners them.” The government deployed police officers and soldiers along the dirt road to the crematory site in a field to keep angry locals from the men.

  Their families shunned them as they pursued their grim work. One young man—Matthew Harmon—who lived not far from the crematory site here, said his mother refused to see him, telling him never to call again.

  “My ma said, ‘You burning body? Then I’nt want see you no more around me,’” Mr. Harmon said.

  The ostracism darkened what was already an abysmal time for the men, so much so that now, a full year after the country has ceased the cremations, their lives remain virtually destroyed.

  Their nights are spent with alcohol or drugs—habits they said they acquired to get through the mass burnings. One burner, William Togbah, says no night goes by when he does not dream of seared flesh. Several of the men, shunted aside by friends and family, now live together, sharing the same room in a house not far from the crematory site.

  “I’m not in a good life now,” Mr. Togbah said.

  For the most part, Liberia has come out of its long national nightmare. Ebola cases flare up sporadically, with three new infections reported just last month, and experts warn that the disease may continue to pop up for years to come.

  But children are back in school, crowding sidewalks in their uniforms as they head home in the afternoon. Soccer games have resumed, with a packed Antoinette Tubman Stadium recently hosting 10,000 people to watch their beloved Lone Star national team take on, and lose to, the African giants called Ivory Coast. Church pews have filled again, with people grasping one another’s hands and trading hugs during the “peace be with you” part of services, a stark change from the no-touching rule many adopted here as the epidemic raged.

  Yet the men continue to be tormented by what they saw and did. Initially they used an incinerator to burn the bodies, usually during the night. But that method left human bones to greet them when they returned in the morning, grisly remnants of the vibrant people who had lived their lives in this West African country.

  Mr. Togbah and several others kept using the word “erase,” as in, they erased the traces of the Ebola dead for their country. In turn, their country has now erased these young men.

  Many Liberians still blame them for burning the dead. While they received certificates of appreciation from the Health Ministry, they were not part of the recognition ceremony held by the president to thank health-care workers for their efforts during the outbreak, an omission the young men took to heart.

  “We missed some people,” President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said in an interview, adding that there were too many people to thank, and that she hoped to hold another event recognizing these men.

  Still, they are largely shunned by Liberian society.

  To understand how cremation is viewed by Liberians, one must first consider that this is a country with a national holiday—Decoration Day—meant solely for people to go and clean the graves of their loved ones. Every year on Decoration Day, Liberians troop to cemeteries and burial plots across the country with brooms, bleach, soap, and water.

  Wakes can go on for days. People with little or no m
oney to spare will beg and borrow to lay their dead in coffins made of black mahogany wood. They will build marble tombstones, and buy entire plots of land just to bury those they love. Many Liberians believe that if the dead are not properly buried, they will come back to haunt the living.

  People here wash bodies and dress them to make sure they are ushered into the afterlife in style. A dead body for many Liberians is, in a sense, still a living thing, to be nurtured, looked after, and lovingly sent onward.

  “It is just not in our culture to burn people,” said Sampson Sayway, who helped organize the group of men to burn the bodies.

  So when a line of government cars showed up in Marshall last year at the Indian-run field that is the country’s sole crematory—previously used only for burning dead Indian nationals—Mr. Sayway, who lives a stone’s throw away, immediately went out to investigate. It was early August 2014, at the height of the epidemic, and Ms. Johnson Sirleaf’s besieged government had made a last-minute decision to take the advice of global health experts who said the bodies of the Ebola dead—the most infectious carriers of the disease—had to be burned.

  Liberian officials knew the public would revolt. The government stationed police officers and soldiers along the route to keep villagers away. Government officials negotiated with Mr. Sayway over what the workers would be paid, around $250 a week. In a poor country like Liberia, that was enough money to get roughly 30 young men for the job.

  But “it was no easy thing,” said Fredrick Roberts, one of the burners, recalling that first night when the trucks came with the first 12 bodies. Terrified of getting too close to the Ebola dead, everyone scattered into the bush at first, as someone in the truck yelled out via a megaphone to keep a distance.

  “I had no clue what I was getting into,” said Ciata Bishop, who was tasked by the president with setting up the crematory operation.

  That first night, the young men wore blue cloth jumpers and plastic gloves, but government officials later gave them protective clothing, gloves, and boots. Day after day, night after night, the trucks came with the bodies. The burners unloaded them, sprayed them with oil, and piled them on an altar.

  “It smelled very bad,” Mr. Koffa said. “Like meat, except different.” His voice caught and he stopped talking, overcome. He and the other burners had gathered near the crematory field. They are never far away from it now. The place they hated so much has become a home, of sorts. Nowhere else will accept them.

  “They would bring us thirty, sixty, one hundred bodies a day,” Mr. Koffa said.

  Because the incinerator was unable to turn the bones to ash, the men switched to burning bodies on pyres set upon two altars in the field. It was more time-consuming, but at least at the end there were only ashes to deal with.

  One day the trucks delivered 137 bodies. “It took two days and a half,” said Burdgess Willie, another burner. “It smelled so bad, we kept having to go away and then come back.”

  Sometimes there were explosions, from the combustion of the oil, body bags, and wood. The noise terrified villagers, further adding to their anger at the burners and the process.

  Mr. Roberts’s landlord put him out of his rented room, and he moved in with Mr. Harmon, the burner whose mother had shunned him. Soon other young men, turned out of their homes, were sharing the small room, too.

  The men took to drinking and drugs to get through the nights. Government officials sent them extra bottles of cane juice, they said.

  “When you see fifty, seventy, eighty bodies like that every day, that the only way you can make it,” Mr. Willie said.

  Then suddenly, just like that, it was over. In December, under intense public pressure and with the number of Ebola deaths declining, the government announced that it was ending cremations. A new 25-acre parcel had been secured, government officials said, to bury the Ebola dead.

  For the 30 young men who carried out the task of burning more than 2,000 Ebola dead, the ordeal was over.

  Except it wasn’t. “People still mock at us,” Mr. Roberts said. “When they see us, they say, ‘That’s Ebola burner them, oh.’”

  Through the ordeal, the young men said they thought they would get government scholarships when it was all over. They thought they would be hailed as heroes, that people would apologize for shunning them. They are still waiting.

  Mr. Roberts said that a few days ago, almost a year since the government ended the cremations, he tried to get into a taxi. One of the passengers spotted him and quickly turned to the driver. “He said, ‘This man worked in the fence, that Ebola burner, oh,’” Mr. Roberts recalled.

  The response came quickly.

  “Get down from the car,” the taxi driver insisted.

  GRETEL EHRLICH

  Rotten Ice

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  I FIRST WENT TO Greenland in 1993 to get above tree line. I’d been hit by lightning and was back on my feet after a long two-year recovery. Feeling claustrophobic, I needed to see horizon lines, and off I went with no real idea of where I was going. A chance meeting with a couple from west Greenland drew me north for a summer and part of the next dark winter. When I returned the following spring, the ice had failed to come in. I had planned to travel up the west coast by dogsled on the route that Knud Rasmussen took during his 1916–18 expedition. I didn’t know then that such a trip was no longer possible, that the ice on which Arctic people and animals had relied for thousands of years would soon be nearly gone.

  In the following years I went much farther up the coast, to the two oldest northernmost villages in the world: Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk. From there I traveled with an extended family of Inuit subsistence hunters who represent an ice-evolved culture that stretches across the Polar North. Here, snowmobiles are banned for hunting purposes; against all odds, traditional practices are still carried on: hunting seals and walrus from dogsleds in winter, spring, and fall; catching narwhals from kayaks in summer; making and wearing polar-bear pants, fox anoraks, sealskin mittens and boots. In Qaanaaq’s large communal workshop, 21st-century tools are used to make Ice Age equipment: harpoons, dogsleds, kayaks. The ways in which these Greenlanders get their food are not much different than they were a thousand years ago, but in recent years Arctic scientists have labeled Greenland’s seasonal sea ice “a rotten ice regime.” Instead of nine months of good ice, there are only two or three. Where the ice in spring was once routinely 6 to 10 feet thick, in 2004 the thickness was only 7 inches even when the temperature was −30 degrees Fahrenheit. “It is breaking up from beneath,” one hunter explained, “because of the wind and stormy waters. We never had that before. It was always clear skies, cold weather, calm seas. We see the ice not wanting to come back. If the ice goes it will be a disaster. Without ice we are nothing.”

  Icebergs originate from glaciers; ice sheets are distinct from sea ice, but they, too, are affected by the global furnace: 2014 was the hottest year on earth since record keeping began, in 1880. Greenland’s ice sheet is now shedding ice five times faster than it did in the 1990s, causing ice to flow down canyons and cliffs at alarming speeds. In 2010 the Petermann Glacier, in Greenland’s far north, calved a 100-square-mile “ice island,” and in 2012 the glacier lost a chunk twice the size of Manhattan. Straits and bays between northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island, part of Canada’s Nunavut territory, are often clogged with rotting, or unstable, ice. In the summer of 2012 almost the whole surface of Greenland’s ice sheet turned to slush.

  What happens at the top of the world affects all of us. The Arctic is the earth’s natural air conditioner. Ice and snow radiate 80 percent of the sun’s heat back into space, keeping the middle latitudes temperate. Dark, open oceans and bare land are heat sinks; open water eats ice. Deep regions of the Pacific Ocean have heated 15 times faster over the past 60 years than during warming periods in the preceding 10,000, and the effect on both glaciers and sea ice is obvious: as warm seawater pushes far north, seasonal sea ice disintegrates, causing the floating tongues of
outlet glaciers to wear thin and snap off.

  By 2004 the sea ice in north Greenland was too precarious for us to travel any distance north, south, or west from Qaanaaq. Sea ice is a Greenlander’s highway and the platform on which marine mammals—including walrus, ring seals, bearded seals, and polar bears—Arctic foxes, and seabirds travel, rest, breed, and hunt. “Those times we went out to Kiatak and Herbert Islands, up Politiken’s Glacier, or way north to Etah and Humboldt Glacier,” the Inuit hunters said, “we cannot go there anymore.” In 2012 the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice shrank to a record minimum. Last year the rate of ice loss in July averaged 40,000 square miles per day.

  The Greenland ice sheet is 1,500 miles long, 680 miles wide, and covers most of the island. The sheet contains roughly 8 percent of the world’s freshwater. GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), a satellite launched in 2002, is one of the tools used by scientists to understand the accelerated melting of the ice sheet. GRACE monitors monthly changes in the ice sheet’s total mass, and has revealed a drastic decrease. Scientists who study the Arctic’s sensitivity to weather and climate now question its stability. “Global warming has fundamentally altered the background conditions that give rise to all weather,” Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, says. Alun Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist, reports: “The melt is going off the scale! The rate of retreat is unprecedented.” To move “glacially” no longer implies slowness, and the “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” on people and nature that the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned us about have already come to fruition in Greenland.