Headwaters Magazine - Spring 2022

Headwaters

The University of Vermont’s Environmental Publication

Spring 2022

Table of Contents Ya Heard of Yerb?

By Sophie Becker | page 3 Poisoning the Heart

By Jamie Cull-Host | page 6

Masthead Co-Editors-in-Chief Eleanor Duva Noah Beckage Managing Designer Ella Weatherington

The Intervale Center: A Gem in the City

By Ali Vollmar | page 7

Treasurer Jake Hogan

Cultivated Meat: The Future of Agriculture on a Decaying Planet

By Kate Brewster | page 9

Contributing Editors Alex De Luise Andie Vellenga Claire Golder Dylan Genter Jake Hogan Kate Wojeck Laura O’Brien Megan Sutor Teresa Helms

The Giving Earth

By Ellie Yatco | page 12 Reimagining the Cuyahoga River Fires

By Bridget Mackie | page 13 Stories from the Dirty Wu

By Jake Hogan | page 16 Final Poem for the US dollar

By Karla Zurita | page 19 Communicating with Beings of the Future

By Kora Freeman-Gerlach | page 20 Matika Wilbur: Project 562 By the Editorial Board | page 23 How to be an Invasive Species

By Teresa Helms and Eleanor Duva | page 25 Propaganda? A Word of Caution on the US Media’s Climate Coverage Op-Ed by Logan Solomon | page 28 The Chief ’s Report From Houston: SEJ 2022 in Photos

By Noah Beckage | page 31

Tule Elk in Point Reyes

By Valentin Kostelnik | page 32 Clarifying the Green Blur

By Maya Kagan | page 35 ground(ing)

By Kate Wojeck | page 38

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Contributing Artists Abby Kaiser Ava Dwyer Ellie Yatco Josh Delahunt Kate Wojeck Lauren Manning Maggie Alberghini Maya Kagan Reese Green Sadie Holmes Samantha Clancy Sophia Mott Wenzdae Wendling

Copywright © 2022 Headwaters Magazine This magazine was printed on the traditional land of the Abenaki People

Dear Reader, Welcome to the Spring 2022 printing of Headwaters Magazine! This semester’s edition is our 12th publication since our inception, and we are continually grateful to offer a publication for UVM students to share their work as environmental authors and artists. As editors, the most rewarding aspect of our role is to witness the growth of our writers and the evolution of their writing processes. Over a semester’s work together, our contemporaries gain confidence in their journalistic voices and proficiency in their command of words. You may recognize some familiar names in the bylines of this edition, and that is no coincidence; often the joy of seeing one’s work in print rejuvenates the spirit enough to do it all over again!

You may also notice a recurring motif in this edition of the magazine. From a personal reflection on the dual nature of the meek but invasive earthworm to an inquisitive manifesto on the threads of power distorting climate change media, many of the pieces within this issue delve below the surface of well-covered issues and themes. The artists and writers that fill these pages have examined the culturally subversive and explored the ecologically subterranean without fear of the profoundly chasmic. Doing so takes courage and resilience in the wake of unprecedented change. As of April 2022, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report conceded the near-inevitability of surpassing the 1.5˚C global warming threshold; undoubtedly a huge disappointment to environmentalists and global citizens everywhere. As young adults likely to live to 2050 and beyond, this is not news we can take easily.

Yet faced with dire straits and buried with forecasts of drought, disaster, and famine, our contributors have shown a resolve for digging deeper still; they face the issues that trouble us in order to unearth the stories that inspire. So, fittingly, our theme for this edition of the magazine is ‘The Underground:’ that which has not been told out of ignorance, trepidation, or because it is—sometimes literally—buried beneath dirt. With this idea in mind, we hope these pages prompt reflection about the ways in which we as a society so often bury the stories that matter most. More importantly, we hope that by doing so, our magazine rekindles a desire for hope, action, and an exhumed world with a brighter future ahead.

Lastly, we would like to extend our thanks to the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, UVM’s Student Government Association, and our advisor, Josh Brown, for their continued support. Most of all, thank you to our hearty crew, whose continued effort keeps our magazine sailing smoothly.

Happy reading,

Eleanor Duva University of Vermont ‘22 Co-Editor-in-Chief

Noah Beckage University of Vermont ‘23 Co-Editor-in-Chief

Photograph by Ella Weatherington Headwaters Magazine 2

Ya Heard of Yerb?

The Story Behind the Ubiquitous Yellow Can

By Sophie Becker

If you go to the University of Vermont, you have definitely encountered people sipping from tall yellow cans while walking around campus. Maybe you’ve seen towers of them or even an entire curtain made out of them.

Students here have adopted yerba mate into their college culture and routine. When I found out that Cat Pause, our on-campus store, was the fourth biggest retailer of Guayakí brand yerba mate in the country, I realized how prevalent this drink is on campus. As an advocate of conscious consumption, I believe that even though we cannot always be perfectly sustainable consumers, we should nonetheless make an effort to be educated and mindful of what we purchase and consume.

My first encounter with yerba was in my hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina; there, I saw the drink become popular on social media. Before I knew it, yerba cans started showing up on the shelves at my local Target. It was not until I came to UVM, though, that I saw such copious consumption of this beverage en masse. I was curious why this drink was so popular, particularly at this school.

This drink is popular with high school and college students in part due to its high caffeine content. As an alternative to coffee and energy drinks, a 15.5 fluid ounce Guayakí Yerba Mate, according to their website, has 150 mg of caffeine. Mate also contains minerals like potassium and magnesium, vitamins B1, B2, and C, amino acids, and polyphenols, all of which have been proven to have positive health benefits by a 2021 conference of scientific dissemination created by the National Institute of Yerba in Argentina. During this conference in which scientists and researchers shared the results of their stud-

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ies, it was established that yerba mate protects cells from oxidative damage, improves the body’s natural defenses, and positively impacts the circulatory and digestive systems. When I spoke to UVM students about their reasons for drinking yerba mate, many mentioned that they love the taste of yerba mate — a sentiment that I strongly agree with. They also appreciate its ability to wake them up in the morning while appearing more natural and eco-friendly than other energy drinks. Lastly, UVM students, with their earthy sensibilities, mentioned that the values of Guayakí aligned with their own, giving them more reason to consume it.

Once I had heard my peers’ thoughts on yerba mate, I wanted to learn more about this drink and its history.

According to the Yerba Mate Argentina site, mate is an herbal drink made from the leaves of a tree in the holly family, Ilex paraguariensis, which is native to the Atlantic Forest in South America. This tropical forest with a diverse variety of wildlife extends along the Atlantic coast of South America, from Brazil to Uruguay. The tree was first cultivated by Indigenous groups in Paraguay, specifically the Guaraní and Tupí peoples, who originally lived in Central Paraguay and still live throughout South America. These groups’ methods highly influenced the way people currently drink yerba mate, though its preparation and consumption has varied from region to region and throughout history.

The most common method of preparation is to handpick, cut, dry, and grind the leaves into a fine powder. The leaves are then placed in a calabash gourd and steeped with hot, but not boiling, water. After preparation, the mate can be enjoyed through a metal straw, called a

bombilla, which has a filter at the bottom to separate the leaves from the liquid. People sometimes add in sugar or swap the water for milk, and if the tea is prepared over ice and with cold water, it is called ‘terere.’ Traditionally, mate is served to a group of people in a ritualistic ceremony as a way to create strong social ties amongst participants, and it thus has great cultural significance for certain indigenous tribes in South America. During a typical ceremony, the host pours the tea into the calabash gourd and then drinks the first, most bitter cup. They then re-steep the tea and pour another cup, which is given to the next person in the circle. This cycle continues until everyone has consumed a cup and the leaves have lost much of their potency.

We call this drink yerba mate, yerba, or just yerb, but where do these terms come from? The word mate comes from Spanish conquistadors’ interpretations of indigenous words for the drink. The words that indigenous people used never referred to the drink itself, only to the cup that held it. Many Indigenous groups called the gourd a version of the word mati, but the Spanish misunderstood and used the term mate, which they adapted to be easier for them to say, to refer to both the cup and the drink itself. The use of the term ‘yerba’ comes from

Indigenous word for plant or herb. As the Spanish colonized South America, they spread yerba mate to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.

In exploring how the drink acquired worldwide popularity, I discovered that the brand behind the yellow cans, Guayakí, is really what brought yerba mate to the United States and catalyzed its success here. One of the co-founders, Alex Pryor, is an Argentinian who grew up drinking traditional yerba mate with his family. He moved to California for college with a duffle bag full of clothes and yerba mate (with his gourd and metal straw) and got a degree in food science at California Polytechnic State University. While doing so, he began informally selling yerba mate with his friend David Karr, who later became a co-founder of Guayakí along with Pryor. The pair’s small enterprise brought about the popularity of yerba mate in the US. With this increasing demand naturally came an increase in pressure for producers.

I started to wonder about the current state of yerba mate—where is it now being produced and consumed?

According to a 2021 publication in the journal Nutrients, the top three countries producing yerba mate are Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. However, less than five percent of this product is being exported while the rest

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is used for domestic consumption. Presently, the heart of yerba mate production is in the Misiones province in Argentina. Syria and Lebanon are some of yerba’s largest importers due to the high number of people who immigrated from these nations to South America prior to WWII. Syrian and Lebanese immigrants began drinking yerba mate and ultimately spread its popularity in their home countries upon returning, where it continues to be consumed in large quantities. Unfortunately, this drink’s high consumption rates globally and domestically has its drawbacks.

As a result of global demand and an unregulated market, corners are cut in order to keep up with competition.

Its widespread consumption has had two major impacts: decreasing biodiversity and increasing soil degradation.

To make space for yerba mate plantations, many farmers cut down forested areas to create their fields, fragmenting forest habitats and decreasing the biodiversity in that area. Biodiversity creates ecological stability and resilience, and without it, an ecosystem is susceptible to major destruction and disturbance. These farms also tend to use large quantities of herbicides, which intensify soil erosion by eliminating other plants that keep soil in place. In addition, soil fertility is severely reduced in monoculture fields, as a lack of diverse plant decay prevents organic matter from being added to the soil.

Furthermore, a variety of social issues have been exposed in the field of yerba mate production, specifically in Argentina. Yerba mate was identified in the United States Bureau of International Labor Affairs 2016 as a product that frequently involves the use of child labor.

The yerba mate confirmed to be produced using child labor is primarily distributed and consumed in South America. In addition, there is the issue of poverty among the farmers who are working on slim margins, as the effort and money they put into this crop often do not outweigh what they can sell it for. Farmers and nearby residents also have to deal with harsh health outcomes that are associated with using herbicides on crops. Roundup is a popular herbicide used for the yerba mate plant and has been found to have carcinogenic effects by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015. These herbicides also include toxic compounds and endocrine disruptors that can cause cancerous tumors and developmental issues. The writer Adam Dohrenwend in a 2019 thesis on the socio-economic impacts of yerba mate poses the question, “¿Cuánto crecimiento de PIB de un país justifica la leucemia de un niño?”— “How much growth of a country’s GDP justifies a child’s leukemia?”

Despite the negative aspects associated with the increasing demand for yerba mate, the drink has positive

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impacts. The increasing global demand for mate can benefit the areas of production, but only if more companies adopt similar business models such as the one Guayakí has adopted. Instead of ignoring Indigenous roots and cultural values, depleting resources in the name of company profit, and showing disregard for ecological wellbeing in relation to the company, Guyaki has done the opposite. Alex Pryor wanted to create a business model that would help the ecosystem and communities that grew yerba mate while also providing a product with nutrients and health benefits. His company began working with indigenous people in Paraguay and small farmers in Argentina, encouraging the use of agroecology to preserve biodiversity. Guayakí oversees 200,000 acres of protected lands owned by indigenous communities and small farmers growing yerba mate plants, according to the Guayakí annual impact report. Later on in the company’s history, three more entrepreneurs with sustainable visions for Guayakí joined the team. Steven Karr (David Karr’s brother), Don Miguel, and Chris Mann helped pioneer a new vision of business they call market-driven regeneration. Their practices include permaculture which prioritizes working with the environment. In practice, this looks like planting trees where they would naturally grow and taking care of the soil and the surrounding environment. Karr, Miguel, Mann, and the rest of the leadership team have identified four pillars of regeneration: practicing conscious leadership, partnering with their values, celebrating communities and cultures, and taking responsibility for their footprint. Every year, they report on their social and environmental performance and upload that to their website in an effort to be transparent.

It is important to be aware of what we consume, and no business will be perfect, but it is our duty to educate ourselves so that we can be conscious consumers. Guayakí is one yerba mate business to support, but there are a few other options. Clean Cause yerba mate has ethical business values and practices and donates a major portion of their proceeds to helping those in recovery from addiction. Another yerba mate seller is Dobra Tea, a tearoom right here in Burlington. There, they serve fairtrade yerba mate in a traditional gourd and bombilla.

Guayakí combines the positive business practices and a connection to the culture of the drink. Because of the accessibility and popularity of this product, the students of UVM show their support for Guayakí Yerba Mate by spending approximately one dollar extra on a bright yellow can instead of the alternative coffee or energy drink.

H Art by Lauren Manning

Poisoning the Heart

By Jamie Cull-Host

Slush slithers out from under well-worn boots Tramping through the would-be glistening white landscape The snow instead tinged a dirty brown Scraped aside into piles towering over salty streets The cars rampaging through, beholden only to Father Time Parking lots glowering in prismatic colors The leaked vehicular lifeblood Mixing with the pitiful remnants of the once pure snow A malicious brew of man-made muck Boiling and gurgling as it seeps into the ground First through dead leaves and forgotten greenery Then bleeding into the soil Passing through layers upon layers of rock created through the grace of eternity Some impurities stripped away but not enough Protections of the Earth faltering before of the ingenuity of man The murky liquid once pristine Now greets its former origin Finding itself not ostracized But instead welcomed with open arms Rejoining and rejoicing As it falls into the comforting embrace of community Unaware of the consequence of its homecoming The poison mixes and mingles into the very heart of Mother Earth H

Art by Maggie Alberghini Headwaters Magazine 6

The Intervale Center: A Gem in the City The Impacts of the Intervale Center on the Burlington Community

By Ali Vollmar

Before arriving in Burlington in the fall of 2020, I had never heard of the Intervale Center. After living in the city for a few months, I took a friend’s advice to take a walk in the Intervale’s woods where I slowly started to unearth a hidden gem in the heart of Chittenden County. It was not until my first environmental studies class at UVM, Environmental Studies 001, that I fully realized the broad impacts of the Intervale on its surrounding land and community. In my lab, we dove into the dozens of unique elements that make up the Intervale, which prompted reflection on how my previously narrow viewpoint of the organization had widened. I realized there must be other people that view the Intervale as only a green area, rather than a hub for food production, community building, and volunteering.

A Brief History The Intervale project was initially formulated by Will Raap, founder of Gardener’s Supply Company, as an effort to restore the 700-acre area of low-lying, underutilized land sitting within Burlington’s city limits. Raap and his dedicated crew cleaned and restored the land, transforming it from a dilapidated dumping ground to its present state as a vibrant community space. Today, the Intervale is recognized for its sustainable agriculture models, specialization in community-supported agriculture, and expansive food hub. Since 1988, innovation in farming styles and land care has been of the utmost priority to the Intervale Center.

Exploration of Nature The Intervale’s natural areas offer a peaceful escape

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from the nearby hustle of the city. All can inhale fresh air as they walk, bike or run along trails extending along the Winooski River to the Ethan Allen Homestead. Snowfall in the winter months expands the Intervale’s outdoor offerings, opening three miles of groomed cross country ski trails, snowshoeing, and more. By engaging in these activities on the land, visitors at the Intervale can experience an intimate sense of place— the connection individuals feel with their natural surroundings. A sense of place can provide people with feelings of groundedness, and is integral to achieving inner peace and balance in our current day and age. The upkeep of natural areas by the Intervale is crucial not only to physical health, but also to the community’s mental health by providing visitors with the opportunity to connect and decompress outdoors.

Positively Impacting the Local Ecosystem A unique feature of the Intervale is that it provides a space for the ‘Tommy Thompson Community Garden,’ the largest of 14 community gardens managed by the Burlington Area Community Garden program. The Tommy Thompson garden site is home to over 150 plots and is an exceptional tool for connecting people in urban or suburban areas to the natural landscape. This opportunity expands access to farming, giving members the ability to grow and harvest fresh food close to their home and utilize the incredibly fertile soil of the Winooski floodplain. It also encourages participants to engage in restorative growing techniques that improve overall growing conditions and soil fertility, such as fertilizing the soil with compost and irrigating plants with water collected in rain barrels. Lastly, the proximity of the gar-

den plots to one another brings people together to foster community and bond over the joy of connecting with the Earth through food production.

Supporting the Community The Intervale Center, however, is more than just land plots for food production and trails for recreation. As a non-profit organization, it offers a variety of programs to support the local community all year round, including providing infrastructure for new farms, leasing land to local farms, offering volunteer opportunities, hosting events throughout the year, and operating the Intervale Food Hub. The Intervale Food Hub is a program that began in 2008 to connect people to locally sourced food that is healthier for their bodies and the planet. The operational structure of The Food Hub benefits both people and the environment by increasing transparency and food chain resilience. Customers of the Food Hub are able to understand where their food is produced due to diligent record-keeping and relationship maintenance with 70 Vermont-based farming families.

By offering seasonal local goods to customers, transportation distances decrease and consumers can be ensured their food is grown in conditions requiring less external inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides. This system allows the consumer to feel more confident that their products are supporting a healthy, sustainable ecosystem and local economy.

Responding to a Pandemic Although the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 disrupted almost all areas of our community, the Intervale quickly rose to the challenge of adapting their services to meeting the community’s needs. The Food Hub expanded its home delivery program to safely support local families with fresh food and 225,000 meals were donated through the Everyone Eats program, which provides food directly to people impacted by COVID-19 in the Chittenden, Franklin, and Grand Isle counties. The Intervale also continued their efforts towards mitigating climate change, setting a personal record by propagating and planting 57,000 trees across Vermont that year.

Life in Burlington Without the Intervale How would Burlington look if the Intervale did not exist? Simply put, land and water quality would worsen and jobs held by Intervale team members would decrease. The Burlington community would have 900 fewer acres of natural area in which to work, volunteer, and play. Local food production yield from Pitchfork, Hallow Herbs, and other farms leasing land from the Intervale would decrease significantly. In addition, the Winooski River could be subjected to high rates of soil erosion and chemical runoff pollution, from which it is currently spared by the thoughtful stewardship of the Intervale.

Burlington might not be classified as the sustainable city it is today, as the land on which the Intervale sits could be occupied instead by businesses and homes. Students

and the greater community would not be able to learn from the Intervale’s sustainable land practices, eliminating a beautiful relationship between people currently upheld by the Intervale. It is places like the Intervale that we must appreciate for their frequently unnoticed, yet diligent, efforts to conserve nature and provide for our community’s health in the environmental, social, and economic sectors. H

Art by Ella Weatherington Headwaters Magazine 8

Cultivated Meat: The Future of Agriculture on a Decaying Planet

By Kate Brewster

“We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” - Winston Churchill, 1931 In the battle against climate change, the impacts of energy, fossil fuels, and transportation seem to dominate the mainstream conversation about mitigation efforts while the devastating effects of agriculture on the environment are often overlooked. This may explain why an inventive, science fiction-esque solution to the overconsumption of meat has managed to fly under the radar until very recently. In 1931, Winston Churchill predicted a future in which meat products could be grown independently in a lab. Now, just short of a century later, China’s new FiveYear Agricultural Plan, which includes cultivated meats and other ‘future foods’ such as plant-based eggs as part of its blueprint for food security, is accelerating the market for cultivated meat. This vision of cultivated meat is tauntingly close, and not a second too soon. For the sake of our environment and food security, global agriculture is in desperate need of sustainable change. So how can cultivated meat, a relatively new and untested concept, actually provide a possible solution to food insecurity, agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, and global poverty?

The development of agriculture has essentially defined human civilization beginning roughly 10,000 years ago when the world population was around 5 million. From 1940 to 1980, the world population almost doubled, and to account for the burgeoning population, Norman Borlaug famously revolutionized the agricultural industry by engineering crops to improve crop yields, according to Kevin Drum. Since then, the world population has skyrocketed further, from roughly 2 billion to almost 8 billion. We have outsourced our agriculture, converted more land to farmland, and expanded small-scale operations to industrial farms. Still, our agricultural system has not evolved effectively to sustain the growing population. The possibility of eliminating the need for animals to grow meat may seem hard to fathom, but it is becoming glaringly obvious that we need to find alterna-

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tives to feed the world while stewarding our resources for future generations. Currently, raising livestock for food accounts for up to 14.5% of global emissions, according to Aryn Baker. Baker also reports that the one billion cows and other livestock used in global agriculture are responsible for releasing an amount of methane equivalent to some 3.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. If we want to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius, the maximum temperature at which Earth can sustain life as we know it, restructuring our agriculture systems might be a good place to start.

Cultivated meat has the potential to feed growing populations using a fraction of the resources required by traditional agriculture, and the resulting product is cellularly identical to conventional meat. The procedure involves acquiring stem cells from animals in a minimally invasive process. Doctors remove a tiny sample of muscle from the cow using a scalpel and anesthetic and grow those stem cells in a bioreactor at high volumes.

The cells are then fed an oxygen rich cell medium containing nutrients and proteins to support their growth as they differentiate into the cell types that make up meat.

The resulting conglomeration of skeletal muscle, connective tissues, and fat are harvested and packaged into sellable products, according to Elliot Swartz and Claire Bomkamp. Following the news of China’s plan, there may now be enough interest to raise funds for a largescale project. Investors have already poured billions into plant-based meat, and this technology is even more likely to appeal to meat consumers, for the simple reason that it tastes a whole lot better. If China creates a market for cultivated meat and attracts investors willing to back it, the increased funding will cause market prices to fall, allowing for the possibility of lab grown meat at affordable pricing on shelves at local grocery stores, according to Aryn Baker.

As reported by the World Resources Institute (WRI),

the global demand for meat is set to nearly double by 2050. This trend reflects the direct relationship between developing nations increasing their capital and beginning to increase their meat consumption. The rising demand for meat cannot be met by current agricultural methods without grave climate consequences. Aside from the need to combat food insecurity while limiting emissions, there are other benefits to cultivated meat. Industrial cattle farming is a glamourless field, and there are many ethical concerns surrounding the quality of life for livestock.

With the implementation of cellular agriculture, animal rights activists can rest easy knowing that lab grown beef could eventually require only around 30,000 cows compared to the 3 billion being slaughtered annually to meet global demand for beef, according to Joe Fassler of The Counter. A divergence from large-scale farming could also be beneficial for human health. For instance, animal meat simply isn’t an efficient source of nutritional energy; cattle consume roughly 25 calories of plant material for every calorie of edible protein they produce. Fassler also found that cultured meat could achieve an improved ratio of only three to four calories consumed for every four produced. Another concern is that when we raise livestock in crowded, often unsanitary living spaces without enough sunlight or space to live, those animals are at high risk for disease, and antibiotics are used generously in response. When we ingest these animals and the antibiotics contained within their tissues, our bodies develop resistance to those antibiotics, putting us at higher risk

for bacterial infections and diseases, according to Michael Rowland of Forbes. When you consider the suspect labor regulations on these types of farms and the elevated risk of zoonotic diseases, it’s easy to imagine that there are probably better methods for meeting demand than conventional animal meat production. Unsurprisingly, large-scale intensive agriculture is bad news for biodiversity, especially considering the amount of land required for fields and pastures, and the massive amount of grains needed to feed livestock. By moving away from largescale farming, we can curb deforestation and convert farmland back to thriving ecosystems.

Alternative meat has been an especially hot topic as of late following China’s January 26, 2022 release of its FiveYear Agricultural Plan. For the first time ever, a government has included cultivated meats in its plans for food security, a plan which promises to cut meat consumption in half by 2030, according to Charlie Campbell of Time Magazine. Cultivated meat has not yet been granted regulatory approval in China (so far, only Singapore has taken this step), but that could soon change as pressure mounts to achieve the five-year plan. This development may spell drastic change for the rest of the world. Charlie Campbell reports that China’s best bet for creating a market for cultivated meat is sweetening the pot for investors by awarding state contracts and government perks like tax breaks and free factory space to companies. Despite the obvious social, economic, and environmental advantages to lab grown meat, the idea hasn’t had its moment

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in mainstream culture yet. However, a global superpower like China has the ability to leverage economies of scale, and so it is quite likely that we’ll see cultivated meat gain traction in the United States and other competing nations over the next few years.

We do not have to look too far into the future to imagine the effects this new wave of sustainable agriculture will have on the United States. U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack has big plans, having recently announced a $146 million investment in sustainable agriculture. As part of this initiative, Tufts University has been granted $10 million to establish the National Institute for Cellular Agriculture as stated by New Food Magazine. Capitalist nations like the United States cannot regulate private production as easily as China, but private companies worldwide will likely see the value in investing. Vilsack’s announcement precedes speculation about the U.S. Farm Bill, a combination of legislations passed once every year that dictates farming livelihoods, how food is grown, and what kinds of foods are grown.

The U.S. Farm Bill will be renewed in 2023, and there is growing pressure to include more climate initiatives. China’s prospective success in implementing cultivated meat into their markets may ultimately determine whether or not the U.S. will follow suit. If lab-cultivated meat is as successful in the fight against climate change as expected, we may very well see its inclusion in the Farm Bill come 2023.

Although many have suggested that a shift to lab based meat is inevitable, a number of barriers still stand in the way of a cultivated meat success story. It is well established that cultivated meat is a more efficient way of obtaining calories than traditional livestock, yet the system still manifests other inefficiencies. For cultivated meat to work on a large scale, we need serious investment in sophisticated equipment. Powering this technology sustainably demands an alternative method to fossil fuels. Furthermore, the amount of bioreactors needed in just one lab facility is staggering. For perspective, according to Fassler, the entire biopharmaceutical industry is powered by roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume; a single meat engineering facility would require nearly a third of this to make only a small fraction of the nation’s meat, 22 million pounds of 100 billion produced annually. A single beef packing plant could produce this amount in a single week, Fassler found. Even if we could produce enough cultivated meat to compete on a larger scale, economists argue that the numbers simply do not work. Based on interacting factors such as cell biology, process design, input expenses, capital costs, and economies of scale, the price of this new meat would come

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to around $17 per pound, according to David Humbird.

The Good Food Institute (GFI) has admitted that a number of things need to change for cultured meat to be cost accessible by 2030, and investors probably should not expect a hugely profitable industry. As most investors are motivated by profit, the industry will likely need public or philanthropic support. This is not outside the realm of possibility since the traditional meat industry does rely on large government subsidies. Cultivated meat does have an advantage over the uncertainty of climate factors in traditional livestock farming, which may eventually cause meat prices to fluctuate dramatically, while lab meat will at least price consistently. But the overarching concern is this: no one has ever produced cultured meat at scale, and there is reasonable doubt that it can even be done. Some scientists insist that cultivated meat will not be economically viable until companies can make cells grow beyond widely recognized biological limits, and there has been little done by GFI to put these fears at rest.

Instead, they insist that the amount of interested investors suggests that the industry is possible, without providing actual methods to scale the operation. Even with fancy bioreactors, cells have a tendency to limit their own growth, and there is not much we can do about that. Even so, companies seem to be aware of these obstacles and are still willing to try. The bottom line is that an unprecedented, highly theoretical concept is close to becoming reality, meaning anyone looking to get in on the market will need to be comfortable placing some “informed bets,” with no guarantee of great profit.

Could cultivated meat actually offer a possible solution to both hunger and climate change? Only time will tell. Like with any sustainable agriculture proposal, there are trade-offs to cultured meat, and it is certainly not a perfect solution. Despite this valid skepticism, if we can get this right, cultured meat may be one of the best options for food security on a changing planet. There are high hopes for this industry, and as weather patterns become more erratic with climate change, contemporary farming will face serious setbacks. In the coming years, growing seasons may shorten, long periods of drought may become routine, and weather disasters could ruin entire crop yields. The stakes are incredibly high. China has made the leap towards sustainable agriculture, and the U.S. and other nations may follow. As a vegetarian, I never thought I would care so much about the future of animal meat. But if and when affordable cultivated meat makes its way onto the shelves in the U.S., I do not plan to miss the chance to taste the future of sustainable agriculture. H Art by Wenzdae Wendling

The Giving Earth

By Ellie Yatco

My piece reflects the effect of consumerism and capitalism, specifically in the fashion industry, on our environment.

I use the concept of Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” to explore how businesses will continually take from our earth to earn money, despite the environmental impacts. In my piece, the rich, corporate man stands in contrast to the poor environmental and ethical outcomes of his business. He is reaching towards the dying earth above him, and continues to take. H Headwaters Magazine 12

Reimagining the Cuyahoga River Fires

By Bridget Mackie

In 1952, Carl Stokes was working as a liquor enforcement agent in Toledo, Ohio. He had come a long way from his childhood in government-subsidized housing in Cleveland’s East Side. After dropping out of high school at seventeen and joining the U.S. Army, he traveled to Alabama and Germany, places that instilled in him a desire to become educated. Once discharged, he went back to complete his high school diploma and eventually enrolled in West Virginia State University. There, Stokes met a professor who inspired him to pursue a better education back in Cleveland at Western Reserve University. It was in Cleveland that Stokes began working part-time and put aside his education for the material gains that a better job could get him.

Using some connections within the Ohio government, Stokes got a job as a liquor enforcement agent.

On November 3, 1952, the same year he was working as a liquor enforcement agent, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire. The resulting damage was estimated to cost over $1.3 million and included the destruction of three tugboats, the dock of the Great Lakes Towing Company, and the Jefferson Avenue Bridge. Despite the enormous damage, this was not the fire that would be ingrained into the public consciousness; in fact, the fire of 1952 was not covered outside of Cleveland at all.

When most people hear about the Cuyahoga River Fire, the one they are talking about is the fire in 1969.

This was the fire that caught the attention of a nation with growing environmental fervor. This was the fire that led to the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. This begs

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the question: Why would one fire become a national rallying cry while the other was barely remembered?

All told, the Cuyahoga River has caught on fire at least thirteen times in recorded history, between 1868 to 1969. Much of the newspaper coverage on these early fires focused on how expensive the damages were. This is due to the attitudes toward the Cuyahoga River at the time. In the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, Cleveland was a city built on industries like steel and oil, both of which are heavy polluters.

Because of the Cuyahoga’s proximity to industry, it was valued for its uses as a shipping route, not as an ecosystem that deserved protection. The Cuyahoga became a dumping ground for industrial waste via the sewer system, which made it one of the most polluted rivers in the United States.

It is important to note that many business owners and members of Cleveland’s government tried to address the pollution on the Cuyahoga River, suggesting measures to reduce the amount of industrial waste that entered the Cuyahoga and starting initiatives to clean the oil slicks off the river. The goal of these initiatives was to prevent fires from disrupting shipping along the river and to keep businesses safe; clearly, the primary motivations of these initiatives were economic and not environmental.

Towards the middle of the twentieth century, the economy of Cleveland, along with those of other industrial cities, began to shift as automation in manufacturing contributed to a decline in jobs within the industry.

Between 1952 and 1969, the years between the two final fires, Cleveland lost some 60,000 jobs in manufactur-

ing. As factory jobs went away, the population began to move outward from the city center into the surrounding suburbs. The deindustrialization and decentralization of Cleveland meant that many citizens living in the suburbs could look at the pollution within the city from a different perspective.

In 1967, fifteen years after he was employed as a liquor enforcement agent and nine years after completing his law degree, Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, becoming the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city. The issues the incoming Stokes administration faced were numerous. Air and water quality in the city were abysmal, Cleveland’s East Side was facing a worsening housing crisis, and the previous year a riot in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Hough resulted in the deaths of four people. These were the problems Stokes sought to address; he wanted to transform Cleveland from a rapidly decaying industrial city to a thriving service city.

The day after the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, Stokes took the local Cleveland media on a tour of the river, emphasizing its heavily polluted nature. Stokes saw the fire as a way to finally turn attention towards Cleveland’s many problems. His goal was not only to reduce the pollution on the river, but to show how pollution had infiltrated much of Cleveland and that many of the city’s problems were interconnected.

By 1969, the predominantly Black East Side of Cleveland, where Stokes grew up, had reached a breaking point. Neighborhoods like Hough faced a tremendous degree of urban decay. Broken glass littered the streets along with other refuse, ongoing rat infestations made housing situations unbearable, and many residents faced rising rents despite poor housing conditions.

In addition, Hough was racked with two race riots, the first in 1966, which resulted in the deaths of four people, and the second in 1968, which caused the deaths of seven people. These riots exemplified the tension escalated by the degrading urban environment within Cleveland and brought national attention to the city. Unfortunately, many government officials had flawed ideas of how to deal with the urban crisis. Stokes’ mayoral predecessor, Ralph Locher, spoke with a senate subcommittee after the 1966 riots and deflected most of the blame of the riots onto the residents of Hough themselves. He argued that “we must not forget—nor sweep under the rug—the problems of the individual unaccustomed to urban life.”

The sentiment that it is the fault of inner-city residents for their condition proved particularly hard to dispel.

Many residents in the suburbs of Cleveland viewed the degradation of the inner city with sadness and disgust.

These suburbanites saw pollution in the city as a prob-

lem necessitating action, signifying how the relationship between those living on the periphery of the city and the downtown had changed. Now, suburban Clevelanders, with a safe distance from the problems of the inner city, felt comfortable enough to demand change.

Though suburban residents sought to improve conditions in the inner city of Cleveland, many, like Locher, expressed that the problems of Hough were the fault of its inhabitants. It was easy for these citizens to look at the unrest within the inner city of Cleveland and compare it to their relatively stable, predominantly white suburbs and conclude that the people were the problem. The white residents of Cleveland used these racist sentiments to blame Black residents of Cleveland for the deteriorating state of the East Side. One white woman wrote to Mayor Stokes about the issues in Hough, writing, “Why don’t these people living there take a broom and shovel and clean up their yards instead of throwing garbage out their windows?” This misunderstanding of the systemic nature of these environmental issues led many of the early programs in Hough to focus on educating the residents on proper trash disposal. This ignored the broader, more complex issues relating to the deterioration of adequate housing, and the need for funds to help clean up Hough.

Stokes had a unique position as both mayor of Cleveland and a former resident of government-subsidized housing in the East Side. He knew what it felt like to “[grow] up poor and Black in Cleveland,” and he knew the benefits of federally-funded housing. Stokes understood that solving the problems in Cleveland required viewing the city as an organism where everything was connected. While giving a testimony to the Civil Rights Commission in 1966, a year before he became mayor, Stokes stated that “metropolitan Cleveland’s citizens must be awake to the facts that unchecked and uncontrolled disease does not stop at the city boundary; nor do the rats that often carry the diseases know they are to stop there; water and air pollution affects all of the county.” Stokes argued that these issues associated with urban crisis were not exclusive to the inner cities. They could spread if the

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root cause was not addressed. As mayor, Stokes sought to draw attention to this idea after the Cuyahoga River fire, which became a way to intertwine the hot button environmental issues, like water and air pollution, to the less glamorous ones, like housing and urban decay.

The Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 did indeed draw attention to Cleveland. Original reporting on the fire may have been confined to local news, but subsequent essays published in Time in the following month and National Geographic the following year brought the Cuyahoga into the national conversation, stressing its environmental significance. Unfortunately, much of this news coverage alienated Cleveland and treated it like an urban wasteland, characteristic of the declining industrial city.

Stokes perceived this messaging and fought against it.

He called on his brother, Louis Stokes, a representative for part of Cleveland in Congress, to help him obtain federal funds to mitigate the pollution in the Cuyahoga. In the fall of 1970, Louis Stokes drafted a bill aimed at utilizing the Army Corps of Engineers to investigate flood control and water quality on the Cuyahoga River as well as find ways to mitigate these issues. Eventually, the resolution passed, but the Army Corps of Engineers focused their efforts primarily on flood control rather than water quality. The federal government was still reluctant to focus on the River as being anything other than industrial.

The same year Louis Stokes drafted that bill, the first Earth Day celebrations were held across the country.

Many Clevelanders attended local marches and talks that called for federal legislation to reduce air and water pollution.

In a statement to press the week before Earth Day, Stokes expressed concern that focusing on air and water pollution would overshadow what he viewed as the more pressing issue of poverty in Cleveland. He stated, “I am fearful that the priorities on air and water pollution may be at the expense of what the priorities of the country ought to be: proper housing, adequate food and

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clothing.” He was not alone in this sentiment; many civil rights activists were similarly concerned that the issues of environmentalism appealed to a white middle-class while ignoring the problems in the predominantly Black East Side neighborhoods. Those white suburban environmentalists were viewing the environmental issues of the city from a distance; they had no personal experience with the polluted banks of the Cuyahoga River or the rat-infested homes on the East Side.

This dilemma raises concerns about the proper way to address environmental issues. On one hand, any progress, however little, might be deemed a success. But on the other hand, what are the little gains worth if other, larger problems persist? Stokes fought hard for people to recognize that the problems within Cleveland, and in many deindustrialized cities, were connected with the environment, and that they should be viewed and addressed as a whole. The Clean Water Act was eventually passed in 1972, though Stokes left office in 1971. Unfortunately, many of the problems Stokes sought to fix went unsolved.

As he predicted, the problems of pollution often overshadowed the poverty of the downtown. In the decade that followed Stokes’ administration, scores of environmental legislation were passed, but the economic crisis within Cleveland worsened. Today, Cleveland has transformed from an industrial city to a service city, as is evidenced by the growth of the health industry and college campuses within Cleveland. And though the Cuyahoga is often seen as a triumph of environmental activism— the river now has populations of fish living in it—Cleveland remains one of the most impoverished cities in the United States, with about 30% of its residents living below the poverty line. And yes, one could argue the issues of poverty are more complex and elusive than reducing pollution in a river, but it confronts us with the question: which issues are we more willing to face? H

Art by Samantha Clancy

Stories from the Dirty Wu

By Jake Hogan

Chickadees in a Chain-Link Fence

I am nine years old and I know everything.

A month ago, Anthony and I were staring up at the sky from the half-acre of asphalt where we have recess. There were no clouds, but the sky was dotted with the white shapes of seagulls circling us above, sojourners from the shore ten miles east. “Why are they here if the ocean is far away?” he asked. “Do they think the pond is the ocean?”

“No, they came here for these,” I told him, as I shook the last Cheez-its from a Ziploc bag into my palm.

“They like it here because it’s dirty,” he said. “My dad says in Winchester they call it the Dirty Wu because when the wind blows over there from Woburn, it smells bad.”

I didn’t like that statement. I’d heard it called that, but I’d never been told that the name referred to a smell. I wanted to tell him that I thought he was mistaken, but if I’m wrong, he might think he knows more than me. So I just said, “I know,” and decided to fact-check later.

The truth is, I am nine years old and I know everything, but I learned it from people who know even more, inheriting information in anecdotal adages. My grandmother has lived here for all sixty-four years of her life, and her mind hosts a dense compendium of things I ought to know—all the stories they don’t write down.

Like how before fridges made ice cubes, Puggy next door was the iceman, and he took horses out onto the pond in winter to cut ice. “Don’t you ever walk on that ice. You’ll fall through like the horses,” she would say.

“Their bodies are still under there.”

It’s a no-go in the summer, too. “There used to be a beach on Horn Pond,” she told me, pronouncing the name like ‘honpon,’ “and when I was your age I nearly died because the weeds pulled me under.”

“And when she was young, your mother ran out the front door screaming ‘cause a man in the pond was drowning. She was gonna jump in the pond and I had to hold her back. Guess what the man was caught on?

A mattress spring! Someone dumped a mattress in there and killed that poor man.”

If the pond could talk back to us, I wonder if it would apologize. My grandmother told me that before I was born, my great aunt Sheila had just graduated from the high school and was driving with her friends when she swerved off the road and plummeted into the water.

But you can’t really blame the pond for that. Besides, there are good things, too.

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When we walk up Horn Pond Mountain, we can see all the way to Boston, and my grandmother showed me where the ski slope used to be. I like to stop and look at the wooden statue of Winitihooloo, who she tells me lived right where we live 400 years ago. There’s music in the sound of crickets chirping at sunset, and there’s art in the way that fog swirls up from the water at sunrise.

Still, some parts are less than pristine, like the rusty, warped chain-link fence around the old reservoir, now colonized by invasive reeds—the natural world mirroring the human. There are plastic water bottles crushed into the fences’ holes, abandoned by people walking the paved path around the pond. The steel wire diamonds are the perfect size for a chicka d e e , though, and there’s always a few jumping through the holes again and again, like it’s a game.

I’ve adopted my grandmother’s way of understanding the environment, some murky combination of distrust and gratitude. For each springtime walk around the pond, chatting with the snapping turtles and gliding parallel to the swans, she told cautionary tales.

I’m nine years old and I know everything, but it’s the type of knowing where the knowledge lives in a communal well that has been poisoned, just like the ones in real life. The warning I heard most often was to never drink the tap water. They say that the factories put chemicals in the river or buried them in barrels and those toxins got into our water and gave a bunch of people cancer. I used to think she was exaggerating to scare me into a life of Poland Springs brand loyalty, but I came to find that this warning was either ironic or true.

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Last month, after my chat with Anthony, I went straight home to my grandmother. I sat next to the hospital bed they set up in our living room and asked her if our town is called “The Dirty Wu” because it smells bad.

She didn’t answer right away, and I worried I had reached a limit on such lessons. But like a frozen lake thaws, she melted the pause, telling me in a shifting tone like waves lapping against sand, “No, they’re just jealous.”

I don’t think that the land we live on wants to hurt us, and she must know that too. Regardless of all that she’s seen, she still loves the pond across the street, so much so that today, per her request, we spread her ashes over it from the mountaintop. From there, you can see all of Horn Pond, our house, the pondside power plant, and the respites of green dotted among the gray of homes and roads.

Pavement and pollution criss-cross on the map, but there are still gaps of trees and nicer things. Even though it’s surrounded by concrete and steel, the pond and its woods sing and dance like chickadees playing in a chainlink fence.

On the walk home, I saw a little brown animal I’d never seen before swimming in the water. I wonder if my grandmother is fond of these creatures or if they have wronged her somehow. Perhaps, like the pond, they are somewhere in between an old friend and a persistent enemy. It occurs to me that my soul’s portrait of this landscape is still only half-painted and that I’ll have to color the rest in myself. So, I’ll talk to the rocks and the rivers and listen for replies on the wind’s breath. I’ll ask my questions to the pond, and the poison barrels, and Winitihooloo, and the seagulls. Regardless of what they tell me, though, I’ll never trust the tap.

An Illegally Buried Barrel of Solidified Industrial Waste Clears His Name.

I’d like to address the accusations. Really, I think that

I’m the one who should be angry.

Let me be clear: my lid is firmly sealed, and I am not leaching chemicals into Woburn’s groundwater. Even if my contents were contaminating the soil, most of the gunk in my 55-gallon volume may be solidified animal fat from a tannery, for all we know. Meanwhile, you’ve had a century of problems with PCE, TCE, PFAS, arsenic, chromium, lead, and likely more you don’t even know about yet.

Nobody cares about that, though. They just hear me introduce myself as “Illegally Buried Barrel of Solidified Industrial Waste” and they immediately think to themselves, “Oh, this guy sucks.”

You think I don’t feel guilty? If I could dig myself up, I would, but this isn’t the fate I chose. My steel could just as easily have been a nice fence, or maybe a telescope; useful things. But instead, my utility is to a select few, while my existence is of disservice to the rest.

Resent the people who buried me here illegally, those who had resources and options, rather than a limbless metal shell. Attack whatever system forced me to be part of the problem, and get off my back.

The Life, Death, and Carving of an American Tree When I was a seed, I knew nothing but the basic instincts baked into my being. When you’re a seed, you feel yourself fall just before the pressure of soil piles above you. That’s when the overwhelming urge to stretch comes over you, and suddenly your root has burst forth into the ground. Your reality shifts when you unfurl your first leaves and feel the sun.

It’s all in perspective now, your simple existence. You will live to stretch your roots and drink from the Earth while sprawling your leaves under the daylight. Long ago, when the stars were visible, you would spend the night relaxing under a blanket of faraway suns and wonder if they were surrounded by celestial flora. I guess you wouldn’t get it if you aren’t a tree.

Those are the memories I hold onto from when I was alive, still growing on the shady south bank of Horn Pond. For a while, I was lucky. The pond got poisoned and the roadways grew, but between them, my little slice of woods persisted.

My good fortunes faltered when they paved a footpath five feet from me. The soil went sour. I grew weaker until one day, a strong gust left me a snag of my former self.

From that jagged, crooked trunk, I was carved in man’s image. Now, I stand with a fish in my right hand and a braid falling over my shoulder. I represent a figure from one of the pre-colonial legends of this pond, published in a book two centuries ago.

The man whose likeness I’m meant to bear, Winitihooloo, loved a woman who lived at my pond. However, I prefer the story about that woman’s father, Wabanowi.

One night, Wabanowi was awoken by a spirit who guided him up Mount Mianomo. There, he entered a cave which closed behind him and he fell into a deep sleep. He awoke years later and the spirit told him that she brought him there to spare him from witnessing what happened to his community. Looking out over the pond, he saw smokestacks rising from foreign chimneys, but no trace of his family.

That’s just a story, though. I’m not old enough to know how much the original was watered down as it flowed from one colonist to another before drying up as ink on a page.

But I too would like to be buried, led underground by a kind spirit and left there to sleep through a burgeoning storm, a seed once again.

Maybe when I woke up from that stasis, like Wabanowi, the world I knew would be long lost, faded into the void. My fellow trees would be clear cut or scorched, and the lake would be gone too, taken as vapor on the wind.

Or maybe I’d emerge into a dense forest full of trees much larger and older than me. Their roots would be drinking clean, fresh water, and their lush canopy would be reflected in the brilliant clarity of the pond. At night there would be a speckled sky above us, no longer saturated by LEDs and incandescents. Unobscured, I would feel the stars greeting me, hugging me with their light like an old friend returning home. H Art by Sadie Holmes

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Final Poem for the US dollar

By Karla Zurita

Mi mama handed Sacagawea’s dollar coin to a pharmacist.

She picked it up in a market in Guayaquil where she was haggling for

handmade toquilla straw hats, macana fringe shawls y wooden casas for our neighbor.

Never accepting the first offer, she pinched me and said “no te dejes tomar el pelo,” don’t be foolish only the white tourists pay full price.

A global international fund made the Sucre disappear from the Andes, the coast, and where the old tortoises grow.

A global international fund replaced gold with silver, Bolivar with Washington and when merchants selling alpaca woven jackets give my mom a dollar coin with Sacagawea’s face on it, the pharmacist rejects it. H

Art by Samantha Clancy 19 Headwaters Magazine

Photograph by Kora Freeman-Gerlach

Communicating with Beings of the Future

By Kora Freeman-Gerlach A few years back, I stood in the nuclear wasteland of Minamisoma, Japan. With a Geiger counter in hand, tracking the fluctuation of radiation with each step I took, I felt the eerie silence of invisible toxicity that had taken over this coastal town. Years after the meltdown of the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Minamisoma was still barren and deserted. There were rusted cars flipped upside down, neighborhood streets filled with trash, and open-air structures that were once enclosed homes.

There was no sign of human activity, let alone any kind of life; maybe it was the road signs that flashed warnings of elevated radiation levels that steered people away. This is the image of a tsunami turned nuclear disaster.

I wonder what it looks like there now, 11 years after the initial disaster. I wonder if the cars still stand on their heads, if pacifiers and shattered pill bottles still line the roads. I wonder if nuclear refugees are still living in temporary homes, where they have created a new community with others like them, forced from their original homes by the risk of exposure to toxic radiation. The problem with radiation is that it is persistent; several years is insufficient time to reduce its toxicity or minimize its harm.

The Fukushima-Daiichi disaster was the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986. On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake caused a massive tsunami along the eastern coast of Japan in the Tohoku region.

Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima-Daiichi plant was hit by the earthquake and tsunami, causing a series of explosions, meltdowns, and an evacuation of almost 200,000 people in the area, according to a report by CNN published at the time. This tragic nuclear disaster displaced hundreds of thousands of residents and caused widespread economic and ecological devastation.

According to a report by CNN’s Wayne Drash, Japan is scarce in traditional resources used to produce energy, such as fossil fuels, thus making it highly reliant on nuclear power. However, following the 2011 nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, all 54 nuclear plants around the country shut down, and just nine of them have since opened back. As reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Henri Paillere and Jeffrey Donovan, there was widespread distrust among the public after the catastrophic event, which made people reluctant to support nuclear power again.

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The Controversy over Nuclear Power The use of nuclear power is hotly debated. On one hand, it produces very few greenhouse gases and is cost-effective. On the other hand, it relies on another finite resource, uranium, thus making it nonrenewable, and comes with a number of safety threats. Although they are rare, nuclear disasters can be catastrophic. Nuclear power plants also produce radioactive waste, which is extremely harmful to humans and the environment and lacks a perfect long-term technology for safe storage.

While nuclear energy has its dangers, the growing consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change are even more pressing, spurring plans to open new nuclear plants around the world. However, the debate around nuclear energy is not limited to present-day costs and benefits; there are ethical concerns that come into play when we think about the impacts of nuclear energy on future generations.

Nuclear waste can last up to 1 million years in the environment. Nuclear engineer Arjun Makhijani says that without a long-term method of storage, it will be left to contaminate waterways and landscapes, kill plants and animals, and destroy ecosystems. Geologic isolation, or burying nuclear waste deep underground, seems like the least harmful solution for nuclear waste storage, but it may not be as easy as it seems.

Protecting Future Civilizations from Nuclear Radiation Creating the technology for the geologic isolation of nuclear waste is no simple task. Scientists, linguists, anthropologists, and engineers must work together to carefully design repository sites while taking into account a few key issues. Firstly, the location is important; even though our current climate might seem relatively stable, over such a long time frame, things like earthquakes and precipitation could corrode the repository.

The material in which the waste is stored is also quite important because it needs to resist corrosion for 1 million years. Lastly, repositories must be designed to ensure that future civilizations will not seek to enter them and be unknowingly exposed to radiation.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), located in New Mexico, is the United States’ only long-term deep geologic radioactive waste repository. Experts around the country have studied the possible methods of intrusion into the WIPP and the best modes of deterrence.

The Sandia report, titled “Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant”, outlines the process of creating markers that indicate the danger and location of nuclear waste repositories to future civilizations. The following drafted designs aim to tell beings of the future that the WIPP is not natural and that there is a significant reason why it is marked.

I spoke with Harlan Morehouse, a geography profes-

(Image description: Landscape of Thorns: this field or forest contains 50-feet high thorns that are randomly placed to seem chaotic.

Made of concrete, the shapes are supposed to look threatening and harmful to the body. Concept: Mike Brill, Drawing: Safdar Abidi, Image courtesy of BOSTI.)

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(Image description: Forbidding Blocks: this structure involves stone and concrete blocks that are the size of a house.

The ‘streets’ which run between them do not lead anywhere; they are narrow, hot, ominous, and prevent the use of space to live in, grow food in, or form any sort of civilization upon. Concept: Mike Brill, Drawing: Safdar Abidi, Image courtesy of BOSTI.) sor at the University of Vermont, to find out more about the challenge of communicating nuclear danger to humans of the distant future. He mentioned that while markers of physical deterrence may steer civilizations away, many nations in northern Europe have gone a different route. Rather than warning civilizations of danger, thereby drawing attention to the site, their strategy is to make waste repositories as discreet as possible. They believe it is impossible to predict what future beings will think about these protruding structures, so leaving the area unmarked would prevent unwanted attention that would make them want to dig up what lies below. Morehouse believes that this might be the most effective way to prevent civilizations from indulging in their natural curiosity attempting to enter such a mysterious structure.

This line of thinking avoids the challenge of figuring out how to best communicate which future civilizations.

Nonetheless, this is a question that is being investigated. The WIPP plans to have an information room onsite that contains 7 current languages (English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo) to inform beings of the toxic waste that lies in the repository. However, what if the languages of today do not exist in the future? What if, in a million years, these languages are just artifacts of ancient civilizations? How do we explain something in writing to a civilization that speaks a totally different language, or that does not even communicate through language at all?

A Path Forward In my view, designing nuclear waste repository sites is an unfortunate necessity moving forward. Countries that use nuclear power have created waste that will lie dormant in our environment for hundreds of thousands of years, and they must find a safe method to store it and deter intrusion.

The climate crisis too often requires that humans choose the ‘least bad’ solution to solve issues we have ignorantly created. These solutions frequently look to new technologies and ignore techniques that already exist. It is irresponsible to rely solely on new technology to fix the climate crisis because that lends itself to the need for economic growth and a vicious cycle of consumption

that has been the root of the climate crisis. Economic growth needs to be decoupled from environmental impacts; the past 200 years since the Industrial Revolution have shown that increased consumption, new technologies, and economic growth are detrimental to the environment. Relying on a single technology such as nuclear to solve the climate crisis is, overall, a flawed approach.

While our current approach to storing toxic nuclear waste must necessarily rely on carefully designed geologic isolation that looks to the future, the most responsible course of action we can take right now is to shift away from this imperfect solution and decrease energy consumption altogether. Ultimately, if high-income countries curbed overconsumption and began a process of economic degrowth, they would no longer need to rely on dangerous sources to fulfill their hasty energy usage.

Only then could we stop searching for the lesser of many evils, and begin focusing instead on methods that truly benefit the environment. We could connect with one another in the present, rather than focusing too much on how to connect with future civilizations. Communities could cultivate a reciprocal relationship with Earth, as many human beings have been doing for generations, and ensure that human impact on the land is one that allows for all life to thrive long into the future. H

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Portait of Matika (right) and her mother, Nancy (left)

Matika Wilbur: Project 562 Changing the Way We See Native America

Matika Wilbur is a photographer from the Swinomish and Tulalip peoples of coastal Washington. The mission of Wilbur’s Project 562 is to change the way we see Native America through photographing the over 562 sovereign nations in the US. Her photographs rewrite historical inaccuracies and stereotypes to create true, contemporary representations of the vibrance and diversity of Indian Country. (Adapted from matikawilbur.com and project562.com) Portrait of Fawn Douglas, Las Vegas Paiute

“For the last ten years, my work has been about counteracting these images to create positive Indigenous role models from this century.”

“I have joined our people in their homes, in tribal schools, in ceremonies, in places of immense and painful history, places of environmental and economic crises, and in settings of extraordinary natural beauty.”

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Portrait of Stephen Small Salmon, Pen d’Oreille, Flathead Reservation

Portrait of Talon and Sky Duncan, the Three Affiliated Tribes, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation

“I’ve done my best to honor, appreciate, and uplift Indigenous nations…I worry I discuss our social disparity too often. There’s enough poverty in Indigenous representation. What our children need is an opportunity to see themselves differently, to see themselves as powerful, beautiful, and resilient. There were major battles fought for us to live in this moment in our traditional territories. As for the colonizers, it’s hard to say what they will take away from this work. We’re fighting a major narrative shift—recent studies revealed 64% of third-year undergraduate students believe Native Americans are extinct. My work is a small effort to help them imagine their world differently and to connect with the Indigenous narrative of the place they’re occupying. Not all of them will read about this work or take an interest in Indigenous intelligence, but maybe one or two will, and we’d all benefit from that shift.”

Portait of Melba Rita (Accawinna) Appawora, Uintah & Ooray Nation, Northern Ute

Portait of Charlotte Rutherford, Unangax, Cook Inlet

Instagram: @project_562 Website: project562.com Podcast: All My Relations Wilbur’s book is coming soon from Ten Speed Press and Penguin Random House.

Canoes from the 2018 Coast Salish Canoe Journey Headwaters Magazine 24

How to be an Invasive Species: Reflections on taking up space and thriving where you don’t belong

By Teresa Helms and Eleanor Duva

“Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies: We shall by morning Inherit the earth.

Our foot’s in the door.”

-Sylvia Plath, Mushrooms In the second grade, as far as I could tell, my one true calling in life was to find, hold, and examine as many earthworms as possible. To put them in jars and watch them devour decomposing leaves. To marvel at their conspicuous non-humanness. One afternoon my best friend and I dug up a six by six foot (it might have been smaller; I was smaller then) patch of grass in my backyard in our quest to uncover the newest inhabitants of the cardboard home we had constructed. We asked for forgiveness rather than permission, and it was granted, when instead of inflicting punishment, or even replacing the grass, my dad turned the bare ground into a garden bed for my

25 Headwaters Magazine

mother. It, and three more, are right outside our kitchen window, full of zinnias in the summer and birdseed in the winter.

In the time of my life when I kept jars of earthworms on my windowsill, I was only abstractly aware of gender dynamics in the sense that I had figured out that the more I acted ‘boyish,’ the more I was taken seriously. I wanted to be a scientist, and more importantly, to be listened to. As it turns out, I am still working on both. I find myself increasingly reluctant to make myself heard while my peers seem to only become more experienced, more knowledgeable, more confident than I am.

I often feel like I should already know the information that I am supposed to be in the process of learning. I sit in my forestry lecture. Third row, one of three women on the left side of the classroom. I realize how little I remember from 10th-grade geometry. Our professor cracks a joke and the hearty chuckle of men in the company of

men reverberates through the room, booming like felled timber. Most of these people look like they could blend right in with the towering eastern white pines we’ll be documenting later. When I measure diameter at breast height it’s more like ‘diameter at top of collar bone.’

I tend to carry myself gently through a system that values brashness; a world in which the meek might not inherit the Earth. This, I’m sure, would be appreciated by any delicate earthworm I were to pry from the comfort of the ground to observe. Yet the worms give me an example of how to be both. Earthworms are hermaphroditic and some are parthenogenetic; unbound by the gender binary and able to reproduce asexually. And surprising to many, they are non-native to Vermont and many other regions of the world. The areas of the Northern Hemisphere that were covered with ice sheets during the Quaternary glaciations of the Pleistocene have no native earthworm species today. The asexual life history of some has facilitated their invasive success. The first earthworms of the family Lumbricidae arrived to North America with European colonists, in soil used as ballast in ships and with plants that would establish the agriculture of colonial ‘America.’ A second clade of earthworms called pheretimoids, native to Asia, are currently invading many areas of the world, including Vermont.

Through human activity, non-native earthworms have found themselves in North, Central, and South America, Northeast Eurasia, and Australia.

And while most species would prefer the agreeable loamy soils of Vermont’s maple-dominated forests, some species can make themselves just as comfortable in the rainforests of Brazil, acidic soils of Alaskan conifer forests, or tundra biomes of Siberia. The success of pheretimoids, the relatively new arrivals, can be partially attributed to their remarkable ability to develop in a single season. They emerge from cocoons as soon as the snow thaws, develop into adulthood, reproduce, and die over the course of an ephemeral Vermont summer. They accumulate biomass rapidly, and ravage forest floors. They

devour the precious plush of the spongy organic layer, consuming years’ worth of fallen leaves, branches, and dormant seeds, and leave behind a layer of their distinctive granular castings. They change the soil dramatically by removing the organic layer, thickening the underlying mineral soil, and altering biogeochemical processes and microbial food webs. The understory becomes unrecognizable, with just a few remaining maple seedlings that will be browsed by deer before the coming winter.

Still, this devastation is achieved through their unflinching ability to invade. They did not consider the particulars of how they might fit into their new environments. They did not need to ask for space to occupy; they took it. They are at once the meek: unseen, covert, discovered only when you dig for them, wriggling and soft in your hand; and the brash: their numbers sudden and multiplicitous, their effects altering the visual landscape of forests and the global carbon cycle. They are masters of thriving where one doesn’t belong. And further, their

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popular reputation has been endeared to gardeners, farmers, and seven-year-olds alike. In the alternate context of agriculture, they are heralded as an organic solution to increase crop yields. Most of the public has never considered that they haven’t always been residents of these soils.

Ecologists were the ones to raise awareness of their threat to our forest ecosystems; to take their presence seriously.

In the forests I study today, earthworms have made themselves commonplace in ground that was not meant for them; beloved many years ago by small hands who didn’t yet know the gravity of these creatures’—or her own—presence. Looking at them now, I see both the threat of invasion and the brilliance of survival. So, I will learn from my old friends. They show me how to unapologetically take up space on the Earth, and to trust that my authentic existence is loud enough to be heard in any climate. I am adaptable. Capable of burrowing in even the most uninviting, frosty soils. I can be at once meek and brash; I can balance a gentle spirit with the voracity and

27 Headwaters Magazine

boldness that is needed to disrupt the systems in which I dwell, giving way to new perspectives and allowing the unassuming to take root. I will keep my foot jammed between the door and the frame until I am naturalized here; until all of us are. H

Art by Reese Green

Propaganda?

A Word of Caution on the US Media’s Climate Coverage Op-Ed by Logan Solomon On February 10, 2022, temperatures soared to record highs—10 to 20 degrees above normal—in Southern California, contributing to three separate brush fires. National news agencies like CNN, NBC, and ABC, along with local news like San Jose Mercury News, ABC7 San Francisco, San Diego Tribune, and KTLA covered the burns. However, none of these networks mentioned climate change as a contributor to the fires. Instead, they characterize the heat wave as “unusual,” “unseasonably high,” “rare,” and perhaps most bizarrely, a “DelightMare,” a supposed combination of delightful and nightmare according to ABC7 San Francisco. People are naturally concerned when they see the devastating impacts that weather can bring. If a viewer is not informed that climate change is increasing the odds of extreme weather occurring, they are unlikely to advocate for the implementation of policies that protect their communities by addressing climate change.

Media Matters for America, a non-profit media watchdog group, reported that in 2020 climate coverage made up just 0.4 percent, or 112 minutes, of overall coverage on major corporate news shows such as ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News. Of those 112 minutes, only 29 percent of this coverage were segments on ‘climate solutions.’

These numbers beg the question, why is climate change covered so little? Why does the media not consistently discuss climate mitigation measures? A useful resource in trying to answer these questions is Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky and Herman outline an analytical framework to trace the influence of money and power through the institutional structures and relationships of U.S. media. This framework is called the ‘Propaganda Model.’

Chomsky and Herman’s framework analyzes the system that mainstream climate coverage operates within, highlighting five filters that distort media to serve the powerful: media ownership, advertising money, sourcing

from ‘experts’ and insiders, flack, and having a common enemy. These five elements reinforce one another, shaping what issues the media chooses to cover and their positions on said issues, as well as influencing what stories they believe are not worth covering.

Media Ownership Mainstream media companies are like any corporation—they function to benefit those who own the company. These owners possess not only the ability to influence their network’s rhetoric, but also an economic interest in manipulating climate coverage.

Shareholder voting is the legal right that allows company owners to engage in business matters. Those with partial ownership, or shares, are given a proportional vote on significant issues that may affect the value of shares. In practice, voting on any business choice can occur, and commonly involves the appointment or removal of company members in upper-level positions. This power to influence media leadership damages climate change coverage efforts by giving power to shareholders that more often than not have economic ties to the fossil fuel industry. This shareholder influence could lead media organizations to take actions that negatively affect climate policy, misinform the general public, or skew discourse to favor special interests.

With shareholder voting being proportional, those with more ownership have more power. Forbes documented in 2016 that 15 billionaires spent tens of millions of dollars operating in news markets of all sizes, with many having majority or complete ownership in multiple news organizations. Richard Murdoch is an investor and board member of fossil fuel-based company Genie Energy. He also has a controlling interest in News Corporation, which has a plurality share in Fox Corporation, which is the operator of the most-watched news network in 2021, Fox News. News Corporation also fully owns The New York Post and Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos,

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who had the largest net-worth in the world in February 2021, owns The Washington Post via Nash Capital. The Washington Post had 82.4 million unique monthly visits in February 2021 alone.

Ultimately, mainstream media is a concentrated industry. Ninety percent of media in America is controlled by executives at six corporations: Viacom, News Corporation, Comcast, CBS, AT&T, and Disney. Many of these corporations have interests and business ventures that span beyond news media.

Advertising Money Advertisers are the real customers of the media industry. According to a 2014 Pew Research poll, “69 percent of all domestic news revenue is derived from advertising.” Advertisers have the power to promote or suppress certain climate change rhetoric and coverage by choosing which media organizations to do business with. Since media companies are largely reliant on advertisers for the bulk of their revenue, they are motivated to compete for their business. Chomksy and Herman identify two key considerations media companies contend with when dealing with advertisers.

The first is the importance of maintaining ‘audience flow,’ defined as the willingness of the audience to sit through news segments and advertisements.

Historically, this has been tracked by the Nielsen Rating, however media companies like NBCUniversal are creating new methodologies themselves to modernize how advertiser engagement is tracked. Segments covering climate change have been known to perform poorly in these metrics. According to former NBC anchor Krystal Ball, “climate change does not drive interest, clicks, and ratings.”

The other factor media companies must consider is their need to align with the advertisers’ own interests and views. At times, the media can be objective, but their goal is to produce content in moderation and marginalize it in order to not disrupt their revenue stream.

Over time, the advertiser’s perspective is understood as what does not put business relationships in jeopardy as opposed to what does. One of these major advertisers is the oil & gas industry which has continued to increase its

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advertising budget in recent years. A study published by Brown University found that between 2008 and 2016, the five largest oil companies each spent an average of $217 million annually on advertising.

Sourcing From ‘Experts’ and Insiders Sources supply the important details and insights that define news coverage on a particular topic. These sources are commonly government officials, corporate spokespersons, think tanks, or other power-holding individuals. These individuals capitalize on their status, having the opportunity to platform their climate policy, while grassroots activists are largely ignored. During the coverage of the first day of COP26, the 2021 UN Cimate Change Conference held in Glasglow, none of the information presented by NBC, CNN, or Fox was sourced by climate activists according to a Media Matters study. Instead, news guests were largely government officials.

It is optimal for both the media and sources themselves to sustain mutually-benefitting long-term relationships. Media is able to reduce their investigative expenses by having trusted sources that report “raw facts” for them.

For sources, these long-term relationships give them a constant and comfortable space to share their opinions.

This dynamic builds prestige for media organizations, by virtue of being a brand that is known for having insider information.

Because this relationship is so valuable, the media makes an effort to preserve it. As a result, journalists will often not challenge sources’ statements or motives, hiding their sources’ motives and biases. On March 17 and March 18, 2022, Axios, The Washington Post, and Politico cited experts who claimed that big oil was not to blame for high fuel prices. It was not mentioned in any of these articles that all three of the “experts” mentioned are members of the National Petroleum Council, a committee meant to “represent the views of the oil and natural gas industries.” There are additional ways that corporate media may safeguard their alliance with sources: not running a story or hiding particular facts on sources,

running questionable stories to appease sources and entertain audiences, and putting sources on payroll to ensure continual ‘insights.’

Flack The term ‘flack’ refers to any negative response to media coverage by media consumers; the public, governments, or those with a lot of money are common producers of flack. If the flack response is big enough, reporters may adjust their future news coverage on politicized or controversial topics like climate change to avoid this backlash. Flack can be direct: letters, social media posts, protests, petitions, lawsuits, speeches, and even Congressional bills. It can also be indirect through advertiser decisions, shareholder and employee action, or the funding of other organizations to counter the media’s narratives.

In the modern day, social media has the potential to exponentially amplify flack.

Different flack techniques have been used by grassroots climate activists. Websites like Media Matters and social media accounts like the Twitter account @ ABCTelltheTruth, document the quality and frequency of climate coverage on various news networks. In 2014, 40,000 environmentalists delivered a petition for better climate coverage to CNBC headquarters according to Media Matters. In 2019, The Guardian reported that 70 protesters were arrested outside The New York Times office for expressing similar concerns.

However, flack is about power; the number of people who spread flack must be large enough to counter the economic interests that dictate the media’s coverage. The volume of the masses required to counter these fossilized interests is immense. With big money institutions and governments capable of being a potent force of flack, the media may consider if a climate-related segment strays too far from the perspectives of powerful people. Alternatively, a larger and more organized climate movement could better utilize flack to spur climate action.

Having a Common Enemy Issues presented in the media are prioritized based on several factors. One factor that increases the priority of a story and promotes viewership is the idea of a common enemy. For example, media outlets might portray big oil as a common enemy, while another might portray politicians promoting green energy as a common enemy.

A common enemy can be another country, an ideal, or some subgroup of the population, like a political party. With high demand for certain coverage, the media will focus on producing content that affirms a common enemy narrative, even if it has openly biased sourcing.

Coverage will frame things in connection to the ultimate evil, including climate coverage, most commonly via headlines and graphics.

Economic competition with China or other economic powers is one common enemy-based narrative that influences climate coverage. An April 17, 2021, CNBC headline reads, “The new U.S. plan to rival China and end cornering of markets in rare earth metals.” This article chooses to grab the attention of the reader via competition. Climate change is a crisis that requires international cooperation which has been unsuccessful because of conflicting interests. General rhetoric of competition further inhibits this.

Another implication is the dichotomization of news to serve special interests and promote the ‘national religion.’ News sources will often fail to mention all potential solutions and deliberately avoid nuance. On February 26, 2022, The New York Times told its readers that President Biden’s “big climate goals depend on Congress.” This is the current common narrative by corporate media on climate policy; we get it via Congress or we get nothing at all. But this presentation of two options is a false dichotomy; climate policy also depends on President Biden, who has used his executive authority to expand federal drilling permits at a pace 34 percent faster than President Trump in his first year.

Final Thoughts The media plays an agenda-setting role, influencing public discourse, including climate policy. You, your friends, and your loved ones buy into a narrative and remember talking points, facts, and quotes. This is then communicated in person or virtually, quickly spreading to more people. Soon there is a general understanding of the circumstances surrounding a topic; maybe people take certain sides or maybe there arises a largely-held consensus.

But what was left out? What topic was ignored? Who benefits from the conversation?

The covert working of the media filters outlined here should incite a level of skepticism of the media. Mainstream media has personal interests, like all other businesses, and these interests shape their product. With much effort needed on climate education and advancing climate policy, we can not only rely on the mainstream media to fulfill this effort. Their debate, criticism, and dissent only operate so long as it does not hurt their own economic interests. Unlikely as it is that this will change, the grassroots must seize any media coverage it gets and mobilize community support to educate and implement climate policy through other channels. H Art by Abby Kaiser Headwaters Magazine 30

The Chief’s Report From Houston: SEJ 2022 in Photos

By Noah Beckage Every spring, the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) hosts an annual conference where reporters, freelancers, scientists, non-profit groups, and industry representatives from around the globe convene. Attendees can then learn from one another about a diverse array of environmental topics—and how best to report on them. Every year, Headwaters receives funding from UVM to send a few lucky writers, editors, and designers from our magazine to attend the conference. This year’s event was the first in-person conference since 2019, and after having missed out on the big jamboree for three years, Eleanor, Alex, and I were more than excited to go and visit the Bayou City.

We ended up attending the conference for a full three days. While there, we had the chance to explore a longleaf pine preserve in east Texas, paddle a flood-mitigating urban bayou, ask questions to the CEO of Edison International (parent company of some of the largest electric utilities in the U.S.), witness improvised twilight theatre on the Rice University campus, and so much more. H

Eleanor and Noah on their way to a networking reception the first night of the conference. Photo by Alex De Luise

Exploring Kickerillo-Mischer Preserve, a man-made urban bayou created to bolster flood control in Houston. Pictured: Alex De Luise.

Photo by Noah Beckage

A grove of fire-adapted longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) at Roy E. Larsen Sandyland Sanctuary. The local Nature Conservancy chapter here practices ecological burnings to promote a balanced ecosystem. Photo

by Noah Beckage 31 Headwaters Magazine

View of the conference lobby during a session break on the second full day of the conference. Photo by Noah Beckage

Tule Elk in Point Reyes

By Valentin Kostelnik

On the windswept coastal bluffs of Point Reyes Nationto clientele in the Bay Area. Their dairy enterprise was al Seashore (PRNS), you can see an animal few would exthe largest in California for decades, but competition pect just an hour and a half north of San Francisco: Tule from other parts of the state came at the same time enelk! Yet, these beautiful creatures are at the heart of fierce vironmental degradation took its toll. It turns out that public and legal controversy because they share the park indigenous burning and tule elk grazing were crucial in with several private ranches. Ten maintaining the rolling green elk were relocated to Point Reyes grasslands that made the masin the 90s, and the population is sive Point Reyes dairy operation now at around 500 today. But so successful, and when shrubs because a third of the Seashore started reclaiming the land, the is leased by cattle ranchers who ex-Vermonters couldn’t comhave been here for a hundred pete financially with dairies in years, the elk’s habitat is restrictother parts of the state. Their ed to the original 2,600-acre monopoly fractured in the early fenced-in plot and two smaller 20th century as smaller ranches areas of coastal prairie. As Calbought the land. Descendants of ifornia’s droughts become more these ranchers still operate the severe, the restricted herds are beef and dairy ranches that are unable to move to other areas so controversial today and were in the park with better food and the center of another crisis in year-round water. In 2020 alone, the 1960s.

152 tule elk starved to death beSpurred on by a rapidly dehind the fence, prompting masveloping Bay Area, real estate sive public and legal backlash developers started eying the vast even before the park announced expanse of beautiful, undevelits plan to extend the rancher’s oped coastlines only an hour leases another 20 years. and a half from San Francisco.

Why does the park defend One of the places they came the ranches so adamantly? It is closest to developing was LiTule elk beside the Tomales Point fence. Photo partly because of the ranches’ mantour Beach, now a popular courtesy of Jack Gescheidt. deep roots in the land, and parttourist destination and home ly because of ranchers’ claims that they were instrumento 143 Tule elk. Visitors to Limantour can find, nestled tal in the creation of the park 60 years ago when urban among the remote, elk-studded, windswept sand dunes, a development threatened the entire seashore.

1960s-style model home showing how close Point Reyes Ranching in Point Reyes began with Mexican cattle came to urbanization. ranches in the early 19th century, but the first large dairy The classic story, as recounted by many guidebooks operations that the park is famous for today were begun and the National Seashore website, is one of cooperation

by Vermonters in 1857. James and Oscar Shafter, both and compromise between passionate lawmakers and lawyers from Vermont based out of San Francisco, saw ranchers, united by a common drive to preserve Point an opportunity to market high-quality dairy products Reyes’s natural beauty from looming urbanization. A law

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passed in 1962 and signed by President Kennedy created and preserved the National Seashore, while also explicitly allowing the land to be leased to agricultural operations. It is a story of opposing values finding a middle ground to save the natural beauty of Point Reyes, but its validity is being called into question today.

Depending on who you ask, Tule elk have either been on the land forever or arrived too recently to take precedence over ranching. Once, 500,000 elk roamed the grasslands of California and created rolling prairies just as bison did on the Great Plains. Just as the bison were hunted to near-extinction on the Great Plains, though, the elk didn’t long survive white settlement. By the 1870s, only 27 tule elk remained in the world, protected by a rancher in Southern California named Henry Miller.

A tortured century of failed reintegration followed for the elk, and in 1969 only a few hundred lived in 3 herds around the state. Then, in the same decade that Point Reyes was established, California stated its desire to rebuild the population of Tule elk around the state and moved to establish new Tule elk herds wherever possible.

One of those places was the former dairy ranch of Solomon Pierce, a Vermonter who built a dairy industry at Tomales Point in Point Reyes in the 19th century.

Tomales Point is a long, thin peninsula of rolling coastal prairie at the northern tip of Point Reyes. At its base, the Park built a 3-mile-long, 8 ft. tall woven-wire fence to create a 2,600-acre sanctuary, then moved in 10 tule elk. The population grew rapidly, and in 1998, the park moved 28 elk to an unfenced area near Limantour beach, where they thrived. Later, several elk swam across to nearby Drake’s Beach and began a new herd, creating the three present-day herds of Point Reyes: the Tomales Point, Limantour area, and Drake’s Beach herds.

Statewide elk populations have rebounded to over 5,000, and in Point Reyes today, there are about 500 elk.

The Point Reyes tule elk population is far from stable, however, and fluctuates wildly in drought years. The fenced-in Tomales Point herd, which is by far the largest, is particularly vulnerable. The Tomales herd peaked in 2007 with 585 elk living beyond the fence, then plummeted to 283 in 2015 after a historic drought. Spurred on by the lawsuits that followed the 2015 die-offs, the Park agreed to draft a new General Management Plan to deal with the Tule elk. This is the plan that has angered environmentalists so much in the last few years, in which the park announced it intended to extend ranch leases by twenty years and cull the herds. This led to the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic suing the Park over the Tomales Point elk fence. The lead plaintiff is Jack Gescheidt, and the defendant is Deb Haaland. I interviewed

33 Headwaters Magazine

Mr. Gescheidt a week after their case had its first day in federal court, in Oakland, CA. To Jack Gescheidt, the matter is plain: Point Reyes is public, protected land, and the Park Service’s job is to manage the land for maximum ecosystem health and natural beauty. Regarding the ranches, he claims: “there shouldn’t be any industry allowed in a national park that is taking up a third of the land, is the number one source of land pollution, water pollution, and air pollution [in the form of methane], and harms the very land it claims to be a protected environment. If protected land is exposed to pollutants, in this case, millions of pounds of manure and urine, why have protected the land at all?

Cows are only there for profit. It’s a destructive industry.”

His claim is well supported by the law that created the Seashore, which states: “[Point Reyes] shall be administered…without impairment of its natural values, in a manner which provides for such recreational, educational, historic preservation, interpretation, and scientific research opportunities as are consistent with, based upon, and supportive of the maximum protection, restoration, and preservation of the natural environment within the area.”

Does the Park’s policy towards ranching break this mandate? The strongest arguments against ranching are that it confines the elk, degrades the land, and pollutes park waterways. Gescheidt says cattle in Point Reyes dump “millions of pounds of manure and urine” on the pastures, and a lot of this runs off into nearby streams and bays. Water samples in January 2021 found that streams draining from pastureland contain 20-40x as much E. coli as health regulations allow and high levels of Enterococcus, a bacterium harmful to humans. The Park is trying to mitigate the runoff, but new 2021-2022 water testing shows fecal contamination of waterways is still ongoing.

The same law mandating the preservation of the natural environment also allowed for ranching. It states: “where appropriate in the discretion of the Secretary, he or she may lease federally owned land…which was agricultural land prior to its acquisition.” But when it was written ranchers hadn’t yet sold their land to the park yet and wouldn’t have if they weren’t allowed to stay. Therefore, one of the main pro-ranching arguments is that the Park couldn’t exist without the ranchers’ consent.

But, this was 50 years ago, and today, Point Reyes is protected. If ranching is harmful today, should the Park honor its past commitments? Should it try to compromise and allow them to coexist, or choose one over the other?

Even environmentalists are divided over these ques-

tions. The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the Park over ranching, while the Sierra Club came out in favor of ranching. The Marin Conservation League announced, “the Comprehensive Ranch Management Plan demonstrates that ranching on the seashore can be sustainable and complement the PRNS’s other values. It is my understanding that the environmentalists’ (Center for Biological Diversity and others) lawsuit would stop this process and we don’t want that to happen. Ranching is a vital part of the West Marin community.”

This leads to the second main pro-ranching argument: ranching is an important cultural and economic foundation of the Point Reyes area. The area is protected from urbanization, but it is still threatened by expansion from the Bay Area. It’s the same story that played out in Aspen and Southern Vermont.

Attracted by the quiet landscape and sense of community, many rich people from the Bay Area have bought vacation homes in small towns near the Seashore. Local landlords realized they could turn a higher profit by renting to short-term customers (via Airbnb) rather than long-term residents, causing steadily declining school enrollments and a shrinking population. The population of Bolinas, a nearby town, was 1,600 in 2010 and just 1,100 in 2019. I have personally witnessed several large families forced out, no longer able to afford the rising cost of living.

Within this changing demographic, 17 ranches and the supporting families still work and live in Point Reyes National Seashore. They make up one of the only local industries not based wholly on tourism left in the area, and currently produce roughly 20% of Marin’s agricultural products. Point Reyes dairies have remained viable in part by producing very high-quality cheeses bought by city-dwellers of the Bay Area, who love the cheese for its exceptional flavor. Cheesemakers claim the superior quality of their products is due to the long growing season, temperature, and refreshing salty ocean air of Point Reyes; all reasons tourists and second homers love the Seashore.

The tensions at the heart of this conflict are playing out all over the United States in different forms. The primary tension is between human uses like ranching, and preservation or restoration of the land. The Point Reyes National Seashore celebrates the return of tule elk, saying: “The majestic animals you see as you travel through the park embody the restoration of the dominant native herbivore to the California coastal ecosystem. They shape the landscape around them as they did for centuries before they were extirpated by humans. They symbolize the conservation of native species and ecosystem processes, one of

the primary missions of the National Park Service.”

There are two visions of what Point Reyes could be: a pristine wilderness without any human use beyond tourism, or a place used by ranchers living off the land, using the grasslands to support local communities. Can the two versions coexist? The Marin Conservation League says yes, that the Park’s new plan “demonstrates that ranching on the seashore can be sustainable and complement the PRNS’s other values.”

Jack Gescheidt says, “They are diametrically opposed land uses. One sequesters carbon, and values wildlife, the other does the exact opposite, killing wildlife, denuding the land, destroying the environment, all for profit. It’s one or the other, you can’t do both.” Gescheidt’s lawsuit against the Park coincides with another lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Resource Renewal Institute, and the Western Watersheds Project, that could remove ranching from Point Reyes if the court decides in their favor.

In a tense battle over how we value our public lands, the court must decide between the two versions of Point Reyes: one that prioritizes nature over human-use, and one that attempts a compromise. Should it announce the end of ranches in Point Reyes and allow the restoration of its elk and grasslands, or support the families whose deep-rooted work on the land supports the fading local communities? H

Tule elk on Tomales Point. Photo courtesy of Jack Gescheidt.

Headwaters Magazine 34

I am lost in Centennial Woods on a Thursday morning in September. Despite visiting this natural area countless times, I take an unfamiliar path and end up where I am no longer able to retrace my steps. Behind and ahead of me all looks the same, a landscape of homogenized greenery. Searching for some sign of familiarity, I look to the ground. I notice Chelidonium majus (greater celandine) for its lobed leaf margins on a compound leaf. I squeeze the stem of the plant between my thumb and pointer finger to reveal its notorious yellow-orange latex. Growing nearby, I recognize Mitchella repens (partridgeberry) for its small red berries and oppositely arranged leaves. Even though I am still physically lost, I feel less so knowing these familiar plants around me.

It was not until the fall of 2021, while taking Dr. Cathy Paris’s Plant Systematics course, that what was once a “green blur” became clarified; what was once unfamiliar became a place of belonging. Previous to this, I could see only as far as I had the words to describe. The expression “clarifying the green blur,” coined by Paris, who teaches in the UVM Department of Plant Biology, encapsulates the grounding experience of practicing field botany. Field botany is a discipline in which the scientific and the personal intersect beautifully, creating a sense of harmony with your surroundings. Once the green blur begins to

35 Headwaters Magazine

clear, it is almost impossible to stop looking for patterns in plants that bring fam i l i a r i t y.

Bringing this observation into your daily vision may change your perception of the world wherever you go.

When first dipping your feet into the practice of field botany, simultaneously expanding and focusing your field of vision is the ultimate balancing act. Simply taking into account the sheer abundance of plants that surround us every day is the first step to igniting your curiosity. Then, you must get close to the ground and the specimen for your broad scope of plant vision to become focused. Close observation is crucial to knowing what to look out for in the field. As you begin to hone these skills, the flowers you pass by on your daily walk suddenly become part of a larger community, a family of plants with a unique natural and cultural history.

Attention to fine detail is equally important when identifying a species. “Keying out” a species is a method of becoming incrementally closer to identifying a plant using a dichotomous key, first finding a plant’s group, its family, then its genus (first Latin name), and finally its species (second Latin name). Dichotomous keys ask a series of questions about the morphology of

the plant, ranging from the makeup of its inflorescence (flower arrangement) to its leaf shape. Keying out a species can be a challenging and daunting task, especially with the barrier of botanical jargon hindering each step.

So, while familiarizing yourself with this language is certainly helpful for accurate plant identification, there are simpler ways you might begin your “green awakening.”

Family-wide characteristics are usually easy to remember and spot, making them a great place to start narrowing the range of your focus. These characteristics apply to a wide enough variety of plants to make them easy to distinguish, yet a small enough group to feel the scope of your vision narrow. What once was a crowded grouping of evergreen ferns, becomes distinguishable as members of the Polypodiaceae family through their once divided leaves (pinnation) and rounded sori (grouping of spora ngium) on their underside. A group of generic flowers arranged in a capitulum head (like daisies or sunflowers) can be attributed to the Asteraceae (Composite) Family. And a plant with many smaller yellow flowers and thin seed pods can be placed in the Brassicaceae (Mustard) Family. Collecting just a handful of these family-wide characteristics into your frame of reference will begin to alter your perception of the plants around you and bring you closer to their world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, indigenous ecologist, professor, and author of the books Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass, expresses the personal connection that comes with identifying plants. In her first book discussing the cultural and natural history of moss, she personifies mosses as beings with unique backgrounds and stories to share. One of these, Bryum argenteum, is a highly adaptable species of moss that has become increasingly suited to city habitats. Laying underneath our feet every day, their spores are the most commonly dispersed via human footsteps. Kimmerer describes the intricacies of

Bryum m o r phology, including their s h i n y hairs that reflect sunlig ht and protect the p l a n t f r o m drying out. This species of moss, as well as similar species, has found a home in the human -made environments we often perceive as unnatural.

Mosses, despite the crucial role that humans play in their lives, often go unnoticed to the untrained eye. Kimmerer’s account of moss is a tale about getting closer to plants right below our feet, allowing us to understand their significance to us, and ours to them.

Bringing together personal experience and knowledge of family characteristics is the recipe for successful field botany.

Imagine you are sitting by the edge of a field of tall grass.

A new type of flower catches your eye.

Relatively short in height, its purple flowers congregate around

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one centralized cone or “spike.” This much you know, without any understanding of what this might mean for the categorization of the flower. Twisting the stem in between your pointer finger and thumb, you feel four ridges in a square-like shape. With the knowledge that a square stem is a defining characteristic of the Lamiaceae (mint) family, you begin to narrow your gaze. With a small hand lens, you focus on the flowers, noticing that each is bilaterally symmetrical, or symmetrical across one point of symmetry. This type of symmetry, as opposed to flowers that are radially symmetrical, is yet another indicator that this flower must belong in the mint family.

These quick observations help to narrow your scope from 437 flowering plant families in existence to just one. Familiarizing yourself with family-wide plant characteristics is something anyone can do with a little time and effort. Resources such as Botany in a Day and Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide are digestible resources to get your knowledge of plant families flowering.

The practice of field botany is directly informed by the field of plant systematics, which encompasses taxonomy, phylogeny, and most importantly, the evolutionary history of plants. Plant systematics utilizes morphological, molecular, and chromosomal data, making it a highly standardized scientific field. Despite this scientific objectivity, there is an inherent emotional response evoked from partaking in such a practice. There is something grounding about being able to put your finger on the name of a plant. In times when almost everything feels out of your control, having the ability to control how you perceive your surroundings is a perfect remedy.

That is the beauty of field botany. It is always waiting for you, inviting you to discover which plants resonate with you most.

There will always be more plants to meet, more stories to learn, and more landscapes to be clarified. You can learn a lot about a place you have

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never been to before by noticing the types of plants growing there. Then again, you can learn a lot about plants by observing where they like to grow. Practicing field botany has taught me that engaging in the practice of paying close attention is sure to change your perception of your surroundings. It is a lesson I hold onto tightly both in and out of the field, and one that is there for anybody who wishes to discover its beauty.

To clarify the green blur is to organically form connections between plants, places, and self in your everyday life. It means having a community you know by name almost anywhere you go that continues to grow as you do. H

Art by Maya Kagan

ground(ing) Inhale– we breathe in oxygenated air released by plants (our bodies transform it to carbon dioxide-infused air) exhale– we release carbon dioxide, plants use this atmospheric carbon to produce food.

The very breath which sustains our life is given to us by plants.

A gift is reciprocated in the exhalation of that breath from our lungs. Photosynthesis and respiration are vital processes that sustain an intricate web of life on earth.

These should be sacred cycles of reciprocity by which we are intrinsically connected to nature. Is there more nuance to this process? Yes. Nor is this the only way humans are connected to the Earth. Though, on a molecular level, we are here by way of this mutual exchange – I remind myself of that often.

I think too of how it feels to be embodied. To coexist.

To be in recognition of my wholeness and intimacy with the Earth, while simultaneously aware of my smallness and the complexities of the ecosystems I inhabit. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “gratitude is so much more than a polite thank you. It is a thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods.” Notice the sensation in your body when you read these words, being told that our pull to give and connect are fundamental elements of our humanity—our very existence. Just as fire and water are vi-

By Kate Wojeck

tal to life, so is the ebb and flow of giving and receiving love.

Kimmerer’s intimate understanding of her orientation to the world expresses an awareness that there is Earth inside us, entwined with us, a thought rooted in indigenous knowledge of what it means to be in relation with a land. Indigenous values are grounded in familial interconnection with the landscape, where the animate beings in inhabitancy are kin. Thus, indigenous people are indistinguishable and inseparable from the land. The land is a source of belonging, a sustainer, and an identity.

It is equally a space of enspirited ancestral connection, knowledge, moral responsibility, and healing. Within this network of relations, trust is placed in the rebalancing act of collective contribution to keep the fire lit. Abundance is known.

Consider then the fundamental elements of Western ideology: values of self-sufficiency and survival of the fittest, exponential growth and for-profit commodification of the environment. Reckless pillaging under the assumption that the environment is a bottomless pit from which to endlessly extract. Alongside these ideals came the unwashed feet of the first settler colonists who stomped on this continent and called it their own, claiming dominion and a divine right from God. Settler colonialism brought with it a dissociative complex as it relates to human beings and their relationships to everything, everyone else.

Our capitalist society has intentionally thrown us into division with the world—taught us not to feel with our bodies, but with an exaggerated logicality of our minds.

Thought bound objectively and systematically. Separate from nature. Separate from ourselves.

Foundational principles of Western ideology have disrupted our cognizance of the interrelatedness which

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graces us in a reciprocal exchange with the air we breathe.

Breath is now ordinary rather than sacred. An obvious element of our humanity taken for granted. This disruption of interconnection has decoupled our bodies and minds from the earth. We are reduced to a symptom that should not be occurring, then treated in isolation.

We are uncomfortable with the ‘absurd,’ here.

Constantly craving instant gratification, here.

Compulsively orienting to exponential gain.

Listening only to respond.

Paralyzed by polarization.

Feeling disgust at the perception of our own bodies.

Feeling defensive and self-oriented.

Consuming as pleasure.

Programmed to believe we are only worthy when ac tively producing.

Thus, working ourselves to the brink.

Capitalism’s oily tentacles have smeared themselves across the landscape, demanding a distinct and dominant livelihood. A political dogma dependent on our cultural conditioning to not criticize the system. Cyclical validation encoded in our minds to the point that it has become radical to do anything out of alignment with what’s been projected as “normal” – a determinance of humanity fixed along racialized, discriminatory lines.

In this positive feedback loop, we spiral into turmoil at the slightest feeling of disruption to our homeostasis: a balanced state we longingly summarize as happiness. We numb ourselves, scrolling. We cannot sit with ourselves.

At least, I know this to be true for myself. In my body, when an overwhelming feeling of tension arises, I run. I fixate on how much I want to let go of it, to escape its paralysis. It is hard to sit with ‘it’—whatever it may be. I use the term ‘it’ because rarely can I articulate the feeling—I do not believe that to be a coincidence.

Bobbing in this ever-fluctuating sea, embodiment appears fickle. We gasp for air, only to be submerged again by socio-political forces threatening our wholeness. We feel tension between the Real and reality. It is a distinction referenced by Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism as a desire to engage with the Real, the actually existing conditions and guts of the world, though instead finding ourselves backpedaling within our constructed reality.

This idea exposes the passive impulses we find ourselves caught up in and tangibly gives space to recognize how deeply embedded this alienation exists within us. Yet, the projection of value onto the landscape as something to be extracted rather than cultivated is flawed. Extraction of a landscape for the accumulation of wealth, capital, and

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power gives way in the long run—ecologically, socially, and economically.

Capitalism ends with the apocalypse in this story: the world warms and we erupt into flames with it.

Capitalism is this story ending with the apocalypse, then saying “so it goes.”

But we are not passive recipients of Earth’s gifts.

We are not meant to lack embodiment.

That is not the story of us (conflicts and heroes and survival of the fittest).

That is not the story of indigenous communities.

That is a story of colonization and capitalism in direct contradiction of Indigenous ways of knowing collected from continual residence on the land for millennia.

The stories of us, rather, are those of gathering. And as we oscillate between ecstasy and agony, dancing on the brink of discovering how to live in a world two degrees warmer, the words gratitude and reciprocity reverberate loudly. To build a holistic relationship with the natural world around us and adapt to catastrophic climate change, we must look to the indigenous communities who know best, and reconnect with the roots of intersectional relationships. Look to these communities who have been navigating the apocalypse for centuries. In recognizing that we are humans participating in our planet’s ecosystems, there is hope in shifting consciousness towards ecologically and socially sustainable futures. We cannot be of any help to the planet if we are numb, disconnected, and paralyzingly overwhelmed. For health, as Earthrise Studio conveys, “exists beyond individuals,” as an “emergent phenomenon of systems, within systems, working in their optimum state.” Our collective resilience is connected to the health of the planet through the food we consume, the water we drink, and the air we breathe to sustain our livelihoods. It is an embodied connection with the places we are in that we access our understanding of the universe and where we stand within it. It is not solely the land that is broken, but also the relationship with the land. We need to heal both together, simultaneously. My body is my home. And so is the Earth. Caring for one supports my work in both. This sense of rekindling a bond to the Earth beneath your feet to be better equipped to protect her. That simultaneously expanding one’s capacity to receive expands their capacity to give.

Part of the essential work involves the individual and collective nurturing of a mindful and radical love—an act

Kimmerer communicates as the “key to awakening to the preciousness of life and the strength we have to save it.”

Often hidden from us, this inclination to cultivate joy is already stored in our bodies; from a physiological perspective, kindness is built into our nervous systems as the opposers of stress. Being kind is a way to move from a state of survival into a state of thriving.

As we envision life, we create it. As we think, we do. By recognizing our role as participants, we foster attitudes in our communities that allow for lively, respectful, and restorative dialogues between body and earth. We must be aware of the ways in which the stories we tell about ourselves become the way we actually think. More importantly, the way we imagine. How can you accept the absurd or create sustainable futures, if you cannot imagine them?

Restoration includes re-story-ation. There is an opportunity to tell different stories about our relationships to land. Indigenous communities who face disproportionate burdens of climate change—at the hand of industrialized Western countries—bear no responsibility to save the Western world, though we all have a responsibility to show respect. “The Earth does not expect you to save her, she expects you to respect her, and we, as Indigenous peoples, expect the same,” says Nemonte Nenquimo, an indigenous activist in the Amazon. Actions of reciprocity and gratitude are the dawn of such an exchange.

So, scribble love notes in the margins, tales of innocents and rogues and those who held on to their embodiment.

Actively seek magic. Remind yourself that everything is in a constant state of transformation. That you too, exist

amongst the magic and are growing, just as the plants.

We are all becoming. Recognize your being as a vessel of felt emotion, this conversation between life and death experiencing being alive.

And ask yourself: What do I carry and how in turn does this carry me?

Ground yourself here.

Can we step into our hearts and fill our bodies—hon estly, as whole beings in deep awareness of our spatial, living, conscious earth—and move through our lives with the mutual understanding that we are taking up space in coexistence; feeling, not reeling. Then our imagination just might have room to breathe.

Inhale– we breathe in oxygenated air exhaled by plants (our bodies transform it to carbon dioxide-infused air) exhale– we release carbon dioxide, plants use this atmospheric carbon to produce food.

The very breath which sustains our life is given to us by plants.

To the plants, I start by saying “thank you.” H Art by Kate Wojeck

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Lost Guidance

By Josh Delahunt

This piece is called “Lost Guidance.” It is an expression of my feelings about finally finding my way in life after feeling lost. In my piece, this sentiment is represented by the man following the woodpecker through the obscure woods. I chose the woodpecker to be the guide because they are a sign of good luck in my life; encountering a woodpecker says to me “I’m on the right path.”

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Front cover art by Ava Dwyer