The monkeys and the sharks
On the nature of storms
I’ll be on This is Hell! Radio at 10:10 CT discussing money and restoration in the Everglades. Tune in here!
Last week was, officially, “Shark Week.” And it’s almost as if the sharks knew: On July 4, in Texas, three people were bitten in two separate incidents. Another attack occurred a few weeks earlier. There have been recent attacks in Florida, too.
One factor in this sudden rash of shark attacks, at least in Texas, might be hurricanes, according to Texas Monthly: the magazine notes that research has found large shark species head toward shore to feed before an impending meteorological disturbance. On July 4, with Hurricane Beryl bound for Texas, the sharks and the swimmers both had cause to be at the beach—a deadly combination that may become more common as storms increase. I haven’t been able to find the actual research—let me know if you have a link—but I’d guess this is a survival strategy: You’ve got to eat when you can.
Back in June, I noted that the wilderness of the South is often slow and mellow. If you had to pick a symbol of Southern wildness, the Everglades might be a good choice: a “river of grass” that is so slow that the water can hardly be seen to move.
But even as I wrote those words, Southern nature was proving me wrong. The Everglades, and the rest of southern Florida, had been savaged two weeks before by torrents of rain. Fort Lauderdale got nearly a foot of water, a record for a summer day. This was, according to the Washington Post, a “200-year event,” which means the chance of so much rain falling in so short a period should have a 1-in-200 chance of occurring in any given year. But similar events have happened four times over the past four years. (NASA, meanwhile, suggests that it was more like a 500-year or even 1,000-year event.)
Meanwhile, one of Ron DeSantis’s staffers suggested on Twitter that all this was normal: “Welcome to the rainy season,” she wrote.
I think she meant to be dismissive. Another staffer, the governor’s press secretary, talked about how absurd it was for people to presume that DeSantis “can control how much it rains”; the governor himself said he would not allow “our energy policy [to be] driven by climate ideology.” But she was also correct. This is what the rainy season will be like. This is, to borrow a dismayingly common phrase, the “new normal.” What was once a 200-year flood is no longer, as the statistics are out of date. Now we must decide: How are we going to respond?
Not long after all that rain fell, Science published an interesting study of how a population of rhesus macaques in Puerto Rico behaved in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The hurricane knocked down trees, which reduced the available shade—a crucial resource in searingly hot summers. In response, the monkeys appeared to increase their social tolerance. This, too, is a survival strategy: sometimes the best way to get through is to come together.
Rebecca Solnit has written about how this instinct appears in humans, too—at least sometimes. The book offers a series of case studies of how, as the title puts it, earthquakes and fires can lead to A Paradise Built in Hell. She offers one exception: Hurricane Katrina, where people in power decided the city’s residents were in many cases too dangerous to be rescued. “How you behave [in a disaster] depends on whether you think your neighbors . . . are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by disaster,” Solnit writes, “or a greater good than the property in houses and stores around you.” Now, once more, a Southern city languishes in the wake of a storm—its suffering all but ignored as the nation is glued to other crises considered more pressing.
There are so many lessons we can draw from nature. After all, “nature does everything,” as the writer adrienne marie brown recently noted on On Being. When the hurricanes come, there are sharks and there are monkeys. There are lessons in nature, but it’s up to us to decide which are best.
In rotation
📖: Robert Caro, The Power Broker [Yes, I’ve been reading along with 99% Invisible]; Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert [a re-read of a book whose excellent writing I’d forgotten; this is for an ongoing project about the Colorado River, I’m still taking nominations for other books to read]; Hanif Abdurraqib, There’s Always This Year
📻: I’m on a Steve Earle kick lately, so I was excited to see a new live album out last week.
Recommended reading
🐶 I was captivated by this New Yorker story about the science and ethics of cloning dogs. The depth of our love for our dogs reveals something interesting about how we think about animals, Alexandra Horowitz notes:
Even if the cost were not so exorbitant, and even if it could be done without using other animals, it would still highlight our objectification of dogs, she added—“viewing them as products or toys or somehow not quite animate beings with feelings and thoughts and life projects of their own, but as our stuff.” As heartbroken as we are when a beloved family member dies, it doesn’t occur to us to bring a dead child or parent back as a clone.
🚀 A rocket launch at SpaceX turned a bird nest into a “yellow smear,” with sand stained by egg yolk. Which, unfortunately, is not a rare occurrence. The New York Times examined more than 10,000 pages of records to report the story of how the company has damaged ecosystems along Texas’s coastline and restricted access to public land.
“We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around and so if it blows up, it’s cool,” Elon Musk said at a news conference in 2018.
⛲ The Washington Post, in its series on Southern flooding, has a well-done tick-tock of “sunny-day” flooding in coastal North Carolina and a look at the protections for an LNG facility in coastal Louisiana. One environmentalist notes “the irony that they’re having to armor these facilities at considerable expense to guard against extreme weather that is their own doing.”
River Roundup
🌧 More than half the water that pours into the Mississippi River comes from “ephemeral streams,” Jackie Flynn Mogenson notes at Mother Jones—waterways fed by precipitation that may be dry much of the year, and, thanks to a Supreme Court decision last year, are no longer protected under the Clean Water Act. Jackie was kind enough to call me for the piece, and as I noted, considering rivers nothing more than a singular line on a map is “a really limited way of thinking.”
+ I also recently appeared on the Nature Revisited podcast and on the American Surveyor’s “Everything is Somewhere” podcast.
+ Climate change is putting a damper on Mississippi River cruising (New York Times)
+ The Biden Administration wants to pour $2.5 billion into river infrastructure—but environmentalists are skeptical (Politico)
+ On their Substack The Atlantic Now, Irene Vázquez reviews Virginia Hanusik’s new book, Into the Quiet and the Light, and considers what it means to stay.
In other news
Michael Adno explains the expansion of the mangrove (Scientific American)
Margaret Renkl explores the forgotten expanse of Southern grasslands (New York Times)
The company that wants to mine the Okefenokee has a track record of disaster (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Louisiana’s pine trees are under attack (Louisiana Illuminator)
The lone-star tick: a Southern menace begins to spread (Washington Post)
Do we need to end bowfishing to save the imperiled redfish? (Nola.com)
The Pearl River map turtle is now officially endangered (Louisiana Illuminator)
The designation comes amid controversial plans to dam the Pearl (Jackson Clarion-Ledger)
The Republican platform includes a proposal to sell off public lands—to ease the housing crisis (HuffPost)
In response to a Southern Environmental Law Center lawsuit, the U.S. Forest Service has dropped plans to log 15 acres of federal land in North Carolina.
In coastal South Carolina, coastal communities turn to conservation to stop gentrification (Inside Climate News).