Alexandra of Russia and her son Alexei, photographed between 1910 and 1913.Library of Congress
Today is International Women’s Day. It also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the start of the revolution that brought down the Russian empire. Given the coincidence, I was delighted to find in our archives an article from our January 1928 issue titled “The Fall of the Russian Empire: The Part Played by a Woman”—that is, until I read author Edmund Walsh’s assessment of exactly what that “part” was:
Russia was the last island fortress of absolutism in the rising tide of democracy, the outstanding anachronism of the twentieth century. … It defied the elements for three hundred years—until the deluge came. Whose hand unloosed the flood gates? In my opinion, a woman, all unconsciously, had more to do with the final debacle than any other single cause. … History probably will clear the memory of Alexandra Feodorovna [of treason, but] it can never clear her memory of tendencies, practices, and imprudences that contributed notably to Russia's ruin. The domination which this imperious, proud, aloof, and resolute woman exercised over her irresolute and impressionable husband became such a menace that more than one grand duke, duchess, and general cried out in warning against it. …
Revolutions are made by men and women determining events. Men are swayed by powerful human emotions. Women create them. And the master passion, particularly in neurotic females, can be as elegantly indifferent to the realities of life and war as ever Montesquieu was to the existence of God.
It’s a fascinating historical document, undeniably sexist in its overtones. The gist of Walsh’s argument is that the Tsarina Alexandra, driven by fear for the health of her hemophiliac son, gave the self-proclaimed holy man and healer Grigori Rasputin a level of influence that irrevocably weakened the Russian government. For evidence, Walsh delves into the embarrassing intimacies of Alexandra’s letters to her husband. And he criticizes the empress on two familiar, contradictory fronts: On the one hand, she’s weak and overly emotional, too much guided by motherly worries to see the bigger picture of Russian politics. On the other, she’s aggressive and overly domineering, stepping outside her proper sphere of childrearing to advise her husband on governance. She’s portrayed as a femme fatale, making a “subtle approach to political questions … through the gateway of the Tsar’s affections.” But she’s not granted agency either: Walsh argues she brought about the fall of the empire “all unconsciously.” She is, like female leaders still are, damned for the stereotypes of womanhood she does fulfill and damned for the ones she does not.
But none of this is to dispute the chain of events that Walsh describes. Alexandra and her husband did fail at governance: For any leader, male or female, it’s a heartbreaking reality that even the safety of one’s own family must come second to the national interest. And for all the sexism embedded in Walsh’s narrative, I agree with his central point that “revolutions are made by men and women determining events.” What struck me, reading this article today, was Alexandra’s simple human vulnerability, and my own reaction to it—my inclination to sweep this unflattering story under the rug. When we seek to recognize the women of history, what do we do with the history that reveals individual women as less than admirable? How do we celebrate women—our role models, ourselves—as powerful, vulnerable, fully complex humans, flaws intact?
If you have thoughts on that question, please let us know. It reminded me of a comment about female characters I’d seen recently from a reader during TAD’s book-club discussion of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The dystopian government of that novel is built on the oppression of women, to which its central character, Offred, bears witness but doesn’t fight back. The reader wrote:
When I started reading The Handmaid's Tale before Christmas, someone (a LADY before you get all "pffft men!") told me that the women of the novel, especially Offred, bothered her. It took me a long time to settle into why Offred might be kind of frustrating—and it's because I think, as women, we all want her to fight, to struggle, to know that what is happening to her is wrong. But she's a product of her conditioning, isn't she? And she's been conditioned so well. She passively allows things to happen to her. She just rides along, not speaking up or out or anything.
But as another reader pointed out, “Offred is like a lot of folks. When it comes down to it. It's easier to put your head down and survive.” And the first reader agreed, summing it up:
I think we expect women characters to be strong nowadays. We’re shocked when they aren’t.
We’ve come a long way since 1928, when portrayals of women like Walsh’s were more or less the norm. Over decades—centuries, for that matter—women have worked to prove that they are strong and brave and smart; that they are leaders and revolutionaries; that they are more than mothers only; that motherhood is no lesser thing. It’s been proven time and again, but women still must demand the freedom to be imperfect—which is no more and no less than what every human deserves.
That’s the question that reader John Harris has been asking himself lately. He’s not alone: In 1862, one of The Atlantic’s founders, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wondered the same thing about aging. Acknowledging that “the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous,” Emerson set out to explain the upsides of senescence. A common theme is the sense of serenity that comes with age and experience:
Youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has, as yet, no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts. … Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into doleful deserts, until it finds proper vent. … One by one, day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his calling, homestead, social connection, and personal power, and thus, at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind.
By 1928, advances in medicine had made it more possible to take a long lifespan for granted. In an Atlantic article titled “The Secret of Longevity” (unavailable online), Cary T. Grayson noted that “probably at no other time in the history of the human race has so much attention been paid to the problem of prolonging the span of life.” He offered a word of warning:
Any programme which has for its object the prolongation of life must also have, accompanying this increased span of life, the ability of the individual to engage actively and with some degree of effectiveness in the affairs of life. Merely to live offers little to the individual if he has lost the ability to think, to grieve, or to hope. There is perhaps no more depressing picture than that of the person who remains on the stage after his act is over.
On the other hand, as Cullen Murphy contended in our January 1993 issue, an eternity spent with no decrease in faculties wouldn’t necessarily be desirable either:
There are a lot of characters in literature who have been endowed with immortality and who do manage to keep their youth. Unfortunately, in many cases nobody else does. Spouses and friends grow old and die. Societies change utterly. The immortals, their only constant companion a pervading loneliness, go on and on. This is the pathetic core of legends like those of the Flying Dutchman and the Wandering Jew. In Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, a fine and haunting novel for children, the Tuck family has inadvertently achieved immortality by drinking the waters of a magic spring. As the years pass, they are burdened emotionally by an unbridgeable remoteness from a world they are in but not of.
Since antiquity, Murphy wrote, literature has had a fairly united stance on immortality: “Tamper with the rhythms of nature and something inevitably goes wrong.” After all, people die to make room for more people, and pushing lifespans beyond their ordinary limits risks straining resources as well as reshaping families.
Charles C. Mann examined some of those potential consequences in his May 2005 Atlantic piece “The Coming Death Shortage,” predicting a social order increasingly stratified between “the very old and very rich on top … a mass of the ordinary old … and the diminishingly influential young.” Presciently, a few years before the collapse of the real-estate bubble that wiped out millions of Americans’ retirement savings, Mann outlined the effects of an increased proportion of older people in the workforce:
When lifespans extend indefinitely, the effects are felt throughout the life cycle, but the biggest social impact may be on the young. According to Joshua Goldstein, a demographer at Princeton, adolescence will in the future evolve into a period of experimentation and education that will last from the teenage years into the mid-thirties. … In the past the transition from youth to adulthood usually followed an orderly sequence: education, entry into the labor force, marriage, and parenthood. For tomorrow’s thirtysomethings, suspended in what Goldstein calls “quasi-adulthood,” these steps may occur in any order.
In other words, Emerson’s period of “ungratified desires and powers untried” would be extended indefinitely. Talk about doleful deserts! On top of such Millennial malaise, Mann also predicted increased marital stress, declining birth rates, a depleted labor force, and a widespread economic slowdown as the world’s most powerful nations entered a “longevity crisis.”
But that’s just one vision. Another came from Gregg Easterbrook, who anticipated “a grayer, quieter, better future” in his October 2014 Atlantic article “What Happens When We All Live to 100?” His argument has some echoes of Emerson’s, but with modern science to back it up:
October 2014
Neurological studies of healthy aging people show that the parts of the brain associated with reward-seeking light up less as time goes on. Whether it’s hot new fashions or hot-fudge sundaes, older people on the whole don’t desire acquisitions as much as the young and middle-aged do. Denounced for generations by writers and clergy, wretched excess has repelled all assaults. Longer life spans may at last be the counterweight to materialism.
Deeper changes may be in store as well. People in their late teens to late 20s are far more likely to commit crimes than people of other ages; as society grays, the decline of crime should continue. Violence in all guises should continue downward, too. … Research by John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, suggests that as people age, they become less enthusiastic about war. Perhaps this is because older people tend to be wiser than the young—and couldn’t the world use more wisdom?
It’s a good point. Couldn’t we all use more wisdom, more experience, more opportunities to learn? Wouldn’t we make better use of our lives if our lives went on forever? Not so fast, Olga Khazan wrote last month:
A common fear about life in our brave, new undying world is that it will just be really boring, says S. Matthew Liao, director of the Center for Bioethics at New York University. Life, Liao explained, is like a party—it has a start and end time. … “But imagine there’s a party that doesn’t end,” he continued. “It would be bad, because you’d think, ‘I could go there tomorrow, or a month from now.’ There’s no urgency to go to the party anymore.”
The Epicureans of ancient Greece thought about it similarly, [psychologist Sheldon] Solomon said. They saw life as a feast: “If you were at a meal, you’d be satiated, then stuffed, then repulsed,” he said. “Part of what makes each of us uniquely valuable is the great story. We have a plot, and ultimately it concludes.”
Even so, some futurists believe immortality is within reach:
So, what do you think: Is there a limit to how long people should live? Is it selfish to want eternity for yourself, or would having even a few immortals around make the world better for everyone? Here’s one reader’s take:
This reminds me a bit of the cylons in the “new” Battlestar Galactica.
With the ability to reincarnate infinitely, and be effectively immortal, they were callous towards humans, and killed humans with impunity. It was only when their ability to reincarnate was ended and they became effectively mortal (and thus subject to basically the same rules of death as humans) that they were driven to behave in a moral way.
But another reader argues:
I for one think the world would be a better place if we collectively took a longer view, and what better way to do that than to give everyone a stake in it?
On Tuesday, President Trump outlined his plans to increase defense spending and invest in America’s infrastructure. This week, we asked Politics & Policy Daily readers where they would allocate extra funds if they were in charge of the country’s budget. Here are some of our favorite responses.
The vast majority of respondents, including Stella Porto here, would invest more in education:
If I controlled the federal budget, I would strengthen basic public education. Provide more access to pre-school education. Make college more affordable. Expand community colleges. Develop re-training programs for those who jobs have been eliminated by automation or other economic trends.
Everything in the country depends on the level of education of its people—absolutely everything, from preventing illness, choosing a better lifestyle, to raising kids responsibly, to choosing elected officials, to fighting for important causes, etc. Citizenship depends on education. Access to good education is at the root of equality.
Chuck Barnes, a retired university faculty member and geologist, suggested funding a year or two of universal service for high school graduates:
I don’t mean military service, although that could be one option. Other options would include a wide range of work and/or training to help create a wide range of social service, training, physical work, military service, etc. This would accomplish two interrelated goals: 1) recognizing that we are such a great nation and that 1-2 years of service are a debt that should be paid for the privilege of being an American; and 2) helping young people from disparate worlds to interact in positive ways, while growing up and maturing.
Donna Hoffman, a former English and drama teacher, thinks America should invest in a new kind of education:
I would take that fictional extra money and put it into the National Endowment for the Arts and change from our current, terrible system of education to the Montessori System used in Europe and in private school systems around the U.S. Yes, our education system needs an overhaul, but it needs to be done by Europeans not Americans who are so enmeshed in what we’re doing now that they cannot see the forest for the trees.
Susan Berkow said she wouldn’t increase military spending because it “is already big enough” but she would spend more on support for veterans.
Connie Hellyer said investing in advancing reproductive rights for women around the world would be a “three-fer” because access to contraception “improves women’s health and ability to enter the labor force,” “improves children’s health,” and “relieves pressure on the environment.”
John Friedin would use the extra money to conduct “scores of scientifically run experiments with guaranteed basic income for all.” More on basic income here.
Jerry Purmal would focus on eliminating student debt:
In order to reduce the time over which each student’s debt lingers, those EXTRA funds would be applied to pay the annual interest on student debt, thus permitting the student’s obligatory loan payments—following graduation and gainful employment—to be entirely credited to reduction of each student’s principal sums interest-free.
Finally, in a time of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” Ken Prahl was thinking about how to learn from some of the lessons of 2016:
I’d use the funds to set up adult-education classes on critical thinking, what it is, and how to perform it—also explaining how history can be described using different narratives and giving examples of different narratives tied to various ideologies.
Because of the Internet I write more and receive feedback from people I know (on Facebook) and online strangers (on TAD and other platforms that use Disqus). I use it as a jumping-off place and resource for planning lessons for my high-school students in science.
However, I don’t practice music as often as I used to.
On a similar note, another reader confesses, “I draw less because I’m always on TAD”:
As a sketch artist, I appreciate my ability to Google things I want to draw for a reference point, but that doesn’t make me more creative. I already had the image in my head and the ability to draw. I honed my skills drawing people the old fashioned way, looking at pictures in books or live subjects and practicing till my fingers were going to fall off.
In my opinion, the internet also encourages people to copy the work of others that goes “viral” rather than creating something truly original. The fact that you can monetize that viral quality also makes it more likely that people will try to copy rather than create.
That’s the same reason a third reader worries that “the internet has become stifling for creativity”:
Maybe I am not looking in the right place, but most platforms seem to be more about reblogging/retweeting/reposting other people’s creations. Then there is the issue of having work stolen and credits removed.
As another reader notes, “This is the central conflict of fan fiction”:
It’s obviously creative. On the other hand, it is all based on blatant copying of another writer’s work. How much is this a huge expansion of a creative outlet, and how much is this actually people choosing to limit their own creativity by colonizing somebody else’s world rather than creating a new one?
For my part, I tend to think the internet has encouraged and elevated some amazing new forms of creativity based on reaction and re-creation, collaboration and synthesis. Take this delightful example:
Those creative forms are a big part of my job too: When I go to work, I’m either distilling my colleagues’ articles for our Daily newsletter or piecing together reader emails for Notes, and those curatorial tasks have been exciting and challenging in ways that I never expected. But I’ve also missed writing fiction and poetry and literary criticism, and I worry sometimes that I’m letting those creative muscles atrophy. If you’re a fanfic reader or writer (or videographer, or meme-creator, or content-aggregator) and would like to share your experience, please let us know: hello@theatlantic.com.
This next reader speaks up for creativity as “the product of synthesis”:
It’s not so much a quest for pure “originality,” as it is a quest for original perspectives or original articulations. I’d say that my creativity has been fueled by letting myself fall into occasional rabbit holes. Whether that’s plodding through artists I don’t know well on Spotify or following hyperlinks in a Wiki piece until I have forgotten about what it was that I initially wondered, that access to knowledge in a semi-random form triggers the old noggin like little else.
On the other hand: So much knowledge! So many rabbit holes! Jim is paralyzed:
I find many more ideas and inspirations, but the flow of information and ideas is so vast that I never find time to develop them. I need to get off the internet.
Diane is also exasperated:
The promise of digital technology was: spinning piles of straw into useful pieces of gold.
My reality is: looking for golden needles in a giant haystack of unusable straw.
I spend so much time looking for the few things actually useful to my project, my writing, my daily info needs, and by the end of the day I feel like I’ve wasted so much time and effort sorting through useless crap. And the pile of useless keeps getting bigger and bigger, like a bad dream.
This next reader provides some tips for productive discovery:
I am old enough to vaguely recall a time before I began to use the internet on a daily basis. What I would do, back then, when I got stuck and could not find a creative angle on a problem, was to go to some arbitrary corner of the library, take down the first book that caught my interest even though it had nothing to do with the problem at hand, and read a few pages—sometimes, the whole book. More often than not, it would trigger all sorts of analogies, and at least a few of them usually turned out to be fruitful. (Even if nothing turned out to be relevant, I usually still learned something interesting, so it was a win-win strategy.) It was a great way (to borrow Horace Walpole’s definition of serendipity) to make discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things one were not in quest of.
I try to use the internet in a somewhat similar fashion: When I’m stuck, I often spend a morning strolling around arbitrary corners of the internet, trying to discover stuff I did not know I was in quest of. Typically, I start in some academic resource like JSTOR. (I almost always start by limiting my search to articles at least 50 years old; it ensures that one does not end up reading fashionable stuff and thus thinking the same thoughts as all the other hamsters in the academic wheel. Also, older articles are usually far more well-written than the crap that results from the publish-or-perish system.) I am not above using e.g. Wikipedia, though, at least as a point of departure.
I also like reading old stuff in online newspaper/magazine archives. Sometimes, a stray remark in one of those wonderful 19th-century magazines written by and for men of letters is all you need to get a fresh angle on a familiar problem.
Gotta love those 19th-century magazines. In some ways, their mission wasn’t so different from that of the Facebook groups and Reddit threads and Disqus forums of today: creating a space for discourse and exchange and reflection, where exciting new ideas could bump up against each other. As James Russell Lowell, The Atlantic’s founding editor, wrote to a friend in 1857, “The magazine is to be free without being fanatical, and we hope to unite in it all available talent of all modes of opinion.” And as Terri, one of the founding members of TAD, reflects today:
TAD itself has been a creative endeavor for me and the other mods. Envisioning the community we wanted. Coming up with ideas to bring it to life. We developed ideas around the mix of politics, open and fun threads that the community has taken on and grown. It really has been a creative experience in collaboration on the internet.
Check out TAD’s whole discussion on creativity here, as well as many more. As for the offline benefits of online collaboration, take it from this reader—a “furniture maker and Weimaraner enthusiast”:
I would like to share a story about a project I am working on in which the internet has certainly aided my creativity. Zeus, our 8-month-old Weimaraner, is a couch hog. When my girlfriend and I sit down on the couch to watch TV, he will sit directly in front of us and bark until we make room for him. There are three large dog beds in the house, but Zeus steadfastly refuses to lie on the dog beds.
I am a member of a Weimaraner-owner Facebook group called Weim Crime. Several people in the group have had similar problems. We came up with a solution I tested out last week: build a dog bunk bed with one bed on the bottom and one bed about the same height as our couch.
It has worked out very well. Zeus quietly relaxes on the top dog bunk while we sit on the couch. I am now collecting feedback from that same group before building the more attractive final version. I have received very useful feedback—for example, lowering the top bunk deck to 18 inches or lower to prevent joint injuries. My end goal is to design and build a simple, low-cost dog bunk bed that is more attractive than the prototype and post a YouTube video showing other owners how to build a similar one.
This is just one silly project, but the feedback and interest I have receiving regarding the project has been really inspiring.
What questions about your day-to-day experience of the world have you been pondering? We welcome your feedback and inspirations. Check back Monday for the next discussion question in this series—and in the meantime, enjoy some Weimaraner art:
When I first contacted Nikolai Formozov about his paper on a 30,000-year-old squirrel originally found by Gulag prisoners, which I wrote about today, he told me he had a “few other colorful details” that didn’t make it into his paper. Would I be interested in hearing more?
I replied yes, of course, wondering how much more interesting this story could get. What he sent was magnificent.
(A note on nomenclature, which should not put you off from reading to the very end: Urocitellus parryii is the scientific name for present-day Arctic ground squirrels, and U. glacialis refers ones from the Ice Age.)
Nikolai wrote:
After we had made sense of the complicated and dramatic fate of Urocitellus parryii in northeastern Eurasia (it had once colonized the territory, then become extinct, and then re-colonized it from America), we began to wonder if there modern descendants of glacialis in Asia, if there were refugiums (shelters) from the Ice Age that still existed. Naturally, we considered Kamchatka, оne of the warmest places in the region. But we had no material from there.
At the time, my friend Igor Shpilenok, a wildlife photographer and popular blogger, was working in the Kronotskiy Wildlife Reserve on Kamchatka. From his blog, I noticed that he often saw a Red Fox, whom he had named Alisa, and that she brought ground squirrels to her puppies.
I wrote to Igor: “Where did Alisa find those ground squirrels? They should not be there (in that part of Kamchatka).”
Igor said, “Oh, they came here 20 years ago from the center of the peninsula.”
I said, “Could you ask her to collect some ground squirrels for us?”
Igor said: “Simple, I’ll trade her cookies for them. She loves cookies.”
But a strange thing happened after that. Igor wrote me “You know, now I don’t even need cookies, because after I received your letter, Alisa began leaving ground squirrels on my porch, the way cats do.”
So we received our first four specimens from Kamchatka courtesy of Alisa, and they were closely related to glacialis, as we predicted.
In our academic article, I had wanted to mention Alisa in the Acknowledgments, but this idea of mine was vetoed.
Have you read it cover to cover? If so, it’s time to test your memory. The quiz below contains 20 surprising facts, each one drawn from a different article in our latest issue. Each question includes the page number where you can find the answer, so if you’ve got a copy of the magazine handy, you can follow along on paper. Otherwise, go to the online table of contents, where the articles are listed in the same order as they appear in the quiz.
On Monday, the Weekly Standardpublished an article by Lee Smith titled “Fake News, Exposed.” It alleged that Rumana Ahmed, a former National Security Council staffer and the author of an Atlanticessay about why she left the Trump administration, had misled readers about the nature of her position.
“Ahmed was a political appointee in the Obama White House. According to Trump White House officials, it was very late in her tenure in the Obama administration when she applied for a civil service position with administrative duties,” Smith wrote. “‘Burrowing,’ as it's commonly called, is the process through which political appointees move into career government status. She was granted her new status at the end of January, just as the Trump team was moving into the White House.”
In fact, Ahmed held a term appointment that was not set to expire until the summer of 2018. Ahmed’s employment documents, which were reviewed by The Atlantic, show that her position with the NSC, which began in June 2014, was a Schedule A excepted service term appointment. Her term was renewed for another two years in August 2016.
“A Schedule A term appointment to the NSC would not ordinarily be described as a political appointment and it is a standard hiring authority for staffing the NSC,” explained Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. “You’re not serving at the pleasure of the president, you’re serving a two-year term.”
The 2016 Plum Book, an exhaustive list of political positions in the federal government, lists only the executive director as a political appointee among the NSC staff—along with the national security adviser and his deputies. A broader definition might encompass most other senior staff on the NSC, who are hired into the excepted service on Schedule C, and required to submit their resignations when a president leaves office.
Ahmed did not change the nature of her non-political appointment with the NSC late in the Obama administration, nor was that status renewed or changed in January. Multiple former senior NSC officials confirmed this account of her employment.
The Weekly Standard, Ahmed said, made no effort to contact her to verify its claims prior to publication.
Our collection of power plants for this photo series keeps growing: a nuclear one over Michigan, another one along the Cali coastline, a bunch of wind turbines over Colorado, a pair of coal-fired plants in Iowa, solar panels with crop circles in Arizona—and now a massive solar plant in Nevada that looks like a moon base or a SETI satellite:
Roberto T. Martins
The stunning image was sent by Roberto, a reader in Georgia:
This is the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy project, in the Nevada desert, as seen on a flight from Denver to San Francisco last November. I had just heard about it on NPR when I saw it right under our flight path. (If I hadn’t listened, I would have no idea what it was.)
Here’s the NPR story that he’s likely referencing. It provides some fascinating details into the unique nature of the Crescent Dunes solar plant, which can generate electricity for up to 10 hours even after the sun goes down. What’s the secret? Molten salt:
“It actually looks like water. It’s clear — it flows like water,” Smith says. He says the molten salt has to remain above 450 degrees Fahrenheit to stay liquid. It’s sent up the tower to the glowing tip, where it’s heated further. When the salt comes back down, it is 1,050 degrees. The molten salt is used to make steam to power a generator.
Here’s a closer view of the plant from Roberto, with the central tower casting a sundial-like shadow across the desert floor:
The plant generates enough electricity to power 75,000 Nevada homes. But it’s had some blemishes: “During a test [of Crescent Dunes last year], observers recorded a video of birds flying into heat from the mirrors and being incinerated.” The group Basin and Range Watch is now suing the agency to get more information on the dangers to wildlife. But flaming fowl isn’t unique to Crescent Dunes; the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California is another example of a broader problem for solar plants. Here’s an explanation from Emma Roller via our archives:
First, insects are drawn to the reflective light of the solar mirrors. That draws small, insect-eating birds, which in turn draw larger predatory birds. The rays of the mirrors’ reflected light produces temperatures from 800 degrees to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Any animal caught in the intense glare of the mirror’s rays may catch fire and plummet toward the ground, or spontaneously combust altogether.
That beam of fiery death is called a “solar flux.” The bigger threat to birds, however, comes from wind turbines. As my colleague Clare Foran noted, “Research published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Biological Conservation [in 2013] estimated that between 140,438 and 327,586 birds — or a mean of 234,012 — are killed annually due to collisions with turbines across the U.S.” Petroleum is another big danger:
In the six months after the BP oil spill in 2010 — when 4.9 million barrels of crude oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico — more than 7,000 birds were collected in the spill area, and more than 3,000 were coated in oil, according to the National Wildlife Federation. Up to 23,000 birds could have been killed by the spill, according to an estimate in Audubon Magazine. It’s also estimated that 225,000 birds died from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.
I worked for many years with seabirds in California and Hawaii, and I wanted to add something about the differing impact of mortality between oil and wind. Oil affects predominately seabirds, whereas wind turbines affect mostly land birds. Land birds and seabirds have much different reproductive lives; seabirds live much much longer and produce fewer young each year. [...]
The relevance of this to oil and wind? Adult mortality in seabirds is generally much lower than for land birds, under normal conditions. But increases in adult mortality are much less sustainable. In a situation where you have a significant die-back of adults, land birds can sustain that die-back longer and rebound back much faster once that problem has been eliminated. The recovery time of seabirds is measured, however, in decades.
As Todd Woody points out in this Atlantic post, windows are probably the greatest scourge for wild birds—even excluding windshields:
Every year as many as 988 million birds—that’s not a typo—or nearly 10 percent of the United States’s avian population, die from colliding with windows, according to a study published in March [2014]. In other words, you and I have bird blood on our hands just from sitting inside our offices and homes.
Circling back to Crescent Dunes and happier thoughts, if you lived in New York City two years ago, as I did, you may have noticed that solar plant while walking past Lincoln Center—or, rather, an artistic representation of Crescent Dunes:
Hopefully no birds barreled into that projection. Its artist, John Gerrard, spoke with Motherboard at the time:
Gerrard and a team of programmers used Unigine, a real-time virtual 3D program typically used in gaming, to place the sun, moon, and stars as they would appear over one year at Crescent Dunes. The perspective cycles through ground level, satellite, and various other vantage points. “No view is precisely the same at any point during the course of the exhibition,” according to the official description.
The artist told Motherboard he was interested in the Crescent Dunes facility because it resembles a solar disc from above and its solar tower reminded him of a light house, two technologies that depend on the sun. “I was interested in transplanting these ancient, iconic shapes into New York City with an alternate reality,” Gerrard said. “Most people ignore public art, but it’s stimulating the public in this enormous way to document it. If you look at the #SolarNYC images on Instagram, people are creating these images within images and wonderful hyperlapse videos of Solar Reserve.”
A closeup image of the tower I captured on Instagram looks like a robotic Mad Hatter:
I am a totally and permanently service-connected, disabled Marine veteran with Gulf War Illnesses. I was an infantryman in the first war in Iraq and spent a good deal of time in and around the burning oil fields. I was also dosed with long-term, low-dose nerve agents from the “superplume” of oil smoke and chemical weapons inadvertently made airborne by coalition forces during demolition while I was aboard ship in the Persian Gulf after the ground combat had ended.
After my four years of active duty I attended college and earned a civil engineering degree. I worked for a few years as a consulting civil engineer for a Fortune 500 engineering firm until the symptoms of my illnesses became too much for me to continue gainful employment as a civil engineer.
My medical care as an engineer was very good, since I had very good private insurance—until I could no longer work. By that point, I had been awarded a 50-percent disability rating and the VA stepped in to cover my treatment. As my illnesses progressed, I became less and less active and more and more dependent upon the 13 different pharmaceutical medications and three pharmaceutical inhalers the VA doctors prescribed to me for daily use. My symptoms/illnesses used to include:
Diagnosed as fibromyalgia for lack of a better explanation.
Chronic migraine headaches.
Two or more every week, without fail.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Daily diarrhea without fail, cramps, and inconsistent schedule.
Asthma
Lung capacity reduced over 50 percent from pre-enlistment screening.
PTSD
Mild case, not constant symptomology, only mildly affects daily life.
I still have all of these symptoms/illnesses. But several years ago, a friend of mine from our time together in the Marines shared his secret for recovering from Gulf War Illnesses. This veteran had been so sick on our way back to the States that he was flown from a hospital ship to Germany then back to our unit in California once he was well after a couple weeks.
His secret and mine—to share with all who will listen—is FECO, or Full Extract Cannabis Oil. This is close to an essential oil of cannabis and is much more highly concentrated with a wide range of cannabinoids and terpenes, as well as flavonoids, than any other form of cannabis available.
FECO is made using the highest proof ethanol as possible. I use 95 percent (190 proof) Everclear available in Washington state, where the cannabis is also legal. (There are plenty of methods to make FECO, but the one I most recommend is from Skunk Pharma Research, LLC; they are actual scientists perfecting the medicinal cannabis extract processes.) FECO is produced using high-proof ethyl alcohol, so no microbiological contaminants remain in the finished product. Also, ethyl alcohol is relatively easy to distill from the final FECO, so the medical cannabis consumer doesn’t have to worry about alcohol.
By making and using FECO, I have reduced my daily prescription dose from 13 pills and three inhalers to two pills and one rescue inhaler I use infrequently. I no longer take ANY prescription pain medicine, nor muscle relaxers or sleep aids.
I was certain my working life was over, but I have started a consulting business again. I feel better than I have in more than a decade. I am working at becoming active and healthy enough to earn enough money to no longer qualify for Social Security Disability.
I don’t sit around smoking cannabis all day. I can mix FECO as a high-strength tincture, inject it into gel caps, mix it with a hot beverage, or vaporize it in cartridge form. I can cook with FECO and eat it directly or even make suppositories, as some FECO acolytes have begun to do. This truly is a “wonder drug,” and the hundreds or thousands of different cannabis strains all produce slightly different FECO but never a “bad” batch!
For more on military vets using cannabis to help cope with their lives stateside, the Dallas Observerhad a long feature last month on a growing campaign in the Lone Star State to get vets legal access:
More than 1,600 Texas veterans have stepped out of the shadows to talk about their marijuana use with legislators, the media and anyone else who’ll listen to their harrowing tales of painkiller addiction and suicide. They’re the vanguard of the medical marijuana lobbying effort that’s making battle plans to bring their cause to Texas lawmakers this legislative session. They say they’re tired of being considered criminals when they have no choice but to use marijuana for service-related injuries because the alternatives—painkillers and psychotropic drugs—are killing too many of them.
They’ve come together as part of Operation Trapped, a veteran lobbying movement with connections to two other marijuana lobbying groups, Texas NORML and the Marijuana Policy Project. They’re supporting passage of state Sen. Jose Menendez’s SB 269, which seeks to expand the Texas Compassionate Use Act and allow any Texas resident with a doctor’s recommendation access to medical marijuana.
Menendez, a San Antonio Democrat, tried to pass a similar bill in the 2015 legislative session, but it never made it out of the Senate’s Health & Human Services Committee. Instead legislators passed the Texas Compassionate Use Act. It allows patients with a rare form of epilepsy access to a cannabis oil stripped mostly of the chemical compound THC, which gets users high. The act leaves out more than 1.7 million Texans who could benefit from medical marijuana. Menendez wants to increase the number of medical conditions that qualify for medical marijuana and allow patients access to the whole plant, not just low-THC oil. (That’s an important point for medical marijuana advocates, who contend that marijuana contains several compounds that are beneficial in treating a variety of ailments.)
Up north in Canada, where marijuana laws are much more advanced than those in the U.S., a Globe and Mail story from August 2016 details an effort to get oils covered for vets:
Despite a Supreme Court of Canada decision that gives sick Canadians the right to use medical cannabis oils, Ottawa is reimbursing the country’s veterans for dried pot only, potentially pushing them to less healthy options of smoking or vaporizing the drug. That has prompted a group of commercial medical marijuana growers to urge Ottawa to expand medical marijuana coverage for former soldiers—a small but lucrative patient base for Canada’s two dozen licensed producers—to include the ingestible oils.
More than 1,700 veterans have access to the largest publicly funded medical marijuana plan in the country, but they are covered only for the plant’s dried flower. They have to use their own money for the oils. Licensed growers started selling the oils last year after the Supreme Court ruled Health Canada was putting sick people at risk of cancer and bronchial infections by sanctioning only dried buds.
For a somewhat dated but still compelling “case for treating PTSD in veterans with marijuana,” see this Atlantic piece from 2012 by Martin Mulcahey:
If anecdotal evidence were the standard, acceptance of marijuana’s calming properties among psychologically scarred soldiers would be a topic relegated to the past. Statistical evidence to support that hypothesis could be petitioned from the state of New Mexico, where medical marijuana is legally prescribed for PTSD. The state’s number one diagnosis for a medical marijuana license, a noteworthy 27 percent of the total, lists PTSD as the qualifying criteria for issuance. That statistic comes as no surprise to Sisley, but she stresses circumstantial evidence is not enough to sway the wide range of government agencies she deals with. “We really believe science should supersede politics,” she said. “This illness needs to be treated in a multidisciplinary way. Drugs like Zoloft and Paxil have proven entirely inadequate.”
An Atlantic reader, Paul Culkin, wrote at the time:
On the battlefield, if something works—a tactic, a piece of equipment, a weapon—you use it, even when someone is on the radio telling you it won’t work. I still find it funny how the American public would find it abhorrent to know that we were withholding weapons or equipment from our servicemembers that could save their lives. Yet we have potential relief [for PTSD through marijuana] for not only servicemembers but for their families that have to suffer along with them, and the Federal government continues to block it.
I have chosen along with fellow combat veterans here in my community to not waste away in the bar at the VFW and the Foreign Legion like a lot of other vets I have seen. Alcohol is really the worst thing for PTSD. With alcohol I can escape reality forever, my life falling apart before my eyes, turning into a monster. Medical cannabis can be a temporary relief, but it doesn’t allow me to turn away from reality forever. And it’s not addictive like alcohol or prescription narcotics. It doesn’t hurt your lungs, since it can be made into an edible form.
I don’t believe cannabis is the single antidote in dealing with PTSD. I firmly believe that doctors are disregarding diet and exercise, so basically it is up to us, the vets, to do what we did in the field: Take care of ourselves and spread knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work, because that is all we have.
The Zika emergency—thankfully now in the past but still without a vaccine—spread throughout 60 countries and affected thousands of pregnant women in 2015 and 2016. The disease is most dangerous for pregnant women due to the risk of birth defects as severe as microcephaly, when the fetus forms a small head and underdeveloped brain. To prevent that gruesome fate for their baby, pregnant women with Zika often turn to abortion (though the procedure is illegal in many of the countries most affected by the virus).
Before Zika, there was the rubella epidemic of 1964 to 1965, when an estimated 12.5 million Americans acquired the disease (also known as German measles). Similar to Zika, rubella’s symptoms for most adults are mild—a rash and a low-grade fever that lasts two or three days. But for a pregnant woman and her fetus, rubella is “very dangerous,” according the CDC, resulting in birth defects ranging from deafness to heart problems to mental disabilities. Also like Zika, rubella is often asymptomatic, thus many pregnant women don’t realize they’re carrying the virus until it’s too late. In the 1960s, prior to the release of the rubella vaccine in 1969 and the Roe decision in 1973 that made abortion legal nationwide, a small number of doctors illegally performed the procedure for pregnant women with rubella.
One of those women is Bette, an Atlantic reader who had a second-trimester abortion in March 1971. She was a 24-year-old married Christian at the time, and she frames her abortion story as “God’s will for my family”:
My husband and I celebrated my pregnancy with friends on Thanksgiving Day in 1970. Although the pregnancy was a bit of a surprise, we were delighted to welcome a baby into the world.
I was teaching fifth grade at the time, and I’ll never forget the moment when a student walked up to my desk and said he didn’t feel very well. When I saw the rash on his face, I flashed back to a terrible photograph I had seen in a magazine in my obstetrician’s office the week before. It was of a “Rubella baby,” and the caption said “Bobby’s mother recovered from German measles in 3 days. Bobby wasn’t so lucky.”
I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I later found out the way scientists realized what the Rubella virus did to a fetus was when someone connected delivery-room personnel coming down with the three-day measles to a baby with severe birth defects. Although the mother recovers in three days, the baby stays sick throughout the remaining time of gestation and is still contagious at birth.
I had almost forgotten about that student and the magazine picture a couple of weeks later when I got up and saw a very slight rash on my own face.
I covered it up with make-up as best I could and drove 30 miles to school, feeling worse and worse the whole way. Halfway through the morning, I couldn’t deny what was happening to me and I cried all the way home. When I called my doctor, he specifically told me not to come in. He knew what was wrong and told me to go to bed and that I’d feel better in a couple of days.
My husband was in the Army at the time, and we felt that we needed to go to our hometown to have support from our family, our church, and the doctor I trusted. My doctor told us about a “therapeutic abortion.” Although he told me about the difference between a simple first-trimester D&C and a second-trimester saline injection, he explained it very gently. He told me that although he couldn’t give me advice, if it were his wife, he would urge her to have an abortion.
As a naive Christian girl, I had never heard the word “abortion.” This was before Roe vs. Wade and I had no idea what was going on in “Women’s Lib” circles at the time.
The reason I didn’t get my abortion until the second trimester was that my Christian family had never faced anything like this before. We were blindsided by the news and needed time to come to grips with what was happening. I wanted to talk to Christian leaders I trusted.
So we turned to our church. My aunt and uncle were missionaries in Taiwan at the time, but they were home on furlough. As a missionary nurse, my aunt agreed with my parents’ Sunday school teacher—a Chief of Cardiac Surgery at a major hospital—that this abortion was within God’s will. They told me that this was a “technology that God has given us in order to prevent more suffering in the world.” On their advice, I went ahead with the procedure.
Although I seldom talk about my abortion, I spent a lot of years being very angry with Christians who made a political issue out of something so deeply personal and spiritual to me. Since I was making one of the hardest decisions of my life, I had spent precious time talking with my Christian support system.
I have since left that church. I had to mask my rage at Christians—Christian MEN in particular who want to have a say in a decision that is between a woman and her God. The way I found peace was in knowing that I sent that little guy, Tory Cameron, back home to be with God.
I look at it the same way now. The suffering that abortion alleviates in the world is the mess we have created because we haven’t figured out a way to take care of the children who are already here. Every story is different, but what the “pro-life” crowd doesn’t want to consider is the fact that abortion is never going to go away—until we figure out a way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Sometimes that can be a young girl living in poverty who has no way to support a child, or it is a mother addicted to drugs whose baby will be born addicted and possibly severely damaged. And then there are the young girls who are so afraid their families will disown them that they take matters into their own hands and risk the tragic consequences. Bottom line: NO ONE thinks abortion is a good thing.
I don’t know what my life would have been like if I had carried Tory to full term, but I do know that it would have been different. I wouldn’t have the two children I now have. My marriage may or may not have ended earlier, or we might have lived “happily ever after” with a beautiful handicapped child whom we both would have loved.
But I do know two things for sure: First, the decision was mine to make. And second, I will someday be reunited with Tory and we’ll talk about it then. That’s when I will apologize, if necessary.
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