Environment

FEEDING THE FERAL GODS:

When Grief Came for the Gravedigger: In pursuit of an interesting life, he came face to face with death. (Will Bahr, d Feb. 11, 2026, NY Times Magazine)

Under Alison, it became commonplace at the sanctuary to invite the bereaved to dig graves and bury their dead themselves. We would still assist, of course, and ensure that no one showed up to dig wearing Crocs. But oftentimes the sanctuary staff was very much in the background. People leaped at the opportunity to take agency in this, their last act of service. Anyone who has borne grief’s leaden weight knows how physical a process it is — that phantom anvil perched on the shoulders, the chest; that lump unswallowable in the throat. Digging a grave yourself is an exceedingly rare opportunity for catharsis. Filling one in is closure, literalized. And so I found myself digging and filling graves beside mothers, sons, dear bereft friends. I came to know the dead through their people, who thanked us for the opportunity nearly to a name.

I wondered sometimes what kind of toll the work was taking on me. Physically, it was clear enough. My shoulders ached, my hands grew calloused and dirt-caked and torn by blackberry thorns (though I mostly loved this part). Mentally, the ledger was more vague. I was well acquainted with personal grief coming into the job, but here I felt like a tourist. I watched as a widow howled in animal anguish, kneeling in black by her lover’s graveside. I watched as a whole dynasty stiffly buried its matriarch, hands jammed in pockets, words unsaid hanging humidity-thick overhead. Most days, it felt like any other job — rote, obligatory. Others, I wept for total strangers.

One evening in late September 2024, it started raining. Then it started raining hard. News of a coming storm crept into our news feeds. We had a burial scheduled for the midst of the squall; Alison and I texted “As I Lay Dying” references back and forth.

“I’ll bring the covered wagon,” I said, “you bring Anse’s teeth.”

“I haven’t read it since high school,” she admitted, “but I’ll take your word for it.”

This sense of ha-ha doomsdayism permeated Asheville. How bad, in western North Carolina, could a hurricane possibly get?

TOUGH BEAT FOR SERIAL KILLERS:

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked (Jennifer Ouellette – Feb 2, 2026, Ars Technica)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cracked down on lead-based products—including lead paint and leaded gasoline—in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on human health. Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed human hair samples spanning nearly 100 years and found a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations, concluding that this regulatory action was highly effective in achieving its stated objectives. They described their findings in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

DON’T REBUILD IN DISASTER ZONES:

The Los Angeles wildfires were ‘the perfect storm’. Is the city ready for the next one? (Gabrielle Canon, 7 Jan 2026, The Guardian)

The dangers are not confined to Los Angeles. There are more than 1,100 communities in 32 states across the US with characteristics similar to those that burned in the LA fires, data from the US Forest Service shows – and they are not only in the west. Researchers estimate roughly 115 million people – more than a third of the US population – live in areas that could host the next fire disaster.

The extreme conditions that aligned here were rare; but the dangers are only increasing. Los Angeles will have to prepare itself, even as the metropolis undergoes the arduous challenge of climbing out from under this catastrophe.

At a minimum, insurance policies ought not grant policies.

GOS:

The goshawk’s name was bestowed by medieval falconers and honours the birds’ formidable predatory powers (Mark Cocker, 6/05/25, Country Life)

What really makes a goshawk hard to see is its blend of sheer speed and inherent caution. They are widespread in Britain, particularly north and west of a line from the River Severn to the Tweed, where there are an estimated 1,200 breeding pairs. In all places, they are lovers of deep woods and spend most of their time within the canopy, dashing along rides or weaving through the trees, using shock tactics to flush and catch prey. In Europe, goshawks can sometimes occupy heavily urbanised places, but remain invisible to the public. There is a celebrated colony in downtown Berlin, Germany, and, although it might be the scourge of the city’s pigeon flocks, its human neighbours remain blithely unaware. The species is particularly partial to pigeon flesh, with some studies putting it as high as 60% of the entire diet. Yet goshawks have the power to overwhelm larger birds. Part-ridges, coots, mallards and even capercaillie — the latter three times the weight of its assailant — have all been recorded.

I once saw a female retrieving an egret from a dyke, where the prey had fallen after the raptor had struck. They will also adjust to more modest fare: squirrels, starlings, sparrows and beetles are fair game for males, which have only two-thirds the bulk of their mates. For all their fondness for deep cover, goshawks will forgo their ghost status during the pre-breeding period. For a few spring weeks, especially on sunlit March mornings, they sail high over their territories, circling and swooping. The climax of these nuptial displays is when a male and female fly together, bonding in a deep-winged, slow-motion butterfly action that they alternate with passages of effortless soaring. A mystery attaching to Britain’s population centres on the precise nature of its origins.

As Helen MacDonald relates in H is for Hawk, T. H. White’s the Goshawk is kind of insane.

ALWAYS TAX EXTERNALITIES:

What warped the minds of serial killers? Lead pollution, a new book argues. (Kate Yoder, Jun 16, 2025, Grist)

In her new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser maps the rise of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest to the proliferation of pollution. In this case, the lead- and arsenic-poisoned plume that flowed from Asarco’s metal smelter northwest of Tacoma, which operated for almost a century and polluted more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound area, the source of the famous “aroma of Tacoma.”

Fraser grew up in the 1970s on Mercer Island, connected to Seattle by a floating bridge with a deadly design, not far from a terrifying lineup of serial killers. George Waterfield Russell Jr., who went on to murder three women, lived just down the street, a few years ahead of Fraser at Mercer Island High School. (No surprise, his family once lived in Tacoma.) She had always thought the idea that the Pacific Northwest was a breeding ground for serial killers was “some kind of urban legend,” she told Grist.

But after much time spent staring at pollution maps, and looking up the former addresses of serial killers, she came up with an irresistible hypothesis: What if lead exposure was warping the minds of the country’s most harrowing murderers? In Murderland, Fraser makes a convincing case that these killers were exposed to heavy metal pollution in their youth, often from nearby smelters and the leaded gasoline that was once burned on every road in the country.

Studies have shown that childhood lead exposure is connected to rising crime rates, aggression, and psychopathy. In children, it can lead to behavior that’s been described as cruel, impulsive, and “crazy-like”; by adulthood, it’s been linked to a loss of brain volume, particularly for men. Fraser doesn’t pin sociopathy solely on exposure to lead, though she suggests that it’s a key ingredient.

THE GREAT UNLEADING:

The end of lead: Lead has been all but eliminated in most of the developed world. Doing the same for the rest of the world might not be difficult. (Clare Donaldson & Lauren Gilbert & James Hu, 6/12/25, Works i Progress)

Two thousand years ago, even the Romans noticed health problems among those who worked with lead: they became pale and sickly, and too much exposure could even lead to paralysis and delirium. But lead was useful and Roman medicine hardly an exact science; some illness might simply be the price society paid for such a versatile mineral.

With two thousand years more of medical knowledge, we can be more precise about lead’s impact on the body. If you ingest lead, it is absorbed through the gut; if you inhale it, it enters through the lungs. From there, it passes into the bloodstream, where it is deposited into the bones and organ tissues.

If it stayed there, perhaps lead exposure could be ignored. But, like all body systems, the bones are not static. Lead re-enters blood in the churn and change of resorption, the nonstop process that dissolves the bones’ contents into the bloodstream as part of the metabolic replacement of old bone tissue with new.

Once released into the bloodstream lead harms the endothelial cells that line the inner walls of blood vessels, while causing a different type of cell – known as vascular smooth muscle cells – to proliferate, simultaneously stiffening and clogging the arteries. At the same time lead damages the kidneys by both hardening the organs’ blood vessels and poisoning the tubes responsible for filtering blood.

These processes, in combination, substantially raise the risk of conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and kidney disease. A national observational study showed that, after adjustment for various other risk factors, American adults with higher levels of blood lead had a 37 percent higher overall mortality risk, 70 percent higher cardiovascular disease mortality risk, and 108 percent higher coronary heart disease mortality risk.

From the blood, lead also slips into the brain. The blood-brain barrier, which protects the neural tissue from most toxins, lets lead through principally because lead ions chemically resemble calcium ions, vital to the proper functioning of brain cells. Once in the brain, lead degrades cell membranes, blunts neurotransmission, and deregulates intracellular signaling pathways that depend on calcium ions. It even directly kills off brain cells.

This can cause a laundry list of neurological and mental disorders: cognitive impairment, nerve damage, hearing loss, dementia, schizophrenia, and behavioral and attention problems. Many studies have found that lead exposure increases violent crime.

While both adults and children can suffer severe consequences from lead exposure, it is generally young children who receive the most exposure and who suffer the gravest consequences.2

To begin with, normal play and hand-to-mouth behavior make young children much more likely than other groups to ingest lead from sources like dust and soil, which can contain lead from paint chips, mining activity, and legacy contamination from gasoline. As they grow and develop, they absorb four to five times as much lead per unit of exposure as adults do, in part because of how lead imitates the chemistry of calcium. Children use much more calcium than adults because they are still growing new bones; replacing their calcium ions with lead is therefore particularly dangerous.

Most things that sicken children leave evidence for parents and doctors. But children exposed to lead don’t have a giveaway fever, or rash, or cough. There is no way for parents to tell that their children have been exposed, only the silent accumulation of cellular damage that, down the line, can cause long-term disease and impaired brain functioning.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as human lead use ramped up, so too did human exposure to lead. By the 1980s, people were exposed to 1,000 to 10,000 times as much lead as ancient humans.

“AND HE DOES NOT GET STUNG”:

Telling the Bees (Emily Polk, April 3, 2025, Emergence)

I drove out to Hudson, a conservative town in rural New Hampshire, to meet leaders of the New Hampshire Beekeepers Association. I arrived just in time to watch a couple of senior bearded men in flannel shirts and Carhartt pants transport crates of bees into new hives. I was completely entranced by their delicacy and elegance. They seemed to be dancing. I wrote of one of the beekeepers, “He moves in a graceful rhythm … shaking the three-pound crate of bees into the hive, careful not to crush the queen, careful to make sure she has enough bees to tend to her, careful not to disturb or alarm them as he tenderly puts the frames back into the hive. And he does not get stung.” I was not expecting to find old men dancing with the grace of ballerinas under pine trees with a tenderness for the bees I wouldn’t have been able to imagine had I not witnessed it myself. This moment marked the beginning of my interest in what bees could teach us.

HUMANS AND BEES have been in close relationship for thousands of years. The Egyptians were the first to practice organized beekeeping beginning in 3100 BC, taking inspiration from their sun god Re, who was believed to have cried tears that turned into honeybees when they touched the ground, making the bee sacred. In tribes across the African continent, bees were thought to bring messages from ancestors, while in many countries in Europe, the presence of a bee after a death was a sign that the bees were helping carry messages to the world of the dead. From this belief came the practice of “telling the bees,” which most likely originated in Celtic mythology more than six hundred years ago. Although traditions varied, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family. Beekeepers draped each hive with black cloth, visiting each one individually to relay the news.

While bees have long been understood to be conduits between the living and the dead, bearing witness to tears from God and the grief of common villagers, less is known about the grief of bees themselves. Can bees feel sad? Do they feel angst? Among the many roles honeybees play in the hive—housekeeper, queen bee attendant, forager—the one that catches my attention is the undertaker bee, whose primary job is to locate their dead brethren and remove them from the hive. (Depending on the health of the hive and its approximately sixty thousand inhabitants, this is no small job.) My beekeeper friend Amy, who, like me, has loved bees since she was a little girl, tells me over lunch that one of the craziest things about this is that there’s only one bee doing it at a time. “Just one bee will lift the body out of the hive and then fly away with it as far as possible,” she says. “Can you imagine lifting one whole dead human by yourself and carrying it as far as you can?” We marvel over this feat of spectacular strength. “It’s always the females doing it,” she adds, which makes me smile, because all worker bees are female. The male drone bees only number in the hundreds and their only purpose is to mate with the queen bee, after which they die.

But I want to know if the undertaker bees feel anything while they are removing dead bees. Do bees have emotions?

A few years ago the first study to show what scientists colloquially refer to as “bee screams” was published. Scientists found that when giant hornets drew near Asian honeybees, the honeybees put their abdomens into the air and ran while vibrating their wings, making a noise like “a human scream.” The sound has also been described as “shrieking” and “crying.” According to scientists, honeybees’ “antipredator pipes” share acoustic traits with alarm shrieks and panic calls that mirror more socially complex vertebrates.

I am not surprised at all that a tiny insect also screams in a way that has been compared to a human scream. I don’t think it has anything to do with social complexity or being a large vertebrate, but rather something much more primal and universal to the experience of being alive. Every day for months after my baby daughter’s death I also felt compelled to scream. I wanted to scream at the dogwood blossoms outside my home in Massachusetts; I wanted to scream at the grocery cashier cracking jokes. I never associated the urge with being human. I felt it was what an animal did who was no longer safe in the world. When I read the study, the sharp edges of my own grief felt soothed by the underlying revelation—there are profound connections shared between living creatures, no matter the size of our brains, no matter how loud the sound of our screams.

I wanted to know more.

WHO WILL….:

Telling the Bees (Emily Polk, April 3, 2025, Emergence)

I HAVE LOVED BEES my entire life, though my love for beekeepers started when I was writing a story for the Boston Globe about the dangers of mites to bee colonies in North America. I drove out to Hudson, a conservative town in rural New Hampshire, to meet leaders of the New Hampshire Beekeepers Association. I arrived just in time to watch a couple of senior bearded men in flannel shirts and Carhartt pants transport crates of bees into new hives. I was completely entranced by their delicacy and elegance. They seemed to be dancing. I wrote of one of the beekeepers, “He moves in a graceful rhythm … shaking the three-pound crate of bees into the hive, careful not to crush the queen, careful to make sure she has enough bees to tend to her, careful not to disturb or alarm them as he tenderly puts the frames back into the hive. And he does not get stung.” I was not expecting to find old men dancing with the grace of ballerinas under pine trees with a tenderness for the bees I wouldn’t have been able to imagine had I not witnessed it myself. This moment marked the beginning of my interest in what bees could teach us.

HUMANS AND BEES have been in close relationship for thousands of years. The Egyptians were the first to practice organized beekeeping beginning in 3100 BC, taking inspiration from their sun god Re, who was believed to have cried tears that turned into honeybees when they touched the ground, making the bee sacred. In tribes across the African continent, bees were thought to bring messages from ancestors, while in many countries in Europe, the presence of a bee after a death was a sign that the bees were helping carry messages to the world of the dead. From this belief came the practice of “telling the bees,” which most likely originated in Celtic mythology more than six hundred years ago. Although traditions varied, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family. Beekeepers draped each hive with black cloth, visiting each one individually to relay the news.

While bees have long been understood to be conduits between the living and the dead, bearing witness to tears from God and the grief of common villagers, less is known about the grief of bees themselves. Can bees feel sad? Do they feel angst? Among the many roles honeybees play in the hive—housekeeper, queen bee attendant, forager—the one that catches my attention is the undertaker bee, whose primary job is to locate their dead brethren and remove them from the hive. (Depending on the health of the hive and its approximately sixty thousand inhabitants, this is no small job.) My beekeeper friend Amy, who, like me, has loved bees since she was a little girl, tells me over lunch that one of the craziest things about this is that there’s only one bee doing it at a time. “Just one bee will lift the body out of the hive and then fly away with it as far as possible,” she says. “Can you imagine lifting one whole dead human by yourself and carrying it as far as you can?” We marvel over this feat of spectacular strength. “It’s always the females doing it,” she adds, which makes me smile, because all worker bees are female. The male drone bees only number in the hundreds and their only purpose is to mate with the queen bee, after which they die.

But I want to know if the undertaker bees feel anything while they are removing dead bees. Do bees have emotions?

A few years ago the first study to show what scientists colloquially refer to as “bee screams” was published. Scientists found that when giant hornets drew near Asian honeybees, the honeybees put their abdomens into the air and ran while vibrating their wings, making a noise like “a human scream.” The sound has also been described as “shrieking” and “crying.” According to scientists, honeybees’ “antipredator pipes” share acoustic traits with alarm shrieks and panic calls that mirror more socially complex vertebrates.

FOR WANT OF A FISH…:

Missouri’s Great Escaped Snake Scare of 1953 (Thomas Gounley, April 21, 2016, Atlas Obscura)

In 1953, Springfield, Missouri, was a city of about 65,000 people and at least 11 escaped Indian cobras slithering loose on the streets.

Between August and October, at least 11 of the snakes were either killed or captured in Springfield, much to the alarm of residents, many of whom fought back with a common gardening tool.

While a local pet shop was always suspected to be the source of the snakes, its owner denied any involvement. It would be 35 years until the person who set the reptiles free came forward.