Environment

“JUST A TRICKLE”:

Where the Rio Grande Is Born: To understand the water crisis threatening millions across Texas and northern Mexico, I backpacked deep into the remote Colorado wilderness. (Jack Herrera, September 2026, Texas Monthly)

We began our journey by driving north through New Mexico. The June heat radiated off the highway, and our packs full of gaiters, puffers, and other winter gear felt absurd. But as we crossed the Colorado border and gained altitude, it felt as if someone had shifted the dial backward on the seasons. At 10,000 feet, winter conditions can last half the year. Steep peaks rose all around us, covered in blankets of snow.

We stopped to grab some provisions (whiskey) in the tiny former mining town of Creede. There I met Cole Birdsey, who was sitting outside his fly-fishing shop. A fifth-generation Creedite, he told me that his ancestors were miners; the first of them had come during the silver rush in the late nineteenth century. Deep in one of those mines, Birdsey’s grandfather had watched his brother die in an accident.

You can still spot the occasional flash of metal ore in the Rio Grande near Creede. That sort of natural wealth has driven settlement and industry across the American West for nearly five hundred years. In 1540 the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado left present-day Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, rumored to be rich in gold. He eventually hunkered down along the Rio Grande near what became Bernalillo, New Mexico, where he terrorized the local Tiwa. Coronado never found Cíbola, but successive generations of European settlers searched for new ways to create wealth in the lands they had conquered.

By the late nineteenth century, deserts flanking the Rio Grande were bursting with cotton. Settlers diverted the river to irrigate these ever-expanding fields. Later, a public works project flooded valleys and renamed them reservoirs. Laborers built hundreds of miles of canals and pipes that today make it possible for humans to capture, claim, and use nearly every drop of the river.

The resources extracted from the dry West have helped build one of the most powerful, wealthiest civilizations in history. Yet some of the small towns in this area tell another story about the cost of that growth. Every boom inevitably goes bust.

GENTLEMAN SNAKE:

Tangled Up in Indigo: Since first encountering an indigo snake as a boy, the author has been haunted by this all-but-extinct vestige of the Southern wild, once as much a part of the landscape as the longleaf pine. For fifty years he has walked the woods in search of an indigo, with an eye to the ground and, at long last, a little help from perhaps the only group in the world trying to save them (Padgett Powell, April/May 2015, Garden & Gun)

James Gregory’s father, we were told, was stabbed twenty-seven times in a shell parking lot outside a liquor store in Jacksonville, Florida, where, possibly, he worked. We never talked to James Gregory about it. We did not know James Gregory well. We put on a school play in which we surgically removed a tumor from a patient using backlit projection on a bedsheet to better show the ghastly tumor lifted from the patient. The tumor was a live six-foot snake that in the projection must have looked fifteen feet long. We got the gasp from the audience that we wanted. I like to think that the patient was James Gregory, and that yada yada we were exorcising a demon from him, but in fact I do not recall who played the patient and doubt that it was James Gregory. We did not know him well, and I do not even often think of James Gregory in this or any other context. I do remember that after the show the snake was enjoying his stardom until too many children touched and grabbed at him and it became a kind of rock star–fandom event that needed security and there was no security and the snake having had enough decided he was his own security and he bit Mike Wilkerson on the thumb, and Mike Wilkerson shook him off his thumb and in that jostle we dropped the snake, who crawled under a long leaning stack of metal chairs for surcease from his admirers.

And let us pause. We have a large snake under a long stack of leaning, heavy chairs. I am an agile twelve-year-old boy with a good sense of physics, which is what confers agility. The snake is under my charge. The snake has been put in my charge by my fifth-grade teacher, Shirley Brown. She has him because she has friends at the Jacksonville Zoo reptile house, whence he comes to her on loan. The snake will not be declared federally protected until 1978, but already in 1964 it is a rare animal. I have been allowed access to him to put him in the play. I am in charge and the snake has survived a fan event without security and is now under a ton of metal that can, with less jostling than dropped him to the floor, slide, shear, crash, and in my agile twelve-year-old brain cut him to pieces or merely crush him to one multiply bolused piece. The prudent thing would have been to put my foot on the rubber foot of the leading leaning chair to secure the stack and ask Mike Wilkerson to get the snake, or, if Mike Wilkerson had had enough of the snake, to have him replace my foot with his and get the snake myself.

Maybe prudence had been abdicated when we decided to pull a snake tumor out of a person onstage. I got down and into the chairs and maybe Mike did too, and we got the snake out without incident; he did not, that is to say, bite us in the face, which we were presenting to him perfectly had he wanted to. I already knew that the character of this snake was special, having handled him some before his stage debut (I posed with him outside the Jax Zoo reptile house), but I suspect his agreeable demeanor at this juncture may have spoken to me in my condition of emotional delicacy, a phrase I borrow from William Trevor and will explain. The snake had no more quarrel with Mike Wilkerson’s thumb. We got him into a secure cage and I had a nervous breakdown. Maybe that overstates it. The expression “burst into tears” understates it. Let’s say I was wracked by a sobbing that made it hard for me to breathe, or see much, but the little I could see included my teacher’s collapsing faith in me as her protégé. (She had called me this when introducing me to a man at a drugstore who was not her husband, whom I knew and liked, and my adult-behavior alarm had gone off.) In my sniff-heaving I could not begin to explain to anyone the vision of those chairs, the hair trigger those old beige rubber feet were, what one rung of chair could do to a snake let alone five hundred…and I watched Shirley Brown dismiss me, and thought something like, Well, this is of course regrettable, but she has no idea, hail-fellow-well-met with her drugstore dandies.

For fifty years I have thought only occasionally about James Gregory, sturdy Mike Wilkerson, or Shirley Brown. I have had no outsize breakdowns, just the steady march unto desuetude. But more than occasionally I thought about that giant purple friendly snake, and I have walked the woods looking for one. At first everywhere, anywhere, because they were alleged to be everywhere, and later in rarefied, special terrain, because they were supposed to be there, I walked the woods looking for an indigo, the gentleman snake.

RUNNING THE GAUNTLET:

Howl: The dark side of wolf reintroduction (Kevin Berger, February 21, 2025, Nautilus)

In 1985, a female wolf with a creamy white coat was traversing the mountains surrounding the Moose Creek meadow, searching for a mate. She found him and by May that year had built a den just north of Montana’s Glacier National Park, where the white wolf nursed and played with her seven new black pups. She had five more pups the next year, this time inside the park.

The white wolf was canny and intelligent. Boyd used her best tricks to try and capture her. She wanted to replace her radio collar before its signal failed. But the “white phantom” kept outwitting her. The white wolf would paw the dirt around Boyd’s traps, expose the buried piece of metal, and pull the trap to the ground, sometimes without springing it. She would defecate to the side of the trap, “proclaiming this turf as hers,” Boyd wrote.

Family dynamics in a wolf pack never stand still. In 1987, the white wolf was deposed as the breeding female from her pack. Her allure, though, hadn’t faded, and in just months she found a new mate and gave birth to her third litter of pups. Something roiled her previous pack, and some of the members rejoined the white wolf to help raise her new family.

In September that year, five of the white wolf’s pups ran afoul of Canadian hunters and poachers, who shot and killed them. The remaining wolves who had lived with the white wolf fled south to their old pack in the sanctuary of Glacier National Park, “seemingly understanding the danger of the British Columbia wolf hunting season,” Boyd wrote.

The white wolf, solitary again, wandered for years through the Northern Rockies. She was 9 years old in 1992, elderly for a wolf, and lingered in the foothills near a forestry camp in Alberta, Canada, where an outfitter shot and killed her.

Before she died, the white wolf trotted across the Moose City meadow toward Boyd’s cabin. She locked eyes with Boyd and then turned around and trotted back in the direction she had come from, disappearing into the willows. Boyd wondered why the white wolf had come. Did she recognize her scent from her traps? Boyd decided the white wolf had “dropped by to let me know that she was still out there, still in control, and still smarter than me.”

The Woman Who Runs with the Wolves: Biologist Diane Boyd has spent 14 years studying the animals in the far reaches of the Rockies (Perri Knize, Sports Illustrated)

The first few times I don’t meet Diane Boyd, I become convinced she must be every inch the misanthrope that she is reputed to be. In the 56 days it took me to track down the held biologist, who is documenting the return of the wolf to the northern Rocky Mountains for the University of Montana’s Wolf Ecology Project, I found phone calls and letters to be useless. Tips from her acquaintances and associates led to dead ends. Vague plans to meet were scrapped abruptly and without warning when she suddenly disappeared. “This is Diane. Don’t come up. I won’t be available” became a mantra my answering machine intoned almost every time I checked in. The woman was as elusive and difficult as the subjects of her research. “Finding Diane Boyd is a project unto itself,” Jim Cole, a local cougar tracker warned me. “Sometimes the only way is to just go up there and find her.”

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.