Reid Singer Archives - ϳԹ Online /byline/reid-singer/ Live Bravely Thu, 12 May 2022 20:18:03 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://cdn.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/favicon-194x194-1.png Reid Singer Archives - ϳԹ Online /byline/reid-singer/ 32 32 The People Trying to Use Technology to Save Nature /culture/books-media/second-nature-nathaniel-rich-under-a-white-sky-elizabeth-kolbert-book-review/ Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/second-nature-nathaniel-rich-under-a-white-sky-elizabeth-kolbert-book-review/ The People Trying to Use Technology to Save Nature

Elizabeth Kolbert and Nathaniel Rich, environmental writers par excellence, survey human solutions to the human-caused mess we’re in. Whether the fixes will help or make things worse remains to be seen.

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The People Trying to Use Technology to Save Nature

At the end of March, the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone tribal council voted to with the resource company Lithium Nevada to explore installing an open-pit mine near the reservation. Thacker Pass, near the Oregon border, is home to the largest deposit of lithium in the United States. Supporters of the mine say it could produce up to 66,000 tons per year of lithium carbonate, a component in rechargeable batteries, which car and truck manufacturers can use to build millions of solar-powered and electric cars over the next five decades, buttressing an essential component of President Biden’s plan to reverse the progress of climate change. And yet it poses plenty of its own risks: according to the EPA, waste tailings from the mine could leave traces of uranium, mercury, and arsenic in the local watershed, where they’d linger for the next three centuries. Regardless of whether a private, for-profit entity like Nevada Lithium is acting with the best of intentions, any attempt to dig lithium out of the ground is likely to make a mess.

Such dilemmas are increasingly common, and they illustrate how even the most well-meaning attempt at environmental progress can lead to other forms of destruction or loss. Journalists who in the past might have sought to describe the scope and depth of humanity’s impact on the natural world are now focusing on the surreal or frightening consequences of human schemes to protect the earth from harm.

The questions they ask are trickier than beforeand less morally satisfying. Two of the best-known journalists looking at these problems are Elizabeth Kolbert, whose portrayed the most intense period of species erasure of the past 66 million years, and Nathaniel Rich, who wrote ,an account of fossil-fuel companies suppressing evidence of the climate crisis in the 1980s. While thosebooks read like detective thrillers, with unmistakable victims and antagonists, the heroes and villains are harder to find in the authors’latest works.

DZ’s and Rich’s , both published this spring, cover similar ground, describing humanity’s present-day tinkerings with the natural world,many of which are aimed at correcting tinkerings of the past. The writers bring plenty of skepticism to their subjects, but relatively little judgment, and by and largethe framing feels less like a courtroom than a museum or science fair. Neither Kolbert nor Rich can imagine a corner or aspect of life on this planet that might remain unaffected by human activity, benevolent or otherwise, and the individualsthey meet seem more or less ready to embrace the brave new world. “People grow up with this idea that the nature they see is ‘natural,’” one scientist tells Rich, “but there’s been no real ‘natural’ element to the earth the entire time human beings have been around.”

(Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux, left; courtesy Crown)

A few of the projects they write about are narrow in scopeor clearly just for fun. Kolbert tries an at-home Crisprkit designed by Josiah Zayner, a garage biohacker, to engineer a batch of antibiotic E. coli. (Another project in the kit involves inserting a jellyfish gene into yeast so that it glows in the dark.) She also visits a 40-acre subsection of Death Valley National Park, where an extremely rare and fragile species of pupfish relies on an artificial habitat to survive, its population hovering in the low hundreds. Rich, meanwhile, talks to the investors and techno chefs involved in producing lab-grown meat, and he introduces readers to the work of , a Brazilian artist who altered the genetic code of an albino rabbit. Under ultraviolet light, the bunny—like the yeast—turns neon green.

Other efforts are more ambitious. To learn about the passenger pigeon, a North American bird that was hunted into extinction by European settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries, Rich interviews experts who intend to revive the species, Jurassic Parkstyle, using preserved samples of the pigeon’s genetic material. He also describes the terrifying ubiquity of PFOA—a chemical ingredient in detergents, floor sealants, adhesive tape, and nonstick frying pans—produced and released into the water supply near Parkersburg, West Virginia,. It is the only chapter in the book with a obvious villain.

Kolbert, similarly, mostly refrains from taking sides when she reports on some of the more avant-garde techniques being proposed to reverse the effects of climate change. These include the direct capture of emissions in basalt stones that can then be buried underground, and “solar geoengineering,” a theoretical method of spraying reflective particles into the air to scatter warmth and light from the sun back into space. For every expert who believes such technologies are a harmless waste of time, another will conclude that they are unforgivably stupid. A plan that some regard as “a broad highway to hell” is treated by others as “inevitable.”

Kac, the artist in Second Nature, appears to bemore intent on normalizing the uncanny edge of the sciences than on upsetting viewers with something weird. He seems to argue that this is simply the world we live in, and we might as well get used to it. David Keith, founder of ,mentioned in Under a White Sky, cheerfully places his work in the centuries-long process of human governance over the planet’s flora and fauna. “People think of all the bad examples of environmental modification,” he tells Kolbert, undeterred by the range of mild criticism and death threats received by his university office. Many are worried about its unintended consequencesor the possibility that it could give fossil-fuel companies an excuse to continue doing harm. “To people who say most of our technological fixes go wrong, I say, ‘Okay, did agriculture go wrong?’”

As it happens, , a sparsely populated branch of southeastern Louisiana thatboth authors spend more than a few pages exploring. Over the years, settlement and development have gradually threatened to convert the parish’s dry land into a salt marsh. In order to keep its 2,567 square miles on the Gulf of Mexico livable, Plaquemines has come to rely on a massive array of gates, levees, and reverse-irrigation systems that are constantly being broken down and revised. These systems are undeniably resource intensive, complex, and Sisyphean, yetabandoning them is out of the question. More than three-fifths of the parish is currently underwater, and this figureis all but guaranteed to increase as sea levels rise and the Mississippi River continues to be rerouted, mostly to accommodate the delta’s ample refineries and cargo traffic. (Since 2011, NOAA has delisted more than 40place names from maps of the area, which Rich compares to “a maple leaf devoured to its veins by cankerworms.”)

For every expert who believes such technologies are a harmless waste of time, another will conclude that they are unforgivably stupid.

Any plan to protect the homes and livelihoods of local residents must also consider the effect that various rerouting schemes will have on wildlife. The results are impossible to untangle: in 2019, the local commercial oyster industry was devastated when the Army Corps of Engineers opened sections of a crucial flood-prevention mechanism that fed pulses of fresh water into Lake Pontchartrain. This simultaneously put at risk the habitats of pallid sturgeon and West Indian manatees. Virtually every stakeholder—from conservation groups to the Department of Commerce—was aggrieved enough to file a lawsuit. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” Kolbert observes. “It’s hard to say who occupies Mount Olympus these days, if anyone.”

For every ecological conundrum they consider, Kolbert and Rich predict a future in which no one is in chargeand everyone is a potential litigant. But that’s about all they can say for sure, which may explain why passages in either book can feel sleepy, meandering, or lacking in revelatory bite. DZ’s description of Zayner’s at-home GMO kit offers plenty to enjoybut not much to learn, and in Rich’s encounters with Shin Kubota—the world’s foremost expert on Turritopsis dohrnii, an “immortal” jellyfish with no fixed life span—he gives an account of the biologist’s singing career that is as touchingly long as it is pointless.

The work these authors have put into describing the scale and pace of a crisis like global warming has got to be exhausting, and it’s hard to blame them for turning to subjects that are more playful and less consequential in order to take some kind of a break. But given the ever more dire developments of the climate crisis, we can only hope their break doesn’t last too long. Talents like DZ’s and Rich’s are still precious and badly needed—including in places like Thacker Pass, where the worst violations haven’t happened yetand the hubris hasn’t fully played out.

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Is Bill Gates’s Climate-Change Book Worth Reading? /outdoor-adventure/environment/bill-gates-how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster-book-review/ Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/bill-gates-how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster-book-review/ Is Bill Gates’s Climate-Change Book Worth Reading?

The billionaire philanthropist has thrown his wealth at some of the world’s most intractable problems, drawing both praise and criticism along the way. His approach to tackling the climate crisis is no different.

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Is Bill Gates’s Climate-Change Book Worth Reading?

Atage65, Bill Gates continues to walk through life with all of the brashnessof an algebra teacher. While his peers among the ultrarich enjoy , , or , the cofounder of Microsoft has devotedhis spare time to book collecting and . With a soft voice and vigorously boringfashion sense, it’s as if he’s trying to politely underplay his immense success as a businessmanor the $36 billion he and his wife, Melinda, have donated to their , which specializes in public health, education, and poverty reduction.

Thisbrand of blandness ison prominent display in his new book. Writing with an uncommon level of calm and self-assurance when discussing the perils of a warming planet, Gates presents climate change as simply a technical problem waiting to be debugged, and finding a solution as more of a mechanical question than a human one. “I think more like an engineer than a political scientist,” he writes in the introduction. “And I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change. Instead, what I hope to do is focus the conversation on what getting to zero [emissions] requires.”

This approach provoked a range of responses when the book dropped last week, with ample exposure from ٴ . While The Wall Street Journal and “can do” spirit, theNew Statesman “typical of privileged men.” Amid all the takes, it’s been hard to parse whether his points are brilliant and original or oblivious and not worth your timebecause they come from an overconfident billionaire.

(Courtesy Penguin Random House)

What you can expect from the bookis a readable, broadlydrawn guide to global warming, its roots in human activity, and the suffering that will surely follow if ouractivities aren’t made carbon-neutral. Writing with an approachable vocabulary and level of detail, Gates introduces inventors and engineers who are developingalternatives. Conveniently, they often work for companies in which he is a direct investor, such as , a firm focused on nuclear-reactor development. Little is said about the need to change consumption habits in rich countries, or about whether people in Chad or Nicaragua should yearn for the same vision of prosperity as those rich countries; instead, Gates focuses on how all countries, rich or poor, can enjoy the same quality of life,powered by a green version of activities that would otherwise accelerate the process of global warming.

In many cases, those versions already existbut have built-in expenses—what he calls Green Premiums—that are too great for poorer countries to access. In the case of heavy manufacturing (see the chapter “How We Make Things”), a green alternative to cement can cost 140 percent more. In transportation (“How We Get Around”), the cost of advanced biofuels is 106 percent. For power generation (“How We Plug In”), Gates estimates that the added expenseof a carbon-neutral alternative to our country’s electrical system is in the range of just 15 percent. The main goal, in his opinion, is to bring the specific Green Premium down as low as possible by harnessing technology, so that the cost of a zero-emissions alternative (or one close to it)is as low or lower than one reliant on fossil fuels.

It’s telling that in the category of heating and refrigeration (“How We Keep Cool and Stay Warm”), the Green Premium is actually negative—an air-source heat pump, which works like a conventional freezer, would be 26 percent cheaper than using an air conditioner and a natural-gas-powered furnace. Unfortunately, many state and local building codes have made it more cumbersome,or even illegal, to replace their gas appliances with alternatives powered by carbon-neutral electricity, which is a point that Gates doesn’t dwell on for long. It can be frustrating to read many passages in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster that seem to avert attention from the decisive effect that government intervention can have on a given technology’s commercial success. Only towardthe end of the book does Gates acknowledge that the business of personal computers (including Microsoft’s) would have been inviable without decades of R&D support, made possible bytaxpayers through grants from the National Science Foundation. Similarly, much of the “cheapness” of oil and gas can be traced to subsidies and write-offs, borne out of tireless government lobbying, which distort the market in their favor.

These distortions are stubbornand more meaningful than Gates is ready to concede. The word “lobbying” never appears in his book, and he gives a sheepish explanation for the foundation’s own divestment from fossil fuels. (In The Nation, writer Tim Schwab thedivestment decisionmay have had less to do with outright moral principle than with the plummeting of oil and gas business.) Gates also leaves the last election cycle out of the conversation, perhaps because Microsoft donated $81,995 during that time (RAGA), an advocacy group intent on forcing approval for the Keystone XL pipeline. (The company has since withdrawn support for RAGA, citing that led to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.)

Clearly, Gates has some blind spots. He is a nonexpertwho travels frequently on private jets, and he readily calls himself an “imperfect messenger.”More importantly, he is not willing to talk frankly about the ways in which a zero-carbon future might conflict with the interests of for-profit business. Without addressing that problem, his only remaining credential is that he’s a well-meaning person who cares.

There’s nothing shameful in his being well-meaning, of course. Nor is there anything really wrong with endorsing a future based on shared progress and prosperity, in which everyone has a chance to be heard, and, in a sense, everyone wins. It just so happens that the reality is much more adversarial. Gates would do well to admit it.

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Two New Books Explore Self-Powered Travel /culture/books-media/books-self-powered-travel-bonnie-tsui-swim-torbjorn-ekelund-praise-paths/ Tue, 26 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/books-self-powered-travel-bonnie-tsui-swim-torbjorn-ekelund-praise-paths/ Two New Books Explore Self-Powered Travel

'Why We Swim' and 'In Praise of Paths' are timely inquiries into human locomotion.

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Two New Books Explore Self-Powered Travel

Two months ago, we were much less self-conscious about why we left the house.We tooka stroll through the park or a dip in the lakein order to get some fresh air,and that was the end of it; there wasn’t much reason to ask why things like swimming or walking were so worthwhile.

Writing before the COVID-19 pandemic, two authors decided to examine the role that self-powered locomotion has on our personal growth and spiritual development. Their books have turned out to be remarkably prescient. In this time of limited movement, they open up new ways to think about the time we spend in the pool or on the path.

‘Why We Swim,’ by Bonnie Tsui

(Courtesy Algonquin Books)

Tsui draws on athletic as well as reportorial grit—and more than a few good jokes—to uncover new lessons about the restorative power of swimmingin, her ode to the life aquatic.Endowedwith more wit (and stamina) than mostjournalists, Tsui adroitlyinterviews Olympic coaches, dives for Pacific abalone, and paddles the frigid San Francisco Bay with open-water titans like Kim Chambers. For Tsui, anative New Yorker whospent much of her childhood in Long Island’s swim clubs,a life without goggles and chlorine would be incomplete. “Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water,” she writes. “Swimming can enable survival in ways beyond the physical.”

‘In Praise of Paths,’ by Torbjorn Ekelund

(Courtesy Greystone Books)

For Ekelund, on the other hand, walking is the preferred mode of transport—and possiblythe only form of exercise that’s worth a damn. After an epilepsy diagnosis made driving too dangerous for him, the Norwegian writer’s feelings about moving on footbecame even more ardent, and he began exploring his attachment to bipedal travel from unique and unexpected angles. He takes a playful and energetic approach to the subject in , rethinking the social, historical, and spiritual needs that are met by putting one foot in front of the other. Ekelund consults with German Romantics, amblesthe prized footpaths of his childhood, reflects onthe transcendent song lines of nomads in the Australian outback, and explores the ragged world of thru-hiking. “All people, regardless of culture, gender, religion, or class, have had a nightmare at one point or another in which they are running but cannot seem to move,” he writes. “We can think of no harsher punishment than being fixed in place for all eternity.”

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The 5 Smart Books You Need to Read This Fall /culture/books-media/favorite-books-fall-2019/ Wed, 27 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/favorite-books-fall-2019/ The 5 Smart Books You Need to Read This Fall

Some of our favorite nonfiction authors are dropping new books that explore everything from climate disaster to unusual acts of endurance.

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The 5 Smart Books You Need to Read This Fall

This fall we were spoiled byfive of our all-time favorite authors releasing new books.They range from essay compilationsٴ memoirٴ science writing, but all boast lyrical prose that exploreswhat it means to be a human during these strange times.

If You’re Body Positive

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(Courtesy Doubleday)

The Body: A Guide for Occupants,by Bill Bryson

A huge amount of research went into , covering everything from the skin and the skeleton to aging, reproduction, and death. But Bryson has a unique ability to camouflage his hard work and depth of knowledge with a light and self-effacing voice, which fans of his Appalachian Trail classic, , will instantly recognize. He uses it to deliver an avalanche of surprising and eminently sharable facts about how our bodies—“a product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks”—are built. (Ever wondered how many species of bacteria live in your belly button? Read on.) Like your favorite teacher, Bryson is someone who loves his subject. Before he’s finished, he’ll make you love it, too.($30, Doubleday)


If You Are F–king Freaked Out by Climate Change

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(Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

We Are the Weather,by Jonathan Safran Foer

Foer begins his newest book as a climate-based argument for eliminating meat, eggs, and dairy from the American diet. But the novelist and is really too thoughtful and self-doubting to stop the conversation there. Probing the contradictions that seem built into how we talk, think, and write about global warming, he concludes that the only way we’ll actually do anything about the crisis is through a collective embrace of personal responsibility. “The ways we live our lives, the actions we take and don’t take, can feed the systemic problems,” he writes, “and they can also change them.” is not just a polemic, it’s also a vigorous and unflinching meditation on Foer’s own status as a father—and a descendant of Holocaust survivors—trying to answer for his role in a man-made disaster.($25; Farrar, Straus and Giroux)


If You Want Training Advice from Animals

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(Courtesy Knopf)

Running with Sherman,by Christopher McDougall

Not everyone would understand the impulse to rescue a donkey from a hoarder, load it with mining tools, and lead it on a trail run in the Rocky Mountains. But burro racing is a real thing, involving real competitors who travel side by side with stubborn quadrupeds over distances that range from a few miles to an ultramarathon. To the author of , now living with his family in Amish country, there was no better way for him to learn about humanity’s relationship with working animals than to train an equine named Sherman for the sport’s world championship in Fairplay, Colorado. If you can forgive the reliance on dad jokes, you’ll find a smart critique of the culture of conventional American sports. “You’ve got one hope of getting to the finish line,” McDougall writes, “and that’s to forget about dominance and ego and discover the power of sharing and caring.”($28, Knopf)


If You Feel Like a Wanderer

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(Courtesy Penguin Press)

Travel Light, Move Fast,by Alexandra Fuller

Fuller was born in England, raised in southern Africa, and resides in Wyoming. She has a gift for depicting the forces that compel people to move, and in her new memoir—written shortly after her father died in a hospital in Budapest—she reflects on how an itinerant farmer who chased zebras and drank to excess could also be a nurturing and perspicacious parent. Ultimately he helped her appreciate the value of restlessness and impermanence: although grief strikes her as “a place between countries, a holding pattern, a purgatory,” the author nevertheless emerges from it with a clearer understanding of what it means to have a home.($27, Penguin Press)


If You’re Trying to Make Sense of It All

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(Courtesy Sarah Crichton)

Erosion,by Terry Tempest Williams

Few writers can match Williams’s talent for capturing big, abstract notions of environmental justice and connecting them to the lived experiences of individuals, families, and communities. In this collection of essays, written between 2012 and 2019, the lifelong activist and educator celebrates the power of friendship and dialogue to bring about authentic change. “We tell stories that remind us we will resist,” she writes, “and insist that our communities be built upon the faith we have in each other.” Crashing oil and gas lease auctions and visiting tea ceremonies in the desert, Williams lyrically depicts global disputes over climate change and public lands through her own community of art making, collective organizing, and prayer.($27, Sarah Crichton)

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The Price Tag for Climate Change Is in the Trillions /culture/books-media/climate-change-books-2019-reviews/ Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/climate-change-books-2019-reviews/ The Price Tag for Climate Change Is in the Trillions

As three new books illustrate, anthropogenic climate change is a trillion-dollar category of market activity and has been for decades.

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The Price Tag for Climate Change Is in the Trillions

If you ask the average person in the U.S. about global warming, you’ll learn a lot about how they were raised, who they trust, and how they vote. It’s tempting to think of climate change as a cultural issue rather than, say, a fiscal one. At times the conversation can feel abstract or otherworldly, as if driven more by personal feelings or beliefs than the actual, material concerns of the present moment.

As three books released this fall illustrate, anthropogenic climate change is, in fact, already a trillion-dollar category of economic activity. This has been well-documented by writers and activists like Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, but bankers, builders, brokers, developers, oil-tank workers, Marine Corps colonels, insurers, and engineers also share in the consensus. To many in these professions, it is abundantly clear that the U.S. derived a century and a half of comfort and security from the assumption that fossil fuels did more good than harm and were available in infinite supply. It was fun. But now anyone who cherishes that comfort and security will have to adjust their plans and rethink how they work, invest, travel, or simply make a living.

In denying the reality of climate change, many commentators depict these adjustments as prohibitively expensive or a magnet for careless spending. Staying the course, however, can be even more wasteful. As Pulitzer Prize winner Gilbert Gaul observes in his probing new book ($28, Sarah Crichton), the ever more frequent hundred-year hurricanes of the past two decades have already cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. And perversely, these costs create a windfall for FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and other agencies that help towns and cities recover from floods.

While these parties aren’t inherently corrupt, their work relies on a persistent cycle of building and rebuilding along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. The government can’t help but enable this: after every major storm, politicians survey the abandoned neighborhoods and shredded boardwalks, vowing to bring beach communities back to full strength. Real estate interests nod in agreement—if a town can’t rebuild, then property values collapse—and government grants are handed out to reconstruct homes and replace the sand, with no guarantee that they’ll stay in place. A few years later, they’re washed away again, and the cycle repeats. “Instead of homeowners retreating out of harm’s way, they build back, often in the same dangerous locations,” Gaul writes. “Insurance money and federal aid fuel building booms. Speculators and developers bid up prices. Land rushes follow.”

Once federal resources are available, it can be hard to keep track of how they’re handed out. In places like Florida and Alabama, the government helps subsidize flood insurance that would be unaffordable on the open market. After Hurricane Sandy, calls to restore homes and businesses in New Jersey resulted in FEMA spending $204,000 on a hockey rink and $194,000 on a baseball field. In one case, relief money was spent on repairs for an apartment complex that was more than 50 miles from the ocean. Even the owners of second homes can qualify for public assistance, and filling out the applications, according to Gaul, has become “an industry unto itself.” And not only real estate: tourism, transportation, recreation, and hospitality all have an incentive to pretend the coasts aren’t disappearing and hit up the feds to reconstruct their beaches. Clearly, there’s a lesson about developing our coastlines to be learned from Gaul’s reporting, but it’s not one that everyone is ready to hear.

“If the Pentagon itself dreads a troubled, chaotic world like this, all the rest of us should be at least as alarmed.”

Jeremy Rifkin, a consultant and business professor at the University of Pennsylvania, paints a more cheerful picture in ($28, St. Martin’s Press). Noting trends in renewable energy in the European Union and China, where the solar industry is thriving, Rifkin foresees a world in which fossil fuels rapidly lose their competitive advantage over enterprises based on renewables. In the U.S., he sees this shift leading to a massive restructuring of the economy. He’s convinced that worker pension funds, worth $25.4 trillion, will soon pull their investments out of oil and gas, and that new technologies will make communication, logistics, construction, and agriculture more efficient, causing energy prices to fall even further. All of this, presumably, will lead to a “showdown” between solar and wind energies and the fossil-fuel industry, which Rifkin argues will take place within about ten years.

It’s a bold prediction, resting on peer-reviewed papers and plenty of straightforward arithmetic—right down to the amount the U.S. should invest in fossil-fuel-free infrastructure if it wants to stay competitive. Unfortunately, Rifkin relies on a lot of slippage between the conditional and future tense, and he doesn’t always distinguish between how he hopes things should go and what will actually happen. Somehow it’s taken as a given that Americans consistently follow their own best interests, including in the energy sector, and that no party has more influence than it should. “The thing to bear in mind is that the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization is inevitable, despite any efforts by the fossil fuel industries to forestall it,” Rifkin writes. “Market forces are far more powerful than whatever lobbying maneuvers the fossil fuel industry might entertain.”

If this optimism is justified, then we’d have to assume that oil and gas companies in 2018 on campaign contributions to U.S. senators and congressmen like Ted Cruz, Beto O’Rourke, Kevin Cramer, and John Barrasso, without expecting anything in return. I’d love to think Rifkin has assessed the fossil-fuel lobby fairly, but that is an awfully large sum to shake off—or to exclude from any discussion of “market forces,” as if lobbying were somehow separate from these companies’ plans for survival. I’ve never met a fossil-fuel lobbyist, but I assume they’re not messing around.

You know who else isn’t messing around? The Pentagon. Michael Klare, a defense correspondent for The Nation and an author of 17 books on geopolitics, has all the material he needs to write a military espionage thriller set in 2035. His newest book, ($30, Metropolitan Books), isn’t desperate to entertain, but it will fascinate anyone who wants to know how warming seas and scarce resources might affect the work of the armed forces. In one scenario, Klare describes a drought in the Middle East that causes a spike in food prices, forcing thousands of farm families to leave the countryside. In the cities, ethnic conflict intensifies into a civil war, threatening allies and catalyzing a migration crisis. At the very least, the U.S. military would have a humanitarian role to play, but perhaps relief operations are also needed at home, following a tropical storm in the Southeast, a flood in the Midwest, or a cholera outbreak in the Caribbean. The Arctic has become a busy place, too, as melting ice caps have made mineral extraction more profitable and contentious. Meanwhile, the military’s own bases must adapt to the effects of storm surges, wildfires, and unstable shorelines. All of these things are easy to imagine, of course, because . What comes next is even scarier. “If the Pentagon itself dreads a troubled, chaotic world like this—even if solely out of its own institutional concern about military ‘overstretch’—all the rest of us should be at least as alarmed,” Klare writes.

Preparing for these scenarios is expensive—but not as expensive as ignoring them. After a hurricane, it could cost $5 billion to reconstruct an Air Force base or over $300 million to replace a single F-22 Raptor aircraft. Again, these sound like figures that Jack Ryan might rattle off to the president, but they are 100 percent nonfiction. And while some military sources use opaque language or jargon to describe the costs of doing nothing, Klare finds people who lay them out quite clearly. In the best passage in the book, he describes the unfailingly polite admiral Sam Locklear, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, speaking to senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma and an outspoken opponent of climate regulation, during a meeting of the Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill. When Inhofe pushes Locklear to voice doubts about climate change and endorse the full-scale exploitation of America’s domestic energy supplies, the admiral stays silent. It’s awkward and grating to see Inhofe try and put words into the admiral’s mouth, but after several attempts, he quits and changes the subject.

The entire exchange lasts a minute or two. Maybe, if there were space in the committee’s schedule, Locklear would have made a more earnest attempt to convert a man who . But like most people, he was simply too preoccupied with his obligations here on earth. These obligations are serious and urgent and leave little time to wrestle with another adult’s concept of self-sufficiency, individual merit, or the “wise use” of natural resources. By talking the way he does about global warming, Inhofe may present himself as a shrewd and worldly operator, rather than someone whose feelings and beliefs have begun to collide, more and more, with how much things actually cost. But for the rest of us: those costs are real, and they are already immense. Frankly, Inhofe’s feelings don’t matter.

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What an Academic’s Downfall Tells Us About Food Science /health/nutrition/brian-wansink-cornell-food-science/ Fri, 19 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/brian-wansink-cornell-food-science/ What an Academic's Downfall Tells Us About Food Science

As head of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, Brian Wansink built a career portfolio out of research practices that now seem very questionable. His resignation has prompted a call for massive reforms in the profession.

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What an Academic's Downfall Tells Us About Food Science

A self-described “former bad open-mic comic,” marketing professor Brian Wansink was endowed with an expressive smile and an above-average grasp of irony. This came in handy during lectures—Wansink is best known as the director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University—and when he gave with titles like “From Mindless Eating to Mindlessly Eating Well.”

During the same time that his research won him a directorship at the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture), Wansink wrote books that seemed uniquely well suited to Americans’ unceasing demand for practical advice on how to eat. Over the years, he presented himself as a “pracademic,” whose empirically rigorous work was still easy to apply in the real world. He became a frequent guest on morning talk shows, in large part because his ideas about dieting were consistently simple, coherent, and cheerfully explained.

But last month, Wansink was forced to resign from his position at Cornellamid charges of academic misconduct. Many researchers now refer to him as a con artistand have begun poring over every article he’s ever published, looking for signs of malfeasance. Wansink, for his part, denies any deliberate wrongdoing and says he will cooperate with auniversity investigation of the Food and Brand Lab. The story is all but guaranteed to make the public less trusting of the findings of behavioral scientists, including those who write about food. While most academics now agree that Wansink’s transgressions are fairly common and should have been easy to spot, there’s little consensus on how a disaster like this could be prevented in the future.

The First Warning Signs

In November 2016, Wansink wrote a blog post that described a mentee who was having a hard time producing publishable material. Though the post was meant to motivate and inspire, commenters were put off by his suggestion that grad students engage in “deep data dives” when looking back on experiments whose results were inconclusive. Many believed that, in the interest of making research sound more impressive, he was flatly endorsing a form of “p-hacking”—a derisive term for statistical massages that make a hypothesis easier to prove. (Wansink claimed he’d been misread, and was eventually taken down.)

“It was so bland and straightforward,” one reader commented. “It seems like, in his effort to do some kind of public engagement, he accidentally outed himself as having not the slightest understanding of the research process.”

A year and a half later, a stunning report revealed e-mail exchanges in which Wansink encouraged others to reframe data sets in such a way as to make the final product “go virally [sic] big time.” The article quoted colleagues at his labwho were concerned that they were sacrificing their academic integrity in the effort to write articles about nutrition that would generateheadlines in the mainstream press. It appeared as if Wansink’s priorities at the Food and Brand Lab were being actively shaped by what could be shared on social media.

“The Sheer Extent of It”

Meanwhile, Jordan Anaya, an academic based in Baltimore, Maryland,began subjecting Wansink’s portfolio to a few homemade tests, which were designed to detect improbable data. He was alarmed by what he found: papers about portion sizes at a pizzeria buffet, or overeating from a cinema concession stand, included mean averages that made no sense. There were also multiple instances of data duplication and self-plagiarism, including one in which nearly identical papers appeared in two separate publications.

“What was surprising was the combination of extreme sloppiness and fraud-like behavior,” says Tim van der Zee, a Ph.D. student at Leiden Universityin the Netherlandswho went on to build an of Wansink’s papers that gave him andhis colleagues pause. “That, and the sheer extent of it. It was very weird and unexpected to find so many errors.”

Along with Nick Brown, a graduate student at the University of Groningen, also in the Netherlands,and James Heathers, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University, Van der Zee and Anaya worked on the dossier entirely in their spare time. The list now contains 52 Wansink articles, andas of this writing, 14 of them—including the six published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association—have been retracted. Several more have been subject to corrections or formal expressions of concern.

How Did We Get Here?

Given Wansink’s public profile, many colleagues have wonderedhow he could have shepherded so many flawed articles into publication over so many years. Some have pointed to the difficulties of getting errors corrected or retracted, which can be overwhelming.

In Wansink’s case, for original data took months to produce any kind of result. A lab that produces shoddy articles will still have multiple opportunities to drag its feet, and even when the signs of data-cooking are clear, most academic publications have an incentive to keep their corrections and retractions to a minimum, as they tend to reflect badly on the journal. Moreover, it can be hard to pin someone for it without seeming selective.

“P-hacking is actually a really serious problem, but there’s never been a single paper retracted for it,” says Anaya. “If we didn't have the media attention from BuzzFeed, Cornell probably wouldn’t have looked into this work.”

Others have pointed to flaws in the practice of peer review, which could have been swayed by Wansink’s celebrity status. “Wansink had (and I assume still has) remarkably original and entertaining ideas about food behaviorand his papers posed questions that nobody else was asking,” Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, wrotein an e-mail. “On that basis, and because not all peer reviewers pay attention to statistics (or could evaluate the data even if they did pay attention), they gave him a pass. Editors did too, for the same reasons, and because the results were so intriguing they were sure to get press attention.”

Given the amount of self-motivation it took to uncover Wansink’s missteps, some have called for major reforms in the entire process of academic publication. In , the cancer researcher Keith Baggerly suggested that institutions like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services dedicate one or two percent of their funding to grants that paid well-meaning outsiders to investigate papers in which they’d found something amiss.

This would give a greater incentive to people like James Heathers—who described a “” of support for his sleuthing—to follow up on research that didn’t look right. Ultimately, it would help ensure fewer research dollars were misspent on faulty theories that affect how people take care of their health.

Nick Brown, thegraduate student who collaborated on Van der Zee’s dossier of Wansink, generally agrees. “Sometimesit feels like you’re doing meaningless nitpicking,” he said. “But then you find lots of articles that are full of elementary errors. People clearly don’t spend enough time reading and critiquing. It’s embarrassing. This is science. We’re meant to get this kind of stuff right.”

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Finally, Congress Makes Progress on Fighting Wildfires /outdoor-adventure/environment/wildfire-funding-congress/ Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/wildfire-funding-congress/ Finally, Congress Makes Progress on Fighting Wildfires

Measures in the new spending bill should help the Forest Service manage fires, but there's still more to be done to prevent future catastrophic blazes

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Finally, Congress Makes Progress on Fighting Wildfires

On Friday, Congress passed a $1.3-trillion spending measure to keep the federal government open through September, and it includes some major changes to how we fight, and pay to fight, wildfires. It’s about time.

In 2017, the government spent more than on fire suppression through the Forest Service alone. The National Interagency Fire Center, the country’s wildfire planning headquarters, is predicting , if not worse. And with average wildfire size expected to grow six times larger by 2039, these blazes will get a lot more expensive. Here’s how the spending bill will help those efforts, as well as a couple ideas from experts on the next steps we need to take.

No More Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

Since the Forest Fires Emergency Act of 1908, the Department of the Interior has been able to spend as much as it needs to fight fires during emergencies. That’sbeen helpful when the costs of wildfire season surpass the DOI’s $1.4-billion yearly fire-suppression allowance, but it’s meant dipping into Forest Service funds that should be spent on other important functions—such as maintaining trails, research, even forest-fire prevention.

“It’s a problem that’s causing a lot of people grief,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, a group that advocates for smarter approaches to wildfire management. “If you’ve got a research project all set, or a recreation project for building trails, and all your funding is taken away at the last minute to pay for firefighting, that’s massively disruptive.”

The major fix inside the new bill allows the Forest Service , which are common for other huge destructive forces like hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, instead of using up the agency'sown money. The billalso raises thefire suppression piggy bankٴ $2.25 billion starting in 2020, with $100-million increases each year so that itreaches$2.95 billion by 2027.

So What Else Needs to Be Done?

An ounce of prevention

With the summer still a long way off, it seems hard to justify the unglamorous Forest Service work that keeps forests healthy and prevents minor fires from expanding into catastrophes. But prevention and the funds to support it are exactly what we should be focusing on. “The Forest Service is bipolar on fire,” says Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist at the Geos Institute, a group of researchers studing howthe country should prepare forclimate change. “When fires aren’t burning, they talk about managing it for ecosystem benefits, and during the season, they’re throwing everything at it.”

Though wildfire prevention is a hard sell this time of year, public attitudes tend to shift rapidly in the next six months, when images of smoke and flames are broadcast over TV and Instagram. By August, authorities are often compelled to use expensive resources like air tankers and helicopters to show the public they’re on top of things.

“Americans are big hearted,” says Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a non-partisan budget watchdog based in Washington, D.C. “We see a disaster, and we want to assist. We want the government to assist. But that means we can’t afford to be softheaded in anticipation of that. You want to see the right priorities from the start, and to be sure that it’s not so rigid or static that the Forest Service can’t still meet their needs as smaller changes develop.”

Ellis and DellaSala hope to see new policies that would encourage the Forest Service to dedicate more resources to off-season mitigation.They’d also like to see the Forest Service take a fire’s size, momentum, and proximity to human structures into account more often when deciding what to do about it. This would meanallowing smaller or more remote fires to burn, or steering them toward places that could benefit from them. Low-intensity fires are part of a forest’s natural cycle and are essential to enriching the soil with nutrients, reducing competition between larger trees, providing necessary heat for seeds to germinate, and allowing smaller plants better access to sunlight.

Stop building homes in the woods

Congress could save taxpayers a fortune in the long runif it passed laws aimed at reducing development along the wildland urban interface, encouraging local and state zoning codes that reduce the damage wildfires can do.The government could also offer more incentive to get people to take precautions.According to , as many as 90 percent of residential structures survived a wildfire if they maintained at least ten yards of fuel-free area around the home. Rewarding local governments that encourage fire-smart living—for example, by offering property tax rebates to homeowners who maintain a fuel-free zone—could off-setmillions in future costs.

Listen to Smokey

Humans accounted for nearly 90 percent of all wildfires from 1992 to 2017, according to from the National Academy of Sciences. As our cities and towns push into wilderness, and as we escape to public lands to get out of our cities, it’s essential we take our role in fires more seriously.

Smokey the Bear had it about right: fighting fires is on all of us.

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Don’t Fall for the Resilient Federal Forests Act /culture/opinion/resilient-federal-forests/ Tue, 19 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/resilient-federal-forests/ Don’t Fall for the Resilient Federal Forests Act

The Resilient Federal Forest Fires Act is based on the idea that unnecessary regulations and lawsuits have kept the Forest Service from doing its job—including the tree thinning that can prevent major wildfires from getting out of hand.

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Don’t Fall for the Resilient Federal Forests Act

If your house is engulfed in flames, you may have a pesky environmental group to blame.

This is the argument made by supporters of the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017, introduced by Republican Representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas.Thebill passed the House , andisnow waiting to be discussed by theSenateCommittee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.

With each fire this past summer and fall, the bill’s supporters renewed their calls for something to be done to end the devastation, and this bill has an interesting answer to why wildfires have become so large and so deadly in recent years.Essentially, itblames the problemon the conservationistswho sue to keep loggers out of forests. As a remedy, the bill aims to scale back public input, reduce wildlife habitat protections, andweaken environmental standards. If passed, a timbercompany could loganarea up to 30,000 acres (twice)with barely any environmentalreview.

There’s no doubt that the country’s system for managing fires is inadequate. Forest fires are to fight today as they were 20 years ago,and in many parts of the country, fire season could soon last . In regions affected by pests or disease, selective logging cando a great deal to stop those ailments from spreading. When old or dying trees are taken out of the picture, competition for sunlight and other resources is less intense, giving younger shoots and smaller flora an opportunity to grow. But when this fuel is allowed to accumulate and crowd, it can turn what would have been a small fire into the type of untamable disastersCalifornia has experienced.

“We saw millions of acres go up in smoke this year, dozens of lives lost, and thousands of homes destroyed, because of unmanaged, unhealthy forest,” says David Saylor, a spokesperson for Westerman.“And that has to change. This isn’t about logging. This is about maintaining a healthy forest.”

The question is, what defines smart tree harvesting, and how is it best regulated?Westerman is a former forester, and he nowreceives more campaign contributions from the timber and paper industries than any member of Congress save house speaker Paul Ryan. His bill would do away with many of the environmentregulations a logging company must satisfy before a sale takes place. Itseems to say that the best approach to tree harvesting is to allow logging companies unfettered accessand focuses almost exclusively on regulations, ignoring problems like lack of funding, a recent surge of pine beetles in the West, climate change, or the slightly nutty and hubristic tendency to treat every wildfire as an innate catastrophe that must be controlled and contained.

“Thousands of lawsuits have been filed by these groups to prevent the Forest Service from pursuing routine thinning and restoration projects,” wrote Utah representative Rob Bishop, a co-sponsor of the bill,in an op-ed for . “As more and more time and money are consumed by regulatory analysis and court battles, scarce agency resources are expended and fewer acres of high-risk forest lands are treated.”

Bishop may have a point, if an overstated one.Of the 1,100 land-management lawsuits brought against the Forest Service between 1989 to 2008, the majority were brought on environmental grounds. The Forest Service is also to foot the legal bill. That cost, however, takes up a tiny sliver of the Forest Service’s overall budget—less than one-tenth of one percent. U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said as much at an April 2013 hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The fees, he testified,“did not have an appreciable effect on program funding.”

Both Bishop and Westermanare critics of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requiresthe governmentٴ conduct impact studies before developing or extracting resources on federal land. Bishop one of the “greatest burdens” to industry, and accused environmental groups of abusing the act with “an unholy combination of activist litigation designed to manipulate policy.” Among other things, Westerman’s bill would drastically scale back NEPA’sprotections, allowing companies to log in forests without first reviewing the impacts on water quality, the habitat, or wildlife. Itwould allow the Forest Service to bypass consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when an animal protected by the Endangered Species Act is impacted by logging. If a company did damagethe environment, Westerman’sbill would bar people from suing or otherwise holding the government accountable.

TheResilient Federal Forests Actseems to focus almost entirely on addressing complaints from the logging industry—and not onthe problem of worseningwildfires. Arizona RepresentativeRaul Grijalva, theranking Democrat for the House Natural Resources Committee, hascriticized the bill as “not about forest health. It’s about increasing the numbers of trees removed from the forest.”

The crazy thing is, the loggingindustry doesn’t always seem all thateager togain access to Forest Service land, even in some of the most valuable old-growth forests. Jim Furnish, a former deputy chief of the Forest Service, says theBig Thornetimberauction in Tongass National Forest is a prime example. In2014,the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, the Alaska Wilderness League, and the Sierra Club filed a joint suit against the Forest Serviceٴ stop the deal, saying the Forest Service had underestimated the impact on the local wolf population, and overestimated the industry’s appetite. The Forest Service estimated the 150 million board feet of timber up for auctionwould fetch $2.6 million. But building logging roads, conducting surveys, and all the other things that go into prepping a forest to be cut. In all of Tongass, the Forest Service reported a $108.7 million loss on timber contracts from 2008 to 2012. the suit, and last Maythe deal went through—albeitat a much smaller volume than expected. Citing “market forces,” the ranger’s office reported a sale of only 97.7 million board feet.

“If nobody buys them, nobody buys them,”Furnish says ofhuge amount of timber leases that gounsold each year.

There’s one benefit Furnish can point to in theResilient Federal Forests Act: it would allow the Forest Service to more easily tapfederal emergencyfunds during fire season.But on the whole, he says, the bill is “totally unnecessary.” In factalot of the bureaucracy that slowed thinning and forest management has already been addressed bythe 2014 Farm Bill, which made it easier for the Forest Service to authorize local projects and expedited approval for thinning diseased, insect-infested,or fire-damaged forests.

So why didWesterman introduce the bill?

It’s hard to understandhow bypassingthe environmental review process before a harvest—or reducingthe public comment period—will help this country fight fires. As written, the bill seems much less focused on the efficiency of fighting fires than it is on the efficiency of logging. It won’t generate morecash to fight fires, but it will be a great help to anyone trying to log forests with as little interference as possible. And if that’s the bill'sgoal, then wildfires provide a compelling, urgent, anddramatic excuse.

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This Olympic Wrestler Is a Dirtbag at Heart /outdoor-adventure/climbing/olympic-wrestler-dirtbag-heart/ Wed, 17 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/olympic-wrestler-dirtbag-heart/ This Olympic Wrestler Is a Dirtbag at Heart

Dan Dennis spent six months rock climbing in Moab and around the West before deciding to start training for the Olympic freestyle wrestling team. Now he's at Rio in what may be his only shot at Olympic greatness.

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This Olympic Wrestler Is a Dirtbag at Heart

There’s a good chance thatafter the Olympics end, freestyle wrestler Dan Dennis will head home from Rio and spend some time climbing the red cliffs around Moab, Utah. Three years ago, his college wrestling career complete, Moab was where Dennis gathered himself and ultimately decided to return to competitionfollowing a six-month hiatus from the sport. On Friday, he’llwrestle againstVladimir Dubov of Bulgaria in the round of 16, and his prospects are looking bright.

“I’m feeling good,like I can beat anybody,”Dennis . “I’m ready now to wrestle anybody, absolutely anybody, in the world.”

Dennis, who is 29 and grew up in Illinois, secured a spot on the U.S. Olympic Team this past April, after coming to the trials as an underdog. Even for a wrestler, he is uncommonly rugged-looking.Standing fivefootfiveinches tall and rangy, with the build of a bantam Tarzan, Dennis has grown a beard since graduating in 2010 from the University of Iowa, where he was a two-time All-American. He often wears a pair of wraparound sunglasses on his forehead, giving him the appearanceofa bike mechanic or climbing guide on his day off. The outdoors are part of Dennis’identity, and might offer a few clues as to how he managed to revive a career that once seemed close to finished.

“Just because he’s out climbing rocks in California doesn’t mean he’s away from the sport,” says Terry Brands, Dennis’coach at the University of Iowa. “But it takes some time. You step away so that your body and mind can catch up with each other. From an elite-level mentality, sometimes the best have to go through that.”

“Just because he’s out climbing rocks in California doesn’t mean he’s away from the sport.”

Some fans lose their composure when describing Dennis’final college matchat the 2010 NCAA Championships in Omaha. Wrestling against Jayson Ness of Minnesota, who had beaten him in the regular season, Dennis all but somersaulted his way out of a takedown in the first periodand maintained a 4-2 lead going into the end of the match. But with fewerthan 15 seconds to go, Ness moved from an unfinished leg attack to a bear hug, not only scoring a takedown (two points)but also putting Dennis on his back (two more points) for the win. Wild cheers from the stands were audible on ESPN, where Dennis could be seen planting his head in his palms before getting up to shake hands with Ness, who then leapedinto the stands to embrace his familywhile Dennis and his coaches shuffled out of sight.

“In my mind, I was done with competition,” Dennis says of the days that followed the tournament, much of which is now a blur. “I knew that as much as anybody ever could know.”

Dennis graduated that spring. Over the next two years, he did odd jobs for a friend’s hunting outfit in Wyoming, coached at summer wrestling camps, and worked at a gas station and for a roofing company. Eventually, he landed an assistant coaching gig at a high school in Windsor, California. In all this time, climbing remained a part of his life. Although gripping and sliding up a rock wall called on a physical wiliness and adaptability that was natural to Dennis as a wrestler, there was nobodyٴ struggle with or outmaneuver. The solitudeand the lack of mutual spectatorshipheld a lot of the charm.

“Sometimes I might catch myself at the gymseeing a good climberand trying to outdo him,” Dennis says. “I have to remind myself to not do that. I don’t want climbing to be competitive. I’m competitive enough already.”

After fixing the brakes on a 1986 Ford F-150, noting that the front seat was just big enough to sleep in, Dennis spent six months of 2013 riding bikes and climbing rocks in Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. His brother turned him on to desert towers in Utah. Dennis eventually tried out Indian Creek and Castleton Tower, working his grip on the slick spots of calcite that run along the four-pitch Kor-Ingalls route. During the three years after school, Dennis competed in a few regional and international wrestling tournaments and did well.Coaches and friends badgered him to return to Iowa City to train for the World and Olympic teams. But he wasn’t sure.

One day, Dennis received a voicemail on his cellphone from Terry Brands’brother, Tom, a world champion, Olympic gold medalist, and Iowa’s current head coach. At the time, Dennis had been out of range, climbing near Indian Creek, Utah.When Denniscalled back, Tom told him about rule changes passed by United World Wrestling, the sport’s governing body. Brands believed the new rules—which included faster penalties for stallingand longer periods that would compel wrestlers to score more—offered an advantage to Dennis, whose wins were built on dogged risk-taking and aggression. His advice, as Dennis now tells reporters, was this: “Go climbing, get that bug out of you, and wrestle again.”

“I was never really, completely out of the sport,” Dennis , describing how he continued to keep eye on his competition. “You’re going to consciously or subconsciously compare yourself to them, and there were guys that were having success that I felt like I could beat.”

In May 2015, having moved back to Iowa City to train, Dennis traveled to Las Vegas for the ASICS U.S. Senior Nationals, his first major tournament in years. Though Dennis showed all the natural confidence of a man who’d never left, after a match, while he plodded around behind an arena curtain, his arched brows and furry face made him look unassuming, almost timid. He placed fourth in the tournamentbut came back to win the following year, putting on an increasingly dazzling display of athleticism and strength at April’s U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Iowa City. Following a victory in a best-of-three series against former Iowa teammate Tony Ramos, an NCAA champion and two-time world team member, Dennis shocked Olympic fans by beating Ramos 10-0, repeatedly scoring points by exposing Ramos’back to the mat.

Since he won the Olympic trials in Iowa City, news articles have shown Dennis riding his motorcycle in the dirt and popping a wheelie. Many reporters have seized on the image of a Harley-riding, rock-climbing wrestler who found a second home in Utah.Friends and family have done little to deny that these pastimes have been the secret to Dennis’success, or that this was all part of a comeback story that would sound saccharine if it weren’t mostly true.

“It just so happens that he uses rock climbingor doing circus tricks on motorcyclesٴ quiet and calm his spirit and his mind,” coach Terry Brands says. “His was a very calculated and resourceful way of coming back to the sport, and he did a brilliant job of it, even though we knew he was coming back. We knew that all along. He had too much left in him.”

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Paddle Like a Fur Trader in Voyageurs /adventure-travel/destinations/north-america/paddle-fur-trader-voyageurs/ Sun, 05 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000 /uncategorized/paddle-fur-trader-voyageurs/ Paddle Like a Fur Trader in Voyageurs

Get lost, in a good way

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Paddle Like a Fur Trader in Voyageurs

I first heard the expression “badass” in 1998, when I was on a trip with Camp Thunderbird for Boys in . A counselor named Twain had seen a kid my age arrive at our campsite with a bear hug full of dry firewood and congratulated him on emulating the French fur traders who’d given the park its name. In the 18th century, the traders traveled these lakes in northern Minnesota in birch-bark canoes, exploring a territory that, at the time, probably felt endless. As a kid, I looked up to them much more than I did Davy Crockett or Lewis and Clark. Despite being almost too scrawny to carry a canoe on my shoulders, I hoped that somehow the bigness and the wildness of the park would rub off on me.

National Parks Centennial

100 reasons to love the parks (and a few things we’d improve)

When I returned to Voyageurs last fall, I still felt that way. With the advice of a park ranger and Eric Johnson, the outfitter who supplied my canoe, my plan was to portage out of Rainy Lake and spend two nights paddling ten or fifteen miles a day between campsites, through the less visited, more sheltered waters of Kabetogama Lake. The drop-off point was so camouflaged by foliage along the waterfront, however, that I ended up missing it. This was only slightly disappointing; while my goal had been to be as solitary as possible, even in the “busier” part of the park I saw very few other boats—five over three days.

People sometimes talk about how small everything seems when they return to their elementary school or the house they grew up in. But as an adult, Voyageurs seemed, if anything, bigger and emptier. At 218,000 acres, it is larger than Zion and Acadia National Parks combined, but has less than one-twentieth the number of annual visitors. A result of this is that distances are surprisingly hard to read. On the second day, I selected one of the hundreds of rock islands in the distance for a solitary lunch, thinking it would take 20 minutes to reach. It was more than an hour. In the afternoon, paddling from cove to cove along Kabetogama’s Black Bay, I tried cutting through the waves at an angle, the way I’d been taught, but the wind repeatedly pushed me into the reeds. The entire three days went like this. I got lost, but in a good way.

On my last night, I built a fire at my campsite. After wandering a quarter-mile or so away from my tent, I picked up only as many dead tree branches as I thought I would need, taking care not to trample the blueberry bushes or brittle gray moss. I admired the pile of wood shavings and twigs, and after a few moments the tinder sticks started to crackle. I poured boiling water into a bag of dehydrated macaroni and cheese and decided Twain would’ve been pleased.

Access + Resources

When: Early May to mid-October.

How: The park is about two hours by car from Bemidji and Duluth.

Play: offers canoe rentals ($30) and guided trips (from $50).

Stay: The in International Falls is 35 minutes from the park (from $125). Apply for campsites at the Rainy Lake Visitor Center or .

Eat: In International Falls, Sandy’s Place opens at 7 a.m. and serves walleye all day. Stock up on supplies at Stewart’s Super One.

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