Too early on a Saturday, high in the hills of Appalachia, Ben Kable and I creep along a mountain road in his SUV, eyeing the passing evergreens like burglars casing a neighborhood. Kable eases to a stop beside a stand of stubby conifers, their roots gripping the roadside gravel like mossy fingers. “This looks like a good spot,” he says. “Let’s take a quick peek.”

We stop the car, and Kable opens the back to free his Rottweiler, Daisy. He makes a clicking sound with his mouth. “Go get ’em, Daisy.” She charges into the trees, giving the base of each trunk a cursory sniff.

Kable keeps one eye on his dog while he pulls a pH meter from a pouch, sinks the long metal stick into the ground, and consults the display. “It’s 7.5. Pretty good.”

A 7.5 pH means the soil is “sweet,” full of calcium and phosphorus from the limestone used to build the road. That’s what we’re looking for, because our quarry lives underground and eats these chemical elements for breakfast.

The Appalachian truffle, Tuber canaliculatum, is a one-ounce ball of delight that could be the next culinary star, yet it’s virtually unknown. I’m here to figure out why. For years I’ve been chasing truffle hunters across half a dozen European countries as I research a book. The prize—extraordinarily pungent orbs of fungus that grow tethered to tree roots, with which they share nutrients—are a billion-dollar business there, where diners pay upward of $6,000 per pound. Every year, tens of thousands of hunters scour the forests, using trained dogs to sniff truffles out underground. The continent’s famous white variety grows almost exclusively in the wild forests of Italy and Eastern Europe, and the great black strain flourishes on farms in Spain and France. North America has always been left out of the smelly fun. I had assumed this was because there are no comparable truffles to be found here.

Then, three years ago, I learned about T. can, as its handful of aficionados call it. The truffle has been found in Michigan and Massachusetts, but the Appalachians seemed to be a hot spot. There were rumors that it was delicious, but all the reports seemed to be thirdhand. I was intrigued but skeptical.

After much searching, I finally managed to get my hands on a T. can sample during a visit to QuĂ©bec two years ago, and I was skeptical no more. It smelled like a hazelnut torte that had taken a tumble in the moss with a wood nymph. It was the prettiest piece of fungus I’d ever seen, wrapped in a jewel-like burgundy coat. As I shaved it over linguine, waves of cocoa, clove cigarettes, and sweaty spice billowed up, as seductive as anything I’d encountered in Europe. I thought: Has one of the world’s greatest wild ingredients been sitting in our backyard all along, waiting for someone to notice?

Insane, but not improbable. You »ćŽÇČÔ’t just stumble across a truffle. You can walk right over one without knowing it’s there. You need a dog. And not just any dog—preferably a Lagotto Romagnolo, a poodlesque hunting machine of Italian heritage, bred for centuries for no other purpose.

Daisy isn’t that, but she is one of a very few specially trained dogs in the country, and one of only a small number of them to ever find an Appalachian truffle, which is why I’m tingling with anticipation as Kable packs up the pH meter and we follow her into the Christmas-scented woods.

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Mycologist Charles Lefevre was always taught that Oregon truffles were no good. As a PhD student in mycology at Oregon State University (OSU)Ìęin the late 1990s, he put himself through school by foraging wild mushrooms and selling them to local restaurants, but he never messed with truffles, which were considered more of a novelty than a coveted ingredient. The few he encountered on menus were either bland or rotten.

At that time, the native truffles had several factors working against them. First, there were no truffle dogs in the Pacific Northwest. Harvesters used rakes, sieving the soil around Douglas fir trees and pulling up every truffle in the stand regardless of size or ripeness.

Second, Oregon truffles »ćŽÇČÔ’t start to ripen until mid-January, but what little demand there was for native truffles tended to be around the holidays, the traditional time to enjoy European truffles. The result was that the truffles that came to market had all the allure of unripe peaches.

Third, Oregon truffles have a very short shelf life, so the ones that weren’t underwhelming people with their woodenness were often terrifying them with their unholy excrescences.

The fourth factor was a consequence of the other three. The unloved truffles sold for about $25 per pound. At that rate, there was no incentive for better handling, or more attentive harvesting, or even for learning about the truffles. Consumers and chefs just steered clear, believing the only good truffles came from Europe.

Charles, however, was fascinated by all truffles. He knew the French and Spanish had been successfully cultivating black winters for decades, but that pioneers had struggled to do so in North America. While still in grad school, he invented new ways to inoculate tree seedlings with black winter spores, and launched in 2000, seeding America’s new wave of truffle love.

But native truffles? Charles didn’t take them seriously until he began foraging for his own, also while in grad school. “Every year I wanted to find something bigger and better than what I’d found before,” he says as we chased after his two dogs, Lagotto Romagnolos named Dante and Mocha, in a forest in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. “You know, I’d found chanterelles, but then I wanted to find porcinis! Eventually I reached a point where I’d found everything except truffles. All the expert mycologists were at OSU, so I asked them.”

His professors told him to look in dense stands of old Douglas fir, which was wrong. “Unbelievably, even at OSU, nobody knew what good truffle habitat was! The commercial harvesters knew, but they weren’t talking.”

After one typical day of failure, Charles pulled his car over to the side of the road to take a leak. He stepped into a stand of young Douglas fir, planted on what had been pastureland just 15 years before. Bladder relieved, he decided to poke around just for the heck of it. “And there were truffles!”

They were Oregon whites. Over time, Charles figured out where they lived. “It’s a very specific type of habitat,” he says. “Pastureland planted with Doug fir, near existing Doug fir. That series of events only takes place on private land, typically on smaller parcels. It’s nearly always in somebody’s backyard.”

In other words, Oregon truffles aren’t just in symbiosis with trees. They’re in symbiosis with us, too. Edge species, they work with seedlings to colonize new areas, and the modern Pacific Northwest gave them a bonanza.

Charles believes the current abundance of truffles in Oregon and Washington is a result of grazing becoming less profitable in recent decades. Landowners planted their pastures in Douglas fir in hopes that Christmas trees would save them. Those open, airy, 15-year-old stands are truffle factories, the Pacific Northwest version of France’s 19th-centuryÌętruffle boom.

By the early 2000s, through his work with New World Truffieres, Charles had experienced truffles all over the world. At the same time, he was foraging native truffles for fun. And one day, he had a revelation. “I had these Oregon truffles that I’d harvested recreationally in my refrigerator,” he says. “And even though all the experts out there suggested that they were nothing but poor, inexpensive substitutes for the real thing, every time I opened the refrigerator, this powerful blast of truffle came out. So it seemed like they were being overlooked. And it seemed like there was an opportunity to redeem this species.”

Charles suspected raking had put the native truffles in the doghouse. He’d seen dogs in action in Europe, and knew they followed their noses to ripe truffles. Obviously, rakers couldn’t do that, and wouldn’t bother, anyway—as a general rule, the people raking truffles in the spooky forests of the Pacific Northwest have quick cash on their minds, not culinary excellence. Only dogs could redeem Oregon’s truffles.

But how do you jump-start a culture of truffle dogs where they’ve never existed? Well, for one thing, you need to significantly raise the price of truffles, and the only way to do that is to convince chefs and foodies that these things are special.

With that realization, the Oregon Truffle Festival (OTF) was born. It would be in late January, when the native truffles are at their peak. It would feature rigorous quality control and top-notch culinary creativity.

And it would be dog-centric.

Not only would that improve the quality of the truffles, it would also be good for the forests. Raking disturbs the soil. In a wilderness area, it can be profoundly destructive. “In an older forest, where the soil biome has developed over decades or centuries, there’s so much interdependency,” Charles says. “Once that’s disturbed, the biome dies off, and the recovery process can take decades.”

Fortunately, most truffles aren’t found in those areas. “These stands of trees that are producing truffles are very young, simple systems,” Charles says. “They’re not wilderness. So the act of raking isn’t necessarily any more destructive than what was happening when it was a pasture. I just think there’s a better way to do it. When you use a dog, you get better truffles. The aesthetics are better, the prices are better, and it’s less work. Besides, working with a dog in the forest is part of the mystique. There’s just no reason not to use a dog.”

The first festival, in 2006, was a simple affair, but it has grown into a four-day blowout. It kicks off on Thursday with the Joriad North American Truffle Dog Championship, in which amateur pooches from far and wide compete to sniff out the most truffles. The first few years of competition were dominated by Lagotto Romagnolos and other scent-work specialists, but in 2018, Gustave the Chihuahua crashed the field, captivated the crowd, and turned the Joriad into a national sensation, reminding everyone that America is the land of opportunity.

The Joriad ends with a Parade of Dogs, an awards ceremony, and a truffle dinner. The rest of the weekend includes a grower’s forum for pros and wannabes, a two-day dog-training workshop, and an evening Mercato del Tartufo, where local restaurants show off outrĂ© concoctions that would never grace a proper European table, like truffle cream puffs, truffle ice cream, truffle pizza, and truffle cocktails. There’s a legit wild-truffle hunt and a tour of a local truffiere (land used to cultivate truffles). And then the whole thing culminates with the Grand Truffle Dinner: 300Ìępeople, six playful courses, no holds barred.

What I notice after a couple of days at the OTFÌęis the pioneering spirit, the sense of discovery and egalitarianism. With no weight of tradition, anything goes, and anyone can be a part of it. It’s grassroots, it’s goofy, and no one’s really doing it for the money. They’re doing it for the dogs.

This canine corps has transformed the reputation of Northwest truffles, and chefs have noticed. Prices for dog-harvested truffles have risen to several hundred dollars per pound, and Oregon truffles are becoming a highlight of the terroir.

A win for local gastronomy, says Charles, and for the forest economy. An acre of Douglas fir can produce thousands of dollars’ worth of truffles every year, which means the trees are worth more alive than cut. Leaving the trees standing is hugely beneficial for wildlife, for carbon sequestration, and for protecting stream banks where salmon spawn, many of which have been degraded by cattle. “Those trees end up producing more value than the cows ever did!” says Charles. There are even B&Bs beginning to market themselves and their forested backyards as truffling destinations. It’s all part of a remarkable awakening, a discovery of goodness that was hiding in plain sight.

Excerpted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing from Truffle Hound by Rowan Jacobsen, copyright Rowan Jacobsen 2021

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The year 2020 has not been good to many things, but it has been very, very good to the tuna melt. As the world got weird and we sheltered at home, many of us hankered for the familiar, the stable, the uncool. And there was the tuna melt waiting for us, as uncool as ever.

References to the sandwich spiked on Reddit. New recipes (more or less indistin­guishable from the old recipes) flowed onto the internet.

I, too, felt the allure. So, during the height of the pandemic, breaking away from the monotony of the keyboard, I made myself a lunch of soaring satisfaction: crispy bread and creamy tuna under a warm security blanket of cheese. What made it especially gratifying, however, was that it was the first tuna melt of my life that involved no fish at all. It was made with a new plant-based faux tuna called , and while I can’t exactly say it changed my life, it definitely changed my lunch.

I swore off canned tuna last year, after reading , Ian Urbina’s wrenching account of human-rights abuses in the global fishing industry. For years, my list of morally acceptable seafoods had been narrowing as I learned about the environmental impacts of industrial fishing. Bluefin tuna, of course, went out the window long ago. Then it was Chilean sea bass, swordfish, and farmed salmon. Cod, gone. Shrimp, toast. But I clung to canned tuna, in part because of the convenience. A highly functional shot of protein, shelf-stable and cheap, it seemed morally defensible as long as it sported the logos certifying that it was dolphin-safe and sustainably fished.

But that changed when I plunged into Urbina’s book, the result of more than three years reporting on high-seas crime across 12,000 nautical miles, all five oceans, and 20 smaller seas. He shipped out on roach-infested, barely seaworthy trawlers, chased pirates and poachers, got caught in border wars, and uncovered a grainy cell-phone video of casual assassinations at sea. After all that, Urbina asked, did we really think “that it is possible to fish sustainably, legally, and using workers with contracts, making a livable wage, and still deliver a five-ounce can of skipjack tuna for $2.50 that ends up on the grocery shelf only days after the fish was pulled from the water thousands of miles away”?

Spoiler alert: it’s not. The average can of tuna drags behind it a tangled net of wrecked ecosystems, definned sharks, debt bondage, child labor, human trafficking, physical abuse, and murder. By the time I finished The Outlaw Ocean, I couldn’t open a can of tuna without imagining a trickle of human blood oozing out. And it’s not just tuna. Swordfish, snapper, mahi mahi, mackerel, sardines, squid, and anchovies are all tainted by slavery. So are farmed salmon, farmed shrimp, and cat food, which relies on meal made out of small fish caught in fisheries rife with human suffering.

Many fishing boats are crewed by migrants from poor countries who are desperate for work. The boats can spend years at sea, periodically off-loading their catch to refrigerated mother ships and taking on fresh supplies. Oversight is almost nonexistent. Men are brutal hours in filthy conditions. Beatings are common. So are deaths.

A typical experience is that of Lang Long, a poor Cambodian man Urbina met in Thailand. Long was smuggled to the Thai coast by a trafficker who promised to get him a construction job, but the job never materialized. Instead, Long was sold to a fishing captain for $530, to cover his trafficking debt. Once on the boat, he didn’t see land again for three years.

During that time, Long was beaten regularly, forced to work up to 23 hours a day, and given insufficent food and water. After trying to escape, he was shackled by the neck and chained to the deck whenever his boat approached another ship.

But Long was relatively lucky. He survived, and was returned to land after a Catholic charity paid the boat’s captain $750 for his freedom. Other sea slaves have described sick deckhands being thrown overboard and intransigent ones being locked in the hold, whipped, or beheaded.

All this happens on the untraceable high seas. By the time a tender comes into port, it can carry a vast mix of legally and illegally caught fish. And that’s how a can of tuna gets to your grocery shelf for $2.50.

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Three miles off the coast of Dominica, on a flat blue Caribbean sea, Pernell Francis lowers a hydrophone into the water and slides a pair of headphones over his ears. Captain Jerry kills the engines on the Southern Cross, his sportfishing boat, and the other two people on board, the marine scientist and her mother, Stacy, get superstitiously quiet.

It’s eight o’clock in the morning on November 21, and we’re listening for the sounds of the world’s brainiest and most charismatic mega­fauna.

Dominica is one of the best places in the world to interact with sperm whales, and each year the government grants a handful of permits that allow scientists and photographers to get in the water with them. Gaelin’s permit is for Visual Assessment of Potential Stressors on Physeter macrocephalus. Her goal is to produce a photographic record of Dominica’s whales, looking for signs of injury incurred from things like ships and fishing gear. She’s also hoping to make a film about our species’ complicated relationship with sperm whales. Pernell, a local Dominican who’s been called the whale whisperer for his uncanny ability to find them, is our guide.

Sperm whales communicate across miles of ocean using a complex language of sonic clicks. By listening to the hydrophone, Pernell can tell if they are near or far, diving or surfacing, feeding or cruising. He rotates the pole, pointing the device in every direction, face tight with concentration.

Behind Pernell, Dominica looms. A precipitative pile of rainforest, with countless waterfalls cascading down its 4,000-foot flanks, it has almost no natural harbors, very little nautical traffic, and deep underwater canyons teeming with large squid. It’s an ideal place for sperm whales.

But they »ćŽÇČÔ’t always show. Just ask Gaelin, who is standing beside me with crossed fingers and is whispering whales, whales, whales. At more than $3,000 a day for the boat, guide, and other appurtenances, the project is a major gamble. To raise the full funding for the film, she needs some killer footage, and for that she needs whales. In 2018, she secured a permit, hired Pernell, and got skunked—five days on the water, a whole lot of silence in the hydrophones. The island’s parting gift was a flash flood at the airport that nearly swept Gaelin, Stacy, and their camera cases out to sea. Now she’s back for one more try.

But as Pernell pulls off his headphones, the early verdict is not encouraging. “It’s quiet,” he says. “Nothing within three miles. We gotta keep going.”

I feel Gaelin deflate a little. Trained in coastal environmental management, she now describes herself as both a scientist and a storyteller. She tagged Atlantic bluefin tuna in graduate school, but after watching her research subjects slide toward extinction, with the population declining some between 1957 and 2007, she shifted to advocacy. In 2008, she founded , which organizes research expeditions and documents the work of scientists through photography and video. More than a decade later, she has partnered with scientists in the Arctic, Antarctic, and many places in between. “It’s about bringing back stories of expeditions that people can relate to,” she says, “as opposed to just writing scientific papers.” Recent trips have taken her to Palau, to make a short about climate-resilient corals, and to the bottom of Belize’s Blue Hole with Richard Branson and Fabien Cousteau, a grandson of Jacques.

Gaelin’s film concept is inspired by a close encounter she had with a sperm whale as a child, which helped set her life’s course. (pronounced “feisty,” a play on Physeter macrocephalus) was a young sperm whale that tried to beach himself on Coney Island in 1981. Sick with a mystery illness and being battered by waves, Physty was towed to a nearby boat basin for rehab.

At the time, well over a thousand sperm whales were still being killed by humans each year, and Physty made their plight personal. Floating on his side in the basin, weak and disoriented, he became a national sensation. Thousands of people traveled to the harbor to root for his recovery.

Among them was Stacy Rosenwaks and her young son and daughter. “We went every other day to watch the vets take care of him,” Stacy says. “We were right there next to him. You could smell his breath, see his spray.”

“I remember being so close and seeing his eye,” says Gaelin. “I wasn’t quite two years old yet, but that moment of interaction was really powerful.”

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The subtropical island of Bermuda does not see many icebreakers, but on a warm May day, Dave Ford is standing on one, welcoming his uneasy guests aboard. Technically, the RCGS Resolute, 400 feet long and eight decks high, is an ice-strengthened expedition ship, one class below an icebreaker. But the choice still seems inspired, because as the factions of environmentalists and plastics executives arrive, the chill on the ship is palpable, and the only way Ford’s vision of some sort of Paris Accord for plastics is going to happen is if a whole lot of icebreaking goes down.

Ford’s company, , takes corporate executives on epic excursions (Antarctica, Kamchatka, Zimbabwe), smacks a little kumbaya into them, then sends them home fired up about corporate responsibility. As we stand on the deck of the Resolute and watch the tender deliver more of the 150 passengers joining this four-day mission, he tells me that he started his career as a hard-charging ad man in the tech world, “but it wasn’t filling me up inside.” In 2008, at 28, he quit and bought a one-way ticket to Argentina. For the next two years, he knocked around the planet’s remote corners, then found himself in Antarctica and felt his spirit mingling with the vastness. “That trip opened me up,” he says. “I knew immediately that I wanted to help others access the breakthroughs that can happen with intense travel experiences.”

SoulBuffalo’s previous expeditions have all been for small groups from single companies, but as the scope of the plastics crisis has unfolded (spoiler alert: it’s worse than you can possibly imagine), Ford began to wonder if a big, boundary-crossing, experiential intervention could turn the tide. “I’ve always believed that travel can capture magic in a bottle,” he says. “You know how when you travel with people, your relationship can advance years in a matter of days? That’s what needs to happen out here.”

Ford is tall and scruffy. At 41, he still dresses in the just-slept-in jeans and T-shirts that make it easy to picture him in his young, globe-trotting days. That informality helps take the starch out of the suits, which is one of his goals for this : Put all the stakeholders on a ship, steam out to the plastic-studded wastes of the North Atlantic Gyre, distribute snorkels, and, in a kind of epic swirly, stick their faces in the problem. Then haul everyone back aboard and hack a solution to the fucking thing.

SoulBuffalo had to write a “very big check” to book the Resolute, which was en route to the Arctic from its January cruising grounds in Antarctica, before Ford knew if anyone would come to his party. “We bet the company on this,” he confesses, “pushed all our chips into the middle.”

When I ask why, his voice rises. “How many whales with 60 pounds of plastic in their guts need to beach themselves? How many turtles with straws up their noses?”

More, apparently, because most of the 70 corporations Ford invited said no. But before going down with his very pricey ship, he elected to raise the stakes. “You know what the tipping point was? When we decided to invite Greenpeace. When people realized that Dow and Greenpeace were going to be on the same ship, they were like, Whoa, this is real.”

And while Greenpeace may be the most anti-corporate of the greens on board, it’s not alone: , , , , the , and the are all here to hash it out with Dow, Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, NestlĂ© Waters, GE, Colgate-Palmolive, Hasbro, Mary Kay, Kimberly-Clark, Clorox, HP, and other industry behemoths. (The 391 tons of carbon dioxide generated by this little soiree will be offset by SoulBuffalo through the Kariba Forest Conservation project in Africa.)

Quarters are tight. Unless you’re willing to pay $25,000 for a private stateroom (which a few of the bigwigs are), everyone has to share cabins, and one of the assignments is dropping jaws: the reps from Greenpeace and NestlĂ© Waters—which have been at war for the past month, after Greenpeace launched a campaign against the bottled-water giant—are bunking in a cramped stateroom with beds three feet apart, at NestlĂ© Waters’ request. (“Haha,” Ford initially wrote back. “Very funny.”)

As word spread that silos would be crumbling in the middle of the Atlantic, 20 companies said yes. But still, Ford says, “That’s fifty noes!” I won’t call out the chickenshits, but you can pretty much figure it out. There are no retailers on this ship. There are also no oil companies, and plastic is basically oil whipped into a hard, waxy meringue.

But Ford says he’s fine with the noes. “This isn’t a boot camp for clueless executives. It’s a leadership summit.”

And leadership begins with service. No sooner have we all checked into our rooms than we have to get right back off the ship. Roll up your sleeves, Ford tells us. Time to clean up a beach.

At first glance, Long Bay Beach looks suspiciously like paradise. The golden sand sparkles. The waves glitter. Bermuda is a wealthy island that regularly cleans up its shoreline. Sure, the odd flip-flop is poking out of the wrack, but rather than any sort of environmental angst, I feel a strong desire to work on my tan.

Then Marcus Eriksen, cofounder of the 5 Gyres Institute and the expedition’s lead scientist, tells me to look closer. A former Marine with a buzz cut and unyielding blue eyes, he’s been crusading against ocean plastics for 15 years. In 2008, he lashed 15,000 plastic bottles underneath an old Cessna fuselage and sailed it from California to Hawaii to raise awareness. He’s led trips to all five of the world’s major ocean gyres—vortexes of current where microplastics and other marine garbage swirl. He’s published papers about the plastics found there and lobbied relentlessly.

None of which has made a dent in the business practices of the big plastics producers, something he’s dearly hoping to change in the next 72 hours. “This is huge,” he tells me. “Nothing like this has ever happened. It’s been my dream my entire career to take the people who run the plastics industries out to sea. Once you’re at sea, you can’t go anywhere. You have to talk.”

And one of the things he most wants to talk about is right at my feet.

At first all I see is sand and seaweed. But then, at the high-tide line, something blue catches my eye. Then something pink. I kneel to get a better look, and—impossible—the shell bits resolve themselves into a confetti of colors. Half the flecks I thought were pieces of shell are actually bleached plastic.

The problem with plastic is that it never rots, never goes away. But contrary to popular misconception, Eriksen explains, it doesn’t form floating islands of trash. It disintegrates. “Sunlight makes it brittle, the waves crush it constantly, and the fish and turtles and seabirds just tear the stuff apart.” The pieces get smaller and smaller until they’re tinier than a grain of rice and qualify as microplastic. By Eriksen’s count, there are more than five trillion pieces of microplastic in the oceans—more than there are fish—and despite some well-publicized debacles like Ocean Cleanup’s dysfunctional 2,000-foot-long boom, which was supposed to sweep the seas free, no force on earth is going to get that plastic out. The best we can do is prevent more from going in.

I’m still absorbing this when a local naturalist takes a group of us around a point to Nonsuch Island, a sanctuary for the Bermuda petrel, one of the world’s rarest seabirds. The island is off-limits to the public and doesn’t see regular beach cleanups. As a result, here, collected into a massive ridge, is 18 months’ worth of civilization’s detritus: bottle caps, toothbrushes, tires, coolers, crates, ropes, nets, glue bottles, soda bottles, bleach bottles, jerricans, fishing totes, fishing line, styrofoam cups, shellfish sacks, Parkay bottles, sleds, spackling buckets, mesh, toys, Ensure bottles, Glade air fresheners, car bumpers, fencing, sneakers, flip-flops, car consoles, cushions, spray guns, shotgun shells, mattresses, floats, noodles, sponges, siding, labels, caps, hard hats, ribbons, zip ties, trash bags, grocery bags, pail handles, foam buoys, sunglasses, drink lids, wrappers, milk jugs, tent stakes, boat hulls, and hundreds of plastic octopus traps that washed up from Africa. What’s weird is that almost every piece has serrated edges. “Those are turtle bites,” Eriksen points out. “See those smaller triangular bites? Triggerfish.”

From the largest whales to the smallest zooplankton, everything is eating plastic. Plastic particles at sea act as magnets for toxic chemicals and organic pollutants. Plastic has been shown to make shellfish sluggish. It’s in virtually all seabirds, which becomes obvious when they die, flesh melting away to reveal the plastic within like trash in a spring snowbank.

Back in 1950, at the dawn of the plastics era, the world made just two million metric tons of the stuff per year. By the seventies, we were up to 50 million metric tons a year, and by the nineties, 150 million metric tons. Then production exploded as the Asian economies took off: 213 million metric tons in 2000, then 313 million metric tons in 2010, and now more than 400 million metric tons per year. About half of this is single-use plastic—the bags, bottles, spoons, straws, sachets, and wrappers that make modern life ĂŒberconvenient and utterly disposable—and most of it has nowhere to go.

Recycling is a joke. For all our careful sorting, less than 5 percent of plastic in the U.S. gets recycled. That’s not a typo. The only types of plastic that are widely recycled are #1 PET (soda and water bottles) and #2 HDPE (milk jugs and laundry-detergent containers), and even they are guaranteed to be recycled only if they’re clean, pure, and not mixed with nonrecyclables. Almost everything else gets incinerated or dumped into the ground or the sea.

In the U.S., which has a well-developed waste-management system, only about 2 percent of recycled plastic gets mishandled, meaning it could potentially wind up in the ocean. For developing countries like China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, 70 to 90 percent goes into the drink. Until 2018, when China stopped accepting most of our recycling, a lot of that plastic started out in America. Chinese recyclers picked out the usable bits and disposed of the rest. Staring at that ridge of very familiar items, I can only wonder how many pieces of plastic I’ve tossed into recycling bins over the years that were dirty or the wrong kind of plastic or just mixed with too many questionable things and wound up in the South China Sea.

Back in 2010, scientists estimate, the oceans contained about eight million metric tons of plastic. Now we add that much every year. Today there are about 75 million metric tons of plastic in the marine environment, and in five years we can expect 150 million metric tons.

Perhaps this explains why the whales of the world keep beaching themselves and expiring with wads of plastic in their guts, a kind of gruesome global protest. And why bugs in the Mariana Trench, 36,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, are packing plastic.

So are you, but we’ll get to that later.

The North Atlantic Gyre is one of the three great endpoints for the world’s plastic. It and the Indian Ocean Gyre each hold about 60,000 tons of the stuff, a figure topped only by the trash in the North Pacific Gyre (a.k.a. the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), which holds 100,000 tons. Each gyre has its own character, according to Eriksen. “The North Pacific is the fishing-gear gyre. The North Atlantic is more like the bottle-cap gyre.”

The best place to find those bottle caps is inside the free-floating sargassum seaweed that accumulates in an area of the North Atlantic Gyre known as the Sargasso Sea.

“To the heart of the gyre!” Ford directed the captain of the Resolute, a no-nonsense Russian.

“I have no idea where that is,” the captain replied.

“Just head east until we hit seaweed.”

As we knife through calm seas, we begin our three-day “design lab.” That’s tech-bro talk for what used to be called brainstorming: get as many different perspectives as possible on how plastic leaks out of the circular economy, break into multidisciplinary groups, stress-test the best ideas against the needs of all stakeholders, then come back as a group on the final day with concrete action plans.

The ship is a rolling spark session. Bonnie Monteleone­—a North Carolina artist who creates Hokusai waves out of ocean plastic—is schmoozing with Ellen Jackowski of HP, which is incorporating millions of Haiti’s plastic bottles into ink cartridges. Gaelin Rosenwaks, a filmmaker fresh off a submarine exploration of Belize’s Great Blue Hole with Richard Branson, is chatting with the AI guru Tom Gruber, one of Siri’s inventors, who has become a prominent ocean advocate since retiring from Apple in 2018. A dude from the World Bank is huddling with Tensie Whelan, the former president of Rainforest Alliance, who now heads up New York University’s Stern School of Business.

I sidle up to Bridget Croke, vice president of Closed Loop Partners, an impact-investment firm that steers money from corporations toward recycling innovations. Croke, who is also a pretty badass rock climber, strong-armed a lot of her clients onto the Resolute. “All of a sudden they decided they couldn’t miss it,” she says.

Considering the speed with which the world is turning against single-use plastic, showing up seems like a no-brainer. Plastic bags and bottles are becoming as socially toxic as cigarettes. Hundreds of U.S. cities, states including California and Hawaii, and countries such as China, France, Kenya, South Africa, India, and Saudi Arabia have all announced bans, and more are on the way.

“The companies that are here are smart,” says Croke. “They understand the trends coming down the pike. What business leader would say no to that opportunity?”

Well, apparently 50 of them, but never mind, the icebreaking has begun in the aft lounge, where Greenpeace and NestlĂ© Waters are on stage for a “Sleeping with the Enemy” panel discussion. John Hocevar, the ocean-campaigns director at Greenpeace, looks a bit spooked by the eyes of so many longtime foes. “I was just saying to someone on board, ‘Oh, the last time I was at your office I was hanging off the front of your building.’ And the last time I was at Nestlé’s office we were there with a giant trash monster.”

Hocevar is long and lean, with a graying goatee and body-length tattoos. He’d be at home in Brooklyn, but his roommate on this trip is NestlĂ© Waters’ chief sustainability officer, David Tulauskas. Clean-cut and Midwest friendly, Tulauskas directed sustainability efforts at General Motors before shifting to NestlĂ© Waters in March 2019.

When Tulauskas extended his sleepover invite, Hocevar was guarded. “I regularly have conversations with people we’re running campaigns against,” he later confides to me, “but sharing a small room? And a bathroom? That’s definitely next-level.” Many Greenpeacers were against it—espionage!—but he thought it was a rare opportunity. “For this insane experiment to make any sense, we have to establish a real connection,” he says. “We have to build some sort of a human relationship. But ultimately, he represents a company that we are campaigning against for good reason. They have a massive footprint, and they have taken very little responsibility for it.”

NestlĂ© Waters (whose portfolio of about a dozen brands includes Arrowhead and S.Pellegrino) produces 1.7 million metric tons of plastic packaging every year (topped only by Coke’s three million metric tons), almost all of it single-use. “We’ve done brand audits after beach cleanups around the world,” Hocevar says. “Everywhere we look, we find that the companies producing the trash are American or European.” In 239 cleanups around the globe, Coca-Cola was the most common brand, followed by PepsiCo and NestlĂ© Waters. Polystyrene was the most common material, followed closely by PET.

For its part, the plastics industry points toward the need to fix waste-management systems in the countries doing the polluting. But to Hocevar, it’s disingenuous to blame people in Southeast Asia. “These companies are fully aware that their packaging is not going to be recycled, and yet they’re flooding those markets with this material.” To him the bottom line is simple: “Single-use plastic has to go.”

Eriksen agrees that would go a long way toward solving the problem. “For a long time, the industry has harped on consumer behavior and deflected all responsibility for how plastic is used in society.” The onus should be on companies, he says, to reduce their packaging and come up with new delivery systems. Instead they’re pushing chemical recycling. “That’s the new buzzword. You’re gonna hear a lot about it on the boat. You’ll hear ‘chemical recycling’ every other word.”

True that. A lot of people here are pretty jazzed about chemical recycling, which can take the worst plastics, all the unrecyclable stuff, and cook them down into fuel. If I’m China or Vietnam right now, bleeding rivers of plastic into the sea, that would sound pretty good to me. But to Eriksen, it’s a Band-Aid that just perpetuates the fossil-fuel economy. Considering the urgency, says Croke, whose Closed Loop Partners invests in chemical recycling, the only strategy that makes sense is all of the above. “There’s nothing we »ćŽÇČÔ’t need to do.”

I’m still stewing on that, thinking that whatever PR genius came up with the term chemical recycling should never work again, when a special announcement crackles over the žé±đČőŽÇ±ôłÜłÙ±đ’s speakers: Sargassum ahoy.

As the ship crane lowers black Zodiacs into the swell, the crew of the Resolute gives us our snorkel briefing: Here’s how to use your snorkel. Here’s how to use your life jacket. Don’t take it off under any circumstances. Accustomed to Arctic conditions, the sailors are a bit freaked out by the thought of 150 bodies bobbing in the water, but they roll with the plan. We flop like penguins from a metal gangway into bucking boats, and then we’re off.

I find myself up front, between Stan Bikulege, the chairman and CEO of Novolex, one of the world’s largest plastic-bag manufacturers, and Bruce Karas, the vice president for the environment and sustainability for Coca-Cola North America. To anti-plastic crusaders, Bikulege is the devil. He’s also a decent guy who hangs on to the back of my life jacket as I lean over the front of the Zodiac to haul passing crates and sneakers out of the sea. But sometimes you just find yourself on the wrong side of history.

Karas is here, as far as I can tell, to not get left in the dust as the issue evolves. Coca-Cola—which has spewed plastic across the planet like few other companies and has staunchly opposed bottle bills, one of the most effective ways to increase recycling rates—has not been a leader on fixing the plastics crisis. From what Karas tells me, he’d like it to be. “I have to be able to carry the message back to our franchisees that I’ve been to the gyre,” he says. “I’ve seen it, I’ve held the plastic in my hands, and it’s real.”

That shouldn’t be a problem. We snorkel through alphabet soup, collecting spoons and toothbrushes and bottle caps. I’m never out of reach of another piece. I grab a hunk of sargassum, I give it a shake underwater, and suddenly I’m in a snow globe, white flecks swirling all around. We »ćŽÇČÔ’t see any of Karas’s bottles or Bikulege’s bags, but that’s because such things disintegrate fast, helped along by tiny marine life that can pick a single plastic bag into 1.8 million micropieces.

Back on the Resolute, we pile our booty into a creepy altar, capped by a toilet seat, and break into a dozen design-lab teams. Croke peels off with the money folks to crunch ideas on funding. People from Dow, the World Bank, and the Pew Charitable Trusts put their heads together on new markets for used plastic. Tulauskas leads a wildly eclectic squad trying to disrupt retail packaging that includes executives from Dow, Clorox, and Kimberly-Clark, the founder of a startup called TAP that’s been billed as the Waze of water, an official from 5 Gyres, NYU’s Tensie Whelan, Gaelin Rosenwaks, and Ovie Mughelli, the hulking former fullback for the Atlanta Falcons, who has started his own environmental foundation.

The groups huddle; the hours fly by; voices rise in frustration and fall in consilience; the windows of the Resolute fill with Post-it Notes as I dolefully watch the blue sea flash by behind them.

That evening I drink a beer with Tulauskas and ask him how he’s getting along with his roommate. “Great,” he says. He and Hocevar have shared lots of personal details. “I know that his parrot is freakin’ crazy, and I know he has a beagle named Otis and a blue­tick hound.” The night was not without issues, however. “Apparently, I kept him up with snoring, for which I apologize. I was hoping the rocking of the ship would make me sleep like a baby.”

Somewhere amid the snoring and small talk, they got into it. “We did exchange high-level business perspectives,” he says. “He shared his view on NestlĂ© Waters. We talked about his criteria for corporate engagement. It was enlightening. I feel like it would be a lot easier to reengage if we ever get the chance.”

Powerful day, Tulauskas admits. “Seeing all that plastic speaks for itself. How do we close the loop? We can design lighter bottles. We can do it in ways that make recycling more efficient. We own that. But we need to move faster and farther with the use of recycled content, and there’s great partners here for that.” (Days after the trip, NestlĂ© Waters will announce that Poland Spring plans to be the first major water brand to convert to 100 percent recycled bottles.)

We drain our beers and watch the sun sink into the ocean. “This needs to be a transformative experience for me,” Tulauskas says softly. “I need to come back a new person.”

By day two, I’ve identified the espresso machine on deck five as the choke point through which the entire summit funnels. I stake out a nearby table, and people stumble past and tell me things they shouldn’t.

I hear that Coca-Cola is secretly planning for a post-single-use-plastics future. Ask Coke about that, my source whispers to me. I can’t, because I’m not supposed to know.Ìę

I learn that, back in December, when it looked like SoulBuffalo wouldn’t be able to pull the trip together, Ford’s partners began referring to it as the Gyre Festival, after the disastrous Fyre Festival that so famously belly-flopped in the Bahamas in 2017. But the scoop that darkens my day is the rumor of a disturbing new study, not yet released, estimating that we each have about a credit card’s worth of plastic in our body, to which I respond: (A) What the fuck are you talking about?, and (B) How do I get it to scan?

Later I check out the details with other scientists on the ship. There’s a grim consensus that the plastics crisis is much more than an ocean issue. As microplastic keeps breaking down, it eventually becomes small enough to pass through cell walls and migrate into organs and flesh. Yes, that means it’s in our seafood, but crossing calamari off your list won’t help. It’s in our beer, our salt, our tap water, and our bottled water, sometimes at concentrations of thousands of particles per liter. The average wash load of clothes launches 700,000 plastic microfibers. A single car trip whips clouds of microparticles off our tires. Plastic sloughs from civilization like hay off the back of a chicken wagon.

No one actually knows what effect it’s having on our lungs, guts, blood, or brains. The science is too new. One source tells me to look out for some freaky news about what it’s doing to our joints. Another mentions carcinogens and endocrine disrupters. But the reality is that we »ćŽÇČÔ’t know shit. It’s one big worldwide experiment. Check back in 30 years.

And that, Hocevar believes, may be why so many corporations are suddenly interested in changing their business model. “I think the time is coming when some of these companies are going to have their tobacco moment,” he says. “I can absolutely picture some of these executives having to stand up in court and answer questions about what they knew about the health impacts of their packaging and what they did about it.”

By day three the bar is empty. The Jacuzzi bubbles forlornly. These people are machines. It’s our last full day at sea; the captain has been told to just drive around, fingernails on the chalkboard of his highly scheduled soul, and even when the call goes out that more sargassum mats have been sighted, almost no one ditches their committees. But I practically run to the Zodiac, where I join the water people: Eriksen, Rosenwaks, a dive instructor and marine advocate from Bermuda named J.P. Skinner, and Tom Gruber, who anticipates my question to him.

“What’s an AI guy doing here?” he says. “Basically, I do intelligence. Siri was individual intelligence, but I also do collective intelligence.” And that, Gruber says as he tinkers with some huge underwater camera from the near future, is what we desperately need right now. “Our brains didn’t evolve for giant civilizations. The election process is broken. It no longer produces quality leaders. You end up with Trump and Brexit. So government is irrelevant, but business leaders are starting to step up, and that’s what you’re seeing on this boat. We may be at a turning point in how we act collectively.”

Gruber says he’s been to other save-the-ocean conferences, and this one feels different. “There’s a ray of hope here that’s not typical. Maybe we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘I was on that ship when things started to change.’ ”

And with that, we all back-flop into the water and badger Steve, our minder from the Resolute, to let us ditch our life jackets.

“If you have to dive under to get a photo, we can use the buddy system,” Steve says grudgingly. “Take off your life jacket, hand it to your buddy, and briefly dive under while your buddy keeps eyes on you.”

“Steve, will you be my buddy?” I ask, shucking my jacket.

“Sure, hand it over.”

Eriksen is next. “Steve, can you be my buddy?”

“OK, sure.”

Soon Steve is everybody’s buddy, a floating coatrack, and we’re all dolphining under the sargassum.

In the water, I forget all about the plastic. I’ve snorkeled the Caribbean, barrier reefs, and crystalline lakes, but never in mile-deep ocean. I gaze down through the bluest blue I’ve ever known, and my mind goes as blank and content as a child’s.

Eriksen shoots beneath me in a MORE OCEAN LESS PLASTIC T-shirt. Rosenwaks mermaids by in a wetsuit, shooting video on her two-handed camera. Skinner is deep underwater holding a GoPro straight overhead, slowly pirouetting toward the surface like Esther Williams. Everyone looks like X-Men against a blue screen.

I churn sargassum beneath the surface with my arms and dive down through it. The color makes me gasp through my snorkel, golden galaxies in a cobalt cosmos. When I surface, a petrel has come winging over to see what the heck we’re doing in its world, and then Rosenwaks pops up beside me. At that moment, the Resolute and the Zodiac are somewhere in the distance behind us, and it’s just her and me and the sea and this sleek little bird turning gyres around us. Rosenwaks says she feels so small, and I babble unintelligently about the blue before coming out and saying what I’m really thinking: It’s the color of God, and I can’t believe it’s still here.

As we head back toward Bermuda, 100 miles and closing, the design sprint pushes well past dinner. In the morning, we’ll arrive in port and head back to our lives, and you can feel a hint of panic set in. We know that one of the world’s most challenging problems is not going to get solved in three days on a boat; we just need to know that we’ve turned this icebreaker in the right direction.

Late at night, the bleary-eyed teams share their ideas. A few sound refreshingly real. Mary Kay announces a new rewards program to get its beauty consultants to recycle their cosmetics containers. A group including executives from Dow and the World Bank proposes a fee on virgin plastics, to be used as a credit to reduce the cost of using recycled plastic. It’s like a carbon tax, and we all turn and stare at one another. Did they really just say that?

The most original idea comes from David Tulauskas’s team. ZeroHero, as it’s called, would be a section—heck, maybe a whole aisle—of big-box stores devoted to zero-waste products. To qualify for the ZeroHero aisle, products could be package-free, refillable, delivered from a dispensary, or otherwise ultralight in their footprint. The program would have its own label, promotion, possibly even a dedicated check-out line. It’ll need a big-box retailer to play ball, but half the brands on the boat are already in, and plans are quickly made for cross-industry working groups in the U.S. and UK.

It’s wildly ambitious, and Zero­Hero gets an ovation. Just like that, a faint glimmer of collective intelligence emerged from the primordial capitalist muck.

Even Hocevar sounds willing to give his roommate the benefit of the doubt. “I do think he came to NestlĂ© Waters to try to turn the company into a sustainability leader,” he says with a sigh. “I »ćŽÇČÔ’t know how on earth he thinks that’s going to happen. But he seems like a gamer.”

So does Ford. Before I disembark the next morning, I tell him to get some sleep. No time, he says. “I’m trying to secure the ship for next year’s summit.”

I ask if he’ll be reaching out to the 50 noes.

“Absolutely. I’m optimistic we can turn most of them into yeses.” Then he pauses. “But to be honest, two of the biggest oil companies in the world have already told me resoundingly that they won’t be a part of any collaborative summit like this. So I’ll take 48.”

I tell him I’ll be curious to see who’s on that boat, then I race to the airport to catch my flight back to New York. As the plane takes off, I can see the Resolute in the harbor, a ridiculously small oval shrinking to a speck, all of Bermuda dissolving into the eggshell blue around it. I push the seat back, massage my sore snorkeling legs, and refuse the flight attendant’s offer of a plastic cup for my water three times.

Contributing editor Rowan ­Jacobsen () is the author of seven books, including and .

The post An Ocean Plastics Field Trip for Corporate Executives appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

There’s a famous Gandhi aphorism about how movements progress: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” ThatÌęwas actually written by Ìęas a summary of Gandhi’s philosophy, but regardless, it’s remarkable how often it accurately describes the evolution of causes, fromÌęlegalÌęcannabis to gay marriage. I’ve been thinking about that quote since I wrote my first piece about plant-based meat (or alt meat, as I like to call it) for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in 2014. Back then, we were firmly in the “laugh at you” stage. Beyond Meat, the first of the Silicon Valley startups to use advanced technology to produce extremely meat-like burgers, had been ignored for its first few years, but in 2014, it released its Beast Burger, which was treated by the press and public as a slightly off-putting curiosity. What was this stuff? Would anyone actually eat it? Ewwww.

That product wasn’t very good—I compared it to Salisbury steak—and when Ethan Brown, ’s founder, announced his intention to end livestock production, you could almost hear the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association laughing in the background.

But I didn’t laugh. I knew it would keep getting betterÌęand beef wouldn’t. And I thought the bar was pretty low. Sure, steak is great, but ground beef makes up 60 percent of beef sales, and most of it is more Salisbury than salutary, a greasy vehicle for the yummy stuff: ketchup, mushrooms, pickles, bacon, sriracha mayo. I knew I wouldn’t object if my central puck came from a plant, as long as it chewed right and tasted right. I suspected others might feel the same.

In the following years, Beyond Meat was joined by , a more sophisticated startup with even more venture capital. ItsÌęImpossible Burger was way better than Salisbury steak. All the cool cats started serving it, from David Chang in New York to Traci Des JardinsÌęin San Francisco. My conviction grew.

Part of the appeal of the new burgers is their smaller environmental footprint. Beef is the most wasteful food on the planet. Cows are not optimized to make meat; they’re optimized to be cows. It takes 36,000 calories of feed to produce 1,000 calories of beef. In the process, it uses more than 430 gallons of water and 1,500 square feet of land, and it generates nearly tenÌękilogramsÌęof greenhouse-gas emissions. In comparison, an Impossible Burger Ìę87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and producesÌę89 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. Beyond Meat’s footprint is similarly svelte.

Yes, a good argument can be made that small-farm, grass-fed beef production (in places that can grow abundant grass) has a very different ethical and environmental landscape, but unfortunately, that’s just not a significant factor. America gets 97 percent of its beef from feedlots. And feedlots are irredeemable.

By 2018, sales of both the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger were surging, and the companies began to ink deals with restaurant chains. Beyond Meat got Carl’s Jr. and A&W (as well as supermarket chains like Food Lion and Safeway), while Impossible got White Castle.

I tracked down a White Castle shortly after the Impossible Slider arrived in the spring of 2018. I’d never been to a White Castle, so I ordered an Impossible Slider and a regular slider. The Impossible was…fine. About what you’d expect. White Castle steams all its meat, which is hard to get past, but with plenty of cheese, it went down easy.

The regular slider, on the other hand, was horrific. I peeled back the pasty bun and stared at the fetid shingle inside. It was appallingly thin and grimy. It made the Impossible Slider look lush and juicy. The bar for fast-food burgers is even lower than I thought. Nobody will miss these shitty little brown things when they’re gone.

Perhaps this explains why the chains are latching on to plant-based burgers as if they were life rings. White Castle initially tested its Impossible Slider in just a few locationsÌęin New York, New Jersey, and Chicago in April 2018. It was such a hit that the companyÌęquickly expanded the program to all 380 outlets. “People are coming back for it again and again,” White Castle’s vice president, Jamie Richardson,Ìę with a touch of astonishment.

They’re coming back at Del Taco, too, which launched a Beyond Meat taco inÌęApril. Within two months, it had sold twoÌęmillion, one of the most successful product launches in its history, so it decided to add Beyond Meat burritos as well.

And then there’s Burger King. The second-largest fast-food chain in the world rattled big beef’s cage by testing an Ìęin April. ResultingÌęfoot traffic was so strong that Burger King decided to serve the Impossible Whopper in all 7,200 restaurants, marking the moment when alt meat stopped being alt.

That was enough to get the meat industry to snap to attention. “About a year and a half ago, this wasn’t on my radar whatsoever,” saidÌęMark Dopp, head of regulatory affairs for the North American Meat Association, .Ìę“All of a sudden, this is getting closer.”

The strategy, predictably yet pathetically, was to engage in an ontological battle over the term meatÌęitself. Big beef for a labeling law in MissouriÌębanning any products from identifying themselves as meat unless they are “derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.” (But this isÌęwrong; the word simply meant sustenance for the first thousand years of its existence.) Similar labeling laws have passed or are pending in a dozen more states, most of them big ranching ones.

Obviously, none of this has stemmed the rise of alt meat. But it did make me think again of Gandhi (a staunch vegetarian, FYI). They ignored, they laughed, and now they wereÌęfighting.

This stuff, I thought, just might win.

This year is shaping up to be the inflection point when this becomes obvious to everybody else. Beyond Meat’s products are in 15,000 grocery stores in the U.S., and its sales have more than doubled each year. On May 2, it held its IPO, offeringÌęstock at $25, which turned out to be a wild underestimation of what investors thought the company wasÌęworth. It immediately leaped to $46 and closed the day at $65.75. That one-day popÌęof 163 percent was one of the best in decades, putting to shame such 2019 IPOs as Lyft (21 percent) and Pinterest (25 percent), to say nothing of Uber (negative 3 percent). In the following days, it kept ripping, climbing above $150, where it has stayed. The market currently estimates Beyond Meat’s worth at close to $10 billion.

Not to be outdone, that same month, Impossible Foods raised an additional $300 million dollars from private investors (for a running total of $740 million and a valuation of $2 billion) and announced it would be joining Beyond Meat in America’s grocery stores later this year. These companies are no longer little mammals scurrying around the feet of the big-beef dinosaurs. And they are gearing up for an epic head-to-head battle.

Both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods recently released new, improved versions of their meat. For the past week, I’ve subsisted on little else. It feels great. Both have the same amount of protein as ground beef (about 20 grams per quarter-pound serving) and less fat. Being plant-based, they also provide a healthy shot of fiber. Both get their unctuousness from coconut oil.

But the core of each formula is very different. Beyond uses pea protein, while Impossible uses soy. Beyond gets its bloody color from beet juice; Impossible uses heme—the same molecule that makes our blood red—to achieve its meaty color and flavor. This is its killer app. Beef gets its beefiness from heme. When you cook heme, it produces the distinctive savory, metallic flavor of meat. Since heme is normally found in blood, no veggie concoction has ever used it. Soy plants do make microscopic amounts of it, but not enough to ever use. Impossible Foods’ breakthrough was to genetically engineer yeast to produce soy heme in a tank, like beer. This GMO process is a deal breaker for some people, but it makes all the difference. The Impossible Burger is incredible, the Beyond Burger merely passable.

The Beyond Burger comes asÌętwo premade four-ounce patties (packaged in a plastic tray wrapped in more plastic—strike one). They »ćŽÇČÔ’t quite pass as hamburgers. They’re too wet and too pink. They almost resemble finely ground salmon burgers. They cook to a satisfying toothinessÌęon either a grill or a griddle, but there’s an inexplicable cellulose quality to the texture. (This is even more pronounced in the Beyond Sausage.) The flavor is also slightly off. There’s a hint of fake smokeÌęand an earthiness I’m guessing comes from the beet juice. (My wife would argue that it’s more than slightly off; she has to leave the room when the Beyond Burger is cooking. But she also hates beets.) It’s not an unpleasant experience, just »ćŽÇČÔ’t expect the burgergasm you get from a quarter pound of USDAÌęprime.

Impossible Foods, on the other hand, has delivered burgergasm after burgergasm. It’s shine-up-the-Nobel-Prize good. Not only does it taste like ground beef, it looks and acts like it, too. It’s truly plug and play.

That wasn’t true for the previous version. When I Impossible Foods three years ago, I had to beg the company to send me one patty. ItÌęwasÌęhesitant. Back then, the burger was fussy. It didn’t work well on a grill, so you had to pan-fry it just right. The companyÌęmade me do a Skype tutorial first, and when the micropatty arrived in a refrigerated box, with a special bun and special sauce, it was accompanied by pages of printed instructions. The burger was good, certainly the most meat-like plant patty up to that point, but it still tasted like a lite product—a little cleaner, a little less decadent, a little bit like filler.

This time, when I asked the company to send me a burger, a five-pound block of meat—clearly what itÌęnormally ships to food-service companies—arrived on my doorstep. No instructions, no hand-holding. It looked identical to ground beef, so that’s how I treated it. And that’s how it performed. I made sliders, kebabs, nachos, chili, Bolognese sauce, even a little tartare (note: the company frowns hard on this).

If I’m being honest, I find that I slightly prefer it to real beef. It’s rich and juicy, more savory, but still somehow cleaner and less cloying. NowÌęwhen I go back to regular beef, I notice a whiff of the charnel house in it, something musty and gray that I »ćŽÇČÔ’t like and »ćŽÇČÔ’t need.

In the coming years, expect a lot of other omnivores to have similar epiphanies. Impossible Foods has performed more than on its burger, which is on track to surpass ground beef in those testsÌęin the near future. What happens then? Impossible has been laser focused on creating the perfect simulacrum of ground beef. But why? The cow never had a lock on gastronomic perfection. It was just the best we could do given the limitations of the natural material. Firelight was fine until electricity came along. Then things got really interesting.

Look for something similar to happen with alt meat. For now,Ìęit’s necessary to make people comfortable with the familiar, the way Steve Jobs loaded the early iPhones with . But once people stop expecting burgers to refer to a hunk of flesh, the brakes on deliciousness will be released.

This will be generational. All change is. Most Baby Boomers are going to stick with their beef, right up to the point where their dentures can’t take it anymore. But Gen Z will find the stuff as embarrassing as Def Leppard and dad jeans.

As this shift accelerates, the beef industry will lose its last advantage—price. Most offerings made with Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are about a buck a burger more expensive. But it’s inherently cheaper to make a burger directly out of plants than it is to feed those plants to an animal first. Beef is currently cheaper because of scale. Big food companies can negotiate tremendously reduced prices for feed, and gigantic factories and supply chains are much more efficient to run.

But the playing field is leveling fast. Last week, Dunkin’ announced a new Beyond Sausage breakfast sandwich that will be just 14 cents more than the meat version. But more than anything Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods has accomplished, the true death knell for the cattlemen is how the mainstream food industry has embracedÌęalt meat. Whole Foods just announced it will start selling burgers from the UK-based startup theÌę in all of its stores. Nestle is launching its this fall. Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat producer, just debutedÌęits own plant-based nuggets, with more products to come. TysonÌęCEO Noel WhiteÌęsaid he expects Tyson “to be a market leader in alternative protein, which is experiencing double-digit growth and could someday be a billion-dollar business for our company.”

If that quote isn’t enough to send chills down the spine of any meat producer, try this one from Perdue Farms chairman Jim Perdue: “Our vision is to be the most trusted name in premium protein. It doesn’t say premium meat protein, just premium protein. That’s where consumers are going.”

And that’s where these companies will go. Beef is a headache. It comes with a lot of baggage to worry about: antibiotic resistance, E. coli outbreaks, animal welfare, climate change. It’s the kind of icky biological variable that corporate America would love to leave behind—and as soon as beefÌębecomes less profitable, itÌęwill.

ÌęsuggestÌęthatÌę60 percent of the meat eaten inÌę2040 will be alt, a figure I think may actually be too conservative. An estimated 95 percentÌęof the people buying alt burgers are meat-eaters.ÌęThis is not about making vegetarians happy. It’s not even about climate change. This is a battle for America’s flame-broiled soul. Meat is about to break free from its animal past. As traditional meat companies embrace alt meat with the fervor of the just converted, making it cheap and ubiquitious, it’s unclear if Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods can survive the feeding frenzy (though Impossible’s patents on its core IP may help), but at least they’ll be able to comfort themselves with a modern take on Gandhi’s wisdom:

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they sue you.
Then they try to buy you.
Then they copy you.
Then they steal your shelf space.
Then they put you out of business.
Then you’ve won.

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These are dark days for supplements. Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study.

If there was one supplement that seemed sure to survive the rigorous tests, it was vitamin D. People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorderÌęyou can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more. The vitamin is required for calcium absorption and is thus essential for bone health, but as evidence mounted that lower levels of vitamin D were associated with so many diseases, health experts began suspecting that it was involved in many other biological processes as well.

And they believed that most of us weren’t getting enough of it. This made sense. Vitamin D is a hormone manufactured by the skin with the help of sunlight. It’s difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities through diet. When our ancestors lived outdoors in tropical regions and ran around half naked, this wasn’t a problem. We producedÌęall the vitamin D we needed from the sun.

But today most of us have indoor jobs, and when we do go outside, we’ve been taught to protect ourselves from dangerous UV rays, which can cause skin cancer. Sunscreen also blocks our skin from making vitamin D, but that’s OK, says the American Academy of Dermatology, which takes a zero-tolerance stance on sun exposure: “You need to protect your skin from the sun every day, even when it’s cloudy,” it advises on its website. Better to slather on sunblock, we’ve all been told, and compensate with vitamin D pills.

Yet vitamin D supplementation has failed spectacularly in clinical trials. Five years ago, researchers were already warning that and the evidence has only grown stronger. InÌęNovember,ÌęÌęof the vitamin ever conducted—in which 25,871 participants received high doses for five years—found no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke.

How did we get it so wrong? How could people with low vitamin D levels clearly suffer higher rates of so many diseasesÌęand yet not be helped by supplementation?

As it turns out, a rogue band of researchers has had an explanation all along. And if they’re right, it means that once again we have been epically misled.

These rebels argue that what made the people with high vitamin D levels so healthy was not the vitamin itself. That was just a marker. Their vitamin D levels were high because they were getting plenty of exposure to the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above.

One of the leaders of this rebellion is a mild-mannered dermatologist at the University of Edinburgh named Richard Weller. For years, Weller swallowed the party line about the destructive nature of the sun’s rays. “I’m not by nature a rebel,” he insisted when I called him up this fall. “I was always the good boy that toed the line at school. This pathway is one which came from following the data rather than a desire to overturn apple carts.”

Weller’s doubts began around 2010, when he was researching nitric oxide, a molecule produced in the body that dilates blood vessels and lowers blood pressure. He discovered a previously unknown biological pathway by which the skin uses sunlight to make nitric oxide.

It was already well established that rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and overall mortality all rise the farther you get from the sunny equator, andÌęthey all rise in the darker months. Weller put two and two together and had what he calls his “eureka moment”: Could exposing skin to sunlight lower blood pressure?

Sure enough, when he exposed volunteers to the equivalent of 30 minutes of summer sunlight without sunscreen, their nitric oxide levels went up and their blood pressure went down. Because of its connection to heart disease and strokes, blood pressure is the leading cause of premature death and disease in the world, and the reduction was of a magnitude large enough to prevent millions of deaths on a global level.

Wouldn’t all those rays also raise rates of skin cancer? Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly few people: less than 3Ìęper 100,000 in the U.S. each year. For every person who dies of skin cancer, more than 100 die from cardiovascular diseases.

People »ćŽÇČÔ’t realize this because several different diseases are lumped together under the term “skin cancer.” The most common by far are basal-cell carcinomas and squamous-cell carcinomas, which are almost never fatal. In fact, says Weller, “When I diagnose a basal-cell skin cancer in a patient, the first thing I say is congratulations, because you’re walking out of my office with a longer life expectancy than when you walked in.” That’s probably because people who get carcinomas, which are strongly linked to sun exposure, tend to be healthy types that are outside getting plenty of exercise and sunlight.

Melanoma, the deadly type of skin cancer, is much rarer, accounting for only 1 to 3 percent of new skin cancers. And perplexingly, outdoor workers have half the melanoma rate of indoor workers. Tanned people have lower rates in general. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”

These are pretty radical words in the established dermatological community. “We do know that melanoma is deadly,” says Yale’s David Leffell, one of the leading dermatologists in the country, “and we know that the vast majority of cases are due to sun exposure. So certainly people need to be cautious.”

Still, Weller kept finding evidence that didn’t fit the official story. Some of the best came from Pelle Lindqvist, a senior research fellow in obstetrics and gynecology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, home of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Lindqvist tracked the sunbathing habits of nearly 30,000 women in Sweden over 20 years. Originally, he was studying blood clots, whichÌęhe foundÌęoccurred less frequently in women who spent more time in the sun—and less frequently during the summer. Lindqvist looked at diabetes next. Sure enough, the sun worshippers had much lower rates. Melanoma? True, the sun worshippers had a higher incidence of it—but they were eight times less likely to die from it.

So Lindqvist decided to look at overall mortality rates, and the results were shocking. Over the 20 years of the study, sun avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.

There are not many daily lifestyle choices that double your risk of dying. In a 2016 study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, Lindqvist’s team : “Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.”

The idea that slavish application ofÌęSPF 50Ìęmight be as bad for you as Marlboro 100s generated a flurry of short news items, but the idea was so weird that it didn’t break through the deadly-sun paradigm. Some doctors, in fact, found it quite dangerous.

“I »ćŽÇČÔ’t argue with their data,” says David Fisher, chair of the dermatology department at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But I do disagree with the implications.” The risks of skin cancer, he believes, far outweigh the benefits of sun exposure. “Somebody might take these conclusions to mean that the skin-cancer risk is worth it to lower all-cause mortality or to get a benefit in blood pressure,” he says. “I strongly disagree with that.” It is not worth it, he says, unless all other options for lowering blood pressure are exhausted.ÌęInsteadÌęhe recommends vitamin D pills and hypertension drugs as safer approaches.

Weller’s largest study yet is due to be published later in 2019. For three years, his team tracked the blood pressure of 340,000 people in 2,000 spots around the U.S., adjusting for variables such as age and skin type. The results clearly showed that the reason people in sunnier climes have lower blood pressure is as simple as light hitting skin.

When I spoke with Weller, I made the mistake of characterizing this notion as counterintuitive. “It’s entirely intuitive,” he responded. “Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. Until the industrial revolution, we lived outside. How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well. What’s counterintuitive is that dermatologists run around saying, ‘Don’t go outside, you might die.’”

When you spend much of your day treating patients with terrible melanomas, it’s natural to focus on preventing them, but you need to keep the big picture in mind. Orthopedic surgeons, after all, »ćŽÇČÔ’t advise their patients to avoid exercise in order to reduce the risk of knee injuries.

Meanwhile, that big picture just keeps getting more interesting. Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.

These seem like benefits everyone should be able to take advantage of. But not all people process sunlight the same way. And the current U.S. sun-exposure guidelines were written for the whitest people on earth.

Every year, Richard Weller spends time working in a skin hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Not only is Addis Ababa near the equator, it also sits above 7,500 feet, so it receives massive UV radiation. Despite that, says Weller, “I have not seen a skin cancer. And yet Africans in Britain and America are told to avoid the sun.”

All early humans evolved outdoors beneath a tropical sun. Like air, water, and food, sunlight was one of our key inputs. Humans also evolved a way to protect our skin from receiving too much radiation—melanin, a natural sunscreen. Our dark-skinned African ancestors produced so much melanin that they never had to worry about the sun.

As humans migrated farther from the tropics and faced months of light shortages each winter, they evolved to produce less melanin when the sun was weak, absorbing all the sun they could possibly get. They also began producing much more of a protein that stores vitamin D for later use. In spring, as the sun strengthened, they’d gradually build up a sun-blocking tan. Sunburn was probably a rarity until modern times, when we began spending most of our time indoors. Suddenly, pasty office workers were hitting the beach in summer and getting zapped. That’s a recipe for melanoma.

People of color rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Caucasians, 5 per 100,000 in Hispanics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Americans. On the rare occasion when African Americans do get melanoma, it’s particularly lethal—but it’s mostly a kind that occurs on the palms, soles, or under the nails and is not caused by sun exposure.

At the same time, African Americans suffer high rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, internal cancers, and other diseases that seem to improve in the presence of sunlight, of which they may well not be getting enough. Because of their genetically higher levels of melanin, they require more sun exposure to produce compounds like vitamin D, and they are less able to store that vitaminÌęfor darker days. They have much to gain from the sun and little to fear.

And yet they are being told a very different story, misled into believing that sunscreen can prevent their melanomas, which Weller finds exasperating. “The cosmetic industry is now trying to push sunscreen at dark-skinned people,” he says. “At dermatology meetings, you get people standing up and saying, ‘We have to adapt products for this market.’ÌęWell, no we »ćŽÇČÔ’t. This is a marketing ploy.”

When I asked the American Academy of Dermatology for clarification on its position on dark-skinned people and the sun, it pointed me back to the official line on its website: “The American Academy of Dermatology recommends that all people, regardless of skin color, protect themselves from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays by seeking shade, wearing protective clothing, and using a broad-spectrum, water-resistant sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher.”

This seemed to me a little boilerplate, and I wondered whether the official guidelines hadn’t yet caught up to current thinking. So I asked David Leffell, at Yale. “I think that sun-protection advice,” he told me, “has always been directed at those most at risk”—people with fair skin or a family history of skin cancer. “While it is true that people with olive skin are at less risk, we do see an increasing number of people with that type of skin getting skin cancer. But skin cancer… is very rare in African Americans… and although they represent a spectrum of pigmentation, [they] are not at as much risk.”

Still,ÌęDavid FisherÌęat Mass General didn’t think that changed the equation. “There’s a pharmacopoeia of drugs that are extremely effective at lowering blood pressure,” he said. “So to draw the conclusion that people should expose themselves to an elevated skin-cancer risk, including potentially fatal cancer, when there are so many alternative treatments for hypertension, is problematic.”

Am I willing to entertain the notion that current guidelines are inadvertently advocating a lifestyle that is killing us?

I am, because it’s happened before.

In the 1970s, as nutritionists began to see signs that people whose diets were high in saturated fat and cholesterol also had high rates of cardiovascular disease, they told us to avoid butter and choose margarine, which is made by bubbling hydrogen gas through vegetable oils to turn them into solid transÌęfats.

From its inception in the mid-1800s, margarine had always been considered creepers, a freakish substitute for people who couldn’t afford real butter. By the late 1800s, several midwestern dairy states had banned it outright, while others, including Vermont and New Hampshire, passed laws requiring that it be dyed pink so it could never pass itself off as butter. Yet somehow margarine became the thing we spread on toast for decades, a reminder that even the weirdest product can become mainstream with enough industry muscle.

Eventually, better science revealed that the trans fats created by the hydrogenation process were far worse for our arteries than the natural fats in butter. In 1994, Harvard researchers estimated that 30,000 people per year were dying unnecessarily thanks to trans fats. Yet they weren’t banned in the U.S. until 2015.

Might the same dynamic be playing out with sunscreen, which was also remarkably sketchy in its early days? One of the first sunscreens, Red Vet Pet (for Red Veterinary Petrolatum) was a thick red petroleum jelly invented in 1944 to protect soldiers in the South Pacific; it must have been eerily reminiscent of pink margarine. Only after Coppertone bought the rights and reformulated Red Vet Pet to suit the needs of the new midcentury tanning culture did sunscreen take off.

However, like margarine, early sunscreen formulations were disastrous, shielding users from the UVB rays that cause sunburn but not the UVA rays that cause skin cancer. Even today, SPF ratings refer only to UVB rays, so many users may be absorbing far more UVA radiation than they realize. Meanwhile, many common sunscreen ingredients have been found to be hormone disruptors that can be detected in users’ blood and breast milk. The worst offender, oxybenzone, also mutates the DNA of corals and is believed to be killing coral reefs. Hawaii and the western Pacific nation of Palau have already banned it, to take effect in 2021 and 2020 respectively, and other governments are expected to follow.

The industry is now scrambling to move away from oxybenzone, embracing opaque, even neon, mineral-based formulations, a fashion statement reminiscent of the old Red Vet Pet. But with its long track record of pushing products that later turnÌęout to be unhealthy, I remain skeptical of industryÌęassurances that it finally has everything figured out. We are always being told to replace something natural with some artificial pill or product that is going to improve our health, and it almost always turns out to be a mistake because we didn’t know enough. Multivitamins can’t replace fruits and vegetables, and vitamin D supplements are clearly no substitute for natural sunlight.

Old beliefs »ćŽÇČÔ’t die easily, and I can understand if you remain skeptical of old Sol. Why trust one journalist and a handful of rogue researchers against the august opinions of so many professionals?

Here’s why: many experts in the rest of the world have already come around to the benefits of sunlight. Sunny Australia changed its tune back in 2005. Cancer Council Australia’s official-position paper (endorsed Ìęby the Australasian College of Dermatologists) states, “Ultraviolet radiation from the sun has both beneficial and harmful effects on human health…. A balance is required between excessive sun exposure which increases the risk of skin cancer and enough sun exposure to maintain adequate vitamin D levels….ÌęIt should be noted that the benefits of sun exposure may extend beyond the production of vitamin D. Other possible beneficial effects of sun exposure
 include reduction in blood pressure, suppression of autoimmune disease, and improvements in mood.”

Australia’s official advice? When the UV index is below 3Ìę(which is true for most of the continental U.S. in the winter), “Sun protection is not recommended unless near snow or other reflective surfaces. To support vitamin D production, spend some time outdoors in the middle of the day with some skin uncovered.” Even in high summer, Australia recommends a few minutes of sun a day.

New Zealand signed on to similar recommendations, and the British Association of Dermatologists went even further in a statement, directly contradicting the position of its American counterpart: “Enjoying the sun safely, while taking care not to burn, can help to provide the benefits of vitamin D without unduly raising the risk of skin cancer.”

Leffell, the Yale dermatologist, recommends what he calls a “sensible” approach. “I have always advised my patients that they »ćŽÇČÔ’t need to crawl under a rockÌębut should use common sense and be conscious of cumulative sun exposure and sunburns in particular,” he told me.

This does not mean breaking out the baby oil or cultivating a burnished tan. All the experts agree that sunburns—especially those suffered during childhood and adolescence—are particularly bad.

Ultimately, it’s your call. Each person’s needs vary so much with season, latitude, skin color, personal history, philosophy, and so much elseÌęthat it’s impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all recommendation. , which uses factors such as age, weight, and amount of exposed skin to track the amount of sunlightÌęyou need for vitamin D production, might be one place to start. Trading your sunscreen for a shirt and a broad-brimmed hat is another. Both have superior safety records.

As for me, I’ve made my choice. A world of healthy outdoor adventure beckons—if not half naked, then reasonably close. Starting today, I’m stepping into the light.

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Josiah Zayner and I are drinking fluorescent green beer at , his Oakland lab. The tables are scattered with pipettes and disposable blue gloves, cases of Red Bull and Slim Jims are near at hand, and Drake is pulsing on the sound system. It’s not St. Patrick’s Day, and the beer isn’t really all that green. It’s the ghostly luminescence of jellyfish pulsing through the depths. That’s because it’s chock full of glowing jellyfish protein.Ìę

But no jellyfish were harmed in the making of this beer. Zayner is the world’s most notorious biohacker—a new breed of garage tinkerer experimenting with DNA and biological systems outside the confines of traditional research. In this case, he genetically engineered a common brewer’s yeast by adding a jellyfish’s green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene that he ordered online. As long as you know the DNA sequence of the gene you want—the A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s of the genetic code—you no longer need the actual critter the gene came from. You just run off the code on a special DNA printer containing cartridges filled with liquid A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s. Then you insert the new DNA into which­ever organism you want to modify. The process is shockingly easy.

for your iPhone to listen to more longform titles.

I raise my glass and pause. Zayner’s yeast suffuses the beer with a gauzy haze. I have no idea which species of jellyfish the GFP gene came from, but my hunch is that it has never been a regular part of the human diet. Zayner assures me it’s safe. Genetic engineers love GFP because it’s such an easy visual. They include it with whichever other gene they’re trying to insert, and if their organism glows, they know the experiment worked without having to send off a sample for DNA sequencing. Scientists have engineered glowing cats and mice using GFP, he points out, and the creatures lived just fine.Ìę

I eye Zayner. He has drunk a fair amount of GFP beer himself, and while I wouldn’t say he looks normal—he sports dozens of piercings, plugs in both earlobes, and a spike of bleached hair that is sometimes blue and sometimes white—he seems healthy enough.

“Dude,” he assures me, “we did all the normal FDA tests. It’s nontoxic, nonallergenic.” As further proof, he shows me his left forearm. Right next to the tattoo that says CREATE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL is a row of four tiny wounds. “I modified myself with it. It’s fine.”

Zayner claims he was the first to genetically modify himself with another species’s DNA. For what he would call a science experiment and I would call conceptual art, he removed dead skin cells from his forearm (just rub the same spot with a toothbrush 200 times) and used a tattoo needle to punch jellyfish DNA into his skin. The DNA was attached to a common virus that specializes in infiltrating human cells and parking itself there. Those skin cells then began manufacturing the GFP along with all their regular proteins—though, to Zayner’s disappointment, not enough to see the glow with the naked eye. He also performed a DIY fecal transplant on himself, which was chronicled in the recent documentary , curing himself of years of irritable bowel syndrome.

I’m not sure what I think about any of this, starting with my beer. I tend to favor pilsner over jellybrew, but I’m trying to maintain my chill biohacker persona, so I chug. We’ve spiked it with enough blood orange juice to cover any weirdness, and frankly it goes down pretty easy. Just like that, this crunchy Vermonter who always shunned GMOs filled his belly with them, and starts looking forward to the week ahead.

I’d always thought of genetic engineering as something done in million-dollar labs by corporate powerhouses like Monsanto. Extracting the DNA from life forms and inserting it into other life forms seemed like the kind of thing that required high-tech machines and years of trial and error. And it used to. But that was before Crispr, Science magazine’s 2015 Breakthrough of the Year, an engineered protein that can snip out sequences of DNA wherever you want. It’s like a search and replace function for genes. It works on bacterial cells, it works on mouse cells, and it works on human cells. It’s been used to engineer immune cells that kill cancer, viruses that kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria, female mosquitoes that can’t reproduce (to crash the population), and a yeast infused with genetic code from poppies and rats that makes opioids out of sugar in a tank. But the crazy thing about Crispr is that it’s so easy to use and cheap to make that it also allows any budding hacker with some basic biology and a mischievous mind to play God in their garage.

The only thing missing is someone to share this knowledge with the multitudes, and that’s where Zayner comes in. He started out traditionally enough: wunderkind Ph. D. candidate at the University of Chicago and then research fellow at NASA, where he adapted organisms for life on Mars. But then, in 2015, he veered off to become the pierced Prometheus of genetic engineering, bringing it down to us mortals from the labs of academia. “In this field, there are a bunch of people with a lot of knowledge and a bunch of people with a lot of crazy,” he says with a smile, “but there are very few with a lot of knowledge and a lot of crazy.”

Not for the first time, I smile back at Zayner and try to gauge the crazy. For now I’m coming down on the side of “like a fox.” He’s made a huge success of the ODIN—short for Open Discovery Institute and inspired by the Norse god—the combination lab and mail-order business he founded in 2013 to make DIY bio accessible to everyone. The ODIN sells pre-engineered ($80) online, along with DIY ($150), ($160), something called the ($349), and a complete ($999) stocked with pipettes, tubes, scales, antibiotics, agar, light-activated bacteria, bioluminescent bacteria, Crispr, and a PCR machine, which makes copies of DNA through polymerase chain reaction. The ODIN’s clients include community colleges, high school kids, and mysterious individuals.

All ODIN kits are designed to engineer bacteria or yeast, the cheapest and simplest critters to work with, and they focus on obvious visuals like GFP. They are the Easy-Bake Ovens of genetic engineering. They offer quick success to rank amateurs like me and a tantalizing taste of the endless possibilities. Where we take it from there is up to us.Ìę

Zayner and his fellow biohackers are big on genetic freedom. Everything your body makes or does is encoded by a gene. And the more we learn about the gen­etic basis of human processes—from disease and life expectancy to athletic and mental performance—the closer we get to being able to reprogram our bodies. “I think we could do substantial changes to ourselves right now,” Zayner says. “You could go a little more crazy than scientists have been willing to let on.”

For years there have been rumors that people already are. Gene doping, as it’s called, could theoretically give anybody the ability to burn oxygen like a Tibetan mountaineer, to build muscle like LeBron James, and to never get heart disease. It’s all in the genes. It’s in the hard work and good habits, too, but without certain tools you can only go so far. And in either the shady present or the not so distant future, we’ll all have access to those tools, which Zayner finds pretty exciting. “This is the first time in human history that we’re no longer stuck with the genes we had at birth. It fucking blows your mind.”

He sees no reason to let corporations and ivory-tower institutions have all the fun. Hence the Easy-Bake Ovens. Give a man a cookie and he eats for a day. Teach a man to cook and you’ve stolen fire from the gods.

Josiah Zayner. The name screams Marvel Comics. The backstory, too: Country childhood on an Indiana farm. Pentecostal parents. (His brothers are Micah, Zachariah, and Jedediah; the dog was named Jeremiah.) Missionary in Peru. Teenage member of the late-nineties hacker collective Legions of the Underground. Biophysics Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Synthetic-biology fellowship at . Then something goes horribly wrong.

In Zayner’s case, there was no lab explosion. No rampaging through the streets of Mountain View, paralyzing Google employees with jellyfish tentacles sprouting from his back. No, what went wrong is that Zayner discovered that NASA was deadly dull. Empty offices. Stultifying bureaucracy. A supervisor who actually told him to spend less time in the lab. Not the place for someone who wanted to change the universe. So he did what any budding superhero would do: he went rogue.

As his two-year NASA fellowship neared its end in 2015, Zayner launched an Indiegogo campaign offering contributors their own DIY gene-editing kit. He’d learned just enough while getting his Ph.D. to realize that genetic engineering was way more accessible than most people knew, and he couldn’t wait to liberate it from the elite labs he loathed and bring it to the people, because, as he told me, “I was always that poor-as-dirt kid dreaming that he could do some great experiment.” The pitch video featured shots of Zayner swigging from a flask at the lab bench (his kitchen counter) while the voiceover asked, “If you had access to cutting-edge synthetic­biology tools, what would you create?” The campaign raised more than $70,000.Ìę

It also freaked out critics. “Zayner’s campaign is worrisome because it does not seem to comply with the DIYbio.org code of conduct,” Todd Kuiken, a scholar in the at North Carolina State University, wrote in Nature in 2016. He was referring to the nonprofit founded in 2008 to foster safe practices in DIY biology. For example, he noted, “The video that accompanies his campaign zooms in on petri dishes containing samples that are stored next to food in a refrigerator.” Kuiken also believes there needs to be a “robust public dialogue” about the responsible use of Crispr.Ìę

The refrigerator comment still annoys Zayner. “So are you saying that being able to do science is a class thing? Only people who can afford second fridges should do science?” But he got his act together and bought another fridge, in part because he was already under scrutiny from the FDA, which had threatened to seize his equipment because of his Internet sales. Zayner has also been warned of possible prosecution by officials in Germany, where biohacking is banned. But the practice is perfectly legal throughout the United States, mostly because it has never occurred to legislators to outlaw such a thing, and the ODIN is doing well. Zayner sells thousands of gene-editing kits globally every year, and he expects to gross at least $400,000 in 2017. The world wants this.

The workday at the ODIN starts late-morning. One employee is multi-tasking, packing kits for the day’s orders while he propagates new batches of microbes. Zayner’s brother Micah is scarfing Chinese takeout on the couch. The air is redolent with the funk of E. coli bacteria and young male. Zayner solders new wiring onto used PCR machines (“There are few things I’m one of the world’s leading experts on, but finding functional lab equipment on eBay is one of them,” he says) while guiding me through an attempt to engineer antibiotic resistance into E. coli using Crispr. Despite the punk trappings, Zayner is gentle, kind, and a very good teacher.

We rehydrate some dried E. coli in a test tube, pour it into a petri plate containing nutrients, and set it aside overnight. In the morning, we have a flourishing colony of fuzzy white bacteria. We scrape it up, divide it into two plastic tubes of liquid, and to one tube add a few drops of Crispr programmed to change a single A to a C, which will flip the electrical charge of a protein in the bacteria from positive to negative at the point where streptomycin normally attacks it, repelling the antibiotic molecules. Then we pour the two batches onto fresh agar plates laced with streptomycin and incubate everything at 99 degrees for 24 hours.Ìę

The next day, I pull our agar plates out of the incubator and examine them. Eureka! The normal bacteria is stone-cold dead. But the plate with the modified bacteria is studded with survivor colonies. We’ve created GMOs in a day. They and their trillions of descendants will be immune to streptomycin.

Or they would have been if we hadn’t killed the whole colony with bleach and thrown it in the trash. As crazy as our creation sounds, it turns out that it was pretty innocuous. This particular version of antibiotic resistance is so simple—just a single changed letter of DNA—that bacteria come up with it on their own all the time. We weren’t introducing anything the world hadn’t seen before, and anyway our weak lab strain was about as dangerous as a cocker spaniel. Yet I can’t help but wonder about all the biohackers out there who aren’t bleaching their experiments. What could the wrong person do with this knowledge?Ìę

That’s what I asked Ed You, the biological-countermeasures specialist at the FBI’s . You is the government’s point person on bioweapons; it’s his job to worry about this stuff, but he had bigger things on his mind than the ODIN. “The most dangerous bioterrorist out there is Mother Nature,” he told me over the phone. “We’re getting hit with emerging and reemerging infectious diseases all the time. Bird flu, MERS, SARS, Zika, West Nile. If you think about a clear and present danger, it’s that. So we absolutely need the innovation that comes from the life sciences, from DIY bio, to make sure we develop the right counters.”

Wait a minute, I said. You actually want them out there tinkering? Yes, he replied. “Biology is proliferating quickly, but how do we address security in a way that doesn’t handicap forward progress? If you shut down DIY bio, then you run a completely different national-security problem. If you stifle innovation, then you’re going to be missing out on opportunities to come up with new vaccines, new biodefense, new countermeasures, new businesses. And if that happens, then you’ve developed a whole different kind of vulnerability.”

You pointed out that the field was moving so fast that agents could never keep up with the pace of the advances. Instead, he’s cultivated a neighborhood-watch mentality among the country’s scientists and biohackers. “They’re best positioned to see where the advances are coming from,” he said. “If someone like Josiah gets a suspicious order of some kind, he knows that he’s got a local coordinator in the San Francisco field office he can contact.”

It all sounded strangely progressive for a bunch of G-men, but every expert I consulted told me that they had no concerns about Zayner. Forget the garagistas, they told me; worry about the academics. Many labs now have the technology and know-how to make some fearsome beasties. Last year, a scientist in Canada shocked the world when he managed to bring to life horsepox, a smallpox cousin that went extinct in the 1980s, by synthesizing its DNA from a sequence stored in a computer database. Are we entering a new era of bioterror?

Probably not, Zayner told me. “Let’s imagine you’re the worst person in the world and you want to hurt people with biologicals. First you have to have the knowledge. Then you have to have the facility. Then you have to think about how it’s going to spread. It would be an astounding feat. Could you kill one or two people? Sure. But you can do that with a fucking kitchen knife.”

That night, Zayner and I celebrate our successful biohack over pig-ear fries and sake at a Korean joint before heading over to , a communal biohacker space where he occasionally teaches. Amid the lab benches and anarchist posters are shelves of strange plants under grow lights and a pig heart in a vat. One woman is attempting to create vegan cheese by inserting cow milk-producing genes into yeast, while another man is quietly sequencing the DNA of the mushrooms he collects in Mexico each summer. A small team are hard at work designing an organism that can produce human insulin. In keeping with the hacker ethos, they will gift it to the world open-source.

There are dozens of biohacker enclaves like this around the globe, such as in Brooklyn, New York, where hipsters can take Crispr classes and attend Biohacker Boot Camp. The U.S. has been the hub, but now Europe is coming on strong. DIYbio.org has nearly 5,000 members in its Google Group and boasts 99 local chapters, from Madison to Mumbai. Most biohackers never get beyond simple experiments with microbes, but a few have taken it further. David Ishee, a dog breeder in Mississippi, is editing heritable diseases out of his dalmatians. Sebas­tian Cocioba, a plant hacker in New York, engineered a pioneering blue rose gene, using a DNA sequence from a tropical clam that produces an intensely blue protein, as well as a “beefsteak” tomato that produces cow protein in its flesh. Cocioba, who operates out of his 12th-floor apartment in Long Island City, is so skilled that he has been asked by MIT to spearhead a top-secret flower project, the details of which can’t be shared except to say that in a few years it will capture the world’s attention.

And what about people? I ask. How long before cyclists start giving themselves the EPO gene to produce more red blood cells, or lifters start playing around with the gene for human growth factor?

Zayner laughs. “Dude, either people are already doing that shit, or it’s going to start immediately. I’d be very surprised if there isn’t somebody out there doing it already. It’s so hard to test for. What are you going to do, look for DNA? If a professional athlete came to me right now and said, ‘I’ll give you $100,000 to make me a piece of DNA,’ I’d be like, ‘Hell yeah.’ ”Ìę

Surprisingly, this is perfectly legal, though it’s long been banned by sporting organizations. Athletes and life-extension buffs have been sniffing around gene-therapy clinics for years, ever since pioneering physiologist Lee Sweeney, from the University of Pennsylvania, showed that mice injected with the gene IGF-1, or insulin-like growth factor, significantly increased their muscle mass. Sweeney has also shown that mice injected with endurance genes were able to run 70 percent farther on the wheel than their unmodified peers, and that couch-potato mice ran 44 percent farther.Ìę

Just this June, a team of U.S. and Israeli scientists announced the discovery of a rare genetic mutation linked to ten years of extra longevity in men. And in 2015, Liz Parrish, the CEO of the startup BioViva, announced that she was the first person to attempt to reverse her own aging with gene therapy. “I am patient zero,” she wrote on Reddit. “I will be 45 in January. I have aging as a disease.” Parrish traveled to a clinic in Colombia (the therapy isn’t approved in the U.S.) and received injections of one gene to extend the lifespan of her individual cells and another to block myostatin, the hormone that regulates muscle deterioration.Ìę

Myostatin is the holy grail of potential dopers who believe they can both arrest the natural deterioration of muscle and build more in their youth. Muscle is metabolically expensive to maintain, so myostatin’s job is to stop new muscle from being made once you’ve got enough and to atrophy muscle you aren’t using. You can find images online of dogs, cows, and people with a rare mutation that shuts down the myostatin gene and turns them into Incredible Hulks. Scientists in China recently used Crispr to turn off the myostatin gene in two beagles. The dogs look healthy, happy—and ripped.Ìę

But I’m less interested in what athletes are doing than in something Zayner said to me on my first day in the lab: This is the first time in history that we’re no longer stuck with the genes we had at birth. If Zayner has his way, we’ll all be sculpting our own evolution.

Let’s be clear: »ćŽÇČÔ’t try this at home! Although hundreds of gene-therapy trials are under way, and many experts believe they will eventually transform almost every aspect of human health, few have been proven safe. When you start scrambling your DNA, very bad things can happen. You can get cancer. Your immune system can attack the unfamiliar DNA, as happened when an 18-year-old with a rare metabolic disorder died during a University of Pennsylvania gene-therapy trial in 1999.

But sick people won’t wait for years of trials, Zayner says. He hears regularly from people willing to roll the dice. He’s been consulting pro bono for a man using Crispr to treat his own Huntington’s disease and another who is treating his 32-year-old wife’s advanced lung carcinoma with genet­ically engineered DNA vaccines. “A lot of people contact me with stuff like that—‘I’m suffering. Can you help?’ ”

Zayner sticks to the free advice, helping people figure out the sequence of the DNA they need without supplying anything himself, but he knows where this is headed. “The only thing holding people back is morality. I have no doubt there are places in Singapore or Thailand or the Philippines doing it. They could totally create individualized cancer treatments right now. Clinics will pop up. You’ll go to shops in the back alleys of Bangkok and hand $10,000 to a synthetic biologist and he’ll take a blood sample and make you up a vaccine in a couple of days.”

I’m flashing back to Blade Runner’s replicant shops—“I just do eyes”—when Zayner gets a funny smile and cocks his head. “Want to try something kind of creepy I’ve been thinking about?”

For our final piece of conceptual art, Zayner and I swab the crevices of our skin and inside our mouths with Q-tips and swirl the gunk into tubes of distilled water. We spread the contents over agar plates and incubate them overnight.

The next morning, Josiahthing is nearly barren, but Rowanthing is crawling with cells. “Look at those big fat yeasties!” Zayner mutters with envy. All I can think is, if this works, it will give new meaning to the term homebrew.

We scrape up some Josiahthing and Rowan­thing and put each in its own micro­centrifuge tube with some chemicals that soften up cell walls so new DNA can get inside. We pipette ten microliters of the jellyfish DNA into each tube, shake them up, let them sit for a few hours, then pour them across new agar plates and cross our fingers. “If this actually works, I might make it a kit,” Zayner muses.

By then I have to catch a flight home, so I tape up my petri plate and pack it, along with yellow-tint glasses and a blue LED, which makes the fluorescence easier to see. TSA doesn’t bat an eye.

The next day I get an e-mail from Zayner: “Any growth on that plate?”

“Yep! Four or five nice, puffy little white colonies.”

“Put on the glasses and shine blue light on them. Do they glow?”

I don the glasses and hit the plate with the blue LED. There are a dozen tiny colonies that stay dull under the light, but there are also five large conical colonies fluorescing like the Green Goblin. “Totally!” I write back, and send a photo.

“Amazing! So cool! So jealous. Mine didn’t work.”

I feel as proud as Victor Frankenstein. I’ve created life from my own spit. In the following weeks, Rowanthing develops an apex so green you »ćŽÇČÔ’t even need the glasses to see it. Whatever it is, it’s new to this planet, and it’s burbling away in my basement, waiting to meet the world.

Contributing editor Rowan Jacobsen () is a at MIT. Ìę() is anÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌęcontributing photographer.

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In Mississippi, people tweet about cake and cookies an awful lot; in Colorado, it’s noodles. In Mississippi, the most-tweeted activity is eating; in Colorado, it’s running, skiing, hiking, snowboarding, and biking, in that order. In other words, the two states fall on opposite ends of the behavior spectrum. If you were to assign a caloric value to every food mentioned in every tweet by the citizens of the United States and a calories-burned value to every activity, and then totaled them up, you would find that Colorado tweets the best caloric ratio in the country and Mississippi the worst.

Sure, you’d be forgiven for doubting people’s honesty on Twitter. On those rare occasions when I destroy an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s, I most assuredly do not tweet about it. Likewise, I »ćŽÇČÔ’t reach for my phone every time I strap on a pair of skis.

And yet there’s this: Mississippi has the in the country and . Mississippi has the ; Colorado has the lowest. Mississippi has the in the country; Colorado is near the top. Perhaps we are being more honest on social media than we think. And perhaps social media has more to tell us about the state of the country than we realize.

That’s the proposition of Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, who co-direct the University of Vermont’s , a warren of whiteboards and grad students in a handsome brick building near the shores of Lake Champlain. Dodds and Danforth are applied mathematicians, but they would make a pretty good comedy duo. When I stopped by the lab recently, both were in running clothes and cracking jokes. They have an abundance of curls between them and the wiry energy of chronic thinkers. They came to UVM in 2006 to start the , which crunches big numbers from big systems and looks for patterns. Out of that, they hatched the Computational Story Lab, which sifts through some of that public data to discern the stories we’re telling ourselves. “It took us a while to come up with the name,” Dodds told me as we shotgunned espresso and gazed into his MacBook. “We were going to be the Department of Recreational Truth.”

This year, they teamed up with their PhD student Andy Reagan to launch the , an online tool that uses tweets to compute the calories in and calories out for every state. It’s no mere party trick; the Story Labbers believe the Lexicocalorimeter has important advantages over slower, more traditional methods of gathering health data. “We »ćŽÇČÔ’t have to wait to look at statistics at the end of the year,” Danforth says. “This sort of data is available every day. We can tell if a public health campaign to invest in school nutrition is changing the way people talk about food or engage in activities.” For example, what if larger than 16 ounces had gone through in New York? Using traditional surveys and hospital reports, it would have taken years to measure the impact. But if the Lexicocalorimeter was tuned finely enough to accurately measure the changes in soda habits by neighborhood, then public health officials could use it to target investments and adjust the campaign to reduce obesity far more effectively.

Playing around with the Lexicocalorimeter is illuminating and occasionally horrifying—a glimpse of the unvarnished American character. Click on a state, and it displays the 200 words that made the biggest difference in that state’s calorie counts. (#48 in caloric balance), everybody’s eating chocolate, cookies, shrimp, and cake. Everybody’s eating, period. It’s one of the only activities frequently mentioned. In California (#12), they dance, run, hike, and bike, but they rarely sit or lie down. In my home state of , the food on the tip of everybody’s thumbs is bacon, which is probably a big part of why we consume slightly more calories than the average state. (In our defense, we also spend an inordinate amount of time tweeting about beets, broccoli, and bananas.) Despite that, we are fairly exercise obsessed, with—you guessed it—skiing leading the way. () All this gives us the third-best caloric ratio in the nation, behind Colorado and Wyoming. And sure enough, the health numbers match: We have some of the lowest rates of diabetes and obesity and one of the highest life expectancies.

In general, all states are more alike than we might like to believe. “Watching TV or movie” is the most-tweeted activity for every single state in the union, and “pizza” is the most-tweeted food for every state except Wyoming (cookies) and Mississippi (ice cream). Where a state’s individual character really shines is in the foods and activities mentioned far more or less than average. Texas (#36) can’t stop tweeting about doughnuts; Maine (#5) is hooked on lobster. In activities, the mountain states do a lot of running, the South is a solid block of eating, New Jersey is all about “getting my nails done,” and Delaware distinguishes itself with “talking on the phone.”

Dodds and Danforth acknowledge their methods are not perfect. The butter on the lobster doesn’t get counted. There’s no way of calculating if somebody ran one mile or ten. But when you’re talking tens of millions of tweets per day over the full range of demographics, the inaccuracies even out—at least as much as they do compared to the other, equally flawed ways of measuring society’s eating and exercising habits. As Dodds points out, the numbers speak for themselves: The Lexicocalorimeter correlates extremely well with rates of diabetes and obesity. “The ridiculous thing about this,” he says, “is that it works.”

We live in strange times. “People leave so much of their id on the web,” Danforth marveled to me, “and they share it openly. That’s enabled a whole host of new instruments to try to understand what’s predictable about our behavior. And it turns out a lot is. As much as we think we’re really complex, people have very structured ways of behaving. The way we move around the earth is very predictable. The way we use language is very predictable.”

For example, Barack Obama’s approval ratings over his presidency strongly correlate with the sentiment of tweets about him three months in advance of the approval polls. In other words, if you’d been a savvy politico with a tool for measuring tweets, you’d have had valuable intel months ahead of anyone else. “It’s an amazing time in social science because of the data available,” Dodds says. “It’s opened up a window that we absolutely did not have access to before.”

That’s the idea behind the UVM team’s , which surveys the country’s tweets each day and calculates a happiness score for each. The team had people rate 10,000 words on a happiness scale of one (sad) to nine (happy). Most words are neutral. The are “laughter” (8.50), “happiness” (8.44), and “love” (8.42). “Hahaha” gets a 7.94, putting it a bit higher than “kisses” (7.74). The biggest negatives are “terrorist” (1.30), “suicide” (1.30), and “rape” (1.44). “Shit” gets a 2.50, “bitch” a 3.14, and “fuck” a surprisingly respectable 4.14. Fuck yeah! “Swearing is really important,” Dodds says.

All this adds up to a tracking the nation’s mood from 2009 (the fledging of Twitter) to the present. “One of our goals was to provide a snapshot of the public’s response to something,” Danforth explained, “the texture of the day.” Most regular days fall into a narrow band with an average happiness level around six, though Saturdays are consistently the happiest days of the week and Tuesdays the grumpiest. There’s also a daily pattern, with happiness levels soaring around 5 and 6 a.m., when we’re all newly optimistic about the day, and then plunging throughout the morning and evening as reality sets in, reaching a trough of despair around 11 p.m. “The wheels kind of come off,” says Dodds. “We call it the daily unraveling of the human mind.”

You can also . The happiest state is—unsurprisingly—Hawaii. The bottom dwellers are, once again, Mississippi and Louisiana, though Delaware gets a surprising bronze for melancholy. The West is happy, both coastal and mountains, while the South and Midwest are unhappy. Only Tennessee bucks the trend, an island of smiles in a sea of Southern gloom.

The happiest day of the year is always Christmas, when the Hedonometer spikes as words like “Christmas,” “happy,” “family,” and “love” flood the ether. The five unhappiest days since 2009: the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Boston Marathon bombings, the Orlando nightclub attack, the shooting of Dallas police officers, and the election of Donald Trump.

National happiness is not consistent. We were quite happy from 2009 to 2011, despite the Great Recession. Then our mood darkened from 2011 to 2014, but we came out of it: The Hedonometer surged! The year 2015 was a relatively joyful one, and the good feelings kept going in 2016—until the election took over. Since then, signs have been growing that something terrible is happening to the American psyche. We’ve never been so erratic, with the normally smooth blips of the Hedonometer starting to twitch like someone failing a lie-detector test. And as of this writing, we’re sinking into an unprecedented malaise.

That is, if you believe the Hedonometer. On the face of it, measuring something as intangible as happiness sounds absurd. Yet, as with the Lexicocalorimeter, the Hedonometer matches “real world” measures such as the (which polls people on things like life satisfaction and personal health) and the (which surveys rates of homicides, violent crime, and incarceration).

History is full of concepts—from longitude to time—that seemed imprecise until the right instrument came along. Even temperature, which to us seems objective, was considered unmeasurable for centuries. “People thought you couldn’t do it,” Dodds says. “Because it’s too multifaceted, and the first thermometers were awful.” But eventually our instruments improved.

Dodds and Danforth see no reason why happiness can’t also be quantifiable. “We’re carrying around these phones that are sensing so much of our behavior,” says Danforth. “Tone of voice. Who we talk to. The types of words we use. We’re trying to push on a few areas and see what’s predictable, both on the population scale and for individuals.” And what they’re finding is that our phones have become surprisingly good instruments for taking our emotional temperatures. “Can we tell you’re about to experience an episode of depression based on your social media behavior? Maybe your friends can’t see it, maybe you »ćŽÇČÔ’t even realize it, but you’ve started to communicate with a smaller group socially, or you’re not moving around the earth as much.”

By analyzing the tweets of both depressed and healthy individuals, the Story Lab has developed algorithms that can accurately identify depression months before actual diagnoses by mental health practitioners. They’ve even done it with Instagram, discovering that depressed individuals are more likely to post photos that are bluer, grayer, and darker. Their method outperformed professional practitioners at identifying previously undiagnosed depression. The lab is now partnering with a psychiatrist at UVM who hopes to use the algorithm to search the social media history of ER visitors (who give their consent) to predict suicidal behavior.

One of the clearest signs that the Hedonometer is on to something is how well it works with media besides Twitter. The Story Lab has analyzed the words in 10,000 books and 1,000 movie scripts, and it accurately sorts the feel-goods from the nihilists. , powered by words like love, smiles, wedding, beautiful, and, yes, sex. At the bottom of the list we have grim fare like Commando, Day of the Dead, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Omega Man.

Yet for grimness, none of those can touch șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s masterpiece of masochism, “Bury My Pride at Wounded Knees,” by Mark Jenkins, about competing in the 2010 Death Race. I asked Reagan, Dodds, and Danforth to take the emotional temperature of 49 , which run the gamut from Steve Rinella’s joyful paean to Argentinian steak (“Me, Myself, and Ribeye”) to Jenkins’ mudfest, which begins “I unintentionally pitchfork a clod of manure into my mouth” and goes downhill from there.

Beyond a piece’s overall happiness score, the Hedonometer allows us to chart its emotional journey. Here’s “,” perhaps the ultimate șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű classic, which starts off happy (Everest adventure!), plunges about a third of the way through the story as Krakauer reaches the perilous Lhotse Face (“It was here that we had our first encounter with death on the mountain”), soars at the halfway point (summit!), and then tanks far and fast as storms move in, mistakes are made, and people die.

Not only does the fall-rise-fall emotional arc of “Into Thin Air” nicely mirror the Himalayas, but it also happens to be a good example of a classic narrative arc. Riffing off on the shapes of archetypal stories, the Story Labbers came up with that stories tend to follow: Rags-to-Riches (rise), Tragedy (fall), Man-in-a-Hole (fall-rise), Icarus (rise-fall), Cinderella (rise-fall-rise), and Oedipus (fall-rise-fall). Encouragingly, an analysis of the bestseller lists found that the more complex narratives (Cinderella and Oedipus) tend to sell better than the simpler ones.

This fall, the UVM team will be working on teasing even more stories out of the data we share: Can financial crashes be predicted ahead of time? When does fake news trump real news? How does a society settle on the story it tells about itself? The questions are far from trivial. “Humans are storytelling organisms,” Dodds says. It’s how we learn who we are. As the Story Lab gets even better at finding the signals in our noise, let’s hope we like what we discover.

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Over the past two years,Ìęthe worst thing that has ever happened to the oceans on humans’Ìę10,000-year watchÌęhas been unfolding in the tropics—and if not for one fanatical diver and his outrageous project, we would have mostly missed it.

I first clued in on November 2, 2015, when the New York Times ran a story titled “” that featured a jaw-dropping photo of a coral reef viewed from the waterline. In intense colors and depth of field, it showed a tree-topped cliff island in American Samoa surrounded by bleached elkhorn coral in all directions. I’d never seen a photo that captured so much reef in one hypersharp imageÌęor that kicked you in the gut with so much bleaching, and it was all the more moving for the accompanying article, which explained that climate change and an El Niño weather cycle had combined to bring mind-boggling warmth to the Pacific, which had triggered the worst mass-bleaching event in history.

Corals are tiny, anemone-like, reef-building animals that derive much of their nourishment and color from symbiotic algae that live on their surfaces. But when temperatures rise too high, the algae turn toxic, and the corals must eject them to survive. Without the algae, the corals bleach bone-white and begin to starve. If water temperatures soon return to normal, the corals can recruit new algae and recover, but if not, they die within months. It takes water temperatures only one degree CelsiusÌęabove the average monthly maximum to trigger bleaching. Four weeks of that and serious bleaching sets in. Eight weeks (or fewer in even warmer water) and mortality begins.

The credit on the Times photo said XL Catlin Seaview Survey. I didn’t think much about it until a new Times story in April 2016Ìę: aÌęsea turtle swimming forlornly over a vast bone field of bleached staghorn, nothing living in sight. Credit: XL Catlin Seaview Survey.

The environmental news site Grist featuring sickening photos of dead coral covered in brown ooze on the Great Barrier Reef. Another site displayed a shot of a diver photographing dead coral with some crazy-looking camera in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. Then the same diver shooting a killing field off Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, and in New Caledonia, Florida, Indonesia, and the Maldives. Every time, the shots were breathtaking and deeply disturbing, and every time, the credit said XL Catlin Seaview Survey.

What on earth is the XL Catlin Seaview Survey? We all get to find outÌęonÌęJanuary 21, becauseÌęit’s the subject ofÌę, a new film by Jeff Orlowski, ofÌęChasing IceÌęfame, that’sÌępremiering at the Sundance Film Festival. The film charts the survey’s efforts to document the world’s reefs in a series of unprecedented words, maps, photos, and eye-popping 360-degree virtual dives.

The diver in all those shots is Richard Vevers,Ìęfounder of the survey. Vevers is a tough guy to get ahold of, but I tracked him down in Australia as he was returning from two weeks diving and filming at Raja Ampat, Indonesia, one of the world’s last pristine reefs. “It was a reward to myself,” he said, almost apologetically. “For the last year and a half, I’ve been chasing around the world looking at dead things, and I needed to see something living. It was quite refreshing to see what we’re actually doing this for.”

Vevers had an unlikely transformation from Don Draper to Jacques Cousteau. After ten years as an ad man in London, he burned out, traveled the world, wound up in Australia, and trained himself to be one of the world’s top underwater photographers. Through his work, he became aware that coral reefs were the most imperiled ecosystems on earth, which is extremely bad news, because they are one of the most important. They support more than a million species—one quarter of everything in the ocean—on less than 0.1 percentÌęof the earth’s territory. When they go, so do those species, as well as the 500 million people who depend on reefs for their livelihoods.

Unfortunately, reefs get very little attention. “A lot of the issues were basically advertising issues,”ÌęVevers said. “Because what happens underwater is out of sight and out of mind. So I thought, let’s get together my old advertising friends and set up a nonprofit with the mission of revealing the oceans.”

The Ocean Agency was born in 2010. Vevers designed a with three extreme wide-angle lenses that could take high-resolution 360-degree images. At a barbecue in Sydney, he met a representative from XL Catlin, a reinsurance company, which offered to fund the entire project on the condition that it be a scientific survey. So Vevers approached Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the University of Queensland’s leading coral reef scientist, whose eyes lit up. There was no comprehensive survey of coral reefs, just small-scale local surveys that all used different methodologies. Hoegh-Guldberg told Vevers that the XL Catlin Survey could revolutionize the monitoring of coral reefs.

In 2012, they tackled the Great Barrier Reef, using a protocol developed by Hoegh-Guldberg. They photographed 150 kilometers of reef, taking a 360-degree image every two meters. Soon they had 105,000 images of the Great Barrier Reef, all GPS- and directionally located so the same photos could be taken in the future. They developed image-recognition software that could identify the species in each photo as accurately as a marine biologist, but 50 times faster. They made the entire database freely available online. And then they expanded their project to reefs worldwide.

This was no snorkel-tour joyride. Many of the world’s inshore reefs have already been hammered by boaters and pollution, so the Catlin team focused on remote, outer reefs, and that meant two-week trips on a live-aboard boat, often in heavy seas. The five-person diving team would wake at 5:30 a.m., prep their cameras, pack a lunch, and head out on small tenders for the day. At each site, two divers would enter the water while two other scientists wrestled the 150-pound camera and a second support scooter into the water.

They were rarely alone. At these remote sites, the marine life had rarely seen a human, and it was engrossed. “As soon as you jump in the water, the sharks just fly at you,” Vevers told me with a chuckle. “Big silver-tip sharks, over two meters, and they turn just at the last minute. You can actually hear the divers underwater squealing.”

The work was treacherous. Divers could be caught in underwater waterfalls, as massive amounts of water poured off a reef with the tide, or in currents that sucked them into the reefs. They always trailed surface buoys that could be tracked by the tender. They would do three dives, each 45 minutes long, returning to the main boat late in the day. “That’s when the work really begins,”Ìęsaid Vevers. There was data to be downloaded, discs to be cleared, batteries to be charged. They’d collapse in their bunks and do it all over again.ÌęThey had no way of knowing that they were taking the final shots of a world no one will ever see again.

In 2013, on a long flight, Vevers watched Jeff Orlowski’s film Chasing Ice, which chronicles the photographer James Balog’s efforts to capture receding glaciers. “I called Jeff as soon as we landed,” Vevers said. “I felt like we had very similar projects. Coral reefs seemed like such a logical follow-up. We met a couple of times, and then Jeff decided to do a film.”

At the time, it wasn’t certain that Chasing Coral would include any images of mass bleaching, something Vevers himself had rarely seen.

Then, in 2014, his life changed forever. The Catlin team was in American Samoa with Orlowski’s film crew to revisit a reef they’d shot a few months earlier. It had been extremely healthy, but there were rumors that it was starting to bleach, so Vevers returned to check it out. “I jumped in the water, and everything was bright white as far as the eye could see. That’s when it dawned on me how quickly this happens and how potentially devastating it could be for coral reefs globally.”ÌęThe American Samoa reef was known to be resilient. It had bleached during previous mass-bleaching events, then quickly bounced back as temperatures cooled. So a few months later, Vevers again returned to document the recovery. “It was completely dead,” he recalled. “This time, it didn’t bounce back.” The Catlin team released some shocking images to the media, and for the first time, the term mass-bleaching entered the public discourse.

“We realized we were the only team documenting this event globally, and we’d been there from the start, and we were in a unique position to tell the story.”ÌęAnd the Chasing Coral team was with them all the way, shooting hundreds of hours of footage.

Working with Mark Eakin, the Coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program, , the XL Catlin team transformed into a rapid-response squad. Within days of getting an alert from Eakin, they’d grab their cameras and hop on a plane. They shot in Hawaii, Fiji, Taiwan, Maldives, Okinawa, New Caledonia, and the Great Barrier Reef.

Never before had the world seen what massive bleaching really looked like. “Because we’ve got the 360-degree cameras, it allows us to take the shots that really show the scale,” Vevers explains. “Generally it’s been hard to get news coverage of bleaching because there hasn’t been good imagery to back up the story.”

It was at Lizard Island, on the far north of the Great Barrier Reef, that Vevers received his worst shock. “It’s a beautiful island,”ÌęVevers said, “a real hub for science with a great coral cove, and it had a beautiful, healthy reef. It was my favorite spot in the world.”ÌęThe team had already photographed Lizard Island at the height of the bleaching, but Vevers returned with a second expedition four weeks later. “I jumped in the water, and I was absolutely shocked by what I saw. The hard corals looked like they’d been dead for years. . The soft corals were hanging down, and they were rotting. Just falling apart and literally dripping off the reef. It was shocking enough to see that transformation from healthy to dead in such a short time, but then when I got out of the water, I realized that I absolutely stank of rotting animals. I’d never heard of that, and I wasn’t expecting it. Often you look at a reef and it’s like looking at a garden, and it’s hard to appreciate that these are all animals. So when you smell it, that’s when the scale of the tragedy really hits home.”

For those of us who can’t smell it, numbers should suffice. . Some previously pristine reefs in the South Pacific lost almost everything. So far, about 20 percent of the world’s reefs have died during this bleaching event. And it isn’t over yet. The oceans are so hot, they no longer need an El Niño to kill coral. “The models indicate that we will see the return of bleaching in the South Pacific soon,”ÌęNOAA’s Mark Eakin told me, “along with a possibility of bleaching in both the eastern and western parts of the Indian Ocean.”ÌęNOAA forecasts a 90-percent chance of serious bleaching across that region by March.

“CO2 levels are already higher than corals can tolerate,”ÌęEakin confirmed to me. Our only chance, he explained, is to reduce emissions to zero and then to start removing heat-trapping gases from the atmosphere. “That process needs to start very soon and be very fast,”Ìęhe said. “Unfortunately, all indications are that it will happen much slower than needed.”

On the off chance that happens fast enough, 90 percent of the world’s reefs will still die, but there will be that other 10 percent. Maybe they’re in deeper spots that will remain just cool enough, or maybe they have corals that adapt particularly well. With his documentation of the mass bleaching nearly complete, Vevers is embarking on a new mission to survey—and save—those last refuges. With time, and a stable planet, they could repopulate the world’s oceans.

It sounds like a long shot, but Vevers likes to cite another long shot. In 1966, the humpback whale population was down to 5,000 individuals, just 4 percent of their original numbers. Most observers were getting ready to write their obituary. But then we stopped killing them, and they recovered better than anyone predicted. “I was expecting humpback whale numbers to be up 20 or 30 percent,”ÌęVevers wrote on his blog. “However, their recovery has been far more impressive than I expected. There are now around 80,000 individuals (65 percent of their original numbers) and their numbers are still improving at about 8 percent per year. That’s phenomenal recovery. There is no reason to think an ecosystem, like coral reefs, can’t bounce back in the same way.”

That’s an inspiring vision, but it only comes true, as Mark Eakin implies, if we bite the bullet right now. That means stopping emissions and beginning to sequester carbon now. It means taking a pass on that hamburger and munching a mushroom patty today. And stepping away from your car, hopping on your bike, and pedaling your ass off. Today.Ìę

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