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We Asked an AI Chatbot How to Fight the Extinction Crisis

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Thursday, June 1, 2023

When a certain search engine recently asked me to test out its new artificial intelligence chatbot, I thought “How bad will this be?” After all, tech companies love to position their AI systems as solutions, but many experts fear they will result in waves of bad data and disinformation. That’s not going to help a world plagued by runaway climate change and an extinction crisis that threatens to push a million species into oblivion. But at the same time, artificial intelligence and machine learning have some truly wonderful implications for conservation — anything that speeds up data analysis is welcome, for example. Could that potential benefit carry over to a chatbot designed to spit out easy answers to users’ questions? I wanted to see how good the systems really are, so I gave it a test — I asked the chatbot how to solve the extinction crisis. No small task. So here they are: the chatbot’s 10 ways to fight the extinction crisis (in italics), along with my interpretation and response. 1. Reduce your consumption of meat and animal products. Animal agriculture is a major driver of habitat loss, deforestation and climate change. By eating less meat and more plant-based foods, you can help to reduce the impact of your diet on the environment. A surprisingly strong start right out of the gate. Animal agriculture is one of the leading factors in the extinction crisis, and while I wouldn’t necessarily have put this at number one, it certainly deserves to be in the top three. Good job, chatbot. 2. Support sustainable farming practices. When you buy food, choose products that were grown or raised using sustainable methods. This helps to protect wildlife habitat and reduce pollution. This is vague and possibly redundant, but it’s useful for the chatbot to lay out causality. Unsustainable farming does destroy habitat and create enormous pollution, often enough to be seen from space. But what “sustainable” methods is it recommending, and how is this recommendation actionable? At the very least consumers should look for the USDA Organic label, but there are a host of other labels out there, some of which are more misleading than others. (Hmm, could be worth digging into that in a future article. Thanks for the idea, chatbot.) 3. Get involved in local conservation efforts. There are many ways to get involved in conservation efforts in your community. You can volunteer for a local environmental organization, donate to conservation groups, or simply spread the word about the importance of protecting wildlife. Fair enough. Local efforts can do a lot to benefit native or migratory species, but a vague reference to “many ways” doesn’t provide any actionable ideas or talk about why local efforts matters. That’s important, since to most people extinction feels like something that happens half a world away, not in their own backyards. 4. Advocate for environmental policies. Contact your elected officials and let them know that you support policies that protect wildlife and the environment. Good advice, chatbot, but the devil’s in the details: What are those policies? Here in the United States, it’s a good idea to actively call for support of the Endangered Species Act, which is chronically underfunded and under threat. There are other regulations and policies — both existing and proposed — that will benefit wildlife, but people will need to do their own digging to find out what those are. (Our suggestion: Start by calling for support for the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act.) 5. Reduce your energy consumption. By turning off lights when you leave a room, unplugging appliances when you’re not using them, and weatherizing your home, you can help to reduce your energy consumption and save money. Okay, here’s where the chatbot starts to get a little … off. Reducing energy consumption is a great goal, but this answer doesn’t connect that with benefiting wildlife. It’s more of a climate solution, which in turn can help address the extinction crisis. However, reducing home energy consumption simply by turning off a light doesn’t address the severe waste and devastation of the fossil fuel industry, which destroys habitats, poisons ecosystems and drives the climate change that causes even more chaos. That needs to be addressed on a systematic level, not by unplugging your blender. 6. Recycle and compost. Recycling and composting help to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfills, where it can release harmful methane gas into the atmosphere. Decent advice, but why? Chatbot, don’t be afraid to spell out the fact that methane is a greenhouse gas that worsens climate change — and why that’s harmful to wildlife. 7. Support sustainable businesses. When you shop, choose businesses that are committed to sustainability. This helps to send a message to businesses that consumers care about the environment. Vague. Vague, vague, vague. 8. Educate yourself and others about the extinction crisis. The more people who know about the extinction crisis, the more likely we are to take action to address it. This echoes things I’ve said for years. It’s why we always ask people to share our articles — so friends and colleagues who might not seek out this kind of reporting on their own can also see what’s going on. We may be intimately familiar with certain environmental topics ourselves but should never assume other people have the same knowledge base. 9. Get creative. There are many ways to get involved in the fight against extinction. Come up with your own ideas and share them with others. Sure. I guess that’s helpful? 10. Never give up. The extinction crisis is a serious problem, but it’s not insurmountable. By working together, we can make a difference. Color me impressed: While still vague, this may be the best advice on the whole list, albeit the hardest to live up to. The extinction crisis is excruciating, but it can be stopped. After all, almost every species that has received endangered species protection in time to do something about it has been saved from extinction. That’s why the Endangered Species Act has been such a massive success in the United States, why we need similar laws around the world, and why we need to communicate our successes — so people see that the things they do can have a lifesaving impact. There you go. Not the worst list, but evidence that chatbots don’t obviate the need for human wisdom, experience and proven solutions. Why does this matter? For now, these chatbots are isolated — you need to know where to go to use them — but search engines have already announced they plan to integrate the technology into average search results. That means that sometimes, instead of a link to an article answering your question, you’ll get a chatbot’s answer. Those answers may or may not come from a reliable authority or be correct. Many publishers worry that these chatbot answers will supersede links to authoritative web pages where readers can find the correct information. That could wipe out critical web traffic and harm the already struggling news business — which in turn could cause publications to go out of business. Artificial intelligence is a tool that could do a lot of good when deployed correctly and cautiously. But if it kills off expert sources, it could drive knowledge itself extinct. We’ve already had a bitter taste of that, here in the “post-truth” era. We may not survive much more. What are the real solutions to the extinction crisis, and how can we each help? We’ll have an article with some answers for you soon — and they won’t be the kind that can be served up by a chatbot. The post We Asked an AI Chatbot How to Fight the Extinction Crisis appeared first on The Revelator.

…and it did a halfway decent job. But algorithms alone can’t save endangered species. For that you need people who care and who act. The post We Asked an AI Chatbot How to Fight the Extinction Crisis appeared first on The Revelator.

When a certain search engine recently asked me to test out its new artificial intelligence chatbot, I thought “How bad will this be?”

After all, tech companies love to position their AI systems as solutions, but many experts fear they will result in waves of bad data and disinformation. That’s not going to help a world plagued by runaway climate change and an extinction crisis that threatens to push a million species into oblivion.

But at the same time, artificial intelligence and machine learning have some truly wonderful implications for conservation — anything that speeds up data analysis is welcome, for example. Could that potential benefit carry over to a chatbot designed to spit out easy answers to users’ questions?

I wanted to see how good the systems really are, so I gave it a test — I asked the chatbot how to solve the extinction crisis.

No small task.

So here they are: the chatbot’s 10 ways to fight the extinction crisis (in italics), along with my interpretation and response.

1. Reduce your consumption of meat and animal products. Animal agriculture is a major driver of habitat loss, deforestation and climate change. By eating less meat and more plant-based foods, you can help to reduce the impact of your diet on the environment.

A surprisingly strong start right out of the gate. Animal agriculture is one of the leading factors in the extinction crisis, and while I wouldn’t necessarily have put this at number one, it certainly deserves to be in the top three. Good job, chatbot.

2. Support sustainable farming practices. When you buy food, choose products that were grown or raised using sustainable methods. This helps to protect wildlife habitat and reduce pollution.

This is vague and possibly redundant, but it’s useful for the chatbot to lay out causality. Unsustainable farming does destroy habitat and create enormous pollution, often enough to be seen from space. But what “sustainable” methods is it recommending, and how is this recommendation actionable? At the very least consumers should look for the USDA Organic label, but there are a host of other labels out there, some of which are more misleading than others. (Hmm, could be worth digging into that in a future article. Thanks for the idea, chatbot.)

3. Get involved in local conservation efforts. There are many ways to get involved in conservation efforts in your community. You can volunteer for a local environmental organization, donate to conservation groups, or simply spread the word about the importance of protecting wildlife.

Fair enough. Local efforts can do a lot to benefit native or migratory species, but a vague reference to “many ways” doesn’t provide any actionable ideas or talk about why local efforts matters. That’s important, since to most people extinction feels like something that happens half a world away, not in their own backyards.

4. Advocate for environmental policies. Contact your elected officials and let them know that you support policies that protect wildlife and the environment.

Good advice, chatbot, but the devil’s in the details: What are those policies? Here in the United States, it’s a good idea to actively call for support of the Endangered Species Act, which is chronically underfunded and under threat. There are other regulations and policies — both existing and proposed — that will benefit wildlife, but people will need to do their own digging to find out what those are. (Our suggestion: Start by calling for support for the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act.)

5. Reduce your energy consumption. By turning off lights when you leave a room, unplugging appliances when you’re not using them, and weatherizing your home, you can help to reduce your energy consumption and save money.

Okay, here’s where the chatbot starts to get a little … off. Reducing energy consumption is a great goal, but this answer doesn’t connect that with benefiting wildlife. It’s more of a climate solution, which in turn can help address the extinction crisis. However, reducing home energy consumption simply by turning off a light doesn’t address the severe waste and devastation of the fossil fuel industry, which destroys habitats, poisons ecosystems and drives the climate change that causes even more chaos. That needs to be addressed on a systematic level, not by unplugging your blender.

6. Recycle and compost. Recycling and composting help to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfills, where it can release harmful methane gas into the atmosphere.

Decent advice, but why? Chatbot, don’t be afraid to spell out the fact that methane is a greenhouse gas that worsens climate change — and why that’s harmful to wildlife.

7. Support sustainable businesses. When you shop, choose businesses that are committed to sustainability. This helps to send a message to businesses that consumers care about the environment.

Vague. Vague, vague, vague.

8. Educate yourself and others about the extinction crisis. The more people who know about the extinction crisis, the more likely we are to take action to address it.

This echoes things I’ve said for years. It’s why we always ask people to share our articles — so friends and colleagues who might not seek out this kind of reporting on their own can also see what’s going on. We may be intimately familiar with certain environmental topics ourselves but should never assume other people have the same knowledge base.

9. Get creative. There are many ways to get involved in the fight against extinction. Come up with your own ideas and share them with others.

Sure. I guess that’s helpful?

10. Never give up. The extinction crisis is a serious problem, but it’s not insurmountable. By working together, we can make a difference.

Color me impressed: While still vague, this may be the best advice on the whole list, albeit the hardest to live up to. The extinction crisis is excruciating, but it can be stopped. After all, almost every species that has received endangered species protection in time to do something about it has been saved from extinction. That’s why the Endangered Species Act has been such a massive success in the United States, why we need similar laws around the world, and why we need to communicate our successes — so people see that the things they do can have a lifesaving impact.

There you go. Not the worst list, but evidence that chatbots don’t obviate the need for human wisdom, experience and proven solutions.

Why does this matter? For now, these chatbots are isolated — you need to know where to go to use them — but search engines have already announced they plan to integrate the technology into average search results. That means that sometimes, instead of a link to an article answering your question, you’ll get a chatbot’s answer. Those answers may or may not come from a reliable authority or be correct.

Many publishers worry that these chatbot answers will supersede links to authoritative web pages where readers can find the correct information. That could wipe out critical web traffic and harm the already struggling news business — which in turn could cause publications to go out of business.

Artificial intelligence is a tool that could do a lot of good when deployed correctly and cautiously. But if it kills off expert sources, it could drive knowledge itself extinct. We’ve already had a bitter taste of that, here in the “post-truth” era. We may not survive much more.

What are the real solutions to the extinction crisis, and how can we each help? We’ll have an article with some answers for you soon — and they won’t be the kind that can be served up by a chatbot.

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The post We Asked an AI Chatbot How to Fight the Extinction Crisis appeared first on The Revelator.

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Turbulent minds: The mental health stigma facing pilots echoes the crisis among men more broadly

An Alaska airlines pilot's mental breakdown underscores the widespread concerns in navigating pilot well-being

In late October, news broke that Alaska flight 2059 had to make an emergency diversion in Portland on its way to San Francisco after an off-duty pilot had tried to “disrupt the operation of the engines.”  Identified as Joseph Emerson, news later broke that he was subdued by the flight crew and taken into custody. Today he faces 83 counts of attempted murder — one for every passenger and crew member on board. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Emerson revealed a portrait of a man who made a “big mistake” in the middle of a mental health crisis. According to the report, he was still suffering the aftereffects of a nightmarish psychedelic trip triggered by the psilocybin mushrooms he consumed 48 hours prior, which left him feeling "trapped in a dream." He took the psychoactive fungi on a trip with friends to commemorate the death of his best friend — a loss that threw him into a deep state of grief and forced him to confront long-standing mental health issues. In the report, Emerson says his therapist commented that he was likely suffering from depression, but the therapist couldn’t diagnose him. He was told to consider getting an official diagnosis from a doctor and perhaps get on an antidepressant medication. The only problem was that he feared this could put his family’s livelihood and career in jeopardy.  As details about what happened to Emerson on the flight have been revealed, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced November 9th that it was establishing a committee “to provide recommendations on breaking down the barriers that prevent pilots from reporting mental health issues to the agency.”  The FAA can disqualify pilots with depression or taking some prescription treatments from flying. In 2010, the agency approved certain antidepressants for use for those with mild or moderate depression. But it comes with a monitoring period that can last years.  "This avoidance can have serious consequences, as it may lead to reported health issues that could affect the pilot’s performance — and in our business performance impacts safety.” In August, the Washington Post reported that federal authorities were investigating 5,000 pilots who have allegedly falsified their medical records to hide benefits they were earning for health issues that could affect their ability to fly. In 2016, an anonymous study published in Environmental Health found hundreds of commercial airline pilots could be clinically depressed and still flying. A more recent study found that many pilots avoid medical professionals due to a fear that revealing health problems could lead to them losing their medical certificate that they’re required to have to fly. Captain Reyné O’Shaughnessy, cofounder and CEO of Piloting 2 Wellbeing, told Salon this fear often stems from the aviation industry’s “stringent regulations.” “And the perception that health issues might jeopardize their ability to fly, and in some cases it does,” she said. “The significance of this is that this avoidance can have serious consequences, as it may lead to reported health issues that could affect the pilot’s performance — and in our business performance impacts safety.” Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. Indeed, Emerson is far from the first pilot to have a public breakdown. In 2012, passengers on a Jetblue flight had to restrain a pilot from having a "bizarre midair breakdown," as the New York Times put it. In July, a United Airlines pilot took an ax to a parking barrier at the Denver airport. He told police he had “hit his breaking point.” In 2015, a Germanwings pilot deliberately crashed a plane into the French Alps, killing all 150 people onboard. O’Shaughnessy said the industry is making progress in terms of encouraging more transparency. Before 2010, if a pilot disclosed they had depression or anxiety, they wouldn’t be flying.  “Now, the paradox is we have this system that we need to self-report if we are struggling with depression or anxiety,” she said. “But the paradox is, why would pilots report that if it impacts their livelihood?” “Mental health and mental well being should be a shared responsibility, and that means involving all stakeholders in this aviation industry.”  The FAA claims that 0.1% of medical certificate applicants who disclose health issues are denied, trying to encourage more pilots to come forward. Yet not all who disclose and go through the monitoring period have sick days to carry them through. Plus, there’s the fear of what others might think. O’Shaughnessy said a “culture change” is one part of the solution, in addition to prioritizing mental fitness in pilot training, and addressing the demanding lifestyle that’s required of pilots, which can include sleepless nights and not being provided a hot meal on the job. “What I'm seeing is that basically companies are just ticking the boxes,” she said. “Mental health and mental well being should be a shared responsibility, and that means involving all stakeholders in this aviation industry.”  While it’s understandable that there’s a required mental health standard for pilots who are responsible for hundreds of lives each day, some mental health experts say this is yet another way in which systemic forces perpetuate the ongoing mental health crisis among men in America. And that the culture change O’Shaughnessy referred to could come from outside the aviation industry, too. In America, women are twice as likely to get a depression diagnosis, yet men are more likely to die by suicide. Nearly 80 percent of suicides are among men — a majority of those over the age of 75, and those who work in more male-dominated industries, like construction and transportation.  Men are less likely than women to get treatment and seek out help. Dr. Carla Manly, a clinical psychologist and author of "Joy From Fear," told Salon that employees in a workplace culture who feel as if they have to “camouflage” mental health issues due to a fear of repercussions can have a negative effect.  “Given the pervasive nature of certain ridiculous beliefs such as ‘real men are tough’ and ‘only weak people need psychological support,’ those who suffer from mental health issues are often afraid to seek the support they need,” she said. “In my clinical work, I have certainly noted that males — even more than females — are hesitant to reveal their mental health issues out of being judged, sidelined or worse.” Erin Pash, LMFT, founder and CEO of Ellie Mental Health, told Salon society needs to rethink what it means to be “strong.” “Men who lean in and accept support for their mental health think about strength differently,” she said. “Being ‘mentally strong’ is being able to work through complicated feelings and come out on the other side smarter, more adaptable, and more engaged in their life.” Read more about air travel

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England’s nature chief calls for building on green belt to solve housing crisis

Tony Juniper believes new homes and protection for green spaces and wildlife should not be seen as oppositesBuilding on the green belt should be part of the UK’s answer to the housing crisis, provided more effort is also put into improving the quality of urban green space, England’s nature chief says.New housing and better protection for green spaces, wildlife and nature should not be seen as opposites, according to Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England. The “oppositional mindset” that sees the two as “binary choices” does not reflect reality, and is hindering local communities from finding ways to provide enough homes for people, while restoring the UK’s dwindling species. Continue reading...

Building on the green belt should be part of the UK’s answer to the housing crisis, provided more effort is also put into improving the quality of urban green space, England’s nature chief says.New housing and better protection for green spaces, wildlife and nature should not be seen as opposites, according to Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England. The “oppositional mindset” that sees the two as “binary choices” does not reflect reality, and is hindering local communities from finding ways to provide enough homes for people, while restoring the UK’s dwindling species.“What we need to be doing is thinking more about how we can accommodate high quality nature within and around residential developments, not only in order to meet nature targets, but also in order to promote social wellbeing,” he says in an interview with the Guardian. “Because we now know, from a vast body of evidence, that access to green spaces and areas with water is very, very good for people’s wellbeing.”The green belt should not be sacrosanct, he says. England could end up with less green belt than it has currently, but “better quality greenbelt – that might have more houses in it. If you look at many green belts around England, quite a lot of them are pretty bereft of wildlife. They’re not very accessible. Some of them are not producing much food either.”Instead of a blanket defence of green belt land, government and local communities should take “a more joined-up view” that could see some new building but better conservation, and more green space where people need it.“If you look at the economic benefits we get from access to good quality, wildlife-rich green space, the economic value of that goes up in proportion to the amount of people who can reach it,” he says. “Putting woodlands in remote areas is going to have much less social benefit than putting woodlands in areas next to where people live.”Tony Juniper – not afraid to take on environmental shibboleths. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/GettyJuniper’s stance is in contrast to that of many campaigners for whom the green belt is a totemic issue, and who resist encroachment on it. But his pragmatic attitude has been honed from years spent arguing the scientific case for nature to often sceptical ministers and civil servants, finding ways to push for bold action within straitening officialdom.A zoologist and conservationist by training, whose first area of study was parrots, he has long experience of straddling what others may regard as starkly different roles. Before taking the Natural England chair in 2019, Juniper had combined heading the campaigning charity Friends of the Earth – usually regarded as one of the deepest green of activist groups, more radical in outlook than Greenpeace – with advising King Charles when he was Prince of Wales.Natural England is charged with ensuring green targets, such as protecting 30% of the UK’s land by 2030, are met. But though these targets are still in place, government policy has changed in ways that many think will make the targets more difficult to meet – or even impossible. Rishi Sunak has taken a publicly anti-green stance, with U-turns on several aspects of climate policy.Nature policy has also been a battlefield – the government announced in August it would roll back policies on nutrients that required housebuilders to make provision for sewage. The nutrient regulations were designed to prevent further pollution of rivers, which are already under severe threat from water companies’ cavalier attitude to sewage overflows from new housing.After a bitter row blew up over the proposals, the government backed down, but it is not clear what attitude the new environment secretary, Steve Barclay, who replaced Thérèse Coffey in this week’s reshuffle, will take.Juniper, speaking before Barclay’s appointment but while Coffey was widely rumoured to be replaced, said the nutrient neutrality scheme that Natural England had been piloting for about 18 months was working well.“Frustrations are expressed in different places and we get criticised for holding up development. But I fully reject that on the grounds that we’re putting a great deal of effort to enable development, at the same time as enabling government and the country to meet their very stretching targets for nature recovery,” he says.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionJuniper is not afraid to take on environmental shibboleths. As well as the nutrient scheme, he supports the biodiversity net gain regulations, and local nature recovery strategies, that will allow for new developments of housing, industrialisation and urbanisation, as long as there are compensatory projects elsewhere. Take newts, he offers. Great crested newts are protected species, and have had “iconic status” among builders because for many years, if populations were found then development had to cease.Today, builders can use the modified rules to carry on building if they also agree to protect populations of the species in other areas. Rather than being a cop-out, this is an improvement, according to Juniper.“Trying to protect a remnant population of these amphibians in an isolated pond is one thing, it may not have very much long-term ecological benefit. However, if you can say we are going to sacrifice that pond, but we’re going to build 10 others, and we’re going to put those 10 others in places where we know we’ll get maximum benefit for the connectivity of the new population, then this is leading to better outcomes for nature,” he says.The River Wye in Bredwardine, England. The Wye is dying under the load of chicken manure dumped in it from surrounding poultry farms. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/The GuardianThough Juniper is carefully neutral, seeing it as his current job to provide scientific advice on the UK’s nature to the government of the day, it is not hard to imagine how difficult that must be with a government whose rhetoric, and many recent actions, have been about attacking green experts and taking on the “Guardian reading, tofu-eating wokerati”, as the recently departed home secretary Suella Braverman put it.More policy action is certainly needed, Juniper says. “There is a lot of really big chunky targets that government is seeking to reach. And you won’t reach them by doing nothing.” Is the government serious about those targets? “I hope so.” Is the policy situation, for instance with the restoration of the nutrient rules, stable? “I don’t know.”His outlook at times may seem overoptimistic. The River Wye is dying under the load of chicken manure dumped in it from surrounding poultry farms. Juniper says: “Places like the River Wye remind us that we still have work to do in terms of being able to find ways of accommodating these parallel objectives for nature and food production.” Most environmentalists would regard that as quite an understatement.He owns it was disappointing that species reintroduction was downgraded to “not a priority” under Coffey. The UK could benefit from more beavers, he says. But of the government’s actions overall, he will not be drawn. “Am I disappointed? I don’t think I’m in a position to be disappointed, I’m a public servant and I have to get on with it.” And if he were not a public servant? “I might be disappointed in my spare time.”

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Tracking down a poison: Inside the fight for global action on lead

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a 2-part series, “Tracking down a poison.” See part 1 here. NEW YORK CITY — A third of the world’s children have so much lead in their blood they’re poisoned. These children experience cognitive and behavioral delays, reduced kidney function, anemia and more. They might drink water that passes through old pipes, play with toys decorated with lead paint, eat food served on contaminated dishes or walk past an informal lead-acid battery recycling facility on their way to school. The sources of this mass-poisoning are widespread, with countless industries and products subtly introducing lead into people’s lives. The impacts of lead are felt most by those in low- and middle-income countries, which often lack the resources to identify and prevent lead-poisoning. The world took one major step forward by banning leaded gasoline in cars in all countries as of 2021. Yet, environmental health experts say lead poisoning remains an overlooked global health crisis. They’re working to bring the impacts of lead into the light and prevent exposure, one country and one source at a time. Lead — an overlooked poisonNo amount of lead exposure is safe, many health authorities agree. For children, lead exposure can be particularly devastating: it decreases IQ points, delays development and creates behavioral challenges, among other symptoms. Adults can experience problems with kidney function, anemia, the cardiovascular system and more. The severity of symptoms increases with higher exposure, but recent research shows that even a small exposure can impact health, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).Despite its severe impacts, it’s difficult for doctors in low- and middle-income countries to diagnose a lead poisoning case, Abheet Solomon, global program lead of healthy environments for healthy children at UNICEF, told Environmental Health News (EHN). He compares lead to the wildfire smoke that descended on UNICEF’s headquarters in New York this summer, “everybody saw the air pollution…you can’t say the same thing about lead because lead is invisible.” The symptoms of lead poisoning are also subtle. While wildfire smoke might make someone cough the same day, lead operates on a longer timeline, and causes less obvious symptoms like IQ deficits or growth delays. “It’s hard to say this is a child that’s been poisoned by lead until you test,” Solomon explained. In high-income countries blood lead tests are more common. In the U.S., most states require or recommend that children have blood lead tests between 12 and 24 months. Young children in the U.S. had a median blood lead level of 0.6 micrograms per decilitre from 2017-2018, according to the latest Environmental Protection Agency data. That’s well below the five micrograms per decilitre threshold for lead-poisoning, estimated in one in three children around the world (although pockets of significant lead exposure still occur in the U.S., such as in Flint, Michigan, where about 5% of children had lead poisoning due to lead water pipes in 2015.) The barriers to sufficient testing in developing countries are numerous. First is a knowledge gap, “there’s little awareness in low- and middle-income countries about how pollution damages children’s health,” said Solomon. He explained that there’s better international awareness and resources for infectious and non-communicable diseases. Then there are resource and technology limitations. Few low- and middle-income countries have the lab capacity needed to monitor blood lead levels. As of 2019, studies of blood lead levels had only occurred in 44 out of 137 low- and middle-income countries.For the data that do exist, the global inequality is stark. One study found mean children’s blood lead levels well-above the five microgram per decilitre measure for lead-poisoning in low- and middle-income areas including Palestine, Pakistan, Cameroon and Egypt, among others.UNICEF is gearing up to change this, Solomon said. Working with governments, they facilitate a survey of children’s health in developing countries about every 10 years, called a multiple indicator cluster survey (MICS). In 2018, Georgia became the first country to add blood lead testing to their MICS, after a small study of children’s blood lead levels indicated there could be a national problem. It was an important step for Georgia to get a national picture of lead-poisoning, Dr. Ziad Kazzi, a medical toxicologist and emergency medicine professor at Emory University who led the initial blood lead study, told EHN. “They don’t typically do environmental health assessments [on the MICS],” he explained. That year’s MICS revealed that 41% of children in the country had lead-poisoning, compared to 2% in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control. Lead-contaminated spices were found to be a significant contributor to the poisonings.That finding triggered better regulation, and there are some early signs that children’s blood lead levels could be dropping as a result. “I'm always hoping that other countries will pursue [blood lead testing] with their UNICEF office,” Kazzi said, and he’s eager to see more comprehensive follow-up data in Georgia.Now, Solomon is working through UNICEF to get testing for lead and other harmful heavy metals on the MICS in more countries. “We have two countries lined up and we plan to do it in 10 countries over the next four years,” he reported, declining to name the two countries.Finding a lead-poisoning culpritOnce lead poisoning is identified in a child, it can be difficult to track down the source. In the U.S., some city and state programs take on this task. In New York City, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene receives the blood lead levels of every New Yorker tested, and investigates each case of poisoning to find and remove the source.Their consumer products database tracks years of investigations that identified lead-contaminated items like kohl eyeliner, metal amulets, painted dishes, cooking vessels, spices and medicines, typically purchased abroad. When patterns emerge, the department issues warnings to communities. They also go incognito in stores to purchase and test items that might contain lead. “If we have identified a certain type of product that keeps showing up amongst our cases, we want to find out if it's available in New York City stores,” Paromita Hore, director of environmental exposure assessment and education at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told EHN.If they find stores selling the products they can take enforcement actions. But most often, the products causing lead poisoning are carried by individuals back to New York from countries with weaker regulation and enforcement.“If one country has a problem, the impact of that problem is not constrained to their borders,” Andrew McCartor, executive director of Pure Earth, a non-profit dedicated to reducing global lead and arsenic exposure, told EHN.Hore’s department often reaches out to other countries’ consulates to alert them of an issue with a product, and she thinks those efforts could be expanded. “We could have a national repository…you can essentially scale up what we’re doing in New York City,” she said. Other areas, like North Carolina, conduct similar lead investigations. Coordinating those efforts could build a better picture of lead poisoning sources and inform action.The kind of investigations needed to find the cause of a lead-poisoning case occur rarely around the world. McCartor’s organization, Pure Earth, is hoping to change that with a program to test blood lead levels in seven low- and middle-income countries and test consumer products that might contain lead in 25 countries. They’re building the data that can show governments where to act to reduce lead-poisoning. And there’s precedent for global action on lead — just two years ago leaded gasoline was phased out from cars in every country on Earth.The world gets lead out of gasoline In August 2021, the last tank of leaded gas going into a commercial vehicle was pumped in Algeria. This exhausted their supply, and made it the final country in the world to phase out the toxic fuel from cars. Leaded gasoline came on the market a century earlier promising to help engines run smoother, but emitting dangerous fumes in the process. Public health experts raised concerns as early as the 1920s, but the gasoline remained on the market for a century, emitting nearly 10 million tons of lead into the Earth’s environment, a portion of it ending up in people’s bodies. Japan became the first country to completely phase out leaded gasoline in 1986, with the U.S. following in 1995, finishing a process started by the Environmental Protection Agency two decades earlier. Between 1976 and 1991 the average blood lead level of a person in the U.S. dropped from 12.8 micrograms per decilitre – well above the 5 microgram per decilitre measure for lead poisoning – to 2.8 micrograms per decilitre. Leaded gasoline is still used in other vehicles like planes, farm equipment and race cars around the world. (In 2022, researchers found that students living near a race track in Florida scored 4.4% lower on a state standardized test until NASCAR voluntarily phased out leaded gasoline in 2007.) Throughout the 2000s, countries around the world followed, spurred by a United Nations campaign to phase out leaded gasoline globally. When they started, 117 countries still used leaded gasoline, including nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Attention and resources from the UN campaign helped phase out the toxic gas in most African countries within just a few years, said Jane Akumu of the UN Sustainable Mobility Unit in a webinar. She explained that collecting data on lead pollution and blood lead levels before and after the phase out in some countries helped convince others to act. Many of the countries that took longer to phase out the gasoline had political conflicts that made policy changes difficult to implement, she said. When Algeria used the last of its supply in August 2021, they ended a century of toxic pollution. This achievement represents “a testament to the power of multilateralism to move the world towards sustainability and a cleaner, greener future,” Inger Anderson, executive director of the UN Environment Program, said at the time. Two of the largest causes of global lead-poisoning today are lead-based paints and informal lead-acid battery recycling centers. Lead can be added to paint for color or corrosion control in homes or products and ingested by young children when it chips. The UN is currently working to help all countries regulate and enforce bans on lead in paint, which 48% of countries have done, according to the World Health Organization. Use of affordable lead-acid batteries is increasing as the world electrifies, exposing many to lead. The batteries can be effectively recycled, but informal recycling centers without sufficient health and safety precautions create health risks for workers and surrounding communities. The UN and other NGOs working on this issue aim to build knowledge, regulations and enforcement capacity to promote safe lead-acid battery recycling. Beyond paints and batteries, countless products create less obvious lead exposures. These are the sources that require more investigative resources to track down. Who’s left behind when it comes to lead exposure?Removing a source of lead poisoning can stop symptoms from progressing, but the neurological and developmental delays it causes can’t be undone. “You’ll find sometimes the environmental toxicology side doesn’t connect to the clinical side,” said Kazzi, of Emory University. “What about the people that have the lead in their body? Who’s going to take care of them?”As a medical toxicologist, he emphasizes providing care to those affected by lead poisoning concurrently with finding and removing exposure sources. That means improving nutrition, which can help reduce absorption of lead still present in blood, and providing support for children with learning and development disabilities. Not all children with lead-poisoning will experience a learning disability, but its negative impacts on IQ and development can push more kids into that category. When countries add blood lead tests to their MICS, equipping governments to address the problem is key, said Solomon of UNICEF. Each country’s government has control over the MICS and they choose what data to share. An action plan to address lead poisoning encourages data transparency, he explained.“We need to be building the response plan with the survey itself,” said Solomon, “[countries] need to be seen to be taking action to actually address these issues.” They took this approach in Georgia, so that when high lead-poisoning was found the government quickly rolled out treatment and exposure prevention plans. Many working in the field worry about the ongoing exposures people face as they race to develop the data and resources they need to take action. “It’s kind of a backwards approach. We’re basically using kids as canaries in the coal mine,” Ed Norman, program manager of childhood lead-poisoning prevention at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, told EHN. His program often identifies homes with lead paint as a source of childhood lead poisoning, along with products like ceramics, spices, toys and bullets. “We’re testing the kids to see if there’s an exposure we should be preventing…in that sense it’s kind of sad, but we are able to prevent exposures for future generations of kids.” Read part 1 to learn about how researchers led the way to get rid of lead in Georgia and Bangladesh spices.

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a 2-part series, “Tracking down a poison.” See part 1 here. NEW YORK CITY — A third of the world’s children have so much lead in their blood they’re poisoned. These children experience cognitive and behavioral delays, reduced kidney function, anemia and more. They might drink water that passes through old pipes, play with toys decorated with lead paint, eat food served on contaminated dishes or walk past an informal lead-acid battery recycling facility on their way to school. The sources of this mass-poisoning are widespread, with countless industries and products subtly introducing lead into people’s lives. The impacts of lead are felt most by those in low- and middle-income countries, which often lack the resources to identify and prevent lead-poisoning. The world took one major step forward by banning leaded gasoline in cars in all countries as of 2021. Yet, environmental health experts say lead poisoning remains an overlooked global health crisis. They’re working to bring the impacts of lead into the light and prevent exposure, one country and one source at a time. Lead — an overlooked poisonNo amount of lead exposure is safe, many health authorities agree. For children, lead exposure can be particularly devastating: it decreases IQ points, delays development and creates behavioral challenges, among other symptoms. Adults can experience problems with kidney function, anemia, the cardiovascular system and more. The severity of symptoms increases with higher exposure, but recent research shows that even a small exposure can impact health, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).Despite its severe impacts, it’s difficult for doctors in low- and middle-income countries to diagnose a lead poisoning case, Abheet Solomon, global program lead of healthy environments for healthy children at UNICEF, told Environmental Health News (EHN). He compares lead to the wildfire smoke that descended on UNICEF’s headquarters in New York this summer, “everybody saw the air pollution…you can’t say the same thing about lead because lead is invisible.” The symptoms of lead poisoning are also subtle. While wildfire smoke might make someone cough the same day, lead operates on a longer timeline, and causes less obvious symptoms like IQ deficits or growth delays. “It’s hard to say this is a child that’s been poisoned by lead until you test,” Solomon explained. In high-income countries blood lead tests are more common. In the U.S., most states require or recommend that children have blood lead tests between 12 and 24 months. Young children in the U.S. had a median blood lead level of 0.6 micrograms per decilitre from 2017-2018, according to the latest Environmental Protection Agency data. That’s well below the five micrograms per decilitre threshold for lead-poisoning, estimated in one in three children around the world (although pockets of significant lead exposure still occur in the U.S., such as in Flint, Michigan, where about 5% of children had lead poisoning due to lead water pipes in 2015.) The barriers to sufficient testing in developing countries are numerous. First is a knowledge gap, “there’s little awareness in low- and middle-income countries about how pollution damages children’s health,” said Solomon. He explained that there’s better international awareness and resources for infectious and non-communicable diseases. Then there are resource and technology limitations. Few low- and middle-income countries have the lab capacity needed to monitor blood lead levels. As of 2019, studies of blood lead levels had only occurred in 44 out of 137 low- and middle-income countries.For the data that do exist, the global inequality is stark. One study found mean children’s blood lead levels well-above the five microgram per decilitre measure for lead-poisoning in low- and middle-income areas including Palestine, Pakistan, Cameroon and Egypt, among others.UNICEF is gearing up to change this, Solomon said. Working with governments, they facilitate a survey of children’s health in developing countries about every 10 years, called a multiple indicator cluster survey (MICS). In 2018, Georgia became the first country to add blood lead testing to their MICS, after a small study of children’s blood lead levels indicated there could be a national problem. It was an important step for Georgia to get a national picture of lead-poisoning, Dr. Ziad Kazzi, a medical toxicologist and emergency medicine professor at Emory University who led the initial blood lead study, told EHN. “They don’t typically do environmental health assessments [on the MICS],” he explained. That year’s MICS revealed that 41% of children in the country had lead-poisoning, compared to 2% in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control. Lead-contaminated spices were found to be a significant contributor to the poisonings.That finding triggered better regulation, and there are some early signs that children’s blood lead levels could be dropping as a result. “I'm always hoping that other countries will pursue [blood lead testing] with their UNICEF office,” Kazzi said, and he’s eager to see more comprehensive follow-up data in Georgia.Now, Solomon is working through UNICEF to get testing for lead and other harmful heavy metals on the MICS in more countries. “We have two countries lined up and we plan to do it in 10 countries over the next four years,” he reported, declining to name the two countries.Finding a lead-poisoning culpritOnce lead poisoning is identified in a child, it can be difficult to track down the source. In the U.S., some city and state programs take on this task. In New York City, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene receives the blood lead levels of every New Yorker tested, and investigates each case of poisoning to find and remove the source.Their consumer products database tracks years of investigations that identified lead-contaminated items like kohl eyeliner, metal amulets, painted dishes, cooking vessels, spices and medicines, typically purchased abroad. When patterns emerge, the department issues warnings to communities. They also go incognito in stores to purchase and test items that might contain lead. “If we have identified a certain type of product that keeps showing up amongst our cases, we want to find out if it's available in New York City stores,” Paromita Hore, director of environmental exposure assessment and education at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told EHN.If they find stores selling the products they can take enforcement actions. But most often, the products causing lead poisoning are carried by individuals back to New York from countries with weaker regulation and enforcement.“If one country has a problem, the impact of that problem is not constrained to their borders,” Andrew McCartor, executive director of Pure Earth, a non-profit dedicated to reducing global lead and arsenic exposure, told EHN.Hore’s department often reaches out to other countries’ consulates to alert them of an issue with a product, and she thinks those efforts could be expanded. “We could have a national repository…you can essentially scale up what we’re doing in New York City,” she said. Other areas, like North Carolina, conduct similar lead investigations. Coordinating those efforts could build a better picture of lead poisoning sources and inform action.The kind of investigations needed to find the cause of a lead-poisoning case occur rarely around the world. McCartor’s organization, Pure Earth, is hoping to change that with a program to test blood lead levels in seven low- and middle-income countries and test consumer products that might contain lead in 25 countries. They’re building the data that can show governments where to act to reduce lead-poisoning. And there’s precedent for global action on lead — just two years ago leaded gasoline was phased out from cars in every country on Earth.The world gets lead out of gasoline In August 2021, the last tank of leaded gas going into a commercial vehicle was pumped in Algeria. This exhausted their supply, and made it the final country in the world to phase out the toxic fuel from cars. Leaded gasoline came on the market a century earlier promising to help engines run smoother, but emitting dangerous fumes in the process. Public health experts raised concerns as early as the 1920s, but the gasoline remained on the market for a century, emitting nearly 10 million tons of lead into the Earth’s environment, a portion of it ending up in people’s bodies. Japan became the first country to completely phase out leaded gasoline in 1986, with the U.S. following in 1995, finishing a process started by the Environmental Protection Agency two decades earlier. Between 1976 and 1991 the average blood lead level of a person in the U.S. dropped from 12.8 micrograms per decilitre – well above the 5 microgram per decilitre measure for lead poisoning – to 2.8 micrograms per decilitre. Leaded gasoline is still used in other vehicles like planes, farm equipment and race cars around the world. (In 2022, researchers found that students living near a race track in Florida scored 4.4% lower on a state standardized test until NASCAR voluntarily phased out leaded gasoline in 2007.) Throughout the 2000s, countries around the world followed, spurred by a United Nations campaign to phase out leaded gasoline globally. When they started, 117 countries still used leaded gasoline, including nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Attention and resources from the UN campaign helped phase out the toxic gas in most African countries within just a few years, said Jane Akumu of the UN Sustainable Mobility Unit in a webinar. She explained that collecting data on lead pollution and blood lead levels before and after the phase out in some countries helped convince others to act. Many of the countries that took longer to phase out the gasoline had political conflicts that made policy changes difficult to implement, she said. When Algeria used the last of its supply in August 2021, they ended a century of toxic pollution. This achievement represents “a testament to the power of multilateralism to move the world towards sustainability and a cleaner, greener future,” Inger Anderson, executive director of the UN Environment Program, said at the time. Two of the largest causes of global lead-poisoning today are lead-based paints and informal lead-acid battery recycling centers. Lead can be added to paint for color or corrosion control in homes or products and ingested by young children when it chips. The UN is currently working to help all countries regulate and enforce bans on lead in paint, which 48% of countries have done, according to the World Health Organization. Use of affordable lead-acid batteries is increasing as the world electrifies, exposing many to lead. The batteries can be effectively recycled, but informal recycling centers without sufficient health and safety precautions create health risks for workers and surrounding communities. The UN and other NGOs working on this issue aim to build knowledge, regulations and enforcement capacity to promote safe lead-acid battery recycling. Beyond paints and batteries, countless products create less obvious lead exposures. These are the sources that require more investigative resources to track down. Who’s left behind when it comes to lead exposure?Removing a source of lead poisoning can stop symptoms from progressing, but the neurological and developmental delays it causes can’t be undone. “You’ll find sometimes the environmental toxicology side doesn’t connect to the clinical side,” said Kazzi, of Emory University. “What about the people that have the lead in their body? Who’s going to take care of them?”As a medical toxicologist, he emphasizes providing care to those affected by lead poisoning concurrently with finding and removing exposure sources. That means improving nutrition, which can help reduce absorption of lead still present in blood, and providing support for children with learning and development disabilities. Not all children with lead-poisoning will experience a learning disability, but its negative impacts on IQ and development can push more kids into that category. When countries add blood lead tests to their MICS, equipping governments to address the problem is key, said Solomon of UNICEF. Each country’s government has control over the MICS and they choose what data to share. An action plan to address lead poisoning encourages data transparency, he explained.“We need to be building the response plan with the survey itself,” said Solomon, “[countries] need to be seen to be taking action to actually address these issues.” They took this approach in Georgia, so that when high lead-poisoning was found the government quickly rolled out treatment and exposure prevention plans. Many working in the field worry about the ongoing exposures people face as they race to develop the data and resources they need to take action. “It’s kind of a backwards approach. We’re basically using kids as canaries in the coal mine,” Ed Norman, program manager of childhood lead-poisoning prevention at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, told EHN. His program often identifies homes with lead paint as a source of childhood lead poisoning, along with products like ceramics, spices, toys and bullets. “We’re testing the kids to see if there’s an exposure we should be preventing…in that sense it’s kind of sad, but we are able to prevent exposures for future generations of kids.” Read part 1 to learn about how researchers led the way to get rid of lead in Georgia and Bangladesh spices.

Crisis
Education
Food

Gov. Tina Kotek’s housing council wants to make it easier for cities to expand

Over the past few months, Gov. Tina Kotek’s Housing Production Advisory Council has identified barriers that would lead to Oregon building fewer homes than needed to keep pace with growth.

Members of a governor-appointed council say Oregon needs to temporarily loosen its land-use laws to meet Gov. Tina Kotek’s goal of building 36,000 homes per year – an idea that’s proved to be one of the more divisive proposals to address the state’s housing crisis.

Crisis
Land Use

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Capturing The Fire

When Louise Coghill saw the first plume of smoke begin to rise behind her parents property, she could never have predicted that in less than four hours, it would become a wall of flames, swallowing everything in its path. A photographer by trade, Louise has travelled the world documenting everything from the nomadic wanderers of Mongolia, to base life at Mount Everest. Capturing the extraordinary comes naturally to Louise, so when her family home in the semi-rural Western Australian town of Gidgegannup became engulfed in flames, her first instinct wasn’t to take shelter, it was to pick up her camera.

Conservation
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Reboot

Humans have exploited Earth to the point where it is no longer possible to live on it. Their only option is to relocate to Mars. When the last group of people has boarded the spaceship for the red planet, the Earth can finally breathe easy. Like an expressionist painting, Reboot depicts a world in which the absence of our species is the only chance nature has to recover its lushness and flourish once more.

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Stalking Chernobyl: Exploration After Apocalypse

A documentary that examines the underground culture of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Three decades after the world's most infamous nuclear disaster, illegal hiking adventurers (known as “stalkers”), extreme sports aficionados, artists, and tour companies have begun to explore anew the mysterious, ghostly landscape, where trees and forest animals have reclaimed land abandoned by villagers. Even as survivors continue to reckon with a dishonest government’s attempts to cover up the extent of the disaster, and as humanity faces new nuclear incidents in place like Fukushima, the Chernobyl site has turned into a bizarre tourist attraction, drawing seekers with a taste for the post-apocalyptic. (a Cultures Of Resistance film)

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The Story of Plastic

A searing expose uncovering the ugly truth behind the global plastic pollution crisis. Striking footage shot over three continents illustrates the ongoing catastrophe: fields full of garbage, veritable mountains of trash; rivers and seas clogged with waste; and skies choked with poisons from plastic production and recycling processes with no end in sight. Original animations, interviews with experts and activists, and never-before-filmed scenes reveal the disastrous consequences of the plastic flood around the world – and the global movement rising up in response.

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A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity is a feature-length documentary that follows a community in Australia who came together to explore and demonstrate a simpler way to live in response to global crises. Throughout the year the group built tiny houses, planted veggie gardens, practised simple living, and learned how to live in community. This film is the product of hours and hours of footage that I shot during that year-long experiment in simple living.

Culture
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