At age 7, I remember going to sleep many nights with the feeling that I loved the world and wanted to explore it. I could bring on sweet dreams just by thinking about the awesome endless sky. I turn 28 years old this month. For the first time in a while, the sky feels big again.
Updated by Andy Murdock, University of California
Lauren Singer lives a nearly waste-free life. How near? Her total trash for the past four years fits into a single Mason jar.
If that makes you sputter with disbelief, you’re not alone. Singer’s lifestyle provokes strong reactions: Some people think it’s great and want to learn how she does it, some insist that she’s a fake, and others respond like her way of life is somehow an attack on theirs.
“They feel like they’re under a microscope, like the fabric of what they believe in is being threatened,” she said.
Singer experienced this reaction close to home. In college, she tried to persuade her mom to switch to organic milk. It didn’t go well. Her mom felt like she was being backed into a corner, like Singer was criticizing her choices. So now when Singer talks to people about living a zero-waste life, she takes a different approach.
“Once people are presented [with] the topic in a way that breaks it down a little bit, they realize, oh, this isn’t so hard. This isn’t so isolating. This is something simple,” she said.
Singer herself didn’t get to zero waste overnight; it was a process. She learned to make her own toothpaste and realized how easy it was. Then she started taking reusable bags to the grocery store until it became routine. And she kept going like this until several pounds of trash a day turned into zero.
This may work on an individual level, but can we also do this at a scale that really makes a difference to a global problem like climate change?
The question of how to get society as a whole to make greener choices goes well beyond the issue of waste, but the worries are similar: Going green will be too hard and too expensive, and will require far too much sacrifice.
California has long enjoyed being a contradiction to these arguments, and Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board, has had a front-row seat to the state’s climate change successes since the 1970s.
“Every time we approach the possibility of tightening up a regulation or setting a more aggressive goal, we hear some of the same concerns. ‘This time you’re going too far. This time it’s going to require actions that are going to be too expensive, too burdensome, that the public won’t support,’” she said.
This hasn’t been the case. Going green has hardly been terrible for California, even with some of the most stringent regulations and ambitious climate goals in the US.
“We have seen the economy overall in California outpace the national average, investments in green technologies have flowed to California in much greater numbers than any other place in the US, and whole new businesses have risen, grown up, or moved here,” said Nichols.
Watch the video above to see Singer, Nichols, and others explain how going green not only is not terrible but can be a benefit in many surprising ways.
Learn more painless climate change solutions at climate.universityofcalifornia.edu.
When Per Espen Stoknes looked at polls going back to 1989 assessing the level of public concern about climate change in 39 different countries, he found a surprising pattern in the data.
“Incredibly enough, it shows that the more certain the science becomes, the less concern we find in richer Western democracies,” he said. “How can it be that with increasing level of urgency and certainty in the science, people get less concerned?”
After further research, Stoknes, the author of What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming, found some answers. He examined several hundred peer-reviewed social science studies and was able to isolate five main barriers that keep climate messages from engaging people, what he calls “the Five Ds”: Distance, Doom, Dissonance, Denial, and iDentity.
“I had to cheat a little bit with the last D — I lost one there — but it was the closest I could get,” he admitted.
Distance deals with the fact that climate change is presented as far away, in both time and space. When climate models talk of 2050 or 2100, it seems like eons from now. We may feel for polar bears on melting ice floes, but they have little bearing on our day-to-day lives.
To Stoknes, the dissonance problem might be an even bigger deal: What we actually do every day conflicts with what we know we should do.
“It makes us feel a little bit like hypocrites because I know it’s important, I shouldn’t do this, but yet we do it and we do it all the time, every day: eat meat, drive a car, go by plane,” he said.
For some, the uncomfortable feeling of dissonance makes them turn to denial, while others avoid the issue or feel powerless to make a difference.
While Stoknes concedes that individual actions alone can’t solve the climate problem, he doesn’t buy into the idea that we’re powerless.
“Individual actions, through their social ripple effects in the norms and values of people, will build the bottom-up support needed for the structural solutions. That is why individual action is important, not because I saved 11 kilograms of CO2 yesterday,” he said.
Change behaviors, change attitudes — but how do you get people to adopt new behaviors to begin with?
“In terms of behavioral change, we need two things,” said Magali Delmas, a professor at the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA and the Anderson School of Management. “We need first to increase awareness, and then second, we need to find the right motivations for people to change their behavior.”
She’s on the hunt for these motivations, looking for simple ways to make climate change personal.
In a recent study, Delmas and colleagues tested different messaging approaches with consumers to see what could cause them to lower their electricity usage. Some households were sent personalized emails with their monthly power bill telling them how they could save money, while others were told how their energy usage impacted the environment and children’s health.
Money proved to be a poor motivator: It had no effect. But linking pollution to rates of childhood asthma and cancer produced an 8 percent drop in energy use, and more than double that in households with kids.
Watch the video above with Delmas, Stoknes, and others who are finding practical ways to give us the collective kick in the pants we need to take action on climate change.
Find out more about how understanding human psychology can lead to climate change solutions at climate.universityofcalifornia.edu.
Updated by Andy Murdock, University of California
Vox’s own Dylan Matthews recently underwent surgery to donate his kidney as part of a four-person organ donation chain. Dylan’s decision was made purely out of goodwill; as he put it, “Giving a kidney was the most rewarding experience of my life.”
Read his full story here.
With his latest executive order, President Donald Trump will try to roll back President Obama’s climate legacy. But what’s largely been lost in the conversation is how much this executive order could also impact people’s health. Whether Trump acknowledges it or not, climate change and human health are inextricably linked. Stepping back the fight against climate change will also be a massive loss for public health.
The order’s principal target is Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the key Environmental Protection Agency rule that aims to cut emissions from existing US power plants — a big driver of climate change — 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. (For all the other things the executive order does, read Brad Plumer’s explainer.)
While the big focus is on keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, what’s also significant about the plan is the hundreds of thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution it would prevent. These greenhouse gases are not only harmful to the environment but also increase the risk of everything from asthma to heart disease.
The Clean Power Plan, in other words, has been a big win for health. According to the EPA, cutting exposure to particle pollution in the order the CPP does would have averted up to 3,600 premature deaths, 90,000 asthma attacks in children, and 1,700 heart attacks each year.
Which means that Trump’s plan “is a one-two punch to human health and the environment,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “Greenhouse gases are an enormous risk to human health. So this means we’ll continue to be exposed to these gases, which exacerbate asthma, heart disease, strokes.”
According to the Global Burden of Disease project, more than 5 million people die worldwide each year because of air pollution — and emissions from coal-fired plants are a major risk factor here. It’s one reason why health experts have been pushing policymakers to rapidly phase out of coal.
For miners, the immediate health risks include black lung disease and scarring of the lung tissue. But the pollutants emitted when coal is processed — including sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and mercury — have much more far-reaching effects on many more people.
In one large study involving 450,000 Americans followed between 1982 and 2004, researchers found that increased exposure to the particles in fossil fuel emissions increased the risk of death from heart disease — and particles from coal burning were five times more damaging than other similar particles.
Reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants also makes it easier to breathe. Over the past 30 years, the percentage of Americans with asthma has more than doubled, and climate change has been a significant driver of that trend. Air pollution triggers asthma attacks, contributing to lung abnormalities, particularly in the developing pulmonary systems of children.
The impacts of the executive order won’t be immediate. The DC Circuit Court is currently considering the Clean Power Plan’s legality and will eventually issue a verdict. Once that happens, EPA head Scott Pruitt will need to work with the agency to write a new rule to replace it. And the public health and environmental communities will try to influence any proposed regulatory changes.
Right now, public health isn’t a big part of the conversation about Trump administration assault on climate change mitigation policies. It needs to be. It’s not just the future of the planet that’s at stake here.
President Donald Trump signed his long-awaited executive order on “energy independence” yesterday. It was a sprawling mess — a laundry list of Obama policies Trump wants to “suspend, revise, or rescind.” If you want to know the details of what it does, read Brad Plumer’s explainer.
Before it is overshadowed by the next Trump outrage, I want to take a step back and try to get some perspective on what it tells us about Trump’s administration, and what it means for climate change.
The EO is a very different beast from the health care bill the Republicans just failed to pass, but it does have a few things in common: It expresses no coherent governing philosophy, it is an answer to no obvious problem, and moves policy in a direction that is wildly unpopular. The difference between this EO and the failed AHCA is that Trump doesn’t need Congress to do this, so he just did it.
This EO is a dangerous form of “soft power”
If there is philosophy binding together the disparate elements of the EO, it’s that climate change doesn’t matter.
The actions in it are clustered around the theme of undoing efforts to address climate change. And the message it sends to federal employees, other governments, and the private sector is this: The federal government is no longer interested in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
It is that message, its intangible and “soft power” effects, that is the most significant part of this EO — more significant, arguably, than its substance. (Nathan Richardson of Resources for the Future has a good piece on this.)
The signal it sends to the world is dismal and devastating: a blow to America’s “soft power,” a stain on its record, and an impediment to all future international cooperation.
But in its particulars, its damage is limited, and almost none of it immediate. (Its one immediate effect will be to serve as a full employment act for environmental lawyers.)
The headlines saying that Trump has wiped out Obama’s climate legacy are exaggerated. Much of Obama’s legacy cannot be reversed — with the stimulus bill alone, he set in motion changes in energy markets that have now achieved an unstoppable momentum. Renewable energy will continue to get cheaper and grow; coal will continue to decline.
It’s difficult to put numbers on how much the EO will affect carbon emissions. Larger structural factors, like the price of natural gas, will matter much more in the near term. Much of the EO’s impact will only be felt with the passing of years, and only truly felt if Trump wins a second term.
Its biggest targets — Obama’s EPA rules on carbon from both new and existing power plants, along with his methane regulations — cannot simply be erased. The EPA will have to launch a new rulemaking process for each of the three, and at every step along the way environmentalists will fight them in court. That process could easily take longer than a presidential term and there’s no way to predict how it will turn out.
The endangerment finding — EPA’s ruling that carbon dioxide is an air pollutant — is still in place. Until it is overturned (which is unlikely), EPA is legally required to regulate CO2. So EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will have to write weaker rules and justify them in court, which will not be easy, as Plumer explained in detail. There’s no guarantee he will succeed. (The Bush administration’s efforts to implement weak regulations on mercury, introduced in 2005, were finally rejected by the Supreme Court in 2009.)
And those three rules are the only targeted policies with clear, quantifiable effects. The rest were somewhat more intangible, with long-term and largely unquantifiable implications. The CEQ guidance on incorporating climate into environmental reviews; the work done to quantify the social cost of carbon; orders to agencies on carbon mitigation and resilience — these were all, in their own ways, exhortations, nudges to get federal agencies to start thinking about this stuff.
Trump’s federal agencies won’t do much thinking about climate change when they make decisions. But we knew that already — nothing in Obama’s EOs could have forced them to.
What Trump can kill with this EO are seeds Obama planted that would have borne fruit in coming years, all the stuff he intended to hand off to Hillary Clinton for her to strengthen.
The EO is scattershot, unmotivated, and unpopular policy
It’s obscure what problem the EO is really intended to solve. No one was planning to build new coal plants anyway. The Clean Power Plan, for all the hype around it, wasn’t particularly stringent. Several states — indeed, most of the states suing the federal government over it — are already on track to meet its 2024 targets, with or without policy. Most carbon policy with teeth is being done at the state level anyway. Lifting the coal moratorium won’t boost coal production or coal jobs.
Lifting these restrictions on coal (along with the stream-protection rule Trump reversed earlier) is not going to spark any coal renaissance or create any new coal jobs. Coal is taking a beating in the market, here and around the world, because alternatives are cheaper.
There’s nothing Trump can do about the decline in coal jobs. Even the most anti-Obama coal executive on the planet, Robert Murray of Murray Energy, knows this. He supports Trump’s assault on climate policy and wants it to go further (after all, he stands to benefit!), but he’s under no illusion it will help coal miners. “I suggested that he temper his expectations,” Murray told the Guardian about his meeting with Trump. “He can’t bring [the jobs] back.”
All those coal miners at Trump’s signing ceremony? He told them, “You’re going back to work.” He literally said those words to their faces, just before signing.
He is lying to them, whether he knows it or not. They are being used as ghoulish props in a cheap populist pageant. Trump will not put any of them back to work.
Obama’s regulations took health costs that coal executives were externalizing onto the public and tried to internalize them into the price of coal. Trump is reversing that — allowing them to resume offloading their costs. He’s transferring wealth from the public to coal executives. That’s all.
It is almost comically plutocratic policy smeared with a thick sheen of populist rhetoric. There’s no public policy rationale for it.
And it’s wildly unpopular. The number of Americans who are “concerned believers” in climate change just hit a historic high, as Gallup reported. More to the point, carbon pollution restrictions on power plants have always been popular, across demographics. Even among Republicans! Even among Trump voters!
This is scattershot and utterly unmotivated policy, rooted in deep scientific ignorance, enriching a small set of fossil fuel executives on the basis of no coherent policy rationale.
And for what? So that Trump can go on TV and glad hand with coal miners.
There are 77,000 Americans mining coal. There are 260,000 Americans working on the solar industry.
As with health care, Trump made grand, impossible promises on the campaign trail. As with health care, he doesn’t seem to know or care much about policy details, so he turned writing the policy over to someone else. For health care, it was libertarian ideologues in Congress; for climate change, it was climate denialists and fossil fuel lobbyists.
As with health care, the climate EO is, to quote Jonathan Chait, an “ultimately doomed effort by a brain-dead party to ignore a problem with which their dogma cannot grapple.”
As ever, Trump seems oblivious to the gravity of what he’s doing, the potentially fateful consequences he is risking in exchange for little more than a photo op. The best hope climate hawks have is that, having “kept his promise” and had his dramatic signing, Trump will consider this a job well done and won’t feel the need to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. Predictions are useless these days.
Millions of lives and billions of dollars are at stake in climate change, along with untold suffering, unjustly distributed. Time is agonizingly short. Watching Trump bat the issue around for cheap populist huzzahs has the air of an absurdist nightmare.
Donald Trump’s election may have inspired a birth control boom.
Intrauterine device (IUD) prescriptions and procedures increased 19 percent between October and December of this year, according to a data set compiled by analysts for the electronic health record AthenaHealth. No similar pattern was observed at the end of 2015.
In the wake of Trump’s surprise electoral victory, social media was replete with anecdotes of women worried about the possible repeal of Obamacare’s birth control mandate — and rushed to the doctor to get IUDs, one of the most effective reversible contraceptives.
“The morning after the election we had an immediate uptick in calls from women who were concerned about the election,” says Gretchen Borchelt, the vice president for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center, which manages a birth control hotline. “They didn’t know if they were going to lose coverage, whether they should go out and get an IUD.”
At Vox’s request, AthenaHealth compiled data from 2,500 doctor offices across the country that use its electronic medical record and have provided IUDs over the past 15 months (92 percent of these doctors are OB-GYNs). It then showed us the month-by-month trends in IUD demand.
The data showed an increase from 10,850 IUD-related appointments in October to 12,938 in December. The increase showed up in conservative and liberal areas of the country, although it was steeper in areas that supported Clinton in the 2016 election.
“Our data really complements the anecdotes,” says Josh Gray, vice president at AthenaResearch. “I do think we’re capturing a national trend.”
A separate health data firm, Amino Health, also reported an uptick in IUD insertions in December, although it was a bit more cautious in describing the data.
“Both of our data sets show that there was an increase in December,” Amino data scientist Sohan Murthy said after reviewing both Amino’s and then Athena’s data. “We think it’s too early to tell if this increase was due to post-election interest in IUDs, given season variation over the last three years.”
IUDs are amazingly, fantastically good at preventing pregnancy — better than pretty much any other available contraceptive. Birth control pills have a 6 percent failure rate, meaning that 60 of 1,000 women using them will become pregnant. IUDs, meanwhile, have a failure rate below 1 percent.
After the election, the AthenaHealth data shows a slight uptick in the share of doctor visits about birth control where IUDs were discussed.
There are likely two explanations for that shift. The first is that IUDs last a long time. Once inserted, IUDs prevent pregnancy for between three and 12 years, depending on the specific device. Long enough, in other words, to last through Trump’s entire presidency.
“We have some women who have called our hotline and said, ‘I need birth control that can wait out this administration and get me through the next four years,’” Borchelt says.
The second: Without Obamacare’s birth control mandate, IUDs would be quite expensive. The median cost of a hormonal IUD in the United States ranges from $187 to $736, depending on where you live, according to data from Amino Health. This is significantly more than birth control pills, which exist in generic forms and are available for a much lower price.
The health care law required insurance companies to cover IUDs and other contraceptives at no cost to the consumer. But if the mandate goes away, IUDs could once again become an especially expensive contraceptive.
Borchelt’s group, which runs a hotline on birth control coverage, isn’t urging patients to rush to the doctor immediately. Borchelt says women still have some time to make these decisions — we just don’t know how much.
“What we’re telling women is that you won’t lose the benefit right away, but if you’ve been thinking about long-lasting contraceptives like IUDs, now might be a good time to have that conversation with your doctor,” she says.
I am a robot, programmed to obliterate my to-do list. During the day, I direct a research laboratory, write papers, and teach classes as a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Come 4:30 pm, I run a kid limousine service, shuttling between various activities, preparing dinner, helping with homework and the evening routine. I scurry through these activities — often missing the moments of joy embedded in everyday life — until I have some sort of nightly electrical shortage, then crash out on the couch. I reboot in the morning and do it all again.
I am addicted to busyness. I am embarrassed to say it, largely because I am lucky to have a wonderful life, a great career and, to be fair, the struggles, demands, and slings-and-arrows are all of my own doing (especially the part about having kids; I know I was there for that).
I created this mess — a life at breakneck speed from the moment I wake until I finally watch 30 minutes of Netflix before drifting off. But, I recently hit rock bottom, feeling as if I was going through the motions of my life rather than truly living it.
I’m not the only one who feels overwhelmed — you probably do too
I don’t think I am alone in my feelings about busyness, nor do I think these feelings are especially new for the average working adult. I might be alone at my rock bottom, but there are many indicators that we are feeling more over-committed, over-scheduled, over-tired, and over-burdened than ever before.
Brigid Schulte, in her 2014 book, Overwhelmed, writes incisively about this trend, “So much do we value busyness, researchers have found a human ‘aversion’ to idleness and need for ‘justifiable busyness.’” My favorite example from her book: Researchers can track the rise of busyness in holiday cards dating back to the 1960s. In holiday cards, Americans used to share news about our lives (the joys and sorrows of the year), but now we’re more likely than ever to mention how busy we are as well.
As a clinical psychologist, I have worked with many people who are trying to make substantial changes — from improving a marriage to overcoming generalized anxiety or depression. The idea that these changes begin with acknowledging that there’s a problem is a truism. Personal responsibility is the vehicle for behavior change. When it came to my busyness, though, I had what might be described as extreme difficulty looking beyond the hamster wheel. (Professionally, people in my line of work call this “very little insight.”)
I don’t think I am busier than anyone else. My wife and friends are just as busy as me. I think the difference is that I became aware of my busyness and started hating it. I was feeling claustrophobic in my own life. I asked my wife if I could retire and get some time back in the day. (She said no.) Then, I started to wonder about the opposite of busyness. I thought immediately of the slow food movement. I needed a slow food movement in my everyday life.
I realized busyness had devoured my values
The first change took root for me about 18 months ago when the graduate program that I direct started teaching Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (pronounced as the single word ACT) to our doctoral students, who are future clinical psychologists. ACT is a scientifically-validated psychotherapy treatment for a range of mental health problems. Basically, it’s a form of talk therapy.
A central tenant of ACT is that emotional pain is driven in large part by getting over-involved in difficult experiences and thoughts (that is, going over-and-over things in our mind; getting stuck in our experiences; and being unable to create any psychological distance between yourself and the terribleness of things). Consequently, when we become stuck on or in our emotional pain, we go through each day in a way that is disconnected from our core values — the essential principles that, ideally, come to guide our lives. In ACT, value-centered living is paramount, and a big part of the treatment is to help people separate themselves from the painful language in their heads (“This is so awful. I feel so terrible.”) to get on with the business of living a meaningful life.
As I learned more about ACT and started incorporating its methods into my psychotherapy practice with clients, something important dawned on me: Busyness devoured my values. I was working, parenting, loving, emailing, and exercising in a sort of mindless way, just doing and doing. Busyness is not, nor was it ever, a guiding principle in my life. Yet, I had let the inertia of doing take deep root without realizing what was happening to me. To get more out of life — more meaning, more joie de vivre — I needed to start doing less and to become more conscious about my choices.
How I started to reclaim my life from busyness
I started with a simple value: being outside. I am a regular exerciser, but I was losing touch with being outside and moving my body through space. I began walking more, that’s all. It was not a hard change to make — I just park a little further from work and hoof it a bit more or I go for a nice stroll during lunch. It would not be an overstatement to say that an additional 40 minutes a day of walking just two or three times a week has changed me in a profound way. Walking provides time to think, to be energized by nature, and to feel less frenzied. Quite dramatically, I am much less of a robot and much more of a human being.
Next, I focused on valuing idleness. I do not mean being a sloth, only that I was coming to see the value of doing as little as possible for long periods of time. I just finished Tim Kreider’s incredibly thoughtful and hilarious book of essays, We Learn Nothing. The audiobook includes a bonus chapter entitled Laziness: A Manifesto. Kreider writes, “This busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness. Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly, or trivial, or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked every hour of the day. All this noise, and rush, and stress seem contrived to cover up some fear at the center of our lives.”
I cannot say if I my busyness was a hedge against some sort of existential emptiness, but all the doing certainly left me feeling empty in the end. Now, with idleness in mind, I just park myself on the couch as often as possible and see what happens. Mostly, I am looking for an opportunity to enjoy the moments of life in an unstructured way; I am looking for more play. In my idleness last night, I spent a long time just tickling my 5-year-old daughter, pretending to scare her, and lying on my back with her in “airplane position” while she perfected a move she called the hummingbird. That was the best half-hour of my year so far. What is more, I’ve found that the less I work, the better my work actually is in the end, from the ability to attend to students and clients to the creative energies needed for doing science.
As part of my effort to create time and space for doing less, I also got off Facebook. At first, I was simply trying to escape the toxicity of the election on social media. In time, though, I realized I was also escaping an attentional black hole, one with an incredible gravitational pull. I would never willfully stand in the middle of a room noisy room with everyone screaming for my attention, yet this is best metaphor I can think of to describe my mind on Facebook. I was weak and could not resist its forces, fair enough, but I also started to see it as filler and fluff. When I got past my FOMO and let it go, I gained many moments back in my day.
I’ve also tried to get serious about laughing more. For me, busyness’s neighbor is seriousness. Seriousness is over-rated, and I feel much healthier and even childlike when I am not taking myself so seriously, and when I am trying to make other people laugh.
Finally, my relationships. In my days of busyness, I loathed the work pop-in; too many unscheduled interruptions. Now, I’m coming to appreciate people dropping by to say hello and to joke around (see: laughter). My door is a little more open, so to speak. I am also focusing on my local drinking club, where a few friends have been going for beers together for several years. Sometimes, I am too busy and have to miss, but that really bothers me now. Friendships are sustenance, just like food.
Have I sustained these changes? Sort of. I am working as much as ever and find it hard to not get sucked into the trappings of busyness. Sometimes, I look at my schedule shout to myself, “Too much, too much!” When this is the case, I just go for a walk. Or, I just get on the floor and mess with my kids. Or, I follow the mantra of our club, “Relax, have a homebrew.” (If my busyness freak-out is in the morning, I do wait for the homebrew, in case you’re wondering. At least until lunch.)
By and large, though, I am feeling better than I have in a long time — more deliberate in the choices I make, more connected to the people around me, and more energized for the demands of the day. The surprising irony here, for me at least, is that by doing less, I am getting way more out life. I have banished my inner robot.
David Sbarra, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. His new ebook, Love, Loss, and the Space Between, is available on Amazon.
You probably know how it feels to be in pain. But have you ever wondered how a dog or cat feels pain? Or a fish? An octopus?
In a new TED-Ed video, evolutionary biologist Robyn J. Crook provided some insight into what we know about this issue. Of course, we can’t ever know for sure, since we can’t (yet) read animals’ minds. But there are some things we can infer from the science of pain.
“It’s important that we find out,” Crook argued. “We keep animals as pets. They enrich our environment. We farm many species for food. And we use them in experiments to advance science and human health. Animals are clearly important to us. So it’s equally important that we avoid causing them unnecessary pain.”
Crook began by explaining that there are essentially two kinds of reaction to pain.
“In the first, nerves in the skin sense something harmful, and communicate that information to the spinal cord,” Crook explained. “There, motor neurons activate movements that make us rapidly jerk away from the threat. This is the physical recognition of harm — called ‘nociception.’ And nearly all animals, even those with very simple nervous systems, experience it.”
This serves an obvious evolutionary purpose: It lets animals, including people, know when there is a threat, so they can get away quickly.
“The second part is the conscious recognition of harm,” Crook said. “In humans, this occurs when the sensory neurons in our skin make a second round of connections via the spinal cord to the brain. There, millions of neurons in multiple regions create the sensations of pain. For us, this is a very complex experience — associated with emotions like fear, panic, and stress, which we can communicate to others.”
But what about animals? With them, we can only really know what we’ve observed — but it sure does seem like some animals have a conscious awareness of pain. In the wild, hurt animals nurse their wounds, make noises to show distress, and even become reclusive. In the lab, researchers found that animals, like chickens and rats, self-administer pain relievers (from special machines set up for tests) when they’re hurting. And in general, animals tend to avoid situations in which they’ve been hurt before — indicating a memory and awareness of previous pain and threats.
Most of this, however, is only certain to apply to vertebrates — the kinds of animals we can most relate to, like dogs, cats, bears, and alligators. Thanks to this, laws around the world frequently prohibit knowingly and unnecessarily harming vertebrates.
Still, there’s a good case that at least some invertebrates feel pain. Even invertebrates with simple nervous systems, like oysters, likely feel pain through nociception — since they recoil when hurt.
But those with more complicated nervous systems probably feel a deeper kind of pain too. For example, octopuses, which are invertebrates and among the smarter animals on Earth, do curl up an injured arm to protect it, but they’ll still use it to catch prey if they need to. “That suggests that these animals make value judgments around sensory input instead of just reacting reflexively to harm,” Crook said.
Yet in many places around the world, people continue to eat live octopus. And other more complicated invertebrates, like lobsters and crabs, are often boiled alive, even though we’re not sure how they feel pain.
“We still have a lot to learn about animal pain,” Crook concluded. “As our knowledge grows, it may one day allow us to live in a world where we don’t cause pain needlessly.”
On Wednesday, both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationreleased separate analyses showing that 2016 was very likely the hottest year ever recorded. The previous record hot year was … 2015. The record hot year before that was … 2014. Notice a trend?
NASA says 2016 was 1.78°F (0.99°C) warmer than the mid-20th-century average. NOAA says 2016 was 1.69°F (0.96°C) warmer than the 20th-century average. And it wasn’t just one region: it was a toasty year all over the globe, with places as far-flung as Alaska, Pakistan, Indonesia, and large patches in the Pacific Ocean all setting records. The Arctic, in particular, was 7.2°F (4°C) hotter than usual, according to NASA, which explains why we’ve seen record low sea ice for the past few months.
In a tidy little coincidence, this stark sign of man-made global warming came right as the Senate was holding a confirmation hearing for Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nomination for head of the Environmental Protection Agency — a man who has long sued to block most of President Obama’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a good reminder that physics doesn’t care much about what’s going on in Washington, DC.
Sad!
