In Alaska, A Mystery Over Disappearing Whales

When it comes to conservation, it’s common knowledge that preserving the environment is critical. It’s perhaps less widely known but just as important to understand the cultural behaviour of whales — the practices and habits passed on from generation to generation — that can help or hinder pods to succeed.

(Biologist Hal) Whitehead uses the belugas of Hudson Bay, in northern Canada, as an example. At least three populations of belugas migrate to Hudson Bay in the summer, and Whitehead focuses on two: One that goes to the eastern side and one to the western side. Which side a whale goes to is a matter of family tradition that baby belugas learn from their mothers. Decades ago, commercial whalers overharvested the eastern population. Yet new generations of eastern belugas kept following their mothers to that more dangerous side of the bay. The eastern population became dangerously depleted while the western whales thrived.

When a pocket of animals with specialized knowledge is lost, “it’s not like it’s immediately replaced. And so you start to blink out unique cultures,” he said. “And that is a loss of adaptive potential going forward.”

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The Dirty Road to Clean Energy

Electric vehicles are supposed to support a healthier environment, but in Indonesia, home to some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, a key component in EV batteries, the burgeoning industry is doing the opposite. Fueled by China’s appetite for EVs and contracts with companies like Tesla, pockets of Indonesia are facing environmental and social devastation, including health problems that the story’s author suffered herself:

Data shared with Rest of World by the community health center of Bahodopi shows that, since 2018, upper respiratory infections have been at the top of the list of diseases in the district — nearly 7,000 cases in total — with health workers claiming that the dust from the industrial complex is the main culprit. There were 928 upper respiratory infection cases in 2021, higher than the 855 cases reported the year before. Health workers told Rest of World that in 2018 and 2019, as IMIP expanded to add more steel factories and coal-fired plants, the construction had led to even more dust. In those two years combined, they counted a total of 5,153 respiratory infections.

…

A few days before leaving Sulawesi, I experienced first-hand some of the consequences of the industrial activity that villagers had spoken about. It started with an intense pain in my left eye, which I initially brushed off. But the pain only grew, and rapidly developed into a severe eye infection. 

Later, in Jakarta, doctors said that the infection was likely caused by the dust and other air pollutants that I had been exposed to in the industrial areas I had visited. The infection was so severe that it damaged my cornea, and I was bedridden for weeks, unable to see. Today, months after our visit, I’m still waiting to fully regain the function of my left eye, which can only be restored by a cornea transplant.

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The Hibernator’s Guide to the Galaxy

If we’re going to send humans to Mars or beyond, we need to figure out how they’ll survive the monthlong (or yearslong) voyage — and oh, by the way, they’ll need to do so without food, since it’s logistically impossible to bring enough for that kind of trip. As it turns out, the animal kingdom has shown us a possible way forward: torpor. With tautness and humor, Brendan Koerner investigates researchers’ long-ranging quest to turn astronauts into icetronauts.

But if hibernation does indeed become a realistic option for humans, even those of us in decent shape may find it tempting. Induced torpor seems to offer a roundabout path to realizing at least a couple of transhumanist dreams. Like life extension, perhaps—provided you’re not purely bent on extending your conscious life. As Raymond J. Hock noted in 1960, hibernation really does seem to offer a fountain of youth. Earlier this year, for example, a team at UCLA found that yellow-bellied marmots, which hibernate for as much as two-thirds of every year, possess much more robust genetic material than might be anticipated based on their chronological ages. “The molecular and physiological responses required for an individual to successfully hibernate may prevent aging,” the researchers wrote in Nature.

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Lucky’s Last Run

This a beautiful essay about friendship. A friendship between two men, and a friendship with a dog. It is also about dealing with grief after a member of your pack passes on. Have a tissue handy.

He learned that in 2016, the salesman’s best friend had died of cancer, and that two years later, that man’s son, also a close friend, had died from ALS. He learned how David and Lucky had met, and how much the dog meant to the salesman. He learned that Lisa Smith-Batchen considered Lucky “not a dog, but a special being.” He learned that in the salesman’s view, “Lucky chose me, I didn’t choose him.”

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Identity Crisis

As the planet continues to warm and change, people around the world will face more large-scale natural disasters. Rescuing survivors is a priority, but in resource-strapped countries like India, putting processes in place to manage the dead is also crucial.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami “laid bare India’s own lack of forensic infrastructure,” writes Deepa Padmanaban. In this Fifty Two feature, Padmanaban details what improvements the country must make to better prepare teams in times of emergency — not just first responder training, but victim identification and, as a result, more support and compassionate care for victims’ families. Padmanaban notes that Argentinian grandmothers in the late 1970s were the first people to suggest forensics as a way to identity victims — their abducted daughters and grandchildren — and goes on to describe how fields like forensic odontology (looking at the teeth of the dead) can be a reliable process of victim identification in India.

Prioritising the living over the dead is a given. But the dead have an afterlife, particularly for their families, and ignoring them has terrible consequences, both in the matter of emotional closure, and other, material ones. In the absence of a positive identification and death certificate, families can only report their loved ones as “missing.” Their lives can, quite literally, be put on hold.

This is at the heart of the humanitarian approach to forensics, a shift from the more traditional approach that deals with criminal investigations, law and order, and evidence. For survivors, humanitarian forensics helps provide closure, and a chance to face the future with a measure of peace. For state agencies and record keepers, it offers a chance to plan for and protect the fragile future of all humans.

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Stewart Rhodes’s son: ‘How I escaped my father’s militia’

This week, Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was convicted of sedition for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. No one knows better how dangerous Rhodes is than his eldest son, Dakota. This is the story of how Dakota, his mother, and younger siblings escaped Rhodes’s grasp:

Standing outside one of the family’s previous homes, a modest dun-coloured house opposite a row of trailers, it’s clear the place brought up uncomfortable memories for Dakota, who had spent his early teenage years there.

He recounted one incident in particular, sometime around 2012. A beloved pet dog named Yeti was in ill health and eventually died inside the house.

“Stewart was busy with [Oath Keepers] conference calls and emailing people and he put off taking my dog to be cremated,” he said.

It took three days for Rhodes to finally take the dog away. He joked about the smell of the carcass and teased his teenage son about his emotional attachment to the animal.

Dakota was furious.

“I was struggling with the impulse to jump out and circle around to the driver’s side door and yank my father out of the car to beat him in traffic,” he said.

Throughout hours of interviews, in tweets and in posts on their blogs, Dakota and Tasha recounted numerous similar incidents of verbal abuse and neglect. A few stood out – like the time Dakota described Stewart choking one of his sisters on the family’s front porch.

“Until I was an adult man,” he said, “I lived absolutely under the thumb of an emotional terrorist.”

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Party Revolution

The latest issue of Stranger’s Guide is dedicated entirely to Ukraine. In this essay, Anastacia Galouchka dances deep inside a burgeoning rave scene to examine the evolution of the connection between art and politics in Kyiv:

Clubs like HVLV, Closer and Keller often hire security guards to man their doors — in itself, not that unusual. But they’ll often stop aggressive youngsters from going inside, as they might create problems for other party-goers, such as members of the LGBT community. In a country where it’s customary to pay off a bouncer to gain entry into a club, this the idea of making basic decency the coin of the realm — “How open-minded do you seem and how likely are you to start harassing girls or beating up same-sex couples?” — was a radical concept. This safe space has allowed people to experiment with self-expression without fear of judgment or risk of oppression. It drew in more and more people from Ukraine’s middle class, and organizers rapidly saw their public double or triple.

That’s what makes the underground scene in Kyiv so unique: none of the people who frequent it have a simplistic “fuck the system” in mind. Instead, they are more nuanced. They believe in a brighter future for Ukraine. And they seem to be building a foundation for it within the confines of this underground safe space, where they can be who and whatever they want to be. The Podil scene is instrumental in uniting these people, allowing them to express themselves and subsequently spread the liberal values they encounter here through all of Kyiv, a city that is now learning to thrive in this new sense of openness and creativity. It has coaxed Kyiv out of the memories of dictatorship and oligarchy into something more modern and open-minded.

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