Good afternoon, fellow critters!
It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the swamp. Perhaps some of you already know this piece of lore, but I used to bartend at an Irish pub in Lyon, France. The bar in question, The Sham’Rock, was a raucous cave where college students danced and drank to classic British rock; the owner was not Irish. One Saint Paddy’s Day, a man in a kilt stood on our tables and played the bagpipe over a sea of green beers.
I started bartending in college and have worked at bars sporadically throughout the years. But a couple weeks ago, I traded pint glasses for coffee cups when I started a new barista role at Joe Van Gogh. Y’all might see some latte-art-progress pics if you’re lucky.
Up today in environmental news, our cars are killing us softly—and unequally—, we confront our big climate feelings, and we bid adieu—in part—to those three little arrows that have come to symbolize reduce, reuse, and recycle.
This week in environmental news: me!
Earlier this month, WUNC 91.5 aired my story on traffic-related air pollution. I reported on a new study that found marginalized communities across the United States experience elevated levels of air pollution due to their proximity to major roadways. NPR’s Here & Now picked up the story and aired it on national news this past week.
Cities and states, with financial support from the federal government, purposefully built many of those roadways in and around BIPOC communities. These urban renewal projects displaced many people and businesses, and those who remain struggle with air quality issues that stem from living so close to sources of traffic pollution.
I’m hoping to expand on this story in the Swamp Boy podcast, so stay tuned.
Jack Igelman of Carolina Public Press continued his coverage of the Mountain Mist Mine. Residents of Hicks Chapel in McDowell County petitioned the state over concerns that the Mountain Mist Mine—which mines decorative stone—would impact the spring that supplies drinking water to the town. An administrative court in Waynesville heard the case and sided with the state, ending the Hicks Chapel residents' two-year battle.
In his reporting, Igelman provided background on the N.C. Mining Act of 1971, which governs the permitting and reclamation of mines over one acre. He highlighted some issues in the current permitting procedure, such as the fact that prior violations do not factor into the approval process for a new permit. This means one less ramification for operating a mine without a permit.
Something I found particularly interesting in Igelman’s story, as a journalist, is the point that Carolina Public Press actually helped close the mine back in 2021. The NC Department of Environmental Quality inspected the mine after CPP put in a request for information, ultimately citing the mine for operating two mines without a permit. However, the end result was anticlimactic.
"The corrective action is to apply for a permit," writes Igelman. Mountain Mist Mine received its permit in June 2022 and will retain it as long as the mine operates.
The story of the Hicks Chapel residents versus the Mountain Mist Mine reminds me of a conversation I had with John Dorney, a former project manager at the NC Division of Water Quality. We were talking about the history of the Division when he brought up an interesting point about the word permit. In Ontario, Canada, Dorney said, they called their permitting process what it is: an approval process.
"Permitting means you give approval to impact [wetlands]," said Dorney. "It's permitting to allow—through some logical process—impacts."
Permits exist to give companies permission to extract resources. As long as land features and water sources don't have legal rights, land remains a collection of “natural resources.” This narrow system of environmental protections ignores the way complex ecosystems function, whether they directly benefit humans or not.
To end things on a lighter note, Igelman reiterates throughout his articles the mining rule that property owners can dig a quarry on their property without a permit as long as the quarry does not exceed one acre. I wonder what the biggest hole someone in NC has dug on their property without a permit is.
You can read part one here.
Next up in environmental news: bats.
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) intends to sue the U.S. Forest Service over its failure to protect endangered bat species. Coincidentally, the endangered northern long-eared bat stands to be impacted by the Mountain Mist Mine. However, the NC Department of Energy, Mining, and Land Resources did not find the impacts sufficient to deny the mining permit.
These bats are a prime example of an animal whose contribution to the ecosystem is maybe less obvious to folks, and yet, an extremely vital part of our ecosystem. Bats pollinate, eat insects, and disperse seeds. The loss of bats due to white-nose syndrome—a fungal infection—represents a huge financial impact to farmers, who rely on bats to control pests and reduce pesticide use. If you have ever enjoyed a mosquito-free evening walk around your neighborhood, thank bats.
The next thing I wanted to discuss isn’t really news, but an essayist that I really enjoy, Jia Tolentino, recently wrote a piece entitled “What to Do with Climate Emotions.” Some background on Tolentino: She’s a reporter and essayist who has written for the New Yorker and Jezebel, among other publications. In 2019, she released Trick Mirror, a collection of essays on the internet, capitalism, megachurches, and everything in between.
In “What to Do with Climate Emotions,” which she wrote for the New Yorker, Tolentino searches for answers to her own feelings of anxiety and guilt about climate change. This search leads her to Leslie Davenport, a climate therapist—a profession I didn’t know existed—who introduces her to the idea of sustainable distress, a kind of middle ground between paralyzing anxiety, nihilism, and living with your head firmly planted in the ground.
You won’t find absolution on the plateau of sustainable distress. You learn to carry the guilt of consumerism unburdened with platitudes—at least you compost, at least you don’t eat meat, at least you bike to work—and other sedatives that make our march into the rising sea more palatable. We were born into the consumer class, and our lot in life is learning to live with blood on our hands without staining every distraction that brings us joy.
Yet even this pilgrimage is a privilege compared to those who are already combatting the climate crisis at home. Tolentino meets Isabella Tanjutco, whose home city of Manila in the Philippines routinely weathers increasingly aggressive typhoons and flooding. Tanjutco, who lives in New York now, expressed exasperation over the injustice of global warming; the Philippines and other countries that have not contributed substantially to global warming are footing the bill for climate change, while people in the United States attend therapy, trundling down our sanguine path, wringing our hands and worrying about our own blood-soaked footprints.
In other news…
The EPA is retiring the recycling symbol from difficult-to-recycle plastics. The federal agency hopes removing the symbol will reduce the burden on recycling facilities that routinely sort out the plastics too expensive to reuse. The change should curtail some forms of greenwashing; companies often abuse the symbol, putting it on products that are functionally single-use. Deceptive packaging has contributed to growing recycling nihilism; some folks have become so disillusioned with the process that they don’t bother recycling at all.
Fish populations in Pigeon River surged after a paper mill in Haywood County closed. Mill activity raised water temperatures and increased particulate matter in the water column downstream, creating intolerable conditions for many species of mountain fish. Since the mill closed, fish diversity has doubled, and populations increased 15-fold.
Marginalized communities in East Durham continue to pay for discriminatory city planning policies as the City of Durham finds lead contamination in two public parks. Researchers and contractors found lead in samples taken at East Durham Park and Walltown. The city operated incinerators at these sites until the 50s. Lead entered the soil from waste the city burned in the vicinity of poor and nonwhite communities.
The county has not offered to test children for lead exposure.
The battle for water quality in the Haw River continues.
A medical and military production facility in Burlington agreed to install a new wastewater system to capture PFAS before it reaches the Haw River. The company will phase out PFAS usage by June 15, 2025. Other sources of PFAS include leachate—or water that has passed through and absorbed chemicals—from landfills, a textile manufacturer, and other industrial facilities. Last month, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services issued a recommendation to limit fish consumption in the Lower Cape Fear River—a river which is fed by the Haw—due to PFAS contamination.
VinFast, an electric vehicle company, disrupted streams and wetlands in Chatham County during the construction of their manufacturing plant. The 1,300-acre project has increased turbidity in the surrounding creeks and tributaries by many times over the legal limit. These water bodies feed the Haw River; increasing the turbidity in these systems can kill aquatic life, destroy habitat, and make drinking water treatment difficult.
The NC Department of Energy, Mining, and Land Resources has scheduled another inspection of the project.
In my last news round-up, I mentioned Burlington’s mysterious 1,4-dioxane discharge that contaminated Pittsboro’s drinking water supply. That investigation is still ongoing.
Make sure to wear long pants and apply bug spray when walking through the woods; researchers from NC State and UNCG have discovered chiggers carrying a potentially lethal bacteria in NC state parks.
Scrub typhus presents many of the same symptoms as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, including fever, headache, and body aches. The disease spread to Africa and the Middle East from Asia and the Pacific in recent years, but this is the first time anyone has identified the bacteria in the United States. Researchers said that while the bacteria can kill if left untreated, there are no confirmed cases of human or animal transmission in the state.
Some uplifting news from across the country: A county judge in Montana sided with 16 youth plaintiffs in Held v. Montana, upholding the next generation’s right to a clean environment.
The judge ruled that “the State of Montana’s failure to consider greenhouse gas emissions from energy and mining projects violates the state constitution because it does not protect Montanans’ right to a clean and healthful environment and the state’s natural resources from unreasonable depletion.”
The students sued the state in response to bills passed by Republican lawmakers that limited the Montana Environmental Policy Act by prohibiting the state from considering climate change when evaluating permits for energy and mining projects.
According to Judge Seeley, “Plaintiffs have a fundamental right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as part of the environmental life support system.”
If you made it this far, I want to give y’all a treat. Environmental news is frequently depressing. Someone somewhere is always pulling rocks out of the ground or mowing down ancient trees.
It doesn’t have to be that way, and I don’t mean that in the let’s-focus-on-trivial-positive-things-for-the-sake-of-being-contrarian way—I can rattle off ten other podcasts if you’re looking for distractions.
What I really mean is if we stopped taking land and our nonhuman neighbors for granted—if we cherished the soil that nurtures our food, the bear’s foot that greets us on the side of our bike path, and the digger wasp who labors in our gardens, then I could tell you stories about flocks of birds so big they block out the sun in the middle of the day. Maybe then I could tell you tales of the red wolf that once howled all across the Southeast. I could tell you about fishers who fed their families with fish straight from the Haw River.
But until Penguin Random House gives me a fiction book contract and a fat advance, I’ll be serving your biweekly allotment of hard facts. Anyway, let’s talk about the moon.
Earlier this month, the sturgeon moon filled the sky with its orange blaze. My housemates and I clambered out onto the roof of my townhome. Word on the street is that the moon was named after the mighty sturgeon that once filled the Great Lakes in August hundreds of years ago. The largest of these aquatic beasts can reach lengths of 15-20 feet. The abundant sturgeon, like the immense bird flocks of precolonial America, have since disappeared.
Keep your eyes on the sky later this month for a Blue Moon on August 30th. Blue moons are what we call the second full moon of a given month, a rare occurrence that likely begat the phrase “once in a blue moon.” My friend Dylan and I just planted a garden in my backyard. Perhaps I’ll have something growing by the Harvest Moon in September.
Thank you for reading Swamp Boy. Remember, I’m still accepting audience questions, so please email me a voice memo containing your environmental questions. Your message should sound something like this:
“Hi, my name is Zack, and I live in Durham, NC. Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of smoke outside my apartment. What is it? Am I safe inside my home?”
I’ll listen, and if I can find a good answer, I’ll air your question on the podcast. In your email, please tell me your name, pronouns, and where you’re writing from; that way, I can give you a proper shoutout.
Take care, y’all!
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