Category: General

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Rising Temperatures and Threats to Health

More Concerted Action on Public Health
Coming from Medical Community Interests:

The public health/climate change connections recognized by the medical establishment might help in informing the public at large. Policy experts say a growing awareness of the public health/climate linkage could be a key in breaking through political logjams impeding action on mitigation and adaptation.

Consider some climate change/public health indicators:
-Roughly 10 million Americans suffered from asthma in 1990. Today, twice as many do — a surge that has been linked to climate change.
-Allergy season is becoming longer and pollen counts are stronger.
-Diseases like dengue fever and malaria, previously seen only in warmer areas, are now popping up in places like Florida and Texas.
-The ticks carrying Lyme disease — once limited to southern New England and mid-Atlantic states — have expanded their ranges to Maine.
-Extreme weather patterns brought about by climate change are expected to cause an increase in injuries and illness.
-And projected heat waves are likely to be so intense that many more people will have trouble simply cooling themselves and, in some cases, remaining hydrated.

As science points to the troubling health consequences of climate change, the American Medical Association and various public health organizations are bracing themselves. In April the AMA published an editorial warning that climate change is putting public health at risk. It stated:

Scientific evidence shows that the world’s climate is changing and that the results have public health consequences. The American Medical Association is working to ensure that physicians and others in health care understand the rise in climate-related illnesses and injuries so they can prepare and respond to them. The Association also is promoting environmentally responsible practices that would reduce waste and energy consumption.

To help doctors prepare for climate-related illnesses and injuries, AMA has held continuing medical education courses on climate change in three states, most recently in Florida. A fourth one is to take place in Illinois. The courses stem from a grant from the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment.

The American medical community’s new advocacy measures arrive on the coattails of climate change policy statements made by other health organizations. In 2007, the American Academy of Pediatrics. AAP, warned of negative health effects of climate change on children. In a statement, Dana Best, MD, MPH, and fellow of AAP said, “As the climate changes, environmental hazards will change and often increase, and children are likely to suffer disproportionately from these changes.”

In 2008, the American Nurses Association declared that “Nurses have the responsibility to be aware of broader health concerns such as environmental pollution,” and acknowledged the “threats posed by global climate change on a massive human and environmental scale.”

A Critical Mass Expresses Concerns

In May 2009, the health community took an especially firm position on climate change when a joint commission led by the British medical journal The Lancet and University College London Institute for Global Health published findings that climate change poses the biggest public health threat of this century. The report outlined “major threats” to global health involving disease, water and food security, and extreme weather events, and added a cautionary statement: “Although vector-borne diseases will expand their reach and death tolls, the indirect effects of climate change on water, food security, and extreme climatic events are likely to have the biggest effect on global health.”

That Lancet study prompted Linda Marsa, a California-based medical and health writer, to do her first reporting on health effects of climate change. “At the time, there was stuff published here and there,” said Marsa, a contributing editor at Discover magazine. “I had to dig down rabbit holes to find information.” But Marsa’s reporting persistence produced a bonanza, and the result was “Hot Zone,” a feature article published in Discover in December 2010 that explores the magnitude of global health impacts of a changing climate.

A Medical, Health Journalist Newly ‘Energized’

Now, Marsa believes a “critical mass” of scientific studies over the past two years has zeroed-in on strong evidence of health consequences. “I personally think climate change is going to be the biggest science story for the rest of my career,” she said. “As a medical and health writer, frankly, this has fascinated and energized me.” Marsa is now working on a book based on her Discover story. It is to be published next year by Rodale Press.

Marsa is among a growing number of journalists now covering health in the context of climate change. The Association of Health Care Journalists, AHCJ, has helped members develop their knowledge of climate change by providing tipsheets, workshops, and panel discussions at conferences. The group has jointly conducted week-long health journalism fellowships with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and climate change has been among the segments covered over the past five years. In 2008 and 2009, the AHCJ’s annual health journalism conference also addressed the climate link with allergies, asthma, disease, heat illness, and injuries.

Leonard Bruzzese, AHCJ executive director, says the organization regularly provides members access to climate-related health topics. For instance, a resources guide for reporting on extreme heat included topics ranging from heat-related deaths among crop workers and how heat-related deaths are underestimated to prevention of heat-related illnesses. The four-page resource guide features links to science articles from magazines and newspapers and summaries of journal articles and scientific resources from public and private institutions. AHCJ has provided similar resource guides for reporting on other public health consequences of climate change.

Scientists, too, are working across disciplines to study the health effects of climate change. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Crop Systems and Global Change Laboratory, worked with colleagues at the National Allergy Bureau and Aerobiology Canada to study effects of climate warming on ragweed plants from Texas north to Saskatchewan, Canada, from 1995 to 2009. The study confirmed that pollen season is extending further into the fall, with the greatest effects at the northern latitudes.

“We were able to confirm that climate change is having an effect on pollen, that it is happening in real time, and we are seeing a real signal,” Ziska now says.

Public Health Issues Sharpening Public’s Focus

The medical community has a formidable challenge, in both addressing the health consequences of climate change and advocating for policy, according to Dan Ferber, co-author, with Harvard Professor Paul Epstein, MD, of Changing Planet, Changing Health.

“They’re dealing not with a single health effect but with a large-scale change with many health effects such as the possible spread of infectious diseases and increase in outbreaks due to extreme weather; the effects of worsening heat waves and other extreme weather; worsening respiratory disease, including allergies and asthma, and more,” Ferber said. “The medical community is realizing that good human health depends on a healthy environment, and they’re starting to broaden their focus to recommend policy efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change, where once they might have considered this beyond their purview.”

Ferber says he thinks public health professionals are well suited to address the human health risks posed by climate change because they’re professionally charged with protecting human health.

“To the extent they take that role seriously and educate themselves about the health risks posed by climate change, they can exert real influence on policymakers,” Ferber said. “Climate scientists have the credibility, but their cautious and carefully parsed pronouncements about the science don’t necessarily connect well with the concerns of ordinary Americans. Policy folks are also often depicted as ivory-tower types in what passes for public discourse on this subject. I think it’s a lot harder to dismiss the serious concerns of bona fide health leaders.”

Despite policy pronouncements and urgent warnings, Ferber said he thinks the medical community is failing on some levels by not yet connecting well with the average health worker. Ferber has talked to doctors and nurses about it. “They’ve complained that they’re aware of the connections between climate change and health but their colleagues don’t seem to take these concerns seriously,” he said. “And they’ve certainly not yet built a large movement in these professions akin to the effort by physicians in the 1970s and 1980s to ease the risk of nuclear war.”

Climate change is responsible for an increasing number of direct and indirect health problems. Communicating these risks of climate change will prove key to understanding how the public can prepare for it. Many who follow the field believe that having the public better understand and appreciate the public health consequences of a warmer world may help break the political logjam in the way of meaningful mitigation and adaptation measures.

**NOTE: After this article was published, Ed Maibach, of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, told me about a new project he has been working on with public health officials. The climate change communications primer, “Conveying the Human Implications of Climate Change,” will soon be co-branded with the Center for Disease Control, he said. The primer will also include a “lunch and learn” slide deck to help public health officials conduct briefings.

This article was originally published on The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media on June 7, 2011. Article illustrations have been changed.

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This Week In Earth: Climate Suits

This Week In Earth reports that Texas and 14 other states sued the U.S. government to protest the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. Meanwhile, a California judge suspended the cap-and-trade portion of the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act until it is brought into compliance with another environmental law. As state and federal climate legislation encounters hefty legal challenges, environmental protections are shaped increasingly by judicial — rather than legislative or scientific — processes.

Here’s my take: Legal experts say linking greenhouse gas emissions to specific regional impacts and damages is daunting, despite strong evidence that climate change is caused by human activities. Nevertheless, William Buzbee, professor of law at Emory Law School, told me, “Individual states continue to be quite active in addressing adaptation issues. That’s where you’ll see science and engineering influencing the courts through briefs.”

On the federal level: The Supreme Court heard arguments last month on whether greenhouse gases can be considered a public nuisance in Connecticut v. American Electric Power. This week, Patrick Parenteau of the Vermont Law School said that the court will likely rule that they can. He added, “I’ll be curious to see whether the COURT addresses the uncertainty surrounding congressional efforts to repeal EPA’s authority.

Looking forward: As climate change impacts become clearer, law experts say that courts will likely need more information through friends-of-the-court briefs written by climate scientists. Many climate scientists tell me they are not prepared to write affidavits requested to challenge EPA’s scientific information in the court record.

Go to This Week In Earth for the complete story.

Read more about this topic in The Yale Forum.

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Ice Flows: What do 28,000 time-lapse photos tell us about glaciers?

Colorado-based photographer-adventurer James Balog, of the Extreme Ice Survey, is working on a new series of time-lapse images of the ice and glaciers on Mount Everest. In my recent story for Slate, I obtained exclusive use of some of the earliest images from the project, including a video of the Khumbu Icefall, one of the most dramatic areas of glacial change over the past 50 years. The movement of glaciers is subtle to the human eye. But with time-lapse photography, Balog can compress nine months into 10 seconds and make glacial change patently visible.

Glaciers move at, well, a glacial pace. But in recent decades, ice has been disappearing from the Arctic and mountain ranges at a shocking rate. Ice that formed over centuries is now melting in a matter of years or months, contributing to rising sea levels and profoundly altering hydrologic cycles and water supplies to regions that rely on glaciers for their water source. Still, the movement is so gradual that its scale is invisible to the casual observer. So how do you communicate the rapid melting of glaciers to nonscientists? Forget graphs, charts, and ice core measurements. Bring in time-lapse photography, a technique to compress a massive number of sequential photographs, taken at set intervals, into what looks like a sped-up video. James Balog, pictured to the right, is the founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey, a spectacular set of time-lapse images chronicling glacial movement—the largest project of its kind. Here, Balog stands near Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, which moves at 50 feet per day, or eight times faster than it did 30 years ago.

Click here to read my slide show essay in Slate on the Extreme Ice Survey.

(Photo courtesy of Extreme Ice Survey.)

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News vs. Views

Science journalism is in big decline. In 1989, 95 U.S. newspapers had dedicated science sections. Today only a third still do. Science blogging now supersedes traditional reporting.

What does the shift from mainstream media to blogs and agenda-based media mean for society’s ability to address environmental issues? Does it reduce the quality and credibility of information? Or enrich us with a greater multiplicity of voices? To learn more, Momentum asked a science journalist in the mainstream media, along with an online reporter who focuses on the politics of energy and the environment.

Seth Borenstein
Science Writer, The Associated Press

I don’t see the decline in science writing as bad as other parts of journalism. At AP, we haven’t had cuts that affect science or environment writing at all. But for the public, the changes in media consumption habits means everything is more fractionalized and factionalized. People want to read and view people who agree with them, and they don’t want to see or hear anything that is not part of their worldview. It has always been that way to some extent, but it has gotten easier. If I were a climate change denier and only wanted to listen to Rush Limbaugh, I could have done that 10 years ago. If I were a Greenpeacer who didn’t want to hear the other voices that conflicted with my worldview, I could’ve found my news. With new media, it allows things to echo more on both ends of the spectrum.

The AP has a kind of credibility that blogs and agenda media don’t have, but it’s more than that. For my work, I hold a mirror to the world in terms of science, climate change and the environment. I still think people want to read and view that. I have been covering science and the environment for about 20 years, and so we provide the expertise. We are not here to feed one worldview or another.

The shrinkage of the conventional press is neither bad nor good, it just is. If you want to read nothing but agenda-based media, you can do it. But you will be more informed if you read reality-based media. Either way, I don’t think it is the media’s job to have people be more or less engaged with science and the environment. Whether people are engaged should have little to do with media.

Darren Samuelsohn
Senior Energy and Environment Reporter, POLITICO

While there is definitely a decrease in the number of reporters covering every issue out there, there’s a stable, core group of writers covering environmental issues like climate change. But you have got to want to find it. Energy, climate and environment issues constantly come back into the limelight and get mainstream coverage when things happen, such as blackouts in the West, the oil spill, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, gas prices shooting up to four bucks, IPCC or Gore’s movie.

Niche publications serve a very important role. There are people out there who demand to use this information all the time, not just when something else brings the issue back into the spotlight. As a reporter specialized in this topic, I cover energy and the environment constantly. I know who to talk to, who to reach out to—and people want to pay for that.

Regarding point of view, absolutely, it’s good to have opinion news out there. There’s a readership that wants writers who think similarly. Some of it is funny and hits a point right on. I read Grist and conservative blogs, trying to see what everyone has to say. I take a lot of it with grain of salt. You can certainly see there is an agenda—either solve global warming or stop policy.

I hasten to say opinionated news media has probably always been that way, with a Democrat newspaper and a Republican newspaper in each city. Now the Internet makes things more available to people you tend to agree with. People are reading, and that is a good thing. If they read a publication like mine, we are trying to call balls and strikes from what I would like to think is the middle.

This story was first published in the Spring 2011 edition of Momentum, a publication of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.

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What’s With the Weather Extremes?

Widespread reports of unusually severe weather persisted coast-to-coast and across much of the world throughout 2010, reconfirming for some the nonlinear impacts of a changing climate but also buttressing talking points for those inclined to be contrarian by, among other things, conflating short-term weather with long-term climate.

As fire and record heat shut down Moscow and killed tens of thousands, floods devastated Pakistan. The Arctic saw extremely warm temperatures, the Mid-Atlantic states in early 2010 recorded record snowfalls, and record heat in the oceans led to massive bleachings of coral. And, despite the cooling effects of La Niña and natural climate variability, 2010 tied with 1998 or 2005, as some experts prefer, for the warmest year on record.

Stories on extreme weather provide an opportunity for journalists to give context and deepen readers’ understanding of the kinds of severe weather events that are likely with climate change as levels of heat-trapping gases continue to rise. Since we’re approaching spring, all eyes will be on extreme flooding. In my home state of Minnesota, folks living near the Mississippi River are already on high alert. Almost half of the country will experience flooding this spring. A new story in the first issue of the journal Nature Climate Change explains that first-hand experience with extreme weather events increases concern about climate change and willingness to engage in energy-saving behaviors.

“We know that many people tend to see climate change as distant, affecting other people and places. However experiences of extreme weather events like flooding have the potential to change the way people view climate change, by making it more real and tangible, and ultimately resulting in greater intentions to act in sustainable ways,” psychologist Dr Alexa Spence, of The University of Nottingham, said in a statement.

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Rapid Response Team pairs climate scientists with media

Think of it as the climate scientists/journalists version of “eHarmony.” A volunteer website launched by scientists serves as a matchmaking venue for media outlets and government officials looking for input on climate science topics.

It’s a Friday morning and Scott Mandia is scanning the Climate Science Rapid Response Team e-mail inbox he shares with two other climate science match-makers.

Today, on Mandia’s watch, a message from a journalist arrives at 5:30 a.m. It’s the first of two or three media requests he’ll likely get this day. Mandia’s task now? Ask for a response from one of 135 scientists in his network most qualified to answer the question.

Mandia, a professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College, in New York, and his fellow Rapid Response founders, John Abraham, associate professor of thermodynamics at St. Thomas University, and Ray Weymann, a California-based retired astronomer and member of the National Academy of Sciences, take shifts. Each is a volunteer custodian of e-mail requests that flow in from their climate change match-making website connecting climate scientists with lawmakers and media outlets.

Launched in November 2010, the website tries to narrow the information gap between scientific understanding of climate change and what the public knows. Scientists involved with the group are screened and selected on an invitation-only basis. The experts come from a range of climate change science specialties, everything from climate modeling researchers and ecologists to economists and policy experts. Most are university faculty members or employees of government laboratories. It’s not a collection that most climate “contrarians” might be comfortable with.

The all-volunteer group promises to respond quickly to media requests to make sure science is portrayed accurately in the day’s news. They say turnaround time for requests is as fast as two hours for media operating on a short deadline.

“The scientists became members of our group because they understand that, as scientists, they have a responsibility to engage the public by engaging the media,” Mandia said in a phone interview. Mandia said he and his colleagues operate the service with no funding, and the website design was donated by Richard Hawkins, director of the Public Interest Research Centre in the United Kingdom.

Early on a Confusing Mix-up with AGU Media Project
Coincidentally, the Climate Science Rapid Response Team website debuted at the same time as the relaunch of the American Geophysical Unions’s Climate Q and A service, which has similarities with the Rapid Response Team but strictly limits questions to matters of science. Some confusion ensued when the Los Angeles Times erroneously reported a link between the AGU’s group and the Rapid Response volunteers, and AGU staff quickly initiated a damage-control effort in fear that some on Capitol Hill would find, based on the newspaper’s coverage, their effort overly politicized.

“When that (Los Angeles Times) story came out, it sounded like scientists were fighting back against politicians. We are not advocates about policy, but it made us look like we were the 98 pound weaklings getting sand kicked in their face,” said Mandia. But the bad press proved a boon to increase the numbers involved in the Rapid Response force.

“Scientists then realized they were being criticized unfairly and wanted to get involved,” said Mandia. The number of scientists involved with the Rapid Response Team quadrupled in number.

The AGU’s Q and A Service first formed to support media requests during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. It started again prior to the U.N. talks in Cancun. The Q and A service is open to anyone with a PhD degree willing to provide scientific expertise on a subject.

“AGU is not a partisan organization. We are here to make our science available so there is good information available to the media,” AGU Executive Director Chris McEntee said in a telephone interview.

About 700 scientists are registered with AGU’s service, which has provided answers to 68 media outlets. “We think it is important that policymakers, media, and the public get unbiased, nonpartisan information when making a decision,” said McEntee. “The service fits with our mission to promote scientific discovery for the benefit of humanity.”

Scientists Step Up
Mandia said scientists involved with his effort are usually tapped once or twice a month for media inquiries. No single person carries the burden of too many repeat requests because the group has selected a range of scientists, vetted for their expertise in various disciplines. The Rapid Response Team also has promised confidentiality of its scientists, who can remain anonymous if they wish. But Mandia said that, despite the offer, “none of them has ever requested anonymity.”

Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A & M University, is affiliated with both information services, but is more involved with the Climate Science Rapid Response Team. He was prompted into action because “dealing with climate change misinformation is difficult to do on your own,” Dessler wrote in an e-mail. “Effectively responding to the denial machine absolutely requires coordinated action by the climate science community. In this way, I think the CCRRT [sic] is a model of how scientists can effectively spend their limited resources on outreach.”

Dessler gives the Rapid Response service high marks, especially for institutionalizing the response process from scientists and distributing the communications workload. “You have to realize the asymmetry here. For [some] so-called skeptics, spreading misinformation is their full-time job. Scientists, on the other hand, already have a full-time job: research and teaching. Thus, we need to have mechanisms to level the playing field, and the CCRRT [sic] is one such mechanism,” said Dessler, adding that he encourages scientists to get involved in public outreach. “Because we are mainly funded by tax dollars, I think we have a responsibility to repay this by spreading the results of our research as far and wide as possible.”

A Goal of Precise Pairing
As of early February, more than 100 media organizations — newspaper, magazine, online media, television, and radio — and government officials have used the service to find climate scientists who could comment on a story. Mainstream media users have included The New York Times, The Guardian (UK), CNN International, and American Public Media’s “Marketplace,” among many others. Mandia said many of the media questions in December had to do with severe weather in the United States and in Northern Europe.

The Rapid Response website includes testimonials from such reporters as Ben Webster, of The Times in London: “I asked a difficult question about ice cores and was impressed by the efforts the team made to find the right people to respond. The response was balanced, stating clearly what was known but also the uncertainties.”

Eli Kintisch, a reporter for Science and author of Hack the Planet (Wiley, 2010), called on the service when he was looking for a scientist to serve as a color commentator of a live blog for Science he was producing during a House hearing. Facing time constraints, Kintisch relied on the matchmakers for the legwork of finding someone to fill this role.

“I have my own batch of sources on climate that I have used to comment on stories, and I have used ProfNet in the past occasionally. But I was looking for someone who had some experience with public engagement and would be available for two to four hours,” Kintisch said in a telephone interview. “The hearing was a review of the basics of climate science, and there were some prominent contrarians testifying, so I thought it would be useful to have someone available who knew the basics of climate science.”

While not all climate scientists feel comfortable engaging with the media, they are finding ways to get more involved in communications. Mandia said, “Some scientists are nervous about speaking to the press and worry they will be misquoted, but getting out of the ‘Ivory Tower’ is becoming very important.” [See complete story in The Yale Forum]

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Behavior Frontiers: Can Social Science Combat Climate Change?

Roughly 44 percent of Californians smoked tobacco in 1965. By 2010, 9.3 percent did—a shift that might have seemed impossible before it happened. Understanding exactly how such a social transformation occurred in the past may prove key to understanding how individuals might alter their behavior to help combat climate change in the future.

By studying past instances of social transformation, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) hope to predict future change in response to global warming as part of California’s Carbon Challenge—a study commissioned by the California Energy Commission to help the state cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels. LBNL energy technology scientist Jeffery Greenblatt and his colleagues are analyzing technology options as well as data records from 10 historical behavior changes—smoking cessation, seat belt use, vegetarianism, drunk driving, recycling and yoga, among others.

Scientists are removing some of the guesswork about how individuals will use energy in 2050 by looking at past campaigns to induce personal change and their effectiveness. See the complete article in Scientific American.

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Pew Center scientist Jay Gulledge tills communication and policy fields

Pew Climate Change Senior Scientist Jay Gulledge has mixed science and communicating since earning his Ph.D. in biological sciences 15 years ago.

On the research side, the biogeochemist has studied carbon cycling and the cycling fluxes of methane between ecosystems and the atmosphere, and he continues to work with colleagues in China on issues involving the country’s methane budget.

Before joining the Arlington, Va.-based Pew Center on Global Climate Change in 2005, Gulledge had taught at the University of Louisville and at Tulane University. Now much of his work involves helping scientists and scientific organizations improve their ability to make research accessible and meaningful to the public, says Gulledge, a self-described “pure-bred scientist” now actively tilling the communications and policy fields.

Gulledge spoke with me recently for an interview that appears in the Yale Forum. So what’s the big takeaway? My guess is that standards for data transparency will move into greater focus in the coming years. Gulledge says, “Industry professionals in fields like engineering have long ago set standards for how they archive their work and so on. That has not been a practice in the basic fields of science, such as earth sciences, because they are not closely tied to contract law. Now they need to start doing it because the need is becoming apparent. The point would be to protect earth scientists from unwarranted accusations of conflict of interest.”

You can read the complete interview here.

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Sea Glass Prized for Oddities, Bits of History, Chemistry

At low tide in a secluded cove on Narragansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island, Suegray Fitzpatrick begins her quest. She beaches her kayak onto the sand, walks to the water’s edge, and pulls out a Ziploc baggie she hopes to fill with bits of rare blue or turquoise, but more likely white, green and brown.

Fitzpatrick is a sea glass collector and jewelry maker, who frequently explores the region’s little known rocky beaches for frosted glass shards nature has formed into precious gems. These glass bits sooner or later wind up as jewelry or decorative objects that she crafts in her Newport home.

The hobby of sea glass collecting is equal parts history, archeology, and chemistry, as I reported in Fortune Small Business. Collector Louise Rogers seeks uncommon colors such as orange and red, which are her Holy Grail. She also favors glass embossed with identifiable patterns or labels, such as the word “Hood” from the Charlestown, Mass., dairy’s milk bottles. All sea glass is becoming less common as more glass is recycled and plastic bottles become the norm.

While sea glass is widely available for purchase – a turquoise piece fetched more than $250 on eBay – Rogers prefers finding her own. Vacations to shoreline destinations feed her collection. A few years ago she traveled to Peaks Island in Maine’s Casco Bay, where she found a china doll’s arm. “My first body part!” she says.

So, why all the fuss over fragments? “People know that sea glass is becoming a rare commodity,” says Richard LaMotte, author of  Pure Sea Glass, a collectors’ guide. The colorful baubles are actually rubbish–glass shards that have been polished smooth by waves, sand, and stone.

I met LaMotte when I reported on the first meeting of the North America Sea Glass Association in Santa Cruz, California, for Coastal Living Magazine in 2006. I regularly found sea glass on my daily beach walks when I lived in Rhode Island, but noticed it was hard to come by in recent years. LaMotte explained that improved waste management practices as well as a marked increase in the use of plastic for drink containers was making sea glass more rare.

Cornelia Dean featured such sea glass collectors in the New York Times Science section recently. In her story about the 5th annual sea glass competition, she quoted LaMotte, who is dead against the rising practice of seeding beaches with broken glass:

If the association is firm against manufacturing sea glass, there is less agreement on “seeding” beaches with glass. Though some collectors already engage in the practice, Mr. LaMotte sees obvious safety and environmental problems with putting broken glass on the beach. Anyway, Ms. Lambert said, it might take 50 or 100 years for a piece of broken glass seeded on a beach to achieve the patina of sea glass. “Until then, it’s just trash.”

Two years ago I searched for sea glass on a trip to Eleuthera, Bahamas. Like Rogers, I was looking for a surprise. I expected to find one or two collectible bits of red, blue or aqua glass–formed by the unique properties of degradation due to a different salt content in those waters, from unusual polishing due to the pink sand beach, or from a different culture of waste disposal. What I found, instead, was a million little pieces of plastic–orange, blue, white, and red confetti from laundry soap bottles and other cartons. This was my surprise.

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Books I’ve Read in 2010

As a book reviewer for the Providence Journal from 2006-2009, my reading list expanded with books I didn’t manage to read during that time. The book review gig ended when I moved to the Washington, D.C. area. So, in 2010 I played catch-up. Here are the books I’ve read so far. What should I read in 2011?

January
Strength in What Remains
Tracy Kidder

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan DIdion

A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway

February
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot

Science as a Contact Sport
Stephen Schneider

Hack the Planet
Eli Kintisch (review copy)

March
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
David Wroblewski

Bobke
Bob Roll (reread)

April
Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert

Julie and Julia
Julie Powell

May
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri

June
Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri

July
Pillars of Hercules
Paul Theroux

Dark Star Safari
Paul Theroux

Fresh Air Fiend
Paul Theroux

August
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah

What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Acheck Deng
Dave Eggers

September
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker
David Remnick (Ed.)
*Do not miss Travels in Georgia (Carol Ruckdeshel) by John McPhee. It’s brilliant.

The Control of Nature
John McPhee (reread)

October
The Help
Kathryn Stockett

Seasick
Alanna Mitchell

Smile
Raina Telgemeier

November
My Story As Told By Water
David James Duncan

The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mt. Everest
Conrad Anker and David Roberts

December

A stack of Stieg Larsson books sits on my table. Which one should I read first?