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Science

Breasts and Beyond.

“When you find out that you are ill, your priorities are shattered. One moment you are in a boat, and the next moment you are in the water…. Once you’ve experienced being mortally ill and you’ve come back, you have learned something that’s worth knowing.” – Susan Sontag

***

THESE DAYS I seem to meet survivors wherever I turn. I can’t decide whether that’s a good or a bad thing, good for the outcome, bad for the frequency of affliction. Yet every cancer survivor who I’ve encountered, or for that matter anyone diagnosed with any life-threatening illness, can relate to Sontag’s words. They were uttered in an interview in 1988 when she had successfully navigated a return to the living from metastatic breast cancer, and before she was diagnosed a decade later with an unrelated uterine cancer. Ultimately, the treatment required to fight these cancers led to yet another one, t-MDS or therapy-related myelodysplastic syndrome, a then untreatable variant of leukemia. She died in 2004.

You are in the boat one moment, and the next you are in the water. The possibility of drowning looms large, but there is still a chance to swim, if you are lucky, strong, determined – and were taught to swim in the first place.

I was thinking of that during my visit with Laura Ross-Paul at her studio last week, meeting the artist for the first time to talk about her upcoming exhibition, The BrEaST Show, at The Nine Gallery (inside Blue Sky Center for Photographic Arts.) Ross-Paul found herself in the water in 2003, diagnosed with breast cancer, and after intense research opted for what was then experimental cancer treatment, being the very first breast cancer patient in the U.S. to undergo a procedure called cryo-ablation. She has shared what she learned ever since she’s come back on land, as an activist as well as an artist. It’s worthwhile knowledge for the rest of us as well, and the exhibition will provide the perfect forum to get informed in addition to see a painter yield color with admirable abandon.

Depending on the type of breast cancer, a person’s surgical options are mastectomy (a full removal of the breast,) lumpectomy (removal of a small part that contains the tumor,) and and now cryo-ablation, a surgical procedure that involves inserting a stainless steel probe directly into the tumor. The thin probe carries cold argon gas down an outer tube to the sealed tip of the probe, then the gas expands as it returns through an inner return tube to the gas delivery system. This makes the probe tip extremely cold, which freezes the surrounding tissue into a controlled, spherical shape with safe margins around the tumor to insure that the entire tumor is killed. (You might have encountered a version of this procedure during a visit to the dermatologist, where they use cryo-ablation to freeze off some of the undesirable growth on your skin.)

There are clear advantages to cryosurgery, breast preservation looming large for many women and/or their partners (which turns out to be something of a conundrum: how to proceed if the husband wants breast preservation at all cost, and the wife would like to avoid experimental procedures in the interest of the tried and true, the knife?) Other benefits come in multiple forms: you avoid major surgery with all the potential problems associated with it. Damage to surrounding tissues is limited. It can be used in conjunction with other cancer therapies, including hormone therapies and targeted immunotherapy which activates our body’s own defenses against the cancer. It is much cheaper (although not all insurance policies cover it) and can be done in a relatively quick in and out procedure, often with local anesthesia only, not requiring a hospital stay. And there is some evidence to suggest that the dead cancer cells, absorbed into the body, stimulate the immune system to recognize cancer on further occasions.

The big question, like for any new procedure, is, of course, does it work?

The answer is as you’d expect: it depends. The great news first (great, because it applies to all cancer types, not just a subset, thus helping the largest number of people): it is an extremely effective palliative approach for patients who cannot be cured of the diseases, but who can receive pain relief by destroying large tumors through freezing, or any tumors in locations that cannot be reached by any other surgical means, when the cancer has spread to the bones or the liver. It can buy time for patients who are too old or otherwise not able to survive conventional surgery.

The good news next: it is an option to cure you from cancer, rid you of the scourge, IF certain conditions apply. On averaged, the best candidates for this method are patients whose tumors are smaller than 15 mm, hormone receptor–positive, and HER2-negative, and have NOT metastasized into the lymph system. In other words, if you have a low-risk, non-aggressive cancer that is detected early in its first stages, cryo-ablation is ensuring survival as well as preserving your breast in full. Many clinics and cancer centers in the U.S. are offering the procedure these days, with China having embraced it full scale and developed specific immunotherapies in conjunction with the surgery, as Ross-Paul told me.

There seem to be few side effects, if any; according to the artist who also received the immunotherapy, she was advised to forgo inoculations for other diseases, which might be a problem in the age of pandemics, or age-related vulnerability to other scourges like shingles and pneumonia. There are certainly research data that show a problem for patients with active cancers undergoing immunotherapy who also received the Covid-shots: it can lead to averse reactions, including a flare of tumor growth.

***

ON MY WAY HOME I was searching for a term that best encapsulated my first impressions of the artist. Spirited, curious, plucky, driven – none seemed to fit the bill, until it dawned on me: undaunted.

As a patient, undaunted. As a pioneer subject for medical research, undaunted. As a pedagogue employing art as social practice, undaunted. And last but not least, as a painter, undaunted. Patient, pioneer, pedagogue, painter: colloquially expressed, the woman has balls.

The pun, of course, applies to a recurring motif in the work to be exhibited as well. Balls, spheres, round configurations appear in the paintings as symbols linking to breasts but also the spheres of frozen tissues that saved her life as well as her physical integrity. Pearls of wisdom rain down from various sages emblematic of her learning curve during an extensive period of research to find a way to retain unblemished breasts while staying alive, her husband, award-winning author Alex Paul, and her children foremost on her mind, since she herself was orphaned at a young age.

Balls are on a dress, when exploring the possibilities of many treatment options, trying the freezing bubbles on for size. Balls are stacking up during treatment, patient now enveloped by the argon bubbles of the dress, and balls can be freely juggled, shedding the illness, leaving an impression of joyous return to a more playful life.

Spheres also appear on the cervid companion, for Ross-Paul a symbol of the innocence that is lost when you encounter existential dread. For me it evoked more of a “deer in headlight” reaction, the fear that paralyzes you at times if living with cancer. Wouldn’t want to embrace that. But then again, I’m also on the war path with these creatures who devour my beloved garden in their nightly visits, so not a neutral observer. Real-life Bambis be gone!

The accumulated work gently guides you through the stages of treatment selection and process, with a focus on the importance of collecting data, having a radar for possibilities, making decisions based on scientific information (for me an example of being “taught how to swim” that I mentioned earlier – it takes an educated person aware of resources and able to discern the quality of information.) This is really the part where Ross-Paul’s educational activism comes to the fore – visual pointers so often more effective than a complex written literature on an unfamiliar topic. She communicates ideas that, in turn, allow you to ask questions of your doctor. This is in parallel to a book she co-authored with her husband and her Doctor, Peter Littrup, M.D., which explains the journey in all of its details.

The painterly work extends to “art as social practice,” a domaine that involves participatory engagement between community and artist, when we look at the many portraits she painted in collaboration with sitters who had opted for the experimental treatment, connecting from across the world. In some ways I am reminded of earlier projects that crossed lines between art and education, if on a different scale. Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse in Los Angeles—which was part art installation, part educational facility, part performance space in the 1970s, comes to mind, given its focus on women’s concerns. Portland State University, by the way, has an increasingly recognized Art and Social Practice MFA program, with an archive established in 2018, well worth exploring.

***

“There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones…and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.” – Emil Nolde, from Emil Nolde: Die Farben sind meine Noten.

***

WHATEVER YOU THINK of Emil Nolde, one of the pioneers of German Expressionism, his work with color reigns supreme. (I have written about his anti-Semitism, his Nazi-affin politics and the incredible research by art historians that went into unraveling the clash between political identity and art of the painter here.) At times his colors do not only sing, they scream. No wonder, that one of the largest retrospectives of his work in 2018 at the National Galleries of Scotland was titled Colour is Life, while a 2019 one at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, Germany was called Emil Nolde. A German Legend. The Artist during the Nazi Regime.

The vibrancy and levels of saturation of many of Ross-Paul’s paintings remind me of his work, using electrifying color as a means of communication rather than a tool for verisimilitude. Her exhibits, if you peruse the show in order, will transition from more muted colors to a riotous slate that is the perfect carrier for the emotional palette the artist intends to invoke. When I said earlier that she is an an undaunted painter, I was motivated by the artist’s generous use of pink. Pink on the surface of the paintings, but also on the sides of the canvasses which are embedded in some sort of reflective frames that emanate a kind of rosy halo.

Pink is a curious choice for a breast cancer survivor who is also a progressive activist. Before I explain, let me say that I ended up liking the pink more so than I had anticipated, or maybe I adored the attitude of an artist who ignores symbolism when it interferes with her sheer love of color and her desire to convey some hope on the horizon. Pink, after all, reflects dawn, the beginning of a new day, not a gentle color slide into the night.

Pink is a color associated with breast cancer since the early 1990s, when Evelyn Lauder (of Estée Lauder) established the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, with pink ribbons becoming a universal symbol for the disease. Of course, the disease had been branded before – the American Cancer Society and Imperial Chemical Industries (now part of AstraZeneca, which makes several breast cancer drugs), launched Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985, originally intended to encourage women to get regular mammograms.

What was meant to help address the rising number of cancer diagnoses and deaths (over 4 million people have a history of breast cancer in the U.S. alone, with 43.700 expected to die from breast cancer in 2023 in this country,) has, alas, become an exercise in pinkwashing. One of the definitions goes along these lines:

Pinkwasher: (pink’-wah-sher) noun. A company or organization that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products containing chemicals that are linked to the disease. (Ref.)

It is desire for profit, not compassion or education that drives the association between products with pink ribbons and inspirational quotes, particularly during October, Breast Cancer Awareness month. Some companies donate a portion of the income to the cause. Others disappear with the proceeds. We are asked to donate with total uncertainty if the funds arrive at their destination: the patients.

Some of the inspirational words, however, ring true enough that they deserve to be put up on the fridge, where my assorted collection of wisdom resides these days, for the most part.

Breast cancer is a word, not a sentence.

Actually it’s 2 words. As is undaunted painter, who already in 2003 upon diagnosis decided to take her fate into her own hands and acknowledged that her breast mattered and a mutilation of her body was unacceptable, ceteris paribus where survival was concerned. That goes beyond breasts and balls, into the realm of knowing yourself and being willing to fight for something truly existential. It was certainly the message I took home from her work that reinforced my own beliefs about living with cancer. There is no one way, no right way, no indisputable way of dealing with what ails you. Just like grief (and plenty of that to go around with the loss of body parts, or decimation of life expectancy, or simply energy levels that will never resume the status quo), you have to find an approach that honors who you are and how your values manage to survive. Otherwise you might as well jump off a cliff, instead into a life net, provided by whatever therapeutic approach you choose.

“It’s unclear where she’ll land, but she shows trust that she’ll land alright.” – Laura Ross-Paul, July 17, 2003

***


The BrEaST Show
Laura Ross-Paul

JULY 6-29, 2023
Opening: Thursday, July 6
5:00-7:30pm

NINE Gallery (inside Blue Sky Gallery)
122 NW 8th Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97209
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Of love and revenge.

Alternatively, today’s musings could be titled “Of avenging orcas and lesbian gulls.”

Orcas: by now you have probably heard that parts of the Mediterranean are plagued by pods of orcas that have taken to disabling the rudders of sailboats, damaging the ships to the point where crews need to be evacuated and some boats having sunk. These are not isolated events – over 50 occurrences have been reported in just the last few months, involving a growing number of these mammals (it is believed there is only a total of about 60 orcas inhabiting that region.)

What on earth is going on in the Strait of Gibraltar? Some scientists believe that the killer whales are simply playful. A speaker for the organization OrcaIberica.org, for example, pointed out that the orcas don’t approach the boats with signs of aggression, nor display aggressive behavior during their attempts to break the rudders. They leave the people who evacuate into life boats in peace. The species is known to play and pursue fads in the process: there was a time when they all started to carry dead salmon on their heads for a while, and another one where they increasingly imitated the noises of sea lions.

Researchers at the University of St. Andrews, on the other hand, believe that a female who was hurt by a sailboat’s rudder in 2020, is modeling revenge, with more and more orcas now participating in the attacks where they bite, bend and break off the rudder, fighting off a perceived common enemy.

“Notions of collective self-defense in cetaceans (aquatic mammals including whales, dolphins and porpoises) are far from outlandish. We have accounts of sperm whales rising to each other’s defense when orcas attack, for example.”

It is assumed that the behavior spreads through social learning. What makes this so problematic, other than humans being thrown into the sea by a bunch of huge, toothed marine mammals, or destroying expensive boats, is the fact that this particular species is critically endangered. Political efforts to protect them will not be helped if people see them as actual “killer”whales, and if boat operators loose tourist income if they are simply asked to leave the marine habitat alone. Demands to cull the orcas are already emerging.

They are smart cookies. Captive orcas learn to regurgitate fish to use as bait for gulls, which they apparently prefer to eat over the fish, for example.

Which brings me to gulls – and the thought-provoking theme how science depends on societal approval, not just for funding, but even for research findings to see the light of day.

Gulls: I will summarize what you can hear on a fascinating RadioLab podcast in full. Lulu Miller, one of the hosts of RadioLab, wanted to showcase same-sex pairings in nature for Pride Month. She offers sea gulls, and many other species – and their sounds – as examples: “gay bonobo yelps usher in squeaking manatees; homosexual Amazon dolphins that love cuddling screech alongside male bottlenose dolphins who have sex (with each other) roughly 2.4 times per hour. Queer rattlesnakes and marsupials harmonize with homosexual bats who have sex upside-down while flying.” Many of these species are bisexual, but there are also small percentages of some species that are exclusively homosexual.

In the course of perusing the literature, she found how, across centuries, the scientific documentation of homosexuality in nature was suppressed. A 1999 compendium by Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, revealed to her how much evidence was omitted from the scientific publications. Suppression also almost happened to the sea gull study by George and Molly Hunt, that showed about 10% of birds nested in same sex (female) pairs, having large clutches of eggs that they cared for together. Finally published in Science in 1977, the Hunts were condemned because of the study’s implication that homosexuality was, in fact, natural. Congress intervened, temporarily blocking the National Science Foundation budget because it had partially funded the Hunts’ research.

The (religious) denial that queerness exists in nature happens even in the face of findings that homosexuality can have adaptive advantage. (Well, I guess any concept associated with evolution is suspect…) For black swans, for example, heterosexual pairings experience a 30 percent cygnet (baby swan) survival rate, while homosexual pairs fledge 80 percent. Male-male pairs tend to commandeer larger pond territories, leaving them with more and better space for rearing their clutch. (Ref.) Miller, the podcast host, suggests that

“It’s not just swans who experience a version of this bisexual advantage. In many species, sexual fluidity enhances “conflict resolution, stress relief, hunting alliances, social fitness, pleasure, and survival rate of offspring.”

Let’s imagine, though, just for sake of thinking it through, that these scientific observations were different. Let’s imagine, perhaps, that we found that homosexuality was only observed in our species, Homo sapiens. That would not for an instant shake my view that condemnations of human homosexuality are offensive and utterly indefensible. In other words, the value judgment here has (and should have) roots that are deeper, more resolute, than the scientific findings! The science is intriguing, and may deepen our understanding of many points, but on this issue (and many others) human values about differences, inherited or chosen, need to have their foundation in immutable principles, not in the scientists’ observations of similar differences in the animal kingdom.

In case all this depletes your mood on a perfectly fine Monday morning, do I have the antidote for you: this clip of a flying squirrel getting out of a pickle made me laugh out loud. Nature at its best. (Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder: is this AI generated? We’ll never know.)

Music helps us dream of the seaside.

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Vultures, all.

My thoughts have been occupied with the fate of certain vultures (real ones), so it is not surprising that the term came to mind when I read about the latest Supreme Court Decision today siding with (or acting as) proverbial ones, allowing developers and land owners to build and pollute in previously protected wetlands. Overall, the Sackett vs EPA decision gutted the Clean Water Act, a key 50-year-old piece of legislation to prevent pollution seeping into rivers, streams and lakes. The ruling undermines the EPA’s authority (a long term goal of those fighting the “administrative state”) and was disastrous enough that even justice Kavanaugh dissented. This comes of course on the heels of another ruling last year which curtailed the EPA’s ability to regulate planet-heating gases from the energy sector. Any hope to force industries to minimally fight climate change was scuttled.

Of course I was looking at a vulture, when vulture thoughts emerged – the original thoughts not much happier than the ones following the SC news. As it turns out, some 90% of India’s population of vultures was wiped out across the last two decades. These birds play an enormous role in the health of that continent, because they devour rotten carcasses that otherwise spread disease to human populations. In fact, they were a means of picking corpses clean, human corpses who can’t be cremated or buried according to Zoroastrian religion. “Zoroastrians put their dead on top of a structure called The Tower of Silence where vultures devour the body in a matter of hours. It’s clean, efficient, eco-friendly. It’s how it’s been for thousands of years.” (I learned all this here.)

Scientists have been sleuthing for years and finally figured it out: the vultures died from kidney failure! But what caused that in all of these birds? Here’s the short version: it’s not a virus, bacteria or fungi, it not’s malnutrition or environmental toxins. It is the unintended consequence of human caring about – cows. They are holy to Hindus, and when they get old and suffer arthritic pain, they are given pain killers, the drug Diclofenac in particular. It’s in a class of drugs called NSAIDs, Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs. That includes, you know, drugs like Advil, Motrin, Aleve, ibuprofen (which are of course also injuring kidneys in humans, if not taken appropriately.) The vultures eat the medicated cows’ carcasses, taking the drug in that way and it absolutely destroys their organs.

Here is the good news: once scientists had established the connection, the drug was abandoned across Asia (and replaced with other pain killers for cows,) and the vulture populations are slowly recovering. Emphasis on s l o w l y: they have only one offspring per year….

The vulture I saw was likely waiting to get a taste of Heuer, not all unlikely given the company I found myself in. Then again, it might have been rabbit for lunch.

I was walking for the first time this year on the Oak Island loop on Sauvie Island, which ended up not being a loop after all, since a quarter of it was completely submerged in water, forcing me to turn back the way I had come.

But the views were restorative, as always, birds happily courting or feeding their young.

A bald eagle hanging out, let me come surprisingly close while looking me straight in the eye from a position on the ground, no less; I later saw him flying away, maybe the starlings had gotten on his nerve.

Ospreys coming and going from their nest.

Almost enough joy to forget about black robed judges potentially bought by special interests, now delivering the spoils, environmental protection be damned. I better go find some more birds….

Quail on the run.

Time to re-up one of my go-to spring albums, Simmerdim.

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Atomic Bamboozle at the Hollywood and Kiggins Theatres

After the catastrophe in Fukushima, Germany’s governing parties, abiding by a societal consensus reached as early as Chernobyl, decided in 2011 to phase out the last remaining nuclear reactors. It finally happened exactly a month ago, on April 15th, 2023.

Nuclear Power in Germany: Finally History!

Not so for the rest of Europe, where 12 of the 27 EU-nations insist that nuclear power is the way to go. They prolong the run times for old power plants and build new ones, with Poland planning to react 6 new reactors, and Holland, Great Britain Hungary and Slovakia not far behind. The largest producer of nuclear energy, 2nd only to the U.S., is, of course, France. They have 56 reactors, with 14 new ones in the planning stages.

This is all the more astounding since France has been facing a fiasco: they do not have enough electricity to meet domestic needs, much less export for economic gain, since in 2022 more than half of its reactors had to be shut down, at least temporarily, because of grave cracks, corrosion and general decay in its aging facilities, and because the summer heat and drought affected the cooling towers, with not enough water available, forcing them to be turned off. They are also grappling with political scandals around the falsification of documents that assured the safety of faulty construction materials for new reactors.

The fact that one clings to a path once chosen even if it makes no longer any sense is called “escalating commitment.” If done by you or me – “hey I stick with a job I don’t love, because I invested so much to get to this position in the first place” – it will only harm ourselves. Done by governments, it can harm a nation, or more.

Here in the U.S. we are seeing a version of this, with people granting that the old nuclear plants were bad, but also loudly proclaiming that the new small modular reactors (SMRs) will solve our energy crisis and propel us into a cleaner, cheaper future.

It ain’t so.

To find out why, you can watch Atomic Bamboozle at the Hollywood Theatre or at the Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver, WA, in case you missed the showing at Cinema 21 that I also advertised, some 2 months earlier. Highly recommended, given my vested interest in this film as part of the production team. The documentary will be shown in conjunction with PORTRAIT 2: TROJAN, a meditative short film on the day that the Trojan Nuclear Plant was imploded and decommissioned, by Portland-based artist and filmmaker Vanessa Renwick. In case my recommendation isn’t enough, here’s on from a more familiar name:

Here is the trailer for the film.

Of particular interest for the upcoming showings are several speakers, Joshua Frank and Kamil Khan among them, who will, in turn, introduce the project, and participated in a panel discussion.

Joshua Frank wrote Atomic Days – The Untold Story of the most Toxic Place in America. The book conveys the calamitous risks and staggering costs attached to nuclear power. The author is emphatically describing the threats implicit to all forms of nuclear energy production, not just from the left over underground tanks iat Hanford, currently corroding during ever delayed clean-up activities tagged at $677 billion and growing, tanks that are leaking radioactive broth from its 56 millions of radioactive waste into the ground water and Columbia river at Hanford, and that before the damage from a potential catastrophic earthquake.

There are also related, but perhaps less familiar perspectives that need to be amplified. Here is one of the relevant commentaries on the book:

Frank, by the way, will be also on site for a discussion/community reading of his book on Saturday, June 10th 3:30 – 5 pm at the Goldendale Community Library in the context of one of the most interesting and effective programs offered by the Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries: Revolutionary Reads. (Details in link.)

Kamil Khan is the new executive director of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, who just recently moved to Portland. Hailing originally from Pakistan, a nuclear-capable power, he is, in his own words, aware of some of the implications of its use.

“What those celebrations of (underground nuclear testing) did not factor was the environmental and social costs of testing, maintaining, and expanding the nuclear arsenal. I firsthand saw the ramifications of a bloated military budget and the divestment from necessary social programs as a result. I was also privy to the lack of political stability and scapegoating of “enemy” countries; this nuclear flexing was a compounded abomination to the very real human suffering occurring on the daily.”

Other speakers and panel discussants are

• Jan Haaken, director and documentary filmmaker
• Samantha Praus, producer
• Lloyd Marbet, executive director Oregon Conservancy Foundation
• Patricia Kullberg, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, moderator.

Photographs today are from the Hanford site and region, where the documentary film crew spent time last summer. Music is self explanatory…

May 21, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd. (Tickets available via link)

Jun 07, 7:00 PM

Kiggins Theatre, 1011 Main St, Vancouver, WA 98660

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Science through the lens of art

This spring, first Ohio’s and now Tennessee’s Governor signed laws that designate methane gas as “green” or “clean” energy. The legislation is pushed as part of a growing industry-funded strategy to delay climate action by codifying misinformation about natural gas into law – and make no mistake, methane is a fossil fuel, a powerful greenhouse gas. We are following closely in the footsteps of the European Union where this kind of designation meant that billions of dollars that were intended to fund climate-friendly projects could legally be used for methane power plants and terminals. But Tennessee is going a step or two further to serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry:

“The fact that methane gas is now legally “clean energy” in Tennessee is a benefit for TVA and its planned methane gas expansion. And it’s not the only recent bill that benefits TVA. Last month, Rep. Clark Boyd sponsored a bill that makes it a Class C felony to interrupt or interfere with “critical infrastructure” like pipelines. In February, Boyd also sponsored a bill to block any future bans of gas stoves. Last year, Tennessee lawmakers passed the Tennessee Natural Gas Innovation Act, which legally categorized methane gas as a source of “clean energy” for utilities. They also passed laws preventing local governments from blocking fossil fuel infrastructure and the state from working with banks that divest from fossil fuel companies.”(Ref.)

The favoring of capital over science in the context of climate change might have the most dire long term consequences, but an anti-science stance, increasingly and fervently pursued internationally by right-wing forces, has immediate impact as well, as we saw (and see) in the context of the pandemic. Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. Antiscience is invading the courts (think about the “un-scientific” reasoning in the S.C.’s Dobbs decision) and the educational system (think about Florida’s purging of text books, for example, or the general push to dismantle public education, so that private schools can pick and choose their curricula.

Historically, antiscience was not an exclusive domain of the Right – if anything one of the greatest antiscience authoritarian of all times was Stalin, whose “beliefs” starved millions of people to death. In the U.S. the Republican Party was actually open to science for some decades: The National Academy of Sciences was founded in the Lincoln administration; NASA in the Eisenhower administration, and PEPFAR (U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), PMI (President’s Malaria Initiative) and the NTDs (neglected tropical diseases) program were launched in the George W. Bush Administration. All this has obviously changed since 2015 when anti vaccers took over and “Health Freedom” became a rallying cry – look at the legislation signed this week by Governor DeSantis and weep. Both medical treatment and medical research are adversely affected.

All this swirled through my head when looking at my photographs of Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory, and its wall and ceiling murals created in 1934 by Hugo Ballin that celebrate science and scientists.

Beyond appreciating the vistas of the approach path to the observatory and the beauty of the building itself, it is really the idea of what science provides and how it moves us forwards, potentially rescuing us, that matters.

The panels on astronomy, aeronautics, navigation, civil engineering, metallurgy and electricity, time, geology and biology, and mathematics and physics celebrate science, and scientists, including path breaking ones from ancient times and non-Western regions. Will kids, traveling in large school classes, who are no longer educated in the history of science or science’s importance even understand why is depicted and why?

Ballin was onto something there, although he was somewhat conservative at heart. In fact his clinging to traditional mural subjects, techniques and representation stood in stark contrast to the progressive muralists of his times, like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros who conveyed social and political messages on public buildings. Then again, their work was eventually whitewashed, while Ballin’s embrace of the old-fashioned Beaux-Arts style made his work survive.

Born to German Jewish immigrants in NYC, the artist made his way out West to join the silent film industry, with little success. His career as a painter and muralist for civic institutions, on the other hand, took off. His impact and importance for L.A.’s Jewish community is described beautifully here with lots of historical photographs for specific projects (e.g. the observatory here.). I found the link on a generally very helpful site, UCLA’s Mapping Jewish L.A., that has numerous interesting digital exhibitions.

The art itself did not do much for me, but the ideas that propelled it forward and that it represented, did. The same could be said for what I saw this week, on the very last day of the Altered Terrain exhibit at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.

Michael Boonstra burn (…fall creek layers…) 2023 with detail

The work by Michael Boonstra and Christine Bourdette is the polar opposite to Ballin’s representational depictions. Both artists abstract the essence of their subjects, but both are clearly informed by science and Boonstra by the impact of humans on the environment, driven, in part, by a rejection of science. Bourdette is deeply interested in geological processes, from gas formations to the creation of geological strata through the massive forces that shape the terrain across millennia.

Christine Bourdette Notch (2023) with detail and Portal (2023) with detail

Boonstra distills his perceptions of forest fires and their aftermath. Both use materials derived from the earth, charcoal, minerals and earthy pigments to capture the colors of the landscapes they care for so deeply.

Michael Boonstra Nowhere/Now here (snowfields) 2018-2022 with detail

The pairing of the two artists worked well, the overall perceptual sparseness of the exhibition provided sufficient (and necessary!) attention for each piece, in short, the curation was spot on.

Given how much I admired the concepts, and the learnedness that went into these works, why did it not resonate on an emotional level? All I can come up with is that it felt so meticulously built-up, acribic, painstaking construction and marking that captured order instead of chaos associated with destruction, whether from fiery infernos or glacial ice-melt floods and volcanic eruptions.

Christine Bourdette Escarpement 1 (2022) with detail

Maybe the creation of beauty in resonance to the fearful natural forces provides a defensive shield, helps to inform or warn the viewer without frightening them away. I, however, could not shake off a sense of sterility, even when looking at gorgeous color palettes. (A more detailed and receptive review by Prudence Roberts, who knows what she is talking about, can be found here.)

Michael Boonstra burn (bootleg) (2023) with details

In any case, having now jumped across topics in the usual fashion again, let me add one more link as a reminder how science-informed art mapped, successfully in my eyes, the alteration of the landscape through external forces. I had written about art, forest fires and the geological Gorge formation here.

Here is Murphy’s Dark Energy, played by the (now disbanded) Linden Quartet, in honor of Einstein’s science.

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Counting Coyotes

It’s getting ridiculous. Here we live some 15 minutes away from the center of a medium-sized city, and yet it feels like we are out in the woods, something we cherish – in principle. We love the trees, the seclusion, the birds. We tolerate the various critters, from field mice to wood rats to rabbits that share our vegetable garden.

We have gotten used to the deer that eat everything from my peas to my hostas to my roses, forgiving their rapacious appetites that even empty the bird feeders directly in front of our windows for the pleasure of seeing “real” wildlife cross our yard several times a week.

Then there are the coyotes. What used to be an occasional sighting during dawn or dusk on the road (a road jokingly known as coyote highway, since it connects several neighborhood parks and ravines,) has now become almost a daily occurrence, during all times of the day. In our yard, where all these photos were taken, as well as the street.

Not only that. Last week our substantially-sized dog, a German Shorthair pointer, ran out, barking his head off when he saw the coyote standing right next to our wheelbarrow. The coyote fled into the trees, only to re-emerge within seconds and approaching the dog, face to face, with a “play-with-me” downward dog posture, only to depart when we started screaming in order to get our dog back to safety, me with camera in hand.

Downward coyote….

Corner of the wheelbarrow lower left

Sniffing the garden bench….

It is half scary, half wondrous to see a wild animal so close. Clearly they have increasingly habituated to human locations. Part of that is our own fault. Although we keep our garbage cans closed (when there are increasing numbers of coyotes with fewer prey spread between them, they tend to go for the garbage,) we do have bird feeders. Feeder spill attracts rodents, which in turn attract coyotes. So far they have not shown signs of aggression to humans, respond with flight when we stand our ground and yell at them or wave our arms, but that might change in May when they have pups. It means always having the dog on leash, and never ever have small kids unsupervised in the yard.

We started to keep count of the daily showing, both in the garden and on our walks in the neighborhood. It is not unusual to see three or four during a single 24 hr period. Which brings me to citizen science. It is pretty amazing how much of scientific knowledge these days can be and is crowd- sourced. Here is an informative NPR podcast about what citizen science is and how ordinary people like you and I can participate in meaningful ways.

How do you do it? You can sign up on apps and websites that steer you to the right ways of observation, recording and sharing of data. Here is an example from Scientific American. You can go to CitizenScience.gov or SciStarter and see which projects tickle your curiosity. If you’re already hooked on something, why, birds come to mind, you can go to specialty programs like iNaturalist or eBird. The Audubon Society has a great Backyard Bird count every February where you can count the birds for 15 minutes to help establish which species flourish and which are on the decline. Not only will your observations help advance science but there is the additional benefit of sharing in conversation with other like minded people, no small thing in these times of isolation for many of us.

“The wisdom of the crowds” was a concept that popped up as early as 1906 when Sir Francis Galton, horrid eugenicist as well as gifted scientist, let’s face it, analyzed bets about the weight of an ox at the country fair. He realized that the average of all bets came within a hair’s width of the actual weight of the bovine. Collective wisdom was superior to any one individual guess. Aggregate answers are only superior, however, if certain conditions are present:

  • The guesses have to be independent of each other – you cannot be influenced by other people’s assumptions.
  • You need to have diverse guesses – people from all over the spectrum, from experts to laypeople who do not share the same biases.
  • There is a need for decentralization – people need to draw on their own, private, local knowledge.
  • Data need to be aggregated. You can take averages, but there are other forms as well.

The areas in which citizen scientists can make contributions are endless. A quick look at the reports unveils topics as widely disseminated as bird populations, migration patterns, bees, mushrooms, frogs, decline in ice sheets on northern lakes, northern lights, ticks, small stream flow, archeological looting and even new planets. (Ref.) Well, maybe not endless. The search for signs of extraterrestrial life by citizen scientist, an enterprise offered by UCal Berkeley’s SETI Research Center, shut down 3 years ago. SETI@home, a two-decades-old crowdsourcing effort to hunt for signs of E.T. in radio telescope data using internet-connected computers, was terminated because “we were scientifically at the “point of diminishing returns.”

I guess I stick to counting coyotes.

Music today- Joni Mitchell no regrets coyote…. about very different kinds of tricksters…

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A Mycologist’s Dream.

Walk with me. I know, we’ve done this loop in the State Park at my doorstep many times before. Yet every year I feel compelled to post the photographs of a yellow/orange-dotted world that appears early November, signaling transition, like yellow lights are wont to do.

There is something so utterly optimistic about yellow or orange dots swarming tree trunks, or yellow leaves providing contrast for the increasingly milky brook, or migrating birds – thrushes to be precise – fitting into the color scheme. A last Hurrah before darkness settles in.

There is something tangibly sensuous about the moist surfaces,

and something mysterious about the lamellae and gills.

A recently launched organization called SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) is devoted to study and protect fungi to safeguard biodiversity and curb climate change. They have a pretty slick website and ambitious plans to map mycorrhizal fungi, tiny organisms that intertwine with roots of certain tress and nearly all the other plants in specific forests. You can see videos of their field trips in South America and Europe and learn about the scientists involved – they call themselves Myconauts, a clever contraction of the mushroom subject and the associated explorative adventures. For a shorter, quite educational summary essay I went here – much to learn.

No need to return to Chile, though, as much as I’d be tempted – the visual harvest in forests closer to home is just as beautiful.

Independently, since I was reading about fungi, I chanced on new research that shows fungal DNA in various human tumors. We have no clue if there is a causal connection – if fungi, in other words, could be responsible for certain cancers – we just know there is a link.

A small number of fungal cells have been found in 35 different cancer types, with fungal species composition differing among them. What are they doing there? How did they get there? Are they participating in pathology, or are they just taking advantage of immune system suppression in cancerous tissues? Or maybe there are immune cells that ate fungi and carried sequences to a tumor site?

If we knew what their role is we could use them in diagnostic procedures as markers for pathological growth. Or, more excitingly, if we knew how they got into the tumors we could theoretically have cancer-fighting drugs hitchhike on those cells and deliver the chemo specifically on site, a breakthrough in therapeutics.

Enough, let’s not spoil a perfectly glorious fall walk with thoughts of disease or environmental destruction. Let’s enjoy the ruffled beauty,

and the occasional daily wild life in search of a tasty morsel.

And for sound today there is some use of bio data sonification to help a listen to some oyster mushrooms. Changes in electrical resistance are converted into control signals for a eurorack modular synthesizer. The guy who records all kinds of fungi, electronic musician Noah Kalos, a.k.a. MycoLyco, is based in North Carolina. His goal: “just being able to find a signal that we can really observe helps to raise awareness that fungi are all living, we’re all part of the same thing.”

Alternatively, we can just listen to Massenet’s classical capture of thoughts in fall.

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Like Clockwork

Feeling like the weight of time rests on your shoulders, buckling your knees in these unsettling days after we had to reset our clocks?

Antonio de Pereda Still life with clock (1652)

You’re not alone. The switch in time that happens twice annually is a generally unsettling experience, and, as it turns out, a generally unhealthy one as well.

Last week’s media were full of articles on the topic, with everybody and their uncle writing about the consequences of Daylight Saving Times, it seems. I thought I’ll add some additional value: art about clocks which, across centuries, reminded us of some basic truths: time is limited, the moment precious. Clocks rule us (even when they show a time that we know is not the correct one) and can be tyrannical in the workplace or at school, when our bodies are not keeping up with the demand. Artists have used clocks as symbols for synchronicity, or morphed them in surreal ways to help us question the reality of time. They have been displayed as symbols of luxury for those who have more free time than others, or as reminders that it is time to wake up and grab the day. Which brings me back to the alternation between Daylight Savings time and Standard time.

Pieter Claesz Vanitas (1625)

Our bodies contain numerous clocks – there is basically a timekeeper in each of our organs, and all of them are kept in perfect synchrony by the brain, that keeps score of the time with the first rays of light each day triggering the cycle. If you change the onset or disappearance of light by an hour, suddenly, the synchronicity between brain and the rest of the organs disappear, and everyone is playing catch up. (Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine with their work on Circadian Rhythms that demonstrated the existence of these plethora of clocks.)

Marc Chagall Homage to Apollinaire (1912)

The consequences? An increase in heart problems, from fibrillation to infarction, particularly when Daylight Saving time arrives in spring. It is harder to fall asleep, during the brighter evenings, and harder to get up in the early mornings. Since the beginning of school, work or other commitments has not changed, “social jet lag” occurs, a mismatch between our internal clock and the external world that almost always leads to sleep deprivation. The health consequences of chronic sleep deprivation are well described: increased risk of mood disturbance, cardiovascular disease and metabolic dysregulation. (Ref.)

Paul Cezanne The Black Marble Clock (1869)

Statistics do not just show an increased hospitalization for heart and vascular disease issues directly after the time switch. We also see an increased number of car accidents and accidents in the workplace for the days following. That might have to do with driving during darker conditions, or being generally groggy and thus less able to pay attention, but the numbers do go up, in fact 6% for fatal crashes alone.

Who suffers the most from a mandated switch? Young people, it turns out.

“Because of the later biological pacing of the teenage brain, waking at 7 a.m. already feels to young people like waking at 5 a.m. With permanent daylight saving time, it would feel like 4 a.m. This would put a serious strain on teen mental health. The result would be, among other things, shortened sleep for a population that is already severely sleep-deprived and a potential uptick in rates of depression, when teens are already struggling with elevated levels of depressive symptoms and suicidal thinking.”(Ref.)

Raqs Media Collective Escapement (2009)

So, in its infinite wisdom, the government decided to do away with the back and forth between Standard time and Daylights Saving time. The Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021, which would establish a fixed, year-round time. If passed by the House and signed by the president, our clocks would stay in the “spring forward” mode in November 2023, leading to permanent daylight saving time across the nation (except in a handful of states and territories that observe permanent standard time). Of course it picked, on the suggestion of Marco Rubio and Kyrsten Sinema, Daylight Saving Time that all of science says is much more unhealthy for us than Standard Time.

José Gurvich Still life with clock (1959)

This is particularly true for the westernmost areas of a given time zone. We already have later sunsets compared with the easternmost areas; during daylight saving time, West Coast citizens would experience a greater mismatch between their circadian clock and the external environment and an increased risk of adverse health outcomes. In addition, the seasonal variation in length of daylight is more pronounced at northern latitudes. Sunrise for the majority of months in a year at 9:30, dear Oregonians?

So why on earth mandate permanent jet lag? Whose demands could outweigh the advice of scientists across the board? Why, the economy’s, of course. Like clockwork.

“Proponents say that extra daylight in the evening increases opportunities for commerce and recreation, as people prefer to shop and exercise during daylight hours.” (Ref.) More time to spend money when it’s still light outside! Less crime which only happens under the mantel of darkness! (Apparently catalytic converter thieves are ignorant to the cover of darkness in the mornings, then. Maybe they like to sleep late…)

Our memories are short.

We’ve tried permanent daylight saving time twice before and it ended up disastrously. The UK installed it once before and ended it early. Russia tried it once, so did India, both abandoning it in no time.

It hurts humans.

Salvador Dali The Persistence of Memory (1931)

Of course the harm is insidious, not revealing itself until time has passed, with the exception of the immediate danger to school kids on their walk to school in the dark. This was also true for emerging cancers of whole groups of industrial workers. For decades, the luminous dial industry used young women to paint the dials of watches with paint containing radium. They were taught to tip their paint brushes on the tongue to make a sharp brush point; this procedure resulted in the ingestion of considerable radium leading to systemic uptake of some of the ingested radium. These massive intakes of emulsions of pure radium salts resulted in severe skeletal injuries and bone sarcomas of the dial painters.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221924527_Ionizing_Radiation_Carcinogenesis

Maybe we should gather all the clocks and walk them right out to fields, allowing our bodies to realign with exposure to natural light. Walk by the voting booth before, though, to make sure you install a Congress that is attuned to science when legislating for all of us. VOTE TOMORROW!

Jacek Yerka Nauka Chodzenia ( Learning to Walk) (2005)

And here is John Dowland’s Time stands still.

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L.B.Johnson was a Democrat – and other things I learned this week.

I stand corrected and appreciate the countless emails gently scolding me for pegging LBJ as a Republican in one of this week’s blogs. My only excuse: I was 11 years old in Germany when he served as President… so now I know.

I also learned this week a few facts about fire season, given that the sight of endless burnt forests on the way to Central Oregon had made an emotional impact which I tried to counterbalance with reading about facts. Useless exercise, of course, since the newly apprehended facts triggered more of the same emotions…

For much of the American West fire season is now almost year-round. Warmer temperatures cause earlier snowmelt which allows vegetation to dry out. There is more atmospheric thirst, technically called evaporative demand, ever increasing due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels. The concept basically quantifies the potential loss of water from the surface as driven by atmospheric factors including temperature, wind speed, humidity and cloud cover. 

With more water vapor sucked up into the atmosphere, you have less water that drains into streams, wetlands and aquifers, particularly in the SouthWest. In turn, soil and vegetation become drier, increasing the risk of forest fires, and also hampering tree regeneration after they were hurt. Tree mortality soars.

In other words, it is not just the supply side – too little rain – that has changed. There is also the demand side – the warmer atmosphere collects and holds more water – that is affecting drought conditions. When water is increasingly drawn from the land surface through evaporation and transpiration, there is less available for plants, animals and humans.

The subsequently increased dryness of flammable materials – fuel aridity – has approximately doubled the Western forest fire area, and extended the times of year in which fires can be expected. As of July 15, 5,238,977  acres have burned in U.S. wildfires.

Less water in the soil, of course, means also that agricultural crops need more watering, putting demands on water sources that themselves have dried up. Crops in the Rio Grande Basin, for example, where some of New Mexico’s blazes burned this spring, need 8% to 15% more irrigation now than they did in 1980. (Ref.)

Humans have not only contributed to the frequency and intensity of wildfires by warming the atmosphere which in turn leads to drier fuel conditions. They have also created a “fire deficit” by (understandably) suppressing small wildfires as quickly as possible across decades. That allowed a lot of flammable material to build up in our forests that are now feeding these mega fires, the biggest ones starting in 2020.

Here is a link to a story about the consequences for communities hit by fires and how they are trying to build back.

And here are Robert Frost’s two cents, who cold not possibly have intuited the current state of the world.

Fire and Ice 

BY ROBERT FROST

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Music today is a bit of a warhorse, but fitting the topic.

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Hanford Journey 2022

WE LIVE IN AN ERA where the necessity to decarbonize the world’s energy has become quite clear, even if the oil and gas-based industries fight tooth and nail against abandoning fossil fuels. To mitigate a climate catastrophe, we need to turn to other, sustainable modes for generating the energy that we need. Renewable energy, solar and wind sources, might be our best alternative, but they are facing enormous obstacles, political resistance by the fossil fuel monopoly being one of them. But they also are linked to very high installation costs, a lack of infrastructure, particularly adequately sized power storage systems. Electricity generation from natural sources does not necessarily happen during the peak electricity demand hours and given the volatility in generation as well as load, storage is a huge, but expensive component. Lack of policies, incentives and regulations have not exactly encouraged investment into these alternative sources either.

No surprise then, that we hear renewed calls for nuclear power as a reliable, “clean” source for energy, often accompanied by the promise that the old days of large, risky plants and unsolved storage problems of radioactive waste are gone.

As if.

I attended this year’s Hanford Journey, a day focused on environmental clean-up. Hanford was an integral part of the Manhattan Project which produced plutonium for the first atomic bombs dropped in Nagasaki and released massive toxins into the ground and Columbia river where it operated. The event, sponsored by Columbia Riverkeeper and Yakama Nation Environmental Restoration Waste Management (ERWM,) made abundantly clear that nuclear waste still presents a clear and present danger to our environment and the people who live near the rivers and polluted land. We don’t even have a handle on the current dangers, and yet people are advocating for increased use of nuclear power. Some are even claiming it is our ethical obligation to promote it as the only way to combat a climate catastrophe and promising that everything will be fine with the arrival – coming soon, if you invest in us! – of small modular reactors.

I was visiting as part of a film crew exploring the possibility of making a documentary film about the current state of nuclear power development. The interest in the topic had evolved straight out of our last films, Necessity (Oil, Water and Climate Resistance//Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line) which revealed the particular vulnerability of tribal nations to environmental pollutants. (An ArtsWatch review of the films by Marc Mohan can be found here.)

Both Hanford Journey sponsors were quite helpful in providing an opportunity for all of us to learn about the history of the clean-up efforts, view the site from boat, and talk to and hear from people who are involved in the struggle. The Yakama Nation ERWM program engages in oversight of this process and issues affecting Hanford Site natural resources. Their involvement includes participation in technical, project management, policy meetings on response and natural resource damage actions, as well as oversight of cultural resource compliance. The Columbia Riverkeeper’s mission is “to protect and restore the water quality of the Columbia River and all life connected to it, from the headwaters to the Pacific Ocean.” The organization uses legal advocacy and community organizing in numerous conservation efforts.

Map of the Hanford Site —- Simone Anter, Staff Attorney, Columbia Riverkeeper

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, with a sense of purpose and hope delivered by multiple speakers, honoring the legacy of tribal environmental leader Russell Jim and promising to continue his mission of Hanford clean up to ensure the safety of future generations. Davis Washines, Government Relations Liaison, Yakama Nation and DNR Fisheries Resource Program for Superfund Section, talked about the history of the people indigenous to the region and their relationship with the river, the price they paid from the exposure to life-threatening pollutants and the governmental hesitancy to fully keep clean-up commitments.

Davis Washines, Government Relations Liaison, Yakama Nation and DNR Fisheries Resource Program for Superfund Section

Laura Watson, Director of the Washington Department of Ecology, evaluated how few resources are spent and how many more are needed. “The Hanford site is and remains one of the most contaminated sites in the world, and is probably the most complicated cleanup that’s ever been undertaken in human history.” Many more talked about what the situation meant for them and their families, past and present.

Kids were playing in the water, families and friends gathered for group pictures, lunch was served.

Puyallup Canoe Family

I met Ellia-Lee Jim who had been selected to be Miss ’22-’23 Yakama Nation, and chatted with Denise Reed, Puyallup and Quileutea cultural coordinator, who wore beautiful items she made with cedar weaving which she also teaches.

Ellia-Lee Jim

Denise Reed and her cedar woven hat and belt

Multiple nonprofit groups, including The Hanford Challenge and Heart of America Northwest, were on-site to educate and encourage us to become involved with ongoing advocacy efforts. A major issue right now, for example, is the Department of Energy’s attempt to reclassify high-level waste at the Hanford site to low-level waste which will allow cleanup shortcuts and unsafe disposal.

Brett VandenHeuvel, the soon-to-be-former Executive Director of the Columbia Riverkeeper (Lauren Goldberg will be his successor on August 1,) drove us from the Mattawa event site to the river, where boats, run by Tri-City Guide Service, took us out onto the Columbia and to the B reactor — one of nine plutonium reactors built at Hanford.  (There was also a hike out to White Bluffs and the Hanford Reach National Monument to view the H, DR, D and F plutonium reactors, which I had to miss.)

Archeologist and ERWM advocate Rose Ferri was our guide on the boat, helping to understand the history of the Hanford Reach, one of the few remaining stretches of river where chinook salmon spawn in significant numbers, a stretch of 51 mile, to be precise, the last remaining free-flowing portion of the 1,212 miles of the Columbia.

Rose Ferri

The National Monument contains an insane number of species overall – details can be found here – all of whom depend on being protected from toxic and radioactive pollution from the Hanford site. Because Hanford is off limits to visitors, the land has been undisturbed for years, a buffer zone between ecological disaster and agricultural industries, beautiful in its sparsity.

THE HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE has been operating since 1943, after the forced removal of the people who lived on the 580 square miles on which 9 reactors were built. 1855 treaty rights to use the land for fishing, hunting and gathering, signed by the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR), the Nez Perce Tribe, and the Wanapum, were often not honored. During the 40 years of plutonium production, cesium and iodine were generated, and chromium, nitrate, tritium, strontium-90, trichloroethene and uranium, among others, leaked into the soil and seeped into the groundwater.

There were some single-shell underground storage tanks for the most dangerous liquids, but the rest flowed freely. The last reactor was shut down in 1987. Clean-up began – theoretically – in 1989 when the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State signed a Tri-Party Agreement. Only in the year 2000 were 2,535 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel in the K Basin along the Columbia River transferred into dry storage. In the following years treatment and immobilization plants were constructed, but will only be fully operative in 2023 from last I heard. Weapons grade plutonium was transferred to South Carolina.

In 2013 we learned that the single-shell tanks leak, and 4 years later one of the PUREX tunnels containing highly radioactive waste partially collapses. Ignoring these warning signs of potential catastrophe, the U.S.Department of Energy decided on a new interpretation of which kind of waste requires most stringent storage requirements in 2019.


“…. “high-level nuclear waste” (HLW) under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) that would exclude some dangerous waste traditionally considered HLW from stringent storage requirements. For over 50 years, the term HLW, as defined in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (AEA) and the NWPA, required the disposal of this most toxic and radioactive waste in deep geologic formations to protect public health. Energy’s new interpretation opens the door for less robust cleanup and the possibility of more waste remaining at Hanford.” (Ref.)

The Tribes and their allies continue to fight for a comprehensive, fully funded, thorough clean-up. Events like Hanford Journey are one way of getting informations out into the public, and familiarizing those of us who are able to attend and experience the landscape, with the history and the scientific consequences of delayed or compromised action. I wish that information could be even more widely spread.

***

I DROVE BACK TO RICHLAND, WA, across the Vernita bridge ,

and passed by a long stretched mountain, Lalíík, or Rattlesnake Mountain, that I had just seen from a very different perspective. I had been told it was the tallest treeless mountain in the world, sacred to Tribes in the region. It is designated a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP), a property that “is eligible for inclusionn the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) based on its associations with the cultural practices, traditions, beliefs, lifeways, arts, crafts, or social institutions of a living community.“(Ref.) At least that sacred mountain had been cleaned up with funds from a 2010 Recovery Act.

The whole story concerning Hanford and the depth of its operational impact on the Tribes of the region can only be understood if you have a glimpse of what it implies for their culture, never mind their existential dependence on non-toxic fish. Is that incorporated into the narratives that are officially told? I was about to find out.

***

THE REACH MUSEUM in Richland, WA, is a beautiful new structure with a mission statement that asserts inclusivity. Open since 2014, it offers various exhibits, with a permanent one on the Manhattan Project and the Hanford enterprise among them.

The staff is super helpful and friendly, the grounds are gorgeous and represent the beauty of the region. You are greeted outside with lots of affirmative information about the “clean” source of power that is nuclear energy.

You are also immediately made aware by historic photographs of trailer parks (and a real trailer) during the peak employment years of Hanford, that the region benefitted economically during times of hardship due to work opportunities. Some 50.000 people arrived at this remote region, families included. Not a mention though, there, whether these opportunities of housing and work were available to the indigenous inhabitants who were driven from their land by the Manhattan project.

The website for the museum is richly informative and emphasizes a desire to tell stories from differential perspectives and acknowledges their Native American partners “who historically used this region—a gathering place of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, the Wanapum people, and the Nez Perce Tribe who cared for this land since time immemorial.”

As far as I could see, one statement poster, in a gallery that, overall, lays out the developments, successes and trials of the Manhattan Project (Gallery 2,) speaks to tribal presence. Acknowledging expulsion, but not going into anything further.

The focus is on the war effort,

the feats of engineering,

and the impact on Cold War developments.

Overall, a well designed, informative exhibition with a combination of local and (inter)national historical information.

To their credit, some safety considerations are mentioned, however mostly regarding the workers in an environment that was experimental in its newness, with less attention to the continuing concerns. The printed and easily accessible materials in this room were quiet about the continuing poisonous legacy and unsolved problem of long-term nuclear waste storage, however, unless I missed something, which was of course entirely possible after a long, intense day.

What would Albert think?

If you check out the educational resources on their website, the topics of Shrub – Steppe and Geologic Past are fabulously covered. In detail, comprehensive, engaging. The topics of the Hanford Legacy and Columbia River Resources are announced to be coming soon. Given the centrality of those topics as well as the controversy attached to them, in some ways, I wondered why they have not yet been designed. Your guess is as good as mine.

I have no intention to diss a museum I rather liked. I am fully aware how hard it is, particularly during this pandemic, to keep small institutions alive, much less current. But my question about how information about the continual danger of toxic environments, long-term storage of radioactive waste and un-remediated injustice of treaty betrayals reaches the mainstream, remains. This is particularly important now that calls for renewed efforts and investments into nuclear energy are getting louder. It might, or might not be a solution to our energy woes – decisions have to be based on knowledge of all the facts, though. Columbia Riverkeeper and tribal ambassadors work hard and, undoubtedly, effectively in many regards to spread the word. It is time, that the rest of us follow suit.

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