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The Mashpee Wampanoag Work With a Cape Cod Town to Restore Their Fishing Grounds

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

This is the second of two articles about the Mashpee Wampanoag’s efforts to assert their fishing rights on Cape Cod. Read the first story here. Vernon “Buddy” Pocknett steered his truck through the curving streets of Popponesset Island, Cape Cod, jostling a satchel that hung from the rearview mirror above a trucker hat reading “WTF (Where’s The Fish).” The satchel was made from a seal paw, adorned with long claws that jiggled as Pocknett took the turns, passing Teslas, sailboat-shaped mailboxes, and sunburned cyclists. Pocknett drove to Fishermen’s Landing at the members-only Popponesset Beach, stopping at a “beach security checkpoint” run by two teenagers who hid from the July sun under an oversized umbrella. One asked Pocknett if he was there to fish, and Pocknett said he was doing research. The teen sounded skeptical and asked what kind. Pocknett patted the sticker on his windshield emblazoned with the official Mashpee Wampanoag tribal seal. “Oh!” she said, sounding flustered. “You’re all set.” “You see what I mean?” Pocknett said, with the girl barely out of earshot. “How do they get to say who’s to come down here and who’s not?” Pocknett was at the beach to identify Indigenous water access points, paths used for generations to reach fishing grounds from shores that are now mostly privatized by non-Wampanoags. Public access points along Massachusetts waters have thinned since the mid-20th century, but their disappearance has been especially pronounced here, in and around the town of Mashpee and the Popponessett Bay, in what was once Wampanoag territory. Meanwhile, overdevelopment has destroyed abundant wetland areas that shaped Wampanoag life for thousands of years, and water pollution threatens many aquatic species essential to the tribe’s survival. A lifelong aquaculturist and fisherman, Pocknett has recently begun work to restore access to traditional fishing grounds and the ecosystem that supports them. Fishermen’s Landing at Popponesset Beach, near New Seabury, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes) With help from the tribe’s Natural Resources Department, the town of Mashpee is compiling a harbor management plan, an extensive document that will set guidelines for the construction of marinas and docks. The plan will also address encroaching erosion and sea-level rise throughout this Massachusetts municipality. As part of the project, the town has invited Pocknett and a group of tribal elders to identify Indigenous pathways to the water, with the goal of eventually opening some of them back up for public use. It is a modest effort, a starting point to repair fraught relations, reconcile with the past, and strategize for the future. If the plan succeeds, it will help rebuild wetlands and traditional food sources for the tribe, once largely excluded from environmental decision-making. At Fishermen’s Landing, Pocknett leaned against a freshly painted railing and looked out at Nantucket Sound. Sunbathers floated and dozed below, on a beach where Pocknett grew up fishing, back when it was still a hotspot for striped bass, or stripers. But as in other parts of the bay, the fish have been driven out of these spawning grounds. Since the arrival of European settlers 400 years ago, not a single season has passed without humans harvesting as much as possible from waters that are now increasingly fouled with pollution. “It’s like they don’t see the impact [on] their great-great-grandchildren,” Pocknett said. “What’s going to happen, four generations from us right here? When’s it end?” A Plan for the Harbor The harbor management plan is, among other things, an attempt to ensure generations of sustainable fishing and clean water in Mashpee. The town’s Harbor Management Committee, with support from the Urban Harbors Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is compiling its second draft of hundreds of pages detailing everything from dock compliance to potential new aquaculture sites, which can help improve water quality over time. Once the final plan is approved by the town, it could open the door to state or federal funding to contend with existential threats like sea-level rise and a shifting coastline. But finalizing the plan has been a slow process. Overdevelopment has destroyed abundant wetland areas that shaped Wampanoag life for thousands of years, and water pollution threatens many aquatic species essential to the tribe’s survival. “It’s a pretty encompassing project, hence why it’s going to take a bit of time,” said Christopher Avis, the town’s shellfish constable. (Each Cape Cod town has a shellfish constable, who enforces shellfish bylaws and oversees aquaculture projects.) “We want to say, okay, here we are today. What do we do tomorrow? And in 10 years, as things change, how do we not only change with them but also kind of be ahead of the curve?” Avis and other members of Mashpee’s Natural Resources Department are actively working to mend their relationship with the Wampanoag, acknowledging that the stewardship of local waterways is a joint effort. In the past, the two sides have clashed over the tribe’s fishing practices, but increased advocacy from Wampanoags has helped shift the town’s official stance on the “Aboriginal right to fish” from what are now private access points. The harbor management plan represents a chance for the tribe to continue this advocacy in a more formal capacity. Under the direction of Ashley Fisher—the head of Mashpee Natural Resources until last month, when she was reassigned to the wastewater department—the harbor management plan has served as a sort of olive-branch offering to the tribe, a solicitation for Wampanoag knowledge that can help address the many resource management crises afflicting the town. To underscore their intentions, the Mashpee Natural Resources Department also plans to include a section clearly outlining Aboriginal rights as they pertain to hunting and fishing, rights that give Wampanoags the option to ignore the “private property” signs that decorate the densely populated wetlands of Popponesset Island and New Seabury. Despite this greater institutional recognition of those rights, water access points have become so impractical—overgrown, gated off, or built up—and the fish so few that only a small group of Wampanoags regularly use them today. On Daniels Island, a giant rock obstructs access to the beach (left). At right, an example of a privatized water access point in the resort community of New Seabury. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes) The slow-moving harbor plan is just the beginning of a long reconciliation process that may or may not come. During the early stages of the plan, in February 2023, Fisher told Civil Eats she felt strongly that the opening of access points would be a good-faith gesture to restore trust between Wampanoags and the town—though not without significant hurdles. “It’s going to be a tough sell,” she said. “There’s going to be some angry people, because our waterfront is landlocked.” Her ambition to partner with the tribe on the harbor plan has at least materialized, though. Pocknett said he and some other tribal “old-timers” met with Fisher this summer to identify access points on a map from their personal memories of “how it was.” There were maybe three or four existing access points acknowledged by the town, but the group was able to identify close to 100 more along the Popponesset and Waquoit bays. Fisher worried that memories and hearsay wouldn’t be enough to reopen the access points, so she asked the tribe’s natural resource team to search their archives for documentation demonstrating that the areas had been used as “historic passage” for multiple generations. While the team continues its hunt for that documentation, consultants at the Urban Harbors Institute are working to revise the first draft of the plan after an extensive public comment period this past spring and summer. Avis said his team has “sort of formed a partnership” with the tribe and its aquaculturists, including Pocknett. “If they need something, they call us. If we need something, we’ll call them. It’s been a tremendous relationship with those guys as to utilizing their resources and our resources to pool together to get as many animals in the water to help clean the water,” he said. Traditional Knowledge Will Shape the Future Pocknett and his younger cousin, CheeNulKa Pocknett, know about using bivalves to mitigate nitrogen pollution. The two manage First Light Shellfish Farm, the tribe’s aquacultural operation on Popponesset Bay, which the elder Pocknett’s father founded in 1977. Since the 1970s, development on the Cape has exceeded the ecosystem’s capacity to support it, made worse by a lack of central sewage systems and wastewater treatment facilities. From Provincetown to Barnstable, untreated wastewater from homes, hotels, restaurants, and golf courses leaches into bays, lakes, and rivers. Joshua Reitsma, a marine chemist at the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, says this effluent is responsible for 80 percent of the Cape’s “nutrient pollution,” leading to algal blooms that blanket the surface in summer and fall to the bottom in winter. The algae smothers keystone species like eelgrass, and coats the sand in muck that can’t support the oysters, quahogs, and soft-shelled clams that would naturally grow there. Quahog (littleneck) clams freshly caught off Cape Cod. (Photo credit: John Piekos/Getty Images) The tribe has always protected and cultivated species like oysters and quahogs, in part because of their role in filtering Mashpee’s waterways. By eating nitrogen-rich phytoplankton and incorporating the protein into their tissues, the bivalves maintain the stasis of their aquatic home. First Light farm is the tribe’s attempt to rehabilitate Popponesset Bay in an era of unprecedented wreckage. (The town of Mashpee runs its own separate aquaculture projects, which have anchored its water-quality strategy for decades.) But no amount of shellfish alone can revive waterways strangled by such heavy pollution. At one of the town’s recent Shellfish Commission meetings, aquaculturist and chair Peter Thomas likened the lopsided reliance on shellfish to “putting a Band-Aid on someone who needs to be med-flighted.” For years, tribal leaders and environmental advocates have raised similar warnings about the quality of Mashpee’s watersheds. For the Pocknetts, this pollution is personal. The 16th-century settlers who claimed the shores of present-day New England were met by people with a vibrant social order, language, and trade network, shaped by the surrounding natural world. Clan identities are just one example: CheeNulKa’s family is part of the wolf clan. There are no wild wolves left in Massachusetts. The eel clan, too, got its name in honor of once-thriving animal relatives. “Without the eels, you can’t have the eel clan,” CheeNulKa said. “Without the eel clan, you can’t have an eel dance. That’s how you lose that culture. It’s something as small or as monumental as this, depending on how you look at it.” “Without the eels, you can’t have the eel clan. Without the eel clan, you can’t have an eel dance. That’s how you lose that culture.” As Indigenous concerns are increasingly heeded, change is creeping in. The town recently broke ground on a wastewater treatment plan to introduce centralized sewering for the first time, part of a Cape-wide effort that will take roughly 30 years to fully implement. The first phase, which involved the $54 million construction of a wastewater collection system and treatment facility, is underway. The second phase, which would begin in spring 2025 at the earliest, is earmarked for $96 million, according to Cape News. Over time, the two phases are expected to reduce nitrogen levels in the Popponesset Bay by 42 percent. Indigenous environmental expertise and traditional ecological knowledge are also getting overdue recognition in Mashpee’s Conservation Commission, which oversees wetland building permits and other environmental conservation projects. The commission recently proposed a plan for the town and tribe to co-steward conservation land, a partnership that Wampanoag Chief Earl Mills, Sr., has said would be a “win-win.” These efforts reflect a pattern emerging worldwide. At the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Indigenous delegates lobbied successfully for a plan that honors the rights of Indigenous peoples, who make up less than six percent of the world’s population but protect nearly 80 percent of its biodiversity. In an unprecedented expression of partnership, President Joe Biden’s cabinet, including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna), proposed that dozens of tribes co-steward ancestral lands from Virginia to Idaho, working alongside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And in November this year, in nearby Bristol, Rhode Island, Brown University confirmed the transfer of 255 acres to the Pokanoket tribe to “ensure appropriate stewardship and management of this unique, historical, sacred, and natural resource for generations to come.” Generations of Knowledge  From the rocky shores of the Waquoit to the pale sand of the Popponesset, Mashpee holds generations of Pocknett family memories. But the Pocknetts have watched the town and its shorelines disappear, parcel by parcel, into the lawns and patios of the highest bidders. A private-property sign near Spohr’s Beach on Monomoscoy Island, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes) Each privately developed access point contributes to the water’s decline. Re-opening whatever is outlined in the harbor management plan won’t heal the waters or bring back the fish. But it would send a message from Mashpee—a municipality that proudly proclaims “Wampanoag land” on signs on its town line—that its Indigenous residents are vital to the success of its ecosystems. In July, Buddy Pocknett lumbered down a footpath on Mashpee’s Monomoscoy Island, past a flurry of metal signs that declared, “Spohr’s Private Beach.” His scraggly gray ponytail grazed the neckline of his T-shirt, above the words “Aboriginal Rights” printed in blue script. He shuffled by a big house and a couple of canoes drying in the shade of the leaning pitch pines, toward an old quahog-digging spot that has gone from public to private in his lifetime. He planted his sturdy brown boots on the sand. The new wave of interest in tribal knowledge makes him cautiously optimistic, he said. But the town has just scratched the surface of collaboration. Moving forward, Pocknett wants Wampanoags to be consulted before the approval of any new developments. “For years, the tribe has been kind of sleeping and not going to these meetings,” he said. “[Townspeople] have been kind of pulling the wool over our face for a long time, just doing whatever they want.” With more Indigenous representation at town meetings and in big projects like the harbor plan, Pocknett predicted more checks on overbuilding, more strategic and effective resource management, and better environmental advocacy across the board. With more Indigenous representation at town meetings and in big projects like the harbor plan, Pocknett predicted more checks on overbuilding, more strategic and effective resource management, and better environmental advocacy across the board. After all, non-Indigenous control of Mashpee is very new, compared with the 12,000 years that the Wampanoags managed the land. Within Pocknett’s father’s lifetime, the tribe had much more say in resource management. One particularly prominent steward was Pocknett’s grandfather, Will, who kept a fishing camp on the edge of the scrubby woods near Waquoit Bay. Will was a respected fisherman, whose knowledge of the bay was widely trusted. At that time, in the mid-20th century, Mashpee was still considered a Wampanoag town. Every bay and fishing ground was run by a tribal member, Pocknett said—someone familiar with its particular quirks, like Will was with Waquoit Bay. “If you went fishing in Waquoit Bay when my grandfather was alive, you asked him and he would tell you where to go,” he said. “It wasn’t just ‘go fishing.’ Each tribal member had a bay. And they would say, ‘There’s more over here today, come fish over here.’ It was equally important to Indian people to recognize the areas that had less fish and leave them alone.” But even with his influence, Will never claimed to own the bay or the surrounding area, Pocknett said, eyeing the metal signs that stuck out of the reeds and laid claim to the beach beneath his feet. He smiled and said, “Because no one can own the land.” The post The Mashpee Wampanoag Work With a Cape Cod Town to Restore Their Fishing Grounds appeared first on Civil Eats.

This is the second of two articles about the Mashpee Wampanoag’s efforts to assert their fishing rights on Cape Cod. Read the first story here. Pocknett drove to Fishermen’s Landing at the members-only Popponesset Beach, stopping at a “beach security checkpoint” run by two teenagers who hid from the July sun under an oversized umbrella. One […] The post The Mashpee Wampanoag Work With a Cape Cod Town to Restore Their Fishing Grounds appeared first on Civil Eats.

This is the second of two articles about the Mashpee Wampanoag’s efforts to assert their fishing rights on Cape Cod. Read the first story here.

Vernon “Buddy” Pocknett steered his truck through the curving streets of Popponesset Island, Cape Cod, jostling a satchel that hung from the rearview mirror above a trucker hat reading “WTF (Where’s The Fish).” The satchel was made from a seal paw, adorned with long claws that jiggled as Pocknett took the turns, passing Teslas, sailboat-shaped mailboxes, and sunburned cyclists.

Pocknett drove to Fishermen’s Landing at the members-only Popponesset Beach, stopping at a “beach security checkpoint” run by two teenagers who hid from the July sun under an oversized umbrella. One asked Pocknett if he was there to fish, and Pocknett said he was doing research. The teen sounded skeptical and asked what kind. Pocknett patted the sticker on his windshield emblazoned with the official Mashpee Wampanoag tribal seal.

“Oh!” she said, sounding flustered. “You’re all set.”

“You see what I mean?” Pocknett said, with the girl barely out of earshot. “How do they get to say who’s to come down here and who’s not?”

Pocknett was at the beach to identify Indigenous water access points, paths used for generations to reach fishing grounds from shores that are now mostly privatized by non-Wampanoags. Public access points along Massachusetts waters have thinned since the mid-20th century, but their disappearance has been especially pronounced here, in and around the town of Mashpee and the Popponessett Bay, in what was once Wampanoag territory.

Meanwhile, overdevelopment has destroyed abundant wetland areas that shaped Wampanoag life for thousands of years, and water pollution threatens many aquatic species essential to the tribe’s survival. A lifelong aquaculturist and fisherman, Pocknett has recently begun work to restore access to traditional fishing grounds and the ecosystem that supports them.

a serene, small beach in a bay on a sunny day. sunbathers can be see in the background

Fishermen’s Landing at Popponesset Beach, near New Seabury, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

With help from the tribe’s Natural Resources Department, the town of Mashpee is compiling a harbor management plan, an extensive document that will set guidelines for the construction of marinas and docks. The plan will also address encroaching erosion and sea-level rise throughout this Massachusetts municipality. As part of the project, the town has invited Pocknett and a group of tribal elders to identify Indigenous pathways to the water, with the goal of eventually opening some of them back up for public use. It is a modest effort, a starting point to repair fraught relations, reconcile with the past, and strategize for the future. If the plan succeeds, it will help rebuild wetlands and traditional food sources for the tribe, once largely excluded from environmental decision-making.

At Fishermen’s Landing, Pocknett leaned against a freshly painted railing and looked out at Nantucket Sound. Sunbathers floated and dozed below, on a beach where Pocknett grew up fishing, back when it was still a hotspot for striped bass, or stripers. But as in other parts of the bay, the fish have been driven out of these spawning grounds. Since the arrival of European settlers 400 years ago, not a single season has passed without humans harvesting as much as possible from waters that are now increasingly fouled with pollution.

“It’s like they don’t see the impact [on] their great-great-grandchildren,” Pocknett said. “What’s going to happen, four generations from us right here? When’s it end?”

A Plan for the Harbor

The harbor management plan is, among other things, an attempt to ensure generations of sustainable fishing and clean water in Mashpee. The town’s Harbor Management Committee, with support from the Urban Harbors Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is compiling its second draft of hundreds of pages detailing everything from dock compliance to potential new aquaculture sites, which can help improve water quality over time. Once the final plan is approved by the town, it could open the door to state or federal funding to contend with existential threats like sea-level rise and a shifting coastline. But finalizing the plan has been a slow process.

Overdevelopment has destroyed abundant wetland areas that shaped Wampanoag life for thousands of years, and water pollution threatens many aquatic species essential to the tribe’s survival.

“It’s a pretty encompassing project, hence why it’s going to take a bit of time,” said Christopher Avis, the town’s shellfish constable. (Each Cape Cod town has a shellfish constable, who enforces shellfish bylaws and oversees aquaculture projects.) “We want to say, okay, here we are today. What do we do tomorrow? And in 10 years, as things change, how do we not only change with them but also kind of be ahead of the curve?”

Avis and other members of Mashpee’s Natural Resources Department are actively working to mend their relationship with the Wampanoag, acknowledging that the stewardship of local waterways is a joint effort. In the past, the two sides have clashed over the tribe’s fishing practices, but increased advocacy from Wampanoags has helped shift the town’s official stance on the “Aboriginal right to fish” from what are now private access points. The harbor management plan represents a chance for the tribe to continue this advocacy in a more formal capacity.

Under the direction of Ashley Fisher—the head of Mashpee Natural Resources until last month, when she was reassigned to the wastewater department—the harbor management plan has served as a sort of olive-branch offering to the tribe, a solicitation for Wampanoag knowledge that can help address the many resource management crises afflicting the town.

To underscore their intentions, the Mashpee Natural Resources Department also plans to include a section clearly outlining Aboriginal rights as they pertain to hunting and fishing, rights that give Wampanoags the option to ignore the “private property” signs that decorate the densely populated wetlands of Popponesset Island and New Seabury. Despite this greater institutional recognition of those rights, water access points have become so impractical—overgrown, gated off, or built up—and the fish so few that only a small group of Wampanoags regularly use them today.

A giant rock blocks beach access gatesA shaded walkway that's a driveway near private property.

On Daniels Island, a giant rock obstructs access to the beach (left). At right, an example of a privatized water access point in the resort community of New Seabury. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

The slow-moving harbor plan is just the beginning of a long reconciliation process that may or may not come. During the early stages of the plan, in February 2023, Fisher told Civil Eats she felt strongly that the opening of access points would be a good-faith gesture to restore trust between Wampanoags and the town—though not without significant hurdles. “It’s going to be a tough sell,” she said. “There’s going to be some angry people, because our waterfront is landlocked.”

Her ambition to partner with the tribe on the harbor plan has at least materialized, though. Pocknett said he and some other tribal “old-timers” met with Fisher this summer to identify access points on a map from their personal memories of “how it was.” There were maybe three or four existing access points acknowledged by the town, but the group was able to identify close to 100 more along the Popponesset and Waquoit bays.

Fisher worried that memories and hearsay wouldn’t be enough to reopen the access points, so she asked the tribe’s natural resource team to search their archives for documentation demonstrating that the areas had been used as “historic passage” for multiple generations. While the team continues its hunt for that documentation, consultants at the Urban Harbors Institute are working to revise the first draft of the plan after an extensive public comment period this past spring and summer.

Avis said his team has “sort of formed a partnership” with the tribe and its aquaculturists, including Pocknett. “If they need something, they call us. If we need something, we’ll call them. It’s been a tremendous relationship with those guys as to utilizing their resources and our resources to pool together to get as many animals in the water to help clean the water,” he said.

Traditional Knowledge Will Shape the Future

Pocknett and his younger cousin, CheeNulKa Pocknett, know about using bivalves to mitigate nitrogen pollution. The two manage First Light Shellfish Farm, the tribe’s aquacultural operation on Popponesset Bay, which the elder Pocknett’s father founded in 1977. Since the 1970s, development on the Cape has exceeded the ecosystem’s capacity to support it, made worse by a lack of central sewage systems and wastewater treatment facilities. From Provincetown to Barnstable, untreated wastewater from homes, hotels, restaurants, and golf courses leaches into bays, lakes, and rivers.

Joshua Reitsma, a marine chemist at the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, says this effluent is responsible for 80 percent of the Cape’s “nutrient pollution,” leading to algal blooms that blanket the surface in summer and fall to the bottom in winter. The algae smothers keystone species like eelgrass, and coats the sand in muck that can’t support the oysters, quahogs, and soft-shelled clams that would naturally grow there.

Quahog, or little neck, clams. (Photo credit: John Piekos/Getty Images)

Quahog (littleneck) clams freshly caught off Cape Cod. (Photo credit: John Piekos/Getty Images)

The tribe has always protected and cultivated species like oysters and quahogs, in part because of their role in filtering Mashpee’s waterways. By eating nitrogen-rich phytoplankton and incorporating the protein into their tissues, the bivalves maintain the stasis of their aquatic home. First Light farm is the tribe’s attempt to rehabilitate Popponesset Bay in an era of unprecedented wreckage. (The town of Mashpee runs its own separate aquaculture projects, which have anchored its water-quality strategy for decades.)

But no amount of shellfish alone can revive waterways strangled by such heavy pollution. At one of the town’s recent Shellfish Commission meetings, aquaculturist and chair Peter Thomas likened the lopsided reliance on shellfish to “putting a Band-Aid on someone who needs to be med-flighted.” For years, tribal leaders and environmental advocates have raised similar warnings about the quality of Mashpee’s watersheds.

For the Pocknetts, this pollution is personal. The 16th-century settlers who claimed the shores of present-day New England were met by people with a vibrant social order, language, and trade network, shaped by the surrounding natural world. Clan identities are just one example: CheeNulKa’s family is part of the wolf clan. There are no wild wolves left in Massachusetts. The eel clan, too, got its name in honor of once-thriving animal relatives.

“Without the eels, you can’t have the eel clan,” CheeNulKa said. “Without the eel clan, you can’t have an eel dance. That’s how you lose that culture. It’s something as small or as monumental as this, depending on how you look at it.”

“Without the eels, you can’t have the eel clan. Without the eel clan, you can’t have an eel dance. That’s how you lose that culture.”

As Indigenous concerns are increasingly heeded, change is creeping in. The town recently broke ground on a wastewater treatment plan to introduce centralized sewering for the first time, part of a Cape-wide effort that will take roughly 30 years to fully implement. The first phase, which involved the $54 million construction of a wastewater collection system and treatment facility, is underway. The second phase, which would begin in spring 2025 at the earliest, is earmarked for $96 million, according to Cape News. Over time, the two phases are expected to reduce nitrogen levels in the Popponesset Bay by 42 percent.

Indigenous environmental expertise and traditional ecological knowledge are also getting overdue recognition in Mashpee’s Conservation Commission, which oversees wetland building permits and other environmental conservation projects. The commission recently proposed a plan for the town and tribe to co-steward conservation land, a partnership that Wampanoag Chief Earl Mills, Sr., has said would be a “win-win.”

These efforts reflect a pattern emerging worldwide. At the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Indigenous delegates lobbied successfully for a plan that honors the rights of Indigenous peoples, who make up less than six percent of the world’s population but protect nearly 80 percent of its biodiversity.

In an unprecedented expression of partnership, President Joe Biden’s cabinet, including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna), proposed that dozens of tribes co-steward ancestral lands from Virginia to Idaho, working alongside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And in November this year, in nearby Bristol, Rhode Island, Brown University confirmed the transfer of 255 acres to the Pokanoket tribe to “ensure appropriate stewardship and management of this unique, historical, sacred, and natural resource for generations to come.”

Generations of Knowledge 

From the rocky shores of the Waquoit to the pale sand of the Popponesset, Mashpee holds generations of Pocknett family memories. But the Pocknetts have watched the town and its shorelines disappear, parcel by parcel, into the lawns and patios of the highest bidders.

Spohr's private beach sign on a green sign in with trees in the background

A private-property sign near Spohr’s Beach on Monomoscoy Island, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

Each privately developed access point contributes to the water’s decline. Re-opening whatever is outlined in the harbor management plan won’t heal the waters or bring back the fish. But it would send a message from Mashpee—a municipality that proudly proclaims “Wampanoag land” on signs on its town line—that its Indigenous residents are vital to the success of its ecosystems.

In July, Buddy Pocknett lumbered down a footpath on Mashpee’s Monomoscoy Island, past a flurry of metal signs that declared, “Spohr’s Private Beach.” His scraggly gray ponytail grazed the neckline of his T-shirt, above the words “Aboriginal Rights” printed in blue script.

He shuffled by a big house and a couple of canoes drying in the shade of the leaning pitch pines, toward an old quahog-digging spot that has gone from public to private in his lifetime. He planted his sturdy brown boots on the sand. The new wave of interest in tribal knowledge makes him cautiously optimistic, he said. But the town has just scratched the surface of collaboration. Moving forward, Pocknett wants Wampanoags to be consulted before the approval of any new developments.

“For years, the tribe has been kind of sleeping and not going to these meetings,” he said. “[Townspeople] have been kind of pulling the wool over our face for a long time, just doing whatever they want.”

With more Indigenous representation at town meetings and in big projects like the harbor plan, Pocknett predicted more checks on overbuilding, more strategic and effective resource management, and better environmental advocacy across the board.

With more Indigenous representation at town meetings and in big projects like the harbor plan, Pocknett predicted more checks on overbuilding, more strategic and effective resource management, and better environmental advocacy across the board.

After all, non-Indigenous control of Mashpee is very new, compared with the 12,000 years that the Wampanoags managed the land. Within Pocknett’s father’s lifetime, the tribe had much more say in resource management. One particularly prominent steward was Pocknett’s grandfather, Will, who kept a fishing camp on the edge of the scrubby woods near Waquoit Bay.

Will was a respected fisherman, whose knowledge of the bay was widely trusted. At that time, in the mid-20th century, Mashpee was still considered a Wampanoag town. Every bay and fishing ground was run by a tribal member, Pocknett said—someone familiar with its particular quirks, like Will was with Waquoit Bay.

“If you went fishing in Waquoit Bay when my grandfather was alive, you asked him and he would tell you where to go,” he said. “It wasn’t just ‘go fishing.’ Each tribal member had a bay. And they would say, ‘There’s more over here today, come fish over here.’ It was equally important to Indian people to recognize the areas that had less fish and leave them alone.”

But even with his influence, Will never claimed to own the bay or the surrounding area, Pocknett said, eyeing the metal signs that stuck out of the reeds and laid claim to the beach beneath his feet. He smiled and said, “Because no one can own the land.”

The post The Mashpee Wampanoag Work With a Cape Cod Town to Restore Their Fishing Grounds appeared first on Civil Eats.

Read the full story here.
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Are Blue Zones a Mirage?

The age detectives are fighting.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsDo you want to live forever? How about to at least 105? You’ve probably heard of blue zones—amazing places where people live disproportionately longer and healthier lives. From Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece these regions of the world have captured the imagination of an aging world.Most of the advice that researchers have extracted from these places are what most people consider just common sense. Don’t stress too much or eat too much or drink too much alcohol. Make sure to eat plants and legumes, build community, and protect familial relationships.But while this might be fine advice, at least one researcher is skeptical that the underlying research holds up.On this week’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Dr. Saul Newman, a researcher at the University of Oxford and University College London, who seeks to debunk the blue-zones research with studies of his own. His critics accuse him of writing a “deeply flawed” paper, keeping the debate active. (You can read their arguments here.)Newman’s argument is pretty straightforward. The documentation certifying people’s births is really hard to verify, and there are many documented cases of age fraud. Some of that fraud is intentional—people claiming to be older than they are for cultural or financial benefit—and some is unintentional, thanks to shoddy recordkeeping or researchers getting fooled or making mistakes.While this debate rests on methodological questions that we can’t fully explore in this episode, Newman’s provocation raises important questions about how much we should trust some of the most popular ideas in longevity research.The following is a transcript of the episode:Jerusalem Demsas: According to Our World in Data, in 1800, not a single region of the world had a life expectancy longer than 40 years. By 2021, the global average life expectancy was more than 70 years. It’s still not enough. We want to live longer, healthier lives. What can we do about it?You’ve probably heard of “blue zones,” regions of the world where researchers claim to have found disproportionate numbers of people living into their hundreds. The first such Eden was Sardinia, Italy. Then Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California, among others.But in recent years, despite the prevalence of cookbooks and diets and Netflix docuseries about these places explaining how to learn from the lifestyles of people living in these regions, something hasn’t quite added up.My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.Saul Newman is a longevity researcher at the University of Oxford and the University College London who has become convinced that this research doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, when he looks at the regions of the world designated blue zones, they just don’t look like particularly healthy places. The blue-zones theory claims that people live longer in these regions because of their naturally healthy lifestyles, but what Saul finds when he looks at these regions is low literacy, low incomes, high crime, and even short life expectancies relative to the national average. But even more tellingly, according to his research, introducing official birth certificates suspiciously coincides with a steep 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people claiming to be over 109. A number of other statistical oddities indicate that the people claiming to be over 100 years old are either misleading us or are misled themselves.Here at Good on Paper, several of the studies we discuss are preprints, which means they haven’t finished going through the formal review process that can take years. We do this because waiting to discuss studies until after they’ve been through that process would mean missing out on tracking important live debates. But I say all that now because, while Saul is convinced of his findings, this is not yet a settled debate. The proponents of blue zones are fighting back and claim he “omits or misunderstands” how rigorous their methods are.But to hear his perspective on the science of longevity and why he doesn’t trust the blue-zones research, I’m excited to have Saul joining us today.Saul, welcome to the show!Saul Newman: Pleasure to be here.Demsas: So why do people die?Newman: Why do people die? Well, this is a fascinating question, and many of the people in aging research sort of still admit that we really don’t understand the fundamentals. So it’s actually a surprising thing that something so obvious is something we’re still figuring out. The best approximation we have at the moment is that we look at the inverse question: Why continue to live? What is the sort of evolutionary advantage of continuing to live?There are two main thoughts. One I favor, and another that’s quite out of date. The out-of-date one is this sort of Darwinian idea that we exist just to make children. And this is the idea that has the problems, because if we exist just to make children, you get stuck with all sorts of awkward questions, like why does menopause evolve? Why evolve not to have children? Why evolve to help other people at the cost of your own reproduction? And we know all these things happen, and they happen across the animal kingdom, which brings us to the second idea.And the second idea is that we evolve to pass on genes. And because we are related to so many different people, there are a lot of ways to pass on genes, including indirect ways where we help others. This is a sort of still-developing field in answering that question of why we exist, essentially. And it’s a very exciting one because it can explain things like the evolution of menopause, where we’re taking care of grandchildren.But it can also potentially explain a lot of traits that are very difficult to analyze. Traits like homosexuality don’t make sense in this sort of cruel, hard Darwinian sense of, Oh, you’re just a baby factory. But there is a potential to explain them using inclusive fitness. I mean, that said, there was also the flip-side argument to that: Why do I need to justify myself in terms of evolutionary theory in order to exist? Well, of course you don’t. So it’s a very difficult debate to get through, but it’s also an open question at this point.Demsas: What exactly is happening, though, when you die? Let’s say you don’t get an illness, right? Like, we know what happens when someone dies of a stroke or has a heart attack or has cancer or some other kind of long-running illness. But if you are just a generally healthy person—you’re in your 80s, or you’re in your 90s—what’s happening to your body?Newman: It is slowly degenerating, in functional terms. So this is, you know, often very hard to measure, because you have to define what the function of your body is to say, you know, how it’s degenerating, but there are sort of obvious signs. So your metabolic function declines with age. Obvious things, like your physical capacity to run a hundred meters, for example, declines with age. Mental capacity does decline, but it can be much slower. And you know, I think that’s really fascinating, because if you look at, for example, the rankings of top chess players, they decline, but they decline extremely slowly. But essentially, there’s this sort of general systemic decline as you get older in terms of how well you can function.Demsas: There’s a paper that I know that you wrote about this idea of, you know, as you get older, of course, your likelihood of death increases as you age. But there was a hypothesis that perhaps at a certain point, the rate at which you were likely to die kind of leveled off. So if you made it to 80, if you made it to 90—yes, your likelihood of dying every year was still, you know, elevated relative to a younger person, but it no longer was increasing significantly. What happened with that hypothesis?Newman: Well, this touches on the best way we have to measure age and aging, and the sort of functional decline is increases in the mortality rate, because once you hit about age 40 or 35, your odds of dying double at a sort of fixed clockwork rate.Demsas: Wait—what year was that?Newman: Around 35 to 40. It depends a little bit because—Demsas: Okay, great. Just logging that. (Laughs.)Newman: Yeah. It starts to decline earlier, but it’s obscured by something called the “accident hump.” And this is basically, like, what you do when you’re a teenager, right? There’s a big bump in mortality caused by, you know, cars running into trees or jumping off of buildings into swimming pools or whatever it happens to be. But this clockwork doubling means that your mortality, your odds of dying, double usually around every eight years, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.We can change the baseline, but every eight years, your odds of dying will double and double and double until you reach old age. And so in old age, there’s a hypothesis that mortality rates stop getting worse with age, and therefore that aging rates kind of stop or at least slow down considerably. Now, it doesn’t mean that things are getting better. You end up in this sort of Russian-roulette scenario where it’s a “see if your odds of dying flatten out.” And essentially, you’re playing Russian roulette every three months in terms of your mortality risk.And what does that mean in terms of human lifespan? So it means something very interesting. It means that there’s no actual limit to how long you can play roulette without losing. You know, there’s a probabilistic sort of cap where eventually you are going to lose.Demsas: Yeah, unless you’re the luckiest person alive.Newman: Exactly. So there’s nothing per se ruling out a run of good numbers. But the problem here is that this idea is something that has been fought over for 50-odd years and has not been resolved, because it may be that your odds of dying do keep doubling and doubling and doubling until they hit the odds of dying that equal to one, right? So this is what I call the “maximum survivable age.” And it’s not clear to scientists which of those two was correct—whether we strike a maximum survivable age, where we can’t possibly live older than this age, or whether we reach a sort of grim Russian-roulette scenario.Demsas: But life expectancy has improved remarkably over the 20th century. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, people with average lifespans of late ’70s in many developed nations, and rates of child mortality have declined significantly. So it seems like there’s a lot that policy, development, changes in public-health strategies can do to improve lifespan.Is it your sense that—I mean, you just kind of brought up this idea of a maximum survivable age. Is it your perception that there is a number—there is a threshold at which, despite all of these things that you can do to make yourself healthier, to make yourself better, the genetic selection that might exist over generations, there’s just not a chance that humans are gonna live to be 300, 400, etcetera?Newman: Well, in 2016, I waded into this debate because, like I said, there are two sides. And one of the sides had published an idea that there was this hard limit to maximum lifespan. And they published it in one of the most elite scientific journals there is. And I realized they had made colossal mistakes in their analysis—really just fundamental mistakes. They had rounded off most of their data to zero. They had accidentally deleted everyone who died in May and June, and just really made a complete mess of it. But they had argued for one case, and this case was that there’s a limit to how long you can live, a single limit.I had another group come along and argue the opposite. Now, the opposite was this Russian-roulette scenario. The problem was that they had done something even worse, because they had taken everybody in Italy over the age of 105 and used them to build this sort of flattening-out curve. And when they had made this curve, they needed to say what it was flattening out from. So they needed to say, Well, what’s the normal midlife probability of death, and how fast does it get worse? What it boiled down to is that they had picked out the only estimate from earlier life-mortality models that gave them a flattening-out result.So they had 861 options, and they chose the only option that gave them a significant result. So here I was, in the middle of a very vitriolic and long-running debate, saying that both camps were wrong. And I think both camps are wrong, because if you take that maximum survivable age and you estimate it, it doesn’t converge to a single value mathematically. And so in plain language, what that means is that if you grow up in a different environment, your maximum survivable age is different. And it moves over time, really clearly moves over time. So there is not one limit to human life. There is, at best, a smorgasbord of limits that depend on where you grew up, what population you’re in.Demsas: So essentially, there is a maximum survivable age, but it will differ based on the environmental and policy choices that are being made at that time. And so I guess that then the question just becomes, like, how much can you really do on environmental factors?So I want to get to this question about this theory of blue zones, which I think has become very popular. I mean, there’s been, you know, a popular book, a Netflix docuseries. It has inspired tons of attention.There are regions of the world where people have claimed to live remarkably long lives—past 80, even past 100—at rates higher than you would expect just based on if it was just distributed normally: places like Okinawa, in Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece. What was originally the evidence for the idea that these places were unusually good for long life?Newman: Well, the original evidence was rather amusing, actually, because like everything else in extreme-age research, there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents. You know, you have government documents or informal documents that say, I’m this old. But the amusing factor was that the first blue-zone study found a bunch of people within Sardinia that seemed to be living a long time. They didn’t measure anyone outside of Sardinia. They decided that this was a global outlier for extraordinary ages, and they thought that incest, that people sleeping with each other was making this island—Demsas: I’ve never heard this. (Laughs.)Newman: It’s extraordinary. It doesn’t make it to the documentary—Demsas: —to the Netflix docuseries. (Laughs.)Newman: —for a very good reason. Yeah. I mean, there’s nobody making this lifestyle recommendation, I hope. (Laughs.)Demsas: Dear God.Newman: It’s kind of amazing. And that was the start of the blue zones.So, you know, I sort of vaguely knew about this idea while I was getting involved in this fight between the plateau people and the people who think there’s a limit to human life. And, you know, I sort of thought of it as an amusing aside, but as time went on, it became less and less amusing, more and more concerning—like, starkly concerning. And the reason is that everything in these studies is based on looking at documents and saying, Oh, they’re consistent.Demsas: You mean, like, birth certificates?Newman: I mean birth certificates. So there are a lot of problems with that, that really came out of the woodwork over time because, you know, it’s on paper.But when I started looking into these extreme-age cases, it really snowballed. Everything snowballed in a way that completely destroyed the idea and the underlying data of the blue zones. And effectively, you know, people are just believing their own fairy tales here. This really, you know, goes beyond cases, though, because early on in the investigation, I discovered that Japan, where it was claimed Japan had among the world’s best evidence for birth records. And in 2010, it turned out that 82 percent of the people over the age of 100 in the country were dead.Demsas: And was it pension fraud, or what?Newman: It was not pension fraud. It was the remarkable fact that in Japan, the household has to register your death, and if you are the last person in the household and you are dead, how do you do that?Demsas: Oh, wow.Newman: So they had, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people who had died in World War II or had died subsequently, and who were just getting older on paper, including the oldest man in Tokyo and the oldest woman in Tokyo.Demsas: Were they paying them, like, Social Security?Newman: Oh, yes.Demsas: Like, what was happening? Where was the money going?Newman: Well, in the case of the oldest man in Tokyo, the money was going to the family. And he was an extraordinary case that kicked off this investigation because—so there’s a sort of week in Japan where there’s a respect for the aged [day], and in preparation, city officials in Tokyo had gone looking for the oldest man. And eventually, they found out that the oldest man was in Tokyo, but he’d been dead in his apartment for 30 years, and his family were living in the apartment. And the oldest man in Tokyo had been steadily collecting his pension checks.Now, what’s extraordinary about that is that his paperwork was perfectly in order. Like, if you handed their paperwork to a demographer, they would not be able to see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not like you die and automatically a form pops out in the central bureaucracy, right? There’s no actual way to know.So it turned out that most extreme-old-age data was undetected errors, and this happened in every blue zone.Demsas: So you went through all the blue zones and saw the same pattern?Newman: I went through all the blue zones. The same thing happened. In Greece, at least 72 percent of the people in Greece who were over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from underground. And what’s remarkable about that is they had just passed a government audit, despite being dead. They passed a government audit in 2011, and in 2012, the government turned around and said, Actually, all those people were dead.Demsas: So walk me through this a little bit, because I think there’s a few different arguments that you’re making here. One is that there are places where it’s quite difficult to know what’s happening with the population, because there’s [a situation] like what you mentioned in Japan, where the reporting of death is happening in a method where you actually can’t validate, when the oldest person in a household has died.And then there’s a second strand of things, which is that people are actively committing fraud because of pensions and Social Security or other sorts of welfare benefits. And then there’s a third, which is just that these documents are not consistent or good, and so when demographers are trying to do this kind of research, they’re ending up having to rely on pretty shoddy documentation or to make broad claims.So how much of this is happening in each place? Like, what do you think is most prevalent?Newman: We don’t know what’s most prevalent. I mean, this is actually part of the problem: that we can see when an error has happened, but if we have documents in front of us that look good, we don’t know if they’re in error or not. And this pattern repeats itself. So there are many, many ways. There’s a whole layer cake of different methods by which you can screw up someone’s age.Like you said, you can just write it down wrong at the start. There was a case where the world’s oldest man was actually just his younger brother, and they just swapped documents. It’s completely undetectable, and it’s happened three times. And there are other cases where there’s active pension fraud. I mean, there’s also cases where you just have someone who is illiterate and has picked up the wrong documents. The list goes on and on and on.But the point is that demographers keep validating these people, and then decades—or even in one case, a century later—find out that they aren’t who they say they are. And that process is pretty much random. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what happens to a field over the course of more than a century when the data can only be checked for being consistent? You can’t actually tell if it’s true?And I think it really set up this extraordinary disaster where not only are the blue zones based on data that doesn’t make sense; we actually have this sort of fundamental problem in looking at the oldest people within our society. Blue zones are an exemplary case of this, but it’s more general.So to give you an example, health in the blue zones was poor before, during, and after they were established. Even in America, at least 17 percent of people over the age of 100 were clerical errors, missing, or dead—at least 17 percent. Many of them just did not have birth certificates. And we have no way of knowing. Like, it’s not as if I can take a person into a hospital, and they can put them into a machine, and it tells me how old they are.Demsas: Cut their arm off and count the rings (Laughs.)Newman: Exactly. The old pirate joke. You cut the leg off and count the rings. You can’t do that.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And that means we are just taking all of this evidence at face value. Normally, that would be fine. Right? And this is where I’m going to apologize for talking numbers. But this is a theoretical result I came up with in 2018.Let’s imagine you have 100,000 people who are 50, really 50. Like, they’ve got their documents, everything. And then you have an extraordinarily low rate of error in which you take 100 40-year-olds, and you give them documents to say they’re 50. If you do that, normally you’d expect, Oh, I can just ignore this. My statistical model will take care of it as noise. But something happens instead that is extraordinary, because those 40-year-olds are, like I said, less than half as likely to die than the real data. So your errors have a lower rate of dying and being removed from the population than your real data—Demsas: Wait—sorry. Can you explain that? I don’t understand.Newman: So you remember: I told you about the clock where your mortality rate doubles every eight years? That means if, let’s say—and I call them “young liars.” If my young liars are eight years younger, their odds of dying day to day are half. So the errors have half the mortality rate of the real data. Every eight years, the percentage of errors doubles, and by the time you get to 100, every single person or almost every single person is an error.So you can’t ignore these tiny error rates. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t just pretend they don’t exist, because they build up in this weird, nonlinear way over time, and it means that you would actually mathematically expect all of the oldest people in the world to be fake. So, you know, I’ve published this in a scientific journal. No one’s ever been able to argue the math, but they do not want to face up to sort of the repercussions of this.Demsas: Yeah. Part of this is very familiar to me. I don’t have a birth certificate. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the only document I have about my birth and parentage is a baptismal certificate, where I’m pretty sure it was filled out by a member of the church that I was baptized into. I’m not joking: It’s written in teal ink.We were asylum seekers here. I’m, like, taking this to the State Department. I’m like, I swear to God, my father is my father. You literally have to give me a passport. I’m a citizen here. And it was such—it was awful. It was such a hassle. And then—now I’m getting off topic here, but—my brother had to get a DNA test to prove that our parents were his parents in order to get his driver’s license eventually, and his passport. So I’m very familiar with this.And there’s another phenomenon—which, I mean, I don’t know if this is something that you’ve seen in your research—wherein some cultures and communities, of course, being older is, like, quite an advantage. And so there will be people who you’re like, I know how old you are, but you are telling everyone you are 10 to 15 years older than you are. Have you seen this in your research?Newman: All the time. Yeah, I mean, constantly. There was a study in the BBC a couple of months ago where they looked at heart age. And this is a National Institute on Aging–funded study on people in the rainforest, right? And they say, We don’t have any idea how old we are. And the headline is, Oh, these people have really young hearts for their age. You know, they don’t know their age. They’re literally telling you, We are making it up.And, you know, if you have any doubts about the blue zones, there used to be something called the “longevity zones” that predates the blue zones. It was put out by National Geographic in exactly the same way. It had exactly the same hallmarks of, Oh, you live in a mountainous region that’s very remote, and you eat yogurt and vegetarian diets.And it was exactly what you’re saying. These people gave status to village elders, so people were inflating their ages to an extraordinary degree. They were saying, I’m 122. And that’s all it was. You know, this was three regions across the world: Soviet Georgia, where apparently yogurt was the secret; the Vilcabamba Valley, in Ecuador; and the Hunza Valley, in Pakistan. These were the blue zones, and every single case was based on rubbish recordkeeping. And, you know, it just seems to be that’s exactly what’s happened again.[Music]Demsas: After the break: Even if blue zones aren’t real, does that really change how we think about living longer?[Break]Demsas: The thing I’m wrestling with when I engage with this, because, you know, you have published this work; you’ve written about it in the Times and other places. But the fundamental idea that there are locations that are better for people’s lifespans seems not overturned by this, right?Like, we know that location matters a lot for health outcomes, air pollution in particular. It feels like there’s a new paper every other week showing that there’s massive impacts of air pollution on life expectancy, on cognitive functioning, on general health. Is the fundamental concept that there are certain places where people are going to live longer still one that we should be putting more research into?Newman: I think that’s not controversial. But I also think it’s very well understood, for exactly the reasons you say. There’s a study every week on average life expectancy. And what’s striking about this is that those places are very different from the places that get extreme life expectancy.So I basically took a sample of 80 percent of the world’s 110-year-olds and most of the world’s 105-year-olds, and looked at their distribution within countries. So I’m sitting in London right now. And in all of England, the place with the best rate of reaching 105 was the single poorest inner-city suburb with the single fewest number of 90-year-olds.So those two things—where it’s good to live, on average, and where it’s good to reach extreme old age—were exactly the opposite. This is like saying Flint, Michigan, is the healthiest place in the U.S.A. No shade on Flint, Michigan. The government is really the cause of this, but it does not make any sense. It fundamentally doesn’t make any sense. And it gets even worse when you start looking at the details.So the single U.S. blue zone is Loma Linda. I mean, the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan. They measure it, and it is completely and utterly unremarkable.Demsas: I’m not, you know, deeply reporting in the longevity space here, but the way that you have talked about your interactions with some of these authors makes me think it’s an especially contentious field. Why has it kind of remained so difficult to sort of overturn this popular narrative around blue zones?Newman: Well, it makes a lot of money.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: It’s really that simple. I mean, there are multiple best-selling cookbooks, you know. And I’d like to point out, of course: Don’t take your health advice from cookbooks. Its really sort of needs reinforcing every now and again. (Laughs.) But, you know, if you really had a cure for aging, you’d be winning the Nobel Prize.Demsas: You wouldn’t be writing a cookbook? (Laughs.)Newman: You would not be writing a cookbook. You wouldn’t be on late-night television, you know, making a sales pitch. You’d just be like, I want my Nobel Prize. I have a cure for all diseases. Where’s my money? It’s really fundamental.But there is another aspect to this in that a lot of research careers are built on examining the oldest old, and even more research careers are built on just assuming that birth-certificate ages are correct. And to show that they’re not correct in an undetectable fashion on such a massive scale threatens a lot of people’s research careers.Demsas: But part of the thing that I find interesting about the blue zone’s recommendations is that a lot of them are things that are just straightforwardly good advice, right? Move naturally. Have a sense of purpose. Stress less. Don’t eat too much. Eat beans and legumes. Have community. Put your family first. The only one that I think is potentially not actually good is: Drink alcohol in moderation. But the rest of them are generally associated with good health to different extents and, you know, with longevity to different extents.I guess, like, what drove you to become so interested in pushing back on this narrative, given that the advice that people are getting is generally still, like, you know, good health advice? Like, you probably should do most of these things if you’re not already.Newman: Well, I think the problem is the way in which the people in these regions are really kind of culturally being exploited. Because they don’t bear any connection to what actually happens in the blue zones. And I think that was what really drove it home for me, is that you have this sort of flavor of some guy who turns up for a few weeks, looks around, decides it’s the ikigai, and goes home. And if you actually go to the government of Japan, they’ve been measuring Okinawa, for example, since 1975. And every single time they’ve measured Okinawa, it has had terrible health. It has been right at the bottom of the pile.Demsas: Wow.Newman: I’ll take you through some statistics that were robustly ignored by people in selling these blue-zones ideas. Body mass index is measured in Okinawa and compared to the rest of Japan, and it’s measured in over-75-year-olds. So if you go back to 1975, that’s people born 1900 or before, and they measure how heavy they are. They have been last every year, by a massive margin.And then you look at the next claim. So that sort of knocks a hole in the “move naturally” claim. The “move naturally” claim also has this sort of idea that people grow gardens in the blue zones, right? The government of Japan measures that, and they are third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. They don’t grow gardens. And we’ve known that since the beginning of records.And then you look at the idea that they eat plants. It seems really noncontroversial. But people in Okinawa do not eat their veggies. And we know this because we ask them. They’re last in the consumption of root vegetables, last in the consumption of leafy vegetables, last in the consumption of pickled vegetables. They’re third from the top in other raw meat. You know, they eat 40 kilograms of meat a year, at least, which is way above the global and national average. And even sweet potato—sweet potato is on the front of the Netflix documentary, these purple sweet potatoes—they are last for sweet potato consumption out of all the 47 prefectures of Japan.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: And they always have been. There’s another idea that, you know, they have a sense of belonging, that they belong to a faith-based community. They’re 93.4 percent atheist. They’re third to last in the country, and it is a very atheist country. So the problem is that none of these claims have any connection to reality whatsoever.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And it’s been sitting in the open for decades.Demsas: Have you become a lot more cynical about scientific research as a result of this?Newman: Oh, I mean, absolutely. It’s extraordinary, the sort of cognitive dissonance that goes on. And really, I mean, all of these claims just have no connection to reality. And you see this sort of sad thing playing out with the locals, where a beach resort will get built. People will fly in for three days, and they’re still sitting there going, like, Why don’t we have a hospital? Why are we all still poor?You know, just basic social problems get overlooked because of this. So yeah, it has made me much more cynical, because these, I guess you would call them “lumps and bumps,” should have been obvious right from the point when someone said incest was good for living a long time.Demsas: So, like, I mean, preregistration helps reduce a lot of issues in social science. There’s also been increasing attempts to subject, you know, big findings, important findings to replication by various groups and individuals.I mean, is there something fundamental that you think needs to happen differently in terms of how reputable journals accept new findings? Do you think that all the data needs to be open? What needs to happen here to prevent these sorts of problems in the future?Newman: In short, the answer is: really a lot.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: The slightly less short answer is that the core of science is reproducibility. It is the core idea. And these results are not reproducible. And it’s not just that they’re not reproducible. After 20 years, nobody has published the underlying data. And there needs to be a much heavier emphasis on replication in science and on testing claims—especially profitable claims—before they’re just thrown out into the open.Because, you know, I find it amazing. This is something that was discussed at an elite level at the World Economic Forum. Now, we cannot have a cookbook-based piece of lifestyle advice governing global health. So we need to really rejig the—I mean, first, the level of skepticism in science needs to go up considerably. And second, we need to really start hitting back on papers that need to be retracted, papers that need to be removed from the scientific record because they do not replicate or because, you know, like the first two—the studies I pointed out here—because they’re based on extremely questionable choices.Demsas: So most people listening to this will have heard of this topic before, but have you found anything that indicates it’s been especially influential in public health in that policy makers are taking it quite seriously as a way of trying to push different nonvalidated recommendations?Newman: Yes. I mean, the presentation at the World Economic Forum is really a low point, an extraordinary low point. But I think what is, like I said, more troubling is that you have an entire machinery of public health here that didn’t spot how completely wrong this is. In retrospect, it’s so wrong that everybody’s sort of giggling. But it’s been 20 years of this being perhaps the most popular idea in demography.And so I get worried about this because I’ve just completed a new study. And in this new study, I have taken every single 100-year-old in the world and analyzed where they’re from and what countries attain the age of 100 at the highest rates. And to do this, I took United Nations data contributed by every government on Earth, in good faith, with the best efforts at data cleaning—both by the governments and by the UN. And the places that reach 100 at the most remarkable rates don’t make any sense.Malawi, which is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth, is in the top 10, and it’s in the top 10 routinely. You know, Western Sahara, which is a region that does not have a government, is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, according to the UN. I mean, that’s fundamentally absurd. And it’s fundamentally absurd that it has been 70 years that this data has been produced for, and nobody has noticed the absurdity. And I find that deeply shocking.Puerto Rico was one of the top 10, and that initially passed muster. You’ve got a place in a rich country that has a long history of birth certificates, until you realize that this is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, and the reason seems to be that the birth certificates are so badly documented that they restarted the entire system in 2010. They said, Birth certificates are no longer legal documents. They threw it all out and started again because of systemic levels of error.Demsas: Wow.Newman: And that’s how you reach 100.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: You just write your age down wrong. And you know, there is this sort of public-health element that is deeply troubling because you are one of the people in the world that doesn’t have a birth certificate, and you’re not alone.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: A quarter of children now don’t have a birth certificate—a quarter of all children. And we are just ignoring that.Demsas: I want to take a step back because I think that even though I think that this is deeply troubling, there is still a desire—I mean, part of the reason why there’s such a focus on this issue is people really want to figure out how to extend their life. Every year they get older, they’re, you know, deeply concerned with yoga, with protein intake, with lifting weights. A lot of different things begin to occupy your mind as the number turns to 3, 4, 5 at the beginning of your age.I want to ask about how much we know about the role of environmental versus genetic factors in determining longevity. Is all of this effort to try and tweak our life expectancy—is it really that worth it, or is it largely just a question of your genetics kind of determining what your life expectancy is going to be?Newman: I mean, there’s good news and bad news. And I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is—well, it depends on your perspective, I suppose. The bad news is that the people who live the longest, on average, are born into rich countries with free health care. It’s that simple. The good news is: When it comes to the environment, it plays a big role, a very big role in how long you live. And there is a lot you can do about it, not a single one of which costs any money, right?So I’ll break it down. The simple things that we really know about lifespan: Don’t drink. There you’ll get, it depends, but if you [weren’t] going to get addicted, you’ll get about an extra 30 years of lifespan over what you would if you got addicted to alcohol. And for context, the CDC estimates that that’s about the same as heroin addiction. But if you drink without getting addicted and give up drinking, you’re still going to gain roughly three to four years.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: Right. So that’s simple.Don’t smoke: You’ll gain about seven years. Do some exercise: You’ll get probably—it depends how much you exercise, but let’s say four years. And go to your GP, and that’s it. You don’t need to buy the cookbook.I think the reason the cookbook sells so well is that those three things are somewhat difficult, right? They’re kind of hard, and I think this is why longevity cures perennially do so well, is that they’re always easier than those three things. Almost always, you know, the ones that do well. And that is what underpins this market. But if you really want to live a longer time, just don’t drink; don’t smoke; do some exercise.Demsas: Well, tell me a little bit more about the genetic factors here. I mean, there was a study I saw that looked at 20,000 Nordic twins born in the late 1800s, and found that genetic differences had negligible impacts on survival before about age 60, but after age 60 and particularly those reaching their 80s and beyond, genetic factors become more important. I don’t know if you’ve seen that paper or if you’ve seen other research about this, but what do we know about the role of genetics in longevity?Newman: I haven’t seen that paper, but I’ve seen some extraordinarily bad papers on the roles of genetics and longevity. There’s just something called a genome-wide-association study, where you effectively say, you know, what genes are associated with extreme longevity. And I’ve seen that conducted on sample sizes of less than 200 people, which is, I mean—it’s a bit like saying you’ve got a space program when you let go of a carnival balloon. It’s a joke.So I would be extremely skeptical of longevity claims. You know, there is just this fundamental problem with our documents that if you go into that study and dive into that study, you’ll realize that they, like everybody else, have to trust what is written down on the piece of paper that says how old these people are.And there’s no way to check that. You know, I think we’re on the edge of a situation where you can. There have been some extraordinary scientific advances in estimating people’s age, but nobody seems to want to face up to that fundamental problem yet.Demsas: Well, Saul, this has been fantastic. Always our last and final question: What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being just good on paper?Newman: I’ll tell you something that turned out to be bad on paper in the moment. When I was an undergrad, it’s kind of like someone said to me, Go to the best U.K. university. It’s the one in Oxford, Oxford Brooks, which is not the University of Oxford. They told me completely the wrong university to go to, and I’d gone to it. And so to sort of crawl my way out of this hole, I found out that my university offered an exchange program to the Ivy League. And it was the first year they’d run it. So they just didn’t understand how much it was gonna cost.Demsas: Okay.Newman: And I was like, Great. I could be the poorest kid in the Ivy League, right? So I went on exchange, but without me knowing it, they realized how much it cost and pulled my visa status after the first six months. So I wound up in the FBI building in L.A., you know, in a locked elevator, going to one of the rooms for an interview, just completely not knowing that I’d overstayed.Demsas: Is that even a good on paper? That just sounds like you got screwed.Newman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s as close as I got. I mean, it was good on paper right up until that point.Demsas: Yeah. What school were you going to?Newman: I was going to Ithaca—Cornell, in Ithaca—and paying, I think, $1,000 a semester in student loans.Demsas: Oh my gosh. That is, like, one of those things where you really gotta check to see if that deal’s going to pan out.Newman: Yeah, I think it worked out long term, but short term, yeah, not so great.Demsas: Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.Newman: Thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.Demsas: If you like what you heard on today’s episode, I have a suggestion for you! My colleagues here at The Atlantic are exploring how we talk about aging, in our newest How To series. You can hear a trailer at the end of this episode, and then go subscribe to How to Age Up, coming April 7, wherever you listen to podcasts.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Don’t Think Too Hard About Gum

When you chew gum, you’re essentially gnawing on plastic.

At the turn of the 20th century, William Wrigley Jr. was bent on building an empire of gum, and as part of his extensive hustle, he managed to persuade the U.S. Department of War to include his products in soldiers’ rations. His argument—baseless at the time—was that chewing gum had miraculous abilities to quench thirst, stave off hunger, and dissipate nervous tension. But he was right: Scientists have since found that gum chewing can indeed increase concentration, reduce the impulse to snack, alleviate thirst, and improve oral health.Perhaps that’s why people around the world have had the impulse to gnaw on tacky materials—roots, resins, twigs, blubber, tar made by burning birch bark—for at least 8,000 years. Today, gum is again being marketed as a panacea for wellness. You can buy gum designed to deliver energy, nutrition, stress relief, or joint health; scientists are even developing gums that can protect against influenza, herpes, and COVID. Ironically, this new era of chewing gum is manufactured with a distinctly modern ingredient, one not usually associated with wellness: plastic.By the time Wrigley began his business venture, Americans had grown accustomed to chewing gum sold as candy-coated balls or packaged sticks. The base of these chewing gums was made from natural substances such as spruce resin and chicle, a natural latex that Aztecs and Mayans chewed for hundreds if not thousands of years. Unfortunately for 20th-century Americans, the chicozapote trees that exude chicle take a long time to grow, and if they are overtapped, they die. Plus, cultivated trees don’t produce nearly as much chicle as wild trees, says Jennifer Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity University and the author of Chicle. In the 1950s, chicle harvesters began struggling to meet demand. So gum companies turned to the newest innovations in materials science: synthetic rubbers and plastics.Today, most companies’ gum base is a proprietary blend of synthetic and natural ingredients: If a packet lists “gum base” as an ingredient, that gum most likely contains synthetic polymers. The FDA allows gum base to contain any of dozens of approved food-grade materials—substances deemed either safe for human consumption or safe to be in contact with food. Many, though, are not substances that people would otherwise think to put in their mouth. They include polyethylene (the most common type of plastic, used in plastic bags and milk jugs), polyvinyl acetate (a plastic also found in glue), and styrene-butadiene rubber (commonly used in car tires). The typical gum base contains two to four types of synthetic plastics or rubbers, Gwendolyn Graff, a confectionery consultant, told me.Everything we love about gum today is thanks to synthetic polymers, Graff said. Polyvinyl acetate, for example, strengthens the bubble film. “If you blow a bubble, and it starts to get holes in it and deflate, that’s usually an indicator that it doesn’t have polyvinyl acetate,” Graff said. Styrene-butadiene rubber creates a bouncy chewiness that makes gum more likely to stick to itself rather than to surfaces like your teeth. Polyethylene can be used to soften gum so it doesn’t tire out your jaw. Gums with only natural polymers “can feel like they're going to fall apart in your mouth,” Graff said.Plastic gum, though, also falls apart, in a way: Gum chewing has been linked to microplastic ingestion. In a study published in December, U.K. researchers had a volunteer chew on a piece of gum for an hour, spitting into test tubes as they went. After an hour of gum chewing, the saliva collected contained more than 250,000 pieces of micro and nano plastics—comparable to the level of microplastics found in a liter of bottled water. In a study presented at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society (which has not yet been peer-reviewed), a graduate student’s saliva contained elevated microplastic levels after she chewed several commercially available gums, including natural ones. The research on gum chewing and microplastics is still limited—these two papers effectively represent analysis of just two people’s post-chew saliva—but gum chewing has also been correlated with higher urine levels of phthalates, plastic-softening chemicals that are known endocrine disruptors.Scientists are still learning about the health impacts of microplastic ingestion, too. Microplastics find their way into all kinds of foods from packaging or contamination during manufacturing, or because the plants and animals we eat absorb and ingest microplastics themselves. As a result, microplastics have been found in human livers, kidneys, brains, lungs, intestines, placentas, and breast milk, but exactly how our bodies absorb, disperse, and excrete ingested plastic is not very well studied, says Marcus Garcia, who researches the health effects of environmental contaminants at the University of New Mexico. Some research in mice and cultured cells hint that microplastics have the potential to cause damage, and epidemiological research suggests that microplastics are associated with respiratory, digestive, and reproductive issues, as well as colon and lung cancer. But scientists are still trying to understand whether or how microplastics cause disease, which microplastics are most dangerous to human health, and how much microplastic the body can take before seeing any negative effects.The answer could affect the future of what we choose to eat—or chew. Ingesting tiny plastic particles might seem inevitable, but over the past 10 years or so, Americans have grown understandably fearful about bits of plastic making their way into our food, fretting about microwaving food in plastic containers and drinking from plastic bottles. Gum has, for the most part, not triggered those worries, but in recent years, its popularity had been dropping for other reasons. In a bid to reverse that trend, gum companies are marketing synthetic gum as a tool for wellness. Just like Wrigley, they are betting that Americans will believe in the power of gum to soothe nerves and heal ailments, and that they won’t think too hard about what modern gum really is. For anyone worried about swallowing still more plastic, after all, gum is easy enough to avoid.

A marine biologist discovered something incredible in a beer bottle on the seafloor

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it […]

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it out.  Through her dive mask, Koch peered inside to make sure it was empty.  That’s when she saw an eyeball.  “There was something staring back at me,” Koch told me.  It wasn’t just one eyeball, actually — but dozens. Inside the bottle was an octopus mom with a brood of babies. “You could see their eyes, you could see their tentacles,” Koch said in a recent interview with Vox and The Dodo. “They were fully formed.” Instead of taking the bottle with her and throwing it away like she initially intended, Koch handed it to her colleague, another marine biologist, who carefully placed it back on the sandy sea floor. Based on the images and video, Chelsea Bennice, a marine biologist at Florida Atlantic University, said the animal was likely a species of pygmy octopus — making this whole encounter even cuter.  On one hand, it’s hopeful to find life — an octopus family! — living in rubbish. “One man’s trash is another octopuse’s nursery,” as University of Miami environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet told me when I showed her the photos. Her graduate student, Janelle Kaz, said it’s actually not uncommon for octopuses to take up residence in beer bottles. “They are highly curious and opportunistic,” Jacquet said.  But it’s also a reminder that, as Florida ecosystems decline, there are fewer and fewer places for wildlife to live. Overfishing, pollution, and climate change have devastated near-shore habitats in the Keys — and especially coral reefs — in the last few decades.  The irony, Koch told me, is that she runs a state-funded project in Monroe County to create “artificial reefs:” structures, often made of concrete, to enhance the habitat for fish, lobsters, and other sea creatures. And she was actually snorkeling that morning to figure out where to put some of the structures.  “This octopus found artificial habitat to make its home,” Koch said. “I was just like, ‘Wait momma, because I’m going to put out some better habitat for you — something that someone can’t pick up and throw away.’”

Sea Lion Bites Surfer Amid One of the Worst Outbreaks of Domoic Acid Poisoning That California Wildlife Rescuers Can Remember

Sea lions, dolphins and birds are sick and dying because of a toxic algae bloom in Southern California—and animal care organizations are overwhelmed by the scale

Volunteers with the Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute in Santa Barbara, California, rescue a sick sea lion that's likely suffering from domoic acid poisoning. David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images It started as a normal surf session for RJ LaMendola. He was roughly 150 yards from the beach in Southern California, riding the waves and enjoying the peaceful solitude. But the situation quickly turned violent when a sea lion emerged from the water and charged at LaMendola. The 20-year surfing veteran tried to remain calm as he frantically paddled back to shore, but the sea lion was behaving unusually—“like some deranged predator,” LaMendola wrote in a widely shared post on Facebook. The sea lion made contact, delivering a hard bite on LaMendola’s left buttock that pierced through his wetsuit. “Never have I had one charge me, especially at that ferocity, mouth open,” LaMendola tells the Ventura County Star’s Stacie N. Galang and Cheri Carlson. “It really was out of, like, a horror movie.” Eventually, LaMendola made it back to the sand and drove himself to a nearby emergency room. After being treated, he contacted local wildlife authorities. The most likely explanation for the sea lion’s abnormally aggressive behavior? The creature was probably suffering from domoic acid poisoning, which results from toxic algae blooms. Across Southern California, authorities are grappling with one of the worst outbreaks of domoic acid poisoning they’ve ever seen. Dozens of sea lions and dolphins have been affected by the condition in recent weeks, reports the Los Angeles Times’ Summer Lin. Birds are also turning up dead, according to the Los Angeles Daily News’ Erika I. Ritchie. At least 140 sick sea lions are being cared for at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, per the Los Angeles Times, because they have a 50 to 65 percent chance of surviving if they receive treatment. Roughly another 45 are being cared for at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, reports the Los Angeles Daily News. SeaWorld San Diego has rescued another 15 this year, reports KGTV’s Jane Kim. Other sea lions have been found dead on area beaches. “This morning, we had three calls within 30 minutes of daylight breaking,” Glenn Gray, CEO of the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, told the Los Angeles Daily News on March 18. “That’s the magnitude of it.” Members of the public are being urged to report any sick, distressed or dead animals they find on the beach. Beachgoers should also stay away from the animals and give them space. David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images Dozens of dolphins, meanwhile, are washing up dead or close to death on beaches. Veterinarians are euthanizing the dolphins, because they rarely survive domoic acid poisoning, per the Los Angeles Times. “It’s the only humane option,” says John Warner, CEO of the Marine Mammal Care Center, to the Westside Current’s Jamie Paige. “It’s an awful situation.” A similar outbreak occurred in 2023, killing more than 1,000 sea lions. But officials say this year is shaping up to be worse. The harmful algae bloom started roughly five weeks ago. During a bloom, environmental conditions cause microscopic phytoplankton to proliferate. Some species of phytoplankton produce domoic acid, which then accumulates in filter-feeding fish and shellfish. Marine mammals become sickened when they eat the affected fish and shellfish. (Humans can also get sick from eating contaminated fish, shellfish and crustaceans.) In marine mammals, symptoms of domoic acid poisoning include seizures, lethargy, foaming at the mouth and a neck-craning behavior known as “stargazing.” Biting incidents—like the one LaMendola endured—are rare, but sickened animals have been known to behave aggressively. “The neurotoxin is crippling and killing sea lions and dolphins,” says Ruth Dover, managing director of the nonprofit Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute, to the Ventura County Star. The bloom likely started when cold water from deep in the Pacific Ocean rose to the surface in February. Now, it also appears to be spreading closer to the shore. Researchers are monitoring the bloom, but so far, they have no indication of how long it will last. Authorities say toxic algae blooms are getting worse and happening more frequently because of climate change, agricultural runoff and other human-caused factors. This is the fourth straight year a domoic acid-producing bloom has developed off Southern California, as Dave Bader, chief operating officer of the Marine Mammal Care Center, tells KNX News’ Karen Adams. “We don’t know what the long-term impacts will be for having so many consecutive years of this toxic bloom,” Bader adds. “But [dolphins are] a sentinel species. They’re telling us about the health of the ocean, and when we see marine life dying, and we’re seeing it in increasing levels with more frequency, the ocean’s telling us something’s off.” The ongoing outbreak is taking its toll on Southern California veterinarians, volunteers and beachgoers. The incidents are particularly heartbreaking for lifeguards, who typically comfort dying dolphins—and keep beachgoers away—until authorities can arrive. Members of the public are encouraged to report any distressed, sick or dead animals they find on the beach. And, more importantly, they should leave the animals alone. Authorities say pushing a sick creature back into the ocean will likely cause it to drown. Dolphins also become especially agitated when they’re out of the water and people are around—to the point that they can die from fear. “People need to leave them alone and not crowd around them,” Warner tells the Los Angeles Times. “Selfies kill animals, so use your zoom, and stay away.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Deep Sea Mining Impacts Still Felt Forty Years On, Study Shows

By David StanwaySINGAPORE (Reuters) - A strip of the Pacific Ocean seabed that was mined for metals more than 40 years ago has still not recovered,...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A strip of the Pacific Ocean seabed that was mined for metals more than 40 years ago has still not recovered, scientists said late on Wednesday, adding weight to calls for a moratorium on all deep sea mining activity during U.N.-led talks this week.A 2023 expedition to the mineral-rich Clarion Clipperton Zone by a team of scientists led by Britain's National Oceanography Centre found that the impacts of a 1979 test mining experiment were still being felt on the seafloor, a complex ecosystem hosting hundreds of species.The collection of small "polymetallic nodules" from an eight-metre strip of the seabed caused long-term sediment changes and reduced the populations of many of the larger organisms living there, though some smaller, more mobile creatures have recovered, according to the study, published in Nature journal."The evidence provided by this study is critical for understanding potential long-term impacts," said NOC expedition leader Daniel Jones. "Although we saw some areas with little or no recovery, some animal groups were showing the first signs of recolonisation and repopulation."Delegations from 36 countries are attending a council meeting of the U.N.'s International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica this week to decide whether mining companies should be allowed to extract metals like copper or cobalt from the ocean floor.As they deliberate over hundreds of proposed amendments to a 256-page draft mining code, environmental groups have called for mining activities to be halted, a move supported by 32 governments and 63 large companies and financial institutions."This latest evidence makes it even more clear why governments must act now to stop deep sea mining before it ever starts," said Greenpeace campaigner Louise Casson.While few expect a final text to be completed by the time the latest round of talks ends on March 28, Canada's The Metals Company plans to submit the first formal mining application in June.On Friday, delegates will discuss what actions should be taken if an application to mine is submitted before the regulations have been completed.TMC said at a briefing last week that it had a legal right to submit an application at any time and hoped that the ISA would bring clarity to the application process.TMC says the environmental impact of deep sea mining is significantly smaller than conventional terrestrial mining."You just have to move a lot less material to get the same amount of metal - higher grade means better economics, but also means lower environmental impacts," said Craig Shesky, TMC's chief financial officer.(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Saad Sayeed)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

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