Why Study Mushrooms During a War?
Our Editor-at-Large returns to Ukraine for a third time
Dear Reader,
Happy Thursday! A lot has happened in the past 24 hours; we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next week. Here are the top stories on the world’s most pressing health and environmental disparities:
Best regards,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor
🍄 EXCLUSIVE: Ukrainian Mycologists Are Not Giving Up
More than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, fungi scientists at the M.G. Kholodny Institute of Botany have been forced to adapt to increasingly difficult working conditions.
“I don't think that someone who has not had the experience of surviving during war can understand the conditions in which people live and work in Ukraine,” says researcher Margarita Lomberg.
Read a dispatch by our Editor-at-Large Kang-Chun Cheng from Kyiv, Ukraine here.
🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR
EDWARDS, Miss. — Cheaper health insurance changed their lives. Then it went away (Shalina Chatlani, Stateline)
“What’s gonna happen to them? Probably present to the emergency room, eventually showing up once their vision is blurry, or they start having chest pain, or they have a sore on their foot that won’t heal,” [Dr. Daniel Edney, Mississippi’s state health officer,] said. “At that point, you’re scrambling to get them placed into care.”
ROSELAND, La. — In Roseland, an Oil Disaster Leaves Black Parents Asking How to Keep Their Kids Safe (Adam Mahoney, Capital B)
“We can’t control the government or these companies,” [resident Elbert McGee] added. “We can pray on it. But you want the best for your children, and it hurts not to be able to give it to them.”
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws. (Amy Yurkanin, ProPublica)
Universities can investigate research and request retractions, like the University of Tennessee did with Towers, but journal editors have the final say about whether to retract a paper or add a correction. Ivan Oransky, one of the experts who spoke with ProPublica for this story, said he has encountered other cases where journals failed to retract a study after a university made such a request.
“You have a situation where the fox is guarding the henhouse,” he said.
How Georgia farms’ fame (and favor) outpace their place in the economy (Maggie Lee, The Current)
🟠 TRACKING TRUMP
Comments on OMB research rule mysteriously removed from federal website (paywalled) (Anil Oza, STAT)
“I don’t see anything obscene. I don’t see anything threatening. I see somebody trying to make an argument by analogy and make an appeal to a public official based on a commonality in their personal life, and that is fair game for a comment. OMB would be expected to respond to a comment like this in its final rule under legal rules that agencies are subject to for how they finalize rules,” said Bridget Dooling, a law professor at Ohio State University who has written about the laws guiding the public comment process and who previously worked as a policy analyst at OMB.
Inside the Struggle to Dismantle America’s Greenhouse Gas Data (Rachel Santarsiero, DeSmog)
“Oil and gas CEOs will always support weak rules they already comply with rather than no rules at all,” Edward Maibach, a climate change communication expert at George Mason University, said by email to DeSmog and the National Security Archive. “Supporting no rules at all would prove to everyone how untrustworthy they are.”
WASHINGTON — E.P.A. Moves to Curb Public Input on Data Centers (Maxine Joselow, The New York Times)
“People need to have a chance to have a say before they see bulldozers,” said Keri Powell, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group.
Read more: Texas Oil and Gas Regulators Will No Longer Have to Accept Public Comment at Open Meetings (Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News)
Read more: US building twice as much gas-fired capacity as China in AI boom, analysis finds (Oliver Milman, The Guardian)
Leaked memo shows how U.S. aims to weaken global limits on plastic production (Conor McGlone, Jake Spring, Emma Bryce and Benard Ogembo, The Washington Post)
“The treaty must lead to real changes to tackle plastic pollution, if not, there is no point having it,” added Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, Norway’s minister of climate and the environment.
Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades (Dan Garisto, Nature)
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🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING
CANYON COUNTY, Idaho — Children in a Faith-Healing Sect Keep Dying. The State Lets It Happen. (Audrey Dutton, ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive)
Asked why God would not want children to live full and healthy lives, [Nathan Kangas, a patriarch in the sect’s Caldwell, Idaho, church,] said he had no answer but quoted a verse from the Book of Psalms: “Precious in the eyes of the Lord are the death of His saints.” The Followers believe that life on Earth is “a preparing ground,” Kangas said. He pointed to the Book of James, which tells people to “be afflicted and mourn and weep” and “let your laughter be turned to mourning.”
“It isn’t necessarily that we’re supposed to have a joyous life here,” Kangas said. “It’s actually quite the opposite.”
MUMBAI — City of Sweat (Aruna Chandrasekhar and Ishan Tankha, Equator)
Temperatures touched 42C as early as March this year, a season formerly known as spring. What was once a slim window of temperatures in which it is comfortable to do things outdoors during the day is now a blip. Millennials prep for concerts as if they are going to war, carrying tetrapaks of oral rehydration solution and N95 masks for the dust. Showers seem futile; in seconds, you’re returned to a primordial liquid state.
The Silencing of Silent Spring (Chris Barton, Red Canary Magazine)
Silent Spring cleared the path for landmark achievements that included founding the EPA as well as legislation such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Clean Water Act. With such protections established, the legal system could then be relied on to hold polluters accountable to the law. Sixty-four years later, this playbook is in tatters.
DĚČÍN, CZECHIA — Hunger stones: The history behind 'if you see me, weep' (Brenda Haas, DW)
Read more: The World’s Breadbaskets Are Getting Pounded by War, Weather and Trade Spats (Somini Sengupta, The New York Times)
Three scientists beat J&J's defamation suit over talc research (Dietrich Knauth, Reuters)
We asked our climate reporters to highlight one idea for positive change. We got a chronicle of global transformation (Bibi van der Zee, The Guardian)
HEBEI PROVINCE, China — China probes use of formaldehyde to keep cabbages fresh (Laura Bicker, BBC)
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