New story in Science and Health from Time: U.S. Fishermen Are Making Their Last Stand Against Offshore Wind U.S. Fishermen Are Making Their Last Stand Against Offshore Wind

A few hundred yards south of the fishing boat docks at the Port of New Bedford in southeastern Massachusetts, workers will soon start offloading gigantic turbine components onto a wide expanse of gravel. Local trawlers and lobster boats will find themselves sharing their waterways with huge vessels hefting cranes and massive hydraulic jacks. And on an approximately 100-square mile patch of open sea that fishermen once traversed with ease, 62 of the world’s largest wind turbines will rise one by one over the ocean waves.

Known as Vineyard Wind, the project is set to be the first-ever commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the United States, generating 800 megawatts of power, or enough to power about 400,000 homes. Dozens of other offshore wind projects are in development up and down America’s east coast. But some in the fishing industry, including many New Bedford fishermen, are concerned that the turbines will upend their way of life.
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Earlier this month, a coalition of fishing industry associations and fishing outfits, including 50 New Bedford fishing boats, filed a lawsuit against several U.S. agencies, including the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which approved Vineyard Wind in May, alleging that they violated federal law in allowing the project to go forward. The fishing groups frame that fight as a matter of survival, a last ditch effort to slow down a coalition of banks, technocrats and global energy companies set on erecting multi-billion dollar projects that they worry could devastate their livelihoods.

Money is certainly a big issue for many of those behind Vineyard Wind—backers like Bank of America and J.P. Morgan have pledged about $2.3 billion in funding for the project, and they’re looking for returns on that investment. But there’s also a societal imperative to push ahead with such projects, with many green energy proponents saying there is little choice but to get offshore turbines built as soon as possible if the U.S. is to have any chance of meeting its obligations under the Paris Agreement and averting the worst effects of climate change. The Biden Administration is counting on such turbines to produce about 10% of U.S. electricity by 2050, and in coastal, population dense states like Massachusetts and New York, leaders view sea-bound wind farms as a lynchpin of their net zero ambitions.

Read More: Biden Is Pouring Billions into Offshore Wind Energy. Will It Be Enough?

Fishing industry interests have long been opposed to offshore turbines elsewhere in the world. In France, for instance, fishermen helped sink an early offshore wind project back in 2004. In the U.S., however, much of the early opposition to offshore wind came from wealthy homeowners opposed to turbines that they thought would mar their ocean views. (A coalition of Cape Cod residents led an effort championed by billionaire businessman Bill Koch and the late Senator Ted Kennedy that, after years of legal opposition, in 2017 helped torpedo what might have been the U.S. first major offshore wind project, known as Cape Wind.) Many subsequent offshore wind leases were extended in waters farther offshore, where turbines would be out of sight of land. Beachfront homeowners could rest easy. Instead, fishing interests worried about hits to their business became offshore wind’s primary opponents.

Some of those fishing operators have been fighting offshore wind long before Vineyard Wind was approved. Scallop fishers on New York’s Long Island, for instance, sued BOEM in 2016 over a proposed wind area lease that they said would hurt their industry. A federal judge dismissed the case the following year, saying that the project still faced years of federal review before anything would be built. Other proposed projects have caused concern for fishermen in North Carolina and Maryland, while a planned 1.1 gigawatt wind farm off the coast of New Jersey has worried some fishers, though the project is largely steering clear of traditional fishing areas. This March, 80 lobster crews in Maine held a boat protest over the planned construction of a single floating wind turbine off the state’s Monhegan Island.

“It’s gonna mess with the ocean and our way of life,” one fisherman told NBC’s local affiliate. “This one off Monhegan, I truly believe, is the foot in the door to get more than one out there.”

In Massachusetts, the fishing advocates who sued BOEM say that the federal government ignored their requests for more rigorous scientific study of offshore wind turbines’ effect on fishing, as well as their concerns over wind turbines making it harder to traverse to fishing grounds, among other grievances.

“This project is really important because it is the first one,” says Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), the coalition suing the federal government. “We need to make sure that the government and the offshore wind industry aren’t just paying lip service to other ocean users.”

Representatives from BOEM and Vineyard Wind declined to comment on the case. Claire Richer, director of federal affairs at the American Clean Power Association, a green energy trade group, pushes back at the notion that local fishing interests were left out of the planning process, citing the fact that millions of acres were cut out of Massachusetts’s wind energy lease area in large part due to fishing industry concerns. In 2019, wind energy developers in the region also changed the orientation of their turbines in order to make it easier for fishing boats to traverse between them, alterations that the companies say cut about 30% of the future wind farm’s potential generation capacity, though an upgrade to newer, more powerful turbines made up the difference.

“The offshore wind industry has made an effort to be a good player, and has made a lot of compromises in this space at the request of fishermen,” says Richer. “There’s momentum that might have caught some folks by surprise. But there has been a process, and there’s been some real changes made.”

That development momentum has been largely caused by rapidly shifting political realities. Under the Trump Administration, Vineyard Wind was stalled for months. Emails released under an E&E News Freedom of Information Act request showed that BOEM was prepared to make a decision on the project starting in 2019 before the administration delayed it for more than a year, along with the rest of the country’s planned offshore wind projects. And after Joe Biden was elected, the outgoing administration issued a legal memo designed to make it especially difficult for wind developers to get a leg up on fishing interests in the federal approval process. But after Biden was inaugurated, federal policy on offshore wind snapped back. New Interior Department officials issued their own memo to cancel out the Trump Administration’s brief, while the new administration pushed hard for rapid offshore development, pledging in March to have 30 gigawatts of wind power installed off U.S. coasts by 2030. Its first approval, for Vineyard Wind, followed soon after.

That new speed reflects the urgency of an accelerating climate crisis. The U.S. is running far behind other nations in efforts to build out offshore wind power, and faces a rapidly shrinking window of time to decarbonize its still largely fossil fuel-powered electricity sector. Fishing industry representatives say the current administration is overemphasizing offshore wind in decarbonization efforts when it should be pushing more into other renewable energy options. But in some sense there isn’t much choice but to build out large amounts of offshore wind as soon as possible. Clean-energy experts say other renewable energy sources, like land-based wind turbines and solar fields, often run into vehement political opposition of their own, and in many cases offshore wind is one of the only realistic options to provide renewable power for densely populated shoreline states.

Moreover, concessions to the fishing industry, like wind area reductions and turbine arrangement changes, may result in less energy production and higher costs, says Alison Bates, an environmental studies professor at Colby College who researches interactions between offshore wind and local communities. The fact that fishermen have traditionally been primary users of coastal waters, she adds, doesn’t mean they have a right to block projects that would benefit others.

“The oceans are commons—they don’t belong to the fishermen,” Bates says, referencing an economics term used to describe natural resources from which all citizens are supposed to benefit. “We as a society have an equal share in what happens in ocean space.”

Read More: This Vermont Utility Is Revolutionizing Its Power Grid to Fight Climate Change. Will the Rest of the Country Follow Suit?

There’s another broad issue with the fishing industry’s demands: Before turbines go in the water, fishermen want more research into how offshore wind installations could affect their livelihoods. But the unfortunate reality is that the climate clock for such investigations may have already run out—at least with respect to these first early offshore wind projects.

“For us to collect all of the information that we need, we’re going to be so far into this climate crisis that it’ll—I mean it’s already irreversible,” says Bates. “The amount of emissions reduction that we need to get to to even stabilize and have anything that even resembles the world today in the future, it’s dramatic, and we don’t have time.” Erin Baker, the director of UMass Amherst’s Energy Transition Institute, says we’re better off moving ahead with building offshore wind farms and then studying what happens, and make necessary adjustments for subsequent projects. “We’re never gonna learn what we need to learn if we don’t get started at least putting some offshore wind in the water,” she says.

As for the hundreds of families in New Bedford and other ports south of Cape Cod that rely on fishing, the immediate effects of building Vineyard Wind might not be devastating: the impact will be “moderate,” according to BOEM’s environmental impact statement, potentially making it harder to access some fishing areas, for instance, or causing losses of fish populations. But the report warns such impacts are likely to get much more severe if other proposed offshore projects in the area end up being approved and constructed. Still, offshore wind industry representatives have insisted that their industry can coexist with traditional fishing, pointing to concessions like transit lanes between turbines and plans to hire local fishing boats to help collect data on wildlife and warn away potential trespassers.

Fishing representatives are skeptical that such programs will provide the employment they need, and many fishing families may look askance at the idea of giving up a trade often passed down through several generations for the chance to become ocean-faring security guards. But as ocean temperatures rise due to climate change, many fishing families’ traditional way of life may be threatened whether offshore wind moves in or not, especially in the waters off New England, which are warming faster than anywhere else in the U.S..

Climate change has given fishing workers an impossible choice: Either fight offshore wind while bracing for a warming climate, or embrace an encroaching industry that’s part of the climate solution. Baker, of UMass Amherst, says that the huge overall societal benefits of offshore wind are clear, and that climate change will ultimately hurt fishermen vastly more than would offshore wind development. But for fishermen, it’s hard not to see the skyscraper-sized towers and long, swinging blades of offshore turbines as the more visible and immediate threat to their way of life. “There is always going to be conflict between offshore wind and commercial fishing,” says Hawkins of RODA. “They are, in some sense, mutually exclusive.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Enduring Hope of Jane Goodall The Enduring Hope of Jane Goodall

In the early years of World War II, when Jane Goodall was around 6 years old, she was often woken from her sleep by the blare of air-raid sirens. The sound warned that Nazi planes were flying over Bournemouth, the English seaside town where Goodall’s family had moved at the outbreak of the war. Her younger sister Judy would be up like a shot, bounding down the stairs to the bomb shelter. But Goodall refused to budge. “I did not want to leave my bed,” she says. “They had to take me down with all my bedclothes.”

Eight decades later, Goodall, now 87, is standing in the living room of the same house, an imposing redbrick Victorian building with cavernous ceilings, thick carpets and heavy armchairs. The bomb shelter is still here, now home to a washing machine and a fridge. In the rest of the house, wooden shelves are crammed with books, figurines and photographs—souvenirs from Goodall’s life as the world’s best-known naturalist. Her grandmother bought the house in the 1930s, and it has the thick layer of bric-a-brac of a home occupied by the same family for many years.

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The new occupants on this late September morning are a camera crew, moving between rooms in search of furniture to take to the garden for a photograph. Goodall, though, is still, arms crossed and eyebrows raised. Her voice cuts through the commotion. Speaking softly yet with conviction, she suggests the crew try her preferred location: her attic bedroom. She exudes the same stubbornness as the girl who clung to her bed in wartime, then leads the group upstairs, victorious.

Goodall’s quiet determination has powered her through a lifetime of waiting for others to come around. In 1960, at 26, she sat for months in the forests of Tanzania, biding her time until chimpanzees accepted her presence and she could observe them up close. When she finally did, she made the seismic discovery that they use tools, transforming our understanding of the relationship between humans and animals and catapulting her to global fame. In 1962, while pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the study of animal behavior, when professors criticized her for using human names and emotions to describe chimps, she says, “I didn’t confront them. I just quietly went on doing what I knew was right.” Although she learned to couch her observations in more scientific language, her contention that chimps are intelligent social animals is now widely accepted and has paved the way for much tighter restrictions on their use in lab testing.

Photograph by Nadav Kander for TIME

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After Goodall shifted from research to activism in the 1980s, her steady, non-confrontational approach allowed her to become one of the most prolific environmentalists in modern history. She leveraged her own life story—drawing on the powerful image of a lone woman living among the animals—to get people excited about environmentalism in an era when it was a fringe activity. Through the Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in 1977, she fundraised for habitat conservation projects, poverty-alleviation programs and animal sanctuaries. The JGI now has chapters in 24 countries, from the U.S. to the United Arab Emirates. In 2004, she became a Dame Commander of the British Empire.

And as she traversed the world, she added countless new stories to her repertoire: on history, animal behavior, human ingenuity and more. These, rather than protest, became her campaign tools. “If I’m trying to change somebody who disagrees—I choose not to not to be holier-than-thou,” she says, perched on a well-loved armchair. “You’ve got to reach the heart. And I do that through storytelling.”

Before the pandemic, Goodall traveled 300 days out of the year to speak to school assemblies, at conferences and on talk shows in an effort to instill some of her determination in others. Through her stories, she has built a popular brand of environmentalism centered around hope—a word that has appeared in the titles of four of 21 books for adults Goodall has published since 1969.

A fifth comes in The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, co-authored with Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson, a memoir cum manifesto on the centrality of hope to activism. The book, coming Oct. 19 in the U.S. and next year in the U.K., documents three sets of interviews between Abrams and Goodall. In their conversations, Abrams questions Goodall on how she can remain hopeful despite the environmental destruction and violent human conflicts she has witnessed, as well as the grief she has experienced, in her lifetime. (Goodall lost her second husband to cancer, less than five years after marrying him, in 1980.) She gives four reasons: “the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power of young people and the indomitable human spirit,” fleshing out these concepts with the color of her life.

Something about her—her enthusiasm, the brightness of her eyes, the detail in her unusual experiences—leaves readers and audiences feeling hopeful that it’s possible, with enough effort, for us to save the planet, and ourselves, from environmental destruction. “She’s an amazing woman,” naturalist filmmaker David Attenborough told TIME in 2019, praising her ability to inspire. “She has an extraordinary, almost saintly naiveté.”

The tenacity of Goodall’s hope, in the face of the crises we now endure, might seem naive. Despite decades of institutional efforts and dedicated activism by millions across the globe, humans have driven the planet to the brink of ecological and climate catastrophe. With a long-awaited U.N. climate summit just weeks away, scientists say world leaders have failed to even pledge enough carbon-emissions cuts to make a livable future, let alone begun to deliver on their promises. The situation has led a younger generation of activists to take a much more confrontational approach than Goodall’s.

Goodall says she understands the bleak projections from climate scientists and the economic and political structures that hinder change. But she argues that hope, and her mission to spread it, are nothing short of necessary for the survival of humanity. “If you don’t hope that your actions can make a difference, then you sink into apathy,” she says. “If young people succumb to the doom and gloom—if they lose hope—that’s the end.”

Read more: Can Hurricane Ida Move Public Opinion on Climate Change?

In March 2020, Goodall had just climbed into a car on the wide, tree-lined street outside the Bournemouth house, the first step on her journey to an event in Brussels. It was one of dozens of trips she had planned for the year, which would take her to cities and forests all over the world, to her house in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and back to Bournemouth to meet with Abrams. But then her sister Judy ran out of the house and told her to come back inside: the event had just been canceled. It was the start of COVID-19 shutdowns in the U.K. and an abrupt end to Goodall’s life on the road.

The 19 months Goodall has now spent in her family home, accompanied by Judy and Judy’s daughter and grandchildren, amount to the longest time she has lived there since school, and the longest continuous period she has stayed in any one place in decades. Over the past year and a half, she has traded hotels and auditoriums for her bedroom, a narrow attic room with a low ceiling, crowded by chests and bookcases, littered with gifts and mementos: a long gray Andean condor feather, a brightly printed South American cloth, dozens of old photos. In the corner, there’s the single bed where she sleeps, and within arm’s reach, a narrow desk, which holds the only two totems of our time: a laptop and a ring light.

Goodall’s determination to spread her message has kept her up here for hours each day, doing, on average, three virtual lectures or interviews between breakfast and bedtime. “That’s including weekends,” she says, both proud and a little weary. “I even had something on Christmas Day and on my birthday.” It’s been hard, she says, to stare into the tiny green light of her laptop camera all day. “When you’re giving a lecture to 5,000, 10,000 people, you say something funny and people laugh, or you say something moving and you see eyes being wiped,” she says. “But if you don’t get the same energy into it, there’s no point doing it.”

If she’d had the option, Goodall says, she would have spent the pandemic period completely alone. “I’ve always loved being by myself,” she says. “If I could have chosen, I would have been in a house with nobody else, and a dog.” She pauses to look disapprovingly at Bean, the gray whippet snoozing on a chair nearby. Occasionally Bean looks up, then noses back beneath a leopard-print blanket to keep the light out of his eyes. “Not a dog like that,” Goodall says, chuckling. “A proper dog. He’s more like a cat.”

NBC/Getty ImagesDuring the pandemic, she has maintained an intense schedule of video appearances to spread her message

Goodall originally wanted to spend her life alone with animals. It’s the dream that sent her to Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in 1960. Although she had no formal scientific education, Goodall had managed to impress Louis Leakey, a renowned paleo-anthropologist, with her passion for animals on a trip to Kenya with a school friend in 1957. Leakey secured funding to send Goodall to Gombe. Her observations of the chimpanzees there dispelled a then widely held belief that humans were the only animals who used tools, or had emotions or personalities. After the tool discovery, Leakey famously wrote to her, “Ah! We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as human!”

Goodall’s mother Margaret came with her, answering a demand of the British research body that funded her trip for her to have a companion, and supported her daughter through the frustrating months in which the chimps ran away whenever she approached. But it was when she was alone, crawling through undergrowth or climbing mountains, that Goodall says she experienced a “spiritual connection” with the forest and its animals. “If you’re alone, you feel part of nature,” she says. “If you’re with one other person, even somebody you love, it’s two human beings in nature—and you can’t be lost in it.”

Goodall was among the last generation of researchers to spend time in the natural world before the scale of humans’ impact on it became a major topic of discussion in the scientific community. In 1986, at a primatology conference she helped organize in Chicago, she attended a session on habitat loss around the world. “After realizing what was going on, it was never quite the same, because then I felt I’ve got to try and save it,” she says. She still feels the spiritual connection when in nature, but there’s something else there, too: “There’s a little plea in it—a plea for help.”

That new understanding would transform Goodall’s life, taking her from the isolation of field and library research to a frenetic schedule of travel, charity work and activism for the next 35 years.

She describes in The Book of Hope an essential realization: if she wanted to protect nature, she would have to take a humanistic approach, striving to alleviate the conditions that drive people to hunt vulnerable animals or cut down trees. In 1991, she set up Roots and Shoots, a youth-activism program that now has local groups across 60 countries, in which young people are running more than 5,800 community projects to support people, animals and the planet. Three years later, she launched the Jane Goodall Institute’s flagship conservation program, which invests in social programs in villages in Tanzania, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond, and then enlists villagers to help with tree planting and forest monitoring. Goodall also began advocating for widening access to birth control in order to prevent population growth from putting too much pressure on natural resources.

Over the years, elements of Goodall’s philosophy have attracted criticism from some in the environmental movement. Some disagree with her focus on voluntary population control in developing countries, for example, when the wealthy contribute so much more to climate change and pollution. Others see the individual lifestyle changes that Goodall cites as inspiring examples of how “everyone can do their bit”—such as adopting a vegetarian diet or using less plastic—as a distraction from the much bigger changes that businesses and governments need to make, and a little hypocritical, given how often she flies.

Reflecting from her chair in Bournemouth, Goodall says she sees her ideas and her career as a pragmatic response to the crises. “We need to address it on every single side we can,” she says. “I try to be as environmentally friendly as I can with the life that I was sort of forced to lead.”

Chris Steele-Perkins—Magnum PhotosGoodall, pictured in Tanzania in 1989, has long valued solitude: “If you’re alone, you feel part of nature,” she says

There’s a hint of martyrdom in Goodall’s use of the word forced. In reality, although she romanticizes the solitude she had in Gombe, she acknowledges that connecting with people gives her energy. Her eyes light up as she picks up the objects she has collected on her travels, using them as prompts to tell stories. And she says she has “five to 12” friends in every big city around the world.

There’s no denying the success of her efforts in spreading hope. Per the JGI, at least 100,000 young people are currently engaged in activism or restoration projects through the Roots and Shoots program. Vanessa Nakate, a prominent 24-year-old climate activist from Uganda, says she read about Goodall’s life online a few years before she began her own work. “Long before I learned about how bio-diversity loss is linked to climate change, I took from Jane’s work an instinctual understanding that protecting our ecosystems is so important,” she says.

For Abrams, Goodall’s co-author, one moment from their talks explained the appeal of her brand of hopeful activism. He asked her if, from what she had seen, she believed humans tended more toward good or evil. She responded that they have equal capacity for both. “The environment we create will determine what prevails,” she told him. “In other words, what we nurture and encourage wins.”

Her hope isn’t a denial of reality, Abrams says. It’s more of a choice: “Whether we focus on the devastation or the regeneration. Whether we focus on the possibility for good, or the inevitability of evil.”

Read more: A Climate Solution Lies Deep Under the Ocean—But Accessing It Could Have Huge Environmental Costs

The devastation of the planet increasingly demands our focus. Extended droughts, destructive storms and unprecedented wildfires are fast becoming part of the daily news cycle. Climate scientists say these events are just the warning shot, with climate-change impacts set to become more frequent and intense—even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow. In November, world leaders will gather for COP26, the U.N. climate conference, where they are due to scale up their emissions targets. Expectations are high, but many activists fear the conference will end without strong agreements.

As usual, Goodall is determined to find hope. “I won’t say I’m optimistic, but I have all my fingers crossed,” she says. “The positive thing is that there’s so much more awareness. There’s so much more pressure from the public.”

But the urgency of this moment has led many activists to doubt whether heightened consciousness will be enough to trigger the drastic changes we need. Kumi Naidoo, a South African anti-apartheid activist and former Greenpeace director, says Goodall was “ahead of her time” on raising awareness and that her present-day work is unquestionably valuable. But, he adds, “All of us in the environmental movement, especially those of us who have been around for a while, must acknowledge that notwithstanding our best efforts, our sacrifices, our hard work, we have not delivered the results we set out to deliver.”

A younger generation of activists has taken up more aggressive strategies to demand radical, systemic change, focusing more on the stakes for humans than for wildlife—an approach Naidoo argues is essential for forcing action. International networks such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion have blocked roads, occupied buildings and created disruptive spectacles in city centers. Millions of students are regularly skipping school to protest, bearing slogans that excoriate adult politicians.

Goodall says she can understand why young activists feel they need to be more assertive. Still, for her own part, a softer touch has always felt best, she says. “But then I’ve never tried the aggressive route. I couldn’t—it’s just not me.” She believes confrontational tactics can backfire, prompting those in power to pay lip service to demands without actually changing their minds. “If you can get into the heart with a story, you may not know at the time, but people will go on thinking.”

Her own story, meanwhile, continues—although not exactly in the same way as before. She will begin traveling again next year but says she will never resume the “crazy” schedule she maintained before the pandemic, having found she can reach so many more people online. “At 87, one never knows quite what the future holds. Still, I have good genes for a long life on both sides of my family.” She’ll work to spread hope and inspire people for as long as she can, for the sake of future generations. “I’m about to leave the world, and leave it behind me with all the mess,” she says. “Young people have to grow up into it. They need every bit of help they can.”

As if remembering her mission, Goodall picks up her laptop. “I want to read you a poem,” she says, enlarging the text so she can see it. The piece she chooses is by Edgar Albert Guest, a rhythmic, staccato quasi nursery rhyme titled, “It Couldn’t Be Done.” She reads with the joyful, kindly spirit of a grandmother speaking to a child, and it’s hard not to feel warmed by the encouragement. “Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing that ‘cannot be done,’ and you’ll do it.” She looks up, eyes flashing. “Don’t you love that?”

With reporting by Alejandro de la Garza and Julia Zorthian/New York and Dan Stewart/London

New story in Science and Health from Time: Reusable Packaging Is the Latest Eco-Friendly Trend. But Does It Actually Make a Difference? Reusable Packaging Is the Latest Eco-Friendly Trend. But Does It Actually Make a Difference?

When you toss a plastic bottle into your recycling bin, there’s no guarantee it actually gets recycled. In fact, odds are, it doesn’t.

According to the World Economic Forum, just 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling globally. And because of complexities in the recycling process, huge amounts of single-use plastic (as well as glass and cardboard) that consumers try to recycle ultimately end up getting burned or tossed into landfills anyway. If recyclable materials are contaminated by food waste, or if consumers misunderstand what can be recycled and where—to cite two common examples—their garbage may not end up being repurposed after all. A 2017 study in Science Advances estimated that, of all the plastic waste generated globally up to 2015, just 9% had been recycled, while 12% was incinerated and the rest ended up in landfills or scattered around the natural environment. Some plastic waste is burned to create fuel or energy, but this process is itself energy-intensive and emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
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Given that broken system, it’s clear that “recycling our way out of [the climate crisis] will not work,” says Sander Defruyt, who runs plastic innovation initiatives at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), a sustainability-focused nonprofit. “Reuse, as well as plain elimination of a lot of packaging we don’t need, will also have to be a crucial part of the solution.”

Recycling is, at its core, about reuse. But Defruyt is talking about something slightly different than that broad definition. Proponents of what’s known as a “circular economy” argue that, instead of feeding into the convoluted recycling process, companies should replace single-use containers with those that can be used over and over again—often a durable metal or glass vessel that can be refilled either in a store, by a company or in a consumer’s own home.

These systems have a clear appeal. They’re intuitive, for one thing: it’s easy to understand the concept of refilling a bottle, whereas it’s hard to know where the plastic container you toss in a bin actually goes, or what happens to it when it gets there. And rather than dealing with waste after the fact, circular systems reduce it at the source. Using the same containers, in the same form, over and over again ideally eases demand for virgin materials, reduces energy needed to spit out thousands of new plastic bottles or cardboard boxes, and prevents heaps of trash from ending up in landfills or oceans. But such programs are not perfect. They rely heavily on consumers following directions and actually reusing packages as intended, and often involve upcharges that exclude consumers without disposable income. Perhaps more importantly, the environmental benefits of these initiatives may not be as great as they appear.

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The idea of reusing containers is hardly new. If you’ve ever bought a vat of hand soap and used it to refill various dispensers around your house, or brought your own cup to Starbucks, you’ve taken part in this system.

But in recent years, companies have experimented with new ways of doing it. The startup Loop, an offshoot of the recycling company TerraCycle (which critics say does not recycle as much as it promises), launched in the U.S. in 2019 as an e-commerce platform selling food, beauty products and household essentials, all in reusable packaging. Consumers could order quinoa in a metal canister or face wash in a glass jar, then send back the empty packaging for cleaning and refilling and repeat the cycle. On Sept. 22, Loop announced that it would also begin offering products in a limited number of brick-and-mortar Walgreens/Duane Reade and Kroger stores nationwide. It’s also working with retailers in the U.K., Japan, France and Australia.

Global corporations including Coca-Cola, Unilever and Procter & Gamble have also piloted reusable packaging programs within the last few years. Unilever, for example, set up refill stations for select hair care products in some Walmart locations in Mexico and Target locations in the U.S.; in Chile, it works with a startup that delivers laundry detergent and cleaning product refills to customers’ homes by electric tricycle. Major beauty brands like the Body Shop are also experimenting with in-store refill stations. Then there are startups like CleanPath and Blueland, whose entire business model is designed around selling concentrated detergents and cleaning products that people can mix with water in reusable containers at home.

Read more: Fossil Fuel Companies Say Hydrogen Made From Natural Gas Is a Climate Solution. But the Tech May Not Be Very Green

Right now, reuse programs like these are small potatoes in the scheme of global manufacturing. Dozens of major companies, including Unilever, Walmart and Johnson & Johnson, share data on their use of both recycled and reusable materials with EMF. Cumulatively, less than 2% of their plastic packaging was reusable as of 2019, Defruyt says. Still, over the past few years, the circular economy movement has gained steam. In the U.S. alone, according to market-research firm Mintel, the reusable packaging market for beauty and personal care products grew by about 65% from June 2020 to May 2021. Unilever and Procter & Gamble have pledged to halve their use of virgin plastics by 2025 and 2030, respectively.

While the particulars of reuse programs vary from brand to brand, two questions apply across the board. One, will customers buy into the system? And two, is the program actually environmentally friendly?

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The answer to the second question depends heavily on the answer to the first.

Shelie Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, says there’s a “payback” period associated with any reusable item—a number of times it must be reused before it’s actually better for the environment than the single-use alternative. Something like reusable sandwich wrap may never break even, according to Miller’s research, because the energy and resources required to make and wash it far exceed what goes into making flimsy disposable bags. (Ditto for many cotton tote bags, as explored recently by the New York Times.)

Refillable replacements for containers that use rigid plastics, like shampoo bottles, are a better bet, Miller says. Making a reusable version of that bottle likely takes only a little more energy than the plastic one, so each time it gets reused, it moves a little closer to paying off its environmental debt—assuming, of course, that buyers refill as directed.

Consumer interest in reuse programs is there: In a 2021 survey run by Trivium Packaging and Boston Consulting Group, about 70% of respondents said they would be willing to pay more for a product that comes in sustainable packaging. But there aren’t many studies on how often consumers actually refill multi-use packages. If someone buys a metal shampoo bottle, gets lazy and tosses it in the garbage instead of refilling it, that may end up being worse for the environment than simply buying a single-use bottle, because more energy went into making the durable metal version.

The mechanics behind reuse programs matter too, says Daniel Johnson, chair of the department of packaging science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “For the right product category and the right supply chain, the effect [of reusable packaging] can be huge,” Johnson says. “But it comes down to, what methods are you going to use to try to recover the packaging…and what does it take to get more product to the consumer?”

For example, if someone has to mail back an empty metal bottle for refilling, there will be an environmental burden associated with transporting it back and forth and cleaning it—one which may eclipse the environmental impact of a single-use plastic bottle that actually gets recycled, Johnson says. Direct-to-consumer companies that give people all the tools they need to refill at home—like shampoo capsules or detergent concentrates—are a good option because they don’t require return shipping and are convenient, he says.

For a reuse program to work, “the simpler, the better,” agrees David Luttenberger, who heads the department that researches packaging at Mintel. Convenience is key—but since refilling containers is never going to be easier than buying from Amazon, brands should also make it “more of an experience for consumers,” Luttenberger says, with well-designed refill stations or discounts on repeat purchases.

For Lush, a Canada-based cosmetics company, reusable packaging is something of a fallback option. Plan A is selling goods without any packaging at all, as Lush does with about 65% of its permanent products, says Katrina Shum, Lush’s sustainability manager—in these cases, the brand sells solids like bath bombs and shampoo bars loose. Liquid products that require packaging, like lotions and shower gels, are sold in pots made from post-consumer-recycled plastic. If customers return five pots to the store, they get a free face mask.

Even with the promise of free stuff, Lush has only about a 17% return rate in North America, Shum says. And because it’s so difficult to adequately clean the returned pots, Lush instead breaks them down and uses them to make new ones. Doing so reduces the brand’s need to buy recycled plastic from other sources, but Shum admits she’s “not too sure if it’s really too much different,” from an environmental perspective, than simply making new pots from recycled material.

TerraCycle founder Tom Szaky says Loop has a return rate of more than 80%, largely because of the financial incentives it offers: customers must pay a deposit of up to $10 (for a pack of Clorox cleaning wipes) for each container they purchase, and it’s only refunded when they return it for refilling. That concept is well-established. A 2019 report from researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology found that, compared to the rest of the country, glass-bottle recycling rates are 40% higher in the 10 U.S. states that bake in a refundable deposit to the cost of items that come in such containers.

But while Loop’s return rate is high, its denominator is low—only about 20,000 people worldwide have used Loop’s pilot programs since they launched two years ago. Szaky is frank about the model’s shortcomings: ordering from the website is expensive (on top of the deposits, round-trip shipping costs at least $20 in the U.S.) and somewhat inconvenient (items come in bulky tote bags best suited for large orders). But, he says, those flaws might be overcome once Loop can move its offerings from e-commerce to retail stores, as will happen soon in the U.S. That was always the end game, Szaky says, because it eliminates some of these costs and hassles. ”If you’re already going to walk to a Duane Reade, what’s the big deal in taking some empties?”

Read more: Thinking of Investing in a Green Fund? Many Don’t Live Up to Their Promises, a New Report Claims

By the beginning of 2022, Loop will enable U.S. customers to buy dozens of brand-name products in refillable containers at select Kroger and Walgreens/Duane Reade stores across the country, then return them at any participating location. (The website will be phased out as the retail program expands, Szaky says.) Loop is also working with fast food restaurants including Burger King to offer reusable food and beverage containers that can also be returned at any participating Loop retailer.

At a September reusability forum hosted by Loop, the World Economic Forum and the World Wildlife Fund, Kate Daly of the think tank Closed Loop Partners pitched an even bigger idea: cities could someday put reusable container dropoff stations on the street, as they currently do with trash and recycling bins. There are obviously logistical challenges around collecting, sorting and returning reusable packages from multiple makers, but Daly said this kind of widespread adoption is crucial for the concept to ever make a significant impact. “You want to have every citizen within a city have access to this new system,” she said.

But are the payoffs really worth the logistical headaches? Though packaging is perhaps the aspect of consumer goods that is most visibly wasteful, “It’s often the product itself that is more environmentally intensive than the package,” Miller says, when you factor in the water, materials and energy required to grow, make and ship it. For the average food product, she says, packaging accounts for only about 10% of its total environmental burden—so while it makes sense for companies to experiment with reusable packaging, it’s also something of a baby step on the path to actual eco-friendliness.

In other words, reusing a bottle is great, but it doesn’t counteract the water and energy required to make and transport the thing in that bottle. As long as we want a fridge full of sodas and a bathroom full of shampoos, there will be environmental prices to pay. Packaging is just the tax on top.

New story in Science and Health from Time: EPA to Drastically Limit Hydrofluorocarbons Used in Refrigerators and Air Conditioners EPA to Drastically Limit Hydrofluorocarbons Used in Refrigerators and Air Conditioners

(WASHINGTON) — In what officials call a key step to combat climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency is sharply limiting domestic production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, highly potent greenhouse gases commonly used in refrigerators and air conditioners.

The new rule announced Thursday follows through on a law Congress passed last year and is intended to decrease U.S. production and use of HFCs by 85% over the next 15 years, part of a global phaseout designed to slow global warming.

The administration also is taking steps to crack down on imports of HFCs, greenhouse gases that are thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide. They often leak through pipes or appliances that use compressed refrigerants and are considered a major driver of global warming. President Joe Biden has pledged to embrace a 2016 global agreement to greatly reduce HFCs by 2036.
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White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy, a former EPA administrator, said the new rule was “a win on climate and a win on jobs and American competitiveness.”

The rule, set to take effect in late October, is expected to reduce harmful emissions by the equivalent of 4.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2050, McCarthy said, a total similar to three years of emissions from the U.S. power sector.

Read more: Seabed Mining May Solve Our Energy Crisis

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the phasedown is backed by a coalition of industry groups that see it as an opportunity to “supercharge” American leadership on domestic manufacturing and production of alternative refrigerants. The industry has long been shifting to the use of alternative refrigerants and pushed for a federal standard to avoid a patchwork of state laws and regulations.

“This action reaffirms what President Biden always says — that when he thinks about climate, he thinks about jobs,” Regan said, echoing a Biden refrain about climate change. Transitioning to safer alternatives and more energy-efficient cooling technologies is expected to generate more than $270 billion in cost savings and public health benefits over the next 30 years, Regan said.

A pandemic relief and spending bill passed by Congress last December directs the EPA to sharply reduce production and use of HFCs. The measure, known as the American Innovation and Manufacturing, won wide bipartisan support. The law also includes separate measures to promote technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide produced by power and manufacturing plants and calls for reductions in diesel emissions by buses and other vehicles.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., who is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, was an influential backer of the law, along with Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. Both represent states that are home to chemical companies that produce alternative refrigerants and sought regulatory certainty through federal action.

The HFC provision was supported by an unusual coalition that included major environmental and business groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers, American Chemistry Council and the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute. The chemistry council represents major companies including Dow, DuPont, Honeywell, Chemours and Arkema.

Read more: Environmental Activist Nicole Horseherder on Reclaiming Water Rights for Native American

The administration said it also is taking other steps to ensure reductions in HFCs, including creation of an interagency task force to prevent illegal trade, production, use or sale of the climate-damaging gases. The task force will be led by the Department of Homeland Security, and EPA’s offices of Air and Radiation and Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

Working with the departments of Justice, State and Defense, the task force will “detect, deter and disrupt any attempt to illegally import or produce HFCs in the United States,” the White House said in a fact sheet.

Joseph Goffman, a top official with EPA’s air and radiation office, said the experience of the European Union shows that enforcement is an important part of an HFC crackdown.

“Unfortunately, (the EU) has experienced a lot of illegal activity” on HFC imports and other issues, Goffman said. “We’re going to be vigorous and proactive” in trying to stop illegal imports, he said.

David Doniger, a climate and clean energy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the EPA’s action was significant, even as the Biden administration presses for ambitious climate legislation making its way though Congress.

“Moving from HFCs to climate-friendlier alternatives is an important part of President Biden’s plan to meet the climate crisis by cutting America’s heat-trapping emissions at least in half by 2030 — with big benefits for jobs, our health and a safer future,″ Doniger said.

Biden issued an executive order in January that embraces a 2016 amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone pollution. That amendment calls for the United States and other large industrialized countries to reduce HFCs by 85% by 2036. The State Department has prepared documents for formal ratification of the amendment, but the White House has not submitted them to the Senate.

McCarthy insisted “there is no hold up” on the amendment, but said she did not know when Biden would submit the matter to the Senate.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Meet the 14-Year-Old Girl Whose Solar-Powered Invention Is a Finalist for Prince William’s Earthshot Prize Meet the 14-Year-Old Girl Whose Solar-Powered Invention Is a Finalist for Prince William’s Earthshot Prize

Tell Vinisha Umashankar that your teen years pale in comparison to hers, and she is quick to remind you that everyone has a different life journey.

But the 14-year-old also knows that the future looks very different for her generation if the world doesn’t act to slow global warming and the effects of climate change. Still, she’s optimistic that “collective action” of people her age will turn the tide.

That’s probably why Umashankar has already been doing more than her fair share. In Tiruvannamalai, a small temple town in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, she designed an ingenious solar-powered alternative for the millions of charcoal-burning ironing carts that ply the streets of India’s cities—pressing clothes for workers and families.
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Her invention is now getting global recognition. Umashankar is the youngest finalist for the first Earthshot Prize, a £1 million ($1.3 million) award launched by Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge. The initiative plans to give £50 million ($68 million) in awards over the next decade to people working to solve environmental problems, with the aim of providing “at least 50 solutions to the world’s greatest problems by 2030.”

READ MORE: Prince William Announces Environment Prize, Calls for ‘Decade of Action to Repair the Earth’

There are 14 other finalists including, the Republic of Costa Rica for a scheme that helped revive rainforests, the Italian city of Milan for cutting down on waste while trying to resolve hunger and a Chinese app, The Blue Map App, that allows citizens to report environmental violations. Five winners will be announced on Oct. 17.

Umashankar’s invention is especially significant in her native India, which is home to 22 out of the 30 most polluted cities in the world, according to a report by IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company. In 2019, 1.6 million deaths in India were attributed to toxic air. The country is also the world’s third-highest carbon dioxide emitter, after China and the U.S., despite being one of the most vulnerable countries to the impact of human-induced climate change.

It’s these pressing problems that Umashankar aims to address by reducing the use of charcoal with her solar-power ironing cart. Ironing vendors, called “press wallahs,” pushing their carts from one neighborhood to the next are a common sight in India. According to the Indian government’s science and technology department, there are an estimated 10 million ironing carts in the country. Each of them uses about 11 pounds of charcoal daily, taking a heavy toll on the country’s air and forests.

An iron vendor, called “press wallah,” uses an iron heated with charcoal to press clothes in Amritsar, India. AFP/Getty Images.

For Umashankar, it started as an internet search during her summer break in 2018. After seeing her neighborhood ironing vendor disposing of used charcoal, Umashankar was curious to learn about the environmental and health hazards of ironing carts burning charcoal all day. “That’s when I learned that something as common as an iron can have such dangerous consequences,” she says.

Umashankar had been fascinated by science ever since her parents got her an encyclopedia at the age of 5. She had previously designed a ceiling fan that operates based on motion sensors. After seven months of researching solutions to the traditional charcoal-heated ironing cart, she started working on a design.

The cart’s roof doubles up as a panel that absorbs sunlight to convert it into electricity to fuel the iron. Surplus energy is stored in a battery for use after dark and on overcast days. By late 2019, she had won a national-level award for her design, following which it was prototyped and patented. She hopes to get the manufacturing process for her carts started later this year or early 2022.

Umashankar believes winning the Earthshot Prize will help her kickstart the process to commence manufacturing. “An innovation’s true potential is understood only when it reaches people,” she says. “A customer’s perspective will help me understand what to change and improve.”

For the Earthshot to Clean our Air, our 3 incredible Finalists are:

💨 Blue Map App, China
💨 Takachar, India
💨 Vinisha Umashankar, India#EarthshotPrize #CleanOurAir #EarthshotLondon2021https://t.co/5XMUqdtlEg pic.twitter.com/8xusoMHS8T

— The Earthshot Prize (@EarthshotPrize) September 19, 2021

Even as she awaits the Earthshot results, Umashankar says she is working on five other projects, all aiming to solve environmental problems. While juggling school work and her innovative side projects is not an easy feat, she feels it’s critical to keep going; time is running out. “We are trying to restore our planet in less than a century, and that’s not much time compared to the time it took us to get to this point,” she says.

But she is also cautiously hopeful. The COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder of human versatility and adaptability, she says. She feels the need to seize this moment to use technology to drive innovation and move towards a sustainable future that is accessible and affordable. “[During the pandemic] we worked our way around and figured out alternative methods to get things done,” she says. “I believe we can take the same initiative for the future and for our planet.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Richard Powers on His Latest Book, Bewilderment—And Why Children Are the Ones to Call Out Climate Change Evasion Richard Powers on His Latest Book, Bewilderment—And Why Children Are the Ones to Call Out Climate Change Evasion

Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory, which won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, followed decades of the MacArthur Fellow’s work investigating the intersections of culture, the environment, science and technology. His most recent book, Bewilderment, released Tuesday, again delves into the impact of science on human life.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

In Bewilderment, something of a contemporary take on the Flowers for Algernon story, Powers writes of a neurodivergent, middle-school-aged child named Robin who undergoes an experiment involving decoded neurofeedback (a cutting-edge neuroscience technique in real life). The experiment improves Robin’s emotional quotient—at least at first.
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Powers spoke to TIME ahead of the book’s release. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

TIME: Bewilderment clearly has a lot to say about current and ongoing events. Was it your intention to have readers not just get swept away in a narrative but to force them to consider the real world moment?

Richard Powers: I was thinking a little bit along the lines of the form that science fiction writers like to call the “near-term future,” where the story treats a world that’s a lot like ours, but set in some undesignated time in the future, in a way that allows the writer to speculate about the potential of the present to unfold in different ways. I guess it’s what Brecht would call the estrangement effect, where the realistic is made unusual again by just slightly changing the perspective from which you view it. And by putting the Earth on a slightly different trajectory, I was hoping to intensify and to make real again a lot of the things that we readers would probably simply gloss over because we’ve already discounted them as familiar.

One of the things that kept coming up for me when I was reading was this idea of trying to help people come to terms with the incomprehensible. Throughout the book, Theo, an astrobiologist whose job is to essentially formulate hypotheses of what life might look like on other planets, talks out these potential worlds with his son, Robin. Of the many life-giving planets you create through this narrative device, the one that stood out to me the most was the one in which there is an intelligent life form somewhere out there that moves at a speed so different from us that we can’t comprehend it. That to me felt extremely relevant with regard to our relation to climate change.

We can only take in things that are unfolding, more or less on our physical scale, in more or less on the psychic timescale that we’ve evolved to take in. Something that unfolds more gradually in the background on a much larger scale can make its way into our intellect, but not into our deeper emotional understanding. I mean, the earliest warnings about climate change date back to more than half a century ago. And at the time we just kept talking about our children’s world, and that’s too abstract.

And yet, as the real-world consequences of catastrophic planetary change have become more real and more present and more immediate, we’ve fallen into that other trap that you mentioned which is, we’ve heard that story already and we’re inured to it, we’ve grown too familiar with the real. We don’t know what to do with that anymore.

That’s where fiction can come in—fiction can kind of shift the ground under the familiar and create that mystery and that instability that makes a reader say, ‘Wait, wait, what? What’s happening? What’s going to happen next? How are they going to deal with that?’ And through that refraction, all these things that they’ve fossilized in their own understanding about the news can become fresh again.

And that’s also what I think is so affecting about the Robin character—he is not inured to anything. It’s like he is able to take everything that he experiences on face value in some ways, where it’s like a sort of direct reaction to the reality of it without any of the social dulling. And that’s kind of the Holy Grail, right?

That’s right. You know, he’s an intense and an unusual child, what we would call neurodivergent, but his ability to directly confront all of the adult evasion that he sees in the world, and to give it a name to call its bluff—the way the little child in the Emperor’s New Clothes can call that bluff—I think is the secret of the story.

But you don’t have to be a neurodivergent child to be baffled by the adult world. I think there is a growing plague among children: They’re born into this world and in childhood we feel the magic of the living world, we’re pantheists, we connect to the nonhuman, we take it seriously. I think any adult with an active, engaged, intense, intelligent child now is going to have a hard time answering their questions about what’s happening. It’s the power of the child to say, ‘Are you for real? Is this really what’s happening and why are you letting this happen?’ That’s the crisis of childhood now, and the crisis of being a parent now is that there aren’t any good answers.

Do you have children?

I’m 64, and I don’t have children. I’ve been an uncle many times over and I’ve been a surrogate parental figure for several children. At least three different children, one nephew and one niece and one son of a friend went into the making of Robin. And Robin, also, I think is a recreation of my own strangeness as a child.

It’s easy to see this ubiquitous condition of disorientation and fear on the part of young people whether or not they’re your own children. There’s a word that you’ve probably seen creeping into the vocabulary: solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness for a place that you’ve never been in or that you’ve never had a chance to enjoy. You don’t have to be all that perceptive to see what it’s doing to young people.

Robin is obviously the character that embodies this the most in the story—but his solastalgia is kind of crippling, right? And I guess I’m wondering if you think it’s similarly crippling to this wider range of kids growing up in the world. Is there a way to deal with or address this “plague” that is productive or healthy?

What I’m seeing in children is a lot of anger and a lot of frustration. But I’m also seeing a huge upsurge in activism and engagement. I see the signs of a generation saying we have to look for meaning in another place outside of ourselves. Greta Thunberg is a very high profile example of this but there are mass movements and stirring stories of teenagers who are doing extraordinary work in, and are simply energized by, this idea that the destruction of this world of private, personal, individual meaning that measured only by accumulation is the beginning of a new world where we can start engaging and rehabilitating and finding purpose beyond ourselves.

Robin, through the course of his engagement with decoded neurofeedback, opens up and transcends his own fury and his own frustration and finds a way of being that’s almost religiously transcendent, and it’s a great source of inspiration to the adults who see him as he’s developing these capacities. And even when the plug gets pulled on their project, and he starts to return to his condition at the beginning of the story, he holds onto something.

Most people want to remain hopeful that we can somehow continue to live the way that we have been living. I have no hope for that. Nor do I think it is wise to have hope for that. But I think if we can learn how to give up hope for that, we can find and place our hope into something much more enduring and that’s really the narrative of this story.

Your previous novel The Overstory was very much about getting the reader to identify and empathize with another type of living thing—trees—that feels so distant, and to recognize the value of identifying with this other kind of way of living. There’s this moment, I think it’s about midway through the book—and to me this is almost the thesis of the book—where Theo says that it’s essential that we do anything that can make us feel what it’s like to not be us. What or who or when do you want readers of this book to identify with?

I think the book holds open the possibility of a more joyous and a more rewarding way of being in the world. It’s a way that the great religions of the world have always advocated for. You mentioned the word ‘empathy,’ and in the book, I describe this decoded neurofeedback training that Robin goes through as a kind of empathy machine. To watch this boy become a joyful person, as he discovers himself beyond himself, as he discovers the reciprocal interconnections between himself and other living things and other humans, is to raise in the reader the possibility of a life that’s more meaningful and more rewarding than the life of accumulation has ever been.

Do you think we need to better connect with each other in order to better connect with everything else?

Well, I think Robin’s anxiety stems from loss, and fear. He is acutely aware of his own strangeness and his own inability to fit in with his peers at school. He feels cruelty and mistreatment on the part of his fellow children, and the anxiety that he feels is the anxiety of homelessness, of not having connection.

At the beginning of the story, he just wants his father to tell him again and again what his mother was like—he wants to rehearse all these old stories because he’s desperate to feel connected to this woman who’s now just a ghost. He doesn’t feel connection to his schoolmates.

Meanwhile, he responds with a kind of visceral panic to the discovery of mass extinction. Everything elicits the terror of isolation, and it’s only this empathy machine, this learning to link himself into somebody else’s state of mind, strangers at first and then his mother, that starts to bring about in him this idea that there’s nothing to be afraid of—that life is everywhere, and it’s an experiment that includes you. He’s transformed from an outsider to an insider—he’s suddenly connected through kinship to all other living things. In a strange way, what happens to Robin is simply the discovery of the fact that his fate is part of this much larger thing. And that greatly lowers all the anxiety about loss and disconnection and mortality that was driving him up to that point in the story.

Flowers for Algernon is one of the first great stories I remember reading as a kid. In it, the power that’s imparted is traditional intelligence, whatever you want to call it, but in Bewilderment, what Robin gets is emotional intelligence. I thought that was an interesting way to recreate and reframe that, and seems relevant to everything you’ve been talking about.

It’s not going to be cognitive intelligence that gets us into the next viable culture here on earth, it’s going to be emotional intelligence. Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book is really articulate on this: we still think that, somehow, new technological mediations are going to solve the problems caused by old technological mediation, without changing the way our system values—our system of morality, our system of consciousness. We have to get wiser, not necessarily smarter.

Certainly. How do we do that?

Stories are the great empathy machine. Decoded neurofeedback in this novel is really a kind of figuration, a metaphor for storytelling. It’s stories that allow us to occupy some other position to see what the world feels like if we weren’t us. And that is the only thing that has the power to change our consciousness. We have to be taken to another place and be another person for a while before we can see the validity of that difference and not be afraid of that difference anymore.

I see the sign already of that cultural transformation underway, especially among the young. The reality is, we won’t have to have too many more years like this year before the writing’s on the wall and most people in the mainstream realize that the bill has come due, and we can’t continue to live the way that we’ve lived. But it will require stories that show that the change from how we lived to how we need to live isn’t a terrifying thing.