Jessica S. McKenzie

Putting the Quiet Dignity of the Wood Stork to Paper

When Franna Lusson embarks on one of her wildlife portraits, she doesn’t bother with practice sketches. She dives right in on the final sheet of paper—drawing and redrawing in bold, expressive lines until she’s satisfied. “I work very instinctively and intuitively,” explains the Bay Area-based artist. “That’s why I erase so much, because I just have to work it until I get it right—until I can live with it.” Her mixed-media pieces aim to capture not only physical characteristics, but also what she calls the “elemental aspect” of an animal, or the feeling it evokes.

Although Lusson had never even seen a photo of a Wood Stork before she began researching them for The Aviary, she was instantly taken by the bird’s distinctive presence. The large wader—the only stork native to North America—has mostly white plumage and a bare, scaly head and neck. “I wouldn’t call Wood Storks pretty birds, but I just loved them,” she says. “It’s not like an everyday bird that you’d see in the neighborhood.”

How ‘Big Car’ poses an existential threat to humanity

The title character of Christine, the 1983 film by John Carpenter based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, is an evil car—specifically a red 1958 Plymouth Fury. Christine is possessive, vindictive, and violent—murdering, or trying to, anyone who insults or injures her. After teen nerd Arnie lovingly restores the vintage automobile to her former glory, his infatuation with his four-wheeled companion threatens his relationships with his family, his best friend and new girlfriend, and, eventually, his life.

My only humble quibble with this premise is that the film presents Christine as uniquely destructive, instead of emblematic of the deadliness of all cars, and our obsession with them.

If you find yourself wanting to object, or to roll your eyes, consider this: Since the invention of the car, somewhere between 54 and 69 million people have died in traffic crashes; 6.3 to 9 million people have died from traffic-related air pollution; and as many as 5.7 million people have died from vehicle-based lead exposure. All told, cars have killed somewhere between 61 and 83 million people. As David Obst observes in his new book, Saving Ourselves From Big Car, cars have killed more people than World War II.

Obst is no stranger to going up against powerful forces. He’s worn many hats in his time—author, editor, film producer—but is perhaps best known for being the literary agent for Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Daniel Ellsberg, and for publishing and distributing Seymour Hersh’s exposé on the My Lai massacre. His only regret with this new book, he confided, is that Big Car collectively shrugged.

“I’m kind of disappointed and shocked that I didn’t get Big Car to come after me,” he said. “They just kind of ignored the book.”

Obst is not the only writer to take aim at car culture this year. There’s also Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Carsby Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, and Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek. But I was intrigued by Obst’s explicit framing of the car as an existential threat. Because while Big Car kills many of us quickly, in deadly collisions, it is killing many more of us slowly, by polluting the environment, warming the Earth, sowing misinformation and doubt about climate science, and impeding attempts to redress these harms.

“I don’t think of the car as a villain,” Obst writes in his introduction (here, we may disagree). “Like you, I use my car almost every day. However, I now understand the price we’re all paying for it. It’s much too high. If we don’t stop Big Car, Big Car will destroy us.”

I recently reached Obst by phone to ask him about how he arrived at this thesis, whether it’s confusing to have the umbrella term Big Car when it overlaps significantly with the widely used phrase Big Oil, and where we go from here.

‘Wholesale destruction’: Government shutdown or not, critical science programs are at risk

The United States is hurtling towards a potential government shutdown if Congress does not pass a budget or short-term funding bill by the end of the month, and the fate of the federal government’s Earth and climate science programs may hang in the balance.

President Donald Trump has proposed vast, devastating cuts to these agencies, many of which target programs dedicated to studying and preparing for climate change. In the event of a shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, has told agencies to consider layoffs or reductions in force for “all employees” in all “programs, projects, or activities” with lapsed funding that are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

As Sophia Cai notes in Politico, this is starkly different from how previous government shutdowns were handled, when federal workers were temporarily furloughed and returned to work when funding was restored. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer characterized the memo as an “attempt at intimidation.”

Bobby Kogan, a former OMB official with the Biden administration, said the direction may not be legal. “It doesn’t seem to me that they would really be able to legally do that additional work during a shutdown—and it doesn’t seem to me that they’d be able to get it all done beforehand,” Kogan told the Federal News Network. “So either this is something they were planning to do anyway, and they are just using this as a pretext, or it’s a threat to try to get what they want.”

Organizations that represent the interests of public workers have been more explicit: “The plan to exploit a shutdown to purge federal workers is illegal, unconstitutional, and deeply disturbing,” Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a statement. “A shutdown triggers furloughs, not firings. To weaponize it as a tool to destroy the civil service would mark a dangerous slide into lawlessness and further consolidate power in the Executive Branch.”

But illegality (or possible illegality) would not necessarily stop the Trump administration from choosing the layoff route if a budget deal is not reached. In any case, the memo obviously creates uncertainty and anxiety for the federal scientists whose work has been singled out for steep funding cuts or even elimination by the Trump administration.

“Either we all go home or it’s business as usual … nobody knows what’s going to happen,” one NASA scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Bulletin.

Republished by Mother Jones here.

NASA missions at risk under the Trump administration

As part of the budget proposal for NASA submitted earlier this year, the Trump administration proposed cancelling more than 40 missions, including at least 14 Earth science missions.

Agency employees have already been instructed to do the preparatory work for ending these satellite and instrument programs, according to a NASA scientist who spoke with the Bulletin.

The Hidden World of the American Oystercatcher

Sculptors often spend a lot of time with their subjects, but Rachel Frank takes that connection to another level. As a rehabilitator at the Wild Bird Fund in Manhattan, she’s cared for an array of creatures that live in or pass through the city, including rodenticide-poisoned owls, kestrels injured by cats, and diseased hawks. Her intimate knowledge of wildlife infuses the ceramic sculptures she creates in her Brooklyn studio.