If you happened to pick up one of those free-flying drones during the holidays, the Federal Aviation Administration says you should be registered with the government.

As of Monday, drone owners who aren’t registered could face penalties. More than 337,000 drone owners have registered with the FAA so far — and about 300 of them are planning one of the biggest drone events ever — this spring in Boston.

“It’s a flying version of NASCAR — [that's] really the best way to explain it,” says Sean Tierney, a programmer who’s been spending his own time and money building and flying drones for about five years. “You feel like you’re flying. I heard someone explain it the other day — it’s like as close as getting to being in Star Wars as you can be, right now.”

Enthusiasts like Tierney are doing what they can to bring order to the drone galaxy. They’re concerned that as the number of drone owners grows, someone will do something dumb — something that puts people in danger or prompts the government to increase oversight and craft more regulations. So, they’re getting organized. They’re recruiting members to the new US Drone Racing Association, and they’re drumming up enthusiasm for big events, like one they’re planning in Boston in May. 

An event like that — a NASCAR for drones — is an opportunity to change the national conversation around drones, says Dave Shevett, a founding member of the US Drone Racing Association.

“When I say I race drones — and I’ve had this happen many times when I sit down to talk to somebody — they say ‘Hey, what’d you do this weekend?’ ‘Oh I was racing my drone.’ ‘They say ... oh I hate those things, they should all be banned,’” Shevett says. “And I’ll turn to them and say ‘Why?’ And they’ll go ‘It’s an invasion of privacy.’ And I’ll say ‘So are cameras, why don’t we ban all the cameras?’ ‘Well it’s different.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because of how it’s used.’ Ah. Now we’re talking.”

That’s why Shevett wants to educate new owners about how to use drones properly and legally. Racing events are a good way to bring people in and give them a safe environment to learn.

“The problem right now is the jury’s still out as to whether [drone] racing will become a big sport or have a big following,” Shevett says. “From a spectator standpoint, it’s boring as dirt to watch. So how do you get a stadium full of people to watch a drone race? We’re not sure yet.”

There’s also the problem of logistics. Tierney and other organizers of this spring's race are still trying to find a place to hold it. In an email, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency said local, state and national public safety officials should all have a say in the location and planning of a drone race. Tierney says he’s been working with those agencies.

“We’re also dealing with insurance issues and some other stuff, because some places don’t want us to be flying,” he says. “They’re worried about people attending, and they’re worried about their property. Which are all valid points. Anything could go wrong.”

But a lot could go right — as far as marketing and sponsorships. Across the country, big companies are getting interested in advertising at these events and recruiting talented fliers. Drone racing could have a huge future. Or, Tierney says, it could be quashed in its infancy.

“It all comes down to who’s going to do the next dumb thing and get it shut down,” he says. “Unfortunately, but that’s kind of the reality we live with. We’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop.”

Until then, Tierney says he and others will keep racing.

A version of this story first appeared on WGBHNews.org.

There’s a room at the University of São Paulo with between 10,000 and 15,000 mosquitoes in it. If you’re very quiet, you can hear them buzzing.

This is where mosquito researcher Margareth Capurro is trying to figure out the best strategy to reduce the type of mosquito, Aedes aegypyti, that carries Zika and other dangerous viruses. The bugs live in plastic containers and screen cages behind a double-doored vestibule, doors built to trap them if they escape from their containers.

The Brazilian government says somewhere between 400,000 and 1.5 million people in the last year may have been infected with Zika, carried by mosquitoes like these. The goal in Capurro’s lab is to find ways to make the mosquitoes combat the virus rather than help spread it, by genetically modifying them or finding a target for a niche insecticide.

Capurro has been a mosquito researcher for nearly 30 years. Recently, she’s worked on genetically modified sterile male mosquitoes. But in December, she shifted some of her focus. She joined the “Zika network,” a collaboration of about 40 labs studying all different aspects of the virus, from its connection to microcephaly to its transmission.

She’s overseeing the mosquito research and receiving specimens from collaborators around Brazil to study their genetic differences.    

“If we have mosquitoes that are susceptible ... and mosquitoes that are totally immune — the idea is to compare the genome between them to see which is the difference,” she says. “Because if we have this information we can have targets for insecticides, or modifications to block the transmission of the disease.”

Using that information, one possible mosquito control intervention would be breeding and releasing millions more of these immune mosquitoes. The theory is that the Zika-immune mosquitoes could crowd out the Zika-carrying mosquitoes in the wild. Capurro did a successful pilot test of a similar “swap” with sterile male mosquitoes in a small suburb in northern Brazil.

However, it’s unclear if this method of population replacement can be scaled up. Critics question its efficacy and sustainability as a solution for an insect that breeds as rapidly as the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Capurro is also experimenting with what she calls a “suicidal” mosquito that would self-destruct if it were infected. Again, there are very real concerns about the unintended consequences of releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild. Those concerns would have to be addressed by regulators before even early-stage field testing could start. That is, if it works.

“If (it) works,” Capurro reiterates. “This is the problem. This is science, you know — you never know.”

All of Capurro’s research is in its earliest stages, so it would be years before any of it could make it out of the laboratory and actually help people, primarily the pregnant women living in fear of the virus and its possible link to serious birth defects.

Still, she thinks it’s important to do a lot of basic science research to try to control the Aedes aegypti mosquito in the long-term. It carries not only Zika, but also dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.   

“I always say that about mosquitoes, or about dengue, or about the disease. We need to think as a general,” she says. “It’s a war. We need to send everything that we have, not only soldiers.”

Mosquito collection’s foot soldiers

After leaving Capurro’s lab, I wanted to get to the source of the problem, where mosquitoes are actually infecting people and being gathered up for research.  

So I traveled northwest from São Paulo for about three hours to meet up with Adriano Mondini, a professor at Universidade Estadual Paulista, in the city of Araraquara.

We met outside the house of a patient who tested positive for dengue, where Mondini and his team were collecting mosquitoes to test them for the virus.

Mondini’s student, Paulo Lopes, walked around the house with a lightweight metal vacuum tube, trying to suck up mosquitoes where they like to lurk.    

Mondini will also test the mosquitoes Lopes collects for Zika, as he’s been doing with new samples since January.

Because the national infection rate figures for Zika are such rough estimates, researchers here are trying to get a better local count, while at the same time handing over mosquitoes and Zika virus samples for lab work.   

“If we find it here, it means that we have a mosquito population that can transmit Zika virus. And it’s good because Dr. Capurro is going to work with that, I’m going to work with that,” Mondini says.

In fact, as of last week, there were two confirmed cases of Zika in Araraquara.

In an example of how health workers are often at the front lines of emerging health threats, one of those infected was Mondini’s graduate student, Arianne Gusmao. Gusmao diagnosed herself when she was showing another student how to draw blood, and drew some of her own to test.

Older threats still loom

Zika may be a mysterious and scary virus. But the old mosquito-borne threat, dengue, is much more deadly. It killed nearly 900 people in Brazil alone last year.

I asked Mondini which virus worried him more.

“We had like 35 years of dengue transmission in Brazil, and millions and millions of cases, and deaths are going higher each year,  so I think I have answered your question, haven’t I?” he says.

Still, he thinks there could be some good that comes out of the Zika scare. New money for mosquito research is coming down from the state government of São Paulo. That could help the fight against dengue and chikungunya, as well as Zika.   

Back in her office in São Paulo, Margareth Capurro told me she was starting to plan for retirement when Zika came to Brazil. That idea has been shelved.  

“It’s a kind of time that if I can contribute with mosquito control. I am very happy, you know, that’s it,” she says.

If you live in Iran, you know about the morality police — the Gasht-e-Ershad.

The group was set up after the Islamic Revolution to make sure Islamic guidelines were followed in the Iranian society. Their agents are notorious for cracking down on anyone who doesn't adhere to Islamic dress codes or behavior.

"There are a variety of things that you can get into trouble for," says Feranak Amidi of the BBC Persian.

For example women can be stopped because of the way they wear their headscarves, or because of the color or tightness of their manteau — the coat-like clothing Iranian women wear in public.

Mixed parties and possession of alcohol could also bring trouble.

Amidi, who left Iran in 2009, recalls her own brush with the morality police. She was a 20-something in Tehran who loved to attend underground parties. Men and women would mingle in those parties and alcohol was served — not the kind of behavior tolerated by the Iranian government.

One night, the police raided the party and she was taken to jail. She and her friends spent the night and were released after being subjected to 10 lashes. The host of the party got 90.

Last week, a new app was released that could help users avoid the morality police. It's called Gershad and it was created by Iranians outside of Iran.

The app works by crowd sourcing its users. When they spot the morality police, they anonymously pin that location on a map which can be seen by others. That will serve as a warning to other users to avoid that location.

The Gershad app was blocked in Iran not long after its release, but its creators say they are not deterred and that they'll continue to work on it. They see it as a "form of non-violent resistance."

Amidi too believes that this is not the end of apps like Gershad.

"New things are going to pop up any minute," she says.

Conservationists tend to spend their time worrying about protecting forests, catching poachers or keeping carbon out of the atmosphere. But wouldn't it be simpler to deal with the root cause: humans?

Given that it’s easier and cheaper to reduce the human birth rate than it is to address these other issues, why aren’t conservationists more concerned about keeping our population down? After all, it's estimated that more than three-quarters of the world’s ice-free land has been modified by people. We are already overstepping the planet’s boundaries and our actions are causing climate change and the sixth mass extinction.

By 2050, human population growth alone will threaten a further 14 percent of the planet’s species; this is on top of the 52 percent decline in populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish over the past four decades.

Only 13 years ago, we were 6 billion; just seven years later, we hit 7 billion and by 2100 we could be as many as 12.3 billion people. Shockingly, with each child a woman has, her carbon emissions legacy is increased six-fold. It cannot be denied that our size, density and growth rate all increase wildlife extinctions.

But all is not lost. Fertility rates decline the longer a girl spends in school. By simply providing better female education, the overall population in 2050 could be 1 billion less than current projections. This is because women who are empowered through education have fewer children, as well as having them later in life and therefore have the resources to provide them with better care. Along with this, one in five women — 800 million worldwide — have an unmet need for modern contraception; in developing countries this can be as high as 60 percent.

We aren’t suggesting any evil population control schemes here — it’s about providing resources to girls who want an education and women who want access to family planning. The benefits can be seen relatively quickly: between 1960 and 2000, contraceptive use by married women in developing nations increased from 10 percent to 60 percent, reducing the average number of children per woman from six to three.

However, we still pay surprisingly little attention to what this all means for the world’s wildlife.

Conservation NGOs are on the case

A small but growing number of organizations are beginning to integrate wildlife conservation with family planning. Blue Ventures, a marine conservation organization in Madagascar, has trained local women to provide contraception in rural villages close to protected areas. In three years, the project reduced its own ecological footprint by 267 global hectares purely by providing access to family planning.

Condoms mean supporting endangered species and safe sex at the same time.

Credit:

AIDS/SIDA NB/CC BY 4.0

A slightly different approach was taken by The Center for Biological Diversity in the US. On World Population Day last year, the group distributed 40,000 condoms wrapped in packaging depicting endangered species with catchy slogans such as “Don’t go bare ... Panthers are rare”. It is unclear whether this had any effect on human behavior, but the emphasis on bringing the issue to a developed country with a high consumption rate is commendable, given the typical focus on stemming population growth only in developing countries.

A more holistic approach combines family planning and other healthcare services with alternative livelihood options — this has been implemented in some key high biodiversity areas that have an unmet need for contraception and healthcare. One program in Nepal led to an increased use of condoms and reduced wood fuel usage equivalent to saving nearly 9,000 trees annually.

Challenges to overcome

There is an increasing gap between donations and demand for contraception. Filling the unmet need for family planning across developing countries would cost $8.1 billion annually; finding this amount of money will clearly be challenging. Furthermore, contraceptive use and female access to education are affected by strong cultural and religious problems. We cannot simply advocate for more access to family planning and education without addressing barriers to access.

Population growth doesn’t seem to be a major concern for conservationists, but it should be. Researchers should investigate the effects of human population interventions on wildlife, while conservationists could form alliances with other sectors of society, such as reproductive choice and womens' rights groups. As environmental organisations often integrate educational aspects into their programs, it would not be difficult to direct further educational materials towards women and girls.

We now have evidence to show the links between human population size, growth and density on the environment, but we need to increase our research efforts on how contraception and female education policies affect biodiversity. Conservation scientists cannot dismiss the effects of overconsumption on the natural world, but we also cannot disregard the effect our sheer population size and growth have on the planet.

Addressing human population growth may be a relatively fast and cheap remedy for wildlife loss, which can help reduce consumption and brings us closer to achieving true sustainability. The sooner we start to pull the brakes, the easier it will be to eventually come to a stop. So what are we waiting for?

Niki Rust, PhD candidate in Carnivore Conservation, University of Kent and Laura Kehoe, PhD research in wildlife conservation and land use, Humboldt University of Berlin

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has raised questions about the state of our nation's water supply, but scientists and officials tell us that most of our water systems provide safe drinking water.

Even so, Americans still consume more bottled water than any others in the world. We buy an estimated half a billion plastic bottles of water every week — and many of them end up in landfills.  

San Francisco is looking to reverse the trend. The city has introduced a ban on the sale of single-use plastic water bottles on city-owned property, which this October will be extended to include events held outdoors on public property, and by January 2018 the ban will be broadened to include large-scale events of 250,000 people or more.  

With its measure, environmentally-friendly San Francisco is following the lead of Concord, Massachusetts, which took on the challenge of plastic water bottle waste first — and developed a solution that goes much further. 

In April 2012, Concord residents voted to ban the sale of single-serving plastic water bottles and the measure went into effect in January 2013. The ban was Jean Hill’s idea. The 88-year-old says she was inspired by her grandson.

“He said, you know grandma, there are big things circling around in the water that are as big as Texas and they’re full of plastic trash and I finally realized that these gyres, these circular currents, are full of plastic trash,” Hill says. “And there’s a fish called a lanternfish that eats it and then it gets into the food chain,” she explains.

Even with widespread recycling, an estimated 2 million tons of plastic water bottles end up in landfills every year. Hill was convinced that banning the bottles was the best way to tackle the problem, but she says the International Bottled Water Association fought her tooth and nail and some local merchants were also against it, including the owner of the local grocery store, Crosby’s Marketplace. But when the ban passed, Crosby’s and all the local businesses complied.

At Crosby’s in Concord, there is just a fraction of the water for sale that you will typically see in most grocery stores.

“Basically, what we’re allowed to sell is anything that they deem cannot come out of a tap,” explains Crosby’s store manager John Cummings. “So anything that has a flavor, we’re allowed to sell at any size, and any plain water we’re allowed to sell in a 1.5 liter bottle or more,” he says.

Concord residents sometimes complain about the ban, because it allows small bottled sugary drinks to be sold, but not healthy water. The ban that San Francisco is phasing in over four years is not as far reaching as Concord’s. Retailers in the city will still be able to sell water in plastic bottles in stores, but environmental advocates see it as an important first step.

Concord residents have some advice for San Francisco or any city or town that wants to make a bottle ban work.

A water filling station in Concord, Mass.

Credit:

Elizabeth Ross/WGBH

David Chiu, the lawmaker behind San Francisco’s ban and a member of California’s State Assembly, says he’s working on that. 

San Francisco already requires that all new buildings have drink tap stations.

“We have city departments that are figuring out where we need to give the public more access to water,” Chiu says. “We’re building more drink tap stations throughout the city, but particularly thinking about our park areas and other open space areas to make sure that people have access to water that doesn’t involve using a wasteful plastic water bottle.”

Whelan also encourages Concord residents to carry their own reusable bottles, especially to outdoor events such as the town’s big annual July 4 picnic.

“Our water department has purchased and made available a multi-filling station so that at large events there’s a product that’s available that could fill the water bottles. I think it’s 8 different parties that can be filled all at the same time,” Whelan says.

This won’t be an issue in sunny San Francisco, but during the long New England winter months, Concord has to turn off all its outside water fountains to stop the pipes from freezing. Some local businesses have helped out with many offering tap water free of charge through a marketing initiative called “Concord on Tap.” 

Environmental activist, Jill Appel, who worked on Concord’s ban, suggests that municipalities brand their local tap water.

“I would recommend that San Francisco focus on the high quality of its own tap water,” Appel says.  “We’ve all been subject to 30 years of aggressive marketing by the bottled water industry to make us distrust our tap water, when I think that the truth is exactly the opposite.”

Some people drink bottled water because they think the quality is better, but that is not necessarily true. Lawmakers in San Francisco say that an estimated one third of bottled water is repackaged tap water. Chiu says billions of dollars have been invested into his regional Hetch Hetchy water system, and San Francisco is on a mission, much like Concord once was, to educate local residents about how pristine and cheap it is. 

A version of this story first appeared on WGBHNews.org.

It's not just humans, says Benjamin Strauss. But for the most part, it is.

He's a scientist with Climate Central, an independent organization researching "the science and impacts of climate change." Strauss says Climate Central worked closely with the authors of a recent study that found the sea is rising at the fastest rate in 28 centuries.

Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, who's the lead author of the study, says it's highly probable that sea-level rise in the 20th century was the fastest since at least 800 BC — 5.5 inches, or 14 centimeters. And he says humans have something to do with that.

Climate Central took the data and put it on a map, comparing the levels of climate change caused by humans versus natural causes.

Strauss published a column on the research organization's website explaining this map. Click on each highlighted city to see how many days of flooding are attributed to humans over the last 50 years.

"Sea levels have always ebbed and flowed, but the 20th century is really extraordinary," Kopp says. "It's extremely likely that less than about half of those 14 centimeters would have happened without human-caused warming."

And if we continue to burn fossil fuels "as the core of our economy," he says, "we very likely would see somewhere between 50 and about 130 centimeters — about 2 to 4 feet — of sea-level rise."

Regardless, Kopp is an optimist. He says the climate talks in Paris set "aspirational goals" nations will have to work toward.

"Humans have accomplished a lot of great things in their time on this planet," he says, "and I think we have it in out power to get off the fossil-fuel intensive path and on to a low-carbon one."

Flint, Michigan has been home to Carolina and Elias since they moved there from Mexico 14 years ago. Still undocumented, the couple has found work in restaurants and construction and is raising four girls.

It’s exactly the life they had wanted to give to their children. They are poor but their daughters are getting an education and other opportunities they wouldn’t have had in Mexico.

But now the couple is worried about their children’s future. They’re panicked that their four girls could suffer consequences of lead poisoning from having consumed Flint’s contaminated tap water for almost two years.

Families across Flint are grappling with the same grim scenario, but the around 1,000 undocumented residents like Carolina and Elias (who requested that I only use their first names) are especially vulnerable. The mostly Spanish speaking community has been among the last to learn about the dangers of lead in the water. And once they are informed, their lack of papers makes it difficult for them to get lead testing and other services.

I met Carolina at their small house in East Flint, a run down area of the city where many undocumented families live.

She told me she had only just learned about the lead in the water around Christmas. That was seven months after Flint resident Lee Ann Walters found out her son Gavin had lead poisoning and three months after Genesee County finally issued a lead advisory.

She did hear something about water contamination back in April, but didn’t know it had anything to do with lead. She quit giving the family tap water to drink at that time but still used it for everything else, including bathing and cooking. Boiling can concentrate lead in the water.

Juani Olivares moved to Flint from Mexico when she was 10 years old. Now she helps undocumented residents in East Flint deal with the city’s water crisis.  

Credit:

Jeanne Carstensen

The day I met Carolina in early February she had only just received a flyer about lead poisoning in Spanish. It was the first printed information she had ever seen about the hazard.

She read the list of symptoms and possible long-term consequences to me out loud in Spanish — growing more and more concerned. Lead poisoning can cause lowered IQ, learning disabilities and aggressive behavior, among other maladies.

One of her daughters has complained for months about body aches and headaches, which can indicate lead poisoning.

“I thought it was just stress,” Carolina says, “But now I’m not so sure.”

She was even more upset about her one-year-old because she was consuming the water during her pregnancy. Lead in the mother’s blood can be transferred to the baby in vitro and later through breast milk.

Now Carolina uses only bottled water for everything for the entire family but she agonized when she thought about the past months before she knew.

“As a mother I don’t want to believe that I hurt the baby that was inside me. Why didn’t they say anything?” she says, holding back tears. “If they would have told us the water was contaminated we would have done things differently.”

Getting services has been another challenge for undocumented residents. Sometimes the services are restricted and sometimes the residents are just nervous about going to a location where authorities might ask them for ID, according to Olivares.

“They cannot receive any health services because they don’t have insurance or a valid ID so they are being denied those services, getting tested for lead,” Olivares told me.

Something had to be done, so Olivares founded the Genesee County Hispanic/Latino Collaborative and began seeking a solution. She says the county has agreed to begin offering insurance to all people who can prove residency, regardless of immigration status. Enrollment is set to begin this week.

Seeing the conditions in Flint and what her family has been exposed to health-wise I had to wonder if Carolina and her husband wouldn’t consider moving the family to another state — or even back to Mexico.

“Leaving or moving to another house isn’t going to get rid of this,” she says, “The harm has been done.”

Besides, they can’t afford to move she says.

How about Olivares? Would she leave?

Before meeting Carolina, Olivares had shown me around East Flint where she had grown up. All the schools and houses where she has wonderful memories from her childhood in the 90s and 2000s are either boarded up or torn down completely, including her childhood home, which is now an empty lot not far from Carolina’s house. Since GM pulled out of Flint in the late 80s, the city has been in decline. The University of Michigan has a strong outpost in town and some other sectors are growing, but much of the city’s once solid middle class neighborhoods are in shambles. Now, with the water crisis — its future is even more uncertain.

“I have considered leaving,” she says, “But not now. It won’t be until I know my people have been taken care of.”

Many of the alleys in São Paulo’s favelas have trash or weeds in them, the things you’d expect in alleys. But one in Sao Mateus, on the outskirts of the city, also has something you might not expect — two brightly painted plastic rain barrels, decorated with kids’ hand and footprints.

Water gets funneled down from the roof above, passes through a filter to catch mosquitoes or leaves, and then settles into the barrel for use in watering plants, cleaning, flushing toilets and other household necessities.

Terezinha da Silva with one of the her signature rain barrels.

Credit:

Anne Bailey

The barrels are the result of a community organizing project begun in response to the São Paulo region’s crippling two-year drought, when water supplies were frequently cut off in many parts of the city and people at the end of the water pipelines — people in places like this neighborhood — often suffered the worst.

But the barrels are also one of the positive legacies of the drought. São Paulo residents were angry about the water crisis. They felt their government wasn’t doing enough to solve it, so many started taking matters into their own hands.

One of them was Terezinha da Silva. Her first name means "little Teresa," and she's just four-and-a-half feet tall. But she's a force to be reckoned with in her neighborhood.

Da Silva installed rain barrels in the courtyard of her home even before the drought officially began, to save money and have water on hand during shutoffs. But as the drought built, she went on to teach other women in her community how to build these rain barrels too, out of inexpensive and easy-to-find materials. Now there are about 50 in the area.

About fifty rain barrels are scattered throughout the Vergueirinho favela in the Sao Mateus district of São Paulo.

Credit:

Anne Bailey

She’s been doing community-building work through a women’s collective she helped found, called “Bread and Art,” which was formed, she says, to help local women “work together in economic solidarity, sustainability, women’s rights and participation by women.”

The "for and by women" idea is vital, da Silva says, because Brazil is a male-dominated society. And, she says, “we know this from statistics and because we’ve lived it — there is a lot of violence against women.”

But she also had personal reasons for wanting to help other women tackle the water crisis and more.

“I do this work with great affection,” da Silva says. “Because I was also rescued. There was a salvation in my life. “

Da Silva started working as a maid when she was 14, and continued for 30 years. Her life felt like it was consumed by work, she says. Then in her mid-40s, she started volunteering and then working with a non-profit that focuses on the welfare of favela residents, Movimento de Defesa do Favelado.

She learned that even though she was poor and a woman, she could change her future.

“When you start to discover your rights, you want to fight! You go in search of your dignity,” she says.  “And that’s especially true for women.”

Da Silva now works full-time with the non-profit she once volunteered for, and she has sprouted a new project rooted in the water crisis and local empowerment: vertical community gardens.

As with the rain barrels, she has some of the very simple technology installed at her own home — rows of plastic water pipes cut in half lengthwise, filled with soil and hung on a wall, where she grows vegetables like chives, basil and peppers.

Da Silva keeps three rain barrels in her garden and one in her laundry room to gather water for cleaning, watering plants and laundry.

Credit:

Anne Bailey

The goal is to get neighbors working together, while at the same time putting fresh vegetables on their plates.

And again, her efforts are resonating throughout the neighborhood.

“Terezinha is a really important person,” says local resident Maria Auxiliadora, who’s working with da Silva to build a vertical garden on her roof. “She’s a very tough person. Even if she’s sick, or has other problems, she doesn’t worry about her own problems, she just comes and does her work for the community.”

Da Silva says that work saved her. And she thinks the drought in São Paulo may actually have done something to help save the environment.

"A good thing came out of this crisis,” da Silva says. “Awareness. The water crisis came at a time when we needed awareness"— that even in a country with an eighth of the world’s fresh water supply, water can’t be taken for granted.

She’s not the only one who thinks that.

“The population learned that water supply is a very important thing,” says Monica Porto, the state of São Paulo’s deputy secretary of water resources. “You cannot expect simply to open your tap and there is water. Each one of us has a responsibility of saving water."

Of course, the picture is a bit more complicated than that. Millions of the region’s poorer residents, people in neighborhoods like da Silva’s, never simply expected to open their taps and have water, and they suffered even more during the drought. So there are many here who didn’t need to learn the value of water.

Water barrels in da Silva's garden. 

Credit:

Anne Bailey

But it’s a lesson the region’s government itself seems to have learned. It’s raining again now in São Paulo, but scientists believe that climate change is disrupting weather patterns here. Porto says the drought helped leaders in the region realize that São Paulo needs a water system that’s better prepared for whatever the future brings.

“We don’t know what to expect of climate change, if the São Paulo region will be a region where there will be more floods or more droughts,” Porto says. “But it doesn’t matter. ... After this drought, we know one thing for sure. We have to increase preparedness.”

That means changes big and small — from new reservoirs and a modern distribution system to rain barrels, rooftop gardens and an engaged community.

Street harassment is a sad reality for women across the world, but in Kosovo it can get particularly vulgar, and mostly goes unreported. But a forthcoming mobile app may help change that. Ec Shlirë, "Walk Freely" in Albanian, is inspired by Hollaback, which is an American movement to report street harassment. 

The Kosovar app, which launches Thursday, will allow users to report instances of sexual harassment. The reports will be visualized on an interactive map and will be sent directly to the authorities. Users will also have an emergency button to directly call the police.

The forthcoming app Ec Shlire, or Walk Freely, will allow users to discreetly report instances of sexual harassment in Kosovo. 

Credit:

Nate Tabak

According to a new report published by the Kosovo Women’s Network, only 4.1 percent of Kosovars have reported sexual harassment or have heard of other people doing so. Those who do report harassment face vague laws and spotty enforcement by police and prosecutors.

“In Kosovo a lot of women who experience harassment don’t go report it directly to the police, because the police may not take one incident of harassment on the street so seriously,” says Albana Dulaj, a 22-year-old programmer. “If we have more reports, I believe they’ll take it more seriously.”

Dulaj is among 30 young women who have been building the app as part of a group called Girls Coding Kosova.

The coders have a personal stake in the development.

“[Harassment is] happening. It happens every day,” says Kaltrina Murseli, a 23-year-old programmer. “It’s happening to your sister, to your mother, to your daughter, to everybody.”

While individual perpetrators won’t be identified, the data gathered by the app will allow Kosovars to actually see the full extent of sexual harassment and will also put pressure on the authorities to respond.

Ultimately, programmer Vjosa Preniqi says that the app will make guys think twice before harassing anyone, "And also, women can learn from this. Because they should not support guys and say, 'Oh, harassment, it’s nothing, it’s a casual thing.'”

The development of Ec Shlirë also is helping address another problem in Kosovo: the lack of women in the tech industry. It’s a problem across the world, but in Kosovo it’s compounded by the absence of women in the workforce altogether. Only one in 10 women has a job and another one in 10 is looking for one, according a study by Democracy for Development.

Blerta Thaci, the programmer who leads Girls Coding Kosova, is trying to change this by giving young women more hands-on experience in coding.

"They thought that this is not something that they can do because it’s only for boys or something like that, but it’s the opposite,” Thaci says.

Another stance against street harassment in Kosovo was inspired by the viral video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman.”

Med student Rita Parashumti endures street harassment in Kosovar capital Pristina on a daily basis. When Kosovo organized a Take Back the Night campaign in 2014, Parashumti spent eight hours walking around Pristina, the capital, while being secretly filmed.

Men whistle and throw lewd comments at her. The worst part, she says, is when two young men follow her for eight minutes straight.

The video got a lot of attention, particularly on social media. People in Kosovo started talking about street harassment.

“It was the first time I was happy when someone said something [lewd to me],” Parashumti says. “I thought, wow. We got this filmed.”

Hana Marku contributed reporting.

It's no news law enforcement agencies conduct cellphone surveillance. But there how the technology works and how agencies use it has been controversial in the US

Devices like the commonly used Stingray and the more powerful DRTbox, called "Dirtbox," mimic cell towers, tricking mobile devices nearby into connecting to and transmitting information to them.

Depending on the model, the simulators can be configured to intercept phone calls, text messages and even jam signals. When used to track a cellphone, they can also capture information from surrounding phones.

Nathan Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union says the FBI and other federal agencies have been using this kind of technology since 1995. As early as 2003, state and local law enforcement agencies began obtaining the devices, for which they had to sign non-disclosure agreements with the FBI and vendors of the products. Wessler says those NDAs are a problem.

"It has kept the public in the dark, it's kept lawmakers in the dark, defense attorneys and even judges intentionally in the dark," Wessler says, "about basic facts of how this invasive surveillance technology that is being used in local towns and cities across the country."

FBI spokesman Christopher Allen says the NDAs never prevented the police from revealing the use of the cell site simulators. He says what the agreements do prevent is the disclosure of “the tradecraft and capabilities” of the devices.

A Stingray device in 2013, in Harris's trademark submission.

Credit:

WP:NFCC#4)/Wiki Commons

“Specific capabilities of certain equipment used by law enforcement agencies are considered law-enforcement-sensitive," Allen says, "since their release could harm law enforcement efforts by compromising the future use of the equipment. So the non-disclosure agreements are intended to prevent unauthorized disclosure of that sensitive law enforcement information.”

Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, called this reasoning a red herring.

“It is not news to criminal organizations or terrorists that law enforcement can spy on cellphones,” says Crockford. “The real reason is that they don’t want attorneys and pesky organizations like the ACLU to have the ammunition to go before court to bring constitutional challenges to this kind of surveillance.”

Allen says the FBI only uses cell site simulators like pen registers, which only record numbers called from a particular phone line. 

“We do not collect content," Allen says. "We follow the DOJ policy.”

The Department of Justice policy says cell-site simulators used by federal agencies "may not be used to collect the contents of any communication in the course of criminal investigations. This means data contained on the phone itself, such as emails, texts, contact lists and images, may not be collected using this technology."

Lt. John Crimpel of the NYPD, which disclosed its use of the technology earlier this month, also said the department only used the device to track phones. And recently, the US Marshals Service revealed that it had used the devices more than 6,000 times — but there was no indication it had used them to snoop on phone contents.

The DOJ's policy does not address how local and state police should use cell surveillance tech, and it's unclear whether the devices obtained by those agencies are also configured to only be used like pen registers.

Still, this issue isn't only stateside.

Similar technology is being used in the UK by the London Metropolitan Police Service. And the UK charity Privacy International released a report that states a secret unit of Egypt's intelligence infrastructure also got hold of cellphone surveillance devices and used them during the Arab Spring to spy on activists and journalists.

Egypt's Technical Research Department is an independent unit within the General Intelligence Service that is only accountable to the president. PI sources say TRD has the largest budget for surveillance technologies of any Egyptian government body.

After a quarter-century of plans and protests and construction and more protests, the Belo Monte dam complex on a tributary of the Amazon River in north-central Brazil will start generating power next month. Its capacity will make it the third largest hydro-electric system in the world.

But indigenous women are among those who have fought it every step of the way, exemplified by an iconic image that represents the resistance to the project.

It’s a photo of an indigenous woman holding a machete up to the face of the dam’s engineer.

It was taken in 1989, and since then the Belo Monte dam has been canceled, reconfigured, pared down and re-started. Amid a tumultuous history, one thing has remained constant: the dam project has motivated generations of female activists in the wake of that machete-wielding leader.

A militant old-school activist

Environmental activist Antonia Melo is one of them. She says she’s been fighting against the dam for 25 years, and even after construction began in 2011, Melo and her group “Xingu Alive Forever” didn’t give up.

“This project is a project of destruction and death of the environment, of the water, of nature, of human life," Melo says.

Antonia Melo talks to indigenous men blocking an entrance to the Belo Monte dam complex in protest.

Credit:

Will Carless

About 200 square miles of land has been cleared, paved, flooded or otherwise affected by the project. According to environmental regulators, about 60 percent of that was forests. The Xingu River has been re-routed. People have been moved.

And Melo has had a front-row seat for it all.

She lives in the city of Altamira, in the state of Para, just west of the three-dam Belo Monte complex and the project’s construction hub.

Until September, she lived in a neighborhood on the banks of the Xingu.

Now that neighborhood is a construction site, too.

On a visit to the site, Melo points to a patch of red Amazon mud where her living room used to be.

“And where those plants are there, that’s where my backyard was,” Melo says.  

A park is now being built here, one of the amenities the dam-building company Norte Energie agreed to during its long, contentious licensing process.

Melo is one of an estimated 30,000 people who have been displaced by the massive project. Some of them have moved from flood-prone homes on the banks of the river to sturdy new ones built on a hill overlooking the city.

But Melo refuses to see any good in the dam coming to town.

“We continue, or I continue, firmly against the hydroelectric complex of Belo Monte,” she says.

Melo’s brash style of activism was bred during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the '70s and '80s. These days she seems to be fighting against the idea of hydropower as much as the dam itself.

But others have abandoned the no-compromise approach as the dam has become a reality.

A more pragmatic movement

Melo drove with me down the Trans-Amazonian highway from Altamira for about an hour to meet one of these next-generation activists.

We stop on a side road that leads to one of the new dams, where a group of mostly indigenous women and children are camped out. They’ve commandeered some of the buses the dam-building consortium uses to transport workers to dam construction sites.

Indigenous leader Bel Juruna helped organize a take-over of worker busses to garner attention for their demands from builders of the Belo Monte dam.

Credit:

Will Carless

Bel Juruna, a young and more measured leader of the Muratu village, says the workers’ buses were taken as a bargaining chip.

Unlike Melo, Juruna is no longer fighting the dam. But she is trying to win a smaller victory for her people: to get the company to keep its promises to indigenous communities.

“We want them to create a fund to help create income and projects, so we can survive and keep our people where we are,” she says. “If not, we’ll have to leave.”

That's because, Juruna says, her people live on a bend in the Xingu River, in a small village of tin and thatch-roofed houses.  

Water levels there have been greatly reduced by the dam, Juruna says, which is a problem for her people.  

They have always fished to survive, but the dams are changing that.

“Lots of fish have died,” Juruna says, “and we don’t know why. This has been very difficult for us.”

The government acknowledges that more than 16 million tons of fish here have died since November as the dam began filling up. Norte Energie was fined about $2 million for the deaths, which were largely unexpected based on the government’s environmental impact reports.

Juruna herself has found a job as a health worker. But others haven’t been so fortunate.

“The only profession here was fishing,” Juruna says, “and now that’s impossible.”

Fishermen in Muratu say the water in their traditional fishing grounds is too murky to dive down to capture the colorful fish they used to sell upriver for pets. Line fishing is also much less fruitful than before, and the fish they do catch are skinny.

Children play in the Xingu River near the indigenous village of Muratu. In this traditional fishing community residents say the dam has clouded the water and killed off fish, changing their way of life.

Credit:

Will Carless

Norte Energie, the company that’s building the dam complex, wouldn’t respond to requests for comment. The company has made good on some of its promises, like urban renewal projects in Altamira. But it also has a history of unmet obligations. The Juruna people say they’re still owed healthcare, educational facilities and protections from encroachment on their land.

Independent monitoring may form the legacy of Belo Monte activism

In response to these concerns, independent monitors are documenting impacts on traditional communities.

Carolina Reis is a lawyer at the Instituto Socioambiental, a non-profit that has been documenting the dam’s impact on fishing grounds.

“The effort to create independent monitoring,” Reis says, “was an effort to try to give voice and to put light on the traditional knowledge that inside the federal licensing process usually is not incorporated.”

The Brazilian constitution requires indigenous groups be formally consulted before any hydropower projects on their lands are approved.

19-year-old Garlier Jacinto is one of about 150 indigenous protesters who commandeered a few dozen buses belonging to a consortium building a huge dam complex here. The indigenous people say the dam has greatly decreased numbers of fish in their waters.

Credit:

Will Carless

But Reis says other, more indirect effects need to be taken into account.

“Many, many, many, many people were totally invisible during the construction of Belo Monte, and now they have to pay with the changing of their way of living,” Reis said. “This legacy needs to be seen, for learning what cannot be done in the other Amazon rivers.”

Reis says regulators do seem to be learning some lessons.

Rodrigo Herles, with Brazil’s environmental agency, says it is not enough to look only at technical reports and studies in evaluating the impacts of projects like this.

“Dialogue with the activist sector is important,” Herles says. “We need more local insight.”

Herles says hydroelectric projects are much less aggressive now than they used to be, and there’s more oversight. A weak point is establishing protections for indigenous communities. 

But he’s clear that Brazil needs Belo Monte.

“Brazil is a country that depends a lot on hydroelectric energy,” Herles says. “[It’s] still the cheapest in the country.”

The main dam in the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam complex, which is set to start generating electricity next month.

Credit:

Will Carless

It’s also a low-carbon energy source in a time when climate change threatens Brazil as much as anywhere.

For Antonia Melo, her rhetoric is still focused on stopping Belo Monte. But she’s also been working with leaders fighting other dams, so that lessons learned here might still lead to victory elsewhere.

“It’s not just Belo Monte,” Melo says. “We continue our fight for this type of project to be cancelled and destroyed all over our planet. Not just in Amazonia.”

It’s the same uncompromising attitude as 25 years ago. 

But the legacy of activism against Belo Monte may yet be felt in fewer and less damaging hydropower projects elsewhere. 

As researchers in Brazil and around the world rush figure out more about the link between Zika and the birth defect microcephaly, many Rio residents say the answer to the health crisis lies not in a laboratory, but in the mud.

“It’s showing where the government actually invests, and where it doesn’t,” says Gleide Guimarães, an activist who lives in the Manguinhos favela, a low-income neighborhood home to around 40,000 people.

One in five Rio residents live in favelas, which have long gotten the short end of the stick as far as public services. They are high-density areas that — like much of Brazil — lack basic sanitation. Brazil’s own government estimates 40 percent of homes in the country are not connected to a sewage system.

And things are not looking up: The budget for improving basic sanitation in Brazil was cut by 70 percent this year. Meanwhile, the Brazilian health system has pledged an estimated $34 million a year to help children affected by microcephaly, and it’s spending around $126 million against the spread of Zika this year alone.

A canal intended for stormwater runoff in Rio's favela Manguinhos is polluted with sewage.

Credit:

Catherine Osborn

Unclean water everywhere

Guimarães, 57, had tuberculosis twice as a young girl; doctors blamed the fact that she lived in areas with little air circulation and major sanitation problems. Now a former health administrator in Manguinhos, she has taken part in different research projects to track public investment in the neighborhood. She says there’s no question of what the government’s spending priority should be.

“Investing in basic sanitation means that you avoid strangling the public health system later,” Guimarães says.

Or, as researcher Marcelo Firpo of Brazil's National School of Public Health, puts it, “There's a wide consensus that for each dollar you spend on basic sanitation, you save $4 down the line in sanitation-related diseases.” To Firpo, the lack basic sanitation in Brazil is the number one factor behind the spread of the Aedes aegypti mosquito — a breed that carries not only Zika but also chikungunya and dengue fever, which has killed hundreds here.

In 2007, a $300 million public works program in Manguinhos was supposed to work with residents to determine their first priority for investment. “Our biggest fight as a community movement was that basic sanitation would be the priority,” says Guimarães. Some improvements were made, but in the end, 60 percent of the money was spent on a flashy railroad overpass.  

Walking around Manguinhos, Guimarães points out low-quality public housing that is less than five years old, and potholes in roads that accumulate standing water.

"This here is a public road, it doesn't have anything to do with residents,” she says, pointing to a wet pile of trash. “And it's been like that for months." Manguinhos is home to many pregnant women and several suspected cases of Zika virus.

Gleide Guimarães points out the extent of trash and standing water in her neighborhood.

Credit:

Catherine Osborn

Fears of favelas

One thing that's been stopping health officials from dealing with trash and standing water in favelas is a fear of crime, says Rio Health Vigilance coordinator Marcus Ferreira. “If there is a shootout, there’s no way we can work there,” he told me last month.

But researcher Marcelo Firpo says recent history refutes that assumption. “Here in Manguinhos and in the favela of Rocinha, huge public works were carried out in direct negotiation with the drug traffic.”

“What the government wants to do, it does,” says Guimarães. But there’s one ray of hope in all this: Because activists like Guimarães have stayed persistent over the years, government health workers are now partnering with favela residents to go door to door to check for standing water and mosquito risk — even in areas that are technically outside government control.

“You have to understand how things actually change” in order to improve your community, says Guimarães. “You have to vote,” she continues. “And you have to track politicians who make commitments, and record whether they complete them.”

Guimarães, who is not college educated, started a history degree at one of Brazil’s most prestigious public universities this year. “If we use different methods of staying in the fight” for neighborhood improvements, she says, “we just might be able to aim the rock in the right place to hit a giant.”

Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay has been getting lots of attention over the last few months, and for all the wrong reasons.

The bay is filthy. Communities across Rio spew their sewage untreated into its waters. Oil and gas facilities dump toxic waste into the bay, while each day 90 tons of trash float downstream to line the bay’s beaches and mangroves.

Rio’s state government has spent decades and billions of dollars on a much-maligned cleanup effort. Millions of the dollars earmarked for sewage works and other programs were allegedly siphoned off over the last 20 years, and today the bay remains as fetid as ever.

International attention to the problem has focused on the athletes who will visit Rio for this summer’s Olympic Games, with local and Olympic officials wringing their hands over whether sailors and rowers might get sick from the water. But thousands of fishermen and women who live on the bay, and depend on it for their livelihoods and daily protein, are less worried about the games than the long-term impact of all the filth entering these once crystalline waters.

Alexandre Anderson, an activist who has been fishing these waters since 1989, says the government seems to be deaf to calls from local communities to get serious about cleaning up the bay.

Alexandre and Daisy Anderson, who have been fishing on the bay for more than two decades and now work to bring attention to the water pollution.

 

Credit:

Will Carless

Every day, Anderson says he and his colleagues see the impact of the bay’s pollution: greasy, luminescent puddles of oil floating on the water; mountains of plastic on the beaches and in the mangroves; and fewer and fewer healthy fish every year.

Most worrying, he says, are the chemicals and waste products constantly pumped into the bay by the local petrochemical industry.

“The government of Rio has decided the bay is dead,” he said on a tour of Guanabara on Friday morning. “The politicians have decided the bay isn’t for the people, it’s for oil.”

Anderson said it gets harder each year for fishermen to survive. There are fewer and fewer fish living in the bay’s stinking waters, he says, and the fish that do survive are often poisoned with heavy metals and other contaminants.

Along his tour, Anderson spots a fishing buddy of his — another Alexandre, Alexandre da Silva. Da Silva is wet from head to toe, grimy from hours of fishing. He’s holding an empty net, looking forlorn. The encounter almost seems staged, but he’s surprised to see us. He says he’s barely caught anything and blames the filth.

“There’s trash everywhere,” he says. “Bags, plastic, bottles. It needs to be cleaned up.”

Rio’s state government recently renewed its pledge to clean up the bay. It promised to use mathematical modeling to improve its trash collection efforts, and the city’s politicians say they’re pushing forward with the latest phase of a decades-long cleanup program.

Anderson said he hopes the glare of the Olympic Games will help push those efforts along before it’s too late for the bay he calls home.

“They think this bay is dead,” he says. “But it’s not. It’s still alive.”

Devi Lockwood is a 23-year-old poet and touring cyclist turned professional storyteller from Boston. And she's traveling the world by bicycle and boat to collect 1,001 stories about water and climate change.

With a background as a rowing coach, Lockwood graduated from Harvard University in May 2014 with a degree in Folklore & Mythology. When she graduated, she received the Gardner & Shaw Postgraduate Traveling Fellowship from Harvard for a year of "purposeful wandering" after graduation. Yes, that is a real thing.

We spoke to Lockwood about her travels, the stories she's collected so far and the people she's met along the way.

IM: What’s your background in environmental science and activism?

DL: I'm not a scientist, but I care deeply about storytelling, water and climate change. The inspiration for this trip came from an 800 mile solo ride I took down the Mississippi River in August 2013 for my senior thesis in Folklore & Mythology. Along the way I collected stories from people I met.

The farther down the river I pedaled, the more stories people told me about the direct, water-based impacts of climate change in their hometowns — intensified storms and coastlines that are disappearing at a rate of football fields per day. It was a cause that I could not turn away from. I have always been interested in environmental issues, but this was the first time in my life that I was compelled to act. 

IM: What was the spark that made you want to go on this story collection journey?

DL: If I were to choose one story from the Mississippi River trip in 2013 that compelled me to act, it would be this: I met 57-year-old Franny Connetti eighty miles south of New Orleans. When I stopped in front of her office building to check my bicycle tires, Franny invited me to get out of the sun. Over a shared plate of fried shrimp, she told me how 2012’s Hurricane Isaac washed away her neighborhood. “We fight for protection of our levees. We fight for our marsh every time we have a hurricane,” she said.

Despite the lack of attention state officials afford the area, Franny stands by her hometown. She and her husband moved back to their mobile home a few months after the disaster. “I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else,” she confessed.

“Do you think there will come a time when people can’t live here?” I asked her.  

“I think so. Not in my lifetime, but you’ll probably see it,” she said.

To imagine the road I had been biking on underwater was chilling. Twenty miles further, I saw where the ocean laps over the road at high tide. 

IM: Why bike?

DV: Cycling is a way of moving slowly, of being present in a place without a windscreen separating my body from the world outside.

I fell in love with cycling after tearing my ACL playing soccer in 2012. The recovery was brutal, but I came out of it with the dream of a bike trip. Cycling was the first thing I could do in rehab that made me break a sweat. I love sweating. Plus, cycling is a way of travel that treads lightly on the planet. I'm a restless person, and it works well for me to have a movement practice built into my every day life. Movement is the language I come from. 

IM: How did you decide on the questions you were asking? What was the purpose of asking them?

DV: Every story I collect is unique.

I never enter an interview with a set group of questions to ask. The purpose of asking someone to 'tell me a story about water or climate change' is to keep the prompt as open as possible.

I have heard stories of everything from tsunamis to weather patterns as they influence farming to learning how to swim as a child — all of it interests me. I'm fascinated with how story both creates and is of a place.

In Folklore & Mythology I learned that wisdom sits in places, that there is no text without context. A story exists within the place that it was told. I am working on the moment on creating a website that will be a platform and an archive for these stories where a visitor can click on a point and listen to a story on water or climate change that someone has told me from that place. I am 23 years old, and I believe that water and climate change are the defining issues of my generation. 

IM: What have you learned on your trip?

DV: So far I have learned this much: Slow is beautiful. Slow down. I think that North Americans are exceptional at being in a rush. I have found joy in distancing myself from that culture of speed. 

IM: Who are three people you met that you still think of from time to time?

Susey, Losite, Lockwood and Angelina in Funafuti, Tuvalu, January 2015.

Credit:

Devi Lockwood

DL: I spent a month in Tuvalu over Christmas and New Year's and these women welcomed me into their homes and their lives with such grace and love.

Tuvalu is their home, and is also one of the first Pacific Island nations on track not to exist due to sea level rise. Wells that once provided fresh water have become salty in the last 10-20 years, and the highest point in the island is only 4 meters above sea level. Many Tuvaluans have already migrated to Fiji.

I think of my Tuvaluan sisters every time a cyclone plows through the Pacific, hoping that they are alright. In one of the great ironies and injustices of climate change, the people most affected are those who have contributed the least to the problem. 

Eleni is a beautiful storyteller from Taveuni, Fiji, who welcomed me into her family's home for a week. It was a blessing to be a part of her life. In that week we walked the hills together in search of the fabled Tagimoucia flowers, and also attended her grandmother's funeral.

Lockwood and storyteller Eleni in Taveuni, Fiji.

Credit:

Dev Lockwood

Jacquie Mackay hosts the morning show on ABC Capricornia in Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia. We met in September 2015 and she interviewed me as part of her show. It was wonderful to see the inner-workings of the ABC studio, learn about storytelling in the public broadcasting world, and to be on the other side of the microphone for a change.

Jacquie is an incredible human with a real talent for storytelling and listening. After recording in studio, we talked about how the job of an interviewer is to be a conduit for story. Water weaves through language in the most beautiful, surprising ways. 

Lockwood and TV host Jacquie Mackay in Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia

Credit:

Dev Lockwood

IM: How did your trip change you and how did it influence what you’re doing now and hope to do in the future?

DL: The trip is ongoing, and while I have enjoyed pausing for these last few months in New Zealand to focus on writing, soon it will be time to hit the road and the water again.

Over the course of the trip I made the choice to stop flying to reduce my environmental footprint, which makes getting out of the South Pacific a creative challenge.

I crossed the Tasman Sea twice by cargo ship, crowdfunding my passage on Kickstarter with support from people who believed in my writing. I am looking now towards Southeast Asia, though those plans could change depending on where I can get to via boat from Aotearoa, New Zealand. 

I don't know what the future holds. I would love to work in public radio. The Moth and On Being make my soul sing.  

I would also love to get more into teaching. I'm teaching two online writing classes in the coming weeks through the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

So, grad school, maybe? Or a hodgepodge of living and work and writing, all mixed up in one beautiful mess?

I want to live a bit more before I get back into the formal education system. The world is vast and I have collected 452 stories, just shy of half-way to my goal of 1,001. If there's one thing I have learned from being on the road, it's that every day is brand new. 

Follow Dev on Instagram and follow her journey here. 

There's a serious water pollution problem that could affect this summer's Olympic Games in Rio: the city’s polluted Guanabara Bay.

It's still an unresolved problem, just six months before the Games begin.

Isabel Swan, an Olympic sailor who won a bronze medal for Brazil at the Beijing Olympics eight years ago, is particularly concerned about the bay. She trains in its waters six days a week.

Despite the fact she’s been sailing here since she was 8 years old, Swan says never gotten an infection from the bay’s polluted waters. But she knows something has to be done, and fast.

“It’s a big problem, a big challenge,” she says.

Garbage barriers now block some of the floating trash that sails in from Rio’s polluted rivers, but those barriers are not going to stop the sewage in-flows that recently prompted Brazilian biologist Mario Moscatelli to call the bay “a latrine.”

(Animation credit: Barbara Benas)

Swan is much more judicious, and hopeful about her country’s efforts to clean up the waters before the Games.

“I think they realize — but we are passing through a crisis, political and economic,” she says.

When Swan carries the Olympic torch in her country — she’s the first athlete who will take it up when it comes to Brazil — she’s keeping her sights on much bigger issues, issues she hopes the world’s attention will help Brazil tackle.

“It’s like a light coming to Brazil — a light that Brazil needs: to believe in your dreams…to keep on working hard to make a better country,” she says.

As the saying goes in Hollywood, “Sex sells.” The same may be true for marine biology.

In a new book called "Sex in the Sea," Marah Hardt, a marine biologist and co-director of the non-profit Future of Fish, documents how life under the waves depends on the intricate, complex and mysterious mating rituals of its inhabitants — and she does it in a way designed to catch people’s attention.

Her skin shone in the moonlight, a flash of silver against a dark beach. She knew he wanted her. She could see him desperately fighting his way toward her from amongst the crowd. She positioned herself perfectly, knowing the sight of her bound body, restrained and prostrate in the sand, would make him — would make all of them — quiver with excitement. The first to reach her, he feverishly curled himself around her. Others soon joined him, forming their own half-circle embraces. This is what she came here for, what they had all come for.

This passage, while reading like a romance novel, actually describes the mating strategies of the grunion, a small silver fish that comes ashore every spring to engage in a mass orgy.

“If you talk about sex, people are curious,” Hardt says, with a laugh. “And maybe there's a way you can talk about sex, draw their attention and then subtly weave in the message of conservation — because ultimately successful sex is the heart of sustainability.”

Some of the reproduction strategies Hardt describes in the book are mysterious, fascinating and funny.

The Nassau Grouper, for example, normally live solitary lives until it’s time to mate. Then, right after the full moon, they will move to the edge of the reef and wait and watch for other groupers to start passing by.

“They gather at the same spot every year, at the same time. They will shift their coloration and change from a sort of desert camo pattern ... to a more ‘black-tie affair’ — dark black or black with a white belly,” Hardt says. “These colors signal that they're ready to be friendly and they're ready to engage more intimately.”

When the females become swollen with eggs, one will rocket out from the group and shoot towards the surface. The males will follow her and form a sort of funnel moving upwards in the water column. The female releases her eggs about 10 to 20 feet below the surface and then the males will streak through this cloud of eggs and release their sperm.

“Then all the fish tumble back down in this cascading sort of geyser that erupts and then falls to the sea floor,” Hardt says. “So you get these repeated geysers — it’s almost like Old Faithful, full of fish that just shoot up and explode like fish geysers. And the visibility will go from 100 feet to where you can't even see in front of your face.”

Coral reproduce in a somewhat similar fashion, even though they are stationary creatures, Hardt says. “They release their eggs and sperm into the water column, but the way that they do this is fantastic … [T]hey organize truly the biggest orgy on the planet and it's perfectly synchronized. You can set your watch to it. In fact, researchers do every year.”

The corals release bright pink bundles of eggs and sperm, which float up through the dark water column and then explode at the surface, creating a giant slick of coral gametes.

“It all mixes and mashes at the top,” Hardt explains, “and that’s how they get sperm from one individual to mix with an egg from another.”

But for sheer spectacle, perhaps nothing rivals the right whale.

“Looking at the anatomy of an animal can tell you a lot about the way that animal reproduces — in particular whether they tend to have many partners or not,” Hardt explains. “Right whales do not have the biggest penis, but they do have the biggest testicles on Earth. Each testis weighs half a ton.”

This indicates that males are having to compete with other males internally to the female, Hardt says. That is, they are competing to deposit more copious amounts of sperm during mating.

“The reason to do that is to try to flush out the sperm of other males that may be in there or to push their fellas as far forward as they can,” Hardt explains.

But the competition is even more fierce than that: Hardt describes an episode in which a female whale came to the surface and two males entered her at the same time.

“We always knew that Right whales were frisky and that there was some sperm competition going on, but if anything is going to encourage the production of gigantic testes it's having to ejaculate at the same time as another male is inside the female,” Hardt marvels.

But size may be no match for cleverness — and the female right whale has a trick of her own that may give her more control over who fertilizers her than previously known.

Dr. Sarah Mesnick, who works out of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego, has found that the whale vagina is not a single tube leading into a uterus, but a kind of a maze, Hardt says.

“They found twists and turns and blind alleys and false flaps and trapdoors,” Hardt marvels. “And I remember Sarah saying to me, ‘When we first looked in this thing, all I could think was 'How the heck does a sperm find his way to the cervix? How do they even know where to go?’ That "last mile," is female territory. It’s their home turf, so they're controlling a lot more than we realized.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

There are places throughout history — Florence in the Renaissance, Edinburgh in the 19th century, Hangzhou during Europe’s Dark Ages — where there’s a flourishing of creativity.

Eric Weiner calls these places "genius clusters," and he thinks their role in the development of genius has been seriously underestimated.

“We just have this myth that you’re just born a genius like Mozart," he says. "Or the 10,000-hour rule: You’ve got to put in the 10,000 hours and then you’ll be a genius. I think that’s wrong. I think you need some genetics, you need some hard work, but you need the right environment or it’s not going to happen.”

Weiner, the author of "The Geography of Genius," says there are a lot of different reasons genius clusters happen, but there’s no magic formula.

We talked with him about where the next genius clusters were likely to pop up — and which locales might be in decline.

Weiner is bullish about Estonia, which is a tech hub.

“Unlike other former Soviet republics, the Estonians were never really Russified," Wiener says, "and they have this openness, this free flow of information, and it’s not a coincidence that Skype and other high-tech firms started there.”

Throughout history, a willingness to take risks and try out new ideas has been key to success.

Weiner points to the Sistine Chapel, which Michelangelo was commissioned to paint, even though he was known more as a sculptor. Pope Julius II simply took a chance on the relatively young artist.

Wiener says compares this kind of risk-taking to Silicon Valley.

“'Innovation' is the buzzword in Silicon Valley. Everyone wants to innovate," Weiner says. "But do they want to be creative? That’s riskier. Do they want to aim for genius? Innovation, to me, sounds like the safe business way of being creative.”

Silicon Valley, Weiner says, is a reflection of our culture — in much the same way that places like Florence, Hangzhou, and Edinburgh reflected their cultures.

“Silicon Valley represents what we value," he says. "We value technology and convenience and speed, and all these things are embodied in Silicon Valley. We get the geniuses that we want and that we deserve. So in 18th-century Vienna, they valued beautiful music, and they got it. They got a Mozart and a Beethoven and a Haydn. What do we value? We value technology, so we get a Steve Jobs, and a Mark Zuckerberg, and a Bill Gates.”

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's Innovation Hub. Subscribe to the Innovation Hub podcast.

Looking for parking in a city is frustrating for the driver and bad for the climate, as circling cars emit unnecessary pollution. One possible answer to this parking problem is not so far in the future: self-driving cars.

In a recent essay in Mother Jones magazine, reporter Clive Thompson says fleets of coordinated, self-driving cars could bring an end to parking as we know it and help make our urban future cheaper, greener and much more pleasant.

“There are some interesting trends afoot,” Thompson says. “Here’s the thing about self-driving cars: It’s likely that by the time these things get fully licensed to be on the road — which is maybe 10, 15, 20 years now — they will probably be deployed not individually, but mostly in fleets. So, your local taxi company will just buy 200 self-driving cars, or the city might decide that it's going to create a kind of a public transit thing with cars. They'll buy thousands of self-driving cars. Uber and Lyft are actively researching to build their own self-driving cars.”

Right now the average car spends 95 percent of its time sitting in one place — parked at home or at work — which takes up a huge and wasteful amount of space. Thompson calculated the square mileage we use for parking is about the size of Connecticut. All sorts of problems stem from that amount of parking, Thompson says.

“On just an aesthetic level parking is pretty ugly,” he says. “[And] they produce a lot of runoff. A big rain hits a massive parking lot, the water's got nowhere to go so it rushes at the edges and it rips the topsoil off of whatever field it encounters. So parking lots cause environmental problems, too.”

Parking lots also encourage excessive driving because of the difficulty finding a parking spot. Studies show circling around looking for parking dramatically increases the amount of time we spend driving. One study done in Thompson’s Brooklyn neighborhood found that 30 to 60 percent of passing cars were looking for parking.

“They're not going anywhere, they're no longer transferring people from point A to point B, they're now just circling,” Thompson says.

In theory, a fleet of self-driving cars servicing a large or mid-sized town would create an urban environment in which if you need to go somewhere, you pull out your phone and call for a car and "a car comes zipping right up to you — and maybe there's somebody already in it, [maybe] it’s intelligent carpooling,” Thompson says. “The person in the car is going in the same direction as you, [so] this is going to cost you almost nothing because you're sharing the cost.”

People will still be using cars all day long, but they won't be cars we own, Thompson says. “And the thing with those cars is that they are not going need to park — ever. They will basically be just be driving and driving and driving around, ferrying people around in this very intelligent, efficient way. So this is the vision.”

It’s also part of a cultural shift — kind of a one-two punch that's moving urban areas towards the end of parking: self-driving cars and a generation of people that are less interested in owning their own car.

“More and more, younger people are living in more densely packed areas and they're discovering that in those situations they can really move around pretty easily without driving,” Thompson says. “For them, autonomy is about having a phone, being able to communicate all day long when they want to, and you can't use your phone while you're driving. Those are rival activities, and they would rather use their phones than drive.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

Despite a couple weeks of good rains and heavy snowfall in California's Sierra Mountains, state officials and water experts say the state should expect to be living with drought conditions for the foreseeable future.

“We don’t really know what’s going to happen,” says Peter Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute, a think tank devoted to global water issues. “It is an El Niño year, but El Niños can be wet for Northern California or they can be dry for Northern California. So it’s a little bit of a toss of the dice, still.”

No matter what the weather brings between now and April, Gleick says, Californians shouldn’t be thinking that El Niño is going to pull the state out of drought.

“Even if it’s a wet year in California, that by itself is not enough to get us out of the drought,” he stresses. “Our reservoirs are still really low, our soil moisture is low, our groundwater is overdrafted. We’re in a deeper hole than one year is going to fill.”

The Sierra snowpack makes up one-third of California’s water supply. At one point recently, the snowpack measured 130 percent above average for this time of year. But then another dry spell followed, with record high temperatures — which has now reduced the snowpack to below average levels.

“We need much better than just average,” says Frank Gehrke, who has been doing snowpack assessments for the California Department of Water Resources since 1981. “Hopefully, we will increase the percent above the average as we move on into the spring.”

“The snowpack is sort of the natural reservoir,” Gehrke explains. “The snow accumulates up here in the Sierra during the winter and then gradually melts when we hit late spring. And if we don’t have a good snowpack then those reservoirs essentially do not recover from the releases they had made the previous summer and fall.”

The most important test will come in April, when scientists tally up the total snow accumulation for the winter, says Gleick.

In February of 2013, for example, the Sierra snowpack was about at its current levels, but the next two months were bone-dry and snow levels ended up well below average for the year.

Despite the snow, the California Water Resources Control Board recently decided to extend Governor Jerry Brown’s emergency water restrictions through October 2016. So far, the water restrictions are working.

Max Gomberg, the Climate and Conservation Manager for the Control Board, says since the governor announced the water restrictions last April, Californians in urban areas have cut their water use by 25 percent.

“It’s really a tremendous achievement,” Gomberg says. “It shows that people are paying attention, and care for this precious resource. Because 25 percent — that’s one in every four drops of water that was used is no longer being used.”

And water conservation is only going to get more important in the future, Gomberg adds. Drought is a natural part of the climate in California, but climate change is making it more common and more severe.

“The drought we’ve experienced in the past four years in California has been so severe we’ve lost 22 million trees,” Gomberg says. “We’ve had a tremendous number of forest fires, communities have run out of water, we’ve lost 97 percent of some of our fish species. The impacts have really been devastating.”

Peter Gleick says with warming temperatures and increased demands on the water supply, California may never really “get out” of the drought.

“[Basically], a drought is not having enough water to do what you want,” he explains. “And in that sense, the Western United States, one could argue, is in a permanent drought. We no longer have enough water to do everything that everybody wants — at least as inefficiently as we’re doing it today.”

This article is based on a story that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

How do you stop a six-ton hungry elephant from rampaging through your garden?

For communities living alongside southern Africa’s national parks, the question has become more pressing in recent years. The African elephant population has boomed, leading to increased conflict with humans as elephants roam beyond park borders. 

The elephants raid crops, threatening the livelihoods of farmers, and can also cause significant property damage in villages.

But researchers have found a crafty way to deter marauding elephants: African honeybees.

"Elephants tend to crop-raid at night time, and farmers confronting elephants in the dark are often left with no choice but to throw stones and firecrackers or shoot bullets into the air to try to scare them away,"says the Elephant and Bees Project, run by the conservation group Save the Elephants. 

"This confrontation leads to heightened aggression and some elephants will charge and attack. These negative incidents often lead to terrible injuries or deaths of both people and elephants."

And that's where the bees come in as potential life-savers. Samburu people in northern Kenya had noticed that elephants were scared of the insects. Researchers investigated further and found that not only were elephants alarmed by the buzz of bees, but they also displayed behavior warning other elephants away from the area.

The elephants dislike being stung by bees, particularly around their eyes and inside their trunks. Studies led by Dr. Lucy King in Kenya found that elephants fled at the mere sound of buzzing bees — including audio playbacks. 

Fences hung with beehives have also proved successful, leading to the creation of a manual on how to build "beehive fences."

While other methods had been tried before — loud noises, fire, chilies, thorn fences — bees have proved a more successful and relatively inexpensive elephant deterrent. 

A recent experiment at South Africa's Kruger National Park found that elephants responded most strongly to a mix of bee noises with the scent of honey. 

"Bees represent a promising tool for managing elephant movements with potential to contribute to long-term conservation of the species by offering an alternative to lethal management of problem elephants," researchers from Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand wrote for The Conversation Africa. 

There are other positive effects: For one thing, bees help pollinate crops. And in some places, local farmers have learned beekeeping skills and are now producing honey for sale — marked as "elephant-friendly honey."