Grandparents served as a safety net for grandkids when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, with unexpected numbers of elders moving in or opening homes to an additional 460,000 U.S. children, said a Washington State University researcher.
A study found such multigenerational households comprised a majority in a 2020 surge of nearly 510,000 children in all pandemic-era “doubled-up” residences. That meant kids and at least one parent lived with another adult – grandparent, aunt, cousin or roommate. The study didn’t count a parent’s partner or an adult sibling.
Amorim
Mariana Amorim, a WSU sociology assistant professor and lead author, said mainly grandparents provided a safety net for families, particularly for six months beginning in spring 2020, when schools and other systems closed.
However, the spike in such living arrangements from 2019 to 2020 was temporary and returned to expected levels in 2021. The research compared such yearly co-residency patterns by using survey data collected by the U.S. Census.
The number of acres burned so far in Washington’s wildfire season this year is on trend with what ecologists predicted. But the damage has been catastrophic, and it could be weeks before fire danger subsides. Dryer, hotter summers and changes to the state’s vegetation mean the fire season spans longer than it once did.
Swanson
In the 20th century, fire suppression and exclusion in the American West by European colonizers prevented a lot of fires that would have otherwise naturally occurred.
“If you look at historic averages in the West, we don’t match the acreage of fire that would touch the West precolonization,” said Mark Swanson, a fire ecology professor at Washington State University.
Nowadays, where fires ignite, they tend to burn in ecosystems where fire was excluded for much of the 20th century. A buildup of grown vegetation as a result means those fires will likely burn at a higher intensity and severity — intensity being heat release and severity being what the flames do to the vegetation.
“We deliberately excluded fire, or suppressed it, for much of the 20th century in the West in the belief that fire was bad,” Swanson said. “The irony is that it allowed fuel to accumulate.”
You may not have heard much about it, but a recently formed group called On2Ottawa is in the middle of a three-week campaign of disruption in the country’s capital, agitating for the federal government to take stronger climate action.
Since arriving on Aug. 20, the group has blocked traffic in front of the Chateau Laurier hotel, the Laurier Avenue bridge over the Rideau Canal and the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge between Ontario and Quebec. On Tuesday, a member of the group threw washable paint on a painting by Tom Thomson in the National Gallery of Canada.
Bugden
Ottawa Police says 12 people have been charged with 36 criminal offences to date.
While the efficacy of such civil disobedience tactics is often debated in the media, they can have the desired effect, said Dylan Bugden, a professor in environmental sociology at Washington State University.
“Civil disobedience can work,” he said. “It works strongest, of course, among people who are already sympathetic [to the cause]. But it can move a small number of people towards that movement.”
Bugden cautioned that to be successful, the tactics should challenge those directly responsible for the problem protesters are trying to solve, such as governments or industries.
When you think about sources of planet-heating greenhouse gases, dams and reservoirs probably aren’t some of the first things that come to mind.
But scientific research has shown that reservoirs emit significant amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. It’s produced by decomposing plants and other organic matter collecting near the bottom of reservoirs. Methane bubbles up to the surface of reservoirs, and also passes through dams and bubbles up downstream.
Scientists call these processes ebullition and degassing.
And there is a growing debate about how much of these gases would be emitted by California’s planned Sites Reservoir, which is slated to be built in a valley north of Sacramento to store water for agriculture and cities.
In a 2021 study, scientists estimated that the world’s reservoirs are annually giving off greenhouse gases equivalent to 1.07 gigatons of CO2 — a relatively smaller piece of the picture if compared the more than 36 gigatons of emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial sources, but still significant.
Harrison
John Harrison, the study’s lead author and a professor at Washington State University, read the findings by the environmental groups and said the per-area methane emissions rates they used in their analysis are within the rate reported for reservoirs in temperate regions, “albeit toward the high end of the distribution and quite a bit higher than emissions from temperate zone reservoirs of comparable size.”
Harrison said in an email that he thinks it’s important to work toward the kind of estimates the groups have attempted, but “due to a lack of supporting data and relevant studies, many of the flux estimates put forth in this report are necessarily quite uncertain.”
A Democratic Senator Defends ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’
A hit country artist offended progressives who couldn’t recognize his song as a primal cry of pain.
The future of progressive politics in America just might revolve around whether someone like Chris Murphy, a U.S. senator from a prosperous New England state, can find common ground culturally and politically with a man like Oliver Anthony. Earlier this month, Anthony, a young country singer, dropped his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” into the nation’s political-cultural stew pot. A red-bearded high-school dropout, former factory hand, and virtual unknown, he strummed a guitar in the Virginia woods and sang with an urgent twang about the despair of working-class life:
Murphy, who is the clean-cut son of a corporate lawyer and has what appear to be national ambitions, makes an unlikely populist. But he seems intent on listening. Earlier this month, he headed to the Blue Ridge Mountains city of Boone, North Carolina, where 37 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. “It’s one of the poorest regions in America and offers a different conversation than in suburban America,” he said. “That trip reinforced to me that we should not obsess on what divides us.”
Sherman
Deaths of despair—that is, from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism—are rising at a frightful pace. Overdose deaths in the United States topped 106,000 in 2021. By comparison, the European Union, which has 100 million more people, recorded about 6,200 overdose deaths that year. Such deaths tend to break along economic and educational lines.
Jennifer Sherman, a Washington State University professor who is president of the Rural Sociological Society, has spent decades among working-class and poor people in the mountains and plains of the West. She has observed a pervasive sense of loss. Workers drop out or end up in service jobs, she told me, and fight losing struggles with the wealthy over zoning and for control of land, forests, and water. “If the Democrats want to figure out how to be relevant, they have to move beyond ‘Trust us, we care,’” Sherman said.
The Republicans are aware of these shifting class tectonics. “I have a very smart conservative friend who describes the next five years as a race,” Murphy said, “to see whether the right can become more economically progressive before the left becomes a bigger tent.”
