SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2022 |
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LEE ENTERPRISES ILLUSTRATION
INNOVATION DRIVES FLAGSTAFF ECONOMY CITY OF FLAGSTAFF
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Flagstaff’s economic revitalization
ovid-19 marked one of the most difficult times for businesses in the last 100 years for employers and employees. Whether it was a fortune 500 company or a local mom and pop store front, no business was immune to the adverse effects the virus created. However, as the pandemic appears to be nearing its end, economic revitalization is on the top of many communities’ minds and the City of Flagstaff is leading the charge on the road to recovery. Recovery can be gauged using many different factors but for our community two metrics are illustrating significantly positive results. Economic reports from April 2022 indicate that the City of
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Flagstaff is experiencing a 27% increase in domestic tourism when measured against pre-pandemic levels. Additionally, retail sales have also increased and are 7% higher when compared to pre-Covid numbers. With tourism and retail both bouncing back better than ever, this certainly bodes well for Flagstaff and our residents from a recovery perspective. This increase is vastly due to the fact that our marketing arm for the destination, Discover Flagstaff, continued to market Flagstaff during the pandemic with safety messaging and welcoming them back when things got better. This messaging included how visitors should stay, play, distance, and mask responsibly and more. Marketing respon-
sibly during a downturn continues to be a smart practice for our city and has assisted businesses with rebounding faster than other Arizona cities. Flagstaff has also seen significant growth in several of its key economic sectors over the last 12 months. Tourism and retail are certainly significant sectors that contribute to the overall economic well-being of our community, but additionally the healthcare, technology, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing sectors also have had a significant positive impact on the local Flagstaff economy. The strengthening and growth of these sectors is another vital indicator to measure further recovery in our community.
Aerospace company locates to Flagstaff
Automotive company opens fourth facility
One example of this growth comes from the arrival of a new aerospace company known as Katalyst Space Technologies. Katalyst is the embodiment of the company the City of Flagstaff searches for to expand our growing aerospace sector. Katalyst looks to address the growing sustainability concerns that threaten Earth’s atmosphere. By developing technology that can preserve and update existing satellites already in orbit, Katalyst hopes to limit the number of debris and clutter currently in revolution around our globe. The forward thinking company recently secured contracts and partnerships with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Katalyst plans to hire 30+ employees in the next two years and has made their new home at the Northern Arizona Center for Emerging Technology (NACET). Katalyst’s decision to choose Flagstaff also arose for a variety of reasons, but the key lures for this decision were due to an already expansive aerospace sector. Lowell Observatory and USGS, coupled with Northern Arizona University (NAU) will help provide the expertise and partnerships their business so greatly wanted. Additionally, the City of Flagstaff ’s Job Creation incentive program helped supply Katalyst with funds to make the move to our community and assisted in solidifying their decision to grow their business in Flagstaff.
Another major success story comes with the arrival of the largest new business to be attracted to Flagstaff in the last 50 years. UACJ Whitehall Automotive Industries is a global leader in automotive manufacturing and made the decision to Choose Flagstaff as the new home for their fourth production facility. Whitehall manufactures components for numerous automotive companies; however, their true specialty lies in producing components for electric vehicles and are major producers for Tesla and Lucid Motors. Whitehall plans to bring over $65 million dollars in capital investment and 350 jobs to Flagstaff over the next three years. They ultimately chose Flagstaff for a variety of reasons including our highly educated workforce, immense quality of life, and the rapid expansion of the electric vehicle supply chain in Arizona. Whitehall is a welcomed new addition to our expanding advanced manufacturing sector and is a clear indicator that economic recovery is in full effect here in Flagstaff. Although there is still much work to be done, there have been many examples of economic development success and growth in Flagstaff. As we continue to navigate our way through the hardships that Covid-19 created, the city is optimistic to gain even more traction for further success. To learn more about economic recovery in Flagstaff and economic development efforts please visit—https://www.chooseflagstaff.com/
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SCIENCE&RESEARCH
| Sunday, May 29, 2022
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THE INNOVATE WASTE CHALLENGE Stewardship and Economic Development at Work JOHN SALTONSTALL
To innovate is to make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. When it comes to supporting residents’ ideas and assisting them with making a good living and making the world a better place, your City of Flagstaff Economic Development Team practices innovation on a regular basis. Dating back to 2017, the city’s Economic Vitality Division implemented a new public program – The Innovate Waste Challenge — to make a positive impact on the community, on the environment, and on the economy by inspiring residents to innovate and be rewarded! The City of Flagstaff Economic Development team started exploring ways to encourage entrepreneurship and environmental stewardship in late 2017. After months of research and drafts, and considering the development of critical partnerships, the Innovate Waste Challenge (IWC) was created with approval from City of Flagstaff City Council. IWC invited entrepreneurs to examine all the material going into the landfill, and to develop a business idea to divert that material and convert it into a business product or service that would result in a new start-up business and jobs in Flagstaff. Since 2019, the City of Flagstaff Economic Development Team has convened with Moonshot@ NACET, the Flagstaff Sustainability offices, Northern Arizona University, and Coconino Community College to participate in introducing and implementing the program to the community. Moonshot@NACET operates the business development program and activities at the Business Incubator and the Business Accelerator, so they were the ideal partner to foster and promote the IWC program. On April 6, 2019, three different businesses pitched their ideas in a “Shark-Tank” style to a diverse panel of judges. Praxis Plastics won the Innovate Waste Challenge with their idea to collect discarded plastic sleds and sled parts from the forest and to recycle the plastic into a number of different products from clipboards to climbing holds, and virtually any other item that can be made from plastic. Economic Development was honored to award
Innovate Waste Challenge Winners 2019 Praxis Plastics 2021 Bee Well 2022 Restoration Soils and Crosswalk Labs 2023 Start thinking of what YOUR innovation will be! Praxis Plastics in the hopes they would grow into a job creating, problem solving business. 2020 was the year that COVID came center stage; still the Innovate Waste Challenge rolled on inviting residents to continue to explore ways to practice true sustainability through innovation, service, and stewardship. In the throes of COVID, the team innovated the challenge with another pandemic pivot. Fear was high and the world was demanding new ways to move about the planet with a renewed focus on personal hygiene. Businesses were pivoting to meet needs and fill gaps in supply chains for all things that would enhance cleanliness, and Scott Hathcock’s team at Moonshot@ NACET spread the word of the program far and wide. Bee Well participated and won the Innovate Waste/PPE Challenge by creating and delivering organic hand sanitizer produced in Flagstaff. Bee Well was impacted by the stories of the rampant spread of COVID on the native populations where limited water availability exacerbated close quarter conditions. The organic hand sanitizer helped their customers maintain cleanliness by providing their product to
those in need. The City of Flagstaff Economic Development Department were honored to award Bee Well for their answer to the call of the Innovate Waste/PPE Challenge. 2021/22 has afforded the Economic Development Department another opportunity to grow the challenge in partnership with Moonshot@NACET in their statewide tour of pitch events that will culminate in June 2022 at Little America Hotel in Flagstaff. APS is sponsoring the Annual Shoemaker Awards which will be a celebration of all things Arizona entrepreneurship including the winner(s) of this year’s event. The
City of Flagstaff Economic Development Department not only provides sponsorship to the annual event but also funded the 2021/22 challenge at $20,000. Partnering also with Sustainability, the call was the Innovate Waste/Carbon Neutrality Challenge with Sustainability providing $10,000 to businesses that would focus on removing or sequestering carbon dioxide. Eight entrepreneurs applied to the program, six pitched, five were awarded, with the top two businesses being awarded by the City of Flagstaff. Restoration Soils pitched their idea of being a facility that may process organic
materials and construction waste into other consumer products. With land, relationships, knowledge, and access to markets, Restoration Soils is poised to have a huge and positive impact on the landfill by diverting material, a huge impact on the environment in general by reusing materials, and a huge impact on the community potentially with new jobs. As such, Restoration Soils won the event and was awarded $20,000 to grow their business idea in Flagstaff. Crosswalk Labs also pitched their idea which is a digital product (software service) that helps municipalities, governments, and agencies calculate greenhouse gas emissions. This capability is increasingly important as governments seek to reduce greenhouse gases. Crosswalk Labs is already growing as demand for their insights is also increasing. Crosswalk Labs was awarded $10,000 to grow their business idea in Flagstaff. The City of Flagstaff Economic Development offices have convened tremendous partners throughout the community each year to deliver this innovative challenge designed to promote entrepreneurship and environmental stewardship. The City of Flagstaff Economic Development Department will continue to partner with and support Moonshot@ NACET to deliver programs to grow ideas and entrepreneurship across the state and right here in Flagstaff. Stay tuned to https:// www.moonshotaz.com/ to learn how the Innovate Waste Challenge will pivot next year! One more reason to visit, discover, and grow in Flagstaff.
SCIENTISTS GROW PLANTS IN LUNAR DIRT MARCIA DUNN
Associated Press
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — For the first time, scientists have grown plants in soil from the moon collected by NASA’s Apollo astronauts. Researchers had no idea if anything would sprout in the harsh moon dirt and wanted to see if it could be used to grow food by the next generation of lunar explorers. The results stunned them. “Holy cow. Plants actually grow in lunar stuff. Are you kidding me?” said Robert Ferl of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Ferl and his colleagues planted thale cress in moon soil returned by Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and other moonwalkers. The good news: All of the seeds sprouted. The downside was that after the first week, the coarseness and other properties of the lunar soil stressed the small, flowering weeds so much that they grew more slowly than seedlings planted in fake moon dirt from Earth. Most of the moon plants ended up stunted. Results were published in Communications Biology. The longer the soil was exposed to punishing cosmic radiation and solar wind on the moon, the worse the plants seemed to do. The Apollo 11 samples — exposed a couple billion years longer to the elements because of the Sea of Tranquility’s older surface — were the least conducive for growth, according to scientists. “This is a big step forward to know that you can grow plants,” said Simon Gilroy, a space plant biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who had no role in the study. “The real next step is to go and do it on the surface of the moon.”
TYLER JONES, UF VIA AP
In this 2021 photo provided by the University of Florida, a researcher harvests a thale cress plant growing in lunar soil, at a laboratory in Gainesville, Fla. Moon dirt is full of tiny, glass fragments from micrometeorite impacts that got everywhere in the Apollo lunar landers and wore down the moonwalkers’ spacesuits. One solution might be to use younger geologic spots on the moon, like lava flows, for digging up planting soil. The environment also could be tweaked, altering the nutrient mixture or adjusting the artificial lighting,
Only 842 pounds of moon rocks and soil were brought back by six Apollo crews. Some of the earliest moon dust was sprinkled on plants under quarantine with the Apollo astronauts in Houston after returning from the moon. Most of the lunar stash remained locked away, forcing researchers to experiment with simulated soil made of volcanic ash on Earth. NASA finally doled out 12 grams to the University of Florida
researchers early last year, and the long-awaited planting took place last May in a lab. NASA said the timing for such an experiment was finally right, with the space agency looking to put astronauts back on the moon in a few years. The ideal situation would be for future astronauts to tap into the endless supply of available local dirt for indoor planting versus setting up a hydroponic, or
all-water, system, scientists said. “The fact that anything grew means that we have a really good starting point, and now the question is how do we optimize and improve,” said Sharmila Bhattacharya, NASA’s program scientist for space biology, The Florida scientists hope to recycle their lunar soil later this year, planting more thale cress before possibly moving on to other vegetation. 00 1
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GOOGLE TURNS AI TO PRESERVE INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES FRANKLIN BRICEÑO AND MATT O’BRIEN
Associated Press
LIMA, Peru — About 10 million people speak Quechua, but trying to automatically translate emails and text messages into the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas was long all but impossible. That changed on Wednesday, when Google added Quechua and a variety of other languages to its digital translation service. The internet giant says new artificial intelligence technology is enabling it to vastly expand Google Translate’s repertoire of the world’s languages. It added 24 of them this week, including Quechua and other Indigenous South American languages such as Guarani and Aymara. It is also adding a number of widely spoken African and South Asian languages that have been missing from popular tech products. “We looked at languages with very large, underserved populations,” Google research scientist Isaac Caswell told reporters. The news from the California company’s annual I/O technology showcase may be celebrated in many corners of the world. But it will also likely draw criticism from those frustrated by previous tech products that failed to understand the nuances of their language or culture. Quechua was the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, which stretched from what is now southern Colombia to central Chile. Its status began to decline following the Spanish conquest of Peru more than 400 years ago. Adding it to the languages recognized by Google is a big victory for Quechua language activists like Luis Illaccanqui, a Peruvian who created the website Qichwa 2.0, which includes dictionaries and resources for learning the language. “It will help put Quechua and Spanish on the same status,” said Illaccanqui, who was not involved in Google’s project. Illaccanqui, whose last name in Quechua means “you are the lightning bolt,” said the translator will also help keep the language alive with a new generation of young people and teenagers, “who speak Quechua and Spanish at the same time and are fascinated by social networks.” Caswell called the news a “very
MARTIN MEJIA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
A student colors in a fox during a Quechua Indigenous language class focusing on animal names at a public primary school in Licapa, Peru. big technological step forward” because until recently, it was not possible to add languages if researchers couldn’t find a big enough trove of online text — such as digital books, newspapers or social media posts — for their AI systems to learn from. U.S. tech giants don’t have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem that’s also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms. Until this week, Google Translate was offered in European languages like Frisian, Maltese, Icelandic and Corsican — each with fewer than 1 million speakers — but not East African languages like Oromo and Tigrinya, which have millions of speakers. The new languages won’t yet be understood by Google’s voice assistant, which limits them to text-to-text translations for now.
Google said it is working on adding speech recognition and other capabilities, such as being able to translate a sign by pointing a camera at it. That will be important for largely spoken languages like Quechua, especially in the health field, because many Peruvian doctors and nurses who speak only Spanish work in rural areas and “are unable to understand patients who speak mostly Quechua,” Illaccanqui said. “The next frontier, or challenge, is to work on speech,” said Arturo Oncevay, a Peruvian machine translation researcher at the University of Edinburgh who co-founded a research coalition to improve Indigenous language technology across the Americas. “The native languages of the Americas are traditionally oral.” In its announcement, Google cautioned that the quality of translations in the newly added
languages “still lags far behind” other languages it supports, such as English, Spanish and German, and noted that the models “will make mistakes and exhibit their own biases.” But the company only added languages if its AI systems met a certain threshold of proficiency, Caswell said. “If there’s a significant number of cases where it’s very wrong, then we would not include it,” he said. “Even if 90% of the translations are perfect, but 10% are nonsense, that’s a little bit too much for us.” Google said its products now support 133 languages. The latest 24 are the largest single batch to be added since Google incorporated 16 new languages in 2010. What made the expansion possible is what Google is calling a “zero-shot” or “zero-resource” machine translation model — one that learns to translate into another language without ever
seeing an example of it. Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta introduced a similar concept called the Universal Speech Translator last year. Google’s model works by training a “single gigantic neural AI model” on about 100 data-rich languages, and then applying what it’s learned to hundreds of other languages it doesn’t know, Caswell said. “Imagine if you’re some big polyglot and then you just start reading novels in another language, you can start to piece together what it could mean based on your knowledge of language in general,” he said. The new languages added are: Assamese, Aymara, Bambara, Bhojpuri, Dhivehi, Dogri, Ewe, Guarani, Ilocano, Konkani, Krio, Lingala, Luganda, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo, Oromo, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sepedi, Sorani Kurdish, Tigrinya, Tsonga and Twi.
Business Retention & Expansion
INCENTIVE Designed to help Flagstaff businesses to stay and grow here EMPLOYEES Does your business employ between 1 and 150 people?
SECTORS Can you find your business in the following business sectors?: Entrepreneurial companies, small business, start-ups, bio-sciences, medical device, air-side companies for the Flagstaff Airpark, research and development, health care, clean energy, software development, and education.
ELIGIBILITY You may be eligible to apply for funding between $5,000 and $30,000 to help you stay and grow in Flagstaff. Applications must be submitted to jsaltonstall@flagstaffaz.gov between July 1st and August 31st. Applications will be scored on four criteria: 1.
Wages of the jobs being retained or created relative to the Coconino County median wage and sector
2. Environmental impact relative to water and power usage and volume of waste going into the landfill 3. Direct community benefit 4. The private investment match
For more information contact City of Flagstaff Business Retention and Expansion Manager at jsaltonstall@flagstaffaz.gov or 928-606-9430 00 1
by the numbers
Photo: Joe Llama
Aluminum is traditionally used to commemorate 10-year anniversaries, a fitting designation as the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) turns 10. April 3, 2012 was the date of “first light” for the LDT, when scientists and engineers first used the fully assembled telescope to image the sky. And why is aluminum appropriate? Because it composes the critical coating on the massive primary mirror used for collecting photons of light. In its 10 groundbreaking years, the LDT has enabled countless discoveries by researchers from all over the world, studying everything from nearby asteroids to far-distant galaxies. To celebrate its aluminum anniversary, here is the LDT by the numbers, one for each year of operation.
The Messier Catologue number of the object selected for the LDT’s first light image. M109 is a barred spiral galaxy in the Ursa Major galaxy cluster. The image stack was taken in 2012 with the NASA42 camera, which was borrowed from Lowell Observatory’s 42inch Hall telescope. The height of the LDT’s dome, in feet, which measures 62 feet in diameter. The dome is visible from 30+ miles away.
The number of instruments that the LDT’s instrument cube can hold at one time, allowing for use of all the instruments, making the LDT one of the most versatile telescopes in the world. As former Lowell Observatory Director Dr. Bob Millis said, the LDT is the “Swiss Army Knife” of telescopes. Lowell Obs/NSF The elevation, in feet, of the terrain on which the LDT facility sits.
The number of published professional research papers using LDT data. The number has now surpassed this, and the papers have been authored by scientists from around the world.
The measure, in meters, of the LDT’s primary mirror. The LDT is the 5th largest optical telescope in the continental United States. The number of devices, called actuators, spread around the bottomof the primary mirror. These are attached to sensors and hold, support, and control the mirror’s shape.
The average thickness, in nanometers, of the aluminum coating on the primary mirror. This is1,000 times thinner than typical copy paper!
The weight, in pounds, of the primary mirror. Why doesn’t this extremely thin mirror bend under its own weight? See 120 above. The telescope’s secondary mirror measures 1.4 meters in diameter and weighs 500 pounds.
The number of megapixels in the massive CCD of the Large Monolithic imager, which is the LDT’s workhorse camera. This is the largest CCD that can be made with current manufacturing techniques. CCD stands for charged-coupled device; such mechanisms are used for high -quality image sensing in digital cameras and video recorders.
RECENT DISCOVERIES YOUNGEST PAIR OF ASTEROIDS IN SOLAR SYSTEM DETECTED An international team of astronomers, including Lowell Observatory's Nick Moskovitz, has discovered a pair of asteroids that split off from their parent body a mere 300 years ago. The duo is exceptional because it is the youngest known “asteroid pair” by at least a factor of ten, it passes close to Earth’s orbit, and it has properties that are hard to explain given its young age.
UC Berkeley/SETI Institute
LOWELL DISCOVERY TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS HELP CONFIRM SECOND EARTH TROJAN ASTEROID Supported by observations made with the 4.3-meter Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) in northern Arizona, an international team of scientists confirmed the existence of the second-known Earth Trojan Asteroid (ETA), 2020 XL5. The findings culminate a ten-year search for such an object and was led by Toni Santana-Ros of the University of Alicante and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona.
CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine
The best way to support our continued research is with memberships, donations, and visits to the observatory. lowell.edu | 928-774-7758 00 1
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THE FUTURE OF HEALTH SCIENCE
How TGen North leads the way
In 2007, the launch of the Pathogen and Microbiome Division of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (locally known as TGen North and originally directed by Dr. Paul Keim), placed the northern Arizona lab at the leading edge of a growing number of facilities across the country whose research focused on the detection and prevention of biological threats and viral outbreaks. Today, led by David Engelthaler, Ph.D., the division uses cutting-edge tools and technologies to gain what Engelthaler refers to as genomic intelligence on a host of pathogens and other microbes. In early 2020 when COVID-19 hit, the team at TGen North pivoted to emergency response mode and worked side-by-side with northern Arizona’s public health and healthcare officials. That effort involved testing, tracking and tracing the novel coronavirus in an effort to combat the pandemic on the local front. Having worked closely with Arizona’s health care, public health and tribal communities for years allowed the team to address the early patient testing and viral genomic analysis needs of COVID-19. “We put our heads down and went to work,” Engelthaler said. “At the time we didn’t know COVID would become a pandemic or the scale to which it would grow. Our only goal was to apply our expertise toward providing actionable information to this novel virus emerging from the other side of the globe.” Shortly after that, TGen became Arizona’s reference lab for COVID-19 viral genome sequencing and analysis throughout the first half of the pandemic and then worked with other sequencing laboratories, as they came on board, to coordinate findings and share results. Beyond COVID, TGen North faculty have achieved success in multiple areas, including identifying the Haitian cholera outbreak sourced to U.N. peacekeepers; investigating the deadliest medical product contamination case in U.S. history; genomically analyzing the source of a fast-growing, flesh-eating fungus that killed five people following a massive tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri; and developing next-generation tools to detect the earliest emergence of drug resistance in tuberculosis, the former number one infectious disease in the
Rebekah Dowling, laboratory technician.
Amber Whitaker, research technician.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TGEN
Jason Agundez, research associate at TGen North. world, prior to COVID. “It’s important to remember, however,” Engelthaler said. “These pathogens live in their own universe—their own ecosystems—called the microbiome. And that’s where the second half of our Division’s name comes fully into play.” To that end, TGen North has been part of microbiome science since the very early days. And armed with the latest genomic sequencing technologies they’re able to study the microbial ecosystem at depths far greater than ever before. “Through the work of our
faculty and staff in the TGen Integrated Microbiome Center we’re beginning to understand and tease apart that ecosystem to fully understand what it all means in terms of the biology of that ecosystem itself and what it means for human health,” Engelthaler said. By sequencing their genomes, scientists at TGen North are digitizing these microbial ecosystems, where knowledge, i.e., intelligence, can be gained on the interaction of these microbes during health and disease. A great example of this is TGen North’s work with City of Hope
studying patients who are going through cancer treatments and the impacts those have on their microbiome. By working closely with clinicians and researchers at the City of Hope they are able to provide a greater understanding of those changes that are taking place and how this information may help achieve a healthier state for their patients. “This is a big data science and it does take these big data approaches for us to even ask the right questions and now really begin to understand and answer those questions,” Engelthaler said.
Beyond the science, however, is the role TGen North plays in the local economy. Today, more than 60 faculty and staff members work at the TGen North location and consider Flagstaff home. The team consists of microbiologists, genomicists, epidemiologists, computational biologists, immunologists, ecologists and many more that make the science happen. “We have a motto at TGen North: ‘We have the ability; therefore we have the responsibility.’ We take that motto to heart,” Engelthaler said.
Climate scientists try to keep hope alive SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press
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In the course of a single year, University of Maine climate scientist Jacquelyn Gill lost both her mother and her stepfather. She struggled with infertility, then during research in the Arctic, she developed embolisms in both lungs, was transferred to an intensive care unit in Siberia and nearly died. She was airlifted back home and later had a hysterectomy. Then the pandemic hit. Her trials and her perseverance, she said, seemed to make her a magnet for emails and direct messages on Twitter “asking me how to be hopeful, asking me, like, what keeps me going?” Gill said she has accepted the idea that she is “everybody’s climate midwife” and coaches them to hope through action. Hope and optimism often blossom in the experts toiling in the gloomy fields of global warming, COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s disease. How climate scientists like Gill or emergency room doctors during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic cope with their depressing day-to-day work, yet remain hopeful, can offer help to ordinary people dealing with a world going off the rails, psychologists said. “I think it’s because they see a way out. They see that things can be done,” said Pennsylvania State University psychology professor Janet Swim. “Hope is seeing a pathway, even though the pathway seems far, far away.” United Nations Environment Programme Director Inger Andersen said she simply cannot do her job without being an optimist. “I do not wish to sound naive in choosing to be the ‘realistic optimist,’ but the alternative to being the realistic optimist is either to hold one’s ears and wait for doomsday or to party while the
ROBERT F. BUKATY, ASSOCIATED PRESS
University of Maine climate scientist Jacquelyn Gill examines a cone from a western pine at the Sawyer Environmental Research Center on May 4 in Orono, Maine. orchestra of the Titanic plays,” Andersen said. “I do not subscribe to either.” Dr. Kristina Goff works in the intensive care unit at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and said at times she felt overwhelmed during the pandemic. She keeps a file folder at home of “little notes that say ‘hey you made a difference.’” “I think half of the battle in my job is learning to take what could be a very overwhelming anxiety and turn it into productivity and resilience,” Goff said. “You just have to focus on these little areas where you can make a difference.” Alzheimer’s disease may be one of the bleakest diagnoses a physician can convey, one where the future can appear hopeless. Yet Dr. Ronald Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer’s research center and a man colleagues describe as optimistic and passion-
ate, doesn’t see it that way. “I don’t think it’s depressing. I don’t think it’s gloomy. It’s difficult. It’s challenging,” Petersen said. But “we’re so much better off today than five years ago, 10 years ago.” The coping technique these scientists have in common is doing something to help. The word they often use is “agency.” It’s especially true for climate researchers — tarred as doomsayers by political types who reject the science. Gill, who describes herself as a lifelong cheerleader, has also battled with depression. She said what’s key in fighting eco-anxiety is that “regular depression and regular anxiety tools work just as well. And so that’s why I tell people: ‘Be a doer. Get other there. Don’t just doomscroll.’ There are entry level ways that anyone, literally anyone, can help out. And the more we do that, ‘Oh, it actually
works,’ it turns out.” It’s not just about individual actions, like giving up air travel, or becoming a vegetarian, it’s about working together with other people in a common effort, Gill said. Individual action is helpful on climate change, but is not enough, she said. To bend the curve of rising temperatures and the buildup of heat-trapping gases, steady collective action, such as the youth climate activism movement and voting, gives true agency. “I think maybe that’s helped stave off some of this hopelessness,” she said. “I go to a scientific meeting and I look around at the thousands of scientists that are working on this. And I’m like ‘Yeah, we’re doing this.’” Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini said that, at 35, he figures it’s his relative youth that gives him hope. “When I think about would
could be, I gain a sense of optimism and create an attitude that this is something I can do something about,” Gensini said. The U.N.’s Andersen is a veteran of decades of work on ecological issues and thinks this experience has made her optimistic. “I have seen shifts on other critical environmental issues such as banning of toxic material, better air quality standards, the repair of the ozone hole, the phase-out of leaded petrol and much more,” Andersen said. “I know that hard work, underpinned by science, underpinned by strong policy and yes, underpinned by multilateral and activist action, can lead to change.” Deke Arndt, chief of climate science and services at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Center for Environmental Information, said what buoys him with an overwhelming optimism is his personal faith, and remembering all the people who have helped his family over the generations — through the Dust Bowl for his grandparents and through infertility and then neonatal issues for his son. “We’ve experienced the miracle of hands-on care from fellow human beings,” Arndt said. “You kind of spend the rest of your life trying to repay.” “Where people are suffering not through their own purchase, that makes me want to recommit as a scientist and a Catholic,” Arndt said. “We’ve got to do as much as we can.” What’s more, Gill and several others said, the science tells them that it is not game over for Earth. “The work that I do inherently lends me a sense of agency,” Gill said. “As a paleo-ecologist (who studies the past) and climatologist, I have a better sense of Earth’s resilience than a lot of people do.”
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| Sunday, May 29, 2022
Special Section 2
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