#101: Our Uninhabitable Earth

OK, Animal Lovers, promise not to unsubscribe because I’ve highlighted this article, which suggests that it’s possible that therapy animals are not, in fact, providing therapy. The jury is still out about whether interacting with animals results in lower stress and anxiety. Some studies suggest a moderate positive effect, but there’s nothing yet that concludes causation over correlation. But even if science says no to comfort animals, what’s the problem of letting them inside grocery stores, restaurants, movie theaters, concert halls, museums, airplanes? (For all you naysayers out there, you’ll love this article from 2014.)

We learned in high school that Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond to get away from the bustle of city life, to live deliberately in nature. Perhaps he was the 19th-century version of Marie Kondo? “Do not trouble yourself much to get new things,” he wrote. “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.” This image of Thoreau — spartan and austere — has driven for 200 years our American construct of gritty, rugged individualism. Except this image is not true. Thoreau wasn’t alone at Walden. There was his neighbor Brister Freeman, a former slave who fought in the Revolutionary War. There was his neighbor Hugh Coyle, a poor Irish ditchdigger, new to the country, and as a result, an outcast. And of course, before Thoreau arrived, hundreds Native Americans lived at Walden Pond before they were killed or pushed away. When we believe that Thoreau lived alone in the woods, we cling to a myth that discredits the more nuanced reality of the American story.

Last week I unveiled my fascination with oranges. This article — about the orange harvest in California — is less gloomy but not exactly hopeful. We learn that each tree holds 1,100 oranges, that they’re picked by hand 16 at a time by men climbing up and down ladders, earning not by the hour but by the bin, that they’re processed by women earning minimum wage, that they’re classified “choice” or “premium,” the former sold in American stores and ones without blemishes shipped to Asia, that rising labor costs are encouraging orange growers to invest in technology that will eliminate jobs, all to make sure that the oranges we buy remain as cheap as they are sweet and juicy. (Also noteworthy: This piece is written in the first-person plural — as in, from the point of view of the oranges themselves.)