They turned up in shifts, all through the course of lockdown: mice, ants, weevils, moths, a fox and, on one unhappy occasion, a magpie in the kitchen. I have been obliged to show the door to all manner of wildlife, with varying degrees of success. The magpie was eager to leave. The ants less so. The moths are still with us.
It’s easy to get angry with household pests, and sometimes – on encountering a particularly rapacious mouse, say – it’s possible to wish them great harm. But most people, I suspect, would rather be as humane as possible when getting rid of invaders. And even when kindness can’t stop you killing things, squeamishness often will. Unfortunately, many pest control products still associate effectiveness with lethality. The ant trap I bought says it “destroys ants and their nests!” I really just wanted them off the worktop. Is it possible to keep your home pest-free using only humane, nonlethal means?
The first thing I had to learn about humane pest control is that the people who promote it don’t like the word pest. Rodents and insects are all wildlife, with a vital part to play in our ecosystem. “Commonly, people call them pests, but they have the same right to live on this planet as we do,” says Laura-Lisa Hellwig, campaigns manager at the vegan charity Viva!. “And some of them have been here for a much longer time than we have. Really, we should find a peaceful way to live together instead of eradicating or cruelly killing some of them.”
Step one, then, is to check if you can simply coexist with your would-be pest.
“When people see, you know, a bee nest in their guttering on the side of their house, the first thing they think is: ‘We need to find a way to control that,’” says Kevin Newell, the founder of Humane Wildlife Solutions, a pioneering nonlethal wildlife control company based in Scotland. He is speaking to me by phone over the peeping of recently rescued baby lesser black-backed gulls, which are temporarily living in his office before being rehomed at a wildlife refuge.
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Tim Dowling … ‘It’s easy to get angry with household pests.’ Photo by Philippe TURPIN/Getty Images
Our descendants will look back on this time in human history with a mixture of confusion and disgust. Americans spend around 90 percent of their time in indoor spaces, which we heat by burning fossil fuels that also warm the planet and sully the air of our homes. Our descendants will be especially confused because for years we’ve had easy access to a cleaner, more efficient alternative: the fully electric heat pump.
At long last, though, the humble heat pump is exploding in popularity. Unlike a boiler or furnace, which burn fossil fuels to produce heat, this device transfers heat through an outdoor unit into the indoor space. (It looks a bit like a traditional air conditioner.) In the winter, a heat pump extracts heat from outdoor air, but it can be reversed in the summer to pump heat out, providing cooling. Exchanging heat in this way is much more efficient than generating it.
Last year, 4 million heat pumps were installed in the US, up from 1.7 million in 2012. Europe, too, is coming around to the heat pump, with sales increasing 28 percent in Germany in 2021 and 60 percent in Poland. That’s no small feat, given the global pandemic slowdown, and it’s just the beginning of growth, especially with Europe’s push for energy independence from Russia amid the war in Ukraine.
“Heat pumps are a few years behind electric vehicles but really deserve similar attention and could deliver very sizable reductions in emissions if we deployed them much more rapidly,” says Jan Rosenow, director of European programs at the Regulatory Assistance Project, an NGO dedicated to the transition to clean energy.
Here’s how heat pumps work, how governments can use them to reduce emissions, and how you can get your hands on one.
Moving Heat, Not Making It
A heat pump works on the same principle as a refrigerator, which keeps your food cold not by pumping cool air in, but by pumping warm air out. The heat you feel on the outside of the machine is actually being transferred away. Similarly, a heat pump can cool a building by moving hot air out. Or, in the winter, a heat pump can warm a building by operating as a sort of “reverse refrigerator,” extracting heat from even cold outdoor air and bringing it inside. (That’s putting it simply—the engineering involved is rather complex.)
Natural gas is a fossil fuel. Like other fossil fuels such as coal and oil, natural gas forms from the plants, animals, and microorganisms that lived millions of years ago.
There are several different theories to explain how fossil fuels are formed. The most prevalent theory is that they form underground, under intense conditions. As plants, animals, and microorganisms decompose, they are gradually covered by layers of soil, sediment, and sometimes rock. Over millions of years, the organic matter is compressed. As the organic matter moves deeper into Earth’s crust, it encounters higher and higher temperatures.
The combination of compression and high temperature causes the carbon bonds in the organic matter to break down. This molecular breakdown produces thermogenicmethane—natural gas. Methane, probably the most abundant organic compound on Earth, is made of carbon and hydrogen (CH4).
Natural gas deposits are often found near oil deposits. Deposits of natural gas close to Earth’s surface are usually dwarfed by nearby oil deposits. Deeper deposits—formed at higher temperatures and under more pressure—have more natural gas than oil. The deepest deposits can be made up of pure natural gas.
Natural gas does not have to be formed deep underground, however. It can also be formed by tiny microorganisms called methanogens. Methanogens live in the intestines of animals (including humans) and in low-oxygen areas near the surface of Earth. Landfills, for example, are full of decomposing matter that methanogens break down into a type of methane called biogenic methane. The process of methanogens creating natural gas (methane) is called methanogenesis.
Although most biogenic methane escapes into the atmosphere, there are new technologies being created to contain and harvest this potential energy source.
Thermogenic methane—the natural gas formed deep beneath Earth’s surface—can also escape into the atmosphere. Some of the gas is able to rise through permeable matter, such as porous rock, and eventually dissipate into the atmosphere.
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Photograph by David Cupp: Burgan Field/ The Burgan oil field, in Kuwait, is one of the richest oil fields in the world. Natural gas, some of which is seen burning here, is often found near deposits of oil and coal. Oil, coal, and natural gas are fossil fuels.
Take only pictures, leave only footprints. We’ve all heard it, but how many of us actually heed it? Today, with more than 1 billion people traveling every year, it’s imperative for frequent travelers to engage in sustainable practices that tread lightly on the Earth. To that end, a multitude of useful apps and websites have emerged to help us be greener globe-trotters: before, during, and after the journey. The following digital resources feature functions that range from finding flights with the lowest C02 emissions to locating sustainably sourced, seasonal food. What’s more—each of these environmentally friendly tools is totally free to use.
Locavore
If you like eating local, Locavore will be your friend for life. This free iOS app uses your phone’s GPS to help you determine which fruits and vegetables are in season wherever you are in the world. In addition, it pinpoints the location of nearby farmers’ markets, farms open to the public, and community-supported agricultural venues. The mobile app also offers quick and easy recipes for an extra fee and prompts users to share their finds on Facebook, inspiring other farm-to-table travelers to join the locavore movement.
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Sustainability-minded apps and websites help reduce the environmental impact of travel by making it easier to find fuel-efficient flights, seek out eco-friendly hotels, and calculate carbon emissions in real-time. Illustration courtesy of alexacrib / Shutterstock.
I’ve struggled with insomnia nearly all of my adult life.
Typically, I’m able to fall asleep within an hour or two, but often it takes much longer, and the anxiety about not sleeping has made it so much worse. I’ve accepted that this is something I just have to live with.
A few years ago, I started wearing a sleep mask and turning on cable news so that the mindless banter in the background would distract me from my thoughts long enough to pass out. This isn’t the wisest strategy, but it has, occasionally, worked. Lately, I’ve started listening to meditation apps that play sounds of waves crashing or fire crackling.
If any of this resonates with you, you might be interested in a new book by Henry Nicholls called Sleepyhead: The Neuroscience of a Good Night’s Rest. Nicholls, a science journalist in England, chose the topic of sleep in part because of his personal experience with narcolepsy, a rare neurological disorder that impacts the brain’s ability to control sleep-wake cycles. So he decided to write a book about how to sleep better.
Nicholls surveyed the latest medical research on sleep, interviewed many of the researchers involved, and underwent intense sleep therapy to treat his own condition.
I spoke to him recently about what he learned and about some of the practical things you can do to get a better night’s sleep.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What’s the key to a good night’s sleep?
Henry Nicholls
The simplest thing is to work on something called “sleep stability,” which is very common advice in insomnia clinics and something my physician, Dr. David O’Regan, recommended as part of my cognitive behavioral therapy course for insomnia.
In theory, Nate works 40 hours a week in the operations department at a major fintech company. In reality, Nate works one hour a day at most. He moseys over to his computer whenever he gets an alert on his phone that he’s got a task to complete. Otherwise, he spends most of the day doing, basically, whatever he feels — he sleeps in, he watches TV, he does household chores. His only real restriction is that he can’t stray too far from home in the event he is needed for something.
“I don’t have a problem with being asked to do work; it’s just I’m not really being asked,” he says. Maybe he could take more initiative and try to take on more, but he gets good performance reviews and raises as it is, so he figures, why bother? Plus, it’s not like he can waltz up to his boss to announce there’s no real business reason for his existence. “How do I initiate that conversation that’s, ‘Hey, I haven’t been doing much of anything this whole time, I need more to do’? You don’t really want to draw attention to it,” says Nate, which is a pseudonym. Vox granted him anonymity to speak for this story for obvious reasons, as we did all of the workers interviewed.
Strongly suspecting that a certain person isn’t doing much, or not nearly enough to fill up what is ostensibly an eight-hour day, seems to be a near-universal work experience. Many people have also, at some point in time, been that less-than-occupied worker. Sometimes, it’s intentional. Other times, like in Nate’s case, that’s just how the corporate cards have been dealt.
These jobless employed are a persistent presence in the working world, their existence a bug that’s become a feature. There’s a percentage of every job that’s bullshit, and in their case, that’s 90 percent, minimum. “It’s not good for the culture. It can engender huge resentment from the person’s colleagues, especially if they themselves are overworked, and you do see that combination a lot,” says Alison Green, a career columnist and expert who runs the website Ask a Manager. “It also raises questions for people about whoever is supposed to be managing that person. Are they incompetent? Do they suck at managing?”
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Your suspicions are right: That one guy at work really doesn’t do anything. A-R-T-U-R via Getty Images/iStockphoto
If companies want to leave Russia, the president is setting the terms — in ways that benefit his government, his elites, and his war.
Soon after Russian troops invaded his country, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, made a plea to Western companies: “Leave Russia,” he said. “Make sure that the Russians do not receive a single penny.”
President Vladimir V. Putin had other plans.
Mr. Putin has turned the exits of major Western companies into a windfall for Russia’s loyal elite and the state itself. He has forced companies wishing to sell to do so at fire-sale prices. He has limited sales to buyers anointed by Moscow. Sometimes he has seized firms outright.
A New York Times investigation traced how Mr. Putin has turned an expected misfortune into an enrichment scheme. Western companies that have announced departures have declared more than $103 billion in losses since the start of the war, according to a Times analysis of financial reports. Mr. Putin has squeezed companies for as much of that wealth as possible by dictating the terms of their departure.
He has also subjected those exits to ever-increasing taxes, generating at least $1.25 billion in the past year for Russia’s war chest.
“Go for a walk,” it said, the no-nonsense command perched in a prominent spot above Katherine May’s desk.
Ms. May, a British author who wrote the best-selling memoir “Wintering” about a fallow and difficult period of her life, had come across more hard times during the height of the pandemic. She was bored, restless, burned out. Her usual ritual — walking — had fallen away, along with other activities that used to bring her pleasure: collecting pebbles, swimming in the sea, savoring a book.
“There was nothing that made the world feel interesting to me,” Ms. May said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “I felt like my head was kind of full and empty at the same time.”
In Ms. May’s latest book, “Enchantment,” she describes how a simple series of actions, like writing that note, helped her to discover little things that filled her with wonder and awe — and, in turn, made her feel alive again.
“You have to keep pursuing it until you get that tingle that tells you that you’ve found something that’s magical to you,” Ms. May said. “It’s trial and error, isn’t it?”
We asked Ms. May for tips on how you can do the same.
Commit to noticing the world around you
“We have to find the humility to be open to experience every single day and to allow ourselves to learn something,” Ms. May wrote in “Enchantment.”
This, she acknowledges, “is easier said than done.”
“Let yourself go past those thoughts that tell you it’s silly or pointless or a waste of time, or you’re far too busy to possibly do this,” Ms. May said during the interview. “Instead give yourself permission to want that in the first place — to crave that contact with the sacred, and that feeling of being able to commune with something that’s bigger than you are.”
Entering a state of wonder is akin to using a muscle, Ms. May said. Put yourself in that mindset more often and it gradually becomes easier.
First, you must “give in to the fascination” that you feel in everyday moments. For example, Ms. May gets “really excited” when she sees light dance across the surface of her coffee.
The holiday season is a time of magic, wonder, and, for some of us, an absolutely overwhelming onslaught of toys from well-intentioned relatives who, notably, will not be the ones tasked with hunting down the one missing piece of the 57-piece Bluey set at 9 p.m. on a school night. If the thought of finding a place for even more stuff gives you hives, you’re not alone. “This is actually a very common thing that comes up around gift-giving, and it is very difficult,” says Jody Baumstein, LCSW, a therapist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. However, asking family and friends who want to give your children presents at the holidays for experience gifts instead of toys is completely reasonable thing to do, she explains. “People don’t want to bring up boundary-related conversations because they think that they’re going to be perceived as negative or difficult, but the reality is, healthy relationships actually have very, very good boundaries.”
It can be hard to accept that it’s not selfish to have preferences about what people give to your kid, but Baumstein says it’s essential to really believe that your feelings are valid before you try to approach a relative about asking for experience gifts instead of stuff this year. “A lot of times people feel guilty. They think I shouldn’t feel this way. It’s nice that so-and-so wants to show up for my kids,” she says. “But, two things can be true at the same time. You can be grateful and feel like the gift-giving is a little off-base.”
How do you ask for experiences instead of toys?
Conversations about gifts can be simple, kind, specific, and direct, Baumstein says. When people are uncomfortable, they can start to talk in circles, but she encourages simplicity and directness, as well as understanding that you don’t need the relative, in-law, or friend to completely understand why you are asking for this. Instead, they just need to respect and hear your wishes. “We don’t need agreement, we need alignment. And that’s a huge difference,” she explains. “We don’t need to agree that this is the right way, what we need is alignment about what you’re going to do for your family in your home.”
People often think they know what causes chronic depression. Surveys indicate that more than 80% of the public blames a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. That idea is widespread in pop psychology and cited in research papers and medical textbooks. Listening to Prozac, a book that describes the life-changing value of treating depression with medications that aim to correct this imbalance, spent months on the New York Times bestseller list.
The unbalanced brain chemical in question is serotonin, an important neurotransmitter with fabled “feel-good” effects. Serotonin helps regulate systems in the brain that control everything from body temperature and sleep to sex drive and hunger. For decades, it has also been touted as the pharmaceutical MVP for fighting depression. Widely prescribed medications like Prozac (fluoxetine) are designed to treat chronic depression by raising serotonin levels.
Yet the causes of depression go far beyond serotonin deficiency. Clinical studies have repeatedly concluded that the role of serotonin in depression has been overstated. Indeed, the entire premise of the chemical-imbalance theory may be wrong, despite the relief that Prozac seems to bring to many patients.
A literature review that appeared in Molecular Psychiatry in July was the latest and perhaps loudest death knell for the serotonin hypothesis, at least in its simplest form. An international team of scientists led by Joanna Moncrieff of University College London screened 361 papers from six areas of research and carefully evaluated 17 of them. They found no convincing evidence that lower levels of serotonin caused or were even associated with depression. People with depression didn’t reliably seem to have less serotonin activity than people without the disorder. Experiments in which researchers artificially lowered the serotonin levels of volunteers didn’t consistently cause depression. Genetic studies also seemed to rule out any connection between genes affecting serotonin levels and depression, even when the researchers tried to consider stress as a possible cofactor.
“If you were still of the opinion that it was simply a chemical imbalance of serotonin, then yeah, it’s pretty damning,” said Taylor Braund, a clinical neuroscientist and postdoctoral research fellow at the Black Dog Institute in Australia who was not involved in the new study. (“The black dog” was Winston Churchill’s term for his own dark moods, which some historians speculate were depression.)
The realization that serotonin deficits by themselves probably don’t cause depression has left scientists wondering what does. The evidence suggests that there may not be a simple answer. In fact, it’s leading neuropsychiatric researchers to rethink what depression might be.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Tim Dowling … ‘It’s easy to get angry with household pests.’ Photo by Philippe TURPIN/Getty Images
Photograph by David Cupp: Burgan Field/ The Burgan oil field, in Kuwait, is one of the richest oil fields in the world. Natural gas, some of which is seen burning here, is often found near deposits of oil and coal. Oil, coal, and natural gas are fossil fuels.
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Experience Gifts
Harol Bustos for Quanta Magazine
James' World 2 