Latest news with #AppalachianMountains
Gizmodo
5 hours ago
- Science
- Gizmodo
Weirdly Hot Rocks in New England Traced to 80-Million-Year-Old Greenland Rift
Roughly 124 miles (200 kilometers) beneath the Appalachian Mountains in New England lies the aptly named Northern Appalachian Anomaly (NAA), a mysterious 218-mile-wide (350-km) region of unusually hot rock. Researchers have long believed that the NAA resulted from the plate tectonic movement that broke North America off northwest Africa 180 million years ago. In a new study published Tuesday in the journal Geology, however, a team of international researchers argue that the hot, subsurface rocks are related to when North America and Greenland split near the Labrador Sea between 90 and 80 million years ago. The NAA 'lies beneath part of the continent that's been tectonically quiet for 180 million years, so the idea it was just a leftover from when the landmass broke apart never quite stacked up,' Tom Gernon, lead author of the study and an Earth scientist at the University of Southampton, said in a university statement. To reach this conclusion, the team used advanced computer simulations, seismic tomography data (like an ultrasound, but for Earth's interior), and tectonic plate reconstructions. According to the study, the NAA may have developed around 1,119 miles (1,800 km) from its current position and, at the rate of around 12 miles (20 km) per million years, slowly moved southwestward to where it sits now. 'Our research suggests it's part of a much larger, slow-moving process deep underground that could potentially help explain why mountain ranges like the Appalachians are still standing,' Gernon added. The slow-moving process is the team's previously proposed 'mantle wave' theory, which hypothesizes that hot, dense chunks of material detach from the base of tectonic plates after continents separate, like blobs in a lava lamp. 'Heat at the base of a continent can weaken and remove part of its dense root, making the continent lighter and more buoyant, like a hot air balloon rising after dropping its ballast,' Gernon explained. 'This would have caused the ancient mountains to be further uplifted over the past few million years.' As the blobs slowly 'drip' from the lithosphere—the layer including Earth's crust and upper part of the mantle—hotter mantle rocks rise to fill up the space, which creates a thermal anomaly. The same team's earlier work also revealed that these blobs can move over time. 'The feature we see beneath New England is very likely one of these drips, which originated far from where it now sits,' said Sascha Brune, study co-author and head of the Geodynamic Modelling Section at GFZ, Germany's national research center for Earth sciences. According to the team, the center of the NAA will likely move under New York in the next 15 million years. 'The idea that rifting of continents can cause drips and cells of circulating hot rock at depth that spread thousands of kilometres inland makes us rethink what we know about the edges of continents both today and in Earth's deep past,' admitted Derek Keir, another co-author of the study and a tectonics expert at the University of Southampton and the University of Florence. The researchers argue that their mantle wave theory could explain a similar anomalous hot zone under north-central Greenland—basically a reflection of the NAA on the other side of the Labrador Sea. The study is ultimately a reminder to never judge a book by its cover—or the Earth by its surface-level tectonic activity.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘The damage is terrifying': Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel
In the spotless kitchen of a white clapboard house in the Appalachian mountains, a retired deacon, a regional jail counsellor and I form an impromptu book club. The novel under discussion is Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which is set in this area, Lee County, Virginia, during the 1990s, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. I say that I loved the novel, that it was vivid and brilliant, heart-warming and tragic. Their reaction is more complex – there's a real sadness behind it. Julie Montgomery-Barber, the jail counsellor, tells me she found the book 'hard to read'. The Rev Nancy Hobbs agrees that reading it was painful, 'because I felt like: I knew these people. At every level, from foster care to the football coaches to Demon. I knew Demon.' Hobbs and Montgomery-Barber sit on the board of Higher Ground, the recovery residence recently established by Kingsolver using royalties from the novel. We are viewing the house together as part of its official launch party, on a sunny Saturday in June. The house is a bright and welcoming space. It provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery. Some of its residents have come directly from prison; one was living in a tent before she moved in; current ages range from 33 to 65 years old. Higher Ground gives residents a roof over their heads and supports them in myriad ways, from transport to AA appointments (most have lost their driving licences), to access to education and help with finding employment. The women can stay for between six months and two years. It opened in January and will be at full capacity later this month, when its eighth resident arrives, though there are plans for expansion. It is the first such residence for women in the county, explains Joie Cantrell, a public health nurse and the board's co-director. She is, she says, 'ecstatic' to be part of the project. So often, when people recover from addiction, they are sent 'right back into the same situation. We were setting them up for failure.' Not here, says resident Syara Parsell, 35, who came to Lee County from prison in 2019. Born and raised in Connecticut, her mother drove her over here, she says, in the hope that the change of location would help her overcome a heroin addiction. Instead, she 'started getting high in this town', and was incarcerated again. She found Higher Ground when she was discharged in February and will be six months sober this month. Thanks to the house, she says, 'my life has changed. My mentality has changed. I am truly sober.' She believes Higher Ground will give hope to others in active addiction nearby. They can see that 'it gets better – and I would have never said that. I've been at some low points. I never thought I could do this.' The launch event includes an afternoon of free Appalachian food and music in the nearby Pennington Gap Community Center, where Kingsolver stands beaming, with her husband Steven at her side, hugging guests and posing for pictures. Later, that evening, she takes to the stage of Lee theatre, an attractive mid-century playhouse next door, and ushers the centre's staff and board members on stage to rapturous applause. Then, with spotlights illuminating the distinctive streak of white in her hair, she tells a largely local audience why she set her story here, in Lee County, the former coal mining region ravaged by addiction after Purdue Pharma flooded the area with its supposedly non-addictive new wonder drug, OxyContin, in the 1990s. Kingsolver, who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, tells the audience that the area's struggles 'are things we are supposed to be ashamed of – but they are not our fault'. Rather, she says, they are the legacy of 'big companies who came here to take something away'. First that was timber, then coal, 'then they came to harvest our pain'. It's a rousing speech which turns emotional when she interviews some residents on stage. Nikki is now studying for her GED (the equivalent of a high school diploma) and says she feels, for the first time, as though she has kin. 'I really got to know the girls in the house, and when you don't have a family, and you really get close to them, that's your new family.' I meet Kingsolver the next day at her hotel, a 40-minute drive along open roads in the green mountains, past clapboard houses with US flags on their porches, churches with white steeples, corrugated iron side-of-road shops and cows chewing the cud on hillside farms. She wears a patterned red top and bootcut jeans, and is still in high spirits from the previous evening, telling me proudly, 'There wasn't a dry eye in the house!' That it has all come together is 'amazing', she says. She could not have imagined any of this happening when she was writing the novel, a retelling of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. 'I didn't have any idea Demon would bring home so much bacon,' she says. 'I never presume success. I write about things that can make people uncomfortable, that ask them to examine their prejudices and think about the world in a new way. I never assume that's going to be marketable.' Kingsolver has been a towering figure in American culture for decades, author of acclaimed novels including The Poisonwood Bible, her 1998 epic about a family of American missionaries in the Belgian Congo, and The Lacuna, for which she won the 2010 Women's prize for fiction. She has frequently written about the Appalachian region which, she says, is the only place that feels like home. She grew up in rural Kentucky, and, after a stint as a journalist in Arizona, has spent most of her adult life on a farm in Washington County, southwest Virginia. Her longstanding literary preoccupations – nature and the web of relationships between people and systems – derive from growing up 'around wildness and woodlands', and from living in a rural community, through which she became aware of 'the interconnectedness of our every ambition and accomplishment'. Rural life and the opioid crisis have not been sufficiently represented in fiction, she says. 'Appalachian life in general has not been sufficiently represented. People don't know the complexity and the nuance.' Appalachians represent 'ecosystems of people, the people in need and the people who give; the Memaws (grandmothers) who take care of all the kids.' She dismisses one infamous account – vice president JD Vance's 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy – as a book that was 'really all about himself, how he got out and made good, and the people that stay behind, well, are just lazy'. Appalachian culture, she says, is about modesty and self-reliance. 'If he were a real Appalachian, he wouldn't tell that story.' Fittingly, then, she says it was Demon's voice that made the novel so compelling to many, and 'I thank Mr Dickens for that. My hesitation with this book, and the trouble I had getting started with it for years, was the stereotypes I was working against. People have ideas about Appalachians, and they have ideas about what so-called addicts are like. By telling the story from the point of view of an orphaned child, readers are immediately sympathetic.' It helps that Demon is so loveable: 'He has moxie, he's so funny. So mad and profane, but he has such a good heart. People want to adopt him.' Even by Kingsolver's standards, Demon Copperhead's success was 'of a different magnitude'. As well as the Pulitzer, she became the only woman to win the Women's prize twice. Her sales were in a 'new stratosphere'. She tells me she has given much of her income away for years. 'Material success came gradually. So I had time to learn how to draw a cap on what we need as a family and what we can do with the rest.' So, when 'that first royalty cheque came in and our eyes all popped wide open, I thought: 'I could do something significant with this.'' After learning from local residents about the desperate need for recovery residences, she bought a building and set about assembling a local team. Many Lee County locals have become deeply involved, from the community college offering one resident free electrical and carpentry training to the centre's 83-year-old neighbour Larry, who 'just kind of adopted these ladies', as Kingsolver puts it, and frequently gives them lifts to appointments. Community involvement is crucial, she says. 'Charity is a very loaded concept. It involves a power imbalance. It is a person standing in a position of privilege saying: I will give this gift to you, and implicit is: 'to help you become more like me'. Everything about that is odious to me.' For all the successes, of both the centre and the book, there has been some local pushback. 'Initially, and maybe still, specifically in Lee County, some people felt like: 'Why did you have to name us?' Nobody told me to my face, but I heard other people sort of sniping about it. I think it's pride. Very privileged people who would really rather not think about their neighbours who are struggling and suffering.' One such naysayer made his opinion clear when Kingsolver tried to donate a set of books to Lee County High School, Demon's alma mater, at the request of an English teacher. 'Between opening the trunk of the car and getting the books to the classroom, they mysteriously vanished,' she says. After some investigation Kingsolver appealed to the school board, telling them how 'life-changing' she would have found it, as a girl in Kentucky, to have read a novel written nearby. The books miraculously reappeared in the principal's office. She is convinced that the perpetrator had not read the book but 'had a sense that it was set in Lee County and it talked about bad things. We can't have people knowing that bad stuff happens here. You know, that wonderful denial that keeps people afloat.' Pride, denial and shame are longstanding Kingsolver fascinations. She says that the archetypal American story of the lone hero pulling themselves up by their bootstraps 'is just bullshit. We have classes in this country. We have class barriers. There are places you can be born that you're never going to get out of.' Still, she says, that myth is powerful: it 'brainwashes' people; it can lead to self-blame. Shame, she believes, is intrinsic to Trump's success, something she explores in one memorable Demon Copperhead passage addressing the word 'deplorable', a reference to Hillary Clinton's infamous description of Trump voters as a 'basket of deplorables'. 'I spent more worry on that word than perhaps any other single word in the book,' she says. 'I took it out, put it back in because, I mean, I love Hillary. I voted for her. I think it was so unfair that one sentence was taken out of context. But, also, there are people in my neighbourhood driving around with trucks that say: 'I'm a deplorable.' It has become so easy for urban people to dismiss all of rural America, to paint us all with the brush of backward, dumb – that was toxic. I'm sure she read this book, and I'm sure she didn't like that I used that word, but I didn't mean it personally. It's just awfully important to get it across that, as Demon says, we have cable. We know what you're saying about us – and we're mad about it.' Trump understands this, she says. He's the guy who says: 'I'm not like them. I'm not a fancy educated guy. I'm one of you. That's what appealed to people. Shame is such a part of this. He got under people's sense of shame and found other places to put it.' She lives in Trump country, and says she understands how he 'hooked' so many people, but she never demonises Trump voters herself, describing her neighbours as 'some of the most generous, kindhearted people you will ever meet'. She has no kind words for the man himself. His presidency is, she says, 'a circus. That's too kind a word for it. Circuses make you laugh. This one makes you cry. It's stunning how much damage one ignorant man can do.' She points out that Trump's 'so-called Big Beautiful Bill' could be devastating for the region, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area. 'The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.' Does she think her Trump-voting neighbours will change their allegiance if such terrors come to pass? 'Will they connect the dots when our hospital closes? I don't even know the answer to that,' she says, shaking her head, fearing that the TV and radio stations that told them to vote for Trump in the first place will 'come up with some other reason why your hospital closed. For those of us who are in the information business, that's a depressing subject.' She writes to her Republican congressman every other day to say: 'You studied history. You know better than this. Come on!' She is seethingly angry with the administration 'because the Congress people do know the law. Pretty much all of them come from wealthy backgrounds. They know what all this means, and they're not standing up to him. I just want them to grow a spine.' She is not thrilled with the Democrats, either. 'I'm very critical of both political parties in this country in terms of how beholden they are to corporate interests. Corporations run this country. It's really just a question of how much or how little they are willing to spare for the public good. A lot of us have been reading about late capitalism for a long time, and now we're seeing it.' In the long term, she says she believes in the Martin Luther King Jr quote that 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice'. Until we start to see that bend, good news comes locally, at least: Higher Ground is already growing, she tells me, with the acquisition of a neighbouring building, which the women will run as a thrift shop. She hopes that the project will expand further, will help more people. She plans to be involved for the long run and hopes to do whatever she can to help in 'destigmatising this disease and bringing the community into the project of supporting our lost citizens'. She is also currently adapting one of her books – she can't say which – for film and is in the middle of writing a new novel. Meanwhile, Demon lives on. His spirit is in the recovery house, whose residents Kingsolver describes as 'the mothers of real-life Demon Copperheads'. Unlike their fictional counterpart, these women have hope of getting back on their feet, thanks to a house paid for, in large part, by book lovers – many of whom have continued contributing. When Kingsolver announced the initiative on her Instagram page, her 150,000 followers donated more than $50,000 in cash in a week, and purchased reams of items from an Amazon wish list. The house's patio seating was gifted by a book club in Switzerland. Demon also lives on in readers' brains. 'Readers still ask me: 'Did he get his happy ending?' I tell them: 'He's yours. Now, you get to imagine whatever happy ending you like for him.'' Faber has reissued Barbara Kingsolver's titles The Lacuna, Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible this summer; for more information on Higher Ground see In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA's National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘The damage is terrifying': Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel
In the spotless kitchen of a white clapboard house in the Appalachian mountains, a retired deacon, a regional jail counsellor and I form an impromptu book club. The novel under discussion is Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which is set in this area, Lee County, Virginia, during the 1990s, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. I say that I loved the novel, that it was vivid and brilliant, heart-warming and tragic. Their reaction is more complex – there's a real sadness behind it. Julie Montgomery-Barber, the jail counsellor, tells me she found the book 'hard to read'. The Rev Nancy Hobbs agrees that reading it was painful, 'because I felt like: I knew these people. At every level, from foster care to the football coaches to Demon. I knew Demon.' Hobbs and Montgomery-Barber sit on the board of Higher Ground, the recovery residence recently established by Kingsolver using royalties from the novel. We are viewing the house together as part of its official launch party, on a sunny Saturday in June. The house is a bright and welcoming space. It provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery. Some of its residents have come directly from prison; one was living in a tent before she moved in; current ages range from 33 to 65 years old. Higher Ground gives residents a roof over their heads and supports them in myriad ways, from transport to AA appointments (most have lost their driving licences), to access to education and help with finding employment. The women can stay for between six months and two years. It opened in January and will be at full capacity later this month, when its eighth resident arrives, though there are plans for expansion. It is the first such residence for women in the county, explains Joie Cantrell, a public health nurse and the board's co-director. She is, she says, 'ecstatic' to be part of the project. So often, when people recover from addiction, they are sent 'right back into the same situation. We were setting them up for failure.' Not here, says resident Syara Parsell, 35, who came to Lee County from prison in 2019. Born and raised in Connecticut, her mother drove her over here, she says, in the hope that the change of location would help her overcome a heroin addiction. Instead, she 'started getting high in this town', and was incarcerated again. She found Higher Ground when she was discharged in February and will be six months sober this month. Thanks to the house, she says, 'my life has changed. My mentality has changed. I am truly sober.' She believes Higher Ground will give hope to others in active addiction nearby. They can see that 'it gets better – and I would have never said that. I've been at some low points. I never thought I could do this.' The launch event includes an afternoon of free Appalachian food and music in the nearby Pennington Gap Community Center, where Kingsolver stands beaming, with her husband Steven at her side, hugging guests and posing for pictures. Later, that evening, she takes to the stage of Lee theatre, an attractive mid-century playhouse next door, and ushers the centre's staff and board members on stage to rapturous applause. Then, with spotlights illuminating the distinctive streak of white in her hair, she tells a largely local audience why she set her story here, in Lee County, the former coal mining region ravaged by addiction after Purdue Pharma flooded the area with its supposedly non-addictive new wonder drug, OxyContin, in the 1990s. Kingsolver, who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, tells the audience that the area's struggles 'are things we are supposed to be ashamed of – but they are not our fault'. Rather, she says, they are the legacy of 'big companies who came here to take something away'. First that was timber, then coal, 'then they came to harvest our pain'. It's a rousing speech which turns emotional when she interviews some residents on stage. Nikki is now studying for her GED (the equivalent of a high school diploma) and says she feels, for the first time, as though she has kin. 'I really got to know the girls in the house, and when you don't have a family, and you really get close to them, that's your new family.' I meet Kingsolver the next day at her hotel, a 40-minute drive along open roads in the green mountains, past clapboard houses with US flags on their porches, churches with white steeples, corrugated iron side-of-road shops and cows chewing the cud on hillside farms. She wears a patterned red top and bootcut jeans, and is still in high spirits from the previous evening, telling me proudly, 'There wasn't a dry eye in the house!' That it has all come together is 'amazing', she says. She could not have imagined any of this happening when she was writing the novel, a retelling of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. 'I didn't have any idea Demon would bring home so much bacon,' she says. 'I never presume success. I write about things that can make people uncomfortable, that ask them to examine their prejudices and think about the world in a new way. I never assume that's going to be marketable.' Kingsolver has been a towering figure in American culture for decades, author of acclaimed novels including The Poisonwood Bible, her 1998 epic about a family of American missionaries in the Belgian Congo, and The Lacuna, for which she won the 2010 Women's prize for fiction. She has frequently written about the Appalachian region which, she says, is the only place that feels like home. She grew up in rural Kentucky, and, after a stint as a journalist in Arizona, has spent most of her adult life on a farm in Washington County, southwest Virginia. Her longstanding literary preoccupations – nature and the web of relationships between people and systems – derive from growing up 'around wildness and woodlands', and from living in a rural community, through which she became aware of 'the interconnectedness of our every ambition and accomplishment'. Rural life and the opioid crisis have not been sufficiently represented in fiction, she says. 'Appalachian life in general has not been sufficiently represented. People don't know the complexity and the nuance.' Appalachians represent 'ecosystems of people, the people in need and the people who give; the Memaws (grandmothers) who take care of all the kids.' She dismisses one infamous account – vice president JD Vance's 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy – as a book that was 'really all about himself, how he got out and made good, and the people that stay behind, well, are just lazy'. Appalachian culture, she says, is about modesty and self-reliance. 'If he were a real Appalachian, he wouldn't tell that story.' Fittingly, then, she says it was Demon's voice that made the novel so compelling to many, and 'I thank Mr Dickens for that. My hesitation with this book, and the trouble I had getting started with it for years, was the stereotypes I was working against. People have ideas about Appalachians, and they have ideas about what so-called addicts are like. By telling the story from the point of view of an orphaned child, readers are immediately sympathetic.' It helps that Demon is so loveable: 'He has moxie, he's so funny. So mad and profane, but he has such a good heart. People want to adopt him.' Even by Kingsolver's standards, Demon Copperhead's success was 'of a different magnitude'. As well as the Pulitzer, she became the only woman to win the Women's prize twice. Her sales were in a 'new stratosphere'. She tells me she has given much of her income away for years. 'Material success came gradually. So I had time to learn how to draw a cap on what we need as a family and what we can do with the rest.' So, when 'that first royalty cheque came in and our eyes all popped wide open, I thought: 'I could do something significant with this.'' After learning from local residents about the desperate need for recovery residences, she bought a building and set about assembling a local team. Many Lee County locals have become deeply involved, from the community college offering one resident free electrical and carpentry training to the centre's 83-year-old neighbour Larry, who 'just kind of adopted these ladies', as Kingsolver puts it, and frequently gives them lifts to appointments. Community involvement is crucial, she says. 'Charity is a very loaded concept. It involves a power imbalance. It is a person standing in a position of privilege saying: I will give this gift to you, and implicit is: 'to help you become more like me'. Everything about that is odious to me.' For all the successes, of both the centre and the book, there has been some local pushback. 'Initially, and maybe still, specifically in Lee County, some people felt like: 'Why did you have to name us?' Nobody told me to my face, but I heard other people sort of sniping about it. I think it's pride. Very privileged people who would really rather not think about their neighbours who are struggling and suffering.' One such naysayer made his opinion clear when Kingsolver tried to donate a set of books to Lee County High School, Demon's alma mater, at the request of an English teacher. 'Between opening the trunk of the car and getting the books to the classroom, they mysteriously vanished,' she says. After some investigation Kingsolver appealed to the school board, telling them how 'life-changing' she would have found it, as a girl in Kentucky, to have read a novel written nearby. The books miraculously reappeared in the principal's office. She is convinced that the perpetrator had not read the book but 'had a sense that it was set in Lee County and it talked about bad things. We can't have people knowing that bad stuff happens here. You know, that wonderful denial that keeps people afloat.' Pride, denial and shame are longstanding Kingsolver fascinations. She says that the archetypal American story of the lone hero pulling themselves up by their bootstraps 'is just bullshit. We have classes in this country. We have class barriers. There are places you can be born that you're never going to get out of.' Still, she says, that myth is powerful: it 'brainwashes' people; it can lead to self-blame. Shame, she believes, is intrinsic to Trump's success, something she explores in one memorable Demon Copperhead passage addressing the word 'deplorable', a reference to Hillary Clinton's infamous description of Trump voters as a 'basket of deplorables'. 'I spent more worry on that word than perhaps any other single word in the book,' she says. 'I took it out, put it back in because, I mean, I love Hillary. I voted for her. I think it was so unfair that one sentence was taken out of context. But, also, there are people in my neighbourhood driving around with trucks that say: 'I'm a deplorable.' It has become so easy for urban people to dismiss all of rural America, to paint us all with the brush of backward, dumb – that was toxic. I'm sure she read this book, and I'm sure she didn't like that I used that word, but I didn't mean it personally. It's just awfully important to get it across that, as Demon says, we have cable. We know what you're saying about us – and we're mad about it.' Trump understands this, she says. He's the guy who says: 'I'm not like them. I'm not a fancy educated guy. I'm one of you. That's what appealed to people. Shame is such a part of this. He got under people's sense of shame and found other places to put it.' She lives in Trump country, and says she understands how he 'hooked' so many people, but she never demonises Trump voters herself, describing her neighbours as 'some of the most generous, kindhearted people you will ever meet'. She has no kind words for the man himself. His presidency is, she says, 'a circus. That's too kind a word for it. Circuses make you laugh. This one makes you cry. It's stunning how much damage one ignorant man can do.' She points out that Trump's 'so-called Big Beautiful Bill' could be devastating for the region, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area. 'The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.' Does she think her Trump-voting neighbours will change their allegiance if such terrors come to pass? 'Will they connect the dots when our hospital closes? I don't even know the answer to that,' she says, shaking her head, fearing that the TV and radio stations that told them to vote for Trump in the first place will 'come up with some other reason why your hospital closed. For those of us who are in the information business, that's a depressing subject.' She writes to her Republican congressman every other day to say: 'You studied history. You know better than this. Come on!' She is seethingly angry with the administration 'because the Congress people do know the law. Pretty much all of them come from wealthy backgrounds. They know what all this means, and they're not standing up to him. I just want them to grow a spine.' She is not thrilled with the Democrats, either. 'I'm very critical of both political parties in this country in terms of how beholden they are to corporate interests. Corporations run this country. It's really just a question of how much or how little they are willing to spare for the public good. A lot of us have been reading about late capitalism for a long time, and now we're seeing it.' In the long term, she says she believes in the Martin Luther King Jr quote that 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice'. Until we start to see that bend, good news comes locally, at least: Higher Ground is already growing, she tells me, with the acquisition of a neighbouring building, which the women will run as a thrift shop. She hopes that the project will expand further, will help more people. She plans to be involved for the long run and hopes to do whatever she can to help in 'destigmatising this disease and bringing the community into the project of supporting our lost citizens'. She is also currently adapting one of her books – she can't say which – for film and is in the middle of writing a new novel. Meanwhile, Demon lives on. His spirit is in the recovery house, whose residents Kingsolver describes as 'the mothers of real-life Demon Copperheads'. Unlike their fictional counterpart, these women have hope of getting back on their feet, thanks to a house paid for, in large part, by book lovers – many of whom have continued contributing. When Kingsolver announced the initiative on her Instagram page, her 150,000 followers donated more than $50,000 in cash in a week, and purchased reams of items from an Amazon wish list. The house's patio seating was gifted by a book club in Switzerland. Demon also lives on in readers' brains. 'Readers still ask me: 'Did he get his happy ending?' I tell them: 'He's yours. Now, you get to imagine whatever happy ending you like for him.'' Faber has reissued Barbara Kingsolver's titles The Lacuna, Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible this summer; for more information on Higher Ground see In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA's National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186
Washington Post
23-06-2025
- Health
- Washington Post
In West Virginia, Medicaid is a lifeline. GOP cuts could devastate the state.
ROMNEY, — Hampshire Memorial Hospital is nestled deep in the Appalachian Mountains, past more than 20 miles of winding mountain roads dotted with lush trees and ridges. It is the only hospital for a county that spans 645 square miles and, for many of its 24,000 residents, is the sole option for health care ranging from routine ailments to life-threatening emergencies.
Reuters
16-06-2025
- Business
- Reuters
ESG Watch: Why extreme weather events are just the tip of the iceberg for companies in a riskier world
June 16 - The small town of Spruce Pine in North Carolina (population approximately 2,000) is an unlikely pinch point for the global digital economy. But it is home to the world's largest deposit of high-purity quartz, and supplies about 70% of the mineral used in computing applications. Given its location almost 300 miles from the Atlantic, in the Appalachian mountains, it has not historically been seen as at significant risk from hurricanes. And yet, when Hurricane Helene struck the United States in October 2024, production ground to a halt after power to the town and roads and rail lines were severely damaged, affecting chipmakers and electronics producers the world over. It is a classic example of the kind of environmental risks that are hidden in value chains, and that are not revealed until some kind of disaster strikes. This leads many companies to underestimate or be unaware of them, says Paul Munday, director, global climate adaptation and resilience specialist at S&P and co-author of a recent report on the issue. 'A lot of research on physical climate risks focuses on direct risks to business operations from hurricanes, droughts, floods and wildfires,' he says. 'We know companies are not just dependent on their own operations but on other entities, too. What happens to an auto company when its parts supplier is hit by a hurricane? The company's own physical risk is compounded.' Sectors such as agribusiness, consumer goods (food), autos, chemicals and paper products, which rely heavily on more climate-sensitive upstream and nature-based sectors, exhibit the highest value-chain exposures, the report says. But it adds that 'all sectors inherit at least some physical climate risk exposures from their value chains'. Low water levels in the Rhine or the Panama Canal, for example, can affect the entire economy of particular regions for prolonged periods, and increasingly have done so in recent years. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 famously had a huge impact on oil and gas infrastructure in the U.S., says Munday, and one of the sectors most affected by that was the airline industry. It faced sharply higher fuel prices, leading carriers to impose fuel surcharges on passengers, which hit demand for flights. As a result of examples such as these and numerous lower profile events, investors are becoming more concerned about the long-term health of the companies they invest in. Value-chain risks can affect companies by disrupting business operations, increasing input costs and by prompting investments in adaptation or resilience investments. But S&P's research shows that only a few companies are identifying these risks. 'Many investors don't have information on value chain risk,' says Bruce Thomson, lead social and sustainable supply chain specialist at S&P. 'There is an interest, but there's a recognised gap in the literature.' Dr Gabrielle Bourret-Sicotte has the title of chief evangelist and head of customer success at Treefera, a firm that uses technology such as AI, satellites and drones to capture data from nature-based assets such as forestry projects. 'Many people view climate risk as being high-profile and primarily physical events, such as drought, wildfires and deforestation,' she says. Yet the impact of extreme climate events on businesses goes far beyond these direct impacts, as they have a knock-on influence on wider environmental effects. 'For example, severe rainfall can create the conditions for plant disease and degrade arable farmland. We've seen examples of this across West Africa, specifically Ivory Coast and Ghana, where swollen shoot disease has directly impacted cocoa farms, leading to a potentially 50% reduction in harvest,' Bourret-Sicotte says. Heavy rainfall in the region, which is the heart of the global cocoa industry, ultimately led to the price of chocolate almost doubling, she adds. Investors don't generally look at the interdependence between a company's assets and the assets in their supply chains in climate risk assessments, says Peter Hirsch, head of sustainability at climate-focused venture capital firm 2150. 'But it's important to be able to think about that one degree of separation, such as where your logistics facilities are sited and what are their risks. 'Developing first-order climate risk assessments to establish what assets are exposed to risks and what revenue is associated with that is important,' he adds. 'For industries that are particularly exposed to high-vulnerability hazards – for example agriculture when it comes to heat and drought – companies need to really think about whether they are going to be able to maintain their supply chains.' Climate change is set to change the way any business reliant on outdoor labour – including massive parts of the economy such as construction and agriculture – operates, he adds. 'The amount they can get done in a day will decrease significantly in certain parts of the world. Managing these risks can feel like an impossible task, given the opacity of many companies' supply chains. For Bourret-Sicotte, greater transparency is key. 'Businesses need to start with visibility – from the first mile all the way through the value chain to the consumer. This is achieved by leveraging technologies, such as AI, satellite imagery and robust risk modelling. Businesses use these insights to assess the environmental impact across their entire value chain and build strategies to mitigate against them.' Business coalitions can also play a key role, says Steven Ripley, director of investor engagement at the Responsible Commodities Facility, an initiative to promote the production and trading of responsible soy in Brazil. The facility, which is supported by UK retailers Tesco, Sainsbury's and Waitrose, lends money to soy farmers at reduced rates of interest provided they commit to zero deforestation and zero land conversion for the period of the loan. 'The retail sector is really on the ball with this, but the fast food groups seem to turn a blind eye to it and take the view that someone else will sort it out," says Ripley. "But companies that are not engaging with transition in the soy sector are the ones that are very likely to end up paying the highest premiums for soy down the road. They won't have the relationships with progressive producers that are necessary to secure the best offers in the market.' Some companies believe addressing value chain risks will give them a competitive advantage. 'We see this as an opportunity, partly because our supply chain management is very robust,' says Mila Duncheva, business development manager UK and Ireland for Stora Enso, the forestry products group. On the one had, the construction industry is likely to use more wood in future because of its renewable nature and ability to sequester carbon, she says. But on the other hand, the forestry sector faces increased risks such as droughts, wildfires and floods, as well as a higher risk of diseases such as bark beetle. Being able to identify and put a monetary value on potential climate impacts will not only help to inform where investments in adaptation and resilience should be targeted. It could even lead to innovations that help to further future-proof businesses in an increasingly unpredictable world.
