The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

by Michio Kaku

  “Pull over there,” a firefighter hollered at Laczko and Fisher as they crept uphill.

  “And then what?” Laczko asked.

  “Hunker down and keep your windows rolled up.”

  “Are you serious?” Fisher erupted. She was hoping for a more sophisticated plan.

  “They wouldn’t have put us here unless it was safer than where we were,” Laczko said.

  He eased his truck into place, parallel with the others. Directly in front of them, through the windshield, the frame of a large house burned and burned. For a moment, it was quiet. Then Fisher broke down again, very softly this time. “I don’t have anything,” she said. “I don’t have anything.”

  * * *

  Fires are unique among natural disasters: unlike earthquakes or hurricanes, they can be fought, slowed down, or thwarted. And virtually every summer in Paradise, until that Thursday morning, they had been. There was always trepidation as fire season approached but also skepticism that evacuation would ever truly be necessary and worth the hassle. “I confess my sense of denial,” said Jacky Hoiland, who had lived in Paradise most of her life and worked for the school district for twenty years. Initially, after hearing about the Camp Fire, she took a look at the sky and then made herself a smoothie.

  Still, even before the Camp Fire, many people in Paradise and around California had started to look at the recent succession of devastating fires—​the Tubbs Fire, the Thomas Fire, blazes that ate through suburban-seeming neighborhoods and took lives—​and intuit that our dominion over fire might be slipping. Something was different now: fire was winning, finding ways to outstrip our fight response, to rear up recklessly and break us down. That morning, in Paradise, there hadn’t even been time for that fight response to kick in. And the flight response was failing too. Those who study wildfire have long argued that we need to reshuffle our relationship to it—​move from reflexively trying to conquer fire to designing ways for communities to outfox and withstand it. And in a sense, that’s what was happening with Laczko and Fisher, though only in a hasty and desperate way: hunkered in that gravel lot, everyone was playing dead.

  After the fire, stories surfaced of people retreating into similar so-called temporary refuge areas all over the Ridge: clearings that offered some minimal protection or structures that could be easily defended. One large group sheltered in the Paradise Alliance Church, which had been scouted and fortified in advance as part of the town’s emergency planning. Another group sheltered outside a bar on Skyway and, when it caught fire, scampered, en masse, to an adjacent building and sheltered there. The Kmart parking lot became an impromptu refuge. So did an antique shop called Needful Things. In Concow, one firefighter instructed at least a dozen people to jump into a reservoir as the fire approached.

  The group on Pearson wasn’t in the gravel clearing long, less than ten minutes, it seems, from videos on Fisher’s phone. Eventually, there was a knock on Laczko’s window. “We’re going to get out of here,” a firefighter said, though he didn’t specify where they would go. Moments later, another firefighter on a bullhorn shouted, “We’re going to go toward the hospital.”

  “Oh, shit,” Laczko blurted.

  “We’re going back?” Fisher said. She sounded both terrified and incensed. The hospital was on Pentz Road, near where she started. The trauma of the last two hours appeared to be flooding back.

  Joe Kennedy led the way in his bulldozer, crawling through the thick smoke on Pearson to batter any obstacles out of their way. The core of the fire had passed, though it had left a kind of living residue everywhere: all the wooden posts of a roadside metal barricade were still burning, and shoals of flames dotted the road where Kennedy had removed burning cars. The cars were still burning too, wherever he had deposited them, belching solid black smoke as the caravan of survivors slowly passed.

  “There’s my car,” Fisher said and turned to film it. Fire spouted from its roof like the plume of a Roman helmet. “It has my Raggedy Ann in it!” she said. The doll was one of the few things she grabbed before evacuating. She had had it since she was six and had expected to be buried with it one day. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’m crying over something so stupid!”

  * * *

  At the hospital, a fire alarm quacked robotically as a small outbuilding, not far from where Laczko and Fisher were parked, expelled smoke from behind a fence. A group of nurses had scavenged supplies from the evacuated emergency room and erected a makeshift triage center under the awning to treat any wounded trickling in. Laczko got out of his truck to see how he could help.

  The hospital campus was ringed and speckled with fire. Some of the men were peeing on the little spot fires that danced in the parking lot’s landscaped medians. Still, the influx of firefighters that morning had largely succeeded in defending the main building when the fire front moved through. Eventually, a call went out on the radio that the hospital campus was “actually the safest place to be.”

  Fisher and Laczko’s group waited in the parking lot for close to three hours. Then, those lingering fires nearby began to swell and expand, threatening the hospital again. The firefighters were losing pressure in their hoses. The nurses were told to pack everything up. The road out was clear; they had a window in which it was safe to move. Everyone would finally be driving off the Ridge.

  As they pulled out of the parking lot, back onto Pentz Road, Laczko noticed his eye-doctor’s office burning top to bottom, directly in front of them.

  “It’s gone,” Fisher said.

  “It’s gone,” Laczko said.

  “It’s gone,” Fisher repeated. “That house is gone! And that house is gone!”

  They went on gesturing at everything as they drove—​or rather, at its absence: all the homes still burning and others that had already settled into static masses of scrap and ash. As happens in any small town, every part of Paradise was overlaid with memories and meanings; each resident had his or her own idiosyncratic map of associations. As Fisher and Laczko coasted down Pentz, they tried to reconcile their maps with the disfigured reality in front of them, speaking the names of each flattened side street, noting who lived there or the last time they had been down there themselves. The iconic home at the corner of Pearson, with the ornate metal fence and sculptures of lions, had been devoured: “It used to be on the garden tour,” Laczko said.

  “Right here, that was my dog groomer’s house.”

  “My sister is just right up here.”

  “Are these the people that used to have the Halloween stuff up?”

  It was 1:45 p.m. Thirty-nine minutes later, and 460 miles away, a small brush fire would be reported near a Southern California Edison substation north of Malibu. Firefighters wouldn’t contain the Woolsey Fire until it had swallowed nearly 100,000 acres and 1,600 structures and charged all the way to the Pacific, where it ran out of earth to consume. This time, as photos surfaced, all of America could find reference points on the map the fire had clawed apart: Lady Gaga evacuated. Miley Cyrus’s home was a ruin. The mansion from The Bachelor was encircled and singed.

  “Oh, God, it’s all gone,” Fisher said again. She gaped at the east side of Pentz Road, facing the canyon, where there didn’t appear to be a single home left: just chimneys, wreckage, the slumping carcasses of cars, everything dun-colored and dead.

  * * *

  Five months after the Camp Fire, at the end of March, the wreckage in Paradise was still overpowering: parcel after parcel of incinerated storefronts, cars, outbuildings, fast-food restaurants, and homes. Patches of rutted pavement, like erratic rumble strips, still scarred Paradise’s roadways wherever vehicles had burned. On Pearson Road, I knelt beside one and found a circular shred of yellow plastic, fused into a ring of tar: a piece of Fisher’s car. It was startling how similar Paradise looked to when I first came, ten days after the fire. Except that it was spring now: clusters of daffodils were blooming, carefully arranged, bordering what had been fences or front steps.

  That week, t
he city issued its first rebuilding permit, though roughly 1,000 residents were already back, somehow making a go of it, either in trailers or inside the scant number of houses that survived, even as public-health officials discovered that the municipal water system was contaminated with high levels of benzene, a carcinogen released by the burning homes and household appliances, then sucked through the pipes as firefighters drew water into their hoses. Driving around at dusk one evening, letting acre after acre of obliterated houses wash over me, I spotted a lone little boy in what appeared to be the head of a cul-de-sac—​it was hard to tell—​with heaps of houses all around him. He was standing with his arms raised, like a victor or a king, then he hopped back on his scooter and zipped away.

  Jim Broshears, Paradise’s emergency-operations coordinator, pointed out that many of the homes still standing tended to be in clusters: “A shadow effect,” he called it, where one property broke the chain of ignitions—​maybe because its owners employed certain fire-wise landscaping or design features, or maybe just by chance. It showed that, while the destructiveness of any fire is largely random, there are ways a community can collectively lower the odds. “It’s really a cultural shift that requires people to look at their home in a different way,” Broshears said: to see the unkempt azalea bush or split rail fence touching your home as a hazard that will carry the next fire forward like a fuse, not just to your house but also to the others around it—​to recognize that everyone is joined in one massive pool of incalculable and unconquerable risk.

  The free market, meanwhile, has continued adjusting to that risk according to its own unsparing logic. Insurance companies have steadily raised premiums or even ceased to renew policies in many fire-prone areas of California, as payouts for wildfire claims will now exceed $10 billion for the second year in a row. Two months after the Camp Fire, PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection. Then it announced, along with two of California’s other major utilities, that it would be expanding its Public Safety Power Shutoff program this year. The company is now prepared to preventively cut electricity to a larger share of its infrastructure—​high-voltage wires, as well as lower-voltage ones—​and across its entire range. Nearly five and a half million customers could be subject to shutdowns at one time or another this summer, “which is all of our customer base,” a PG&E vice president, Aaron Johnson, told me: every single one. “With the increasing fire risk that we’re seeing in the state,” he added, “and the increasing extreme weather, this program is going to be with us for some time to come.”

  In California, the prospect of life without electricity from time to time—​a signature convenience of the twentieth century—​has apparently become an unavoidable, even sensible, feature of the twenty-first.

  * * *

  How did it end? With smoke—​with colossal shapes of smoke gurgling out of Paradise behind Laczko and Fisher as they glided downhill, and with a stoic figure somewhere inside the smoke, single-mindedly grinding through neighborhoods in his bulldozer, music blaring, chasing after flames as they stampeded uphill, but mostly failing to get ahead of them as he and every other firefighter labored to keep fire away from structures that seemed, in the end, determined to burn.

  The houses had revealed themselves: they were just another crop of tightly clustered and immaculately dried-out dead trees, a forest that had grown, been felled and milled, then rearranged sideways and hammered together by clever human beings who, over time, came to forget the volatile ecosystem that spawned that material and still surrounded it now. Some of that wood most likely lived 100 years or more and had been lumber for almost as long: a storehouse of energy that was now bursting open, joining with the burning forests around the Ridge into a single, furious outpouring of smoke—​ominous because it was dark and high enough to challenge the sun, but also because it was largely composed of carbon: an estimated 3.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases that, as seems to happen at least once every fire season lately, was more than enough to obliterate the progress made by all of California’s climate-change policies in a typical year.

  How did it end? With smoke—​with smoke that signaled the world that Fisher knew at the beginning of the day was gone and that surely signaled something just as grave for the rest of us. Within hours, and for nearly two weeks after that, smoke would swamp the lucid blue sky over the valley where Fisher was now heading; where, for weeks, she would be afraid to be left alone and, for months, refuse to drive, terrified by the sensation of slowing down in traffic, even momentarily; where she found herself repeatedly checking the sky to make sure it wasn’t black; where she kept showering but swore she still smelled the smoke on her skin. And before long, the smoke had floated all the way to the coast, where it forced the city of San Francisco to close its schools.

  How did it end? It hasn’t. It won’t.

  MELINDA WENNER MOYER

  Vaccines Reimagined

  from Scientific American

  The heat of the sun, a blazing basketball in the West African sky, was softened by a breeze one afternoon last spring. Every so often the wind whisked a mango off a tree branch and dropped it with a thud on the corrugated iron roof that covered the health center in Bissau, the biggest city in the tiny country of Guinea-Bissau, where the rust-colored ground hadn’t felt a raindrop in six months. Inside the building, the air was still and dry, and a line of women and toddlers were sticky with sweat.

  An eighteen-month-old named Maria with thick, dark braids studied me nervously as she perched on her mother’s lap. (The child’s name has been changed to protect her privacy.) Next to them, Carlito Balé, a soft-spoken doctor in a short-sleeved, white button-down shirt, talked with Maria’s mother in Portuguese creole, a percussive fusion of Portuguese and African dialects. Balé was telling the mother that Maria was eligible to participate in a clinical trial to test whether an extra dose of measles vaccine prevented not just the measles but many childhood infections that cause serious illness and death.

  In the U.S., where life-threatening infections are rare, such a trial might not garner many volunteers. But in Guinea-Bissau, where lives have been scarred by decades of scant resources and poor medical care, families lined up in droves. The nation is one of the world’s poorest, and the CIA ranks infant mortality there as the fourth highest among 225 countries. Mothers often wait months to name their babies because one out of every twelve will die before his or her first birthday.

  The researchers leading the trial—​anthropologist Peter Aaby and physician Christine Benn, whom I had traveled to Guinea-Bissau to meet—​have amassed evidence that a few specific vaccines can thwart a multitude of threatening plagues. Over decades they have published hundreds of studies suggesting that live, attenuated vaccines, which are made from weakened but living viruses or bacteria, can stave off not just their target infections but other diseases, such as respiratory infections (including pneumonia), blood infections (including sepsis), and diarrheal infections. In a 2016 review published in the journal BMJ, a research team commissioned by the World Health Organization analyzed sixty-eight papers on the topic, many of which came from Aaby and Benn’s research. It concluded that the measles and tuberculosis vaccines “reduce overall mortality by more than would be expected through their effects on the diseases they prevent.” Some of the research the team evaluated linked the measles vaccine with a whopping 50 percent lower risk of death from any cause.

  This notion that live vaccines have what are called “off-target” effects—​and powerful ones—​has implications that stretch far beyond Africa. In 2017 in the U.S., for instance, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that children were half as likely to be hospitalized for non-vaccine-targeted infections between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four months if the last immunization they had received was a live vaccine rather than an inactivated one. New research in immunology suggests that live vaccines can have such wide-ranging effects because they stimulate a part of the immune system that fights a broad
-based war against all outside invaders, giving the system a head start on defense. “Although we still need to know much more about the details, I now have no doubt that vaccines do have some off-target effects because of the support from many different types of evidence,” says Frank Shann, a pediatrician at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne in Australia.

  Yet other scientists are far less certain. Aaby and Benn’s work is, in fact, quite controversial. For one thing, most of the studies from the two Danish researchers do not prove cause-to-effect connections. “Purported effects” is how Paul Fine, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, describes them. Kids who get live vaccines might survive longer for reasons that have nothing to do with immunizations: the children in those groups might have been healthier to begin with. To address these concerns, Aaby and Benn are now running intervention trials, such as the one Maria was being recruited for. In it, children will be matched for age and basic health, but some will have only the standard single measles shot at nine months, whereas others will get an additional dose as toddlers.

  The two investigators also counter that political and pragmatic concerns drive resistance to their ideas far more than do valid scientific critiques. Aaby says that his and Benn’s research is inconvenient for public policy because it indicates that live vaccines should be given last in any vaccine series, which upends current immunization schedules and could inadvertently trigger parental worries about safety. Public health scientists “don’t want to hear it, and I can understand why they don’t want to hear it,” Aaby says. And as a result, he claims, many orthodox vaccine researchers “have clearly made me persona non grata.” The seventy-four-year-old, who is bespectacled and has a salt-and-pepper goatee, fits the part of the eccentric, obstinate, and misunderstood scientist so well that he has literally become one in a novel: he inspired a character in a best-selling 2013 Danish mystery book, The Arc of the Swallow, who gets murdered in the first chapter.