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by Knight Science Journalism / June 21st 2022 / Announcements

2022-23 Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellows Announced

The Knight Science Journalism Program and STAT, the award-winning Boston-based biomedical magazine, have announced Ambar Castillo and Brittany Trang as the 2022-2023 recipients of the Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellowship. Named in honor of Sharon Begley, an award-winning science writer for STAT, who died in January 2021 at 64 from complications of lung cancer, the one-year fellowship was established last year with the goal of diversifying the ranks of science and health journalists and fostering better coverage of science that is relevant to all people.

Before winning the fellowship, Ambar Castillo was a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellow at the Washington City Paper. She earned her B.A. in Latin American Studies at Boston University and an M.A. in Spanish-language journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she concentrated on health/science reporting. A Fulbright research scholar, she researched complex human relationships in India, worked with StoryCorps, and reported for hyperlocal newspapers in the Bronx. Castillo has also worked with international communities in the health, education, and theater spheres from Brooklyn to Boston.

Brittany Trang, a scientist and writer, most recently was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Fellow at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Chemical & Engineering News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Chemistry World. Trang has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and English from Ohio State University and before starting the fellowship, expects to complete her chemistry Ph.D. at Northwestern University, where she has developed PFAS remediation methods.

“Both Ms. Castillo and Ms. Trang bring a wealth of experience and expertise to the STAT newsroom,” said Gideon Gil, a managing editor at STAT. “We are incredibly excited to have such amazing talent join our team. We look forward to helping them grow as health and science journalists as they continue Sharon’s extraordinary legacy.”

At MIT, Castillo and Trang will join the five mid-career journalists who will make up the 2022-23 Knight Science Journalism Fellowship class: Mary-Rose Abraham, an independent multimedia journalist based in Bangalore, India; Laura Bliss, a reporter and editor for CityLab, a division of Bloomberg News; Wojtek Brzeziński, a freelance science journalist based in Warsaw; Sebastien Malo, a climate and environment reporter in New York for Reuters; and Kelly Servick, a staff reporter and editor at Science Magazine. The five fellows were originally selected to come to MIT during the 2020-21 academic year, but their appointments were deferred due to the pandemic. Other fellows selected for the 2020-21 class have opted to defer their appointments until the 2023-24 academic year.

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, founded in 1983, is the world’s premier fellowship program for science journalists; more than 300 reporters, from media outlets ranging from the BBC to the Los Angeles Times, have studied at MIT and Harvard while participating in this prestigious program. In addition, KSJ publishes the award-winning magazine, Undark, offers training in fact-checking and science editing (including a free, downloadable handbook for science editors available in three languages) and hosts the Victor K. McElheny Award in Science Journalism for small and regional media outlets.

About the Sharon Begley Fellowship

The Sharon Begley Fellowship prepares early-career U.S. journalists from racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in the profession for a successful career in science journalism. It combines a paid reporting position at STAT with an educational component provided through the Knight Science Journalism program. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative provided funding for the first two years of the program and KSJ provides health insurance and other MIT resources to the fellows. After completing her fellowship, the inaugural Sharon Begley Fellow, Isabella Cueto, was hired by STAT to report on chronic diseases.

Begley, STAT’s senior science writer, was considered one of the nation’s finest science journalists and was known for her enthusiasm for mentoring and teaching the next generation. She was especially eager to help other women advance in a profession that, when she began as a researcher at Newsweek in 1977, was unwelcoming. She later worked at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, before joining STAT at its founding in 2015. Her legacy includes her powerful advocacy for people of color, exemplified by a series she wrote in 2016 and 2017 about the neglect by scientists, government funders, drugmakers, and hospitals of patients with sickle cell disease, who in the U.S. are predominantly Black. This fellowship pays tribute to her outstanding career while paving the way for the next generation of science journalists.

by Ferris Jabr / June 1st 2022 / Fellowship Life, Guest Posts

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 2021-22 Project Fellows.

About two and a half years ago, in the early stages of writing a book about the coevolution of Earth and life, I began planning a reporting trip to a remote research station in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil. The station, known as the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO), comprises a series of metal containers that function as laboratories, as well as several research towers equipped with scientific instruments that sample the air. The station’s most famous feature, the one everyone wants to see (and climb), is a 325-meter tower—the tallest structure in South America. Scientists from around the globe visit ATTO to study the relationship between the rainforest and atmosphere, including how the forest alters local weather and global climate. I was hoping to accompany some of them to learn more about these fascinating interactions.

By late 2019, I was scheduled to visit ATTO the following March. Then, in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began. After weeks of anxiously monitoring the situation, I decided to cancel the trip. Shortly thereafter, the research station officially closed its doors to media and remained closed to most visitors, including many scientists, for the greater part of the following two years. In the fall of 2021, shortly after I began a 9-month appointment as a Knight Science Journalism Project Fellow to support my book, the station began preparing to resume some of its usual activities. Earlier this year, thanks in large part to the patience and generosity of the ATTO staff and several visiting researchers, I was able to reschedule the trip.

Getting to ATTO was an adventure in and of itself. In mid-April, I took a series of connecting flights from Portland, Oregon to Manaus, Brazil. From there, several scientists and I drove about four hours northeast: first on highways with massive potholes that cars and trucks had to swerve to avoid, then on rural dirt roads that had repeatedly flooded, forming mud pits and small lakes. We continued the journey by boat, traveling another two hours along a tributary of the Amazon River to a small, unassuming dock. Two signs in Portuguese marked the site as part of a protected area where it was illegal to fish, hunt, forage, cut down trees, or trespass. We piled our luggage and gear into pickup trucks and drove another 45 minutes on rough dirt roads into the rainforest, finally arriving at the research station. The camp was centered around a kitchen, mess hall, and a screened room filled with hammocks where everyone slept. A few trails and boardwalks linked the camp to the research towers and container labs.

Although I was immensely relieved and excited to have made it to ATTO, I knew there were more hurdles ahead. First there was the daunting prospect of climbing the tower. In addition to being intimidatingly tall, it had no foolproof barrier to prevent someone from falling. It was essentially a wide-gapped staircase enclosed in a sturdy but highly porous scaffolding. To ascend the tower, one had to carefully navigate the staircase while tethered to a spiral railing. Even with a harness and safety gear, it was possible to misstep, fall through a gap, and break a limb. In some cases, visitors had been paralyzed by fear part way up, requiring convoluted procedures to safely return them to the ground. Although I’d never been particularly afraid of heights, I’d also never climbed such a tall, barebones structure. I worried I might start to panic somewhere along the way.

Another challenge was the constant threat of inclement weather. Weather in the Amazon rainforest is mercurial. During the wet season, you can be certain it will rain, but knowing precisely when it will rain and for how long is next to impossible. Several times during my weeklong stay, the skies seemed to open without warning, unleashing torrents of astonishing intensity. When it’s raining hard—and especially during a thunderstorm—the tower is even more dangerous than usual. I knew that if it remained too cloudy and rainy during my brief visit, I might not have a chance to climb the tower, and that if it started to rain as we were climbing, we might have to turn back before reaching the top. After the second consecutive day of frequent and heavy rains, I was quite anxious.

Fortunately, the following morning was clear and sunny. I joined a group of visiting scientists for a safety tutorial near the base of the tower. We strapped on climbing harnesses and hard hats and entered our information in an electronic log. As soon as I started climbing, adrenaline and exhilaration replaced all fear. It took approximately an hour to reach the top, with a few stops along the way to rest and check on various instruments. Standing on the observation deck, about 300 meters above the forest canopy—literally halfway to the clouds—we could see a vast expanse of relatively pristine rainforest stretching all around us.

Unlike a glimpse of distant terrain through the awkwardly small oval of an airplane window, the view from this height was entirely unencumbered, yet not so far removed as to feel unknowable, inviting contemplation. When I’d walked through the forest earlier on the trip, I’d been overwhelmed by its lushness and intricacy—its dense green knottiness. To appreciate it, I had to choose an individual organism and focus on it: a particular tree, fern, bird, or butterfly. Here, the scope was so much wider, and inescapably so. I felt as though, for the first time, I could genuinely see the rainforest as an ecosystem—as an immense living network forming the skin of the planet. I could see, more clearly than ever before, how at that scale living creatures were not simply shaped by their environments, but also had the power to alter and define their environments—the power to change a continent, or even Earth as a whole. It was a visceral reminder of the elasticity of perspective and the importance of routinely shifting one’s point of view. In that respect, writing and traveling are much the same: they are both ways of improving one’s understanding of the world by learning to see it a little differently.

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. His book about the coevolution of Earth and life is forthcoming from Random House.

by Anna Kuchment / May 27th 2022 / Fellowship Life, Guest Posts

Reading Tracy Kidder in West Texas

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 2021-22 Project Fellows.

In March, I flew to Dallas from Boston to meet with a group of earthquake scientists I’d been following for years. The interviews would help me wrap up a book project about the surge of human-induced quakes in Texas, Oklahoma, and several other states — tremors that were triggered by the production of oil and gas. On the trip, I’d brought a copy of Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about the pioneering global health and infectious disease doctor, Paul Farmer, who had died suddenly in February.

The book, I thought, would inform my own writing as I traveled through West Texas’s oilfields, spoke with experts at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University, and struggled to produce two new chapters.

“Mountains Beyond Mountains” takes up a subject wholly different from my own. It’s about Farmer’s quest to bring first world healthcare to those living in extreme poverty. Kidder follows Farmer as he travels to France, Cuba, Peru, Haiti, and Boston treating patients, raising funds, and pushing against the prevailing wisdom that first class medical care is too expensive to be offered in the developing world.

My book, which I’m co-writing with Boston College historian of science Conevery Bolton Valencius, follows more than a half dozen scientists in three states as they investigate a surge of earthquakes in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. They conclude that oil and gas production, specifically the disposal of wastewater from fracking and other operations, caused the rate of quakes in the central United States to balloon from roughly 25 per year in 2008 to more than 1,000 in 2015. During that time, Oklahoma surpassed both California and Alaska to become the most seismically active state in the nation.

Yet the books have some similar themes. Just as Paul Farmer succeeds in shifting conventional thinking in global public health, the seismologists succeed in nudging regulators and oil and gas companies to better monitor and regulate how and where they drill in order to lessen the threat of earthquakes.

Here are five lessons I took away from Kidder’s book:

Not every story needs death and villains … but they help. An editor once said about my earthquake reporting: “This story has no villain, and no one dies.” And yet, I found the story endlessly compelling and hoped I could hook others in the same way that I was hooked.

In “Mountains Beyond Mountains” there are no clear villains, either, though there is plenty of death. To make up for the lack of a villain, Kidder depicts Farmer pushing against the prevailing wisdom with edgy, unorthodox ideas. Some of Farmer’s critics saw him as a ”mere clinician, too interested in patients to see the big picture” of stopping transmission of a disease like tuberculosis, Kidder wrote. Conflict and controversy can go a long way in taking the place of a clear villain.

Science and sex. Farmer’s book reminded me of the importance of writing about scientists as fully rendered human beings – people with emotions, longings, and flaws. Many don’t like to be portrayed that way, wishing their work to speak for itself. I was surprised when I came across a steamy shower scene between Farmer and an ex-girlfriend in the middle of “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” It highlighted the tension between Farmer’s work and personal life.

Conflict and controversy can go a long way in taking the place of a clear villain.

Pruning the cast of characters. Kidder focused his book on Farmer, even though many people, including Farmer’s co-founders, were responsible for the success of the nonprofit Partners In Health. Kidder addresses this deliberate decision in the epilogue. “Paul Farmer never wanted me to imagine that he alone was responsible for the early work of Partners In Health,” Kidder wrote. “I think if he’d been the writer, he would have given equal time to all the people involved in the organization’s early days … a cast of at least dozens. But I couldn’t have written a book like that, and I’m glad I didn’t try.” Our book’s cast is much larger than Kidder’s, and “Mountains Beyond Mountains” is a reminder to limit the number of names we expect readers to remember.

Being there. A key to the success of “Mountains Beyond Mountains” is Kidder’s close observation of Farmer over months as he traveled to global health conferences, went on rounds at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and hiked for miles to visit sick patients in Haiti.

Unfortunately, much of the action in my book takes place behind computers as scientists analyze waveforms to locate earthquakes, in hearing rooms, and around conference tables where scientists meet with regulators and representatives of oil and gas companies. Moreover, some of the more heated exchanges took place when I wasn’t around.

To make up for these deficiencies, I have asked scientists to recreate scenes and events I’ve missed with as much color as possible.

Personal descriptions. Kidder writes some of the most graceful descriptions of people I have ever read. I wonder how much he struggled with them or if they came to him naturally. Take this one of Farmer: “I remember thinking that Captain Carroll and Dr. Farmer made a mismatched pair, and that Farmer suffered in the comparison. The captain stood about six foot two, tanned and muscular. As usual, a wad of snuff enlarged his lower lip. Now and then he turned his head aside and spat. Farmer was about the same age but much more delicate-looking. He had short black hair and a high waist and long thin arms, and his nose came almost to a point. Next to the soldier, he looked skinny and pale, and for all of that he struck me as bold, indeed downright cocky.” Following best practices, Kidder uses only active verbs (“made,” “suffered,” “enlarged,” “struck”) and eschews “to be.” And he has a way of honing in on the specific characteristics that make a person recognizable. Those characteristics are a mix of conventional ones (short black hair) and unexpected ones (a high waist, a nose that came almost to a point), and he sets them off by signaling that they contrast with his seemingly cocky personality.

I also noticed a tip for how to let readers know that a character is physically attractive without saying so directly, which can be awkward. Let someone else do the talking, as Kidder does here, about two young women doctors: “PIH-ers weren’t all alike, of course, but many had impressive academic credentials, many were religious, the majority were female, and a lot of those were, as Ophelia said, ‘rather good-looking.’ The full description fit both Serena and Carole.”

As I finished the book, I thought about how I could hope to achieve even a fraction of what Kidder did with “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” Was it possible with my own material? I thought back to a comment a colleague of mine made when I asked him to collaborate on the earthquake book with me. “Nah,” he said. “When I write a book, it will be about one person working to solve one important problem.” Ultimately, that’s what Kidder did with “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” But while the plot and focus of the book appear to materialize effortlessly as you read it, I know through my own struggles that they probably didn’t just “materialize” for Kidder when he first sat down to write. So many difficult decisions and so much labor and effort go into creating something that reads so flawlessly. My co-author and I can only keep striving to do our very best.

Anna Kuchment is The Boston Globe’s Medical and Biotechnology editor. Prior to joining the Globe, she was a reporter at Newsweek magazine, a senior editor at Scientific American and a science enterprise reporter at The Dallas Morning News.

by Natasha Singer / March 30th 2022 / Fellowship Life, Guest Posts

What Cold War Physics Can Teach Us About Computer Science in Public Schools

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 2021-22 Project Fellows.

In the fall of 1956, a group of prominent physicists began meeting regularly on the M.I.T. campus. They called themselves the Physical Science Study Committee. A few of them were Nobel Prize winners. Many of them had worked together during World War II, some on creating radar systems for the military and others on building the first atomic bomb. Their host, a towering figure in physics named Jerrold R. Zacharias, had done both.

But now some of the physicists who had helped weaponize the power of the atom were eager to collaborate on a more idealistic project: remaking science education in public schools.

The professors were perturbed by a particular problem. Recent discoveries in atomic physics were propelling advances in everything from health care to rocket science. But high schools in the United States, the researchers believed, seemed stuck in a 19^th-century take on the subject.

Their solution: develop an entirely new curriculum, one that would introduce high school students to a modern view of how atomic particles and other natural phenomena around them worked.

“Physical science has meaning for present society as deep and important as that of the humanities or social studies,” the physicists argued in meeting notes in 1956. “Students are less aware of the part physical science plays in forming the assumptions of their individual life and that of the community.”

The meeting notes were just one among a trove of archival documents in the MIT Libraries that I studied as part of my Knight Science Journalism fellowship project. They captured an early moment in what would soon become an important classroom revolution, touching millions of students first in high schools and then in middle schools.

I wanted to understand the professors’ 20^th-century effort to promote physics because I am currently writing a book on a similar, modern-day campaign: a national drive to boost access to computer science, the study of computer programming and computing concepts like algorithms, in public schools.

What should modern education look in an era of rapid scientific and technological change? Who is that education for? Who gets to decide?

It’s an extraordinary phenomenon that is sweeping classrooms from Pomona, California, to Plymouth, Massachusetts. And, just like the 20^th-century physics crusade, the computer science education campaign has been driven in part by outside forces — in this case, by tech industry money, expertise and lobbying.

I came to this project already steeped in contemporary examples of education disruption. As a reporter at The New York Times, I’ve spent years examining how tech companies, education start-ups and tech nonprofits are remaking the classroom.

The archival research, however, gave me a chance to focus more deeply on how education reform campaigns tap into fundamental questions about public schooling that Americans have been debating at least as far back as the industrial revolution.

What should modern education look in an era of rapid scientific and technological change? Who is that education for? Who gets to decide?

During my visits to the MIT Libraries’ archival reading room, I also reflected on why I feel so compelled by these themes. On a personal level, I’m drawn to the history of physics and computer science in schools in part because education is my family vocation.

My grandmother was a school principal. My mother was a teacher. My father, a math professor at M.I.T. for many years, was the first person in his family to go to college. I teach a summer course for high school students on emerging technologies and their societal consequences. I believe in the transformative power of learning to open new worlds for kids.

I also believe that studying efforts to remake education can give us important insights into the groups working to influence how and what the nation’s public school children learn.

The atomic physicists, for instance, enjoyed an elite status in the 1950s as innovation superheroes who had helped the United States win the Second World War. Their clout enabled them to exert a new kind of power in public schools. In fact, it was the first time that dozens of leading scientists teamed up to reinvent a pre-college science course, notes John. L. Rudolph, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, in his book “Scientists in the Classroom.”

The physicists’ motives were at once civic-minded and self-serving. On one hand, they felt driven to teach school children scientific approaches to problem-solving that could be useful in understanding the world around them.

On the other hand, the professors also wanted students — and, by extension, their families and the public — to value scientific discoveries and support government research funding. Above all, they wanted to promote rational, evidence-based thinking in American culture. To do that, they argued that schools should make physics a part of the academic canon on par with subjects like English and history.

Today the push to spread computer science has ushered in a new caste of high-status influencers in public schools.

The attempt to remake physics, however, ultimately serves as a cautionary tale. Despite the physicists’ best efforts, enrollment in high school physics declined in the 1960s, according to a report from UNESCO. Some critics blamed the new course, saying it was too abstract and catered only to advanced science students.

A few years later, a separate group of physicists at Harvard created their own high school course aimed at a broader student audience. This time the curriculum took a more democratic, humanistic view of science. One course textbook I read asked students how citizens could ensure technological innovations were made “in a manner befitting society as whole.”

Today the push to spread computer science has ushered in a new caste of high-status influencers in public schools. Only instead of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, they are tech companies, tech executives and tech philanthropists.

These technologists in the classroom have their own agendas. Many industry leaders genuinely want students to learn computational thinking — a broad-based approach to tackling complex problems that can be useful in real life, not just in software engineering.

Unlike the physicists, tech companies also have business motives: They want schools to train more students to help fill industry jobs. To that end, some executives argue that computer science should be a core subject for all students on par with writing and arithmetic.

“Right now, there are 500,000 computing jobs open in America alone, but we produce only 50,000 computer science graduates every year. That makes no sense,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post a few years ago promoting computing in schools. “Coding is a basic skill and is something everyone should be able to do, like reading,” he added. “It’s something every school should teach.”

Given that school children in the United States get only one chance at a free public education — an undertaking with huge implications for their personal development, economic prospects, and communities — I believe it’s vital to examine efforts to reshape the classroom, no matter whether they are propelled by physicists or underwritten by tech giants.

Natasha Singer, a reporter at The New York Times, has received national recognition for her work focusing on the intersection of business, technology and society.

by Sam Bloch / March 16th 2022 / Fellowship Life, Guest Posts

What Does Extreme Heat Look Like?

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 2020-21 Project Fellows.

We know what a flooded city looks like. Parked cars bob in placid waters, first responders steer motorboats through streets, and marooned residents wait for help on their roofs. We have all seen videos of a hurricane’s gale force winds tearing metal from a shed. We can imagine the devastation after a wildfire or a tornado rips through town. But what about the silent, pernicious threat of extreme heat, which killed more Americans last year than all of those weather-related events combined? What does that look like?

I thought about that question as Kelly Turner, a University of California, Los Angeles urban environmental planning professor, presented computer-modeled heat maps of the Watts neighborhood at a community meeting held on Zoom last summer. Officially, Turner was there to share data on the neighborhood’s baseline temperature conditions, measured two Septembers ago with the help of local kids for a wider study of “micro-scale cooling strategies” — like planting trees and erecting shaded bus shelters — that California’s governor’s office is funding here and in other neighborhoods burdened by air pollution and urban heat.

The first set of baseline conditions were the neighborhood’s land surface temperatures, known as LSTs, which are ground temperatures recorded by satellites. Compared to other neighborhoods, Watts has a high overall LST, because there are fewer trees and grasses and more asphalt and concrete. It’s crisscrossed by railroad tracks and freight lines, and wide roads designed to haul cargo from a nearby port. But even within the neighborhood, some surfaces are hotter than others. According to Turner’s data, the hottest surface in Watts isn’t a parking lot or a road, but a school. She showed a heat map with a bright red splotch signaling a hot spot in the middle of the neighborhood. It was an AstroTurf play field at Markham Middle School, which was a scalding 134 degrees. That’s hot enough to burn bare skin in less than a minute of contact.

The second set of baseline conditions were the neighborhood’s mean radiant temperatures, or MRTs — calculations of the total thermal burden on a human body in a given location. MRT factors in air temperature, humidity, and wind speed, plus the things you don’t hear on the weather report, like the intensity of sunlight and all the heat reradiating from the ground, building walls, and other nearby surfaces. MRT records microscale conditions far better than air temperature does, and for that reason, it’s a better proxy for how people experience heat, step by step, block by block. In hot, dry environments like Watts, it’s the real “feels like” temperature.

By 3:00 p.m., the [mean radiant temperature] was almost 162 degrees — the result of all those hard, dark surfaces, holding in hours of sun and reradiating it back as heat.

Turner showed a map of these modeled MRTs surrounding Grape Street Elementary, another local school. This was heat vision, and the neighborhood was incandescent, all reds and oranges, submerging the roads, streets, and schools like magma. The school’s blacktop play yard looked nearly identical to the roads surrounding the nearby train tracks. At 10:00 a.m., the mean radiant temperature in both locations was around 152 degrees. It creeped up to 158 degrees at noon. And by 3:00 p.m., the MRT was almost 162 degrees — the result of all those hard, dark surfaces, holding in hours of sun and reradiating it back as heat.

“The play yard is essentially the same, thermally, as a major roadway,” Turner said. “The place where our children play is the same experience they would have as if they were playing on a parking lot or a highway.”

The good news, she said, is that thermal burdens are substantially reduced in shade, at all daytime hours. She pointed to cool, blue spots on the map, where bungalows had cast squat, north-facing shadows on sidewalks, or where tree canopies had blocked out the sun. At noon, the MRT in these shady spots was around 120 degrees — still hot, but much lower than a place in the sun. Three hours later, the modeled temperatures dipped to around 117 degrees — sweet relief from the afternoon sun.

The reason why shade is so effective, Turner said, is because it does “double work” to improve human thermal comfort. In the shade, people don’t absorb incoming, direct solar radiation from the sun, nor are they exposed to the outgoing, longwave radiation emitted by heated surfaces. For emphasis, she showed the temperatures modeled in an unshaded residential yard. The surface temperatures on soil were lower than those on asphalt, because moisture absorbs and evaporates heat. But the MRTs were about as high.

As Turner wrapped her presentation, the chat box lit up. Comments streamed in. People raised virtual hands. They were incensed by what they’d seen. The playgrounds are as hot as the railroad — really? Do the schools know this? Do the parents know this? Are you going to release this information to the public? Is anyone going to do something about it? A handful of neighborhood schools were slated for tree planting and asphalt replacement, but Grape Street and Markham weren’t among them.

A couple days later, I called Stephanie Ayala, a Watts resident and Markham graduate, to talk about that heat map. It hit hard, she said, because it confirmed what she’d already known — that Watts was too hot. She had her epiphany that summer — the hottest in California’s history — when she drove by her old middle school and saw the unshaded blacktop sizzling in the sun. She knew it was hot — but didn’t know it was that hot.

“And to think that it could get even hotter than it is already, and that it’s our youth that are going to be out there?” she asked. “It’s got me thinking — how can it be different? How can we help?”

The heat map helped her see what Watts needed — more trees and shade. Now, she wondered if her neighborhood would ever get it.

Sam Bloch is a contributing writer at The Counter, where he covers business, environment and culture. He has written for The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, Places Journal, Bloomberg CityLab, and Art in America, among other publications.

by Nina Berman / March 2nd 2022 / Fellowship Life, Guest Posts

When the Jets Fly

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 2020-21 Project Fellows.

The noted psychologist and noise researcher Dr. Arline Bronzaft, who pioneered the 1970’s study on how noise from elevated trains in the Bronx affected child learning outcomes, urged me to think about sound in three ways. It’s a physical phenomenon; something makes a noise. And it’s physiological; our ears process the noise into neuronal signals. But sound is also psychological, meaning that when one hears a sound, that sound is interpreted and judged. So when reporting on noise pollution, it is important to consider not simply the decibel level or the frequency, but also the non-auditory and psychological impacts, which include feelings of helplessness, anxiety, and terror experienced by those living in hostile sonic landscapes.

During my Knight Science Journalism Project Fellowship I’ve been reporting on how one type of hostile sonic landscape, created by U.S. military warfare training of the latest generation of warplanes, is affecting civilian communities. My video documentation, which can be seen here, focuses on Whidbey Island and the greater Puget Sound area in Washington State and on communities around Burlington, Vermont.

While the specific details of each location vary, the experiences and challenges for residents are similar and point to a lack of regard for the complex nature of noise pollution and its multiple impacts. These impacts will only grow as the U.S. military ramps up deployment of its latest generation of aircrafts.

Residents described the noise as hostile and all encompassing — far more than a mere annoyance. One man said it felt like his entire protoplasm was shaking due to the low frequency vibrations.

Nearly every day on Whidbey Island, for hours at a time, electromagnetic jamming jets known as Growlers, fly low-altitude patterns, sometimes late into the night, over residential communities, with pilots practicing touch and go exercises to simulate aircraft carrier operations. The pilots fly over schools, homes, farms, and play areas, at noise levels exceeding 120 A-weighted decibels — about four times as loud as the experience of hearing a jackhammer from 5 feet away. It’s not uncommon for residents living near the flight paths to wear construction style ear muffs both outside and inside their homes.

The Washington State Department of Health characterized the noise pollution as “a public health threat.” In 2019, Washington attorney general Bob Ferguson, along with a local non-profit, Citizens of Ebeys Reserve, (COER), sued the Navy to stop a proposed expansion that would subject an additional 17,000 people to daily average sound levels of 65 decibels or more — levels the FAA has determined are unsuitable for residential land use. (The World Health Organization suggests an even lower threshold of 55 decibels.) In December, a judge ruled against the Navy on several points, including failure to take account noise impacts on childhood learning and the various bird populations.

Multiple studies show both auditory and non-auditory impacts from high-decibel noise pollution, including cardiovascular disease, tendency to dementia, anxiety, depression, and negative childhood learning outcomes and hearing loss. But my reporting found a gap in the scientific literature in the area of military jet impacts. Noise from military jets is intensely loud but happens less frequently than noise from commercial aviation, which is the subject of most studies. As a result, metrics based on daily average decibel levels are insufficient for capturing the potential harms of military jet training noise. The Washington Department of Health recommended in 2017 that the Navy conduct a health impact assessment. No such study has been forthcoming.

But to the residents of the Puget Sound area, the impacts of the Navy’s deafening roars seem readily apparent. The Navy operates a complaint line where residents can call or email their noise concerns. According to a Freedom of Information Act request, in 2020 the base received 3,897 complaints. I read through the noise complaints and thousands of public comments submitted while the proposed Navy expansion was being reviewed. I also interviewed residents on Whidbey and Lopez Islands, and I set my own phone up as a de facto hotline so residents could leave voice mail messages in real time as to what they were experiencing.

Residents described the noise as hostile and all encompassing — far more than a mere annoyance. One man said it felt like his entire protoplasm was shaking due to the low frequency vibrations. A doctor described outdoor conditions as “unlivable.” Another resident said it felt like the “planes are going to bomb us.” Several callers expressed aggravation and frustration that their concerns were being dismissed. “I just can’t take it anymore. I’m trying to get some work done and I can’t. I’m getting ready to lose my farm over this stuff but I know you don’t care.” Many residents told me they stopped calling the complaint line because nothing is ever done.

Courtesy of YouTube/The Intercept

Dr. Bronzaft described these interactions as creating a state of learned helplessness. “Helplessness means I’m giving up. It’s no use for me to complain. Nobody’s going to care. And you know, the agency making the noise relies on that because once you enter a state of learned helplessness, the complaint levels decrease, and then you certainly don’t have to do anything about the noise.”

This is the condition many residents now face not just on Whidbey Island but also on the Olympic Peninsula where researchers have shown that the Navy’s Growler training has dramatically altered a once pristine soundscape. That the noise polluter is the same military tasked with protecting the residents is profoundly unsettling. Residents said they feel like the enemy.

Similar conditions are playing out in Burlington, Vermont where 20 F-35 planes are now stationed at the Air National Guard base. Four days a week for several hours a day and some nights and weekends, F-35s train over the most densely populated region of Vermont. Hardest hit is the community of Winooski, a poor city just north of the airport where about 20 percent of residents are new Americans, many from war-torn countries such as Iraq. The arrival of the F-35s put 2,640 dwellings in the 65 decibel and above range, meaning thousands of people are living in conditions the FAA deems incompatible with residential use. To soundproof all of these buildings — and there is disagreement over the effectiveness of sound-proofing — would take 25 years, and still wouldn’t address the noise pollution when people are outdoors.

During my reporting I interviewed Dr. Peter Bingham, a pediatric neurologist and Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurology at the University of Vermont Medical Center and a Professor of Neurology at the Larner College of Medicine. In a letter to the editor of the alt-weekly publication Seven Days he wrote, “Hundreds of children in our communities are likely experiencing hearing loss — the so-called ‘temporary threshold shift’ — for hours, days or weeks beyond those few seconds when the F-35s are exposing their brains to neurotoxic levels of noise.” He advised families against moving anywhere near the F-35 training area and was concerned about non-auditory impacts such as depression and anxiety.

The conflict between community health concerns and the growing demands of the U.S. military are playing out all over the country. Madison, Wisconsin, is on schedule to receive the next batch of F-35s. Health professionals and noise pollution researchers play an important role in helping communities and lawmakers understand the risks posed by military warfare training. But my reporting shows that for the most part, these concerns are falling on deaf ears, and residents have few resources available to protect themselves.

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, author, and professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.