Science Friday - Climate Change Music, Industrial Animal Husbandry, Grief Book. Feb 3, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

How Grief Rewires The Brain Being a human can be a wonderful thing. We’re social creatures, craving strong bonds with family and friends. Those relationships can be the most rewarding parts of life. But having strong relationships also means the possibility of experiencing loss. Grief is one of the hardest things people go through in life. Those who have lost a loved one know the feeling of overwhelming sadness and heartache that seems to well up from the very depths of the body. To understand why we feel the way we do when we grieve, the logical place to turn is to the source of our emotions: the brain. A new book explores the neuroscience behind this profound human experience. Ira speaks to Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, a neuroscientist, about adjusting to life after loss.   Midwest Aims To Add Large Indoor Animal Farms, Despite Concerns Legislation and programs in states like Missouri and Nebraska are paving the way to welcome large livestock operations by limiting local control over the facilities. Some rural residents worry about the potential pollution and decreased quality of life that will bring.In Cooper County, Missouri, CAFOs are a controversial topic. Susan Williams asked to meet in a small local library to talk about it, hoping that there wouldn’t be anyone around. Even in this quiet atmosphere, she’s nervous about people overhearing the conversation. “I just don’t want the whole town to hear me,” she said. Concentrated animal feed operations, commonly called CAFOs, are large animal facilities that hold thousands of head of livestock. Iowa leads the Midwest in the number of CAFOs with about 4,000 of them. However, in recent years, laws and programs have paved the way for CAFOs to operate in other Midwestern states, including Missouri and Nebraska. That’s worrying residents like Williams, a retired elementary school principal and a farmland owner from Clarksburg, Missouri. Back in 2018, a large hog operation called Tipton East planned on moving in less than a mile away from her house. The size of the operation, about 8,000 hogs, concerned her, especially since she grew up with a small hog farm. “Just the smell and the waste that you had was tremendous with that,” she said. “And I couldn’t imagine what it would be like with that many hogs.” Read the rest on sciencefriday.com   Blending The Sounds Of Climate Change With Appalachian Music Daniel Bachman is an acclaimed musician, known for his unique blend of Appalachian-inspired folk music and meditative drones. But, for his latest album, titled Almanac Behind, he wanted to try something a little different. Bachman lives in central Virginia, which has recently experienced multiple extreme weather events influenced by climate change. Unusually heavy snow in January 2022 caused power outages and trapped drivers in their cars on highways. Later in the year, intense rainfall led to downed power lines and flooding. And wildfires are becoming increasingly common in the Appalachian region. “I had the idea to document everything that we experienced through the end of this recording process,” he said. With the help of family and friends, Bachman gathered field recordings of these sounds of climate change, and weaved them together with the banjo and guitar. “It did feel like I was working collaboratively with non-human partners,” he said. “It makes me feel better to work with these forces, instead of trying to constantly push them away.” Bachman also talks about his work as an independent scholar, and how the traditions of Appalachian folklore influenced his view of the album as a climatological historical document.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Close relationships can be one of the most rewarding parts of life. But having strong relationships also means experiencing loss. Grief can bring overwhelming sadness and heartache that reaches deeply into the very core of your being. To understand why we feel the way we do when we grieve, the logical place to turn to is our brain. Last year, we talked about a book that explores the neuroscience angle to this profound human experience. The grieving brain, it's coming out now in paperback next week, and we're excited to announce that the Science Friday Book Club will be reading it together this March. Go to sciencefriiday.com slash griefbook to learn how you can take part. Mary Frances O'Connor, Ph.D., author of The Grieving Brain, is based in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to

Science Friday. It's so nice to be here, Ira. It's so nice to have. have you. Let's start with some of the wordplay here, if I might. I'm inclined to use the words grief and grieving interchangeably, but they're actually different experiences, correct? That's right. I have found this to be really helpful in studying grief and grieving. Grief is that wave that just knocks you off your feet, where grieving is how the feeling of grief changes over time without ever going away. So what I mean by that is that grief is a natural response to loss. And if I, you know, open a drawer, I come across my mom's signature, say, for example, 20 years after she's died, I may still dissolve into tears on that day. And yet, I know that that feeling of grief

is maybe more familiar. And so it's not the same as it was 20 years earlier. But if we're expecting that we're not going to feel grief anymore, we may start to wonder if we're actually getting any better or if we're adapting the way people are expecting us to. You said when you study grief, how long have you been studying grief? And what do you mean by studying grief? I have been studying grief for a good 22 years now. I started in graduate school because, you know, fMRI technology was brand new back then, and I was absolutely intrigued. So after my dissertation, we brought people back and put them in the neuroimaging scanner for the very first study of grief from a neuroscience perspective. So this was groundbreaking stuff then. Yes, the American Journal of Psychiatry

thought it was at least. Well, when you put them in the scanner, what do you ask of them? We really struggled with, you know, how do you evoke something as deeply intense and personal as grief in such a, you know, sterile sort of hospital-like environment? And what we came up with was what people do pretty naturally. If they're going to tell you about someone who has been, you know, the love of their life, they often open a photo album and show you photos. And so we scanned photos, individuals brought us and took words from the stories they told us about their loss and projected those onto goggles that people were wearing in the scanner. So we literally had images of what their brain was reacting to when they were each looking at individual photos of

their loved lost one, which was a little unusual at the time. Usually we try to have standardized stimuli across everyone, but it is such a personal experience that felt important. Please, can you, can you share with us what you've learned? Tell us what is going on in the brain when you look at those pictures or when we lose a loved one? You know, one of the things we realized is that grief is really complex. So it actually involves a bunch of different things that the brain is doing all at the same time. And those include things you might expect like memory and even things like being able to take someone else's perspective. So encoding of sort of the self and the other. But other things as well, even things like, you know, regulating our heart rate and so forth.

You've just described how you show pictures to people who are getting their brain scan, and that must dredge up memories, correct? What's going on in their brain about these memories? Well, one of the interesting things is the brain is very complex, and we can actually be using two streams of information at the same time. So you're absolutely right. One aspect is memory. We're thinking about times we spent with the loved one, maybe even seeing the loved one decline over time or being there when they passed away or getting that phone call to tell us that they have died. But interestingly, we also have to think about the bond. So in the human brain, there is a bond created when we come to be a parent or we become a spouse. that bond is very strong and comes along with some beliefs.

And one of these beliefs we have is that person is going to be there for us. No matter what, that person is there. What that leads to is these two streams of information. On the one hand, you know that they're gone. But on the other hand, it sort of feels like they're going to walk through the door again. And so that can be very confusing for people. I think it takes a long time for the brain to be able to predict. No, I'm not really going to see this person again and all the emotions and what that means

that comes along with it. So does that mean that in the brain, the brain cells has to have to physically rewire themselves for the new reality? That's exactly right. So even in simple things, say in a mouse, if you put him in a box, if you put him in a box, him in a box every day and he sees, you know, some blue Lego item, after a number of days, if you take the Lego out and you put him back in the box, there is still a ghost trace of that block because the rat is expecting it, there are neurons that fire when he is in the area

where that block should be. Now, this persists for a number of days. But imagine for a life that is so intersected with another person. Everything we do and think and plan is involved with this other person, the brain literally has to create new wiring to understand what's happening. And that takes time. It does take time. It turns out that time is one of the most important things, but actually experience is another important thing. Something we sometimes see is that people have a lot of difficulty with grief and start avoiding situations or conversations or even people that remind them of the loved one because it's quite painful. But it turns out that kind of avoiding doesn't give our brain a chance to learn the new reality. Yeah. Grief can feel like such a physical event.

Yeah. Can't it? It really can. I think it is a physical event in part because it's physically happening in your brain. Usually when we say that, of course, we're referring to the bottom. feelings. But really, those changes, for example, some work by Zoe Donaldson and University of Colorado Boulder shows that there are specific neurons in rodents that pair bond. Some of you will have heard of them called voles. There are specific neurons that are activated just when that VOL is approaching their one and only. And the number of neurons increases as that bond gets stronger. And so if you think about then all the things that have to happen in order to be able to predict this person isn't going to be back and understand what that means, it's pretty complicated and really

is a physical process. Yeah. Yeah. You talk on your book also about how grief can actually cause physical ailments? Well, the term the broken heart phenomena is something, you know, we think of as a metaphor. We think about that in terms of sort of a poetic way to put what we're feeling. But we actually know from epidemiological research that it is true that when a person has lost their spouse, their own risk of mortality goes up. For men, it goes. For men, it goes. up twice as high than their married counterpart for the first six months. And it goes up in women as well, not quite as high. And so we know that that connection is a lot about physiological regulation.

We really, you know, being with our loved ones is extremely rewarding and it feels safe. And so our physiology really has to live in what feels like an unsafe world for a while and try and figure out how to come back to homeostasis. Yeah, because we know that losing a loved one can be very traumatic. Yes. Do trauma and grief overlap? We used to think that grief and depression were the same thing, and sometimes we even thought grief and PTSD might be the same thing, depending on how the loved one died. But some work by Richard Bryan at the University of New South Wales in Australia, did neuroimaging scans, of people who had a severe form of grieving. And it actually looked different from PTSD and from major depressive disorder in the brain,

recruiting different parts of the brain, recruiting the orbital frontal cortex when people who had this severe grief looked at pictures of people with sad faces. So knowing that there are some biological differences or neurobiological differences, really reinforces what we see clinically that PTSD and grief, they are different. That is interesting. You say in your book that many people who lose a loved one turn to religion to help them understand what has happened and where their loved one may have gone. Is there science that backs up this connection? I think, you know, as a neuroscientist, it isn't so much that I'm,

trying to figure out if religious beliefs are true, but rather what does it do for us if we have religious beliefs? So on the one hand, we know, you know, often being a religious person comes along with having a religious community, and we know social support is really important, and we can see that in studies. The other thing that sometimes happens for folks, though, is that they get into a lot of concerns about guilt, sometimes even feeling that they are being punished for what has happened. And this can be really problematic for people in trying to understand the meaning of what they're going through. We have to take a break, but when we come back, more about how our brain processes grief

with author Mary Frances O'Connor. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with author and new. neuroscientist Mary Frances O'Connor about how our brains process grief. Her book, The Grieving Brain, is our March Pick for the Science Friday Book Club. And you can go to sciencefriiday.com slash grief book to find out more. Are there medications designed to alleviate or help people cope with grief? This is a very important question. And I would say that at this point, we do not have

medications. In fact, one of the things that we know is that, as I said before, major depressive disorder and even severe forms of grieving are different things. This was really neatly, sort of elegantly explored in a study by Kathy Shear at Columbia University, where they did treatment for a severe type of grieving called prolonged grief disorder. And they also looked to see if they had major depressive disorder. So in one case, they were given just psychotherapy, targeted for grief, and then they were either given an antidepressant or not given an antidepressant. What they discovered was antidepressants were very helpful if the person had comorbid depression. We saw their depressive symptoms remit, but the antidepressant did not actually have an impact on those

feelings of yearning and wishing that the person was back, that sort of that type of emotional pain was not actually helped by the antidepressant. And that was very helpful again in helping us distinguish between these difficult experiences. Do you suspect, though, that when someone is grieving and it's quite obvious how much they're suffering that somebody, a psychiatrist or their physician may prescribe an antidepressant just to give them something when they don't actually need it? This is a bit of a challenge. I think, you know, there hasn't been a lot of education in medical schools, frankly, in psychology training either, about grief. It really is in its infancy. And so often, because just as you say, doctors are empathic, they see this person, they want to give them something.

Sometimes they'll prescribe an antidepressant, even sometimes when the patient says, I don't really feel depressed. But the other problem is that a lot of people who are grieving have difficulty sleeping. And so a doctor will often prescribe a sleep medication. What we know about that is the difficulty sleeping that comes with bereavement is a temporary situation. It is incredibly difficult, but it is also temporary. And those sleep medications tend not to work well in the long run, and yet people tend to stay on them, sometimes because coming off of them is difficult. So it's more important to think about, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, what we call CBTI, which is a way of thinking about supporting the natural sleep cycle through behavioral means and enabling that person to get back into a rhythm naturally. so that in the long term, they don't have these sleep difficulties.

Now, your book was written pre-COVID, but it's very timely for right now, I would imagine. So how much grief is happening in the world because of this virus? I mean, has this pandemic changed how you look at grief in some ways? It has in some ways. I think there's been a lot of discussion about grief, but what we know from evidence in the United States, some modeling done by some sociologists demonstrated that for every person who has died, there are about nine loved ones who remain, who are survivors. So if you think about we're getting close to, you know, a million people who have died of COVID. That's nine million people who are acutely grieving. And that's just in our country. And that's just in our country. So one of the difficulties is just understanding what it means to have such a large number of people, but also who are all going through it at the same time. Usually when we're losing a loved one, we have people around us who aren't going through that experience that we can kind of lean on. And now we have a pretty unusual situation where, I mean, let's face it, we're dealing with a lot of types of grief. But even if we focused only on bereavement, we're dealing with a lot of deaths.

And for me, it isn't just what does that grief feel like or how many people have it. But as a grief researcher, my interest is partly in why might the pandemic circumstances be harder for people who are grieving? And that thing I said before about the brain relies on this stream of information where we've maybe seen the person decline. We may have been there at the bedside when they passed away. We went to a funeral or a memorial service. Many of those circumstances have really changed because of social distancing. And so as I'm doing research right now, I'm talking with people who, you know, the 70-year-old woman who dropped off her fairly healthy husband who had a cough at the ER and was having a some trouble breathing. And then because we're not allowed to be in the hospital with them,

the next thing she knew, she was being told that he had died. And that's a very unusual circumstance for us not to be present. People who have loved ones in long-term care experience this as well. And I think the problem is that it doesn't give our brain a chance to understand what's happening as we're going through the experience. Yes, that I'm sure has happened many times, unfortunately. And as you say, we're experiencing what feels like a group grief event with COVID. Do you think this might change us as a species? It's an interesting question.

Certainly, in the sense of a species, grief is such a universal experience and even pandemics. right, mass casualties. We certainly, as a species, have faced difficult situations before, and we can look to some of those for important ways that people have coped. I think it's unusual in a cultural way. Part of what we sometimes forget is that bereavement is a health disparity, right? So 65% of all the children experiencing COVID-associated, you know, loss of a caregiver are of a racial or ethnic minority. And this has always actually been true. Black Americans become widowed at much younger ages. Work by Deborah Umbersome done at UT Austin showed that by the age, between the ages of 65 and 74, 25% of black Americans are widowed compared

with only 15% of white Americans. Right. And so bereavement isn't affecting everyone equally. If we're thinking at a kind of public health level, we have to really make sure that the response is targeted in the way that it will do the most help. If there are people who are listening and who are grieving, what do you recommend they do to listen to pain or help them move on or find help? This is a very challenging time for people. I think it's confusing. The grief experience is not often what people are expecting. There's a lot of anger often or just the intrusive thoughts. You can't sort of stop thinking about it. Much of that is actually pretty normal. And, you know, people often have the desire to talk about their experience to try to put into words what it means to know that you're

not going to retire with this person, that you would plan to do that forever. So I actually recommend then reaching out and talking with the people around you, especially people who may have had their own grief experience, often there's a level of empathy there that it can be more difficult for people who don't have the same lived experience. So reaching out and talking with people, and also if people are experiencing things like feeling life isn't worth living, or feeling they can't get through the day without drinking a large amount of alcohol, These are really signs that it is important to reach out for professional help as well, because this is a temporary situation. And although it doesn't feel like it in the moment, it will change over time.

And we want to support a person who's in that immediate part of grieving in order to help them get onto that sort of healing, grieving trajectory. You know, the news is filled almost every day with someone else suffering a violent death, whether it's from gunshots, whether it's from murders, whatever. Is there a special kind of grief that these people, the relatives and the loved ones of these people go through that needs a special kind of treatment or counseling? We sometimes refer to this as traumatic grief, meaning that the situation itself that led to the death was a traumatic situation. And we know that violent deaths and unexpected deaths can be more problematic as people are trying to understand what has happened and what it means for their life. Often people who've experienced a traumatic death experience more grief symptoms.

But often also it comes with other things as well. Sometimes there is what we might call survivors guilt. So depending on what the situation was, the sort of question to oneself of why did I live when this other person did not? And that can be complicating as you're trying to come to terms with what has happened and then learn how to sort of restore a meaningful life. What research would you like to see on grief and grieving in the future? And if I gave you, I'm going to give you the sci-fri blank check question. Maybe you've heard it before.

If I had a blank check, which I don't have it, to give you for spending on buying anything you'd like on the kind of research you'd like to see done that hasn't been done, how would you spend it? You know, I think there are even some really basic questions that we don't know. One is that we have a number of studies now on grief, that single snapshot in time across a number of people. What we don't have a lot of research on is actually grieving. So looking at the same person, putting the same person in the MRI scanner numerous times across that changing experience and seeing what does it look at? like in the brain when people are coming to terms with what has happened, restoring a meaningful

life. And the second question I would want to know at the same time, we don't actually know if people who are psychologically having a lot of difficulty adjusting are the same people who are having a lot of difficulty medically adjusting. So we don't actually know yet because these are tend to be different groups of people studying them, we don't actually know if the changes physiologically are related to the changes in the brain and in the mind. And so I'd love to see more integrated work over time with people. When you say medically adjusting, what do you mean by that? Well, this gets a little bit back to what I was saying about the broken heart phenomenon earlier. what we know is that acutely, and this is true even in animal pair bonds,

some work by Oliver Bosch at University of Regensburg in Germany, has shown that when a bond is formed, it's almost like cocking a gun, so that as soon as there is separation, cortisol goes up, or the animal version of cortisol, cortisol goes up in humans upon separation and remains high. So think about that moment when you lose your kid in the mall and you can't find them, that utter panic, right? Or think about when, you know, a husband even goes on a trip out of town and you feel awful, right? As soon as that separation happens, we know there are these physiological changes,

and we're still really trying to understand in human beings for who, whom do those changes happen most? Is that related to how they feel emotionally? And then are there things that we can do to help sort of support the body as it deals with this stress hormone imbalance in order to improve their experience and even improve their medical situation in that initial period of grief? If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with author and neuroscientist Mary Frances O'Connor about how our brains process grief. Her book, The Grieving Brain, is our March Pick for the Science Friday Book Club, and you can go to sciencefriady.com slash grief book to find out more. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You told me earlier that you've been

studying grief for over 20 years. Does it get to you studying grief? This is a really common question for me. You know, I teach an undergraduate psychology of death and loss course, so 150 undergrads, you know, who say the word death probably more in that 14 weeks than they ever have in their life. And they often say to me, you know, I feel like you're too happy to be teaching this class. And I tell them, you know, the thing for me is the reason I'm happy is because I really understand the suffering. And so I have found a way in my own life. life from the death of my mother when I was in my mid-20s and then the death of my father, not so many years ago, I know what that suffering is like. And for me, it has helped me to find

a lot of meaning in life. To know that working with that one student to help them understand something is really rewarding because this is all the time we got. So I think, you know, the surprising thing is for people who have found meaning, it can be very powerful. And that is sort of an unexpected side to grieving. Well, that's about all the time we've got, Mary Francis. Thank you for taking time to be with us and for this terrific book that you've written. Thank you so much, Ira, for bringing this conversation to the radio. Mary Frances O'Connor, author of The Grieving Brain.

She's based in Tucson, and we are excited to announce the Science Friday Book Club will be reading The Grieving Brain together this March. and if you're interested in joining the conversation about how grief affects our brains and what science can tell us about love and loss, go to ScienceFriday.com slash grief book. Make sure to sign up for our newsletter to hear about upcoming events, discussion questions, and even how to enter to win a free book. Yeah, that's ScienceFriday.com slash grief book. We have to take a break and let me come back how big factory farms are gaining traction in the Midwest, even though. though many are not happy about the smell and the pollution. Their concern was the smell, but one of their big concerns was, yeah, the manure would be spread on fields.

They use a lot of groundwater there for drinking water. So the concern was whether that would seep into the groundwater and affect people's well water. The fight's not ever going to be over. I think this public is always going to have to be vigilant to make sure that the public's interests are taken into account just as much as any industry. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. And now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Animal agriculture is a big industry in the Midwest. To make it even bigger, some states are courting concentrated animal feed operations known as KFOs. These are huge facilities that hold thousands of animals in science.

But some rural residents are not happy about having a whole bunch of animals in a small space nearby. Their big concern, water pollution from manure runoff. Joining me to talk about this is Eva Tesfai, reporter for KCUR and Harvest Public Media. She's based in Kansas City, Missouri, and has been reporting on this story. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. Okay, please define for us what CAFO is.

Yeah, so as you said, it's a lot. stands for concentrated animal feeding operation. And so basically what that means is that animals are kept inside. They're kept inside a building and fed inside. And concentrated is given to animal feeding operations that just have a large amount of animals. So usually like thousands of them. So it's really these industrial-sized operations. So you can also think of them as factory farms. Yeah, that's the old words for describing them, right? Yeah. Concentrated animal feeding operation is like the official USDA term. I got it.

What states did you look at during your reporting? What kind of changes are happening in support of CAFOs? Yeah, so I looked at Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri. And I looked at Iowa as mainly a point of comparison because that state has the most KFOs in the Midwest. It has about 4,000 of them. And in recent years, both Missouri and Iowa made it harder for local communities to oppose KFOs.

So Iowa reversed a Supreme Court decision. And doing that, they made it harder to file nuisance suits against CAFOs. So neighbors can't sue CAFOs. In Missouri, the Senate passed a bill that made it so counties can't put any restrictions on agriculture that are more strict than the state. Another way that they're bringing in more CAFOs is both Missouri and Nebraska have programs that counties can sign up for, where basically they just get this designation that signals that they are friendly counties to CAFOs. friendly to livestock productions. And the things that they have to agree to in order to get these designations are usually promising to not enact regulations or more restrictions on these

operations. So a lot of what's been happening has been about preventing more local restrictions or regulations or local opposition to CAFOs. Like legal loopholes. Speaking of that, what are some of the big complaints people are having about CAFOs? So a huge thing is the smell. If you go, near any kifo you will immediately be hit by the smell of the manure. Did you find that yourself? Did you find that? Yeah, I went to a few kaphos in Missouri outside of them and they actually didn't have the pigs there but I could still smell how bad it was and I could also, I was still starting to get

a headache from the ammonia and the people who live there, you know, describe it as literally being unlivable. They can't be outside when the wind brings that smell. their ways. So it is really, really bad. The other thing is that, you know, these operations produce huge, huge amounts of animal waste. It can be millions of gallons a year. And in order to dispose of that waste, they have to spread it on field. So they don't discharge directly into water or anything like that. But water pollution is still a concern because the manure that spread on fields runs off into our waterways. And one of the big concerns is nitrates. Nitrates from that runoff can go into, especially here in the Midwest, can go into the rivers that go into the Mississippi River,

which contributes to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Nitrates can also cause harmful algae blooms. Research in Nebraska is also linking high nitrate levels to pediatric cancer. So water pollution from these KFOs is a huge concern, not only for the people who live in the area, who drink that water, but also further downstream. Now, if people want to protest against this, and they really want, you know, to voice their concerns, I know you've talked to people there. You've talked to one woman Susan Williams in Cooper County, Missouri. How did this KFO situation play out there? Yeah, so Susan Williams, so she's a farmland owner in Cooper County. And basically, a few years ago, So a CAFO announced that it would be moving in less than a mile from her home.

So basically what she did was she got a bunch of people and she also got the health department involved. Their concern was the smell, but one of their big concerns was, yeah, the manure would be spread on fields. They use a lot of groundwater there for drinking water. So the concern was whether that would seep into the groundwater and affect people's well water. So that health department passed some regulations on manure and air.

quality. But then what happened right after that Senate bill that I spoke about earlier, that passed? And so now she and Cooper County are suing the Missouri government for passing that law that basically said they couldn't enact those regulations and restrictions on CAFOs. So that case went to the Supreme Court, so they're waiting for the decision on that. But, you know, she told me she's basically doing everything she can. Basically, here's what she said about fighting CAFOs. The fight's not ever going to be over. I think this public is always going to have to be vigilant to make sure that the public's interests are taken into account just as much as any industry. She is optimistic because it seems like there is more of that people paying attention to this than before there is more of that

vigilance. So what do we know about how CAFOs have worked in other states? For example, in Iowa. Yeah. So Iowa has a lot of CAFOs. And we also know that's partly because of the protection for animal agriculture in that state. I also talked to a researcher who studied right to farm laws. Her name is Dr. Loka Ashwood. So right to farm laws are laws that protect agricultural operations from lawsuits from their neighbors, from those nuisance lawsuits. And basically every state in the United States has some form of those laws.

And she said, basically, across the U.S., we see that KFOs actually win these lawsuits the most. Like, these lawsuits tend to protect KFOs. and small farmers are the ones who are losing them the most. So a lot of these laws got passed because people wanted to protect farmers, but it's the small farmers that are actually losing. That is interesting. Well, so what is the agriculture industry response?

What did they say in support of KFOs? Yeah, so I talked to Mike Dearing from the Missouri Cattlemen's Association, and this is what he had to say about it. It's food security. It's the food supply chain. and to make sure that we are keeping that local and not having to import, import, import. And so we have to encourage growth. Basically, the argument is that it's really necessary for economic growth, especially in states like Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa,

where agriculture and the livestock industry is one of the main economic sectors. And some also argue that it provides needed employment in rural communities. The EPA recently said, though, admit that it plans to look into this CAFOs issue. They had an announcement, right? Yeah. So nationally, the EPA doesn't actually have very strict regulations on CAFOs. But a couple weeks ago, EPA said it was going to study whether they should update their regulations on CAFOs. And so this was after environmental groups pressured them last year with a lawsuit.

I talked to Iowa Food and Water Watch, which was one of the groups that spearheaded this. And they basically said they were turning their attention to getting national change because states like Iowa and Nebraska and Missouri, you know, are really not regulating this industry. So they're really looking to get some national changes to get these states to start regulating more. Well, I want to thank you. This is really interesting and something I know that you'll be following. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Eva Tess Fye, reporter for KCR and Harvest Public Media.

She is based in Kansas City, Missouri. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. As the effects of our climate crisis become more visible everywhere, artists are reflecting those changes in their work. Sci-fi producer Dee Petersmith spoke to one of those artists, folk musician Daniel Bachman, about his new album and how the recent floods and wildfires in Virginia shape the music's creation.

To start things off, here's a clip of one of the songs from the album 540 Supercell. Daniel Bachman is an acclaimed folk musician and independent scholar. We're here to talk about his new album, Almanac Behind, a blend of Appalachian folk music and audio collages, documenting the effects of extreme weather and climate change that affected his home region of Central Virginia. Daniel Bachman, welcome to Science Friday.

Hey, thanks so much for having me. Yeah. Can you tell me about what happened in your personal life that made you want to make an album like this? Yeah, sure. So some people out there might remember last January, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, this region got a really heavy wet snow that was really uncharacteristic for our region. It was destroying power infrastructure and closing roads. And

it shut down Interstate 95. People were trapped in their cars. It was really bad. So the very first field recordings and ideas for this kind of came from that first storm. A lot of the wind sounds and hail and sleet. And then kind of had the idea, you know, I'll okay, I'm going to document everything that we experience through the end of this record process. Yeah. Why do you think it was necessary to have field recordings to communicate the message of the album? Well, you know, it's tough working in the confines of traditional Western instruments, you know, whether it be banjo or guitar or even piano and stuff, you're kind of bound to a certain harmonic range that only expresses so much emotion, you know. And so when you get into these deep problems that we face, I feel sometimes that you lose the weight of these events if you're just simply trying to play a minor or major scale or, you know, things like that.

But in order to really convey the power of these events, you know, when you hear rushing water or, you know, like hard driving rain, I really thought that using the field recordings intentionally, you know, this is something that people can, from all over the world, hopefully could relate to. you know, these sounds are inherent to our experience living on Earth. And it just happens, you know, that I'm just, you know, interested in folk cultures and history, and that's my vehicle for it. Yeah. Appalachia has this incredibly rich history of not just storytelling, but passing those stories down. And as you've mentioned, you've done quite a bit of your own historical research on the cultures and folklore of Virginia and its music. Can you talk a bit about that work?

And if you wanted an almanac behind to be in conversation with that history and tradition. Yeah, there's a tradition of documenting events and especially natural disasters in folk music. Charlie Patton has high water everywhere. There's dry well blues. Uncle Dave Macon has Tennessee tornado, you know. So, yeah, I was definitely aiming for that energy creating this piece. You know, I kind of wanted it to be a contemporary document of these events. It's definitely abstract, you know, but I do like to think that it does kind of fall in line in that history of music.

Yeah, I mean, it's abstract, but even though the subject matter is pretty dark, to me at least, it was very calming to listen to. I've listened to the album a few times, and you weave emergency radio broadcast transmissions into the album, and then, like, you follow them up with solo meditative banjo. How did you think about balancing really intense and kind of maybe like diametrically opposed emotions on this? Yeah, well, there's a lot of waiting in these events. The time between when, you know, you learn over the radio broadcasts or whatever, how you hear about these things coming, there's a calmness, you know, that you almost feel. Even if they do hit like a train, you can see them coming. And I was hyper aware of weather while I was documenting it. You know, I had my field recorder by the front door and, you know, at any time that we were going to have weather that was going to produce a good audio.

sample, I was, you know, ready to go out there and stuff. It was pretty wild to put this thing together. Yeah. I read that you involved your friends and family to help you gather the sounds on this album. It felt good to bring family and friends in it. I did ask my friend Will Thornton, who's a sound artist from Fredericksburg, if he could contribute some of his flood recordings. So in the section where you hear the waters rising and electrical lines snapping and stuff, that's actually the sound of five major rivers in Virginia at flood stage all at once. A friend of mine, Zep Mann, actually made a computer program that renders photographs into wave files.

And forest fires are becoming increasingly common in the middle Appalachians here. So I took photographs of different weather events of Old Rag Mountain here in Madison County with a red sun setting behind it from wildfire smoke and then completely rearrange the pixels and you get a new thing out of it. Can you tell me about the sort of cyclical nature of this album? Yeah, the album actually plays on a loop. If you listen to it through and you have it on repeat, it starts with wind blowing through chimes on our front porch.

And as, you know, the cleanup efforts are happening towards the end of the record, you can hear the chimes and the wind picking up again, kind of hinting that, you know, that this is a repeating cycle, that we're entering. And if I can quote Professor Bill McGuire's new book, Hot House Earth, he suggests that we might not be experiencing extreme weather anymore, but simply just weather. You know, these events are increasingly the norm. So that's kind of what I was getting at, you know, with the looping nature of the record. You know, one of the things without getting too far out that I actually really liked about working on this record is that it did feel like I was working

collaboratively with non-human partners, you know, just being with these weather events, working with them to create a piece of art. That's the energy that I like, you know, that is making me feel better in these times a little bit, you know, working with these forces in the earth instead of constantly trying to, you know, push them away or whatever. Totally. I love that idea. What do you hope people take away after listening to Almanac behind? Well, currently, you know, how we talk about climate change, I think there's a real tendency in the U.S. right now to kind of put it off. But, you know, we really are seeing

these drastic earth changes happen constantly all over the globe. And so I made this album, you know, as a way for me to kind of participate in climate activism that I see other people doing that I'm really inspired about and just, you know, hope that it serves as a document. But, yeah, this is the way that I feel

that I can best participate in, raising awareness of, you know, what's happening to our, Earth. Yeah. Well, thank you. I really recommend people check out the album. If you go to our site, you can watch the film that accompanies Almanac Behind. That's at ScienceFriiday.com slash climate songs. Daniel, thank you so much for your time and thank you for the album. It's really special. Well, thank you so much, too. This is such a pleasure. That was Daniel Bachman, musician, and independent scholar. And that does it for this week. If you missed any part of the program

or you would like to hear it again, sure. Subscribe to our podcasts. or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And of course, you can say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us, yes, the old-fashioned way. SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. Please send us feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great weekend.

We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.