Six on History: Geography and Science
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"Massachusetts is the healthiest state in the country, according to a new survey.
A report released Tuesday by Sharecare, a digital health company, and Boston University’s School of Public Health found that in 2020, Massachusetts topped all other states in community well-being, while Mississippi came in last.
Massachusetts ranked in the top 10 for a number of health factors the survey assessed, including well-being as it pertains to finances, socializing, purpose, physical health, community health, housing and transportation, health care access, and food access, according to a statement from Sharecare and BU.
Massachusetts improved its position from the 2019 community well-being ranking, when it landed the No. 2 spot, after Hawaii. The most recent report put Hawaii behind Massachusetts on the list.
The top nine states “all have populations with generally lower-than-average individual health risk factors and better-than-average social determinants of health,” the statement said.
Sharecare and BU surveyed more than 450,000 adults across all 50 states to assess individual health risk factors like physical health, community and social bonds, the ability to manage finances to achieve their goals, and strength of purpose in daily life, and analyzed data from more than 600 sources for social determinants of health associated with community outcomes, like access to health care, food and resources, housing and transportation, and economic security.
The survey also found that from 2019 to 2020, community well-being mostly stayed the same, increasing slightly from 60.2 in 2019 to 60.5 in 2020. Zero represents the lowest-possible well-being score while 100 is the highest.
Physical and social well-being increased across the country from 2019 to 2020, while financial well-being decreased amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The top nine healthiest states voted for President Biden in the 2020 presidential election, while the 10 states determined to be the least healthy in the country, except for New Mexico, voted for former president Donald Trump, the survey found."
"Six months ago, Santana joined the hundreds of thousands of people who have moved to the greater Phoenix area in recent years looking for affordable homes, sunshine and warm winters. The pandemic has only intensified that trend, with home sales increasing by nearly 12 percent in 2020. There’s just one problem: The region doesn’t appear to have enough water for all the planned growth.
In 2017, Phoenix became the fifth-largest city in the U.S., a sprawling “megalopolis” of almost 5 million people that’s also known as the Valley of the Sun. A few outlying “mega-burbs” like Buckeye and Goodyear to Phoenix’s west and Queen Creek to the east have annexed large amounts of land and are themselves some of the nation’s fastest-growing cities. By 2040, the region’s population is expected to reach more than 7 million, despite its limited and shrinking water supply.
Even though the effects of climate change are intensifying throughout the Southwest, people keep moving here — to the hottest, driest part of the country. Unlike wildfires or hurricanes, a diminishing water supply is a slow-moving, mostly invisible crisis. But if current growth rates continue, in roughly a decade it will be impossible to ignore. That raises questions about whether policies and attitudes that encourage maximum growth are sustainable. Many of the area’s rapidly expanding suburbs lack access to the water necessary for all the growth they are planning, said Mark Holmes, Goodyear’s water resources manager from 2012 to 2018. Unless they can develop significant new water supplies, he said, “the alternative is something they don’t want to think about.”
“To live in a city named after a bird that periodically self-immolates itself is to invite scrutiny.”“TO LIVE IN A CITY NAMED after a bird that periodically self-immolates itself is to invite scrutiny,” writes lawyer, academic and Phoenix resident Grady Gammage Jr. in his 2016 book The Future of the Suburban City. And sociologist Andrew Ross dubbed Phoenix the “least sustainable city on earth” in his 2011 book Bird on Fire.
There’s truth to these assessments: The Valley of the Sun receives less than 8 inches of rainfall each year. Most of the valley’s water supply comes from the winter snowpack in distant mountains, which melts and flows through a vast system of dams, reservoirs and canals. Two major watersheds are involved: The Central Arizona Project (CAP) diverts water from the Colorado River, 300 miles away, and the Salt River Project (SRP) draws from the Salt and Verde rivers, north of Phoenix. There are two other water sources: groundwater, which is pumped from the aquifer below, and a small but growing amount of treated wastewater, accounting for an estimated 5% of the water supply statewide. Every municipality has a different mix of water supplies with varying degrees of reliability. Urban Phoenix, for instance, has diversified and carefully managed water supplies, while many of the newer outer-lying suburbs are much more dependent on a single source, according to the City of Phoenix Water Services Department.
In the early years of Phoenix’s growth after World War II (when air conditioning became widely available) much of its water supply came from pumping groundwater. But rapid declines in aquifer levels in the 1960s and 1970s pushed state lawmakers to pass the Groundwater Management Act in 1980. The law created “Active Management Areas,” which required developers and municipal water providers to obtain permits from the Arizona Department of Water Resources confirming that they had 100 years of “assured water supply” for new homes.
Originally, that assured water supply came primarily from the Salt River Project or the Colorado River, but in 1993, the state paved a way to build new homes served only by groundwater, allowing housing development to spread into the outer reaches of Phoenix and Tucson. To do that, legislators created the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District (CAGRD), an entity tasked with replacing pumped groundwater by finding renewable water supplies and injecting that water back into the aquifer.
The Central Arizona Project canal had just been completed, and the Valley of the Sun was flush with new surface water deliveries from the Colorado River. Developers and municipalities that lacked an assured water supply could enroll in the CAGRD, which in turn, charged a fee for replenishing the groundwater they used. They did so with surface water acquired by various means, including the purchase of excess CAP supplies or leasing Colorado River water from tribes."
"Picture a robin, out in the morning and hopping around the park. It finds breakfast in the form of a worm, but out of the nearby trees swoops a bigger bird. The bigger bird acts threatening, and the robin surrenders its worm like a kid giving up their lunch money to the school bully. It’s a common scenario between many kinds of animals – and a classic example of kleptoparasitism.
Kleptoparasitism is parasitism by theft, usually of food. Like in other types of parasitism, one animal is harmed by the interaction while another benefits from it. Ecologists who study kleptoparasitism, including Erika Iyengar of Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, measure “harm” and “benefit” in terms of each animals’ energy budget. In the case of our two birds, the robin loses energy looking for a breakfast it never gets to eat, while the bully bird gobbles a free meal.
While many kleptoparasitic interactions remind me of mealtimes with my two-year-old, who helps herself to whatever is on my plate, Iyengar points out that kleptoparasitism is defined as occurring between unrelated individuals. Often, but not always, the animals involved are two separate species.
Kleptoparasitism comes in two flavors: obligate and facultative. Obligate kleptoparasites are rare and completely reliant on stealing food from a host. An example is the tiny pea crab, which settles inside bivalves such as oysters; the female crab remains in the same oyster to maturity and gains all its food by stealing from the host. Most kleptoparasites are facultative, meaning they can steal if they want to – and if the opportunity arises – but can also hunt or forage for themselves.
Kleptoparasitism is widespread throughout the animal kingdom but is best studied in birds, where the behavior is always facultative. Iyengar explains that birds are an attractive target for other, thieving birds because they frequently transport high quality food items. The period of time between catching the food and consuming it offers a window of opportunity for a kleptoparasite.
On a recent trip to Maine, my family and I watched an osprey fly across a bay carrying a fish in its talons. We were puzzled when we noticed a larger eagle making a beeline for the osprey. Both birds disappeared behind a tree, and the osprey emerged minus the fish, which had apparently been snatched by the eagle."
Dina surprised us this week when she lifted off and 'branched' right atop our live Sauces Cam. After much debate among the viewership, Dr. Peter Sharpe from Institute for Wildlife Studies has dubbed this a fledge.
Pop the champagne and watch our video all about bald eagle fledging.
Never Stop Birding,
The explore.org Team
Explore is the world's leading philanthropic live nature cam network and documentary film channel.
Explore Daily Dose of Love Newsletter.
"I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go."
Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was less than a year old, her father died, and shortly thereafter, her mother was committed to an asylum. Bishop was first sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and later lived with paternal relatives in Worcester and South Boston. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1934.
Bishop was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery that surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North & South (Houghton Mifflin), published in 1946.
She was influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend, mentor, and stabilizing force in her life. Unlike her contemporary and good friend Robert Lowell, who wrote in the Confessional style, Bishop’s poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world.
Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. She lived for many years in Brazil, communicating with friends and colleagues in America only by letter. She published sparingly, and her work is often praised for its technical brilliance and formal variety. She received the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955). Her Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), won the National Book Award in 1970. That same year, Bishop began teaching at Harvard University, where she worked for seven years. For years she was considered a “poet’s poet,” but with the 1977 publication of her last book, Geography III (Chatto and Windus), Bishop was finally established as a major force in contemporary literature.
Elizabeth Bishop was awarded an Academy Fellowship in 1964 for distinguished poetic achievement, and served as a Chancellor from 1966 to 1979. She died in her apartment at Lewis Wharf in Boston on October 6, 1979.
