Month: March 2019

The books, movies, music, and podcasts we couldn’t stop talking about in August

This month, we loved albums that we discovered before they came out and sci-fi thrillers that we discovered an embarrassingly long time after they came out. It’s all good stuff. Right this way.

What We Read

I just finished reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson, and it’s the best real-talk self-help book I’ve read. It’s funny and filled with insights on what it means to live a good life on your own terms and prioritize what’s important to you.

—Colette Harris, editorial fellow

'The Edge of the World,' a New Book from Outside

A visual adventure to the most extraordinary places on earth.

Feast Your Eyes

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy has been out since 2014, but I only heard of it recently because the talented illustrator Eric Nyquist (who’s worked with Outside) designed the series’ book covers. Now I’ve finally read the first in the trilogy, Annihilation, and I can’t stop talking about it, to the regret of all my friends. Annihilation is an expedition journal with a heavy dose of sci-fi horror that follows a team of scientists into a mysterious area reclaimed by wilderness. Some of the best parts read like dispatches from a nature writer—just one who’s exploring a deeply unsettling landscape where you have to throw out everything you learned in biology class.

—Erin Berger, associate editor

Ever wonder why every kid at camp makes god’s eyes? This article explains it.

—Aleta Burchyski, copy editor

My old colleagues at Quartz published this complete guide to pretending you saw the total solar eclipse, and it’s hilarious.

—Svati Narula, assistant social media editor

Recently I have been hate reading Bloomberg Businessweek. For a brief period, it was my favorite magazine on earth. Then they turned it into a normal magazine (in search of profits?), and I loved it less and stopped reading. Now I have returned. Because, to be honest, it’s still a great read, and I still get about 75 percent of my stories ideas from it.

—Scott Rosenfield, digital editorial director

What We Listened To

I’m a big fan of the Ezra Klein Show podcast from Vox Media. The interview format is pretty saturated these days, but Klein keeps it fresh with surprising guests—most of whom haven’t appeared on 12 other shows to plug a new project—and engaging conversations on everything from criminal justice reform to workplace procrastination. Every episode makes me feel a little smarter.

—Chris Keyes, editor-in-chief

The Outside Podcast

Our latest episodes. Plus, where to listen and subscribe.

Listen

The Ringer (Bill Simmons’ outfit) just started a new podcast called The Rewatchables. They spend an hour going over the best rewatchable movies of the past few decades, and it’s pretty great, though admittedly bro-y. I didn’t really want to like it, but recently they poked a ton of holes in The Departed, which is near and dear to my heart as someone from Boston. In particular, their attacks on Jack Nicholson, whose performance many praised outside of Boston, were spot-on. It’s perfect to listen to when you’re chopping vegetables for dinner.

—Will Ford, editorial fellow

The War on Drugs’ new album, A Deeper Understanding, was released on August 25, but I couldn’t wait and had been spinning the teaser singles on repeat since the April release of “Thinking of a Place,” an 11-minute opus. On another teaser track, “Holding On,” frontman Adam Granduciel dives in deep with lines like “Is an old memory just another way of saying goodbye?” while maintaining the newly buoyant sound of his band. For an artist who has explored themes of depression and heartbreak, A Deeper Understanding, as the title suggests, represents a new direction and maturity for Granduciel.

—Chris Thompson, visual producer

I just started listening to Rough Translation, the new NPR podcast about how other countries are handling big issues that are also part of the national conversation in the United States. The first episode focuses on the unconventional ways Brazil is implementing affirmative action and talking about race. Of all the ways to step out of the American news cycle for half an hour, this one’s pretty informative, at least.

—Molly Mirhashem, associate editor

The Bandcamp Weekly podcast is my favorite Tuesday ritual. I have it to thank for my current obsession with Sudan Archives, a singer-songwriter I’ve been jammin’ out to all month. Favorite songs: “Wake Up” and “Goldencity.”

—Jenny Earnest, assistant social media editor

Sara Trunzo is a longtime family friend, and I grew up listening to her play Americana tunes in a renovated barn down the street from my house. Which is why I’m stoked on her recently released five-song EP, Thanks Birdie. Sara is as talented a songwriter as she is a musician, and her lyrics, combined with simple guitar riffs, tell vivid stories of her times spent in rural Maine. It’s perfect listening for contemplative road trips.

—Ben Fox, assistant editor

What We Watched and Otherwise Looked At

I liked Al Gore’s new documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel. It inspired me to see that despite all the challenges in the environmental movement these days, Gore is working hard behind the scenes and really getting good things done. Plus, it was cool to see what the climate accord meetings are like in Paris through his eyes.

—Mary Turner, deputy editor

I’ve been keeping up with the intricate cut-paper creations of Rural Pearl, the site of Lawrence, Kansas–based artist Angie Pickman. She’s particularly fond of birds, Midwestern flowers, and landscapes, which become the subjects of eventual silhouettes or layered collages. Her one-minute animated short about a wolf in winter, “The Longest Night,” is also lovely and full of childlike wonder.

—Tasha Zemke, copy editor

These people are turning disheartening data into amazing paintings, sculptures, and illustrations

Climate change data has its problems: It is often lofty and complicated, hard to digest, and even harder to conjure into feelings of urgency. But artists are stepping in to marry data with their crafts, bridging the gap between scientific information and human connection. Recognizing that people often act by heart rather than logic, these ten artists aim to help viewers understand the data while developing an emotional attachment that convinces them to do something about it—now.

Zaria Forman

Amid the dire reality of melting ice sheets and subsequent rising sea levels, Zaria Forman opts to spotlight the beauty: “A bombardment of terrifying news is paralyzing, but focusing on the positive is empowering.” Forman’s staggeringly realistic paintings capture the majesty and fragility of the icebergs. Look closer and you’ll see the finely painted ice fjords crackling, crumbling, and melting. Still, Forman’s message always leans toward hope and action. “I try to celebrate what is still here; to give viewers the sense that it is still possible to do something to protect this Earth that sustains us.”

Sean “Hula” Yoro

Growing up in Hawaii, Sean “Hula” Yoro was raised to respect nature. The surfer and self-taught artist creates murals usually involving portraits on hard-to-reach locales like ship docks and dams to illustrate the changing landscape. In some cases, he paints on natural surfaces like icebergs or forest trees, letting the figures rapidly melt or get washed away by natural forces to create a sense of urgency. “The idea of my art not lasting adds another depth to the message and feels more real,” says Yoro.

Jill Pelto

At 24, painter and environmental science student Jill Pelto is already establishing a new kind of art informed by scientific data and inspired by early 20th-century explorers like Edward Adrian Wilson. Pelto knows that her generation and those that follow are the ones inheriting the issues and that the research isn’t always simple to digest. “I also find that many people just don’t pay attention,” she says. Her illustrations depict the same kind of graphs you might find in a textbook (decline in glacier mass balance; ocean acidification; deforestation) overlaid with watercolor paintings of the affected natural wonders, bringing the research to life.

PangeaSeed

Murals can transform cities and inspire change. Photographer Tre’ Packard, who founded PangeaSeed with his wife to promote environmental activism through art and education, applies the same concept to ocean conservation. The organization’s Sea Walls festivals, hosted in cities around the world, unite artists with scientists to create abstract street art that encourages dialogue. “I’m not delusional,” says Packard. “I know we are not going to change the world, but small efforts add up. We want to lead by example.”

Courtney Mattison

One of the challenges in communicating the scope of environmental change is that we mostly can’t see it. With coral reefs, though, the impact is clear: The water gets warmer, the corals bleach, and unless the temperature is stabilized, they deteriorate. “It’s like a city going bankrupt and letting the buildings fall apart,” says former marine biology student and sculptor Courtney Mattison. Her thousand-pound ceramic reef renderings show this process starkly, with white corals mixed into the vibrantly painted and meticulously detailed pieces. She lets her fingerprints show on the stoneware and porcelain corals, speaking to our potential role in recovering the fragile ecosystems by emphasizing the human element of the work. “If people see evidence of my hands in the work, they may relate more closely,” says Mattison. “I don’t want it to be too literal, because the point is to spark curiosity.”

Tamiko Thiel

Tamiko Thiel uses technology to illustrate the impact we have on the planet. Her Gardens of the Anthropocene virtual reality installation first appeared in Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park and depicts a world overtaken by mutated versions of regional drought-resistant plants that feed on everything in sight—phones included. As an engineer, Thiel felt compelled to include factual data, but as an artist she wanted to complete the picture and pick up where the science (which she notes is couched in conditionals) stops. The series, now on view at Stanford University, is meant to entertain while stealthily urging viewers to do their part. “Humans only change when they see no other alternative in order to survive,” says Thiel.

Justin Guariglia

Justin Brice Guariglia became one of the first artists in a decade to work with NASA when he joined the group on survey flights for Operation IceBridge as an independent artist in 2015. The aerial images obtained are impressive, but Guariglia takes it a step further by transforming the photos into topographical prints that pop off the canvas through a printing process he developed. His work will be presented in West Palm Beach, Florida’s Norton Museum of Art in September. This year, Guariglia also launched After Ice, a selfie app with a filter that shows how high sea levels will rise by 2080 in New York. (Spoiler alert: If you’re near the city, you’ll be swimming with the fishies.)

Eve Mosher

In 2007, artist Eve Mosher took to the streets of Brooklyn with a baseball field chalker to trace a 70-mile line around the city marking the projected reach of a flood that could hit the coast within three to 20 years. Mosher’s HighWaterLine project simplified complex data down to a clear-cut line that hit way too close to the literal home of thousands of New Yorkers. It got attention. Then Hurricane Sandy came along and proved the predictions true. Now, HWL has grown to include workshops, community outreach, and other public art installations in cities from South Florida to England. “Art can create the space needed to go from grief and shock of what is coming to action.”

Hannah Rothstein

“I have been worried about climate change for a long time, and when I saw the systems designed to fight it being dismantled, I felt my time to pull out the art guns had come,” says illustrator Hannah Rothstein. She drew from some of the most iconic images in U.S. history—vintage National Park posters—and reimagined seven of them to resemble their fated decline for 2050, only 33 years away. Although she stays away from politics, Rothstein has been pleasantly surprised to see people sending postcards of the prints to senators. “Instead of deepening our divisions,” she says. “I hope this project will inspire our country’s policymakers to put politics aside and focus on the greater good.”

Lisa Murray

Photojournalist Lisa Murray has seen firsthand how new weather patterns affect rural communities. She’s seen women in Kenya walk hours to get water for their families following periods of intense drought; healthy villages in South Sudan going hungry after flash floods wipe away the harvest; fishing communities in Indonesia disappearing due to erosion and rising sea levels. “In the West, climate change doesn’t impact on our lives the same way it does in the global South,” she says. “It’s easy for people to ignore it.” Murray launched Faces of Change to document how environmental issues impact the lives of real people without sensationalizing or harping on the negative. “Showing the impact climate change has on everyday people and everyday life enables us to understand the consequences of a warming planet on a human level,” says Murray.

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Want to pay less in taxes this year? Want to fight President Trump? Want to save our public lands? Donating to the charities suing to stop his reductions to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments will accomplish all three of those goals. With our public lands under unprecedented assault, we can’t think of a better time to donate than now.

Each of the linked plaintiffs below are contributing to these lawsuits—and accepting donations.

Bears Ears

Utah Dine Bikeyah, Patagonia Works, Friends of Cedar Mesa, Archeology Southwest, Conservation Lands Foundation, Access Fund, Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, National Trust for Historic Preservation

President Donald Trump, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Bureau of Land Management Director Brian Steed, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, U.S. Forest Service Chief Tony Tooke

Under the Antiquities Act, the president has the authority only to create monuments, not to modify or eliminate them. Only Congress can do that. Plaintiffs claim material harm from threat to cultural artifacts, recreational opportunities, and environment. Patagonia’s case is particularly interesting: It claims that the reduction makes worthless the millions of dollars it has invested in the monument, and that its other charitable efforts will suffer due to a need to invest even more in saving it.

A restoration of the original size for Bears Ears and a ban on the administration from taking further action against it.

Bears Ears

The Wilderness Society, National Parks Conservation Association, Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Trust, Defenders of Wildlife, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

Same as above.

Artifacts and cultural sites are threatened by the size reduction and potential resource extraction.

To block extractive activities like drilling and mining from the area formerly protected by Obama’s monument declaration.

Grand Staircase-Escalante

The Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife, Natural Resources Defense Council, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Grand Canyon Trust, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity

Donald Trump, Ryan Zinke, Brian Steed

Reducing the size of the monument renders “remarkable fossil, cultural, scenic, and geological treasures exposed to immediate and ongoing harm.”

A stop to permits for drilling or mining in the area formerly protected by the monument.

Grand Staircase-Escalante

Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners, Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Conservation Lands Foundation

Donald Trump, Ryan Zinke

The Antiquities Act doesn’t authorize the president to reduce the size of a monument, and doing so leaves important and threatened plants, animals, insects, artifacts, and geological formations in danger.

To stop the government from “recognizing, enforcing, or otherwise carrying out” the size reduction.

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Sitting on a gym floor in Brooklyn, Araliya Ming Senerat and two other members of the Women’s Strength Coalition describe how powerlifting has helped them overcome trauma. The actual goal of powerlifting, they explain to me, is to lift the most weight. But the sport has also enabled these women to cope with eating disorders, PTSD, and suicidal thoughts. Imagine a 1980s ideal of a meathead, then add empathy and send her to therapy, and you’ll have a pretty good sense of the WSC lifters’ vibe.

Senerat, the organization’s vice president, had been lifting for two years when she came up with a plan to commit suicide. “Powerlifting was the one place in the gym where I felt like I knew how to cope with what I was dealing with,” she says. “I actually planned out my suicide, and then, the day that I decided not to commit suicide, I deadlifted 185 pounds, which was the most I’d ever done.” The accomplishment kept her alive. Now she can deadlift up to 300 pounds.

Founded by Shannon Wagner in a burst of post-election ire, the WSC unites lifters under the goals of social justice and increased access to strength training. In just its first year, the organization has coordinated five charitable events in four cities. Wagner organized the first one—a powerlifting meet to benefit Planned Parenthood at her home gym, Brooklyn Athletic Club—after last year’s Women’s March, as she searched for an active way to channel her newfound energy. When Lift for Planned Parenthood sold out in six days, Wagner decided to turn the one-off event into an entire organization. “Powerlifting communities already exist in pockets across the country, so the idea is to tap into each of them and get them involved,” she says.

Today, the WSC is a 501(c)(3)-certified nonprofit with advisory and directors boards and a network of affiliated gyms across the country. The group gets so many volunteer offers that it’s having trouble finding work for everyone. The group’s tagline—“Using our collective strength to impact the world in a meaningful way”—is so catchy that it makes one want to pick up a barbell immediately. The first Lift for Planned Parenthood raised more than $14,000. By June 2017, the organization went national. WSC members in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C., organized “Pull for Pride” competitions to fundraise for local LGBTQ charities. Next year’s Pull for Pride is shaping up to be an even bigger draw, with gyms across the country already signed up to host their own affiliated competitions.

As many WSC members told me, there’s a need for inclusive, deliberate planning in powerlifting. Unlike traditional powerlifting competitions, the WSC does not require lifters to identify a gender on event registration forms, weigh in before competition, or wear tight-fitting singlets. “The WSC is booming, and I’m really happy to see that,” says D.C.-based lifter Breanna Diaz. “I think one reason is that this diverse group of woman-identified individuals, femme, or gender-nonconforming people have always been here in the fitness world. We just haven’t had some sort of group that really represents us and is advocating for us and acknowledging us.”

The hardest day of powerlifting is often the first, especially for women. As Wagner points out, even fit women often skip the weight rack. “It’s just not something that women are socialized to want—to become stronger,” she says. “It’s a cliché at this point, but we come to the gym to get thinner and smaller.” Even after you decide to attempt a lift, the sport has a built-in intimidation factor: It largely involves massive dudes picking up hundreds of pounds of steel.

Female lifters often commiserate over the gender imbalances in the sport: Fewer women enter lifting competitions, the barriers to entry for non-cisgender people are high, and the dress codes are sexist (while men may go shirtless, women are often expected to wear tight outfits). Then there’s the general lack of representation in gyms. I realized after my own sample training session (I can now deadlift my bodyweight, thank you very much) that I was instinctively keeping tabs on the muscle-bound men in tiny tank tops around me. A room full of sweaty 250-pound men certainly takes some getting used to, though during months of interviews and research, I met only sheep in wolves’ spandex and many smiley giants who were eager to talk shop.

The growing sport has spawned overarching organizations like USA Powerlifting and small groups of female lifters like the Iron Maidens, but the WSC is the first nonprofit to unite the female lifting community with the issues they face outside the gym—and the first to encourage collective action. “Powerlifting is much more of a community than the standard fitness class,” says Wagner. Through the WSC, she’s been working to connect with existing groups of lifters and mobilize them for the greater good. Lifters love competing, she says, and this way they get to participate in society instead of “just complaining” about it from the comfort of the weight rack.

With its social justice goals and charity lifts, the WSC aims to reach beyond the fitness community. But it’s also putting money back into its roots. The organization is currently raising funds to build a dedicated gym in the outer boroughs of New York City, with the goal of creating a physical and emotional safe space for woman-identified lifters. WSC members have plenty of suggestions for an ideal gym, like no wall-to-wall mirrors, which can encourage comparison or body shaming, and workout playlists without aggressive or misogynistic music. Volunteers have already signed up to offer physical therapy, support groups, and mindfulness-specialized training. Laura Khoudari, a trainer on the five-person WSC Advisory Board, has agreed to work as a trauma-informed coach. She plans to offer a sliding-scale training program for lifters dealing with trauma, chronic pain, anxiety, or depression. She doesn’t want to replace conventional mental health treatment, like therapy or medication, but rather acknowledge that physical fitness can and should play a role in recovery.

“The body doesn’t forget trauma,” says Lisa Schieffelin, a New York–based social worker who plans to offer group support gatherings in the WSC space. “Strength training is perseverance, it’s tenacity, it’s failure, it’s conditioning.” Other WSC members believe the physicality of lifting can overflow into mental health benefits. Wagner recovered from her eating disorder when lifting helped her realize that, as she puts it, “in order to get stronger, I had to eat food.” Khoudari decided to become a trauma-informed coach after she used strength training as a supplemental treatment for her own PTSD.

At a gym session in Brooklyn, I watch as Wagner works her way from 45- to 135- to 175-pound lifts. It’s extra impressive when she tells me that she taught herself to lift at home via social media, using a broomstick as a barbell. In the three years since she took up the sport, Wagner has gone from a yoga teacher focused on stretching to a strength and conditioning specialist who can powerlift up to 290 pounds. For Wagner, powerlifting’s incremental but tangible results offer a metaphor for activism. “You go to the gym, sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. But you know that over time that work is going to accumulate. Even if you don’t have a good day on Monday, three Mondays from now you might have a good day,” she explains. “Just having that faith that what you’re doing is important and meaningful, I think that translates directly to social justice. Every little thing you do might seem inconsequential or like you don’t matter, but you are part of this collective.”

Senerat is also using powerlifting to combat her politics-fueled anxieties. “After the election, I felt like I couldn’t do anything,” she says. “I was just one voice. I heard about the Lift for Planned Parenthood and thought I definitely wanted to be a part of it. I feel like we can grow, try to make a difference, and create a community for women to feel safe.”

In November, I attended the organization’s first official strategy meeting. The conversation took place in Brooklyn over homemade energy bars. Twelve members, including a social worker, a farmer, two med students, a librarian, and a handful of trainers, discussed how to raise $30,000 toward their new gym space in a little over a month. If you happen to know an activist powerlifter, expect a friendly fundraising phone call very soon. Fundraising expert Susan Shiroma offered this insight: “Women are mad.”

If some women channel that anger toward learning how to lift hundreds of pounds? Even better.

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Ryan Zinke has a fondness for military men. (Have you heard he admires Teddy Roosevelt? Did you know he was a Navy SEAL?)

The latest object of the interior secretary’s affection is John Wesley Powell. A Civil War veteran who lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, Powell is best known as a geologist and geographer who led expeditions in the American Southwest, including the first documentedfloat down Grand Canyon.Those travels inspired Powell, in an 1878 report, to recommend the West be settled in a fashion that would organize the desiccated territory by watershed. Doing so, he argued, would make for a more collaborative and ecologically sound way of managing resources, especially in a region where the most precious resource is water. “Years of drought and famine come and years of flood and famine come,” Powell once wrote, “and the climate is not changed with dance, libation, or prayer.”

One hundred forty years later, the secretary of America’s most sprawling bureaucracy has decided Powell was on to something. Zinke recently unveiled an intention to reorganize the Interior Department’s 70,000 employees and 12 agencies into 13 zones dictated not by state lines but by watershed and basin.

“Taking inspiration from Powell’s concept of watersheds,” Zinke said in a video, “we’re looking at reshaping our current bureau-based regional system of management and moving to a system based on ecosystems, watersheds, and science.” Consistent with his desire to remake Interior in the image of the military, Zinke’s idea is a mishmash of Powell’s ideas and the “joint management agency” concept utilized by the armed forces. Zinke is pitching the reorganization as a way to streamline the Interior Department’s myriad agencies by aligning their missions and goals by geography.

“Intellectually, the idea of organizing more in terms of the landscape in the West—that works,” says John Freemuth, executive director of the Cecil D. Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University. “But the devil is in the details. The damage that could be done to relationships and how agencies do business, that doesn’t look like it’s been well thought out yet.”

From a resource management perspective, Zinke is wise to seek Powell’s guidance. Water is the defining resource in the West. Save for mountain ranges and the Pacific Northwest, nowhere west of the Texas Panhandle gets more than 20 inches of precipitation a year. Powell sought settlement patterns in which water, timber, and other resources would be managed in a collective fashion for the benefit of communities instead of companies—and profit.

“For Powell, the water would not be taken out of the watershed or out of the basin and transferred across mountains…hundreds of miles away to allow urban growth to take place,” Donald Worster, a Powell biographer, told NPR in 2003. “So L.A., if it existed at all, would have been a much, much smaller entity. Salt Lake City would be smaller. Phoenix would probably not even exist.”

Alas, this Phoenix-free land of sensible management never emerged. The West today is one of the most heavily engineered landscapes on earth, where water is pumped over and through mountain ranges, and alfalfa is grown in deserts. Overseeing all of it is Zinke’s sprawling department, whose new reorganization efforts many say are misguided and futile.

The issue is one of execution. Reorganizations, as any corporate CEO will tell you, are time consuming, difficult, and expensive. At a time when Zinke is proposing trimming his workforce by 4,000 jobs and favors decreasing the Interior Department’s budget by $1.6 billion, he’s proposing an action that would likely require consultants and untold people-hours and would inevitably shift the focus away from on-the-ground management he claims to prioritize. “Park rangers aren’t going to be out there in the parks,” Freemuth says. “They’re going to be sitting down, figuring out how to reorganize the Park Service.”

Other hurdles await. One is that each Interior agency functions differently, at scales both massive and minute. The National Park Service’s mission is to preserve, so its employees operate under a very different framework than those at the Bureau of Land Management, which must balance conservation, drilling, grazing, and other land uses. Thus, neither agency has the same administrative processes as, say, the Bureau of Reclamation, yet under Zinke’s plan they’d all have to coalesce under respective watershed boundaries. Zinke’s desire to shrink Interior’s Washington footprint by moving more management positions West could also backfire, says Kate Kelly, public lands director at the Center for American Progress and a former senior adviser at the Interior Department, because funding and policy discussions overwhelmingly take place in D.C.

“You have to remember that the Interior Department has vast and diverse missions,” Kelly says, adding that it covers everything from offshore energy management to education programs on Native American lands. “It appears that, through this reorganization, he’s attempting to fit every agency into the same mold, which frankly doesn’t make sense.”

Reorganizing the BLM, in particular, could prove challenging. Both Kelly and Freemuth say western governors and land managers will likely face bureaucratic headaches if the BLM shifts from state-based to regional management.

There’s reason to believe these new boundaries won’t necessarily yield more sound environmental management, either. For instance, Zinke’s proposed regions 8 and 10, which cover much of the Northwest, are split by the Columbia River. This alignment divvies up a heavily managed watershed. And Region 7, the Colorado River basin, pumps water to regions 5, 6, 9, and 11. In the engineered West that Zinke is managing, basin-based zones are, in some instances, as arbitrary as state lines.

Zinke’s proposal also raises the question of why he is considering organizing his department by environment-inspired lines at all. “He seems to be prioritizing oil and gas over everything else…and now he wants to organize Interior by environmental boundaries?” Freemuth says. “There’s a disconnect in grand theory here.”

Perhaps it’s best to think of Zinke’s watershed-based West as a thought experiment. “Past is prologue,” Kelly says. “The Obama administration and previous administrations have proposed mergers and reorganizations, only to quickly run into the buzzsaw that is Congress.” Indeed, western legislators are already voicing skepticism. Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico told the Washington Post that the plan “looks more like a dismantling than a reorganization.”

So unless Zinke can whip up congressional support, Powell’s idea will likely remain one of the West’s great what-ifs.

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Each year, we see the rise of at least one new, seemingly-crazy health fad. 2007 brought the four-hour work week. In 2009, we learned that we should probably all be running barefoot, or at least invest in some spectacularly ugly shoes. In 2013, according to Google, we couldn’t stop searching for the Paleo Diet. Perhaps 2017 will be remembered as the year biohacking went mainstream.

Of course, it can feel impossible to determine the precise moment when a particular health or fitness movement took hold—these things just kind of happen. But maybe there’s more to it than that. We reached out to coaches, editors, trend forecasters, and some of the brightest minds in the fitness industry to tell us what they think will be trending in 2018.

I think that we will start to see the trend for high intensity, CrossFit-style training flatline or at least slow down. While it continues to be both a popular and effective way to train, many of the people who've been using it exclusively are starting to see missing holes that short, fast workouts don't fill. They're also starting to realize that throwing yourself as hard as you can against a wall isn't always required to get what you want, and it starts to hurt after a while.

–Andy Petranek, cofounder of the Whole Life Challenge

I think we are in for a cycle similar to the original running fitness boom of the 1970s. More people are going to become performance vs. participation oriented. Some of the big shoe/apparel/equipment companies will start to feature sub-elite and hardcore recreational people a bit more in their marketing and branding as brand ambassadors. There is going to be some pushback and we will start to hear about how too much technology was making us slower. And we will hear more about targeted and strategic use of monitoring and other technology vs. blanket application.

–Michael J. Joyner, M.D, physiologist and anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic

I think the quantified-self is just about to have run its course, and we are primed for an “everybody to the other side of the boat” moment, when folks start ditching the devices and instead train by feel. I think we'll continue to see a proliferation of niches: sub-elite runners, CrossFit, Spartan racers, power-lifters, yoga-fanatics, etc., etc. I think this is largely powered by the internet and social media. Instead of being the only person in your community serious about CrossFit or going Sub-3 for the marathon, you can be connected with the entire country, and in some cases, entire world.

–Bradley Stulberg, Outside columnist and co-author of Peak Performance

One of the big themes in recent years has been the promise of exercise advice tailored to each unique individual. This idea has been fueled by the rise of wearable technology and the advance of genetic testing. But at conferences this fall, I’ve started to hear a lot of pushback on whether we’re really able to distinguish individual variation from random fluctuations. In 2018, research that claims to identify “responders” and “non-responders” to a given intervention is going to have to work harder to justify these claims.

–Alex Hutchinson, Outside columnist and author of Endure

I predict that in 2018, people will become increasingly aware of the negative health effects of sugar, and will actually make fundamental changes to their eating habits.

–Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

There will eventually be the introduction of both big and small devices that are used when not exercising to measure physical recovery and adaptation to the recent workouts—and to enhance both outcomes. For example, I expect to soon see an office chair that helps the user gently stretch muscles to aid recovery. But eventually such a chair will measure physiological metrics such as heart rate, breathing rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation levels, and several others. This is mostly available as of 2017 for one’s bed. At first, the chairs will be rather basic (and expensive) but they will set the stage for what’s to come.

–Joe Friel, endurance coach and cofounder of TrainingPeaks.com

The health and fitness world will continue to move to incorporate people’s inner experience with their outer results. That is, physical improvements will be accompanied by support of individuals’ inner development. Everything we've already seen in the focus on mindfulness to acceptance, gratitude, and joy will become seen as critical to people's health and well-being.

–Michael Stanwyck, former coach and general manager at CrossFit Los Angeles and cofounder of the Whole Life Challenge

With the increasing interest in DNA, body types, women vs. men, and the undercurrent of health insurance situation in the U.S., I think you will see a rise in more personalized and tailored fitness plans—e.g. matching of exercise and food to the individual to maximize their outcomes. There is also a bigger public awareness of women being different from men and that their training and nutrition should be different. I think you will continue to hear and see more women discussing their periods and how to modify their training.

–Stacy T. Sims, Ph.D., exercise physiologist, nutrition scientist, and author of Roar

If 2017 felt like the expansion of the wellness category—with interesting offshoots from the beauty, nutrition, fitness, and luxury spaces—then I think 2018 will be the year that mainstream growth and adoption start to take place. There’s already been a shift away from traditional physical measures of health (namely fitness and diet) towards a more holistic approach that also views aspects like sleep, mental acuity, and emotional well-being as equally important. I only see that continuing. In some ways, it’s an antidote to the uncertain times we’re living in.

–Scott Lachut, president of strategy at trend research company PSFK

It’s possible that 2018 will see a trend of rebellion against the quantified self, with people becoming overwhelmed with their digital exhaust and responding by being more selective about their use of tracking technology. Some may even revert to simple tools like a stopwatch or a counter. The rebirth of jump rope, instigated by CrossFit, and the upswing in flip phone sales are two examples of this trend already taking hold.

In polar contrast, individualized “omes," including data on one’s genome, proteome, and microbiome will show great strides with companies like Helix, Soma Logic, and I-Carbon X becoming more established names in the world of bioinformatics, with marketing towards improved performance leading the diffusion of these innovative technologies. Given the continued push and pull between nurture vs. nature, expect a possible upswing in fecal transplants as people look for viable albeit disgusting ways to improve their health and fitness.

–Dr. Allen Lim, Elite cycling coach and sports physiologist

My prediction is that we’ll see aging athletes shatter the concept that performance slows after age 40. This will be felt from the recreational runner to elite athletes, extending from mothers reconnecting to their sport after the baby years to retirees who now have time to train.

–Rebekah Mayer, National Program Manager for Life Time Run

I expect to see rapid growth in the popularity of power-based run training in 2018. Using power to monitor and control intensity during running makes sense for all the same reasons it does on the bike. As a direct measurement of work rate, power gives runners a reliable indication of how hard they are working in all circumstances and is not affected by the external influences, such as topography, and internal influences, such as hydration status, that affect the most widely used intensity metrics, pace, and heart rate. Runners are notoriously slow to adopt new technology, so I've been surprised by the degree of penetration that run power monitors have achieved in this market in the short time they've existed. All signs point to further growth in 2018.

–Matt Fitzgerald, sports nutritionist and author of The Endurance Diet

Tech is going to fully take over. The biohacking movement in health and fitness is going to accelerate and intensify, thanks in part to places like the new Bulletproof Labs. People are going to seek the biggest return with the least amount of effort. There will be even more wearables to help us track every movement and heartbeat. More gadgets like the Oura Ring will appear, measuring our sleep. We’ll stop running on a treadmill or, god forbid, on roads or trails, in lieu of short intense workouts on machines like Vasper. We’ll spend a lot of time in pods. The outdoors will become a strange novelty.

–Nick Heil, Outside Contributing Editor and author of Dark Summit

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Your core is the powerhouse of your body—the place from which most of your movement starts. But many forget that your back is an integral part of the core and often neglect those muscles during training. “The back is the unsung hero of our physique. Because you can’t see it in the mirror, it tends to get less attention than the abs, shoulders, or arms, but it quite literally ties all the other muscle groups together,” says Rob Sulaver, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, founding trainer at Rumble, and founder of Bandana Training.

It’s especially important to focus on the back if you’re into endurance sports. “It transfers power through the torso, making it a pivotal player in our foundation movements like running, swimming, lifting heavy things off the ground, and climbing,” Sulaver says.

Failing to strengthen your back won’t just keep you from reaching your full performance potential—it may cause injury that can keep you from training entirely. Back pain is a common complaint among endurance athletes, who are often asking these muscles to endure heavy pounding over long distances. But simple targeted strength exercises can prevent such pain and injury.

This move strengthens the entire posterior chain and is one of the best exercises for working your back top to bottom, says Sulaver. Try to maintain a neutral spine throughout your deadlift—excessive rounding under a heavy load can cause pain or herniation.

Stand with your feet hip-width apart and with a loaded barbell in front of you. The bar should be close to your shins. Bend at your hips and knees, grabbing the bar with an overhand grip, just wider than shoulder width. Straighten your legs as you drive through your heels and raise the bar up along your shins and past your knees. Stand tall, squeezing your shoulder blades together at the top of the movement. Reverse to start. That’s one rep. Complete five sets of five reps.

With every lift, you’ll hit some of the most prominent muscles in your back, like your lats and traps, as well as your biceps. If you need extra support, loop a heavy circular resistance band around the top of the bar and place one foot inside. Perform pull-ups from there.

On a parallel pull-up bar (one with two bars parallel to each other), grab one bar with each hand so your palms are facing each other. Hang with arms fully extended. Pull yourself up by engaging through your lat muscles (the sides of your back). Pause at the top and slowly lower. That’s one rep. Complete five sets of five reps.

No muscle goes untouched during this exercise—it calls on all parts of your back as you move through the row. Aim for a neutral spine and an upright torso. If you find yourself swaying forward and back, lighten the load a bit, Sulaver recommends.

On a seated row machine, sit and grab the handles with your palms facing in. Pull back on the handles, keeping your elbows close to your body and bringing them back past your torso, squeezing your shoulder blades together. Return to start. That’s one rep. Complete three sets of 15 reps.

A great way to isolate your lower back, this move develops the muscles that run along and support the spine, formally known as the paraspinal erectors and the quadrates lumborum.

Think of this like a reverse crunch. On a back extension machine, sit, grab the handles, and place your feet on the footrest. Maintaining a neutral spine, slowly extend your hips to straighten the torso. Return to start with control. That’s one rep. Complete four sets of ten reps.

Unilateral exercises—moves that work a single side of the body—are key for balancing out any asymmetries that may exist. Start with your nondominant side, which will probably be a little weaker, Sulaver says. Then perform the same rep scheme on your dominant side to avoid perpetuating any imbalance.

Hold a dumbbell in your dominant hand, palm facing in. Using a bench, place your nondominant knee on the center of the bench with the opposite foot on the floor, slightly behind the nondominant knee. Place your dominant hand on the bench. Maintain a flat back and keep your elbow close to your side as you row the dumbbell up past your torso. Return to start. That’s one rep. Complete ten reps on one side, then switch to the other side. Repeat for four sets.

This move isolates the shoulders and sides of the back while also hitting your triceps. Perform this single-joint exercise at the end of your back workout, when you’re spent from multi-joint exercises, Sulaver says.

Using an adjustable cable machine or a set of resistance bands with handles attached to a fixed point, grab onto the handles with an overhand grip, arms shoulder-width apart. Your feet should be shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent. With straight arms, pull the bar down to your thighs. Return to start. That’s one rep. Complete three sets of 15 reps.

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Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s proposal to reshape the department into a “system based on ecosystems, watersheds, and science” got off to a rocky start. The idea was to redraw regional department lines not around arbitrary state boundaries, but rather natural and ecologic ones. It would be a huge achievement and one that would surely add to his legacy. But almost immediately after Zinke revealed his grand plan, the Western Governors’ Association wrote, in early February, that its members “regret that DOI did not seek input from western states on the impact of this proposal.” Then county associations jumped in a couple weeks later, advocating for “boundaries that follow state lines.” That very day, Zinke acquiesced, and he has since released a redrawn draft that hews much closer to state lines.

It seems Zinke’s most significant achievement is on a fast track for failure. Congressional support for Zinke’s $18 million plan seems limited to those whose states might land a big new government office—like Colorado, up to receive the Bureau of Land Management’s new headquarters and whose delegates expressed optimism for the plan last week as Zinke defended the idea before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

And the fact remains that calling it his achievement would be only partly true, because much of the plan was thought up by the Obama administration. And had Zinke borrowed more of the idea and not just pieces of it, he might have actually achieved what he called the “greatest reorganization in the history of” the DOI.

Planning 2.0 was an Obama-era revision of the BLM that Congress repealed in March 2017. Zinke supported the repeal, even though it included the interagency, landscape-based planning he wanted; it also emphasized a science-driven approach to decision-making, which Zinke has also said is key to his redesign. But the most important part of Obama’s BLM 2.0—the part Zinke has seemingly ignored—provided more opportunity for state, local, and tribal governments to collaborate with the BLM.

When Congress repealed 2.0, it struck down a rule that would have allowed the DOI to plan using “sensible boundaries,” says Kathryn Kovacs, a Rutgers Law School professor who advised former BLM director Neil Kornze during the 2.0 process. The idea is that animals and forests don’t care where Colorado begins and Wyoming ends, so it made sense for an agency that manages land and animals to follow more natural boundaries. The concept had bipartisan support. But trying to revamp the BLM without the public process Obama’s rule mandated, as Zinke attempted, proved impossible. Amending the deep-seated relationships between counties, states, and local BLM workers would require years of discussion and collaborative, public tweaking. Instead, Zinke surprised governors with his plan, and their reaction forced him to pivot.

“The West today, it’s not the West of 30 years ago,” says Jamey Anderson, another former 2.0 adviser. “There are more uses being requested of the same piece of land, and that naturally results in more conflict…The idea that we would not arm our field staff with the very best tools and mechanisms for resolving these issues is a curious one.”

Another Zinke proposal that harks to Obama’s 2.0 is his push for conservation along wildlife migration corridors, an endeavor that inherently involves all the jurisdictions elk, pronghorn, and deer walk through. This effort, in particular, could prove challenging if the BLM doesn’t adequately engage with stakeholders and look for the best available science. Researchers are beginning to agree widely that extensive oil and gas development inhibits migration. “The challenge is understanding how many holes you can punch in the landscape before a migration is lost,” Matthew Kauffman, a wildlife biology professor at the University of Wyoming, told the New York Times. Picking where to allow drilling and where to allow deer requires an understanding of ecology, climate change, and the latest technology available to drillers. The other irony is that by mimicking Obama’s plan so closely, Zinke may have landed his DOI in trouble.

The plan was axed in the Senate by the Congressional Review Act, and when that happens, the rules are sent to a kind of regulatory hell; not only are they banished, but they cannot be revisited without approval from Congress. So if, say, a drilling company feels a BLM plan unduly inhibits development in an elk migration corridor, it could potentially sue the BLM for too closely mimicking the revoked 2.0 plan. “It would be, at least, a legal challenge for Interior,” Kovacs says. And if Zinke wanted to follow through on some of his grander proposals, Kovacs argues, it would likely require an act of Congress.

Planning 2.0 could have provided a useful framework for the Trump administration. Already, some of the Interior Department’s best-known actions—deregulating methane emissions, opening up offshore drilling, reviewing national monuments—risk being derailed by lawsuits. A more thorough planning process and increased public involvement may have helped. The DOI has been notorious of late for the lack of public input that precedes its proposals. Advocates were all but shut out of the national monument review, nobody seemed to be consulted about the departmental reorganization or Zinke’s offshore drilling proposal, and advisory groups of all stripes say Zinke has cast them aside. “Planning 2.0 was designed to bring all voices of the public into the planning process early to make a better plan overall,” Kovacs says. “That’s an idea this administration should try on for size.”

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“Girls do fine when it comes to housework, raising children, doing office work, doing the twist and even riding the ankle snappers at Malibu,” wrote big-wave surfing pioneer Buzzy Trent in a 1963 article in Surf Guide magazine. “But one thing I can’t stand is girls riding (or attempting to ride) big waves.”

He went on: “You see, girls are much more emotional than men and therefore have a greater tendency to panic. And panic can be extremely dangerous in big surf. …Girls are weaker than men and have a lesser chance for survival in giant wipeouts.”

Finally, he concluded by writing: “Girls are intended to be feminine, and big-wave riding is definitely masculine… Girls are better off and look more feminine riding average-sized waves.”

Sure, that sounds like classic 1960s sexism, but has much changed in the intervening 55 years?

According to two big-wave pros I spoke with—Bianca Valenti, a professional surfer from the Bay Area, and Paige Alms, a Maui local and big-wave world champion—the answer’s no. Both Valenti and Alms have been invited to surf in the 2018 World Surf League Mavericks Challenge, which if it goes off in the next month, will be the first time women have ever surfed in the event. They also co-founded the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing along with fellow big-wave surfers Keala Kennelly and Andrea Moller. Here’s what they had to say about Buzzy, sexism, and the future of their sport. 

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“While paddling out to a Northern California surf break, a guy yelled, ‘This is a man’s playground. I don’t want to see you unless I’m going out on a date with you, because you’re kind of cute.”

“As a woman, you have to constantly prove yourself, whereas a guy—even of lesser experience—will paddle out and no one will say anything. Now I get cheered on [by the guys], but it took me a while. Psychologically, it was hardest thing to deal with that hungry pack of wolves while I earned my place.”  

“Men will look at women and be like, ‘Who does she think she is?’ A lot of the time they don’t say anything, but you can feel it. The male bravado, the ego.”

“It takes a tremendous amount of hard work to be out there—for anyone. But if you’re a woman, you have exponentially more work, mentally and physically. To catch waves, you have to be able to match the speed of the wave and most men have an easier time with this, with more muscle mass up top and a longer wingspan. For every man’s paddle-stroke, I have to do three.”

 “There’s a young, up-and-coming male big-wave surfer at Mavericks who has older male surfers basically fighting over him, wanting to his mentor. Most girls don’t have that sort of opportunity. For most women, without mentors, the questioning and looks by men is enough to keep them from trying. Women really have to be willing to blaze their own trail.”

 “Yeah, big-wave surfing is dangerous and scary, but I don’t see why that makes it more masculine. Women birth people—that’s pretty much the gnarliest thing you can go through and no one’s calling that masculine.”

 “I’m a female and I’m a surfer, therefore surfing is feminine. Men feel like we’re trying to take something away from them, but we’re not. We’re all in this together. Let’s celebrate men and women.”

“We’re at a time and place in our country, and in our world, and in this sport where we [women] are in a place of power, where we need to speak up.”

 “It’s exciting right now. Women are getting media exposure, and competitive opportunities, and the overarching conversation in our society of is focused on equality.”

The Koraloc Pack is the ultimate wave rider’s companion

It’s one of those inventions that makes you wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

For years, surfers have awkwardly tiptoed through crowds and tight spaces with our surfboards held to our sides. We held our breath and spun around to avoid bumping into people, all the while chafing our armpits on unfortunately placed surf wax. Carry that board on your back in a regular bag and you risk falling over with all the top weight or smacking the back of your ankles with the fins.

Koraloc Packs’ answer to that problem is a backpack ($200) with wide, adjustable straps that wrap around the top and bottom of your surfboard. These allow you to comfortably and securely elevate the board a few feet from the ground so it doesn’t collide with your legs while you’re hiking, riding a bike, or pumping on a skateboard. Most important, it keeps your hands free to deal with whatever’s directly in front of you, whether you’re trekking into the Lost Coast or riding your cruiser to Pacific Beach.

You can carry up to three boards, ranging in length from 5.5 to 8 feet, stacked in the Koraloc. With 32 liters of waterproof storage space, it’s perfect for stashing your wetsuit, with room to spare for a towel and road snacks.

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