Category: reason

It may be among the more unusual medical interventions in recent history. Over the past two years, researchers have been diving beneath the waves in South Florida and applying antibiotic goop to thousands of coral colonies infected with a mysterious and lethal disease.

The efforts are part of an unprecedented collaboration among conservation groups, researchers and biologists, several federal and state government agencies, the Smithsonian, Disney, aquariums around the country, special forces veterans, citizen-scientists, and volunteer scuba divers to save America’s only barrier reef.

Florida’s coral reefs are in deep trouble. Over the past seven years, an infection called Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD) has swept through the 225-mile length of Florida Reef Tract, from north of Miami to Key West, with a lethal speed that stunned conservationists. The disease killed a gigantic, locally famous colony of Mountainous Star coral called “Big Momma,” which had up to that point survived 330 years of hurricanes and industrialization, in a few months. It’s since popped up in 19 other Caribbean countries.

And the disease couldn’t have come at a worse time for Florida’s ailing reefs, which were already in steep decline due to four decades of overlapping environmental pressures. 

“If you take the Atlantic Caribbean area, the Keys were the pinnacle,” Mike Goldberg, the owner of Key Dives, a dive charter company in Islamorada, Florida, says. “When it came to coral, when it came to fish life, it had the most volume and variety. Having made over 10,000 dives in various places around the world and in the Caribbean—lived there for about 14 years—there was really nothing that compared.”

A 1962 National Geographic cover story on John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in the Florida Keys (the magazine’s first-ever underwater color cover, in fact) showed vibrant fields of hard corals.

By the time SCTLD arrived, 97 percent of that historical reef cover was already dead. Scientists worried this new threat could deliver a killing blow to what was left of a once-magnificent ecosystem.

But now there’s preliminary evidence that antibiotics can save some of the most important corals left, and an impressive restoration effort is underway to breed and plant corals back onto the reefs where they once thrived. The decline of Florida’s reefs is a sad story, but if these current efforts can reverse that trend, it will be one of the largest and most innovative public-private environmental successes in American history.

How To Treat Sick Corals

Erin Schilling, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Institute of Marine Science, recently returned from a trip to Dry Tortugas National Park, on the far southwestern tip of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

The Dry Tortugas were the last spot in the Florida Reef Tract that hadn’t been hit by SCTLD yet, and because of its isolation, everyone hoped it would remain untouched. However, the disease arrived this June.

Scientists still don’t know exactly what SCTLD is—a virus or a bacterial infection or possibly a combination of both—or even how it spreads. The disease is such a threat because it targets slow-growing stony corals—boulder-shaped species such as star and brain corals. Those are the literal foundation of reef ecosystems, creating the 3D structures that shelter and sustain other species. Unlike past coral diseases that have run through Florida’s reefs, SCTLD doesn’t appear to wax and wane seasonally, and, when untreated, the disease has a devastating 80 to 100 percent mortality rate for the 20 or so species it affects. It starts as a white patch that expands across a coral colony in a matter of months, sometimes weeks, leaving behind nothing but a bleached skeleton.

The good news is Schilling says she and other research divers treated 6,000 corals at the Dry Tortugas with antibiotic paste to protect them from SCTLD.

Schilling published research this April showing positive results for treating Great Star Coral colonies with the common antibiotic amoxicillin. “It has a really high rate of success in treating what we call an individual lesion, basically white spots where the corals are losing tissue,” she says.

Nova Southeastern University researcher Dr. Karen Neely published more research this August reporting that amoxicillin is also effective at treating long-term and repeat infections.

“In my study we only treated them once, and we saw that they could still get the disease again, or maybe continued having the disease, but [Neely] has even been able to show that sometimes after a couple of treatments, it seems like they are able to heal completely,” Schilling says.

Scientists began using antibiotics in 2019 to try and slow the disease’s march across reefs. It was a gamble, since they didn’t know what side-effects it would have on the corals or nearby wildlife, but the alternative outcome was clear.

“If we do nothing, the corals will just keep dying,” Shilling says. “It’s a grim enough situation that definitely needs a drastic response. Hopefully this will also work well for areas where the disease is still newer. If we’re able to keep understanding how this treatment works, it can be helpful in areas where the reefs haven’t been as impacted yet.”

The results of doing nothing would also be disastrous for the tourism-dependent economy of the Florida Keys. World-class fishing and scuba diving attracts millions of people to the Keys every year. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the reefs in southeast Florida are valued at $8.5 billion and sustain 70,000 full- and part-time jobs. The barrier reef, as the name implies, also protects the Keys from hurricanes and major storms by soaking up wave action that would otherwise batter the low-lying islands.

Diving underwater and manually applying goop to corals is an expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming method, though, and it’s ultimately only a stopgap measure.

Andy Bruckner, research coordinator at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, says the goal is to save the most valuable corals, from a reproduction standpoint, and reduce the amount of pathogens in the water.

“The interventions right now are really challenging,” Bruckner says, “We know that we can’t save entire reefs by doing that, so we have to have a more holistic approach.”

Noah’s Ark for Corals

Before conservationists began experimenting with antibiotics, the outlook was so bad that several state and federal agencies created a Coral Rescue Team to collect specimens for a gene bank, in case some species were wiped out entirely.

The team started out with day trips, but the disease was spreading so fast that they turned to a live-aboard cruise vessel, allowing them to spend multiple days at a time on the water collecting endangered corals.

The problem was they had nowhere to keep thousands of pieces of living coral. The rescue team reached out to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the only facilities with the expertise and equipment to keep the corals alive.

“The stark reality is that if the Rescue Team cannot fully develop and execute the Rescue Plan within a very short time frame, one third of the coral species that are found in Florida will become ecologically extinct,” Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute Director Gil McRae warned, according to The Washington Post.

One species, pillar coral, was critically endangered in Florida before the disease struck. Pillar corals are now “functionally extinct” in the Florida Reef Tract, according to a May paper in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science; the remaining individuals are so far apart that they can’t reproduce.

There’s hope, though. In 2019, scientists at a Tampa aquarium announced that after two years of work, they had induced pillar corals to spawn in a laboratory for the first time ever, collecting 30,000 coral larvae and potentially ensuring the future of the species in Florida waters.

There are now Florida corals being held in 20 aquariums across 14 states. The next phase is getting the children and grandchildren of those corals back onto the reef.

An Army of Volunteers and a Lot of Glue

In 2019, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has authority over the protected waters inside the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, launched “Mission: Iconic Reefs,” a 20-year plan to try to restore seven of the most notable reefs in the Keys. The plan calls for growing and out-planting roughly 500,000 corals. Bruckner calls it “the largest restoration effort that’s ever been attempted anywhere in the world for coral reefs.”

To accomplish this, NOAA is relying on several ocean nonprofits, like Mote Marine Laboratory, Reef Renewal, and the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF), to do the heavy lifting. The CRF maintains large underwater nurseries where it grows critically endangered staghorn and elkhorn corals. Pieces of corals are strung up on PVC “trees,” that are regularly cleaned by volunteer divers to keep them clear of algae. When the corals are big enough, they’re transported to one of the several reefs.

Planting coral underwater is both tough and delicate work, especially when you’re getting pushed back and forth by surge. Divers use chisels to scrape clean patches of ocean hardbottom before applying an epoxy and essentially gluing pieces of coral down.

So far, the CRF says it has out-planted 130,000 corals back onto the reefs since 2007 with the help of volunteer divers from around the world.

Mike Goldberg, the dive shop owner, also started a local nonprofit called I.CARE that works specifically on the reefs offshore of Islamorada.

“The reason why we got started was not only to restore the reef, but to involve the largest workforce that I believe is out there, and that’s the recreational dive community,” Goldberg says. 

Goldberg says I.CARE volunteers have out-planted about 2,000 corals back onto the reefs since the program began in January.

Another partner in the Florida Coral Rescue Project is Force Blue, a nonprofit that gives special forces combat veterans what it calls “mission therapy,” the chance to do some relaxing diving with a purpose. For the past two years, the National Football League has partnered with Force Blue to restore a football-field size coral reef for Super LIV and Super Bowl LV.

Conservationists can’t control two of the most important factors for coral health, water quality and water temperature, but the hope is to at least give the corals a fighting chance. Because corals can propagate asexually, essentially cloning themselves, as well as through spawning, they can be split into fragments that then grow into new, genetically identical colonies. This allows researchers to not only preserve and grow specimens of wild corals, but to experiment and select for ones that are more resistant to disease or tolerant of extreme water temperatures. Fragments of those hardier individuals can then be planted back out in the wild.

As part of the holistic approach that Bruckner mentioned, the initiative also plans to reintroduce “grazer” species of animals, like king crabs and spiny urchins, which eat algae that can crowd out slower-growing corals. Urchins used to fill this role in the Florida Keys, but in the 1980s, a disease practically wiped out the local population.

Because coral grows so slowly, it will be a long time before anyone can say how well the restoration efforts are working, and even longer, maybe generations, before the reefs potentially return to their former glory.

“It’s going to take decades of work,” Goldberg says, “but there will, in my opinion, be a day where we are successful.”

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Comedian Dave Chappelle’s newest hourlong special, The Closer, pokes fun at people’s pieties, sprinkled with a tenderness that Chappelle has long supplied. It’s humane and irreverent and, yes, he directly deals with the criticism and cancellation attempts he’s gotten from transgender activists; why wouldn’t he? He’s never been one to shy away from good material.

If you were reading reviews of the special, you wouldn’t know that. “Too often in The Closer, it just sounds like Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his own homophobia and transphobia,” sanctimoniously declares an NPR piece, clumsily arguing that he thinks that the plight of the black man in America trumps oppression faced by all other identity groups, intimating that Chappelle is just looking for thinly veiled excuses for his own purported animus. A Daily Beast headline reads “Dave Chappelle, and the Week From Hell For Trans People.”

Chappelle’s comedy exists in the liminal space between irresponsible and downright dangerous to trans people, or so his critics’ argument goes. He’s gratuitously edgy, pushing the envelope because he knows he can, allegedly prioritizing little glimmers of comedic payoff over nurturing a culture that’s comfortable and welcoming for trans people. But he jokes about almost everyone in a manner that could cause discomfort if you’re overly preening and self-serious. This man jokes about hoping “white bitches” get tear-gassed at the Women’s March!

No one is safe from Chappelle’s jokes—but also, everyone is safe from Chappelle’s jokes, given that words don’t directly cause harm, and that Chappelle is not uncaring or unfeeling. He seems sincere when he insists he’s “not indifferent to the suffering of someone else” (before launching into a joke about taking a shit at Walmart and trans bathroom bills and DaBaby killing a guy, of course).

“These transgenders…want me dead,” Chappelle says later on. “Every time I come out on stage, I be scared. I be lookin’ around the crowd, searching for knuckles and Adam’s apples to see where the threats might be coming from.”

“A nigga came up to me on the street the other day, he said, ‘Careful Dave, they after you,'” Chappelle says, pausing, his eyes wide. “I said ‘What? One they, or many theys?'”

Jokes like these have inspired outcry from within Netflix. Lower-level employees took to crashing a company meeting of executives; media sites dishonestly declared that “Netflix Employee Who Criticized Dave Chappelle’s Special Gets Suspended,” neglecting to mention in the headline that it wasn’t really the criticism that was the problem, but rather the unkosher practice of crashing leadership’s meeting. (Many media outlets, from The Daily Beast to The Verge to NPR to The New York Times neglected to convey the appropriate nuance in their headlines.) “It is absolutely untrue to say that we have suspended any employees for tweeting about this show. Our employees are encouraged to disagree openly and we support their right to do so,” a Netflix spokesperson clarified to Variety, failing to stop the deluge of misleading headlines.

Earlier this week, Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos issued a careful rejoinder to his employees, some of whom were staging a walkout in protest of the company airing the Chappelle special. “Our goal is to entertain the world,” Sarandos wrote, “which means programming for a diversity of tastes.…We also support artistic freedom to help attract the best creators, and push back on government and other censorship requests.” Excerpted below:

With The Closer, we understand that the concern is not about offensive-to-some content but titles which could increase real world harm (such as further marginalizing already marginalized groups, hate, violence etc.) Last year, we heard similar concerns about 365 Days and violence against women. While some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.

The strongest evidence to support this is that violence on screens has grown hugely over the last thirty years, especially with first party shooter games, and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries. Adults can watch violence, assault and abuse – or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy – without it causing them to harm others. We are working hard to ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story. So we have Sex Education, Orange is the New Black, Control Z, Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle all on Netflix. Key to this is increasing diversity on the content team itself.

With this, Sarandos delivered a decisive blow to the words-are-violence crowd. Well-adjusted adults should be able to coexist in a world with people who don’t share their tastes, morals, sensibilities, and convictions. They ought to be able to work for a company that platforms content that does not conform to their own personal sense of what is worthy or even prudent. You will not break, or be mowed down in the streets, simply because Chappelle said transgressive things in a Netflix special; the supposition that our world works that way is unfounded.

Chappelle’s comedy is at its strongest when he’s engaging with issues that are actually quite hard to stomach, issues requiring both deftness and heart. His suicide-related comedy (the Foot Locker guy/Anthony Bourdain bit, from Sticks & Stones; the bits about Daphne Dorman’s plight, from The Closer), which oscillates comfortably between irreverent and humane, is some of his finest work. And his trans-related comedy indicates just how much he wishes he could opt out; he reserves his right to just not care that much about people’s pronouns and niche subcultures he’s not particularly interested in.

He tells us later on in the special that he’s happy to have friends who are trans—provided they’re not humorless—implying that he sees them as individuals, not as symbols or representatives of any one idea or thing. There’s no categorical opposition to being friends with trans people expressed, not even once. (In fact, Dorman’s story, which he tells right before closing out, wholly counters the idea that Chappelle has no heart for transgender people.)

But the great disappearing act that is Chappelle, who famously quit The Chappelle Show and moved to South Africa (and worse, Ohio), has announced with his latest special that he’s once again dipping out. Receding from the limelight is Chappelle’s specialty; he famously walked away from $50 million when he felt like it was time to stop doing his show, and he’s indicated, with this latest special, that he’s neither interested in backing down from his beliefs and sense of humor nor in relitigating the same things over and over in the public square.

Surprising no one, Chappelle—the man who once dreamed up Clayton Bigsby, a blind white supremacist who doesn’t realize he’s black—failed to make an adequately sensitive special, and he failed to make one that pleased or mollified critics. But he succeeded at making a special that was both funny and tender, if only people would stop chattering about his purported sins long enough to listen.

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At Legal Planet, Eric Biber has a series of posts exploring recent litigation challenging the University of California at Berkeley’s alleged failure to adequately consider the environmental impacts of increased student enrollment, as ostensibly required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The lawsuit, filed by local residents who would like to stem UC Berkeley’s growth, has resulted in a court-ordered freeze on UC Berkeley enrollments at 2020-21 levels.

The litigation and surrounding controversy raise a host of interesting legal and policy issues, ranging from what sorts of government actions are reviewable under CEQA, what sorts of environmental impacts should be considered, whether socio-economic factors should influence such review, the extent to which local NIMBY pressures can distort development decisions, and whether CEQA litigation can, at least in some contexts, cause more harm than good.

Here are Biber’s posts, in chronological order:

• CEQA and UC Berkeley’s Enrollment
• What Is a Project?
• CEQA and Socioeconomic Impacts
• IF Not Berkeley, Where?

From the last post:

The superior court’s remedy in this case is what really has put the Internet up in arms. That remedy was not just an injunction against the individual project that was the trigger for the lawsuit (the Upper Hearst housing project) but also enjoining any change in university enrollment above 2020-21 levels. That remedy makes sense if you think of enrollment as a “project” – see my first post on that topic. But it also looks a lot like policymaking by a court – one of the reasons UC Berkeley enrollment has expanded, for instance, is real pressure by the state legislature on the UC system to expand enrollment for Californian students. (These issues are not unique to UC Berkeley either.) And here the policymaking is really problematic when you consider the policy context.

The UC system is one of the single most important programs for social mobility in the state of California . . . Moreover, a key driver for the UC Berkeley’s increase in enrollment is an effort to expand the diversity of the student body and serve larger numbers of lower-income and first-generation students.

Yet it is plaintiffs in surrounding Berkeley neighborhoods – some of which are higher-income and whiter than the average neighborhood in the East Bay – that are seeking to (at least temporarily) shut the doors to access at UC Berkeley for these students. . . . And while the plaintiffs have made statements about welcoming increased enrollment if the university would just provide additional housing, there have also been statements by leadership of the plaintiff’s organization that that additional housing is best put several miles away, on a UC Berkeley owned site in the city of Richmond.

But residents of Richmond surely have reason to object to university development there. Much of Richmond is much more disempowered and has suffered arguably worse impacts from historical racial discrimination than the neighborhoods around the UC Berkeley campus. And on top of that, the UC Berkeley site in Richmond is likely vulnerable to impacts from sea level rise from climate change. Even worse, by dispersing students over a wider geographic area, focusing development at the Richmond site (which is not close to public transit) rather than the central UC Berkeley campus would probably increase automobile usage and greenhouse gas emissions.

Which begs the real policy question here – if you aren’t going to increase enrollment in UC Berkeley, where would you do it?

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The United States is known as the land of the free, but it has become a place where the government decides whom we are allowed to buy from and sell to. For instance, when denied the freedom to trade without paying an expensive import tax, many Americans will find themselves begging our trade overlords for an exemption. This is, I believe, a fair description of the Biden administration’s decision to not only maintain ineffective import taxes—also called tariffs—but to re-up the listless exemption process.

After a monthslong review by her agency, United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai recently announced that the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration in order to make the Chinese government change its ways have failed. Yet the administration’s prescription seems to be more of the same.

It’s a shame. By staying with the tariffs, the administration continues to signal a belief that when it comes to trade, Uncle Sam always knows best. While tariffs are pitched to the public as a way to help domestic workers or boost U.S. competitiveness, they always penalize domestic consumers through fewer choices and higher prices. Many of these consumers are themselves domestic producers trying to secure the goods they need to make and sell fundamentally American products.

Over at the Cato Institute, Scott Lincicome summarized the point well: “The tariffs that the Trump administration imposed on Chinese imports harmed U.S. consumers and manufacturers, deterred investment (mainly due to uncertainty), lowered U.S. GDP growth, and hurt U.S. exporters (especially farmers but also U.S. manufacturers that used Chinese inputs).”

Meanwhile, the tariffs aren’t achieving former President Donald Trump’s goal to pressure China to give up its central planning. The truth is that the reliance on tariffs—instead of on a real trade agreement’s traditional compliance incentives—set it up to fail. As Lincicome explains: “Because the agreement is so one-sided, China—the party making all of the concessions—has very little incentive to comply in order to maintain its agreement benefits (there are none) or encourage U.S. compliance (there’s nothing for the U.S. to comply with).”

He adds that “current U.S. policy actually appears to have pushed China to double down on self-sufficiency, distortive industrial policy, and nationalism more generally.”

As for the hope that the tariffs would force multinational companies in China to settle back in the United States, this has failed too. Reporting on a new paper published by researchers at the University of Kansas and the University of California, Irvine, Reason Magazine’s Eric Boehm wrote this:

“Roughly 11 percent of multinational companies exited China in 2019, the first full year in which tariffs were in place—a significant increase from previous years. But the overall number of multinational firms operating in China actually increased during that same year, as foreign investment continued to flow into China even as the trade war ratcheted up costs.”

To the extent that firms left China, it apparently had less to do with the tariffs than with the uncertainty created by the trade war between an erratic president and the Chinese authoritarian government.

Yet, our policy is to continue doing what hasn’t worked before. Tai, President Joe Biden, and our trade overlords may hope that we will all swallow this bitter pill because they are allowing American producers to come and plead their cases. It will be little comfort to those who received no mercy during the Trump administration.

Indeed, data from a September 2021 Congressional Research Service report reveal that only a small percentage of applicants were granted exemptions. The process was, and I assume will continue to be, skewed toward special interests. It was also arbitrary, costly and time consuming, as the Government Accountability Office has documented.

When faced with this evidence, most people would back away from using tariffs—but not politicians and trade bureaucrats. It’s not just pursuit of a failing policy, it’s also doubling down on the idea that American producers must beg for the freedom to continue trading and doing what is best for their businesses and employees.

Are we in the land of the free, or the land of the permission-slip petitioners?

COPYRIGHT 2021 CREATORS.COM

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[Reposted with an updated list of subject matter.]

Publication of the 2021 Sisk, et al., study of law faculty scholarly impact, Brian Leiter has been compiling lists of the most cited law faculty by subject areas for the period 2016-2020, as well as an overall list of the most cited law faculty.

Leiter’s tabulations are based upon the same data as the Sisk study, which looked at citation counts in articles contained in the Westlaw journals database (as of June of this year) for the 2016-2020 period. Search results were checked for over-counting and rounded.

Here are the lists of most cited faculty by subject area. Note that one reason to list citation counts by subject area is that there is a tremendous disparity in citation counts across fields, reflecting a variety of factors (including what law review editors like to publish). I will update this list as additional subject areas are posted.

• Antitrust Law
• Commercial Law
• Constitutional Law (Conspirators Eugene Volokh, Randy Barnett and William Baude are 6, 10, and 18 respectively.)
• Corporate & Securities Law
• Criminal Law & Procedure (Conspirator Orin Kerr tops this list!)
• Evidence
• Family Law
• Health Law
• Intellectual Property
• International Law & Security
• Law & Economics
• Law & Philosophy
• Law & Social Science
• Law & Technology
• Legal History
• Property (including Wills & Estates)
• Public Law (excluding constitutional & election law) (I make an appearance on this list.)
• Tax Law
• Torts & Insurance Law

In addition to the above posts on Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports blog, the Legal Planet environmental law blog has posted a list of the most cited Environmental and Energy Law scholars. Note that this list includes some folks (including myself) who work in multiple areas, which may affect citation counts.

Update: The Originalism blog has posted a list of the most cited Originalism scholars, on which Randy Barnett, Will Baude, Ilya Somin, Keith Whittington, Stephen Sachs, and Josh Blackman are all listed.

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