In June 2020, Sony Interactive Entertainment released The Last of Us 2. The game, a postapocalyptic adventure created by the California-based video game developer Naughty Dog, swiftly became one of the highest-grossing in Sony PlayStation history, selling four million units in its opening weekend and receiving more than 300 awards. Yet it also sparked a sharp backlash from a significant group of players who felt betrayed by the game’s brutal, manipulative story line. Fans and critics clashed online, some of the game’s producers received death threats, and many players still feel wounded by the experience.

The Last of Us 2 incident highlights a large, understudied issue in the gaming world. For years, social scientists and media critics have warned that violent acts within video games might promote real-world aggression, even though the evidence for such a link is equivocal at best. Yet the same experts and pundits have largely ignored what I consider a far more serious problem: intense emotional experiences within the game that can lead to genuine trauma. Game designers do not pay nearly enough attention to psychological safety, particularly regarding the bonds that develop between players and the characters they identify with. As a gamer, I have both seen and experienced it firsthand.

In social media forums and in real life, players often react intensely to upsetting in-game events, especially when they involve harm to a favorite character. “It’s just a game” is the common response, but in the moments when a player feels vulnerable and hurt, is it really just a game? The anguished responses to The Last of Us 2 show that deep emotional attachments within immersive games, when mishandled, have the power to trigger depression and anger that stick with the players, bleeding into outside social dynamics.

“What you experience in life will influence how you experience the game,” says Julia Ayumi Bopp, a gaming user-experience researcher in Finland. “But also, what you experience in the game may influence what you’re going through in real life.”

Video games wield tremendous emotional influence because of the way players identify with controllable characters within the world of the game, experiencing a loss of self-awareness and, to an extent, melding their identities with those of the characters. Philosophers Jon Robson at the University of Nottingham and Aaron Meskin at the University of Leeds write that games “stand in sharp contrast to most other kinds of fiction (even other kinds of interactive fiction)” because they invite players to “generate fictional truths about themselves.” As players become immersed, they subconsciously adopt the game’s world as an extension of their own. Even non-controllable characters, whose behaviors are set by the game itself, can take on the role of trusted companion or protégé and begin to seem real.

When done right, the attachment between player and character can enrich the player’s experience beyond compare. One of my most memorable gaming experiences happened in The Walking Dead, a franchise game based on the comic book series and TV show of the same name. In it, a protagonist named Lee Everett must defend an orphaned girl, Clementine, in a world overwhelmed by zombies. Over time I developed a deep and genuine concern for the child—a type of bond that Bopp and her colleagues call “concern for one’s protégé.” My protective feelings toward Clementine were so acute that there were moments when I was driven to tears as I guided her through the horrors of a zombie outbreak. Understandably, many players consider Clementine one of their most beloved video game characters.

The psychological impact of the player–character bond becomes more complicated when the game doesn’t follow a clear good-versus-bad morality. I and many others experienced conflicting emotions when the original The Last of Us was released in 2013. Its story setting superficially resembles that of The Walking Dead. Joel Miller, the player character, must protect Ellie, a spunky 14-year-old who is immune to a spreading fungal disease that turns its victims into mindless, lethally aggressive beings. Throughout the game, Joel is a morally complex character who does not fit neatly into the “hero” archetype. Still, many of us were shocked at the end of the game, when he decides to kill a group of hospital workers who want to sacrifice Ellie and develop a vaccine from her brain tissue.

We understood and even empathized with Joel’s multifaceted motivations, however. He was traumatized from witnessing his daughter’s murder earlier in the game. He was fiercely devoted to Ellie, even if it meant valuing her life above many others. We shared in his pain and determination. This amalgamation of emotions solidified our relationship with Joel and Ellie through The Last of Us. As long as the designers respected that relationship, our emotions seemed validated and comprehensible.

Bopp and her collaborators surveyed hundreds of gamers and analyzed their accounts to understand the emotional qualities of their attachments. Players reported developing a broad range of emotional connections to game characters, from a sense of companionship to romantic feelings, and reacted strongly if any of those characters suffered or died. “Character loss was one of the most frequently mentioned causes of the emotional experience,” Bopp says. “These people often wrote that it had a lasting impression on them. They felt sad for several hours, several days, sometimes several weeks after experiencing it. At least one person wrote that they were actually mourning.”

As in many passionate relationships, with intense attachment comes the potential for psychological harm. Developers strive for an immersive experience through believable characters and strong player–character relationships; many of us gamers value and seek out such intensity without considering that it could leave us vulnerable to emotional manipulation and trauma. In The Last of Us, we grew to love Joel and Ellie, becoming emotionally invested in their relationship and their survival. Hence our shock when the rich moral pluralism defining these connections was abruptly rejected in its sequel, The Last of Us 2, in ways that felt manipulative and cruel.

Overturning the emotional landscape of The Last of Us, the developers at Naughty Dog retroactively framed Joel as a selfish, morally bankrupt person. In The Last of Us 2, he is brutally murdered at the hands of a new character, Abby, who is taking vengeance on Joel for killing her father, the doctor who would have operated on Ellie. Joel, who previously was depicted as a hardened survivor, now behaves in seemingly naive ways that make him easy prey. The murder is depicted in gruesome detail, as Abby beats Joel to death with a golf club; Ellie, feeling alone and friendless, develops PTSD.

From there, The Last of Us 2 offers players no opportunity for emotional recovery. Quite the contrary: The game then forces us to play as Abby’s character for several hours without any resolution to the murder, and without any emotional history for Abby that might explain the motivations and justifications behind her brutal act. The experience left many of us shattered.

Neil Druckmann, the creative director of The Last of Us 2, admitted that he had deliberately set out to provoke extreme emotional responses. He told the prominent gaming site Eurogamer, “The whole thing was constructed in such a way as to say . . . we’re going to make you feel such intense hate that you can’t wait to find these people and make them pay.” Some early testers were upset by the game’s harsh new direction, reacting to many of the same things that later triggered controversy among fans, but Naughty Dog moved forward anyway. Druckmann explained, “I’d rather have people passionately hate it than just be like, ‘Yeah, it was OK.’ ”

My own review of online comments suggests that many of the players’ responses to The Last of Us 2 were motivated by pain, not by hate. But some fans took out their frustrations by harassing and threatening Laura Bailey, the motion-capture actress who played Abby. Trauma begat trauma, as players who felt hurt by the game developers lashed out at a visible embodiment of their hurt.

In response, Naughty Dog issued a statement saying, “We condemn any form of harassment or threats directed toward our team and cast.” Yet the company did nothing to address its role in cultivating intense relationships between The Last of Us 2 players and characters and then providing players no outlet for release when those relationships were brutally torn away.

That casual attitude is common in the gaming world, despite developers’ unique power to curate traumatic psychological experiences for millions of people. In a 2016 paper, Alistair Raymond Bryce Soutter and Michael Hitchens at Macquarie University in Australia note that video games differ from traditional media in that “individuals are not simply a passive audience, instead individuals are active participants.” Game developers are doing more than making entertainment; they are inviting players into potentially life-altering circumstances.

Nevertheless, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) uses letter-based rating categories (T for teen, M for mature, etc.) that treat games as if they were just like movies or TV shows. These categories do not meaningfully address the emotional aspects of gaming. More to the point, ESRB ratings do almost nothing to provide ethical guidance at the development stage of video games, when creators make the key decisions that could affect players’ psychological well-being. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) likewise fails to address adult players’ emotional and psychological safety in the “Principles” section of its Code of Ethics.

Game companies recognize the creative and commercial value of immersion, as Bopp documents in a set of interviews with developers. One, who worked on Gone Home, a first-person exploration game, expressed a typical desire for deep connections: “The intent was to allow the player to get to know these people like someone that they might know in their own life.” Bopp also finds that video games have been cultivating character attachments for much longer than most people realize. “I asked players to recall an emotionally moving game experience,” she says. “A lot of the emotional experiences that players wrote out referred to games that are quite old.” Immersion has existed across games of all generations, from classic 8-bit to photorealistic 4K.

Developers need to take the responsibility that comes with their power and be more careful in how they use it. In my view, the best way to prevent another Last of Us 2 incident (or worse) is to establish ethics committees within development studios to prevent psychological manipulation and abuse of players. A possible starting point would be to task these committees with asking specific ethical questions—perhaps developed in partnership with the IGDA and ESRB—about in-progress and finished games. The committees could then develop a scoring system for each game’s compliance with set guidelines that account for players’ emotional and psychological safety.

Games could be evaluated according to standard ethical questions like: What types of psychological traumas or social controversies could the game agitate? Is the development studio prepared to handle such consequences? Do gamers receive the proper in-game tools and opportunities to address the emotions being triggered? Gaming companies could also employ experts trained to predict player interpretations of a game’s content and to supplement the results of play-testing conducted during the game’s development. Neglecting to take player feedback seriously is where The Last of Us 2 failed most egregiously.

With such oversight, game developers would finally be guided by clear standards for the prevention of emotional harm. The developers would be forced to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with creating immersive experiences that powerfully affect us players. Maybe they would be inspired to create more creative, humane games. Until then, gamers’ best course of action is to engage in respectful, open discourse with development studios. We need to let them know that emotional trauma is a commercial issue as well as a moral one.

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Tips for gamers who experience emotional trauma

• Seek out supportive channels (on YouTube, Discord, or Twitch, for instance) where gamers honestly discuss specific games or create video essays that open up a safe space for others to share their feelings.
• Join the Video Games Awesome community, which encourages group engagement both online and at in-person gaming events. I’ve been a part of this community for years. I also follow individuals like The Completionist, who articulates how many of us feel about certain games and helps us understand why.
• If you belong to an underrepresented group in gaming, look for organizations that support your specific community—for instance, Can I Play That?, Black Girl Gamers, and Gay Gaming Professionals.
• Remember that everyone’s experience is different. If you don’t find the support you need in one channel or group, try another.

On November 8, 2021, the American Heart Association journal Circulation published a 300-word abstract of a research paper warning that mRNA Covid vaccines caused heart inflammation in study subjects. An abstract typically summarizes and accompanies the full paper, but this one was published by itself. According to Altmetrics, the abstract was picked up by 23 news outlets and shared by more than 69,000 Twitter users. On the basis of that abstract, a video on BrandNewTube, a social media outlet that circumvents YouTube’s anti-misinformation policies, pronounced Covid vaccinations “murder.” Sixteen days later, the American Heart Association added an “expression of concern,” noting that the abstract might not be reliable, and on December 21 it issued a correction that changed the title to indicate that the study did not establish cause and effect, noting there was no control group nor a statistical analysis of the results.

This incident underscores a flaw at the center of the scientific enterprise. It’s all too easy to make outsize claims that sidestep the process of peer review. No publication should carry a standalone abstract, particularly one making such a bold claim, and particularly during a pandemic. But the problem goes much deeper than that: Even scientific papers that have passed through the intended safeguards of peer review can become vectors for confusion and unsubstantiated claims.

As we’ve seen again and again over the past two years, Covid-19 hasn’t been just a viral pandemic, but also a pandemic of disinformation—what the World Health Organization calls an “infodemic.” Many scientists blame social media for the proliferation of Covid-related falsehoods, from the suggestion that Covid could be treated by drinking disinfectants to the insistence that masks don’t help prevent transmission. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and other platforms have indeed propagated dangerous misinformation. However, social media is a symptom of the problem more than the cause. Misinformation and disinformation often start with scientists themselves.

Institutions incentivize scientists going for tenure to focus on quantity rather than quality of publications and to exaggerate study results beyond the bounds of rigorous analysis. Scientific journals themselves can boost their revenue when they are more widely read. Thus, some journals may pounce on submissions with juicy titles that will attract readers. At the same time, many scientific articles contain more jargon than ever, which encourages misinterpretation, political spin, and a declining public trust in the scientific process. Addressing scientific misinformation requires top-down changes to promote accuracy and accessibility, starting with scientists and the scientific publishing process itself.

The history of the scientific journal goes back hundreds of years. In 1731 the Royal Society of Edinburgh launched the first fully peer-reviewed publication, Medical Essays and Observations, initiating what has become the gold standard of credibility: vetting by experts. In the traditional model, scientists conduct original research and write up their findings and methodology, including data, tables, images, and any other relevant information. They submit their article to a journal, whose editors send it to other experts in the field for review. Those peer reviewers evaluate the scientific soundness of the study and advise the journal editors whether to accept it. Editors may also ask authors to revise and resubmit, a process that takes anywhere from weeks to months.

By 2010, most traditional scientific journals also had digital counterparts. The “open access” movement makes roughly 1/3^rd of those available to the public for free. Meanwhile, the number of science publications and the number of published papers increased dramatically, and most academic institutions established themselves on social media to help promote the work of their researchers.

In this new world, scientific journals and scientists compete for clicks just like mainstream publications. Articles that are downloaded, read, and shared the most receive a high “impact factor” or Altmetric Attention Score. Studies show that people are more likely to read and share articles with short, positively worded, or emotion-invoking titles.

The rating system can’t help but affect scientists’ publications and their careers. “Many [scientists] are required to achieve certain metrics in order to progress their career, obtain funding, or even keep their jobs,” according to Ph.D. candidate and researcher Benjamin Freeling of the University of Adelaide, who was lead author of a study on the topic, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. “There’s less room for a scientist to work on a scientific question of immense importance to humanity if that question won’t lead to a particular quantity of publications and citations,” he wrote in an email to OpenMind. Valuing exposure above the scientific process incentivizes sloppy and unethical practices and demonstrates British economist Charles Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

University of Washington data scientist Jevin West, who studies the spread of misinformation, says that university public relations offices responsible for press releases and other media interactions “also play a role in the hype machine. Universities want their scientists to win prestigious grants and funding, and to do that, “the research has to be flashy and boundary-pushing.” PR offices may add to that flash by exaggerating the certainty or implications of findings in press releases, which are routinely published almost verbatim in media outlets.

The demand for headline-worthy publications has led to a surge in research studies that can’t be replicated. Results of a reproducibility project published by the Center for Open Science found that only 26 percent of the top cancer studies published between 2010 and 2021 could be replicated, often because the original papers lacked details about data and methodology. Compounding the problem, researchers cite these nonreplicable studies more often than those that can be replicated, perhaps because they tend to be more sensational and therefore get more clicks.

Most readers, including journalists, can’t discern the quality of the science. Yet it’s “taken forever for the publishing community to provide banners on the original papers” to signal they “might not reach the conclusion readers think,” West says. Tentative or unsubstantiated claims can have profound social impacts. West references a one-paragraph letter written by two physicians and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980, which he regards as largely responsible for the current opioid crisis. The authors asserted that “addiction is rare in patients treated with narcotics,” but they provided no supporting evidence.

It took 37 years before the New England Journal of Medicine added an editorial note warning that the letter had been “heavily and uncritically cited,” but neither a warning nor a retraction can put the misinformation genie back in the bottle, especially given the letter’s decades-long influence on narcotics prescriptions. What’s more, readers can still access misleading studies, and researchers continue to cite them even after they’ve been retracted because they either don’t know about a retraction, or don’t care.

The rise of preprints, scientific papers that have yet to be peer-reviewed, has generated further debate about the proper way to communicate scientific research. Some people celebrate preprints as a way to invite advance feedback and disseminate findings faster. Others argue that so much unvetted material adds to the misinformation glut.

Preprints accounted for roughly 25 percent of Covid-19–related studies published in 2020. Of those preprints, 29 percent were cited at least once in mainstream news articles. Take the infamous example of ivermectin, a drug developed for treating parasitic infections. A preprint touting its efficacy in treating Covid-19 patients appeared on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) server in April 2021, prompting widespread interest in and approval of the drug, including by governments in Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru. As people began taking ivermectin to treat or prevent Covid-19, scientists expressed concern about the data used in the preprint—data supplied by Surgisphere, a health-care analytics company whose unreliable data had previously led to retractions of papers in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. The paper was removed from SSRN, and shortly thereafter Surgisphere shut down its website and disappeared.

The now-removed preprint paper inserted ivermectin directly into the political spin machine. What’s more, the hype and drama surrounding the drug obscured the critical uncertainty about whether it could actually treat or prevent Covid-19. (A subsequent study suggests that if taken soon after diagnosis, ivermectin can help prevent serious illness.) It also distracted from the important fact that the efficacy of any drug depends on timing, dosage, and other health and safety factors that people shouldn’t try to determine on their own.

Approximately 70 percent of preprint literature is eventually peer-reviewed and published, but what about all the rest, which never become anything more than preprints? Many reporters don’t distinguish between unvetted preprints and formally published papers; to casual web sleuths, the two can appear nearly the same. When unsubstantiated findings guide personal behaviors and policies, even a small number of faulty studies can have significant impact. A team of international researchers found that when first-draft results are shared widely, “it can be very difficult to ‘unlearn’ what we thought was true” —even when the drafts are amended later on.

Unlearning falsehoods is especially challenging given today’s oversaturated news cycle. Online news aggregators syndicate local and national publications and present readers with an endless barrage of information via notifications and emails. In this context, it’s hardly surprising that readers tend to click on splashy headlines and articles that confirm their preexisting beliefs. “Science is embedded in an information ecosystem that encourages clickbait and facilitates confirmation bias,” West says.

And when people try to explore the research behind the headlines, they run into barriers: Scientific articles are becoming increasingly hard to understand as researchers pack them with more jargon than ever. A group of Swedish researchers who evaluated scientific abstracts written between 1881 and 2015 found a steady decrease in readability over time. By 2015, more than 20 percent of scientific abstracts required a post-college reading level. A big issue is the heavy use of acronyms; as of 2019, 73 percent of scientific abstracts contained them. Scientists themselves sometimes avoid citing papers rife with jargon because not even they can confidently parse it. We’ve all heard of “legalese,” but “science-ese” can be similarly inscrutable and alienating to readers.

Addressing the science-driven misinformation problem will require a “profound restructuring of how the science ‘industry’ works,” Benjamin Freeling says. One recommendation is for journals to help readers see the preprint as a work in progress, not as the end result. Critical care physician Michael Mullins, editor-in-chief of Toxicology Communications, referred to a 2020 paper about the effects of hydroxychloroquine on Covid patients that appeared on the preprint server medRxiv and was published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents that same day without undergoing peer review. Many people (including the president of the United States) regarded the study as complete, underscoring the danger of scientists using preprints to circumvent peer review.

One change that statistician Daniel Lakens of Eindhoven University of Technology advocates is to implement a system of “registered reports,” which involve peer review and acceptance of a study’s design, methodology, and statistical plan before data are collected and regardless of what the data ultimately suggest. These reports would be pre-accepted for publication when the final data and analysis are complete. Registered reports would combat the tendency to publish papers with greater potential for publicity and clicks because publication would revolve not around the outcome but around the process. In 2020 the journal Royal Society Open Science initiated a rapid Registered Report system that allows for ongoing documented revisions. Many other journals have followed suit, attempting to balance the need for a faster review process with the need for accuracy. If publications relied on process rather than the outcome or the potential for clicks, scientists could focus on and produce better science.

As for the academic public relations machine, Jevin West believes scientists should be held accountable for the text in university press releases. Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington who is active in public outreach, suggests that scientists sign off on press releases before they’re sent out, putting those releases through their own form of scientific review.

Scientists aren’t responsible for the critical thinking skills of the average reader or the revenue models of journals, but they should recognize how they contribute to the spread of misinformation. To address the jargon problem, scientists could use fewer acronyms and include “lay summaries,” also known as plain-language summaries. Some publications now require these, but they could go further by requiring glossaries of technical terms and acronyms, jargon cheat sheets, or other types of decoders necessary for understanding a study, especially for open-access and preprint articles. Freeling’s advice is more blunt: “Try better writing.”

Scientists can also communicate more effectively with the public by harnessing social media. Freshwater ecologist Lauren Kuehne, whose work includes a devotion to science communication, advocates informative blog posts, Twitter threads, TikTok videos, and public talks to build relationships. But open communication comes with its own issues, especially balancing a desire for influence with trustworthiness. Organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) offer workshops and communication tool kits on effective public science communication, but scientists have to pursue that information on their own. The good news, says Kuehne, is that “10 years ago, the debate was around whether scientists should spend their time engaging with the public,” whereas now the question isn’t “whether it’s important, but how to do it.”

Direct public engagement is the best way to help people understand that even the most canonized scientific facts once were subject to debate. Making the scientific process more transparent will expose flaws and may even beget controversy, but ultimately it will allow scientists to strengthen error-correcting mechanisms as well as build public trust.

That science works despite the problems noted here is, as Bergstrom puts it, “amazing.” But the ability of science to transcend flaws in the system shouldn’t be amazing—it should be standard. Let’s save our amazement for the discoveries that emerge because of the scientific enterprise, not in spite of it.

“Water shortages are brewing wars,” warned the BBC last year. People who worry about climate change are drawn to this dramatic, high-stakes idea. After all, persistent droughts and destructive floods are symptoms of a changing climate, and it seems irresistibly intuitive to claim that when water becomes scarce or unpredictable, states will go to war with each other to secure it. But by paying so much attention to an exaggerated, simplistic scenario (even with good intentions), we miss the true risks of water shortages and the solutions at hand.

Take the current conflict in Ukraine, described by some people as a conflict over water: Russia intervened, they say, to ensure Crimea would get water that Ukraine has been holding back since 2014. But alleged causes of the ongoing invasion also include economics, identity, history, security, and an unhinged dictator.

This does not mean that water is immaterial. Water infrastructure can be a target in war, as when Russian forces cut off Mariupol from its water supply to conquer the city. Water can also be weaponized, as both Ukrainian and Russian forces have done by breaching dams to flood the landscape and shift the odds in the ground fight. And, of course, localized conflicts can ignite over water when institutions collapse, as when Russian-backed separatists took over parts of the Donbass region in 2014, cutting in half the Soviet-era integrated water system that served it. History is littered with examples of times when water, or the infrastructure designed to manage it, played some role in war. But that is not the same as being the cause of an international war. Attributing wars to water scarcity implies that material conditions inevitably determine armed conflict, when in fact military aggression is almost always a matter of choice.

Blaming war on water absolves politicians of their responsibility and deprives people of their agency, undermining efforts to resolve the very conflicts water is supposedly driving. There are 310 river basins straddling national boundaries, covering nearly half of the earth’s land surface and home to half of humanity. Many of those rivers are under stress today. Focusing on them as possible theaters of war—as the “water wars” story would have it—diverts us from seeing them for what they could be: 310 instruments of peace. In fact, cooperation rather than conflict is the most common response to a difficult water situation.

In contemporary culture, the thesis of a war over water has a modern archetype: the Arab–Israeli conflict. The Jordan River, more than 300 kilometers long, is fed by tributaries in southern Lebanon and Syria and flows into the Sea of Galilee. From there it receives water from two more tributaries on its eastern bank—the Yarmouk and the Zarqa—and runs along borders that, after the armistice in 1949, separated Israel and the West Bank on one side from Jordan on the other.

In the early 1950s, both Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan began drawing from that system to support economic development. Jordan announced plans to divert the Yarmouk. Two years later, Israel began construction of its National Water Carrier, a system of pipelines and canals that would draw water mainly from the Sea of Galilee. These developments were not meant as threats, but they set the stage for what happened next.

By 1956, with Israel’s Carrier system still under construction, Egypt had blocked Israeli ships from passing through the trade route of the Suez Canal. Amid growing tensions, in 1964 Egyptian president Gamal Nasser convened a summit of Arab states—a meeting notable for the birth of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Famously, participants declared that the continued economic development of Israel would displace more Palestinians and pose an existential threat to the Arab world.

One way to constrain Israel’s development was to divert the Syrian headwaters of the Jordan River, reducing the amount reaching the Sea of Galilee by about a third and limiting what Israel could draw for its Carrier system. With construction of the system finally completed, Israel declared the diversion an infringement of its sovereign rights. Things escalated, and in May 1967 Nasser’s troops surrounded Israel. During the Six Day War that followed, Israel destroyed the Syrian diversion and took over the Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Sinai, vastly extending its control over the region. This not only secured control of the Jordan River but gave Israel access to the aquifers below the West Bank. Its National Water Carrier had even more room to grow.

Water clearly played a key role in this conflict. The Arab attempt to divert the headwaters weaponized the river’s sources. But water was not the cause of the conflict. Water in the Jordan valley has always been scarce. It took the carving up of the Middle East, Israel’s quest for statehood, Arab nations’ refusal to recognize it, and Egypt’s desire for Arab unity and expansion to fuel war.

Besides, the very same war offered an important, if incomplete, example of how difficult water conditions could facilitate peace. Following 1978 negotiations at Camp David, Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor as president of Egypt, resurrected an old water plan, offering Israel its Nile waters to develop the Negev desert in the hopes of finding a workable compromise for regional stability. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and nothing came of the offer, but the attempt showed how water scarcity could be a precursor to cooperation rather than a cause of conflict.

Despite this, the “water wars” thesis held sway, attracting serious public attention when Sadat claimed that water was “the only matter that could take Egypt to war again.” In 1985 Sadat’s former minister of state for foreign affairs, Boutros Boutros-Ghali (later the secretary general of the United Nations), reprised this statement, claiming that the next war in the Middle East “will be fought over water, not politics,” a thinly veiled threat to states along the Nile.

Then, in 1995, during a speech to water experts in Stockholm, another Egyptian, World Bank Vice President Ismaïl Serageldin, claimed that “if the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, “the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.” Serageldin wasn’t literally predicting a water war; he was drawing people’s attention to the importance of water management. This time the alliterative phrase was picked up widely by media, including the New York Times, Newsweek, and CNN.

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ublic fascination with the idea of a water war led academics to investigate its empirical basis. Scholars dug into the past to find evidence of military conflicts between nations over water. The very first water war in recorded history was described in the Stele of Vultures. The stele is a Sumerian monument from about 4,500 years ago whose fragments are at the Louvre in Paris. It tells the story of what could be called a water war between Umma and Lagash, two city-states in lower Mesopotamia, between Baghdad and Basra in modern Iraq. But the geographer Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University, a prominent expert in water-related conflicts, wrote that if this was the first water war, it was also the last.

Overwhelmingly, the evidence that Wolf and others have collected shows that cooperation, not conflict, is the recurrent theme when nations share a water source. The most famous example of this took place in the Indus River valley. More than 3,000 kilometers long, the river rises in western Tibet and Kashmir, flows through the Punjab in India and Sindh in Pakistan, and finally empties into the Arabian Sea.

One of the most egregious legacies of the British Raj was that, at the time of independence for India and Pakistan in 1947, this river basin was split between the two countries with no regard for the infrastructure that had turned it into the largest contiguous irrigation system in the world. Most of the irrigated land went to Pakistan, but the infrastructure that ended up in India could stop the flow to its neighbor almost entirely. With no rules of engagement and no history of joint management, the newly formed states faced severe tensions over water, among other things. Ethnicity itself caused a crisis. In what has been called the biggest migration of the century, an estimated 15 million people moved across the new border in a matter of months. Hindus moved to India and Muslims to Pakistan while community ethnic cleansing left a long trail of victims and hatred along the migration paths.

It was an inauspicious start to separation, but the two countries had no choice. They had to manage the shared river, and that is what they did.

In 1960, after protracted negotiations, Field Marshal Ayub Khan of Pakistan and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India signed the Indus Waters Treaty. The treaty divided the tributaries of the river between the two countries, established a World Bank infrastructure financing package to reengineer the river in service of both, and, crucially, adopted mechanisms for arbitration so that neither country could pose an existential threat to the other. It was imperfect, as all international agreements are. Yet it was a treaty between two countries that would soon become nuclear powers. Remarkably, it has withstood the test of time, surviving the conflict of 1965, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, and the Kargil conflict of 1999. It stands to this day as an extraordinary monument to cooperation between rivals that work together on the river, even when at war over other things.

Popular culture has drawn the wrong lesson from history. A fear of “water wars” is a misreading of water events. From the Jordan to the Indus to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, shared among Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, the lesson is always the same: Even the most difficult of neighbors can find a route to cooperation over water. This does not make it easy, nor is it inevitable. But a failure to cooperate does not lead to armed international conflict. Instead it produces persistent water insecurity and suffering. Unmanaged scarcity can cripple economies; uncontrolled floods can destroy communities; both can lead to migration.

The focus on “water wars” blinds us to the opportunity for cooperation and the need to encourage it. In the first few months of 2022, skirmishes have broken out between Taliban and Iranian forces where the Helmand River crosses the border between Afghanistan and Iran. The Taliban reacted to alleged attempts at dredging additional canals. Iranian farmers, in turn, protested over perceived threats to the water flowing from Afghanistan. These are not “water wars,” though; localized skirmishes are not unusual when individuals or communities fight over water, but they happen precisely because states have been unable to develop effective cooperation.

Afghanistan is struggling with a severe drought and insufficient infrastructure to manage its own water resources, risking a famine of unprecedented scale. Over the last few months, a flood not of water but of people, mostly fleeing the Taliban and hunger, has been crossing the border out of the country. The high number of refugees is putting further pressure on Iranian communities, which then react with anti-Afghan protests, compounding tensions. The management of water resources is central to overcoming these problems. It is a cure for conflict, not a cause.

What these neighbors need are better institutions to support cooperation, reliable data to manage the river, and institutions to negotiate joint river management as the flow changes over time. Cooperation is the key to survival. From the Helmand, the Jordan, and the Nile to the Mekong between China and its neighbors downstream to all the other international rivers worldwide, water offers an opportunity to cooperate across borders. In the face of climate change and deteriorating water security, the real challenge is not war but successful cooperation. That, above all, will safeguard the future of the shared waters of the world.

My first move in the online game Harmony Square is to transform myself into a fake-news mastermind. “We hired you to sow discord and chaos,” my fictional boss informs me in a text box that pops up on a stark blue background. “We’ve been looking for a cartoonishly evil information operative. You seemed like a good fit.”

Through a series of text-box prompts, the game goads me to inflame my pretend social media audience as much as possible. I stoke an online firestorm with a ginned-up takedown article about a fictitious local politician: “PLOOG LIED ABOUT PAST—SUPPORTED ANIMAL ABUSE IN COLLEGE!” At management’s behest, I unleash an army of bots to comment approvingly on my story, driving more traffic to it. As I escalate my crusade against Ploog, the game cheers me on.

Harmony Square is one of several games University of Cambridge researchers have developed to bolster people’s resistance to disinformation. “What we thought would be interesting was having people make their own fake news in a safe environment,” says Cambridge psychologist Jon Roozenbeek, a lead researcher on the games project with fellow psychologist Sander van der Linden. “The goal is to prevent unwanted persuasion.”

These games rest on a single, overarching premise: You can inoculate people against fake news by exposing them to small amounts of such content—much as low doses of live virus can vaccinate people against a disease—if you catch them before they are fully infected by conspiratorial belief. So far, games like Harmony Square are among the best-developed vehicles for disinformation inoculation. Researchers are also proposing and testing other, related strategies, including inoculating students in classroom settings, having people cook up their own conspiracy theories, and creating online classes that teach how to identify common fake-news tactics.

Reaching enough people to achieve something akin to herd immunity against disinformation is a significant challenge, however. In addition to bolstering people’s BS detection skills, a broad immunity-building campaign would need to neutralize fake news’s strong emotional pull. “Even as this approach of science and inoculation takes off, the problem has to be solved at the cultural level,” says Subramaniam Vincent, director of journalism and media ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center. “So many efforts have to come together.”

Mentally vaccinating people against fake news goes back to the 1960s, when psychologist William McGuire proposed making people resistant to propaganda using a strategy he called a “vaccine for brainwash.” Much as weakened viruses can teach the immune system to recognize and fight off disease, alerting people to false arguments—and refuting those arguments—might keep them from succumbing to deception, McGuire reasoned.

Take, for example, the public-health recommendation that everyone visit a doctor every year. In an experiment, McGuire gave people counterarguments against going to the doctor annually (say, that regular visits promote health anxiety and actually lead people to avoid the doctor). Then he poked holes in those counterarguments (in reality, regular doctor visits reduce undue health anxiety). In McGuire’s studies, people became better at resisting false arguments after their beliefs were challenged.

The inoculation messages warned people of impending attempts to persuade them, causing them to recognize that they might be vulnerable. The brain is wired to mount a defense against apparent threats, even cognitive ones; when challenged, people therefore seek fresh ways to protect their beliefs, much as they’d fight back if someone attacked them in a bar. Threat is a critical component of inoculation, says Josh Compton, a Dartmouth speech professor who specializes in inoculation theory. “Once we experience threat, we are motivated to think up counterarguments folks might raise and how we’ll respond,” he says.

In the 1980s and ’90s, experts put inoculation theory into practice with fairly limited goals, like preventing teenage smoking, and limited but promising outcomes. It wasn’t until the mid 2010s, as fake news gained traction online, that Cambridge’s Van der Linden was inspired to take the inoculation concept to a higher level. Like McGuire, he was convinced that “prebunking,” or sensitizing people to falsehoods before they encountered them, was better than debunking fake stories after the fact. Multiple studies show that once someone has internalized a nugget of false information, it’s very hard to get that person to disavow it, even if the original creator posts a correction.

Van der Linden found that focusing on a single issue, as McGuire had done, has its limits. Warning people about lies on a particular subject like smoking may help them fend off falsehoods about that one topic, but it doesn’t help them resist fake news more broadly. So Van der Linden started focusing on building people’s general immunity by cluing them in to the persuasion techniques in every fake-news creator’s toolbox.

In a series of mostly online studies, Van der Linden gave people general warnings about bad actors’ methods. For instance, he told them that politically motivated groups were using misleading tactics, like circulating a petition signed by fake scientists, to convince the public that there was lots of scientific disagreement about climate change. When Van der Linden revealed such fake-news tactics, people readily understood the threat and, as a result, got better at sniffing out and resisting disinformation.

The idea of turning fake-news inoculation into something fun was conceived in 2016 at a bar in the Netherlands. Over beers with friends, Roozenbeek batted around the possibility of using a game to combat false information online. He created a prototype, which he called Bad News. As he researched the idea further, Roozenbeek came across Van der Linden’s studies, and the two agreed to work together on more advanced online inoculation games. Their collaboration expanded on Bad News, then added Harmony Square, which is now freely available at harmonysquare.game.

In tongue-in-cheek fashion, the games introduce players to a host of common fake-news tactics. As I type a fake headline about a local politician in Harmony Square, my boss stresses the importance of stoking people’s fear with inflammatory language. “You missed some. Do better,” she scolds when I don’t include enough incendiary words like corrupt or lie in my headline. “Remember: Use words that upset people.” The game also goads me to create a website that claims to be a legitimate news outlet, sucking people in by projecting the appearance of credibility.

The argument against these dishonest tactics is embedded in the game play. The more disinformation you spread, the more unrest you sow in the fictional town of Harmony Square. By the end of the game, normally placid townspeople are screaming at one another. As I play, I get caught up in the narrative of how fake-news tactics undermine community from within.

To evaluate whether the games are truly effective, Roozenbeek and Van der Linden surveyed about 14,000 people before and after they played Bad News. After playing the game to the end, people were better overall at spotting falsehoods, rating the reliability of fake tweets and news reports about 20 percent lower than they had before. The effects lasted for more than two months. These results are in line with those of other anti-disinformation tactics such as correcting or fact-checking suspect content, according to a meta-analysis of such interventions by researchers from the University of Southern California.

Social scientists see promise in the Cambridge team’s efforts to inoculate people against fake news. “Walking in the perpetrators’ shoes, so to speak, can be very effective for understanding how disinformation can be produced and some reasons why,” says Robert Futrell, a sociologist and extremism researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, although he has not reviewed specific data from Bad News or Harmony Square.

Even if they work well, games alone will not be enough to inoculate whole populations against online disinformation. Several million people have played the Cambridge team’s offerings so far, according to Roozenbeek, a tiny fraction of the global population. Daniel Jolley, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham, notes that large-scale inoculation will have to be implemented in a wide range of settings, from classrooms to community centers. Ideally, such programs should reach students during their school years, before they have been extensively exposed to fake news, Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg has argued.

Finland is the first country to try inoculating people against fake news on a national scale. As Russian fake news began making its way across the border into Finland in 2014, the Finnish government developed a digital literacy course for state-run elementary and high schools. The curriculum, still in use, asks students to become disinformation czars, writing their own off-the-wall fake-news stories. As they learn how fake news is produced, students also learn to recognize and be skeptical of similar content in the real world.

Elsewhere, researchers and organizations are experimenting with inoculation efforts on a smaller scale. In Australia, communications professor John Cook designed an online course in 2015 to teach people how to detect common disinformation tactics used by climate deniers. So far, more than 40,000 people have enrolled in Cook’s course.

In the United States, nonprofits like the News Literacy Project teach middle and high school students how to distinguish between fact and fiction in the media. NLP has developed a series of 18 interactive lessons, some of which walk students through fake-news creation and give examples of bogus stories likely to spread like wildfire (“Fireman Suspended & Jailed by Atheist Mayor for Praying at Scene of Fire”). More than 55,000 educators have signed up to work with NLP so far. (The Science Literacy Foundation, which supports OpenMind, is also a financial supporter of the News Literacy Project.)

Adding to the challenge of fake-news inoculation, a serious literacy campaign must do more than train people to ferret out falsehoods. It must also counter the emotional pull of those falsehoods. People tend to wade into conspiracies and false narratives when they feel scared and vulnerable, according to Jolley. When their brains flood with stress hormones, their working memory capacity takes a hit, which can affect their critical thinking. “You’ve got the skills” to mentally counter conspiracy theories, Jolley says, “but you may not be able to use them.” Research shows that people who feel socially isolated are also more likely to believe in conspiracies.

By contrast, the more fulfilled and capable people feel, the less vulnerable they are to disinformation. Jolley suggests that community-building ventures in which people feel part of a larger whole, like mentoring programs or clubs, could help individuals grow psychologically secure enough to resist the pull of a conspiracy theory. Making it easier to access mental health services, he adds, might also support people’s well-being in ways that improve their immunity to common fake-news tactics.

As the disinformation-vaccine movement grows, one crucial unknown is just how much inoculation is enough. “What’s the equivalent of herd immunity for human society?” Vincent asks. “Do we have to have inoculation for, let’s say, 80 percent of a country in order for the spread of misinformation to be mitigated?” Calculating that percentage, he notes, is a complex undertaking that would have to account for different ways of reaching people online and the multiple strategies used to counter fake news.

Given how challenging it will be to defang disinformation, it seems fitting that the Cambridge team’s Harmony Square game builds to an open-ended finish. When I complete the game’s final chapter, everyone in town is still fighting over the content my fake news empire churns out, and it’s unclear whether the destruction I’ve caused can be reversed. Surveying the damage, my boss applauds me. “They’re all at each other’s throats now.”

August 30, 2022 — This story was updated to include a more recent estimate of the number of educators who have engaged with the News Literacy Project platform. The number of available NLP lessons was also updated.

Take a swim through Clear Lake, North America’s oldest (and California’s largest) natural body of fresh water, and you’ll encounter the outsiders: bass, catfish, crappie, and a dozen other predatory fish with no ecological basis for being there. The fish began arriving in the 1870s when state agents, ignorant of the local ecosystem, recklessly introduced wave after wave of invasive animals that permanently wrecked the lake’s aquatic balance. These predators drove local extinctions, devastated food webs, and destroyed tribal fishing culture. Four endemic fish species were ultimately wiped out, and a fifth—the Clear Lake hitch—is nearly extinct.

For some 150 years, authorities managing the region introduced alien species, never consulting the Tribal bands who had successfully managed the lake for millennia. Likewise, scientists studying Clear Lake’s toxic mercury levels and harmful algal blooms failed to alert Indigenous communities to the looming threat. Local involvement came only when Tribal experts began monitoring the waters, sharing their findings, and joining lawsuits to protect native species in the lake. Fish kills on Clear Lake are persistent and frequent, but only the Tribal EPA office of the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians records the assaults.

Ignorance of native science and the centuries of knowledge it represents is hardly limited to Clear Lake. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s historical inability to distinguish among seven separate species of abalone (well known to coastal Tribes including the Chumash, Ohlone, and Yurok) led to successive waves of overexploitation. All seven species are currently in trouble; the one remaining viable fishery—red abalone—was shut down in 2017 and will remain so until 2026. In the western United States, which is experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years, government-mandated fire suppression plans replaced millennia of indigenous wildland stewardship that included vegetation management and the intentional burning known as “good fire.” Instead, every year, millions of acres burn, homes are annihilated, and people die in catastrophic wildfires that cost billions of dollars.

With climate change escalating superstorms, heat waves, mega-floods, and drought, indigenous science can no longer be ignored. For almost two millennia, beginning with local inhabitants of the Mediterranean who provided baseline data for the 600 plants described in Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica in 77 A.D., Indigenous peoples have furnished substantive source material for scientific research. Even the system of scientific nomenclature—categorizing living things by using Latin genus and species names, such as Homo sapiens (human) and Canis lupus (wolf)—is derived from uncredited indigenous science. The 18th-century Swedish scholar Carl Linnaeus, often referred to as “the father of taxonomy” for his work codifying species classifications, based his taxonomic nomenclature on indigenous knowledge from the Indonesian–Malaysian archipelago documented by 16th- and 17th-century explorers. In other words, Linnaeus plagiarized the Natives’ naming systems and claimed them for his own when describing “new” botanical specimens. (Side note: The Linnean Society of London now describes Linnaeus as one of the founders of scientific racism because he associated positive character traits [wisdom, inventiveness] with the “Europaeus” classification of humans and “monstrous” traits [sluggishness, greed] with the “Africanus” and “Asiaticus” groups.)

As it turns out, indigenous knowledge is exceptionally nuanced and deep. It is cumulative, place-based, and acquired largely through observation and experimentation on both large and small scales. Indigenous science—including contributions highlighted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Indigenous Climate Hub—is crowd-sourced citizen science taken to the next level, constructed over multiple generations in close relationship with the species, habitats, bodies of water, weather patterns, and other natural phenomena surrounding the observers. It is not superstition or isolated observation or pseudoscience, all misinterpretations stemming from the racist and classist assumptions of Western explorers and ethnographers starting in the 17th century and persisting to the present day.

The languages of Native peoples overflow with scientific observations. In Northern California, Yurok place names include regok-o-yū u wro, meaning “trout run up a creek” and tskwe’ges-o-rike’n, translated as “harbor seal where he sits,” describing a rock in a river. The Hupa term for sea lion is yida:ch’in-te’il, meaning “coming from downstream—they swim along.” The Tolowa Dee-ni’ name for the California condor translates to “whale lifter,” a nod to the fact that condors sometimes feed on the carcasses of humpback whales. However, because academia relegates indigenous knowledge to ethnic studies or files it under folklore or legend—thus confining its study to scholars in the humanities—vast reservoirs of historical expertise have remained untapped by the scientific community, especially in the United States.

Last year, a Bishop Paiute elder named Harry Williams, the last living encyclopedia of ancient Paiute hydrological systems in California’s Owens Valley, passed away. Understanding local hydrology is essential to solving critical ecological issues in the region, including mitigating the disastrous effects of massive water exports, saving the endangered Owens Valley pupfish, and protecting native plants that once flourished under Paiute irrigation. Prior to belated efforts to document Williams’s knowledge, the only study of Paiute hydrology had been performed by Julian Steward, an ethnographer who spent 12 weeks interviewing 13 Paiute people in 1927 and 1928.

The disparity between 12 weeks’ research by an outsider and a lifetime of fieldwork by a resident Paiute is immense. Yet a persistent lack of knowledge about—or partnership with—communities whose lands are studied by scientists is commonplace, running rife through the resumes of Euro-American researchers hailed as the founders of science disciplines and conservation programs: Linnaeus, John James Audubon, John Muir. Paraphrasing my colleague and Southeast Asia specialist Roy Ellen, what we now recognize as scientific knowledge of the natural world was constituted largely by researchers absorbing preexisting local folk knowledge while erasing whatever they weren’t interested in or willing to absorb—and, I would add, failing to credit the source of that knowledge.

Indigenous peoples continuously occupying specific ecosystems for centuries or millennia maintain intimate familiarity with how those ecologies function. From the Yanomami in the Amazon to the Inupiat in the Arctic, Native communities successfully shepherded resources through a combination of deeply held belief systems and sophisticated adaptive management technologies, augmented by the pervasive accumulation, intergenerational transfer, and application of scientific knowledge. This is why Native peoples developed scientific terminology to categorize and characterize species and interspecies relationships—such as birds associated with specific fruiting trees, or the migration patterns of walrus and caribou—long before Western science invented academic fields like agronomy, animal behavior, ecology, climate science, restoration ecology, soil science, and zoology. Traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, is a scientific term used to acknowledge this wide-ranging body of nature-based expertise.

But a cultural blitzkrieg has tried to wipe that away. The era that saw invasive fish first introduced to Clear Lake was characterized by government-sanctioned massacres of First Peoples and the species most sacred to them. The devastation included rampant slaughter of apex predators (wolves, bears) and ecosystem engineers (bison, beavers, salmon); the enforced servitude of Tribal members and the removal of their children to boarding schools; and the “Code of Indian Offenses” that criminalized native beliefs and practices.

Disdain for, and erasure of, Indigenous peoples and their lifeways and culturally significant species paralleled Western myths that Americans of European descent would tame and improve wilderness and wild peoples. This is why national parks were founded and why Indigenous peoples throughout the world are still forbidden from residing, hunting, fishing, or gathering in their ancestral territories that lie squarely within those parks.

When science is dominated by a cultural subset, countless forms of bias prevail, influencing which questions are asked, who gets to ask them, how the questions are asked, and where scientific efforts are focused. For example, when I began graduate school in ecology, mutualisms—interspecies relationships in which both species benefit—were considered rare, and my assigned readings focused largely on competition and predation. We learned all about resource scarcity and predator–prey cycles, but nothing about trees sharing metabolic resources or belowground biochemical warning systems (“trees talking to each other,” which is widely recognized by Indigenous experts).

Twenty years later, the ubiquity of mutualisms in aquatic and terrestrial systems is widely acknowledged. How did scientists overlook such common ecological phenomena? Retrospective meta-analyses of scientific studies provide a clue: Seventy percent of published studies during the past generation concentrated on only one species or negative interspecies interactions, in a field where the overwhelming majority of scientists were males of European ancestry focusing primarily on Europe and the Americas. Because of who decided which questions to ask, we didn’t investigate the sorts of things, or interact with the sorts of people, that would have enabled us to see and study positive multispecies relationships.

In stark contrast, traditional ecological knowledge and the origin stories of indigenous peoples are replete with positive multispecies relationships. In Karuk stories, Turtle gave fire to Frog, and Frog took fire underwater before spitting it into willow roots along the river. For Karuk firefighters, this translates into setting up nighttime burns to keep fire in the grasses, protecting turtles nesting in the willows. While the modern world is surprised by videos of coyotes and badgers cooperating on hunting expeditions, stories of coyote–badger collaborations have been circulating among Hopi, Apache, Pueblo, and Klamath Tribes (among others) for centuries, possibly millennia.

During my career as a university lecturer, whenever scientists in my field alluded to place-based or experiential knowledge, they described it as “anecdotal” or derived from an “informant,” downgrading local expertise as nonscientific or ancillary to “real” science. In every natural resource management agency meeting I attend as a consultant, decisions are ostensibly based on the “best available science.” Translation? Anything written by someone with degrees accompanying their name, even if it was published decades ago or is the sole article on the topic, will take precedence over the unpublished expertise of a Native or local practitioner.

But when we begin our scientific analyses with place-based expertise and TEK, our theoretical world is expanded, enabling richer and more rigorous science. Researchers working in the Peruvian Amazon with the Matsigenka Tribe documented 98 distinct habitats in the traditional Matsigenka classification system; another Amazonian group, the Matses, recognizes 178 rainforest types. One team of scientists concluded that traditional ecological knowledge “represents a vast and underutilized database about habitat diversity, species distributions, ecological interactions among organisms, economically important species and sustainable management practices.”

If we define wealth as the concentration of irreplaceable human and natural capital, then regions with the highest concentrations of languages and species, known as biocultural diversity hot spots, constitute the richest areas on the planet. Protecting that wealth must be a collaborative effort, beginning with the founders and original cultivators of that wealth, whether we refer to them as First Nations, First Peoples, Aboriginals, Indigenous peoples, or Natives.

As Max Liboiron, a Canadian researcher, recently tweeted: “Protip for environmental scientists: when writing about gaps, say ’nothing/little is published on this topic’ rather than ’nothing/little is known about this topic’ because it’s almost certain that local people and Indigenous people know.” To this pro tip I would add another suggestion: Say “We have yet to connect with local experts” because in most cases, sadly, my fellow researchers don’t even think to try.

Why, despite current reckonings with justice, equity, diversity, and inclusivity in the 21st century, does indigenous science continue to get short shrift? The reason is that what we credit as “science” continues to be embedded within a hierarchy of knowledge produced in the English language by university-educated and -affiliated academics. Anything produced by a European or an American of European descent is automatically awarded a higher status, despite that preference being biased and therefore unscientific.

The world is waking up to the need for change, and the tide is slowly turning. My own doctoral thesis, completed in 2004, focused on Indigenous Indonesian communities with encyclopedic knowledge of thousands of species and farmers who incorporate sophisticated understanding of variations in microclimates, soils, wildlife behavior patterns, and rice genetics to maintain and enhance agrobiodiversity. On the other side of the Pacific, thanks to expert testimony from myself and dozens of Tribal members before the California Fish and Game Commission, native science informed the creation of marine protected areas and led to the appointment of Tribal advisers at every level of the California Natural Resources Agency.

These examples, alongside the increasing recruitment of Indigenous scholars in universities and research institutions, are spurring paradigm shifts in conservation policies. With the help of Tribal co-management, indigenous conservation practices are now being applied across a range of national, state, and county wildlands, including Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona, Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota, Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, and Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. The same input is helping to conserve culturally significant species such as salmon and steelhead in Washington State.

The natural world is best understood through long-term, repeated, intimate contact with ecosystems and their associated experts, a practice that remains in short supply among most scientists. Local communities and Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, have accumulated generations’ worth of scientific data and expertise, much of it overlooked as Native peoples lose access to homelands; elders die; languages are extinguished; historical documents languish in rarely consulted microfiche files or white papers; and local experts, fed up with being excluded and ignored, boycott agency meetings.

Environmental problems that took generations to become entrenched cannot be resolved by transient researchers or long-distance government staff. Now is the time for all hands on deck, especially the expert hands (and minds) of Native peoples whose lifeways, cultures, and identities are irrevocably intertwined with their ancestral territories. Enrolling local Tribal experts as science advisers, partners, and co-managers in addressing biodiversity loss, climate change, legacy pollutants, and other pernicious issues not only makes sense, but is the only way to effectively turn things around.

On July 7, 2022, at Yosemite National Park, someone started a fire on the Washburn Trail, at the southwest corner of the world-famous Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees. Sequoias are the most massive single-stem plants in the world, some growing taller than 300 feet and exceeding 35 feet in diameter. They can live more than 3,000 years. Preserved on public lands, they exist as wards of our government, but the older ones have been around longer than any government, ever. They occur naturally in about 70 relatively small groves along the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, and they have become the focus of great concern. Since 2020, between 13 and 19 percent of them have been killed or are dying from large fires driven by climate change.

The July blaze, known as the Washburn fire, was human-caused; whether accidental or intentional is unclear. With temperatures in the 90s, flames spread quickly through the woods, where trees already killed by drought and beetle infestations had a moisture content equivalent to that of kiln-dried lumber. Fire crews, engines, and aircraft streamed into the park and the neighboring Sierra National Forest. The fight lasted three weeks. On some days violent convection columns like brown thunderheads boiled into the sky. A tree branch, lifted hundreds or thousands of feet by one of these updrafts, narrowly missed two firefighting aircraft as it plummeted back to earth.

The good news was that firefighters kept the blaze out of most of Mariposa Grove and the nearby village of Wawona. None of the 500 or so mature sequoias in the grove perished in the flames. Yosemite’s fire management chief, Dan Buckley, credits this to decades of work to reduce a buildup of fuels—younger trees of other species, deadwood, and brush—that had accumulated in Yosemite forests under an eight-decade government policy of extinguishing all wildland fires. This policy, now rescinded, actually worked against fire control, eliminating the frequent, low-intensity flames that had flickered through sequoia groves every 15 years, on average, consuming fuels on the ground with little harm to mature trees. In the twentieth century Yosemite’s staff responded to the consequences of their own firefighting efforts by cutting down thousands of white firs and incense cedars that grew up around the sequoias in fire’s absence, and after 1970, by repeated controlled burning.

That work paid off during the Washburn fire, but its success occurred against the background of a lawsuit, filed less than a month before, challenging a new round of tree cutting at Yosemite. An environmental group, Earth Island Institute of Berkeley, California, sued to stop the National Park Service’s use of chainsaws and logging equipment to thin trees in strips along 40 miles of roads and trails to create strategic fuel breaks that firefighters could safely enter and stand their ground.

Behind the controversy was a larger question: Given human-caused climate change and alterations to forests from decades of fire suppression, is it appropriate to use such unnatural means to protect natural treasures? It turns out that this question is not particular to the era of climate change. Rangers, scientists, and conservationists have been fighting over how much and what kind of modifications of nature ought to take place in national parks since at least the 1920s.

The Park Service refers to the present tree thinning as “biomass removal.” Earth Island Institute denounces it as “commercial logging” because some of the trees have been sold to lumber mills to defray costs. The laws and policies of other land management agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service provide for the sale of timber, but commercial exploitation of natural resources is inconsistent with the preservationist mission of national parks. In its defense, the Park Service argues that the cutting is done not to make money, but to stop the new class of climate-driven “mega fires” from destroying the park.

Behind the argument is a lot of history, from which both sides draw conflicting conclusions about how much we should tinker with protected ecosystems in order to save them. The Park Service points to thousands of years of human management of nature in Yosemite—fires ignited by Indians, then decades of government fire suppression, the cutting of trees grown up under fire suppression, and later, attempts to reintroduce natural fire. On the other side, the man behind Earth Island Institute’s lawsuit, research ecologist and maverick environmental activist Chad Hanson, counters that human alteration of forest regimes amounts to a scientific conspiracy to soften resistance to commercial logging. Hanson says that instead of thinning forests, which he believes just makes fires worse, we should stop all logging and fall back to hardening homes and landscapes in populated areas against wildfire. Let the fires go, he says, and nature will work everything out. But Hanson’s confidence in the balance of nature is not shared by other scientists working on sequoias, forests, and fire.

In his bestseller Blink, Malcolm Gladwell noted that we see things most clearly in a quick, initial take. If this is true elsewhere, it does not work on forests. The forests of Yosemite today are a product not only of nature but of history. Trees are made of history. You can count good and bad years in their growth rings and fire years in charcoal scars healed over and buried deep in their trunks. Fire years are also recorded in layers of charcoal at the bottom of forest ponds.

Early explorers left accounts of Indigenous people’s use of fire in Yosemite and much of the rest of North America. Yosemite’s Indians burned to open up the woods for hunting and stimulate fresh growth of forage for game. They set fires to harvest bulbs, roots, acorns, and other foods and to cultivate sprouts on plants used to make arrow shafts, fish traps, and basketry. So pervasive was indigenous fire that ecologists have come to understand the structure and distribution of post–Ice Age vegetation of North America as having coevolved with it.

With the displacement and genocide of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, unregulated logging unleashed mayhem on American forests. Timber was dragged out of the woods by wood-burning steam winches and locomotives. Wood fires heated buildings roofed with wood shingles. Mountains of logging debris were left to dry in the sun. So, wherever logging went, catastrophic fire followed. A series of spectacular infernos that killed thousands of people between 1871 and 1910 focused attention on wasteful use of forests. In 1905 a new federal agency, the U.S. Forest Service, stepped into the vacuum of authority over forest conservation and wildfire. Its first chief, Gifford Pinchot, made it clear where firefighting stood in his priorities. “Officers of the Forest Service, especially forest rangers, have no duty more important,” he wrote. This doctrine remained in force for much of the twentieth century.

Native American fire never really disappeared. Merging with European modes of agricultural burning, it continued as a folk tradition in some parts of the country and was resurrected on some Indian reservations. But in the main the United States waged effective war on fire, and annual acreage burned drastically declined. Fire is one of nature’s important recyclers, releasing nutrients stored in plants back into soil for use by other plants. Without it, photosynthesis kept turning sunlight into wood, leaves, bark, and roots, and production of plant matter quickly outstripped its dissolution back into the soil.

Stopping fires was not the only wrongheaded manipulation of nature in national parks. For the supposed benefit of recreational fishers, early rangers transplanted nonnative fish to lakes and streams, where they laid waste to aquatic life. Wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions were hunted down, and consequently their prey, such as deer and elk, overpopulated parks. Park boundaries were drawn up without a thought to migrations of wildlife across them. Bears were allowed—even encouraged—to feed on tourists’ food, resulting in dangerous human–bear conflicts.

In the 1920s, as the nascent science of ecology came into its own, groups such as the Ecological Society of America expressed concern over the alteration of natural conditions in national parks. Park Service biologist George Melendez Wright argued that mere protection would not repair damage done by mismanagement. To restore natural conditions would take deliberate manipulation of nature.

Wright died young in an auto accident, and by the 1950s his successor in advocating purposeful manipulation of ecosystems to restore their health was Berkeley wildlife biologist A. Starker Leopold. In the absence of predators the government had wiped out, for instance, Leopold said the Park Service might have to artificially control the numbers of their prey, such as deer and elk, lest their competition for food destroy park vegetation. And the parks should reintroduce fire in its ecological role, Leopold argued.

Leopold’s recommendations, laid out in a 1963 white paper known as the Leopold Report, made him the Park Service’s principal adviser on what would later be called “restoration ecology.” His advocacy of fire was influenced by fellow Berkeley forestry professor Harold Biswell, who had been conducting controlled burns on private land since 1951. Biswell was so avid about fire he acquired the nickname “Harry the Torch.”

In 1961 two members of the pro-fire Berkeley circle around Leopold and Biswell compared old panoramic photographs of Yosemite Valley from the 1860s onward to newer ones taken from the same locations. The changes were stunning. Where the old photos showed forests of widely spaced trees broken by open areas, later images captured the same forests now densely packed with trees and invading former meadows. Similar “repeat photography” studies elsewhere in California, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, and South Dakota rendered similar results—a continental-scale advance of trees and brush.

Sensing a moment of opportunity, Leopold and Biswell set out to bring fire back to the sequoia groves of Yosemite and, to the south, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Beginning work on university land just outside Sequoia National Park in 1964, Biswell found tangles of trees, brush, and debris built up during more than a half-century of fire suppression and directed workers to cut, pile, and burn it before lighting ground fires in order to avoid incinerating sequoias. On the other side of the boundary, researchers inside the parks did the same thing.

Nor was this cutting new. Almost as soon as they started putting out fires, Yosemite’s early keepers had noticed trees of other species growing up to block tourists’ views of the sequoias. In 1933 the park’s superintendent ordered workers to cut and haul away more than 3,000 trees—mostly white fir—to restore scenic vistas in Mariposa Grove. In the late 1960s, in consultation with Biswell, the park’s new chief of resource management directed cutting, piling, and burning of what he described as “tens of thousands” of trees to prepare Mariposa Grove for its first controlled burns.

In 1971 Biswell’s graduate student Jan van Wagtendonk, who became the park’s research scientist, contributed formulas to professionalize controlled burning into more scientifically rigorous “prescribed burning.” From that point to this year’s Washburn fire, portions of Mariposa Grove were burned as many as six times. Still today, before a burn is ignited, fallen branches and other fuels are piled away from the trunks and root systems of the giants.

One thing that cannot be said of Mariposa Grove is that it is untouched by humans. But a vision of a primeval world before the compromised present is what people expect at a national park.

To the extent that George Wright’s and A. Starker Leopold’s purposeful manipulation of wildlands to restore natural conditions was generally popular in the Park Service, it did not delight some conservationists in the “wilderness movement” whose goal was to preserve remaining areas of roadless backcountry free of human domination and control. When the Leopold Report was published in 1963, wilderness advocate and Park Service biologist Adolph Murie called it “the most extreme anti-park statement I have yet encountered.”

Howard Zahniser, executive secretary of the Wilderness Society and principal author of the Wilderness Act, signed into law the following year, called Leopold’s ideas “a serious threat to wilderness.” Such places “should be managed so as to be left unmanaged,” argued Zahniser in an editorial in the Wilderness Society’s magazine. He then summarized his position: “With regard to areas of wilderness we should be guardians, not gardeners.”

Earth Island Institute’s Chad Hanson subscribes to this sort of hands-off philosophy. Hanson says that with regard to the operation of public lands there are three kinds of people: those who believe nature is there to exploit for profit, those who love nature but don’t trust nature to look after itself, and those who love nature and trust it to work everything out. He’s in the latter category, he says.

The problem with Hanson’s purism is that it’s not 1963 anymore, and nature isn’t all that natural. The loss of as much as a fifth of all living sequoias to fire over the past two years suggests that if we want to keep some of the world’s largest living things, we may not want to put total trust in a hands-off approach.

Hanson is clearly intelligent and dedicated, but talking to him is like entering a parallel world where everything is opposite. He is not worried about the survival of sequoias or other forests in the era of mega fires. On the contrary, he has written on the benefits of mega fires. Asked about the dissonance between the idea that there is no threat to sequoias and the number of them lost to fire in two years, Hanson disparages the mortality estimates and the scientists who made them, calling the effort “a back-of-the-cocktail-napkin thing.” One of the scientists he dismisses has been working on sequoias since Hanson was a grade-schooler. Hanson has yet to produce his own figures, but he says he’s working on it. Meanwhile he estimates that the actual loss of mature trees is “probably about seven or eight” percent. He does not say how even that level of mortality could be sustained if it continues but points enthusiastically to the numbers of sequoia seeds that germinated in the fires’ wake. Of course a sequoia seedling is not a millennia-old giant.

Regardless of Hanson’s idyll, human manipulation of nature paid off in Mariposa Grove during the July blaze. When a fire burning in heavy fuels runs into an area where fuels have been reduced, the flames tend to “lie down.” Park Service ecologist Garrett Dickman, who had been directing the tree cutting, witnessed this effect during the Washburn fire in areas that had been repeatedly subject to prescribed burns. There, flame lengths were about two feet, while in neighboring areas they reached more than 150 feet into the air. This was reminiscent of what happened in the KNP Complex fires in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks the previous year, where the successful effort to keep the fire out of the sequoia grove at Giant Forest was advantaged by a two-lane highway bordered by an area that had seen half a century of repeated prescribed burns.

Control is a term scientists use for an untreated group of experimental subjects, such as those receiving a placebo in a medical trial. There happens to be a control group of giant sequoias that can aid in evaluating whether human intervention helps save the ancient trees. These groves, located in the backcountry without roads, fuel-reduction projects, or prescribed burns, have not fared well. In fact, most of the sequoias lost to recent fires were in backcountry groves. Ninety-five percent of Yosemite is designated wilderness under the Wilderness Act, which prohibits use of machines such as logging equipment. Management of fires in Yosemite’s wilderness is limited to allowing some unplanned human or lightning caused ignitions to burn, when conditions are favorable, to shape vegetation, improve wildlife habitat, and prevent larger conflagrations down the road. The recent fuel-break work has been taking place outside the wilderness and covers less than 0.5 percent of Yosemite’s land area.

Hanson, who has a law degree from the University of Oregon and a doctorate in ecology from U.C. Davis, alleges that the Park Service dodged a full review and public comment on the effects of its tree cutting. The Park Service argues that the work is covered in a 2004 environmental impact statement and fire management plan, parts of which were updated in 2017. But a lot can change in nature and science in 18 years, and the plan called for removing only trees with a diameter of 12 inches or less, not the 20 inches specified in the present work.

Hanson also objects vehemently to the Park Service’s removal of trees that had grown in during fire suppression to block iconic views, such as that of the 3,000-foot granite prow of El Capitan from the road entering Yosemite Valley—a process of forest change already visible in the 1961 photo comparison study. The Leopold Report had called for just this sort of cutting to restore scenic vistas, drawing fire from Adolph Murie, who complained that by manicuring views Starker Leopold was trying to turn the national parks into Disneylands.

Categorically, the scenic vista program and the fuel breaks are both responses to the unintended consequences of fire suppression, but Chad Hanson lumps them together as a conspiracy to conduct commercial logging in the national park.

“They’re clear-cutting!” he says. “They’re selling these trees to logging companies, coming in and intensively logging old-growth forests.”

However, if the sight of loaded log trucks leaving Yosemite speaks of a new comfort in tinkering with nature, it is one that Leopold foresaw six decades ago, and particularly with the fuel breaks, a lot is at stake. To have witnessed the loss of as much as one-fifth of all living sequoias on their watch is heartbreaking for Dan Buckley, Garrett Dickman, and Nicole Athearn, Yosemite’s chief of resource management and science and Dickman’s boss. “We cannot stand by and do nothing,” says Athearn. “Doing nothing is doing something,” she adds, because human effects on climate and fuels would continue even if the rangers were to adopt Hanson’s hands-off philosophy.

Nevertheless, doing something in a hurry carries its own risks. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Congress’s 2022 Omnibus Spending Bill provide almost $10 billion for wildland fire management, fire risk reduction, and research to agencies like the Park Service, Forest Service, and U.S. Bureau of Land Management. When the government gets fistfuls of money with orders to spend it fast, haste can make waste, as was the case with the billions in pandemic relief funds lost to fraud. In April 2022 in the Santa Fe National Forest, firefighters lost control of two prescribed burns that joined to become the largest wildfire in New Mexico history. Among the causes cited in the Forest Service’s investigation was pressure within the agency to accomplish a backlog of fuel-removal projects.

Notwithstanding the overwhelming proof to the contrary—including the 1961 Yosemite photo study—Hanson says there has been no broad increase in the density of North American forests from fire suppression. He says he would agree with fuel breaks along roads if the park service used only fire to create them. He does not oppose felling hazard trees that might fall on cars or buildings, but he wants the park to leave any trees felled to decay naturally on the ground, not haul them to a sawmill, pile and burn them, or chip them and truck them to a biomass power plant, as the park has done when the trees are not suitable for lumber. Of course leaving trees on the ground is in conflict with the very idea of a fuel break. But Hanson does not seem to hold himself responsible for the nuts and bolts of controlling fire, because outside of developed areas, he is not in favor of it.

Two days before the Washburn fire, the Park Service and lawyers for Earth Island Institute reached agreement on a temporary halt to the cutting at Yosemite pending a court hearing. After the Washburn fire, Dan Buckley, Garrett Dickman, and Nicole Athearn spent August of 2022 waiting for a federal judge to render an opinion and praying there wouldn’t be another fire in the big trees. On the wall above Dickman’s desk hangs a drawing by his five-year-old nephew of a huge sequoia. Dickman and his colleagues don’t believe the trees will save themselves without some help. Chad Hanson does. There is something deeper here than facts and figures, though. It is how people who love the natural world deal with foreboding, even grief, about the future of life on earth. Some do it by fighting what may be a losing battle, some by downplaying the need to act and placing their trust in the Magna Mater, Mother Nature, that all-knowing deity of the ancient world.

We all want—need, really—to have our stories told. And it takes wise storytellers to do it, especially if we become unable to fully do it ourselves.

As human beings, many of us, if not all, will be disabled at some point in our life. As journalists, our profession must take that fact into account, with stories portraying disabled people in ways that are dignified, accurate, and forward-thinking. One in four American adults lives with a disability of some sort, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some disabilities are obvious, but others may be more subtle, such as colorblindness, dyslexia, or problems during pregnancy.

At every turn, disability writing should strive to be free of stigma and hold space for disability pride. In this kind of reporting, human experience should be seen through a social lens. That means writers shouldn’t depict disability narrowly, as a problem to be solved, but rather as a lived identity to be framed with nuance and sensitivity. They should choose the right language and make sure to give disabled people the chance to speak for themselves.

Experts I spoke to for this story were universally emphatic on a particular point: Talk to disabled people when you write about disabilities. Many of those experts lamented that they frequently see journalists fail to do this. Laura Casey, who was a WSJ Trust Fellow focusing on disability coverage, noted that simply prioritizing disabled voices could reframe stories and get at the truth more accurately.

“Make an effort to ensure that the sources you speak to have life experiences that are representative of the heterogeneity of the disabled population,” she told me. “You’ll probably get a very different response to questions about public transit accessibility from a wheelchair user with a spinal cord injury versus a person with multiple chemical sensitivities.”

Casey has multiple chronic illnesses that are dynamic, affecting her in different ways at different times, so she requested that we do our interview via email. Had we done it over the phone, she said, she’d likely have been able to explain only about half of her points.

Casey’s altered interview arrangement illustrates a key point about accommodations for disabled sources in general. Reporters should build in flexibility when reaching out to disabled sources. That means allowing extra time for them to respond to interview requests and conducting the interview in whatever format they are most comfortable in, whether via text message or sign language or anything else. With sources from vulnerable or marginalized communities, it’s particularly important to explain the general practices of journalism (define “off the record,” for instance) to those who aren’t media trained. Publishing sensitive information, such as someone’s medical diagnosis, can be harmful if done in a cavalier way.

And allow disabled people to speak for themselves, rather than relying on the perspective of a caregiver or family member, who doesn’t have the actual direct experience.

Journalists should also understand that people with disability are news consumers and part of their audience. “If you are considered a consumer of news, then you are an audience that a news outlet must consider,” says Eric Michael Garcia, senior Washington correspondent for The Independent and author of We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. “When we don’t see them as an audience, we then feel a license and an authority to talk about them in a way we wouldn’t talk about other groups.”

USE LANGUAGE CORRECTLY

To clarify nuances around specific disabilities and terms, the National Center on Disability and Journalism offers an alphabetical style guide in multiple languages to explain concepts such as “abled-bodied” and “vegetative state.” Historically, language has been used to dismiss, disparage, and even to justify killing disabled people. Notions of what it means to be “stronger” and “weaker” have fueled the eugenics movement, and activists understand that words matter.

One of the most common discussion points in disability reporting is about using person-first language versus identity-first language. Prior to the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, an earlier generation of disabled activists favored person-first language (“person with a disability”), emphasizing their basic humanity. A younger generation, growing up with their rights enshrined in law, has felt more freedom to emphasize identity (“disabled person”). Whether to use one or the other can be decided on a case-by-case basis, depending on the community. The identity-first preference is particularly common in the autism community, as in “autistic person.”

If you’re not sure, ask the subjects how they would like their disability to be portrayed. We all want to be shown as fully dignified human beings. It’s preferable to write someone is “a wheelchair user” rather than “wheelchair bound.” I’ll admit I made this mistake in a story I wrote in 2019 and received several angry emails. I wish I, or my copy editor, had known better. Guides like this may help others avoid the same mistake.

And if you do make a mistake, listen and learn from the disability community. Let it be a teachable moment. In late 2021, Mykola Bilokonsky, an autistic software engineer, objected to language used in a promo for a CNN documentary about autism and marijuana (a show I worked on). He reached out to CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, on Twitter, offering some gentle feedback on how to cover autism. In an essay, “How to Talk About Autism Respectfully,” Bilokonsky explains that Gupta asked for a phone call, took time to listen, and promised to report on the topic in a more nuanced way going forward.

DIVERSIFY YOUR TEAM

Many newsroom leaders make the mistake of not hiring disabled writers or commissioning stories from them. Consciously add disabled people to your team. You’ll be more likely to get the story right. An autistic reporter will write knowledgeably and authentically about autism. And because symptoms or experiences of one disease can resemble those of another, you may find that a writer who is hard of hearing is your most insightful reporter on “brain fog.”

Several years ago, the site Refinery29 was publishing its “Voices of Disability” package, a set of stories that at first did not have a dedicated editor. The outlet asked Kelly Dawson, a writer and media consultant with cerebral palsy, if she could serve as a guest editor for the series to ensure the coverage was correct. “I’m really surprised at how simple it is,” Dawson said at the time. “It really is me coming to the team, and them being, like, ‘OK, what are we doing this year?’ ”

Dawson helped the team expand the inclusiveness of the stories, think intentionally about the colors used on the site, and incorporate alt text for all its images, for those with visual impairment. Adding voice recordings for all the stories helped not only blind audience members but also those who have trouble reading due to cognitive dysfunction.

When hiring disabled reporters or commissioning them for stories, know that lived experience isn’t bias. It’s wisdom. Disability activist Alice Wong describes disabled people as “oracles” who see the world through a uniquely perceptive and profound lens. That’s a lens newsrooms can use to their advantage and is an important part of newsroom diversification. Newsrooms produce more vibrant stories when Black editors and queer producers and disabled writers make contributions and write stories about what interests them, whether that be medical research or Lord of the Rings.

Not all disabled journalists will want to be pigeonholed on the disability beat. That’s great. We need disabled reporters holding truth to power on Wall Street, at the White House, and in the court system in O’Fallon, Illinois. Issues of equal access and opportunity are not confined to the disability community. They’re universal.

DEPICT YOUR SUBJECTS WITH DIGNITY

A disability that isn’t outwardly noticeable can be no less life-altering than one that is. “The problem is that we only talk about it if it’s in the context of health, but disability impacts so many other issues, whether it’s being able to get a job or being able to get housing,” says Mia Ives-Rublee, director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress. “Disability affects everything, and leaving it out of the conversation means you’re missing large parts of the picture.”

Don’t use disabled people as “inspiration porn.” The disability community often complains that their stories are framed as tales of overcoming adversity, while the harder journalistic work of exposing systemic injustice goes undone. There’s no substitute for reporting on the substantive policy issues. Even basic reporting about daily life can expose important truths. For the New York Times, reporter Amanda Morris followed one wheelchair user’s journey flying from Palm Beach, Florida, to San Antonio, Texas. Morris showed how air travel can be “embarrassing, uncomfortable, and perilous,” with wheelchair users enduring risks such as injury, loss of equipment, and lack of accessible bathrooms in order to fly.

Moreover, cheap inspiration porn can “otherize” disabled people. Don’t make them seem exceptional for doing normal things. “We know we live these lives,” says Vilissa Thompson, a social worker and founder of the self-advocacy organization Ramp Your Voice! “We know that we go to school. We know we can be doctors, we can be everything else. It’s society’s narrow viewpoint of who we are that allows inspiration porn to exist.”

If the story isn’t specifically about disability, and your subject just happens to be blind or to use a wheelchair, don’t give their disability more focus than it needs. In those instances, it’s just a fact of everyday life.

Know that people are relying on your coverage to tell the truth about their disease.

Just as in other areas of journalism, be careful about false equivalence. When there is overwhelming scientific consensus on a subject, being overzealous about finding dissenting views can actually misinform readers. One pitfall in disability reporting, for instance, is that some journalists writing about long Covid repeat disproved myths about post-viral illness being “all in your head,” even when hundreds of studies have shown measurable biological abnormalities that can persist for decades. Similarly, some voices in the scientific world question the evidence for certain chronic diseases that are widely acknowledged to be real. Giving those voices air, and not fact-checking longstanding myths, can implicitly feed into dehumanizing tropes about “takers and fakers.”

For instance, Janet Dafoe, whose son Whitney is disabled and cannot speak due to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, told me that in 2015 she refused to allow a reporter to use her interview material if the reporter spoke to psychologists who doubted her son’s disease. Dafoe’s gambit worked. The resulting Washington Post story became a breakthrough moment for the global patient community and led to well-framed follow-up stories.

The first story I successfully pitched at CNN, in 2016, was about disabled Bolivian protesters marching in wheelchairs through the Andes toward the nation’s capital, calling the government out for meager disability pensions. The activists demanded increased disability benefits to help move closer to basic subsistence. But rather than sympathy, President Evo Morales’s regime met them with riot police and water cannons. It was a good story not because it was a disability story but because it was a human story about fully dimensioned people with a problem, a fight, and oh, what a journey.

Nearly every story we tell as a species is ultimately about how we reckon with suffering, how we build community, and how we deal with the inevitable frailty and deterioration of self. That’s not disability. That’s being human.