Hamburger with a Side of EpiPen

"The aliens are already here" 

Spurred on by NASA scientist James Hansen’s dramatic testimony to the Gore-Wirth congressional hearings on climate change in 1988 and 1989, I completed my book, Climate in Crisis, after nearly a decade of research and interviews with scientists on that topic. It referenced more than 8000 studies up to that time and included my own map projections of disappearing coastlines, migrating forests, and inundated floodplains. When it wasn’t melting polite dinner conversation by predicting catastrophes from Southern Europe to the Himalayas, the book made a modest little warning about vector-borne disease. 

 

The book warned:

Changes in temperature and humidity will likely alter the ranges of bacteria and viruses as well as plants and insects. Both Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Lyme disease are already considered serious public health problems in the United States, but the spread of these tick-borne diseases is expected to rapidly accelerate with global warming. Rocky Mountain spotted fever is primarily borne by the American dog tick. With warmer winters and increased precipitation in the southern states, dog tick populations would shift from south to north. While this is good news for those in the south, the human population is much larger to the north.

I warned that the dog tick, also known as the Lone Star tick for the white splotch on adult females’ backs, would move northward, out of Dixie and into the parts of the country that still thought of a tick as something that happened to other people’s dogs.

I remember thinking, at the time, that this was good news for the South and bad news for everyone else. I did not, in 1989, imagine that thirty-seven years later I would be reading a New York Times Magazine cover story confirming that yes, I was right, and also, by the way, alpha-gal is way worse than Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Because now there is a tick with a superpower.

 

I refer, of course, to the Lone Star tick, which — and I want to be fair to deer ticks that have been menacing hikers since I hiked the AT in the summer of ’72 — has apparently decided that mere fevers are for amateurs. The Lone Star doesn’t wait politely in the grass or drop from trees like its cousin. It can detect a warm body from fifteen meters and track it like a shoulder-launched Stinger. Like those mud-dauber wasps that seem to prefer radioactive mud (White Oak Lake studies in Oak Ridge), this arachnid—related to scorpions and spiders—smaller than a sesame seed, has an organ on a foreleg that detects and homes in on the carbon dioxide in exhalations and lactic acid and ammonia in sweat. This is not an insect. This is an IR-seeking missile with eight legs and a mission.

It is restoring Gaian homeostasis by diminishing the population of a planet-killing parasite. Ticks are Gaia’s immune response.

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Its calling card, alpha-gal syndrome, is the sort of thing that sounds like it was invented by a cli-fi novelist who’d been told her last book wasn’t dark enough. One bite, and a molecule in the tick’s saliva can rewire your immune system so that the next hamburger you eat might be the one that kills you.

And you laughed when that nine-year-old told you that you should become a vegan.

Doctors are reportedly telling people to carry an EpiPen — not for the tick bite, mind you, but for when you collapse at the barbecue, gasping for air. I have spent five decades warning people that industrial civilization was a tiger they had by the tail and it was going to turn around and bite them. I did not picture it happening literally, at a cookout. Nor did I imagine it was a cow we had by the tail.

I take a small satisfaction in all this, the way anyone does when a fire alarm they installed decades ago finally goes off, and everyone realizes it wasn’t just decorative. But mostly what I feel is the particular, specific exhaustion of Cassandra — the fatigue of having said “the range is going to shift” back before climate was a thing.

Watching it happen so precisely, so on schedule, is like watching a slow-motion car crash. Or video images coming from the Tibet-Nepal border.

Ticks are not the problem. Ticks are the messenger. There are 30 million white-tailed deer where there used to be closer to 300,000. We shot all their predators and then planted them a buffet of suburban shrubbery. The deer are taco stands for ticks.

Another aspect is winters that don’t kill tick eggs anymore. Oblivious (because no one read my book), we built commuter towns and golf courses right up against the tree line and then acted shocked, shocked, when the tree line noticed. Nature has a very long memory and absolutely no respect for boundaries.

Naturally, since this is 2026 and nothing is allowed to be a public health problem anymore, there is also a conspiracy theory in which the ticks are a secret government bioweapon unleashed from a research lab on an island, presumably by the same shadowy cabal that also controls the weather, the vaccines, and my grocery bill. I confess a certain professional jealousy here. I spent thirty-some years trying to get people to believe that human behavior was altering the climate, using peer-reviewed data, and they called me an alarmist. Somebody else suggests the Deep State is farming ticks in New Jersey and half of Capitol Hill nods along solemnly. The lesson, I think, is that the most persuasive rhetorical device available to any theory is a good villain. Diffuse, slow-moving, collective responsibility does not sell. A secret island lab sells.

Ticks are Gaia’s immune response.

The proposed solutions, meanwhile, read like a fever dream co-written by the Department of Agriculture and a Bond villain. Kill the deer — but only if you kill nearly all of them, and good luck getting that past a town hall meeting where somebody’s kid has named a neighborhood doe. Carpet-bomb the mice with antibiotics. Genetically engineer a new, Lyme-proof mouse and release tens of thousands of them onto Martha’s Vineyard, a plan whose Phase One is apparently “spend a decade convincing rich islanders to accept a lab mouse.” Or my personal favorite: outfit deer with a sort of automated car wash for their heads that paints them with pesticide every time they want a snack, until the regulators decide the corn feeder is 745 feet too close to somebody’s property line and shut the whole operation down.

We are a species capable of sequencing a tick’s saliva proteins and building an mRNA vaccine against it, and also a species that cannot agree, county by county, on whether Bambi has to get the shot. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2.

I don’t say any of this to be glib about the people getting sick — the pilot who never woke up from a hamburger, the kids getting “Montauk knee,” the researcher who got handed the wrong antibiotic because the clinic’s protocol hadn’t caught up to the tick that bit him. That part isn’t funny, and I’d ask you not to laugh at it, only at the rest of us, standing around it in our permethrin-soaked socks, arguing about deer sterilization budgets. At the same time, the actual thermostat of the actual planet keeps climbing.

What I said in 1989 wasn’t a prophecy. It didn’t require one. It was arithmetic: warmer plus wetter plus more sprawl equals more ticks in more places biting more people. It was available to anyone willing to sit with the data and the discomfort. The tick, God love her disgusting little barbed mouthpart, has never lied to us. She has just been doing exactly what a warming, fragmenting, deer-dense landscape invites her to do, patiently, sensing us walking a few meters away and homing in.

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Let’s end these wars. We support peace in Iran, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to end the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. With your assistance, it will continue. We have a pipeline to aid in the West Bank that may only last a short time, so we appreciate immediate donations—right now.

We support Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road, and we work to heal collective trauma worldwide through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVI.cool). I appreciate your support. This week I am teaching a workshop in Kyiv, with my introductory video open for your comments:

It compares natural-building systems by performance, cost, degree of difficulty, structure, insulation, water, safety, labor, durability, climate management, and carbon storage. Our purpose is to provide DIY housing for displaced populations. Global Village’s long-term objective is to empower the Permaculture Association of Ukraine with tools to build a more beautiful, healthy, and prosperous future.

I gave a similar course in far-western China near the border with Tibet, ten years ago.

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#RestorationGeneration.

Even when humans are locked in a cage, the Earth remains beautiful. So the lesson is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

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We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

We now have our own merchandise store on Redbubble. Swing on in for the latest wearables and chachkas….

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion.