Inaspect the quest to engineer climate-saving “super trees”

Fifty-three million years in the past, the Earth was a lot hotter than it’s in the present day. Even the Arctic Ocean was a balmy 50 °F—an almost-tropical atmosphere that appeared one thing like Florida, full with swaying palm bushes and roving crocodiles. 

Then the world appeared to pivot. The quantity of carbon in the ambiance plummeted, and issues started to cool towards in the present day’s “icehouse” circumstances, which means that glaciers can persist properly past the poles. 

What brought about the change was, for many years, unclear. Eventually, scientists drilling into Arctic mud found a possible clue: a layer of fossilized freshwater ferns up to 20 meters thick. The website instructed that the Arctic Ocean could have been lined for a time in huge mats of small-leaved aquatic Azollaferns. Azollas are amongst the fastest-growing vegetation on the planet, and the scientists theorized that if such ferns coated the ocean, they may have consumed enormous portions of carbon, serving to scrub the ambiance of greenhouse gasses and thereby cooling the planet.

Patrick Mellor, paleobiologist and chief expertise officer of the biotech startup Living Carbon, sees a lesson in the story about these diminutive ferns: photosynthesis can save the world. Certain fluke circumstances appear to have helped the Azollasalongside, although. The association of continental plates at the time meant the Arctic Ocean was principally enclosed, like a large lake, which allowed a skinny layer of contemporary river water to acquire atop it, creating the sort of circumstances the ferns wanted. And crucially, when every era of ferns died, they settled into saltier water that helped inhibit decay, preserving microbes from releasing the ferns’ saved carbon again into the ambiance.

Mellor says we are able to’t wait hundreds of thousands of years for the proper circumstances to return. If we would like vegetation to save the local weather once more, we have now to prod them alongside. “How do we engineer an anthropogenic Azolla event?” he says. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

At Living Carbon, Mellor is attempting to design bushes that develop quicker and seize extra carbon than their pure friends, in addition to bushes that resist rot, preserving that carbon out of the ambiance. In February, lower than 4 years after he co-founded it, the firm made headlines by planting its first “photosynthesis-enhanced” poplar bushes in a strip of bottomland forests in Georgia. 

This is a breakthrough, clearly: it’s the first forest in the United States that comprises genetically engineered bushes. But there’s nonetheless a lot we don’t know. How will these bushes have an effect on the remainder of the forest? How far will their genes unfold? And how good are they, actually, at pulling extra carbon from the ambiance?

Living Carbon has already bought carbon credit for its new forest to particular person shoppers inquisitive about paying to offset a few of their very own greenhouse fuel emissions. They’re working with bigger corporations, to which they plan to ship credit in the coming years. But teachers who research forest well being and tree photosynthesis query whether or not the bushes can be ready to soak up as a lot carbon as marketed. 

Even Steve Strauss, a outstanding tree geneticist at Oregon State University who briefly served on Living Carbon’s scientific advisory board and is conducting subject trials for the firm, advised me in the days earlier than the first planting that the bushes won’t develop in addition to pure poplars. “I’m kind of a little conflicted,” he stated, “that they’re going ahead with this—all the public relations and the financing—on something that we don’t know if it works.”

Roots of an concept

In photosynthesis, vegetation pull carbon dioxide out of the ambiance and use the vitality from daylight to flip it into sugars. They burn some sugars for vitality and use some to construct extra plant matter—a retailer of carbon.

A analysis group primarily based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign supercharged this course of, publishing their ends in early 2019. They solved an issue offered by RuBisCO, an enzyme many vegetation use to seize atmospheric carbon. Sometimes the enzyme unintentionally bonds with oxygen, a mistake that yields one thing akin to a toxin. As the plant processes this materials, it should burn a few of its sugars, thereby releasing carbon again to the sky. 1 / 4 or extra of the carbon absorbed by vegetation could be wasted via this course of, referred to as photorespiration.

The researchers inserted genes into tobacco vegetation that helped them flip the toxin-like materials into extra sugar. These genetically tweaked vegetation grew 25% bigger than controls.

The breakthrough provided excellent news for the world’s pure landscapes: if this genetic pathway yields extra productive crops, we’ll want much less farmland, sparing forests and grasslands that in any other case would have to be cleared. As for the vegetation’ potential to take away atmospheric carbon over the long run, the new trick doesn’t assist a lot. Each 12 months, a lot of the carbon in a crop plant’s biomass will get returned to the ambiance after it’s consumed, whether or not by microbes or fungi or human beings. 

Still, the consequence caught the consideration of Maddie Hall, a veteran of a number of Silicon Valley startups who was inquisitive about launching her personal carbon-capture enterprise. Hall reached out to Donald Ort, the biologist who’d led the challenge, and realized that the similar tweaks would possibly work in bushes—which keep in the floor lengthy sufficient to function a possible local weather answer.

Late in 2019, Hall settled on the identify for her startup: Living Carbon. Not lengthy afterward, she met Mellor at a local weather convention. Mellor was then serving as a fellow with the Foresight Institute, a suppose tank centered on formidable future applied sciences, and had grow to be inquisitive about vegetation like Pycnandra acuminata. This tree, native to the South Pacific islands of New Caledonia, pulls enormous portions of nickel out of the soil. That’s doubtless a protection towards bugs, however as nickel has pure antifungal properties, the ensuing wooden is much less susceptible to decay. Mellor figured if he may switch the right gene into extra species, he may engineer his Azolla occasion.

When Mellor and Hall met, they realized their tasks had been complementary: put the genes collectively and also you’d get a really tremendous tree, faster-growing and able to extra everlasting carbon storage. Hall tapped numerous contacts in Silicon Valley to acquire $15 million in seed cash, and an organization was born.

In some methods, Living Carbon’s objective was easy, a minimum of when it got here to photosynthesis: take recognized genetic pathways and place them in new species, a course of that’s been performed with vegetation for practically 40 years. “There’s a lot of mystification of this stuff, but really it’s just a set of laboratory techniques,” Mellor says. 

Since neither Mellor nor Hall had substantial expertise with genetic transformation, they enlisted exterior scientists to do a few of the early work. The firm centered on replicating Ort’s enhanced-photosynthesis pathway in bushes, focusing on two species: poplars, that are standard with researchers due to their well-studied genome, and loblolly pines, a standard timber species. By 2020, the tweaked bushes had been planted in a develop room, a transformed recording studio in San Francisco. The enhanced poplars shortly confirmed outcomes much more promising than Ort’s tobacco vegetation. In early 2022, Living Carbon’s group posted a paper on the preprint server bioRxiv claiming that the best-performing tree confirmed 53% extra above-ground biomass than controls after 5 months. (A peer-reviewed model of the paper appeared in the journal Forestsin April.) 

Through the loophole

Plant genetics analysis is usually a lengthy scientific slog. What works in a greenhouse, the place circumstances could be fastidiously managed, could not work as properly in outside settings, the place the quantities of sunshine and vitamins a plant receives fluctuate. The customary subsequent step after a profitable greenhouse result’s a subject trial, which permits scientists to observe how genetically engineered (GE) vegetation would possibly fare exterior with out truly setting them totally unfastened.

US Department of Agriculture (USDA) laws for GE subject trials goal to decrease “gene drift,” through which the novel genes would possibly unfold into the wild. Permits require that biotech bushes be planted removed from species with which they may doubtlessly reproduce, and in some instances the guidelines dictate that any flowers be eliminated. Researchers should test the subject website after the research to guarantee no hint of the GE vegetation stay.

Before planting bushes in Georgia, Living Carbon launched its personal subject trials. The firm employed Oregon State’s Strauss, who had given Living Carbon the poplar clone it had utilized in its gene switch experiments. In the summer season of 2021, Strauss planted the redesigned bushes in a piece of the college’s property in Oregon.

Strauss has been conducting such subject trials for many years, usually for industrial corporations attempting to create higher timber applied sciences. It’s a course of that requires persistence, he says: most corporations need to wait till a “half rotation,” or halfway to harvest age, earlier than figuring out whether or not a subject trial’s outcomes are promising sufficient to transfer ahead with a industrial planting. Living Carbon’s bushes could by no means be harvested, which makes setting a cutoff date tough. But once we spoke in February, lower than two years into the subject trial and simply earlier than Living Carbon’s preliminary planting, Strauss stated it was too early to decide whether or not the firm’s bushes would carry out as they’d in the greenhouse. “There could be a negative,” he stated. “We don’t know.” 

ANA MIMINOSHVILI

Strauss has been essential of the US regulatory necessities for subject trials, which he sees as expensive, a barrier that scares off many teachers. The framework behind its guidelines emerged in the Nineteen Eighties when, somewhat than wait on the gradual grind of the legislative course of, the Reagan administration tailored current legal guidelines to match new genetic applied sciences. For the USDA, the chosen software was its broad authority over “plant pests,” a time period meant to describe something that may injure a plant—whether or not an excessively hungry animal, a parasitic bacterium, or a weed that may outcompete a crop.

At the time, gene switch in vegetation was nearly fully achieved with the assist of Agrobacteriumtumefaciens. This microbe assaults vegetation by inserting its personal genes, very similar to a virus. But scientists discovered they may persuade the bacterium to ship no matter snippets of code they desired. Since Agrobacterium itself is taken into account a plant pest, the USDA determined it had the authority to regulate the interstate motion and environmental launch of any plant that had had its genes remodeled by the microbe. This meant practically complete regulation of GE vegetation. 

In 1987, only one 12 months after the USDA established its coverage, a group of Cornell researchers introduced the profitable use of what’s grow to be referred to as a “gene gun”—or, much less colorfully, “biolistics”—through which bits of DNA are actually blasted right into a plant cell, carried by high-velocity particles. No plant pest was concerned. This created a loophole in the system, a means to produce GE vegetation that the present legal guidelines didn’t cowl.

Since then, greater than 100 GE vegetation, principally modified crop vegetation, have thus escaped the USDA’s regulatory scrutiny.

Agrobacterium stays a standard technique of gene switch, and it’s how Living Carbon produced the bushes mentioned in its paper. But Mellor knew going to market with bushes thought of potential plant pests “would be a long and depressing path,” he says, one with exams and research and pauses to acquire public remark. “It would take years, and we just wouldn’t survive.”

Once Living Carbon noticed that its bushes had promise, it dove via the loophole, creating new variations of its enhanced bushes by way of biolistics. In formal letters to the USDA the firm defined what it was doing; the company replied that, as a result of the ensuing bushes had not been uncovered to and didn’t include genes from a plant pest, they weren’t topic to laws.

Other federal companies even have authority over biotechnology. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates biotech vegetation that produce their very own pesticides, and the Food and Drug Administration examines something people would possibly devour. Living Carbon’s bushes don’t match into both of those classes, in order that they might be planted with none additional formal research.

A 12 months after Living Carbon introduced its greenhouse outcomes—earlier than the information from the subject trial had any which means, in accordance to Strauss—the firm despatched a group to Georgia to plant the first batch of seedlings exterior strictly managed fields. Mellor indicated that this may double as yet one more research website, the place the bushes could be measured to estimate the charge of biomass accumulation. The firm may make an effort to begin absorbing carbon even because it was verifying the efficacy of its bushes.

Out in the wild

Experiments with genetically modified bushes have traditionally evoked a powerful response from anti-GE activists. In 2001, round 800 specimens rising in Strauss’s take a look at plots at Oregon State University had been chopped down or in any other case mutilated. 

In 2015, in response to the information that the biotech agency ArborGen had created a loblolly pine with “increased wood density,” protesters descended on the firm’s South Carolina headquarters. (The firm had taken benefit of the similar loophole as Living Carbon; ArborGen has stated the pine was by no means commercially planted.) But after the New York Times wrote about Living Carbon’s first planting in February, there have been no notable protests.

One cause might be that the threat is much from clear-cut. Several forest ecologists I spoke to indicated that bushes that develop considerably quicker than different species may outcompete rivals, doubtlessly making Living Carbon’s “super tree” a weed. None of those scientists, although, appeared significantly frightened about that occuring.

He identified that the timber business has been working with scientists for many years, hoping to engineer fast-growing bushes. “This is a billion-dollar industry, and if they could make trees grow to harvest in five years, they would,” he stated. But there have a tendency to be tradeoffs. A faster-growing tree, for instance, is likely to be extra weak to pests. 

The different cause for the quiet reception of those bushes could also be local weather change: in a ravaged world, individuals could also be extra prepared to tolerate threat. Keolu Fox, a geneticist at the University of California San Diego, is a co-director of science at Lab to Land, a nonprofit that’s finding out the potential for biotechnology to speed up conservation objectives on threatened lands, significantly in California. “We’re now talking about editing natural lands—that’s desperation,” Fox says. He thinks this desperation is suitable, given the state of the local weather disaster, although he’s not fully satisfied by Living Carbon’s method.

Mellor means that gene drift shouldn’t be an issue: Living Carbon is planting solely feminine bushes, so the poplars don’t produce any pollen. That won’t forestall wild-growing male bushes from fertilizing the transgenic poplars, although the quantity of ensuing gene drift will doubtless be small and simply contained, Living Carbon says, particularly given the firm’s potential to keep away from planting its bushes close to species that might fertilize them. But Mellor says he prefers to deal with different points. Yes, some corporations, like Monsanto, have used transgenic crops in exploitative methods, however that doesn’t imply transgenic applied sciences are inherently unhealthy, he says. “Purity” is a foolish customary, he says, and by attempting to hold vegetation pure we’re lacking the likelihood for wanted improvements.

Living Carbon’s poplars appear to develop quicker and survive droughts higher than their pure counterparts, Mellor says. The remainder of their genes match. “So, if, say, that competitively replaces the non-photosynthesis-enhanced version, is that a problem?” he asks. “And what kind of a problem is that? That’s the question now.” 

Plant or pest?

In 2019, earlier than Living Carbon was shaped, the USDA introduced its intention to replace its regulatory method to transgenic vegetation. The new guidelines went into impact in August 2020, simply after Living Carbon submitted letters in search of exemption for its bushes; the letters had been reviewed and the bushes had been grandfathered in beneath the outdated guidelines.

Any additional biotechnology the firm develops can be analyzed utilizing the new method, which focuses on what traits are inserted into vegetation somewhat than how they get there. There are nonetheless methods to keep away from scrutiny: merchandise whose genetic modification might be achieved via typical breeding, for instance, should not topic to regulation—a loophole watchdog teams discover problematic. But in accordance to USDA spokespeople, Living Carbon’s core expertise—fast-growing bushes, produced via genetic insertion—doesn’t seem to qualify for such exemptions. If Living Carbon desires to make even a slight genetic tweak to its bushes, the new product would require additional examination.

The USDA’s first step is to decide whether or not there may be “a plausible pathway to increased plant pest risk.” If the reply is sure, the firm will want permits to transfer or plant such bushes till the USDA can full a full regulatory assessment. 

Because the company has not but reviewed a tree with enhanced photosynthesis, officers declined to touch upon whether or not the trait would possibly represent a pest threat. Even if it doesn’t, the course of would possibly miss different dangers: a 2019 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identified that pest threat is a slender metric that doesn’t seize all of the potential threats to forest well being. 

Nor does the USDA course of supply a seal of approval suggesting the bushes will truly work.

“One of the things that concerns me is [Living Carbon is] just focusing on carbon acquisition,” says Marjorie Lundgren, a researcher at Lancaster University in the UK who has studied tree species with pure diversifications main to elevated photosynthetic effectivity. She notes that bushes want extra than simply carbon and daylight to develop; they want water and nitrogen, too. “The reason they have such a high growth rate is because in the lab, you can just super-baby them—you can give them lots of water and fertilizer and everything they need,” she says. “Unless you put resources in, which is time and money, and not great for the environment, either, then you’re not going to have those same outcomes.” 

Living Carbon’s paper acknowledges as a lot, citing nitrogen as a possible problem and noting that how the bushes transfer carbon could grow to be a limiting issue. The additional sugars produced via what the firm calls “enhanced photosynthesis” have to be transported to the proper locations, one thing bushes haven’t usually advanced to do. 

The remaining, peer-reviewed model of the paper was amended to observe the want to examine the grow-room outcomes with subject trials. And, because it occurred, in April—the month the paper was printed—Strauss despatched Living Carbon an annual report with thrilling information. He had famous statistically important variations in top and drought tolerance between Living Carbon’s bushes and the controls. He additionally discovered “nearly” important variations in quantity and diameter for some strains of engineered bushes. 

Capturing the carbon

Living Carbon appears conscious of the common public mistrust of genetic applied sciences. Hall, the CEO, has stated the firm doesn’t need to be “the Monsanto of trees” and is registered as a public profit company. That permits it to decline ethically doubtful tasks with out worrying about being sued by shareholders for passing up income.

The firm advertises its deal with “restoring land that has been degraded or is underperforming.” On its web site, the pitch to potential carbon-credit patrons emphasizes that the tree-planting tasks serve to restore ecosystems. 

One hope is that Mellor’s metal-accumulating bushes can be ready to restore soils at deserted mining websites. Brenda Jo McManama, a marketing campaign organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, lives amid such landscapes in West Virginia. She has been preventing GE bushes for nearly a decade and stays opposed to the expertise, however she understands the enchantment of such remediating bushes. One key drawback: they continue to be experimental. 

McManama notes, too, that landowners are allowed to harvest the wooden from Living Carbon’s bushes. This is just not an issue for the local weather—lumber nonetheless shops carbon—however it undercuts the concept that that is all about ecosystems. “Under their breath, it’s like, ‘Yeah, this will be a tree plantation,’” she says.

The preliminary planting website in Georgia, for instance, belongs to Vince Stanley, whose household owns tens of hundreds of acres of timber in the space. Stanley advised the New York Times that the enchantment of the bushes was that he would have the ability to harvest them earlier than conventional bushes.

Living Carbon contests the concept that it’s creating “plantations,” which by definition would imply monocultures. But it has planted 12 completely different species on Stanley’s land. The firm indicated that it’s “interested” in partnering with timber corporations; as Hall has famous, the prime 10 in the US every personal a minimum of 1 million acres. But the Stanley website in Georgia is presently the solely challenge that’s technically categorized as “improved forestry management.” (And even there, the firm notes, the current forest was regenerating very slowly due to moist circumstances.)

Living Carbon funds its plantings—and makes its income—by promoting credit for the additional carbon the bushes soak up. Currently, the firm is providing “pre-purchases,” through which corporations make a dedication to purchase a future credit score, paying a small portion of the price up entrance to assist Living Carbon survive lengthy sufficient to ship outcomes.

The firm has discovered that these patrons are extra inquisitive about tasks with ecosystem advantages, which is why the first challenge, in Georgia, has grow to be an outlier. There has been a subsequent planting in Ohio; this and all presently deliberate plantings should not close to sawmills or in lively timber harvesting areas. Thus, the firm doesn’t count on these bushes to be harvested.

Wherever they plant bushes—whether or not atop an outdated minefield or in a timber-producing forest—Living Carbon pays the landowner an annual per-acre price and canopy the value of plant website preparation and planting. At the finish of the contract, after 30 or 40 years, the landowner can do no matter they need with the bushes. If the bushes develop in addition to is hoped, Living Carbon assumes that even on timber land, their measurement would imply they’d be changed into “long-duration wood products,” like lumber for development, somewhat than shredded to make pulp or paper.

Until just lately, Living Carbon was additionally promoting small-scale credit to particular person shoppers. When we spoke in February, Mellor pointed me towards Patch, a software program firm with a carbon-credit gross sales platform. The Georgia challenge was marketed there as “biotech-enhanced reforestation.” The credit had been provided as a month-to-month subscription, at a value of $40 per metric ton of carbon eliminated. 

When I pressed Mellor for particulars about how the firm calculated this value, given the lack of any stable information on the bushes’ efficiency, he advised me one thing the firm had not  acknowledged in any public-facing documentation: 95% of the saplings at the Georgia website had been not photosynthesis-enhanced. The GE poplar bushes had been planted in randomized experimental plots, with controls for comparability, and contribute solely a small quantity to the website’s projected carbon financial savings. Despite the promoting, then, clients had been actually paying for a conventional reforestation challenge with a small experiment tucked inside. 

A spokesperson for Living Carbon clarified that this planting make-up was dictated by the requirements of the American Carbon Registry, the group that independently licensed the ensuing credit, and that subsequent plantings have included a better proportion of enhanced bushes. By partnering with a brand new credit score registry, Living Carbon hopes its 2024 plantings can be nearer to 50% photosynthesis-enhanced.

That carbon credit could be provided for the Georgia website in any respect serves as a reminder: old school bushes, with none new genes, already function a viable carbon drawdown expertise. “There’s 80,000 species of trees in the world. Maybe you don’t have to throw nickel in them and CRISPR them,” stated McMahon, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “Maybe just find the ones that actually grow fast [and] store carbon a long time.” Or, he added, move regulation to defend current forests, which he stated may assist the local weather greater than even a large adoption of high-tech bushes. 

Grayson Badgley, an ecologist at the nonprofit CarbonPlan, notes that the value of the credit on Patch was on the excessive aspect for a reforestation challenge. CarbonPlan examines the efficacy of assorted carbon removing methods, a crucial intervention on condition that carbon markets are ripe for abuse. Several current investigations have proven that offset tasks can dramatically inflate their advantages. One main regulatory group, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, just lately introduced a brand new algorithm, and Verra, a US nonprofit that certifies offset tasks, additionally plans to part out its outdated method to forestry tasks.

Given the more and more shaky status of carbon markets, Badgley finds Living Carbon’s lack of transparency troubling. “People should know exactly what they’re buying when they plug in their credit card number,” he says. 

Living Carbon says it started phasing out direct-to-consumer gross sales in late 2022, and that the remaining transaction was made late February, not lengthy after the Georgia planting. (In complete, subscribers funded 600 bushes—a small portion of the 8,900 transgenic bushes Living Carbon had planted as of late May.) I bought a credit score for analysis functions in early February; as of March 1, once I canceled the subscription, I had obtained no particulars clarifying the make-up of the Georgia planting, nor any updates noting that the program was ending. I used to be additionally struck by the undeniable fact that in February, earlier than Strauss delivered his information, Living Carbon was already touting subject trial outcomes on its web site, ones that had been much more spectacular than its grow-room outcomes. After I inquired about the supply of those figures, the firm eliminated them from the web site.

The firm says it’s totally clear with the large-scale patrons who make up the core of its enterprise technique. What appeared to me like problematic elaborations and elisions had been, in accordance to spokespeople, the rising pains of a younger startup with an evolving method that’s nonetheless studying how to talk about its work. 

They additionally identified that a lot of the issues with forestry carbon credit come from the tasks meant to defend forests towards logging. Such credit are granted primarily based on a counterfactual: what number of bushes could be destroyed in the absence of safety? That’s inconceivable to know with any precision. How a lot additional carbon Living Carbon’s bushes soak up can be measured far more clearly. And if the bushes don’t work, Living Carbon received’t have the ability to ship its promised credit or receives a commission for them. “The risk that in the end [the trees] won’t deliver the amount of carbon that’s expected is on us—it’s not on the climate,” an organization spokesperson stated.

Pines and pollen

Living Carbon has larger plans in the works (which is able to doubtless want to bear USDA scrutiny). Mellor hopes the photosynthesis-enhanced loblolly pines can be prepared for deployment inside two years, which might open alternatives for extra collaboration with timber corporations. Experiments with metal-accumulating bushes are underway, with funding from the US Department of Energy. Last 12 months, the firm launched a longer-term challenge that goals to engineer algae to produce sporopollenin, a biopolymer that coats spores and pollen and may final 100 instances longer than different organic supplies—and perhaps longer than that, the firm says. This may create a safe, long-term means to retailer carbon.

A Living Carbon spokesperson instructed that “every scientist is in a way a bioethicist,” and that the firm operates with cautious morals. As a startup, Living Carbon can’t afford to dither—it wants to make a revenue—and Hall says the planet can’t afford to dither, both. To remedy local weather change, we have now to begin attempting potential expertise now. She sees the present plantings as additional research that may assist the firm and the world perceive these bushes. 

Even with the new information, Steve Strauss remained circumspect about the bushes’ long-term prospects. Living Carbon has solely offered sufficient funding for the Oregon subject exams to lengthen simply past the present rising season; Strauss indicated that had been this his firm, he’d “want more time.”

Still, Strauss was the one tutorial scientist I spoke to who appeared enthused about Living Carbon’s plantings. He stated they’d made a breakthrough, although one that’s much less scientific than social—a primary step past the confines of test-plot fields. As a longtime proponent of genetic engineering, he thinks analysis into biotechnical options to local weather change has been stalled for too lengthy. The local weather disaster is rising worse. Now somebody is pushing ahead. “Maybe this isn’t the ideal thing,” he advised me once we first spoke in February. “And maybe they’re pushing this one product too hard, too fast. But I’m sort of glad it’s happening.”

Boyce Upholt is a author primarily based in New Orleans.