It’s fueling the affordable housing crisis, worsening flooding, and driving us nuts.
Most Americans, especially those living outside of major cities, need to drive to get around, and so the need to put one’s car somewhere when we’re not using it — ideally somewhere safe, free, and convenient — is a quiet force that often dominates how we get around. But how parking works (or doesn’t work) is something we rarely stop to consider.
Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, has done a lot of thinking about the issue. In his new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, Grabar demonstrates in a fascinating way how parking shapes our lives in the United States, determining the kinds of homes we live in, the communities we build, and how we interact with our built environments. He shows how zoning requirements requiring off-street parking for new construction strangle new development and help fuel the affordable housing crisis. Finally, he offers a series of solutions to make our cities more affordable and livable — and to keep parking from driving us all mad.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why does parking make us so crazy?
That is the million-dollar question. I think there are a few reasons that parking makes people really upset, but perhaps the most obvious is that in almost every place in this country, it is obligatory to have a car, and there is almost nothing that you can do without a car. So to the extent that you are able to hold down a job or go to a restaurant or pick your kids up from school, you have to drive, and parking becomes the link between driving and whatever else you want to do with your life. And so naturally, there’s a great deal of importance placed on having a good parking space.
That’s the first thing. And then the second one is that we have just catastrophically mismanaged the way we provide parking in this country, in a way that actually doesn’t make things better for people who are driving and parking. Parking is not shared, and it’s not properly priced. We have acquiesced to the idea that parking on city streets has to be a total free-for-all.
As you point out in the book, you’re not just talking about this symbolically. People have actually died over arguments about parking spots.
Oh yeah, all the time. When I started working on this book, I set up a Google alert for “parking space murder.” So that’s been how I’ve been keeping track of this. I’m really excited to turn that Google alert off now that the reporting is done. The first person to be killed in New York City this year was actually killed over a parking space. I estimate that it happens several dozen times a year in US cities.
How did you get interested in parking?
In my work as a reporter, I was writing about cities, and it seemed like every topic that I would come across had this hidden component to it that was determinative in the result of whatever was being discussed, and that issue was parking. When I went to Houston to report on Hurricane Harvey, I talked to a guy whose house had flooded for the first time, and he was saying that his house never used to flood and he was blaming it on an enormous parking lot that had been constructed and the displacement of water falling on that parking lot, and how that was contributing to the stormwater issue in his neighborhood. And this is a widespread issue in Houston — the city’s brand of sprawling, auto-centric development does involve paving over a ton of land. That’s just an example.
Parking is really expensive, and the obligation to provide parking can break projects that would otherwise succeed. Mass transit, the ability to create bus rapid transit lanes, or even to create bike lanes is dependent on being willing to reallocate the street parking supply.
When you think about its spatial impact, well, cars spend 95 percent of their time parked. Parking literally takes up more room than the roads, and it costs more than the automobiles. But many of us don’t think much about parking at all, or if we do, it’s an afterthought.
Is the problem that we have too little parking or too much?
I will give you an annoying answer: It depends. On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need. There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time, so parking may be a good deal emptier than that.
Of course, there are places where people get frustrated because there isn’t enough parking. So if what you’re interested in is having a free place to park, you could look at this situation and say, well, there isn’t enough parking. In fact, that’s sort of what we did as a country: We decided, at some point in the middle of the 20th century, that there wasn’t enough parking, that this was at the root of our traffic problem, and we had to create more parking. But you can only do so at great expense, and at a tremendous cost to the urban fabric. There may be places where there isn’t enough parking, but the solution is rarely to create more parking, but rather to more intelligently manage the parking that we have and try and find ways to control demand for parking by, for example, sharing it, pricing it, and telling people where it is.
What does that look like?
When somebody decides they want to open a new restaurant or open a new building, instead of saying it needs X number of spaces, we could say, let’s look at the parking stock and find accommodations that are already there. Office parking could be used at night for residential parking. That dentist’s office parking lot could become the parking lot for a restaurant.
The other part is pricing. If you institute a parking fee, you’ll find out exactly how many people are willing to pay to park there. If you keep raising prices until you always have spots available, you’ll find out exactly how high it needs to be to create a few open spots on every block. Because it might seem like it only takes you a couple of minutes to find a spot for free, but the net effect is thousands of miles of driving every day across the United States. There’s an unbelievable amount of driving being done just looking for parking spaces. You can look up a restaurant and look at exactly how to get there, but finding good parking is dependent on local knowledge. If you want to park downtown, you should be able to know it’s going to cost this much, and you can do it here — that should be made clear at every highway exit to downtown. But it’s not.
Is the implication that parking is going to have to get more annoying in places where everyone wants to park, like busy urban commercial areas?
I don’t think it should be more annoying. We’ve become so accustomed to the idea that you have to hunt for parking that it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around the idea that it will be easier. Yes, you’re going to have to pay for it, but no, you don’t have to stress anymore because you’ll know there’ll be a parking spot where you want it. That’s a new concept, but in the places where it’s been instituted, people seem to have found it agreeable. There is a way, even without eliminating any parking, that a little bit of management can make a smoother parking experience for everyone. Time is money, and circling around the block and not knowing when you can find a spot, or leaving 20 minutes early to find a spot to park, that’s a cost as well.
How does parking affect our housing supply?
There are two principal ways that parking affects the housing supply. The first is that many jurisdictions in this country have parking requirements for new housing. That places a geometric and financial constraint on the types of things that can be built. And then what gets built contains a lot of parking, and the cost of that parking is folded into the cost of the units, whether they’re being sold or rented. And this is a pretty significant cost. In California and Arizona, it adds tens of thousands of dollars onto the cost of every new low-income housing unit. It’s folded into the rent or the asking price, whether you drive a car or not.
Parking functions as a third rail in neighborhood politics. The public parking supply is such a fixation that people oppose new projects, especially projects that don’t have “enough” parking, on the grounds that they’ll threaten that public parking supply, whereas if I were to say, “I don’t want poor people living in the neighborhood,” that would be considered unacceptable. I cite this survey in the book of baby boomers, and more than half of baby boomers say that free parking is more important than affordable housing in their neighborhood.
How did we mess this up so bad?
I think that parking requirements were done with the best of intentions. At its roots, it was really thought that it would solve the traffic problems in congested neighborhoods that were caused, [mid-century urban planners] thought, by not having enough parking. This was the situation in American cities in the 1940s and ’50s: It was just unbelievable traffic jams, which city planners concluded were caused by the fact that there wasn’t enough parking. So lots and lots of parking was provided. The thing that they probably couldn’t have anticipated was just how thoroughly it would remake the urban environment, and how expensive it would be, and the extent to which it would begin to constrain the types of housing we could build.
What more recent research proves is that the more parking you provide, the more people will drive, and parking is perhaps the greatest determinant of whether people decide to make a trip in a car or by some other means. So providing more parking does not actually make it easier to park. If parking actually encourages people to drive, then more parking is actually going to create more traffic, not soak up the traffic of people looking for parking.
Some places have gotten rid of parking minimums, or requirements that new construction have a certain number of parking spots, in the last few years. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about what the results have been in those communities.
There’s been a ton of movement on this in the last five years. It’s kind of amazing, dozens of cities deciding that they no longer want to require people to build a certain amount of parking corresponding to land use. One of the best examples is in Seattle, where in 2012 they decided to stop requiring parking for new apartment buildings around transit. This was right at a period when residential construction in Seattle was booming. And they approved 60,000 units between 2012 and 2017. Most of them still have parking — I mean, developers know people who move into their buildings want space to park their cars — but they built 40 percent less parking than would have been required under the old regime. And that meant they built 18,000 fewer parking spaces, and the amount of money saved from that, which we can assume went into cheaper apartments and lower rent, was $540 million: half a billion dollars saved just by not building quite so many parking spaces.
What else can we do?
If you could imagine a paradigm in which parking was a little less important, and we needed a little less of it, you can do so much with the land that we have currently reserved for parking lots. The more spectacular opportunity is with curb parking in cities, where we’ve got some of the most valuable real estate on earth, and that is really crucial in shaping people’s perception and understanding and enjoyment of the places they live in. You saw this during Covid, with the [outdoor] restaurant pop-ups; to even have 12 people outside sitting and having coffee on the street is just tremendous. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, right?
You could imagine a world in which streets were pedestrianized and where we planted trees and gardens and in what is currently space reserved for parking, and closed streets, outside schools, so kids can have places to play. I think all those things are within reach. Those aren’t even particularly expensive or ambitious ideas. They just depend on 25 car owners saying, all right, we’ll give up our rights to this little strip of land. The changes to parking on surrounding streets would probably be pretty marginal, if you consider 25 cars in neighborhood parking stock that’s probably in the thousands.
Why an ex-Biden official is “deeply disappointed” in his Buy American policies.
In everything from climate change to the courts to foreign policy, the Trump and Biden presidencies could not be less alike. But when it comes to foreign trade and protectionism, there’s more continuity than difference.
Former President Donald Trump was the most pro-tariff president in decades, particularly targeting China. Instead of pushing back, President Joe Biden has preserved most of the Trump tariff regime. The Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill, extensively favors US industry in a way that has provoked mass outrage from foreign governments, including close allies; an Indian government official called it “the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world,” and a South Korean official called it a “betrayal.”
Biden seems to be joining Trump in turning America inward, at least economically, and undermining the open trade regime that their predecessors from both parties worked for decades to build.
In making sense of this strange continuity, the first person I called was Kimberly Clausing. A professor at UCLA Law School, Clausing was formerly deputy assistant secretary of the treasury for tax analysis in the Biden administration, making her the lead economist for tax issues in the Treasury department. Before her time in the White House, she also wrote an excellent book, Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital, in 2019, which pushed back both on Trump’s isolationist tendencies and on hostility to trade, immigration, and capital flows from progressives.
Clausing is immensely proud of many Biden administration accomplishments, and obviously believes him infinitely better than his predecessor overall. She worked on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s effort to win an international agreement to tax multinational corporations at a minimum rate of 15 percent, which 19 countries plus the EU have taken steps toward adopting, even if the US hasn’t. “This reduces the pressures of tax competition by creating a higher floor on tax rates worldwide, whereas the floor used to be literally zero,” Clausing says. “It makes it a lot easier for a country like France or Japan or the United States to go above a 15 percent rate on corporations if they want to.”
She’s enthusiastic about the Inflation Reduction Act’s potential to combat global warming, and about many aspects of the CHIPS and Science Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“infrastructure is some of the best money a government can spend,” she says).
But she’s concerned about some of the administration’s posture toward international trade, and its insistence on moving production to the US, even at the expense of both friendly trading partners like the EU and Canada and global efforts to rapidly reduce carbon emissions. “It’s kind of a fool’s errand to think that you’re going to get a lot of manufacturing jobs out of all this CHIPS money and all this steel protection,” she says.
There’s the rub — the Biden approach to industrial policy might not just undermine other commitments, but fail on its own terms to bring huge numbers of jobs building things like solar panels and semiconductors back to the US.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Dylan Matthews
Among the most obvious protectionist measures undertaken by Biden are the “made in America” rules that have dominated implementation of the infrastructure bill and key climate provisions, like tax credits for electric cars. That means that most of the electric cars on the market aren’t eligible for credits.
This strikes me as not just a problem for meeting our climate goals but a pretty brazen return to protectionism of the kind you condemn at length in your book.
Kimberly Clausing
I am deeply disappointed by the inclusion of these national content provisions in the green subsidies for at least two reasons. One reason is that it makes the entire transition project less efficient. While we might hope that all the things that we want can be achieved with one policy tool, often when you load up policy tools with multiple objectives, you make it more difficult to achieve the goals you most wanted.
For example, if we say you can only have this tax credit if it’s also made in America, and it has certain labor requirements, etc., that makes it harder to achieve the underlying environmental goal.
The second reason it’s problematic is that we’ve had a long tradition going back decades of discouraging national content provisions like these. And the WTO [World Trade Organization] has clear rules on this that we argued for, because we knew that when other countries did this too, it would affect the ability of our firms to sell in their markets. We hadn’t enthusiastically stepped over that line until these credits.
Now the administration’s attitude appears to ask, “What line?” They don’t even use the word “WTO” or acknowledge that this is a problem. When you’ve got an institution like the WTO that’s built around solving a global collective action problem, and then you pretend that it doesn’t apply to you, it would be better if you could think a few steps ahead, and imagine, what happens when the global collective action unravels?
What if everybody else decides to do that too? What if Canada and Germany and Japan decide, “You know what, we’re going to have our own national content requirements?” Fortunately, I don’t think many of our trading partners are going to do it that way, because they realize it’s an inefficient way to meet climate goals.
Climate change is arguably the world’s most important externality. Ideally we’d want to deal with it in a cost-effective way. But that doesn’t seem to be in front of mind on some of these issues.
Dylan Matthews
A counterargument might be that a subsidy competition on particular things in the green transition could be positive. We all suffer from extreme global warming. Yes, this might set off a subsidy race with South Korea, EU, Japan, but that just accelerates the green transition. What’s wrong with that narrative?
Kimberly Clausing
Part of that narrative is correct. If we all throw money at our green industries — let’s ignore the national content part, let’s just focus on the fact that we’re subsidizing — if we all do that, then those industries get bigger. The bigger they get worldwide, the better, right? Because there are scale effects, there’s innovation, there’s learning. Take, say, green hydrogen or carbon capture. These are technologies that aren’t quite economically feasible now, but if you invest enough, they might be.
Where it gets a little trickier is that in the short run, there are some zero-sum elements here. If you want to expand the supply of critical minerals, you need more mines. Mines take years to develop. There’s going to be some short-run scarcity regarding key companies, key expertise, and key inputs. If the rich countries of the world are cornering those resources, that makes it harder for India or countries in Africa to do their transitions. If one country has the lock on the expertise or the inputs, it may actually set back others in the short run, even though those clean energy industries are expanding over time in a useful way.
It’s easy for the US government to say, in a somewhat self-serving way, “everybody should just subsidize.” But not everybody can afford to, poor countries especially. If you add up US and EU emissions combined, [it’s] less than a quarter of the entire world’s emissions. If you’re making it harder on the Global South to transition away from fossil fuels, that’s not necessarily helping with the vast majority of world emissions.
A subsidy approach also makes it a little harder for a country like, say, Canada, to price carbon. Because they rely on a carbon price and the US subsidizes, the result may give US firms a large advantage relative to the Canadian counterparts. So if you’re Canada, why should you price carbon anymore? I worry that US policy choices might unravel these effective policies abroad.
Dylan Matthews
I wonder if the Buy America stuff will even work on its own terms. One thing your book is clear about is that the decline in manufacturing jobs in the US owes a lot more to automation than it does to trade competition. Is this going to work as a means of stimulating manufacturing jobs here, even if that was the right goal for the administration to pursue? Maybe we do bring manufacturing back, but we don’t bring jobs because it’s a highly automated industry now.
Kimberly Clausing
That’s more likely than not, right? What can we control? We can’t control technological innovation and we can’t control the myriad actions of thousands of companies who are working on their bottom line. We’re not a command and control economy, and thank goodness for that.
But we can control elements of the policy environment. Do we have a good education system? Do we have an open immigration policy? Are we collecting enough tax from people in the top part of the income distribution? Are we collecting enough tax from people in the middle of the income distribution? Do we have a strong enough social safety net? All of those things we can control, and those would probably do more to bring society together than focusing on industrial policy to target elusive manufacturing jobs.
Focusing on this manufacturing and jobs question, it’s kind of a fool’s errand to think that you’re going to get a lot of manufacturing jobs out of all this CHIPS money and all this steel protection. Your fiscal costs per job could reach something like a million dollars, right? There are much better ways to improve people’s lives that are less expensive that we should really be focusing on instead.
Dylan Matthews
We’ve been talking a lot about friendly partners like the EU, Canada, South Korea. The trade war with China seems like it’s really ramped up kind of dramatically. I would have expected a lot more of a divergence from what Trump did, and it seems like there’s a lot of continuity between the Trump and Biden approaches to China instead.
Kimberly Clausing
The Trump administration cast a long shadow in a couple of ways. If you look at the government of China and their attitude towards the United States, it clearly got worse during those years and hasn’t recovered at all.
But also, if you look at some of the US government’s recent policy choices and statements, it could be interpreted as if their goal is to suppress economic development in China.
When Trump’s steel tariffs were challenged by the WTO for not fulfilling the national security criteria under which they were levied, USTR [the US Trade Representative’s office] said, effectively, we don’t care about your views on our national security interests. The administration was making an argument that steel writ large is a national security thing. Nobody thinks that’s actually true. But some of these policy actions could provide fodder for the hardline Chinese view that we’re trying to suppress their development, and the policy link between these tariffs and US policy goals has always been rather weak.
Other US policy statements, such as those from Secretary Yellen, for example, do a better job of separating national security goals from the broader economic case for engagement, trade, and policy coordination on matters like climate. At the same time, the Chinese state hasn’t helped matters because it’s often taken a much more hardline approach. They’ve threatened countries and firms with large repercussions if they do anything even slightly against the Chinese state’s view of things. Australia was targeted by such retaliatory trade actions in recent years. So I don’t think China is at all blameless.
So we’re in a bad equilibrium, and that does worry me a lot. But, the US government is leaving some important tools by the wayside. A great response to concerns about China would be to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership [an Obama-era free trade pact of non-China Pacific nations that Trump withdrew from, now called CPTPP]. That was a brilliant foreign policy move; it provided real benefits to partner countries and deepened economic relationships in a way that should both improve economic resilience and achieve foreign policy objectives.
It is such an own-goal to negotiate this great policy response, and then simply step aside and have other countries do it without us. (Indeed, that great Pacific power, the UK, just joined!) What if China joins eventually? Then we’ve created this great market access tool and a harmonized region that is serving someone else’s economic interests, not ours.
Scientists have never seen anything like it.
In the past two years, a viral disease has swept across much of the planet — not Covid but a type of avian flu. It’s devastated the poultry industry in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, sickening millions of farmed birds, which either die from infection or are killed by farmers seeking to stem the spread.
The poultry outbreak has become an animal welfare crisis. It’s also one reason eggs have become so expensive; there are simply fewer hens to lay them.
But the virus is causing another major crisis that’s drawn far less attention: the death of wild birds.
The ongoing outbreak of avian flu has killed hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of wild birds, including endangered species like the California condor. It’s one of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks in history. Having now spread across five continents and hundreds of wildlife species, scientists call the current outbreak a panzootic, meaning a pandemic among animals.
“What we’re seeing right now is uncharted territory,” said Andrew Ramey, a wildlife geneticist at the US Geological Survey, one of the federal agencies involved in testing wild birds for the virus.
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Vicki Jauron/Getty Images
The number of dead birds in itself is historic, but so is the virus’s biology. Typically, avian influenza viruses only cause severe disease and death in domestic birds like chickens and farmed ducks; they sweep through populations, killing upward of 90 percent of the flock.
This virus, however, is different. It’s hammering wild birds and other wildlife, including mammals.
“It’s causing a high amount of mortality in a huge breadth of wild birds, which is not something that has been seen before,” said Wendy Puryear, a molecular virologist at Tufts University who studies viral evolution.
This is especially concerning because birds are already at risk across the world. North America alone has lost an astonishing 3 billion breeding birds in the last half-century, due to threats like climate change, predation by feral and pet cats, and the loss of grasslands and other habitats. This panzootic is only making an ongoing extinction crisis worse.
The virus could also pose a threat to us. While it doesn’t readily infect and spread among people today, the avian virus could evolve traits that make it more dangerous to humans as it circulates among wild animals. That’s another reason scientists are taking the outbreak among wild birds so seriously.
An unusual avian flu
Viruses that cause avian flu are actually pretty common. They’ve been circulating for eons among wild birds — and especially waterfowl, such as ducks and geese — without causing them much harm. These mild forms of infection are called low-pathogenic avian influenza, or LPAI, which means they’re typically not deadly.
On occasion, a low-pathogenic virus can jump from wild birds to poultry farms. As the virus replicates in densely packed warehouses of farmed birds, it can quickly evolve and pick up adaptations that make it highly deadly to poultry. At that point, it gets dubbed a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, or HPAI virus. Historically, however, most of these HPAI viruses haven’t killed large numbers of wild birds, even if they did spill out of the farm and back into wild populations.
Then came an avian flu outbreak on a goose farm in China.
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Zhang Lianhua/VCG via Getty Images
In the spring of 1996, influenza caused by a virus known as H5N1 (named for the kinds of proteins found on its surface) spread among the geese. It was highly pathogenic and killed more than 40 percent of the farm birds it infected.
Descendants of this virus have since triggered a new era for bird flu. They’re not only adapted to spread disease among poultry, but — and this is key — some varieties are also capable of spreading and causing severe disease among wild birds. That’s an important trait that separates this virus from past versions of avian flu.
The US first experienced one of these goose farm viruses in 2014. After spreading to North America for the first time, the virus killed or affected tens of millions of poultry and an unknown number of wild birds, across at least 13 US states. At the time, officials were able to control the outbreak by slaughtering a huge number of farm birds.
The situation today is more dire — and much harder to control.
How bad is the current outbreak?
The world now faces a more frightening version of this goose farm virus that appears better equipped to infect wild birds. First detected on North American soil in the winter of 2021, the virus, which is also a form of H5N1, has since spread throughout the US, into Mexico, and down through Central and South America. It’s infecting birds on every continent now other than Antarctica and Australia (where it almost certainly will arrive soon).
The current outbreak has killed — or forced farmers to cull — more than half a billion poultry worldwide, a simply mind-boggling number of birds.
It’s much harder to estimate the toll the virus has taken on wild birds.
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Lewnanny Richardson/iNaturalist
In the US, suspected or confirmed cases of H5N1 in wild birds are in the tens of thousands, according to a study published in April. Reporting by the Guardian revealed that the flu has killed more than 50,000 birds in the UK. In Eastern Canada alone, roughly 40,000 birds have been reported as sick or dead, likely linked to the flu, according to Stephanie Avery-Gomm, a research scientist with the Canadian government, who cited her preliminary, unpublished research.
Yet most of these numbers are almost certainly underestimates. Government agencies don’t have the resources to test every dead bird. Plus, many individuals die out at sea, or in rural areas that lack any kind of surveillance.
Testing in the US tends to focus only on a small number of avian species, or on birds that die en masse, according to Johanna Harvey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who studies avian influenza. That leaves out smaller-scale outbreaks. Plus, global reporting of H5N1 cases in wild birds is often inconsistent or incomplete, according to a preprint paper published earlier this month.
This suggests that “only a fraction of outbreaks in wildlife have been detected and appropriately reported,” scientists Marcel Klaassen and Michelle Wille wrote in the paper, which has yet to go through the formal peer review process.
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Johanna A. Harvey, et al./Biological Conservation
So how big is the number really? It’s likely in the millions globally, according to the paper by Klaassen and Wille. Scientists may never have an exact toll, but the spotty numbers they do have are ringing alarm bells.
“We haven’t seen these kinds of numbers with an influenza outbreak in wild birds previously, ever,” said Puryear, of Tufts, who was not involved in that study.
What avian flu means for biodiversity
The virus that’s killing birds today is highly “promiscuous,” Puryear said — meaning, it’s infecting and causing disease in all kinds of species. Scientists have found it in everything from vultures and bald eagles to American white pelicans and snowy owls.
Birds that nest in colonies have been hit especially hard. These include things like snow geese, terns, and double-crested cormorants. According to Avery-Gomm, more than 20,000 of the potential cases of influenza in eastern Canada came from northern gannets — giant, colonial seabirds that spend most of their lives on the ocean.
Scientists fear these die-offs could make a big dent in some avian populations, especially in ones that are already small.
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US Fish and Wildlife Service
Since March, more than 20 California condors in the Southwest have died, and most of them tested positive for avian flu. The largest bird in North America, with a wingspan that can reach more than 9 feet, the California condor almost went extinct in the 1980s. A successful captive breeding program revived the population, which now stands at roughly 500 worldwide, though they’re still listed by the US government as endangered.
Last summer, meanwhile, bird flu knocked out more than half of Lake Michigan’s population of Caspian terns, another threatened species.
“Large die-offs can impact populations of these species for decades and may contribute to species collapse and further ecosystem damage, particularly given the critical declines seen in North American bird biodiversity over the last half century,” scientists wrote in the April study, which tallied reported and suspected cases of H5N1 in North American birds.
Indeed, prior to the current outbreak, birds were already declining in nearly all habitats in the US, according to Cornell University’s State of the Birds report. Roughly half of all bird species are known (or likely) to be in decline globally.
More troubling still is that avian influenza is also killing many mammals, including foxes, coyotes, mink, and seals. Earlier this year, officials reported that bird flu killed almost 3,500 seal lions in Peru. That’s worrying on a whole different level — because humans are mammals. Could this avian flu become a pandemic?
The frightening link between infected wild birds and human health
No, in its current form, avian influenza is not at all likely to cause a pandemic. While hundreds of humans have contracted H5N1 over the years — and many of them have died — those cases usually involve extremely high exposure to infected poultry. Biologically speaking, the virus isn’t well equipped to overtake our immune systems and spread quickly among human populations.
The problem for us is that viruses, and especially influenza viruses, evolve quickly. Not only do they mutate, but they can also swap entire portions of their genomes with other viruses if they infect the same hosts. Under the right circumstances, this evolution could give them the tools to replicate more easily in mammals, which would make them more threatening to humans. (My colleague Keren Landman and I go into this in detail here.)
The risk of the virus morphing into a human threat remain slim, yet the outbreak in wild birds may push it in that direction.
During most past outbreaks, only poultry farms were badly infected, so countries could kill giant flocks of infected farm birds and exercise other biosecurity measures to stem the spread. That’s what happened during the outbreak in 2014 and 2015. In this case, however, wild birds are also a reservoir for highly pathogenic influenza. So no matter how much culling farmers do, wild birds could still pass H5N1 over to domestic populations.
This is happening already: Most recent outbreaks on farms were started by wild birds, not farm-to-farm spread, Yuko Sato, a poultry veterinarian at Iowa State University, said in a briefing for reporters last month. Infected wild birds can spread the virus through their feces or breath when they flock to reservoirs near farms, or stop over while migrating. One reason wild birds are likely to enter farms in the first place is that so much of their natural habitat has been destroyed.
“The challenge is that you can do all this work to make farms more secure, but that won’t matter if you have lots of infected wild birds,” said Nichola Hill, an infectious disease ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Once wild birds contaminate farms, the risks skyrocket. Viruses evolve much more quickly within animals that are packed tightly together, simply because they have more bodies to grow in. They’re also known to pick up adaptations that make them better equipped to replicate among mammals, Puryear said, though it’s not clear why.
The other problem is that when flu viruses are widespread among wild birds, they have more opportunities to spill over directly into mammals. The virus has infected animals like foxes and seals that interact with birds. And as these microbes replicate within their cells, the flu viruses can pick up traits that make them more harmful to humans.
This is not just theoretical. In a recent study, Puryear found that some H5N1 viruses that infected seals in New England had genetic changes that have been shown to make them more efficient at replicating within the cells of mammals. Researchers have found similar adaptations in H5N1 viruses found in foxes and mink. All of these animals likely got sick from wild birds.
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There is some reassuring news, however: Not only is the virus biologically ill-equipped to cause a pandemic, but the US government has also stockpiled vaccines, including those specifically for H5N1. (There are also vaccines for birds, which my colleague Kenny Torrella writes about here.)
“It’s not Covid,” Puryear said, referencing how there were no coronavirus vaccines stockpiled when the pandemic hit. “In theory, we should be able to respond quickly if this becomes an issue.”
What to do for the birds
In time, wild birds will likely develop some immunity to the current H5N1 virus, causing the panzootic to wane. It’s not clear how long that will take, Puryear said, because “this scale of HPAI in wild birds hasn’t occurred before.”
But there are ways to help wild birds short of waiting for them to gain natural immunity. Countries including the US, for example, could ramp up surveillance, so they can better understand how avian flu is spreading, scientists say. That information could help give farmers a heads-up if infected species are moving their way.
In the US, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and USGS lead surveillance, together with state agencies. Those agencies do most of the field-based sampling, Hill said. According to Puryear, however, government officials simply don’t have the resources or funding to keep up with the outbreak. “They are slammed,” she said.
Part of the problem, Hill said, is that USDA is primarily focused on protecting the poultry industry. Controlling outbreaks on farms draws a lot of their resources that could otherwise go toward wild birds, she added.
“Wild bird surveillance is a critical part of USDA’s response to highly pathogenic avian influenza,” USDA spokesperson Lyndsay Cole told Vox. The agency and its partners tested more than 30,000 wild birds last year, Cole said. The agency also emphasized that studying the virus among wild birds is important because it can spread between wild and domestic populations. “While there is always room to expand efforts, the surveillance that has been done has been invaluable in identifying how the virus is spreading and where introductions to domestic birds occur,” Cole said.
Academic institutions like Tufts and the University of Georgia, which both do testing, help fill in some of the gaps in surveillance, but those projects cost money, Puryear said. On that note, one solution is to free up more federal funding for groups that are equipped to surveil and test wild birds for H5N1, she said. Surveillance would also benefit from government and state agencies talking to each other more, many scientists told me. (Cole of USDA said the agency is able to “coordinate closely” with its partners to carry out surveillance.)
The public can help, too, Hill said.
Birders are “the eyes and ears of this panzootic,” she said, “and I don’t think they’re being harnessed enough.” People are used to photographing beautiful wildlife on their phones and uploading it to platforms like iNaturalist. But right now, it’s more important that they document dead birds, she said. (iNaturalist actually has a webpage exactly for this purpose. If you find a dead wild bird and are not sure what to do, check out this one-pager from the USDA.)
Ultimately, protecting wild birds and reducing the risk of a pandemic will require that we make much bigger changes, such as to our food system. The normal way many companies raise birds for slaughter — in warehouses, packed tightly with chickens or turkeys — is a recipe for highly pathogenic viruses, Hill said.
“It’s useful to remember that wild birds are the victims here,” Hill said. “They spread HPAI but are not the original source. My motto has become: Bird flu sucks, blame chicken nuggets.”