People killed by lightning

The universe, it seems, has decided that for every bald eagle we coax back from the brink of extinction, someone must stop being killed by lightning, as if the two were locked in some cosmic zero-sum game orchestrated by a deity with a very specific sense of irony. Between 2006 and 2021, as eagle nesting pairs climbed from around 9,000 to nearly 72,000, lightning deaths fell from roughly 50 per year to 20, moving in such perfect lockstep that you might suspect the eagles were actively intercepting bolts with their increasingly numerous bodies. They were not.

What's almost certainly happening here is that both phenomena respond to the same vast, invisible hand: the slow electrification and sheltering of American life. More people work indoors now, in climate-controlled offices and warehouses, than in 2006—fewer of us standing in open fields during thunderstorms, which means fewer deaths by lightning. Meanwhile, the Clean Air Act and the Bald Eagle Protection Act have been quietly doing their jobs for decades, improving air quality and habitat protection in ways that allow eagle populations to boom. You could fit roughly 400 bald eagles into the average Costco, which is irrelevant but helps illustrate how many more of them now exist. Both trends are really just different ways of measuring American environmental progress and the gradual enclosure of daily life.

The correlation is real, the relationship is nonsense, and somewhere in between lies a useful lesson about pattern-seeking creatures like us. We are very good at noticing that two things move together, and very bad at asking whether that matters, which may explain why we spent fifteen years not realizing it. Perhaps that is as it should be.