Rare Earth Metals Must Not Come at the Cost of Indigenous Rights

As mining interests expand in northern Sweden, Indigenous Sámi communities face existential threats. But a sustainable and just alternative exists — urban mining.

As the global race for rare earth metals accelerates, industries and policymakers in the European Union and Sweden have increasingly set their sights on the mineral-rich lands of northern Sweden. But amid calls for new mines to fuel a wide range of technologies, a vital truth is being sidelined: There’s a more sustainable and just alternative — urban mining (or circular mining). Recycling metals from existing products and waste can help meet strategic needs without sacrificing the environment or Indigenous rights.

Modern economies are built on a linear model of consumption: Extract, consume, discard. This model underpins traditional mining as well. State-owned mining company LKAB is now planning a new mine in the Per Geijer area of Kiruna, Sweden, a region known to contain significant rare earth element deposits. These materials are crucial for electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, drones, military applications, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence hardware. The scramble for these materials is partly about climate policy, but also about geopolitics and economic dominance.

But there is a high risk that this industrial expansion will once again harm the Indigenous Sámi population and the ecosystems some of the Sámi depend on. After years of reporting on Sweden’s environmental controversies, one thing is clear to me: Sámi culture is repeatedly steamrolled, and the ecosystems that sustain us are treated as expendable.

People speaking on behalf of the Gabna Sámi village warn that a mine in the Per Geijer area would destroy the last viable migration corridor for reindeer in the region. Reindeer herding is not only an economic activity but a vital part of some Sámi’s culture and identity. Currently, the herds are already squeezed between regulated rivers, expanding urban areas, and existing mining operations. The loss of this last narrow corridor could mark the end of reindeer herding in the area. Some Sámi wonder: Will it even be possible to continue this way of life?

This is not an isolated conflict. In Gállok, outside Jokkmokk, another mining project threatens lands adjacent to the Laponia World Heritage Site. A 2024 review by UNESCO concluded that mining could cause “significant damage” to this protected area, not least because it could threaten the ongoing practice of Sámi reindeer herding in the region.

UNESCO’s criticism was clear: Sweden has failed to adequately consider the site’s cultural and Indigenous value in its decision-making.

Should the growing demand for rare earths be satisfied through industrial expansion that devalues Indigenous rights? Or is there a path that is both sustainable and just? This is why urban mining matters.

Every year the world produces over 62 million metric tons of electronic waste, according to the Global E-Waste Monitor. This includes old smartphones, laptops, solar panels, and batteries. Many of these products contain rare and valuable metals. Instead of discarding them or shipping the waste to low-income countries, these growing resources can be harnessed.

According to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, recycling cobalt from lithium-ion batteries alone could cover up to 42% of the EU’s cobalt demand by 2050. Extraction from used batteries is far more efficient and environmentally friendly than mining virgin ore. For example, producing 1 kilogram of cobalt from the ground consumes 250 kg of water and generates at least 100 kg of waste. Recycling that same cobalt from batteries requires only 100 kg of water, with far less environmental impact.

Urban mining also helps the EU reduce its heavy reliance on imports. Today China controls about 70% of the global battery value chain and is expected to maintain over 75% of the global material recovery capacity by 2030. Meanwhile the EU’s own recycling infrastructure is underdeveloped, handling only around 5% of the global recovery capacity. A significant portion of the EU’s battery waste is still being exported — ironically, often to the very countries that dominate raw material production — because recycling is considered more cost-effective in the same facilities where those primary materials were originally processed.

Despite local opposition, the Per Geijer project was classified in April 2025 as a strategic project under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act. Exploration continues. At the same time, the EU has set ambitious recycling targets. By 2031 80% of lithium and 98% of cobalt in batteries must be recovered. Member states are expected to build up domestic capacity and implement laws that drive collection, sorting, and product design for recyclability.

Sweden has the potential to play a role in this shift. A report from the Geological Survey of Sweden and the Swedish EPA found that Swedish mining waste contains up to 500,000 metric tons of rare earth elements, along with significant quantities of cobalt, bismuth, and other strategic metals. But despite this, recycling efforts are hampered by weak policy incentives, legal uncertainty, and underinvestment.

Although Sweden’s Parliament has signaled support for urban mining and the government has launched a circular economy roadmap, new mining continues to take precedence in practice.

This is not inevitable.

Reconciling Indigenous rights with the demand for strategic resources is possible — but it requires a fundamental shift in how northern Sweden is viewed. This is not an empty wasteland where resources can be mined; it’s a living, cultural landscape with its own inherent value and rights. Society’s demand for rare earth metals must not come at the expense of Sámi land. Consumption habits can be adapted, and product designs and recycling systems can be altered.

In Sweden public opinion supports recycling — 8 in 10 Swedes believe it’s important to recycle electronics. Yet 6 in 10 have never recycled an old phone. Worse, much of Sweden’s e-waste is exported to countries with poor labor and environmental standards.

Urban mining is no silver bullet. Some primary extraction will likely remain necessary in the foreseeable future. But it’s a critical piece of the sustainability puzzle. By integrating urban mining into our resource strategies, it is possible to reduce pressure on ecosystems, improve supply chain resilience, boost recycling industries and innovation, and cut dependence on overseas mines — many of which are devastating for women, children, Indigenous communities, and local environments. Most importantly, urban mining offers a path forward where we no longer pit nature and cultural heritage against the technical needs of the green transition and society at large.

There’s plenty of room for improvements, and those improvements should be based on EU law (like the Critical Raw Materials Act and the Batteries Regulation), Sweden’s own circular economy roadmap, international Indigenous rights frameworks, and analyses by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and Swedish Geological Survey. In other words, they should be logical extensions of existing research, legal commitments, and policy gaps. Sweden’s government and regulatory authorities should:

1. Implement a moratorium on new mining in Sámi territory until urban mining is fully investigated and developed.
2. Develop a national strategy for metal recycling, including mapping of secondary resources, enforceable design requirements, and improved collection infrastructure.
3. Ban the export of recyclable battery waste outside the EU to retain critical materials within the region.
4. Meet EU recycling targets and invest in Sweden’s own recovery capacity.

Sweden must show that it takes both Indigenous rights and environmental responsibility seriously. Urban mining works, and the time for it is now.

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Previously in The Revelator:

On the Horizon: Nature’s Top Emerging Threats and Opportunities

The Exotic Pet Trade Harms Animals and Humans. The European Union Is Studying a Potential Solution

EU legislators are considering a form of regulation that could protect many species from unsafe exploitation — if it’s done right.

By the time a sugar glider named Mango entered an animal sanctuary in the Netherlands in 2023, life as a pet had taken a terrible toll. Mango lost both his brothers and his right eye due to health issues, despite being kept by a veterinarian for seven years.

These days, Europeans keep tens of millions of exotic pets — as do people in other countries around the world. Although beloved by their owners, experts say most of these animals, like Mango, do not adapt well to life in captivity and often face health problems and premature death as a result of this legal trade.

Mango the sugar glider. Courtesy AAP Animal Advocacy and Protection

Globally, the business involves an estimated 13,000 species, many unsuited to being companion animals, says Michèle Hamers, EU policy officer at the nonprofit AAP Animal Advocacy and Protection. The organization runs the sanctuary where 9-year-old Mango lived — alongside fellow sugar gliders Radagast, Didache, Duizeltje, and Sushi — until his sudden death on July 21, likely from a hematoma.

“Something needs to change,” says Hamers.

For her organization, that change would involve the introduction of an EU-wide “positive list” for exotic pets — a limited inventory of approved pet species suited to captivity.

They’re not the only ones asking for this. In recent years, momentum has grown toward making this a reality.

The Pet Trade in Europe

Sugar gliders are marsupials native to Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea named for their ability to “glide” through the air between trees on fleshy membranes connecting their front and back legs. Their arboreal, nocturnal lifestyles are among the traits that make them unsuitable for living in a cage in someone’s house, Animal Advocacy and Protection says.

By their very nature of being wild, many other species don’t do well in captivity. As a result, the nonprofit’s rescue centers in the Netherlands and Spain take in as many exotic pets as they can. It’s never enough: they typically have a waiting list in the hundreds.

Hamers says relinquished or seized animals typically arrive with behavioral and physical problems, including bone malformations, malnutrition, and stress-related issues like self-mutilation.

An exotic bird market in Paris, which was shuttered in 2021. Photo: Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons

To tackle the root cause of the situation, the organization and other concerned NGOs are pushing for EU-wide legislative change, preferably a “preventative approach” to regulating the trade. Hamers says this would establish a selective list of animals who can be kept, with all others banned by default.

This type of system is known as positive, reverse, or whitelisting.

Only animals who “can thrive in captivity and are safe to be kept” should make the cut, explains Hamers.

Presently, the EU has no regulation designed to address the pet trade, although the market sometimes falls under laws concerning animal health, “invasive alien” species, and trade in threatened wildlife. Mostly, though, member states decide their own rules on exotic pets, which can vary greatly from country to country.

Some EU nations don’t regulate the exotic pet trade at all, while others use a negative list system, meaning they create lists of banned species. The remaining member states — 12 out of 27 — have some form of positive list in place or the legal basis to develop them, says Hamers.

In recent years European lawmakers have signaled support for an EU-wide positive list through varied resolutions and action plans. As a result the European Commission, which is the bloc’s executive body, commissioned a study on its feasibility in late 2023. The results are due later this year.

On June 19, as part of a proposed regulation on the trade in pet cats and dogs, the European Parliament also voted in favor of establishing an EU-wide positive list for exotic pets, providing that the feasibility study shows the measure to be valuable and legally possible.

One Trade, Many Problems

In the proposed regulation, EU lawmakers warn that “the absence of a common Union framework” leads to “inconsistencies, gaps in enforcement, confusion for consumers and, often, to serious animal welfare consequences for species that are unsuitable to be kept as pets, as well as risks to biodiversity, human health and safety and nature conservation.”

This statement illustrates why support for a positive list is gaining steam: the exotic pet trade is associated with several problems, not solely animal welfare.

For Animal Advocacy and Protection, the welfare of kept animals is a priority. Whether captivity can meet animals’ physical and psychological needs should be the main criteria for considering who gets on the list, says Hamers.

But, she adds, the criteria should include other factors, such as risks to biodiversity and public health and safety.

A 2021 report by nonprofits Born Free and the RSPCA highlighted the potential risks exotic pets pose to public health. They include injuries and transmission of zoonotic pathogens: diseases like Covid-19 that can be passed between humans and other animals.

A dyeing poison dart frog, a popular species in the pet trade. Photo: Michael Hoefner/Wikimedia Commons

More than 85% of live animals traded globally are not native to the countries importing them, according to a 2023 analysis, which can pose a risk to environmental health. Hundreds of imported species have ended up being released into the wild, sometimes with dire consequences for native wildlife. For instance, scientists have implicated the trade in live amphibians for pets and meat in the global spread of the disease chytridiomycosis, which is linked to widespread amphibian population declines and 90 documented extinctions.

On the flip side, trade can pose a threat to exploited species themselves. Scientists have calculated that 25% of the over 800 amphibian species traded as pets are threatened. They said further regulation and other measures are “urgently needed to slow the decline of populations and loss of species as a consequence of unsustainable, and largely unmonitored trade in wildlife.”

Likewise, the industry is notorious for scooping up newly described species, often ones with limited ranges, to support collectors’ voracious desire for novelty. Positive lists could help to nip this unscrupulous inclination in the bud, because commerce in such species would be banned by default.

Exotic pets are both sourced from the wild and bred in captivity. Breeding operations can relieve pressure on wild populations. But they can also be associated with illicit activity, such as the laundering of wild-caught animals into the captive-bred trade.

In 2019, Belgium’s federal body for health, food chain safety, and environment, pointed to further links between captive breeding and illegality in a factsheet about the live amphibian trade. It stated, “illegal specimens are assumed to be the founding stock for many captive specimens, including within the European Union.”

Illegal trade is a significant issue in the exotic pet business. A report by Traffic highlighted that 28% of all animals seized by EU countries in 2023 were likely destined to be pets, amounting to some 3,500 individuals.

The lack of uniform regulation across the EU is a “massive problem” in this regard, says Hamers. Market fragmentation in a free trade bloc creates a ripe environment for illegal trade, she explains, because people can purchase animals banned in their own country from other EU states with relative ease.

The United States has the same issue. In a 2023 paper, researchers noted that state and local regulations govern much of the trade, despite federal rules having some bearing on it, such as the Lacey Act’s prohibitions on the importation of certain “injurious” species.

Differing and incomplete rules across states, alongside lackluster penalties for wrongdoing, have “facilitated continued possession of exotic pets in states where these animals are banned,” the researchers warned. They concluded the U.S. would benefit from a nationwide positive list system, too.

Making Positive Lists Meaningful

Even with captive breeding, many exotic pets being traded across the EU and the U.S. originated from countries elsewhere, says Peter Lanius, director of the Australian nonprofit Nature Needs More.

Lanius’ organization released a report in June outlining how a global positive list for exotic pets could be introduced by the global wildlife trade treaty body, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

Alongside yardsticks like considering species’ welfare needs and mortality rates in captivity, it argues that a determining factor should include whether trade is easy to monitor.

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This ties to the report’s broader theme: the importance of establishing a robust regulatory architecture around positive lists, which the authors say is generally lacking even for the few that already exist. Pet industry advocates have described existing lists in European countries and elsewhere as “unenforceable,” the report notes.

“If you stop at the point where you just list what can be traded, but there’s no infrastructure… it’s symbolic, not practical,” insists Lynn Johnson, Nature Needs More’s founder and CEO.

Positive lists must be accompanied by “dedicated monitoring and enforcement capacity,” according to the report. Nature Needs More also calls for businesses to be registered, licensed, and required to provide end-to-end traceability for the animals they trade.

Owners should be required to register exotic pets too, the report says, with the veterinary profession engaged in maintaining care standards.

Other outlined provisions include creating a listing authority to determine and perpetually review the positive list, as well as interventions to reduce consumer demand for banned species. The organization also calls for legislation to compel social media companies to police commerce on their sites by making them liable for traded animals.

The organization says financing these provisions should come from a business levy on traders.

None of these ideas are revolutionary, the nonprofit stresses. Nations have imposed similar regulatory measures on the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. But the model would be a massive step for the wildlife trade, which typically lacks adequate monitoring and enforcement.

A Trivial Trade in Living Beings

This January the European Pet Organization — which bills itself as “the voice of the pet sector at European level” — released a position statement on positive lists. In contrast to ornamental fish trade veteran Tim Haywood, who told The Revelator last year that the number of species in the pet fish trade must shrink, the pet organization rejected the idea of “restrictive measures” such as positive lists.

The group suggested poor welfare and illegality in the trade are limited and could be dealt with through improved enforcement of existing legislation and education of consumers. It also argued that restricting petkeeping through positive lists wouldn’t stop determined owners from buying forbidden exotic animals.

However, a Finnish study found that many hobbyists are put off from buying exotic pets when the animals are subject to trade restrictions.

Hamers has further reason to doubt that a positive list system will lead to significant rises in illegal petkeeping. The trade is “hyper-commercialized,” she explains, and “many purchases are done on the whim,” often driven by popular culture trends like movies or social media.

“Once species aren’t for sale anymore through common channels, the possibility to buy an animal on an impulse also disappears,” says Hamers.

For Nature Needs More, the often-trivial nature of modern-day pet purchasing makes positive listing so necessary. Although the keeping of exotic pets has occurred for centuries, substantially more people can casually engage it now due to having the money, time, and access to animals in “our globalized, industrial society,” its report says.

“When a trade in living beings is allowed to function by the rules of the throw-away consumer society, then we have a serious problem,” the organization warns.

Previously in The Revelator:

Time to Confront the Aquarium Trade’s ‘Gray Areas’

Save This Species: Temminck’s Pangolin

In Zimbabwe, traditional conservation methods offer new hope for this heavily trafficked, reclusive, and shy animal.

Species name:

Temminck’s pangolin (Smutsia temminckii), also known as the ground, Cape, or steppe pangolin. Sometimes listed as Manis temminckii.

IUCN Red List status:

Vulnerable.

Description:

The Temminck’s pangolin can grow to about 3 feet long — plus another foot or two for their tail. They’re well-adapted to eat ants and termites and can eat as many as 70 million a year. They have large digging claws, a cone-shaped head, and a long, sticky tongue. Their color can differ depending on their range; some are slate gray to dark brown, while others are yellow-brown.

Where they’re found:

Temminck’s pangolin is the only pangolin species found in southern Africa, and they inhabit the dry and arid savanna environments. They can be found in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Angola, and Botswana.

Why they’re at risk:

Many countries in southern Africa have become key players in the illegal pangolin trade. These pangolins are being trafficked for their meat and scales, which are used in traditional medicine and considered a delicacy in some cultures, particularly in Asia. The poaching and illegal trade of pangolin products pose a significant threat to the survival of the species. Despite harsh laws and severe penalties in countries like Zimbabwe, poaching remains one of the biggest threats to the survival of pangolins. At the same time, massive deforestation, urban and agricultural expansions, and climate change have led to pangolin habitat loss.

Who’s trying to save them:

At the community level in Zimbabwe, traditional leaders are taking leading roles in protecting pangolins. Since olden times pangolins were considered mystical; they are believed to bring good life, good rains, and good harvests to communities. And killing a pangolin is still considered taboo in many Zimbabwean cultures; anyone who kills one faces the wrath of the spirits, according to traditional leaders.

But on a national level, pangolins are a specially protected species in Zimbabwe under the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Act. And Zimbabwe has a National Pangolin Conservation Strategy and Action Plan (2023-2027) aimed at protecting pangolins from poaching, illegal trade, and habitat loss. At the same time, nongovernmental organizations like the Tikki Hywood Foundation also help to rehabilitate and monitor pangolin populations.

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My favorite experience:

As a journalist, I have worked extensively with traditional leaders in Zimbabwe to share their long-established wildlife conservation methods, which have been passed down for generations.

These traditional conservation methods are mostly centered on myths, legends, and beliefs, but have been relatively successful in saving the Temminck’s pangolins in the country.

While working on a story, I hypothetically asked one traditional leader, “What happens if I try to poach a pangolin from this area?”

Without even flinching, the traditional leader warned me confidently: “You will be caught; pangolins protect themselves; they’re mystical; they can’t be stolen or killed. If we kill these pangolins, our ancestors will be very angry with us, and rains will not come, and we will all die.”

This is what many people in this community think about pangolins. Pangolins are revered, and it is only outsiders who can come and poach pangolins from this area, the traditional leader added.

And I have realized that wildlife conservation programs work effectively if they involve local communities. At times stiffer penalties are not enough to protect endangered wildlife species, but there’s a need to tap into generational or Indigenous knowledge on wildlife conservation. In Zimbabwe, for example, in ancient times, it was only chiefs or kings who were allowed to eat pangolin meat. The pangolin population has been low for generations, and the ancestors knew that the only way to protect the pangolin from total extinction was to restrict the number of people allowed to eat them.

What you can do to help:

I will continue to give a voice to traditional leaders and their communities who are helping to save Zimbabwe’s last pangolins. Voices of these communities should be amplified, and some of these initiatives to protect pangolins can be replicated in other countries or communities in Africa.

Share your stories: Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Save This Species.

Previously in The Revelator:

Save This Species: Sumatran Orangutans

Happy 50th Birthday, Monkey Wrench Gang

Half a century after the novel’s publication, the Glen Canyon Dam still stands, now home to the world’s largest mud puddle.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first press run of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel that launched environmental activism and eventually sold more than a million copies.

Unfortunately, successful as the book has been, a big loss was the original opening chapter that I read as it came out of Ed’s typewriter, in which the gang blew up the Glen Canyon Dam. He decided it was “too unbelievable” to include in this instruction book about environmental preservation, explaining how to seize up the engines of bulldozers, tear up train tracks, deconstruct wilderness roads, bring down big, invasive billboards, and more.

Alas, the dam still stands today, neither taken down nor blown up, damning the drying river’s side canyons to weedy plants and trees taken root where they should not be, dead humpback chubs and razorback suckers, flooded caves where the walls once showcased Stone Age art, and the halt to the red rock silt load that has been deepening the canyon for millions of years.

Today Lake Powell, backed up behind the dam, is just a huge mud puddle, which hopefully will one day shove the dam out of its way.

Memories Burn

The female character in The Monkey Wrench Gang, Bonnie Abbzug, is a ballerina from the Bronx. I am too. Or, I should say, I was. My days of double pirouettes and split leaps are long gone. Today I am a prisoner of noisy, overpopulated, polluted New York City because I cannot persuade my offspring’s family to move with me to Kanab, Utah — among the places where Ed and I lived — where the town’s population is the same size as the Manhattan block I live on.

Alas, moving back to North Rim at the Grand Canyon where Ed and I spent our summers is also not an option. Climate change has just burned it to the ground.

Eisenstadter at North Rim, Grand Canyon. Photo by Edward Abbey, from the collection of Ingrid Eisenstadter, used with permission.

When we lived there, no television or radio connections were available at our Canyon lodgings 8,000 feet in elevation; we were fine with that. Noise pollution was limited to crickets, and the unpolluted sky was filled with thousands of blinking stars every night. Once a week, however, the mailman would deliver a copy of Newsweek and we’d skim through it to see if the world was at war. Again.

Though our time as a couple would end before long, our friendship lived on. I saw Ed just before his 1989 passing. I will always regret this loss — and so do the undisturbed lands and threatened species everywhere that are struggling for protection.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Genuine Stupidity

While Ed sitting at his manual typewriter would not have foreseen electrified, computerized, desktop artificial intelligence, he certainly knew that people everywhere were inexcusably uninformed about preserving our natural environment and foresaw that they would grow in number.

When Ed was born in 1927, there were 120 million people populating the United States and 2 billion people in the world. Now our population has grown to more than 330 million in the U.S. and soared above 8 billion worldwide.

Overpopulation is the root of all evil: 100 countries currently at war cross-border or internally; poisoned air and land and waters; climate chaos; every large mammal and millions of other species suffering dangerous population decreases — all evils traceable to man.

Ed, now lying in his illegal desert-wilderness burial site, can’t see the worst of his fears coming to pass: Too many people and too few surviving grizzlies, lions, crocodiles, and polar bears to eat them.

The Movie That Never Was

Robert Redford was the first to buy movie rights to The Monkey Wrench Gang, and he was expected to take a role in the movie. But, no.

Since then the rights have switched hands a number of times, always owned by someone — I have two completed screenplays — but nothing has come of it.

And why? Because it’s OK to produce movies about killing people, but not about decommissioning bulldozers or backhoes, or blowing up unwelcome bridges or dams. That’s illegal.

I doubt that the movie will ever come to the screen, because with proper instruction smithereened bridges and dams would fly into the air, paved wilderness roads and rail tracks would disappear, and lawsuits directed at the movie’s producer, actors, writers — all — would fly.

Ed for President

While Abbey was no advocate of violence against people, he would have long ago set up a Go Fund Me page to pay for all the dynamite needed to bring down the Glen Canyon Dam and free the once-mighty red river.

That task completed, as the donations would have poured in, with the remaining funds I would have persuaded him to run against Trump. Lots of people would have voted for Ed — excluding the rich, greedy ones who live off their mining and drilling and environmental poisons production as the world speeds to the lemming cliff.

Perhaps Ed should be on the next ballot for president anyway, 2028, because even though he is dead, the current president is brain dead, which is the same thing.

So, while Trump trashes environmental protections, remember the write-in ballot:

2028
Vote for Edward Paul Abbey
The Real EPA

Holy Herbaria: Protecting Plant History — or About to Become History?

Plant repositories provide crucial links between plants, botanists, and the rest of us. But their already-shrinking budgets face new threats from the Trump administration.

This July, a jury in Australia found a woman guilty of poisoning four of her estranged husband’s relatives. Three died. The nine-week trial gripped the world, in part because of how she went about it: slipping death cap mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) into their beef Wellington.

According to evidence presented at the trial, she foraged mushrooms from locations near her house after looking them up on the iNaturalist website. A search history on her phone revealed this and other damning details.

Like the woman, death cap mushrooms are infamous: They’re responsible for 90% of deaths by fungus — a fact we know thanks to the world’s herbaria.

What are herbaria? Picture an archive — only instead of a room stuffed with old papers, fill it instead with dried plants and fungi. This space is called an herbarium. The preservation of its contents allows them to be studied even when they’re not in season — or in some cases, no longer living on Earth at all.

In the case of the murderous mushroom scandal, herbaria would have helped document death cap’s existence in Australia, explains Barbara Thiers, the director emerita of the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium. This data would also allow a plant expert to verify the fungus in question.

“The reason we can tell one fungus, or plant, from another is because some scholar examined hundreds or thousands of herbarium specimens and characterized that plant and provided a means of telling it from every other species,” Thiers says.

She keeps track of herbaria. As of June 30, she says there were 403,871,563 specimens stored in 3,983 herbaria around the world.

Herbaria have a plethora of practical uses. They can be used to track phenology, the study of cyclic phenomena in nature, such as when a plant flowers or when a bird migrates, recurring natural events, and their relation to seasonal changes in the climate.

Because herbaria offer historic records of plants, they can also help scientists study how herbivory — feeding on plants — has changed over time, or gauge declines in pollination ecology.

And herbaria are indispensable when it comes to understanding how climate change may affect life on Earth. Just as a knowledge of human history helps us face the future, a knowledge of plant history can help us help future plants survive.

Yet just as many plant species are under threat or going extinct, so are herbaria — albeit for different reasons.

Why Study Dead Plants?

Botanist Luca Ghini established the first documented herbarium in Italy during the Renaissance. His collection has not survived the ravages of time, but universities and other bodies have established thousands of others around the world.

Herbaria often house flowering plants (angiosperms, which comprise up to 90% of plant species), but can also include mosses, ferns and other types of plants, along with fungi (more closely related to animals) and algae.

Collectively, the world’s herbaria store centuries of data. Yet science has only learned a fraction of what there is to know about the more than 300,000 identified species of flowering plants.

Few of us visit these herbaria, but we all rely on plant-based products and services, from pharmaceuticals to food. Even if we don’t understand how plants function and adapt, scientists need to — now more than ever. In the face of climate change, experts say, we need new conservation strategies and new crops as well.

Preserving reference specimens is essential to correct identification and, ultimately, the scientific method. It teaches us about the history of evolution — and in the Anthropocene, perhaps the future of evolution, too.

21st Century Herbaria

Herbaria may seem antiquated, rooms of dead plants with little relevance to our world today. Historically, they were used for taxonomy: naming and classifying plants. While that still matters — scientists keep discovering new plants — their uses today continue to expand.

“I think the trick with herbaria and natural history collections in general is that at the time of their collection, we really don’t fully understand their potential,” says Erin Sigel, collection manager of the Hodgdon Herbarium at the University of New Hampshire. “But the amazing thing is that the value only increases over time, because we don’t know how they’re going to be used in the future. It’s kind of magical.”

Two modern uses are digitization and genetic sequencing.

To digitize a plant, herbaria try to do two things. First, they take a high-resolution photo of a specimen with a label explaining where the plant was collected, by whom, with ecological information. Second, they add the photo and accompanying information to large databases called thematic collection networks that have portals and link a bunch of data together. These efforts aim to make valuable “dark data” — information stored in physical collections — readily available to researchers, educators, and the public.

“By pooling all our data together, we have much larger data sets for anyone interested in accessing that data,” Sigel explains. “One of the most immediate uses of all this digitized data is that it’s available to researchers around the world. It’s much more accessible online.”

Digitization also helps preserve specimens — some of which are hundreds of years old — from constant handling or the potential risks from shipping them to faraway labs that want to study them. “It’s really important to retain the actual specimen,” Sigel says. “But if someone can use it digitally, it’s less wear and tear.” Meanwhile, the specimen remains available if a researcher wants to examine its genetic material, such as its DNA.

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The data for each specimen is important, but additional value comes from collecting disparate details from multiple specimens or herbaria. “By pooling data into datasets, we can see how a plant’s distribution has changed over time,” Sigel says. “Have lower elevation plants moved to higher elevations because of higher temperatures? Are plants on mountaintops going extinct because there’s nowhere for them to go?”

Another expanding use is genetic sequencing. Over the past decade or so, researchers have been able to sequence whole genomes from herbaria.

Scientists evaluate patterns of genetic variation in plants to see how they’re related to each other and how they’ve evolved.

“It helps us understand how the Earth and its populations have changed over time,” Sigel says.

Thiers offers an example of how this has helped to understand a species that has become a problem in the United States.

“Cheat grass is an incredible invasive throughout the West, costing millions, maybe billions, because it’s replacing all the good [plants] we feed to cattle.” It’s not invasive in Europe, she points out, so why has it gone haywire here? Analysis of herbaria specimens going back decades “showed that once specimens came here, they came in contact with each other, began to hybridize and take over the West. You can sequence genes and get an understanding of how that species existed at a point in time, to reconstruct that. Herbaria provide a historical context you can’t get any other way.”

Why Herbaria Are Under Threat

The number of herbaria worldwide is growing, Thiers says — at least on paper.

“But they are being killed by the removal of resources,” she continues. “A few in Europe have over a million specimens with one person working with that collection. Many herbaria have no budget at all. Zero budget. That is really more the problem.”

For example, the University of Arizona’s herbarium has no budget, despite its collection of nearly 450,000 plant specimens. The University of Maryland’s has been taken offline. Now a group of volunteers go in there on the weekends to do what they can: prepare specimens that were not completed when the herbarium closed, check for insect infestations, and try to answer information requests that come in.

“These are the day-to-day tasks of managing an herbarium. The most important one is monitoring for insect infestation, which is a constant threat to all herbaria,” Thiers says.

When it comes to budgets, plant collections are easy targets. Traditionally housed on campuses across the country, many schools no longer want to dedicate the money or the space to maintain them.

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When it comes to actual closure, Thiers says that tiny herbaria seem to be most threatened. Up until now, though, other collections have adopted those orphaned plants.

“To a certain extent, one herbaria has always absorbed another,” Thiers says.

For example, Iowa State University’s herbarium has grown in recent decades, in part because it took in the collections of smaller herbaria.

But now some big collections are threatening to disappear. Duke University created shockwaves in February 2024 when it announced it was closing its massive herbarium. Thiers says the administration “just assumed someone could step in and absorb it. I’ve seen more than a dozen absorbed, but these were 20,000 [specimen] collections, not 825,000. We were confronted for the first time [with the fact] that no other herbarium may be in a position to take on this very large and important collection.”

Duke’s decision sparked backlash from scientists and caused real fear, too. For now, its herbarium is still functioning, and Thiers says the administration has stopped talking about it. That doesn’t mean they plan to keep it, though.

“They thought they could just give it away, no more expenditure, and someone could come and take it,” Thiers says. But that process of transferring a collection is expensive, and someone needs to pay for it.

“Basically, [transfers are] never done for less than a dollar a specimen,” Thiers explains. “It’s essentially a million dollars just to move the herbarium, and that assumes there’s somewhere to put it — the quantity in shortest supply.”

And while Duke is the first major collection that may close, smaller collections continue to shut their doors and budgets continue to shrink. “What we’re really concerned about is the slow attrition and the prospect that very large herbaria could fail,” Thiers says. “We have no idea what could happen in that case.”

The Fate of Federal Funding

In the United States one critical source of funding — for transfers, preservation, expansion, and making plant collections accessible — comes from federal agencies, particularly the National Science Foundation. It’s the main federal government funder of herbaria, Thiers says, with occasional help from other federal groups.

Until now, for example, the NSF has funded numerous plans and projects to digitize plant collections. In the southeastern United States, Sigel says, NSF funding allowed collections to be digitized across more than 100 herbaria. As a result, researchers worldwide can access more than 3 million specimens. Other federal funds support cataloging specimens and improving their storage, conservation of threatened and endangered plant species (which often involve herbarium collections), and training the next generation of botanists.

But times have changed, and much of this federal funding has become uncertain or threatened. Under the Trump administration, DOGE has cut hundreds of millions of dollars to federal agencies that fund herbaria.

President Trump’s grudge against Harvard hasn’t helped.

Sigel’s school in New Hampshire was part of an effort to digitize a collection from Asia. At least 40 herbaria were involved, but the project was led by Harvard, and “that project is coming to a rather abrupt end,” Sigel says.

She also knows several people who’ve had their research grants revoked that focused on taxonomic diversity and genomic sequencing of plants. As a result, studies in biodiversity — including evolution, extinction, climate change, and other crucial scientific questions — are suffering.

As of July 9, the NSF has canceled more than 1,500 research grants, including some related to herbaria. Nearly 90% of eliminated grants were related to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Some nonprofits who have lost funding speculate that the Trump administration includes projects related to biodiversity when making DEI cuts. When it comes to herbaria, Thiers says “many of the NSF grants that were cancelled had to do with training groups of people who are underrepresented in science and training for students in general. All the things that we have done to try to make collections more relevant have been targeted for cuts,” Thiers says, adding, “It’s already been bad, and can only get worse.”

Invisible Extinctions?

Most people in the public will never notice if an herbarium closes its doors.

In many ways, that echoes the disappearance of plant species around the world, with many populations shrinking or disappearing without a ripple.

Without the scientific expertise of herbaria, we may never know that those plants have gone extinct — or maybe that they existed at all.

“Documenting extinction really helps us understand how our actions as a human species have impacted the world,” Sigel says.

Aside from admitting our guilt, why does documenting extinction matter?

“To some people it doesn’t matter,” Sigel says. “But I think the world around us is shaped by biodiversity. We don’t exist in the world as species unto ourselves. And most of the things that shape our reality really come from other organisms, like the food we eat and the medication we use. Without that knowledge of what biodiversity exists in the world, I think we’re lost.”

Previously in The Revelator:

All the Plants We Cannot See

Wild Reads: 10 New Books that Celebrate Wildlife and Their Environments

From chimpanzees and wolves to snakes and starlings, these new books capture hidden truths about fascinating species — and reveal how to better protect them.

This year has brought dozens of new books about some of the world’s most fascinating — and often, endangered — species.

In fact, there are far more of them than we can wrap up in one column, so here are 10 of the most notable new titles that have crossed our desks so far this year. They cover apes, bats, birds, wolves, insects, trees, fish — okay, just about everything. These books often take deep dives into a single species, revealing the complexities of their lives and their often-fraught coexistence with humans. They also offer new reasons to appreciate these animals — including maligned wildlife like starlings and snakes — and the latest science on how to protect them.

We’ve excerpted the books’ official descriptions below and provided links to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find these books in a variety of formats through your local bookstore or library.

Look for more wildlife books in upcoming columns — including some great titles for kids.

Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird

By Mike Stark

A great book authored by one of our colleagues at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Has there ever been a more hated bird than the European starling? Let loose in New York City’s Central Park by a misguided aristocrat, the starlings were supposed to help curb insect outbreaks and add to the tuneful choir of other songbirds. Rather than staying put, the dark and speckled starlings marched across the continent like a conquering army. In less than sixty years, they were in every state in the contiguous United States and their numbers topped two hundred million. Cities came under siege; crops buckled beneath their weight. Public sentiment quickly soured. A bitter, baffling, and sometimes comical war on starlings ensued… Stark’s Starlings is a first-of-its-kind history of starlings in America, an oddball, love-hate story at the intersection of human folly, ornithology, and one bird’s tenacious will to endure.

A Year with the Seals: Unlocking the Secrets of the Sea’s Most Charismatic and Controversial Creatures

By Alix Morris

It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people’s interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.

The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats: Demystifying These Often-Misunderstood Creatures

By Alyson Brokaw

These woefully misunderstood creatures dwell in darkness, inspire fear, and threaten danger. They’ve been viewed as the pawns of evil deities and taken the undeserved blame for the spread of deadly viruses. The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats provides a fresh introduction to these curious flying mammals, explaining how they experience the world through unique senses, where and how they fly, the origins of their complex relationships with humans, and how we can learn from them — not only to coexist, but potentially grow healthier and wiser together.

TreeNotes: A Year in the Company of Trees

By Nalini Nadkarni

Telephone poles, baseball bats, railroad ties. Peaches, nutmeg, and vanilla. The more you look, the more you realize: Our world depends on products made from trees. In this sweet book, forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni takes you on a worldwide journey to learn more about trees — their variety, their usefulness, their beauty, and their importance, not only to human culture, but to the entire natural world.

The Other Ten Wolves: A Yellowstone Backstory

By Carter Niemeyer

In a bittersweet blend of science and yarn, wolf expert Carter Niemeyer takes us back to 1996 on a heart-pounding, eye-witness adventure to add ten more wolves — the Sawtooth pups — to Yellowstone’s newly reintroduced wolf packs. So much could go wrong. So much did go wrong. But in the end, the other ten wolves helped change the character of Yellowstone’s wolves forever.

Insectopolis

By Peter Kuper

Award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper transports readers through the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them. This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their stories and humanity’s connection to them throughout the ages. Kuper’s thrilling visual feast layers history and science, color and design, to tell the remarkable tales of dung beetles navigated by the stars, hawk-size prehistoric dragonflies hunting prey, and mosquitoes changing the course of human history. Kuper also illuminates pioneering naturalists, galvanized by the sixth extinction and the ongoing insect crisis, Kuper takes readers on an unforgettable journey.

The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life

By Drew Harvell

An elegantly written exploration of the cutting-edge science of the strangest and most remarkable creatures on our planet by a leading marine biologist: Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms that rival human cities, and jellyfish that glow in the dark. As our planet rapidly changes, the biomedical, engineering, and energy innovations of these wonderous creatures inspire ever more important solutions to our own survival. This book is a tale of biological marvels, a story of a woman’s passionate connection to an adventurous career in science, and a call to arms to protect the world’s most ancient ecosystems.

The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species

By Trevor Ritland and Kyle Ritland

As young boys, Trevor and Kyle Ritland were fascinated by the magnificent golden toad of Costa Rica, a brilliant species their biologist father showed them in his projector’s slide shows. Native to only one wind-battered ridgeline high on the continental divide above the cloud forests of Monteverde, thousands of golden toads would congregate for a few weeks each year in ephemeral pools among the twisted roots to mate, deposit their offspring, and retreat again beneath the earth. But from one year to the next, the toads disappeared without a trace; the last of them vanished more than thirty years ago. Since then, only rumors remain — alleged sightings by local residents, which beg the question: could the golden toad still be alive?

Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World

By Stephen S. Hall

For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and beyond. From the foundational deities of ancient Egypt to the reactions of squeamish children today, it is a historically commonplace belief that snakes are devious, dangerous, and even evil. But where there is hatred and fear, there is also fascination and reverence. How is it that creatures so despised and sinister, so foreign of movement and ostensibly devoid of sociality and emotion, have fired the imaginations of poets, prophets, and painters across time and cultures?

Apes on the Edge: Chimpanzee Life on the West African Savanna

By Jill Pruetz

While most primate research occurs in isolated reserves, Fongoli chimpanzees live alongside humans, and as primatologist and anthropologist Jill Pruetz reports, this shared habitat creates both challenges and opportunities. The issues faced by Fongoli chimpanzees — particularly food scarcity and environmental degradation — are also issues faced by their human neighbors. This connection is one reason Pruetz, who has studied Fongoli apes for over two decade…decided to write this book, the first to offer readers a view of these chimps’ lives and to explain the specific conservation efforts needed to help them.

That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations, including many more about wildlife of all shapes and sizes, in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

And let us know what you’re reading: drop us a line at [email protected]

Previously in The Revelator:

Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife

Saving Okefenokee

A potential titanium mine threatened the famous swamp — until activists and local journalists stepped in.

Journalist Drew Kann credits his father for his love of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. “I’ve been going to Okefenokee since I was a kid,” he says. “I grew up camping down there.”

But one early trip might have ended differently if not for his father’s watchful eye.

“He saved me from stepping on an alligator when I was about eight years old, backing a canoe into the swamp,” Kann recalls. “He gave me a timely shout that I was getting too close to one of the guys laying in the water. I might not be here today, if not for that.”

Today Kann is the one paying close attention to Georgia’s environment, as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“I think it’s an amazing state,” he says. “We have amazing mountains up in the Appalachian corner of the state. We’ve got beautiful forests, incredible beaches and marshlands, and then wild places like the Okefenokee.”

It’s also a state that generates a lot of storytelling for environmental journalism.

“Georgia is really at the center of so many of the biggest environmental energy issues that are not just dominating our country, but the world,” Kann says. “We’ve been seeing tons of battery manufacturers, electric vehicle manufacturers, and we have the biggest solar panel manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere, not too far from Atlanta and Northwest Georgia. There’s just a lot going on here.”

Those two realities collided in recent years when a company called Twin Pines Minerals announced a plan to mine for titanium and other minerals near Okefenokee. Residents and activists feared the proposed mine would cause insurmountable damage to the swamp and its hundreds of unique plant and wildlife species, not to mention the human communities nearby.

Activists fought the project on multiple fronts, and won several victories along the way, including convincing the National Park Service to nominate Okefenokee for listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site (an effort spearheaded by The Revelator’s publisher, the Center for Biological Diversity).

Meanwhile Kann and other AJC journalists dug into it from other angles, such as looking into the mining company’s less-than-stellar record and examining the mine’s potential effects on local hydrology and wildfire risks.

The collective efforts resulted in a massive victory this past May: A nonprofit called The Conservation Fund paid about $60 million to acquire the 8,000-acre proposed mine site and the mineral rights to the land, halting the project.

The Revelator spoke with Kann about this success, the role of local media in protecting the environment, and what comes next. (This conversation has been lightly edited.)

How did you get involved in the Okefenokee mining story?

There’s been interest in mining on the swamp’s edge for decades. Back in the 1990s, there was a proposal by the materials and chemicals giant DuPont to mine near the swamp, and that faced a lot of opposition from environmentalists and the federal government. Ultimately, DuPont backed off and donated most of the land to the Conservation Fund.

This latest attempt to mine near the swamp started to gain traction in 2019, while I was still at CNN. When I joined the AJC in 2021, I knew that this mining threat would be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, stories I’d be covering here. It was actually the first story I wrote for the AJC, explaining how the permitting for this mine ended up in the hands of the state instead of the federal government.

Activists have been fighting this mine for years and have had a lot of success along the way. What role did the media play in the final outcome?

Obviously the media brought accountability to the issue. We spent a lot of time… my colleague Dylan Jackson and I, our investigations team, spent months digging into the company behind the proposal, Twin Pine Minerals, and their parent company. We found that the company and its affiliates had a pretty spotty environmental track record.

There were certainly other news organizations who covered bits and pieces of that, but I don’t think the full picture of the concerning environmental interactions would have come to light.

The AJC put a full-court press into this, with investigative reporting, a rare front-page editorial, a note from the publisher, and cartoons by Mike Luckovich. Why did the newspaper go all-in?

We felt it was important for people to know what was potentially going to happen on the doorstep of what many consider one of our nation’s last wild places. We’ve heard from readers about how important this issue was for them.

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Are there any memories that really stick with you about the reporting process?

I just love every time I get to go back to the Okefenokee. I’m excited to do it. It’s kind of like you’re going back in time.

On one of my visits, I was with the refuge manager. We pulled up next to a big floating peat bed. It’s so thick in places that we were able to step out on it and walk on this island of peat in the middle of the Okefenokee. Pretty incredible experiences like that.

Honestly, I love just popping into little shops and restaurants and stores in the area in Folkston, which is the small town that’s kind of the gateway to the swamp, and talking to those people about their views on what’s happening, what could happen next. That’s my favorite part of this job.

After working on this story for years, what were some of your key takeaways?

I think it showed the value of being there and showing up to things. I made several trips down to the swamp and to Folkston for meetings. I think this whole process really showed me the value of getting out there and seeing things with your own eyes, talking to people in person. I feel it enables you to convey the richness and importance of a place like the Okefenokee.

What’s the state of local media in Georgia right now? According to some data I’ve looked up, there are 17 counties in Georgia that don’t even have their own paper, and a lot that are down to one paper. How important is it for local journalism to be able to dig into these stories, and what would have happened if you hadn’t been there?

It’s hard to say what would have happened had we not reported on this, but I think folks can imagine. There would have been a lot less information out there for both decisionmakers and the public to evaluate for a significant proposal like this.

It’s no secret that journalism is in a tough spot right now. We face a lot of different pressures from our business models to things like artificial intelligence and the current political climate.

I came here from CNN, and while that was a great experience, I’ve found that the stories I get to write about in local news are so much more interesting and compelling. The local level is really where things happen that affect people’s lives. I think it’s a tragedy that local news is in the spot that it is. Local news is vital to our state, our country, and democracy.

What are the other big environmental stories on the horizon for Georgia?

What I think a lot of regular folks are thinking about … is artificial intelligence. Georgia has already become a hotbed for data center development: warehouses packed with servers that power things like artificial intelligence, streaming services, digital finance, you name it. The Metro Atlanta area is one of the hottest destinations in the country for these kinds of things. They take up a lot of land, use a lot of electricity, and there are concerns about their water consumption. We’re seeing increasing friction on the local level to some of these proposals.

We have the state’s biggest utility planning a historic expansion of their electric generation capacity. We’ll see if that gets approved or not.

There’s a lot to be determined about the fate of wild places in Georgia… We’re going to continue to stay on [the Okefenokee story] and see what happens next, because I don’t think this is the end of potential mining proposals near the swamp.

For more, listen to Drew Kann and fellow AJC journalist Greg Bluestein discuss Okefenokee on the newspaper’s Politically Georgia podcast:

Previously in The Revelator:

Mining Policy Must Be Reformed

The Roadless Rule Is on the Chopping Block — and So Are Our Wildest Forests

This widely popular regulation protects 58.5 million acres of national forests and 1,600 at-risk species. The Trump administration wants gut it.

(Editor’s note: A version of this op-ed about the Trump administration’s efforts to remove the Roadless Rule appeared in several Montana newspapers last month. We thought it deserved a national audience, especially given the abbreviated public comment period to provide feedback.)

Healthy, intact landscapes — home to the natural systems that produce our clean water, clean air, and livable climate — provide humanity’s life support system. Only 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact, and we cannot afford to abuse what little remains. It’s common-sense ecology many of us understood in fifth grade: If we don’t treat Mother Earth with respect, she will stop providing and we will suffer.

And now, of course, the Trump administration wants to trash one of our best tools for protecting relatively unspoiled public lands — the Roadless Rule — and replace protections with the heavy machinery of extraction.

Following one of the largest efforts in American history to engage the public, the U.S. Forest Service adopted the widely popular Roadless Rule in 2001 to limit road building and logging on some of the country’s wildest and most remote national forest lands. More than 95% of the 2.5 million public comments submitted when the rule was first proposed supported the move. That overwhelming public support continues today, with a 2019 Pew poll showing only 16% oppose the rule.

Why is road building bad for ecosystems? Because roads fragment habitat; disrupt wildlife and watersheds; increase pollution; facilitate damaging extractive industries; and worsen the spread of invasive species.

In this way, the Roadless Rule protects 58.5 million acres of our national forests nationwide. That’s habitat for 1,600 at-risk species. That’s clean drinking water for 60 million Americans. That’s trees, still standing today, that grew hundreds of years before Lewis and Clark.

Rescinding the Roadless Rule would open the door not only for loggers to clear-cut swaths of national forests, but also for the mining and fossil fuel industries to blast through millions of acres of cherished public landscapes. There are plenty of lands available to these industries without threatening critically important roadless areas, the wildlife within, and the multi-billion-dollar recreation economy. Hikers, backpackers, mountain bikers, paddlers, wildlife watchers, hunters, fishing enthusiasts, backcountry equestrians: The Roadless Rule probably protects places special to you.

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In my home state of Montana alone, removing this rule would threaten the Flathead. The Gallatin. The Helena. The Kootenai. The Lewis and Clark. The Beaverhead Deerlodge. The Lolo. The Bitterroot. A Roadless Rule rescission would place every national forest in the state at risk.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Sec. Rollins claims rescinding the Roadless Rule will help combat devastating wildfires, presumably due to all these prospective new roads. She is wrong. First, 84% of wildfires are started by humans, and roads will facilitate more human movement, deeper into these areas. While more roads may facilitate firefighting, they also facilitate more fires started by people.

Second, the Roadless Rule does not prohibit all wildfire reduction measures and in fact, as of 2020, more wildfire fuels management activities had already occurred per square mile in roadless areas than in roaded ones.

Third, roads create pathways for invasive plant species that pose a long-term threat to forest health and may well exacerbate forest fires.

Fourth, fire prevention measures should focus on areas in the wildlands urban interface, where people and human infrastructure are most likely to be impacted. Moreover, studies show forest roadless areas that have experienced multiple fires, are recovering and are less likely to experience stand-replacing fires. These remote areas will be better served by allowing adaptation back to a more natural fire regime.

Besides, the national forest system already has 368,102 miles of roads and a $10.8 billion backlog for road maintenance. With additional budget cuts, the Forest Service cannot afford to build and maintain even more roads.

Our roadless areas in our national forests are not disposable. Many are mature or old-growth forests, and thus irreplaceable — a non-renewable resource, protecting plant and animal diversity, clean drinking water, clean air, cultural sites, and more. Logging, mining, and drilling for fossil fuels in these areas is an assault on our life support system. The only scant benefits of rescinding the Roadless Rule’s smart public lands policies — to private industries’ bottom lines — are overwhelmingly outweighed by the costs to our essential national forests and future generations’ quality of life.

This move by the Trump administration is just as bad as selling public lands to the highest bidder. Scale your outrage accordingly.

Public comments on the proposed changes to the Roadless Rule are due Sept. 19. Submit your comments at Regulations.gov or through our publisher, the Center for Biological Diversity.

Previously in The Revelator:

How Does Habitat Fragmentation Harm Wildlife?

Wildlife Trade: Does the ‘Livelihoods Depend on It’ Defense Hold Up?

New research into the turtle-meat trade reveals that assumptions and unsubstantiated claims could hurt conservation efforts.

Wild beasts are often the stuff of legends, but narratives surrounding wildlife trade contain some tall tales, too.

One of the most frequently uttered statements in support of the wildlife trade is that many people depend on it for their livelihoods. But just because this claim is common, “does not necessarily make it true,” wildlife researchers Vincent Nijman and Chris Shepherd wrote in the journal Discover Animals earlier this year.

Taking these broad assertions — often made by researchers, government agencies, or others — at face value without further study has the potential to “pervert conservation efforts,” the paper warns.

Reptiles offer an example. Some conservationists have defended the trade in reptile skins, arguing that it supports livelihoods.

Nijman and Shepherd wanted to understand if this held true for an area in which they have significant expertise: the export of wild turtle meat from Indonesia. Their study reveals how many turtle collectors can make a basic living from the trade.

The answer? Surprisingly few.

One in a Million

Indonesia permits the harvest of four freshwater turtle species for consumption: Asiatic softshell, Southeast Asian box, Asian leaf, and Malayan softshell turtles. Almost all the meat from these species is exported. On average Indonesia permits around 50,000 turtles to be legally collected from the wild annually.

The researchers considered Indonesia’s quotas for catching and exporting turtles, the range of prices collectors get for turtles, and the recommended minimum wage in different areas.

They found the trade could generate a minimum wage for somewhere between 241 and 360 full-time collectors, or around one person in every million inhabitants.

If expanded to include people who supplement their income with occasional turtle collecting, the researchers estimate that the trade could support between 2,400 and 3,000 people.

“Very often, when we publish things on unsustainable reptile trade — the turtle trade in particular — we get hammered by people who believe it is an important component of livelihoods,” says Shepherd, who took a role as senior conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator) after completing the paper.

Yet, the findings reveal that the turtle meat trade is hardly the economic engine that proponents claim.

Of course, other people also make money from the turtle meat business, such as exporters and sellers in importing countries. But wildlife trade chains like this have a pyramid structure, Nijman says, with many people at the base, such as the people who hunt or collect the animals from the wild, and fewer people involved further up. Livelihood claims usually refer to the often-impoverished people at the base of the pyramid.

Nijman emphasizes that the analysis focuses solely on Indonesia’s international trade in turtle meat because the regulations on harvest and exports mean that any legal domestic use and trade of these animals locally should be very limited.

Broadly speaking though, he says local use and trade of wildlife “clearly contributes to livelihoods” and is a fundamental aspect of many people’s lives in Indonesia.

Time to Re-Evaluate?

All four turtle species traded internationally from Indonesia for meat are “experiencing population declines and two are considered globally threatened,” the researchers explained in their paper.

“If very few people actually make a living out of this [trade] … then perhaps you have to reevaluate and say, well, our justification of ‘it’s a livelihood issue’ may not be all that correct,” says Nijman.

This has wider ramifications. Asian turtles have faced an ongoing crisis for decades. Researchers began raising the alarm about populations of Asian tortoises and freshwater turtles in the 1990s and identified collection of the animals for trade — for their meat and as pets — as chief among the causes. At that point, researchers in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s turtle-focused specialist groups determined that almost three-quarters of known species in the region were threatened.

The situation is even worse now. A 2018 assessment found that 83% of Asia’s turtle species were threatened.

And this crisis does not exist in a vacuum. Experts say diminishing populations of Asian species has led to increased trade on other turtle species around the world, including the United States.

The U.S. exports millions of turtles annually. The animals are often raised on farms but several states also permit commercial exploitation of wild populations.

“The legal and illegal trade of turtles has certainly taken a significant toll on certain populations across the United States,” says the University of Richmond’s Jennifer Sevin, who is co-founder of the Collaborative to Combat the Illegal Trade in Turtles.

However, she says state and federal agencies have taken steps to better safeguard wild populations over the past five years.

Around 40% of turtle species in the U.S. are threatened, according to the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies. Globally, researchers say over half of turtle and tortoise species are at risk of extinction, due to pressures like habitat destruction and exploitation.

Turtles Are Not Cut Out for Trade

“Turtles have evolved with traits like delayed sexual maturity, low reproductive rates, and high hatchling mortality which make them especially vulnerable to pressures like exploitation,” Sevin explains.

“Once a population begins to decline, it can be incredibly difficult for it to recover,” she warns.

This is especially true when it comes to commercial-scale exploitation, says Nijman. Although local use can impact targeted species’ populations, “the Asian turtle crisis really came about because of the large-scale commercial trade,” he says.

A 2021 study drew similar conclusions about the wildlife trade more broadly. It found that international and national trade significantly contributed to population declines of targeted animals, whereas local exploitation only had a “limited impact.”

The dynamics of the turtle meat trade makes matters worse.

For one thing, it targets bigger, mature turtles because they provide more meat. These are breeding age individuals who are important for producing future populations. On top of that, the turtle meat business is a “high volume, low value” trade, Nijman says. The income people get from selling turtles in the earlier stages of the chain is so low that the trade is “only commercially viable if it’s done at scale.”

In theory, Indonesia’s quotas and other restrictions should limit the volume of turtles traded. But as Nijman and Shepherd point out in the new study and several prior publications, poor management and other factors means overexploitation is rife.

For instance, research published in 2022 estimated that two traders in an Indonesian province received between 19,000 and 45,000 Southeast Asian box turtles a year from collectors when their combined quota was only 400 turtles.

Shockingly, Nijman says evidence like that suggests that up to 90% of the trade in turtle meat and carapaces out of Indonesia could be illegal.

In locations where a legal turtle trade exists, criminals can exploit the system to launder illegally collected animals by exporting or selling them alongside legal individuals.

Exceptions to the Rule

Another common claim about the merits of trading wildlife suggests it can benefit conservation. But Nijman says he can’t recall any instances where the Asian turtle trade has been shown to benefit targeted species.

Where “proper management” of wild species’ populations and their exploitation exists, trade can benefit conservation, Nijman says. But he stresses that these cases are the exception, not the rule.

Such cases include well-worn examples like the crocodile and alligator trade in Australia and the U.S., mainly for their skins. These trades are not without controversy though, particularly concerning animal welfare.

Another celebrated case comes from Peru — this one involving freshwater turtles. In certain managed basins in the country, Indigenous and local communities collect yellow-spotted river turtle eggs as part of a ranching program. After incubating and hatching the turtles, they release some back to the wild and sell others internationally as pets.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the body that regulates global trade in threatened species, commissioned a case study on this program. It revealed that around two-thirds of supply-side earnings from the trade go to exporting companies, with communities taking the rest. When broken down, this income equated to around $14 per week for each involved family in 2017.

Monitoring efforts within the program have led to a significant rise in turtle numbers in some areas, such as the Pacaya Samiria Reserve, due to reduced poaching and illegal trade, according to the case study.

However, poaching of these turtles and their eggs in Peru overall remains a major problem, as Mongabay has reported. Official seizure data shows that the yellow-spotted river turtle was the third most trafficked species in the country between 2015 and 2020.

A Lack of Evidence

CITES’ core mandate is ensuring that trade does not threaten species’ survival. But “CITES and Livelihoods” is an active area of work for the body and in recent years it has been gathering evidence on the benefits of trade to livelihoods. It also commissioned an independent review of 48 relevant case studies to produce guidance and strategies for countries on “maximizing the benefits” of trade in CITES-listed species for Indigenous peoples and local communities. The guidance includes suggestions like supporting these communities to seize trade opportunities and mounting campaigns that “sensitize” potential consumers to the wildlife trade to create an “enabling environment.”

There is little consensus among countries about whether embracing the guidance and strategies is appropriate, particularly amid concerns that they may promote expansion of the wildlife trade and could curtail states’ ability to adopt strict trade limitations to protect species.

Considering that CITES regulates the international trade in over 40,000 threatened species, it’s notable that only 48 studies were identified as “relevant” to the independent review. It suggests that substantive evidence of the wildlife trade’s contribution to livelihoods is thin on the ground, as Nijman and Shepherd argue in their study.

The researchers have urged people to stop promoting the wildlife trade as important to livelihoods “unless proven to be factual.”

Nijman stresses that this is not because they are opposed to trade or do not consider livelihoods important. Rather, he makes the point that discussions must be data-led and “realistic” so that involved actors can honestly weigh up whether the level of livelihood support provided by international trade justifies the continued decline in targeted wild species like turtles.

“This conversation is not being had presently, that is the major issue,” says Nijman.

Previously in The Revelator:

To Save This Critically Endangered Bird, It Takes a Village

18 Things to Do for Yourself, Wildlife, and the Planet Before Summer’s End

Our annual recommendations offer ways to recharge, make the most of the season, and come back ready to fight for progress.

Have the first eight months of this year left you feeling slightly … tapped? You’re not alone! Being exhausted is both okay and natural — and recognizing our individual and collective exhaustion provides an important opportunity to recharge and prepare to fight for the planet (and our sanity) in the months ahead.

With that need to recharge in mind, we’re about to take our annual summer publishing break. We’ll be back with new articles and commentaries starting on Tuesday, Sept. 2.

Although we won’t publish anything else during that time, we’ll be in the office for another week or so preparing materials for September and October. We have a lot of great stories coming your way — sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss any of them.

But we’ll also devote time and energy over the next few weeks toward finding new influences and inspirations, being creative, experiencing nature to its fullest, renewing our community connections, and reflecting on the chaos of 2025 (so far). We hope you have similar opportunities, now or later, to do the same.

Not sure where to start? Here are 18 things you can do over the next couple of weeks to help set the path for a powerful, nature-loving, resilient, and resistant autumn:

1. Breathe. Take a deep, slow breath, followed by a slow, thorough exhale (maybe even a loud sigh). Now repeat, one or two more times, with your eyes closed if that makes you feel comfortable. We’re all feeling stressed, and a moment of deep breathing can help to alleviate some of the pressure. Taking even just 15 seconds to slow down and focus can help us lower our collective blood pressure, sharpen our brains, and settle in for whatever comes next.

2. Protest. Millions of people around the country — and around the world — are marching in the streets to stand up to rising authoritarianism and declining environmental protections. Join them. Make your voice heard. Make connections with your community. Build for the future.

3. Look ahead to your November election. Sure, we just had a big election last November (you’ve probably noticed), and local ballots this November probably won’t contain many dramatic options, but you should never pass up a chance to participate in the electoral process. (The fate of one of my local libraries, for instance, depends on a just-held August election — who expected that?)

4. Look even further ahead to the November 2026 elections. I know, it seems too early to start thinking about the midterms, but they’re closer than you think. Ask if any candidates or community organizers in your area need support. Can you help with voter registration or other efforts? Is there an opportunity for you to run for anything? The midterms have never been so important, so it can’t hurt — in fact, it’s essential — to start planning now.

5. Check your tires. Make sure they’re at the manufacturer’s suggested air pressure. All vehicles, even electric or hybrids, run more efficiently if their tires are properly inflated. Simple stuff like this adds up and can make a big, collective difference, so don’t pass on the routine maintenance of your car — or anything else (including your health).

6. Write to your mayor, town council, or other local leadership to tell them that they’re doing a great job on an environmental issue — or how to do a better job. We often forget that our local leaders can make a difference. A simple “thank you” can make them feel appreciated; a polite or insistent nudge can help them move in the right direction. Volunteering your time or expertise can also help!

7. Find a “new to you” green space. Are there parks, trails, fields, water bodies, outdoor art, or other spaces near you that you haven’t visited yet? Plan a trip! Then share what you discovered with friends.

8. Look at an animal in your neighborhood. Write a poem about what you saw. Anyone can write a poem. You might even find that the act of writing about a local wildlife species awakens you to a new observation about that plant or animal — or about your relationship with that species.

9. Pick up some trash. Maybe you just grab up one piece or garbage at a time, or you could put on some gloves and take a trash bag with you for a longer walk. You might spark an interesting conversation with passers-by.

10. Consider buying an electric vehicle while tax credits are still in place. I wouldn’t run out and replace your vehicle just because these credits will vanish on Sept. 30, but if you need your own transportation and you’re in the market an EV, now might be the time to buy one.

11. Try turning your phone off for a day. We could all use a break from doomscrolling and constantly looking at the little glowing screen. What will you notice around you without your phone distracting you? (Another tip: Try turning off notifications on all but the most essential apps. You’ll get updates when you log into various apps; you don’t need your phone to ping you with every interaction.)

12. Sign up for a library card. Library budgets are being slashed around the country, and book bans are still being discussed — or implemented. Show your support for your local institutions — and learn about the vast array of services your library probably offers beyond traditional books. (Many give out native seeds or lend tools, for example.)

13. Donate to an environmental group. They’re fighting for the planet harder than ever right now. (Might I suggest our publisher?)

14. Read and review an environmental book. Authors depend on online reviews to inspire sales (and spread their ideas to new readers.) Read a recent environmental book (we have a few hundred for you to choose from) and then leave a review on Goodreads or another site, or just share your thoughts with friends. (Side note: Why not start an environmental book club in your area?)

15. Teach a kid or a neighbor to repair something. Let’s break away from our disposable culture. The more people who can fix something — anything — the better!

16. Ask a friend if they need any help. They probably do. And don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it. Build community by being there for each other.

17. Write something for us! We’re always open to op-eds, contributions to our “Save This Species” and “Protect This Place” features, and other expert commentaries. And for the freelance journalists reading this: Prepare to pitch us. We reopen to story ideas on Sept. 3.

18. Examine your fears. Share your courage. Don’t hide your anxieties, or your successes. Share how you’re feeling, what you’re doing, your questions, and your solutions. Many of us feel disconnected right now or worry that we’ll get attacked if we bring up climate change or other threats. Don’t buy into that anxiety. Sharing makes us all stronger, and courage is contagious. Let’s support each other now — and in the heady months to come.

That’s it for now. We’ll see you on Sept. 2. Until then, as always, we hope you’ll stay safe, strong, and connected.

Previously in The Revelator:

Who Heals the Earth’s Healers? Ways to Avert Burnout for Environmental Advocates