It took a decade of hard work, but one of the world’s most important wildlife corridors is now emerging from the fragmented forests of coastal Brazil.
Sometimes conserving rare species and habitats requires waiting a few years for all of the pieces of a puzzle to come together.
For one project in coastal Brazil, that process took the better part of a decade. But now, after years of hard work, the puzzle’s nearly complete, and what could end up being one of the world’s most important wildlife corridors is about to emerge.
The Fazenda Dourada corridor in the state of Rio de Janeiro will link two isolated federal biological reserves — União and Poço das Antes — with newly restored forests and a bridge over a major highway, creating a migratory pathway for the endangered golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia) and potentially thousands of other imperiled species to travel through previously degraded and fragmented landscapes.
The iconic golden lion tamarin served as the flagship species for this restoration “because it’s such a charismatic animal,” says Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke chair of conservation at Duke University and president of SavingSpecies. The species was nearly extinct 30 years ago, and the corridor will be essential for their continued recovery, but the location will also serve many other unique species. “Coastal Brazil has more endangered species probably than anywhere else in the Americas,” he says. “It certainly has more endangered birds, but it’s also a major center of endemic mammals and amphibians and something like 6,000 plant species.”
Coastal Brazil has the highest concentration of endangered bird species in the Americas. Courtesy SavingSpecies.
The biodiversity-rich region has also been subject to what Pimm calls “just appalling levels of habitat loss. It’s a very, very fragmented landscape. The habitat that remains is in pieces.” Many of the species that live in this region have very small ranges, he says, placing them at high risk of extinction if their habitats are destroyed or if populations become separated from each other.
The two nonprofits have been working together for the past 10 years — first to acquire land and then to restore roughly 50 miles of forests between the two federal reserves. “We’ve planted more than 30 species of trees,” Pimm says, pointing out that Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado has done most of the hard work on location. “I planted two trees myself, but they’ve planted thousands.”
Restoring habitats takes time, of course, but the 69-year-old Pimm says he’s pleased with how quickly the forests have begun to bounce back. “I thought I might be in my dotage before it did anything, but the amazing thing is that this is a tropical forest. It’s warm and wet and once you give trees a chance to grow, they grow very rapidly.” Some of the trees, he says, have already reached 30 feet in height, and the efforts have visible results. “You can look at the satellite imagery on Google Earth to see how it’s all coming back.”
The final piece of the puzzle took the most time to put into place. Last month the two groups announced they have acquired a 585-acre plot of land near a major highway that runs north of Poço das Antas. About half of that land, which is currently used as pasture, will now be reforested. At the same time, a bridge will be built across the highway, allowing the wildlife in the two reserves to reconnect and expand their habitats.
Bridge mockups. Courtesy AMLD
“I always knew the challenge was going to be to connect these populations across the highway,” Pimm says. “We needed not one miracle, but two. We needed to get the road company to agree to build this habitat bridge so the species could cross the road, which they agreed to do, and then we had to get more land on the other side of the road. We got the money about a year and a half ago. It’s taken that long to get the agreement with the property owner, but now we’ve got the ability to create this really exceptional wildlife corridor.”
The two organizations say this isn’t just about helping wildlife, including the iconic tamarin; it’s also about repairing the “tear” in the Brazilian rainforest. “This is an especially important step toward our vision of connecting and protecting enough forest to support a viable population of golden lion tamarins far into the future,” Luís Paulo Ferraz, executive director of Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado, said in a press release. “Because of the continual threat of forest fragmentation from development and linear infrastructure, restoring and protecting the Atlantic Forest is the only way for its magnificent biodiversity to survive.”
Pimm adds that this corridor, and the decade of forest-restoration efforts associated with it, prove that the puzzle pieces of hard work, determination and a little bit of time can pay off — and possibly change the fate of the world’s most imperiled species. “This is an example of us taking the offense,” he says. “We don’t have to accept that bad things are happening. We’re going to reconnect landscapes. We can use smart, informed science and we can begin to reverse the declines. We can really start taking nature back.”
A review of Trump’s stated war on regulations doesn't find many successful repeals. But it is hurting regulatory enforcement in quieter ways.
One year ago, the Trump administration’s deregulatory push was in full swing. The administration was preparing a proposed rule to repeal the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) regulation, and to delay and repeal the restriction of methane emissions from oil and gas extraction on public lands.
Surely these well-publicized deregulatory initiatives which the Trump administration has made a big show of taking credit for have taken effect by now.
Well, not exactly. The WOTUS proposal has not been finalized, and the methane extraction rule is tied up in a thicket of court cases.
President Trump’s record on deregulation has gotten a great deal of attention. He brags about it regularly. It is often placed alongside the tax cuts passed by Congress when his chief accomplishments are recounted. To listen to the president (or the media), one would think that thousands of regulations were repealed.
But as the WOTUS and Bureau of Land Management extraction rules indicate, the actual extent of deregulation is much more limited. At the same time, other moves to dismantle the “administrative state” have quietly been more effective.
No more easy routes
Early in the Trump administration, Congress used the Congressional Review Act, a statute that allows the Senate to bypass the filibuster to repeal recently issued regulations. By May 17, 2017, Congress had repealed 14 Obama regulations using the CRA in a wide array of policy areas. They would add one more regulation from the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau by the end of 2017.
But these repeals are largely the work of Congress and frequent punching bag for President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And now, most Obama-era regulations are off limits for the CRA (although Congress has explored expanding its use). That leaves President Trump and his administration to rely on the typical route for writing and revising regulations – the executive branch – if they want to repeal any more of the thousands of regulations issued during the Obama administration.
In seeking to roll back fuel economy standards and other regulations, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s staff hasn’t shown the same attention to the rule-making process as his predecessor. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-NC-NDMaking announcements about a desire to repeal regulations is easy. President Trump did so in December (although his claim that 22 regulations had been repealed for every new regulation was vastly exaggerated). Actually repealing significant regulations is much harder, as the administration is finding out.
An agency must start by developing a proposal to repeal a regulation. This must often be accompanied by a detailed economic analysis of the repeal. The proposal and the analysis are then sent to the Office of Management and Budget for a review. When that review is complete, the proposal is published in the Federal Register for public comment. Agencies must review the public comments, respond to them, make any changes they feel necessary to their proposal and analysis, and then resubmit it to OMB before publishing a final rule. Finally, the rule is subject to litigation.
To navigate this process takes time and expertise. President Trump and his Cabinet members, particularly Scott Pruitt at the EPA, have instead tried to rush through the many steps of this process. This has meant that the last step, the litigation over regulatory repeals, has proven particularly problematic for the administration. At the EPA, courts have struck down delays or repeals of regulations six times already. This pattern holds across the government.
Another kind of damage
Part of the problem for the Trump administration is that while they have been hasty in trying to repeal regulations, the Obama administration was thorough in promulgating them. Over the course of eight years, Obama appointees solicited comments on their proposals, did detailed economic analyses, and built strong cases for many of their regulations. For example, the former EPA administration compiled a 1,217-page analysis done over years to buttress its fuel economy rules, while the current administration generated a 38-page document dominated by auto industry comments to justify reviewing and rescinding them.
Repealing existing regulations requires the work of government staffers who know the processes but a number of agencies, including the EPA, have lost many significant employees. AP Photo/Alex BrandonIn order to repeal these regulations, the Trump administration will have to convince courts that there are sound legal reasons to ignore all of this work. The statute that governs the creation of regulations, the Administrative Procedure Act, requires agencies to demonstrate that they are not arbitrary and capricious.
This means not only has the administration failed thus far to repeal many regulations beyond those overturned by Congress using the CRA, but their prospects for doing so in other cases are not strong. These cases include the WOTUS regulation, the Clean Power Plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants, and the recently announced plans to roll back emission standards for automobiles and take on California over their auto emission requirements.
Stephen Bannon listed the deconstruction of the administrative state as a goal of the Trump administration. The repeal of regulations is often trumpeted as the most important sign that Trump is succeeding. But while the administration is failing at the piece of deconstruction they are talking about most loudly, there are signs that they are succeeding in other ways.
The first is the enforcement of existing regulations. While the Trump administration has ramped up enforcement of immigration regulations, it has ratcheted down enforcement of environment and worker safety requirements. This selective pattern of enforcing regulations sends signals to firms that they don’t need to worry about complying with the law when it comes to the environment or public health.
Meanwhile, there has been an exodus of employees from the federal government which will likely have a corrosive long-term effect. Replacing talented public servants is not something that can be done overnight, even by a new administration dedicated to doing so. Training these new government employees will take even longer. As government becomes less effective because of the talent drain, faith in government diminishes further and a cycle of cynicism about public service is made worse.
The Trump administration has declared war on the regulatory state. But the things the administration is reluctant to take credit for, notably not enforcing the law and driving out talented public servants, are likely to have a much larger impact than its largely nonexistent regulatory repeals.
Chemicals collect in microplastics, which then get eaten by fish, birds and seals — and by humans.
Even a hundred yards out from the stern of the old steel sloop, the fish at the end of the line looked enormous. And it was strong: As it leapt up out of the water in an attempt to free the hook from its mouth, its long body — green and yellow and speckled with fluorescent blue — slashed violently, unspooling more and more line. The sailor at the end of the reel had to put up a significant fight to avoid losing his rod in the vast blue Pacific.
“That is a mahi-mahi, the most beautiful fish in the world!” called out the ship’s captain. At the beginning of the third week of what would turn out to be a 23-day scientific expedition across the Eastern North Pacific Gyre — a highly polluted ocean vortex that swirls clockwise from the California coast to the Hawaiian Islands and back again — a fresh fish was a welcome source of food for his crew of eight.
After several minutes of an intense duel, the sailor reeled in the fish, smiling.
That smile soon faded a bit. After the sailor was done separating the fish’s thick flesh from skin and bone, he cut open its stomach as requested by the ship’s lead scientist. Inside was a small flying fish. The scientist directed the sailor cut open that second fish’s stomach.
Out rolled two small pieces of plastic.
These plastic bits were what’s classified as “microplastic” due to their small size — less than .04 inches in diameter.
“That’s not too appetizing,” said the scientist, Kristian Syberg, a professor of environmental risk at Roskilde University in Denmark who was aboard the ship to sample the seawater for plastic.
Scientists who study plastic, like Syberg, are just beginning to understand the implications of microplastic and even smaller pieces of plastic called nanoplastic on the marine food web. Fishers, beachgoers and scientists are finding a growing number of marine animals — from live-caught fish to deceased seabirds and whales — with microplastic in their bodies. While the issue has only been studied in-depth for a handful of years, the latest research suggests these tiny pieces of plastic are capable of being transferred from organism to organism, wreaking havoc all the way up the marine food web — possibly all the way to humans.
At the Cornish Sea Sanctuary in the United Kingdom, Plymouth Marine Laboratory Ph.D. student Sarah Nelms compared the levels of microplastic found in the bodies of wild-caught Atlantic mackerel and the scat of the captive gray seals to which they were fed over the course of 16 weeks in 2016. She found microplastic in half the seal scat she studied, and in one-third of the mackerel fed to the seals. She posited that the mackerel — considered secondary consumers because they are one step above the bottom of the marine food web — ate microplastic particles along with their normal diets of zooplankton and this plastic was passed on to the seals.
“The seals are not exposed to any other sources of plastic,” Nelms told me recently.
Yet the plastic still ended up in their systems. In a paper published this February in the journal Environmental Pollution, Nelms and her coauthors noted that her team took “extensive contamination control measures” to prevent the seals from being exposed to other sources of plastic during the study. “We were therefore able to conclude that the microplastics we found in the seal scats came via the fish.”
The fishes’ bodies contained a higher number of plastic particles than the seal scat did, particularly microfibers, which crumble off fishing rope or are shed from clothing when washed. Nelms says this could mean the unaccounted-for plastic particles might be getting caught inside the seals’ bodies, causing unknown harm.
Microplastic is known to absorb chemicals from ocean water. When marine creatures consume microplastic, they’re also getting a dose of toxins. Syberg has studied this so-called “vector” effect where microplastic acts as a transporter of toxic chemicals. He says persistent organic pollutants, called “POPs” for short, are most worrisome because, once consumed, they tend to adhere to organisms’ fat cells where they are metabolized by the body and cause health problems.
Throughout history humans have released huge amounts of POPs into nature, where they persist and spread for decades without degrading. These chemicals, which include pesticides, industrial chemicals and unintentional pollutants such as DDT, PCBs and hexachlorobenzene, are considered highly toxic to humans and wildlife. They are proven to cause health problems such as allergies, reproductive and hormone problems, immune system disorders and cancer.
For this reason, and because there’s still so much scientists don’t known about how plastic acts inside the bodies of living things, Nelms says, “I would consider any amount of plastic inside an animal to be too much.”
Plastic’s movement up the marine food web appears to start with the ocean’s smallest animals, and even in these creatures can cause severe harm. Independent plankton scientist Richard Kirby recently filmed a common plankton species called an arrow worm found off Plymouth, in the U.K., eating a tiny plastic microfiber. The fiber blocked the worm’s gut, stopping the movement of copepods — its food source — through its body. Eventually this would kill the worm — though Kirby pointed out that doesn’t always happen with microplastic.
“In some cases the microplastics will pass through the animal or can be retained and eaten by another animal when the plankton itself is eaten,” says Kirby.
Widespread deaths of plankton caused by microplastic would certainly disrupt the marine food web. But their consumption is already changing the health of the oceans: Microplastic has been found in middle-ocean and deep-sea fish, which, like mackerel, are prey to ocean top predators, like seals or mahi-mahi. With each bite, plastic is moving up the food web, all the way to fish sold for human consumption in markets across the world. Kirby says scientists must urgently perform more research to gain a better understanding of the quantity and geographical distribution of microplastics in order to get a clearer picture of its effects on the oceans.
After my expedition across the North Pacific, Syberg took the plastic pieces and a chunk of the mahi-mahi’s flesh back to his lab in Denmark. He hopes to compare the chemicals found in the plastic with the chemicals found in the fish flesh to see if the vector effect had begun to act on the fish. While results of his chemical analyses are pending, he told me when I visited him in his lab a few months after our sailing trip that “I don’t even have to test the mahi-mahi and plastic to tell you that both of these things contain toxic chemicals.”
At sea, yes, we ate that fish. Just one more link in the chain.
As the wild population of red wolves falls to just 40 animals, captive breeding may be their last chance for survival.
April was a roller-coaster month for the world’s rarest wolves.
On April 21 the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C., announced that its female red wolf (Canis rufus) had given birth to a trio of adorable pups. Only about 220 red wolves exist in captivity, with the animals spread around the country among 43 institutions, so every birth tends to be cause for celebration.
Newborn red wolf pups. Courtesy: Museum of Life and Science
This time, sadly, there wasn’t much opportunity for joy. Just four days later, on April 25, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the wild population of red wolves had crashed to about 40 individuals, including just three breeding pairs. That’s down from about 120 wild wolves in 2013.
Why this sudden, precipitous decline? It all started in 2012, when North Carolina introduced a new state rule that allowed night hunting of coyotes, which are often considered to be pests. That put the wolves, which are a bit bigger than coyotes and have been known to cross-breed with them, directly in the crosshairs. Since that rule went into effect dozens of the animals have been accidentally — and in some cases, it appears, intentionally — killed by bullets, private trappers or poisonings. Others were killed after being struck by vehicles, an unfortunately side effect of their once-growing and dispersing population
The decline is now so severe that the Service’s report warns the few remaining wolves in the wild could be completely gone in as little as eight years. “The red wolf does not have the adequate numbers or multiple resilient populations needed for the species” to persist in the wild, according to the report.
The news marks a dramatic turn in the conservation of red wolves, a species which has already been saved from extinction once before. Red wolves nearly disappeared in the last century after decades of hunting by farmers trying to protect livestock. The final 14 purebred wolves were brought into captivity for a breeding program that started in 1969, and every red wolf that lives today is descended from those few animals. The wolves living in the wild, all of which are in North Carolina, came from that founding population and an experimental reintroduction program which began in 1992.
Now that experiment appears to be failing, leaving the hope for the species once again on the captive-breeding program.
“What we’re doing in the captive populations is more critical than ever before,” says Sherry Samuels, animal department director for the Museum of Life and Science, one of institutions participating in the captive-breeding program.
That comes with its challenges. Captive breeding, it turns out, is not as easy as just putting males and females together in the same enclosure. It takes a little more planning — and a fair amount of luck.
Life — and Breeding — in Captivity
The most important part of captive breeding, Samuels says, is genetics.
With such a small founder population, it’s essential to make sure potential breeding partners aren’t too closely related to each other. “You’ve got a pretty limited gene base to start,” she says.
As an example, she points to the two wolves that gave birth to four pups at the museum in 2017. The North Carolina museum has limited room, so all six wolves were transferred to the much larger Wolf Conservation Center in New York, where the parents had four more pups. “Those 10 offspring, genetically speaking, are identical. There are about 220 wolves in the captive population, so those 10 pups genetically make up five percent of it.”
Those 10 pups, once grown, will need to be found partners that expand the next generations’ genetic health. The Red Wolf Species Survival Program, which maintains the red wolf stud book and meets once a year to determine the wolves’ breeding requirements, shuffles animals among facilities in order to maintain future genetic diversity.
Other considerations come into play. For one thing, younger females may get prioritized as potential mothers. “The reproductive research is showing that it’s very important to try and breed these young females,” Samuels says. “Otherwise they may not breed when they’re older.”
Beyond that, some wolves possess rarer genes that need to be preserved in the larger population. “If you have some wolf that’s underrepresented, you try and breed them, find a good match and keep trying.” Even if those wolves become older, they may still be prioritized when the Species Survival Program establishes each year’s pairs.
Of course, picking genetics isn’t the same as choosing a mate. Sometimes paired wolves just don’t cooperate with their human-generated dating algorithms. “We had eight years, from 2009 to 2016, where we had a breeding pair of red wolves here at the museum but didn’t have pups,” Samuels says. That doesn’t mean those wolves will never become parents. One male wolf, which had been paired with two females unsuccessfully, was moved from North Carolina to a facility in Washington, where he had pups with his new mate the very next year.
“Some of it is just finding the right match,” Samuels says.
Space: The Limiting Frontier
Despite these challenges the red-wolf breeding program works. Samuels says about 20 to 25 percent of the paired wolves give birth each year, a pretty good success rate for such an endangered species.
But that brings up another problem. Outside of genetics, the most limiting factor for red wolves in captivity is simply lack of space. These are fairly large carnivores — slightly smaller than gray wolves — that require a minimum of about 5,000 square feet each in which to move around. “Zoos, museums and nature centers inherently have smaller exhibits compared to what they’d experience in the wild,” Samuels says. “We don’t have unlimited space. Last year we had a family of six living in an exhibit that was built for two, maybe three wolves.”
That’s a problem across the board. “There’s nowhere to move pups,” she says. “There’s no extra space out there right now.”
That’s especially true now that all pups born in captivity currently stay in captivity. Until a few years ago, some pups used to be placed in the wild to supplement the experimental population. Samuels says that cross-fostering program “was a huge success, and the first of its kind for any carnivore.” Unfortunately reintroductions stopped in 2015 while the Fish and Wildlife Service began to reassess the program, a process that culminated in last month’s bad-news report.
Health and Tragedy
Even if there’s no current plant to let captive-born wolves leave captivity, they are still managed as if they are wild animals. The facilities don’t engage in what’s known as operative conditioning, where zookeepers build relationships with their animals and effectively train them to take actions to enable easier feeding or health checks, such as coming to a fence or opening their mouths on command. “With the potential of release, that’s not a tool that we use,” Samuels says.
That does make it harder to do health exams on the wolves, especially the newborn pups. The pups were watched closely the first week after they were born to make sure they were gaining weight and they didn’t have any obvious health problems. “It’s just like with a human baby,” Samuels says. “Are all the parts in the right place?”
There is some risk, no matter how healthy the pups are upon birth. Pups could fall and hurt themselves, or an inexperienced parent could roll over onto them. Pups are also prone to injuries on their paws, which for the first few weeks of their lives have very tender foot pads that can become infected. In fact, two of last month’s three pups had sores on their feet the day after their birth and required treatment with antibiotic ointments.
The biggest goal, even in non-breeding seasons, is to let the wolves just be wolves and minimize stressful interactions. “You have to come up with decisions about what to do,” Samuels says. “There are pros and cons — if you go in and you treat the animals, you have to worry about the impact on the stress level for the whole family.” These are very shy animals naturally, she points out, so people going into their enclosure for any reason can be stressful. “It’s a constant balance of do we engage or not engage — and sometimes, really, less is more.”
Unfortunately red wolves experienced one more roller-coaster turn last month. One of this year’s pups, a female, died unexpectedly on April 28. The cause of her death is not yet known. “A necropsy, or animal autopsy, has been conducted and results are pending,” the museum wrote on its Facebook page. “While losses like these are difficult, they are not uncommon among red wolf litters.”
The museum has now closed its red wolf exhibit to the public in order to minimize any potential additional stress on the family. The two remaining pups appear to be doing well and were recently photographed cuddled together in a heart-shaped pose.
Ultimately, that death may be a bit of a setback to the program even beyond the loss of the pup, because keeping the exhibit open helps to drive support for the species. “How do we get people to care about red wolves?” Samuels asked me before the pup’s untimely passing. “They need to know about them, which means they need to see them having these pups here, where people can get excited about babies. Furry things are what people like. So we need to build the connection, the relationship, the understanding.”
A Powerful Responsibility, an Uncertain Future
What’s it like to work with such a rare species — one that would already have gone extinct without the hard work of small teams of people around the country?
“When I think too far ahead, it literally brings tears to my eyes,” Samuels says. “I’ve worked now with just about 40 different red wolves in my life. You know, there’re only 40 in the wild right now, and only 220 in captivity.”
Still, she’s proud of what she and her team have accomplished. “We gave them a habitat here, and they’re obviously comfortable enough to produce offspring. The museum has done something well and I’ve been part of that. That’s pretty amazing.”
She hopes to impress more people about the red wolf’s value, not just as part of a healthy ecosystem but as a uniquely American and North Carolinian species. “This is an animal that’s been here for a long time and deserves under our laws, let alone our ethical responsibility, to move forward and be protected,” she says.
Meanwhile, she discounts often-repeated criticism that too many red wolves have hybridized with coyotes and therefore the species isn’t worth saving. “If you look at the scientific papers there really isn’t much debate over the fact that this is an entity worth of protection,” she says.
As for what comes next, that’s a big question. “My hope for the future is that we can get new institutions on board really quick so we’ll have more space for red wolves,” Samuels says. She’s also hopeful that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will “step up their game and do more to protect and recover the species, to do their job better both in captivity and in the wild.”
She adds that individuals can also play a big role in that future. She encourages people to contact their representatives and officials, some of whom have introduced bills to end the red wolf reintroduction program, to “tell that it’s important to keep these animals around.”
Samuels also suggests people try to witness these rare animals in person by visiting any of the 43 facilities around the United States that are keeping and breeding red wolves, most of which are open to the public.
That’s potentially more important now than ever. “If you get a chance to see them, you’re looking at something not many people have seen,” she says. “And if things don’t go well,” she adds, “they might not be here in the future.”
Demand for organic food is growing, but corporations are pushing back to keep consumers in the dark about what they’re eating, says food campaigner Stacy Malkan.
You may not know her, but Stacy Malkan is fighting for you.
For over 15 years Malkan has worked as a consumer advocate to make the products we buy safer. Through the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which she cofounded, she’s helped reduce hazardous chemicals in personal care products like shampoo, deodorant and makeup. Now, in her work as cofounder and co-director of the nonprofit consumer and public health watchdog group U.S. Right to Know, she advocates for transparency and accountability in the food industry to build a healthier food system.
The industries Malkan works to reform are large, powerful and protected, but her dedication and vision are supporting an explosion of consumer interest in healthier products and better food. At this cultural turning point, we sat down with Malkan to ask her about the current state of food — and what the future may hold.
So, what’s on your dinner plate today?
Courtesy, Stacy Malkan
Simple foods that work for a toddler! I buy organic as much as possible, especially when it comes to the grain products my child consumes in large quantities. I also try to avoid plastic food containers due to concerns about toxic chemicals leaching. For breakfast we often go with oatmeal, and a typical dinner is baked chicken and a vegetable, usually broccoli or asparagus (the only two vegetables my toddler will eat), or beans and rice, or pizza, which is always the most popular choice in my house.
Food defines us and our cultures in so many ways. Does that make it easier or harder to encourage healthy food production?
One of my favorite weekly activities is the local farmer’s market. We try to go every Sunday. They always have a live band and wonderful food that stays fresh for so much longer than produce I buy in the supermarket. So in a very tangible way, food defines my community for me and my community helps encourage healthy food production. But conscious eating gets a lot more difficult when it comes to eating in restaurants and other communal eating situations that rely on mass production of cheap foods, such as school food — although local groups are trying to change that. The community has a huge role to play in supporting healthy food systems and local food production, and we need to step it up.
Where do we stand at this point? Is our food system getting more transparent or are things getting worse?
There are many positive signs. Organic demand is growing across all demographics. The largest group of organic buyers is millennial moms, and most women in that age group haven’t even had children yet. Food companies are scrambling to meet the demand for foods free of pesticides and chemical additives. It’s a disruptive time for the food industry, and full of possibility for transformation. On the other hand, large food and chemical corporations are pushing back with mighty force — spending hundreds of millions on propaganda and lobbying campaigns — to prop up an unhealthy food production system that depends on GMOs and pesticides and keeps consumers in the dark about what they’re eating. So it’s also a dangerous time and unfortunately I hear many consumers and reporters parroting industry propaganda without questioning it.
Where do you think the most (or least) progress is being made?
Most progress: consumer demand for healthy food and the rising awareness about the healing power of food are unstoppable trends, and the smart companies are stepping up to meet that demand. Least progress: bad policies that rig the market in favor of chemical-intensive, unsustainable agriculture, and factory farms that are not being challenged with enough power. The good food movement needs to figure out how to become an effective political movement to create a fair playing field.
Speaking of propaganda, what tip would you give people to help them see past fake “experts” like SciBabe?
There’s an aggressive, condescending attack style common to the corporate propaganda campaigns to manufacture doubt about science and risk. The message is: “Don’t worry your pretty little head and keep buying our chemical food.” If people suggest you are ignorant, or try to shame you for raising concerns about our food system or insisting on transparency, ignore them.
As extreme weather conditions arrive, vulnerable people in migrating populations could find themselves at risk from sexual exploitation or forced labor.
The impacts of climate change could soon become big business for human traffickers, a new paper warns.
The rise in forced labor, sexual exploitation and other types of trafficking would be driven by many of the effects of climate change that are already well known and widely documented. Greenhouse gas emissions are making our oceans more acidic and destroying coral reefs, affecting communities’ access to fish and other food. Rising temperatures are causing the glaciers to shrink and contribute to sea-level rise, pushing people away from their homes. And intense heat waves and droughts are drastically impacting the livelihoods of farmers who depend on agriculture for their survival.
Collectively, these climate impacts have already started causing an increase in human migration, making people more vulnerable to trafficking, says the paper’s author, Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Law at Columbia University. “There’s no question that climate change will make things worse,” he says.
Gerrard’s work builds upon previous research. One paper, published in 2010, predicted that there could be as many as 250 million “climate refugees” by 2050. Another study in 2016 warned that by the end of the century climate change would force one-eighth of the world’s population — as many as 1.4 billion people, largely from the tropics — to migrate more than 620 miles from their current homes. Some of these “climate migrants,” finding themselves desperate for security and work, could become victims of human trafficking, the paper says.
Gerrard started thinking about this subject after attending a conference on human trafficking in the Vatican City in 2016. At the time he had been working with the Republic of the Marshall Islands, one of the island nations most vulnerable to climate change, to address legal issues that would arise if an entire nation went underwater. In the Marshall Islands, there was already evidence that people were moving as a result of rising sea levels. Seeing this connection between migration and climate inspired Gerrard to look at the link between climate change and trafficking.
Climate change, he writes in the paper, can cause populations to move in many ways, although it’s difficult to isolate it as the sole cause of human migration. In many cases ethnic or religious conflict adds pressure on people to leave. Gerrard notes that extreme flooding, water shortages, and desertification are the factors most likely to galvanize people to move. Sea-level rise, too, will force a population to abandon their land when it starts to go underwater.
Among these people who move, those are the most poor and vulnerable could fall victim to human trafficking and become subject to sexual exploitation or forced labor. This already happens in many places around the world. Studies have shown that trafficking has increased in the aftermath of natural disasters such as cyclones, flooding, earthquakes and tsunamis — which are likely to become more intense due to the effects of climate change. These people are often the most powerless and do not have the ability to lobby for their own protection, and are “often in the back of the line for governmental attention,” says Gerrard.
And although countries where climate change is already causing displacement — such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines — may be aware of the issue, Gerrard says they may not have the resources to help those who are the most vulnerable. “These countries are almost invariably extremely poor with few governmental resources, so awareness doesn’t necessarily lead to prevention,” he says.
Geoffrey Dabelko, a climate security expert at Ohio University, cautions against calling people affected by these crises “climate refugees.” “We want to resist the temptation for things ‘caused by climate change,’ because it removes the responsibility from the people who are actually doing the trafficking,” he says.
Dabelko adds that he feels Gerrard’s new paper is a good example of “thinking beyond the obvious for what climate change is going to mean. It has to be understood in the wider context of migration, human trafficking and movement of people in a warmer world.”
How can we protect these migrating peoples? Gerrard says he worries that international agreements and domestic laws might not be able to combat the scale of human trafficking as a result of climate change. “Unless there’s a corresponding dramatic rise in the governmental resources devoted to enforcement, we simply won’t have enough people carrying out the enforcement,” he says.
In order to mitigate the amount of trafficking that’s projected to increase as a result of global climate change, Gerrard says the world’s economies need to transition away from using fossil fuels, which will decrease greenhouse gas emissions and can make the impacts of climate change less severe. “That’s the single most important thing that could be done,” he says.
It’s also vital to improve the ability of vulnerable communities to stay in place so that they won’t be tempted or lured away by human traffickers. “If people have clean water and adequate food, they’re more likely to stay,” Gerrard says. Other adaptations can also help. For example, communities can build their homes on stilts in areas that have periodic flooding, making that those homes less likely to be destroyed.
Strengthening enforcement against traffickers could also mitigate the impacts. “Don’t go after the victims,” he says. “Go after the traffickers.”
Ultimately Gerrard believes that if world communities, leaders and international organizations act accordingly, the amount of suffering of those who are displaced due to climate change can be reduced. “This,” he writes in the paper, “should be viewed positively by everyone.”
Exhaustive searchers have failed to turn up the lost Algerian species Adenocarpus faurei. Could other plants in the region also be extinct?
A rare plant native to northern Africa has been declared extinct after an exhaustive five-year search failed to turn up any sign of its continued existence.
Known only by its scientific name, Adenocarpus faurei, this yellow-flowering shrub was native to the Oued Sidi Khaled valleys of northern Algeria, where it lived at altitudes of around 3,600 feet. It was first described scientifically in 1926 — which, coincidentally, was the last time it was ever officially seen.
1921 illustration of Adenocarpus faurei
That didn’t stop people from looking. Most recently, researchers from Algeria’s University Ibn Khaldoun — located in the city of Tiaret, near where the plant once lived — started a search for Adenocarpus faurei in 2009. They then conducted a thorough exploration from 2012 through 2017, systematically covering the entire forested area around Tiaret.
Their searches revealed a highly degraded habitat but turned up none of the missing plants, as they described in a paper published April 26 in The Journal of Threatened Taxa:
This survey was not successful in finding Adenocarpus faurei. Since the region remains highly influenced by human activities, with the extension of habitations, intensive grazing and pollution being of major concern the observed threats reinforces the hypothesis of possible extinction for this plant.
Researchers tend to be careful in their language, so they aren’t quite going so far as to declare this plant’s extinction definitively — but prospects aren’t good. Meanwhile, they warn that Adenocarpus faurei’s fate could be shared by other endemic Algerian plants, which have been understudied since the country’s independence in 1962. They write: “Research on these endemic, rare and localized plants is deficient and their conservation status, or even their existence, is not well known. In Algeria and the neighboring countries of northern Africa, several similar species may be extinct in areas that are poorly protected or even neglected by responsible authorities.”
The authors say the likely loss of Adenocarpus faurei should serve as a bit of a wake-up call. “These results present a reminder for the need for novel and up-to-date field data when generating conservation assessments of the rare and endemic plants of Algeria and elsewhere,” their paper concludes. “The protection of their natural habitats remains a priority.”
Eco-books coming out this month cover some of the most important topics on the planet — and give you some tools to help.
What do climate change, krill, energy development and public lands have in common? They’re all among the topics of new environmental books arriving in bookstores this month.
Frankly there are more environmental books coming out this May than any one person could read, so as usual we’ve tried to pick what looks like the best of the best. The full list — 15 thought-provoking titles — includes books for just about every reader, from dedicated environmentalists to history buffs to wildlife-friendly kids. You can check them all out below — links are to publishers’ or authors’ websites — and then settle down in your favorite chair or park bench for a month of great reading.
Climate Change:
The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet From Climate Change by Sheila Watt-Cloutier — The weather in Inuit territory has become what the local peoples describe as Uggianaqtuq, “behaving in strange and unexpected ways.” This memoir by one of the world’s most important indigenous advocates recounts her efforts to save her native land — and its peoples — from the destruction of climate change. It gets our vote for the book of the month.
Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know 2nd Edition by Joseph Romm — Yup, you need to read this book. It not only provides the science behind climate change in an easy-to-digest question-and-answer format, it also dives into the solutions. Buy copies for yourself and your friends.
Weather: An Illustrated History: From Cloud Atlases to Climate Change by Andrew Revkin and Lisa Mechaley — To understand climate change, you need to know what’s changing in the first place and how things have changed over the centuries and millennia. This book provides 100 snapshots into the history of our understanding of, and relationship with, our weather system. Revkin has been covering global warming since the 1980s and has provided some of the most essential reading on the subject, so this is another must-read for the month.
Philosophy and Climate Science by Eric Winsberg — Climate change, as Winsberg writes in the introduction to his new textbook, is not as simple as “1+1=2.” It’s real, but it involves complex work from dozens of scientific disciplines, and that make it hard to understand. Can exploring the philosophy of science help to connect the dots? (Hint: The answer is “yes.”)
A Thirsty Land: The Making of an American Water Crisis by Seamus McGraw — Using Texas as a case study, McGraw’s book proves that the United States simply isn’t ready for the next big drought or flood. This is a problem that’s been brewing for a long time, and climate change is about to make it worse. Gulp.
Wildlife and Endangered Species:
Trapped! A Whale’s Rescue by Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Wendell Minor — Inspired by a true story, this kids’ book shows how a humpback whale got trapped in fishing ropes and nearly died — until humans came to her rescue. A gorgeous, powerful book offering important lessons for readers of any age.
The Curious Life of Krill: A Conservation Story From the Bottom of the World by Stephen Nicol — Chances are you haven’t thought about krill in a while. Well, let’s change that. Nicol, a krill scientist, dives deep into the lives of these incredible oceanic species, reveals their importance in the food chain, and talks about how climate change and pollution have started to threaten species that have existed for millions of years. You’ll get a thrill out of reading about krill.
No Word for Wilderness: Italy’s Grizzlies and the Race to Save the Rarest Bears on Earth by Roger Thompson — The last 50 or so Abruzzo bears of central Italy are in trouble on all fronts, with threats including farmers, illegal hunting, diseases, and even the mafia. Thompson discusses the complex history of this rare subspecies — and whether or not they have a future.
Pandora’s Garden: Kudzu, Cockroaches, and Other Misfits of Ecology by Clinton Crockett Peters — Does the way we treat “unwanted” species like sharks or invasive species like kudzu really reflect the threats they create, or are we just projecting elements of our own psyches into these “misfits”? This is possibly this month’s most thought-provoking book.
Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature by Liam Heneghan — What do talking lions and wise spiders teach kids about the natural world? More importantly, does children’s literature contain the tools necessary to teach kids about heady topics such as extinction, climate change and deforestation? Heneghan explores the answers, looking at everything from Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter.
Energy (and the Problems It Creates):
Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes — Life is about transitions, and here the Pulitzer Prize-winning author explores how the world has transitioned from early energy sources like wood and water to coal and oil and now wind and solar — and how that history may reveal what to expect in the near future.
Fallout: Disasters, Lies, and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age by Fred Pearce — An exploration of eight decades of nuclear technology, the lives it has destroyed and the landscapes it has ruined. An important look back in an era when some people have proposed renewed development of nuclear power as a low-carbon source of energy.
Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West by James Pogue — Our final book this month is another timely, thought-provoking title. As armed-insurrectionist rancher Ammon Bundy tours the West talking about “range rights” and calling environmentalists “an enemy to humans,” this new book offers a firsthand account of the Bundy family’s seizure of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and digs deep into the roots of the anti-government militia movement. An important read for troubled times.
That’s it for this month, but there are lots more recent books waiting for you at your local bookstore or library. Check out our previous “Revelator Reads” columns for dozens of additional recent recommendations.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture killed more than 23,000 beavers last year. There’s a better way to manage our ecosystem engineers.
Each spring Wildlife Services, the branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture tasked with controlling problematic fauna, engages in a ritual as reliable as snowmelt or bird migration: It announces how many wild animals it killed the previous year. Although 2017’s toll, released earlier this month, is down from previous years, the numbers are still staggering. All told the agency eliminated 1.3 million native critters, including 319 cougars, 552 black bears and a whopping 23,646 beavers. That’s one paddle-tailed rodent every 22 minutes.
It’s no wonder Wildlife Services is particularly vexed by beavers, a species whose penchant for modifying its surroundings is surpassed only by our own. These relentless engineers gnaw down valuable timber, clog culverts, plug irrigation ditches, wash out roads, flood homes and even chew through fiberoptic cables. One 1983 study suggested that annual beaver damage approaches $100 million per year, a figure that has almost certainly continued to climb as Castor canadensis’s numbers have grown over the past several decades.
And beavers don’t just furnish us with ecosystem services — they also sustain a vast menagerie. From wood frogs to warblers, mink to mergansers, sage grouse to salmon, there’s hardly a creature in North America that doesn’t seek sustenance in beaver-built ponds, marshes or meadows. In North Carolina biologists are even mimicking beavers to create habitat for the St. Francis satyr (Neonympha mitchellii francisci), an endangered butterfly whose preferred sedges flourish only in sunlit, beaver-sculpted wetlands.
The conundrum, then, is this: What will it take to square beavers’ proclivity for nurturing life with their tendency to damage infrastructure? How do we reap their benefits without incurring their costs?
Last week I traveled to the town of Agawam, Mass., for some hands-on training in castorid coexistence. My companion for the day was Mike Callahan, founder of the nonprofit Beaver Institute. Since 1999 Callahan has installed more than 1,300 flow devices — pipe-and-fence contraptions that control beaver flooding without requiring trappers to kill the offending rodents. If you appreciate having beavers in your backyard but aren’t keen on snorkeling through your basement, a flow device might just be the solution you’re looking for.
On this day the conflict fell along a road: Beavers had wedged gooey wads of cattails, sticks and mud into a culvert, preventing the adjacent wetland from draining through the pipe. If the water rose too high, Callahan explained, it could wash out the road. To forestall that disaster, we assembled a rectangular wire fence, its sides 16 feet long, and pounded its posts into the mud at the wetland’s bottom. As we worked the vibrato screech of red-winged blackbirds and jackhammering of pileated woodpeckers attested to the pond’s fecundity. The completed flow device effectively surrounded the culvert, preventing beavers from plugging the aperture. (Other designs incorporate concealed pipes to keep water flowing without alerting rodents to the source of the leak.) While beavers would likely be tempted to dam along the fence, Callahan hoped its considerable length would discourage them.
“The goal is to end up with a truce,” he told me.
Callahan’s apparatuses might look simple, but they’re sufficient to thwart nature’s most tireless builders. In one 2005 paper, Callahan found that his culvert-protecting flow devices succeeded 97 percent of the time. Other researchers have observed equally impressive results. A 2008 study found that for every dollar the Virginia Department of Transportation spent on flow devices along the state’s roads, it reaped more than eight dollars in savings on road maintenance and beaver trapping — over $370,000 altogether. And beaver researcher Glynnis Hood recently calculated that a dozen flow devices installed in a wetland park near Edmonton could save Alberta’s government around $180,000.
Even Wildlife Services, beavers’ bete noire, shows fitful signs of coming around. In a 2013 review of various flow device models, Wildlife Services biologists acknowledged that “tools and techniques are currently available to integrate non-lethal beaver management into landscape-scale management plans.” Although the agency’s trappers have been notably slow to apply flow devices in the field, there’s reason to hope that future springs will bring lower kill counts.
“To keep every cog and wheel,” wrote Aldo Leopold, “is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” Beavers, the animals who double as ecosystems, are among our most important cogs, fundamental to the conservation of North America’s water, wetlands and wildlife. Here’s hoping our tinkering gets more intelligent in the years to come.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Bears Ears National Monument’s imperiled fossil heritage holds clues to understanding some of our most urgent questions about climate change.
One of my earliest memories is of extinct animals. I was three years old, standing among the dinosaurs at the Smithsonian Museum, and I was sobbing.
It wasn’t that the enormous beasts scared me, but that it was time to go. My family was visiting D.C., and I knew I would only be able to see these amazing creatures in books once we returned to Florida. To console me, my mother crafted a small Eryops from orange fabric. Even then I knew my cuddly new companion wasn’t a dinosaur but a strange giant amphibian that lived during the Permian, a mysterious time that predated the rise of the “terrible lizards.”
I couldn’t help but wonder what had become of all the real Eryops, not to mention the other bizarre animals, like the sail-backed Dimetrodons that shared their vanished world.
Years later I would understand the chilling implications of the answer: climate change.
When I was a kid, even the demise of the nonavian dinosaurs was an open question. Since then scientists have come to suspect that an asteroid probably finished them off at the end of the Mesozoic Era about 66 million years ago, although there’s evidence that other factors also played a role.
That “extinction event” was nothing, however, compared to the earlier one that ended the Permian Era over 250 million years ago. Colloquially known as “the great dying,” it was a time when more than 90 percent of all species on Earth were extinguished, including over two-thirds of land animals, most trees, and an astonishing 95 percent of the species in the seas.
If it had been just a little worse, we might term it a “sterilization event.” Or we might not be here at all.
If this all sounds depressingly familiar amidst the modern-day extinction crisis, CO2 swelling, melting ice caps, acid rain and huge anoxic marine “dead zones,” you may know why scientists are so keen to understand exactly what caused this particular historic apocalypse. The science behind the interplay of climate, ocean currents and the atmosphere is well understood, but the system is complex. The Earth’s biosphere as we know it now is moving into uncharted territory thanks to our actions. It would be helpful if we had a former event to compare to some of the markers we’re now seeing. The fact that previous events were natural, while ours is human-caused, matters little when solutions as well as probable results are being sought.
Stalking a killer 250 million years after the fact, though, isn’t easy. Rocks of the right age are often deep underground or have already been pulverized to dust. Still, there are a few promising outcroppings: the Karoo desert in South Africa, for example, or the Black Triangle in the Czech Republic, which, ironically, is now easier to prospect thanks to its forest dying as the result of human-caused acid rain.
And then there’s Bears Ears National Monument in the western United States, unique among the world’s fossil sites because its exposures document not just the end-Permian event, but an almost unbroken span of time stretching from 300 million years ago to 150 million ago. Written in rock, this chronicle reveals not only the worst extinction event of all time but the rise of life beforehand and the aftermath of its death.
Nowhere else in the world is the puzzle so complete — or so endangered.
When President Obama created Bears Ears National Monument, he did so not only because the land is beautiful and teeming with wildlife, although it is both those things. He also took into account its cultural heritage and importance to the American Indian tribes who hold much of it sacred. But there was a further reason, as outlined in his Presidential Proclamation, which was meant to protect it for future generations. Two long paragraphs of the short document are devoted to explaining the value of the region’s fossil riches and the secrets they can reveal.
And while there are fossils galore in the Bears Ears region, dating from the time of the dinosaurs as well as the much more recent Pleistocene, it’s no accident that it encompasses so much of the record of one of life’s greatest disasters, too. The scope of what could be gleaned from these rocks is enormous.
Now, of course, things are different. In December President Trump signed an order shrinking the monument by 85 percent. Inevitably, many of the most important fossil sites will lose protection under this plan. If those sites are subsumed by oil, gas or uranium extraction, the information they hold will be lost forever, along with their record of the sequence of events that led to the greatest dying the Earth has ever seen.
That may mean that we as a species are denied important clues about the consequences of what we’re currently doing to our climate and environment. We understand that what we’re creating is unsustainable, but exactly how unsustainable? Will it be just enough to make life uncomfortable, or bad enough to halt oceanic circulation, asphyxiate marine organisms and starve life on shore? Careful scrutiny of Permian fossils could provide the answer — not to mention a call to action.
Despite Trump’s order the fate of Bears Ears is not yet written in stone. Many groups have filed suit to reinstate protections. Eventually the fate of the monument will probably be up to the courts and public opinion. With luck Obama’s designation will stand. If that happens we will all profit from what we learn from the fossils. And the wildlife that currently calls the monument home won’t end up relegated to museums as examples of an extinction event we had the power, but not the will, to stop.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
For over 15 years Malkan has worked as a consumer advocate to make the products we buy safer. Through the 
Frankly there are more environmental books coming out this May than any one person could read, so as usual we’ve tried to pick what looks like the best of the best. The full list — 15 thought-provoking titles — includes books for just about every reader, from dedicated environmentalists to history buffs to wildlife-friendly kids. You can check them all out below — links are to publishers’ or authors’ websites — and then settle down in your favorite chair or park bench for a month of great reading.
