A new book asks, “Can we feed the world without destroying it?” The answers might surprise you.
The world needs to change the way it eats, not just as individuals but as a society.
That’s the message from a groundbreaking report issued last month by the EAT-Lancet Commission, which made a series of societal recommendations to help the world’s ever-increasing human population ensure its food security in the face of global warming.
The recommendations are all designed to accommodate a planet that is projected to contain 10 billion people by the year 2050. They include switching to a diet that’s low in meat and sugar but higher in whole grains, fruits and vegetables; cutting food waste; reducing fossil fuel use and emissions; and incentivizing small and medium farming.
The changes, the report said, would lead to a healthier planet and healthier people, while also helping the more than 820 million people currently suffering from chronic hunger.
Coincidentally, the report came out the same week as a challenging new book that makes many of the same recommendations, while also presenting some contrasting and complementary ideas.
According to Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?, written by food activist Eric Holt-Giménez and published by Polity Press, we already produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, and we’re gearing up to grow even more to accommodate the projected increase in human population.
All that food comes with multiple costs, including climate change, drought, water contamination, habitat loss and species extinctions — which themselves put the very future of food at risk. Holt- Giménez writes, “our greenhouse-gas-spewing industrial food system has entered a dangerous negative feedback loop. The way we produce and consume food is undermining our ability to produce food at all.”
So where is all this food if so many people are still going hungry? Holt- Giménez — who says as many as 2.5 billion people are hungry — argues that hunger is less a problem of production and more a function of our global food system and poverty. “People are going hungry not because of lack of food,” he writes, “but because they are too poor to buy it.”
Much of that poverty, Holt- Giménez claims, is actually caused by the agricultural industry:
“Commercial farmers don’t produce food to feed people: they produce food to sell on the market, where they compete with other food producers. Whoever can produce the most food at the cheapest price will have the most market power — power to flood markets and push out other producers. When smaller, subsistence farmers who are actually growing most of the world’s food go broke, they often go hungry.”
Perhaps more importantly, he writes, the commercial agricultural system forces farmers to grow monocultures for the global market, which doesn’t help anyone living on or near the farms themselves. “Farmers are nutrient-deficient,” he writes, “because they no longer grow a balanced diet.”
And much of what the world produces is never consumed. About 30 to 50 percent of the world’s food rots on the fields or in landfills, resulting in wasted water and energy and excessive production of greenhouse gases — which bring us back to the climate-change threat.
What’s the root cause of these problems? Holt- Giménez places the blame squarely on capitalism. The global food system, he writes:
“…is working precisely as a capitalist food system is supposed to work: it expands constantly, concentrating wealth in a few, powerful monopolies, while transferring all the social and environmental costs onto society. These costs are borne inequitably by women, the poor, indigenous peoples, people of color, the working class, rural communities — the most exploited and vulnerable.”
He calls this the “hunger-industrial complex,” a system that guarantees people will go hungry by refusing to address low wages and economic inequality.
On top of that, and in contrast to the Lancet report, Holt- Giménez argues that the world population isn’t going to explode by 2050. It’s more likely, he writes, to level off, which presents two problems for capitalism: “the specter of stagnant population growth and of communities too poor to buy the food being produced.”
So what are the solutions? Holt- Giménez says hunger and famine will only be solved by putting political power back in the hands of the world’s poorest people. In other words, it requires transforming the concept of food security into one of food sovereignty.
More broadly, he argues that a food movement could “catalyze society to demand the deep systemic reforms on which our collective future depends.” This would require linking food with other concepts such as climate justice, the women’s movement and the indigenous rights movement. That linkage would help address agriculture’s contribution to the climate crisis.
Holt-Giménez lays out a few guidelines for making this possible, including embracing the “polluter pays” principle, where food production will need to be responsible for its water and soil use and greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing livestock production and meat consumption would refocus the grain industry toward producing human food, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and allow farmers to diversify their crops. Providing farmers with living wages would also give communities the financial support they need while removing the incentive for overproduction. Finally, he calls for the dismantling of the world’s food, agriculture and chemical monopolies as another way to protect farmers and consumers.
Like the EAT-Lancet report, Can We Feed the World presents a challenging set of ideas and science and facts to back up its case. As Holt-Giménez writes, global warming threatens the world’s food, while the world’s food system threatens us with worsening climate change and ever-increasing inequality. The two publications may not completely agree, but they do present a unified message that immediate change is needed.
The unexpected announcement reverses a plan to move people out of critical protected habitats — and puts the nation’s amazing biodiversity at risk.
Some of the most important habitats in the United Republic of Tanzania, one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, could soon be inundated with farmers and livestock following a recent decree by President John Magufuli that orders relisting protected lands as village property.
This is a major reversal for Tanzania, a country known for its wild spaces, including World Heritage sites ranging from the Ngorongoro Crater and Mt. Kilimanjaro to the vast Selous Game Reserve and famous Serengeti National Park. Tanzania’s protected areas support an amazing array of wildlife, including some of the largest remaining elephant and lion populations in Africa and the continent’s largest wildebeest and zebra migrations.
Udzungwa red colobus (Piliocolobus gordonorum) in Udzungwa Mountain National Park. This primate, an endemic to the Udzungwa Mountains, is already in danger of extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation from agriculture and livestock. Photo courtesy of Brennan PetersonWood.
In addition to the large and well-known national parks, Tanzania also holds many smaller forest and game reserves; in total this network of protected lands accounts for over 30 percent of the country’s land mass. These smaller forest and game reserves, while lacking the large and charismatic species or wide-open views that attract tourists and money, still contain many endemic species and subspecies. The geographically isolated nature of many of the forest reserves — like ones adjacent to a small conservation NGO we managed from 2016-2017 — means the species contained within are vulnerable to habitat loss. Many local species like the Udzungwa red colobus and Kipunji monkey are listed as endangered and critically endangered by the IUCN.
President Magufuli’s announcement puts much of this land, and the survivability of the country’s wildlife, at risk.
This threat wasn’t on the horizon for most conservationists. Prior to the announcement, the government had actually earmarked more than 300 human settlements where people have recently moved in and built houses for removal from protected areas. Some of these forest invaders have been identified as foreign nationals who settled in as recently as July of last year.
The president’s recent directive stopped the eviction of those settlements and directed ministries to begin the process to formalize them into villages. In his statement he also ordered “leaders in the ministries concerned to identify conservancies and forest reserves that have no wildlife so that the same are given to landless pastoralists and farmers.” He decreed that forest reserves lacking trees should also be handed over to farmers and directed an inquiry into changing a current law that prohibits cultivation of crops within about 200 feet of any river — a law that’s already often ignored, at the expense of the health of the country’s waterways.
Tanzania’s population is one of the fastest growing in the world and has expanded from around nine million people in 1961 to more than 55 million today. As the human population has increased, so, too, has the number of domesticated animals. The country currently holds more than 35 million heads of livestock. President Magufuli cited both growing populations as the justification for his directive.
The announcement comes at a time when protected areas and wildlife around the world are facing increased threats, including Brazil’s new president announcing increased Amazon deforestation and the loss of one of the last intact lowland rainforest ecosystems in Central America. Unfortunately the move in Tanzania has not received anywhere nearly the level of international attention as these other actions.
President Magufuli’s directive does compare, however, in its potential for destructiveness. For example, the order lacks any clear guidelines or determining factors for when a reserve would be considered empty and no longer serving a conservation purpose. Regulatory standards based on science are of utmost importance in these situations, as even seemingly empty reserves can still support populations of invertebrates, birds and other more difficult species to visually record. Many of the large charismatic mammals whose presence is often used to establish protected areas are migratory in nature and may only pass through certain areas infrequently. With climate change disrupting rain patterns across Africa, these migrations and timings are becoming more unpredictable and random than before. Habitat loss and fragmentation are the leading threats to wildlife with ever-shrinking protected lands becoming more isolated. This leads to increased edge-effect threats and genetic inbreeding among formerly wide-roaming species. While a reserve may seem empty of permanent occupation by large mammals, the land protected can still serve as a vital corridor linking other protected areas, particularly in times of drought or other disturbances.
Once under control of village leadership the previously protected lands will almost certainly be over-grazed and inefficiently and unsustainably farmed, resulting in the desertification of even more of the country.
Another particular concern is the statement that forest reserves lacking trees should be handed over to farmers. Most rural households in Tanzania cook over open wood fires, and both legal and illegal wood cutting already exist at unsustainable rates. Magufuli is ignoring the fact that reserves currently lacking trees became deforested through past illegal logging and grazing. Rewarding villages by handing over those reserves will most likely encourage further deforestation in protected areas.
A. Harvested firewood taken within the Wildlife Management Area adjacent to Ruaha National Park to be sold in the nearby village of Tungamelenga. B. Firewood being harvested just outside the protected boundaries to be used for home consumption. C. Stacks of firewood in the village of Tungamelenga, which will last only a few days, origins unknown. Photos courtesy of Adam C. Stein and Isacka Lemulebeli
Relaxing the law prohibiting crop cultivation within 200 feet of waterways will also have massive negative impacts on the ecosystems. Agricultural runoff, streambank erosion and overuse of limited water sources will almost certainly occur. Increased farming near water sources will also increase human wildlife conflicts as animals such as elephants, hippos and bush pigs frequenting those waterways will now come into increased contact with crops. Overconsumption of waterways is already a major driver of human wildlife conflict in Tanzania, with rivers running dry and forcing elephants out of national parks and into farmers’ fields.
This isn’t the only emerging environmental problem in Tanzania. The announcement comes on the heels of a project to dam the Rufiji River at Stiegler’s gorge in the Selous Game Reserve, a World Heritage Site, putting it at risk of losing that classification. Conservationists have expressed grave concern over the project, while economists point out that greater electricity production can be achieved through the expansion of already existing natural gas, geothermal, wind and solar.
Given Tanzania’s rate of human and livestock population growth and reliance on foreign aid, the president’s call to increase land areas for human activities is understandable. But Tanzania relies heavily on wildlife tourism, which accounts for more than $2 billion annually and over 12 percent of employment. Further loss of protected areas — which are crucial to the survival of both isolated endemic species and long-ranging mammals such as lions and elephants — will likely result in a decrease in the tourism income that is vital for the economic health of the country.
Simply delisting protected land is unlikely to achieve long-term results given the unsustainable farming and grazing practices available to most Tanzanians. Specifically, maize is still grown mainly by smallholders and medium-scale farmers using traditional techniques that have yields significantly lower than the potential for the land. In addition, pastoralists’ response to increased livestock deaths as a result of overgrazing and climate change has been to increase herd size to serve as a buffer against further losses, thus exacerbating the problem.
Notably, many alternative methods of increasing human livelihoods while simultaneously protecting sensitive species habitat and forest reserves have successfully been employed in Tanzania. Instead of delisting land, the government should invest in teaching better agricultural practices and income diversification, which would have lasting positive effects and still allow the protection of wildlife and habitat.
This is obviously still a developing situation, but it could become a disaster for Tanzania’s wildlife and subsequently its economy. It’s possible that the government could succumb to international pressure and reverse course, but any delay in strengthening protections for these forests could be what truly turns them into empty woodlands devoid of the life that makes Tanzania so special.
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.
Researcher Emily Francis explains how the coast redwoods and sequoias fared during California’s drought and what that means for future climate resilience.
California’s most iconic trees can live for centuries — but can they survive in a warming world?
Populations of the state’s two redwood species — coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) and giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) — have already declined by 95 percent since 1850 due to logging and development. Now scientists want to know how climate change and drought will affect them in the near future.
Many of California’s other tree species are already known to be at risk. The record-breaking drought that plagued the state from 2011-2016 killed an estimated 129 million trees, mostly in the state’s mixed-conifer forests that include trees like white fir, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, sugar pine and California black oak. The drought left entire swaths of the Sierra Nevada streaked with the sight of reddish-brown dying or dead trees.
California redwoods didn’t display as much obvious damage, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t impacted. Figuring out how and why they would be affected by future droughts and warming temperatures — and how they’ll resist the changes — remains an important line of questioning, not just for the trees themselves but for everything around them. The famous trees make for great tourist attractions, and also serve important ecosystem functions. They capture more carbon dioxide than any other tree and provide habitat for hundreds of bird species and everything from black bears and elk, to mountain lions and beavers.
“Old-growth forests are important to society for many reasons, but their worth cannot be measured,” says Emily Francis, a fifth-year PhD student in the department of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University who’s studying how redwoods are responding to drought and climate change. “It is humbling to consider the depth of their history and resilience as living organisms.”
We talked to Francis about her research and what the future may hold for these beloved trees.
What have you learned about how climate change is affecting redwoods?
Climate change has resulted in warming temperatures in California, which has increased the severity of droughts. Redwoods are adapted to environments with high water availability, so increasingly severe droughts threaten redwoods.
On the other hand, redwoods are also experts at utilizing water from fog or coastal low clouds. Fog supplies water through condensation on leaf surfaces and fog drip, which in some locations, can exceed water input from winter rainfall in a normal precipitation year.
However, access to fog water is variable depending on where trees are located — at high elevations, or at locations where fog is blocked by a mountain, fog moisture is largely absent. We expect redwoods without access to fog water to be more sensitive to climate change.
Stanford University researcher Emily Francis in a redwood forest. (Photo courtesy of Emily Francis)
How did redwoods fare during California’s recent five-year drought?
Coastal redwood forests suffered less mortality than the mixed-conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains, most likely because fog cover in redwood forests both moderated the exceptionally high temperatures and supplied moisture to redwood forests during the driest and hottest summer months.
But it’s likely that their growth rates and carbon uptake were still severely impacted. We’re currently measuring growth rates from tree rings dating back to the 1950s to study the effect of recent droughts on tree growth rates and to quantify the buffering effect of streams and fog on redwood responsiveness to drought.
Are there any differences between how climate change or drought is affecting the two tree species?
The natural climate conditions of coastal redwood and giant sequoia habitats are very different. Giant sequoias are endemic to the Sierra Nevada mountains, which is a much drier climate with no access to water from fog during the summer. Because of this, redwoods and giant sequoias have variable responses to drought, but both respond by reducing the volume of leaves in their canopy, which seems to be a very effective strategy. Both species suffered relatively low mortality rates during the recent drought.
For giant sequoia in particular, few individuals died during the recent drought, and many of those that did were trees that had suffered damage during recent fires. The low mortality rates of giant sequoias were in stark contrast to other adjacent tree species — in particular sugar pine and ponderosa pine — which suffered high mortality.
Visitors to California’s Sequoia National Park photograph the General Sherman redwood tree. (Photo by Linda Tanner, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
What do we still need to learn about how climate change may affect redwoods?
We still need better predictions of the impact of climate change on fog patterns in California to understand how redwoods are responding to climate change.
Current projections of climate change’s impact on fog are contradictory. Is it increasing or decreasing? On the one hand, long-term airport records of fog cover suggest that it declined over the second half of the 1900s relative to the first half. On the other hand, some predictions suggest that warming temperatures in the Central Valley of California could increase the coastal-to-inland temperature gradient, thereby resulting in more fog cover.
Finally, the formation of fog cover is dependent on a cold coastal upwelling zone off of the coast of California, which is also vulnerable to climate change.
What does the long-term picture look like for the health of California’s redwoods?
While temperatures continue to rise in California, drought stress in redwood forests is likely to increase. In response, the natural habitat of redwoods may be reduced.
Over large geographic scales we expect the natural habitat of redwoods to move northward, and over small scales within forests, we expect redwood habitats to become more confined to sites that have high access to water from streams and fog. Because of this, it’s important to identify and protect these redwood stands — especially those that are close to streams and in high-fog environments.
The removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River helped river conservationists reimagine what’s possible.
Welcome to the first edition of “Turning Points,” our new column examining critical moments in environmental history when change occurred for the better — or worse.
More than 1,000 people lined the banks of the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine, on July 1, 1999. They were there to witness a rebirth.
The ringing of a bell signaled a backhoe on the opposite bank to dig into a retaining wall. Water trickled, then gushed. The crowd erupted in cheers as the Edwards Dam, which had stretched 900 feet across the river, was breached. Soon the whole dam would be removed.
The Kennebec hadn’t run free here since 1837.
Those who advocated for the dam’s removal promised that devastated fisheries would return, and the city of Augusta would benefit from new recreational opportunities and a revitalization of the riverfront.
They were right. But it wasn’t just Augusta where change was felt.
The removal of Edwards Dam became a pivotal moment in the history of the environmental movement and river restoration in the United States. It was the first functioning hydroelectric dam to be removed — and the first time the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ever voted, against the wishes of a dam owner, not to relicense a dam.
But most importantly the demolition signaled a shift in thinking about how we balance environmental and economic interests — and that had a ripple effect.
“It was the first big dam that came out that demonstrated to the country that our rivers had other values beyond industrial use,” says John Burrows, director of New England Programs for the Atlantic Salmon Federation, which was a key player in the dam-removal effort. “It helped folks recognize that our rivers, which we’ve not taken good care of for several hundred years, could be a different asset for communities. And for society.”
Killing a River
Building the Edwards Dam was never a popular idea. Even in the 1830s there was concern that the robust fisheries of the lower Kennebec River would be wiped out. But the cheerleaders of industrialism prevailed, and the dam was built in 1837 to bring power to local mills.
The consequences were immediate.
The dam’s construction shut the door on the migration of nearly a dozen sea-run fish species that used to swim up more than 40 miles from the Atlantic Ocean in search of prime spawning habitat in the Kennebec and its tributaries.
“The river was transformed from being a thriving producer of millions of fish such as shad, herring, striped bass, Atlantic salmon, sturgeon and alewives and supporting a wide cornucopia of other species ranging from otters to eagles — into a wastewater drainage system,” Jeff Crane, a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Martin’s University, wrote in a paper published in 2009.
Within a few years, the alewife run on the Sebasticook River, a tributary of the Kennebec just upstream from the dam, was gone. Where once you’d been able to catch 500 salmon a season in Augusta, by 1850 you were lucky to get five. The state reported that the shad industry there was completely lost by 1867. And the sturgeon catch on the lower Kennebec declined from 320,000 pounds a year before the dam to just 12,000 pounds a year by 1880.
In the 1900s the river’s problems got even worse. The Kennebec River became a dumping ground for toxic waste from paper mills and municipal sewage. Log drives from the upstate timber industry choked the river’s flow, and declining oxygen levels from sewage caused major fish kills. By the 1960s no one wanted to fish or swim in the Kennebec anymore.
Brian Graber, who now works as the senior director of river restoration at American Rivers, grew up in Massachusetts and spent his summers in a family cabin outside Augusta. The Kennebec River of his childhood wasn’t a place to have a good time — or even to live.
“I think what struck me the most as a kid was that all the buildings in downtown Augusta were facing away from the river and were either boarded up or just didn’t have windows at all along the river,” Graber recalls.
But things began to gradually improve after the passage of the national Clean Water Act in 1972.
The state of Maine spent $100 million on water-treatment facilities between 1972 and 1990 to clean up the river and meet modern environmental laws. Improvements in water quality triggered a new interest in expanding river restoration. The Kennebec wasn’t hopeless after all.
But one hurdle remained.
Thinking Big
During the 1980s efforts to improve fish passage at dams and water quality in the river continued. Even though many environmental groups thought dam removal was the best ecological hope for restoring the Kennebec, few believed it was a winnable campaign.
“At that time removal of dams was a pretty outlandish concept and most people who we were interacting with did not see us prevailing,” says Pete Didisheim, senior director of advocacy at the Natural Resources Council of Maine.
The only other talk of dam removal happening then in the United States was across the country on Washington’s Elwha River. (The Elwha’s two dams wouldn’t end up being removed, however, until 2011 and 2014.)
In 1991 the owners of the Edwards Dam, Edwards Manufacturing Company, applied for a 50-year renewal license to operate it. The newly formed Kennebec Coalition jumped in to convince the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency in charge of the relicensing, to deny that permit. The coalition was made up of the nonprofits American Rivers, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and Trout Unlimited and its Kennebec Valley chapter.
“People began to not only imagine what dam removal would do for the benefit of the fish, but also what it would do for the benefit of the town if they had a functioning, free-flowing river running through it,” says Andrew Fahlund, currently senior program officer at the Water Foundation, who was working for American Rivers during the push for dam removal.
The coalition had a strong argument. The dam produced only 3.5 megawatts of power, providing less than 0.1 percent of Maine’s electricity. It employed only a few people and was aging and unsafe, having been breached numerous times. It blocked critical upstream fish habitat, including the migration of endangered sturgeon.
And a restored fishery would bring economic as well as ecological benefits — profits that could be more widely shared than those of the small company that owned the dam.
But taking down a functioning hydroelectric dam for the benefit of fish had never been done before.
“Initially the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff issued their proposal that the dam should be relicensed,” says Burrows. “It took our organizations doing a lot of work with some experts to actually demonstrate that the ecological values of removing the dam outweighed the power generation.” The coalition produced 7,000 pages of documentation on the impacts of the dam and the economic importance of a restored fishery.
At the same time, they worked to educate the public and earned national attention and the support of Maine’s governor, Angus King, who said that the removal of the dam would help the Kennebec “reclaim its position as both an economic asset and an ecological miracle.”
Dam proponents countered that removal would be too expensive and would cause riverbank erosion, bring more downstream floods and lower property values for those along the riverfront.
But in 1997, after mounting evidence from the coalition, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted to deny license renewal. It ordered that the dam be removed. People campaigning for removal were ecstatic, while dam owners across the country were shocked.
This was the first time the commission used its authority to deny a permit against the wishes of a dam owner. And it hasn’t been done since.
It wasn’t just the commission’s ruling that was groundbreaking; it was also the first time a dam was coming down on the main stem of a river and not a smaller tributary, which Graber says was a significant achievement. “It was a pivotal moment for us to build a national movement to take out dams,” he adds.
A crowd gathers on the banks of the Kennebec River of the breaching of Edwards Dam in 1999. (Photo by NRCM)
The battle wasn’t yet won, though.
It took another year for a negotiated settlement to be reached with the dam owner, conservation groups and federal and state agencies that managed to stave off the threat of lengthy lawsuits from Edwards Manufacturing Company.
Much of the funding for the removal ended up coming from Bath Iron Works, a downstream shipbuilder that was expanding its operations into prime sturgeon habitat. The company paid into the dam-removal settlement as part of its environmental mitigation.
The decision had far-reaching impacts.
“The success of this effort would serve as an example of what could be accomplished for other river restoration activists around the nation, thereby contributing to the dramatic growth of dam removal efforts and fisheries restoration projects,” wrote Crane.
A River Reborn
The removal of Edwards Dam in July 1999 turned out to be a chance for Augusta to rebuild its relationship to the river.
“Like most towns in New England of that era, their backs had been turned to the river for more than 100 years,” says Fahlund, who was on the banks that day. He remembers it feeling electric and the atmosphere festive — music played, commemorative T-shirts were sold and reporters from around the world showed up.
It was also, he says, a day of mixed emotions for some residents. The dam had been a piece of the town’s history for more than 160 years, both infrastructure and monument, but part of the campaign to remove it had been to counter the notion that dams are meant to last forever.
That echoed beyond the town limits. “Even though it wasn’t a huge dam, it had somewhat of a seismic impact on people’s thinking about dams that they’re not necessarily permanent fixtures in eternity on the landscape,” says Didisheim.
As soon as the dam came down, the river rebounded. Fish immediately had access to 18 more miles of habitat, up to the town of Waterville at the mouth of the Sebasticook River. Atlantic sturgeon began to swim past the former dam site, and alewife and shad soon returned. Within a year seals could be seen chasing alewives, a type of river herring, 40 miles upstream from the ocean.
Alewives returned by the millions after the Edwards and Ft. Halifax dams were removed. (Photo by John Burrows/ASF)
And with alewives coming back, so did everything that eats them — river otters, bears, mink, bald eagles, osprey and blue herons.
But the best indicator of the ecosystem’s recovery was the resurgence of aquatic insects like mayflies and stoneflies, which signaled improved water quality.
“They all rebounded and the diversity just skyrocketed,” says Fahlund. “And so we knew something great was happening and that it was going to lead to everything we had hoped.”
Within a few years the river began to meet higher water-quality standards.
“The water… is now that much healthier because it’s no longer sitting still and dead,” stated a 2009 editorial in the Kennebec Journal Morning Sentinel. “Instead, it bubbles and spills its way downstream across rediscovered gravel bars and river ledges, collecting and absorbing oxygen as it moves toward the ocean. The river is alive in a way it hasn’t been for generations.”
The benefits spread to the community as well. A park and trails were built along the waterfront. “People are out on the water, mostly paddling a kayak or canoeists,” says Graber. “The downtown is starting to make use of the river more. The buildings that have been redeveloped are now using the river as an amenity. The river’s really just come back to life both for humans and the ecology.”
Ripple Effect
The success didn’t end in Augusta, though. The removal of Edwards Dam ignited efforts to take out the next obstacle up-river, the Fort Halifax Dam on the Sebasticook River in Waterville. After eight years of work that dam was removed in 2008, further extending habitat for native fish.
“We have species like sturgeon, striped bass, rainbow smelt and other key sea-run species which now have access to all of their historic habitat in the watershed,” says the Atlantic Salmon Federation’s Burrows.
The breaching of Ft. Halifax Dam on the Sebasticook River. (Photo by NRCM)
The removal of both dams, in conjunction with active stocking of alewives into lakes and ponds upriver and in other parts of the watershed, has helped the river herring population rebound dramatically. The number of alewives returning to spawn jumped from 78,000 in 1999 to 5.5 million last year.
And the downstream estuary has reaped rewards, too.
When those billions of juvenile river herring leave the freshwater lakes and rivers, they head for the sea and may spend between three and five years in the marine environment. There they serve are a food source for everything from cod and haddock to whales and seals.
“They are really a kind of keystone ecological species for the Gulf of Maine,” says Burrows.
The river herring are also a valuable source of bait for commercial lobstermen, who in recent decades have had such a deficit in securing local supplies that they’ve had to turn to importing bait from southeast Asia, introducing a host of new environmental problems and costs.
“We’ve now got the largest river herring population on the east coast of the United States, maybe even on the entire eastern seaboard of North America, but that population could easily be three, four times what it is now,” says Burrows. “And so we’re continuing to work on restoring more habitat and we’re hoping to see those populations continue to increase.”
Didisheim says an estimated 27 million alewives have reached spawning habitat since the Ft. Halifax Dam was removed, and none of it would have happened without first removing the Edwards Dam.
The Edwards Dam also helped propel a large restoration project a couple hours northeast of Augusta on the Penobscot River. Conservation groups worked with the dam operator on the Penobscot to increase hydropower generation on some other dams and then remove a series of lower dams that opened up more than 1,000 miles of river access for fish, especially critically endangered Atlantic salmon.
While that project was being developed, its proponents could point to the Kennebec River restoration as an example of what could be achieved.
“The Kennebec River activists and city and state leaders did not have the advantage that later river restoration activists would have — namely, the Kennebec River restoration itself as powerful example of how quickly river restoration could work and how successful it could be,” wrote Crane. “This is the one reason that the Edwards Dam removal is so important; it showed other communities the process required and how successful it could be.”
A Movement Grows
Dam removals followed outside Maine. When the Edwards Dam was removed, about five dam removals were taking place nationwide each year. Last year it was 80. Since Edwards, more than 1,100 dams have come down.
Many of these have been small dams, but there have also been high-profile projects, like the two Elwha River dams that were the largest dam-removal project so far in the world.
The removal of the 125-foot-tall Condit Dam in 2011 on the White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia River in Washington, was a big step in aiding threatened salmon and steelhead. The Condit was removed because adding modern requirements for fish proved to be uneconomical — it was cheaper to remove the dam than build fish passage.
Overall there’s been a shift in public thinking about dams over the past two decades. “It’s not just something that conservationists and environmentalists are advocating for anymore,” says Amy Souers Kober, communications director at American Rivers. “Dam removal also makes sense for economic reasons and public safety in a lot of cases.”
That includes Bloede Dam on the Patapsco River in Maryland, where nine people have drowned, she says. Efforts to remove the dam there began in September.
Dam-removal proponents don’t think we need to take out all of our dams, and of course we couldn’t. The United States has more than 90,000 dams, and many still serve crucial functions. But where dams have been removed, the past two decades have shown the environmental results are unparalleled.
“There’s no faster or more effective way to bring a river back to life than taking out a dam,” says American Rivers’ Graber. “That’s why we focused on it for 20 years. It’s a win for environmental reasons, public safety and a relief from liability for dam owners.”
Ultimately, dam removals are much bigger than the dams themselves, says Kober. “Dam removals are really stories about people reclaiming their rivers.”
The gigantic Ozark hellbender salamander is in trouble in the wild, but one zoo — and a hard-working team — is helping to boost its populations.
The two-foot-long salamanders that live in Missouri go by a lot of different names.
Scientifically they’re known as Ozark hellbenders (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis bishopi).
More colloquially these massive amphibians have a few more colorful sobriquets, including “mud devil,” “snot otter,” “Allegheny alligator” and even “old lasagna sides.”
But if they could talk, some of the Ozark hellbenders living at Saint Louis Zoo might call each other by different names: Mom and Dad.
Saint Louis Zoo is the only institution in the world that’s breeding Ozark hellbenders, and they’re doing it well. Since 2011 their program’s parent hellbenders have laid more than 6,500 eggs that have resulted in the births of more than 5,100 tiny hellbender hatchlings.
Newly hatched Ozark hellbenders. Photo courtesy Saint Louis Zoo
That’s critically important, because the species isn’t doing well outside the zoo walls. Ozark hellbenders are admittedly hard to count in the wild — they’re nocturnal and live under big rocks in remote rivers — but the most recent estimates suggest that the adult population has fallen from about 27,000 just a few decades ago to around 600 today. That’s due to a combination of threats, including habitat loss, pollution, pesticides, disease, river sedimentation from construction and the illegal pet trade.
The zoo is helping to boost that number. Over the past several years many of the salamanders born in the zoo — along with more hatched from eggs collected in Missouri’s rivers — have been returned to their native habitats as juveniles. As of last October the zoo has released 5,792 juvenile Ozark hellbenders, along with an additional 319 eastern hellbenders (a separate subspecies).
Caring for these hellbenders is a heavenly responsibility. “To be part of a program that works with a relic species that’s been around for millions of years, and it’s right in our backyard here in Missouri, that’s just very special,” says Mark Wanner, the zoo’s manager of herpetology and aquatic species.
“I am still mind-blown every time I walk into this center,” adds Lauren Augustine, the zoo’s curator of herpetology. “They’re a really incredible species and a great way to connect us with the people in Missouri. Personally, I like how they eat like crocodiles.” Hellbenders, which have notoriously big mouths, eat mostly crayfish in the wild, but they’ve been known to chow down on just about anything that they can swallow whole.
The eating may be cool, but it’s the breeding that matters. Like many species brought into captivity, hellbenders require very specific conditions in their artificial habitats in order to live and thrive. At the zoo, adult hellbenders live in two outdoor artificial streams, each 40 feet long and 6 feet deep with plenty of rocks for hiding, plus another 32-foot, indoor stream housed in one of four climate-controlled rooms.
The indoor facilities are carefully adjusted to copy the ebb and flow of the hellbenders’ natural rivers. “We try to mimic the natural conditions as close as we can,” says Wanner. “We have chillers and boilers, and all year long the temperature is tweaked according to historical wild river temperatures.” They can also simulate rain events, adjust the water speed, and raise or lower the river at any given time.
But the real trick for successfully keeping hellbenders in captivity is the water itself — or more specifically, what’s in it.
“We think the golden ticket was paying closer attention to the total dissolved solids and ion concentrations in the water,” Wanner says. The addition of nitrates, nitrites, nitrogen ammonia and phosphates makes the water in the zoo’s streams much more like that of real rivers and that, along with the efforts to mimic other annual river conditions, has contributed to the breeding success. The number of fertilized and hatched eggs took off after the zoo came up with what Wanner calls “our recipe” in 2011.
It turned out the water used before that may have been a little too clean. “We’re still not 100 percent sure, but what we believed was happening was that the hellbender sperm was being damaged by the hard water,” Wanner says.
Hellbenders, it turns out, breed more like fish than other salamanders. The female lays a clutch of eggs and the male comes by and releases sperm (“or ‘milt,’ as we call it in the hellbender world,” he says). The sperm enters the water column on its way to the clutch, but if the water damaged the sperm it couldn’t penetrate the egg. Changing the composition of the water appears to have solved this problem.
Another important tool in the program is a series of artificial nesting boxes, which the males use to solicit a nest site. After the eggs are fertilized, the males stick around and guard them. “If another male tries to enter the next box, the male guardian will sometimes flight to the death to protect the nest,” Wanner says. “Usually it doesn’t end up that way. Mostly it’s a good bite on the head or the front arm and the other male goes in the other direction.”
The water and the nest boxes work well with each other. “We think that’s the combination of things that allowed us to have this success,” he says.
Ozark hellbender at two weeks. 2011 photo by Mark Wanner, Saint Louis Zoo
Of course, the hellbenders don’t do it all on their own. “The incredibly dedicated staff that meticulously care for these animals is also in the recipe,” Augustine points out. “There’s an amazing attention to detail. They have very specific husbandry procedures and being able to track and keep data on these animals over the years has obviously been very beneficial to the success of the program.” The team includes three full-time hellbender keepers, one more part-timer, a seasonal keeper and “a plethora” of interns every semester. It has partners at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Missouri Department of Conservation, not to mention the support of zoo veterinarians, nutritionists, volunteers and other aides.
“It does take an army to manage the program,” Wanner says.
Most recently that army has been witness to the program’s latest success: This past October a 7-year-old hellbender male — one of the first of his kind born at Saint Louis Zoo — became the proud papa of 39 little hatchlings. It was the first time a group of second-generation Ozark hellbenders had been produced by a first-generation, captive-born parent.
Wanner recounts the period leading up to the hatching. “It was a really rainy day, and Jeff Briggler, the state herpetologist — who is hands down probably the best hellbender biologist in the world — just happened to be here at the zoo checking eggs and we found a fertile clutch. It was what Jeff called a ‘yahoo’ moment. It was definitely a great day.”
Again, that’s important, because Ozark hellbenders face increasing pressures in the wild — climate change may be the next looming threat — and proving that captive-raised animals can go on to produce the next generation may be a key to the subspecies’ survival, both at the zoo and in the wild.
“I think that this program can safeguard us from any kind of tragedies,” says Augustine before she brings up a painful example. One of the hellbenders’ native river systems recently experienced a major flood, and surveys after the event did not turn up any remaining salamanders, meaning an entire genetic line could have been wiped out in the wild. “Luckily, we have animals from that river system in our collection,” she says. “That gives me the confidence that this program is going to save hellbenders.”
Meanwhile, the brood at Saint Louis Zoo is expected to keep growing. Hellbenders take six to eight years to reach sexual maturity, so more of the animals born at the zoo will soon start entering the dating pool. The younger females won’t produce many eggs at first — Augustine says that’s typical with many species of reptiles and amphibians — but the clutch size will increase as they get older, meaning the number of captive hellbenders could soon expand exponentially — as could the number of juveniles eventually eligible for release back into the wild.
Of course, the real proof of the program’s impact will come in a few years when we learn how the juveniles have done after release. Each animal is tagged so it can be identified as coming from the zoo if it’s later recaptured. Following those released hellbenders will reveal whether all the hard work has paid off.
“The first time we find a male that’s been raised here, released to the wild, guarding a nest with fertile eggs,” Wanner says. “That would be, I think, the culmination of success for us.”
New books hitting shelves this month ask if we’re doomed (or at least how badly) while laying out critical solutions to the climate crisis.
This month sees the publication of four striking new environmental books, at least two of which promise to make a stir.
Let’s start with the big one: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. The book lays out a pretty tough scenario, asking if the current extent of climate change means we’re already doomed. If the title and premise sound familiar, that’s because this is an expanded, book-length extrapolation of the author’s bleak, widely read and controversial New York Magazine article from 2017. Both the book and the article present a worst-case climate change scenario — warming and sea-level rise are just the start of the chaos to come, writes Wallace-Wells — and the book serves as a fright-fest and a call to action.
If you want to know more about taking action, or about climate change in general, try The Thinking Person’s Guide to Climate Change by Robert Henson. This second edition of Henson’s classic book lays out the science of climate change, illustrates how we know what we know, talks about the debates in politics, and lays out a series of solutions for people, politicians and companies. The previous edition of this book, by the meteorologist-turned-journalist, is considered a must-read in many circles.
Speaking of solutions, is one going to happen naturally? Just about every statistical model shows the Earth’s human population growing at enormous rates through the coming century, but the new book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson predicts the exact opposite. They argue that the growing empowerment of women around the world means the projected population bomb could soon be a dud. If the human population really does decline, the authors say, that could bring massive benefits to the climate and the planet — as well as a few growing pains for the people who live here. The book, likely to generate quite a bit of debate, explores the possibilities.
While most of this month’s books look to the future, it also helps to examine the past. That’s the point of Power Trip: The Story of Energy by Michael E. Webber, which looks to key moments in history to see how society has adapted to new energy technologies — and show how we can do it again. Along the way Webber writes about the potential costs of new technologies, the need to tailor solutions for different parts of the globe, and the requirement for public support of innovative new science.
The ancestors of the newly described Heath’s tick date back to the time of the dinosaurs, but climate change and invasive species could soon wipe the tick out.
Ticks have been making headlines recently. Whether it’s due to tick-borne disease, range expansion, or the emergence of invasive tick species — as far as most folks are concerned, ticks are bad news. And to an extent this is true, although only a small number of tick species actually threaten the health of people and their pets. The vast majority of tick species leave humans well alone and actually serve important roles in their ecosystems.
Unfortunately a few of these harmless ticks are teetering on the brink of extinction, including one that’s just been discovered.
Each year a team of conservationists from Zoos Victoria head out to survey wild populations of the mountain pygmy possum (Burramys parvus). These cute little marsupials live in alpine boulder fields on some of Australia’s highest peaks and are listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. While undertaking health checks last year, the team stumbled upon some small ticks riding along on the possums, and a few samples were taken and forwarded to my lab. I examined them, and their distinctness was immediately obvious. In conjunction with the team at Zoos Victoria, we have described them as a new species: Heath’s ticks (Ixodes heathi), which we named after the eminent tick biologist Allen C.G. Heath.
Mountain pygmy possum, Australian Alps collection – Parks Australia (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Apart from the fact that this is only the second endemic tick species to be described from Australia in the past 20 years, what was so surprising was the fact that Heath’s tick seems to survive exclusively on mountain pygmy possums above the snowline, a truly precarious lifestyle. It was for this reason that we realized we were not only dealing with a new species, but a critically endangered one. The tick is on the brink of extinction, as the loss of a significant additional portion its host’s population would likely spell the end.
So clearly Heath’s tick need protection — but why should we save a parasite? you ask. Well, unlike some parasites, Heath’s tick is a rather good neighbor to its host, and surveys have revealed no ill effects caused by it. That’s certainly a good thing for both host and parasite.
Heath’s possum tick is also unique. Its closest genetic relatives live in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, thousands of feet above the tropical lowland forests. This peculiar habitat preference suggests that Heath’s tick and its relatives may descend from a group of relic ticks from the time of the Gondwanan supercontinent, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and the climate was much cooler and wetter.
So what’s driving this unlikely duo toward extinction? The threat posed by introduced animals is a significant factor. Invasive cats and foxes hunt the vulnerable little possums, and feral horses overgraze mountain plum pines (Podocarpus lawrencei), which the possums partly rely on for shelter and food. Habitat loss is another major threat facing both species: The land they occupy is also ideal for skiing, which sometimes results in land clearing for ski slopes.
The most pressing threat to both species, however, is the danger posed by a warming climate. Both the tick and the possum are highly adapted to snowfall and the cool temperatures afforded to them by mountaintop living. A reduction or complete disappearance of wintertime snowfall could spell disaster for these highly threatened critters.
Fortunately help is at hand for the mountain pygmy possum, and perhaps soon also for Heath’s tick. Conservationists at Zoos Victoria are running a highly successful captive-breeding program for the mountain pygmy possum, and Heath’s tick may soon be added into the program. Such a move would help preserve one of many complex interactions within the Australian alpine ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, ecosystems with more complex interactions are generally more resistant to change, and collapse.
Bringing Heath’s tick into an ex situ conservation program would make it the first such program in the world — something other zoos would also do well to incorporate into future efforts. As we’ve seen with parasites like the Californian condor louse (Colpocephalum californici), not taking the conservation of these tiny passengers into consideration can lead to their extinction by the very scientists tasked with preserving the planet’s rich biodiversity.
For now, though, this new species remains at risk in its threatened alpine habitat. Only time will tell if Heath’s possum tick will survive or if this chance discovery will be both our first and our last glimpse of this remarkable little beast.
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.
Healthy parasites are one sign of a healthy ecosystem, but there’s a lot more to them than that.
Parasite. To most people, the very word is cause for fear or disgust — which is a shame, because most parasites don’t actually harm their hosts. In fact their very existence is a sign of a healthy ecosystem, as I discussed on a recent segment of the Green Divas podcast. We also talked about the values some parasites provide, what we can learn from them, and what we lose when they go extinct.
Listen in, below:
For more, check out the articles mentioned in this interview:
Alex Dehgan’s new book The Snow Leopard Project details successful strategies for conserving endangered wildlife — and helping people in the process.
In 2006 Alex Dehgan, then the newly hired Afghanistan country director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, was given a daunting task: to strengthen biodiversity conservation and create the first national parks in a country that had weathered three decades of war.
His first assignment was getting field biologists safely from the capital, Kabul, to remote, treacherous terrain to determine whether enough wildlife still existed to even merit establishing protected areas.
That was only the first in a long series of logistical and political hurdles to achieve the project’s goals.
To everyone’s surprise the team eventually found a wealth of biodiversity in Afghanistan — notably Persian leopards (surprisingly, found just outside Kabul), Marco Polo sheep populations, musk deer, and double the estimated population of snow leopards thought possible in the country.
Despite the land mines, bombings, lack of infrastructure and threat of attack, Dehgan says “Afghanistan was the easiest conservation job I’ve ever had.” Prior to his work there, he’d studied lemurs in Madagascar, helped rewrite environmental laws in post-Soviet Russia, and helped rebuild scientific capacity in Iraq. Compared to those places his latest assignment was a breeze, he says, because the Afghan people were so welcoming and invested in the process.
“The most important investment we made was in the Afghan people,” he says. “You have to harness human behavior, rather than work against it.” To that end his team helped piece together the funding, enhance scientific capacity, strengthen existing institutions and create new ones, where necessary, and empower people to own management systems of national parks.
Alex Dehgan. Provided.
Dehgan recalls how he had goosebumps as he watched the Afghan people assemble and seize opportunities to manage their own system of national parks. “This was about the people, protecting their identity, which helped us be successful in the face of difficult odds,” he says. The largely rural Afghan population understood, perhaps more than most, that human conservation and species conservation go hand in hand. “For them, natural security was clearly tied to national security,” he says.
Dehgan left Afghanistan in 2007, but his efforts ultimately led to the country’s first national park, at Band-e-Amir, that year, which the Wildlife Conservation Society documented was home to ibex, Persian leopards and Himalayan lynx, among other species. After that the momentum continued. In 2014 the 4,200-square-mile Wakhan National Park was established in a corridor of 20,000-foot-high mountains that connects Afghanistan to China and separates Tajikistan from Pakistan. The park encompasses the entire distribution range of Marco Polo sheep in Afghanistan and 70 percent of its snow leopard habitat.
Dehgan credits these and other achievements to the enthusiasm of a vast team of conservationists, from WCS Asia director Peter Zahler to Afghan officials such as wildlife enthusiast Prince Mostapha Zaher, grandson of a popular former monarch and then head of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency.
All of this was about more than just setting aside land. As the team laid the groundwork for the protected areas, they realized the snow leopard faced distinctive threats — notably, poaching and a lack of prey. Illegal trade of exotic pelts was largely driven by humanitarian military presence from the West, Dehgan says. One American soldier reportedly ordered 100 lynx and snow leopard comforters.
To collapse demand for exotic pelts, Dehgan and colleagues first developed an awareness campaign to make it socially unacceptable to own endangered cat rugs, bedding or coats. The team also went undercover to measure the illicit trade supply and demand, trained customs officials how to spot illegal items, and shut down wildlife trade at pop-up markets on military bases. The Wildlife Conservation Society even began training American soldiers about wildlife concerns, including illegal trade, before they were dispatched to Afghanistan. To Dehgan’s surprise Afghan fur-store owners, whose shops had been hurt in the crackdown, asked him for training to identify which species they could sell legally and without impact on their country’s wildlife.
Instilling pride in a region’s native wildlife is a powerful tool, he says. In the 1970s the international nonprofit conservation organization Rare created a successful marketing campaign that incorporated St. Lucians’ namesake parrot as part of their identity, featuring it on everything from billboards and T-shirts to local music and artistry. The parrot made a dramatic comeback, an example that long resonated with Dehgan and inspired his work in Afghanistan.
In addition to working toward a decline in poaching, the team took steps to tackle the other threat facing the snow leopard — a lack of prey, which led to conflict with farmers, including retaliatory killings, when snow leopards attacked livestock for food. Their efforts focused on restoring rangelands, which, Dehgan says, not only prevents desertification but also serves to better support a prey base to keep hungry snow leopards fed, thereby relieving stress on livestock owners.
The experiences in Afghanistan demonstrated the power of conservation to rebuild governance and diplomacy in conflict areas, which Dehgan says he hopes is one of the main lessons of his book. There are additional areas where it could prove a useful strategy, he adds. For example, one of the largest ungulate migrations in the world was found in 2007 in south Sudan, having persisted over 25 years of civil war.
“Conservation allows a way to reintegrate opposing sides, provides a common language around a new sense of identity, and brings in development dollars to support a struggling country,” he says. It also offers work options for former military in post-conflict areas. Dehgan suggests the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, or even former poachers could be retrained as park rangers or wildlife guardians.
“If we are in places to rebuild societies and reinforce rule of law, rebuilding identity is core to that mission,” says Dehgan. “It’s important not to see ourselves as apart from nature, but that nature is part of who we are.”
The deeply unpopular plan would benefit a few rich oil companies while threatening people, wildlife and the climate.
The Trump administration is barreling ahead with plans to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest refuge in the country and an area of global ecological importance.
Many refer to the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge — the very place where oil drilling is being planned — as the “American Serengeti.” A home for grizzly bears, wolves, musk oxen and a host of other species, the area is famous as the birthing ground for the enormous Porcupine caribou herd, which each spring floods across the refuge’s coastal plain in the tens of thousands, arriving in time to raise newborn calves amid fresh tundra grasses. The coastal plain is also the annual destination for millions of migrating birds, who come from nearly every continent on Earth to raise the next generation of swans, terns and over 200 other species. In late summer these avian visitors disperse to backyards, beaches and wetlands across the planet.
Photo: Steve Hillebrand/USFWS
Drilling on the Arctic Refuge has long been opposed by most Americans. Among the staunchest opponents of drilling are indigenous people in northern Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, whose cultures and diets are entwined with the Porcupine herd. They include the Gwich’in people of northern Alaska, who have lived in the Arctic for millennia and reside alongside the Arctic Refuge. Their name for the coastal plain is Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, or “the Sacred Place Where Life Begins,” a name reflecting the shared destiny of the caribou and the people. For the Gwich’in and others, fighting against drilling is a cultural imperative and a civil-rights issue.
The refuge has another cultural relevance: It’s a unique part of American conservation history. President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1960 protection of the area followed decades of research and advocacy by some of the tallest figures in American conservation, including Mardy and Olaus Murie, Bob Marshall and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, among many others. These proponents held that the northeastern corner of Alaska should remain as one of America’s last truly wild places, to benefit future generations and the land itself. Informed by the predator-prey research of Olaus Murie and disappointed by a trend toward development in the national parks, advocates pressed for a version of preservation that excluded roads, facilities and interference with predators or other natural ecological forces. They wanted to preserve wilderness.
Photo: USFWS
When Eisenhower’s order protected the area’s “unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values,” it marked the first time federal law specifically protected a thing called wilderness. As Roger Kaye describes in his book The Last Great Wilderness, the move was a precursor to the 1964 Wilderness Act, which the Muries also helped shape and which remains among our bedrock conservation laws. Later, in 1980, Congress affirmed the national significance of the Arctic Refuge by nearly doubling its size.
But to the current administration and its loyal allies in Congress, the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge is destined to be an industrial oilfield. Caribou, birds, native people and history be damned — to say nothing of the climate, which needs another industrial oilfield about as much as Donald Trump needs another criminal investigation into his presidency.
We arrived at this pivotal moment after Republicans, following decades of failed attempts, used the 2017 tax law to pry open Arctic Refuge protections. Led by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, they tacked a provision onto the law’s last page, in Section 20001, mandating drilling on the area’s coastal plain. The law even amended the refuge’s enabling legislation to include oil drilling as a purpose of the refuge. Absurdly, drilling for oil now stands alongside other refuge purposes such as maintaining environmental health, conserving wildlife and protecting the wilderness values Eisenhower singled out back in 1960.
The law also prescribed a strict timetable for drilling. It orders the government to offer a minimum of two massive lease sales in the next 10 years, with the first to be completed by 2021. Each must encompass at least 400,000 acres of the coastal plain and include rights-of-way for a tangle of pipelines, roads, airstrips and other infrastructure, all certain to harm the natural values of the refuge.
Designing those lease sales is the focus of the government’s work today. The process began with an initial public comment period last spring, which garnered nearly 700,000 responses that overwhelmingly opposed drilling. We are now in the second comment period, which quietly opened during the holidays and was originally scheduled to close on February 11 — a period mostly characterized by President Trump’s 35-day government shutdown. The purpose of the comment period is to gather input on an array of generally weak environmental restrictions proposed to govern the lease sales the administration hopes to offer this year. It’s all part of a fast-tracked attempt to transfer large swaths of the coastal plain into oil-industry hands before the 2020 election.
Comments have now been extended through March 13, but the shutdown also resulted in the Interior Department postponing a series of public meetings, which would have enabled people to learn more about the sales. Those meetings are now scheduled to take place this week.
Still, comments were accepted throughout the shutdown. Based on published media reports we know they already include recent objections from the Canadian government, the governments of the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and several Canadian First Nations groups, who all agree drilling on the coastal plain violates international agreements to protect the Porcupine caribou.
Meanwhile the government is expected to invite more public comment soon, this time on the impacts of seismic testing on the refuge. This destructive process, which will unleash convoys of giant “thumper trucks” onto the coastal plain, was previously conducted in 1985 under the Reagan administration. Monitoring a quarter-century later showed that more than 120 miles of ruts still scar the fragile tundra, their hard angles and straight lines intercepting the ponds and meandering streams of the natural landscape. Although testing was scheduled to begin next month, it has been slowed by evidence it may harm or kill denning polar bear mothers and cubs. Ironically, unseasonable warmth and President Trump’s chaotic government shutdown also slowed the process.
The Gwich’in Steering Committee, which includes Alaska Native people who grew up alongside the refuge and have been nourished by its caribou and other resources, are not laying all of their hopes on the comment period. On January 14 their representatives joined other indigenous people in Houston, Texas, to hand-deliver 100,000 letters pressuring SAExploration to withdraw its bid to perform the testing. The Sierra Club reports at least 200,000 emails, calls and letters have been sent to the company, the sole outfit to bid on the project.
The direct appeal to SAExploration reveals how resistance to drilling continues outside of formal comment periods — and it shows signs of success. Last month international bankers at Barclays responded to public pressure by announcing they are unlikely to finance drilling in the Refuge because it is a “particularly fragile and pristine ecosystem.”
Here’s the final insult about drilling in the refuge: It’s not necessary, either economically or for the energy it would produce. Fracking technology and decades of generous public lands giveaways to the oil industry have already given the United States undeniable global energy dominance. Drilling in the Arctic Refuge is an unnecessary excess, especially when we consider that the oil from far-off northern Alaska would most likely be sold for corporate profit to foreign markets, not to support America’s energy needs. All it would serve is to line a few companies’ pockets.
As the accelerated and sometimes confusing work to drill in the refuge moves forward, the time to stop this from happening — and prevent permanent harm to this extraordinary landscape — grows increasingly short. It’s also a reminder of the threat the current government and extractive industries pose to our vital public lands. This is an important fight for wildlife, for wilderness, for the rights of indigenous peoples and for the climate. The Arctic Refuge may be remotely located and out of sight for most Americans, but it should not be out of mind.
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.
According to Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?, written by food activist Eric Holt-Giménez and published by Polity Press, we already produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, and we’re gearing up to grow even more to accommodate the projected increase in human population.
Within a few years, the alewife run on the Sebasticook River, a tributary of the Kennebec just upstream from the dam, was gone. Where once you’d been able to catch 500 salmon a season in Augusta, by 1850 you were lucky to get five. The state reported that the shad industry there was completely lost by 1867. And the sturgeon catch on the lower Kennebec declined from 320,000 pounds a year before the dam to just 12,000 pounds a year by 1880.
Let’s start with the big one: 
Dehgan and his colleagues’ arduous efforts, chronicled in his new book 
