Amur Leopard Population Triples — to 103

Thanks to protective efforts in Russia, these critically endangered big cats have renewed hope of avoiding extinction.

Just a few years ago, the Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) appeared to be on the fast track to extinction. Surveys conducted in 2000 revealed that only about 30 of these critically endangered big cats remained in the forests of southwestern Russia, with just two more across the border in China. With poaching and habitat loss still so rampant at the time, saving the species appeared to be a “mission impossible,” says ecologist Yury Darman, senior advisor to WWF-Russia’s Amur branch.

In fact the situation was so bad that many conservationists felt drastic steps needed to be taken. The only question was which drastic measure to take. “In 2001, during the International Workshop on Conservation of the Far Eastern Leopard in Vladivostok, many scientists and state authorities seriously proposed to catch the last wild 30 Amur leopards to ensure their survival in captivity,” Darman says. That would have protected the cats from poaching and other threats while laying the groundwork for breeding and future reintroduction efforts.

Instead, another dramatic option emerged. WWF started a campaign called “Save each of the survivors” in the hopes of halting leopard poaching and gaining support for the cats amongst local people. Meanwhile the Russian government, encouraged by the conservation organization and spearheaded by former vice-minister of the Russian Federation Sergey Ivanov, laid the groundwork to create a massive protected area for the big cats. That effort proved to be contentious, but it eventually led to the 2012 establishment of Land of the Leopard National Park — about 647,000 acres of prime leopard habitat where the animals could live and breed in safety.

All of those efforts have now paid off. Land of the Leopard National Park announced this month that the population of Amur leopards within its borders has increased to 84 adults and 19 cubs or adolescents. This is a dramatic increase over the 57 leopards counted in the national park in 2015 and the first time in decades that the Amur leopard population has exceeded 100 animals.

Darman credited hard work by “enthusiastic NGOs, scientists and really responsible state authorities” for achieving the tripling of the wild Amur leopard population in under 20 years.

Most of that increase is natural growth due to the removal of the pressures that had been causing the cats’ decline, but some of it is also probably due to improved scientific methods for monitoring the population. It’s hard to count leopards under the best of circumstances, and the solitary cats are scattered across a huge amount of territory. Early attempts to establish population sizes relied on counting their paw prints in the snow. Different scientific teams have used different methods to calculate population size, meaning the number of leopards in 2001 could have been between 30 and 44. Even with that possible range in population size, Darman points out that the subspecies was “at the edge of extinction.”

Today we have not only more cats to count, but also more accurate counting methods. The national park now has a network of 400 camera traps placed across 890,000 acres of leopard habitat. Scientists can now compare the photos, looking for each cat’s unique fur patterns, to come up with the new population count. The new numbers were calculated from all of the pictures taken in 2017.

“The increase is really, really exciting,” says John Goodrich, senior tiger program director for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, who has studied Amur leopards but was not involved with the new counts. “It speaks to strong conservation efforts and strong government commitment.” He credits Russian actions such as the 2016 establishment of a 1,500-foot tunnel under a major highway, an important effort which has improved Amur leopard migration. In addition the park has enabled increased anti-poaching patrolling and reforestation of areas previously grazed by livestock.

Meanwhile the population of leopards across the border in China also appears to be increasing slightly. Although a spokesperson for Land of the Leopard National Park told me that the population numbers outside of Russia are “only speculations,” a paper published last year by Chinese and American researchers estimated that 5-7 leopards live on the Sino side of the border. The same paper counted 31 leopards that crossed the border between the two countries. “Depending on conditions each year, a different number of leopards can use the Chinese side of border, and we need data from both sides,” says Darman. He credits several factors with the growing number of leopards in China, including the establishment of three protected areas and a snare-removal campaign that collected traps set by poachers. China is also enhancing its own camera-trap network, and Darman says the two countries will compare their data in the next couple of months.

Of course, Amur leopards aren’t completely out of the woods. They’re still one of the world’s most endangered big cats — only Iran’s Asiatic cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), with a population of just 50, are rarer in the wild today — and the snow-covered national park already contains about as much prey as it can support, so getting the population to grow still further could be a challenge. Still, as Darman says, the subspecies “has stepped out from the edge of extinction.” That’s a success worth celebrating.

Previously in The Revelator:

While Mexico Plays Politics With Its Water, Some Cities Flood and Others Go Dry

In many Mexican cities, water is treated as a political bargaining chip – a favor that public officials can trade for votes, bribes or power.

By Veronica Herrera, University of Connecticut

When Cape Town acknowledged in February that it would run out of water within months, South Africa suddenly became the global poster child for bad water management. Newspapers revealed that the federal government had been slow to respond to the city’s three-year drought because the mayor belongs to an opposition party.

Cape Town is not alone. While both rich and poor countries are drying out, the fast-growing cities of the developing world are projected to suffer the most acute shortages in coming years.

Scarcity turns water into a powerful political bargaining chip. From Delhi to Nairobi, its oversight is fraught with inequality, corruption and conflict.

Mexico, too, has seen its water fall prey to cronyism in too many cities. I interviewed 180 engineers, politicians, business leaders and residents in eight Mexican cities for my book on politics and water. I was startled to discover that Mexican officials frequently treat water distribution and treatment not as public services but as political favors.

When thunderstorms are cause for panic

Nezahualcoyotl is a city in Mexico State near the nation’s sprawling capital. Just after lunch one Friday afternoon in 2008, Pablo, an engineer, was showing me around town when news of an unexpected thunderstorm began lighting up his team’s cell phones and pagers.

The engineers shouted back and forth, looking increasingly frantic. Having just begun my book research, I did not yet understand why an everyday event like a thunderstorm would elicit such panic.

Pablo explained that Nezahualcoyotl’s aged electric grid often failed during big storms and that the city lacked backup generators. If a power outage shut down the local sanitation treatment plant, raw sewage would flood the streets.

These “aguas negras” carry nasty bacteria, viruses and parasitic organisms and can cause cholera, dysentery, hepatitis and severe gastroenteritis. If raw sewage also contains industrial wastewater – which is common in rapidly industrializing countries like Mexico – it may also expose residents to chemicals and heavy metals that can lead to everything from lead poisoning to cancer.

Pablo and his colleagues avoided a flood that day. But I later read news articles confirming how relatively common sewage overflows are there. Nezahualcoyotl residents have been dealing with this multisystem failure for 30 years, complaining of gastrointestinal illness and skin lesions all the while.

So why hasn’t this public health emergency been fixed? The answer is a primer on the tricky politics of urban water delivery in Mexico.

Profit from dysfunction

Public malfeasance in Mexico is widespread. Nearly 90 percent of citizens see the state and federal government as corrupt, according to the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

The country’s water situation, too, is pretty dire. The capital, Mexico City, is “parched and sinking,” according to a powerful 2017 New York Times report, and 81 percent of residents say they don’t drink from the tap, either because they lack running water or they don’t trust its quality.

Officially, nearly all Mexicans have access to running water. But in practice, many – particularly poorer people – have intermittent service and very low pressure.

Workers in one city asked me to keep their identity anonymous before explaining why the water infrastructure there was so decrepit. It wasn’t a lack of technology, they said. The mayor’s team actually profits from refusing to upgrade the city’s perpetually defunct hardware. That’s because whenever a generator or valve breaks, they send it to their buddies’ refurbishing shops.

Numerous engineers across Mexico similarly expressed frustration that they were sometimes forbidden from making technical fixes to improve local water service because of a mayor’s “political commitments.”

In Nezahualcoyotl, I met a water director who openly boasted of using public water service for his political and personal gain. In the same breath, he told me that he fought to keep water bills low in this mostly poor city because water was a “human right” but also that he had once turned off supplies to an entire neighborhood for weeks because of a feud with another city employee.

No voter ID, no water

Public officials also use water to influence politics.

My sources also alleged that the powerful Revolutionary Institutional Party, or PRI – which has long run Mexico State, and thus controlled its water supply – has turned off the water in towns whose mayors belonged to opposition parties. These tactics are not reported in the Mexican press, but according to my research the cuts tend to occur just before municipal elections – a bid to make the PRI’s political competition look bad.

Water corruption isn’t limited to Mexico State, or to the center-right PRI party.

The millions of Mexicans who lack reliable access to piped water are served by municipal water trucks, called “pipas,” which drive around filling buildings’ cisterns. This system seems prone to political exploitation.

Interviewees told me that city workers sometimes make people show their voter ID cards, demonstrating their affiliation to the governing party, before receiving their water. Across the country, mayoral candidates chase votes by promising to give residents free or subsidized water service, rather than to charge based on consumption.

The phenomenon of trading water as a political favor is probably more common in lower income communities, which rely almost exclusively on the pipas.

Water is a state secret

In Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz state, I saw how water can hold a different kind of political power.

There, I found, the location of underground pipes and other critical water infrastructure was guarded like a state secret, known by just a handful of public workers. It made them irreplaceable.

So when customers complained that some municipal employees were asking for bribes to provide water, management hesitated to fire them. The workers controlled valuable information about the city’s water system.

Water may be a human right. But when politicians manipulate it for their personal or political benefit, some cities flood while others go dry.

Veronica Herrera, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Connecticut

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

What Is Acoustic Ecology? We Have 5 Questions

David Dunn says we can learn a lot about nature by listening to it — and in some cases, even use sound to heal the natural world.

The sound of ants communicating with each other by scraping their legs on their bodies.

The echoes under the surface of a small freshwater pond.

The sound of a pine forest dying.

These are just a few of the sounds David Dunn has investigated in his decades as a composer, musician, acoustic ecologist and audio engineer. His compositions, soundscapes and other projects fuse art and science, inviting us to pay close attention to nonhuman activities and environments that usually pass beneath our notice.

Recently Dunn has applied his bioacoustical research to the problem of dying pine forests. For almost two decades, pine trees across the American west have been decimated by bark beetles, whose populations have exploded due to warming temperatures. The beetles have destroyed over 45 millions of acres of pine trees, disrupting ecosystems and altering landscapes — and they show no signs of stopping. Dunn and his collaborators have been awarded a patent for technology and protocol that uses sound to disrupt key behaviors and life stages of bark beetles to slow the devastation of pine forests.

The Revelator asked him about his approach to the art and science of acoustical ecology.

What are you listening to today?

It probably sounds odd for a composer to say that as I’ve gotten older, my listening habits have moved away from intentionally listening to music. Obviously, I listen to my own work when I’m working on it but beyond that I don’t find listening to other music as useful or as interesting as I used to. I still enjoy it but it doesn’t fulfill the kind of purpose, for myself, that it seems to for other people: emotional/intellectual stimulation, setting a mood, background ambience, etc. It’s mostly become too familiar to have that kind of effect upon me. Instead I spend more time seeking out complex soundscapes and auditory phenomena in the world that are novel or in constructing sounds that are unfamiliar and unpredictable.

What came first for you, music or the sounds of nature? Or are they the same thing?

I believe that the sounds of nature come first for all of us and that music is something that we learn to differentiate from those natural sounds through cultural influence. We are all very sensitive to the vibratory substrate of our mother’s womb, and that is, most likely, the initial patterning that allows us to make sense of both the sounds of the natural world and what we later come to regard as music. The sounds and rhythms of our mother’s physiology are so similar to those of the other living things around us and to those of musical expressions in many traditional cultures. What also seems possible is that we learn to perceive these patterns in utero as we revisit the evolutionary stages of life that we pass through: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

David Dunn at work in his Environmental Sound Lab. Photo by Richard Hofstetter. Used with permission.

What do you hope listeners learn or take away from your compositions?

It is probably different for every composition or project. However, they may all share the aspect that, aside from the plethora of other cultural uses that music has been put to, music exhibits a few critical epigenetic characteristics. It is obviously an important force for creating social identity and cohesion, but I also think it’s a primary way that we actually evolve the sensitivity and capacities of our aural sense. Furthermore, it may be a strategy for conserving ways of communicating with the nonhuman world that we share with other forms of life. One aspect of that is my belief that music (and dance) is one of the only ways in which we can express our experience of “time” in a manner that is not purely abstract.

How do your artistic sensibilities help you to approach things from a scientific perspective?

Artists and scientists bring something significant to each other when they take the time to truly understand how the jobs of art and science are different and that we usually need to admit that they are each much larger than our prosaic assumptions tell us. Science seeks to understand and describe essential mechanisms in nature through a rigorous rational process. Art seeks to understand and describe the world through perceptual processes and a greater reliance upon the human gift of imagination. Serious problems arise when these two domains lose sight of each other. Gregory Bateson said it best: “Rigor alone is paralytic death, imagination alone is insanity.”

What advice would you give to other artists and scientists to help them collaborate?

Too often the attempt to create a substantial interdisciplinary collaboration between art and science has been stuck in an abstract and largely philosophical discourse. My experience has been that this problem can be transcended by involving practitioners who are willing to get into the trenches together and try to address real-world problems. However, this is only possible when each side of this process has realistic expectations, remains open to discovery, and maintains true respect for how these processes are both distinct and complementary.

Is Earth Day Off Its Axis?

This year’s theme is “end plastic pollution.” That misses the point made by Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson.

Earth Day is the largest civic-focused day of action in the world — a global event with more than an estimated 1 billion people in 192 countries raising awareness of environmental issues. But would the founder of Earth Day be happy at the current state of this worldwide day of recognition?

The goal of Earth Day 2018 is to mobilize the world to “End Plastic Pollution.” The National Geographic Society estimates there are over 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating around our oceans. That’s 10 times more than all the stars in our galaxy. In addition to the plastic toys, chairs and other objects we purchase, an average American consumes over his or her lifetime an estimated 44,300 plastic, glass and aluminum cans and bottles of water, soda, juices, milk and various other non-alcoholic liquids beverages. Many of these containers don’t make it into landfills and end up on our roads and in our waterways.

Obviously, plastic pollution is an enormous problem for our environment, but does this specific focus ignore one of the overarching principles its founder was trying to emphasize by establishing this annual day of recognition?

The founder of Earth Day, the late U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), was one of the great environmental heroes of America. Drawing on his experience as the “conservation governor” of Wisconsin, Nelson’s success in bringing the environment to the forefront of Washington politics as a senator signified the beginning of an era of bold federal legislation, including the Environmental Protection Act, and the growth of the modern environmental movement. As part of his campaign to create a national environmental agenda, he made the case for the inextricable link between the global population and the health and wellness of our planet.

Nelson understood that no matter how much we may try to lessen the impact we have on nature, through recycling, conservation or lowering our consumption of resources, each one of us alters the environment in which we live.

Over time he became frustrated with mainstream environmental organizations’ retreat from advocating limits to population growth, choosing to focus more on safer, more visible issues like urban sprawl, traffic congestion, endangered animals, dam removal, clean air initiatives, forest conservation and climate change. In a March 2000 speech, Senator Nelson opined, “Will there be any wilderness left? Any quiet place? Any habitat for song birds? Waterfalls? Other wild creatures? Not much.”

Will we forget and ultimately fail in achieving Gaylord Nelson’s goal of forming “a new national coalition whose objective is to put quality of human life on par with gross national product?” Or will the Green movement that now celebrates Earth Day heed his wisdom and foresight and reignite an honest and forthright dialogue on the fundamental cause of all of our environmental crises — rampant, unsustainable population growth?

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.

From Foe to Friend: How Carnivores Could Help Farmers

Farmers don't like living near big predators like leopards, but new research shows the carnivores provide a vital ecological service.

By Sam Williams, Durham University; Lourens Swanepoel, University of Venda, and Steven Belmain, University of Greenwich

Across the globe, the numbers of carnivore species such as leopards, dingoes, and spectacled bears are rapidly declining. The areas they occupy are also getting smaller each year. This is a problem, because carnivores are incredibly important to ecosystems as they may provide services such as biodiversity enhancement, disease regulation, and improving carbon storage. And that, in turn, is important to human wellbeing.

But convincing people to conserve wildlife based on these indirect benefits can be challenging – particularly in the case of farmers. After all, carnivores such as leopards can pose a threat to livestock, livelihoods, and sometimes even lives. So interactions between farmers and carnivores have typically been framed as a conflict.

Farmers often overestimate these threats. For many, the response is to kill carnivores – even those that are not eating livestock. This is one of the main reasons why carnivores are in crisis.

This could change if people were aware of the more tangible benefits that carnivores could provide. Our new study showed that far from causing problems for farmers, carnivores could actually be beneficial by controlling rodent pests.

Rodents and carnivores

There’s a desperate need for farmers to control rodents because they destroy 15% of the crops growing in African fields. The most common solution is to use poison. But this can be expensive and can kill many other species. On top of this, rodents eventually become resistant.

We set out to find out whether carnivores that eat rodents were found naturally on smallholder farms. We set camera traps on land used for cropping in South Africa, areas used to graze cattle (which was less disturbed than cropland), and among houses in village settlements.

A cape fox (Vulpes chama) on a maize farm feeding on Gerbilliscus, a common rodent pest in South Africa’s grain areas. Lourens Swanepoel, CC BY

Infographic summarizing the findings of the study of rodent control by carnivores on South African farms. Sam Williams

Big potential

The idea to use natural predation to control rodents is not new. But to use mammalian predators to assist in biological control of rodent pests has often been neglected in conservation circles. As such there is great potential for carnivores to help farmers, but for this to work, farmers would need to stop killing them.

Changing these perceptions would take a lot of work. But efforts to change African perceptions about predatory birds, particularly barn owls, have been successful in some South African townships. Successful approaches to change community attitudes has often relied on education programmes through local schools. Bringing owls, snakes and other predators to primary schools can help raise awareness among children, who then go home and educate their parents, ultimately breaking down widely held superstitions.

If education campaigns could convince farmers to kill fewer carnivores, carnivores might just repay the favour by doing a better job of controlling rodents in crop fields. This could lead to less reliance on poisons, avoiding unnecessary killings and costs.

If successful, this could help farmers to save money, while working in a much more environmentally friendly way. This really could be a win-win situation for both people and wildlife, and it shows that interactions between people and carnivores on farmland can be much more nuanced and positive than the traditional image of conflict.

Finding new ways in which people and wildlife can coexist will be essential to lessen the impact of the growing human population on the ecosystems on which humans depend.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Surprising Ways Tigers Benefit Farmers and Livestock Owners

Operating Under the Radar: Top Zinke Aides Undermine Protections for Public Lands and Endangered Species

David Bernhardt, Greg Sheehan and Susan Combs are implementing Trump’s energy-dominance agenda while ignoring Congress and the public.

Operating in the shadows of Trump administration’s chaos and the financial scandals dogging Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a powerful trio of Interior Department political appointees is now in place to accelerate an already aggressive effort to quickly offer leases for millions of acres of public land, much of which is in sensitive environmental areas, to the oil and gas industry.

A combination of appointments by President Donald J. Trump and Secretary Zinke have installed senior leadership at the Department of the Interior who have extensive experience in running government bureaucracies while embracing an anti-environmentalist agenda that furthers development of fossil fuels.

Overseeing the department’s daily operations is Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil, gas and mining lobbyist who also served as a high-ranking official in the President George W. Bush’s Interior Department, where he strongly supported fossil fuel extraction from public lands and used reports funded by oil companies in congressional testimony.

Since Bernhardt was confirmed by the Senate in July 2017 — after overcoming concerns about his cozy relationship with the oil and gas industry and numerous potential conflicts of interest — he has focused on implementing a series of executive orders issued by Trump and Zinke regarding regulations that “burden” the energy industry. The primary goal is to increase energy production from more than 245 million surface acres controlled by the department’s Bureau of Land Management and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights.

To facilitate this effort, Bernhardt signed an August 2017 order “streamlining” Environmental Impact Statements, documents required under the National Environmental Policy Act that frequently take years to complete and can easily surpass thousands of pages. Bernhardt directed Interior agencies to limit impact statements to not be more than “150 pages or 300 pages for unusually complex projects.” The order also required Interior agencies to complete the statements “within 1 year from the issuance” of a “Notice of Intent” to prepare the statement. Prior to his appointment, Bernhardt was a lobbyist for the Rosemont Copper Company, which is seeking permits to build the nation’s third-largest open-pit copper mine in southern Arizona. The Environmental Impact Statement for the project took the U.S. Forest Service more than eight years to complete and is many thousands of pages.

Accompanying Bernhardt is Greg Sheehan, whom Zinke appointed in June 2017 to the newly created position of principle deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There he is responsible for protecting endangered species and enforcing hunting and fishing regulations, despite the fact that in July 2017 testimony before Congress, Sheehan expressed support for proposals in Congress to weaken the Endangered Species Act.

Sheehan’s opposition to endangered species has a long history. Prior to his appointment he served as the director of Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources, where he opposed allowing the endangered Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) into the state and eased restrictions on killing and relocating the endangered Utah prairie dog (Cynomys parvidens). More recently Sheehan, an avid hunter, attracted headlines last November when he lifted a ban on the importation of elephant trophies from two African countries while attending a hunting conference in Tanzania.

Earlier this month the Fish and Wildlife Service, under Sheehan’s direction, proposed a rule that would remove key protections in the future for species classified as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, which is one classification below “endangered.” Currently, threatened species receive the same protections as endangered species to prevent their harm, death or harassment from human activities.

The third member of this trio, former Texas Comptroller Susan Combs, was appointed by Zinke last month to serve as acting assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks. A fierce opponent of the Endangered Species Act, Combs’ position at Interior oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service. A previous attempt by Trump to appoint Combs as Interior’s assistant secretary for policy, management and budget was blocked in the Senate after Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) put a hold on her nomination until he received assurances that the administration would not pursue offshore drilling off the Florida coast.

Combs is adept at working the legislation and bureaucratic labyrinth to weaken protection for endangered species. In 2011 she helped maneuver an 11th-hour bill, backed by the oil and gas industry, through the Texas legislature to shift oversight of endangered species from the state’s Parks and Wildlife Department to the Comptroller’s Office, which she headed.

As comptroller she fought efforts to put Texas plants and animals on the federal endangered species list. An Austin American Statesman investigation revealed she “found fault with nearly every listing proposal from Washington, citing inadequate sciences, low-ball economic impact projects or insufficient notification of local residents.” During a 2013 legislative briefing, the paper reported, she referred to proposed species listings as “incoming Scud missiles.”

Combs, a rancher and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, is now in a powerful position to weaken protections for threatened and endangered species to facilitate expansion of oil and gas development into areas that are critical to their survival.

The Bernhardt-Combs-Sheehan troika is poised to implement internal department policies through instruction memorandums to streamline oil and gas leasing and staff reassignments to undermine environmental protections on public lands and for endangered species that will help accelerate oil and gas leasing.

“These are the people behind the curtain who are really, really changing our public lands and setting a future direction that may or may not be consistent with what the law requires,” says Jim Lyons, a research scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

“I think they’re smart,” he says, referring to Zinke’s leadership team. “They’re thinking of this in a comprehensive way and they are using diversions and deceptions to get them what they really need to get done under the radar. They come in with Bernhardt, who has done this before and they know how to use (bureaucratic) power and they’re using it effectively.”

Bernhardt, as solicitor during the Bush administration, wrote a legal opinion that Interior could not use the Endangered Species Act to address the threats of climate change on polar bears, even if the species was listed under the act, according to a letter opposing his Senate confirmation signed by 150 environmental organizations.

According to the Western Values Project, Bernhardt’s “time at Interior was marred by scandal, including when he replaced independent government analysis in congressional testimony with reports funded by oil companies, oversaw the forced resignation of a whistleblower, and served as Counselor to the Secretary when J. Steven Griles, the ‘second-ranking official of the Interior Department,’ was involved in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal.”

Not surprisingly, a primary goal of Trump’s Interior Department is to fundamentally undermine protection of endangered species.

“I anticipate these officials will support legislative efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act, as well as pursue regulatory and policy-based efforts internally to also decrease both procedural and substantive protections for threatened and endangered species,” says Daniel Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., specializing in the protection of endangered species and their habitat.

Dave Owen, a law professor at the University of California Hastings specializing in environmental and natural resource law, says the appointments of Bernhardt, Combs and Sheehan continue a Trump administration pattern of naming people to lead agencies who are “deeply skeptical of the laws they are supposed to be implementing and the goals of the programs that they are implementing.”

“They fundamentally do not believe in the Endangered Species Act or in other statutes that protect the environment,” Owen says.

Sidestepping Senate Confirmation

Zinke’s appointments of Sheehan and Combs to high-ranking Interior Department positions have not been sent to the Senate for confirmation, as required by the Constitution and subsequent legislation. This continues a pattern by the Trump administration of avoiding Congressional oversite. Acting directors, rather than presidentially appointed directors requiring Senate confirmation, also oversee the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

The avoidance of Congressional oversight through the Senate confirmation process is unprecedented, critics say, and raises serious questions of whether decisions made by “acting” officials such as Sheehan and Combs will withstand legal challenges.

“The Trump administration has dropped the ball and has failed to promptly nominate qualified personnel to lead these important agencies,” says Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “The law limits the ability of so-called acting officials to do the job. This is not the way that government is supposed to be run.”

Terry Sullivan, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina’s White House Transition Project, says, “If you allow acting (directors) just to stay on and make decisions forever, then what’s the point of the Constitution? That delegitimizes the role of the Senate in confirming people. That’s about the balance of power and checks and balances.”

The U.S. Government Accountability Office is reviewing a complaint filed in February by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility alleging that the acting Interior appointments violate the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. The complicated law outlines how long temporary, or acting, officials can remain in office. For vacancies that occur on the day of, or within 60 days of, a new president’s inauguration, an acting officer may serve for 300 days from the date of the vacancy, according to Lawfare, a legal blog.

Creating a Shadow Agency

“Why don’t the missions and responsibilities of the Park Service, [Bureau of Land Management] and Fish & Wildlife Service merit permanent, Senate-confirmed directors,” asked Jeff Ruch, executive director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, in a recent press release.

The answer appears to be that the Trump administration wants to avoid public scrutiny of Interior’s decisions and sidestep Congressional oversight. This is occurring while the department systematically dismantles policies designed to protect the multiple use of public lands, including conservation and recreation, and tilt public lands use solidly in favor of the oil and gas industry.

“What they are trying to do is create a shadow Department of the Interior,” says Bobby McEnaney, senior lands and wildlife analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Western Renewable Energy Project. “It’s designed by the secretary and David Bernhardt to create a functioning department that does not have to go through the normal checks and balances.”

By creating a “shadow” agency, McEnaney says, the Trump administration reduces transparency of critical actions taken by Interior leadership, which is now dominated by oil and gas industry supporters and hostile to protecting biodiversity and combating climate change.

“What we have seen with this administration and Secretary Zinke is that they have embraced a race to the bottom,” he says. “They have embraced the most extreme policy that one could imagine for every type of resource law.”

For example, last week the Interior Department issued new legal guidelines that undermine the enforcement provisions of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which was one of the first major conservation laws adopted in the United States. The department, according to a December 2017 solicitor’s opinion that was forwarded to Bernhardt, will no longer pursue penalties against individuals or companies whose actions resulted in killing or injury of migratory birds if the intent of the action was not to harm or kill birds.

Oil companies will be the greatest beneficiary of the law, according to an Audubon Society study. Under Interior’s new enforcement guidelines, oil companies responsible for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska would not have been fined for injuring or killing migratory birds.

Seventeen former Interior officials — including the Fish and Wildlife directors under presidents Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — repudiated the reinterpretation in a Jan. 10 letter to Zinke after the legal opinion underpinning these new guidelines was first announced. Unlike many environmental laws, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act does not have a provision allowing citizens to file a lawsuit seeking to overturn the department’s new interpretation.

Kate Kelly, a former senior advisor to President Obama’s Interior Secretary Sally Jewel and now director of public lands for the Center for American Progress, also says Interior is shutting out Congress.

“They are giving Congress the middle finger in many ways,” Kelly says. “Both in how they are not actively working to put nominees up for very critical agencies, but also how they don’t seem to give a lot of weight of to what Congress suggests how they should be prioritizing their funding.”

The public is being ignored as well, she says.

“They are very willing and able to meet with oil and gas industry, the coal industry and the mining industry as evidenced by their calendars and what public records we are able to get our hands on,” she says. “Yet organizations that represent the public or members of the public themselves are shut out of the planning processes and unable to really be heard.”

Kelly points to Zinke’s decision to reduce the size of several national monuments last year, including Bear Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in southern Utah, despite receiving more than 3 million comments from the American public in support of maintaining the monuments as they are.

“Despite that overwhelming response, (Zinke) decided to take the unprecedented actions to rollback protections for national monuments,” she says.

Ramping up Oil and Gas Leasing, Removing Land From Protection

Under Bernhardt’s direction the Interior Department’s quarterly sale of 10-year oil and gas leases across the West eliminates environmental conservation not only for the leased acreage, but also a wide portion of the surrounding public lands. Combs and Sheehan, through their direct oversight of implementing the Endangered Species Act, are expected to play a key role in reducing protections for species that could slow oil and gas development.

Last month the Interior Department sold 43 oil and gas leases in southern Utah covering 51,000 acres for about $1.5 million, which averages only $29 per acre. Many of the plots are believed to have scant oil resources, but the lease sales effectively sterilize the land for conservation purposes for the next decade, if not much longer.

“Once you start leasing areas that have never been leased before, you foreclose opportunities for conservation in those areas,” McEnaney says.

Most of the time, the leased federal land never is developed for oil and gas production. There are about 27 million acres of public land leased to oil and gas companies. But only 46 percent of that is in production, according to a report by WildEarth Guardians.

The discrepancy between leases and production is particularly wide in Nevada where 1.1 million acres have been leased to oil and gas companies but only 27,000 acres, or 2 percent of all leased acreage, is in production

There is a reason for this discrepancy, McEnaney says. “They are leasing thousands and thousands of acres in Nevada which have little or no potential for oil and gas opportunity. But (sell) one lease, say a 40-acre plot in the middle of a 400,000-acre piece of landscape, and the Bureau of Land Management can consider that (entire) landscape leasable.”

Despite the huge surplus of oil and gas leases that are not producing, the Interior Department is continuing to offer massive amounts of public land for lease. The oil and gas industry, so far, has given the department the cold shoulder. Last year, McEnaney says, the department offered 11.85 million acres for 10-year leases, but only 782,000 acres were purchased.

Despite the low conversion rate of leases offered to leases sold of about 6 percent, the leased land will likely remain in control of the oil and gas industry well past the 10-year lease term.

“Often companies are able to get extensions and hold on to these leases indefinitely, which means the surrounding lands cannot be managed for other purposes like conservation and recreation,” Kelly says. “It really tilts the balance of public lands toward extractive uses for a long horizon.”

Possible Showdown With Congress

The Interior Department’s unorthodox operation of relying on acting officials such as Sheehan and Combs under the direction Bernhardt is on a collision course with Congress over several provisions included in the omnibus spending bill enacted last month.

“One big concern is we will be seeing if Secretary Zinke and the Interior Department follow the budget that congressional appropriators just passed,” says Aaron Weiss, media director for the Center for Western Priorities.

Congress explicitly opposed three Interior initiatives.

First, Section 120 of the omnibus bill, signed into law last month by President Trump, expressly prohibits the department from spending funds on its proposal to revise an agreement between federal agencies, states, private landowners, industry and conservation groups to conserve 35 million acres of federal lands across 10 states to protect the imperiled greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus). The unprecedented agreement was reached to keep the bird off the endangered species list to avoid major economic losses across its habitat.

Last September the Interior Department announced its intent to amend the greater sage grouse land use plans to loosen protections for the bird to encourage energy and mineral production from lands within its habitat. Congress has now ordered the department to leave the 2015 plan alone.

“Congress sent down very explicit instructions on sage grouse, where they said stay the course, honor the deal,” Weiss says.

Bernhardt, Combs and Sheehan will play a central role in whether and how the administration plans to advance its sage grouse reforms because of Endangered Species Act implications.

Congress also rejected Interior’s request to eliminate funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The fund is financed by oil and gas leases on the Outer Continental Shelf. Instead, Congress appropriated $425 million for the fund, up $25 million from 2017.

The fund supports the protection of federal public lands and waters and provides matching grants to the states and tribal governments for the purchase and development of public parks and outdoor recreation sites. Since it was created in 1965, the fund has provided $3.9 billion in grants to states for more than 40,000 projects.

Finally, Congress turned down Interior’s request for $18 million to begin a department-wide reorganization, which would have transferred personnel from Washington, D.C., to locations primarily in the West. Bernhardt has been working with Zinke to advance the reorganization plan.

The bill “included language that explicitly reminded the administration they need to seek approval from Congress and they don’t have approval yet,” says Kate Kelly, public lands director at Center for American Progress.

The spending act has set clear limitations on what Interior’s leadership can pursue while providing the agency more money than it requested for conservation efforts.

“You now have a case where Congress is directly contradicting the secretary’s own priorities and what the secretary has proposed,” Weiss says. “So, the question is, if Secretary Zinke blows off Congress, blows off congressional appropriators and just does his own thing, will Congress hold him accountable?”

So far the Republican-controlled Congress has not held Trump administration accountable for its refusal to fill agency director positions at the Interior Department with officials that require Senate confirmation such as Susan Combs and Greg Sheehan.

Asked if there is anything that can be done to force the Trump administration to make appointments that require Senate confirmation, Steve Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy could only guess.

“Midterm elections? I mean that’s a good question,” he says. “And I don’t know the answer.”

The Trump Administration’s Awful New Migratory Bird Policy Undermines a Century of Conservation

The Interior Department is narrowing protection for migratory birds to cover only deliberate harm such as hunting, but not threats like development or pollution that kill millions of birds yearly.

By Amanda Rodewald, Cornell University

The Trump administration has announced a position on protecting migratory birds that is a drastic pullback from policies in force for the past 100 years.

In 1916, amid the chaos of World War I, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and King George V of Great Britain signed the Migratory Bird Treaty. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) wrote the treaty into U.S. law two years later. These measures protected more than 1,100 migratory bird species by making it illegal to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill or sell live or dead birds, feathers, eggs and nests, except as allowed by permit or regulated hunting.

This bold move was prompted by the decimation of bird populations across North America. Some 5 million birds, especially waterbirds like egrets and herons, were dying yearly to provide feathers to adorn hats, and the passenger pigeon had just gone extinct. Fearing that other species would meet the same fate, national leaders took action.

snowy egret — Snowy egrets were hunted close to extinction in the late 1800s to supply plumes for hats. Photo: www.shutterstock.com

Now the Interior Department has issued a legal opinion that reinterprets the act and excludes “incidental take” – activities that are not intended to harm birds, but do so directly in ways that could have been foreseen, such as filling in wetlands where migrating birds rest and feed. Why? For fear of “unlimited potential for criminal prosecution.” As the argument goes, cat owners whose pets attack migratory birds or drivers who accidentally strike birds with their cars might be charged with crimes.

But the MBTA has not been enforced this way. It is applied to cases of gross negligence where potential harm should have been anticipated and avoided, such as discharging water contaminated with toxic pesticides into a pond used by migratory birds. This new reading of the law means that companies will escape legal responsibility and liability for actions that kill millions of birds every year.

Pollution, development and habitat loss kill birds

Purposeful killing is only one of many threats to migratory birds. Habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and collisions with buildings take heavy tolls on many species. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, every year more than 40 million birds are killed by industrial activities or structures such as power lines, oil pits, communication towers and wind turbines. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico killed more than 1 million birds in a single event.

Seventeen former Interior Department officials representing every presidential administration from Nixon through Obama have written a memo expressing deep concern about the new policy. As they explain, the MBTA has given industries a strong and effective incentive to work with government agencies to anticipate, avoid and mitigate foreseeable death or injury to birds.

For example, it prompted energy companies to install nets above pits where they store waste fluids from oil drilling. Because these pits look like water sources, birds often land on them and can become trapped and die. Installing nets over the pits has cut annual bird deaths from roughly two million birds yearly to between 500,000 and one million. Not perfect, but a meaningful improvement.

Global citizens, global consequences

Because migratory birds don’t recognize international boundaries, the consequences of reinterpreting the MBTA may be felt across borders. In one year, an individual warbler may spend 80 days in Canada’s boreal forests, 30 days in the United States at resting and refueling sites during migration, and over 200 days in Central America.

At the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, we have constructed maps and animations using data collected by volunteers for eBird, the world’s fastest-growing biodiversity database. These references illustrate how migratory birds connect countries. Many spend the year in locations that span the Western Hemisphere.

migration map — Migration pathways for populations of 118 migratory birds species within the Western Hemisphere from 2002 to 2014, based on data from eBird. La Sorte et al., 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2588., Author provided

The eastern-breeding magnolia warbler, for example, spends winters in areas in the Yucatan Peninsula and Central America that are fractions of the size of its breeding range. Seeing how densely these birds are clustered in their winter habitat shows us that each acre of that territory is important to their survival.

Similarly, most populations of the western-breeding western tanager overwinter in Mexico. By identifying where bird populations winter in this way, we can better target conservation actions to protect species throughout their annual cycles.

migration data — Year-round abundance map for the Western tanager based on computer models using eBird data. State of North American Birds Report

Still at risk

Today we know much more than early conservationists did about the value of birds. Healthy bird populations pollinate crops and help plants grow by dispersing seeds and preying on insects. Migratory birds also contribute billions of dollars to economies through recreational activities like hunting and birdwatching. And they connect us with nature, especially through the dazzling spectacle of migration.

Conserving migratory birds requires effective protection both in the United States and through international agreements and partnerships. The most important threats are loss and degradation of habitat, which can be caused by land conversion – for example, clearing forests for farming – or by climate change.

In the 2016 State of North American Birds report, an international team of scientists assessed the conservation status of 1,154 birds across Canada, the United States and Mexico. They found that over one-third of all North American bird species are at risk of extinction without meaningful conservation action.

Birds associated with oceans and tropical and subtropical forests year-round are in the most dire straits. More than half of North American seabirds are declining due to pollution, unsustainable fishing, energy extraction, pressure from invasive species and climate change. Birds that rely on coasts, arid lands and grasslands also are in serious decline.

A dead albatross on Midway Atoll in the North Pacific with plastic waste in its stomach. Chris Jordan, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Flickr, CC BY

There are no easy solutions, but new science is supporting responses. Transformational citizen science projects like eBird are developing vast data sets to help pinpoint where conservation action should focus. Bird conservation groups and government agencies have formed international teams to eradicate invasive predators on islands that are critical to breeding seabirds and drafted multinational agreements to clean up large floating mats of garbage in our seas that can choke, trap or poison seabirds and other animals.

Birds are a shared resource among nations. Where governments have acted, they have successfully protected migratory birds and the habitat they depend on. In my view, the Trump administration’s shift would abdicate U.S. leadership on migratory bird conservation and undermine public good for private profit.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on August 15, 2016.

Amanda Rodewald, Professor and Director of Conservation Science, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

‘Instability, Uncertainty and Chaos’ — How Climate Change Threatens National Security

Anyone who disregards the threats of climate change “is stupid,” says retired Lieutenant General John G. Castellaw.

How does the U.S. military and intelligence community perceive the threat of climate change? Last week I sat down with retired Lieutenant General John G. Castellaw of the U.S. Marine Corps to explore this and other questions.

Lt. Gen. Castellaw is a member of the Center for Climate & Security Advisory Board and also sits on the board of the American Security Project. Because of his affiliation with these nonpartisan organizations, Castellaw was adamantly tight-lipped on the topic of President Trump dramatically slashing the budget for environmental programs across the country, including ones for which Castellaw himself has voiced support.

John Castellaw — Lieutenant General John G. Castellaw © 2018 Francis Flisiuk. All rights reserved.

Castellaw represents a minority of conservative thinkers that recognizes climate change as a serious threat, but believes that the free market is equipped to solve the crisis. Considering that major corporations are the some of the largest accelerants of climate change, and that a former coal industry lobbyist was recently appointed as deputy administrator to the Environmental Protection Agency (right behind Scott Pruitt, a climate-change denier who is actively dismantling environmental regulations), it’s understandable why some might reduce Castellaw’s stance to mere wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, because of his 36-year experience leading marines around the world — often in flood-and drought-prone regions that are on the front lines of the climate crisis — Castellaw offers a sobering perspective on this international issue. Here’s my exchange with him, lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Do people in the military and intelligence community view climate change as a serious threat?

When I was in a commander I was responsible for everything that happened in my battle space.

What I did was what all commanders do, something called intelligence preparation of the battlefield. Basically, you determine what the threats are. It may be enemy armor or aircraft. But we also look at weather and terrain. Climate change and its impacts, extreme weather events, increasing sea levels, all of those are threats that military leaders are considering.

Every military guy is going to do that, regardless of their political affiliation. They’re trained to take those threats seriously. And anybody who disregards those threats is stupid. It’s science; it’s a fact. You disregard those solid threats at your own peril.

What is about your military experience that informs your stance on climate change?

As Marines we’re trained to look at things in an unemotional, fact-based way. We like stability, certainty and order. What we try to prevent is instability, uncertainty and chaos.

And so when you start looking at the factors that generate instability, uncertainty and chaos, you start to see various threats associated with climate change.

Take the Lake Chad basin [in Africa] for example. I went there first in the ’90s to do planning for a non-combative operation. Americans were in the middle of a potential coup going on and needed to be escorted out. When I entered the countryside and flew over Lake Chad I saw a lot of fishermen using the lake — 150,000, believe it or not. Herdsmen were there, and crops were being grown.

But last year, when I went back, I learned that the lake is 10 percent of what it was in 1960. I saw dry land where people were fishing last time. Migration problems arose from the diminishing resources.

The cattle herdsmen that were moving into different areas were often times in open conflict with farmers. [They were] killing each other over resources. And during that time we saw extremists like Boko Haram taking advantage of the chaos, recruiting, generating money, and attacking ever more areas down there.

Eventually, because we have economic, diplomatic and strategic relationships with those countries, when those countries are undermined, our relationship with them, and ergo our national security, is undermined.

Analyze the facts and you get to this point: Climate change is a serious threat to our national security.

Have you traveled to coastal areas that have raised similar types of concerns?

Yes. Recently we did a study on the sea-level rise in the United States and its impact on military installations.

Portsmouth Naval Shipyard was founded in 1800, and is only one of four. It has a very specific mission: The people there are working on nuclear submarine modifications and refurbishment. It’s a very important facility in our national defense. Our studies show that by 2050, it’s going to see an increase in flood tides affecting the industrial areas on the western side of the complex — the crane tracks, the docks, various facilities. This will significantly hinder the facility’s ability to accomplish its mission.

By the end of the century the water-level rise will be so severe that the island itself may be bisected.

The impact that sea-level rise and climate change are going to have on our economy and national defense will be felt across the country.

We’re going to have to deal with it, but at the same time if we keep waiting, the bill is going to keep climbing.

How serious a threat is climate change when ranked with other perceived apocalyptic threats like nuclear war or terrorism?

When you’re a cattle herder or fishermen or a farmer in the Lake Chad basin, it’s the most serious thing in the world.

What do you make of the budget cuts to the EPA and the attempt to remove the phrase climate change from its website?

What I can tell you is that where I am is at the deck plate. I’m around the farmers. I sat around a table with a group of farmers and agronomists not long ago, and what they’re worried about is the shortening of the growing season and the extreme weather events.

Just like in the military, the farmers are going to do what’s necessary to preserve their economic well-being.

Are you against the budget cuts to the EPA?

I’m for things that reduce greenhouse gases and emissions from power plants. Cleaner car fuel-economy standards. Scientific measures, common sense economical moves like switching from coal to natural gas. Increasing the use of sustainable energy.

It’s just difficult to determine if those policies/regulations would even pass with so many climate-change deniers in Congress.

We’ve passed the tipping point already. We’re going to continue to move toward renewable energy because it makes sense, it’s economically viable and it’s not a political move.

But what do you make of the fact that more than half of our lawmakers in Congress are climate-change deniers, and the commander in chief doesn’t seem to consider climate change a top security priority?

My job is to make sure that my position is the one that carries the day.

That’s a very diplomatic answer. But wouldn’t more investment in the EPA for example help neutralize the threats associated with climate change at this point?

As I’ve said, I think we’ve already reached a tipping point. A lot of stuff that supports the environment is making economic sense. And if anything else that’s going to push us in the right direction. There are right-leaning people out there pushing for market-based solutions. We [free market conservatives] don’t like a lot of government intervention. What we like is to do things that make sense and what’s in our best interest, and that’s what I’m seeing now. The momentum that’s built over the past 20 years will continue to grow.

Won’t it be an uphill battle to get corporations and climate-change deniers to care about ameliorating the crisis?

In the Marine Corps, we’ve always had uphill battles; it’s part of the challenge of life. When you look at a problem like climate change, the best thing to do is charge up that hill, because it’s the right thing to do.

How Can We Improve Communication About Climate Change? We Have 5 Questions

With the Climate Listening Project, filmmaker Dayna Reggero offers people a chance to talk — and be heard.

Listening can make things happen, says environmentalist and documentary filmmaker Dayna Reggero. When you listen — really listen — you provide a space for the speaker to make discoveries, connections and critical shifts.

To shift the conversation around climate change, Reggero has been crisscrossing the United States, listening. She asks individuals and families to talk about the climate impacts they’re experiencing — and the climate solutions they’re coming up with. She films these conversations so that others can listen too. This is the Climate Listening Project, one of the goals of which is creating connection around a topic that usually results in sharp divides.

The Revelator asked Reggero about the Climate Listening Project and how we can move forward in our conversations about climate change.

How did the Climate Listening Project come about?

I started the Climate Listening Project in 2014 while collaborating with Sierra Club on the “Years of Living Dangerously” docu-series and after my community experienced the most rain on record in 2013. I wanted to hear the stories of people dealing with climate impacts and people creating climate solutions. I filmed the stories so others could listen as well.

What’s surprised you about it so far?

I’ve been surprised to continue collaborating with new groups to follow more and more stories over the past four years. I wasn’t expecting to film a rabbi and priest for the “Faith” video, a Republican congressman working with women for climate solutions as part of “The Story We Want” web series, or a South Carolina farmer of the year for the “Cultivating Resilience” series — and the list goes on.

Have you encountered any roadblocks? How did you overcome them?

I think the idea that we have to choose a side on climate action because of our current political divide is the biggest roadblock in the United States. I overcome this by listening. I follow the connections that bring people together. I have found that when we really listen to each other, there is more that connects us than divides us. Through my films, I try to follow connections people can relate to so they can see someone like them, who cares about the same things they care about, and create opportunities for listening parent to parent, person of faith to person of faith, farmer to farmer, business person to business person, and so on.

Who do you think needs to open up their ears and hear these stories, either individually or as a group?

I think if people listen to their neighbors who are dealing with the same climate impacts they are experiencing, we can connect the dots and have real dialogue about climate solutions locally. The reality is that people are already experiencing impacts from climate change — and people need to know that they’re not alone.

The other reality is that people are creating mitigation and adaptation solutions — and people need to know that there are actions they can take for their families and communities.

What should we all be listening for, in terms of climate and communication?

I think we just need to listen to the real people dealing with climate impacts and the real people creating solutions. I have found that people are relieved to have a safe space to share their climate stories. It’s time for honest communications about how we can protect the people we care about, the things we need, the things we love and the places we call home.

Poachers vs. Poop

The key to saving elephants and other species may lie in the DNA contained in their droppings, says conservation biologist Samuel Wasser.

Last month customs officials in Singapore intercepted more than 60 bags containing nearly 1,800 pieces of smuggled elephant ivory. To help shed more light on the crimes, they placed a call to American conservation biologist Samuel Wasser.

Wasser is a scientist, but also a bit of a detective. Using techniques he has spent decades perfecting, Wasser can extract DNA from any elephant tusk, allowing him to identify almost exactly where the animal was killed by poachers. “I can take a tusk and I can pinpoint where it came from within three kilometers — and sometimes to the very park,” he says.

The key to that precision lies not in the ivory itself, but in something much less treasured by poachers: pachyderm poop.

That’s because feces contains DNA — not just of what’s been eaten, but also of the animal who ate it. Wasser and his colleagues have collected enough dung and DNA over the past 15 years to create a map of every elephant population in Africa, including their localized DNA mutations. Knowing those tiny genetic variations allows Wasser to test a piece of ivory and accurately pinpoint its place of origin — or perhaps, more specifically, its place of death.

That map has already made an enormous difference. In 2015 Wasser used data from dozens of gigantic ivory seizures to identify the two worst elephant poaching “hotspots” in Africa, places where thousands of elephants have been killed for their tusks. The research also revealed that the smuggled ivory shipments originated in countries other than the ones where the elephants were first poached.

“It just changed everything,” says Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington. Before this new information, researchers and law enforcement had believed that large ivory shipments, often weighing multiple tons, were collected from elephants all across the continent and then cherry-picked and consolidated by traffickers. “What we found was that the ivory was all coming from the same place and poachers were coming back over and over again to get these tusks,” he says.

That revealed a lot about not just the place but also the methods of poaching. “To be a poaching hotspot you need to have a lot of elephants present and you’ve got to know how to get in there and find them,” he says. “You have to be familiar with the area and you’ve got to be familiar with the rangers so you can perhaps pay them off, and you’ve got to have connections to move the ivory out up to the cartels that are shipping them. You can’t just go to a new place and have all of that present. So that was a really big breakthrough for law enforcement.”

That was just the start, though. Wasser knew the ultimate law-enforcement goal should be to find the cartels that were buying and smuggling ivory, not the low-level poachers hired by them.

That piece of the puzzle came, again, from Wasser examining large ivory seizures — and from an attempt to save time and money. “These seizures, they can have 2,000 or more tusks in there,” he says. “We can’t afford to analyze all of them, so one of the first things we tried to do was figure out how to identify the two tusks from the same animal so we could put one aside and not pay to analyze the same animal twice.”

Dr. Wasser examines confiscated elephant tusks. Courtesy Animal Welfare Institute

That was easier said than done, though. It turned out although that they could match paired tusks by size, color and the shape of the gum line, more than half of the tusks in each big seizure didn’t have a match. “I thought, where the hell’s the other tusk?”

By this point Wasser had examined and genotyped close to 50 large ivory seizures. “I said, well, I wonder if the missing tusks are in another seizure.” Sure enough, he not only found them, he found a connection between each shipment. “In every single case the paired seizures went through the same port within 10 months of each other and the distribution of ivory in those two seizures was almost perfectly an overlap.”

This second major discovery allowed Wasser and law enforcement to connect multiple shipments with each other and, through that, identify the three biggest cartels moving ivory out of Africa. “Now that is where the rubber meets the road,” he says. Two cartel leaders have already been convicted, while the third is in custody awaiting trial.

With this proven success, Wasser is now taking his DNA techniques to another group of species in need: pangolins. With grants from the Wildlife Tech Challenge — a partnership between the U.S. Agency for International Development and other institutions — Wasser and his team are applying their elephant methodology to the eight species of scaly anteaters, which have become the most poached animals on the planet. Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in China and Vietnam, while their scales are valued for use in folk medicine. (Like rhino horns, the scales are made of keratin and are actually medicinally useless.)

Just as with elephant ivory, pangolin has become big business. “It’s just crazy how many pangolins are being poached,” Wasser says. “The biggest seizure was 10 tons. I find that just mind-blowing.”

Of course, pangolins present a few new technical challenges compared to elephants. For one thing, pangolins produce small fecal pellets, as opposed to the giant 25-pound dung-heaps left behind by elephants. They’re also solitary animals that eat insects, so their poop falls apart quickly. Wasser and his team are currently training detection dogs — another technique he pioneered — to find the droppings. So far they’ve taken their canines sleuths to Vietnam and Nepal, with more countries to come.

Wasser’s studies and work to protect animals have not gone unnoticed. Among his other honors, this week the Animal Welfare Institute honored his achievements with the Albert Schweitzer Medal, an award for outstanding achievements in the advancement of animal welfare.

“I’m deeply honored,” Wasser says of the award. “This has really been my life’s work since the mid-eighties,” Wasser says. “Honestly, I never dreamed that I’d be doing the work I’m doing now.”

He laughs a bit and says his work to collect data from droppings all stemmed from a desire to collect information about animals without using techniques that would stress out his subjects, such as radio collars or collecting blood samples. “For a long time people said, oh, you’re just an animal-hugger and you just want to do your work non-invasively. You know, that’s meritorious in itself, but the fact of the matter is these techniques are far more powerful. It’s endless, the things you can do.”

He also points out that his work appeals to the public — not just with elephants, but also his research into Washington State’s killer whales, where a dog named Tucker helps him to find floating whale poop before it sinks beneath the waves. “It’s just a fantastic outreach magnet,” he says. “The people love it. It’s just an all-around fantastic way to create change.”