Wildlife Rangers Face A ‘Toxic Mix’ of Mental Strain and Lack of Support

They’re tasked with protecting the world’s most endangered species, but at least 100 rangers die each year, mostly after conflicts with poachers.

Originally published by Mongabay.

On April 9, suspected members of an armed militia gunned down five wildlife rangers and their driver in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was the worst attack in Virunga’s bloody history, and the latest in a long line of tragic incidents in which rangers have lost their lives defending the planet’s natural heritage.

But it’s not just danger that rangers must contend with. We spoke with people who have worked with or alongside front-line ranger forces in Africa and Asia. They described challenging working conditions, community ostracization, isolation from family, poor equipment and inadequate training for many rangers — all for low pay and little respect.

“The pressure is relentless, there is no respite,” said Elise Serfontein, founding director of Stop Rhino Poaching. “The physical and mental fatigue is taking its toll.”

Despite a growing awareness of the vulnerability of many of the world’s most beloved and charismatic species, such as elephants and rhinos, there is little awareness and virtually no research into the stress and possible mental health implications for those tasked with defending them. In fact, more research has been conducted on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among elephants following a poaching incident than on the rangers protecting them.

“We have got to take care of the people that make a difference,” said Johan Jooste, head of anti-poaching forces at South Africa National Parks (SANParks).

A Dangerous Line of Work

Eighty-two percent of rangers in Africa and 63 percent of rangers in Asia said they had faced a life-threatening situation in the line of duty, according to 2016 surveys by WWF, one of the world’s largest conservation groups. These are the only extensive surveys ever to examine rangers’ working conditions.

The Thin Green Line Foundation, a Melbourne-based organization dedicated to supporting rangers, has been compiling data on ranger deaths on the job for the last 10 years. Between 50 and 70 percent of the recorded deaths are due to conflict with poachers. The remainder are due to the challenging conditions rangers face every day, such as working alongside dangerous animals and in perilous environments.

“I can categorically tell you about the 100-120 [ranger deaths] we know of each year,” said Sean Willmore, founder of the Thin Green Line Foundation and president of the International Ranger Federation, a non-profit organization overseeing 90 ranger associations worldwide. Topping the list is India, with 175 deaths in the last five years alone.

Willmore said he believed the true global figure could be much higher, since the organization lacks data from a number of countries in Asia and the Middle East.

Rohit Singh, a law enforcement specialist with the WWF and chairman of the Ranger Federation of Asia, was kidnapped and held for three days, during which he was routinely beaten, after an undercover operation in Nepal went wrong in 2006.

But the 15-year veteran is quick to downplay the experience, instead pointing out the risks his fellow rangers endure.

“What I have faced is just one example of what thousands of rangers are faced with every day,” he said.

That Singh considers his ordeal unexceptional offers some insight into the violence that many rangers are forced to live with on a daily basis. Psychological research has shown, unsurprisingly, that soldiers and police officers exposed to dangerous and stressful situations over an extended period of time face increased risk of mental health issues. Although no one has published similar research on rangers, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to that end from those who have spent time on the front lines.

Willmore recalled a ranger he met in Kahuzi-Biéga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who eight months earlier had come face-to-face with three poachers armed with AK-47s in the bush. In the ensuing fight, the ranger killed one poacher and injured another before being shot three times. He managed to escape and crawl the 10 kilometers (6 miles) back to his station.

With parks resources already thinly spread, management asked him to return to work before his injuries had fully healed and without any psychological support.

“The look on his face, the look in his eyes. I can still see it perfectly, he was just petrified,” Willmore said.

Rangers often come from the same communities as poachers, inevitably leading to additional conflict. Of the 570 rangers WWF surveyed across Africa, 75 percent said their local communities had threatened them because of their work.

“I’ve seen guys receive death threats and they don’t know how to deal with it,” said Francis Massé, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield. “They don’t know if these guys who are threatening them also know where their family lives in the city.”

Massé studied the anti-poaching forces in Mozambique for his Ph.D. Many of the rangers faced threats and attacks during the five months he spent living alongside them. Massé said he believed Mozambique’s legal system exacerbated the problem.

“[Poachers] get arrested and in two weeks they are back out in the communities right outside the park where the rangers have to pass in and out,” he said. “I’ve seen rangers cry from the stress, from being afraid … because of the strain and the stress and the anxiety that goes along with their work.”

The Poaching War

Not all rangers face the same level of risk. Chris Galliers, chairman of the Game Rangers Association of Africa, said threats vary significantly in different countries, from tackling subsistence poachers with snares, to heavily armed militias.

The resurgence of the illegal ivory and rhino horn trade over the last 10 years has created especially dangerous conditions for rangers in sub-Saharan Africa.

South Africa saw the start of an intense escalation in rhino poaching in 2008. The year before, poachers killed just 13 rhinos. By 2013, they were killing over a thousand a year. In total, the country has lost more than 7,100 rhinos in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, poachers killed around 30 percent of savanna elephants between 2007 and 2014, and 66 percent of forest elephants between 2008 and 2016.

Organized criminal networks have been enticed into the rhino horn and ivory trade by the vast amount of money exchanging hands. The result: well-funded and supplied poaching syndicates.

In his role with SANParks, Jooste, a former major general in the South African military, is charged with defending Kruger National Park’s white rhino population. He said he believed the poaching syndicates were now more assertive and aggressive than ever before.

In response, many conservation managers have adopted paramilitary-style tactics, sparking a heated debate about the “militarization of conservation.”

Law enforcement has always been part of a ranger’s duties, but in areas where poaching is most intense it is now eclipsing all other duties.

“Eighty percent of the work now, in many of the parks, is hard-core, 24/7 operations to combat poaching,” Jooste said.

Rangers, originally trained for traditional conservation tasks like ecological surveying, now need a whole new skill set. In many countries, the resources are not available to train rangers for these new, often combat-oriented, responsibilities, leaving them unprepared for what is required on the ground.

“It’s really difficult for a ranger that’s been given a gun and sent out on patrol to know how to escalate properly,” Willmore said. “It’s more dangerous for the ranger and the poacher.”

And the new rules of the game are not always clear.

Serfontein, who has worked closely with rangers through her NGO, Stop Rhino Poaching, said she believed the legal implications for rangers engaging with poachers added another layer of complexity and stress.

“You have a split second to make a call,” she said. “Pulling that trigger to defend your life and the lives of your fellow rangers will result in a police inquest or potential murder charge.”

For many rangers, especially those who have served for a long time, this increasingly violent and soldier-like role is not what they signed up for.

“Not everyone is comfortable with being in the position of having to possibly shoot someone,” Massé said. “It’s asking a lot of people to go way beyond what we would think of as a conservation ranger.”

But for many there is little choice. In impoverished countries like Mozambique, where Massé conducted his research, paid employment is hard to come by. Leaving a relatively secure job, however dangerous, is simply not an option when there’s a family to support, no matter the personal and familial toll.

So far, support for rangers has not kept pace with the escalating violence of their role.

“Just as [parks] need to adapt their strategies and escalate their responses … so they need to adjust their ranger well-being programs,” Serfontein said.

Tough Working Conditions

Besides being dangerous, ranging can be a tough life. Rangers often spend long periods away from home on patrols, and Willmore said isolation was the number one stressor for rangers.

The rangers Massé studied in northern Mozambique were dropped off in remote areas the size of Switzerland for three months at a time — up to five if trucks were unable to reach them during the rainy season.

“They’ll tell you straight: ‘This is no way to live,’” Massé said.

Some families are allowed to stay at ranger stations, but these are generally remote sites with no schools nearby. Rangers are often forced to choose between educating their children and keeping them close. The result is that children as young as 3 are often sent away to boarding school.

“This is heart-breaking stuff, when you’ve got to say goodbye to your 3- or 4-year-old not to see them for the rest of the year,” Willmore said.

This has an impact on relationships. In some countries, the divorce rate among rangers is as high as 90 percent, according to Willmore, who attributes this to the pressures of so much time spent apart.

To add to their stress, many rangers are also chronically underequipped. The WWF survey revealed that as many as 74 percent of the rangers polled in Asia did not feel they had the adequate equipment to safely discharge their duties.

“Most rangers don’t even have the basics like mosquito nets, boots, uniforms and wet weather gear,” Willmore said.

For all the risk and hardship rangers endure, remuneration is often poor. Rangers cited low and erratic pay as the worst part of the job in both the African and Asian WWF ranger surveys. Low pay was also the number one reason why rangers did not want their children to follow in their footsteps.

Financial insecurity is further compounded by a lack of life insurance. Many rangers are the sole breadwinners in their family. If they are killed in the line of duty, their family could be left bereft.

In the absence of insurance, it has been up to NGOs like the Thin Green Line Foundation to step in and offer support to deceased rangers’ families.

“Those colleagues that have seen their friends die will at least see there is some support for their families,” Willmore said. “It gives them greater confidence and greater morale to continue doing patrols.”

Singh, from the Ranger Federation of Asia, said a lack of recognition was just as demoralizing as low wages.

“They work under extremely difficult conditions but they don’t get credit for it. How do we give the message to the entire world that … it’s a job everyone should look up to?” he said.

When rangers feel the risks they take go unappreciated, the money offered by poaching cartels becomes ever more appealing.

“You think, if no one else cares about me, I may as well get some insurance policy for my family, I may as well take that money,” Willmore said. He added he was amazed that more rangers didn’t choose to sacrifice their integrity for a quick buck, given their difficult living and working conditions.

Even where rangers receive better support, the escalating price of wildlife parts such as rhino horn can be a difficult temptation to resist. Between 2012 and 2016, 17 staff at Kruger National Park were implicated in rhino poaching. In one case, Rodney Landela, a previously highly regarded section ranger who had won a number of awards, was chased down and apprehended inside the park with bloodied shoes, a high-caliber rifle and two rhino horns.

“As the money becomes bigger and the odds become greater there is corruption, some rangers are bought,” Jooste said.

As a former army officer, he said, he was highly aware of the impact such betrayals could have on morale.

A Toxic Mix

“Add that up, it’s a toxic mix,” Jooste said. “We daily see rangers struggling to cope.”

Under Jooste’s command, South Africa is one of the only places that proactively cares for its rangers’ psychological well-being. Project Embrace, under SANParks, offers psychological support to rangers in Kruger National Park.

As an employer providing firearms, SANParks has a legal duty under the current South African Firearms Act to provide a “psychological debriefing within 48 hours after experiencing any violent incident, discharging their firearm or witnessing a shooting.”

But SANParks also has a team of volunteer rangers who visit stations on a regular basis, teaching rangers and their families techniques to cope with stress and recognize the warning signs of mental health issues.

“Anybody who has to use firearms in any of the armed forces is at greater risk of developing stress-related mental health conditions,” said Susanna Myburg-Fincham, a clinical psychologist working with Project Embrace. “That is well documented.”

Myburg-Fincham, an expert in trauma-related stress, was brought in by SANParks in 2011 to provide psychological counseling to rangers.

“The work I do is preemptive work, to prevent mental health problems,” she said, adding that she believed strongly in the importance of her work.

“All you have to do is look at the Vietnam War where people feel totally abandoned,” she said. “We’re trying not to let that happen, we want our rangers to know that they are supported.”

Myburg-Fincham said she was keen to fill in the research gaps on ranger mental health. She said she found that a narrative approach, where rangers relate their experience through stories, was the most effective method with the Kruger Park rangers.

Jooste said he believed the project was delivering real benefits.

“We are a long way from where we need to be, but the change is significant,” he said.

Project Embrace is just one part of a raft of measures SANParks has put in place to support its rangers, which includes legal advice, advanced training, and state-of-the-art equipment. But the harsh reality is that most ranger forces around the world simply do not have access to the kind of resources that SANParks can afford.

“To have consistent psychological services for these rangers who are in remote communities is a real hard ask,” Willmore said.

Even the well-resourced SANParks program requires additional support. When Serfontein found out about Myburg-Fincham’s work at a conference in 2015, she created a collaboration between Stop Rhino Poaching and the Game Rangers Association of Africa to ensure the project had continued funding and support.

“It’s one thing to implement a [psychological well-being] project,” Serfontein said. “It takes commitment to maintain it.”

Taking Care

So long as there is money to be made from ivory, rhino horn and numerous other wildlife products, poaching and illegal logging are likely to persist. And on the front line of the poaching epidemic, even the well-supported SANParks rangers are struggling to cope.

All of the individuals we interviewed said rangers were owed more than many of them currently receive: that they should be paid fairly, trained properly, equipped correctly, and supported fully.

But it’s not just a case of more boots, more training and more helicopters. In the increasingly militarized scrabble to defend nature, conservationists must also do much more to protect the psychological well-being of the rangers asked to put their lives on the line.

“They expect the rangers to look after the animals,” Myburg-Fincham said. “Someone has to look after and protect the rangers.”

Living Will Template for Critically Endangered Species

“In the event of my imminent extinction, I hereby authorize the following as a testament of my wishes...”

In the event that my species is so badly depleted due to hunting or habitat loss that it is on the verge of extinction, and I am (still) unable to direct my own care, I hereby authorize this Living Will/Advance Directive as a testament of my wishes:

I, GENUS AND SPECIES NAME, residing at NAME OF ZOO / WILDLIFE PRESERVE / ROADSIDE TORTURE CIRCUS, being of sound mind, and acting willingly and without duress except for YOU CUTTING DOWN / PAVING MY HOME / PUTTING ME IN SOUP, herein state the following desires with regard to my end-of-life care:

Life Support

I wish to ACCEPT / REFUSE attempts to create a romantic environment for a partner and me while people with clipboards watch us through a window.

I wish to ACCEPT / ABSOLUTELY REFUSE encouragement to mate with a related subspecies or species I’m not really attracted to.

I will BE COOL WITH IT / NOT BE COOL WITH IT if I get put to sleep with a dart gun and wake up with a big scar on my nether regions.

I wish to GRUDGINGLY ACCEPT / POLITELY DECLINE being the subject of an earnest Change.org petition circulated on Facebook.

In the event that men with rifles are standing around me while I sleep to fend off poachers, I wish that they would GET THEIR GROSS SMELL OUT OF MY SWEET URINE-NEST / SHOOT SOMEONE FASTER / COME OVER HERE AND SCRATCH THIS SCAR ON MY NETHER REGIONS.

De-Extinction

After my death, I wish to ACCEPT / REFUSE having my frozen sperm or eggs combined with those of a related species in an ambitious IVF procedure that will result in news headlines such as “Frog-enstein’s Monster?” or “In Vitro Turtle-ization!”

I wish to REFUSE / REFUSE, OH GOD WHY having my genes approximated by the manipulation of a living species’ DNA and turned into an embryo that an elephant or other animal is forced to carry to term.

Commemoration

I wish to ACCEPT / REFUSE / ACCEPT, BUT ONLY IF IT’S TASTEFUL being put onto a special-edition stamp.

In the event that a third-grade teacher assigns his or her students to draw a poster about an extinct species and one of them chooses me, I wish to ACCEPT / REFUSE (WHY ARE YOU PUTTING THE BURDEN OF YOUR SHAME ONTO YOUR CHILDREN?).

If Elon Musk wants to engrave my genetic code on a rocket and shoot it into space, that would be KIND OF DUMB / VERY DUMB.

If a museum wishes to taxidermy my carcass and pose it in a diorama, feebly trying to escape a human hunter mannequin, I REFUSE / ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME / I WILL COME BACK AND HAUNT YOU.

Signed,

COMMON NAME

SPECIES NAME

WITNESS / ZOOKEEPER / TORTURE CIRCUS PROPRIETOR

DATE

How More Border Barriers Could Harm the Biodiverse Texas Rio Grande Valley

Even before the border wall is built, local business owners and conservationists worry about its impact on tourism and wildlife.

About 25 miles from where the Rio Grande River meets the Gulf of Mexico, a dirt road hemmed by agricultural fields on either side leads visitors to one of the most spectacular birding sites in the country: The Nature Conservancy of Texas’ Southmost Preserve. The property’s entrance atop an earthen levee offers a view of one of only two large stands of native Mexican sabal palm and Tamaulipan thornscrub remaining in the United States. These 1,014 acres provide habitat for a number of other rare, threatened and endangered species and are an important layover spot for dozens of species of migrating birds.

Mexican sabal palms as Southmost Preserve. Erika Nortemann/The Nature Conservancy

Well before reaching the levee, though, visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of this magnificent landscape get an entirely different view: rows of 18-foot metal bollards four inches apart, stretching in both directions from the road.

Constructed in 2010, this section of border barrier sits up to a mile from the actual Texas-Mexico border, according to The Nature Conservancy’s Sonia Najera, and runs north of most of the preserve.

“It is a very accurate statement to say I’m not a fan of the barrier,” Najera says.

She has plenty of company here. Other non-fans include local birding guides; owners of land adjacent to, behind, and in sight of, wall sections; and tourists, scientists and former wildlife refuge employees (current employees cannot officially comment). Statewide 61 percent of Texas adults oppose a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Rio Grande, a meandering, flood-prone river, forms the border between Texas and Mexico, 1,254 miles from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico. The final stretch, through what’s known as the Rio Grande Valley, already has 70 miles of “pedestrian barrier” — fences that stand 12 to 18 feet high and include various combinations of solid metal, metal mesh fencing and vertical steel slats or bollards.

Designed to stop people, these barriers also serve to stop most wildlife.

In addition to Southmost Preserve, pedestrian barriers also cross several state Wildlife Management Areas and portions of the South Texas National Wildlife Refuge Complex, which includes Lower Rio Grande Valley, Santa Ana and Laguna Atascosa refuges. The Audubon Society’s Sabal Palm Sanctuary, the other remaining stand of those native palms, ended up completely south of the wall. There the fence interferes with the natural spread of sabal palm seeds via the scat of animals such as coyotes, which are too large to pass through openings in the structure. The sanctuary also provides important habitat for ocelots, and biologists say the wall hampers critical genetic mixing of Texas and Mexico populations for this species.

An ocelot photographed in 2017 at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, Texas. Photo: USFWS

People have different reasons for opposing the additional border walls proposed by the Trump administration, but in the valley, many of those reasons relate to an ecotourism industry that brings in $463 million annually. In the 1980s and 1990s, communities here worked hard to protect habitat in order to create that industry. Locals say more wall puts it at risk.

Najera points out that the wall and security infrastructure create noise, lights, traffic, surface disturbance, altered hydrology and, most seriously, habitat fragmentation.

Breaking up species’ habitat limits their movement, says Tim Keitt, biology professor at the University of Texas, while also disrupting population connectivity and genetic interchange. Keitt is one of four scientists who reported, in the April 2018 journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, that every kilometer of new barrier proposed by the federal government represents the loss of at least 4.8 to 7.3 acres of habitat, not including construction sites, service roads or edge effects on adjacent land. A previous study Keitt co-authored concluded that new barriers along the border increased the number of species at risk, and other scientists have documented 841 vertebrate species alone that are at risk of extinction or severe decrease in numbers from proposed additional border wall segments.

“People fought very hard to preserve those last bits of habitat in the valley,” Keitt says. “It’s a very dynamic, growing area, agriculturally productive, and it was quite a battle to get these places preserved. It is tragic and a shame that those efforts could be compromised by shortsighted decisions.”

Keith Hackland, owner of Alamo Birding Services and the Alamo Inn, has worked against the idea of a border wall for 15 years. “If we want to preserve birds in the valley, we have to preserve the habitat they use, and to preserve the habitat, we need tourist dollars, which essentially place a value on the habitat,” he says. “Tourism is key.”

Hackland notes that existing sections of barrier have actually served to protect some habitat by moving migrant and Border Patrol activity to other areas. A continuous wall, however, would change those dynamics.

“Let’s say they build walls all along the Rio Grande levee in the Valley, but not at places like Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge and Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. That would focus all the migrant and enforcement activity into those areas, which would ultimately degrade them.”

In addition to its effect on wildlife, the border wall degrades the experience of those who come to see wildlife. Last fall Hackland had clients cancel trips after reading news reports of bulldozers on the Santa Ana refuge and the nonprofit National Butterfly Center. This year’s spring birding season, fewer people stayed at his inn; he blames constant news coverage of violence along the border, which often fails to clarify that it happens on the other side.

“The wall is not what I want to see when I take people from Europe on a tour,” he says. “Aesthetically it demonstrates that our immigration policy is in tatters and not addressing what we need or what migrants need. It’s a way of diverting attention. It strikes people as strange that we were against the wall in Berlin but are building our own.”

As former project leader for the South Texas NWR Complex, Ken Merritt saw firsthand how the first round of border barrier affected wildlife. He also finds the wall unsightly. “It gives me a bad feeling about how we deal with our neighbors. I don’t think it’s particularly effective, and it’s not going to solve the problem.”

Merritt adds that he understands why some people in other parts of the country appreciate the idea of a wall. ”You can get a lot of notice by putting up a wall,” he says. “The folks who live in Iowa and watch Fox News think the problem is being solved, while very few people who live here and see how things work would agree.”

Placement of wall sections also can affect people’s access to protected areas, Keitt says. “Sabal Palms is a classic example. [Limiting access] would be quite tragic.”

Najera says visitors sometimes ask if they’re in Mexico after passing through the opening in the barrier into Southmost Preserve. “It is a mental, visual and physical barrier,” she says.

Hackland stresses that, so far at least, the valley remains one of the best destinations in the world for birders. “There isn’t another place in the world where you can see so many birds so close. It’s an unforgettable experience.”

Whether that remains true depends in part on whether wall proposals become reality.

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.

Memorializing the Wake Island Rail: An Extinction Caused by War

This small, flightless bird, native to an atoll in the Pacific, went extinct as a direct result of World War II.

There’s not much to the tiny Pacific atoll known as Wake. Located roughly halfway between Guam and Hawaii, Wake is a loose, U-shaped grouping of an island, three smaller islets and a sand flat, all situated around a beautiful blue lagoon. There’s not a whole lot there; in fact, there can’t be. The entire atoll adds up to just over 2.5 square miles of land. Today fewer than 100 people live on Wake full-time.

Wake was never a good home for people. It was, however, a haven for birds. With no other islands nearby, it was once a perfect layover point for dozens of seabird species, including multiple kinds of albatrosses, frigate birds and terns. So many birds could be found on Wake during the early 20th century that it became a veritable gold mine for Japanese poachers, who killed whole flocks of the animals for sale in the global feather trade.

Most of those birds visited Wake as part of their annual migrations, but only one species lived there year-round. The Wake Island rail (Gallirallus wakensis) was a flightless bird that reached about 9 inches in length. It fed on insects, mollusks and seeds and managed to survive in an ecosystem with no access to fresh water.

What the Wake Island rail could not survive, however, was World War II. The atoll was occupied by U.S. Navy forces in January 1941, and one of the most famous battles of the war was fought there the following December. The Japanese took control of Wake on Dec. 23, 1941, after more than 1,100 people were killed or wounded.

After the American surrender, thousands of Japanese soldiers took up residence on Wake Atoll. In 1944 their supply chain was cut off by the U.S. Navy. With no provisions making their way to the island and little else to eat, the soldiers turned to whatever they could find and catch. The Wake Island rail, unable to fly away and escape, quickly became one of their main sources of protein.

By 1945, the species was gone — eaten out of existence.

Thousands of people died on Wake Island, and Japanese forces committed numerous war crimes there. A permanent memorial commemorates 98 American civilian workers who were executed by machine gun in 1943.

But there are no memorials for the Wake Island rail. They’re simply gone. Few photos or museum specimens of the birds remain, and only a handful of scientific papers even mention them. Their extinction is rarely remembered, not even in the accounts of World War II.

They’re just one of the many, many forgotten victims of war.

A version of this article was originally published by Scientific American.

“We Roam With Jaguars” — 5 Questions With Wildlife Artist Racheal Rios

“My art can’t help but comment on political, cultural and environmental issues of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands,” says the award-winning artist.

Visual artist Racheal Rios’s work reflects the cultures and ecosystems of her hometown of Tucson, Ariz. Her bold, iconographic work features native wildlife and saint-like figures, cactus and flowers, braids and stars.

Rios, who received the Buffalo Exchange Arts Award for local emerging artists in 2016, first came to our attention because of her work inspired by two jaguars (Panthera onca) living along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. These big cats once roamed North America from the mountains of Southern California to Louisiana. Due primarily to a 20th-century government extermination program, jaguars all but vanished from their U.S. range. Recent footage from wildlife cameras, however, shows that a handful of jaguars are still to be found north of the border.

The Revelator asked Rios about her artistic influences and themes — and about jaguars.

As an artist based in Tucson, Ariz., how does your work comment on cultural, political and environmental issues of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands?

Most of my early exposure to art growing up in Tucson was murals and lowrider art in magazines. They depicted scenes of Aztec warriors, Mexican revolutionaries, Yaqui deer dancers and other prolific imagery that would have incredible influence on my art today. Because of where I live my art can’t help but comment on political, cultural and environmental issues of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. They’re all tied together.

Rachael Rios braided snake hands — © Racheal Rios. Used with permission.

How has your art been received by audiences?

I find people either really like and feel connected to what I make (mostly my dad), or don’t like it at all. Art critics are like a box of chocolates.

Who are your biggest influences — artistic or cultural?

Some of my biggest cultural influences are the Chicano mural movement and hip-hop. My biggest influences artistically are probably Leonora Carrington, an English-born Mexican artist, and Remedios Varo, a Spanish artist. As far as a contemporary: Artist Chip Thomas, aka jetsonorama, creates an intimacy with his viewer that I find very inspiring and thrive for. I would also say that although my husband Albert Chamillard makes very different work than mine, his dedication and daily practice of drawing heavily influences my artistic work ethic and lights my artistic fire.

Rachael Rios handjaw — © Racheal Rios. Used with permission.

You’ve created art based on El Jefe and Sombra, two wild jaguars that crossed the border from Mexico to reside in Arizona. Why did you choose jaguars?

The jaguars that have recently been making their way back into the Arizona mountains are really a symbol of hope. My family and I spend a lot of time hiking and camping in the mountains surrounding Tucson and across southern Arizona, and I am in awe that we would roam the same spaces as jaguars.

Rachael Rios birth of Osa — © Racheal Rios. Used with permission.

What advice would you give to other emerging artists?

I think my biggest piece of advice to emerging artists is that you have to make a lot of bad work to make good work. It’s a practice that needs practice.

To see more of Rios’ work, check out her Instagram account.

America’s Wild Horses: Neglected and Thrown Overboard

The Bureau of Land Management has proposed a mass sterilization, euthanasia and “sale without limitation” of America’s wild mustangs.

When 16th century conquistadors crossed the ocean from the Old World to the New, their ships often became stranded along the equator at a place where the winds stopped blowing. To lighten their load, they would throw their horses overboard. Eventually the sails would fill with air and the voyage could continue. Over time this part of the ocean came to be known as “the horse latitudes.” It is said that about half of the horses on the early crossings perished in this region.

The horses that survived helped the Spanish launch their conquest. But unlike the conquistadors, the horses were not newcomers. After thousands of years, they were returning to their homeland, linked through their DNA to Ice Age horses originally found on this continent. Given our history, it would seem that their return was fated.

We all know the Longfellow poem about Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the fearless steed who “kindled the land into flame” in April 1775. The poem tells us little else about the gallant animal, but we know from the record that she was a mare named Brown Beauty, and her forebears included Spanish horses that had disembarked on the Carolina banks as the conquest began. When Revere’s ride was over, the mare was seized by a British soldier who mounted her and galloped away. The horse collapsed and died later that night — spent — after launching the war for independence.

In the West her historic Spanish relatives became the foundation stock for the mustangs that went on to blaze trails and fight wars. By the end of the 19th century, the day of the horse was over, and the 2 million mustangs then roaming the range became a cash crop. An era known as “the great removal” ensued, and countless horses were sent back to Europe in tin cans or on boats to serve in foreign wars.

They would have vanished like the buffalo had it not been for the efforts of a woman known as Wild Horse Annie. After seeing blood spilling out of a truck on a Nevada highway in 1950, she followed it to a slaughterhouse and watched as dying mustangs were offloaded for rendering. For the next 20 years, she battled for legal protections for wild horses.

That finally came when President Richard Nixon signed the landmark Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act in 1971. “We need the tonic of wildness,” he said at the time, quoting Henry David Thoreau. “Wild horses merit protection as a matter of ecological right,” Nixon added, “as anyone knows who has stood awed at the indomitable spirit and sheer energy of a mustang running free.”

Under that law horses are to be “considered in areas where presently found as an integral part of the system of public lands.” Oversight falls to agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, which often favor corporate cattle ranching in their policies. Many stockmen regard mustangs as “thieves” that “steal” food from other grazing animals (ironically, these same people often accuse defenders of wild horses of assigning human traits to the animals).

Today the free-roaming law is often ignored, and mustangs are in peril. Cruel roundups are conducted using helicopters, sometimes based on outdated mustang counts or less-than-accurate studies. Those counts remain a matter of contention. According to the government, there are about 83,000 wild horses on public lands; there are also thousands in the Orwellian maze of federal housing. Other experts, however, say that the number of free-roaming horses is much lower, and often find many fewer horses on the range than what is stated in official census reports.

Mustang populations also endure other stresses, such as “emergency gathers” during drought, such as the one underway right now in Cold Creek, Nev. (No other species is rounded up under such conditions, and the horses aren’t returned to the range after being given food or water.) More roundups are scheduled for this year, during which some horses will likely perish and most others will be funneled into pipelines leading to a life in captivity, adoption or a trip to the slaughterhouse across the Mexican border.

The ultimate goal is to reduce the mustang population to 17,000 — the count at the time the law protecting them went into effect, although that number is in dispute and not likely to sustain the wild horse. Nevertheless, the Bureau of Land Management last month announced a drastic plan, in line with the Trump administration’s search-and-destroy approach to wildlife management in America, calling for sterilization, euthanasia and “sale without limitation” — also known as a truck ride to the slaughterhouse.

For years the situation has been aggravated by a media that has routinely reprinted government talking points — mustangs destroy the land, constitute an invasive species (until recently, contradicted by some of the Bureau’s own websites, which accurately referred to the wild horse as a “reintroduced” animal), and cost too much to manage. Yet at dozens of talks over the years, rarely have I met anyone who is opposed to spending tax dollars on taking care of our great partner. Many people, in fact, have said they would like to designate an amount for exactly that purpose on their annual tax forms.

“We owe it all to God, and the horse,” said Hernando Cortes when the conquest was over. That’s still true today, regardless of your religious beliefs. Will government officials heed the words of the old conquistador and act accordingly? As it stands now, nearly 500 years after horses returned to their homeland, we’re still throwing them overboard, trying to lighten our load.

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.

Blinded by the Light Pollution

We mapped light pollution from oil and gas fields and found they outshine American cities — and that's bad news for birds.

Humans increasingly live in a world of constant artificial lighting — so much so that it’s easy to forget about the environmental consequences of light pollution. “Light is a symbol of urbanity that changes the experience of any landscape from a human perspective,” says Travis Longcore, co-editor of the landmark book Ecological Consequences of Artificial Lighting, “but it alters the landscape for wildlife in ways that’s really hard for humans to imagine.”

For birds the consequences of light pollution can be deadly. The loss of features normally visible in an unobstructed night sky, along with the attraction of artificial lights, often throws birds off their migration paths. Some have been known to fruitlessly circle bright natural-gas flares, unable to navigate away from the light and as a result lose close to half of their body weight in one night. Artificial light can also degrade habitat quality and disrupt predator-prey relationships.

These problems aren’t limited to big cities — massive oil and gas development projects, often located far from populated areas, are incredibly bright affairs that produce light pollution on a scale few people realize. The infrastructure built up around these sites is well-lit for navigation, while excess natural gas that’s unprofitable to transport is burned off on-site. This can turn an underground petroleum deposit into a blazing field of fire on the surface.

Take a look at this simulation of how light pollution from oil and gas operations can dramatically alter the night sky:

How bad is the problem of gas flaring? We mapped the light pollution caused by some of the highest-producing oil and gas operations in the country.

In addition to the brightest hubs of light, the less intensely developed areas of oil and gas sites can sprawl across multiple counties – and while they are less bright than cities, they still have significant ecological impacts for birds.

Is there a solution to this problem? Sure. Longcore says, “the best way to remove these impacts is to avoid development of energy systems in wildlands.” That would help make sure that dark night skies remain available for birds and other species that depend on them.

Coming Soon:

Just how bad has light pollution gotten in your area? We’ll show you — right down to your zip code.

Sources and Methods

Main Sources:

Photo of San Ardo oil field by Drew Bird Photography.
The simulation was based on information in A Physically-Based Night Sky Model by Jensen et al.

Light pollution data: Version 4 DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights Time Series Year 2013 Satellite 18 – Average Lights x Pct for gas flaring volumes, by NOAA.

Methods:

Oil and gas development sites were chosen from a list of the most oil-rich areas in the country that were also geographically isolated from populated areas, and therefore suitable for analysis.
The outer limits of the oil and gas development area were manually defined based on geographic production well data produced by The FracTracker Alliance. Any census populated areas within those boundaries were erased.
Average city brightness was calculated using the NOAA light pollution dataset and Urban Area boundary shapefiles provided by Census.gov.
A sliding scale of the brightest section, i.e. the highest values of the light pollution data layer was applied to obtain multiple versions of mean/average brightness values for each oil and gas production area in order to find suitable city matches.
Oil and gas development areas were then matched with the most well-known city having the same average brightness and total area.

Tools: Adobe Photoshop CC 2017, Adobe After Effects CC 2017, ESRI ArcMap 10.5

How the Golden Lion Tamarin Is Helping to Heal Brazil’s Rainforest

It took a decade of hard work, but one of the world’s most important wildlife corridors is now emerging from the fragmented forests of coastal Brazil.

Sometimes conserving rare species and habitats requires waiting a few years for all of the pieces of a puzzle to come together.

For one project in coastal Brazil, that process took the better part of a decade. But now, after years of hard work, the puzzle’s nearly complete, and what could end up being one of the world’s most important wildlife corridors is about to emerge.

The Fazenda Dourada corridor in the state of Rio de Janeiro will link two isolated federal biological reserves — União and Poço das Antes — with newly restored forests and a bridge over a major highway, creating a migratory pathway for the endangered golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia) and potentially thousands of other imperiled species to travel through previously degraded and fragmented landscapes.

The project is an initiative of Brazil’s Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado (Golden Lion Tamarin Association) and the U.S. nonprofit SavingSpecies. It was enabled by a grant from a Dutch foundation called DOB Ecology.

The iconic golden lion tamarin served as the flagship species for this restoration “because it’s such a charismatic animal,” says Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke chair of conservation at Duke University and president of SavingSpecies. The species was nearly extinct 30 years ago, and the corridor will be essential for their continued recovery, but the location will also serve many other unique species. “Coastal Brazil has more endangered species probably than anywhere else in the Americas,” he says. “It certainly has more endangered birds, but it’s also a major center of endemic mammals and amphibians and something like 6,000 plant species.”

Coastal Brazil has the highest concentration of endangered bird species in the Americas. Courtesy SavingSpecies.

The biodiversity-rich region has also been subject to what Pimm calls “just appalling levels of habitat loss. It’s a very, very fragmented landscape. The habitat that remains is in pieces.” Many of the species that live in this region have very small ranges, he says, placing them at high risk of extinction if their habitats are destroyed or if populations become separated from each other.

The two nonprofits have been working together for the past 10 years — first to acquire land and then to restore roughly 50 miles of forests between the two federal reserves. “We’ve planted more than 30 species of trees,” Pimm says, pointing out that Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado has done most of the hard work on location. “I planted two trees myself, but they’ve planted thousands.”

Restoring habitats takes time, of course, but the 69-year-old Pimm says he’s pleased with how quickly the forests have begun to bounce back. “I thought I might be in my dotage before it did anything, but the amazing thing is that this is a tropical forest. It’s warm and wet and once you give trees a chance to grow, they grow very rapidly.” Some of the trees, he says, have already reached 30 feet in height, and the efforts have visible results. “You can look at the satellite imagery on Google Earth to see how it’s all coming back.”

The final piece of the puzzle took the most time to put into place. Last month the two groups announced they have acquired a 585-acre plot of land near a major highway that runs north of Poço das Antas. About half of that land, which is currently used as pasture, will now be reforested. At the same time, a bridge will be built across the highway, allowing the wildlife in the two reserves to reconnect and expand their habitats.

“I always knew the challenge was going to be to connect these populations across the highway,” Pimm says. “We needed not one miracle, but two. We needed to get the road company to agree to build this habitat bridge so the species could cross the road, which they agreed to do, and then we had to get more land on the other side of the road. We got the money about a year and a half ago. It’s taken that long to get the agreement with the property owner, but now we’ve got the ability to create this really exceptional wildlife corridor.”

The two organizations say this isn’t just about helping wildlife, including the iconic tamarin; it’s also about repairing the “tear” in the Brazilian rainforest. “This is an especially important step toward our vision of connecting and protecting enough forest to support a viable population of golden lion tamarins far into the future,” Luís Paulo Ferraz, executive director of Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado, said in a press release. “Because of the continual threat of forest fragmentation from development and linear infrastructure, restoring and protecting the Atlantic Forest is the only way for its magnificent biodiversity to survive.”

Pimm adds that this corridor, and the decade of forest-restoration efforts associated with it, prove that the puzzle pieces of hard work, determination and a little bit of time can pay off — and possibly change the fate of the world’s most imperiled species. “This is an example of us taking the offense,” he says. “We don’t have to accept that bad things are happening. We’re going to reconnect landscapes. We can use smart, informed science and we can begin to reverse the declines. We can really start taking nature back.”

Trump’s Deregulatory Record: Not Much Actual Deregulation, But Still Lots of Damage

A review of Trump’s stated war on regulations doesn't find many successful repeals. But it is hurting regulatory enforcement in quieter ways.

One year ago, the Trump administration’s deregulatory push was in full swing. The administration was preparing a proposed rule to repeal the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) regulation, and to delay and repeal the restriction of methane emissions from oil and gas extraction on public lands.

Surely these well-publicized deregulatory initiatives which the Trump administration has made a big show of taking credit for have taken effect by now.

Well, not exactly. The WOTUS proposal has not been finalized, and the methane extraction rule is tied up in a thicket of court cases.

President Trump’s record on deregulation has gotten a great deal of attention. He brags about it regularly. It is often placed alongside the tax cuts passed by Congress when his chief accomplishments are recounted. To listen to the president (or the media), one would think that thousands of regulations were repealed.

But as the WOTUS and Bureau of Land Management extraction rules indicate, the actual extent of deregulation is much more limited. At the same time, other moves to dismantle the “administrative state” have quietly been more effective.

No more easy routes

Early in the Trump administration, Congress used the Congressional Review Act, a statute that allows the Senate to bypass the filibuster to repeal recently issued regulations. By May 17, 2017, Congress had repealed 14 Obama regulations using the CRA in a wide array of policy areas. They would add one more regulation from the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau by the end of 2017.

But these repeals are largely the work of Congress and frequent punching bag for President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And now, most Obama-era regulations are off limits for the CRA (although Congress has explored expanding its use). That leaves President Trump and his administration to rely on the typical route for writing and revising regulations – the executive branch – if they want to repeal any more of the thousands of regulations issued during the Obama administration.

In seeking to roll back fuel economy standards and other regulations, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s staff hasn’t shown the same attention to the rule-making process as his predecessor. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-NC-ND

An agency must start by developing a proposal to repeal a regulation. This must often be accompanied by a detailed economic analysis of the repeal. The proposal and the analysis are then sent to the Office of Management and Budget for a review. When that review is complete, the proposal is published in the Federal Register for public comment. Agencies must review the public comments, respond to them, make any changes they feel necessary to their proposal and analysis, and then resubmit it to OMB before publishing a final rule. Finally, the rule is subject to litigation.

To navigate this process takes time and expertise. President Trump and his Cabinet members, particularly Scott Pruitt at the EPA, have instead tried to rush through the many steps of this process. This has meant that the last step, the litigation over regulatory repeals, has proven particularly problematic for the administration. At the EPA, courts have struck down delays or repeals of regulations six times already. This pattern holds across the government.

Another kind of damage

Part of the problem for the Trump administration is that while they have been hasty in trying to repeal regulations, the Obama administration was thorough in promulgating them. Over the course of eight years, Obama appointees solicited comments on their proposals, did detailed economic analyses, and built strong cases for many of their regulations. For example, the former EPA administration compiled a 1,217-page analysis done over years to buttress its fuel economy rules, while the current administration generated a 38-page document dominated by auto industry comments to justify reviewing and rescinding them.

Repealing existing regulations requires the work of government staffers who know the processes but a number of agencies, including the EPA, have lost many significant employees. AP Photo/Alex Brandon

To do so, the Trump administration will have to rely on the expertise that lies within the federal bureaucracy. But President Trump and his appointees have regularly denigrated those whose help they now require. As a result, many of the most talented people at the agencies have left public service. At the EPA alone, more than 700 employees have left during this administration.

This means not only has the administration failed thus far to repeal many regulations beyond those overturned by Congress using the CRA, but their prospects for doing so in other cases are not strong. These cases include the WOTUS regulation, the Clean Power Plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants, and the recently announced plans to roll back emission standards for automobiles and take on California over their auto emission requirements.

Stephen Bannon listed the deconstruction of the administrative state as a goal of the Trump administration. The repeal of regulations is often trumpeted as the most important sign that Trump is succeeding. But while the administration is failing at the piece of deconstruction they are talking about most loudly, there are signs that they are succeeding in other ways.

The first is the enforcement of existing regulations. While the Trump administration has ramped up enforcement of immigration regulations, it has ratcheted down enforcement of environment and worker safety requirements. This selective pattern of enforcing regulations sends signals to firms that they don’t need to worry about complying with the law when it comes to the environment or public health.

Meanwhile, there has been an exodus of employees from the federal government which will likely have a corrosive long-term effect. Replacing talented public servants is not something that can be done overnight, even by a new administration dedicated to doing so. Training these new government employees will take even longer. As government becomes less effective because of the talent drain, faith in government diminishes further and a cycle of cynicism about public service is made worse.

The Trump administration has declared war on the regulatory state. But the things the administration is reluctant to take credit for, notably not enforcing the law and driving out talented public servants, are likely to have a much larger impact than its largely nonexistent regulatory repeals.

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

Something Fishy: Toxic Plastic Pollution Is Traveling Up the Food Chain

Chemicals collect in microplastics, which then get eaten by fish, birds and seals — and by humans.

Even a hundred yards out from the stern of the old steel sloop, the fish at the end of the line looked enormous. And it was strong: As it leapt up out of the water in an attempt to free the hook from its mouth, its long body — green and yellow and speckled with fluorescent blue — slashed violently, unspooling more and more line. The sailor at the end of the reel had to put up a significant fight to avoid losing his rod in the vast blue Pacific.

“That is a mahi-mahi, the most beautiful fish in the world!” called out the ship’s captain. At the beginning of the third week of what would turn out to be a 23-day scientific expedition across the Eastern North Pacific Gyre — a highly polluted ocean vortex that swirls clockwise from the California coast to the Hawaiian Islands and back again — a fresh fish was a welcome source of food for his crew of eight.

After several minutes of an intense duel, the sailor reeled in the fish, smiling.

That smile soon faded a bit. After the sailor was done separating the fish’s thick flesh from skin and bone, he cut open its stomach as requested by the ship’s lead scientist. Inside was a small flying fish. The scientist directed the sailor cut open that second fish’s stomach.

Out rolled two small pieces of plastic.

These plastic bits were what’s classified as “microplastic” due to their small size — less than .04 inches in diameter.

“That’s not too appetizing,” said the scientist, Kristian Syberg, a professor of environmental risk at Roskilde University in Denmark who was aboard the ship to sample the seawater for plastic.

Scientists who study plastic, like Syberg, are just beginning to understand the implications of microplastic and even smaller pieces of plastic called nanoplastic on the marine food web. Fishers, beachgoers and scientists are finding a growing number of marine animals — from live-caught fish to deceased seabirds and whales — with microplastic in their bodies. While the issue has only been studied in-depth for a handful of years, the latest research suggests these tiny pieces of plastic are capable of being transferred from organism to organism, wreaking havoc all the way up the marine food web — possibly all the way to humans.

At the Cornish Sea Sanctuary in the United Kingdom, Plymouth Marine Laboratory Ph.D. student Sarah Nelms compared the levels of microplastic found in the bodies of wild-caught Atlantic mackerel and the scat of the captive gray seals to which they were fed over the course of 16 weeks in 2016. She found microplastic in half the seal scat she studied, and in one-third of the mackerel fed to the seals. She posited that the mackerel — considered secondary consumers because they are one step above the bottom of the marine food web — ate microplastic particles along with their normal diets of zooplankton and this plastic was passed on to the seals.

“The seals are not exposed to any other sources of plastic,” Nelms told me recently.

Yet the plastic still ended up in their systems. In a paper published this February in the journal Environmental Pollution, Nelms and her coauthors noted that her team took “extensive contamination control measures” to prevent the seals from being exposed to other sources of plastic during the study. “We were therefore able to conclude that the microplastics we found in the seal scats came via the fish.”

The fishes’ bodies contained a higher number of plastic particles than the seal scat did, particularly microfibers, which crumble off fishing rope or are shed from clothing when washed. Nelms says this could mean the unaccounted-for plastic particles might be getting caught inside the seals’ bodies, causing unknown harm.

Microplastic is known to absorb chemicals from ocean water. When marine creatures consume microplastic, they’re also getting a dose of toxins. Syberg has studied this so-called “vector” effect where microplastic acts as a transporter of toxic chemicals. He says persistent organic pollutants, called “POPs” for short, are most worrisome because, once consumed, they tend to adhere to organisms’ fat cells where they are metabolized by the body and cause health problems.

Throughout history humans have released huge amounts of POPs into nature, where they persist and spread for decades without degrading. These chemicals, which include pesticides, industrial chemicals and unintentional pollutants such as DDT, PCBs and hexachlorobenzene, are considered highly toxic to humans and wildlife. They are proven to cause health problems such as allergies, reproductive and hormone problems, immune system disorders and cancer.

For this reason, and because there’s still so much scientists don’t known about how plastic acts inside the bodies of living things, Nelms says, “I would consider any amount of plastic inside an animal to be too much.”

Plastic’s movement up the marine food web appears to start with the ocean’s smallest animals, and even in these creatures can cause severe harm. Independent plankton scientist Richard Kirby recently filmed a common plankton species called an arrow worm found off Plymouth, in the U.K., eating a tiny plastic microfiber. The fiber blocked the worm’s gut, stopping the movement of copepods — its food source — through its body. Eventually this would kill the worm — though Kirby pointed out that doesn’t always happen with microplastic.

“In some cases the microplastics will pass through the animal or can be retained and eaten by another animal when the plankton itself is eaten,” says Kirby.

Widespread deaths of plankton caused by microplastic would certainly disrupt the marine food web. But their consumption is already changing the health of the oceans: Microplastic has been found in middle-ocean and deep-sea fish, which, like mackerel, are prey to ocean top predators, like seals or mahi-mahi. With each bite, plastic is moving up the food web, all the way to fish sold for human consumption in markets across the world. Kirby says scientists must urgently perform more research to gain a better understanding of the quantity and geographical distribution of microplastics in order to get a clearer picture of its effects on the oceans.

After my expedition across the North Pacific, Syberg took the plastic pieces and a chunk of the mahi-mahi’s flesh back to his lab in Denmark. He hopes to compare the chemicals found in the plastic with the chemicals found in the fish flesh to see if the vector effect had begun to act on the fish. While results of his chemical analyses are pending, he told me when I visited him in his lab a few months after our sailing trip that “I don’t even have to test the mahi-mahi and plastic to tell you that both of these things contain toxic chemicals.”

At sea, yes, we ate that fish. Just one more link in the chain.