With environmental regulations under attack and EPA budgets being slashed, can the destruction of the agency be prevented?
Like a lot of his fellow EPA professionals, John J. O’Grady is in crisis mode these days.
“You can’t describe the madness that’s going on,” he says. “It’s something that just never would have been expected.”
O’Grady, a 31-year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency, is president of Council 238 of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing EPA employees around the country. He’s also the national spokesman for Save the U.S. EPA, a campaign organized by the union to protect its workers — and to protect the environment from assault by the Trump administration.
The campaign has a big goal: “We’re trying to prevent the utter destruction of the EPA,” O’Grady tells The Revelator by phone. “We’re hoping there’s something left in the rubble after this particular administration leaves office, but who knows.”
Saving the agency could be a tough task considering the recent actions by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, which include rolling back regulations for clean air and water, recommending the repeal of the Clean Power Plan, removing climate change from official policies (and from EPA web pages), and extending the use of toxic pesticides.
“By his actions, you can tell Scott Pruitt’s not here to make EPA better, not to protect human health and the environment, not to make sure that the child with asthma is protected, but to deconstruct the agency,” O’Grady says.
The deconstruction starts with the plan to slash the number of people working for the EPA. The pending 2018 federal budget aims to slash the agency’s workforce by about 2,200 employees, funded by $79 million worth of buyouts (something that may or may not survive this week’s budget vote). And that’s just the start: Trump’s 2019 budget proposal contains another $35 million for EPA buyouts, or about another 1,000 people.
With that and everything else that’s gone on over the past year, O’Grady thinks a lot of EPA employees are starting to feel discouraged. “I’m very concerned that this administration under Scott Pruitt has created a very toxic environment at EPA,” he says. “Imagine if you’re a great football player and you were brought on by the team to win Super Bowls, and then you’re told, no, you have play soccer. It’s kind of similar. These people come on board EPA because they’re dedicated to protecting human health and the environment. And then they’re basically not allowed to do their jobs, and that’s creating a lot of frustration.”
If many EPA employees do stay frustrated enough to accept buyouts, the agency will be less able — or even unable — to enforce whatever regulations Administrator Pruitt leaves on the books. The EPA has never had the capacity to inspect even a fraction of all potential projects that could affect the land, water or air, but O’Grady says it had enough people on the ground doing their jobs to act as a deterrent. He equates it to the crime-reduction effect of state highway cops: If companies see one “speeder” pulled over, more of them might slow down and comply with environmental regulations.
Beyond that, a shrinking EPA workforce could also result in what O’Grady calls “brain drain and the disappearance of institutional knowledge” — a loss that could take years to reverse.
The damage done to EPA doesn’t just affect things on the federal level. It also spins down to states and local communities. “There’s a lot of talk by Scott Pruitt about ‘cooperative federalism’ and it drives me right up the wall,” O’Grady says. “We’ve been doing that for decades. Sixty-five percent of our EPA budget passes through the agency and goes directly to states, tribal authorities and municipalities. At the same time this administration is talking about pushing cooperative federalism, they’re cutting the funding that goes to the states, tribal authorities and municipalities.” That’s all made worse, he says, because at least 30 states are currently under budgetary restraints and depend on the EPA for technical assistance, scientific expertise and enforcement. “They don’t have excess funds to support additional environmental duties.”
So what’s Save the U.S. EPA doing to try to turn this around? “We’re trying to speak out as much as possible,” O’Grady says. They’ve created alliances with many environmental groups and they’re asking people to write to their elected officials. “Stay on them,” he says. “Make sure they know this is a critical issue and that they need to act accordingly.”
With all that’s going on, what gives O’Grady even a small amount of hope? “November 2018,” he says without hesitation, pointing out that several Republican representatives are up for reelection in potentially tight races, possibly enough to lessen that party’s control of all three houses of government. “I know some people are predicting a sea change,” he says. “That would be wonderful. I’d be happy if they just reduce the margin.”
Ironically, O’Grady thinks the threats to EPA are made possible by the environmental successes we’ve had over the past few decades. “People in America look at our air and they get the tap water for drinking and it all looks clean,” he says. “People should be concerned about their children and their grandchildren. They should be concerned about the quality of the water that comes out of their tap. And you know, when they take that walk in the woods, they should be assured that the land hasn’t been used for some kind of dumping. Before EPA came on board, there was a place called the Valley of the Drums. It was a valley, literally, where companies just threw their drums of spent chemicals. That’s what we’re going to see again, if this doesn’t improve.”
The most famous rhino in the world has died, leaving behind two aging females and a hole in our world.
This is the face of extinction.
Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), died Monday at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. He was 45 years old and is survived by just two females, 27-year-old Najin and 17-year-old Fatu, neither of which are capable of breeding due to their own various health problems.
Perhaps the most famous rhino in the world, Sudan’s aging visage has graced magazine covers and newspaper articles around the world. In most of those photos he was seen accompanied by rifle-bearing guards that stood guard around the clock to protect him and his family from the threat of poachers, which continue to plague rhino populations wherever they still live.
Most recently the dating app Tinder called Sudan “the most eligible bachelor in the world,” a promotional effort that raised thousands of dollars for the conservation effort at Ol Pejeta.
“We on Ol Pejeta are all saddened by Sudan’s death,” Richard Vigne, Ol Pejeta’s CEO, said in a press release late Monday night. “He was a great ambassador for his species and will be remembered for the work he did to raise awareness globally of the plight facing not only rhinos, but also the many thousands of other species facing extinction as a result of unsustainable human activity. One day, his demise will hopefully be seen as a seminal moment for conservationists worldwide.”
The northern white rhino’s road to extinction was a long and painful one. The subspecies, which once roamed several nations in central Africa, were heavily poached throughout the first part of the 20th century, mostly to feed the rampant desire for their horns, which have been erroneously linked to traditional health treatments in China.
By 1997 the wild population of northern white rhinos had dropped to just 25 animals, all in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nine years later that population had fallen to just four lonely animals. Poachers, emboldened and enabled by war and conflict, probably got them, too. Repeated searches in 2007, 2008 and 2011 failed to find any evidence that they had survived.
That wasn’t quite the end, though. Eight aging, non-breeding northern white rhinos remained, all living in zoos: two at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and six at Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic.
In 2009 four of the Dvůr Králové rhinos were flown to Ol Pejeta in Kenya, where it was hoped that the feel of their native sun on their backs and earth beneath their feet would inspire them to start breeding and save their species from extinction, possibly by mating and producing hybrid young with related southern white rhinos (C. s. simum).
The simple act of returning to Africa helped immensely. The animals were in “pretty poor state” when they first arrived, but “within six months of their being here their skin had improved, their toenails had improved, the whole condition of the animal had completely changed,” Richard Vigne told me in 2014. “They became semi-wild very quickly.”
And yes, there were some mating attempts, but no pregnancies ensued. Meanwhile, the last captive rhinos at San Diego and Dvůr Králové slowly passed away from old age, as did one of the four at Ol Pejeta, a male named Suni, who expired in 2014.
Now Sudan has joined the list of the dead. In all likelihood, Najin and Fatu will not be far behind.
That doesn’t mean Ol Pejeta or the worldwide conservation community have given up. For the past few years, scientists have collected sperm from the (now gone) male northern white rhinos and anticipate trying to extract eggs from the females at some point later this year. The hope is that someday that genetic material could be used to implant a fertile egg into a rhino of a different species, resulting in the (re)birth of a northern white.
That possibility of that plan working, like all such de-extinction attempts, still seems remote, but at least it still exists.
And so, for now, do the last two female northern white rhinos. Now they, like Sudan before them, are the faces of this species slowly fading away into extinction.
Disease outbreaks could be coming your way — our interactive map shows how you could be affected.
You don’t have to wait decades to witness the impacts of climate change in the United States. Just ask people like Mark Elwin, a carpenter in Maine whose life was devastated after he was infected by a blood parasite.
The infection caused severe fever and pain that required Elwin to be hospitalized, and eventually left him unable to return to his job. He’s one of thousands of Americans who have already become victims of the tick-borne diseases outbreaks currently spreading across the Northeast because of warming temperatures.
As average temperatures across the United States and the rest of the world climb, disease-carrying ticks and insects have started spreading farther north, reaching places where winters were previously too long and cold for them to survive. Tick populations in wintery Maine, for instance, have exploded, causing cases of some diseases to multiply by 30 times in just the past decade.
Scientists have predicted that climate change is creating prime conditions for the spread of insects and contagions — bringing cases of plague from memories of medieval history to California’s Silicon Valley and tropical blood parasites to the plains of Nebraska. Some Texans could even become allergic to eating meat as a result of tick bites.
Despite these predictions President Trump has slashed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget to fight global epidemics by 80 percent. Although most of this funding goes to efforts in other countries, critics say the cut leaves the United States vulnerable to diseases that could be introduced to the country.
Speaking to the Boston Globe, Daniel Brooks, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nebraska, explained: ‘‘The warmer the planet gets, the more pathogens and vectors from the tropics and subtropics are going to move into the temperate zones. Countries such as the United States tend to have a false sense of security, but vectors and pathogens don’t understand international boundaries. You can’t just put up a fence to keep them out.’’
How could this affect you? Below, explore the counties where scientists predict 10 key diseases could spread or worsen because of climate change.
(Mobile users: click counties to select; desktop users: mouse over for results. The darker the county, the greater the disease risk.)
Get a closer look: Enter your ZIP code for more information about disease risks in your town or city.
Remember, these are just 10 of many possible diseases, and diseases that are already established in your area may not show up in this search.
Disease
risks to :
No results or invalid ZIP code.
Diseases risks in other parts of the country:
Potential disease risks nationwide:
Sources and methods:
The data used to visualize national vector-borne disease risks due to climate change were derived from a compilation of predictive maps from suitable studies found through a literature search involving geospatial modeling of habitat suitability of vectors and/or pathogens. These studies utilized a range of internationally accepted climate models by CSIRO, Hadley and CCCma, for example, which further utilized a range of climate change scenarios/Representative Concentration Pathways established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The predictive time scale of these studies ranged from the years 2020 to 2080. Geographic scales and units of study ranged from counties to meters. Once identified, the published maps were georeferenced and areas with spreading and/or intensifying disease risks were isolated and used to build a compilation of general future disease risks to the country, visualized here. Considering the range of attributes used to build these predictive models and maps, the visuals presented here do not represent a single future scenario but paint a broad picture of possible future threats.
View supplemental information with the full list of mapping data and disease information sources here.
Tools used to generate map data were ESRI ArcMap 10.5.1 and Adobe Photoshop CC 2017.
Photo credits:
Ixodes scapularis by Patrick Randall CC BY-NC-SA.
Aedes aegypti from E. A. Goeldi (1905) Os Mosquitos no Pará. Memorias do Museu Goeldi. Pará, Brazil., Figure 2 from Plate 1 in the Appendix CC0.
Lutzomyia longipalpis from Ray Wilson, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine – (2009) PLoS Pathogens Issue Image – Vol. 5(8) August 2009. PLoS Pathog 5(8): ev05.i08. CC BY.
Anopheles quadrimaculatus by Edward McCellan, USCDCP CC0.
Lone star tick by CDC CC0.
Oropsylla Montana flea by Kat Masback CC BY-SA.
Triatoma gerstaeckeri by Drriss & Marrionn CC BY-NC-SA.
DOUGLAS, Ariz.— Public Works director Lynn Kartchner guides his city pickup truck down the overgrown, littered alleys of the Bay Acres mobile-home community in search of raw sewage.
Bay Acres’ small lots were carved from the desert 10 miles north of the Mexican border in the 1970s without any sewer connections, requiring each trailer to be connected to a septic tank and leach field. But septic systems built into clay-laden soils could only last so long. They were destined to fail.
While some homes are well kept, many bear the classic trappings of slums, including chained pit bulls guarding dilapidated singlewides and makeshift auto-repair businesses in back yards.
It doesn’t take Kartchner long to find his target.
Black sewage seeping from a failed septic system oozes into the alley, pooling in tire ruts. The black water indicates it has turned “septic,” meaning the water has become dangerously polluted.
Photo: John Dougherty
“There’s overflows of effluent all over the place,” Kartchner says. “You’ve got dogs and kids out there playing in it.” The community, he says, has had outbreaks of cholera and hepatitis and there is worry that polio could appear.
A Cochise County Health Department official later downplays that assertion, saying no “clusters” or disease “outbreaks” related to sewage exposure in Bay Acres have been reported to the county.
“Is it a risk? Absolutely,” says Carl Hooper, a Cochise County environmental health specialist. “Is it a concern? Absolutely.” Otherwise, he says, he wouldn’t be going down there every month and depositing chlorine tablets to disinfect the contaminated water.
Despite more than $10 billion in environmental infrastructure investments along both sides of the border by the United States and Mexico since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, many communities ranging in size from Tijuana to Bay Acres lack safe wastewater-treatment systems, threatening the public health of millions of people on both sides of the border.
“It’s definitely a public-health risk,” says Kelly Reynolds, an associate professor of public health at the University of Arizona. “If you look, historically and currently, at any developing country that doesn’t have some dependable infrastructure for sewage containment and treatment, there’s always a higher level of morbidity and mortality” from waterborne infectious disease.
Failing or nonexistent wastewater treatment systems on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border can impact public health on the other side, particularly if groundwater is used for drinking water, as is common in border communities.
“The way water moves underground, the way sewage moves underground, there’s no differentiation between where the border is,” Reynolds says. “There is definitely the potential for cross-contamination on either side of the border.”
Most communities along both sides of the border lack the financial resources to build wastewater-treatment systems, which can cost tens of millions of dollars and more. Communities are forced to rely heavily on federal grants and loans.
The Trump administration and Congress are cutting back on key infrastructure funding programs and, in some cases, seeking to eliminate all spending. The North American Development Bank, which is jointly owned and operated by Mexico and the United States, is facing a sharp reduction in lending unless both nations increase their capital contributions. The Environmental Protection Agency’s primary grant fund for border infrastructure projects is nearly depleted, and the Trump administration and House Republicans are requesting no additional money.
Without continuous investment in upgrading, maintaining and expanding facilities, wastewater systems fail. Geography then takes over and untreated sewage flows downhill — usually from higher-elevation Mexican border towns into their sister communities in the United States. The impact is felt border-wide, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
In Arizona border communities, waterborne diseases such as hepatitis A and shigellosis, occur at more than three times the rate in the rest of the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Hepatitis A is a liver disease associated with unhealthy wastewater disposal and the use of inadequate or contaminated water. Shigellosis is a diarrheal disease often the result of poor sanitation, lack of water or wastewater facilities, or the use of contaminated water and food. It is common in poverty-stricken communities such as Bay Acres.
The tale of wastewater treatment, or the lack thereof, in two small Arizona border towns provides insight into the complex political, financial, regulatory and emotional factors that have allowed a festering public health menace to continue for decades.
A novel proposal by a third Arizona border town offers a possible solution, but it would require cooperation at the presidential levels of both countries, a prospect dimmed by President’s Trump harsh rhetoric toward Mexico and demands for a $25 billion border wall.
Mystery Sewage Flows
After decades of delays, the city of Douglas plans to install sewer lines in Bay Acres to eliminate the septic systems on 342 lots. But first it must expand its wastewater treatment plant, which operates near, and occasionally beyond, its 2 million gallon-per-day capacity.
The plant abuts the Mexican border immediately north of the much larger Agua Prieta, Sonora. The treatment plant is wedged between the border fence and hills of black waste rock called slag, generated decades ago when Douglas was the hub of a major copper-producing region in southern Arizona. At the time, a Phelps Dodge Corp. copper smelter was one of the largest single-source sulfur dioxide polluters in the United States. When it closed in 1987, the surrounding community went into economic decline. Now one of the area’s biggest employers is a state prison.
By the late 1990s, the city couldn’t afford to upgrade its 80-year-old wastewater collection system, water-delivery network or wastewater-treatment plant. Failing septic tanks were becoming a health hazard in places like Bay Acres.
The North American Development Bank helped arrange for more than $8 million in financing in the early 2000s, allowing the city to rebuild its water and sewer connection network and make improvements to the treatment plant. But there wasn’t enough money to hook Bay Acres up to the improved system.
The Bay Acres residents are finally about to see change. The development bank, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Arizona Water Infrastructure Financing Authority are helping the city finance a $16.3 million project to expand the treatment plant to 2.6 million gallons a day and connect Bay Acres.
Douglas City Manager Jim Russell says construction on the treatment plant is expected to begin later this spring. The improvements can’t come soon enough.
Lynn Kartchner. Photo: John Dougherty
Kartchner, the Douglas public works director, told The Revelator on two separate occasions that untreated sewage is appearing in the Douglas wastewater discharge pipe immediately after it crosses under the border wall into Agua Prieta.
The United States and Mexico have a longstanding agreement that Agua Prieta would accept treated wastewater from Douglas and use it to irrigate farms. But releases of untreated raw sewage would violate the binational agreement.
Kartchner insists that the Douglas wastewater facility is not the source of the untreated sewage. Instead he blames Mexico.
“There is no untreated water that goes through there,” he says referring to the Douglas wastewater-outfall pipe. “There’s a few thousand (gallons) that come up from Mexico and join our line as it crosses the border, but that’s their raw sewage, not ours.”
Renata Manning, the North American Development Bank’s director of projects, says she was not aware of any raw sewage in the Douglas outfall pipe until told of Kartchner’s comments. She contradicted Kartchner’s explanation that it was coming from Mexico.
“The (Agua Prieta) sewage collection system does not intersect with the Douglas outfall pipeline,” she says, adding that Agua Prieta city officials also confirmed this on Mar. 1. Manning says the bank is “not aware of the source of the wastewater that may be appearing in the outfall box on the Mexican side.”
In late February The Revelator observed what appeared to be feces in a cement junction box where the Douglas outfall pipe enters Mexico just feet away from the border fence. Douglas’ 20-inch diameter outfall pipe connects with a 10-inch Mexican pipe that carries the Douglas effluent underneath a two-lane dirt road and into retention ponds about 40 yards south of the border fence.
Douglas outfall junction box. Photo: John Dougherty
The junction box is in disrepair and overflow wastewater was observed leaking from it and flowing into a ditch between the border wall and a nearby street.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. section of International Boundary and Water Commission, which is part of the State Department, stated on Tuesday that the agency sent engineers to inspect the outfall and “they did not find any sewer pipe connection to the outfall sewer line or structure, or any evidence of raw sewage in the discharge flow.” The commission provides binational solutions to issues that arise regarding boundary demarcation, national ownership of waters, sanitation, water quality, and flood control in the U.S.-Mexico border region.
Erin Jordan, an Arizona Department of Environmental Quality spokeswoman, says the Douglas wastewater treatment plant is in compliance with state regulations and “is not discharging raw sewage.” The state, however, does not have jurisdiction across the border to inspect the junction box, she says.
Margot Perez-Sullivan, an Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 spokeswoman, says it is possible that stagnant water from the wastewater holding ponds is backing up in the sewage junction box.“There is no raw sewage discharge from the U.S. nor is there any connection between the Agua Prieta sewer system and the junction box,” she says.
Douglas City Manager Russell stated in an email on Wednesday email that the city “is not discharging, in any way, any waste into” Agua Prieta. Russell states that the city believes any raw sewage showing up in the Douglas outfall is coming from Agua Prieta sewage pipes that drain into the wastewater holding ponds and untreated waste is backing up in the outfall.
It could not be independently confirmed Wednesday whether Agua Prieta has sewage pipes that dump into the wastewater reservoirs.
If raw sewage is being released from the United States into Mexico it would show how difficult it is for both nations to properly manage waste flows at the border. This would also signify the need for more cooperation at a time of high political tensions between the United States and Mexico and declining funds for improving environmental infrastructure along the border.
“The irony here is that it is usually the United States that finds itself at the receiving end of sewage flows that cross or join the boundary, as seen at Laredo, Texas, Nogales, Ariz., Calexico, Calif., and San Diego,” says Steve Mumme, a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where he specializes in comparative environmental politics and policy with an emphasis on Mexican government and U.S.-Mexican relations.
“If this is a chronic problem, Mexico is well within its rights to ask the U.S. to fix it,” he says.
While the reports of raw sewage in the Douglas outfall remains a mystery, residents in Bay Acres provided a mixed reaction to having the community finally hooked up to the sewer system.
Miguel Ochoa, who has lived Bay Acres for 10 years, says it is “very good” that the septic tanks will be removed because bad smells often occur at night and there are a lot of cockroaches in the neighborhood, which he blames on the open sewers. The new sewer system, he says, will encourage homeowners to upgrade their properties.
But other residents in the impoverished community were more worried about the additional cost of having to pay $40 a month for city sewage hookups rather than free disposal in septic systems — even if they are leaking raw sewage.
“After they do this we will start paying and I think that will be a heavy impact,” says Norma Loreto, who has lived in Bay Acres for more than 20 years, and shares a trailer with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson.
Norma Loreto and her grandson. Photo: John Dougherty
Raw Sewage Contaminates Twin Border Towns
Less than 30 miles west, in the twin border towns of Naco, Sonora, and Naco, Ariz., raw sewage has intermittently flowed from Mexico into the United States for decades. The untreated sewage spills over from sediment-filled treatment ponds on the east side of the Sonoran town and from sewer manholes on the west side of town.
The Naco, Sonora, wastewater and potable water-supply system was upgraded in the late 1990s with $200,000 in North American Development Bank funds and a $454,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant. The wastewater system, however, is once again failing from a lack of maintenance.
Since the Mexican town is at a higher elevation than its sister city, the sewage flows beneath the border fence and, depending on the flow rate, into Greenbush Draw, an ephemeral stream that runs within 600 feet of the primary drinking water wellfield for communities north of the border, including nearby Bisbee.
Greenbush Draw. Photo: John Dougherty
On the west side of the Sonoran town, workers have punched holes in the sides of manhole standpipes to prevent raw sewage from backing up inside homes, allowing it to discharge directly on the ground.
In late February raw sewage was observed pouring out of the side of a manhole pipe about 15 yards south of the border fence. A stream of sewage flowed down a dirt road in Naco, Sonora, before turning north beneath the border fence.
On the east side, sewage could be seen draining from the holding ponds and flowing beneath the border fence, where it collected in a low spot on a Border Patrol dirt road. During heavy flows the sewage crosses the road and drains into the desert toward Greenbush Draw, says Hooper, the Cochise County environmental health specialist.
During a late February inspection of the site by TheRevelator, the overwhelming stench from the untreated sewage made it uncomfortable to be nearby for more than a few minutes before a headache set in.
Hooper routinely places disinfecting chlorine tablets in pools of sewage north of the border. Nevertheless, Hooper says increased levels of fecal coliform bacteria have been detected in Greenbush Draw. The local water utility is putting the maximum allowable amount of chlorine into drinking water drawn from nearby wells.
Chlorine tabs in sewage. Photo: John Dougherty
The raw sewage flows have recently been averaging about 60 gallons per minute, but Hooper says there have been surges where more than 6,000 gallons a minute of untreated sewage is released into the United States.
“Depending on the flow rate, it could go a couple of hundred yards or up to a mile and quarter,” Hooper says. During the heavy monsoon summer rains, the sewage can be swept about 20 miles down Greenbush Draw into the environmentally critical San Pedro River.
Last summer heavy rains unleashed a torrent of raw sewage from Mexico that flowed into Greenbush Draw and through a nearby cattle ranch. The incursion attracted widespread press coverage, and Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, along with Rep. Martha McSally, sent joint letters complaining about the situation to the EPA and the International Boundary and Water Commission.
“This flow of sewage poses a health, safety, and economic risk to Arizona’s vulnerable border towns” the joint letter stated, “and we are greatly concerned about the lack of response of the federal agencies tasked with the oversight of this issue.”
The International Boundary and Water Commission provided Naco, Sonora, with a pump to help reduce the amount of sewage in sedimentation ponds and the EPA provided $10,000 to help defray emergency repairs.
But the repairs have failed to stem the untreated sewage flows.
Hooper says one potential solution to the problem would be to connect the Naco, Sonora, wastewater system to the Naco, Ariz., system, which has capacity to handle the overflows. This could be done with only 300 feet of pipe at a relatively low cost, he says.
The Naco Sanitary District, which operates the Naco, Ariz., wastewater collection and treatment system, rejected the proposal last fall during a contentious meeting fraught with harsh overtones against allowing Mexican sewage into the treatment system.
Hooper says “they almost took my head off” when he suggested the proposal.
Naco Sanitary District general manager Rosa Ramirez says the board was “not necessarily opposed” to the idea but wanted more details on how Mexican sewage would impact their wastewater treatment system, particularly if toxic chemicals were present. “We were concerned not with just the sewage but what else was coming through,” she says.
Ramirez confirmed that political opposition to accepting sewage from Mexico was part of the reason the district did not agree to the proposal. She declined to elaborate and referred The Revelator to district board president Jim Dwyer, who in turn declined to comment.
Board member David Loyd said he another member of the five-person board wanted to take action to address the problem. “Speaking personally, the board was regressive,” Loyd says. “Considering the conditions, personally, I and one other member felt that we missed an opportunity to be progressive.”
Congressional finger-pointing and a lack of adequate funding to construct environmental infrastructure, along with a refusal by the Naco Sanitary District to treat sewage spills from its neighbor, means untreated wastewater will continue to flow from Naco, Sonora, into Arizona for years to come.
“We all know what needs to be done but folks who could potentially be part of the solution are often the same ones who say we don’t want (to process Mexican sewage) here,” says Hooper. “‘It’s going to ruin my property values.’ There’s a laundry list of excuses that are out there.”
Bisbee Proposes a Radical Idea
A common problem in Mexican border towns is the lack of qualified personnel and money to operate and maintain wastewater-treatment systems.
Municipal elections are held every three years, and a new mayor may appoint unqualified political supporters to jobs that require technical training. Many impoverished Mexicans, meanwhile, are reluctant or unable to pay their monthly water and sewer bills. Local politicians, in turn, may use promises of low utility rates to get elected.
This can result in situations where Mexican utilities lack the funding and expertise to manage wastewater systems — just like in Naco, Sonora.
“They don’t have the money or the expertise to man a modern plant and they don’t have the money and wherewithal to manage what they have,” says Andy Haratyk, Public Works operations manager for Bisbee.
Rather than browbeat Mexico and demand political, financial and technical reforms that could stop the sewage from flowing across the border but are unlikely to occur anytime soon, Haratyk is proposing a solution.
“We will take your water,” he says. “We will bring it to our plant and treat it and we get to keep the water to either sell or to sell discharge credits” for replenishing the ground water basin. “That will be how we recoup our costs.”
Bisbee’s plan would require the North American Development Bank and EPA to provide the city with approximately $20 million spread out over several years. This would allow the city to add additional capacity to treat about 500,000 gallons a day of wastewater from Naco.
Haratyk emphasizes that Bisbee’s proposal to treat Naco’s wastewater would be “at no cost to the city of Bisbee or the citizens of Bisbee. Not a penny.” The plan would also not require any payment from Naco residents or the Sonoran city, both of which are hard-pressed for money, he says.
The Bisbee expansion would cost about one-third of what it would take to construct a new wastewater plant in Naco, Sonora, which lacks the technical manpower to run a new plant and the financial strength to maintain it.
“What’s important to me is that we can’t allow this to continue to be happening for the health, safety and welfare of our citizens,” Haratyk says. “This is the least expensive way to protect the United States of America and the people I live with.”
One major challenge is that plan will require a treaty with Mexico, because wastewater that could theoretically be reused in Mexico would instead be transferred to the United States, he says.
Haratyk is hopeful that the EPA will fund a feasibility study to firm up the plant’s design and overall cost. If all the details can be hammered out, including a treaty with Mexico for the water, he says the project would take about a year to 18 months to complete.
The North American Development Bank is recommending that the EPA fund a $75,000 technical study on how to address the Naco, Sonora, wastewater needs. “As part of the analysis, we will include the Bisbee treatment option as an alternative,” Manning, the bank’s project manager, says.
Manning calls Bisbee’s proposals “an interesting long-term option,” but she adds that there are several major hurdles to overcome, including obtaining presidential approvals to transfer water from Mexico to the United States.
“The high implementation costs for that option, along with structuring an affordable agreement between the two utilities, may also be significant challenges,” she says.
The political, financial and cultural challenges facing small communities like Douglas and the twin Nacos are repeated in many border communities that lack the financial ability to construct wastewater-treatment systems without assistance from the two federal governments.
“We’re coming at it from a public-health perspective that this is an issue that doesn’t matter what side of the border you live on,” says Hooper, the Cochise County environmental health specialist. “We need to live in a healthy community and this is what it is going to take to get there.”
Ecotourism brings valuable funds for conservation to the islands, but it also delivers a torrent of garbage that could damage this unique ecosystem.
The equatorial rays and humidity welcomed me after I stepped off the plane in Baltra, a small island in the Galápagos that, save for the airport, was otherwise deserted. Waves lapped up against the reddish-brown sand. Small lizards with red bellies darted between the prickly Opunti cacti that dotted the earth. After a short boat ride through the Itabaca Channel — during which I marveled at the opalescent, turquoise waters — I arrived on the island of Santa Cruz and hailed a cab to go to the town center.
Tourists who visit the Galápagos usually pass through Santa Cruz, the most populous and central island in the archipelago. As we made our way through the highlands, our driver kept pace with the cars in front. Suddenly the vehicles in front of us began to slow down. Our driver pointed to the small shoulder on the side of the road and said, “Tortuga.”
I turned my head just quickly enough to catch my first wild giant tortoise sighting in the wild and marveled at how majestically these creatures carried themselves. For the remainder of the ride, I stared intently out the window, hoping to spot another. Instead what I saw was disheartening. Instead of wildlife, empty bottles of sunblock, soda cans and Cheetos wrappers were visible, strewn alongside the road, even though ever-present red and blue signs instructed people not to litter.
Although the Galápagos is often hailed as one of the last remaining beacons of biodiversity, its trash problem has grown worse through the years as more and more tourists flock to see this unique ecosystem. In 2015 more than 220,000 tourists visited the islands — up from just 2,000 back in the late 1960s. “The generation of waste is directly proportional to the growth of the local population and tourism — [the Galápagos’] economic engine,” says Mario Piu, director of the Environmental Management Unit in Santa Cruz. And while there are strict measures to control the number of people who visit, the sheer number of tourists still increases pressure on the ecology of the islands.
The impact of this trash on wildlife — whether it’s litter on the side of the road, plastics swept along by marine currents, or waste generated on cruise ships — hasn’t gone unnoticed. Sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki) on the coast of San Cristobal Island have been found entangled in plastic bags, rubber rings, fishing gear and other debris. Researchers suspect that the waved albatross (Phoebastria irrorata) — notable for having the largest wingspan in all of the Galápagos — are ingesting floating plastic directly from the water, mistaking them for fish. And while there aren’t any recorded instances of giant tortoises choking on plastic debris in Santa Cruz, people have seen fragments of plastic in their poop, a clear sign that the tortoises are somehow ingesting the human-generated waste around them.
Beyond the direct impact, there’s also worry that floating plastics could carry invasive species from other parts of the world into the Galápagos, where they could compete with the native flora and fauna. “This type of invasion is especially disastrous in the Galápagos, with such a high proportion of endemic animals that rely on very specific conditions [for their survival],” says Jessica Howard, a researcher at the Charles Darwin Foundation in Santa Cruz who studies marine plastics as a vector for invasive species to enter the archipelago.
Howard’s worried that if the waste problem persists, it could hurt the same tourism that caused it. “The degradation of the beaches could impact tourism. The economy could be weakened, which would in turn decrease the funds available for research and policy enforcement,” she says.
In response to the amount of waste that’s generated, citizens and organizations are working together in a variety of ways. On another taxi ride into the highlands of Santa Cruz, I saw groups of people collecting roadside trash. Later I learned these were residents who self-organize to collect waste that would later be processed in the landfill. In addition to these community efforts, the World Wildlife Fund has worked with the municipality of Santa Cruz to develop an integrated waste-management system, which includes collecting all the waste in inhabited islands and live-abroad vessels, developing an efficient street-cleaning method, and reducing the use of disposable plastic bags in Santa Cruz. The Galápagos National Park Directorate, Conservation International and Coca Cola Ecuador have also teamed up to collect trash and limit the impacts of plastic waste on the islands. On an eight-day trash excursion along the eastern coast of Isabela Island, the team collected 2.5 tons worth of trash — approximately the weight of 10 adult male giant tortoises.
More broadly the Galápagos’ dirty problem highlights the need to weigh the benefits and costs of otherwise valuable ecotourism-oriented economies around the world. Juan Carlos Garcia, the conservation director for the World Wildlife Foundation in Ecuador, believes that curbing the number of visitors to the islands could reduce unwanted waste in the future. That would be accomplished by increasing the entry fee into restricted areas and revising the tourism standards of land-based hotels to match that of live-aboard vessels like cruise ships. “The existing management system was developed when most of the tourism in Galápagos took place on live-abroad boats. Nowadays, there are more beds in towns than berths in vessels, and this can represent a major threat to the conservation of the protected areas,” he says.
As someone who embarked on a land-based trip in the Galápagos, I was quickly confronted not only by my own ecological footprint but also that of the visitors before me. On a rather remote, 15-mile hike to the sulfur mines on Isabela Island, I was disheartened to find plastic ribbons, bottle caps, candy wrappers and plastic cups strewn alongside the trail. Because it was a path less traveled, it was jarring to think how long that waste must have sat there before I came along and picked it up.
But at the same time, visiting the Galápagos gave me a glimpse of what’s at stake if the potential downfalls of ecotourism are not addressed. On a dive just off the coast of Santa Fe, a school of blue-striped snappers — small fish donning navy pinstripes and a yellowtail — emerged from an underwater cave. Careful not to get water in my ears, I turned my head slowly, only to see the shadows of white-tipped reef sharks moving in the distance. Elsewhere around us marine turtles, spotted eagle rays and pufferfish swam languidly in their home waters. I felt lucky to be immersed in such an untarnished ecosystem, and hoped places like this one could be preserved for generations to come.
Nearly half of all freshwater turtles and tortoises are at risk of disappearing forever, a new report warns.
It’s not easy to be a turtle in the 21st century. A new report warns that freshwater turtles and tortoises are among the world’s most threatened groups of species, with more than 40 percent at risk of extinction due to habitat loss, the illegal pet trade, and consumption for food and traditional medicine.
Among the most threatened species are the Yangtze giant Asian softshell (Rafetus swinhoei), which is down to its last three individuals in China and Vietnam; the ploughshare tortoise (Astrochelys yniphora) of Madagascar, which fetches enormous prices in the illegal pet trade and could disappear from the wild as soon as this year; and the three-striped box turtle (Cuora trifasciata), ownership of which “has become a financial investment and status symbol in China,” according to the report.
Also considered highly at risk: the Nubian flapshell turtle (Cyclanorbis elegans), not seen in the wild in at least 15 years and feared extinct by some conservationists.
All told about half of all tortoise and freshwater turtle species and subspecies are threatened or at risk of extinction.
The authors of the report, which was issued last week by a partnership of 10 turtle conservation organizations, call it “an effort to publicize the plight of tortoises and freshwater turtles by highlighting those species that are at the highest risk of extinction.” Sadly that’s obviously needed, as not much has changed since the previous edition of this report in 2011, which contained a very similar list of turtles. Conservation efforts have benefited a few of these species during that time period, but not enough to improve their overall outlook. In fact the only species from the 2011 list that doesn’t appear in the 2018 edition is the Pinta giant tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii) of the Galápagos, which went extinct in 2012 with the death of world-famous tortoise Lonesome George.
So why should we care? Well, other than the fact that this list contains some stunningly beautiful and interesting species, tortoises and freshwater turtles also serve vitally important ecological roles in their native habitats. As the report points out, various species help to shape rivers and waterways, assist plant populations by dispersing seeds and fungi, and even keep water clean by scavenging dead animals. They’re also significant in human culture and art — which is one of the reasons they’re at risk.
Here’s the list of the 27 most threatened tortoise and freshwater tortoise species. You can learn a lot more about each of them by downloading the full report here.
Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei)
Ploughshare tortoise (Astrochelys yniphora)
Yunnan box turtle (Cuora yunnanensis)
Northern river terrapin (Batagur baska)
Myanmar roofed turtle (Batagur trivittata)
Zhou’s box turtle (Cuora zhoui)
McCord’s box turtle (Cuora mccordi)
Geometric turtle (Psammobates geometricus)
Golden-headed box turtle (Cuora aurocapitata)
Dahl’s toad-headed turtle (Mesoclemmys dahli)
Nubian flapshell turtle (Cyclanorbis elegans)
Three-striped box turtle (Cuora trifasciata)
Burmese star tortoise (Geochelone platynota)
Roti Island snake-headed turtle (Chelodina mccordi)
Southeast Asian narrow-headed softshell turtle (Chitra chitra)
Bellinger River snapping turtle (Myuchelys georgesi)
A new study finds that the big cats and other endangered animals do best in places where there’s no phone coverage.
Jaguars are not impressed by your cell phones.
In fact, phones and jaguars just don’t go well together at all. A new study finds that the big cats and dozens of other threatened mammal species do best in areas where there isn’t much human disturbance — in particular, places where you can’t get any coverage.
The study, published last month in Biological Conservation, looked at the distributions of 45 medium and large mammal species in the Brazilian Atlantic forest and compared that data to the distribution of cell towers in the region. The results: Out of more than 18,000 animal observations (including everything from in-person sightings to tracks and camera traps), only 18 percent occurred in areas where there was decent cell-phone coverage. The relationship was even more striking for threatened species, like the jaguar: Only 4 percent of sightings occurred in locations where you could make a mobile phone call.
Now, it might seem obvious that the very presence of humans (and their phone networks) pushes out wildlife from their former habitats, but this is data that’s never really been used to make conservation decisions before. The study builds on a well-established project called the Human Footprint Index, which looks at factors such as roads, nighttime lighting and human population density to determine the impact of civilization on natural systems and help make conservationists to make strategic decisions about what habitats to protect. That index, though still incredibly useful, is based on data from 2005 and earlier and predates the vast worldwide proliferation of mobile devices. These past dozen years have made quite a difference, the researchers found; their study reveals that many sites which the Human Footprint Index ranks as “roadless” and therefore hospitable to wildlife actually have high levels of cell coverage, indicating they’re more degraded than the index alone would reveal. For example, they wrote, the maps that feed into the Footprint Index often poorly represent things like the accessory roads that lead to cell towers or the power-transmission lines that supply them — the types of things that carve up habitats and make them less suitable for healthy animal populations.
That means something like your mobile carrier’s coverage map might actually supplement the Human Footprint Index with newer, more rapidly accessible data than what many researchers are currently using to make conservation decisions. As the authors wrote in their paper, this “is the first study demonstrating that cellphone coverage can be used as a simpler, modern and unprecedented tool to assess human influence.”
The authors caution that this still isn’t perfect — the ground-level data could be even finer, and there are certain cases when the technique isn’t particularly useful, such as when wildlife-friendly reserves are surrounded by cell-phone-heavy urban centers. Still, they say the fact that cell-tower data is updated very often means it could be used as an “early warning system” to help prioritize areas of high conservation value before too many more cell towers are built and people move in. “We may be able to distinguish areas free from cellphone coverage,” the authors wrote, “and, therefore, from human influence.” Locating these areas with no cell towers and no roads could allow governments to set them aside for conservation before any further degradation occurs.
The research earned quick praise from experts. “This paper provides a valuable contribution to the field of conservation biology,” says conservation biologist Richard Schuster, a Liber Ero fellow at Carleton University, adding he is “excited to see this develop further.” He did note that this approach could have limitations in other parts of the world, but “it seems to be doing a good job in identifying areas of high human impact” in the study area.
William F. Laurance, distinguished research professor at Australia’s James Cook University, one of several researchers involved in updating the Human Footprint Index, also praised the paper. “It’s just one more line of evidence showing that vulnerable wildlife species need places that are free of human influence. We keep thinking that we can have our cake and eat it too as far as nature is concerned, and that’s just not true. Nature needs part of the planet just to itself.”
That’s a message that needs to be heard, loud and clear.
With Youth v. Gov, the next generation of young Americans is stepping up to save itself from climate change and other threats.
It’s not that often you see dozens of lawyers give a standing ovation to a 12-year-old girl, but that’s exactly what happened this weekend at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Ore.
The attorneys, along with a room full of law students and activists, were gathered at the University of Oregon early Sunday morning to hear about a landmark federal climate-change lawsuit called Juliana v. the United States, filed in 2015 on behalf of 21 children from around the country. The case — better known as Youth v. Gov — asserts that the government’s actions and inaction have caused climate change, thereby putting the next generation of citizens at risk and violating their constitutional rights to enjoy life, liberty and property.
One of those youth plaintiffs, Avery McRae, appeared on the panel, where she shared her feelings on being involved in the suit for the past two and a half years.
“It is awesome and really concerning at the same time,” she said. “I get to have my voice heard and I get to be a part of this awesome lawsuit and I get to be around 20 other amazing students from across the country. That’s the awesome part. The not-so-awesome part is that we have to do this in the first place.”
Avery, looking alternately uncomfortable and at home in front of the audience, acknowledged the tremendous responsibility of being a part of such an important case. “I try not to let it dominate my life, because I’m a 12-year-old girl,” she said, “I just want to be a 12-year-old kid.” The pressures of keeping up with the suit, as well as her homework and her friends, haven’t stopped her, though. “I have a sense of needing to help the lawsuit. I’m a part of this, you know.”
Although the case is awaiting a trial date and therefore isn’t getting the same level of media attention as the gun-control Never Again movement inspired by the recent shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the two groups of children share something important: They’re both taking on the government and corporations in ways that could have more impact than anything accomplished by the older generations around them.
And that’s the point Avery made that brought the room to its feet: “Why is it,” she asked, “that the new normal is for kids to be doing our job, not adults to do theirs?”
For more on Juliana v. The United States, watch this recent lecture by co-lead counsel Julia Olson:
Panama’s Barro Blanco dam was supposed to help fight climate change. It ended up damning a culture.
President Trump’s determined pivot away from climate action probably means that the low-lying Maldives Islands will submerge sooner, droughts in sub-Saharan Africa will more rapidly intensify and urban heat waves will get hotter and more frequent. Around the world, failing to confront climate change will affect vulnerable people first. The rest of us won’t be far behind.
But sometimes the act of combating global warming can actually have its own victims, too. Few people understand this better than the Ngäbe-Buglé, the largest indigenous group in Panama.
Early last year Bulu Bagama, a Ngäbe-Buglé farmer, paddled the Tabasará River in a dugout canoe along the shore of his natal village, Kiad. He seethed. Followers of the indigenous Mama Tata religion were expected in the village soon. He said he’d be on dry land harvesting cassava and cooking fermented corn to feed them if the government hadn’t destroyed his orchards of bananas, oranges, mangos and avocados — if the Honduran construction company GENISA hadn’t flooded sacred petroglyphs chiseled by ancestors into boulders midstream in the river. Instead he was floating with a foreigner above flooded houses he’d built, flooded fields he’d planted and the flooded cemetery where he’d buried his parents. We paddled above it all on several yards of murky water.
“If God did this, if he filled this with water, it’d be one thing,” said Bagama, eyes ablaze under a hand-woven straw hat. “But it wasn’t God who did this. It was done by man, and someday, he’ll pay.”
The proximate cause of Bagama’s misery was not just one man, but Barro Blanco, a 20-story-tall hydroelectric dam three miles from where he canoed. The company Generadora del Istmo, better known as GENISA, had built it at the request of the Panamanian government — purportedly to help fight climate change.
The administration of Martín Torrijos, Panama’s president from 2004 to 2009, first proposed the Barro Blanco Dam in 2006. The project came to fruition under the administration of his successor, Ricardo Martinelli, a real estate mogul-turned-politician sworn in as Panama’s 36th president in July 2009. A man in the Trumpian mold, Martinelli promised to make Panama more business-friendly and improve the country’s infrastructure.
Meanwhile, a new sail-shaped building, Trump Ocean Club, was rising slowly into the sky above Panama City. It was Donald Trump’s first international real-estate venture. When the Panamanian president and American president-to-be met at the sky scrapper’s ribbon cutting, they traded public praise. “Everything you touch turns to gold,” Martinelli told Trump, according to The Christian Science Monitor. Trump called Martinelli a “great businessman,” and “a great president.” Trump invited Martinelli to his own inauguration in 2017, even though the former Panamanian leader was by then living in a luxury condo in Miami after fleeing embezzlement and wiretapping charges while in office. (He has since been arrested and is battling extradition from the Miami Federal Detention Center.)
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Martinelli’s administration staunchly championed the Barro Blanco dam. In fact, shortly after Martinelli took office, the government’s electricity regulator dramatically expanded the plan, increasing its capacity by 50 percent, to 29 megawatts, or 2 percent of Panama’s electrical needs. The enhancement also raised the level of the required reservoir behind the dam, preordaining the destruction of Bulu Bagama’s house and crops.
Under Martinelli’s watch the United Nations registered Barro Blanco in the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, a program encouraging investors in wealthy countries to finance carbon reduction in poor ones. CDM projects earn one Certified Energy Unit, for each ton of CO2 they displace, redeemable on carbon markets, such as the European Trading Scheme. Barro Blanco was projected to cut carbon dioxide production by 1.5 million tons in two decades of operation, according to UN documents.
Opponents of the dam say that without the UN stamp of approval and the income promised from energy units, Barro Blanco might never have been built. It most likely helped with the financing. Two European Banks, the Dutch Development Finance Company and the German Investment and Development Corporation, each invested $25 million. Ironically, Panama later withdrew from the CDM program in 2016 after facing criticism over misrepresentations in its paperwork.
By then, the dam’s concrete had long since dried.
In January 2017, while the U.S. presidential inauguration transfixed most of the world, the residents of Kiad were preparing for their own ceremony. Pilgrims from across Ngäbe-Buglé territory would arrive soon, as they do every year to pray and worship. But this time would be different. In past years several hundred guests had always arrived. Now no one knew how many would come or where they’d stay. The purpose of the event was to worship by the petroglyphs, but the carved boulders could no longer be seen. They’d been completely submerged when the reservoir was filled months earlier. The flat land along the previous shore was also underwater, leaving little good camping space.
Many Ngäbe-Buglé practice Mama Tata, an indigenous religion that combines Christianity and animism. They believe their ancestors encoded wisdom in the cryptic markings scored into the boulders in Kiad and elsewhere in their territory. Ricardo Miranda, a resident of Kiad and an ardent opponent of the dam, told me that the drawings connect them with forefathers before the Spanish conquest. They’re Mama Tata’s sacred texts and repositories of indigenous wisdom. The dam is “erasing our history,” he said angrily. “How can I talk about that with younger generations if I can no longer tell them, here it is.”
“Some people say, well, take the stones out elsewhere,” said Eduardo Vallarino of the boulders in a meeting in his Panama City office in January 2017. Vallarino is president and CEO of PanAm Development, which wants to build a smaller hydroelectric dam 15 miles from Barro Blanco, also in the face of indigenous protest. He was Panama’s ambassador to the United States in 1990 and once ran for president. He accused Barro Blanco’s detractors of making up spurious objections to the project. “They’re looking at everything they can in order to stop things.”
But the protests are nothing new. Panama’s indigenous people have long battled against incursions on their territories. Successive governments sought for decades to dam the Tabasará River before Martinelli’s administration succeeded. The indigenous people opposed every attempt, sometimes with demonstrations, construction-site occupations and blockades of the nearby Panama American Highway. Indigenous people were kept out from the first public meetings about Barro Blanco, in 2007.
At times the project has sowed divisions within the community. Still, the Ngäbe-Buglé have challenged the dam in Panamanian courts and — failing that — petitioned for help from international human-rights organizations. A 2014 report written by the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples admonished Panama that “Ngäbe people should not be flooded or adversely affected in any way without the prior agreement of the representative authorities of that people….”
GENISA had long insisted that that few Ngäbe-Buglé would even be inconvenienced, and that, in the words of its 2011 report on the social and environmental impacts of the project, the “land and riverbank that will be submerged by the reservoir is not currently under cultivation, nor used for any other productive use.” But by then, changes in the dam’s design guaranteed that some houses and crops would be flooded in many feet of water. And that, according to a study conducted on behalf of the project’s European funders, was a fact about which residents of Kiad and other communities were kept in the dark.
Opponents of Barro Blanco have exhausted legal options in Panama. But they continue fight the dam in the court of local and world opinion, by staging protests and by petitioning help from international rights organizations, such the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Last September they won a small victory when a Panama court acquitted three Ngäbe-Buglé leaders, including Ricardo Miranda, of charges that they’d disrupted activities at the dam during protests.
Ironically, the dam’s touted environmental benefits are increasingly in doubt. A growing scientific consensus says that dams are sometimes of marginal value for the climate. Rotting organic matter in the soil they flood releases methane, a gas that warms the planet many times more powerfully than carbon dioxide. A 2012 paper in Nature Climate Change called tropical dams “methane factories” that “can be expected to have cumulative emissions that exceed those of fossil-fuel generation.”
But tropical dams keep getting built anyway. Barro Blanco is only one of the latest, and even its lofty promises now ring hollow.
In January 2017, two days before the Mama Tata ceremony, Manalo Miranda put up an open-air pavilion made from spindly tree trunks and corrugated iron.
The reservoir had filled up several months earlier, after GENISA technicians had shut the dam’s flood gates. The rainy season was due any day and arriving pilgrims would need shelter. Goejet Miranda walked to a thatched hut above town, to charge his phone. A solar panel there provides Kiad’s only electricity.
But there was no room to plug in. The panel’s output was maxed out.
The one benefit that Barro Blanco might have provided the Ngäbe-Buglé — electricity — is in limited supply.
Grossman’s reporting in Panama was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Frank B. Mazer Foundation.
Eco-books coming out this March include volumes about Rachel Carson, environmental destruction, plant-based diets and radical resistance.
What do Rachel Carson, sea otters, toxic toads and the Gold King Mine disaster have in common? Easy: They’re all among the subjects of this month’s new environmentally themed books.
The full list — an amazing 18 titles — includes books for just about everyone, from dedicated environmentalists to foodies to nature-friendly kids. You can check them all out below (links are to publishers’ or authors’ websites). Then get ready for some long evenings of reading as the cool nights of winter give way to a hopefully not-so-silent spring.
Environmental History:
Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment by Rachel Carson — the book that sparked the modern environmental movement gets an archival collection from the Library of America, edited by acclaimed ecologist Sandra Steingraber.
This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent by Daegan Miller — a history of 19th century “radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress” (and who remain relevant today).
Cane Toad Wars by Rick Shine — the true tale of the ecological nightmare caused by the introduction of this toxic species to Australia.
The Monarchs are Missing: A Butterfly Mystery by Rebecca E. Hirsch — a book offering grade schoolers insight into why monarch butterflies are in trouble and what they can do to help.
Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale by Matt Hern and Am Johal — a horror-filled road trip through the polluted tar sands of northern Alberta. Features art and additional material by journalist/cartoonist Joe Sacco.
Read 
The authors of the report, which was issued last week by a partnership of 10 turtle conservation organizations, call it “an effort to publicize the plight of tortoises and freshwater turtles by highlighting those species that are at the highest risk of extinction.” Sadly that’s obviously needed, as not much has changed since the 
Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment
Return of the Sea Otter: The Story of the Animal That Evaded Extinction on the Pacific Coast
The Tantrum That Saved the World
Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale