Eight Years Until Red Wolf Extinction?

As the wild population of red wolves falls to just 40 animals, captive breeding may be their last chance for survival.

April was a roller-coaster month for the world’s rarest wolves.

On April 21 the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C., announced that its female red wolf (Canis rufus) had given birth to a trio of adorable pups. Only about 220 red wolves exist in captivity, with the animals spread around the country among 43 institutions, so every birth tends to be cause for celebration.

Newborn red wolf pups. Courtesy: Museum of Life and Science

This time, sadly, there wasn’t much opportunity for joy. Just four days later, on April 25, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the wild population of red wolves had crashed to about 40 individuals, including just three breeding pairs. That’s down from about 120 wild wolves in 2013.

Why this sudden, precipitous decline? It all started in 2012, when North Carolina introduced a new state rule that allowed night hunting of coyotes, which are often considered to be pests. That put the wolves, which are a bit bigger than coyotes and have been known to cross-breed with them, directly in the crosshairs. Since that rule went into effect dozens of the animals have been accidentally — and in some cases, it appears, intentionally — killed by bullets, private trappers or poisonings. Others were killed after being struck by vehicles, an unfortunately side effect of their once-growing and dispersing population

The decline is now so severe that the Service’s report warns the few remaining wolves in the wild could be completely gone in as little as eight years. “The red wolf does not have the adequate numbers or multiple resilient populations needed for the species” to persist in the wild, according to the report.

The news marks a dramatic turn in the conservation of red wolves, a species which has already been saved from extinction once before. Red wolves nearly disappeared in the last century after decades of hunting by farmers trying to protect livestock. The final 14 purebred wolves were brought into captivity for a breeding program that started in 1969, and every red wolf that lives today is descended from those few animals. The wolves living in the wild, all of which are in North Carolina, came from that founding population and an experimental reintroduction program which began in 1992.

Now that experiment appears to be failing, leaving the hope for the species once again on the captive-breeding program.

“What we’re doing in the captive populations is more critical than ever before,” says Sherry Samuels, animal department director for the Museum of Life and Science, one of institutions participating in the captive-breeding program.

That comes with its challenges. Captive breeding, it turns out, is not as easy as just putting males and females together in the same enclosure. It takes a little more planning — and a fair amount of luck.

Life — and Breeding — in Captivity

The most important part of captive breeding, Samuels says, is genetics.

With such a small founder population, it’s essential to make sure potential breeding partners aren’t too closely related to each other. “You’ve got a pretty limited gene base to start,” she says.

As an example, she points to the two wolves that gave birth to four pups at the museum in 2017. The North Carolina museum has limited room, so all six wolves were transferred to the much larger Wolf Conservation Center in New York, where the parents had four more pups. “Those 10 offspring, genetically speaking, are identical. There are about 220 wolves in the captive population, so those 10 pups genetically make up five percent of it.”

Those 10 pups, once grown, will need to be found partners that expand the next generations’ genetic health. The Red Wolf Species Survival Program, which maintains the red wolf stud book and meets once a year to determine the wolves’ breeding requirements, shuffles animals among facilities in order to maintain future genetic diversity.

Other considerations come into play. For one thing, younger females may get prioritized as potential mothers. “The reproductive research is showing that it’s very important to try and breed these young females,” Samuels says. “Otherwise they may not breed when they’re older.”

Beyond that, some wolves possess rarer genes that need to be preserved in the larger population. “If you have some wolf that’s underrepresented, you try and breed them, find a good match and keep trying.” Even if those wolves become older, they may still be prioritized when the Species Survival Program establishes each year’s pairs.

Of course, picking genetics isn’t the same as choosing a mate. Sometimes paired wolves just don’t cooperate with their human-generated dating algorithms. “We had eight years, from 2009 to 2016, where we had a breeding pair of red wolves here at the museum but didn’t have pups,” Samuels says. That doesn’t mean those wolves will never become parents. One male wolf, which had been paired with two females unsuccessfully, was moved from North Carolina to a facility in Washington, where he had pups with his new mate the very next year.

“Some of it is just finding the right match,” Samuels says.

Space: The Limiting Frontier

Despite these challenges the red-wolf breeding program works. Samuels says about 20 to 25 percent of the paired wolves give birth each year, a pretty good success rate for such an endangered species.

But that brings up another problem. Outside of genetics, the most limiting factor for red wolves in captivity is simply lack of space. These are fairly large carnivores — slightly smaller than gray wolves — that require a minimum of about 5,000 square feet each in which to move around. “Zoos, museums and nature centers inherently have smaller exhibits compared to what they’d experience in the wild,” Samuels says. “We don’t have unlimited space. Last year we had a family of six living in an exhibit that was built for two, maybe three wolves.”

That’s a problem across the board. “There’s nowhere to move pups,” she says. “There’s no extra space out there right now.”

That’s especially true now that all pups born in captivity currently stay in captivity. Until a few years ago, some pups used to be placed in the wild to supplement the experimental population. Samuels says that cross-fostering program “was a huge success, and the first of its kind for any carnivore.” Unfortunately reintroductions stopped in 2015 while the Fish and Wildlife Service began to reassess the program, a process that culminated in last month’s bad-news report.

Health and Tragedy

Even if there’s no current plant to let captive-born wolves leave captivity, they are still managed as if they are wild animals. The facilities don’t engage in what’s known as operative conditioning, where zookeepers build relationships with their animals and effectively train them to take actions to enable easier feeding or health checks, such as coming to a fence or opening their mouths on command. “With the potential of release, that’s not a tool that we use,” Samuels says.

That does make it harder to do health exams on the wolves, especially the newborn pups. The pups were watched closely the first week after they were born to make sure they were gaining weight and they didn’t have any obvious health problems. “It’s just like with a human baby,” Samuels says. “Are all the parts in the right place?”

There is some risk, no matter how healthy the pups are upon birth. Pups could fall and hurt themselves, or an inexperienced parent could roll over onto them. Pups are also prone to injuries on their paws, which for the first few weeks of their lives have very tender foot pads that can become infected. In fact, two of last month’s three pups had sores on their feet the day after their birth and required treatment with antibiotic ointments.

The biggest goal, even in non-breeding seasons, is to let the wolves just be wolves and minimize stressful interactions. “You have to come up with decisions about what to do,” Samuels says. “There are pros and cons — if you go in and you treat the animals, you have to worry about the impact on the stress level for the whole family.” These are very shy animals naturally, she points out, so people going into their enclosure for any reason can be stressful. “It’s a constant balance of do we engage or not engage — and sometimes, really, less is more.”

Unfortunately red wolves experienced one more roller-coaster turn last month. One of this year’s pups, a female, died unexpectedly on April 28. The cause of her death is not yet known. “A necropsy, or animal autopsy, has been conducted and results are pending,” the museum wrote on its Facebook page. “While losses like these are difficult, they are not uncommon among red wolf litters.”

The museum has now closed its red wolf exhibit to the public in order to minimize any potential additional stress on the family. The two remaining pups appear to be doing well and were recently photographed cuddled together in a heart-shaped pose.

Ultimately, that death may be a bit of a setback to the program even beyond the loss of the pup, because keeping the exhibit open helps to drive support for the species. “How do we get people to care about red wolves?” Samuels asked me before the pup’s untimely passing. “They need to know about them, which means they need to see them having these pups here, where people can get excited about babies. Furry things are what people like. So we need to build the connection, the relationship, the understanding.”

A Powerful Responsibility, an Uncertain Future

What’s it like to work with such a rare species — one that would already have gone extinct without the hard work of small teams of people around the country?

“When I think too far ahead, it literally brings tears to my eyes,” Samuels says. “I’ve worked now with just about 40 different red wolves in my life. You know, there’re only 40 in the wild right now, and only 220 in captivity.”

Still, she’s proud of what she and her team have accomplished. “We gave them a habitat here, and they’re obviously comfortable enough to produce offspring. The museum has done something well and I’ve been part of that. That’s pretty amazing.”

She hopes to impress more people about the red wolf’s value, not just as part of a healthy ecosystem but as a uniquely American and North Carolinian species. “This is an animal that’s been here for a long time and deserves under our laws, let alone our ethical responsibility, to move forward and be protected,” she says.

Meanwhile, she discounts often-repeated criticism that too many red wolves have hybridized with coyotes and therefore the species isn’t worth saving. “If you look at the scientific papers there really isn’t much debate over the fact that this is an entity worth of protection,” she says.

As for what comes next, that’s a big question. “My hope for the future is that we can get new institutions on board really quick so we’ll have more space for red wolves,” Samuels says. She’s also hopeful that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will “step up their game and do more to protect and recover the species, to do their job better both in captivity and in the wild.”

She adds that individuals can also play a big role in that future. She encourages people to contact their representatives and officials, some of whom have introduced bills to end the red wolf reintroduction program, to “tell that it’s important to keep these animals around.”

Samuels also suggests people try to witness these rare animals in person by visiting any of the 43 facilities around the United States that are keeping and breeding red wolves, most of which are open to the public.

That’s potentially more important now than ever. “If you get a chance to see them, you’re looking at something not many people have seen,” she says. “And if things don’t go well,” she adds, “they might not be here in the future.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Rethinking the Big, Bad Wolf

What Does the Future Hold for Food? We Have 5 Questions

Demand for organic food is growing, but corporations are pushing back to keep consumers in the dark about what they’re eating, says food campaigner Stacy Malkan.

You may not know her, but Stacy Malkan is fighting for you.

For over 15 years Malkan has worked as a consumer advocate to make the products we buy safer. Through the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which she cofounded, she’s helped reduce hazardous chemicals in personal care products like shampoo, deodorant and makeup. Now, in her work as cofounder and co-director of the nonprofit consumer and public health watchdog group U.S. Right to Know, she advocates for transparency and accountability in the food industry to build a healthier food system.

The industries Malkan works to reform are large, powerful and protected, but her dedication and vision are supporting an explosion of consumer interest in healthier products and better food. At this cultural turning point, we sat down with Malkan to ask her about the current state of food — and what the future may hold.

So, what’s on your dinner plate today?

Simple foods that work for a toddler! I buy organic as much as possible, especially when it comes to the grain products my child consumes in large quantities. I also try to avoid plastic food containers due to concerns about toxic chemicals leaching. For breakfast we often go with oatmeal, and a typical dinner is baked chicken and a vegetable, usually broccoli or asparagus (the only two vegetables my toddler will eat), or beans and rice, or pizza, which is always the most popular choice in my house.

Food defines us and our cultures in so many ways. Does that make it easier or harder to encourage healthy food production?

One of my favorite weekly activities is the local farmer’s market. We try to go every Sunday. They always have a live band and wonderful food that stays fresh for so much longer than produce I buy in the supermarket. So in a very tangible way, food defines my community for me and my community helps encourage healthy food production. But conscious eating gets a lot more difficult when it comes to eating in restaurants and other communal eating situations that rely on mass production of cheap foods, such as school food — although local groups are trying to change that. The community has a huge role to play in supporting healthy food systems and local food production, and we need to step it up.

Where do we stand at this point? Is our food system getting more transparent or are things getting worse?

There are many positive signs. Organic demand is growing across all demographics. The largest group of organic buyers is millennial moms, and most women in that age group haven’t even had children yet. Food companies are scrambling to meet the demand for foods free of pesticides and chemical additives. It’s a disruptive time for the food industry, and full of possibility for transformation. On the other hand, large food and chemical corporations are pushing back with mighty force — spending hundreds of millions on propaganda and lobbying campaigns — to prop up an unhealthy food production system that depends on GMOs and pesticides and keeps consumers in the dark about what they’re eating. So it’s also a dangerous time and unfortunately I hear many consumers and reporters parroting industry propaganda without questioning it.

Where do you think the most (or least) progress is being made?

Most progress: consumer demand for healthy food and the rising awareness about the healing power of food are unstoppable trends, and the smart companies are stepping up to meet that demand. Least progress: bad policies that rig the market in favor of chemical-intensive, unsustainable agriculture, and factory farms that are not being challenged with enough power. The good food movement needs to figure out how to become an effective political movement to create a fair playing field.

Speaking of propaganda, what tip would you give people to help them see past fake “experts” like SciBabe?

There’s an aggressive, condescending attack style common to the corporate propaganda campaigns to manufacture doubt about science and risk. The message is: “Don’t worry your pretty little head and keep buying our chemical food.” If people suggest you are ignorant, or try to shame you for raising concerns about our food system or insisting on transparency, ignore them.

The Surprising Link Between Climate Change and Human Trafficking

As extreme weather conditions arrive, vulnerable people in migrating populations could find themselves at risk from sexual exploitation or forced labor.

The impacts of climate change could soon become big business for human traffickers, a new paper warns.

The rise in forced labor, sexual exploitation and other types of trafficking would be driven by many of the effects of climate change that are already well known and widely documented. Greenhouse gas emissions are making our oceans more acidic and destroying coral reefs, affecting communities’ access to fish and other food. Rising temperatures are causing the glaciers to shrink and contribute to sea-level rise, pushing people away from their homes. And intense heat waves and droughts are drastically impacting the livelihoods of farmers who depend on agriculture for their survival.

Collectively, these climate impacts have already started causing an increase in human migration, making people more vulnerable to trafficking, says the paper’s author, Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Law at Columbia University. “There’s no question that climate change will make things worse,” he says.

Gerrard’s work builds upon previous research. One paper, published in 2010, predicted that there could be as many as 250 million “climate refugees” by 2050. Another study in 2016 warned that by the end of the century climate change would force one-eighth of the world’s population — as many as 1.4 billion people, largely from the tropics — to migrate more than 620 miles from their current homes. Some of these “climate migrants,” finding themselves desperate for security and work, could become victims of human trafficking, the paper says.

Gerrard started thinking about this subject after attending a conference on human trafficking in the Vatican City in 2016. At the time he had been working with the Republic of the Marshall Islands, one of the island nations most vulnerable to climate change, to address legal issues that would arise if an entire nation went underwater. In the Marshall Islands, there was already evidence that people were moving as a result of rising sea levels. Seeing this connection between migration and climate inspired Gerrard to look at the link between climate change and trafficking.

Climate change, he writes in the paper, can cause populations to move in many ways, although it’s difficult to isolate it as the sole cause of human migration. In many cases ethnic or religious conflict adds pressure on people to leave. Gerrard notes that extreme flooding, water shortages, and desertification are the factors most likely to galvanize people to move. Sea-level rise, too, will force a population to abandon their land when it starts to go underwater.

Among these people who move, those are the most poor and vulnerable could fall victim to human trafficking and become subject to sexual exploitation or forced labor. This already happens in many places around the world. Studies have shown that trafficking has increased in the aftermath of natural disasters such as cyclones, flooding, earthquakes and tsunamis — which are likely to become more intense due to the effects of climate change. These people are often the most powerless and do not have the ability to lobby for their own protection, and are “often in the back of the line for governmental attention,” says Gerrard.

And although countries where climate change is already causing displacement — such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines — may be aware of the issue, Gerrard says they may not have the resources to help those who are the most vulnerable. “These countries are almost invariably extremely poor with few governmental resources, so awareness doesn’t necessarily lead to prevention,” he says.

I witnessed this vulnerability in Bangladesh while reporting on the Rohingya crisis in April. Since last August religious violence against the stateless, Muslim minority in Myanmar sent nearly a million Rohingya across the border to Bangladesh, where they are now seeking shelter. They live in flimsy makeshift homes constructed from bamboo and tarpaulin, situated on barren hills that used to be forest. Although monsoon season does not start until June, strong winds and intermittent heavy rain are already destroying homes and lives. Women and children are being trafficked into brothels; other refugees are fleeing to different countries in Southeast Asia.

Geoffrey Dabelko, a climate security expert at Ohio University, cautions against calling people affected by these crises “climate refugees.” “We want to resist the temptation for things ‘caused by climate change,’ because it removes the responsibility from the people who are actually doing the trafficking,” he says.

Dabelko adds that he feels Gerrard’s new paper is a good example of “thinking beyond the obvious for what climate change is going to mean. It has to be understood in the wider context of migration, human trafficking and movement of people in a warmer world.”

How can we protect these migrating peoples? Gerrard says he worries that international agreements and domestic laws might not be able to combat the scale of human trafficking as a result of climate change. “Unless there’s a corresponding dramatic rise in the governmental resources devoted to enforcement, we simply won’t have enough people carrying out the enforcement,” he says.

In order to mitigate the amount of trafficking that’s projected to increase as a result of global climate change, Gerrard says the world’s economies need to transition away from using fossil fuels, which will decrease greenhouse gas emissions and can make the impacts of climate change less severe. “That’s the single most important thing that could be done,” he says.

It’s also vital to improve the ability of vulnerable communities to stay in place so that they won’t be tempted or lured away by human traffickers. “If people have clean water and adequate food, they’re more likely to stay,” Gerrard says. Other adaptations can also help. For example, communities can build their homes on stilts in areas that have periodic flooding, making that those homes less likely to be destroyed.

Strengthening enforcement against traffickers could also mitigate the impacts. “Don’t go after the victims,” he says. “Go after the traffickers.”

Ultimately Gerrard believes that if world communities, leaders and international organizations act accordingly, the amount of suffering of those who are displaced due to climate change can be reduced. “This,” he writes in the paper, “should be viewed positively by everyone.”

Extinct in Algeria: Rare Plant Declared Lost

Exhaustive searchers have failed to turn up the lost Algerian species Adenocarpus faurei. Could other plants in the region also be extinct?

A rare plant native to northern Africa has been declared extinct after an exhaustive five-year search failed to turn up any sign of its continued existence.

Known only by its scientific name, Adenocarpus faurei, this yellow-flowering shrub was native to the Oued Sidi Khaled valleys of northern Algeria, where it lived at altitudes of around 3,600 feet. It was first described scientifically in 1926 — which, coincidentally, was the last time it was ever officially seen.

That didn’t stop people from looking. Most recently, researchers from Algeria’s University Ibn Khaldoun — located in the city of Tiaret, near where the plant once lived — started a search for Adenocarpus faurei in 2009. They then conducted a thorough exploration from 2012 through 2017, systematically covering the entire forested area around Tiaret.

Their searches revealed a highly degraded habitat but turned up none of the missing plants, as they described in a paper published April 26 in The Journal of Threatened Taxa:

This survey was not successful in finding Adenocarpus faurei. Since the region remains highly influenced by human activities, with the extension of habitations, intensive grazing and pollution being of major concern the observed threats reinforces the hypothesis of possible extinction for this plant.

Researchers tend to be careful in their language, so they aren’t quite going so far as to declare this plant’s extinction definitively — but prospects aren’t good. Meanwhile, they warn that Adenocarpus faurei’s fate could be shared by other endemic Algerian plants, which have been understudied since the country’s independence in 1962. They write: “Research on these endemic, rare and localized plants is deficient and their conservation status, or even their existence, is not well known. In Algeria and the neighboring countries of northern Africa, several similar species may be extinct in areas that are poorly protected or even neglected by responsible authorities.”

The authors say the likely loss of Adenocarpus faurei should serve as a bit of a wake-up call. “These results present a reminder for the need for novel and up-to-date field data when generating conservation assessments of the rare and endemic plants of Algeria and elsewhere,” their paper concludes. “The protection of their natural habitats remains a priority.”

Previously in Extinction Countdown:

What Is the Fate of the World’s Plants?

Climate Change, Entangled Whales and the Bundy Militia: 15 New Environmental Books for May

Eco-books coming out this month cover some of the most important topics on the planet — and give you some tools to help.

What do climate change, krill, energy development and public lands have in common? They’re all among the topics of new environmental books arriving in bookstores this month.

Frankly there are more environmental books coming out this May than any one person could read, so as usual we’ve tried to pick what looks like the best of the best. The full list — 15 thought-provoking titles — includes books for just about every reader, from dedicated environmentalists to history buffs to wildlife-friendly kids. You can check them all out below — links are to publishers’ or authors’ websites — and then settle down in your favorite chair or park bench for a month of great reading.

Climate Change:

The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet From Climate Change by Sheila Watt-Cloutier — The weather in Inuit territory has become what the local peoples describe as Uggianaqtuq, “behaving in strange and unexpected ways.” This memoir by one of the world’s most important indigenous advocates recounts her efforts to save her native land — and its peoples — from the destruction of climate change. It gets our vote for the book of the month.

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know 2nd Edition by Joseph Romm — Yup, you need to read this book. It not only provides the science behind climate change in an easy-to-digest question-and-answer format, it also dives into the solutions. Buy copies for yourself and your friends.

Weather: An Illustrated History: From Cloud Atlases to Climate Change by Andrew Revkin and Lisa Mechaley — To understand climate change, you need to know what’s changing in the first place and how things have changed over the centuries and millennia. This book provides 100 snapshots into the history of our understanding of, and relationship with, our weather system. Revkin has been covering global warming since the 1980s and has provided some of the most essential reading on the subject, so this is another must-read for the month.

Philosophy and Climate Science by Eric Winsberg — Climate change, as Winsberg writes in the introduction to his new textbook, is not as simple as “1+1=2.” It’s real, but it involves complex work from dozens of scientific disciplines, and that make it hard to understand. Can exploring the philosophy of science help to connect the dots? (Hint: The answer is “yes.”)

A Thirsty Land: The Making of an American Water Crisis by Seamus McGraw — Using Texas as a case study, McGraw’s book proves that the United States simply isn’t ready for the next big drought or flood. This is a problem that’s been brewing for a long time, and climate change is about to make it worse. Gulp.

Wildlife and Endangered Species:

Trapped! A Whale’s Rescue by Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Wendell Minor — Inspired by a true story, this kids’ book shows how a humpback whale got trapped in fishing ropes and nearly died — until humans came to her rescue. A gorgeous, powerful book offering important lessons for readers of any age.

The Curious Life of Krill: A Conservation Story From the Bottom of the World by Stephen Nicol — Chances are you haven’t thought about krill in a while. Well, let’s change that. Nicol, a krill scientist, dives deep into the lives of these incredible oceanic species, reveals their importance in the food chain, and talks about how climate change and pollution have started to threaten species that have existed for millions of years. You’ll get a thrill out of reading about krill.

No Word for Wilderness: Italy’s Grizzlies and the Race to Save the Rarest Bears on Earth by Roger Thompson — The last 50 or so Abruzzo bears of central Italy are in trouble on all fronts, with threats including farmers, illegal hunting, diseases, and even the mafia. Thompson discusses the complex history of this rare subspecies — and whether or not they have a future.

Pandora’s Garden: Kudzu, Cockroaches, and Other Misfits of Ecology by Clinton Crockett Peters — Does the way we treat “unwanted” species like sharks or invasive species like kudzu really reflect the threats they create, or are we just projecting elements of our own psyches into these “misfits”? This is possibly this month’s most thought-provoking book.

Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature by Liam Heneghan — What do talking lions and wise spiders teach kids about the natural world? More importantly, does children’s literature contain the tools necessary to teach kids about heady topics such as extinction, climate change and deforestation? Heneghan explores the answers, looking at everything from Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter.

Energy (and the Problems It Creates):

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes — Life is about transitions, and here the Pulitzer Prize-winning author explores how the world has transitioned from early energy sources like wood and water to coal and oil and now wind and solar — and how that history may reveal what to expect in the near future.

Fallout: Disasters, Lies, and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age by Fred Pearce — An exploration of eight decades of nuclear technology, the lives it has destroyed and the landscapes it has ruined. An important look back in an era when some people have proposed renewed development of nuclear power as a low-carbon source of energy.

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy — Speaking of nuclear disasters, here’s a book-length history about one of the worst. You know, a little light reading.

Public Lands:

Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West by James Pogue — Our final book this month is another timely, thought-provoking title. As armed-insurrectionist rancher Ammon Bundy tours the West talking about “range rights” and calling environmentalists “an enemy to humans,” this new book offers a firsthand account of the Bundy family’s seizure of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and digs deep into the roots of the anti-government militia movement. An important read for troubled times.

That’s it for this month, but there are lots more recent books waiting for you at your local bookstore or library. Check out our previous “Revelator Reads” columns for dozens of additional recent recommendations.

Can Wildlife Services Learn to Believe in Beavers?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture killed more than 23,000 beavers last year. There’s a better way to manage our ecosystem engineers.

Each spring Wildlife Services, the branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture tasked with controlling problematic fauna, engages in a ritual as reliable as snowmelt or bird migration: It announces how many wild animals it killed the previous year. Although 2017’s toll, released earlier this month, is down from previous years, the numbers are still staggering. All told the agency eliminated 1.3 million native critters, including 319 cougars, 552 black bears and a whopping 23,646 beavers. That’s one paddle-tailed rodent every 22 minutes.

It’s no wonder Wildlife Services is particularly vexed by beavers, a species whose penchant for modifying its surroundings is surpassed only by our own. These relentless engineers gnaw down valuable timber, clog culverts, plug irrigation ditches, wash out roads, flood homes and even chew through fiberoptic cables. One 1983 study suggested that annual beaver damage approaches $100 million per year, a figure that has almost certainly continued to climb as Castor canadensis’s numbers have grown over the past several decades.

Whatever destruction beavers inflict, however, is far outweighed by their immense ecological value. In the course of reporting my book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, I’ve witnessed these miraculous mammals helping people tackle just about every environmental problem under the sun. In droughty Nevada beaver ponds are raising water tables, sub-irrigating pastures and helping ranchers feed their cattle. In Washington they’re storing water to compensate for declining snowpack. In Rhode Island they’re filtering out agricultural pollution. According to one report, restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year.

And beavers don’t just furnish us with ecosystem services — they also sustain a vast menagerie. From wood frogs to warblers, mink to mergansers, sage grouse to salmon, there’s hardly a creature in North America that doesn’t seek sustenance in beaver-built ponds, marshes or meadows. In North Carolina biologists are even mimicking beavers to create habitat for the St. Francis satyr (Neonympha mitchellii francisci), an endangered butterfly whose preferred sedges flourish only in sunlit, beaver-sculpted wetlands.

The conundrum, then, is this: What will it take to square beavers’ proclivity for nurturing life with their tendency to damage infrastructure? How do we reap their benefits without incurring their costs?

Last week I traveled to the town of Agawam, Mass., for some hands-on training in castorid coexistence. My companion for the day was Mike Callahan, founder of the nonprofit Beaver Institute. Since 1999 Callahan has installed more than 1,300 flow devices — pipe-and-fence contraptions that control beaver flooding without requiring trappers to kill the offending rodents. If you appreciate having beavers in your backyard but aren’t keen on snorkeling through your basement, a flow device might just be the solution you’re looking for.

On this day the conflict fell along a road: Beavers had wedged gooey wads of cattails, sticks and mud into a culvert, preventing the adjacent wetland from draining through the pipe. If the water rose too high, Callahan explained, it could wash out the road. To forestall that disaster, we assembled a rectangular wire fence, its sides 16 feet long, and pounded its posts into the mud at the wetland’s bottom. As we worked the vibrato screech of red-winged blackbirds and jackhammering of pileated woodpeckers attested to the pond’s fecundity. The completed flow device effectively surrounded the culvert, preventing beavers from plugging the aperture. (Other designs incorporate concealed pipes to keep water flowing without alerting rodents to the source of the leak.) While beavers would likely be tempted to dam along the fence, Callahan hoped its considerable length would discourage them.

“The goal is to end up with a truce,” he told me.

Callahan’s apparatuses might look simple, but they’re sufficient to thwart nature’s most tireless builders. In one 2005 paper, Callahan found that his culvert-protecting flow devices succeeded 97 percent of the time. Other researchers have observed equally impressive results. A 2008 study found that for every dollar the Virginia Department of Transportation spent on flow devices along the state’s roads, it reaped more than eight dollars in savings on road maintenance and beaver trapping — over $370,000 altogether. And beaver researcher Glynnis Hood recently calculated that a dozen flow devices installed in a wetland park near Edmonton could save Alberta’s government around $180,000.

Even Wildlife Services, beavers’ bete noire, shows fitful signs of coming around. In a 2013 review of various flow device models, Wildlife Services biologists acknowledged that “tools and techniques are currently available to integrate non-lethal beaver management into landscape-scale management plans.” Although the agency’s trappers have been notably slow to apply flow devices in the field, there’s reason to hope that future springs will bring lower kill counts.

“To keep every cog and wheel,” wrote Aldo Leopold, “is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” Beavers, the animals who double as ecosystems, are among our most important cogs, fundamental to the conservation of North America’s water, wetlands and wildlife. Here’s hoping our tinkering gets more intelligent in the years to come.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

The Great Dying: Modern Solutions From an Ancient Crisis

Bears Ears National Monument’s imperiled fossil heritage holds clues to understanding some of our most urgent questions about climate change.

One of my earliest memories is of extinct animals. I was three years old, standing among the dinosaurs at the Smithsonian Museum, and I was sobbing.

It wasn’t that the enormous beasts scared me, but that it was time to go. My family was visiting D.C., and I knew I would only be able to see these amazing creatures in books once we returned to Florida. To console me, my mother crafted a small Eryops from orange fabric. Even then I knew my cuddly new companion wasn’t a dinosaur but a strange giant amphibian that lived during the Permian, a mysterious time that predated the rise of the “terrible lizards.”

I couldn’t help but wonder what had become of all the real Eryops, not to mention the other bizarre animals, like the sail-backed Dimetrodons that shared their vanished world.

Years later I would understand the chilling implications of the answer: climate change.

When I was a kid, even the demise of the nonavian dinosaurs was an open question. Since then scientists have come to suspect that an asteroid probably finished them off at the end of the Mesozoic Era about 66 million years ago, although there’s evidence that other factors also played a role.

That “extinction event” was nothing, however, compared to the earlier one that ended the Permian Era over 250 million years ago. Colloquially known as “the great dying,” it was a time when more than 90 percent of all species on Earth were extinguished, including over two-thirds of land animals, most trees, and an astonishing 95 percent of the species in the seas.

If it had been just a little worse, we might term it a “sterilization event.” Or we might not be here at all.

If this all sounds depressingly familiar amidst the modern-day extinction crisis, CO2 swelling, melting ice caps, acid rain and huge anoxic marine “dead zones,” you may know why scientists are so keen to understand exactly what caused this particular historic apocalypse. The science behind the interplay of climate, ocean currents and the atmosphere is well understood, but the system is complex. The Earth’s biosphere as we know it now is moving into uncharted territory thanks to our actions. It would be helpful if we had a former event to compare to some of the markers we’re now seeing. The fact that previous events were natural, while ours is human-caused, matters little when solutions as well as probable results are being sought.

Stalking a killer 250 million years after the fact, though, isn’t easy. Rocks of the right age are often deep underground or have already been pulverized to dust. Still, there are a few promising outcroppings: the Karoo desert in South Africa, for example, or the Black Triangle in the Czech Republic, which, ironically, is now easier to prospect thanks to its forest dying as the result of human-caused acid rain.

And then there’s Bears Ears National Monument in the western United States, unique among the world’s fossil sites because its exposures document not just the end-Permian event, but an almost unbroken span of time stretching from 300 million years ago to 150 million ago. Written in rock, this chronicle reveals not only the worst extinction event of all time but the rise of life beforehand and the aftermath of its death.

Nowhere else in the world is the puzzle so complete — or so endangered.

When President Obama created Bears Ears National Monument, he did so not only because the land is beautiful and teeming with wildlife, although it is both those things. He also took into account its cultural heritage and importance to the American Indian tribes who hold much of it sacred. But there was a further reason, as outlined in his Presidential Proclamation, which was meant to protect it for future generations. Two long paragraphs of the short document are devoted to explaining the value of the region’s fossil riches and the secrets they can reveal.

And while there are fossils galore in the Bears Ears region, dating from the time of the dinosaurs as well as the much more recent Pleistocene, it’s no accident that it encompasses so much of the record of one of life’s greatest disasters, too. The scope of what could be gleaned from these rocks is enormous.

Now, of course, things are different. In December President Trump signed an order shrinking the monument by 85 percent. Inevitably, many of the most important fossil sites will lose protection under this plan. If those sites are subsumed by oil, gas or uranium extraction, the information they hold will be lost forever, along with their record of the sequence of events that led to the greatest dying the Earth has ever seen.

That may mean that we as a species are denied important clues about the consequences of what we’re currently doing to our climate and environment. We understand that what we’re creating is unsustainable, but exactly how unsustainable? Will it be just enough to make life uncomfortable, or bad enough to halt oceanic circulation, asphyxiate marine organisms and starve life on shore? Careful scrutiny of Permian fossils could provide the answer — not to mention a call to action.

Despite Trump’s order the fate of Bears Ears is not yet written in stone. Many groups have filed suit to reinstate protections. Eventually the fate of the monument will probably be up to the courts and public opinion. With luck Obama’s designation will stand. If that happens we will all profit from what we learn from the fossils. And the wildlife that currently calls the monument home won’t end up relegated to museums as examples of an extinction event we had the power, but not the will, to stop.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

From Australia to El Salvador to Vietnam, the Environment Is Finally Getting Its Day In Court

Specialized environmental courts are now operating on every continent except Antarctica. What’s behind the boom?

Originally published by Ensia.

When the improper disposal of wastewater from the construction site of a joint shopping center and apartment complex threatened to contaminate hundreds of residents’ water in Sonsonate, El Salvador, activists and community leaders filed a lawsuit through the country’s specialized environmental justice system. In response, Lina Pohl, El Salvador’s minister of environment and natural resources, went to inspect the water. When she found signs of contamination, she ordered the suspension of construction.

Using legal tools to report an alleged violation of the law might not seem groundbreaking. But in El Salvador, justice in environmental disputes has long swung in favor of rich developers with political connections rather than activists and citizens. So, in 2014 the Central American nation established three regional environmental tribunals to even the playing field in environmental disputes.

“Historically, institutions in El Salvador have operated with lots of corruption. This is a system that breaks with that tradition of corruption,” says Salvador Recinos, specialist in ecological policy for the Salvadoran Ecological Unit, a non-governmental organization based in San Salvador. “With this court system, there is clearly a better chance of people in El Salvador having access to justice in these types of environmental cases.”

Justice systems around the world face obstacles to settling environmental cases quickly and fairly, whether from corruption, drawn-out trials or judges who lack understanding of environmental issues. Specialized environmental courts have emerged as an important defense against human-caused destruction of the environment. In 2009 there were only 350 of these specialized court systems in the world. Today there are at least 1,200 in 44 countries.

Evolving Understanding

The boom in environmental courts is driven by an evolving understanding of human rights and environmental law, increased awareness of the threats of climate change, and dissatisfaction with general court systems, according to George (Rock) Pring, co-author of “Environmental Courts & Tribunals,” a United Nations Environment Programme guide for policy-makers.

“Human rights and environmental rights are now seen as overlapping and complementing each other, not surprisingly,” he says. “Climate change has also been a big pressure on creating environmental courts, as have concepts such as sustainable development.”

International agreements like the Paris Climate Change Accords have made important strides in recognizing the severity of the problems posed by climate change, but their non-binding nature means that it is up to national court systems to ensure these promises are carried out.

Specialized environmental justice systems are now operating on every continent except Antarctica with a range of responsibilities and capabilities. The goal of these specialized justice systems is always the same: to decide cases quickly, fairly, and more cheaply than would be the case through the conventional court system. Specialization, the logic goes, is the way to do that.

Take India, for example. The country suffers from intense air and water contamination, problems that have dire consequences for the environment as well as public health. Solving these problems is urgent, but the country of 1.3 billion people has a court system that is notoriously slow, with some cases dragging on for more than 10 years.

In 2011, a specialized court system called the National Green Tribunal began operating in India. The tribunal, with multiple branches across country, is made up of specialized environmental judges and scientific experts. The court can settle cases in multiple ways. In some cases, instead of just handing down judgments, the court practices a stakeholder consultation process, working with the activists, companies and government institutions to come up with solutions, such as phasing out older cars to reduce air pollution.

“Problem solving is very central to this tribunal, and to solve the problems the court is looking beyond the traditional remedies that are available because they want to solve the issue rather than linger on for years to come,” says Gitanjali Gill, a National Green Tribunal expert and professor of environmental law at the Northumbria Law School in the U.K.

To ensure swift judgments, the tribunal is required to solve cases in six months. Gill reports that this rule is not strictly followed, with some cases lasting longer than six months, but they are still resolved much faster than in India’s general justice system.

Key to Success

In Australia, the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales has operated successfully since 1980, solving problems of sustainable development, fighting against the effects of climate change, and protecting the coastline and national parks.

Its longevity has given it the time to evolve and test difference approaches, making it one of the most innovative environmental court systems to date. One of these innovations is the concept of the “m ulti-d oor c ourthouse,” which offers different types of conflict resolution so all parties involved can reach an agreement that is not necessarily handed down from a judge.

Strong leadership, steady funding, and political support have been the key pillars to the court’s success, according to the United Nations Environment Programme report.

The report attributes the success of the court to “judicial leadership, sufficient budget, comprehensive jurisdiction, political support and stakeholder overview.

In El Salvador, trust in the justice system is low and risk of environmental damage by climate change is high, making the country a prime candidate for a specialized environmental court system. Before the system launched in 2014, some Salvadoran citizens and activists didn’t see the point in reporting environmental violations. Without pressure from civil society, government institutions didn’t keep on top of environmental violations. But that’s changing.

“Now, citizens know that there are environmental tribunals. Companies also know. So there is a new push within the country towards recognizing the importance of environmental laws …”“Now, citizens know that there are environmental tribunals. Companies also know. So there is a new push within the country towards recognizing the importance of environmental laws given that there is a new institutionalized system that handles these cases,” says Samuel Lizama, presiding judge at the Environmental Tribunal of San Salvador, one of the three regional courts in the country’s specialized environmental court system.

Far From Perfect

These specialized systems are far from perfect. Some experts oppose them in principle, arguing that they lead to biased judgments, that the benefits do not outweigh the costs, and that they are a Band-Aid for a larger problem of a weak justice system, as Pring explains.

In India, judgments are not always carried out, and the tribunal does not have the capability or resources to follow up on all the cases. In El Salvador, environmental judges balance other caseloads, taking their time and energy away from environmental cases. In at least seven cases, including Bahamas, Netherlands and South Africa, environmental court systems have been discontinued because of lack of funding, change in political leadership or pressure from special interest groups.

In addition, it’s hard to objectively judge the value of environmental court system decisions in a world in which environmental law evolves and climate change creates new challenges.

“The problem is, how do you tell if something is a good environmental judgment?” says Pring. “Ten years ago, courts were not focusing on sustainable development or climate change and rulings that looked good at the time are not good now. It’s hard to tell today what today’s good-looking environmental decision will look like 10 years from now.”

Environmental courts don’t provide a one-size-fits-all approach to solving problems of governance when it comes to environmental issues, but they have proved effective for many countries, from El Salvador to India to Australia. They will likely continue as an important line of defense against environmental deterioration as the threats from climate change intensify in the coming years.

Editor’s note: This feature is co-published with Public Radio International.

Amur Leopard Population Triples — to 103

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously in The Revelator:

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

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

By Veronica Herrera, University of Connecticut

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

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

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

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

When thunderstorms are cause for panic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Profit from dysfunction

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

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

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

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

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

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

No voter ID, no water

Public officials also use water to influence politics.

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

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

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

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

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

Water is a state secret

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

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

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

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

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

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