Introduced rabbits threatened the unique birds of Chile’s Humboldt Penguin Natural Reserve. But after a century of devastation, hope has returned.
Penguins and rabbits frolicking around coastal cacti may strike you as a charming scene, but one of these species does not belong. On Choros and Chañaral islands, located off the coast of Chile about 600 kilometers north of Santiago, penguins and cacti are a great fit. But the flash of a white tail and brown fur in the undergrowth? That spells trouble.
A rabbit hole out of place is bad news for birds
A tale of destruction began in the Humboldt Penguin Natural Reserve 100 years ago, when European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) were introduced to Choros and Chañaral, two of the reserve’s three islands. The rabbits quickly proliferated and began to munch away at the desert islands’ sensitive plants. Even the sharp spines of the native cacti weren’t enough to deter these voracious herbivores. As damage to cacti accumulated, shady areas for nesting Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus humboldti) and their chicks grew scarce. Considering that the reserve supports 80 percent of the world’s Humboldt penguin population, this habitat depletion was alarming to seabird researchers and Chilean authorities.
Penguin with cactus. Tommy Hall/Island Conservation
To make matters worse, the invasive rabbits also discovered that seabird burrows made great dens. When the invasive rabbits moved in, the native seabirds lost their homes.
A foxhole isn’t any better
One problem sometimes creates another. Foxes were introduced to Chañaral Island in the mid-20th century to help control the invasive rabbit population. Not surprisingly, the plan backfired. Instead of taking care of the rabbit problem, the introduced foxes preyed on another bird, the native Peruvian diving petrel (Pelecanoides garnotii). Chañaral is thought to have been home to as many as 100,000 pairs of the endangered petrels before invasive species arrived. Today there are none.
The strategy of releasing one invasive species into a habitat to control another invasive species has repeatedly proven to do more harm than good, and the disarray of the reserve reflected the inadequacy of that approach. In 1994 the Peruvian diving petrel was listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. In 2000 the Humboldt penguin was listed as vulnerable.
The decline of native species and growing threat of extinction in the reserve were not only problematic in an ecological context. Nearby fishing communities depend on an ecotourism industry to make up for declining fishing opportunities. People don’t travel far to see nibbled cactus and hundreds of rabbits; they’re a lot more likely to travel to see a thriving diversity of plants and wildlife. If the lagomorphs continued to dominate the reserve, an important source of income would be lost. The local communities had no obvious backup industry available.
Conservation intervention returns hope to the region
Luckily a change for the better was in the cards for the reserve. In 2013 the Chilean National Forestry Corporation, in collaboration with the organization I work for, the international nonprofit Island Conservation, initiated a project to remove invasive species from Choros Island.
Every removal project is different and comes with its own complex set of challenges. There’s no “one size fits all” removal method. To ensure success a variety of removal options was evaluated in coordination between the partners. In this case, systematic placement of rodenticide across the island was deemed the strategy most likely to be effective. More than 1,500 successful island eradications have been completed worldwide using this approach.
Implementation on Choros occurred from July to September of 2013. Following that, camera traps were placed on the island to confirm the island was free of invasive rabbits. In 2016, after months of monitoring, conservationists set out to determine the results of the project with the aid of Finn, a detection dog trained to support this kind of conservation effort. Finn, to everyone’s relief, sniffed out no rabbits on Choros, and the partners confirmed the project’s success.
Finn (with protective booties). Photo: Karen Andrews/Island Conservation
Island Conservation project manager Madeleine Pott tells me the results of the restoration on Choros Island were almost immediately evident across the island, with “fields of seedlings, hillsides covered in the threatened flower Alstroemeria philippii, and Peruvian diving petrels looking to nest in former rabbit burrows.”
The success on Choros paved the way for a similar intervention on Chañaral Island in 2016. A team of 30 people conducted fieldwork over a 20-month period, covering over 6,680 kilometers; they powered through the harsh desert sun and the strong southern winds that rip up from the Antarctic to complete the project.
In 2016, after the final phase of monitoring Chañaral for signs of remaining rabbits, the island and the entire reserve were declared free of invasive vertebrate pest species. Conservationists are now optimistic that the petrels will eventually return to the rabbit-free island.
Aarón Cavieres, executive director at the Chilean National Forestry Corporation, pointed out that the restoration of the reserve supports Chile’s biodiversity goals and builds momentum in the movement toward global environmental health, as well as improving ecotourism opportunities for local communities.
The success of the projects also holds promise for similar conservation efforts currently underway and planned for the future.
Helping our planet thrive one island at a time
The successes on Choros and Chañaral reinforce the growing evidence of the efficacy of invasive-species removal on island ecosystems. This form of conservation intervention is key to supporting biodiversity and preventing extinction.
Pott notes that the rebounding vegetation and wildlife of Choros and Chañaral are testament to the power of invasive-species removal. She expressed to me that the restoration of the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve offers hope for continued conservation success in the region and around the world.
Building on this success, the Chilean National Forestry Corporation and Island Conservation are looking to restore other islands in Chile with high biodiversity benefits, including Alejandro Selkirk Island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago.
Prospects are good, not only for the region but for islands in need of restoration around the world. What makes the Earth so incredible is the great variety of plants and wildlife that live here, with the Humboldt reserve being a prime example — cacti and penguins thriving together on a coastal desert island isn’t something that happens on just any planet. With continued and enhanced efforts, we can look forward to more and more unique island ecosystems returning to health, and ultimately, thriving.
Thriving cacti. Photo: Diego Tabilo/Island Conservation
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.
President Trump and Congress ignore the nation’s poorest residents along the U.S.-Mexican border, where an environmental health crisis threatens millions of lives.
IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif.— U.S. Border Patrol Agent Christopher Harris steers his truck along the hilly road next to the border fence separating this beach community in the extreme southwest corner of the U.S. from Tijuana, Baja California’s largest city.
On a late November afternoon, Harris tours three different canyons along the border. At the bottom of each canyon, a ribbon of dark wastewater originates in Tijuana and flows into the wetlands of the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge on its way to the Pacific Ocean.
Drainage to Pacific Tijuana Slough. Photo: John Dougherty
No one in the United States is certain whether the effluent is coming from Tijuana’s failing wastewater-treatment system or if it is illegally dumped in the canyon creek beds in Tijuana. On this day, it flowed through dry creek beds, where Harris says it hadn’t rained in many weeks.
The saltwater estuary has long been a hotspot for drug smuggling and human trafficking. Harris says Border Patrol agents conducting patrols and apprehensions of illegal immigrants are routinely exposed to contaminated mud and effluent. Harris, the secretary for the National Border Patrol Council Local 1613, says more than 80 agents have suffered from contamination, injuries and illnesses — including encountering chemicals that sometimes eat right through their boots.
Harris holds up a pair of fairly new work boots and says they belong to an agent who suffered chemical burns on his feet after the rubber soles were melted by chemicals in the effluent.
Melted boots. Photo: John Dougherty
“We’re breathing it in,” Harris says. “It gets in your mouth, you’re ingesting it. It gets in your mucous membranes. We’ve had people with what they believe is methane burns to the lungs.”
During heavy rains there’s no doubt that Tijuana’s wastewater-treatment system routinely fails, sending hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage flowing into the Tijuana River from Mexico and then into the U.S. The floods of sewage force health officials to close public beaches on Imperial Beach — where 25 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and 60 percent are nonwhite — and sometimes further north, toward the Silver Strand State Beach and ritzy Coronado.
Even when there’s no heavy rain, 40 million gallons a day of treated — but mostly raw — sewage is dumped into the Pacific Ocean from Tijuana’s sewage treatment plant, located less than five miles south of the border, says Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina.
The sewage can drift north during southern swells, forcing U.S. public beaches to close. Dedina has led a crusade to try to get desperately needed funds to help Tijuana make emergency repairs to fix collapsing sewer lines and failing pump stations and upgrade its primary wastewater-treatment plant.
An avid surfer, Dedina has repeatedly fallen ill after surfing off Imperial Beach. He says there have been more than 320 sewage spills in the past two years. “It’s like a horror show,” he says during an interview on a picnic bench overlooking the beach. “It’s horrendous.”
The serious health problems and environmental contamination are not isolated to Tijuana. The lack of adequate wastewater treatment occurs all along the 1,954-mile U.S.- Mexico border, and the problems don’t just originate in Mexico.
A three-month-long investigation by The Revelator reveals thousands of underserved communities on the U.S. side of the border that lack basic environmental and health infrastructure such as sanitary sewer systems and utility-provided drinking water. Most of the people living in these unplanned communities, called colonias, are poor and of primarily Hispanic descent. Environmental infrastructure problems also afflict several larger U.S. cities, including Nogales, Ariz., Calexico, Calif., and Laredo and El Paso, Texas.
While so much of the discussion in Washington, D.C., revolves around Trump’s proposed $25 billion border wall, a longstanding humanitarian crisis is going unaddressed along the nation’s southern border — home to some 14 million people.
The Revelator traveled to some of the hardest-hit communities in California, Arizona, Texas and in Mexico and spoke with residents, politicians, health workers and others living among a failing and largely forgotten infrastructure system. We found poverty, sickness and environmental contamination plaguing both large and small communities straddling the U.S.-Mexico border — a region that experiences poverty rates double the national averages and has some of the highest rates of infectious disease in the United States.
In the coming months, our “Border Betrayed” series will take readers to those border communities and examine the profound health and environmental effects of a region whose infrastructure has been systematically neglected by both countries — leaving millions of people to suffer the consequences far from the view of politicians and most of America.
Investing in Mexico Helps Americans
To understand the crisis is to understand its roots in money, power and political decisions.
Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the United States and Mexico together have invested more than $10 billion in constructing an international network of wastewater treatment plants, potable water connections, modern landfills, hazardous waste collection sites, recycling centers and renewable energy facilities that benefit the citizens of both countries.
But the money has been nowhere near enough to stem the rising tide of environmental health problems afflicting both sides of the border.
The outlook is even worse.
President Trump’s proposed $25 billion border wall comes at the same time his administration wants to eliminate funding for the most important Environmental Protection Agency grant program used to construct environmental infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico border including Tijuana.
The administration also opposes an increase in funding for the North American Development Bank, which provides infrastructure development loans to border communities in the United States and Mexico. Without additional capital, the bank’s ability to make loans will be sharply reduced.
Trump’s anti-Mexican statements further inflame relations between the countries and come at a time when Mexico is recovering from two major earthquakes that require significant public investment, reducing money for border projects.
“The rhetoric is bad and the policy is zero,” Dedina says of Trump’s statements and the administration’s recommendations for spending on border environmental infrastructure. “They have made it really very clear how they feel.”
Concentrating on hot-button issues of immigration ignores the basic human-rights problems that affect citizens in both countries.
“The Trump administration, with all of its hyperbolic rhetoric, has so obscured and clouded the issue that people aren’t thinking straight,” 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.
“They are suddenly retreating to their corners of the ring and thinking that they don’t have to engage anymore and the problems will somehow magically solve themselves and people will go away,” he says. “Good luck with that.”
The Trump administration is clearly aware of the acute sewage contamination issues in Imperial Beach. Dedina says he met with EPA Director Scott Pruitt’s senior adviser, Ken Wagner, last fall and discussed the issue. Nothing tangible resulted from their meeting, Dedina says.
Diverting billions of dollars for the wall while at the same time slashing funds to invest in environmental infrastructure — such us helping to finance improvements to Tijuana’s wastewater treatment system — ultimately hurts Americans, border experts say.
“Investing on the Mexican side of the border really improves the quality of life for U.S. residents,” says Paul Ganster, chairman of the Good Neighbor Environmental Board, a federal advisory committee that makes recommendations to Congress and the White House on environmental infrastructure needs on the U.S.-Mexican border.
“It’s absolutely clear,” says Ganster, who is a social scientist at San Diego State University specializing in Latin America. “There is no doubt about it.”
America’s Forgotten People
The environmental health crisis stalking millions of people living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border has been steadily unfolding for decades but has become more acute in the past 20 years as the population along the border continues to surge.
In a strange twist, it is the American side of the border that is substantially poorer when compared to the rest of the United States. Meanwhile, the Mexican border cities are relatively well developed compared to many areas of their country, where basic services like electricity, running water, paved roads and sanitary sewers can be extremely limited or nonexistent.
“The border region tends to be the poorest area in the United States,” says Ganster. “And at the same time, across the border in Mexico, is an area where there has been explosive demographic growth and urbanization and manufacturing development.”
The Mexican border cities, for the most part, are much larger than their U.S. neighbors. In addition to NAFTA, which greatly increased trade between the two countries, Mexico and the United States have passed laws that encourage U.S. companies to build factories in Mexican border towns. The factories, called maquiladoras, import parts from the U.S. and assemble products in Mexico, taking advantage of $2 an-hour wages. The finished goods are then re-exported back into the United States at reduced tariffs.
Trade and manufacturing have attracted millions of Mexican workers and families to border communities. There were approximately 6,171 maquiladoras employing 2.5 million workers in 2014, according the University of Arizona’s Economic and Business Research Center. The mass migration of workers to fill these jobs has overwhelmed the ability of Mexican border cities to keep up with basic services.
Mexico is still a developing nation, and its border cities have relatively small amounts of per capita income to pay for basic services. Mexican border cities have focused primarily on providing electricity and potable water at the expense of other systems that people in the United States might take for granted, Ganster says.
“Sewage has not been the highest priority,” he says.
This allocation of limited resources has a direct impact on the United States. Mexican border cities — including Tijuana, Mexicali and Nogales — are upstream from their U.S. neighbors. So when the overwhelmed wastewater system in Tijuana fails, public beaches close in Imperial Beach and border agents get sick. When Mexicali’s sewage system collapses, the New River is polluted as it flows north to the Salton Sea in California. And when the Nogales, Sonora wastewater and storm water systems can’t handle heavy flows, the Santa Cruz River valley in Arizona is contaminated.
Farther east in Texas, there’s no escaping the serious health impacts of millions of gallons of raw sewage being dumped every day into the Rio Grande, regardless of which flag flies over your border town.
Border cities in both nations draw their drinking water from the river. In some cases, like in Nuevo Laredo, located just across the Rio Grande from its namesake in Texas, the city’s drinking water intake sits within a quarter-mile downstream of two untreated sewage outfalls.
None of these problems are new.
They have persisted for generations and will continue as more people move to towns and cities located adjacent to the border that simply don’t have sufficient resources to provide basic environmental infrastructure.
About 14 million people live in 38 Mexican municipalities and 23 U.S. counties adjacent to the border. The population in these municipalities and counties is expected to more than double to 29 million by 2045, according to a 2013 comprehensive analysis of the U.S.-Mexican border by the Border Research Project.
More people means more needs for basic sanitary services, including sewage treatment plants, sanitary landfills, potable water connections, toxic waste management, renewable energy, clean vehicles and road paving to reduce dangerous levels of air pollution that engulfs border communities.
The North American Development Bank, which is owned and jointly operated by the United States and Mexico, estimates that $10 billion is needed just to provide first-time connections for wastewater and/or potable water for communities on both sides of the border, with $8.5 billion just in the United States.
And that doesn’t include upgrading collapsing sewer lines and modernizing sewer treatment facilities. Officials estimate that Tijuana alone will need $400 million to overhaul its crumbling wastewater treatment system.
These environmental health problems have been brewing for decades.
Twenty-five years ago the Sierra Club estimated that $20 billion was needed for basic environmental infrastructure along the border — and that was before NAFTA went into effect.
“There certainly is a higher cost now given that NAFTA included incentives for corporations to shift their pollution to border communities,” says Ben Beachy, director of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program.
The World’s First Green Bank
Obscured in the raging debate over President Trump’s proposed border wall and the ongoing contentious negotiations over whether the United States will withdraw from NAFTA is another crucial trilateral initiative between the United States, Mexico and Canada that created the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation.
During the NAFTA debate in the early 1990s, Congress, environmental groups and other nongovernmental organizations demanded that the trade agreement include environmental and labor protections to address the already serious environmental problems along the U.S.-Mexican border that most agreed were only going to get worse with increased trade.
The environmental cooperation agreement was created to address the ongoing environmental disaster, making NAFTA the first trade agreement that explicitly linked trade to environmental protection.
When NAFTA went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994, only 21 percent of wastewater in Mexican border cities was being treated, causing widespread pollution in shared watersheds including the Tijuana River, the Colorado River, the New River, the Santa Cruz River and the Rio Grande. That number is now close to 90 percent.
In addition to the environmental cooperation agreement, the United States and Mexico also established the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission and the North American Development Bank, widely considered the world’s first “green bank,” to help Mexican and American border communities finance the construction of wastewater and potable drinking-water projects.
Mexico and United States each contributed $225 million to provide capital for the development bank to make loans and each pledged an additional $1.3 billion in callable capital reserves. The bank’s charter created a board of directors with an equal number of representatives from each country.
Today the bank provides environmental infrastructure loans within the borderlands region that straddles both sides of the border. The borderlands includes the area from 62 miles (100 kilometers) north of the border to 186 miles (300 kilometers) south and stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
The bank’s lending has expanded to include wind farms and solar energy to reduce border air pollution and desalinization plants in Mexico to reduce reliance on declining groundwater supplies and over-allocated surface water.
Mexico supports doubling the bank’s capitalization, which would allow it to increase annual lending to $350 million by 2024, but the United States has not yet agreed. Without additional capital, the bank’s projected annual lending will drop from $250 million to below $90 million, the Treasury Department stated in 2017.
“Strengthening [the development bank] would be tangible demonstration of the United States commitment with Mexico to build a stable and prosperous region,” the Treasury Department stated during President Obama’s last year in office, adding the bank’s “environmental infrastructure projects help promote greater regional stability and diminish migration flows.”
Providing the bank with the ability to make more loans would also increase investment opportunities for U.S. companies to build wastewater treatment plants and other environmental infrastructure.
But under the Trump administration, the Treasury Department recommended no increase in the bank’s capitalization for fiscal 2018. “Treasury is not requesting funding for the North American Development Bank due to budget constraints,” the department stated in its 2018 budget request to Congress.” The Trump administration’s proposed 2019 budget, was released this month, however, calls for a $10 million contribution to the bank’s capital, matching what Mexico had already put in.
Other sources of funding are also at risk. The EPA’s Border Environment Infrastructure Fund plays a key role in supporting the North American Development Bank’s operations. The grant fund was created in 1996 and was allocated $170 million in the first two years. Funding remained at $50 million a year or more through 2007 before beginning a steady decrease to below $10 million in fiscal year 2017. Trump and House Republicans now want to eliminate funding for the program.
The fund’s grants have played a crucial role in financing development projects by helping make it affordable for financially strapped communities to pay for construction projects. The North American Development Bank, meanwhile, provides construction loans, grants for technical assistance and helps attract money from other public and private sources.
The development bank has awarded $650 million in Border Environment Infrastructure Fund grants since 1996. For every dollar spent, the grants attract $3 in additional funds from other public and private sources, including North American Development Bank loans. Mexico has matched $2 for every $1 in grant funds for environmental infrastructure projects south of the border.
In the past 22 years, the EPA grants have helped finance construction of 59 wastewater treatment plants that are now treating sewage generated by 8.5 million people a day. Thirty-three of the plants were built in Mexico, eliminating 353 million gallons of raw sewage a day that was directly impacting 1.7 million U.S. residents and another 2.3 million indirectly.
“We certainly could use a lot more grant funds,” says North American Development Bank managing director Alex Hinojosa. “There is a huge need.”
Not only is there demand for new projects, many of those initial projects are now coming to the end of their lifespans, spurring a need for a second wave of construction at a time when financing options are evaporating and population increasing.
Old Infrastructure is Collapsing
An as-yet undetermined amount of money is needed to replace collapsing sewer lines, worn out sewage pump stations, antiquated sewer treatment plants and safe drinking water systems on both sides of the border, border financing experts say.
“So, once again we have an infrastructure crisis for basic sewer, water and so on,” says Paul Ganster, the Good Neighbor Environmental Board chairman. “And that’s beginning to have negative effects such as in the Tijuana area. We are a seeing a number of failures in the sewage treatment infrastructure which results in contaminated water flowing downhill and affecting the U.S. side.”
Last November the North American Development Bank approved $1.2 million in EPA grant funds for the rehabilitation of 2.8 miles of a major sewer line in Tijuana. Frequent collapses of the sewer trunk line have contributed to sewage spills into the Tijuana River. Mexico has committed another $1.8 million for the project.
Construction will take two years to complete. The project is just one step in the massive overhaul of Tijuana’s sewer system. There are more than 40 major sewer collectors in Tijuana with failing pipes that contribute to pollution flows into the U.S., bank officials say. Mexico, so far, has only requested funding assistance to repair five sewer lines.
Tijuana is just one of a long list of critical infrastructure projects that need to be built or repaired. The North American Development Bank has 61 projects currently requesting $295 million in funds on both sides of the border.
“We know this is just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the needs that exist,” says Jesse Hereford, a bank spokesman. At the same time as infrastructure needs continue, the EPA grant fund has declined to only $15 million, Hereford says.
There is strong support from border state members of Congress to provide funds for the Border Environment Infrastructure Fund and to increase the development bank’s capitalization. Legislation pending in the Senate includes $10 million for the grant fund for 2018 and doubling the bank’s capitalization. In late January, Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-CA, requested the grant fund receive $20 million. But there is no similar legislation in the House.
A bipartisan group of border state House members has requested House leaders to restore funding for the grant program that was eliminated from a spending bill in committee last year.
“These funds play a crucial role in protecting public health, including those tasked with protecting our borders by reducing sewage runoff and human exposure to bacterial and viral pathogens,” states a Dec. 8 letter signed by 13 House members requesting the House Appropriations Committee include $10 million for the grant program.
Rep. Scott Peters, D-CA, has requested the administration to include much stronger environmental provisions during the ongoing NAFTA negotiations between the US, Mexico and Canada.
“The continued lack of enforceable environmental standards in our trade agreements is no longer tenable,” Peters stated in Dec. 8 letter sent to Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative leading the U.S. negotiations on NAFTA.
“Recognizing that environmental hazards do not stop at transnational borders, it is of the utmost importance that any renegotiated or future trade agreements with Mexico include high-standard, enforceable environmental provisions that empower the United States to stand up for communities through meaningful dispute resolution,” stated Peters, whose district includes San Diego.
But ultimately it comes down to money invested in environmental infrastructure and whether the Mexican and the U.S. governments are willing to spend billions of dollars to protect the health of citizens on both sides of the border.
For communities along the border, the help can’t come fast enough.
Next up:
Our “Border Betrayed” series continues with a look at two small Arizona border communities, each struggling with dangerous environmental health issues.
African elephant populations have already fallen from 26 million to 350,000. Is extinction next?
President Donald Trump recently made headlines when he said he would not allow trophies from legal elephant hunts to be imported into the United States. Although this was the right move, it isn’t enough to stop elephants from being slaughtered into extinction.
Amazing creatures with a life expectancy of 60 to 70 years, African elephants lead complex emotional and social lives. They carry their babies for two years — the longest gestation of any mammal. Their calves then nurse for several years, and family connections remain close. Not surprisingly, as the largest land mammal, weighing 10,000 pounds or more when adults, the elephant also has the largest brain of any land animal.
But tragically, their brains and size offer no protection against those who kill them indiscriminately. In repulsive, incomprehensible and immoral acts of poaching, these highly intelligent, sentient beings have been poisoned and then dismembered for their tusks, which are turned into ivory trinkets and speculative investments for the wealthy elite.
Elephants By the Numbers
These heinous crimes are abominations against the species (and other wildlife, which can suffer or die from the poison put in the environment), and they are ongoing — in both legally protected and unprotected areas. There’s no safe haven for elephants in Africa. Between 2010 and 2012, poachers killed 100,000 African elephants in numerous gruesome ways, according to a 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Today, more African elephants are murdered for their ivory than are born. This illicit killing is driving the extirpation-level decline of African elephants, which numbered as many as 26 million in the 1500s — just 500 years ago, a mere blink in time — when they roamed most of the African continent. In 2016 the Great Elephant Census, funded by Microsoft cofounder-turned-environmentalist Paul G. Allen, found that the population had plummeted to 352,271 elephants, representing a 93 percent decline in the 18 countries surveyed.
As with all illicit trafficking — be it in drugs, humans or wildlife — there are tremendous costs. As a keystone species, elephants are essential to the ecosystems in which they live, playing their part in a complex structure that affects other plant and animal life. Their elimination disrupts a balance that evolved over millions of years.
There’s a very human cost to the assault on elephants as well. Park rangers and conservationists put their lives on the line daily, and many have died protecting wildlife. Earlier this month Esmond Bradley Martin, one of the world’s top ivory and rhino horn trafficking investigators, was murdered in Kenya. There is speculation that his murder was linked to his work. Last year another well-known elephant conservationist, Wayne Lotter, was murdered in Tanzania. Again, suspicions were that the murder was connected to his work.
More Action Before It’s Too Late
“It’s clear we need an immediate, effective, large-scale approach to conservation,” Paul Allen has said. “Otherwise, we risk elephants disappearing from the continent for good.” But whether that’s happening fast enough to save the elephant is questionable. In recent years — as governments, organizations and communities argue over threat level designations, rehash past transgressions of colonialism, burn ivory stockpiles and debate how to eliminate ivory demand — elephants have continued to be killed in alarming numbers.
As an armchair conservationist closely following these developments, I’m flummoxed. With such small numbers of elephants remaining in Africa, it seems the global community must come together much more effectively to protect these animals. To kill the trade, this means more outreach in China and Asia to educate the end-users of ivory of how their purchases are killing a species, and more work with local communities to deploy more boots on the ground to guard elephant herds using technology against well-organized criminal syndicates.
It means working to better educate local communities about elephants and other wildlife, and creating economic opportunities that would discourage local poaching and encourage people to be defenders of wildlife. While viewed globally, protecting elephants, obviously, must happen at a very local level. American Scientistreported on a study that looked at areas of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, countries which are part of Africa’s Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. While the situation is reported as stable for elephants, human residents are challenged. With unemployment at more than 90 percent in parts, and farming-elephant conflict putting people at risk, locals feel left out of input into conservation plans and tourism opportunities. The study’s authors outline a case where the needs of the community were inadequately addressed in conservation plans.
Policy Responses
Former Colorado Governor and outspoken policy critic Dick Lamm has said governments are most responsive when situations reach crisis. Elephants are in real crisis — the time for more countries worldwide to respond is now. For example, last month major ivory market Hong Kong announced it would end the legal sale of ivory in a four-year phaseout — a long timeframe for elephants in the 11th hour. Accompanying this step, which came on the heels of China’s earlier announcement to ban legal ivory sales, are harsher penalties for smugglers, an important component as battening down the hatches on legal sales is likely to drive black-market sales.
These announcements from China and Hong Kong, the world’s most voracious ivory consumers, have been called a “major game-changer” by conservationists. With them, there’s optimism that Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, also large ivory dealers where demand is increasing, will end their legal markets. Without a broad commitment to ending the trade — legal and illegal — eliminating the devastation will continue to be difficult.
Prior to this, in 2016, 182 countries signed a legally nonbinding agreement calling for the end of all legal ivory markets. In the United States, the world’s number-two market for illegal ivory, a nearly complete ban on the commercial sale of African elephant ivory went into effect under the Obama administration. The ban was temporarily overturned for Zambia and Zimbabwe under the Trump administration last November, but President Trump confirmed in January that the ban would remain in place. Blaming “a very high-level government person” for the sleight of hand on lifting the ban, Trump said, “As soon as I heard about it, I turned it around.”
Surprisingly, the United Kingdom remains a very large ivory importer and exporter. It has not shut down its legal ivory trade, despite 85 percent public support to end it.
The twin evil to poaching is legal hunting of elephants in many countries, including Cameroon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Given the precipitous drop in elephant numbers, what we know about the social structures of animals and that more elephants are killed than being born, among so many other points, how hunting of elephants can align with heading off extinction is counterintuitive, and raises the question of when, or if, elephant “trophy hunting” will become illegal.
Change, Act
Laws and law enforcement to curb the business of dealing in animal body parts are essential. But beyond that, unless more people embrace the rights of these animals to exist and have sufficient habitat to thrive in peace, then the threat of extinction will remain.
What a contribution to the world it would be if the outrage directed at such things as proposals to have a parade in the U.S. could be redirected — and generate real change — to ending the genocide against elephants, and many other species… if the rich trophy hunters worldwide contributed the $45,000 per “adventure” that they pay to kill rare animals instead to actual conservation efforts and programs for sustainable African communities in balance with local wildlife… if those who chose to spend $3,000 for a Super Bowl ticket, or a designer handbag, instead wrote a check for elephants… if Paul Allen’s large-scale conservation idea for Africa could come to fruition… if Homo sapiens actually earned “the thinking man” claim through a change in actions.
Oh, utopian thinker!
In the current age of mass extinction in which we live, and that humankind is driving, John Donne’s oft-quoted “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” is as apt today as when it was written centuries ago, with one deletion, to read: “Any death diminishes me.”
The war on elephants isn’t just an Africa problem; it’s a global crisis to solve. Among the 7.6 billion people on our green planet, there are enough of us who, working collaboratively, can save the elephant. We must challenge more nations to follow the lead taken by the Obama administration and reconfirmed in the Trump administration to do better and ban the importation of elephant ivory. And we must advocate loudly for putting an end to legal elephant hunting and for committing essential resources to destroying crime syndicates that deal in animal body parts and extinction.
Update: After this essay was published, the Trump administration announced it would start to allow the import of elephant hunting trophies on a “case-by-case basis.”
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.
Climate scientist Michael E. Mann and children’s book author Megan Herbert want kids (and maybe also adults) to learn that their voices can and must be heard.
Sometimes truly effective change starts when a polar bear knocks at your door and asks for a place to live.
The book opens when a young girl named Sophia meets a desperate polar bear whose Arctic home has melted away, leaving him with no place else to go.
“The ice that he lived on had ceased to exist. He hoped that Sophia would kindly assist.”
Artist: Megan Herbert
It turns out the polar bear is not alone. Soon he and Sophia are joined by other climate refugees: farmers whose land has flooded; fishermen whose nets have come up empty; and a flamingo, sea turtle and Bengal tiger that have fled various climate-threatened habitats.
Sophia sets out to help these lost souls, only to be met with resistance and dismissal by her local government officials.
“Someone must help them. Why not you,” Sophia asks.
“We see you’re upset, but we’ve got things to do,” comes the backhanded reply.
Sophia feels momentarily helpless and frustrated at this inaction — common emotions among people who care about environmental issues. That’s something the authors say they needed to tap into.
“This is exactly the feeling that the book addresses, because it was exactly the feeling that we were experiencing ourselves,” says Herbert. “Some days it feels like no one in a position of power to make substantive change — in politics or industry — is really listening or realizing the urgency of the situation we’re in. It can make you want to cry or scream or completely lose hope.”
Mann — who’s faced down the climate-denial machine in order to spread the world about the latest climate-change science — says he feels frustration sometimes himself. “I can tell you that there’s a mix of emotions that I encounter when I speak to audiences about climate change,” he says, “and powerlessness is one of them — powerlessness in the face of what seems like an overwhelming challenge.”
Herbert and Mann. Art: Megan Herbert
Ultimately, though, the book isn’t about feeling helpless. It’s about overcoming that. Sophia gets motivated, raises her voice, organizes, and throws a tantrum that, well, helps create change and save the world (the title’s a bit of a spoiler).
“We wanted a story that would be empowering,” explains Mann. “I hope that the kids and parents who read this book will indeed feel empowered to make their voices heard.”
Herbert says that’s the key to Tantrum. “When talking to kids about an issue as big and scary as climate change, you need to give them a feeling of empowerment that they can do something about it, otherwise it can lead to a sense of hopelessness and a lack of engagement,” she explains. “We wanted to avoid that at all costs. So by telling kids that yes, this is a huge problem, and it’s not fair that it falls to you, and it’s frustrating and you want to scream, but there are things you can do about it, then it gives them the tools to convert all their negative emotions about it — fear, anger, frustration — into positive ones, like agency, action, positivity and hope.”
Herbert acknowledges that the word “tantrum” has a bad reputation, but says it may be the most important tool we have left. “Tantrums are seen as negative behavior, the last straw for a child with limited means to communicate their frustration to try to be heard,” she says. “Right now, that feels like the position that we’re in. The people who have the will to do something to stop the burning of fossil fuels are being roundly ignored by the people who want to keep burning them. The time for polite conversation and reasonable discussion is past. It’s time for us all to make a lot of noise and demand to be heard. As long as that tantrum is followed up by positive action, then I think it’s completely justifiable.”
She adds, “I don’t think this message is just relevant to kids.” She hopes parents who read this book to their children will also be inspired to speak up and make changes in their households and communities. “I hope they will help their children to contact their elected officials to reach the people who have the power to make bigger legislative changes, and by doing that they will find a way to convert their own frustration into positive action.”
Mann, who just last week won an award for his climate-communication efforts, says working on the book gave him some new communication tools. “Most of my outreach and communication has been aimed at adults,” he says. “I learned a lot from working with Meg about the additional challenges of using appropriate language and explaining things at level that’s accessible to a younger audience. That’s been a very rewarding experience for me.”
In addition to showing Sophia in action, Tantrum also comes with a detailed action guide, giving kids some tools to help change the world themselves, such as saying no to plastic and learning to fix things instead of just replacing them. Beyond those recommendations, Mann says the most important tool for kids is to talk about climate change — “with your parents, your friends, your relatives and your schoolmates. The first step to solving the problem is talking about it. And the more we talk about it, the more difficult it is for politicians to ignore it.”
The Tantrum That Saved the World is available now in e-book form from World Saving Books. A carbon-neutral printed version will ship beginning in March.
The 196 nations that agreed to the Aichi Biodiversity Targets have just two years to meet auspicious conservation goals. How are we doing?
The Paris Climate Accord has gotten a lot of press lately, but did you know there’s an equally important international strategy to preserve the world’s most threatened ecosystems?
The Aichi Biodiversity Targets — named after Japan’s Aichi Prefecture — were established under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and are quite possibly the best roadmap nations have for biodiversity conservation. Unfortunately, though the deadline to meet the Aichi Targets is looming, few people have ever heard of it.
That’s a shame, because Aichi’s goals are arguably just as important as the Paris Climate Accord, which set worldwide goals to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Aichi targets predate Paris, going back to 2010, when 194 signatories of the Convention gathered in Nagoya, Japan, to hammer out 20 ambitious conservation goals to safeguard global biodiversity. The targets ranged from preventing the extinction of threatened species to halving the rate of forest loss.
Each nation was expected to meet all 20 of these targets by 2020, but with just two years left to go, the world is falling short. “Our assessment suggests that no country is currently on track to reach of all the Aichi Biodiversity Targets,” Convention on Biological Diversity Executive Secretary Cristiana Paşca Palmer tells The Revelator. “However, in many cases progress has been made.”
How far off are we? A 2016 report by The Nature Conservancy, WWF, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and BirdLife International found that only 5 percent of countries appeared to be on track to meet their global targets. Though roughly three-quarters of signatories are making progress, none are moving quickly enough to meet the 2020 deadline. And 20 percent of nations have made no progress at all — or are even moving further away. (The United States, meanwhile, is the only country in the world that hasn’t ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity, so it’s excluded from the get-go.)
Where are countries struggling and succeeding the most?
One of the first steps outlined under Aichi was for each party to update and revise its national biodiversity strategies and action plans. In these plans parties were to develop their own national targets using the Aichi Biodiversity Targets as a framework, but with some flexibility dependent upon national priorities and capacities. Ultimately, though, these plans were meant to contribute to the collective effort to reach the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. To date 151 nations — 77 percent of the convention’s now-196 parties — have submitted their plans post-Nagoya. The submission of these plans is actually an Aichi Target itself (number 17), making it the goal with the most progress made thus far.
Similarly, countries are making the most progress on targets that are procedural in nature, such as ratifying the Nagoya Protocol and submitting such action plans.
But more practical progress has also been made. Another key area of success is Target 11, which calls for conserving “at least 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services.” As of June 2017, 87 parties to the Convention have achieved their terrestrial protection goals.
Work on protected areas has long been integrated into national strategies, far ahead of the official Aichi Biodiversity Targets, which understandably means more countries have moved toward this target. Still, though the target represents only a modest increase in the proportion of land protected from previous levels, it includes “a more ambitious increase for marine protected areas,” says Paşca Palmer.
Target 11 is about more than just setting aside land and water. By achieving this goal, countries will “help us achieve other targets in restoring ecosystems and contribute to the challenges that we have in addressing climate change and so on,” explained Convention on Biological Diversity Deputy Executive Secretary David Cooper when he spoke at the last Conference of the Parties in Cancun, Mexico, in late 2016 (COP-13).
Speaking at the same COP, Elizabeth Mrema, director of the UN Environment’s law division, noted that just declaring protection for land and marine areas is not enough. Though the world has already exceeded protection of 10 percent of coastal and marine areas, she emphasized that “we need to also ensure there is effective legislation and enforcement to ensure those protected areas are well-managed and conserved, and not just laws on paper.”
On the flip side, Target 20, which calls for resource mobilization — i.e. monetary contribution — toward implementing the strategic plan, is faring poorly. Fewer than 15 percent of parties have met their commitments. “The low level of progress for many countries is likely to be explained in part due to competing national resource allocation,” explained the 2016 report.
Indeed the Aichi Targets also depend on governments to frequently monitor and report their biodiversity, using surveys to estimate each nation’s total species richness. For poorer countries, allocating resources to continually measure progress is asking a lot.
However, one silver lining is that least-developed countries appear to be showing a higher level of ambition than developed countries, “and are thus demonstrating a different development pathway that better recognizes the value of nature to economic growth and prosperity,” Andrew Deutz, director of international government relations at The Nature Conservancy, said in a 2016 press release.
While it’s hard to individually name countries that are in the lead, the executive secretariat points to a few specific national projects that are making inroads.
In India, for example, the government is taking steps to encourage balanced fertilizer use to help maintain soil biodiversity, and to sustain and increase the rate of agricultural productivity by reforming fertilizer pricing to encourage the use of potassium, phosphorus and micronutrient based fertilizers while reducing the use of urea, which has more damaging effects on the environment.
Ultimately, though, 95 percent of countries are behind schedule on the Aichi Targets, and the targets won’t be met unless countries significantly ramp up their efforts.
So what’s next?
One of the main areas of focus in the next two years will be increasing support for low-income countries to turn their ambitious goals into reality.
There’s hope that bilateral and multilateral funding mechanisms such as the Global Environmental Facility, which provides money to developing countries to meet the objectives of international environmental conventions and agreements, will make this a priority.
Meanwhile the executive secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity will conduct a full assessment of progress toward the targets; a final assessment will be published in the fifth edition of Global Biodiversity Outlook in 2019, the first update since 2014.
Before that the parties will meet again in November 2018 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, where they’ll discuss plans for follow-up to the 2011-2020 Strategic Plan for Biodiversity.
What will follow after Aichi 2020 deadline has passed? Paşca Palmer says the status quo is not enough. “It is clear that business-as-usual approaches must be abandoned. What is needed now is transformational change… This includes a change in behavior at the levels of producers and consumers, governments and businesses that in turn will lead to tangible results on the ground.”
Paşca Palmer says that echoes the goals of the Aichi Targets. “We need to remember that biodiversity is not a hindrance, but rather a solution for sustainable economic growth and human well-being by supporting the functioning of our Earth’s life support system.”
Fake news may be hard to spot, but fake arguments don’t have to be.
Much of the public discussion about climate science consists of a stream of assertions. The climate is changing or it isn’t; carbon dioxide causes global warming or it doesn’t; humans are partly responsible or they are not; scientists have a rigorous process of peer review or they don’t, and so on.
Despite scientists’ best efforts at communicating with the public, not everyone knows enough about the underlying science to make a call one way or the other. Not only is climate science very complex, but it has also been targeted by deliberate obfuscation campaigns.
If we lack the expertise to evaluate the detail behind a claim, we typically substitute judgment about something complex (like climate science) with judgment about something simple (the character of people who speak about climate science).
But there are ways to analyze the strength of an argument without needing specialist knowledge. My colleagues, Dave Kinkead from the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project and John Cook from George Mason University in the U.S., and I published a paper in Environmental Research Letters on a critical thinking approach to climate change denial.
We applied this simple method to 42 common climate-contrarian arguments, and found that all of them contained errors in reasoning that are independent of the science itself.
In the video abstract for the paper, we outline an example of our approach, which can be described in six simple steps.
The authors discuss the myth that climate change is natural.
Six steps to evaluate contrarian climate claims
Identify the claim: First, identify as simply as possible what the actual claim is. In this case, the argument is:
The climate is currently changing as a result of natural processes.
Construct the supporting argument: An argument requires premises (those things we take to be true for the purposes of the argument) and a conclusion (effectively the claim being made). The premises together give us reason to accept the conclusion. The argument structure is something like this:
Premise one: The climate has changed in the past through natural processes
Premise two: The climate is currently changing
Conclusion: The climate is currently changing through natural processes.
Determine the intended strength of the claim: Determining the exact kind of argument requires a quick detour into the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. Bear with me!
In our paper we examined arguments against climate change that are framed as definitive claims. A claim is definitive when it says something is definitely the case, rather than being probable or possible.
Definitive claims must be supported by deductive reasoning. Essentially, this means that if the premises are true, the conclusion is inevitably true.
This might sound like an obvious point, but many of our arguments are not like this. In inductive reasoning, the premises might support a conclusion but the conclusion need not be inevitable.
An example of inductive reasoning is:
Premise one: Every time I’ve had a chocolate-covered oyster I’ve been sick
Premise two: I’ve just had a chocolate-covered oyster
Conclusion: I’m going to be sick.
This is not a bad argument – I’ll probably get sick – but it’s not inevitable. It’s possible that every time I’ve had a chocolate-covered oyster I’ve coincidentally got sick from something else. Perhaps previous oysters have been kept in the cupboard, but the most recent one was kept in the fridge.
Because climate-contrarian arguments are often definitive, the reasoning used to support them must be deductive. That is, the premises must inevitably lead to the conclusion.
Check the logical structure: We can see that in the argument from step two – that the climate change is changing because of natural processes – the truth of the conclusion is not guaranteed by the truth of the premises.
In the spirit of honesty and charity, we take this invalid argument and attempt to make it valid through the addition of another (previously hidden) premise.
Premise one: The climate has changed in the past through natural processes
Premise two: The climate is currently changing
Premise three: If something was the cause of an event in the past, it must be the cause of the event now
Conclusion: The climate is currently changing through natural processes.
Adding the third premise makes the argument valid, but validity is not the same thing as truth. Validity is a necessary condition for accepting the conclusion, but it is not sufficient. There are a couple of hurdles that still need to be cleared.
Check for ambiguity: The argument mentions climate change in its premises and conclusion. But the climate can change in many ways, and the phrase itself can have a variety of meanings. The problem with this argument is that the phrase is used to describe two different kinds of change.
Current climate change is much more rapid than previous climate change – they are not the same phenomenon. The syntax conveys the impression that the argument is valid, but it is not. To clear up the ambiguity, the argument can be presented more accurately by changing the second premise:
Premise one: The climate has changed in the past through natural processes
Premise two: The climate is currently changing at a more rapid rate than can be explained by natural processes
Conclusion: The climate is currently changing through natural processes.
This correction for ambiguity has resulted in a conclusion that clearly does not follow from the premises. The argument has become invalid once again.
We can restore validity by considering what conclusion would follow from the premises. This leads us to the conclusion:
Conclusion: Human (non-natural) activity is necessary to explain current climate change.
Importantly, this conclusion has not been reached arbitrarily. It has become necessary as a result of restoring validity.
Note also that in the process of correcting for ambiguity and the consequent restoring of validity, the attempted refutation of human-induced climate science has demonstrably failed.
Check premises for truth or plausibility: Even if there were no ambiguity about the term “climate change,” the argument would still fail when the premises were tested. In step four, the third premise, “If something was the cause of an event in the past, it must be the cause of the event now,” is clearly false.
Applying the same logic to another context, we would arrive at conclusions like: people have died of natural causes in the past; therefore any particular death must be from natural causes.
Restoring validity by identifying the “hidden” premises often produces such glaringly false claims. Recognizing this as a false premise does not always require knowledge of climate science.
Flow chart for argument analysis and evaluation.
When determining the truth of a premise does require deep knowledge in a particular area of science, we may defer to experts. But there are many arguments that do not, and in these circumstances this method has optimal value.
Inoculating against poor arguments
Previous work by Cook and others has focused on the ability to inoculate people against climate science misinformation. By preemptively exposing people to misinformation with explanation they become “vaccinated” against it, showing “resistance” to developing beliefs based on misinformation.
This reason-based approach extends inoculation theory to argument analysis, providing a practical and transferable method of evaluating claims that does not require expertise in climate science.
Fake news may be hard to spot, but fake arguments don’t have to be.
An added 25-cents-per-gallon fuel tax would hurt consumers, but something different could benefit the environment.
Start hunting around your couch cushions for extra quarters, folks. You may need them soon. President Trump has reportedly endorsed the idea of raising the federal gas tax by 25 cents a gallon to help fund trillions of dollars’ worth of national infrastructure projects.
Trump’s supposed backing for this new fuel tax, currently at 18.4 cents a gallon, echoes an op-ed last month from Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the country’s largest lobbying organization), which called for a five-cent-a-year increase over the next five years. Donohue pointed out that the fuel tax has not been raised in 25 years and said the funds could help revitalize the lagging construction industry — a major component of the Chamber’s membership.
Now, cost aside, there is a potential environmental benefit to an increased gas tax: It could actually decrease gas use. An analysis by the policy group called Energy Innovation, which supports the growth of clean energy, estimates that higher gas prices would actually push 1.2 million people toward getting rid of their expensive gas-guzzlers and switching to electric vehicles. In the process, it would also cause consumers to use less fuel — 1.3 billion barrels of oil through the year 2050.
But that points to one of the major flaws in a gas tax: How much longer will we actually be using gas to fuel our vehicles? It certainly won’t be forever. The average American keeps her or his car on the road for a little longer than 11 years, and with the rapid improvements in electric-vehicle technologies we’re going to see a paradigm shift in what Americans drive over the next decade as those older cars age out of the system. Just about every major analysis — including one by OPEC itself — predicts a major increase in electric vehicle ownership worldwide by mid-century. You can’t keep funding infrastructure with a gas tax if fewer people are using gas. In fact, some experts propose replacing the fuel tax with a new kind of tax based on how many miles you drive each year.
Of course that brings us to the second flaw with gas taxes: asking consumers to foot the bill. The tax that really needs to be raised is the tax on fossil-fuel company profits. A report last year estimated that an astonishing 6.5 percent of the entire world’s Gross Domestic Project — $5.3 trillion in 2015 — goes toward subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry. Not only do these companies get drilling rights (usually on public land) at bargain-basement prices, their tax rates are way too low and they defer their environmental and health costs onto governments and people, who pay and pay and pay for the right of energy CEOs to make hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
And that’s the third flaw of gas taxes — they should go toward helping to build infrastructure, sure, but maybe not roads and bridges. Fuel taxes could do a heck of a lot more good if they were put toward getting us away from the fossil-fuel economy. We could use those funds to support clean-energy infrastructure, new renewable energy technologies and climate-change mitigation. Think of what we could do as a nation — and as a world — with a few billion extra dollars a year pointed in those directions.
Of course, the thought of President Trump proposing anything like that seems, at best, unlikely, especially since he already wants to slash federal funding for sustainable-energy research. Then again, maybe all he needs is the right person to whisper the idea in his ear. That seems to be where this gas-tax increase idea came from in the first place, after all.
There’s little talk of actually building a physical wall, though, and more discussion of cameras, facial recognition and other technology.
Maurice Gill practically jumps up and down on stage in his green uniform. “It’s free money!” Gill, law-enforcement liaison with the U.S. Border Patrol, shouts at the crowd. “For us! For you! We need to operationalize right now.”
Gill is addressing a room of around 150 border-security industry executives at the 2018 Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas, describing the tidal wave of funding Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have received from the Trump administration. This year border-security budgets have ballooned, growing 23 percent for border protection and 30 percent for immigration enforcement, two agencies that operate under Department of Homeland Security authority to enforce immigration laws and police borders. This is in stark comparison to budgets slashed 30 percent for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of State.
Photo: Laiken Jordahl
Jay Ahern, former acting head of Customs and Border Protection and principal at the Chertoff Group, suggests to the crowd that this border-security funding boom mirrors that of the post 9/11 era.
“We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunity,” adds Benjamin Huffman, chief of strategic planning and analysis for Customs and Border Protection. He enunciates each word slowly and carefully. The industry executives are attentive, situated at the helm of an industry whose time has come.
An entrepreneurial spirit pervades the three day-conference. Homeland Security officials eagerly describe new frontiers to deploy technology and manpower, and few of these frontiers are anywhere near the physical border. Increased funding and personnel will allow the department to beef up interior enforcement and international operations like never before, which deputy director Elaine Duke calls “the away game of national security.” She describes how the border-security technology industry will play a crucial role in this expansion.
On the expo floor, industry contractors show off their gadgetry, ranging from high-resolution facial recognition cameras to ATVs mounted with assault rifles and air-conditioned K-9 kennels.
Cameras. Photo: Laiken Jordahl.
Amid talk of drones, biometrics and expanding enterprise, there is conspicuously little discussion of the border wall.
When the wall is mentioned, it is done so with the obligatory “big and beautiful” prefix, or the dubious “sea to shining sea” postscript, each of which elicits an audible chuckle from the crowd. One Border Patrol official likens the wall to a token of acknowledgment for the president. The same official then assures the crowd that no wall will be complete without an arsenal of motion sensors, cameras, lighting and other technology, though these assurances contradict prior reporting that Trump has offered to slash funding for border-security technology in order to pay for his wall.
Of course, there was no discussion of topics such as endangered species, land takings or environmental justice concerns at the Border Security Expo. There’s no need. Due to the legal waiver authority granted to Homeland Security under the Real ID Act of 2005, the department’s secretary holds the singular power to waive any and all laws in regard to constructing barriers and roads along the border. This degree of power wielded by the secretary, an unelected official who can nullify any congressionally mandated law at the strike of a pen, is truly unprecedented.
Using the Real ID Act waiver, the Trump administration has already waived dozens of environmental and public-health laws to build border-wall prototypes, replace sections of fencing in San Diego and build new fencing in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. Laws voided by the administration include the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and dozens more. Due to this unchecked authority to waive any and all laws, the administration doesn’t have to confront the disastrous implications border walls have for wildlife and communities.
And based on recently introduced legislation, the border-security industry may not have to consider the human and environmental costs of the deployment of radio towers, motion sensors, cameras or other gadgetry, either. Though the digital wall is often touted as an environmentally amenable solution, fortifications to the existing network of towers, sensors, drones and cameras will have clear impacts on ecosystems and wilderness areas, especially if laws are waived to expedite their deployment.
Much of this digital wall is already in place, officials at the expo explain, and with a seemingly bottomless border-security slush fund, it’s rapidly becoming more powerful. Cameras can detect motion from seven miles away, differentiating between human and animal movement. Facial recognition technology can rapidly tell agents who’s in a vehicle traveling 100 miles per hour, all from a split-second snapshot. The virtual surveillance possibilities are almost limitless.
Throughout the expo, far more attention is given to the development of a tactical network of technology than to border walls. One official notes that more than 650 miles of existing border barriers already exist, built in high-traffic urban areas and travel corridors where, from a tactical perspective, these barriers are most effective. Border-security officials are tacticians; it makes sense that the strategy put forth at the expo is one of sophisticated tactical deployment. The wall, on the other hand, is born from a political rather than tactical mindset. It seems that everyone in the conference hall is well aware of this fact.
As day two at the expo begins, breakout panels address the fentanyl epidemic, the changing supply routes of drugs coming into the country and the transnational criminal organizations working to undermine border security. Each of these presentations paints a grave picture of threats streaming into the country. Metaphors frequently compare the arrival of people, drugs and even religious ideologies to water. Migrants “flood” across our borders. Drugs “pour” onto our streets. We must “stem the tide” of refugees before we are overrun. According to the forecast given at the expo, it feels as though a cyclone is enveloping the country, and the foreign seas of contraband, disease and criminality are lapping at our feet.
Photo: Laiken Jordahl
What expo presenters fail to mention is the fact that apprehensions on the southwestern border are actually at a 46-year low. In 2017 Customs and Border Protection apprehended fewer undocumented immigrants on the border than any year since 1971. In fact, since 2015 — well before President Trump was elected — more undocumented Mexican immigrants have been leaving the United States than coming in. As U.S. Representative Ron Kind said last year, “to build a wall now would be locking them in this country.”
Under the Trump doctrine of nativism and deregulation, the border-security industry is poised to win big. And with an annual market valuation reaching upwards of $600 billion, a blank check from the federal government, and little oversight or accountability, it doesn’t matter that our country is no longer in an immigration crisis. There is money to be made.
For the border security industry, the stars have aligned — this truly is an era of insurmountable opportunity.
A new book offers insight into how our public lands were created — and what that means as we fight to protect them today and in the future.
“Through interpretation, understanding; through understanding, appreciation; through appreciation, protection.” —Anonymous, U.S. National Park Service administrative manual
Nine of 12 members of the congressionally mandated National Parks System Advisory Board resigned in late January over their inability to obtain a meeting with current Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, the former Navy SEAL and U.S. congressman who has professed, “I’m a Teddy Roosevelt guy!” and “No one loves public lands more than I do.” In the resignation letter, co-signed by eight other advisers, former Alaska governor Tony Knowles wrote, “I have a profound concern that the mission of stewardship, protection, and advancement of our National Parks has been set aside.”
Previous Interior Secretary Sally Jewell noted in a recent NPR interview that this administration has launched an “all-out attack on public lands.” It’s hard to view the actions of this administration any other way. As Knowles noted in his letter, Zinke has “no interest in continuing the agenda of science, the effect of climate change, pursuing the protection of the ecosystem.”
Indeed President Donald Trump has made it clear that the fox is guarding the henhouse, and fossil-fuel industries reign supreme. Step one was to hire hatchetmen such as Zinke and others who have spent their careers undermining environmental regulation in order to rollback federal protections for human and environmental health, and thereby support extractive industries.
Given the president’s unprecedented attack on the people’s lands and the environment, as well as the ever-unfolding escapades of Cliven Bundy and his ilk and Trump’s desire to build the ecological disaster that is “the wall,” one can learn a lot from the recent book by journalist Stephen Nash. Nash’s Grand Canyon for Sale (University of California Press, 2017) is a love story about what was, is, and should be our number-one focus on conservation on U.S. federal lands, especially national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges and other places. Nash’s work is about not only sense of place and the need to prioritize conservation above other interests but also the degradation of the people’s lands and how they are routinely trampled as private interests seek to control those lands and work in concert with politicians to make it happen.
The hands of federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service and Parks Service were tied long before Trump took office. These agencies have the ability to prioritize science and the conservation of healthy plants, animals and lands, but that is not happening, to the detriment of ecosystems. As Nash makes abundantly clear, America’s greatest invention — national parks — and other federal lands are under attack by developers, cattle ranchers, introduced and other invasive plant and animal species, tourists and climate change. Using Grand Canyon National Park and surrounding federal lands as his case study, Nash offers each chapter as a vignette looking at topics affecting the ability of our national parks and our public/federal lands to thrive.
Nearly one-fourth of the book adroitly describes the perils associated with cattle grazing on federal lands and the need to establish a “national cow conversation.” Such dialogue is needed, as cattle — an invasive, non-native species to North America — are one of the biggest environmental stressors after climate change. Overgrazing is simply “grazing” and like large-scale dam projects, such as the nefarious Glen Canyon Dam, it has had dramatic and negative impacts on plant and animal life in the Grand Canyon and much of the Southwest.
Huge swaths of federal land are grazed. In fact a majority of Bureau-controlled lands are grazed. The only reasonable conclusion from the evidence presented by Nash is that “multiple use” is not likely always possible, and should not be the standard under which we decide what activities to support in our parks and other federal lands. Some uses are incompatible with natural ecosystems. We should forbid special interests such as mining, oil and gas extraction, energy generation, and sheep and cattle ranching from operating on federal lands. (If any environmentalist reading this review still doubts the collective impact cattle ranching has on natural ecosystems or the need to adopt a plants-only diet, I challenge you to read page 122.)
According to the language in the Organic Act of 1916, which created the National Park Service, “The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations.” Furthermore, the “purpose” of these federal lands “is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” The goal is sustainability, not ranching, oil and gas extraction, etc., for as Theodore Roosevelt once put it when describing the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it.”
The scale of the constant intrusions into the parks and federal lands by ranchers, business owners and politicians should be unsettling to everyone. Some of the wealthiest Americans and private international corporations — including David and Charles Koch, Stanley Kroenke, the descendants of W. Barron Hilton, and others — are essentially on the federal dole and benefit from the beauty of cheap grazing leases, resulting in yearly deficits to the taxpayers. If we stopped private grazing on Bureau and Forest Service lands, American citizens would save $50 to $125 million a year. In fact, we could likely pay the ranchers to stop ranching and still come out ahead.
The bottom line is that “federal lands” are our lands, not the private playgrounds for the rich and well connected. Nash shares the words of Freeman Tilden, the man who worked with the National Park Service to protect public lands: “The national parks are not in the least degree the special property of those who happen to live near them. They are national domain.” Continued Tilden, “Yellowstone and Yosemite belong as much to the citizens of Maine as to those of Wyoming and California; Isle Royale to the New Mexican as much as to the people of Michigan.”
Nash’s book is missing indigenous voices. They were dispossessed of these lands first, oftentimes by the U.S. military, Mormons and businessmen working side-by-side. Their voices need to be foregrounded in the narrative. However, my small critique in no way detracts from the success of the book, nor its more-important-than-ever message. Nash is excellent at providing a broad outlook — the big picture on every issue and topic. Although the obvious focus of the book is the Grand Canyon, the aim is much larger and makes an even more significant point about all federal lands and all national parks, monuments and refuges everywhere in the United States.
Stephen Nash’s book is important and strong medicine, chock-a-block with important insights and suggestions. His comments and research cover, for example, entrance fees, the failure of “multiple use,” cattle ranching, politics, economics, dams, coal-fired power plants, ecological restoration, including reseeding with native species, and increased inspection of goods and agricultural products arriving in our nation’s ports. He highlights the need for substantially more money in historically cash-strapped federal land-based agencies, and, most significantly, the need for citizens to not only educate themselves about what is happening to our federal lands but also to do something about it.
In the context of Trump-era threats to parks, other federal lands, and other nature infrastructure, it is important to get outraged, to do something, and to reprioritize sustainability and conservation now. As Nash wrote, “These natural systems are unraveling quickly. We need to see the protection of all public lands as the potential salvation for the parks… National parks…need powerful and consistent political support, loudly expressed.” Lend your voice to the effort. Make America the world leader of conservation of public lands again.
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.
Growing palm oil for use in food is already destroying habitats and causing extinctions. Using it for biofuel will make things even worse.
Malaysia and Indonesia are massive producers of palm oil, much of which is exported overseas.
Oil palm is not only the biggest direct driver of deforestation and peat-swamp destruction in these nations but is a growing forest-killer elsewhere in the tropics — often in mega-diversity areas such as New Guinea, Equatorial Africa and Latin America.
Native forests and peat swamps in the tropics have remarkable biodiversity and are massive stores of carbon — the destruction of which spews out billions of tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions each year.
Growers Love to Clear Native Forests
Those investing in oil palm love to find unoccupied, intact forests for their plantations. They don’t have to worry about local residents kicking up a fuss about losing their land, and the valuable timber in the forest can be used to help offset the costs of plantation production.
And now a new report by the respected Rainforest Foundation Norway suggests that oil palm could become a far bigger driver of deforestation in places like Indonesia and Malaysia.
And this is despite clear evidence that oil palm is one of the worst feed-stocks for producing biodiesel because of the exceptionally high environmental costs — to biodiversity and our climate — as well as to local landowners displaced by the big plantation companies.
This kind of backlash has been a long time coming — and let’s hope that pending counter-moves by China and Indonesia don’t offset the courageous E.U. ban.
In the coming months, our “Border Betrayed” series will take readers to those border communities and examine the profound health and environmental effects of a region whose infrastructure has been systematically neglected by both countries — leaving millions of people to suffer the consequences far from the view of politicians and most of America.
