Sold Out: Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Drilling in the refuge was tucked into in last month’s Republican tax bill, defying decades of attempts to protect this pristine wildnerness.

Over the holidays the Republican tax bill gifted one of our most treasured national landscapes to oil companies. Against any measure of public interest, and in defiance of plausible economic reason, the new law mandates oil drilling in Alaska’s iconic Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is a gift to Alaskan politicians and an unneeded bonus for the world’s richest corporations. It must be reversed.

The Refuge, as many Alaskans reverentially call it, has been steadily targeted by Alaska politicians for decades. Its federal protection came in 1960, when Republican President Dwight Eisenhower formally recognized its national importance, preserving its “unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values.”

Eisenhower was informed by even more decades of research and advocacy from some of the most prominent figures in American conservation, including Olaus Murie, Bob Marshall, Justice William O. Douglas and the indefatigable Mardy Murie. Over many years each poured passion, science and reason into ensuring future Americans — you and I — would inherit a slice of unspoiled Arctic Alaska. Congress affirmed the refuge’s national significance in 1980, enlarging it and designating much of it as federal wilderness. The move came just in time: By then most of Alaska’s coastal arctic plain was already open to drilling.

But the refuge is more than conservation legacy. Most famously, it’s the birthing grounds of the massive Porcupine caribou herd, which migrates 400 miles each spring to raise thousands of newborn calves on the area’s coastal plain, the very place Republicans just opened to drilling. Additionally, it supports Alaska’s highest concentration of denning polar bears — mothers nursing newborn cubs. It is also the locus for millions of migrating birds, arriving each spring from nearly every continent to raise the next generation of swans, terns, sandpipers, loons and eiders. In late summer these flocks disperse to backyards, beaches and wetlands across the planet. With grizzly bears, wolves, musk oxen and other species also present, many dub the refuge “America’s Serengeti.”

But it’s also critical human habitat. The Gwich’in people have lived there for millennia, calling the coastal plain Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, which translates as “the sacred place where life begins.” The Porcupine caribou are a nutritional and cultural staple, and fighting for their protection has long been a matter of cultural identity and civil rights. The new tax law is a gut-punch to the Gwich’in. It also stabs at small businesses bringing hikers, rafters, researchers and others to the refuge every year, contributing jobs and revenue to Alaska’s economy.

And then there’s climate change. Just days before Republicans passed their bill, scientists west of the refuge were double-checking their instruments, doubting an extreme spike in temperatures. But the gauges were correct, recording yet more alarming warmth in a state facing melting permafrost, disappearing sea ice, acidifying oceans and glaciers wasting away to rubble.

America doesn’t need more Arctic drilling; it needs clean energy.

So if drilling the Arctic Refuge trashes American conservation history, endangers wildlife, violates the cultural identity of local people and scoffs at the notion of catastrophic climate change, why did Republicans do this?

A main goal, it seems, was securing tax plan support from Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who attached refuge drilling to the bill. Murkowski had already demonstrated her potential for disrupting Trump’s legislative agenda by voting against health-care repeal, and Republicans were not about to mess with her. For their part, Murkowski and other Alaska politicians have long obsessed over drilling in the refuge. One reason, as recently described by Philip Wight in Yale Environment 360, is that refuge oil could decrease operating costs and extend the life of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a gift to oil companies. Depending on upcoming discoveries, it may also boost the state’s oil-rigged economy.

But do we really need to destroy a prized national wildlife refuge so Alaska can go after more oil? Keep in mind that oil has eliminated the need for Alaska sales and income taxes, and that every woman, child and man here still receives an annual oil dividend check, which typically exceeded $1,000 before recent cuts. Also remember that U.S. oil production is soaring — we are not desperate for new sources.

Murkowski knows drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is unpopular. That’s why she slipped it into the tax law, with the bogus promise that it will send $1 billion to the U.S. Treasury and help cover tax cut costs. It’s a preposterous claim, first because no one knows how much oil lies beneath the refuge, and second because $1 billion covers only a sliver of the $1.5 trillion tax cut. Even that $1 billion number is in question, as a sale of other Alaskan oil and gas leases last month netted less than 1 percent of expected bids at far lower prices than expected.

And please don’t buy Murkowski’s claim that drilling would only affect 2,000 acres of the refuge. The figure imagines a line tightly drawn around every road, pipeline and oil rig necessary for drilling. In reality, a toxic spider web of infrastructure would lace the refuge’s coastal plan, as it currently does nearby Prudhoe Bay, where oil spills are common.

What happens next is uncertain. Watch for Murkowski to press for fast action from oil companies to secure their presence and de facto ownership of refuge lands. Concerned citizens should tune into the hard-working folks at Trustees for Alaska, the Alaska Wilderness League, The Wilderness Society and others who have fought for generations to protect the refuge. Their lawsuits or other actions will be the place’s last defense. We can also hope for continued low oil prices, surging renewables and growing divestment from fossil fuel companies, which might discourage bidding on upcoming refuge leases. And in 2018 we must change the balance of power in Washington, where Republican attacks on public lands are only beginning.

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.

As the Arctic Melts, Nations Race to Own What’s Left Behind

Drawing clear borders around the Arctic Ocean matters for the future of the people who live there — and for the planet as a whole.

Geopolitics in the Arctic are quickly becoming incompatible with the physical and social realities of the region.

According to NASA, the average amount of Arctic sea ice present after the summer melting season has shrunk by 40 percent since 1980. Winter sea ice has also been at record lows.

As melting ice frees up once-inaccessible sections of the frozen Arctic Ocean, the seven nations around it will have to negotiate new borders — a series of decisions that has the potential to alter the Arctic landscape and make life harder for its people and wildlife.

In 2018 these nations will attempt to answer a question with massive implications: Who owns the Arctic Ocean?

For the nations in the Arctic Council — Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and the United States — climate change presents an opportunity for access to brand new waters, previously cloaked in ice, that are chock full of valuable resources.

Russia and Denmark have submitted new territorial claims in 2017, with Canada expected to follow, and it’s up to the United Nations to determine which country gets what in 2018.

How these competing interests are negotiated will affect the whole world, says Andrey Petrov, a Russian scientist, professor and member of the International Arctic Science Committee.

“This should get settled because it applies to both short-term change and long-term impact,” says Petrov. “It’s important to consider how the Arctic is connected to the world, and how climate change and economic interests are changing life for the people living there.”

Differing Claims

The problem is there’s a lot of overlap between each of the three claims. Denmark claims sovereignty over the 347,500 square miles north of Greenland, which includes the North Pole and the contentious Lomonosov Ridge, but so do Russia and Canada. In 2007 the Russian government even went so far as to dive 2 miles below the surface near the North Pole to plant its flag on the seabed.

A potential trove of resources hide in these contested waters, ranging from untapped fishing stocks of cod and snow crabs (in which even non-Arctic nations like China and South Korea have expressed interest), to rare minerals like manganese, uranium, copper and iron below the seafloor.

Nations are also interested in drilling for energy resources in the Arctic, which the U.S. Geological Survey estimate contains 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13 percent of the world’s oil.

New Arctic oil-development projects and the emissions they create would also exacerbate climate change, the very force that’s providing access to these new resources in the first place. Each year the Environmental Protection Agency publishes a report detailing which U.S. industries contribute the most to carbon emissions — from 2011 to today, oil and gas production is the second biggest polluter of greenhouse gases, behind power plants. Currently at 282.9 million metric tons of CO₂ emitted in 2016, this number could be expected to rise with new developments.

But the troubling relationship among carbon emissions, climate change and development in the Arctic isn’t enough to quench a country’s thirst for oil.

The Russian minister for the environment and natural resources told The Daily Telegraph last year that the country was looking for “recognition of exclusive economic rights to about 460,000 square miles, estimated to hold 5 billion tons of hitherto unexploited oil and gas.”

In addition to its impact on global carbon emissions, oil development in the Arctic can damage the environment around drilling sites beyond repair.

This past December the U.S. Senate approved of the Republican tax overhaul, which has hidden in it a provision to approve of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, an area that although uncontested internationally, is of huge importance to the native Gwich’in’ people, who fear that oil development will affect caribou, their main source of food.

The fear of a major disaster in the refuge is real, too. According to a 2014 report from the National Research Council, Alaska is ill prepared to respond to a spill or other event, with the nearest Coast Guard station more than 1,000 miles away from the proposed drilling site (which would be capable of releasing 21 million gallons of oil).

The scramble to stake claims in the Arctic also has implications for trade and diplomacy. The United States has challenged Canada’s sovereignty in the Northwest Passage, for instance, arguing that the strait is international, while Canada wants its own maritime laws to apply there.

And national-security interests depend on Arctic territorial claims that will largely dictate which country has military dominance in the area. Over the years Russia has beefed up its military might in the Arctic. According to a report released in September by the Henry Jackson Society, a UK think tank, Russia currently has 45,000 troops, 3,400 military vehicles, 41 ships, 15 submarines and 110 aircraft in the Arctic region — a display of power that makes neighboring countries uneasy.

“We can no longer ignore Russia’s growing military footprint in the Arctic,” noted James Gray, a UK MP and member of the House of Commons Defense Select Committee, in the report. “As the ice melts and new commercial opportunities emerge in the region, Britain and her allies must do more to ensure that the Arctic remains stable and peaceful.”

The Arctic People

Andrei Petrov, as chairman of the International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences — a triennial conference that brings scientists from around the world together to share research on the Arctic — is interested in improving life for the 4 million people in the region’s communities who stand to lose the most from climate change and geopolitical interest.

Petrov says environmental changes in the Arctic, such as flooding, coastal erosion, permafrost thawing, altered migration patterns of both land and sea animals, and a shifting in vegetation zones, have already had drastic impacts on indigenous communities that rely on subsistence hunting and fishing.

According to him, communities in the Arctic are grappling with diet changes, high suicide rates and a degradation of local culture from the tides of globalization that bring big industries to their once isolated and sustainable communities.

“Unfortunately, with most of the development happening today, the local communities receive very little in return,” says Petrov. “Right now we’re at the point where we need social responsibility and a general understanding of human rights in the Arctic. The hope is that development will pay attention to that. It’s important that locals will have the chance to say no to oil development.”

Tricky Negotiations

These high stakes are why clearly defined borders in the Arctic matter, but how are the border claims going to get negotiated?

Currently, under Article 76 of the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Seas, nations have territorial rights to the waters that extend 200 nautical miles beyond their shores. In 2009 Norway was the first country to submit territorial claims to a special U.N. committee, successfully extending its border by 235,000 square kilometers. The United States has not ratified the convention but recognizes it as international law.

If they want to gain access and rights to the new sections of Arctic ocean, Russia, Denmark and Canada need to prove to the United Nations how far their respective continental shelf — the shallow extension of the continent’s landmass under the ocean — actually reaches.

These countries have spent the past couple of years collecting geological data from their submarines and radar in order to prove that the land extending past their established border — 200 nautical miles off the coast of each — is indeed part of their continental shelf.

And if U.N.-appointed geologists can verify the data submitted by each country, then officials there can legally draw new borders and gain new territory, with clear strategic benefits.

“The main thing is that there are a lot of resources there and big interest at play to access them,” says Petrov. “It’s important that eventually we reach some solution about who’s there and what’s the agreement.”

Otherwise competing interests could lead to unregulated construction, overfishing, oil spills and military clashes, which will have consequences not just for life in the Arctic, but for life on the planet.

“These are trans-border issues,” says Petrov. “It’s very important that countries work together.”

In other words, this is a problem the world needs to own.

Revelator Reads: 6 New Environmental Books for the New Year

This month’s new books cover climate change, gorillas, warfare and…Godzilla?

January is always such a great time of year. We start the month well-rested, the pressures of the holidays are over, and we get a chance to look at the New Year with fresh eyes and new perspective. Maybe that’s why so many great environmental books are scheduled for publication this month — they provide a perfect primer for change and opportunity.

Here are our picks of the best new eco-books coming out in January 2018, covering topics ranging from climate change and sustainability to gorillas and Godzilla (yes, really). As usual we tried to pick books for inspired activists, interested kids and hard-working professionals — or anyone with a holiday gift card burning a hole in their pocket.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann

This month’s most challenging tome: a look at the radically different ideas proposed by twentieth-century scientists Norman Borlaug and William Vogt. Borlaug, founder of the so-called “Green Revolution,” set out to feed the world. Vogt, who advocated for reducing the human population, called for us to dramatically cut back on our consumption. How will their ideas fare in a world poised to soon contain 10 billion people? (Knopf, Jan. 23, $28.95)

Snowy Owl Invasion! Tracking an Unusual Migration by Sandra Markle

Here’s a fun one for kids that I’m actually looking forward to reading myself. Why did snowy owls start leaving the Arctic in 2013 to arrive in far-flung places like southern Florida? This beautifully illustrated science book for students digs into the reasons behind this rare phenomenon. (Millbrook Press, Jan. 1, $31.99 print/$6.99 digital)

Ranger Rick: I Wish I Was a Gorilla by Jennifer Bové

Boy, would I have loved this book when I was just starting to read. Gorillas were probably the earliest thing that drew me into caring about animals and the environment. If you’ve got a nature-loving wee one, check this out. (HarperCollins, Jan. 2, $16.99 print/$4.99 digital)

The End of Sustainability: Resilience and the Future of Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene by Melinda Harm Benson and‎ Robin Kundis Craig

Is it time to retire the word “sustainability”? The authors argue that we should replace it with a better word: “resilience.” Will their ideas prove to be resilient? Read the book to find out. (University of Kansas Press, Jan. 5, $29.95)

Tide of War: The Impact of Weather on Warfare by David R. Petriello

In a world where climate change is sometimes making things a little…tense…around the world, perhaps it’s time to take a look back at history to see how past weather events have influenced conflict. From massive rainstorms to the outbreak of disease to the appearance of Halley’s Comet, Petriello digs into the past to reveal what might happen in the future. (Skyhorse Publishing, Jan. 16, $24.99)

Japan’s Green Monsters: Environmental Commentary in Kaiju Cinema by Sean Rhoads and Brooke McCorkle

Godzilla is more than just a big green monster that breathes radioactive fire. Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera and other Japanese movie creatures (collectively known as kaiju) are also environmental metaphors for topics such as extinction, pollution, nuclear power and climate change. This academic text explores the deeper meaning behind the big green guy and his rubbery ilk. (McFarland, Jan. 29, $37.95)

Well, that’s it for our list this month. Happy reading — and feel free to share your own recent recommendations in the comments.

17 Ways the Trump Administration Assaulted the Environment Over the Holidays

New rules could affect everything from clean power to migratory birds, and they’re just a hint of what’s yet to come.

While visions of sugarplums danced in some of our heads, the Trump administration had a different vision — of a country unbound by rules that protect people, places, wildlife and the climate. Over the past two weeks, the administration has proposed or finalized changes to how the government and the industries it regulates respond to climate change, migratory birds, clean energy, pesticides and toxic chemicals. Here’s a timeline:

Dec. 18: Announced a plan to possibly replace the Clean Power Plan, one of President Obama’s signature climate actions.

Dec. 18: Dropped climate change from the list of global threats affecting national security. (Oddly enough, Trump did this just five days after he signed off on next year’s military budget, which just so happens to call climate change a national security threat.)

Dec. 19: Hid language that would exempt the Federal Emergency Management Agency from following requirements set by the Endangered Species Act in an an $81 billion emergency supplemental funding bill.

Dec. 20: Indefinitely postponed the previously announced ban of three toxic chemicals, methylene chloride, N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) and trichloroethylene (TCE).

Dec. 20: Signed an executive order requiring the “streamlining” of the leasing and permitting processes for exploration, production and refining of vaguely defined “critical minerals” (a list of which will be announced later by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke).

Dec. 21: Halted two independent studies by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, one to improve the safety of offshore drilling platforms and another to look at the health risks of mountaintop-removal coal mining in central Appalachia.

Dec. 21: Revoked the Obama-era Resource Management Planning Rule (Planning 2.0 Rule), which advocated new technologies to improve transparency related to mining on public lands. A Federal Register filing said this rule “shall be treated as if it had never taken effect.”

Dec. 22: Signed the massive, unpopular Republican “tax reform” bill. The bill, which strongly benefits the richest Americans, contains numerous anti-environmental elements, including opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Dec. 22: Ruled that “incidental” killings of 1,000 migratory bird species are, somehow, not illegal under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The legal opinion is considered by many a giveaway to the energy industry — which applauded the change — and was written by a former Koch staffer turned Trump political appointee.

Dec. 22: Reversed a previous Obama-era Interior Department decision to withdraw permits for a proposed $2.8 billion copper mine in Minnesota. The mine lease is owned by the Chilean billionaire who also happens to own Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s rented D.C. mansion.

Dec. 27: Announced a plan to consider dramatically expanding the use of a neonicotinoid insecticide called thiamethoxam, which has been proven damaging or deadly to bees.

Dec. 27: Prioritized oil and gas leasing and development near and even inside greater sage-grouse habitat management areas, yet another Obama-era reversal.

Dec. 28: Declared the beaverpond marstonia snail extinct, the first such extinction under the Trump administration. (Obviously this is a failure of the administrations that preceded Trump, but the declaration still comes under his watch.)

Dec. 28: Announced a plan to repeal yet another Obama-era rule, this one governing fracking standards on federal and tribal lands. The rule, which never actually took effect, would have required companies to disclose chemicals used in their fracking fluids, set standards for well construction and required surface ponds holding fracking fluids to be covered.

Dec. 28: Trump sent yet another tweet mocking climate change during a period of record cold temperatures, a not-so-subtle hint about his legislative agenda and personal intractability on the subject.

Dec. 29: Proposed to remove or rewrite offshore-drilling safety regulations put in place by the Obama administration after the deadly Deepwater Horizon disaster, saying “it’s time for a paradigm shift” in regulations.

Now that the New Year has arrived, how many other changes will follow? In all likelihood, this is just the beginning. President Trump’s “Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions,” announced Dec. 14, contains hundreds of provisions affecting endangered species, energy development and just about every other major environmental issue. Those will all start to move forward in the months ahead.

The Revelator’s Top 10 Articles of 2017

Stories about Bears Ears, sharks, vaquitas, an extinct bat and the Endangered Species Act resonated with our readers this year.

What a year. 2017 sometimes felt like a nonstop assault on the environment, but it was our job to get the news out there, good and bad.

That meant bringing you stories about everything from sharks and snails to Bears Ears National Monument and beyond. Here they are, our 10 most-read articles for 2017, as clicked by you, our valued readers:

1. Snails Are Going Extinct: Here’s Why That Matters

2. Florida Anglers Are Targeting Endangered Sharks

3. The Last Vaquitas: “I’ve Seen More Dead Than Alive”

4. The Fungus Killing America’s Bats: “Sometimes You’ll See Piles of Dead Bats”

5. Does Trump Really Have the Authority to Shrink National Monuments?

6. Scientists: The Endangered Species Act Needs You

7. Killer Whales Face Killer Toxins

8. Christmas Island Bat, Last Seen in 2009, Confirmed Extinct

9. The Roots of the Antiquities Act? They’re in Bears Ears

10. Rethinking the Big, Bad Wolf

What were your favorites? Did anything you enjoyed reading not make the list? Let us know in the comments. And stay tuned for even more great articles — good news and bad — in the New Year to come.

Reflecting on The Revelator’s First Year

The year of Trump brought challenges, but it also inspired us to seek the truth and find solutions.

This was a year of painful and powerful change.

On Jan. 20 Donald Trump ascended to the U.S. presidency, bringing with him a regressive collection of anti-environmental ideas and a right-wing crew of industry insiders and billionaires to help execute them.

That was a pretty awful day, but I remember watching the inauguration and knowing that I would soon be in a position to help do something about it.

Just three days later the small staff of what would become The Revelator — made up of myself and investigative journalist John Dougherty — reported for duty. Spurred by Trump’s election, the Center for Biological Diversity had set out to create a new kind of independent environmental news site. Our goals were simple and not-so-simple: stand up against the administration and stand for the environment and the species and people who depend on it. It would be a site to promote transparency, to tell stories that other publications were missing and to investigate truths no one else was uncovering.

We didn’t give ourselves an easy task. It took a few months to pull things together, design the website and start our reporting. But once we launched on May 17 we immediately began a journey that took us to some pretty wild places. We covered Trump’s assaults against Bears Ears and other national monuments; the environmental disaster of his proposed border wall; his push to drill for oil off the Atlantic coast; the administration’s attacks on public funding of science; the attempts to dismantle the EPA; and a whole lot more.

All of this work presented some…challenges. From the moment this administration took office, officials either stopped talking to the media or did so only under duress — or with the knowledge that it could cost them their jobs. This isn’t universal, of course. Many people in the government are still incredibly helpful to journalists, but finding these sources becomes harder and harder.

But we pressed on. We talked to the people affected by these proposed changes, as well as the experts who told us how many of them probably won’t stand up in a court of law. We dug into documents to reveal things the administration or tight-lipped corporations weren’t telling us. We looked back at history to show us the potential implications of what’s happening now. And we looked at some possible solutions that could outlast the Trump administration, no matter what they end up doing.

And of course, we looked beyond the world of Trump, with articles about endangered species, climate change, pollution, unsafe oil companies and the Bundy trial. We ran essays and op-eds that challenged readers to consider different approaches. We talked about the books and the arts — vital places to generate new ideas for resilience and resistance. We also started a series of graphic data stories that presented difficult issues in new and interesting ways. I like to think we stood out in our coverage of all of these issues, often tackling stories that no other environmental news sources touched.

Throughout it all we asked tough questions, which remains at the heart of everything we do.

And our readers, thankfully, responded. A few weeks ago we celebrated our first million unique page views, and our daily readership continues to climb. Our articles have been reprinted in nearly a dozen other publications. More and more people are following us on Twitter and Facebook. We received a lot of nice letters — and more than a little bit of hate mail, but that just tells me we’re doing something right.

Of course, we stumbled a bit along the way, as every startup does. Our website had some bugs at first, which took a couple of months to correct. Our lack of name recognition in the early days slowed our ability to talk to sources and to attract top essay-writers, something that’s now turning around. Our attempt at a semi-daily aggregation feature, “The Dose,” didn’t really click, so we rightfully reassigned our resources to bigger and better articles (we still hope to revisit that idea, though). And it took forever to find the time to launch our weekly email newsletter, but that’s chugging along nicely now, with more subscribers joining every day.

There were also some frustrations, but only because we couldn’t do more. A staff our size can only write and publish so much, but we did bring you nearly 180 articles this year, so we’re pretty happy with that.

Next year we’ll do even more. Right now we’re drawing to a close for 2017 — after this past Trump-filled year, we need a bit of a recharge — but we’ll be back the first week of January with renewed vigor, purpose, dedication and hard truths. And maybe a few surprises.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for staying in touch. We look forward to continuing our journey with you in 2018, no matter what challenges we all face.

Nothing to Wheeze At: Air Pollution’s Disproportionate Effect on Poor and Minority Communities

Air pollution is an unevenly distributed issue — how it affects you depends on where you live.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s assessments show that breathing ground-level ozone at levels of just above 0.070 parts per million can cause a range of harmful health effects, including asthma and emphysema.

The effects add up: Air pollution kills tens of thousands of Americans every year and costs the economy over $4 billion.

The damage, however, is not evenly spread. Your exposure to ground-level ozone depends, in no small part, on where you live, and where you live often depends on your economic status. So according to the EPA’s own data — who exactly is America dumping its air pollution burden on?

This map of national ground ozone levels shows a large amount of variation across the country, ranging from safe to hazardous levels. Click on any of the dots signifying monitoring locations to view ozone levels and the demographics of local residents.

The graphic below compares the average American to the average person experiencing different levels of ozone pollution using EPA and census data. Move the slider below the image to explore levels.

The average person experiencing the worst ozone pollution is 11 percent more likely to be a person of color and live in a household with income $7,440 less than the average person being monitored by the EPA overall.

According to this data, the most vulnerable Americans are bearing the brunt of the country’s pollution footprint — of every American’s pollution footprint.

That’s because the ozone and other emissions from a car’s tank of gas don’t just settle where a car travels; drivers are also ultimately responsible for polluting the places fuel was originally extracted, refined and transported — possibly on the other side of the continent.

Too often, that puts the burden of these emissions on racial minorities and low-income families, who disproportionately live near refineries, extraction sites and highways. Research has shown that particulate pollution and ground-level ozone at these types of locations increase the risk of death, even at levels below the government’s air-quality standards. The American Petroleum Institute, however, dismissed a recent report detailing the increased risk to African Americans of cancer and asthma caused by air pollution by natural gas emissions by suggesting their genetics and other social factors were to blame.

The Trump administration is similarly skeptical of the hazards of air pollution and has attempted to delay and missed deadlines in enforcing an Obama administration regulation to curb ozone pollution — one the largest industrial source of which is the oil and gas industry.

In the face of an apparently uncaring industry and government, narrowing this inequity remains an uphill battle.

Data sources and methods

Ozone data:
Highest reported value of available fourth-highest daily maximum 8-hour concentration reported in EPA’s 2016 annual summary data by monitor.
Source
In 2015 the EPA revised the ozone standard to 0.070 ppm using the O3 indicator with 8-hour averaging time and form of annual fourth-highest daily maximum, averaged over 3 years.

Demographic data:
Five demographic criteria were selected from the 2015 American Community Survey Five-year Estimates:
1) Age: median age of total population
2) Income: median household income in the past 12 months in 2015 inflation-adjusted dollars.
3) Educational attainment: percentage of population 25 years and over with an associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, or graduate or professional degree.
4) Race: percentage of total population reported as black or African American, American Indian and Alaska native, Asian, native Hawaiian or Pacific islander, some other non-white race, or two or more races.
5) Health insurance: percent uninsured of total civilian noninstitutionalized population.
Source

Location averaging:
Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA) are the geographic unit of study. If more than one air quality monitoring station was present in a single ZCTA, only the station recoding the highest value was retained. Demographic data by ZCTA was then collated by levels of ozone recorded within the ZCTA (0.06 ppm and above, 0.07 ppm and above, 0.08 ppm and above, 0.09 ppm and above). Finally, demographic data were averaged by ozone level category while weighting data by total population of each ZCTA. The ‘average person’ was defined as the average person living in all ZCTAs where all monitoring stations were located.

Data limitations:
The locations of air quality monitoring stations across the country are somewhat arbitrary and do not provide complete national coverage.

These Butterflies Have Lawyers

The National Butterfly Center just filed suit to block Trump’s border wall from being built on its property in Texas.

Don’t mess with Texas butterflies. They have lawyers.

This week attorneys representing the North American Butterfly Association filed a suit against the Trump administration for its plan to build a section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall through a significant portion of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas. The construction plan would cut off the organization’s access “to no less than two-thirds of the Butterfly Center property” just north of the Rio Grande River, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was officially filed Monday against the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agencies responsible for building and patrolling the wall.

The filing, provided to The Revelator by the National Butterfly Center, also alleges that “the Agencies and their agents and contractors have entered, damaged and destroyed NABA’s private property without authorization or permission” — details The Revelator uncovered when we originally reported on this story last July. At the time Executive Director Marianna Trevino Wright said crews had chopped down “dozens, perhaps hundreds,” of trees, shrubs and other plants. She captured the damage on video.

As we reported in July, Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted entering the private property but repeatedly denied they had removed any vegetation. After nearly a week of inquiries, Customs officials admitted that the tree-removal had actually taken place.

The unexpected presence of border agents reportedly continues practically to this day. In a phone call on Tuesday, Wright said that a customs agent had been on their property in late November turning visitors away from the area near where the border wall would be built.

That part of their property has been unexpectedly popular lately. “All kinds of folks have been coming here, saying they want to see where the wall is going to go,” Wright says. “People have said they wanted to see this place before the landscape is marred by this atrocity.”

What comes next is unclear. Even though the lawsuit has been filed, Wright says she remains worried about how all of this will play out. She’s also concerned that people will stop paying attention. “I don’t know at what point this becomes old news,” she says. “I think people are getting sort of tired of these crises. I mean, every day it’s some new thing with Trump. People are maybe getting desensitized to all of this. But maybe I’m wrong.”

How Al Gore and 799 New Friends Helped Me to Become a Climate Leader

A three-day event offered me the opportunity to shape future discussion about global warming and its effects.

When it comes to climate change, I really don’t need to believe it because it’s smacking me in the face every day.

But some days aren’t like others. A few months ago I found out that the 35th Climate Reality Training — a brainchild of Vice President Al Gore, launched in his barn in Tennessee in 2006 —was going to take place in Bellevue, Wash., less than two hours from where I live in Gig Harbor. These trainings now happen all over the world.

I’d seen An Inconvenient Truth when it came out, but that was 10 years ago. From what I heard and read since then, I knew we were moving on a steeper trajectory than what some people, including the film, had predicted.

With that in mind, I registered for the three-day training. I wasn’t at all sure what to expect once I got to the Meydenbauer Center, but I soon got the sense I was with “my” people: a lot of others profoundly interested in learning about climate change.

The hall filled with 799 other people from all over the world, of all ages, eager to learn from the vice president and other experts. As we arrived we were assigned to a table, and stayed with that group throughout the training. I was the one there from Gig Harbor, and I did my best to meet people who lived closer to me to stay better connected and supportive of our collective work.

The training was free — there were even snacks and lunch — all supported by profits Vice President Gore made from his books and An Inconvenient Truth.

The days were intense and information-packed. Mr. Gore was our instructor for most of the training. Passionate about climate change, he hosted panel discussions with scientific experts when he wasn’t lecturing himself — as well as health-care experts and people his organization dubbed Climate Leaders, who’d already gone through the training.

We spent the first day and a half learning and the rest of the time finding out how to present what we learned. We were taught to share our own stories, which put me in touch with my own past and present. I’ve been an environmentalist since I was a kid, and do my best to lead a green life. I’m the godmother to a grown man now who has a son of his own and was recently asked to be the godmother of a baby girl my friend adopted; I want these children to inherit a world filled with clean air and water, trees as far as the eye can see, and an ocean filled with more sea life than plastic.

I want them to be surrounded by the beauty of nature and to eat food that isn’t contaminated with pesticides. I want them to live in a world free of fossil fuels that pollute everything. And most of all, I want them to feel that elation when you see a whale breach in the ocean. I want them to see animals in the wild and not tucked away in a zoo or aquarium because there’s no land left for animals to roam free. That’s part of my story.

The training was exciting because Mr. Gore’s latest documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel, was scheduled to be released a few weeks after the event. Some of the slides we’d seen throughout the training came from his documentaries.

The last hour of our training was the most emotional. He shared the “lyric video” for An Inconvenient Sequel with us. I honestly didn’t see anyone who wasn’t crying. If you haven’t seen the film, I strongly encourage you to do so:

The last day of the training was filled with emotion. I so enjoyed being with people who were passionate about saving the planet that I didn’t want to go back home and read the news about people hell-bent on destroying it.

With my training completed, I am now one of 12,500 Climate Leaders throughout the world, and my work is only beginning. The one thing they ask of you after the event is that you perform ten “Acts of Leadership,” which can include giving a talk to a community group, a class, or community leaders. They provide you with slides so you, too, have current, up-to-date information to share.

In the end, I realized I hadn’t really learned anything new about climate change because I’d kept up with the science, but what I did learn was to have hope. If Al Gore can see all he’s seen, know the politics behind it all, and yet still remain hopeful, then I can, too.

I’d encourage everyone to attend a training event if you are able to. You can find schedules and more information at climaterealityproject.org.

You might not believe in climate change, but do us all a favor and at least prepare for it. Your neighbors shouldn’t suffer and first responders shouldn’t have to put their lives at risk trying to save you because you don’t believe in something.

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.

Squirrel Sex Is Complicated

Only 35 Mount Graham squirrels remain in the wild, but five captive squirrels could hold the key to their long-term survival — if we can get them to breed.

It began with a bolt of lightning on June 7 and ended with a fire that eventually encompassed a staggering 48,000 acres of southeastern Arizona. By the time the blaze had been extinguished this past July, thousands of trees had been lost or damaged, impacting the already degraded habitat for the critically endangered Mount Graham squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus grahamensis). Surveys conducted this past September in the high-elevation forests of the Pinaleño Mountains, about three hours east of Phoenix, revealed that the squirrels’ population had fallen to an estimated 35 animals and that at least 80 percent of their habitat had been damaged by the fires.

Could this be the end of the Mount Graham squirrel, which was already once thought to be extinct and has been protected by the Endangered Species Act since 1987?

The answer to that question may lie not on the mountain itself but in the halls of Phoenix Zoo’s Arizona Center for Nature Conservation, where five Mount Graham squirrels form the core of a captive-assurance program that could help save the species from extinction.

There’s just one catch: We need to figure out how to get them to breed first.

That hasn’t been easy, says Stuart Wells, the zoo’s former director of conservation and science, who was in charge of the program until last month. The squirrels, it turns out, are extremely territorial, aggressive loners who attack and even kill other squirrels, including potential mates, that invade their home turf. That makes it impossible to keep the captive animals together in the same enclosure — or even within sight of each other. On top of that minor complication, the animals are also incredibly sensitive to environmental changes like temperature and sound. And until recently we simply didn’t know how to keep the species healthy in captivity, let alone get it to breed.

Fortunately we’ve learned a lot since the squirrels were first brought into captivity in 2011. Wells says one of the most striking new pieces of information we’ve discovered is that female squirrels don’t only enter estrus once or twice a year, as most previous scientific evidence indicated. Instead, it appears they cycle about every 25 days.

Wells and his team hit upon this new information in the early days of the captive program, before they had a federal permit to actually breed the animals (a required step under the Endangered Species Act). As part of ongoing health monitoring they tested the female squirrels’ droppings for steroids called fecal metabolites — a technique Wells first used on cheetahs — which revealed when the animals were fertile. This is information that never could have been gathered in the wild, he points out.

“We were actually very surprised when we got the first year’s results back and noticed that they were actually cycling somewhat periodically throughout the year,” Wells says. That meant they had more than one opportunity a year to try breeding.

After timing, the next challenge was figuring out which of the zoo’s three males would be welcome suitors to the two females in breeding season. Again, not an easy task, since the males and females had to be kept apart most of the time in order to minimize their aggression toward each other. Wells and his team solved that problem with more steroid tests, which revealed that males became much less aggressive when females were most receptive to breeding.

That was enough information to try to put a pair together. On the zoo’s first try, in 2016, they got a successful breeding attempt, and the female became pregnant.

It didn’t come to term, though. Tragically, the zoo’s air conditioning went out and temperatures in the squirrels’ enclosures soared above comfortable levels. “It only got to 82 degrees in the enclosures, but these are animals that live at 10,000 feet,” Wells says. With temperatures above what the squirrels would normally encounter high in the mountains, the pregnancy failed. Another test of her fecal steroids revealed why: the female’s stress cortisol levels had shot up to 10,000 nanograms, well above her normal level of just 488, because of the heat.

A second attempt also failed because of a different stressor: noise. “Our breeding season last year began in March and concluded in October,” Wells says. That overlapped with the time the zoo was building a new enclosure to hold the squirrels. “It wasn’t heavy construction,” he says, but it was too loud for the animals. “If you can imagine how much sound you hear in the forest when you’re walking through, that’s pretty much where they’ve evolved. They tend to avoid any sounds above 70 decibels, but in this captive setting their tendency to want to move away from that sound would be compromised because they can’t go someplace else.”

That stress was too much: The animals just weren’t in the mood.

Those early attempts didn’t work, but they helped improve knowledge of what will be necessary in the future to allow the rare squirrels to breed. “What we’re hoping is that this next coming season will have everything in place and be ready to get a successful breeding, and that’s going to be the next part of the story,” Wells says.

And if they do succeed in breeding, it could be a game-changer for Mount Graham squirrel conservation. The captive females could conceivably give birth a few times a year, each time producing two to four pups, some or all of which could eventually be returned to their native habitat. “The goal of the program is producing animals that can survive in the wild,” Wells says.

Here’s another interesting twist: The research conducted to benefit the captive population might also be of value for the few remaining wild squirrels — not in terms of getting them to breed, but of making sure they have enough food on the mountaintop, which was heavily degraded by construction even before the fires. “Some of the work we did early on was to develop a nutrient program for keeping these guys at the right weight in captivity without being too heavy,” Wells says. That information could be useful for providing supplemental food for wild squirrels whose seed sources were lost or damaged in the fires. “Our partners with U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Arizona Fish and Game have identified in which areas the squirrels are active. Providing food to those areas will help the squirrels have as good a chance as possible of having food for the winter.”

And not just this winter — Wells says it could take up to 70 years for the trees on Mount Graham to recover enough to provide enough food for the squirrels and protective cover from aerial predators. “That is…daunting,” he says. “How do you keep these guys going for 70 years, and none of us will be around — at least I won’t — to say ‘yeah, that worked.’ You kind of have to have faith that what you’re doing now is actually going to have a positive impact. Really, that’s all you can do.”