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.”
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.
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.”
Yet the right-wing talking point that climate scientists are only in it for the money persists.
It happened again: A neighbor just me asked what I do, I told them I run an environmental news site, and they responded with a sneer: “Oh, that climate change crap. Those scientists only say that stuff because they’re getting paid.”
Hearing this much-echoed right-wing talking point — which has been repeated so many times many people often believe it’s true — just saddens me, because I’m in a rare position to understand the reality. I’ve been working with scientists for the majority of my life. Over the past few decades I have spoken with, and interviewed, thousands of scientists over the phone and in person, sometimes over meals and drinks. Never once has anyone bragged about the money they’re making. Instead I usually hear the opposite: how hard it is to fund their research or even their own salaries.
Maybe they’re out there — these Ferrari-driving, money-grubbing researchers fleecing us all —but in all my years of environmental reporting I’ve never encountered them. The scientists I’ve met are doing their work because they’re dedicated to the pursuit of scientific truth and making the world a more intelligent, thoughtful place. It can be a difficult, tedious and lonely task, with long hours and stubbornly elusive fame and fortune. But they do it anyway, because they believe it’s important. And it is.
But it doesn’t really pay. Take environmental scientists, for example. According to the job site Indeed, the environmental scientist jobs posted over the past two years had an average salary of $58,885. Postdoctoral positions — the most common jobs for early-career scientists — pay a little less, about $53,000, according to the job site Glassdoor. Climbing up the job ladder helps, although there are much fewer jobs at higher levels. Research scientist jobs are paid $76,154 on average, and if you’ve got years of professional experience you can made an average of $90,619 as a senior scientist.
That sounds like a lot — heck, it’s more than most of the people in my neighborhood make — but keep in mind that these jobs all require doctorate degrees and many years of education, meaning any budding scientist likely leaves school heavily in student debt. That financial obligation doesn’t go away quickly, if ever. According to a recent report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about 2.8 million Americans over the age of 60 are still struggling to pay off their student debts.
But what’s that, you say? It’s not the salaries that draw people into this field, it’s the lucrative grant money? Millions and millions of dollars, right? Well, to let the air out of that conspiracy theory, check out this “Global Weirding” video from climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who illustrates quite clearly just how much money from a recent $1.1 million grant went into her pockets:
(If you skipped the video, here’s the answer: $0.00.)
All of this brings to mind a troubling story. A few years ago I traveled to a scientific conference for which I’d been lucky enough to receive a fellowship. I wasn’t being paid to attend, but the organization sponsoring me did cover my airfare and hotel room, which I shared with another journalist from the fellowship. It was a fairly nice room, right at the same building where the conference took place, meaning we didn’t need to find transportation between buildings at night. I thought that was a good deal, because the surrounding neighborhood was what I could categorize as one step above seedy.
I figured most of the scientists speaking at the convention would also be staying at the same hotel and therefore easy to interview. Nope. It turned out many of them were staying at hotels a few blocks or a few miles away, in much less desirable parts of town. They didn’t have anyone paying their way, nor did they have expense accounts. Their travel costs, hotel fees and meals were all coming out of their own pockets. As a result they needed to do everything they could to cut their expenses.
For one group of researchers I spoke with, that penny-pinching actually put them in a decent amount of danger. There were several of them, all early-career women, splitting a room in a run-down motel about a mile from the conference. One morning they woke up to find their door ajar. It turned out the frame was bent and the door just didn’t latch correctly, allowing someone else to silently sneak into their room.
They were very lucky. None of them was hurt and they had slept through the intrusion — but in the early morning light they realized that some of their laptops were gone.
I guess this is what irritates me the most about the conspiracy theories that claim scientists say the world is warming just to enrich their own wallets. In reality these are highly educated, highly devoted individuals. They’re doing work they know is critically important, and they’re sometimes living well below the mean for their trouble. They’re not enriching themselves, but they are enriching our understanding of the planet. That’s something we should all be commending, not attacking.
We look at nature through our all-too human lens, but how does that reflect back on us?
A group of tourists ran up to a lanky ball of fur curled up on a sidewalk at our resort in the Riviera Maya.
“Look! It’s a monkey!”
Phones and cameras took over the scene and snapped away for a few seconds. People shrieked and giggled, and then they continued walking.
That same monkey kept showing up, and the tourists loved it. I was with them. More than 50 New World monkey species live in Latin America, and that’s exciting when you come from a place like Texas — home to plenty of wild rattlesnakes, but not a single monkey.
One evening, I saw a woman slowly walking around the premises, scanning the area like she’d lost something.
“Have you seen a monkey around here?” she asked me.
I described the one that had been hanging around the resort.
“Ah, yes. He must be getting depressed. He escaped from our monkey sanctuary about five months ago, and it’s getting cold.”
Slightly disappointed that my monkey encounters weren’t actual wildlife encounters, I asked what species it was. She described it as a subspecies of spider monkey.
Turns out they’re not even native to the region. Little did all the tourists know, the monkey fulfilling exotic expectations wasn’t even from around here. And he seemed to miss his tribe.
For my wife and I, it was the first of many encounters with nature throughout our nine-day honeymoon in Mexico’s haven of tourism, ranging from odd to uncomfortable, contrived and unexpected, and — in the end — glorious.
The ferocious jungle
Finding nature was easy, but there was often something about it that felt a tad sterile. Even the “Jungle Maya Tour” we did — which was supposed to be an up-close encounter with the jungle — almost felt more like a stereotypical movie jungle set than raw nature. I looked around at the trails and they were clear of any scattered foliage. Picturesque palm branches looked groomed to symmetry.
And then something else hit me: Where were the bugs?
I asked our guide, a burly guy with rosy cheeks, a red beard and thick Austrian accent.
“Oh they cleared them out about five years ago,” he explained. All it took was sprinkling an “all-natural” powder in the park’s ponds where mosquito larvae hatched and it wiped them all out at once.
Effective, yes, but wouldn’t this mess with the ecosystem?
He insisted that it had no negative effect since it was in such an isolated area.
I also wondered about snakes — after all, I’d heard that 52 species live in the region — and he told me about huge fer-de-lance vipers they used to find. But they also posed too much of a risk to visitors, so they had them relocated.
By this point, I’m sure he sensed that I felt a little uneasy about the whole situation and perhaps even a tad gypped. Then he told me a story about how he had trekked deep into the jungle a few weeks ago for some conservation work, and within minutes he landed in thick patches of ticks that ended up clinging to his entire body. He was also covered in mosquito bites. The jungle isn’t for anyone.
The thing is, everyone loves the idea of nature, but once we see the reality of its pure ferocious majesty, we all beg for that tame Hollywood set again.
Perhaps the jungle just wasn’t the right place to start.
The mighty sea
As I write this, I’m stretched across a beach chair, watching tourists wade in the calm, shallow waters of the Caribbean Sea. A couple hundred feet out, a line of buoys stretches around the bay with huge, perfectly rounded rocks stacked just beyond them, each one covered in some type of netting that catches the full brunt of choppy whitecaps. It was a dividing line — the only thing standing between thousands of miles of raw nature and the wee sliver of tamed nature we called “the beach” — like a wall to our safe little cage.
I also found out that many beaches in the area don’t even have natural sand — or, it may be real, but it’s brought in by the truckload from somewhere else. The practice is quite common around the world. That’s because beaches don’t exactly maintain the same shape when they’re being slammed by waves all day. Multiply that process across years and decades, and entire coastlines may soon be unrecognizable. Meanwhile, man-made buildings and other structures are plopped beside these malleable lands. To make that work in the long-run, you’re gonna need some backup sand.
Plus, let’s be honest — humans like their sand fine and free of jagged rocks, and you just don’t find that everywhere. So if you’re the owner of a resort, and your beach isn’t sandy, what are you gonna do?
When we went on a snorkeling excursion on one of the days, we saw a different side of the ocean, beyond our beach’s wall of buoys. A small boat brought us a couple miles out to drop our tiny bodies into the vast open water to explore the world’s second largest barrier reef, the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.
For some reason, I expected something calm and crystal-clear, like our resort’s aquarium of a beach, but instead, tall waves carried us back and forth and up and down as we tried to keep our focus on the colorful fish and coral below us (which some people complained weren’t colorful enough). I inhaled water a few times and almost vomited twice. Everyone else seemed to get by just fine, but it certainly wasn’t what we expected.
I was starting to get the impression that raw nature didn’t really want us there.
Hidden time-capsules
As we continued our excursions, we learned that some raw habitats are better-suited for exploration than others. The most memorable experience of the trip was a snorkeling venture through the Sistema Sac Actun, the second longest underwater cave in the world that slithers beneath earth’s surface for 143 miles, extending hundreds of feet deep in some parts. The Mayas considered it an entrance to the underworld.
On the surface, it was a scene that would make anyone a little claustrophobic — with only one or two feet between us and the stalactites above — but after dipping my face in the water it was like opening up fantasy’s favorite wardrobe, where you’re suddenly granted access to a vast, magical world (but with far fewer lions and witches). Rays of light from the guide’s headlamp shone through turquoise waters, illuminating walls of underwater stalagmites that zig-zagged in every direction, and some parts opened up like the floor had dropped beneath us. I effortlessly floated along, propelled by the gentle wiggle of my feet, and I gazed, wide-eyed, at the beauty around me.
Besides my goggles, there was no filter to the scene. It was about as pristine as nature gets, encapsulated in the earth to keep it that way. In 2007, divers explored the cave system’s depths and found bones of giant sloths, mastodons (similar to elephants), and even the oldest complete human skeleton ever discovered in the Americas — that of a teenage girl who had apparently fallen down its chambers about 13,000 years ago. And she was still down there all this time, preserved in ancient waters.
To be fair, it wasn’t entirely natural — after all, wooden steps led us into the water, and small lights were installed near the entrance — but wow, am I glad humans interfered with this one. My echolocation isn’t quite up to par with the colony of bats we saw, and it would have been a dark and scary swim without lighting.
Back home in the sky
When nine days were said and done, I hadn’t seen a single wild monkey.
Back on the plane, I sat down in my chair in the sky — my second home — and reflected on the trip, looking out the window at the gradient of natural environments below us. I saw strips of land in all shades of greens and blues, which molded into seas and warped with underwater sand dunes that occasionally peaked out as little islands. I saw miles of jungle, and hundreds of resorts carved out of its materials, roads crisscrossing the land, and beaches with shared sands.
I knew that somewhere down there were manatees and dolphins, jaguars and tapirs, snakes that can take you down in minutes, tree frogs and salamanders, and surely, thousands of monkeys — vast webs of life tucked away in ferocious jungles and swimming through mighty seas that simply aren’t suited for man. You can see it through screens, and you might catch glimpses in the parks, or even escaped from the zoo, but without our little filters — without the gear, without the walls and groomed environments — nature’s truly “exotic” side would swallow us whole.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.
The fashion industry can learn a lesson or two from sustainable food.
Conservation, renewables, organic, sustainable. These have become colloquialisms in the energy, ecology and agricultural sectors. But in the fashion industry? Not so much.
What little progress there has been toward more “sustainable” fashion comes on the coattails of the food movement. The same way we’ve become sticklers for sustainably sourced seafood, local broccoli and, among the most diehard true believers, cashew cheese, we’re increasingly asking “Who made my clothes?” One of these days, we may be as curious about our hangtags as our ingredient labels.
Fashion stands to gain much by following the food movement’s lead. But it should avoid one pitfall that bottlenecked our progress in sustainable food: the fallacy whereby consumers wrongly equate “natural” with “good.”
Philosophers have grappled with this idea in moral ethics and environmentalism since at least the turn of the 20th century. Today it’s become a new, more pernicious form of greenwashing. We see the words all natural emblazoned on an array of foodstuff wrappers from meats, breads, dairy products and drinks to , until recently, chips in the Frito-Lay family, all touting spurious health claims.
Sadly, the “natural” fallacy is now spilling into fashion. The same way the food industry has misled well-intended “conscious consumers” to believe an “all-natural” label is somehow more regulated or more sustainable, fashion companies are now coopting consumers’ established notions around food sourcing and using them to their advantage. In the United States, brands tout “natural production methods” and suggest that materials like cotton and bamboo (viscose rayon or bamboo linen) are better for the environment without substantiating their claims (hint: they’re not). Unfortunately, in a regulatory environment that defers to industry to set the agenda, consumers are unable to get a clear view.
King Cotton
Let’s look closer at the fabric of our lives to illustrate this point. Most consumers who subscribe to “sustainable dressing” believe that cotton, in its plant-based glory, reigns supreme over its devilish and cheap alternative, synthetic polyester. “Earth good, chemicals bad.”
But, as with most things in sustainability, it’s not zero-sum.
Cotton, even in its organic form, uses a vast amount of water, land and energy. Estimates put the water requirements for organic cotton somewhere in the ballpark of 1,400–3,400 gallons per pound of fiber. When it comes to land use, cotton is cultivated as a genetically modified monocrop in the United States, meaning it depletes, rather than replenishes, the soil.
Ironically, this over-engineering does not actually increase output. Only a third of the yield gets used in textile production. Adding to this, organic cotton also requires fossil fuels to provide energy for irrigation and produce the chemicals and fertilizers needed to sustain its growth. Accounting for this added energy expenditure, the arithmetic of that shockingly puts organic cotton on a par with virgin polyester.
It takes about 8.6–9.4 Kwh per pound of fiber to make both conventional and organic cotton, not factoring in energy needed for irrigation and fertilizers. Photo: Trisha Downing via Unsplash
Polyester, on the other hand, requires slightly more energy expenditure up front, but can be recycled infinitely in a near closed-loop system without any quality degradation. Also, it requires little to no water, even in virgin production.
When it comes to longevity, cotton doesn’t hold up like polyester. When recycled, cotton fibers gradually degrade, producing a lower-quality thread. Today there’s not much use for recycled cotton other than industrial rags or paper. Eventually most of it ends up in landfills.
All data considered, it’s hard to make an outright call on eco-impact, unless organic cotton is compared against recycled polyester, in which case, the latter “unnatural” fiber wins. This isn’t as clear-cut for virgin polyester. Still, in this gray area, one thing is undeniable: The ecological halo around “natural” cotton is mostly hype.
Dyes from Past Decades
The same thing goes for dyes. Increasingly we praise indie brands for “going back to nature” and “honoring slow processes” when they use avocado pits and indigo instead of acids and AZOs. But there’s more to the story than the hangtag tells.
Sure the dyes are plant-based, but were they sustainably or organically grown? How much land and water did they use?
Then we get to issues having to do with application. Usually more “natural” dye is needed to achieve the desired outcome than with synthetics, and, even when that’s executed right, consumers often complain the colors aren’t saturated enough and quickly fade. What happens next? Buyers trash their naturally dyed garments, which end up in landfills, and resort to “conventionally” dyed ones. And the vicious waste cycle continues.
Consumers are dubious natural dyes will achieve the same vibrancy as conventional ones. Photo: Laura Ockel via Unsplash
This isn’t to say synthetic dyes are a positive alternative. Quite the contrary. But with limited resources and a growing population, natural dyes alone won’t sustain us. Reverting to old methods of dyeing only holds the industry back from more intelligent solutions.
Forces Against Nature
A better way forward will come from innovation — namely, technologies that fuse nature and science to minimize or eliminate toxic chemicals, petroleum, water and emissions from garment production.
Right now there’s a nascent group of companies creating solutions, and they’re backed by big names like H&M, through its Global Change Awards, and accelerators like Fashion Tech Lab.
Dropel is probably the best example of this “fusion” approach. By adding a protective layer of hydrophobic polymers to natural fibers, they’re creating more functional textiles. In essence they’re “life-proofing” garments for the long haul. Other innovators, like Evrnu, have developed technologies that make recycled cotton more viable. So viable, in fact, that Levi’s used it to make a pioneering pair of jeans from recycled cotton T-shirts.
Yet, despite this progress, fashion tech startups like these still need more funding. And to get it, they need to garner the attention of mainstream consumers. Regrettably, this could take longer if we stay wedded to the idea that “natural is better.”
While this thinking has been helpful in slowing rampant consumerism temporarily, if fashion is to go from small, homespun solutions to sustainability at scale, the industry’s future hinges on moving beyond it.
This doesn’t mean abandoning natural processes outright, but instead examining them to see if they are, indeed, the best options. With deeper analysis and a more logical approach to design that plans for things like circularity and longevity, we won’t have to revert “back to nature” to clothe ourselves.
A challenge from the reporter who blew the lid off of Thailand’s Tiger Temple and exposed illegal wildlife trafficking from a Buddhist monastery.
For the past few years, much of my work as a journalist has focused on wildlife and environmental crime. I’ve covered poaching busts and seizures of everything from pangolin scales and big-cat skins to rhino horn, live turtles and songbirds. I’ve reported on the Asian, African and South American markets that sell animals live, dead and in parts, and about the consumers that drive this black-market trade. I’ve written about China, the largest consumer, where many endangered species products are luxury items bought by the wealthiest and most influential as a way to flaunt power and gain prestige. I’ve also explored the trade here in the United States — the world’s second largest consumer. I covered the ubiquitous bird trade in Latin America, where ownership of pet parrots and other birds is so rampant that few realize these animals are endangered, or that it’s against the law to buy or keep them.
One thread links all of these stories: illicit wildlife trade has become big business. It’s a $19 to $23 billion dollar a year industry, run by international organized crime syndicates — often the same people responsible for trafficking guns, drugs and people.
Yet from where I sit, there’s never been enough mainstream coverage on this massive loss of life on Earth. And despite the scope of the crisis, lately it’s become even harder for journalists to sell these stories.
Here’s the harsh reality of media today: When it comes to possible nuclear war with North Korea, millions of U.S. citizens potentially losing health coverage, massive climate-change-charged hurricanes or mass shootings in a nightclub, rock concert or Sunday church service, wildlife stories become a hard sell. A story on coral bleaching, pangolin poaching or tiger trafficking is just not going to grab an editor’s attention.
Another challenge is the time scale of the demise. Although scientists say this is becoming a full-blown crisis that will ultimately affect all life on Earth, it’s a slow-motion train wreck in terms of the news cycle. This doesn’t necessarily work well for media outlets focused on maximum page views, Tweets and shares.
And it’s always difficult to sell these stories unless there are dramatic or bloody headlines.
But wildlife trade is a dramatic and bloody business, although it’s rarely seen as such. And we’re witnessing an unprecedented surge in poaching and illegal trade of wild plants and animals, which is now occurring at an industrial scale.
Growing demand is driving what has become a large-scale massacre of African elephants for ivory, rhinos for their horn (which is now worth more than gold or cocaine on the black market), tigers for their skins. A census published in 2016 found that 144,000 elephants disappeared from 15 African countries in less than a decade. The Species Survival Commission’s African Rhino Specialist Group reported in 2016 that the number of African rhinos poached in Africa had increased for the sixth year in a row.
Perhaps 3,800 tigers still roam the wild, split among the five remaining wild subspecies, meaning that only a few hundred wild Siberian, Sumatran, Indochinese and Malayan tigers survive.
These are the iconic creatures that make headlines, but this massive illegal industry in wildlife has put innumerable animals on the fast track to extinction. We’re losing species at more than 100 times the normal rate. From a scientific perspective, this loss is so rapid and extreme that it’s often called “the Sixth Extinction.” In July, Paul Ehrlich and colleagues categorized the situation in even more catastrophic terms, calling it “biological annihilation.” If this level of widespread slaughter were killing human beings, we’d label it genocide. Many of the world’s most iconic, beloved species — as well as animals we’ve never heard of — could vanish from the wild or disappear from the planet within our lifetimes.
Numbers like the ones I’ve cited have become the standard journalistic narrative, and I’ve written plenty of these stories, too. While they matter, numbers don’t tell the whole story — and now, a decade-plus into the current poaching crisis, many readers are aware that elephants and tigers are in the crosshairs.
We need to go beyond quoting statistics on the carnage and reporting from the surface. I’m challenging myself — and challenging other journalists — to dig deeper. And not just on wildlife crime, but on broader environmental crime that’s killing wildlife, poisoning land and felling the remaining tracts of forests that pump out the oxygen we need to breathe, store carbon and filter the water we need to drink.: illegal logging, illegal mining, illegal land grabs that demolish forest for industrial plantations — and more.
We need to start asking tough questions. Who’s behind large wildlife trafficking operations? Who’s laundering the profits from illegal wildlife, logging and fishing operations?
Which U.S. companies buy palm oil from newly or illegally deforested land — and who are the local officials turning a blind eye and/or financially benefitting from rainforest slash-and-burned for crops or cattle ranches?
Who are the customs agents, local police, military or government officials who facilitate illegal activity? (Al Jazeera’s deep-dive investigation in the Poacher’s Pipeline documentary did just that — linking illegal rhino trade in South Africa to the country’s head of state security and Asian embassies.) Who gets the money from trophy-hunting operations in Africa that purportedly benefit wildlife conservation?
More of my fellow reporters need to dig into corruption and wrongdoing. Follow the money.
But we also need to write the success stories. We need to cover innovative initiatives and technologies that are effective — and examine why they’re working. Some examples: WildAid makes Hollywood-quality PSAs starring Chinese business leaders and celebrities like Jackie Chan and Yao Ming to discourage Asian consumers from buying endangered species. The U.S. Wildlife Trafficking Alliance is working with the U.S. government urging travelers to avoid buying souvenirs that come from imperiled species — items like conch shells and tortoise shell jewelry.
I’d like to share the impact of one of my stories, produced last year: an investigation into the Tiger Temple in Thailand.
For a decade global news stories alleged that Thailand’s Tiger Temple — a Buddhist monastery that doubled as a tourist attraction where visitors petted, fed and took selfies with tigers — abused its cats and might be involved in illegal wildlife trade. That was the narrative that had been published in innumerable stories by media outlets across the globe. But no one ever dug in to find out for sure.
Then, in 2015, I was approached by Sybelle Foxcroft, a former source whom I’d interviewed as part of a book project. Foxcroft told me she had proof that the temple was trading tigers into the black-market trade in wildlife, and soon began feeding me documents. It launched an 11-month investigation.
Through Foxcroft and other sources, I obtained a trove of information. It included leaked audio of the temple’s abbot talking about trading tigers; numerous eyewitness accounts of disappearing tigers; a tiger trade contract with a Laotian tiger “farm” signed by the abbot; emails and piles of documents, spreadsheets and data. I was given a videotaped interview with the monk who unlocked the gates on evenings when three tigers vanished in December 2014, tigers that were microchipped and therefore traceable, as well as the temple’s CCTV footage from those two nights.
In January 2016, National Geographicpublished the results of this investigation in a feature story that included a 7 ½–minute video I co-produced with photographer Steve Winter. It included strong allegations of illegal international tiger trafficking by the Tiger Temple that began in 2004 and continued for a decade.
It was a challenging story for many reasons. First off, I’m not trained as an investigative reporter. I don’t speak Thai. Much of the material I gathered had to be translated, and since Thai-to-English translations are not exact, key sections of video, audio and documents had to be translated three times to ensure I had it right. Deep government corruption and a cultural proclivity for “saving face” — aka not revealing wrongdoing — made it necessary to confirm all facts with many sources. I ultimately interviewed 70-plus people from across the globe. Trying to probe possible criminal activity within a religious institution in any country is extremely difficult, and that was certainly a hurdle as I tried to investigate an abbot and a monastery in Thailand, a devout Buddhist country.
With leads from many colleagues and sources, it all came together, and the world took notice. The day after publication, the story was picked up by the Bangkok Post, by Thailand’s top TV news station and by international media. The coverage prompted outrage from the public and wildlife groups, and sparked a campaign by the nonprofit Sanctuary Asia, which buried the environment minister’s office in letters and emails.
Four months later, under intense pressure, the government shut down the Tiger Temple. In the first of two follow up stories, I reported what happened: Thai officials confiscated all of the venue’s 137 tigers. They discovered 40 tiger cubs frozen in the kitchen’s industrial freezers, 20 more preserved in large glass bottles and other endangered species products. Police arrested two monks trying to drive away in a car filled with tiger contraband.
This story had global implications. The growing demand for tiger products is being fed, in part, by captive-breeding facilities in Asia — and this growing market places the last 3,800 wild tigers in the crosshairs.
So how do we produce these deep-dive stories — especially as freelancers — in today’s media market? It’s a serious challenge. I worked on the Tiger Temple story for 11 months; the last seven weeks were 12-hour days, seven days a week. I was given bare-bones travel expenses for one trip to Thailand and a small budget for experts to translate Thai audio, video and documents. I was paid a fee for the story and the video — but frankly, if I break down my payment by the hour, I was making less than I would have behind the counter at a fast-food restaurant.
That story fell into my lap, and I found myself amidst a whirlwind. Now, whenever I can, I’m trying to work smarter: applying for grants and angling multiple stories from my reporting to broaden the income stream.
There’s another important consideration in doing this work. When young journalists speak to me about wanting to cover the illegal wildlife trade, I remind them that this is, first and foremost, crime coverage. That means serious safety considerations for ourselves and, sometimes, for our sources, whose lives could be at stake if their identities are revealed.
Let me share a painful example. I obscured the identity of my main source on the Tiger Temple story, a trusted Temple insider. But the Bangkok Post then dug in, discovered who he was — and outed him. Since then, the man has received periodic death threats and hasn’t slept in the same place for more than three nights in a row — for the past 18 months. It’s not surprising; there was a lot of money involved. This man helped shut down a $3 million a year tiger tourism operation — plus whatever the temple may have brought in from wildlife trafficking.
Another ethical issue is what we report. For example, what are the ethics of revealing an undercover method used by wildlife investigators if it means that this tool is outed — and can no longer be used to investigate wildlife crime? It’s something to consider.
These are important stories, and they’re not just about the demise of individual species. Each of these animals is part of interwoven ecosystems that have evolved in synchrony over millions of years. Pulling threads from this fabric of life has cascading effects that reverberate throughout and across systems. Take elephants: They’re the landscapers of the savannah, eating shrubs and tree sprouts that would transform the land to forest. In the process, they keep the land open for antelope, zebras and other grazers. They dig for water with their tusks, creating watering holes that other animals use to survive. African forest elephants spread seeds farther and more effectively than any other forest animal on the continent — and some plants rely entirely on these pachyderms for dispersal and survival.
But at the current rate of slaughter for their tusks, wild African elephants could disappear in a decade. And much of the African continent could suffer forever in their absence.
It’s just one example of why wildlife stories matter and why it’s important for journalists to keep them in the public eye.
How racism, grave robbery, disrespect of tribal sovereignty and Mormon belief in divine rights is driving Utah’s attack on public lands.
President Trump’s visit to Salt Lake City Monday to sign two orders slashing the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments also included a meeting with Mormon religious leaders who shared “Church doctrine” with the president before he signed the controversial proclamations.
Trump’s unprecedented, two-million-acre cut in public land protection was spurred by Mormon political leaders, including Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, and supported by the entire Utah congressional delegation, Utah governor and Utah legislature.
It remains unknown what was discussed when Trump met with the top leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the closed meeting.
But if Trump had also chosen to sit down with experts such as Thomas Murphy and Angelo Baca, two scholars of American Indian descent who were raised Mormon, he surely would have heard a different perspective on Mormon doctrine from the one offered by church leaders.
Trump would have heard how latent racism, a history of grave robbery beginning with LDS founder Joseph Smith, disrespect of tribal sovereignty and a belief in divine right to the land are at the heart Utah’s relentless drive to seize control of federal public lands, particularly Bears Ears.
The paper provides an indigenous interpretation of Mormon history and details how religious scripture has been used to marginalize American Indians, justify the looting of artifacts, and reject tribal sovereignty and rights to petition the federal government to create national monuments such as Bears Ears.
Bob Wick/BLM
The paper acknowledges that the LDS Church has issued statements condemning all forms of racism. But the scholars argue that until the church takes tangible steps to compensate for the racist tenets it held to in the past — steps like returning indigenous artifacts and body parts taken from grave sites — its rejection of racism will continue to ring hollow.
“A fundamental problem for the Latter-day Saint aspiration to move beyond all forms of racism is that the foundation events of this new world faith began with looting indigenous artifacts and graves made possible through the theft of indigenous lands,” they wrote in the paper.
“Racism, as experienced by indigenous peoples under colonialism, has often included differential standards in the treatment of the dead and the artifacts they left behind as well as religious justifications for the usurpation of lands,” the paper continues. “Mormon scriptures produced in part through the desecration of graves continue to denigrate American Indians and Africans cursed by God with dark skin, while paradoxically claiming that God is ‘no respecter of persons.’
“For nearly two centuries these sacred texts have been central to the acquisition of wealth and power in the LDS Church, much of it gained at the expense of indigenous peoples. If racism is truly to be rejected in all of its forms then the LDS Church needs to consider repatriation of indigenous body parts, burial goods, sacred artifacts and stolen lands as an active way to change the current structures of domination and realize its egalitarian aspirations.”
The paper chronicles the early history of Mormon founder Joseph Smith in the “money-digging business” in and near Palmyra, N.Y., in the early 19th century. The business included looking for artifacts in indigenous burials. In 1823 an angel purportedly guided Smith to gold plates, which have never been presented, buried in a hillside near Palmyra.
The gold plates, according to Mormon doctrine, were inscribed with the history of the former inhabitants of North America written in an unknown language described as “reformed Egyptian.” The purported translation, said by Smith to have been conducted with a “seer stone” — rocks considered sacred gifts from God — placed in the bottom of a hat, became the Book of Mormon.
Smith would later similarly translate Egyptian papyri that LDS members in Kirkland, Ohio, purchased in 1835 from a businessman who was touring the country displaying mummies and other artifacts. The translation, completed in 1842, became the canonical Mormon text, the Book of Abraham, according to the LDS church.
“The Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham both owe their origins to the practice of grave-robbery, an offense not just today but also at the time of their production,” stated Murphy’s and Baca’s paper.
Murphy is chairman of the anthropology department at Edmonds (Wash.) Community College and gained national prominence in 2002 when he published a research paper on DNA analysis that debunked a fundamental Mormon belief that American Indians descended from Israelites. The church ordered him to renounce his paper or face excommunication. He refused, and the church backed down and suspended its excommunication proceedings.
Murphy is of Mohawk descent and Baca is Navajo and Hopi.
Photo: John Dougherty
“The presumption of the right of the settler colonists (to the land) is not unique to Mormons,” Murphy tells The Revelator. But, he says, what’s unique to Mormon settler colonists is that they use scripture to justify their actions.
“When you add a divine sanction to it you get an element of righteous zeal that I think is playing out” in the intense opposition to Bears Ears National Monument from Utah’s elected leaders, nearly all of whom are Mormons, he says. “There’s not just a righteous zeal, but there’s a righteous fury.”
The anger is rooted in the fact that the tribes bypassed state and local government and requested President Obama make Bears Ears a national monument. This action came only after years of being closed out on discussions in Utah Rep. Rob Bishop’s Public Land Initiative that failed to get out of the House Natural Resources Committee in 2016.
“When the tribes tried to protect these cultural and natural resources by bypassing the local governments and going to the federal government, the Mormons were able to see this as federal overreach instead of seeing it as a tribal sovereignty issue,” Murphy says.
Bob Wick/BLM
Trump and his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke seized on the Utah political leaders’ rhetoric of the monument designations as a “federal land grab” meant to “lock up” economic resources. Both monuments include lands that were already controlled by U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, undercutting the federal overreach claim.
When viewed from the American Indian perspective, Trump’s decision to gut Bears Ears is another ugly chapter beginning with the white settler colonists who stole their land and killed and displaced millions of their people. The indigenous people that were left after the genocide were confined to reservations where their languages were banned, children sent away to boarding schools, and their indigenous societies were isolated and cut off from commerce and communication with other tribes.
And now, after five tribes (Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Unitah Ouray Ute) with a history of conflict came together to successfully petition the federal government to create Bears Ears to protect significant cultural resources, Trump has reneged on a previous president’s pledge to preserve the land.
“I’m approving the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase recommendation for you, Orrin,” Trump told Hatch in an October phone call, according to CNN. According to Hatch the majority of Utah residents, including American Indians, supported reducing the size of Bears Ears.
Murphy said Hatch is “lying” about tribal support, which is supported by the fact that at least five tribes are preparing to file a joint lawsuit seeking to block Trump’s downsizing of Bears Ears.
“(Hatch) seems to be taking on sort of Trumpesque political move of claiming native support for his actions” while ignoring opposition from non-Mormon Indian leaders, Murphy says. “They are being entirely dismissed in favor of one or two Navajo that happened to be Mormon that are supporting this.”
Murphy says some Mormons tend to dismiss the legitimacy of non-Mormon American Indians positions because they are often associated as descendants of the Lamanites, who were “cursed” by God with dark skin because they had become wicked, according to LDS teachings. The Lamanites, according to LDS teachings, are the Israelites who are said to have colonized North America around 600 B.C.
“The book of Mormon story gives Mormons license to dismiss native voices and their legitimacy because they see that indigenous people of once having a right to the land, they lost through their own wickedness,” Murphy says. Not only were the Lamanites considered wicked, they also annihilated a subset of the original Israelite colonists called Nephites, who were white. LDS teachings assert that “there was an ancient white civilization that was destroyed by the ancestors of the American Indians.”
Murphy says Mormon founder Joseph Smith attributed the great cultural artifacts found in North America, including the earthen mounds built by the Mound Builders, to the white Nephites rather than to the ancestors of American Indians. Combine this with Smith’s history of grave robbing and Murphy says it’s not surprising that some Mormons don’t see anything wrong with collecting ancient artifacts off public land, even if it violates federal law.
“They don’t see themselves as stealing from Native Americans because they see Native Americans as usurpers of what once belonged to white people,” Murphy says. “And that’s the story that comes out of the Book of Mormon.”
Bears Ears is estimated to have more than 100,000 significant cultural sites. Many sites have already been looted as part of a lucrative trafficking business that has proliferated in southern Utah for more than a century. Some of the most notable artifacts are on display at the Edge of Cedars State Park and Museum in Blanding, Utah.
Photo: John Dougherty
In a written statement to The Revelator, Baca said: “American Indians are not cursed with a dark skin. We are not morally and ethically cursed by God because we are brown and indigenous.” He called on Mormons to “educate themselves on American Indian history, culture and language.”
Baca asked Mormons to truly move past the “racism and discrimination coded as law and order in a deeply unjust-settler-historical system.”
He sharply criticized Mormon leaders for hosting Trump. “I believe they have sacrificed their own Mormon values and beliefs in supporting a morally and ethically questionable man.”
The proclamation to remove more than a million acres from protection has been called everything from illegal to racist.
“Offensive.” “Illegal.” “Racist.” Those are just a few of the words used by Native American leaders and groups this week in response to President Trump’s plan to remove protections from 85 percent of the 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument. Tribes have spent decades trying to protect the culturally and historically significant Utah landmark.
The long-rumored details of President Trump’s action — fulfilling vague promises he made back in May — were officially announced today at a heavily protested public event in Salt Lake City, Utah. “We got it done,” said the president during the event.
At the close of his speech, Trump signed two presidential proclamations to shrink both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by a total of more than 2 million acres and in the process carve up what remains into several smaller monuments.
President Trump holds up one of his signed proclamations. Via The White House YouTube channel.
Native leaders wasted no time condemning Trump’s plan in the days leading up to its formal announcement.
During one of many public protests held in Salt Lake City this past weekend, Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch said Trump does not have the authority to remove or shrink national monuments, a position on which Constitutional scholars agree.
Natalie Landreth, senior staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, also took that position in a prepared statement last week, calling Trump’s action “completely illegal.” She added: “This is an issue of tribal sovereignty, tribal self-determination. The five tribes that advocated tirelessly to create this monument did so to protect their ancient and modern cultural and spiritual importance. The fact that it is being revoked without any consultation, or even concern, for the tribes is offensive.”
Landreth also spoke to the cultural threats that led to the establishment of Bears Ears. “The monument was created in large part to help stem the tide of widespread looting and grave robbing, which was the original purpose of the Antiquities Act, and removal of that protection leaves more than 60,000 known sites in danger. It’s disgraceful.”
And it’s not just about history; it’s also about the cultural and political reality of today. “Bears Ears isn’t just about a few artifacts in isolated locations,” Shaun Chapoose, a member of the Ute Indian Tribal Business Committee, said in an earlier statement issued by the Rights Fund. “Our cultures are still here and still thriving. The Bears Ears region is a cultural landscape — a place to nurture our families in our traditions. The monument came about through government-to-government negotiations with the previous administration, state and local officials. The president’s proposed unilateral action pleases a few powerful Utah politicians. It’s a sad state of affairs, but we are prepared to fight for our rights, and to protect Bears Ears.”
Many critics spoke to how Trump’s plan attempts to erase the years of effort put into seeking protection for Bears Ears. “The establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument was a historic advancement for all five Native Nations (Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Ute Mountain, Zuni) who advocated for the monument,” Russell Begaye, president of the Navajo Nation, said in the Rights Fund prepared statement. “At the very least, President Trump should have consulted with the original local governments of the Bears Ears region: our five Indian nations. Instead, our many requests for consultation were ignored. An action to diminish the Bears Ears National Monument in any way will be an action against the Navajo Nation and the Navajo people who have worked so tirelessly to protect these lands.”
American Indian groups have been gearing up for a fight ever since the president first promised to remove protections for the monument, which was established by President Obama. “What the politicians are doing is violating what’s sacred to us,” Alfred Lomahquahu Jr., vice chairman of the Hopi Tribal Council, told The Nation last week, comparing it to removing protections for Arlington National Cemetery. “Our holy, sacred ground happens to be the big landscape out here. But people don’t understand that. Not honoring Bears Ears is against our religion. And it’s racist.”
Ironically, Trump said during his speech that removing protections from Bears Ears protects religion. “We will ensure the right of the people to live according to the faith in their hearts, which is why we will always protect your religious liberty,” he said.
Immediately following the end of Trump’s speech, the Navajo Nation announced plans to sue to protect Bears Ears National Monument. “This is a sad day for indigenous people and for America,” Navajo Nation Vice President Jonathan Nez said in a press release. “However, we are resilient and refuse to allow President Trump’s unlawful decision to discourage us. We will continue to fight in honor of our ancestral warriors who fought for our way of life, for our culture and for our land too.”
Updated: The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Council held a press conference this afternoon. You can watch the video below:
The trouble is, almost all animal populations today are facing increasing stress from changing environments.
By Rob Knell, Queen Mary University of London
People are now the most important predators for many animal populations on the planet, but people are rather different from “ordinary” predators. While a lion or an eagle is just trying to get dinner, human predators can be motivated by other aspects of an animal than simply how much meat it can provide.
Trophy hunters obsessively target animals with the largest horns, antlers or manes. Poachers focus on elephants with the largest tusks – and there is a subset of insect collectors who will pay premium prices for stag or rhinoceros beetle specimens with really huge horns or mandibles.
All of these focus their predation on what biologists call “sexually selected” traits. These evolve because they give the (usually male) animal that carries the trait an advantage in competition for mates, either by allowing him to dominate and exclude rival males – think of red deer stags – or because females of his species actively prefer to mate with males with large, loud or bright sexually selected traits, as in the case of birds of paradise.
How these sexually selected traits evolve is a question that has been a difficult issue for biologists for some years: why should females prefer males with a long tail or with especially bright colors – and what is it about stags with large antlers that allows them to win contests and dominate groups of females?
An increasing body of evidence now supports the idea that the expression of these traits is linked in some way to the genetic “quality” of a male. Males who have lost the genetic lottery and who are carrying more than their share of genes that are detrimental to health do not have the resources to grow a big tail or a large set of antlers. Conversely, those lucky males who happen to have a particularly good set of genes can afford the handicap of carrying around a super-sized rack of antlers or set of horns, or will be able to grow extra long and brightly colored feathery plumes.
Selective harvest
This is useful for our understanding of animal behavior, but it also has wider implications for the evolution of these species. Researchers have recently found that strongly sexually selected species can evolve faster in response to environmental challenges than species where mating is more random.
Because males with higher genetic quality gain the majority of matings in these species, their “good genes” can spread through a population much faster than they would if mating were random. This means that strong sexual selection can allow a population to adapt faster to a changing environment, and in some scenarios these species can avoid extinction when the environment changes because of this fast evolutionary response.
In our newly-published research, we asked the question of how this might change when those highest-quality males are removed by “selective harvest”. It’s prohibitively difficult to test these ideas with real hunted populations, so we developed a computer simulation which allowed us to examine what happens when you take these animals out of a population.
Our results are clear – and worrying. If the environment is relatively stable, then even quite severe harvesting of high-quality males is sustainable. But if the population is already stressed by a changing environment, then removing even a small percentage of the best males can lead to extinction. The trouble is, almost all animal populations today are facing increasing stress from changing environments.
This goes against the conventional wisdom. Since there is usually little paternal care of offspring in these animals – and because it seems reasonable to assume that females will not have problems getting fertilized if we remove, say, 15% of the males – it is usually assumed that trophy hunting and similar selective harvests are unlikely to drive animals to extinction when only a small proportion of males are hunted. Our results suggest otherwise.
Better management would make a difference
Should we, therefore, ban trophy hunting and insect collecting? The argument about trophy hunting in particular goes on – but we do not think that our research adds great weight to either position. So far, it is only based on a computer model – clearly we need some tests of our results based on real data.
What we might consider, however, is changing management practices. We examined how different management altered the outcome of our model, and again we found a clear result. If a minimum age limit is applied to hunted animals, so that only old animals who have already had a chance to mate and spread their genes are removed, then the increased extinction risk that we found goes away.
If a population must be hunted, then restricting hunting to older males only and managing the population sensibly by adjusting quotas when there are signs of stress should ensure that any risk of extinction is minimized.
