Damage is coming soon, but we can strengthen ourselves now.
I woke up an hour early on Wednesday morning, checked the news on my phone, and got punched in the face.
Then I put the teakettle on, walked the dogs in the fog, came home to a brilliant sunrise, and got to work.
By the time you read this an endless stream of pundits, journalists, and other experts will have analyzed the 2024 election and Trump’s pending return to power. I’ve already read and watched more than my share of them. Dark days are coming; that much is all but certain.
But those days aren’t here yet. The things we fear are months in the future — if many of them happen at all. Because the people who will resist Trump 2.0 are already planning, (re)building, and getting ready to do what they need to do.
Of course, that’s also in the future. That’s not today.
Today is all we have for certain on this planet. Today is about living, enjoying that sunrise, getting in touch with your community and coalitions, and reminding yourself of what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s about the species you love, the wild spaces you treasure, the causes you advocate for, and for the cultures that give us strength.
I know we all have worries about what happens after Jan. 20, 2025. But we can’t let those worries and fears consume us now. The late Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh said it well: “The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”
Today reminds you what’s worth saving and gives us the strength for tomorrow.
So let’s talk about today. What are you doing to build your strength and resilience? Send your thoughts; we’ll compile and share some of your answers with Revelator readers. (Me, I’m taking walks, talking with friends, watching nearby wildlife, reading, and filling my sketchbook.)
But let’s also talk about the past. Trump 1.0 and other right-wing governments (local or national) caused a lot of environmental damage. How did you, your organizations and coalitions, or your community resist — or recover? Let us know briefly or write a more in-depth op-ed or essay to help others in the fights to come.
And yes, let’s talk about the future. What environmental threats (federal or local) do you worry about, or what are you doing now to prepare for potential upcoming developments? Share your plans to help others with the same or similar fears or goals.
And you can write to us today or in a few weeks; we’re not going anywhere.
Speaking of which, we have a half-dozen great articles and commentaries ready to publish and dozens more coming down the pike. We’ll start publishing those in the days ahead. Because Trump 2.0 is just the latest threat — there are lots of other ongoing problems (and solutions) for us all to understand and act upon. Today and every day.
Critics argue the authoritarian government has rammed the project through with minimal environmental oversight and in violation of several laws.
To most of the world, Great Nicobar Island doesn’t seem to exist. Few photos from this remote, fragile island in the Indian Ocean have been posted online. The citizen science site iNaturalist contains no uploads about the island’s wildlife. The tourism site TripAdvisor only lists one restaurant on the island, with just two reviews.
But India sees the potential for something huge on Great Nicobar: profits.
Great Nicobar is part of India’s Andaman & Nicobar archipelago, more than 800 miles away from the Indian subcontinent. The Indian government has spent the past several years pushing through a controversial $9 billion “holistic development project” for Great Nicobar — including an international port, an airport, a power plant, ecotourism hubs, and a residential township with entertainment zones, shopping complexes, and restaurants.
The project is a brainchild of, and being piloted by, India’s public policy think tank Niti Aayog, which was established in 2015 after the right-wing Narendra Modi government came to power. The execution of the project has been entrusted to a little-known government agency, Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation Limited, whose stated objective is to “develop and commercially exploit the natural resources for the balanced and environment friendly development of the territory.” The project comes under the purview of India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and is also supported by the port and Tribal affairs ministries.
The project, these entities argue, will transform this remote island into a world-class free trade zone like Hong Kong and usher in “development” for its people. At least 10 national and international corporations, including the Gautam Adani-led Adani Ports and the Dutch dredging major Royal Boskalis Westminister, have already expressed interest in the port project.
But environmentalists, ecologists, and conservation experts argue that the project, if allowed to go on as planned, will be “ecocide” and “genocide” for the island and its inhabitants, including hundreds of unique plant and animal species and two Indigenous communities.
“In the past, successive governments had taken a hands-off approach to the Andaman & Nicobar because of its ecological fragility,” says Ritwick Dutta, environmental lawyer and cofounder of the advocacy group Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment. “That has now changed to an intervention-heavy approach that could not only change the ecological character of the islands but also put them at imminent risk.”
The Island
Great Nicobar is the southernmost of the 572 islands that form the Andaman & Nicobar archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean, where they sit closer to Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia than to mainland India.
Over 95% of this island, the largest in the Nicobar chain, is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, within which there are two national parks: the Campbell Bay National Park and the Galathea National Park. Great Nicobar supports diverse habitats, including mangrove forests, littoral (beach) forests, coral reefs, and tropical evergreen forests.
That diversity, coupled with the island’s geographic isolation and tropical wet climate, supports an assemblage of at least 1,767 known animal species and 811 plant species. Of these, many — such as the Nicobar megapode, Nicobar long-tailed macaque, Nicobar scops owl, Nicobar serpent eagle, and Nicobar tree shrew — are endemic to the island and classified as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List.
The Nicobar megapode. Photo courtesy K Sivakumar
In 1956 the government demarcated this entire island as a “Tribal reserve,” carving it out for the sole use of the Indigenous Shompen and Nicobarese peoples and prohibiting encroachment or use in any other form.
The nomadic forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer Shompens, with a surviving population of around 240, are recognized by the central government as a particularly vulnerable Tribal group. In February of 2024, 39 genocide experts warned that the project and its accompanying demographic shifts “will ensure the death knell of the Shompen,” who have thus far managed to limit their contact with the outside world. As a result, “simple contact between the Shompen — who have little to no immunity to infectious outside diseases — and those who come from elsewhere, is certain to result in a precipitous population collapse,” the experts wrote in an open letter to India’s President.
“We have met some families of Shompens living in Great Nicobar and none of them are interested in outsiders coming there and setting up shop or home or factories,” says social ecology researcher Manish Chandi, who has been working among Andaman & Nicobar’s Indigenous communities since 1995. “The southernmost family of the Shompens live close to the Indira Point, the southernmost tip of the island, and their territory extends to the mouth of the Galathea Bay, which is exactly where the port is slated to be constructed. So you can imagine a complete transformation of their lives,” he says.
Take action today 👉 Comment on India’s Ministry of Tribal Affairs’ @TribalAffairsIn posts and say no to the Great Nicobar Development Project which will destroy the uncontacted #Shompen people if it goes ahead! ❌ pic.twitter.com/JfLVjI4Gca
The 1,094 Nicobarese live along the coasts and depend on fishing, hunting-gathering, pig and poultry rearing, and horticulture of coconut and areca nut. Displaced from their ancestral lands following the cataclysmic Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December 2004, they have since been forced to live in government-provided shelters despite appeals to the local administration to be allowed to return.
“The Nicobarese want their ancestral lands back, if not to live, then at least to create their plantations,” Chandi says. “Even if we see it as ‘primitive’ or ‘rural,’ this is the life they have chosen and they want to continue with it to a great extent, of course with the addition of some modern facilities, such as medicine and education.”
The island also supports a heterogenous settler community whose members have migrated to the Great Nicobar from India’s mainland states since the 1960s.
Great Nicobar has spent the past 20 years rebuilding from the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, which claimed at least 3,449 lives (or as many as 10,000 according to some estimates), submerged parts of the coastline by nearly 13 feet, wiped out 27 square miles (6,915 hectares) of forestland, and caused widespread ecological destruction with lasting effects on the island’s biodiversity. It took over a decade for altered coastlines to re-form and mangroves and coral reefs to recover. The island is seismically volatile and has experienced 444 earthquakes over the past 10 years, or one earthquake a week, according to data compiled by researchers at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
India’s Playground
This ecologically fragile, biodiverse, and earthquake-prone zone is now the playground for the Indian government’s aspirations to create “an alternative to Hong Kong.”
This massive development will require 64 square miles (166 square kilometers) of land, or roughly 18% of the total area of Great Nicobar. According to data provided by the environment ministry in Parliament, it will wipe out a million trees over 50 square miles (130.75 square kilometers) of pristine evergreen rainforests dating back to the Pleistocene era. Recent estimates by independent researchers suggest that the number may be as high as 10 million trees. The proposed port and parts of the airport and township will subsume the entire Galathea Bay on the island’s southeastern coast, leading to destruction of mangrove forests and coral reefs that create natural barriers against tsunamis and cyclones. The port will also claim 32 square miles (84 square kilometers) of Tribal reserve land, which constitutes half of the project’s designated land.
Protecting this Tribal land is crucial, Chandi notes, because most of the wildlife across the Andaman & Nicobar islands are found in the Tribal reserves. While there are nearly 100 wildlife sanctuaries and national parks across the island chain, most of them have a smaller complement of wildlife. As the largest protected ecosystems in the islands, Tribal reserves are important not only because they are home of the original inhabitants but also because they are crucial repositories of wildlife, he explains.
In addition, the areas adjoining the Galathea and Campbell Bay national parks will be left without any eco-sensitive zones to speak of. These zones are meant to provide an additional buffer or protection to the biodiversity within national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. In 2021 the environment ministry approved a proposal by Andaman & Nicobar administration officials to maintain a buffer zone of just 0 to 1 kilometer (0-0.6 miles) around these parks, meaning they may have no eco-sensitive zone around their boundaries. This is significant given that in a June 2022 order, India’s Supreme Court ruled that each national park and wildlife sanctuary must have a minimum eco-sensitive zone of at least 1 kilometer, though a year later the court relaxed its own order, saying such zones cannot be uniform across the country.
“Having a zero-extent eco-sensitive zone sets a dangerous precedent, since such zones are created to prevent human-animal conflict,” says Dipak Anand, a senior project associate with the Wildlife Institute of India.
Given that the Galathea National Park lies next to the Galathea Bay, it is also likely to experience the fallouts of construction and dredging activity as land is reclaimed for the port and the airport.
Source: Draft Notification on Eco-Sensitive Zone Around Galathea National Park.
Finally, the environmental assessment report conducted for the project suggests that it will increase the island’s population from just over 8,500 today to 350,000 by 2052, placing huge pressure on its natural resources.
A Monkey in the Middle
The consequences, environmental activists say, will be catastrophic for the island’s flora and fauna. Among the species that will find themselves pushed to the brink is the endemic Nicobar long-tailed macaque, already listed as endangered under India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act and vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.
A Nicobar long-tailed macaque stares out from between the leaves. Photo: Pankaj Sekhsaria (used with permission)
The primate has adapted to a wide range of habitats, including inland and littoral forests, coastal areas, and mangroves. But the 2004 tsunami reduced their population — in 2014, researchers recorded 36 troops, compared to 53 in the pre-tsunami years — and significantly shrank their habitats. With extensive patches of the forests that contain their food destroyed, macaques increasingly ventured into human settlements to explore new food sources. This problem of habitat shrinkage will be further exacerbated by the felling of a million trees under the megaproject.
The EIA report claims that macaques will not be significantly affected and attempts to trivialize the potential harm to the species by describing them as “rampant,” “a pest,” and a “menace in residential areas.” The only mitigation measures suggested in the report are installing canopy bridges to maintain forest corridors and counter habitat fragmentation or, where necessary, relocating the macaques to other islands.
However, as Ishika Ramakrishna, a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Wildlife Studies who works on human-primate relationships, writes in The Hindu, “Macaques have a restricted range, and such drastic alterations to their surroundings and threats to their already limited numbers can increase chances of inbreeding and loss of diverse gene pools. This can be disastrous, resulting in epidemics and loss of reproductive viability that will decimate the population.”
Big Feet vs. Big Footprint
Relocation is also the only conservation measure proposed for a coastal ground-dwelling bird called the Nicobar megapode, a big-footed species also known as the Nicobar scrub fowl.
The birds build mounds of coastal sand and leaf litter to hold their eggs until they are ready to hatch. That makes the megapodes particularly vulnerable to coastline alterations, says K Sivakumar, a former scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India who has been researching the birds since the 1990s. The 2004 tsunami not only wiped out 70% of their population but also battered their nesting mounds, he says, adding the subsidence of the southern tip of the Great Nicobar means much of the bird’s prime habitat has already been permanently lost.
Now the project will shrink their breeding grounds even further. Of the 51 active megapode nests in the project area, about 30 will be permanently destroyed, environmental clearance documents show. That will be a huge blow to the species, says Sivakumar.
One of the birds’ key nesting sites is the Galathea Bay, declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1997. That gave it protected status under India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act, which prohibits most construction activity, hunting, and human habitation in wildlife sanctuaries, national parks, biosphere reserves, and other habitats in the interest of biodiversity conservation. But in 2021 the National Board of Wildlife, the apex body that oversees wildlife-related matters in India, stripped the bay of this protected status, making way for the port as well as the destruction of the megapodes’ coastal habitat.
To compensate for this loss, the EIA report suggests turning nearby Menchal Island, an area of less than half a square mile, into a megapode sanctuary. Sivakumar remains skeptical about the effectiveness of this measure. In a post-tsunami survey in 2006, he recorded only six active nests on Menchal, compared to 203 on Great Nicobar. While still with the WII, Sivakumar recommended that beaches at the Alexandria and Dagmar Bay, the megapodes’ other crucial nesting site in the Great Nicobar, be given protected status to secure the bird’s remaining habitats. The suggestion went unheeded, leaving these areas open to coastal development in the future.
“If the project is expanded to other parts of the coastal habitat, that will be detrimental for the Nicobar megapode,” Sivakumar cautions. “It will be a big question mark on how long and whether we can retain the species in the Great Nicobar, whether it will be 50 or 100 years.”
An Important Site for Turtles
The loss of Galathea Bay’s protected status will similarly threaten a prime nesting site for the world’s largest sea turtles.
Growing up to 7 feet long and weighing nearly 2,000 pounds, leatherbacks travel to these beaches from as far as Australia and parts of Africa during their annual breeding season, says Kartik Sanker, professor at the Centre for Ecological Studies, Indian Institute of Science, who has been part of several leatherback monitoring projects in the archipelago.
As with the Nicobar megapode, leatherbacks lost most of their nests on Great Nicobar in the tsunami, according to Sanker, who says it took over a decade for the beaches to recover and for the turtles to start nesting there again. In 2016 over 400 nests were recorded in Galathea, which was close to pre-tsunami levels. Nearly two-thirds of all leatherback nests on Great Nicobar were concentrated in Galathea, with the rest distributed between the Alexandria and Dagmar beaches.
With the leatherbacks returning to these beaches every year, Sanker cautions that “any permanent alteration to these breeding sites could impact their long-term survival.”
The EIA report emphasizes that the port is to be built on the eastern side of the Galathea Bay, so as not to disturb the leatherback nests that lie on the western flank. But given the scale of the project, Sanker says very little of the beach will likely survive for the leatherbacks to continue nesting in. Also, “any disturbance in the form of light and noise tends to be a deterrent for leatherbacks. Even if they do come and nest, hatchlings will get disoriented in the light and may end up going towards the land rather than the sea,” he explains.
Sea turtle tracks to the sea on Great Nicobar Island. Photo courtesy Pankaj Sekhsaria.
These impacts, the EIA report claims, could be mitigated by suspending construction at night during turtle nesting season, dimming lights in the port area, and reducing underwater noise. Once the port becomes operational, the plan is to monitor the movement of ships to avoid collision risks, install deflectors to keep turtles away from the path of suctioning equipment, and establish hatcheries to ensure the survival of hatchlings. In addition, the project proposes a leatherback sanctuary of about 5 square miles (14 sq km) at Little Nicobar, which had about 200 nests as of 2016. But activists say these measures are either ineffective or grossly inadequate to counter the threat to the leatherbacks’ largest nesting site in India.
Birds in Plight
Noise, light, and habitat loss will also take a toll on the island’s bird diversity.
Great Nicobar’s wetlands, located at the intersection of the Central Asian and the East Asian-Australasian bird migratory flyways, offer sanctuary to hundreds of migratory birds. This is in addition to endemic species such as the Nicobar scops owl, Nicobar sparrow hawk, Nicobar serpent eagle, Nicobar parakeet, Nicobar imperial pigeon, and Nicobar jungle flycatcher.
The EIA acknowledges that the loss of trees will affect the region’s birds but claims that “the impact will be limited as most of the faunal species will be able to relocate to other areas where the vegetation is significant.” For the territorial Nicobar owl, the EIA assures readers that trees with their nesting holes in the project area will be identified, geo-tagged, and “safeguarded as far as possible.”
But “even if scores of India’s finest birdwatchers were to work year-round to document all actual and potential own nesting sites, it would be hopefully unrealistic to survey one million trees (some as tall as 45 m) to identify the owls’ nesting holes,” Pankaj Sekhsaria, a member of the environmental action group Kalpavriksh, recently wrote in the magazine Sanctuary Asia. Sekhsaria has been working on issues of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands since the 1990s and has recently curated a book titled The Great Nicobar Betrayal on the proposed development project.
Authoritarian Approaches
Such half-baked mitigation measures aside, approvals granted to the project demonstrate a disregard for existing regulations and processes.
For more than a year now, India’s environmental court, the National Green Tribunal, has been hearing petitions and counterarguments on the merits of the transshipment port. Several petitioners have challenged the project for violations of environmental and coastal regulations and failure to comply with environmental clearance processes, a charge that the environment ministry is currently defending in court.
The judicial process, thus far, has not been encouraging. In an initial hearing in April last year, the green tribunal said it would not interfere with the forest and environment clearances granted to the project even as it appointed a committee to look into certain “unanswered deficiencies” in the clearances. In an obvious conflict of interest, the committee is made up of members of the very same agencies involved with the project, namely NITI Aayog, which has conceived it, ANIIDCO, which is implementing it, and the environment ministry, which has signed off on it. Predictably, a year later, this committee concluded that the port project could go ahead as planned.
“We have no idea how the high-powered committee has come to any conclusion, because that report is not in the public domain,” says Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the Mumbai-based nonprofit Conservation Action Trust, one of the entities that challenged the project in the courts. The Trust had filed three petitions before the green tribunal, challenging the forest and two environmental clearances. “Our three petitions were dismissed by the tribunal when our lawyer was not present in court, without giving us a hearing,” Goenka says. “That was one of the grounds for a fourth petition we filed in the Calcutta High Court. That’s still pending,” he adds.
One of the remaining holdups of the project, and one that is currently being contested in India’s environmental court, is that parts of it will lie in areas where major development activity is prohibited under India’s coastal zone regulation. According to its provisions, areas with mangroves, corals and coral reefs, turtle- and bird-nesting grounds, among others — all of which can be found in the demarcated project area — are deemed ecologically sensitive and classified as Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ)-1A, where minimal construction activity is allowed.
Indeed, the Andaman & Nicobar coastal regulatory body had earlier classified parts of the site where the port is slated to come up as a CRZ-1A zone. Recently, as environmental bodies challenged the project in court, the national coastal management body conducted a fresh survey and decided that the same areas come under a lesser-protected category, CRZ-1B, the area between high tide and low tide lines, where construction is permitted.
However, as Conservation Action Trust’s Goenka explains: “The government’s own documents, the EIA report, and whatever studies they have furnished for clearance, indicate that there are thousands of coral colonies in the areas that they are going to reclaim and dredge for the port project. Per the CRZ notification, if the site has corals, it automatically becomes CRZ1A, and you cannot build a port there, you cannot destroy the corals. That will be an offense under the Wildlife (Protection) Act.”
What’s more, Sekhsaria points out, the project was cleared with unprecedented haste by India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, despite its magnitude and potential far-reaching consequences. The request for proposals for the project, preparation of a feasibility study, release of a draft and final EIA reports, and granting of environmental clearance by the ministry were accomplished in just two years. The draft EIA was based on just four days of surveys, even though large parts of the island are impenetrable forests and difficult to access. The ministry invited comments on the EIA from stakeholders and environmental groups, but the final report was published three months later without accounting for the concerns raised on ecology, biodiversity, rights of Indigenous communities, seismic volatility, and disaster vulnerability, Sekhsaria says.
The process of obtaining the consent of Indigenous communities for the project was also replete with misinformation and inconsistent information. In November 2022 members of the Tribal council of Great and Little Nicobar withdrew their support for the project, pointing out that during public stakeholder meetings they had not been informed by local government authorities that the land marked for development included their traditional pre-tsunami villages. In a letter to the environment ministry and Andaman & Nicobar administration, the Tribal council of Great and Little Nicobar said that they were not informed about the extent of “the Tribal Reserve that falls within the proposed project” and the precise “locations of the port and the township.”
“We are aware of how we are systematically being marginalized in this manner through this proposal and also the lack of understanding in the entire planning process that prevents our sustainable holistic development in both economy and through our island culture,” members of the council wrote. Their letter has yet to receive a response from the government.
This at-all-costs approach is symptomatic of the way the Modi government has been clearing infrastructure projects. An analysis by the Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment shows that in 2021 the NBWL approved all 129 proposals for diversion of land from wildlife sanctuaries, national parks, and conservation reserves for the purpose of mining, irrigation, roads, and highways. Headed by the prime minister, environment minister, and Tribal affairs minister, among others, the board granted approvals “without waiting to verify conservation plans, allowing projects without site inspections or the reviewing of necessary details like compensatory afforestation,” the study says.
Much of this is true for the Great Nicobar project as well. Backed by a hasty EIA report, institutions like the WII and Zoological Survey of India have been tasked with monitoring the project’s ecological impacts once construction is underway. The protected status of the Galathea Bay was rescinded in January 2021, nearly a year before the release of the draft EIA and before the government had clarity on the feasibility of building a port there. As the Legal Initiative study points out, India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act does not allow for the “denotification” of an entire wildlife sanctuary, as has been done in this case. The law only allows the alteration of boundaries of protected areas, thus raising more questions on the legality of constructing a port at Galathea Bay at the cost of widespread habitat destruction of some of the world’s most vulnerable and endangered species.
“Animals can usually recover from population declines if they have the opportunity to reproduce and there are resources for the offspring,” says Sanker. “But what is harder to recover from is the loss of habitat.” As things stand, the threat of habitat loss looms large over the thousands of species that call Great Nicobar their home.
As Sekhsaria puts it, the best mitigation plan for them “is to not have the project at all.”
How a Girl Scout project became a widespread community effort to inspire deep sea conservation.
Ocean enthusiasts and random passersby alike came together in Seattle this past August to explore and celebrate their connection to the deep sea.
Two years in the making, the Deep Sea Conservation Festival started as my idea for a free community event centered around the deep sea and its relevance in our daily lives. After months of work, it blossomed into a massive collective effort with the support of dozens of people and complete with speakers, booths, food, and musical performances.
Starting this process as a 16-year-old with no formal deep sea or scientific experience, I had no idea my dream for this event would find so much support and success. I envisioned this festival just a few hours after randomly attending a National Geographic Live talk about the deep ocean by marine biologist Diva Amon. There I heard for the first time about this remarkable, crucial, and threatened habitat. Somehow this one inspiring spark was enough to ignite my love of the deep sea and motivate me to share this passion with my broader community, setting me on a trajectory that would change my entire high school experience.
Now, as I enter my senior year of high school, I find it remarkable that one hour, one piece of information — bundled with excitement — could have had such a profound influence on me. It makes me wonder if this event allowed me to pay that forward.
A Deep Realization
The Deep Sea Conservation Festival was my Girl Scout Gold Award Project, the highest award available to Scouts and earned for completing a “take action” project that addresses the root cause of an issue they perceive in their community.
At the time the inspiration for this festival came to me, I wasn’t a total stranger to ocean conservation. I had grown up along the water and had served as a youth volunteer at the Seattle Aquarium for more than a year. In that role I’d begun to track how conservation messages diffused through more general audiences. I found that facilitating connection is a crucial part of inspiring preservation.
Even with this foundation, as I listened to Diva speak, I was shocked by my own ignorance about the marvels of the deep sea and the impending doom facing it. At the same time, my feelings of inadequacy helped me realize that if I’d never explored my connection with the ocean beyond the surface level, then the members of my community who were also juggling other passions — like those I consistently talked to at the aquarium — wouldn’t have their attention turned to the deep sea either.
At first look, the deep sea and my local community appeared to be two separate entities. But the more I learned, the more I began to poke holes in this “out of sight means out of relevance” worldview. That’s why I centered my Gold Award project on addressing the lack of awareness surrounding how what we do impacts the deep sea — and vice versa.
Swimming Together
Throughout the process of organizing this event, I met so many incredibly kind and generous people, from policy experts to attendees and from conservation advocates to community organizers. Countless individuals and organizations dedicated their time and expertise to show up for me and this common dream of deep-sea conservation.
Bolstered by their support, this festival grew from an amorphous blob of inspiration and fuzzy mental images into a detailed and effective plan to enact change.
The first event of its kind, the Deep Sea Conservation Festival invited people from around the community to show up and celebrate the vibrant and unexplored corner of our planet that is the deep ocean.
On the day of the festival, more than 500 people from around northwest Washington came to explore their relationship with the deep sea. The Seattle clouds parted, and under a gleaming sun people of all ages and backgrounds engaged with the deep ocean and their role in its preservation. After attendees got their Deep Sea Passport upon entry, they moved between booths, speaker sessions, and activities; designed their own deep-sea fish; discovered counterillumination; and talked with volunteers at tables covering subjects such as deep-sea mining and current deep-sea policies. The combination of basic activities — like creating personalized anglerfish hats — and more intensive opportunities, like learning about seawater electrolysis, enabled people of all backgrounds and interest levels to explore their relationship with the deep.
Through the experience of organizing this event, I was able to watch my community solidify behind me and the ocean in a massive way. I felt a new energy and excitement about the deep sea, particularly as I spent the day of the festival talking to so many passionate attendees who were enthusiastically engaged in learning and dedicating themselves to taking action.
And act they did: During the event, 176 people emailed Washington state senators encouraging them to support a national deep-sea mining moratorium, our target action item for the festival. In this way, the project went beyond fostering individual connections to the deep ocean to encompass advocating for political change as well.
From Interest to Action
To gauge the effectiveness of the event, we surveyed as many of the participants as possible — both as they arrived and after they left the festival.
While walking into the event, only a little more than 40% of 140 presurvey takers agreed that ocean conservation felt accessible to them. Comparatively, upon leaving the festival, nearly 70% of attendees reported the same.
This data shows two main trends: one, that marine science and environmental preservation continue to be daunting fields to break into; and two, that by engaging in informal ocean education, festival attendees were able to better see themselves as a part of the collective effort to protect the oceans.
These results echo back to a lesson I first learned while volunteering at Seattle Aquarium: I discovered that many people were eager to help protect our planet, but their willingness to accept the research laid out in front of them didn’t transfer to their ability to actively parse out and interpret data on their own. Marine science remains inaccessible for many reasons, particularly because it takes a significant amount of time and knowledge to interact with and because many people assume they need a degree to get involved.
It’s consistently evident that so many people care about conservation. But people still need help crossing the many time and educational barriers that prevent them from effectively participating in the conversation. The festival proved that by making science and environmental preservation more accessible and attainable, we can effectively tap into a large and passionate force of potential changemakers.
After the festival, 90% of 60 postsurvey participants reported that they agreed or strongly agreed with this statement: “The Deep Sea Conservation Festival helped increase my understanding of the deep sea and the threats that it is facing.” Similarly, 76.7% of attendees agreed or strongly agreed with this statement: “My experience here has motivated me to become more involved in the world of deep sea/ocean research and conservation.”
It’s been amazing to see the impact of my vision and the efforts of my entire community to realize it. I’ve found myself incredibly motivated by how my event empowered my community and how large something like this could be scaled.
Since the event, I’ve found myself dreaming about how it could have looked if it had double its 500 attendees, or if it was adopted by a larger group and became something that could have a legacy larger than myself and my team. I’ve caught myself hoping that my work to organize this celebration of the deep sea has inspired other people to put in the effort to share their dreams, research, and missions with others and mobilize a broad range of communities to take action.
A new global study reveals we’re missing the mark on understanding the critical role of governance in species conservation. COP16 is the moment to set us on the right path.
As global leaders gather at the Convention on Biological Diversity COP16 in Cali, Colombia, the world’s attention is focused on the urgent need to protect our planet’s biodiversity. With this backdrop, a crucial question arises: What truly makes or breaks the success of species conservation?
While many would instinctively point to funding — and they wouldn’t be wrong — emerging evidence suggests there’s another equally critical factor: governance.
What exactly is governance, and how does it impact conservation? Governance refers to the rules, policies, and decision-making processes that guide how conservation projects are managed. It can range from approaches led by Indigenous peoples and local communities to government-led approaches and various hybrid models in between.
To be clear, governance is not the management of a project. It’s like the difference between setting the rules of a game and actually going out and playing the game. You can’t do either successfully without the other, but they’re not the same.
Governance is also the key that ensures everyone from local communities to national governments works together effectively, and we’re starting to definitively show that governance is just as crucial as funding for the success of conservation efforts. In fact, the 2030 Global Biodiversity Framework finally acknowledges this by highlighting governance explicitly in its targets. You can see that most clearly in its “Target 3: Conserve 30% of Land, Waters, and Seas.”
This isn’t theoretical. A study published in Conservation Letters in July 2024 provides a practical example of how governance impacts conservation on the ground. The study focused on African elephants and found that the two factors best predicting whether populations increased or declined were the funding allocated to the site and the effectiveness of governance. The study estimated a staggering $1.5 billion annual deficit needed to stabilize elephant populations across sub-Saharan Africa. Current spending is only about $226 million per year, resulting in an ongoing decline of elephant numbers.
Surprisingly the study found that even with insufficient funding, effective governance helped slow the decline in elephant numbers substantially, through stronger law enforcement, better management of resources, and active collaboration with local communities.
Photo: Dr. Matt Luizza/USFWS
Stories like this demonstrate that when funding and effective governance align, conservation efforts are significantly more successful. However, we often only hear about governance impacts through isolated examples. To determine whether governance truly has substantial influence, we need a comprehensive understanding of how different types of governance affect conservation across all regions, ensuring that success isn’t just seen in snapshots but sustained worldwide.
To that end, a collaborative team of researchers — including myself — from World Wildlife Fund, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s International Affairs, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation, and various academic institutions undertook a global study that was released this month. Our research, Challenges in Assessing the Effects of Environmental Governance Systems on Conservation Outcomes, spanned conservation projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, seeking to uncover the relationship between governance and conservation outcomes.
The results, published in Conservation Biology, were quite surprising. Despite widespread recognition that governance is vital for driving conservation toward more just, equitable, and legitimate practices, leading to greater societal support and rule compliance, the field of conservation isn’t collecting sufficient empirical research. In fact only a tiny fraction — 3.2% of the more than 1,000 papers we screened — provided direct evidence linking governance to conservation outcomes.
We know countries require good governance for prosperity. Measuring and comparing different governance systems helps us evaluate which is most effective for a top-functioning society. Similarly, in conservation, while we know governance is crucial, we currently lack sufficient data to assess which types of governance models — whether community-led, government-managed, or hybrid approaches — are most effective at delivering the best results for species conservation. And it’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy. What works in one part of the world might not be the best option in another. Unfortunately, until we bridge this gap, we’re left with broad assumptions rather than evidence-based decisions.
“Effective governance is essential for conservation projects, but our findings show that the current evidence base is remarkably limited,” Matt Luizza, one of the study’s lead authors and staff in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s International Affairs program. “There is a significant gap in our understanding — it’s almost impossible to answer the question, ‘Do different types of governance lead to better or worse conservation outcomes?’ We simply need more empirical research.”
Why should we care about how conservation is governed? Because it directly impacts whether efforts to protect endangered species and their habitats actually succeed. As the Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP16 convenes, it’s the perfect time to advocate for increased research funding and stronger commitments to governance.
Advocate to increase funding for research that links how conservation is governed to the outcomes it delivers and ensure that this research is shared openly and fairly.
Encourage decision-makers to develop better tools to track the success of conservation projects, helping us know what works so we can replicate it.
Push for stronger commitments on improved governance research at major events, like the CBD COP16, where global leaders gather to set conservation priorities.
Finally, support initiatives that bring local communities, researchers, and policymakers together, ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard and that conservation efforts are tailored to the needs of both people and wildlife.
Governance might sound like something that only policy insiders worry about, but it plays a huge role in shaping the future of wildlife conservation. Strong governance ensures that every dollar spent on conservation is a dollar well spent. With this new research identifying key gaps in our knowledge base, we have the power to close them — and by doing that, we can elevate conservation efforts globally, securing a brighter future for both wildlife and the human communities that depend on them.
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 written, Decision 15/9 won’t allocate conservation funds in a manner that delivers the greatest benefit. There’s a better way.
This month 23,000 people representing nearly 200 nations and hundreds of NGOs have gathered in Calí, Colombia, for the sixteenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, aka COP16 of the CBD. Delegates from 196 parties are debating numerous proposals to help imperiled wildlife. Center stage in the discussions is “Decision 15/9,” which establishes a “multilateral mechanism for benefit sharing from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources, including a global fund.”
In other words, Decision 15/9 obligates the sharing of benefits when genetic resources from plants, animals, and microorganisms are used to create biotechnologies.
The “benefit” of greatest interest is, not surprisingly, money. Payments for genetic resources will “support the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity,” which are underfunded if funded at all.
But who decides what projects are funded for “conservation and sustainable use?” According to the draft recommendation for implementing Decision 15/9, a funded project may not be located within the country (in treaty parlance, the party) from whose habitat the genetic resource was de-materialized, researched, and developed. This means that the range country of species that harbor the principal agent may not receive any funding from the resulting intellectual property and blockbuster sales.
There’s an even more fundamental problem. What if conservation and sustainable use don’t require a project, but rather the imposition of limits — e.g., not to open highways in primary forests, not to dam rivers, not to drain wetlands, and so on? The alignment of incentives remains unaddressed in Decision 15/9.
More unwelcome questions arise. Would biogeographic islands (habitat refugia) in the middle of thousands of hectares of cleared forest be a conservation project? Those refuges are valuable, but protecting them doesn’t solve the problems that make them refuges in the first place.
Similarly, would fishways and ladders for a newly dammed river be a “sustainable use?” And would fungible projects — those projects that would have been funded anyway — be eligible for allocation from the “global fund”? One thinks of reforestation of an urban watershed or tree-planting in an asphalt jungle.
The global fund of Decision 15/9 strips the sovereignty of provider parties to allocate revenues that originate from the use of their own resources. Funds slated by the “multilateral mechanism” won’t necessarily be allocated to the public goods with the greatest benefit for society. Sovereignty is violated wholesale.
For many mega-diverse parties, greater social benefit may be had in rural electrification, sanitation, and health. A forest unfelled, a river left free flowing, and a wetland not drained don’t need a funded project.
A different approach could go a long way toward aligning incentives between utilization and conservation.
Bounded Openness over Natural Information
In 2010 political scientist Chris May coined the term “bounded openness” to discuss the global governance of intellectual property without offering a succinct definition. My colleagues and I expanded his concept to the wildlife realm several years later, when we introduced the phrase “bounced openness over natural information.”
May’s neologism is apt for the conservation policy that I had spent a career researching and developing. Under bounded openness over natural information, users (CBD parlance for those who “access genetic resources”) in both the non-commercial and commercial sectors would enjoy unencumbered access to genetic resources, no matter whether the medium be biological matter, print, or digital. In exchange, provider parties (e.g. megadiverse countries) would claim a share of royalties whenever a biologically derived product is commercially successful and enjoys intellectual property protection.
The magnitude of the royalties draws on the concept of “rent” in economics, which is the difference between the price one pays and what one would have paid were the market competitive. Users enjoys huge rents for artificial information through the limited-in-time monopolies of their patents and copyrights. Under bounded openness over natural information, providers would likewise enjoy rents for natural information. Because species overlap national jurisdictions, provider parties would get a greater share when they have a larger share of habitat and a smaller share should they permit alternative land uses that shrink habitat.
Under this allocation method, incentives are aligned between provider parties and users. The criteria of efficiency, feasibility, and practicality touted in Decision 15/9 could then mean something.
This focus on self-interest has been foundational to economics ever since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Self-interest for parties translates into self-determination. The global fund of Decision 15/9 should be regarded as an escrow account without any allocative power.
History Repeats Itself
Institutional memory illuminates how COP16 is moving full circle to the origins of the CBD.
I’m sufficiently old to recall the Fourth IUCN World Congress in Caracas, Venezuela, in February 1992, where the Swiss conservationist Cyrille de Klemm lamented the non-progress of the draft biodiversity treaty and the looming deadline of June 1992 for its presentation at the Earth Summit, Rio ’92.
De Klemm had pressed hard for a global fund in the International Negotiating Committee for the CBD, which was then meeting in Nairobi under the auspices of the UN Environment Programme. Developing countries balked and would hear none of it. They’d conflated sovereignty with the right to negotiate bilaterally. Developed countries obliged, perhaps realizing that a price war, which would behoove them, was in the offing (cynicism is a hazard of my profession, economics).
De Klemm and the developing countries were simultaneously right and wrong. De Klemm was wrong to advocate for allocative power in a global fund; developing countries were wrong to insist on bilateralism.
Bounded openness over natural information includes what De Klemm got right — the need for a multilateral mechanism. Bounded openness also includes what the developing countries got right — the preservation of allocative power.
Thirty-two years have transpired since Nairobi. Patience wears thin. Failure is predictable for COP16. Nevertheless, self-congratulations by the parties and secretariat are also predictable for the closing ceremony on Nov. 1, 2024. Reform of Decision 15/9 must not be pusillanimous. I write with hope for COP17.
Economics is not diplomacy.
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.
This massive rainforest in Aceh, Indonesia is home to tigers, elephants, pangolins, and other threatened species, but it needs one key change to ensure their survival.
The Place:
The Ulu Masen Ecosystem spans 3,600 square miles (9,500 square kilometers) of tropical rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Located in Aceh province about 4 degrees north of the equator, the region forms part of the immense Sundaland biodiversity hotspot.
Topography in Ulu Masen ranges from lowland rainforest at 650 feet above sea level (200 meters) to montane peaks up to 9,100 feet (2,785 meters). Approximately 50% of Ulu Masen occurs at elevations below 2,600 feet.
The author on a ranger patrol in Ulu Masen in 2022.
Ulu Masen is managed under the jurisdiction of provincial forest management units. Dinas Lingkungan Hidup dan Kehutanan (DLHK, or Environment and Forestry Service of Aceh) has designated about a quarter of the region as production forest (12%) and other “nonforest” areas (14%). The “production” forests, where permitted logging and other extractive activities are legal, mirror the distribution of the region’s lowland forests.
The remaining 74% are officially designated “protection forest.” However, forests in Indonesia outside national parks (which are prioritized for conservation by the central government) receive significantly less attention and funding. That remains true here: The World Database on Protected Areas, the most comprehensive source for data on the subject, lists the 31 square mile (80 km²) Jantho Nature Reserve as the lone protected area in Ulu Masen. Still, the provincial government’s efforts to maintain the region’s extensive forest cover — without internationally recognized protected areas besides Jantho — are deserving of recognition.
The government’s efforts are aided by Ulu Masen’s geography, which provides further protection. The steep, forbidding walls of its mountains, deep gorges, and numerous unnavigable rivers created barriers that have prevented settlement and farming even now. Most villages are restricted to the fringes in the lowlands.
A gorge in the Ulu Masen Ecosystem. Photo by Irwan ‘Kayukul’ Yoga
Also in the lowlands: 17 palm oil mills — fed by the harvest from nearly 770 square miles (2,000 km²) of surrounding oil palm plantations — that flank the southern border of the ecosystem.
Across Ulu Masen, two main distinct languages are spoken: Bahasa Aceh and Bahasa Gayo. Most Gayo and Acehnese people are farmers who grow rice and other cash crops such as bananas, durian, maize, chilis, candlenut, and betel nut.
Why it matters:
Ulu Masen’s forests overlap 12 key watershed areas that provide drinking water, clean air, flood control, soil stabilization, crop pollination and other essential ecosystem services to nearly 3 million people.
Below 2,600 feet the forest biomass is dominated by dipterocarps, a family of trees ravaged by illegal logging due to their high economic value. Figs are also found in the lowland forests, providing an important food source for many animal groups.
Oaks and laurels become common at higher elevations, as do tree ferns in the genus Cyathea. Interspersed among the hills and mid-elevation forests are pockets of Sumatran tropical pine trees, represented primarily by the range-restricted Merkus’s pine (Pinus merkusii), the southernmost naturally occurring pine species on Earth. This tree is most commonly found at elevations between 1,300–4,900 feet (400–1,500 meters).
Ulu Masen forests harbor rare and endangered mammals, including populations of Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae), Sumatran elephants (Elephas maximus sumatrensis), Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), Sumatran serows (Capricornis sumatraensis), sambar deer (Rusa unicolor), Sunda clouded leopards (Neofelis diardi), marbled cats (Pardofelis marmorata), wild dogs (Cuon alpinus), sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), Thomas’s leaf monkeys (Presbytis thomasi), and Sunda pangolins (Manis javanica).
A Sumatran serow (Capricornis sumatraensis) detected by camera trap at 8,005 feet (2,440 meters) in Ulu Masen. Photo by Joe Figel and Hermansyah
Over 300 bird species occur here, including range-restricted and threatened species such as Wallace’s hawk eagles (Nisaetus nanus), Hoogerwerf’s pheasants (Lophura inornate hoogerwerfi), Aceh bulbuls (Pycnonotus snouckaerti), and helmeted hornbills (Rhinoplax vigil).
Habitat loss, hunting, and poaching have already wiped out many of these species in other areas of Sumatra and southeast Asia.
The threat:
As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, agriculture and logging — much of it undocumented and therefore illegal — remain the main threats to the region’s forests. Between 2001 and 2023, Ulu Masen lost 140 square miles (370 km²), about 3.9% of its primary forest cover. Concerningly, the region has lost more forest in recent years than in the first decade of the century.
Five mining concessions occupy 135 square miles (357 km²) in the landscape. One of the mining groups, Asiamet Resources Limited, states on its website that southeastern Ulu Masen mineral deposits could reach 2.4 million tons of copper, 2.1 million ounces of gold, and 20.6 million ounces of silver.
A three-legged tiger, victim of a snare trap, detected in Ulu Masen’s infrequently patrolled forests. Photo by Joe Figel and Hermansyah
Poaching incursions, aided by a severe lack of ranger patrols, also threaten the survival of highly persecuted species such as tigers and sambar deer. Poachers primarily use foot snares, which they set on animal trails in the forest, usually along ridgelines.
My place in this place:
I first stepped foot in Ulu Masen in 2019 as a researcher with the Fulbright U.S. Scholar program working in close coordination with a network of local partners. My objective was to assess the status of Sumatran tigers and their prey. At that time fundamental data on tiger distribution and the presence of breeding females were nonexistent — tiger population trends were anyone’s guess.
Since 2019 we have documented — alongside key collaborators from Aceh-based NGOs, government agencies, and universities — a widespread prey base, which is good news. Tigers need a lot of food, after all.
But we have also found demographic characteristics that indicate tigers face heavy poaching pressures. Our most recent findings (just published in Scientific Reports) indicate high population turnover, an unbalanced sex ratio heavily skewed toward males, and a lack of evidence of reproduction.
Who’s protecting it now:
Two main government agencies lead the protection of Ulu Masen’s forests and wildlife: DLHK and Balai Konservasi Sumber Daya Alam (BKSDA-Aceh, or Natural Resources Conservation Center).
A handful of local and international NGOs — including Perkumpulan Rincong, International Elephant Project, and Fauna & Flora International — have mobilized ranger patrols and organized human-wildlife conflict response teams in Ulu Masen. The Leuser International Foundation supported ranger patrols in Ulu Masen in 2020 and 2022.
In October 2023 the Indonesian government issued legal acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples’ collective rights over 87 square miles (225 km²) of Ulu Masen forests. This formal granting of forested land titles marked the first time in Aceh’s history that the central government handed over management to Acehnese communities. However, the effectiveness of this new initiative has yet to be fully assessed.
What this place needs:
Ulu Masen needs more ranger patrols. These teams, usually made up of carefully selected local villagers, have demonstrated their effectiveness in reducing poaching threats. Employment opportunities as rangers can provide income for individuals who may otherwise be lured to participate in illegal logging or poaching.
The ranger network in Ulu Masen is understaffed and ill-equipped to protect Ulu Masen’s diverse animal communities. Here a ranger surveys birds in the canopy. Photo by Joe Figel
In the first rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of rangers in protecting Sumatran tigers, the work of these mobilized guardians resulted in a 41% reduction of snares set in Kerinci-Seblat National Park. Similar gains in Ulu Masen are unachievable without a boosted ranger network. Considering the size of Ulu Masen, there is a need for an additional 560–640 trained rangers, numbers consistent with documented tiger recoveries in other rainforests of southeast Asia.
Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.
Massive art installations depicting birds and other wildlife help bring a touch of nature, and creative inspiration, to cities around Europe.
As more and more of Earth’s natural beauty gets paved over each year, one woman has made it her mission to capture the wonder of the world beyond the cityscape and inspire people to venture outside the concrete and steel.
Artist Sarah Yates, who works under the name Faunagraphic, is known for her massive murals: 20-foot-high wild birds or brilliantly rendered octopi with tentacles that snake along the bricks for a whole city block and transform what was once cold and lifeless into an enlightening expression of nature’s wonders.
“I love to paint small things on a large scale,” she says. “This wasn’t really a style when I first began as a graffiti artist. Most graffiti artists were painting letters, so at first I felt a bit like a black sheep. But I painted the birds I loved, and the public, in turn, loved my art.”
Faunagraphic’s work has been transformative for the cities and villages that have invited her to create colorful murals within their borders. Neighbors emerge from their cramped quarters, entranced by the sight of the mesmerizing imagery blooming in their neighborhood, waving at the smiling woman with wild auburn hair on her scaffold with her spray-paint cans. A child asks his mother what kind of bird she’s painting. The mother remembers the bird from when she was young and tells her child the story, saying they’ll have to go looking for the bird one day. The art’s spell has settled into the hearts and minds of the residents, a magic that they’ll take with them throughout the day, making them dream of a world without roads, wild and free and untainted by industry.
Environmentalism through art. Conservation through contemplative thought.
“I developed my style through painting the things I loved,” she says. “I have always loved game design, fantasy art, stories of magic, folklore, ancient history, future tech … I always wanted to have something within my work to keep me inside that imaginative place.”
Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, England, Yates discovered her passion for creating art with spray paint as a 19-year-old graphic design student. Over the next 15 years, Faunagraphic honed her craft of blending graphic elements with nature-related realism. It became her mission to advocate for the importance of the natural world through the beautification of urban developments.
“I love nature and the things that inspire us inside the woods — the feelings we get when walking through a forest path full of bluebells, bright green grasses, little birds shifting through the trees. I put myself in that place when I draw and try to surround myself with these things.”
Her audience easily interprets the message behind her art and advocacy: Embrace nature more.
“At times my message is more to remind people of how lucky we are and how beautiful and unique our planet is,” she remarks. “To value time, help others, and love each other. Our world has many issues, but nature is always at the core. When we have nothing and someone’s life is not going great, I hope only that they can find joy in nature, at least.”
Painting to Heal
Much as being in nature can provide psychological healing, Faunagraphic hopes her work can achieve a similar effect in the heart of a city.
“I believe it has a big impact on peoples’ wellbeing,” she says. “Seeing any form of creativity triggers ideas in people: clear thinking, positive reactions. They then walk away to lead their own inspirational or motivational behavior within their circles of influence.”
Faunagraphic reflected on a particularly difficult time in her own life where she drew upon the solace of the natural world for peace and strength.
“I was very sick and in the hospital with blood cancer when I was 18,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to leave my room for 30 days. I was in confinement, isolation. However, each day at the same time different animals would pass by my window, including fox cubs who would play in the grass outside. I wasn’t sure what the future had planned for me, but I stayed positive and tried to be strong, knowing that soon I could go outside again into the greenery and wind.”
Her mind drifted to things others have told her about how her work has changed and inspired them.
“I hear a lot of stories about people starting to watch birds when a family member dies or something traumatic happens to them,” she says. “These kinds of stories move me. I feel there is a more spiritual connection that people overlook until they are on their own, having a quiet moment in nature and realize they are not alone.”
I ask about her work with children as an activist and preservationist, and whether she’d observed a difference in the responses of children versus adults when it comes to the idea of nature conservation.
“I think children are more engaged,” she says. “They want to get involved, to help more. They want to make their own art. Adults are more reflective and take the inspiration into their lives in their own ways. It’s very positive.”
Art Spreads Its Wings
When it comes to her focus in the world of environmental conservation, Faunagraphic is drawn to several different bird societies across the United Kingdom and Europe, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds — RSPB for short — and Swift Conservation. During 2024 she has focused on heritage and urban regeneration projects, one being a new UNESCO protected site, the details of which are still developing.
In a past interview on the BirdBuddies blog, Faunagraphic remarked, “I always find the story of the RSPB amazing. I have a few friends and they’re like, ‘Oh, protesting for nature, it doesn’t get anywhere.’ And I’m like, that’s wrong, because the RSPB was just two women that started it off, fighting for the rights of these birds, because they kept getting slaughtered for hats, and the birds were going extinct. And that’s how it all began, just two women.”
Faunagraphic doesn’t limit her artistic endeavors to murals. She has been invited to participate in dozens of European gallery exhibits and installations. Recently she extended her presence in the art world across the Atlantic Ocean to be part of the 2023 Aruba Art Fair in the Caribbean Islands.
Faunagraphic has also collaborated with some of the most influential brands today — including Sony, TOMS Shoes, Converse, Diesel, Pioneer, and Reebok — to design unique nature-themed consumer products.
She might even launch her own product line one day. “It’s something I’m working on,” she says. “I love linen and organic or sustainable fabrics, which I would then screenprint onto. I have been spending years speaking with different suppliers in different countries, as well as machinists and clothing makers.”
Faunagraphic’s stunning and impactful work reaches thousands of people every year, and her murals could continue to inspire viewers for generations to come. She understands the power of her murals on young and old alike and continues to strive to spread her message of nature conservation. With every thoughtful swath of paint, Faunagraphic continues to make the human fabricated landscape — as well as the lives of those who live within it — a little more beautiful by turning concrete jungles into urban oases.
Ultimately Faunagraphic’s hope is to reconnect people to the Earth and reinvigorate their childlike curiosity about the natural world. For it’s only through a deeper connection with nature that we can preserve the beauty of our world.
Plus a spotlight on leopards, the risks to primates, the link between bats and chocolate, otter taste buds, and a whole lot more.
I started writing about conservation 20 years ago because I kept seeing so many interesting scientific papers that never seemed to make a splash beyond their initial publication.
Little has changed. In just the past month, I’ve seen dozens of new papers that I thought deserved exposure but didn’t appear to reach a wide audience.
That’s why I launched “This Month in Conservation Science” — to get people talking.
Here are more than two dozen papers that have grabbed my attention in the past few weeks. They cover picky otters, shrimp that live in trees, roaming leopards, changed landscapes, overheated turtles, youth reactions to climate change, and more. Most of the articles are open access, so they should be available to researchers (and any other interested readers) around the globe.
“A new species of nightjar (Caprimulgus) from Timor and Wetar, Lesser Sunda Islands, Wallacea” (Ibis)
“Climate futures for lizards and snakes in western North America may result in new species management issues” (Ecology and Evolution)
“Hidden gems: Scattered knowledge hampered freshwater jellyfish research over the past one‐and‐a‐half centuries” (Ecology and Evolution)
“Investigating the distribution of a unique crustacean microendemic to tree hollows” (The Science of Nature)
“Local extirpation of woody species in Colophospermum mopane woodland under chronic utilisation by elephants” (African Journal of Ecology)
“Microplastics and chemical contamination in aquaculture ecosystems: The role of climate change and implications for food safety — a review” (Environmental Sciences Europe)
“Natural shading is helpful but not sufficient for mitigating warming in green sea turtle nests in the tropical South China Sea” (Biological Conservation)
“Rediscovery and future approaches to conservation of the elusive giant salmon carp Aaptosyax grypus, a Critically Endangered megafish in the Mekong” (Biological Conservation)
“Seed dispersal by bats (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae) and mutualistic networks in a landscape dominated by cocoa in the Brazilian Amazon” (Global Ecology and Conservation)
“Small forest patches in West Africa: mapping how they are changing to better inform their conservation” (Environmental Conservation)
“Taxonomic revision of the king cobra Ophiophagus hannah species complex, with the description of two new species” (European Journal of Taxonomy)
“Tracing seven decades of Chinese wildlife legislation from 1950 to the COVID-19 pandemic era” (Biological Conservation)
“Human-wildlife conflict in Bardia-Banke Complex: Patterns of human fatalities and injuries caused by large mammals” (Ecology and Evolution)
“Cub survival in a wild leopard (Panthera pardus fusca) population” (Animals)
In-depth:
Beyond those individual papers, the journal Rangeland Ecology & Management has published an entire open-access issue on sagebrush conservation that covers a wide range of interesting subjects.
We found these papers through a combination of email alerts, RSS feeds, newsletters, notes from researchers, and other sources. We’re happy to hear from any author or team who has a new paper coming out in a peer-reviewed journal or other publication, especially if you’re from the Global South or an institution without much public-relations support. For consideration in a future column, drop us a line at [email protected] and use the subject line TMICS. (Our next column will focus on material published between Oct. 20 and Nov. 20, 2024.)
These beautiful ecosystems recently began to recover from overexploitation. Will Russia’s invasion once again push them over the brink?
In 1909 Russian scientist Sergey Zernov discovered a strange and lovely ecosystem in the Black Sea. Just above the sandy seafloor floated a field of red seaweed. Among the seaweed were animals — fish, sponges, worms, crayfish, and more — nearly all in various shades of red.
Scientists have since learned that this ecosystem hosts some 110 invertebrate species, 40 species of fish, and 30 species of algae. At its foundation are three crimson seaweeds, forming a vivid aquatic structure where biodiversity thrives.
Two of the three are in the genus Phyllophora (the third once was too, but now has a different name). While various species of this red seaweed grow around the world, it’s only in the Black Sea that they form vast fields. Other lifeforms have adapted to live among the Phyllophora, with red protective coloring for camouflage.
Zernov’s Phyllophora Field, named for its discoverer, occupies a large patch of the northwestern Black Sea. A second one, the Small Phyllophora Field, was discovered in 1957 near the shore of the Crimean Peninsula. Both are marine protected areas of Ukraine. And both now face unprecedented threats from Russian military aggression.
Wavelike clusters of seaweed in the Small Phyllophora Field. Credit: Alexander Kurakin/Institute of Marine Biology of the NAS of Ukraine
Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, followed by its 2022 escalation into full-scale war, brought destructive pollution, noise, fires, and explosions to these delicate ecosystems. The war has also blocked scientists from visiting the Phyllophora fields, which were only just recovering from damage wrought by 20th century industry.
Yet Ukrainian scientists continue their work from a distance. They’re tracking threats by satellite, extrapolating from research elsewhere, and planning a future with new protections for the red seaweed fields.
The Seaweed That Sprang Back
Seaweed often grows on hard surfaces, but in the Phyllophora fields it also grows unattached, floating over the seabed.
The seaweed balls cluster in wavelike patterns near the bottom, shaped by the water’s movement. In this structure, animals like seahorses and crabs make their homes. Some are in the Red Book, Ukraine’s formal list of protected threatened and rare species.
“In these areas, the habitat is usually sandy bottom, which is suitable for some species, but usually is not enough for many species to live,” says Sadogurska. “But with the Phyllophora on the bottom of this diverse habitat, there are many species which you can find only there.”
These seaweeds are both keystone and indicator species: They’re the basis of the ecosystem, and the messengers of local environmental status. Since they’re large and grow slowly, they’re easily damaged by issues such as runoff pollution.
If these species start to disappear, “we know the ecological situation is worsening,” says Galyna Minicheva, a marine ecologist and director of the Institute of Marine Biology at the NAS of Ukraine.
It has happened before. Today, as a marine protected area, Zernov’s Phyllophora Field covers 1,550 square miles (4,025 square kilometers). But in the early 1950s it covered almost four times that space. In addition to damage from pollution and introduced species, the seaweeds were harvested to make agar, a gelatin-like product. In the 1950s and 60s, the agar industry extracted 12-15,000 tons each year. By the 1980s the huge Zernov’s Phyllophora Field was mostly gone.
Satellite data shows oil spills in the northwestern Black Sea, reaching Zernov’s Phyllophora Field (large pentagon in center) and the Small Phyllophora Field (square-ish shape in bay at right). Credit: Evgen Sokolov, senior researcher of the Institute of Marine Biology of the NAS of Ukraine
Yet as the ecosystem shrank, extraction became less profitable, and in 1996, just a few years after Ukraine’s independence, scientists added a Phyllophora species to the Red Book for protection. The following year the agar harvests stopped. New international agreements like the Danube River Protection Convention and Carpathian Convention guided cleanups of the many rivers that run into the Black Sea. Zernov’s Phyllophora Field became a marine protected area in 2008, and the Small Phyllophora Field followed in 2012. The red seaweed ecosystems began to recover.
When scientists see what’s happening in the Phyllophora fields, “we can understand the whole ecological state for the Black Sea,” says Minicheva. The recovery of these fields was good news for the entire region.
A Recovery Interrupted
“But this beautiful period for the whole Black Sea ecosystem, for Zernov’s Phyllophora Field, finished after the start of 2022,” says Minicheva. “Everything changed.”
Some areas, like the Small Phyllophora Field, had been cut off from research and conservation since 2014. “But of course, with the beginning of the full-scale war and the active hostilities in the northern part of the Black Sea, the impacts are much bigger and the scale is much higher,” says Sadogurska.
Scientists lost access to both fields. Russia blocked ports, destroyed coastal infrastructure, and littered the sea with dangerous floating mines.
“One of the threats from the Russian invasion in Ukraine is the lack of this long-term monitoring and lack of this data on the state marine ecosystems in the northwestern part of the Black Sea,” says Sadogurska.
Ukrainian scientists are doing their best to fill those gaps. “We can compensate using remote technology and take information from satellites,” says Minicheva. The scientists have developed intensive satellite use since the war’s start. What they can see on the water’s surface suggests impacts to the seaweed fields far below.
Through satellite images they’ve seen a military ship shooting near an important Phyllophora research station. They’ve tracked the sheen of oil from sunken aircraft and warships like the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, which sank in Zernov’s Phyllophora Field. “We make special assessments of how much of the Phyllophora field is covered by oil spills,” says Minicheva.
And perhaps worst of all, they’ve watched destructive floodwaters flow into the Black Sea after Russia attacked the Kakhovka Dam, draining a massive reservoir. It was “all freshwater, with garbage, with pollution, coming in the northwest part,” says Minicheva.
“One month after destroying the Kakhovka Dam, the situation was critical,” she recalls.
Satellite data on the dam disaster. Credit: Evgen Sokolov, senior researcher of the Institute of Marine Biology of the NAS of Ukraine
Yet just a few months later, the satellites showed a more promising picture. The pollution had sparked a bloom of algae that fed on the pollutants. While the Phyllophora fields face lasting damage from the disaster, the algae helped by cleaning up the environment.
Although algae blooms can also have risks, like toxicity to humans and blocking sunlight from other species, Minicheva emphasizes that in this case they are “an excellent nature mechanism, which [brings] back the system to the start position.”
Educated Guesswork
Other threats are harder to measure from afar. Damaged ships have floated ablaze through the northern Black Sea, polluting both water and air. Ballast water from military ships have a long history of introducing unexpected species. For example, in 1982, ballast water from U.S. ships brought an Atlantic comb jelly to the Black Sea, which severely threw off the ecological balance as it ate almost all the zooplankton. And sunken planes and ships from this war may leak pollutants for decades (vessels downed during World War II are still causing ecological harm).
Some effects may never be fully known.
Prewar lab work on Phyllophora residents. Ukrainian scientists await the day they can study the Phyllophora habitats in person again. Credit: Galyna Minicheva
“It’s often quite hard to estimate the impact of war if you were not present in this specific place when something happened and you come there sometime after,” says Sadogurska.
Still, extrapolating from one ecosystem can help scientists understand another.
“It’s unsafe to go to the marine coastal areas, due to the mines,” says Sadogurska. “But the lagoons, they are safe and are open, and we can use them as kind of a laboratory for science to collect some samples, to understand some impacts, to continue some of our work.”
For example, scientists observing Ukrainian freshwater ecosystems found that underwater explosions ruptured the swim bladders of fish, causing mass die-offs. Explosions in or near the Phyllophora fields have likely killed many fish there, too. Yet without in-person research, the true status of the Phyllophora fields, deep under the surface of the Black Sea, remains unknown.
The Future of Phyllophora
As the war rages on, scientists are planning for an eventual post-hostility future by “trying to put in place the policies and approaches which will allow for better conservation of these ecosystems,” says Sadogurska.
She’s among those working to add ecosystems including the Phyllophora fields to the Emerald Network, a European system of protected areas for non-European Union countries.
“Since we cannot access many of our territories and water areas due to the occupation and the ongoing war, we still have a lot of data related to their biodiversity, and we can push for creation of the protected areas on these territories even if they are currently under occupation,” Sadogurska says.
After Ukraine’s accession to the EU, the Emerald Network sites will join the EU’s Natura 2000 network of protected places. Experts then expect to have access to additional funding for conserving and restoring these areas.
China’s Great Sparrow Campaign aimed to “conquer nature” but resulted in as many as 75 million human deaths.
The world’s deadliest environmental disaster got its start in 1958. Its effects are still being felt today, more than six decades later.
It wasn’t an oil spill, like the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon. It wasn’t a chemical disaster, like Union Carbide’s gas leak in Bhopal. And it didn’t have anything to do with nuclear power, like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.
It happened in the People’s Republic of China in the years after Mao Zedong came to power, causing mass starvation, murder, and even cannibalism.
And it started with a bird.
The Great Sparrow Campaign
In 1958, nine years after the Communist Party of China seized power, Chairman Mao launched what he called the Great Leap Forward, a multipronged effort to transform China into an industrialized nation.
Around the same time, Zedong launched the Four Pests Campaign, an effort to eliminate flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows to improve human hygiene and increase agricultural output. The campaign, accompanied by rampant propaganda, had a powerful slogan: ren ding sheng tian, or “Man must conquer nature.”
A 1958 propaganda poster from the Four Pests Campaign
Three of those “pests” made relative sense: Flies, mosquitoes and rats can carry disease, and humans still try to control them today. But why were sparrows lumped in with the other three? Mao, it turns out, wanted to prevent the abundant birds from eating grain seeds — a perceived threat to farm production.
To stop sparrows from doing what comes naturally, China directed its citizens to persecute the birds at a level of carnage that may remain unmatched in human history. During the Great Sparrow Campaign people smashed nests and eggs and chased sparrows while shouting, banging pots and spoons, lighting firecrackers, and making other loud noises. Many of the birds spent so much time and energy fleeing the cruel cacophony that they exhausted their reserves and found themselves too tired to escape a well-aimed whack from a shovel. Others “simply dropped from the sky” and expired, as Frank Dikötter wrote in his 2010 book Mao’s Great Famine.
It’s impossible to say exactly how many sparrows died, but many accounts place the toll in the hundreds of millions.
And it wasn’t just sparrows: Birds of adjacent nearby species also fell victim to the noise pollution and violence.
Two years later the absence of sparrows spawned a crisis of epic proportions. Insects such as locusts, previously kept in balance by the sparrows and other birds, swarmed out of control in 1960, a year that — in a grim coincidence — also saw a massive drought. Crops vanished as the voracious insects spread across the country.
Photo: Alexander Lerch (CC BY-NC 2.0)
As a result of this imbalance in nature, millions of people starved to death over the next two years.
How many? No one knows for sure. The Chinese government officially counts 15 million dead. Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng, writing in his book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, put the death toll at 36 million. Some academics suggest even doubling that to 75-78 million.
And they didn’t just die of starvation. People killed each other for food — and committed other unspeakable acts. “Documents report several thousand cases where people ate other people,” Yang told NPR in 2012. “Parents ate their own kids. Kids ate their own parents.”
The ultimate irony: China’s oppressive government had enough grain stored before the disaster to feed everyone in the country. However, they refused to release it and covered up the problem (in part by arresting and beating anyone who questioned the official narrative).
Today China still fails to acknowledge the problem of its own making, calling it the “Three Years of Difficult Period.”
Regardless of what you call it, the Great Sparrow Campaign and resulting environmental disaster offer six major lessons for the future.
Lesson 1: Environmental Disasters Last a Long Time
The Chinese famine was over by 1962 — but for those who survived, it’s hardly a thing of the past.
Two studies published in 2023 examined the lifelong health effects of starvation resulting from the Great Sparrow Campaign. Researchers found that the survivors, many now in their eighties, and the people born shortly after the famine all suffered health problems, or “noncommunicable diseases,” at a significantly higher rate than the general population. These include “hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, liver disease, heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, digestive disease, psychiatric problems, memory-related disease, arthritis, and asthma,” according to one of the studies.
As the authors of the study in the journal BMC Public Health wrote, “Experiencing famine at an early age or the experience of famine in a close relative’s generation (births after the onset of famine) are associated with an increased risk of” these noncommunicable diseases.
The second study, in the journal PLOS Global Public Health, found that the lifelong effects were particularly prevalent in people whose mothers were pregnant during the famine.
We can see parallels of this today in modern famine crises such as the ones happening right now in Gaza, Sudan, and Yemen, which many experts warn will cause suffering for years if not decades to come.
Neither study examined the mental-health effects of the famine, but “there are certainly social and psychological effects of these kinds of repressions,” says historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, who frequently writes about authoritarianism. Previous research, she points out, has shown intergenerational traumas in descendants of the Holocaust, slavery, war, and genocide.
Lesson 2: Science Matters
Authoritarians have a pattern: They belittle, ignore, diminish, and even punish scientific expertise.
That pattern played out in China’s great famine. As Judith Shapiro wrote in her 2001 book Mao’s War Against Nature, the Chinese leader held disregard for science throughout his rule. Even before the crisis, his agricultural policies had caused mass deforestation and hydrological problems. Mao even sent one hydro engineer to a labor camp for criticizing his plans.
And he ignored scientific warnings about removing sparrows, which led directly to millions of deaths.
His anti-science policies were not restricted to the Four Pest Campaign. Just a few years later, during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, Mao ordered farmers to plant grain instead of the local crop species they’d grown for generations, even in areas inhospitable to grain. “Such formalism supplanted local practices and wisdom, damaged the natural world, and inflicted enormous hardship on the Chinese people,” Shapiro wrote.
We see this pattern repeating today in authoritarian regimes around the world, which routinely denigrate the science of climate change in favor of extractive technologies.
Lesson 3: Compounding Problems Make Things Worse
China’s famine wouldn’t have occurred if not for Chairman Mao’s leadership, but when it did arrive, it was made worse by drought.
That’s a portent of things to come.
A study published earlier this year found that 2024 was already the worst year on record where water scarcity, severe drought, flooding, and other effects of extreme climate change had served as a linchpin of armed conflict. The study also found that these acts of violence have increased from about 20 incidents a year in 2000 to 347 as of its release on Aug. 22.
As climate scientist Peter Gleick, an author of the study, said in a press release, “the significant upswing in violence over water resources reflects continuing disputes over control and access to scarce water resources, the importance of water for modern society, growing pressures on water due to population growth and extreme climate change, and ongoing attacks on water systems where war and violence are widespread, especially in the Middle East and Ukraine.”
Many of these conflicts are caused by authoritarian regimes, but as Ben-Ghiat explains it, a crisis also create opportunities for strongmen and their corporate, billionaire allies to seize power and exploit the planet.
“The core of authoritarianism is fewer rights for the many,” she says, “and more liberties for the few, meaning the elites, the people who make money off plundering the environment. Control of resources, control of land — it’s bringing out the worst. You see that more as resources become scarce. A lot of the conflicts in the Middle East are about controlling water. I see right now as the last gasp of these plundering evil people. It’s getting worse because they’re all out trying to plunder as much as they can.”
Lesson 4: Authoritarian Rule Is Deadly (Especially for Protestors)
Ben-Ghiat thinks the Chinese famine was so extreme that it’s an outlier when it comes to the history of authoritarianism, but it still contains parallels to other regimes, including the denigration of science, the reliance on propaganda, and the crushing of resistance.
That’s not just history. Even today hundreds of environmental activists and defenders are killed every year, according to data compiled by the organization Global Witness.
“The most dangerous type of protestor to be is an environmental protestor,” says Ben-Ghiat.
Meanwhile the very nature of strongman governments makes it easier to commit the types of environmental crimes people are protesting.
“When you have dictatorship, you can orchestrate campaigns like the Great Sparrow Campaign or the famine created by Stalin very efficiently,” says Ben-Ghiat, “because you there’s no one telling you not to. There’s absolutely no opposition in parliament, there’s no journalism, there’s no free press. You’re not responsible to anyone. You’re not going to lose your job or get voted out because you cause these effects.”
Democracies are not immune from these problems, she points out, “but in authoritarian states, it’s all very nakedly revealed because there’s no check on the government.”
Lesson 5: Given Time and Effort, Some Things Recover
The bird targeted by Mao was the Eurasian tree sparrow (Passer montanus) — by 1962, they were all but extinct in China.
But the Eurasian tree sparrow is a wide-ranging species. When China realized its countryside needed the birds, it brought some back. Many books and studies report that China imported thousands of sparrows from neighboring Russia to reestablish some balance in devastated ecosystems.
It’s worth noting that in the years I’ve been studying and writing about the Chinese famine, I’ve never uncovered any primary documents about these Russian sparrows. Nonetheless, the species today flies in Chinese skies where they were once erased: There are thousands of observations from China on the citizen-science site iNaturalist. The sparrow also ranges from the easternmost coasts of Europe to the westernmost coasts of Asia and beyond into many island nations. Less populous than before, they’ve faced recent declines due to agriculture and other development but still number in the hundreds of millions — not bad, considering how many were wiped out six decades ago.
Lesson 6: We Need to Talk About These Things
Harvard University granted Yang Jisheng a prestigious Neiman Fellowship for his book Tombstone in 2016. The retired journalist was forbidden from traveling to the United States from China to receive the award, and his book remains banned in the country of his birth. The subject of the famine remains taboo in China to this day.
That’s exactly why we need to talk about it — and other environmental crimes being committed around the world — even if corporations or governments threaten to punish us for telling the truth.
As Timothy Snyder writes in his essential book On Tyranny, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”
Authoritarians want their abuses and deadly histories to fade from view. It may not be comfortable to address our painful pasts or dangerous present, but to ignore unpleasant realities is an invitation to catastrophe.
