New research backs up conventional wisdom that getting people outdoors inspires them to conserve nature.
The natural world faces many threats, but to many environmentalists, none are so baffling and heartbreaking as public apathy toward those threats.
How do we get more people to care about the natural world so they’re moved to stand up and defend it? The answer is complex, of course, because humans are complex. But part of it can be found in a simple truth: Some people don’t care much about the natural world because they haven’t experienced nature directly.
For years experts have pointed to a potential solution: Getting people to spend more time in nature, they say, can help make them care more about threats to our environment and adopt more pro-environment behaviors.
Does this popular wisdom work? A new study synthesizes the evidence from a dozen other studies and finds there’s some truth to it.
“Personal contact with nature, especially at an early age, can strengthen an individual’s emotional affinity to it, facilitating their motivation to adopt pro-nature behaviors,” says ecologist Masashi Soga, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the University of Tokyo.
According to the research, more time in nature results in caring more about nature and, therefore, being more willing to change behavior to promote better conservation outcomes.
“Those who frequently experience nature are more likely to recognize … environmental decline in their surroundings,” Soga says by email. “This may, in turn, increase their motivation to contribute to mitigation efforts.”
Specifically, Soga says, he and his fellow researchers found that “direct experiences with nature might increase altruistic and pro-social behavior, promoting environmentally sustainable behavior and decision-making.”
The new analysis looked at studies from all over the world. Each looked at people’s experiences, ranging from visiting parks in a city to birdwatching in a forest or participating in nature cleanups and organized tree-plantings. A wide variety of pro-environment behaviors resulting from spending time in nature were measured by these studies, ranging from recycling (and not littering) to being more conscious about energy usage and driving less.
Across the board the studies showed that people who did more in nature were more willing to change their behavior to protect it.
“Enhancing people’s experiences with nature might be one approach to encouraging desired behavioral change to halt biodiversity loss,” Soga says. And conservation policy to stop extinctions, he says, “would likely benefit from expanding efforts to reconnect people to nature.”
Getting to that point, though, requires some effort.
How Do We Actually Get More People to Experience Nature?
Early exposure to nature is especially important, but increasingly rare for kids born in urban areas. The University of Miami lab where I got my Ph.D., for example, took middle-school and high-school science classes out on shark-tagging expeditions, and I was always shocked at how many kids who lived an hour’s walk from the coast had never seen the ocean.
Fortunately some groups are working to change this, including one in the nation’s capital.
“Washington, DC, is a wonderful place with lots of nature nearby, but not all populations have the same access to it, so we’re working to expand that access,” says Dan Ebert, director of communications for the City Kids Wilderness Project.
City Kids takes children from the DC area to local hiking and rock-climbing events year-round, and to a ranch in Wyoming for summer camp. Students start in middle school and participate through high school, with older kids mentoring younger ones.
“We also incorporate conservation education into our trips,” Ebert says. “We see a lot that kids have a newfound appreciation for nature, they find themselves relaxing a lot more, and their anxiety is lower when they’re spending time in nature. Kids find themselves in nature, and of course that translates to wanting to help conserve and protect it.”
But you don’t need to be a kid to experience nature for the first time and derive benefits from it. Another group that brings people out into nature is Black Girls Hike, which organizes events both for beginners and experienced adventurers. “We do lots of outdoor activities like hiking, kayaking, birdwatching, and more with the goal of introducing Black girls to nature and destigmatizing what it means to be Black in nature,” says Black Girls Hike CEO and founder Asia Bright. “In our four years of existence, thousands of people around the world have joined us for some time in the great outdoors. Some peoples’ minds explode when they realize there are no skyscrapers in sight and no cell service!”
Bright agrees that spending more time in nature makes people think about conservation more.
“The more people who can see the effects of what they do on nature, the more people who can see the state of the natural environment, the more people who can be awakened to caring about the environment and awareness of how their actions can cause harm,” she says.
Nature Is Where You Find It
For both children and adults, Soga points out that “nature” doesn’t have to mean isolated pristine wilderness. We can bring nature closer to where people already are.
“Many current policies focus on the creation and preservation of urban green spaces as a means to mitigate biodiversity loss,” he says. “But given the impact of peoples’ lifestyles and behaviors on biodiversity, our results suggest that these places can also help with biodiversity conservation by fostering connection between urban dwellers and the natural world.”
“People need to be outside more,” Bright tells me. “It’s about introducing people to the benefits of the outdoors and teaching them to care for the environment.”
Trish O’Kane’s book Birding to Change the World is a guide to linking people, nature and activism.
When Hurricane Katrina walloped New Orleans in August 2005, it destroyed Trish O’Kane’s home and neighborhood and took some of her neighbors’ lives. As the toxic floodwaters receded, O’Kane, who had worked as human-rights journalist in Central America and was about to start teaching writing at a college in the city, found hope in a surprising place.
Birds.
Katrina ignited her concern with the environment and an interest in birds that sent her career — and life — on a wild new path. She left the South to pursue a doctorate in ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she became enmeshed in local activism and found that birding and nature don’t need to be segregated from racial and justice issues.
Her memoir, Birding to Change the World, is a way of repaying her debt to the birds. In it she tells the story of Wild Warner, a neighborhood environmental defense group she helped to found in Madison, and how she’s developed environmental education programs that bring middle school and college students together in nature to create lasting change.
O’Kane, now a senior lecturer at the University of Vermont, tells The Revelator why birding and journalism aren’t that different, what happens when kids connect with nature, and how to build a flock that can tackle our biggest environmental problems.
In your book you explain how the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call for you to learn about the environment. How did birds become that entry point?
They were there. My husband and I evacuated to Alabama where we had friends and we had lived before. And then I returned to New Orleans to teach the following semester when the colleges reopened. Our house was destroyed. Our whole neighborhood was destroyed. Many of our neighbors drowned. So I was living in another area of the city, renting a room in a house in an area that hadn’t flooded.
I wake up the first morning, totally disoriented in a new place, and it’s silent. I can’t hear traffic, I don’t hear people. I lay there in the bed thinking, “Oh my God, I’m in a city. And it’s very quiet. And that’s because a lot of people died and a lot of people haven’t returned, and who knows if they will?” It was very strange and sad.
Right then I heard this clicking and I had the window open and I looked outside. It was probably about 6:30 a.m., and there’s this red bird in a bush. I knew it was a cardinal. That’s all I knew. Nothing else. I just saw it and thought, “There’s something still alive here.” A lot of animals drowned, but the birds were there, and that’s how it began, really with that first cardinal.
Birds are accessible. They’re a portal into the natural world.
You started a birding club in Madison where your college students became mentors with local middle school kids — a program you also now run in Burlington, where you teach at the University of Vermont. How did this first start?
I never imagined myself doing this. I wasn’t a birder or a bird person, or even really an environmentalist. This is a second life for me. I was an investigative human-rights journalist in Central America for 10 years, and then several years in the deep South.
What happened was, I had moved to Madison to get a Ph.D. in natural resources so I could understand what a wetland was and what had happened in Katrina. I took ornithology because I got interested in birds in New Orleans because of that cardinal. The professor tells us our homework is to go birding for an hour. We were living across the street from this wonderful park, called Warner Park, and I started birding in that park an hour a week, and then it was an hour a day, and then it was up to five hours a day, and then it was weekends and owling at night.
Any birder who’s reading this will know what I’m talking about. I went off the deep end.
Soon after that, about a year or two, I discovered that there was a city plan to build in this park and to pave areas of it, and it was going to destroy the birds’ homes. I was distraught. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never done any environmental organizing, but I thought, “These birds are saving my soul. I have to do something.”
So I started going to neighborhood meetings, city council meetings, and it was a city counselor who I was fighting with at the time over the development plans, who said to me that this park is surrounded by latchkey kids with parents who are working two jobs. They live on the edge of this park, but there’s no environmental programs and the kids aren’t playing very much in the park.
She said, “I want to see those kids in the park. You’re at the university, you do something about that.” Because I don’t have children and didn’t know much about them at the time, I thought I’d work with little, very well-behaved children who are interested in birds and are going to be adoring and respectful. I got a real wake-up call at a neighborhood meeting when there was a principal of a middle school who said he needed tutors for his kids.
I thought middle school kids sounded terrible. I was a terror in middle school. But I learned in Central America that you don’t do what you want to do, you do what your community is asking you to do. So I thought, “I’m going to go talk to this guy. This is crazy, but I’m going to see what he thinks about an afterschool birding club.” And the first meeting, he said he thought it was great. He said, “My sister works at Cornell Labs. I know about the birding thing. I bet this could get really popular.”
We started with five kids the first semester. Never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be 45 and then 95 signing up five years later. That’s how it all happened. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t expect to do it, and I certainly would never have chosen middle school kids. I am sorry now to say that because they were delightful. I fell in love with them, but I was afraid at first.
Looking back now does it seem like a leap from human rights journalist to someone who teaches birding?
It’s not two separate lives. I’m still a journalist. It’s just that I see myself as interviewing the birds now and other nonhumans. That’s not easy. There are different techniques you have to use.
The other thing is in my teaching, the social justice aspect and the human rights are part and parcel of what I teach. I am not just teaching ornithology. My [college] students are paired with kids at the local school in my neighborhood [in Burlington, Vermont]. Through birding together, my students are forced to examine — as I was forced to examine when I started birding — how much privilege is associated with birding and with recreating outside, especially in a place with such a cold climate. Every winter here in Vermont, and it happened in Madison, there are some students who will declare after two or three weeks, “What’s wrong with these kids’ parents? How come the kids are wearing cotton socks or sneakers? How come they don’t have good boots?”
I live in a neighborhood that’s very mixed income, and Vermont is very expensive. Some of these kids don’t have $25 SmartWool socks or whatever they cost. That’s when I say to my students, “Hey, sit down and make your clothing privilege list right now. What are you wearing and what does each item cost?” I’ll tell you what I’m wearing. It’s about $600 worth of stuff, even though it doesn’t look very good. I’ve been wearing it a while. We’ve got the $100 Smartwool undershirt. How many families in my part of Burlington with several kids can afford to buy every single one of those kids Smartwool socks or an undershirt like that? Not a lot of people.
And then there’s human rights. What about the rights of children to go outside and play? Our children are imprisoned in these little desks all day long. We’re making our children sick in this country. So I think it’s a human right to go outside and play and learn to climb a tree.
What about the right not to be terrified that they’re going to lose the world we’re in? I’ve got fourth and fifth graders right now that say to us on the first day of our afterschool bird club, “Yeah, this is beautiful, but it’s all going to be gone. The bees and the flowers are all going to die.”
What kind of changes do you see in your college students and in the younger kids they mentor when they go through the program?
Their teachers report that the kids start raising their hands in class. They start seeing kids who had never spoken up before telling stories about the animals. One little boy at the school here ended up on TV. We were invited by a local TV station to give a presentation, and it was in City Hall, standing room only, packed to the rafters. This kid gets up and gives the first speech about the park. Some of his teachers were in the audience. His first-grade teacher came up to me afterwards, she said, “He never raised his hand. I can’t believe it. He’s the quiet one.” I said, “Well, he is not quiet in our club.” He never stopped talking about the animals.
So you get these kids outside and they can be themselves. And the same thing happens with my college students. They become like kids. They become more playful, a lot less anxious. There’s a serious mental health crisis hitting colleges right now. It’s not hard to understand with a world on fire and falling apart.
This is a respite for my students. It teaches them that all they have to do is go outside. We’re lucky and privileged to live on a beautiful green campus. It teaches them what I learned after Katrina. The birds are there for you. The animals are there, the trees are there. Get outside and you can calm yourself. And then we can start to find a way forward together. But if we’re not calm and we don’t have clear heads, how are we going to find our way out of this mess?
In 2018 a shy student fell so madly in love with the tiny golden-winged warbler that she began protesting in Vermont to protect the bird’s summer nesting grounds threatened by a natural gas pipeline. This fight led her across the Canadian border to testify in Montreal at an international stockholders’ meeting to stop natural gas fracking on indigenous lands. After she graduated, she continued to work to stop pipelines across Vermont. Now she and a crew of joyful, creative young people are working to shut down the last coal plant in New England.
Golden-winged warbler in VT. Photo: John Sutton, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)
There is also a mighty flock of former birding mentors now from both UW-Madison and UVM working all over the country as teachers, environmental educators, urban planners, land stewards, lawyers, journalists, researchers and environmental activists. They are scientists, nature center directors and school garden coordinators.
Birding can seem like a really solitary endeavor. How do you use it to build community and connection?
One of the main goals of my class is to build a flock. I have my students over; they were here two weeks ago for bagels and coffee, birding in my backyard in the morning, which they love. And we saw birds. But the main goal was for them to get to know each other better, get to know me better and get to know the neighborhood better. I walk them around the neighborhood. This is where the kids live who we work with.
The other thing I do is pair every student with another student as a bird buddy. And if there are any students who know birds already, they’re paired with the ones who don’t know anything. So they have to teach each other, and they have to go out every week together for an hour. I will tell you, lifelong friendships come out of that weekly hour. For me, especially now in the world we live in and with the phones and the social media and the isolation and the mental health issues, building a flock in my class is my number one priority.
There’s over 100 scientific studies on the benefits of spending time outside. Not very many of the studies, very few of them, focus on birds because it’s hard for scientists to parse out the benefits of watching birds versus just being outside with the trees and the vegetation. But I think that so many of the public health problems we have right now in this country could be solved if people just spent more time outside.
The solutions are staring us in the face. They’re right out the window. And a lot of people discovered that during the pandemic. But I think people need to think about this more and how we can change our education system so kids spend more time outside and we have far fewer mental health problems and kids on medications.
“I’ve seen grown men reduced to tears in the Annamite Mountains,” says wildlife biologist Lorraine Scotson of the mountain range along the border of Laos and Vietnam. “[Men] who are physically fit and really strong, adventurous types.” There’s a “claustrophobia that gets introduced” when you’re in these forest-covered mountains, she says.
“Then you’ve got the leeches and the ticks and the horseflies and all of the mosquitoes biting,” Scotson says. “It’s like the whole forest is out to get you.”
Scotson knows the Annamite Mountains well. She’s spent almost two decades in the jungles of Southeast Asia studying bears. Now, as the CEO of the Saola Foundation, she’s on a different mission in the Annamites: locate what is likely the world’s most elusive large land mammal, the saola.
Only discovered by Western scientists in 1992, the animal, which scientists believe is naturally rare and low density, has become so endangered that a tracker with the Saola Foundation, Maiy Thammanan, says few local people even know of it — though older residents are more likely to, due to “direct experience catching saola by snaring and hunting dogs.” But knowledge of the saola to the West came as a shock, akin to the finding of the okapi in 1901.
There is nothing on Earth like the saola — a true megafauna at around 200 pounds (90 kilograms), with two long curving horns up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) and striking white face markings. Superficially, it resembles an African antelope, like a bongo or an oryx. But the saola is not an antelope; instead, it’s more closely related to wild cattle. Still, it’s so distinct from every other bovid that it sits alone in its own genus, Pseudoryx.
Since 1992, the saola has only been documented a handful of times, including a couple animals briefly held in captivity and a couple others caught on camera trap. The last conclusive proof the saola still existed was in 2013 when one was photographed by a camera trap.
Now, a team of trackers with the Saola Foundation is hoping to change that. The expedition, currently ongoing in the Annamite Mountains, involves a unique pairing of high-tech and natural-tech tactics, using in-field DNA detectors, tracking dogs, and local and international experts.
A natural question to such an effort for an animal that might be extinct is: Why do it? Why put all this energy into trying to find the saola?
But for William Robichaud, co-founder of the Saola Foundation and the world’s leading expert on the animal, that’s not the right question. “Nobody ever asks the guards and the curators of the Van Gogh Museum at Amsterdam, ‘Why are you doing all this work to save [his paintings]?’” Robichaud says.
That said, the intrinsic value of the animal aside, Robichaud, who spent a brief time with a captured saola dubbed Martha before she died in 1996, notes that the foundation’s effort is about much more than the saola.
“We’re developing a field team unlike anything that’s ever been seen in Southeast Asia before. It’s extraordinary,” he says. “This approach has never been attempted before in Laos and breaks from the traditional model of relying entirely on international expertise.” He further notes that no one has combined detection dogs, professional trackers, local indigenous ecologists and field DNA tests before.
Robichaud thinks the foundation’s model could help in efforts to track other endangered species in the region, such as Edwards’s pheasant, Owston’s civet, red-shanked douc langur and the large-antlered muntjac.
“We want this team to be together for the next 20, 30, 40 years working on conservation projects in Laos, in the Annamites, and serving as a regional model for other NGOs,” Robichaud says. “We’re this tiny little saola foundation barely with two nickels to rub together, but we’re figuring out how to do this. Maybe other NGOs will take notice and start copying what we’ve done because we think it’s quite successful.”
Game Changer
One game changer in how the Saola Foundation is pursuing their quarry is a bespoke DNA field tester created by the Wildlife Conservation Society Molecular Diagnostics Lab. It’s groundbreaking because of its speed. When the team finds scat that might be from a saola — and not that of other animals in the region — they take it back to base camp to be tested, with results available in just an hour.
“It’s essentially very similar to a COVID test. The result comes back saola, not saola,” says Scotson. Prior to the new in-field DNA tester, she says, it would take months to get a result. Researchers would have to carry the sample out of the forest and transport it to a city, where they would get permission to mail it to a lab overseas. By that point, even if the test came back positive for saola, it would not be particularly useful for tracking the animal. “Without [the new] device, none of this would be possible.”
However, tracking the animal is just one of the group’s goals. That tracking will be followed by what might seem like an audacious plan for an animal that has been dubbed the “Asian unicorn” due to its nearly mythical elusiveness: starting a captive-breeding program in Laos.
“We don’t just need one saola, we need a breeding population,” says Scotson.
Capturing the animals is risky, but conservationists believe it’s the best chance to keep the saola from extinction.
The foundation is working off years of research and advocacy by the Saola Working Group, a part of the IUCN. The group’s analysis showed that the saola is likely among the most endangered land mammals on the planet and helped convince both range countries, Vietnam and Laos, that captive breeding is the best path forward to avoid the worst case scenario for the saola.
Before capture, the team must first monitor the animals to better understand their movements and needs. “The first saola will really be like the teacher and allow us to train Saola-specific dogs, learn about its behavior, movement pattern, ecology and also how to identify its tracks, because at the moment it’s mostly guesswork,” Scotson says.
Deep Habitat
Conservationists fear that snaring, which has wiped out tigers from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, will do the same to the saola. Hunters lay thousands of metal snares in the region that are like land mines to animals. The snares can lie in the foliage for years until something, maybe a saola, gets caught in one and dies slowly, often of thirst.
“The main problem is organized poacher gangs in Vietnam crossing the border in the forest of Laos,” says Robichaud. “They’ll set hundreds or thousands of snares. Then they go back to Vietnam for like a month or two, and then they just come back and check the snare lines.”
It doesn’t matter if the animal is rotted, Robichaud says, because the poachers are mostly looking for items valuable in Chinese medicine, such as cat bones, pangolin scales or deer antlers. They aren’t even looking for the saola.
But the Saola Foundation expedition is, and it’s not easy. “The slopes are truly steep, the forest tangled, the rocks slippery, the places where we need to go don’t have paths. Undiagnosed fevers and infections [are] a certainty,” says Rob Timmins, the technical director of the foundation.
One team member had to be evacuated with dengue fever. Another got trench foot due to the endlessly wet conditions, and a landslide split the team for a week during the rainy season. At one point even a tracking dog had to be evacuated.
“[A team member] just strapped the dog to his chest and just marched out the forest with him,” Scotson says.
Still, it’s not all unpleasant. Onkeo Khamphavongsa, another tracker, describes the joy of waking to gibbons singing every morning or encountering groups of doucs — a type of monkey — 10 to 40 strong.
The team has already taken a photo of a frog that is likely previously unknown to Western science. There have also long been rumors of a monkey that has yet to be described by Western science in the remote karsts of the Annamite Mountains, based on reports from villagers and observations from Timmins and other researchers. What’s needed now is photographic evidence.
Timmins says he thinks they could probably find a new species every day if they had a full taxonomy team.
After months of training, the team is now entering deep habitat where the forest is potentially healthy enough — and remote enough — to still contain saola. While they haven’t detected the animal yet, Robichaud says they are seeing signs of an abundance of other species that no one would have expected, including hundreds of scat and visual sightings of serow, a goat-antelope.
But the question remains: Is the saola even out there? Or has it vanished in the last 10 years? The Saola Foundation estimates that the potential habitat of the animal is the size of New Jersey, but points to an analysis that shows only about 2% of that potential habitat has been intensively, and therefore sufficiently, explored for the saola.
Robichaud, who lives in Wisconsin, points out just how stealthy even large animals can be. He says the moment hunting season starts in his home state, all of a sudden, the 1.6 million white-tailed deer that live there are almost impossible to find.
“That’s what I think about,” he says. “I can’t even find a white-tailed deer in rural Wisconsin once the hunting season starts.”
The team remains convinced the saola is still out there, its secrets waiting to be discovered and, with some luck, its future ensured. But even if the search fails and the saola has been lost to time, many other needy species await, and Robichaud expects the team’s model will be helpful in future endeavors to find and protect them.
“Laos is a Buddhist country,” says Robichaud, “and the Buddha said no good effort is wasted.”
Reining in the unruly global trade in wild species could help mitigate the climate emergency, experts say.
According to trade records, people plucked more than 400,000 Central Asian tortoises from the wild to sell internationally between 2012 and 2021, mainly for the pet trade. About half of the animals across that decade were imported into the United States, where the going price for the reptiles — also known as Russian tortoises — is a mere $100-200.
These same tortoises, according to scientists, could have provided priceless climate benefits to the planet in the wild. A study published last year identified many animals with a high potential for protecting and enhancing carbon storage in natural landscapes. Tortoise species who make their homes in semi-arid places, such as Central Asian tortoises, were among them.
International Animal Rescue, for instance, ran a COP28 campaign asking policymakers to “give wildlife a seat at the table.” Ahead of the conference, the organization’s chief executive Gavin Bruce wrote, “By conserving wildlife and their habitats, forests are protected, ensuring that millions of tonnes of carbon remain stored in the flora and deep peat below.”
It’s that interaction between wildlife and habitat that makes a difference for the climate. As ecologist Simon Mustoe put it in his 2022 book Wildlife in the Balance, it “takes two to tango” when it comes to the functioning of ecosystems. Accordingly, “lose wildlife, you lose the basis for any environmental remediation to work,” he tells me by email.
In other words, Mustoe says that to weather the environmental crises of our time, we must protect and restore wild animal populations.
To achieve this, experts say the legal trade in wild species needs an overhaul.
Exploiting Climate-Valuable Species
“The exploitation of wild animals is one of the greatest threats to the survival of species,” says biologist Sandra Altherr, cofounder of the nonprofit Pro Wildlife.
In 2023 Altherr teamed up with other researchers to study the sustainability of the legal wildlife trade. Their paper stressed that trade can be sustainable if it’s well managed. But they found little proof of sustainability in most trade.
Their paper highlights 183 cases of legal yet seemingly unsustainable trade, including the blacktip reef shark. Exploited for meat, fins, and public aquariums, the shark’s population has plummeted by an estimated 30-49% over three generations. This is bad news for the climate, as the carbon storage study named blacktip, lemon and tiger sharks as key species in enhancing the uptake of CO2 in reef ecosystems.
Altherr warns the examples in the paper may only scratch the surface.
“Our case studies are only the indicative tip of the iceberg,” she says. “We assume that far more wildlife species, probably thousands, are utilized on a non-sustainable scale.”
Understanding the full scale and impact of the wildlife trade is difficult. Illegal trade is, by its nature, hard to quantify, while the legal trade in species is mostly understudied despite being gargantuan in scale.
Altherr says the legal wildlife trade is often assumed to be sustainable. But she and her co-authors argued this assumption is flawed, as most trade lacks the supportive evidence to demonstrate sustainability.
“Of particular concern is the lack of data on export volumes, wildlife populations utilized and the lack of evidence-based impact assessments of the trade,” says Altherr.
Strengthen Records and Assessments
The study’s authors identified several policies on legal trade that are ripe for strengthening. Those who profit most from the trade should fund improvements, they argued, which would place the burden of costs at the feet of importers, largely in richer nations.
The recommended reforms include instituting rigorous monitoring of exploited animals’ populations in the wild to inform decision-making. The authors also called for the creation of a centralized database for all international trade in wildlife — CITES and non-CITES species — structured toward enhancing traceability, transparency and, ultimately, sustainability.
CITES already maintains a database for the trade it regulates, but it frequently contains discrepancies and can fail to align with other data sources, such as customs records.
CITES also requires countries to produce “non-detriment” findings for species before trade occurs — which means assessing the impact of the trade on wild populations. However, the current system doesn’t provide for mandatory scrutiny of all assessments, nor is there an obligatory format. As a result, non-detriment findings do not exist in some cases and where they do, they vary from complex to extremely rudimentary.
Although it’s impossible to quantify, Wildlife Conservation Society vice president of international policy Susan Lieberman says she suspects that non-detriment findings are lacking in a “significant proportion” of cases.
Lieberman says the process is “slow, it’s bureaucratic and it works,” although not enough species are subject to reviews.
The paper suggested that the centralized database could involve formalizing countries’ reporting of non-detriment findings, allowing them to be better examined and studied. Lieberman believes more scrutiny is essential. “The only way the system can really work is if countries would have to share their NDFs,” she says.
Protect Threatened Species
CITES is also slow at bringing at-risk species under its regulatory wing. It takes over 10 years on average for CITES to list species in its Appendices after the International Union for Conservation of Nature identifies them as threatened by international commerce, according to analysis released in 2019. The researchers found that 28% of 958 threatened IUCN Red List species likely jeopardized by global trade lacked CITES protections as of 2018.
Skins confiscated from the illegal wildlife trade. Photo: Bill Fitzpatrick/FWS (public domain)
CITES parties are working to better identify candidates for listing, with varying views on what measures are necessary. The authors of the listing gap research called for the creation of a “near- automatic pathway” that would ensure CITES promptly considers protecting species the Red List has identified as threatened by international trade. Co-author Eyal Frank, an environmental economist, says “At a minimum, every species that is threatened with extinction should be brought up for discussion and potentially a vote for inclusion in Appendix I or II” where global commerce is a contributing factor.
The inclusion of species in CITES’ Appendices leads to various outcomes, such as bans on commercial trade in highly endangered species taken from the wild. Vast amounts of trade — commercial and non-commercial — continues under the treaty but it is subject to some controls, such as permit requirements. Critically, the listing of species in CITES makes trade in those wild animals visible to a certain extent.
In principle, wildlife farming is meant to limit extraction of animals from the wild. But a recent paper found that captive breeding operations commonly put pressure on wild populations. Although examples of sustainable farming exist, unsustainable practices include supplementing captive-bred populations with wild-caught individuals and fraudulently laundering wild animals through operations.
Caged tigers at a tiger farm. Photo: Karl Ammann / The Tiger Mafia. Used with permission.
The wildlife farming paper’s authors called for increased oversight of captive-breeding operations by regulatory authorities. Among other things, they recommended that CITES create a database of farmed species, spotlighting which ones are arduous to breed in captivity. When it is cheaper and easier to capture individuals of a species from the wild than breed them, the risk of illegal and unsustainable practices is higher. A database — and its use in decision-making — could help root out wrongdoing.
The Future Is Wildlife
Overall, Altherr insists that authorities need to start acting with much more caution. Rather than conservationists having to sound the alarm about issues with trade when it is already occurring, she says “we need a reversal of the burden of proof.”
“Instead, only what can be proven to be traded sustainably should be authorized for trade,” says Altherr.
Limiting trade in this way would help to tackle excessive exploitation — a major driver of the biodiversity crisis — and have climate benefits. It would also reduce harms to the world’s species as they grapple with other pressing threats, such as habitat loss, pollution and global warming.
As several researchers have argued, ensuring trade is sustainable would also benefit people who depend on it for their livelihoods by protecting their incomes into the future.
For ecologist Mustoe, people the world over have a lot to gain — or lose — from how wild animals fare moving forward.
“The single simplest thing we can do to pave the way for a future that’s more comfortable for humanity on all levels — food security, water security, climate security, disease security, everything — is rebuilding wildlife,” says Mustoe.
This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.
Science helps us understand the threats we face, but bold policies to fight climate change and extinction depend on our language, art, and experience with the natural world.
It’s midnight on the east coast of Australia, sometime in November 1998. I have just turned 11 years old, and I am lying on the cold, wet boat dock of my family home, counting streams of light as they race across the clear black sky. The Leonids meteor storm, a once-in-33-year phenomenon, has reached perihelion and is casting its spectacle down upon my youthful imagination.
This solitary commune with nature, this relinquishing of control and drifting along on the sensory experience, became a pastime I promised to chase throughout life. Between childhood and adolescence, I found myself sitting atop bleached white sand dunes on Moreton Island studying emergent patterns in schooling fish or floating above the Great Barrier Reef seeing colors I’d never known. And then there were the seemingly countless years in the corner of our sprawling backyard, observing the rhythms of hibiscus harlequin bugs. Life seemed to move to the tempo of the natural world as I daydreamed beneath the towering Norfolk pine trees that lined my stretch of the Pacific Ocean.
Now, as a musician in New York, most of my days are spent leaping between rehearsals, recording sessions, teaching, and performing. This contemporary, metropolitan existence hasn’t proven the most conducive to contemplative encounters with the natural world, but that world finds its way in.
A few years ago, my artistic work began to shift to create space for a fresh perspective on our relationship to the environment. I created projects that put natural processes at the core of their design: site-specific sound and light installations powered by native plants, music composed using earthquake data and the rhythms of historic thunderstorms. Most recently I’ve been working on sound installations at the nexus of art, science and policy, collaborating with scientists from the European Joint Research Centre and policy officers from the European Commission Directorate-General for Environment.
Nester plays trumpet overlooking Ka Lae. Provided.
Besides moving me closer to my youthful experiences, working with scientists on the leading edge of ecological degradation research has taught me vital lessons.
Most pressing, environmental policy no longer has the luxury of remaining slow. We face the greatest challenges in human history, and it’s crucial that policymakers at all levels of government create enforceable regulations that produce environmental improvements immediately. The 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has painted a bleak picture of the damage already caused by the climate crisis and asks for urgent action. Most concerning is that the IPCC has produced six reports since its initial findings in 1990, all of which prioritize reducing CO2 emissions — and yet reduction has not occurred.
But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. While it’s unlikely we will achieve the 2015 Paris Climate Accords goal to keep temperature rise below 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels, every decimal point in global temperature maintenance acts to decrease the severity of the coming impact. It is not an all or nothing equation: 1.7°C is indeed better than 2.0°C. As the age-old adage goes, “The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now.”
Another lesson: Instead of bold policies, we’ve put all our faith in technology to solve the problem. I too hope technology will save us, but a diversified approach holds the potential for a safer future. Let’s continue to advance technology to turn the tide on climate change, but let’s also look to the immediate implementation of nature-based solutions. These not only give us more time to tinker with ideas for geoengineering, such as Klaus Lackner’s CO2 scrubbing artificial trees, but may help slow biodiversity loss. While it’s possible that novel technologies will help lower global temperatures, every extinction within the biodiversity crisis leading to that day is permanent — there is no bringing back the Labrador duck or the western black rhino.
Most surprisingly, my experience has taught me that science is not enough.
It may seem opportunistic for an artist whose work highlights the natural world to write this, but these are not my words alone. Frans Timmermans, former vice president of the European Commission, made the following statement in his closing remarks at the 2023 European Environment Network Conference:
Due to our training and empirical backgrounds, we think that if we’ve got the facts right, and we’re right, that automatically that will have the power to convince everyone. Sadly, we learn everyday that’s not the case…If we are unable to translate what we discover, what we see, what scares us because it is having an impact, what we know needs to be done, if we are unable to translate that in images, in words, in concepts that relate to the people who give us the support to take the measures we need, we will fail.
There is indeed a serious failure in climate and biodiversity crises messaging. We’ve lived too long with the notion that nature is inferior to us and here to serve us, and the economic fearmongering surrounding solutions to these crises has added a weight that doesn’t seem to engage action but confuses and overwhelms. In his 1990 work Le contrat naturel (incidentally, published the same year as the first IPCC report), French philosopher Michel Serres discussed making peace with the world in order to save ourselves – the creation of a contract between Earth and its inhabitants. But we cannot create a contract with that which we do not know or may have forgotten.
In 2007, and again in 2012, the Oxford Junior Dictionary (designed for seven-year-old children) removed a significant number of words related to nature in favor of words such as broadband, chatroom, and voicemail. The editors deemed these more fitting for the modern-day childhood experience. This sparked Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris to publish The Lost Words: A Spell Book, in the hopes of returning British children to the splendor of the world outside the virtual. Meanwhile, some 1,800 miles away in Lapland, the Indigenous Sámi children who inhabit northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula have 300 words for snow.
It was Baba Dioum, the Senegalese forestry engineer, who famously made the comment that “in the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” It is science that helps us understand, but it is our language, our art, and our personal experiences with the natural world that teach us to love and reconnect. Without these we have little hope in transforming the public policy that will secure the future many of us want.
The arts’ ability to facilitate meaningful introspective encounters with the material and abstract experiences of this world can, and does, inspire action. I think of Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch installation of 2014, in which glacial ice was collected from Greenland and allowed to melt in public spaces around major European cities. His work disrupted the daily pulse of urban life and offered the public an immediate experience of the climate crisis, creating a tangible encounter with what can still sometimes feel at a distance from our northern metropolitan existence. Echoing the words of Dioum, Eliasson and Minik Rosing issued an essay to coincide with Ice Watch in which they made the argument that:
Facts are one part; just as guilt does not inspire initiative, people will not act on facts alone. We are inspired to act by emotional and physical experience. Knowledge can tell us what we should do to achieve our goals, but the goals and the urge to act must arise from our emotions.
Affecting people, influencing emotion, and changing minds is what art does. It was the urge to stir emotion that pushed Agnes Denes to design her 1982 Wheatfield – A Confrontation, in which a two-acre field of wheat was planted in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park). The golden straws of grain stared down Wall Street and the World Trade Center for months while being tended to and ultimately harvested. The work was a symbol of food, waste, commerce, trade, ecology, and economy, on land worth $4.5 billion.
And then there’s Chris Jordan’s Midway: Message from the Gyre. In a series of photographs from 2009, Jordan shows the bodies of juvenile albatross who died from consuming plastic waste on Midway Atoll. These moving and disturbing images have confronted the world with the extent to which our modern mass consumption has affected the environment. The project demonstrates that even a small ring of volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean, some 2000 miles from the nearest major landmass, are no longer safe from plastic.
Plenty of works simply celebrating the beauty of nature are also having an influence. Ruup, designed by Birgit Õigus, are giant wooden megaphones that amplify the sounds of forests and are returning audiences to a slow appreciation of the subtlety of bustling ecosystems. In London’s Kew Gardens, Wolfgang Buttress’ Hive, an immersive sound and light installation, takes real-time data from a beehive to hum an ever-changing, generative experience of life inside a bee colony.
Our great modern memory loss of how intimately intertwined human lives are with the natural world has reached its zenith. When I arrived as one of 20 artists at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in 2022, an opening speech concluded with the comment that “it has gotten so bad, we called in the artists.”
Europe isn’t alone in recognizing the potential for the arts to play a role in creative solutions to the climate crisis and our growing disengagement with nature. On Jan. 30 of this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts, announced an inaugural Artist-in-Residence Program. This initiative aims to integrate artists into the effort to reveal new ideas for water restoration and climate resilience and help advance the goals of the National Estuary Program and Urban Waters Federal Partnership. There’s a growing recognition that art, in addition to connecting with the public, helps push those who make and implement policy.
In recent years my work has afforded me audiences with more than one Australian prime minister, a handful of U.S. senators, ambassadors, a director-general of Europe, and even a sitting U.S. president. There is power in art to reach the hearts and minds of a wide array of people and help direct attention to the beauty of the natural world, the terror of our present relationship to her, and offer potential solutions for a brighter, more connected future.
As I look to the year 2031 — one year after the European Commission will have either succeeded or failed in its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% and also the year comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle is once again due to reach perihelion on its 33-year orbit — I wonder how the global experience of the Leonids meteor storm will land. As a child watching the storm unleashed a vast universe of wonder in me, and there is potential for that same experience again.
But as our planet continues to warm, the number of extinction events increase, and we become further estranged from the rhythms of the natural world, future inspiration from the majesty of nature will be predicated on the swift implementation of enforceable policies that consider the totality of global life and longevity beyond the immediate potential effects on an economic experience some believe they are accustomed to.
Planning for 2031 or 2064 or 2097 rather than the end of this financial year seems to create a special kind of conflict in our human minds — but time can be measured in many ways. The Leonids will light up Earth’s sky for thousands of years regardless of our speed to action — how long do we want to be here to see it? How many generations of Sumatran elephants or vaquita porpoises or monarch butterflies are left? How many words for snow will be lost?
As the dams come down, crews prepare for miles of new vegetation to rise up. That starts with thousands of tiny acorns.
On a cool October morning, Joshua Chenoweth and Alauna Grant crane their necks and peer into a canopy of round-lobed oak leaves.
“This one is loaded,” says Chenoweth, taking in the twisty limbs and furrowed gray bark. “Oaks are slow growers; that’s an old tree.”
Chenoweth, senior riparian ecologist with the Yurok Tribe, is leading the effort to replant newly revealed reservoir footprints as four dams are removed from the Klamath River in northern California and southern Oregon. To prepare for the mammoth endeavor, his crews have been collecting native seeds from around the project area. Today they’re gathering acorns from white oak trees along Scotch Creek, a tributary of the Klamath.
Photo: Juliet Grable
The oak leaves are still green, but the shrubs along the creek have turned shades of rust and russet; adjacent, where western meadowlarks call, is a field of straw. While Chenoweth heads upstream to scout more trees, Grant, assistant crew lead, stays behind to collect. She works quietly and methodically, examining each acorn, discarding any with obvious holes or cracks or that yield to the pressure of a finger. Later the nuts will be soaked in a five-gallon bucket and the “floaters” discarded.
Grant, a member of the Karuk Tribe, joined the vegetation crew in 2020, after the paint store where she was working went out of business. Though it can be tough — “You gotta keep drinking water and get your shade breaks,” Grant warns — she loves working outside and giving back to the Earth.
“I’m excited to see what the river is going to look like,” Grant says. “It’s going to be such a different landscape. It will actually be a river again.”
Photo: Juliet Grable
The region’s Tribes, which include the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Shasta and Klamath, have long depended on the Klamath River’s abundant salmon runs. Their members have been among the most passionate and effective voices advocating for the removal of the dams, which have cut off fish habitat and impaired water quality for over a century.
Now that it’s happening, the removal of the four dams of the Lower Klamath Project is being hailed as the biggest dam removal in U.S. history. Even more significantly, it’s one of the largest restoration projects ever.
Resource Environmental Solutions, spearheading the restoration, tapped Chenoweth for his experience revegetating two former reservoirs on the Elwha River in southwest Washington. This week his goal is to collect 500 pounds of white oak acorns, which he hopes will translate into 30 to 40 viable nuts per pound — and then 15,000 to 20,000 potential new trees. Acorns don’t store well, and the ones his crew is collecting now must be planted within a year.
“I’m hoping to grow 5,000 to 10,000 in nurseries, which would be ready to plant in 2025,” he explains. “If I could have an equal number to seed [directly] in the reservoirs, maybe I could get another 10,000 to germinate.”
For a project of this scale, Chenoweth must think in thousands — or tens of thousands. RES is responsible for revegetating 2,200 acres of formerly submerged lakebed, along with several miles of tributary creeks.
The acorns are just one element of this effort. Since 2018, RES has contracted crews to collect seed from around 100 different native plant species.
It would be impossible to directly collect enough seed to cover such a vast area, so several commercial nurseries have partnered with RES to “amplify” seed. By growing plants specifically for their progeny, a single seed can yield hundreds or even thousands more. So far RES has secured 80,000 pounds of “pure live seed” — about 15 billion individual viable seeds.
“Seed mixes tailored for different locations across the project area will cover the bulk of the reservoir footprint,” says Dave Coffman, geoscientist and project director at RES. They will supplement seeding with trees such as blue elderberry and Klamath plum, shrubs like buckbrush, and an array flowering plants.
Their approach is “replanting by community” — grouping species that will help each other thrive by holding in moisture and buffering from the wind. Planting densely will also help keep invasive weeds like medusa head and reed canary grass from taking over the reservoir footprints, which will essentially be blank slates once drained.
Early on RES hired Siskiyou BioSurvey, a group of nine botanists based in Ashland, Oregon, to help identify appropriate native species and find good collecting locations. Some plants have been chosen for their cultural significance or importance to pollinators. Hedgerow Farms, a nursery near Davis, California, is growing thousands of milkweed rhizomes for the project. Milkweed is the host plant of monarch butterfly caterpillars, and the flowers attract a range of bees and butterflies.
“The faster we can bring pollinators to the reservoir footprints, the faster the rest of the plantings become successful,” says Coffman.
The plantings will help stitch together the landscape, but the river will do most of the work all by itself, he adds. “The approach is one of process-based restoration, where over time the river will do what the river does.”
Planting the First Acorns
On Jan. 16 Chenoweth’s crew gathers at Iron Gate reservoir to begin seeding along the shoreline. Less than a week before, the gate at the base of Iron Gate, the lowest of the Klamath River dams, was cracked open, and a slurry of water, sediment and rocks began gushing out, initiating the draining — or drawdown — of a reservoir first filled in 1962.
Chenoweth explains the strategy: “Acorns first; then we’re going to seed it. Next, we’ll plant shrubs and trees starting on February 3.”
Crews at Iron Gate. Photo: Juliet Grable
Five botanists from Siskiyou BioSurvey are here, and Chenoweth’s crew has staffed up. Most of the dozen or so planters are members of the Yurok Tribe.
“Let’s keep all foot traffic in the flagged zone,” Chenoweth calls as the crew files down to the shore. The seeds of nonnative weeds love to cling to muddy boots.
The shoreline has already dropped several feet, exposing a band of sticky mud skimmed with green — strands of an aquatic plant, exposed and dying, that emit a pungent, briny odor.
They start on a north-facing shore with the acorns some of them collected last fall. “To me it’s a big symbolic moment to have a member of the Yurok Tribe put the first acorn in the ground in the reservoir footprint,” says Dave Meurer, director of community affairs at RES.
Richard Green, field technician and Yurok Tribe member, demonstrates the technique. The mud is so soft he can drive the nut in without using his hori-hori knife. He plants the acorns, swollen from an overnight soaking in water, sideways, then covers them with sticky mud.
Others join him, and soon clusters of bright blue and red flags dot the drab shoreline. Once 30 clusters are planted, a crew member walks into the center and takes a GPS reading; then the crew pulls the flags and repeats the process farther along the shore.
Photo: Juliet Grable
Chenoweth leaves one crew to plant acorns and takes another to start seeding. They’re using a mix that includes yarrow, fescue, wild rye and bunchgrasses — hardy natives that will thrive in this rocky upland zone. Grant and another crew member demonstrate the hand-broadcasting technique: keep moving and take advantage of the wind. As she tosses handful after handful, the tiny seeds disappear into the mud.
From Overlook Point, in their high-vis vests, the crew are bright specks on the fissured shoreline. Though RES may turn to seeding from the air via helicopter if they start running out of time this spring, they will rely on hand sowing as much as possible.
“We know for a fact, based on experience, that we’ll get better coverage with seed and higher level of success with hand planting,” says Coffman.
The crew is lucky: They can easily access this part of the reservoir by truck. “It’s intense, physical work,” says Greg Carey, cofounder of Siskiyou BioSurvey. Iron Gate reservoir is sinuous, skinny, and nine miles long; later this week they’ll be planting in areas that can only be accessed by foot, which means packing 40 pounds of acorns cross-country, boots taking on more mud with each step.
Several of the planters wear gloves, masks, caps and hoodies to brace against the steady breeze coming off the reservoir. Come summer the landscape will turn hot, dry, and windy — tough conditions for plants to take root. To take advantage of the residual moisture in the mud, Chenoweth’s crews will chase the new shoreline as the lake recedes, repeating the process at the two other reservoirs: Copco Lake, a few miles upstream of Iron Gate, and Topsy, behind J.C. Boyle dam in Oregon. Before long the Klamath River’s new shape will reveal itself, and the quagmires of mud will bloom.
Carey, who typically takes winters off, will be out with the planting crew as much as possible to witness the landscape transforming around them.
“We’re smelling the lakebed; all of this biology that has just died and become nutrients,” says Carey. “The plants are just going to explode.”
Conservationists in Namibia have found the fate of people and cheetahs are closely intertwined — and so are solutions to help both.
Today we know a good bit about cheetahs: They’re the fastest land animal, going from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds. They’re expert hunters, although they often lose their prey to bigger predators. And they also face big threats, occupying just 9% of their historic range. But when Dr. Laurie Marker first began working with the animals in the early 1970s, many people didn’t even know if they were a dog or a cat.
“They’ve got dog-like claws,” she explains. “I think that confused all the farmers.”
Marker has dedicated her career to closing that knowledge gap. She began working with cheetahs in 1974 at the Wildlife Safari, a wildlife park in Oregon, which included trips to South West Africa (now Namibia) to research the rewilding of cheetahs born in captivity. During her time there she realized that farmers were killing hundreds of cheetahs a year to protect their herds, and some of the world’s last remaining cheetah populations could be lost.
So in 1990 she moved to Namibia and launched the Cheetah Conservation Fund, an organization that does research, education and conservation to help secure a future for wild cheetahs and support surrounding communities.
Laurie Marker. Photo: Jennifer Leigh Warner
Marker spoke to The Revelator about how dogs can help cheetahs, what risks climate change poses, and why addressing poverty would aid conservation.
Where did cheetahs historically range?
Around 1900 there were about 100,000 cheetahs, and they were found throughout Asia and Africa. They had a very large distribution. But by the 1950s they were gone in most of the areas of Asia — the last of the Asian cheetahs are in Iran, and there’s probably less than 20 there. By the 1950s they were gone in India. Today there’s only about 7,000 cheetahs left, and they’re found in about 23 countries in 31 populations, of which 20 of those populations are under 100 individuals.
We have put cheetahs back into India in the last year, and I just got word two of the cheetahs that we actually sent over had a litter of cubs. So today, I think there’s three or four new cubs in India.
Conflicts with people are a big threat to cheetahs. What solutions have you found?
The majority — more than 80% — of the cheetahs found today are outside of protected areas. Here in Namibia, about 90% are found outside of protected areas. When I moved here, it was to find out more about how they were living on the farmlands with livestock farmers and then what kinds of programs could be developed.
What we’ve done in the last 30 years is develop a variety of programs so that cheetahs and people could live in harmony together. Many of those are about good livestock management, good rangeland management and good wildlife management. I think farmers around the world think predators are all going to eat all their livestock. Where we as farmers can actually play a key role in protecting our livestock. It’s not that much work, but you have to think about it. Predators aren’t just out there wanting to eat your livestock. What they want is an easy meal.
Puppies being raised as livestock guarding dogs. Photos: Isabella Groc
So we use livestock guarding dogs, which we breed and place with farmers, that protect their livestock. Around here people mostly have goats, sheep and cattle. And the other area that I work in is up in Somaliland where there’s mostly goats, sheep and camels. Through an integrated program like good livestock management and having dogs, you can actually reduce your livestock loss 80 to 100% and not have to kill predators. We not only like cheetahs, we like all the other predators because predators play a really important role in the health of the ecosystems.
We have leopards, which are harder to live with, but if you get the right practices down, it is all the same. We also have hyenas, brown and spotted, as well as jackals and caracals. Those are the main predators around.
Cheetahs actually are one of the best hunters on the savannas. When they eat, they eat very rapidly and then move away. So there’s usually things left over that allows for more biodiversity. For instance, I always say to the farming community that if you have cheetahs on your land, the cheetah will make a kill and the jackals will be eating off of what the cheetah killed, and the jackal isn’t going to be in your goat yard. Not only is it feeding the jackal, but it’s feeding the birds of prey and all the other insects and small carnivorous mammals. That’s why you end up with greater biodiversity, and that’s the important part of a top predator within a healthy ecosystem.
Are more protected areas needed?
I think in Africa there might be 12 game reserves large enough for cheetahs. Cheetahs have one of the largest home ranges of any animal on Earth. So between the cheetahs and the African wild dogs, which we also work with here, you have huge ranges. And so that means you have to develop programs within those ranges so that the people and the wildlife can live together.
In Namibia about 20% of the land is protected by the government. And then another 20% are conservancies. Namibia is a leader in conservancy management where the communities actually manage their natural resources and they’re able to benefit from that management as well. We’ve been very active in trying to help develop these kinds of initiatives throughout other areas in Africa as well.
Our human-wildlife conflict laws are different from most countries. In many countries people get compensation if they lose their livestock [to wildlife]. And Namibia won’t do that because we believe that you’re developing farmers that are just losing their livestock to get paid. Namibia has tried to be very proactive by having conservancies, by having things like livestock guarding dogs, and good livestock and wildlife management training programs, so that the farmers actually benefit through having access to their own wildlife through ecotourism.
Is there a lot of overlap in the techniques you use and those used by others in the United States and Europe who are working on reducing conflict between livestock and other predators like wolves?
Yes. The livestock guarding dog program started in Oregon and that was back in the middle ’70s and early ’80s, where I learned about it. Now our programs [in Namibia] have been going on since the early 1990s and we have spread the word. We published all of our data. People monitor what we do very closely. We work with a Turkish breed called the Anatolian Shepherd and Kangal dogs and they’ve been used for about 5,000 years. I went to Turkey and spent a lot of time learning about how the dogs work from the Turkish herders and they usually have three dogs — a female and two males. The female wakes up and she barks, and the males are huge and go after whatever might be around, but also their bark is loud.
You have to have enough dogs to protect against wolves because wolves are also a pack animal. And so for us, cheetahs aren’t a pack animal, leopards aren’t a pack animal. So we can actually work with individual dogs with herds up to 200 to 300 animals and have great success.
But we also encourage the use of herders as well. I think a lot of people in America don’t utilize [herders] a lot. They throw the animals out in the field, in the open range, and then blame anything that might happen. And I’m opposed to that. I am a livestock farmer myself, we have a dairy goat farm, and my agriculture background is linked together with the wildlife background. For me, I like my livestock and I like the wildlife and I like the predators. I feel it’s my responsibility to take care of my livestock through good management.
What kind of a threat does climate change pose?
Cheetahs are found in the most arid and semi-arid landscapes in all of the world with the poorest people on Earth. The animals are being affected through the loss of habitat and what’s going to happen with climate change. We’ve got much hotter days, longer days that are hot, less days that have rain. All of these are affecting and will affect the movements of the animals, the diseases that potentially animals can get and can carry — the prey base will be very much affected, and the grazing lands. That’s going to shift the migration of these animals and put them possibly in even more conflict with the human population.
Cheetah running. Photo: Jennifer Leigh Warner
I think livelihood development is a really critical part of the solution. [Too much grazing has led to] desertification, you end up with either sand deserts taking over, or with invasive bushes taking over, or thickened bushes. We’ve developed a whole habitat restoration project because here in Namibia, an area about the size of California is so thickly thorn-bushed that it has reduced the economic value for agriculture as well as the grazing lands for the wildlife and livestock.
We see this in many of the areas where cheetahs are found because of the effect of this overgrazing by the livestock. With this form of desertification — where you’ve got thickened thorn bushes, no grasses, and then the underground water is being taken up by these invasive bushes — it causes even a greater effect for climate change.
What kind of action would you like to see?
I don’t think anybody in the western world really cares about the poor people that I work with in the middle of Africa, but I really care about them and they don’t want to be poor starving farmers. It’s getting worse and worse. We are helping develop alternative livelihoods and funding to assist greater wildlife and livestock management techniques to help the people get out of poverty.
Then we can have more habitats where animals like the cheetah can live, and when you end up with a top predator, like a cheetah, you end up with a much greater amount of biodiversity.
Often these arid landscapes are called “dead lands,” but they’re only dead because they’re overgrazed and the biodiversity isn’t there. We really need to re-establish biodiversity and it can be done, but we first need to reduce the impact on the land by people. And that revolves around poverty reduction plans, education and the development of conservancies.
I think that the cheetah can be an icon — it can help people accept predators on a worldwide basis, but we just need to understand that we can live together.
This elusive predator’s stripes act as camouflage, but that’s not enough to protect them from poachers and habitat loss.
Species name:
Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae or sondaica)
Description:
The Sumatran tiger is the world’s smallest tiger subspecies* but still the largest predator in Indonesia. An adult female weighs about 198 pounds (90 kg), while an adult male can be more than 264 pounds (120 kg), with a shoulder height of about 23 inches (60 cm). Sumatran tigers have great day and night vision, very strong canine teeth, and impressive claws for holding and gripping moving prey. Their vision is six times better than humans’ at night, but hearing is their most acute sense, mainly used for hunting. They can detect high-pitched sounds produced by prey. Each individual Sumatran tiger has nearly 100 unique stripe patterns, like human fingerprints, which provide camouflage. Based on these stripes, scientists can identify individual tigers in the wild.
* (Editor’s note: Tiger subspecies remain a matter of ongoing scientific discussion.)
Where it’s found:
Endemic to the island of Sumatra, this predator still lives in 24 of 38 landscapes larger than 96 square miles (250 square km), the smallest area that can support a breeding unit.
IUCN Red List status:
Endangered at the species level of Panthera tigris. Assessment for all subspecies, including Sumatran tigers, has been discharged by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature awaiting further reassessments. Detail about Sumatran tiger status, however, is provided in the supplementary material of the assessment.
Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
Major threats:
Conflict between tigers and humans and illegal poaching and trafficking remain the most pressing threat to these big cats. Meanwhile rapid forest loss has left their habitat fragmented. Agriculture, the main driver of deforestation, contributed to an estimated loss of 27% of tropical forests across the island between 2000 and 2016. With demand for products such as palm oil, coffee and timber only increasing, this trend will continue.
Notable conservation programs or legal protections:
The Sumatran tiger is legally protected by the government of Indonesia through the Law No. 5 of 1990 regarding the Conservation of Natural Resources and Ecosystems. Key conservation priorities include:
Strengthening the capacity of Sumatran tiger conservation through research – exploration, knowledge management, and training and education.
Increasing the effectiveness of tiger landscape management in both major landscapes and marginal habitats.
Strengthening the protection of tigers from habitat destruction, poaching, and conflict through effective patrols and law enforcement.
Strengthening networks and partnerships for conservation that increase mutual benefits, supports, and added value to the community and stakeholders.
Improving infrastructure and strengthening human-tiger conflict mitigation to save problem tigers and threatened populations.
Increasing permeability and connectivity between habitat clusters in fragmented habitats.
My favorite experience:
I have been studying the Sumatran tiger using camera traps since 1998. Discovering tigers and other wildlife species, especially those with low detection probabilities, has always been my favorite experience. Together with the San Diego Zoo, where I’m a research fellow, I also learned many interesting new things related to technology in wildlife conservation, including the use of GPS collars, thermal drones, and new analytical techniques to strengthen the management of the Sumatran tigers and other key wildlife. As a senior manager, I’ve also had an opportunity to build and enhance the capacity of young people to become a new generation in Sumatran tiger and wildlife conservation.
What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?
We need studies on potential connectivity among Sumatran tiger landscapes, with an emphasis on the roles of marginal habitats; nature-based solutions to strengthen active involvement of forest-edge communities in Sumatran tiger and key wildlife conservation; and technologies to enhance the capacity of forest rangers to prevent and detect illegal hunting on the tiger and principal prey.
Key research:
Goodrich, J., H. T. Wibisono, D. Miquelle, A. Lynam, E. Sanderson, S. Chapman, T. N. E. Gray, A. Harihar, P. Chanchani. 2022. Panthera tigris: IUCN Redlist status update. Catnews, 76: 12 – 13.
Wibisono, H. T. 2021. An Island-Wide Status of Sumatran tiger (Panthera Tigris Sumatrae) and Principal Prey in Sumatra, Indonesia. A Ph.D Dissertation, Department of Entomology and Wildlife Conservation, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Delaware, DE, US. https://udspace.udel.edu/items/c86c7184-8214-463b-ad51-f5da61b98132
Ongoing research finds that trashcans can feed and boost crow populations, which comes with a potentially deadly cost for some other bird species.
Last summer a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia headed into the field to study the food web linking a local bird community. But their destination wasn’t a temperate rainforest or rocky coastline — it was urban Vancouver on trash day.
Their goal: untangling hidden ways in which food in the city’s trash cans may shape its ecosystem.
The project is the brainchild of Dan Forrest, a Ph.D. student at the university’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, who says urban trees held special significance for him while he was growing up in Philadelphia.
“I depended on these urban parks and green spaces to get a bit of respite from the urban hustle and bustle,” he says.
But not everyone enjoyed the same benefits he did. “I saw that these spaces weren’t distributed evenly everywhere around the city.” Some people, often those in richer, whiter neighborhoods, had greater access than others to urban nature. Even then, he worried the trend would expand and worsen. “I knew that urbanization was fast becoming one of the major forces for change in our world.”
When he arrived in Vancouver as a grad student, he and other students and faculty members noticed large numbers of crows and gulls coming onto campus to raid trash cans. How, they wondered, was the easy availability of food waste affecting the urban ecosystem?
It’s not a small question, as 30-40% of food in the United States — and as much as 60% in Canada — ends up uneaten and in the trash. This can be a bonanza for urban wildlife — including crows, who tend to thrive in cities.
But if food waste attracts unusual numbers of these gregarious, intelligent birds, could it create ripple effects through the rest of the local bird community?
In addition to eating trash, crows often prey on other birds, raiding their nests to eat eggs and young. According to Forrest, Vancouver’s robin population has been declining for decades, while black-capped chickadees have been holding steady or even increasing; he wonders if this could be, at least in part, because robins’ open cup nests are more vulnerable to crows than chickadee nests hidden in tree cavities.
These questions eventually became the focus of his dissertation research, which began last summer. Forrest and a group of undergraduate research assistants woke up before sunrise to walk through neighborhoods across the city, note trash receptacles with visible food waste, and observe the behavior of birds in the area. “What were they doing? Were they eating, calling, interacting with another species?” says Forrest. “And if they were eating something, what was it?”
He’s still analyzing the data, but it’s already clear that human trash “is making up a substantial portion of crows’ diet [in Vancouver],” says Forrest, and “they’re congregating in areas where there’s lots of food waste.”
The next step will be to connect the presence of crows with overall urban bird diversity across Vancouver neighborhoods, drawing on a range of data sources. In addition to nest predation, “there could be a number of different reasons why there are fewer [bird] species around where there are crows — because they’re scared of the crows, or they’re being outcompeted by the crows,” says Forrest.
Forrest is already in touch with the city government, and if it does turn out that crows attracted by trash are having negative impacts on bird communities, he hopes to work with officials to make changes that will benefit both birds and people, such as introducing more crow-resistant trash bins or improving trash pickup services in lower-income areas — changes that could be made in other cities, too.
Forrest’s project adds to a rich body of research on the dynamics of urban bird communities. Past studies have uncovered complex relationships between bird feeders (another artificial source of food for wildlife), nest predators, and songbirds’ nesting success. And as Forrest has noticed in both Philadelphia and Vancouver, socioeconomic and racial inequality among human communities affects birds, too — for example, neighborhoods in Los Angeles where Black people were once prevented from buying homes by “redlining” still have greater bird diversity than historically Black neighborhoods, which tend to have denser housing and fewer trees.
Although it’s still in the early stages, other experts are intrigued by his project’s potential. Desirée Narango of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, an ornithologist and urban ecologist who is not involved in Forrest’s research, says he is embarking on “an ambitious study, which is definitely admirable. I think it’s exciting that he’s already having conversations with the city, because that’s how urban ecology can really make a difference, by actually having these conversations, determining what sort of actions can help people and wildlife, and then making it happen.”
Forrest notes that his research isn’t intended to vilify crows — or any other species. Crows may be a threat to smaller birds, but as Forrest acknowledges, a lot of people like them, too. On his surveys, he met people who carried peanuts in their pockets to feed crows while walking in their neighborhoods.
“I don’t necessarily want to make a judgment call on behalf of the community,” Forrest says. Instead, he wants to help residents make better-informed decisions by revealing the hidden dynamics of the urban ecosystem they’re part of. That may start by paying better attention to what we eat — and what we, as a society, throw away.
Conservationists agree that Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands are an ecologically important area, but how to protect them isn’t as simple.
Outdoor adventurers visiting Oregon often flock to the rocky coastline, climb snow-capped Mount Hood, or peer into the gleaming blue waters of Crater Lake. But few make it to the Owyhee Canyonlands, in the remote southeast corner of the state. Here millions of acres of desert wilderness stretch into southwestern Idaho and northern Nevada — a sea of sagebrush interrupted by jagged red-rock canyons, clear streams, rollicking whitewater, riverside hot springs and darky, starry night skies.
The Owyhee offers recreation opportunities for bikers, hikers, paddlers, fishers and other travelers. But it’s the area’s conservation potential that has attracted attention recently. It contains a huge expanse of sagebrush steppe, a habit in decline as the desert West has been plowed, paved and grazed. Intact sagebrush steppe is needed by far-ranging animals like pronghorn, elk and bighorn sheep, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has identified the Owyhee as a priority conservation area for imperiled greater sage grouse. It’s home to some 250 species, including 28 endemic plants and 14 bats — wild, diverse, and largely unprotected.
But that could change.
Wilderness or Monument
Protecting the Owyhee has long been a goal of conservationists, and legislation now in Congress could help — depending on who you ask. The Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act would designate 1.1 million acres as wilderness in the Owyhee that’s currently managed by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s supported by Friends of the Owyhee, Oregon Natural Desert Association, the Wilderness Society, Conservation Lands Foundation and other regional and national organizations.
The bill also has the backing of Oregon’s two senators. It was introduced in the summer of 2023 by Sen. Ron Wyden and is cosponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley. It passed the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in December with bipartisan support, which is further than previous versions of the bill introduced in years past have made it. But that could be as far as it goes.
Three Forks Recreation site in the Owyhee, Oregon. Photo: Bureau of Land Management (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
“We recognize that we’re in an election year and that the House of Representatives hasn’t been prioritizing conservation legislation,” says Ryan Houston, executive director of Oregon Natural Desert Association. “Actually getting this bill all the way through both houses of Congress and getting it on the president’s desk before the end of this Congress at the end of December are really long odds.”
That’s why supporters are also pursuing another strategy: calling on the Biden administration to designate the area a national monument.
“We know that the Biden administration is interested in monuments and given the groundwork that’s been laid here, we believe this is a good, viable alternative to the legislation if Congress doesn’t act,” he says.
Land designated as “wilderness” comes with protections under the Wilderness Act, which includes closing the area to future mining claims. A monument would come with whatever protections are in the president’s proclamation, which can also include limitations on road building and industrial development.
Preventing any industrialization of the Owyhee would be particularly important.
The sagebrush steppe landscape across the intermountain West is a heavily fragmented type of habitat, which makes large remaining swathes critical for wildlife. “When we have intact areas where wildlife can move across tens of thousands of acres without having to interface with industrial facilities, we can maintain strong wildlife populations, we can maintain good healthy habitat,” says Houston. “But once it gets fragmented, that can have significant impacts on wildlife.”
An uninterrupted landscape will also better help plants and animals cope with climate change as they need to shift their ranges to higher elevations as temperatures warm.
“Species need to be able to move across elevation gradients to be able to accommodate and adapt to a changing environment,” he says. “Having connected habitats across elevational gradients, soil types, geology, moisture and precipitation regimes — all of those kinds of forms of connection are fundamentally what help protect biodiversity on a landscape like this.”
The Grazing Problem
While that’s true, not all environmentalists see the current legislation or national monument effort as the best ways to protect the area’s wildlife and wilderness characteristics. One of those is Katie Fite, director of public lands for Wildlands Defense.
[The legislation] “would be a tragedy for biodiversity and for anyone seeking a real wilderness experience on public lands,” she says. “It’s a ticket for destroying the very wilderness-worthy and monument-worthy values that are out there in the Owyhee landscape.”
At issue is the fact that the vast majority — upwards of 90% — of Oregon’s high desert lands managed by the BLM are used for cattle grazing, and this includes the 1.1 million acres proposed for wilderness designation, says Houston. Grazing can threaten the ecological health of sagebrush steppe landscapes. Cows trample native vegetation, pollute water sources and cause streambank erosion. Under either the wilderness bill or a potential national monument, that grazing is likely to continue. Under the 1964 Wilderness Act existing active grazing permits are allowed to continue.
Cattle grazing in an allotment east of the Owyhee River Canyon. Photo: Bureau of Land Management (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
In the case of a national monument, the president has the choice. “But in this case, based on the other monuments the president has established, based on the politics here, based on who’s around the table, we would fully expect that the president would establish a monument that would allow for the continuance of grazing subject to existing law and regulation,” he says. “It can change in the future because the BLM has the role and the responsibility to manage grazing. So in the future, there could be more, there could be less, it could be different. But a wilderness designation itself isn’t a trigger that changes it.”
While Houston says that “impacts of grazing on that landscape have been significant.” He also sees a path for better management. “In both cases there are ways that management could improve conditions on the landscape,” he says. “The first goal is to protect the habitat, the next to manage for conservation.”
The BLM is charged with managing for multiple uses, which includes goals that are often opposed — like protecting wildlife and managing grazing. Designating land as a monument or wilderness can help narrow the focus, says Houston.
But Fite sees grazing in a wilderness area like the Owyhee as fundamentally problematic.
“I view this as an attack on the Wilderness Act, on wilderness as a whole and on public lands by enshrining grazing,” she says. “It would degrade the very meaning of monument and wilderness.”
And it would greatly imperil the ecosystem the conservation effort seeks to protect, she says.
Grazing can fuel the spread of nonnative invasive plants such as cheatgrass and Medusahead, which are highly flammable, she says. It’s a problem made worse as ranchers haul water into more remote areas for livestock, and further spread invasive plants, which proliferate near water sources in the arid landscape.
“Areas of extensive trampling disturbance around water sources are epicenters for weed infestation,” she says. “They’re hauling the water along these roads and then putting the trough out in the middle of nowhere. Once you get these weeds going out there, there’s really no going back.”
Additional Risks
Besides grazing, other threats loom, such as industrial development and the roads that come with it. That includes mining for minerals such as silver, gold and uranium; oil and gas production; industrial wind and solar development; and the transmission systems that accompany all kinds of energy infrastructure.
Wilderness protections would ward off those advances, but Fite worries that they miss the most at-risk area: the McDermitt caldera, which isn’t included in proposed land for protections in the Owyhee. The Thacker Pass lithium mine has already been permitted on BLM land at the southern edge of the volcanic crater just across the border in Nevada and would be on the Owyhee’s doorstep.
“Oregon senators are totally looking away from the biggest threat out there in this very water-starved landscape, which is lithium mining and uranium mining in the McDermitt Caldera,” she says.
As Houston sees it, wilderness protections aren’t perfect but still a necessary step.
“We care about protecting [the Owyhee landscape], and we care about managing it better. Protecting it is something like wilderness. It shuts down those [development] threats. Period. Done. Permanently,” he says. “Managing it better is about things like grazing and other types of decisions that the BLM makes continuously over time. Fundamentally managing it better is a longer-term conversation.”
But if more protections do come, that would also mean more people. Despite the fact that the Owyhee isn’t a well-known travel destination, it also isn’t undiscovered. Growing Boise sits just an hour to the east, and recreationists of all kinds hike, drive, and fish the Owyhee. More could join them.
“Change is happening regardless of what happens with the designation, so what we need is better management, and we need the BLM to have the resources and the direction from leadership — whether that’s Congress or the president — to manage the recreation well,” says Houston.
There’s one thing that all conservationists are likely to agree on: “It’s a special, majestic landscape, and that’s why fundamentally we’re interested in protecting it,” he says.
