Extinct Icons: Art to Memorialize Vanished Species

A powerful new art exhibit is just one event for this year’s Remembrance Day for Lost Species.

How do we mark out grief for the loss of the world’s now-extinct species? For British artist Katie Tume, who works under the name Mother Eagle, the answer comes in the form of thread, beads, precious metals and gemstones. Her embroidered artworks commemorating the Tasmanian tiger, Barbary lion, dodo and other vanished wildlife are now on display at the ONCA art gallery in Brighton, England, as part of a worldwide series of events called Remembrance Day for Lost Species, held on November 30 each year.

Tume says the idea for the “Extinct Icons” in this exhibit came from seeing photos of reliquaries honoring Catholic martyrs and saints. “The idea of martyrs, persecuted in their lifetime for their beliefs or actions but now revered and regaled in death, made me think how we treat animals, specifically extinct ones,” she says.

She calls the animals she chose to depict “the poster children of the extinct hall of fame,” noting they frequently turn up in “top-ten”-style lists of extinct species. “In reading the stories of these endings, and ‘endlings,’ it became apparent to me how so many of these species’ demise were wrapped up in colonization, European exploitation, and extractive capitalism,” she says. “So much of this felt so familiar because the behaviors are still very real, present and very destructive. So, like those martyrs, persecuted in their lifetimes, I am interested in completing that cycle and illuminating them as saints.”

Persephone Pearl, founder of Remembrance Day for Lost Species and ONCA co-director, told me last year that the annual event helps people to understand that “learning to grieve is part of the process of healing our broken culture.”

This year’s Remembrance Day for Lost Species events include a dance competition in Madrid, Spain; a benefit concert with songs about endangered species in Chicago; a ceremony to recognize lost pollinators in Sacramento, California; and a workshop for children at the Redpath Natural History Museum in Montreal, Canada. A complete list of events, many of which run into early December, can be found here.

Extinct Icons by Katie Tume

From Tropical Islands to Polar Bears: Half a Degree in Warming Makes a Difference

For small island nations threatened by rising seas, swelling waters are a daily reminder of the need to act on climate.

The recent climate conference in Bonn, Germany, shined a light on one of the most certain and serious impacts we expect from unabated climate change: sea-level rise. Melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are releasing water into the sea — water that has been held on land for millennia. At the same time, warmer water is taking up more room because of “thermal expansion.” This means that sea levels will continue to rise as long as temperatures increase.

For small island nations threatened by rising seas, the swelling waters lapping at their shores are a daily reminder of the need to act on climate.

At the Paris climate conference in 2015, these nations were in no small part responsible for setting the goal to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times. The latest scientific studies on sea-level rise confirm that for these nations there is truly a world of difference between a 1.5 degree and 2 degree average temperature increase. Nations like Fiji or Kiribati lie so close to present sea level that they are projected to be underwater if the global mean temperature increases by 2 degrees. If we keep temperature rise below 1.5 degrees, however, projections keep these nations and their people above water — saving the worlds they know, at least for the next several hundred years.

Such threshold behavior is a special problem of climate change, one not well understood in public and policy circles. To most people a half-degree difference in mean temperature rise may seem trivial. But even as average temperatures rise smoothly, they can cause leaps in biological and geophysical responses.

And tropical island nations are not alone in their vulnerability. Two recent studies have shown that Arctic summer sea-ice extent, the habitat and hunting ground for polar bears, is also highly sensitive to small changes in the global temperature. Dr. Alexandra Jahn of the University of Colorado at Boulder demonstrated that by the end of this century the probability of an ice-free summer in the Arctic Ocean is about 33 percent if we stabilize global temperature at around 2 degrees Celsius (see figure below). This means that roughly every third year there could be essentially no summer sea ice in the Arctic. Imagine that your local grocery store closed for half a year every third year and you had no way to store food purchased during the other two years — clearly polar bears and other animals that depend on sea ice would struggle to survive in such a scenario.

probability of ice-free September — Probability that September Arctic sea ice extent drops below 1 million km2 (referred to as “ice-free”) as projected by the Community Earth System Model, a state-of-the-art climate model, under two scenarios reaching 1.5 and 2 degrees Celcius global mean warming, respectively, in the second half of the 21st century. See Sanderson et al. (2017) for more details.

In contrast, the analysis also showed that, if global temperature increase can be halted at 1.5 degrees instead of 2 degrees Celsius, the probability of an ice-free Arctic summer drops to less than 3 percent (again, see the figure above). That sounds more manageable. The analysis by Dr. Jahn was published in a comprehensive paper, led by Dr. Benjamin Sanderson, documenting various climate-change impacts and how they differ between a 1.5 degree and 2 degree warmer world. An independent study lead by Dr. James Screen from the University of Exeter in the UK arrived at almost identical numbers.

Years ago Dr. Wallace Broecker at Columbia University warned the world there would be surprises in the greenhouse effect. Sea-level rise and Arctic sea-ice sensitivity to temperature differences as small as 0.5 degrees — and the differences that sensitivity can make to people and animals — are prime examples of such surprises. Numerous other surprises, some already known, many unknown, await if we continue to warm the world, emphasizing the importance of achieving the goals agreed to in Paris.

Extinct in the Wild But Still Flying: The Guam Kingfisher

The last 150 birds of this critically endangered species rely on humans for their survival.

I rounded a corner and there it was: one of the world’s last 150 Guam kingfishers (Todiramphus cinnamominus). The bright orange, blue and white bird sat by itself on a branch in an enclosure at Pittsburgh’s National Aviary, watching visitors as they passed by. It didn’t seem to blink an eye as I stood there for several minutes, starting at this tiny, beautiful and vitally important bird.

I knew that I was incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to see this rare species. Once native to the island after which it’s named, the Guam kingfisher all but disappeared during the decades after World War II, when invasive brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) arrived and ate their way through the native fauna. By the 1970s most of Guam’s unique bird species had gone extinct.

The island’s kingfishers held on for a few more years, until 1988, the last year they were seen in the wild.

Luckily, just before that fateful day, conservationists managed to capture a total of 29 birds and bring them into captivity for protection. The kingfishers were transported to a number of U.S. zoos, where they became the core of a breeding program that has managed to save the species from extinction.

Today 11 of those birds, including two breeding pairs, live at the National Aviary, one of more than two dozen U.S. zoos and one government facility on Guam that are participating in the kingfisher’s Species Survival Program. The aviary had 13 of the birds until earlier this month, when two young offspring were sent to zoos in Denver and St. Louis to help boost their own breeding programs.

The breeding pairs have done remarkably well in less-than-tropical Pittsburgh since they arrived just two nesting seasons ago. “We produced four offspring our first year and five our second year,” says Kurt Hundgen, the National Aviary’s director of animal collections, speaking to me by phone a few weeks after my visit. “That’s pretty good considering we’ve only had them for roughly three years.”

That success was a bit slow in coming, though. At first, one of the breeding pairs was on display, in the same enclosure where I had seen a female kingfisher during my visit. “They didn’t do much for the first eight months,” Hundgen says. “They do okay when they’re in public view, but they’re very secretive birds.”

After that the aviary moved the breeding pairs off display into specially constructed behind-the-scenes enclosures. There the facility could more closely mimic the temperature, humidity, vegetation, daylight cycles and even sounds of the kingfishers’ native habitat, while also giving them much-need privacy in specially constructed, hollowed-out tree logs and nest cavities.

“That’s when they kicked in,” Hundgen says. The birds took to their new habitats and quickly started mating and laying eggs.

Guam kingfisher — Courtesy National Aviary

The recent breeding success at the aviary is just part of an important turnaround for the kingfisher’s population, which barely grew during their first two decades in captivity. “For the longest time, the kingfisher population just maintained itself at around 50 to 60 birds,” Hundgen says. That lasted until about 2005, when the participants in the kingfisher working group got together to develop new and more consistent husbandry techniques. “It really has made the difference and that’s where we’ve seen the increase in the captive population.”

One element that has dramatically helped was the decision to carefully hand-rear some kingfisher chicks. Females normally lay a two-egg clutch, but only one of them typically survives. “There has never been a pair in captivity in human care yet that has successfully raised two chicks,” Hundgen says. “So the recommendation became, when you do get two fertile eggs, you let the pair rear one egg and you pull the other one and hand-rear it.”

That’s a pretty intense process. “There are great lengths that go into the details of feeding that chick and caring for it,” says Dr. Pilar Fish, the aviary’s director of veterinary medicine. “It needs to have the perfect temperature, humidity which changes over time, the right amount of food, the right type of food, and the right feeding schedule. It requires such intensive care and allowing their natural activity.”

Guam kingfisher chick — Courtesy National Aviary

That’s where another aspect of the special enclosures comes in: the hollow logs in which the birds nest are fitted with hidden cameras. They parent birds feel safe and secure in their private logs, but aviary staff can observe exactly how they behave with their chicks and learn to mimic the same behaviors with the hand-reared chicks.

In addition to all of that, the tiny birds undergo extensive health checks. “We do regular neonatal care on each one of these chicks to make sure that make sure that as they are growing — they grow up so quickly — they’re reaching each developmental milestone and staying as healthy as possible,” says Fish. “There’s a whole team of people caring for them and assuring their health and development.”

Through all of this work, the veterinary team feels the significance of their actions. “Each one of these chicks is so important to its species,” she says.

Sometimes that team actually means rushing to save a chick’s life. “These chicks are so fragile,” Fish says. “They’re just so tiny and they’re naked and every parameter is important.” Because most of the chicks live in the enclosures with their parents, “natural things” happen, like the risk of chicks falling out of their nest.

“In the wild, they would succumb to the elements,” she says. “We have the ability to examine them, treat them, and put them back in the nest.”

“Treat them” might be a bit of an understatement. “One little chick — I remember this vividly — fell out of the nest,” Fish recalls. “I did my veterinary exam and the chick had ruptured its respiratory system. Birds have lungs and air sacs. The chick actually inflated like a balloon and it was having labored breathing. We had to use a tiny needle that is actually used in pediatric medicine human pediatric medicine and prep the area and deflated it and then had to repeat that procedure and give it breathing treatments. We used a human nebulizer, like an asthmatic would need, and we gave it oral medicines, tiny little dilutions of medicine. At this point the check only weighed half an ounce! But within two days it fully recovered from the trauma and within just a week it was completely normal.”

Still, it was a stressful process — both for the bird and its human caretakers. “It’s nerve-wracking to be handling this bird knowing that its species is extinct in the wild and that that little chick is so important,” Fish says. “We’ve been very fortunate that these chicks have recovered, and I tell you what, it’s just a real privilege to be able to be involved in this program. I love working with all birds, but when you know that a bird is gone in the wild and that these birds are the future, then working on them it is really a significant honor.”

Hundgen echoes that sentiment. “I’ve been on Guam on several occasions,” he says. “When you go in the woods, there are no birds anymore. For me, that makes this pretty special to be involved with this species. It’s fulfilling. That’s why we’re here.”

With populations growing at the National Aviary and so many other zoos, will the Guam kingfisher ever again live in the wild? In truth, Guam itself may never host the species — not unless the brown tree snake is completely and permanently eradicated there — but other nearby islands could one day serve as adequate release sites and replacement habitats, especially if the captive population keeps growing. That’s beginning to look more and more likely. “I think you’re going to see the day when the kingfisher will be introduced,” Hundgen says. “Without a doubt.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Whooping Cranes Could Be Wiped Out by Climate Change

Guam’s Forests Are Being Killed – By A Snake

Guam’s birds have been killed by invasive snakes. Now trees struggle to spread their seeds.

By Elizabeth Wandrag, University of Canberra and Haldre Rogers, Iowa State University

Can a snake bring down a forest? If we’re talking about the Pacific island of Guam, the answer may well be yes.

Our research adds to mounting evidence that the killing of many of the island’s bird species by an invasive species of snake is having severe knock-on effects for Guam’s trees, which rely on the birds to spread their seeds.

Invasive predators are known to wreak havoc on native animal populations, but our study shows how the knock-on effects can be bad news for native forests too.

Globally, invasive predators have been implicated in the extinction of 142 bird, mammal and reptile species, with a further 596 species classed as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. But the indirect effects of these extinctions on entire ecosystems such as forests are much harder to study.

The brown tree snake was accidentally introduced to Guam in the mid-1940s and rapidly spread across the island. At the same time, bird populations on Guam mysteriously began to decline. For years, no one knew why.

In 1987 the US ecologist Julie Savidge provided conclusive evidence that the two were linked: the brown tree snake was eating the island’s birds. Today, 10 of Guam’s 12 original forest bird species have been lost. The remaining two are considered functionally extinct.

The brown tree snake has caused a cascade of problems. Isaac Chellman, Author provided

But the ecological damage doesn’t stop there. The loss of native bird species has triggered some unexpected changes in Guam’s forests. Both the establishment of new trees and the diversity of those trees is falling. These changes show how an invasive predator can indirectly yet significantly alter an entire ecosystem.

Birds and trees

Birds are very important to trees. In the tropics, up to 90 percent of tree species rely on animals, often birds, to spread their seeds. Birds eat fruit from the trees and then defecate the undigested seeds far away from the parent tree’s canopy, where there are fewer predators and pathogens that specialise on that species, where competition for light, water and nutrients is less intense, and where seeds can take advantage of promising new real estate when old trees die.

Without birds, roughly 95 percent of seeds of two common tree species on Guam (Psychotria mariana and Premna serratifolia) land directly beneath their parent tree. Compare that with the nearby islands of Saipan, Tinian and Rota – none of which have brown tree snakes – where less than 40 percent of seeds land near their parent tree. On Saipan, seeds that escape their parent tree are five times more likely to survive.

Close neighbours, but very different situations. Author provided

What’s more, passing through the gut of an animal can actually increase the likelihood that a seed will germinate. On Guam, seeds that had been eaten by birds were two to four times more likely to germinate than those that hadn’t.

Overall, for the roughly 70 percent of tree species on Guam that rely on birds to spread their seeds, research suggests that the bird deaths caused by the brown tree snake have reduced the establishment of new tree seedlings by 61-92 percent, depending on the species.

Forests’ future threatened

These numbers suggest that many tree species in Guam are under serious threat, which in turn threatens the species diversity of the island’s forests.

Our new research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the number of seedling species growing in treefall gaps on Guam compared with Saipan and Rota, which still have their birds.

Treefall gaps appear when an adult tree dies, opening up the canopy and increasing the light that reaches the forest floor. Many species rely on this increased light for germination and early growth, so these gaps are hotspots for new seedlings.

Birds such as the Mariana fruit dove are a big help to the islands’ trees. Lainie Berry, Author provided

We found that Saipan and Rota had roughly double the number of species of seedlings growing in these gaps, compared with Guam. What’s more, seedling species on Guam tended to be clumped together, as you might expect if more than 90% of seeds are falling beneath their parent trees.

We also found that birds are important in moving the seeds of certain types of species to gaps. In forests, “pioneer species” are those that rapidly colonise gaps, exploiting the increased light to grow fast and reproduce young. Crucially, we found pioneer species in all gaps on islands with birds, but in very few gaps on Guam, where these species could be at risk of being lost entirely.

Invasive predators are a reality for many ecosystems, particularly on islands, and the situation on Guam is particularly extreme. Perhaps nowhere else in the world has experienced such dramatic losses of native fauna as a result of invasion.

While these direct impacts of invasion are astounding, the indirect impacts cascading through the ecosystem are just starting to unfold, and may prove to be similarly catastrophic.

Elizabeth Wandrag, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ecology, University of Canberra and Haldre Rogers, Assistant Professor, Iowa State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Rehabilitating Injured Wildlife Taught Me to Look at Both Life and Death

It also revealed to me the devastating impact humans are having on the world around us.

It’s Saturday night, and instead of going out into town with friends, I’m sitting in my apartment examining a sick red-tailed hawk. Holding him upright against my body, one hand clasped around his ankles, I unfurl and look closely at each drooping wing, study his glazed eyes with a bright penlight, test his reflexes in his tired feet, look down his gaping beak and feel his protruding keel. I’m looking for signs of illness or injury — broken bones, gunshot wounds, poisoning, entanglement — mostly, harms caused by human behavior.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an uncanny finesse understanding and interacting with nonhuman animals. No one taught me how. Looking back it seems it stemmed from curiosity, my desire to know what was going on inside their minds.

As a five-year-old, I’d imagine what it was like to be an animal by acting like one: lapping up water from my glass like a cat or pecking up food off my plate like a bird. I only assumed “animal mode” when I thought no one was looking.

One day I was caught at a swimming lesson literally doing the doggy paddle, fists balled up like paws. Others didn’t think this was as normal as I did. “Erica’s a strong swimmer, but she’d be a lot faster if she opened up her hands,” I overheard an instructor tell my mother. I realized it was probably not acceptable — at least by other people’s standards — to act like an animal, so I stopped. But I continued to think about what it was like to be one.

If I couldn’t be an animal, I decided, I’d work with them. At age seven I started walking dogs. At 15 I was accepted as an animal-care volunteer, and soon after I was hired as a clinic assistant at a wildlife hospital. I worked there for six years.

My job at the clinic was wildlife rehabilitator, a person who cares for sick, injured and orphaned wild animals so they can be released back into the wild. In the beginning I prepared meals: rodents stuffed with vitamins for the raptors and assemblages of fruits, veggies, proteins and mushy dog food for the opossums. I’d also clean cages, mop floors and haul out trash.

Over time, as I devoted more hours to clinical work and applied for my New York State wildlife rehabilitator license, my responsibilities grew. I learned from more experienced colleagues how to dose medications, give first aid to opossums, splint baby bird legs, treat bumblefoot in gulls, syringe-feed baby mammals and take the clinic’s non-releasable hawks for “walks” outside on a falconer’s glove. What started as a summer job morphed into a weekend gig during the school year and later became a full-time job during college.

In my years of reading my wild patients’ charts, there was one thing that’s stood out to me: The fact that most of them were admitted as a result of direct or indirect human activity. Hawks poisoned. Opossums trapped. Turtles crushed by cars. Songbirds that crashed into windows. Baby birds unnecessarily picked up by people. Squirrels orphaned after trees were cut down and nests destroyed. Many animals died, sometimes in my arms or hands as I tried to provide aid. I quickly learned to accept death as a side effect of life — though each individual animal lost stung me.

I learned to recognize every animal beyond its value as part of a species population. Each animal is its own intelligent being. I saw it in my pets at home just as much as I saw it in the clinic. At work, one resident crow would immediately squawk when he saw me, even if I was in a crowd of people. I’d notice how baby squirrel siblings would be quick to nuzzle up with their kin in a crate full of orphans from various squirrel families (I’d keep track of each by dotting their tails with colored magic markers).

It’s not just me thinking this way: scientists have proven individuality and intelligence in crows and squirrels, and have found signs of “higher” — meaning human-like — thinking in plenty of other species. Killer whales have culture and extensive kin groups, and chimpanzees engage in social learning. Scientists say animals are rational thinkers. Yet humans continue exploit, dominate and sometimes exterminate nonhumans.

One day all the death in my workplace caught up with me. It became clear it would be impossible to save each individual animal through rehabilitation alone because humans were in many cases unaware of how their actions were harming wild animals.

So I decided to change course and focus on prevention. I became a science writer. Maybe, I thought, writing about wildlife issues would give people the information they needed to appreciate animals and make informed decisions about their possibly harmful behavior. Maybe this kind of work could avert wildlife from danger. Maybe fewer wild animals would end up dead.

I did not leave wildlife rehabilitation because I think it’s futile. In fact, I think such work is necessary today, since humans have so intensely and irrevocably changed Earth’s ecology. We’ve wiped entire species off the map, destroyed forests and wetlands, built up cities and introduced species to new habitats where they’ve wreaked havoc. The scale of human impact on wildlife is huge: Scientists estimate somewhere between 365 and 988 million birds are killed in building collisions, and outdoor cats kept by humans kill as many as 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion small animals annually in the United States. That’s on top of car collisions, poisonings, habitat destruction and other human activities.

Wildlife rehabilitation is certainly not a cost-effective way to help every animal in need. Based on my experiences, out of pocket, it can cost a rehabber anywhere from $50 to hundreds of dollars to save the life of one animal. And it must be acknowledged that, in nature, there are situations where some live and others die, such as when a mother bird gives most of her time and attention tending to her strongest babies and allows the weakest to die. But humans have upset the balance so much that helping those animals in need — no matter what the cause of their illness or injury — may be the right thing to do.

And so while now my focus is prevention, all the while I’ve kept my wildlife rehabilitator’s license. People in my home state of New York call me when they find animals in need of help. Over the years I’ve raised a few baby squirrels and rabbits, rescued trapped owls and carried giant snapping turtles out of the road. Most recently, it was the sick red-tailed hawk. A woman had called me asking for help with the lethargic bird, which was sitting in her driveway. I agreed to come right over.

I pulled up to the woman’s home, got out of my car and slipped a pair of mismatched gardening gloves on my hands, then grasped both a dog crate and towel. The woman and her young daughter ran out of their front door to greet me. They looked relieved.

My eyes quickly found the distressed red-tailed hawk sitting beneath some shrubs. After a short exchange with the woman and her daughter, I slowly approached the bird. He defensively leaned back — talons out, strike-ready. But when I grabbed his ankles with my hands it became apparent he had no strength to pose much danger.

His body was light and flaccid, emaciated and paralyzed. His mouth hung ajar, I thought from stress, until I realized his tongue was sticking out at an askew angle. Something in his brain was causing his body to malfunction — maybe a poison or a virus or a cancer. I looked in his deep brown eyes and decided he had some fight left. I decided to try and save him.

“Thank you so much! You’re a hero!” said the woman as I tucked the crate — hawk inside — into my car and waved goodbye.

According to wildlife rehabilitation experts, encouraging the public to call a wildlife rehabilitator for help when they find a sick, orphaned or injured wild animal — while sometimes harrowing — actually helps connect them to nature in a deep way. “Humans respond with compassion to the immediate and individual, where they may feel overwhelmed by the larger issue and unable to affect change,” says Kai Williams, executive director of the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council. “These experiences change people, change the way they see wildlife.”

Later that night in my apartment I sat on the edge of my couch with the hawk cradled in my arms, plucking enormous hippoboscid “flat flies” out of his feathers, I thought about what the woman had said about me, and what I really feel are my motivations to rehabilitate wildlife. I don’t think of myself as a hero. Maybe, I thought, I rehabilitate wild animals because I feel like it is just to right humanity’s wrongs. Or maybe I do it to make myself feel a tiny bit better about the things I regret doing — driving a car, flying in planes, eating meat on occasion — that I know harm nonhumans.

A post shared by Erica Cirino (@4feathers1fern) on Oct 28, 2017 at 2:21pm PDT

I was able to stabilize the hawk overnight and the next day transferred him to a federally licensed clinic, as mandated under my state license. Unfortunately I learned a few days later that the hawk had passed away, despite the clinic’s best efforts.

Maybe rehabbing is my small way of showing that I recognize the lives of all living beings as valuable: human, hawk or otherwise. And I hope that my efforts help others realize why each nonhuman life is worth saving.

Wasted Water: The Crappiest Places in America — Literally

America’s waters are contaminated by poop and bacteria. Use our maps to find the worst waste locations near you.

It’s in the water. In our favorite beaches, swimming holes and — somehow — even in wild creeks and streams in the middle of nowhere.

Poop, that is.

America’s waters are infested with feces. We know this because state and federal agencies routinely test surface water across the country looking at various factors of quality, including E. coli bacteria levels, an indirect measure of fecal contamination. E. coli live exclusively in human and animal intestines, so the only reason for them to be present in the environment is…they were pooped there. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that several hundred thousand human cases of E. coli infection occur in the United States every year.

As disgusting as this is, the news is actually worse in some cases. Since E. coli is an indicator of untreated sewage, it can be a sign of everything else that comes with it — hazardous chemicals, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, antibiotics and pesticides, among other things. This single bacterium tells a larger story of an environmental issue that affects humans and whole ecosystems.

Dive in (metaphorically only, please) to these waste-filled waters as we explore the most egregious poop contaminations recorded across the country (and possibly near you).*

*Scroll to the bottom of the article if you’re interested in reading about our methods for processing and ranking E. coli data, as well as the limitations to the accuracy of the nationwide picture that emerged.

The top 10 percent most contaminated locations in America:

If your state didn’t show up on the map and you’re wondering what the situation is closer to you, take a look at:

The 10 most contaminated locations in each state:

Whose poop?

One thing you might be wondering at this point is — whose poop is it? If you’ve explored the maps above for a few minutes, you’ll have noticed that a lot of these places aren’t exactly in highly populated areas.

Location, location, location.

To try to understand what’s really going on, let’s get down to the street level at the 10 most contaminated sites in the country.

No clear solutions.

Here’s the rub — there’s no reasonable explanation for all this contamination. Treated urban sewage and farm manure contain low levels of E. coli. Waste from livestock farms sprayed as manure on fields is meant to stay there and fertilize fields — not flow into waterways. Some of the contamination comes from wildlife, but that’s only one small piece of the puzzle. There’s no reason E. coli should be present in our waters at these levels if there are proper systems in place to deal with the excrement of 320 million Americans and the farm animals that outnumber us — which means current systems are failing somewhere along the line.

While the country’s ecosystems are silently being flooded with poop, the situation is on track to get even worse. Earlier this year a congressional bill was introduced to further weaken regulations on dairy manure. Meanwhile climate change is increasing the frequency of critical sewage flooding events with every hurricane that hits the country.

This is not a problem that can easily be flushed away, and solving it will require communities to address the need not just for safer fecal management, but for larger sustainable choices that reduce the magnitude of the problem if they want to keep their citizens safe — and clean.

Disclaimer: This is not an absolute ranking of the most contaminated sites in America. There are many limitations to available data. Many known catastrophic manure spills and sanitation failures — such as hurricane flooding in North Carolina — do not show up in these maps, and some states just do not monitor their waters as closely as others.

Methods:

Data source:
Water-quality data downloaded from The Water Quality Portal, a cooperative service sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency and National Water Quality Monitoring Council. It serves data collected by more than 400 state, federal, tribal and local agencies.

Land cover and urban areas geospatial data provided by USGS.

Data parameters:
Quality characteristic: Escherichia coli. Other fecal organisms are sometimes evaluated by agencies, but E. coli testing has the widest and most uniform geographic coverage.

Quality measure: Number of E. coli as reported in Colony Forming Units (CFU), Most Probable Number (MPN), or number (#). Suitable data were collated under these three most widely used measures, and the top 10 percent of each of the three categories were collected separately to obtain the top 10 percent results overall.

Time period: All test results in five years — from October 2012 to October 2017. The same monitoring stations are sampled annually, but sampling occurs at different and sometimes arbitrary times of the year. To account for seasonal changes, unusual events, and other sources of stochasticity, five years of data were pooled and the highest result for each monitoring station was retained.

Limitations: Monitoring stations varied widely across states, with some states having more than 5,000 sampling sites, and others having as few as 500. However, existing monitoring stations across all states appeared to be well distributed across watersheds. Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, and Rhode Island had the poorest monitoring coverage of all states.

What Is Pesticide Drift — and Why Is It So Dangerous?

Drift of the pesticide dicamba has been linked to crop damage in 25 states this year.

Drift kills.

Earlier this month the Environmental Protection Agency announced that the pesticide dicamba — a weed killer sprayed on genetically modified, pesticide-resistant soybean and cotton crops — had drifted away from application sites and caused damage to more than 3.6 million acres of soybean crops in 25 states.

It was the latest blow against the use of dicamba, which was recently banned in Arkansas and Missouri after complaints from hundreds of farmers. The pesticide, which is manufactured by Monsanto, BASF and other companies, has also been linked to increased rates of cancer in humans exposed to it, as well as risks to wildlife.

Most of the problems with dicamba, experts say, can be linked to a phenomenon known as “pesticide drift,” which is actually two different processes by which a pesticide can travel beyond the application site into other agricultural locations, or even onto nearby residences, schools or other facilities.

One of these types of drift is fairly simple to explain: A pesticide is applied in sprayed liquid form and is then picked up by the wind. “That’s when droplets get blown off target,” says Emily Marquez, staff scientist with Pesticide Action Network North America. “It could be due to applicator error or it could be due to weather.”

The other type of drift — the one most commonly talked about — occurs when a pesticide volatilizes, or turns into a gaseous state. “When it volatilizes, it just travels in the air and then weather can bring it some distance away,” Marquez says.

Volatilization is a natural phenomenon and quite common in other substances. “A good analogy I’ve used is an onion,” Marquez says. “If you cut it, the vapor in the air makes your eyes sting. You can smell it, but you can’t see it. It is the chemical evaporating into the air and going from liquid to vapor.”

What makes dicamba stand out when compared to other pesticides — or onions — is its propensity for volatilization, which has been well known for years. The chemical has a high vapor pressure, meaning it’s more likely to evaporate and rise into the atmosphere. “Even if a pesticide doesn’t have the high vapor pressure, it could still exist in the air to some extent, but not like a fumigant where you have this very high volatility and you see it rising off a field immediately after you apply it,” Marquez says. Recent research has found that dicamba damage was observed 220 feet away from application sites. The EPA requires just 110 feet of buffer between application sites and other vegetation.

Of course, none of this is completely unique to dicamba. “All pesticides can drift,” Marquez says. “Some are more prone to it than others.” Meanwhile, pesticides can also travel via run-off, erosion, equipment contamination and other processes. “All pesticides go somewhere,” she adds.

Monsanto has claimed that its current formulation of dicamba contains additives that make it less prone to volatilization, but how much less prone it is to volatilization —or whether it really is less prone —remains in question. “There can be things you add to reduce volatility,” Marquez says, “but we already knew dicamba was volatile, so I don’t know if it’s possible to add something to reduce volatility when we knew it was damaging crops many years ago.”

In response to this year’s dicamba drift problems, the EPA last month announced an agreement with three manufacturers to put new requirements into place for the pesticide’s use in 2018, including limiting application to days with maximum wind speeds below 10 miles per hour.

Marquez says she thinks that’s about as far as the federal government will go with this pesticide under the current administration. “I think individual states are probably the ones having to do any further restrictions of dicamba.” She adds, though, that further actions could be possible “if enough farmers speak up or just don’t buy it.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Why Does It Take So Long to Phase Out Bee-killing Neonic Pesticides?

Trump’s Budget Kills Funds for Clean Tap Water in Struggling Small Towns

The Rural Utilities Service has helped millions of people, but the Trump White House says money for rural water isn’t needed.

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

ST. JOSEPH, Louisiana – On a hot delta day, Roy Bowman fills a gallon jug from an Army green trailer-mounted water tank. All year, Bowman and his neighbors in this crushingly poor, mostly African American town perched on the west bank of the Mississippi River have gotten their water this way.

Brown and gritty, the city’s water had been fouled by deteriorating pipelines and treatment equipment for years; parts of the system were more than a century old. But last year, tests discovered a worse problem: The drinking water was loaded with high concentrations of lead, the same brain-damaging contaminant that poisoned people in Flint, Michigan.

Suddenly, an inconvenience became an emergency. Don’t drink the water or cook with it, state officials warned. The Louisiana National Guard brought in water tanks as a stopgap. The state stepped in to fund a new $9 million water system.

It was a calamity caused by carelessness – neglect of a worsening water problem, a small town and its people.

“I really felt like it was a man-made disaster,” said Bowman, a part-time pastor who, with his wife, Wanda, pushed for action to protect people here from their own water.

St. Joseph, population 1,029, is one of thousands of small towns across the country that have no access to safe, clean drinking water. The reason: The towns can’t afford it.

This chronic problem has threatened rural America’s health and economy for decades. And it could worsen under President Donald Trump, who has proposed axing a program that provides a vital last resort for rural communities without clean water.

Trump wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, which awards water and sewer loans and grants to towns with 10,000 or fewer people. It received $498 million in President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2017 budget. The amount in Trump’s 2018 budget: zero.

The program is a backstop for small towns that can’t find funding elsewhere. A slow, complex network of federal, state, local and private dollars typically fund water systems.

In St. Joseph, because public health was at immediate risk, Louisiana tapped its own capital outlay fund instead. But most towns cannot count on that kind of salvation, and the goal of the Rural Utilities Service is to stop emergencies such as this from happening to millions of people in thousands of small towns across the nation.

‘Wildly successful’ or unnecessary?

Despite its small projects – a typical undertaking cost about $1.4 million for a community of 1,500 people – the Rural Utilities Service has been celebrated as a success. Since 2009, 19.5 million people in rural areas have benefited from $13.9 billion in funding for 5,825 water and wastewater projects.

This program has fixed smelly, cloudy water in Manistique, Michigan; eliminated frequent system breakdowns and outages in Thomasville, Alabama; and provided the first clean, affordable water for hundreds of families in “colonias” in El Paso County, Texas. In and around Eagle Butte, South Dakota, about 8,500 people, including the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, have good drinking water, fire hydrants and economic opportunities because of this federal funding.

The program’s portfolio of nearly 16,000 loans, totaling more than $12 billion, boasts a 0.43 percent delinquency rate, about one-third the rate for banks’ commercial and industrial loans.

“It’s always been wildly successful,” said John Padalino, who led the Rural Utilities Service from 2012 to 2014. “If I were a conservative, I would like this program. It’s very fiscally conservative.”

But the Trump White House says money for rural water isn’t needed.

“The Administration believes that (the Environmental Protection Agency) or private sector sources should fund this activity,” said a note in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. That reflects the view of the libertarian Cato Institute, which in a 2016 report called rural subsidy programs “unneeded duplication” and “an unfair redistribution of wealth.”

Yet at the same time, Trump’s budget also would slash EPA funds that help pay for state water inspectors and enforcers. The White House wants them cut by nearly 45 percent, from the 2017 total of nearly $1.1 billion to $597 million. The administration suggests that states could seek other funding sources, impose fees or simply do less – “reducing or eliminating additional activities not required under Federal law.”

The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, said the Trump budget “merely shifts responsibility from the federal government to the states, while cutting funding for both.” There’s no guarantee that states would be able to fill the gaps and protect the public from unsafe water, the organization said.

Testifying before senators in June, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt described a minimalist approach to federal water oversight.

“EPA should only intervene when states demonstrate an unwillingness to comply with the law or to do their job with regard to keeping water clean and safe for families, businesses and the public at large,” Pruitt said.

Pruitt’s office, the White House Office of Management and Budget and the office of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue did not respond to questions submitted by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Some congressional leaders say they won’t go along with the White House on defunding the Rural Utilities Service.

“That’s not going to happen,” said Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., chairman of an appropriations subcommittee that handles agriculture and rural development.

“We want to make sure that whether you’re living in rural areas or in the city, you have access to safe drinking water and the proper sanitary sewer system,” he said. “That’s just a hallmark of America.”

St. Joseph’s plight

Roy and Wanda Bowman were used to being in the small but intense spotlight of St. Joseph politics. They tussled with the longtime mayor, Ed Brown, over nearly every local issue.

When the lead crisis hit last December, the Bowmans again were propelled to the front lines. They became community voices in small but important decisions. How many portable water tanks – “water buffaloes” – would the state bring in? How often would the state flush the tanks and bring clean water?

And they began loading up jugs to deliver to their neighbors.

“Not everybody could get out and get their own,” Roy Bowman said. “Old people, sick people – what about those folks? You’re supposed to get clean water from your tap.”

St. Joseph is the seat of Tensas Parish. It’s mostly row-crop country: cotton, corn, soybeans, grain sorghum and rice, plus some timber. One summer morning, a yellow crop-dusting plane repeatedly banked over City Hall on the town’s quiet main street, Plank Road.

About halfway between the cities of Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi, on the other side of the Mississippi River, St. Joseph fits the pattern of thousands of small towns. People are leaving – nearly one-third have departed since 1990 – and those who remain are increasingly poor. Of those still there, 73 percent are African American.

Median household income has fallen by more than half since 2010, to $16,923 – less than one-third of the nation’s median and 38 percent of the state’s. Nearly 40 percent of households are below the poverty level.

Such economic strains would have made water upkeep a challenge under the best circumstances, but for years, the town’s water system, finances and management had been deteriorating. State audits in recent years revealed a financial mess, automatically blocking previously promised state aid for water improvements.

At the state’s request, a court named a fiscal manager for the town in mid-2016, stripping the mayor of financial authority. Brown lost his re-election bid in December by three votes out of 421 cast; he died in May.

Help had been a long time coming. Starting at least five years before the lead crisis emerged, as the water system fell apart, violations, boil-water orders and complaints had become routine.

“This was not a problem that developed overnight,” Wanda Bowman said.

The poor spent scarce dollars on bottled water and taking laundry to nearby towns. The affluent had to adjust as well.

St. Joseph native Rebecca Vizard, who opened a downtown shop that makes high-end custom pillows for interior decorators in New York and other fashion capitals, has her pricey fabrics washed in an adjacent lakefront community. “Different water system,” she said – no orange stains.

Valerie Sloan lives in a restored 1855 house facing the Mississippi River levee. She had old plumbing replaced, but the city system still delivered water that looked like chocolate milk. She held up a brownish sample.

“That came out of my kitchen faucet,” Sloan said. “That is a sin. We wanted clean water, and we thought we deserved it here in the USA.”

Wilma Subra, an environmental health scientist and community activist, said, “Everybody was raising hell about the iron and the manganese – the visible yucky, yucky stuff.”

But the same decrepit pipelines and treatment system that caused the brown, smelly water also contaminated the water with dangerous levels of lead, which can’t be seen, smelled or tasted.

Lead is one of the most notorious poisons. Even at low levels, it can harm developing brains, causing reduced IQs, learning disorders, attention problems and other health issues.

“We should be especially concerned about kids who live in poor communities,” said Bruce Lanphear, a prominent lead researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Many low-income children, he said, often get a double dose because they may be exposed to other lead sources, too, including old paint and tainted soil.

Tests in December found tap water with high lead levels in two St. Joseph locations: a private home and City Hall. Gov. John Bel Edwards, a first-term Democrat, declared an emergency and ordered wider testing.

The follow-up found unsafe lead levels in more than 1 of every 5 homes tested. The taps of 98 homes had water with more than 15 parts per billion of lead, the federal limit. In one home, the water hit 1,810 ppb.

Lead has been on the public mind since 2015 because of Flint, the faded industrial city northwest of Detroit that also had been through a financial crisis. In a cost-cutting move, a manager made changes to the city’s water supply without taking vital safety measures, so lead in old pipes was released into the water supply – and into children’s bodies – in high concentrations.

When the tests revealed the lead risk in St. Joseph, residents and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network launched a campaign for an immediate fix: emergency state money for a new system.

“We pleaded our case for five or six weeks,” Roy Bowman said. “We wrote letters daily. That really moved the legislators – the cry of the people.”

Subra, who was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 1999, spoke at the new water system’s groundbreaking in March with Edwards and other dignitaries.

“The governor says it will be the best water quality in the U.S.,” Subra said in a recent interview.

But Subra also notes that it’s only a start. About 400 other small Louisiana towns still need help with their water. Cutting any source of funds, including the Rural Utilities Service, can only make things worse, she said.

“I get calls all the time from these small systems,” she said. “All 400 want to be next.”

Thousands of rural systems at stake

The Trump administration’s argument that other money is readily available for small water systems ignores what’s known about their unique problems. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, thousands of rural systems don’t have enough population density to generate money for improvements. Many lack the cash flow or customer base to qualify for affordable private loans. Deferred repairs grow into big problems. Required monitoring and reporting might not happen on time – or at all.

Seeing little profit but plenty of risk, few commercial lenders would step in to finance an impoverished small town’s water needs, said Mike Keegan, an analyst at the National Rural Water Association, which represents small systems.

“It’s the antithesis of profit,” he said. “You need a subsidy. (Water) is an essential life service.”

Just planning a water project can take a year – a challenge even for a big system with “teams of engineers, teams of scientists, teams of grant writers, teams of management,” he said. By contrast, thousands of small systems can’t afford even a single full-time operator.

“I’ve been in a lot of communities where the mayor’s got a dairy farm and he’s running the water system,” said Padalino, Obama’s Rural Utilities Service administrator, “and he’s doing that at night.”

Padalino knows that firsthand. He once worked as a water and wastewater plant operator in his native South Texas, near the Mexico border. Many people there face poverty comparable with some undeveloped countries.

Most U.S. residents routinely get clean, safe water. But incidents such as that in Flint, a city of nearly 100,000 people, show that even in larger cities, the margin of safety can vanish with shoddy management, inadequate upkeep or accidents.

In the early 2000s, Washington, D.C., had a serious lead problem. In 2014, Charleston, West Virginia, was without water for days after a chemical spill in the Elk River. That same year, Toledo, Ohio, shut down its system for more than two days because of toxic algae in Lake Erie. Tens of thousands of places have less dramatic violations.

Also, as many as 75,000 sewer overflows a year pollute lakes, rivers, beaches or drinking water, according to the EPA. In Atlanta, for example, fixing the sewers in the early 2000s took about 15 years and cost more than $2.5 billion. Smaller systems don’t have that kind of money.

About 97 percent of the country’s 157,000 water systems serve 10,000 or fewer people. The smallest, serving 500 or fewer people, accounted for 70 percent of drinking water violations in 2015, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported. They exceeded limits on contaminants or skipped required monitoring or reporting.

The biggest funding sources are state and federal revolving funds, but they’re woefully inadequate. Spending on drinking water systems alone would have to increase nearly twelvefold, to $384.2 billion, to cover the needs that the EPA projects for the next 20 years. The American Water Works Association paints an even more dire picture: The shortfall reaches $2 trillion when counting both drinking water and wastewater systems.

Even when Congress provides more, however, small towns mostly are frozen out. This year, the EPA invited 12 water systems to apply for $2.3 billion under the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act. Nearly all were in big cities.

Local politics also worsens the problem. Customers’ bills would soar if they reflected the real cost of future needs. City officials often keep the peace by postponing the pain. The result, as in St. Joseph, is an increasingly brittle system that’s prone to breaking.

Through much of this year, machines dug ditches along St. Joseph’s streets to install new distribution pipes. Crews were deployed to the aging treatment plant to replace old equipment and valves that tended to break and fix other mechanical problems. Work on the system is expected to be finished this month.

And workers refurbished the town’s water tank. They gave the rusty tank a new white paint job, too. Now it stands over the city, promising a healthier future.

“That,” resident Valerie Sloan said, “looks like it would provide clean water.”

The Swinging Pendulum of Conservation Politics

A new book dives into the ever-changing history of conservation legislation — and gives us a hint of the future.

The conservation movement can often take itself for granted. For all those who have advocated on behalf of public lands and animals, and who have petitioned elected officials about taking steps to protect and defend our land, air, water and food supply, the ceaselessly daunting task of defending our natural world and those who inhabit it can feel like a perpetual uphill climb.

Sounding the alarm and inspiring action, especially within the framework of our country’s legal and political system, is where the challenges often lie. That eternal struggle is illustrated in Daniel Nelson’s new book Nature’s Burdens: Conservation and American Politics, the Reagan Era to the Present (University Press of Colorado, $31.95), which covers the intersection of defending wildlife and wild places with the ever-changing political shifts at the White House and in Congress.

The book makes a deep, detailed dive into the history of conservation legislation, beginning in the late 19th century, when the first national parks were created. It soon moves into the 1960s and 1970s, explaining how critical pieces of legislation — specifically the Endangered Species Act, the Land and Water Conservation Act and the Wilderness Act — came into being. The book then shifts into the Reagan era and beyond, where we see the working of individuals (like Interior Secretaries James Watt and Bruce Babbitt), a variety of agencies (such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service) and administrations — which, not surprisingly, view conservation differently depending on who occupied the White House at the time.

Political appointees in the Agriculture Department under Reagan, for instance, pushed for more cutting and logging in the Pacific Northwest. Following up on a campaign promise, one of President Clinton’s earliest initiatives was a “timber summit” that led to the Northwest Forest Plan. That plan, while controversial and not nearly as limiting and strict as environmentalists had hoped, led to significant reductions in logging. This kind of back-and-forth is a consistent theme.

But the most compelling elements of the book have less to do with legal maneuverings and bureaucratic wranglings and more to do with the shifts within the conservation movement and conservation science on the most efficient, effective ways to save species and public lands. Our understanding of the natural world, and what’s truly in the best interest of species and their habitat, evolved throughout this period — and continues to evolve. By referencing academic and scientific journals and reports, the author shows how nature doesn’t recognize our politically influenced rules and borders and boundaries; the interdependence of nature extends way beyond our political compromises.

Likewise, the timelines of natural evolution don’t hue to election schedules, making the task of marking — and even defining — success a critical challenge in it. This a key question Nelson asks: How do environmentalists measure progress? Is it by how many species are saved from extinction, or by how many acres are marked as national parks, refuges or wilderness? One of the compelling narratives in this book is how what environmentalists and conservationists are trying to change has evolved with scientific — and to some degree, philosophical — theory on species and land management.

Nelson references studies showing attempts to “return” areas to prior, pristine conditions (before grazing, development, etc.) may be inadvisable just as much as it may be impossible. Land and the species on it change and evolve; even trying to restore specific species’ populations to certain areas may not be in the best interest of that species if the other conditions that led it to thrive there initially are no long in place. Imposing human judgement on what we view is best for nature and animals has risks of its own; Nelson shows us that the reintroduction of some species in certain locales has worked, but over time, while what’s truly best is for us to leave nature alone, in as large as swaths as possible, and let nature take care of it on her own.

But over time — and this is where Nelson’s rigorous study most clearly elucidates the conservation challenge — competing interests among ranchers, hunters, livestock producers, real estate developers and conservationists have forced all kinds of compromises, and back-and-forth, in the political realm of land management.

And as administrations change, so too do their philosophies in terms of running the Interior department and its myriad agencies. With nature constantly evolving and our political landscape always changing, keeping things consistent over the long timeframes required by nature and species is almost impossible.

Nelson’s book relies heavily on legal specifics and political maneuverings, which at times made the text a bit dry. I wish he’d provided more color and commentary from politicians, agency staff and representatives of groups in the conservation movement. It would have brightened the material and made it feel more alive. Nelson spends a good bit of time on the histories and missions of various nature groups. Their growth and influence over the years are also an important focus of this book. Adding in more detail regarding the colorful personalities, and maybe a tad less focus on the fates of various legislative proposals, could have made this a more engaging and effective read.

The book concludes with the Obama presidency. We know — though it’s left unsaid — that the conservation pendulum in America has shifted again. A later volume could include details of the current chapter of the conservation struggle. But the point of this book, really, is that the pendulum never stops swinging. Coming to terms and dealing with that might be the conservation movement’s biggest challenge.

Can Plastic Ever Be Made Illegal?

Laws have banned plastic bags in some places, but taking the next steps requires overcoming some pretty major hurdles.

I thought I knew what garbage looked like. Then I arrived in Bangalore, the third-largest city in India.

There was trash was almost everywhere you looked. Plastic bottles, food packaging and other waste that could’ve potentially been recycled contaminated the landscape, even in people’s front- and backyards. When I’d ride into the city from the ashram where I was staying in the countryside, I’d inhale toxic fumes of garbage piles burning and observe wild animals rummaging through fields of trash.

During my first day on Commercial Street, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, I could feel the pollution sink into my pores and ignite oils on my face. The ground was no better. While wearing only flimsy flip-flops, I nearly stepped on a rat with a candy wrapper in its mouth.

My experiences weren’t just anecdotal. According to a 2016 study by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore generates 5,000 metric tons of garbage a day, of which only 10 percent on average is recycled. The city’s landfills, however, can only handle 2,100 tons of waste per day.

When I returned home, I quickly learned that Bangalore was not alone, and how the United States plastic lobby keeps its waste pollution behind closed doors. New York City — which has a population 1.5 million fewer people than Bangalore — throws away twice as much garbage; according to GrowNYC, residents of the Big Apple produce 12,000 tons of solid waste a day.

My experiences inspired a radical belief in me, going beyond plastic-bag bans and littering fines: Plastic should be illegal.

Communities around the world have taken action to ban single-use plastic bags. I began to wonder, could we ever take things a step further by banning plastic altogether? That’s not an easy question, I quickly learned, because not all plastics are created — and therefore, disposed of — equally.

When we explore the possibility of banning plastic, we need to be specific about which kinds. The base of all plastic is resins, which are composed of polymers. Different chemicals are required to make the many different types of resin. According to the American Chemistry Council, some common types include:

Polyethylene terephthalate, found in water bottles;
High-density polyethylene, included in bags for grocery and retail purchases;
Low-density polyethylene, used for food packaging and shrink wrap;
Polypropylene, utilized for medicine bottles and bottle caps; and
Polystyrene, typically in the form of Styrofoam.

Each of those types of plastic comes with different potential environmental costs. “The plastics of greatest concern from an environmental health perspective are polyvinyl chloride (vinyl), polystyrene, polycarbonate, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene,” says Mike Schade, Mind the Store campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. “Using vinyl products exposes consumers to hormone-disrupting phthalates, which are dangerous at very low levels of exposure.” Even getting rid of vinyl is dangerous, he says, because incinerating it releases dioxins, one of the most toxic man-made chemicals.

Additionally, I found that not all plastics are regulated equally. Although there hasn’t been any federal U.S. legislation yet banning vinyl, or any other type of plastic, cities and states have successfully passed and adopted measures to ban plastic bags. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Austin, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco are among the cities to implement straight bans as opposed to fees. Meanwhile, statewide bans have passed in California and Hawaii.

“When it comes to high density polyethylene and other [types of] plastic bags, the biggest issues are with them clogging up landfills, polluting parks, and waterways,” Schade says. “Plastic bags are a huge solid waste problem and a waste of precious resources.”

According to the Earth Policy Institute, the United States consumes 100 billion plastic bags each year, which is enough to circle the equator 1,330 times.

What if plastic bags were to be banned in the United States, as they were in Kenya earlier this year? Unfortunately that legal battle would require likely copious amounts of money to fight the plastic industry, most notably the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a pro-plastic lobbying group run by the American Chemistry Council. In her documentary Plastic Patch: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which I initially watched after returning from India, journalist Angela Sun revealed that the council is an umbrella organization for Dow Chemical Company, DuPont and ExxonMobil.

According to a recent report in The Huffington Post, the group is the moneybag behind legislation to ban the banning of plastic bags. These types of laws have already passed in states like Florida and Arizona. As depicted in Sun’s film, the American Progressive Bag Alliance ran negative, untruthful commercials urging Californians to vote against that state’s proposed plastic bag ban years ago. This year, the Iowa became the most recent state to ban plastic bag bans following a push from the organization and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Ironically, experts tell me that plastic-bag bans can actually endanger municipalities by instigating lawsuits from “big plastic.”

“Cities potentially expose themselves to lawsuits over environmental claims if they only ban plastic bags, but allow other bags to be given away for free,” explains Jennie Romer, a New York City-based attorney and founder of Plastic Bag Laws. Romer works with grassroots organizations in New York City to push for plastic-bag fees; according to The New York Times, Governor Cuomo quashed a measure to implement a 5-cent fee on plastic bags earlier this year.

There’s a reason why conversations about the plastics industry revolve around plastic bags: it’s a gateway to other environmental issues. Romer explains that once people get accustomed to having certain plastics banned, the plastic industry becomes concerned about the potential of all plastic products being banned rather than just bags. In other words, I realized that plastic bag legislation isn’t really about plastic bags; it’s about what other types of plastic can be potentially banned in the future.

While governments can regulate the plastics industry, ultimately, the effort to reduce plastic consumption comes down to shifting consumer behavior, Romer says. She adds that implementing fees encourage consumers to be more mindful compared to straight bans.

“People just don’t get a bag when they get an item or two or they bring a bag when they don’t want to pay a fee,” Romer explains.

While plastic bags are her focus, Romer also consults on expanded polystyrene, found in Styrofoam. She believes this type of plastic requires a straight ban because it breaks up more easily and cannot be recycled, unlike high-density polyethylene in plastic bags.

Sun tells me the government should have a role in regulating the labeling of plastic products. “Just because Bisphenol A [or BPA] is a buzz word and in social consciousness, the chemical industry can easily make a slight change and call it something else and still have a BPA-free label on it because it’s technically free of BPA,” she says. “Putting a BPA label on a baby bottle doesn’t mean it’s necessarily OK to be used.”

Sun also stresses that while governments should implement policies to reduce plastic consumption systematically, it’s up to individual people to raise awareness about the issue. No matter how much policy can influence our everyday lives, reducing plastic ultimately falls us — as individual consumers — to take action. This both inspires me and disappoints me, because it’s difficult to fight against a culture specifically designed to consume plastic. After all, bringing your own reusable bag doesn’t go very far when most of the products you purchase are packaged in plastic.

“Social change is hard to do, but it can be done little by little,” explains Sun. “Empowered citizens in different realms have pushed and lobbied for this change. It’s power to the people.”

While bans, whether they are for plastic bags or certain types of resin, seem to be the best idealistic policy for the environment, I learned that they can make governments vulnerable to lawsuits by the plastic lobby. While fees can inspire a change in consumer behavior without the potential of legal action, even those are difficult to just get passed. If we seriously consider banning plastic, not only do we have to specify which kinds, but we also need to work around a system heavily influenced by plastic manufacturers. Otherwise the United States’ garbage problem could start to look a lot more like Bangalore’s.