South Africa’s Climate-Fueled Fire Factories

Fires cost South Africa more than $750 million in damages in 2015.

Shongaziph Ngcongo awoke one windy night in August to find her thatched-roof house ablaze. She just managed to grab her six children and a few meagre possessions before escaping the wildfires that burnt down her valley.

Ngcongo lives in an idyllic-looking rural community located in hills above the Nhlazuka valley. In this rural part of KwaZulu-Natal, people live in traditional rondavel homes that are spread out among thornveld valleys. Steep hillsides make the homesteads easy targets for wildfires, especially those with thatched roofs.

“When fires start in the valley, sparks fly up on top of the thatch and then the houses start burning,” says community member Bono Cwazibe.

Many of the wildfires are caused by people hunting bush pigs: they set the bush alight to flush out wild animals, and when the flames get out of control they spread rapidly through the dry thornveld scrub and grasslands. The community has no firebreaks, so their livestock, crops and homes are vulnerable to fire attacks.

The peak fire season in Nhlazuka, which has a population of 7,903, is in August as wind speeds reach up to 100 knots an hour. Wildfires cause loss of grazing for livestock, and some community farmers have had their sugarcane plots destroyed.

Every year an average of three to four wildfires ignited in Nhlazuka spread to commercial farming land and timber forests in neighboring areas. These wildfires are often detected only after they have entered the commercial properties, and by then the damage is done.

Nhlazuka’s fire factory is not isolated: at least 16,027 fires were detected across South Africa between January and June this year, statistics from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Fire Information for Resource Management System show.

The cost of fire incidents amounted to more than R1-billion ($750 million) in damages across the country in 2015, according to The Fire Protection Association of Southern Africa.

Building Resilience

With temperatures rising and drought spreading due to the impacts of global climate change, neighbourhoods such as Nhlazuka that are vulnerable to wildfires need to build up resilience.

Nhlazuka is part of the uMgungundlovu district municipality, identified in scientific studies as an area of high climate change risk. This is because increased warming, rainfall, wildfires and extreme weather events have already been observed, with increasingly negative impacts on local people, ecosystems and economies.

The municipality is adapting to the effects of climate change by implementing the uMngeni Resilience Project, in partnership with the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Agriculture, Earth and Environmental Sciences, South African National Biodiversity Institute, Fire Protection Associations, Working on Fire and Department of Environmental Affairs.

A fire early warning system in Nhlazuka is one of the resilience measures being put in place during a five-year, multi-component project supported by the Adaptation Fund, a global initiative that finances climate adaptation projects in developing countries.

“There is no doubt that climate change is real and that it is happening,” says uMgungundlovu mayor Thobekile Maphumulo. “Last year our municipality, along with many other parts of South Africa, faced a severe drought that we are still recovering from.”

2016 fires graph“We have seen an increase in sudden and severe high-intensity weather events, such as storms, lightning and flooding, that risk human life and cause damage to the environment, infrastructure and people’s homes.”

The uMngeni Resilience Project responds to the anticipated changes in climate in the uMgungundlovu district by reducing climate vulnerability and increasing the adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities and small-scale farmers.

“Climate change and all that it brings with it – droughts that threaten food security, cause job losses in the agricultural sector and affect availability of water; storms and flooding that threaten human lives and homes – is likely to make poverty, inequality and unemployment worse.

“It is vital that we work with communities, particularly those that are most vulnerable, to build their resilience so that when the worst comes, the impacts will be less, they will be able to rebuild quicker and emerge stronger and more self-sufficient,” Maphumulo says.

FireHawk Down

In 1994 commercial farmers and the timber industry joined forces to install FireHawk, the first computer-assisted fire detection system in the world, in the Richmond local municipality. Nhlazuka is a ward of Richmond, about 80km away, and the municipality plans to deploy the FireHawk system as part of the uMngeni Resilience Project.

FireHawk consists of 360-degree rotating cameras mounted on a 27m-high tower overlooking the area. The cameras stream images to the FireHawk detection center, where a bank of computers are monitored 24/7 by operators working three eight-hour shifts a day.

When the cameras detect smoke or a potential fire, the computers help the operator to zoom into the site and watch it live, to determine the direction of the fire, how far away it is and how threatening it is. Once it is confirmed that a fire is threatening, it is then positioned on a map to show its exact location.

The FireHawk system has a cross-referencing feature which provides 99.9 percent accuracy of the location of the fire. Once the operator positions the location of the fire on the map, he then selects another camera with a clear view of the fire. There are two cameras looking at the fire from two different angles, enabling the operator to determine the distance of the fire from farms and homes.

The operator’s duty is to notify the owner of the property where the fire has been located. If it is a threat, firefighting personnel and vehicles are quickly dispatched from the Richmond incident command center based next to the FireHawk detection center.

The Richmond FireHawk system detects an average of 350 wildfires a year, although each season is different. The most wildfires detected in one season was five years ago, with 540 fires.

Last year was the best season, with the detection of 84 wildfires. Terry Tedder, who has worked at the Richmond Fire Protection Association since 2007, says increased education in fire prevention and management methods is helping to reduce the number of wildfire incidents.

The FireHawk team aims to erect a 30m camera tower system in Nhlazuka at the Thusong community center, which has an eagle’s-eye view over the community. The early warning system should be piloted in 2018, and the dream is to have a Working on Fire team stationed at the center, says Tedder.

“Detection is not enough, we need a team to extinguish the fires close to the community. It takes about an hour to drive from the main town of Richmond to Nhlazuka, so even if a fire is detected early it may be too late by the time a firefighting team arrives to assist,” says Tedder.

Mayor Maphumulo says the FireHawk early warning system needs to be part of a holistic fire-fighting approach in Nhlazuka: “We won’t just focus on sending out warnings, but will work with the communities to develop local fire management and response plans so that everyone knows how to respond to the different types of warnings. This system will help us to avoid loss of life and property from veld and forest fires.”

Tedder says the Richmond FireHawk system covers an area of about 240,000 hectares (925 square miles) and is funded by members in the timber and commercial farming industries.

Until now its protection did not include the 17,000 to 20,000 hectares of community land owned by the Ingonyama Trust in uMgungundlovu municipality, including Nhlazuka. The trust is the registered owner of large tracts of land in KwaZulu-Natal that have historically been part of the Zulu kingdom, dating back to various Zulu kings.

“The biggest challenge fire protection associations face is the issue of costs of firefighting staff and equipment. Commercial farmers can afford the equipment to help with the prevention and management of fire, but rural areas cannot, making them not self-sufficient,” says Tedder.

FireWise Interventions

Bono Cwazibe, who grew up in Nhlazuka, is the local supervisor of a national government initiative called the FireWise Communities Programme. His job involves door-to-door education on preventative fire methods and assisting in the clearing of fire-fueling alien plants.

Bono and the community do not fully understand climate change and its global impacts, but he believes the resilience project is part of the uMgungundlovu municipality’s goal of educating the community about climate change.

Since the implementation of FireWise in 2014, he says, the number of fires in the Nhlazuka area have decreased. It takes on average five hours to put out a fire once it has spread and to date, there is only one known death due to fire that occurred in 2013.

In the past four years, the residents of Nhlazuka began receiving municipal water facilities and electricity. Receiving electricity has reduced the number of fires as people no longer need to cook on open fires – disposing of ash and strong wind speeds easily carried the sparks.

Another intervention has seen more than 70 percent of the thatched roofs replaced by tin roofs. This doesn’t solve the problem completely, however, as most of the homes are built with timber structures and once alight, the entire house can burn down.

Carrying her three-month-old granddaughter on her back, Shongaziph Ngcongo (44) says her thatched roof was replaced with a tin one after her home burnt down and this has helped her to feel safer.

“We would be happy to have a way to detect fires early,” she says. “This is important, because then we can take precautionary measures and protect ourselves. Wildfires affect us. They damage our belongings and our fields.”

Originally published at oxpeckers.org

This investigation by #ClimaTracker and Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism was produced in partnership with Code for Africa, and funded by ImpactAfrica and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Extinct Frogs and the Golden Goose

Research into the frog-killing chytrid fungus earns a Golden Goose Award, recognizing the value of federally funded science.

The first dead toads showed up in 1991.

At the time no one knew why they had died — only that they were suffering from some sort of mysterious skin disease. More frog and toad deaths soon followed, but for years the cause remained a mystery.

Today we know the truth about those fatalities. They were the result of the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, also known as Bd or chytrid, which causes a fatal skin infection in most amphibians that encounter it. Over the past few decades, the fungus has killed millions of frogs around the world and plunged hundreds of species into extinction.

Last week the four researchers who discovered Bd — Joyce Longcore, Elaine Lamirande, Don Nichols and Allan Pessier — were among the recipients of the sixth annual Golden Goose Awards, an honor created to recognize the value of federally funded basic research — studies that may often appear strange or obscure on the surface but lead to significant social or economic benefits for humanity.

“The Golden Goose Award reminds us why politicians must leave scientific research to the scientists,” Congressman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said in a prepared release. “This year’s winners prove how obscure and even unbelievable studies can change the world as we know it. We must continue to support our scientists whose brilliance and ingenuity keep America the greatest nation on earth.”

The awards come at a time when the Trump administration has proposed massive — and politically unpopular — cuts in federal funding for basic science and health research.

All of this year’s Golden Goose Award recipients had particularly strong environmental impacts. Also recognized were research into soy-based proteins that have replaced toxic, cancer-causing formaldehyde in much of the plywood made in the United States and the world-changing field of mathematics known as “fuzzy logic,” which has an almost endless array of environmental applications.

None of these achievements would have been possible without funding from the federal government. “We wouldn’t have been in the right place at the right time” to discover Bd without the government’s specialized resources, Pessier said during last week’s awards ceremony.

Even if the Trump administration fails to cut budgets, this type of work could still be at risk. Oregon State University researcher Kaichang Li, whose research into soy protein adhesives was funded by the USDA, said during the ceremony that the current trend is to provide huge grants in the neighborhood of $20 million, not the small type of grant that led to his discoveries. “We need small grants so people can explore crazy ideas,” he said.

You can watch a short documentary about this year’s recipients below:

Revelator Reads: Great New Environmental Books for Fall

October brings us new books about sea-level rise, wolves and feeding the resistance.

October arrives with a chill in the air, a touch of color on the leaves, the promise of impending ghosts and ghouls… and a heck of a lot of new environmentally themed books.

Publishers must love fall as much as I do, because they have a ton of new titles scheduled for this month, including books on climate change, canines and food for your soul.

Here are five of our favorites being released during October:

water will comeThe Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

After the past month of natural disasters, this book couldn’t be more perfectly timed — or more necessary. Goodell traveled across the globe to see how climate change and sea-level rise are affecting cities — and the people who live in them — in a dozen countries. He even visited one island nation that may not exist for much longer. This book covers the history of how we have adapted to changing sea levels as well as the science of what’s happening now and in the near future. A must-read. (Little, Brown and Company, October 24, $28)

Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity by Sandra Postel

If The Water Will Come gets you too depressed, here’s the flip side: Postel’s examination of water projects around the world that actually work. If safe drinking water, working watersheds, clean rivers and un-floodable cities matter to you, check this one out. (Island Press, October 10, $29)

american wolfAmerican Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee

The true story of one wolf — Yellowstone’s fabled alpha female named O-Six — and her effect on people around the world. Some admired her. Others feared her and her kind. This is not a story that ends well, but Blakeslee tells it marvelously, in a way that will leave every reader thinking. (Crown, October 17, $28)

Science Comics: Dogs – From Predator to Protector by Andy Hirsch

Sticking with canines, here’s a new graphic novel to help fill kids in on the genetics, evolution and adaptation of mankind’s best friend. Make sure to check out other books in this series, especially the ones on sharks and coral reefs. (First Second, October 31, $12.99)

feed the resistanceFeed the Resistance: Recipes & Ideas for Getting Involved by Julia Turshen

They say an army marches on its stomach. If that’s true then the resistance to the current wave of regressive ideas had better be well-fed. Turshen provides a book full of recipes perfect for eating while gathering around to talk about civil rights, environmental justice and other tasty topics. She also provides the ingredients on how to get started in the worlds of “food, politics and social causes.” (Chronicle Books, October 3, $14.95)

That’s our list for October, but we know there’s a lot more out there. What are you reading? Share your favorite new or old environmental books in the comments below.

Previously in The Revelator:

Revelator Reads: 8 New Environmental Books for September

Revelator Reads: 7 New Environmental Books for August

Revelator Reads: 7 New Environmental Books for July

Trump’s America First Energy Plan Puts Foreign Companies First, Marine Species Last

Oil surveys in the Atlantic Ocean could harm marine life without benefiting the US economy.

WASHINGTON— Few days go by without President Trump touting his “America First” agenda, which includes his ambitions to dramatically ramp up offshore drilling for oil and natural gas.

There’s some irony, then, that the first beneficiaries of these initiatives could be mostly foreign-based companies that stand to reap millions of dollars in revenue from conducting oil and gas seismic surveys in the waters off the East Coast.

An investigation by The Revelator reveals that four of these seismic survey companies are based overseas. Only one is based in the United States. The surveys are highly speculative ventures, to be conducted in a region thought to hold relatively low oil and gas reserves and appear unlikely to proceed without significant upfront funding from oil companies.

Our investigation also shows that despite decades of research on the impact of noise on marine mammals and other wildlife, there has never been a robust, ecosystem-wide examination of its effects. This gap in the understanding of regional impacts of seismic surveys on an array of marine life is contributing to ongoing debate within the marine science community on their impacts on oceanic species.

The oil and gas industry and the federally funded National Science Foundation, along with Columbia University’s prestigious Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, say the seismic testing causes no lasting harm to marine life. But other marine biologists and environmentalists say there is increasing evidence showing that the surveys do cause significant harm and therefore should not be conducted in the Atlantic.

“The (industry) claims there is no demonstrated effect,” says Douglas Nowacek, associate professor of conservation technology at Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina. “But nobody has looked” thoroughly enough.

Opening up the Atlantic to Oil and Gas

The National Marine Fisheries Service is currently reviewing the applications to conduct seismic surveys spanning 330,000 square miles of the Atlantic between New Jersey and Florida.

Trump issued an executive order this past April to open the mid- and south-Atlantic to potential oil and gas development. The order also directed the fisheries service to “expedite all stages” of seismic survey applications. Decisions on whether to proceed with oil and gas leasing in the Atlantic and to award seismic survey permits are expected later this year.

Seismic surveys use super-loud underwater blasts from powerful air guns to map the ocean floor in search of fossil fuels. The surveys are a crucial first step in determining whether there are sufficient oil and natural gas for energy companies to invest billions of dollars to develop offshore production platforms and onshore processing facilities. The sounds are roughly equivalent to a grenade blast and can be detected thousands of miles across the ocean.

The Trump administration’s plan to open the Atlantic for oil and gas exploration offers one of the largest seismic testing opportunities in the world. Offshore seismic surveys are conducted on a regular basis across the globe.

Applications to conduct these surveys have been submitted by Spectrum Geo and TGS, both headquartered in Norway; the French company CGG; and WesternGeco, a subsidiary of oil services giant Schlumberger that’s incorporated in the Caribbean island nation of Curaçao and has offices in Houston. The smallest of the five companies is Houston-based Ion Geophysical Corp.

Seismic survey cruises are generally required to have certified marine wildlife lookouts on watch and typically use “passive acoustic monitoring” systems to listen for marine mammal vocalizations. Seismic survey testing is stopped if marine mammals are detected nearby.  But the monitoring is far from foolproof.

Conservation experts argue that more mitigation is needed to reduce the potential impacts of these studies that could harm not just wildlife but other industries, including commercial and sport fishing.

“Approving seismic blasting in the Atlantic would simply shift the conservation burden [for marine species] onto U.S. fisheries and others in this country, to profit what are mostly foreign companies,” Michael Jansy, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project, tells The Revelator.

Seismic Survey Industry Struggles to Stay Afloat

The Atlantic seismic surveys would come at a crucial time for the seismic survey industry, which has been battered by three years of low oil prices. The industry suffers from overcapacity, bankruptcies, layoffs, declining stock prices and years of financial losses that have slashed its market by 60 percent since 2012, according to the trade publication E&P Hart Energy.

Trump’s support of this industry also comes at a time when the United States is approaching record domestic oil production, with surging exports lead by steady productivity increases from fracking in the West Texas Permian basin, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Atlantic reserves, by comparison, aren’t necessarily attractive to oil companies. Pavel Molchanov, senior vice president and equity research analyst at Raymond James & Associates Inc., told E&E News in July that the Atlantic leases are unlikely to spur major new activity. “Industry does not want to drill in those places right now because prices are relatively weak,” he said.

It also seems unlikely that the debt-laden seismic survey companies will proceed with the very expensive surveys unless they receive some upfront prefunding from oil companies willing to purchase the survey data, The Revelator’s review of the five companies’ public financial reports show.

At least one of the companies confirms this to be true. “If we have customer support, we will move forward with a seismic data acquisition program,” Susan Ganz, a spokeswoman for WesternGeco, stated in an email to The Revelator.

How Much Oil Are We Talking About?

Seismic surveys taken in the Atlantic between 1966 and 1988 indicate approximately 2.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil reserves exist, mostly in the mid-Atlantic. Only 2.4 billion barrels are considered economically recoverable at $100/barrel, nearly double the current price, according to a 2016 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management report. That’s just enough oil to meet current U.S. demand for about 120 days.

The industry is hopeful that these old estimates are incomplete. “Atlantic seismic survey data are needed to update resource estimates that are based on decades-old information,” a consortium of oil industry trade groups stated in an Aug. 17 filing to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. “With new seismic data in hand, decisions informed by science can be made as to the true resource potential in these areas.”

The current proposed round of Atlantic seismic applications calls for two-dimensional (2D) testing. But if new prospects are discovered, additional seismic surveys using more advanced 3D and 4D technologies could be conducted, providing a four-dimensional view of the ocean floor, industry experts say.

Environmental groups question why it’s necessary to issue Atlantic seismic permits to all five companies, which will conduct surveys in overlapping areas and in some cases, at the same time. The companies will pay nothing to the federal government for the potential harm that could result to marine life.

To minimize the impact on species, environmentalists urge the sharing of survey data from a single company rather than allowing multiple companies to acquire data that would then be subsequently sold to oil and gas companies.

“Under the law, cumulative impacts (from seismic surveys) are not taken into account,” says Ingrid Biedron, a marine scientist with Oceana, an environmental group working to protect the world’s oceans.

A Seismic Split in the Science Community

Offshore seismic surveys use a series of air guns clustered in arrays and dragged underwater behind survey ships. The guns release compressed every 10 to 12 seconds, creating a sonic wave.

The testing continues 24 hours a day for months a time. The sound can travel several thousand miles through the ocean depending on water temperature, salinity and the ocean floor contour.

The sound waves are generally directed downward and bounce off subsurface geological formations. Hydrophones dragged behind the ship then receive the reflected sound. Sophisticated computer programs use the data to generate maps of the ocean floor, showing where potential oil and gas reserves may be located.

How does all this affect marine life? That’s still a matter of controversy.

The government previously considered the impact on marine life as potentially consequential. President Obama last December permanently withdrew the north- and mid-Atlantic from offshore oil and gas development because of the high potential for environmental damage and low amount of estimated hydrocarbon resources. Trump’s April executive order partially reverses that decision.

Before that, in the wake of Obama’s decision, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management canceled six seismic survey applications. The agency’s then-director Abigail Ross Hopper stated this past January that the value of the potential information from “new air gun seismic surveys in the Atlantic does not outweigh the potential risks of those surveys’ acoustic pulse impacts on marine life.”

Oil-industry trade groups disagreed and stated in public comments filed in July with the National Marine Fisheries Service that “there has been no demonstration of any biologically significant negative impacts to marine life” from seismic surveys and that the proposed Atlantic surveys “will have no more than a negligible impact on marine mammal species” or on fisheries.

The oil industry’s contention that seismic testing causes negligible impact on marine life is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences. The science foundation owns the seismic survey research ship Marcus G. Langseth, operated by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Office of Marine Operations. The foundation provides about $10 million a year for offshore seismic survey research conducted by academic scientists across the country using the Langseth.

The Langseth serves as the national seismic research facility for the U.S. academic research community. The ship’s seismic research “provides a view of the Earth’s interior that is unmatched in clarity, quality, and detail by any other method,” a brochure issued by the Lamont-Doherty observatory states. “As a result, a wide array of key Earth processes can now be studied in all three dimensions.”

The National Science Foundation and the observatory have repeatedly stated in seismic survey applications to the National Marine Fisheries Service that the tests do not cause lasting harm to marine life, a position the federal regulatory agency has generally echoed.

In an October 2015 draft environmental analysis for a proposed seismic survey in the south Atlantic, the observatory’s environmental consultant concluded that the 42-day survey using an array of 36 air guns with total discharge of 6,600 cubic inches would have little impact on marine mammals. The size of that air gun array is comparable to the ones used by the five companies seeking Atlantic permits.

“It is unlikely that the proposed survey would result in any cases of temporary or permanent hearing impairment, or any significant non-auditory physical or physiological effects,” stated the observatory report, which was prepared by an Ontario-based environmental research firm called LGL Ltd. “If marine mammals encounter the survey while it is underway, some behavioral disturbance could result, but this would be localized and short-term.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service published a comprehensive assessment of seismic surveys on marine life in April 2016. The report was in response to a request for a permit to conduct a 60-day seismic survey in the south Pacific.

The fisheries service “does not anticipate that serious injury or mortality would occur as a result of Lamont-Doherty’s proposed seismic survey in the southeast Pacific Ocean,” the report stated.

“Lamont-Doherty’s proposed activities are not likely to cause long-term behavioral disturbance, serious injury, or death, or other effects that would be expected to adversely affect reproduction or survival of any individuals.”

Mounting Evidence of Significant Impact

But ongoing scientific research — often conducted in controlled settings — is compiling an increasing body of evidence that seismic surveys have negative impacts on marine life, with a chorus of scientists issuing dire warnings.

“Opening the U.S. east coast to seismic air gun exploration poses an unacceptable risk of serious harm to marine life at the species and population levels, the full extent of which will not be understood until long after the harm occurs,”  75 marine biologists stated in a 2015 letter sent to President Obama.

Researchers in Australia announced earlier this year they found that the seismic blasts killed zooplankton, raising concerns about the impact on the basic component of the ocean nutrient cycle.

On a larger scale, the endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is known to be sensitive to seismic generated noise and marine scientists fear any impact on its behavior — from decreased foraging to reproduction declines — could plunge the species toward extinction. The species experienced a spike of deaths reported earlier this year, primarily from entanglements with fishing gear, pushing the population below 500 whales.

The International Whaling Commission scientific committee concluded in 2005 that seismic surveys can cause “population level impacts.” The Convention on Biological Diversity stated in 2012 “there are increasing concerns about the long-term and cumulative of noise on marine biodiversity.”

A 2013 review on the impact of seismic air gun surveys on marine life found that “seismic air guns are the second highest contributor of human caused underwater noise in total energy output per year, following nuclear and other explosions.”

For years the government resisted even conducting significant studies on the possible impact of seismic surveys on marine mammals. It was only after environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, publishers of The Revelator, sued federal agencies that an Environmental Impact Statement on the impacts of seismic testing in the Gulf of Mexico was conducted.

That study clearly shows there are impacts. And in some cases, the study found, they can be severe. But the research was far from definitive and relied heavily on underwater robots to measure sound impacts. But the impact is harder to measure for marine mammals, which often have the ability to move away from loud sound sources, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions.

Still, the report estimated that 31.9 million marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico could be “moderately” harassed by oil and gas seismic surveys over 10 years. That includes 8 out every 10 members of the Gulf’s endangered sperm whale population.

The report concluded, however, that “the best available information, while providing evidence for concern and a basis for continuing research, does not, at this time, provide grounds to conclude that these surveys would disrupt behavioral patterns with more than negligible population-level impacts” (chapter 4-57).

The Gulf of Mexico has been routinely subjected to seismic surveys for decades but without a comprehensive examination of its impacts in marine life.

“Nobody has studied whether seismic on the scale of the Gulf of Mexico impacts the populations of marine mammals, turtles, fish, whatever,” says Nowacek, who is among the world’s leading scientists studying the impact of sound on marine life and has testified before Congress.

Burden of Proof

The lack of definitive information on the impacts of seismic surveys on marine life has given industry an advantage when it comes to obtaining permission from the National Marine Fisheries Services to issue Incidental Harassment Authorization permits to conduct the surveys, experts say.

The permits allow seismic survey companies to “incidentally but not intentionally harass marine mammals.” The agency typically issues the permits with stipulations that “prescribe monitoring, reporting, and mitigation measures to minimize the impacts of the surveys to marine mammals.”

Marine scientists opposed to seismic testing say the industry and National Science Foundation’s position that seismic surveys cause no lasting damage to marine life is based on a faulty premise.

Nowacek says the standards should be revised by requiring applicants to prove that the testing causes no serious harm to marine life, rather than forcing environmental groups and university marine biologists with limited funding to conduct decades of research that, while showing negative impacts on individuals, remain inconclusive on an ecosystem level.

“You have some tool, some technique of sampling, and it’s a good tool for what it does,” Nowacek says. “But why is the burden of proof that somebody has to show that there is a severe negative impact instead of the other way around? We should be having a discussion about where the burden of proof lies.”

That discussion is not currently part of the seismic testing application process in the mid-Atlantic, nor is it expected to be.

Rebuilding Puerto Rico’s Devastated Electricity System

Chronic neglect of energy infrastructure increases vulnerability to extreme weather.

(Originally published at the blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Reprinted with permission.)

Over the last few days, I’ve been glued to social media, the phone, and ham radio-like apps trying to find out more about the fate of family members in the catastrophic situation in my native Puerto Rico following Hurricane María. (Fortunately, I was able to confirm on Friday that everyone in my immediate family is accounted for and safe). My family is among the few lucky ones. My childhood home is a cement suburban dwelling built on well-drained hilly soils, some eight kilometers from the coast, and well outside flood zones. But many of my 3.4 million co-nationals in Puerto Rico have not been so lucky, and are experiencing, as I write this, catastrophic flooding.

Puerto Rico remains completely dark and silent following Irma’s assault, having lost 100 percent of its electricity, hampering communications and complicating recovery efforts. Additionally, many residents are without access to clean drinking water, some are in areas that have not yet been aided by rescuers, and supplies are dwindling. In addition, there are more than 170,00 affected in the nearby US Virgin Islands and Dominica, Caribbean islands who have also experienced catastrophic damages.

The flood waters also continue to rage. Just in the largest suburban community in Puerto Rico — Levittown in the north — hundreds had to be evacuated on short notice during the early Thursday dawn as the gates of the Lago La Plata reservoir were opened and the alarm sirens failed to warn the population. The next day, a truly dramatic emergency evacuation operation followed as the Guajataca Dam in the northwest broke and 70,000 were urged to leave the area. At least ten have been confirmed dead so far.

The government of the Commonwealth has mounted a commendable response, but has been hampered in large part by the lack of power and communications facilities, which are inoperable at the moment except for those persons, agencies, and telephone companies that have power generators and the gas to keep them running. This has been one of the main impediments for Puerto Ricans abroad to communicate with loved ones and for the Rosselló administration’s efforts to establish communications and coordination with many towns that remain unaccounted for.

Electric power in Puerto Rico is almost non-existent following Hurricane María. (NOAA)

Puerto Ricans are also fearful of being left behind or forgotten. While the U.S. media coverage for storms Harvey and and Irma was robust, the same level of coverage has not been seen for Hurricane María. If this out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality were to spread to the federal government, whose help is so desperately needed, it could prove monumentally disastrous for the island.

Underinvestment and neglect of infrastructure increases vulnerability to extreme weather

Why has Puerto Rico’s energy infrastructure been rendered so vulnerable in the recent weeks? The ferocity of Irma and María could stretch the capacity of even well-funded and maintained energy production and distribution systems. In Florida—where the power grid had received billions in upgrades over the last decade—Irma left two-thirds of the population without power (but was also able to bounce back after a few weeks).

But years of severe infrastructure underinvestment by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) has led to a fragile system that has completely collapsed after these two hurricanes. Irma’s indirect hit damaged distribution lines but not production; María’s eye made landfall on the southeast and exited through the central north, placing it right on the path of four of the high-capacity plants that burn heavy fuel and diesel oil. These plants are also located close to, or within, flood zones.

The reconstruction of the power infrastructure in Puerto Rico is a monumental task as it is critical to guarantee the well-being of Puerto Ricans. More than 3.4 million US citizens are now in a life-threatening situation and getting electricity up and running in the near term is critically important as it can support rescue and recovery efforts.

Wherever possible, these immediate efforts should aim to align with a broader rebuilding mission that points Puerto Rico toward a more economically robust and climate resilient future, not repairs that repeat the mistakes of the past. There is a need also to build resilience against the climate and extreme weather vulnerability Puerto Rico is so brutally facing right now.

There is a great need also for economic alleviation of the high cost of energy in Puerto Rico: electricity prices for all sectors (residential, commercial, and industrial) are much higher in Puerto Rico than in the United States. Reliance on imported fossil fuels for generation is one driver of the high cost: in 2016 nearly half of energy production came from petroleum, nearly one-third from natural gas, and 17 percent coal). Only 2 percent comes from renewables.

While there is quite a bit of clean energy momentum in the United States, that impetus is not being transferred to Puerto Rico. There are many reasons for that, including lack of support from PREPA. But Puerto Rico has strong solar and wind energy resource potential, and renewable energy has been proposed as a way to help PREPA pare down its $9 billion dollar debt, help reduce reliance on fossil fuels and fossil fuel price volatility, lower costs to consumers, and contribute to an economic recovery for the Commonwealth.

This unprecedented catastrophe affecting millions of US citizens requires the intervention of the federal government

To ensure a safe and just economic recovery for Puerto Rico, Congress and the administration need to commit resources to help the territory recover. President Trump has declared Puerto Rico a disaster zone, and FEMA director Brock Long will visit the island on Monday. The priority right now is to save lives and restore basic services. To aid these efforts, Congress and the Trump administration should:

  • Direct the Department of Defense to provide helicopters and other emergency and rescue resources to Puerto Rico.
  • Provide an emergency spending package to the US territory.
  • Increase the FEMA funding level for debris removal and emergency protective measures in Puerto Rico.
  • Temporarily suspend the Jones Act. The Jones Act, which mandates that all vessels carrying cargo into the US and its territories be US Merchant Marine vessels, significantly increases the cost of importing goods into the island.

Once the state of emergency ends, Governor Rosselló needs to be very vocal that Puerto Rico’s energy infrastructure reconstruction should help put the Puerto Rican people and economy on a path to prosperity and resilience from climate impacts. The 2017 hurricane season is not over yet, and the situation in Puerto Rico right now is catastrophic. Decisions about energy infrastructure will be made in the coming days, weeks, and months. Those decisions need to take into account the short- as well as the long-term needs of the Puerto Rican population and help make Puerto Rico more resilient to the massive climate and weather extreme dislocations that we are facing.

Want to help?

Critical Critters Call for Gonzovationists

Artist Ralph Steadman and writer Ceri Levy make us laugh while worrying about extinction.

Artist Ralph Steadman has become the ultimate recycler.

Until recently, the dirty water the 81-year-old satirist used to clean his paint brushes each day would get dumped down the sink, never to be seen again.

But last year Steadman started pouring his water glasses onto something else: large pieces of paper on his studio floor. After the dirty water has dried for a day or two, he examines the faint colors and patterns — like a giant Rorschach inkblot — and an image forms in his mind. His paintbrushes come out again and he swirls and splats color and ink until the portrait of an endangered animal emerges.

“Picasso had his blue period,” he tells me. “I’ve entered my dirty-water period.”

The resulting paintings — 100 of them — can be found in the new book Critical Critters, published Sept. 26 by Bloomsbury, with proceeds from each sale benefitting the World Wildlife Fund.

The watery book marks Steadman’s third collaboration with writer, filmmaker and conservationist Ceri Levy. “That’s us,” Levy says. “A team built out of filth.”

ralph steadman ceri levy
Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy. Courtesy Bloomsbury

The book is packed with portraits of endangered animals — giant pandas, tigers, chimpanzees, vaquitas, pangolins and dozens of other species — all depicted in the wild, paint-splattered technique Steadman made famous through his collaborations with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Next to each painting, Levy provides text (both scientific and comic) about the various species. Alongside that information he contributes a running narrative about the process the duo used to develop the book and its contents.

critical critters orangutanThat process involves Steadman and Levy trading a constant barrage of jokes, insults, barbs, slings, snipes and burns, along with the more-than-occasional pun.

“I guess that’s why we work well together,” Steadman laughs, “because we enjoy the hurt.”

The duo first teamed up a little over six years ago, when Levy asked Steadman to provide a single painting for an art exhibition about extinction. Steadman produced dozens. That led to their first book, Extinct Boids (2012), which contained portraits of bird species that are no longer with us. They followed it in 2015 with Nextinction, about the bird species that could be next to fall into extinction if the world doesn’t take action. Now they’ve finished the series by turning their pens and keyboard to the rest of the animal kingdom, tackling mammals, reptiles, fish, insects and even a plant or two.

(There are still a couple of birds in the new book. Steadman likes drawing beaks.)

Despite the heady topics of endangered species and extinction, Critical Critters — like the two books before it — is remarkably funny while remaining deeply informative. “We’ve always maintained that you’ve got to make people laugh in order to engage them,” Levy says. “If we just tell people, ‘you’re all dreadful bastards, you’ve screwed it all up, and now look what’s going to happen,’ people go, ‘yeah, whatever.’ But if you make them laugh, you’ve got a chance.

“That’s all you’re trying to do is inform people,” he continues. “But you’re trying to bribe them by giving them a good joke or two. And then they come to the table.”

Both creators say they feel they’ve accomplished something over the course of their collaboration and friendship. “Three hundred paintings down the line and we’re still talking to each other,” Levy says. “The weird thing is that one painting has now turned into a trilogy. We’re calling it the ‘gonzovation’ trilogy.”

critical critters nextinction extinct boids“He stole that word off of me,” Steadman accuses gruffly, as the three of us talk over Skype.

Levy sighs, exasperated. “As soon as he’s in public, he says I’ve stolen everything.”

“Ceri just causes trouble,” growls Steadman. “He’s a bit like one of these critters. He creeps about and smashes things and then he eats somebody’s sandwich.”

Even with the book done, the two still trade their fair share of barbs.

So — what exactly is “gonzovation?” Levy says a gonzovationist is just an alternative conservationist. “I think it means the normal, regular people who are trying to help the world of conservation in some way,” he explains. “Everyone can do something to help animals, creatures, the planet, nature, and we don’t have to have, you know, university degrees. We can partake in conversation.”

Steadman interrupts. “What do you mean we don’t have university degrees?”

“Yours isn’t real! Did you show up for the tests?”

“I’m a BSc,” says Steadman, mock-indignant.

“I know what the BS stands for.”

“Bloody silly.”

“Gonzovation,” Levy finally continues, “allows the rest of us who aren’t in those hallowed halls of conservation to have a chance to do something. That’s the important thing. I think everyone’s fed up with clicking the ‘like’ button on Facebook or donating three dollars a month to help this or that animal. We need to find a way to participate and be hands-on.”

Both say working on the trilogy has opened their eyes. “I’ve learned an awful lot,” Levy says. “I had no idea when we started just how screwed the planet is at the moment and how many people are trying to screw with it. We’ve all got to do something. We can’t do nothing anymore. It could mean taking out the recycling. It could mean planting a tree that butterflies like. It could mean getting really good pollinating plants. We can all do things that help.”

Steadman says he’s stunned to find out why some of these species are endangered. “One of the things that amazes me, is that people have a need to go out hunting still.”

Even with three books under their belts, Levy feels there are still important things to learn, not just for himself but for the entire conservation community. “Conservation needs to find a way to get more people to do things that will help,” he says. “We need to engage. We need to find a way to make people feel they’re part of it, so they’re not disassociated from conservation projects. That’s the million-dollar question for conservationists today: how do we make people gonzovationists?”

The process that led to the creation of Critical Critters may hold part of that answer: “It’s just teamwork,” says Steadman. That’s what works in conservation — only maybe with fewer puns and snipes.

Thai Activists Fight Trash Taboo

Beach cleanup efforts in Thailand illustrate the global problem of plastic pollution.

U.K. expat Rich Cramp and I sat in white plastic chairs on Nai Yang Beach in Phuket, Thailand, one afternoon this past June. With the sea behind us, plates of pad thai and Leo beer in front of us, we chatted about his involvement as a local organizer with Trash Hero, a Thailand-born, but now global, conservation nonprofit. He said the organization’s goal is to educate people about plastic pollution and get volunteers to clean up beaches, especially in places like Thailand where awareness of plastic pollution and its implications is low.

“It is a huge cultural taboo in Thailand to clean up other people’s trash,” said Cramp. “So much of what gets onto the ground stays on the ground or blows into freshwater sources or the ocean.”

thailand beach trash plastic
Plastic covers Nai Yang Beach in Phuket, Thailand. © 2017 Erica Cirino, used with permission

In Thailand — the world’s sixth-greatest plastic polluter — and many other developing countries in Asia, socioeconomically disadvantaged people are delegated to clean up trash. So, Cramp explained, while Thais will clean up trash on their own properties, they tend to avoid cleaning other people’s trash in public places to avoid being seen by others as “lower class.”

This cultural taboo has lead to a huge accumulation of plastic trash in Thailand’s forests, lagoons, roadsides and beaches.

While exploring the country’s urban and natural places, I found that most of the litter on the ground was single-use plastic items like food wrappers and disposable eating utensils. But I also came across unwanted plastic-heavy items with more long-term use, like dishwashers and microwave ovens, washed up on beaches after being tossed into the sea. I saw huge amounts of microplastic — colorful plastic bits broken down from larger items —on beaches, and yards of frayed synthetic rope and fishing line wrapped around mangrove roots.

That’s consistent with the latest global data on plastic production, consumption and disposal. According to some of the world’s foremost plastic experts, 42 percent of all plastic not used to make clothing is used to manufacture packaging for consumer products. The second-biggest user of nonfiber plastic is the building and construction sector, followed by consumer products, industrial machinery, electronics and transportation, among other uses. About 8.3 billion metric tons of virgin plastic has been produced since the 1950s, with 6.3 billion metric tons of all that plastic discarded after use, most of which ends up in landfills and the environment. Only a small fraction gets recycled.

Cramp, in agreement with other cleanup organizers and scientists I’ve spoken to, said that the key to reducing the amount of plastic that ends up in the natural environment is to stop producing so much of it. But as we sat there on the beach, he also said events like beach cleanups can have a positive effect on the planet.

“When people get involved, they see the problem and learn more about it,” said Cramp. “They may feel empowered to buy less plastic and take care not to litter. Or they may feel compelled themselves to pick up the litter they see.”

Yet in Thailand, where there’s a huge amount of plastic to tackle, native Thais tend to be reluctant to join the cleanups for cultural reasons — which means many of his volunteers are expats like him.

Beach cleanup organizer Krix Luther, another U.K. expat who founded his own Thailand-based beach-cleanup nonprofit called Clean the Beach Bootcamp in May 2013, said he has the same issues as Cramp. Still, he’s optimistic about where things are heading. It seems that a growing number of Thais, especially young people, have the awareness and desire to take good care of their home environment.

“While most of my volunteers are expats and tourists, as well as teachers and their students, I do see a growing number of Thai volunteers,” said Luther, who holds a free fitness boot camp for people of all ages before his weekly cleanups. “Many are young people in their thirties, twenties and even teens. The beauty of a beach cleanup is that it’s so easy, anyone at any age can get involved and make a difference.”

I attended one of Luther’s Clean the Beach Bootcamps at Nai Harn Beach. There participants completed an hour-long beach workout led by Luther. About 50 participants — men and women; seniors, adults, teens and children; intense athletes and everyday people — ran and crawled across the beach’s soft sand and splashed through its turquoise-blue water. After a beach yoga cool-down, they spent an hour working together to pick up trash off the beach, stuffing about 660 pounds of trash into black garbage bags. Luther and a few volunteers also installed two bamboo garbage receptacles on the beach, which he said he hopes will encourage people to responsibly dispose of their trash, rather than leaving it on the beach.

trash heroes
About 50 participants showed up on Nai Harn Beach at this Clean the Beach Bootcamp session this summer. © 2017 Erica Cirino, used with permission

Among the participants that day was Emanuele Mario Montalde, an 18-year-old Thai man who had just graduated high school. Montalde, who said he wants to pursue a career in environmental conservation, told me part of the reason for Thais’ reluctance to clean up trash is that in the past, it wasn’t as much of a problem.

“The state contracts some cleanup efforts and resorts will pay people to pick up trash,” said Montalde. “But Thailand began using plastic much later in the game than many other countries — in my grandparents’ and parents’ generations they used materials like banana leaves, glass, metal and paper to hold food and make things. So there’s not a great infrastructure in place in Thailand to deal with plastic today.”

I asked Cramp, Luther and several Thai people where the trash collected on the beach ends up. And I got a resounding “I’m not quite sure” from each of them. According to Thai investigations, Thailand has a fast-growing solid waste management problem. Only about 20 percent of its 2,500 dumping sites are properly managed, and only about 5 million tons of the nearly 30 million tons of solid waste generated annually are recycled.

Awareness of plastic pollution in Thailand is increasing, said Montalde, but until the country gets ahold of how it manages its waste, the environment will remain imperiled. “Unfortunately people are still using huge amounts of plastic every day. And if we want to save the planet, we need to use a lot less of it and dispose of it properly.”

© 2017 Erica Cirino. All rights reserved.

Previously in The Revelator:

Junk Raft: A Journey Through a Polluted Ocean

Environmental Justice Means Desegregating the Environmental Movement

Here are five ways to help to make the world a more diverse — and more just — place.

If a sports team left some of its best players sitting on the bench and didn’t bring them into the game, fans would wonder why. It just doesn’t make any sense to leave out people who can help win.

And yet this is essentially what the mainstream U.S. environmental movement is doing. According to a recent analysis by the group Green 2.0, most people who work at mainstream environmental organizations are white. The comparatively few people of color who are paid to work on environmental issues are more likely to be employed at environmental justice groups. Given that mainstream environmental organizations have far more money and influence than environmental justice groups, this segregation is a real problem.

When I raise this topic with other white people, it often makes them uncomfortable. I’ve been told that efforts to increase the number of people of color who get conservation jobs are artificial, unnatural and go against meritocracy. In addition to the obvious unconscious racism, I believe these views are motivated by fear that racially diversifying the environmental movement will mean they or someone they love won’t get hired.

In my experience, this fear is unfounded. White people lose environmental jobs to other white people, not to people of color. I know because I am a middle-aged white woman, and I have applied for many environmental jobs. With one exception, jobs I’ve not gotten have gone to other whites. In that case, the position went to a Latina whose political experience was much superior to mine. She earned the job because she outcompeted me, which is how the process should work. Unfortunately, too often it doesn’t.

Luckily, this situation is far from hopeless. There are things that can be done right now to desegregate the U.S. environmental movement and employ more people of color. You can help, regardless of your race and your role in the environmental movement.

Things Anyone Can Do:

Use your money to create change. There’s an old rule of thumb that when people donate money to a cause, they can usually afford to give twice as much as they actually do. So if you’re currently giving money to environmental groups, please keep doing that. But in addition, please consider giving that much again to groups that are on the front lines of environmental justice. Although many large environmental organizations saw a big bump up in donations after the November 2016 election, lots of small, scrappy groups who fight environmental racism didn’t. These are the groups who hire the most people of color, and they could really use your assistance.

If you’re tired of being asked for money, it may help if you remember that more than 70 percent of all charitable giving in the United States comes from individuals, but only 3 percent goes to environmental and animal welfare groups. If you have more time than money, you can volunteer.

Use your voice to push. You can also help by pressuring mainstream environmental groups to desegregate. An easy way is to participate in Green 2.0’s accountability campaign, which uses Twitter to encourage environmental foundations to make their own staffs and boards more diverse.

If you’re a member of an environmental group, ask them what they’re doing to desegregate and support communities of color. If the group already has a diversity statement, you can ask how they’re implementing it. If the group doesn’t have a diversity statement, you can ask them to write one.

Keep in mind that some organizations will not be receptive to a direct approach. At one small group I worked for, I quickly found that talking openly about diversity triggered instant resistance — even though the group already had employees who weren’t white. Because I had become that group’s executive director after a difficult job search that included several months of unemployment that I couldn’t afford to experience again so soon, I changed tack. I quietly put my efforts into building the organization’s relationships with more diverse groups and seeking funding that would require it to diversify. The latter is why it’s so important to get more environmental foundations and donors on board.

Things You Can Do if You Work for an Environmental Group

Look outside. First, change hiring processes to make them more inclusive. Many environmental jobs go to people who are already known to people at the organization or their friends. Because friendship in America is still highly segregated and most environmental groups have largely white staffs and boards, network-based hiring approaches favor whites. In addition, many environmental job listings are posted only on specialized job boards or email lists that that potential job applicants will not know about unless someone already working in the field clues them in. Since most of the people working in the environmental field are white, this method of publicizing job openings selects for white candidates.

Try harder. A common excuse for all-white or nearly all-white environmental group staffs is that diverse candidates did not apply. When this happens, it reflects a group’s social isolation. Fixing it means working long before the hiring process begins to build relationships with people who are more representative of what America looks like now. I have found community colleges, local United Way organizations, and VISTA and AmeriCorps groups helpful for finding new entry-level employees from outside the personal networks of coworkers and board members. Organizations looking for more senior workers may need to build different relationships.

Yes, I know this takes time that’s in short supply, and some will complain that it’s not part of their group’s mission. But if environmentalists don’t bust out of their current ways of doing things, the situation won’t improve.

Think about degrees of separation. Whether they realize they’re doing it or not, many organizations use college degree requirements as a filter to reduce the number of applicants. Although for some jobs, such as environmental attorneys, specific degrees and professional certifications are mandatory to do the work, many jobs at environmental groups don’t really require a university degree. Since going to college is expensive and college degrees are not evenly distributed by race and ethnicity, requiring college degrees for jobs that don’t actually need them filters applicants by social class, race and ethnicity.

Know that this change is vitally important and worth your time and money. From personal experience I can tell you that being paid to be a professional conservationist is life-changing. It means you can spend most of your time working on the environmental issues that mean so much to you instead of having to support yourself with a day job and volunteer on the side. Those who get hired by the largest environmental groups have the opportunity to do this work for a middle-class income and benefits. Reserving that experience primarily for whites is not only unjust, but robs the movement of talented people who would make it stronger.

© 2017 Kelly Fuller. All rights reserved.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.

Previously in The Revelator:

Finding Your Way as an Environmentalist in Rural America — Even if You’re LGBT

An Arctic Adventure, A Melting World

Rowing through the melting Northwest Passage means meeting the local people affected by climate change.

In 2013 four adventurers set out on an 80-day rowboat mission through the Arctic’s rapidly melting Northwest Passage. Their journey brought them face to face with the changing seas in a world of climate change. In this excerpt from adventurer Kevin Vallely’s new book about the expedition, Rowing the Northwest Passage (Greystone Books), we also see how climate change has affected some of the people the team met along their journey:

An elderly woman walks toward us from the road. Tuktoyaktuk, in the Northwest Territories, is a sizable town by Arctic standards, with a full-time population of 954, but it’s small enough that the bulk of the town likely knows we’re here. The woman is smiling when she reaches us.

“I saw you coming in,” she says. “Where you guys come from?” “We’re from Vancouver,” I say, my mouth still half full of food. “We started our trip in Inuvik nine days ago.” Her name is Eileen Jacobsen and she’s an Elder in town. She and her husband, Billy, run a sightseeing business. “You should come up to the house in the morning and have some coffee,” she tells us.

rowing northwest passageOur night’s sleep in the Arctic Joule is fitful; our overindulgence runs through all of us like a thunderstorm. By seven in the morning, even with both hatches open, lighting a match in the cabin would blow us out like dirt from that Siberian crater. The roar of the Jetboil pulls me out. Frank’s already up, down jacket on, preparing coffee. “You like a cup?”

It’s still too early to drop by Eileen Jacobsen’s house, so we walk into town on the dusty main road, our ears assaulted by a cacophony of barking dogs. Dirt is the surface of choice for roads and runways in Arctic communities, as any inflexible surface like concrete would be shredded by the annual freeze–thaw cycle. Most of the town runs the length of a thin finger of land, with the ocean on one side and a protected bay on the other. About halfway down the peninsula, a cluster of wooden crosses rests in a high grass clearing, facing west. We heard about this graveyard in Inuvik. Because of melting permafrost and wave action, it’s eroding into the sea, and community members have lined the shore with large rocks to forestall its demise. This entire peninsula will face this threat in the coming years. There’s not much land here to hold back a hungry ocean.

We notice an elderly man in a blue winter jacket staring at us a short distance away. He’s sitting outside a small wooden house and smiles as we approach. “You guys must be the rowers,” he says. “Too windy to be out rowing.” His jacket hood is pulled tight over his ball cap and he dons a pair of wraparound shades with yellow lenses that would better suit a racing cyclist than a village Elder. His name is Fred Wolki, and he’s lived in Tuk for the last fifty years. “I grew up on my father’s boat until they sent me to school in 1944, then I came here.”

His father, Jim Wolki, is a well-known fox trapper who transported his pelts from Banks Island to Herschel Island aboard his ship the North Star of Herschel Island. Interestingly, we had the Arctic Joule moored right beside the North Star at the Vancouver Maritime Museum before we left. Built in San Francisco in 1935, the North Star plied the waters of the Beaufort Sea for over thirty years, her presence in Arctic waters playing an important role in bolstering Canadian Arctic sovereignty through the Cold War.

“We’re curious if things have changed much here since you were a boy,” Frank says.

“Well…it’s getting warmer now,” Fred says, shaking his head. He gestures out to the water speaking slowly and pausing for long moments between thoughts. “Right up to the 1960s…there was old ice along the coast… The ice barely moved… It was grounded along the coastline.” He looks out over the shoreline, moving his arm back and forth. “They started to fade away slowly in the 1960s… icebergs… They were huge, like big islands… They were so high, like the land at the dew Line station… over there.” He points to the radar dome of the long decommissioned Distant Early Warning Line station that sits on a rise of land just east of us. “It’s been twenty years since we’ve seen one in Tuk.” There’s no sentimentality or anger in Fred’s voice; he’s just telling us his story. “It’s getting warmer now… Global warming is starting to take its toll… All the permafrost is starting to melt… Water is starting to eat away our land.”

I listen to his words, amazed. There’s no agenda here, no vested interest, no job creation or moneymaking — just an elderly man bearing witness to his changing world.

Excerpted from Rowing the Northwest Passage: Adventure, Fear, and Awe in a Rising Sea by Kevin Vallely, published September 2017 by Greystone Books. Condensed and reproduced with permission from the publisher.

Primate in Peril: India’s Vanishing Monkey

Populations of the once-common bonnet macaque have fallen 65 percent.

Sometimes even common species can vanish in the blink of an eye.

That’s apparently the case with a well-known Indian monkey called the bonnet macaque (Macaca radiata). Although conservationists consider this species to be of “least concern” in terms of its extinction risk, new research reveals that populations of the macaque have actually crashed by nearly 50 percent since 2003 and more than 65 percent over the past 25 years.

Researchers warn that this species now faces “serious conservation challenges” in order to stave off further declines.

So why have so many bonnet macaques disappeared in recent years? For one thing, they’ve lost ground to an invading species, the larger and more aggressive rhesus macaque (M. mulatta), which outcompetes its smaller cousins for food and habitat. “It’s been a gradual invasion,” reports one of the study’s authors, Honnavalli N. Kumara with the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History in Coimbatore, India. “The rhesus macaque is much more dominant species and highly adaptable,” which enables it to live in a wide range of habitats.

rhesus macaque
Rhesus macaque by Robert Martinez (CC BY 2.0)

The bonnet macaques, on the other hand, use a much narrower range of habitats. They typically live in or near Hindu temples, tourist sites, agricultural fields and roadways, where until recently they had abundant sources of food. That has shifted over the past quarter-century. The vegetation these macaques depend upon has been replaced with what the researchers call “barren lands and urbanization,” with many areas either completed razed or dominated by buildings, roads and aqueducts. As a result, fewer than half of the bonnet macaque roadside populations observed in 2013 remain today.

The macaques have also vanished from nearly 50 percent of temple sites and tourist areas, in part because they are considered nuisances. As the researchers wrote in their paper, “there has been a tremendous increase in the number of people visiting temples and tourist places in India. It has been observed that the tolerance of people for macaques in such places has been decreasing and there have been frequent trappings and translocations of macaques from such places to unfamiliar habitats” where they do not appear to have thrived. The researchers conclude that these temple sites no longer pose stable habitats for the species.

This has all hit the monkeys hard – because, as the researchers were surprised to find, the species does not typically dwell in forests. “We had a notion that the species is common everywhere, but when we started the surveys of the primates in south India we realized that the bonnet macaques are in really low in numbers in the forest,” says Kumara.

Now that the decline has been documented, can it be stopped? That depends on how many of the threats to the macaques can be managed. “What we are taking is a composite impact, including the loss of trees for the road development, and regular translocation from agriculture fields, tourist spots and temples,” says Kumara. “These factors together will have an impact the species’ population and its growth and survival.”

But hope is not lost. The researchers have identified several untouched areas where the bonnet macaque could still thrive. They have also created a list of active conservation efforts that would help the species, such as planting fruit trees on roadways, establishing vegetation patches in agricultural plots and creating migration corridors. Even building artificial bridges between trees could help the animals get to the food they need without descending to the ground and bothering humans. Speaking of which, the researchers also suggest that it is important to educate farmers, villagers and temple devotees about living near macaques, as would stopping what they call “unscientific unplanned translocations.”

This roadmap proposed by the researchers could help not only the bonnet macaque but several other at-risk Indian primate species. As the researchers conclude, their paper offers “a model for developing conservation strategies for all such species,” whether they are of “least concern” or not.

Previously in The Revelator:

Climate Change Puts Sea Turtles in the Hot Seat