After 30 Years, the Montreal Protocol Is Paying Ozone Dividends

September 16 marks the anniversary of perhaps the most successful achievement in environmental policy.

On rare but breathtaking occasions, waves of opalescent clouds paint the twilight Antarctic sky in a mix of pastel hues. These “nacreous” clouds float at freezing stratospheric altitudes, where they mingle with the ozone layer and intense sunlight.

But that same sunlight that produces this spectacle also mixes with something less natural and less beautiful. When the sun’s unfiltered UV rays hit human-generated chlorofluorocarbons high in the stratosphere, they initiate a chemical reaction that cascades through those clouds and turns ozone into regular oxygen, weakening and depleting the ozone layer.

Because the ozone layer shades all life on earth from the most intense and carcinogenic UV radiation, our health and well-being depend on its integrity. Three decades ago this month, the world came together in the layer’s defense and formed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.  Today, the true benefit of that agreement is just starting to make itself known, thanks to a process that was set in motion by a bold and disruptive theory.

Theoretical Beginnings

As the son of a mathematics professor, Sherry Rowland was drawn to numbers and surrounded by books from a young age. Being somewhat precocious, he sailed quickly through his early education in central Ohio and began high school in 1939 at the age of 12.

During Sherry’s adolescent summers, his high school science teacher entrusted him to manage the local weather station, where he collected data on local temperatures and precipitation. During those summers in the early 1940s, the influence of his work on the global atmosphere several decades later must have been far from his active imagination.

Sherry would be more widely known as F. Sherwood Rowland by the time he became chair of the chemistry department at U.C. Irvine in 1964. There he crossed paths with Mario Molina, a recent PhD graduate with expertise in photochemistry. Aided by Molina and invigorated with a desire to explore new avenues of research, Sherry Rowland shifted his attention back to the sky.

It had been just reported that nitrogen oxide compounds degrade under stratospheric conditions and affect the chemistry of the ozone layer. Being aware that human-generated chlorofluorocarbons were accumulating in the atmosphere, Rowland and Molina wondered if those compounds might also affect the ozone layer. They worked out the chemistry and found that chlorofluorocarbons would also theoretically degrade, and then release ozone-depleting chlorine. This chemistry and its potential implications were laid out for the first time by the duo in a 1974 report published in the journal Nature.

The Cold Backlash

Chlorofluorocarbons (also known as CFCs, or as Freon and other trade names) were first synthesized for refrigeration in 1928 — the year after Rowland was born. Because they were not only effective but also stable, nontoxic and nonflammable, they quickly replaced more hazardous 19th-century refrigerants. This enabled refrigeration technology to become more domesticated during the 1930s.

The availability of safe automotive and home air conditioning spurred the expansion of post-war suburbia. Air conditioning and refrigeration became all but ubiquitous in the developed world by the 1970s, and the CFC industry sat profitably on the crest of that wave.

Although the public knew very little about CFCs at the time, and even less about the layer of stratospheric ozone that was incidentally at risk, corporate resistance to Rowland and Molina’s 1974 report was swift and severe.

DuPont, the leading manufacturer of CFCs, responded on June 30 the following year with a full-page advertisement in The New York Times in which the company argued that it was too soon to be drawing any conclusions about the CFC-ozone theory. Regarding that theory, the ad proclaimed, “Hypothesis lacks support. Claim meets counterclaim. Assumptions are challenged on both sides. And nothing is settled.” DuPont’s well-financed public relations campaign continued promoting this narrative over the next decade.

Support from the scientific community for the CFC-ozone theory did not come immediately. It was no small claim to be made, and as Rowland and Molina’s contemporary Carl Sagan frequently said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Rowland was nevertheless convinced and concerned, and he felt compelled to put his reputation on the line and promote the theory publicly.

Fortunately, supporting evidence for the theory had been quietly accumulating for nearly two decades at a research station off the coast of Antarctica.

Extraordinary Evidence

As the Cold War was building in the 1950s, the United States, Soviet Union and eventually 65 other countries came to an agreement to allow scientific collaboration across political boundaries in the field of geophysics. This resulted in a flurry of research projects that began circa 1957 as part of what became known as “The International Geophysical Year.”

Many of those projects took place in Antarctica, including efforts to record the first continuous measurements of ozone levels in the earth’s atmosphere. By the 1980s, these measurements had begun to show a clear decline in atmospheric ozone. A 1985 scientific report was published in Nature that presented this data and demonstrated how the decline could be explained by increases in atmospheric chlorine.

That same year, NASA released the first satellite image of the ozone layer, including the lack thereof above Antarctica. This provided a stunning picture in color of what was suggested in data, and it gave rise to the phrase “ozone hole.“ Meanwhile, other support poured in independently from several academic and government studies, which cohered a consensus that paved the way for action.

From Vienna to Montreal

The year 1985 was also an inflection point for the political process. The first international talks on ozone depletion began that year at the Vienna Convention, coordinated by the United Nations. Meanwhile, DuPont and the CFC industry continued to dispute the science and campaign against regulations until it became apparent that CFCs could be economically replaced by other refrigerants that were more ozone-friendly.

Within the next two years, the discussions shifted in favor of gradually phasing out CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals, and a plan was put in ink. The proposed regulations on CFCs had bipartisan support in the United States under the Regan administration. Leaders from 24 nations signed on to the agreement in Montreal on September 16, 1987, and the Montreal Protocol went into effect on New Year’s Day 1989.

Eventually, the list of participants in the Montreal Protocol expanded to include 197 nations — practically every sovereign state in the world. It was the first treaty to ever receive universal ratification from every U.N. nation, and Kofi Annan later declared it “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.” Global CFC production was phased out by 2010 in accordance with the protocol.

Through all of this, Rowland remained actively involved in the science as well as the political process. Within 20 years, he went from an academic voice in the wilderness to a Nobel Prize recipient, alongside Mario Molina and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen.

Slowly Reversing the Trend

Scientists expect that CFCs from decades past will remain in the atmosphere for decades to come before they finally degrade. The ozone hole, consequently, is a wound that has not yet healed, and will only do so slowly.

But already, there is evidence that it is on the mend.

cfc

During the last few years, Antarctic ozone measurements have begun tilting upward, as CFC measurements have begun to drop. Although ozone levels are naturally variable and temperature-dependent, the general trend appears to be reversing.

It is difficult to know the full impact of the Montreal Protocol on human health and the environment. But recent estimates suggest that by 2013, the Antarctic ozone hole would have been 40 percent larger, and by 2030 skin cancer rates worldwide would have increased 14 percent.

What we do know is that human activity can have a global impact on the environment. But we also know that what mankind is capable of destroying, mankind is capable of repairing when resources are shared, and science and policy work patiently together. The 30-year history of the Montreal Protocol and the series of events that preceded it, now prove that.

© 2017 Robert Lawrence. All rights reserved.

A Troubling Take on Extinction

A new book argues, unconvincingly, that biodiversity is actually increasing.

From the first page of his new book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in the Age of Extinction (PublicAffairs Books, $28), conservation biologist Chris D. Thomas makes his conclusion pretty clear: The alarm over species going extinct thousands of times faster than the normal background rate is being blown out of proportion. Biodiversity, Thomas asserts, is not disappearing like biologists and environmentalists warn; it’s increasing.

inheritors of the earthThat growth in biodiversity, Thomas writes, hinges on speciation, which is the evolution of new, distinct species. It’s happening much more quickly than biologists previously thought — mostly through migration and subsequent diversification and hybridization of existing species into new, distinct species. According to Thomas, this rapid speciation is good news.

In making his argument, Thomas spends page upon page on stories and “evidence” proving species diversity is growing. He cites sparrows frequently, noting that a small bird from the Asian steppe has become ubiquitous around the world. He notes that the Monterey pine, struggling in its native California, is thriving in New Zealand’s forestry efforts, while monarch butterflies that used to depend on those pines now over-winter on blue gum trees, a type of eucalyptus native to Tasmania generally considered invasive by environmentalists. Yet, Thomas claims, the blue gum tree is a more suitable tree for the monarch, a species also threatened with extinction. He suggests that the tree is an invasive species that will save America’s most iconic butterfly. And, coming off strongly as an English gentleman scientist, Thomas cites his own garden and the change in diversity over the years has grown from just a few species of butterfly, birds and plants to more than a dozen newcomers, with over a third of the species there now only able to thrive because of man-made changes.

But there’s a big piece of the equation he fails to mention.

Thomas leaves out the population sizes of all these species, new or old. While diversity is important, the number of individual animals in a population is also essential in determining how likely a species will survive threats such as natural disasters and climate change. Technically we still have northern white rhinos, Yangtze River dolphins and Pinta Island tortoises, but their populations are so small they are functionally extinct. We can’t write off the extinction crisis based on species diversity until we do a critter census.

But that wasn’t the biggest weakness of Inheritors. It was Thomas’s assessment of humans and our role in the equation.

As a part of nature, he argues, everything we have done, all of our colossal, Earth-changing influence, is “natural.” Climate change, the introduction and the distribution of invasive species around the planet, extinction, the transformation of land from wild to cultivated — the whole shebang — is what Thomas calls “natural.” He claims humans shouldn’t be blamed for our part in creating this new “natural” system. Rather we should be thanked. The extinction of odd, specialized island birds or the occasional photogenic megafauna kicking the bucket is just part of that transformation.

Near the end of the book Thomas almost had me agreeing with him. “The inevitable ups and downs of different species that take place when the environment changes, and as they colonize new locations and evolve new characteristics, dictate that we will ultimately fail if we attempt to keep things exactly, or even roughly, as they are,” he argues.

To his credit, Thomas isn’t saying that these ups and downs have all been to the betterment of the planet or the species we share it with. He doesn’t argue that environmentalists should just all give up and go home, but rather that we need to reevaluate how we’re trying to save the world and, more importantly, what we’re trying to save.

As someone newer to the environmental movement, I found the argument enticing. I wanted to agree with him. After all, who are we to decide what species come or go? More to the point, do we fight to protect species that are important to an ecosystem, or do we just ensure an ecosystem survives — filling the hole with whatever fits?

But humans don’t get a “get out of jail free card” just because we’re such a “successful” species. That’s why I have to disagree with Thomas’s follow-up to the previous statement: “We need a conservation philosophy that is based on natural change, with humans centre stage: partly because we have already brought about so many changes to the world that cannot be ignored, and partly because humans evolved naturally and we are part of the natural system.”

Species are worth protecting not just because they serve important functions in their ecosystems. They’re worth protecting because they have unique intrinsic value.

No bacterium thought about how creating oxygen might affect its fellow early earthlings; nor could it do anything to change that. Cataclysmic seismology or a stray asteroid are even less likely to have thought about the literal impact of their actions. And no matter how ubiquitous the little bird from the Asian steppe has become, no sparrow thinks about its place in the natural order.

People do.

That’s exactly Thomas’s logical flaw. Calling human-caused change “natural” is dangerously reductive. Both in scope and speed, people are altering the planet in ways no other species does. We have changed the very chemistry of the Earth. We’re driving the extinction crisis.

We can’t go back to some perfect Earth, unaffected by our kind. There isn’t evidence that that would be ideal anyway. But we have to fight to preserve species the way they are, not just because they serve their ecosystems but because they have value, as they are, altered or unaltered, but not purposefully tinkered with for our selfish purposes.

Despite Thomas’s arguments otherwise, it’s clear that the real inheritors of the Earth — and therefore the ones who have to step up to save it — are humans.

Life in the Trumpocene

We have to work together to solve climate change and other environmental problems, says author David Biello.

Author David Biello has an idea to get President Trump to take action on climate change.

“We should rename this current era the Trumpocene,” he says. “It’s pretty much the same as what we now call the Anthropocene, because it’s an old white dude ruining the world, but if we rename it he might actually pay attention to some of these challenges. When you put his name on something, he seems to care a lot more.”

Biello, formerly the environmental editor at Scientific American, knows a thing or two about the Anthropocene. His book about climate change, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age, came out last year just after the presidential election. Biello traveled the world to gather stories for the book, which examines both the history of our current environmental decline and the hard work of the people trying to reverse it.

Both the book and Biello himself are more optimistic than you might expect in this era of political strife, extinction and climate change. “One thing I would say about the despair versus hope conundrum is that hope is a place of inspiration and action,” he says. “Frankly, things can always get worse, so hope is always an option. Just taking the example of climate change or species extinction, if we can’t stop a temperature rise of one degree Celsius, we can still stop at 2 degrees Celsius. If we can’t save one species of rhino maybe we can save another species of rhino, or if we can’t save the rhinos at all maybe we can save the elephants. So there’s always room for hope.”

He says that’s an important message in today’s increasingly negative media environment. “Unfortunately, in my experience and from what I’ve seen in the world, despair just tends to have people throw up their hands and go eat a hamburger or whatever it might be because you really feel powerless to do anything.”

Interestingly enough, Biello feels that the despair many people feel from the current administration’s policies have actually become a motivating factor for positive change.

“Let’s be honest, if Hillary Clinton was president, folks would be a lot more sanguine about action on climate change, action to stave off species extinction, and action on social justice,” he says. “You name it, people would be a little bit more accepting of the status quo. So in a way, the election of Trump has served as a wake-up call that these things aren’t going to change on their own, that if we want to see them, if we want action on climate change, if we want to save our fellow travelers on this little blue orb in the vastness of space, we have to actually take action. We have to do things.”

That drive for action, Biello says, started happening almost immediately after the election. “People are more energized than at any point that I’ve directly experienced,” he says. “I’ve been reporting on climate change since the 1990s, and so folks have always been like, ‘yeah, yeah, we should do something about that,’ but without any sense of urgency. That has changed with the election. We saw a March for Science, which was an incredible thing. That, as far as I know, has never happened before, and people are getting involved in local politics.”

That, he adds, is the most important thing right now. “People are always asking me, what’s the number-one technology for solving climate change or the extinction crisis? They’re expecting me to say something like genetic engineering or artificial trees to suck CO2 out of the sky. But the number one thing to solve any of these kinds of interlocking problems of the Anthropocene is politics and the collective act of getting together and making some better decisions as a society.”

He continues, “We can’t go it alone. You as an individual are not going to buy your way to a better Anthropocene. You have to come together at the societal level to build this better world. I can’t do it alone, you can’t do it alone. Neither can anyone else. We have to come together in the hard but necessary work of politics to get these problems resolved and to build a better Trumpocene.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Drawdown: 100 Powerful (and Sometimes Surprising) Solutions to Global Warming

The Big Picture: Southern Inhospitality

Mountaintop mining and excrement-filled lagoons threaten the unique biodiversity of the American southeast.

The southeastern United States is a place of unparalleled aquatic biodiversity, harboring a majority of the country’s fish, mussel, crayfish, and dragonfly and damselfly species.

This habitat supports a remarkable breadth of wildlife, from the majestic Florida sandhill crane:

…to the somewhat less impressive fuzzy pigtoe mussel.

All told, thousands of unique species call the American southeast home.

Unfortunately, the region has become increasingly inhospitable for these species over the past few decades. More than 70 percent of the southeast’s mussels are at risk of extinction. The same goes for 48 percent of its crayfishes and 28 percent of its fish species.

The reason? People.

Without significant work to cut pollution, development and other manmade threats, we stand to lose some of the most fascinating species on the continent.

All of these threats are particularly hard for the southeast’s vulnerable species because many are limited to small sections of rivers or a single cave. This leads to isolated populations that are, or can become, cut off from the world at large.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the rest of the world often doesn’t seem to give these species the respect they deserve. For instance, many of the region’s snails are not only endangered, they also have to suffer the additional indignity of being called names for being chubby.

Scientists have never documented what snails could have done to earn the names corpulent hornsnail, ample elimia, or ponderous siltsnail.

Threat # 1:

Among the region’s top threats, mountaintop removal mining destroys the tops of mountains overlying coal deposits using explosives and dumps the blast-debris into nearby valleys and waterways.

This archaic and incredibly destructive process threatens the survival of hundreds of native, inter-dependent species that are vital members of their ecosystems.

(Even if some species, such as the green floater, are named as though they’re completely useless superheroes.)

Threat # 2:

Another threat: The entire region’s waterways have been dramatically altered and strangulated to divert natural flows for industrial and urban use at an unsustainable rate.

 

A staggering number of dams — around 80,000 — were constructed in the United States in the 20th century. Although construction of new dams has diminished significantly in recent years, the extinction threat caused by existing water impoundment remains severe.

Threat # 3:

The third and particularly twisted threat facing sensitive wildlife in the region is the saturation of their habitats with the excrement of livestock animals. Animal waste is not only created in vast amounts but is also poorly regulated — the current “solution” to get rid of it is to irrigate crops with the noxious liquid.

Swine waste lagoons in Cape Fear watershed, North Carolina

There is virtually no end to the threats that have been decimating their habitat and population numbers, as you can see in this gallery:

Tragically, time is running out for innumerable species, including the legendary Western chicken turtle, an incredible animal with the head of a turtle, and the body… of a turtle.

With populations plummeting and the likelihood for species extinctions on track to rise, the region’s intricately interconnected freshwater ecosystems will continue to unravel unless the Southeast takes serious efforts to make these habitats hospitable once again.

Use the arrows to scroll through this gallery of more species at risk

References

Image credits

  • Florida sandhill crane by Andrea Westmoreland (CC BY-SA)
  • WV Mountaintop removal aerial footage by Mike Youngren/WV Public Broadcasting/Vimeo (CC BY-NC)
  • Green floater courtesy Smithsonian Institution
  • Coosa River by Wruple/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
  • Swine lagoon aerial photo courtesty Waterkeeper Alliance Inc. (CC BY-SA)
  • Maps in gallery of threats by Curt Bradley/Center for Biological Diversity.

Digging Deep into De-Extinction

Can extinct species ever truly be brought back to life? More importantly, should they?

Right now, in labs around the world, researchers are doing what science-fiction writers used to dream about: trying to bring extinct species back to life.

The science of resurrecting lost species takes many forms, but collectively it has become known as “de-extinction.” According to advocates like Stewart Brand, de-extinction could soon result in the return of the passenger pigeon to the skies of North America or the woolly mammoth to the forests of Eastern Siberia.

With the actual science advancing so quickly, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and examine the implications of such technological advances and potential resurrections. In fact, a journal called The Hastings Center Report — which “explores the ethical, legal, and social issues in medicine, health care, public health, and the life sciences” — has done just that in a special supplemental issue devoted to the topic of de-extinction. The issue — subtitled “Recreating the Wild: De-Extinction, Technology, and the Ethics of Conservation” — contains 11 fascinating and thought-provoking essays addressing what de-extinction really is, the promises of biotechnology for conservation, the value of the technology to still-living endangered species, the morality of the concept and the potential risks.

The Revelator reached out to Gregory E. Kaebnick, editor of the Hastings Center Report, to dig even further into the topic.

Platt: How did this special issue come about?

Kaebnick: I came at it from a nearby issue. I’d been doing research on the ethical questions surrounding the group of high-tech endeavors that go under the heading of “synthetic biology,” and I kept seeing these references to a new example of synthetic biology that was getting called “de-extinction.” Most of syn bio has to do with making genetic changes to microorganisms that cause them to do something useful for humans — produce fuel photosynthetically or turn a sugar into a medicine, for example — and some of that stuff seems acceptable to me in principle, as long as details about the organism or the way the organism is being changed and used give reason to think that the risks aren’t going to be unbearable when set against the potential benefits. However, the idea of genetically changing organisms, in the process maybe basically creating new species, does raise an important question about how far we humans should be going in bending the natural world to suit our needs and preferences. I thought de-extinction offered a chance to dig into that question.

De-extinction raises that question in a really powerful way because it’s about using those technologies specifically to alter the shared natural environment and because extinction has always seemed to be such an inalterable fact of nature. De-extinction also raises that question in a very complicated form, because the idea in it is that you’re trying to protect nature, but you’re doing that by changing nature. Is that even conceptually coherent? And if it is, how should you be thinking about the changes you’re making?

At the same time as I began working on de-extinction, I was invited to serve on a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee about the use of gene drives, which are another technology for altering the shared environment, again with some potential conservation-oriented uses. So de-extinction seemed like maybe the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. It might lead to other and even more significant ways of altering nature.

Platt: What do you hope readers will take away from reading these essays?

Kaebnick: First off, de-extinction is no solution for the extinction crisis. It is too hard to do, and most of the few “successes” would be so limited that they wouldn’t deserve the term “de-extinction.” If you were trying for a woolly mammoth, all you’d be likely to get is a hairy, cold-tolerant Asian elephant. Even if you got something genetically almost identical to a mammoth, it would still have such a different set of relationships to its environment and to other species that it wouldn’t really be a mammoth. (Curt Meine emphasizes this point in his essay.) And just as a conceptual matter, a species is not something that can be “brought back” or “resurrected,” as some proponents like to say. A species is a lineage of organisms, and once that lineage ends, the species is gone. Period. Even if we created something totally identical to the original mammoth, it would be a human creation, not a “resurrection” of the extinct species.

That said, the technologies are still very interesting. Perhaps the technologies could sometimes be used not for “de-extinction” but for the protection of merely threatened species. And maybe sometimes “de-extinction” would be reasonable. There might be some few occasions where creating a kind of proxy or replacement of a lost species would be possible and environmentally reasonable, maybe because having something in that environmental role is necessary for an ecosystem, for a network of other species. And in a very, very few cases, “de-extinction” might be done simply through cloning rather than with genetic alterations, and the organisms created that way could be put back into the original environment in a way that essentially picks up and carries on the species’ relationships with the environment. The gastric brooding frog might be an example of this category. “De-extinction” is still not the right word for these cases, but it’s less misleading than when we’re talking about bringing back the woolly mammoth.

So, I guess the second take-home point is that while de-extinction isn’t the answer to the extinction crisis, the technologies may have some meaningful conservation-oriented uses. We should be realistic about them — which the proponents of de-extinction are not — but we shouldn’t unthinkingly write them off, either.

And I think a third big take-home point is that the emergence of these technologies means we need to think very carefully about what we mean by “conservation” and what the goals and values of conservation are. How much human intervention is consistent with a preservationist mindset? Is the “gardening ethic” that Michael Pollan and Emma Maris have proposed a better mindset for an environmentalist?

Platt: What surprised you from the contributions?

Kaebnick: The contributions largely agreed that, as a practical matter, de-extinction is very limited, but they got to that point from very different philosophical positions. Philip Seddon, a zoologist in New Zealand who chaired a task force on de-extinction for the IUCN, defended the idea of using technological interventions for conservation goals, while Claudio Campagna, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and some coauthors argued basically that the very idea of de-extinction is horrible and shows that conservation isn’t sitting on secure philosophical foundations. Hank Greely, a legal scholar who served with Seddon on the IUCN task force, argued that de-extinction is basically just another in a line of bioethical issues, and he laid out a bioethical framework as the philosophical foundation for assessing it, but some environmental theorists, including Curt Meine from the Aldo Leopold Foundation and Christopher Preston, who’s a philosopher at the University of Montana, put de-extinction in the context of other environmentalist thinking about the human relationship to nature.

Maybe this combination of near-agreement on practical conclusions and wide divergence on theory is not all that surprising, but it is very interesting, and as the technology moves forward and some of the other, more powerful ways of intervening in nature become feasible (if they do), then we may well need better clarity on the philosophical foundations. That’s what I argue in my essay in the set, anyway.

Platt: What topics might still need to be explored?

Kaebnick: Can we use genetic or other technologies for “assisted adaptation”? The work being done to make an American chestnut that survives chestnut blight is an example of that. Can we use “de-extinction” merely to help threatened species like the black-footed ferret — say, to recreate some of that species’ lost genetic diversity? And how should we think about human management of nature? Obviously the main thing we need to do is to reduce our alteration of nature — eat more wisely, drive more efficiently, fly less frequently, keep houses cool in the winter and warm in the summer, and so on — but it seems pretty plain to me that it is no longer possible to protect biodiversity just by reducing the alteration of nature. Management is necessary. But does accepting that we have to manage nature force us to go along with Pollan’s gardening ethic? To me, that seems dangerous. I can go along with the gardening ethic only if we’re very careful and conservative about what “gardening” means.

You can read the entire issue of The Hastings Report special issue on de-extinction here.

The Persistent Sediments of Mercury Pollution

An atrocity of mercury poisoning began in the 1930s. Does a new treaty go far enough?

Originally published in Dejusticia’s Global Rights Blog

The Minamata Convention on Mercury, an international treaty designed to protect human health from the impacts of mercury and mercury compound emissions, just entered into force this past August 16. Though the history of the Convention negotiations dates back only to 2002, it was named after a small fishing village in Kumamoto Prefecture, near the southwestern tip of Japan, which, in the 1950s was ground zero for establishing that methylmercury caused devastating health effects.

The atrocity of Minamata disease began silently in the 1930s, when the predecessor of Chisso Corporation began producing acetaldehyde and acetic acid and dumping mercury-based pollutants into Minamata Bay. It continued doing so until the late 1960s. What became known as Minamata disease was astounding in its cruelty. Its victims lost control over muscles and speech, and suffered from intellectual development losses, strabismus, blindness, convulsions, limb deformities, and a bevy of neurological disorders. Some children were born with the disease, as methylmercury has the lamentable quality of breaching the placenta, unlike many chemicals, and focusing its effects on the fetus, rather than the mother. Others were attacked later in life.

The telltale hands of the most severely affected Minamata disease patients, curled forward in a tight muscle contraction against which fingers seem to be constantly rebelling became the icon of the mysterious disease, which was traced to mercury early on. The victims had to wait until 1968, however, for the Japanese government to finally recognize that Minamata disease was caused by methylmercury dumped into the bay by Chisso. This was only the beginning of a decades-long struggle for regulation, reparations, resources, information, accountability, and even identification as a victim of the disease. A struggle that continued even as late as 2016.

In 1971, Eugene Smith’s iconic picture Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath turned the plight of the victims of Minamata disease from a national scandal into a global alarm bell. Tomoko’s parents chose to expose the suffering of their child to make the world see what toxic pollution had done (and in 2001, withdrawing the picture from additional distribution, they chose to let her rest). Tomoko’s picture sparked outrage, action and, more importantly, empathy for the human costs of pollution.

Unfortunately, unsafe practices with mercury have always spread much faster than information about its health effects. For example, in 1971, the same year as Smith’s iconic photo was published, Alcalís de Colombia began discharging effluents with mercury compounds into the Bay of Cartagena. Only in 1977 did the government order the plant shuttered. But mercury had sedimented into the bottom of the bay and its impacts are still felt today.

In the Canadian rural community of Grassy Narrows, a paper mill that dumped mercury into the waterways was shut down in the 1970s, but the effects of its brazen pollution persist even today. In the United States, Dow Chemical plants dumped 200 pounds of mercury a day in the 1970s. As national alarms were raised, there was a lot of arm waving and not much action, for lack of information and lack of clarity about legal responsibility. Today, mercury levels are unexplainably rising in the Great Lakes once more.  In the Baltic Sea, 23,000 barrels of mercury were discovered in 2006, off the coast of Sweden, the remnants of a not too distant era when chemical dumping into international waters was done without a second thought. These are not isolated incidents; they are simply especially stark.

The Minamata Convention, having entered into force a full 85 years since Chisso Corporation began to pollute Minamata Bay, is a belated but welcome instrument to confront the dangers of mercury systematically. It calls for placing strict controls of the supply and trade of mercury and mercury-added products (Arts 3 and 4), creating an inventory of all points where releases of mercury or mercury compounds exist and providing information on environmentally sound practices (Art. 9), reducing or eliminating the use of mercury in small scale gold mining (Art. 7), and strengthening research and training regarding health hazards of mercury (Arts. 16(c) and (16(d)).

There should be some optimism at the fact that Minamata has entered into force, but let’s remember that only 74 countries have ratified it. Let’s also recall that after entry into force comes the hard work of implementation. Consider the difficulties for implementation of mercury safety measures in Colombia: while the country has not yet ratified the Minamata Convention, it has sent strong signals of its commitment to ending mercury pollution. It created a register of authorized mercury purveyors and passed norms to address the pollution caused by illegal and artisanal mining (now the leading sources of mercury pollution in the country). It supports research into the health costs of mercury use, and passed an ambitious 2013 Mercury Law, which contemplates eliminating the industrial and productive use of mercury within ten years. Despite these norms and commitments, however, Colombia climbed from third to second worst mercury polluter in the world, second only to China. Over 200 tons of mercury continue to be discharged in its waters each year, and the deaths by mercury poisoning pile on.

Like Colombia, Indonesia has paid a high cost for the use of mercury in informal mining, and its President recently called for an end to the use of mercury in mining. The questions, for Indonesia, for Colombia, and for mercury pollution across the globe, are: what can we do to bring norms in line with implementation, and how soon we can we do it?

The best allies and advocates for Minamata disease victims were those who approached their work with deep empathy for the human impact of toxic pollution, from artists to scientists. We can learn a lesson from this commitment to the people who were exposed to the effects of mercury, and demand that implementation be measured not in terms of laws passed or commitments made, but in terms of the health and living conditions of those most vulnerable to toxic mercury impacts, including victims who may not yet know that the ravages of mercury have already detonated in their bodies.

© Dejusticia and Claret Vargas. Used with permission.

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

The Burning/Flooding/Dying Season

People around the world are struggling with wildfires and floods and other crises, but I don’t give up hope.

The air in the Pacific Northwest this week is filled with smoke, ash and a sense of dread.

People tend to think of Portland, Oregon, as the land of perpetual rain, but in truth we’ve barely seen a drop of the wet stuff for months now. Instead the earth has gone dry, the grasses have gone dormant and the fires have had a field day. Last week nearly 1,000 wildfires burned in and around the state, leaving a haze in the atmosphere and a cough in many peoples’ lungs, mine included.

This week it is worse — much worse. A new fire, reportedly set off by kids throwing firecrackers, struck the Eagle Creek Trailhead in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge on Saturday. By Tuesday the flames had spread to more than 10,000 acres; by this morning it was up to 20,000 acres. At my home just 25 miles away, ash from centuries-old trees drifted through the sky like snowflakes, coating everything not in white but in gray and charred brown. The smell of burning wood surrounded us yesterday, even seeping in through windows tightly closed against the concurrent heatwave and its nearly 100-degree weather.

Smoke on the Columbia River. Photo: John Platt

Of course all of this pales in comparison to the fires still surrounding Los Angeles or the floods still strangling the Hurricane Harvey-ravaged Houston region and monsoon-struck Southeast Asia, where more than 1,200 people have died. And what comes next could become another crisis. Even as I struggle with the relatively minor discomfort of smoke and ash, all my friends in Florida and the Caribbean are battening down the hatches in anticipation of upcoming monster storm Hurricane Irma, which threatens to rip through their homes starting as early as today.

Meanwhile, all of this comes at a time when government programs to deal with floods and disaster relief — not to mention climate change — face slashing if not complete eradication through the machinations of the science-denying Trump administration.

Through it all, though, I refuse to give up hope. It’s not that I’m an optimist — far from it. I’m a realist with cynical overtones. I know how bad things are, and I know that in most ways they’re going to get worse over the next few years. But despair does not yet have me in its grip.

Where does my sense of hope come from? Honestly, it’s a function of my years of reporting on climate change, the extinction crisis, pollution and other horrifying topics. People ask me all the time, “How can you stand to write about this terrible stuff every day?” The answer is simple: Even when I’m reporting on the worst-case scenarios, I’m usually interviewing the very people who are working hard to understand what’s going on — or to try to turn these situations around. I see the work going on behind the scenes. I know that people are making a difference. I see the positive change, as painfully slow and incremental as it may be, and I embrace it.

The world is choking and burning and drowning. People are dying and species are going extinct. Politics make it all seem even bleaker. But I’ll never let any of that stop me, and it shouldn’t stop anyone else either. It should serve to motivate us to do better, and to encourage others to do the same.

Living on the Edge With Lions

Ewaso Lions founder Shivani Bhalla aims to help people learn to live with local predators.

As a young girl, Shivani Bhalla — a fourth-generation Kenyan— admired the large lion prides she saw on family safaris. But when she moved to Samburu in the north in 2002, those big prides were gone. Lions only roamed in groups of two or three.

“It was different from what I expected,” Bhalla recalls. “And I wanted to know why.”

Lion populations across Africa have plummeted, with only about 20,000 now occupying just 8 percent of their former range. About 2,000 are in Kenya, a number that’s dropped about 60 percent from a decade ago. Bhalla is trying to change that trend.

In northern Kenya, home of the nomadic Samburu people, protected areas are too small for lions. As a result, livestock and lions increasingly roam in the same places. That can lead to conflict, with predators killing the livestock and people retaliating by poisoning or shooting the lions.

To encourage coexistence, in 2007 Bhalla established Ewaso Lions, a nonprofit organization based in Samburu and Isiolo counties. Ewaso Lions works through three main programs: Warrior Watch, which engages men to respond to lion attacks on livestock and calm the situation; Lion Kids Camp, which teaches children (who are often shepherds for livestock) about conservation; and Mama Simba, which educates women and provides them with a voice in conservation. The NGO also monitors lion movements and analyzes livestock killings, which helps them target strategies to avoid additional conflict.

Bhalla understands the distress of communities living with the lions. From her base in Samburu, she spoke with me about helping to secure a future for lions in Kenya.

Neme: How do you change people’s perceptions of lions?

Bhalla: Mainly through engaging with the community. I’m lucky I work with Samburu communities, who have lived with lions for generations, so they already have a tolerance. Plus, it’s the Samburu community working with the Samburu community. When we encourage warriors to not kill lions, it’s warriors who are speaking with warriors. If we are working with women, it’s our Mama Simba ladies doing that. It is they who are spreading the word. I think that’s what makes it effective.

Shivani Bhalla (second from left) with the women of Mama Simba. Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Neme: How did Warrior Watch begin?

A local warrior, Jeneria (Lekilelei), started this project in 2010. He joined me in the early days, and went from seeing lions only as killers of goats and cows to seeing them as something much more. It was his idea. He said that if we wanted to stop warriors from killing lions, we needed to bring them on-board — and he went ahead and trained five warriors. Now we are working with 20, and that’s going to increase at the end of this year.

Janeria and other warriors. Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Neme: Reflecting on Ewaso Lions’ 10-year anniversary, what’s changed?

Bhalla: It’s gotten harder because there are more people and more livestock, and less room for lions. People are under pressure to find grazing and water for their livestock, and the lions are trying to survive with less food. Because of this pressure, changing hearts and minds is harder. When we have drought and unpredictable livestock movements, lions tend to attack more — so we’re seeing more conflict because of the changing landscape.

Neme: Have lion populations changed since you started?

Bhalla: When we started, there were 11 lions. Now there are 50. We lose one or two a year. This year is really challenging. In addition to drought and fewer herbivores, we have an increased number of lions and they are looking for safe areas. Meanwhile we have more people and more livestock, and the livestock are moving into lion habitat. So more lions are being killed than before.

Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Neme: What happens after an incident?

Bhalla: Generally one of our warriors responds. All are fully employed by us. We usually find out quickly through phone calls, radio messages, or someone walks into camp. We are quick to respond, so we can calm that person down. That point of anger is the most dangerous. Sometimes it might take two days to calm down the community. We need to be there so we can ensure they do not go out and hunt lions when they are really angry. We also get information, like when the livestock was killed, what time, was it being looked after, were there herders with it. This helps us identify patterns and encourage community members to come up with solutions.

Neme: What patterns of livestock killings have you found?

Bhalla: About 90 percent of livestock is killed during the day, when the animals are not guarded properly. There’s very little killing at night here in Samburu unless livestock are lost. This is different than other parts of Africa. We take that and work with communities on better husbandry techniques. We encourage the children to be more focused when they watch livestock. If they see tracks or signs of lion, don’t take livestock there. If they are running around playing games, they don’t notice these signs. Also, livestock should be kept together. The animals that get killed are the livestock that stray.

Because the warriors are on foot, they know where lions are and they communicate that to the herders and encourage them to take their livestock elsewhere.

Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Neme: How is Ewaso Lions an example for other places?

Bhalla: Our Lion Kids Camp program is being used as a model in other places. For instance, the Saiga antelope program in Uzbekistan came out to learn. And in Peru, the spectacled bears project team is now using this same idea. The Saiga project was also inspired to start Mama Saiga — following on our Mama Simba program.

Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Our methods of conflict resolution are being used, too. For example, Jeneria has been called by KWS to help train others in conflict transformation, and we have trained various other project personnel in Kenya on this. These are just a few examples.

Neme: What can people do to help?

Bhalla: There a number of things they can do to support lion conservation efforts. Ewaso Lions is the only project in northern Kenya. We rely on donor funding for our $400,000 a year budget, so financial support is always welcome. But it is not just us. Five conservation projects (including Ewaso Lions) have come together and formed the Pride Lion Conservation Alliance to safeguard lions. There’s also a new Lion Recovery Fund that was launched on August 10 to recover lion populations across Africa. So there are a lot of ways people can get involved in lion work across Africa.

There are also a lot of non-financial ways to help. Like others, our work is field-based, but often I have to do things like writing reports, applications, press releases and using MailChimp for example. People might have skills in this area and could volunteer time to create newsletters, update website or help in similar ways.

It also helps to spread the word. People might hear about rhino crisis but not about the lion crisis. So people can speak about the problems facing lions. Lions are running out of space and running out of time. That’s something I hope can change.

© 2017 Laurel Neme, all rights reserved.

Previously in The Revelator:

Elephant Ambassador in Chad: A Conversation with Stephanie Vergniault

Revelator Reads: 8 New Environmental Books for September

This month brings new books about elephants, energy and an all-too-real mythic figure.

Ah, September — time to throw open those windows and enjoy a good book in the rapidly cooling evenings. Publishers must have that in mind, because they have at least two dozen new environmentally themed books scheduled for release in September, featuring everything from animals to energy.

We can’t cover them all at once, but here are our eight top picks of the books coming out this month. As always we’ve tried to choose titles for both adults and kids, as well as for enthusiasts and professionals.

grand canyon for saleGrand Canyon for Sale: Public Lands versus Private Interests in the Era of Climate Change by Stephen Nash

Probably the most perfectly timed book of the month, this important investigative work dives into the efforts to undermine our country’s public lands and what that means for the wildlife that lives on them. Not to be missed. (University of California Press, September 5, $29.95)

rights of natureThe Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World by David R. Boyd

This provocative new book looks at cases around the world that have granted, or seek to grant, legal rights to animals and ecosystems. Don’t worry, chimpanzees won’t be able to vote, but under this movement rivers could gain the right not to be polluted. (ECW Press, September 5, $15.95)

johnny appleseedJohnny Appleseed by Paul Buhle and Noah Van Sciver

The bizarre true story of the man behind the legend, retold as an astonishingly beautiful graphic novel. You’ll gain a new appreciation for the myths — and maybe find a few seeds of truth along the way. (Fantagraphics Books, September 5, $19.99)

changing energy

Changing Energy: The Transition to a Sustainable Future by John H. Perkins

Can we get past fossil fuels to an all-sustainable energy system? Perkins looks back at history to show we’ve made three earlier energy transitions and prove that it’s time for the fourth. (University of California Press, September 12, $29.95)

How to be an Elephant by Katherine Roy

A kids’ book with a difference. The artist traveled to Africa to better understand elephants in their natural habitat and turned that into a book full of amazing watercolor paintings, poetic text and incredible scientific details. It’s stunning. (David Macaulay Studio, September 19, $18.99)

three zeroesA World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

Yunus, the Nobel laureate who invented microcredit, brings us a tome that offers to show us how we can alleviate poverty, create jobs and save the planet. No small task, but what have we got to lose? (Public Affairs Books, September 26, $28.00)

whale songWhale Song by Margret Grebowicz

This short book — part of Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” line — looks at the problems currently facing ocean ecosystems as a way to explore how whales connect to humans and what that means for how we live our lives in our strange new online social world. (Bloomsbury, September 7, $14.95)

critical crittersCritical Critters by Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy

This gets my vote as the book of the month, if not the year. Steadman and Levy previously teamed up for the amazing art books Nextinction and Extinct Boids. Like the first two parts of their trilogy, this new volume combines Steadman’s gonzo paintings of endangered species (most of which are real, a few of which come straight out of his paint-splattered imagination) with Levy’s informative text to create a volume full of humor, pathos, power and pain. Check it out. (Bloomsbury, September 26, $50)

 

That’s our list for September, 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: 7 New Environmental Books for July

Revelator Reads: 7 New Environmental Books for August

The Bats, the Bridge and Hurricane Harvey

Rescuers turn out for Houston’s famous Waugh Bridge bat colony.

Houstonians turned out by the thousands this week to help rescue neighbors who had been displaced or trapped by Hurricane Harvey’s record floods.

Some of those neighbors had wings.


Over the past few days rescuers have saved thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadaria braziliensis) from Waugh Bridge’s famous colony, which before the storm was home to an estimated 250,000 flying mammals. Dedicated volunteers sometimes hung over the top of the inundated Waugh Bridge to pull bats out of the water in nets.

Additional bats were scooped up into buckets and taken to peoples’ homes to dry off. Others ended up at shelters, working with Bat World Sanctuary, where they received emergency fluids and food before being released.

Some bats didn’t need rescue; they made their way to nearby office buildings and parking garages, where they found shelter from the storm.

Mylea Bayless, senior director of network & partnerships for Bat Conservation International, based in Austin, says they will begin monitoring the Waugh Bridge bat colony after the waters recede. “We are a little bit worried about the impact this flooding is going to have on them, so we’re going to be paying attention to that,” she says.

Mexican free-tailed bats are a populous and wide-ranging species, so even if the colony were devastated it wouldn’t have much impact on the species as a whole. It would, however, be a blow to the local people. “It’s a really visible bat colony,” Bayless says. “People in Houston gather along the banks of the Buffalo Bayou to watch the bats come out from under the bridge. It’s just really become part of the local community to go out and watch these bats. It’s a great educational opportunity.”

Ultimately, Bayless says, she’s relatively optimistic about the colony. “We’re hoping some of the colony crawled out and they’re roosting in these temporary places until the rain and the wind subside and they can go back to roosting under the bridge.”

Other bats, however, may not have been as lucky. The Texas coast is also home to several tree-roosting bat species that could have been harder hit by the hurricane.

“Yellow bats roost underneath palm fronds in the South,” Bayless says. “If those trees get whipped around and as their foliage gets knocked off, those tree-roosting bats are likely to be impacted too. They might end up on the ground or without roosts. That’s a little harder for us to assess because those bats are distributed across the landscape. You can’t just go check all the palm trees to see what bats got knocked out, while you can go to a bridge and see a whole colony. The impact on trees and vegetation is going to be really hard to assess.”

Bayless adds that Harvey’s effect on bats and other wildlife offers an important lesson for the future. “It’s moments like this that should point out how important open spaces are,” she says. “I think about this a lot on the Texas coast, particularly in big cities and where every square foot of land is at a premium. Maintaining those natural open spaces, even in urban environments, it’s not only good for the soul but also those open spaces are the areas that can absorb the rising flood waters. In Houston, the bayous and the parks are safe places for the floods to happen, as opposed to the floods moving up the streets and going into peoples’ houses. It may be an opportunity to call attention to how important it is to protect those open spaces and continue to protect those open spaces for future storms and future situations like this.”

For now, the question remains how many of the Waugh Bridge bats were lost and how that impact will be felt in the near future. Before the disaster the colony consumed an estimated 2.5 tons of insects every night. With mosquito populations anticipated to explode as waters recede, Houston may need every bat it can get.

Previously in The Revelator:

Is Hurricane Harvey a Harbinger for Houston’s Future?