‘Instability, Uncertainty and Chaos’ — How Climate Change Threatens National Security

Anyone who disregards the threats of climate change “is stupid,” says retired Lieutenant General John G. Castellaw.

How does the U.S. military and intelligence community perceive the threat of climate change? Last week I sat down with retired Lieutenant General John G. Castellaw of the U.S. Marine Corps to explore this and other questions.

Lt. Gen. Castellaw is a member of the Center for Climate & Security Advisory Board and also sits on the board of the American Security Project. Because of his affiliation with these nonpartisan organizations, Castellaw was adamantly tight-lipped on the topic of President Trump dramatically slashing the budget for environmental programs across the country, including ones for which Castellaw himself has voiced support.

John Castellaw — Lieutenant General John G. Castellaw © 2018 Francis Flisiuk. All rights reserved.

Castellaw represents a minority of conservative thinkers that recognizes climate change as a serious threat, but believes that the free market is equipped to solve the crisis. Considering that major corporations are the some of the largest accelerants of climate change, and that a former coal industry lobbyist was recently appointed as deputy administrator to the Environmental Protection Agency (right behind Scott Pruitt, a climate-change denier who is actively dismantling environmental regulations), it’s understandable why some might reduce Castellaw’s stance to mere wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, because of his 36-year experience leading marines around the world — often in flood-and drought-prone regions that are on the front lines of the climate crisis — Castellaw offers a sobering perspective on this international issue. Here’s my exchange with him, lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Do people in the military and intelligence community view climate change as a serious threat?

When I was in a commander I was responsible for everything that happened in my battle space.

What I did was what all commanders do, something called intelligence preparation of the battlefield. Basically, you determine what the threats are. It may be enemy armor or aircraft. But we also look at weather and terrain. Climate change and its impacts, extreme weather events, increasing sea levels, all of those are threats that military leaders are considering.

Every military guy is going to do that, regardless of their political affiliation. They’re trained to take those threats seriously. And anybody who disregards those threats is stupid. It’s science; it’s a fact. You disregard those solid threats at your own peril.

What is about your military experience that informs your stance on climate change?

As Marines we’re trained to look at things in an unemotional, fact-based way. We like stability, certainty and order. What we try to prevent is instability, uncertainty and chaos.

And so when you start looking at the factors that generate instability, uncertainty and chaos, you start to see various threats associated with climate change.

Take the Lake Chad basin [in Africa] for example. I went there first in the ’90s to do planning for a non-combative operation. Americans were in the middle of a potential coup going on and needed to be escorted out. When I entered the countryside and flew over Lake Chad I saw a lot of fishermen using the lake — 150,000, believe it or not. Herdsmen were there, and crops were being grown.

But last year, when I went back, I learned that the lake is 10 percent of what it was in 1960. I saw dry land where people were fishing last time. Migration problems arose from the diminishing resources.

The cattle herdsmen that were moving into different areas were often times in open conflict with farmers. [They were] killing each other over resources. And during that time we saw extremists like Boko Haram taking advantage of the chaos, recruiting, generating money, and attacking ever more areas down there.

Eventually, because we have economic, diplomatic and strategic relationships with those countries, when those countries are undermined, our relationship with them, and ergo our national security, is undermined.

Analyze the facts and you get to this point: Climate change is a serious threat to our national security.

Have you traveled to coastal areas that have raised similar types of concerns?

Yes. Recently we did a study on the sea-level rise in the United States and its impact on military installations.

Portsmouth Naval Shipyard was founded in 1800, and is only one of four. It has a very specific mission: The people there are working on nuclear submarine modifications and refurbishment. It’s a very important facility in our national defense. Our studies show that by 2050, it’s going to see an increase in flood tides affecting the industrial areas on the western side of the complex — the crane tracks, the docks, various facilities. This will significantly hinder the facility’s ability to accomplish its mission.

By the end of the century the water-level rise will be so severe that the island itself may be bisected.

The impact that sea-level rise and climate change are going to have on our economy and national defense will be felt across the country.

We’re going to have to deal with it, but at the same time if we keep waiting, the bill is going to keep climbing.

How serious a threat is climate change when ranked with other perceived apocalyptic threats like nuclear war or terrorism?

When you’re a cattle herder or fishermen or a farmer in the Lake Chad basin, it’s the most serious thing in the world.

What do you make of the budget cuts to the EPA and the attempt to remove the phrase climate change from its website?

What I can tell you is that where I am is at the deck plate. I’m around the farmers. I sat around a table with a group of farmers and agronomists not long ago, and what they’re worried about is the shortening of the growing season and the extreme weather events.

Just like in the military, the farmers are going to do what’s necessary to preserve their economic well-being.

Are you against the budget cuts to the EPA?

I’m for things that reduce greenhouse gases and emissions from power plants. Cleaner car fuel-economy standards. Scientific measures, common sense economical moves like switching from coal to natural gas. Increasing the use of sustainable energy.

It’s just difficult to determine if those policies/regulations would even pass with so many climate-change deniers in Congress.

We’ve passed the tipping point already. We’re going to continue to move toward renewable energy because it makes sense, it’s economically viable and it’s not a political move.

But what do you make of the fact that more than half of our lawmakers in Congress are climate-change deniers, and the commander in chief doesn’t seem to consider climate change a top security priority?

My job is to make sure that my position is the one that carries the day.

That’s a very diplomatic answer. But wouldn’t more investment in the EPA for example help neutralize the threats associated with climate change at this point?

As I’ve said, I think we’ve already reached a tipping point. A lot of stuff that supports the environment is making economic sense. And if anything else that’s going to push us in the right direction. There are right-leaning people out there pushing for market-based solutions. We [free market conservatives] don’t like a lot of government intervention. What we like is to do things that make sense and what’s in our best interest, and that’s what I’m seeing now. The momentum that’s built over the past 20 years will continue to grow.

Won’t it be an uphill battle to get corporations and climate-change deniers to care about ameliorating the crisis?

In the Marine Corps, we’ve always had uphill battles; it’s part of the challenge of life. When you look at a problem like climate change, the best thing to do is charge up that hill, because it’s the right thing to do.

How Can We Improve Communication About Climate Change? We Have 5 Questions

With the Climate Listening Project, filmmaker Dayna Reggero offers people a chance to talk — and be heard.

Listening can make things happen, says environmentalist and documentary filmmaker Dayna Reggero. When you listen — really listen — you provide a space for the speaker to make discoveries, connections and critical shifts.

To shift the conversation around climate change, Reggero has been crisscrossing the United States, listening. She asks individuals and families to talk about the climate impacts they’re experiencing — and the climate solutions they’re coming up with. She films these conversations so that others can listen too. This is the Climate Listening Project, one of the goals of which is creating connection around a topic that usually results in sharp divides.

The Revelator asked Reggero about the Climate Listening Project and how we can move forward in our conversations about climate change.

How did the Climate Listening Project come about?

I started the Climate Listening Project in 2014 while collaborating with Sierra Club on the “Years of Living Dangerously” docu-series and after my community experienced the most rain on record in 2013. I wanted to hear the stories of people dealing with climate impacts and people creating climate solutions. I filmed the stories so others could listen as well.

What’s surprised you about it so far?

I’ve been surprised to continue collaborating with new groups to follow more and more stories over the past four years. I wasn’t expecting to film a rabbi and priest for the “Faith” video, a Republican congressman working with women for climate solutions as part of “The Story We Want” web series, or a South Carolina farmer of the year for the “Cultivating Resilience” series — and the list goes on.

Have you encountered any roadblocks? How did you overcome them?

I think the idea that we have to choose a side on climate action because of our current political divide is the biggest roadblock in the United States. I overcome this by listening. I follow the connections that bring people together. I have found that when we really listen to each other, there is more that connects us than divides us. Through my films, I try to follow connections people can relate to so they can see someone like them, who cares about the same things they care about, and create opportunities for listening parent to parent, person of faith to person of faith, farmer to farmer, business person to business person, and so on.

Who do you think needs to open up their ears and hear these stories, either individually or as a group?

I think if people listen to their neighbors who are dealing with the same climate impacts they are experiencing, we can connect the dots and have real dialogue about climate solutions locally. The reality is that people are already experiencing impacts from climate change — and people need to know that they’re not alone.

The other reality is that people are creating mitigation and adaptation solutions — and people need to know that there are actions they can take for their families and communities.

What should we all be listening for, in terms of climate and communication?

I think we just need to listen to the real people dealing with climate impacts and the real people creating solutions. I have found that people are relieved to have a safe space to share their climate stories. It’s time for honest communications about how we can protect the people we care about, the things we need, the things we love and the places we call home.

Poachers vs. Poop

The key to saving elephants and other species may lie in the DNA contained in their droppings, says conservation biologist Samuel Wasser.

Last month customs officials in Singapore intercepted more than 60 bags containing nearly 1,800 pieces of smuggled elephant ivory. To help shed more light on the crimes, they placed a call to American conservation biologist Samuel Wasser.

Wasser is a scientist, but also a bit of a detective. Using techniques he has spent decades perfecting, Wasser can extract DNA from any elephant tusk, allowing him to identify almost exactly where the animal was killed by poachers. “I can take a tusk and I can pinpoint where it came from within three kilometers — and sometimes to the very park,” he says.

The key to that precision lies not in the ivory itself, but in something much less treasured by poachers: pachyderm poop.

That’s because feces contains DNA — not just of what’s been eaten, but also of the animal who ate it. Wasser and his colleagues have collected enough dung and DNA over the past 15 years to create a map of every elephant population in Africa, including their localized DNA mutations. Knowing those tiny genetic variations allows Wasser to test a piece of ivory and accurately pinpoint its place of origin — or perhaps, more specifically, its place of death.

That map has already made an enormous difference. In 2015 Wasser used data from dozens of gigantic ivory seizures to identify the two worst elephant poaching “hotspots” in Africa, places where thousands of elephants have been killed for their tusks. The research also revealed that the smuggled ivory shipments originated in countries other than the ones where the elephants were first poached.

“It just changed everything,” says Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington. Before this new information, researchers and law enforcement had believed that large ivory shipments, often weighing multiple tons, were collected from elephants all across the continent and then cherry-picked and consolidated by traffickers. “What we found was that the ivory was all coming from the same place and poachers were coming back over and over again to get these tusks,” he says.

That revealed a lot about not just the place but also the methods of poaching. “To be a poaching hotspot you need to have a lot of elephants present and you’ve got to know how to get in there and find them,” he says. “You have to be familiar with the area and you’ve got to be familiar with the rangers so you can perhaps pay them off, and you’ve got to have connections to move the ivory out up to the cartels that are shipping them. You can’t just go to a new place and have all of that present. So that was a really big breakthrough for law enforcement.”

That was just the start, though. Wasser knew the ultimate law-enforcement goal should be to find the cartels that were buying and smuggling ivory, not the low-level poachers hired by them.

That piece of the puzzle came, again, from Wasser examining large ivory seizures — and from an attempt to save time and money. “These seizures, they can have 2,000 or more tusks in there,” he says. “We can’t afford to analyze all of them, so one of the first things we tried to do was figure out how to identify the two tusks from the same animal so we could put one aside and not pay to analyze the same animal twice.”

Dr. Wasser examines confiscated elephant tusks. Courtesy Animal Welfare Institute

That was easier said than done, though. It turned out although that they could match paired tusks by size, color and the shape of the gum line, more than half of the tusks in each big seizure didn’t have a match. “I thought, where the hell’s the other tusk?”

By this point Wasser had examined and genotyped close to 50 large ivory seizures. “I said, well, I wonder if the missing tusks are in another seizure.” Sure enough, he not only found them, he found a connection between each shipment. “In every single case the paired seizures went through the same port within 10 months of each other and the distribution of ivory in those two seizures was almost perfectly an overlap.”

This second major discovery allowed Wasser and law enforcement to connect multiple shipments with each other and, through that, identify the three biggest cartels moving ivory out of Africa. “Now that is where the rubber meets the road,” he says. Two cartel leaders have already been convicted, while the third is in custody awaiting trial.

With this proven success, Wasser is now taking his DNA techniques to another group of species in need: pangolins. With grants from the Wildlife Tech Challenge — a partnership between the U.S. Agency for International Development and other institutions — Wasser and his team are applying their elephant methodology to the eight species of scaly anteaters, which have become the most poached animals on the planet. Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in China and Vietnam, while their scales are valued for use in folk medicine. (Like rhino horns, the scales are made of keratin and are actually medicinally useless.)

Just as with elephant ivory, pangolin has become big business. “It’s just crazy how many pangolins are being poached,” Wasser says. “The biggest seizure was 10 tons. I find that just mind-blowing.”

Of course, pangolins present a few new technical challenges compared to elephants. For one thing, pangolins produce small fecal pellets, as opposed to the giant 25-pound dung-heaps left behind by elephants. They’re also solitary animals that eat insects, so their poop falls apart quickly. Wasser and his team are currently training detection dogs — another technique he pioneered — to find the droppings. So far they’ve taken their canines sleuths to Vietnam and Nepal, with more countries to come.

Wasser’s studies and work to protect animals have not gone unnoticed. Among his other honors, this week the Animal Welfare Institute honored his achievements with the Albert Schweitzer Medal, an award for outstanding achievements in the advancement of animal welfare.

“I’m deeply honored,” Wasser says of the award. “This has really been my life’s work since the mid-eighties,” Wasser says. “Honestly, I never dreamed that I’d be doing the work I’m doing now.”

He laughs a bit and says his work to collect data from droppings all stemmed from a desire to collect information about animals without using techniques that would stress out his subjects, such as radio collars or collecting blood samples. “For a long time people said, oh, you’re just an animal-hugger and you just want to do your work non-invasively. You know, that’s meritorious in itself, but the fact of the matter is these techniques are far more powerful. It’s endless, the things you can do.”

He also points out that his work appeals to the public — not just with elephants, but also his research into Washington State’s killer whales, where a dog named Tucker helps him to find floating whale poop before it sinks beneath the waves. “It’s just a fantastic outreach magnet,” he says. “The people love it. It’s just an all-around fantastic way to create change.”

Oak Flat: Government Complicity in Indigenous Sacred Site Desecration

Settler colonialism in Arizona is ongoing. It continues to harm both the planet and indigenous peoples.

On March 17 vandals desecrated the Holy Ground ceremonial space at Oak Flat Campground, a sacred Western Apache site in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona. After hacking up two wooden crosses and stealing two others, as well as federally protected eagle feathers, the criminals left only tire tracks.

Known in the Apache language as Chi’Chil’Ba’Goteel, Oak Flat has been used by Apaches for centuries, according to substantial archeological evidence. Pointing out that “An act specifically targeting an Apache ceremonial ground is no different from vandalism of a church, temple or synagogue,” the San Carlos Apache tribal chair has requested that the Forest Service and FBI investigate this hate crime.

The American Indian Religious Freedom Act requires that American Indians have access to their sacred sites and that, in this case, the U.S. Forest Service launch an investigation and work with law enforcement to prosecute the offenders.

Blame should fall squarely on the shoulders of U.S. Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain, both Arizona Republicans, who were able to orchestrate the trade of federal forest lands — the people’s lands — to a foreign-owned multinational and multibillion-dollar mining corporation for resource extraction at Oak Flat. Through the attachment of a rider to a must-pass military spending bill in December 2014, Flake and McCain guaranteed the privatization and industrialization of Tonto National Forest generally and Oak Flat specifically.

(Attaching amendments to unrelated appropriation bills is a favorite pastime of McCain’s, who did the same thing to benefit a University of Arizona observatory on Dził Nchaa Si’An, otherwise known as Mount Graham, another Western Apache sacred site and unique natural area, and by backsliding on noise-pollution regulations to benefit air-tour industries in the Grand Canyon, to name but a few.)

That unique riparian areas will be denuded, aquifers contaminated and depleted, and landscapes destroyed is not in question. Rio Tinto, the mining company, admitted that it will create the largest copper mine in the United States and that within 50 years will leave a crater in the Earth that is two and a half miles wide and 1,000 feet deep, producing 1.6 billion tons of toxic mining waste — all within one of the country’s largest national forests. Such numbers are conservative estimates supported by industry. The reality will likely be much worse in terms of the size of the expansive, uninhabitable crater, the effects on plants, trees and animals, water use and contamination, and air quality. As Roy Chavez, a former mayor of nearby Superior, Ariz., stated, “The fight has just started. No one wants to lose Oak Flat.”

Yet the destruction has already begun. In addition to the recent hate crime, water is already reportedly being contaminated: Rio Tinto has drilled into an ancient lake and is working feverishly to dewater the mine area. The company’s large pumps carry 700 gallons of water to the surface where it is supposedly treated and used by farmers.

Such destruction is the continuation of 170 years of settler colonialism, begun violently in the wake of the Mexican-American War and waged against Apaches and landscapes in the Southwest. The Apache genocide that ensued, adroitly described in scholar John Welch’s recent research, centered on the U.S. government and military’s outspoken efforts to kill Apaches wherever they were found and protect any and all mining interests, including those at the current site of Rio Tinto’s insult to Apache heritage.

“Deliberate, state-sponsored violence against Apache families,” according to Welch, was policy. General James Carleton, other military leaders, mining companies and civilian soldiers in the 19th century made clear their intentions and volunteered to eliminate Apache peoples and claim the lands for their own use. Government officials termed Apaches “beastly savages” and called for their “subjugation.” In fact, Carleton explicitly required Apache “removal to a Reservation or by the utter extermination of their men, to insure a lasting peace and a security of life to all those who go to the country in search of precious metals.”

Oak Flat was so ecologically significant that both Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon protected those lands. In 1955 Eisenhower signed Public Land Order 1229, which placed this land off limits to future mining activity.

In the 21st century, we should all learn to respect the wisdom of indigenous sovereign nations. We should leave the Apache people and federal lands alone. The core of Arizona’s current U.S. congressional delegation does not do that, and arguably has not for decades. It should.

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.

Will the Southwest U.S. Run Short of Water in 2019?

Water managers say no, but Native American tribes are keeping careful watch on the “water that connects us.”

As the world watches the impending water-shortage crisis in Cape Town, South Africa — which could become the world’s first major city to run out of water as early as this July — water wonks and customers alike are concerned that a similar situation may be approaching in the American Southwest as soon as 2019.

Experts say the Southwest is veering toward a dangerous intersection caused by a “structural deficit” of the long-term drought and a continuingly increasing population. As the region continues to use more water than can be replaced by rain and snow, the day that supply no longer meets demand could leave cities like Phoenix, the largest city in the nation’s fastest-growing county, high and dry, with water being as severely rationed as Cape Town is currently forced to do.

Phoenix and other southwestern cities rely on the reservoir at Lake Mead, which itself famously depends on the Colorado River as its source of water. Now, the fate of that river remains in question. Although nearly all Colorado River water managers agree that 2018 won’t see a need to enact the first protocol in the existing river water-shortage plan, they’re still concerned about the future.

That includes local Native American tribes, several of which are major Colorado River users and have treaty rights and cultural connections to much of its water.

“Water connects us historically, culturally and economically,” says Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis. “It’s a sacred resource.” His tribe originally lost their central water resource when the Gila and Salt rivers were dammed in the early 20th century, plunging the 11,200-member tribe into nearly a century of dire poverty. The tribe regained its water rights in 2004, and in the years since has been rebuilding its water systems, including restoring some riparian habitat along the Gila River. This major watershed, which includes the Verde and Salt rivers, encompasses much of central and southern Arizona and New Mexico, merging with the Colorado just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The wetlands also recharge aquifers and support cultural activities like basket weaving.

The tribe now receives 41 percent of Arizona’s 2.8-million acre-foot Colorado River allocation — a fact that comes with a great responsibility. “We feel we have a moral imperative to conserve our shudaz, or water,” says Lewis. “We never wasted our water, and we are its caretakers.” (An acre-foot would cover a football field with 1 foot of water.)

What about the rest of the region? “A shortage won’t be declared this year,” predicts Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. However, she calls the prospect of a shortage an urgent incentive to continue negotiations over Arizona’s Drought Contingency Plan, which if enacted would provide a roadmap to manage shrinking Colorado River water. The plan includes more active management, shortage protocols and conservation measures.

The two tribes with the largest allocations, the Colorado River Indian Tribes and the Gila River Indian Community, have indicated they “want to be part of the solution,” Porter says. “They are reducing their use of river water and they’re leaving water in Mead.” And tribes are far down the line in taking water cuts, she says. “Central Arizona farmers are first in line to receive less water.”

The Gila River tribe is cognizant of the need for a coordinated water policy. “We’re trying to work for a larger solution,” Lewis says. “Shortages affect all of us — the tribes, the cities, the counties, agriculture, commercial developers alike.”

The state of Arizona was one of five participants in the March 2017 agreement to leave 40,000 acre-feet of water controlled by the Gila River tribe in Lake Mead to help stabilize water levels, and Lewis noted that the tribe has left more than 90,000 acre-feet in the lake to date. In Arizona, that’s enough to supply 180,000 average families with water for a year. Gila River has also embarked on a water-banking partnership with the state, the city of Phoenix and the Walton Family Foundation.

Arizona Department of Water Resources director Tom Buschatzke says these cooperative agreements with Arizona’s tribes are a critical tool for saving Lake Mead from falling to critical levels. “Tribal participation in those efforts to protect the integrity of Lake Mead is vitally important,” he says. “We need them to be our partners [and] many of them have the desire to be those partners. The state is committed to giving them the tools that they need and can take advantage of.”

DiEtta Person, a spokesperson for the Central Arizona Project, which manages Arizona’s Colorado River allocation, echoed Buschatzke’s sentiment. “We’ve been working with all partners on conservation,” says Person. “We’re mostly acting as if the Drought Contingency Plan has been implemented.” And, she adds, tribal water is key to keep Lake Mead’s water levels from going to “crisis mode.”

But not all Arizona players seem to be on board. Porter notes that there’s been a falling out — with the tribes, the city of Phoenix and the department of water resources on one side and the Central Arizona Project on the other — over the “very complicated question of what happens when contract holders don’t order all their water,” which results in an “excess water” pool. “How much excess water should be left in Lake Mead?” Porter says. Excess water is important for the Central Arizona Project in terms of finances, she says.

But it’s not just revenues that are at stake: Buschatzke says that the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, the agency that oversees the Central Arizona Project, shouldn’t try to stop tribes and other clients from conserving water in Lake Mead — even though the feds and state agree that they have the legal right to do so — through the use of “sovereign immunity,” a legal tool that shields some governments from many lawsuits. “To date, [the district] refuses to recognize that right [to leave water in Lake Mead],” he said March 23 at a regional meeting in Yuma. “We need all hands on deck within the state of Arizona.”

However, Porter feels that this dilemma can be resolved.

Lewis is also working to ensure that tribes aren’t the last to learn about water issues as the Southwest grapples with a long-term drought and climate change-induced hotter, dryer seasons. “We have to be at the table to help make policy,” he says. “We know the effects that occur when water is taken away,” Lewis said. “That’s why we stepped up to be part of the solution.”

In any case, although the Southwest isn’t confronting an imminent water crisis such as occurring in Cape Town, water managers across the region are casting a wary eye on their own supply, hoping to avert — or mitigate — a similar disaster.

Trump Budget Cuts Could Cause Hundreds of Plant Extinctions in Hawaii

The “extinction capital of the world” could start losing unique plant species in as little as a month if funding disappears.

President Trump’s budget cuts could doom nearly 200 Hawaiian plant species to rapid extinction, conservationists warn.

“They’d be gone within five to ten years,” says botanist Joan M. Yoshioka. “Some within a year. Some would be extinct within a month.”

As you might expect in a place often referred to as “the extinction capital of the world,” many of Hawaii’s plants are already critically endangered and depend on direct intervention actions for their long-term survival. “A lot of our species are so rare they’re down to one population that’s less than a quarter-acre in size,” says Yoshioka, statewide manager for Hawaii’s Plant Extinction Prevention Program. “Some are down to the last handfuls of individuals.”

Only two wild Kokio drynarioides, remain in the Kona region of Hawaii Island. It has been readily propagated and outplanted. Courtesy PEPP.

All told 239 Hawaiian plant species now have populations of 50 or fewer individuals in the wild. The 11-member team of the Plant Extinction Prevention Program protects 190 of those species. Working on a shoestring budget of just $1.1 million a year, the team does whatever it can to save them, including collecting seeds and cuttings for propagation, replanting new populations in the wild, building and maintaining fences to block out invasive pigs and other herbivores, and even going so far as to help pollinate some species by hand. Their journeys often take them to the most remote areas of the island chain, including steep cliffs and places probably never before seen by other human eyes. They’ve discovered more than a dozen new species in the process.

rapelling — Wendy Kishida, Kauai coordinator, rappels to a rare plant population. Courtesy PEPP.

“Without the program there wouldn’t be any of those triage-type emergency actions,” Yoshioka says. “So the potential for one feral pig to destroy an entire species is a very real threat and one we experience every single day.”

About 70 percent of the program’s budget comes from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grants through the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund, which provides conservation funding to states and territories. That nationwide fund, initially proposed for a 64 percent reduction, barely survived the federal 2018 budget, which passed just a few weeks ago.

“Now we’re hopeful that Hawaii will receive their share of the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund for this year, but it’s up to the state to decide what programs will be allocated from those funds,” says Yoshioka.

But the future of the conservation fund remains uncertain, as Trump and Interior Secretary Zinke have proposed completely eliminating it in the 2019 budget. “Whether we can secure funding for fiscal year 2019 is anyone’s guess at this point,” says Yoshioka. The program, a project of the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit of the University of Hawaii, has started an emergency fundraising campaign to help raise $480,000 — enough to help fill any funding gaps that might emerge.

Yoshioka says the campaign has already helped to raise broader awareness about the plight of Hawaii’s native species, most of which exist nowhere else in the world. “A lot of people don’t know that our extinction crisis is such a huge deal,” she says. Indeed, since Europeans arrived on the islands at least 110 Hawaiian plant species have gone extinct, along with 35 bird species, several fish, dozens of kinds of insects and hundreds of species of snails.

That could be just the beginning. Today more than 500 Hawaiian species are considered endangered. “We’re just a little tiny spot in the middle of the Pacific, but we have a lot of endangered species,” Yoshioka says.

One of the biggest threats on the islands is introduced game and agricultural animals that have gone feral, including pigs, goats, deer and cattle. “Each island has its own suite of ungulate problems,” Yoshioka says. Meanwhile feral cats eat Hawaii’s birds, invasive mosquitoes carry new diseases, and invasive plants choke native species out of their habitats.

Many of these problems build upon each other. As plants begin to disappear, so do their pollinators. This, in turn, causes more plants to vanish, leaving less fruit for native birds, whose populations decline so that they have fewer opportunities to carry seeds to new places, further weakening plant populations. “You have these cascading effects,” Yoshioka says.

On top of all of this, climate change looms as an emerging threat. The program is already anticipating a need to adapt where it plants endangered species if lowland habitats become too warm. “We might have to migrate plants to higher elevations where it’s a little cooler, and we may lose the natural communities that are already at low-elevation areas,” she says, adding, “We imagine that through climate change we will unfortunately see species blink out, as there just won’t be suitable habitat for them.”

The Plant Extinction Prevention Program actually has the best record in Hawaii against this wave of problems, and Yoshioka says she’s proud they haven’t lost a species since they began 15 years ago. She credits her team’s dedicated botanists and horticultural partners around the state, who have worked tirelessly to bring several species back from the brink of extinction.

“I think if you asked every single one of our PEPPers — that’s what we call ourselves — they will say they have a sense of responsibility to protect these plants because they’re part of what makes Hawaii Hawaii,” Yoshioka says. “They existed well before humans ever set foot on this land. We feel that if you are here, if you love Hawaii, if you care about your legacy, that everyone should feel responsible, because they preceded us. In the way that we protect and care for our kupuna, our elders, we need to care for the land.”

Regardless of how the short- or long-term funding pans out, Yoshioka says she and her team remain committed to preserving that natural heritage. “That’s why I can say, with truthfulness, that they’re out there every day — with blood, sweat and tears — to protect what is all of our legacies,” she says. “It’s the fuel that keeps us going.”

Previously in The Revelator:

What Is the Fate of the World’s Plants?

America’s Freshwater Mussels Are Going Extinct — Here’s Why That Sucks

Dozens of these water-filtering species are at risk of vanishing, and that’s bad news for every living creature that relies on them.

Give Rachel Mair two tanks of water and she’ll show you something amazing.

“When I do outreach at a festival, I put mud and algae and stuff in the tanks,” says Mair, a biologist with the Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery in Charles City, Va. “Then I put some freshwater mussels in one tank and tell people to come back and check on me in a few hours.”

Those few hours make a difference, as do the mussels. “People come back and the water in the tank that has the mussels will be substantially cleaner,” Mair says. “I say, which water you rather your kids play in or drink? That’s what mussels are doing for you.”

Unfortunately, despite the service they provide to our rivers and streams, North America’s freshwater mussels now need some conservation muscle. Pretty much wherever they’re found, the shelled bivalves are disappearing. Many of the 300-plus mussel species in the United States have already been added to the endangered species list; many more are waiting for similar protection. Beautiful species with crazy names like the orangefoot pimpleback, purple bean, Higgins eye pearlymussel and pink mucket could soon be a thing of the past.

In part that’s because the very water the mussels filter through their bodies has also often become dangerous to them. “A lot of our streams are not as clear as they once were,” Mair says. “With all of the factories and discharges and agriculture and increases in human population, there’s a lot of pressure on our freshwater mussels.”

Scientists don’t always know exactly what levels of contaminants, such as ammonia, affect which mussel species, but we do know is that it doesn’t always take much. “They’re really very sensitive animals,” says Mair. “They’re the canary in the coal mine for our freshwater resources — the first thing to start disappearing when you have water-quality issues.”

Mussels also depend on something else that’s often in short supply in many streams — fish. You see, most mussel species can’t reproduce without assistance. In order to create the next generation, adult mussels lure in nearby fish — often using fleshy appendages camouflaged to look like fish food — then inject them full of larvae (glochidia) and let the fish carry the young’uns around until they’re old enough and big enough to go back into the water and survive on their own.

The important thing here is that not just any fish will do. Most mussel species partake of this parasitic relationship with just a handful of fish species; others rely on only one kind of fish. Unfortunately, thanks to river dams, pollution, habitat loss and other factors, those fish often aren’t available to mussels anymore. This has left all too many mussel species with limited or nonexistent means of reproduction.

Figuring out how to keep all of these endangered mussels from going extinct is no easy task. “There’s 300 species in North America,” Mair says. “They’re not easy to study. They all need a host fish. They all have different life-history aspects and different water-quality parameters that they can survive in. So you have 300 species that have 300 different needs, and we often don’t know what those needs are.”

Beyond biology, the species also face unique environmental challenges. “It’s certainly harder to clean up rivers than it is to clean up the land,” Mair says. “We can see what’s happening in the land and air. We don’t always see what’s happening in the rivers. We don’t know if our water quality is bad until we can go out there and physically test it.”

Even then, it’s not always easy to pinpoint — let alone resolve — whatever factors might be affecting water clarity. “I mean, you’re talking about thousands of acres,” she says. “Whatever is happening on those thousands of acres, it’s going to be affecting that one stream where that one mussel species lives. These are things that are out of our ability, especially as biologists, to change. You know, I can’t fix the water quality.”

Pollution is bad enough. What comes next might be even worse for mussels. “We’re coming into drought, climate change, water temperatures warming up — there are a lot of other things at play,” she says.

That’s not stopping people, though. More and more scientists are looking into how to breed mussels in captivity. Many of them are learning their craft from experts like Mair, who is one of the co-authors of a just-released book, Freshwater Mussel Propagation for Restoration (Cambridge University Press, March 2018). “There are so many people now that are starting to produce mussels,” she says. “My hope is that this book at least sends them on the right track.”

Mair adds that she knows the need for this knowledge base exists. “We teach a propagation class every year at the National Conservation Training Center in West Virginia, and every year we have a full class.” People also contact her year-round. “I get questions all the time. ‘I’m starting to grow mussels, how do I do this and do that?’ Nobody needs to start out at point zero. There are a lot of people out there that have been doing it, and I guess that’s my take-home message: Just contact somebody to help you and get you started.”

mussel propagation — Rachel Mair on Harrison Lake, where freshwater mussels are reared in floating baskets. Photo: USFWS

Of course, some of these mussel species are so rare now that managing to find a male and a female and bringing them together with the right host fish feels daunting, if not next to impossible. On the other hand, a handful of individuals and a few fish could help put a species back on the right track. “If you get one larvae infestation, you could get a thousand juveniles,” Mair says. “After they got big enough you could potentially put 500 back in the river. That could be incredible. I think a lot of people are looking to propagation right now because it’s the last strategy in a lot of cases.”

It’s easy to see the potential for a cleaner system of waterways if mussels returned to more American rivers and streams. Some places are actually already deploying mussels specifically to help purify the water. “A large bed of mussels could filter millions of gallons of water a day,” Mair says. “That’s pretty huge.”

There’s another reason to support your local mussels: “They are really just amazing,” says Mair. She describes one critically endangered species, the birdwing pearlymussel, which employs the greenside darter as its host fish. “This mussel has a lure it sticks out that looks like a snail, with fake antennae,” she says. The darter, in turn, loves to eat snails and has a specialized mouth designed to suck the meat right out of a shell. The mussel takes advantage of that. When a fish clamps down on the lure looking for a bite to eat, it gets a face full of mussel larvae instead. And the circle of life continues.

That’s just one out of many evolutionary marvels Mair recounts, each species description more excited than the last. And that, she says, is why mussels matter. “Yes, they clean water and that’s really important. But for me, they’re just so interesting, so unique, and that diversity is what makes nature great. I would hate to lose that.”

Previously in The Revelator:

The Big Picture: Southern Inhospitality

Pruitt Pulls President Obama’s Climate-Saving Fuel Economy Rules

The rules, bemoaned by auto manufacturers, would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 540 million metric tons.

As expected, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on Monday announced plans to “revise” President Obama’s signature fuel-economy rules for cars and trucks, which would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 540 million metric tons and reduced oil consumption by 1.2 billion barrels. The rules governed cars and light trucks released during the 2022-2025 model years and would have increased their required fuel economy to more than 50 miles per gallon.

In a press release — which was not posted to the EPA website as of press time and was only distributed to certain members of the media — Pruitt called President Obama’s rules “inappropriate.” Several automakers had vocally opposed the rules, as did Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry trade group.

Science and environmental groups were quick to blast Pruitt’s plan. “This decision is not based on science,” wrote Dave Cook, senior vehicles analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Pruitt, he wrote, “is overturning thousands of pages of hard evidence, and the consequences will be limiting consumer choice, increasing emissions and undercutting the economy.”

Even EPA officials criticized this week’s action, saying it diminishes the role of science at the agency. “I am concerned that those who provide the technical basis for Administrator Pruitt’s regulatory decision will be ignored or dismissed, and that sound science and engineering may be reassigned to another government agency that lacks the technical expertise,” AFGE Local 3907 President Mark Coryell said in a prepared release. The union represents members who work at the EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory.

What comes next? The Obama-era emissions standards were part of an agreement with the state of California, which has set its own clean-air and fuel-emission standards higher than the federal government’s. California officials, anticipating this week’s decision, have already been hinting at a legal fight to maintain the standards. New York, meanwhile, could join the fray, as state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today called Pruitt’s actions “illegal,” adding “we stand ready to take legal action to block the Trump administration’s reckless and illegal efforts to reverse these critical standards and the gains we’ve made in ensuring cars are more fuel-efficient and less polluting.”

14 New Books About Lions, Climate Change, Green Living and Indigenous Rights

Eco-books coming out this April look at the life and death of Cecil the lion, the history of oppressive oil development, and living a zero-waste lifestyle.

April, goes the old saying, is the cruelest month, so perhaps it should be no surprise that one of the most anticipated books being published this month is about the infamous death-by-dentist of Cecil the lion. But that’s not all, and the rest isn’t necessarily cruel — April will also see the publication of fantastic new books about living a zero-waste lifestyle, taking back our public lands, how fossil fuels hurt indigenous peoples and a whole lot more.

Honestly there are more environmental books coming out in April than any one person could read, but we’ve tried to pick what looks like the best of the bunch for you. The full list — 14 amazing titles — includes books for just about every reader, from dedicated environmentalists to Earth-friendly kids. There’s even one for poetry fans. You can check them all out below — links are to publishers’ or authors’ websites — and then settle down in your favorite reading chair for a month of great page-turning.

Wildlife and Endangered Species:

Lion Hearted: The Life and Death of Cecil & the Future of Africa’s Iconic Cats by Andrew Loveridge — Advance word on this book is already reigniting the complex emotions around this case. Written by the scientist who studied Cecil the lion for eight years until the big cat was shot by American dentist Walter Palmer, Lion Hearted is about more than just Cecil and Walter; it’s about the plight faced by all of Africa’s disappearing lions. This gets our vote for the book of the month.

The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species by Carlos Magdalena — It’s a sad fact in conservation that endangered plants often don’t get enough attention, whether it’s from the general public, governments or even researchers. Maybe this impassioned memoir from Magdalena, a globe-trotting horticulturalist who spent his life saving endangered plants, will help to turn that around a little bit.

Back From the Brink: Saving Animals From Extinction by Nancy Castaldo — Here’s one for younger readers, the true stories of how humans came close to killing off species like wolves, alligators and the California condor, as well as how we kept them from disappearing forever. Good lessons if we want the next generation to succeed in saving the species around them.

Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution by Menno Schilthuizen — Wildlife and cities don’t mix, right? Well, not so fast. Some species are adapting to live in urban environments, either by changing their behavior or by evolving new physical characteristics. It’s never going to be as good as living in natural habitats, but for some species life goes on, as this book reveals.

Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil — Poetry about a planet in peril. This isn’t strictly about wildlife — it covers a lot of environmental topics — but many of the poems in this thought-provoking volume are about animals, including Bengal tigers, bees and a whole lot more.

Green Living:

Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things by Elizabeth R. DeSombre — An academic book, but one that asks some important questions we should all be considering if we hope to change our own behaviors or those of the people around us.

Trash Revolution: Breaking the Waste Cycle by Erica Fyvie— What’s the impact of the stuff around us, and how can kids make informed decisions about the products they buy? Fyvie and illustrator Bill Slavin provide the answers in this book, which comes our way from the delightfully named publisher, Kids Can Press.

Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash by Shia Su — Did you know the average American produces 4.4 pounds of garbage a day? Yikes. Well, here are 168 pages of tips on how to reduce your trash footprint all the way down to zero. Not a bad goal!

The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution: 100 Ways to Build a Fossil-Free Future, Raise Empowered Kids, and Still Get a Good Night’s Sleep by Mary DeMocker — Sleep is a good thing, as is having a planet on which to sleep. Bill McKibben provides the foreword to what sounds like an essential book.

Public Lands:

This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back by Ken Ilgunas — The perfect book for the times we live in, when public lands are increasingly under assault and even national monuments are at risk of disappearing.

Energy Development and Indigenous Rights:

Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia by Michael L. Cepek — For half a century, the indigenous Cofán nation of Ecuador has struggled under the ecological destruction of the fossil-fuel industry. Cepek, who has worked and lived with the Cofán for more than 20 years, tells their story, revealing how oil extraction has threatened these marginalized people but also how they have remained resilient.

Damming the Peace: The Hidden Costs of the Site C Dam by Wendy Holm (editor) — A massive, $10 billion hydroelectric dam project on British Columbia’s Peace River could threaten the First Nations peoples who live nearby. This volume dives deep into the potential impacts and decades of governmental cover-ups related to this long-planned project.

Climate Change:

Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C. Serreze — We all know now that the Arctic is melting, but how did we come to find that out? Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, provides a firsthand account of how scientists first observed and understood these changes and how they will affect the planet.

Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change by Mary Beth Pfeiffer — Ticks like warm places; climate change is making more places warmer. That’s already causing tick-borne illnesses like Lyme to travel to new areas and hurt more people, a situation Pfeiffer explores. (For more on this topic, check out our article and interactive maps, “Climate Goes Viral.”)

Looking for even more new eco-books? Check out our previous “Revelator Reads” columns for dozens of additional recent recommendations.

U.S.-Mexico Commission Fails to Stop Sewage Plaguing Border

The Trump administration is backing away from treaty mandate to “give preferential attention to the solution of all border sanitation problems.”

Part III of The Revelator’s “A Border Betrayed” investigation.

LAREDO, Texas — Tom Vaughan steers his two-person kayak across the 50-yard-wide Rio Grande River to an inlet on the Mexican side of the river. On either side of the creek plastic bags, diapers and shredded clothing dangle from the shrubs, providing a warning of the hazard ahead.

“As you can tell, this is raw sewage,” Vaughan says as we paddle up the creek against a gentle current of dark brown water overlaid with a pungent earthy aroma.

Vaughan is a member of the advisory board for the Laredo-based Rio Grande International Study Center, a nonprofit that works to preserve and protect the local watershed. A zoologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, he has been taking weekly water samples for 20 years as part of the Texas Clean Rivers program.

Vaughan turns his blue, rubber-shelled kayak downstream into some rapids. A wave splashes over the bow, sending sewage-laced river water into the boat. We paddle along the Mexican side of the river toward the water-treatment plant for a city called Nuevo Laredo, the sister city of its Texan counterpart.

Nuevo Laredo draws drinking water for its 635,000 residents from the Rio Grande — less than a quarter mile downstream from the sewage outfall.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says as we glide by the water works.

Fishermen downstream from Nuevo Laredo sewage outfall. Photo: John Dougherty

The Mexican city, which has grown rapidly from increased U.S.-Mexico trade spurred by the North American Free Trade Agreement, dumps about 6 million gallons a day of raw sewage into the Rio Grande.

It used to be much worse — as much as 25 million gallons a day — before the city’s first wastewater-treatment plant was constructed in 1996. An obscure bi-national agency called the International Boundary and Water Commission built and operates the $60 million facility.

More than 20 years later, the Nuevo Laredo wastewater treatment system is in poor condition and the city’s sewage lines are failing. Raw sewage once again plagues the Rio Grande.

Nuevo Laredo drinking water intake. Photo: John Dougherty

The failure of the joint investments by the U.S. and Mexican sections of the International Boundary and Water Commission to permanently eliminate untreated sewage discharges from Nuevo Laredo is just one of many examples of where the commission has been unsuccessful in constructing vital wastewater treatment systems in border communities.

The commission has struggled for decades to address ongoing border sanitation issues along the U.S.-Mexican border. The commission appears to lurch from crisis to crisis and rarely has enough money to complete a wastewater system before it becomes obsolete. Experts tell The Revelator the commission lacks long-term strategic planning to deal with a surging border population and takes a very narrow view of its role in addressing border environmental infrastructure needs.

The commission declined repeated requests for interviews with its top officials.

Another crisis is brewing in California, where the U.S. section of the commission is now under fire for failing to find a solution to Tijuana’s collapsing sewer system. Baja California’s largest city is growing faster than its aging wastewater infrastructure can handle.

Tijuana is built in the hills abutting the U.S. border, so when its wastewater system is overwhelmed it sends millions of gallons of raw sewage flowing into the Tijuana River, which crosses the border and drains into the Pacific Ocean. The floods of sewage force U.S. cities to routinely close public beaches from Imperial Beach to Coronado. (See Part I and Part II of The Revelator’s series “A Border Betrayed.”)

Infuriated by decades of raw sewage flows, two California border cities filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court on March 2 against the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission for failing to control and treat untreated wastewater discharges from Tijuana.

“Defendants have utterly failed to fulfill their legal and moral mandates,” alleges the lawsuit filed by the cities of Imperial Beach and Chula Vista and the San Diego Port Authority.

World War II-Era Treaty

The U.S. and Mexican sections of the International Boundary and Water Commission were created in a 1944 treaty between the two countries. The commission is required to be led by an engineer and the U.S. section has about 313 employees. The Trump administration wants to cut the U.S. section’s annual budget from $77 million in 2017 to $71 million by 2019. The U.S. section is part of the State Department.

One of the commission’s duties — mandated in Article 3 of the 1944 “Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande” treaty — is to “give preferential attention to the solution of all border sanitation problems.” When the treaty was ratified, the preamble noted that the countries were entering into it “by the sincere spirit of cordiality and friendly cooperation which happily governs the relations between them.”

But even with initial goodwill the International Boundary and Water Commission hasn’t been able to meet the border’s environmental infrastructure needs, which continue to steadily increase. Rapid growth of Mexican border communities has outstripped cities’ ability to finance, build, operate and maintain expensive wastewater collection and treatment systems. The U.S. has long subsidized investments in Mexican wastewater-treatment systems because of the positive public health benefits to populations on both sides of the border.

The commission owns wastewater-treatment facilities in Nuevo Laredo, Rio Rico, Ariz., and in the San Diego community of San Ysidro. The Nuevo Laredo and San Ysidro facilities process sewage from Mexico. The Rio Rico wastewater treatment plant treats sewage from two towns in Arizona and Mexico, each called Nogales.

The Nuevo Laredo wastewater treatment system needs more than $55 million in upgrades. The Rio Rico facility needs at least $40 million to replace a deteriorating sewer line that occasionally ruptures and pollutes the Santa Cruz River.

That pales in comparison to cost estimates to rehabilitate Tijuana’s entire wastewater treatment system, which could run as high as $400 million over the next 50 years.

But more immediate, short-term fixes to capture and divert the current wave of sewage in the Tijuana River are also necessary.

“It’s in the tens of millions to fix the system that we need to stop sewage flows,” says Serge Dedina, mayor of Imperial Beach, Calif.

Even that amount of money will be tough to find.

With bi-national relations seriously strained by President Trump’s demands that first Mexico, and now Congress finance a $25 billion border wall and his threat to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement, the outlook for funding to repair and upgrade the three commission-owned wastewater treatment facilities is bleak.

The commission is also facing $75 million to $80 million in repairs for the wastewater treatment system in the Baja California city of Mexicali, where the northerly flowing New River is contaminated by untreated sewage and slaughterhouse discharges before it crosses the border into Calexico, Calif. The commission estimates it will cost another $98 million for additional treatment once the New River crosses into the U.S.

Spending on the border wall instead of stopping the Tijuana sewage incursion is becoming a major political issue in California, where President Trump made his first visit in mid-March to inspect wall prototypes.

“While the federal government is requesting billions of dollars to build a wall at the border, it has failed repeatedly to act on this serious contamination issue that has plagued the Tijuana River Valley, Imperial Beach residents, businesses and tourism in the San Diego region for 30 years,” state Senator Ben Hueso wrote in a statement after Trump’s visit.

On March 15, Hueso introduced a resolution before the California Legislature requesting that the state join Imperial Beach, Chula Vista and the port authority in their lawsuit. The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control board voted the next day to file 60-day notice with the U.S. section of the commission over its intention to also file a lawsuit.

Five members of the San Diego delegation to the House of Representative — three Democrats and two Republicans — have also requested the State Department’s Office of Inspection General investigate the Tijuana River sewage spills and the role of the International Boundary and Water Commission, KPBS Radio reported on March 26.

Tijuana River channel leaving Mexico. Photo: John Dougherty

Border environmental infrastructure experts say Trump’s proposed wall will do nothing to address the ongoing public health crisis caused by a lack of safely operating wastewater treatment systems.

“The wall doesn’t provide any practicable urban-municipal function,” says Stephen Mumme, a Colorado State University professor and one of the few U.S. academic experts focused on the International Boundary and Water Commission.

Instead, he says increased investment in the border zone to improve the standard of living on both sides of the border would help create a “social wall” that would discourage illegal immigration, increase economic prosperity and reduce public health concerns.

Delaying investments in wastewater treatment systems, Mumme adds, only prolongs the inevitable.

“This is not the place to go about doing a lot of budgetary surgery to save money because you are really getting a lot of value for what you’re putting in,” he says. “And if you don’t do that, you’re going to have to come back and do it anyway because people are going to get sick and people are going to complain,” as is happening now in the San Diego metropolitan area.

Making matters worse, he says, is the Trump administration’s animosity toward Mexico, which reduces that country’s incentive to invest extremely limited funds into border environmental infrastructure when it has pressing needs in far poorer sections of a country that are recovering from two major earthquakes last year.

“It’s just crazy to be alienating a partner that has struggled to make investments in the border area,” Mumme says.

Backing Away From Its Mandate

The International Boundary and Water Commission, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the North American Development Bank are the three federal agencies that have played a fundamental role in attempting to address wastewater management along the 2,000-mile southern border.

The EPA has provided more than $1 billion in grants to communities on both sides of the border since the late 1990s, but now the EPA’s Border Water Infrastructure Grant Program is nearly depleted. Congress passed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2018 that includes $10 million for the grant program. The appropriation came after strong bi-partisan support in the House and the Senate.

The North American Development Bank, which was created by a side-agreement of the North American Free Trade Agreement, is also struggling for funds. Unless Mexico and the United States greatly increase the bank’s capital reserves, it will have to sharply reduce lending for border environmental infrastructure projects. There was no money for the bank included in the 2018 omnibus bill, although the Trump administration has requested $10 million for fiscal year 2019.

The funding crisis comes at the same time the Trump administration appears to be backing away from the 1944 treaty requirements.

In an ominous sign for fixing border wastewater issues, the U.S. Justice Department is now attempting to diminish the U.S. section of International Boundary and Water Commission’s role in handling trans-border sanitation issues, despite the explicit requirement in the treaty.

In response to a request from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board for the commission to commit funds for building infrastructure to stop the Tijuana sewage flows, the Justice Department’s Environmental Defense Section stated in a March 1 letter that the commission is not responsible for trans-border sanitation issues.

The letter states the U.S. section commission’s role under the 1944 Water Treaty “does not make it the agency that, under U.S. law, is ‘responsible for managing trans-boundary trash, sewage and sediment discharges’ from Mexico.”

The Justice Department’s claim that the commission is not responsible for stopping the sewage flowing from Mexico into the United States spurred the California cities to file their joint lawsuit the next day, says Mayor Dedina, who has been pressing for state and federal funding to stop the sewage flows that are damaging his city.

A commission spokesperson declined to comment on the Justice Department letter.

The Justice Department’s position appears contrary to earlier commission agreements for handling Tijuana sewage. In 1990 the U.S. and Mexican sections of the commission entered into an agreement to jointly manage and operate the Tijuana wastewater collection and treatment system.

“The agreements stipulate that the commission oversee and manage the project,” says Mumme, the Colorado State University professor. “The Justice Department is simply wrong in saying that they are not in charge.”

No Fix in Sight

The Mexican section of the commission operates a series of pumps and diversion structures that are supposed to capture up to 25 million gallons a day of Tijuana sewage on the south side of the border. The wastewater is sent across the border to the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is owned and administered by the U.S. section of the commission and managed and operated through a private contractor.

The main diversion pump and deteriorating sewer lines in Tijuana frequently fail, sending raw sewage into the Tijuana River. The untreated wastewater flows past the South Bay wastewater treatment plant that is wedged between the south bank of the Tijuana River and the border. The sewage continues through Border Field State Park and the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge before dumping into the Pacific Ocean.

The boardwalk through Tijuana Slough. Photo: John Dougherty

The U.S. and Mexican sections of the commission are working with the EPA and the North American Development Bank to develop a long-term plan to identify infrastructure improvements to mitigate the transboudary sewage flows in the Tijuana River. The development bank expects to award a contract for the study in April.

“We are cognizant of the many adverse impacts posed by sewage, trash and sediment flow which include health hazards, habitat destruction and quality of life aspects,” International Boundary and Water Commissioner Edward Drusina wrote in an August 2017 letter to the city of Imperial Beach.

But the commission’s slow pace and bureaucracy have provided no immediate solutions to the problem forcing state and local governments to attempt to fix a federal problem.

The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board has also developed a Tijuana River Recovery Team strategy to address the sewage flows, sediment and massive piles of trash that flow into the river during large storms.

Control board Executive Director Dave Gibson says the agency has proposed installing additional pumps on the U.S. side of the river to capture some of the Tijuana sewage releases that occur when the primary pump operated by the Mexican section of boundary commission fails.

The project would divert the sewage flows to settlement ponds, the South Bay wastewater treatment plant or directly into a pipe that dumps treated wastewater from the South Bay facility into the Pacific Ocean several miles offshore. The project would cost about $10 million to $12 million to build and between $3 million to $5 million a year to operate, he says. But the board has been unable to move forward because of a lack of state and federal funding.

“We’ve been trying to get funds available for years now,” Gibson says. “We haven’t been successful.”

The lack of consistent and timely funding for wastewater-treatment plants along the U.S.-Mexican border has persisted for decades. The U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission states that it can’t do any work on specific projects unless it receives funding authorization from Congress.

The 2018 omnibus bill provides the commission with about $26 million for construction. All of that money is earmarked for improvement of levies along the Rio Grande. The commission is also facing a major construction bill for fixing five of the six dams it owns and operates, which, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, are in unsafe and dangerous condition.

Unless the Trump administration and Congress decide to make major investments on a fundamental government services to safely treat wastewater, the Rio Grande, Santa Cruz, New and Tijuana rivers will continue to be besieged by raw sewage and public health threatened by infectious disease.

As Paul Ganster, chairman of the Good Neighbor Environmental Board, a federal advisory committee on environmental infrastructure needs on the U.S.-Mexican border, puts it: “Without funding from Congress, the border sewage problem cannot be solved.”