February’s Best New Eco-books — All 17 of Them

This month’s new books look at America’s disappearing bees, how religion can fight climate change, a pioneering woman scientist and a lot more.

February may be the shortest month, but this year it also brings a huge number of new environmentally themed books. Titles to be published this month cover everything from climate change to wildlife to important environmental history. The list also includes books for everyone — from dedicated environmentalists to nature-friendly kids. Check ‘em all out below (links are to publishers’ or authors’ websites) and then warm up your library card or plan a trip to your local bookstore.

Wildlife:

Our Native Bees: America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them by Paige Embry — an in-depth look at North America’s pollinator crisis.

A Forest in the Clouds: My Year Among the Mountain Gorillas in the Remote Enclave of Dr. Dian Fossey by John Fowler — the shocking true story and “the only first-person account from inside Dian Fossey’s beleaguered camp.”

Leatherback Blues: The Wild Place Adventure Series by Karen Hood-Caddy — a YA novel about a young girl trying to rescue sea turtles in Central America who goes head-to-head with vicious poachers.

Conservation Optimism:

The Future of Conservation in America: A Chart for Rough Water by Gary E. Machlis and Jonathan B. Jarvis — a “clear and compelling guide” and “a unified vision of conservation that binds nature protection, historical preservation, sustainability, public health, civil rights and social justice, and science into common cause — and offer real-world strategies for progress.”

Thank You, Earth: A Love Letter to Our Planet by April Pulley Sayre — science, nature, geography, biology, poetry and community, all wrapped up together in this beautifully illustrated children’s book.

Climate Change:

Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival by Dr. Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth — an indemnification of the world’s governments, corporations, religious bodies and the media. Foreword by climate scientist James Hansen.

Rising Seas: Flooding, Climate Change and Our New World by Keltie Thomas — an eye-popping kids’ book showing us what the world might look like when climate change puts some of our most famous landmarks underwater.

Climate Garden 2085: Handbook for a Public Experiment by Manuela Dahinden and Juanita Schläpfer-Miller — learn how climate change will affect your neighborhood by creating a garden that mimics what will happen in the future. An interesting thought experiment turned real.

Climate Church, Climate World: How People of Faith Must Work for Change by Jim Antal — a look at the moral challenges of global warming and how churches can address them. Bill McKibben provides the foreword.

Last Diamonds by Francesco Bosso — a beautiful photography book capturing the Arctic’s icebergs before they disappear.

Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright — a challenge to avoid a future of “capitalist planetary sovereignty” brought about by climate change. Yikes.

Pollution:

Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest Against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions, edited by Anthony E. Ladd — an interesting look at this hotly contested form of energy development and the sociology of protest.

Environmental History:

The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit by Brian James Leech — the long and troublesome history of an infamous open-pit mine that has now become a toxic lake.

The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America by Robert Wuthnow — a window into how Trump, Cliven Bundy and their like rose to power.

Pushing Our Limits: Insights From Biosphere 2 by Mark Nelson — one of the crew members locked into this infamously failed experiment recounts the experience. You know Steve Bannon was in charge of this, right?

The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science by Joyce Sidman — a kids’ book about a pioneering woman scientist in a time before women were allowed to be scientists.

The New Deal’s Forest Army: How the Civilian Conservation Corps Worked by Benjamin F. Alexander — a look at how America’s parks, national forests, scenic roadways and even picnic shelters came to exist, and how they gave birth to the modern environmental movement.

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

Another Deadly Year for Rhinos

Video: Poachers slaughtered 1,028 South African rhinos for their horns in 2017.

Transcript:

Poachers slaughtered 1,028 rhinos in South Africa in 2017.

That’s nearly 3 dead rhinos… every day.

Rhino horns sell for prices higher than gold — all because of their perceived (but mythological) medicinal values.

Even baby rhinos are killed for the sake of their tiny horns.

South Africa is home to 90 percent of the world’s rhinos.

Other rhino species live in Asia, where they’re also threatened by poachers.

At this rate, how long do rhinos have left in the wild?

Is This the Year the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Goes Extinct?

With just a few dozen left in the wild, things don’t look good for these critically endangered birds. But a captive-breeding program could help save them.

This year the United States could experience its first bird extinction in more than three decades.

That’s the warning from the scientists and conservationists working to protect the critically endangered Florida grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum floridanus). Once common in the grasslands of central Florida, this geographically isolated subspecies has experienced a catastrophic population decline since the 1970s, mostly due to habitat loss and degradation. Although the tiny birds have been protected by the Endangered Species Act since 1986, their numbers have continued to fall — to the point where recovery now seems next to impossible. A survey last year found that just 22 females and 53 males remained in the wild — and that was before 2017’s hurricane season and record-setting winter cold snaps.

“Extinctions really happen,” warns Paul Reillo, zoologist and president of the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation in Loxahatchee, Fla. “This is going to be North America’s next extinct bird if we do nothing.”

Reillo says there’s just one option left to save the Florida grasshopper sparrow: the captive-breeding program that began in 2015. “Captive breeding is never anyone’s desire, and it’s always the approach of last resort,” he says. “Given the collapse of the wild population it’s not only the last option, but it’s the last of the last options.”

Getting to this point took several years of debate among the various government agencies and partner organizations working to protect the birds. Finally the first sparrow eggs and juvenile birds were brought into captivity at the Rare Species Conservatory and the White Oak Conservation Center plantation near Jacksonville in 2015 and 2016, respectively.

Learning to Live

As with any captive-breeding program, learning how to get the birds to mate and hatch outside their native habitat has been a complex process. Early attempts to hatch the birds’ tiny eggs failed before the team established the proper temperature, humidity and incubator-rotation procedures. They learned quickly, though; by May 2016 a successful artificial incubation protocol had been established. The first captive-laid eggs hatched that month at the conservatory. Several additional chicks have been born since that point, although not all have survived. The captive population now stands at a total of 48 birds, with 29 living at the conservatory in Loxahatchee.

Beyond figuring out how to hatch the birds, the conservation teams also learned more about the adult birds, specifically the critical role of parenting. For one thing, the birds they’ve hand-reared never learned how to act like wild birds and “tend to be very poor parents,” Reillo says. Breeding pairs rarely work together to build nests, while females sometimes lay eggs outside of their nests and then fail to sit on the eggs until they hatch. Most of the females who did successfully nest often fed their chicks improperly, while males were rarely attentive to any part of the reproductive process except for mating — a big change for a species that engages in bi-parenting in the wild. During 2016 and 2017 most of the fertile eggs laid at the facilities had to be artificially incubated and then hand-reared after hatching, a process that could conceivably extend this cycle of parental neglect.

Parenting is also important in other ways. Although chicks can be raised by humans to become healthy adults, they need some quality time with their parents first. “The first two to three days of parental care stimulate all sorts of wonderful things, the most important of which seems to be the bacteria in the gut flora that enables a healthy immune system to develop,” Reillo says. “We cannot replicate that.” The facilities have managed to raise more than a dozen chicks whose eggs were removed from their parents after just a day, but “it’s extremely difficult and it often ends in disappointment because they develop septicemia and often there are infections that the chicks can’t overcome,” he says.

A Threat Revealed

Another immunological challenge has revealed itself through the captive-breeding program: Many of the birds, they found, have become afflicted with a previously unknown protozoan parasite that starts in the intestines and then invades vascular tissue in the liver, heart, spleen and other organs. This causes high mortality in the sparrows, particularly young birds, as well as birds stressed by factors such as cold, handling or even breeding.

Reillo says we might not have learned about this parasite without the captive-breeding program. “When birds die on the landscape the bodies disappear very quickly, and you can’t explain the mortalities,” he says. That’s why there has never been what he calls a “unifying explanation” for the collapse of the wild population. Captivity, on the other hand, provides a more controlled setting and gives the scientists “a window into some of these problems facing the birds that otherwise you would not see in the wild.”

Although the parasite’s still killing some captive birds, the conservation teams have learned how to detect and treat it. “We’ve stumbled across a means of controlling it and we do have a therapy that clears this organism from birds very quickly,” Reillo reports. “But so far we’ve only found one such drug that actually works well. That’s a concern because whenever you use one thing over and over again there’s a good chance that the target organism will evolve some resistance to it, and then you’ve got a real serious problem because you’ve got something that you can’t treat.”

What Happens Now?

The next step involves finding out more about how parasites and other potentially transmittable threats affect the birds both in captivity and in the wild. Larry Williams is the Florida supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the lead agency in the birds’ conservation efforts. He says disease analysis is being conducted and is expected to be completed by March. In April the wild population will be surveyed “so we’ll have a feel for how many birds survived the winter.” Once that’s complete the species’ conservation working group will meet in mid-May to make a final plan for possibly collecting any of the remaining wild birds and bringing them into captivity.

“We’re being really careful about this,” Williams says. “If the working group says our plan will be to bring in 10 females, then we want to have the cages and capacity in the captive facilities to handle those 10 new females. We don’t want to be sitting there at May 15 saying ‘bring in 10’ when nobody thought to build the cages to house them.” He expects that if the working group gives the go-ahead to start collecting more wild birds, the effort would start in June when the birds are nesting, so both mothers and eggs can be brought into the breeding facilities.

One big hurdle looms over all of this: money. After investing millions of dollars on field research, mitigation efforts and launching the captive-breeding program, the Fish and Wildlife Service has requested an additional $150,000 to $200,000 for future captive-breeding efforts. But federal funding for many endangered species programs is up in the air under the Trump administration. Reillo says “we’re not counting on the federal government actually providing tangible resources for this program going forward.” The Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida is currently raising funds to help the captive-breeding program, as is the Rare Species Conservatory through Florida International University’s Tropical Conservation Institute, the latter with a matching-grant program.

Another obstacle for this entire effort: Some of the captive birds may not live much longer. Florida grasshopper sparrows typically only live four to five years in the wild, and Reillo reports that several of the birds in their collection are already older than that. “Why they’re still alive is anybody’s guess,” he says. “They’re on borrowed time.”

Hope Springs Eternal

If most or all of these many difficult problems can be overcome, there is actually hope for this subspecies. Although the sparrows are relatively short-lived, they make up for it with several biological advantages. “These birds are hardwired for rapid reproduction,” Reillo says. Parents incubate eggs for just 11 days, and chicks can start leaving the nest at nine days before becoming completely independent just after three weeks of age. They start reproducing about one year later, and females can lay three to four eggs at a time, with as many as five clutches in a season. “So a female may be able to produce up to 20 chicks a year,” Reillo says. “It is a species that is engineered and has evolved for rapid population growth.” That means the captive population could conceivably grow fast enough and large enough that a release program could be considered some time down the road.

Of course, getting to that point won’t be possible without additional potential breeders, and every day that passes without bringing more wild birds into the captive population is a day when the total population could shrink even further. “Every single life is precious for these birds,” Reillo says.

Ultimately what happens next depends on the people who have devoted their lives to saving the Florida grasshopper sparrow from extinction. “I’m worried about our ability to save the species,” Williams admits, “but I’m confident that the people working on it are doing the absolute best work possible.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Extinct in the Wild But Still Flying: The Guam Kingfisher

Turning Power Over to States Won’t Improve Protection for Endangered Species

Many states currently are poorly equipped to assume the responsibility of caring for their threatened wildlife.

By Alejandro E. Camacho, University of California, Irvine and Michael Robinson-Dorn, University of California, Irvine

Since the Endangered Species Act became law in 1973, the U.S. government has played a critical role in protecting endangered and threatened species. But while the law is overwhelmingly popular with the American public, critics in Congress are proposing to significantly reduce federal authority to manage endangered species and delegate much of this role to state governments.

States have substantial authority to manage flora and fauna in their boundaries. But species often cross state borders, or exist on federal lands. And many states either are uninterested in species protection or prefer to rely on the federal government to serve that role.

We recently analyzed state endangered species laws and state funding to implement the Endangered Species Act. We concluded that relevant laws in most states are much weaker and less comprehensive than the federal Endangered Species Act. We also found that, in general, states contribute only a small fraction of total resources currently spent to implement the law.

In sum, many states currently are poorly equipped to assume the diverse responsibilities that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries (collectively, “the Services”) handle today. In our view, therefore, devolving federal authority over endangered species management to the states will almost certainly weaken protections for those species and undermine conservation and recovery efforts.

Endangered species listings — Endangered and threatened species listings by year for all U.S. states and territories. ESA, CC BY-ND

Science-based decisions

The Endangered Species Act requires the Services to list and then protect endangered fish, wildlife and plants and their habitat, working with expert scientists, state authorities and citizens. It prohibits anyone from harming any listed species, and requires decisions about whether a species is endangered to be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available.” While costs are clearly relevant to protecting at-risk species, the law is clear that determinations about whether a species is endangered or likely to be harmed by a particular activity should not be based on the decision’s potential economic impacts.

In addition, the act directs the Services to cooperate as much as practical with states on conserving listed species. This may include actions such as signing management agreements and providing funding to state agencies. The law also allows citizens to petition to list species as endangered and file lawsuits to help enforce the Act.

Congress takes aim

Critics argue, often with little proof, that federal endangered species protection is too cumbersome and costly, and that the agencies act without sufficient input from states and localities. Some contend that endangered species protection can be more effectively and efficiently accomplished by state agencies alone.

Sea turtle tracks — USAF biologist Danielle Bumgardner measures a path left by a nesting sea turtle at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., June 22, 2016. All sea turtles found in US waters are listed as threatened or endangered. USAF

The House Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Utah Republican Rob Bishop, has approved five bills that would weaken key provisions of the Endangered Species Act. These measures would:

Allow the Services to deny that a species is endangered (and forgo protection of that species) due to economic impacts of listing.
Require the Services to classify indiscriminately any data submitted by states, tribes or counties for listing decisions as “best available science.”
Make it harder for citizens to challenge government actions under the ESA by limiting recovery of attorneys’ fees in citizen suits.
Remove protection for at-risk non-native species within the United States.
Lift federal protection for gray wolves in the Great Lakes states and Wyoming.

Observers expect similar legislation to be introduced in the Senate. And Utah Senators Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch have reintroduced a bill that would remove all federal ESA protection for species found within the borders of a single state. Such action would eliminate federal protection for hundreds of currently listed species, including the Florida panther and Florida manatee.

These legislators argue that states should play a larger role. When a federal appeals court found that the Endangered Species Act barred the Services from transferring management of federally threatened prairie dogs in Utah to the state in 2016, Bishop asserted that “Utahns have proven they can maintain prairie dogs. The only thing impeding the state is federal meddling.”

More recently, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso said, “Endangered species don’t care whether the federal government, or a state government, protects them. They just want to be protected.”

State laws are weaker and narrower

Our review shows that most states are poorly positioned to assume primary responsibility for endangered species protection. State laws generally are weaker and less comprehensive than the Endangered Species Act. West Virginia and Wyoming do not protect endangered species at all through state law. In 30 states, citizens are not allowed to petition for listing or delisting of a species.

Only 18 state laws protect all federally listed endangered species found in that state. Another 32 states provide less coverage than the federal statute. And 17 states do not cover endangered or threatened plants.

Only 27 states require use of scientific evidence in listing and delisting decisions. In 38 states, regulators are not required to consult with the state’s wildlife experts for state-level projects.

California condors perch above an enclosure where biologists trap them to conduct research in the Ventana Wilderness, east of Big Sur. AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

Unlike the Endangered Species Act, 38 state laws do not authorize regulators to designate critical habitat for threatened or endangered species – areas essential for those organisms to survive. Only two state laws require recovery planning, only five state laws restrict harm to important endangered species habitat, and only 16 states protect endangered species on privately owned lands.

Finally, state-reported expenditures make up only five percent of all annual spending to implement the Endangered Species Act. In short, states will need to massively increase spending to maintain current levels of protection.

Better ways to enhance state roles

We agree that there is a need for better collaboration between states and federal agencies. States and tribes may have important knowledge and data that can complement the substantial expertise and resources provided by federal authorities. But that information alone should not substitute for the science-based decision making required by the ESA.

Furthermore, the Endangered Species Act already provides ample opportunities for federal and state collaboration. Many charges of poor coordination appear to be thinly veiled attempts to reduce protections, rather than efforts to promote meaningful collaboration. In our view, effective coordination under the ESA requires an enduring commitment to conservation and recovery by both the Services and the partnering state.

Congress should find ways to provide more incentives for conservation on private lands, which provide habitat for nearly 80 percent of listed species. The Endangered Species Act already encourages federal collaboration with states and private landowners, and there are many examples of successful partnerships.

Several studies have shown that listing species and developing conservation and recovery plans improves their status, provided that recovery efforts are funded. Rather than dismantling the Endangered Species Act, Congress needs to provide more resources to achieve its goals. The most productive strategies would be increasing funding for listing, conservation and recovery; systematically implementing and enforcing the law; and developing strategies for managing looming stressors to ecosystems, such as global climate change.

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

Tribal Cultures Underwater — and Falling Through Thin Ice

A national tribal climate-change conference highlights impacts to culture, heritage and survival.

Maija Katak Lukin’s cousin plunged through the ice to his death while hunting for food for his family. Wenceslaus “Boyo” Billiot, Jr. and Stanley Tom continue to encounter new hurdles in their quest to relocate their communities threatened by encroaching seawater. And Henry Lickers worries about seasonal changes that are altering the dates on which his community holds traditional ceremonies.

These were some of the stories presented during Cultures Under Water: Climate Impacts on Tribal Cultural Heritage, a conference held in December 2017 at Arizona State University. Hosted by the university’s Indian Legal Program, the three-day conference brought together tribal leaders, cultural practitioners, attorneys and nonprofits that support tribal climate efforts. They discussed how they advocate for policy changes in a nation that’s dismissive, at best, of their unique cultures and history. And they all expressed a common goal: ensuring their communities survive in an era where ecosystems are changing almost daily.

In her remarks, Rebecca Tsosie, a Yaqui law professor at the University of Arizona and longtime native-rights activist, noted that the U.S. failure to recognize or respect tribal cultures is leading to tribes being left behind — or left out entirely — in planning and policy. Ninety percent of all coastal land lost in the United States is in Louisiana, she reported, yet the tribes whose homes are in the coastal bayous and wetlands that line the Gulf of Mexico, and who are on the front line of climate change, are “not even mentioned in state planning.”

Wenceslaus Billiot. © 2018 Debra Utacia Krol. All rights reserved.

Another Louisiana tribe, the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, is planning to relocate its entire community from a rapidly disintegrating island to further north in Terrebonne Parish. But they’ve run into some roadblocks, says “Boyo” Billiot, the tribe’s deputy chief — namely, the state of Louisiana, which wants to wrest control of the project away from the tribe, and the federal Fair Housing Act, which would force the 600-member tribe to accept non-native residents, since they lack federal recognition.

Stanley Tom feels the Isle de Jean Charles tribe’s pain. “We’re just one storm away from extinction,” says Tom, the tribal administrator for the Newtok Traditional Council, whose own relocation project in Alaska is snarled in red tape and a dispute with a neighboring community. “If we hadn’t built our own new village, we would have had to move to the city and become refugees,” Tom said. “We would have lost our lands and our culture.” He agreed with Billiot that the two communities should not have had to compete for the same relocation grants.

Lukin, who lost her cousin, said she isn’t just heartbroken at the loss of yet another community member to thinning ice: More broadly, she’s the superintendent of the Western Arctic National Parklands, headquartered in Kotzebue, Alaska. Her dual roles — as a wife and mother concerned with ensuring her family gets proper nutrition through traditional subsistence in a changing ecosystem, and as an executive charged with managing public lands — can sometimes be in conflict. Due to the thin ice, she has to send her staff out by air on projects; but, she said, “I’m worried that, by sending them out in airplanes, I’m contributing to climate change.”

Maija Katak Lukin. © 2018 Debra Utacia Krol. All rights reserved.

Being a federal employee also meant that Lukin’s presentation wasn’t as detailed as it could have been; “I’m not sure how much I should say,” she replied when asked about how she felt about the changes occurring in her community. However, Lukin and Tom both stressed undeniable facts about the loss of sea ice and a rapidly altering climate. The changes affect subsistence food security, as well as sport hunting and fishing and other recreational activities by non-native hunters and other visitors in the 104-million-acre region under Lukin’s management.

“Climate change is one of those things that can uproot all people,” said Lickers, environmental science officer for the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne in Ontario, Canada, one of the Haudenosaunee peoples. “We’ve been concerned about climate change for a long, long time.”

Traditionally, Haudenosaunee seasons align with a moon phase, he said. “Each one of those seasons dictates when to plant beans or corn. We have ceremonies that are tied into those seasons that tell us what the world looks like.” But, those ceremonies have been disrupted, he reported. The ceremony associated with bean planting, for example, can no longer take place at the traditional time, because “the seasons have shifted,” he said.

It’s not just about seasons. Tsosie said that climate change is causing nothing less than “cultural genocide,” as governments fail to respect traditional ways of life and may even be sparking the “intentional destruction of cultural heritage.”

Keynote speaker Joel Clement echoed this, saying “There’s nothing climate change doesn’t touch.”

Clement, the former climate change lead at the Department of the Interior, said that the current administration is mounting an “all-out assault on anything that had to do with climate change — it’s like being led by a gang of vindictive fifth-graders.” Clement detailed how the Interior Department is working to eviscerate its staff, including slashing people of color and native people from the federal payroll by reassigning staffers with no notice and taking other moves to dislodge them from federal employment. “It’s clear that Secretary Zinke had no respect for the career ranks and the mission of DOI, and clearly wasn’t going to do any work on climate change,” he said.

So, in a political environment that has little interest in protecting tribal cultures, how do indigenous peoples assert their rights?

Robert Hershey, law professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, said, “Every attorney should read the Guideline for Considering Traditional Knowledge and Climate Change Initiatives,” which contains information on how to understand and abide by protocols when advocating for tribal communities.

Another possible solution involves a more radical approach. Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, averred that capitalism, and its addiction to fossil fuels, is the cause of climate change. Goldtooth’s solution was delineated in a report released at the conference that called for an end to public subsidies for fossil fuel extraction, including carbon taxes, markets and offset pricing.

Finally, Stephen Roe Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community, offered another solution: Remain connected to tribal communities and their lands.

“Once those connections are broken, that’s when we become unfocused, a weaker society,” Lewis said. “My elders tell me, ‘Don’t forget our stories of resilience and adaptation.’ ” He added that tribes should create their own action plans, with a cultural foundation, to deal with climate change.

“We should all look to each other as our allies, as water protectors,” he said.

Whatever the future holds, one thing is certain: “We must be ready for changes,” Lickers said. “Societies that can’t change will collapse.”

These Decaying Film Canisters Could Hold Secrets to Saving Species from Extinction

Archivists are working to save decades of film and other scientific information that could hold clues to protecting species and habitats today.

It’s a cool and rainy June morning in upstate Jamestown, N.Y., when I first catch a glimpse of the rustic river-rock façade of the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. In 1984 Roger Tory Peterson, the pioneering American naturalist and ornithologist of Peterson-Field-Guides-fame, founded this scientific establishment to serve as an educational storehouse for his life’s work. Nearly 21 years after his death, I’m here to learn more about efforts to preserve Peterson’s vast and varied collection of sketches, drawings, films, research equipment, slides, letters, bird feathers and skins.

Preserving and maintaining decades of Peterson’s analog works and artifacts in an ever-modernizing world is a challenging and time-consuming task, according to the Institute’s staff. They cite funds, free hands, time and technology as limiting factors affecting how quickly the institute’s collection can be preserved in long-lasting and shareable modern formats. Worldwide, tens of thousands of scientific establishments face the same problems in preserving scientific artifacts of yesteryear, leaving millions of these old and possibly scientifically valuable items in danger of being lost to time and obsolescence.

When I walk out of the rain and into the Institute I almost immediately notice a detailed Peterson painting of a soaring barn owl with a prominent heart-shaped face. As I’m admiring the piece, I’m greeted by Twan Leenders, Institute president, who leads me upstairs to show me one of America’s largest and likely most valuable collections of old nature films.

Upstairs Leenders and I walk into an air-conditioned room crowded with shelves of film reels. Jane Johnson, the Institute’s director of exhibits and special collections, is taking inventory of the films. She’s tasked with preserving these and the other items in the institute’s collection. Johnson shows me the degrading film canisters up close. Some are unlabeled; others are marked with short, nondescript titles like “Mexico – 51 – 52” and “Wood Ibis” on yellowed masking tape or plastic labeler tags. Johnson says each reel holds unique documentary footage shot by Peterson during the middle of the 20th century. Preserving these films, she says, is currently the Institute’s biggest archival challenge.

Film archives — © Erica Cirino. All rights reserved.

“I’m very excited to start digging into the film collection,” she tells me. The Roger Tory Peterson Institute has preserved a few of the films, including Wild America, Wild Africa and Wild Eden. “This gave our staff a glimpse into the types of footage contained on the films,” says Johnson.

Once given some TLC, these artifacts shed some new light into the scientific work contained in Peterson’s many mysterious, often unlabeled canisters. Based on these first restored recordings and the story of Peterson’s life, Leenders says, he expects the total scientific value of the footage to be enormous. He adds that Peterson was involved with many high-profile conservation efforts in globally important research areas like the Galapagos Islands and Coto Doñana in Spain. The reels, he says, could contain abundant images of extinct or now-endangered species, and habitats that are now destroyed or threatened.

“Peterson would be on the front lines of conservation and documented a lot of these areas photographically and through film in times when nobody was doing anything like that still,” says Leenders. “Hopefully, the materials in our collection will one day allow us to virtually travel back in time and see how these areas have changed in the past 50 to 70 years.”

To look back in time through artifacts like Peterson’s footage requires an intensive preservation process, according to preservation expert Ian Bogus. Bogus, who now works as executive director of the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium at Princeton University, formerly directed preservation for university libraries as the MacDonald Curator of Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. Libraries are filled with artifacts containing possibly valuable scientific data; to uncover what each artifact contains, he says, requires an often-intensive preservation process that starts with some important decision-making.

“We look at needs of institution and quality of the artifact before we delve into the preservation process,” says Bogus. “We have a variety of good strategies to deal with deterioration, some of which fundamentally change an item. But that’s not always a bad thing if it helps preserve important data or information so it can be shared.”

With old footage, Bogus says, it’s impossible to stop the degradation of a deteriorating film, but it is possible to slow the process. Decaying films should be cooled, which decelerates the chemical deterioration process by four to ten times, allowing the film to be usable for a while.

“Ultimately old acetate films, like those at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute and countless libraries and museums across the world, must be transferred to a more stable media, such as polyester,” says Bogus. “Keep in mind that digitizing can change the way things look in films, reducing three-dimensionality and quality. And digitized films need to be maintained over time as technology changes and advances — so keeping these artifacts alive is an important and ongoing process.”

Amber Anderson, registrar at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, says the practice of preserving and caring for objects at her institute is constantly evolving. Keeping items accessible and in good shape requires keeping up with new preservation technologies. Anderson’s staff uses grants to fund 3-D printing projects to make replicas of fragile specimens, such as fossils, for use as educational tools to avoid damaging the originals while sharing knowledge with a wide audience.

Outside the scientific world, there’s a growing effort to preserve artistic artifacts, particularly films, before they’re lost. Virtually every library and art museum has its own preservation staff, and groups like Obsolete Media Miami — run by artists — are working to preserve 35mm slides, films and film equipment so they can continue to be viewed and enjoyed. Science and art, it seems, are two disciplines that are too valuable for us to lose to time.

“Continued preservation of films and other archival items allows the legacies of scientists and artists, like Peterson, to endure,” says Bogus. “It opens up their works for the world’s enjoyment.”

The Roger Tory Peterson Institute is moving forward with the preservation of its founder’s footage, but it’s been a slow and arduous process. Since my visit in June, the film preservation project has still not gone into full swing — it’s just one part of Peterson’s vast and important collection that needs continued attention.

Preservation of historical scientific and artistic works could help instill an understanding of Earth’s past, present and future ecological conditions. For example, just this month scientists at William and Mary College announced a project involving the examination of digitized herbaria records to determine how human development has affected monarch butterfly habitat.

Peterson’s aging bird skins, slides and footage hold records of species, places and times that may no longer exist, at least not in the way Peterson experienced them, says Leenders. “In essence, his notes, sketches, slides and film represent virtual time capsules that, in some cases, allow for direct comparison with today’s situation and illustrate environmental changes.”

Democracy Depends on Scientific Information

We need all the tools we can get to address the environmental and economic inequality felt by many across the globe.

Recently, high ranking officials from President Donald Trump’s government gave the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) a selection of common words it was forbidden from using in draft budget requests.

The now well-circulated list included “diversity,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

Fighting infectious diseases is a difficult task but hindering the ability of organizations like the CDC to explain their core functions does a disservice to us all.

But this is far from an isolated incident.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency deleted key statistics on its web page about the percentage of Puerto Ricans who were living without drinking water and electricity, along with other key measurements of recovery.

This made it difficult to judge the effectiveness of recovery efforts, even if the numbers were later restored. Three weeks after the storm, 35 per cent of residents did not have access to safe drinking water and some were even drinking water from toxic Superfund sites.

Now, the territory is reexamining the number of reported deaths due to Hurricane Maria, and suggesting that the official numbers need to be revised — 10 times as many people may have died.

These events highlight the Trump administration’s hostility towards science — and its fight against the public’s right to scientific information.

Democracy depends on citizens having knowledge and being a part of the environmental decision making process — being shut out results in growing gaps between those who are protected and those who are not.

The key to public participation

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is well known for his description of known knowns, the “things we know we know,” and the unknown unknowns, “the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

This second part is the realm of science. Exploring, searching, finding. But, as we saw numerous times in 2017, today we struggle to keep the catalogue of what we do know.

These are the details the public needs so that it can be engaged and informed, take part in the decision-making process and be able to shift its collective focus and energy to where it is needed most. This information is critical to holding all elected officials — from small town mayor to prime minister or president — accountable, a key point in a democracy.

The public’s rights to knowledge and to participate in the environmental decision-making process are outlined by the Aarhus Convention. Although neither the U.S. nor Canada are signatories to the convention, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said its “significance … is global… the most ambitious venture in the area of environmental democracy.” States have a requirement to collect and disseminate facts “important in framing major environmental policy proposals.”

The value of an informed public

Only when the public is made aware of environmental information, can it act.

We saw that in the 1970s when concern about the growing ozone hole and its link to an increased risk of skin cancer stirred public opinion and resulted in the groundbreaking Montreal Protocol, the international treaty that phases out the production of substances that deplete the ozone layer.

And we saw it in Canada when the longform census was cut by the Harper administration and vast areas of the country were unaccounted for. This vital information was no longer available to anyone, including the community groups and businesses that depend on reliable information to plan their approaches to addressing our key problems.

Knowledge increases accountability

Knowing the environmental facts is also key to holding our public officials accountable.

The drinking water situation in Puerto Rico echoes the story line from Flint, Mich. There, the public was shut out of the city’s money-saving decision to change the source of its drinking water.

Free clinic medical treatment — Veronica Robinson draws blood from 7-year-old Zyontae Looney at a lead-testing clinic. Thousands of parents in Flint, Mich. have had their children tested at free clinics since they became aware that their water had become contaminated with lead. (AP Photo/Mike Householder)

The move resulted in a massive public health crisis that continues to unfold. More than year later, the residents of Flint still deal with contaminated water. Five people connected to the decision have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.

In both Flint and Puerto Rico, public policy failures were related to a lack of openness around public access to information. How can policy be evaluated in the absence of scientific fact?

As my own fieldwork in South Africa has shown, when members of the public have trouble accessing scientific information and the public participation process they can resort to the legal system. However, laws that support the public’s right are essential.

Our future — climate change and science

In the future, our response to climate change will be critical in determining what happens to the world’s most vulnerable people. Until recently, climate change mitigation has mainly been discussed on the global stage, but soon it will shift from being an international issue to one that affects communities large and small.

The impacts of climate change are numerous, and will increase inequality in many ways. Destabilized economies will shed low-skill jobs, rising sea levels will force many to move, and longer bouts of severe heat will create more demand for air conditioning, which will stress electricity grids, add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and release more heat to the environment.

These outcomes are more easily weathered by well-off individuals and families, but could prove disastrous to those living on lower incomes.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, the U.S. administration began neutering references to the well-documented impacts of climate change. These actions were opposed by many cities, including Chicago.

“The Trump administration can attempt to erase decades of work from scientists and federal employees on the reality of climate change, but burying your head in the sand doesn’t erase the problem,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said at the time.

Science can help the public address an uncertain future. Only a policy of openness will ensure a shared commitment of equality for everyone.

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

Ghost Cat Gone: Eastern Cougar Officially Declared Extinct

The subspecies has now been removed from the Endangered Species Act, 80 years after its last sighting.

Say good-bye to the “ghost cat.” This week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially declared the eastern cougar (Puma concolor couguar) to be extinct and removed it from the endangered species list.

This news, sad though it is, has been a long time coming. The big cats, once native to New England, were last verifiably observed back in 1938. The Service first concluded that the species was extinct back in 2011, and then proposed removing its protected status in 2015. This latest step, taken after extensive scientific review and public comment, completes the eastern cougar’s long journey into the night.

Eastern cougars — also known as “ghost cats,” catamounts, panthers and, of course, mountain lions — disappeared after decades of overhunting on multiple fronts. The large predators were seen as threats to livestock, which resulted in the cats being actively hunted and bounties placed on their heads.

On top of that, the cats also ran out of their primary prey, deer, which were themselves hunted into near-extinction. “White-tailed deer were nearly eradicated from the eastern U.S. in the late 1800s,” Service biologist Mark McCollough told me in 2011. “The few cougars that survived [after that] would have had very little food to support them.”

Biologist Bruce Wright poses with the body of the last known eastern cougar in 1938. USFWS

Extinct or not, the eastern cougar remains a vital part of New England culture and mythology. Several boys’ and girls’ sports teams in the region are still called the Cougars or Catamounts, and people still think they see the animals quite frequently, although these sightings are usually later proven to be bobcats, lynx or other animals. A few New England sightings, however, have been confirmed to be escaped captive cougars of other subspecies. One of the most credible reports took place just a couple of miles from where I used to live in Wiscasset, Maine.

Meanwhile cougars from the West are actually expanding their range and repopulating areas where they had once been exterminated. Most of those settle in the Midwest, but one famous mountain lion trekked all the way from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Connecticut a few years ago — a journey of about 2,000 miles.

That particular cat died after being struck by an SUV — like so many of its Florida panther cousins — but it may not be the last western panther to make New England its home, even temporarily. Many experts feel the Maine woods and other New England locations hold a lot of potential as a possible sites for cougar rewilding as the species continues its eastward expansion. “Biologically, it wouldn’t be hard to resettle them,” McCollough said at a meeting in Damariscotta, Maine, last year. “They could adapt to the East.”

That would be too little, too late to make up for the extinction of the eastern cougar, but who knows, maybe one day soon the forests of New England will once again have their own populations of breeding big cats, not just the ghosts that used to live there.

Previously in Extinction Countdown:

Christmas Island Bat, Last Seen in 2009, Confirmed Extinct

222 Bird Species Worldwide Now Critically Endangered

According to the latest IUCN Red List update, 13 percent of the world’s bird species are now threatened.

What do the southern red-breasted plover, ultramarine lorikeet and Rimatara reed warbler have in common?

Here’s the unfortunate answer: They’re just a few of the bird species newly listed as critically endangered in the latest update of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The update, released last month by BirdLife International, cites climate change and overfishing as causes of the population declines of many species, particularly seabirds.

All told 222 bird species worldwide are now considered critically endangered, putting them one step above extinction. In fact, some of those species may already be gone: 21 species haven’t been seen in years and are actually listed as “critically endangered, possibly extinct.”

The yellow-breasted bunting (Emberiza aureola) could join that list of extinct species before too much longer. Previously considered to be of least concern, this once-common Asian species has experienced a catastrophic 80 percent population decline over the past 13 years and is now listed as critically endangered. The brightly colored bird is commonly trapped and sold as food on China’s black market, despite being legally protected in that country.

In addition to the critically endangered list, another 461 bird species are now listed as endangered, with another 786 considered vulnerable. Fully 13 percent of the world’s bird species are now considered threatened.

BirdLife didn’t reassess every bird species this year, but it did publish new data on 238 of them. Among the most striking examples:

Snowy owls (Bubo scandiacus), previously listed as of least concern, are now considered vulnerable, with threats ranging from illegal hunting to climate change.
Nesting black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) are having trouble feeding their chicks as overfishing and climate change have robbed them of their food, a situation echoed with several other seabird species. The Cape gannet (Morus capensis), for example, has resorted to following fishing vessels in search of food and now relies on the discards thrown off the boats — essentially low-nutrition “junk food” that lowers the survival rates of newborn chicks.
Similarly, the kea (Nestor notabilis), a parrot from New Zealand, has been listed as endangered because tourists keep feeding them unhealthy food like bread and potato chips.

Thankfully, there are several bright spots amongst all of this bad news. BirdLife found that several dozen bird species are now doing better than they were and have been downlisted to lower threat categories. This includes two species of kiwi, five owls, three parakeets and a number of warblers and babblers. Most notably the Dalmatian pelican (Pelecanus crispus), the world’s largest freshwater bird, has been downlisted from vulnerable to near threatened — a testament to decades of protective efforts and proof that the fate of many of these endangered species can still be turned around.

One Year Into the Trump Administration, Where Do We Stand?

Attacks on science and the environment have been met with an increase in civic engagement and resistance.

What a long, strange year it’s been.

On Saturday, Jan. 20, the world will mark the one-year anniversary of the Trump administration officially taking office after a long and arduous election. It’s a year that has seen seemingly unending attacks on science and the environment, along with a rise in hateful rhetoric and racially motivated policies. But it’s almost been met by the continuing growth of the efforts to resist what the Trump administration has to offer.

So where do we stand, one year in?

Well, for one thing, we can say that the year has given the administration’s actions a visible shape. “These are not isolated incidents at this point,” says Jacob Carter, research scientist for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has been tracking the administration’s attacks against science — at least 65 since the president took office. “They’re happening so often now that there is definitely a pattern starting to emerge. The administration really wants to undermine the role of science and science-based decision making. They’re getting the expertise out of the way to further a political agenda.”

Carter says these attempts to remove science from government decision-making — ranging from ending a study of the health effects of mountaintop-removal mining to eliminating the words “climate change” from all EPA grants — “have real consequences on peoples’ lives. It’s about our health and safety. If we don’t listen to the best available science, then our lives are at risk.”

But pushing science and scientists aside doesn’t mean they go away forever. “Under this administration we know the scientific evidence isn’t going to be able to speak for itself, so scientists really have to step up and speak for it,” Carter says. And scientists have been doing that in record numbers, starting with last year’s March on Science and continuing on multiple fronts ever since. “They’re stepping up in an unprecedented number and saying science has got to be used in policy-making decisions.” That’s not slowing down; Carter recalls how he attended two big scientific conferences last year and “I had tons of scientists coming up and asking me how they can advocate, what they could do to make sure that science is being used and remains in a proper place.”

That increased level of activism is not unique to scientists, as people from many walks of live have definitely become more politically engaged in the past year. “Trump’s election was a wakeup call in a way,” says Gayle Alberda, an assistant professor of politics at Connecticut’s Fairfield University, who studies elections, political participation and civic engagement. “Nation-wide, we’ve seen this huge influx of people wanting to know not only how to run for office, but how to get politically engaged.”

Of course, people are rising up on both sides of the political aisle. In addition to the citizens opposing Trump’s policies, Alberda says the people who see Trump as representing their ideals have also made their voices louder over the past year. “I think both sides are getting pushed in a way to really engage vastly differently than we have in the past,” she says.

Unfortunately, the two sides aren’t exactly talking to each other, and that’s bad for the country. “We’re losing the ability to engage in civil discourse in a way that’s healthy for democracy,” Alberda days.

Alberda says this has been building for a while, even before the election. “It’s almost like you keep throwing firewood onto the fire and you don’t realize how big it is until it blows up,” she says. “You’re like, ‘whoa, that’s a big fire.’ Lots of little things have happened over the years and we’re kind of seeing that all of a sudden in our face, because you have all of these questions about the state of democracy today.” She says examples such as Trump’s attacks on the free press, the Republican push to pass their legislative agenda, and the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the last election have only served to stoke this fire even further.

So where do we go as we enter the administration’s second year? One avenue is to look toward groups that have experience fighting these kinds of regressive activities. “One of the strengths of the movement is solidarity,” says Nadia Aziz, program manager of the Stop Hate Project run by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “There are a lot of organizations like ours that have been around for 50 years or more. We’ve been fighting to secure equal justice for racial and ethnic minorities for a very long time. I think we’re very resilient organizations because of that,” she says.

That resilience is important, she says, because right now we’re at a critical point: “How do you make sure that this movement that we’re all in, this resistance, is creating sustainable action and that we all don’t get burned out?”

One way Aziz says she keeps herself strong is by seeing and experiencing what others are doing. “There are a lot of a lot of groups are doing such wonderful work,” she says. “One of the most inspiring things about my job is being able to connect with people. I think that gives me resiliency, seeing how awesome the people are on the ground what the remarkable work they’re doing.”

That, in fact, may be one of the lasting legacies of this administration: Local community groups and national groups are connecting with each other, learning from each other, and collectively strengthening their voices. “I do think we’re going to keep getting stronger and we’re going to keep building out our movement,” Aziz says.

As we enter year two of this administration, Alberda says she’s looking toward local 2018 elections and the rise of candidates opposing Trump and his policies. “That is going to be really interesting,” she says. “We’ve seen already that Republicans in safe Republican state legislative seats are getting challengers. I think that’s indicative that we’re going to see some interesting elections.”