Page 119 • The Revelator

We Must Be Good Neighbors to Other Species

Calls to “modernize” the Endangered Species Act really just want to weaken it.

I find it hard to understand why politicians — such as Wyoming Senator John Barrasso — want to weaken or gut the Endangered Species Act. That’s like driving your car through the wall of a neighbor’s house and then claiming you have no responsibility for repairing the damage. We humans cause neighboring species to go extinct. We need to repair the damage.

A short list of human-caused problems that threaten other species includes human population increase, habitat damage, industrial development, pollution, unregulated hunting and fishing, introduction of non-native species, and, of course, climate change.

Considering those problems, it’s clear that to be good neighbors we should fight for endangered species on two fronts. We must spend the money needed to recover species already protected. And we ought to confront these human-caused problems so as to prevent more species from facing extinction.

The battle to save the whooping crane provides a good example of our past and present impact on a species. The whooping crane is one of only two cranes in North America, the sandhill crane being the other. More than 10,000 whooping cranes lived on this continent when Europeans arrived. Damage to the whooping cranes’ habitat and unregulated hunting reduced that population to less than two dozen birds by 1941. Since listed as endangered, the count has grown to around 600, including captive birds. Yet even today with so few birds surviving, ESA-protected whooping cranes are still illegally killed.

Since we sent the whooping crane down the path toward extinction, it’s up to us to help this species through a difficult, lengthy, and costly recovery. But if Senator Barrasso and his cronies have their way with the ESA, the bird’s chances of recovery plummet.

Barrasso wants you to believe the ESA isn’t working, that it needs to be “modernized” — a euphemism for gutting the ESA. Don’t believe it. The ESA has been incredibly effective and has kept 99 percent of the listed species — including the whooping crane — from extinction. And it has done so even though Barrasso and others like him have not appropriated all the money the ESA needs to be even more effective.

The truth is that Barrasso and his followers don’t care about being good neighbors. They don’t want a healthy and well-funded Endangered Species Act that can fix the damage we humans have caused. To them a strong ESA means they might not be able to drill for oil or gas or build a housing development wherever they please. They might not be able to clearcut a hillside. They might not be able to shoot a trophy. The Senator’s concern with the ESA has nothing to do with saving species. It’s all about letting greed run unchecked.

Resurrecting the Riverkeepers

Saving freshwater mussels requires scrappy scientists and unlikely allies.

This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an online magazine about nature and sustainability powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

Under cover of darkness, thieves dove into the inky waters of Tennessee’s river sanctuaries and scooped up endangered washboard mussels by the thousands. The thick shells of these animals — some as big as Frisbees — were destined to be cut into cubes, polished round, and implanted in saltwater oysters to grow cultured pearls. “Every one of them was almost a twenty-dollar bill,” says David Sims, then a game warden with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency who was charged with surveying these bivalves. Poachers could wipe out an entire bed of mussels in a single night.

Today, 25 years later, Sims can rattle off the common names of freshwater mussel species like a lineup of Seussian characters: Appalachian monkeyfaces, white wartybacks, Tennessee heelsplitters, fat pocketbooks, shiny pigtoes, pistolgrips, and spectaclecases. The orange-footed pimpleback conceals in its bumpy case a fleshy appendage the color of Orange Crush soda. “They’re hard to find,” Sims says, lifting a glistening mussel from a gurgling tank. “We hold on to them, once we’ve got them.” He cradles the creature like a rare jewel as the mussel pulls the two halves of its shell closed and an elegant arc of water shoots out.

North America hosts the richest variety of freshwater mussels in the world, and the epicenter for this biodiversity is in the southeastern United States. In surveys, biologists have found more species in a few square meters of the Tennessee River than are found in all of Europe. The smallest mussel species can fit on a pinky fingernail when fully grown; the largest have the diameter of a dinner plate. Their shells grow rings over time, like trees, and some can live to be more than a hundred years old.

Mussels are critical, if unsung, players in river systems. They spend their lives half-buried in sediment, stabilizing riverbeds and preventing erosion. There they serve as food for birds, muskrats, and otters; and when they die, their shells are adopted as secondhand homes by crayfish and aquatic insects. Most importantly, mussels filter river water — up to 20 gallons per mussel per day by some estimates. They live off the algae and plankton gleaned from this filter feeding, and in the process remove silt and toxic substances from the water, including some heavy metals, harmful bacteria, pharmaceuticals, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as PCBs. “They’re like little miniature treatment plants,” says stream ecologist Jesse DiMartini, of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District in Illinois. But, despite their capacity to take up harmful chemicals, mussels have their limits and can be wiped out in vast numbers when toxin levels are too high.

Considering that more than two-thirds of tap water in the U.S. comes from lakes and rivers, mussels have a direct impact on human health and well-being. And yet our cities, towns, and industries have generated the pollution and habitat threats that are largely responsible for the uncertain future these creatures now face. Of the roughly 300 mussel species native to the U.S. and Canada, well over a hundred are endangered or threatened. Seventy others are of special concern, which means they’re especially vulnerable to environmental change. The United States Geological Survey calls freshwater mussels the most imperiled group of organisms in the country.

On a map of the Cumberland River, Sims can point to mussel colonies that thrived just 20 years ago, but are now submarine graveyards: tens of thousands of empty, algae-covered shells splayed open, a lasting testament to what’s been lost. The causes of these losses are many — poaching, dams, agricultural runoff and invasive species among them — but the effects are always the same: “They didn’t reproduce, and now they’re gone,” Sims says.

To rebuild populations, Sims has spent his career submerged in local waterways. Through dogged trial and error, he’s figured out what big-river mussels require to live and reproduce. The payoff — if he succeeds — will be keeping a few endangered species from the brink. It will take a continent-wide network of scrappy efforts like his, each propagating their own resident bivalves, to reestablish these key members of their ecosystems and undervalued contributors to our public health before they’re lost for good.

Rivers Paved with Bivalve Gold

At the dawn of the 19th century, early naturalists collected and traded a wide variety of freshwater mussel shells. As recently as a hundred years ago, observers described scenes nearly impossible to envision today: mussels so plentiful they seemed to pave the river bottoms. While people didn’t often eat the mollusks, they were viewed as an abundant source of raw material. Crushed shells filled potholes in roads and served as poultry grit and exfoliants in soap. Harvested from the Mississippi and other big rivers by the millions, their shiny shells were used to make buttons. Indeed, by 1900, half of the entire U.S. supply of buttons was made from mussel shell. Then came the “pearl rushes” of the early 20th century, when freshwater mussels were ravaged for the unlikely chance of finding a marketable pearl inside (most of which were small and misshapen.) Such overharvesting caused local populations to dwindle. And broader threats still loomed.

Beginning in the 1930s, and peaking in the 1960s, rampant dam building nearly eliminated the free flow of rivers throughout the Southeast. There are now 79,000 dams in the U.S. — 1,237 in Tennessee alone. These impoundments block the flow of nutrient-rich water that mussels rely on for food, as well as their access to the fish species the mollusks require to reproduce. Dams also artificially warm or cool water, disrupting the seasonal temperature changes that drive spawning behavior. Plus, since mussels are long-lived, it could take decades before the full effects of dam construction are seen.

The impacts of overharvesting and dams have only been compounded by water pollution. In the mid 20^th century, virtually unchecked dumping of toxic chemicals made rivers across the country uninhabitable for many species. By the 1970s, biologists were describing “mussel deserts” in the Mississippi. The passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act led to dramatic improvements in water quality by reducing industrial pollution from factories, but a variety of chemicals, including agricultural products and pharmaceuticals, still flow in rivers today. Researchers are only beginning to understand the effects of these substances on aquatic ecosystems.

Scientists like Sims still don’t have a firm grasp on which chemicals kill or sterilize which species of mussel, and it’s incredibly complicated to figure out. For example, a 2007 study revealed that the pesticide glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) is toxic to juvenile and larval fatmuckets, but not to adults. Adults are, however, sensitive to one of the inactive ingredients in the pesticide. And that’s just one example. Trying to account for the combinations of substances in a river and how those effects vary with temperature is a daunting task. “It’s embarrassing how little we know about what’s poison in the world,” says malacologist Chris Barnhart, who runs a mussel conservation program at Missouri State University.

Bringing Bivalves Back

Despite the myriad threats mussels face and the important roles they play, for river ecosystems and human health alike, they are hardly a conservation priority. In 2014, the last year for which data are available, the federal government spent less than $10 million on conservation efforts aimed at all endangered mussel species combined, compared to the $190 million dedicated to Chinook salmon — a single species.

In 2006, Sims was recruited to help the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency launch a conservation project called the Cumberland River Aquatic Center. Sims’s reputation as a workhorse, together with his successful poaching surveys and advocacy for freshwater habitats, made him the perfect candidate to run the operation. The center was designed to fill a particular void in mussel conservation: propagating endangered big-river mussels, which other labs had struggled to do up to that point. It would also be the first mussel conservation program in Tennessee, the state with the second highest mussel diversity. (Only Alabama has more).

The new facility had a peculiar address, though: It would be housed on the grounds of the second-largest coal-burning power plant in Tennessee. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the plant, originally constructed the building as a catfish hatchery to take advantage of the warm water discharged from the plant. Programs like these satisfy the plant’s environmental stewardship mandate under the National Environmental Policy Act. In 2006, the power company offered the facility to the state wildlife agency for use in mussel conservation — a way of offsetting environmental damage the company had caused to the mollusks’ habitat.

In the shadow of the smokestacks, between the looming coal pile and the four-story boilers, Sims got to work. Bolstered with funds from the Army Corps of Engineers, he patched holes, checked plumbing, and pumped river water into the 10 40-foot-long concrete tanks at a rate of 1,200 gallons per minute. He then gently placed baskets of mussels in these simulated rivers.

Sims knew that mussels live and die at the mercy of the water quality, and that individual species require very particular parameters. So for six years, he adjusted water flow and squinted at thermometers. Sims tested for ammonia, aluminum, and other contaminants, and filtered out parasites invisible to the human eye. He measured shell growth with calipers and counted growth rings on bumpy shells. Eventually, he learned enough through all this toil and observation to shepherd colonies of endangered pink muckets from larvae to full-grown adults.

After dams had doomed huge numbers of mussels, Sims’s work represented a step toward keeping them alive long enough to find hospitable riverine homes. This was no small feat.

A Complex Courtship

Mussel reproduction is a marvel of evolution. At every step of the process, the likelihood of failure far exceeds the likelihood of success. The process begins when a male mussel discharges a white cloud of sperm into the surrounding water. Most of this sperm will be carried away by the current and go to waste, but some may find its way into the gills of a female, where her eggs lie in wait. Once fertilized, the eggs develop into larvae, called glochidia, which females hold in their gills for a month or more. Some species release their larvae in the cool waters of late summer or early fall; others wait for spring.

In order to mature, the larvae must feed on fish blood. That means when the female releases her glochidia, they must find and latch onto the gills of a fish. But not just any fish will do. Each mussel species requires particular host species; if the larvae latch onto the wrong fish, the fish’s immune system recognizes them as a parasitic invasion to be fought and killed. If the larvae succeed, they will hold on for a couple of weeks until they’re mature enough to drop off and drift to their lifelong home on the river bottom.

To attract a suitable host, mussels have evolved lures that mimic fish food. The lure of the snuffbox mussel, for example, looks like a grub nestled inside its open shells. When a fish swims in for a bite, the mussel snaps shut onto the fish’s head before releasing the larvae into the open mouth of its suffocating prey. A log perch is the preferred fish for a snuffbox; its immune system tolerates the mussel larvae infestation, and it can survive this aquatic chokehold. If a smaller fish, like a darter, goes in for the bait, it may lose its head.

Spectaclecase mussels take a gentler approach. They unreel a six-foot line of mucus with glochidia on the end. When a fish goes in for a bite of the lure, it ends up with a mouthful of larvae instead. That’s at least what biologists suspect. Even though the mechanism is known, Sims says, “no one’s been able to figure out the host fish.” That’s one of the reasons propagating mussels is so finicky. Experiments aren’t technically difficult, but they are time-consuming. They require infesting different types of fish with glochidia and hoping something sticks. If the larvae fail to develop, researchers have to wait another year, until the female mussels have glochidia again, to try with a new host species. The programs simply don’t have sufficient resources, either in time or researchers, to infest every native host fish up front, so they must take a systematic approach.

Successful Conservation Efforts

Of course, infesting fish is just the first step — propagation also involves keeping juveniles alive once they drop off the host, until they’re large enough to avoid being eaten by flatworms or other predators. Because these trial-and-error experiments have multiple steps and a high risk of failure, and because so many questions about host fish and toxicity remain unanswered, the captive breeding of mussels has been slow to succeed. “It’s only in the last five or six years that research facilities have been able to establish new populations,” says biologist Paul Johnson, who runs the Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center in Montgomery. The first propagation efforts began in the 1990s, with the first lab-reared populations restored to rivers a few years later. Now researchers want to establish sustainable populations in the river, a goal that’s becoming increasingly attainable. In the past 6 years, Johnson’s lab has released more than 110,000 mussels into rivers throughout the state.

Johnson’s is one of the dozen or so operations that represent hope for the future of freshwater mussels in North America. Although the labs are small, they often collaborate, sharing species and techniques to help move the whole field forward. For example, when a researcher in Virginia found two rare golden riffleshells with glochidia in their gills, he called the Kentucky lab that had pioneered in vitro propagation techniques to raise mussels without host fish. The labs were 350 miles apart, so the two researchers got in their cars and started driving to make the handoff at the midway point. A year later, the Kentucky lab had produced 1,200 juveniles from those two females.

By 2012, Sims’s project, too, was flourishing. He and his team had resettled more than 18,000 adult mussels into river habitats. Encouraged by this success, other centers began sending him breedstock — or starter mussels — so Sims could try to emulate those results with other endangered species from nearby states. Those were heady days in the world of freshwater mussel conservation, but then Sims received some sobering news.

A Turn for the Worst

In the fall of 2012, the 50-year-old coal-burning power plant announced plans to make a long overdue upgrade: installing new scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide from its emissions. This was good news for air quality, but the new construction meant the hatchery that had been Sims’s headquarters for the past six years would be demolished. Then, to make matters worse, flatworm parasites snuck into his tanks and devoured thousands of juveniles.

Sims loaded what was left of his mussels into coolers, put the coolers in the back of his pickup, and drove away. The best location he could come up with was a wildlife agency storage shed on a stagnant Cumberland backwater about 20 miles away. In the shed, Sims kept a few brown shells, dry, empty, and open, lined up on his desk in the shed like a malacological memento mori. The living mussels in his care at that time numbered about 300. They sat in tanks, filled with water from the near-motionless cove outside. The shed also lacked the space for Sims to put a fish and a mussel in the same tank, which meant he couldn’t work on propagation at all. The goal was pure survival.

Fortunately for Sims and his mussels, environmental groups rallied shortly after the plant’s announcement. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Tennessee Environmental Council, and the Sierra Club threatened to sue the Tennessee Valley Authority for violating the Endangered Species Act if the mussels weren’t given a new home. In response to the criticism and the threat of a lawsuit, the Tennessee Valley Authority changed course. In February 2013, they offered to build Sims’s operation a new $1.5 million facility.

A Room with A View to the Future

In early 2016, Sims loaded the last of the mussels from the shed back into coolers, put the coolers into his pickup, and drove them to their new home. The new center is cavernous — big enough to hold two-dozen hot tub-sized tanks fed by filtered Cumberland water. It includes raceways, boat storage, classroom space, and a room six times the size of the shed dedicated entirely to propagation. There’s also another malacologist on staff, senior scientist Dan Hua, who started out in China’s freshwater pearl cultivation industry. While at Virginia Tech, she earned a reputation for nurturing endangered juvenile mussels until they grew large enough to tag — a bottleneck that the program had been struggling to overcome for years. The secret to Hua’s success was feeding the mollusks with the nourishment found in natural water sources, like ponds, rather than commercial food. Sims sees Hua’s novel techniques as the biggest boon yet for the center — and for the future of big-river mussels in Tennessee.

By last December, things were once again looking up, Sims says. His population of pink muckets had gone from dozens to thousands. The juveniles looked like pebbles strewn across the gravelly bottoms of the simulated rivers. He hopes to eventually turn the colonies of several species into sustainable mussel populations in the Cumberland. “Maybe in 10 or 20 years we’ll see them spread,” he says. “If we can do that up here, there’s a real good chance we can downlist some, like the pink muckets.”

There are no guarantees when it comes to this work, though. Sims knows this firsthand. What works for one species or population may not work for another. New construction projects and invasive species encroach on native habitats. Human populations are growing, spreading, and increasing their environmental impact. And that’s not to mention the effects of a changing climate. There is a lot of work to do to keep lowly mussels alive, but there are steely labs around the country with workhorse biologists like Sims, who have devoted their careers to the challenge.

At the end of last year, Sims returned to a spot a few miles downstream of Carthage, Tennessee where he had placed 100 pink muckets along the Cumberland River bottom two years earlier. From the riverbank, he could see all the females clearly displaying their lures. “They were just beautiful,” he says. The mussels had successfully fertilized eggs and were trying to attract host fish. “Nobody else saw it, but I could see all their lures in that one little spot,” he says. “They were doing their thing.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Climate Change Puts Sea Turtles in the Hot Seat

Slow Loris Trade Spreads to Turkey

The exploitation of threatened slow lorises has spread to Turkey. New research shows that the country is the latest to use the tiny primates as tourist props, where people can pose with the animals for a nominal fee. Researchers found dozens of examples of tourists posing with two vulnerable South Asian loris species, despite the fact that no primate has ever been legally imported into Turkey. Lorises, perhaps best known from seemingly adorable YouTube videos, have become increasingly illegally trafficked in recent years. The fragile, nocturnal animals suffer greatly from the practice and rarely survive long in captivity.

Conserving Forests for the Good of All

The Old-Growth Forest Network works to protect America’s shrinking woodlands.

Oaks, tulip poplars and hickory trees rise to form the old-growth canopy of the James Madison Landmark Forest, which encompasses 200 acres behind Montpelier, the fourth president’s historic home. In the spring in Virginia, a walk among these giants is warm and breezy. Shade and sun shift, a wood thrush sings, an inchworm wafts midair, and the old woods offer a sense of both escape and belonging.

The James Madison Landmark Forest is one of 65 such areas in 16 states operating under the banner of the Old-Growth Forest Network, an organization that identifies, protects and connects U.S. forests. Founded in Maryland in 2012, the network serves to unify pro-forest groups, tree-loving activists and landowners around the goal of creating a network of accessible old-growth and “future old-growth” forests across the country — one within each county where forest naturally grows. Only forests made accessible to the public and protected from commercial timbering can join the network.

The network is “the only group focused specifically on forest preservation, nationally,” founder Joan Maloof explains to me via email. While other groups focus on forests, she says, they may concentrate on forests within a specific region, with a specific ownership, or on a broader range of conservation areas.

The organization also serves to connect smaller groups. “So many ’Friends of the Forest‘ types groups exist,” Maloof says, “but they have no umbrella group to assist, advise and help with communications. Think of all the land trusts before the Land Trust Alliance. We want to be the organization that helps to network all the smaller groups together.”

She adds that she hopes by working together they can all protect more forests, something that’s much needed. “We’re still losing forest cover and ancient forests,” she says. “That’s unacceptable. Something must be done.”

While planning out the network, Maloof, a professor emeritus at Salisbury University, evaluated the types and distribution of forests across the United States and calculated that out of 3,140 counties, an estimated 2,370 will support forests. In many of these counties, the forests are already located on protected state or federal land. When this is not the case, the network plans to work with cities, local nonprofits and private citizens to establish protected and visitor-friendly forested areas.

For example, Whiteoak Canyon in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park is already protected and accessible, so the group “merely draws attention to it,” Maloof explains.

At other times forests receive additional protections. When the city of Salisbury, Maryland, was planning to build a ball field in a Wicomico County wooded park — which protects the town’s main municipal drinking well — the network stepped in. It drew public attention to the plan and the community convinced the city to save the forest.

In other instances, potential network forests are protected but not yet open to all; Camp Oty’okwa in Ohio opened its woods trail to the public in order to join.

In some cases, according to Maloof, the network encounters “fear and skepticism” from forest managers who don’t want to be “constrained” by blocking commercial timbering. “Even those in charge of our giant sequoia groves act this way,” she says. “Do we want to constrain what can happen to those forests? Absolutely. They should want that too.” But, she adds, some forest supervisors and managers “get it” and embrace the network immediately.

The Need for Old-growth Forests

As Maloof traveled the United States and studied the history of the land, she learned that only a small portion of the untouched forests remain. According to the U.S. Forest Service, the country contained more than 1 billion acres of forest in 1530. By 2014 that was down to 766 million acres, much of which contained fairly young trees.

In terms of old-growth forests, a 2015 United Nations Forest Resource Assessment found, about 186 million acres of primary or “not significantly disturbed” native forests remain in the United States, down from 257.4 million just 10 years earlier.

Old-growth forests contain trees hundreds or thousands of years old, which typically have wide diameters and create complex canopies. To Maloof these forests are “so much more than trees,” she says. “We need ancient forests as habitat for other organisms as much as we need them for clean air and clean water.”

The loss of old-growth forests is also the loss of powerful carbon sequestration sites.

“Old forests sequester more carbon and more efficiently than any other terrestrial ecosystem,” says Ernie Reed, president of the forest preservation nonprofit Wild Virginia. A study published in the journal Ecology in 2015 backs up this statement. It found the total carbon density in old-growth forests to be 30 percent higher than in younger forests, and dead-wood carbon density to be 1,800 percent higher.

“Highlighting those remnants of old-growth forests that embody a hint of their earlier majesty and diversity is of the utmost importance,” says Reed, in praise of the network’s mission. Wild Virginia runs a grassroots Forest Defense Task Force that allows trained volunteers to participate in forest management and engagement with the Forest Service. Reed thinks habitat fragmentation is the most significant risk to Virginia forests, pointing out forests are often carved “into smaller and smaller pieces” by the creation of energy infrastructure and resource extraction.

Moving Toward the Future

The Trump administration’s actions relating to the environment — including restarting protested pipelines, reviewing national monuments and deleting climate change data — have alarmed many conservationists. Maloof says she is “especially concerned about the current talk of monetizing our natural resources and opening more areas to industry. These natural areas are most valuable just as they are.”

Chasing Coral and Ice, Running Out of Time

Director Jeff Orlowski’s documentary "Chasing Coral" is visual evidence from the front lines of a planet falling apart.

“Without a healthy ocean, we do not have a healthy planet,” explains Richard Vevers, founder of a nonprofit called The Ocean Agency, at the outset of director Jeff Orlowski’s sobering new documentary Chasing Coral. The ocean, he says, “controls the weather, the climate, the oxygen we breathe.”

But despite the ocean’s existential role in planetary health, many people have no idea we’re currently engineering the extinction of aquatic life around the globe. That includes our monumental coral reefs, often referred to as the “rainforests of the sea,” about which we know quite little and won’t have much time to learn, because climate change is killing them faster than we can study them.

And what we have recently learned about reef extinction is partially thanks to Vevers, one of Chasing Coral’s chief subjects, whose stunning 360-degree image surveys of ravaged coral in 13 countries provide some of the documentary’s most powerful moments.

Orlowski’s award-winning 2012 documentary Chasing Ice painstakingly documented the titanic collapse of glaciers across the Arctic. When Vevers screened that movie, he knew he’d found the filmmaker who could communicate the accelerating madness of global warming and our responsibility for creating and solving it.

“We look at it as visual evidence,” Orlowski told me by phone, ahead of Chasing Coral’s July 14 premiere on Netflix. “People dismiss so many threats from climate change as being part of the natural cycle. Instead of just providing a snapshot of what that looks like, we need to show people, in greater detail, the evidence of what’s going on.”

Even before its online premiere, the film is already having an impact. Footage from Chasing Coral and Orlowski’s earlier film will be used as evidence in Juliana v. U.S., the landmark climate change lawsuit filed against the United States government on behalf of a group of teens, and supported by by Our Children’s Trust, which recently landed a trial date in February 2018.

Scott Thill: So you’ve gone from chasing ice to chasing coral.

Jeff Orlowski: Yes. Unintentionally, we’ve been on the front lines of the planet falling apart.

Thill: What did you learn on the front lines once you trained your cameras on reefs?

Orlowski: I hadn’t spent much time in the ocean before this project. And with Chasing Ice, I thought I knew everything there is to know about climate change. But once I started learning about the ocean’s story, it completely transformed me. I didn’t realize how fast the ocean was changing; that was the biggest thing. The hit to the biological diversity was across the board.

Thill: The speed at which this was happening is what surprised you the most?

Orlowski: Yeah, the acceleration. There’s a statistic explaining that 93 percent of the energy from climate change is being absorbed by the ocean. So what we see with coral reefs right now is they have reached the tipping point between living and dying. The oceans have warmed enough, and are projected to continue warming enough, that we will lose them. What still constantly surprises me is how many other tipping points there are around this temperature threshold. We’re starting to hit those points at which species will not survive; that is probably the most shocking thing.

Something I learned more recently, which is not in the film, is that we are at a state right where we’re starting to lose oxygen in the atmosphere, in large part because we are killing the large oxygen producers on the planet. These are the consequences of carbon emissions.

Thill: Chasing Coral likens temperature degree rise in the ocean to that of our bodies, a more accurate way of gauging its danger than comparing it to surface temperature.

Orlowski: That was another huge shift in my understanding in how to communicate the issue. Because the oceans have absorbed so much heat, they operate very differently than air. So when people think about climate change, they tend to think that they can survive a wide temperature range, but that’s not how it happens with oceans.

Thill: Speaking of acceleration, Chasing Coral begins by talking about how time slows down when humans dive into the ocean, but ends with exponential bleaching taking place over months, barely years, with coral dying before your eyes.

Orlowski: I’m so glad you picked up on that. An interesting thing for me was learning about the physiological experience you have when scuba diving. Apparently, there is a shift in your body chemistry — metabolism, resting heart rate, and so on — that particularly happens when your face is submerged in water. When you dive, it really does feel like time slows down. So in Chasing Coral, as well as Chasing Ice, we try to play with time using time-lapse and slow-motion shooting. The manipulation of time is a recurring theme of both films, although I’ve only recently begun to think of it in that way.

After scuba diving, when I watch underwater footage of aquatic life in real time, it actually feels like it’s sped up. When you’re seeing it happen in the water, because your body is processing time in a different way, it feels like it’s actually slower. Almost all of the underwater footage in the film is shot and played back in slow motion, so that when you’re experiencing it, it feels closer to what you feel in the water and not what real-time footage looks like. It’s a very odd thing that goes on in the brain.

Thill: Which bleeds into another of your film’s themes, that of aliens and alienation. Humans are alienated from processes taking place in oceans that cover the majority of Earth, but we still consider oceanic biodiversity to be alien.

Orlowski: Humans are alienated from the processes that allow life to exist on the planet. We have systematically alienated ourselves from nature over the last couple of centuries, and I think that’s one of the big issues we’re confronting in the film. There is a concept called nature deficit disorder, which is when children grow up without exposure to nature, and then don’t have a care and concern for it.

I grew up in New York, so my upbringing was in Manhattan. Look at any big city; food just comes to you, and waste just disappears. You’re just a pass-through. Most people aren’t aware of how their food is made, or where their water comes from. The resources that keep us alive come in, and then someone magically takes the garbage away. So we are seeing huge consequences happening to those parts of the planet where our food is made and trash is taken.

Thill: The part of Chasing Coral when your crew dives into bleached reefs off of a floating restaurant, whose customers have no idea what is happening, hammers that disconnection home.

Orlowski: That was a very poignant moment for all of us. That’s the whole problem in a nutshell.

Thill: How do you think governments are failing the reefs and what do you think they should be doing to save them?

Orlowski: Governments are failing reefs, but they are also failing human civilization, and the future. One of government’s roles is to protect people from threats they might not even know about, because we cannot expect the public to know all of them. Are you familiar with the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit?

Thill: Absolutely. It’s awesome.

Orlowski: Yeah, it’s phenomenal. They’re using footage from Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral as evidence in the lawsuit, which is really exciting. This is a prime example of youth coming out and explicitly arguing that the government is not protecting their rights. Youth are disproportionally going to be affected by climate change, because it’s going to get worse, so the whole premise of their legal argument is that government is screwing over kids.

Thill: So you’re doing the government’s job by documenting these processes so youth can understand and protect themselves. To get meta, much of your film is about the role of film, in terms of what it can do to illuminate and combat warming and extinction.

Orlowski: We look at it as visual evidence; this is what I learned from photographer James Balog on Chasing Ice. People dismiss so many threats from climate change as being part of the natural cycle. Instead of just providing a snapshot of what that looks like, we need to show people, in greater detail, the evidence of what’s going on. Instead of a polar bear on an iceberg, we need to show time-lapses of glacial retreat. Instead of showing them bleached coral, we really wanted to show the process in action, what the transition over time looks like. It’s a harder thing to capture, but a much more impactful argument.

Thill: The technical and emotional struggle to capture all of it is a major part of the film.

Orlowski: Exactly, and the hope there is to make it more accessible through a human story and the experience of a team, so it’s not just the science speaking. It’s a team of humans, and you can sense their concerns, passions and hopes. Through them, hopefully you can connect to the issue in a broader way.

Thill: Speaking of the wider lens, what do you hope the film will accomplish?

Orlowski: I look at the film as trying to be this definitive argument that helps end denialism. I haven’t met anyone who has seen the film and still said climate change is a hoax. I’m trying to find more and more climate deniers to share the film with, just to get a sense of what their take is. But we need to get past this argument, so we can actually move toward solutions. Our hope is that this film can be another piece of visual storytelling that will open people’s hearts and minds to what is going on.

Thill: The last time we talked, you said that we are slaves to fossil fuels. Has that changed?

Orlowski: We have a civilization that has thrived because of fossil fuels, just like, prior to that, we had a civilization that thrived on whale oil. But we don’t need it to continue living the quality of life that we want, and I think that’s the big shift we’re seeing in technology right now. You can put solar panels on your house and you can drive an electric car. I’m blown away by the changes in clean energy technology that we have seen in only the last five years. NASA and Boeing are developing hybrid planes; there is a company in France which announced an electric plane that can travel 600 miles on a single charge. The technology is changing so rapidly, which gives me hope more than anything else. Our civilization prospered because of fossil fuels, but that doesn’t mean we need fossil fuels to continue to prosper.

Watch the trailer to Chasing Coral below:

200 Environmental Activists Killed in 2016

A record number of environmental activists and defenders were killed in 2016 — at least 200 people in 24 countries, according to records compiled by the organization Global Witness. The list includes activists who were protesting dams, mines, logging or agriculture, as well as wildlife rangers, forest guards and indigenous peoples. Global Witness says the actual number of slain activists may be much higher, as many deaths go unreported. Will this number continue to rise? Global Witness has tracked at least 98 more murders in the first five months of 2017.

Trump Has Secretive Teams to Roll Back Regulations

An investigation finds many appointees with potential conflicts of interest.

by Robert Faturechi, ProPublica, and Danielle Ivory, The New York Times

President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations.

But the effort — a signature theme in Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts.

Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone.

The appointees include lawyers who have represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political dark money groups, employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to environmental rules and at least three people who were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for.

At the Education Department alone, two members of the deregulation team were most recently employed by pro-charter advocacy groups or operators, and one appointee was an executive handling regulatory issues at a for-profit college operator.

So far, the process has been scattershot. Some agencies have been soliciting public feedback, while others refuse even to disclose who is in charge of the review. In many cases, responses to public records requests have been denied, delayed or severely redacted.

The Interior Department has not disclosed the correspondence and calendars for its team. But a review of more than 1,300 pages of handwritten sign-in sheets for guests visiting the agency’s headquarters in Washington found that appointees had met regularly with industry representatives.

Over a four-month period, from February through May, at least 58 representatives of the oil and gas industry signed their names on the agency’s visitor logs before meeting with appointees.

The EPA also rejected requests to release the appointment calendar of the official leading its team — a former top executive for an industry-funded political group — even as she met privately with industry representatives.

And the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security provided the titles for most appointees to their review teams, but not names.

When asked for comment about the activities of the deregulation teams, the White House referred reporters to the Office of Management and Budget.

Meghan Burris, a spokeswoman there, said: “As previous administrations have recognized, it’s good government to periodically reassess existing regulations. Past regulatory review efforts, however, have not taken a consistent enough look at regulations on the books.”

With billions of dollars at stake in the push to deregulate, corporations and other industry groups are hiring lawyers, lobbyists and economists to help navigate this new avenue for influence. Getting to the front of the line is crucial, as it can take years to effect regulatory changes.

“Competition will be fierce,” the law firm Clark Hill, which represents businesses pitching the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a marketing memo. “In all likelihood, interested parties will need to develop a multi-pronged strategy to expand support and win pre-eminence over competing regulatory rollback candidates.”

Jane Luxton, a lawyer at the firm, said she advised clients to pay for economic and legal analyses that government agencies, short on staff, could use to expedite changes. She declined to identify the clients.

“You may say this is an agency’s job, but the agencies are totally overloaded,” Luxton said.

On a cloudy, humid day in March, Laura Peterson, a top lobbyist for Syngenta, arrived at the headquarters for the Interior Department. She looped the letter “L” across the agency’s sign-in sheet.

Her company, a top pesticide maker based in Switzerland, had spent eight years and millions of dollars lobbying the Obama administration on environmental rules, with limited success.

But Peterson had an in with the new administration.

Scott Cameron, newly installed at the Interior Department and a member of its deregulation team, had just left a nonprofit he had founded. He had advocated getting pesticides approved and out to market faster. His group counted Syngenta as a financial partner.

The meeting with Peterson was one of the first Cameron took as a new government official.

Neither side would reveal what was discussed. “I’m not sure that’s reporting information I have to give you,” Peterson said.

But lobbying records offered clues.

Syngenta has been one of several pesticide manufacturers pushing for changes to the Endangered Species Act. When federal agencies take actions that may jeopardize endangered animals or plants, they are generally supposed to consult with the Interior Department, which could raise objections.

For decades, the EPA largely ignored this provision when approving new pesticides. But recently, a legal challenge from environmental groups forced its hand — a change that affected Syngenta.

Pesticide lobbyists have been working behind the scenes at agencies and on Capitol Hill to change the provision. Companies have argued that they should be exempt from consulting with the Interior Department because they already undergo EPA approval.

Along with spending millions of dollars on lobbying, they have funded advocacy groups aligned with their cause. Cameron’s nonprofit, the Reduce Risks From Invasive Species Coalition, was one such group for Syngenta.

The organization says on its website that its goals include reducing “the regulatory burden of the Endangered Species Act on American society by addressing invasive species.” One way to do that is to use pesticides. The nonprofit’s mission includes creating “business opportunities for commercial products and services used to control invasive species.”

Because donations are not publicly reported, it is unclear how much Syngenta has contributed to Cameron’s organization, but his group has called the pesticide company one of its “generous sponsors.”

Cameron also served on a committee of experts and stakeholders, including Syngenta, that advised the federal government on decisions related to invasive species. At a committee event last July, he said that one of his priorities was “getting biocontrol agents to market faster,” according to meeting minutes.

Paul Minehart, a Syngenta spokesman, said: “Employees regularly engage with those in government that relate to agriculture and our business. Our purpose is to balance serving the public health and environment with enabling farmers’ access to innovation.”

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department did not respond to questions about how Cameron’s relationship with Syngenta might influence his review of regulations.

Under the law, members of the Trump administration can seek ethics waivers to work on issues that overlap with their past business careers. They can also formally recuse themselves when potential conflicts arise.

In many cases, the administration has refused to say whether appointees to Trump’s deregulation teams have done either.

One such appointee is Samantha Dravis, the chairwoman of the deregulation team at the EPA, who was a top official at the Republican Attorneys General Association. Dravis was also president of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which brought together energy companies and Republican attorneys general to file lawsuits against the federal government over Obama-era environmental regulations.

The Republican association’s work has been criticized as a vehicle for corporate donors to gain the credibility and expertise of state attorneys general in fighting federal regulations. Donors include the American Petroleum Institute, the energy company ConocoPhillips and the coal giant Alpha Natural Resources.

The Republican association also received funding from Freedom Partners, backed by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch. Dravis worked for that group as well, which recently identified regulations it wants eliminated. Among them are EPA rules relating to clean-water protections and restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.

Liz Bowman, an EPA spokeswoman, declined to say whether Dravis had recused herself from issues dealing with previous employers or their backers, or had discussed regulations with any of them.

“As you will find when you receive Samantha’s calendar, she has met with a range of stakeholders, including nonprofits, industry groups and others, on a wide range of issues,” Bowman said.

Bowman said the calendar could be obtained through a public records request. ProPublica and The Times had already filed a request for records including calendars, but the agency’s response did not include those documents. (An appeal was filed, but the calendar has not yet been released.)

“We take our ethics responsibilities seriously,” Bowman said. “All political staff have had an ethics briefing and know their obligations.”

Addressing the agency’s regulatory efforts, she said, “We are here to enact a positive environmental agenda that provides real results to the American people, without unnecessarily hamstringing our economy.”

At the Agriculture Department, the only known appointee to the deregulation team is Rebeckah Adcock. She previously lobbied the department as a top executive both at CropLife America, a trade association for pesticide makers, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group for farmers.

The department deals with many issues involving farmers, including crop insurance and land conservation rules, but it would not disclose whether Adcock had recused herself from discussions affecting her past employers.

At the Energy Department, a member of the deregulation team is Brian McCormack, who formerly handled political and external affairs for Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing investor-owned electrical utilities.

While there, McCormack worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council, an industry-funded group. Both organizations fought against rooftop solar policies in statehouses across the country. Utility companies lose money when customers generate their own power, even more so when they are required to pay consumers who send surplus energy back into the grid.

Though the Energy Department does not directly regulate electrical utilities, it does help oversee international electricity trade, the promotion of renewable energy and the security of domestic energy production. After joining the department, McCormack helped start a review of the nation’s electrical grid, according to an agency memo.

Clean-energy advocates fear the inquiry will cast solar energy, which can fluctuate, as a threat to grid reliability. Such a finding could scare off state public utility commissions considering solar policies and serve as a boon for electrical utilities, said Matt Kasper, research director at the Energy and Policy Institute, an environmental group.

Disclosure records show that while McCormack was at Edison, the trade group lobbied the federal government, including the Energy Department, on issues including grid reliability.

The department would not answer questions about McCormack’s involvement with those issues.

Across the government, at least two appointees to deregulation teams have been granted waivers from ethics rules related to prior jobs, and at least nine others have pledged to recuse themselves from issues related to former employers or clients.

Some of the recusals involve appointees at the Small Business Administration and the Education Department, including Bob Eitel, who leads the education team and was vice president for regulatory legal services at an operator of for-profit colleges.

Another recusal involves Byron Brown, an EPA appointee who is married to a senior government affairs manager for the Hess Corporation, the oil and gas company.

Hess was fined and ordered to spend more than $45 million on pollution controls by the EPA during the Obama administration because of alleged Clean Air Act violations at its refinery in Port Reading, N.J. Disclosure records show that Brown’s wife, Lesley Schaaff, lobbied the EPA last year on behalf of the company.

An EPA spokeswoman declined to say whether Brown or Schaaff owned Hess stock, though an agency ethics official said Brown had recused himself from evaluating regulations affecting the company.

The agency declined to say whether Brown would also recuse himself from issues affecting the American Petroleum Institute, where his wife’s company is a member. The association has lobbied to ease Obama-era natural gas rules, complaining in a recent letter to Brown’s team about an “unprecedented level of federal regulatory actions targeting our industry.”

Before being selected to lead the deregulation team at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Maren Kasper was a director at Roofstock, an online marketplace for investors in single-family rental properties. Financial disclosure records show Kasper owned a stake in the company worth up to $50,000.

Changes at HUD could increase investor interest in rental homes, affecting a company like Roofstock. The agency, for example, oversees the federal government’s Section 8 subsidies program for low-income renters.

Ethics officials allowed Kasper to keep her stake, but she pledged not to take actions that would affect it. (A spokesman for HUD said Kasper’s tenure on the deregulation task force has since ended.)

One by one, scientists, educators and environmental activists approached the microphone and urged government officials not to weaken regulations intended to protect children from lead.

The forum, run by the EPA in a drab basement meeting room in Washington, was part of the agency’s push to identify regulations that were excessive and burdensome to businesses.

Few businesspeople showed up. As public hearings on regulations have played out in recent weeks, many industry and corporate representatives have instead met with Trump administration officials behind closed doors.

Still, the EPA has asked for written comments and held about a dozen public meetings. The agency has received more than 467,000 comments, many of them critical of potential rollbacks, but also some from businesses large and small pleading for relief from regulatory costs or confusion.

After a quiet moment at the meeting to discuss lead regulations, the owner of a local painting company, Brian McCracken, moved to the microphone.

McCracken was frustrated by what he described as costly rules that forced him to test for lead-based paint in homes before he could begin painting. Each test kit costs about $2, and he may need six per room. If a family then declines to hire him, those costs come out of his pocket.

“I don’t think anyone is sitting here saying that lead-based dust does not hurt children,” he said. “That’s not what we are talking about. What the contractor needs is a better way to test.”

His voice quavered: “Why do I have to educate the general public about the hazards that generations before me created? It doesn’t make sense at all.”

Trump is not the first president to take on such frustrations.

President Bill Clinton declared the federal government was failing to regulate “without imposing unacceptable or unreasonable costs on society.” He assigned Vice President Al Gore to collect agencies’ suggestions for rules that should go. One rule dictated how to measure the consistency of grits.

President George W. Bush’s regulatory overhaul focused more on how new regulations were created. The administration installed a political appointee inside each agency who generally had to sign off before any significant new rule could be initiated. At the EPA for a time, that official came from an industry-funded think tank.

President Barack Obama ordered regular updates from each agency about the effectiveness of rules already on the books.

“When you raise the profile, when it’s clearly an executive priority, it gets attention,” said Heather Krause, director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office, the main auditor of the federal government. According to the auditor’s analysis, the effect under Obama was mostly to clarify and streamline rules, not eliminate them.

Like Bush, Trump has empowered political appointees. Though some agencies have included career staff members on their review teams, an executive order from Trump creating the teams does not require it — nonpolitical employees are generally believed to be more wedded to existing rules. And like Obama, Trump has imposed regular reporting requirements.

But Trump, who spent his business career on the other side of government regulations, has put an emphasis on cutting old rules.

The same day he signed the executive order initiating the review, he addressed a large crowd of conservative activists at a Maryland convention center.

“We have begun a historic program to reduce the regulations that are crushing our economy — crushing,” Trump said. “We’re going to put the regulations industry out of work and out of business.”

Amit Narang, a regulatory expert at the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said Trump’s decision to create teams of political appointees — formally known as regulatory reform task forces — should make it easier for the White House to overcome bureaucratic resistance to his rollback plans.

“To the extent there’s a deep state effect in this administration,” Narang said, “the task force will be more effective in trying to get the agenda in place.”

The New York Times’ Kitty Bennett contributed reporting to this story.

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Climate Deniers or Neighbors?

Angry messages to the Trump-supporting mayor of Tangier Island illustrate a need to listen, not to shout.

The calls rolled in:

“I hope you sink.”

“You’re racist.”

“We’re going to boycott you.”

So it went for Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge and the Chesapeake Bay island of 400 fishermen that he calls home: messages from people who knew nothing about Tangier Island or the long, frustrating and exhausting fight to save it.

The backlash began in June, when CNN aired a story on the Tangiermen’s struggles to secure a seawall that would shore up the island. The place is losing land at a rate of about 15 feet a year, and it doesn’t have much more to give. CNN’s report wouldn’t have been so different from other tales of towns losing their battles with climate change — except that Eskridge mentioned two things: He doesn’t believe the sea is rising, and he loves Donald Trump like a family member.

Trump, devoted CNN viewer that he is, called Eskridge and told him not to worry about his future.

“Your island has been there for hundreds of years,” he told Eskridge, “and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.”

That phone call, recounted in The Washington Post, was apparently enough for strangers to reach out to the picturesque island and wish death upon it. The reaction surprised the mayor, who, like many on the island, works long days catching crabs and then overseeing the activities at his shedding shanty.

“People make comments about us. They don’t know us. They don’t understand us,” Eskridge told me. “If we disagree or we have a different way of thinking, that’s no reason to hate somebody or wish him dead.”

I do know Ooker Eskridge. I’ve been interviewing him for years. Along with my then-8-year-old daughter, I spent the better part of three days with him in 2014 to gather information for a couple of stories, and I’ve been back since, too. I know he can tell you as much about birds as any ornithologist. I know he has a pet osprey that returns every year to a platform he built near his shanty. I know he’s a devout Christian with a Star of David tattooed on his arm. I know he and his wife adopted a girl from India, Sreedevi, then adopted three more and helped others on the island do the same. He named his boat Sreedevi, in keeping with the tradition of a Chesapeake waterman naming his first boat after his daughter. She’s probably the only Sreedevi in a bay full of boats named Barbara and Anne. (And one Wicked Witch, and one Crazy Bitch, but that’s another story, and more likely to be about ex-wives than daughters.)

Some journalists would call Eskridge a climate denier, shoving him into a familiar place in a familiar debate between scientists and industry-backed “climate skeptics.” Maybe it’s easy to dismiss Eskridge as a man who ignores what’s plain to see. And maybe, for people who’ve gotten to be deeply intolerant of other points of view, it’s not much of a leap to say that he and his island deserve what they get.

But Eskridge doesn’t actually deny that the waters around his island are rising. He’s just convinced that the bigger problem is erosion. For decades he has pleaded with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build him a seawall, like the one that already protects the island’s airport and does a great job at it. He even found a guy willing to sink barges off the coast to shore up the island. The federal government nixed the idea.

He’s not the only one in a slowly sinking boat. Denise Drewer, the mayor of tiny Saxis, Va. — another Eastern Shore island, this one connected to the mainland by road — has been begging the Corps for help. On Taylor’s Island, Bruce Colson is hoping the Corps will add dredge material to nearby James Island to protect his campground from encroaching water. In southern Dorchester County, council members want to protect schoolchildren who can’t get to the bus because of high water.

In all those places I’ve have reported on, people blame the problem on “erosion” and “tides.” No one’s talking about Arctic ice melt. On the Eastern Shore, the oceanographer Bill Boicourt once told me, opinions on climate change range from an “open skepticism to a closed skepticism.” But whatever they believe is causing the problem, the solutions are the same: Fortify with breakwaters and seawalls or plan an orderly retreat and settle elsewhere.

Eskridge — and Colson and Drewer and their neighbors — are not the political opportunists who deny climate change and then quietly ask oceanographers how much time their North Carolina beach house has. They’re farmers, fishermen, real estate agents, businesspeople and ministers. They are real people with real doubts and concerns. They are perspectives we can’t afford to ignore.

I can see why environmentalists would be dismissive of the idea that Donald Trump is going to solve such places’ problems. He wants to cut the Corps’ budget, which means that Tangier’s seawall is far less likely. He wants to cut NOAA, which will mean less planning for adaptation in coastal communities. The U.S. Geological Survey conducts key monitoring at tide gauges, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rebuilds habitat for birds, which can also protect populated islands; he wants to cut their budgets too. And of course, he wants big cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is supposed to ensure the waters are clean enough for Tangiermen to keep crabbing for as long as they are able to stay.

Yet 87 percent of the Tangiermen voted for Trump. They backed him because, like millions of other Americans, they felt they had nothing left to lose. Maybe a billionaire, outside of the political system, would shake up Washington, pay attention to the rural areas, and give them the thing that could save them, whether it’s a bowling alley in South Carolina or a new factory in Ohio or some rock for a wall on Tangier. After years of false promises, Eskridge was elated that someone seemed to be listening. Whatever comes of Trump’s call, that’s something not to ignore, either.

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Life Before the EPA

“Biological Annihilation”

Extinction starts to have an effect on ecosystems long before a species fully disappears. A new paper calls this “biological annihilation” — the effect that localized extinction has on a region when certain species, such as lions, become extirpated from their former habitats. The paper argues we should pay more attention to species even if they are considered “of low concern,” because many of them are actually in decline. Although these species are not currently considered threatened with extinction, their “population decay” causes cascading effects on the abundance of other local species — which, the paper warns, will eventually result in yet more extinctions.

4 Thoughts on World Population Day

We need to solve runaway human population growth if we hope to fix any other environmental problems.

Today, as on every July 11th, the United Nations celebrates World Population Day, an occasion designated to “focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues.”

Let’s take a look at some of those issues.

1. We’re not making much, if any, progress.

The first World Population Day was held in 1990, when the world population was about 5.3 billion.

That number has now soared to more than 7.5 billion.

And if you think things are crowded now, just wait a few years. A recent United Nations study calculates the world human population will hit 8 billion in 2023 and balloon to 9.8 billion by 2050.

Now, that increase is not universal. Some countries will actually see declines — all European nations, for example — but the UN found that half of the population growth will take place in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia. India will eclipse China as the world’s most populous country by about 2024, while Nigeria will pass the U.S. as the country with the third-biggest population by 2050.

2. It’s not about just the number of people, but also what they consume.

We have more people now, but our average impact is also growing. One recent study found that more than 10 percent of the world population classifies as medically obese. That’s obviously just one marker for overconsumption, but it serves as a pretty potent illustration of how much the human population drives the environmental impact of our food system alone. Add in carbon emissions, deforestation, species habitat loss and extinction and we’ve got a real mess on our hands.

3. It’s also about inequality.

Much of the population explosion boils down to gender inequality. Women around the world lack access to education, social status, jobs, family planning and medical care — which drives population growth. Solving these problems would not only help make society more equal; as Paul Hawken notes in his book “Drawdown,” it could also give us some of the tools we need to help tackle global warming.

And this is also about wealth inequality. The world’s five richest men now control more wealth than half of the world’s population. With extreme poverty affecting populations around the world, this top-heavy concentration of assets leaves little opportunity for anything to get better.

4. Population needs to be a priority.

I know this is a tough issue to talk about. No one wants to say “you should have fewer kids,” but really, the world needs to have fewer kids and we need to do more for the people we already have. Every other topic we cover here on The Revelator — climate change, pollution, clean water, overdevelopment and the extinction crisis — stems at least in part from the impact of the ever-increasing human population and the systemic inequality with which we all live.

This is unsustainable. We need to take population issues seriously, both for the billions of people already on this planet and for the billions of other species that share our home.