It’s in the water. In our favorite beaches, swimming holes and — somehow — even in wild creeks and streams in the middle of nowhere.
Poop, that is.
America’s waters are infested with feces. We know this because state and federal agencies routinely test surface water across the country looking at various factors of quality, including E. coli bacteria levels, an indirect measure of fecal contamination. E. coli live exclusively in human and animal intestines, so the only reason for them to be present in the environment is…they were pooped there. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that several hundred thousand human cases of E. coli infection occur in the United States every year.
As disgusting as this is, the news is actually worse in some cases. Since E. coli is an indicator of untreated sewage, it can be a sign of everything else that comes with it — hazardous chemicals, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, antibiotics and pesticides, among other things. This single bacterium tells a larger story of an environmental issue that affects humans and whole ecosystems.
Dive in (metaphorically only, please) to these waste-filled waters as we explore the most egregious poop contaminations recorded across the country (and possibly near you).*
*Scroll to the bottom of the article if you’re interested in reading about our methods for processing and ranking E. coli data, as well as the limitations to the accuracy of the nationwide picture that emerged.
The top 10 percent most contaminated locations in America:
Whose poop?
One thing you might be wondering at this point is — whose poop is it? If you’ve explored the maps above for a few minutes, you’ll have noticed that a lot of these places aren’t exactly in highly populated areas.
Location, location, location.
To try to understand what’s really going on, let’s get down to the street level at the 10 most contaminated sites in the country.
No clear solutions.
Here’s the rub — there’s no reasonable explanation for all this contamination. Treated urban sewage and farm manure contain low levels of E. coli. Waste from livestock farms sprayed as manure on fields is meant to stay there and fertilize fields — not flow into waterways. Some of the contamination comes from wildlife, but that’s only one small piece of the puzzle. There’s no reason E. coli should be present in our waters at these levels if there are proper systems in place to deal with the excrement of 320 million Americans and the farm animals that outnumber us — which means current systems are failing somewhere along the line.
While the country’s ecosystems are silently being flooded with poop, the situation is on track to get even worse. Earlier this year a congressional bill was introduced to further weaken regulations on dairy manure. Meanwhile climate change is increasing the frequency of critical sewage flooding events with every hurricane that hits the country.
This is not a problem that can easily be flushed away, and solving it will require communities to address the need not just for safer fecal management, but for larger sustainable choices that reduce the magnitude of the problem if they want to keep their citizens safe — and clean.
Disclaimer: This is not an absolute ranking of the most contaminated sites in America. There are many limitations to available data. Many known catastrophic manure spills and sanitation failures — such as hurricane flooding in North Carolina — do not show up in these maps, and some states just do not monitor their waters as closely as others.
Methods:
Data source:
Water-quality data downloaded from The Water Quality Portal, a cooperative service sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency and National Water Quality Monitoring Council. It serves data collected by more than 400 state, federal, tribal and local agencies.
Land cover and urban areas geospatial data provided by USGS.
Data parameters:
Quality characteristic: Escherichia coli. Other fecal organisms are sometimes evaluated by agencies, but E. coli testing has the widest and most uniform geographic coverage.
Quality measure: Number of E. coli as reported in Colony Forming Units (CFU), Most Probable Number (MPN), or number (#). Suitable data were collated under these three most widely used measures, and the top 10 percent of each of the three categories were collected separately to obtain the top 10 percent results overall.
Time period: All test results in five years — from October 2012 to October 2017. The same monitoring stations are sampled annually, but sampling occurs at different and sometimes arbitrary times of the year. To account for seasonal changes, unusual events, and other sources of stochasticity, five years of data were pooled and the highest result for each monitoring station was retained.
Limitations: Monitoring stations varied widely across states, with some states having more than 5,000 sampling sites, and others having as few as 500. However, existing monitoring stations across all states appeared to be well distributed across watersheds. Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, and Rhode Island had the poorest monitoring coverage of all states.
What Is Pesticide Drift — and Why Is It So Dangerous?
Drift kills.
Earlier this month the Environmental Protection Agency announced that the pesticide dicamba — a weed killer sprayed on genetically modified, pesticide-resistant soybean and cotton crops — had drifted away from application sites and caused damage to more than 3.6 million acres of soybean crops in 25 states.
It was the latest blow against the use of dicamba, which was recently banned in Arkansas and Missouri after complaints from hundreds of farmers. The pesticide, which is manufactured by Monsanto, BASF and other companies, has also been linked to increased rates of cancer in humans exposed to it, as well as risks to wildlife.
Most of the problems with dicamba, experts say, can be linked to a phenomenon known as “pesticide drift,” which is actually two different processes by which a pesticide can travel beyond the application site into other agricultural locations, or even onto nearby residences, schools or other facilities.
One of these types of drift is fairly simple to explain: A pesticide is applied in sprayed liquid form and is then picked up by the wind. “That’s when droplets get blown off target,” says Emily Marquez, staff scientist with Pesticide Action Network North America. “It could be due to applicator error or it could be due to weather.”
The other type of drift — the one most commonly talked about — occurs when a pesticide volatilizes, or turns into a gaseous state. “When it volatilizes, it just travels in the air and then weather can bring it some distance away,” Marquez says.
Volatilization is a natural phenomenon and quite common in other substances. “A good analogy I’ve used is an onion,” Marquez says. “If you cut it, the vapor in the air makes your eyes sting. You can smell it, but you can’t see it. It is the chemical evaporating into the air and going from liquid to vapor.”
What makes dicamba stand out when compared to other pesticides — or onions — is its propensity for volatilization, which has been well known for years. The chemical has a high vapor pressure, meaning it’s more likely to evaporate and rise into the atmosphere. “Even if a pesticide doesn’t have the high vapor pressure, it could still exist in the air to some extent, but not like a fumigant where you have this very high volatility and you see it rising off a field immediately after you apply it,” Marquez says. Recent research has found that dicamba damage was observed 220 feet away from application sites. The EPA requires just 110 feet of buffer between application sites and other vegetation.
Of course, none of this is completely unique to dicamba. “All pesticides can drift,” Marquez says. “Some are more prone to it than others.” Meanwhile, pesticides can also travel via run-off, erosion, equipment contamination and other processes. “All pesticides go somewhere,” she adds.
Monsanto has claimed that its current formulation of dicamba contains additives that make it less prone to volatilization, but how much less prone it is to volatilization —or whether it really is less prone —remains in question. “There can be things you add to reduce volatility,” Marquez says, “but we already knew dicamba was volatile, so I don’t know if it’s possible to add something to reduce volatility when we knew it was damaging crops many years ago.”
In response to this year’s dicamba drift problems, the EPA last month announced an agreement with three manufacturers to put new requirements into place for the pesticide’s use in 2018, including limiting application to days with maximum wind speeds below 10 miles per hour.
Marquez says she thinks that’s about as far as the federal government will go with this pesticide under the current administration. “I think individual states are probably the ones having to do any further restrictions of dicamba.” She adds, though, that further actions could be possible “if enough farmers speak up or just don’t buy it.”
Previously in The Revelator:
Why Does It Take So Long to Phase Out Bee-killing Neonic Pesticides?
Trump’s Budget Kills Funds for Clean Tap Water in Struggling Small Towns
This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.
ST. JOSEPH, Louisiana – On a hot delta day, Roy Bowman fills a gallon jug from an Army green trailer-mounted water tank. All year, Bowman and his neighbors in this crushingly poor, mostly African American town perched on the west bank of the Mississippi River have gotten their water this way.
Brown and gritty, the city’s water had been fouled by deteriorating pipelines and treatment equipment for years; parts of the system were more than a century old. But last year, tests discovered a worse problem: The drinking water was loaded with high concentrations of lead, the same brain-damaging contaminant that poisoned people in Flint, Michigan.
Suddenly, an inconvenience became an emergency. Don’t drink the water or cook with it, state officials warned. The Louisiana National Guard brought in water tanks as a stopgap. The state stepped in to fund a new $9 million water system.
It was a calamity caused by carelessness – neglect of a worsening water problem, a small town and its people.
“I really felt like it was a man-made disaster,” said Bowman, a part-time pastor who, with his wife, Wanda, pushed for action to protect people here from their own water.
St. Joseph, population 1,029, is one of thousands of small towns across the country that have no access to safe, clean drinking water. The reason: The towns can’t afford it.
This chronic problem has threatened rural America’s health and economy for decades. And it could worsen under President Donald Trump, who has proposed axing a program that provides a vital last resort for rural communities without clean water.
Trump wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, which awards water and sewer loans and grants to towns with 10,000 or fewer people. It received $498 million in President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2017 budget. The amount in Trump’s 2018 budget: zero.
The program is a backstop for small towns that can’t find funding elsewhere. A slow, complex network of federal, state, local and private dollars typically fund water systems.
In St. Joseph, because public health was at immediate risk, Louisiana tapped its own capital outlay fund instead. But most towns cannot count on that kind of salvation, and the goal of the Rural Utilities Service is to stop emergencies such as this from happening to millions of people in thousands of small towns across the nation.
‘Wildly successful’ or unnecessary?
Despite its small projects – a typical undertaking cost about $1.4 million for a community of 1,500 people – the Rural Utilities Service has been celebrated as a success. Since 2009, 19.5 million people in rural areas have benefited from $13.9 billion in funding for 5,825 water and wastewater projects.
This program has fixed smelly, cloudy water in Manistique, Michigan; eliminated frequent system breakdowns and outages in Thomasville, Alabama; and provided the first clean, affordable water for hundreds of families in “colonias” in El Paso County, Texas. In and around Eagle Butte, South Dakota, about 8,500 people, including the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, have good drinking water, fire hydrants and economic opportunities because of this federal funding.
The program’s portfolio of nearly 16,000 loans, totaling more than $12 billion, boasts a 0.43 percent delinquency rate, about one-third the rate for banks’ commercial and industrial loans.
“It’s always been wildly successful,” said John Padalino, who led the Rural Utilities Service from 2012 to 2014. “If I were a conservative, I would like this program. It’s very fiscally conservative.”
But the Trump White House says money for rural water isn’t needed.
“The Administration believes that (the Environmental Protection Agency) or private sector sources should fund this activity,” said a note in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. That reflects the view of the libertarian Cato Institute, which in a 2016 report called rural subsidy programs “unneeded duplication” and “an unfair redistribution of wealth.”
Yet at the same time, Trump’s budget also would slash EPA funds that help pay for state water inspectors and enforcers. The White House wants them cut by nearly 45 percent, from the 2017 total of nearly $1.1 billion to $597 million. The administration suggests that states could seek other funding sources, impose fees or simply do less – “reducing or eliminating additional activities not required under Federal law.”
The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, said the Trump budget “merely shifts responsibility from the federal government to the states, while cutting funding for both.” There’s no guarantee that states would be able to fill the gaps and protect the public from unsafe water, the organization said.
Testifying before senators in June, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt described a minimalist approach to federal water oversight.
“EPA should only intervene when states demonstrate an unwillingness to comply with the law or to do their job with regard to keeping water clean and safe for families, businesses and the public at large,” Pruitt said.
Pruitt’s office, the White House Office of Management and Budget and the office of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue did not respond to questions submitted by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
Some congressional leaders say they won’t go along with the White House on defunding the Rural Utilities Service.
“That’s not going to happen,” said Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., chairman of an appropriations subcommittee that handles agriculture and rural development.
“We want to make sure that whether you’re living in rural areas or in the city, you have access to safe drinking water and the proper sanitary sewer system,” he said. “That’s just a hallmark of America.”
St. Joseph’s plight
Roy and Wanda Bowman were used to being in the small but intense spotlight of St. Joseph politics. They tussled with the longtime mayor, Ed Brown, over nearly every local issue.
When the lead crisis hit last December, the Bowmans again were propelled to the front lines. They became community voices in small but important decisions. How many portable water tanks – “water buffaloes” – would the state bring in? How often would the state flush the tanks and bring clean water?
And they began loading up jugs to deliver to their neighbors.
“Not everybody could get out and get their own,” Roy Bowman said. “Old people, sick people – what about those folks? You’re supposed to get clean water from your tap.”
St. Joseph is the seat of Tensas Parish. It’s mostly row-crop country: cotton, corn, soybeans, grain sorghum and rice, plus some timber. One summer morning, a yellow crop-dusting plane repeatedly banked over City Hall on the town’s quiet main street, Plank Road.
About halfway between the cities of Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi, on the other side of the Mississippi River, St. Joseph fits the pattern of thousands of small towns. People are leaving – nearly one-third have departed since 1990 – and those who remain are increasingly poor. Of those still there, 73 percent are African American.
Median household income has fallen by more than half since 2010, to $16,923 – less than one-third of the nation’s median and 38 percent of the state’s. Nearly 40 percent of households are below the poverty level.
Such economic strains would have made water upkeep a challenge under the best circumstances, but for years, the town’s water system, finances and management had been deteriorating. State audits in recent years revealed a financial mess, automatically blocking previously promised state aid for water improvements.
At the state’s request, a court named a fiscal manager for the town in mid-2016, stripping the mayor of financial authority. Brown lost his re-election bid in December by three votes out of 421 cast; he died in May.
Help had been a long time coming. Starting at least five years before the lead crisis emerged, as the water system fell apart, violations, boil-water orders and complaints had become routine.
“This was not a problem that developed overnight,” Wanda Bowman said.
The poor spent scarce dollars on bottled water and taking laundry to nearby towns. The affluent had to adjust as well.
St. Joseph native Rebecca Vizard, who opened a downtown shop that makes high-end custom pillows for interior decorators in New York and other fashion capitals, has her pricey fabrics washed in an adjacent lakefront community. “Different water system,” she said – no orange stains.
Valerie Sloan lives in a restored 1855 house facing the Mississippi River levee. She had old plumbing replaced, but the city system still delivered water that looked like chocolate milk. She held up a brownish sample.
“That came out of my kitchen faucet,” Sloan said. “That is a sin. We wanted clean water, and we thought we deserved it here in the USA.”
Wilma Subra, an environmental health scientist and community activist, said, “Everybody was raising hell about the iron and the manganese – the visible yucky, yucky stuff.”
But the same decrepit pipelines and treatment system that caused the brown, smelly water also contaminated the water with dangerous levels of lead, which can’t be seen, smelled or tasted.
Lead is one of the most notorious poisons. Even at low levels, it can harm developing brains, causing reduced IQs, learning disorders, attention problems and other health issues.
“We should be especially concerned about kids who live in poor communities,” said Bruce Lanphear, a prominent lead researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Many low-income children, he said, often get a double dose because they may be exposed to other lead sources, too, including old paint and tainted soil.
Tests in December found tap water with high lead levels in two St. Joseph locations: a private home and City Hall. Gov. John Bel Edwards, a first-term Democrat, declared an emergency and ordered wider testing.
The follow-up found unsafe lead levels in more than 1 of every 5 homes tested. The taps of 98 homes had water with more than 15 parts per billion of lead, the federal limit. In one home, the water hit 1,810 ppb.
Lead has been on the public mind since 2015 because of Flint, the faded industrial city northwest of Detroit that also had been through a financial crisis. In a cost-cutting move, a manager made changes to the city’s water supply without taking vital safety measures, so lead in old pipes was released into the water supply – and into children’s bodies – in high concentrations.
When the tests revealed the lead risk in St. Joseph, residents and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network launched a campaign for an immediate fix: emergency state money for a new system.
“We pleaded our case for five or six weeks,” Roy Bowman said. “We wrote letters daily. That really moved the legislators – the cry of the people.”
Subra, who was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 1999, spoke at the new water system’s groundbreaking in March with Edwards and other dignitaries.
“The governor says it will be the best water quality in the U.S.,” Subra said in a recent interview.
But Subra also notes that it’s only a start. About 400 other small Louisiana towns still need help with their water. Cutting any source of funds, including the Rural Utilities Service, can only make things worse, she said.
“I get calls all the time from these small systems,” she said. “All 400 want to be next.”
Thousands of rural systems at stake
The Trump administration’s argument that other money is readily available for small water systems ignores what’s known about their unique problems. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, thousands of rural systems don’t have enough population density to generate money for improvements. Many lack the cash flow or customer base to qualify for affordable private loans. Deferred repairs grow into big problems. Required monitoring and reporting might not happen on time – or at all.
Seeing little profit but plenty of risk, few commercial lenders would step in to finance an impoverished small town’s water needs, said Mike Keegan, an analyst at the National Rural Water Association, which represents small systems.
“It’s the antithesis of profit,” he said. “You need a subsidy. (Water) is an essential life service.”
Just planning a water project can take a year – a challenge even for a big system with “teams of engineers, teams of scientists, teams of grant writers, teams of management,” he said. By contrast, thousands of small systems can’t afford even a single full-time operator.
“I’ve been in a lot of communities where the mayor’s got a dairy farm and he’s running the water system,” said Padalino, Obama’s Rural Utilities Service administrator, “and he’s doing that at night.”
Padalino knows that firsthand. He once worked as a water and wastewater plant operator in his native South Texas, near the Mexico border. Many people there face poverty comparable with some undeveloped countries.
Most U.S. residents routinely get clean, safe water. But incidents such as that in Flint, a city of nearly 100,000 people, show that even in larger cities, the margin of safety can vanish with shoddy management, inadequate upkeep or accidents.
In the early 2000s, Washington, D.C., had a serious lead problem. In 2014, Charleston, West Virginia, was without water for days after a chemical spill in the Elk River. That same year, Toledo, Ohio, shut down its system for more than two days because of toxic algae in Lake Erie. Tens of thousands of places have less dramatic violations.
Also, as many as 75,000 sewer overflows a year pollute lakes, rivers, beaches or drinking water, according to the EPA. In Atlanta, for example, fixing the sewers in the early 2000s took about 15 years and cost more than $2.5 billion. Smaller systems don’t have that kind of money.
About 97 percent of the country’s 157,000 water systems serve 10,000 or fewer people. The smallest, serving 500 or fewer people, accounted for 70 percent of drinking water violations in 2015, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported. They exceeded limits on contaminants or skipped required monitoring or reporting.
The biggest funding sources are state and federal revolving funds, but they’re woefully inadequate. Spending on drinking water systems alone would have to increase nearly twelvefold, to $384.2 billion, to cover the needs that the EPA projects for the next 20 years. The American Water Works Association paints an even more dire picture: The shortfall reaches $2 trillion when counting both drinking water and wastewater systems.
Even when Congress provides more, however, small towns mostly are frozen out. This year, the EPA invited 12 water systems to apply for $2.3 billion under the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act. Nearly all were in big cities.
Local politics also worsens the problem. Customers’ bills would soar if they reflected the real cost of future needs. City officials often keep the peace by postponing the pain. The result, as in St. Joseph, is an increasingly brittle system that’s prone to breaking.
Through much of this year, machines dug ditches along St. Joseph’s streets to install new distribution pipes. Crews were deployed to the aging treatment plant to replace old equipment and valves that tended to break and fix other mechanical problems. Work on the system is expected to be finished this month.
And workers refurbished the town’s water tank. They gave the rusty tank a new white paint job, too. Now it stands over the city, promising a healthier future.
“That,” resident Valerie Sloan said, “looks like it would provide clean water.”
The Swinging Pendulum of Conservation Politics
The conservation movement can often take itself for granted. For all those who have advocated on behalf of public lands and animals, and who have petitioned elected officials about taking steps to protect and defend our land, air, water and food supply, the ceaselessly daunting task of defending our natural world and those who inhabit it can feel like a perpetual uphill climb.
Sounding the alarm and inspiring action, especially within the framework of our country’s legal and political system, is where the challenges often lie. That eternal struggle is illustrated in Daniel Nelson’s new book Nature’s Burdens: Conservation and American Politics, the Reagan Era to the Present (University Press of Colorado, $31.95), which covers the intersection of defending wildlife and wild places with the ever-changing political shifts at the White House and in Congress.
The book makes a deep, detailed dive into the history of conservation legislation, beginning in the late 19th century, when the first national parks were created. It soon moves into the 1960s and 1970s, explaining how critical pieces of legislation — specifically the Endangered Species Act, the Land and Water Conservation Act and the Wilderness Act — came into being. The book then shifts into the Reagan era and beyond, where we see the working of individuals (like Interior Secretaries James Watt and Bruce Babbitt), a variety of agencies (such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service) and administrations — which, not surprisingly, view conservation differently depending on who occupied the White House at the time.
Political appointees in the Agriculture Department under Reagan, for instance, pushed for more cutting and logging in the Pacific Northwest. Following up on a campaign promise, one of President Clinton’s earliest initiatives was a “timber summit” that led to the Northwest Forest Plan. That plan, while controversial and not nearly as limiting and strict as environmentalists had hoped, led to significant reductions in logging. This kind of back-and-forth is a consistent theme.
But the most compelling elements of the book have less to do with legal maneuverings and bureaucratic wranglings and more to do with the shifts within the conservation movement and conservation science on the most efficient, effective ways to save species and public lands. Our understanding of the natural world, and what’s truly in the best interest of species and their habitat, evolved throughout this period — and continues to evolve. By referencing academic and scientific journals and reports, the author shows how nature doesn’t recognize our politically influenced rules and borders and boundaries; the interdependence of nature extends way beyond our political compromises.
Likewise, the timelines of natural evolution don’t hue to election schedules, making the task of marking — and even defining — success a critical challenge in it. This a key question Nelson asks: How do environmentalists measure progress? Is it by how many species are saved from extinction, or by how many acres are marked as national parks, refuges or wilderness? One of the compelling narratives in this book is how what environmentalists and conservationists are trying to change has evolved with scientific — and to some degree, philosophical — theory on species and land management.
Nelson references studies showing attempts to “return” areas to prior, pristine conditions (before grazing, development, etc.) may be inadvisable just as much as it may be impossible. Land and the species on it change and evolve; even trying to restore specific species’ populations to certain areas may not be in the best interest of that species if the other conditions that led it to thrive there initially are no long in place. Imposing human judgement on what we view is best for nature and animals has risks of its own; Nelson shows us that the reintroduction of some species in certain locales has worked, but over time, while what’s truly best is for us to leave nature alone, in as large as swaths as possible, and let nature take care of it on her own.
But over time — and this is where Nelson’s rigorous study most clearly elucidates the conservation challenge — competing interests among ranchers, hunters, livestock producers, real estate developers and conservationists have forced all kinds of compromises, and back-and-forth, in the political realm of land management.
And as administrations change, so too do their philosophies in terms of running the Interior department and its myriad agencies. With nature constantly evolving and our political landscape always changing, keeping things consistent over the long timeframes required by nature and species is almost impossible.
Nelson’s book relies heavily on legal specifics and political maneuverings, which at times made the text a bit dry. I wish he’d provided more color and commentary from politicians, agency staff and representatives of groups in the conservation movement. It would have brightened the material and made it feel more alive. Nelson spends a good bit of time on the histories and missions of various nature groups. Their growth and influence over the years are also an important focus of this book. Adding in more detail regarding the colorful personalities, and maybe a tad less focus on the fates of various legislative proposals, could have made this a more engaging and effective read.
The book concludes with the Obama presidency. We know — though it’s left unsaid — that the conservation pendulum in America has shifted again. A later volume could include details of the current chapter of the conservation struggle. But the point of this book, really, is that the pendulum never stops swinging. Coming to terms and dealing with that might be the conservation movement’s biggest challenge.
Can Plastic Ever Be Made Illegal?
I thought I knew what garbage looked like. Then I arrived in Bangalore, the third-largest city in India.
There was trash was almost everywhere you looked. Plastic bottles, food packaging and other waste that could’ve potentially been recycled contaminated the landscape, even in people’s front- and backyards. When I’d ride into the city from the ashram where I was staying in the countryside, I’d inhale toxic fumes of garbage piles burning and observe wild animals rummaging through fields of trash.
During my first day on Commercial Street, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, I could feel the pollution sink into my pores and ignite oils on my face. The ground was no better. While wearing only flimsy flip-flops, I nearly stepped on a rat with a candy wrapper in its mouth.
My experiences weren’t just anecdotal. According to a 2016 study by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore generates 5,000 metric tons of garbage a day, of which only 10 percent on average is recycled. The city’s landfills, however, can only handle 2,100 tons of waste per day.
When I returned home, I quickly learned that Bangalore was not alone, and how the United States plastic lobby keeps its waste pollution behind closed doors. New York City — which has a population 1.5 million fewer people than Bangalore — throws away twice as much garbage; according to GrowNYC, residents of the Big Apple produce 12,000 tons of solid waste a day.
My experiences inspired a radical belief in me, going beyond plastic-bag bans and littering fines: Plastic should be illegal.
Communities around the world have taken action to ban single-use plastic bags. I began to wonder, could we ever take things a step further by banning plastic altogether? That’s not an easy question, I quickly learned, because not all plastics are created — and therefore, disposed of — equally.
When we explore the possibility of banning plastic, we need to be specific about which kinds. The base of all plastic is resins, which are composed of polymers. Different chemicals are required to make the many different types of resin. According to the American Chemistry Council, some common types include:
- Polyethylene terephthalate, found in water bottles;
- High-density polyethylene, included in bags for grocery and retail purchases;
- Low-density polyethylene, used for food packaging and shrink wrap;
- Polypropylene, utilized for medicine bottles and bottle caps; and
- Polystyrene, typically in the form of Styrofoam.
Each of those types of plastic comes with different potential environmental costs. “The plastics of greatest concern from an environmental health perspective are polyvinyl chloride (vinyl), polystyrene, polycarbonate, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene,” says Mike Schade, Mind the Store campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. “Using vinyl products exposes consumers to hormone-disrupting phthalates, which are dangerous at very low levels of exposure.” Even getting rid of vinyl is dangerous, he says, because incinerating it releases dioxins, one of the most toxic man-made chemicals.
Additionally, I found that not all plastics are regulated equally. Although there hasn’t been any federal U.S. legislation yet banning vinyl, or any other type of plastic, cities and states have successfully passed and adopted measures to ban plastic bags. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Austin, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco are among the cities to implement straight bans as opposed to fees. Meanwhile, statewide bans have passed in California and Hawaii.
“When it comes to high density polyethylene and other [types of] plastic bags, the biggest issues are with them clogging up landfills, polluting parks, and waterways,” Schade says. “Plastic bags are a huge solid waste problem and a waste of precious resources.”
According to the Earth Policy Institute, the United States consumes 100 billion plastic bags each year, which is enough to circle the equator 1,330 times.
What if plastic bags were to be banned in the United States, as they were in Kenya earlier this year? Unfortunately that legal battle would require likely copious amounts of money to fight the plastic industry, most notably the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a pro-plastic lobbying group run by the American Chemistry Council. In her documentary Plastic Patch: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which I initially watched after returning from India, journalist Angela Sun revealed that the council is an umbrella organization for Dow Chemical Company, DuPont and ExxonMobil.
According to a recent report in The Huffington Post, the group is the moneybag behind legislation to ban the banning of plastic bags. These types of laws have already passed in states like Florida and Arizona. As depicted in Sun’s film, the American Progressive Bag Alliance ran negative, untruthful commercials urging Californians to vote against that state’s proposed plastic bag ban years ago. This year, the Iowa became the most recent state to ban plastic bag bans following a push from the organization and the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Ironically, experts tell me that plastic-bag bans can actually endanger municipalities by instigating lawsuits from “big plastic.”
“Cities potentially expose themselves to lawsuits over environmental claims if they only ban plastic bags, but allow other bags to be given away for free,” explains Jennie Romer, a New York City-based attorney and founder of Plastic Bag Laws. Romer works with grassroots organizations in New York City to push for plastic-bag fees; according to The New York Times, Governor Cuomo quashed a measure to implement a 5-cent fee on plastic bags earlier this year.
There’s a reason why conversations about the plastics industry revolve around plastic bags: it’s a gateway to other environmental issues. Romer explains that once people get accustomed to having certain plastics banned, the plastic industry becomes concerned about the potential of all plastic products being banned rather than just bags. In other words, I realized that plastic bag legislation isn’t really about plastic bags; it’s about what other types of plastic can be potentially banned in the future.
While governments can regulate the plastics industry, ultimately, the effort to reduce plastic consumption comes down to shifting consumer behavior, Romer says. She adds that implementing fees encourage consumers to be more mindful compared to straight bans.
“People just don’t get a bag when they get an item or two or they bring a bag when they don’t want to pay a fee,” Romer explains.
While plastic bags are her focus, Romer also consults on expanded polystyrene, found in Styrofoam. She believes this type of plastic requires a straight ban because it breaks up more easily and cannot be recycled, unlike high-density polyethylene in plastic bags.
Sun tells me the government should have a role in regulating the labeling of plastic products. “Just because Bisphenol A [or BPA] is a buzz word and in social consciousness, the chemical industry can easily make a slight change and call it something else and still have a BPA-free label on it because it’s technically free of BPA,” she says. “Putting a BPA label on a baby bottle doesn’t mean it’s necessarily OK to be used.”
Sun also stresses that while governments should implement policies to reduce plastic consumption systematically, it’s up to individual people to raise awareness about the issue. No matter how much policy can influence our everyday lives, reducing plastic ultimately falls us — as individual consumers — to take action. This both inspires me and disappoints me, because it’s difficult to fight against a culture specifically designed to consume plastic. After all, bringing your own reusable bag doesn’t go very far when most of the products you purchase are packaged in plastic.
“Social change is hard to do, but it can be done little by little,” explains Sun. “Empowered citizens in different realms have pushed and lobbied for this change. It’s power to the people.”
While bans, whether they are for plastic bags or certain types of resin, seem to be the best idealistic policy for the environment, I learned that they can make governments vulnerable to lawsuits by the plastic lobby. While fees can inspire a change in consumer behavior without the potential of legal action, even those are difficult to just get passed. If we seriously consider banning plastic, not only do we have to specify which kinds, but we also need to work around a system heavily influenced by plastic manufacturers. Otherwise the United States’ garbage problem could start to look a lot more like Bangalore’s.
© 2017 Danielle Corcione. All rights reserved.
The Unexpected Ways Fracking Affects Air Pollution
Urban air pollution in the U.S. has been decreasing near continuously since the 1970s.
Federal regulations, notably the Clean Air Act passed by President Nixon, to reduce toxic air pollutants such as benzene, a hydrocarbon, and ozone, a strong oxidant, effectively lowered their abundance in ambient air with steady progress.
But about 10 years ago, the picture on air pollutants in the U.S. started to change. The “fracking boom” in several different parts of the nation led to a new source of hydrocarbons to the atmosphere, affecting abundances of both toxic benzene and ozone, including in areas that were not previously affected much by such air pollution.
As a result, in recent years there has been a spike of research to determine what the extent of emissions are from fracked oil and gas wells – called “unconventional” sources in the industry. While much discussion has surrounded methane emissions, a greenhouse gas, less attention has been paid to air toxics.
Upstream emissions
Fracking is a term that can stir strong emotions among its opponents and proponents. It is actually a combination of techniques, including hydraulic fracturing, that has allowed drillers to draw hydrocarbons from rock formations which were once not profitable to tap.
Drillers shatter layers of shale rock with high-pressure water, sand and chemicals to start the flow of hydrocarbons from a well. The hydraulic fracturing process itself, aside from its large demand for water, is possibly the least environmentally impactful step along the complete operational chain of drilling for hydrocarbons. Arguably, the more relevant environmental effects are wastewater handling and disposal, as well as the release of vapors from oil and gas storage and distribution.
The production, distribution and use of hydrocarbons have always led to some emissions into the air, either directly via (intended or accidental) leaks, or during incomplete combustion of fuels. However, through regulations and technological innovation, we have reduced this source dramatically in the last 30 years, approximately by a factor of 10.
Nevertheless, wherever hydrocarbons are produced, refined or stored, there will be some emissions of pollutants. In the age of fracking, the large operations at conventional well sites have been replaced by hundreds of well pads dotting the landscape. Each requires the transportation of water, chemicals and equipment to and from these pads as well as the removal of wastewater, and none is regulated like any larger facility would be.
As a result, unconventional production has not only increased truck traffic and related emissions in shale areas, but also established a renewed source of hydrocarbons. They enter the atmosphere from leaks at valves, pipes, separators and compressors, or through exhaust vents on tanks. Together with nitrogen oxides emissions, largely from diesel engines in trucks, compressors and drilling rigs, these hydrocarbons can form significant amounts of harmful, ground-level ozone during daytime.
Measurement challenges
In 2011, a paper argued that methane emissions from unconventional sources compared to conventional oil and gas exploration were being significantly underestimated. Researchers began to investigate hydrocarbon emissions from fracking operations in earnest. And thus a significant body of literature has developed since 2013, much of which focuses on methane emissions, the main component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas.
The EPA keeps track of methane emissions in its greenhouse gas inventory, but the numbers are based upon estimates developed in the 1980s and 1990s and are compiled through calculations and self-reporting by the industry.
In fact, both satellite and atmospheric measurements suggest that the EPA estimates could be underestimating real-world methane emissions by up to a factor of two. And if this is true for methane, co-emitted hydrocarbon gases are likely underestimated as well.
Ozone formation
As in many such cases, nuances exist.
Airborne measurements by NOAA suggest that the EPA methane estimates may be applicable to older, mature shale areas with mostly natural gas production. But that’s not the case in younger shale areas that also produce large amounts of oil alongside natural gas, such as the Bakken in North Dakota. Emissions from just the Bakken may be so large as to be responsible for roughly half of the renewed increase of atmospheric ethane in the Northern Hemisphere since the beginning of the fracking boom.
Similarly, our own studies for the Eagle Ford shale in south-central Texas suggest that hydrocarbon emissions are higher than currently estimated. This increases the potential for regional ozone formation as these hydrocarbons are oxidized in the atmosphere in the presence of nitrogen oxides. And as the ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard was recently lowered to 70 parts per billion, with ozone in San Antonio downwind of the Eagle Ford trending close to the old threshold of 75 ppb, the impact of shale hydrocarbon emissions is not trivial.
San Antonio’s ozone woes are not unique. In some areas, decades-long progress on ozone air quality has stalled; in others, particularly the Uintah basin in Utah, a new ozone problem has emerged due to the fracking industry’s emissions.
Benzene
Aside from effects on ozone trends, the increase of hydrocarbon emissions has also led to the resurgence of an air toxic thought to be a story of the past in the U.S.: benzene. Unlike ozone, which is widely monitored, benzene is not. However, since it is a known carcinogen, it has long been on the radar of regulatory agencies.
Routinely measured above 1 part per billion in urban areas in the 1970s and ‘80s, urban ambient benzene concentrations have dropped 5-10 percent per year, similar to other air pollutants, throughout the last 20 to 30 years. Annual average benzene levels are now below 1.5 parts per billion at over 90 percent of locations monitoring benzene regularly, but few such monitoring stations are in or near shale areas.
High levels of benzene in shale areas, such as near well pads in the Barnett shale in Texas, were recorded early into the fracking boom, but few continuous air monitoring data are available to this day, with virtually no data prior to the fracking boom for comparison.
While benzene is generally monitored below levels the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) would be concerned about, it is becoming clear that levels must have increased at rural shale area locations.
Our fingerprinting analysis of 2015 data from the newest air monitor in Karnes City, Texas, at the center of the Eagle Ford shale, suggests that less than 40 percent of benzene is still related to tailpipe emissions, its formerly dominant emission source. Instead, over 60 percent is now linked to various oil and gas exploration activities, including gas flaring emissions.
Studies from Colorado and Texas show that elevated levels of benzene in shale areas are clearly correlated with other hydrocarbon gases emitted from oil and gas exploration.
Health impacts
While ozone is distributed relatively uniformly in a region, primary emissions of benzene and other nonmethane hydrocarbons will be at higher concentrations in air next to sources. Therefore, whereas most monitoring stations of ozone are quite representative for a larger area, monitoring benzene far from its dominant sources in shale areas does not provide a representative picture.
The risks for people living in shale areas are elevated by their nearness to well pads. Ongoing health research has revealed that certain minor health effects such as sinusitis, migraines and fatigue, but also hospitalization rates and certain birth defects, are identifiably connected to an area’s well density or a home’s distance to oil and gas wells as a proxy of exposure, warranting more detailed research.
In conclusion, the shale boom has created a new source of large-scale, diffuse hydrocarbon emissions that adversely affect air toxics levels. While the effects are subtle, they happened in areas generally without any air pollutant monitoring, making estimates of trends difficult.
In many cases, these pollutants can be reduced by common-sense emissions reduction measures, and some companies put or plan to put good practice in place. Nevertheless, continued growth of the fracking industry as well as plans to remove regulations on methane emissions will not alleviate high hydrocarbon emissions and associated regional ozone problems.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Welcome to the Age of Humans
Humanity now finds itself living in a world of its own creation, for better or worse. Our collective actions ripple out across the planet, taking a massive toll on all living things and their habitats, creating an uncertain future.
The “Anthropocene,” an era defined by lasting human impacts on the natural world, is a controversial epoch-labeling term still awaiting final approval by the International Union of Geologic Sciences. But reading the new book Living in the Anthropocene: Earth in the Age of Humans (Smithsonian Books, $34.95) leaves little doubt about how fundamentally we’re altering our world.
This comprehensive collection of essays from scientists, academics and other experts in their fields, edited by top curators at the National Museum of Natural History and National Museum of American history, covers myriad aspects of the human juggernaut.
Anthropogenic climate change — and the rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, ocean warming and acidification and sea-level rise that go along with it — is what many commentators associate with the dawning of the Anthropocene. But it’s just one part of how people have changed the Earth.
That’s evident in the opening essay, “The Advent of the Anthropocene” by Georgetown University professor J.R. McNeill, which dates the dawning of our new age to 1950 and includes a series of eight graphs to reinforce his point. Each one — “Marine Fish Capture,” atmospheric concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide, use of water and fertilizer, dam construction, energy use and urban population — shows slow, steady increases over decades or centuries turning sharply upward as prosperity returned following the horrors of World War II.
At that point, we mastered the art of creative destruction and applied it on an industrial scale, heedless of the cost or damage.
Similarly the closing essay, by renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, decries human impacts to the natural world that have increased the extinction rate 1,000 times, calling for us to drastically expand the amount of land protected from human impacts until it covers about half the planet, a level he considers relatively stable. Otherwise today’s greed will lead to a drastically altered world.
“There is a momentous moral decision confronting humanity today,” Wilson wrote. “It can be put in the form of a question: what kind of a species, what kind of an entity, are we, to treat life so cheaply? What will future generations think of those of us now alive having made such an irreversible decision of this magnitude so carelessly?”
In between those two contributions, World Bank officials Paula Caballero and Carter J. Brandon urge us to rethink our measures of economic progress; psychoanalyst Lindsay Clarkson talks about the psychology of environmental abuse; and art professor Subhankar Banerrjee discusses why the polar bear has become such an important cultural and artistic icon. More than two dozen diverse essays share their pages.
As the book discusses, new technologies and ways of working have allowed us to harvest crops, seafood, meat, oil and minerals at previously unimaginable levels for a skyrocketing global population. But the tradeoff has been equally high levels of pollution, habitat loss, resource depletion and the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s history.
Speaking of which, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction, contributed the foreword to Anthropocene. “The more we understand about our impacts, and our impacts’ impacts, the more urgent the questions become,” she wrote. “What should we do with this knowledge? Should we scale back our influence? Can we?”
These are good questions, and she’s right that they urgently demand answers. Our current course is unsustainable, whether we’re looking at our economic system, the energy sector, food and water supplies, social systems, the ability of the ocean and atmosphere to continue absorbing our emissions, or any of the other realms this book explores.
The essays in this collection can be a bit dense and academic, so it’s not always the easiest read. But the expertise and research reflected in these pages is impressive, explaining in startling detail the complexities of how our world is changing, and how we’re processing that change in our science, art and politics.
How the World’s Oldest Wisdom Is Informing Modern Responses to Climate Change
For two decades Canadian conservation biologist Gleb Raygorodetsky has worked on environmental projects with indigenous peoples from the tropics to the Arctic, in the Americas, Europe, Russia and the Pacific. The resilience of these communities — which, despite centuries of political, social and ecological upheavals, have maintained their deep, ancient relationships with their historic lands and waters — convinced him that their knowledge offers valuable guidance to the world for dealing with the greatest environmental crisis in human history: climate change.
“The more I learned from the science, the more I felt there’s this hole that is not being filled by science,” says Raygorodetsky, “the sort of intimate, spiritual relationship with the land, with the planet, that science lacks. So I gravitated toward that more holistic way of relating to the land, the animals and our place in this planet.”
In his new book Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change (Pegasus Books, $28.95), published this week, Raygorodetsky recounts how indigenous communities living on the front lines of climate change have begun to collaborate with scientists and nongovernmental organizations to document emerging environmental conditions, inform those studies with traditional knowledge, and combine the two toward their own physical and cultural survival. He also describes how activists and some indigenous communities are successfully fighting back when governments and corporations ignore indigenous needs and rights in their pursuit of economic ventures. “With indigenous groups there’s a natural law by which the world works. It’s not something that we invented,” he says. “We have to breathe. We have to have water, air, sunlight. Otherwise we don’t survive, as individuals or as a species.”
There has been a longstanding disdain for indigenous environmental knowledge among many scientists, perhaps because that knowledge is bound up with their spiritual beliefs and practices, which goes against the grain of modern science’s foundation in the western Enlightenment. Is that attitude changing?
I think there’s more of a realization that if we are truly trying to tackle the issues of today — climate change, industrial development, quality of life — then we need to look at the experiences and best practices of people who have actually be around the block for much longer than our modern civilization without destroying our home.
There are a number of fields that try to use different lenses of interpreting the world around us, fields like biocultural diversity and resilience thinking. Ecology is all about the interdependence of different processes and elements of the web of life. At the metaphysical level, more thinking is going into parallels between what quantum physics and cosmology tell us about how the world works, and how indigenous worldviews interpret how the world works.
A lot of it also has to do with power, and who is telling the story. Science is complaining that they’re not at the heart of decision-making. Well, they can certainly understand how indigenous peoples feel, because they haven’t been at the decision-making table for centuries.
Why are indigenous views and practices a source of hope when it comes to dealing with climate change?
We depend on biodiversity, or as we call it “ecosystem services.” Eighty percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is on the territories of indigenous peoples, and most of them have a clear understanding of what’s happening on that land or that sea, and what needs to be done to protect it. That’s reassuring to me. If the majority of our collective wealth and natural capital would be in the hands of corporations, then I’d be worried.
The hope also comes from the fact that they’ve been dealt so many blows through social and environmental change, and despite that there’s resilience in how they see themselves on the land now, and how they think about the future. They’re not trapped in the past but rooted in that generations-long relationship with the land, and the responsibility for maintaining it for future generations.
What’s an example of that from the communities that you write about in the book?
Look at the Karen people of Hin Lad Nai, in northern Thailand. They’ve been displaced. Their traditional forests have been clear-cut. But they manage to cling to whatever is left, and continue to practice their traditional agriculture. Now that land is restored to a point where the government sees it as an example of good stewardship and wants to establish a park in that area, which is obviously not what communities would really appreciate, because they would rather see strengthening of their rights and how they look after their traditional forest.
Why wouldn’t a park be the best solution for protecting these northern Thailand forests and the Hin Lad Nai?
In that particular case, a park would be setting aside area where it “conserves biodiversity” within the perimeter of the park, and most of the traditional activities, like slash-and-burn agriculture — something that actually enriches biodiversity of the forest and sustains those communities — would be prohibited. Which would change the dynamic of how the forest grows, how animals disperse through the territory, and obviously communities are not going to be able to live on that traditional territory and would have to move out to urban centers, where their cultures would eventually dissipate.
A lot of it is about, “yes, if you want to establish a park, let us be at the decision-making table. Because it’s our territory, let us decide about what’s going to happen where, and not the other way around.”
This is not unique to developing countries. It’s happening all over Canada, and all over the States. And to take it back to climate change, one of the reasons for intensifying fires throughout North America is changes to the fire regime, because those forests and shrublands were traditionally managed with fire. Something that’s been stopped and suppressed under the imposed management regime.
What indigenous peoples want is to find a way to restore some of those practices. But it’s impossible to do if you are not really in charge of what’s happening on your traditional territory.
It struck me how every indigenous community you write about is struggling to survive and thrive, even in countries that recognize their rights. In Ecuador the government treated the Sapara respectfully. But as soon as it became more economically feasible for oil companies to get at the oil under their forest land, that fight began again.
In Ecuador, yes, they are recognized. But they have to fight off the government and corporations having their own agenda to get access to their territory. Those fights about the rights to the land and the resources are an ongoing battle. But without it, it’d just be a green light for development to go in and do whatever they want. Even in countries that recognize indigenous rights and have land claims settled with indigenous groups, there’s still surface versus subsurface rights, providing access.
Even the REDD program, “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation,” a climate-change mitigation effort that many international organizations and governments promote, amounts to projects that actually do more harm than good at the local level. Because the decision-makers, the policymakers and even the researchers are looking just at a small piece of the puzzle, compared to how indigenous peoples look at that relationship with the forest.
Right now, with climate change mitigation discussions, the focus is on getting CO2 out of the atmosphere, minimizing greenhouse gas emissions, rather than looking at the whole problem holistically. If you look at the forest just as a carbon bank, then we’re missing multiple other dimensions. That’s something that indigenous peoples have been trying to tell us on a variety of issues, but particularly on climate change, from the very beginning. A lot of mitigation projects that are being proposed or developed have severe consequences that undermine communities’ abilities to adapt.
Like what?
Like hydroelectric projects. We are supposedly switching from a carbon-based economy to a renewable economy. But in the process, we’re changing water flow regimes in watersheds such that people downstream cannot have access to their traditional hunting and fishing territories.
The same thing with reforestation. “We’re gonna fly over this deforested area and just bomb it with seed pellets, and in 10 years it’s gonna be a lush green forest. Isn’t that great?” Well it isn’t, because you’re going to end up with a really simplified forest structure: one age class, little biodiversity.
From your perspective as a scientist informed by indigenous world-views, why aren’t global and regional pacts to deal with climate change more effective?
The problem with all this stuff, from my ill-informed perch, is that the solutions are coming from the same cesspool of ideas as everything else, based on the same economic model. We think that the economy can just continue to grow.
Even when we talk about renewables, we conveniently look away from where the minerals are coming from, where all the technology to generate that renewable energy is coming from, and what the impact of that is in local communities.
Why is it happening? Again, because decision-making is disconnected from the places where those decisions are having an impact, and the people who have to live with the consequences of those decisions.
Globally more people live in cities now than in the countryside, and that trend is expected to continue for decades to come. Won’t that undercut whatever impact a more holistic approach to climate change could have?
Except that trend cannot exist without the countryside. Cities without support of everything around them would just collapse. One of the lessons from resilience thinking is that for the society to be resilient, you need to have diversity. Diversity is undermined by a design where everything is concentrated in one place.
At a more conceptual level, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in an urban or rural environment. You’re still dependent on the web of life, and being cognizant of those relationships and treating them in a respectful way. Farm-to-table, community markets, understanding where your food comes from and the relationship between food and well-being, all that stuff is also informed by some of the concepts that resonate with indigenous worldviews. The relationship between the prey and the hunter, and the gatherer and plants, it’s all in there.
There is value in looking at institutions that have regulated our interaction with the environment for millennia, without undermining that balance, and learning from it.
These are the messages that are coming from indigenous communities. Without them we wouldn’t even be talking about these implications. So that’s another source of hope.
© 2017 Emily Gertz. All rights reserved.
Parasite Lost: Did Our Taste for Seafood Just Cause an Extinction?
A lot can change in five decades.
In 1963 University of Aberdeen researcher Ken MacKenzie published a paper about a parasite called Stichocotyle nephropis living in the waters around Scotland.
Last month he came full circle, publishing a new paper in the journal Fisheries Research describing the tiny flatworm’s possible extinction due to overfishing of its host species.
“Stichocotyle was the subject of the first paper I ever published in 1963 and it is a sobering thought that it has probably disappeared in my lifetime,” he says. He adds that he regrets never photographing the species while he was working on it in the 1960s, although he did provide this drawing from an earlier paper:
The species — like most parasites — spent its life in different hosts depending on its life stages. According to MacKenzie’s new paper, Stichocotyle’s larval form lived in the bodies of Norway lobsters (Nephrops norvegicus). In its adult form — a worm reaching about 4 inches in length — it could be found in the bile ducts of the thornback ray (Raja clavata). It was also observed one time in the barndoor skate (Dipturus laevis).
Neither the ray nor the skate are commercially fished, but they are frequently killed as bycatch, enough so that they are considered near-threatened and endangered, respectively.
According to the paper, it’s the overfishing of these two species that may have caused the parasite’s extinction because there now aren’t enough of the animals to host the adult parasites.
The reports of this extinction have been a long time coming. Stichocotyle was last seen in 1986, and attempts to locate it since then have proven fruitless. “I was initially surprised when I went to look for specimens in 2001 in areas where I knew it to have been common in the 1960s and I failed to find it,” MacKenzie says. More recently he and his co-author examined more than 1,200 Norway lobsters and found no signs of infection. Similar inspections of thornback rays did not turn up any signs of the parasite.
This doesn’t mean the species is definitely extinct, but the prospects don’t look good. The host rays have been seriously overfished and its populations have become disconnected, so there is little opportunity for the parasite’s larvae — if they still exist — to be transmitted from lobsters to the rays. According MacKenzie additional populations of Stichocotyle could still survive, but only in isolated pockets with few opportunities for propagation. “We would love to be proved wrong about Stichocotyle now being extinct and we hope that parasitologists in other areas will now search for it,” he says.
So why should we care about the extinction of a tiny parasite? For one thing, it was the only known member of its taxonomic order, meaning an entire evolutionary line has possibly been lost.
Beyond that, we don’t know exactly what role Stichocotyle played in its ecosystem, but MacKenzie points out that its very existence was an important sign. “Parasites can be good indicators of the health of an ecosystem,” he says. “It is said that a healthy ecosystem has a healthy parasite fauna.” The loss of this parasite, therefore, indicates an ecosystem pushed out of balance by human activity.
Meanwhile, Stichocotyle may not be a lone example. Earlier this year a paper published in Science Advances warned that climate change could cause one-third of the world’s parasites to go extinct by the year 2070.
MacKenzie himself has seen evidence of this. “I have some indications of local parasite extinctions, but not enough evidence yet to publish anything. I have been retired from full-time work since 1995 but I continue to pursue my interests as an honorary member of staff of the University of Aberdeen. I hope that younger workers, such as my co-author Campbell Pert, will continue to monitor parasites as indicators of the health of marine ecosystems.”
In other words, keep checking those lobsters. Our oceans could need what’s inside them.
Previously in Extinction Countdown:
The Lesser Prairie-Chicken: Gone With the Wind?
North on U.S. 270 to Woodward, Oklahoma, wind turbines own the horizon. They hover above rusting barns, cattle-guards and the barbed-wire fences that protect private land. When standing below, you feel the massive blades swoosh like flyswatters cutting through the air. As the wind picks up, the blades spin faster and the machines emit a soft mechanical whine: the sound of power generated by nature. The town, home to 12,000 people, lies in the northwest corner of the state. The citizens who are paid to house the silo-sized white turbines on their property may not see controversy in them. But other locals see them as eyesores — or something even worse.
The energy scarecrows rise south of Woodward and west into the panhandle, spreading widely across the landscape. This dry, warm environment once gave rise to some of the most dynamic ecoregions of what is now the United States. Short, sod-forming grasses that evolved with the climate set the western short grasslands apart from other kinds of prairies. The prairie’s proximity to the tropics funneled in an incredible diversity of insects, birds and mammals. Seeing the number of endemic species would have been as breathtaking as watching turbines fan across U.S. 270.
But now, the region’s bird populations are among the fastest declining on the continent, and the turbine is the latest aggressor to swat native species out of existence. The flat, windswept plains seem to be made for renewable energy. Can the wind industry harbor as much hope for conservation as it does for renewable energy? One bird — the lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) — will test that possibility.
The lesser prairie-chicken belongs to the grouse family of birds so iconic to prairie culture. This brown-barred, stocky species nests in shrubbery and grasses of the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado. It’s about the size of a 20-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola. In a flashy mating ritual called lekking, the male chickens’ necks flair with inflating red air sacs to wow female chickens during spring nesting. But this elaborate mating ritual is now harder to perform as shortgrass habitat loses ground to development, agriculture and other industries.
David Hunter, owner of Hunter’s Livestock Supply in Woodward, recollected that the prairie-chickens were often spotted on his family’s 120-year-old farm in eastern Woodward when he was young. “There were just thousands of them everywhere,” the 57-year-old told me. In northwestern Oklahoma alone, the bird’s habitat once covered 12 counties. Today their range has shrunk to isolated pockets in seven counties, all near or in the panhandle. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the prairie-chicken has lost as much as 84 percent of its historic prairie and grassland.
The Service first named the lesser prairie-chicken as a candidate for the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife in 1998 and declared the bird “threatened” in 2014. When a species gains a place on the list, it is protected by law from hunting or trade, its habitat gains legal protection from being destroyed or adversely modified, and the agency develops and implements a conservation plan. The lesser-prairie chicken and state conservation departments were set to benefit from the federal aid. But just over a year later, the Permian Basin Petroleum Association and several New Mexico counties challenged the listing in District Court. Permian Basin won the suit in September 2015, effectively ending federal Endangered Species Act protection for the bird. The move became official in July 2016. Almost immediately, wildlife conservation groups began petitioning for the prairie-chicken to be listed once again. “We are undertaking a new status review to determine whether listing is again warranted,” wrote then-Service director Dan Ashe in a statement, “and we will continue to work with our state partners and others on efforts to…ensure this flagship of the prairies survives well into the future.” A few months later the Service agreed to reconsider protecting the species by the end of Summer 2017 — a decision that is already overdue.
The Uncomfortable Feeling of Being Watched
Alva Gregory is the lesser prairie-chicken habitat coordinator for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation and grew up in the county with the highest prairie-chicken populations. He told me from his office in Woodward that many dynamics factor into the species’ decline. “Whether it’s wind [turbines], whether it’s transmission lines, oil and gas,” he said, “It’s just a huge gamut of stuff that affects it.” A four-year drought and industry expansion have recently contributed to the lower bird numbers.
Yet it’s the chicken’s innate fear of looming, vertical structures that has made turbines so disastrous in Oklahoma. Russ Horton, a research supervisor with the department of conservation, told me that prairie-chickens instinctively distance themselves from anything they might perceive as a raptor perch, high lookouts where wolfish birds scout for meals. Even tree-planting has hurt prairie-chicken populations, since the skittish birds avoid anything that casts a shadow. They’re a bird of the grasslands after all, Horton said, and there’s not a whole lot that naturally sticks up from the state’s mostly flat landscape. Raptors such as red-tailed hawks and prairie falcons prey on ground-nesting birds of all kinds. And the lesser prairie-chicken is particularly vulnerable, especially during spring nesting season. As a female lays and then incubates her clutch of about a dozen eggs, Horton said, “she’s tied to a spot about the size of a dinner plate for over a month.” The hens incubate their eggs while coming and going to feed themselves for just over three weeks, making themselves easy targets for birds of prey. Turbines give the lesser prairie-chicken an uncomfortable feeling of being watched.
Northwest Oklahoma, where lesser prairie-chickens occur, now houses more wind farms than any other part of the state. Just over a decade ago, the state’s utilities had no turbines to produce wind energy. Now, its capacity is ranked fourth in the nation. With a new transmission project set to transport wind power to Arkansas and Tennessee, more farms being constructed, and still more room for growth, the market shows no signs of slowing down.
The state’s largest utility company, Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co., owns and operates three such wind farms in northwest Oklahoma, plus two more south of Woodward. Built between 2003 and 2007, the turbines came online before the lesser prairie-chicken was placed on the endangered species list in 2014. Still, to monitor any impacts the turbines may cause to the prairie-chicken and other wildlife, the utility formed a partnership with the state and federal wildlife agencies.
Usha Turner, the utility’s corporate environmental director, says her company has “had conversations with local and federal agencies about the lesser prairie-chicken,” even though it was only listed for a few years. Once the bird was protected under the Endangered Species Act, the utility became a voluntary member of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, a group dedicated to preserving and maintaining wildlife in the West. The association operates in each of the five states that prairie-chickens call home and has collected over $42 million in enrollment and impact fees from companies causing “unavoidable impacts” to habitats and ecosystems. All fees go toward off-site mitigation projects, such as contracts with private landowners to leave their property as feral grassland. As of 2015, ten 10-year contracts for more than 96,000 acres had been finalized.
Yet the utility’s relationship with the lesser prairie-chicken and its habitat remains complicated. To date, the utility has avoided paying mitigation fees to offset any impacts from its turbines since turbine installation in the bird’s habitat was completed prior to the chicken’s 2014 listing, Turner said. While the company’s wind developments have dominated the area since Oklahoma’s green-energy endeavors began in the early 2000s, the utility has secured roughly 40,000 acres of habitat for prairie-chickens and other grassland animals. Prior to that, Turner said, an agreement with the state wildlife department saw the company direct over $8 million dollars toward prairie-chicken habitat preservation.
Still, the utility isn’t blind to declining prairie-chicken numbers. Even before its listing, Turner told me, they worked with wildlife agencies to relocate turbines and transmission infrastructure away from regions containing known prairie-chicken habitat. An important move, to be sure, but one that won’t halt or likely even slow the bird’s dramatic population loss, especially with more than three dozen new wind farms in the pipe for Oklahoma alone. Six of these farms will be built near or in the panhandle; four are coming to Woodward and Ellis counties, while the same number will be built in Texas, Beaver and Woods counties. As they rise, prairie-chickens fall.
Wind Turbines One Factor Among Many
As convenient as it would be to point the finger at wind turbines as the main culprit in prairie-chicken’s slow demise, it’s not that simple; it never is in nature. “We saw declines in habitats and habitat conditions, we saw good nesting years, bad nesting years — we’ve seen all of that with and without the turbines,” said Horton. “To say that the wind turbine is the cause of everything bad that’s ever happened to the lesser prairie-chicken — no. That’s not the case.”
While the list of factors impacting the bird’s habitat is ever-increasing, Horton believes it largely comes down to habitat loss and degradation. “There used to be, at one point in time, just literally endless miles, miles, miles and miles of continuous, good habitat,” Horton told me. Many miles of that habitat are now gone, and the causes are legion: urban sprawl, road construction, energy infrastructure expansions, field conversion to non-native crops and, yes, wind turbines. All of it has hurt prairie-chicken habitat.
Despite challenges in stemming the loss of prairie-chickens, Horton knows that no one wants to see the charismatic bird suffer extinction. “If there was a clear solution, you and I wouldn’t be talking about prairie-chickens,” he told me. “It would have been implemented already. It’s not easy.” He feels there are potential solutions in conservation efforts that focus on finding common ground between competing interests on the landscape. The state and federal wildlife agencies encourage private landowners to manage their land for high quality native habitat, which provides desirable food source, among other benefits. The G. M. Sutton Avian Research Center has implemented an initiative to mark barbed-wire fences with white vinyl clips about three inches long. The clips are said to allow chickens to see the fence clearer so they don’t get stuck (locals mock this theory).
Whether it’s land management or simply good weather conditions, prairie-chicken numbers have bounced back in the past few years. The Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies reported that between 2014 and 2015, aerial surveys showed a 25 percent population increase in three-quarters of the ecozones where lesser prairie-chickens are found, stretching from New Mexico to Kansas and into Colorado. In 2015 USFWS figured that lesser prairie-chicken numbers hovered around 30,000, a significant rebound after the population dipped to a low of 17,000 in 2013.
However, the problem remains that more wind farms are being constructed directly in the chicken’s limited habitat than the birds can handle. Locations need to be identified where the turbines can be situated that will minimize their impacts. Horton believes those places can be found. “Obviously we’d like to work with companies to talk about siting,” he said. And if companies cannot feasibly avoid habitats, he said, then mitigating any impacts caused by the turbines will become his department’s primary objective. “There are enough people with enough smarts, resources and knowledge working on the issue,” he says. “The bird will persist.”
Alva Gregory still worries about the prairie-chicken’s future. Habitat loss isn’t helped by the fact that the best sites for wind turbines tend to be where prairie-chickens congregate. If private companies “develop wind like they would like to, in the areas they want to, I’m afraid that we’ll lose a lot of birds,” he said. And if that land disappears, Gregory said, “If they cover the northwest panhandle up, I don’t know where the birds will go.”
Originally published by New Territory magazine. © 2017 Bryce McElhaney. All rights reserved.