We’ll use 1.7 Earths’ worth of resources this year. Can six pledges make a difference?
We humans use a lot of stuff — so much stuff, in fact, that we consume more in a year than the planet is capable of regenerating.
That wasn’t a problem until a few decades ago. Back in 1987 the “overshoot” date for Earth’s resources was December 19, less than two weeks before the end of the year. That’s not too bad, right?
Thirty years later, however, that date has moved up — and up — and up. Last year what has now been dubbed Earth Overshoot Day had moved all the way up to August 8.
This year it’s even earlier.
August 2.
That means that by the end of 2017 we will have used the equivalent of about 1.7 Earths’ worth of resources.
Oops.
“It’s surprising that we haven’t been able to turn around the trend much,” says Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network, which runs the Earth Overshoot Day campaign each year. “The increase seems to be slowing down, but not very rapidly yet.”
(The Revelator is published by the Center for Biological Diversity, one of Global Footprint Network’s partners in Earth Overshoot Day.)
Despite the six-day leap forward this year, Wackernagel actually encourages people to take Earth Overshoot Day as a positive moment and an opportunity for change. “Since the very beginning we have pledged to be optimistic, positive, and just describe what the situation is.”
Being positive helps, but it isn’t necessarily enough, so this year Earth Overshoot Day has introduced a new level of interactivity. “We added a new twist called Move the Date,” Wackernagel says, “to say what would it actually take to move the date four and a half days per year?” The Move the Date webpage contains six pledges people can take to make an individual or societal difference. They include something as simple as trying a new vegetarian recipe to pledging to reach out to your city leadership for broader change.
“It’s a way to translate something that feels insurmountable into kind of bite-sized opportunities,” Wackernagel says.
Wackernagel admits that moving the date back 4.5 days is a relatively small goal. “To my taste that wouldn’t be enough, but at least it would be much, much better than what we do now,” he says. And, he adds, if we accomplished that 4.5-day shift every year, we’d be back to using the resources of a single planet by the year 2050.
Another new component this year is a web tool to “calculate your own Overshoot Day.” Visitors can use the site’s footprint calculator — which looks like a 3D video game — to figure out how much they use and how it compares to others. “It lets people see what Earth Overshoot Day would be like if everybody acted like you,” Wackernagel says.
The site also contains resources for students and teachers, as well as a list of additional solutions from Project Drawdown, which earlier this year calculated the 80 most effective ways to reverse global warming.
Wackernagel acknowledges that some simple things such as eating a single vegetarian meal won’t move the global needle very far, but adds that everyone can make a difference. “We want to get away from people’s strong perception that sustainability is about a voluntary lifestyle choice for a select few. Rather, sustainability is a collective necessity, if we want to have a successful, prosperous future,” he says.
The story began on July 20 when Marianna Trevino Wright, executive director of the nonprofit center, found a crew of workers armed with chainsaws and heavy machinery on their privately owned property and private road, located just north of the Rio Grande River. The crew, she says, had already chopped down “dozens, perhaps hundreds,” of trees, shrubs and other plants. Wright also found orange stakes and large painted tags marking off about 200,000 square feet of land for apparent bulldozing. That land, according to the National Butterfly Center, serves as habitat for more than 400 endemic and migratory species, including monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus). All of that habitat might be lost to accommodate Trump’s wall, Wright fears.
The workers had not notified anyone of their presence or their intentions and had entered the property without permission, driving right past “private property” signs, Wright tells The Revelator.
Wright says the work crew, reportedly from an Alaskan construction company, told her they had been contracted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The agency quickly denied to the media that any trees had been removed by it or its partner, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That assertion was repeated to The Revelator this week. “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ contractor has not performed any clearing or tree removals in the vicinity of the National Butterfly Center,” Corps spokesperson James Frisinger wrote to me in an email.
Video evidence, however, showed that trees had been cut down:
In addition to the cleared vegetation, the video also shows a Texas tortoise (Gopherus berlandieri), a state-protected species, wandering near the contractors’ machines.
Who was responsible for this? The two agencies spent most of this past week still denying that it had even happened. Frisinger did say that a Corps-employed crew was present to collect soil samples from the flood-prevention levee on the property as part of “the limits of the permanent levee easements owned by the U.S. Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission.” The markings, he said, were to help gather “geotechnical data to help CBP plan its current and future border security program.”
But Frisinger said a second crew was also present. After several days of inquiries, Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Roderick Kise was able to confirm that the trees had been removed by this second crew. He said the work was part of ongoing maintenance work for the levee on the National Butterfly Center’s property and the access road used by border patrol agents. He added that the center should have been informed of the work prior to the crew’s arrival.
Wright disputed those comments, saying the levees on their property meet all standards and are “certified FEMA compliant” and that tree removal would not mitigate future floods. The access road, meanwhile, is “already wide and well-maintained,” she says.
The bigger picture continues to emerge, and it shows plans that would affect private properties such as the National Butterfly Center. Wright has posted online copies of an email originally sent by Customs and Border Protection acting branch chief Daniel Schroeder to undisclosed recipients on July 25 — five days after the work on their property — stating that the agency had begun research into which landowners would be affected by border-wall construction. “Obtaining the appropriate real estate interest is imperative to completing this project,” the email reads. It continues: “CBP anticipates beginning direct engagement activities with identified landowners before the end of FY 2017. This initial landowner engagement will include seeking permission to identify the boundaries of the property through a right of entry to survey agreement. Both the landowner and the government will then engage expert appraisers to give an opinion on the value of the land. At that time, USACE will attempt to negotiate with the landowner for the sale of the property at fair market value.”
If things do move forward with the border wall, Wright says the markers placed on their land indicate that about 1.2 miles of the National Butterfly Center’s property would end up behind the wall, making it inaccessible. “We’re losing about two-thirds of our property,” she says.
They wouldn’t be alone. Maps posted online reveal that the wall would also cut off nearby county parks, the famously haunted La Lomita Mission, local businesses and residences, and even a RV park. “That entire community will be behind the wall,” Wright says. “How will they receive emergency fire and medical services?”
Carlos Diaz, southwest branch chief for Customs and Border Protection, told me via email on July 26 that “no decision has been made regarding locations as we’re waiting for the FY18 [budget] to be approved.” The House of Representatives voted to approve that budget on July 27.
Ultimately, Wright says this is not about protecting the center’s titular butterflies. “It’s about due process and property rights,” she says. “Private property is sacrosanct. It’s the fiber of the American dream.”
Legal experts consulted by The Revelator say the federal government has a lot of power, but can’t just show up and start bulldozing things. “No, they can’t do that,” says Patrick Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School. “When it comes to actually taking property — certainly by physical occupation, damaging property and causing economic harm — they’re going to have to pay. That means somebody’s got to file a lawsuit, though.”
Wright says the National Butterfly Association and its parent organization, the North American Butterfly Association, are already looking into that and have set up a crowdfunding campaign to support their legal fight. “We don’t imagine that we can stop the wall,” she admits. “This really is a David and Goliath-type fight. But who knows. We’ve got to give it our all.”
Just two weeks after France said it will no longer allow the sale of gas- and diesel-powered autos after 2040, the United Kingdom has followed suit. In addition, the UK announced it is also exploring ways to tax the dirtiest vehicles on the road as a way to lower current air pollution levels in the most-affected local areas. About half of all cars registered in the UK each year are diesel-powered; electric and hybrid vehicles, although a growing market, still represent a tiny fraction of all new cars sold there. Experts predict that should start to shift in the mid-2020s as prices become more competitive.
Wildlife would disappear most dramatically in the remaining forests and grasslands of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. The greatest species loss would occur in the Peruvian Amazon basin where as many as 317 species could vanish as a result of agricultural development.
As a doctoral researcher at Humboldt University Berlin, I studied human food consumption, land use and how they affect wildlife. Our research was published July 17 in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
While human population has doubled since 1970, the number of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians have dropped by more than half. At its root, this widespread environmental destruction is a result of our growth as a species and increasing food consumption to sustain ourselves.
Our research shows that Sub-Saharan Africa is particularly at risk of harmful agricultural development. This region is at the crossroads of economic, demographic and agricultural growth, and minimizing potential effects of agricultural change there is an urgent challenge.
The potential biodiversity loss due to agricultural expansion and intensification worldwide could be as high as 317 species in some locales (left), reaching 31 per cent of known vertebrate animals (right). (Laura Kehoe), Author provided
This becomes more worrying when considering the percentage of land that is currently at risk (i.e. natural but arable) and not protected against future development. Four-fifths of the regions we identify at risk of farmland expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa are unprotected. This is less than half of the 43 percent protected in Latin America.
Some may mistakenly believe that protecting land from farming is about preserving wildlife habitat while local people go hungry. But it’s not a binary choice. Instead, the goal is to ensure an ample supply of nutritious food while at the same time conserving the most biodiverse and unique places on Earth. This is possible if we try. Knowing in advance what areas are most at risk allows us to better plan for a more sustainable future.
Aside from protecting land, food can be grown at little to no cost to biodiversity. For example, small-holder agro-ecological farming, which uses diverse cropping techniques along with fewer chemical fertilizers and pesticides, can produce large quantities of nutritious food at little to no cost to wildlife.
We need to increase awareness of agro-ecological farming methods and secure local people’s land-holder rights — a crucial step to preventing large foreign corporations from buying up land for monoculture farming.
Communities adopting agro-ecological techniques is a win-win solution that goes a long way towards sustainably feeding the world without pushing wildlife towards extinction.
What can policy makers do?
Current large-scale conservation schemes are based on factors that include past habitat loss and the threatened status of species, but none include the potential for future land-use change. We need to do a better job of predicting future pressures on wildlife habitat, especially because timely conservation action is cheaper and more effective than trying to fix the damage caused by farming. Our research takes a step in this direction.
We also show which countries could do with more support for conservation initiatives to protect land and find ways to sustainably grow food. Suriname, Guyana and the Republic of the Congo are just a few examples, as well as a number of countries in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa that are at the center of high agricultural growth, low conservation investment and very high numbers of species that could be lost due to agricultural development.
Since most agricultural demand comes from richer nations, those countries should provide education and support for sustainable farming methods and locally led conservation efforts.
Map shows countries at risk of high species loss from agricultural development (yellow, bear icon), rapid agricultural growth 2009 to 2013 (orange, tractor symbol), and differing levels of conservation spending. Red represents low spending, high growth, and high species loss. Purple shows high spending, high growth, and low species loss. Green is high spending, low growth, and high species loss. Low values for all three factors are in grey. White represents no data. Dollar figures per square kilometer. Laura Kehoe, Author provided
What can you do?
All of this raises the question: How can we eat well without harming wildlife? One simple step we can all take right now that would have a far greater impact than any other (aside from having fewer children): Cut out the grain-fed beef.
Imagine throwing away 25 plates of perfectly good food to get one plate of beef — the idea is absurd and would likely be news if done en masse. But that is precisely what we are all unknowingly doing by eating resource-intensive meat. Articles on food waste seem half-baked when keeping in mind the bizarre grain-to-meat ratio of many of our most popular meats.
There are ways in which farmers can raise livestock with little to no environmental damage, particularly when land is not overgrazed and trees remain on the landscape. Indeed, in some remote areas grazing cattle are a crucial source of food and nourishment. Unfortunately, the industrialized feedlot model that relies heavily on grain makes up the overwhelming majority of the meat in your supermarket. That is the kind of farming that our research investigates.
Livestock quietly causes 10 times more deforestation than the palm oil industry but seems to get about 10 times less media attention. While it’s certainly true that avoiding unsustainable palm oil is a good idea, avoiding eating animals that were raised on grain is an even more effective conservation tactic.
Feeding the world without damaging nature is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces. But with a little foresight, better land governance and some simple meal changes, many of the solutions are at arm’s length.
For wildlife’s sake, go forth and enjoy your veggie burgers.
Conservation fences protect nearby forests, but do they leave some people unexpectedly vulnerable?
On one side of the fence is a Kenyan forest, cool and misty due to the high elevation of the peaks and valleys. As you move away from the fence and deeper into the forest, the vegetation becomes denser and lush green light envelops you. Under the forest canopy an ecosystem teems with wildlife, including large mammals such as elephants, cape buffalos, rhinos, and the critically endangered eastern mountain bongo, of which there are thought to be fewer than 100 left in the wild.
On the other side of the fence is a community of families who have historically depended on the forest for their livelihoods. For them the forest contains fuelwood, water, building materials, medicinal herbs, grazing land, honey and game meat. There are even sacred spaces, trees that hold cultural significance, and caves where elders go to slaughter a goat and stay for weeks to pray.
The fence that stands between the forest and the community was put in place by conservation organizations in conjunction with the Kenyan government, in the hope of decreasing forest loss. In recent years human activity such as logging, charcoal burning, and clearing for farming has caused large areas of forests in Kenya to disappear. By surrounding the forest, the fence is meant to conserve the country’s main sources of water and the tourist-attracting wildlife that live in the forest habitat. The fence also keeps wildlife inside the forest instead of in the community, where animals like elephants have been known to destroy entire crops in a single night, leaving families without the food they depend on for survival.
On paper, fencing is a very convincing tool to reach conservation goals. It serves as a physical barrier between humans and forest, of course, but also provides a visual reminder and warning to potential trespassers. With a clear boundary created, the hope is that the forests will remain and recover.
And indeed, in areas where there was once heavy forest destruction there are signs of reduced human disturbances. For example, in some parts of Kenya’s Aberdare Range, where a fence project was completed in 2009, instances of cutting down indigenous trees within the forest to produce charcoal have decreased.
I’ve seen all of this firsthand. For my Ph.D. dissertation I spent the past year conducting research concerning the social impacts of conservation initiatives on forest-adjacent communities in Kenya. Hundreds of household surveys across four forest communities have shed light on the positive and negative effects that fencing of forests has on nearby families.
Local people living near forests in Kenya tell me they are overwhelmingly supportive of the conservation of their forests. Beyond the daily uses for their households, they understand the importance of their forests and the role they play in bringing rain and fresh air.
However, placing a barrier where there once was none has the potential to create unintended negative consequences. In some locations a newly placed fence cuts off a source of water previously used by community members, and households must find water elsewhere. As a result, some of the households end up relying on manmade dams, with stagnant water that’s shared by cattle. In other instances, the placement of a fence has cut off key access routes used to collect firewood for cooking. Women and children who once walked freely only a few meters to reach the forest edge now must walk several kilometers to access the main gate and present a permit to enter. Valuable time is lost that could otherwise be used for earning money or studying for school.
There is an even darker side. In some rare cases, recounted to me at one site during my interviews, the placement of a fence has brought cases of sexual assault to women and girls in the community. With a fence comes new employment for guards, who are hired by the national government and travel rotate to posts around the country. Women who enter the forest, they told me, are vulnerable to sexual assault. Because many of them rely on the forest to provide for their families, they fear reporting in case of backlash from the forest guards. It’s hard to quantify these cases due to the lack of official investigation, but they remain an important issue that needs to be discussed.
As is true in many fields, success stories and positive impacts of conservation plans are eagerly reported, while negative results are less publicized. That lack of publicity doesn’t mean that they have no effect, however. Although these adverse consequences are unintended, the question remains concerning who is responsible for helping to resolve them. Should conservationists and their organizations be involved in following up on the negative effects that occur as a result of their conservation initiatives? When protecting the forest is the main goal, what level of responsibility do these organizations have in preventing and then treating the negative symptoms?
My year of data collection is drawing to a close, and as I prepare to write my dissertation and defend my work, I find myself asking these questions and wrestling with the answers. Conservation is often a field of more questions than answers, more setbacks than successes, and sometimes more challenges than rewards. It is difficult and exhausting to celebrate the new growth of trees that might not otherwise exist if it were not for your effort, while at the same time face the challenge of a family that depends on those trees for their very existence. As conservationists, researchers and nature enthusiasts, we may find that fencing and other tools are useful to protect and restore wildlife and habitats. If we look, we may also find that our conservation tools have unintended negative impacts on vulnerable populations. This is not something to hide from, but rather an opportunity to be transparent and a chance to work toward solutions that demonstrate the value and importance of all forms of life.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.
Oceanic plastic poses an increasing threat for these top predators.
Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) spend most of their lives 1,000 feet and deeper below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, foraging for food in the cold dark — but even that’s not far enough down to escape the impact that humans have on the oceans.
In one well-known case in November 2011, an imperiled young elephant seal dragged himself out of the surf and flopped on the beach at Central California’s Piedras Blancas beach, about three hours’ drive south of Monterey. A green plastic packing strip dug into the flesh around his neck, slowly strangling him.
He was lucky. A group of tourists observed his plight from the scenic overlook on Highway 1 and reported him to rescuers at the Marine Mammal Center San Luis Obispo Operations Center, 35 miles south. Elephant seal encounters are restricted by the Marine Mammals Protection Act, so the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had to sign off on rescue efforts. Once that was done, a team came to the beach to sedate him, cut the plastic strap off, treat his wound and set him free.
After he returned to his ocean home, he was identified in rescue-center records as “Green Tie,” for obvious reasons. I was delighted when he showed up in 2013, easily identified by his distinctive scar. I’ve spent one morning a week on the bluff as a docent, watching the seals and talking to visitors, since 2007. That day I took this picture of him from that vantage point.
He’d become a regular to the rescue team by then. They’d responded to another call reporting him entangled in 2012, but it turned out it was only the scar from the 2011 entanglement — so deep observers thought he was still wrapped in plastic. They couldn’t see the orange tag on his left rear flipper that indicated he’d previously been treated. After he was sedated, the veterinarian found that the scar, so deep that skin folded over on itself, was irritated — a simple skin dermatitis, rather than a plastic noose.
Since then, Green Tie comes back to the beach at least once a year. Now an adult, he’s become a successful alpha male beachmaster, reigning over a harem of 30 or so females and defending breeding rights against less dominant males.
A Colorful Opportunity
Compared to the well-studied site at Ano Nuevo, the elephant seal colony at Piedras Blancas isn’t well documented — yet. Dr. Heather Liwanag, professor of marine science at nearby California Polytechnic University, is organizing her students to start tagging seals to collect baseline data.
“So many things about these seals are unanswered,” Dr. Liwanag says. Identifying individual seals of known age allows her and her students to follow behavior, such as when (or if) a female pups and how long she stays on the beach. “If it’s a tagged animal, we can follow its progress. Establishing a baseline of known-age animals will help us understand the age structure of population, when they come to sexual maturity, and develop hypotheses about them.”
Green Tie’s unique double scar makes him easy to spot. Otherwise, it’s tricky to tell one seal from another. They’re migratory, so the population on the beach is constantly changing, with seals coming and going. The small colored plastic ID tags currently attached to their back flippers are difficult for observers to read. The tags are only an inch and a half long, and the tiny numbers are often rubbed down by contact with sand, even if you get close enough to read them.
Liwanag is reviving a technique that’s been used before: dyeing identifying numbers eight inches tall on each seal’s fur that can be read from a distance. She and her students will use Clairol’s Nice ’n Easy hair color on a wooden template to stamp the seals from broom-handle-length. They’ll mark adult females as well as young seals that already have flipper tags. Dyed numbers will need at least annual replacement as the seals molt.
“We will mark any adult that has a flipper tag, so we can keep track of animals that are already tagged,” she says. “In future years, when we have a lot of tagged animals, both tagged moms and tagged pups, we’ll be able to get a feel for everybody. We intend to mark a good chunk of the population.”
The data will provide insight into how the Piedras Blanca population compares with the population at Ano Nuevo in behavior and physiology. Are the seals at Ano Nuevo, where guides lead visitors onto the beach among the seals, more acclimated to the presence of humans than seals at Piedras Blancas, where the public must stay on the bluffs above the beach? Does it influence their reproductive success or their weight?
The larger ID numbers make it easier for visitors, docents and other citizen scientists to report sightings. Liwanag and her students will be able to track individual seals and establish facts about their lives, such as when they pupped and where, and when they move from one rookery to another. Having factual data will help relate the seals’ body condition and movements to climatic conditions, population changes and other events.
Liwanag works closely with Marine Mammal Center. Her research permit allows her to be on the beach more often than the center’s restricted permit for rescue. When Liwanag and her students encounter entangled seals, the rescue team can join them on the beach instead of having to wait for permission. If they wait too long, an injured seal may leave the beach or move to another location.
The plastic problem is likely to get worse as more garbage is dumped into the ocean.
The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis reported that between 4.8 million and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic waste entered the oceans in 2010, a figure that could increase by an order of magnitude by 2025.
The NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project invites citizen scientists to report the amount and type of marine debris they find on their beaches. Similarly, California’s Coastal Cleanup Day, held annually in September since 1985, collects millions of pieces of plastic trash. It helps, but it’s not keeping up with the volume being discarded. California has banned single-use plastic bags, but plastic water bottles, cups, plates and utensils, straws, foam takeout containers and construction material continue to pour into the oceans. A gray whale with its head stuck in a crab trap was monitored as it swam north along the California coast earlier this year.
The increasing threats make the work Liwanag and her students, the Marine Mammal Center’s volunteers and staff, and other watchdog groups are doing more urgent. Making identification more visible will help protect these top predators and their role in the ecosystem.
“I hope to increase the conversation,” Liwanag says. “Part of the study will be to increase awareness that we are researching the seals. It’s important that we do what we do. Part of the process is how to communicate properly.” It’s not an easy job, but the Nice ’n Easy will make it a little bit less difficult.
A stunning new report reveals that utilities knew about the potential dangers of climate change nearly 50 years ago. Scientists first warned the electric utility industry about CO2 emissions back in 1968, according to a report from the watchdog Energy & Policy Institute. Then, during the 1970s and 1980s, utilities actually sponsored what the watchdog agency calls “cutting edge” climate-change research. Knowing that this could cause a shift away from fossil fuels, some utilities started a disinformation campaign against climate change, something that some industry players continue to do today.
Critics say the blood-soaked quest for ratings presents an image far from reality.
Tiger Shark Terror. Great White Shark Serial Killer Lives. Great Hammerhead Invasion. Australia’s Deadliest Shark Attacks. These are just a few of the programs airing this week during Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week and NatGeo Wild’s copycat, Sharkfest. Undoubtedly these programs will attract their usual massive ratings, but they may be guilty of the same kinds of film fakery that plagues many wildlife films, where the images on your screen don’t tell a full or even truthful story. In the process, experts warn the films may actually send the wrong conservation message and harm endangered species.
“The term ‘fakery’ has many nuances to it,” says Chris Palmer, founder of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University in Washington, D.C. Palmer shined a light on some of the worst aspects of wildlife filmmaking in his 2010 book and 2013 documentary Shooting in the Wild. Shark Week, he says, typifies one of the most common aspects of film fakery, where producers create a mistaken impression in the audience’s minds about what goes on in the wild. “With Shark Week, people get to see sharks as being dangerous and man-eating because that’s what gets ratings. The networks are looking for that male demographic, age 21 to 35, so they push sensational shots of sharks chomping down on people.”
Palmer, who has won two Emmy Awards for his own wildlife films, believes that pushing this misinformation — that sharks are nothing but dangerous killing machines — can hurt conservation efforts. “The wrong perception can lead to misperceptions and in the end, I think, hurt public policy toward these animals,” he observes. “One has to wonder how that affects work that goes on at CITES [the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species] and places like that where we try to get international protection for sharks. If the populace is thinking of sharks as dangerous, why would anyone save them? That makes it harder, I think, to do the right thing.”
Real or fake?
Demonizing animals is just one of the many kinds of fakery tainting the wildlife filmmaking industry. Another kind of deception involves manipulating events to get the “right” shots on film. That might include leaving food out for animals, dosing a carcass with candy, drugging animals so they don’t move or pushing them toward the camera. “The worst case is when you put predator and prey together to get photographs,” Palmer says. Although this technique has been employed extensively in the past, he calls it immoral: “You get these dramatic shots, but people don’t see animals as they really are.”
In other cases, what appears to be on camera isn’t completely true even if it may seem to be that way on the surface. Some films claim to follow the story of specific animals, although the footage is of multiple individuals edited together to tell a “real” story. In other films, discordant shots are edited together to depict something that could not be filmed in the wild. Sir David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet series infamously mixed footage of polar bears in the wild with sequences shot in a zoo. This created a scandal a few years ago when viewers found out, and the Discovery Channel added a disclaimer when it brought the series to the U.S.
A more subtle kind of fakery can occur in the editing stages. Filmmakers might be in the field for months at a time, getting limited shots of their subjects every few weeks. But all too often those short shots can be edited together to make it seem as if they occurred in a very short sequence. “The final film looks like there are a lot of these rare animals,” Palmer says. “People watching it are saying to themselves, ‘Well, golly, what’s the problem? I was just watching this film, and I see hundreds of these chimps or these white-tipped oceanic sharks or whatever,’ and then they don’t realize that the film has been put together with very little footage because it’s hard to find these animals.”
The risk to wildlife
In addition to fakery, Palmer points out that the animals themselves are often endangered by filmmakers. “We get too close, we harass them, we’re desperate to get the money shots,” he says. “And we go in so close and bother them that some of the animals even get killed.” Ethical codes for filmmakers should prevent this from happening, but they lack enforcement. “They set a marker, but if someone breaks them there is no one in the field to say, ‘Don’t do that,’” Palmer says.
Many filmmakers may find themselves placed under extreme corporate pressure to get dramatic footage of rare and endangered species. Because most crews contain just one or two people and no one is in the field watching, circumstances can lead to cutting corners. “No one’s looking at you,” Palmer says. “It’s very easy to do things that no one would know about.” He notes that there aren’t any real metrics about this, because people don’t admit it, but it happens: “The only time you hear the truth is at 2 A.M. after a few beers.”
The public’s role
The public can have a role in reducing film fakery, whether it’s during Shark Week or on another wildlife program. “I would encourage people to be a little skeptical and ask questions,” he says. “How did they get that shot? Is the animal being controlled? Did that animal come from a game farm where it was held under inhumane conditions? Especially for endangered species, how was it treated? Did the filmmakers keep their distance so the animal was undisturbed or was the animal harassed and chased down to get good footage?” Asking television networks these questions, he suggests, can lead to change: “All of these networks are sensitive. I think if the public speaks up, they will do a better job.”
Although he expresses a lot of criticism for fakery, Palmer does think that wildlife filmmaking can have a very positive effect, even in cases where the narrative plays loose with a few facts to pull at heartstrings. “People who love the film may vote in a positive way for senators and congressmen who will vote in a more sustainable manner,” he asserts. “That may be an example where fakery is, if you like, pro-conservation.”
Two years after the infamous shooting of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, one of his sons has also been shot and killed. Xanda, a six-year-old father with his own cubs, wandered outside of protected Hwange National Park earlier this month and was legally shot by a trophy hunter. Like Cecil before him, Xanda carried a radio collar as part of a long-term scientific research effort. Conservationists now fear that Xanda’s seven cubs could die as other males vie to take over for the late pride leader.
Trying to save this species from extinction also means being witness to their destruction.
Trying to save one of the rarest species on Earth takes an emotional toll on you.
“It’s horrible,” says Captain Oona Layolle. “It’s really hard on everyone in the crew.”
Layolle is the campaign leader for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Milagro III mission, which just returned from the Gulf of California after a six-month effort to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus) from extinction. The most important part of their mission — a partnership with the Mexican government — involved finding and removing illegal gillnets set by fishermen to capture another local species, the totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), whose swim bladders that sell for thousands of dollars a pound to Chinese investors. The indiscriminate gillnets, set and anchored into place, capture and kill totoaba, vaquita and everything else that crosses their paths.
“I have never in my life seen so many dead animals,” says Layolle. “Whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles…it’s crazy. We see the dead every day.” She sighs. “It’s gotten so it’s almost kind of normal to me now.” All told this year the Milagro crew pulled 1,195 dead animals from 233 illegal nets and fishing lines.
The list of the dead includes five dead vaquita, a species whose population had already declined to just 30 animals by the end of last year and which may fall to as few as 15 by 2018.
“A dead vaquita is the last thing we want to see,” Layolle says. “I’ve seen more dead than alive.” At least one of this year’s dead vaquita was a newborn or fetal animal, possibly pushed out by its mother in a vain attempt to save it from death in a net.
The nets weren’t the only place they found dead animals. At the end of the mission, the crew walked the 27 kilometers of beach between the Mexican towns of San Felipe and Santa Clara and found themselves on a killing field. “The beach of San Felipe was littered with the bones of totoaba,” Layolle reports. “We photographed and measured 384 totoaba heads.” The bodies were all that remained after fishermen carved out the totoabas’ valuable swim bladders.
But even amidst this catastrophic level of mortality, life persists. Sea Shepherd rescued nearly 800 live animals from nets this year, including several totoaba, many of which barely clung to life by the time they were discovered. “When we find them, most of the time they are dying,” Layolle says. “So we have to do a massage, kind of, move it back and forth with water on the lungs. Usually they just start swimming.”
They weren’t lucky enough to save any vaquita from nets, but Layolle recounts one emotional encounter toward the end of this year’s mission. “It was just when we were getting ready to turn back,” she says. “It was a very calm day, the third day in a row with no illegal fishing during the daytime. We were drifting. Suddenly a vaquita came into view of our ship. It was kind of like a call, like she was saying ‘don’t ever leave.’
“It’s so magical to see such a rare animal,” she continues. “I always remember that on the hard days.”
Despite the difficulty of their work, Layolle stands firm in her belief that their mission matters. “When I started this campaign, a lot of people told me there was no point to do it because the vaquita was already nearly gone. But I actually think it has been really important because they can’t go extinct without anyone knowing. And it can’t happen again to any other species.”
Beyond that, she feels her team has made a difference for the wildlife in the Gulf of California. “I know finding these nets has saved so many species that would have died in them,” she says. “Maybe if we hadn’t retrieved all of those nets the vaquita would already be gone.”
“It’s surprising that we haven’t been able to turn around the trend much,” says Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network, which runs the Earth Overshoot Day campaign each year. “The increase seems to be slowing down, but not very rapidly yet.”
For wildlife’s sake, go forth and enjoy your veggie burgers.
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