The deadly wildfires raging through Portugal have killed more than 60 people and created smoke clouds big enough to be seen from space. Is this the wave of the future? A new study finds that wildfires have tripled over the past 30 years in the Great Plains, putting a strain on local agencies. Meanwhile, California’s wildfires have doubled this year, where drought is over but a wetter season has just produced more grasses to burn. On top of that, another recent study found that the smoke from wildfires can, itself, have an effect on the climate, extending the vicious cycle even further.
Beyond Division: American Indians Unite to Create Bears Ears
A conversation with Navajo/Hopi filmmaker Angelo Baca.
BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT— Sitting on the ground, in a grass clearing surrounded by ponderosa pines, in the shadow of the Bears Ears butte, Angelo Baca speaks first of his grandmother.
“She knew where all the spots were for deer and elk,” the Navajo/Hopi filmmaker says. “She would literally say, ‘Be careful around this corner, this is where they cross.’ And when you turn around that corner, a whole line of deer would appear. And she wasn’t even a hunter.”
Her knowledge of the land and plants and animals was ingrained in her soul, says Baca. There was no difference between her and the land. She would wander off from the family for days to be immersed in the Bears Ears landscape, following the footsteps of her own grandmother, who once lived here.
“There’s a very deep longstanding traditional knowledge base that a lot of the folks around here have and which was built into the protections for Bears Ears,” he says. “We wanted to put those first and foremost as the things we wanted to have protected. The relationships of the people, the place, the landscape and biodiversity and how it all interacts.”
Baca is referring to a provision in President Barack Obama’s Dec. 28, 2016 proclamation creating the 1.35-million acre Bears Ears National Monument. Obama specifically called for management of the monument to “carefully and fully consider integrating the traditional and historical knowledge and special expertise” of American Indian cultures deeply connected to the cultural landscape.
Bears Ears has long served as a refuge — not only for the soul, but also physical freedom. Whether it was Navajos, led by their great chief Manuelito to avoid the U.S. Army seeking to round his people up for the brutal and deadly 1864 Long March, or western outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hiding from the law, the labyrinth of canyons, mesas, washes, forested uplands and ancient ruins made it a haven for those seeking solitude, for whatever reason.
“This place represents freedom and peace and civility and refuge,” Baca says in the soft, even, thoughtful cadence of his forefathers and tempered by a deep understanding that the land has mysterious powers to be honored.
“This is a beautiful peaceful environment and you have to watch what you say and think when you are up here because this is like an amplifier,” he says. “It makes the kinds of things that you think and feel that much stronger.”
Baca, of Hopi/Navajo lineage, grew up in the Blanding area after his family decided it would be better for him to have the opportunity of a formal education. He took advantage of it and is now a documentary filmmaker. He has an undergraduate degree in anthropology and American Indian studies and a master’s in communications and American Indian studies from the University of Washington, and is now a Ph.D. candidate at New York University in anthropology.
His deep roots to the land through his family and traditions, combined with his years of rigorous academic training, gives him unique insight into the conflict that swirls over Obama’s national monument designation for Bears Ears. Utah politicians and many non-native people living in the small towns of Blanding and Montecello east of the monument are adamantly opposed to its protection.
They fear their western way of life is being trampled as their ability to access the Bears Ears landscape for a wide range of uses — from recreation to natural resource development to cattle grazing and weekend pot-hunting excursions — will become more regulated and restricted.
“There’s a lot of differences between the western and indigenous way of thinking about land and people and space, time, temporality,” he explains. “There’s a western framework that is very Eurocentric in the way of thought, that’s very lineal, compartmentalized, separated. You can take things and look at them and dissect them very single-mindedly, narrow-mindedly.
“Whereas in indigenous epistemology, and indigenous system of thought, it is very holistic, it’s all encompassing and overall related. Everything affects something else,” he says.
With such a fundamentally different way of looking at the same landscape, it’s no wonder conflict arises.
“The differences are from the get-go,” Baca says. “It’s very difficult to have one person who is talking in squares talking to one person who is thinking in circles.”
But the most important conflicts that had to be resolved before Bears Ears National Monument could become a reality were longstanding disputes and bitterness that has persisted between the American Indian tribes surrounding Bears Ears. The distrust between the tribes slowly melted away after Navajo leaders recognized that all the region’s tribes had a deep history and close relationship to the Bear Ears landscape.
Two words cleared the path to collaboration on achieving a greater goal of protecting Bears Ears. “Welcome home,” Navajo elder and political leader Mark Maryboy told an intertribal gathering that included Hopi, Zuni and 19 other New Mexico tribes in April 2015.
Maryboy’s gracious overture, Baca says, allowed rivals to set aside their differences. “It was the acknowledgment and respect of the welcoming and understanding that we don’t call this ours as in ownership and property,” Baca says. “We just call it ours as in something shared.”
Those disarming words of inclusion, Baca says, opened the door for American Indians to work together on a project that no one had ever done before: Petition the president of the United States to designate a common spiritual homeland for American Indians a national monument.
A few months later, five tribes formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and used the work that the Salt Lake City nonprofit Utah Diné Bikéyah had accomplished through years of compiling and documenting the oral history and cultural significance of Bears Ears. Baca is the cultural resource coordinator for Utah Diné Bikéyah.
The intertribal coalition includes the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah Oury. Baca says the coalition’s efforts to present its plans and open a dialogue with Utah state and county officials and the Utah congressional delegation were met with silence.
“The coalition decided after being disrespected and not listened to that they would just go over their heads and activate their nation-to-nation relationship that we have with the federal government as a federally recognized tribe,” he says.
Elders from different tribes met with federal leaders and described to them why Bears Ears was so important.
“Even though a lot of them are not great English speakers or writers, or highly educated, they are still smart,” he says. “And they are still passionate. And they know how to relate, reach people, talk with folks and help communicate about the significance of this place.”
The Obama administration listened. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell held a public hearing in Bluff, Utah, where Baca had a chance to interview her for a documentary film he’s producing.
Opposition to Obama’s monument designation was immediate. Utah’s congressional delegation, led by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and Rep. Rob Bishop, asked President Trump to rescind the national monument. Last April Trump signed an executive order requiring Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review all national monuments designated in the last 21 years greater than 100,000 acres, with Bears Ear targeted for a shorter review.
On June 12 Zinke said he would recommend that Bears Ears be reduced in size, but offered no details on the magnitude of the reduction stating that more details will be forthcoming later this summer.
Baca says indigenous leaders are very concerned about the attempt to renege on the national monument designation and intend to legally fight any effort to overturn or reduce the size the monument. He says Trump’s effort to downsize or overturn Bears Ears is a warning that all of America’s public lands are threatened.
“I think it means that public lands, national parks, national monuments are not safe,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re native or not. It’s an excuse for the administration to take a wide swath at all of the beautiful lands that we have already protected and kept safe and have been stewards of and its being opened up to all forms of extraction.”
No matter what happens to Bear Ears, the tribes intend to protect this area.
“We’re still going to be going here. We’re still going to pray here, do our ceremonies. We’re still going to gather our firewood and our herbs and medicines,” he says. “We will reserve, retain, and assert our sovereign rights.”
“It’s still native land,” he adds. “And it’s always going to be.”
Climate Change Puts Sea Turtles in the Hot Seat
Eggs and hot sand do not mix.
When the fate of your species depends on the temperature of your incubating eggs, climate change is a big deal.
Take sea turtles, for example. Years of research has shown that the sex of turtle hatchlings depends on the temperatures of their sand-covered nests, a process called “temperature-dependent sex determination.” If temperatures are on the cool side, the hatchlings will be male. When things warm up, more females are born.
Of course, temperature has one more effect: If things get too hot, the eggs can die and fewer hatchlings — or none at all — are born. This is already happening in some places, such as Florida, according to a recent report from Oceana.
For years now researchers have warned that climate change will cause sea turtles nests to heat up, producing more females than males. This gender imbalance would eventually drive the animals toward extinction, since not enough males would be born to keep the turtles going into successive generations.
Now a new study — published today, World Sea Turtle Day, in the journal Global Change Biology — takes our understanding of these climate impacts on sea turtles even further. The paper predicts that climate change will, indeed, cause more female sea turtles to be born, which could actually result in a temporary increase in breeding populations and nests.
That will only last for a few decades, though. After the year 2100, the researchers warn, nest-incubation temperatures will become so warm that egg survival will decline dramatically. When combined with the gender imbalance that will already exist by that point, they predict that this will threaten the survival of all seven sea turtle species.
The researchers conducted their study on the Cape Verde islands, the world’s third-most important nesting site for loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta). The islands, off the west coast of Africa, are also important rookeries for olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea) and green turtles (Chelonia mydas).
Over the course of six years, the research team gathered more than 6,600 days of sand- and air-temperature data. They also monitored the hatching success rate of more than 3,600 sea turtle nests, including more than 1,500 nests that were moved from the beaches where they were laid to a hatchery (an important step to protect the eggs from poachers).
Most of the eggs they monitored during the study did well, but that won’t last, they write. Climate models predict that air temperatures in the region will rise between 1.5 and 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100, enough to change sex ratios and lower survival rates.
There are a lot of variables in all of this, including sand color (darker sands get hotter), rainfall levels and hurricane activity. The dates when warmer temperatures occur also matters, as more-developed turtle embryos appear to have a better chance of surviving higher temperatures, although that warming still reduces their overall fitness and may affect post-hatching survival.
The paper reveals a few potential conservation and research priorities. First, the researchers commented, conservation plans may need to focus on light-colored beaches, which won’t warm quite as much. Second, more research is needed to determine the minimum number of males required for a sea turtle population to remain viable.
Finally, the researchers conclude their paper with a call to monitor hatchling mortality for other temperature-dependent species, such as lizards. That, they wrote, “should be a key conservation priority in order to safeguard the species in a warming world.”
Previously on The Revelator:
Judge Calls for More Review of Dakota Access Pipeline
Less than three weeks after crude oil started flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline, a judge has ruled that the pipeline’s environmental review was inadequate and did not address potential impacts to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s fishing and hunting rights, or on environmental justice. President Trump ordered an expedited approval process for the Dakota and Keystone XL pipelines this past January, following years of protests by environmental groups.
The Roots of the Antiquities Act? They’re in Bears Ears
America’s newest national monument was also the first ever proposed by American Indian tribes.
BLUFF, Utah— The first national monument approved by President Theodore Roosevelt after the passage of the 1906 Antiquities Act was Wyoming’s Devils Tower — made famous to a generation of 1970s moviegoers by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Roosevelt’s proclamation said that the isolated, dramatic rock outcropping, whose sweeping vertical lines jut 867 feet out of the ground, is “an extraordinary example of the effect of erosion as to be a natural wonder and object of historic and great scientific interest.”
Devils Tower set the stage for Roosevelt to create Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908, when he set aside 818,000 acres for protection and signaled that large-scale national monuments were part of the president’s prerogative.
But as important as the Grand Canyon is to the nation’s environmental and cultural heritage, historical records reveal that the primary reason the Antiquities Act was passed was to preserve ancient culture — to stop the widespread looting of American Indian ruins scattered across the Four Corners region of the Southwest.
For more than 20 years before the passage of the Antiquities Act, a debate had raged in academia and on Capitol Hill on how to stop the pillage of archeological treasures. Newly arrived settlers were looting ruins, ceremonial structures and burial grounds scattered across vast canyons, mesas and washes — including the land that’s now part of the new, and under President Trump hotly contested, Bears Ears National Monument.
It took 110 more years than Devils Tower to put the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears monument in place, but it finally happened this past December with President Obama’s signature. But this week Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke confirmed that the Trump administration will follow through on its long-threatened plans to shrink the monument — a move that brought instant condemnation from the coalition of five southwestern tribes that first proposed Bears Ears for protection.
“Any attempt to eliminate or reduce the boundaries of this Monument would be wrong on every count,” the Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition said in a statement. “Such action would be illegal, beyond the reach of presidential authority.”
Largely lost in the debate over Bears Ears and other sites is this: The monument in southeast Utah was the first-ever driven by tribal interests wanting to see this place protected for its deep cultural and ecological significance. And attempts to roll it back are provoking bitter reactions among tribal leaders who worked most of this decade to research and document the significance of Bears Ears.
“It’s an attack — an attack on tribal nations,” says James Adaki, Navajo Nation Oljato Chapter president and a Bears Ears commissioner.
Obama’s proclamation created the Bears Ears Commission, which includes representatives from the five southwest tribes that proposed the monument. Established this past March, the commission will work now collaboratively with the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to develop a management plan.
Adaki and other members of the Bears Ears Commission interviewed by The Revelator during a recent joint management meeting with federal officials in Bluff, Utah, said that opposition to the monument and Trump’s review of Bears Ears in particular is rooted in distrust, lack of knowledge, disrespect of tribal governments and, in some instances, racism.
Despite the monument’s uncertain future, federal officials and the commission engaged in daylong discussion on May 16 on developing a management plan. Even as they moved forward, federal officials said no money would be spent to purchase and install Bears Ears National Monument signs until the completion of Trump’s review process.
The good-faith discussions during the management meeting don’t defuse the strained relationship between the tribes and monument opponents which became further inflamed by a statement last month by Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, who said the tribes were “manipulated” into supporting Bears Ears National Monument.
“The Indians,” Hatch said, “they don’t fully understand that a lot of the things they currently take for granted on those lands, they won’t be able to do it if it’s made clearly into a monument or a wilderness. Once you put a monument there, you do restrict a lot of things that could be done, and that includes use of the land…Just take my word for it.”
Adaki says Hatch’s comments were “an insult against tribes, because we know what we are doing.”
Davis Filfred, the Navajo Nation’s spokesman for the seven Utah chapters and a Bears Ears commissioner, says the monument opponents want the designation rescinded so they can exploit natural resources.
“They want to go after coal. They want to go after petroleum, uranium, potash. They want to clear all the timber,” he told me, during a break in a commission meeting held in Bluff at a Utah State University auxiliary building beneath sweeping cottonwood trees.
Filfred, a former Navajo law-enforcement officer, is particularly concerned about protecting the extraordinary biodiversity at Bears Ears.
“This is habitat for a lot of species. We have big trophy elk, trophy mule dear, antelope, bobcat, mountain lions, bears you name it. Not only that, we have vegetation. They just want to clear that and make it a parking lot and just terrorize it,” he says.
“And we’re saying no,” he says emphatically. “That’s sacred ground.”
Just beneath the heated debate over Bears Ears, Filfred says, lies the unmistakable odor of racism against Native Americans, which, he says is “absolutely” a force driving the opposition.
“That’s what it is, plain and simple,” he says. “It’s very obvious.”
Bears Ears: A History of Exploitation
People have been profiting off Bears Ears and similar sites for more than 150 years. Starting in the mid-to-late 1800s, artifact hunters routinely plundered burial grounds and tore down walls of irreplaceable stone-and-masonry structures in search of treasures buried beneath the Ancestral Puebloan ruins across the Southwest.
Pottery, baskets, human remains, tools, weapons and other artifacts disappeared into the private market. Major museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, sponsored expeditions to excavate ruins and extract tens of thousands of artifacts for their collections. Southwestern tribes, many of whom had cultural and historical ties to the ancient sites, lacked any substantial influence to stop the exploitation.
Hoping to reverse this trend, renowned archeologist and anthropologist Edgar L. Hewett identified the Bears Ears region, which he then called the Bluff district, in 1904 as one of the top four areas in the Southwest in need of immediate protection.
“No scientific man is true to the ideals of science who does not protest against this outrageous traffic, and it will be a lasting reproach upon our Government if it does not use its power to restrain it,” Hewett wrote in a Sept. 3, 1904 memorandum on preserving the “historic and prehistoric” ruins of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.
Hewett, believed by historians to have closely worked with Progressive Era leaders in President Theodore Roosevelt’s Interior Department, also wrote the language for the Antiquities Act, which passed the House and the Senate without a single word changed. Roosevelt signed it into law on June 8, 1906.
“There seems little doubt the impetus for the law that would eventually become the Antiquities Act was the desire to protect aboriginal objects and artifacts,” wrote legal scholar Mark Squillace in his 2003 treatise, The Monumental Legacy of the Antiquities Act of 1906.
The destruction of antiquities on Bears Ears has continued unabated for the past century. Local San Juan County residents have a long history of pilfering the ruins, which has led to high-profile federal police raids in Blanding that increased bitterness between the mostly white Mormon community and nearby tribes.
“In southeastern Utah, there are generations of families who have looted cultural sites and removed precious archeological resources from public land,” according to the Bureau of Land Management’s Office of Law Enforcement and Security report included in an October 2016 San Juan County-commissioned legal analysis arguing against designating Bears Ears a national monument.
“For many of these individuals, these activities were part of a typical weekend outing,” the report reads.
A Long-delayed Designation
Starting in 1906 the Antiquities Act gave presidents sweeping authority and the sole authorization to create national monuments — without prior congressional approval or the need for consultation with local communities.
The law states, in part, that the president “could declare by public proclamation, historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other areas of historic and scientific interest, that are situated upon lands owned and controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments.”
The law placed no restrictions on the size of monuments, a major difference from previous bills that had been introduced in the years leading up to passage of the Antiquities Act that limited monuments to about 640 acres.
President Jimmy Carter set aside 56 million acres for various national monuments in Alaska in December 1978, the most for a land-based national monument at one time. Like Obama, Carter was severely criticized by Republican leaders for an allegedly dictatorial action they saw as an infringement of their rights. But Carter’s designation was never overturned.
President Roosevelt swiftly made use of the Antiquities Act power, and the first two areas on Hewett’s most endangered ancient cultural sites list soon found themselves protected. The third was protected in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson.
Roosevelt created Mesa Verde National Park, which includes more than 600 cliff dwellings in southwest Colorado, just three weeks after he signed the Antiquities Act. In 1907 he proclaimed Chaco Canyon National Monument, in northwest New Mexico. Woodrow Wilson designated Bandelier National Monument north of Santa Fe, N.M nine years later.
Cultural areas that Hewett ranked as of lower importance also quickly gained protection. In 1906 Roosevelt designated the 60,000-acre Petrified Forest National Monument near Holbrook, Ariz., Montezuma Castle National Monument near Camp Verde, Ariz. and El Moro National Monument near Ramah, N.M. He added the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument near Silver City, N.M in 1907.
Despite several efforts over the past 80 years, more than a century would pass before the vast number of priceless antiquities remaining within Hewett’s Bluff district would be designated Bears Ears National Monument.
“With more than 100,000 archeological sites, there is just no place that is more deserving of protection, particularly given its importance in the passage of the Antiquities Act,” says Josh Ewing, executive director of Friends of Cedar Mesa, a Bluff environmental group working to protect Bears Ears.
Obama’s Bears Ears proclamation came after numerous public meetings over the course of five years held by proponents and opponents of the monument. The public meetings culminated with a contentious field hearing held by former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell in Bluff in July 2016.
Obama’s proclamation begins with the following passage:
“Rising from the center of the southeastern Utah landscape and visible from every direction are twin buttes so distinctive that in each of the native languages of the region their name is the same: Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe, or ‘Bears Ears.’
“For hundreds of generations, native peoples lived in the surrounding deep sandstone canyons, desert mesas, and meadow mountaintops, which constitute one of the densest and most significant cultural landscapes in the United States.
“Abundant rock art, ancient cliff dwellings, ceremonial sites, and countless other artifacts provide an extraordinary archaeological and cultural record that is important to us all, but most notably the land is profoundly sacred to many Native American tribes, including the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah Ouray, Hopi Nation, and Zuni Tribe.”
Setting Aside a Bitter Past
The willingness of these five tribes to set aside longstanding disputes over land, cultural differences and development priorities and instead work together by forming the Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition in July 2015 ultimately led to the creation of the monument.
“The coalition was formed to be able to address the federal government on federal public lands at a government-to-government level,” says Carleton Bowkatey, a Zuni tribal councilmember and co-chairman of the Bears Ears Commission. “We believe that was the missing component in the grassroots efforts.”
The coalition used years of research and documentation collected by the Salt Lake City-based nonprofit Utah Diné Bikéyah to prepare the formal Bears Ears National Monument proposal. The proposal, which requested 1.9 million acres be included in the new monument, was presented to Obama in October 2015.
Bowkatey says the Bears Ears collaborative management plan “will promote tribal interests” and serves as a model that can help resolve conflicts over land use that “will prevent other situations such as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests from occurring.”
He adds, “When you look at the language of the proclamation it specifically states that traditional cultural knowledge is a scientific object worthy of value. Now that we are the ones determining the value, we are not letting that go.”
Utah Leaders Oppose Bears Ears
Filfred says repeated efforts during the tribal coalition’s development of the monument proposal to meet with state and local officials went nowhere as tribal overtures to hold discussions were met with silence.
“The whole Utah delegation is against us and they have been for many years,” he says.
That has continued. The Utah Congressional delegation, state legislature, governor and the San Juan County commission where Bears Ears is located all came out against the monument and lobbied President Trump to rescind Obama’s proclamation.
In response Trump issued an April 26 executive order requiring Zinke to review any 100,000-acre or larger national monument created in the past 21 years. The Bears Ears review was to be completed within 45 days, with the rest of the reviews due in 120 days.
Trump’s executive order expands the criteria that should be used to designate national monuments beyond the Act’s original language by including “public outreach and proper coordination with State, tribal and local officials” and the need to take into consideration “achieving energy independence” and restrictions on public access that could curtail “economic growth.”
“Designations should be made,” the order states, “in accordance with the requirements and original objectives of the Act and appropriately balance the protection of landmarks, structures, and objects against the appropriate use of Federal lands and the effects on surrounding lands and communities.”
Trump’s order adds a balancing requirement to the Antiquities Act, which is not part of the law, to provide justification for rescinding or curtailing the size of national monuments. But legal scholars say he doesn’t have the power to change previously established monuments.
“The President lacks the legal authority to abolish or diminish national monuments,” concludes a Virginia Law Review article published Monday written by four prominent environmental and land-use professors, including Squillace. “Instead, these powers are reserved to Congress,” the authors write.
Moving Forward
Shaun Chapoose, the Unitah and Ouray Ute representative on the Bears Ears Commission, says the commission is going to continue working with the federal land agencies to develop a collaborative management plan for Bears Ears until something tangible changes.
“We need to manage exactly how the proclamation is stated until that is either reaffirmed or changed,” Chapoose says. “So as far as I’m concerned, the monument is designated.”
History has already been made, he adds.
“It has to be emphasized that this is the first time that actual sovereign tribes, elected tribal leaders, engaged in a process that they had never done before and through their effort they were able to get the monument designated,” Chapoose says.
Chapoose is taking a wait-and-see attitude over the political and legal firestorms surrounding Bears Ears.
“I think the legal standing that protects Bears Ears is untested,” Chapoose says. “A lot of the rhetoric you hear is that it has never been challenged but it could be challenged. Well, I guess we’re going to find out.”
Previously on The Revelator:
Does Trump Really Have the Authority to Shrink National Monuments?
The Ask: What Environmental Issues Give Nightmares to Horror Writers?
Who needs zombies when you have global warming and the extinction crisis?
I write about real-life environmental horrors every day, but at night I often escape from reality by reading horror fiction.
It’s not about thrills and chills or blood and gore. Horror stories, at their best, reflect the world around us. They take our personal or societal fears and turn them into something that we can process from the relative safety of our homes or movie theaters.
And what a world of fears we have today. We live in an era of climate change, deregulation of pollution, assaults on public lands and mass extinction. That’s worse than any zombie, serial killer or eldritch demon.
It’s an alarming world, and that’s echoed in our fiction.
But even the horror writers who tap into these existential dreads have their own fears to face. So I turned to some popular horror novelists and asked:
What environmental issue scares you the most?
Their answers may give you a chill.
Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and the Southern Reach trilogy:
“Honestly, what scares me most is silence. The idea of silence in the world because the animals are gone, the birds are gone. I have nightmares in which I wake up in the morning and instead of the call of jays and cardinals and sparrows, there’s nothing. That the communal chatter that we take for granted and think will always be there…is gone, and we created the circumstances by which it went away. I can think of nothing more horrifying than the sound of our own voices without some counterbalance in the world.”
Stephen Graham Jones, author of more than 20 books, most recently the werewolf novel Mongrels:
“Used to be, our zombie stories were about loss of autonomy. These days, they’re more about severely limited resources. When we see a dozen zombies trying to feed off one person, we’ve nearly got to read those zombies as figurations of ourselves — specifically, what we’ll be reduced to when we’ve used up and poisoned all the drinking water. So, the question for us right now, is the zombie story going to have been a cautionary tale for us, or an instruction manual? I would hope the former, but it’s hard not to see the latter already becoming reality. Best that we savor every drink now. Maybe even best if we write down the sensation of stepping into a swimming pool, a bath, a sprinkler, or sitting through a carwash, or watching a water show at a casino. Our writings of those sensations may very well be the only record, before too long.”
Elizabeth Hand, author of Hard Light and Wylding Hall:
“I have nightmares about the wasteland. T.S. Eliot’s was vast, but a wasteland can also be pocket-sized. These small ruined landscapes are more insidious, because we don’t necessarily recognize them as blighted. A vernal pool eradicated by agriculture or a golf course, a new housing development or a careless backyard renovation, means no breeding ground for amphibians, which means another sort of silent spring than the one Rachel Carson imagined: an April where no peepers or wood frogs or toads or tree frogs sing, and no salamanders lurk under rocks to be discovered by wide-eyed children.
“We fall in love with the natural world when we’re young, but what happens when we no longer have access to it, when we turn over every rock to find nothing beneath? What happens when fear — of things like tick- and mosquito-borne disease and exposure to UV rays, pesticides, predatory humans or wild animals — keeps us indoors, and the natural world is supplanted by a computer-enhanced vision of wilderness we can explore without risk or a responsibility to protect it? ‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,’ Eliot wrote, ‘And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/And the dry stone no sound of water.’ Look to where the bulldozers are making way for that clubhouse, and I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Jonathan Maberry, author of Patient Zero and Dogs of War:
“I write weird science thrillers for a living and am always jolted when the real world out-weirds what I write. The greed-driven resistance to the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change is appalling. If it was pure ignorance I would be more optimistic about the possibility of mutual understanding and a movement toward adequate response. But it does come down to greed. Shifting from the kind of industry that pollutes our biosphere and promotes everything from coral reef bleaching to the melting of the ice caps is inconvenient to those in power. It is cost ineffective for them to change, and they proceed with a determined bullheadedness that makes me wonder if they care at all for the health and safety of their children and grandchildren. It’s a smash-and-grab approach that continues to do damage to the environment, and it is more chilling than anything I’ve written into my novels. That terrifies me. It also makes me deeply ashamed to be of the same species.”
Tim Lebbon, author of Relics (a horror novel about wildlife trafficking) and 40 other books:
“The planet’s going to be just fine. It’s not something that people want to hear, but when our time is up and humanity is gone, the planet will move on. It’ll get better, it will be different, and our effect on its history will probably be felt for many millennia to come.
“But while we’re still here, the environmental issue that troubles me the most — aside from the obvious ones involving climate change and the imminent disaster we’re facing — is our failure at waste management. Micro-beads (used in facial scrubs, etc.) find their way into the guts of deep sea fish. Islands a thousand miles from anywhere are covered in rubbish swept along on ocean currents. Not only are we drastically affecting our planet’s climate, we’re spoiling it for ourselves and the animals that live upon it, too.
“However, I’m also uplifted by the way nature adapts. There’s a species of cliff swallow that has seen its wingspan reducing by several millimeters over a very short time, because it nests beneath road bridges and a shorter wing span enables it to dodge traffic more effectively. It’s a positive example of evolution at work, and nature adapting to the environments we create.”
Owl Goingback, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of numerous novels, children’s books, scripts and short stories:
“The environmental issue that scares me the most is the shortage of safe, clean drinking water. It’s a global problem, with over a billion people already lacking access to potable water. And the problem is rapidly growing. Scientists estimate that within the next 10 years, two-thirds of the Earth’s population may face severe water deficits.
“Climate changes, pollution and the overuse of existing water tables have put us in a stressed situation. And it’s not just happening in third-world countries. We’ve seen lakes and wetlands here in the United States dry up due to increased water demands.
“In California, and the American Southwest, heavily populated cities have faced off against rural farming communities over ownership and control of existing water supplies. These “water wars” are not new, for such legal battles have been waged since the 19th century, but tensions may escalate over dwindling resources.
“Recent protests by the Standing Rock Sioux, and their supporters, against oil companies routing the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath Lake Oahe (part of the Missouri River), have served to remind us about the importance of drinkable water, and how easily it can be contaminated. As Native Americans say: ‘Water is life.’”
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The Dangers of the Global Road-Building Tsunami (Videos)
Roads are a double-edged sword that can both help and harm.
New roads can be treacherous — even fatal — for wildlife, native forests, and the global environment.
That’s why my team at the Centre for Tropical Environmental Sustainability and Science, where we’re studying the impact of roads on wildlife and ecosystems, put together these two short videos.
First up is “Why Roads Are So Dangerous,” which shows how the first cut into a pristine habitat can create an unstoppable wave of changes.
Our second video, “Why Roads are Like Pandora’s Box,” shows that new roads can also be surprisingly dangerous for human economies and societies.
Many people advocate for roads, believing they will bring wealth, jobs, and myriad other benefits.
But few appreciate the full story. Roads are neither entirely good nor bad: they are a double-edged sword.
It’s essential to see both sides of the blade.
Elephant Ambassador in Chad: A Conversation with Stephanie Vergniault
The founder of SOS Elephants works to save elephants from poachers and other threats.
On her first visit to the Republic of Chad in 1995, Stephanie Vergniault fell in love with the country’s elephants. Plentiful and easy to see at the time, they gave her a sense of freedom and peace.
That was before the elephant poaching crisis began. By 2007, the elephant numbers had plummeted — from 20,000 in the mid-1990s to roughly 4,000 that year. Today only about 1,200 remain in Chad.
“They were no longer visible,” she recalls. “Poaching was decimating the elephants of Central Africa without anybody reacting.”
That’s when she established SOS Elephants, the first organization in Chad dedicated to saving the elephants.
Vergniault, a native of France, set up camp in southwestern Chad where she could monitor the area’s elephants, then numbering about 300. The area has no protected status, which could help provide funding and additional security, so it is a frequent target of poachers — 63 elephants were slaughtered in July/August 2012, another 86 in a single week in March 2013, and 13 more were gunned down in a March 2017 spree, among other incidents.
Yet without her efforts, the situation would likely be worse. In her earnest and quiet way, she has captured attention of Chadian president Idriss Déby Itno about the elephants’ plight. The species’ protection is now a high priority, and the country’s military is active in responding to poaching incidents. She has also built support for elephants in communities, which has led to a network of informants who will provide information on both elephant movements and poachers.
Elephants, too, tend to see the area as a safer haven, as they often flee there to escape poaching elsewhere. About 500 elephants now inhabit the region.
Living on the front lines, Vergniault feels the elephants’ distress and does everything she can with her limited resources. She spoke with me about her experiences and priorities for elephant conservation in Chad.
Neme: Tell me about the most recent poaching incidents?
Vergniault: It started on 22 March in Bousso. Thirteen elephants were killed and ten were wounded by bullets. The government deployed troops but it was too late.
Even though the elephants were found without their tusks, I suspect that the main motive was to get rid of the elephants within this particular area, where human-elephant conflict is very high. Twenty people were killed the past few years by the elephants, and crops were devastated. I suspect some of the local communities to be accomplices with the poachers.
It was very sad because I could not do much. I was just staying nearby the elephants and trying to protect them and push away the communities.
Neme: How is your work viewed in Chad?
Vergniault: At the beginning, the president looked at my work with a certain level of curiosity. Over time, he became more involved and the protection of elephants has become a national priority.
Village people know me and my team and are happy to work with us. They will call our free “green line” to give us information, and we reward them. Over time, we have established a list of people who give us information about the presence of elephants and also about poachers.
But at the same time they would like me to take care of their problem of crops being eaten by the elephants. I ask them to be patient, but they lose patience because of the deteriorating economic situation in the country. [Editor’s note: Chad depends on oil for 70 percent of its income, and plunging oil prices have devastated the country’s economy.]
Neme: What are you doing to change attitudes?
Vergniault: Communities need to feel that you are supporting them and that you understand their situation. Gradually, they become more receptive toward the elephants because we are giving the elephants a lot of attention, and they understand that these elephants can be a potential source of revenue.
One of my favorite programs is the development of beekeeping [to repel elephants and protect crops]. I want to target this activity in the villages that help us protect elephants. Another is an environmental school. So far, at least 500 children have been educated. I think I have given these children a love for elephants, and I hope they continue to fight to save them when I am too old or no longer here.
Neme: What are some of your biggest challenges?
Vergniault: Certain remote villages hesitate to work with us because they are more or less accomplices with the poachers. We try to engage these communities, but it is not simple because they are from semi-nomadic tribes in which hunting is cultural. These villagers are very poor. There is a lack of basic education. They do not send their children to school but send them to keep the cattle in the bush. And the poachers use them as guides to reach the elephants. Last week I went to the bush, a five-hour drive from Ndjamena, with brochures to distribute to them, and promised a big reward to anyone who denounces the poachers.
It remains challenging but we have to engage them. I need to push them to realize how much an elephant alive can benefit their communities.
The situation in Chad is also complicated because of Boko Haram. We were working with a lot of soldiers on anti-poaching, but many were sent to the Lake Chad area to fight against Boko Haram. The last two years, I do not have soldiers to protect my camp. Since November 2016, 30 elephants have been killed in my area.
On top of that, the elephants are destroying farmers’ crops, and because no compensation is given to them, they are more and more hostile to the presence of the elephants.
Neme: What are your hopes for the future?
Vergniault: For more than 10 years I have been calling for the government of Chad to register this area as a protected area. I understand now that I will have to take the lead to make it happen and organize experts to do the feasibility studies and field research.
Lack of resources remains a major challenge. Right now I am using my own money in this battle. I have logistical problems and cannot implement our activities on a larger scale. We also need drones and aircraft to better monitor the area. I need more experts to come and help with anti-poaching, education and eco-tourism training.
Neme: Do you feel you have had an impact?
Vergniault: Some people compare me to Dian Fossey [the famous primatologist who studied mountain gorillas]. I am not sure it is very optimistic because she died alone, killed by a group of poachers.
I am proud that I have influenced the survival of the herds in my area, and that 500 elephants are still here roaming around. It is a success, but it also generates more and more trouble for the farmers. It remains challenging, but I cannot give up.
© Laurel Neme, all rights reserved
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Solar Energy Coming Back to Nevada
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