Extinction starts to have an effect on ecosystems long before a species fully disappears. A new paper calls this “biological annihilation” — the effect that localized extinction has on a region when certain species, such as lions, become extirpated from their former habitats. The paper argues we should pay more attention to species even if they are considered “of low concern,” because many of them are actually in decline. Although these species are not currently considered threatened with extinction, their “population decay” causes cascading effects on the abundance of other local species — which, the paper warns, will eventually result in yet more extinctions.
4 Thoughts on World Population Day
We need to solve runaway human population growth if we hope to fix any other environmental problems.
Today, as on every July 11th, the United Nations celebrates World Population Day, an occasion designated to “focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues.”
Let’s take a look at some of those issues.
1. We’re not making much, if any, progress.
The first World Population Day was held in 1990, when the world population was about 5.3 billion.
That number has now soared to more than 7.5 billion.
And if you think things are crowded now, just wait a few years. A recent United Nations study calculates the world human population will hit 8 billion in 2023 and balloon to 9.8 billion by 2050.
Now, that increase is not universal. Some countries will actually see declines — all European nations, for example — but the UN found that half of the population growth will take place in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia. India will eclipse China as the world’s most populous country by about 2024, while Nigeria will pass the U.S. as the country with the third-biggest population by 2050.
2. It’s not about just the number of people, but also what they consume.
We have more people now, but our average impact is also growing. One recent study found that more than 10 percent of the world population classifies as medically obese. That’s obviously just one marker for overconsumption, but it serves as a pretty potent illustration of how much the human population drives the environmental impact of our food system alone. Add in carbon emissions, deforestation, species habitat loss and extinction and we’ve got a real mess on our hands.
3. It’s also about inequality.
Much of the population explosion boils down to gender inequality. Women around the world lack access to education, social status, jobs, family planning and medical care — which drives population growth. Solving these problems would not only help make society more equal; as Paul Hawken notes in his book “Drawdown,” it could also give us some of the tools we need to help tackle global warming.
And this is also about wealth inequality. The world’s five richest men now control more wealth than half of the world’s population. With extreme poverty affecting populations around the world, this top-heavy concentration of assets leaves little opportunity for anything to get better.
4. Population needs to be a priority.
I know this is a tough issue to talk about. No one wants to say “you should have fewer kids,” but really, the world needs to have fewer kids and we need to do more for the people we already have. Every other topic we cover here on The Revelator — climate change, pollution, clean water, overdevelopment and the extinction crisis — stems at least in part from the impact of the ever-increasing human population and the systemic inequality with which we all live.
This is unsustainable. We need to take population issues seriously, both for the billions of people already on this planet and for the billions of other species that share our home.
Does Scott Pruitt Have a Case for Repealing the Clean Water Rule?
Or do his arguments not hold water?
On June 27, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt signed a proposed rule rescinding the Obama administration’s “Clean Water Rule.” This regulation is designed to clarify which streams, lakes, wetlands and other water bodies fall under the protection of the Clean Water Act.
EPA developed the Clean Water Rule in an attempt to resolve uncertainty created by a fractured 2006 Supreme Court decision, Rapanos v. United States. The Rapanos ruling caused widespread confusion about which waters were covered, creating uncertainty for farmers, developers and conservation groups. Efforts to clarify it through informal guidance or congressional action had failed, and EPA acted under mounting pressure from various quarters, including some members of the court.
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt unsuccessfully sued to kill the rule, which he has called “the greatest blow to private property rights the modern era has seen.” Now he is seeking to accomplish by administrative fiat what he failed to achieve in court. However, he faces a stiff challenge from supporters of the rule, and the courts may not buy his arguments for wiping a rule off the books.
Making the case for change
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, federal agencies must follow specific steps when they seek to establish or repeal a regulation. These procedures are meant to establish efficiency, consistency and accountability. To promote fairness and transparency, the law requires that the public must have meaningful opportunity to comment on proposed rules before they take effect.
The Clean Water Rule emerged from an extensive rule-making process that featured over 400 meetings with state, tribal and local officials and numerous stakeholders representing business, environmental and public health organizations. It generated over one million comments, the bulk of which supported the rule.
This process was preceded by a comprehensive peer-reviewed scientific assessment that synthesized over a thousand studies documenting the importance of small streams and wetlands to the health of large rivers, lakes and estuaries. According to a 2015 fact sheet, which has been scrubbed from EPA’s website but is archived here, the rule protects streams that roughly one in three Americans depend upon for their drinking water.
To undo the Clean Water Rule, EPA will have to go through the same notice-and-comment process. Pruitt’s proposal to rescind the rule will be published in the Federal Register sometime in the near future. From that date, the public will have just 30 days to file written comments electronically. (Normally public comment periods last for 60 days, and the Clean Water Rule was open for comment for 120 days.)
USEPA/Flickr
EPA must then review and respond to the comments, make any changes it deems necessary and publish a final rule. Parties with standing can then challenge the final rule, although there is a question as to which court will have jurisdiction to hear them. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on this issue in the fall. In weighing challenges, the key question the court must address is whether EPA’s action is “arbitrary and capricious,” meaning that the agency has failed to consider important aspects of the problem or explain its reasoning.
In a seminal 1983 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that an agency must supply a “reasoned analysis” when it rescinds a rule adopted by a previous administration. The court acknowledged that agencies have some discretion to change direction in response to changing circumstances. However, it noted that “the forces of change do not always or necessarily point in the direction of deregulation.” Further, the court said that a decision to rescind a rule would be arbitrary and capricious if it offers an explanation “that runs counter to the evidence before the agency.”
Pruitt asserts that his repeal “need not be based upon a change of facts or circumstances,” citing a 2009 opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia. But in my view, Pruitt reads too much into that decision, which simply held that an agency did not face “heightened scrutiny” – that is, an extra-high bar – when changing policy, but must still “show that there are good reasons for the new policy.” As Justice Breyer observed, dissenting in the same case, “Where does, and why would, the Administrative Procedure Act grant agencies the freedom to change major policies on the basis of nothing more than political considerations or even personal whim?”
Does Pruitt have good reasons? Let’s consider them.
Repair or replace?
In his draft proposal, Pruitt argues for repealing the Clean Water Rule because it fails to pay enough homage to federalism principles embodied in section 101(b) of the Clean Water Act, in which Congress expresses a policy to “recognize, preserve and protect the primary responsibilities and rights of States to prevent, reduce and eliminate pollution.” Yet at another point he states that “This action does not have federalism implications” and, further, that it will not affect “the relationship between the national government and the States.”
Which is it? Either the repeal is necessary to rebalance power relationships or it isn’t. Moreover, wouldn’t it make more sense to first identify how the current rule encroaches on states’ authority and propose specific changes for public comment? Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Pruitt also contends that if states want to protect waters more strictly than the federal standard, they can choose to do so. But according to a detailed 50-state survey by the Environmental Law Institute, 36 states “have laws that could restrict the authority of state agencies or localities to regulate waters left unprotected by the federal Clean Water Act.”
According to a report by the Association of State Wetland Managers, only 23 states have laws that directly regulate activities that impact wetlands. The rest depend upon authority provided by section 401 of the Clean Water Act to provide protection for important wetlands. As the act shrinks, so do those authorities.
Gage Skidmore/Flickr, CC BY-SA
After rescinding the Clean Water Rule, Pruitt proposes to carry out a new and potentially lengthy rule-making process in which EPA and other agencies will reevaluate which waters are protected under the Clean Water Act. President Trump has directed Pruitt to consider a revised rule modeled on a highly restrictive definition that Justice Scalia proposed in the Rapanos case. As I have explained elsewhere, the Scalia test is not the controlling standard that the courts have adopted following Rapanos, and it would drastically reduce the coverage of the act from its historic reach.
Pruitt says it is necessary to repeal the Clean Water Rule while EPA reviews which waters should be covered by the Clean Water Act. Otherwise, he contends, the Supreme Court may lift a stay imposed on the rule by a federal appeals court, opening a floodgate of litigation across the country. But that is exactly what his proposed repeal would do. The court would likely grant EPA’s request to extend the stay for a reasonable period of time to allow EPA to initiate a full rule-making on a proposed revision of the rule.
Verdict: Arbitrary and capricious
Scott Pruitt has been on a slash-and-burn crusade through his predecessors’ regulatory initiatives. But the courts are beginning to scrutinize these moves more closely. Notably, the D.C. Circuit just ruled that Pruitt cannot suspend an Obama-era rule to restrict methane emissions from new oil and gas wells.
Elections do matter. But so does the rule of law. Pruitt has not offered any compelling reason to justify killing the Clean Water Rule outright. There is plenty of time for a more “reasoned analysis” of ways to protect the nation’s water quality.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
France Bans Gas-Powered Autos
In a move to help the country meet its Paris Accord climate goals, France announced this week that it will ban the sale of gas- and diesel-powered automobiles by 2040. That will be a big shift, as only 1.1 percent of new cars sold in France are currently pure electric vehicles. Even with the pending ban it will still take a long time to get older cars off the road: French consumers currently keep their gas-powered cars running for an average of 8.5 years, well below the 11.6 years in the United States.
Last Chance to Save the Vaquita?
Fewer than 30 of these rare porpoises remain. Can their extinction be prevented?
The race to save the vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus) from extinction has begun.
Earlier this week the Mexican government announced a permanent ban on the use of gillnets within the Gulf of California — a step that has become necessary to save the critically endangered vaquita. Fewer than 30 of these rare cetaceans remain in the northern Gulf, the species’ only habitat, where their population has been utterly devastated over the past few years by illegal fishing nets.
The massive gillnets aren’t actually used to target vaquitas. Poachers are looking for a fish called the totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi). Totoaba swim bladders, long considered a treatment for circulatory and skin problems in traditional Chinese medicine, have soared in value in recent years, selling for upwards of $4,500 a pound. That price is hard to ignore in an impoverished region.
Conservationists have called for a permanent gillnet ban for years. It finally came to pass after actor Leonardo DiCaprio put public pressure on Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who, with DiCaprio and billionaire Carlos Slim, signed a memorandum of understanding last month to strengthen the country’s fishing legislation. That set the stage for this week’s gillnet ban.
Still, experts fear the ban won’t be enough. Conservationists also have a controversial, and admittedly last-ditch, plan to try to bring some vaquitas into captivity, putting them in the equivalent of protective custody. They’ll use a fleet of boats and a team of U.S. Navy dolphins to round up as many of the small porpoises as they can find, then move them to special enclosures that are being built now.
To understand how we got to this point, and what comes next, I spoke with biologist Barbara Taylor from the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Consortium for Vaquita Conservation, Protection, and Recovery (VaquitaCPR). A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
John Platt: The last time we spoke, the vaquita population had fallen to about 100, then it was 60. Last year we heard that the number had fallen even further, to just 30. How many are there now?
Barb Taylor: Well, the truth is, is that we won’t know the new abundance number until September. The next acoustic monitoring will finish in the middle of August, and we hope to have a new number out the first week of September. I’m anticipating that it will be a rate of decline like we’ve been seeing. We went from 60 to 30 and we’ll probably lose another half by the end of this year, I would guess.
So yeah, it’s very grim.
Platt: It must weigh heavily on the whole team of people working on this species.
Taylor: Oh, yes. We’re definitely in emergency mode. It’s been quite the rollercoaster, I have to say, just getting results back and seeing dead vaquitas.
We had a temporary ban in place and vaquitas still continued to decline, which is why we are pushing forward. We need to get them out — capture as many vaquitas as we can as quickly as we can until we have evidence that the gillnets are out of the water.
Platt: So why do you think the previous, temporary gillnet bans weren’t enough or didn’t work? I’ve seen a lot of comments about funding to fishermen being distributed unequally, and obviously there’s a level of corruption going on. What were the barriers to success there?
Taylor: Well, I think there were a number of barriers, the biggest one being that totoaba is still incredibly lucrative and nobody has gone to jail over that. And the penalties, even if you do get caught, are minor. It’s just a cost of business. So, it’s such an enormous temptation to go totoaba fishing. That made it very difficult.
And then, enforcement has not done what needs to be done. The evidence is Sea Shepherd pulling out over 250 nets totoaba nets and other gillnets in the last two years. So clearly the fishermen are operating outside the law.
And I’m sure there’s some blame to go around on the compensation front, but that’s never really been well documented except, ironically, with some of the fishermen who were really the good guys, the guys who tried to convert to alternative gear and yet were not compensated. So yeah, that’s the biggest thing.
The second thing is that there was a loophole in the ban that allowed corvina (Cynoscion othonopterus) fishing. Corvina is the smaller cousin of totoaba and the big capture period is when they are aggregated for spawning right at Easter, which is when lots of Catholics like to eat fish, so it has been one of the major fisheries in the area. It’s an active gillnet fishery so they wrap the corvinas in this rodeo-style method.
It’s not been known to kill vaquitas and so they exempted it, but by doing that there were, I think, a couple of really bad outcomes. One, everybody had gillnets all the time, so the number of gillnets has not really decreased.
The other is the operation for totoaba. What they do is set one of these nets on the bottom with huge anchors and no surface markings. They just go down, hook the net, pull it up, taking the totoaba out and letting it drop back down to the bottom.
Well, it doesn’t really take that long to do that and it’s a relatively big area. So any boat that’s out in the water doing anything, they could be doing corbina fishing, but they could be looking like they’re sports fishing or whatever. The minute that no one’s looking they go over to their totoaba net and they pull the totoabas. So I think having all of the boats on the water for corbina season, which is the same time the same spawning season as totoaba and corbina, that’s when we saw all the dead vaquitas. And there were hundreds of boats out in the water, which just makes enforcement a nightmare.
Platt: Is fishing the main economic opportunity for the people in that region?
Taylor: Definitely for El Golfo de Santa Clara. It’s basically that and purported illegal activities of moving drugs through the area and human trafficking and things like that.
San Felipe has the big Baja 250 road race and it has a tourism industry built up around that. But since 2008, when the economy went sour and the drug wars happened at the same time, the tourism has really dropped off. Just when the fishermen actually were starting to convert to different kinds of gear and livelihoods, the hotels, restaurants and economy went south and just sort of drove them back into the dependency on fishing. It is still, I think, the spine of both of those communities, but it’s everything or nearly everything in El Golfo.
Platt: So now there’s the gillnet ban, the Mexican president and Leonardo DiCaprio and the Slim Foundation, plus the effort to get some of these animals into captivity. Are these three all kind of working in conjunction with each other?
Taylor: We hope so. That’s the intention. We always are concerned that something will happen like with California condors, that there will be a major NGO pushback on the idea of taking vaquitas into captivity. So far that hasn’t happened, even though many NGOs won’t actively endorse that strategy. But the recovery team basically acknowledged that Plan A of recovering vaquitas was making their habitat safe and gillnet free. There’s no evidence that that’s working and now we’re down to maybe 15 individuals left.
Despite all of the uncertainties with capturing vaquitas and keeping them in captivity, it’s still in my mind safer than it is leaving them out where they have a 50 percent chance of dying in a gillnet.
Until there’s real evidence that not only are the laws in place, but they’re being effectively enforced and there really aren’t gillnets in the water, you have to move forward on trying to keep some animals safe. Otherwise we’re going to lose them in the next year or two. I mean that’s just the reality.
The other reality is that unlike California condors, once you make the decision, we can’t pull them all out of the wild overnight. There’s lots of uncertainty.
And so we’re pushing forward as hard as we can on both fronts, because even if we are successful in catching some vaquitas in October and November we’re not going to have any chance at catching all the vaquitas. Some will be out there in that dangerous habitat no matter how successful we are.
And it may be that they aren’t suitable for captivity. We won’t know that until we try. In fact, we won’t know whether we can even catch them. We’re going out there with this tremendous team of experts from all over the world to try to make this happen and I can’t imagine a better team of people. We’re giving it the best shot we can, but it’s still uncertain that we’ll even be able to catch one.
Platt: It’s a huge habitat isn’t it? I mean it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Taylor: Yes, that’s my job. I am the looker for the needle in the haystack.
That happens to be my piece in this now-very complex puzzle. We’ll use the experience that we’ve developed doing surveys for vaquitas to get the same team of experts out there and use our big binoculars to try to find them. And what we found in 2015 was that the animals had hugely contracted their distribution. So, there wasn’t as much area to really survey. Plus we have our acoustic monitoring grid that’s out there as we speak and it will be getting us 3,000 days of data in the next couple of months about where the vaquitas are spending their time.
So we have a lot more insight as to where to look for them. It’s not as big an area as one would think. I mean basically they’re spending all their time on one of three little ridges. They’ve sort of contracted back to their absolute best spots, so I think if they’re out there we can find them. But then keeping track of them is also something that has been extremely difficult in the past. In the past we were using one ship with six pairs of these giant 25-power binoculars, but you can only really look in one direction. When vaquitas are broadside you can see that triangular dorsal fin side and even then it’s hard to see them. If they decide that they don’t like the vessel noise and they’re going to move away from you, then you just get this knife’s edge view.
We’re actually going to use three visual platforms so that we can sort of form a triangle and reduce the chance of losing them. That’s where the Navy dolphins come in to actually help track the animals, so that we can get the experts with their nets in the right place at the right time and hopefully catch them and be able to then evaluate how they respond to being handled.
There are many steps along the path.
Platt: So, you would theoretically capture one, and if it doesn’t pass the first test it would go back in the water?
Taylor: Right. Each one of the catch vessels will have a porpoise veterinarian onboard and they are trained to recognize the symptoms of an animal that’s going into shock. And if it does start to go into shock then the plan is to release them, but with a satellite tag on them.
If we have any bad outcomes we have an independent panel of expert veterinarians that will help us evaluate what the next step will be, whether we should try again or whether we should declare them to be just not suitable for captivity, like Dall’s porpoise.
Platt: On the off chance that they are suitable, you’re building a containment center for them right now. Is that in the ocean or on land next to the water?
Taylor: Yes, both. The plan is to build these tuna pens — if you’ve been down to Ensenada you’ll see them floating off the coast there — that are specially designed for the porpoises. They can actually be anchored out where the animals are spending all their time now. So, it’ll be sort of a soft introduction. We’ll be able to evaluate them, put them in these ponds right out in their habitat that they’re used to, evaluate how they’re doing, teach them how to eat dead fish, all of that in the first month. Meanwhile, there’s a facility that’s being built as we speak that is basically a vaquita temporary hospital on land. It will have pools where if an animal got sick or needed to be separated for some reason and have intensive care they could be moved into those pools or in case of an emergency, if there’s a red tide or there’s a hurricane.
And then, as winter approaches the idea is to construct sea pens that are accessible from land behind the protective mountains. In winter storms it’s very difficult to get out and feed them. It’s just much better to be able to walk out a walkway and be able to take care of the animals, but still have them in their natural environment that they’re used to with the temperature and water turbidity and all those kinds of things. So, that is all designed, but isn’t being built yet, and the other two are actually in construction.
Platt: I remember you telling me a couple of years ago that these are very slow-breeding animals. They take a while to reach sexual maturity and only reproduce once every couple of years. So even if we manage to stop the attrition and get these animals breeding, it’s still going to take a while to rebuild the population. Do you have any confidence or hope in the ability to grow the population again?
Taylor: I have become a student of species that have gone extinct in the wild, or have gone through a captive phase, then recovered and been reintroduced and have now healthy populations in the wild again. There are many amazing examples of animals that have gone down to way lower numbers. In fact a New Zealand robin went down to two and the California condors down to eight. But they are birds, so it makes it a little easier because you can get several offspring every year.
But there are examples of mammals that only have one offspring per year that were in similar situations. Przewalski’s horses and Père David’s deer were both less than 15 when they were taken into captivity. And yeah, it took decades. We have to be realistic about that. If we can’t release them back into the wild, we’re in this for the long haul. It would be completely unprecedented with a marine mammal, so it’s a big challenge for sure and we can only hope that they actually can have one offspring per year instead of one every other year. But we won’t know until we try.
Platt: International Save the Vaquita Day is coming up on July 8th. What would you like my readers to know that could help these efforts?
Taylor: Well, right now I think the most important thing people can do is to donate to Vaquita CPR, where we’re still a half-million dollars short on a $5 million budget. Everyone can play a role now that we’re down to needing to pay for the emergency room.
The other really important thing — and I say this as somebody who works on many species globally — is that people learn more about gillnets, which are the biggest threat to marine mammals and to too much marine life.
Everybody, when they go out to restaurants, they’re eating seafood that’s been caught in gillnets, and I think people are just unaware that hundreds of thousands of animals inadvertently die in those nets every year. Pushing on Mexico to make this the first good example of converting a community over to using gear that isn’t driving species extinct is really important. Because there are many other species, sadly, that will be lined up behind vaquita if we lose them. They’re going to blink out because of gillnets. And I think people are just completely unaware of what astounding effect this is having on marine life.
The Revelator will bring you updates on the efforts to save the vaquita throughout the year.
A Declaration of Interdependence
A look back at history reveals a need to come together.
It’s 9 a.m. on July 4, 2017. I’ve just staked all my tomatoes, watered the sweet potato starts I planted over the weekend, and read The Declaration of Independence. Today is the first time I’ve ever ditched going to the lake for the 4th of July holiday with my family. I sent them off without me because the world changed.
Instead I’m here at my desk… because while I slipped baby sweet potato plants into dirt in ever-warmer weather, someone else was tweeting violent images of a pro wrestler taking down CNN as fake news. “Someone else” who viscerally reminds me of all the times I’ve been oppressed, hurt, abused and told to be quiet since I was a young girl who spent broken chunks of childhood in an authoritarian family, and who grew up female in a patriarchal system that constantly pushed us down.
It’s the first time since the election that I can write again, and even now it’s hard. Engaging in any way with such toxic power jolts my body with a familiar cocktail of stress hormones, and it’s all I can do to write, let alone allow for my own agency and creative impulses to speak to that kind of power.
Like so many others I wear a cloak of invisibility, one that hides the wounds inflicted by oppression so I can act normal in the face of what is not normal, what has never been normal. It is a mantle that lets me survive and function as best I can despite the indoctrination of stress physiology, in a systemic culture of toxic domination — a culture whose origins trace back to the days when human beings first claimed land, women and “others” as property.
A culture I recognized immediately while reading The Declaration of Independence this morning.
As I skimmed all the egregious acts of the ruling monarch of England, I shook my head. No wonder our founders incited a revolution. No wonder. The colonies were being dominated, unfairly, unjustly, horrifically, by the king. But I was also sickened by the impossible-to-miss similarities between that monarch’s tyrannical authoritarian acts and those of our president. I’m scared by the intense, empathic recognition I have of the emotions our founders must have known in order to write and act upon the Declaration, and later, The Articles of Confederation.
It is the first 4th of July of my life in which my mirror neurons are firing alongside men who signed papers 241 years ago.
Even more frightening though, is knowing a whole segment of our populace — the ones who (unwittingly or not) support what is essentially that same culture of domination we rebuked on July 4, 1776 — must surely also feel intense incitement to revolt against the other culture. The one that my beloved country, the United States of America, has given birth to through the great experiment of democracy. That other “culture” — really, a natural order of the world and all life in it — is interdependence.
Our democracy has allowed that natural law of interconnection to reemerge in post-patriarchal human society. And to begin to flourish. But by our own history of indigenous genocide and slavery and their ongoing traumatic consequences, the careless unleashing of harmful chemical pollutants, the erasure of whole species and ecosystems, the impacts and brutalities of misogyny, industrial agriculture, and gun violence that shreds thousands of families, and now, the dire and immediate threats of fossil fuel poisoning and climate change to our own civilization and the rest of life on Earth, our path to seeing — and living by — our interdependence has been… fraught.
That I am here now, dirt under my nails, smelling like tomatoes and soil, writing, is a testament to the solace and healing of lived interdependence. Every healthy human family on this planet enjoys the fruits of lived interdependence. Some of us find it via alternate routes. For years I have studied biology, zoology, chemistry, physiology, and most especially, ecology and the interconnection of the unity and diversity of life. Then, for decades, I reported on the infinite glittering facets of these as a science and environment writer. Most recently I wrote a novel for young adults about killer whales, climate change, shamans, and how domination culture has brought us to a terrible brink — but one we can step away from. One that our innate empathic interdependence will help us step away from.
I sent my kids off on holiday without me this year, because their lives — and the lives of all our youth — are now on the climate clock. Having reported on climate change since the inception of the term, and our first inklings of awareness, I hear the clock ticking all the time. Like Captain Hook stalked by the tic-toc croc. The news last week that we have all of three years to heed that clock, to do enough to safeguard the climate, has me here at my desk instead of in a kayak paddling alongside my sons.
I don’t know yet exactly what I can do to make a difference. I do know about life. I know about what happens when you put toxic chemicals into a body, or pollute a waterway, or spew the poisons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. I do know what it means to be a mother, knowing these things, to children facing the most unprecedented era of change ever to confront humanity. And I do know love. So much love.
It is our interdependence that gives us love. It is our interdependence that will guide us in solving the crises caused by our “us against them” cultural baggage. And it is our interdependence that will continue to heal the traumatic wounds inadvertently inflicted by our country’s original independence days.
If they were here now, I suspect our founding fathers would join hands with our rising mothers and so many others — we who’ve transmuted our cloaks of invisibility into indivisibility — and together craft the next iteration of democracy for the world:
The Declaration of Interdependence.
© Rachel Clark. All rights reserved.
The opinions expressed above at those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.
Previously in The Revelator:
Junk Raft: A Journey Through a Polluted Ocean
What better way to understand the dangers of plastic pollution than by traveling on a ship made out of garbage?
Few people intentionally sail through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of the world’s most notoriously polluted stretches of ocean. Even fewer choose to do so in a ship that’s literally a piece of trash. In fact, only two people have done so: Joel Paschal and Marcus Eriksen. The two men accomplished their 2,600-mile journey in 2008 to help publicize the fact that we need to act now to stop the sea from drowning itself in plastic.
Eriksen, also president and cofounder of ocean conservation organization 5 Gyres, has written a book about his adventure, aptly titled “Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution” (Beacon Press, $26.95), which came out this week. I recently spoke to him about his new book, his adventure in Junk Raft — and yes, she is a registered oceangoing vessel — and his mission to convince the world to stop using and producing plastic.
Cirno: “Junk Raft” recounts your epic trip in a boat of the same name across the Northern Pacific Ocean, from Los Angeles to Hawaii. What inspired you to take this journey?
Eriksen: My inspiration to do it was simply the plastic use and pollution issue. Prior to this, I went sailing on the Mississippi River for five months on a similar plastic-bottle raft. What I witnessed there was a never-ending trail of plastic leading to the sea. And then I went to Midway Atoll and saw all the effects on albatross. My idea for the second raft, Junk Raft, went back to my experience in the Gulf War. I was a Marine on the ground, in a sniper platoon. I saw the region’s great oil rigs catch fire and burn. I couldn’t understand the destruction around me. I wanted to rethink what I was fighting for: Conservation is worth it, not a resource war on petroleum.
I thought, “The plastic problem is fixable. Nonsensically we use plastic to create items we use once or twice and throw away — we just have to stop doing that.”
I have a lot of confidence in how rafts work and perform, and a great team: Joel Paschal, my fellow sailor and adventurer, and Anna Cummins, my wife, who served as a one-woman, land-based support team. All three of us were on a boat with Charles Moore — who coined the term “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” — on his sixth crossing across the North Pacific. This was the start of 5 Gyre’s global research. We’ve done at least 20 research trips since.
Cirno: What kinds of junk was Junk Raft made out of?
Eriksen: 15,000 plastic water bottles donated from schools and recycling centers; 2,000 Nalgene bottles that Patagonia stopped using because they contained toxic BPA; an old airplane cockpit as the ship’s hull, salvaged from wrecks in the desert; and 25 broken sailboat masts as a deck. Everything was lashed together Polynesian-style. We put the plastic bottles in socks underneath the deck, used two masts as an A-frame, and also sewed together spare, damaged sails as our mainsail.
We had modern communications and electronics on the raft — solar panels, wind generator, new batteries, chart plotter, satellite phone, computer. I could plug in the satellite phone to the computer and upload short, half-megabyte videos to the internet for our followers to watch. Anna was our land-based mission control. She was constantly checking weather for us and fundraising like mad to help support our sailing journey on the Junk Raft.
Cirno: How long did the trip take?
Eriksen: It took two months to build the raft and three months to sail it. Our sponsors thought our decision to sail away on that raft was a death wish. But as soon as we were halfway across, people realized we were succeeding — that we were doing it. When we got to Hawaii, a hundred people stood cheering for Joel and me on the dock. We later learned that a million people were following our journey online.
Cirno: In November I sailed the same stretch of the North Pacific that you did, but I was in a proper steel sailboat. What were some of the challenges of sailing in Junk Raft?
Eriksen: For what it was made of, the raft was rather seaworthy…it got the job done. But there were many difficulties, especially during storms.
The boat was constantly falling apart. We had problems with leaks and parts falling off. On day three we had our biggest storm, with 50 mile-per-hour winds. All the bottle caps began spinning off, and as a result, the boat sank a foot into the water. Our deck was submerged and we started sinking. So I called Anna and she sent forth a resupply mission to bring us glue so we could secure the bottle caps. They also brought greens and other fresh foods — because much of our food was damaged by water — and beer.
Cirno: When did you decide to write a book about the journey?
Eriksen: Two-and-a-half years ago, before I lost my memory of the journey and moved on to my next project. I’d kept a journal the whole time we sailed, and the movement to end the plastic problem was growing fast.
Cirno: So what was your goal when writing this book?
Eriksen: I wanted to use adventure as a vehicle to attract a lot of people. Here’s this crazy adventure we had, but here’s this issue we should all be knowledgeable about. We sailed 1.5 miles per hour, our ship began falling apart, we tried to outrun hurricanes, and more. It’s exciting but it teaches a lesson: We’ve created such a huge plastic trash problem that it’s become easier to sail across the ocean in a raft made of trash than to clean it all up.
Cirno: This journey was in 2008; it’s now 2017. How do you feel about the progress we’ve made on these issues?
Eriksen: I think it’s been highly positive. We’ve accomplished a lot. There’s been a huge surge in environmental NGOs forming to try to address the problem in a variety of ways, and some are doing great things, helping establish legislation that curbs or bans plastic use or changes peoples’ habits so that they use less plastic.
Yet stakeholders have reached this impasse: Many people are aware the problem exists, but we as a global community are not doing enough to make sure it doesn’t get worse.
What we need now is a revolution by design. There are some plastic products that really have to go, such as wrappers on foods and products. Right now we need to scale back plastic production immediately and eventually stop it. We need better waste management and recycling programs. We need to make bioplastics mainstream and affordable. We must do more recycling. Basically, we must do things that don’t harm people and the planet. Plastic has got to go.
© 2017 Erica Cirino. All rights reserved.
Previously on The Revelator:
Ivory Trading Hub Uncovered
Criminal syndicates from a small town in southern China are responsible for trafficking as much as 80 percent of all illegal ivory into the country, according to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency. Undercover operatives tracked a two-ton shipment of tusks from Mozambique to the town of Shuidong, thereby revealing trade routes, rampant bribery, and the ability to smuggle other wildlife products, including pangolin scales and rhino horns. China has announced the closure of its legal ivory market, but EIA found the syndicates remained active as late as last month.
Vaquita Lifeline
Has Mexico finally taken the step that will save the vaquita from extinction? Or will it not be enough?
Mexico this week permanently banned gill nets as part of a last-minute effort to save the vaquita from extinction. Just 30 or fewer of these critically endangered porpoises (Phocoena sinus) remain in their only habitat, the Gulf of California. The cetaceans frequently die after becoming entangled in gill nets, which poachers use to catch the totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), an endangered fish whose swim bladders sell to Chinese consumers for thousands of dollars a pound. Conservationists have called for a ban on gill nets for years. Vaquitas have continued to die while poachers continued their efforts under the cover of legal operations.
The Revelator will cover this developing story extensively in the coming weeks.
Revelator Reads: 7 New Environmental Books for July
Check out Al Gore’s “Sequel” plus books about birds, disasters and pollution.
Ah, July…the perfect time of year for reading on the beach, or in the woods, or in the comfort of your own home. This month will see the publication of quite a few new environmentally themed books, making it the perfect time not just for escapism but also a bit of enlightenment. Here are our top seven picks for the month.
“An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” by Al Gore.
Yes, the former Vice President and perpetual client advocate is back with his much-needed follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth. This heavily illustrated book accompanies the new documentary of the same name and serves as a “call to action, exposing the reality of how humankind has aided in the destruction of our planet and groundbreaking information on what you can do now.” (July 25, Rodale Books, $25.99)
It’s nonfiction that reads like science fiction. If you haven’t heard of de-extinction, it’s the scientific effort to resurrect long-gone species such as the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth. Yes, just like Jurassic Park only real. Can it be done? Should it? Read the book and find out. (July 4, Atria Books, $26)
How do you call attention to the problem of plastic pollution? Eriksen and Joel Paschal did it by collecting a ton of that plastic junk, strapping it together into the form of a raft, and then sailing across the Pacific Ocean from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Yikes. Look for our interview with Eriksen this Wednesday. (Beacon Press, July 4, $26.95)
Okay, this might not exactly be beach reading, but it seems like a pretty important book for the people who need to deal with disasters caused by, as the publisher puts it, “both natural and anthropogenic sources.” If that’s you, check it out. (July 5, Wiley, $110)
Does Western-style philanthropy always benefit conservation? Hanes looks at the history of conservation in Africa to find quite a few examples where we did at least as much harm as good. This will definitely inspire some conversations. (Metropolitan Books, July 11, $28)
“An Uncertain Future: Australian Birdlife in Danger” by Geoffrey Maslen
The author of “Too Late: How We Lost the Battle with Climate Change” returns with an equally depressing look at the fate of Australia’s rapidly disappearing bird species. This book serves as both a warning sign and a call to action: As Maslen writes, “In saving Earth for birds, remember, we will be saving all other life forms as well. And that includes us.” (This is only in print in Australia but it’s available on Kindle and other e-platforms.) (July 1, Hardie Grant Books, $37.99)
“Wasteland Compendium Vol. 1” by Antony Johnston and various artists
Let’s end with something fun: a 700-page compilation of the Wasteland comic book series, set a century after an apocalyptic event that society only remembers as “the Big Wet.” Environmental fiction at its finest — and weirdest. (July 26, Oni Press, $39.99)
Well, that’s it for our list this month. What are you reading? Share your new or old favorites in the comments below.