The Big Picture: Southern Inhospitality

Mountaintop mining and excrement-filled lagoons threaten the unique biodiversity of the American southeast.

The southeastern United States is a place of unparalleled aquatic biodiversity, harboring a majority of the country’s fish, mussel, crayfish, and dragonfly and damselfly species.

This habitat supports a remarkable breadth of wildlife, from the majestic Florida sandhill crane:

…to the somewhat less impressive fuzzy pigtoe mussel.

All told, thousands of unique species call the American southeast home.

Unfortunately, the region has become increasingly inhospitable for these species over the past few decades. More than 70 percent of the southeast’s mussels are at risk of extinction. The same goes for 48 percent of its crayfishes and 28 percent of its fish species.

The reason? People.

Without significant work to cut pollution, development and other manmade threats, we stand to lose some of the most fascinating species on the continent.

All of these threats are particularly hard for the southeast’s vulnerable species because many are limited to small sections of rivers or a single cave. This leads to isolated populations that are, or can become, cut off from the world at large.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the rest of the world often doesn’t seem to give these species the respect they deserve. For instance, many of the region’s snails are not only endangered, they also have to suffer the additional indignity of being called names for being chubby.

Scientists have never documented what snails could have done to earn the names corpulent hornsnail, ample elimia, or ponderous siltsnail.

Threat # 1:

Among the region’s top threats, mountaintop removal mining destroys the tops of mountains overlying coal deposits using explosives and dumps the blast-debris into nearby valleys and waterways.

This archaic and incredibly destructive process threatens the survival of hundreds of native, inter-dependent species that are vital members of their ecosystems.

(Even if some species, such as the green floater, are named as though they’re completely useless superheroes.)

Threat # 2:

Another threat: The entire region’s waterways have been dramatically altered and strangulated to divert natural flows for industrial and urban use at an unsustainable rate.

 

A staggering number of dams — around 80,000 — were constructed in the United States in the 20th century. Although construction of new dams has diminished significantly in recent years, the extinction threat caused by existing water impoundment remains severe.

Threat # 3:

The third and particularly twisted threat facing sensitive wildlife in the region is the saturation of their habitats with the excrement of livestock animals. Animal waste is not only created in vast amounts but is also poorly regulated — the current “solution” to get rid of it is to irrigate crops with the noxious liquid.

Swine waste lagoons in Cape Fear watershed, North Carolina

There is virtually no end to the threats that have been decimating their habitat and population numbers, as you can see in this gallery:

Tragically, time is running out for innumerable species, including the legendary Western chicken turtle, an incredible animal with the head of a turtle, and the body… of a turtle.

With populations plummeting and the likelihood for species extinctions on track to rise, the region’s intricately interconnected freshwater ecosystems will continue to unravel unless the Southeast takes serious efforts to make these habitats hospitable once again.

Use the arrows to scroll through this gallery of more species at risk

References

Image credits

  • Florida sandhill crane by Andrea Westmoreland (CC BY-SA)
  • WV Mountaintop removal aerial footage by Mike Youngren/WV Public Broadcasting/Vimeo (CC BY-NC)
  • Green floater courtesy Smithsonian Institution
  • Coosa River by Wruple/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
  • Swine lagoon aerial photo courtesty Waterkeeper Alliance Inc. (CC BY-SA)
  • Maps in gallery of threats by Curt Bradley/Center for Biological Diversity.

Digging Deep into De-Extinction

Can extinct species ever truly be brought back to life? More importantly, should they?

Right now, in labs around the world, researchers are doing what science-fiction writers used to dream about: trying to bring extinct species back to life.

The science of resurrecting lost species takes many forms, but collectively it has become known as “de-extinction.” According to advocates like Stewart Brand, de-extinction could soon result in the return of the passenger pigeon to the skies of North America or the woolly mammoth to the forests of Eastern Siberia.

With the actual science advancing so quickly, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and examine the implications of such technological advances and potential resurrections. In fact, a journal called The Hastings Center Report — which “explores the ethical, legal, and social issues in medicine, health care, public health, and the life sciences” — has done just that in a special supplemental issue devoted to the topic of de-extinction. The issue — subtitled “Recreating the Wild: De-Extinction, Technology, and the Ethics of Conservation” — contains 11 fascinating and thought-provoking essays addressing what de-extinction really is, the promises of biotechnology for conservation, the value of the technology to still-living endangered species, the morality of the concept and the potential risks.

The Revelator reached out to Gregory E. Kaebnick, editor of the Hastings Center Report, to dig even further into the topic.

Platt: How did this special issue come about?

Kaebnick: I came at it from a nearby issue. I’d been doing research on the ethical questions surrounding the group of high-tech endeavors that go under the heading of “synthetic biology,” and I kept seeing these references to a new example of synthetic biology that was getting called “de-extinction.” Most of syn bio has to do with making genetic changes to microorganisms that cause them to do something useful for humans — produce fuel photosynthetically or turn a sugar into a medicine, for example — and some of that stuff seems acceptable to me in principle, as long as details about the organism or the way the organism is being changed and used give reason to think that the risks aren’t going to be unbearable when set against the potential benefits. However, the idea of genetically changing organisms, in the process maybe basically creating new species, does raise an important question about how far we humans should be going in bending the natural world to suit our needs and preferences. I thought de-extinction offered a chance to dig into that question.

De-extinction raises that question in a really powerful way because it’s about using those technologies specifically to alter the shared natural environment and because extinction has always seemed to be such an inalterable fact of nature. De-extinction also raises that question in a very complicated form, because the idea in it is that you’re trying to protect nature, but you’re doing that by changing nature. Is that even conceptually coherent? And if it is, how should you be thinking about the changes you’re making?

At the same time as I began working on de-extinction, I was invited to serve on a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee about the use of gene drives, which are another technology for altering the shared environment, again with some potential conservation-oriented uses. So de-extinction seemed like maybe the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. It might lead to other and even more significant ways of altering nature.

Platt: What do you hope readers will take away from reading these essays?

Kaebnick: First off, de-extinction is no solution for the extinction crisis. It is too hard to do, and most of the few “successes” would be so limited that they wouldn’t deserve the term “de-extinction.” If you were trying for a woolly mammoth, all you’d be likely to get is a hairy, cold-tolerant Asian elephant. Even if you got something genetically almost identical to a mammoth, it would still have such a different set of relationships to its environment and to other species that it wouldn’t really be a mammoth. (Curt Meine emphasizes this point in his essay.) And just as a conceptual matter, a species is not something that can be “brought back” or “resurrected,” as some proponents like to say. A species is a lineage of organisms, and once that lineage ends, the species is gone. Period. Even if we created something totally identical to the original mammoth, it would be a human creation, not a “resurrection” of the extinct species.

That said, the technologies are still very interesting. Perhaps the technologies could sometimes be used not for “de-extinction” but for the protection of merely threatened species. And maybe sometimes “de-extinction” would be reasonable. There might be some few occasions where creating a kind of proxy or replacement of a lost species would be possible and environmentally reasonable, maybe because having something in that environmental role is necessary for an ecosystem, for a network of other species. And in a very, very few cases, “de-extinction” might be done simply through cloning rather than with genetic alterations, and the organisms created that way could be put back into the original environment in a way that essentially picks up and carries on the species’ relationships with the environment. The gastric brooding frog might be an example of this category. “De-extinction” is still not the right word for these cases, but it’s less misleading than when we’re talking about bringing back the woolly mammoth.

So, I guess the second take-home point is that while de-extinction isn’t the answer to the extinction crisis, the technologies may have some meaningful conservation-oriented uses. We should be realistic about them — which the proponents of de-extinction are not — but we shouldn’t unthinkingly write them off, either.

And I think a third big take-home point is that the emergence of these technologies means we need to think very carefully about what we mean by “conservation” and what the goals and values of conservation are. How much human intervention is consistent with a preservationist mindset? Is the “gardening ethic” that Michael Pollan and Emma Maris have proposed a better mindset for an environmentalist?

Platt: What surprised you from the contributions?

Kaebnick: The contributions largely agreed that, as a practical matter, de-extinction is very limited, but they got to that point from very different philosophical positions. Philip Seddon, a zoologist in New Zealand who chaired a task force on de-extinction for the IUCN, defended the idea of using technological interventions for conservation goals, while Claudio Campagna, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and some coauthors argued basically that the very idea of de-extinction is horrible and shows that conservation isn’t sitting on secure philosophical foundations. Hank Greely, a legal scholar who served with Seddon on the IUCN task force, argued that de-extinction is basically just another in a line of bioethical issues, and he laid out a bioethical framework as the philosophical foundation for assessing it, but some environmental theorists, including Curt Meine from the Aldo Leopold Foundation and Christopher Preston, who’s a philosopher at the University of Montana, put de-extinction in the context of other environmentalist thinking about the human relationship to nature.

Maybe this combination of near-agreement on practical conclusions and wide divergence on theory is not all that surprising, but it is very interesting, and as the technology moves forward and some of the other, more powerful ways of intervening in nature become feasible (if they do), then we may well need better clarity on the philosophical foundations. That’s what I argue in my essay in the set, anyway.

Platt: What topics might still need to be explored?

Kaebnick: Can we use genetic or other technologies for “assisted adaptation”? The work being done to make an American chestnut that survives chestnut blight is an example of that. Can we use “de-extinction” merely to help threatened species like the black-footed ferret — say, to recreate some of that species’ lost genetic diversity? And how should we think about human management of nature? Obviously the main thing we need to do is to reduce our alteration of nature — eat more wisely, drive more efficiently, fly less frequently, keep houses cool in the winter and warm in the summer, and so on — but it seems pretty plain to me that it is no longer possible to protect biodiversity just by reducing the alteration of nature. Management is necessary. But does accepting that we have to manage nature force us to go along with Pollan’s gardening ethic? To me, that seems dangerous. I can go along with the gardening ethic only if we’re very careful and conservative about what “gardening” means.

You can read the entire issue of The Hastings Report special issue on de-extinction here.

The Persistent Sediments of Mercury Pollution

An atrocity of mercury poisoning began in the 1930s. Does a new treaty go far enough?

Originally published in Dejusticia’s Global Rights Blog

The Minamata Convention on Mercury, an international treaty designed to protect human health from the impacts of mercury and mercury compound emissions, just entered into force this past August 16. Though the history of the Convention negotiations dates back only to 2002, it was named after a small fishing village in Kumamoto Prefecture, near the southwestern tip of Japan, which, in the 1950s was ground zero for establishing that methylmercury caused devastating health effects.

The atrocity of Minamata disease began silently in the 1930s, when the predecessor of Chisso Corporation began producing acetaldehyde and acetic acid and dumping mercury-based pollutants into Minamata Bay. It continued doing so until the late 1960s. What became known as Minamata disease was astounding in its cruelty. Its victims lost control over muscles and speech, and suffered from intellectual development losses, strabismus, blindness, convulsions, limb deformities, and a bevy of neurological disorders. Some children were born with the disease, as methylmercury has the lamentable quality of breaching the placenta, unlike many chemicals, and focusing its effects on the fetus, rather than the mother. Others were attacked later in life.

The telltale hands of the most severely affected Minamata disease patients, curled forward in a tight muscle contraction against which fingers seem to be constantly rebelling became the icon of the mysterious disease, which was traced to mercury early on. The victims had to wait until 1968, however, for the Japanese government to finally recognize that Minamata disease was caused by methylmercury dumped into the bay by Chisso. This was only the beginning of a decades-long struggle for regulation, reparations, resources, information, accountability, and even identification as a victim of the disease. A struggle that continued even as late as 2016.

In 1971, Eugene Smith’s iconic picture Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath turned the plight of the victims of Minamata disease from a national scandal into a global alarm bell. Tomoko’s parents chose to expose the suffering of their child to make the world see what toxic pollution had done (and in 2001, withdrawing the picture from additional distribution, they chose to let her rest). Tomoko’s picture sparked outrage, action and, more importantly, empathy for the human costs of pollution.

Unfortunately, unsafe practices with mercury have always spread much faster than information about its health effects. For example, in 1971, the same year as Smith’s iconic photo was published, Alcalís de Colombia began discharging effluents with mercury compounds into the Bay of Cartagena. Only in 1977 did the government order the plant shuttered. But mercury had sedimented into the bottom of the bay and its impacts are still felt today.

In the Canadian rural community of Grassy Narrows, a paper mill that dumped mercury into the waterways was shut down in the 1970s, but the effects of its brazen pollution persist even today. In the United States, Dow Chemical plants dumped 200 pounds of mercury a day in the 1970s. As national alarms were raised, there was a lot of arm waving and not much action, for lack of information and lack of clarity about legal responsibility. Today, mercury levels are unexplainably rising in the Great Lakes once more.  In the Baltic Sea, 23,000 barrels of mercury were discovered in 2006, off the coast of Sweden, the remnants of a not too distant era when chemical dumping into international waters was done without a second thought. These are not isolated incidents; they are simply especially stark.

The Minamata Convention, having entered into force a full 85 years since Chisso Corporation began to pollute Minamata Bay, is a belated but welcome instrument to confront the dangers of mercury systematically. It calls for placing strict controls of the supply and trade of mercury and mercury-added products (Arts 3 and 4), creating an inventory of all points where releases of mercury or mercury compounds exist and providing information on environmentally sound practices (Art. 9), reducing or eliminating the use of mercury in small scale gold mining (Art. 7), and strengthening research and training regarding health hazards of mercury (Arts. 16(c) and (16(d)).

There should be some optimism at the fact that Minamata has entered into force, but let’s remember that only 74 countries have ratified it. Let’s also recall that after entry into force comes the hard work of implementation. Consider the difficulties for implementation of mercury safety measures in Colombia: while the country has not yet ratified the Minamata Convention, it has sent strong signals of its commitment to ending mercury pollution. It created a register of authorized mercury purveyors and passed norms to address the pollution caused by illegal and artisanal mining (now the leading sources of mercury pollution in the country). It supports research into the health costs of mercury use, and passed an ambitious 2013 Mercury Law, which contemplates eliminating the industrial and productive use of mercury within ten years. Despite these norms and commitments, however, Colombia climbed from third to second worst mercury polluter in the world, second only to China. Over 200 tons of mercury continue to be discharged in its waters each year, and the deaths by mercury poisoning pile on.

Like Colombia, Indonesia has paid a high cost for the use of mercury in informal mining, and its President recently called for an end to the use of mercury in mining. The questions, for Indonesia, for Colombia, and for mercury pollution across the globe, are: what can we do to bring norms in line with implementation, and how soon we can we do it?

The best allies and advocates for Minamata disease victims were those who approached their work with deep empathy for the human impact of toxic pollution, from artists to scientists. We can learn a lesson from this commitment to the people who were exposed to the effects of mercury, and demand that implementation be measured not in terms of laws passed or commitments made, but in terms of the health and living conditions of those most vulnerable to toxic mercury impacts, including victims who may not yet know that the ravages of mercury have already detonated in their bodies.

© Dejusticia and Claret Vargas. Used with permission.

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.

The Burning/Flooding/Dying Season

People around the world are struggling with wildfires and floods and other crises, but I don’t give up hope.

The air in the Pacific Northwest this week is filled with smoke, ash and a sense of dread.

People tend to think of Portland, Oregon, as the land of perpetual rain, but in truth we’ve barely seen a drop of the wet stuff for months now. Instead the earth has gone dry, the grasses have gone dormant and the fires have had a field day. Last week nearly 1,000 wildfires burned in and around the state, leaving a haze in the atmosphere and a cough in many peoples’ lungs, mine included.

This week it is worse — much worse. A new fire, reportedly set off by kids throwing firecrackers, struck the Eagle Creek Trailhead in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge on Saturday. By Tuesday the flames had spread to more than 10,000 acres; by this morning it was up to 20,000 acres. At my home just 25 miles away, ash from centuries-old trees drifted through the sky like snowflakes, coating everything not in white but in gray and charred brown. The smell of burning wood surrounded us yesterday, even seeping in through windows tightly closed against the concurrent heatwave and its nearly 100-degree weather.

Smoke on the Columbia River. Photo: John Platt

Of course all of this pales in comparison to the fires still surrounding Los Angeles or the floods still strangling the Hurricane Harvey-ravaged Houston region and monsoon-struck Southeast Asia, where more than 1,200 people have died. And what comes next could become another crisis. Even as I struggle with the relatively minor discomfort of smoke and ash, all my friends in Florida and the Caribbean are battening down the hatches in anticipation of upcoming monster storm Hurricane Irma, which threatens to rip through their homes starting as early as today.

Meanwhile, all of this comes at a time when government programs to deal with floods and disaster relief — not to mention climate change — face slashing if not complete eradication through the machinations of the science-denying Trump administration.

Through it all, though, I refuse to give up hope. It’s not that I’m an optimist — far from it. I’m a realist with cynical overtones. I know how bad things are, and I know that in most ways they’re going to get worse over the next few years. But despair does not yet have me in its grip.

Where does my sense of hope come from? Honestly, it’s a function of my years of reporting on climate change, the extinction crisis, pollution and other horrifying topics. People ask me all the time, “How can you stand to write about this terrible stuff every day?” The answer is simple: Even when I’m reporting on the worst-case scenarios, I’m usually interviewing the very people who are working hard to understand what’s going on — or to try to turn these situations around. I see the work going on behind the scenes. I know that people are making a difference. I see the positive change, as painfully slow and incremental as it may be, and I embrace it.

The world is choking and burning and drowning. People are dying and species are going extinct. Politics make it all seem even bleaker. But I’ll never let any of that stop me, and it shouldn’t stop anyone else either. It should serve to motivate us to do better, and to encourage others to do the same.

Living on the Edge With Lions

Ewaso Lions founder Shivani Bhalla aims to help people learn to live with local predators.

As a young girl, Shivani Bhalla — a fourth-generation Kenyan— admired the large lion prides she saw on family safaris. But when she moved to Samburu in the north in 2002, those big prides were gone. Lions only roamed in groups of two or three.

“It was different from what I expected,” Bhalla recalls. “And I wanted to know why.”

Lion populations across Africa have plummeted, with only about 20,000 now occupying just 8 percent of their former range. About 2,000 are in Kenya, a number that’s dropped about 60 percent from a decade ago. Bhalla is trying to change that trend.

In northern Kenya, home of the nomadic Samburu people, protected areas are too small for lions. As a result, livestock and lions increasingly roam in the same places. That can lead to conflict, with predators killing the livestock and people retaliating by poisoning or shooting the lions.

To encourage coexistence, in 2007 Bhalla established Ewaso Lions, a nonprofit organization based in Samburu and Isiolo counties. Ewaso Lions works through three main programs: Warrior Watch, which engages men to respond to lion attacks on livestock and calm the situation; Lion Kids Camp, which teaches children (who are often shepherds for livestock) about conservation; and Mama Simba, which educates women and provides them with a voice in conservation. The NGO also monitors lion movements and analyzes livestock killings, which helps them target strategies to avoid additional conflict.

Bhalla understands the distress of communities living with the lions. From her base in Samburu, she spoke with me about helping to secure a future for lions in Kenya.

Neme: How do you change people’s perceptions of lions?

Bhalla: Mainly through engaging with the community. I’m lucky I work with Samburu communities, who have lived with lions for generations, so they already have a tolerance. Plus, it’s the Samburu community working with the Samburu community. When we encourage warriors to not kill lions, it’s warriors who are speaking with warriors. If we are working with women, it’s our Mama Simba ladies doing that. It is they who are spreading the word. I think that’s what makes it effective.

Shivani Bhalla (second from left) with the women of Mama Simba. Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Neme: How did Warrior Watch begin?

A local warrior, Jeneria (Lekilelei), started this project in 2010. He joined me in the early days, and went from seeing lions only as killers of goats and cows to seeing them as something much more. It was his idea. He said that if we wanted to stop warriors from killing lions, we needed to bring them on-board — and he went ahead and trained five warriors. Now we are working with 20, and that’s going to increase at the end of this year.

Janeria and other warriors. Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Neme: Reflecting on Ewaso Lions’ 10-year anniversary, what’s changed?

Bhalla: It’s gotten harder because there are more people and more livestock, and less room for lions. People are under pressure to find grazing and water for their livestock, and the lions are trying to survive with less food. Because of this pressure, changing hearts and minds is harder. When we have drought and unpredictable livestock movements, lions tend to attack more — so we’re seeing more conflict because of the changing landscape.

Neme: Have lion populations changed since you started?

Bhalla: When we started, there were 11 lions. Now there are 50. We lose one or two a year. This year is really challenging. In addition to drought and fewer herbivores, we have an increased number of lions and they are looking for safe areas. Meanwhile we have more people and more livestock, and the livestock are moving into lion habitat. So more lions are being killed than before.

Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Neme: What happens after an incident?

Bhalla: Generally one of our warriors responds. All are fully employed by us. We usually find out quickly through phone calls, radio messages, or someone walks into camp. We are quick to respond, so we can calm that person down. That point of anger is the most dangerous. Sometimes it might take two days to calm down the community. We need to be there so we can ensure they do not go out and hunt lions when they are really angry. We also get information, like when the livestock was killed, what time, was it being looked after, were there herders with it. This helps us identify patterns and encourage community members to come up with solutions.

Neme: What patterns of livestock killings have you found?

Bhalla: About 90 percent of livestock is killed during the day, when the animals are not guarded properly. There’s very little killing at night here in Samburu unless livestock are lost. This is different than other parts of Africa. We take that and work with communities on better husbandry techniques. We encourage the children to be more focused when they watch livestock. If they see tracks or signs of lion, don’t take livestock there. If they are running around playing games, they don’t notice these signs. Also, livestock should be kept together. The animals that get killed are the livestock that stray.

Because the warriors are on foot, they know where lions are and they communicate that to the herders and encourage them to take their livestock elsewhere.

Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Neme: How is Ewaso Lions an example for other places?

Bhalla: Our Lion Kids Camp program is being used as a model in other places. For instance, the Saiga antelope program in Uzbekistan came out to learn. And in Peru, the spectacled bears project team is now using this same idea. The Saiga project was also inspired to start Mama Saiga — following on our Mama Simba program.

Courtesy Ewaso Lions

Our methods of conflict resolution are being used, too. For example, Jeneria has been called by KWS to help train others in conflict transformation, and we have trained various other project personnel in Kenya on this. These are just a few examples.

Neme: What can people do to help?

Bhalla: There a number of things they can do to support lion conservation efforts. Ewaso Lions is the only project in northern Kenya. We rely on donor funding for our $400,000 a year budget, so financial support is always welcome. But it is not just us. Five conservation projects (including Ewaso Lions) have come together and formed the Pride Lion Conservation Alliance to safeguard lions. There’s also a new Lion Recovery Fund that was launched on August 10 to recover lion populations across Africa. So there are a lot of ways people can get involved in lion work across Africa.

There are also a lot of non-financial ways to help. Like others, our work is field-based, but often I have to do things like writing reports, applications, press releases and using MailChimp for example. People might have skills in this area and could volunteer time to create newsletters, update website or help in similar ways.

It also helps to spread the word. People might hear about rhino crisis but not about the lion crisis. So people can speak about the problems facing lions. Lions are running out of space and running out of time. That’s something I hope can change.

© 2017 Laurel Neme, all rights reserved.

Previously in The Revelator:

Elephant Ambassador in Chad: A Conversation with Stephanie Vergniault

Revelator Reads: 8 New Environmental Books for September

This month brings new books about elephants, energy and an all-too-real mythic figure.

Ah, September — time to throw open those windows and enjoy a good book in the rapidly cooling evenings. Publishers must have that in mind, because they have at least two dozen new environmentally themed books scheduled for release in September, featuring everything from animals to energy.

We can’t cover them all at once, but here are our eight top picks of the books coming out this month. As always we’ve tried to choose titles for both adults and kids, as well as for enthusiasts and professionals.

grand canyon for saleGrand Canyon for Sale: Public Lands versus Private Interests in the Era of Climate Change by Stephen Nash

Probably the most perfectly timed book of the month, this important investigative work dives into the efforts to undermine our country’s public lands and what that means for the wildlife that lives on them. Not to be missed. (University of California Press, September 5, $29.95)

rights of natureThe Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World by David R. Boyd

This provocative new book looks at cases around the world that have granted, or seek to grant, legal rights to animals and ecosystems. Don’t worry, chimpanzees won’t be able to vote, but under this movement rivers could gain the right not to be polluted. (ECW Press, September 5, $15.95)

johnny appleseedJohnny Appleseed by Paul Buhle and Noah Van Sciver

The bizarre true story of the man behind the legend, retold as an astonishingly beautiful graphic novel. You’ll gain a new appreciation for the myths — and maybe find a few seeds of truth along the way. (Fantagraphics Books, September 5, $19.99)

changing energy

Changing Energy: The Transition to a Sustainable Future by John H. Perkins

Can we get past fossil fuels to an all-sustainable energy system? Perkins looks back at history to show we’ve made three earlier energy transitions and prove that it’s time for the fourth. (University of California Press, September 12, $29.95)

How to be an Elephant by Katherine Roy

A kids’ book with a difference. The artist traveled to Africa to better understand elephants in their natural habitat and turned that into a book full of amazing watercolor paintings, poetic text and incredible scientific details. It’s stunning. (David Macaulay Studio, September 19, $18.99)

three zeroesA World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

Yunus, the Nobel laureate who invented microcredit, brings us a tome that offers to show us how we can alleviate poverty, create jobs and save the planet. No small task, but what have we got to lose? (Public Affairs Books, September 26, $28.00)

whale songWhale Song by Margret Grebowicz

This short book — part of Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” line — looks at the problems currently facing ocean ecosystems as a way to explore how whales connect to humans and what that means for how we live our lives in our strange new online social world. (Bloomsbury, September 7, $14.95)

critical crittersCritical Critters by Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy

This gets my vote as the book of the month, if not the year. Steadman and Levy previously teamed up for the amazing art books Nextinction and Extinct Boids. Like the first two parts of their trilogy, this new volume combines Steadman’s gonzo paintings of endangered species (most of which are real, a few of which come straight out of his paint-splattered imagination) with Levy’s informative text to create a volume full of humor, pathos, power and pain. Check it out. (Bloomsbury, September 26, $50)

 

That’s our list for September, but we know there’s a lot more out there. What are you reading? Share your favorite new or old environmental books in the comments below.

Previously in The Revelator:

Revelator Reads: 7 New Environmental Books for July

Revelator Reads: 7 New Environmental Books for August

The Bats, the Bridge and Hurricane Harvey

Rescuers turn out for Houston’s famous Waugh Bridge bat colony.

Houstonians turned out by the thousands this week to help rescue neighbors who had been displaced or trapped by Hurricane Harvey’s record floods.

Some of those neighbors had wings.


Over the past few days rescuers have saved thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadaria braziliensis) from Waugh Bridge’s famous colony, which before the storm was home to an estimated 250,000 flying mammals. Dedicated volunteers sometimes hung over the top of the inundated Waugh Bridge to pull bats out of the water in nets.

Additional bats were scooped up into buckets and taken to peoples’ homes to dry off. Others ended up at shelters, working with Bat World Sanctuary, where they received emergency fluids and food before being released.

Some bats didn’t need rescue; they made their way to nearby office buildings and parking garages, where they found shelter from the storm.

Mylea Bayless, senior director of network & partnerships for Bat Conservation International, based in Austin, says they will begin monitoring the Waugh Bridge bat colony after the waters recede. “We are a little bit worried about the impact this flooding is going to have on them, so we’re going to be paying attention to that,” she says.

Mexican free-tailed bats are a populous and wide-ranging species, so even if the colony were devastated it wouldn’t have much impact on the species as a whole. It would, however, be a blow to the local people. “It’s a really visible bat colony,” Bayless says. “People in Houston gather along the banks of the Buffalo Bayou to watch the bats come out from under the bridge. It’s just really become part of the local community to go out and watch these bats. It’s a great educational opportunity.”

Ultimately, Bayless says, she’s relatively optimistic about the colony. “We’re hoping some of the colony crawled out and they’re roosting in these temporary places until the rain and the wind subside and they can go back to roosting under the bridge.”

Other bats, however, may not have been as lucky. The Texas coast is also home to several tree-roosting bat species that could have been harder hit by the hurricane.

“Yellow bats roost underneath palm fronds in the South,” Bayless says. “If those trees get whipped around and as their foliage gets knocked off, those tree-roosting bats are likely to be impacted too. They might end up on the ground or without roosts. That’s a little harder for us to assess because those bats are distributed across the landscape. You can’t just go check all the palm trees to see what bats got knocked out, while you can go to a bridge and see a whole colony. The impact on trees and vegetation is going to be really hard to assess.”

Bayless adds that Harvey’s effect on bats and other wildlife offers an important lesson for the future. “It’s moments like this that should point out how important open spaces are,” she says. “I think about this a lot on the Texas coast, particularly in big cities and where every square foot of land is at a premium. Maintaining those natural open spaces, even in urban environments, it’s not only good for the soul but also those open spaces are the areas that can absorb the rising flood waters. In Houston, the bayous and the parks are safe places for the floods to happen, as opposed to the floods moving up the streets and going into peoples’ houses. It may be an opportunity to call attention to how important it is to protect those open spaces and continue to protect those open spaces for future storms and future situations like this.”

For now, the question remains how many of the Waugh Bridge bats were lost and how that impact will be felt in the near future. Before the disaster the colony consumed an estimated 2.5 tons of insects every night. With mosquito populations anticipated to explode as waters recede, Houston may need every bat it can get.

Previously in The Revelator:

Is Hurricane Harvey a Harbinger for Houston’s Future?

To Restore Salmon, Think Like a Beaver

Manmade “dam analogues” could help beavers recolonize former habitats — and help fish in the process.

In the 19th century, demand for North American beaver pelts lured trappers westward — and worldwide demand for fur set off a chain reaction that has reverberated across time. Overhunting led to the beavers’ near-demise on the continent, a loss that changed the hydrology of river systems. Previously wet and wild places became far less so with the loss of beaver populations and their dam-building ways.

Jump ahead 250 years, and several projects are underway in California to alter the future, both for landscapes and for beavers. In one project landowners and public-land managers have started building structures called “beaver dam analogues,” which are essentially starter kits designed help beavers recolonize rivers.

The premise is simple: Drive a row of narrow logs into a streambed and then weave the pilings together with cuttings sourced from nearby trees. The structure slows the pace of the water and traps sedimentation, allowing a small pond to form and creating favorable conditions for nearby beavers (Castor canadenis) to move in. Then the beavers can build their own homes and continue to modify streams to meet their needs.

Dam analogue being colonized by a beaver. Credit: NOAA.

Construction on these dam analogues began in earnest in Oregon in 2009 when a group of scientists affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration decided to find out whether the structures could add complexity to river systems and restore salmon populations in the process.

Their use has spread. In California Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, co-directors of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, facilitate the effort to introduce beavers to watersheds. Because the animals provide ecosystem services, Dolman and Lundquist see them as underutilized allies in watershed recovery efforts. Their handiwork transforms the landscape, creating a mosaic of habitats. First, beaver dams modify streamflow, creating slow and fast-moving bodies of water. This leads to an increase in the types of streamside habitats available to a variety of wildlife, boosting biodiversity in the process.

Lundquist says the North American beaver is the continent’s original water manager, renowned for storing and caching water for future use. Since beaver dams are temporary and permeable, she explains, the structures allow water to flow, thereby reconnecting mountain streams with the floodplains below.

As California looks for ways to become more resilient in the face of climate change and the prospect of prolonged droughts, the construction of these dams may prove to be advantageous. They could even buy more time for stressed aquatic species such as oceangoing salmon and steelhead trout, which have been left high and dry by California’s prolonged droughts, deforestation and water-diversion projects meant to help farmers.

In 2014 arid conditions compelled the residents within the Scott River watershed, in Northern California, to take action. When their rivers and streams dried up, local wildlife officials had few options but to truck out thousands of juvenile coho salmon to locations with adequate water. In response to the salmon crisis, the residents of the watershed banded together to build eight beaver dam analogues. Today six beaver families occupy eight of the structures, and according to published accounts, juvenile salmon in the watershed have rebounded.

The Scott River project was the first approved by California‘s Department of Fish and Wildlife, and several more pilot projects are underway. As the state seeks effective ways to restore river systems parched by drought and hurt by decades-long land-use patterns, natural resource managers may start looking to dam analogues and beavers for answers.

Unfortunately, prior to the deep drought that hit California beginning in 2012, beavers were an afterthought. “In California, no one was talking about beavers,” Lundquist says. “It was a missed opportunity.” She adds that there’s now been an uptick in interest as word spreads among rural residents about the success of the analogues and the benefits beavers can deliver. “We’re helping people connect the dots between the science of beaver restoration and implementation,” she says. Determining whether beavers can recharge groundwater is an open question and subject of ongoing debate. “It’s an evolving science,” she admits.

What remains unchanged is the beaver itself. “They are highly adaptable animals and able to persist,” Lundquist says. “What limits beaver are water and wood — period.” And that combination may be a damned good way to restore streams and solve water woes in California and other parched states.

© 2017, Enrique Gili, all rights reserved.

Kenya Makes Plastic Bags a Criminal Offense

Kenya this week made it official: Anyone manufacturing, importing, selling or even using plastic bags faces thousands of dollars in fines or up to four years in jail. It’s not just shopping bags; garbage bags also count. The ban could help reduce the hundreds of millions of plastic bags used in Kenya each year, but it’s also controversial, as many Kenyans rely on plastic bags to carry charcoal for heating and cooking, or even for sanitation. Still, the BBC reports that people are already adapting by wrapping goods in old newspapers or carrying them in their hands.

Is Hurricane Harvey a Harbinger for Houston’s Future?

Human-caused climate change and over-development enhanced some of the impacts of the storm.

Over the past week we have seen two major tropical storms devastate different parts of the world. First Typhoon Hato struck Hong Kong and Southern China killing at least a dozen people. And over the weekend Hurricane Harvey made landfall from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing extremely heavy rain to southern Texas and causing devastating floods in Houston.

Tropical cyclones are, of course, a natural feature of our climate. But the extreme impacts of these recent storms, especially in Houston, has understandably led to questions over whether climate change is to blame.

How are tropical cyclones changing?

Tropical cyclones, called typhoons in the Northwest Pacific and hurricanes in the North Atlantic, are major storm systems that initiate near the Equator and can hit locations in the tropics and subtropics around the world.

When we look at the Atlantic Basin we see increases in tropical storm numbers over the past century, although there is high year-to-year variability. The year 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, marks the high point.

There is a trend towards more tropical storms and hurricanes in the North Atlantic. US National Hurricane Center

We can be confident that we’re seeing more severe tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic than we did a few decades ago. It is likely that climate change has contributed to this trend, although there is low statistical confidence associated with this statement. What that means is that this observed increase in hurricane frequency is more likely than not linked with climate change, but the increase may also be linked to decadal variability.

Has Harvey been enhanced by climate change?

Unlike other types of extreme weather such as heatwaves, the influence of climate change on tropical cyclones is hard to pin down. This is because tropical cyclones form as a result of many factors coming together, including high sea surface temperatures, and weak changes in wind strength through the depth of the atmosphere.

These storms are also difficult to simulate using climate models. To study changes in tropical cyclones we need to run our models at high resolution and with interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean being represented.

It’s much easier to study heat extremes, because we can do this by looking at a single, continuous variable: temperature. Tropical cyclones, on the other hand, are not a continuous variable; they either form or they don’t. This makes them much harder to model and study.

Tropical cyclones also have many different characteristics that might change in unpredictable ways as they develop, including their track, their overall size, and their strength. Different aspects of the cyclones are likely to change in different ways, and no two cyclones are the same. Compare that with a heatwave, which often have similar spatial features.

For all these reasons, it is very hard to say exactly how climate change has affected Hurricane Harvey.

So what can we say?

While it’s hard to pin the blame for Hurricane Harvey directly on climate change, we can say this: human-caused climate change has enhanced some of the impacts of the storm.

Fortunately, in Harvey’s case, the storm surge hasn’t been too bad, unlike for Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, for example. This is because Harvey did not travel as far, and weakened rapidly when it made landfall.

We know that storm surges due to tropical cyclones have been enhanced by climate change. This is because the background sea level has increased, making it more likely that storm surges will inundate larger unprotected coastal regions.

Building levees and sea walls can alleviate some of these impacts, although these barriers will need to be higher (and therefore more expensive) in the future to keep out the rising seas.

Deluge danger

Harvey’s biggest effect is through its intense and prolonged rainfall. A low pressure system to the north is keeping Harvey over southern Texas, resulting in greater rainfall totals.

The rainfall totals are already remarkable and are only going to get worse.

We know that climate change is enhancing extreme rainfall. As the atmosphere is getting warmer it can hold more moisture (roughly 7 percent more for every 1℃ rise in temperature). This means that when we get the right circumstances for very extreme rainfall to occur, climate change is likely to make these events even worse than they would have been otherwise. Without a full analysis it is hard to put exact numbers on this effect, but on a basic level, wetter skies mean more intense rain.

Houston, we have a problem

There are other factors that are making this storm worse than others in terms of its impact. Houston is the second-fastest growing city in the US, and the fourth most populous overall.

As the region’s population grows, more and more of southern Texas is being paved with impermeable surfaces. This means that when there is extreme rainfall the water takes longer to drain away, prolonging and intensifying the floods.

Hurricane Harvey is likely to end up being one of the most costly disasters in US history. It is also likely that climate change and population growth in the region have worsened the effects of this major storm.

Andrew King, Climate Extremes Research Fellow, University of Melbourne

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.