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.

vaquita binoculars — NOAA Fisheries West Coast

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.

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:

Life Before the EPA

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.

Previously on The Revelator:

Plastic Pollution: From Ship to Shore

Revelator Reads: 7 New Environmental Books for July

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)

“Woolly: The True Story of the De-extinction of One of History’s Most Iconic Creatures” by Ben Mezrich

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)

“Junk Raft” by Marcus Eriksen

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)

“Natural Catastrophe Risk Management and Modelling: A Practitioner’s Guide” by Kirsten Mitchell-Wallace, Matthew Jones, John Hillier & Matthew Foote

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)

“White Man’s Game: Saving Animals, Rebuilding Eden, and Other Myths of Conservation in Africa” by Stephanie Hanes

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.

3 Surprising Reasons Why TV Meteorologists Don’t Talk About Climate Change

…and one really important reason why they should.

Will the weekend rain clouds arrive before or after that long hike you want to take? Your local TV meteorologist probably has the definitive answer.

What climatic changes will occur in your region over the next 10 years? That’s a question your local weathercaster may decline to discuss on the air.

It’s not that your local weatherperson is a climate-change denier (although a handful of them are). It’s that his or her job — seemingly a perfect platform for communicating science to the masses — just isn’t conducive to spreading the facts about global warming.

That’s the word from a new study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Bentley University. Published last month in the book “Climate Change Adaptation in North America,” the study found three surprising reasons meteorologists don’t talk about the future beyond the next 10 days.

1. Their jobs depend on their popularity.

Think about it: Do you watch the local news because you trust the anchors or because you trust the weather reports? If the same station kept getting its predictions wrong, you’d change the channel, wouldn’t you?

“It turns out that the weather forecaster is the main driver of local news loyalty,” says one of the study’s authors, Helen Meldrum, an associate professor of psychology. “I had thought it was maybe the anchor, but people feel that ‘Tom on station ABC 5 tends to get those snowstorms right,’ so they stay tuned into that station.” That translates into ratings for the TV station and profits for everyone involved.

It goes even further than that. Meldrum says many viewers develop deep attachments to their local weathermen in what are known as “parasocial” (one-sided) relationships. The audience members feel the TV personalities are friends.

These two factors add up. Meldrum says meteorologists are aware of their viewers’ loyalty and these emotional relationships, which makes it even harder to talk about the potentially polarizing subject of climate change. “They are incredibly aware of their popularity and they do not want to do things that will risk it,” she says. “Why risk stepping into the role of being a science educator and presenting the facts if you know the facts are going to alienate over half of the people who have given you ‘likes’ on your Facebook page,” she asks.

2. They just don’t have time.

Consider your local evening news program and its weather segments. First the anchors banter with their station’s meteorologist for about 30 seconds, joking about the weather, and then it’s time for the forecast, which has to cram predictions for the morning the commute, the evening rain and the entirety of the next week into about two minutes. They can’t go a second over their allotted time — after all, the sports report’s next. No room for discussion of climate.

On top of that need to be pithy, today’s average meteorologist also has to spend time interacting with viewers on his or her personal Facebook page and Twitter account, while squeezing in a never-ending barrage of personal appearances.

“They’re just completely strapped for time,” says Meldrum, who interviewed meteorologists around New England for the paper. Many of them struggled to find even half an hour to talk with her.

3. Their profession doesn’t prepare them to talk about climate.

Standing in front of a green screen pointing at digital clouds and numbers may look easy, but getting a meteorology degree takes a lot of work. Even the most advanced coursework, however, leans heavily on the science of developing an instantaneous snapshot of the atmosphere. “They don’t have enough time to put climatology or paleoclimatology into the curriculum,” says another of the study’s authors, David Szymanski, an associate professor of geology. “They don’t get the long-range view. Distinguishing between natural and unnatural climate requires this lens.”

The Impact on the Public

All of this is a bit of a shame because the public loves and trusts their local weather professionals. “Broadcast meteorologists are perceived as the TV station’s resident scientists,” Szymanski says, adding that they may be the only scientists that many viewers know. “When people are asked to name a living scientist, many of them pick their local weathercaster.”

That makes meteorologists what he calls “a fantastic conduit of information on climate change” — one the world isn’t really getting the chance to experience.

Luckily things are changing. Some meteorologists are talking about climate change at their public appearances, and a few have become strong advocates for science on Twitter and other social networks. Others are using special climate-change-related graphics, created by Climate Central’s Climate Matters program, during their broadcasts. “These new services give them pre-made, empirically tested images that don’t kill their time budget,” Meldrum says.

Finally, some broadcasters are taking the message outside of their two-minute window. Meldrum reports that one of the meteorologists they interviewed decided to do a special climate report outside her normal weather segment, and that’s an example others can follow. “The ones who want to be climate change communicators, they need to have enough power within their station to negotiate for longer special reports,” she says.

Meanwhile the number of meteorologists who actively deny climate change continues to fall. A survey published this March by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication found that 95 percent of weathercasters think climate change is happening, and that only about 21 percent think it’s not man-made. That’s much better than it was five years ago.

“It’s a sign of hope,” Meldrum says.

Previously on The Revelator:

Lobsters in Hot Water: Climate Change Threatens Maine’s Most Valuable Fishery

The Boom in Batteries

Increases in battery storage capacity will soon transform renewable energy. Battery manufacturing is expected to more than double by 2021, with China leading the charge in building new factories. US states, meanwhile, are already investing in battery storage to support the growth of wind and solar power. This battery boom will help utility-scale energy and individual consumers: a new study finds that batteries could allow solar households to start “defecting” from the power grid in a little over a decade. Just one question remains: where are we going to get the lithium for all of these batteries?

The Fight Over Bears Ears: A Tale of Two Towns

Bluff and Blanding represent diametrically opposing views over the future of the national monument and its Indian ruins.

BLUFF, Utah — When it comes to the fight over Bears Ears National Monument, the stark differences in attitudes toward the monument designation between residents of Bluff and nearby Blanding are literally 15 centuries apart.

The roadside signs welcoming travelers to each community located along U.S. 191, one of the nation’s most beautiful highways, succinctly sum up the difference between the two communities.

In a respectful nod toward the ancient settlements that first appeared along the banks of the San Juan River, Bluff’s welcome signs declare that the unincorporated community of about 300 was founded in 650 A.D.

Twenty-three miles north, on a windswept mesa, the city of Blanding welcomes travelers with signs proclaiming its motto, “Base Camp for Adventure,” and stating that it was established in 1905.

Although Mormon pioneers founded both communities, Bluff has shed its ultra-conservative past and has become an intellectual mecca noted for its preponderance of PhDs and archeologists. Residents overwhelmingly hailed President Barack Obama’s proclamation last December creating the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument.

“When people are educated and learn to look at other opinions, they are not closed minded,” says Jackie Warren, who works at a Bluff resort and has owned a home in the community for the past 20 years. “I think that’s what you are finding here in Bluff.”

On the other hand, Blanding remains steeped in its deep Mormon heritage. The alcohol-free community has a striking dearth of restaurants and retail stores that creates a depressed downtown pockmarked with vacant buildings. A handful of motels, however, are generally full at night and lodging is relatively expensive.

Most of Blanding’s 3,000 residents adamantly oppose the monument designation and are encouraging President Donald Trump to rescind it as soon as possible. Front lawns prominently display signs opposing the monument, and cars and trucks frequently carry anti–Bears Ears decals in their back windows.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced earlier this month that Bears Ears should be downsized, but he provided no indication of how much of a reduction he will recommend to the president later this summer. Last April Trump issued an executive order requiring Zinke to review all national monuments designated in the past 21 years greater than 100,000 acres in order to determine if they should be revoked or downsized.

Blanding Embraces Its Past in Opposing Bears Ears

To many in Blanding, getting rid of Bears Ears won’t come soon enough.

“It’s an absolute disaster,” says Jerry Murdock, a longtime Blanding resident who manages Canyonlands Lodging, a website that books vacation homes and cabins.

“In order to save Bears Ears and the lifestyle here, they need to rescind the monument,” he says in a lengthy, rambling telephone interview. “There is no reason to take 1.3 million acres and turn it into a monument when 98 percent of it was already protected.”

Murdock claims that the majority of American Indians in southern Utah oppose the monument but cites no polling to support this claim. He says that tribal leaders who requested President Obama create the monument have not been truthful to their constituents about future access to the land.

Many American Indians forage for plants, hunt for game and collect firewood from the public lands that are now part of the national monument. Murdock and others in Blanding say that monument managers will cut off access.

“They have been fed a line of baloney and that is not going to change,” Murdock says.

Perpetuating the claim that American Indians will be denied access to the land persists, despite the fact that Obama’s proclamation creating the monument addresses this concern. The proclamation creates the Bears Ears Commission, made up of representatives of five area tribes.

The proclamation requires the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and the Department of the Interior — which manages Bureau of Land Management property, as well as the National Park Service — to “meaningfully engage with the (Bears Ears) Commission” in developing and revising management plans. The goal is “to ensure that management decisions affecting the monument reflect tribal expertise and traditional and historical knowledge.”

Murdock’s anti-monument attitude echoes the city of Blanding’s official position. In July 2016 the city passed a resolution opposing the monument, declaring it would be “unilateral and unwarranted Presidential designation.”

Blanding City Councilman Robert G. Ogle says in an email that the biggest complaint about the monument designation comes from many in the community who believe “they were not consulted” in the monument decision. “The voice of the local citizens has been minimized,” he adds.

Ogle notes that San Juan County is Utah’s largest county, and federal and state governments control 92 percent of its land. Blanding is the largest community in the county. “Simply put,” Ogle says, “the national monument designation is a land grab to generate greater control.”

Like others in his community, Blanding businessman Joe Lyman, currently serving his third term on the Blanding City Council, turns to a far-right fringe analysis to buttress his anti-monument stance.

Lyman, a descendent of Mormon pioneers who founded Bluff in 1880 after a harrowing trek through the rugged mountains, provided The Revelator with a copy of a report written by J.R. Carlson of Stillwater Technical Solutions of Garden City, Kansas, which was presented to the San Juan County Commission in October 2016.

Carlson’s report claims, incorrectly, that the president doesn’t have the authority to proclaim a national monument under the Antiquities Act of 1906, and that the 43 grazing allotments on Bear Ears National Monument are lands that are not “owned or controlled” by the federal government and therefore not eligible for monument inclusion.

Carlson, the executive director of the Kansas Natural Resource Coalition — an alliance of county governments that engage with federal agencies on natural resource policies — argues in the document that “for purposes of a monument designation, grazing allotments (districts) are a limited-fee, surface title property, and as a result such lands are not owned or controlled by the Federal government.”

There is no widely accepted legal basis to support Carlson’s claim, which is often cited by ranchers seeking to assume control of federal land. The federal government has been leasing federal land to ranchers since passage of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934.

The Act instituted a permitting system to be issued by the federal government for all public rangeland, where for the first time in federal land-management history, fees could be charged in exchange for grazing rights, according to a 2015 Montana Law Review article on the legal framework for transferring federal public land to states.

The article concludes that unless Congress legislates the “disposal of federal public lands, federal lands will remain federal, regardless of which state makes the demand.” In other words, unless Congress transfers ownership of grazing land to ranchers, the property remains under federal control.

Carlson also claims that when Congress in 2014 “reauthorized” the Antiquities Act and moved it under Title 54 National Park Service Preservation Statutes, it eliminated the president’s power to declare national monuments.

“In placing the AA (Antiquities Act) under Title 54, Congress removed any potential for the AA to be considered a stand-alone, executive prerogative,” his report states.

Carlson fundamentally misstates the intent of Title 54, which had no impact on the meaning of the Antiquities Act. Title 54 “did not create new law or change the meaning or effect of existing law,” according to the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Spurious legal arguments aside, Lyman says Blanding has long relied on the tax base created from grazing, mining and timber harvesting on federal lands, including Manti-La Sal National Forest, that are now included in Bears Ears National Monument. He worries the national monument designation will reduce economic development opportunities.

“Continued multiple use of the land is vital to our way of life and our economic survival,” he says. “An increase in seasonal tourism is no replacement for a diverse and healthy economy.”

Bluff Looks Ahead to Protecting Bears Ears

Steve Simpson points to a mound of dirt across the parking lot at his Twin Rocks Café and Trading Post in Bluff. “That’s an unexcavated ruin,” he says. “You can’t go in any direction without finding antiquities.”

There are an estimated 100,000 archeological sites scattered across the Bears Ears cultural landscape, according to the Bears Inter-Tribal Coalition’s national monument proposal submitted to Obama in 2015. Many have been looted over the last 150 years, but countless more remain undisturbed, hidden beneath the soil, in caves and remote canyons.

“I have spent most of my life in this area,” he says. “The pressure on these sites is extreme. Sites where you could once find huge pot shards everywhere, now they are basically sterile.”

Simpson, a tax attorney by training, says most of the people living in Bluff support the national monument and embrace a tourist-based economy that they believe is far more sustainable than relying on the boom-bust extractive industries that have historically underpinned the regional economy.

“You have Bluff, which is a liberal community, right in the middle of an extremely conservative, extremely LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) area,” he says. “The position of Bluff doesn’t mesh well with the folks in Blanding.” Simpson also knows quite a few people who are opposed to the monument. Many of them are Mormon pioneer descendants, he says, and have strong ties to the land that their ancestors settled in the late 19th century.

There is resentment, Simpson says, that a huge part of what they see as their back yard is now being set aside as a national monument — particularly since it was at the request of American Indian tribes that were forcibly removed from much of their traditional lands, including Bears Ears, more than 150 years ago.

The resentment toward American Indians by the local population was readily apparent during the debate leading up to the monument designation. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman told Navajo leaders that they “lost the war” and have no right to comment on public land management. Ranchers in San Juan County were also telling American Indians to “get back on the reservation.”

For some American Indians, the overt hostility of some monument opponents has resulted in an unofficial boycott of Blanding.

Woody Lee, an American Indian who has worked for years on the monument designation with the Salt Lake City nonprofit Utah Diné Bikéyah, says Blanding’s negative attitude is scaring off business.

“I live approximately 4 to 5 minutes from Blanding,” Lee says. “Now, why am I not going to Blanding? Well, because the town is not so welcoming.”

Lee says he will travel several hours to Cortez, Colo., or Farmington, N.M., to go shopping rather than spend money in Blanding. He finds it ironic that Blanding cites negative economic impact from Bears Ears while ignoring its less-than-welcoming attitude toward American Indians.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where to go,” he says. “So now they are jumping up and down about their economy. They are the ones who messed it up.”

Simpson takes a less harsh attitude about Blanding’s opposition to the monument. “I don’t feel it’s a dislike of local Native American people, or a disrespect of Native American people. I think it is more a feeling of possession. ‘We are here. Our ancestors worked this land. We are emotionally invested.’”

At the same time, Simpson says, those opposed to the monument “overlook the Native American spiritual connection to the land. They are overlooking the fundamental idea that this is just not my land. The fact that I live in Bluff doesn’t give me superior right to the land.”

The two fundamental arguments that monument opponents cite — they were not involved in the monument decision and the designation is a land grab — don’t sway Simpson.

Nearly all of the 1.3 million acres of Bear Ears were already federal land, with 109,000 acres controlled by the state of Utah. Obama’s proclamation requests that Utah enter into negotiations to trade the state land within the monument for other federal land in Utah. Utah, so far, has refused and instead enacted a resolution in February requesting that the monument be rescinded.

Monument opponents, Simpson says, also had opportunity to express their views to local, state and federal representatives, including former Interior Secretary Sally Jewel, who held a contentious public hearing on the monument proposal in July 2016 in Bluff.

“To say there was no opportunity for public input is absolutely wrong,” Simpson says.

Bluff is also home to Friends of Cedar Mesa, an environmental group working to protect the monument’s countless archeological resources and stunning landscape.

Josh Ewing, executive director of Friends of Cedar Mesa, credits the fact that five American Indian tribes set aside their longstanding differences and worked together to prepare a comprehensive proposal for the monument that Obama subsequently supported.

His organization, at first, supported efforts to find a legislative solution to debate over Bears Ears. But when that failed, he says, a presidential monument proclamation became the best option.

That won’t be enough, though, if the monument designation ends up in court and the federal government doesn’t allocate sufficient funds to protect the monument from an already significant increase in tourism, Ewing says.

“This is a place where government is not going to be the solution,” he says. “It’s going to have to come from philanthropy, volunteers and hard work on the ground.”

Moving forward, his group is stepping up its efforts to protect resources on the ground by hiring additional employees and promoting a campaign to protect the area’s archeological treasures.

He knows that his group is facing an uphill battle to protect the monument, particularly given the fierce opposition from the state and local governments to its designation. But he remains optimistic and isn’t going to focus on trying to change opponents’ minds.

“The folks against the monument would have been against it no matter who proposed it or how it came about,” he says.

An avid rock climber, Ewing left a corporate job in Salt Lake City to move to Bluff in 2012. He and his wife, Kirsten, are passionate about protecting the Bears Ears cultural landscape that the Trump administration so far has taken a negative approach to protecting.

“Anywhere else, this would be a national park, even if you didn’t have the archeology,” he says.

Previously in this series:

The Roots of the Antiquities Act? They’re in Bears Ears

Beyond Division: American Indians Unite to Create Bears Ears

California Lists Glyphosate as Causing Cancer

The herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, has been added to California’s list of chemicals known to cause cancer. The listing, which goes into effect on July 7, will require manufacturers to add package warning labels and similar warnings to be places around certain sites where large quantities of the weed killer have been applied. The World Health Organization had previous labeled glyphosate as a “probable” human carcinogen. The chemical is the most widely used pesticide in California – and in the entire world. Monsanto has said it will fight California’s designation in court.