Our Addiction to Online Shopping Is Poisoning These Neighborhoods

The warehouse boom — and its resulting air pollution — causes dangerous health risks in California’s Inland Empire.

A scene from the HBO miniseries Chernobyl keeps me awake some nights. It takes place just a couple of hours after the explosion of Number Four RBMK’s nuclear reactor core. A group of family and friends gather on a bridge to watch the burning power plant on the horizon as if it’s a Fourth of July firework show. “It is beautiful,” a woman remarks. People close their eyes in a seeming act of reverence as the falling dust coats their faces like snowflakes, oblivious to its radioactivity. Children dance in a sandbox to celebrate the impromptu neighborhood gathering and unexpected faux snowfall.

Forty years later, viewers watch this fictionalized re-creation with a suffocating sense of heartache and helplessness — a retrospective knowledge of the cancer deaths that were to come.

There’s an added layer of injustice when the threat is invisible.

I felt a similar eeriness a few months ago walking through Esplanade Park, in California’s Riverside County. I’m an environmental consultant focusing largely on on developments in Southern California, and I was visiting the area to observe some projects we’ve worked on. It was a February afternoon — 82 degrees and sunny — and my colleagues and I sat at a lunch table in the middle of the park. We found ourselves surrounded by an ordinary playground scene: a father and son playing catch, two girls competing to see who could swing the highest, a man riding a bike with his daughter sitting on the handlebars. A monotonous suburban neighborhood enveloped the park, reinstating an air of comfort and safety.

And yet, only 1,500 feet from Esplanade’s edge — 125 feet from the nearest backyard — is the corner of these sprawling acres of highly polluting warehouses.

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I felt a familiar melancholy trying to rationalize the industry infringing on the innocent: a threat, though not radioactive, that you couldn’t see or smell. The warehouses were hidden behind the homes, and the invading air toxics were, of course, invisible.

“Do these people even know?” I asked my colleagues on our drive away from Esplanade.

“I think some might know and care, but feel like they have no other choice,” one said.

An Empire of Diesel

In recent decades the Inland Empire — comprised of San Bernardino and Riverside counties — has been the primary victim of America’s warehouse boom. As demand for online shopping has surged — e-commerce sales grew 50% to $870 billion during the pandemic alone — this region has served as a billionaire’s dumping ground. Those are the words of Tom Dolan, executive director of Inland Congregations United for Change. “Now it’s no longer just Warren Buffet, it’s Jeff Bezos and Amazon,” Dolan told The Guardian in 2021. “And we’re paying the cost of doing their business.”

That business is only made possible by taking out a nonconsensual loan from the residents of surrounding communities. It’s a coercive trade: the health and safety of citizens for the profits they’ll never share. And no worthwhile efforts have been made to pay off that debt.

In order to fulfill the glamorous promises of expedited, overnight and same-day deliveries, diesel trucks conduct over 600,000 daily trips through the Inland Empire alone, carrying roughly 40% of the nation’s goods. These vehicles emit 1,000 pounds of diesel particulate matter every day (alongside 100,000 pounds of nitric oxide and 50,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide).

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The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified diesel particulate matter as a Group 1 carcinogen — the most severe category — due to sufficient evidence linking diesel exposure to lung cancer. (Other studies have suggested a relationship to cancers of the bladder, larynx, esophagus, stomach, pancreas and blood, alongside asthma, other respiratory disease, heart attacks and premature mortality.) The region bordering the warehouse hub in one Inland Empire city, Ontario, ranks in the 95th percentile of cancer. A 2015 study estimated that 70% of the total cancer risk from air pollution in California is caused by diesel exhaust alone.

An Undue Burden

The people who suffer the consequences of our online shopping are not typically over-consumers themselves. The South Coast Air Quality Management District found that the 2.4 million people living within half a mile of a warehouse are also disproportionately Black and Latino communities below the poverty line. In 2012 San Bernardino ranked as the second poorest city in America with over 34.6% of people living in poverty. And of all the residents living within a mile of the average Amazon warehouse, 80% are people of color.

In January a coalition of over 60 environmental groups (including the Center for Biological Diversity, publisher of The Revelator) wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and asked him to declare a public health state of emergency in the Inland Empire. The request included testimony from residents on their firsthand experiences dealing with the everyday reality of increased asthma attacks, nose bleeds, hospitalizations, and coronary episodes. Given “nowhere else to turn,” they’re demanding government intervention, alongside a moratorium on new warehouse construction until the health consequences can be better understood.

Inland Empire warehouse moratorium pitched to @GavinNewsom https://t.co/7glIIvhfuA pic.twitter.com/AV5ciTQPSR

— Jeff Horseman (@JeffHorseman) January 31, 2023

It is now May, and they have not yet heard back.

“It’s been very scary fighting all of this,” an advocate from Colton said in a Pitzer College student documentary about the Inland Empire. “It feels like no one is listening.”

Natives of Southern California drive by acres of warehouses without blinking an eye. The buildings are mundane, unassuming, even inviting: Walmart’s fulfillment center is decorated with banners of sunshine logos and sky-blue font that reads, “Hi There. We’re Hiring,” with the familiar warmth of a neighbor knocking on your door.

No Choice

Even for residents who are well aware of the health consequences associated with these warehouses, it can be hard to ignore the knock. Along with introducing air toxins and environmental degradation, the warehouse boom has brought a blanket of economic security. As of 2021 the logistics industry was responsible for 1 in 8 Inland workers’ employment, adding more jobs here than any other part of the state. The region has also traditionally served as a refuge from ultra-high Los Angeles rent. The low cost of living and the influx of jobs have served as a siren call to new residents — who now find themselves victim to invisible poison, much like the workers who lived in the communities around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

And so the warehouses build on — and with remarkable speed. Warehouses are currently increasing at five times the rate of population growth. In 1980 the Inland Empire was home to just 237 warehouses. Today there are more than 4,000.

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Before our site visit, we planned our stops by researching neighborhoods located closest to large warehouse clusters. We found Edenglen — a residential community with a similar sensation of a Disney movie set — located just 1,400 feet from what our online maps told us was a 13-warehouse lot. However, upon arrival, it became clear that even satellite images can’t keep up with the stark reality. We stood in the barren, grassy lot separating Edenglen from the industrial site and counted not just the 13 warehouses but five new ones under construction — this time, just 200 feet from the nearest backyard.

We watched a worker coat the gray building with a slightly-less-gray layer of paint. The sun was cruel, and the freshly painted walls were blinding.

My boss suggested we stop for a beer on the ride home.

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.

Previously in The Revelator:

What a New Jersey Creek Taught Us About How Animals Respond to Pollution

Why Tree-Planting Schemes Aren’t a Silver Bullet

Numerous global reforestation efforts are underway, but research suggests getting long-term benefits is harder than it looks, and some projects can do more harm than good.

The race is on to plant trees. The World Economic Forum launched a 1 trillion trees initiative in 2020. The Bonn Challenge aims to restore 865 million acres of deforested landscapes by 2030. Individual countries have set their own targets, too, like Canada’s announcement to plant 2 billion trees in 10 years.

These reforestation efforts have been spurred by the need to store more carbon to fight climate change and help create habitat for dwindling biodiversity. Planting more trees can also help reduce air pollution, prevent erosion, and provide cooling shade for everyone from city dwellers to creek-swimming salmon.

Seems like a perfect solution to a lot of problems, including two of our biggest: climate change and biodiversity loss. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it may seem.

Wrong Place

There are a lot of ways that tree planting can go awry — especially as people aim to hit arbitrary metrics. This includes planting trees in the wrong places, like in native grasslands or wetlands. Or planting nonnative trees that take up too much water or create other dangerous conditions.

Alberta, Canada has learned that lesson. In the 1980s the government decided to create forests out of peat bogs by swapping swamps for black spruce. Here the goal wasn’t to help the environment — it was to create loggable forests — but it should still serve a warning.

“The new spruce trees gorged themselves on the groundwater out of the swamps, growing unusually wide canopies — which choked out the peat moss,” the Pulitzer Center and National Geographic reported in 2019. “A different, drier moss replaced it — kindling in the place of fire retardant — and as the land dried the trees grew into enormous stores of fuel.”

The result was a massive forest fire in 2016 that tore through the town of Fort McMurray, destroying 2,400 homes.

Short-Lived

Even tree planting with good intentions can come up short. And about half do.

A recent study in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences examined 176 restoration sites in tropical and subtropical forests in Asia where the most common restoration practice is planting nursery-grown saplings. On average, researchers found that tree mortality was 18% after one year, but that jumped nearly 50% beyond 10 years.

“In practice, there has been an over-emphasis on numbers of trees planted as a metric for forest restoration success, rather than managing, protecting and monitoring how these planted trees perform over longer timescales,” the researchers wrote.

Getting trees in the soil is only part of forest restoration. Caring for those trees is also crucial.

“We recommend that tree-growing efforts set targets for the area of forest restored after 10, 20 or 50 years, rather than focusing on numbers of seedlings planted,” restoration ecologists Karen D. Holl, of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Pedro Brancalion of the Universidade de São Paulo wrote in The Conversation.

rows of tiny green plants growing in greenhouse. — Acai nursery in Acre, Brazil to aid reforestation. Photo: Kate Evans/CIFOR, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But even a lot of living trees doesn’t make a forest if efforts are short on diversity. Many reforestation projects function more like plantations.

The researchers of the Philosophical Transactions study found that 625 tree species had been planted at the sites they studied, but the richness at most sites was low. That’s problematic for biodiversity, but also for carbon sequestration, as another study published in Nature in April confirmed. Those researchers found that “greater tree diversity is associated with higher soil carbon and nitrogen accumulation.” If tree planting is done with the goal of sequestering more carbon, species diversity should be a consideration, they say.

Ensuring Funding

Success also requires sustained effort and money.

This can be hard to achieve. Most projects are allotted short-term funding, but restoration is a long-term endeavor. “Currently, funding is typically provided only for the restoration intervention to be implemented, as opposed to ongoing maintenance, and the various infrastructure requirements around a project,” found another study in Philosophical Transactions. There’s also a lack of information about how much money is required to sustain these long-term efforts.

It’s a lesson being learned now by backers of “one of the world’s most ambitious ecological-restoration schemes,” according to Nature.

Africa’s Great Green Wall initiative aims to restore nearly 250 million degraded acres across the Sahel by 2030. The project was initially planned as a 4,300-mile swathe of trees across 11 countries from Senegal to Djibouti, but now includes an additional focus on protecting existing forests, improving soils and other restoration efforts.

As it’s going now, it’s on track to achieve only 30% of its target. Part of the problem is stable and equitable funding, a United Nations report found. “The report suggests that trust between the African Union and international donors is in short supply,” reported Nature. “Donor nations seem to be picking and choosing which countries to invest in, with a preference for those in relatively stable regions.”

That means the areas that are being passed over are the ones that need the most help.

Enabling Success

There are ways to ensure better outcomes from reforestation efforts by addressing ecological and social factors.

It starts with understanding what native trees should grow well in an area and having a plan — and funding — for who will manage the project for years after planting.

When it comes to ecological issues, researchers of the Philosophical Transactions study about restoration efforts in Asia found that larger seedlings often fare better, and restoration was more successful when the previous disturbance was less intensive.

Aerial view showing areas of forest next to clearcuts. — Clearcuts on the Oregon Coast. Photo: Eric Prado, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

The proximity of newly planted trees to those already growing can be beneficial.

“An established tree canopy facilitates rapid colonization of planted seedlings’ root systems by mutualistic fungi, which are known to enhance seedling survival and growth, whereas soil physical, chemical and biological properties may be more disturbed in open sites as a result of their disturbance history,” the researchers explained.

There are also a lot of social factors, including land tenure, governance and community buy-in.

Local people should be involved in planning and monitoring of projects. “Initiating projects without appropriate engagement and buy-in from local communities may lead to social conflict, lost income, and displacement of people, which can actually increase deforestation,” wrote Holl in Climate & Capital Media.

Sometimes economic incentives are required, but that too, demands careful consideration.

A tree-planting program in Chile from 1974 to 2012 subsidized 75% of the cost of planting new forests. But it didn’t go as hoped.

“While it was intended not to apply to existing forests, lax enforcement and budgetary limitations meant that some landowners simply replaced native forests with more profitable new tree plantations,” the BBC reported. “Their study found the subsidy scheme expanded the area covered by trees, but decreased the area of native forest.” And that in turn led to more biodiversity loss and didn’t increase carbon storage.

It’s an important reminder that protecting existing forests is crucial. Any biodiversity and climate mitigation gains from new restoration efforts are offset by each acre of forest we continue to raze. And we know that older trees are even better at storing carbon than younger ones, which makes protecting old-growth and mature forests even more crucial.

“It is much more effective to prevent clearing of existing forests than to try to put them back together again,” wrote Holl and Brancalion. “And existing forests provide benefits now, rather than decades into the future after trees mature.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Protecting Mature Forests Slows Climate Change, So Why Is Biden Still Allowing Them to Be Logged?

Is Life for Wild Animals Really ‘Red in Tooth and Claw’?

New research argues that most animals enjoy positive experiences throughout their lives, and that can help their conservation.

By Heather Browning and Walter Veit

If you know anything about the experiences of animals reared in captivity for food, fur or human amusement, you might imagine that the lives of wild animals are idyllic. If nature is conceived as a sort of Garden of Eden then animals which live in it, free of human interference, are presumably living their best possible lives.

Others see life in the wild as far harsher. Nature is “red in tooth and claw” as poet Alfred Tennyson once put it. According to this view, the average life of a wild animal can be best understood as a desperate search for food and shelter, enduring pain and sickness and burdened with the ever-present prospect of a savage death.

This latter view is arguably dominant among those who ponder questions of wild animal ethics and welfare. Scholars like Yew-Kwang Ng and Oscar Horta have aimed in part to debunk the view that wild animals have it pretty good by evoking the prevalence of vicious predators and other sources of harm. Yet this picture may be just as inaccurate.

In our recent paper, we argued that the real experience of wild animal life most likely sits somewhere between these two extremes – though it’s probably a lot better than many researchers think.

The popular view of wild animals being consumed by suffering has been influenced by a preoccupation with their experiences at the time of their deaths. Too little attention has been paid to the range of positive experiences available to wild animals throughout their lives.

Death Is Fleeting

Consider an antelope pursued by a pack of hungry hyenas: it eventually tires, is captured and eaten alive. The common occurrence of predation like this suggests animal suffering is widespread. But it is worth thinking about these events a little more closely, as they may not cause as much suffering as it first seems.

A hyena searching a grassland with an antelope in the background. — Though unpleasant, death is only ever a small part of an animal’s life. Paco Como/Shutterstock

Some animals follow a breeding strategy in which they produce lots of offspring, most of which will die off very quickly and never make it to maturity. For these animals, with short lives and violent ends, is the balance more likely to be negative? Perhaps, in some cases. But it is important even in these instances not to underestimate the potential for positive experiences in the time they have.

The Joy of Living

To judge the quality of an animal’s life we must consider the whole experience, not just select the worst parts.

A life contains a range of experiences – many negative ones, as researchers who document wild animal suffering point out – but also a range of positive ones. We could make a list of all the bad things that wild animals encounter: predation, starvation, thirst, disease, parasites, poor weather, aggression from members of their own species. Looking at this list might convince us that their lives must be bad. But we can write an alternative list of the good things they also enjoy: social contact, eating, mating, resting comfortably, playing, exploring, perceiving vistas or sounds or smells that they like.

One concept that may be important here is that of the joy of living. This idea describes the possibility of a baseline experience that all animals have that is itself positive. This could help animals stay motivated.

We can see in cases of human depression that one of the main symptoms is a lack of motivation and an unwillingness to move. For an animal needing to acquire food and other things necessary to live, this could mean death. So for evolutionary reasons it would be logical for the baseline experience of animals to be at least slightly positive. It is plausible that just being alive, perceiving, exploring, and experiencing the world, could itself bring happiness to animals.

Putting the lists side-by-side, it’s no longer so obvious that wild animal lives are, on balance, bad ones. It becomes far more dependent on the interplay of positive and negative experiences, their intensity, how often they occur and for how long, and how the animal weights their importance. Some species might have substantially better lives than others.

A superficial look at the lives of animals in the wild will not allow researchers to draw meaningful conclusions about what this balance is like for them. Instead, empirical research conducted in the field could uncover the intensity and duration of the different experiences wild animals face and how they affect their welfare. Researchers in the emerging field of wild animal welfare research already do this, supported by organisations like the Wild Animal Initiative.

This is not idle musing. Understanding the lives of wild animals could make interventions to alleviate some widespread sources of suffering – such as disease outbreaks or pest control – more accurate and infringe less on positive experiences.

We won’t know for sure until more information is gathered, but we have argued that there are several good reasons to suspect that such research will show that many – if not most – wild animals do in fact have happy lives.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Human Activities Have Drastically Reduced Habitat for Asian Elephants

New research shows when human actions started to fragment elephant habitat in Asia and how that could help conservation efforts.

Despite their iconic status and long association with humans, Asian elephants are one of the most endangered large mammals. Believed to number between 45,000 and 50,000 individuals worldwide, they are at risk throughout Asia due to human activities such as deforestation, mining, dam building and road construction, which have damaged numerous ecosystems.

My colleagues and I wanted to know when human actions started to fragment wildlife habitats and populations to the degree seen today. We quantified these impacts by considering them through the needs of this species.

In a newly published study, we examined the centuries-long history of Asian landscapes that once were suitable elephant habitat and often were managed by local communities prior to the colonial era. In our view, understanding this history and restoring some of these relationships may be the key to living with elephants and other large wild animals in the future.

How Have Humans Affected Wildlife?

It isn’t easy to measure human impacts on wildlife across a region as large and diverse as Asia and more than a century ago. Historical data for many species is sparse. Museums, for instance, only contain specimens collected from certain locations.

Many animals also have very specific ecological requirements, and there often isn’t sufficient data on these features at a fine scale going far into the past. For instance, a species might prefer particular microclimates or vegetation types that occur only at particular elevations.

For nearly two decades I’ve been studying Asian elephants. As a species, these animals are breathtakingly adaptable: They can live in seasonally dry forests, grasslands or the densest of rain forests. If we could match the habitat requirements of elephants to data sets showing how these habitats changed over time, we knew that we could understand how land-use changes have affected elephants and other wildlife in these environments.

Defining Elephant Ecosystems

The home-range sizes of Asian elephants can vary anywhere from a few hundred square miles to a few thousand. But since we couldn’t know exactly where elephants would have been centuries ago, we had to model the possibilities based on where they occur today.

By identifying the environmental features that correspond to locations where wild elephants live now, we can distinguish places where they could potentially have lived in the past. In principle, this should represent “good” habitat.

Today many scientists are using this kind of model to identify particular species’ climatic requirements and predict how areas suitable for those species might shift under future climate change scenarios. We applied the same logic retrospectively, using land-use and land-cover types instead of climate change projections.

We drew this information from the Land-Use Harmonization (LUH2) data set, released by a research group at the University of Maryland. The group mapped historical land-use categories by type, starting in the year 850 — long before the advent of nations as we know them today, with fewer large population centers — and extending up to 2015.

Map of elephant ranges in the region. — Asian elephants live in countries with large human populations, and their range has been shrunk and fragmented. Hedges et al., 2008, via Trunks & Leaves, CC BY-ND

My co-authors and I first compiled records of where Asian elephants have been observed in the recent past. We limited our study to the 13 countries that today still contain wild elephants: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

We excluded areas where elephant populations are prone to clashing with people, such as intensively farmed landscapes and plantations, in order to avoid classifying these zones as “good” elephant habitat. We included areas with lighter human influence, such as selectively logged forests, because they actually contain great food for elephants.

Next, we used a machine-learning algorithm to determine what types of land use and land cover existed at our remaining locations. This allowed us to map out where elephants could potentially live as of the year 2000. By applying our model to earlier and later years, we were able to generate maps of areas that contained suitable habitat for elephants and to see how those areas had changed over the centuries.

Dramatic Declines

Land-use patterns changed significantly on every continent starting with the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s and extending through the colonial era into the mid-20th century. Asia was no exception.

For most areas, we found that suitable elephant habitat took a steep dive around this time. We estimated that from 1700 through 2015 the total amount of suitable habitat decreased by 64%. More than 1.2 million square miles of land were converted for plantations, industry and urban development. With respect to potential elephant habitat, most of the change occurred in India and China, each of which saw conversion in more than 80% of these landscapes.

In other areas of Southeast Asia — such as a large hot spot of elephant habitat in central Thailand, which was never colonized — habitat loss happened more recently, in the mid-20th century. This timing corresponds to logging concurrent with the so-called Green Revolution, which introduced industrial agriculture to many parts of the world.

Could the Past Be the Key to the Future?

Looking back at land-use change over centuries makes it clear just how drastically human actions have reduced habitat for Asian elephants. The losses that we measured greatly exceed estimates of “catastrophic” human impacts on so-called wilderness or forests within recent decades.

Our analysis shows that if you were an elephant in the 1700s, you might have been able to range across 40% of the available habitat in Asia with no problem, because it was one large, contiguous area that contained many ecosystems where you could live. This enabled gene flow among many elephant populations. But by 2015, human activities had so drastically fragmented the total suitable area for elephants that the largest patch of good habitat represented less than 7% of it.

Sri Lanka and peninsular Malaysia have a disproportionately high share of Asia’s wild elephant population, relative to available elephant habitat area. Thailand and Myanmar have smaller populations relative to area. Interestingly, the latter are countries known for their large captive or semi-captive elephant populations.

Less than half of the areas that contain wild elephants today have adequate habitat for them. Elephants’ resulting use of increasingly human-dominated landscapes leads to confrontations that are harmful for both elephants and people.

However, this long view of history reminds us that protected areas alone are not the answer, since they simply cannot be large enough to support elephant populations. Indeed, human societies have shaped these very landscapes for millennia.

Today there is a pressing challenge to balance human subsistence and livelihood requirements with the needs of wildlife. Restoring traditional forms of land management and local stewardship of these landscapes can be an essential part of protecting and recovering ecosystems that serve both people and wildlife in the future.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

A New Way to Count African Forest Elephants: DNA From Dung

Species Spotlight: Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo — an Elusive, Arboreal Marsupial

This remarkable species lives in forests of towering trees. Locals call it the “ghost of the forest,” because it’s so hard to find and moves so quickly.

No one is exactly sure when this marsupial in the kangaroo family took to the trees, but it’s clearly well adapted for life on high — with long, bark-gripping claws, strong limbs for climbing, and a long tail for balance. These are good traits to have for an animal that spends most of its time 100 feet or more above the ground, nibbling ferns and orchids and looking out at dizzying views over the forest canopy.

Species name:

Matschie’s tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus matschiei)

Description:

The Matschie’s tree kangaroo has thick, reddish mahogany fur on its back and a dark stripe down its spine. Its limbs, feet and ear tips are yellow, and its face is white or cream-colored. Stocky in build, a Matschie’s tree kangaroo has muscular forelimbs approximately the same length as its hind legs and long, sharp claws on both front and hind feet that help them climb trees. An adult female weighs between 15 and 20 pounds, while an adult male weighs between 20 and 25 pounds. They measure from 20 to 32 inches in height.

Where it’s found:

Native to Papua New Guinea and endemic to the Huon Peninsula, Matschie’s tree kangaroos live in elevations of up to 11,000 feet and spend most of their time in trees, eating leaves, vines, ferns, orchids, shrubs and herbs. Little is known about Matschie’s tree kangaroos in their native habitat, but they are believed to be solitary animals, except when a mother is raising offspring.

IUCN Red List status:

Endangered. It is estimated that there are fewer than 2,500 adults left in their native habitat, and their population is decreasing.

Major threats:

Matschie’s tree kangaroos are hunted by humans for food and trade. Habitat loss due to expanding agriculture further threatens their population.

Notable conservation programs:

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo Species Survival Plan is designed to help save this species from the brink of extinction. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance also donates to the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program, which supports in situ conservation, scientific research, land protection and local community livelihoods in Papua New Guinea.

My favorite experience:

We have three Matschie’s tree kangaroos at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and in August 2022 saw the birth of the newest joey. On average, a female Matschie’s tree kangaroo cycles about every 55 days for about 48 hours, providing very limited time for the female and male to breed. We knew Arona, the female, and Beks, the male, had mated, but we didn’t know if the outcome would be successful. We began watching Arona on cameras placed in her den and anxiously waited for signs that she might be pregnant and give birth.

Arona participates in her own healthcare, and she has choice and control of what she wants or does not want to do. She has a great relationship with her wildlife care specialists, and because of this, we were able to look inside her pouch and discover the joey. Our team was so excited. This birth helps contribute to the world’s population of Matschie’s tree kangaroos, and we are proud of the work we do for the conservation of this species.

As a first-time mom, Arona is very attentive to her joey, and both are doing very well. The joey will remain in the pouch for up to 10 months or so, exiting the pouch for extended periods and returning to nurse. Arona will wean her joey when it’s about a year old, but the joey will stay close to mom for about a year and a half.

What else do we need to do to protect this species?

These animals need our help. Habitat loss through deforestation and poaching are pushing Matschie’s tree kangaroos to the brink of extinction. People can help the species by supporting organizations like San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and others working to conserve this species. Also, when buying wood or furniture, ask if the wood is Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified. This means the wood was taken in a way approved by forestry experts.

Previously in The Revelator:

Species Spotlight: Baird’s Tapir, Our Allies Against Climate Change

Youths to G7: Protect Our Generation

What if governments finally decided to act on climate change and environmental degradation?

Later this month world leaders will gather in Hiroshima, Japan for the 49th G7 summit, the annual meeting devoted to issues of global diplomacy. Will they listen to the voices of their youngest constituents and act on climate change?

A few weeks ago the Y7 — the G7’s official youth engagement group — concluded work on our Youth Communiqué. Developed by youth representatives from each country in the group, it proposes policies to heads of state on pressing global issues like climate and environment, peace and security, global health, economic resilience, and digital innovation.

This year’s Y7 Climate and Environment discussions, in which I represent European Union youth, call on the G7 to ensure a just and orderly transition, restore biodiversity and protect ecosystems, and prioritize and finance resilient human settlements. After months of youth consultations, those recommendations have now been handed over to the Japanese G7 presidency, Prime Minister Fumia Kishida.

While leaders read our recommendations as part of their stated aim to take an intergenerational approach, one question continues to spiral in my head: What if our governments decided to act on climate change and environmental degradation as if this will affect our generation?

Several rows of people sitting and standing in a formal pose — Youth delegates with Prime Minister Fumia Kishida.

We’re left with seven years to act for life within planetary boundaries, as shown by the latest IPCC report. Considering the rapidly closing window of opportunity to limit the global average temperature rise to below 1.5°C, the viability of humanity rests on the actions we take today.

High-income and high-pollution countries need to lead the transition, granting our generation the basic human need to walk on healthy soils and breathe clean air. Our G7 Youth Communiqué asks for nothing more than this.

In truth 1.5°C should not be considered a target but a ceiling. Overshooting this means entering a blind spot: overstepping planetary limits in which life has flourished for millions of years.

The difference between 1.5°C and 2°C is not just a temperature rise of 0.5°C. It means that climate risks will be at least twice as disruptive. Considering nearly half of the world’s population lives in the danger zone of climate impacts, every fraction of a degree counts.

We already see the disproportionate effect of 1.1°C warming above preindustrial levels, particularly on the lives of vulnerable communities — those that have contributed the least emissions and pollution.

At the same time, public and private financing of fossil fuels is still greater than for climate adaptation and mitigation.

As governments continue to shake hands with the fossil fuel industry, current climate policies are projected to increase global warming by 3.2°C in 2100.

A row of people at a table, one speaking into a microphone — Youth representatives discuss climate issues. Photo: Maxime van Hoeve

The Y7 Communiqué will not be the last message from my generation demanding change. Another scientific report, youth engagement group and United Nations initiative will follow — all repeating the same message.

Yet what we need is the political will to comply with Earth’s nine planetary boundaries.

These boundaries — climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, biogeochemical flows of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, freshwater use, change in land use, erosion of biodiversity, atmospheric aerosol loading, and novel entities — are required for us to live in harmony with nature. By now, 6 out of 9 have been crossed due to human activity, particularly in high-income countries.

So unless we substantially change our socioeconomic structures — how we work, move, produce and communicate — the stability of global ecosystems is put at stake.

True action asks us to give up current economic models requiring unrelenting growth to produce and consume products and services which conflict with the planet’s natural metabolism.

True action asks us to rethink our relationship with nature as an integrated part of life whilst moving towards absolute resource use reduction.

True action allows our and future generations the basic human need for breathable air, clean water, and sustainable food systems.

With these goals in mind, our Y7 Communiqué calls on the G7 to:

- Phase out and commit to no new investment in the exploration or production of fossil fuels by endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, redirecting investments into renewable energy projects and prioritising energy demand reduction.
- Strengthen loan-free climate financing mechanisms — and embed the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, intergenerational dialogues, and decolonial frameworks in all climate policies.
- Deliver socially equitable commitments to reverse biodiversity loss, deforestation, and soil degradation by acting on the Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30×30 target and endorsing responsible nature-based solutions.
- Lead the transition to regenerative agriculture and plant-based food systems by divesting from intensive monocultures, acting on the Global Methane Pledge and establishing ambitious animal welfare standards for livestock.
- Support the United Nations Convention for the Laws of the Seas by enforcing international surveillance systems against illegal, unregulated and unreported fisheries, ending dangerous indiscriminate fishing techniques, and banning deep sea mining.

In the next seven years, high-income countries like the G7 can and must decide to act on climate change and environmental degradation — taking an active stance for climate justice by limiting unfolding damage.

Our generation depends on it.

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Making Shift Happen: Momentum Grows for New Thinking About River Restoration

An unconventional gathering helped spur ideas to speed the pace and scale of river restoration projects across the West.

Brian and Pat Robertson first noticed something wrong nearly 30 years ago. A stream called Little Bear Creek ran through their property in northern Idaho, but the waterway had long ago been altered during a logging operation and essentially functioned as a ditch, carrying water swiftly away from the valley. Trees were dying; the water table was dropping; neighbors were digging dry wells. After consulting with Natural Resources Conservation Service and touring several Forest Service restoration projects in Oregon, the Robertsons decided to take the creek back to Stage Zero.

Stage Zero is like hitting the reset button to a time before the stream had formed a channel. With help from 10 agencies, the Robertsons filled in their stretch of Little Bear Creek until it was flush with the surrounding landscape. They scattered large logs about to help slow the flow of water. Then the stream could decide where it wanted to go: spreading out in fingers across a valley; pooling in wetlands; creating little micro-habitats — places where water-loving plants could grow, insects could hatch and young salmon could thrive.

Since the restoration at Little Bear Creek began more than five years ago, the water table has risen several feet. The meadow is transforming into a wetland. In time, the Robertson say, willows may return, then beavers.

The Robertsons’ project is an example of process-based restoration. This approach differs from conventional form-based restoration, which emphasizes building discreet structures and modifying a river channel. Process-based restoration is about restoring functions, and its scope expands beyond the channel to include the floodplain and valley bottom — the whole riverscape.

Chris Jordan, a fisheries biologist at the Nation Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was an early pioneer of process-based restoration. In 2009 he led an experiment sinking posts into a riverbed in central Oregon to give beavers points of attachment for their dams. The beavers responded. Four years later the water level had risen, and juvenile steelhead had increased by 175%. The processes set in motion not only improved the quality of the habitat, but the quantity, too.

Could the same thing happen elsewhere?

River systems across the West are degraded from logging and grazing, channelization, the removal of beavers, and the construction of dams, diversions, dikes and roads. Twenty-eight species of salmon and steelhead are currently listed under the Endangered Species Act.

There’s a whole industry — Jordan calls it the restoration-industrial complex — focused on form-based restoration: building log jams, excavating river channels, and populating riverbanks with native plants.

“There’s billions of dollars being spent, yet on the salmon recovery side of things, we’re not seeing the ecological uplift of the projects,” he says. Notably, you do see those benefits with process-based restoration projects, which include such things as removing dams and breaching levees as well as newer strategies such as building beaver dam analogs. But they aren’t happening fast enough to address the crisis at hand.

“I think it’s crystal clear that everyone in the restoration community and people throughout government understand that we’re dealing with catastrophic species and habitat loss that’s only going to be exacerbated by climate change,” says Erika Lovejoy, director for Sustainable Conservation’s Accelerating Restoration Program. “If we don’t do the restoration more quickly and put these solutions in place, we’re going end up dealing with everything on an emergency basis.”

An Unconventional Workshop

Jordan and his colleague at NOAA, senior policy advisor Irma Lagomarsino, wanted to get more people on the process-based restoration bandwagon. Their solution: a special workshop called Restoring Riverscapes. The three-day event, held this March, gathered students and scientists; fluvial geomorphologists, aquatic ecologists and fish biologists; civil engineers and regulatory specialists; private landowners, tribal members and ranchers — in the same virtual room.

“The workshop was designed to help the very large community in California, Oregon, Washington, and parts of Idaho to learn and think together about potential solutions or ideas to expand the rate and the pace and the scale of process-based habitat restoration,” says Lagomarsino.

Jordan and Lagomarsino didn’t want Restoring Riverscapes to be an ordinary workshop. They brought on a team of producers, led by filmmaker Sarah Koenigsberg, who, among other projects, produced the award-winning feature documentary The Beaver Believers.

Two people standing in marsh installing poles — Three beaver dam analogs were installed Woods Creek, a tributary of the Cispus River, WA. Photo: Cascade Forest Conservancy, public domain.

Restoring Riverscapes took over a year to plan. Koenigsberg helped them shape the workshop experience like a story, with a clear narrative arc. They created a color-coded chart of the presentations: inspiring stories of stewardship interspersed with pre-recorded presentations and live panels — no snoozy PowerPoints. The planners knew they would have to appeal to people from career restoration practitioners to graduate students to decision-makers — many of whom aren’t scientists.

“We needed to change people’s minds,” says Jordan. “And you don’t change someone’s mind when they’re asleep.”

The first half of the workshop laid the foundation: explaining what process-based restoration is, why it works and showcasing examples. A trio of career Forest Service biologists traced their long evolution as restoration practitioners who now embrace the concept. Lisa Huntington talked about restoring a creek and floodplain in a Portland neighborhood. A short film presented the Robertsons’ story.

With help from a team of filmmakers, editors and other creatives, Koenigsberg produced this and three other films specifically for the workshop. The films are moving, the production values high. Storytelling is critical for winning hearts and minds, she says. “When you see other people who persevere and were inspired and didn’t give up, that’s what gives us this inspiration to go try, and to also keep at it.”

Cutting the Green Tape

Midday on Day 2 the focus pivoted to why it’s so hard to get more of this work done. Topping the list are regulatory compliance, landowner cooperation and funding.

Restoration projects typically require a host of permits: water quality certification, removal-fill permits from the Army Corps of Engineers, floodplain development permits from the county, Endangered Species Act compliance…the list goes on. Whether seeking permission to build a beaver dam analog or a bridge, the regulatory requirements are the same, and they are costly and time consuming.

“The systems that were created to protect the environment and stop bad things from happening were designed for development type activities,” says Lovejoy. “They aren’t designed to help fix the environmental problems that we face in any type of efficient manner.”

Lovejoy is part of a coalition that successfully lobbied the state of California to create separate streamlined permitting pathways for restoration projects. Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot took up the cause, launching Cutting the Green Tape, an initiative to accelerate ecological restoration across the state.

Cal Trout is taking advantage of a new programmatic permit for its project on Big Chico Creek in Northern California, which aims to restore over eight miles of salmon and steelhead habitat. They estimate it will cut permitting time in half and slash costs by $250,000.

Aerial view of narrow creek with large boulders. — Fish ladder and rock fall barrier in Big Chico Creek, Calif. Photo: Mike Wier, courtesy of Cal Trout.

During her presentation, Lovejoy outlined the ingredients needed to catalyze such a sea change: strong coalitions, empowered agency staff, and support from leadership. She hopes other states, or maybe even the West as a whole, can develop similar initiatives to speed restoration efforts.

“When you have the permitting, the technical assistance and the funding under one roof, I feel it helps change the mindset,” she says. “You’re not regulating development, but helping steward restoration.”

The Human Dimension

In many cases restoration projects need to happen on private land: farms, ranches and urban neighborhoods. But how to earn the cooperation of people who may care about different things than you do?

To address that question, two social scientists presented at Restoring Riverscapes. Laura Van Riper, with the Bureau of Land Management’s National Riparian Service Team, shared ways to build trust with landowners and communities affected by restoration projects. Hannah Gosnell of Oregon State University talked about rivers as social-ecological systems.

Lagomarsino lobbied to include the social component in the workshop.

“A lot of us don’t have the tools and the concepts at hand,” she told me. “We just think we’re doing this really important work.” But cooperation requires trust, and the key to gaining that trust is finding ways to appeal to different values. That may require talking less about salmon and more about how a wetland could create a fuel break, helping protect a community from fire. Or how a restored riverscape could help a rancher through the dry season.

Gaining trust and engaging diverse stakeholders might be one of the most important challenges, Lagomarsino told the virtual audience in a session on collaborative conservation. But “it might be our greatest opportunity to expand the scale, pace and efficacy of process-based actions.”

Next Steps

Over 1,200 people showed up (virtually) for Restoring Riverscapes. Lagomarsino and Jordan are still sifting through mountains of comments and figuring out how to build on the momentum.

“Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Koenigsberg. “That’s really hopeful to me. It can be hard to maintain positivity when we’re facing such an uphill battle.”

One of the workshop’s aims was to nudge people into seeing, thinking and talking about rivers in a new way.

Some of the bullet points Gosnell, the social scientist, used in her discussion of Resilience Thinking — embrace dynamism; work with Mother Nature; relinquish control — could have easily belonged in a different workshop. At one point she read aloud comments she’d captured from other workshop participants:

Rivers are a series of scenes in a really long movie.

Rivers need room to play, like kids on a playground.

We need to think of riverscapes as biological beings with agency.

The final keynote speaker was Amy Cordalis, cofounder of Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation and Yurok Tribal member. She talked about the Tribe’s long advocacy to remove four dams on the Klamath River — the biggest process-based restoration project ever — and the reciprocal relationship between people and rivers. She invited the hundreds of people hunched over screens all over the West who care deeply about rivers, salmon, people, and the future health of our planet, to draw strength from the very ecosystems they’re working to repair.

“The river, if you ask it, the water, if you ask it, will tell you what you can do to help it to get back to that good place,” she said.

Previously in The Revelator:

Standing Up for Freshwater Biodiversity

The Regions Most at Risk for ‘Statistically Impossible’ Heat Extremes

Regions that have been lucky so far may be less well prepared for an unprecedented heatwaves in the future.

In the summer of 2021, Canada’s all-time temperature record was smashed by almost 5℃. Its new record of 49.6℃ is hotter than anything ever recorded in Spain, Turkey or indeed anywhere in Europe.

The record was set in Lytton, a small village a few hours’ drive from Vancouver, in a part of the world that doesn’t really look like it should experience such temperatures.

Lytton was the peak of a heatwave that hit the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada that summer and left many scientists shocked. From a purely statistical point of view, it should have been impossible.

I’m part of a team of climate scientists who wanted to find out if the Pacific Northwest heatwave was unique, or whether any other regions had experienced such statistically implausible events. And we wanted to assess which regions were most at risk in future. Our results are now published in the journal Nature Communications.

Tracking these outlier heatwaves is important not just because the heatwaves themselves are dangerous, but because countries tend to prepare to around the level of the most extreme event within collective memory. An unprecedented heatwave can therefore provoke policy responses to reduce the impact of future heat.

Map of temperatures across PNW. — Map of temperatures in the Pacific Northwest during the 2021 heatwave. Photo: European Space Agency, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

For instance, a severe heatwave in Europe in 2003 is estimated to have caused 50,000-70,000 excess deaths. Although there have been more intense heatwaves since, none have resulted in such a high death toll, due to management plans implemented in the wake of 2003.

One of the most important questions when studying these extreme heatwaves is “how long do we have to wait until we experience another similarly intense event?” This is a challenging question but, fortunately, there is a branch of statistics, called extreme value theory, that provides ways in which we can answer that exact question using past events.

But the Pacific Northwest heatwave is one of several recent events that have challenged this method and should not have been possible according to extreme value theory. This “breakdown” of statistics is caused by conventional extreme value theory not taking into account the specific combination of physical mechanisms, which may not exist in the events contained in the historical record.

Implausible Heat Is Everywhere

Looking at historical data from 1959 to 2021, we found that 31% of Earth’s land surface has already experienced such statistically implausible heat (though the Pacific Northwest heatwave is exceptional even among these events). These regions are spread all across the globe with no clear spatial pattern.

We also drew similar conclusions when we analyzed “large ensemble” data produced by climate models, which involve computers simulating the global climate many times over. These simulations are extremely useful for us, since the effective length of this simulated “historical record” is far larger and thus they produce many more examples of rare events.

However, while this analysis of the most exceptional events is interesting, and cautions against using purely statistical approaches for assessing the limits to physical extremes, the most important conclusions of our work come from the other end of the spectrum — regions that have not experienced particularly extreme events before.

Some Places Have Got Lucky — So Far

We identified a number of regions, again spread across the globe, that have not experienced especially extreme heat over the past six decades (relative to their “expected” climate). As a result, these regions are more likely to see a record-breaking event in the near future. And with no experience of such a huge outlier, and less incentive to prepare for one, they may be particularly harmed by a record heatwave.

Socioeconomic factors, including population size, population growth and level of development will exacerbate these impacts. As a result, we factor in population and economic development projections in our assessment of the regions that are most at risk globally.

Our at-risk regions include Afghanistan, several countries in Central America and far eastern Russia among others. These regions may be surprising, since they are not those people typically think of when considering extreme heat impacts of climate change like India or the Persian Gulf. But those countries have recently experienced severe heatwaves and so are already doing what they can to prepare.

Central Europe and several provinces in China, including the area around Beijing, also appear to be vulnerable when considering the extremeness of the record and population size, but as more developed areas they are likely to already have plans to mitigate severe impacts.

Overall, our work raises two important points:

The first is that statistically implausible heatwaves can occur anywhere on the Earth, and we must be very cautious about using the historical record in isolation to estimate the “maximum” heatwave possible. Policymakers across the globe should prepare for exceptional heatwaves that would be deemed implausible based on current records.

The second is that there are a number of regions whose historical record is not exceptional, and therefore is more likely to be broken. These regions have been lucky so far, but as a result, are likely to be less well prepared for an unprecedented heatwave in the near future. It is especially important that these regions prepare for more intense heatwaves than they have already experienced.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

How Cities Are Preparing for the ‘Silent Killer’ of Extreme Heat

California Condors vs. Avian Flu: Can the Endangered Birds Survive?

An outbreak has killed 20 condors in the Southwest, putting wildlife conservationists on high alert.

This story is jointly produced by Sierra and The Revelator.

In Arizona, fans of the endangered California condor frequently gather at the historic Navajo Bridge at Vermilion Cliffs, near where some of the very first condors were reintroduced to the wild, to watch breeding adults engage in their ritual courtship dances. The male stands in front of his mate, his dark, glossy wings spread, bald head bowed, circling her in a slow strut, rocking from one foot to the other.

Spring, when bonded pairs tend to their gawky, fluffy gray chicks, is a good time to celebrate the comeback of the Pleistocene-era vulture that very nearly went extinct before being returned to the wild in 1992. In late March The Peregrine Fund, which manages the Arizona-Utah flock, announced that the first eggs of the 2023 season had been discovered. “We have quite a few other pairs we suspect are nesting but haven’t been able to confirm yet, so we expect the numbers to climb over the next few weeks,” condor program director Tim Hauck wrote in a Facebook post. “We had 13 confirmed nesting attempts in 2022, the highest number since the establishment of the AZ-UT population in the late 1990s, and we’re hoping to equal or even best that number this year.”

The celebration was cut short when staff noticed a condor — a nesting female — acting lethargic. On March 20 a field crew went and collected the bird, who had died below her nest. Meanwhile other birds had sickened.

On April 7 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that three condors from the Arizona-Utah flock were confirmed to have died of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or avian flu. The horror continued. Fish and Wildlife set up an Incident Command Team to deal with the outbreak. By April 17, 20 condors had died — about 20% of the entire flock, which had numbered 116 birds before the flu outbreak.

It’s impossible to say how the condors first contracted the deadly flu, says Joanna Gilkeson, public affairs officer for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The highly contagious virus can be transmitted from bird to bird, through feces, or by ingesting an infected animal.

To reduce the risk of lead poisoning, staff from The Peregrine Fund regularly supply uncontaminated carcasses to their flock. As soon as they suspected avian flu, they stopped providing the sociable condors with supplemental food and water. They hoped that by discouraging the remaining birds from congregating, they could reduce the chance of transmission.

Several condors cluster together — Photo: Bob Wick/BLM

The comeback of the California condor is often celebrated as one of the greatest success stories in wildlife conservation history, but an episode like this highlights how fragile the species still is. “Even though we have more than 500 individuals in the world, we’re not out of the woods,” Hauck says.

The avian flu outbreak among condors highlights the worrying rise of this new threat among wild birds at a time when many species are already facing serious declines.

Low pathogenic avian influenza is widespread in both domesticated poultry and wild birds, especially geese and ducks. It usually doesn’t cause severe symptoms or disease. But the virus can mutate into a highly pathogenic strain.

This happened in North America in 2015, when 50 million domesticated birds, mostly chickens and turkeys, died or were culled. Though devastating to the livestock industry, wild birds were largely unaffected.

A newer subtype called H5N1 made landfall in North America in Newfoundland in December 2021. The first cases appeared among domestic fowl, then seabirds. Soon outbreaks were being reported among wild birds all over Canada and the United States.

This outbreak is different, says Johanna Harvey, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who is leading an effort to track the spread of H5N1 in North America.

H5N1 is impacting wild birds more than it ever has, says Harvey. The disease is ravaging seabirds, shorebirds, and raptors. Tens of thousands of colony-forming seabirds have died, as have scores of Caspian terns, hundreds of bald eagles, and countless birds that we don’t know about. Songbirds don’t seem to be susceptible.

“Equally important is the diversity of wild species that are being impacted, including many sensitive species,” says Harvey. “And it’s happening at a time when wild birds are facing steep declines because of habitat loss, degradation and climate change.”

H5N1 is also not fizzling out as previous subtypes have. “We’re seeing sustained disease throughout the year,” Harvey says. Because of this, birds are continuing to spread it around the globe as they migrate.

“This huge diversity of highly migratory species like gulls and skuas — and other birds that we know have unique migration patterns — are moving the disease in ways we haven’t seen before,” says Harvey. H5N1 is expanding into Central and South America. “Antarctic populations may be next, which would be disastrous.”

Harvey and her fellow researchers are urging a coordinated management approach, involving as many decision-makers as possible, to help respond to the crisis and its many unknowns. Their findings were published April 26 in Conservation Biology.

If there’s any silver lining to this HPAI outbreak, it’s that the vast team of partners involved in condor conservation already coordinate closely with each other. Flock managers had been preparing for a potential outbreak for nearly a year, ever since it became clear that H5N1 was killing wild birds.

Ironically, the fact that California condors remain so endangered and isolated offers them some protection. When conservationists began re-establishing wild populations in the late 1990s, they deliberately created distinct flocks: in northern Arizona/southern Utah; Baja, Mexico; Southern California; and Central California. More recently condors have been reintroduced in Northern California’s redwood country.

“These are five truly separate flocks,” says Kelly Sorenson, executive director at Ventana Wildlife Society, which co-manages the central California flock. “Except for rare instances of mixing between the southern and central California flocks, we’ve never documented movement among those sites.”

The geographic separation was by design, to ensure that if a disease or natural disaster were to strike one flock, it would likely not impact the others. Today about 350 condors fly free, and there are more than 200 birds in captivity. All of the flocks are supplemented with captive-bred birds, but condors are successfully reproducing in the wild, too. The biggest check on their overall population growth is lead poisoning, which accounts for half of all wild condor deaths and remains the birds’ greatest threat.

“The problem is, because bird flu is transmitted by wild birds, there’s really nowhere to hide. It’s scary in that regard,” Sorenson says.

Condors tend to hang out on ridges — high and dry places that aren’t friendly to viruses. But the sociable birds drop down to water sources — and on the coast, to beaches to feed on marine mammals. There they come into contact with shorebirds, known carriers of HPAI.

HPAI has been detected in California, but so far no condors have contracted it. In addition to careful monitoring, managers of the central and Northern California flocks have launched fundraisers so they can acquire or build quarantine pens. Ventana Wildlife Society raised $85,000 in a week, allowing the organization to order 10 pens, which in a worst-case scenario could contain up to 30 condors. If staffers detect a sick bird, they will immediately capture and isolate it. The mesh on the pens is fine enough to keep other birds from entering, and the design prevents other birds from roosting (and pooping) on top of the pens.

Because The Peregrine Fund uses radio telemetry and GPS to track individual condors, its staff has been able to locate and recover sick birds who are still alive and most of the dead birds who could potentially spread the disease. “I really truly think that because of the level of monitoring we’re doing, that we’ve limited the number of mortalities,” Hauck says. “As bad as it is, it could have been a lot worse.”

The live birds retrieved by crews in Arizona were severely dehydrated and malnourished. “They’re suffering from the flu; we all know what that’s like,” Hauck says. “Now think of a flu that’s worse than any flu you’ve ever had.”

Originally, eight condors were taken to Liberty Wildlife. Four soon died. Veterinarians are providing the four remaining birds with the avian equivalent of chicken soup: fluids, vitamin B complex, and a single shot of meloxicam, which reduces inflammation. The birds are improving and Hauck is cautiously optimistic that they will recover.

“HPAI is usually fatal in other species,” Hauck says. “This is new for condors, and what we’re seeing is, it does look like some of the birds are able to get through it, which is very hopeful given the high mortality rates that have been documented in other species that contract this virus.”

Condors who recover will have natural immunity and shouldn’t contract the H5N1 strain again. They will also likely have some degree of immunity even to new mutations of the virus. In the near future, flock managers may be able to vaccinate condors against HPAI.

“USDA and U.S. Fish and Wildlife are having conversations about trial runs for vaccines for condors, specifically,” Gilkeson says.

The Peregrine Fund is raising money to help pay for the extra travel, lodging and field time for its staff, and for transporting and treating sick birds. The response has been overwhelming, with donations from 48 states and several countries. Just as important has been the emotional support, especially for field staff reeling from the loss of 20 condors, including 11 adults that were actively tending eggs or young.

Some birds that could have been potentially been exposed to HPAI are still tending to their nests. “That’s a plus,” Hauck says. “The fact that we still have breeding birds that are seemingly uninterrupted is heartwarming for us.”

How You Can Help: Official Guidance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

If you see a condor exhibiting any of the following signs of illness in Arizona or Utah, please contact The Peregrine Fund at 928-352-8551 or condorprogram@peregrinefund.org. Signs include lethargy, incoordination, presenting as dull or unresponsive, holding head in an unusual position, and walking in circles.

Please follow these best practices to help limit the spread of the virus and avoid bird-human contact:

- Report dead or sick animals to your state wildlife agency.
- Keep your family, including pets, a safe distance away from wildlife.
- Do not feed, handle or approach sick or dead animals or their droppings.
- Always wash your hands after working or playing outside.
- Prevent contact of domestic or captive birds with wild birds.
- Leave young animals alone. Often the parent animals are close by and will return for their young. For guidance on orphaned or injured wild birds, please contact your nearest wildlife rehabilitation center, state wildlife agency, or local land management agency.
- USDA also has biosecurity guidance for people who keep backyard poultry.

Previously in The Revelator:

Bird Flu Outbreaks: When Will We Learn Our Lesson?

What Sound Can Tell Us About Our Changing World

As new technologies supercharge the field of bioacoustics, researchers can better listen to environmental changes — and use the information to guide conservation efforts.

After Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico in 2017, photos showed downed trees, flooded communities, collapsed homes and buckled roads. But what did the aftermath sound like?

Ben Gottesman, now a member of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab, was part of a team of researchers from Purdue University’s Center for Global Soundscapes and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that monitored changes in the soundscape on land and in the water to better understand how birds, bugs, shrimp, fish and other animals responded to the disturbance.

The work is part of the growing field of bioacoustics, which combines biology and acoustics to gain insight into the world around us by listening. It’s become a potent tool for research and conservation as recording devices have improved and gotten cheaper — and as machine learning can crunch massive amounts of data. That’s helped researchers from the Yang Center and other institutions better understand everything from right whales in the North Atlantic to tiny katydids in the canopies of tropical forests.

The Revelator spoke to Gottesman about which animals bioacoustics can help us study, how researchers sort through millions of hours of recordings, and why new technologies aren’t just for experts.

You did your Ph.D. in soundscape ecology. What is that?

It’s the study of sound in our environment and trying to understand places through how they sound. That can be learning about biodiversity through recording and analyzing the sounds from different ecosystems or doing a more comparative approach where you’re trying to understand what makes this tropical forest sound the way it does. What are all the sounds in a given place? How do they vary over space and time?

I think a lot of places have something to tell us about either environmental issues or interesting behaviors.

What can sound tell us about a changing world?

It can tell us a lot. You can look over decades where you see ocean noise levels doubling every 10 years, and that corresponds with this increase in shipping. These long-term anthropogenic stressors, a lot of them are tied to changes acoustically.

Likewise long-term changes in biodiversity also convey acoustically. There was a big study led by the Cornell Lab that found that 3 billion birds were lost [in North America] since the 1970s. I imagine that that’s led to a desaturation of dawn choruses, which is a peak period of biophony, or sounds produced by animals. Biodiversity loss carries an acoustic signature in many places with a desaturating soundscape or a loss of dynamics.

Then over shorter time scales, you have impacts such as logging or mining that can also have a large effect on the soundscape as well. Through that we can learn about changes to the animal communities.

In my work I studied the impact of Hurricane Maria. It’s not a direct human-caused disturbance, but there was a marked reduction in dawn chorus periods where usually you have a whole vibrant mix of birds that are singing. That declined sharply after the storm, likely signifying the initial damage wrought by this intense hurricane. The insect choruses were depleted as well.

But then we had these hydrophones recording just a few miles away, and there was very little change. The fish choruses were present during the night just like before. The snapping shrimp were still snapping away at very similar levels. That was one example early on that gave me this firsthand experience learning about how soundscapes can convey ecological changes.

People are trying to use passive acoustic monitoring as a tool to understand the degree to which places are being affected by all kinds of different stressors. But it can also [be used to understand] restoration. Acoustics is a really great way to understand what species are profiting from such restoration, how long it takes for places to bounce back, and what restoration methods are most effective given your management goals. My colleague Vijay Ramesh just published a paper about understanding the effectiveness of restoration using passive acoustic monitoring.

What kinds of tools are used for this?

There are passive recording technologies, and those are typically recorders with battery and storage that you can leave outdoors. The SwiftOnes that we make at the Yang Center can record for more than a month continuously. Underwater, the tech is more advanced. We’ve developed underwater recorders called Rockhoppers that can record for more than a year straight as deep as 1,000 meters.

Cornell Researcher Builds Groundbreaking Machine Learning Toolkit For Bioacoustics | The Cornell Daily Sun https://t.co/xNQM497iOP

— Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics (@CornellSounds) November 10, 2022

There’s a lot of next steps or frontier areas. We’re working toward real-time detection and streaming of sounds. So let’s say you’re interested in some sort of human stressor like illegal logging or poaching, the ability to record, but also to analyze and then ping out what’s going on in real time — that’s an area that people are actively working on. We have some units in Hawai‘i that are doing just that, which is quite exciting.

One shortcoming of these fixed sensors is that they’re robust through time, but they don’t cover a big area. So to complement that, there are also acoustic gliders in marine environments. There’s some that just drift, and then others that you can program routes. We’re thinking about how that can take shape terrestrially, potentially using drones. That’s one area that people are thinking about in order to increase the spatial resolution of acoustic sampling.

How do you analyze all this data?

That’s one of the big challenges. When I think of even just a few months of data from a few sites, I get the image of a glacier of sound. How are you able to break that up into more manageable units or get some insights and analyze this mountain of data? Especially as projects scale, it’s increasingly important to have automated tools that can go through and find signals that you’re interested in or make automated measurements of the soundscape.

In the case of a bioacoustic monitoring project in the Sierra Nevada led by Connor Wood, each year it collects more than a million hours of sound from more than 1,000 sites. He’s worked with Stefan Kahl to create BirdNET, this very powerful algorithm for classifying bird sounds within an audio data set. That’s just one example of these machine learning tools that are changing the game and making it possible for us to analyze these enormous soundscape data sets.

You mentioned birds, which is what I often think of with acoustic monitoring. What other species are we able to learn about now with acoustic tools that we have been missing before?

I can think of Laurel Symes’ work. She uses passive acoustics to understand the biodiversity and relative abundance of katydids in tropical forests. Most of these katydids live high up in the canopy, and their sounds are ultrasonic. So even if you’re there trying to survey them, you won’t be able to hear them.

Green bug on green leaf. — A round-headed katydid. Photo: Terry Priest (CC BY-SA 2.0)

But with passive acoustic monitoring, you can get a sense of their behavioral patterns and phenology, which is how their vocal activity changes over the course of the year. And then ultimately, the golden goose is to get a sense of how many of these insects are in these forests because they’re such a critical food source in these tropical forest communities.

That’s one example. But there’s so many. A large part of the work at the Yang Center is dedicated toward the marine environment in places like Antarctica or off the coast of California or Cape Cod Bay, which is home to the endangered North Atlantic right whale. These animals are extremely difficult to survey, if not for passive acoustic tools.

Especially in aquatic environments, whether it’s freshwater or marine, acoustics is really giving us a window into studying creatures that otherwise are really logistically difficult to survey.

Can this kind of technology be used by regular people?

Yes, and there’s a tremendous power in making tools accessible to a wider audience. That’s happening with these acoustic technologies. BirdNET, which I spoke about earlier, is an app that anybody can download and use to identify the birds singing in their environment. Merlin is another app from the Cornell lab that has the similar goal of recording and detecting different bird species on your cell phone.

As citizen science continues to be on the rise with eBird and iNaturalist, I think sound will become an increasingly large part of those efforts. You can go out and record the sounds of different species and archive them in this huge, publicly accessible library, called the Macaulay Library at Cornell.

Equipping people with the tools to do this automated classification of different sounds around them is actively happening now — mainly with birds — but that will expand.

Once you have names for things, it makes you appreciate them more and it’s a real portal toward facilitating more learning and engagement. I’m a big believer that sound has the power to do that.

Sound has captivated me, and it can really spark something in people. It could be sounds from Antarctica or it could be your backyard pond with water beetles clicking and bugs doing these rhythmic whirrs. The surprise and mystery can just captivate you and make you want to go outside — and hopefully do some recordings yourself.

Previously in The Revelator

The Call of the Wild: Using Sound to Help Imperiled Species and Ecosystems