The UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s Decision on Genetic Resources Will Violate National Sovereignty

As written, Decision 15/9 won’t allocate conservation funds in a manner that delivers the greatest benefit. There’s a better way.

This month 23,000 people representing nearly 200 nations and hundreds of NGOs have gathered in Calí, Colombia, for the sixteenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, aka COP16 of the CBD. Delegates from 196 parties are debating numerous proposals to help imperiled wildlife. Center stage in the discussions is “Decision 15/9,” which establishes a “multilateral mechanism for benefit sharing from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources, including a global fund.”

In other words, Decision 15/9 obligates the sharing of benefits when genetic resources from plants, animals, and microorganisms are used to create biotechnologies.

The “benefit” of greatest interest is, not surprisingly, money. Payments for genetic resources will “support the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity,” which are underfunded if funded at all.

But who decides what projects are funded for “conservation and sustainable use?” According to the draft recommendation for implementing Decision 15/9, a funded project may not be located within the country (in treaty parlance, the party) from whose habitat the genetic resource was de-materialized, researched, and developed. This means that the range country of species that harbor the principal agent may not receive any funding from the resulting intellectual property and blockbuster sales.

There’s an even more fundamental problem. What if conservation and sustainable use don’t require a project, but rather the imposition of limits — e.g., not to open highways in primary forests, not to dam rivers, not to drain wetlands, and so on? The alignment of incentives remains unaddressed in Decision 15/9.

More unwelcome questions arise. Would biogeographic islands (habitat refugia) in the middle of thousands of hectares of cleared forest be a conservation project? Those refuges are valuable, but protecting them doesn’t solve the problems that make them refuges in the first place.

Similarly, would fishways and ladders for a newly dammed river be a “sustainable use?” And would fungible projects — those projects that would have been funded anyway — be eligible for allocation from the “global fund”? One thinks of reforestation of an urban watershed or tree-planting in an asphalt jungle.

The global fund of Decision 15/9 strips the sovereignty of provider parties to allocate revenues that originate from the use of their own resources. Funds slated by the “multilateral mechanism” won’t necessarily be allocated to the public goods with the greatest benefit for society. Sovereignty is violated wholesale.

For many mega-diverse parties, greater social benefit may be had in rural electrification, sanitation, and health. A forest unfelled, a river left free flowing, and a wetland not drained don’t need a funded project.

A different approach could go a long way toward aligning incentives between utilization and conservation.

Bounded Openness over Natural Information

In 2010 political scientist Chris May coined the term “bounded openness” to discuss the global governance of intellectual property without offering a succinct definition. My colleagues and I expanded his concept to the wildlife realm several years later, when we introduced the phrase “bounced openness over natural information.”

May’s neologism is apt for the conservation policy that I had spent a career researching and developing. Under bounded openness over natural information, users (CBD parlance for those who “access genetic resources”) in both the non-commercial and commercial sectors would enjoy unencumbered access to genetic resources, no matter whether the medium be biological matter, print, or digital. In exchange, provider parties (e.g. megadiverse countries) would claim a share of royalties whenever a biologically derived product is commercially successful and enjoys intellectual property protection.

The magnitude of the royalties draws on the concept of “rent” in economics, which is the difference between the price one pays and what one would have paid were the market competitive. Users enjoys huge rents for artificial information through the limited-in-time monopolies of their patents and copyrights. Under bounded openness over natural information, providers would likewise enjoy rents for natural information. Because species overlap national jurisdictions, provider parties would get a greater share when they have a larger share of habitat and a smaller share should they permit alternative land uses that shrink habitat.

Under this allocation method, incentives are aligned between provider parties and users. The criteria of efficiency, feasibility, and practicality touted in Decision 15/9 could then mean something.

This focus on self-interest has been foundational to economics ever since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Self-interest for parties translates into self-determination. The global fund of Decision 15/9 should be regarded as an escrow account without any allocative power.

History Repeats Itself

Institutional memory illuminates how COP16 is moving full circle to the origins of the CBD.

I’m sufficiently old to recall the Fourth IUCN World Congress in Caracas, Venezuela, in February 1992, where the Swiss conservationist Cyrille de Klemm lamented the non-progress of the draft biodiversity treaty and the looming deadline of June 1992 for its presentation at the Earth Summit, Rio ’92.

De Klemm had pressed hard for a global fund in the International Negotiating Committee for the CBD, which was then meeting in Nairobi under the auspices of the UN Environment Programme. Developing countries balked and would hear none of it. They’d conflated sovereignty with the right to negotiate bilaterally. Developed countries obliged, perhaps realizing that a price war, which would behoove them, was in the offing (cynicism is a hazard of my profession, economics).

De Klemm and the developing countries were simultaneously right and wrong. De Klemm was wrong to advocate for allocative power in a global fund; developing countries were wrong to insist on bilateralism.

Bounded openness over natural information includes what De Klemm got right — the need for a multilateral mechanism. Bounded openness also includes what the developing countries got right — the preservation of allocative power.

Thirty-two years have transpired since Nairobi. Patience wears thin. Failure is predictable for COP16. Nevertheless, self-congratulations by the parties and secretariat are also predictable for the closing ceremony on Nov. 1, 2024. Reform of Decision 15/9 must not be pusillanimous. I write with hope for COP17.

Economics is not diplomacy.

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.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Environmental Change, Written in the DNA of Birds

Protect This Place: The Mountainous Ulu Masen Ecosystem

This massive rainforest in Aceh, Indonesia is home to tigers, elephants, pangolins, and other threatened species, but it needs one key change to ensure their survival.

The Place:

The Ulu Masen Ecosystem spans 3,600 square miles (9,500 square kilometers) of tropical rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Located in Aceh province about 4 degrees north of the equator, the region forms part of the immense Sundaland biodiversity hotspot.

Topography in Ulu Masen ranges from lowland rainforest at 650 feet above sea level (200 meters) to montane peaks up to 9,100 feet (2,785 meters). Approximately 50% of Ulu Masen occurs at elevations below 2,600 feet.

The author on a ranger patrol in Ulu Masen in 2022.

Ulu Masen is managed under the jurisdiction of provincial forest management units. Dinas Lingkungan Hidup dan Kehutanan (DLHK, or Environment and Forestry Service of Aceh) has designated about a quarter of the region as production forest (12%) and other “nonforest” areas (14%). The “production” forests, where permitted logging and other extractive activities are legal, mirror the distribution of the region’s lowland forests.

The remaining 74% are officially designated “protection forest.” However, forests in Indonesia outside national parks (which are prioritized for conservation by the central government) receive significantly less attention and funding. That remains true here: The World Database on Protected Areas, the most comprehensive source for data on the subject, lists the 31 square mile (80 km²) Jantho Nature Reserve as the lone protected area in Ulu Masen. Still, the provincial government’s efforts to maintain the region’s extensive forest cover — without internationally recognized protected areas besides Jantho — are deserving of recognition.

The government’s efforts are aided by Ulu Masen’s geography, which provides further protection. The steep, forbidding walls of its mountains, deep gorges, and numerous unnavigable rivers created barriers that have prevented settlement and farming even now. Most villages are restricted to the fringes in the lowlands.

Peering out from inside a rocky gorge, water in the foreground and trees in the background
A gorge in the Ulu Masen Ecosystem.  Photo by Irwan ‘Kayukul’ Yoga

Also in the lowlands: 17 palm oil mills — fed by the harvest from nearly 770 square miles (2,000 km²) of surrounding oil palm plantations — that flank the southern border of the ecosystem.

Across Ulu Masen, two main distinct languages are spoken: Bahasa Aceh and Bahasa Gayo. Most Gayo and Acehnese people are farmers who grow rice and other cash crops such as bananas, durian, maize, chilis, candlenut, and betel nut.

Why it matters:

Ulu Masen’s forests overlap 12 key watershed areas that provide drinking water, clean air, flood control, soil stabilization, crop pollination and other essential ecosystem services to nearly 3 million people.

Below 2,600 feet the forest biomass is dominated by dipterocarps, a family of trees ravaged by illegal logging due to their high economic value. Figs are also found in the lowland forests, providing an important food source for many animal groups.

Oaks and laurels become common at higher elevations, as do tree ferns in the genus Cyathea. Interspersed among the hills and mid-elevation forests are pockets of Sumatran tropical pine trees, represented primarily by the range-restricted Merkus’s pine (Pinus merkusii), the southernmost naturally occurring pine species on Earth. This tree is most commonly found at elevations between 1,300–4,900 feet (400–1,500 meters).

Ulu Masen forests harbor rare and endangered mammals, including populations of Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae), Sumatran elephants (Elephas maximus sumatrensis), Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), Sumatran serows (Capricornis sumatraensis), sambar deer (Rusa unicolor), Sunda clouded leopards (Neofelis diardi), marbled cats (Pardofelis marmorata), wild dogs (Cuon alpinus), sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), Thomas’s leaf monkeys (Presbytis thomasi), and Sunda pangolins (Manis javanica).

A Sumatran serow (Capricornis sumatraensis) detected by camera trap at 8,005 feet (2,440 meters) in Ulu Masen. Photo by Joe Figel and Hermansyah

Over 300 bird species occur here, including range-restricted and threatened species such as Wallace’s hawk eagles (Nisaetus nanus), Hoogerwerf’s pheasants (Lophura inornate hoogerwerfi), Aceh bulbuls (Pycnonotus snouckaerti), and helmeted hornbills (Rhinoplax vigil).

Habitat loss, hunting, and poaching have already wiped out many of these species in other areas of Sumatra and southeast Asia.

The threat:

As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, agriculture and logging — much of it undocumented and therefore illegal — remain the main threats to the region’s forests. Between 2001 and 2023, Ulu Masen lost 140 square miles (370 km²), about 3.9% of its primary forest cover. Concerningly, the region has lost more forest in recent years than in the first decade of the century.

Five mining concessions occupy 135 square miles (357 km²) in the landscape. One of the mining groups, Asiamet Resources Limited, states on its website that southeastern Ulu Masen mineral deposits could reach 2.4 million tons of copper, 2.1 million ounces of gold, and 20.6 million ounces of silver.

A three-legged tiger, victim of a snare trap, detected in Ulu Masen’s infrequently patrolled forests. Photo by Joe Figel and Hermansyah

Poaching incursions, aided by a severe lack of ranger patrols, also threaten the survival of highly persecuted species such as tigers and sambar deer. Poachers primarily use foot snares, which they set on animal trails in the forest, usually along ridgelines.

My place in this place:

I first stepped foot in Ulu Masen in 2019 as a researcher with the Fulbright U.S. Scholar program working in close coordination with a network of local partners. My objective was to assess the status of Sumatran tigers and their prey. At that time fundamental data on tiger distribution and the presence of breeding females were nonexistent — tiger population trends were anyone’s guess.

Since 2019 we have documented — alongside key collaborators from Aceh-based NGOs, government agencies, and universities — a widespread prey base, which is good news. Tigers need a lot of food, after all.

But we have also found demographic characteristics that indicate tigers face heavy poaching pressures. Our most recent findings (just published in Scientific Reports) indicate high population turnover, an unbalanced sex ratio heavily skewed toward males, and a lack of evidence of reproduction.

Who’s protecting it now:

Two main government agencies lead the protection of Ulu Masen’s forests and wildlife: DLHK and Balai Konservasi Sumber Daya Alam (BKSDA-Aceh, or Natural Resources Conservation Center).

A handful of local and international NGOs — including Perkumpulan Rincong, International Elephant Project, and Fauna & Flora International — have mobilized ranger patrols and organized human-wildlife conflict response teams in Ulu Masen. The Leuser International Foundation supported ranger patrols in Ulu Masen in 2020 and 2022.

In October 2023 the Indonesian government issued legal acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples’ collective rights over 87 square miles (225 km²) of Ulu Masen forests. This formal granting of forested land titles marked the first time in Aceh’s history that the central government handed over management to Acehnese communities. However, the effectiveness of this new initiative has yet to be fully assessed.

What this place needs:

Ulu Masen needs more ranger patrols. These teams, usually made up of carefully selected local villagers, have demonstrated their effectiveness in reducing poaching threats. Employment opportunities as rangers can provide income for individuals who may otherwise be lured to participate in illegal logging or poaching.

The ranger network in Ulu Masen is understaffed and ill-equipped to protect Ulu Masen’s diverse animal communities. Here a ranger surveys birds in the canopy. Photo by Joe Figel

In the first rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of rangers in protecting Sumatran tigers, the work of these mobilized guardians resulted in a 41% reduction of snares set in Kerinci-Seblat National Park. Similar gains in Ulu Masen are unachievable without a boosted ranger network. Considering the size of Ulu Masen, there is a need for an additional 560–640 trained rangers, numbers consistent with documented tiger recoveries in other rainforests of southeast Asia.

Follow the fight:

Hutan Harimau (Tiger Forests)

Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight. 

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Previously in The Revelator:

Species Spotlight: Going to Bat for Painted Woolly Bats

 

Environmental Muralist Faunagraphic Brings an Urban Oasis to the Concrete Jungle

Massive art installations depicting birds and other wildlife help bring a touch of nature, and creative inspiration, to cities around Europe.

As more and more of Earth’s natural beauty gets paved over each year, one woman has made it her mission to capture the wonder of the world beyond the cityscape and inspire people to venture outside the concrete and steel.

Artist Sarah Yates, who works under the name Faunagraphic, is known for her massive murals: 20-foot-high wild birds or brilliantly rendered octopi with tentacles that snake along the bricks for a whole city block and transform what was once cold and lifeless into an enlightening expression of nature’s wonders.

“I love to paint small things on a large scale,” she says. “This wasn’t really a style when I first began as a graffiti artist. Most graffiti artists were painting letters, so at first I felt a bit like a black sheep. But I painted the birds I loved, and the public, in turn, loved my art.”

 

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Faunagraphic’s work has been transformative for the cities and villages that have invited her to create colorful murals within their borders. Neighbors emerge from their cramped quarters, entranced by the sight of the mesmerizing imagery blooming in their neighborhood, waving at the smiling woman with wild auburn hair on her scaffold with her spray-paint cans. A child asks his mother what kind of bird she’s painting. The mother remembers the bird from when she was young and tells her child the story, saying they’ll have to go looking for the bird one day. The art’s spell has settled into the hearts and minds of the residents, a magic that they’ll take with them throughout the day, making them dream of a world without roads, wild and free and untainted by industry.

Environmentalism through art. Conservation through contemplative thought.

“I developed my style through painting the things I loved,” she says. “I have always loved game design, fantasy art, stories of magic, folklore, ancient history, future tech … I always wanted to have something within my work to keep me inside that imaginative place.”

Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, England, Yates discovered her passion for creating art with spray paint as a 19-year-old graphic design student. Over the next 15 years, Faunagraphic honed her craft of blending graphic elements with nature-related realism. It became her mission to advocate for the importance of the natural world through the beautification of urban developments.

“I love nature and the things that inspire us inside the woods — the feelings we get when walking through a forest path full of bluebells, bright green grasses, little birds shifting through the trees. I put myself in that place when I draw and try to surround myself with these things.”

Her audience easily interprets the message behind her art and advocacy: Embrace nature more.

“At times my message is more to remind people of how lucky we are and how beautiful and unique our planet is,” she remarks. “To value time, help others, and love each other. Our world has many issues, but nature is always at the core. When we have nothing and someone’s life is not going great, I hope only that they can find joy in nature, at least.”

Painting to Heal

Much as being in nature can provide psychological healing, Faunagraphic hopes her work can achieve a similar effect in the heart of a city.

“I believe it has a big impact on peoples’ wellbeing,” she says. “Seeing any form of creativity triggers ideas in people: clear thinking, positive reactions. They then walk away to lead their own inspirational or motivational behavior within their circles of influence.”

 

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Faunagraphic reflected on a particularly difficult time in her own life where she drew upon the solace of the natural world for peace and strength.

“I was very sick and in the hospital with blood cancer when I was 18,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to leave my room for 30 days. I was in confinement, isolation. However, each day at the same time different animals would pass by my window, including fox cubs who would play in the grass outside. I wasn’t sure what the future had planned for me, but I stayed positive and tried to be strong, knowing that soon I could go outside again into the greenery and wind.”

Her mind drifted to things others have told her about how her work has changed and inspired them.

“I hear a lot of stories about people starting to watch birds when a family member dies or something traumatic happens to them,” she says. “These kinds of stories move me. I feel there is a more spiritual connection that people overlook until they are on their own, having a quiet moment in nature and realize they are not alone.”

I ask about her work with children as an activist and preservationist, and whether she’d observed a difference in the responses of children versus adults when it comes to the idea of nature conservation.

“I think children are more engaged,” she says. “They want to get involved, to help more. They want to make their own art. Adults are more reflective and take the inspiration into their lives in their own ways. It’s very positive.”

Art Spreads Its Wings

When it comes to her focus in the world of environmental conservation, Faunagraphic is drawn to several different bird societies across the United Kingdom and Europe, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds — RSPB for short — and Swift Conservation. During 2024 she has focused on heritage and urban regeneration projects, one being a new UNESCO protected site, the details of which are still developing.

In a past interview on the BirdBuddies blog, Faunagraphic remarked, “I always find the story of the RSPB amazing. I have a few friends and they’re like, ‘Oh, protesting for nature, it doesn’t get anywhere.’ And I’m like, that’s wrong, because the RSPB was just two women that started it off, fighting for the rights of these birds, because they kept getting slaughtered for hats, and the birds were going extinct. And that’s how it all began, just two women.”

 

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Faunagraphic doesn’t limit her artistic endeavors to murals. She has been invited to participate in dozens of European gallery exhibits and installations. Recently she extended her presence in the art world across the Atlantic Ocean to be part of the 2023 Aruba Art Fair in the Caribbean Islands.

Faunagraphic has also collaborated with some of the most influential brands today — including Sony, TOMS Shoes, Converse, Diesel, Pioneer, and Reebok — to design unique nature-themed consumer products.

She might even launch her own product line one day. “It’s something I’m working on,” she says. “I love linen and organic or sustainable fabrics, which I would then screenprint onto. I have been spending years speaking with different suppliers in different countries, as well as machinists and clothing makers.”

Faunagraphic’s stunning and impactful work reaches thousands of people every year, and her murals could continue to inspire viewers for generations to come. She understands the power of her murals on young and old alike and continues to strive to spread her message of nature conservation. With every thoughtful swath of paint, Faunagraphic continues to make the human fabricated landscape — as well as the lives of those who live within it — a little more beautiful by turning concrete jungles into urban oases.

Ultimately Faunagraphic’s hope is to reconnect people to the Earth and reinvigorate their childlike curiosity about the natural world. For it’s only through a deeper connection with nature that we can preserve the beauty of our world.

“Small steps lead to big changes, you know.”

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Previously in The Revelator:

Project Animalia: A Year in 365 Animal Paintings

This Month in Conservation Science: ‘The Earth Is Dying, Bro’

Plus a spotlight on leopards, the risks to primates, the link between bats and chocolate, otter taste buds, and a whole lot more.

I started writing about conservation 20 years ago because I kept seeing so many interesting scientific papers that never seemed to make a splash beyond their initial publication.

Little has changed. In just the past month, I’ve seen dozens of new papers that I thought deserved exposure but didn’t appear to reach a wide audience.

That’s why I launched “This Month in Conservation Science” — to get people talking.

Here are more than two dozen papers that have grabbed my attention in the past few weeks. They cover picky otters, shrimp that live in trees, roaming leopards, changed landscapes, overheated turtles, youth reactions to climate change, and more. Most of the articles are open access, so they should be available to researchers (and any other interested readers) around the globe.

    • “A new species of nightjar (Caprimulgus) from Timor and Wetar, Lesser Sunda Islands, Wallacea” (Ibis)
    • “Climate futures for lizards and snakes in western North America may result in new species management issues” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “The Earth is dying, bro” (M/C Journal)
    • “Emaciated enigma: Decline in body conditions of common dolphins in the Celtic Seas ecoregion” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Fair division for avoidance of biodiversity impacts” (Trends in Ecology & Evolution)
    • “First peoples’ names for Australian birds? Only with free, prior and informed consent” (Emu – Austral Ornithology)
    • “Global primary predictors of extinction risk in primates” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)
    • “Hidden gems: Scattered knowledge hampered freshwater jellyfish research over the past one‐and‐a‐half centuries” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Investigating the distribution of a unique crustacean microendemic to tree hollows” (The Science of Nature)
    • “Local extirpation of woody species in Colophospermum mopane woodland under chronic utilisation by elephants” (African Journal of Ecology)
    • “Microplastics and chemical contamination in aquaculture ecosystems: The role of climate change and implications for food safety — a review” (Environmental Sciences Europe)
    • “Natural shading is helpful but not sufficient for mitigating warming in green sea turtle nests in the tropical South China Sea” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Rediscovery and future approaches to conservation of the elusive giant salmon carp Aaptosyax grypus, a Critically Endangered megafish in the Mekong” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Seed dispersal by bats (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae) and mutualistic networks in a landscape dominated by cocoa in the Brazilian Amazon” (Global Ecology and Conservation)
    • “Small forest patches in West Africa: mapping how they are changing to better inform their conservation” (Environmental Conservation)
    • “Taxonomic revision of the king cobra Ophiophagus hannah species complex, with the description of two new species” (European Journal of Taxonomy)
    • “Tracing seven decades of Chinese wildlife legislation from 1950 to the COVID-19 pandemic era” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Why do Eurasian otters eat so few invasive blue crabs?” (European Journal of Wildlife Research)

Spot(light) on leopards:

This month saw several interesting papers about these threatened felines (and other nearby species, including humans):

    • “Leopards on the edge: Assessing population status, habitat use, and threats in Southeast Asia” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Identifying priority areas for the Indian leopard (Panthera pardus fusca) within a shared landscape” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Are wild prey sufficient for the top predators in the lowland protected areas of Nepal?” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Distribution patterns of tigers and leopards in Thung Yai Naresuan (East) Wildlife Sanctuary, Western Thailand” (Ecology and Diversity)
    • “Human activities reshape the spatial overlap between North Chinese leopard and its wild ungulate prey” (Frontiers in Zoology)
    • “Droughts reshape apex predator space use and intraguild overlap” (Journal of Animal Ecology)
    • “Human-wildlife conflict in Bardia-Banke Complex: Patterns of human fatalities and injuries caused by large mammals” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Cub survival in a wild leopard (Panthera pardus fusca) population” (Animals)

In-depth:

Beyond those individual papers, the journal Rangeland Ecology & Management has published an entire open-access issue on sagebrush conservation that covers a wide range of interesting subjects.

We found these papers through a combination of email alerts, RSS feeds, newsletters, notes from researchers, and other sources. We’re happy to hear from any author or team who has a new paper coming out in a peer-reviewed journal or other publication, especially if you’re from the Global South or an institution without much public-relations support. For consideration in a future column, drop us a line at [email protected] and use the subject line TMICS. (Our next column will focus on material published between Oct. 20 and Nov. 20, 2024.)

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Previously in The Revelator:

This Month in Conservation Science: The Eagles Who Ate the Lions

War Threatens Ukraine’s Unique Red Seaweed Fields. Here’s How Scientists Monitor Them From Afar

These beautiful ecosystems recently began to recover from overexploitation. Will Russia’s invasion once again push them over the brink?

In 1909 Russian scientist Sergey Zernov discovered a strange and lovely ecosystem in the Black Sea. Just above the sandy seafloor floated a field of red seaweed. Among the seaweed were animals — fish, sponges, worms, crayfish, and more — nearly all in various shades of red.

Scientists have since learned that this ecosystem hosts some 110 invertebrate species, 40 species of fish, and 30 species of algae. At its foundation are three crimson seaweeds, forming a vivid aquatic structure where biodiversity thrives.

Two of the three are in the genus Phyllophora (the third once was too, but now has a different name). While various species of this red seaweed grow around the world, it’s only in the Black Sea that they form vast fields. Other lifeforms have adapted to live among the Phyllophora, with red protective coloring for camouflage.

Zernov’s Phyllophora Field, named for its discoverer, occupies a large patch of the northwestern Black Sea. A second one, the Small Phyllophora Field, was discovered in 1957 near the shore of the Crimean Peninsula. Both are marine protected areas of Ukraine. And both now face unprecedented threats from Russian military aggression.

Wavelike clusters of seaweed in the Small Phyllophora Field. Credit: Alexander Kurakin/Institute of Marine Biology of the NAS of Ukraine

Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, followed by its 2022 escalation into full-scale war, brought destructive pollution, noise, fires, and explosions to these delicate ecosystems. The war has also blocked scientists from visiting the Phyllophora fields, which were only just recovering from damage wrought by 20th century industry.

Yet Ukrainian scientists continue their work from a distance. They’re tracking threats by satellite, extrapolating from research elsewhere, and planning a future with new protections for the red seaweed fields.

The Seaweed That Sprang Back

Seaweed often grows on hard surfaces, but in the Phyllophora fields it also grows unattached, floating over the seabed.

“It forms kind of a ball,” says Sofia Sadogurska, a marine biologist at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences. The Black Sea’s circular currents keep the floating fields in place.

The seaweed balls cluster in wavelike patterns near the bottom, shaped by the water’s movement. In this structure, animals like seahorses and crabs make their homes. Some are in the Red Book, Ukraine’s formal list of protected threatened and rare species.

“In these areas, the habitat is usually sandy bottom, which is suitable for some species, but usually is not enough for many species to live,” says Sadogurska. “But with the Phyllophora on the bottom of this diverse habitat, there are many species which you can find only there.”

These seaweeds are both keystone and indicator species: They’re the basis of the ecosystem, and the messengers of local environmental status. Since they’re large and grow slowly, they’re easily damaged by issues such as runoff pollution.

If these species start to disappear, “we know the ecological situation is worsening,” says Galyna Minicheva, a marine ecologist and director of the Institute of Marine Biology at the NAS of Ukraine.

It has happened before. Today, as a marine protected area, Zernov’s Phyllophora Field covers 1,550 square miles (4,025 square kilometers). But in the early 1950s it covered almost four times that space. In addition to damage from pollution and introduced species, the seaweeds were harvested to make agar, a gelatin-like product. In the 1950s and 60s, the agar industry extracted 12-15,000 tons each year. By the 1980s the huge Zernov’s Phyllophora Field was mostly gone.

Satellite data shows oil spills in the northwestern Black Sea, reaching Zernov’s Phyllophora Field (large pentagon in center) and the Small Phyllophora Field (square-ish shape in bay at right). Credit: Evgen Sokolov, senior researcher of the Institute of Marine Biology of the NAS of Ukraine

Yet as the ecosystem shrank, extraction became less profitable, and in 1996, just a few years after Ukraine’s independence, scientists added a Phyllophora species to the Red Book for protection. The following year the agar harvests stopped. New international agreements like the Danube River Protection Convention and Carpathian Convention guided cleanups of the many rivers that run into the Black Sea. Zernov’s Phyllophora Field became a marine protected area in 2008, and the Small Phyllophora Field followed in 2012. The red seaweed ecosystems began to recover.

When scientists see what’s happening in the Phyllophora fields, “we can understand the whole ecological state for the Black Sea,” says Minicheva. The recovery of these fields was good news for the entire region.

A Recovery Interrupted

“But this beautiful period for the whole Black Sea ecosystem, for Zernov’s Phyllophora Field, finished after the start of 2022,” says Minicheva. “Everything changed.”

Some areas, like the Small Phyllophora Field, had been cut off from research and conservation since 2014. “But of course, with the beginning of the full-scale war and the active hostilities in the northern part of the Black Sea, the impacts are much bigger and the scale is much higher,” says Sadogurska.

Scientists lost access to both fields. Russia blocked ports, destroyed coastal infrastructure, and littered the sea with dangerous floating mines.

“One of the threats from the Russian invasion in Ukraine is the lack of this long-term monitoring and lack of this data on the state marine ecosystems in the northwestern part of the Black Sea,” says Sadogurska.

Ukrainian scientists are doing their best to fill those gaps. “We can compensate using remote technology and take information from satellites,” says Minicheva. The scientists have developed intensive satellite use since the war’s start. What they can see on the water’s surface suggests impacts to the seaweed fields far below.

Through satellite images they’ve seen a military ship shooting near an important Phyllophora research station. They’ve tracked the sheen of oil from sunken aircraft and warships like the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, which sank in Zernov’s Phyllophora Field. “We make special assessments of how much of the Phyllophora field is covered by oil spills,” says Minicheva.

And perhaps worst of all, they’ve watched destructive floodwaters flow into the Black Sea after Russia attacked the Kakhovka Dam, draining a massive reservoir. It was “all freshwater, with garbage, with pollution, coming in the northwest part,” says Minicheva.

“One month after destroying the Kakhovka Dam, the situation was critical,” she recalls.

Satellite data on the dam disaster. Credit: Evgen Sokolov, senior researcher of the Institute of Marine Biology of the NAS of Ukraine

Yet just a few months later, the satellites showed a more promising picture. The pollution had sparked a bloom of algae that fed on the pollutants. While the Phyllophora fields face lasting damage from the disaster, the algae helped by cleaning up the environment.

Although algae blooms can also have risks, like toxicity to humans and blocking sunlight from other species, Minicheva emphasizes that in this case they are “an excellent nature mechanism, which [brings] back the system to the start position.”

Educated Guesswork

Other threats are harder to measure from afar. Damaged ships have floated ablaze through the northern Black Sea, polluting both water and air. Ballast water from military ships have a long history of introducing unexpected species. For example, in 1982, ballast water from U.S. ships brought an Atlantic comb jelly to the Black Sea, which severely threw off the ecological balance as it ate almost all the zooplankton. And sunken planes and ships from this war may leak pollutants for decades (vessels downed during World War II are still causing ecological harm).

Some effects may never be fully known.

Prewar lab work on Phyllophora residents. Ukrainian scientists await the day they can study the Phyllophora habitats in person again. Credit: Galyna Minicheva

“It’s often quite hard to estimate the impact of war if you were not present in this specific place when something happened and you come there sometime after,” says Sadogurska.

Still, extrapolating from one ecosystem can help scientists understand another.

“It’s unsafe to go to the marine coastal areas, due to the mines,” says Sadogurska. “But the lagoons, they are safe and are open, and we can use them as kind of a laboratory for science to collect some samples, to understand some impacts, to continue some of our work.”

For example, scientists observing Ukrainian freshwater ecosystems found that underwater explosions ruptured the swim bladders of fish, causing mass die-offs. Explosions in or near the Phyllophora fields have likely killed many fish there, too. Yet without in-person research, the true status of the Phyllophora fields, deep under the surface of the Black Sea, remains unknown.

The Future of Phyllophora

As the war rages on, scientists are planning for an eventual post-hostility future by “trying to put in place the policies and approaches which will allow for better conservation of these ecosystems,” says Sadogurska.

She’s among those working to add ecosystems including the Phyllophora fields to the Emerald Network, a European system of protected areas for non-European Union countries.

“Since we cannot access many of our territories and water areas due to the occupation and the ongoing war, we still have a lot of data related to their biodiversity, and we can push for creation of the protected areas on these territories even if they are currently under occupation,” Sadogurska says.

After Ukraine’s accession to the EU, the Emerald Network sites will join the EU’s Natura 2000 network of protected places. Experts then expect to have access to additional funding for conserving and restoring these areas.

For now remote monitoring of the Phyllophora fields continues, while researchers plan how they’ll study the war’s damage in person once it ends.

“There is still a lot of work to do,” Sadogurska says.

To Ukrainian researchers, this fight to protect the red seaweed fields is about science, and much more.

“For me as a scientist, it’s personally really hurtful to see the impact of war specifically on the areas where I worked,” says Sadogurska.

“Morality and ecology are two things that go very close together,” says Minicheva.

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Previously in The Revelator:

20 Endangered Species at Risk in Ukraine

Six Lessons From the World’s Deadliest Environmental Disaster

China’s Great Sparrow Campaign aimed to “conquer nature” but resulted in as many as 75 million human deaths.

The world’s deadliest environmental disaster got its start in 1958. Its effects are still being felt today, more than six decades later.

It wasn’t an oil spill, like the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon. It wasn’t a chemical disaster, like Union Carbide’s gas leak in Bhopal. And it didn’t have anything to do with nuclear power, like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.

It happened in the People’s Republic of China in the years after Mao Zedong came to power, causing mass starvation, murder, and even cannibalism.

And it started with a bird.

The Great Sparrow Campaign

In 1958, nine years after the Communist Party of China seized power, Chairman Mao launched what he called the Great Leap Forward, a multipronged effort to transform China into an industrialized nation.

The many changes initiated during this period included banning privately owned farms in favor of collective, state-sponsored agriculture.

Around the same time, Zedong launched the Four Pests Campaign, an effort to eliminate flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows to improve human hygiene and increase agricultural output. The campaign, accompanied by rampant propaganda, had a powerful slogan: ren ding sheng tian, or “Man must conquer nature.”

A 1958 propaganda poster from the Four Pests Campaign

Three of those “pests” made relative sense: Flies, mosquitoes and rats can carry disease, and humans still try to control them today. But why were sparrows lumped in with the other three? Mao, it turns out, wanted to prevent the abundant birds from eating grain seeds — a perceived threat to farm production.

To stop sparrows from doing what comes naturally, China directed its citizens to persecute the birds at a level of carnage that may remain unmatched in human history. During the Great Sparrow Campaign people smashed nests and eggs and chased sparrows while shouting, banging pots and spoons, lighting firecrackers, and making other loud noises. Many of the birds spent so much time and energy fleeing the cruel cacophony that they exhausted their reserves and found themselves too tired to escape a well-aimed whack from a shovel. Others “simply dropped from the sky” and expired, as Frank Dikötter wrote in his 2010 book Mao’s Great Famine.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many sparrows died, but many accounts place the toll in the hundreds of millions.

And it wasn’t just sparrows: Birds of adjacent nearby species also fell victim to the noise pollution and violence.

Two years later the absence of sparrows spawned a crisis of epic proportions. Insects such as locusts, previously kept in balance by the sparrows and other birds, swarmed out of control in 1960, a year that — in a grim coincidence — also saw a massive drought. Crops vanished as the voracious insects spread across the country.

Photo: Alexander Lerch (CC BY-NC 2.0)

As a result of this imbalance in nature, millions of people starved to death over the next two years.

How many? No one knows for sure. The Chinese government officially counts 15 million dead. Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng, writing in his book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, put the death toll at 36 million. Some academics suggest even doubling that to 75-78 million.

And they didn’t just die of starvation. People killed each other for food — and committed other unspeakable acts. “Documents report several thousand cases where people ate other people,” Yang told NPR in 2012. “Parents ate their own kids. Kids ate their own parents.”

The ultimate irony: China’s oppressive government had enough grain stored before the disaster to feed everyone in the country. However, they refused to release it and covered up the problem (in part by arresting and beating anyone who questioned the official narrative).

Today China still fails to acknowledge the problem of its own making, calling it the “Three Years of Difficult Period.”

Regardless of what you call it, the Great Sparrow Campaign and resulting environmental disaster offer six major lessons for the future.

Lesson 1: Environmental Disasters Last a Long Time

The Chinese famine was over by 1962 — but for those who survived, it’s hardly a thing of the past.

Two studies published in 2023 examined the lifelong health effects of starvation resulting from the Great Sparrow Campaign. Researchers found that the survivors, many now in their eighties, and the people born shortly after the famine all suffered health problems, or “noncommunicable diseases,” at a significantly higher rate than the general population. These include “hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, liver disease, heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, digestive disease, psychiatric problems, memory-related disease, arthritis, and asthma,” according to one of the studies.

As the authors of the study in the journal BMC Public Health wrote, “Experiencing famine at an early age or the experience of famine in a close relative’s generation (births after the onset of famine) are associated with an increased risk of” these noncommunicable diseases.

The second study, in the journal PLOS Global Public Health, found that the lifelong effects were particularly prevalent in people whose mothers were pregnant during the famine.

We can see parallels of this today in modern famine crises such as the ones happening right now in Gaza, Sudan, and Yemen, which many experts warn will cause suffering for years if not decades to come.

Neither study examined the mental-health effects of the famine, but “there are certainly social and psychological effects of these kinds of repressions,” says historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, who frequently writes about authoritarianism. Previous research, she points out, has shown intergenerational traumas in descendants of the Holocaust, slavery, war, and genocide.

Lesson 2: Science Matters

Authoritarians have a pattern: They belittle, ignore, diminish, and even punish scientific expertise.

That pattern played out in China’s great famine. As Judith Shapiro wrote in her 2001 book Mao’s War Against Nature, the Chinese leader held disregard for science throughout his rule. Even before the crisis, his agricultural policies had caused mass deforestation and hydrological problems. Mao even sent one hydro engineer to a labor camp for criticizing his plans.

And he ignored scientific warnings about removing sparrows, which led directly to millions of deaths.

His anti-science policies were not restricted to the Four Pest Campaign. Just a few years later, during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, Mao ordered farmers to plant grain instead of the local crop species they’d grown for generations, even in areas inhospitable to grain. “Such formalism supplanted local practices and wisdom, damaged the natural world, and inflicted enormous hardship on the Chinese people,” Shapiro wrote.

We see this pattern repeating today in authoritarian regimes around the world, which routinely denigrate the science of climate change in favor of extractive technologies.

Lesson 3: Compounding Problems Make Things Worse

China’s famine wouldn’t have occurred if not for Chairman Mao’s leadership, but when it did arrive, it was made worse by drought.

That’s a portent of things to come.

A study published earlier this year found that 2024 was already the worst year on record where water scarcity, severe drought, flooding, and other effects of extreme climate change had served as a linchpin of armed conflict. The study also found that these acts of violence have increased from about 20 incidents a year in 2000 to 347 as of its release on Aug. 22.

As climate scientist Peter Gleick, an author of the study, said in a press release, “the significant upswing in violence over water resources reflects continuing disputes over control and access to scarce water resources, the importance of water for modern society, growing pressures on water due to population growth and extreme climate change, and ongoing attacks on water systems where war and violence are widespread, especially in the Middle East and Ukraine.”

Many of these conflicts are caused by authoritarian regimes, but as Ben-Ghiat explains it, a crisis also create opportunities for strongmen and their corporate, billionaire allies to seize power and exploit the planet.

“The core of authoritarianism is fewer rights for the many,” she says, “and more liberties for the few, meaning the elites, the people who make money off plundering the environment. Control of resources, control of land — it’s bringing out the worst. You see that more as resources become scarce. A lot of the conflicts in the Middle East are about controlling water. I see right now as the last gasp of these plundering evil people. It’s getting worse because they’re all out trying to plunder as much as they can.”

Lesson 4: Authoritarian Rule Is Deadly (Especially for Protestors)

Ben-Ghiat thinks the Chinese famine was so extreme that it’s an outlier when it comes to the history of authoritarianism, but it still contains parallels to other regimes, including the denigration of science, the reliance on propaganda, and the crushing of resistance.

That’s not just history. Even today hundreds of environmental activists and defenders are killed every year, according to data compiled by the organization Global Witness.

“The most dangerous type of protestor to be is an environmental protestor,” says Ben-Ghiat.

Meanwhile the very nature of strongman governments makes it easier to commit the types of environmental crimes people are protesting.

“When you have dictatorship, you can orchestrate campaigns like the Great Sparrow Campaign or the famine created by Stalin very efficiently,” says Ben-Ghiat, “because you there’s no one telling you not to. There’s absolutely no opposition in parliament, there’s no journalism, there’s no free press. You’re not responsible to anyone. You’re not going to lose your job or get voted out because you cause these effects.”

Democracies are not immune from these problems, she points out, “but in authoritarian states, it’s all very nakedly revealed because there’s no check on the government.”

Lesson 5: Given Time and Effort, Some Things Recover

The bird targeted by Mao was the Eurasian tree sparrow (Passer montanus) — by 1962, they were all but extinct in China.

But the Eurasian tree sparrow is a wide-ranging species. When China realized its countryside needed the birds, it brought some back. Many books and studies report that China imported thousands of sparrows from neighboring Russia to reestablish some balance in devastated ecosystems.

Tree sparrow

It’s worth noting that in the years I’ve been studying and writing about the Chinese famine, I’ve never uncovered any primary documents about these Russian sparrows. Nonetheless, the species today flies in Chinese skies where they were once erased: There are thousands of observations from China on the citizen-science site iNaturalist. The sparrow also ranges from the easternmost coasts of Europe to the westernmost coasts of Asia and beyond into many island nations. Less populous than before, they’ve faced recent declines due to agriculture and other development but still number in the hundreds of millions — not bad, considering how many were wiped out six decades ago.

Lesson 6: We Need to Talk About These Things

Harvard University granted Yang Jisheng a prestigious Neiman Fellowship for his book Tombstone in 2016. The retired journalist was forbidden from traveling to the United States from China to receive the award, and his book remains banned in the country of his birth. The subject of the famine remains taboo in China to this day.

That’s exactly why we need to talk about it — and other environmental crimes being committed around the world — even if corporations or governments threaten to punish us for telling the truth.

As Timothy Snyder writes in his essential book On Tyranny, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”

Authoritarians want their abuses and deadly histories to fade from view. It may not be comfortable to address our painful pasts or dangerous present, but to ignore unpleasant realities is an invitation to catastrophe.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Portugal’s Deadly Wildfires Are Rooted in Its Authoritarian Past

12 New Environmental Books You Need to Read This Autumn

The season brings important new books by climate scientists, conservationists, activists, and novelists.

Publishers have an impressive slate of environmental books lined up for release this autumn — even more than usual. Maybe that’s an indication of how bad our environmental problems have become, how many problems we face, and how hungry people are for solutions.

As the nights get longer and cooler, here are 12 noteworthy new books for readers to put at the top of their fall reading piles. The list includes important new titles from climate scientists, activists, conservationists, and environmentally aware novelists — and they all point toward ways to appreciate, understand, and help this planet and everyone who lives here.

As usual, the links for each book go to the publishers’ websites, but you should also be able to find them through your local bookseller or library.

The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It by Genevieve Guenther

Words matter, and this stunning book cuts to heart of corporate doublespeak and inspires us to think critically, excise disinformation, and rebuild our communication efforts to ensure a more just and livable future.

(Read our 2022 interview with Guenther on this very subject.)

What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

The most inspirational and solutions-driven climate book of the year, with contributions from more than 30 all-star experts. Read it and stop weeping.

(Read our 2018 interview with Johnson about ocean conservation.)

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer

The famous Southern Reach trilogy that began with Annihilation expands to a fourth novel, and it’s a mindbender. Return to Area X and be horrified and illuminated. (Now excuse me while I go reread the first three novels with this one fresh in my brain.)

(Read VanderMeer’s 2017 Revelator essay, inspired by his book Strange Bird.)

Playground by Richard Powers

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Overstory returns with a new novel that has already been nominated for a bevy of awards following its UK publication. This one focuses on the ocean — carve out a few days to absorb and appreciate every well-crafted thought.

The Insect Epiphany: How Our Six-Legged Allies Shape Human Culture by Barrett Klein

Now, this is the way to write a conservation book. Klein, an entomologist, illustrates not just how the planet needs its bugs but how much humans have appreciated their very insect-ness over the millennia and expressed that in art, industry, technology, fashion, and our core cultural systems. Along the way he delivers a vital history that paves the way for the future.

The Revolution Will Be a Poetic Act: African Culture and Decolonization by Mário Pinto de Andrade, translated by Fabienne Moore

Not strictly an environmental book but one that cuts to the root cause of many of today’s biggest problems. The author died in 1990, but this collection of his speeches and essays still feels of the moment.

Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe by Jeremy Rifkin

I’ve just started dipping my toes into this one, and it’s an eye-opener. Rifkin (whose The Green New Deal we reviewed in 2019) argues that humans aren’t a land-based species but one that will rely on water, and the hydrological systems we’ve altered, for our future. I look forward to drinking in the rest of this thoughtful tome.

Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, With Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell

Eels are big business, especially when they’re at their smallest. Catching “elvers” or “glass eels” — the early phase of their existence, when they’re just a few inches long and eerily translucent — can earn Maine fishermen tens of thousands of dollars for a few nights’ work. The fish then get shipped overseas to grow in tanks and eventually be eaten. This jaw-dropping book tracks the lucrative and often illegal (not to mention violent) trade in these tiny animals, while also diving into humanity’s relationship with eels.

Atlas Obscura: Wild Life by Cara Giaimo and Joshua Foer

I’ve had a PDF of this massive compendium for a couple of months now, and I keep opening it to random pages and finding myself filled with wonder. Maybe one of these days I’ll read it from cover to cover. Until then I’m appreciating the surprises.

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder

I wouldn’t call this one — a powerful follow-up and companion to Snyder’s On Tyranny — an environmental book, but its insights can be applied to environmental issues. At its heart it positions freedom not as something we achieve from something else (“freedom from oppression”) but as something we’re entitled to (“freedom to move,” “freedom to be,” etc.). I’ve read On Tyranny and its graphic-novel adaptation a dozen times over the past few years; I see myself returning to On Freedom again and again as well.

The State of Fire: Why California Burns by Obi Kaufmann

Can we find hope in a world of constant wildfires? Kaufmann proves we can. Although focused on California, this book offers lessons for other fire-prone parts of the world.

(Read our 2020 interview with Kaufmann on the power of forests.)

A Little Queer Natural History by Josh L. Davis

Nature is a rainbow. This concise book (just 125 pages) offers an enjoyable and illuminating look at the diversity of the natural world and shows that Earth’s plants and animals (including us) are far from binary.

That’s it for this month, but we’ll have another big batch of autumn books next month (along with a few from earlier in the year that we’ve been waiting to share). Meanwhile you can find hundreds of additional book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

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All the Plants We Cannot See

Our culture has moved away from a fascination with the greenery around us. Experts warn that “plant blindness” could come with a cost.

When Kathryn Parsley taught biology to undergrads, she sometimes talked about Australia’s stinging tree, which is among the world’s most venomous plants — and can cause months of excruciating pain for anyone who approaches it.

“It’s incredibly dangerous,” she says. “If you even get close, its trichomes can get on you and it feels like your skin is on fire.” The sensation has been compared to being burned with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.

The stinging tree got her students’ attention, and that was Parsley’s aim. Many people consider plants benign and boring, if they consider them at all. Most plants don’t exist for them as distinct species; instead they compose what some botanists call “a green curtain”— a generic backdrop for more interesting creatures, namely animals, preferably vertebrates, ultimately humans.

What Is Plant Blindness?

Parsley wrote her dissertation on the subject of plant blindness, a term coined in 1999 by American botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, who defined it as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment.”

Several studies — including one Parsley conducted — have documented a difference in the visual attention people pay to animals compared to plants. When shown images in rapid succession, university students were better able to detect the animals and recalled more animal than plant names. There’s even evidence that some students didn’t perceive plants as being alive.

Flowers in meadow with urban buildings in background.
Wildflower meadow planted by roadside and housing. Photo: Tim Dennell (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Because of its reference to vision, Parsley considers the term “plant blindness” ableist and suggests the term plant awareness disparity instead. It has also been called zoochauvinism and zoocentrism.

Whatever you call it, many people find plants unworthy of their consideration. Yet in terms of sheer volume, plants dwarf the rest of life on Earth’s surface. Plant biomass is estimated to be 450 gigatons on land, while animals account for only 2 gigatons. Plant-blind humans simply discard most of the plant information their eye-brain systems take in, processing information about something else instead.

Wandersee and Schussler attributed some of that apathy to the fact that plants, unlike animals, don’t have a face. Nor can they move or threaten us in the way animals can. But while these plant traits have been fairly constant over time, experts think plant blindness is on the rise.

So if plants haven’t changed, why have we?

Plants in Culture

As it turns out, we haven’t all changed. The rate of plant blindness varies across cultures. Most of the research on it has been done in the United States and United Kingdom, whereas “Indigenous people are very plant-oriented,” Parsley points out. “Some subcultures in the U.S. and outside the U.S. are very plant-oriented.”

It wasn’t that long ago that many people in Eurocentric cultures revered plants, too. But our relationship with plants has changed. Two hundred years ago, most people lived on farms. They grew and gathered their own food, so they had to know plants. Today most of us live in cities and towns. We don’t rely on our plant-identification skills in order to eat.

Wisps of cottongrass blows in the wind
Cottongrass blows in the wind at the edge of Etivlik Lake, Alaska. The plant is a sedge with wind-dispersed seeds. Photo: Western Arctic National Parklands, (CC BY 2.0)

Kate Bergren is an associate professor of English at Trinity College in Connecticut who teaches a class called “Plants in Literature and Film.” It puts our relationship with plants front and center, something folks like William Wordsworth did in the early 19th century and we don’t do much in the 21st.

She wrote her dissertation and eventually a book, The Global Wordsworth, on the Romantic poet and his attitude toward plants.

“I got interested in how writers understood nature as being constituted by specific plants that they knew a lot about,” she says. “They had what we now think of as a scientific interest in plants themselves. In Wordsworth’s time, people had a lived practice of doing things with plants. He and his sister and his friends would go hiking and collect plants they thought were cool and plant them in their garden… They had a lived experience of doing stuff with plants.”

This, she says, reflects the values of the day: “The discipline of botany was a realm that average people, not just scientists, were really interested in, and poetry was a valid way to talk about discoveries in botany.”

Before the Romantics nature poetry was just that: a description of nature. “We read it today and it feels really boring, just line after line of description,” Bergren says. “Romanticism, in addition to its interest in nature, is also interested in the self, a recognizable contained self.”

Early in the Romantic Era, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) offered an example of this kind of writing in his 1791 book-length poem, “The Loves of the Plants.”

“The poem goes through plants one by one, describing how they reproduce, using the language and imagery of courtly romance to describe the process,” Bergren says. “Lots of swains. Hundreds of pages of this. People were super interested in that work, people talked about it, people wanted to learn about plant reproduction. So much Romantic poetry is intertwined, discovery of the self with discovery of nature.”

The poem is virtually forgotten today — and not very good, Bergen adds — which further proves to her how much the culture has changed. “We’re still living in a time when interest in the self is paramount. [But] now it’s just the interest in the self.”

And while she is fascinated by these cultural shifts, many botanists are troubled.

Why Is Plant Blindness a Problem?

Plants supply the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, serving as the base of the food chain. Yet many of our plants are faring poorly, and climate change makes them even more vulnerable. A 2023 report from Kew Royal Botanical Gardens estimates that 100,000 plant species have yet to be scientifically identified, and says 3 in 4 of these undescribed vascular plant species are already threatened with extinction.

But is this attributable to plant blindness? Kristine Callis-Duehl thinks so. She is the executive director of Education Research and Outreach at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, and she sees plant blindness on the rise.

“First and foremost, our habitat consists of plants,” she says. “Yet the general public largely doesn’t notice plants in their environment and therefore don’t appreciate how important they are to the biosphere and society, let alone how to identify a specific plant. People are failing to prioritize conservation or protect local areas because they don’t see the plants as important.”

Mesquite tree
A bee visits a mesquite tree blossom in Arizona. (Photo by Ken Bosma, CC BY 2.0)

When humans overlook plants, they also overlook their importance to human affairs, from food security to cultural preservation to the source of most medicines we use today, says Callis-Duehl.

“If you can’t identify the role of these plants, you aren’t seeing biodiversity. You’re just seeing a sea of green and not preserving what’s crucial to safeguard our ecosystem.”

She works with a lot of students in the Midwest who can’t tell the difference between a field of corn and a field of soybeans. “Is this kind of plant knowledge fundamental to the economy? No. But it is fundamental to being an informed citizen and making good choices,” she says. “If you don’t know the different plants, you don’t know how water runoff is affecting your natural resources. I’ve seen forest areas that became a dumping ground for everything from furniture to cars to bags of trash — anything that was no longer wanted or needed and too expensive to dispose of properly. They say, ‘It’ll just degrade into the forest.’ They don’t know the forest is alive.”

Callis-Duehl wants to reverse this trend, but here too, she encounters obstacles.

“We submit an enormous amount of National Science Foundation grant applications every year. We say we want to expose kids to careers in plants. The rejections are guaranteed to ask, ‘Why is this only focused on plants? Why not animals? Why not humans?’ … These grant reviewers are faculty experts, and yet their plant awareness disparity is so high.”

Can Plant Love Be Taught?

“The best way I’ve seen to overcome plant blindness is to have somebody really passionate about plants teach you,” Parsley says. “If you have a teacher in fifth grade who makes you do a leaf collection, like I did, then you’re more likely to have more plant awareness. If you don’t get exposed to them through school at the K-12 level, you may never be exposed to them or develop much plant awareness.”

Our K-12 education system centers animals far more than plants, Parsley argues. If a biology textbook is choosing between an example of a plant or animal to illustrate a concept, it almost invariably goes for the animal.

And very few college students study plants either.

When Parsley taught biology to college students, plant blindness was pervasive. “It’s almost become a running joke in the botany community, with each new crop of undergraduates complaining, ‘I don’t know why we have to learn about plants.’ Those anecdotes are a dime a dozen.”

Yet when she told students about an extraordinary plant such as the fierce stinging tree, “they were like, ‘oh, this is so cool, I didn’t know it could do that.’”

 

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Outside of the education system, there are other opportunities for people to connect with plants. Parsley thinks botanical gardens are great, if you’re lucky enough to live near one. But those often lure plant enthusiasts — in other words, they’re preaching to the choir. And while many Americans garden, many focus on a few select plants like tomatoes, which are grown in 86% of home gardens in the United States.

Still, Parsley grants that not every person who loves plants hails from a plant-oriented culture.

“We don’t know why some people get the plant bug,” she says. When doing her dissertation research, she found that people who spent a lot of time outdoors scored less on PAD. She also thinks childhood events matter, from visiting an apple farm or a forest to picking strawberries. Parsley’s grandfather had a garden, her mom had houseplants, and “I was just old enough to get kicked outside. All of those are contributing factors.”

Other factors contribute to plant blindness. The world is a far more urban place than it was in 1802 when Wordsworth wrote about daffodils in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” But as Bergren points out, plants exist in cities too, from weeds in sidewalk cracks to potted plants on a fire escape.

“I probably wouldn’t chalk it up entirely to urbanization,” she says. “I think there is an inattentiveness that certainly causes plant blindness but causes a lot of different kinds of blindness and an inability to see what’s right in front of you. The inattentiveness I’d chalk up to lots of features of modern life.”

First on that list? Our obsession with our phones — which, ironically, can also help people fight their plant blindness with apps like Leaf Snap and Plant Net.

Bergren is doing her part to combat plant blindness. This semester, for the first time, she’s asking her lit students to pick a plant on Trinity’s tree-filled campus (designated an arboretum in 2023), write about it each week, and see it.

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Previously in The Revelator:

The Extinction Crisis in Watercolor and Oils: Using Art to Save Plants

Haul Water, Rescue Pigs, Help Neighbors: How My Students Confronted Climate Chaos in a Horrific Hurricane Season

Collective action helps alleviate climate anxiety, as my class found following Hurricane Helene. It’s also helping our community to recover.

“We need ten people on flush crew, five to clean out the fridges in the science building, and 15 to clear trees on the roads! We’re gonna do this together!”

This wasn’t a pep rally or a community service event. It was the morning meeting called at 9:30 a.m. each day by campus leaders in front of the cafeteria at the small college where I now live without power or water, after the climate disaster of Hurricane Helene devastated our community in western North Carolina.

“We know the Swannanoa Valley has been hit especially hard,” the college president told the group of students and employees. “And we are here for this college and for the greater community. This is our work together.”

Students and faculty gather around to hear the college president speak
Photo: Courtesy of Warren Wilson College

That day I joined my neighbor Tom Lam chain-sawing his way across campus with a crew of students clearing brush along the way.

“Now gather ‘round so you can see how to sharpen this chainsaw,” Tom said in his booming Jersey voice, pulling on his suspenders after we’d cleared trees crushing a neighbor’s car.

I’ve spent 25 years teaching environmental education, raising two daughters, and living at this 1,000-acre campus where all students work in jobs in places like the farm, garden, forests, and even fiber arts. And I think this might be one model of how to live in community in a climate emergency.

I wake each morning worried and wondering about the hundreds washed away by a river I can see from my small rental duplex — and those who have died from Milton miles away as well.

I first realized the extent of “Katrina in the mountains” three days after the storm, when my youngest daughter, 18, called at midnight from her college two hours away.  Both my grown children had been trying to connect since the storm hit land and the waters changed our lives in this small town of Swannanoa, a ten-minute drive from Asheville.

“Mom, they’re pulling bodies out of the river,” she texted. “It’s all over TikTok. My friend’s aunt and uncle drowned. Bodies are in trees. They say the air smells like death.”

How do you comfort a young adult who has watched online as water raged through this mountainous region once billed as a “climate haven”? This is not the Gulf Coast of Alabama where I grew up, where my mother needlepointed a hurricane tracking chart and hung it on the bright yellow kitchen wall. During the pandemic, people from California and Florida flocked to Western North Carolina to escape the wildfires or hurricanes of their own climate realities.

Since the storm hit, I’ve worked with students and staff at Warren Wilson College who are like family, giving out water bottles, preparing meals, washing the solar-powered golf carts. One day my best friend and I cleaned out food from fridges in empty dorm rooms.

After working another day, I went down to the garden where students were harvesting sweet potatoes as well as the dead carp flung into the beds from the nearby Swannanoa River. “We have to get these sweet potatoes out or they’ll go bad,” they said. We later learned it was unsafe to eat any of the produce from the garden.

A Student Farm Leader takes care of pigs. Photo: Courtesy of Warren Wilson College

Other students on the farm crew rescued pigs who’d been carried off by the river, although they couldn’t get them all. My neighbor spotted a missing pig on an Instagram post, and students rescued it and brought the pig home to applause.

With deep heartache, we also saw rescue workers retrieve human bodies from the banks of this same river and place them in body bags.

Since August I’d spent five weeks of this semester working with my students in a course called “Everybody’s Environment: People, Place, and Planet.” We volunteered weekly in the Dr. John Wilson Community Garden that provides healthy produce for folks who need food. We studied a curriculum called Climate Wayfinding to help students find their place in the climate movement. Developed by the All We Can Save Project, these workshops provide a space to talk about climate anxiety but also commit to collective action.

“When I’m working in the garden, I don’t feel as anxious about the climate and our future,” one student wrote last month.

No one in my classes contributed to the fossil fuel pollution on a scale that escalated this long-term disaster. And we know the subsidized fossil fuel industry is making money while we’re trying to survive.

Students head out to clear fallen trees. Photo: Courtesy of Warren Wilson College

These young people have learned that real solutions exist to prevent this climate emergency. They know polluters should pay for these damages. But we are the ones paying for it now. I believe my students will be farmers, social workers, solar panel installers, health care workers and more — and help build a vibrant future. But it’s hard to cheerlead for that future when fossil fuel executives and government allies are profiting, rather than being held accountable for their harm.

It was a former student who alerted me on Instagram that an 800-square foot rental house I own a few miles away was teetering on a ravine. The post included a photo with this message: “Any Warren Wilson students! Searching for Mallory McDuff who owns this house. Someone needs to secure the house.”

On my modest salary, I don’t know how I’ll pay the mortgage and the expensive repairs without a tenant. But I’m charging my phone by running my car so I can deal with the insurance company, although no one I know has flood insurance. FEMA has helped so many, but won’t cover rentals, although it’s the only house I own. Many of the small houses on this block were submerged under water.

Even with this challenge, I know I am damn lucky to be alive, given the horrific losses.

Growing up on the Alabama coast, I remember driving through the damage wrought by Hurricane Camille, Frederick, and even Katrina. But I have few tools to comfort my own child — and my students — for the vast extent of this destruction. The only tool that works for me is working together and voting to protect the health of all in our community.

That is our collective power. As my friend and climate communications expert Anna Jane Joyner posted, “We — I — desperately need human stories that help us figure out how to be human in this world. To face this monumental unprecedented crisis.”

Each morning I wake up with my heart pounding, scared not for my small life but for life on Earth. But I will go to the next morning meeting with my students and show up for this world we cherish and call home.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Building a Flock: How an Unlikely Birder Found Activism — and Community — in Nature

Why Indigenous-Led Management Is Integral to Reconciliation and Restoration Efforts

Western science structures are embedded in a deeply rooted settler-colonial mindset. Indigenous traditional knowledge has the potential to overturn western systems destined for doom.

As a legislative policy fellow and anthropologist who studies women’s well-being in coastal communities of Chile and Indigenous salmon management in Alaska and Canada, I’ve witnessed how genocidal attempts to eradicate Indigenous peoples and their cultures have also damaged the environment. We see it in current management’s low returns in fish, high levels of runoff and nutrient input into ocean systems, and generally unsustainable levels of resource extraction.

I’ve also seen the opposite: I interviewed managers and biologists in Vancouver, Canada, who described the substantial improvements of Indigenous-led, bottom-up approaches to conservation. They see fish return and people fulfilling their well-being and nutrition needs. They see political and economic reform and a revitalization of social and cultural practices.

Unfortunately this is still not the norm, as we saw in a recent international agreement between the United States and Canada that placed a seven-year fishing moratorium on Chinook salmon to encourage fish populations to rebound. Most people would agree that this is a worthy goal for the conservation of both the species and the people who depend on Chinook. However, the new agreement fails to factor in Indigenous access to resources for ceremonial and subsistence harvest, which is mandated by law, nor did legislators acknowledge public comment that supported that access.

The marginalization of Indigenous peoples today, as seen in this agreement’s failures, can be traced back to colonialism.

The history of colonialism is steeped in human-rights violations such as the outlawing of Indigenous salmon-management practices that settlers later appropriated for their own economic gain. Settler wealth was achieved only through the exploitation of resources and forced relocation of Indigenous peoples out of economically advantageous spaces and acculturation into oppressive colonial ones.

“Settler governments [are] primarily concerned with economic gain,” a British Columbia-based project manager focused on salmon restoration told me during an interview. “Their mandate is to work commercial fisheries or recreational ones that generate economic value for their states, provinces, or countries…That’s the starting point; when human well-being is the starting point — like it is with Indigenous people — then it leads to a very different kind of management.”

A Broader Worldview

Indigenous traditional knowledge incorporates a worldview that recognizes humans as a part of, rather than separate from, the animal family. As the restoration manager explained: “That changes everything if you really think it through, because we’re no longer in control. We’re not in charge, nature doesn’t exist to serve us, nature isn’t there to be exploited for our own benefit.”

For example, the Nisga’a Nation — whose treaty with the government of British Columbia and Canada protects their right to manage and harvest fish species and other resources — place value on what’s left behind, not how much is extracted. Here, colonial extractive ideologies are challenged by traditional regenerative strategies that have sustained fisheries and Indigenous societies for thousands of years.
Nisga'a Museum sign

Incorporating an embedded subsistence culture and traditional knowledge into ongoing and future reconciliation and restoration efforts would benefit from a concept called transformative conservation.

Transformative conservation recognizes environmental contexts as inextricably linked to cultural, social, economic, and political ones, confront issues as they arise, and therefore operate in less limited, binding boundaries.

As the project manager explained: “Epistemologically, western science is very naïve about how the world actually functions. Indigenous people have much more sophisticated (in my view) worldviews that are quite effective in actually integrating western science outputs into their management systems. Western science is by its nature a methodology that’s reductionist. It operates most effectively when it can reduce problems to very simple systems, models, variables and then test them out. It’s a very powerful knowledge creation system but it has real limitations when it comes to then building back up again, to develop an integrated view of ecosystems and how they function.”

We can see this at work in Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. On its website the agency says it “helps to ensure healthy and sustainable aquatic ecosystems through habitat protection and sound science. We support economic growth in the marine and fisheries sectors, and innovation in areas such as aquaculture and biotechnology.” In practice this appears to give little attention to the needs of Indigenous peoples.

My interviewee described the agency’s purpose as obsolete. “There are times when institutions are too far gone to rehabilitate, and DFO’s raison d’etre has ceased to hold true.”

For everything there is a season, and “government organization has a shelf life,” the manager said.

DFO is not alone. Structural change and institutional reform, not merely Indigenous inclusion, are necessary for true representation of Indigenous people in all forms of governance. Writing in the book Pathways of Reconciliation, scholars Melanie Zurba and John Sinclair argue “structural forms of oppression” in state-sanctioned, top-down forms of governance “inhibit meaningful First Nations participation” and wield “Indigenous people into becoming instruments of their own dispossession” — thus reproducing colonial violence and marginalization against Indigenous people while moving away from ecological resilience fulfilled only in tandem with Indigenous self-determination and agency in decision-making.

In addition to institutional reform, Indigenous self-determination requires capacity building made possible with funding and resources devoted to tangible improvements through bottom-up, grassroots co-management approaches within and between First Nations and Tribes. The Kuskokwim Intertribal Fish Commission is an example of successful co-management between Tribes and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Change Is Necessary

These approaches would serve the needs of both Chinook and people. In this case, there’s great potential for DFO and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to adopt co-management agreements similar to the Kuskokwim to reach holistic approaches to salmon management. My interviewee elaborated: “I’d suggest the best thing DFO and all those other orgs could do would be go to Indigenous scientists and managers and say: ‘You guys set up a system and tell us how we can feed into that, because we trust you.’ That’s how I do it.”

The unwillingness of settler governments to resign their power to Indigenous people has strained the potential of climate adaptation and species and habitat preservation. Complex, multiscale problems require complex solutions — discussion across geographical boundaries and multiple scales of formal and informal governance, a discourse around institutional reform, a sticky un-meshing and remeshing of knowledge systems, and an overall willingness for actors to learn, fail, re-learn, and think beyond self-imposed boundaries with enduring hope.

Current methods are simply not working. It’s time we look to those who view salmon survival through a holistic lens, those who are dependent on salmon both economically and culturally, and those Indigenous peoples who have successfully managed, protected, and cared for salmon for thousands of years. An active rather than passive representation of Indigenous voices and an incorporation of their worldviews into policy and management initiatives will not only establish a starting point to solve complex ecological problems such as climate change but also lead down a long-ignored path toward true reconciliation.

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:

Why Indigenous Knowledge Matters to the Future of Fisheries

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