One of the world’s oldest and rarest trees survives at a secret gorge in Australia, but it still faces many threats — from fire to fungi.
Wollemi pines are among the rarest plants in the world, with fewer than 100 trees left in their native habitat. They were known only by fossil records until 1994, when a thicket of about 40 massive, conifer-type trees was discovered in Wollemi National Park, in Australia’s Blue Mountains.
Scientists quickly dug into identifying these then-unidentified trees, working in heavy secrecy to protect their location. Eventually they found fossil evidence in stone that matched the living trees — confirming that a tree species they had thought was extinct, in fact, still existed.
Since then, scientists and horticulturists have worked to ensure that this species survives. One way is through propagation techniques and growing the trees in gardens. It’s a slow process: The Wollemi pine has very controlled growth, sometimes taking up to 25 years to reach its first 20 feet in height.
Species name:
Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis)
Description:
With their tough, fern-type fronds and dark brown, oddly “bubbled” bark, Wollemi pines have a distinct, unusual look. They’re tall, coniferous trees with needle-like leaves, that can grow to 130 feet in height. Their trunks can reach up to three feet in diameter, and it’s common to find numerous trunks emerging from a single root base. Wollemi pines reproduce vegetatively and by wind pollination. They are monoecious plants, having both male and female cones on each tree, and extremely long-lived: Some trees in their native habitat are estimated to range from 500 to 1,000 years old.
Where it’s found:
The Wollemi pine is native to Wollemi National Park, west of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia, where it occurs along a creek, in a deep and sheltered sandstone gorge in the Blue Mountains.
IUCN Red List status:
Critically endangered
Major threats:
Their limited geographic distribution and small population size make Wollemi pines extremely vulnerable to disease and wildfire. Pathogens threatening the trees include Phytophthora cinnamomic, a mold that causes root rot, and Botryosphaeria, a group of disease-causing fungi species.
Notable conservation programs:
Wollemi pines are critically endangered, with their native populations scattered within isolated pockets of Wollemi National Park. The trees are protected through wildlife conservation efforts, and the locations of the wild groves are kept secret to prevent damage and disease introduction.
Their isolation doesn’t always protect them: The catastrophic Gospers Mountain megafire of 2020 burned more than 1.2 million acres and nearly destroyed the last remaining native populations of Wollemi pine. Luckily the Australian government noted the significance of these isolated forests and deployed a specialized team of firefighters to safeguard the cherished groves. In a coordinated effort, air tankers dropped fire retardant while crews on the ground set up irrigation systems to hydrate the environment. The strategy proved successful, and very few of the trees were consumed by the fire. Photos of the aftermath showed a desolate and charred landscape, with verdant pockets of Wollemi pines standing tall.
Outside of their protected locations, Wollemi pines grow in several horticultural facilities around the world — including San Diego Zoo Safari Park, which currently has two Wollemi pines and five more growing in propagation.
Photo of Wollemi pine at San Diego Zoo Safari Park
The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is also engaged in Australian plant conservation through our support of the Australian Network for Plant Conservation. Our funding helps support wildfire ecology and recovery research. The relationship began after the devasting Australian wildfires of 2019/2020.
It’s not just the professionals keeping these trees alive. Australian residents can order Wollemi pine seedlings to grow in their backyards, a unique conservation effort that helps ensure the species’ genetic viability.
My favorite experience:
I have never had the opportunity to see Wollemi pines thriving in their native habitat, but during a recent trip to Australia, I did have the opportunity to visit the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne, where I enjoyed discussing horticulture management best practices for these pines with the staff horticulturists. Their cultivation techniques have helped inform our own horticulture practices and provided clarity to some of our observations and experiences in San Diego.
What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?
A combination of in situ protection along with ex situ cultivation helps safeguard this critically endangered species. There is also a considerable amount of collaborative plant science research on Wollemi pines occurring in academic, governmental and botanic garden settings. The research is predominantly focusing on:
Understanding how the Wollemi pine grows in its native habitat, and in cultivation
Investigating germination requirements and seed banking potential
Banking seeds that can be conserved through seed banking, and developing alternative conservation measures
Providing plants for display, interpretation and reintroduction
Passing on lessons learned to the wider community.
Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? Share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.
To preserve habitat for fish and benefits for humans, some scientists suggest we need to explore the need for assisted migration.
Coral reefs support vibrant marine ecosystems, stimulate tourism and fishing industries, and protect shorelines from tropical storms and erosion. But reefs around the globe have been hit hard by pollution, overfishing and climate change, which is causing increasingly frequent and severe coral bleaching. Scientists predict severe bleaching on 99% of the world’s reefs within this century unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Saving coral reefs requires major systemic changes — dramatic cuts in energy consumption, switching to renewable energy, managing overfishing and pollution, and restoring target reefs.
Restoration efforts have now become a priority for many scientists. This series looks at some of those efforts.
The computer screen shows a map of the Florida Keys, but instead of the traditional blue, the water appears as a blend of bright colors outlining this string of islands. The screen belongs to University of Texas professor Mikhail “Misha” Matz, who explains that the palette represents the latest research in support of saving coral reefs: seascape genomics.
The term refers to the ways conditions in the ocean environment shape the genetic variation of the organisms living there.
“We ask corals what makes their life difficult by looking at what the environment is doing and the genetic similarities in corals sampled across the seascape,” explains Matz. “That shows us the parameters that drive the corals’ adaptation.”
Reefs are made up of different species of hard corals, such as domed brain corals and branching elkhorn. Each reef contains thousands of individual organisms called polyps living inside hard external skeletons. Research shows that individuals from the same species have varying degrees of resilience, heat-tolerance, reproductive viability and other characteristics. The colors on Matz’s map correspond to these adaptations: A coral from an area of one color should thrive in any area of the same color, but not in areas of other colors.
Reefs in the Keys and throughout the Caribbean are highly degraded, with coral cover down 80% on average in the past several decades. Experts say restoration is essential to stave off extinction of coral species until — or if — the ocean once again becomes hospitable to them. But it’s expensive and labor-intensive and can, as previously noted by The Revelator, expose new corals to the same stressors that damaged a reef in the first place.
That is what drives researchers to find ways to identify the hardiest corals, the right locations from which to take them, and the best places to transplant them. Seascape genomics could be one of those ways.
Choosing Which Corals to Move Where
Scientists at dozens of labs around the world are collaborating on this type of work through the Restoration Genetics Working Group under the aegis of the Coral Restoration Consortium. Matz, a member of the group, operates the Matz Lab on the UT campus in Austin, more than 200 miles from the nearest coast. Its research focuses on how reef-building corals adapt to different environments and respond to climate change at the genomic level.
To create the Florida maps, Matz and a handful of graduate and undergraduate students sampled corals at more than 60 sites, then sequenced their DNA. The environmental data, which goes back to 1995, came from the Southeast Environmental Research Center Water Quality Monitoring Network at Florida International University. Those data include surface salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, total organic nitrogen, how much light penetrates the water column, and dozens of other parameters. Henry Briceño, a professor at FIU who runs the network, says his team goes out quarterly to collect samples and take measurements at 112 stations throughout the Keys.
Bleached plate corals and sea fans on Molasses Reef, Key Largo. Photo: Matt Kieffer (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Matz has put the combined datasets to good use. “We have mapped adaptation and can use that if you want to move corals around and predict where they will survive,” he says. “Get a matrix of genotypes and a matrix of the seascape and find the best alignment and you get magical things. You can predict adaptation over whole seascapes, even where you didn’t sample corals.”
To Matz, the most interesting thing about seascape genomics is what it says about the conditions that corals are facing. But several studies also support it as a viable management strategy. For example, in 2020 researchers identified reefs potentially adapted for heat stress in the northwestern Pacific and revealed how they disperse to neighboring reefs, creating a metric that could be used to prioritize reefs for restoration or protection in that region.
The Caribbean has seen significant restoration activity over the past few decades. Here, a Coral Restoration Genetics Working Group paper concluded that corals raised in nurseries and then secured onto reef habitat in the ocean — a process known as outplanting — should come from genetically unique colonies both locally and at a distance.
Traditionally, restoration for any organism has favored sourcing only from local areas. But the working group suggests that needs to change for corals.
One possible approach is assisted gene flow or assisted migration — deliberately moving entire organisms, larvae or genes (through breeding) from one area to another. Migration happens naturally and allows adaptation in one population to improve the fitness of others. Assisted gene flow speeds up the process; it can be particularly important where corals are not dense enough or genetically diverse enough to support successful sexual reproduction, or in scenarios of rapid environmental change.
Elkhorn coral spawning. Photo: Brett Seymore/National Park Service
Those conditions pretty much describe the Caribbean, where a major problem is long-term recruitment failure by the two major reef-building species, elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) and mountainous star coral (Orbicella faveolata). Recruitment failure means that larvae created by sexual reproduction, which travel on ocean currents for up to two weeks before settling on existing reef structure as polyps, are not settling and growing into adults.
“If we don’t fix the recruitment problem, these corals will go extinct and no amount of restoration will change that,” Matz says. “Some people are hoping conditions will fix themselves, but I’m skeptical. I think these two species are functionally extinct.”
Matz has a controversial solution: Bring in non-native corals.
Going the Distance
“We need to import other species from other geographic areas,” he says. “That idea is not popular, but the situation is drastic.”
He doesn’t mean corals from just a few miles away.
“I think we need to rewild the Caribbean with corals from the Pacific Ocean,” Matz says. “A controlled invasion.”
Pacific corals “live fast and die young,” he explains, which means they can recover more quickly from adverse environmental events than slower-growing, longer-lived corals. If it works, it could give local fish and other species that depend on reefs their own opportunities to recover.
Current recommendations apply assisted gene flow only to native species — and even that is a tough sell to many in the Caribbean region and Florida.
“I think the idea of introducing non-native species, at least at this point, is a ‘bridge too far’ for almost everyone,” says Margaret Miller of SECORE International, a nonprofit that is producing corals via sexual reproduction for outplanting and researching strategies for improving the process. “If we reach extinction or virtual extinction for many Caribbean corals, I think this is an approach that might be truly a last-ditch effort to maintain coral reef function there. Obviously, we are working pretty hard to avoid this scenario.”
Matz readily acknowledges that the conventional wisdom says to keep things where they are and that translocation is bad. “That is true when things are good,” he says. “But when they are bad, we must let or even make things move.”
Things are bad enough that we need to start thinking about that possibility right now, he says. “It could have some unintended consequences, so we need to do some basic, safe research first and not just jump in. We need to at least allow some research on it.” He notes that so far, authorities at NOAA have strenuously objected to his inquiries about permits to conduct such research.
One of the concerns is the potential spread of disease, but Matz says the Caribbean “is riddled with disease already.” Reef-building corals reproduce both sexually and asexually, and translocating larvae or gametes rather than adult fragments likely would minimize that risk, according to the working group paper. Research could further refine these methods.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Existing research has paved the way for other actions.
“We have proven there is a genetic basis for heat tolerance in corals and that selection based on this variation can produce higher heat tolerance,” Matz says. “Corals do exchange variants over long distance — that’s validated by patterns of ocean currents, which carry coral larvae. If heat is the only problem corals face, it looks like there is enough resilience to keep some alive for a while.” His research suggests that “a while” could be at least 100 years.
The Restoration Genetics Working Group paper provides specific guidelines for restoration practitioners. The group also is seeking funding to develop a tool to sequence coral DNA in the field rather than having to take samples back to a lab. That would help local restoration experts quickly identify, and move, the best corals.
And Matz’s seascape genomics maps of the Keys are set to move from his computer screen to a scientific journal soon, providing another tool to guide restoration.
“In a perfect world, we would not be doing research simultaneously with restoration, but time is short,” says Miller, who also is a co-author on the working group paper. “Restoration investment is not going to matter unless we can get the real world back to a healthy, happy home for corals. That is going to take a whole host of actions that need to proceed in parallel.”
Bottom line, scientists — and the rest of us — may need to start thinking about even more extreme measures to save these vital habitats.
This month Links From the Brink has a pack of good-news stories about wild, endangered felines.
The news about our planet seems to get worse every day. When you dig a little deeper, though, you can find progress going in the right direction all over the world. It’s not all-encompassing, and it’s not enough, but it may give you hope to keep fighting for a better future.
This month a good deal of that hope comes from the world of big cats — tigers, cheetahs and other feline predators. And it all starts with a story I thought I’d never hear.
Multiplying Cheetahs
I’ve been writing about endangered species for 19 years, and in each of those years people have proposed restoring cheetah populations to India — or actively blocked efforts to repopulate the subspecies.
Asiatic cheetahs have a long and storied history in India. Rulers tamed the big cats centuries ago, but they were also hunted for their pelts and faced both habitat loss and depletion of their prey. Cheetahs couldn’t outrun these problems; Humans wiped out the last Asiatic cheetahs in India about 70 years ago.
People started talking about reintroducing the animals almost immediately after the last ones died, but the controversial idea faced resistance at every turn. Proponents went all the way up to the Indian Supreme Court in 2009, which blocked plans for another decade.
But the court changed its mind a couple of years ago, and finally, just last September, Namibia gifted eight African cheetahs — a related subspecies — to the nation of India, including five females. That fall, after a brief quarantine, the cats were released into Kuno National Park to great fanfare.
South Africa provided another 12 cheetahs last month, illustrating the international support for the effort.
But something else happened last month that was even better: Some of those initial cheetahs gave birth to four little cubs — the first cheetahs born in India in more than seven decades.
Photo: Ministry for Environment, Forest & Climate Change
“I congratulate the entire team of Project Cheetah for their relentless efforts in bringing back cheetahs to India and for their efforts in correcting an ecological wrong done in the past,” environment minister Bhupender Yadav said on Twitter when he announced the news.
Unfortunately the news was tinged with a bit of sadness: One of the female cheetahs imported from Namibia died of suspected renal failure just the day before the birth announcement.
Still, this rare case of rewilding a large predator proves that India can support cheetahs — and it has proven successful enough to inspire imitation. This month Nepal announced that it, too, was interested in importing cheetahs to the country. It’s unclear if Nepal ever had native cheetahs, so this may or may not fly. But with cheetahs facing range restrictions and poaching wherever they live, giving them one or two new places to exist and thrive can only help.
One last thing to mention: This isn’t a perfect reintroduction. For one thing, creating space for nonnative African cheetahs has effectively blocked the hope of establishing a second population of Asiatic lions, who currently live in just one site in Gujarat, where a disease could easily rip through the entire subspecies.
For another, this offers little benefit to Asiatic cheetahs, who remain all but extinct, with only 50 or so left in Iran. Until the pressures threatening that species have been alleviated, the native cheetahs of Asia remain in a race against extinction.
Counting Tigers
More good news out of India: The population of wild tigers there has surged to 3,167. That’s up from just 1,411 in 2010 and represents a major victory for tiger conservation and worldwide efforts to boost the big cats’ populations.
A Bengal tiger in India. Photo by Bernie Catterall (CC BY 2.0)
For many years the total number of tigers worldwide hovered at just 3,200. India now has almost that exact amount.
The governments of the world have missed their self-imposed deadline to double the tiger population by 2022, and the threats to tigers remain, but this illustrates the progress is still being made at least in some tiger range countries.
Also in Tiger News
Scientists have shown the big cats have individual personalities, a discovery that could have implications for their conservation. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise — all cats have personalities, as any housecat owner can tell you — but it could allow for customized approaches to benefit each tiger, and through the individuals help the population as a whole. As the journal Science reported, “Understanding how a particular tiger is wired may help conservationists manage its interaction with nearby human inhabitants, livestock, and even other tigers.”
Lions Return # 1
The last time I wrote about West African lions, way back in 2014, things didn’t look good. The genetically distinct population — relatives of the extinct Barbary lion — had fallen to about 400 animals scattered across 11 nations. Today the population is even smaller, somewhere between 120 and 374 animals, according to Panthera, the big cat conservation organization.
But that number is just part of the story. This March Panthera announced that a West African lioness named Florence had just given birth to her third litter, this one containing three young cubs.
Photo: Panthera/DPN/Everatt
Mama and family all live in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site which now holds 30 lions and healthy prey populations — an amazing conservation victory. Panthera hopes to raise that population to 100 lions by 2030, something that seems eminently doable if they keep breeding the way they are.
That park has represented hope for West African lions since the 2014 study that first documented their decline, as conservationist Philipp Henschel told me that year:
Henschel says the most rewarding encounter occurred in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park. They had been searching the area for more than a month under extreme heat — “over 95 degrees Fahrenheit even at night” — when they finally spotted a big cat. “What says it all, concerning the rarity of the lion in the park, is that not one of my four survey team members, all long-serving national park service staff, had ever seen a lion in their lives. It was extremely rewarding to see how excited they all were to finally have seen the animal that is also a symbol of national pride in Senegal.”
Lions still face enormous threats throughout West Africa. Food for large predators is nearly nonexistent, habitats are shrinking, and poaching of lions and their prey animals remains rampant. But this conservation success in Senegal proves that lions have a future here and in other West African countries.
Lion Return # 2
Meanwhile, in the Central African nation of Chad, a lion has turned up in Sena Oura National Park for the first time in 20 years.
Photo: WCS, Govt. of Chad
A press release from the Wildlife Conservation Society calls her a “beautiful lioness, in her prime and clearly in great health.”
The press release continues:
The region saw a period of ruthless, organized poaching more than a decade ago, but has since benefitted from a very strong commitment to conservation by the governments of both Cameroon and Chad. This has produced better protection of the national parks and wildlife populations are now starting to recover.
Adjacent Bouba N’djida National Park in Cameroon supports lions, which are now increasing and appear to be recolonizing parts of their former range, including Sena Oura.
Western and Central African lions need all the help they can get, and this double dose of good news should help to support future conservation efforts.
Tick Tock
Protecting big cats in the wild also necessitates protecting them in captivity. In the United States, that’s the role of the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which was finally passed into law this past December. Thanks to this important regulation, people will no longer be allowed to own or breed tigers, lions, jaguars, leopards, cheetahs and other newly prohibited wildlife species.
This is a big deal for big cats, about 20,000 of whom are estimated to be in private hands in the United in the United States alone. These animals often suffer under cramped, inhumane conditions, and have sometimes been bred from multiple species or subspecies, making them useless for conservation. Countless people have been injured or killed by privately owned cats, many of whom have been displayed in roadside zoos or other “attractions” (think “Tiger King”). Conservationists have long suspected that some privately bred cats ended up in the illegal trade, either as live pets or body parts, which further fueled demand for wild cats, nearly all of which are endangered.
Ownership of most of these big cats was previously legal under certain lax state laws. That’s finally ended. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this month declared that people who own big cats have until June 18 to officially register them, after which they will be allowed to possess them but not breed or sell them.
Ideally possession of most of these 20,000 big cats would now shift to accredited sanctuaries, where they would spend the rest of their lives in safety. But private ownership of big cats is one of the major threats to their survival in the wild, and now one major market for the animals is closed. We call that a victory.
Cats As Gardeners?
A new study further emphasizes the ecological value of mountain lions. Researchers found that when cougars kill their prey, the carcasses deliver nitrogen to the soil, which inspires more plant growth, which sets the stage for higher herbivore populations.
Which, of course, sets the dinner table for another helping of mountain lion prey, which starts the cycle all over again.
“To those who care for the well-being of wildlife and the wild habitats sustaining all living beings,” researcher Mark Elbroch told Mongabay, “these findings yet again demonstrate the value and need to conserve the Americas’ pumas.”
Eric Kilby (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The One Bit of Bad News This Month
A mountain lion in Wyoming has died from avian flu, possibly after eating infected birds. Expect to hear a lot more about this rapidly spreading disease in the months to come.
Stamp of Approval
Finally, in feline philately news, the Florida panther is one of 20 threatened animals honored on a new set of stamps commemorating this year’s 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act.
Source: USPS
Each stamp bears a photo by National Geographic “Photo Ark” creator Joel Sartore. The set will go on sale next month, after which there will be more photos of Florida panthers in circulation than there are actual Florida panthers.
Activism isn’t only for the young. Many seniors are eager to join the climate movement — and they have the power to achieve key goals, says Bill McKibben.
Last month thousands of senior Americans took to the streets in 30 states to demand that the country’s major banks divest from fossil fuels.
This “rocking chair rebellion” — organized by Third Act, a fast-growing climate action group focused on older Americans — shows that Baby Boomers are becoming a new force in the climate movement.
Third Act cofounder Bill McKibben, who joined a Washington, D.C., protest, says it’s unfair to put all the weight of climate activism on the shoulders of young people. It’s time for older Americans to take a central role.
“Young people don’t have the structural power necessary to make changes,” McKibben tells The Revelator. “But old people do. There are 70 million Americans over the age of 60. Many of us vote, we’re politically engaged, and have a lot of financial resources. So if you want to press either the political system or the financial system, older people are a useful group to have.”
The March protests hope to build on an earlier success. In December Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, announced that it will stop investing in new oil and gas projects. McKibben says activism and pressure from Democratic politicians, many at the state and city level, will eventually force U.S. banking giants to follow suit.
“The amount of attention and anger that the climate crisis is creating keeps rising and rising and at some point, even players as big as Chase and Citi and Wells Fargo and Bank of America are going to have to listen,” he says.
These four banks provided $1.2 trillion in funding to the fossil fuel industry between 2016 and 2021 — a quarter of all the financing that oil and gas companies received in that period.
Win-Win Activism
Third Act’s National Day of Action to Stop Dirty Banks, when many people over 60 sat in rocking chairs in front of bank branches and cut their credit cards, showed that older climate activists are becoming a force to be reckoned with.
Photo: Third Act
Retired Baby Boomers have plenty of time to spare, control more than two-thirds of the country’s household wealth, and their ranks are increasing rapidly. By 2050 people over 65 are expected to account for nearly 22% of the country’s population, up from around 17% at present.
Researchers are seeing an increase in climate activism among older Americans, says Karl Andrew Pillemer, a sociologist and gerontologist who is the Hazel E. Reed Professor of Human Development at Cornell University.
Older climate activists tell The Revelator that in addition to joining protests, they help increase climate change awareness in their communities, lobby local leaders and legislators, write newsletters, and join regular webinars and meetings.
One of their main motivations is the welfare of future generations.
“When people reach their 70s and beyond,” Pillemer says, “psychological research shows that they become motivated by ‘generativity’ — that is, a desire to contribute to a future that they themselves may not live to see.”
Dave Freedman, a member of Elders Climate Action, says he and his wife joined the climate movement when they retired, partially because they have two kids and two grandkids. “And we were concerned about the future for them and others. I mean, it’s not just my kids, it’s all kids and all grandkids,” the 73-year-old says.
But elders are also being prompted into action by “self-interest,” says Pillemer. Research shows that older adults are more vulnerable to air pollution and extreme heat, while they often have compromised immune systems that make them more prone to water- and insect-related illnesses, which are set to increase as the planet continues warning.
Another reason why climate action is a win-win for Baby Boomers is that there is a very clear correlation between volunteering and well-being.
“We’re trying to share this with our community members so they understand that what they’re doing isn’t just some nice to do,” says Peter Kaldes, president and CEO of the American Society on Aging. “It’s actually impacting their health and well-being in a positive way.”
A couple of years ago, Jim Thompson, the founder of THIS! Is What We Did, a climate action group for people over 50, didn’t know anyone in the climate movement.
“And now I’ve got new friends, some of the most amazingly wonderful people in the world to work with on this. It’s kind of a blessing,” he says, adding that climate activism has filled him and his peers “with a sense of purpose.”
Although people who identify as Democrats are often more likely to take part in climate action, sources say the partisan divide is not as obvious among elders. Many older Republicans have joined the climate movement because Middle America is packed with farmers and outdoorsy retirees who enjoy hunting and fishing; the kind of people who have seen the impacts of severe drought, devastating hurricanes, and floods with their own eyes.
Elders are also motivated by a sense of nostalgia. “Baby Boomers are responsible for the climate activism of the 1960s and 1970s,” Kaldes says. “What we see is a real renaissance, a real desire to revive this activism of theirs.”
Perhaps that’s why poetry, live music, dance and art installations played a central role in the March 21 protests. McKibben, who is 62, says this joviality is partly the result of the “generational muscle memory” of senior protesters who joined the Civil Rights movement back in the 1960s and the first Earth Day in 1970.
Photo: Third Act
The most high-profile member of this new wave of senior climate activists is Jane Fonda. Last year the actress, feminist and long-time civil rights advocate, who is 85, unveiled a climate PAC to help elect politicians with a climate action agenda and counter the political influence of the fossil fuel industry.
Generational Divide
And yet sources say elders face many barriers when it comes to environmental activism.
Polls show that people over 60 are less likely than younger generations to consider climate change “a top concern” or get involved in climate action. In addition, many Americans don’t understand climate science well and fail to see the correlation between the climate crisis and respiratory ailments and mental health issues, and older adults are no exception. That’s why rising awareness of the climate crisis is a priority for many senior climate activists.
To make matters worse, Pillemer says some environmental organizations are not particularly “elder-friendly” and often fail to make a concerted effort to recruit older people or offer opportunities for volunteers with less physical ability, effectively creating a generational divide in the climate movement.
To fill that gap, over the past 10 years, Cornell University has run the Retirees in Service to the Environment program in New York, Florida, Illinois and other states.
RISE provides training and group support to older citizens interested in joining the climate movement. It includes six educational sessions on topics such as climate change impacts, green energy and water quality.
The final goal of the program, Pillemer says, is not just to educate older Americans but to build a movement based on “intergenerational solidarity,” because we need people of every age to save the planet.
The good thing is that many younger climate activists are welcoming Baby Boomers with open arms.
Twenty-six-year-old Giselle Herzfeld, who works for 350.org in Colorado, has been a climate activist since her late teens. On the one hand, she says high school climate activists “are crushing it,” while on the other she notes that many of her mentors are older activists who were involved in the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements decades ago.
“As a younger activist, I know there is a lot I can learn from everyone around me,” she says. “There’s just a lot of wisdom and a lot of organizing insight that older people can bring to the new generation of climate activism. It’s going to take everybody from every generation working together.”
Removing two aging Eel River dams known as the Potter Valley Project would benefit salmon, lamprey and people, but what happens next remains unclear.
This summer crews will break ground on the first of four dam removals along the Klamath River in California and Oregon. The dam-removal and river-restoration effort over the next two years is the largest of its kind, and river advocates hope more will follow.
They may not have to wait long. Up next in the region could be two dams on the mainstem of Northern California’s Eel River.
The Eel River is the third-largest river basin in the state and once had the largest runs of salmon and steelhead on the North Coast. Both Chinook and steelhead are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Citing this and other environmental and safety concerns, the river advocacy nonprofit American Rivers this week listed the Eel as one of the 10 most endangered rivers in the United States. It shares that distinction with the Colorado River, which faces threats from climate change and outdated management, and the Ohio River, which is at risk from toxic pollution.
The removal of Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam could help boost populations of Chinook and steelhead by providing access to hundreds of miles of prime, cold-water spawning and rearing habitat, acutely needed because climate change can push water temperatures above what’s tolerable for salmonids. The dams, known as the Potter Valley Project, belong to power company PG&E as part of a hydroelectric facility that also includes a transbasin diversion, which sends water through a 1-mile-long tunnel to the Russian River to irrigate fields in Potter Valley and provide water for downstream users in Sonoma County.
The small, 9.4-megawatt hydroelectric project has been economically unprofitable for years, and after PG&E found no willing buyers, it declined to renew its operating license in 2019. An equipment failure in the summer of 2022 stopped power production. A draft plan for surrender and decommissioning is expected at the end of the year. But it doesn’t guarantee either dam’s removal.
“Decommissioning can just mean locking the gates and walking away,” says Charlie Schneider, the Lost Coast project manager for California Trout. “Or it can mean full dam-facility removals.”
It can also include something in between, but Alicia Hamann, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, hopes the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, which oversees regulation of hydroelectric dams, will require full removal of the project.
“It would be highly unusual for FERC to allow PG&E to lock it up and walk away,” says Hamann. The project has risks not just to fish, but potential public safety hazards as well. Looming questions include whether all or some of the project would need to be removed and what would happen to the water diversion.
Fish on the Brink
Data suggests that the Eel River once teemed with salmonids, with estimated annual runs of more than 1 million salmon and steelhead, including some 800,000 Chinook. Now those fish populations are between 1% and 3% of their historic numbers.
Experts attribute the declines to a combination of pressures, including dams, logging, grazing, and the introduction of the Sacramento pikeminnow, a salmon predator.
A report from fisheries biologists at the U.C. Davis Center for Watershed Sciences found “that coho salmon, Chinook salmon and steelhead are all on a trajectory towards extinction in the Eel River basin, with only winter steelhead being widely enough distributed and abundant enough to persist beyond the next 50 years.”
What role dams have played isn’t easy to calculate, but the 95-foot-tall Cape Horn Dam, constructed in 1908, has fish passage that experts consider outdated and inefficient.
“We know that the fish ladder isn’t effective at passing fish,” says Schneider, “so almost certainly some of them are getting to that concrete wall in the river and turning around and maybe spawning in more marginal habitats.”
The fish ladder fails to operate when the river has high flows, and it can clog with debris, forcing it to be temporarily shut down.
“There’s a structure at the base of the fish ladder called ‘the hotel’ where the fish enter and then get oriented and find the trigger flow to go the right direction up the fish ladder,” says Hamann. “And that entire structure can get completely inundated.”
There’s also no protection from predators, “which makes it like an all-you-can-eat buffet for otters,” she says.
If fish do clear the ladder, they then hit the 141-foot-tall Scott Dam 12 miles upstream. This is the end of the line. Scott Dam, which was erected in 1922, contains no fish passage and blocks about 288 miles of high-quality spawning and rearing habitat.
Headwaters of the Eel River. Photo: CalTrout/Mike Wier
While that’s only about 10% of the whole watershed, it’s among the best areas for these fish.
“Based on our thermal and geomorphic habitat assessments, the blocked Upper Mainstem generally contains a higher proportion of suitable habitat for all freshwater salmonid life stages than much of the rest of the Eel River Basin,” found researchers from the National Marine Fisheries Service and other institutions in a study published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science in 2021.
That’s because of the gravelly sediment that’s ideal for spawning, the availability of food, and the temperature of the water.
“The habitat in the upper mainstem Eel River watershed provides cold-water refugia in tributaries over summertime for steelhead trout as well as ample spawning grounds for Chinook salmon and steelhead trout,” confirmed researchers of a study published in Northwest Science in 2020.
The colder water also can help protect them from invasive pike minnows, who Schneider says are better adapted to warmer conditions.
The population declines have been a loss for recreational and commercial fishers, as well as Tribes.
“We’re really in crisis mode,” says Adam Canter, natural resources director of the Wiyot Tribe, whose ancestral lands encompass the lower Eel River watershed. “The Tribe has lost a cultural and subsistence icon by not being able to fish for Chinook, coho and steelhead as they used to.”
Lamprey, whose numbers have also declined significantly, are a species of special concern in California — and are especially important for the Wiyot Tribe.
“Pacific lamprey are a really culturally important food for the Tribe,” says Canter. Settlers mistook the long, slender fish for eels and incorrectly gave the river its English name for them. Like Chinook and steelhead, lamprey historically used the habitat above Scott dam as well and would benefit from the increased habitat.
Shaky Ground
Declining fish numbers aren’t the only problem.
Friends of the Eel River also worries about seismic concerns at Scott Dam, which sits along a fault capable of producing a magnitude 7 earthquake. When engineers built the dam in the 1920s, they realized that the bedrock they were attempting to secure to part of the southern abutment was in fact a boulder that’s part of a very slow but active landslide.
“So they decided to just re-engineer the dam to go right in front of that giant moving boulder,” says Hamann. “We commissioned a study back in 2018 evaluating that landslide and trying to figure out how much of a risk that is to dam safety and reliability. Miller Pacific Engineering concluded for us that it is a quite serious concern and that PG&E should be evaluating the seismic risk in tandem with that landslide.”
Recent moves from the PG&E show that it’s aware of some seismic issues.
In spring the company usually closes spillway gates at the dam to increase the amount of water behind the dam during periods of high runoff. But this March PG&E announced that it wouldn’t close the gates.
“Keeping the spillway gates open at Scott Dam from this point forward allows us to reduce potential risk around seismic performance,” the company said in a press release. “New information and updated analyses suggest the level of risk around seismic performance at Scott Dam is greater than the previous evaluation.”
Basin Water Issues
If the dams are removed, it remains unclear how authorities will resolve the issue of the transbasin water diversion.
As it is now, “The Russian River gets all the benefits from this project. The Eel gets all the impacts. How is that fair?” says Schneider.
The Cape Horn Dam and fish ladder on the Eel River. Photo: CalTrout/Kyle Schwartz
A few years ago a group of stakeholders from the Eel and Russian river watersheds, who called themselves the Two Basin Solution Partnership, tried to find a way to improve conditions in the Eel while maintaining the water diversion to the Russian River. The group had hoped to purchase the project, remove Scott Dam, and continue a diversion with less ecological harm.
“Unfortunately, they just weren’t able to come up with the necessary funding to complete the studies needed for that process,” says Hamann.
There may be other options to remove both dams while continuing to divert some amount of water. But that’s not popular with everyone, including the Wiyot.
“The Tribe wants to see the dams come down and the water diversion no longer used,” says Canter. “The Tribe really just wants to see the river back to its natural state. All that cold water being diverted hurts not just fish but also contributes to increased water temperatures, which then promotes toxic algal blooms and other diseases that can be bad for humans, pets, fish — everyone alike.”
He says the Tribe would support efforts to replace that lost water by investing in more water storage and conservation in the Russian River. “The Tribe certainly doesn’t want them high and dry,” he says. “We have to acknowledge that they’ve been in that water regime for over 100 years now, but it’s come with a big cost.”
Before dam removal could happen, though, there are a lot of other steps.
PG&E will submit its draft plan for decommissioning to FERC at the end of this year, and then there’ll be stakeholder outreach, consultations and public comments, with the final plan due in 2025.
“The state is going to have to issue a clean water certification,” says Hamann. “The water boards are probably going to have to get involved when it comes to straightening out water rights and what happens to those with the end of this project. If we all moved really quickly and all the bureaucratic ducks were lined up and fell just right, we could see those dams out of there by 2030.”
That, she says, is the most optimistic timeline.
For the Wiyot, it would be the best scenario.
“By restoring the river back to health and removing the dams, it would not only be restoring our animal and plant relatives that are associated with the river,” says Canter. “But also our culture and our human health as well.”
A shiny black insect returns from the dead and inspires intercontinental collaboration to make its way back home.
Lord Howe Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site several miles off the coast of Australia, was once home to numerous endemic species found nowhere else on Earth. Among them were stick insects that had historically been so abundant fishermen used them as bait. When rats arrived with a grounded ship in 1918, sightings of these stick insects declined precipitously. By the early 1930s, they were presumed to be extinct.
But there were rumors that the big, black bug was present on Ball’s Pyramid, a tiny, sheer-faced volcanic sea stack about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Lord Howe Island. In 2001 a team of scientists traveled to the pyramid to investigate. After a treacherous night climb, they were astonished to find a tiny population of the insects surviving on a scruffy melaleuca shrub, clinging to life on a 60-degree slope of the barren rock.
Upon the insect’s “rediscovery,” two pairs were brought to the Australian mainland for breeding — one to the Melbourne Zoo, which has successfully maintained this species in managed care and pioneered best practices for its recovery. Years later two other zoos — including the San Diego Zoo — are now also participating in recovering the rarest insect on the planet. These breeding populations will serve as insurance, in case something catastrophic occurs on their tiny island or to the group at the Melbourne Zoo.
Species name:
Lord Howe Island stick insect (Dryococelus australis)
Description:
The Lord Howe Island stick insect is a large, flightless, nocturnal insect that can measure up to 8 inches in length. It has a stout body — females have a broad abdomen that tapers to a conspicuous ovipositor, while males are slimmer, but with longer and thicker antennae and more robust hind legs with prominent spines. Juveniles, called nymphs, are bright green for the first few months of life and active during the day; as they mature, they begin to darken to greenish-brown and seek shelter during the day. Adults are a dark, glossy brown-black and are strictly herbivorous, foraging at night on host plants like melaleuca and fig.
Photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
Where it’s found:
Lord Howe Island stick insects are endemic to the Lord Howe Island Group, a cluster of volcanic islands in a crescent shape in the Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand.
IUCN Red List status:
Lord Howe Island stick insects are listed as Critically Endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species. The native population exists only on Ball’s Pyramid, in extremely low numbers.
Major threats:
Lord Howe Island stick insects are threatened in their native habitat by the presence of invasive plants and non-native predators, including the rats that originally extirpated them from Lord Howe Island. Their tiny habitat on Ball’s Pyramid is subject to catastrophic weather events, and the fragility and low abundance of the existing host plants is of critical concern.
A highly infectious plant fungus called myrtle rust was detected on Lord Howe Island in February 2023, threatening the plant biodiversity there — in particular, an important group of Lord Howe Island stick insect host plants. It’s a grim reminder of the challenges all ecosystems face, and that the best-laid plans must be flexible in the face of uncertainty.
Notable conservation programs or legal protections:
The Lord Howe Island stick insect was listed as critically endangered in Australia under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act in 2002. The Melbourne Zoo has spearheaded a breeding program since 2003 and, along with the government of Australia, engaged additional partners for the global collaboration, which includes assurance populations, habitat restoration and rat eradication. The Lord Howe Island Board and residents have been key partners in the decades-long preparation to one day return this animal to its ancestral home on Lord Howe Island.
My favorite experience:
My most vivid memory has to be the very surreal experience of flying back to the San Diego Zoo in 2016 with 300 critically endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect eggs in my backpack. We had a bumpy start and a low hatch rate the first time we received eggs in 2012, and we spent the next four years building greater capacity to support them in North America. Many of the plant species preferences were different at our zoo, so we sent a horticulturist from our team to Australia to acquire seeds and cuttings of key host plants we couldn’t get here. When we finally felt confident that we had sufficient resources of the new plants and were ready to go pick up our eggs in Melbourne, a disease outbreak in the adult stick insects threatened that plan, and we had to pivot again.
I’ll never forget counting out the eggs with the Melbourne wildlife health and care teams, who surface-sterilized them pre-flight, so that they could come home with me with a lowered risk upon hatching. The idea that we were finally bringing this incredibly rare species back to San Diego to make their global population a little more secure made me hug that backpack closer. And yes, I did take them to the bathroom with me on the flight.
Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? Share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.
Researchers warn we risk losing a sustainable future if we don’t take action to conserve insects and address climate change. They also offer solutions.
Maybe you’ve noticed summer night skies dimmed by the loss of fireflies, or a lack of bug splatter on your windshield. Or perhaps you’ve been urged to plant milkweed to help monarch butterflies recover. Those are just small glimpses at the insect declines happening globally.
In the United States research has documented American bumblebees down 90% since 2000. Moth populations have fallen 33% since 1968; the western population of migratory monarch butterflies has plummeted by 90% in the past 50 years. In Germany researchers measured a 76% reduction in the biomass of flying insects, and research in East Asia showed the summertime number of predator insects had fallen by 20%.
A look at the bigger picture isn’t much better: A 2019 study concluded that we could lose 40% of the world’s insect species to extinction in the next few decades.
This mounting body of scientific evidence prompted a 2018 New York Times story, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” which caused a storm of media attention.
New research since then only adds to the concern. It also hones in on the additional pressure of climate change, which amplifies other threats already facing many insect species.
“We have enough data to know we are in a critical moment because many of the insects we know are declining, and Earth is experiencing transformations that will make it even more inhospitable to insects as we know them,” says Mariana Abarca, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Smith College. She’s the coauthor of a paper published in November in Ecological Monographs called, “Scientists’ Warning on Climate Change and Insects,” which summarizes the effects of gradual global surface temperature increases on insects, as well as the effects of increased extreme events.
“We warn that, if no action is taken to better understand and reduce the action of climate change on insects, we will drastically reduce our ability to build a sustainable future based on healthy, functional ecosystems,” the authors of the study concluded.
That’s bad news not just for insects but for all wildlife — and for us.
Life as we know it relies on insects doing what they do: pollinating plants, including three-quarters of the crops we eat and 80% of wild plants; controlling pests; breaking down organic matter and recycling the nutrients; and being eaten. Insects make up the base of the aquatic and terrestrial food webs. Salmon, birds, people — and countless other animals — would all go hungry without them.
How Bad Is It?
Are concerns of an “apocalypse” justified? The answer may be somewhere between “not sure” and “not yet.”
To be certain, we’d need more information.
“In order to know what proportion of insect populations are declining and how geographically widespread these declines are, we would need long-term monitoring data from multiple locations in the globe,” says Abarca. “Only a subset of insects in a restricted geographic range have been properly monitored, so of those, we know many are experiencing serious declines and that is concerning.”
But signs are strong that we’re headed into dangerous territory.
A butterfly on a butterfly bush. Photo: Michele Dorsey Walfred (CC BY 2.0)
“If we don’t change what we’re doing, the areas and groups that are declining will spread,” says Carol Boggs, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, and another coauthor of the study.
The Threats
Climate change will hurry that process along.
Some of the biggest threats to insects are habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution, invasive species and land-use changes like deforestation, urbanization and industrial agriculture. Climate change adds another compounding layer.
Warming temperatures will force some species to migrate, but that’s a prospect that gets harder as we convert natural areas — and potential climate refugia — into roads, housing developments and chemical-intensive farms.
Most insects are ectothermic, making them unable to control their own body heat and therefore vulnerable to changing temperatures or moisture levels.
When temperatures get too high insects can suffer a range of injuries, including development failures and negative effects on longevity, dispersal and fecundity. “All of which can reduce their resilience in the face of climate change and in the worst-case scenarios lead to population crashes,” the researchers wrote.
Many insects also rely on temperature signals to initiate stages of life, including diapause, a necessary period when development is suspended in winter. More summer heatwaves or warmer winter spells could trigger mistimed biological cues, resulting in “trophic mismatch” where a lack of synchronous resource availability affects organisms’ survival.
“I’ve collaborated with Dr. David Inouye to show that early snowmelt in montane regions can lead to flowering plants starting to grow earlier; those plants’ flower buds can then get aborted due to late spring freezes,” says Boggs. “A lack of flowers leads to reduced egg laying by the Mormon fritillary butterfly, which leads to decreases in population. This phenomenon likely applies to other butterflies as well.”
Extreme Weather
It’s not just long-term warming trends. More climatic extremes can be dangerous for insects, too.
Climatic extremes pose “a short-term threat to insects, with long-term consequences for ecosystems,” the researchers write.
Heat waves can impair reproduction and fertility. Extreme rainfall and floods can dislodge insects from plants, change soil properties, and force those who live underground to come to the surface, increasing the risk of predation.
Drought also threatens insects and the plants they rely on. For example, the study found “a recent mega-drought in western North America had negative and long-lasting effects on montane butterfly communities that were comparable in magnitude to the combined effects of decades of habitat loss and degradation at lower elevations.”
One exception may be wildfires, the aftereffects of which are a boon for wood-boring beetles (and the birds who eat them). Emergent vegetation after a fire can boost the understory and bugs attracted to that new growth — though even for these species, researchers warn, big changes to fire regimes can still be problematic.
But smoke from wildfires can also negatively affect some insects, a recent study found, including blocking antennal receptors in bees and decreasing flying abilities of painted lady butterflies.
Winners and Losers
That’s an important reminder that climate change won’t affect all species the same way — insects included.
Tropical insect species have been found to be at a greater risk than those in temperate areas, who are more adapted to a greater range in temperature. But insects in the coldest places, like areas in front of receding glaciers, also face habitat change.
Some insects could benefit — in some cases the ones we least want to see proliferate. Warming winter temperatures are leading to more forest and crop pests that were previously held in check by cold weather. In Hawai‘i native birds like the ‘akikiki, a kind of honeycreeper, are endangered by the avian malaria spread by invasive mosquitoes that are now increasing their range to higher elevations with warming temperatures.
“Winners tended to be generalist/invasive species, good dispersers, generally colonizing from downstream or downslope, such as grasshoppers,” they write. “Conversely, the losers are often specialist species, adapted to cold habitats, among which some were restricted to isolated glacier-influenced ecosystems.”
Taking Action
Despite a lot of concerning findings, there’s also some good news if we act quickly. “Most insects have short generations and lay hundreds of eggs, so they have a better chance of bouncing back than other imperiled animals, such as rhinos or tigers,” says Abarca. “I’m optimistic about the success of insect conservation programs — we just have to start them.”
Some of that can be small, like “microclimatic refugia.” This includes flower strips, hedgerows, woodlots, and diverse agricultural areas and cover cropping.
Wheat fields bordered with flowers to attract pollinating insects. Photo: Paul van de Velde (CC BY 2.0)
Insect needs also vary at different times of the year.
“Overwintering insects need the protection that leaf litter and organic debris provide,” she says. “It’s important to not only provide native flowers for pollen and nectar during the growing season, but also to let caterpillars and other larvae to eat the foliage of trees and to leave the leaves where they fall in autumn, so they host pupae until the following spring.”
People can help this process in their own yards by using a diverse mix of native plants, forgoing pesticides, sowing native wildflowers, limiting mowing and leaving plant debris on the ground.
“I would like to change the image of a neat, tidy yard as something desirable and replace it with the image of a rich, messy, biodiverse yard,” says Abarca.
We also need actions on a much larger scale.
“It’s vitally important that factors such as habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive species, intensive agricultural practices, various forms of pollution, and other stresses are fully integrated into conservation management approaches,” the researchers write. “Only in this way will declines in insects be stabilized or reversed.”
Curbing climate change will be needed to help insects, too. The study highlights a range of actions along those lines, including reducing and eliminating the use of fossil fuels, curbing short-lived pollutants like methane, restoring and permanently protecting ecosystems to safeguard biodiversity and store carbon, embracing a circular economy and growth within ecological limits, and stabilizing human population levels.
“Scientific progress alone is unlikely to result in desirable outcomes and needs to be paired with enabling policies, broad awareness-raising, and stakeholder education,” it reads. “The evidence is clear and the onus is on governing bodies to act now. With species and habitats being lost every day, a refusal or delay to act is not a wise choice.”
There’s also one more way we can all help: Tell stories about insects. “Insects are so different from mammals that we don’t typically connect with them,” says Abarca. “But once people learn more about their ways of life and their ecological importance, they change their minds.”
Every crisis is connected. We must address the biodiversity crisis, the climate emergency, and poverty and injustice at the same time.
People ask me all the time: What can I do to help stop extinction?
As a scientist working to protect endangered species, I hear the frustration in their voices. But I also know how to answer. It’s not simple, it’s not quick, but it’s essential — and it will help more than threatened animals and plants.
First and foremost, we can’t think of biodiversity protection as isolated from everything else, something that only environmentalists or scientists handle while society goes on as usual. We have to address the biodiversity crisis, the climate emergency, and poverty and injustice simultaneously. And we can accomplish that by integrating biodiversity protection into the mainstream, into concerts, sports, fashion, business, education, transportation, everything everywhere all at once.
Habitat loss is still the biggest driver of extinction, and all our purchases and activities affect habitat somewhere. For all the things we purchase and consume, it’s important to ask where they came from, whose lives they affected — wildlife and human alike — and what byproducts are involved.
Our dollars are actions. If we see a terrible product — like a living frog or fish in a sealed plastic container in a toy aisle, a trinket made out of a dead animal, or invasive landscaping plants like nandina, tropical milkweed, or Bradford pears — there’s a whole ladder of actions to take. First off, we can ask the store to stop selling them and ask the company to stop producing them. Most companies have parent companies that have a sustainability statement on their website but little knowledge of what the smaller brands they own are actually doing. They may not even know if we don’t tell them.
We can also work to promote legislation and rules at the state, local and national levels that ban the sale of exploitative products, invasive plants and toxic ingredients. Supporting proactive initiatives that advance environmental justice and safeguard wildlife and wild places is an evergreen need.
At the macro level, we need to re-examine happiness and wellbeing. We must step back and look at the big picture — how our culture pushes consumerism and destroys self-esteem. We need to actively cultivate ideas of high quality of life that aren’t based on accumulating wealth and stuff: bigger houses, more cars, more outfits, more products, more gadgets.
If we delve into our motivations for buying things, we’ll likely find that we don’t need them; we just get a quick dopamine hit from acquiring something new. Instead of going to a department store we can volunteer with a community group, explore a library or thrift store, organize an outdoor adventure with friends, gather and watch a documentary, or make a game plan for positive change.
Saving biodiversity doesn’t have to be boring or doom-and-gloom. We need to enjoy the creativity of breaking out of cultural norms and looking at solutions as solving a puzzle or going on a quest.
It’s essential to find community to support each other and share ideas and small victories. To get started, I’d suggest picking a challenge of interest and approaching it from multiple angles, including looking for neighborhood allies. Cleaning up a park, say, could include planting native plants, pressuring the city not to use pesticides, hosting fun environmental education and community-building games, preparing tasty plant-based snacks, having a clothing or book swap, sharing seeds and vegetable starts, or building “catios” to encourage people to keep their cats away from native birds and wildlife. There are so many ways to forge new connections.
And there are endless options and opportunities to act. You could stand up to development or urban sprawl, fight pollution from factory farms, start a grassroots campaign to repeal unjust legislation — the world is your (endangered) oyster.
And along with taking action, we need to look at cultural attitudes. We have to overcome the pessimism that we’re just doomed so nothing we do matters, but we also need to look out for the optimism that everything will be okay because someone, somewhere will figure out how to make it all work out.
Everything we do does make a difference. It’s easy to think that our individual actions don’t matter, but it’s precisely because there are so many of us that they do.
The silver lining in that ominous-looking cloud is this — every action has the potential to create change. That’s the answer on how to help: It’s me, hi, I’m the solution. It’s me.
A new book looks at efforts to recover dwindling populations and what more is needed.
In 2019 a staggering study revealed North America had lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970 — almost 30% of the total population, with declines in both common and rare species. Grassland birds were down more than 50% and shorebirds by around one-third.
The figures floored even the researchers.
It also provided a jolt to avid birders and retired journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal. They wanted to know what had happened — and what could be done.
To find out the couple took off on a cross-country trip, meeting with 300 experts and other people working to recover birds. They have now chronicled their journey in their new book, A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds.
The Revelator spoke with the Gyllenhaals about who’s saving birds, how technology helps, and what more we need to do.
Why write this book now?
Beverly Gyllenhaal: We’re those people whose hobby took over their lives. Anders is a banjo player and a photographer, and I like to read. We’d go to bluegrass festivals on the weekends, pulling this tiny fiberglass bubble of a trailer. And as we were in these campsites, all of a sudden we started to notice the birds.
Anders started taking pictures and we started identifying them. One thing led to another. Fast forward 10 years, and we’d given up our condo in the city and were immersing ourselves for about half the year in birds.
Then in 2019 when the 3 billion birds report came out, we became aware that approximately one-third of the breeding birds in North America had disappeared. We were surprised, and we were surprised that we were surprised. So we put on our journalists’ hats and started asking ourselves questions.
Beverly and Anders Gyllenhaal. Photo: Courtesy of Anders Gyllenhaal
Anders Gyllenhaal: The interesting thing about the report was that everyone knew that birds and other wildlife were declining, but when you put a specific number on it and really get into the granule details, it has a real power.
There’s so much wonderful writing about birds, but we didn’t see anything that tried to look at the bigger picture: Where is all this going? And is it possible to influence it and alter the direction? So that’s the thing we wanted to try to do with this book.
What kind of impact do you think that report had on the general public?
Beverly: I think that it really helped that it was right before the pandemic, when everyone ended up being at home. People looked out their windows, saw birds and got interested in them. Did it stay in the headlines? Well, if you look at The Washington Post, they have all kinds of bird stories now. The New York Times is writing about birds. So I think it ratcheted up a notch on the hobby list for sure.
Anders: I think the question that was hard to answer, and as it is with so many environmental stories, is whether we’re powerless against this? Is this just too much [to fix]? Part of the answer with birds is that it’s a discrete element of the broader environmental story, where there are in fact myriad things that can be done — and myriad things that aren’t being done that could be done to try to change the situation.
That’s one of the things we’re trying to get across: the stories behind this that can help people understand what they can do in response.
What did you find?
Beverly: It all kind of comes underneath the umbrella of how birds get saved in the United States. How does that happen? And it took us a long time to begin to try to get perspective on that. When we started out we had no idea that politics really plays any part in it, and we didn’t really understand the breadth and depth of the Endangered Species Act.
We talked with more than 300 people to get a fix on how birds do get recovered — and many do. It’s a fascinating story in of itself, and much more complicated than we thought.
How much of that work is government agencies versus nonprofits and foundations?
Anders: It’s this amalgam of different things, and that’s both good and not so good.
We’re at a point now where if there’s going to be real impact, there needs to be more coordination. There needs to be a broader strategy to try to say what can have the most impact?
Barred owl. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal
The system we built really primarily through the 1960s and 70s into the 80s was designed for one period of time, one landscape of birds, which is really focusing chiefly on those that are at the very brink of extinction. That was successful for some period of time, as birds began to enter that sort of final phase.
But now that 50% of species are in some form of decline, there needs to be a new look at how you start trying to have an impact earlier in this regime.
What role is technology playing in this work?
Beverly: You can’t save a bird if you don’t know where it is and where it goes.
When they put tracking backpacks on prothonotary warblers in Louisiana, they thought that it migrated across the Gulf of Mexico and only stopped in the one place where it was going. But they found that this bird would stop for sometimes as long as a week in multiple places and in different countries. That was really important, because it meant that you have got to go into all those places and see what the problems are and try to help fix them.
Anders: In some ways the most interesting piece of technology is allowing people to tune in to birds and other wildlife in ways that really put you close up. Birds are always trying to hide from us. They’re hard to see. The best birds are almost invisible, but when you can see them in cameras and in satellite imagery, that helps us better understand what’s undermining them, and we can also learn about what will better safeguard them.
But it doesn’t do the whole job. There still needs to be concrete work done in the field — figuring out if there’s a pesticide that’s impacting a species in particular, or that there’s a predator that has gotten out of hand. But the technology has enormous power that I think is encouraging.
Legislators put forward a really interesting proposal for funding that will probably reach about $1.4 billion a year that will go to birds and other wildlife that aren’t necessarily being funded now. The legislation had kind of stalled in Congress, but it’s [just been] reintroduced.
There’s a lot going on in Congress that makes it hard to produce this kind of legislation, but if you think about the level of support that most people hold for conservation, this is a sound and bipartisan effort.
If you want to ask, is it possible to have a strategic, science-based strategy for helping birds, just look at what has happened on behalf of waterfowl over the last 80 years. They did exactly what was needed, but that needs to be extended to other birds.
Beverly: At the end of the day, that worked because there was funding. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to make a difference with anything if there is no money behind it.
That’s the frustrating part for me as a birder — and as someone who cares about the air I breathe and the water I drink. It’s crazy that we’re not willing to spend what’s needed to help save birds, because we can do it.
Federal agencies are implementing numerous logging projects in mature and old forests despite calling for forest protections.
Forests are critically important for slowing climate change. They remove huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — 30% of all fossil fuel emissions annually — and store carbon in trees and soils. Old and mature forests are especially important: They handle droughts, storms and wildfires better than young trees, and they store more carbon.
The Biden administration is compiling an inventory of mature and old-growth forests on public lands that will support further conservation actions. But at the same time, federal agencies are initiating and implementing numerous logging projects in mature and old forests without accounting for how these projects will affect climate change or forest species.
As scientists who have spent decades studying forest ecosystems and climate change impacts, we find that to effectively slow climate change, it is essential to increase carbon storage in these forests, not reduce it. A first step toward this goal would be to halt logging federal forests with relatively high-biomass carbon per acre until the Biden administration develops a plan for conserving them.
Balancing Timber and Climate Change
Many of the 640 million acres that the federal government owns and manages are used for multiple purposes, including protecting biodiversity and water quality, recreation, mining, grazing and logging. Sometimes these uses conflict with one another.
Some logging projects fall into this category. But many large logging projects that affect thousands of acres have been legally exempted from such analysis.
What’s Lost When Old Trees Are Cut
Most forests in the continental U.S. have been harvested multiple times. Today, fewer than 5% of these forests are more than 100 years old. Old, very large trees are the ones that hold the most carbon, and harvesting forests is the main driver of forest carbon loss.
A logging truck entering U.S. Highway 50 in Gunnison County, Colorado. Photo: Jeffrey Beall (CC BY-SA 2.0)
For example, in Oregon’s national forests east of the Cascades crest, a 1990s policy formerly spared trees larger than 21 inches in diameter – but the rule was rolled back in 2021 so that large trees could be cut. A recent analysis found that these larger trees comprised just 3% of all trees in the six national forests, but accounted for 42% of living tree carbon.
In the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, federal officials have approved 40,000 acres of harvest since 2016, targeting many mature and old trees. One 14,270-acre area that was approved for harvest in 2019 contained more than 130 stands older than 100 years. This project required the construction of 25 miles of logging roads, which can have harmful effects, including fragmenting forests, polluting streams and making forests more vulnerable to human-caused wildfires.
Canada is also allowing large, mature trees to be harvested. In British Columbia, mature forests that include old-growth trees historically absorbed more carbon than they released to the atmosphere, resulting in a net carbon sink annually. But since 2002, these tracts have emitted more carbon than they removed from the atmosphere, primarily because of logging, beetle attacks and wildfires. According to British Columbia’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory, these forests now emit more carbon than the province’s energy sector.
In eastern Canada, the Pacific Northwest and the southeastern U.S., timber companies have removed many old trees and replaced them with plantations that contain just one or two tree species. This shift has reduced the structural diversity of the forest canopy — the ecologically important layer formed by the crowns of trees — and the diversity of tree species. Losing old-forest habitat has also caused broad-scale population declines among many forest bird species in eastern Canada, and is likely having the same effect in the U.S.
More Harvesting Releases More Carbon
One argument forest product companies make to support logging is that wood can be regrown, and it releases less carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than other building materials. Such claims often make optimistic assumptions that overstate the carbon benefits of harvesting trees by factors of 2 to 100.
Old-growth forest on Vancouver Island. Photo: Thomas_H_foto (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Some studies indicate that thinning forests by harvesting some trees and reintroducing low-intensity fires can reduce the intensity of future wildfires, leaving more carbon stored in trees. But these studies don’t account for the large amount of carbon that is released to the atmosphere after trees are cut.
In a review published in 2019, we worked with colleagues to estimate how much carbon was contained in trees that were harvested in Washington, Oregon and California from 1900 through 2015, and what happened to it after the trees were logged. We calculated that just 19% of the harvested carbon was in long-lived wood products like timber in buildings. Another 16% was in landfills, and the remaining 65% was released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, implementation of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which the Clinton administration developed to protect endangered species in old-growth forests on public lands, significantly increased carbon storage over the next 17 years. In contrast, privately managed lands in the region accumulated virtually no additional carbon after accounting for losses from wildfire and harvesting.
The Cheapest and Simplest Way to Capture Carbon
President Biden has set a goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. To reach that goal, U.S. forests, lands and oceans will have to remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as the nation emits from fossil fuels, industry and agriculture.
In the western U.S., our research shows that protecting half of the mature carbon-dense forests in zones that are relatively less vulnerable to drought and fire could triple carbon stocks and accumulation on protected forests by 2050. A majority of these forests are on public lands.
The carbon dioxide that human activities are releasing into the atmosphere today will elevate global temperatures and raise sea levels for 1,000 years or more, unless societies can find ways to remove it. In its 2022 climate assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that protecting existing natural forests was “the highest priority for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Conserving forests is one of the lowest-cost options for managing carbon dioxide emissions, and it doesn’t require expensive or complex energy-consuming technologies. In our view, sufficient science exists to justify a moratorium on harvesting mature trees on federal lands so that these forests can keep performing their invaluable work.
