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)
“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)
“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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.’”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Darwin’s writings show that stories are central to ecology — and that appreciating nature as a portfolio of wondrous, pristine places is an obstacle to ecological literacy.
These landscapes, which once covered more than 11,000 square miles of Great Britain and northwest Europe, are all but featureless. Trees do not grow there. The only vegetation that thrives on heathland is a squat, monotonous cloak of prickly gorse and heather shrubs, occasionally interrupted by the odd holly bush or clump of ferns. Some wildlife inhabit these deserted places, but they are typically scattered widely or hidden beneath the shrubs. Heaths aren’t known for stunning cliffs, mountains, or rock formations, either. Typically their terrain ranges from relatively flat land to gently rolling hills. The effect is anything but picturesque: Heathlands leave no place for the eye to rest, no pleasing contrasts for it to explore, no sense of action at all.
Unattractive and agriculturally infertile, heaths were the original wastelands. The novelist Thomas Hardy, who was born at the edge of a heath in southwest England, understood such landscapes as deeply and essentially inhuman, emblems of primordial nature untouched by civilization. In The Return of the Native (1878), his novel about an impoverished community situated on the fictional Egdon Heath, Hardy described heathland as a relic of what the earth looked like before the rise of human agriculture — and what it would return to after our extinction. It was a “great inviolate place” that “had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead.” The attention Hardy lavished on Egdon Heath and other British terrain would help establish his reputation as a “landscape novelist,” in the words of one early admirer, a writer whose works cultivate the kind of admiration for natural landscapes that provides the foundation of ecological attachment.
A century and a half later, Hardy’s Egdon Heath has lost none of its dark, primordial power. As it turned out, however, he was utterly wrong about the ancient, enduring permanence of heathland ecosystems. Over the course of the 20th century, Britain’s lowland heaths all but vanished, dwindling in size to 14% of the acreage they covered in the 1800s. The elemental, featureless stability that entranced Hardy and his readers turned out to be an illusion. Some heaths succumbed to predictable forces of modernization, development, and urban sprawl. But others mysteriously sprouted trees and became woodlands, seemingly without human intervention whatsoever. Whatever the causes of their disappearance, the dwindling of English heathland has left the creatures that once flourished unrecognized in these eerily empty landscapes — animals like the Dartford warbler, the red-backed shrike, the sand lizard, and the slow worm — in danger of being extirpated from the country entirely.
To get the full story behind English heathlands, it’s necessary to close the book on Hardy’s magnificent but misleading fictions and turn instead to the work of someone who is not widely considered a storyteller at all: Charles Darwin. Darwin wrote about his encounters with heaths in On the Origin of Species (1859), the book that famously laid out his theory of natural selection and charted the course for modern biology. But the Origin was equally vital to the rise of ecology. Darwin’s writings about heathlands highlight both his pivotal place in the history of ecology and the foundational role of storytelling to the science. What Darwin saw on these depopulated landscapes — and what Hardy could not see, for all his intimacy with them — had little to do with scientific training and everything to do with the different narrative forms these writers used to tell their stories about the natural world.
Darwin’s first impressions of heathland closely resembled Hardy’s. Rambling through a vast heath on a relative’s estate, Darwin was stunned by the overwhelming sameness of everything he saw. Like Hardy, he noted the feeling of barren endurance that seemed to characterize the landscape around him. The only relief from the land’s oppressive, featureless monotony occurred in a few fenced-in areas, where Darwin saw that the landowners had successfully planted pine trees and established thriving woodlots on the otherwise infertile heathland soil. The trees in these miniature forests had flourished, utterly transforming the communities of plants and animals around them. Darwin didn’t reflect much on the observation, however, until he found himself on another heath — and noticed a similar phenomenon beginning to unfold there.
Struck by the coincidence, Darwin took a closer look at some of the more recently created enclosures — and he saw something odd. The pines were fenced off for protection, but they were growing in chaotic clusters. This overcrowded approach to planting meant that few of the evergreens would survive to become harvestable timber. No competent forester would design a plantation in such a fashion. Suddenly it hit him: The trees in the younger enclosures must not have been planted after all. They had grown up on their own, somehow finding a foothold in a landscape that appeared incapable of sustaining plants taller than a holly bush.
Darwin had a mystery on his hands. If these trees weren’t evidence of the work of a forester, where had they come from? And how had they managed to survive in a landscape so obviously hostile to their growth?
Darwin — an avid fiction reader who once wrote “I often bless all novelists” — began to suspect that there was a story hidden in the landscape. He just had to learn how to read it. Assuming that a wider view would show him some previously unobserved nearby woodland or timber plantation that could explain the source of the seeds, the naturalist began scrambling up every local hillock and scanning the horizon. He was disappointed: “I went to several points of view, whence I could examine hundreds of acres of the unenclosed heath, and literally I could not see a single Scotch fir, except the old planted clumps.”
If the area around him was trying to tell a story, it suffered from an obvious plot hole. Trees don’t spontaneously sprout in the middle of landscapes that can’t support them. The place made no sense. Baffled by the implausibility of it all, Darwin did something remarkable: He literally pulled the place apart. Bending down, Darwin parted the thick stalks of heather and gorse that surrounded him like a shallow sea. There, beneath the superficial stasis and monotony of the landscape, he was astonished to discover a plenitude of tiny pine trees. These pines, he realized, were trying to grow all across the heathland.
As a Victorian naturalist, Darwin had none of the shyness of later scientists when it came to personifying other beings. Seeing the young pines, he recognized that they were crucial characters in the story this scenery was hiding. He treated the trees accordingly, understanding each plant as a distinct individual striving toward the goal of a flourishing life. “In one square yard,” he wrote, “I counted thirty-two little trees; and one of them, with twenty-six rings of growth, had during many years tried to raise its head above the stems of the heath, and had failed.”
Bestowing this kind of interest on each tree raised yet another question of plotting. The struggling pine’s story began when it blew over the heath as a seed, found a suitable spot to germinate, and began to sprout. Next the sapling reached up toward the sun, taking in minerals and air and water in its attempt to become a full-grown tree. There its plot halted. What happened next? Darwin wondered. Twenty-odd years went by — but the tree never got any taller. Who or what had intervened in this little tree’s once promising success story? What characters and sequences of events was Darwin missing?
This story, Darwin realized, was beyond the pale — in the original sense of the phrase. A pale or paling is simply an archaic name for a fence staked into the ground. The saplings Darwin found around his feet grew outside of any fenced-off enclosures, the first places he had been surprised to find both intentional and accidental woods springing from heathland. The fences were of simple construction; all they did was deter wandering livestock. If fences alone made the difference between heathland and pine forests, that meant livestock must be the antagonists in the sad tale of the unsuccessful sapling. Cattle were browsing on the saplings, munching them down before they could overgrow the surrounding shrubs and convert the entire heathery countryside into woodland.
The story was simple enough, but its implications were enormous. It suggested that the stable expanses of English heathlands — places that Darwin, like Hardy, first saw as “large and extremely barren” places “which had never been touched by the hand of man” — were as manmade as today’s parking lots. Without the constant disturbance of sheep, cattle, and pony populations maintained by domestication, the scattered heathlands that naturally sprouted up in the margins and clearings of woodlands would soon be overtaken by trees.
The endurance of English heathlands, then, was not some memento of nature’s inhuman, primordial power. It was a product of this landscape’s longstanding symbiosis with a species that had dominated the island of Great Britain for many thousands of years: human beings.
Hardy’s personal intimacy with heathland enabled him to see many features of heathland life that Darwin had missed. The Return of the Native includes enthralling descriptions of the many creatures that shared this unique habitat with humans — including the sheep and ponies whose wanderings of such common lands helped guarantee the heaths’ continued existence. Hardy’s novel also details the customs of human heath-dwellers who had learned how to satisfy their needs using what the local vegetation provided — cutting the shrubs and even harvesting the turf itself in the processes of producing food, firewood, and household implements. These activities magnified the disturbances to the landscape caused by grazing animals, all but ensuring that evergreens had no chance of overtaking the local scrub and converting the heath into forest.
For all his careful observation of heathland creatures and customs, however, Hardy could only see the heath as a setting: a dramatic backdrop for more compelling human fates. This vast, dark sweep of terrain remained a static place for him, a timeless environment essentially untouched and untouchable by human doings. He could not fathom that the grazing animals and the folkways he detailed so meticulously might actually make a difference — that heathland might be more than just an ominous setting for his novel’s plot. This untouchability added to the land’s fascination and majesty, but also to its horror. As Hardy saw it, the heath’s sublime size and durability only underscored the smallness of human life in the face of nature and geological time. These themes would percolate through all of Hardy’s later fiction, lending his best-known works their profoundly pessimistic tone.
It took the founder of ecology to see heathland differently. Darwin’s mind, like Hardy’s, had a strong narrative turn. But Darwin saw plot and characters unfolding not just among human beings, but among all the plants and animals around us, too. His hunger for stories enabled him to see incongruities in heath landscapes — incongruities that led him to pull the setting apart and discover the plots hidden within it. Heathland, he realized, was not a timeless backdrop. It was the ongoing appearance of a living, breathing community, the product of a fragile balance of power between heather, gorse, trees, and human beings. When that balance was upset — either by the obvious activity of bulldozers and asphalt or by more subtle shifts in agriculture and the change of ancient folkways — the seemingly timeless, unchanging heath could not survive.
Less than a decade after Darwin published Origin, the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel recognized that Darwin’s stories of interspecies communities constituted a subject so innovative it deserved a new name. He coined the word Oekologie to describe it. We now think of ecology as a science, a field whose rigor and objectivity separate it from the more personal, fanciful, and emotionally charged kinds of writing found in literature.
Returning to the roots of ecological science helps remind us that it, too, started as a way of reading the stories embedded throughout the world around us. The history of English heaths shows how treating nature as a collection of environments, places, or landscapes — as Hardy did — risks obscuring the complex, mutually dependent relationships of human beings to other lifeforms. The result is a misunderstanding of both the land and of our crucial role in maintaining it.
What Darwin practiced, then, was not simply an early form of ecology but an early form of ecological literacy. That literacy was not just a metaphor for a more scientific understanding of natural systems — it was an actual art of reading, interpreting, and sharing the stories nature told. Darwin’s ecological literacy involved extending aims and desires to animals and even plants, a habit that might be dismissed as unscientific anthropomorphism today. Nevertheless, it helped Darwin recognize that humans are not the main characters treading earth like an empty stage. We are part of a much larger ensemble cast. Darwin’s work refused simplistic divides between the arts and sciences. If we do the same, we can come to a clear sense of the stories nature tells us — and make better decisions about the parts we need to play to keep the tale of our time on this planet from turning into a tragedy.
More than 50 years after the fall of Portugal’s dictatorship, the authoritarian regime still casts a long shadow over this wildfire-prone country.
Wildfires tore through central and northern Portugal this September, burning more than 350 square miles in a matter of days. Nine people were killed. As many as 11,300 were affected, according to the European Union’s Copernicus system.
As the climate changes, these fires are only getting worse, says doctoral researcher Tiago Ermitão from the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere, who studies how vegetation recovers after fires. He adds that hot and dry conditions, “mainly caused by anthropogenic activities,” have significantly increased fire susceptibility and risk in Portugal in recent years.
But what makes this small country on the edge of the Atlantic so vulnerable?
One factor has its roots in the authoritarian regime that ruled the country for more than four decades.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a military dictatorship and the corporatist Estado Novo (New State) that followed implemented sweeping agricultural reforms across Portugal, focused on ideas of self-sufficiency and ruralism that were popular among Europe’s authoritarian regimes at the time.
Wheat vs. Heath
The first of these policies was the Wheat Campaign (a Campanha do Trigo), which aimed to make Portugal’s food supplies self-sufficient through increased cereal production, predominantly in the central Alentejo region.
The policy had some success, with wheat production booming in just a few years. However, this was mainly due to expansion into heathlands rather than the intensification of existing farms many agronomists had envisioned. The nearly 30% increase in Alentejo wheatfield acreage between 1927 and 1933 was spearheaded by sharecroppers, driven by the high prices of a protected market, subsidies for newly cultivated land, and a lack of access to quality fields.
With the help of newly available fertilizers, they cultivated the poor soils where heathland grew.
But the wheat boom wouldn’t last for long. By the mid-1930s, overproduction removed many of the financial motives, and the intensive use of thin soils led to severe erosion and significantly decreased productivity by the 1940s and 1950s.
Only a couple of decades after the wheat campaign began, there was “an official realization that soil degradation had reached serious proportions,” agriculture started to decline, and people began abandoning these newly cultivated lands, according to the Desertification Indicator System for Mediterranean Europe project.
Foresting the Commons
Meanwhile, in the north of the country, another of Estado Novo’s agricultural campaigns was getting underway: the Afforestation Plan. In the mid-1930s, the Forestry Service identified some 1,600 square miles of mountainous common land called baldios, which the regime interpreted literally as “barren” or “waste” lands, to be forested over three decades.
This policy would convert common property to state forests, which could then, according to justifications at the time, supply new industries and energy generation.
By 1968 the Forestry Service had planted about 1,000 square miles, and industries such as furniture making and paper pulp had started operating, some of which still exist. The Navigator Company, for example, is a multibillion-dollar pulp and paper company originating in 1950s northern Portugal.
The baldios that were planted during this time were certainly degraded before Estado Novo took power, with only 7% of Portugal covered by forest at the turn of the century, according to Iryna Skulska, a researcher at the Centro de Ecologia Aplicada Prof. Baeta Neves (named after the late forestry professor) who has studied the environmental impacts of the regime.
“[The baldios] were very, very exploited — overly exploited — by local communities,” because the “Portuguese rural community in the 19th [and] 20th century were very, very poor,” she says.
However, rather than reviving mixed forests, the regime established pine monocultures. “They implemented the forest monoculture stands … which in terms of biodiversity, is not a good idea,” Skulska says. “They wanted to use… species that adapt very quickly to the poor condition of the soil, [and] at the same time produce [wood] very quickly.”
What’s more, these “wastelands” were only considered as such because they were uncultivated, not because they were unused.
“One hundred years ago, before the Second World War, you had a lot of pastoralists who used to drive their flocks of sheep, goats, cows, etc, through the landscape,” explains Pedro Prata, executive director of Rewilding Portugal. “This landscape was much more used in terms of the collection of vegetal matter. Everything was used, from creating the sleeping beds of the animals, to compost for manure, to fire, and as energy.”
These policies in the north were not only driven by the desire for self-sufficiency but also by the social structures of the region. A survey in the 1930s found that 14% of households were managed by single women, which the state chalked up to the “improper” sexual conduct of male and female shepherds, completely out of line with the authoritarian Estado Novo’s conservative ideals.
The Internal Colonization Board, which implemented parts of the agricultural plans, thus looked to draft in settlers from more densely populated areas and, as historian Tiago Saraiva puts it in a paper on the subject, “convert local people to the moralizing activity of agriculture.”
But while the landscapes were converted, the people were not, and the destruction of the common lands brought an end to many of the pastoral communities that relied on it. Once again, far from creating the rural idylls that authoritarian regimes of the time idolized, this policy led to a massive migration away from rural areas.
Fragmented Landscapes, Fragmented Communities
These two campaigns had immediate and profound effects on ecosystems and biodiversity. From the uprooting of heathland in the Alentejo to the pine monocultures in the north, the changes contributed to the destruction and fragmentation of native landscapes and the decimation of indigenous species such as wolves, Iberian lynx, and imperial eagles, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a multicountry project that examined the impact of ecosystem change on human well-being in the early 2000s.
This environmental destruction echoes today, with many species still missing from the landscape.
More concerningly, these policies also contributed to the depopulation of rural areas and the “consequent abandonment of agricultural activity” that continues to this day, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Along with monocultures of “high fire risk” species like pine and eucalyptus, this abandonment is among the main causes of fires in Portugal, which result in fresh ecological damage almost every year, the assessment notes.
Abandoned Land
The increased risk of fire from rural abandonment is largely due to the unmanaged accumulation of vegetation that can fuel the flames, explains Ermitão.
The pastoralists who were once “responsible for managing the land through grazing” have gone, and in their place, unmanaged shrubland and nonnative forests have sprung up, he says.
“When you have abandonment of these lands, it drives the growth of other plants and disorganization of the forests, so if you have a fire, you have more fuel accumulated that is not managed,” Ermitão says.
What’s more, the few domestic grazing animals that remain are managed in a significantly different way.
“They’re not driven,” Prata says, meaning they stay in one place all year long. “You can have paddocks that are completely overgrazed next door to areas with full accumulation of fuel for decades.”
And this fuel accumulation can be significant. A study focusing on the very north of Portugal between 1958 and 1995 found that the decline in agricultural areas and low shrublands and an increase in tall shrublands and forests represented a 20% to 40% increase in fuel accumulation, which, according to the study, suggests “that the abandonment of farming activities is a major driving force of increasing fire occurrence in the region.”
At the same time, human-driven climate change is leading to extreme heat waves that form “the perfect environment for larger, more frequent forest fires,” according to the World Resources Institute.
This creates the perfect storm, where land abandonment and fire-prone species provide the fuel and climate change the catalyst.
The effects of these wildfires can be devastating. Severe burns can result in biodiversity destruction, forest damage, carbon and nutrient cycling disruption, and potential post-fire effects such as soil erosion and debris flows, according to a recent paper co-authored by Ermitão.
They also pose a significant threat to human life and take a serious economic toll on the regions where they occur. The full impact of this year’s fires is not yet known, but last year’s fires, which were a fraction of the size, cost an estimated $420 million, according to a report from the World Bank.
Managed Lands as Adaptation
When it comes to preventing these wildfires, the biggest challenge is land management, says Ermitão.
In an attempt to address this, the Portuguese government has implemented policies that require people to care for their land, protect villages, and manage excess vegetation that could otherwise become fuel for wildfires.
Meanwhile, the few baldios that were re-established following the fall of the Estado Novo are moving towards “mosaic landscapes,” which combine agriculture, pastoralism and forestry in a way that helps control wildfires, according to Skulska. This, she continues, also supports “incomes and more diversity [of] activities,” which could entice people back to these rural areas.
However, not everyone agrees that people should be the ones to manage these landscapes. Human intervention tends to be “systematic and very predictable,” and therefore lacks the nuance needed for healthy ecosystems, says Sara Casado Aliácar, head of conservation at Rewilding Portugal.
Instead, Aliácar explains, we should reintroduce wild grazers to manage these fire-prone ecosystems in a more holistic way.
“[Wild grazers] are reducing biomass while respecting biodiversity” through seed dispersal and the creation of habitats for other creatures like invertebrates and insects, says Aliácar, and “if [wild] grazers are reducing biomass, there are less things to burn.”
What’s more, wild grazers such as European bison and wild horses could also maintain permanent pastures, which are “accumulating organic matter and carbon continuously,” she explains. This helps address the immediate causes of fires by reducing fuel accumulation as well as the underlying catalyst of climate change by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.
Almost a century since Estado Novo implemented its agricultural campaigns, and more than 50 years since the regime fell, Portugal is still grappling with the consequences of rural abandonment and forest monocultures.
Whether through legislation, community management, or rewilding, the path to recovery is slow and complex — but as the climate crisis drives increasingly severe and frequent fires, it’s more important than ever to confront these underlying vulnerabilities.
From creating a plan to packing a go bag, here’s how you can prepare for the next wildfire, hurricane, or other natural disaster.
This story byLyndsey Gilpin & Jake Bittle was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
No matter where you live, extreme weather can hit your area, causing damage to homes, power outages, and dangerous or deadly conditions. If you’re on the coast, it may be a hurricane; in the Midwest or South, a tornado; in the West, wildfires; and as we’ve seen in recent years, anywhere can experience heat waves or flash flooding.
Living through a disaster and its aftermath can be both traumatic and chaotic, from the immediate losses of life and belongings to conflicting information around where to access aid. The weeks and months after may be even more difficult, as the attention on your community is gone but civic services and events have stalled or changed drastically.
Grist compiled this resource guide to help you stay prepared and informed. It looks at everything from how to find the most accurate forecasts to signing up for emergency alerts to the roles that different agencies play in disaster aid.
Where to Find the Facts on Disasters
These days, many people find out about disasters in their area via social media. But it’s important to make sure the information you’re receiving is accurate. Here’s where to find the facts on extreme weather and the most reliable places to check for emergency alerts and updates.
Your local emergency manager: Your city or county will have an emergency management department, which is part of the local government. In larger cities, it’s often a separate agency; in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts. Emergency managers are responsible for communicating with the public about disasters, managing rescue and response efforts, and coordinating between different agencies. They usually have an SMS-based emergency alert system, so sign up for those via your local website (Note: Some cities have multiple languages available, but most emergency alerts are only in English.) Many emergency management agencies are active on Facebook, so check there for updates as well.
Local news: The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a storm. Follow your local newspaper and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly.
Weather stations and apps: The Weather Channel, Apple Weather, and Google will have information on major storms, but that may not be the case for smaller-scale weather events, and you shouldn’t rely on these apps to tell you if you need to evacuate or move to higher ground.
National Weather Service: This agency, also known as NWS, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and offers information and updates on everything from wildfires to hurricanes to air quality. You can enter your zip code on weather.gov and customize your homepage. The NWS also has regional and local branches where you can sign up for SMS alerts. If you’re in a rural area or somewhere that isn’t highlighted on its maps, keep an eye out for local alerts and evacuation orders, as NWS may not have as much information ahead of time.
These can often be expensive to create, so contact your local disaster aid organizations, houses of worship, or charities to see if there are free or affordable kits available. Try to gather as much as you can ahead of time in case shelves are empty when a storm is on the way.
Some of the most important things to have:
Water (one gallon per person per day for several days)
Food (at least a several-day supply of non-perishable food) and a can opener
Medicines and documentation of your medical needs
Identification and proof of residency documents (see a more detailed list below)
Battery-powered or hand crank radio, batteries, flashlight
First aid kit
Masks, hand sanitizer, and trash bags
Wrench or pliers
Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
Diapers, wipes, and food or formula for babies and children
Food and medicines for any household pets
Don’t forget: Documents
One of the most important things to have in your emergency kit is documents you may need to prove your residence, demonstrate extent of damage, and vote. FEMA often requires you to provide these documents in order to receive financial assistance after a disaster.
Government issued ID, such as a drivers’ license for for each member of your household
Proof of citizenship or legal residency for each member of your household (passport, green card, etc.)
Social Security card for each member of your household
Documentation of your medical needs, such as medications or special equipment including oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, etc.
Health insurance card
Car title and registration documents
Pre-disaster photos of the inside and outside of your house and belongings
Copy of your homeowners’ or renters’ insurance policy
For homeowners: copies of your deed, mortgage information, and flood insurance policy, if applicable
For renters: a copy of your lease
Financial documents such as a checkbook or voided check
You can find more details about why you may need these documents here.
Disaster Aid 101
It can be hard to know who to lean on or trust when it comes to natural disasters. Where do official evacuation orders come from, for example, or who do you call if you need to be rescued? And where can you get money to help pay for emergency housing or to rebuild your home or community. Here’s a breakdown of the government officials and agencies in charge of delivering aid before, during, and after a disaster:
Emergency management agencies: Almost all cities and counties have local emergency management departments, which are part of the local government. Sometimes they’re agencies all their own, but in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts. These departments are the first line of defense during a weather disaster. They’re responsible for communicating with the public about incoming disasters, managing rescue and response efforts during an extreme weather event, and coordinating between different agencies. Many emergency management agencies, however, have a small staff and are under-resourced.
Much of the work that emergency managers do happens before a disaster: They develop response plans that lay out evacuation routes and communication procedures, and they also delegate responsibility to different government agencies like the police, fire, and public health departments. Most counties and cities publish these plans online.
In most cases, they are the most trustworthy resource in the days just before and just after a hurricane or other big weather event. They’ll send out alerts and warnings, coordinate evacuation efforts, and direct survivors and victims to resources and shelter.
You can find your state emergency management agency here. There isn’t a comprehensive list by county or city, but if you search your location online you’ll likely find a website, a page on the county or city website, or a Facebook page that posts updates.
Law enforcement: County sheriffs and city police departments are often the largest and best-staffed agencies in a given community, so they play a key role during disasters. Sheriff’s departments often enforce mandatory evacuation orders, going door-to-door to ensure that people vacate an area. They manage traffic flow during evacuations and help conduct search and rescue operations.
Law enforcement agencies may restrict access to disaster areas for the first few days after a flood or fire. In most states, city and county governments also have the power to issue curfew orders, and law enforcement officers can enforce these curfews with fines or even arrests. In some rural counties, the sheriff’s department may serve as the emergency management department.
Governor: State governors control several key aspects of disaster response. They have the power to declare a state of emergency, which allows them to deploy rescue and repair workers, distribute financial assistance to local governments, and activate the state National Guard. The governor has a key role in the immediate response to a disaster, but a smaller role in distributing aid and assistance to individual disaster victims.
In almost all U.S. states, and all hurricane-prone states along the Gulf of Mexico, the governor also has the power to announce mandatory evacuation orders. The penalty for not following these orders differs, but is most often a cash fine. (Though states seldom enforce these penalties.) The state government also decides whether to implement other transportation procedures such as contraflow, where officials reverse traffic flow on one side of a highway to allow larger amounts of people to evacuate.
HUD: The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, also spends billions of dollars to help communities recover after disasters, building new housing and public buildings such as schools — but this money takes much longer to arrive. Unlike FEMA, HUD must wait for Congress to approve its post-disaster work, and then it must dole out grants to states for specific projects. In some cases, such as the aftermaths of Hurricane Laura in Louisiana or Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, it took years for projects to get off the ground. States and local governments, not individual people, apply for money from HUD, but the agency can direct you to FEMA or housing counselors.
FEMA
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is the federal government’s main disaster response agency. It provides assistance to states and local governments during large events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
FEMA is almost never the first resource on the ground after a disaster strikes. In order for the agency to send resources to a disaster area, the state’s governor must first request a disaster declaration from the president, and the president must approve it. For large disasters such as Category 4 or 5 hurricanes, this typically happens fast. For smaller disasters, like severe rain or flooding events, it can take weeks or even months for the president to grant a declaration and activate the agency. FEMA has historically not responded to heat waves.
FEMA is broken into regional offices and offers specific contacts and information for each of those, as well as for tribal nations. You can find your FEMA region here.
FEMA has two primary roles after a federally declared disaster:
Contributing to community rebuilding costs: The agency helps states and local governments pay for the cost of removing debris and rebuilding public infrastructure. During only the most extreme events, the agency also deploys its own teams of firefighters and rescue workers to help locate missing people, clear roadways, and restore public services. For the most part, states and local law enforcement conduct on-the-ground recovery work. (Read more about FEMA’s responsibilities and programs here.)
Individual financial assistance: FEMA gives out financial assistance to individual people who have lost their homes and belongings. This assistance can take several forms. FEMA gives out pre-loaded debit cards to help people buy food and fuel in the first days after a disaster, and may also provide cash payments for home repairs that your insurance doesn’t cover. The agency also provides up to 18 months of housing assistance for people who lose their homes in a disaster, and sometimes houses disaster survivors in its own manufactured housing units or “FEMA trailers.” FEMA also sometimes covers funeral and grieving expenses as well as medical and dental treatment.
In the aftermath of a disaster, FEMA offers survivors:
A one-time payment of $750 for emergency needs
Temporary housing assistance equivalent to 14 nights’ stay in a hotel in your area
Up to 18 months of rental assistance
Payments for lost property that isn’t covered by your homeowner’s insurance
And other forms of assistance, depending on your needs and losses
If you are a U.S. citizen or meet certain qualifications as a non-citizen and live in a federal disaster declaration area, you are eligible for financial assistance. Regardless of citizenship or immigration status, if you are affected by a disaster you may be eligible for crisis counseling, disaster legal services, disaster case management, medical care, shelter, food, and water.
FEMA also runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides insurance coverage of up to $350,000 for home flood damage. The agency recommends that everyone who lives in a flood zone purchase this coverage — and most mortgage lenders require it for borrowers in flood zones — though many homes outside the zones are also vulnerable. You must begin paying for flood insurance at least 30 days before a disaster in order to be eligible for a payout. You can check if your home is in a flood zone by using this FEMA website.
How to get FEMA aid: The easiest way to apply for individual assistance from FEMA is to fill out the application form on disasterassistance.gov. This is easiest to do from a personal computer over Wi-Fi, but you can do it from a smartphone with cellular data if necessary. This website does not become active until the president issues a disaster declaration.
Some important things to know:
FEMA will require you to create an account on the secure website Login.gov. Use this account to submit your aid application.
You can track the status of your aid application and receive notifications if FEMA needs more documents from you.
If FEMA denies your application for aid, you can appeal, but the process is lengthy.
Visiting a FEMA site in your area after a disaster: FEMA disaster recovery centers are facilities and mobile units where you can find information about the agency’s programs as well as other state and local resources. FEMA representatives can help you navigate the aid application process or direct you to nonprofits, shelters, or state and local resources. Visit this website to locate a recovery center in your area or text DRC and a ZIP Code to 43362. Example: DRC 01234.
What to Expect After a Disaster
Disasters affect people in many different ways, and it’s normal to grieve your losses — personal, professional, community — in your own time. Here are a few resources if you need mental health support after experiencing an extreme weather event.
The National Center for PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, on what to expect after experiencing a disaster.
The American Red Cross has disaster mental health volunteers they often dispatch to areas hit by a disaster.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, has a fact sheet on managing stress after a disaster. The agency has a Disaster Distress Helpline that provides 24/7 crisis counseling and support. Call or text: 1-800-985-5990
After a disaster is an especially vulnerable time. Beware of scams and make sure to know your rights.
Be wary of solicitors who arrive at your home after a disaster claiming to represent FEMA or another agency. FEMA will never ask you for money. The safest way to apply for aid is through FEMA’s official website: disasterassistance.gov.
Be cautious about hiring contractors or construction workers in the days after a disaster. Many cities require permits for rebuilding work, and it’s common for scammers to pose as contractors after a disaster.
Renters can often face evictions after a disaster, so familiarize yourself with tenant rights in your state.
What to Keep in Mind Before, During, and After a Disaster
The most important thing to consider during a disaster is your own, your family’s, and your community’s safety. The National Weather Service has a guide for hurricanes and floods; FEMA has a guide for wildfires; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a guide for extreme heat safety.
A few potentially life-saving things to remember:
Never wade in floodwaters. They often contain harmful runoff from sewer systems and can cause serious illness and health issues.
If it’s safe to do so, turn off electricity at the main breaker or fuse box in your home or business before a hurricane to prevent electric shock.
If you lose power, never operate a generator inside your home. Generators emit carbon monoxide, a colorless and odorless gas that can be fatal if inhaled.
Unattractive and agriculturally infertile, heaths were the original wastelands. The novelist Thomas Hardy, who was born at the edge of a heath in southwest England, understood such landscapes as deeply and essentially inhuman, emblems of primordial nature untouched by civilization. In The Return of the Native (1878), his novel about an impoverished community situated on the fictional Egdon Heath, Hardy described heathland as a relic of what the earth looked like before the rise of human agriculture — and what it would return to after our extinction. It was a “great inviolate place” that “had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead.” The attention Hardy lavished on Egdon Heath and other British terrain would help establish his reputation as a “landscape novelist,” in the words of one early admirer, a writer whose works cultivate the kind of admiration for natural landscapes that provides the foundation of ecological attachment.
