Portugal’s Deadly Wildfires Are Rooted in Its Authoritarian Past

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.

While these are some of the worst blazes in recent years, wildfires sweep through Portugal every summer, burning an average of just over 1% of the country annually — more than double that of the second-most affected EU country, Greece.

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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.

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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.

Fire Portugal

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.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Anthrax in Zimbabwe: Caused by Oppression, Worsened by Climate Change

Climate Disasters Are Coming. Are You Ready?

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 by Lyndsey 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.

How to Pack an Emergency Kit

As you prepare for a storm, it’s important to have an emergency kit ready in case you lose power or need to leave your home. Review this checklist from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, for what to pack so you can stay safe, hydrated, and healthy.

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.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/extreme-weather-101-your-guide-to-staying-prepared-and-informed/.

Wildfire Data Is Flawed — Here’s How to Fix It

The U.S. Forest Service includes fire it intentionally sets as part of its acreage count of the nation’s “wildfires.” That presents an inaccurate picture.

A version of this essay was originally published at Counterpunch. Fire moves rapidly, so this version has been updated and expanded.

Both Congress and the U.S. Forest Service have told us that our forests and communities are experiencing a “wildfire crisis” — that an increasing amount of wildfire is burning on our landscapes and fire severity is increasing. The primary “solution” they’re currently planning and implementing, embodied in the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, is a substantial increase in logging, thinning and burning treatments in our forests, for which Congress has provided billions of dollars of funding, along with the mandate to get it done.

So that begs the question — to what extent are we actually in a wildfire crisis? Certainly the aggressive and environmentally damaging logging and over-burning being carried out in some forests, with much more to come, should be based on solid data and science.

As someone who’s worked to protect western forests for over 15 years as an advocate and journalist, including as the cofounder and director of The Forest Advocate, I’m searching for answers to fundamental questions underlying prevailing forest-management paradigms and strategies.

The basic premise of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy is that wildfire is greatly increasing on our western landscapes. The facts on that shouldn’t be difficult to obtain, as the Forest Service and other land-management agencies maintain records and maps of wildfire perimeters. This data goes into national wildfire databases, such as one called Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity. MTBS is “an interagency program to map the location, extent and associated burn severity of all large fires (including wildfire, wildland fire use and prescribed fire) in the United States across all ownerships from 1984 to present.” This program is largely run by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Forest Service, and datasets include state and federal fire history records.

However, Forest Service wildfire perimeter data is vastly compromised: A large proportion of acres burned within the officially designated wildfire perimeters are actually ignited for supposed “resource benefit objectives”  by the Forest Service itself, most often by aerial ignitions via drones and helicopters. In many cases the majority of a fire that is called a “wildfire” on national forest lands is actually Forest Service intentional burning. This strategy for managing fire has increased to the point that numerous fires are substantially expanded by intentional burning.

The recent Tanques Fire in the Santa Fe National Forest was originally ignited by a lightning strike and then greatly expanded through aerial and ground firing operations under command of the Forest Service. According to a Forest Service news release, the fire was first reported on July 18 and by July 25 had grown to only 13 acres.

Tanques Fire, i.e. Tanques intentional burn. Photo: U.S. Forest Service.

But by that date, the Forest Service had made the decision to expand the fire up to a “planned perimeter” of 7,000 acres with firing operations. That means the Service intended to expand it up to 538 times its size. The fire may have continued to slowly expand naturally, but relatively high vegetation moisture from recent rains made it unlikely that the fire would spread much on its own. By Aug. 1, when the fire had been expanded to 6,500 acres, enough rain came that it was apparently too difficult to expand the fire any further. It’s hard to say exactly which part of the 6,500-acre “wildfire” was due to intentional burning and which was “natural” wildfire, but it is clear the vast majority of the acres burned were due to the Forest Service’s own ignitions. Nonetheless the agency calls the Tanques Fire a wildfire.

Map of Tanques Fire 7,000-acre focal area and planning area. U.S. Forest Service.

Recently the Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy (an organization closely aligned with the Forest Service), along with a university professor, authored the “Tamm review: A meta-analysis of thinning, prescribed fire, and wildfire effects on subsequent wildfire severity in conifer dominated forests of the Western US.” This review is a consideration of the efficacy of forest “thinning” and prescribed fire in moderating the incidence and severity of wildfire. It begins with citing a 2022 research article to support their contention that “In the western United States, area burned [by wildfire] has doubled in recent decades.”

That 2022 study, conducted by Virginia Iglesias and other researchers at the University of Colorado, found that “U.S. fires became larger, more frequent, and more widespread in the 2000s.” Their conclusion is based on data from over 28,000 fires in the MTBS dataset. However, since this dataset is derived largely from Forest Service wildfire data, it includes the large proportion of fire intentionally set by the Forest Service during wildfire-management operations. The agency does not differentiate in its published wildfire data between fire ignited during wildfire-management operations and fire that burned due to the original wildfire ignition. The study concludes that there have been more fires and larger fires in the West since 1999 — yet we have no way of knowing to what extent this is true, given that the Forest Service has, over the past 20-25 years, been igniting more and more fire under the umbrella of wildfire management and calling it all wildfire.

The first publicized example of such wildfire expansion was the 2002 Biscuit Fire. Timothy Ingalsbee of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology estimated that a large proportion of the Biscuit Fire was ignited by Forest Service firing operations. Inglasbee stated in a 2006 report largely focused on the Biscuit Fire that “burnout operations can sometimes take place several miles away from the edge of a wildfire, or alternately, miles away from the fire containment line.” Wildfire expansions have greatly increased since 2002, and wildfire starts, such as lightning strike ignitions, are often simply the “match that lit the fire,” leading to numerous firing operation ignitions to implement intentional burns that the agency calls wildfires.

The Tamm Review “found overwhelming evidence that mechanical thinning with prescribed burning, mechanical thinning with pile burning, and prescribed burning only, are effective at reducing subsequent wildfire severity.” These conclusions are controversial and do not consider research from independent scientists. In 2022 independent conservation scientists published a paper summarizing a growing conservation perspective and strategy, “Have western USA fire suppression and megafire active management approaches become a contemporary Sisyphus?” Based on their collective research, the authors “urge land managers and decision makers to address the root cause of recent fire increases by reducing greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, reforming industrial forestry and fire suppression practices, protecting carbon stores in large trees and recently burned forests, working with wildfire for ecosystem benefits using minimum suppression tactics when fire is not threatening towns, and surgical application of thinning and prescribed fire nearest homes.”

However, an even more fundamental issue with the Tamm Review is that the purpose and need for such aggressive forest treatments are at least partially predicated on flawed data that indicates wildfire has doubled on our landscapes in recent decades. The acreage burned by wildfire is likely increasing given the warming and drying climate and the abundance of fuels, but who knows to what extent, since the wildfire data is so skewed by the inclusion of the Forest Service intentional burns. This data issue also affects considerations of trends in fire severity, and that should be investigated.

A significant proportion of wildfire research depends on wildfire perimeter data, including the University of Colorado research referenced as support for the premise of the Tamm Review. It is clear we have little knowledge of how much fire that was not ignited by the Forest Service has burned on our landscape in recent decades. It’s a major flaw in “wildfire” data. No forest management actions should be contemplated or initiated based on such data.

Yet Congress and the Forest Service are going forward with a strategy for addressing the “wildfire crisis” without having determined with reasonable data and responsible science to what extent the crisis exists. That’s unacceptable — especially considering that the remedy often involves severely damaging impacts to our forests and communities. Clear parameters need to be developed for how to support appropriate amounts of fire on our landscapes, based on accurate data and a range of scientific research. Any resulting plan should be analyzed with an environmental impact statement.

There is understandable concern about wildfires increasingly impacting wildland/urban interface communities, and this issue requires serious consideration and action. However, evidence clearly shows that burning of homes and communities by wildfire is not significantly impacted by logging, thinning, and intentional burning treatments out in the forest, and that only the 100 feet surrounding homes and other structures is relevant to structure ignitions.

The best response to the home ignition problem is home hardening and treating the landscape immediately surrounding homes and other values. This takes a coordinated effort between governmental bodies, land-management agencies, and the public. Such coordination would more likely occur with increased transparency on the part of the Forest Service and affiliated scientists, which could build trust with the public.

The accurate collection and categorization of wildfire data, which underlies research concerning wildfire, are a fundamental basis for transparency and trust — and good science.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Previously in The Revelator:

How Do We Solve Our Wildfire Challenges?

‘Three Rivers of Woe’ — David Quammen on Climate Change, Extinction, and Epidemics

Journalists and activists should focus on these three linked problems, says the acclaimed author, who also encourages us to talk about hope.

[Editor’s note: This article is a joint publication of SEJournal and The Revelator.]

This past May, as the world started to emerge from the restraints of the COVID-19 epidemic, a paper in the journal Nature warned that future pandemics were coming, due to climate change, chemical pollution, invasive species and other factors.

The most likely cause of future outbreaks, the researchers found, could come from a threat we don’t talk about enough: biodiversity loss.

The threat of emerging pandemics will be even greater, according to the paper, when these factors combine. “For example,” the authors wrote, “climate change and chemical pollution can cause habitat loss and change, which in turn can cause biodiversity loss and facilitate species introductions.”

It’s a warning that science writer David Quammen, author of the award-winning 2012 book Spillover, has been sounding for years.

As he said on a panel at the 2023 Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Boise, Idaho, the threats of extinction, climate change and emerging diseases are “three big, brown, churning, murky rivers of woe, with some channels interconnecting now, but flowing parallel, independently to a great degree, but coming from the same source, … the human footprint.”

Connecting the Dots

Quammen has been writing about the extinction crisis since 1981, initially as a columnist for Outside magazine.

Since then his work for National Geographic and other publications, as well as his many books, has taken him all over the world. He’s written about emerging diseases, including HIV and COVID-19, as well as climate change and other threats.

And he encourages other journalists and people working in environmental fields to do a better job connecting the dots.

“When many journalists and activists talk about climate change, they tend to think that this is the big, all-encompassing problem and everything else is a subcategory,” he told me by Zoom from his book-lined home office in Bozeman, Montana.

“It’s important for people to understand: We do not have one huge problem called climate change, in which all other problems are subsets. We have three coequal problems that need to be understood fully in their severity and in their independence as well as their interconnectedness. Those are climate change, loss of biological diversity, and emerging pandemic threats.”

For journalists, as well as the public, that means we need to look a little deeper.

“Climate change is a problem that comes to us, right? It comes home to us. It comes to everybody,” Quammen said. “Loss of biological diversity can be happening at a distance.”

That might make the changes hard to see, especially if your vantage point doesn’t change much.

“If you go out and about, if you’re a traveling journalist as I’ve been, then you have seen with heartbreaking concreteness the loss of biological diversity over the decades. For instance, the decline in insect populations around the world, the decline in migrating songbird populations, the decline in populations of a lot of other creatures that perhaps need a particular high altitude or cold habitat, ranging from bumblebees to polar bears.”

Seeing these species, seeing these places, offers journalists an opportunity to illustrate to readers how these major environmental issues connect and to bring them to life — and hopefully help readers feel connected to them in return.

“Connectivity is just one of the very great truths,” Quammen said. “It’s the essence of ecology and the essence of human history, which I think of as a subcategory of ecology rather than the other way around.”

Making It Real

Illustrating that connectivity is especially important when we’re writing about far-flung wildlife that people won’t encounter in Bozeman or Boise or New York City.

“Most people were never going to see a pangolin, polar bear or lowland gorilla except maybe in a zoo. My particular career and route through life have given me the opportunity to see those creatures and a lot of others in the wild. And I’ve felt that it was part of my duty, as well as my opportunity, to try and make those creatures real, at least at one remove, in the minds and the hearts of readers who will never have the same opportunity.”

pangolin
Photo: Adam Tusk (CC BY 2.0) www.tuskphoto.com

That could help, for example, to provide some emotional understanding of the wildlife trade threatening all eight species of pangolin (a trade that’s been linked to the COVID-19 pandemic), or the loss of sea ice threatening polar bears.

“My job and my opportunity are to go out there as a proxy for other people,” Quammen said.

“I get to say, ‘Hey guys and gals, this is happening. Look at this creature through my eyes. This is a magnificent, appealing, complex, amazing creature. And yet look at this situation that this creature is in. It’s outrageous, it’s heartbreaking, it’s dangerous, but it’s reversible.’”

‘Golden Thread of Hope’

Despite the dangers he’s chronicled, Quammen brings a lot of humor to his work.

“I am one of those people who believes that almost nothing is too sacred for a joke to somehow enrich the contemplation of it,” he told me. “I really believe that when you write a rich piece of nonfiction, a piece of journalism about the environment, about the living world, if you can make your audience laugh and cry and think and maybe see the world in a slightly different way, that’s the goal. Because those moments are best when they come unexpectedly, and they knock the reader a little bit off balance.”

He also brings another H- word to his work, as he discussed in a recent interview with Orion, where he said hope is a duty when writing about the extinction crisis.

Sure, there’s a lot of gloom in the extinction crisis, but Quammen told me we should always be looking for solutions, or at least small bits of progress.

“I think we should all do that,” he said. “I do that in my most recent book, The Heartbeat of the Wild, where I write about some situations, some efforts, some conservation models around the world that are working pretty well, and therefore they give me hope.”

That hope, he admitted, “is sandwiched between a lot of concern and doom and pessimism.”

And, he cautioned, writing about it “should never be programmatic.”

Too many gloomy articles contain “a hopeful ski jump at the end,” Quammen said. “It’s autopilot, it’s predictable. There are other ways to lace a golden thread of hope through the narrative tapestry that you’re creating. And I think it’s important to do that.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Anthrax in Zimbabwe: Caused by Oppression, Worsened by Climate Change

Tree Cutting in Egypt: The Desertification of Governance

Egyptians face worsening threats from heat and pollution. So why is the country cutting down thousands of healthy trees?

In 2022 the Egyptian government announced its 100 Million Trees initiative, a plan in part intended to improve air quality in the capital city of Cairo and surrounding communities. So why, then, is Egypt still cutting down thousands of healthy trees?

According to information published by Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, the country needs approximately 58 million square meters of parks and green spaces to keep its air clean, yet currently only about 5.4 million square meters are available. Egypt lost 75% of its tree cover between 2010 and 2023, according to a recent study from the American University in Cairo.

And the problem keeps getting worse: Egypt has expanded construction of roads and buildings, and despite ongoing protests the government has destroyed many of its last green spaces to accomplish this. The loss of vital trees has made Cairo feel even hotter as climate change worsens. Citizens have been documenting the events with before-and-after photos to raise awareness of this environmental crime.

Authoritarians Versus Trees

The tree-cutting phenomenon illustrates the authoritarian traits of Egypt’s political system: a lack of public participation in decision-making, weak oversight mechanisms, failed planning and governance, and the prevalence of class discrimination. The phenomenon signals a growing injustice and cruelly affects people, cities, and nature alike.

Authoritarian policies exacerbate social inequalities, favoring bureaucratic and capitalist interests, particularly as the construction and real estate sectors grow at the expense of the environment and green spaces. Rampant tree-cutting has become a recurring phenomenon, often on the pretext of road development, bridge construction, and waterway maintenance. But trees are even being cut down in areas not undergoing development, with no justification in terms of the public interest.

The assaults extend even to public parks, some of which hold historical significance, where portions are leased out for commercial purposes such as shops and kiosks. Local administrative bodies collect rental income by deeming unused land as ripe for “redevelopment.”

This behavior reflects a shortsighted and inadequate approach, aiming to fund government budgets, particularly in local districts. The conversion of green spaces is seen as an investment, treating trees as fertilizer, wood, or raw materials to be sold to manufacturers.

A Crisis of the Environment and Employment

Tree-cutting affects everyone but is especially hard on the poorest Egyptians. Every day Cairo receives an influx of people adding to its population of 10 million, driven by migration from nearby regions and governorates in search of work. The influx is exacerbated by high unemployment rates in rural areas of southern Egypt and the Delta, where the poorest populations reside. An estimated 29.7% of Egypt’s population of over 112 million lives below the poverty line.

Internal migration is on the rise as people flee dire social conditions and a lack of job opportunities, increasing population density in major cities. In Cairo car emissions rise and industrial activity expands unchecked, without consideration for sustainability or environmental regulations. Following the state’s abandonment of a planned economy and adoption of economic liberalization without a developed private sector capable of driving growth, a low-capital private sector, often the most polluting and employing the most exploited workers, has expanded.

Smog

Data indicates that Cairo’s air-pollution levels are extremely high. In Yale University’s 2024 Environmental Performance Index, Egypt ranked 122nd in the world for air quality. Some residents feel as though they’re struggling just to walk through the crowded streets during peak hours. A migrant worker who lost his job in agriculture and now commutes daily to the capital told me how he can smell Cairo both upon arriving and leaving during his daily 50-kilometer journey. The commute is considered preferable to unemployment, as his village has lost much of its greenery due to the shrinking agricultural sector, which once employed about a third of the population.

How We Got Here

During the 1950s President Abdel Nasser redistributed land owned by feudal landlords to the peasants. However, in the early 1990s, the land returned to large landowners through a law passed by President Hosni Mubarak. The descendants of these feudal landlords invested in land and abandoned agriculture in favor of real estate, contributing to the expansion of the construction sector in both villages and cities. Many viewed housing as a store of value, particularly with the depreciation of the Egyptian pound and the liberalization of exchange rates.

As a result of a complex set of historical stages, green spaces have dwindled, and tree-cutting has become a topic of debate over the past five years with Egypt facing unprecedented warming, rising pollution levels, and increased population density. I recently had a discussion with sociologist Hoda Badran, who was born in 1929 and has witnessed Egypt’s political shifts and urban transformation since the 1950s. She remarked: “I spent my childhood in the countryside of Qalyubia, a city close to the capital, surrounded by greenery. After graduating from university, I worked as a social worker in factories, where I saw development as being closely tied to environmental, social, and psychological elements that form an interconnected whole.”

Badran recalled that workers’ housing built by Nasser’s government included green spaces that have since vanished.

A Social Solution

Through Badran’s leadership roles in United Nations organizations, she came to understand the integral nature of development elements. “Greenery, a clean environment, and environmental awareness are developmental necessities and human rights,” she told me.

Reflecting on the 1990s, she remembered cofounding the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood in Egypt with Suzanne Mubarak, where environmental education was made a central component of its programs. The council worked on tree-planting initiatives with international and regional organizations, especially targeting children.

“Today there’s an awareness of climate change and the crime of cutting trees, but it’s not enough,” she tells me. “Environmental concerns must be at the heart of every policy and priority. Just as childhood issues are a priority within every priority, the environment must be a priority in every step and policy implemented in Egypt.”

Majesty of Egypt

She offers an example. “How can we ensure children’s health when they are exposed to respiratory diseases and poisoning due to pollution? Here the voices of the social sciences and environmental experts must be heard. Sociology connects the dots; it is a social medicine that diagnoses problems and influences policies. I believe that tree-cutting is a crime.”

An Investment Horizon

In December 2014 the Sadat City Authority announced the sale of 300 acres of forested land. According to Egypt’s Ministry of Environment, the country contains 8,000 acres of forest spread over 34 tree plantations in 17 governorates, all irrigated with wastewater. Therefore, tree-cutting cannot be justified under the pretext of water conservation, particularly in light of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam crisis, which threatens to reduce Egypt’s share of Nile River water.

Despite the dam crisis, green spaces, especially forests, could be expanded, which would mitigate the effects of severe climate change in Egypt. These forests could also provide jobs in the timber industry, where wood prices have skyrocketed. This has motivated corrupt forces to illegally harvest trees in a desperate bid for profit, as if they’re living in their final days. These groups are active in tree-harvesting, with occasional support from official voices.

In September 2022 Egypt’s Grand Mufti (a high religious office) justified tree-cutting as permissible “in the public interest.” Meanwhile other government officials admitted that mistakes had been made, claiming that the cutting was merely pruning — a term used as deception, similar to how prisons are called rehabilitation centers, power outages are termed load reduction, and floating the Egyptian pound and selling public assets are called economic reforms. Yet these so-called reforms often involve selling off national assets to pay down loans and debts, which have ballooned from $46.1 billion to $164 billion over the past decade.

Urban development plans fail to account for people’s rights to green spaces, with most official data (including government reports) showing that per capita green space has shrunk to less than one square meter, which is unevenly distributed. In contrast, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme recommend that green spaces should not fall below nine square meters per person. Yet the authorities continue to ignore the importance of green spaces in reducing both noise and air pollution, the latter exacerbated by rising fossil fuel consumption, which contributes to health problems, especially respiratory diseases. And cities suffering from overcrowding and pollution, as Egypt’s are, are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, particularly heatwaves.

 

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Neither the environment nor the people seem to matter to a government obsessed with accumulating wealth through geographic redevelopment and economic exploitation. Bureaucracy and state policies view everything — people, land, and natural resources — as opportunities for profit, without regard for long-term consequences.

The current trajectory of urban development benefits certain classes who profit from desertification and the ongoing tree-cutting phenomenon. In some cases plastic trees replace real ones, adding a touch of irony and sadness. Large amounts of artificial turf (landscape) are supplied directly to government agencies, where economic interests intersect with cruelty and deception, forming a triangle of power.

A Heartless City

Poet Abdel-Moati Hegazy described Cairo as a “city without a heart” in his 1959 collection, and again in his 1989 book Trees of Cement, in which he lamented, “This cement tree stretches everywhere / Writhing like devils / Catching birds that fall like stones / Into radar devices.”

At the time Hegazy wrote these lines, Cairo was far less environmentally and architecturally degraded than it is now, with a smaller population and a more visible role for the state in maintaining greenery. Class disparities in urbanization and access to green spaces were also less pronounced, and tree-cutting crimes were not as pervasive or heavily justified by state propaganda, as they are today, where reasons range from facilitating security surveillance to bridge construction, most of which involve steel structures that lack aesthetic value and feel more like wartime fortifications.

A System That Cuts Trees and Claims to Fight Climate Change

While the government cuts down trees, it simultaneously engages in a publicity campaign about combating climate change, aiming to secure $100 billion in funding by 2030. Part of this money has already been secured through green investments and grants for large-scale, important projects — though some have stalled.

In May 2023 the government offered for sale shares in three large electricity production plants, including clean energy facilities, at a time when the country was grappling with an energy crisis. It has also constructed some areas that meet international housing standards, in collaboration with international partners (with plans to build 14 smart cities). But these remain limited, expensive, and largely accessible to foreigners and the wealthy.

Many climate-related projects have an air of showmanship. The Ministry of Environment launched the “ECO EGYPT” campaign to promote tourism, as part of the presidential initiative “Prepare for Green.” The project was initially designed by Egyptian graphic designer Ghada Wali and funded by the UN Development Programme and the Global Environment Facility. However, the project’s official website collapsed, along with Wali’s promotional materials, after she was accused of plagiarizing artwork for another project — the metro beautification initiative. This scandal reflects corruption under the guise of climate action.

The scandal illustrates the level of propaganda surrounding climate issues and highlights how profiteering circles extend beyond the government to other sectors, proving that the rhetoric about addressing climate change is superficial.

A Crisis of Green Space — and of Government

Egypt is facing a multifaceted crisis that stems from the nature of its authoritarian regime, which considers neither sustainable urban planning nor the rights of its citizens. Lacking an active parliament or local councils (which haven’t been elected since 2008), the government remains disconnected from its people, rendering environmental justice and social equity unattainable.

Ultimately authoritarian regimes often use environmental issues for propaganda purposes while failing to address them effectively. Their policies on reducing green spaces worsen environmental destruction, much as colonial and military regimes prioritize private interests over the well-being of indigenous populations.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Warming Cities, Dying Trees: Can We Keep Our Cities’ Tree-lined Streets?

Coastal Restoration: Shifting Sand — for Better or Worse

Taking sand from one place to save another often creates more problems — but there are ways to fix that.

Coastal beaches are dynamic systems. Wind, waves, and currents constantly move sand around, enlarging a beach here, narrowing one there. Storms make more drastic changes, sometimes washing away or depositing entire beaches.

When humans build houses, roads, hotels, and other structures on or near beaches, they put themselves in conflict with this dynamic nature. Communities trying to protect such infrastructure often employ a variety of methods to hold sand in place, including hard structures such as jetties and seawalls.

These don’t actually stop sand from moving, though. They just change where and how it does move, and they often enhance local erosion. Increasingly severe storms and sea-level rise caused by climate change are only making the problem worse.

Officials in many towns and cities have turned to another method: beach renourishment. This involves bringing in sand from elsewhere and adding it to eroded beaches. Beach nourishment only accounts for about 5% of the more than 55 billion tons of sand mined worldwide every year — a level of removal that threatens coastal ecosystems worldwide — but experts say its benefits are questionable and its potential for harm perhaps underestimated.

A Complex Issue

Since the first beach renourishment in New York in 1923, projects in 470 U.S. communities have used almost 1.7 billion cubic yards of sand, according to the National Beach Nourishment Database published by the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association.

The practice is also common in Europe, with a 2021 study reporting that the Netherlands uses an average of 12 million cubic meters of sand for nourishment annually (a cubic meter is roughly the size of a pickup truck bed, slightly larger than a cubic yard). Germany uses 1.9 million cubic meters annually, Spain about 10 million cubic meters, and Denmark 2.5 million, compared to about 16 million in the United States.

Ocean City Beach Renourishment

Some experts point out that beach nourishment projects help protect coastal infrastructure and restore beaches for tourism and can replace or create wildlife habitat. The city of Galveston, Texas, for example, credits a 1985 project with a tourism revival there. Another project on the island resulted in buildup of dunes along the seawall that provided additional protection and wildlife habitat.

But experts also warn that collecting and depositing sand for beach renourishment can damage complex ecosystems. Underwater sand is habitat for seagrass and marine animals such as sea stars, sea cucumbers, and conchs, and feeding grounds for rays, fish such as flounders, and sharks.

Many U.S. renourishment projects use sediment collected during regular dredging of ports and ship channels. The city of Galveston, for example, reports that many of its of 19 renourishment projects, representing more than 4.6 million cubic yards, used sediment from maintenance dredging of a ship channel at the island’s east end. Since this dredging is already happening, at least this practice avoids disturbing additional sites.

But dredging can significantly degrade water quality over large areas and for long periods of time, and the quality of dredged sand often differs substantially from that naturally on the beach. Changing the size and type of grains on a beach can affect the flora and fauna living in sand, and multiple studies have shown that changing sand characteristics affects nesting by sea turtles and birds.

For example, a long-term study by the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation in Florida found annual sea turtle hatching success on nourished beaches fell by about 20% on average compared to non-nourished ones. Another study, conducted by the Sea Turtle Conservancy, reported significant reduction in successful nesting by sea turtles following a renourishment project in Martin County, Florida, and noted that the width and flatness of the new beach left a higher percentage of nests prone to inundation during high tides. (Three years following the renourishment, nesting had returned to normal.)

Rather than bringing in sand from elsewhere, some projects use bulldozing to restructure beaches. Three months after a project in North Carolina bulldozed sand from the lower beach to build up dunes at the back beach, researchers recorded dramatically lower numbers of saltwater clams and sand and ghost crabs on the bulldozed segments. Sand crabs had failed to recover by midsummer, when they serve as the primary food for important surf fishes and some shorebirds. The study authors blame this failure on poor match in sand-grain size, high shell content in the sand, and extension of the project too far into the warm season.

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According to a North Carolina Coastal Federation report, monitors have documented sea turtles prevented from nesting or even killed by bulldozing, and renourishment pipelines preventing hatchlings from reaching the sea. Nests can be buried as well, adds Kerri Allen, the organization’s coastal management director, and the noise and lights from a project can deter nesting females.

In addition, sand placed on a beach is eventually lost to the same forces that removed sand in the first place. That means renourishment must be constantly repeated — generally every three or four years. In an unfortunate coincidence, that’s about the time it takes natural systems on a renourished beach to recover, according to a study in the Journal of Coastal Research.

Most sand used for renourishment in the United States is mined legally, so at least here the practice doesn’t contribute to the worldwide problem of illegal sand mining. But that’s not true in other parts of the world. Stephen Leatherman, a professor at Florida International University — known as  Dr. Beach and famous for his annual list of the world’s top 10 beaches — tells me armed guards once blocked him from a beach in Morrocco. Illegal miners were removing its white sand, which he says ended up on a formerly black sand beach in the Canary Islands.

Making It Better

The four authors of the 2022 book Vanishing Sands, all researchers and experts in geology and coastal sciences, suggest the need to rethink beachside development, which drives much renourishment.

“If no buildings crowded the shoreline, there would be no need for shoreline armoring, beach nourishment, or beach scraping,” the book stated. “The threats to the beach fauna and flora or the recreational quality of the beach would not exist. And there would be no erosion problem requiring mined replenishment sand. No buildings, no erosion problem.”

Extensive beachside development already exists on most of the world’s coastlines, of course, and preservation of sandy beaches is essential to protect this development and for tourism, a major contributor to coastal economies. Add in rising sea levels, and efforts to hold shorelines in place and protect infrastructure will likely intensify.

Rockaway Beach Renourishment Work

To many, beach renourishment seems less harmful than hardened structures such as seawalls and bulwarks. But that may not be the case. While beach monitoring studies are routinely required for U.S. beach nourishment projects, a 2005 review published in the journal BioScience reported that, at the time, 73% of them misinterpreted at least some of their results and more than half lacked rigorous support from evidence and analysis for their conclusions, often due to poor study design.

“The review was motivated by our observation that despite years of mandated monitoring of beach nourishment projects, our knowledge of the biological impacts remained poor,” says co-author Melanie J. Bishop, now at Macquarie University in Australia. “Sadly, our finding of major deficiencies in the majority of studies was what we suspected — that ecological monitoring was essentially a box ticking exercise, done to fulfill permitting obligations, but with little scientific rigor.”

She and co-author Charles H. Peterson (now deceased) suggested addressing these problems by improving permitting, monitoring, and mitigation for renourishment projects. Monitoring, for example, needs to be driven by clear goals, conducted by independent research organizations, and subject to peer review.

“Monitoring in and of itself does not make beach nourishment more or less harmful,” Bishop says. “Instead of requiring monitoring of each and every project as a box-ticking exercise, funds otherwise dedicated to monitoring may be better placed into a central pool used strategically to fund basic research that improves our understanding of how sandy beach ecosystems operate and respond to change.”  The paper also recommended that state and federal permitting ensure compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, which has yet to happen.

In North Carolina Allen says she’s seen improvement in the management of nourishment projects, partly due to stronger regulations at both the federal and state level, she says, and partly due to increased awareness, education, and oversight.

“Coastal residents are highly educated when it comes to issues like these, and they are the first to call when they see something that is out of place,” she says. “These residents will call an advocacy group, like the Coastal Federation, and we will call the regulatory agency and local government reps to make sure that all the rules are being followed. We also review permit applications when they are sent out for public notice to ensure regulations are being followed and to remind the agencies that someone is watching.”

The North Carolina organization also has recommended that permits require projects to avoid operations during certain months and that nourishment sand closely match the beach’s original grain size, color, and shell and silt content.

“Conducting these projects well outside of nesting season is key,” Allen says, “as is detailed analysis looking at the composition of the placement material to make sure it is compatible. If both the size and composition don’t match what is on the beach, it can exacerbate erosion and also disrupt imprinting for sea turtle hatchlings. It’s well-documented that sea turtle hatchlings return to the beach where they hatched to lay a nest, and a fairly mainstream understanding for how that works is that hatchlings imprint on sand while making their way to the water.”

Allen adds that it is important to note that, without nourishment projects, sea turtles in some places would not have a beach to nest on. “And beaches with hardened seawalls, groins, jetties, sandbags, and such are far worse for sea turtle nesting than nourished ones,” she says. “Like most coastal management issues, there is no cut and dry ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ solution.”

The United Nations Environment Programme’s 2022 report “Sand and Sustainability,” which addressed the larger issues of global sand use, also recommended using sand that is as similar as possible to the original, as well as from a location that keeps the sand in the larger ecosystem.

UNEP further urged using nature-based (green) engineering over built or gray engineering (seawalls, bulwarks, and the like):

“Sand has key functions in nature and drives important natural processes,” the report stated. “Nature-based solutions make intentional use of these natural processes to strengthen engineering performance and preserve certain ecosystem services linked to sand. Replacing grey engineering with green engineering is the ‘no regrets’ option. It is natural and environmentally friendly, reduces the use of concrete, can be done in collaboration with local communities, requires low (if any) maintenance, has aesthetic value, stores carbon, supports biodiversity and usually is cost effective.”

(Making concrete itself requires significant amounts of sand.)

With climate change increasing the natural forces that continually move sand around on the world’s coasts and oceans, beach renourishment is unlikely to go away anytime soon. But at the very least, we can start doing it better.

“It’s easy to assert that there shouldn’t be development on barrier islands and that managed retreat is the only responsible option long-term,” Allen says. “But the reality is, these homes and businesses and infrastructure exist in these dynamic habitats, and municipalities have a responsibility to serve their residents as best they can. We work hard to get coastal leaders and residents thinking about long-term solutions, but in the meantime, we’re all just trying to do the best we can with the information we have.”

That said, Allen admits beach nourishment is probably not the best solution. “But do I wholeheartedly believe it’s the far better alternative to hardened structures? Yes. So we have to continue to weigh the pros and cons of all of these methods and continue to support and fund research that may yield an even better alternative.”

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Previously in The Revelator:

Coastal Restoration: Recycled Shells and Millions of Larvae — A Recipe for Renewed Oyster Reefs

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

…and other interesting new research that crossed our paths in the past few weeks, including a look at ecotourism land grabs.

Science doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Good science builds on what came before and enables the next wave of knowledge — and real-world applications — to be built on it.

But for that to happen, new discoveries first need to get out into the world. And that can be tough. A lot of new studies get promoted through university media departments and press releases, but far too many scientific papers on conservation and other important topics don’t enjoy that benefit and therefore don’t have the reach to influence discussion, policy, or behavior.

Let’s change that. Welcome to the first edition of “This Month in Conservation Science,” a semiregular column where we’ll bring you some of the latest scientific papers from around the world. Our priority will be on brand-new papers that haven’t gotten a press release, so our readers may discover something other people aren’t really talking about — yet.

We’ll also try to draw from journals that publish under an open access model, so that the papers we highlight are available to everyone rather than a select few. (We’ll include some that are behind subscription firewalls, though: That’s an unavoidable aspect of scientific publishing.)

The focus of this column will be on what’s new, but we’ll occasionally take a more thematic approach and look at recent and classic papers that, collectively, will help drive a broader understanding of a key area of conservation.

Here are more than a dozen papers that grabbed our attention in the past few weeks, covering an unusual predator of lions, a symbiotic crow, ecotourism land grabs, advice for students, disappearing wetlands, and a whole lot more:

    • “A feathered past: Colonial influences on bird naming practices, and a new common name for Ardenna carneipes (Gould 1844)” (Ibis)
    • “Assessing population viability and management strategies for species recovery of the critically endangered Puerto Rican parrot” (Animal Conservation)
    • “Assessing the potential of species loss caused by deforestation in a mature subtropical broadleaf forest in central China” (Trees, Forests and People)
    • “Comparing occupancy and activity metrics for assessing temporal trends in vulnerable bat populations” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Conservation threats from tourism land grabs and greenwash” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Current species protection does not serve its porpoise — Knowledge gaps on the impact of pressures on the Critically Endangered Baltic Proper harbour porpoise population, and future recommendations for its protection” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “The effect of habitat fragmentation on Malay tapir abundances in Thailand’s protected areas” (Global Ecology and Conservation)
    • “Exploring the user experience, quality, and provision of urban greenspace: A mixed-method approach” (Urban Forestry & Urban Greening)
    • “Is the general threatened status of four mammal groups affected by taxonomic changes over time?” (Journal for Nature Conservation)
    • “Lost and found coastal wetlands: Lessons learned from mapping estuaries across the USA” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Monitoring soil fauna with ecoacoustics” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)
    • “Observation of threatened pinyon jays Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus in the EU pet market as a potential additional threat” (European Journal of Wildlife Research)
    • “Point of View: Teaching troubleshooting skills to graduate students” (eLife)
    • “Predator becomes prey: Martial eagle predation of lion cubs in the greater Mara region, Kenya” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Predicting conservation priority areas in Borneo for the critically endangered helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil)” (Global Ecology and Conservation)
    • “Symbiosis between the Javan rhinoceros and slender-billed crow: A novel inferred cleaning mutualism” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Systematic review of remote sensing technology for grassland biodiversity monitoring: Current status and challenges” (Global Ecology and Conservation)

We found these papers through a combination of email alerts, RSS feeds, newsletters, and other sources, but we’re happy to hear from any author or team who has a new journal paper coming out. For consideration in a future column, drop us a line at [email protected] and use the subject line TMICS.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Busy Cheetahs, Critical Lions, Surging Tigers and Other Big Cat News

Mining Policy Must Be Reformed

Current plans to update our 152-year-old mining laws fail to redress centuries of mineral-extractive colonialism.

The first time I visited Peehee Mu’huh, mining for lithium had already begun.

I was there in the fall of 2023 as part of my work with People of Red Mountain, descendants of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe who lead the movement against extraction on this sacred landscape. We gathered at the valley in northern Nevada, known as Thacker Pass, to commemorate the massacre of 31 Paiute-Shoshone people there by the U.S. Cavalry on Sept. 12, 1865.

Historic violence underlies the importance of Peehee Mu’huh, a site whose name means “rotten moon” in Paiute — a reference to the massacre. Yet the place’s spiritual significance to Great Basin Indigenous peoples runs deeper. They have long come here to hunt, gather food and medicine, workshop, fish, and sojourn for ceremony and family gatherings.

None of these connections were included in Tribal consultations for the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine — because, essentially, there were no consultations.

Sure, the government said it consulted the Tribes. As part of the standard environmental impact statement process — which is intended to mitigate ecological and cultural harms on Bureau of Land Management public lands — three local reservations each received a letter outlining the plans to mine lithium. Unfortunately this occurred during COVID-19 lockdowns when Tribal councils closed and many Tribal members were ill. Still, those unanswered letters were considered “input” by native community members on the 18,000-acre mine slated to produce electric vehicle batteries out of their ancestral homelands.

After that, a social movement emerged to challenge the lack of consent, affirm the significance of this space, and resist the sacrifice of Indigenous sacred landscapes to extract “energy transition minerals” like lithium — over 50% of which lie within Indigenous lands.

It was that movement that brought me to Thacker Pass.

On the first night after I arrived, the sun set to reveal a radiant orange-sorbet sky. Below our perch on the ridge, everyone could see miners scraping the surface and hear diesel trucks and engines droning ominously.

Peehee Muhuh showing early phases of mine development, September 2023 photo by author

That winter I made further visits while producing a documentary with People of Red Mountain. Snow crunched underfoot as we took in the landscape changes: a pipeline siphoning water from Quinn River, electric lines, and ancillary facilities for the open-pit mine.

To picture the other major impact to come — a planned 1,300-acre waste dump — I would have to use my imagination.

Waste and the Courts

To dig up every pound of lithium, the mine will remove thousands of pounds of rock, soil, and other minerals, most of which will not be used and are considered waste.

That’s the secret of mining: It requires significant space to dump its byproducts.

Mine waste is no longer in the forefront for the environmental movement as it was when coal and nuclear power had their heyday, but it remains a key issue activists and scholars should be following. At Thacker Pass the 1,300 acres of wasteland will occupy the space indefinitely. Arsenic, antimony, and other hazards from the refining process to get lithium from the clay will pile up in this backfill pit and leach into the soils, watersheds, and air.

Efforts to handle the threat of mining waste like this seemed to improve for a brief stint a few years ago. In 2019 a federal appeals court ruled that Rosemont Copper Company, which was digging copper on U.S. Forest Service lands in Arizona, was required to prove the existence of minerals on all of the ground they covered, including an area sited for waste “tailings” dumps but under which they had not proven minerals. This would prevent them from dumping waste on nearby land not part of the actual mining. Having to prove the existence of minerals on land that would be used to dump mine waste became a cumbersome precedent for the industry.

An appeals court upheld that policy in 2022. Through these cases ambiguity in mining law was supposedly clarified, and a modest victory in halting the loss of Forest Service lands to mining seemed to have been won.

But eventually the Rosemont ruling turned out to be ineffectual: The company whose public-lands waste heap had been blocked simply moved its mine to another side of the mineral-rich area, this time on private land.

A federal judge found the Rosemont decision to be applicable in a 2023 appeals against the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, but ultimately this held no sway. Citing Rosemont, the judge miraculously admitted that BLM had erred in permitting the 1,300-acre tailings area without verifying that the mine company had proven mineral resources underneath. Despite this the court refused to vacate the mine’s approval and assured Lithium Americas Corporation that the agency would patiently walk them through amending their claims to be compliant without stopping work. Mining that had been paused restarted.

The Need for Reform

So what did Rosemont, supposedly the “most significant federal court decision on mining in decades,” amount to? Nothing substantial. Yet Rosemont is still widely reported as a critical, threatened precedent. This shows the need not only for better information about mining (more minerals, and a broader variety of them, are used in renewables), but also for mining reform. It illustrates that we must pay attention to the landscapes being sacrificed in a “just transition” from fossil fuel energy and transportation.

A new bill before Congress aims to strip away even the baby-steps reform of Rosemont. The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act (HR2925) passed the House in May and awaits Senate approval (S1281). One would assume a bipartisan effort with such a name would offer progress, but the bill guts Rosemont by removing the requirement of claimants to prove minerals before using and dumping waste on public land.

A competing bill, the Green Energy Minerals Reform Act, would introduce requirements such as paying mineral royalties and funding cleanup — basic protections that should have already been in force. Congress held hearings about this proposed legislation in late 2023, but it has not moved forward since.

Colonialism Run Amok

Historically miners have faced minimal oversight. Any individual could venture onto public lands and stake a claim to the minerals they contained — rights to occupy the land were established merely by proving a mineral’s presence and getting there first. Unlike loggers on public land, miners don’t pay any royalties; mine leases on public lands cost as little as $3 dollars per acre.

You might be forgiven for thinking this scenario sounds like something out of the 1800s prospector and ‘49ers era — and in fact, it is. Mining law was last meaningfully legislated under the 1872 General Mining Act.

Just as with the Black Hills gold rush in the Dakota Territory and those in Oregon and California, mine fervor during the gold and silver rushes that white settlers led on the red-colored mountains of Paiute-Shoshone lands in the 1850s-60s was violent and met by Indigenous resistance.

Gold Dust

That resistance was crushed. Many noncombatants were killed and others forcibly displaced to Washington; the destruction continued for decades and hasn’t stopped yet.

Today the land base of the Paiute, Shoshone, and Bannock peoples of the area — collectively known as Atsawkoodakuh wyh Nuwu or Red Mountain Dwellers — is permeated by both abandoned and active mines. Gold and tungsten mining waned in the early to mid-1900s, but then companies started extracting uranium and mercury at the McDermitt and Cordero mines across the road from Fort McDermitt. According to Department of the Interior archives, this was the nation’s largest mercury mine from the 1930s to the 1970s. After the Cordero mine closed, crews spread arsenic-contaminated waste from the mine around the town and reservation as a fill dirt. The region was later declared a Superfund site, and the contaminants were removed between 2009 and 2013.

But the toxic waste caused decades of harm in the community before that removal. In a brazen environmental injustice, many Tribal members who worked there perished of cancer. Sunoco and Barrick Gold, the companies that exploited the quicksilver lode, simply “declined” the EPA’s order to clean up the area and escaped culpability.

Now the sacred landscape of Peehee Mu’huh will become the country’s largest lithium bounty.

In an attempt to distance themselves from past mining injustices, spokespeople for Lithium Nevada Corporation present a new story, saying they use mitigation and undertake community engagement. In a June 2023 appeal hearing, they even claimed that, after mitigation, only five acres of the 17,933-acre project area would have “permanent disturbance for wildlife and habitat.” Indeed, they would leave a “net conservation gain” using the state’s conservation credit scheme.

But far from bringing a “gain,” this will devastate local ecology. Scientists have documented that greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophiasanus) live in the area and return to their mating grounds, or leks, in the same spot. Once that land is gone, the birds are gone. Plans to reseed native plants or number-crunch to make habitat materialize on paper cannot change that fact. As scholars have shown, theoretical (i.e. empty) habitat is not the same thing as a population, but the system for healing post-mine lands mandates such scams to justify ecosystem destruction.

Due to livestock production, sprawling car-centered urbanization, and other factors, the sagebrush steppe biome is one of the most threatened ecosystems in the western United States. Near-threatened species like greater sage grouse and Lahontan cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii henshawi) face encroachments and irreversible change.

Meanwhile the McDermitt Caldera, the extinct volcanic hotspot where Peehee Mu’huh rests, now contains four more proposed lithium and uranium mines. Whether these resources will enact a profound cut in fossil fuel pollution remains to be seen.

What is easy to envision, however, is mining that continues wiping out carbon-sequestering sagebrush, the further suppression of mass transit by the fossil-fuel lobbies, and the dominance of cars. Last year General Motors invested $650 million in Thacker Pass, surpassed by the Department of Energy’s $2.26 billion loan to the mine company in March. The People of Red Mountain face new barriers and constrictions on their own homeland at the expense of EV-mobility for well off consumers afar.

Moving Forward

The social movement has shifted toward broadly protecting McDrmitt Caldera as a cultural landscape and critical habitat, as well as supporting the creation of a nearby Owyhee Canyonlands National Monument to pause new extraction in the northern stretch of Paiute-Shoshone lands.

Yet the proposed national monument — like other Forest Service, designated wilderness areas, and even national park lands — does not ban extraction outright. The proposed monument boundary also excludes McDermitt Caldera, where sage grouse dance on their mating grounds and Lahontan cutthroat trout swim through the canyon streams.

Conservation easements are one option that may bring more land into Tribal resource management and protection. Another key method to protect sacred landscapes is for all entities to respect Tribes’ consent — and fundamental right — to accept or decline development projects on their lands, per the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Perhaps what’s needed at a broader scale is awareness that Indigenous peoples are guardians of biodiversity. Mining and car companies are unlikely to lead the way to equitable, low-emissions futures since they focus on profit. We must reconnect the struggle for climate justice in our atmosphere to the quest for Indigenous land rights on the ground.

Left unchecked, colonial extraction patterns will undermine a “just transition,” leading instead to an unjust continuation of familiar forms of environmental oppression.

Previously in The Revelator:

The EV Revolution Brings Environmental Uncertainty at Every Turn

Are Botanists Endangered?

As funding drops and institutions change, the study of plants appears to be withering on the vine. That’s letting critical skills go extinct.

Researchers in Indonesia recently captured a surprising event on video: A wild orangutan named Rakus, with a deep gash on his cheek, harvested liana leaves, chewed them up, and rubbed them on his wound. His cheek healed without infection. As it turns out the plants have anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antifungal, and other chemical properties that help heal wounds.

The great ape saw the plant, recognized the plant, and valued the plant because he knew something about a subject that few humans do anymore: botany.

At a time when our net knowledge about plants keeps growing, our individual understanding of plants is in decline. This is unsurprising, because while we still depend on plants for life, few of us need to know much about them in our daily lives — as long as someone else does. We rely on botanists to identify plants, keep them alive, and in so doing help keep us alive as well.

It’s a lot of responsibility for a group of scientists that isn’t getting any bigger. And that has some people in the field worried.

Crunching Numbers

The National Center for Education Statistics triggered the first alarm about the future of botany in 2015. According to data released that year, the number of annual undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees awarded in botany or plant biology in the United States had dropped below 400 for the fifth time since 2007. In 1988 the number of degrees was 545.

The number soon rose again and so far has stayed above 400. In fact it rose to 489 in 2023 — the highest in decades. (By comparison, American universities gave out more than 45,000 marketing degrees last year.)

The definitive downward trend, though, remains in the number of U.S. institutions offering botany or plant biology degrees — from 76 in 2002 to 59 in 2023.

“Botany Ph.D.’s are disappearing,” says Kathryn Parsley, who got her Ph.D. in biology, not botany, even though her dissertation focused on plants. “The number of botanists is declining rapidly and the people filling those spaces are not botanists.” When a biology department has a job vacancy, she says, they tend to hire a professor who has “nothing to do with plants. The department will have all kinds of scientists in it, with only one or maybe two botanists, sometimes only one or two plant scientists at all.” Because she attended one such school, “a botany degree was out of the question,” Parsley says.

While nobody has tracked the average age of botanists in the United States, students of “pure botany” do seem to be waning, according to Kristine Callis-Duehl, the executive director of education research and outreach at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. “Skills are shifting away from old-school botany. A lot of that’s being driven by funding sources,” she says. “More and more, just being a botanist is not enough in academia.”

Follow the Funding

Experts agree that in recent years, most botany professors aren’t being replaced once they retire. But why?

Money is one reason. The National Science Foundation, for instance, has shifted its funding away from natural history at herbariums and other museums, Callis-Duehl says. “It’s harder to convince Congress that that work — pure botany — contributes to the economy. They prefer basic science that can lead into more applied science, where they can make a case that it fuels the U.S. economy.”

Applied plant science has more NSF options than botany. For example, agriculture is more likely to be funded by USDA, Callis-Duehl says.

Taking pictures of butterwort

Those federal budget decisions shape university budget decisions, she says. The drop in research funding for pure botany has “tanked those programs at schools across the country,” she explains, including two that she attended. “Both saw they weren’t getting the federal funding to justify the existence of a botany department anymore. I see it over and over and over again.”

But shifting funding still begs the question of underlying causes. Some degrees go away because the world no longer needs them, but the world still needs plants and plant knowledge. So why is pure botany in decline?

“A Green Curtain”

For many people, the world’s flora registers as what Parsley calls “a green curtain” — a backdrop for more interesting objects of their attention such as animals or, better yet, other humans. By failing to really notice and distinguish one plant from another, we care less about plant knowledge or even plant survival, she says. And that lack of interest can be profound.

“You can’t talk about the decline in botanists without talking about plant blindness,” Parsley says.

Plant blindness is a term coined in 1998 by two American botanists. They defined it as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment,” leading “to the inability to recognize the importance of plants in the biosphere and in human affairs.”

Parsley wrote her dissertation on a related phenomenon called plant awareness disparity, which refers to the difference between how we notice and treat plants versus animals. She believes this difference is another reason botany degrees are disappearing. “People think plants are boring. Nobody wants to learn about them.”

Across the Pond

This trend is not unique to the United States. As botany professors retire in the United Kingdom many are not being replaced; fewer students are getting degrees in botany, according to Sebastian Stroud, a teaching fellow at the University of Leeds who, in a 2022 paper, coined the phrase “the extinction of botanical education.”

Service botanist Mara Alexander taking a water sample

As in the United States, applied plant science attracts more funding there.

Yet as the winds of restoration begin to blow, the UK has a growing need for people who can identify plants, a set of skills that Stroud says is currently lacking in favor of other plant skills.

Early this year a law intended to reverse the UK’s decline of nature took effect. Biodiversity Net Gain mandates that when developers undertake a project, they must provide a net gain of at least 10% biodiversity, either by creating or enhancing habitat. The idea is to leave the land in a measurably better state than it was before the development.

Restoring degraded ecosystems means many projects will need to hire botanists. These jobs are not in academia but industry, where ecological consultants with strong botany skills identify endangered plants on a site and deliver surveys of what they find.

“They need competent ecologists to understand an area,” Stroud says. “There are lots of jobs and not enough botanists, a real skill gap for the industry. That’s where the real concern is, because if we want to restore nature, we need to have good baseline data.”

At present there’s a gap between what the UK needs — students with a strong understanding of plant identification — and what its schools have been producing. Recent job candidates “didn’t have the identification skills, practical skills, required for extensive surveying work,” Stroud says. “The UK has multiple plant bio-tech programs, few on taxonomy and ecology, species identification or conservation. Reviews by the UK House of Lords identified taxonomy as a science being in a critical state.” A more recent report from the Royal Society of Biology found that “96% of organizations surveyed expressed concerns over gaps in the skills of UK plant scientists.”

Plant taxonomy is the branch of botany that identifies, classifies, and names plants based on their similarities and differences. Increasingly, ecological consultants are taking Stroud’s courses in plant ecology and identification, he says, “because they need to upskill for habitat survey. There are not enough places to accredit professionals in the industry. We can’t meet the demand or deliver enough students and accreditations quick enough.”

A Rose by Any Other Name

The world still needs botanists. In prior generations older botany professors were mostly training younger botany professors. Today’s students, however, are often migrating to other plant majors.

That doesn’t necessarily mean plant knowledge is being lost. It means, according to two 2023 papers, that there’s a mismatch between the careers for which current graduate students are being trained and the careers they’re more likely to end up with. One study found that few of those careers will be in academia. According to the second study, the jobs now are and increasingly will be in the private, nonprofit, and government sectors.

For example, “government employers discussed skills they’re looking for in new hires — plant identification was the number-one skill,” says Callis-Duehl, one of the authors of both studies.

This trend has been growing for a while: In 2018 the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management — which in combination control more lands than any other U.S. agencies —indicated they can’t find enough botanists to deal with invasive plants, wildfire reforestation, and basic land management.

2010 May - The Nature Conservancy's Megan Gibney and Service botanist Carolyn Wells recording data

In response to this need, dozens of U.S. legislators have sponsored something called the Botany Bill, which has been introduced twice to the House of Representatives and the Senate. The bill is intended to promote botanical research, generate demand for native plant materials, and protect native ecosystems. It has yet to pass, but its existence suggests a growing recognition that plant knowledge needs to be preserved.

And although the emphasis on pure botany is decreasing, botany may be evolving rather than tapering off. “A lot of botany degrees are becoming joint degrees with, say, ecology,” according to Callis-Duehl.

Stroud agrees. “Just because we don’t have many botany students doesn’t mean there aren’t students of botany,” he says. The same applies to teachers like himself. With his Ph.D. in urban ecology, he isn’t a botany professor by name. Yet he teaches plant content, including those valuable plant-identification skills.

“You don’t necessarily need to be professionally accredited to be a botanist,” Stroud says. “Many people who we might describe as botanists might not identify as botanists. They might call themselves something else. Botany is a broad church.”

Still, both Stroud and Callis-Duehl acknowledge that some skillsets like taxonomy are being lost as the botany field contracts. Plant knowledge lives on in some form, she says. But for now the plant skills that employers seek — and that our planet needs — appear to be in short supply.

Previously in The Revelator:

Rock and Roll Botany: An Endangered Plant Named After Legendary Guitarist Jimi Hendrix

Voting in the Age of Climate Change: How to Vote After a Disaster

If you’re displaced by wildfire, a hurricane, or other extreme weather, here’s how to cast your ballot.

This story by Lyndsey Gilpin & Jake Bittle was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Louisiana experienced a parade of devastating hurricanes. On August 27, Hurricane Laura hit the state’s southwest coast as a Category 4 storm, bringing winds up to 150 miles per hour, extreme rainfall, and a 10-foot storm surge. Hurricane Delta hit the same region six weeks later as a Category 2. Hurricane Zeta then hit the southeast part of the state a week before the election. The storms made voting a chaotic and difficult process: polling locations damaged, thousands displaced from their state, all the necessary paperwork and IDs lost to floodwaters.

It is an experience that many Americans have found themselves in, or will in the future, as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters. According to recent polling from the Pew Research Center, seven in 10 Americans said their community experienced an extreme weather event in the past 12 months, including flooding, drought, extreme heat, rising sea levels, or major wildfires.

The aftermath of a disaster can be terrifying and traumatic, and many victims struggle to secure basic necessities such as food and shelter, or to fill out paperwork for disaster aid and insurance. Finding accurate information about where and how to vote is even harder — so hard, in fact, that many people who have experienced disasters don’t bother to vote at all.

With experts forecasting a historically active hurricane season and a rash of wildfires breaking out across the West, it’s more important than ever to be prepared for disruptions to the voting process in what stands to be a pivotal election year.

The guide below aims to help you navigate early voting, absentee voting, and election day, the rules of which vary widely across the U.S. (Still not registered to vote? You still have time: Find your state’s voter registration rules here.)

In-Person Voting

If a disaster strikes, the governor can extend voting deadlines, allow ballots to be forwarded to a new address, allow local officials to change or add new polling places, or postpone municipal elections. Those rules are different depending on the state, and in the wake of a disaster that information may be hard to find.

The U.S. Vote Foundation has a tool to access your county election office’s contact information. These range by state; they’re typically county clerks, supervisors, auditors, boards of elections, or election commissions. You can try to contact these offices, but it’s not guaranteed they’ll be able to answer the questions. You can also ask voting rights groups in your area and watch local news for any changes or updates.

In the wake of a disaster, first confirm where you should be voting. Has your polling place been damaged or moved? If multiple locations are combined or election day volunteers are scarce post-disaster, be prepared to stand in long lines to vote. If you’re waiting in the heat, make sure to wear comfortable shoes and appropriate clothing (21 states prohibit campaign apparel, so keep that in mind), and bring water. Here are some other resources on heat waves.

Was your car damaged in a disaster? Need a ride to the polls? Some ride share services and public transit systems offer free rides on Election Day. Here’s more information.

Early Voting

Most states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands offer some form of early voting, which is voting in-person before the election anywhere from a few days to over a month early, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. However, the hours, locations, and timing differ for each. Three states — Alabama, Mississippi ,and New Hampshire — do not allow early in-person voting.

Early in-person voting is a useful option if you’d like to avoid lines on election day or will be out of town. It’s also an option for people who live in a region of the country prone to natural disasters or have been recently hit by one. In-person voting on election day, which comes at the tail end of “danger season,” may not be a possibility or a priority. Go here to see the specific rules around early voting in your state.

Absentee Ballots

Absentee voting is often called “mail-in voting” or “by-mail voting.” Every state offers this, but some require you to meet certain conditions, like having a valid excuse for why you can’t make it to the polls on election day. Absentee voting can be a particularly useful tool for people who have been recently displaced by extreme weather, or are at risk of being so. It also safeguards voters who live in the hottest parts of the country, where heat can make waiting in long lines dangerous.

The League of Women Voters explains absentee voting rules by state here. If you reside in a county that gets a federal disaster declaration after a disaster hits, there may be changes to these processes that can offer you more time and flexibility.

Since it’s the height of hurricane season, we’ve included the registration and absentee ballot request deadlines for hurricane-prone states below:

Florida: Registration deadline is October 7. If voting by mail, you must request an absentee ballot 12 days before the election, no later than 5 p.m. (more here).

Alabama: Registration deadline is 15 days before the election. If voting by mail, request a ballot five days before the election if you’re applying in person, or seven days before if you’re mailing your request (more here).

Mississippi: Mississippi does not have online registration. The deadline is October 7, 30 days before election day. The last day to request an absentee ballot is five days before election day (more here).

North Carolina: Voter registration deadline is 5 p.m. Friday, October 11, 2024. You must request an absentee ballot no later than a week before the election (more here).

South Carolina: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. You must request an absentee ballot no later than 5:00 p.m. on the 11th day prior to the election (more here).

Louisiana: Online registration deadline is 20 days before election on October 15; in-person or mail is 30 days on October 7. Read the absentee ballot requirements here.

Georgia: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. You can request an absentee ballot starting 11 weeks before the election (more here).

Texas: Registration deadline is October 7, 30 days before the election. If voting by mail, you must request an absentee ballot 11 days before the election (more here).

Voter ID Laws

Each state has a different voter ID law. Some require photo identification, others require a document such as a utility bill, bank statement, or paycheck; some require a signature. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a breakdown of these rules here.

If your ID gets destroyed in a flood, fire, or tornado, your state may be able to exempt you from showing an ID at the polls. For instance, after Hurricane Harvey, Texas residents who lost their ID to floodwaters could vote without one if they filled out an affidavit stating that the voter didn’t have identification because of a natural disaster declared by the governor. Your state may also waive the fees associated with getting a new ID.

The best way to find this information out is to contact your county clerk or other election official, or contact a voting rights group in your area.

Know Your Rights

Just as there are strict rules in states around how people can cast ballots, there are also many others that dictate what happens outside of polling places. In most states, you can accept water and food from groups around election sites, but there is misinformation around whether or not it is legal. After the 2020 election, Georgia passed a law prohibiting this within a certain buffer zone. A judge struck down part of that law: there is no longer a ban on handing things to votes with 25 feet of them standing in line, but it’s still illegal to do so within 150 feet of the building where ballots are being cast.

Call or text 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) to report voter intimidation to the Election Protection Coalition. You can also find more information on voter rights from the ACLU.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/elections/your-guide-to-voting-after-a-disaster/.

Previously in The Revelator:

Displaced by Fire or Smoke? Here’s How to Protect Your Right to Vote

How to Vote If You’ve Been Displaced by Hurricanes