A Wolverine Feasts — on Fish?

We followed a wandering wolverine for weeks in the Arctic and found a frozen mystery.

Nimbus, a wolverine we had GPS-collared, kept drawing an intriguing pattern on our map. For weeks, he returned again and again to one site — spending four hours there one day, nine the next. I thought, surely, he’d found a carcass. Caribou maybe, or even muskox. I couldn’t imagine what else it could be.

So my colleague Louise Bishop and I found time to investigate.

We’d come to Arctic Alaska to study how these curious critters use permafrost and had spent weeks during this unusually cold winter visiting places where they spend time. We had yet to visit Nimbus’s favorite site, so we skimmed north by snowmachine as April’s high sun flooded the tundra around us.

Wolverines usually spent just a few hours at the places we visited, leaving slick bowls formed when they slept, often tucked at the end of snow tunnels. Sometimes we found scat nearby, or ptarmigan remains. Though the region teems with caribou during summer, none were there now. Maybe one got lost, I thought.

Nimbus’s site was on the Shaviovik River, between the Prudhoe oilfields and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When we were a mile away, we descended 20 abrupt feet to the river’s floodplain, then picked our way through willows and sharp snowdrifts, homing in.

The GPS data came unambiguously from a single 60-yard stretch of river. When we arrived, there was nothing. No carcass, no bowl, no scat. The river channel was frozen, though some ice seemed recently formed. Wolverine tracks loped along the bank.

Nimbus investigates. Photo by L. Bishop.

Nimbus’s data pointed to the channel’s center, but we were reluctant to venture onto questionably stable ice. Anyway, what could be out there — just 10 yards away — that we couldn’t see from shore?

Exploring the area, Louise turned up the first wolverine scat. We prodded it gently, and tiny glimmering discs fell onto the snow. I looked up, incredulous. “Are those fish scales?”

Wolverine is Gulo gulo; the glutton so nice they named it twice. Across their range, they are known to eat goats, grouse, goose eggs and everything between. People have been picking apart their scat for half a century. I had never heard of anyone finding fish scales.

So we were delighted, but also disappointed. The channel was frozen, the feast apparently over. Was this wolverine swimming during Arctic winter? Or had he gotten fish some other way?

In the coming days, to my amazement, Nimbus marched back to the channel and sat at its center for hours, accumulating GPS locations at a baffling rate. From camp, I inspected our photos of the barren ice, imagining him there. What on earth was he doing?

So, we returned, determined to stand at Nimbus’s exact location. At the site, I gingerly stepped onto the frozen river and chipped a hole with an ax. No water after six inches, so I proceeded slowly, cutting new holes every few feet.

At the channel center, I swung the ax and felt it break through a thin top layer, then sink into something soft. I leaned in to inspect. “Hah!” I yelled. “I got a fish!” It was frozen, entombed in the ice just under its surface.

An Arctic Grayling frozen in overflow ice at Shaviovik Spring, April 2022. Photo by T. Glass.

We eventually found nearly 100 fish in the channel. Many were in the ice that had seemed newly formed from shore, and under them lay a foot of unfrozen water. Others, though, were spread far downstream, apparently carried there when the ice ruptured and water gushed onto the surface. Nimbus had been clawing and gnawing, excavating them one by one, leaving a trail of fish-shaped holes. A bevy of other scavengers — arctic fox, red fox and ravens — were close behind, cleaning up.

Finding water was a surprise, since it’s rare up here this time of year. Rivers freeze solid from October to May, and lakes shrink to puddles under ice as thick as your car. It’s a hard time to be a fish. But there are a few springs where waters spout forth year-round and provide overwintering habitat. Perhaps, I thought, this is such a site.

My hunch was later confirmed. Old reports we found mentioned thousands of fish preparing to overwinter here in autumn, and we learned that it’s known to the local Iñupiat, who harvest these fish for food, as the “Place Where the Land Sweats.”

But our observation held an element of newness. Oases like this give freshwater fish a lifeline through the harsh Arctic winter, but knowledge about mortality — let alone a mass die-off like this — remains scarce. How often do these oases become traps? With weather becoming more extreme due to climate change, could it happen more often — or less often? Could that pose a problem for all the species that depend on this river?

Hundreds of dead fish under the ice at Shaviovik Spring, April 2022. Photo by T. Glass.

This morbid find, equally fascinating and disturbing (and described in our recent Ecology paper), connected seemingly distant corners of the ecosystem — fish, ice, wolverine, people — and reminded us that even little things, like a slow spring or a cold winter, can tip the balance.

It was bad news for the fish, no doubt, but I keep thinking of Nimbus, the first wolverine recorded eating fish. It brings a smile to imagine him out there, trotting along the Shaviovik after a long, cold winter, sun warming his back as he lifts his snout to the breeze and absorbs that first, bountiful whiff.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Road to Nowhere: Highways Pose Existential Threat to Wolverines

The Future of Water

A new book from water expert Peter Gleick urges a rethinking of how we use, manage and value one of our most important resources.

It’s time for a reckoning … with water. It’s central to our bodies, the planet, our modern lives, and yet we continue to use it unwisely, to pollute rivers, to overdraft groundwater, to dewater ecosystems, and to leave some of our fellow humans without this most basic necessity.

Faced with mounting water problems, compounded by biodiversity loss and climate change, we have an opportunity — and a necessity — to chart a new course.the ask

“We are a minor character in the scientific epic of water — and we’re at a moment in time when we must decide whether to recognize that fact and all its consequences and move to a sustainable and equitable future or to barrel forward in catastrophic denial,” writes Peter Gleick in his new book, The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future. 

Gleick, a scientist and founder of the global water think tank the Pacific Institute, has been a leading voice on water’s connection to conflict, climate change, human rights and privatization. He’s written 14 books but it’s his most recent that brings together much of his work over the past three decades into a call for action.

The book stretches from the Big Bang to our future path.

Gleick’s first age covers how water shaped the planet and later how it shaped the lives of early humans. The second age encompasses advancing civilizations like the Greeks and Romans and continues into our own lifetimes. This includes the advent of aqueducts and dams, deadly waterborne diseases, scientific and technological breakthroughs, and “replumb[ing] the entire planet” — what Gleick calls the “hard path.” The third age is what lies ahead, and Gleick presents a “soft path” that takes humanity on a less perilous course than where we’re currently headed.

The Revelator spoke to Gleick about where the “soft path” takes us, what conflicts lie ahead, and how far we’ve already come.

Why this book now?

This book is in many ways a sort of culmination of all of the work I’ve been doing. It’s a synthesis of my thoughts about the role that water has played in human history. It’s also a reflection on the water crisis that we’re facing.

But maybe most importantly, from my point of view, it’s an opportunity to talk about the choices we have today to move forward to a different future, a better future.Book title with watery background

I offer an optimistic view, a possible future that’s more sustainable and more equitable than the one [we’re headed to] if we follow our current path. I really think of it as the book I’ve been wanting to write for a long time to address all of those pieces.

What should we learn from earlier people?

We’re much more dependent on water than we really understand in general. Many of us, not all of us, take the advantages of the second age of water for granted — the science and technology that developed that permitted us to turn on the taps and flush our toilets and wash our clothes and grow food.

But [earlier civilizations] couldn’t really take water for granted in the first age of water. They had to figure out how to manage it in order to survive, to support populations, to maintain the empires that developed over time. In some ways, we’ve lost that connection to water that I think many of the earlier cultures had to have.

What is the soft path?

I think of what we’ve been doing in the second age of water as the “hard path.” Hard as is in hard infrastructure. Hard as in not-flexible institutions. The hard path ignored ecological values in decisions about water. And so many years ago, I formulated this idea of the soft path for water.

The characteristics are the need to rethink supply. That is, instead of taking more water out of natural systems — more water out of rivers, more overpumping of groundwater, more draining of lakes — we rethink supply. Alternative ways of thinking about supply are recycling and reusing water, capturing more stormwater, and desalination. These are nontraditional supply options that have the potential to reduce the impacts we have on the hydrologic system.

The second aspect is rethinking demand. In the hard path, demand was something to be met. If there’s an assumed demand for water, let’s meet it. That’s true for resources in general. Populations grow, economies grow. We’ll figure out where to get the resources for them. But in the soft path, rethinking demand means a focus on conservation and efficiency. Doing more with the water we already have, that we’re already extracting. Grow more food with less water, making semiconductors more efficiently. It’s basically an efficiency revolution, and I would argue we’re already doing a lot in that area.

The third area of the soft path is ecological values: incorporating the critical needs of ecosystems into our decisions about water policy. In the hard path, we didn’t think or didn’t care about the environment, but those days ought to be over. And the soft path says ecological values are critically important and need to be integrated into water policy, planning and management.

The fourth category is economics. The hard path thinks about water as an economic good. The soft path thinks about water as an economic good, but also a human right. The human right to water has largely been ignored. I wrote about the human right to water in the 1990s. And in 2010, the United Nations finally formally declared a human right to water. But we’re still not very good about understanding what that really means for water management.

Photo of white man with gray curly hair and black glasses wearing a blue shirt.
Peter Gleick. Photo: Curtis Lomax

There is an economic value to water, and there’s a human right to water. And the soft path says combine them. Think about them together. Part of that means providing basic water and sanitation services for everyone on the planet, independent of economic ability to pay. The ability to pay shouldn’t be relevant to whether or not people have access to safe water and sanitation.

The final category in the soft path is rethinking our institutions. Institutional development around water has been very fixed. We have water utilities. We have water management systems. They tend to be old school, very narrow, very disciplinary. And the soft path says we need better institutions that are more decentralized, that integrate water with energy, and water with food, and water with climate. And the institutional structures we have now for water aren’t good at that, but the soft path says better institutions would be more interdisciplinary, more integrated, more community focused.

How well are we doing this already? 

I argue in the third age of water that what needs to be done isn’t magic — and that these things are already happening.

There’s a figure in the book that shows economic productivity of water in the United States going way up. It’s evidence that we’re doing more, even with just the economic things we can measure with the water we’re already using. It’s direct evidence of the success of efficiency improvements and pieces of the soft path.

There’s another graph that shows that our economy is continuing to grow. Our population is continuing to grow, but our total water use has gone down. That’s evidence, in my opinion, that this new path is not only possible, but that we’re in the transition now. That’s why I describe myself as an optimist, because I see some of the things that are low-hanging fruit actually being captured, and I see success stories and evidence in each of those areas of the soft path where things are being done differently.

Is this path an opportunity to address water and climate solutions together?

It takes a lot of energy to produce and to collect and treat and distribute and use water, and then to collect and treat the wastewater we produce. Anything that we can do to reduce the water footprint of our energy use has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some of the cheapest carbon emissions reductions now available turn out not to be energy efficiency policies, but water use efficiency policies, especially things that save hot water. So there’s a clear opportunity there for tying water and energy together on the mitigation side.

On the adaptation side, some of the worst impacts of climate change on water resources are changes in demand for water because of rising temperatures, loss of soil moisture for farmers from higher temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, loss of snowpack in the mountains, faster runoff of snowpack when we do get it because of higher temperatures, more extreme events, and more frequent extreme events. All of those things are happening already.

Tying water and climate together in people’s understanding offers us an opportunity to address both problems. If people care about water, if you can explain to them the connection between water and climate, maybe we can help them care about climate.

What are other areas of concern?

Water and conflict. There are a couple of sections in the book about the first water war in Mesopotamia, but also the history in the early west in the United States where there were conflicts over water. And then more recently in the Middle East.

I worry about that. I just think there’s a growing risk of conflicts over water. We’re seeing more and more of it. To the extent to which we can solve water problems — meet basic human needs for water, restore ecological health — I think is an opportunity to reduce the risk of conflicts as well.

I gave a lot of attention to it in the book, in part because I see it as a worrisome trend, but I also see it as an opportunity. I think the third age of water could not just be one where we’ve solved our water problems, but where we’ve reduced conflicts in general.
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Previously in The Revelator:

Water Conflicts Will Intensify. Can We Predict the Worst Problems Before Conditions Boil Over?

 

It’s Black and White: The Grevy’s Zebra Needs Our Help

These endangered zebras have experienced one of the most substantial range reductions of any African mammal.

Species SpotlightThe Grevy’s zebra, also known as the imperial zebra, is the largest living wild equid and the most threatened of the three species of zebra.

Unlike the other two species — plains and mountain zebras — Grevy’s zebras do not have a herd system, and males and females have no permanent bonds. Stallions establish territories, with mares crossing through them to breed and foal. Once the foals are old enough to travel, the mares usually leave the protection of the stallions’ territory to continue their nomadic lifestyle.

Species name:

Grevy’s zebra (Equus grevyi)

Description:

The long-legged Grevy’s zebra is the largest of all zebras, weighing up to 1,000 pounds and measuring up to 5 feet high at the shoulder. It has the skinniest stripes of any zebra, which run all the way down to a white belly and rump. (Other zebra species have stripes on their belly.) Grevy’s zebras have long necks with prominent, erect manes, and their long, narrow heads give them a mule-like appearance. They’re also recognizable by their large, rounded ears and brown muzzles.

Grevy's Zebra closeup
Photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

Where it’s found:

Grevy’s zebras live in semi-arid grassland habitats in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

IUCN Red List status:

Endangered. Their world population has declined from 15,000 in the 1970s to only around 2,250 today.

Major threats:

While Grevy’s zebras can run up to 35 miles per hour, there are some threats — loss of habitat, poaching and disease — that they can’t outrun. Habitat loss in an already restricted range is a serious threat. They must compete with other wildlife and domestic livestock for grazing land and water. The endangered population also has been ravaged by anthrax outbreaks.

Notable conservation programs:

San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is a member of the Grevy’s Zebra Trust, an independent wildlife conservation organization in Kenya whose Healing Rangelands program works to revitalize local grazing management and rangeland restoration. Partnering to restore healthy rangelands benefits livestock-based livelihoods, provides better water access for zebras, and advances protection of natural spaces for all who depend on them.

Every weekend at the San Diego Zoo, we offer guests an opportunity to feed the Masai giraffes for a $10 donation. The money raised goes to the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya and the Grevy’s Zebra Trust, both of which have a major focus on helping zebras. Through the generosity and participation of guests, donations have brought much-needed help in vaccinating zebras against anthrax in Kenya and funding other needs.

My favorite experience:

I remember a time we were hosting one of our field research partners from Kenya at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. This researcher works every day on Grevy’s zebra conservation, but rarely gets to appreciate this incredible species up close. During his visit, we were able to take him to see our large thriving herd and watch him be captivated by their huge ears, pencil stripes and impressive size. Helping people experience wildlife is something we do every day at the Safari Park, but having the opportunity to share Grevy’s zebras with a partner who helps protect them in their native habitat was very special.

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

The loss of this endangered species from their native habitats would have devastating consequences for all other species in that ecosystem. Grevy’s zebras are beneficial to other wild grazers — such as wildebeest, antelope and ostriches — because they clear off the tops of coarse grasses that are difficult for other herbivores to digest.

Grevy's Zebra

Protecting the rangelands of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia is vital to secure a safe habitat for a thriving Grevy’s zebra population. With only 1% of this habitat formally protected, expanding the range will be vital to the conservation of this species.

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

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Previously in The Revelator:

Species Spotlight: Sunda Clouded Leopard, the Ethereal and Declining ‘Tree Tiger’

What City Birds Around the World Have in Common

How a study of so-called “trash birds” revealed conservation clues for urban species.

Why do some bird species seem to flourish alongside humans, eating our crumbs and nesting in our backyards, while others prefer to live as far as possible from dense human populations?

Researcher Monte Neate-Clegg first began to ponder that question while attending the American Ornithological Society’s 2019 conference in Anchorage, Alaska. “I was staying at an Airbnb, and two of the birds I wanted to see in Anchorage, white-winged crossbills and boreal chickadees, were just in the yard,” says Neate-Clegg, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah. Although new and beautiful to him, the species are common in Anchorage — so omnipresent they’re typically ignored by residents.

“I started thinking, what is it that makes these ‘trash birds’ here, and not elsewhere?”

A small brown and white bird sits on a pine tree
A boreal chickadee in Anchorage. Photo: Tom Wilberding (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Neate-Clegg sounds sheepish about using the pejorative-sounding term “trash bird,” but it’s a phrase commonly used by birdwatchers to refer to species so ubiquitous at a given location that they cease to become interesting and, in fact, can become downright irritating. Classic examples include pigeons in city centers and snack-stealing gulls on beaches.

But one man’s trash bird is another’s research query. Neate-Clegg wondered if specific traits make certain species more able to thrive in cities around the world. And after joining ornithologist Morgan Tingley’s lab at UCLA as a postdoctoral researcher in 2021, he proposed a lab-wide project to try to answer his question.

Their research drew on big data to provide some clues — and may even reveal a roadmap for making our cities more bird-friendly.

What Makes a City Bird?

To look at shared traits among urban birds on a global scale, Neate-Clegg and his collaborators turned to several massive datasets. First, to determine which species preferred city habitats and which avoided them, they downloaded the entire database of sightings submitted to eBird, the popular online platform where amateur birdwatchers around the world can upload their observations. “It’s basically like an Excel sheet with more than a billion rows,” says Neate-Clegg.

For their analysis of the characteristics these birds had in common, they then drew from other databases, including a new one called AVONET. Published in 2022, AVONET includes physical measurements (wing length, beak length, etc.) for all the world’s 11,000-plus bird species. Neate-Clegg himself contributed to the project as a research assistant, painstakingly measuring thousands of bird specimens preserved in natural history museums.

Ultimately the members of the Tingley lab examined traits underlying the urban tolerance for 3,768 bird species in 137 cities. They found that urban-tolerant birds tend to be smaller, less territorial, longer-lived, and less picky about their diets and habitats than other species. They also have greater dispersal ability — they move more easily from one place to another — and lay larger clutches of eggs.

Two green parrots sit on a balcony edge overlooking the city
Two red-shouldered macaws in São Paulo, Brazil. Photo: Diego Torres Silvestre (CC BY 2.0)

Neate-Clegg was particularly surprised by the link with longevity. Longer-lived birds tend to be large, so the association between small size and urban tolerance seemed to be contradictory. But “long-lived species are, on average, more intelligent,” he says. “Previous studies have found that birds with larger relative brain sizes are more urban tolerant, so it’s possible that lifespan is a proxy for intelligence, which helps [birds survive] in urban areas.”

Although the study, published in the journal Current Biology in April 2023, is not the first to look at characteristics of so-called trash birds, it’s the first to examine these patterns for so many traits on such a massive scale.

Not every trait examined was equally significant everywhere in the world: For example, being a diet generalist was more important in temperate regions, while being a habitat generalist was more important in the tropics.

Helping More Birds Survive

Kylie Soanes, a research fellow at Australia’s University of Melbourne and an expert in urban biodiversity who was not involved in the Tingley lab study, hopes that this won’t be seen as the last word on which species are capable of persisting in cities, but rather as a starting point for considering ways in which we could make cities more hospitable for a broader suite of birds.

“Do we need to provide more diverse food or shelter sites? Where can we make some areas safer for ground nesters? How can we make cities safer to move through?” asks Soanes. “A lot of these negative associations between species traits and cities can be ameliorated, and that’s where we should turn our focus for conservation action.”

Soane’s own research has identified a surprising range of threatened species living in Australia’s cities, including 39 found only in urban areas. They are mostly orchids and other plants, but also a critically endangered tortoise.

Concrete jungles may not be as good for wildlife as native habitat, but this growing field of research shows that cities still play a critical role for many species. And this is important to keep in mind as urban areas expand around the planet.

“There’s an enormous range of things that we can do to improve urban living for native wildlife,” Soane says, such as preserving habitat corridors to make dispersal easier or increasing plantings of native plant species to support birds with specific habitat and diet needs. “We need to make sure we don’t relegate [these possibilities] to the ‘too hard’ basket.”

In other words: Let’s make more birds, and more diverse birds, into “trash” birds. And while we’re at it, let’s drop the “trash” label altogether. City birds — adaptable, prolific and smart — deserve our respect. And our conservation attention.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Urban Ecology: A Bright Future for Sustainable Cities

‘We Found Plastic on the Seabed in Antarctica and I Just Cried’

As Antarctica faces a host of human-caused threats, a marine biologist calls for action.

Emily Cunningham could hear the sounds of whales breathing and the creaking of ice. The marine biologist — bursting with excitement — had just arrived in Antarctica aboard an expedition ship but found the peninsula cloaked in fog. As she set out in a small Zodiac boat to test some scientific equipment for the next day’s work, the fog slowly lifted, unveiling spectacular beauty.the ask

“It felt like Antarctica wasn’t quite ready to reveal herself,” says Cunningham. “And then all of a sudden, she showed off in all her glory.”

Cunningham, co-founder of the Motion for the Ocean initiative that supports local ocean conservation efforts, would spend the next six months aboard a ship in Antarctica teaching science to visitors and helping inspire them to advocate for Antarctic conservation and engage in climate action.

After she returned to her home in the United Kingdom this spring, The Revelator spoke to her about balancing tourism with conservation, how wildlife in Antarctica are coping with climate change, and what global efforts are needed to protect the ocean.

What were you doing in Antarctica? 

I was working on board an expedition ship that takes paying guests to Antarctica. We arrived there in October. We have a resident science team on board, of which I’m a member, and then we also have visiting researchers from institutions around the world. My job was citizen science coordinator, which involves developing ways to engage the guests with the scientific research in an authentic, hands-on way.

We have a study looking at the effect of melting glaciers on the phytoplankton populations that’s led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina. We have our own project in collaboration with the Norwegian Institute for Water Research looking at the presence of microfibers in seawater in Antarctica. Then there’s a project that the chief scientist on my ship developed this year looking at the effect of penguin colonies on nearby fish populations using a remotely operated vehicle.

And I developed a project which I called Extreme Citizen Science. We’ve got two submersibles on board. The guests go in the submersibles and take photos for us to develop a baseline understanding of the seabed communities at a number of sites we go to multiple times over the season.

How do guests react to these science projects?

It’s a real spectrum. Some people chose this trip specifically because they wanted to get that hands-on experience and came after they had really done their homework. And then you get people who just thought it looked cool and didn’t realize that there was any science happening at all — they wanted to go in a submersible, or they just wanted to see penguins — but they didn’t really know a lot about Antarctica.

I designed the program to be accessible to everybody, no background in science needed. We do three to four lectures a day. There’s workshops all the time. It’s very educational. I would hope that everybody left knowing more than when they came. And often the people who ended up enjoying it the most were the ones who had no idea about the science projects or perhaps took some convincing to participate.

Over the course of a 10-day trip you really get to know people and see how their mindsets are shifting from perhaps just thinking that this is a nice thing to do, to then genuine awe and genuine concern.

The program is designed to balance understanding what stands to be lost, but also empowering them. So when they go home, they have some citizen science projects or some actions they can do.

What’s the balance of getting people to understand the gravity of what’s happening in Antarctica but not having too many visitors that it’s further imperiled?

That’s a really big one that I struggled with. I have some concerns about mass tourism, mass cruising to Antarctica. I decided I needed to go and see it with my own eyes to really understand it and form an opinion.

The rate at which the industry is growing is deeply concerning to me. There were 100,000 visitors this season, and it’s likely to continue to increase. Most companies are commissioning more ships at the moment. The rule is that if you have more than 500 passengers, you can’t land your guests. But even our ship with nearly 400 passengers, that’s a lot of people. Some of the sites will have two ships a day visiting. Penguin colonies throughout the most important time of the year have visitors traipsing through from dawn till dusk.

From what I saw, it was well regulated and responsibly delivered. But I would be concerned if it got much bigger. And there’s lots of things related to mass tourism that aren’t necessarily visible: the carbon footprint, the consumerism, the impact from the soot of the engines on the snowmelt and lots more.

Like you say, it’s the balance. How many of those thousands of visitors feel inspired and want to go home and do something? I think we need to understand whether people go away and actually change their behavior. I’m still forming my thoughts on the Antarctic tourism industry because I really see both sides of the coin, but it has to continue to be very strictly regulated and it does concern me if it continues to grow at the pace that’s projected.

What environmental changes did you see?

When I got to dive in our submersible as part of the seabed studies, it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever had the privilege to do. I didn’t really know what to expect. I’ve seen pictures, I’ve seen survey transacts, but they don’t prepare you for what it looks like to be able to see a seascape.

It’s just a sight to behold. It’s a living carpet, just full of color and life. Everywhere you looked, there were soft coral sponges, all different colors. There are sea spiders the size of your hand. And seeing all that and then realizing that this incredible seascape, which has evolved over millions of years, is going to change in my lifetime because of warming …

The Antarctic peninsula is warming five times faster than the global average. And with that warming, we’re seeing an increase in invasive species.

We talked about the increasing number of ships for tourism and other purposes — those are also going to increase that invasion risk. There’s research that connected Antarctica to 1,500 ports around the world because of refueling, et cetera. There’s a lot of nooks and crannies on ships that things can stow away in.

Another [climate-induced change] is the starving penguin chicks. The last two years we’ve had much later snow than usual. The snow is falling later into the spring. The penguins should be laying in late November, early December, but most of the sites were still covered in snow. So they can’t lay their eggs. By the time the parent penguins come to molt towards February time, the chicks aren’t fledged because they’ve had to lay so late. If the parents are molting they can’t get wet, so they can’t go and forage.

So you have starving penguin chicks. The parents can’t do anything about it. Reading about a starving penguin chick is very different from watching a starving penguin chick. With all these things I think, “I’m a scientist, I should be able to decouple myself from this thing.” But of course you can’t. And when you know that it’s something that is anthropogenically driven, it’s even harder to bear.

When people want to take action, what do you tell them?

We talk about climate change, the effects that it’s having on the ocean and Antarctica. Climate action is key to a lot of what we talk about to our guests and we explain that it’s not in the distance, it’s something that needs to happen now.

We try to empower people to use their voice to protect this incredible place, even if sometimes it takes being uncomfortable to do so.

For me personally, I realized I needed to take every opportunity to try and spread the word and use this experience to try and raise awareness. Antarctica can feel very far away. But there are things that you can do personally or in your own community — local action, national action —that will have relevance to Antarctica.

Because what happens in Antarctica is going to affect us all. A campaign I’ve been running for a long time is something called the Motion for the Ocean. It’s an initiative to help local governments step up and play their part in recovering the health of the ocean.

It renewed the importance of that kind of “act local, think global” mindset to tackling these kinds of problems. I’m trying to piggyback off the interest in Antarctica to try and get better local action here in the UK and offering that as a blueprint for other places in the world as well.

What would you like to see at the global level for ocean protection?

I’m excited about the United Nations Plastics Treaty. We need to shift the thinking around plastics. We need to design out the waste before it’s created and think about the whole life cycle of an item. If the plastic treaty can get that right, I think that’s going to be game changing for the plastic pollution problem all around the world.

We found plastic on the seabed in Antarctica and I just cried because, if it’s there, it’s everywhere. I’ve been down in the submersible and seen huge clouds of krill, and then I think, well, there’ll be microfibers in the krill. If they’re in the krill, then they’re in those penguins that had been walking around my feet yesterday and then they’re in those seals that I’m seeing lounging on the ice flows, and they’re in the whales that are swimming past.

You can’t get away from it.

And then there’s the High Seas Treaty, which is at the ratification stage. It could also be game changing. But I’m holding my judgment until we get a little bit further down the line.

There’s lots of things I think that are giving me hope at the moment, but we have to make sure they’re actually effective rather than just a sound bite.

I also think we need a moratorium on deep-sea mining until we know more. We’re running before we can walk. A lack of good governance should not be a reason to proceed with something. It should be the reason not to proceed with something.

If I had one wish with a genie, it would be a moratorium on deep-sea mining.

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Previously on The Revelator:

Action for Antarctica: Saving the World’s Last Great Wilderness

 

We Asked an AI Chatbot How to Fight the Extinction Crisis

…and it did a halfway decent job. But algorithms alone can’t save endangered species. For that you need people who care and who act.

When a certain search engine recently asked me to test out its new artificial intelligence chatbot, I thought “How bad will this be?”

After all, tech companies love to position their AI systems as solutions, but many experts fear they will result in waves of bad data and disinformation. That’s not going to help a world plagued by runaway climate change and an extinction crisis that threatens to push a million species into oblivion.

But at the same time, artificial intelligence and machine learning have some truly wonderful implications for conservation — anything that speeds up data analysis is welcome, for example. Could that potential benefit carry over to a chatbot designed to spit out easy answers to users’ questions?

I wanted to see how good the systems really are, so I gave it a test — I asked the chatbot how to solve the extinction crisis.

No small task.

So here they are: the chatbot’s 10 ways to fight the extinction crisis (in italics), along with my interpretation and response.

1. Reduce your consumption of meat and animal products. Animal agriculture is a major driver of habitat loss, deforestation and climate change. By eating less meat and more plant-based foods, you can help to reduce the impact of your diet on the environment.

A surprisingly strong start right out of the gate. Animal agriculture is one of the leading factors in the extinction crisis, and while I wouldn’t necessarily have put this at number one, it certainly deserves to be in the top three. Good job, chatbot.

2. Support sustainable farming practices. When you buy food, choose products that were grown or raised using sustainable methods. This helps to protect wildlife habitat and reduce pollution.

This is vague and possibly redundant, but it’s useful for the chatbot to lay out causality. Unsustainable farming does destroy habitat and create enormous pollution, often enough to be seen from space. But what “sustainable” methods is it recommending, and how is this recommendation actionable? At the very least consumers should look for the USDA Organic label, but there are a host of other labels out there, some of which are more misleading than others. (Hmm, could be worth digging into that in a future article. Thanks for the idea, chatbot.)

3. Get involved in local conservation efforts. There are many ways to get involved in conservation efforts in your community. You can volunteer for a local environmental organization, donate to conservation groups, or simply spread the word about the importance of protecting wildlife.

Fair enough. Local efforts can do a lot to benefit native or migratory species, but a vague reference to “many ways” doesn’t provide any actionable ideas or talk about why local efforts matters. That’s important, since to most people extinction feels like something that happens half a world away, not in their own backyards.

4. Advocate for environmental policies. Contact your elected officials and let them know that you support policies that protect wildlife and the environment.

Good advice, chatbot, but the devil’s in the details: What are those policies? Here in the United States, it’s a good idea to actively call for support of the Endangered Species Act, which is chronically underfunded and under threat. There are other regulations and policies — both existing and proposed — that will benefit wildlife, but people will need to do their own digging to find out what those are. (Our suggestion: Start by calling for support for the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act.)

5. Reduce your energy consumption. By turning off lights when you leave a room, unplugging appliances when you’re not using them, and weatherizing your home, you can help to reduce your energy consumption and save money.

Okay, here’s where the chatbot starts to get a little … off. Reducing energy consumption is a great goal, but this answer doesn’t connect that with benefiting wildlife. It’s more of a climate solution, which in turn can help address the extinction crisis. However, reducing home energy consumption simply by turning off a light doesn’t address the severe waste and devastation of the fossil fuel industry, which destroys habitats, poisons ecosystems and drives the climate change that causes even more chaos. That needs to be addressed on a systematic level, not by unplugging your blender.

6. Recycle and compost. Recycling and composting help to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfills, where it can release harmful methane gas into the atmosphere.

Decent advice, but why? Chatbot, don’t be afraid to spell out the fact that methane is a greenhouse gas that worsens climate change — and why that’s harmful to wildlife.

7. Support sustainable businesses. When you shop, choose businesses that are committed to sustainability. This helps to send a message to businesses that consumers care about the environment.

Vague. Vague, vague, vague.

8. Educate yourself and others about the extinction crisis. The more people who know about the extinction crisis, the more likely we are to take action to address it.

This echoes things I’ve said for years. It’s why we always ask people to share our articles — so friends and colleagues who might not seek out this kind of reporting on their own can also see what’s going on. We may be intimately familiar with certain environmental topics ourselves but should never assume other people have the same knowledge base.

9. Get creative. There are many ways to get involved in the fight against extinction. Come up with your own ideas and share them with others.

Sure. I guess that’s helpful?

10. Never give up. The extinction crisis is a serious problem, but it’s not insurmountable. By working together, we can make a difference.

Color me impressed: While still vague, this may be the best advice on the whole list, albeit the hardest to live up to. The extinction crisis is excruciating, but it can be stopped. After all, almost every species that has received endangered species protection in time to do something about it has been saved from extinction. That’s why the Endangered Species Act has been such a massive success in the United States, why we need similar laws around the world, and why we need to communicate our successes — so people see that the things they do can have a lifesaving impact.

There you go. Not the worst list, but evidence that chatbots don’t obviate the need for human wisdom, experience and proven solutions.

Why does this matter? For now, these chatbots are isolated — you need to know where to go to use them — but search engines have already announced they plan to integrate the technology into average search results. That means that sometimes, instead of a link to an article answering your question, you’ll get a chatbot’s answer. Those answers may or may not come from a reliable authority or be correct.

Many publishers worry that these chatbot answers will supersede links to authoritative web pages where readers can find the correct information. That could wipe out critical web traffic and harm the already struggling news business — which in turn could cause publications to go out of business.

Artificial intelligence is a tool that could do a lot of good when deployed correctly and cautiously. But if it kills off expert sources, it could drive knowledge itself extinct. We’ve already had a bitter taste of that, here in the “post-truth” era. We may not survive much more.

What are the real solutions to the extinction crisis, and how can we each help? We’ll have an article with some answers for you soon — and they won’t be the kind that can be served up by a chatbot.

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Is Kelp the Next Ocean Hero? Only if We Can Protect It.

New research shows we’ve long underestimated the environmental benefits from kelp forests. Now these important ecosystems are threatened.

Floridians are bracing for an unwanted visitor this summer: sargassum. A 5,000-mile-long island of this rootless seaweed is floating around the Atlantic, and large swathes of it are expected to wash ashore in Florida and other states in the coming months. Smaller amounts have already arrived, and the rotting clumps of algae on the beach release hydrogen sulfide, giving off the smell of rotten eggs.

A large landfall will be a health hazard — and a deterrent for tourists and nesting sea turtles alike. It’s also expected to cost communities millions in lost revenue and cleanup.

Out at sea, sargassum isn’t bad: It’s a life raft and food pantry for a variety of ocean organisms. It’s also a reminder of the myriad benefits that algae can provide.

Kelp, in particular, is having a moment.

“Kelp” is a loose designation that encompasses roughly 100 species of brown seaweeds that grow in the cool waters along nearly one-third of the world’s coastlines. The thick algae form underwater forests, providing food and refuge for numerous animals, as well as numerous environmental benefits.

Kelp forests are one of the “most widespread and valuable marine ecosystems on the planet,” according to a United Nations Environment Programme report released in April.

New initiatives aim to tap these resources. But before we can reap the benefits, we need to ensure kelp forests aren’t destroyed.

The Benefits

Kelp has been applied as fertilizer, eaten as food, and used medicinally by coastal peoples for thousands of years. Now researchers are beginning to tally more of its environmental benefits.

Kelp provides habitat and food for ocean dwellers like abalone, lobsters, crabs, octopuses, fish, sea otters, sea lions and whales. It also helps reduce damage from storms, stores carbon, produces oxygen and reduces nutrient pollution in the ocean.

Fish on sea floor surrounded by kelp
A kelp forest in the Great Southern Reef, Australia. Photo: Stefan Andrews / Ocean Image Bank

A new study in Nature Communications found that kelp forests contribute about $500 billion globally to fisheries production, carbon capture, and nutrient-pollution reduction, which can help limit toxic algal blooms and improve water quality. When it comes to mitigating climate change, the researchers estimated that kelp forests sequester nearly 5 megatons of carbon from the atmosphere annually. That’s roughly the emissions from burning 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

This is probably news to most people.

“While kelp forests are valued to some degree by ocean users, they are not perceived to be high-value ecosystems to the public, which can limit public support for kelp conservation and restoration,” the study’s researchers wrote. “We found that kelp forests are on average over 3 times more valuable than previously acknowledged and expect these evaluations to increase as more market and non-market services are assessed.”

Tallying economic contributions, they say, isn’t meant to commodify kelp forests but to help spur conservation efforts and draw attention from policymakers who have overlooked these important ecosystems.

“To date, no global legal or policy instruments have focused explicitly on kelp,” the U.N. report found. “There are, however, many international frameworks and national laws and policies in place that could, in principle, support the conservation and effective management of kelp.”

If we are to draw on those, it will need to happen quickly.

The Threats

Kelp forests across the world are in decline. Around half have been degraded in the past 50 years by a combination of local pressures and climate change. Nutrients, pollutants and sediments that wash into coastal waters from urban developments and agriculture can harm kelp forests.

Climate change also poses big challenges.

Kelp thrive in cool waters and are stressed by marine heat waves and ocean warming. More extensive losses of kelp forests are being found at the warm ends of its ranges. Climate change is also causing kelp species that like warmer water to replace those that prefer colder temperatures, causing a shift in the composition and diversity of kelp forests. In some cases, kelp forests are losing out altogether to mats of turf algae, which don’t provide the same nutrients and habitat complexity.

Warming ocean temperatures are also changing the distribution and abundance of animals that eat kelp. So has hunting or overfishing of their predators. Sea urchins, for example, have been blamed for overgrazing kelp forests in Alaskan waters after their predators — sea otters — were hunted extensively.

Dark purple urchin between rocks and kelp
Urchin and kelp in the Great Southern Reef, Australia. Photo: Stefan Andrews / Ocean Image Bank

One imbalance in the ocean can create another.

“Destructive grazing of kelp has been recorded among many different kinds of herbivores including sea urchins, fish, crustaceans and snails,” the U.N. report found.

The Opportunity

Indigenous peoples have harvested kelp for thousands of years, and many continue to do so. It’s also become the fastest-growing segment of the aquaculture industry.

That’s because a kelp extract called alginic acid, also referred to as algin or alginate, can be used as a thickening and emulsifying agent. It’s found in animal feed, pharmaceuticals, toothpastes, shampoos, salad dressings, frozen foods, dairy products, paper, charcoal and more.

Long strands of kelp being unloaded from truck and hung to dry.
Collecting seaweed and drying it to be processed to make alginate. Photo: Michael, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

But ensuring kelp forests continue to provide important environmental functions means that harvesting wild and cultivated kelp needs to be done sustainably, which isn’t always the case. The U.N. report called attention to unsustainable methods, including industrial harvesting in Norway where trawlers tear kelp from the seafloor, leaving 10-foot-wide gouges. This not only destroys kelp but can harm invertebrates and fish who depend on it, as well as the birds who eat them.

As kelp industries grow, policymakers in the United States hope to provide some ground rules. In March Rep. Jared Huffman of California and Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska introduced the Coastal Seaweed Farm Act of 2023, which calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Agriculture to “carry out a study on coastal seaweed farming, issue regulation relating to such farming, and establish an Indigenous seaweed farming fund.”

The latter would help reduce the cost barriers for Indigenous communities to participate in coastal seaweed farming and use the methods to help restore ecological functions.

“We also want to ensure equity in this field so that Indigenous people can continue benefiting from the industry — so our bill creates a grant program to reduce cost barriers for native communities, many of whom have farmed seaweed for thousands of years,” Huffman said in a statement.

Globally, other efforts are underway as well. The Kelp Forest Alliance aims to protect and restore nearly 10 million acres of kelp forests by 2040. “This is a call for governments to meet their commitments to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and act now to save these ecosystems,” Aaron Eger, lead author of the Nature Communications study and founder of the alliance, wrote in The Conversation.

Kelp needs much more.

The U.N. report provides a list of recommendations, including: taking action to address climate change; investing in mapping and long-term monitoring of kelp forests; better quantifying the ecosystem functions kelp forests provide and how they’re affected by climate change and other human pressures; incentivizing kelp protection and restoration through a monetary value on carbon; assessing practices used for harvesting and making necessary changes; using existing international frameworks to recognize kelp forest values and threats; and ensuring broad partnerships and stakeholder involvement, including with women, local communities, and Indigenous communities.

“The battle to save our kelp forests is just getting started,” wrote Eger. “And we need greater action to protect these intrinsically and economically valuable marine ecosystems.”

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Previously in The Revelator:

The Top 10 Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots to Protect

 

The Perils of Capitalism and Disinformation: 4 Critical New Books

You can’t stop climate change or the extinction crisis without fighting inequality, injustice and conspiracies.

Not every environmental book is an environmental book. Sometimes the best wisdom on how to protect the planet comes from books on other subjects.

Take the four books in this month’s column, for example. None of them are wholly about environmental issues, but they do focus on capitalism, misinformation, inequality and corruption — among the root causes of climate change, environmental injustice and the extinction crisis.

We can’t solve any of these crises without addressing the problems that created them in the first place, so let’s dig into these new books about the “wolves of Wall Street” and other critical topics so we can better protect wolves in the wild — not to mention ourselves.

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism

By Sen. Bernie Sanders with John Nichols

Sanders does two things with this new book: relitigate the 2020 presidential election season and set the stage for the progressive agenda for election seasons to come. As you might expect from the title, the majority of the book addresses the failure of big business and the government that’s supposed to regulate it. At the same time, a smaller yet significant portion of the book covers climate change and environmental justice, which were key elements of Sanders’ platform. I’d love to have seen him cover other crucial subjects like endangered species, but all the same, this is a rousing call to action for the next for the next generation of leaders — or potential leaders.

From the publisher: “Senator Bernie Sanders takes on the billionaire class and speaks blunt truths about our country’s failure to address the destructive nature of a system that is fueled by uncontrolled greed and rigidly committed to prioritizing corporate profits over the needs of ordinary Americans.”

Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity

by Sander van der Linden

No lie — this is an important book. Disinformation helps fuel the climate crisis, as well as so many other problems we face today, from election denial and anti-vaccine attitudes to QAnon and anti-LGBTQ policies. Countering these threats require everyone to operate on the same baseline of truth, and that also requires understanding why mistruth is so easily duplicated from brain to brain. Reading this book will help you to fight the tendrils of misinformation working their way into your perceptions, as well as enable you to prevent them from reaching others. Whether that will help your already infected crazy uncle remains to be seen, but the fact is that this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of truth.

From the publisher: “Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds, exploiting shortcuts in how we see and process information to alter our beliefs, modify our memories, and replicate at astonishing rates. Once the virus takes hold, it’s very hard to cure. Strategies like fact-checking and debunking can leave a falsehood still festering or, at worst, even strengthen its hold. But we aren’t helpless. As van der Linden shows based on award-winning original research, we can cultivate immunity through the innovative science of “prebunking”: inoculating people against false information by preemptively exposing them to a weakened dose, thus empowering them to identify and fend off its manipulative tactics. Deconstructing the characteristic techniques of conspiracies and misinformation, van der Linden gives readers practical tools to defend themselves and others against nefarious persuasion — whether at scale or around their own dinner table.”

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking

By Mehdi Hasan

This is most definitely not an environmental book, and yet I would argue that it is. Getting to a safer, cleaner future will depend on being able to convince people of the science of climate change and the danger we face. That means breaking through disinformation — much of which is, itself, well-argued by design — and the bubbles around people’s minds. This book may offer a road map for many activists, politicians and journalists trying to have those world-saving arguments and discussions.

From the publisher: “MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan isn’t one to avoid arguments. He relishes them as the lifeblood of democracy and the only surefire way to establish the truth. Arguments help us solve problems, uncover new ideas we might not have considered, and nudge our disagreements toward mutual understanding. A good argument, made in good faith, has intrinsic value — and can also simply be fun.”

The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

By Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

No one knows more about fighting unfettered capitalism than Oreskes and Conway, the authors of the classic Merchants of Doubt. Their latest book serves as a potent reminder that you can’t address the climate crisis without addressing injustice, inequality, corruption, misinformation, big business and oligarchy. It’s all connected — but then again, so are the solutions.

From the publisher: “In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with ‘big government’ and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions and defend child labor… By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction and a baleful response to the covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy.”

What other non-environmental books are you reading that help illuminate the problems facing the planet? Send your suggestions to comments@therevelator.org.

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Previously in The Revelator:

The First Must-Read Environmental Books of 2023 Have Arrived

Our Addiction to Online Shopping Is Poisoning These Neighborhoods

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embed from Getty Images

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

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

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

An Empire of Diesel

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

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

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

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

An Undue Burden

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

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

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

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

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

No Choice

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

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

Embed from Getty Images

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

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

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

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

Previously in The Revelator:

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

Why Tree-Planting Schemes Aren’t a Silver Bullet

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

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

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

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

Wrong Place

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

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

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

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

Short-Lived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ensuring Funding

Success also requires sustained effort and money.

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

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

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

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

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

Enabling Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Previously in The Revelator:

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