Many Firefighting Foams Contain Dangerous PFAS ‘Forever Chemicals.’ Have We Learned Our Lesson?

Protecting civilian and military firefighters — and the communities they serve — requires a comprehensive strategy, including disclosure of the chemicals in new firefighting foams.

Every week the lawyers at my firm talk to civilian and military firefighters whose health has been threatened by the very tool they relied upon to protect other peoples’ lives: aqueous film-forming foams.

For decades aqueous film-forming foams were the gold standard in fire suppression. But like many seemingly foolproof solutions, these fire extinguishers bear a dark legacy through the carcinogenic toxic chemicals called per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

Since its invention by the U.S. Navy and the 3M company in the 1960s, PFAS-based firefighting foams, especially aqueous film-forming foams AFFF, were promoted as “safe as soap” until PFAS’s hazardous nature came to light. AFFF is highly effective against flammable fuel fires, but the chemicals that make this foam a lifesaver also cause devastating health and environmental damage.

You’ve probably heard of the alarming nationwide problem of PFAS contamination of our drinking-water sources and their link to various types of cancer, including testicular and kidney, and altered immune and thyroid function.

While almost 97% of Americans are affected by the toxic chemicals, mainly through drinking water, firefighters are disproportionately affected. These hardworking, risk-taking first responders have found themselves directly exposed to PFAS chemicals for decades. The consequences are devastating. Firefighters have a 9% higher risk of developing cancer than the general population, mainly because of military and civilian fire departments’ extensive use of aqueous film-forming foam.

The ‘Forever Chemicals’ and Their Cost

PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” are a large family of human-made substances used in a variety of industries like firefighting and for the production of a wide range of household products. They do not break down naturally and can accumulate in water, soil, and even the human body.

The Environmental Protection Agency has made it clear that there is no safe level of chemical exposure — implying that even low amounts of these substances can pose significant risks over time.

The Environmental Working Group’s updated PFAS contamination map reveals that military installations and industrial facilities have the highest levels of PFAS in their groundwater. Due to the persistence of PFAS in the surroundings, contamination from these sites can easily spread to nearby water systems and endanger communities who rely on the same aquifers or water sources.

Another Tool

This makes PFAS a critical public health and environmental issue, especially for firefighters whose exposure is often unavoidable.

As the realization of the dangers of PFAS grows, so does the push to find safer and more sustainable alternatives. Yet the major question is whether these new formulations truly represent a breakthrough in safety or if they could merely be another regrettable substitution.

The Rise of PFAS-Free Alternatives

The market now offers a range of viable and biodegradable options that promise to reduce the environmental and health risks associated with traditional foams. Many of these formulations adhere to stringent international standards and have already been adopted globally. By April 2019 over 90 fluorine-free foams were produced and made available by 22 different manufacturers. These products vary in composition, but a notable innovation is the emergence of soy-based foams that are seen as more environmentally friendly.

Yet such promising benefits still warrant caution. AFFF was hailed not long ago as nonhazardous — a claim that has since been debunked with the discovery of severe long-term health risks. This may similarly happen with the alternatives, which are not completely guaranteed risk-free.

For instance, some solvent-laden formulations — though PFAS-free — still contain chemicals that can irritate the respiratory system, cause skin reactions, and lead to liver toxicity with prolonged exposure. Meanwhile, soy-based foams may trigger allergic reactions in some individuals, specifically those with sensitivities to the legume.

A study published in May 2023 discusses concerns about hydrocarbon surfactants and other non-fluorinated surfactants commonly found in fluorine-free foam formulations. A 2011 medical study demonstrated that long-term exposure to hydrocarbon surfactants leads to hypotension, mental deterioration, respiratory failure, acute kidney injury, and arrhythmia.

Such studies are necessary, and scientists call for more research to investigate the safety and efficiency of these alternatives.

What Should Be Done Next?

Certain states, such as Alaska, have already banned PFAS-containing firefighting foam. However, state laws do not apply to military bases. The Department of Defense planned to transition to fluorine-free firefighting foams by October 2024, but the deadline was extended. The DOD has been investing in studies to find suitable replacements that conform to its military requirements in terms of efficiency but do not pose environmental and health concerns.

A significant concern linked to the quest for a suitable fluorine-free foam alternative is that many products claim to be greener and safer for the environment and human health. But manufacturers are still not required to disclose all the chemicals they use. Without proper third-party testing, knowing what some foam products contain is hard. To address this, the Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization Clean Production Action in 2020 launched the first eco-label certification program for PFAS-free firefighting foams, the “GreenScreen Certified Standard for Firefighting Foams.” The program ensures that foams claiming to be PFAS-free are indeed free of these added chemicals and thousands of other chemicals of high concern. Several states have already turned to the GreenScreen certification program.

As thorough research and testing necessitate time and resources, we need a more comprehensive and collaborative approach involving all responsible parties, such as the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, research institutes, and firefighting foam manufacturers, to develop a suitable replacement foam that does not pose a risk to firefighter’s health and does not contaminate the environment.

Furthermore, finding a suitable replacement foam is only the first step. While there are guidelines, we need an overarching policy that fire departments can follow throughout the complex transitioning process, including training on handling the new foam, what kind of new equipment would be necessary, and how to decontaminate old equipment.

The rise of PFAS-free alternatives is a positive development, as they appear to be better and safer. But it’s crucial to remember that “safer” does not always mean “safe enough.”

As the world gets hotter and wildfires more severe and deadlier, firefighting foams — and firefighters — will become more important than ever. Let’s look out for their future — and ours.

Scroll down to find our “Republish” button

Previously in The Revelator:

The Silent Threat Beneath Our Feet: How Deregulation Fuels the Spread of Forever Chemicals

The Psychological Effects of Climate Change: The Scientific Explanations — and Solutions That Can Empower Your Mind

Our minds can flip the script on climate change. Here are ways to reframe our perceptions and make us more resilient and empowered.

Are environmental and climate change problems overwhelming you? As psychologists my colleagues and I increasingly see the psychological and physiological effects of climate stress on our clients. These effects — including “fear of the unknown,” instability, catastrophizing, financial insecurity, and biophysiological alterations due to unseasonal weather events — create an ominous feeling of chaos, adversely affecting people’s emotional and mental equilibrium and making it hard to focus on clear actions, solutions, and effective pathways to fighting back climate confusion. This can leave us feeling deeply uneasy about the future.

How can we cope with these feelings of overwhelming apprehension or hopelessness? As individuals we can’t take on the world — that’s an impossible task. So do we just turn away and give up?

Of course not. Instead let’s look at more productive approaches to applying the brakes when anxiety, nihilism, and emotional shutdown leave us stuck in place.

There’s a new and growing field in psychology focused on addressing the increasing burdens on our psyches due to climate chaos. Climate psychology addresses the emotional, mental, and sociological processes that contribute to the climate crisis, and human responses and adaptations to that can make positive, proactive, and productive solutions to climate-change events.

As I’ve seen with my clients, friends, family, and community, the effects of climate change on mental and emotional wellbeing require a fresh approach to this lived experience challenge.

For many people the first step to addressing this psychological crisis starts in our own minds. Psychologically this is known as “taking back the power”: Choose to do something — something that will empower you, energize you, and heal the trauma of climate insecurity, ignorance, and willful destruction by the rich and powerful.

Before we do that, though, it helps to understand the psychological and physiological damage we’re trying to heal.

“Where Did the World I Used to Know Go?”

The word “solastalgia” describes the emotion of longing for a natural world that no longer exists. You’ve probably experienced this: The ongoing disruption of seasonal weather’s traditional timing makes us feel deeply disoriented, moody, depressed, confused, irritable, and uneasy on a subconscious level as our bodies’ biological, mind-affecting chemicals become unbalanced — much like what’s happening to our planet.

There are biochemical reasons for these emotions caused by climate disruption.

Climate trauma causes remarkable physiological — and therefore psychological — alterations to human biochemistry that significantly alter brain chemistry, leading to dysregulation of neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, and dopamine. This adversely affects normal stress response, memory, and emotional regulation.

Physiologically, increased heat and climate instability can even accelerate the aging process, new research suggests.

Examples of events that disorient and alter our minds include:

    • Plants bloom too early for the wildlife that depend on them, pushing them out of synch with the natural system.
    • Salt and freshwater wildlife migrate with warmer temperatures, disrupting our food systems.
    • Wildlife and plants become infected with disease or poisoned due to algae blooms or poisonous flood runoff.
    • Drought causes water insecurity, increases costs, and threatens livelihoods.
    • The loss of slow “transitional seasons” like spring and autumn causes deep temperature swings — and mood swings.
    • Warmer climates mean invasive species, whether planted by humans or caused by “species creep” out of inhospitable climates.
    • Diseases kill wildlife who historically have kept disease-carrying pest populations down.

These disruptions alter our behavior and affect some of our most significant life choices.

Climate Change Affects Life’s Biggest Decisions

People are now questioning important life decisions under an uncertain climate context. Should we have children? Should we buy a home? Where should we live? Can we afford children and a home mortgage? Will there be food and clean water? How secure is my job?

This is the psychological trauma and uncertainty of displacement, which leaves us feeling trapped, without agency or control.

We can’t look into a crystal ball and see the future, but climate anxiety and resource insecurity create a very difficult, confusing decision-making process when planning family, home, job, and community. The increasingly likely threats of displacement — loss of life and health, region, or country — are highly stressful and traumatic because they’re unpredictable.

Globally we see the increasing geographical relocation of individuals, cultures, and communities. Leaving behind generations of the family sense of “home” is highly traumatic as entire cultures must relocate due to resource insecurities caused by drought, floods, invasive species, or the extinction of native species.

These insecurities cause extreme and enduring stress. A few examples include the rising cost or unavailability of insurance for disasters, community dissolution, loss of a “home” or place, and friends and family scattering to new geographic locations because of better opportunities there.

Globally these events affect local, federal, and international government and political decision-making. Huge migrations of wildlife and humans to other geographical locations upset existing populations, which causes perceived cultural threats, so emigrants are demonized, segregated, and violence erupts, destabilizing societies and governments.

All of this creates a universal sense of helplessness: “There’s nothing I can do, so why bother?”

Take Back Your Power: Try This Psychology 101 Exercise

Exercise 1. Spend an hour enviro-dooming online.

It’s easy. Go for it with gusto: Furiously repost the bad things, “like,” and share — send the doom to all your groups and friends. The algorithms and AI will direct you to every negative environmental disaster online, because the scientists hired by Big Tech know what excites your brain chemicals and tickles your brain’s pleasure centers. It’s based on addiction science: Create exciting content, keep supplying more stimulation and agitation. Big Tech is a drug dealer for negative, aggressive, pleasurable chemicals. You’ll always get a fix, because Big Tech algorithms and AI now know your mind — and offers your brain maladaptive chemical and behavioral solutions.

Now stop and check yourself. Scan your mind and body. How do you feel?

Exercise 2: Turn off all your electronics.

Get up and go for a walk, stroll into town and see what’s happening. Art shows? Community events? Farmers markets? What’s new at the library and community center? Is there a park to kick back and enjoy nature? Smile and be nice to strangers and shop clerks, open a door for someone, help someone with directions, or help an elderly or disabled person reach that can of corn on the top shelf. Research shows that when we smile and act nice to strangers, we get a burst of serotonin and other happiness chemicals in our brains. And the people we help do too. It’s contagious.

Now how do you feel?

We can all take advantage of that reset. Whether we’re talking about climate change, civil rights, politics, or anything else, you control the mediums you expose yourself to. Use your critical thinking, set limits and boundaries, resist the manipulation of media.

It takes some practice to resist bad habits. But we can do it.

Let’s reframe your relationship with the world in its current health. Start with your mindset, then, using what you discovered above, branch out into your community. Get involved with others around you and you’ll soon find yourself making small local changes, then bigger ones as your positive engagement ripples outward to others. See how those positive brain chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins — which play crucial roles in regulating mood, promoting well-being, and fostering feelings of pleasure and satisfaction — are radiating out to others, and the world.

Be kind to yourself. It all starts with you.

Scroll down to find our “Republish” button

Previously in The Revelator:

Why Climate Grief Is an Essential for Climate Action

Trump’s Approach to Public Lands? Expanding the Extractive Economy and Declaring a War on Nature

The Trump team has launched a three-pronged attack on the environment. We need to understand it if we hope to stand up to it.

On March 3 Randy Moore, the 20th chief of the U.S. Forest Service, stepped down after a lifelong career that started in 1981. A soil scientist and forester, Moore was also the first African American chief of the Forest Service. His resignation came on the heels of a widespread wave of mass firings of Forest Service personnel that amounted to approximately 10% of its workforce. In his farewell letter, Moore laid bare his frustration regarding the ongoing dismantling of the agency and the need for personnel to stick together and remain nimble, adding that for those in the Forest Service “feeling uncertainty, frustration, or loss, you are not alone.”

Moore was replaced by Tom Schultz, a timber executive with deep ties to the logging industry. Schultz is also the first chief in Forest Service history who has not previously worked in the agency. In his introduction letter, Schultz highlighted his 25 years of land management, focusing on his timber and mineral extraction directive roles in Idaho.

This change in leadership provides a clear example of what the Trump administration means to do to federal agencies and public lands: crush agency capacity, shift focus from conservation to exploitation, and bring private interests directly into public agencies whose mandate is to serve the public.

By weakening protections — and decimating the agencies in charge of enforcing those that are left — the Trump administration will ensure that economic activities have primacy over everything else, including, perhaps, the rule of law.

This shift is rooted in the ideology that nature should be commodified to the utmost extent allowable, and it’s part of a bigger strategy determined to withdraw the state from public life and toward a capitalist economy unrestrained from “unnecessary burdens” like public and environmental protections. Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for this presidential administration, includes detailed instructions to achieve these goals, primarily through diminishing the ability of the administrative state to fulfill its duties.

While much of this has been highly visible, just as much has not.

When austerity-minded governments cut services, often branded as “downsizing,” the costs end up in one of two places.

They can go to government contracts in the private sector, if agencies are expected to keep providing the same services or doing the same amount of work.

Or, if an agency is left resourceless and reduces its work, these costs become social and environmental externalities that fall first and foremost on frontline communities and affected ecosystems.

We’re already seeing the ground laid for both these outcomes, with dire consequences for our public lands and waters.

For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — a building block of the nation’s system for earth monitoring, climate research, and emergency preparedness and response — is preparing to lay off more than 1,000 employees — just ahead of hurricane season.

Even more concerning is the fate of the Department of the Interior, the agency responsible for managing more than 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf. All these resources are now up for grabs to the highest bidder. During CERAWeek, an energy industry meeting organized by S&P Global, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that “If the Interior Department was a stand-alone company, it would have the largest balance sheet in the world, bar none.”

Many of us feel overwhelmed by these changes, which was itself central to the strategy laid out by Project 2025.

We need an approach that allows us to make sense of this new reality. I believe we can understand this “war on nature” by grouping the administration’s actions into three main buckets:

Bucket 1: Fewer Legal Protections

The Trump administration is implementing a coordinated effort to weakening our entire system of public and environmental protections, including federal regulations, operational guidelines and policies, tools such as Resource Management Plans, emergency declarations to bypass environmental reviews, and others. These provide legal and policy guidance for questions of resource extraction, infrastructure buildout, and balancing different policy goals, like development vs. conservation.

In the Department of the Interior, for example, the Trump administration has initiated a push to revise all management plans finalized during the Biden administration. These plans govern the full range of activities that can occur on public lands, including off-highway vehicle use, wildland fire and wildlife management, mineral leasing, and livestock grazing. The revision of these plans was included in one of Trump’s first Executive Orders and a Secretarial Order that soon followed.

There has also been a push for broad deregulation, best captured by another EO called “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” which according to Sharon Block, former OIRA official from the Biden administration, has the potential to be destructive to the “system of rights and protections that our regulatory system has provided for the public since the New Deal.”

Other avenues for eliminating protections include changes in policy implementation, suspension of departmental policies that prioritize conservation and restoration or environmental legal opinions, and redefinition of what is protected under current laws.

Additionally, the administration can misuse processes meant to act as environmental safeguards, as they did when they improperly used emergency declarations to fast-track the approval of pipeline construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The administration has also indicated a preferential or expedited permitting process for investments over $1 billion. This list is not exhaustive.

Bucket 2: Increased Leasing and Resource Extraction

Project 2025 calls for doing everything in the agencies’ power to facilitate resource extraction and leasing.

For example, it urges the Bureau of Land Management to expand onshore and offshore oil and natural gas lease sales to the maximum extent possible. It also urges the expansion of timber harvesting.

In an EO published March 1, the president directed Interior and Agriculture secretaries to issue new guidance to facilitate increased timber production on federal land, instructing agencies to remove as many barriers as possible to expedite permitting for timber harvesting. Similarly, the president has pushed for expanding timber harvesting and mineral extraction in Alaska by proposing to eliminate protections, modify land use plans, and grant permits across the Tongass National Forest and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

This announcement is part of a vast effort to hamstring the capacity of the Forest Service and other land-management agencies, which will likely affect their ability to enforce whatever protections are left and carry out vital work such as wildfire mitigation efforts.

This makes clear the ultimate goal of Project 2025 and this administration: diminishing the capacity of the administrative state and its agencies as much as possible, which is the third and final “bucket.”

Bucket 3: Less Agency Capacity

Under the guise of “downsizing” and “increasing efficiency” in government spending, the Trump administration has been taking a hammer to agency capacity across multiple fronts: constraining budgets and withholding grants, reducing personnel, and eliminating facilities and other resources.

This is where the impact of tech oligarch Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is being felt most strongly. Critically, DOGE is not a department of the U.S. government but an advisory body that was given vast powers to slash regulations and cut expenditures across the government.

Under DOGE around 2,300 employees of the DOI — including 1,000 National Park Service staff members — as well as more than 3,000 employees of the Forest Service were fired unexpectedly in February. Meanwhile another 2,700 Interior Department staff reportedly resigned as a result of Musk’s resignation pressure campaign, which included a series of FAQs regarding the benefits of private sector jobs.

Recently DOGE also assumed authority to review government expenditures. For example, a recent EPA issued a guidance stating that expenses over $50,000 now require DOGE approval. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the ranking minority member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, highlighted, this now means that a host of agency actions including routine contracts and grant awards will now face unnecessary bureaucratic delays.

This is an irony apparently lost on DOGE enthusiasts who take their mission at face value, though not to anyone familiar with Project 2025, which advocates for precisely this sort of reduction in needed government services.

Moreover, as Sen. Whitehouse wrote, allowing “unskilled, self-proclaimed experts … to have veto power over funding determinations is inappropriate and risks compromising the agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment.”

Finally, DOGE has been at the forefront of canceling leases for offices and work spaces used by employees at the National Park Service, EPA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Geological Survey, all of them critical for ensuring responsible land management and rule enforcement.

Now That We’ve Identified the Buckets, What Do We Do?

Although deregulation and the diminishing of agency capacity has been a hallmark of past Republican presidential administrations, the current cycle stands out for its brazenness and illegality — particularly in contrast to the Biden administration, This cycle also represents a departure from the Biden administration’s approach to public-lands management, which took conservation and restoration as explicit policy goals, at the same level as resource extraction, leasing, and grazing. This resulted in more protected lands and waters than any other in American history (a total of 674 million acres), created, expanded, and restored national monuments, and channeled an estimated $35 billion toward conservation efforts.

If we are to prevent Trump 2.0 from causing irreversible damages to the natural world, we must remain vigilant and take action. The administration’s policies have been met with public resistance and legal backlash, forcing the administration to reinstate nearly 25,000 federal employees (many of the reinstated workers, however, were immediately placed on administrative leave).

We are seeing a coordinated effort to upend the public-lands system and the role of federal agencies as we know them. It is now time to take stock, understand the Trump administration’s strategies, and develop responses that will allow us to keep swimming upstream — no matter how strong the current against us.

Previously in The Revelator:

Mining Policy Must Be Reformed

Giraffes for Peace

In a world that feels increasingly at odds, Kenya’s Baringo giraffes showcase how a common cause can unite communities.

On the shores of Lake Baringo in Kenya’s Rift Valley, an unusual common denominator has helped bring peace to two warring communities­ after generations of fighting: the love of giraffes.

Clashes between the two pastoral communities — the Pokot and Il-Chamus (also known as Njemps) — had ebbed and flowed over decades, with most of the conflicts revolving around access to land, water or cattle.

A cycle of droughts and floods, the spread of invasive plants that reduced grassland for livestock, and a surge of malaria made matters worse.

By 2000 the country was in the throes of its worst drought in 60 years. The impacts on the Lake Baringo region were devastating. People were displaced, and many lost much of their livestock. Already-existing tensions increased and spurred a steady stream of brutal skirmishes involving cattle raids, home invasions, attacks, and killings between the two groups.

“It was very bad,” recalls Rebby Sebei, a 35-year-old woman from East Pokot who now manages the Ruko Community Wildlife Conservancy in Baringo County. “It was based on who you were, if you had a different language.”

The violence continued to escalate. In March 2005 a series of armed attacks by Pokot warriors on the Il-Chamus resulted in several dead and more than 2,000 head of cattle stolen.

The brutality also pushed people from their homes.

“Women were forced to spend the night in the bushes and sleep there with their kids,” Sebei says. But the bush, too, was hazardous. “There were so many dangers, like snakes and scorpions.”

Families were often separated, including Sebei’s.

When she was around 15 years old, she came home for school break and found her family gone.

“At first I couldn’t find them,” she says. “I had to inquire, talk, get some good people to take me around. At that time, there were no mobile phones, no transport, no mobility. I needed to walk for long distances.”

When the family finally reunited, they stayed in the bush where it was safer.

“We spent many nights outside,” she says. “It was very memorable.”

A Big Idea

To stop the violence, elders from both communities sought common ground.

And they found it with giraffes.

By restoring these animals they both treasured to their ancestral land, they would work together toward a shared purpose. That, in turn, would build trust and increase understanding among the different communities.

Historically, the area was home to the rare Baringo giraffe (also known as Rothschild’s or Nubian giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis camelopardalis). A subspecies of northern giraffe, they’re known for a coat pattern that disappears down their legs so that it looks like they’re wearing white socks. According to the IUCN Red List, there are only about 2,000 left in the world, including fewer than 800 in Kenya.

Although Kenya has two other giraffe species (Masai and reticulated), this area was known for the Baringo giraffes who used to live here. But decades of conflict, expanding human settlements, and hunting had wiped them out. They hadn’t been seen there since the 1960s.

Even if more modern residents had never seen giraffes, both communities still revered them.

Charles Lekatai, a ranger commander for the Ruko Community Conservancy, told Northern Rangelands Trust in 2020 that he grew up hearing his grandfather’s tales about “a strange, long-necked, spotted animal that used to roam the rangelands around the village, feeding on trees and shrubs” and that it captured his imagination.

Sebei says the animals had a particularly important cultural relevance.

“Giraffe are associated with someone who plans, who sees far, because of their height,” she says. Like seeing into the future. “Elders equated that to the vision of people coming together and living in peace.”

Working Together

Based on that vision, the two communities came together in 2008 to establish the 44,000-acre Ruko Community Conservancy (so named because it brought together the Rugus and Komollion areas of Baringo County), with each setting aside part of their land for it and being part of the management board.

They also designated about 100 acres on the Longicharo peninsula as a special area for the giraffe. Not only was it lush with acacia trees — a giraffe favorite — but its geography (surrounded by water on three of its four sides) would make it easier to protect them from poachers.

In 2011 the communities worked with the Kenya Wildlife Service and others to move eight Baringo giraffes — two males and six females — to the conservancy.

The achievement, the first time that the animals had lived in this stretch of their native habitat in 70 years, received media coverage around the world.

“We sang, celebrated, and the elders blessed the giraffes,” conservancy warden James Cheptulel recalled to Northern Rangelands Trust in 2018. “Everyone, whether Il-Chamus or Pokot, came together to celebrate the return of the giraffe to Baringo.”

Both communities hoped that working together would not only help the giraffes but also ease tensions and make their own lives better by bringing in tourism.

And it worked.

By 2018 the conservancy had about 500 guests each year, with 40% of tourism revenue paying for conservancy operations and the rest split equally between the two communities for healthcare and education.

“In spite of our past differences,” Cheptulel said in 2018, “what matters to us now is the work that the conservancy has entrusted us with.”

Challenges

But it wasn’t all rosy.

“We were having all sorts of challenges,” Sebei recalls. Some giraffes died.

Calves did especially poorly. The first was strangled by a python, and others died shortly after birth, likely related to nutritional deficits.

“Calves couldn’t survive more than 14 days,” Sebei says. “There were constant attacks by disease and pests. And there wasn’t enough forage to sustain pregnancies.”

To address the problems, the conservancy started to explore moving the giraffes. Together with the American group Save Giraffes Now, they built a 4,400-acre sanctuary on the mainland.

But they had to accelerate their plans.

In 2020 intense rains caused the lake’s water to rise dramatically, cutting the peninsula off from the mainland and trapping the giraffes on a small, muddy 8-acre island.

While the conservancy and its partners figured out what to do, rangers ferried lucerne pellets and other food to the island to help keep the giraffes alive.

Giraffe Rescue

Eventually the community designed a special barge to bring the giraffes across a mile of open lake. In essence, it was a big raft, with tall, reinforced sides on 60 empty steel drums for buoyancy, towed by motorboat.

Asiwa, a giraffe who has become stranded on Longicharo Island, is moved off the flooded island by a barge December 2, 2020. Photo by Ami Vitale, courtesy of Save Giraffes Now

One by one, the community — together with partners Kenya Wildlife Service, Save Giraffes Now, and Northern Rangelands Trust — brought the giraffes across the lake, with the first moved on December 2, 2020, and the last — a mom and newborn calf — four months later, on April 12, 2021.

“One unique thing about this move was that the community tried training the giraffes to enter the barge voluntarily using food — acacia and mangoes,” said Susan Myers, CEO of Save Giraffes Now. “They were able to move three of eight giraffes successfully that way, and this model is now being tried elsewhere in Africa.”

Today the herd has grown to 30, up from 18 in 2023. Translocations and successful births drove the population expansion. In July 2024 Kenya Wildlife Service moved seven giraffes overland by truck from a farm in Eldoret and, in January 2025, another two from the Giraffe Center outside Nairobi.

2024 Ruko Translocation: Photo courtesy of Save Giraffes Now.

The partners hope the newcomers will improve the giraffes’ genetic diversity as they breed and multiply, which Kenya Wildlife Service notes will help “ensure the robust health in their offspring.” That, in turn, would eventually help them repopulate the entire region.

As before, the communities welcomed the arrival of the giraffes with singing and dancing. And they also recognized the burgeoning peaceful coexistence between them.

At the celebrations members of both communities expressed how the conservancy had brought them together. For example, James Parkitore, from the Il-Chamus community, told Agence France-Presse that he thought the conflict “is over now because we are interacting,” while Pokot farmer Douglas Longomo said “we can move freely without any fear.”

Kenya continues to experience devastating drought and floods — including a deadly flood in the capital city of Nairobi in May 2024. The constant flooding has doubled the size of Lake Baringo since 2010, which in 2022 inspired some residents to sue the government for not doing enough to address climate change. The region has also experienced outbreaks of malaria, exacerbated by the floods which leave pockets of standing water that act as breeding grounds for the mosquitos that carry the disease. And the people around Baringo have experienced an “endless cycle of displacement.”

But even amidst this stress, the giraffes and the most recent translocations remain “a game-changer to the community,” Sebei says.

“Giraffes have a symbolic meaning to the two warring communities and has united them,” she says. “When they see giraffes, they see peace.”

Scroll down to find our “Republish” button

Previously in The Revelator:

A Day for Africa’s Disappearing Giants

Save This Species: Sumatran Orangutans

The “people of the forest” won’t live in the wild much longer if we keep chopping down their rainforest homes.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of “Save This Species” — a column that lets people advocating for, or working with, a rare of interesting plant or animal share their stories and passions. We launch this column with my own entry, revealing one of the reasons so much of my journalism focuses on orangutans:

Species name:

Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii), one of the world’s three orangutan species.

IUCN Red List status:

Critically endangered.

Description:

These famously orange-haired great apes stand about 5 and a half feet tall when full grown — not that they stand all that often. They spend most of their time in the trees; when they’re on the ground, they tend to use all four limbs to ambulate. The older males grow their famous cheek flanges (that’s the puffy, fleshy bits that encircle their faces).

Where they’re found:

The north end of the island of Sumatra, in Indonesia. Most remain in Aceh Province, although a few small and potentially unviable populations persist on other parts of the island.

Why they’re at risk:

It’s hard to be an arboreal species when the trees you live in and depend on (the word “orangutan” means “people of the forest”) keep getting chopped down to make way for plantations (mostly palm oil), logging, mining, and other human activities. Work crews have been known to kill adult orangutans to get them out of the way and then sell their infant offspring into the illegal pet trade.

My favorite experience:

In 2015 I met and “interviewed” a 55-year-old Sumatran orangutan named Inji, who at the time was the world’s oldest known member of her species. Originally a victim of the pet trade, she’d been living at Oregon Zoo in Portland since 1961. During the interview her keepers showed me how they made sure she got plenty of exercise and social engagement to keep her both physically and mentally healthy (lessons I’m taking to heart now that I’ve reached that same age). She moved a bit stiffly, sure, but she had a lot of character and took great interest in my interest in her. She didn’t belong in captivity, but there was no going back after her time in the pet trade, and she served as a wonderful ambassador for her species.

Inji died in 2021 at age 61, having lived longer than any other orangutan on record.

I’ve written about orangutans dozens of times since meeting her, and they remain my favorite primate species — if not my favorite species of all. Meeting Inji and writing about the journey that brought her from Sumatra to Oregon helped to cement that appreciation and push my journalism to further protect them.

What do we need to do to protect this species?

The world needs to exert more pressure on Indonesia to slow or stop deforestation.

What you can do to help:

It can be hard to directly protect a species on the other side of the world, but there are a few steps anyone can take to help Sumatran orangutans (or other orangutan species).

First off, don’t buy any foods containing palm oil. Deforestation for palm-oil plantations has exploded over the past decade or so and now threatens a much wider range of species, but forgoing this ingredient is a good step toward protecting orangutans and other wildlife. (It’s also high in saturated fat, so skipping it is probably a good idea anyway.)

Second, don’t buy furniture or other products containing Indonesian wood. Sustainable certification programs exist and could theoretically label lumber from Sumatra as sustainable, but why take that risk?

Third, if you suspect a corporation is selling products that put orangutans at risk, write to them to complain.

Finally, we can support on-the-ground efforts to protect orangutans, either by donating or spreading the word about their efforts (yes, we can still use social media for good). I’ve interviewed experts from several notable organizations over the years, including the Sumatran Orangutan Society, the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, and Orangutan Outreach. Many of these organizations help support orphaned orangutans or other rescued apes, a sadly important part of the mission of preserving these species for future generations.

Do you have a story about species advocacy or conservation to share? Here’s how to write your own “Save This Species” entry.

Scroll down to find our “Republish” button

Call for Submissions: Save This Species

Have you worked with or advocated for an imperiled, rare, or fascinating species? We want to share your stories and support efforts to protect these endangered plants and animals.

For the past four years, The Revelator’s “Species Spotlight” feature has helped scientists and conservationists share their stories about rare, endangered, and fascinating plants and animals around the world.

Now “Species Spotlight” is morphing into something similar but new. We’re calling it “Save This Species” — a companion to our popular “Protect This Place” feature.

This time we’re opening submissions to anyone who has worked with or advocated for these amazing species. If you’re trying to make this a better world for a species you care about, we want to share your story and passion — and help you encourage others to help save them.

Our first “Save This Species” feature launches today — penned by myself (I can’t let you have all the fun, after all).

But after this one, the feature belongs to the public. We’d love to have you as one of the authors. I’ve posted instructions and a writing template, and you can submit drafts to me at [email protected]. Don’t worry if you’re not a professional writer: We’ll help you craft and edit your submission so it can do the best job possible to advocate for your favorite species.

We’ll accept these on an ongoing basis (there’s no deadline) and we publish them under a Creative Commons license, allowing our partners around the world to republish them.

And don’t forget our ongoing “Protect This Place” feature, which has its own template and remains open to submissions as well.

What are you waiting for? The world’s endangered species aren’t going to protect themselves. We look forward to your submissions.

Scroll down to find our “Republish” button

Protect This Place: Montana’s Untamed Black Ram Forest

A proposed timber sale within the Yaak Valley threatens massive old-growth trees and habitat. Instead, could it become the nation’s first climate refuge?

Can one tree save a forest? Absolutely.

The Place:

The Black Ram region of extreme northwestern Montana — on the U.S.-Canada border — exists in a magical seam of unparalleled biodiversity where the Pacific Northwest integrates into the Northern Rockies. It’s the first place where water flows into the state of Montana, and the last place where sunlight falls each day.

Black Ram is in Yaak Valley, itself part of the Kootenai National Forest, which excels at storing significant amounts of carbon in long-term safekeeping. It’s the wettest place in Montana. It’s the lowest elevation. It’s the northernmost. Its waters are the purest — the only watershed in the state that remains free of aquatic invasive species. Fire will come here, too, but it will come here last.

There’s still not a single acre of permanently protected land in the Yaak, which we at the Yaak Valley Forest Council define as the million-acre land mass lying north of the Kootenai River (the largest tributary to the Columbia) and south of the Canadian border. The Yaak’s western boundary is the Idaho border, and its eastern boundary is the enormous (and aging) manmade reservoir of Lake Koocanusa.

The Yaak is literally a land that time forgot; during the last Ice Age, when the glaciers retreated, the Yaak remained uncarved, sleeping in a nest or bowl of ice that did not retreat, and which took a couple extra thousand years to melt.

In this regard, it’s one of the newest places on Earth. And in it a rare primary forest such as the one at Black Ram is an extremely valuable and mysterious thing, worthy of much deeper study.

The U.S. Forest Service has plundered Yaak for decades — two-thirds of it has been roaded or clearcut, when once roughly 50% of the valley was old growth.

And yet the Yaak lives and possesses an unvanquishable rainforest spirit of eternal green fire. Here, rot is the primary agent of change, not fire. Its spectacular biodiversity is still intact, for nothing has gone extinct here yet — not since the last Ice Age.

Fully 25% of Montana’s list of sensitive species are found on this one national forest. Dozens of migrating bird species depend on its unique habitat. So do cutthroat trout, northern alligator lizards, pika, and endangered grizzlies. An estimated 18-25 bears remain in the Yaak, and the recent deaths of female grizzlies leaves this isolated population even more imperiled.

The Yaak is also the epicenter of western larch, a deciduous conifer that can live nearly 1,000 years and rains billions of golden needles onto the valley in the fall, covering everything, the animate and the inanimate, in spun gold, sometimes over the course of but a single night.

Why It Matters:

Not every gesture in the Anthropocene should be made purely for the sake of that brief, wobbling, severely untested species called humanity. It should be noted, however, that old and mature forests such as those in the Black Ram region protect us: They can store up to 12% of the globe’s annual carbon emissions in long-term safekeeping. The Yaak itself has been called “the Fort Knox” of aboveground carbon storage in Montana.

So it matters that Yaak Valley is the poster forest for Forest Service overreach — for the agency’s stealth campaign to liquidate old growth rather than protect it.

In this case the Service has proposed a timber sale at Black Ram that would affect more than 95,000 acres, including 4,000 acres that could be clearcut. The Service has already hacked its way into this ecosystem, widening a road near an existing clearcut and harming centuries-old trees in the name of “fire prevention.”

It matters because an enormous timber lobbying group, American Forest Resources Council, has declared Black Ram a line in the sand.

Well, so too have the six employees of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, The Montana Project, and a whole lot of other people, including writers Wendell Berry, Richard Powers, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, musicians Maggie Rogers and James McMurtry, poet laureate Beth Ann Fennelly, painters Monte Dolack and Clyde Aspevig, and many more.

AFRC has specifically listed YVFC’s 2023 court victory, which temporarily blocked the logging plan at Black Ram, as one of the key reasons they’ve petitioned the Supreme Court to do away with the National Environmental Policy Act, complaining that a group as small as ours should not be able to intervene in lawbreaking. As you can see, democracy is under attack here, too — one of 10,000 arrows fired at it daily.

The successful defense of Black Ram — since appealed by the Forest Service — also matters because it is important from a scientific perspective that the general populace understand that the wildfires of this century are wind- and drought- and temperature-driven, not forest-driven. One need look no farther than the streets and buildings of Hollywood to understand this: that the dark cool forests of the north country are not our enemy; they are our solution. Global warming and the burning of fossil fuels is invisible, unfortunately, and therefore deniable.

Black Ram matters also because it is the foundation for a new social movement of artists-as-activists. Much as the Harlem Renaissance and the Hudson River School became a place-based social and artistic movement, so too is the old forest at Black Ram becoming one, attracting the nation’s finest photographers, painters, poets, musicians, sculptors, performance artists, luthiers, and more. U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón visited the old forest and wrote two poems about Black Ram, one of which she read to President and Mrs. Biden.

Actor and musician Jeff Bridges has commissioned several craft guitars to be made from a piece of ancient tight-grained spruce damaged by a Forest Service roadbuilding operation — 315 years a tree, and now but in one year a guitar. The guitars are being played around the country as part of Bridges’ and Breedlove Guitars’ “All in This Together” sustainability campaign.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Stop Black Ram (@stopblackram)

Who’s Protecting It Now:

The tiny band of six employees of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, whose mission is “working for a wild Yaak through science, education, and bold action,” are aided by an arts-based organization called the Montana Project. YVFC has partnered to provide invaluable ground truthing to partner in legal victories along with the Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator), the Alliance for Wild Rockies and Wild Earth Guardians, as well as Save the Yellowstone Grizzly, to help hold back the bulldozers — for now.

The heart of wildness, heart of science, heart of mystery, heart of art is at stake, clinging by one thread: a good story.

The story is this: We went into the old forest with rage against the U.S. Forest Service, which plans to clearcut this ancient primary centuries- or perhaps millennia-old forest — but we realized our rage might not be the most effective advocacy. Instead, we’re gambling on art, paired with an increased dosage of science.

The Forest Service went in prematurely and painted the trees with bright orange and blue paint. It strung what seemed like miles of ribbons and widened a road to the edge of the proposed giant clearcuts. We went to court and prevailed, but still the Service hungers for this land, appealing our victory.

In the old-growth clearcutting that occurred when the Service widened the road (calling it “fire protection”), they damaged numerous ancient giant Engelmann spruce at the edge of the new clearcut. Engelmann spruce are prized for producing guitars that make the cleanest, clearest sound. From this fallen giant, we cut out a section about the size of a whale vertebrae, which revealed the most perfect tight-grained spruce imaginable. We wheelbarrowed it out, took it to master luthier Kevin Kopp and the team at Breedlove Guitars, who used the thin sheets cleaved from its center to make a small handful of Black Ram guitars, which now advocate for the protection of old forests around the world.

Can one tree save a forest? Absolutely.

What This Place Needs:

We need more artists to come paint it, poets to write about it, and musicians — around the world — to sing for it and to play the Black Ram guitar at concerts.

We need more scientists to study this unique ecosystem, engaging grad students in long-term studies that measure the effects of climate change on sensitive species, including our own. There are so many questions to answer here: Do western larch hybridize with alpine larch, and if so, where is the strand line between the two, and is it rising or falling? What about our whitebark pine, the northernmost in the lower 48? What is the fungal profile beneath a clearcut compared to that of an ancient primary forest — never logged, never roaded — such as the rarity at Black Ram? What a great opportunity for a biological transect across the entire million-acre Yaak country, such as explorer Michael Fay and National Geographic did across the entirety of the African continent.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Stop Black Ram (@stopblackram)

We also need a big green group or coalition to sponsor a national concert of awareness campaign — call it Climate Aid — celebrating the ability of old and mature forests to store up to 12% of the world’s annual carbon emissions. Sure it’s a big dream, but what have we got to lose? Oh, right: everything. How much time do we have left? Another 1,000 years? Certainly not. A thousand days? Unlikely. Hurry.

Twelve percent is not 100%, but it is enough to buy us a bit of the commodity rarer than gold or silver, time, and life.

The Yaak Valley Forest Council’s dreams are as big as the land itself, yet utterly achievable. Because forests of big old trees store far more carbon than younger forests and smaller trees, and because they continue over the course of their long lives to absorb and store carbon at a far faster rate than the pipe-stem youngsters. (Even when an old forest burns, the vast majority of its carbon remains stored on-site, aboveground, in the dramatic firescape of the sentinels and spars that then become the home of so many of the cavity-nesters that are part of the secret thrumming engine of the Yaak’s relatively unstudied ecosystem.)

We envision Yaak being declared a Climate Refuge — the first in a national and then global Curtain of Green, old forests protected everywhere but particularly in the northern latitudes, where boreal and sub-boreal forests possess the ability to store extraordinary amounts of carbon, up to six times more than the Amazonian rainforests.

We envision the Black Ram Climate Refuge as being a place dedicated to the maximum recovery of the Yaak’s grizzly bears — currently referred to by some scientists as “the walking dead,” unless current management practices change.

We envision it being an area for increased scientific as well as artistic inquiry into the effects of climate change on sensitive species, including our own, and co-managed by a Tribal nonprofit such as the Montana band of the Kootenai, who traditionally performed the annual summer drumming ceremony of the Sun Dance along the banks of the Yaak River.

And the tiny staff of YVFC needs financial support; for parts of nine years now, our little six-member group has kept the Department of Agriculture, 35,000 strong, from erasing this ancient inland rainforest.

But most of all Black Ram needs one more year of grace, after the thousands that have preceded it — millennia that have been invested in this farthest and most unknown corner of Montana.

Lessons From the Fight:

We don’t have the kind of access where a lobbyist can freely enter a congressperson’s office, but each of you has the ability to write and let the politicians know they’re being watched on this issue. That a light is shining down from above on this dark shady cool wet ancient forest. You may well know a musician or other artist with whom you want to share this story, or a scientist. That’s what a refuge is, in part: a place to come to, in advance of the flames. It’s your land, our land; the law requires the management officials and agencies to take into consideration your input on these actions.

Whether you’ve ever walked in the old forest at Black Ram or not is not the primary consideration. Your passion is your authority, this land is your land, and again, by joining in the defense of Black Ram — advocating to protect it forever as a Climate Refuge, rather than converting it to hot windswept dust — you can take active steps to help slow the rate of climate change. There is so much now that lies beyond our control that it’s exhilarating to find something we can do: that we still have the power of action available to us. All it takes is one short and direct letter: “Don’t clearcut Black Ram. Protect it as a Climate Refuge. Make the recovery of the Yaak’s supremely imperiled grizzly bear far more of a priority than it currently is for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Scroll down to find our “Republish” button

Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: Ladakh, the Planet’s ‘Third Pole’

From EPA Staff: An Open Letter to the American Public

“We cannot stand by and allow this to happen,” write current and former EPA employees. “We need to hold this administration accountable.”

Editor’s note: This op-ed was written by a group of current and former employees of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who have asked to remain anonymous due to concerns about retaliation. It was originally published by Environmental Health News and is republished with permission.

The Trump administration is making accusations of fraud, waste, and abuse associated with federal environmental justice programs under the Inflation Reduction Act as justification for firing federal workers and defunding critical environmental programs. But the real waste, fraud, and abuse would be to strip away these funds from the American people.

As current and former employees at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who developed and implemented the agency’s environmental justice funding and grant programs, we want to offer our first-hand insights about the efficiency and importance of this work. This is not about defending our paychecks. This is about protecting the health of our communities.

IRA funding is often described as a “once-in-a-generation investment,” putting billions of dollars toward improving the lives of American families in red, blue, and purple states. Working with communities, we’ve been placing these resources directly into their hands, supporting people to better protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land where we live, learn, work, play, and grow — including key protections from natural disasters.

As civil servants, we took an oath to protect and invest in the American public. We are committed to providing effective programs and being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, and there are many policies in place to ensure our accountability. But despite our careful planning and oversight, the new administration is halting programs Americans depend on for their health and wellbeing.

We should work together to demand that the Trump administration restore this critical funding back to the people.

The Risks of Losing a Once-in-a-Generation Investment

The Bush administration introduced environmental equity (and justice) programming to the EPA in the 1990s. EPA staff working on environmental justice programs partnered with communities to meet their needs and used rigorous systems to track funds and results.

The Trump administration recently paused many of these environmental justice programs that fund community-led projects like air, water, and soil testing; training and workforce development; construction or cleanup projects; gardens and tree planting; and preparing and responding to natural disasters. Other examples of the EPA’s environmental justice programs include providing safe shelters during and after hurricanes, land cleanups to reduce communities’ exposure to harmful pollutants, and providing water filters to protect residents from lead in drinking water.

This administration has halted funds, claiming “the objectives of the awards are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” In reality, these funds were approved by Congress, and these grants remain in alignment with the agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment. Even though there are court orders to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal grants, the Trump administration continues to withhold this critical money from the people who need it most.

We cannot stand by and allow this to happen. We need to hold this administration accountable to serving the American people, applying the same mandates that we have held our federal workforce and grant recipients to: follow the law, follow the science, and be transparent.

Terminating the EPA’s Environmental Justice Programs Is Hurting Our Communities and the Economy

Some grant recipients who have lost access to EPA funding had already been working for more than a year on projects that must now be paused. Many recipients have hired local employees and made commitments in their communities.

Now that funds are being pulled back, these organizations have had to lay off staff, pause local contracts with private companies and small businesses, and shut down community-driven projects. These attacks will impact the integrity of programs funded by our hard-earned tax dollars and take money away from communities across the country.

By withholding promised funding and terminating existing contracts, the Trump administration is exposing the EPA to increased risks of litigation. Relationships that were built through years of meaningful engagement between communities and the federal government are being jeopardized. Organizations, institutions, and companies will likely shy away from future federal grant or contracting opportunities because no one wants to work with someone who doesn’t pay their bills and backs out on their promises.

It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. Government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors. It is fraud for the U.S. Government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.

How to Take Action to Restore Funding to the American People

It can feel impossible to keep up with the news right now, but this story touches all of us. We should pay attention to what’s going on in our communities and find ways to stay engaged, like attending town halls to hear about the local impacts of federal policies and making your voice heard.

If you are interested in advocating for the return of federal funding to the American people, we urge you to:

    • Advocate for funding to be restored in your community. Take part in local town hall and other events in your area to advocate for federal funding to be returned to the people. Make your voice heard and claim your right to clean water, clean air, and a safe environment.
    • Learn how the EPA’s environmental justice programs are investing in your state, city, or community. View this environmental justice grants map to see where IRA dollars and funding from the EPA’s environmental justice programs were invested.
    • Learn how federal cuts are impacting your communities. Stay tuned to view a Federal Cuts Tracker Map (we’ll add a link here when it’s live) to read and share stories about how federal cuts are currently impacting your communities.
    • Share on social media. Share our story or similar news stories on social media with #federalfundingfreeze, #federalcuts, or #truthtopower.

Previously in The Revelator:

Life Before the EPA

How DOGE Cuts Threatens Science That Could Save the Planet

Politicians have mocked, belittled, and cut federally funded research for decades, but funding basic science has a long history of lifesaving discoveries.

Just because you don’t understand why or how federal funds are being spent doesn’t mean they’re waste or fraud — especially if you’re too lazy or ideologically focused to ask questions about the nature of the spending in the first place.

I learned those lessons more than a decade ago when I covered a great program called the Golden Goose Awards, which recognizes federally funded research that often seemed trivial at the time it was funded but later yielded lifesaving science or commercially important technologies.

At the time federally funded researchers often found their projects mocked, trivialized, belittled, or under attack — in ways that almost seem quaint today as the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE team take a chainsaw and blowtorch to the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NOAA, USGS, and other federal agencies.

How many of those now-unfunded research projects could have protected us from climate change, pollution and toxic chemicals, or the extinction crisis?

We may never know the answer to that question, but a look at two of the most recent Golden Goose Award winners offers a clue:

    • A project about the red-cockaded woodpecker that revealed new ways to protect all birds.
    • An observation that “bright pink penguin poop appeared on satellite images” yielded a 40-year effort to track penguin populations (and all wildlife) from space.

You can find a lot more in past years’ award recipients, including a study of frog skin that has saved 50 million human lives and another frog study that revealed the nature of the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus.

For more on the hidden value of federally funded scientific research — and ideas about how to protect it in the future — let’s look back at my November 2013 article on the Golden Goose Awards, originally published in IEEE-USA’s Today’s Engineer. The original is no longer online, so the publisher has approved its republication below.

Federally Funded Research: The Key to Unexpected (and Valuable) Discoveries

One of the most important discoveries in modern genetics and biotechnology got its start more than four decades ago with a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the humble bacteria that live in high-temperature geysers in Yellowstone National Park.

Back in 1969 microbiologist Thomas Brock and his undergraduate research assistant Hudson Freeze journeyed to Yellowstone and discovered a new bacteria species, which they named Thermus aquaticus bacteria, in the waters of the Lower Geyser Basin. In the years that followed their discovery unlocked new fields of study for other researchers, inspiring new technologies for studying DNA, genetic tests to diagnose diseases and conditions, and sequencing the human genome.

That’s the beauty and importance of federally funded research, says Freeze, who today serves as the director of the genetic disease program at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “You can’t predict where the research is going to go next.”

Taking a Chance on the Unexpected

The early work of Brock and Freeze has not been forgotten. This year they are among the honorees of the second annual Golden Goose Award, created to recognize scientists and engineers whose federally funded research led to “significant human and economic benefits.” The award, now in its second year, highlights seemingly obscure federally funded studies that led to later breakthroughs which had a major impact on society. The other recipients of this year’s award include John Eng, whose study of Gila monster venom led to an important drug for diabetes; and David Gale, Lloyd Shipley and Alvin Roth, whose separate research into subjects as varied as marriage stability and urban school choice programs led to the creation of the national kidney exchange program.

“The value of federally funded research has been proven time and time again,” says Barry Toiv, vice president for public affairs at the Association of American Universities, one of the organizations sponsoring the Golden Goose Award. “Economists suggest that 50% of growth over the last several decades has been a result of innovation, much of which is in turn a result of federally funded research at American universities.”

Toiv says this research is important even though “it’s impossible to know where so much of it is going to lead. It’s basic research, mostly, and it may not have some end-result in mind when it takes place.”

Federally funded research is the “only place that you can take that kind of chance,” says Freeze. “Private industry can’t do it because they have to show that they’re working on something that will eventually yield a profit.” He notes that the lifesaving research being done at his own organization, a nonprofit, would probably not be conducted at all in the for-profit world.

Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, echoes this observation. “There’s not a lot of room for fundamental science in an environment where people are driven by the next quarterly report.” He says corporations have a hard time justifying investments that “may take decades to pay off or pay off in a completely different way than anticipated and not necessarily in a way that would enrich the company which did the work.”

ORNL receives its funding through the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, as well as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Although the lab does tend to work in areas that Mason characterizes as “not too far away from some kind of end-use application,” the fact that they do not build or sell anything means they are not restricted to work that has an immediate commercial application. “We can push things to a point of proof of principle and then, hopefully, hand it off to the private sector or the Department of Defense or whoever to really deploy it.”

Research for All

Beyond funding individual projects, federal dollars also help pay for collective resources that become available to researchers from around the country. ORNL, for example, hosts the famous Titan supercomputer, the Spallation Neutron Source, and the High Flux Isotope Reactor, among other tools.

“It’s a big investment,” Mason says. “These are shared resources. They serve a wide range of communities.”

These types of systems exist outside the scope of most if not all corporate budgets, says IEEE Fellow Pramod Khargonekar, assistant director for the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Directorate. “Modern scientific and engineering research involves very sophisticated infrastructure, whether that infrastructure is physical laboratories, instruments or computational resources. It’s very difficult to imagine that any entity other than the federal government would have the resources to create and then support and sustain this kind of fundamental, long-term basic research. I think it’s just too expensive for any single entity.”

Beyond that, Mason points out that the majority of the research conducted at government facilities is open-literature research.

“It’s not proprietary, so again, how would you ever justify a return to shareholders if the results are just going to be published in the open literature?”

Since most of this research is basic science, it is also hard to protect it as intellectual property, a priority for corporate research.

Outside of the research itself, the federal government helps support the development of young scientists.

“We’re not just federally funding research,” Toiv says, “we’re also funding training of scientists and engineers, and this has been extraordinarily successful for the country.”

Khargonekar himself benefited from that support back in 1985 when, as a young researcher, he received the NSF’s Presidential Investigator Award.

“I must say it was one of the best things that have happened to me in professional life,” he tells me. “I still remember receiving the certificate with President Reagan’s signature on it. You know, I was born in India and I came to U.S. to do my graduate work. But to receive an award from the President of the United States left a deep impression on me and was very, very helpful in my early research.”

He used the funding from the award to attract “some really outstanding graduate students” and together they wrote a number of papers he says have had a very strong impact on the field of control theory. “That NSF Presidential Investigator Award was certainly very critical to our success and I think at the foundation of my professional career,” he says.

Despite Successes, Threats Abound

Despite the proven track record of federally funded research, budgets continue to shrink. The federal sequester of 2011 and the shutdown of 2013 both hurt federally funded science, and some politicians see the need to cut things even more.

“Research funding is going down,” Toiv says. “It’s not just flat. It’s just declining.” Many research labs have had to shutter projects, lay off employees and scale back their operating hours as a result of these cuts.

Meanwhile a few politicians even go as far as to mock federally funded science projects, something we first saw decades ago when then-Senator William Proxmire began issuing his monthly Golden Fleece Awards. (The Golden Goose Award is named in part as a response to Proxmire’s awards.)

“This is damaging to the public’s view of science,” Toiv says. “When policymakers ridicule individual examples of research, when they look for things that sound funny, when they target and when they try to de-fund them or even try to de-fund entire disciplines, they are dismissing the possibilities of discovery. They are, in the long run, damaging the country, because they are limiting the possibilities of innovation that benefits the economy, that leads to a new industry and that leads to a new idea that ends up saving lives.”

The public isn’t the only group to feel the effect of this dismissal. Researchers feel it as well.

“If the creativity of researchers is stifled, if they are worried or if federal agencies are worried that they can’t fund research, it could damage the entire innovation enterprise that has made this country,” Toiv says.

While Sanford-Burnham has ramped up its efforts to attract additional funding from philanthropists and to license some of its discoveries, that may not be the most sustainable path. Freeze says funding uncertainty has already created a brain drain in his organization, as faculty members have left to take positions overseas. Similar brain drains are happening around the country, as other nations attract people with promises of more stable funding. Several European countries, China and Korea are pouring their resources into research and basing their systems on that in the United States.

“Other countries are absolutely trying to imitate this,” Toiv says, “because the magnitude of the success of the scientific enterprise in this country is unquestionable.” He points at countries such as China, which is developing new research universities at a record pace. “They’re not going to match our research universities in the short run, but in the long they are.”

Let’s Talk

Although Mason acknowledges that other countries are overtaking us, he says the United States remains the “gold standard” for federally funded research. Khargonekar used the same phrase when describing the NSF grant review process, which he calls “one of the very best review processes anywhere in the world.” That helps to support the high quality of the research being done in this country. “We do the best job we can for the taxpayers and for the public so that their investments help society as best as is possible.”

But do the public and legislators get that message? Freeze suggests that researchers in general “haven’t done the greatest job at the grassroots level of educating people about science and where science funding comes from.”

Khargonekar takes it further: “We, the scientific community and the engineering community, need to continuously make the case to the public and the policymakers as to why investment in research is critically important for national progress, our well-being and our society to remain economically competitive, health of our citizens, and the security of the nation.”

And Mason recommends that emphasizing the value of science in general may help to alleviate fears about the economy.

“A component of solving the deficit problem has to be growth in the economy,” he says. “You’ve got to grow the revenues. You’ve got to grow the economy, and innovation technology research is a critical part of that.”

Toiv suggests that politicians may need to be better educated about the value of scientific research.

“What policymakers sometimes don’t realize is that the work that researchers do may end up leading to some extraordinary innovation, but it’s impossible to know at the time. It is discovery upon discovery, twists and turns. Researchers are looking for one thing and they find something else. There’s serendipity often involved.”

How do we turn things around? Freeze suggests that a well-prepared team of engineers going out and talking to local groups could help do the trick. “Just try and think what a thousand scientists could do by going out there and preaching the value of science. It would be revolutionary.”

It may also help to embrace and promote why we conduct science in the first place.

“It speaks to us as human beings who are curious about our place in the world and want to know how the world works,” Khargonekar says. “Since the dawn of human civilization that fundamental drive to know and explore the frontier is part of what makes for a great society.”

Previously in The Revelator:

The Extinct Frogs and the Golden Goose