Good News for Bears, Birds, Whales and People

This month, Links From the Brink looks at several conservation success stories and shines a light on new tools to fight pollution.

Did you hear the recent good news about songbirds, whales, bears (both black and grizzly), and pollution?

No? Well, that doesn’t surprise us. In a season dominated by the chaos of the midterms, the latest U.N. climate conference and billionaires gone bad, a lot of good environmental news slipped through the cracks.

So let’s spackle those cracks with some stories you may have missed. Welcome to Links From the Brink: Good News Edition.

A Song of Joy

Conservationists are breathing sighs of relief this month for the straw-headed bulbul (Pycnonotus zeylanicus), an Asian songbird with some of the natural world’s most beautiful vocalizations. Alas, those songs — meant to attract mates — are the main reason this bird has become endangered in recent years, as humans have trapped so many of them that some of the species’ native forests have fallen silent. The caged and trafficked birds end up competing in Southeast Asia’s songbird competitions, where owners can win big prizes for the birds with the best songs.

Straw-headed bulbul
Photos: Michael MK Khor (CC BY 2.0)

But November saw important progress when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) finally added the bulbul to its list of species that are banned from legal commerce. This only affects international sales, not those within a nation’s borders, but it’s a huge step that will help to support existing national legislations.

Also protected by CITES this year: Another songbird (the white-rumped shama), 90 shark species (including hammerheads and guitarfish), 53 turtle species, all 160 glass frog species, and lots more. Meanwhile proposals to reopen trade in elephant ivory and rhino horns were, thankfully, defeated.

Discussions about protecting wildlife continue this week at the UN Biodiversity Conference, which finally convenes in Montreal from Dec. 7-19 after a string of Covid-related delays. Here’s what to expect.

Residents’ Rights

In more local news, the city of Port Townsend, Washington, this week officially recognized the inherent rights of the last 74 Southern Resident killer whales, who often swim past its shores.

The latest victory in the Rights of Nature movement, the city’s proclamation declares that the orcas have “the right to life, autonomy, culture, free and safe passage, adequate food supply from naturally occurring sources, and freedom from conditions causing physical, emotional, or mental harm, including a habitat degraded by noise, pollution, and contamination.”

Two Southern Resident killer whales swimming
Southern Resident killer whales. Photo: NOAA

Of course, Port Townsend can’t save the Southern Residents on its own. These whales need additional support from other communities. Gig Harbor could be next: The city council will read a proclamation recognizing orca rights at their meeting on Dec. 12. Meanwhile, organizers hope to convince Washington to extend Rights of Nature to the orcas on the state level.

The Good News Bears

Hunters in Washington can lower their rifles: The  state just closed the door on its annual spring black bear hunting season. Last year hunters killed a reported 1,686 black bears out of an estimated statewide population of 20,000. About 120 of those came during the now-closed spring hunting season, which happened to correspond to when hungry bears (including new mothers) emerge from hibernation.

Most states do not permit bear hunting during this post-hibernation season, and Washington now, at last, joins their ranks.

Which brings us to good bear news # 2: The Biden administration just jumpstarted long-brewing efforts to reintroduce grizzlies to Washington’s North Cascades National Park. The plan, like so many others, fell by the wayside during the Trump years and has now been resurrected. Getting more grizzlies to the park — a handful may already live in the region — could take years, but this is a huge step in the right direction and could signal renewed willingness to reintroduce the bears in other parts of the country.

grizzlies historic range*

Conservation Quickies

Here are some more success stories to warm your heart and keep you motivated:

Got Any Non-Animal Stories?

Sure — how about one on energy? Renewables will overtake coal by early 2025 to become “the largest source of global electricity generation,” according to a stunning new report from the International Energy Agency.

Why the rapid shift? Two words: energy security. That’s usually a term bandied about by Republicans supporting domestic fossil-fuel production, but in this case it’s the growing recognition that reliance on fossil fuels is inherently unsafe due to production and distribution disruptions — like, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Energy security concerns caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have motivated countries to increasingly turn to renewables such as solar and wind to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, whose prices have spiked dramatically,” writes the IEA.

Close-up view of five offshore turbines in choppy water
The Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island. Photo: Dennis Schroeder / NREL (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This report offers exactly zero solace to the suffering people of Ukraine or energy insecure households in Europe, nor does it justify this destructive war. But at the same time, this feels like a potential transformative moment. It could be one of the most important environmental stories to watch in the coming year.

Polishing Off Pollution

And speaking of fossil fuels, who are the world’s worst polluters? New mapping projects have some answers.

The first, called Climate Trace, tracks the greenhouse gas emissions of nearly 80,000 of the worst polluters on the planet — everything from oilfields and cargo ships to cattle feedlots. Anyone can dig into the maps to find the polluters in their area (in my case, the worst are an airport, a steel factory, and a couple of landfills) or just look at the world to see how nations compare.

The second map covers just the United States, but there’s a lot to cover. The EPA’s FLIGHT project tracks greenhouse emissions from large industrial facilities around the country — about 8,100 of them. Users can zoom into their state or filter the results by facility type (power plants, chemical factories, etc.). You can even see how things have changed over time, with data going back to 2010 (and yeah, they got worse in the past year).

Seeing all these polluters visualized out can feel, admittedly, a bit disheartening. But there’s a reason we included this work in the “good news” category: The more data like this we have, the better we’re able to target emissions and shut them down. These maps will help regulators, activists, and everyday citizens to let us all breathe a little easier.

That’s it for this edition of Links From the Brink. Look for the next column in late January. Until then, mark your calendars for International Mountain Day on Dec. 11, Monkey Day on Dec. 14 and National Bird Day on Jan. 5. And of course, tip a glass or your hat to the Endangered Species Act, which celebrates its 49th anniversary Dec. 28.

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Learning to Love — and Protect — Burned Trees

Wildfire-killed trees are some of the most important structures in a forest. So why are they still being logged?

A forest needs all kinds of trees — even dead ones.

Dead trees, known as “snags,” are some of the most valuable wildlife structures in the forest and help support hundreds of animals.

“A tree really has a second life after it’s been killed, particularly with fire-killed trees, which decay far slower than if a tree succumbs to disease or insects,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildfire ecologist and executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “I’ve called them ‘living dead trees.’”

Wildfire-ravaged forests may appear devoid of life from a distance — they’re often described in the media as “destroyed” or “moonscapes” — but the reality is quite different, as more than 200 scientists and land managers wrote in a letter to Congress when the 2018 Farm Bill contained proposals to speed up and expand logging on public lands in response to increasing wildfires:

“Though it may seem to laypersons that a postfire landscape is a catastrophe,” they wrote, “numerous studies tell us that even in the patches where fires burn most intensely, the resulting wildlife habitats are among the most biologically diverse in the West.”

But that hasn’t stopped federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management from cutting trees burned in wildfires or selling the logging contracts to private timber companies. Post-fire logging, which is done in forests all over the world, is prevalent the western United States, where there’s a large amount of federally owned land, a lot of big trees, and frequent fires.

Even the term frequently used by agencies for post-fire logging — “salvage logging” — gives a good indication of how forests are seen after a fire.

“Just about every time you get a burn — a severe burn, especially — the agencies are going to go in and do post-fire logging,” says Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a nonprofit that focuses on forest protection and restoration. “They’ve taken advantage of the public’s perception that if there was a big burn and it’s a blackened forest, it’s no longer important, so why not just log it.”

The Value of ‘Living Dead Trees’

The ecological reasons for leaving burned trees in a forest are numerous.

For one thing, dead trees help jumpstart the new forest. They’re biological legacies that offer habitat, food, and other resources to bugs, birds and mammals.

After a fire life returns within days. Longhorn beetles and other wood borers come to feast on the sap from burned trees while they’re still smoldering. They’re usually followed by the birds that feed on them. In the West’s coniferous forests, that often means black-backed woodpeckers. They build homes for themselves in the burned trees, as well as for other cavity-nesters, including birds, squirrels and martens. Other birds that flock to burned forests include white-headed woodpeckers, Lewis’s woodpeckers, three-toed woodpeckers, olivesided flycatchers, Clark’s nutcrackers and mountain bluebirds.

As wildflowers, shrubs and morels emerge, more small mammals arrive to eat the newly regenerating vegetation. Then come the larger mammals and birds like spotted owls to prey on these smaller animals.

Yellow and green plants blanket forest floor with burned trees.
Mountain arnica blooming in profusion near the Siskiyou Crest at the headwaters of East Fork Indian Creek following the 2020 Slater fire. Photo: Luke Ruediger. Used with permission.

Snags provide areas for foraging, nesting, roosting and denning. They’re particularly important for birds — one-quarter of all birds in the West’s forests rely on dead trees at some point in their lives.

When snags fall, they also have benefits. Downed trees can help retain moisture, add nutrients to the soil, and become “nurse trees,” out of which new saplings grow. “An astounding two-thirds of all wildlife species use deadwood structures or woody debris for some portion of their life cycles,” wildlife biologist Richard Hutto of the University of Montana wrote in a study for Conservation Biology. They can even help provide habitat for fish and other aquatic animals if they fall into creeks and rivers.

“The snags and the downed logs are all part of the rebirthing of a forest — a process that eventually gives you an old-growth forest,” says DellaSala.

Logging’s Degradation

While some people may think a wildfire is a disaster for a forest, DellaSala says the real disaster is what can happen if the area is heavily logged after such an event. The process can impede the forest’s recovery by compacting soils and killing the associated microbial communities that are important for a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem.

“A burned forest is very sensitive to additional disturbances,” says Ingalsbee. “Bare exposed soil is very erosive and when you’re slamming large logs and dragging them on steep slopes, then you lose forest soil and that is more or less a permanent loss in a human lifetime. It takes a long time to develop a fertile soil bed.”

Logging trucks and equipment can also kill or disturb native seed banks that would naturally regenerate after fire and lead to new growth. The associated roadbuilding can cause water-quality problems and degrade habitat.

Cleared trees and bare dirt with burned trees in background
Extensive soil damage and clearcut post-fire logging in the Slater Fire footprint in southwestern Oregon. Photo: Luke Ruediger. Used with permission.

And it’s not just the initial clearcutting that’s problematic — it’s also what follows, which is usually intensive management with tree planting and herbicides.

“Instead of having this natural diverse mosaic of vegetation patterning that comes in after a fire with patches of hardwoods and patches of conifers and open areas where flowering species can thrive,” says Luke Ruediger, conservation director of the Klamath Forest Alliance. “The agencies tend to come in and plant these even-aged, evenly spaced and relatively densely packed plantation stands that then can increase fire risks and are more biologically sterile than the naturally regenerating habitats that surround them.”

Agency Rationale

These cumulative impacts add up to a lot of reasons not to log a forest after a wildfire.

“I am hard pressed to find any other example in wildlife biology where the effect of a particular land-use activity is as close to 100% negative as the typical postfire salvage-logging operation tends to be,” wrote Hutto in the Conservation Biology study.

So why does post-fire logging persist? Mostly, it’s money.

“Harvesting timber following fire is usually an economic undertaking and rarely a restorative activity in the sense of ecological restoration,” a 2009 Forest Service study makes clear.

Fire-killed or damaged trees are still seen as valuable if they’re cut within a couple of years. Usually there’s just a thin layer of char on the outer bark of the trees that can be stripped off. The inside wood is then used for lumber or other wood products, just as green-cut trees would be.

While private companies can make good money, government agencies also bring in a fair amount. “The federal government pulls in about $150 million annually from selling the timber in national forests, about one-fourth of which comes from post-fire logging,” reported Forbes.

But the math doesn’t always pencil out for taxpayers, who also foot the bill for roadbuilding, replanting, herbicides, and the other treatments that follow. A 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office found that salvage logging after the 2002 Biscuit Fire, which burned 500,000 acres in California and Oregon, was a $2 million loss for taxpayers.

The other reason is safety. Fire-killed trees in areas where people drive or recreate can be hazardous. That’s why popular hiking trails are often closed following wildfires when trees are at risk of falling.

Removing dead trees that pose a public safety risk is a legitimate concern. But increasingly environmental advocates say they’ve seen roadside post-fire logging projects for remote Forest Service roads or needlessly far from the road’s edge.

“A number of years ago they were logging about 50 feet on either side of the road and now they’re going to 200 and 300 feet, which starts to look and feel a lot more like unit logging than hazard tree removal,” says Ruediger. Much of this work is done using a “categorical exclusion” under the National Environmental Policy Act, which doesn’t require an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement. That makes the approval process quicker and allows cutting to begin before fire-killed trees are too compromised by bugs and rot to be used for lumber.

Cut trees on the ground
Post-fire logging after California’s Rim Fire. Photo: Tara Lohan

“Agencies were proposing a lot of categorical exclusions for roadside logging, calling it ‘road maintenance,’ ” he says. Last year in Oregon, for example, the Forest Service planned to allow commercial logging 200 feet on either side of 400 miles of Forest Service roads in areas burned during the 2020 Labor Day fires in the Willamette National Forest.

The agency said the 20,000-acre plan fell under a categorical exclusion for “repair and maintenance” of roads in the national forest. But three conservation groups sued, saying it was nothing more than a standard logging project disguised as a hazard tree removal effort and should be subject to environmental review.

A federal judge agreed, writing in his decision that, “This Project allows commercial logging that, at least at this stage, will almost certainly have more than a minimal impact on the environment.” His order halted the project in November 2021, and the agency formally withdrew the plan in January 2022.

In a similar case last year, the Klamath Forest Alliance legally challenged a 4,000-acre logging project in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest following the 2020 Slater fire along the California-Oregon border. The group contended that many of the areas proposed for logging to remove hazard trees were along backcountry roads that saw little traffic. The Forest Service settled with the organization out of court, agreeing to limit cutting to only important roadways where there are imminent safety hazards.

Shifting Perspective

Legal challenges from environmental groups have helped prevent some unnecessary logging of snags, but DellaSala admits that a much bigger effort is needed to change hearts, minds and policy. Getting the public, legislators and agency staff to see the benefit of a burned forest isn’t easy, because wildfires — pardon the pun — are a heated issue.

“There’s issues of economics, the smoke, fire phobia, misinformation, people losing their homes, firefighters losing their lives,” he says DellaSala. It’s complicated.

Forest floor carpeted with yellow, purple and white wildflowers.
Diverse and spectacular floral displays in the Slater Fire footprint. Photo: Luke Ruediger. Used with permission.

His own understanding of the value of burned forests changed after three decades of studying forest ecosystems. In 2012 he went for a hike with his daughter near their home in Ashland, Oregon. The area had been burned a decade earlier in a wildfire, but they were surprised to find the area alive with wildflowers, dragonflies, butterflies, songbirds and woodpeckers.

“There was more sound in that high-severity burn patch than I was used to hearing in old-growth forests. It was so alive. It was not a moonscape, it was not a catastrophe,” he says. “I had to recalibrate my understanding of what a forest is.”

Ruediger has seen the same thing in the mountains of California and Oregon.

In July he hiked through forest burned two years prior in the Slater fire and found a superbloom. He wrote of the experience:

Bursting with vibrancy, life and unbelievable color, the flowers are currently so thick that you can see bright yellow swaths of Oregon sunshine (Eriophyllum lanatum) and mountain arnica (Arnica latifolia) blooming from ridges away. The butterflies, bees, pollinating beetles and flies swarm the sea of blossoms in a frenzy, collecting pollen and nectar. Songbirds dart about in the regenerating vegetation, eating insects and wildflower seeds. Deer and elk nibble on the herbaceous growth and the abundant, fire-coppiced trees and shrubs. Bears graze on the greenery. Raptors soar above the snag forest looking for prey species, whose populations have exploded since the fire, and woodpeckers drum against the standing snags in a repetitive chorus, noisily foraging for ants, grubs and other insects.

And that experience, he says, is not uncommon.

“I think that people will be shocked and surprised by how much life there is in a lot of these areas that they were told were devastated by wildfire,” he says. “My experience is that as long as there isn’t post-fire logging, in a lot of these situations the regeneration comes back — the trees come back. Sometimes that just takes more time than people are willing to give it.”

Get more from The Revelator. Subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Bad Seeds: Are Wildfire Recovery Efforts Hurting Biodiversity?

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The Earth Has a Microbiome — And It Needs Help

Soil’s microbial communities keep it healthy, just like the one in our guts. But new research finds we’re not doing a good enough job of protecting it.

Tackling the biodiversity crisis may mean starting small — very small.

The life we can’t see is some of the most threatened, say researchers of a new study in Nature Microbiology. And those microbial organisms — tiny bacteria, fungi and viruses that live in the soil — are fundamental to our existence.

“A functioning Earth without a functioning microbiome is nearly unimaginable,” they write.

But soil microbes today are at risk of extinction and homogenization. A wide variety of environmental changes has spurred these losses, including deforestation, intensive agriculture, pesticides, soil compaction and soil sealing.

There’s also the threat from “accelerated co-extinction” — as host plants decline, so do their specialized microbial networks.

The Earth microbiome urgently needs our defense, the researchers urge in their study. And they provide three avenues to help do just that.

“We need to conserve, we need to restore and we need to integrate microbes into managed landscapes,” says study co-author Tom Crowther, a professor of environmental systems science at ETH Zürich. “The belowground world is exactly as important as the aboveground world. It’s also exactly as diverse.”

The first step to conservation is data collection, so we know what exists where and how it’s changing over time.

Thousands of soil ecologists all over the world are engaged in this process, which has been streamlined by the use of DNA sequencing.

“By compiling all of those data sets, you can start to see the patterns in microbial communities across the globe,” says Crowther. “Then we link it up with satellite observations and climate information to look at the correlations.”

But we need to devote more effort to quantifying and mapping the Earth’s existing microbiome to identify knowledge gaps and emerging threats. The researchers note several projects already underway attempting to do just that, including SoilBON, the Global Fungi Database and the Earth Microbiome Project.

But while data availability has exploded, they warn that “there are clear and persistent sampling gaps in our global picture of the Earth microbiome.” There’s still a lot we don’t know and many places where data doesn’t yet capture a long-term picture that can help identify decline. Places where we lack information include the northern parts of Canada and Russia, the Amazon, southeast Asia, and the entire African continent.

This information could aid efforts to include microbial biodiversity in conservation planning and in the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of species in need of conservation, the researchers say.

In the second step, the research shows that ecological restoration efforts should include attention to restoring microbiomes.

Restoration can take place by allowing nature to regenerate on its own, but that can also be an incredibly slow process. There’s now evidence that active microbiome restoration — which includes mixing microbial spores into water and spraying the landscape or using soil inoculants that contain microbes— can help the speed and resiliency of ecological restoration projects.

The researchers reviewed the findings of dozens of previous studies that examined these practices and found that restoring native microbial communities helped boost plant growth by an average of 64%.

This kind of restoration can be used not just for natural landscapes, but also those managed for agriculture.

green farm field
Agricultural field, Idaho. Photo: Nicholas D. (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Managed landscapes are “a vital and underappreciated avenue to promote microbial biodiversity,” the researchers write, and exploring the possibilities of microbial restoration in these areas is the third avenue the study recommends.

Efforts should be made, they say, to identify diverse, native microbiomes that can be restored to fields and forests managed for agriculture, which covers nearly half the planet’s land.

For farmers, the benefits are twofold. “Simply spraying these microbes — healthy, diverse mixtures across soils — increases your diversity within the system, will be beneficial in itself to farmers,” says Crowther, especially if incentives for promoting biodiversity become available in the future. And it can also help boost plant production.

That, he says, is “a rare example in ecology where we’ve got something that improves biodiversity and at the same time increases (crop) yields.”

The end goal of this work is for belowground ecosystems to receive the same attention as the ones aboveground, so we know how to appropriately restore them and protect them.

“If we manage a tropical forest the same way we manage a boreal forest, it wouldn’t work very well. So we manage them very differently,” he says. “We also need to be managing our soils relative to the variation in microbial biogeography. We need to understand those ecosystems if we’re going be able to manage them right.”

Crowther believes that’s starting to happen, but there’s still a long way to go.

Fungi have gotten the most attention so far, which is important, “but fungi are just the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “There’s a wealth of soil biodiversity that’s absolutely critical for the survival of everything on this planet — the bacteria, the nematodes and the soil animals that are essential.”

Despite an increasing awareness of the importance of protecting soil biodiversity, there’s still no strong conservation planning around it, says Crowther. “We really have to start getting serious about it — that’s the case for all biodiversity and particularly the belowground world.”

The next big chance to do that will be in December at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, he says.

“I hope it will be a big turning point in the environmental movement for bringing biodiversity up to a place that’s as important as climate in our international policy governance.”

Get more from The Revelator. Subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Previously in The Revelator:

‘Soil Isn’t Forever’: Why Biodiversity Also Needs Protection Below the Ground

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Reptile Trade Blues

Rampant illegal trade is pushing the blue tree monitor lizard toward extinction. These steps can help save it.

Reptiles are extremely popular in the global pet trade. People love them — love them to death.

Thanks to the increasing demand for reptile pets, many species are now threatened with extinction. Among these are the approximately 80 species of varanids, or monitor lizards, from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and parts of Oceania.

While many monitors reach enormous sizes — the massive Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) being the largest — some are considerably smaller and seen as easier to maintain in captivity. This includes the tree monitors, a group of nine brilliantly colored species that evolved on isolated islands. Their stunning appearance, small size, prehensile tails, and seemingly intelligent nature mean they’re more and more sought after — by any means possible, legal or illegal.

Our research focuses on the plight of the blue tree monitor (Varanus macraei). This intricately patterned species, which grows to a length of about 3.5 feet, lives mainly in trees and is only found on Batanta Island and some of its small offshore islands, in the easternmost part of Indonesia. It likely has the most restricted range of any monitor lizard.

The blue tree monitor was only described scientifically in 2001, based on specimens found in the wildlife trade in the United States. It was named after Duncan R. MacRae, a reptile trader who was instrumental in the species entering the international pet trade. The specimen used to describe the species was caught on Ayem Island (off Batanta) and entered the international market via a trader on Batanta.

Under two decades later, in 2017, the IUCN listed the species as endangered. Researchers warned that this little varanid is in serious decline due to illegal over-harvesting in its small range, with the demand coming from traders and hobbyists. The species is so rare that researchers spent a few days between each sighting.

Our research highlights the volume of blue tree monitor trade and the issues in controlling it.

A Snapshot of the Market

Earlier this year we investigated the online trade in Indonesia to spotlight the threats this species faces and illuminate the need for urgent and more effective measures to prevent poaching and illegal trade.

On June 25 we conducted a search for blue tree monitors for sale online within Indonesia. Because there is no legal harvest for the species, and the commercial trade in captive-bred and captive-born specimens is mainly (or even exclusively) for the international market, we expected to find very few.

We were wrong.

Finding blue tree monitors for sale online was simple. We found 18 advertisements on seven different platforms. Several of the sellers indicated that they had more individuals available or that additional specimens could be obtained if required.

blue lizards on a blue surface
Blue tree monitor lizards on Batanta. Photo: Brian Gratwicke (CC BY 2.0)

Ten sellers were commercial traders or established pet shops. One appeared to be a hobbyist. Sellers were mostly based on Java, with seven in the Greater Jakarta area, and one each in Semarang, Jember and Surabaya (the last of which is over 1,240 miles, or 2,000 kilometers, from Batanta). One trader was based in Banjarmasin, on the island of Borneo.

All advertisements and posts were written in Indonesian, with some English terminology widely understood in the reptile hobbyist community.

All but two of the lizards for whom we were able to establish an age — or for whom age was given — were adults. Five sellers specified that their animals were “jumpy” or “shy,” and two added that the animals were “damaged.” None indicated that the animals were tame or that they were captive-bred. This all suggests it was wild-caught individuals being offered for sale. While four of the sellers indicated that the species was “rare” or “super duper rare,” none indicated that capture was prohibited, that trade was strictly regulated in Indonesia, or that its export was covered by CITES.

Research like this allows us to develop recommendations for the government of Indonesia and importing countries where demand driving the trade can, and should be, addressed. Our aim was to find what platforms offered this species for sale, where traders were based, and who offers them for sale (hobbyists, commercial traders, pet shops, etc.) and ultimately, to inform importing countries of the illegal nature of this trade.

Mystery Sourcing

So where do the traded lizards come from?

As we saw in our snapshot sampling, and from an abundance of literature, there’s ample evidence that registered reptile breeders in Indonesia often illegally remove animals from the wild and launder them into the global trade by claiming they were bred in captivity.

This is not uncommon. While shipments of laundered reptiles from Indonesia are sometimes detected and seized, officials in importing countries often grapple with proving the animals were not bred in captivity. This method of smuggling is rife and a major obstacle in the fight against reptile trafficking.

How many lizards are we talking about? Data from the CITES wildlife trade database shows that Indonesia reported the export of 3,167 blue monitor lizards for commercial purposes from 2010-2020 (inclusive). Of these 1,199 were reported to have been bred in captivity (i.e., they were second-generation offspring, bred out of parents who themselves were bred in captivity) and 1,968 as being born in captivity (bred from parent(s) who had been wild-caught). It’s likely that at least most of the blue tree monitors exported from Indonesia are in fact wild-caught.

In a recent study, Indonesian ecologist Evy Arida and colleagues spoke with lizard collectors living on the island of Batanta, who reported that blue tree monitors used to be available in the vicinity of their homes some 30 years ago, prior to their popularity in the pet trade. These same people told the researchers that blue tree monitors have become very scarce; they now must travel by boat to find the lizards in remoter parts of the species’ range.

The research shows that local collectors specifically target blue tree monitors and purposefully search for them to sell to traders who eventually export the species. Their assessment also shows that while these collectors do make some welcome cash from their illegally sourced monitor lizards, none of them rely solely on blue tree monitor collection for income. Instead they regularly sell fish, vegetables and fruit in the markets, and tree monitors are an occasional but dwindling bonus.

How Do We Protect Them?

Clearly the species is in grave danger.

And yet these lizards still generate big profits for some people. Research published in 2015 estimated that the total retail value of the international trade in blue monitor lizards is more than $100,000 a year, based on a retail price of $750 per lizard.

New Guinea villagers receive a very small proportion of the final sale. This provides little incentive for local people to harvest these species sustainably or to protect the habitats in which they live.

Moreover, illegal trade can undermine sustainable harvest and community-based conservation initiatives.

There is clearly little in the way of disincentive as well, as efforts to prevent the illegal capture and trade in the species appear to be minimal.

Obviously continual illegal take of this species could potentially lead to its extinction in the wild. To prevent this, the Indonesian government must start enforcing existing policies prohibiting its capture.

In addition, we see three opportunities to prevent further decline in the wild population of blue tree monitors:

First, the government of Indonesia should propose the species be listed in Appendix I of CITES to assist in preventing international trade.

Second, the European Union, which currently has a temporary suspension on blue monitor imports, should make the ban permanent.

Finally, the United States should protect the blue tree monitor under the Endangered Species Act. As a major importer of such reptiles from Indonesia, its listing of the monitor would deter demand in the country and have positive impacts on conservation of the species.

On top of these three steps, we recommend all other major consumer states explore, develop, and put into action strategies to reduce demand.

Similar steps already protect many species around the world from the covetous eyes of collectors. It’s time to extend that to the blue tree monitor — an evolutionary marvel that deserves to thrive in its native habitats instead of lonely cages around the world.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Wildlife Trafficking: 10 Things Everyone Needs to Know

Europe’s Surprising Record of Dam Removals

A growing movement across the continent is working to remove thousands of barriers and restore some of the world’s most fragmented rivers.

The 1999 demolition of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River set off a wave of dam removals across the United States. Since then some 1,200 dams have come down to help restore rivers and aquatic animals, improve water quality, and boost public safety — among other benefits.

Across the Atlantic, European nations have been busy removing thousands of river barriers, too. But until recently the efforts have gone largely unnoticed, even among experts.

Pao Fernández Garrido can attest to that.

An engineer and expert in ecosystem restoration from Spain, Fernández Garrido was finishing her master’s thesis in 2012 when she attend a dam-removal training in Massachusetts that was part of a conference on fish passage.

She was floored to learn about the United States’ widespread dam-removal efforts and returned to Europe determined to learn what was happening with dam removals on the continent — and to be a part of the action.

So did Herman Wanningen, a freshwater consultant  from the Netherlands, who also attended the conference. Fernández Garrido joined him when he founded the World Fish Migration Foundation in 2014. Soon after they helped form a coalition organization called Dam Removal Europe that also includes European Rivers Network, WWF, Rewilding Europe, the Rivers Trust, Wetlands International and the Nature Conservancy.

One of the first things Fernández Garrido and her colleagues wanted to know was the extent of river fragmentation on the continent. That wasn’t easy: While the United States has an exhaustive inventory of its 90,000 dams, not every European country, they learned, had collected similar data.

At the time not much was known beyond the fact that Europe had 7,000 large dams. But as their project to map river barriers, known as AMBER, got underway, they learned the on-the-ground reality included many smaller dams and other barriers — at least 1.2 million river barriers in 36 European countries.

Fernández Garrido and her colleagues spent more than three years on research, including river surveys in 36 countries, to gather the more robust data. Their results, published in Nature in 2020, found that on average river barriers occur almost every half mile.

Two-thirds of these barriers are under seven feet tall, but small doesn’t mean insignificant. Low-head dams and smaller obstructions like weirs and sluices can still block the movement of some fish, as well as aquatic plants, invertebrates, and the flow of sediment and nutrients.

Many of the dams — around 150,000 — are also obsolete and no longer provide any beneficial functions.

The good news, though, is that they also found that 4,000 European river barriers had already come down in the previous 20 years, with France, Finland, Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom being the most active.

These efforts, though, had largely flown under the radar.

“Nobody was talking about these, nobody,” says Fernández Garrido. “The United States is celebrating that it has removed 1,200 and nobody’s celebrating in Europe because nobody knows.”

That’s changed as they continued with their work to compile research, organize supporters across the continent, and push policymakers for action.

In 2019 the researchers delivered a report on case studies of dam removals and their benefits to the European Commission. The following year the World Fish Migration Foundation published the first-ever Living Planet Index on the global state of migratory fish. It found that migratory freshwater fish populations in Europe had dropped 93% since 1970, much higher than the already dismal global average of 76%.

The cumulative weight of those findings may have had a big impact on policy.

That same year the European Commission published its biodiversity strategy for 2030.

“For the first time ever in history, it stated that we should free at least 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles) of river in Europe from barriers by 2030,” says Fernández Garrido.

While that was welcome news, it was still only a guideline — not legally binding.

In May 2022, however, the commission followed up with a proposal called the EU Nature Restoration Law. “In this law, they say we must start removing dams,” she says. And the proposed language calls for restoring 15,500 miles of river to a “free-flowing state by 2030.”

The European Parliament will need to ratify the law in the next couple of years. “In the meantime politicians could work to weaken it,” she says. “That’s why environmental groups are working hard to keep it strong.”

On the ground, the work to restore free-flowing rivers continues.

Last year 239 river barriers were removed in 17 European countries, including more than 100 in Spain. Finland is in the process of removing three hydroelectric dams on the Hiitolanjoki River, which will aid salmon populations. And France is home to the tallest dam removal on the continent yet, the 118-foot Vezins Dam on the Sélune River in Normandy, which was removed in 2020. Demolition began this summer on a second dam on the river, La Roche Qui Boit, which will allow the Sélune to run free for the first time in 100 years. Migratory fish populations like salmon are expected to return, and the dam removals will also reduce toxic algae that pooled in the warm waters of the reservoirs during summer.

Some of this work — and more — is showcased in a new documentary, #DamBusters, by director Francisco Campos-Lopez of Magen Entertainment. The film follows Fernández Garrido across Europe as she meets dam-removal heroes in Spain, France, Estonia, Lithuania and Finland.

“Restoring nature is probably the job of our time, our generation,” she says in the film.

But it’s a process that will also take time.

“There are some river systems, like for example in North America, where the benefits of dam removal are shocking and so amazing because that river system was only blocked for only 100 years,” she tells The Revelator. “But when you are talking about recovering our river systems in Europe that have been controlled and mismanaged for 500 years, 600 years, 1,000 years, we have to be cautious about what we expect.”

But even if ecological restoration comes more gradually, political movement has been swift.

“The progress since we started in 2016 until now — having policies proposed at the European level — it’s amazing,” Fernández Garrido says. “It’s really an achievement.”

The combination of research, policy reports, political pressure and movement-building have kickstarted a river restoration effort that shows no signs of slowing down — and could be a model for other regions.

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Previously in The Revelator:

5 Reasons to Rethink the Future of Dams

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‘Free Water’ Was Never Free, Writes a Historian of the American West

Subsidized water cultivated the West, but this required becoming increasingly profligate with the region’s scarcest resource.

The West uses too much water. For such a simple problem, the obvious solution — use less — lies frustratingly out of reach.

That inability to change may seem hard to understand, but the root of the problem becomes clearer if we consider the role of the West in the historical development of the United States:

The purpose of our system of “free water” — heavily subsidized water for irrigation — was to provide opportunities to settlers.

The frontier has served an important function in the Euro-American imagination since before there was a United States. For historians of the American West like me, the significance of the frontier has been at the center of our field for more than a century. Thomas Jefferson made the most notable case for westward expansion, prescribing it to relieve the social and political pressures that were building up as eastern populations grew and fought over limited resources. By the mid-1800s policymakers believed his ideal of yeoman homesteaders and their patchwork of farms was the Manifest Destiny of the United States’ exceptional democracy.

But that ideal never made it all the way across the continent. It ran into a problem right around the 100th meridian, west of which there wasn’t enough rainfall for agriculture.

Agriculture would require irrigation. A lot of it.

Green circles of irrigated crops against a desert background.
Colorado desert irrigation in 1990. Photo: Gary Todd (public domain)

To solve this problem, the United States formed the Reclamation Service (the precursor to the Bureau of Reclamation) just over a decade after the frontier closed in 1890. While the federal government wasn’t quite powerful or rich enough, at the time, to construct many major irrigation projects, the Service provided a signal of the nation’s commitment to investing in the West as a site for settlement. It was too important a project to leave to private irrigation companies and too much work for individual homesteaders. As historian Donald Pisani put it in his book Water and American Government, “Federal reclamation was the last stage of Manifest Destiny.”

With the New Deal, the Bureau of Reclamation came into its own: Hoover Dam, completed in 1935 as the world’s largest dam, served as a symbol for the country’s ability to conquer nature.

Progressives championed desert reclamation at the turn of the century, but the federal government’s willingness to build infrastructure and give water away on extravagantly lenient terms was just as appealing for conservatives after World War II. Even Barry Goldwater, while courting the libertarians of the nascent New Right, advocated for the federally funded Central Arizona Project in his home state so that farmers could grow cotton in the Sonoran Desert.

That’s the defining contradiction of life in the West: “Government,” in Western parlance, was and is the stuff of restrictions, even when it’s the government that underwrites ever-popular sprawl.

While some made fortunes off this deluge of government spending, the enrichment of a few landowners was not the policy objective. Rather, the purpose of all the free water was to retain the West as a “safety valve,” a place of refuge for those who wanted to avoid the taxes and regulations of the East. But to accommodate growth without limits as the population boomed, the region would need to heighten the contradictions and become increasingly profligate with its scarcest resource.

Agriculture was once the means for permanent settlement of the arid West, and it continues to drive water consumption today. Around 80% of Colorado River water goes toward agriculture. About half of that is directed toward alfalfa hay that feeds cattle, an extremely inefficient way to provide calories for humans.

Agricultural water rights are some of the oldest in the West, and water law here revolves around seniority. Yet even if there were a ready legal pathway to divert water away from alfalfa fields, the fact remains that the apparatus for western water delivery was simply not built with a regulatory lever. The underlying imperative to grow without limits would inevitably lead back to a state of crisis.

Consider St. George, Utah. The fastest growing metropolitan area in the country consumes almost no agricultural water, yet its lawns and golf courses quickly suck up its scarce water supply. The city, a popular destination for retirees, is expected to double in population by 2050. Officials now find themselves struggling to find sources of water for the surge in residents. What is quickly becoming a crisis for humans is also creating additional pressure on other species such as the endangered woundfin and Virgin River chub.

Sprawl in St. George, Utah. Photo: Murray Foubister (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The system’s deference to ideology over pragmatism is clear when it comes to the Basin’s 30 Native American Tribes. Collectively, they control about 20% of the water rights in the Colorado River system, yet many of those rights consist of “paper water.” They’re unrealized due to a lack of infrastructure. Building the necessary water projects for the Tribes would not only cost money but also push the system past the point of collapse. The very viability of the free water system depends on a de facto denial of the water rights of Indigenous nations, just as broken treaties facilitated the “free land” policy of the 19th century.

Free water was destined to run out eventually. Facing this problem in the West will be difficult, considering that politics and culture have worked in tandem for so long to keep “government” out of government-subsidized water. It’s unclear whether the system can be retrofitted with an off switch and whether the necessary governments can work together to do so before the Colorado River system crashes.

So how do we move forward? Ending the current subsidies seems the most commonsense solution — as well as the most unlikely to gain political traction.

Another possible solution: commodities trading. The classic solution for an imbalance of supply and demand is to introduce markets. Yet applying this approach to western water faces logistical challenges and can do little about longstanding problems of equity.

Still, the problem is big enough that all interventions may be necessary. Perhaps these first two ideas can be implemented. And perhaps we can think bigger.

One way forward is for the government to recognize the inherent worth of natural waterways, rejecting the premise that all fresh water must be consumed. Giving legal rights to ecosystems is the goal of the rights of nature movement, which has had some success across the world and even in the U.S. West. The organization Save the Colorado helped the communities of Ridgway, Nederland, and Grand Lake in Colorado pass resolutions recognizing the intrinsic rights of their watersheds. I’m part of an organization, Save Our Great Salt Lake, that’s exploring a similar strategy.

Wherever the future leads, the aridification of the American West will have consequences not just for those living here, but for the entire country.

It’s conceivable that westerners will adapt more readily to a drier climate than the rest of the nation will adapt to the loss of a region that functions as a safety valve. At any rate, we’re approaching the end of an era in which water was taken for granted. Just as human beings physically depend on water, our policies and conversations need to align with the water cycle.

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:

Left Out to Dry: Wildlife Threatened by Colorado River Basin Water Crisis

Let’s Rename the Day After Thanksgiving ‘Extinction Friday’

The annual Black Friday ode to commercialism and overconsumption sits at the core of our ongoing destruction of Earth’s ecosystems. We can flip the script.

This is the week when Americans gather to eat turkey and pie, watch football, argue at the dinner table, and — after we’ve digested our excesses — line up in front of our computers or big-box retail stores for the chance of shaving a few pennies off the already low, low price of a shiny new 75-inch 8K QLED TV. Of course, the marketers tell us, we need the model with built-in Alexa voice control — for more shopping without ever getting up from our well-worn couches.

Black Friday has become a testament to our society’s embrace of overconsumption — a blood-sport game of conquest and consumerism that’s as far as we can possibly get from a holiday supposedly devoted to giving thanks.

So this year, let’s ditch Black Friday, Cyber Monday and whatever they’re going to try to get us to “celebrate” this coming Wednesday.

Let’s pull back and remember those we’ve left behind.

Let’s mark the post-Thanksgiving date as Extinction Friday: a moment to think about the peoples and species we’ve driven off the face of the Earth, and to promise to do our part to prevent others — or ourselves — from joining them.

This Friday, instead of shopping, offer up a homily for Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died alone in her cage at Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, and vow to do your part to ensure that no other bird species share her fate.

Give a moment to think about Toughie, the last known Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog, who gave up this mortal coil in 2016. Promise to protect any amphibians who cross your path.

Bow your head to George, the last Hawaiian tree snail of his species, gone since 2019. May his memory serve to remind us to grow a backbone when it comes to standing up for the invertebrates around us.

Raise your hands to the unnamed thousands of species (and trillions of individuals) we lose each year to the forces of commerce and progress, and then offer a mantra to slow the growth that’s killing us all. The people dying in Cancer Alley in Louisiana. The tribes facing deforestation in the Amazon and displacement in Africa. The mountain gorillas falling to the spears and shotguns of wildlife traffickers. The corals getting bleached by climate change — our ultimate sin. The orangutans slaughtered to make way for the cheap palm oil baked into this weekend’s pumpkin pie …

The list goes on and on. Don’t limit yourself; devote yourself to those you can help, or inspire others to help.

Because Extinction Friday isn’t just this Friday. It’s also Extinction Saturday, Extinction Sunday, Extinction December, and on and on, ad nauseum.

But we can do better. We can skip that 8K UHD TV. We can avoid shopping at Amazon-dot-com and protect the calm of the natural forest. We can give thanks for the world around us, let the memories of those we’ve failed change us as much as they haunt us, and act.

We can steer the narrative and alter our reality. We can turn Extinction Friday into a Day of Evolution.

Then — only then — can we rest and truly be grateful.

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How (and Why) I Planned a 40-City Book Tour About Shark Science and Conservation

If a book contains critical conservation messages but nobody reads it, does it make a difference?

As a shark scientist, I know the importance of generating public support for endangered, poorly understood or ignored species. That’s why I wrote my new book, Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive With the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator — to reach people I couldn’t through my technical papers, articles or conference presentations.

I spent almost 10 years writing the book, but as the publication date neared, I realized that was just the first step. I also needed people to know it existed so they could buy it, read it, and hopefully act on its recommendations.

My publisher has some resources to help with media interviews, but like most academic presses their promotional budget is limited. I knew that if I wanted to really get the book out there, I had to do it myself.

I decided that a book tour was the best option.

As I write this, I’m in a hotel room in Raleigh, North Carolina — stop number 28 on a 40-city (and growing) tour that’s already gone better than I expected. I’ve reached thousands of people, sold crates full of books, and spread the message that sharks are worth protection and conservation.

Yes, I did all the planning for this myself — it’s beyond the scope of an academic publisher — and I planned it all as environmentally mindfully as possible.

Here’s how I accomplished that.

Why I Wanted to Do a Book Tour

Authors always want people to read their books, but good scientific communicators embrace the principle of “double dissemination” — telling the same story in multiple ways, and possibly different formats, for varied audiences.

I knew going into this tour that some folks would be more receptive to my book’s “here’s how we have to change our behaviors to save the planet” arguments if they heard them delivered persuasively by an expert speaker. That’s why the public-speaking component of a tour helps the cause I care about so deeply.

I love public speaking. Standing on a stage in front of a live audience has been a welcome break from giving talks into my webcam from my living room. They’re a lot more exciting, too. Each of my talks includes a Q&A component, which lets people ask me anything they want to know about sharks, marine biology or ocean conservation. You never know what you’re going to get asked, so this is also a good test of your ability to speak off the cuff.

The book tour has also, obviously, helped to drive book sales, both in person and through media and social media attention that sold even more books elsewhere.

I had a few additional, personal reasons for the tour.

After the past couple of years, I’ve really missed travel. As an academic, some of my closest friends are now scattered all over the world. Work travel lets me visit places (and people) where I used to live and now miss, and it lets me go to some places where I’ve never been and have always wanted to visit. I wanted to do more of that.

I certainly got to — but that came with challenges.

Balancing the Environmental Impact of Travel

Travel, especially air travel, has an environmental impact that we can’t ignore.

I don’t believe that the answer is “never travel if you care about the planet,” but instead to be thoughtful and strategic about it. For me, flying halfway around the country to give a half-hour talk is neither thoughtful nor strategic.

Instead I rely heavily on a concept introduced to me in Brett Favaro’s book The Carbon Code: If you can’t minimize your carbon footprint, maximize the value you get out of it. Do more than one thing per trip.

That meant sometimes building a book tour talk into trips to places I was already going. For example, I attended a conference in Spokane, Washington this summer, so I also gave a public talk there and added on side trips with talks in nearby Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia. (I used to live in Vancouver, so this also let me catch up with friends and colleagues while I was there.) The only flights associated with this trip were to Spokane and home from Canada.

I also planned regional swings, often centered around an anchor point. Some venues don’t really care when I speak, while others have a particular date in mind (or were based around work events like scientific conferences with fixed dates). In those cases, I’d make sure to be in the area when the venue needed me, then reach out to other nearby venues and say, “Hey, I’m in town for X and free these days to give a talk.”

That allowed me to limit my coast-to-coast flights to one round trip. I flew to California once and visited five cities while in the area.

Throughout the tour, I’ve flown as little as possible. Sometimes this meant trains, while other times it meant driving. My personal rule is if I can get there in less than six hours of driving, I won’t fly. Your (literal) mileage may vary here.

How I Arranged It

I’m an experienced public speaker and I’ve developed an extensive network of contacts from years of conferences and professional events. I also have a significant social media following and contacts with folks who run social media for venues all over the world. All of this is to say that some of this was easier for me to arrange than it might be for you — but the basic principles should work for anyone interested in planning similar events.

The basic model of my talk was a 30- to 40-minute presentation, followed by a Q&A, book sales and signings. I mostly worked with zoos, aquariums and science museums, as well as a few universities with public lecture series, bookstores that do author events, and libraries.

Step one was to lock down the anchor talks. I started by using social media and emails to announce that I was planning a book tour and inquire if anyone had interest in hosting me.

Here’s the important lesson I learned: I don’t reach out randomly to anyone who lives in a town I hope to visit. I start with people I already know who work for venues that might be interested in the type of events I’m offering. If I knew of a venue but didn’t know anyone who worked there, I used social media to ask if anyone could connect me. This avoided the need to cold call anyone.

Once I had anchor talks in place, I started looking into nearby cities and venues.  I asked my connections something like “I have a talk at South Padre Island on X dates and I’m interested in event venues in nearby cities and towns — do I know anyone with contacts at venues in Corpus Christi, Port Aransas, etc.”

My contacts had another key role: Local champions have helped bring me to their areas and arrange logistics, including meet and greets with local scientists and students. Many helped arrange housing and other accommodations, including some meals and rides from the airport.

The Economics

Academic publishers don’t pay for things like this. At my book’s intentionally affordable price point of $25, a tiny portion of which goes to the author, I would need to sell a lot of books to cover the costs of even one of my trips. (Venues usually sell my books directly, or through a partnership with a local bookstore, to avoid me having to carry books around the world.)

So how does it work? Simple: The venues pay my speaking fee and travel expenses. We negotiate based on venue size and resources — a rural public library wouldn’t have the same events budget as a large city science museum. But on every one of my regional legs, I made more in speaker fees than it cost me to get there — often substantially more.

As an academic I can take advantage of another way to pay for me travel costs: departmental research seminars. I was able to get to several cities because a university brought me out to speak about my research to their students and staff. Then, while I was nearby, I could arrange events at smaller public-facing venues.

Also worth noting: I kept my day jobs and worked remotely while on the road, although I sometimes had to take half days to account for travel.

Pros and Cons

As of this writing I’m about three-quarters through the originally planned 2022 book tour, and I’ll extend it through 2023 in some capacity. I had feared that I might be burned out by now, and I need to tell you — I’m not. I’ve visited friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in years and visit traveled to places I used to live and now miss.

I’ve also gotten to tour tons of wonderful museums, zoos and aquariums and chat with some fascinating people.

And there’s nothing like a live audience who appreciates what you have to say. I love this.

When the tour is all over, I’ll be thrilled that I did it and look back fondly on the memories I made.

But I do miss sleeping in my own bed, and I haven’t seen some friends at home for a while. Planning this tour has been a ton of work. While I’ve avoided burnout, being on the road living out of a suitcase and eating unhealthy roadside food and visiting tons of different time zones all takes its toll.

I can’t imagine I’ll ever do anything like this again.

Unless the sharks still need me, of course.

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Election Denial Is the New Climate Denial — and Still a Threat

The midterms may have avoided a red wave, but there’s still blood (and some anti-science conspiracy theorists) in the water.

Let’s start with the good news. Several prominent proponents of former President Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud failed in their bids for elected office in the recent midterms, allowing Democrats to keep control of the Senate and flip several key statehouse roles. We won’t need to worry about the likes of Kari Lake, Tudor Dixon, Doug Mastriano or Mark Finchem anytime soon.

But here’s the bad news: We will still need to worry about them — and many others like them — in the long term.

Lake and her ilk may have failed at the ballot box, but zealots like her and Mastriano are unlikely to disappear for long. Fueled by conspiracy theories, right-wing misinformation and propaganda, Christian nationalism, and antigovernment extremism, they have too much invested in their aggressive identities to give up and go home.

And they still have plenty of support.

One of the most disturbing results of the midterm is the sheer number of election deniers who did get elected. By last count, at least 220 people won federal races this year after directly supporting Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud or otherwise expressing skepticism about the proven validity of elections. The candidates who will soon take office included at least eight governors and 10 senators, according to The New York Times and CNN. Hundreds more appear to have taken or kept office in local elections around the country. An additional crop of QAnon believers and other extremists lost their elections by painfully narrow margins, meaning they (and their voters) still have a lot of power in the broader political spectrum.

This is an environmental issue.

Election deniers also embrace a wide range of antidemocratic, anti-science beliefs and conspiracy theories — including casting doubt on the very existence of climate change and its threats, as shown in dozens of public statements compiled by Emily Atkin at Heated. All too often they use their comments to not only spread misinformation about climate change but to attack government institutions, left-leaning politicians, renewable energy, progressive causes, or the media.

Perhaps that’s one reason election-denying candidates received millions of dollars from energy and transportation companies leading up to the midterms, according to analysis by ProPublica and The Hill. It’s corporate support that gives these people a big chunk of their power. Now that the midterms are over and Republicans have taken control of the House, we can expect these newly elected representatives to pay back their corporate benefactors and support pro-business, pro-pollution, anti-voting policies, regulations and legislation.

Speaking of which, election deniers also overwhelmingly support restrictive new voting legislation that would disenfranchise young and poor voters, as well as voters of color — the same groups most likely to be put at risk from climate change and pollution. This threat will continue on both federal and state levels, most notably from four incoming secretaries of state who will now have power over elections in Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Let’s not forget about the people who voted for them, either. The MAGA wing remains strong throughout the country and far too many folks still carry the Trump flag and bemoan the results of the 2020 election while finding new ways to threaten election officials, volunteers and voters — or government institutions in general.

And then, of course, there’s Trump himself, who just threw his red MAGA cap back into the ring and declared his intent to run for president again in 2024. The Insurrectionist in Chief continues to spread election lies and misinformation about both the 2020 and 2022 elections, and we’re still recovering from his four years of antienvironmental policies. If he ever ascends to office again, it will be more of the same and likely worse, fueled by delusion and his scorched-earth modus operandi.

Heck, we don’t even need to wait for 2024 to see what will happen. Even with their twice-impeached leader out of office, his acolytes have continued their assaults against the EPA, reproductive rights, voting rights, energy policy and other safeguards and freedoms.

They’re just warming up.

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Frogs vs. Climate Change: How Long Can They Stand the Heat?

New research compiles the “heat tolerance” of 616 amphibian species — and reveals how much more we need to know.

This summer’s brutal European heatwave delivered record temperatures that baked cities, dried out rivers, and sent thousands of people to the hospital.

The heat also harmed wildlife across the continent, especially frogs and other amphibians that can’t regulate their own body temperatures. The British conservation group Froglife told The Independent that reports of frog deaths increased around the country this summer, with the amphibians dying from dried-out skin, dehydration or starvation.

One gruesome case happened at Benhill Road Nature Garden in the United Kingdom, where visitors and their children stumbled across dozens of dead, desiccated frogs. Their pond, once a refuge in an ongoing drought, had dried up too quickly.

“It does feel really relevant to what’s going on at the moment,” local mother Linda Tibbets told Southwark News. “It’s this visual representation of what’s happening and maybe what’s to come.”

With heatwaves predicted to become both worse and more frequent due to climate change, and average temperatures rising around the world, amphibian conservationists find themselves with a challenge: How to prevent mass mortalities like this — or even extinctions — in the future?

One answer may come from understanding amphibians’ “heat tolerance” — the upper temperature range at which an animal can survive.

We have a long way to go to get to that understanding, though. According to new research published this October in the journal Scientific Data, scientists haven’t determined the heat tolerance for about 93% of recognized amphibian species. In fact, we lack information for entire groups of species.

“We haven’t found any data for caecilians, an entire order of limbless amphibians,” says the study’s lead author, Patrice Pottier, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

But Pottier and his coauthors did manage to collect and consolidate, for the first time, previously published heat tolerance data for 616 species of frogs, toads and salamanders around the world. Many of the species are already endangered due to habitat destruction, disease, invasive predators or other factors.

A toad held in a gloved human hand
An endangered Wyoming toad. Photo: Ryan Moehring / USFWS

For the people working to protect these species, this information is a potential gold mine. In addition to their paper, the researchers have made the data available through a downloadable database, which the scientific community has already started digging into for additional studies.

“Some people are currently investigating potential drivers of the variation in heat tolerance, how different life stages cope with heat, or whether heat tolerance is correlated with disease susceptibility,” Pottier says. Previous research has shown that frogs with lower temperature tolerances are more susceptible to the deadly chytrid fungus, which thrives in cooler environments. Chytrid has already caused several extinctions and continues to spread, so this is a particularly important area of study.

Looking for Languages

The dataset happened, like so many innovations, out of a frustration with existing tools.

“We weren’t originally planning to compile a database,” Pottier says. “I started to design a project that required a large and comprehensive dataset on amphibian thermal tolerance, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the scope of previous syntheses. I knew none dug into the literature in languages other than English.”

Although most scientific journals — 90% or more, depending on the field — publish in English, important conservation data often exists in other languages. Researchers studying Asian horseshoe crabs, for example, had to compile and translate data from multiple Indonesian and Chinese languages and dialects to get one species listed as endangered in 2019.

The overreliance on English poses particular problems for research in amphibian-heavy nations. For example, a 2020 survey of doctoral students in Colombia — which is home to more than 1,000 amphibian and reptile species — found that “publishing in a second language creates additional financial costs” and that 43.5% of their papers were rejected or required revisions because of English grammar. At least 220 Colombian journals publish in Spanish, but they lack the reach of English-language publications.

Close-up of a red toad's face
A red Rhinella margaritifera from the Tanimboca reserve in Colombia. Photo: Sebastian Di Domenico (CC BY 2.0)

“Most amphibians live in countries where English is not the primary language,” Pottier says, “so we had reason to think that there’s a lot of data published in different languages.” After an initial pilot to test results from a broader linguistic sample, they settled on Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, simplified Chinese, French and Japanese for their searches.

Those languages yielded 13% of their data — information they would have missed if they’d stuck with English publications.

Even so, the results still weigh heavily on the Global North. As with other areas in science and conservation, that gap needs to be addressed on a more systemic level.

“Tropical areas are the most diverse and perhaps the most threatened, yet they’re the least studied,” Pottier says. “I believe we need to create more collaborations with researchers from the Global South. If we can stimulate new data collections with this paper, then this goes beyond our expectations.”

Adapt or Die?

Pottier says they’re already putting the data to use studying amphibians’ plasticity — a species’ adaptability to major environmental shifts such as climate change.

“It’s extremely important because we know that current heat waves are stressful for most animals on this planet,” he says. “We need to understand whether animals will be able to adapt or acclimatize to future temperatures.”

We know how this works for other species. Humans, for example, can tolerate temperatures between 95 and 130 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on humidity levels and how much time people have to adapt to rising heat levels.

But humans and other mammals have an advantage over frogs: We can regulate our own body temperatures. Amphibians are ectotherms, meaning they rely on external heat sources. That makes them more vulnerable to sudden environmental shifts.

But how vulnerable remains an active field of study. Pottier says their current work aims “to predict how much temperature amphibians can tolerate currently and by the end of the century, and which parts of the globe would be the most important for conservation.”

emerald glass frog
An emerald glass frog (Espadarana prosoblepon) observed in Los Cedros. Photo: Juan Sebastian Forero Rodriguez via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Of course, this type of research doesn’t have to be limited to frogs. “We hope others can use a similar framework to gather comprehensive data on fish, reptiles, or invertebrates,” Pottier says.

No matter what species researchers decide to target with their heat tolerance studies, accelerating climate change and habitat destruction mean time is of the essence if we hope to give wildlife opportunities to adapt.

“We found data for species that are now extinct,” Pottier says. “It made me sad to see how biodiversity erodes so quickly.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Harlequin Found: ‘Extinct’ Toad Rediscovered After 30 Years

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