Protect This Place: The Montana River Threatened By a Shuttered Pulp Mill

Industrial waste from a mill is leaching into the groundwater and polluting the Clark Fork River. A major flood could cause an even bigger catastrophe.

The Place:

The Smurfit-Stone pulp mill site along the Clark Fork River in Montana was shuttered in 2010 but still poses an environmental threat.

Why it matters:

The Clark Fork River — situated in western Montana in the heart of the ancestral homelands of the Salish, Kalispel, and Ksanka peoples — is an important part of the history of the region, as well as the present and future for all who live here.

Rising out of the Continental Divide and flowing through a 14-million-acre basin, the river is a rich habitat for bountiful fish and wildlife, a magnet for recreation, an economic driver for our riverside communities, and an agricultural resource.

The threat:

The pulp and paper mill operated near Frenchtown — 11 miles from Missoula — for 53 years, discarding industrial and toxic wastes in unlined dumps, sludge ponds, and wastewater settling ponds next to the river. The huge dumps cover roughly 140–190 acres.

The wastewater ponds were drained long ago, but the soil and groundwater remain polluted with dangerous toxins, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, furans and arsenic. The fish in this reach of the Clark Fork and downstream suffer from contamination. The only thing separating the site from the river is a deteriorating, four-mile-long gravel berm. A major flood could breach the berm and cause an even bigger catastrophe by sweeping pollutants downstream for hundreds of miles

My place in this place:

The Clark Fork River is the heart of our community and one of the central reasons people have lived in this place for millennia. It’s a gorgeous and dynamic river through every season, home to eagles, herons, moose, bull trout and beaver, among a myriad of other species.

Although the river is often characterized as the hardworking backbone of the industrial, agricultural and recreational economy, it’s also a place that inspires love and gratitude beyond its value as a resource. It has been described to me as a living relative who deserves respect and appreciation.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, author Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness…” Protecting and restoring the Clark Fork River starts with a sense of gratitude and responsibility.

Last summer, while getting ready to launch rafts on a tributary of the Clark Fork for a four-day camping trip, I learned the Ojibwe word for “thank you.” Miigwech, we said to the river before stepping onto our small rafts and entrusting ourselves to the power of the high, fast waters.

“Miigwech,” I murmured this winter as I crunched across snow and stepped into the icy waters of the Clark Fork with the Missoula Cold Soakers — a group of over a dozen people who happily plunge into the cold river every Saturday. As I slowly stepped deeper and deeper in the cold water, I was thankful for this place of such immense beauty, which brings our community together and reminds us of the joy of being alive.

The Clark Fork River is the place I take visiting friends and relatives when I want to show off our home. It’s the place I take my child for an afternoon of play. I walk along the riverbanks when I need to think or simply move my body in fresh air. Through it all, I recognize that we owe the river a duty of care, not only for all it gives us, but also for its place in the ecosystem and the generations that will follow us.

Who’s protecting it now:

The Clark Fork Coalition was started as a nonprofit in 1985 by a group of concerned locals who worked together to keep the pulp mill from discharging waste directly into the river, year-round. Since then, the Coalition has grown, expanding advocacy and restoration work throughout the Clark Fork River basin. But it’s still focused on the mess at the now-closed pulp mill.

In 2011 the Environmental Protection Agency started an investigation of the site and determined that International Paper, WestRock and Wakefield are the corporations responsible for cleanup. But over a decade later, cleanup has yet to begin.

In April American Rivers named the Clark Fork River as one of America’s 10 Most Endangered Rivers due to the remaining toxic contamination and the threat of a flood causing an even bigger environmental catastrophe.

What this place needs:

To protect this place, we need more robust data about the extent and location of contamination. Then we need the EPA to act quickly to clean up the dumps, remove the berms and restore the floodplain.

Lessons from the fight:

Protecting a place as large and varied as the Clark Fork Watershed requires perseverance, resources and passion.

We have learned that a vital factor in protecting the river is community engagement. When people understand how the ecosystem works and how we can live as part of it, they are willing to fight for solutions that support human needs while protecting the river now and in the future.

All the work we have accomplished in the basin — stopping the original discharge permit from the mill, restoring flow levels and fish passage in tributaries, tracking the progress on another Superfund site upriver — have come about because concerned people learned about the challenges, understood the value of the river and acted out of love for this place.

The Clark Fork Coalition and its partners have launched a Clean Smurfit Now! campaign to educate the public and decision makers about the threat and put pressure on the EPA to take action before a major flood makes the situation worse.

Follow the fight:

The Clark Fork Coalition, American Rivers and Montana Public Interest Research Group are collecting signatures and comments to send to the EPA expressing concerns and pushing action.

Watch these videos on the damage Smurfit-Stone causes on the Clark Fork River to learn more.

Previously in The Revelator:

‘There’s No Memory of the Joy.’ Why 40 Years of Superfund Work Hasn’t Saved Tar Creek

Carnivore Conservation Is Tougher in the Mountains

Scientists “tromp out there into far-away places” to learn how to help recover three elusive, high-mountain predators: wolverines, Canada lynx and Cascade red foxes.

When the Yakama Nation detected a wolverine on Washington’s Mt. Adams in 2005, outside the animal’s known distribution, Jocelyn Akins wanted to learn more. Was it part of a population that hadn’t been previously known or a lone animal seeking new territory?

To answer those questions, Akins, who had previously studied wolverines and grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains, launched the Cascades Carnivore Project in 2008. Studying these elusive and rare mountain carnivores is no easy feat. After setting up remote camera traps with the help of friends and other volunteers, it was 15 months before they got their first photograph of a wolverine. And it wasn’t until 2018 when field researchers working with Akins documented the first female wolverine in 75 years in Washington’s South Cascade Mountains.

Over the course of months skiing and snow-shoeing into remote alpine areas, Akins also became fascinated with another rare and elusive mountain dweller: Cascade red foxes, a subspecies found only in Washington that sits perilously close to extinction. With very little known about them, she embarked on a Ph.D. program to use genetics to understand the conservation status of these foxes and figure out ways to reconnect their populations across the landscape.

The Cascade Carnivore Project now helps lead research efforts into three rare, elusive mountain predators in the region: Cascade red foxes, wolverines and Canada lynx.

The Revelator spoke with Akins about the challenges of studying these animals, why they’re important to the ecosystem and what’s needed to help them recover.

Woman next to monitoring device on tree. — Cascade Carnivore Project founder Jocelyn Akins. Photo: Cascade Carnivore Project

What are you finding out about these three species?

Rare carnivores, especially ones that live at high elevation, are hard to collect data on. They naturally occur at low densities, and then they’ve had many threats from habitat loss to over-trapping to loss of connectivity that’s causing numbers to go down even further.

Much of getting a handle on the conservation needs of high-elevation carnivores is first getting baseline data. We know that these three species are extremely low in abundance. All of them only occur in a portion of their historical distribution — their range is really contracted.

Canada lynx are probably doing the worst of all of those three species. There are very few left in Washington. They occur almost exclusively in western Washington, east of the Cascade crest, in the Okanagan area.

How do you go about studying them when they’re hard to find?

You’ve got to tromp out there into far-away places just to get to where they live, but that’s what attracted me to this research. I just love to figure out how to do this.

We use non-invasive methods to collect information on the species without ever seeing them.

We hike along trails up high in the mountains and collect carnivore scats. We do this systematically across vast swaths of the Cascade range with field crews and community science volunteers. That allows us to identify different individuals within a species and then look at the health of the population.

The other thing we do is we set camera stations designed specifically for wolverines.

wolverine facing camera — A adult female wolverine stands at a camera station in Mt. Rainier National Park. Photo: NPS/Cascades Carnivore Project

They’re set up in a way that the photographs show the ventral side of the animal — their throat and chest — because each wolverine has a unique white pattern in that area that we call a chest blaze. We can identify each wolverine just based on photos, and then we can track them as they move from one of our stations to another and better understand which portion of the landscape they occupy.

They also leave hair samples that we can send to the lab and have the DNA extracted. That allows us to compare individuals and understand if the genetic diversity of a population is low or if an individual has the signature of a Canadian wolverine or a wolverine from Idaho. We can understand this recolonization that the wolverines are doing on their own. Where did they come from to return to Washington?

[By around the 1930s] they were all wiped out from the western United States by over-trapping. There had also been this systematic targeting of carnivores that was focused on other species — primarily wolves, coyotes and bears — but it really had an impact on wolverines because they’re scavengers and they were eating the poisoned bait.

Eventually wolverines returned to Washington on their own from British Columbia. And there’s been a wolverine nicknamed Stormy, living in the Wallowa Mountains in [eastern] Oregon, that came from Idaho.

This year in May a wolverine was photographed on the south bank of the Columbia River in the suburbs of Portland. It was just bonkers. We don’t know if that wolverine swam across the Columbia River and came perhaps from our study area in Washington. We’re waiting for someone to get a better photo.

It was in Portland and then beelined into the Cascades of Oregon.

Coincidentally, a couple weeks later, a wolverine showed up in central California, but it’s probably not the same one. That would be a bit too far.

There was one wolverine in California in 2008 that had the signature of an Idaho wolverine. So there’s a couple avenues that they can use to repopulate the lower 48 in the Western states. But it’s a really slow process and full of tons of risk.

What are you learning about how climate change will affect the three species you’re studying?

All three species are snow-adapted. Lynx have these enormous feet. Wolverines do as well. Cascade red foxes occur at high elevation year-round. It doesn’t come down in the winter like cougars and bears do following elk and deer. These three carnivores rely upon snow. They are adapted to snow. They’re good at capturing prey on snow throughout the winter.

The wolverine is particularly interesting because wolverines give birth in the heart of winter from about January to March high up in the mountains at treeline. The moms dig through the snowpack right down to the ground. In the Cascades, that’s 10 or 12 feet of snow. This snow den protects the wolverine kits from predation and cold.

It’s very important for wolverines to have snow. Globally more than 90% of wolverine habitat is where snow persists into the late spring because the females need the snow to have their dens, and then they need the kits to stay in those dens as the first spring is happening. In February, March and April, the little wolverines are in the dens. And if the snow were to melt too fast at that time of year and disappear, then those kits would be really vulnerable to predation.

The other thing that’s super cool is that females provision their kits on their own. She has to roam her territory — a much smaller area of it, because she can’t leave her kits for too long because they won’t survive. So she needs to have food sources that are close by in the middle of winter at high elevation, where there’s snow everywhere, and there’s just not that much food because all the other species have moved down in elevation or are hibernating. There are just a few species active in the winter.

One thing that she does as a scavenger is if she finds a carcass in, say, the early winter, she’ll shove it down a tree well near her den or her den-to-be. And then she can find that food later, and she can bring it to her kits, or she can eat it herself because she can’t travel too far from her den. The tree wells act like refrigerators. They keep the food cold and safe. That’s another important reason why wolverines need snow.

We’re doing a study right now called DNA metabarcoding, where we extract every fragment of DNA that’s in the wolverine scat, and then we sequence it. We can see all these different prey that the wolverines are eating, and we can learn what are the important species. We’re starting to accumulate a list of exactly what they eat in Washington — it’s things like snowshoe hares, hoary marmots, songbirds and some ground squirrels. Mostly small mammals up to mountain goat carcasses.

What are the challenges to trying to conserve these carnivores? Do you find public opposition even though these animals rarely interact with people?

Wolverines, foxes and lynx aren’t eating people’s livestock. They’re up high in the mountains, and so they’re not preying on people’s pets. Still, I’m surprised when people are opposed to rare carnivore conservation.

Cascade red fox sitting on a rock with evergreen trees in background. — A Cascade red fox. Photo: Gretchen Kay Stuart

I think there’s so much to be done to educate people about the role [of these animals] in the ecosystem. As predators they keep prey populations in check. They’re out there preying on the weak and the injured first. Those are the easier animals to kill. So they keep disease in check. They keep prey populations healthy, and as a result, prey populations don’t overpopulate the landscape and they don’t over-browse it or negatively impact native plant species.

One of the big challenges is that a lot of people just don’t even know that these species even exist. Certainly people rarely see them. When I started the Cascades Carnivore Project, people didn’t even know what a Cascade red fox was. And X-Men hasn’t really helped. Everyone just thinks that wolverines are superheroes.

I think there’s quite a bit of support for their conservation, but there’s still a long way to go.

What do they need to recover? Is it better connectivity from things like safe highway overpasses or do they need more large areas of land to be protected?

Probably both. A lot of their habitat is within protected public lands. Some are in wilderness areas. And some do occur outside of protected areas. But they also need to cross unprotected lands to disperse and set up new home ranges.

Major highways are quite a large source of mortality for those three species, especially for wolverines. We’ve lost several wolverines in the last couple years from road kills. When you think that there’s something like 35 to 45, maybe 50 wolverines in Washington, and you lose one or two a year — especially in the south Cascades where there’s less than 10 — it doesn’t bode well for the population sustaining itself.

We’re just starting a genetic study of Canada lynx, so we don’t have answers there, but for the Cascade red fox, they’re somewhat inbred, and their levels of genetic diversity that we can test through sampling their DNA are low. There are barriers across their distribution, particularly Interstate 90. Connectivity is a problem for all three of those species.

There’s a legacy of population decline from those things I mentioned, like trapping and predator control programs that were targeting other species. In order for these high-elevation carnivores to recover, their populations need to grow, and then they need to be able to move across the landscape. Right now that’s hard because there’s lots of human disturbance in between places where they might like to set up a home range.

Previously in The Revelator:

Fisher Rewilding: How Washington State Is Restoring a Native Carnivore

How 30×30 Ocean Conservation Can Protect Human Rights and Nature

New international agreements are a step in the right direction, but the real work to ensure robust and equitable protections is just beginning.

The ocean sustains all life on Earth. It absorbs around 25% of all human CO₂ emissions and captures 90% of the heat those emissions generate. It’s also a key source of protein for 3.3 billion people around the world. But only 8% of the ocean is designated as protected and, in reality, even these areas are all too often left unmonitored and unsecured. Changing that, effectively and justly, can no longer wait.

The good news is that some important progress is happening. The 2022 COP15 United Nations Biodiversity Conference agreement established the 30×30 target to protect 30% of marine and terrestrial ecosystems by 2030. In March, member states agreed to the United Nations High Seas Treaty, which will help protect some of the most remote parts of the ocean in the areas beyond national jurisdiction. The treaty, which still remains to be signed and ratified by at least 60 countries, could be a key tool to enable 30×30 ocean conservation.

Now it’s crucial to ensure that new marine protected areas — aka MPAs — created under 30×30 plans are resilient and robust. Many current “protections” fail to adequately safeguard nature. For example, allowing bottom trawling and other destructive industrial fishing activities in MPAs makes a mockery of their intended purpose. We can’t afford to continue making the same mistake.

In bottom trawling, vessels drag vast weighted nets along the seabed, scooping up enormous amounts of marine life and turning many ocean floors into lifeless deserts. This unselective fishing picks up everything from turtles to centuries-old coral reefs.

Close-up of turtle under water. — Sea turtle underwater. Photo: Bart Lukasik / Ocean Image Bank

In New Zealand between just 2018 and 2019, 1,515-4,769 tonnes of coral were destroyed on the seabed by bottom trawling. When wildlife is wiped out, livelihoods in coastal communities often rapidly follow.

When it comes to waters of the European Union, 12% are designated as MPAs, but less than 1% of those areas are strictly protected. The protections are also clearly not working — bottom trawling takes place more in MPAs than in unprotected areas in the EU. Meanwhile, bottom trawling and dredging took place in 97% of the United Kingdom’s MPAs in 2019.

These failures are just some examples of a global problem with direct human consequences. More than 100 million people depend on small-scale and subsistence fishing for food resources and livelihoods, often with few alternatives available for income or food.

Bottom trawlers often fish off the coasts of less wealthy nations in direct competition with local fishers, undermining their most basic human rights. The vast carbon emissions from bottom trawling — an estimate 1 billion tonnes of carbon per year from the seabed — worsen the accelerating climate crisis around the world.

COP15 and the High Seas Treaty were important steps forward, but the real work starts now. The Environmental Justice Foundation’s Ocean Manifesto provides a policy roadmap to get there. It demands that the High Seas Treaty be ratified as quickly as possible, with the rapid designation of a network of MPAs in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

While the treaty doesn’t directly protect the ocean from existing threats like illegal fishing, overfishing and deep-sea mining, the relevant international bodies, like the International Seabed Authority, must echo the spirit of this treaty by taking immediate action to protect the ocean for all humankind.

Swift action to cut the ecological footprint of bottom trawling is sorely needed. Banning it in all MPAs and prohibiting it in areas that have so far been spared would be a start toward an effective global MPA network. This network should be co-designed with Indigenous peoples and local communities, not just co-managed.

Two lines of people hold a fishing net at the shoreline. — Small-scale fishers in the Philippines. Photo: Bernard Spragg

All action must center the rights, leadership and active participation of local communities, resource users, and Indigenous peoples. This should be done to support cultural, economic and social rights, but it also improves conservation outcomes, benefiting wildlife, people and the planet all at once.

If world leaders can turn the recent progress on 30×30 into tangible action by their governments, with an unswerving focus on just, effective conservation, we can restore a healthy relationship with nature, support the ocean as it defends us from global heating, and halt the ongoing extinction crisis.

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

Previously in The Revelator:

The Top 10 Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots to Protect

Wildlife Winners and Losers From the West’s Snowy Winter

A swing from drought to heavy snow and rain has been a mixed blessing for the West’s plants and animals.

The superbloom can be seen from space. California’s wet winter — bolstered by a torrent of atmospheric rivers — has yielded a bumper crop of colorful, knee-high wildflowers cascading across hillsides in the region.

It wasn’t all roses — or purple phacelia — earlier in the year. The state’s heavy winter rains at lower elevations and dozens of feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains took more than 20 lives, cost billions in damages and prompted 47 counties to declare a state of emergency. Many still brace for flooding as one of the largest snowpacks on record melts out of the mountains and rushes downstream.

Other states like Wyoming, Colorado and Utah also received above-average snowpacks, which has helped to ease drought across the West. But for wildlife throughout the region, the rain and snow has been a mixed blessing.

The impacts to wildlife — both positive and negative — vary widely, says Caitlin Roddy, environmental program manager for the North Central region of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The Bad

In many places ungulates suffered significantly.

Wyoming saw deep snowpacks at lower elevations that proved deadly. Mule deer and pronghorn starved to death by the thousands. The Wyoming range mule deer herd, one of the state’s 37 herds, lost half its numbers.

ICYMI: The Wyoming winter was especially severe at low-elevations, where record snow depths persisted into the spring and wildlife suffered because of it. Up in the mountains, it was a different story. https://t.co/ULW7Mv6nKi

— WyoFile (@WyoFile) April 17, 2023

Deer and elk herds in Northern Colorado were also hit hard by the deep snowpack, which made finding food more difficult. That forced the animals to roadways where they could move more easily but were exposed to threats from vehicle collisions.

It was a similar story in northern Utah, where record-breaking snow falls also made it difficult for mule deer to find food, leading to expected losses in one area of 70% of adults and 90% of fawns.

“What you’re seeing in other states with ungulates, we’re expecting the same issues, but we don’t have our data yet to give hard numbers,” says Roddy. California is likely to see lower pronghorn and elk numbers, she says, but deer, which can move to lower elevations where snowpack wasn’t as heavy, should fare okay.

Fewer pronghorn and elk could cause problems in the months and years ahead, including changing the behavior of one their predators: mountain lions.

“When there’s limited forage for the ungulates, then they don’t have a good reproductive year and there’s fewer of them,” she says. “Then the mountain lion population, you’d expect it to decline after that, and you hope that they don’t switch to alternative prey, which is livestock.”

That could lead to more human-mountain lion conflicts.

Other animals could face declines as well.

For bi-state sage grouse, which number only 3,300 as they await Endangered Species Act protections, heavy snows would have made finding food harder. Researchers are concerned the birds may be further imperiled by predators as they undertake showy displays to attract mates while white snow still covers their breeding grounds.

Birds that nest near the ground at high elevations, like white-crowned sparrows, may skip breeding if there’s still too much snow, Ryan Burnett, Sierra Nevada group director at Point Blue Conservation Science, told the Los Angeles Times.

Some people may be surprised to know that the wet winter weather may also yield a worse wildfire season.

“We tend to think if there’s a lot rain it means less fire, but really it’s the opposite – rain means you also see more plant growth overall, and that can increase the fuel load,” says Roddy. “[Those plants are] going to dry out at the tail end of the summer because that’s how our climate works. So it could be a difficult fire year for us.”

The Good

The wet weather certain wasn’t all bad news. For many species, it was a boon.

Populations of native salmon, steelhead and trout — previously diminished by low river flows from drought and diversions for human use — will now find revived creeks that provide good spawning habitat. The higher river flows can make it easier for them to migrate. And when rivers wash up onto floodplains, nutrients that help fish develop and thrive are returned to the water.

Migratory birds that travel the Pacific Flyway will benefit from more water in wildlife refuges and flooded rice fields. This will help reduce disease outbreaks that occur when the birds are forced into small areas with limited water.

Hundreds of snow geese on a green field and in the air. — A large flock of snow geese takes flight from a field next in Sutter County, California. Photo: Kenneth James / California Department of Water Resources

The wet winter will also result in an increase in vegetation this spring and summer that Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep enjoy, helping them to boost fat reserves for next winter. Unlike their counterparts in the northern part of the state, deer herds in southern Utah are benefitting from greener vegetation and more moisture, with experts expecting a higher-than-normal survival rate.

Lots of rain also gave blue oaks, a tree found only in California, a needed reprieve, says Angela Moskow of the California Wildlife Foundation.

“The drought was hard on California’s oaks, and so too has been the shifting climate — the intense heat combined with dry weather is really stressing some of them,” she says. “For the oaks, we’re happy in general to have the rains.”

That will help the trees and many others. Some 330 vertebrate species in the state depend on oaks, and many more insects and other plants are associated with the woodlands.

But long-term drought and higher temperatures have also taken a toll on other forests. Roddy cautions that when it comes to the Sierra Nevada’s pine forests, much more precipitation is needed.

“For the pine forests, I don’t know that a single wet year will make that much of a difference,” she says. “If this is the beginning of this long-term drought that we’re in lessening and we end up having more average or above-average water years, then that would be a good thing for the forest.”

It’s a reminder that for many species, it will take months or years to understand the full effect of this winter’s weather — and the bigger changes ahead. Not all wildlife will be able to quickly adapt to extreme weather events amplified by climate change, not to mention long-term changes in temperature and precipitation.

That’s not an invitation to intervene. “Just because it’s an extreme year, it doesn’t mean the wildlife need you to feed them,” says Roddy. “Give them a chance to be wild.”

Plants and animals do need our help in curbing climate change, though — and not just in the United States, of course. As plants and animals face climate-induced weather extremes across the globe, researchers say there’s a key thing we can do to help beyond the work of rapidly limiting the burning of greenhouse gasses: protect and restore habitat.

“The one fail-safe option for helping species cope with extreme events is to retain intact habitats, as these are the places where species are most resilient to extreme events,” Australian scientists Sean Maxwell and James Watson wrote in The Conversation. “Where intact habitat protection is not possible, restoring land or seascapes can also help species to adapt to extreme events.”

Previously in The Revelator:

As Extreme Weather Events Increase, What Are the Risks to Wildlife?

Species Spotlight: The West African Slender-Snouted Crocodile

With fewer than 500 individuals left, this is not only one of the word’s lesser-known crocodilian species but one of our most endangered reptiles.

Species name:

West African slender-snouted crocodile (Mecistops cataphractus)

Description:

The slender-snouted crocodile can grow to approximately 13 feet long. This species has a narrow snout, which it uses to eat fish and small mammals. Its coloring tends to vary from dark tan to light olive, with dark flecking that creates a slightly patterned, mottled look.

A crocodile stares directly into the camera — West African slender-snouted crocodile at San Diego Zoo. Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

Where it’s found:

Slender-snouted crocodiles can be found in smaller river tributaries in densely forested habitats of West Africa, including Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and Togo.

IUCN Red List status:

Critically endangered. They are also categorized as CITES Appendix I, which bans all international trade, and are federally listed as endangered by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Major threats:

Subsistence hunting and habitat destruction are some of the major threats faced by this species. Hunting for skins in Central and West Africa has abated due to declining population numbers and the availability of skins, and to a lesser extent from restrictions on international trade established by CITES. Modern anthropogenic pressures hampering recovery of the species include bushmeat markets; small-scale, subsistence fisheries (resulting in a reduced prey base and incidental mortality in fishing nets); and habitat modification (where large tracts of forest are cleared for cacao and rubber plantations or settlements).

Notable conservation programs:

Project Mecistops, along with work that colleagues are doing though the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group.

The crocodile swims underwater while several fish float nearby — West African slender-snouted crocodile at San Diego Zoo. Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

My favorite experience:

We helped sponsor and participate in the third West and Central Africa Regional IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group meetings, held in Cote d’Ivoire in December 2015. These gatherings focused on helping create regional conservation initiatives, including a headstart program at the Abidjan Zoo. It was a great opportunity to meet colleagues; share advice and recommendations on animal care; and gain knowledge on how to care for eggs, incubation parameters, care and feeding of offspring, and interpretive components and related education programs.

As part of this meeting, we were also able to visit a resident population of West African slender-snouted crocodiles in a remote field site in Liberia. It was amazing to travel to such a far-flung location and see this species in its native habitat. The site was beautiful and intact. There, we lodged at a field research facility with a group of regional biology students who were just beginning their conservation careers.

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

We need more field work and monitoring of remaining populations in West Africa, along with more regional protections of habitats and long-term creation of wildlife corridors to help link isolated remnant populations. I work as the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Species Survival Plan coordinator for this species, and more human care documentation of its preferred requirements is needed to share with colleagues in West Africa who care for animals in headstart and assurance colony facilities, along with best care practices implemented for headstarted animals as they near reintroduction age and size in West Africa. Increased education is also needed for regional schools and other facilities in West Africa, to help reduce hunting and impacts from habitat destruction. Finally, better understanding of diversity for cryptic species such as this is critical to help maintain healthy assurance populations in human care, to eventually serve as source populations for reintroductions into native habitats.

Key research:

Detectability and impact of repetitive surveys on threatened West African crocodylians

Systematic revision of the living African Slender-snouted Crocodiles (Mecistops Gray, 1844)

West African Slender-snouted Crocodile (Mecistops cataphractus) AZA Species Survival Plan

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: Lost or Found? (Podcast)

What a new paper can teach us about hope amidst the extinction crisis.

“What do you believe?” Sea Change Radio host Alex Wise asked me before taping an episode of his program. “Is the ivory-billed woodpecker extinct?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I always default to hope.”

Hope seems to be the operative word when it comes to the ivory-billed woodpecker. A new paper published this May claims to present evidence that the long-lost species still exists in an undisclosed location in Louisiana. If ever proven true, it would be quite the find. The ivory-billed woodpecker was last officially seen in 1944 and people have been looking for it ever since.

Many experts, however, feel it will never be found. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service falls into that camp; in 2021 the agency announced its intention to declare the species extinct.

Will the new paper change anyone’s minds? It contains several grainy photos and indistinct videos, along with first-hand accounts that, while earnest, illustrate the shortcoming of eyewitness statements.

But as I discussed with Wise on his show, if the ivory-billed woodpecker still exists anywhere, this is the place it’s likely to be.

And if the species still exists, what does that mean? Could it finally be saved from extinction? What would it take to accomplish that Herculean task? Would the massive birds need to be taken into a captive-breeding program like the last California condors in the 1960s? Or could we somehow preserve (or recreate) enough old-growth forest for them to thrive in the wild once again?

Meanwhile, our discussion of the potential rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker opened many other questions: What do we lose when we lose a species? What’s working in conservation? Could the cloning technology known as de-extinction help the planet? Why did I spend so much time talking about freshwater mussels?

You can listen to the full episode of Sea Change Radio below, or on your favorite podcast app:

Our Summer Reading List: Birding, Climate, Animal Rights and Justice

This month’s best new environmental books provide a healthy dose of hope while also tackling tough topics like pollution, extinction and trauma.

What are you reading this summer? We’ve got the word on several great new environmental books — all published so far this year — to boost your activism, enhance your compassion, and supercharge your passion for the planet.

Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World

By Christian Cooper

Remember that awful case back in 2020 when a white woman called the police on a Black birder in Central Park? Christian Cooper sure does — it happened to him — but it’s just one piece of a much bigger story and an entertaining, thought-provoking book that celebrates nature, both wild and human, and offers life lessons we should all embrace.

From the publisher: “Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the common grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself. Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper’s story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas and the Himalayas.”

Can’t get enough birding memoirs? Check out the delightful Birdgirl: Looking to the Skies in Search of a Better Future by Mya-Rose Craig.

Thing: Inside the Struggle for Animal Personhood

By Sam Machado, Cynthia Sousa Machado and Steven M. Wise

This exquisitely illustrated graphic novel uses the story of Happy, an elephant living in isolation at the Bronx Zoo, as a lens to explore why nonhuman animals deserve the same legal and ethical rights as Homo sapiens. Although the book lacks the storytelling drive of a TV courtroom drama, it digs deep into the history of humanity and the beings that surround us, mostly by exploring the legal efforts of the Nonhuman Rights Project (led by Wise). The result is a must-read that combines science, legal history and compassion — and may just change a few minds.

From the publisher: “In Thing, comic artists Sam Machado and Cynthia Sousa Machado bring together Wise’s groundbreaking work and their powerful illustrations in the first graphic nonfiction book about the animal personhood movement. Beginning with Happy’s story and the central ideas behind animal rights, Thing then turns to the scientists that are revolutionizing our understanding of the minds of nonhuman animals such as great apes, elephants, dolphins and whales. As we learn more about these creatures’ inner lives and autonomy, the need for the greater protections provided by legal rights becomes ever more urgent.”

For more on this, pick up the just-updated version of Peter Singer’s 1975 classic Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed.

A New War on Cancer: The Unlikely Heroes Revolutionizing Prevention

By Kristina Marusic

You wouldn’t guess that this is an environmental book by the title alone, and that’s the book’s only flaw. This is a quest to find the doctors who are not just treating people with cancer but looking to identify and tackle its causes, often linked to environmental pollution and chemical exposure. If you or anyone you know has ever suffered the indignity of cancer or chemo, this book offers a healthy dose of heroism and — dare I say it — hope.

From the publisher: “The astonishing news is that up to two-thirds of all cancer cases are linked to preventable environmental causes. If we can stop cancer before it begins, why don’t we? That was the question that motivated Kristina Marusic’s revelatory inquiry into cancer prevention. In searching for answers, she met remarkable doctors, scientists and advocates who are upending our understanding of cancer and how to fight it. They recognize that we will never reduce cancer rates without ridding our lives of the chemicals that increasingly trigger this deadly disease.”

For more on this subject, pair this with Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World by Theresa MacPhail. Bring tissues.

Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

By Judith L. Herman, M.D.

This isn’t a strictly environmental book, but it takes on a topic every environmentalist should understand. Trauma — both individual and collective — is something we all need to deal with at some point, whether it stems from the pain of extinction or the disruption and death caused by climate change and extreme weather. This essential, long-awaited follow-up to Herman’s groundbreaking Trauma and Recovery focuses on survivors of sexual trauma, but the techniques of justice it embodies are appropriate to all manners of trauma and all survivors — including, she notes, climate refugees.

From the publisher: “The conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. Renowned trauma expert Judith L. Herman argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them. In Truth and Repair, she commits the radical act of listening to survivors. Recounting their stories, she offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities.”

For more on how climate change can cause PTSD, read The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle (or any book on environmental justice).

A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: George P. McLean, Birdman of the Senate

By Will McLean Greeley

A confession: I believe in the power of government to change lives for the better. I know, I know, that’s a strange thing for a watchdog journalist to say, especially after the past few years, but a book like this helps cement my faith, even if it’s recounting events that took place more than a century ago. More like this, please?

From the publisher: “Senator George P. McLean’s crowning achievement was overseeing passage of one of the country’s first and most important wildlife conservation laws, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The MBTA, which is still in effect today, has saved billions of birds from senseless killing and likely prevented the extinction of entire bird species. A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington puts McLean’s victory for birds in the context of his distinguished forty-five-year career marked by many acts of reform during a time of widespread corruption and political instability.”

Threatened and Recently Extinct Vertebrates of the World: A Biogeographic Approach

By Matthew Richardson

The “problem” with a book like this is that it’s out of date almost the second it’s published. But that doesn’t change the fact that this compilation is a remarkable achievement that could help to guide conservation efforts around the planet.

From the publisher: “This unique volume provides, for the very first time, a comprehensive overview of all threatened and recently extinct mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes within the context of their locations and habitats. The approach takes a systematic examination of each biogeographic realm and region of the world, both terrestrial and marine, but with a particular emphasis on geographic features such as mountains, islands and coral reefs. It reveals patterns useful in biodiversity conservation, helps to put it all into perspective, and ultimately serves as both a baseline from which to compare subsequent developments as well as a standardization of the way threatened species are studied.”

Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm

By Susan Crawford

Crawford, a former Obama appointee, teaches courses on climate adaptation at Harvard Law School, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this is a textbook. It’s a powerful look at a threat that’s not just coming — it’s already arrived, and the centuries of rot at the heart of American society have already weakened the foundation that should keep us all safe.

From the publisher: “At least thirteen million Americans will have to move away from American coasts in the coming decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions of dollars in damages. In Charleston, South Carolina, denial, boosterism, widespread development, and public complacency about racial issues compound; the city, like our country, has no plan to protect its most vulnerable. In these pages, Susan Crawford tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America’s painful racial history for centuries and now, as the waters rise, stands at the intersection of climate and race.”

For a more hopeful vision of water, check out The Three Ages of Water by Peter Gleick (and our interview with the author).

That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

A Wolverine Feasts — on Fish?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nimbus investigates. Photo by L. Bishop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Road to Nowhere: Highways Pose Existential Threat to Wolverines

The Future of Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this book now?

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

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

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

What should we learn from earlier people?

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

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

What is the soft path?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How well are we doing this already?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are other areas of concern?

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

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

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

Previously in The Revelator:

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

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

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

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

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

Species name:

Grevy’s zebra (Equus grevyi)

Description:

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

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

Where it’s found:

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

IUCN Red List status:

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

Major threats:

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

Notable conservation programs:

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

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

My favorite experience:

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

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

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

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

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

Previously in The Revelator:

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