‘What Really Keeps Me Up at Night’: A Climate Scientist’s Call to Action

“Climate change is real and it is here, and it’s not going away. We need your help,” writes Joëlle Gergis in the new book Humanity’s Moment.

We’re running out of time to get things right.

With the final installment in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report released this week, the world’s leading climate scientists have offered a stark warning that we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 or face a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”

This will require an abrupt about-face as emissions continue to rise despite the massive body of scientific literature affirming the dire risks of proceeding with business as usual.

“Recognize that you are living through the most profound moment in human history,” climate scientist Joëlle Gergis tells The Revelator. “How bad we let things get is still in our hands. Averting planetary disaster is up to the people alive right now.”

The Australian scientist is one of the lead authors of the latest IPCC assessment. She has also issued a rising call to action in a new book, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope.

It’s clear from the book that Gergis isn’t a shout-it-from-the-rooftops kind of person. But she felt compelled to share the loss she was feeling — not just as a scientist but as a person. And it’s something she hopes more scientists will do.

“It’s a long-held myth that a credible scientist should be devoid of human emotion, presenting our work rationally, without commentary,” she writes. “Given that humanity is now facing an existential threat of planetary proportions, and scientists are the people who really know exactly what’s at stake, shouldn’t that logically include acknowledging our sense of despair, anger, grief and frustration?”

Humanity’s Moment provides a front-row view of our planetary emergency. Not surprisingly, it’s scary. Gergis writes:

The more I hear, the more I realize that the situation is far worse than most people can imagine. In truth, it’s also hard for me to fathom that our generation is likely to witness the destabilization of the Earth’s climate; that we will be the last to see the world as it is today.

That’s what really keeps me up at night. I wonder if we may have already pushed the planetary system too far, unleashing a cascade of irreversible changes that have built such momentum we can now only watch as they unfold.

For those who need a refresher on how we got to this perilous moment, the book summarizes the science of climate change and explains concepts like the importance of polar areas in regulating the Earth’s climate, the threats to biodiversity, the human health risks, the cultural losses to come, and why the scientific community has been stunned by the rate of change they’re seeing.

But it’s also deeply personal. Gergis writes about her fear that we will not be able to right this ship. And what it means to live with the weight of that.

“It’s a pretty fraught moment, to be honest,” she tells The Revelator. “As a scientist trying to sound the alarm, I feel a sense of responsibility to do what I can to help people understand the significance of the time we are living in. I don’t think most people are aware of how bad things are, or that we can still do something to avert the worst aspects of climate change.”

And that last part is key. All is not lost … yet.

But we do need to take swift and meaningful action. The good news is that we have a roadmap to follow.

Women marching with signs to reject fossil fuel development — Climate protest on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. in Oct. 2021. Photo: Victoria Pickering (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

“The IPCC has very clearly laid out a path toward stabilizing the Earth’s climate. We know exactly what we need to do, we just need governments all over the world to urgently implement policy to avert disaster,” she says. “For that to happen we need ordinary citizens to vote for politicians who will take real leadership, and also be prepared to do whatever we can in our own lives to live more sustainably on the planet.”

Of course the gist of this action requires leaving fossil fuels in the ground, something major governments of the world — most especially the United States — have thus far failed to do. And the approval last week of a large new oil-drilling project in Alaska shows there’s still a long way to go.

But Gergis also highlights other bright lights, including regionally led renewable energy transitions, and a shifting tide of public sentiment and coordinated action. “The social tipping point we need is now clearly on the horizon,” she writes.

And in hand is irrefutable evidence gathered by scientists in the latest IPCC assessment that was compiled over countless hours, distilled from thousands of studies by researchers working to exhaustion. All so we could have the scientific foundation to guide action.

Scientists have done their part. Will we do ours?

“The 2020s will be remembered as the decade that determined the fate of humanity,” says Gergis. “We can each choose to be part of the critical mass that will change the world. And when we do, it will bring profound meaning and purpose to our lives.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Why We Need Environmental Justice at the Heart of Climate Action

PFAS ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Everywhere: Here’s What That Means for Wildlife

Researchers have found PFAS in the bodies of wild animals everywhere they’ve looked. Now they’re beginning to understand the health effects.

Images of starving polar bears staggering across the snow earned the species the dubious honor of being the “poster child” of climate change. But now another human-caused environmental danger threatens these apex predators: pollution from a class of 12,000 chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). And they’re not the only ones.

The nonprofit Environmental Working Group analyzed hundreds of recent peer-reviewed scientific studies and found more than 120 different PFAS compounds in wildlife. Some 330 species were affected, spanning nearly every continent — and that’s just some of what scientists have identified so far.

PFAS have been around since the 1940s in paint, cleaning products, food packaging, nonstick pans, stain-resistant fabric, waterproof clothing, and firefighting foam used at military bases and airports. Dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment, they migrate into the soil, water and air — and then into the food chain.

In people different PFAS chemicals have been linked to a range of risk factors, including increased cholesterol, increased risk of pre-eclampsia in pregnant women, decreased vaccine response in children, and increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer.

“The scientific literature shows that PFAS exposure is one of those risk factors that make our western lifestyle unhealthy,” says Catharina Vendl, a wildlife health researcher at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, who is mapping the health risk of PFAS in wildlife. “And unfortunately, wildlife has become unwillingly part of our western lifestyle.”

On the Research Trail

We have some idea of the human impacts of PFAS pollution, but we still have a long way to go in understanding what it does to wildlife.

The first study published about PFAS in wildlife was in 2001, “which is shocking,” says Vendl, “because the chemicals have been around for ages.” For the next 15 or 20 years, she says, the research was mostly focused on measuring concentrations of PFAS compounds in the bodies of wild animals.

Wherever researchers looked for PFAS, seemingly, they found it, as a map of studies from Environmental Working Group revealed. In recent years they’ve also started working to determine how these chemicals actually affect wild animals’ health — a much more daunting task.

What they’ve learned so far is that there’s evidence that PFAS can pose a threat to immune function, hormone balance and fertility.

For example, studies have found that higher levels of PFAS correlates to higher incidence of disease in sea otters, increased susceptibility to disease in dolphins, reduced foraging behavior in crayfish, and lower hatching success in sea turtles.

A study of American alligators — who can live for 60 years — in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River found that exposure to PFAS “broadly alters immune activities resulting in autoimmune-like pathology.” This included atypical skin lesions and wounds that were slow to heal.

Alligator swimming in the water — Alligator in Everglades National Park. Photo: Shell Game (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The researchers concluded that the data “reaffirms the need to reduce exposure and cease production and use of a chemical class that, through its ubiquity and persistence, is a global environmental health concern.”

Although the problem is global, one clear pattern emerges: Wild animals who live near areas with larger human populations tend to have higher levels of PFAS in their bodies.

“If we reduce those known sources where there are releases, that can be a step to reducing accumulation in animals and people,” says Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at Environmental Working Group who’s involved in its mapping project. “Because those higher levels do track with more developed and populated areas.”

Polar Bears and the Arctic

Unfortunately the high mobility and longevity of PFAS also means that even the most remote wildlife face risks, too. Research in the early 2000s found high concentrations of PFAS in Arctic ocean waters and animals.

“That was a wake-up call to the research community, because if PFAS was being found in remote wildlife in the Arctic, then it was surely everywhere,” says Vendl. It also inspired increased research efforts on environmental toxicity from scientists in Norway.

“What those researchers found was that polar bears have the highest level of PFAS of all wildlife species in the Arctic, comparable to concentrations of people who work in or live near a PFAS manufacturing plant in China,” she says.

Their study concluded that, “PFAS exposure in Arctic biota, in particularly in polar bears, is alarming.”

What does that mean for the bears’ health?

“The toxicologist who works on those polar bears told me that it’s really hard to say because they only see the animals once, and if they’re in bad body condition, it could be the result of climate change and not finding enough food,” says Vendl. But modeling studies suggest “that it goes towards reduced fertility and messed up hormonal balances,” because some PFAS components have an effect that’s similar to the effect of estrogen in mammalian bodies.

Research Gaps

There’s still much to be learned about how wild animals are affected, but Vendl’s work has found that there are already big geographic gaps in where research is occurring.

Studies have been heavily focused in wealthier countries, including in North America, Europe and China, which spend more on scientific research generally. But PFAS abounds globally, and many less affluent countries, including those in the Global South, have the same contamination issues.

“Those countries will have as much — or more — exposure to PFAS,” she says. “But there’s barely any research measuring concentrations because there’s no money and therefore little interest. And that’s a big issue.”

Arms Race

Another looming problem with PFAS is how to regulate this broad class of chemicals.

Trail sign identifying PFAS contamination in water and ground. — Signs along the White Pine trail north of Rockford, Michigan warn people about water quality risks. Photo: G. Witteveen (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Two of the more commonly used compounds, PFOS and PFOA, have been phased out in North America and Europe, but production continues in Asia. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency launched a strategic roadmap for addressing PFAS pollution in 2021 and has just announced a proposed drinking-water standard for six of those chemicals.

It’s a necessary and overdue step, but it only scratches the surface of a much greater problem.

With new regulations exposing health risks of long-time PFAS compounds, manufacturers are producing a new generation of the chemicals. But there’s an inevitable lag in studying the impacts and assessing any potential harm.

“So for a few years companies can do whatever they want,” says Vendl, “By the time we realize it’s a problem, they move on to another chemical and it starts all over again.”

That’s why it’s important to regulate the entire class of fluorinated chemicals, which have similar structures and properties, says Stoiber.

“The more that we study PFAS and the more that we study the replacements, the more that we’re seeing that they act the same and many of them have the same health impacts,” she says. “We need to make sure that when we’re tackling this, we’re looking at the whole class of chemicals so that we don’t have these regrettable substitutions that are going to be just as much of a problem as the original chemicals.”

And the time to do that is now, she says. Many wildlife species are facing unprecedented rates of decline from climate change and habitat loss and degradation. Chemical pollution adds another pressure — and one that could prove too much.

“Those effects might not be as visible, but the harms that animals might sustain as a result of these chemicals may leave them less likely to deal with some of some of these other factors,” she says. “All of these pressures acting together simultaneously on animals is a huge problem that we need to tackle.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Injustice Forever? Toxic PFAS Chemicals Have ‘Made a Mockery of Our Environmental Regulations’

When Renewable Energy Threatens Irreplaceable Tribal Culture

A pumped hydro facility is just one of many proposed clean energy projects that threaten cultural property of the Yakama Nation.

“Is it green energy if it’s impacting cultural traditional sites?”

Yakama Nation Tribal Councilman Jeremy Takala sounded weary. For five years, Tribal leaders and staff have been fighting a renewable energy development that could permanently destroy Tribal cultural property. “This area, it’s irreplaceable.”

The privately owned land, outside Goldendale, Washington, is called Pushpum, or “mother of roots,” a first foods seed bank. The Yakama people have treaty-protected gathering rights there. One wind turbine-studded ridge, Juniper Point, is the proposed site of a pumped hydro storage facility. But to build it, Boston-based Rye Development would have to carve up Pushpum — and the Yakama Nation lacks a realistic way to stop it.

Back in October 2008, unbeknownst to Takala, Scott Tillman, CEO of Golden Northwest Aluminum Corporation, met with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a collection of governor-appointed representatives from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana who maintain a 20-year regional energy plan prioritizing low economic and environmental tolls. Tillman, who owned a shuttered Lockheed Martin aluminum smelter near Goldendale, told the council about the contaminated site’s redevelopment potential, specifically for pumped hydro storage, which requires a steep incline like Juniper Point to move water through a turbine. Shortly thereafter, Klickitat County’s public utility department tried to implement Tillman’s plan, but hit a snag in the federal regulatory process. That’s when Rye Development stepped in.

“We’re committed to at least a $10 million portion of the cleanup of the former aluminum smelter,” said Erik Steimle, Rye’s vice president of project development, “an area that is essentially sitting there now that wouldn’t be cleaned up in that capacity without this project.”

Meanwhile, Tillman cleaned up and sold another smelting site, just across the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon, a Superfund site where Lockheed Martin had poisoned the groundwater with cyanide. He sold it to Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which operates water-guzzling data centers in The Dalles and plans to build more. For nine years, the county and Rye plotted the fate of Pushpum — without ever notifying the Yakama Nation.

The Tribal government only learned of the development in December 2017, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a public notice of acceptance for Rye’s preliminary permit application. Tribal officials had just 60 days to catch up on nine years of development planning and issue their initial concerns and objections as public comments.

When it came time for government-to-government consultation in August 2021, FERC designated Rye as its representative. But the Yakama Nation refused to consult with the corporation. “The Tribe’s treaty was between the U.S. government and the Tribe. We’re two sovereigns,” said Elaine Harvey, environmental coordinator at Yakama Nation Fisheries, who’s been heavily involved with the project. “We’re supposed to deal with the state.”

FERC countered that using corporate stand-ins for Tribal consultation is standard practice for the commission. When the Tribe objected, FERC said it could file more public comments to the docket instead of consulting.

But sensitive cultural information was involved, which, by Yakama Tribal law, cannot be made public. Takala noted, for example, that Yakama people don’t want non-Natives harvesting and marketing first foods the way commercial pickers market huckleberries: “That has an impact for our people as well, trying to save up for the winter.” The Tribe needs confidentiality to protect its cultural resources.

There’s just one catch: Rule 2201. According to FERC, Rule 2201 legally prohibits the agency from engaging in off-the-record communications in a contested proceeding. Records of all consultations must be made available to the public and other stakeholders, including prospective developers and county officials. Who wrote Rule 2201? FERC did.

“Nevertheless,” FERC wrote to the Yakama Nation in December 2021, “the Commission endeavors, to the extent authorized by law, to reduce procedural impediments to working directly and effectively with Tribal governments.” FERC said the nation could either relay any sensitive information in a confidential file — though that information “must be shared with at least some participants in the proceeding” — or else keep it confidential by simply not sharing it at all, in which case FERC would proceed without taking it into account. So formal federal consultation still hasn’t happened. But FERC is moving forward anyway.

Man holding fish in net above river. — Yakama Tribal member fishes in the Klickitat River for salmon. Photo: USFWS Pacific Region (CC BY-NC 2.0)

“It’s important for First Nationsto be heard in this process,” said Steimle, the developer. During a two-hour tour of the site, he championed the project’s technical merits and its role in meeting state carbon goals. “If you look at Europe at this point, it’s probably 20 years ahead of us integrating large amounts of renewables.”

Steimle repeatedly described Rye as weighed down by stringent consultation and licensing processes. Rye, he said, lacks real authority: “We don’t have the power in the situation to ultimately decide, you know, it’s going to be this technology, or it’s going to be in this final location.” Becky Brun, Rye’s communications director, echoed Steimle’s tone of inevitability: “Regardless of what happens here with this pumped storage project, this land will most certainly get redeveloped into something.”

When asked what Rye could offer the Yakama people as compensation for the irreversible destruction of their cultural property, Steimle suggested “employment associated with the project.”

Takala wasn’t surprised. “That’s always the first thing offered on many of these projects. It’s all about money.”

Presented with the reality that Yakama people might not want Rye’s jobs, Steimle hesitated. “Yeah, I mean I, I can’t argue that — maybe it won’t be meaningful to them.”

But for Klickitat County, the jobs pitch works: It’s a chance to revive employment lost when the smelter closed. “That was one of the largest employers in Klickitat County — very good family-wage jobs for over a generation,” said Dave Sauter, a longtime county commissioner who finished his final term at the end of 2022. The smelter’s closing was “a huge blow,” he said. “Redevelopment of that site would be really beneficial.”

Sauter acknowledged the pumped hydro storage facility would only provide about a third of the jobs that the smelter offered in its final days, but “it will lead to other energy development in Klickitat County.” The county, with its armada of aging wind turbines and proximity to the hydroelectric grid, prides itself on being one of the greenest energy producers in the state and has asked FERC for an expedited timeline.

Klickitat County’s eagerness creates another barrier to the Yakama Nation. In Washington, a developer can take one of two permitting paths: through the state’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, or through county channels. Both lead to FERC. In this case, working with the county benefits Rye: Klickitat, a majority Republican county, has a contentious relationship with the Yakama Nation, one that even Sauter described as “challenging.”

“Klickitat County refuses to work with us,” said Takala. On Sept. 19, 2022, Harvey logged into a Zoom meeting with the Klickitat County Planning Department to deliver comments as a private citizen. Harvey says county officials, who know her from her work with the Yakama Nation, locked her out of the Zoom room, even though the meeting was open to the public and a friend of hers confirmed that the call was working and the meeting underway. Undeterred, Harvey attended in person and delivered her comments.

The Planning Department denied that Harvey was deliberately locked out, claiming that everyone who arrived on Zoom was admitted. They also said they were having technical difficulties.

Fighting Rye’s proposal has required the efforts of Tribal attorneys, archaeologists and government staffers from a number of departments. “Finding the staff to do site location is very difficult when we don’t have the funds put forth,” Takala said.

And Rye’s project is just one of dozens proposed within the Yakama Nation’s 10 million-acre treaty territory. Maps from the Tribe and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife show that of the 51 wind and solar projects currently proposed statewide — not including geothermal or pumped hydro storage projects, which are also renewable energy developments — at least 34 are on or partially on the Yakama Nation’s ceded lands. Each of these proposals has its own constellation of developers, permitting agencies, government officials and landowners.

“There’s so many projects being proposed in the area that we here at the nation are feeling the pressure,” said Takala. He noted that when it comes to fulfilling obligations to Tribes, the United States drags its feet. “But when it’s a developer, things get pushed through really quickly. It’s pretty much a repeating history all over again.”

This story first appeared in High Country News. Read the original here.

The World’s Dams Are Filling Up — But Not With Water

Accumulating sediment in reservoirs is affecting how much water dams can hold back to supply water for drinking, irrigation and flood control.

Images of a shrinking Lake Mead illustrate a stark water crisis — one that’s being exacerbated by climate change. As the arid Southwest is getting hotter and drier, there’s less water to store.

But a lack of water isn’t the only kind of storage problem dams can present. They’re designed to hold back water — whether for water supply, hydropower or flood control — but they also block river sediment from flowing downstream. And over time it accumulates in reservoirs, leaving less and less space for water.

How bad is the problem? Pretty bad, it turns out. Some dams could lose up to 50% of their water-storage capacity by mid-century, according to a new study published in the journal Sustainability.

The study — conducted by researchers from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and other institutions — estimated the loss of storage from sedimentation in more than 47,000 large dams in 150 countries and called reservoir sedimentation “a significant challenge … that must be addressed.”

The Findings

The study isn’t the first to suggest that sedimentation is a problem — that’s been known for decades, although the researchers write that it’s also been largely ignored. Their work, however, is the first to assess potential storage loss on a global scale.

On average they found that by 2050 the world’s major dams will have lost more than a quarter of their storage capacity. Their findings varied by region and by country, with the size and age of dams being the biggest factors.

This is “an alert to this creeping global water challenge with potentially significant development implications,” they write.

The United States is expected to see the second-highest storage loss in the Americas after Panama, with 34% reduction expected across its 7,469 large dams by 2050. Europe, with thousands of old dams, has already lost 19% of its storage capacity, and that number will climb to 28% in the next 30 years.

In Africa, where dam construction is more recent, storage losses are predicted to be 17% by 2030 and 24% by 2050. The worst-hit will be the archipelago nation of Seychelles — which has two large dams around a half century in age. They are projected to lose half of their storage capacity by 2050.

Asia-Pacific, the most heavily dammed region in the world, should expect capacity losses around 23% by mid-century, lower than other regions. The biggest losses will be felt by Japan, where the average dam age is 100 years. The country has lost 39% of storage in its reservoirs already, and that will climb to 50% by 2050. After Japan, Azerbaijan (24%), Israel (24%), Kazakhstan (20%) and Afghanistan (20%) are next on the list.

“In Asia, the region where 60% of the world’s population lives, water storage is crucial in sustaining water and food security,” the researchers write. “It will face a more challenging future if it loses 23% of its water storage in large dams due to sedimentation.”

The Problem

One of the most significant problems from sedimentation, as the study points out, is the loss of storage capacity for water supply or flood control. As climate change brings longer droughts and bigger storms, maximizing water storage will become even more crucial.

Aerial view of dam wall and reservoir — The Susquehanna River flows south past Conowingo Dam near Conowingo, Md. The dam has long captured sediment, preventing millions of tons from reaching the Chesapeake Bay. Photo by Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program with aerial support by Southwings.

But the loss of sediment that’s blocked by dams is also important downstream. Sediment flux in rivers provides the material for sandbars, dunes, marshes and barrier islands. These structures help protect communities from floods, storm surges and rising tides. And they also provide habitat and carry nutrients used by wildlife.

Sedimentation comes from riverbanks and upland runoff, but activities like deforestation, mining, and other development can cause it to increase.

And lately it has.

A study published in June 2022 in Science found that in the global hydrologic north, dams have blocked almost half the sediment that used to flow down rivers. But in the global hydrologic south, more intensive land use is causing greater erosion, leading to about 41% more suspended sediment in rivers there since the 1980s.

There are fewer dams there to block sediment, but that’s likely to change with 300 large dams planned for the Amazon — and more for other parts of South America and Oceania.

“The Amazon, which exports two-thirds of the sediment from South America and more sediment than any other global river, is home to globally unrivaled channel, floodplain, and estuary biodiversity and transfers essential nutrients to coastal waters,” the researchers wrote. “The planned dam projects there and on other unregulated rivers are particularly impactful because the current absence of dams allows virtually unchecked river transport of sediment, conditions that persist along few major rivers.”

The Solutions

How do we solve this engineered problem?

The researchers of the Sustainability study point to dredging but warn that it’s costly and temporary. A cheaper option is flushing out sediment, but that can have “significant adverse impacts downstream,” they caution. A better option would be a bypass that diverts flows around the dam using a separate channel.

There’s one other option. “Complete removal of dams, including those that are filled with sediments, is also a (slowly) emerging practice,” they write. “Dam removal can bring rivers back to their natural state and reestablish the natural river sediment transport.”

None of the solutions are easy, cheap or quick, which is why the researchers hope their study can ignite action.

“What’s important to underline is that the overall magnitude of water storage losses due to sedimentation is quite disturbing,” they write. “It adds to the list of water development issues that the world is already facing and has been unable to resolve.”

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Nature’s Supermarket: How Beavers Help Birds — And Other Species

New research shows that these ecosystem engineers can be an “ally in stopping the decline of biodiversity.”

Researchers in Poland have found another reason to love beavers: They benefit wintering birds.

The rodents, once maligned as destructive pests, have been getting a lot of positive press lately. And for good reason. Beavers are ecosystem engineers. As they gather trees and dam waterways, they create wetlands, increase soil moisture, and allow more light to reach the ground. That drives the growth of herbaceous and shrubby vegetation, which benefits numerous animals.

Bats, who enjoy the buffet of insects found along beaver ponds, are among the beneficiaries. So too are butterflies who come for the diversity of flowering plants in the meadows beavers create.

Some previous research has found that this helping hand also extends to birds. For example, a 2008 study in the western United States showed that the vegetation that grows along beaver-influenced streams provided needed habitat for migratory songbirds, many of whom are in decline.

Pile of branches of beaver dam in green wetland. — A beaver dam in Bierbza Marshes, Poland. Photo: Francesco Veronesi (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The new study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management found further evidence by focusing on birds in winter. The researchers looked at assemblages of wintering birds on 65 beaver sites and 65 reference sites in a range of temperate forest habitat across Poland. Winter can be a challenging time for birds in that environment, as they need to reduce energy expenditures in the cold weather and find habitat that has high-quality food and roosting sites.

Wintering birds, it turns out, find those qualities near beaver habitat.

The researchers found a greater abundance of birds and more species richness near areas where beavers had modified waterways. Both were highest closest to the shores of beaver ponds.

One of the reasons that birds are attracted to these areas in winter has to do with warmth: The open tree canopy caused by flooding and tree diebacks lets in more sun, and ice-free beaver ponds can release heat, previous research has found.

The changes beavers make to the landscape also provide for different kinds of birds. Standing dead wood caused by flooding is sought after by woodpeckers, and then by secondary cavity nesters that follow. The diversity of plants that grow in beaver areas produce fruits and attract insects — and therefore frugivorous and insectivorous birds.

“All beaver-induced modifications of the existing habitat may have influence on bird assemblage,” says Michal Ciach, a study co-author and a professor in the department of Forest Biodiversity at the University of Agriculture in Krakow, Poland. “But different bird species may rely on different habitat traits that emerge due to beaver activity. It’s like a supermarket.”

Just how far into the forest do beavers’ benefits extend?

While the study found that the number of bird species and the number of individuals were significantly higher in the study areas closest to beaver ponds, “for some species this tendency also held in forests growing at some distance from beaver wetlands,” the researchers wrote.

Beaver crouched by water's edge. — The Eurasian beaver. Photo: Per Harald Olsen/NTNU (CC BY 2.0)

Those instances, though, weren’t statistically significant. But Ciach says beaver effects can be far-reaching in other cases. He’s the coauthor of a study published last year that found a greater number of wintering mammal species near beaver ponds, which extended nearly 200 feet from the edges of ponds.

And it’s likely that what’s good for birds may be good for many other species, too.

“Birds are commonly considered a good indicator of biodiversity,” he says. “If they positively respond to beaver presence, one may expect that such patterns will be followed by other groups of organisms. At this moment we are sure it works for wintering mammals. Other groups of organisms need investigation, but I’m quite sure many other organisms will do the same.”

The growing research about beavers suggests a greater need to protect their habitat and understand their important role in the ecosystem.

“Beaver sites should be treated as small nature reserves,” says Ciach. “The beaver, like no other species, is our ally in stopping the decline of biodiversity.”

Previously in The Revelator:

The Free Agent Beaver

Fear of Nature, Love of the Ocean, and Other Links From the Brink

We’ve got the word on an important new treaty, a victory against ag-gag laws, and two new threats to the massive Andean condor.

March keeps barreling forward like a freight train full of vinyl chloride — but hope and spring are both in the air, and they smell like victory.

Welcome to another edition of Links From the Brink, where we gather and dissect (in an ethical manner, not like your high school biology class) the environmental news that might otherwise fall through the cracks.

This month we take a look at giant birds, awful laws, an oceanic win, and … fear.

Seas the Day

International victory of the month: It isn’t official yet, but members of the United Nations have ironed out a decades-in-the-making treaty that would protect biodiversity in the high seas — the mostly lawless stretches of the ocean outside national boundaries. (That’s about two-thirds of the ocean, for those of you counting at home.)

If the U.N. member nations all agree to adopt this treaty — and remember, the United States has still failed to sign on to the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea — it would allow for the creation of large marine protected areas, establish an international organization to address biodiversity issues, and restrict companies from exploiting the genetics of ocean life (say, for pharmaceuticals).

This treaty will do a heck of a lot more than conserve dolphins and sharks (although it will do that too, and that’s important). It will help reduce overfishing, ocean mining and oil extraction. And it will also go a long way toward the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s land and water by 2030 — key to slowing both climate change and the extinction crisis.

We’ll be watching to see which nations sign on to this new treaty — and which ones don’t.

Biophobia Redux

Back in 2020, researcher Masashi Soga warned us about how “biophobia,” the fear of living things and a complete aversion to nature, had become the latest risk to conservation. “I believe that increased biophobia is a major, but invisible, threat to global biodiversity,” he told us. “As the number of children who have biophobia increases, public interest and support for biodiversity conservation will gradually decline.”

Well, that fear isn’t going anywhere, but luckily neither is Soga, who’s back with another must-read paper titled “The Vicious Cycle of Biophobia.” Here’s a key graphic:

That image, of course, details how biophobia builds into a feedback loop that gets worse at every step.

But the paper goes beyond that. Much like in their original paper in 2020, Soga and colleagues write that education, outreach and direct experiences with nature can help break the vicious cycle. There’s no “silver bullet,” they caution, but anything we do now to help people appreciate the natural world will help in the long run.

So take a nature-averse friend to a park, ask for help with gardening, or share an article or cute animal video. What have you got to lose — other than the planet?

Gag Off

Best activist news of the month: A federal court has ruled that North Carolina’s infamous ag-gag law, which blocked undercover operations at livestock facilities and other companies, violates the First Amendment. Similar laws have fallen in court rulings around the country. This law was particularly egregious, as it blocked undercover video in any business and made it a civic liability.

But the fight to shine a light on cruel or unsafe agricultural practices ain’t over: Iowa last month asked the courts to reinstate its ag-gag law and introduced a new bill to block drone surveillance of livestock operations. Someone’s got something to hide…

Condor Conundrums

A few years ago I wrote about how livestock owners in Argentina have started using high doses of pesticides to kill Andean condors, a persecution driven by the (needless) fear that the massive birds will attack live sheep and other animals. (Scavengers don’t do that.)

As if those deliberate poisonings weren’t bad enough, now we have reports of two new indirect environmental threats to Andean condors: Pharmaceuticals and plastics.

Andean condor wings — An Andean condor spreads its wings at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The first emerging threat, detailed in the journal Biological Conservation, comes again from livestock owners, who researchers found are treating their animals with veterinary drugs — antibiotics and anti-inflammatory NSAIDS — in even the most remote grazing locations. When livestock die on the range, condors scavenge the corpses and get dosed by proxy. The researchers didn’t find this to be a quantifiable danger to Andean condors yet, but they remind us that “these compounds can produce catastrophic consequences for populations of avian scavengers,” like it’s doing for vultures throughout Asia and Africa. Could the same thing happen in South America?

The second threat — plastic — is even more worrying. Researchers tested undigested food regurgitated (gross) by condors at two remote protected sites in Peru and found that almost all of them contained “different sizes and varieties of plastic debris, with a very high frequency of occurrence (85–100%) of microplastics in pellets of both areas studied.” According to the study, published in Environmental Pollution, this means the condors’ prey — mostly camelids and marine mammals — is already packed with plastic, even though the two locations are far from human settlements.

As we’ve seen with whales, eagles and humans, the chemicals from plastic — and their health effects — tend to bioaccumulate and cause the most harm to top-of-the-food-chain predators. Andean condors could soon be added to that list.

Two Contradictory Headlines to Nuke Your Brain

Biden’s DOE Announces $1.2 Billion to Extend or Restart the Life of Nuclear Plants

Nuclear Waste Is Piling Up. Does the US Have a Plan?

Dammed Salmon

Maine’s Milford Dam is supposed to allow 95% of adult Atlantic salmon, an endangered species, to quickly pass through as the fish migrate up the Penobscot River. According to documents obtained by environmental groups and the Penobscot Indian Nation, the dam misses that target by (checks math) 74%.

Yup, only 21% of salmon passed by the dam within the allotted 48 hours. That’s bad.

Milford is operated by Brookfield Renewable Partners, the same company that’s been targeted — and has to date refused — to remove four dams on the Kennebec River. Both the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers, expert say, hold the key to restoring Atlantic salmon.

“Ultimately the fate of the species in the United States really depends upon what happens at a handful of key dams,” John Burrows, executive director of U.S. programs at the Atlantic Salmon Federation, told us last year. If any of those dams don’t allow the fish to pass, he said, “you could basically preclude recovering Atlantic salmon in the United States.”

The salmon’s in your court, Brookfield.

And Finally, in No Particular Order, 10 Stories About Forests

That’s it for this edition of Links From the Brink. We’ll be back in late April with another dose of environmental news and analysis.

Until then, stay tuned for the latest on the East Palestine chemical disaster (or whatever train crash comes next), some important news about clean water (what little of it’s left), and more culture war nonsense from the MAGA right.

Also in the weeks ahead: International Day of Action for Rivers (March 14), World Sparrow Day (March 20), Manatee Appreciation Day (March 29) and International Beaver Day (April 7). Check out our full list of environmental holidays for even more reasons to celebrate.

Previously in The Revelator:

Elephant Poop, Tasmanian Snails and Other Links From the Brink

Moby: Veganism, Skepticism and Punk Rock

The musician’s new documentary, Punk Rock Vegan Movie, shines a light on a hidden history of the animal-rights movement.

The musician Moby wants people to stop eating animals — and he’s recruited a few dozen performers from the punk rock scene to help explain why.

Moby’s new documentary, Punk Rock Vegan Movie, casts the punk music of the late 1970s and 1980s as one of the primary seeds of today’s animal-rights movement. Bands like Crass, Bad Brains, the Cro-Mags and Earth Crisis led vegetarian or vegan lifestyles, raged against animal cruelty in their songs or on stage, included animal liberation messages on their physical albums and at their merchandise tables, and inspired a generation of activists and musicians that followed.

“It’s a surprising story,” Moby tells The Revelator. “This genre of super-loud, aggressive punk rock is actually where a lot of animal-rights activism came from.”

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The punk scene, as shown in the film, embraced social justice with an ethos of questioning authority and the status quo, standing up against cruelty and injustice, and living ethical lives.

And that, Moby says, offers lessons that still resonate as loudly as the songs, especially when it comes to animal rights.

“If you’re a smart, reasonable person, an extension of that should be questioning everything,” he says. “And once you start to question things, one of the first things that falls apart under scrutiny is where our food comes from.”

Animal agriculture, the film points out, is one of the primary drivers of the extinction crisis and climate change. The animals themselves suffer horrible lives and deaths, while their sentience is ignored. Diseases run rampant, and pollution from industrial farms harms workers and nearby communities.

In the face of that harsh reality, many of the musicians interviewed in the documentary portray punk as a form of resistance against capitalist oppression and unjust systems. For bands like Youth of Today, that meant taking on the food system in hardcore songs like “No More,” where they sang “When the price paid is the life of something else / No more / I won’t participate.”

Punk, meanwhile, served as its own ecosystem, allowing communities of like-minded people — many of whom were already feeling alienated from or rebelling against society — to find each other, to learn from each other, and to protest and take other forms of collective action.

The music scene was hardly alone on that front, of course, but it echoed other avenues for progress.

“Every change-oriented movement, every activist movement, has required that sort of incubating community,” Moby says. “That women should have the right to vote, or that humans should not be owned, or that people should be allowed to marry whomever they choose — all these notions, which are so ingrained in our culture at this point, at one point they were the most radical ideas you could possibly espouse. As a result, activists were beaten and thrown in jail.”

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“I really do see animals as being the next extension of that,” he continues. “The vegans now are the weird ones. And the fascinating thing is that everyone already agrees with us for the most part. People care about workers. They care about antibiotic resistance. They care about the rainforest, the climate, water use. They care about health costs. They care about animals. But then you say, ‘OK, so you’re a vegan.’ They’re like, ‘Well, no.’ Why aren’t you taking that logical next step and simply acting in accordance with your belief?”

But getting to that point isn’t always easy. Every person responds to different messaging. And stepping back from the status quo and going vegan can present unique, social challenges.

“One of the reasons it’s so hard for people to give up meat and dairy is because it’s simply choosing a degree of isolation and loneliness,” Moby says. “So the rebellion — and it is a central aspect of both activism and punk rock — is that idea that principles are what you’re committed to, even if it means potentially being lonelier, even if it means you’re not going to be invited to the barbecue, even if people are going to give you weird looks at Thanksgiving when you don’t eat the turkey and the ham. There is a loneliness to a principled existence.”

Perhaps that’s why so many misfits and nonconformists find solace in punk and other music — it tells them they’re not alone and gives them a shared direction.

That message from these vegan punk bands still resonates today, as does the music itself. But Moby says he also hopes viewers go beyond the music and embrace the punk ideal of questioning the status quo.

“I personally love the form of punk rock,” he says, “but what’s far more interesting that I hope I looked at in the movie is the function of punk rock, which is that idea of incredibly principled skepticism — not irrational, anti-vax skepticism, not irrational, angry skepticism for the sake of skepticism, but skepticism that has empirically supported rational and ethical criteria attached to it. Obviously punk rock does not have the exclusive rights to that type of skepticism, but I feel like our culture, to speak very broadly, is really missing that.”

That principled approach, ultimately, is the intent of the film.

“My hope is that people will be reminded of the important utility of skepticism and questioning and apply it to every aspect of our lives,” Moby says. “And as I say at the end of the movie, if things don’t conform to our ethics, if things don’t conform to our values, don’t support them. If there’s an easy alternative, and in this case a healthier alternative and a more environmentally sustainable alternative, just simply choose that.”

Punk Rock Vegan Movie is free on YouTube. Watch it below:

Previously in The Revelator:

Nature Sings: New Protest Songs for the Climate Emergency

Rage Against the Anthropocene: The Extinction Crisis Gets an ‘Eco-slam’ Soundtrack

Drought to Deluge: Managing Water for Climate Extremes

California’s recent floods show that we aren’t ready for the bigger storms that climate change will bring, an expert warns.

The year began with a soaking for California. Nine atmospheric rivers doused the state, leaving at least 20 lives lost, roads washed out, and communities underwater.

Though it may have felt that way, the quick swing from drought to deluge isn’t uncommon: California naturally pivots between extremes.

“I think people forget how ordinary rain can be in California,” says Ann Willis, an engineer and California regional director at the nonprofit American Rivers. “It wasn’t too long after that series of storms when scientists were saying that this wasn’t climate change, this was a regular year for California. We just haven’t seen it for so long that we forgot.”

But that doesn’t mean climate-amplified storms aren’t coming. This year’s heavy rain events aren’t even close to what’s expected in the future as climate change makes weather whiplash more severe. That’s why it’s important for California — and other states — to start planning now.

“It was such a valuable message because this is why we need to think much more critically and urgently about rivers and how we’re managing water,” says Willis. “We can’t even manage normal water events, let alone what we know we should expect [because of climate change] in the future.”

The Revelator spoke to Willis about green infrastructure, whether we need more dams, and how to make sure water management is climate-ready.

What is California doing to cope with big swings between wet and dry?

California is accelerating its investment in multi-benefit green infrastructure. By that I mean things like accessing floodplains and setting back levees so rivers have enough space to carry these relatively modest flood events.

When we originally built our levees and our dams, it was with this mindset that we were going to capture all the water that we could and then divert it out of the channel. This is why our rivers are entirely overallocated from our water-rights system and why levees were built that really pinched our rivers down to a size that they were never really designed to function at.

To put it even more starkly, some of these really large dams in California’s Central Valley, for example, aren’t even designed to carry what was historically a flood event that would’ve happened 50% of the time, let alone 0.5% of the time.

It worked because we assumed we were going to capture and divert all the water in these large projects. However, now that we’re thinking differently about rivers, now that we’re seeing the extreme distress and collapse of freshwater ecosystems, and we have chosen as a community to then address those through creating healthy functioning rivers, we’re recognizing that we haven’t left ourselves with very good options.

This is why focusing a lot of investment on things like making room for rivers, restoring access to floodplains, restoring wetlands and meadows — these are all ways that we can naturally store, filter and improve the function of water moving through rivers.

Exposed ground and water covering a field — A groundwater recharge FloodMAR site in an agricultural field in Yolo Couny, Calif. after heavy rains in January, 2023. Photo: Andrew Innerarity / California Department of Water Resources

California has experimented with flooding agricultural lands in winter to redirect high river flows into depleted aquifers. Has that been successful, and is it something that can be scaled?

It has been moving forward, and I think it’s a really great example of how a lot of this water management and conservation discussion is trying to be both realistic and forward facing. We really do need to take hundreds of thousands of acres [of farmland] out of production. It’s completely overdeveloped.

However, it’s not realistic to say that we’re taking all agricultural land out of production. So we have to focus on ways to integrate what we want to preserve in terms of our land with what we need to do to restore natural river processes.

How do we make those two things work together? By flooding almond orchards in winter we can start to recharge and restore our aquifers.

We’re seeing agencies start to accelerate the processes by approving permits for water diversions to flood agricultural lands in the winter. The places where we still need to see more investment, more development, is in the infrastructure to move that water.

We have a pretty good understanding of the state’s geology and where it makes sense to try this kind of approach and where it doesn’t. Moving the water to those places where the ability to infiltrate water happens more rapidly and efficiently, that’s where we need the conveyance infrastructure.

Our biggest opportunities to increase storage in the state actually lie below our feet.

Does that mean that new dams and reservoirs aren’t still on the table as a water-supply solution?

New reservoirs are on the table, but it’s not a good option. Just thinking about the larger, named dams, we already have almost 1,500 in California. So the idea of adding the 1,501st dam to address storage doesn’t hold much water.

More storage doesn’t create more water. What we saw in looking at these past rain events is that there was actually quite a bit of [reservoir] storage available to us, and that’s because these wet years really don’t happen all that often.

We’re much more likely, especially moving into the future, to be seeing drier hydrology, lower flows coming out of our rivers, less runoff for the same amount of precipitation. All of that’s related to climate change. And the surface water storage we have is already widely built out in all of the best places that we had to put a dam.

If we can think about the potential for groundwater storage, and not just surface-water storage, that’s really where the future of California water needs to be focused right now.

Is there anywhere else that’s doing this well that California could learn from? Or is California the example that other states should be looking to in terms of managing for more climate extremes?

We need to move into this next iteration of water management that isn’t so heavily based on hard infrastructure, and California really is a leader in that.

But the answer is also a little complicated because California is geographically so diverse. If California only had one problem like drought, then there are absolutely other places that are addressing these kinds of problems effectively. But California has all the problems.

So what we need is not just a strategy to manage water for drought, but we also need a strategy to manage water for our coastal streams with a lot of runoff. We need a strategy that manages water across nations because we have Tribal nations that are rights holders that we have to negotiate with within our state. The really tough part is trying to balance all those different approaches — whether it’s managing Colorado River water for almost desert-based agriculture in Southern California, all the way up to the Emerald Triangle in the north part of the state and managing for a completely different kind of agricultural and geographical economy.

Are there any projects you find inspiring?

One of the projects I’m involved with at American Rivers is Paradise Cut, which is modeled after the Yolo Bypass [on the Sacramento River]. It’s creating a bypass through an urban community, and also an agriculturally developed community, in order to make space for floods from the San Joaquin River.

We know that this kind of infrastructure is climate resilient, recession resilient, and it has the added value of bolstering ecosystem function, as well as providing flood protection.

American Rivers has also developed a tool looking at 14 indicators of socially vulnerable communities and laying that over flood-risk maps to try and understand where we see the most flood risk intersect with communities that have the least resources to manage it.

One of the highest priority areas that was revealed was in the Merced-Planada area [in the San Joaquin Valley]. And with this last series of atmospheric rivers, that’s exactly where we saw levees fail and communities flooding.

So now we have this roadmap to try and address these kinds of problems in some of the most vulnerable communities in the state.

We know that climate change is urgent, and there are opportunities to do things now that are going to reduce how serious the consequences might be in the future. The fact that we already struggle to manage relatively moderate flood flows should impress upon us the urgency of wanting to reduce the likelihood that we have to manage much more catastrophic events in the future.

Our droughts are going to get drier, our floods are going to get wetter, and there’s a cost to delay. The longer we delay, what we really lose is the opportunity to keep existing in this more moderate, manageable middle ground.

Previously in The Revelator:

Stormwater Could Become an Important Water Source — If We Stopped Ignoring It

Time Is Running Out to Restore Plants and Animals That Exist Only in Captivity

At least 33 animals and 39 plants are extinct in the wild. But research suggests there is hope for restoring wild populations.

It was April in 1981 when a party of four camped for two days and nights on the forested slopes of Mount Evermann, the central peak of Socorro, a volcanic island in the Pacific some 400 kilometres southwest of Baja California, Mexico. Their fruitless search confirmed their suspicions: the Socorro dove, an endearingly tame bird unique to the island, had disappeared, eaten by the cats of Spanish colonists, pushed out by grazing sheep and shot from the sky by hunters.

But the species had not vanished. Fifty six years prior to this search, in 1925, 17 Socorro doves had been collected from the island and transported to a bird keeper in California. Somehow, almost 100 years later, the descendants of these birds — the last Socorro doves on the planet — are still with us, distributed across captive facilities in Europe and North America.

It’s a strange liminal space: disappeared from the wild, yet not entirely extinct. And it’s one not peculiar to the Socorro dove. Our research has confirmed that at least 33 animals and 39 plants no longer have wild populations, but survive under human care in places such as zoos, aquariums, botanic gardens and seed banks.

These species are categorized as “extinct in the wild” under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the system conservation biologists use to evaluate and communicate extinction risk. It’s a diverse set that includes the manicillo, a relative of the peanut only found in Bolivia; the Tali palm originally identified from a lone specimen on the campus of Dhaka University in Bangladesh; and a number of tree snails from the remote Society Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

In one sense, here is something worth celebrating: a group that has given extinction the slip. But what does the future look like for these species? Human care will not preserve them indefinitely. On the contrary, the longer they spend in captivity the more they risk becoming inbred or losing the genetic diversity that helps them resist diseases and other threats. Eventually, outright extinction looms, especially if their populations are small.

Life in Captivity

A quirk in the red list means that conservationists don’t systematically count the numbers of seeds, plants or animals in captivity or monitor any changes in their status in the same way we do for threatened species in the wild. An extinct in the wild species numbering in the thousands is indistinguishable from one represented by a handful of individuals. We have somehow contrived to ignore the extinction risk of the very group of species for which we are most responsible.

area of vegetation surrounded by fence on hillside — Exclosure to protect Oahu tree snails. Photo: Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resource Conservation (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Our review of this group uncovered reasons to be concerned. For the most part, it seems that these populations were founded by a tiny number of individuals and would require large populations, ideally in the thousands, to best insure against future genetic deterioration and extinctions. Unfortunately, where known, most species are held in small numbers (in the hundreds or lower), and across a small number of institutions (fewer than eight in most cases).

There also tends to be a lack of coordinated planning across institutions and regions where the same species is held. This is especially true for plants, where it’s not always known how many collections exist and where they are. Fortunately, there have been recent efforts by botanical gardens to share data and collaborate more closely. Seed banks are also important facilities that can store threatened plants as seeds for many decades or even centuries. But most extinct in the wild plant species can’t easily be found in online databases that might allow conservationists in different regions to work on joint recovery programmes.

Conservationists, and society more widely, must do better. We know that outright extinction is a real threat. Of the 95 species that have found themselves extinct in the wild or restricted to human care since 1950, 11 have since been lost forever, like the Christmas Island whiptail-skink and the Saint Helena olive, a tree endemic to the island of the same name in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

Return to the Wild

Is there hope? Perhaps surprisingly, yes. The flip side to the 11 species we’ve lost is the 12 that have been restored to the wild. These include the European bison, which, having disappeared from the wild in 1927, is now thriving in its native range in Eastern Europe and Russia, thanks to reintroduction efforts starting in the 1950s using stock from European zoos.

Encouragingly, more should follow: two-thirds of extinct in the wild animals and just under a quarter of extinct in the wild plants have already been released back to natural habitats. These nascent populations may not yet have reached true “wild” status by, for example, producing viable young, but this is a promising start. They show that being Extinct in the Wild needn’t be a dead end: it can be a platform for long-term restoration.

But if this is the aim for all extinct in the wild species and others perched on the brink, there must be a transformation in the way they are regarded and resourced. Conservationists should continue to rescue species nearing extinction and care for them in captivity. But collectively, we must also commit to revitalising the precarious populations under our care, with more individuals in more institutions.

Where return to the wild is a challenge, we must redouble efforts to find and mitigate threats in native habitat, or explore whether populations can be set up in new areas. Continued care of these wild populations will probably be needed.

Extinction looms but recovery is achievable. Conservation biologists have the tools for success, but need the support and attention of decision makers, funders and the broader public to deliver it.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

How Do You Save an Endangered Tree From Extinction When You Can’t Save Its Seeds?

Countdown to the Next East Palestine?

Train derailments and chemical disasters could happen in any community — even yours.

A freight train whistles in the distance, and my heart skips a beat.

Ever since the train derailment and resulting chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, three weeks ago, I’ve taken to listening to the sounds of trains passing through my small town every day. The train tracks are about a mile from my house — not visible from my office window, but easy to see if I walk down to the end of the street. Easier still if I drive anywhere in town; the tracks bisect streets and neighborhoods, and trains often block traffic for five to six minutes at a time as their seemingly endless chains of graffitied cargo carriers rattle past.

What’s on those cargo trains, in those earth-toned train cars? We know some of it is coal and oil, and some of them carry grain, but do any of them also contain vinyl chloride or other toxic chemicals? Could my little town in Washington state become the next East Palestine?

Could your town? Could all our towns?

Those are the questions that run through my head every time I hear a train whistle or the echo of metal wheels rattling on the tracks.

There are a lot of opportunities for potential disaster — and not a lot of information around to ease worried minds.

Eight years ago the then-mayor of our town set out to find out how many trains passed through here every day and what they carried. It wasn’t easy. The rail company wouldn’t tell him. He ended up parking by an intersection and counting them himself — 174 trains in a week, an average of one per hour.

He tracked how fast they traveled, too. The fastest roared through town at 54 miles per hour. Other trains — those moving around 35 miles per hour — slowed down because of regulations for carrying hazardous materials through residential areas.

I asked BNSF, the rail company that operates in our area, how many trains now pass through our town every day and how many carry hazardous chemicals. As of press time, the company hasn’t responded to my request for information.

To be fair, there’s not much indication that there would be an accident. A train did kill a pedestrian last year, and another one hit a pickup truck in 2019. Neither of those accidents resulted in a spill of any sort.

But what if they had? The train tracks pass by a national wildlife reserve full of rare birds and fish, multiple parks and schools, grocery stores, housing developments, apartment complexes, creeks and rivers (including the mighty Columbia between Oregon and Washington states), churches, restaurants, dentists and doctors’ office, veterinarians, and so much more… Go one town over, and the tracks pass by the notoriously polluting paper plant that helped inspire Earth Day activist Denis Hayes. One disaster in either town could devastate this community and its natural beauty.

Local and state legislators have worried about that possibility for years, especially after the Trump administration eased train-safety regulations in 2017:

2017 news coverage of the Trump administration rolling back railway safety policies put in place by Obama. pic.twitter.com/AkMOOK3ydc

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) February 24, 2023

Obviously we need trains to move the goods that keep our society flowing and growing. But we don’t need the oil that many of them carry. We don’t need all the grain, much of which goes toward feeding livestock rather than people. We don’t need chemicals that can destroy the environment, kill wildlife, and leave a toxic legacy for years to come. We do need regulations to keep it all safe, and we need to embrace the ongoing decarbonization that will make these trains less essential.

Until then, I may just lie awake at night listening to the trains rattling by and worrying about what could come next.

All Aboard

We’ve collected some essential reading about East Palestine and other disasters:

Human-rights lawyer Steven Donziger argues that strong laws against ecocide — the destruction of the natural environment — could have prevented the East Palestine disaster.

Trains have a reputation for low levels of greenhouse gas emissions compared to shipping by road or air, but that’s not the whole story. What they carry often creates its own emissions. After all it was the fracking boom, which drove a surge in crude-by-trail traffic that peaked nearly a decade ago, that put the phrase “bomb train” into common parlance.

And trains aren’t emissions-free. Writing for National Geographic, Jason Bittel shines a light on the many health hazards of living near railroads.

Carey Gillam points out that East Palestine is not an aberration: “Accidental releases — be they through train derailments, truck crashes, pipeline ruptures or industrial plant leaks and spills — are happening on average, every two days.” On a related note, The Conversation analyzes crash data and reveals that trucks carrying hazardous materials have more frequent, deadlier accidents than trains.

But train disasters are just bigger. For NBC News, Evan Bush writes about the 1982 tanker-car spill in Livingston, Louisiana, and what that historical disaster suggests for the future of East Palestine.

The Wall Street Journal reminds us that communities around the country could feel effects from the crash, most notably as toxic soils are moved elsewhere. Meanwhile about 5,500 species in Ohio were killed by the spill, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

In The Times assigns some blame: “Wall Street caused the East Palestine crisis.” Antiplastics advocate Judith Enck has a different take: The disaster, she writes, “was a direct result of the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and plastic.”

Speaking of plastic, James Bruggers at Inside Climate News writes about why vinyl chloride and PVC are so bad for people and the planet.

Finally, as they warm up for the 2024 presidential race, Republicans and their media colleagues are trying to turn the East Palestine disaster into the latest culture war battlefield. Columbia Journalism Review calls this “empty politicization.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Death by Rail: What We’re Finally Learning About Preventing Wildlife-train Collisions