Links From the American Brink: Abortion, Insurrection, Pollution

The Supreme Court pushed its radical agenda this past month, while the threat from extremism grew. But all is not lost.

The United States took a hard, fast and dangerous turn during the last eight days of June, when members of the Supreme Court’s ultraconservative wing — emboldened and empowered by four years of the Trump administration and an even longer period of court-stacking machinations by Sen. Mitch McConnell — fulfilled their long-simmering mandate to cripple the federal government and reduce the rights enjoyed and depended on by Americans.

Their accomplishments included slashing reproductive rights, expanding gun rights, reducing Miranda rights, eroding the separation of church and state, whittling away at Tribal sovereignty and, in one last blow, partially dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate pollution — a decision that could have dangerous effects on the worldwide climate as well as the power of all other federal agencies.

“I cannot think of many things more frightening,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent of the EPA decision. “Today, the Court strips the Environmental Protection Agency of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’ … The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision-maker on climate policy.”

Meanwhile, thanks to the Congressional commission investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, we learned more about the insidious depths of Trump’s attempted coup. Apparently, democracy came close to ending not with a bang or a whimper but with the signatures of fake electors, the crash of fine China, and the sight of leftover ketchup dripping down the White House walls.

What does this momentous month mean for the future? We’ve collected some essential reads, context and commentary about these issues.

Abortion and Reproductive Rights:

Why are abortion rights an environmental issue? Kierán Suckling, executive director of our parent organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote this: “Without reproductive justice there can’t be environmental justice. People, wildlife and wild places across the world are threatened by the same systems of abuse and exploitation. Pregnant people are particularly vulnerable to the harms of pollution, and sexual and reproductive healthcare are critical to help people face the challenges of the climate crisis.”

Ms. Magazine made similar points back in March in an extensive piece by Katherine Gladhart-Hayes, who pointed out that climate change, wildfires, increased storms and pandemics make travel particularly dangerous for any people who need to travel to find abortion access.

For added context, Naveena Sadasivam and Eve Andrews wrote for Grist about how the Roe v. Wade decision would affect pregnant people in pollution hotspots.

Of course, it’s not just abortion. As Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in the Supreme Court’s decision, birth control is now in his crosshairs.

And speaking of birth control, Thomas has an unlikely ally tangentially tied to the environmental movement: online natural-living influencers who promote a “glamorous version of femininity untarnished by modern chemicals,” as Keira Butler at Mother Jones wrote recently. By the way, these are the same types of people who often spread disinformation about vaccines and Covid-19.

On a related note, NBC News sent its producers to several crisis pregnancy centers, which don’t offer abortion services, and found them to be hotbeds of scientific disinformation — often from the same types of faith-based groups that have been known to spread climate disinformation and dissent.

One last added context: Some legal scholars also worry that the ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization narrows who could have standing in legal cases and therefore could limit which cases are heard — a problem that could stretch well beyond women’s health. “Dobbs can be read as a signal that the new conservative majority is poised to embrace a once-minority viewpoint on third-party standing, making it harder for environmental advocates and other public interests to pry open the courthouse door,” John Echeverria, a professor at Vermont Law School, told E&E News.

Insurrection and Extremism:

Will the Jan. 6 hearings make any long-term difference to those whose minds have already been poisoned by Trump’s lies? Cassidy Hutchinson’s bombshell testimony on June 29 made some inroads into the right-wing media echo chamber, but pundits like Tucker Carlson continue to diminish and disparage the commission’s work — all while spreading more lies and conspiracy theories. Death threats against the committee and their family members highlight this continued threat to democracy, which puts all other progress at risk.

Speaking of threats: Several dozen members of the Proud Boys have been convicted or remain in jail awaiting trial for their roles in the insurrection, but don’t count these far-right extremists out. Although their national leadership is currently in shambles, local Proud Boys chapters have grown since Jan. 6, and they’re increasingly showing up to cause trouble at events like town halls and school board meetings. At least 17% of these appearances have turned violent.

There is, of course, an environmental connection: As climate journalist Emily Atkin wrote in 2020, the Proud Boys and their ilk are driven by “the exact same type of masculinity that researchers have repeatedly shown to be a driving force behind climate denial.” Oh, and some of them are running for or have been voted into office.

The Proud Boys haven’t shown up at many environmental events yet, but let’s not forget the link between violent far-right extremism, racism and eco-fascism, or that Homeland Security says the country “remains in a heightened threat environment” and that it fears further violence from domestic terror.

That threat has grown in the American West, which journalist Leah Sottile calls “a de facto testing ground for the far right to see what it can get away with.” She points to militias summoned by the antigovernment Bundy clan to their infamous 2014 standoff in Nevada and the 2016 occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, adding that members of those militia groups later stormed the Capitol in 2021.

Finally, we also need to remember the link between the insurrection and corporate interests. This relationship is perhaps most closely embodied by one of the foot soldiers of the coup, Jeffrey Clark, who is often mischaracterized in the media as an “environmental lawyer.” But as Lawrence Tribe and many others have pointed out, he’s the opposite — “a hired gun for the fossil fuel industry.”

Pollution and Climate:

Why does the Supreme Court’s ruling against the EPA matter? Oddly enough, it doesn’t change any existing regulations, but it does place limits on future regulations from the EPA and other agencies. Basically, the court is saying that major policies and actions need to come from Congress, not a federal agency. Of course, given the current disfunction in Congress, how likely is that?

Adding further context, Cara Horowitz, the co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law, explained that the ruling “holds that it is unlawful for EPA to regulate existing power plant climate pollution by requiring generation shifting from dirtier sources to cleaner ones — which my grid expert clients and many others know to be the best, cheapest and fastest way to reduce climate pollution from this sector.”

How did this happen? Writing in The New Yorker, Bill McKibben gives some important historical context for the ruling, explaining how it’s “the culmination of a five-decade effort to make sure that the federal government won’t threaten the business status quo.” Echoing that, Emily Sanders of the Center for Climate Integrity wrote that Big Oil finally got what it paid for, and Coral Davenport of The New York Times wrote that the case was “the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.” We can be sure that push will continue now that they have this victory under their belts.

But all is not lost. Writing on the Legal Planet blog, environmental law professor Dan Farber calls the Supreme Court decision “more than a flesh wound” but emphasizes that “it didn’t hit any vital organs.” He continues: “Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion leaves EPA other options to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. It also gives a fairly narrow reading to a legal doctrine that could limit the fallout from the case in terms of other regulatory powers.”

On that note, climate journalist Amy Westervelt laid out several ways the EPA, the federal government (especially the Biden administration), state and local governments, and activists can still act on climate. It’s a great roadmap for change.

Looking to the future, this ruling isn’t the only legal threat to environmental protections. Umair Irfan and Neel Dhanesha at Vox highlight some concerning state actions and an upcoming Supreme Court case in October that will determine how the EPA is able to regulate pollution in our waterways.

Finally, here’s an important reminder from the not-so-distant past: what America looked like before the EPA.

Previously in The Revelator:

Life Before the EPA

Regulators Have a Big Chance to Advance Energy Equity

A small circle of industry insiders controls crucial decisions about energy projects. New changes — if done right — can offer communities a seat at the table.

These days the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can no longer be described as a technocratic, under-the-radar agency that sets policies on energy infrastructure and market rules, rates, and standards.

As energy policy has become front-page news — driven by climate change and recent price volatility — FERC has begun updating its regulations to meet new exigencies. The agency has taken big steps this spring to support affordability and a transition to cleaner energy, including proposing updates to the way it permits natural gas pipelines and beginning to overhaul how regions plan and pay for the expansion of electricity transmission infrastructure.

These moves have provoked controversy because their stakes are high: Billions of dollars of infrastructure expenditures are on the table. What gets built, who pays, who hosts this infrastructure, and who makes those decisions also have major implications for equity and racial justice.

In 2017 the residents of Union Hill, Virginia, a predominantly Black community settled by freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, witnessed this firsthand. Over their objections FERC approved plans by the developer of the controversial Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline to site a highly polluting facility known as a compressor station in their community.

Spurred in part by pushback from incidents like these, this past April FERC signaled a new approach when it released its Equity Action Plan, which aims to better account for how its policies affect structurally marginalized communities.

People carrying union hill banner walk down the street — A protest march and calls for equity in Union Hill, Va. Photo: Caitlin Morris, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Fittingly, the plan casts the agency’s newly constituted Office of Public Participation in a starring role. As we document in a recent report, this office represents a crucial experiment in “energy democracy” — that is, making FERC’s policymaking actions more responsive to and inclusive of the public, particularly members of marginalized communities.

In removing barriers to public participation, the Office of Public Participation has the potential to bring a sea change to an agency that has historically been inhospitable to the views of anyone beyond a small circle of industry insiders. Our report offers several recommendations for how the new office can fulfill its potential and spur FERC to better engage with the public and incorporate their on-the-ground perspectives to inform policy — and ultimately make better, fairer decisions. Many of our recommendations closely align with three priorities outlined in FERC’s plan.

The plan’s first priority is building the office itself. We urge FERC to continue the progress it has made over the past year in establishing its institutional capacity, including identifying leadership and hiring staff.

To further advance this priority, we call on the Office of Public Participation to enact new internal policies like instituting an “intervenor funding” program that would set aside money to reimburse individuals for some or all costs incurred when participating in the agency’s policymaking processes, such as attorneys’ fees. Inadequate funds are one of the biggest barriers to participation that communities face. The Equity Action Plan singled out intervenor funding as a key objective for establishing the office.

A second priority in the plan calls for aligning natural gas projects with environmental justice principles. FERC’s tentative moves in this direction have garnered substantial industry pushback, but the necessary reforms are anything but radical — they merely update FERC’s longstanding statutory obligation to ensure that pipeline development is in the public interest.

The office can and should go further, though. Our report recommends that it take steps to revise procedural requirements for participating in natural gas project proceedings and identify opportunities for streamlining and simplification. These include instituting a new policy in which it serves as FERC’s main point of contact with communities affected by natural gas pipeline development. Currently pipeline developers themselves play this role, despite the obvious conflict of interest.

But it is not enough merely to collect views — FERC must integrate them into its decision-making. To this end, a third priority of its Equity Action Plan looks at whether it has the skills and cultural commitment to promote equity as part of its organization mission. It calls for surveying staff capacity to incorporate equity considerations into the agency’s decision-making and providing equity training for staff.

Internal agency capacity will play a crucial role in promoting equity. We call on the Office of Public Participation to reorient FERC’s organizational culture so it genuinely values and embraces public engagement. It must go beyond simple staff training and adopt relevant performance metrics that reinforce widespread commitment to this culture and incentivize the agency’s political leaders to nurture and sustain it over the long term.

Worsening climate-induced disasters disproportionately harm those who contributed the least to them. Our nation’s energy policy must incorporate the voices of those who pay the greatest price for our fossil-fueled energy prosperity. Communities like Union Hill must have a meaningful chance to shape the energy policy questions that affect them, including where they get their energy from and what, if any, energy infrastructure they will host. Indeed, while Union Hill was eventually able to block construction of the compressor station in their community, it was only after prevailing at a different agency under a different law.

As it scales up its operations, FERC’s Office of Public Participation has a historic opportunity to redesign public participation toward a goal of energy democracy. If successful it will not only bring greater fairness and equity to its work but stand out as a leader among agencies in advancing our constitutional vision of government “by the people.”

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:

Closing the Tree Equity Divide

Can Sanctions Help Tackle Climate Change?

New research highlights the benefits sanctions can provide to international cooperation, while proposed legislation would put them into action.

Over the past few weeks, the United States and other nations have slapped a series of new financial sanctions on the Russian Federation and its key officials and oligarchs. The hope is that those sanctions will put enough pressure on Vladimir Putin and associated powers in Russia to convince them to end their brutal war against Ukraine.

Could similar sanctions help protect the planet from countries that fail to meet their international climate obligations?

New economic and social-science research out of Germany and Russia puts that question to the test.

The study — conducted and submitted before the invasion of Ukraine — examined the potential of sanctions to improve international cooperation to address climate change. To accomplish this, the researchers designed an experiment to analyze the actions of individuals from Germany, where sanctions have historically paid off, and Russia, where historical sanctions haven’t been as effective. More than 750 people participated in the study, which assessed how they managed simulated funds devoted to collective risk under scenarios with and without sanctions.

The results were “very surprising,” says lead author Gianluca Grimalda, an experimental economist and social psychologist with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at Duisburg-Essen University.

Although the paper calls Russia an example of “low-cooperator groups,” the researchers still found that participants representing both nations improved their levels of international financial cooperation under scenarios that included climate sanctions.

“What I would have expected — and what surely many other researchers would have expected — would have been a drop in cooperation in the international interaction,” Grimalda says. “When one mixes high cooperators and low cooperators in a group, normally a ‘bad apple effect’ predominates. That is, high cooperators tend to become dissatisfied with the presence of free riders in their group, and they lower their own cooperation levels. The antagonism between different national groups makes things even worse.”

A field of flags against a blue sky — Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro/DoD

Grimalda credits their experimental results to two factors. First, they used sanctions, which are more active than you might find in other research into international cooperation. Second, they used a model that focused on avoiding collective losses, rather than one in which international cooperation would simply contribute to the public good.

That doesn’t mean there was no “public good” in their outcome. “This is a ‘positive sum’ game, where a surplus exists if everyone cooperates,” he says.

That makes it different from Russia’s war against Ukraine. “It would be tempting to apply our study to the understanding of the tragedy of Ukraine war, but the context is obviously very different,” he says. “A war is a zero-sum game, or probably a ‘negative-sum game,’ in which everyone loses.”

That said, their experiment showed that individuals from both Germany and Russia would be willing to cooperate with interests from outside their own nations.

Would political leaders follow? Not necessarily. “I often think that decisions made by political leaders do not really reflect the preferences of their citizens,” Grimalda says. “Politicians — especially in autarchies — often have a private agenda that clashes with citizens’ interests and wellbeing. I think there is more distrust and hatred among political leaders than among ordinary citizens of the countries they represent.”

Putin at a podium — Vladimir Putin speaks at the U.N. climate conference in 2015. Photo: United Nations (uncredited) (CC BY 2.0)

Perhaps that’s one reason why some past sanctions have done more environmental harm than good. “Fascist Italy, imperial Japan and Franco’s Spain all responded to Western energy sanctions by promoting self-sufficiency in fuel production, at tremendous economic and environmental cost,” historian Nicholas Mulder wrote in The Nation in 2019.

To increase their effectiveness, Mulder and other experts suggest that climate sanctions be levied against corporations, not nations.

Progressive Democrats in the United States are already thinking along those lines. Last year Sens. Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, along with Rep. Veronica Escobar, called on the Biden administration to levy sanctions against the government officials, individuals and corporations “that are perpetrating the worst climate damage.”

As the legislators wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, “Combined with additional climate diplomacy with key countries like China, financial sanctions would ensure that addressing the climate crisis remains at the center of U.S. foreign and national security strategy.” They urged the administration to employ the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to accomplish these climate goals — a new direction for both of those laws.

china air pollution — Air pollution in China. Photo: Nicolò Lazzati (CC BY 2.0)

That call built on ideas set forth in legislation proposed by Markey and Escobar. The Targeting Environmental and Climate Recklessness Act would “restrict access to the U.S. financial system for those individuals and companies most responsible for exacerbating climate change.” The bill was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in April 2021 but hasn’t moved forward since.

“The climate crisis is an existential threat to our planet, which is why the United States must exhaust all of the tools we possess to hold destructive companies and individuals responsible for contributing to the worst effects of climate change accountable,” Markey tells The Revelator. “I will continue to engage with the Biden administration to use the available domestic and foreign policy tools at our disposal to hold destructive companies and individuals responsible for contributing to the worsening effects of climate change.”

Of course, American companies, CEOs and legislators have in many cases also failed to rein in emissions in the United States, and the country has fallen way behind its climate goals. Democrats last year also proposed a $500 billion tax against big polluters — including U.S.-based companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron and international players with U.S. subsidiaries. And the European Union could soon vote on a proposal to tax imported goods based on their carbon emissions. Neither of these ideas quite fall into the realm of sanctions, but they could complement tariffs and other efforts.

Of course, the long-term effect of sanctions related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine remain to be seen, and this March Russia claimed sanctions will harm the country’s ability to meet its own (already inadequate) climate goals. Without a clear example of success, legislators may still have difficulty pushing sanctions as a solution to the climate crisis.

But Markey says they remain a viable option. “As the real-world impacts of climate change continue to grow,” he says, “we must urgently and strategically enhance our global strategy to prevent and mitigate harm to the environment, while working to protect those that advocate on the planet’s behalf.”

Climate sanctions may yet prove to be one more tool in the toolbox to help accomplish that.

Previously in The Revelator:

10 Ways War Harms Wildlife

The Battle Over Hunting and Predators in Greater Yellowstone

Can state agencies ensure conservation when hunters pay the bills and ranchers determine wildlife policy?

In the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem of the northern Rocky Mountains, a century-old struggle for control of wildlife continues unabated. At its core are Yellowstone National Park itself, an untouchable icon of American conservation, and its younger sibling to the south, Grand Teton National Park.

For much of the past 50 years, state views and state politics played no part in conservation conversation about the importance of Yellowstone and its surrounding regions. Under federal conservation mandates, the recovery of the West’s most charismatic animals within the park’s borders flourished.

Yet now that wolves, grizzlies, and elk among others, have rebounded from their 20th century lows, Wyoming hopes to gain exclusive control of wildlife management — for the first time since protections were enacted.

Wyoming, the state in which 97% of Yellowstone lies, is the front line of an ongoing struggle to define what conservation looks like without federal oversight. It has recently petitioned the federal government to remove grizzlies’ endangered species protections, giving management of the bears back to the state.

There has long been a tug-of-war between federal and state wildlife managers over how to handle both predators and prey. Predators, like the wolves, were hunted to extinction in the 19th century; grizzlies nearly went extinct except for the population in the park. In times of crisis, the federal government took control of these species to avoid extinction, and imported Canadian wolves, creating new American packs.

map showing Yellowstone National Park in the NW part of Wyoming — Credit: & the West

When Wildlife Protections Create Unforeseen Problems

But the history of federal conservation in the region is often a story of what happens when strategies work too well.

When settlers moved into Jackson Hole, in the southern region of the Yellowstone ecosystem, they built the town and ranching operations in the wintering grounds of the Jackson Elk Herd. In the winter of 1908-1909, the mass starvation of the local herd led Congress to create the National Elk Refuge on a plot of land on the north side of town. Elk — a favorite prey of the state’s hunters — could be fed there throughout the winter to prevent die-offs.

In the 1940s, the Wyoming Game & Fish (WGF) recognized the refuge’s success in not only boosting elk populations for hunting, but keeping elk from damaging stored crops or spreading diseases to livestock. It added a system of 22 nearby winter feedlots offering supplemental food for many western Wyoming herds when snowfall makes natural forage more difficult.

In recent years, however, the feedlot system has been called into question as Chronic Wasting Disease, a deadly sibling of Mad Cow Disease, threatens to devastate local elk populations and limit the number of elk that hunters can harvest. By some models, the disease could eliminate all of the Greater Yellowstone elk population by the end of the century. The very system that saved elk 100 years ago may lead to their extinction in a matter of decades.

A line of elk crosses a field with snowy mountains in the background — Members of the Jackson elk herd migrate off of the National Elk Refuge into Grand Teton National Park. Photo: Syler Peralta-Ramos

State Wildlife Managers Balance Population Control With Ensuring Enough Elk for Hunters Who Pay the Bills

Wyoming officials have twin goals in wildlife management. They need to maintain an appropriate number of wolves, grizzlies and elk — and their definition of “appropriate” is very different from that of their federal colleagues.

They also need to generate the revenue to pay for wildlife management.

Sustaining current populations and harvest numbers is essential to funding the Game and Fish Department. “Seventy to 80% comes from hunting and fishing licenses,” said Peter Dube, the president of the commission. Those revenues amounted to $83 million in 2021. Elk were the biggest money-makers, bringing in $25.8 million and making up about a third of hunting revenues in 2021. They were followed by deer and pronghorn, which are also susceptible to chronic wasting disease.

When it comes to management of ecosystems, differing state policies can result in an inconsistent system, making it extremely hard to achieve a common conservation objective. In 2017 wildlife commissioners in Montana, worried that migrating elk would bring the disease to their state, asked Wyoming to stop feeding the elk. The National Elk Refuge, under federal management, began to phase out the feeding program as the disease appeared.

But Wyoming wildlife officials wanted to keep it going. They launched an effort to determine how ending elk feeding would affect hunters and ranchers. Dube said the results of the initiative won’t come until later this year; any decisions on policy changes are still “down the line.” As decisions remain on hold, the disease continues to spread.

Elk remain central to Wyoming’s wildlife management. So do predators like wolves and grizzlies, but for different reasons. The attitude towards predators always focused on ruthless removal. Efforts to eliminate wolves and grizzlies in the 19th and 20th centuries were so successful that the pockets of the remaining animals were quickly put under the protection of the Endangered Species Act after it became law in 1973. Protections were strongest on federal lands, like national parks.

Grizzlies were fed and cared for until 1970; having lost the ability to forage on their own, they began to die out. In 1975, Yellowstone grizzlies were put on the endangered species list.

The Endangered Species Act Has Held Hunters — and State Governments — at Bay

In the ensuing decades, both grizzlies and wolves have bounced on and off the endangered species list. Successful resuscitation of some wolf packs and grizzly populations led to increasing conflicts with ranchers and outdoor recreationalists outside park borders. Most recently, a Feb. 10 court decision relisted wolves as an endangered species, though not in Montana, Idaho, or Wyoming. In 2012 Congress had preempted the courts, giving these states final say over wolf management.

Similarly, in 2017 grizzlies retained endangered species protection, but only after federal judge Dana Christensen blocked the federal Fish & Wildlife Service’s effort to delist them. Before it could be delisted, he ruled, the Yellowstone grizzly needed to connect with the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem — the area in and around Glacier National Park — to ensure the species’ genetic viability and its climate resilience.

The decision marked the third failed delisting attempt since 2007. Dube’s explanation: conservation groups feared state regulators’ decisions would “annihilate” the grizzlies. Meanwhile WGFD and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon are pushing to eliminate endangered-species protections for grizzlies. “It’s abundantly clear that we have to have some management authority over these grizzlies in areas that we don’t want them,” Dube said.

“I think it’s our increase in damage claims. We’re concerned about not only personal safety, but … people’s livelihoods and … when [bears] get into beehives and all kinds of different things, you know, we start seeing bears out in corn mazes… We don’t need that,” he added.

As federal conservation controls restored grizzly and wolf populations within the borders of Yellowstone National Park, state officials continued to fight to keep the two species from repopulating areas from which they had been eradicated.

A grizzly and her cubs lying on the ground — “Felicia,” a well known grizzly-sow who lives just beyond the border of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, plays with her two cubs in the snow. The area where Felicia lives would likely be a location for trophy hunting if grizzlies lost Endangered Species protection. Photo: Syler Peralta-Ramos

Where Wolves Lost Protection, Extermination Efforts Followed

Like grizzlies, wolves are unwelcome outside of park borders. In a circle around Yellowstone, state wildlife officials allow trophy-hunting of wolves that venture outside of park boundaries. Beyond that region — in roughly 85 percent of the state — the Wyoming Department of Agriculture controls predators; they can be exterminated as agricultural pests.

This approach has fostered controversial wildlife-killing contests, often focused on coyotes and other species that prey on livestock. Management in these zones largely resembles the campaigns that eradicated large predators from much of the West 100 years ago.

Actions of state legislatures in Montana and Idaho recently led to the largest mass extermination of wolves since the early 20th century. More than 500 were exterminated in those two states this winter. Wyoming, whose wolf population is at the federally mandated minimum, could not follow suit — if they had, they would have triggered emergency federal controls. Nonetheless, inside Yellowstone, the Phantom Lake pack has now likely been eliminated by hunts that drew its members out by baiting with meat just beyond the park’s borders.

Yellowstone Park officials told the AP that this hunting season was, “a significant setback for the species’ long-term viability and for wolf research.”

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland recently condemned the escalating war on wolves. “We have communicated to state officials that these kinds of actions jeopardize the decades of federal and state partnerships that successfully recovered gray wolves in the northern Rockies,” she wrote in an opinion column in USA Today.

Haaland threatened to invoke an emergency endangered species listing, pending federal regulators’ formal findings that would support a request to Congress to reverse the judge’s 2012 ruling.

Dube takes pride in Wyoming’s ability to keep wolves at their mandated minimum population. “Do people think… there should be more [wolves]? Yes. Do people think there should be less? Yes. So I think we’ve done well within the constraints that we have,” he said.

State Controls Often Stand in Opposition to Federal Practices

At the heart of wildlife conflicts in the West is the perennial issue of state’s rights. In Wyoming, hunters and ranchers control the state’s wildlife and benefit financially from removing predators and providing elk with feedlots.

When it comes to elk, grizzlies, and wolves, the WGF commission is the primary governing body for conservation policy. Dube says his department is, “bar none, probably the best wildlife agency in the world.” He sees the funding structure, based on hunting and fishing, as the department’s greatest success. “We do not get funding from the state legislature, so I think that helps tremendously. Politics can somewhat stay in the background,” he said.

The best wildlife agency? Lisa Robertson, founder of Wyoming Untrapped, has her own view. “To stake a claim as the ‘best,’ we must move beyond the old status-quo goal of “grow ’em to hunt ’em.”

The commission, populated by gubernatorial appointments, remains highly political. Of the seven current commissioners, six are either avid hunters, come from multi-generation ranching families, or both. Dube spent most of his career running a hunter-outfitting business and raising cattle. Commissioners are not required to have any particular qualifications other than aligning with the governor’s vision of the state.

Kevin Bixby, a lifelong conservationist from New Mexico, worries about the lack of diverse representation and scientific knowledge on wildlife commissions. He founded the Wildlife For All initiative to push for greater diversity of priorities in wildlife management. He believes ranchers and hunters “should have a voice at the table, but they shouldn’t be the only voice.”

“Less than 20% of Americans hunt or fish, so they would be a minority,” Bixby said. He hopes to make wildlife management more democratic with both diversity of representation and funding that comes from the public generally. “The reality is hunters pay and they become the primary constituents of the agencies, and the agencies feel they need to serve their primary customers… It’s a terrible way to protect biodiversity,” he said.

Grizzly stands near a dead elk at the edge of water — The largest known grizzly bear in the Yellowstone ecosystem stands guard atop a recently killed bull elk along the Yellowstone River. Photo: Syler Peralta-Ramos

Nonprofit Organizers Seek to Add People of Different Backgrounds to State Wildlife Agencies

Bixby and other nonprofit organizers understand that federal control is unlikely to last over long periods, and want to see a more progressive, ecology-oriented view to take hold with state regulators.

Several wildlife advocacy nonprofits have popped up in the state in response to concerns over the prevailing wildlife management policies. Wyoming is among the worst “in archaic trapping regulations and the lack of animal cruelty protection laws. Non-consumptive voices don’t count at all,” Robertson said. Among a long list of her goals, keeping grizzlies and wolves on the endangered species list rises to the top. Many conservationists view the act’s role today as a stopgap until state wildlife policies change or additional federal policies are enacted.

“The Endangered Species Act can only go so far,” Bixby said. A species has to be in bad shape for it to be listed and then you always have efforts in Congress to undermine the act, to change it and to weaken it. Then you’re always at the mercy of the courts and their interpretation of what the [U.S.] Fish and Wildlife Service decides to do.”

Roberston and Bixby want to nominate representatives from diverse groups to fill three upcoming vacancies on the WGF commission, including Dube’s role. Whether their nominees are appointed, however, depends on a Republican governor.

The extreme differences between state and federal approaches make removing a species from the federal endangered species list highly contentious.

Robertson worked for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service for 10 years until 2008, running wolf-tracking flights to study the newly re-introduced animals in Yellowstone. But as she immersed herself in Wyoming’s wildlife policies, she became disillusioned by the disconnect between federal and state managers.

“What disappointed me the most at that time was the feds actually turned over wolf management to Wyoming, knowing that the cruelty factor was as bad as it could possibly be for 85% of the state where wolves are predatory animals,” she said. “They were tired of it. They were ready to move on and so they did.”

An elk silhouette with moon — A cow elk wanders outside the gates of Yellowstone National Park in southern Montana at dusk. Photo: Syler Peralta-Ramos

Seeing Wildlife Managers as Trustees of the Future of Wyoming’s Lands

Why is changing Wyoming wildlife policy so hard? Kristin Combs, the director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, believes that ideas about conquering nature left over from the 19th century western expansion are still prevalent.

As long as permissive state policies take hold each time federal oversight ends, conflicts over endangered species listings will persist. “There’s just this very much this feeling of like, we have to be involved. Humans have messed the landscape up so much that we can’t just let nature play out right now,” Combs said.

Advances in conservation science over the past 50 years led to a whole-ecosystem approach and more hands-off management at the federal level. Wyoming’s approach remains unchanged. “Some animals were seen as good, others were seen as bad and that [viewpoint] is very much alive and well here today,” Combs explained.

From feeding elk to exterminating predators, Wyoming wildlife management is hardly hands-off. The agricultural sector dominates the state government. State legislators, who set the rules for WGF, work part time in the winter months, which suits farmers and ranchers. “Getting to the point where you can overcome the agricultural community that’s so embedded into the legislature is very difficult.…” Combs said.

When Combs works with conservationists in other states, “it’s no surprise to anybody that Wyoming is a tough state to work in when you’re dealing with wildlife issues and animal rights,” she said. “I just want to see [conservation] … be seen as part of a larger progressive agenda to bring justice to this country,” Bixby explained.

Bixby believes that “wildlife is a public trust and the government is a trustee, and [they have] a duty as trustee to manage and protect the public trust for the benefit of all.”

“But ‘all’ is open to interpretation.”

Originally published by & the West, a digital magazine of the Bill Lane Center for the America West at Stanford University.

Previously in The Revelator:

How to Protect Both Wolves and Livestock

An Earth Activist Talks to the Trees

The Lorax taught us to speak for the trees. But what if we also learned to listen to them?

When trees are cut, they send out the same electronic patterns as a wound of human flesh. And when some are injured by insects, they tell the others: Produce the enzymes that will protect you.

In our Age of the Anthropocene, the talking and listening by trees echoes the communications of humanity. This is one of the messages I hear in the books of the German forester Peter Wohlleben, especially the bestselling The Hidden Life of Trees, What They Feel, How They Communicate, which has been translated into 11 languages. He has the touch of Wangari Maathai or Rachel Carson, making sense of the difficult (at first) idea that, in the ultra-slow actions of tree-time, they talk.

A man in a white suit hugs a giant redwood — Listen. Photo courtesy Rev. Billy Talen.

The communications between trees are often practical messages, such as warnings of insect invasions or leaf-eating giraffes. Trees create most of their electric signals and “sounds” outside the range of human senses, but researchers have established these basics: Trees work in families; mothers send descendants nourishment through the connecting fungi and root filaments that interlace beneath forests. Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia heads a team of grad students who track the signals between trees in the root system networks underground and up in the open air too, where the communicating takes place through the medium of scented pheromones.

Yes, there is evidence that trees have a sense of smell, and even of taste.

In my layperson’s browsing of these studies on the expressiveness of trees, I didn’t find an observation of joy. As I write this the trees in Brooklyn are blossoming and full of ecstatic songbirds that sing late into the night and start again before dawn.

The question arises, are the trees singing along with the melodies filling their branches? “What do trees say when there is no danger, and they feel content?” Monica Gagliano of the University of Western Australia told Smithsonian in 2018. “This I would love to know.”

Coastal redwoods — Coastal redwood trees in Humboldt, California. (Photo by trevorklatko, CC BY-NC 2.0)

From this thought, a sudden flood of possibilities. This changes our experience of the natural world. This is the revolt of the beautiful view. All the many things that lay down upon that view of nature are now confronted by a no longer hidden world. What we see is alive with language, conversations, meaning. Concepts of beauty, property lines, recreation are overwhelmed. The beautiful view has within it an emergent community, a world of feelings, intelligence, lived experience.

This means that your local wasteland is connected, and we don’t know what the messaging is and where it might go. No one can say at this point if the communicating jumps the border of subspecies or species, but like our mammalian howls, it must. The international collection of scientists now unearthing this buried Tower of Babel mostly tell visiting writers that they don’t know much about the content of the talk, but it sure is exciting.

Aided by the ancient desire shown in our mythology of anthropomorphizing trees, we must go right to the question, “Is the fungi wiring so general in the landscape that the Earth is like a brain? Is the maneuvering of life through extinctions discussed on the planetary level?” Very quickly we are in the creative territory of Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick.

Some of my readers must share the fantasy with me, when we reflect on the assault of fire and flood, virus and heatwaves. Doesn’t it sometimes seem as if the wave of natural disasters is a coordinated strategy? Is Earth the ultimate activist?

What does this tree-communicating mean for Earth-defending activists? If the landscape is fulminating everywhere with different flows of talk, isn’t this a good thing to discover at this moment when the environmental movement has allowed itself to sink into boredom? The big NGOs — you look at their websites and they don’t seem to like the Earth! They display the fear, the pain, but not the joy.

What do environmentalists say when there is no danger? What do they say when they feel content? When we fail to convey these emotions, when we miscommunicate our values, we fail to prevent the next round of chainsaws and cuts to our very flesh.

Reverend Billy stands over several large felled trees — Photo: Rev. Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir / Facebook

This invisible miscommunication pervades our culture, as well. We have watched with growing horror as the possibility of a conscious Earth becomes the juicy plot point in commercial entertainment. The huge movies of James Cameron may be the most egregious example. The big blue aliens on Pandora, with their mother tree and Tinkerbell-like seeds raining down, use green politics as the storyline while depoliticizing the audience with special effects that leave us purged, hung-over, completely used. The Earth as blockbuster is diabolical. The Earth is dragged into Hollywood hegemony, against which “resistance is futile.” After we recover from the movie, we might remember that monetizing nature makes it impossible to defend nature.

Cameron masks the revolution that is possible with the acceptance of a talking and thinking Earth. This is a new reality, not a new product. (Well, the communication with the Earth is new to us, the Euro-Americans who have pushed the living Earth away by mediating it, mythologizing it, fearing it.).

The Earth as an alive being — that would be the one transformation that could successfully de-consumer-ize us. This is radical indeed.

The ultimate authority at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow were the Indigenous mothers who led the walkout, rejecting the negotiations, the whole corporate “net-zero carbon by 2050” that was on offer at that poker table. Now it is clear that the mothers were walking out of the language of death because they had the language of living things whispering and shouting inside them.

The talking trees take environmentalism out of that negotiation, out of our predictable motives for fighting for the Earth, the anger, ego, career, fear, bitterness — the emotions of futility as the rich keep drilling. The talking trees are whispering in their woody language a far deeper radical defense of Mother Earth.

Let’s keep listening. Our instructions are rising toward us from that beautiful view.

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 Earth Reviews Her Activists

Set It Back: Moving Levees to Benefit Rivers, Wildlife and Communities

Removing dams is one thing, but thousands of levees also restrict rivers in the United States — and they’re not working as intended.

A female duck rests in the water where Gibbons Creek meets the Columbia River in southwest Washington. The common merganser grooms her rust-colored head in a site that, until recently, didn’t flow freely. But now the fish ladder that blocked salmon from spawning for decades is gone, and so is the levee that had held the Columbia back from spilling onto its historic floodplain since 1966.

In the largest restoration project on the lower Columbia River, crews spent nearly two years removing 2.2 miles of levee, reconfiguring Gibbons Creek, and realigning two new levees at Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge. The new levees — which total 1.6 miles and serve as public trails — reconnect the river to 965 acres of floodplain. They sit perpendicular to the Columbia, rather than lining its banks, giving the river and Gibbons Creek room to flow messily across the refuge, which is located just east of Vancouver and northeast of Portland.

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This May visitors started exploring the newly reopened U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge, considered the gateway to the Columbia River Gorge, after its intermittent two-year closure. Tractor tire imprints covered the muddied former levee. Hundreds of newly planted willows, cottonwoods and wapato grew nearby.

The project has already benefited local wildlife — and not just the ducks. Soon after the levee was removed last summer an American dipper visited the refuge for the first time. Salmon returned to spawn last fall in an unfettered Gibbons Creek.

“It’s a big chunk of new floodplain,” says Chris Collins of the Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership, a nonprofit that worked on the $31 million project. “But it’s also in a part of the river that’s important to try to reestablish what we can.”

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Just upriver, where steep basalt cliffs border the water, migrating salmon have few places to rest and eat. Downriver, miles of levees line the Columbia’s banks from Portland to Astoria.

Now, at Steigerwald, salmon have 19% more floodplain habitat between Bonneville Dam and the Willamette River confluence, Collins says.

And the refuge is not alone.

Steigerwald Lake is among dozens of projects in the Northwest where levees have been realigned or moved back to give rivers room to meander unconfined by the artificial walls that have tightly lined their banks and transformed ecosystems since Europeans arrived. As debates continue around removing dams to restore salmon runs, experts say levee removals and setbacks help threatened and endangered species, among other ecological and community benefits.

Although similar projects nationwide are few, Northwest tribes, nonprofits and government agencies have been buying land, acre-by-acre, to piece together restored floodplains.

Despite many successes, these projects often face political barriers and involve costly and time-consuming private land acquisition, pitting agriculture and development against conservation.

Rethinking the Levee

Levees built throughout the 1800s and 1900s along the country’s major rivers blocked rivers from their floodplains and turned the ecosystems into farms or neighborhoods. Prior to levees, the once vast landscapes were messy, complex and full of food for birds, fish and invertebrates. Their slow-moving, shallow channels meandered through native grasses and willows and provided critical resting and rearing sites for young salmon before they headed to sea.

They are among the most biologically rich freshwater systems that clean water and control floods, but few healthy floodplains are left.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built levees close to rivers to turn braided waters into straight channels. They hoped to gain as much farmland as possible, but some early Corps engineers also believed that they could train rivers to run like canals, making them essentially flood proof, says Nicholas Pinter, a professor and associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Thousands of miles of levees nationwide restrict rivers, protecting millions of acres of farmland and cities. Across the country, Pinter says, new development and levee construction continue within floodplains.

“And that’s the challenge,” he says. “We have engineered enough of our river systems to within an inch of their lives, and now stepping back from that is difficult. It’s a political challenge more than an engineering or technical one.”

Water flows through a gap in a levee as construction equipment continues removal efforts. — The Army Corps of Engineers partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore wetlands at the Julia Butler Hansen Wildlife Refuge in Washington in 2014. After constructing a new setback levee the Corps notched the original levee, allowing the Columbia River to flow in. The rest of the original levee was allowed to erode naturally.

When levees fail, the Corps typically rebuilds them higher, often at a steep cost, Pinter says. But his research shows that when levees are moved roughly half of a mile to a mile away from river banks, they require less maintenance and better protect communities. With more territory, rivers can rechannelize during floods, which slows their energy, spreads water across more land and moves sediment down river.

Levee setback projects in Northern California, such as those along the Cosumnes River, decreased flood risk to communities and helped recharge aquifers, Pinter says. Fish came back.

“If the water gets there, the fish will get there,” Pinter says. “Nature seems to be grateful for these little bits that we give back.”

Set It Back

Moving levees even 100 feet back benefits communities and ecosystems, says Ian Sinks, the stewardship director for Columbia Land Trust, a conservation nonprofit.

Since the early 2000s, Sinks has led more than a dozen levee removal and setback projects. He’s pieced together floodplains throughout the Columbia River estuary, especially along the Grays River in southwest Washington.

Columbia Land Trust acquired properties after some residents retired and couldn’t maintain their land. Other plots became too wet for farming, while some sat on the market, Sinks says. Over the years, the nonprofit purchased several hundred acres.

The organization preserved some of the last remaining Sitka spruce swamps that once covered large areas of the river’s estuary before levees destroyed the ecosystems. The habitats that remain, and which are now protected, provide abundant food for animals, lower water temperature, absorb floodwater, and give threatened chinook, coho, chum and steelhead safe rearing sites.

“You have to get the water back and the dynamics of the water back on the land,” Sinks says. “Once you do,” he adds, the ecological changes are “nearly instantaneous.” By the following spring, native plants and juvenile salmon return.

Piecemeal Projects

Although setback levees are cheaper to maintain over the long term than repairing existing levees, these projects are initially expensive. Organizations often must buy property, then remove and realign a new levee. Bonneville Power Administration paid most of Steigerwald’s $31 million cost as part of the agency’s required habitat mitigation under the 1980 Northwest Power Act for operating Columbia River Basin dams that have decimated fish runs.

Other regional projects are also largely funded by state and federal grants, but many grant programs fund restoration work project-by-project — a patchwork system that doesn’t view rivers and flood management from a broader watershed scale.

That’s somewhat changing in Washington, says Brandon Parsons, who leads floodplain restoration in the Puget Sound and Columbia River Basin for the nonprofit American Rivers.

Since 2013 Floodplains by Design, a state-run grant program in partnership with American Rivers, Bonneville Environmental Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, has secured $215 million to reconnect more than 7,200 acres of floodplains in 59 flood-prone communities across Washington.

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Many of the state’s rivers begin in the alpine, descend thousands of feet quickly, and bring loads of gravel and wood that don’t flow well in confined, leveed systems, often causing flooding.

“We’ve fought the river system for so long that finally we realized it wasn’t working,” Parsons says. “We’re investing billions of dollars to straighten rivers, and it’s not working. So we had to change.”

Parsons and other experts say similar floodplain restoration projects would benefit ecosystems and communities elsewhere across the nation — if the politics align. The Atchison County Levee District in Missouri, for example, realized it needed a new approach after a devastating 2019 flood breached 100 levees along the Missouri River, forcing 278 people to evacuate and caused millions of dollars in damage. The district worked with landowners to buy their land and build new setback levees along a five-mile stretch of the river, reconnecting 1,040 acres of floodplain and better protecting the community.

Northwest tribes are also trying to bring floodplains back to pre-colonization conditions. For nearly two decades, the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians has removed levees and pieced together bits of floodplain along the Stillaguamish River in Washington.

When Tribal leaders first approached neighbors about salmon recovery, everyone asked how they could help, says Jason Griffith, the Tribe’s environmental program manager.

“So, you start going down the list,” he says. “You need to stop farming the land, you need to plant these natives, remove the levee, take out the bank armory, stop killing the beaver. And they were like ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not what we’re gonna do.’ ”

The Tribe then decided to purchase its own land. Once they buy a parcel, they place deed restrictions on it that prohibit any future development.

So far they’ve acquired 1,200 acres, mostly along the heavily farmed estuary north of Everett. Chum, Chinook and other fish can now use habitats that levees blocked for 150 years, Griffith says. Their goal is to restore about 7,000 acres, from spawning grounds to the estuary.

“The literature is pretty clear from across the range of Pacific salmon that these are the kinds of projects that will, in time and with enough of them, move the needle toward more abundant wild salmon,” Griffith says.

But it won’t be easy — or necessarily fast.

“It’s taken 150 years to get to this point,” he adds. “It’s going to take decades to get out.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Let Rivers Flood: Communities Adopt New Strategies for Resilience

14 New Environmental Books to Kickstart Your Summer Reading List

Writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, Barry Lopez, Sy Montgomery and others celebrate the fragile beauty of this modern world — and address how to help save it.

Summer is normally beach-read season, the time of year when publishers pump out potboilers and steamy romances to fill the sun-drenched days.

But what if your local beach is polluted, flooded, plagued with invasive species or just too darn hot?

No matter where you find the time and place to read this summer, let’s make it a season of protecting those beaches — and other important sites and species around the planet.

We’ve got the word on 14 new environmental books — all released in May or June of this year — by an astounding collection of writers. They celebrate the natural world and cover some tough topics, but they offer you the insight and inspiration to keep you focused on making this a better, safer Earth — whether you’re on the beach this summer or not.

The High Sierra: A Love Story

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Our take: Sometimes we need a science fiction writer to remind us of the beauty (and fragility) of reality. This book doesn’t focus as much on the threats of climate change as Robinson’s recent articles and novels, but it serves as a celebration of what we could lose.

From the publisher: “Over the course of a vivid and dramatic narrative, Robinson describes the geological forces that shaped the Sierras and the history of its exploration, going back to the indigenous peoples who made it home and whose traces can still be found today. He celebrates the people whose ideas and actions protected the High Sierra for future generations. He describes uniquely beautiful hikes and the trails to be avoided. Robinson’s own life-altering events, defining relationships, and unforgettable adventures form the narrative’s spine. And he illuminates the human communion with the wild and with the sublime, including the personal growth that only seems to come from time spent outdoors.”

The Hawk’s Way: Encounters With Fierce Beauty

by Sy Montgomery

Our take: Few things fill me with more joy than the sight of a hawk slowly circling overhead, hunting for something to eat. This book will help you see the world through a bird of prey’s eyes and remind you what’s worth saving.

From the publisher: “[Hawks] are deeply emotional animals, quick to show anger and frustration, and can hold a grudge for years. But they are also loyal and intensely aware of their surroundings. In this mesmerizing account, featuring sixteen pages of gorgeous color photographs, Sy passionately and vividly reveals the wonderous world of hawks and what they can teach us about nature, life and love.”

Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis

by Britt Wray

Our take: Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “The only way to ease our fear and be truly happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape from our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.” This book aims to help readers turn their fear of climate change into positive action.

From the publisher: “The first crucial step toward becoming an engaged steward of the planet is connecting with our climate emotions, seeing them as a sign of humanity, and learning how to live with them. We have to face and value eco-anxiety, Wray argues, before we can conquer the deeply ingrained, widespread reactions of denial and disavowal that have led humanity to this alarming period of ecological decline.”

Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling

by Ryan Tucker Jones

Our take: From death comes life? I picked up this book ready to find another reason to dislike Russian government — and I got it, as Soviet whaling in the last century pushed many species closer to extinction — but I also learned how scientists and the public helped turn things around, from wholesale slaughter to critical conservation.

From the publisher: “Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: Today’s cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country’s whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling — not long before the world’s whales might have disappeared altogether.”

A Clouded Leopard in the Middle of the Road: New Thinking About Roads, People and Wildlife

by Darryl Jones

Our take: Road ecology is having its moment. As new roads carve scars through the Amazon, Africa and at-risk habitats around the world, books like this help us to understand the damage they do — and the ways we can mitigate the problems they create.

From the publisher: “One of the most ubiquitous indicators of human activity, roads typically promise development and prosperity. Yet they carry with them the threat of disruption to both human and animal lives. Jones surveys the myriad, innovative ways stakeholders across the world have sought to reduce animal-vehicle collisions and minimize road-crossing risks for wildlife, including efforts undertaken at the famed fauna overpasses of Banff National Park, the Singapore Eco-Link, ‘tunnels of love’ in the Australian Alps and others.”

The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time: The Arctic Mission to the Epicenter of Climate Change

by Markus Rex

Our take: The closest thing to a traditional beach read on our list, this book offers a thrilling and harrowing account of a dangerous mission to discover the information we need to save the planet.

From the publisher: “Rex begins with life aboard the Polarstern, a powerful icebreaker ship that is frozen into fragile ice and carried across the Arctic by the Transpolar Drift. Away from the rest of the world, the team prepares for life under brutal conditions, constructing ‘cities’ and ‘towns’ on the ice where they will study the Arctic ecosystem, its atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and more. A terrifying feat that had never been attempted before, the team of hundreds of scientists perform their research during terrifying storms, cracking ice floes, frostbite, and even quarantines as Covid-19 sweeps the globe.”

Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration

by Laura J. Martin

Our take: As efforts to protect 30-50% of the planet move forward, restoring the damage we’ve done is more important than ever.

From the publisher: “Restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more — a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.”

Read our interview with Martin here.

A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir’s Journey through an Endangered Land

by Dan Chapman

Our take: Muir has a troubled legacy, but this book is less about him and more about the environmental scars running through the modern U.S. South, damage that stands in stark contrast to the region’s unparalleled biodiversity.

From the publisher: “Veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation and a deep love of place to celebrate the South’s natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special.”

Read an excerpt.

Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

by Barry Lopez

Our take: This posthumously published essay collection cements Lopez’s legacy as one of nature’s most important voices — and he still has a lot to teach us.

From the publisher: “An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed much of what was dear to him in his home place and the community around it — a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he’d long warned.”

Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive With the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator

by David Shiffman

Our take: Because they’re cool? Shiffman, a shark scientist and frequent Revelator contributor, delivers the book he was born to write.

From the publisher: “Exploring the core tenets of shark conservation science and policy, Shiffman synthesizes decades of scientific research and policymaking, weaving it into a narrative full of humor and adventure. Touching on everything from Shark Week to shark fin soup, overfishing to marine sanctuaries, Shiffman reveals why sharks are in trouble, why we should care and how we can save them.”

Read an exclusive excerpt.

National Parks Forever: Fifty Years of Fighting and a Case for Independence

by Jonathan Jarvis and T. Destry Jarvis

Our take: Painful history + a roadmap for change = a compelling book.

From the publisher: “Two leaders of the National Park Service provide a front-row seat to the disastrous impact of partisan politics over the past 50 years — and offer a bold vision for the parks’ future.”

The World As We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate

Edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen

Our take: This anthology collects stunning and heartbreaking first-person accounts of a world in crisis. We should all join these authors in sharing stories of the Anthropocene in our backyards.

From the publisher: “Nineteen leading literary writers from around the globe offer timely, haunting first-person reflections on how climate change has altered their lives. With essays by: Lydia Millet, Alexandra Kleeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Omar El Akkad, Lidia Yuknavitch, Melissa Febos and more.”

Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods

by Lyndsie Bourgon

Our take: Elephants aren’t the only living things killed and stolen by poachers. This deep dive of investigative journalism takes us into the forests and a crisis that receives far too little attention — but also shines a light on the people that protected territories often leave behind.

From the publisher: “Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels and Indigenous communities along the way.”

Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

Our take: Provocative title, stunning book.

From the publisher: “Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones — dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn’t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life and, simply, more fun.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Ten New Environmental Books Offering Inspiration, Insight and Ideas

How We Got Here: Ecological Restoration’s Surprising History

A new book uncovers the development of the world’s most widespread environmental management practice.

Rising carbon emissions. Heatwaves and wildfires. Supercharged storms. Environmental headlines these days can be bleak — and with good reason. But a new book proposes an antidote.

“There is hope to be found in ecological restoration,” writes Laura J. Martin in Wild by Design.

If we want to save threatened species or ecosystems on the brink, we’ll need to get our hands dirty. Across the world billions are being spent on restoration projects — like reforestation efforts or reintroducing extirpated species — to try and undo some of the harm we’ve done to the natural world.

How well we do those projects, and what science and ethics guide them, is critically important to the future of life on this planet. But to plot the best path forward, it helps to understand how we got here. Wild by Design provides that roadmap by tracing the history of ecological restoration in the United States and the emergence of the scientific field of ecology.

It’s a book that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand our current environmental challenges. But it’s also not the book Martin thought she’d write. Now an environmental historian and professor at Williams College, she initially worked as a wetland ecologist.

In trying to understand why we manage invasive species the way we do, she needed to better understand the bigger picture of natural resources management. And that led her to dig deeper and deeper into the past — and eventually to a career shift.

Her pivot helped unearth a story that’s both troubling and inspiring — and undoubtedly necessary.

The Revelator spoke to her about how restoration ecology began, a surprising moment that led to an important breakthrough, and whether it taught us any key lessons.

We have a lot of environmental problems in front of us. Why is it important to understand the history of restoration?

Because ecological restoration is currently the most widespread and influential mode of environmental management in the world. Governments and public and private organizations are spending billions of dollars a year on restoration, whether that’s invasive species removal or endangered species breeding or planting trees for carbon offsetting.

I wanted to put the history of ecological restoration in dialogue with the future of ecological restoration. There are so many times I’ve heard people say, “It’s been done this way for decades.” But when I dug into the archives I found that wasn’t always the case.

I also wrote this book now because, as a professor, I was finding in my environmental studies classes that I was spending 95% of my time talking about doom and the end of the world and that left students feeling disenfranchised and disempowered.

I really wanted my students to see themselves as agents of political change. And restoration is really active. It’s a choice to intervene in ecosystems, a choice to do something, a choice to try and undo harm. That’s a political action. It’s also a hopeful story. I think that the book is full of examples where policies and individuals really made a difference in saving particular species and ecosystems.

There is hope in restoration, but as you write in the book, it’s also been a fraught process. How did it begin?

I was specifically interested in ecological restoration informed by the science of ecology, which didn’t really take off until the 20th century. But there were restoration movements that predated that, and those included big game restoration. So I decided to start the book with bison restoration, which is often celebrated as this story of incredible success. Bison were almost extinct, and they were brought back from the brink and are now flourishing.

But it’s a well-known fact that many of the big game conservationists in the early 20th century were eugenicists and white supremacists. I knew that these perspectives deeply influenced how these conservationists thought about the relationship between animals and society. What I didn’t know until I got into the research was just how direct a project of settler colonialism bison restoration was.

Of course bison extirpation was a key strategy of white settler colonization. The federal government and states intentionally killed bison to erode Tribal sovereignty. But I found that bison restoration was also a strategy of further colonization. When the federal government was dismantling Indian reservation land under the Dawes Act, bison restorationists realized that they could get cheap land that was being parceled out by the federal government.

Time and time again restorationists have failed to zoom out and look at the larger picture of the politics of restoration. And that in this case, what was framed as a quite narrow project of setting aside land for bison and other large game was, in fact, a tool for dispossessing people of their homelands.

Historians have told the story of how Tribes were forcibly and violently removed from their homes in order to create national parks. Wild by Design tells a parallel story of how these bison restoration sites [that were taken from Tribes] became some of the first areas in what is now the national wildlife refuge system.

Women played a key role in the early years of restoration. Why is their story overlooked?

Head shot of author — Laura J. Martin. Photo: Permission of the author

Often when people talk about the history of ecological restoration, they credit Aldo Leopold as the sole inventor or founder of restoration ecology. But there was a whole network of mostly women ecologists who were working on methods to propagate and restore native plant species for decades before Leopold and his colleagues conducted their famous restoration work at the University of Wisconsin.

Indeed, they were drawing upon the research and methods of these women.

One reason that this history has been kind of hidden is that the Ecological Society of America, which was run by men, forcibly took over the Wildflower Preservation Society in the 1920s [which had been run by women].

The person who led this takeover was an anti-suffragist and argued that women ecologists were radicals who were feminizing the study of botany and that the Wildflower Preservation Society should move away from restoration work and toward preservation work. The people who engineered this takeover argued that setting aside large areas for the recovery of wildflowers was the best way to protect wildflowers, rather than these more active interventionist methods that women ecologists like Edith Roberts and Elsa Rehmann were developing.

There’s an interesting shift that happened after the development of nuclear weapons. How did ecologists begin to realize that people could do irreparable harm to the environment?

Ecologists in the early 20th century generally believed that ecological harm could be reversed if the action that was causing harm ceased. They argued, for example, that in order to allow an area to recover people should stop hunting or logging, et cetera, on that land.

But by the 1960s, ecologists were starting to write about the idea that an ecosystem can be so damaged that it loses the ability to repair itself. I found that much of the ecological literature on ecosystem damage and the idea of a threshold of damage beyond which ecosystems can’t repair themselves came from research funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is part of the Department of Defense].

Beginning in the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission contracted ecologists to simulate World War III — to place radiation sources in forests and to study how wild plants and animals responded.

There were simulations and there were also actual detonation sites that ecologists studied.

Beginning in 1945 the United States detonated 215 aboveground and underwater atomic weapons, primarily in the colonized Marshall Islands. Ecologists were tasked with studying the ecological impacts of these weapons.

Through these experiments and simulations, they developed the idea of a homeostatic threshold — that there’s this point at which ecosystems are so damaged that they can’t repair themselves. And they also developed the diversity-stability hypothesis, which today guides most environmental management around the world. This is the idea that ecosystems that have a greater number of species are better able to withstand disturbance than ecosystems with a fewer number of species.

Over the last hundred years we seem to repeat a cycle of doing harm and then trying to undo it. We have a federal policy of killing predators, then we attempt to restore their populations. We systematically drain wetlands, and then spend billions of dollars trying to recreate them. Have we learned anything or are we still repeating that cycle with climate change?

I think historians of the future will look back at this time and tell a similar story of the federal government supporting fossil fuel burning and extraction for decades before reversing course and trying to undo that harm. I don’t think with climate change we’re at that shifting point yet.

I do believe that much environmental and ecological damage can be undone both by individuals and by governments, but I worry that some of the restoration actions that are being proposed as antidotes to climate change are distracting people from the real work of reducing our burning of fossil fuels — such as forest-based carbon offsetting.

Such large-scale restoration projects are often used by governments and other entities as a justification for kicking people out of their communities and restricting traditional access to natural resources. I worry that forest-based carbon offsetting in particular stands to further harm the very people who are already being disproportionately harmed by climate change.

“Carbon colonialism” is one term that a group of researchers are using to describe this phenomenon.

There’s so much money being put toward ecological restoration around the world and the United Nations recently declared this to be the decade of ecosystem restoration. So it’s a really important moment to be thinking about how to better align the goals of ecological restoration with the goals of social justice.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Fight Against Extinction Requires Biocultural Restoration

The English Volunteer Group Changing How We Study Animals at Night

How can we research animals in the darkness of night, when we can’t even see them properly?

In April 2016, among the spring blossoms in the West Midlands of England, an idea came to Ben Dolan and Paul Hopwood. As certified ringers belonging to the West Midlands Ringing Group — volunteers who mark birds’ legs with bands and unique ID numbers so that researchers can study and track them over time — they were out looking for lapwing chicks. Although they’d managed to find 10 or so birds by eye, others eluded them. Thinking there had to be a better way of locating the chicks, Dolan and Hopwood wondered if thermal imaging might allow them to find birds based on their body heat.

They returned another afternoon with a borrowed thermal camera in hand and tried it out. This time they found more than twice as many of the baby birds.

Inspired, they acquired access to a thermal camera they could use regularly and, the following winter, decided to try using the technology at night.

It was during these dark winter days that they realized how useful thermal could really be.

thermal example — A bird shows up on thermal imaging. Photo courtesy West Midlands Ringing Group

Dolan says thermal imaging can help solve an important conservation problem: If field ecologists don’t see wildlife when they survey during the day, they can declare fields ecological wastelands, leaving the regions open to development without the relevant mitigation strategies to reduce harm to native species.

“And then on the night, we find at times significant numbers of winter migrants utilizing the fields for feeding and roosting,” he says. “So it’s a bit of a worry when daytime surveys are done and nothing of ‘value’ is found, and then on the night we find that actually it is one of the most valuable fields [for local wildlife].”

Recent ecology reports state there’s nothing of value on this land because they’ve surveyed it during the day. We need to understand the value of land at night. Over 50 Jack Snipe, 100 Common Snipe, 20 Lapwing, 30 Skylark & 4 Golden Plover on this land at night #thermalwildlife pic.twitter.com/qJGhrJpeTT

— West Midlands Ringing Group (@RingersWm) November 23, 2021

Waking Up to the Nocturnal

Since they embraced the technology, the West Midlands Ringing Group — which Dolan and Hopwood help run — has pushed the use of thermal imaging for the study of farmland birds. In 2021 they won an award for pioneering the use of the technology in the field.

And it’s not just birds, either: Running ecological surveys, people routinely ignore the needs of all kinds of animals that are active at night.

This bias toward animals who share our circadian rhythm is common throughout the ecological sciences. As it stands, there’s no comprehensive field of study dedicated to nocturnal animals. With up to 30% of vertebrates and 60% of invertebrates predicted to be nocturnal, however, this leaves a massive gap in our understanding of the biosphere — a strange problem to accept in the ongoing global mass extinction.

The lack of study in nocturnal ecology isn’t necessarily due to a lack of trying. More than 70 years ago, American ecologist Orlando Park identified the need to deal with the “nocturnal problem” — to recognize and understand the different needs of nocturnal animals. Even though some humans may consider themselves night owls, human bodies are not really adapted for life under the moon. And that’s always made the study of nocturnal animals difficult.

Recovery: Woodcock, originally ringed at The Bradshaws, Staffordshire on 22/12/2019 has been reported shot 5km away Jan 2022. These birds are still shot in the UK despite being a red listed species. From what we know this bird may have flown over 14,000 miles on migration alone. pic.twitter.com/2ZBhlBlTpd

— West Midlands Ringing Group (@RingersWm) February 5, 2022

So how did we study animals at night when we couldn’t even see them properly?

“You just kind of had to infer what animals had done at night based on what you could see, like counting footprints or seeing some of the marks they left behind,” says Wesley Payne, a Ph.D. student in ecology at the University of Hull in Yorkshire, England.

Like the West Midlands Ringing Group, Payne has been using thermal imaging to study the nocturnal behavior of over-wintering waders as part of his doctorate.

“Essentially, thermal just makes it much easier to find whatever you’re looking for,” he says.

Thermal also has some benefits for the birds.

“You’re reducing disturbance because you’re not walking all over the field,” says Dolan. “You can actually see these birds from quite a distance.”

And the benefits of thermal extend far beyond the avian world. Zoologist Priscillia Miard, founder of the Night Spotting Project in Malaysia, has used it to study nocturnal mammals like the slow loris. She has had similar experiences to Dolan’s and Payne’s and says thermal has provided new insights.

“A lot of things we thought about [slow loris] were actually wrong,” she says. “They are more social than we thought, so it really helped research specific behaviors.”

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A post shared by Night Spotting Project (@nightspottingproject)

Spreading the Science and the Benefits of Volunteerism

Communicating how thermal has improved their fieldwork has now become a key part of the Ringing Group’s mission. They work directly with other volunteer groups and landowners in England to show them how to use thermal imaging and have set up a global network of interested ringers.

Recovery: Goldfinch, originally ringed on 21/03/21 @handles4forks has been re-caught on 19/04/22, 323km away at Leswalt, Dumfries & Galloway pic.twitter.com/K6DY85CnVP

— West Midlands Ringing Group (@RingersWm) May 13, 2022

Volunteer ringers play essential roles in conservation. Driven by a passion like birdwatching, they often act as citizen scientists and collect data over many years in their local areas. Professional ecologists, on the other hand, are paid to run surveys to determine the worth of land. This has to be done if someone wants to convert that land to agriculture or housing, for example. The ecologist’s job is to come up with mitigation strategies for protecting local wildlife.

These may appear to serve different roles, but the Ringing Group has started to build a presence in the scientific community, showing that the lines between groups can sometimes blur.

Looking forward to giving a talk to Oxford Ornithological society on Thermal Birding tonight. It’s been an incredible journey and we love sharing our experiences with others. @ThomasJacksLtd pic.twitter.com/WJp98dsUmh

— West Midlands Ringing Group (@RingersWm) April 13, 2022

“We’ve written our first paper on thermal and submitted it, and we’re going to write several more as well,” Dolan says. “If you look at academia, there’s not a lot around about thermal imaging for this type of work, so it’s an opportunity for us to share even further.”

Heat Gaps

Even with its wide array of benefits, most ecology companies still don’t seem to be picking the technology up.

“I’m personally not aware of any consultancies that are introducing it as standard practice for breeding and wintering bird surveys,” says Jess Stuart-Smith, an associate ecologist at Focus Environmental Consultants, based in Worcester, England. They use thermal, she says, for studying bats and other consultancies might use thermal for completely nocturnal species, but there are no guidelines for studying birds who may use different land depending on the time of day. Her first experience of using thermal in this capacity came through volunteering for the Ringing Group, and she has slowly been introducing it into her professional work.

Stuart-Smith suggests a lack of awareness explains why nocturnal surveys haven’t become standard practice yet.

“My long-term goal is to get some actual guidelines out there for wintering bird surveys that people can use and implement because you just get a better-rounded picture of land use if you’re looking at it at nighttime as well as daytime,” she says.

But there are also limitations associated with thermal. Miard says research-grade thermal equipment can cost up to $2,000 — an outlay many research-funding agencies aren’t willing to make.

“I think people are interested in thermal, but the price is a big factor that a lot of people here cannot afford,” she says.

Another downside is that the data retrieved can often be quite poor. “What I get mostly is a silhouette of the bird, which has some variation in color, but it can be difficult to tell the species apart,” says Payne.

Where people can’t get close enough to the animal they’re studying — for geographical reasons, for example — thermal becomes less useful. “If you get a dense group of birds, you can’t tell them apart. You just get one blob of heat, because all of the thermal signatures overlap.”

To gather better data, Payne has started using thermal in combination with infrared imaging. Although both technologies detect infrared radiation, they do so at different frequencies, which means the data they generate is completely different. Infrared provides a much more detailed picture of the birds being studied, making it easier to accurately assess the species.

Side-by-side images show the difference in thermal and infrared technologies. — A red-legged partridge in thermal (l) and infrared (r). Photo courtesy West Midlands Ringing Group.

Even so, it’s still a lot harder to find the birds using infrared, as it provides less contrast between the animals and their surroundings than thermal. In that way, the technologies complement one another: One can be used to find the birds, where the other gives more accurate information.

Following his own experience of nocturnal ecology, Payne says the field has a brighter future.

“I think it’s going to grow as equipment becomes cheaper and more portable,” he says. “I really hope it’s going to help conservation and maybe make it more targeted, so that any money going in focuses on where it’s actually going to be most important.”

Meanwhile, Dalton hopes that their work at the Ringing Group shows the value volunteer groups can bring to conservation.

“What we’d like to see is ecology companies, when they speak to landowners, ask if they have volunteer groups on your land surveying? And can you link us with them?” he says. “Groups like ours can offer a hell of a lot to ecology companies — we have that baseline data, which they haven’t got.”

Stuart-Smith has similar thoughts.

“At the end of the day, we’re all doing it for the same goal,” she says. “It’s all about biodiversity net gain. It’s absolutely critical that we’re all interacting with one another.”

Previously in The Revelator:

A Move to Preserve the Night Sky

The South’s Hidden Climate Threat

It’s not just the coastlines that are recording climate change. Even the mountains of North Carolina are feeling the heat — including some endangered plants.

Excerpted from A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir’s Journey Through an Endangered Land by Dan Chapman. Copyright © 2022 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Editor’s note: Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman retraced John Muir’s 1867 trek through the South, including the naturalist’s troubling legacy, to reveal environmental damage and loss that’s been largely overlooked.

Boone, North Carolina — It’s a wonder anything survives the ice, snow, and winds that pummel the ridge, let alone the delicate-seeming yellow flowers known as spreading avens. The lovely, long-stemmed perennials are exceedingly rare, officially listed as endangered, and found only in the intemperate highlands of North Carolina and Tennessee. They sprout from shallow acidic soils underlying craggy rock faces and grassy heath balds. At times blasted with full sun, but mostly shrouded in mist, the avens are survivors, Ice Age throwbacks that refuse to die. Geum radiatum is only known to exist in fourteen places, including hard-to-find alpine redoubts reached via deer trail or brambly bushwhacking.

And that is where I find Chris Ulrey, the world’s preeminent spreading avens expert. Granted, not a lot of botanists devote their professional lives to spreading avens. And Chris, a plant ecologist with the National Park Service, doesn’t focus solely on that particular flower, aka Appalachian avens and cliff avens. Yet I know of no other Geum aficionado who, over two weeks each of the last twenty summers, has scoured the highest peaks of the Blue Ridge monitoring the elusive flowers. He has also written a series of authoritative reports on the plant’s status and prospects, all of which underscore that avens are heading down the extinction highway. The culprit? Climate change. Avens, after all, move higher and higher up the mountains in search of cooler climes. So what happens when there’s nowhere else to go? I’d come to this off-piste mountaintop — whose name Chris requests I not mention so rare-plant hunters and rock climbers don’t destroy the remaining avens — to find out.

But Chris is busy, dangling from a hundred-foot rope attached to a vertiginous cliff, rappelling between clumps of avens. At least, I’m told by a colleague that he is. I can’t see Chris. He’s shrouded in thick fog on the other side of a fifty-foot ravine that promises, with one slippery misstep, a most painful death. Occasionally, I can hear Chris. He chirps out the statistics of the latest avens colony — length, width, number of rosettes — either marveling at their hardiness or lamenting their fragility. The colleague duly takes notes and quickly compares them to the flower’s status the previous year. A full scientific accounting will come later. Today is all about the search, and the scenery.

Chris is in his element.

“This is awesome,” he yells skyward, a break in the fog allowing a glimpse of the beatific botanist, head thrown back, arms outstretched, beseeching the heavens.

_______

Most Southerners, if they think about climate change at all, think about the weather. They know about record-breaking temperatures and increasingly nasty storms. They’ll mention droughts or rising seas. They may even connect wildfires and flooding to a warming world. Yet there’s a widespread perception that climate change is mainly a coastal phenomenon. Seventy percent of Americans who live within twenty-five miles of a coast say the changing climate affects their local community, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey. Of those who live more than three hundred miles from the coast, only fifty-seven percent say it affects them.

Perhaps the findings aren’t that surprising. After all, if you witness ever-higher tides and more frequent coastal floods, you’re more likely to believe that something strange is going on. The changes are more subtle, and longer range, across the mountains. But those same climatic forces — higher temperatures, more (and less) precipitation, extreme weather — that hammer the lowlands bedevil every region and ecosystem in the world. And, make no mistake, a warming world portends drastic and irreparable harm to the southern Appalachians, which Muir labeled “the most beautiful deciduous forest I ever saw.”

He never made it to this corner of North Carolina, crossing the Old North State’s southwestern corner instead. The same hills and vales that so entranced Muir during his post–Civil War trek kept a grip on his imagination for the rest of his life. It would take three decades, but Muir eventually returned to the verdant, botanically rich forests of the South. By then he was the nation’s most famous naturalist, his name synonymous with mountains, glaciers, Yosemite, Alaska, and the Sierra Club. In an 1898 letter to Charles Sprague Sargent, the Harvard professor and the nation’s top tree expert, Muir wrote: “I don’t want to die without once more saluting the grand, godly, round-headed trees of the east side of America that I first learned to love and beneath which I used to weep for joy when nobody knew me.”

That fall, Muir joined Sargent and William Canby, a banker and well-regarded amateur botanist, on a month-long tour of the southern Appalachians. They visited Roan Mountain, the five-mile-long massif of alpine grasslands that explode in a riot of red, pink, and white rhododendrons each spring. Muir, under the weather from days of heavy travel, reposed at the Cloudland Hotel, which straddled the North Carolina–Tennessee line and afforded magnificent views. “All the landscapes in every direction are made up of mountains, a billowing sea of them without bounds as far as one can look,” he wrote to wife Louie, “and every mountain hill & ridge & hollow is densely forested with so many kinds of trees their mere names would fill this sheet.”

Muir made no mention of the spreading avens. Other botanical luminaries did. André Michaux, the famed French botanist, visited Roan in the late eighteenth century and shipped specimens back to Paris. Asa Gray, the ensuing century’s botanist extraordinaire, found avens atop Roan “in the greatest profusion.”

Chris Ulrey has studied Roan’s avens every July for two decades. Compared to The Unnamed Mountain (TUM) that I promised to not identify, Roan is a walk in the park. Motorists can practically drive to the top of the 6,300-foot mountain. Its accessibility, though, makes it an imperfect barometer of the plant’s health. Hikers who leave the AT and other trails trample or pick the flowers. Rock climbers, acid rain, second homes, and ski resorts harm avens elsewhere. But TUM, perhaps more than any other remote mountaintop, offers a truer — and scarier — barometer of the changing climate’s impact on avens and mountain ecology.

Man in helmet and climbing gear hang from the side of a rock face inspecting plants growing on the rock — National Park Service’s Chris Ulrey inspecting a spreading avens clump. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (CC BY 2.0)

“It’s pristine; nobody comes out here. There are no recreational impacts,” Chris says. “It’s one of the largest populations. We haven’t recorded many deaths. But we rarely see any young plants, which is a concern. If it wasn’t a long-lived plant, it definitely would’ve gone extinct long ago.”

Avens, most likely, were more abundant at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. As the glaciers retreated, and the South warmed, the plants were trapped, unable to migrate farther north. So they crept up the mountains in search of cooler, wetter locales. They settled in their alpine homes above 4,500 feet surrounded by spruces and firs and, in the case of TUM, red oaks. They thrive in humid places with annual temperatures averaging forty-five degrees. Rain and snow amounts may top one hundred inches a year. Most avens face north or northwest, avoiding direct sunlight. Fog is a constant companion. They grow in very shallow soil, as little as two centimeters deep.

Avens made the endangered species list in 1990. A Fish and Wildlife Service “recovery plan” three years later tallied eleven distinct populations of avens; five other groupings had already been extirpated. And eight of the remaining eleven had undergone moderate or significant damage during the previous decade. “Populations are declining and vanishing for reasons that are, in many cases, not clearly understood,” Service biologists wrote.

Chris has a pretty good idea why. In 2016, he authored “Life at the Top: Long-Term Demography, Microclimatic Refugia, and Responses to Climate Change for a High-Elevation Southern Appalachian Endemic Plant,” which appeared in the journal Biological Conservation. Chris wrote that “climate in the southern Appalachians is projected to rapidly change over the coming few decades [and] is likely to be particularly threatening to rare plants because of their narrow distributions, small population sizes, and specific habitat requirements.”

He’s blunter on top of TUM.

“At the pace we’re going,” he says, “they will not be able to adapt and move — they’ll just blink out.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Move or Change: How Plants and Animals Are Trying to Survive a Warming World