Protect This Place: Rapa Island, Home of Rare Seabirds and Beautiful Forests

The most remote inhabited island in French Polynesia is the habitat for several rare indigenous plants and animals, but it’s severely threatened by invasive introduced species.

The Place:

Rapa is the most southeastern island of the Austral Archipelago in French Polynesia. Ten islets, ranging in size from two to 64 acres, surround the main island, with a total land area of just 15.6 square miles (about 40 square kilometers). Rapa is sometimes called Rapa Iti, or “Little Rapa,” to distinguish it from Rapa Nui (better known as Easter Island). As of 2017 Rapa had a population of 507 people, a unique community that still follows old Polynesian traditions and speaks its own Polynesian language, Rapa. There are three main villages — Ahurei, Tukou and Area — all located around the central bay. It’s the only island in the country that has a winter season, usually between May and October, when the temperature can go down to 37 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). That temperature difference is one reason there are seabirds and plants living here that don’t live in other parts of French Polynesia.

Rapa map — Caption: Rapa Island, courtesy SOP Manu/BirdLife.

Why it matters:

Rapa is a place of extraordinary biodiversity, with at least 300 endemic species. The main inhabited island has one terrestrial endemic bird species, the endangered Rapa fruit-dove (Ptilinopus huttoni, local name Koko), which is the country’s largest fruit-dove.

White-bellied storm petrel — White-bellied storm-petrel (Koru’e) ©Hadoram Shiriai, used with permission.

Rapa Island is also a very important site for seabirds, with 11 species, mainly rare petrels, shearwaters and storm-petrels. Three species breeding on its uninhabited islets are now in danger of extinction: the Rapa’s shearwater (Puffinus myrtae or more locally as Kakikaki), white-bellied storm-petrel (Fregetta grallaria titan) and Polynesian storm-petrel (Nesofregetta fuliginosa) — the latter two locally named Koru’e. These species are very rare, difficult to observe, and of significant scientific interest. It’s suspected that the Rapa’s shearwater and white-bellied storm-petrel are endemic to this island — an exception among seabirds, who normally have large reproductive areas and breed in many different countries.

Rapa Island also has a unique human community. It was first settled by Polynesians, most likely in the 13th century. Their dialect developed into what is today the Rapa language. It’s believed that the depletion of natural resources on the island resulted in warfare, and the inhabitants lived in up to 14 fortified settlements (pa or pare, a type of fort, similar to the Māori pā) on peaks and clifftops.

Contact with Europeans brought liquor and disease, and between 1824 and 1830 over three-quarters of the local population died. Peruvian slavers raided the island as well. When a handful of their victims were returned to the island, they brought smallpox, which caused an epidemic. In 1826 there were almost 2,000 inhabitants; forty years later, there were fewer than 120.

The independent island kingdom was declared a French protectorate in 1867 and formally annexed on March 6, 1881. Subsequently the local monarchy was abolished. But the Rapa Island community still follows the old traditional ways — even if it has a governing town hall and an elected mayor.

The land belongs to the community and their descendants, so it can’t be bought by any exterior landowners. There is an elder council (Tohitu) that decides who the land goes to; if the land isn’t used for more than two years it can be taken away and redistributed to another local that needs it. There is also a Tomite Rahi (leaders from different factions of the island — religious groups, fishermen, taro planters, school teachers, etc.) that decides on rahui delimitations (protected marine areas where people are not allowed to fish, to protect food resources in the long term). These groups are not recognized in France or French Polynesia governments, but on Rapa Island their decisions are law.

Making Taro popoi — Making Taro “popoi,” beaten cooked taro with rocks and mixed with water from the river, a job mainly done by women. Often the sounds resonate in the village. They sing local songs to have a constant rhythm when beating. ©Tehani Withers, used with permission.

On the island almost every plant, bird and fish species has a unique local name. That’s part of why it’s so important to protect these species: If they were to be lost to extinction, Rapa’s local community would also lose a part of its cultural heritage, which was already close to disappearing in the 1800s.

The threat:

Due to its large number of uninhabited islets and remoteness, Rapa is an ideal site for the protection of endemic animals and plants. But they’re threatened by invasive species.

Non-native species were introduced to Polynesia by humans and have profoundly altered the ecosystems where they settled. Invasive plants, for example, can gradually occupy a space and squeeze out local species. Other species can cause significant habitat destruction: Goats consume native plants and cause significant erosion, while predatory species like rats and feral cats directly attack chicks and eggs.

Threats to Rapa’s flora and fauna have increased dramatically. Twenty years ago overgrazing and extensive degradation of the endemic forests was caused by the introduction of cattle, goats and horses. Now the invasion of strawberry guava (Psidium cattleyanum) and Caribbean pine (Pinus caribaea) has worsened the situation. Introduced plants had already invaded 64% of the island in 2005, including most of the forested areas. A local environmental NGO, Raumatariki, has tried to reverse the situation since 2012 by installing a fence around important native forest areas to prevent further grazing by domestic stock and setting up a native plant nursery. Further measures are needed to avoid this ecological disaster.

Strawberry guava — Raumatariki staff cut strawberry guava around Rapa’s endemic sandalwood tree — once thought to be extinct, rediscovered in 2020. ©Roberto Luta, used with permission.

Sandalwood — One of the last seven Rapa sandalwood trees in the world. © Tehani Withers, used with permission.

All offshore sites are affected by invasive grass species, especially Comelina nudiflora and Melinis minutiflora. These can form dense patches, restricting the growth of native endemic plants, which can consequently affect the breeding success of seabirds since they provide less protection against the weather conditions and make it more difficult for burrowing seabirds to nest.

Of the nine islets first surveyed in 2017, three are invaded by Pacific rats — a major problem for seabirds nesting in burrows or on the ground, as they eat chicks and eggs. Unstopped this will eventually cause the birds to disappear. For example, the Rapa shearwater population (a burrow-nesting species) has collapsed from 1,000 pairs in the 1990s to fewer than 200 pairs today.

The restoration of the important indigenous forest areas on Rapa main island and offshore islets are essential projects for the Polynesian Ornithology Society, or SOP Manu, and its partner BirdLife International. The disappearance of the Koko and these seabird colonies would constitute a significant loss of the Polynesian cultural heritage and undoubtedly serious damage to our environment.

My place in this place:

I work for SOP Manu as an island restoration project manager, and my projects take place in multiple islands across French Polynesia. With the help of BirdLife International, I’m in charge of organizing restoration projects on uninhabited islets that are biodiverse or have populations of rare bird species. Rapa was of course identified as one of the hotspots, especially for seabird colonies. Since it’s very remote, there have not been that many visits from scientists — for birds especially. The last ornithological work was done in the 1990s.

Tehani Withers on top of Tauturau islet. In the background: Karapoo rahi and Tapiko islets, and the Rapa mountain/cliff named Makatea. Photo ©Roberto Luta, used with permission.

The first time I went onto Rapa was during school holidays in 2017, when I joined one of the special ship rotations for children of the island to go home for two weeks every six weeks. There’s only one primary school on the island, so kids need to leave home when they’re 11 years old for schooling.

To go there, you really need to be prepared. A week before, you have to send all your gear and food onto a ship named the Tuhaa Pae, take a flight to an island the ship will stop at before going on to Rapa, and then spend 36 to 48 hours at sea.

With a team of scientists from SOP Manu and BirdLife International, we had to survey the fauna and flora on 10 different islets. It was a lot of work — during very bad weather. The town hall lent us a very old small boat. Sadly, while we were camping, we lost it! The rope broke during the night due to tumultuous waves and it floated away. We had to have a team of locals come pick us up in a bigger boat. The scariest part was jumping off the islet into the waves to catch the buoy and be pulled onto it. Of course, BirdLife helped us compensate the loss of the boat with a new one, so we could continue to have a good relationship with the town hall and the local community.

The second time I went, during school holidays in 2018, everyone remembered me: “You were with the group who lost the boat!” I met more locals than I had the time before, as my role was to start training them on biosecurity: We’d discovered on the previous trip that ship rats were absent from the island, and we wanted to keep it that way. Again, it was super fun, but bad weather limited what we could do.

I thought then that if I wanted to do more, I’d have to spend more time on this island. With the president of Raumatariki and my other colleagues from SOP Manu, we decided to form a team to do more work on the restoration project and applied for the Young Conservation Leadership Award.

I remember going for the third time in 2019, alone, to join Tiffany, Raumatariki’s president, and help her with the YCLA project for six weeks. At that time, I was in a slump because my SOP Manu projects on other sites weren’t working out. It had just been so discouraging to even be in this field. But the third trip saved me. I got to know more about Rapa and its local community, and it made me passionate about conservation again. Their involvement in our project and their views on nature are what I think of when I think of how our Polynesian society should be: protectors of our island resources for future generations and protectors of our cultural heritage.

Biosecurity — Tehani explaining differences between rat species for biosecurity during a public meeting. ©Roberto Luta, used with permission.

I’ve returned three times since then. Each time I visit, people recognize me — they’ve kind of adopted me as their own bird expert. I’m often invited to village meetings and events. I get so much help from them, both in the field and when I’m staying in the village. They like to share everything, and if we walk around we never go home without a gift like fish, fruit or vegetables.

At each public meeting we organize to share our progress, a lot of people attend and give their opinions. In 2020, during my fifth time on the island with Raumatariki, we brought school kids onto islets to see birds and onto the main island restored forest sites to remove invasive plants. I learned a lot of their culture and we helped kids know more about their birds and plants.

I’m now very attached to this community and this beautiful island, and I really hope I can continue to help them restore the sites. Each time we arrive, we get flower crowns; each time we leave we receive necklaces of local blue seeds (which means you will come back). Life on Rapa isn’t perfect, and sometimes our visions clash with public opinions, but having the mayor, his employees and the tohitu (elder council) support our projects has made my experience a joy. I feel I’ve learned a lot more about the Polynesian way of life than during my lifetime in Tahiti, which has become modern and individualistic.

They probably won’t read this, but Tongia maitaki (thanks a lot!) to everyone on Rapa Island. You’re the best.

Who’s protecting it now:

Raumatariki protects the environment and cultural aspects related to the nature of the community. They produce indigenous plants in their plant nursery, remove invasive plant species, and plan to restore important archeological sites such as fishing pools (Paeka) and forts (Pa). They’re our local partners in protecting the birds of the island, so we train volunteers and staff to identify birds and invasive species, as well as in biosecurity and related subjects. In exchange they help us communicate with the population and give us logistical support.

What this place needs:

Funding is of course essential. Volunteers would be welcome, if they’re ready to spend months in remote conditions. But paying someone local to oversee these tasks full-time would be ideal.

We also need more scientific help in researching rare birds, their habits, and ways to protect them and restore their habitat. Some plant species, too, are so rare we just don’t know how to produce them on a larger scale for replanting at restored sites.

Lessons from the fight:

I’ve learned that the local community must be involved in conservation projects. Without their support, you can’t effectively protect these sites in the long term. Even though community dialogue can slow down the projects — since there are always diverging opinions — you learn to adapt your methods. Having everyone working together is better for the future of the island’s environment and for the future generations of these remote communities.

Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: The Fragile and Enchanting Costa dos Corais

Ten New Environmental Books Offering Inspiration, Insight and Ideas

April’s best new eco-books look toward solutions to the extinction crisis, climate change, water shortages, environmental justice and more.

April brings spring showers — or it used to, at least. Here in the Portland area, this year, it also brought snow, hail, wind and thunder, along with downed trees, power outages and traffic accidents. Similar abnormal weather occurred throughout the country, with several regions experiencing mid-April blizzards.

That’s climate chaos for you: a series of unpredictable and dangerous events making life more complicated and deadly.

How can we make sense of this and other crises affecting the natural world? Ten new books — including several by Revelator contributors — may offer you the answers, along with some insight, inspiration and ideas to create powerful change.

These books — all published this month — cover heady topics like climate change, environmental justice, biodiversity loss and more. Some are intended for people just learning the basics, while others speak to dedicated environmental professions. Many provide a window into the wonders of the natural world. All offer a vision not just for April, but far into the future.

Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery (Illustrated Edition)

by Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe

Our take: If we ever hope to meet the goal of protecting 30-50% of the planet, we’d better start recovering some of the land and water we’ve lost in the first place. Rewilding ain’t easy, but it’s going to be essential.

From the publisher: “Written by two leaders in the field, this book offers an abundantly illustrated guide to the science of rewilding. It shows in fascinating detail the ways in which ecologists are reassembling ecosystems that allow natural interactions rather than human interventions to steer their environmental trajectories.”

Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge

by Erica Gies

Our take: Gies has written a bevy of articles about “Slow Water” over the past few years, and we’re glad to see her tackle the topic in book form.

From the publisher: “In this quietly radical book, science journalist Erica Gies introduces us to innovators in what she calls the Slow Water movement who start by asking a revolutionary question: What does water want? Using close observation, historical research, and cutting-edge science, these experts in hydrology, restoration ecology, engineering, and urban planning are already transforming our relationship with water.”

Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, From 1979 to the Present

by Eugene Linden

Our take: We’ve followed Linden’s writing for years. Here he offers vital history as a window to the future.

From the publisher: “From a writer and expert who has been at the center of the fight for more than 30 years, a brilliant, big-picture reckoning with our shocking failure to address climate change. Fire and Flood focuses on the malign power of key business interests, arguing that those same interests could flip the story very quickly — if they can get ahead of a looming economic catastrophe.”

Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice

by Aviva Chomsky

Our take: Chomsky’s previous books have focused on immigration, labor exploitation and related issues, and she brings an awareness of racism and equity to her discussion of climate change (which, despite the book’s title, offers a fair amount of science for those readers who are new to the danger it poses).

From the publisher: “…Chomsky breaks down the concepts, terminology and debates for activists, students and anyone concerned about climate change. She argues that science is not enough to change course: We need put social, racial and economic justice front and center and overhaul the global growth economy.” YES! Magazine has an excerpt.

Maker Comics: Live Sustainably!

by Angela Boyle; illustrated by Les McClaine

Our take: This series of enthusiastic educational graphic novels takes a hybrid approach that combines character-based stories with easily followed how-to lessons. This latest volume joins earlier editions on science experiments, robots and gardening.

From the publisher: “…a step-by-step DIY guide that will help kids roll up their sleeves and get making with confidence! Inside this graphic novel you’ll find instructions for eight sustainability projects.”

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs

by Juli Berwald

Our take: Berwald gave us a flavor of this moving book in her essay “Vanishing: The Bleaching in My Backyard” and in this interview.

From the publisher: “…an inspiring, lucid, meditative ode to the reefs and the undaunted scientists working to save them against almost impossible odds. As she also attempts to help her daughter in her struggle with mental illness, Berwald explores what it means to keep fighting a battle whose outcome is uncertain. She contemplates the inevitable grief of climate change and the beauty of small victories.”

How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall and Toxic Return of DDT

by Elena Conis

Our take: Sex sells, but is using a sexy cover photo the wrong idea for a book about a dangerous pesticide? Check out this revealing Twitter thread where Conis discusses the 74-year history of the photo (which depicts a woman in a fog of “harmless” DDT) and its modern relevance.

From the publisher: “…the sweeping narrative of generations of Americans who struggled to make sense of the notorious chemical’s risks and benefits. Historian Elena Conis follows DDT from postwar farms, factories and suburban enclaves to the floors of Congress and tony social clubs, where industry barons met with Madison Avenue brain trusts to figure out how to sell the idea that a little poison in our food and bodies was nothing to worry about.”

What Climate Justice Means and Why We Should Care

by Elizabeth Cripps

Our take: A philosopher and former journalist, Cripps addresses the climate crisis through the lenses of morality, ethics and justice. She makes you care about climate change’s most vulnerable victims and in the process offers advice on how we all can help.

From the publisher: “Who should pay the bill for climate action? Who must have a say? How can we hold multinational companies, organizations — even nations — to account? Cripps argues powerfully that climate justice goes beyond political polarization. Climate activism is a moral duty, not a political choice.”

The Coasts of California: A California Field Atlas

by Obi Kaufmann

Our take: This is the third book in Kaufmann’s unique series of “field atlases,” which combine art and science into a beautifully illustrated guide for any naturalist or nature lover. For a flavor of what to expect, check out Kaufmann’s essay about one of California’s most beautiful but overlooked trees, “Vanishing: In Love With the Blue Oaks.”

From the publisher: “…much more than a survey of tourist spots, Coasts is a full immersion into the astonishingly varied natural worlds that hug California’s shoreline. With hundreds of gorgeous watercolor maps and illustrations, Kaufmann explores the rhythms of the tides, the lives of sea creatures, the shifting of rocks and sand, and the special habitats found on California’s islands.”

Chasing the Ghost Bear: On the Trail of America’s Lost Super Beast

by Mike Stark

Conflict of Interest Department: Stark, a former journalist, is a fellow Center for Biological Diversity employee who helped launch The Revelator. His latest book is a riveting examination of the extinction crisis by way of a prehistoric loss. Read an excerpt here.

From the publisher: “No animal shakes the human consciousness quite like a bear, and few compare to the giant short-faced bears that stalked North America during the Pleistocene… The bears weren’t invincible, however. Despite their size, they were swept off the planet in a mysterious wave of Ice Age extinctions more than ten thousand years ago, then mostly forgotten… Part natural history, part travelogue, and part meditation on extinction and loss, Chasing the Ghost Bear returns these magnificent beasts to their rightful place in our understanding of the world just an epoch past.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Now Read This: Stop Doomscrolling and Save the Planet

Six Ways to Talk About Extinction

Including one we forget far too often.

As Earth faces the rampant biodiversity loss many scientists call the Sixth Extinction, it becomes more important than ever to talk about the crisis.

There are, I’ve come to realize in my 15 years on the extinction beat, six ways to do this.

The first, of course, involves sharing the devastating news that a species has gone extinct. Researchers have looked for a species for years and, failing to find evidence that it still exists, declare that it has been lost.

These are usually phrased as “probable extinctions,” because it’s harder to prove that an organism doesn’t exist than that it does. Also, calling something “extinct” too early can result in removing the very protections that could be saving it from that fate. That’s always an important context for these discussions.

The Lord God Bird and Dozens of Other Species Declared Extinct in 2021

The second way to talk about extinction — by far the most common — is a warning: An animal or plant, or a group of them, is disappearing and could soon go extinct. Invariably, human activities are to blame for the decline of these populations.

Mice, Hedgehogs and Voles Need Conservation Champions

Again, sometimes you find variations on this, such as when we proclaim that a species has disappeared from a specific portion of its range and has become locally extinct. This warning is no less worrisome, though the messaging can sometimes create confusion when people come to believe a species is completely gone.

Tigers Extinct in Laos

That brings us to the third way to talk about the subject: Someone is trying to do something to prevent an extinction. These are stories of struggle, science and drama. They can involve heroes, villains and everything in between. They serve to lift us up in the continued fight against human-caused entropy.

A Virus Wiped Out 90% of This Turtle Species. Can It Recover?

Occasionally — and not as rarely as you might think — this leads to discussion number four: People have saved a species from extinction and it’s now recovered — or at least on its way. This serves as a vital counterpoint to the darkness that surrounds stories of loss.

Saving California Condors — With a Chisel and Hand Puppets

Sometimes these heroic achievements have nuances: Someone finds a species that had previously been declared extinct. This is great news…with reservations. It shows that science works and that people don’t give up. But most of these rediscovered species remain at high risk or are even critically endangered, and they’ve been found in the nick of time for people to (ideally) take action to protect them. That places this kind of conversation somewhere between types two and four. We’ll call it type five.

Harlequin Found: ‘Extinct’ Toad Rediscovered After 30 Years

Which brings us to type six: the discussions that reveal what we’re losing when species go extinct. The beauty. The wonder. The parts of our culture and collective experience. The ecological roles that protect us. The mystery of species not yet understood. The marvel of evolution. The interconnectedness of ecological systems.

Ideally, there should be no type six. These are the messages that belong in discussions one through five, but all too often are left by the wayside. Perhaps that’s why type six is at the bottom of the list: It’s the rarest conversation of all.

And potentially, that’s the reason one through five exist in the first place.

What Losing 1 Million Species Means for the Planet — and Humanity

Unearthing the Story of North America’s Lost Giant Bear

A new book digs through dark caves and historical documents to tell the story of the now-extinct giant short-faced bear, which disappeared around the time of the mammoths.

Excerpted from Chasing the Ghost Bear: On the Trail of America’s Lost Super Beast by Mike Stark by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. ©2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

Editor’s Note: Giant short-faced bears (Arctodus simus) went extinct some 11,000 years ago. These massive animals, which stood 10-feet-tall on their hind legs and weighed nearly a ton, vanished near the end of the Pleistocene. The Center for Biological Diversity’s Mike Stark brings their story back to life — and helps illuminate the cost of today’s extinction crisis.

On August 8, 1988, a man named Chris Nielson was digging with a backhoe as part of a reconstruction project for Huntington Reservoir in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Out of the sticky mud he pulled what looked to be a log. A closer examination revealed that it was actually a bone. A very large one. It turned out to be a front leg of a fifteen-foot-tall Columbian mammoth. Part of a long, curved tusk was also found. To the crew’s credit, work halted and a concerted excavation began. That summer about 90 percent of the mammoth’s skeleton was found during a meticulous recovery process. It was in remarkable shape, thanks mostly to the encasement of mud that had hovered around freezing for thousands of years, acting as the perfect refrigerator — and preservation agent — for this ancient mammoth.

“At the excavation it was so fresh that we thought we could smell rotting meat at one place,” said David Gillette, who was Utah’s state paleontologist at the time.

Based on the wear and tear of its teeth, the big bull mammoth was likely around sixty years old — granddaddy age for an elephant. It was no charmed life on the edge of this receding alpine lake. Nearly all of his bones showed signs of severe and painful disease, mostly arthritis. The partially digested food in his intestinal tract revealed that his last meal was meager and thin, mostly needles and twigs from a fir tree, sedge leaves and seeds. Finally, around thirteen thousand calendar years ago — a point representing “the very end of mammoth existence in America” — he keeled over and died in a mud bog atop this mountain, far from his ancestral home.

Columbian mammoths were typically plains dwellers, so it was unusual to find one in the mountains at nine thousand feet above sea level. (At the time it was the highest mammoth skeleton ever found in North America.) But, when he died, the Pleistocene and the continent’s mammoth species were in their twilight as the climate was getting warmer. It’s likely the Huntington mammoth was moving upslope in search of cooler climes in the upper reaches of the Wasatch Mountains. But he wasn’t alone.

Several projectile points were also found at the dig site, leading to speculation that Paleoindians may have either hunted the mammoth or scavenged it after finding it dead.

Word got out about the mammoth in 1988 and soon locals were sneaking onto the site and digging on their own, even though it was on federal land and they didn’t have permission. A crew was called in to guard the area. That’s apparently when the remains of a giant short-faced bear were found and whisked away: a single rib and part of its skull, including several teeth. The story was that someone on the night watch duty took the bear parts and stowed them in a refrigerator. They were eventually returned, but the damage was done. Situational context is crucial in paleontological digs, and removing pieces before their location can be closely documented is like ripping pages from a book and trying to understand what they mean. Although the bear bones were recovered and placed safely in a museum the physical context, including exact proximity to the mammoth and the human tools, was lost forever.

Still, there was enough to scientifically piece together some of the story of this giant short-faced bear by Gillette, the Utah paleontologist, and David B. Madsen, both of whom worked at Utah’s Division of State History. First of all, it was big, likely in the same ballpark of the giant found in the early 1980s near ancient Lake Bonneville that was estimated to weigh around 1,400 pounds. The Huntington bear also had large teeth, a tall nasal cavity and an exceptionally squished snout. “This individual was distinctly short-faced, an extreme among the short-faced bears,” Gillette and Madsen wrote.

And then there was the matter of the projectile points and other lithic tools found nearby. Some of them were similar to points found in western Wyoming from around 9,500 years ago. Others were comparable to those found higher up in the Rocky Mountains of the same vintage, if not a bit older. Could it be that, at this ancient lake, the mammoth, the bear, and the people were existing contemporaneously, each in their own desperate struggle for survival in a changing world? Maybe.

“The presence of these Paleoindian materials suggests, but cannot prove, that humans were contemporary with the Columbian mammoth and the short-faced bear at the Huntington dam site,” Gillette and Madsen said.

Utah has long been a hotbed for Ice Age wildlife discoveries. About two miles away from the Huntington Reservoir, there’s a site where American mastodons, extinct bison, and extinct horses have been found. About sixty miles north there’s another rich Pleistocene find. Silver Creek, as it’s known, includes twenty-nine species, like mastodons, ground sloths, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, camels, horses, and bison. The date there is from about forty thousand years ago. But what happened at Huntington may have been a final dramatic chapter in the final hours of the late Pleistocene. “I’m guessing Arctodus was feeding on our poor, dear mammoth,” Gillette, the state paleontologist, said at a community meeting a couple months after the discovery. “Perhaps it delivered the final blow.”

It’s hard to know for sure, but the frozen dead mammoth, so well preserved in the cool boggy ground, might’ve been one of the last meals of the Huntington bear. Gnaw marks on one of the mammoth’s wrist bones show a groove that matches the size and teeth arrangement of the bear. State officials later revised what they think happened: “It’s possible that the bear fed on the carcass and died at the same place,” they said.

Or it’s possible that a different short-faced bear had dined on the mammoth. It’s certainly not out of the question. Years later, scientists published a paper after examining mammoth remains found near Saltville, Virginia, with “extreme examples of carnivore gnawing.” The mammoth had died, and its carcass was probably partially submerged in water or mud. And then a wolf and another meat-eating scavenger — possibly an American lion or a giant short-faced bear — had come along and gnawed on its heel bones with enough force to be identified by scientists thousands of years later.

skull in museum with hand next to it for size — The skull of a giant short-faced bear. Photo: Travis (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Arctodus simus remains, including parts of its jaw and a fearsome-looking lower canine, had been found nearby. The exact size of the bear is unknown, but there was enough evidence to say it was large and likely quite capable of stealing and defending any carcass coveted by other, smaller scavengers. “In fact its only likely rivals would’ve been larger members of its own species,” said the paper, which was authored by Blaine Schubert and Steven C. Wallace at East Tennessee State University.

Still there was another dimension to the bear at Huntington that had caught my eye. “This individual was one of the last of the Pleistocene megafauna in North America,” a state report said in 1996, “perhaps even the last generation.”

While the date may be in dispute — Schubert has since calculated that the Huntington bear lived sometime between 12,764 and 13,058 calendar years ago — the thought of a final, lonely bear, whether at Huntington or elsewhere, struck a melancholy note within me.

_______

This may have been the last stop for the giant short-faced bear. Of course it’s extremely unlikely, astronomically so, that the exact bear found at Huntington Reservoir was the last one on Earth — what are the odds that the last one would actually be found? And that we could ever make that determination? Still, somewhere the last of its kind dropped dead and when it fell, the great shroud of extinction descended over a species that had inhabited the planet for more than a million years. Strange as it was, I let myself consider the possibility that the final moments for Arctodus simus had ticked away at the top of this mountain, the very place I was standing in the chill of the first day of summer.

In recent years, a term has been coined to signify the final individual of a species: an endling. It’s an oddly charming term that’s poignant and sorrowful and final. I wondered if this Huntington bear was the endling for giant short-faced bears. Had his final meal, and the final meal for his kind, been eaten here? Had he spent years searching in vain for a mate, driven by the indefatigable pursuit of procreation at all costs? Had he wandered into the mountains in a last-ditch attempt to outlast the changing world around him only to find a sickly mammoth on the same lost and doomed path?

And then I wondered why I cared about this particular bear. Surely thousands upon thousands of A. simus had perished on the continent, so maybe this one should matter no more than those. But for whatever reason it did. The mind does funny things, and while I stood for a few minutes in the little covered pergola, I ticked through some of the other endlings I knew.

Martha was the name of the last of the passenger pigeons, a species once so populous that when flocks of hundreds of millions flew overhead, day turned to dark. They were mostly gone by the turn of the twentieth century. Martha was born in captivity, spent twenty-nine years at the Cincinnati Zoo, and died in 1914, taking all of the species’ genetic and cultural information with her.

Benjamin was the name given to the world’s last Tasmanian tiger, a sleek carnivorous marsupial with tiger stripes and a kangaroo pouch. He was captured in the wild and held at Australia’s Hobart Zoo under less-than-favorable conditions. He died in 1936, just months after a ban on hunting the species was put into place. Since then, though, there’s been considerable debate about whether Ben was actually the last of his kind.

I was always fond of Toughie, the last of the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrogs. Originally from Panama, he spent his last years living alone at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, a sort of stately but tragic ambassador of the story of frog extinctions happening around the world. He died in 2016.

And it’s hard not to love Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, a giant tortoise subspecies, from the Galapagos Islands. He lived to be more than one hundred years old, was never able to breed, and died in 2012, possibly of a heart attack.

It’s a mournful record but only a fraction of the extinctions that have happened during our lifetimes. Many went unnoticed, and nearly every endling went unnamed and uncelebrated. What name would we have given this Arctodus endling in the Utah mountains if we knew indeed he was the last? Huntington? Wasatch? Björn?

Without a good answer, I walked back up the hill to the car, pausing to take in the long stands of aspens and, at their feet, the snowfields stubbornly hanging on against the season’s change, the same way a child clings to a parent’s legs when trouble is afoot. I drew in a long breath of the thin mountain air and let it go. Nothing really lasts.

What It’s Like to Study Endangered Killer Whales

Researcher Deborah Giles is on the frontlines of efforts to understand — and help protect — critically endangered Southern Residents.

You can learn a lot from poop.

Deborah Giles would know. As the research director of the nonprofit Wild Orca and a research scientist at the University of Washington, Giles has worked for years on a project collecting scat from endangered Southern Resident killer whales to better understand their health.

And there’s reason for concern. Southern Residents are a distinct population of orcas — known as J, K and L pod — that make their home in the waters around the Pacific Northwest. For the past 20 years their populations have trended dangerously downward. In 2005, with just 88 individuals remaining, they were federally protected as endangered. Today their numbers have dropped to 73.

The Revelator spoke with Giles about the biggest threats facing these killer whales and what can be done to save them.

With the help of specially trained dogs, you’re able to find Southern Resident killer whale scat in the sea. What can you learn from it?

Five people on boat watching whale breach — Researchers, including Deborah Giles (left), aboard the National Marine Fisheries Service vessel Noctiluca off San Juan Island, Washington in 2006. Photo: NOAA

Scat is a great proxy for blood or blubber. In the past we would’ve had to have taken a blubber biopsy to understand things like how much toxicants are stored or circulating through the whale’s body. But an analysis of one fecal collection yields things like nutrition status, stress hormones, pregnancy hormones. We can tell if a female is pregnant — and how pregnant — based on sex hormones associated with different stages of pregnancy. We can tell things about the gut microbiome, fungus and bacteria. Pretty much anything you can imagine health-wise that can be learned from a biological sample, you can learn from feces.

One of our papers showed that 69% of pregnant females are losing their calves either before they’re viable, meaning they miscarry them or the calves are born and die right away. And one-third of those are females that were pregnant into the last stages of pregnancy, and yet their babies died. Those females are the ones that we were also able to show were nutritionally deprived.

In addition, we can look at things like microplastics. We haven’t done any actual analysis on that yet, but that’s going to be a big one going forward. And we’ll be able to go back and analyze our past samples.

Chinook salmon are the preferred source of food for these killer whales. Is a lack of Chinook what’s driving their health problems?

That’s the biggest problem. Chinook are decimated in quality and quantity throughout the whales’ entire range. We Washingtonians like to think of these whales as ours, but they’re really Oregon’s and California’s whales, too.

Fish declines from Monterey Bay to southeast Alaska are at fault here. What’s causing the declines in salmon? Overfishing, fishing in inappropriate ways and in inappropriate areas, and using inappropriate gear. There’s a massive amount of bycatch from other fisheries.

Dams on rivers are also making the lives of salmon that much harder. So is habitat destruction in estuarine places — in areas that are the interface between the fresh water and saltwater. We’re filling those in with concrete and building condos in those areas that are vitally important for out-migrating salmon.

We’re also creating more fish that are inferior in quality by throwing more hatchery salmon into the mix. Wild salmon have a greater ability to withstand oceanographic perturbations in a way that hatchery fish don’t.

Another problem is with fisheries management. Salmon from much of Oregon, and all of Washington and British Columbia, exit their natal rivers and go up to Alaska to spend anywhere from two to five years in the ocean getting big. Then they leave Alaska return to their natal rivers to spawn.

But often, before they can do that, the Alaskan fishery takes a tremendous amount of the fish. Around 97% of Chinook caught in Alaska are non-native to Alaska. Those fish are bound for these rivers [in Oregon, Washing and British Columbia] and come from a huge number of runs that are on the endangered species list.

What effect is climate change having on Southern Residents?

Climate change is the largest elephant in the room. It’s the one that’s overshadowing everything, because everything that’s impacting the natural world will ultimately find its way to direct impacts to the Southern Residents. Killer whales occur in all oceans of the world, the warmest to the coldest waters. A several-degree temperature change isn’t going to impact the killer whales themselves, but it’s going to affect the fish that they rely on.

That’s another reason some of us are pushing for the Snake River dams to be removed. Those four dams on the mainstem of the Columbia and four on the Snake block some of the highest elevation, coldest water habitat needed for salmon. If we could remove those dams that would give those fish the biggest access to cold water habitat.

The salmon that these whales coevolved with used to be over 100 pounds. It makes sense that you would have these large-bodied whales that can live into their 80s when they were able forage on these incredibly large fatty-rich, lipid-rich fish. A full-grown killer whale or a pregnant killer whale needs 300-400 pounds of food per day.

So back in the day, even 100 years ago, they would have to forage on three or four Chinook and they would have enough to eat and be healthy and thrive.

Now, when the average size of a Chinook in Washington state is 12.5 pounds, killer whales have to forage a lot more to find the same amount of food. And when the prey that they’re looking for is less quality, smaller and more widely dispersed, these whales are having to exert so much more energy to try and get their daily caloric needs met. So it’s no wonder we’re seeing that 69% of females that get pregnant are not able to bring their calf to term.

aerial view of whale chasing fish — A young resident killer whale chases a chinook salmon in the Salish Sea near San Juan Island, Washington 2017. Photo: John Durban (NOAA Fisheries/Southwest Fisheries Science Center), Holly Fearnbach (SR3: SeaLife Response, Rehabilitation and Research) and Lance Barrett-Lennard (Vancouver Aquarium’s Coastal Ocean Research Institute)

What else can we do to help them?

I think we need to be getting dams down that we can do without. That includes the Klamath dams in California and others. We need to be doing habitat restoration on rivers to return healthy riparian corridors so that there’s shade to keep waters cool for salmon, and woody debris to create different habitats within the river system. We need to stop farming right up to the river’s edge. We need to be mindful of the inputs into the river, including industrial toxicants and those associated with agriculture.

We need to stop decimating that interface between the saltwater and the freshwater realm, which is an area that people seem intent to just completely pave over everywhere. We need fisheries management that focuses on maximizing a fish’s potential to get all the way back to its natal river.

We also need to change when, where, and how we fish. We can utilize fishing techniques that can significantly reduce salmon bycatch, like nets with holes in the sides that other species of fish don’t even seem to see, but the Chinook can exit. We need to be very mindful about what is returning, what is moving through an area. Just because you’re out for a pollock or a hake or some other sort of fish, if there’s salmon in the area, I’m sorry, you don’t get to fish there.

In terms of research, I think we need to see what the emerging toxicants are that are impacting these whales, like PFAS. We do need to be looking at how healthy the whales are at different times of the year and to be able to couple that with a knowledge of fisheries abundance. When these whales are getting enough to eat, what’s happening with fisheries there? What are we doing right there? We need to be tracking this throughout the year to be able to see change over time.

What is it like to be studying these animals that are perilously close to extinction?

I know these whales as individuals. I’ve been following them since I was 18, and I’ve watched

the majority of them grow up. I’ve watched them have babies of their own. I’ve gotten a front row seat to see their interactions with each other. I see how tightly bonded they are.

We saw what happens when a whale loses her calf, like with J35 [who carried her dead calf for at least 17 days in 2018]. That was the world’s opportunity to see what we researchers get to see anytime we’re with them. We see that they’re incredibly socially bonded. They care for each other. They cooperatively hunt and share food, even when they themselves are starving.

And we see that they’re not giving up, they’re continuing to get pregnant. It’s not necessarily a conscious thing — it’s who they are, it’s what they do. But they’re still here and I want to give them as much of a fighting chance as possible.

By continuing the work that we do, by continuing to magnify and highlight what’s happening with them — both the positives and the negatives — it gives the public an opportunity to get engaged and stay engaged.

But is it heartbreaking? Absolutely. Every day it’s heartbreaking to think about what’s happening with them. I think about them every time I get in my car. I ask myself, “Do I really need to take this trip? How is this impacting the whales?”

That’s what I try to impart to people that I’m teaching or getting to visit with: It doesn’t matter where you’re from, the things that you do have an impact on not only these whales, but all the other species on the planet.

It comes down to education, people learning about something that they care about and not just leaving it at that but continuing their education and passing that information onto their friends and family.

Wherever you live, get involved in groups that are doing good work. Don’t just give a thumbs up — actually participate.

Previously in The Revelator:

Whales Face New and Emerging Threats

Lessons for the Long Term: Tom Lovejoy’s Legacy for Life on Earth

As the world debates the need to protect 30% of the planet’s land and water, research in collaboration with the late conservation biologist shows the importance of long-term support for biodiversity.

The scientific consensus is clear: The climate and ecological crises are accelerating, converging, and putting humanity at risk. Stewardship of large, unbroken ecosystems can help alleviate these crises — by keeping carbon in the ground and sustaining the vast array of life on Earth, including ourselves.

No one knew this better than Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy, the legendary scientist who famously coined the term “biological diversity” (often shortened to “biodiversity”) and dedicated his life to its protection.

Thomas Lovejoy — Amazon Biodiversity Center

Starting in the 1970s, in the early days of the modern environmental movement, Lovejoy spearheaded an experiment in the Brazilian Amazon to answer a critical debate: Is it better to have a single large reserve or several small ones? In collaboration with the Brazilian government and locals, Lovejoy’s team created forest fragments of different sizes and tracked the ecological consequences. Its findings have unfolded over decades, showing that fragmenting forests leads to species declines or extinctions, affects the local climate, and hinders carbon storage.

The results are clear: While even small forest patches can remain strongholds of endangered species and should be conserved, when it comes to nature reserves, large areas are fundamental and provide unique, irreplaceable benefits for biodiversity.

In the decades since this forest experiment began, governments around the world have increasingly established and expanded nature reserves. These protected areas now cover about 17% of the world’s lands and hold the promise of safeguarding biodiversity within large, unbroken ecosystems for the long term.

But there’s an inconvenient truth for nature reserves that conservationists in the 1970s did not anticipate: Protected areas are not necessarily permanent. In fact, they’re increasingly subject to legal changes that roll back protections and can put ecosystems at risk.

Notably, not all protection rollbacks have negative consequences, as they may restore rights to the original Indigenous or local stewards or enable conservation planning. But many rollbacks to protections are not so benign and authorize new or expanded industrial-scale, extractive development. We’ve seen this happen several times recently:

“Australia to Open More Marine Parks to Commercial Fishing”

“Brazil Launches Plan to Expand Mining in Amazon”

“Environmentalists [in Kenya] Fear a Proposal to Allow Boundary Changes to Protected Areas Will Open the Door to Deforestation”

Nine years ago, as a prospective Ph.D. student who’d initially studied this phenomenon in the United States — and with a keen interest in the biodiversity of Amazonia inspired by a semester abroad in Ecuador — I audaciously approached Lovejoy with an idea. Could we look at the phenomenon of protected area rollbacks in the Amazon? Given increasing pressures from agribusiness, hydropower dams, mining and other industrial development, and the critical importance of large, unbroken ecosystems for biodiversity, the topic seemed ripe for study.

Kroner Lovejoy — The author with Tom Lovejoy at the 2017 Tyler Prize event. Provided.

Tom agreed to advise me through my Ph.D., and I also benefited from generous collaborations with Conservation International. Our study began in the Amazon but evolved to include data from around the world. In a paper published in Science in 2019, we showed that 73 governments enacted more than 3,700 rollbacks to protected areas. Although about one-quarter of these legal changes restored land or rights to communities, most allowed new extractive, industrial-scale activities. We found that Brazil, the home of Tom’s forest-fragment experiment, is a global hotspot of rollbacks.

In a separate study, my colleagues and I — working without Tom — found that protected areas with more deforestation are at higher risk of being rolled back, suggesting the importance of sound management and enforcement to keep protections intact.

Tom called the phenomenon of protected area rollbacks the “underbelly of conservation.” Rollbacks are largely hidden, as official statistics focus on net growth coverage of protected areas. As long as the total number grew, any shrinkages or adjustments to loosen restrictions could remain hidden.

Yet our research has driven new awareness. Protected area rollbacks have now been recognized in a motion by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and provisionally included as a “complementary” indicator in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. That’s expected to be agreed later this year in a “Paris moment” for biodiversity.

Even as rollbacks continue during the Covid crisis, donors are increasingly prioritizing long-term conservation funding. More comprehensive monitoring by civil society, reporting of information by governments, and financial support from public and private sectors could go a long way toward enhancing durable conservation. Targeted funding, for instance, can support better management. And beyond state-led protected areas, other land stewardship approaches — especially those led by Indigenous peoples and local communities — need more support.

Durable support for conservation is especially important as conservation groups and world governments debate 30×30, the goal of protecting and conserving at least 30% of the planet’s lands and waters by the year 2030. That’s just eight years away, and as governments rush to meet this goal, any lands lauded as protected by the end of the decade could be chipped away and rolled back without anyone being the wiser.

How can the world ensure that 30×30 goals are achieved in as effective and durable a manner as possible? Again, Tom Lovejoy had the answers.

Make Good Trouble — and Conservation Magic

Working on a bold research topic, I was, and continue to be, inspired by Tom’s wisdom. In the spirit of the late civil rights leader John Lewis, Tom often ended our regular meetings with a wink, smile and reminder to “make good trouble.”

Tom modelled good-trouble-making himself, strategically working along the science-policy interface to make a difference. For instance, with Carlos Nobre, he put pressure on the Bolsonaro administration by spotlighting the Amazon tipping point — a deforestation threshold that, if passed, could flip the tropical forest ecosystem into a savanna, with devastating consequences for the local water cycle, global climate, and irreplaceable biodiversity.

Despite daunting conservation challenges, Tom remained focused on how different stakeholders can safeguard large, unbroken ecosystems and their biodiversity. He took a systems and collaborative approach to identify and advocate for holistic solutions. To name a few: He championed Indigenous and local community stewardship, advocated for forest conservation as a pandemic prevention strategy, and promoted restoration before it was in vogue.

And Tom knew better than anyone that spatial protections alone are not enough to save the world. Scientists agree that transformative changes to address the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss are urgently needed. These changes could include redirecting environmentally damaging subsidies, enhancing nature-positive regulations and sustainable supply chains, accounting for diverse values and ways of measuring societal progress (e.g. beyond GDP), and ensuring equitable access to education.

Tom’s engagements on dozens of boards of organizations across sectors meant that he lived the words he penned in 1989: “Science must take on an advocacy role with respect to environment … indeed, it is our responsibility.” Tom modeled these values through his long-term research, engagements with governments around the world, and generous, legendary convenings. With these actions he created some of the conditions we need to save the world: knowledge generation, meaningful collaborations of scientists with decisionmakers, and political momentum.

In short, Tom Lovejoy made conservation magic happen.

What remains most inspiring is that he never faltered in his persistence and optimism. Despite his position on the front lines of conservation — witnessing ecosystem loss, unsustainable development, and political challenges like rollbacks firsthand — he remained steadfast in his belief that a better way forward is possible. That there’s always some opportunity to make progress.

Governments have an opportunity to do just that, later this year, by agreeing to and financing transformative goals and targets for the Convention on Biological Diversity, including the goal to inclusively protect and conserve at least 30% of the planet by 2030. This effort should be centered in a human rights-based approach with recognition of Indigenous and local community rights and ensure that extractive and industrial-scale activities — and the harmful rollbacks that would enable them — are avoided in protected and conserved areas.

These actions would not only honor Tom Lovejoy, the “Godfather of Biodiversity,” but also give humanity a chance at safeguarding our beautiful planet and its large, unbroken ecosystems for the long term. The future of life on Earth depends on it.

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:

Now Read This: Stop Doomscrolling and Save the Planet

Best Practices to Confront Pandemics at the Source

The international community must agree to end deforestation, close live-wildlife markets, and embrace a treaty to prevent future outbreaks.

The rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 made it clear: Emerging infectious diseases present global health and security threats to every home and family.

Like SARS-CoV-2, most new infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic, meaning they originate from other animals — and particularly from wildlife. The accelerating frequency and extent to which humans and domestic animals come into contact with wildlife due to land-use change and wildlife markets and trade, together with the lack of proper livestock biosecurity, have increased novel pathogen evolution and spillover.

Combined with ever-increasing global interconnectedness, these trends mean that future outbreaks will occur more often, and spread faster, if we don’t immediately eliminate the primary drivers. We have commonly understood “best practices” to avoid catching Covid-19 from our friends, coworkers, and neighbors: Vaccinate, wear a mask, and socially distance. We now need best practices to prevent pandemic spillover at the source.

1. Protect Habitat

Research shows that landscapes of high ecological integrity (those that are less disturbed and with full ecological function) are resilient in limiting spillover and spillback between humans and animals of the pathogens innocuously circulating and evolving among wildlife. Those un-degraded environments — areas with limited human penetration, encroachment and exploitation — maintain a wealth of proven complementary and cumulative natural barriers to the spread of pathogens with pandemic potential.

Sadly, however, human activities and exploitation now continuously erode and destroy these vital barriers. Twenty-five months into the present pandemic, we know we must put an end to deforestation and widespread agricultural conversion and land-use changes. These actions directly disrupt species composition, density and distribution, which in turn drives stressed species into new habitats with newly established behaviors and the potential for increased pathogen shedding.

2. Shut Down the Markets

We must also close markets in large urban centers that sell live wildlife for human consumption — a niche consumer extravagance that mixes a stupendous variety of live wildlife species from diverse sources, both legal and illegal. Animals are either trapped in the wild, come from unregulated captive wildlife farms, or emerge from a porous mixture of both.

The animals are also obtained locally, regionally and — for some species — internationally, then transported under horrendous conditions to market. There live animals are stacked on top of, or next to, each other and intermix with domestic livestock like pigs and chickens — and, of course, people. This allows for direct exchange and recombination of pathogens through respiration, excrement and blood.

Smuggled pangolin meat seized at Miami International Airport. Photo: USFWS (uncredited)

The trade in live wildlife patently violates wildlife-human-wildlife interface integrity and increases spillover and spillback opportunities between wildlife, livestock, poultry and ultimately humans. We can no longer tolerate these vast open-access, wholly unregulated, unsupervised market-based experiments in urban agglomerations and megapolises.

Let me be clear: Commercial urban wildlife markets primarily provide luxury products, do not contribute to nutritional needs, and are of negligible economic importance compared with the global economic devastation of a pandemic such as Covid-19.

3. Address Inequality

Beyond the health threat they pose, the live-animal trade perpetuates global inequities. By emptying forests and landscapes, it deprives vulnerable Indigenous peoples and local communities of their rights, food security and cultural needs. Eliminating the urban commercial trade in wildlife will directly benefit these communities, which are critically dependent on accessing food from intact, biodiverse and healthy landscapes.

It would also bolster the global economy. The costs of many individual recent major outbreaks such as SARS, MERS and Ebola are estimated in the tens of billions of U.S. dollars. When all is tallied, the economic devastation caused by Covid-19 will certainly be orders of magnitude greater: in the tens of trillions.

4. Plan Ahead

As governments and the global public health community ponder post-spillover pandemic preparedness, we must strongly advocate for prevention at the source — in other words, for stopping outbreaks where they’d start. Only prevention directly addresses the growing interfaces and barrier losses where spillovers — and more recently spillbacks — into wildlife occur can mitigate future zoonotic disease threats in an expedient, cost-effective manner.

Prevention has been largely missing in the global debates and approaches to future pandemics as the world attempts to learn from Covid-19. So far most conversations have focused on post-spillover preparedness, interventions and health system strengthening. While these steps are critical, they’re insufficient to protect against the coming pandemics.

Some steps have been taken in this direction, though. In the United States, the House of Representatives passed pandemic prevention provisions as part of the America COMPETES Act on Feb. 4. The bill calls on the U.S. government to work with countries to end the commercial live wildlife trade for human consumption. An alternate version of the bill passed the Senate on March 28, so the two chambers must reconcile their differences before it can go to President Biden’s desk. The key primary spillover prevention and One Health policies must be retained during the conference negotiations.

On a global scale, pandemic preparedness — and to a far lesser degree, prevention — has also been discussed in major multilateral forums, including the G7, G20 and the United Nations security council. Most importantly, the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, initiated a global process in December 2021 to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instruments under the WHO constitution to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

This was an essential step as it recognized the importance of pandemic prevention, which had previously been absent from the global agenda. However, a recent statement by World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in support of a global treaty on pandemic prevention omitted any mention of a prevention-at-the-source approach. This demonstrates that the concept of pandemic prevention has yet to be fully embraced. NGOs and civil society need to urgently inform and nudge governments and delegates at the World Health Assembly to focus efforts on pandemic prevention. At the same time, concerned citizens can engage their representatives to advocate and support funding for prevention.

This pandemic has made it blatantly clear that we can no longer view our health in isolation. We need to implement a One Health framework that recognizes the interrelatedness and interdependencies of all living things and acknowledge health as a tightly intertwined global common.

We know the best practices to avoid the next pandemic. Recognizing and valuing the foundational importance of intact and resilient environments, stopping deforestation, limiting land-use change, and eliminating the commercial live animal trade for consumption will be critical to our future health and wellbeing. Let’s make these our urgent priorities.

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:

Coronaviruses and the Human Meat Market

Protect This Place: Kenya’s Kinangop Grasslands

Saving these privately owned grasslands is the key to protecting endangered birds and other unique biodiversity.

The place:

Kinangop Plateau lies between the western border of the Aberdare Mountains and eastern escarpment of the Great Rift Valley, Kenya. It is 62 miles northeast of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

Why it matters:

The Kinangop Highland Grasslands are internationally recognized as an Important Bird Area. They’re home to approximately 200 bird species, many of which are threatened. These include the endangered and endemic Sharpe’s longclaw (Kinangop being its stronghold habitat), endangered grey crowned crane, vulnerable Aberdare cisticola and range-restricted long-tailed widowbird.

Sharpe's longclaw — A Sharp’s longclaw hides in the Kinangop grasslands. Photo: FoKP

The threat:

Despite their ecological importance, the Kingangop Highland Grasslands are privately owned and therefore not protected. We’ve seen a sharp decline in their extent and quality over the past 50 years. Now it’s estimated that less than 10% of the original 300 square miles (77,000 hectares) remains suitable habitat for Sharpe’s longclaw and other threatened birds in the region.

Kinangop grasslands — Intact grasslands. Photo: FoKP

Serious threats include the change of land use from traditional livestock grazing to crop cultivation, exotic tree plantations, weed invasion and overgrowing of tussock, along with habitat fragmentation as the local human population increases. This rampant decrease of suitable habitat is directly harming the Sharpe’s longclaw, a grassland specialist that completely avoids non-grassland landscapes like agricultural fields. If this trend continues, the birds are likely to become extinct soon.

My place in this place:

While growing up as a young, energetic and playful boy here in Kinangop, I vividly recall the great diversity of birds that I observed. My parents owned close to 50 acres of land, and almost all of it was intact grassland used for grazing livestock. This was the situation for most of Kinangop three decades ago.

Yet over the years I witnessed the collapse of the livestock-rearing support system. This led to a severely reduced income among grassland owners, who had to start cultivating vegetables — potatoes, peas, beans and cabbages — and fast-growing non-native trees to make a living. The change in land use dramatically reduced the extent and quality of the grasslands throughout plateau, which decreased the population size and diversity of the birds these habitats supported, including the Sharpe’s longclaw. This situation prompted action from conservationists at Friends of Kinangop Plateau.

FoKP, a community conservation organization, has been running for about two decades. We initially started working to understand the biodiversity in Kinangop Grasslands and create awareness among the local communities, but later we started helping local farmers earn an income sustainably.

Working for FoKP has added to my passion for species conservation and granted me the perfect opportunity to pursue research in Kinangop. In particular, I have monitored the habitats and the resident bird populations over the past two decades, and have found that bird numbers, diversity and habitats have significantly reduced, with less than 10% of the grasslands and fewer than 700 individual Sharpe’s longclaw remaining.

Who’s protecting it now:

The grasslands have received little conservation attention other than from FoKP. Our efforts have helped raise awareness about species and habitat conservation among a large proportion of local residents. Together with our strategic partner Nature Kenya and other partners, we have bought four grassland nature reserves, totaling over 200 acres, which provides suitable habitat for the Sharpe’s longclaw and other grassland biodiversity. We have also built a Resources Centre for training and creating conservation awareness among local communities. Finally, and most importantly, to complement sheep farming, FoKP established a Cooperative Society, an initiative that involves working with more than 30 local farmers who control over 600 acres of grasslands. FoKP buys their wool products at favorable prices, serving as an incentive for them to maintain the grasslands.

A woolen door mat produced at the FoKP workshop.

What this place needs:

There’s a need to incentivize livestock rearing amongst farmers — especially for those farms harboring high numbers of Sharpe’s longclaw — because it’s more compatible with bird conservation than continued conversion of grasslands to cropland. While livestock can still disturb or trample longclaw nests without the right precautions, the re-adoption of this economic model would lead to a positive impact for the biodiversity currently living on the edge of extinction.

A black-headed heron in newly cultivated grasslands. Photo: FoKP

In the past few years, a support system has revitalized livestock rearing in the region, which is good news for maintaining and hopefully increasing the extent of the grasslands. Research has shown that sustainable open livestock grazing can be beneficial to the endangered Sharpe’s longclaw, which requires short grass with tussock. This requires farmers to maintain the right numbers of livestock in each of these grasslands to avoid overgrazing and ensure optimum productivity of livestock and biodiversity sustainability.

A few challenges still hinder the wide adoption of livestock rearing, and solving them would mean significant success in saving the grassland habitat and its biodiversity:

1. Inadequate financial capacity of farmers and landowners is preventing them from shifting to livestock rearing, such as purchasing good livestock breeds and building good-quality sheds for the animals. We would like to see several demonstration farms established across the grassland for residents to learn from and adopt easily.
2. Inadequate skills in good livestock management amongst farmers, which could be addressed by training, workshops and exchange visits.
3. Difficulty in sustaining a biodiversity monitoring scheme that offers a comprehensive, up-to-date dataset to help inform decisions.
4. Fear of change by farmers due to insufficient knowledge about income rates, sustainability and markets. Socioeconomic research needs to be carried out, and the results effectively communicated to residents, to show them that open livestock rearing is more profitable than cultivation farming.

Follow the fight:

To see more of what we’re doing for the grasslands, visit our website: www.fokp.or.ke

grey crowned crane — Grey crowned cranes in Kinangop. Photo: FoKP

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: Burley Estuary, Threatened by Industrialized Aquaculture

Oil Development Is Changing the Rules of the Game for Wildlife

New research shows that oil drilling in Canada’s boreal forest is changing how wolves, caribou, bears and other species interact.

Major ecological changes are afoot in western Canada’s boreal forests, and they have scientists concerned. The most glaring problem is a steep decline in boreal woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou), listed as threatened under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.

“There are populations in Alberta that probably don’t have a couple years to live,” says wildlife ecologist Jason Fisher of the University of Victoria. “It’s bad. This is really something we have to address immediately.”

Some scientists and government officials have blamed wolves for caribou losses. And desperate times have led to desperate measures to protect the endangered ungulates, including culling wolves. But research published in 2020 showed that landscape changes like oil development and logging are ultimately responsible for caribou declines. Clearings in the forest, the researchers found, function like predator highways and aid the wolves in their hunting.

Now a new study in the journal Science of the Total Environment shows that development from the oil industry in Alberta is causing more than just a change in wolf-caribou relations. The research analyzed three years of camera trap data that also included other forest mammals, like white-tailed deer, moose, black bears, coyotes, lynxes and fishers.

Yes, the forests still hold a lot of wildlife, the study found. But not necessarily in a good way.

“What this paper showed is that these features are bringing animals together,” says Fisher, a study co-author, who also leads the mammal component of the Oil Sands Monitoring Program, which tracks the environmental impact of extraction in Alberta. “The industrial footprint changes the rules of the eternal game of hide-and-seek between predators and prey,” he adds.

Scientists are realizing this can have far-reaching effects across the ecosystem.

A Fragmented Landscape

Alberta, Canada sits above one of the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world. But it’s also “unconventional” crude known as oil or tar sands, which are much harder to get out of the ground than conventional oil that’s in liquid form between rock formations.

The fossil fuel industry extracts deposits closest to the surface by razing the boreal forest and digging massive open-pit mines. Much has been written about the great harms that process causes to the environment and human health.

But from a production standpoint, open-pit mines extract less oil than in situ development, in which wells are dug in the ground and the viscous bitumen pumped out (often after heating or adding other fluids).

That process doesn’t create the same decimated landscape as mines — or the arresting images that have garnered the world’s attention.

cleared land with bitumen, mud — An oils sands mine in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Kris Krüg (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But it’s still a significant industrial process.

First it requires cutting straight routes through the forest to run seismic machines that use ground-penetrating sonar to look for oil deposits. If producers find an area or “play” they think they want to develop, they use another type of seismic machine that requires felling more trees. These swathes are narrower, but are cut in a hashtag-like pattern, known as 3D seismic lines.

That maps out where in the play to start drilling exploratory wells, which then requires clearing larger patches of ground completely. If a suitable area is found, a wellhead is constructed.

“Once you have enough of those well sites in the landscape, you have to connect them up with pipelines,” says Fisher. “Then you need roads to service the pipelines, and all the pipelines go to a compressor station that gathers it all up and then sends it on down the line.”

All that development leaves industrial footprints of different shapes and sizes stamped across the boreal forest.

“Our job [as landscape ecologists] is to understand how that’s affecting what’s left, because the amount of forest removed is actually only about 10% of that land base,” he explains. “You might think that’s ‘intact’ — but it’s not, because in landscape ecology, shape matters.”

Predators and Prey

What happens when a forest is heavily fragmented? In the boreal, researchers found that larger mammals — especially predators — react more strongly to the disturbed areas when lots of deer and moose show up, which they usually do, because they’re attracted to the vegetation that grows after the trees are cut.

Moose and deer come for this new buffet, which attracts more wolves and bolsters their populations. The lines cleared through the forest also make it much easier to move around and hunt.

Along the way, caribou become an unintended target.

“Wolves encounter woodland caribou more often, which means they nail more caribou,” says Fisher. “And that’s one of the proximal mechanisms for woodland caribou decline.” Previous research found a similar scenario playing out in Ontario after large-scale disturbances like commercial logging.

Oil development in the boreal also enables coyotes, who thrive in human-disturbed landscape, to expand their ranges. And coyotes, the researchers found, were more likely to use roads when moose were around. That closer proximity allows for more coyote predation on moose — especially moose calves. And like, wolves and caribou, roads enable coyotes to run faster and hunt moose more effectively.

forest with series of lines cleared through and snow on the ground — Lines cleared through the forest in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Kris Krüg (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Another recent study found that rare and elusive wolverines could suffer as more coyotes expand into boreal forests, competing for similar resources.

As for the region’s biggest predators, bears often avoid the clearings from 3D seismic lines, but the study in Science of the Total Environment found they’re more attracted to those areas (or minimally less repulsed) when moose are present. Bears may even play an unseen rate in moose declines. Moose populations in Canada are “all over the map,” says Fisher, and are dropping in some areas, including neighboring British Columbia.

Bears will prey on young caribou, too. They don’t seem to gravitate toward oil and gas development like wolves, but they also don’t always avoid those areas either, says Fisher.

“They just sort of seem to go where they want, when they want,” he says. “If we drive wolves down, my worry is that things like coyotes will take their place, but maybe also bears.”

Then there are the smaller furbearers like lynxes, red fox and fishers. The picture there is less clear. Overall things aren’t great for those populations. “They’re tanking fast, but we’re not really sure why yet,” he says.

Changing Climate

Climate has a hand in amplifying some of these changes.

Warming temperatures are increasing insect infestations from mountain pine beetles and spruce budworm, which have killed large swathes of forest. Once that happens, any rules in place to ensure more responsible logging are out the window.

“If mountain pine beetles have killed it, [loggers can] take the wood,” says Fisher. “And so you end up with these big moonscapes, which probably has something to do with moose declines.”

Warming temperatures also means less severe winters with reduced snowpacks — and that has also opened the door for white-tailed deer to move into the boreal. The changes in vegetation from logging and gas development have lured them north in such great numbers that they’re now the most abundant ungulates in boreal.

And as we already know, that drives wolf numbers up, and woodland caribou down.

“This interplay between climate change and landscape change is almost like a perfect storm of problems that have beset the boreal forest,” Fisher says. “We’re only on the tip of the iceberg now — we’ve only really started looking at this in earnest over the last couple of years and realizing, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got a real brewing storm on our hands.’ ”

Solutions … or Lack Thereof

So what’s to be done?

The most time-sensitive problem is the decline of caribou, but killing wolves likely won’t provide a long-term solution. Fewer wolves may boost the number of coyotes, who also prey on young caribou.

Invasive white-tailed deer could also increase in numbers at a greater rate if wolf populations fall.

Another problem is that land is still being cleared at a rate that’s detrimental to caribou.

“We can do a better job at landscape protection,” says Fisher.

Not to mention restoration. All companies are required to do reclamation, but that’s often a far cry from real restoration. Reclamation focuses on making a brown area look green, usually by planting something quick-growing like grasses.

Some companies have gone beyond Canada’s federal mandates and replanted native shrubs and trees. But a lot more of that is needed, says Fisher. And it will be a long time before the newly planted vegetation grows up.

caribou eating in enclosure — A caribou maternity penning project in Revelstoke, Canada to aid southern mountain caribou. Photo: Revelstoke Caribou Rearing in the Wild (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In the meantime, research suggests that wolves can be slowed down in other ways. A 2021 study found that erecting obstacles along linear clearings reduced the ratio of wolf-caribou encounters by 85% and black bear-caribou encounters by 60%.

“By managing animal movements that regulate predator–prey encounters, risk to endangered species can be reduced without the disruptive trophic effects caused by intensive carnivore removals,” the researchers found.

Protecting caribou when they’re young also helps. In British Columbia the Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations have had success with a program that pens and protects pregnant woodland caribou and the calves until they’re a few months old.

“I think the evidence is really clear that using multiple strategies is far better than just throwing all your eggs into the wolf-kill basket,” says Fisher. “And we can’t do that either because people see that as lifting the weight of responsibility from oil companies and putting it on wolves as a scapegoat, and that’s just not sustainable societally.”

There’s still a lot that needs to be done to understand the changes that are happening, he says. But the world should take note.

As Fisher and conservation biologist A. Cole Burton warned in a 2018 study, “The Canadian oil sands provide an early warning: as oil and gas extraction continues to drive national and global economies, the biodiversity effects we observed are a precursor of the potential future of landscape change in unconventional petroleum regions around the globe.”

Previously in The Revelator:

What’s Really Behind Dwindling Numbers of Woodland Caribou?

In Austria the Government Pays to Repair Your Stuff

A Viennese repair bonus is keeping thousands of items out of the junkyard and inspiring other cities.

This story was originally published in Reasons to Be Cheerful. Read the original here.

Sepp Eisenriegler loves giving second chances: To the defunct electrical appliances awaiting repair or refurbishment, the hundreds of unemployed people he’s trained as skilled repairers over the decades and even the two rescue dogs that follow him devotedly around R.U.S.Z., the repair and service center he founded in Vienna in 1998.

It wasn’t always an easy road, but he’s noticed a sea change in the past couple of years. It started with Fridays for Future: “Attitudes started to change. We saw more and more young people in our weekly repair café and as clients at our repair shop.” When the pandemic hit, business increased again: “People were uncertain about the future and decided to save money by having things repaired instead of buying them new. At the same time, everyone had too much time and started cleaning out their garages and attics, finding all sorts of old things with sentimental value that they wanted to have repaired.”

And then came the Vienna repair bonus. The city of Vienna started the Reparaturbon as a pilot in 2020 as a way to promote repair and support local businesses. Through the scheme, which has since concluded, 50 percent of repair costs were subsidized by the city, capped at €100. The bonus, which covered anything repairable, from clothing and electronics to bicycles and furniture, was a success: Over 35,000 items were repaired through the scheme, saving 850 tons of CO2 emissions. Other Austrian cities had tried repair bonuses in the past, but the beauty of the Viennese model was in its simplicity: while previously customers had to pay for the repair in full and then jump through bureaucratic hoops for reimbursement, they can now simply pay half of the cost, with the rest reimbursed directly to the repair shop. In January 2021 Austria also reduced the tax (VAT) on repairs of bicycles, shoes and clothing.

Now a national repair bonus, which will kick off this month, will adopt the same approach focusing on E-waste, which is the fastest growing waste stream in the developed world. Eighty-three thousand tons of it land in Austrian landfills every year, of which only around 17% is recycled. The national repair bonus will subsidize 50% of repair costs for electronic and electrical equipment, capped at €200 per repair.

The price of repair is one of the biggest mental hurdles that prevent people from seeing it as a viable option, says Chloé Mikolajczak, a campaigner for Right to Repair Europe. “We find that if the cost of repair is 30% or higher than the cost of a new product, people don’t tend to repair.” Eisenriegler has often experienced this firsthand: “If we tell a customer that the repair of their washing machine will cost €152, they often say ‘sure, but for €250 I can buy a new one on sale.’”

Man leaning over desk in shop — Gasim, a R.U.S.Z. employee, prepares items that can’t be repaired for a trip to the recycling center. Photo: Kaja Šeruga

The repair bonus promotes a mind shift that will pay dividends once repair becomes the more accessible option. Since the Viennese repair bonus started, local repair shops have seen a rise in new customers, as well as a rise in the quality of repair, as people decided to splurge on better spare parts, says Markus Piringer from the eco-counselling NGO, DIE UMWELTBERATUNG, who also coordinates the Repair Network. “But I prefer the idea of changing the whole economic system — the repair bonus is just a single step,” he points out.

“The repair bonus is an excellent crutch to compensate for the failure of the market,” agrees Eisenriegler. A glut of cheap low-quality products combined with the high cost of repair due to expensive spare parts and labor have skewed people’s perceptions. A system change is needed in the long-term, including a right to repair on all products that are not limited to professional repair people, easy and affordable access to spare parts and environmental tax reform.

Until that day comes, the repair bonus model is gaining in popularity as a bridging measure. Both the German state of Thüringen and the city of Portland, Oregon, followed Vienna’s example with their own schemes in the spring of 2021. Eisenriegler, who has spent the better part of 30 years lobbying for sustainable solutions in Brussels, already sees the first signs of an EU-wide repair bonus. It is being discussed in connection with eco-social tax reforms, but he points out that the desired systemic change would make the repair bonus obsolete: “If we have a tax reform where labor is taxed less while resources become more expensive, we won’t be needing this crutch anymore.”

The Austrian repair bonus, which is expected to run until 2026, is financed by €130 million from the EU Covid-19 recovery fund, and is expected to subsidize 400,000 repairs. Piringer points out that Austria might have trouble meeting a steep rise in demand, since thereis a dearth of skilled repair professionals.

Luckily, Eisenriegler is already a few steps ahead. In September, 2021 he started a pilot program in cooperation with the Austrian Public Employment Service (AMS) and the Vocational Training Institute (BFI), in which 10 long-term unemployed people were trained in repair in a 6-month program. In a way, his story has come full circle: R.U.S.Z. started out as a work-integration social enterprise that turned about 400 people from marginalized backgrounds into repair professionals in its first decade. The plan is to extend this model to other Austrian states and abroad, and they are currently in discussions to add a repair specialization to the mechatronics course at the BFI.

He expects that the first graduates of this program might be entering the workforce in 5 years’ time, and they will find themselves in a very different world. The eco-design regulation that gave EU its first right to repair legislation in 2021 will soon include tablets and smartphones, and there are discussions about an EU-wide repairability index based on the French model, as well as several other policy initiatives regarding the right to repair. Coupled with a move towards environmental taxation, these changes could soon pave the way towards a world where repair, not replacement, is the first choice. Mikolajczak is looking forward to it: “I think it’s going to be a great year for repair.”