Russia’s Ukraine Invasion Causes a Deadly Oil Spill on the Black Sea

Russia’s “shadow fleet” of aging oil tankers helps fund the ongoing war but puts the region at risk of more environmental disasters.

On Dec. 15, 2024, in a raging storm, two Russian oil tankers carrying more than 9,000 tons of heavy oil collided off the coast of Port Taman in the Kerch Strait in the Black Sea. A video posted to Telegram allegedly depicting the crash shows one of the tankers, with a broken bow, sinking into the sea. The second vessel reportedly ran aground closer to the port.

The crash spilled thousands of tons of toxic heavy fuel oil and has harmed thousands of birds, dozens of dolphins, and other animals, and resulted in a state of emergency in Crimea. By mid-January the fuel had spread far enough that it could be seen from space. Satellite images studied by Greenpeace show coastal contamination stretching from Novorossiysk in the Krasnodar Krai to Ozero Donuzlav in the western coast of Russian-occupied Crimea. Even Russian president Vladimir Putin called the disaster “one of the most serious environmental challenges we have faced in recent years.”

For a region accustomed to rough seas and choppy weather, this accident, while unfortunate, was not uncommon. Experts have raised alarms about Russian tankers in the region for years, following previous accidents that caused smaller but still significant spills.

With this new crash continuing to cause damage, experts and activists warn that the region remains heavily militarized and under the control of the corrupt, autocratic Russian government, making response to the oil spill increasingly challenging.

This has left a vacuum in disaster response, filled sparingly by local volunteers who’ve worked for three months to mitigate the damage.

Anna, a student from Moscow, was among the first few volunteers on the scene.

“I study at a university that specializes in the oil and gas industry, so I was able to find out quickly how much fuel oil was on the surface and what the government was doing to deal with the emergency,” she told The Revelator. (Anna did not disclose her full name for fear of retribution.)

Heavy oil mixed with sand and shells on the polluted beach. Photo provided by volunteers and used with permission.

Along with a dozen others, Anna made her way to the Anapa, a coastal resort town in Krasnodar Krai, and began coordinating with groups organizing rescue and cleanup efforts. Within days hundreds of volunteers had mobilized to help, including other students, many of whom traveled from as far as Moscow to help with the cleaning.

The reaction from the Russian government has been a lot less enthusiastic. It took the government nearly two weeks to declare the state of emergency Dec. 25.

Volunteers, however, have been working relentlessly.

“We are catching, cleaning, and helping birds” affected by the spill, Anna said. “This is the easiest part of our work.” Volunteers also engaged in beach-cleaning efforts, but full treatment of the pollution will require specialized workers.

A Heavy Problem

The problems facing volunteers are not just logistical. The nature of the fuel they’re attempting to clear is itself problematic.

“Fuel oil is quite heavy, so it sinks,” Anna explained. “But if the temperature rises or there are storms, it rises in the water and hits the shorelines again.”

The vessels carried mazut, a type of low-quality heavy fuel oil that can be very difficult to clean in a spill.

“Heavy fuel oil, also known as residual fuel, is what’s left at the end of the refining process,” explained Sian Prior, a marine science expert and lead adviser to the Clean Arctic Alliance, an organization that has advocated for tighter rules on fossil-fuel shipments in the region. “It’s used by a lot of ships in many different parts of the world.  Most of the heavy fuels also have very high sulfur levels, which when burned releases sulfur oxides, which is bad for health and the environment.”

In 2020 the International Maritime Organization, which regulates global commercial shipping, introduced a limit on the amount of sulfur allowed in the fuel.

But the fuel industry responded by blending fuels, mixing lighter fuels with heavy fuel to create a product that has low sulfur but still has a lot of heavy residual fuel, Prior said.

The resulting mix poses several challenges after spills. “It’s very difficult to clean up, because it’s very viscous and emulsifies when it mixes with water, so its volumes actually increase,” she said. “Once this fuel is spilled … it’s virtually impossible to clean it up adequately.”

The effects of a mazut spill could be worse than regular oil spills, which in themselves are disastrous.

“The lighter fuels, distillate fuels, will break up much more quickly in the environment,” Prior explains.

Mazut, however, remains very thick and viscous.

“It can even end up forming hard balls of oil that will sink to the seabed, and get mixed into the sediment, sand, and can persist there for a very, very long time,” she said. “If there’s a storm it can get then released back into the environment, or if it gets very warm, it will become a little bit more viscous,” she said, echoing the experiences of volunteers in Anapa.

“It clogs everything it mixes with…and can have a smothering effect on wildlife, marine mammals or birds if they come into contact with it. It’s also toxic, so if they ingest it, it will have an effect internally on their organs.”

While Prior’s organization mainly focuses on advocacy in the Arctic Sea region, it says the events in Kerch are a warning on the dangers of transporting heavy fuel. As a result of the work by Clean Arctic Alliance, the International Maritime Organization instituted its ban on the use and carriage of heavy fuel oil in the Arctic as of July 2024. “But not all countries have implemented it so far. Russia hasn’t yet.”

Shady Oils, Shadow Vessels

Russia’s transport of this already dangerous substance has become more precarious because it’s currently being navigated across continents on fleets of extremely old, poorly maintained and uninsured ships.

One of the crashed tankers, Volgoneft-239, in 2024. Photo by VladimirPF – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=159254368

In fact, while the total number of oil spills worldwide has declined over the past four decades, the statistics are the opposite in the Russian seas, said Dmitry Lisitsyn, a Russian environmentalist and executive fellow at the Yale School of Environment.

Lisitsyn’s organization, Sakhalin Environment Watch, monitors environmental safety and wildlife preservation on the eastern coast of Russia. The Russian government has declared it a “foreign agent,” limiting their work there.

Before that they worked on cleaning up after a similar, albeit less pervasive oil spill in the southwest coast of Sakhalin Island in 2015.

Lisitsyn said that despite growing number of oil-spill incidents in Russia, the government has lacked the political will to enforce preventive measures or actionable laws. Following December’s crash a local court in Krasnodar Krai filed the company that owned the tankers just 30,000 rubles (about $215) last month.

But more worryingly, Lisitsyn said, the stakeholders seem reluctant to learn lessons from previous spills — including one in the Kerch Strait in 2007.

“A similar spill, in the same region, involving the same type of tankers in the same kind of weather conditions should have been lesson enough,” he said.

“It was about 20 kilometers to the north [of the current site], near the island of Tuzla, and took place around the same time of the year, but was half the amount of mazut spilled,” said Russian environmental scientist Eugene Simonov. “It caused a lot of damage, even though the scale and geographic range was smaller.”

Oiled Bird - Black Sea Oil Spill 11/12/07

But 2007 was not even the first time, Simonov pointed out.

In 1999 a tanker, the same kind that crashed in December, crashed “in front of the Istanbul ports. The tanker split in half and heavy fuel poured out in front of some popular tourist spots,” he said. “It was the least problematic because Turkey was really good at handling that and did not even engage with Russia or anyone else. They just went ahead and cleaned it up.”

The biggest takeaway from these incidents, Simonov said, is that these tankers need to be decommissioned.

“They are beyond their useful working age and not well-equipped to go into the sea, even into the Black Sea,” he said. “They’re built for the river and even the smallest waves put them in a clear danger of splitting, because they are too long and too weak.”

Lisitsyn agrees. “These series of tankers should not go to the sea,” he said. “They are completely unsafe in the stormy seas.”

Both tankers were built during the Soviet times. The Volgoneft-212 was about 55 years old, while Volgoneft-239 was a little over 40 years old.

Why does Russia still use these old, unreliable vessels? The answer lies in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the many sanctions on Russian goods, particularly oil exports.

Soon after the 2022 invasion, several western countries banned or significantly reduced the import of Russian oil, sanctions implemented largely on pipeline purchases. To bypass the sanctions, Russia has employed fleets of tankers, usually very old and in poor condition with obscure details of ownership, to continue its trade with western companies.

The lack of identity of these tankers, widely referred to as “Shadow Fleets,” helps Russia circumvent sanctions to continue selling its prime economic product. One report by the Carnegie Eurasia center documented 2,849 oil tankers in the first nine months of 2024. The vessels carried an estimated average of 48 million barrels of oil per day.

In 2024 Greenpeace identified a list of 192 aging tankers carrying Russian oil around the world.

“The list covers only crude oil tankers, which are currently not on any sanctions list but are outdated old vessels,” said Natalia Gozak, director at Greenpeace Ukraine. “The ships visited Russian ports at least three times during the observation period, which established their connection to the Russian oil trade, and it was noted that they didn’t have internationally recognized insurance which would cover costs of any potential oil spill.”

Since Greenpeace released the list, Gozak said, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have sanctioned about 70 of the vessels. Another 130 ships continue transporting oil for Russia.

The shadow fleet has several major implications, said Gozak, “the first of which is that it is financing the war and invasion of Ukraine.”

Nearly 1,000 Russian tankers sailed along the Baltic coast in 2023, a Greenpeace report noted, averaging two to three ships per day, and the “highest number of Russian oil tankers ever recorded off the German coast.”

As Russia increasingly moves its oil trade through shadow fleets, Gozak estimates the revenues from these exports fund approximately one third of its military budget.

“It’s a huge source of income that continues fueling the war,” she said. “I’m based in Kyiv, and I can feel the impact here every day when we come under drone and missile attacks. It’s intensive.”

The other prominent effect of these fleets is on the environment.

“We have conducted a simulation of possible oil spill in the Baltic Sea and calculated the currents any spill in the region could spread really fast and the impact will be absolutely huge, affecting all countries bordering the Baltic Sea,” Gozak warned.

He also brought up the 2007 spill in Kerch to emphasize the dangers posed by the most recent tragedy.

“At the time about 1,300 tons of mazut was spilled,” much less than the current spill, he says. “But the impact was huge. Nearly 30,000 birds were killed.”

The contamination also “lasted for years,” he said. “This type of oil doesn’t remain on the surface. It sinks down, especially when it’s cold, affecting bottom marine life, including filtrating organisms like mussels, and in this way could enter the food chain. We will continue to see the impact in the coming years, much like in 2007, when even two years after, studies showed high levels of contamination in the water there.”

Russian War Preventing Response

The conflict in the region, beginning with the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and continuing through its invasion of Ukraine, has resulted in heavy militarization of the Black Sea region. This has further complicated redressal of the catastrophe.

The war decreases the ability to mobilize international support, said Simonov.

To make things worse, “the disputed status of occupied areas creates an incentive to hide the degree of disaster even more than in times of peace.”

During the 2007 spill, Simonov said, both Russia and Ukraine participated in a cleanup. The two countries “quarreled with each other but had some joint operation” and allowed for international intervention. “Now you have a militarized area where they don’t want any eyes. So even if they lack technical capacity, they’re unwilling to seek support.”

The war has already contributed to environmental pollution in the region, as Simonov wrote in a paper for the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Working Group.

“Risks posed by wrecked ships have also increased, with roughly 100 additional ships, military and civilian, sinking or damaged since the war began,” he noted in the paper. “For example, evidence of a limited oil spill was visible from space at the site where the Moskva military cruiser sank. Most of its fuel reserves, which may exceed 2,000 tons, are probably still stored in its fuel tanks at a depth of 50 meters — a huge risk for the future.”

Russia may also not readily admit that it lacks the technical capacity to assess the damage or conduct adequate cleanup.

“There are two aspects: the political will and the technological capacity to respond. Russia lacks both,” Simonov said.

“Their systems are based on false reporting,” he continued. “Even when the initial figures demanded immediate action, they had no capacity to monitor or respond. It took them ten days to make key decisions.”

Additionally, Simonov said, Russian officials had a full-scale oil-spill prevention and response drill in October 2024 that was supposedly concluded successfully.

“So essentially they faked the whole complex of environmental preparations, because only two months after an emergency drill, they were still unable to do anything,” he said.

“They purport themselves to be a great energy empire but lack the technological capacity to deal with a situation that has occurred before, and for which there should have been plans, drills and protocols in place.”

Prior said Russia is not alone in this problem.

“Obviously things are very difficult in terms of engaging with Russia at the moment, because environmental groups no longer have any status there,” she said. “But they’re not the only ones by any means. Countries that have large shipping fleets tend to be more challenging in terms of getting them to work to the same level.”

Assessing Future Risk

Parts of the sunken vessels, still holding nearly 4,000 tons of fuel, lie at the bottom of the strait. Environmentalists have raised concerns over the potential effects.

The timing of the accident made a difference, though.

“It happened during a season when there wasn’t any active breeding of the marine population, or migration,” Simonov said. The colder temperatures also helped prevent some of the active pollution, he pointed out.

But as the temperature rises and seasons change, the insufficient response from the government increases vulnerability.

“The greatest fear right now is that those tankers still down there with remaining mazut will start actively spilling around March-April…during the active bird and fish migration. That may make things clearly much worse,” he said.

With global waters already warmer than previous decades, the mazut at the bottom of the sea increases the risks of marine pollution.

Volunteers have been working relentlessly over the past two months but aren’t sure yet of the extend of the damage.

“I hope that we will be able to clean the beaches and catch the [affected] birds,” Anna said. “But it’s impossible to say how much has been cleaned and how much remains.”

Meanwhile the damage spreads.

“The emergency affected not only the city of Anapa, but also Sochi and Crimea,” Anna said. “There are also rehabilitation centers working in the area. Volunteers are helping to get rid of all this because they care.”

The tragedy continues to threaten the safety of marine life three months after the initial crash. According to the Delphi Scientific and Ecological Center for Dolphin Rescue, which is operating rescue efforts in the region, at least 84 dolphins have been killed by the oil spill as of February.

Anna urges the administration to take coastline health more seriously to mitigate further damage.

“We need to bring equipment that can remove one and a half meters of sand at a time,” she said. “We need a system to work with landfill [owners] to remove the contaminated soil.”

But most importantly, she said, “we need to improve our oil-spill response plan. We don’t know when or where it might happen again.”

That’s a warning echoed by many of the experts we spoke with: Under Russia’s corrupt, autocratic system and fossil-fuel-based economy, the chances of the country’s shadow fleet causing another environmental disaster — and the people and wildlife of the area suffering because of it — remains all too high.

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Previously in The Revelator:

War Threatens Ukraine’s Unique Red Seaweed Fields. Here’s How Scientists Monitor Them From Afar

Plastic Pollution: So Much Bigger Than Straws

The current administration continues to senselessly undermine efforts to reduce single-use plastics. But plastic never was and never will be disposable, and neither are the people it poisons.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen the current U.S. administration grasping at straws, mocking restrictions on single-use plastics, and trying to distract from the real issue: Plastic poisons people and the planet, and the industries that produce it need to stop making so much of it.

When I started “The Last Plastic Straw” movement in 2011, the sole purpose was to bring attention to a simple, tangible issue and raise awareness about the absurdity of single-use plastic items and engage people to take action.

So what are the real problems with plastic? Plastics don’t break down, they break up: Unlike natural materials that decompose, they fragment into smaller and smaller pieces, never benignly degrading but remaining forever plastic. All plastic items shed plastic particles called microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics, which we inhale, ingest, and absorb into our bodies. Plastics, depending on their manufacturing composition, contain a mixture of more than 16,000 chemicals, at least 4,200 of which are known hazards to human health. When we use plastic straws, cups, plates, utensils, and food packaging, we are literally swallowing those toxic plastic particles and chemicals.

These tiny microplastic and nanoplastic particles accumulate at alarming rates throughout our bodies: in our blood, hearts, lungs, penises, testicles, uteri, and more. Researchers estimate a whole spoon’s worth of plastic resides in the average human brain, where it definitely doesn’t belong.

Plastic particles have also been found in placenta and breast milk, so children today are being born plasticized. This is a toxic burden that today’s youth should not have to bear.

Plastic in our bodies has been linked to higher risks of cancer; heart attack, stroke, and death; dementia and Alzheimer’s disease; and infertility and reproductive problems, including miscarriage and stillbirth. Plastic particles in the penis have been linked to erectile dysfunction. On the industrial fencelines of plastic production, shipping, and disposal activities and infrastructure, plastic particle and chemical pollution of the air, as well as soils and waters, sickens and kills residents living nearby. The list of plastic’s harmful effects goes on and on.

It goes without saying that plastic’s harms to our health come at an enormous cost to us, who must suffer through the heartbreaking and painful diseases it causes. It’s estimated that every 30 seconds, someone dies from plastic pollution in the Global South, an area overburdened by mountains of plastic pollution that is shipped away from the Global North under the guise of “recycling” only to be dumped and often burned, releasing additional toxic pollution. Financially too, plastics are expensive: The chemicals in plastic alone cost the U.S. healthcare system $250 billion in just one year.

We can’t recycle our way out of this. Plastic was never made to be recycled and is still not made to be recycled.

Our leaders who support continued or even increased plastic production seem ignorant of the facts about plastic pollution. Let us enlighten them: All plastic pollutes, and single-use plastic items like straws are not only hazardous to our health, they’re especially wasteful.

We could all save money if our government prioritized building up plastic-free reuse and refill systems, where we hold on to our stuff rather than continuously buy it and throw it away. Such reuse and refill systems were the reality before single-use plastic was mass-produced and marketed. And they worked. Most U.S. voters support reducing plastic production, along with national policies that reduce single-use plastic, increasing use of reusable packaging and foodware, and protecting people who live in neighborhoods harmed by plastic production facilities.

To change this nightmare scenario, our leaders need to support policies that reduce plastic production, not grow it. This means curbing wasteful plastic production and supporting plastic- and toxic-free, regenerative materials and systems of reuse and refill.

As the advocacy and engagement manager at Plastic Pollution Coalition, my work continues to support the solutions to this massive global crisis — strong policies that focus on plastic pollution prevention, better business practices, and a culture shift. We work together with our allied coalition organizations, businesses, scientists, notables and individual members every single day to make these solutions a reality — no matter how much the U.S. administration or other leaders try to undermine, belittle, or dismiss efforts to minimize the use of straws and other quickly disposed plastic products that poison our planet and our bodies.

Plastic never was and never will be disposable, and neither are people.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Block Progress Again — This Time on Plastics

A Gulf of Misunderstanding

A veteran journalist writes: Let’s celebrate the Gulf of Mexico — and stand up against censorship, for the First Amendment, and with fired government workers and scientists.

Dear Mr. President,

Sadly, the gulf between us seems to keep growing. All the document purging, agency firings, and instant geographic remapping feel like an assault on our rights. Who came up with that bizarre “Gulf of America Day” flyover proclamation on Super Bowl Sunday? Had school kids sent mailbags of cards begging a change? Or was Elon having a little social engineering fun, pushing a deluge of faux AI demand?

We all like to party, sir, but that embarrassing in-flight proclamation landed like a big nothingburger in New Orleans. The boos rivaled your cheers soon thereafter in those Big Easy, big game seats — barely a stone’s throw from what everyone knows is the “Gulf of Mexico.”

And yet, since then, you’ve thrown your fury on anyone who refuses to use your invented geographic name. Banning the Associated Press from the White House? Petty and un-American. A tyrant’s first task is to often to control the media. You’re right on track, sir.

I think that day’s wandering flight left you off-balance, with some mistaken official idea of editorial powers over the First Amendment and speech. l mean, what’s next: Black ops raids on library reading rooms? Daytime assaults at AAA Travel? SWAT teams storming fourth-grade geography? The youngsters will be traumatized watching masked men pull the sun-bleached Map of the World from their classroom walls as Ms. Rollins gets dragged off for the crime of displaying it.

That “Map raid! Hands on the table!” stuff won’t play well in the media, sir, particularly on social. Millions upon millions of maps of the Gulf of Mexico are still circulating. The public library business could prove a real hot mess — confiscating atlases, historic maps, all the dictionaries. Again, not a good look. Can our landfills handle the sudden influx?

The other night a broadcaster name-checked the Gulf of Mexico three times. A scientist referred to it as well. There’s a giant hornet’s nest of common speech pinging around out there, all of it unmonitored. It’s way beyond anything a new Name Police Force could handle. I now worry I may wake up to a new street address some morning, should its moniker suddenly be proclaimed un-American.

Among the things I hold dear, sir, are my civil rights and a decades-old Atlas of the United States, Canada and Mexico. It hails from the one time I glimpsed that iconic Gulf from the edge of Mobile Bay.

All the speech-twisting, terminations, and censorship seems downright mean-spirited to me — some of it lobbed at longstanding international friends. Given all that, please understand the tide won’t be going out on the “Gulf of Mexico” for me, sir. Ever. I may even get a tattoo.

You have your capitulators, sure, but I’ll not let Google, Apple, or anyone else force words into my mouth, or be de facto arbiters of truth, define the written word, or abridge or devalue my maps, current speech, or thinking. I’ll bow to no kings.

I think all the censorship, bluster, and instant re-geography will ultimately fall flat. The people have a history of facing down limits on language, the written word; of not yielding to fear and innuendo in this republic. Speech, publishing, a free, independent press — they’re unalienable rights. I think the AP, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court will all have my back on this one.

There is time to change course, sir, and I’d like to offer an olive branch in that vein. I’m proclaiming Tuesday, March 18 “Gulf of Mexico Day.” It will be a “people’s” holiday, tacked onto the tail end of the St. Patrick’s Day carousing, like a second Fat Tuesday. Celebrate with me, with us! Raise a cerveza or two! I think you’ll be surprised how many taverns, sports bars and pubs will be eager to join in. I’m thinking beer, drink, and burger specials — maybe fundraisers for the families being summarily deported and the NIH scientists tossed from their jobs?

This one is for the “essential workers” who got us through a pandemic, and for the teachers, nurse aides, crop workers, bus drivers, librarians. It’s for the NOAA forecasters, FWS wildlife researchers, and USGS climate scientists. It’s for the beat reporters and all the rank-and-file folks who uphold a civil society, an open government, and help this democracy function each day. Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Houston — Ottawa, Acapulco, who knows how far this might fly?

Come celebrate the Constitution, civil speech, and friendship. We’ll have what the Irish call a good craic in the places where we share our stories, truths and plain speech — and maybe a bit of trash talk. “Gulf of Mexico Day” sir, March 18, 2025. Mark it on the calendar. This one’s headed onto the map.

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

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Previously in The Revelator:

This Month in Conservation Science: ‘The Earth Is Dying, Bro’

How Will Your Garden Grow? New Books to Inspire Your Home Gardening, Landscaping, and Community Green Spaces

Start your transformative journey of creating sustainable plantscapes that embrace native, non-invasive, pro-pollinator plant species.

It’s that time of year: Winter is waning, giving us an opportunity to rethink our gardens and landscaping from an environmental, sustainable perspective. We’ve got some inspiring recent and forthcoming books to help you realize those goals.

Whether you’re a beginner or expert home gardener, a participant in a community garden, or have responsibility for a park or other public space, these books offer practical advice for weeding out nonnative species and establishing sustainable public spaces, home gardens and landscaping that showcase local plants and attract wildlife to pollinate and coexist with human communities.

Our list includes practical guides, firsthand success stories, and uplifting approaches to gardening and landscaping at home and beyond. We’ve included each book’s official descriptions, and the links for each title on the publishers’ websites. You should be able to find or request any of these books through your local booksellers or libraries — or maybe the local garden club, further supporting your community.

How Can I Help? Saving Nature With Your Yard by Douglas W. Tallamy

Tallamy tackles the questions commonly asked at his popular lectures and shares compelling and actionable answers that will help gardeners and homeowners take the next step in their ecological journey. Tallamy keenly understands that most people want to take part in conservation efforts but often feel powerless to do so as individuals. But one person can make a difference, and How Can I Help? details how.

Whether by reducing your lawn, planting a handful of native species, or allowing leaves to sit untouched, you will be inspired and empowered to join millions of other like-minded people to become the future of backyard conservation. (Available April 8.)

Grass Isn’t Greener: The Everyday Conservationist’s Guide to Bringing Nature to Your Yard by Danae Wolfe

Rooted in 20 practical steps that anyone can take starting today, Grass Isn’t Greener demonstrates how small changes in your yard or garden can create lasting impact for the planet: From leaving your leaves to selecting eco-friendly holiday decorations; from eliminating light pollution to attracting wildlife; from saving seeds to devoting even a small patch of lawn to native plants. With easy-to-follow advice and real-life examples, conservation educator Danae Wolfe will help you appreciate the new life you’ve attracted to your yard. A companion for new homeowners, renters, and gardeners, Grass Isn’t Greener is a resource for anyone looking for little ways to make a big difference — and to have fun doing it. (Available May 13.)

Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop by Paula Whyman

With humor, humility, and awe, one woman attempts to restore 200 acres of farmland long gone-to-seed in the Blue Ridge Mountains, facing her own limitations while getting to know a breathtaking corner of the natural world. When Paula Whyman first climbs a peak in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of a home in the country, she has no idea how quickly her tidy backyard ecology project will become a massive endeavor. Just as quickly she discovers how little she knows about hands-on conservation work.

In Bad Naturalist readers meander with her through orchards and meadows, forests and frog ponds, as she’s beset by an influx of invasive species, rattlesnake encounters, conflicting advice from experts, and delayed plans — but none of it dampens her irrepressible passion for protecting this place. With delightful, lyrically deft storytelling, she shares her attempts to coax this beautiful piece of land back into shape. It turns out that amid the seeming chaos of nature, the mountaintop is teeming with life and hope.

Survival Gardening: Grow Your Own Emergency Food Supply, From Seed to Root Cellar by Sam Coffman

Learn how to grow your own food supply and be prepared just in case of an emergency with this essential guide by a survival skills expert. Author Sam Coffman shows you how to select and grow the most valuable crops in the least amount of space, using few or no store-bought amendments. He also shows you how to grow food quickly (in as little as five days) in an emergency, choose and plant perennial food plants for longer-term harvest, grow mushrooms, forage from the backyard, and store food for the long term. Great for adults and teens to take back control from big food suppliers’ gouging.

Indoor Kitchen Gardening for Beginners by Elizabeth Millard

In this condensed, beginner-friendly edition of Indoor Kitchen Gardening, you’ll discover it takes just a few dollars and a few days for you to enjoy fresh, healthy produce grown indoors. Accent home-cooked meals with your own carrots, lettuce, herbs, and microgreens, all cultivated right inside your home.

Millard teaches you how to grow dozens of different edible plants — from sprouts and mushrooms, to tomatoes, peppers, and more — on a sunny windowsill, under grow lights, or even in a basement, where you won’t have to worry about pests or climate unpredictability.

The Regenerative Landscaper: Design and Build Landscapes That Repair the Environment by Erik Ohlsen

Created for beginner gardeners and large-scale permaculturists alike, this step-by-step guide starts with your ideas and educates readers on what and how to cultivate seeds, plants and trees confidently.

More than just a guide to landscaping, The Regenerative Landscaper is a motivational read in which Ohlsen addresses climate change, species extinction, and ecological collapse with a sense of encouragement that each of us can become stewards of the land by installing healthy ecosystems in our own yards. Full of hope and tangible action, readers can feel empowered to restore planetary health one garden at a time.

Climate-Wise Landscaping: Practical Actions for a Sustainable Future, Second Edition by Sue Reed and Ginny Stibolt

Predictions about future effects of climate change range from mild to dire — but we’re already seeing warmer winters, hotter summers, and more extreme storms. Proposed solutions often seem expensive and complex and can leave us as individuals at a loss, wondering what, if anything, can be done. Sue Reed and Ginny Stibolt offer a rallying cry in response — instead of wringing our hands, let’s roll up our sleeves. Based on decades of the authors’ experience, this book is packed with simple, practical steps anyone can take to beautify any landscape or garden, while helping protect the planet and the species that call it home.

The Climate Change Garden, Updated Edition: Down to Earth Advice for Growing a Resilient Garden by Sally Morgan and Kim Stoddart

It’s no longer gardening as usual. Heat waves, droughts, flooding, violent storms…and gardeners are feeling the effects. Certain pests stay active until later in the season, many plants bloom earlier, soils are eroding rapidly. What’s a gardener to do?

Learn how to protect a garden from climate extremes, exotic pests, invasive weeds, and more. The Climate Change Garden is the first book to reveal which types of gardens are better suited to deal with such extremes and which techniques, practices, and equipment can be used in our gardens to address the issues. No matter where on the planet you live, the climate and weather are changing fast, and our gardening practices need to catch up.

Gardening in a Changing World: Plants, People and the Climate Crisis by Darryl Moore

Moore explores how gardens can be better for humans and all the other lifeforms. Recent developments in horticulture and plant science show us how to think about plants beyond purely aesthetic concerns, and to adopt more holistic approaches to how we design, inhabit and enjoy our gardens. He looks at today’s garden design and suggests positive ways to change our behavior for sustainable ecological horticulture.

The Climate Change-Resilient Vegetable Garden: How to Grow Food in a Changing Climate by Kim Stoddart

Stoddart outlines a clear path to build resilience in your vegetable plants, your soil — and yourself. Providing actionable tasks that reduce resource use, stabilize the garden’s ecosystem, and regenerative solutions to the most challenging issues faced by gardeners, Kim comes to the rescue with advice to help you adjust your gardens with ease.

Resilient Garden: Sustainable Gardening for a Changing Climate by Tom Massey

Award-winning garden designer Tom Massey shares essential tips on how to analyze your garden looking at everything from soil type to sun exposure, before recommending practical projects and plant choices that will be perfect for your plot. Discover how a hedge can reduce noise and trap pollution, how a patio affects waterlogging, how to harvest your rainwater, and much more.

Revered Roots: Ancestral Teachings and Wisdom of Wild, Edible, and Medicinal Plants by LoriAnn Bird

With Indigenous Métis herbalist LoriAnn Bird as your guide, connect with the ancestral wisdom of over 90 wild edible and medicinal plants from across North America.

A purposeful and powerful reference to the lessons, nourishment, healing, and history of our “plant teachers,” Revered Roots shares guidance on exploring, gathering, and reclaiming these long-revered plants as food and medicine.

Reclaiming our natural rhythms and connections to the earth we walk on is essential to our health and well-being, both as individuals and as a community. One simple way to do that is by appreciating, respecting, and seeking to understand the plants around us.

Now that you’ve focused on your green spaces, here’s another way to enjoy and learn from them:

The Urban Naturalist: How to Make the City Your Scientific Playground by Menno Schilthuizen

Imagine taking your smartphone-turned-microscope to an empty lot and discovering a rare mason bee that builds its nest in empty snail shells. With a team of citizen scientists, that’s what Menno Schilthuizen did — one instance in the evolutionary biologist’s campaign to take natural science to the urban landscape where most of us live today. In this delightful book, The Urban Naturalist, Schilthuizen invites us to join him, to embark on a new age of discovery, venturing out as intrepid explorers of our own urban habitat — and maybe in the process doing the natural world some good.

Beyond technology, this book holds the promise of reviving the citizen scientist — rekindling the spirit of the Victorian naturalist for the modern world.

Happy reading and gardening — and let us know how it goes (or grows). Send your success stories, tips, and other book recommendations to [email protected].

For hundreds of additional environmental books — including several on farming and plants — visit the Revelator Reads archives.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Urban ‘Microrewilding’ Projects Provide a Lifeline for Nature

As Heat Deaths Rise, Planting Trees Is Part of the Solution

But how do we ensure everyone has equal access to shade? Tucson, where heatwave mortality has soared, shows a path forward.

TUCSON, Ariz. — If you’ve ever walked down a city street on a sweltering summer day, you know what a welcome relief it is when you reach a tree’s canopy. Both physically and mentally, that shade is a natural resource.

Like so many other resources, though, shade often goes to the privileged. The richer the community, many studies show, the more likely they are to have trees that provide a cooling respite.

Around the country local governments have launched efforts to address this inequality by measuring shade equity — equal access to the cooling benefits of tree cover. It’s an index of inequality and an issue of climate justice.

In the heart of the rapidly heating Sonoran Desert, providing equal access to the cooling benefits of tree cover can make the difference between life and death.

“Planting trees is a meaningful, tangible thing that people can do to fight climate change,” says Nicole Gillett, Tucson’s urban forestry program manager.

While southern Arizona is a region better known for its cacti, native trees have fed and shaded desert dwellers for centuries. Trees everywhere have been shown to raise people’s happiness, reduce crime, muffle noise, and support more wildlife.

And now more than ever, humans need them.

Deadly Inequity

In a 2021 paper, a team of public-health, remote sensing, and landscape scientists looked at mean temperatures in 20 Southwest cities from Sacramento to Houston. On an average summer day, in all 20 cities studied — including Tucson — temperatures were significantly hotter in poorer and more Latino neighborhoods than in richer, whiter ones.

A lack of green space causes these temperature disparities, according to the researchers.

Poorer neighborhoods often have fewer trees and more rock and gravel, which absorb heat and make the surrounding air hotter. Large, paved areas and densely built areas do the same, creating an urban heat island effect that boosts neighborhood temperatures. Across the country low-income neighborhoods have fewer trees than high-income neighborhoods in 92 % of U.S. cities, according to a study by Robert McDonald, lead scientist for nature-based solutions at The Nature Conservancy.

In Tucson, Gillet says, seven of the 10 hottest neighborhoods are on the city’s Southside. This is where social demographics and urban heat intersect, since South Tucson is one of the poorest parts of town as well as a Latino stronghold. The 2021 study found that on an average summer day, temperatures in the hottest Southside neighborhoods exceeded citywide averages by 7 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit.

When compared to the Catalina Foothills — one of the metro area’s most affluent regions — the temperature disparity ran as high as 12 degrees.

It’s no surprise. The city’s shadiest neighborhoods are also often its most well-heeled, Gillet says, their residents less vulnerable because they’re likelier to have access to air conditioning — and be able to pay the electric bills to keep it running.

In hotter neighborhoods, on the other hand, residents with the highest heat burden have the fewest resources to mitigate that heat.

Extreme heat can be deadly, especially for vulnerable populations like the elderly, the unhoused, and those with preexisting medical conditions. In contrast to headline-grabbing natural disasters, extreme heat has been called “the silent killer,” and Arizona is its deadly epicenter. While the rate of heat-related deaths rate has roughly doubled in the United States in the past 20 years, Southern Arizona’s heat-related deaths have increased tenfold.

Two trends drive the epidemic: rising temperatures and people’s rising vulnerability to the heat. Homelessness has exploded in urban Arizona since 2015, and the risk of heat-related death for unsheltered people may be 200 to 300 times that of other people.

But while the current swing in temperatures between the coolest and hottest neighborhoods is already wide in many cities, the mercury tells only part of the story.

“For a city like Tucson, that isn’t the most effective way to measure heat,” Gillett explains. “If you’re standing under a tree next to a wash in Tucson, it could be 100 degrees but feel like 80 or 90 degrees. But if you’re standing on concrete, next to an asphalt road, under a metal bus shelter, that feels like 130.”

Mapping Shade Equity

To achieve better shade equity around the country, the nonprofit American Forests launched an online tool in 2021 to score geographic regions based on tree canopy and surface temperature as well as income, employment, race, age and health factors. It calculates a Tree Equity Score for each neighborhood that allows planners to identify areas with the greatest need for trees.

Today, Gillett says, “Any major city utilizes this methodology for looking at tree equity.”

Gillett is Tucson’s first urban forestry program manager — hired in late 2020 to help cultivate its green space. Yet when she began her job a little over four years ago, the concept of shade equity, along with the tools and programs for achieving it, were still new. So, she acknowledges, “We’re flying the ship here as we build it.”

Using this technology along with federal data, the Tucson government created its own Tree Equity Dashboard, a map that identifies where it should prioritize tree planting. The map color-codes each neighborhood, on a scale moving from green to red.

Tree equity map of Tucson
Screen grab March 6, 2025

Not surprisingly, the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods score the highest, due in part to vegetation and in part to that wealth — better access to other cooling resources.

“My goal is to reach tree equity across the entire city,” Gillett says. “That will look and feel very different across the city. Within a neighborhood itself, I want it to be as practical and mean as much as it can.”

In practice, that means putting more trees where people live.

“If you’re walking down the sidewalk to school, that tree is going to be more helpful than if it’s planted in the middle of a park,” she says.

A Million Trees

As with all the best proverbs, this one still holds true: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.

In 2020 Mayor Regina Romero launched Tucson Million Trees, an initiative whose goal is to increase the city’s tree canopy by planting, yes, a million trees by 2030. Residents and businesses fund the effort through their monthly water bills; the city collects a “green infrastructure” fee of $0.13 per CCF of water used. This fee supports the city’s Storm to Shade program, which funds tree plantings and water harvesting efforts.

The city has already planted 120,000 trees over the past four years, at a rapidly increasing annual rate.

“We’ve almost doubled every year what we’re planting,” Gillet says.  “We could just go out and plant a million trees, but as someone with scientific ethics, I wanted first to implement standards and tracking and training.”

Tree planting success assumes tree survival at a time when some cities are struggling to keep alive the trees they already have. To successfully establish trees in a desert city, Gillet says, each tree planted must be a tree that someone agrees to water, at least until it becomes established. The city can’t care for them all. This means the trees need to put down roots where residents can water them, at least initially.

“They need to be on irrigation for two years while getting established, or hand-watered,” explains Joselyn Aguilar, community engagement and education manager for Watershed Management Group, one of the local nonprofits working with the city.

But in some low-income neighborhoods, most of the homes are rentals. This limits people’s interest in long-term planting efforts, and absentee landlords are often uninterested, too.

“We don’t just want to plant a tree that nobody wants or takes care of,” Aguilar says. “This is where education and community engagement come in. We want to show people why these plants are important and [help them] become stewards of the trees.” She recently helped plant some trees at a Boys & Girls Club on the Southside, which promised to hand-water the plants for the next two years.

Similar efforts are playing out across the city.

“I really like to emphasize that all these plants we put in the ground are alive,” Gillett says. “They are the only piece of infrastructure that grows in value over time because they are alive.”

And because they are alive, some people grow attached to them. “People really care for trees. We develop relationships with trees,” but each neighborhood must commit, she adds. “People think of planting trees as this straightforward, easy thing … but an urban tree is going to have a harder time than its counterparts right away. The more people who have a stake, who are involved, the better.”

And this isn’t about planting decorative trees beloved by landscapers and developers. Tucson’s effort favors trees that are adapted to the Sonoran Desert, including velvet mesquites, palo verdes and ironwood trees, which have some of the hardest wood in the world and can live up to 800 years.

“We want to make sure it’s native plants,” Aguilar says. “One of the benefits is … recreating our native ecosystem.”

Trees vs. Trump

Tucson’s tree equity program — and other efforts in nearly 400 other communities around the country — received a big boost in September 2023 when the U.S. Forest Service announced it would award more than $1 billion in competitive grants to plant and maintain trees in urban areas in all 50 states to combat extreme heat and climate change and improve access to nature. Tucson received $5 million to invest in neighborhoods on the frontline of climate change.

By focusing on a handful of the city’s hottest neighborhoods, Grow Tucson, which just launched this year, works in synch with the Million Trees goal. The mayor’s program is broader in scope, citywide, but both are committed to shade equity and creating green spaces, especially in frontline and low-income communities.

The Forest Service issued the grant through its Urban and Community Forestry Program, begun in 1978 to assist states and partner organizations in applying nature-based solutions to both chronic and emerging challenges. But the grant money originates from the Inflation Reduction Act, the ambitious Biden administration law that channeled billions of dollars to climate action.

The current administration wants to stop that spending and maybe repeal the whole act.

What’s more, the Trump administration considers equity — shade or otherwise — a dirty word. President Trump has issued several executive orders aiming to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within the federal government.

The Trump administration has also denied access to critical federal data, including the Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, a tool to help implement President Biden’s Justice 40 initiative, which set a goal that 40% of the benefits of certain federal investments would flow to disadvantaged communities. Gillett and her team utilized CEJST and the American Forests tool to identify which Tucson neighborhoods to prioritize.

And the Trump administration may yet deny funding to the entire Forest Service initiative. In Oregon recipients of the same grant funding are seeing their invoices go unpaid due to President Trump’s freeze of IRA funds. As a result folks there are cutting budgets and staff. In New Orleans a terminated grant to the Arbor Day Foundation has left a local foundation, Sustaining Our Urban Landscape, without the funds to water 1,600 trees they’ve already planted in low-income communities.

Asked about the status of Grow Tucson’s funds, Gillett wrote, “As of [March 4], we have not received any formal word from the Forest Service and our program is proceeding.”

Fortunately Tucson and other hot cities still have access to American Forests’ methodology. Tucson also has its customized Tree Equity Map, which it created before CEJST was taken down. And it still has a lot of people dedicated to making Tucson a livable city for everyone. So even if the Trump administration pulls the plug on Grow Tucson, the city will keep planting trees.

The goal for Grow Tucson is 20,000 trees, plus 11,000 native pollinator plants. (A 2024 study found that enhancing total greenness, not just canopy cover, is the most effective strategy to reduce urban heat.) That’s a drop in the city’s Million Trees bucket, but a good drop.

Without it, Aguilar says, “We wouldn’t be able to dedicate those resources to those neighborhoods that have no shade.”

And while the Trump administration attempts to reverse every gain this country has made battling climate change, she adds, “Tucson and the world are getting hotter.”

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Previously in The Revelator:

Tree Cutting in Egypt: The Desertification of Governance

Inadvertently Victorious — How Some Species Persist as the Climate Collapses

Hunting enthusiasts moved species like muskoxen and mountain goats to new environments, but their survival in those faraway lands may help animals in other areas.

In his dark 1967 sonnet “All Along the Watchtower,” Nobel Laureate songwriter Bob Dylan painted a dour picture of businessmen and plowmen abusing earth while clueless of its value. If it were written today, phrases like “climate catastrophe,” “pollution,” “species extinctions,” and “a planet gasping for air” might have made the list.

Echoing the song’s twin sins of greed and moral corruption, some may believe only a small sliver of the world’s stunning biodiversity remains healthy. Yet for those of us in the conservation arena, where we’ve long battled, there’s always room for optimism about the natural world. As a case in point, several notable mega-beasts have been arising as climate refugees, though their entry has been through an accidental backdoor.

Persistent but little-known species like Arctic muskoxen and North America’s mountain goats — one black in color, the other white, both with dark horns — survive in the cold icy shadows of melting mountain glaciers and Arctic tundra. Their survival in parts of their rapidly heating and deteriorating ranges has more to do with happenstance a century ago by hunting enthusiasts than any carefully crafted strategy to thwart our current climate conundrum.

A proud mountain goat male (‘billy’), introduced to high elevation Colorado, reclines in sun. Photo credit: Joel Berger © WCS.

Moveable beasts have been part of human history for a long time, as animals were purposefully transported to places where they never previously occurred. An answer to the “why” question is simple: to establish food security or provide trophies of “heroic” gamesmanship. In that context species little known to anyone but big game hunters were brought to the most unlikely of remote places.

Europe’s red deer and mountain-climbing chamois were sent to New Zealand. Mouflon, a wild sheep from the Lesser Caucasus, was resituated to Patagonia’s rugged mountains in South America and to New Mexico. Caribou and moose went to subpolar islands north of Antarctica, while other deer found transit to South Africa and Australia.

Smaller animals, too, were widely transplanted. That’s how beavers came to Tierra del Fuego, where they’ve now crossed the Straits of Magellan and some 100,000 may persist in Patagonia. Weasels, foxes (red and Arctic), and snowshoe hares were moved far from their natural northern boreal or Arctic homes, but they’ll never reunite with original populations since they’re on islands. All this human meddling has led to countless ecological disasters resulting from the impact of invasive species on local fauna.

Have any of these cold-adapted transplants — species moved well beyond their native ranges for our human fancy — contributed real conservation gains that safeguard Earth’s biodiversity?  If so, the resituated cold-adapted quarry must benefit their brethren back in their natural ranges. Most do not.

Yet bright spots exist.

In the 1930s muskoxen from Greenland were transplanted to Alaska’s Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea. In these previously ungrazed and predator-free lands, they did well. In the 1970s descendants of those original transplants were released into Arctic Alaska, where original muskoxen had gone extinct by the 1890s. Others served the U.S. government’s collaborative interests with Russian scientists as additional descendants were moved in the 1970s to Chukotka’s Wrangel Island — where Joel has since studied them.

A muskoxen herd moves past possible danger in Arctic Alaska (identities from left to right are bull, adult female, yearling, and young male). Photo credit: Joel Berger © WCS.

For mountain goats the journey to an inadvertent climate refuge shares similarities in the enhancement of biodiversity. First introduced to Washington’s Olympic Mountains in the 1920s, they flourished. Sometime after the 1938 establishment of Olympic National Park, goats were considered a nonnative species. Across recent decades, extending into the 2020s, goats were removed; yet their conservation value remains realized as they’ve been relocated to the Cascades, where they supplement native populations.

Now, decades later — and this is the central point — some of these forced emigrants to faraway lands of wind and tundra have been returned to their original ranges, where they augment the persistence of their native cold-adapted relatives.

Other cases demonstrate more nuanced but successful trajectories. In 1941 bison from Yellowstone were shipped to the Henry Mountains high above the warm deserts and canyons of southern Utah, where evidence of prior existence lacked. There, however, in the suitable cooler climes up to 11,000 feet, they reproduced successfully. Descendants were transferred back to areas of Uintah and Ouray Ute Reservation lands where bison once had persisted and where they now play important biocultural roles as a source of food and spiritual value.

A muskoxen group in Arctic Alaska moving to windswept slopes; two muskoxen in central left part of photo also visible as small black dots. Photo credit: Joel Berger © WCS.                                     ????????????????????????????????????

In different ways success stories like these highlight examples where past relocation efforts contributed positively, if unintentionally, to current biodiversity and species protection. Needless to say, all of this begs the question of who decides when we should play God — what, when, and where various species should be transplanted, restored, or just introduced.

Economic and ethical tradeoffs will always reign — with a burden on the animals themselves. While Dylan had his metaphorical watchtower and plowmen digging up earth, today we’re the guardians. We know what biodiversity is worth.  We must not only celebrate inadvertent past successes where species found their way to suitable climate “refuges” that helped them survive and thrive, but be deliberate and be proactive to continue achieving victories for conservation.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Climate Refugia: Protecting Biodiversity in the Face of Climate Change

‘We Can Be That Voice’ — Building Community Through Bold Protests

Animal-rights activists come together in San Diego to stand up for tortured animals and hope others will follow.

SAN DIEGO — I heard the protests about two blocks before I saw them.

It was a Wednesday night in mid-February and I was in California on a rare vacation, hoping to take a brief recharge before covering the latest environmental abuses of the second Trump administration. But I hadn’t fully disconnected: My news alerts carried continuous updates about mass program cuts and federal workforce firings initiated by Elon Musk’s DOGE team, not to mention the resulting protests that had started to pop up around the country.

So when I heard the chants and shouts on Pacific Beach that night, I wondered if people were out in force protesting Trump’s budget cuts.

Imagine my surprise when I realized I’d stumbled across a good old-fashioned animal-rights protest.

A small group of activists had gathered outside PB Shore Club, a second-floor sports-themed bar and restaurant just off the boardwalk. With their bullhorns blaring, the activists carried signs bearing slogans like “Every animal is someone,” “End Speciesism,” and “Fish feel fear.”

They were there, one of the organizers told me, to protest PB Shore Club’s weekly “goldfish races.” In these casually cruel events, two goldfish are placed in long, side-by-side tanks and patrons push them to the finish line by blowing through straws into the water behind the fish. Winners get part of their bar tab paid.

“We’re telling people that fish are just like us,” co-organizer Brooklyn Fontana told me on Feb. 19, the night of their third weekly protest. “They feel pain, they have families, and they don’t want to be exploited for cruel bar games.”

Videos of events posted by PB Shore Club show obviously distressed fish panicked from the air bubbling out of the straws behind them and bouncing off the sides of the tanks as they’re driven forward. And in a recent TV news report, two regular supporters of the goldfish races acknowledged that the fish live “for weeks” — goldfish can live a decade or longer if properly cared for — and that “some people try to eat the fish.”

 

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A post shared by PB Shore Club (@pbshoreclub)

Despite that support the protest was obviously working: The club’s outdoor patio, normally full of rowdy patrons, sat empty while crowds of people walked by on their way to other bars or restaurants.

While I spoke with Fontana, I saw several other people stop by to ask what the protest was about. A few shook their heads in disbelief.

“When people take the time to stop and ask us, they’re typically disgusted that the Shore Club is holding goldfish races,” Fontana said. “We have had at least five groups of people tell us that they’re no longer going in, and several people tell us that they have been upset about the goldfish races for a long time and are thankful someone is finally speaking up.” They’ve also received hundreds of signatures on their online petition and received positive coverage from local media.

But those opinions weren’t universal: Ten minutes before I arrived, someone had driven by the protest on a motorcycle and pepper-sprayed the activists and nearby crowds. The sting of the irritant still hung in the air.

 

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The activists have also experienced verbal abuse. “Some of the younger crowd — especially those going to the bar — think it’s funny to harass us, mock us, or try to argue with us while usually not even understanding the cause or being passionate about goldfish racing,” Fontana says.

The fate of two goldfish may seem like a relatively minor thing to protest while crises like climate change, mass extinction, and environmental injustice are overwhelming us. But the cruelty and indifference at the root of all these problems remain the same.

And the tools to fight these societal ills all share common, effective elements: building community and vocal protest.

“If you see something you’re against, then go speak out on it,” said 19-year-old co-organizer Justice Owens. “Use the anxiety as fuel to help those who are being tormented. Their torture will always outmatch our anxiety and sometimes we just need to tell ourselves that. Because there is someone suffering that needs a voice, and we can be that voice.”

The activists, who affiliate under the name Bold Activists for Animal Liberation, a group founded by Owens, mostly found each other through social media. They suggest that might help people organize protests against abuses in their own communities — while building up their own networks and support systems.

Protestors in front of PB Shore Club. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator

“There are likeminded individuals wherever you are, even if you feel alone,” says Fontana. She recommends creating events on Facebook “and sharing it to as many local and animal-rights groups as possible.” For example, they received support from the action team at PETA, who added them to their database and provided some signs and leaflets.

Owens also suggested going to “go to vegan events, marches and protests. Make sure to network all you can to get your foot in the door.”

Starting a protest may require getting out of your comfort zone. “My advice is to be brave and get active,” said Fontana, who was arrested last year at the San Diego airport while protesting SeaWorld’s history of orca captivity. “It can be intimidating and uncomfortable to start, but it’s nothing in comparison to what the animals you are fighting for must be going through.”

Owens echoed that: “A lot of people aren’t willing to take on the task, but once you start, some will be inspired.”

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Previously in The Revelator:

In France, One Group Seeks to Do the Unthinkable: Unite the Climate Movement

Meet the Passionate Advocates Trying to Save Western Monarch Butterflies

Western monarchs face myriad threats. A network of advocates is doing everything they can to mitigate the dangers and unravel mysteries about monarch movements and behavior.

Every fall dozens of monarch butterfly enthusiasts deploy to groves on the California coast to tally the orange-and-black insects who spend the winter clustered on tree limbs. In 2024 there were more volunteers than ever, but dreadfully few of the colorful butterflies to count.

On Dec. 9 a monarch lover named Saunie Holloway posted numbers from her annual pilgrimage to the Pismo Beach grove on the Western Monarch Advocates Facebook page. This grove is usually a favorite: More than 16,000 butterflies had adorned the eucalyptus trees there in 2023.

In 2024 volunteers counted fewer than 200.

“I just stood in the grove and wept,” Holloway wrote.

On Jan. 30 the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation announced the official peak season numbers for Western monarchs: just 9,119 butterflies in 257 overwintering sites. It’s the lowest count since 2020, and the second-lowest since 1997.

The distressingly low numbers coincided with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Dec. 12 proposal to list the monarch as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

One male Western monarch perched on a leaf.

The population west of the Rocky Mountains is in especially dire straits. Western monarchs, already a fraction of the size of the eastern population, has shrunk to just 1% of its historic abundance. If nothing changes, the Service estimates, western monarchs face a 99% chance of going extinct in the next 50 years.

As numbers have plummeted, advocates have doubled down to save their western butterflies. This loose network of conservationists, educators, and citizen scientists — as dispersed as the butterflies themselves — have used technology and social media to connect and effectively share their messages. Both awareness and acres of pollinator habitat planted have expanded.

These efforts have been critical, says Isis Howard, an endangered species conservation biologist at Xerces Society.

But to help monarchs recover, she says, “We need to work at a larger scale and address widespread issues … beyond what voluntary efforts have been able to achieve.”

Complex Behavior, Complex Challenges

Most western monarchs overwinter at some 400 sites on the California and Baja coasts. They leave their coastal groves in late winter and early spring, dispersing into California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and beyond, breeding along the way. It takes several generations to make these yearly journeys; the butterflies who return to coastal groves are not the same individuals as the ones who left the year before.

The reasons for western monarchs’ decline are complex. Pesticides, habitat loss, and climate change are the most oft-cited factors. With numbers so low, other factors — predators, disease, and extreme weather events, for example — loom larger.

Vibrant monarch butterflies spread their wings while perched on the Eucalyptus tree.

This January, volunteers with the Western Monarch Count made a horrific discovery near the Pacific Grove Monarch Sanctuary: dozens of monarchs scattered across a lawn, spasming as they died. Testing revealed their bodies contained an average of seven different pesticides.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has called for information and input on pesticide use as part of its public comment period on the animals’ proposed Endangered Species Act listing, which runs through March 12.

Climate change is also affecting monarchs across their range. In January the Palisades Fire destroyed monarch habitat in lower Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles. More severe winter storms also threaten overwintering butterflies. Howard of Xerces Society says extreme heat likely affected the third and fourth generation of monarchs last year.

Tom Landis, a retired U.S. Forest Service nursery specialist, says climate change isn’t just making it harder for monarchs to thrive; it’s also changing their behavior.

Landis lives in southern Oregon, where he teaches workshops to help people plant critical “stepping stone” habitat for migrating monarchs — milkweed and nectar plant waystations within densely developed areas. He says he’s honed in on a bottleneck that may be preventing monarchs from making it to his region in the first place.

Monarch caterpillar

To successfully breed, monarchs who leave their overwintering sites in California must lay their eggs on milkweed — the exclusive diet of their caterpillars. “I don’t think they’re finding it,” says Landis. This is because the butterflies are leaving earlier than they used to.

Native milkweeds die back in winter and put out fresh new leaves in spring, too late for these early season migrants. Landis thinks we can — and should — help accommodate the butterflies.

Two California species emerge before all the others. Planting these in key places could help that first generation of monarchs as fly inland, Landis explains.

“We need to get them out on sites along the coast range and the interior valley so that when monarchs come out, they have some place to lay their eggs.”

Xerces Society has named planting pesticide-free early season native milkweed and nectar plants in the “early breeding zone” in California a top priority for recovering Western monarchs. Landis has been traveling to California to collect seeds, and with the help of a master gardener in Yuba City he’s developed techniques for successfully growing them in pots. Now California nurseries and master gardeners are helping him propagate them. The Forest Service has provided some funding to cover basic expenses.

Landis grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where monarchs were “annoyingly common.” He became enchanted with them after moving to the Pacific Northwest, where sightings are rarer, and co-founded Southern Oregon Monarch Advocates. He says isn’t surprised so many people are willing to help with his project.

“Everybody loves monarchs,” he says. “I call them charismatic microfauna.”

Calling All Citizen Scientists

Helping western monarchs will rely on filling in knowledge gaps about their movements and behavior — a difficult task with such a widely dispersed population. Xerces Society is supporting several efforts to better understand key characteristics, including fire risk, at overwintering groves. One project is experimenting with tiny GPS units that track butterflies as they migrate.

From the hundreds of volunteers with Western Monarch Count to backyard gardeners, citizen scientists have played a key role in helping unravel monarch mysteries over the past decade. David James, an associate professor at the Department of Entomology at Washington State University, has enlisted the help of citizen scientists to tag and track Western monarchs. Among other things his work has helped illuminate the migration routes of thousands of butterflies from Washington state.

The Fish and Wildlife Service wants people to help save monarchs, and its proposed listing is purposely flexible so people can actively engage in conservation. The listing may contain a “4(d) exception” — named after a section of the regulation that would otherwise prohibit handling, netting and small-scale captive rearing of monarchs.

Robert Coffan, who cofounded the organizations Southern Oregon Monarch Advocates and the larger Western Monarch Advocates, says he’s pleased the Service’s proposal doesn’t prohibit citizens from tagging butterflies. Affixing tiny wing tags on monarchs to help trace where they go has already yielded important insights about western monarch movements and behavior.

Coffan says hands-on citizen science can also light the passion of young conservationists by giving them the “monarch miracle.”

“To have them write the data down for the tag and let them know they are part in research for the whole country, they absolutely love it,” he says. “And if one of their tags is found, it’s absolute mayhem.”

Susie Vanderlip, a public speaker and monarch advocate who lives in Orange County, California, hopes the federal listing will prompt California to lift its restrictions on handling and tagging monarchs, which have been in place since 2021.

“Citizen scientists keep the focus on the value of monarch butterflies,” says Vanderlip, who has connected with monarch experts from around the country and exchanges information through her Facebook page. “Not just the value, but the iconic beauty and the spirituality that they represent to so many people.”

Vanderlip has accumulated anecdotal knowledge about Southern California monarchs, but she would like to see a study that tracks monarchs from her part of the state.

“Nobody’s tagged a bunch of monarchs in Southern California to see where they go. So we don’t know,” she says.

A Chain of Pearls

Loss of habitat is one of the primary reasons for the monarchs’ decline. A big factor is the dramatic increase in so-called “Roundup Ready crops,” bred to be resistant to the pesticide glyphosate. When Roundup is applied to herbicide-resistant corn and soy, it kills everything else that might compete with the crops, including milkweed and nectar plants.

Logging, urban sprawl and development have also displaced pollinator plants.

While replanting habitat — including both milkweed and the nectar plants that adult butterflies need — will likely not by itself save the monarch, it’s a critical piece of the puzzle and something nearly everyone can do.

“Having a chain of pearls of connected habitat in urban areas is really important,” says Coffan, adding that “waystations” along migratory routes can help ensure monarchs complete their migratory journeys to the coast. “Every single one of the monarchs in those [coastal] clusters came from somewhere else, either in California or from one of several other states.”

 

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In Portland, Oregon, where monarch sightings are relatively rare, Ida Galash is on a mission to expand pollinator habitat.

Galash fell in love with the showy butterflies in 2019. She began documenting caterpillars and adult butterflies that visited her garden and posting the sightings to her neighborhood NextDoor group. Eventually she launched a Facebook Group called Portland Monarchs. Still not satisfied, she began stocking seed libraries with free native seeds and information sheets.

“I can’t save the monarchs myself,” says Galash. “I try to take down barriers and make it easier for other people to create habitat.”

In recent years she’s given away more than 4,000 seed packets for native showy and narrowleaf milkweed and 30 kinds of native, nectar-producing flowers.

Her social media posts have dispersed seeds of their own.

In December a woman named Pam saw Galash’s post about the dismally low overwintering numbers.

“After a few days of wringing her hands, she decided she had to do something,” says Galash. Pam, who lives in Salem, Oregon, posted on her local Buy Nothing group, offering to help anyone who wanted to replace their lawn with pollinator habitat. Twenty people responded. Pam purchased seeds and 300 native plants and recruited people to help install the new gardens.

“She was right on it,” says Galash. “One person can really make a difference.”

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All the Plants We Cannot See

Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife

These new comics collections use satire, poetry, and science to shine a light on human failures — and who and what we need to save.

In 1970 the lead character in cartoonist Walk Kelly’s popular “Pogo” comic strip found himself in an ecosystem overtaken over by pollution and uttered the immortal words, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” *

More than 50 years later, comic books and graphic novels continue to tackle environmental issues, sometimes from Kelly’s satirical perspective, other times from a place of anger, and increasingly as an educational tool.

Here are our reviews of eight new or forthcoming graphic novels and comic-strip collections that tackle the Earth’s problems — from pollution and fossil fuels to extinction and climate change — as well as some of its marvels. You’ll find books for both adults and kids that will inspire you or make you angry (and then perhaps inspire you some more).

As always the title of each book is linked to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find most of these volumes through your local library, bookseller, or comic shop.

You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis by Madeleine Jubilee Saito

Intense, lovely, and dreamlike, this collection of poems in comics form embraces the pain of fire, flood, and capitalism-driven climate change. More importantly, it crystalizes our collective strife into a call for justice. The book’s 17 poems are presented in a series of painted images, mostly four panels to a page.

In addition to the emotional text, the poems use the visuals to set or continue the mood and narrative. Some sequences go on for several pages without a single word — poetry by way of image and imagination. It’s a powerful experience that deserves our attention while it attempts to heal our souls. (Available March 25.)

I’m a Dumbo Octopus! A Graphic Guide to Cephalopods by Anne Lambelet

What an utterly charming book for young readers — heck, even this jaded older guy enjoyed it. Lambelet walks, or swims, us through the amazing variety of cephalopod life, using an insecure dumbo octopus (a real species from the genus Grimpoteuthis) as our tour guide. This is a science-based book — it doesn’t shy away from big words like “chromatophores” — but it’s also narrative-driven, colorful (both in art and character), and full of humor. You can’t help but love the doubt-filled narrator (who gains some self-confidence by the end of the book), or the other octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, and nautiluses we meet along the way.

Quite simply this is science comics done right, and it could help any young reader gain an appreciation for the ocean and everything that lives in it. It’s also apparently the first book in an intended series on marine life, although the subject of next title has not yet been announced. Whatever that one covers, you can guarantee we’ll be first in line to read it. (Available March 4.)

My Time Machine by Carol Lay

If you found yourself in possession of a time machine, would you travel to the past to kill Hitler before he started World War II and the Holocaust? Or would you go forward to better understand the pending threats of climate change — and then hopefully prevent them from happening?

Since this review is published in an environmental publication, I’m sure you can guess which path the protagonist takes in this entertaining (and occasionally tense) graphic novel.

Lay, best known for humorous and satirical efforts such as the “Story Minute” comic strip and the Simpsons comic book, takes a more serious turn here. Following cues from H.G. Wells’ most famous novel (presented in this context as nonfiction), our 67-year-old heroine (based on Lay herself) bounces forward in time, encountering autocracies, out-of-control heat, biodiversity loss, flooding, fire, civilizational collapse, and what may become Earth’s dominant form of … life?

That sounds bleak, but strong cartooning and stronger characters — and yes, an undercurrent of humor — make this a welcome exploration of both today and our potential tomorrows.

Traveling to Mars by Mark Russell and Roberto Meli

In the not-so-distant future of this melancholy and magnificent graphic novel, Earth has all but used up its energy supplies and civilization (if you can call it that) has started to collapse. In a last-ditch hail Mary, a dying loner (or is that “loser?”) finds himself recruited to make one-way race to Mars. If he becomes the first human to set foot on (occupy) the red planet, he can lay a claim to its mineral and fossil-fuel resources on behalf of his corporate fake-meat “benefactors” — who in turn promise to save humanity (and net a healthy profit).

The weightlessness of space, the company tells him, will slow his cancer’s growth, but his inevitable death remains part of the plan. He’s disposable — a human flag to plant in the soil, useless to his corporate masters after he completes his mission. As long as he gets there first and fast, extraction crews can follow, and the energy (and money) will flow.

If you’ve read anything else by Russell (God Is Disappointed in You, Not All Robots), you know he touches on climate change and other environmental problems in many of his graphic novels, which also dig deep into history, philosophy, social issues, and religion, usually with a satirical lens. This one is no different.

What is different in Traveling to Mars is the tone. The satire is subtler, while the introspection is ramped up to 11. This is a book about a man left alone on a spaceship for months with little more than his thoughts, and those thoughts dig deep. I don’t know if readers will come out of it with any insight into energy issues, but Russell’s character-driven ruminations on the state of the planet and humanity are sure to energize those who take the journey.

(Publisher Ablaze Comics doesn’t sell to readers directly, so here’s a link for Traveling to Mars on Bookshop.org.)

Animal Pound by Tom King and Peter Gross

Just as George Orwell’s Animal Farm took on Stalinism, this graphic novel uses domesticated animals — in this case dogs, cats, and rabbits living in a shelter — to satirize and warn about the rise of Trumpism.

It starts simply. The animals, tired of seeing their unadopted brethren euthanized, stage a revolution and take over the shelter. The cats and dogs form an unstable alliance and election system, with the rabbits going along mostly out of fear of being eaten. But hunger threatens them all — they drove off the humans who fed them, after all —until a kitten points out the shelter’s webcam, which the workers had used to promote animals up for adoption.

The animals soon start performing on the webcam for an eager audience around the world, earning donations and food to be delivered to the shelter.

That opens the door for a cartoonish, overweight buffoon of a bulldog named Piggy to rise to fame and power — with bloody, revenge-soaked repercussions.

Published as five issues starting in 2023, long before the election, this new collected edition packs an extra powerful wallop now that Trump is back in office. It’s not really an environmental book, although the early pages contain several strong messages about animal rights. It is, however, a brutal examination of our times and a cautionary tale of power and personality.

King, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, has a lot to say about fascism and cults. It’s a bit heavy-handed at times, and comes about six months too late, but perhaps it will serve a warning for all of us animals about who or what might follow. (Available April 1.)

Hi, Earth by Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz

This painfully funny collection of one-page comic strips from the “War and Peas” webcomic takes a hard-edged satirical razor to humanity’s follies, including climate change, deforestation, extinction, and all the other laugh riots of the 21st century.

Of course, the creators aren’t mocking climate change. They’re making fun of people, and I’m sure you’ll recognize a few of their characters’ actions. You might even find a few moments when reading the book feels like holding a mirror up to yourself.

Like many webcomics the art here is somewhat simple and the gags are occasionally crude. But Hi, Earth comes with a unique point of view: Nature is celebrated, Earth survives, and people get knocked down a few pegs — although at one point a tree acknowledges that it sure is nice to be hugged.

This is a short book — you can dive through it in half an hour — but it will leave you thinking (and maybe chuckling under your breath) long after you’ve finished reading it. (Available April 1.)

Blow Away by Zac Thompson and Nicola Izzo

An ambitious graphic novel that aims to read like a paranoid celluloid thriller. Alone on Canada’s Baffin Island in the Arctic, videographer Brynne Brautigan has spent months trying to get “the shot” of endangered red knots. She’s on deadline, feeling pressure from her bosses, and possibly starting to crack from extended isolation. In the first few pages, she courageously (if improbably) frees a wounded polar bear from a trapper’s snare, an act that’s supposed to illustrate … something about her, but which immediately puts the book on awkward footing.

Speaking of awkward footing, Brynne soon spies two mountain climbers through her camera. As they make their way up the icy, precarious peak, they turn on each other. Did Brynne just witness a murder?

It all twists and turns from there, getting ever-more paranoid and ever-more improbable. The book moves like a blizzard — fast, dark, and frigid — but ultimately falls flat and left me feeling cold. I’ll give it bonus points for the wildlife angle, but the humans never come to life on the page.

Squeak Chatter Bark: An Eco-Mystery by Ali Fitzgerald

Hazel McCrimlisk can talk to animals — but she’s no Dr. Doolittle. She’s an 11-year-old girl living in a science experiment gone wrong and learning to communicate with the genetically modified animals around her. She’s also on her own following the kidnapping of her scientist parents by a mysterious monster (a crime that’s been completely ignored by the people who run the Perfect Animals Worlds Biosphere). Hazel and her animal friends, including a pint-sized elephant named Nina, set off in search of her parents and journey through a man-made ecosystem that’s supposed to be an ecological wonderland but gets darker at every turn.

Fitzgerald, a frequent New Yorker and New York Times cartoonist, fills the pages of this book — her first foray into fiction — with lush brush strokes and an appreciation for nature (and some underlying, if softly spoken, contempt for what humans can do to it). She’s developed some interesting characters, especially Hazel, who is full of doubts and fears and makes mistakes but uses her brain and keeps moving forward. Her animal characters are both fully drawn and a little too convenient (Nina has a few abilities that further the plot but make little biological sense).

As for Fitzgerald’s villains — spoiler alert — I found them a bit shallow and not much of a mystery (despite the book’s title). The kidnapping and the entire ecosphere turn out to be a plot to rewild the planet with genetically modified animals — at base, a good intention, warped by anger, arrogance, twisted science, and capitalism.

But Hazel loves animals more truly and deeply than the eco-terrorist bad guy, so of course she wins in the end. It all adds up to a fun journey that may generate some conversation without being too heavy-handed. (Available April 1.)

That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations — including several more graphic novels — in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

* Correction: This column originally attributed the Pogo quote to a 1952 comic strip, but it actually first appeared on a 1970 Earth Day poster, and in the strip the following year. Cartoonist Walt Kelly first used a version of the quote in the text introduction to his 1953 book, The Pogo Papers. Thanks to several keen-eyed Pogo fans for the corrections!

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Previously in The Revelator:

20 Environmental Books to Inspire You in the Year Ahead

 

Protect This Place: Otay Mountain — Boon of Biodiversity on the Border

Home to important plant and animal species, this mountain and its spectacular views face threats from climate change, wildfires, and the border wall.

The Place:

Located just north of the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego County, Otay Mountain is the highest summit within the San Ysidro Mountain range at 3,568 feet (1,087 meters). This rugged habitat is part of an ancient chain of volcanos creating the foundation of fertile metavolcanic soils that support numerous rare plant species and plant communities of coastal sagebrush and chaparral.

Why it matters:

Otay Mountain is a unique ecosystem and home to many sensitive plants and animals, including the largest stand of Tecate cypress trees (Hesperocyparis forbesii), which is the host plant for the imperiled Thorne’s hairstreak butterfly (Callophrys gryneus thornei), whose larvae feed on young Tecate cypress stems. Only five very small populations of the butterfly exist following the fires here in 2003 and 2007.

Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

A few other important plant species on the mountain include:

    • Mexican flannelbush (Fremontodendron mexicanum)
    • Otay manzanita (Arctostaphylos otayensis)
    • Otay Mountain ceanothus (Ceanothus otayensis)
    • Otay Mountain lotus (Hosakia crassifolia var. otayensis)
    • Cleveland’s bush monkeyflower (Diplacus clevelandii)
    • Southern mountain misery (Chamaebatia australis)
    • Gander’s pitcher sage (Lepechinia ganderi)
    • Chaparral pea (Pickeringia montana)

Meanwhile the mountain is also home to several species of sensitive fauna:

    • California gnatcatcher (Polioptila californica)
    • Orange-throated whiptail (Aspidoscelis hyperythrus)
    • Coast horned lizard (Phrynosoma coronatum)
    • Bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis)
    • Mountain lion (Puma concolor)
    • Southern bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus)

The threat:

While it’s protected from development, Otay Mountain is not safe from wildfires or the impacts of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. The construction of roads and grading have negatively affected the sensitive habitat. Migrant camps can degrade habitat and increase fire risk, and the heavy border patrol presence adds to pressures on the land. So does other off-road activity, as this has become a popular OHV destination.

Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

Climate change also has a detrimental effect and has increased fire frequency. Fires can be particularly destructive to Tecate cypress. Although it does benefit from fire for seed germination, burned trees do not re-sprout from the roots and may take a decade to become mature enough to produce cones and longer to reach peak reproduction. An increase in fire frequency prevents the Tecate cypress from building up a healthy quantity of cones amongst its branches, limiting their ability to bounce back from back-to-back fires.

The habitats in general are prone to degradation with increased fire frequency. Fires offer more opportunity for erosion, invasive grasses to take over, and other effects.

My place in this place:

This mountain has high biodiversity, particularly for rare plant species. The Native Plant Gene Bank Collection, which I oversee, gathers rare plant seeds here for long-term conservation. We began collecting seeds from plants (rare or not) in 2006 and to date we have more than 65 collections from the area.

Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

I love visiting this mountain. The views as you approach the peak, which are accessible to the public via Minnewawa Truck Trail or Otay Truck Trail, are spectacular. On a clear day you can see the rural foothills east of Tijuana into Tecate, Otay Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, and suburban San Diego. The roads can be quite rugged, with steep drops into canyons. In addition to the views, these steep hillsides will be awash with color from the many plants that comprise the coastal sage scrub or chaparral bloom profusely in the spring. You’ll also observe the skeletal remains of large Tecate trees that burned during the most recent fire.

Exploration is better on foot, and there are various paths leading through the habitat.

Who’s protecting it now:

The Otay Mountain Wilderness is a designated U.S. Wilderness Area under the Wilderness Protection Act and has been managed by the Bureau of Land Management since 1998, effectively preserving 18,500 acres. California Department of Fish and Wildlife also protect 1,200 acres of the nearby Otay Mountain Ecological Reserve. There are other property boundaries that are managed by other local government or privately owned entities.

What this place needs:

The legal protections for the land are important but insufficient. Protected areas can’t safeguard against climate change and fire; nor are they very effective against border impacts. Otay Mountain needs active management and increased awareness. This ecosystem needs funding support from the federal legislature to help BLM do weed management and clean up illegal camps, make seed collections to conserve diversity, and provide a resource to reseed post-fire. Supporting government funding of our “green infrastructure” helps the land managers with these needed management actions.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Species Spotlight: Renewed Hope for the Charismatic Thick-Billed Parrot