A new law will allow the state’s wildlife agency to reintroduce the endangered species.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has signed a law to allow wildlife authorities to reintroduce the North American wolverine to the state. Under the law Colorado Parks and Wildlife is expected to create new rules for a wolverine reintroduction program, as well as set guidelines for compensating ranchers and farmers for potential financial losses from any damage to livestock. (Wolverines typically prey on rabbits and other small mammals but have been known to take down animals are large as elk or moose; experts say they rarely prey on livestock.)
Colorado has been attempting to reintroduce wolverines for nearly 15 years. The state first floated a potential program in 2010, but officials opted to reintroduce lynx first. The state wildlife agency estimates Colorado is now home to as many as 250 lynx.
The Northern American wolverine’s natural habitat includes snowy, cold climates. They’ve traditionally been found in the northern Rockies and North Cascade mountain ranges and parts of Alaska and Canada. However, due to aggressive hunting, climate change, and habitat fragmentation, they have been virtually eliminated across the United States. In November 2023 the North American wolverine received federal protection as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Meanwhile, the species has recently started to expand its range — one wandering wolverine was even spotted last year near Portland, Oregon, and may still be patrolling the region.
Most people will never have an opportunity to see reclusive wolverines in the wild, but they’ve appeared several times in the pages of The Revelator. Here’s some of our previous coverage of this fascinating species:
What’s Needed to Save Wolverines? A New Study Has Answers
Wolverines are notoriously elusive, which has made them hard to study. And harder to protect.
Often dwelling in high mountain reaches and denning in deep snow, wolverines (Gulo gulo) prefer to stay away from people. Although evidence has long suggested their populations have declined, some scientists and policymakers have, for years, fallen back on a common trope that not enough is known about them to warrant protective action.
But a new study published in Global Ecology and Conservation flips this narrative — and renews the call for conservation.
Carnivore Conservation Is Tougher in the Mountains
When the Yakama Nation detected a wolverine on Washington’s Mt. Adams in 2005, outside the animal’s known distribution, Jocelyn Akins wanted to learn more. Was it part of a population that hadn’t been previously known or a lone animal seeking new territory?
To answer those questions, Akins, who had previously studied wolverines and grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains, launched the Cascades Carnivore Project in 2008. Studying these elusive and rare mountain carnivores is no easy feat. After setting up remote camera traps with the help of friends and other volunteers, it was 15 months before they got their first photograph of a wolverine. And it wasn’t until 2018 when field researchers working with Akins documented the first female wolverine in 75 years in Washington’s South Cascade Mountains.
Wolverine is Gulo gulo; the glutton so nice they named it twice. Across their range, they are known to eat goats, grouse, goose eggs and everything between. People have been picking apart their scat for half a century. I had never heard of anyone finding fish scales.
In the coming days, to my amazement, Nimbus marched back to the channel and sat at its center for hours, accumulating GPS locations at a baffling rate. From camp, I inspected our photos of the barren ice, imagining him there. What on earth was he doing?
Road to Nowhere: Highways Pose Existential Threat to Wolverines
This is not a good time to be a wolverine.
The infamously scrappy, snow-adapted mustelid — a relation of badgers, martens and otters — is barely hanging on in the contiguous United States, where its population has dipped to mere hundreds. Decades of habitat loss and trapping reduced the wolverine’s numbers, and now diminishing snowpack from climate change is adding insult to injury.
And we can add one more surprising threat to the list: roads.
Yes, even though wolverines thrive in remote, snowy wildernesses, roads can still pose a problem — but perhaps not in the way you might think.
For cartoonist Tom Toro, humor about climate change attacks hypocrisy, supports truth, and fuels resistance.
Think climate change isn’t funny? Try telling that to cartoonist Tom Toro. The frequent New Yorker contributor, who also writes and draws a comic strip called “Home Free,” often points his pen at the pain and hypocrisy behind the climate crisis and other environmental issues, with blistering results.
It’s not just about mocking the systems and people behind the problems. As Toro tells The Revelator, humor provides worried readers with a laughter-induced catharsis.
At the same time, he points out, humor serves a vital form of resistance.
Platt: This is a tough time for the planet — but also for political cartooning. Most newspapers don’t have staff cartoonists anymore.
Toro: Still, this is a boom time for journalism. There’s plenty of material out there. People are really seeing, more than ever now, the value of the fourth estate and holding power accountable.
Yeah, journalism as the co-equal fourth branch of government. But it’s almost like cartooning should be the fifth branch.
Cartooning is definitely a good part of it. I think people are just really hungry for satire.
It’s tricky, though. You don’t want to minimize things and you don’t want to trivialize. But there’s a way of clarifying an idea in a single panel with a caption. The power, the clarity of that, I think is what’s really appealing.
Cartooning is so well suited to the sort of media diet that people have nowadays. The short captions appeal to kind of the Twitter mentality. It’s just ideally suited to the way that people receive media.
You are always looking for the pithiest caption. Wordiness is kind of the death of a quip. You’ve got to cut like a knife.
But marrying those words with art — how does that shape the satire in comics form?
For the cartoonist — editorial cartoonist, New Yorker cartoonist, whatever — you’re really looking for the stuff that you can attack with the strengths of your own art form. What can I do in a cartoon that they can’t do on Saturday Night Live? That’s the kind of stuff that you really try to hone in on.
Every day I catch up on what Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert did, and SNL — it’s something funny that we all watch, and everyone kind of attacks the same material. There’s a little bit of repetition that goes into it.
With the cartoonists, it’s like, well, what can I do? Because in cartoons you don’t have to obey physics. You don’t have the sort of constraints of a production of Saturday Night Live. They might shy away from an idea just because it’s not necessarily worth it to create an entire set.
And sometimes those “sets” for you are just a moment in cartoon time.
Yeah. Probably my most popular one was the one that was the sort of postapocalyptic landscape and the guy who’s kind an investment banker talking to some children around a fire saying, “yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.” That’s probably been my most popular one. And I was surprised when the New Yorker took it.
That brings up something I hear from freelance or staff journalists, who still have challenges getting editors to accept environmental topics.
I’ve submitted a lot of carbon footprint stuff. I have this one they just refuse to buy where there’s two women sitting on the table and she’s saying, “my heart says Jack because he has a private jet, but my head says, date Don, because he has a small carbon footprint.”
There’s that sort of stuff where it’s, like, lifestyle choices that yuppies can make based on trying to have a low impact on the Earth kind of thing. So you’re trying to find humor in environmental stuff. It’s a little bit hard to sell as a gag.
It’s not that the New Yorker is not environmentally conscious, but they sometimes don’t want their jokes to address the same stuff that the journalism is addressing. The jokes have to kind of live in their own world and not necessarily be comments on what they’re approaching in their articles. So whenever you manage to slip one in there, the planet got destroyed, it’s gratifying.
Are there other reasons why more cartoonists don’t address environmental issues?
Maybe because it’s just uniquely hard to find levity in that. Or there’s something about climate change that’s hard to particularize because it’s such a sweeping thing and the actual impact on our first-world lives is not entirely evident.
Whereas with politics, it’s right in our face all the time. Maybe if global warming was on the front page every single day. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be something that was more addressed in the culture of humor. But I think we’re still in denial.
And it’s tough. I mean, climate change is the death of a thousand paper cuts, and it’s hard to be that scalpel blade cutting through the humor of a particular thing when it’s all this slow incremental change that adds up over time.
Right? Yeah. There’s no smoking gun and there’s only so many polar bears you can draw on shrinking ice floes. That’s the stereotypical image. Not a lot of political cartoonists are addressing it.
There would probably be more of a variety of topics you could address if we were living in more of a sane political environment. But yeah, it’s like you were saying, it’s the death of a thousand cuts and how you particularize that?
I mean, I have kind of a silly one where there’s an Eskimo, and the ice is receding. And so they’re saying, “well, one good thing about climate change is I can find all my lost pens” — and all the pens are on the ground that’s cleared by the melting ice. There’s stuff like that that I try to do.
You’ve got to give people that catharsis.
Yeah, bringing up catharsis is interesting. Do you think cartoons can be useful in today’s mental environment in terms of changing people’s minds about anything? I mean, you can also go back to the original editorial cartoons taking down all the New York City bosses and things like that. Obviously, they had a political edge, and they did have an effect. Do you think cartooning still has any of that power on individuals or society?
I think it is powerful in terms of just giving fuel to what’s become known as the resistance. I think people are hungry for it, and it has a way of lending force to the ideas that are going into the resistance. I don’t know if humor can necessarily change the world, but it can definitely buoy up the movements that will change the world.
The power of jokes is that they’re truth-telling, but they do it in a way that’s surprising and funny. At the core of it, they’re demystifying something. They’re telling some truth. They’re pointing out a hypocrisy in people who are in power. And so I think the more that you can lend humor to the cause of the resistance, the more that you stack facts on that side of the argument — because there’s such a countervailing force against the resistance to call it fake news, to keep the shroud of doubt around things that are self-evidently true, that you have to keep pushing that boulder uphill.
And I think that cartoons, in the way that they can really clarify an idea in a simple form and be memorable in that way, sort of put the shoulder to the wheel in terms of keeping the energy on the side of truthfulness and factuality. Because jokes don’t work unless they’re true.
That’s something that I’ve found really to be useful in terms of clarifying what I’m trying to do. And I’ve also found it to be, in itself, a true statement.
The reason we find jokes funny, and particularly the Daily Show kind of jokes or political cartoons, is because it’s almost that sort of burst — just opening the window and getting that breath of fresh air. It’s like, “oh, that is true.” It’s sort of an epiphany moment when a joke works.
Increasing demand for this seemingly abundant and common material harms human and natural communities — and fuels a lucrative and dangerous illegal industry.
Coastal ecosystems — including oyster reefs, sandy beaches, mangrove forests and seagrass beds — provide important habitat for marine life and food and recreation for people. They also protect shorelines from waves and storms. But these precious systems face serious threats. This series looks at what put them at risk, along with examples of efforts to restore and protect important coastal ecosystems around the world.
We need to talk about sand.
Most people don’t realize that these humble grains — that ubiquitous stuff of vacations, ant farms and hourglasses — are the second-most used natural resource in the world after water. According to a 2019 report from the United Nations Environment Programme, we use more than 55 billion tons of it per year — nearly 40 pounds per person per day.
And a lot of that sand comes from illegal activity, involving criminal gangs who mine, smuggle, and kill for the precious material.
The Building Blocks of Modern Society
Sand — legal or otherwise — gets used to enhance beaches, extract petroleum through hydraulic fracking, fill land under buildings, and make computer chips.
But the biggest amount by far — an estimated 85% of the sand mined globally — goes into making concrete. Concrete combines two key ingredients: cement, a binding agent made from calcium or other substances, and aggregate, which is either sand or a combination of sand and gravel. Quality concrete requires jagged and angular aggregate grains — a quality found in only a tiny fraction of the worlds’ sand, most of it on beaches and in rivers. This sand also is easy and cheap to mine, and it’s located close to much of the construction taking place around the world.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, world consumption of aggregate for all uses exceeds 40 billion metric tons (44 billion U.S. tons) a year — an estimate that’s likely on the conservative side and represents about twice the amount of sediment carried annually by all the world’s rivers. (Sediment from land rocks is the source of most coastal sand, which also comes from shells and marine organisms pulverized by waves, the digestive tracts of coral-eating fish, and the remains of tiny creatures called foraminifera.)
The organization also warns about sand mining’s serious consequences for humans and the natural environment.
Removing beach sand leaves coastal structures more vulnerable to erosion even as climate change raises sea levels and makes storms more intense. Transporting sand generates carbon dioxide emissions. Sand mining has political and cultural consequences, including effects on the tourism industry, and creates noise and air pollution.
Coastal sand mining also destroys complex ecosystems. The microorganisms, crabs, and clams that live in beach sand are important food sources for birds. Sea turtles and several bird species nest on sandy beaches. Seagrass, an important food source and habitat for marine residents, needs sandy ocean floor to grow. Stretches of underwater sand provide habitat for sea stars, sea cucumbers, conchs, and other critters, and are feeding grounds for flounder, rays, fish, and sharks.
Yet this harm is not the only issue. Increasing demand for sand has created a vast illegal industry resembling the organized criminal drug trade, including the same violence, black markets, and piles of money — an estimated $200 to $350 billion a year. Of all the sand extracted globally every year, only about 15 billion metric tons are legally traded, according to a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Pascal Pedruzzi, director of UNEP’s Global Resource Information Database-Geneva, became aware of illegal sand mining when the Jamaican government asked UNEP in 2014 to find out why the island had a serious beach erosion problem.
“There was a lot we didn’t know about sand extraction, including how much was being taken,” he says.
Or from how many places: Sand is mined from coastal environments in at least 80 countries on six continents, according to the 2022 book Vanishing Sands, written by several geologists and other experts on coastal management and land rights.
The book outlines a litany of sand crimes, from seemingly small to massive. In Sardinia, Italy, airport officials have seized about 10 tons of sand over 10 years, much of it carried in thousands of individual half-quart bottles. In Morocco criminals removed as many as 200 dump trucks of sand a day from massive dunes lining the Atlantic coast.
According to Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, illegal sand mining in Morocco is run by a syndicate second in size only to the country’s drug mafia. It involves corrupt government and law enforcement officials and foreign companies. Much of the Moroccan sand, for example, ends up in buildings in Spain.
In India demand for sand tripled from 2000 to 2017, creating a market worth 150 billion rupees, just over $2 billion. Multiple diverse and competing “sand mafias” run mining sites surrounded by armed private security guards. Their weapons likely are obtained illegally, given the difficult process of acquiring guns legally in India.
The NGO South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People reports hundreds of deaths and injuries related to illegal sand mining in India each year, including citizens (adults and children), journalists, activists, government officials, and law enforcement.
There are similar stories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, elsewhere in Africa, and in the Caribbean — almost everywhere sandy coastal areas can be found.
How to Solve the Problem
UNEP has begun tackling the problem of sand mining, putting forth ten recommendations that include creating international standards for extracting sand from the marine environment, reducing the use of sand by using substitutes, and recycling products made with sand.
While these recommendations target legal sand mining, more responsible management and reduced overall demand also should make illegal mining less lucrative and, therefore, less common.
“The good news is there’s a long list of solutions,” says Peduzzi. “We start by stopping waste of sand. We can make the life of buildings longer, retrofitting them instead of knocking them down. Maybe change the use of a building over time, as a school first and then 50 years later, a place for elderly people. When a building needs to be destroyed, crush and reuse the concrete. Build with wood, bricks, adobe, and straw.”
Building with straw also could reduce burning of crop waste. Every year, India produces 500 million tons of straw but burns 140 million tons as “excess.” One company there, Strawcture Eco, is using straw to create wall and ceiling panels that are fire resistant, insulating, and sustainable.
Alternatives to sand in concrete include ash from waste incineration and aluminum smelting waste. Peduzzi notes that ash creates concrete that is about 10% less solid, but points out, “that is still pretty good. You can use it to make buildings, but maybe not a bridge.”
The UNEP report notes that involvement from industry, the private sector, and civil society is vital in solving the problem. For example, shifting away from building with concrete will require changing the way architects and engineers are trained, acceptance by building owners, and new laws and regulations.
“We rely on sand, as a commodity,” Peduzzi says. “But we also need to realize its ecosystem services. We must be wiser about how we use it.”
UNEP hopes to collect solutions into a single, accessible online location (although it currently lacks funding for the effort). The idea is to create a hub for policies and technological solutions, Peduzzi says, and to develop best practices for them. The Global Initiative report on India also calls for a website for tracking illegal sand mining hosted by a think-tank or journalism agency — a sort of crime-spotters portal where people could anonymously upload evidence.
Shifting Sands, Shifting Thinking
William Neal, an emeritus professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and one of the authors of Vanishing Sands, suggests in an email that finding sand substitutes is not enough. Coastal communities, he says, need to retreat from rising seas rather than build more hard structures such as seawalls. This “shoreline engineering” often destroys the very beaches it is intended to save, he explains, and the long-term cost of saving property through engineering often ends up exceeding the value of the property. Seawalls also tend to simply shift water elsewhere, potentially causing flooding and significant damage along other parts of the shoreline.
Peduzzi also espouses shifts in thinking, including how we get around in cities.
“Instead of building roads for cars, build subways,” he says. “That moves people faster and gets away from fossil fuels. The icing on the cake is that when digging subway tunnels, you are getting rocks, generating this material instead of using it. Cars are not sustainable — not the material to make a car itself or the roads and parking lots.”
Without systemic changes, the problem of sand removal is only going to grow bigger as the population increases and people continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, increasing the demand for infrastructure like roads and buildings.
“The problem has been overlooked,” Peduzzi warns. “People need to realize that sand is just another story of how dependent we are on natural resources for development.”
The unanticipated environmental effects of inhalers underscore the contradictions of piecemeal climate solutions.
In Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” where the air is thick with pollutants and asthma rates are alarmingly high, a troublesome irony is unfolding.
This region is home to sprawling petrochemical plants and toxic fossil fuels that disproportionately affect the respiratory health of the area’s majority-Black residents.
Here, inhalers — one of the key tools for managing diseases like asthma — play a dual role: alleviating symptoms of pollution while also contributing to environmental degradation. This paradox has underscored the urgent need for sustainable solutions that holistically address environmental justice, health, and race equity issues in frontline communities like Cancer Alley.
Inhalers, often viewed as life-saving devices, have a profoundly negative impact on the environment. The most popular of the two main varieties of inhaler, metered-dose inhalers, release a gas that warms the earth hundreds of times faster than carbon dioxide.
A recent investigation by NPR revealed that the cumulative amount of climate-damaging gasses released from traditional inhalers is the equivalent of driving half a million gas-powered cars for a year. This means that each puff contributes significantly to climate disintegration. And as pollution damages more people’s lungs, the need for inhalers increases.
This 85-mile stretch of land wasn’t always referred to as Cancer Alley. Older residents recall a thriving community where many people lived off the nutrient-rich land. However, corporate greed and negligent politicians have irreparably damaged the soil, the land, and the air, leading to some of the highest cancer rates per year for residents.
Dozens of new cases each year are believed to be linked to severe air pollution. That pollution has also led to high rates of asthma in the area. Even more concerning is data showing the link between pollution, asthma, and cancer is visible in neighborhoods with high poverty rates — but not in more affluent communities, proving again that poverty kills.
The implications of the inhaler paradox are staggering. Not only do frontline communities bear the brunt of pollution-related health burdens, but they also face the ironic reality of using medical interventions that perpetuate the cycle of environmental degradation. Addressing this issue requires collective advocacy and action between healthcare professionals, environmental advocates, policymakers, and community leaders.
We have long approached environmental and public health solutions with a bandaid instead of a cure. The unique problem posed by inhalers releasing toxic gasses that increase climate change is one example why short-term solutions are no longer an acceptable way to manage our climate’s deteriorating health. Frankly speaking, it’s too costly to keep operating under this model when it is costing lives, the health of our planet, and our collective future.
Beyond encouraging the use of other inhalers and safe recycling, it is critical that government agencies do more to address greenhouse gas emissions so that we can proactively focus on prevention efforts instead of doing damage control.
While recent EPA rules on clean vehicles and emission reduction efforts are encouraging, it is not enough to combat the damage we have already done to the planet.
That is why my organization, the Hip Hop Caucus, is working with communities on the frontlines of these issues, uplifting their stories through The Coolest Show. Together we’re pushing back against attempts to roll back the minimal regulations protecting these communities and advocating to shut down operations that disproportionately put Black and brown lives at risk.
We’ve witnessed the effects of corporate greed and climate denial on our planet. It’s untenable to keep proposing short-term public health solutions without addressing the underlying causes of disease. Reports have shown how creating climate friendly policies can save taxpayer dollars in the long run — and more importantly, save lives.
It’s not too late to do right by the 20,000 residents of Cancer Alley. But we must act before it’s too late.
This op-ed was produced by Inequality.org and distributed for syndication by OtherWords.org.
A recent success got a lot of publicity, offering us insight into not only the species but the narratives that resonate with people.
Last November conservationists carefully carried 70 young, critically endangered Mojave Desert tortoises to the reptiles’ natural habitat on Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. The tortoises had been hatched and reared in captivity, and the team — a collaboration between U.S. Air Force officials at the base, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Springs — were hopeful that the animals would survive the rigors of life in the wild, where ravens would try to peck through their shells and coyotes could attack them.
It would take a while to learn how they fared: Soon after their release, the reptiles would hide in underground burrows and go into brumation, a state of inactivity, for the winter.
But six months later, this past April, news of their fate came out: The tortoises had emerged from their burrows healthier and stronger than ever, a notable milestone in the ongoing tortoise conservation story.
Photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
The news quickly made headlines around the country. Local outlets covered the outcome, as did the Associated Press, which transmitted it internationally. Even celebrity-focusedPeople magazine profiled the project. The media blitz demonstrated that even though conservation projects can be expensive and time- and energy-intensive, concerted efforts to help species come back from near extinction, and even thrive, can work.
Dozens of conservation success stories come out every year, from bald eagle population surges to black-footed ferret births, zebra shark releases to red wolf habitat protections. Yet few get as much publicity as the tortoises did in the spring.
So why did the story of the tortoises resonate so widely when so many other conservation stories fail to reach the public? The answer may reflect not only the state of human views on our effect on the environment, and our opinions of animals, but also the state of the news industry and what we cover.
“A Huge Downer”
Research published in 2022 by Carlos Corvalan, an advisor on risk assessment and global environmental change at the World Health Organization, suggested that people often feel overwhelmed by today’s biodiversity and climate change crises, which can lead to feelings of helplessness and result in people taking less action, not more.
Bad news about habitat destruction, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere, and struggling species abound. The public, it seems, is hungry for positive stories.
“In this time, in all times, conservation can be a huge downer,” says James Danoff-Burg, director of conservation at The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens. The tortoise story, however, was about how the reptiles did well in their new environment after months in brumation. “This,” he says, “is a success.”
Another reason that the tortoise story got so much traction may be because they’re cute and unthreatening. Unlike endangered predators, tortoises won’t hurt anyone or take down prey with their fangs. Studies on stories about hyenas and sharks, for example, show that conservation focused on those species is less popular among certain age groups who think of them as scary.
Although tortoises may not qualify as charismatic megafauna — typically thought of as popular, attractive, and well-known animals — they have endearing features and are charmingly awkward.
“We relate to those big eyes,” says Danoff-Burg. “Tortoises, they’re just so funny and odd and alien, but adorable. I think that sold the story as much as anything.”
Photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
The groups involved also have communications departments that helped narrate the story of the species the organizations care for. Typically it’s up to the researchers themselves to relate successes in the field, but media departments can help tell those stories to a wider audience, says Melissa Merrick, associate director of recovery ecology at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
“They really did a great job in elevating the work that we’ve been doing,” she says. “Not every organization is fortunate to have such a great communications team, and that’s really something that’s overlooked in a lot of conservation work, the importance of getting the story out there and letting people know some of the wins.”
Can the Tortoises’ Media Success Be Duplicated?
If conservationists or public relations professionals want to replicate the Mojave Desert tortoise story success, the task may be difficult, says Betsy Hildebrandt, senior vice president of external affairs for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. “A great, compelling story often doesn’t land, while one that seems insignificant can have legs,” she says.
In her more than three decades in communications, she’s seen how uncontrollable factors often influence the amount of publicity a study or a success will have in the media. Those can include a heavy news cycle, whether a reporter or editor has interest in a particular species, or whether viewers think the species is cute and cuddly.
“The best a PR department can do is put together a compelling pitch, be smart and target reporters who may have covered something similar in the past, [and] try an ‘exclusive,’ which you can then promote on social media to get further pickup,” she says.
Success Stories Have Power
In the void of good news, the doom and gloom stories often earn more attention, so the conservation community should promote even small victories.
“There are so many successes out there,” Danoff-Burg says. “We just don’t tell those stories very well.” We often fail to advertise minor wins in a conservation success story, such as efforts to mitigate threats like roads or poaching.
Some in the media understand that dynamic, which has led organizations like the Solutions Journalism Network to advocate for stories with a positive message that can show readers why, and how, people responded to a particular problem.
Sure, sometimes even good-news stories fail to make a splash. But even if a conservation story doesn’t grab the public’s attention the first time there’s a breakthrough, a species’ comeback could become an even more compelling narrative over time.
Take the black-footed ferret, for example. The species was thought to be extinct by the early 1980s, until a rancher’s dog found one in the wild a few years later. Biologists named the ferret Willa and collected her genetic material. Decades later they created her genetic clone in 2021 to help the species recover. The news of the genetic advance made national headlines in places like Science, National Geographic, and Smithsonian Magazine. Biologists just recently used that same genetic material to create two more younger sisters, also clones, generating yet more headlines.
The organizations that contributed to the Mojave Desert tortoise success could have more news to promote in the future, too, as they continue their research, like what makes a tortoise clutch successful, whether specific females are likely to produce young that succeed in cold weather, and whether individual differences in behavior change how they respond to predators. That could all make conservation efforts more effective on a faster timeframe, Danoff-Burg says.
As researchers and biologists increase their knowledge of how to best protect and support lots of other threatened and endangered species — and the habitats they rely on — conservationists will have more tales to tell of their successes. That could benefit both humans and animals alike.
For Wan Faridah Akmal Jusoh, the night skies hold a sense of natural wonder and offer opportunities for citizen science.
When I was a child, my mother instructed me to stop playing outside and come home at the sight of the first twilight firefly. For many years I believed what most children believe: that when darkness falls, the day’s fun is over. It wasn’t until my stint as a Student Conservation Association intern at Arches National Park, many moons ago, that I began to explore the night sky and all the secrets it holds.
Dr. Wan Faridah Akmal Jusoh had a similar experience. As the Malaysian conservation scientist recounted in a talk at TED Women in Atlanta, Georgia, last fall, she and her siblings grew up in a “superstitious, conservative community” and were always told to return home at sunset. “This particular rule made the night seem mysterious to me,” she recounted at the conference, where we first met. “I spent my school years admiring the dark, but never got around to really exploring it.”
When she was a young scientist, that began to change. On a late-night boat ride through a mangrove estuary one evening, she found herself surrounded by thousands of fireflies, all blinking in unison. As she said in her TED talk, “That is the moment I will never forget — the moment I officially fell in love with kelip-kelip,” the local name for fireflies.
Now a senior lecturer in biodiversity and conservation at Monash University in Malaysia, Jusoh has dedicated her career to firefly research and conservation. Among her accomplishments, she recently coauthored a paper outlining firefly threats and conservation strategies around the world.
Another area of Jusoh’s research focuses on the genus Pteroptyx, also known as congregating fireflies. Like the insects she saw that fateful night, Pteroptyx gather in large swarms in trees and shrubs along tidal rivers in mangrove swamps and flash their lights in nearly perfect synchronicity. Because of these displays, the IUCN refers to them as “icon species.”
But even these icons are in trouble. Last month, just a few days before World Firefly Day on July 6, the IUCN Firefly Specialist Group announced that four congregating species — the Comtesse’s firefly (Pteroptyx bearni), synchronous bent-wing firefly (P. malaccae), perfect synchronous flashing firefly (P. tener), and nonsynchronous bent-winged firefly (P. valida) — have been assessed as vulnerable to extinction, one step above endangered. (The extinction risk of the majority of firefly species has yet to be assessed, something the Specialist Group is working to address.)
On the day of the IUCN Red List announcement, Jusoh and I reconnected over video to discuss her work.
Wan Faridah Akmal Jusoh speaks at TEDWomen 2023. Photo: Erin Lubin / TED
There are more than 2,200 known species of firefly. They’re found on every continent except for Antarctica. And each type serves as an indicator of its habitat. Why is this important?
Fireflies are so important. I think the first thing that we talk about is balancing the ecosystem. There are also other insects that play a role like that, but if you look at fireflies, their life stage has [a] different role.
When we talk about firefly larvae, we are also talking about maintaining good habitat for their prey. So, for example, we’re talking about firefly larvae eating snails. The snails require good water quality. When you don’t have good water quality, the snail population will decrease and the fireflies’ population will also decrease.
But I also like to talk about specific fireflies — for example, the aquatic firefly. We don’t have many, at least not all over the world, but there are aquatic fireflies [who] can swim. They require high quality water to actually live in the water.
It’s not just about fireflies alone. When you remove the firefly from the ecosystem, you are disturbing the other parts of the food chain.
For those of us who are not scientists and have not devoted our lives to fireflies, what can we do to help foster healthy habitats so that the widest range of species of fireflies can thrive?
This might be funny, but as a collective group of firefly researchers we all say that the first, very simple thing that you can do is turn off the lights when you don’t use them.
That’s the easiest thing that we can do as citizens because fireflies are talking to each other using signals. And when you have the light too bright, you will see decreased number of fireflies because you disrupt their communication.
And number two, if we cannot contribute scientifically, we can always go for a citizen science program. There are national recording systems, or something like iNaturalist. People [like me] actually get the data. Sometimes [users] will ask, “hey, what is this species?” Then experts try to identify it. And that’s very, very helpful. We can see that [and say] “oh, I have never seen this firefly, maybe next time I should visit this place.”
I think awareness, education, is very important. And in terms of contribution, nowadays almost every country has a citizen science program.
Maybe we think that it’s quite slow. Maybe we don’t see the return on investment in this kind of work. But in the long term it creates guardians, the people who one day, when they know there are fireflies here, will become the eyes and ears for scientists to help protect them.
A mangrove forest in Thailand at twilight. Photo credit: Banthoon Pankaew.
You’ve spoken of the moment that you first saw the kelip-kelip dancing, and how it was a moment of wonder and excitement.And that moment has led to your entire life’s work.What would you say to people who have maybe not experienced that wonder? Where would they start to find wonder in nature?
I think it’s really hard to answer this. I think it really depends on how much you’re willing to be open to curiosity, open to new experiences. If you’re into nature, or if you have a high curiosity, you’re probably easily attracted to that kind of mystery. The message can be really powerful. But I think fireflies have a strength here that even by looking at them, you always have that magical moment.
In your talk you spoke of how coming home at twilight meant the night was mysterious to you. And that’s something shared by children around the world. How would you recommend we foster wonder of the dark in children?
People talk about the safety issue, of children being out at night, and that makes sense. But then when you grow up — and it was always instilled since you were young that you cannot go out — it feels dangerous. For you to get out and explore, there’s always many layers of doubt. But there are always ways to do it.
Nowadays we have a lot of opportunities to go explore an area that has already been established — for example, an ecotourism area. If we are not sure yet — and especially if we have that fear about about night — you can go with your family, ask your friends to come. The more the merrier.
Helping Indigenous peoples to protect forests and other shared resources will keep us all safer from climate change and other threats.
Saudamini Mohakud, the 65-year-old elder of her village, proudly calls herself the daughter and bride of the Eastern Ghats, the range of mountains that borders the eastern Indian state of Odisha. The mountains’ undulating wooded hills cradle her native village, Punasia, where she was born and wed. Saudamini says she could not have been happier growing up in its lap of lush greenery, which included about 50 acres of the community forests near her village.
“The forests were then a treasure trove of nature’s bounties, providing us with fruits, vegetables, tubers, medicines, and numerous other resources that sustained our households,” says Saudamini, now a grandmother to four children. “Our sacred grove, dedicated to our village deities, also flourished within these community forests.” The village cattle, too, grazed at the edge of the forest and community pastures.
But in the 1980s the forests began to disappear. The hills turned bare. According to villagers, loggers rampantly smuggled timber. Summers became hotter; dusty winds from the nearby hills hit the village. Rainfall became scarce and erratic. Agriculture, their primary means of livelihood, became uncertain. Depleted forest resources also hit their secondary source of income: collecting seeds, mushrooms, flowers, and other wild plants.
By the 1990s Punasia’s economy was as bare as the nearby hills. “This resulted in migration of men and youths from our village to find work outside,” rues Saudamini.
But over the past two decades, Punasia village has turned that around. A dedicated band of women led by Saudamini have nurtured nearly 50 acres of degraded forest patches and restored them to their former glory.
The formerly depleted forests have regrown with native trees such as sal, siali, mahua, tamarind, mango, and bamboo. Natural water bodies have also been revived with regular rainfall and rising water tables.
“It was hard work” that relied upon their traditional knowledge, recalls Mami Mohakud, now 35 and a member of Saudamini’s team. “We reared the reappearing saplings in the forests, created fences around them, and saved them from grazing cattle.”
Saudamini’s 20-year-old granddaughter, Nirupama, says these protected and restored community commons are an intrinsic part of Punasia’s existence, spiritual, cultural, and ecological heritage, as they are for other Indigenous communities. “They are not just forests or grazing land for us, but deeply connected with our feelings, sustenance, and day-to-day life,” she says.
Community commons also provide many ecosystem services that regulate the local climate, a process seen around the world, according to Sharat Kumar Palita, a professor in the department of biodiversity and conservation of natural resources at Central University of Odisha, Koraput.
“Different kinds of commons — including forest patches, water bodies, and grazing lands — play their respective roles in maintaining favorable microclimatic conditions,” says Palita.
Patches of community forests, he says, reduce heat and local temperature, bring rainfall, and help recharge the water table.
Pastures and grazing lands are also ecosystems on their own, explains Palita. The vegetation provides habitats for diverse pollinating insects such as grasshoppers, butterflies, and bees, and birds such as sparrows. The grass cover, meanwhile, checks rainwater runoff, binds the soil, and, most importantly, provides fodder to the cattle. “All these [benefits] enable the communities to develop a sustainable bond with natural resources,” he says.
Community commons also play an important planetary role by sequestering carbon, a necessary process in a world threatened by climate change. According to FAO’s Global Forest Assessment Report (2020), an average hectare of living forest biomass sequesters 72.6 metric tons of carbon.
But protecting the commons well enough to provide these benefits remains a challenge.
India’s Endangered Commons
Research shows that community commons, which constitute nearly a quarter of the Earth’s land, sustain the livelihood and fulfill the cultural and spiritual needs of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In India common lands constitute nearly 38% of the country’s landmass, spanning 308 million acres that provide critical subsistence and livelihoods for more than 350 million rural people.
Despite their significance, India’s commons have seen a 31-55% decline during the past few decades, in part due to a failure to acknowledge Indigenous practices and skills.
“Though the Indigenous communities have been historically managing and governing the commons for centuries, their time-tested systems are yet to be acknowledged or officially recognized in India,” says Swapnasri Sarangi, the head of gender, diversity, and inclusion at the Foundation for Ecological Security, a pan-Indian nonprofit that has been working with Indigenous communities on conservation and protection of commons and other issues since 2001.
Without any well-defined policy, Sarangi says community common lands are vulnerable to human encroachments and diversion for economic development, such as power projects, roads, industries, constructions, and other threats. The Indigenous communities, who suddenly feel thrown out of their age-old native resources, become impoverished and seldom enjoy the benefits of the “new age” developments. “The conservation and management of community commons is thus a global challenge today,” she says.
But a solution has emerged, and it’s helping villages like Punasia.
Community Mapping
In 2019 the Foundation for Ecological Security developed a mobile application it calls the Common Land Mapping tool, which can identify and demarcate community commons land and shared resources using GPS data. The application allows users to create images and maps of the common land and shared resources, check for encroachment on their territories, and develop collective economic opportunities.
The foundation has trained more than 8,000 community members across Odisha, 30% of whom are women. To date users have mapped an area of 450 square miles (11,7285 hectares). The organization says this work could potentially benefit up to 20,000 villages and millions of people in the state.
In Punasia village, for instance, the mapping tool has helped users to scientifically establish the village’s boundaries so they can protect the forests against unauthorized access. “Today, with sticks in hand, every household in the village regularly patrols and protects our community forest in turns,” says Mami Mohakud. Loggers pose less of a threat now, but the sticks serve as a symbolic gesture that they women are actively monitoring the forests.
Women use the mobile-based Community Land Mapping tool to demarcate the boundaries of their community forest patches and guard them against unauthorized forest resource collections and tree felling from nearby villages. Photo by Biju Tudu
The protection has boosted Punasia’s ongoing efforts to restore its forests. Today the villagers are particularly excited to watch herds of migrating elephants pass through the forest patch from the nearby Dalma sanctuary. “Sometimes, they even stay in the forest for a day or two, until the forest department drives them to the nearby Simlipal forests,” says 15-year-old Namita from the village.
The revival of the community worship site within the forest makes her particularly happy. “The forest deity is our mother and ultimate savior of the jungles,” she says. “We do not allow anyone to pluck a single leaf from her sacred site.”
Protecting the Commons, Restoring Culture
“Integrating commons with local culture and traditions is the best way to conserve them,” says Sanjukta Basa, chairperson of Sangram, a state-based nonprofit that has worked with Indigenous communities to conserve forests and wildlife since 1995.
According to Basa, the organization has so far worked in 450 villages in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, reviving at least 350 acres of degraded worship sites. Today the dense growth of these sacred patches of forest (an average of 0.5-1 acre each) welcomes animals such as barking deer, sloth bears, jackals, and wild boars. These commons are also places for celebration, where the local communities dance and sing to the rhythm of their traditional drums.
A common place of worship in a tribal village surrounded by trees and forests. Photo: Moushumi Basu
Other communities have taken on their own restoration efforts. In the Koraput district, 30-35 families in the village of Nuaguda have revived about 10 acres of forest cover with various commercial varieties of native plants. They have also collectively restored natural water bodies in their village. The largest of them, with an area of 5 acres, is used by the community to cultivate native fish species such as catla, rohu, prawn, and puntius, among others.
Four other water bodies, each 1.5-2 acres, are used for rainwater harvesting. “During the dry season, we drain out the water from these smaller ponds to cultivate vegetables,” says Kamala Mathapadia, who heads a women-led self-help group in the village that determines the community marketing of fish and vegetables. “We ensure the earnings are distributed equitably among the community members,” she adds.
The weaving community from Kotpad village takes pride in rejuvenating their traditional art of preparing vegetable dyes from plants in their community forests. According to conventional weaver Kunti Mohont, their 20 acres of community forests have plants such as tesu, catechu, annatto, Indian mulberry, shikakai, and harada (chebulic myrobalan). “We use vegetable colors derived from the flowers, roots, barks, or fruits of these plants for long-lasting effects on the fabrics we weave,” she says.
These efforts protect the local ecology while providing value to local communities. According to field research conducted by the Centre for Youth and Social Development, the restoration of commons by the local communities has augmented the livelihood of the village households by at least 20-25% during the past 8-10 years. The organization has worked with Indigenous communities in the state since 1982, empowering them through sustainable livelihoods and conservation of community forests and other commons. According to their records, the effort has so far covered about 21,300 acres (8,617 hectares) in 1,183 villages.
“The correlation between the livelihood of the local communities and the commons is best understood through the positive impacts the latter has on the region’s microclimate,” explains Ashish Jalli, senior project manager at the Centre, who was part of the field research team.
He adds that it has resulted in adequate and timely rains, restored soil fertility, erosion checks, and other accompanying factors that have secured agriculture as the primary source of livelihood for the local communities. In addition, the sale of natural resources such as vegetable dyes, leaves for making containers or plates, wild grass, honey, incense materials, and medicines in local markets are substantially contributing to their secondary sources of income.
The efforts may help sustain the villages in another critical manner, by removing the incentive to leave home and work elsewhere.
“It is rewarding for me to see how the youths are choosing to stay back and work in their native village, thus strengthening the social fabric of their community,” says Jalli.
With these successes already boosting many local commons, efforts to protect the similar territories will continue to expand. Within the next three years, the Foundation for Ecological Security says it plans to extend its outreach to other states in India, including Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra. It also expects to expand partnerships with nonprofits and government agencies to enhance the capacities of local communities to identify and strengthen the governance of commons in the country.
The ongoing work will depend on combining traditional knowledge with new technology and high-quality, open source, accessible information. “Strengthening the community knowledge on commons — and adding scientific data — empowers and instills confidence within Indigenous communities,” says Sarangi. “When their skills and knowledge are acknowledged, their capabilities and confidence are also enhanced.”
Local communities strive to protect local forests and headwaters that include some of the Amazon River’s most important water sources.
The Place:
The communal reserves of the Pampa del Burro and Copallin Private Conservation Areas, and the Jardines Ángel del Sol Conservation Concession, are nestled in the forested Andean foothills of northeastern Peru. Their geographic splendor encompasses waterfalls, orchids, hummingbirds, amphibians, and other rare and endemic wildlife. Local communities are striving to conserve these areas to protect local forests and headwaters that include water sources of the world’s largest river, the Amazon.
Why it matters:
The formerly vast Andean forests of northern Peru have drastically declined in area due to rapidly increasing agriculture and livestock grazing that have reached unsustainable levels. These montane forests are known for their high diversity of wildlife and plant species, many of which are only found there. We still have a lot to learn about the amazing wildlife in this region. In just the past five years, many species have been newly described by science: at least 26 amphibians and reptiles, six orchids, and even a small wildcat (the clouded tiger cat, Leopardus pardinoides).
Local communities support the legal designation of their lands to prioritize conservation of Andean forests. When requesting official designation of their lands as a conservation area, a community must follow legal guidelines in a participatory process to develop a master plan for management of the community conservation area. Designation of the conservation area, with a developed master plan, makes them havens for the protection of headwaters and biodiversity, safeguarding the communities’ future well-being.
Each of these conservation areas is managed by a committee of community members. These residents focus on balancing sustainable agriculture, such as of coffee and cacao, with these forests’ water storage, potential for ecotourism, and intrinsic beauty and worth.
Since 2001 communities across Peru have been formalizing private and communal protected areas to prevent forest and habitat loss. The communities of Copallín, La Perla del Imaza, and Libano each have their own conservation area. Although they’re not close together, their protected areas face the same regional threats.
A conservation area of the Andean forest. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero
The threat:
These montane hills have experienced an expansion of logging, legal mining, cattle grazing, and roads that facilitate further cattle grazing. In addition, lands in remote areas with little governmental presence here, and elsewhere in Peru, are sometimes illegally acquired by land speculators.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, people migrated to rural areas, expanding anthropogenic pressure and bringing beliefs — such as that burning fields will increase soil productivity or that smoke during the dry season seeds rain clouds — that increase the risk of forest fires.
To prevent those threats, local communities conduct patrols around their protected areas through the “minka” or “faena,” an Indigenous cultural practice of collaborative work among families for a common benefit. These activities are often organized through local civil structures called the Rondas Campesinas.
Local families want to do more for conservation, but their resources are limited. Without technical support, it is difficult for them to implement the master plans for their conservation areas, which include their vision, goals, and action items for the area. One goal of those master plans is to produce information about local biodiversity, and to promote biodiversity conservation in these important but vulnerable ecosystems.
My place in this place:
I realized during my first visit that this journey was akin to sailing toward new horizons. My team and I travelled 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the south of Peru, where we were based, to the north of the country. This involved long hours on the road while adapting to more tropical weather. Along the way new views of vast transformed landscapes, primarily dominated by rice fields, and extensive livestock pastures were common. It was shocking to observe the disappearance of the forest. However, as we moved deeper into the countryside, we enjoyed long hours of green mountain views.
In the communities families were eager to share stories of their lives and their motivations to create protected lands. In the community of Libano, the Fernandez family with Srs Eugenio, Armandina, and Arcadio created the Jardines Angel del Sol Conservation Concession because the protection of headwaters as a water resource is important for their future. In the community of La Perla del Imaza, the President Edilberto and Sr Benjamin shared with us the latest news of a newly discovered endemic orchid species, Epidendrum edquenii sp, and the newly named endemic monkey frog (Callimedusa duellmani). In the Pampa del Burro Private Conservation Area, Sr Llantoma from Copallin has been passionate since his youth about exploring the wild forest, watching primates like critically endangered yellow-tailed woolly monkeys (Lagothrix flavicauda) and other wildlife. All of them recognize the value of nature and their ecosystems and want to protect these lands. Highly motivated from our conversations, we explored the forest, following incredible animal trails, with a lot of evidence of Andean bears — clear evidence of the remarkable good health of these ecosystems.
In subsequent presentations at community meetings and school groups, we witnessed the emotional response to camera trap photographs of mammals that many local adults and children had never seen before.
As a biologist and conservationist, I’ve felt deeply rewarded by people who embrace a commitment to conservation.
A conservation area of the Andean forest. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero.
Who’s protecting it now:
The admirable work protecting these lands is managed by the committee of residents from each community, with the collaborative support of the NGO Neotropical Primate Conservation (NPC):
What this place needs:
To demonstrate the conservation importance of these communities’ lands, and illustrate the effectiveness of management of the reserves, we need to produce scientific information on local wildlife diversity to validate the master plan for each area.
Communities that believe in conservation need conservation biologists’ support. The Andean forest program of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and SDZWA-Peru has carried out conservation research in collaboration with national and local protected areas, NGOs, and private landowners, in other Peruvian landscapes since 2010, most recently in the Manu Biosphere Reserve of SE Peru. We’ve recently started collaborative research with NPC and the communities it supports in NE Peru. This expanded collaboration allows us to enhance our understanding of Andean bears and other wildlife in this region, in comparison to the results we’re obtaining elsewhere.
Because of its cultural and biological significance, and its conservation needs, research on the Andean bear can motivate broader interest in conservation and support conservation of less well-known species.
An Andean community working to protect the area. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero.
Lessons from the fight:
The most important lesson for me has been that cooperative work between residents, students, and scientists can have a healing impact on the resilience of these lands.
Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.
Insurers are pulling out of areas prone to climate risk — even as they continue to cover the fossil-fuel companies contributing to that risk.
In an era of climate disasters, Americans in vulnerable regions will need to rely more than ever on their home insurance. But as floods, wildfires, and severe storms become more common, a troubling practice known as “bluelining” threatens to leave many communities unable to afford insurance — or obtain it at any price.
Bluelining is an insidious practice with similarities to redlining — the notorious government-sanctioned practice of financial institutions denying mortgages and credit to Black and brown communities, which were often marked by red lines on map.
These days, financial institutions are now drawing “blue lines” around many of these same communities, restricting services like insurance based on environmental risks. Even worse, many of those same institutions are bankrolling those risks by funding and insuring the fossil fuel industry.
Originally, bluelining referred to blue-water flood risks, but it now includes other climate-related disasters like wildfires, hurricanes and severe thunderstorms, all of which are driving private-sector decisions. (Severe thunderstorms, in fact, were responsible for about 61% of insured natural catastrophe losses in 2023.)
In the case of property insurance, we’re already seeing insurers pull out of entire states like California and Florida. The financial impacts of these decisions are considerable for everyone they affect — and often fall hardest on those in low-income and historically disadvantaged communities.
Flooding in New Orleans in 2012. Photo: U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Bill Huntington (public domain)
A Redfin study from 2021 illustrated that areas previously affected by redlining are now also those prone to flooding and higher temperatures, a problem compounded by poor infrastructure that fails to mitigate these risks. This overlap is not a coincidence but a further consequence of systemic discrimination and disinvestment.
This financial problem exists no matter where you live. In 2024, the national average home insurance cost rose about 23% above the cost of similar coverage last year. Homeowners across more and more states are left grappling with soaring premiums or no insurance options at all. And the lack of federal oversight means there is little uniformity or coordination in addressing these retreats.
This situation will demand a radical rethink of how we approach investing in our communities based on climate risks. For one thing, financial institutions must pivot from funding fossil fuel expansion to investing in renewable energy, natural climate solutions, and climate resilience, including infrastructure upgrades.
What about communities in especially vulnerable areas?
One strategy is community-driven relocation and managed retreat. By relocating communities to low-risk areas, we not only safeguard them against immediate physical dangers but also against ensuing financial hardships. Additionally, preventing development in known high-risk areas can significantly decrease financial instability and economic losses from future disasters.
As part of this strategic shift, financial policies must be realigned. We need regulations that compel financial institutions to manage and mitigate financial risk to the system and to consumers. We also need them to invest in affordable housing development that is energy-efficient, climate-resilient, and located in areas less susceptible to climate change in the mid- to long-term.
Meanwhile, green infrastructure and stricter energy efficiency and other resilience-related building codes can serve as bulwarks against extreme temperatures and weather events.
The challenge of bluelining offers us an opportunity to forge a path towards a more resilient and equitable society. We owe it to the future generations to do more than just adapt to climate change. We also need to confront and overhaul the systems that harm our climate. The communities most exposed to climate change deserve no less.
What can Germany’s long-defunct Iron Curtain tell us about our place on Earth?
During the four decades of the Cold War, one of the world’s most highly militarized borders cut across the landscape of my home country. The 900-mile-long German section of the Iron Curtain, to use Winston Churchill’s metaphor, was a strip of land several hundred feet wide, enclosed by fences and filled with trip wires, dog runs, minefields, vehicle ditches and other obstacles designed to keep East Germans from crossing west.
It was a ghastly thing. Every day border guards had to rake a 20-foot-wide “control strip” of bare soil along the fence so they could see the footsteps of anyone trying to cross. Even outside the border fence (but still on East German soil), they regularly cut trees and shrubs to maintain a clear line of sight to target anyone in case of potential escape. Nearly 500 people lost their lives trying to flee. Others suffered grievous wounds or were imprisoned for committing the crime of Republikflucht — fleeing the republic. Countless families were separated, dreams dashed, professional lives derailed.
A memorial for a border victim. Photo: Kerstin Lange
The Berlin Wall, though less than one-tenth the length of the German-German border, came to symbolize the Iron Curtain and the Cold War division — perhaps never more strikingly than on Nov. 9, 1989, when it gave way to peaceful protesters. I watched the images, open-mouthed, on my TV in upstate New York, where I had emigrated two years earlier. I had never seen my fellow Germans so euphoric. If East Germans could simply walk into West Berlin, I thought, the longer border between the two German states had lost its purpose, too.
On visits over subsequent years, I reveled in discovering eastern Germany, connecting with those other Germans, walking in the footsteps of Bach and Goethe.
I didn’t think much about the border during those initial visits. It was gone, and that was good enough. It wasn’t until 20 years after Reunification that I finally wondered what had become of it — and then learned that it has become a long, skinny, bizarrely shaped nature preserve called the Grünes Band: Green Belt.
Lange’s book about the Grünes Band, Phantom Border, comes out in October 2024.
It’s nothing like the African Green Belt Movement, which focused on planting trees. Rather, the lack of commercial development and intensive agriculture allowed the border strip to serve as a refuge for plant and animal species that had become rare across the rest of the landscape. Bird species like European nightjars and northern lapwings, amphibians like moor frogs, plant species like western marsh orchids, and mammals like European wildcats and lynx.
Nature preserves don’t simply pop up in the landscape; they’re human creations. First, someone needs to notice and document species or habitats worth protecting. People need to do the unglamorous work of negotiating land purchases or trades, navigating legal protection categories, installing interpretive signs, and conducting biological inventories.
But first, someone has to notice.
What They Saw
Aside from the border guards, few people had paid much attention to the border while it stood. Most East Germans were not allowed within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of it. Many of the people who lived in what became the restricted zone were forcibly moved inland.
Though the human toll on the West German side was less drastic, the economic effects of the border were felt there, too. Businesses lost all customers and suppliers to the east. Jobs disappeared, and many residents moved away from what became known as the Zonal Borderlands. Granted, there was a certain degree of “border tourism.” But the West Germans and other foreigners who climbed onto viewing platforms to gaze at the border strip were generally more interested in the surreal grimness of the military installations than in the nearby flora and fauna.
One person who was paying close attention was a teenaged bird lover named Kai Frobel, who could see the border strip from his childhood home in Bavaria, in West Germany. It was the early 1970s — the height of the Cold War. During walks and bike rides, he noticed that he would see certain bird species only in the vicinity of the border strip.
He not only noticed but kept records of his observations, beginning when he was 13.
On his rambles along the border, Kai was particularly taken with whinchats (Rubetra saxicola), small, brownish birds with orange-tan breasts and light eye stripes. From his forays along the borderline — careful not to step past the warning signs saying “Halt! Hier Grenze (Stop! Border here)” — he would often see whinchats perching on bushes, reeds, cabbage thistles, or the black-red-gold East German border markers. Like several other bird species that did well in the border strip, whinchats are ground breeders and need perches to survey their surroundings and see the insects they feed on.
“I learned to ID birds backwards,” Frobel said with a grin when I met him in the Green Belt for a walk recently. He’s now in his early sixties, with a gray-streaked beard. “The normal sequence is that you start with the common species and then expand your knowledge to the less common ones, and eventually you get to see some really rare ones. But growing up here next to the border, I practically stumbled onto rare and threatened species.”
Kai Frobel. Photo: Kerstin Lange
Against all odds, he also made friends with a young East German birder named Gunter — through letters at first, and eventually through visits when 24-hour visas became available for West Germans.
When Kai was 17, he wrote up his whinchat records for a science contest and won first prize. The year was 1977. Winning was nice, he said, “but the important thing was that this was the first scientific documentation of the high biodiversity in the border strip.”
He followed it up a few years later with a more extensive survey conducted with a volunteer conservation group. “When the Berlin Wall fell and the border opened, we had very good data. We were well prepared to propose that this ribbon of land should be preserved as a feature in the landscape to protect that unusual biodiversity.
“Not that I ever expected that the border would actually open,” Frobel added. “Especially growing up here, seeing it every day — I really thought this monstrous thing was here for eternity.”
By the time the wall fell in 1989, he had gotten a Ph.D. in biogeography and begun to work for BUND, the German affiliate of Friends of the Earth.
As he and Gunter would later discover, their friendship had not escaped the attention of the Stasi, the East German secret police, which amassed hefty files on the two birders for their “subversive activities.” But their bond also helped them build a network of naturalists and conservationists — another critical factor in the story of the Green Belt.
A Movement Grows
The morning after the Berlin Wall fell, Frobel wrote postcards to all 24 contacts in their network, inviting them to a meeting to discuss the future of the border strip. When he arrived at the small restaurant where he had reserved a meeting room, the parking lot was nearly overflowing with Trabants, the basic-but-iconic East German car make. Just by word of mouth — these were the days before email and social media — his invitation had drawn 400 people to attend.
Convinced by the data Frobel presented, the group unanimously passed a resolution to call for the German government to protect the border strip as a feature in the landscape.
This, it turned out, was the easy part. Conservation, in Germany, is a matter of the federal states, nine out of 16 of which either include or abut segments of the former border. Consideration was due, too, to those people who had been forcibly removed from their homes in or near the border strip. They had received only minor indemnification from the East German state. At the same time, some who had chafed under the restrictions in the border zone felt that the Green Belt would be little more than another no-go zone, albeit without the military installations.
How, I asked Frobel, does one navigate a project that straddles conservation and historic preservation — and that aims to protect something that in the eyes of some should not be preserved at all?
“Right,” he reflected with a smile, “just imagine the atmosphere at the time, in December 1989. The border had been open for just a few days in some places, a few weeks in others. It was an amazing time. Everyone, myself included, was just elated that this border was finally gone. And then we conservationists come and say, folks, let’s preserve the border strip. That could really have backfired! We half-expected politicians to say: You guys are out of your minds.
“But we knew that there would soon be enormous pressure on this strip of land from agriculture and development,” Frobel said. “And fortunately, the resolution was well received, and the media did a good job explaining the significance.”
No doubt the guided walks Frobel and his colleagues offered were helpful, too, as were the publicity materials BUND released. The message was compelling: “From Death Strip to Lifeline,” “Nature got a 40-Year Holiday,” “Borders Divide, Nature Unites.” The brochures made a point, too, of stating that the Green Belt could never retroactively justify the brutal border system. Frobel himself told me on our field walk that he thinks of the Green Belt as a landscape of both remembrance and renewal.
In the years after Reunification, a survey of the entire Green Belt documented 1,200 rare plant and animal species. It was a remarkable finding. Nature thrives when we humans leave it alone, seemed to be the lesson.
An Accidental Lifeline
The connection between military sites and biodiversity is not a rare phenomenon: Biological abundance has also burst forth in places like the Korean DMZ, the landscape around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and abandoned military sites in the United States. Does it take military sites, of all places, to show us that our ecological footprint does not have to be one of destruction everywhere we step but can promote natural abundance? Could the paradox in BUND’s “Death Strip to Lifeline” narrative contain a message about our confused relationship to the rest of nature?
I carried these questions with me as I made my way along the Green Belt by bicycle a few years ago. It was a sort of trifold expedition during which I hoped to reconnect with my home country after 30 years abroad, learn what the border had meant in people’s lives, and understand what legacies it had left in the landscape.
Those legacies, it turns out, were still unfolding.
Somewhere between segments of my expedition I became aware of a study by biologist Stefan Beyer. Combining bird survey data from 1990 and 2011 with photo documentation along sections of the Green Belt, Beyer had noticed a perilous drop in biodiversity. Two of the typical, and endangered, Green Belt bird species had completely disappeared from the study sites. Three other species had declined by 66-90%. In the same period, 60% of previously open habitat had become overgrown or forested.
This was not entirely surprising. As anyone who tends to even a small garden patch knows, nature takes over the moment you look away. After a storm opens clearings in a forest, the seedlings and saplings of the next generation of trees quickly emerge and eventually close the canopy. Ecological succession occurs.
Still, Beyer’s findings were significant enough to prompt BUND to take a closer look at the nature of the border’s impact and revisit its management guidelines.
There’s no question that the military infrastructure had serious ecological consequences, especially where swaths were cut through forests or the hydrology of wetlands was altered. Mine fields were just as deadly for deer and other wildlife as they were for humans.
A memorial for a young man who was killed by a land mine in the attempt to flee the GDR. The plaque says “He wanted to go from Germany to Germany.” Photo: Kerstin Lange
But Beyer also concluded that through their maintenance activities, the border guards had — albeit inadvertently — fostered near-perfect conditions for biodiversity.
To explain, Beyer pointed to a much earlier chapter in the story of Central Europe’s landscapes, one that began some 12,000 years ago after the last continental glacier retreated.
Once the scraped-bare rock had weathered into enough soil to support a pioneer suite of flora, animals moved back in. Trees and forests started to grow. Thunderstorms sparked fires, creating clearings. Large herbivores — wild horses, mammoths, and a prehistoric-looking kind of wild cattle called aurochs — did their part to keep the forest from closing back in. Contrary to the long-held view that much of Europe was covered with dense forest, the landscape took on a semi-open, mosaic structure of meadows and woods. Humans eventually domesticated or wiped out the large animals, but for a stretch of a few thousand years, small-scale farmers and herders continued to support a wide range of flora and fauna — along with the varied structure of the post-glacial landscape. Patch dynamics, ecologists call this type of process, in which a certain amount of disturbance promotes a high level of biodiversity.
Over time, then, different types of human activity had mimicked the effects of natural disturbances. A key outcome was a landscape pattern characterized by a high degree of ecotones: transitional or edge habitats like hedgerows or the transition between a forest and a meadow.
The balance changed, geobotanist Hansjörg Küster has written, when intensive agriculture came to dominate the landscape in the middle of the 20th century. Ever larger plows and combines required ever larger fields and fewer hedgerows. Pesticides not only killed the intended targets but compounded up the food chain, leading to the near-extinction of species like white-tailed eagles. By the mid-1970s, large swaths of the West German landscape consisted of vast monocultures. In East Germany collectivization of agricultural lands had produced giant expanses of farm fields even earlier.
The way natural scientists like Beyer and Küster see it, it was in precisely this chapter of the European landscape story that history, in the form of the Iron Curtain, threw an accidental lifeline to the beleaguered flora and fauna. The border strip — as deadly as it was for humans and other mammals — had created a semi-open, layered landscape beyond the reach of plows, fertilizers, and pesticides. In and along that narrow band were habitats that supported a wide range of different species. Not the aurochs or wild horses, but mammals like lynx and European wildcat and birds like the whinchat and black stork. All in all, BUND’s surveys documented 146 habitat types, from fens and bogs to nutrient-poor grasslands and alpine meadows. This was not a wilderness untouched by humans. And like all landscapes, it was not static but dynamic. To maintain the Green Belt’s remarkable biodiversity in the coming decades would require humans to take an active role. At a 2011 symposium, Beyer, Frobel, and other experts developed a set of management strategies based on the guiding principle of fostering a semi-open, layered landscape. Depending on the habitat type, that could mean measures like brush-hogging, sheep-grazing, or rewilding with semi-wild breeds of horses or cattle.
Human Hands
I once loved the idea of the Green Belt as a wild corridor in the middle of my densely populated home country, freed both from military installations and other human impact. I still love the idea of wilderness as something larger than our human selves and see an urgent need for places where ecological processes dominate the landscape, rather than human designs. But all too often in history the idea of wilderness has served to erase the human presence in a landscape, both in narratives and by actual removal of humans from the land.
Here, then, is the flip side of the border–Green Belt paradox. As environmental historian William Cronon puts it, “the notion of wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall.”
As if we humans actually could exist outside the natural world, I thought as I rode my bike along a stretch of the Green Belt, listening to the wild duetting calls of a pair of cranes.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote years before the Iron Curtain descended across the landscape. His words traveled with me as I tried to fathom the paradoxes of this time and place. Humans and nature. The frequent memorials for people who had died along the border, and the silver lining in the legacy of life it left.
And as the legacy became clearer over the past 30 years, we’ve seen biodiversity plummet on a global scale. The 2022 UN Biodiversity (COP15) report handed our species not only a dire warning for our own continued existence but also a large chunk of responsibility for the staggering loss of species.
What if we recognized the human-nature divide as an illusion? Could the glimpse into earlier cultural landscapes that the Green Belt provides help us think of nature as our ecological home?
Biologist Bernd Heinrich reminds us in his book The Homing Instinct that home is where what you do has consequences, and where you expect and get feedback — both positive and negative — from what you do. That feedback is perhaps the main, if not the only, mechanism that maintains balance with the environment that we deem relevant to us.
But homes are also places with which we are familiar. And that is exactly the challenge many of us face regarding our ecological homes: we are not familiar with what is around us. If we can’t tell one species from another, how can we even notice the loss of biodiversity? Author Robert Michael Pyle calls this the extinction of experience. One study found that children can recognize on average 1,000 different corporate logos but only a few plants and animals native to the area they live in.
This was disturbing. To cheer myself up, I recently arranged a visit at a Waldkindergarten — a forest preschool near the Green Belt. Groups of two or three children were scattered around a clearing. Some were balance-walking across a downed log, two were taking turns on a simple board-and-rope swing attached to a sturdy tree branch. Other kids were half-hidden by ferns and saplings, pointing to something I couldn’t see.
Then I noticed a little girl arranging leaves on a log. I walked over to her and told her my name. She glanced up at me, a look of concentration and contentment on her face. She couldn’t have been more than four or five years old.
“I’m Emma,” she said. “Do you want to help me collect leaves?”
“Sure,” I said. “What kind would you like?”
“I could use some beech leaves, and maybe some hazel. So far I have mostly oak,” she replied, then turned back to her log.
She’s at home right here, I thought, and she can tell one tree species from another.
Could it be so easy? Might we solve the crisis of biodiversity by sending our children to forest preschools and having adults take botany and zoology courses?
Ecological literacy and a connection with the natural world may not be the whole story, but they’re foundational. What we do with our ecological knowledge is the next question.
The spring 2023 BUND magazine reports that whinchats — the poster-child birds of the Green Belt — remain very endangered. But the article contains some silver linings, too. In a program adjacent to a northern segment of the Green Belt, not far from little Emma’s pre-school, BUND pays farmers a premium to mow later in the season so whinchats have time to get their broods off the ground — literally. Farmers are also asked to install perching posts. On the other side of the river Elbe (a 70-mile stretch of which overlapped with the Iron Curtain), a levee was moved inland to restore 400 hectares of floodplain forest and meadows. In both cases the number of breeding pairs of whinchat went up significantly.
Such programs speak directly to the question of how we humans relate to nature: How we produce our food and energy is about as fundamental as it gets.
What Kai Frobel’s resolution recognized in 1989 — the former border strip’s role as an ecological corridor across Germany and a landscape of remembrance — has increasingly found broader recognition. The Green Belt was anchored in Germany’s federal Law on the Conservation of Nature in 2009, and three federal states have, so far, designated it as a National Monument of Nature — Germany’s newest conservation category. As of January 2024, the Green Belt is a candidate for UNESCO’s natural and cultural heritage lists. All of this recognizes the former border strip’s natural, cultural, and historical significance within and beyond the reunited country.
And of course, it has immense, ongoing personal significance. That’s part of Kai Frobel’s vision for the Green Belt. “I dream of the Grünes Band,” he told me on our walk, “as an alternative Camino de Santiago, a kind of pilgrimage route that allows people to retreat from the noise of everyday life. A place to come for Besinnung” — reflection and awareness.
I nodded, moved by the arc of this man’s life and work. What better place than this path of loss and silver linings to find our home on this planet.
