For Ukrainian activists, rescuing the dogs of war — not to mention the cats, swans, bats, bears and other wildlife — often means putting their own lives on the line.
Saving Ukraine’s injured and displaced animals during wartime often means seeing the worst elements of Russian cruelty.
“When a territory is liberated, our team goes there and we speak with the people who survived the occupation,” says Olga Chevhanyuk, chief operating officer of UAnimals, Ukraine’s largest animal-rights organization. “And each time we hear that when the Russians entered the town, they started shooting animals for fun, starting with dogs just walking the streets and ending with huge farms and shelters. Sometimes it’s probably a matter of manipulation, getting people scared. But mostly it’s no reason at all, just because they can.”
Originally founded to oppose inhumane conditions in circuses, the nonprofit UAnimals has shifted its mission to rescuing and caring for domestic animals and wildlife devastated by Russian aggression.
Working with local volunteers and shelters, they’ve helped tens of thousands of animals since the war began a year ago, including dogs and cats, horses, deer, swans, birds of prey and bats — even large predators like bears. In January alone they rescued more than 9,600 animals, provided food and medicine to thousands more, rebuilt shelters, and helped fund operations throughout the country.
They’ve also found themselves purchasing supplies not traditionally used in animal rescues.
“Before the war, you never think of buying helmets for your team,” Chevhanyuk says.
And then there’s the human toll: The nonprofit has contracted with psychologists to provide on-demand assistance to its team in the field. “So now they can have a session with the psychologist when they’re overwhelmed,” she says.
But this is all about saving more than individual animal lives and human minds. It’s about saving the soul of a country.
A Crime Against Nature
UAnimals has started calling the Russian war an ecocide — the deliberate destruction of the natural environment.
“Nowadays 20% of Ukraine’s nature conservation areas are affected by war,” Chevhanyuk says. “Russians occupy eight national reserves and 12 national parks, and some of the national parks are land-mined. Holy Mountains National Park is 80% destroyed. Some of them are destroyed 100%, meaning there’s no plants, no animals, no buildings which people used to heal animals. The land is littered with remains of destroyed objects, like tons of oil and burned products.”
Landmines are among the worst problems. They kill humans and animals indiscriminately, start fires, and will take years to mitigate. About 62,000 square miles of Ukraine may be contaminated with landmines. “This is greater than the size of Illinois,” according to information provided by a U.S. State Department official. “The United States is investing $91.5 million over the coming year to help the government of Ukraine address the urgent humanitarian challenges posed by explosive remnants of war created by Russia’s invasion.”
Cleaning up the pollution will require even more funding and effort. The war has caused at least $37 billion in environmental damage, a Ukrainian NGO said in November.
UAnimals predicts it could take more than a decade to repair the damage, but Ukraine’s wildlife doesn’t have that much time. “More than 80 species of animals in our country are on the verge of extinction and may completely cease to exist due to Russian aggression,” Chevhanyuk says. “Some of them are the steppe eagle, black stork, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, barn owl and eared hedgehog.”
While many of these species also exist in other countries, Chevhanyuk says wildlife has been an important element of Ukrainian folksongs, art and symbology — the very fabric of its culture — for centuries. “Being humane and treating animals as something really important and equal — this is one of the things which differs us a lot from Russians. And that’s, I believe, a part of our future victory.”
Moving Forward
UAnimals continues to ramp up its fundraising and recovery efforts while expanding its network of shelters outside the country — a necessary step, as Ukrainian shelters and reserves are rapidly filling to capacity with animals too wounded ever to be released back into the wild.
“We have big shelters for bears, for example,” Chevhanyuk says, “but they are already full. I’m afraid that if something happens, we’ll need to bring these animals abroad. So we are very grateful to all our partners in different countries, because there’s a big need right now.”
The organization is also tapping back into its activist roots to bring international attention to conditions in Ukraine. In February they organized Stop Ecocide Ukraine rallies in four U.S. cities — Atlanta, Austin, New York and San Antonio — that each attracted hundreds of people.
In a way this is a return to form. “We used to create huge animal-rights marches in 30 Ukrainian cities every September,” Chevhanyuk says. “But since war started, we are more focused on the emergency.”
And the international community has started to take notice. Last month the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution to “build and consolidate a legal framework for the enhanced protection of the environment in armed conflicts” — steps that support establishing ecocide as a new international crime.
“From a legal perspective, this is really encouraging,” says Jojo Mehta, cofounder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, “because if you put severe harm to the living world on the same level as severe harm to people, if you say ecocide is as bad, wrong and dangerous as genocide, you’re creating a mental rebalance.”
It could still take years for ecocide to become international law. But meanwhile the destruction of Ukraine continues, as do recovery efforts.
“If our team knows there is an animal to rescue,” Chevhanyuk says, “they will go in.”
Can science and tradition finally help heal the region’s peoples and bring balance to its biodiversity-rich waters and mangrove forests?
When I visited the floating palafito fishing village of Nueva Venecia in early 2021, I found myself staring out across the calm, reflective expanse of the coastal lagoon complex known as the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. Looking back at that moment, I understand why Ernesto Mancera has spent the past 35 years studying the region’s mangroves and other species: Everywhere I looked, I saw life.
More than 130 fish species call the Ciénaga Grande home, along with 200 bird species, manatees and 18 other mammals, 26 reptiles, three mangrove species and hundreds of other types of plants and trees.
Mancera, a marine biologist from the National University of Colombia, later told me, “The Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta is the most productive estuarine ecosystem in the world.”
As with any estuary, it’s the properties of the brackish water that make the difference. The Ciénaga Grande serves as a node of interconnection in a complex hydrological network, linking Colombia’s principal waterway, the world’s highest coastal mountain range, and the Caribbean Sea. For millennia this system has existed in a dynamic balance that allowed life to flourish.
But despite its internationally recognized beauty and value, a sense of awe and sadness intertwine here. No place better represents Colombia’s rich biocultural diversity and tragic history.
The Ciénaga Grande has suffered decades of degradation. Human alteration of its dynamic hydrology and the obstruction of essential points of connection have led its mangroves and aquatic species to suffer devastating mass die-offs.
At the same time, the traditional people who have long lived in harmony with the ecoregion have experienced brutality, exploitation, and the denigration of their traditional knowledge.
But today there’s hope. Experts and community leaders say rigorous and coordinated effort could lead to the recovery of this complex, resilient place.
To the east is the towering Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range, which itself is a biodiversity hotspot and a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Three rivers rise in the highlands of the Sierra — the Sevilla, Fundacion and Aracataca. These rivers directly feed the Ciénaga Grande with freshwater and rich sediments.
The mountains also contain montane forests, paramos and glaciers, all located within the territories of Indigenous peoples.
Running along the west is the Magdalena River, Colombia’s longest and most important waterway. The Ciénaga Grande is part of the Magdalena Delta system, which drains into the Caribbean Sea to the north, and connects to the river through natural channels that bring sustained flows of freshwater and sediment.
The freshwater from the channels and the Sierra’s rivers is critical to the health and balance of the Ciénaga Grande, whose semi-arid hydroclimate experiences much more evaporation on average than precipitation. Climate change is expected to exacerbate this freshwater deficit.
“The interconnection between these various ecosystems, the hydroclimate, and the interchange of brackish and fresh waters created unique conditions and provided the energy for the Ciénaga’s remarkable biodiversity and productivity,” Mancera said.
This hydrological connectivity and the Ciénaga Grande itself also have irreplaceable biocultural value for the Sierra peoples.
“The life, vital feminine energy and balance generated in the Ciénaga supports the environmental, social and spiritual equilibrium of the entire Sierra,” according to my colleague Teyrungümü Torres Zalabata, an Arhuaco physicist and leader of the Agua Maestra collective.
That connection has suffered for nearly 100 years.
A Tragic Social and Ecological History
The decades-long deterioration of the Ciénaga Grande began as an extension of the bananero epoch of the 1920s, when multinational corporations like the United Fruit Company, in collaboration with local authorities, incentivized and exploited large banana plantations. This region along the western Sierra foothills near the Ciénaga Grande became known as the “banana zone,” and its complex history inspired the magical realism of the fictional town of Macondo in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
But the reality was far from magical. Powerful plantation-owners diverted and contaminated water from the rivers that feed the Ciénaga Grande and blocked the Sierra’s Indigenous peoples from making their traditional pilgrimages.
“In the late 1950s a road connected the cities of Ciénaga and Barranquilla to facilitate the export of bananas to the United States,” said Mancera. “This cut off the natural communication between the Ciénaga and the Caribbean Sea.” Towns sprang up along the road, bringing increased deforestation and human waste.
Thus began the wide-scale alteration of the hydrological and socioecological dynamics of the Ciénaga Grande.
In the 1970s the government built another ill-conceived road parallel to the Magdalena River along the western banks of the Ciénaga Grande. “This was the critical point,” said Mancera. “This road cut off the vital connection between the Magdalena River and the Ciénaga.”
With less freshwater flowing into the system, the water and soils of the Ciénaga Grande became hypersalinated. Water levels also lowered, exacerbated by an El Niño. This led to the first mass mangrove and fish die-offs.
“Mangroves provide many important ecosystem services,” said Mancera. “They ensure water quality, prevent coastal erosion, provide refuge for many species, and capture carbon. Their degradation in the Ciénaga led to cascading negative impacts for the entire ecosystem.”
Over the decades these die-offs increased in severity and frequency, with approximately 55-60% of the mangrove forests now lost. Upwards of 70% of the fish were lost as well.
Dead mangroves along the Ciénaga-Barranquilla road. This road cut off the natural connectivity between the Caribbean Sea and the Ciénaga Grande. Photo by D.H. Rasolt
This ecological disaster caused enormous suffering for the peaceful palafito fishermen and their families, a situation exacerbated by Colombia’s prolonged civil war and notorious history of drug trafficking. In the most pronounced example of the horror inflicted on the region, paramilitaries perpetrated a brutal massacre in 2000 within and around the floating villages of Nueva Venecia and Buenavista. The assault killed at least 39 locals and displaced hundreds.
“We lived in fear for a long time, and many never returned,” said fishermen and community leader Diego Martinez from his stilted home in Nueva Venecia. (Editor’s note: Martinez’s name has been changed to conceal his identity and protect him from retaliation.)
The Palafitos
For more than 200 years, traditional amphibious palafito communities have lived within the Ciénaga Grande in floating villages. Artisanal fishing with traditional hand-woven nets called atarrayas has been the foundation of their idyllic life and livelihood.
“We know the Ciénaga, its many species that are still here and those that are gone, and the many changes it has gone through, better than anyone because we live it, every day, every minute, and we should be listened to,” Martinez tells me, his voice filled with indignation.
Policymakers and researchers, both national and international, have drastically overlooked this traditional ecological knowledge of the palafitos in their many failed plans for the Ciénaga Grande.
For example, the opportunity to build capacity within the communities for monitoring water quality and fisheries has been largely neglected. When I visited the region in 2020 and 2021 as part of a project investigating cumulative impacts to the Lower Magdalena River wetlands and the potential for establishing water monitoring stations and decentralized clean energy technologies, I learned that nearly all previous projects neglected both the palafitos’ multi-decadal, firsthand knowledge of changes to the Ciénaga Grande, as well as their ability to participate in data collection for long-term research projects.
A young palafito fisherman arrives with his catch in the amphibious community of Nueva Venecia. Photo by D.H. Rasolt.
It is not only the palafitos’ knowledge and capacity to participate in protecting the Ciénaga Grande that is ignored. Their constitutionally guaranteed rights to life and livelihood are frequently neglected by designated government entities.
“When we call on the regional authorities to maintain the water flow, which they have promised to do and which is essential to the fisheries and our access to food and drinkable water, we are almost always ignored,” said Martinez.
The regional authority in question, CORPAMAG, has been consistently unaccountable, said environmental attorney David Vargas from the Colombian Ombudsman office, who worked for years in the Ciénaga Grande ecoregion.
“We formed popular actions and petitioned CORPAMAG in 2018 on numerous rights violations of local communities, from water concessions and illegal dike constructions of large landholders along the rivers of the Sierra that feed the Ciénaga, to water quality and waste-management issues within the Ciénaga that impact the health and livelihoods for palafito communities. These petitions were all ignored.”
Protective Status and Past Interventions
The Ciénaga Grande, while largely degraded and ignored, is not lacking in formal protective status — although they exist in part in name only.
At the international level, the Ciénaga Grande has been declared a Ramsar protected wetland, a UNESCO biosphere reserve and an AICA bird conservation area — all designations that in theory require the Colombian government to protect it.
Countless environmental protection laws exist in Colombia, including those covering wetlands and mangroves, but many of the best ideas and policies remain only on paper.
“We have the tools, the knowledge and the data, but nobody listens or pays attention to the science,” said Mancera. “It has been many years of inefficiencies, unnecessarily repeated studies and failed policies.”
There was a time, during the 1990s, where ambitious integrated research and planning for restoring the Ciénaga Grande was put into action. The framework was known as Procienaga.
“Much was learned over this period regarding the fisheries, water quality and mangrove forests,” said Mancera. Robust data — since organized into a publicly available database — demonstrated the importance of river-Ciénaga connectivity for maintaining hydrological balance and healthy salinity levels in the water and soils. Scientists also identified the eutrophication-inducing impacts of agrochemicals like phosphorus coming from the banana zone of the Sierra, which was beginning to host water and chemical-intensive oil palm plantations.
Fishermen in the Ciénaga Grande near the one remaining Ciénaga-Ocean connection, with the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the background. Photo by D.H. Rasolt.
Starting in 1996 five channels connecting to the Magdalena River were dredged, allowing freshwater to flow back into the Ciénaga Grande. The relatively sudden rush of freshwater — aided by a La Niña event in 1998 — shocked certain important components of the complex interdependent hydrology and ecology, such as eutrophication-controlling oysters. But at the same time, many positive signs were seen for mangrove recovery. The hypersaline soils returned to tolerable levels in certain areas.
Since the Procienaga project ended in 1999, Colombia’s Institute of Marine Investigations, INVEMAR, has continued monitoring the mangroves, water quality and fisheries, while making recommendations to authorities like CORPAMAG. But accountability and action have been few and far between. Channels frequently become blocked by sediment, while agrochemicals and diminished water flow from the Sierra keep killing fish.
New Initiatives and Governmental Change
After a damning report in 2017, the Ciénaga Grande was officially placed on the Ramsar Montreux List of wetlands at extreme risk, which brought some renewed interest and investment into the ecoregion. One example is the new “Sustainable Landscapes” project through the UN’s FAO, in collaboration with INVEMAR and other entities.
“These projects hold promise for better coordinating the different actors and including the communities in the process,” said Mario Rueda, research coordinator and fisheries scientist at INVEMAR.
While the impact of this renewed internationally backed interest remains to be seen, there has been a major governmental change within Colombia. New president Gustavo Petro — who has proclaimed support for the environment, traditional peoples and peace — may bode well for Colombia’s diverse ecosystems, including the Ciénaga Grande.
Rivers that rise in the highland territories of Indigenous Peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta feed the Ciénaga Grande with freshwater and rich sediments. Photo by V. Circe.
Petro has extended his biocultural priorities internationally by appointing Leanor Zalabata, a strong, principled female Arhuaco leader from the Sierra with a holistic worldview, as the new Colombian ambassador to the United Nations.
Integrated Solutions for Recovery
It’s a testament to the resilience of the Ciénaga Grande that this complex ecosystem remains productive at all and still has restoration potential after decades of interconnected threats.
But resilience only goes so far, and the ecosystem can still reach a critical point of no return. If the Ciénaga Grande is going to recover, it needs long-term integrated research and planning, with local community participation and even guardianship, which has a record of success in other local and Indigenous-led areas.
Most notably the region needs rigorous mangrove restoration studies to demonstrate how much soil salinity each species can resist and what outcomes are possible in terms of carbon capture and fishery recovery.
“Just planting seeds without this firm knowledge for a dynamic estuarine ecosystem, or any other forest ecosystem, has been shown not to work,” said Mancera. “Many projects in the Ciénaga have failed because they ignore basic science and integrated planning.”
This research would need to run in parallel with plans for periodically dredging the channels, based on monitoring and alerts from the palafitos, to maintain a healthy dynamic hydrological equilibrium for the Ciénaga Grande.
Ideally integrated long-term plans would also encompass projected climatic changes for the ecoregion, cumulative impacts from “development” along the Magdalena River Basin, and attention to the basin-scale integrity of the Sierra rivers that feed the Ciénaga.
“These collaborations and commitments would give time for the recovery of mangrove species and fisheries and for the Ciénaga overall,” said Mancera.
To anticipate the impacts of a historic river restoration, we need to understand how salmon, bats, insects, algae and other parts of the ecosystem are behaving today.
Next year will be the big year. By the end of 2024 the Lower Klamath River will run free for the first time in a century, enabling fish like salmon and steelhead to reclaim 400 miles of river habitat in California and Oregon.
The removal of four dams on the river — the largest dam-removal and river-restoration project to date — got the official go-ahead late last year after two decades of work from the region’s Tribes and other advocates.
But before next year’s much-anticipated demolitions begin, a lot remains to be done.
The smallest of the four dams, Copco 2, will come down in 2023, and crews will improve roads and bridges, move a municipal water line, and build a new fish hatchery.
PHOTO: The Klamath River watershed and the four dams slated for removal. (Map by Klamath River Renewal Corporation)
Proponents expect dam removal to help resuscitate a beleaguered river where dams have blocked migratory fish and warm reservoir waters have spurred toxic algae growth and fed deadly fish parasites. But evaluating the ecosystem after dam removal — and understanding how to manage a changing river — requires a firm understanding of how all the river’s components function today.
To accomplish that, researchers have spent years gathering information on everything from salmon to algae to bats. And now, as they enter the critical final year, they’re hustling to collect as much data as they can before the dams finally come down.
“It’s an exciting time for the river because dam removal has been a long time coming,” says Laurel Genzoli, a researcher from the University of Montana who has been studying algae and water quality on the Klamath. “But it’s also a stressful time, because this is the last summer to collect data with the dams in place, and we have to make sure we have everything we think we might need.”
Long-Term Data
The uphill political battle to remove the dams began two decades ago. But the effort only started gaining widespread support in the past few years. Thankfully researchers have been studying the river for a longer time, amassing comprehensive data that could form the baselines for future comparisons.
Many of these researchers are affiliated with universities, or state and federal agencies, and some are from the region’s Tribes. Upstream are the Klamath Tribes in Oregon. And along the lower Klamath River in California are the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa Valley, Quartz Valley Indian Community and the Resighini Rancheria.
“We’ve been monitoring fish populations for decades — how many fish are spawning, how many are being captured, how many juvenile fish are out-migrating,” says Barry McCovey Jr., a fisheries biologist from the Yurok Tribe. “As far as salmon populations go, we’ve been tracking that closely for a long time.”
Recovering salmon populations for Tribes’ cultural and subsistence needs, and for the health of the ecosystem, is a key goal for river restoration.
Tribes have also been involved in more than a decade of research in partnership with state agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and researchers from the Oregon State University to track the fish disease Ceratanova shasta, a parasite that’s decimated salmon populations.
That work began independent of dam removal, but it’s become increasingly important because researchers expect a free-flowing river will help reduce the deadly parasite.
The same is true for water quality, which Tribes have tracked for years.
“That work didn’t begin because of dam removal, but the baseline data will be helpful afterwards,” says Genzoli, who works with Tribes from the lower Klamath River to gather data on water quality.
She’s also studying the growth of algae and other aquatic plants. Driven in part by a large amount of upstream nutrients, the river produces a lot of algae. Too much can clog fishing nets, and some can be toxic, endangering wildlife and human health.
Algae on the Klamath River. Photo: Tara Lohan
Robert Lusardi, a research scientist at the University of California, Davis and a fish scientist for the nonprofit California Trout, is working with the Yurok Tribe and others to study the aquatic invertebrates which feed on those plants, as well as water temperature and chemistry. “Those are really good indicators of change in the system,” says Lusardi.
That baseline data will be important. “When the dams come down, we’ll start doing this same work in the river that’s currently under the reservoirs and it will help us evaluate how the river and tributaries are recovering,” says McCovey.
Moving up the food chain, another group of researchers is studying an animal that often feeds on aquatic insects — bats.
Barbara Clucas, an associate professor in the Department of Wildlife at Cal Poly Humboldt, works with her graduate student Ryan Matilton and other researchers to collect baseline data on the species of bats in the region and their activity levels.
As the diversity or abundance of invertebrates change after dam removal, so might their predators.
“I would imagine that dam removal would change bats’ prey base,” says Clucas. “That could impact when and where we see them. It’s possible that looking at how their diversity, abundance or activity levels change could give an indication of the health of the system overall.”
Dam-Removal Research
While some long-term monitoring will be useful for post-dam study, other efforts have been initiated specifically for dam removal.
One of those is extensive research and mapping by the U.S. Geological Survey of how sediment will move, and what effect that could have on streamside vegetation and the downstream estuary.
Other work has targeted fish — a main conservation priority.
Lusardi has been studying where salmon go in the basin, including the mainstem of the Klamath and its tributaries, by examining fish ear bones — or otoliths. The researchers began by measuring how much of the element strontium was present in the water in different parts of the basin. Most tributaries have very distinct strontium signatures.
“When juvenile salmon rear in the basin, depending on where they are, they’re picking up these strontium signatures in their ear bones,” he explains. “When they come back as adults and they spawn and die, we pull the carcasses out of the river, remove their otoliths, and send them to the lab to be analyzed.” Based on the strontium values, they can learn where the juveniles spent their time.
Working with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Yurok Tribe, they’ve spent two years collecting otoliths.
“This will provide a baseline of understanding how fish use the basin below the dams now,” he says. After the dams come out, they’ll be able to track returning fish to understand how they’re moving back into the longer reach of the river and tributaries they couldn’t reach before.
Lusardi is also involved in another project with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Klamath Tribes, the National Marine Fishery Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to better understand how spring-run Chinook will use the basin.
Once numerous throughout the watershed, these native fish are now limited to only one tributary below the dams. Last year the researchers released 1,500 acoustically tagged juveniles above the dams by Upper Klamath Lake and have followed how and when they’re out-migrating. They’re set to do another release this spring.
The earth-filled hydroelectric Iron Gate Dam, powerhouse and spillway on the lower Klamtha River near Hornbrook, Calif. in 1962. Photo: D.L. Christensen / California Department of Water Resources
“We’ve got a really good idea of when they were leaving the tributaries, when they’re moving into Upper Klamath Lake, and how quickly they’re moving through the lake,” he says. “It’s giving us a really good idea of how spring-run Chinook might use the basin [after dam removal] and should be really useful for adaptively managing them in the future.”
Science, People and Decisions
Another area of study enabled by funding from Oregon Sea Grant pairs university researchers from Oregon State University with University of Montana’s Genzoli and the Yurok Tribe to look at how dam removal will affect water quality, the aquatic food web, and water use by the diverse groups that live in the basin.
“We’re partnering with the Yurok Tribe to expand our knowledge about the river and about how decisions can be more equitable,” says project leader Desiree Tullos, a professor of river engineering at Oregon State University.
There are three parts to the project. The first is understanding the connections between water quality and the food web, which can create good or bad habitat for fish, aquatic plants and toxic algae.
Second is the people part. They’re working with stakeholders in the basin, including Tribal members, landowners, ranchers, irrigators and environmental advocates to inform decision making about managing water quality with an eye toward equity.
That scientific and social research will then inform the third part of the project — decision modeling.
“We’re going to bring all those data on the people and the ecosystem together and run a bunch of computer simulations,” she says. That might include looking at how recreation or opportunities for Tribes could change if water quality is managed in a different way.
Models can tell them “if we restore 1,000 acres of wetland in the upper basin, would that get us to a place where there’s no longer toxic algal blooms, or do we need 10,000 acres of wetland?” she says. “And then how does that change if there’s more droughts or more wildfires in the future? Or how does it change if we use a decision process that the Tribe follows, or a local NGO, or the Bureau of Reclamation?”
Funding Issues
All of this research is just a sampling of what’s being undertaken on the river. And while much of it is done in collaboration, there’s no overarching entity — or fund — responsible for overseeing pre-dam removal study.
“Although more than $450 million has been allocated for the dam removal, to our knowledge, little has been allocated to fund the science needed to evaluate it,” they wrote. “This is a mistake.”
Despite that, researchers have found money from disparate sources — government agencies, universities, nonprofits, private foundations. And they’ve established their own working groups and conferences to share information and drive further collaboration.
“People are sticking with it and dedicated to continuing to do what we can to try to collect data and understand how these changes are affecting the river,” says Genzoli. But she admits that some bigger picture connections could be missed between areas of specialty.
Making sure the science is funded, “is the most important thing,” says Lusardi. “Not just to document what’s happening, but to adaptably manage the river [after dam removal] too.”
Tribal Leadership
While researchers may lack a central — and robust — monetary fund, they do have another valuable resource that’s helped deepen their understanding of the river: Tribes.
Klamath Basin Tribes and allies rally in 2006 for dam removal. Photo: Patrick McCully, (CC BY 2.0)
“Tribal members were essential in driving the politics of dam removal forward, but they have also been maintaining long-term water quality, fisheries and wildlife records of this river in a way we don’t see on most rivers,” says Genzoli.
And it’s not just the western scientific data Tribes have collected, but their traditional knowledge of the ecosystem.
“Tribes have been on the landscape since time immemorial,” says Tullos. “They can tell us things about what a wet versus a dry year is that don’t rely on discharge measurements, but on their observations of where the river was or how bad the algae was in that year. We can get these really full data sets by piling on what we, western scientists measure, with what Indigenous folks understand about the system. By bringing together these multiple ways of knowing, that gives us a much richer understanding.”
And that can help drive an ambitious goal.
“A lot of people would say that this is just a huge fish-restoration project and it’s going to really be great for salmon,” says McCovey. “But for me, it’s so much more than that.”
It’s in their culture as Yurok people to restore balance to the world and ecosystem, he says. To be “people who fix the world.”
“The act of removing those dams and restoring that energy flow from the upper basin to the lower basin is an act of our cultural identity,” he says. “From a Tribal perspective, we are helping to restore that balance, and in a small way, we’re helping to fix the world.”
Art raises awareness, but environmental organizations too often fail to engage with artists or their own creativity.
In the last year a series of open calls, panels, film festivals and magazine articles have signaled a rising tide of awareness about the vital connection between climate action and art. As a climate artivist — an artist combining creative practice and climate advocacy — these fill me with both hope and frustration.
I’m filled with hope because climate change is a crisis of imagination that needs artists to reclaim the creativity beaten out of us by the same extractive systems that are making our planet and people sick. A crisis is a turning point in a disease; here it’s the turning point we need for mass climate action.
Art can help us to dream the world we want, to remember our Earth roots, to grieve our losses, to celebrate life amidst it all, to resist greenwashed perceptions of climate apathy, to heal our interconnected web of life, and to create just climate futures.
Artists have long helped inspire and mobilize individual and collective action. From the Civil Rights Era to the AIDS crisis to the Black Lives Matter Movement to the recent Covid-19 pandemic, art has helped channel feelings, spread the message, and galvanize action. Today the climate movement needs artists more than ever before.
Despite the scientific consensus on the need to phase out fossil fuels to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, the latest federal data show an increasing number of oil and gas drilling permits in the United States. In the face of this mammoth bipartisan failure, we need to integrate art with fossil resistance.
Art raises awareness, sometimes through courting controversy. For example, in 2022, climate activists from organizations like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion desecrated artworks in galleries around the world. The protests were their own kind of synchronized performance art. Whether artists and the art world like it or not, such sensational protests catch our short attention spans: Our planet is burning. Our leaders keep digging us ever deeper into the climate hole.
But these actions are no replacement for the patient work of participatory artivism that mobilizes communities, as in the case of the anti-coal movement in California. A 2021 qualitative study investigated artivism’s role in resisting the construction of a coal-export terminal in California. It found that art had played a decisive role in growing the campaign’s demographic reach and influencing key decision-makers. By engaging poets, musicians, dancers and visual artists in ways that spoke to diverse aesthetics and community spaces, and in doing so from the beginning of the campaign, the organizers effectively engaged women and youth of color.
Art is more than a means of expressing resistance. It is essential for breaking our flight or freeze response to climate angst and for stepping into our own agency to create solutions for ourselves and those disproportionately affected by climate disruptions.
A study in an American Psychological Association Journal evaluated the psychological effects of climate art on spectators. It found that while the use of dystopian elements can catch initial attention, it’s art that offers solutions, and artworks that emphasize the beauty and interconnectedness of nature, that have the most emotional and cognitive impact on viewers to encourage climate action.
To be sure, art alone will not solve the climate crisis. We need to break out of our bubbles. We need to expand our imagination to weave interdisciplinary artistic collaborations with frontline activists, climate scientists, behavior change researchers, policy advocates and lawmakers.
Seeing my climate and art worlds coming together gives me hope. Yet it’s frustrating when — as happened last year — climate activists convene a lengthy panel on the role of artists without having a single artist participate in the discussion. (And no, putting an evocative art by an artist of color on your invitation is not enough.)
It’s frustrating when the leader of a big environmental advocacy organization opines on the role of artists for making people care about climate change without naming concrete steps his own organization is taking to systemically collaborate with artists.
It’s frustrating to see call after call for donations of art for major climate causes without pausing to consider if perhaps artists have worldly concerns like rent, insurance, or a broken kitchen faucet.
If you’re part of the climate movement, stop treating art as an afterthought relegated to your communications departments and artists as the romanticized subjects of soliloquies. Inspiring a creative climate solutions renaissance begins with the art of change within.
Here are a few places to start as you reimagine ways to foster the climate movement’s relationships of solidarity and mutuality with artists:
Connect with diverse artists: Get to know artists from varied backgrounds and practices in your communities. Invite them to your next climate gathering in ways that honor creative labor. Explore artistic engagement in your shared context. Plant the seeds of a climate art salon, an open mic or residency program to foster cross-pollination of diverse people dreaming, singing, dancing, crying and laughing their way toward climate-just futures together.
Learn about imaginative climate art collectives: Study how Design Science Studio’s global creators (including me) are making art for a regenerative future; The Climate Museum’s first pop-up in Manhattan is blending art, social science and climate action; Gulf Coast Murals is bringing together artists, activists, communities and allies in the Gulf Coast to remember and envision; Art and Climate Initiative is using theater for climate solutions; The Climate Comedy Cohort is engaging comedians in the hottest climate science; and 5millionstrong is building artists’ mass actions to shape our shared future.
Reclaim your creativity: As you foster climate art “out” in the world, be creative in your own life: doodle, play, write a poem, hum your favorite song, move out of your very serious chair. In a burning world, so many of us are burned out and separated from our creative vitality. Art offers possibilities of building bridges that embody our intertwined private, collective and planetary healing.
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.
Can we help species adapt to the evolving threat of compound climate extremes?
When dead birds fall from the sky, you know something is wrong. But finding out exactly what killed them isn’t as easy.
Scientists had plenty of theories when migratory sparrows, flycatchers, blackbirds, swallows, warblers and other birds in the southwestern United States turned up dead or dying in August and September of 2020. Some suggested it could have been smoke from wildfires. Others said it could have been a cold snap. Some experts thought it was lack of food, as evidenced by the birds’ emaciated, dehydrated bodies.
No matter what the cause, the effect was devastating on the people who found the bodies. “I collected over a dozen in just a two-mile stretch in front of my house,” biologist Martha Desmond told The Guardian that September. “To see this many individuals and species dying is a national tragedy.”
Now we may know why those thousands of birds died. According to a paper published in the journal Sustainable Horizons, the deaths were caused by “compound climate extremes” — multiple factors and events that pounded the birds over and over again until they expired.
It started in August 2020, when smoke and heat from Western wildfires forced migratory birds to flee their traditional feeding grounds before they could bulk up for the winter. They moved inland at first, landing in areas where food and water were naturally scarce. That would have been okay under normal, well-fed conditions, but then came the second punch. A four-day cold snap and snowstorm struck the northern Rockies and pushed the already weakened birds to move yet again. Not yet recovered from their first emergency journey, they turned their beaks southward, where their energy stores finally gave out.
The researchers call this “weather whiplash” — or more scientifically, an “ecological cascade” — and warn that future double or triple whammies could pose a threat to migratory species here in the United States and around the world. It could even cause extinctions, they write.
But they also provide a roadmap that could help lessen the impact. First, the authors call on the scientific community to further study the threats of environmental stress on bird health, so we better understand when we need to intervene. They also express the need for sustainable land strategies that could provide alternatives to existing trees, so birds have more places to nest, roost and feed. Finally, they recommend preparing sanctuaries to help injured animals recover in these potentially affected ecosystems and implementing reintroductions to boost populations of species suffering from all these compound effects.
In a world where climate extremes get more dangerous every year, and where people also suffer from weather whiplash, adaptations like this will become increasingly necessary — unless we want to see more flocks falling from the sky.
As one of the world’s most endangered birds returns to its ancestral skies, partners work to eliminate a persistent threat on the ground.
Last May biologists from the Yurok Tribe and Redwood National and State Parks released four captive-bred California condors into the wild. They were the first condors to soar above the towering coast redwood trees in Northern California in more than a century. The reintroduction effort had been years in the making.
A second cohort of four condors joined the small flock in autumn. A bird known as A6, whose Yurok name is Me-new-kwek’, was the last to leave the release pen, Nov. 16. He immediately took flight.
“A6 went down to the bottom of the hill canyon and got a little bit stuck,” says Tiana Williams-Claussen, wildlife department director for the Yurok Tribe.
Me-new-kwek’, which means “I’m bashful,” spent 19 days exploring his new world at the bottom of the canyon. Some of the other young condors visited A6 and even roosted near him at night during his odyssey. Finally he made his way back up to the release site, where he eagerly fed on a carcass the biologists had provided to keep the flock close to home.
Watching the young condors claim their independence is a little like watching your kid go off to school for the first time, says Williams-Claussen. “It makes you happy, but there’s still a niggling worry as they start to spread their wings.”
Me-new-kwek’ (A6, 1101) takes to the sky! Final release of 2022 and 8th #Californiacondor now wild over @TheYurokTribe ancestral lands and @RedwoodNPS. His name means “I’m bashful” or “I’m shy” because of his reserved demeanor. The journey is just beginning! Many thanks! pic.twitter.com/KWB4KB6zHV
— Northern California Condor Restoration Program (@YurokCondors) November 16, 2022
Those worries are well-founded: California condors are critically endangered, and every bird alive today is a descendant of a captive-breeding program that prevented the species’ extinction.
Condors still face real dangers out in the wild, the greatest of which is lead poisoning. As scavengers, they only eat carrion and risk ingesting lead when they consume the remains of animals killed with lead ammunition. This includes hunted game like deer and elk as well as “pest” animals such as coyotes and ground squirrels, who are frequently shot by ranchers and farmers.
Late last fall the remains of three poached elk were discovered in Northern California in areas the condors are known to frequent. X-rays revealed lead fragments in the neck of one of the carcasses — enough to kill several condors.
“This is about as close as you can get to a worst-case scenario,” Chris West, Yurok wildlife department manager, wrote in a Facebook post about the incident.
At least four condors were just a 10-minute flight away from the poaching event when it happened. Fortunately, the carcasses were recovered before the birds discovered them. But experts worry that other condors might not be so lucky in the future.
A Barrier to Recovery
It takes very little lead — a gram or less, or about 1% of a typical rifle bullet — to sicken or kill the giant raptors. It’s a slow, painful death: The lead shuts down digestion, weakens muscles, and eventually damages organs, including the brain. In the period between 1992 — when nearly extinct condors were released back into the wild — and 2021, 120 birds died of lead poisoning, accounting for over half the deaths among wild birds. Even condors who don’t ingest a lethal amount of lead can experience side effects that further threaten their development or survival.
As early as 2010, the Yurok Tribe began reaching out to hunters, first within the tribe, then outside, to educate them about how lead ammunition harms wild animals.
“We had a lot of individual success; 85-95% of hunters we talked to said they didn’t realize lead was an issue and of course they would switch,” says Williams-Claussen.
Part of the Tribe’s Hunters as Stewards program involved handing out free nonlead ammunition. That had to stop in 2018, after a new California law limited ammunition distribution to licensed vendors. The Tribe has since partnered with Ventana Wildlife Society, which holds such a license, to distribute a limited amount of lead-free ammunition.
“As Tribal members, harvesting game has been part of our life forever,” says Williams-Claussen. “We’re really hoping to increase nonlead availability to help folks make that transition.”
In July 2019 California banned hunting wildlife with lead ammunition, although it still allowed sales for other purposes.
That should have helped condors. But since the law went into effect, lead poisoning deaths have gone up, not down.
The reasons for this are complicated, says Kelly Sorenson, executive director for Ventana Wildlife Society, which co-manages the wild condor flock in Central California with Pinnacles National Park. The overall market share for nonlead ammunition is around 10%, and at least one major wholesaler has stopped shipping to California, further tightening supply.
California also requires that ammunition transactions happen face to face. “When you go to the store you have an extremely low probability of getting the ammo you want, especially .22 [rifle ammunition],” says Sorenson. This is frustrating for rural ranchers who must drive long distances to purchase ammunition, he adds. Too many customers who might have been willing to switch end up driving home with lead ammo.
Since 2012 Ventana has provided nonlead ammunition to local ranchers and hunters in Central California, which is home to a flock of about 100 free-flying condors. As ammo availability has shrunk, this service has become even more vital.
Private land holds some of the best condor habitat, and in many cases, once landowners understand the dangers of lead ammunition — not just for condors, but for other animals and humans — they become vital partners in conservation, says Sorenson.
One by One
A recent incident shows how technology and outreach work together to help protect condors.
Ventana’s biologists keep close tabs on their flock using signals from the birds’ GPS transmitters. “We can map out where these birds are on a daily basis and even infer when they are feeding,” says Sorenson. One day last fall, they noticed several condors feeding in a new location. Mike Stake, who runs Ventana’s nonlead program, knew that area ranchers are constantly battling with ground squirrels over their hay crops and other property damage. He reached out to a rancher in that area to see if they were using nonlead ammunition.
“The guy wrote back, ‘It’s terrible. I can’t find it anywhere and I have condors flying and feeding all over the place,’ ” says Sorenson. Stake immediately drove to the ranch and delivered lead-free ammunition. The rancher told eight of his neighbors. All eight called within a week, requesting lead-free ammo.
As successful as Ventana’s nonlead ammunition program has been, its scope is limited. In the long run, full recovery of the species will require reducing lead use across the condor’s present and future range.
“We know that the death rate due to lead poisoning is so high that without ongoing releases from captive flocks the population [of wild condors] would not be self-sustaining,” says Sorenson. “The good news is, if we can just lower those lead deaths to a reasonable level, there’s every reason to think condors will bounce back, much like bald eagles and peregrine falcons have.”
Reducing the Lead Threat in Oregon
The Yurok regard condor, or Prey-go-neesh, as sacred. The condor plays an important role in the Tribe’s creation story and ceremonies, and its relationship with the birds extends back thousands of years. In restoring the condor, the Yurok are restoring their cultural landscape, too.
Condor fans are anticipating the day when the giant scavengers spread out through the Pacific Northwest and return to the skies above Oregon. Leland Brown, manager for the nonlead hunting education program at Oregon Zoo, has been preparing for that day for years. Since 2015, the zoo, which breeds condors for the wild population, has worked to reduce lead exposure in “nontarget” wildlife, primarily raptors.
“We’re providing options that allow hunters to be successful but remove or mitigate lead exposure to wildlife,” explains Brown. This includes sharing information and hosting events where hunters can test nonlead ammunition in their own firearms.
In 2018 the Oregon Zoo partnered with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife on a pilot incentive program in northeast Oregon for elk-hunters on the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, which is managed by The Nature Conservancy. The program is still active today. Before the hunt, Brown sends hunters a request to consider using nonlead ammo. A check-in process allows hunters to show that they are using nonlead ammunition and explain the reasoning behind their choices. Participants are entered into a drawing to win gift cards.
When the program started, only 20-25% of nearly 300 hunters used nonlead ammunition. By 2019 and 2020, the number had risen to over 75%.
The partners are building on this success and expanding the program statewide. They are also launching a study with Portland State University and recruiting hunters to test the performance of different types of bullets.
Nonlead ammunition isn’t as scarce in Oregon as it is in California, says Brown. One of the biggest barriers he observes stems from doubts about how the ammunition will perform.
“Some hunters wait several years to draw a tag,” says Brown. “They have concerns that they might be switching to ammunition that isn’t as effective.” Although research studies and filmed demonstrations prove the efficacy of lead-free copper ammunition, forums where people can ask questions and, better yet, test the products and decide for themselves, are critical.
“As much as we like to think conservation is about wildlife, it’s just as much about human behavior,” says Brown, who cofounded the North American Non-lead Partnership in 2018. “If we’re able to accomplish the same effect [as legislation] using voluntary efforts then we’re probably building a more durable outcome in the long run.”
Every Bird Is Sacred
Condor crews working in Yurok ancestral territory are dedicated to helping their small flock thrive and grow. They plan to release at least four birds each year for 20 years, and they will continue to provide lead-free carcasses sourced from local ranches (and occasionally, road-killed animals) to help reduce the condors’ exposure to tainted meat. Biologists will capture the birds twice a year for health checks. Any bird found to have lead in its system can be treated through a blood-filtering process called chelation.
But stopping the poisoning before condors eat lead remains key. Condor crews closely monitor the birds’ movements; if they suspect the birds are “wild foraging” on a carcass, they will visit the site and make sure it isn’t contaminated with lead.
Understanding where lead is in use is key: The National Park Service has partnered with the Tribe on joint funding proposals to investigate the risks of lead contamination in the recently released birds, says Karin Grantham, resource management and science program manager for Redwood National Park. The two entities are also working with nonprofits to help educate the public on the dangers of lead ammunition to all wildlife, especially condors.
Will the eight birds in the burgeoning flock encounter deadly toxins in their new home? The condors are starting to fly farther afield, says Williams-Claussen. They’ve explored as far as the Klamath River and even made it to the coast — about 80 miles.
Watching the young birds acquire skills has been fun, says Williams-Claussen, adding that the second cohort of condors, taking cues from the first, has been much quicker to venture out.
“Every condor is critical and sacred,” Williams-Claussen wrote in a Facebook post about the elk-poaching incident. “Older condors teach younger birds how to make it in the wild. When a condor dies prematurely from lead poisoning, all of the knowledge it amassed throughout its life…is lost.”
Better accounting can go a long way in establishing sound policy to tackle the climate crisis.
The Environmental Protection Agency recently earned applause from environmental groups for a move that went largely unnoticed.
For the first time, the U.S. government in 2022 included methane emissions from dams and reservoirs in its annual report of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions to the Inventory of Greenhouse Gases and Sinks required by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
“It’s a big deal that they’re now reporting this,” says Gary Wockner, executive director of the river advocacy group Save the Colorado.
While we’ve long known that coal and gas-fired power plants emit troubling amounts of greenhouse gases, research has found that reservoirs can emit significant amounts of methane, too — which has a global warming potential 85 times that of carbon dioxide over 20 years — along with smaller amounts of nitrous oxide and CO2.
Emissions from some reservoirs can even rival that of fossil fuel power plants. Yet, until now, there’s been no real accounting at the national or international level for these emissions, which fall under the category of “flooded lands.”
“To our knowledge, the U.S. is the first country to include estimates of methane emissions from flooded lands in their greenhouse gas inventory,” the EPA press office told The Revelator.
That may be in part because calculating reservoir emissions isn’t a simple task, as The Revelator reported last year:
Tracking emissions from reservoirs is complicated and highly variable. Emissions can change at different times of the year or even day. They’re influenced by how the dam is managed, including fluctuations in the water level, as well as a host of environmental factors like water quality, depth, sediment, surface wind speed and temperature.
“We’re happy the EPA’s doing it,” says Wockner. “And we’re looking for the next step, which is refinement in the modeling.”
Water rushes through 12 spillway gates at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Hartwell Dam in Georgia. Photo: Doug Young, (CC BY 2.0)
EPA researchers are working to improve how they calculate those emissions, and they’re also conducting a four-year study of CO2 and methane emissions from 108 randomly selected U.S. reservoirs. This aims to “inform a greater understanding of the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from U.S. reservoirs, and the environmental factors that determine the rate of greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs,” according to the agency’s website.
Wockner applauded the EPA for those important actions but has urged the agency to go even further.
Last year his nonprofit, along with more than 100 other organizations, petitioned the EPA to begin a rulemaking to include dams and reservoirs under the United States’ Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which currently requires 8,000 facilities, including coal- and gas-burning power plants, to declare their greenhouse gas emissions. Hydroelectric plants and other reservoirs aren’t currently included in that list.
There are a few reasons why they should report their emissions, the petitioners explain. Hydropower is largely regarded as a clean, emissions-free energy source — although research suggests otherwise.
“As a result, the federal government, states and utilities frequently make decisions regarding climate policies and advancing toward a cleaner electric sector based on incomplete information and mistaken assumptions regarding dams and reservoirs’ greenhouse gas emissions,” the petition states.
If operators of hydroelectric dams are required to regularly report emissions, that would help agencies, nonprofits and the public better assess whether current dams should be relicensed or decommissioned — and whether new projects should be built.
The result, the petitioners say, would be “better-informed climate policies and better-informed permitting decisions.” A win-win.
The United States continuing to report dam emissions to the United Nations, and at home, would also send an important international signal.
“The U.S. helps set climate policy across the planet and helps fund various development projects through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, United States Agency for International Development, and others,” says Wockner. “Accounting and reporting the greenhouse gas emissions from dams is a critical step forward in climate policy.”
A 10,000-acre logging project threatens endangered species, recreation and nearby communities.
The Place:
The Jellico Mountains are on the southern edge of the Daniel Boone National Forest along the Kentucky-Tennessee state line. Here the Appalachian foothills turn into the steep slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, giving rise to remote forests hosting some of the highest tree and aquatic species diversity in the United States.
Why it matters:
The geology and geography of the area create a rich diversity of both flora and fauna. Eroded sandstone has formed gorges, cliffs, waterfalls, rock shelters, natural arches, bridges and caves that provide critical habitat for many endangered, threatened, and rare plant and animal species. Opportunities for outdoor recreation are plentiful here and provide solitude and adventure to those seeking a relationship with the natural world. This area is also home to nearly 1,300 acres of secondary old-growth forest, much of which is proposed to be clearcut.
Kentucky Heartwood Executive Director, Lauren Kallmeyer next to an old growth hickory in Jellico. Photo: Tina Camp Scheff. Used with permission.
The threat:
A proposed U.S. Forest Service project includes nearly 5,000 acres of clearcutting and 5,000 acres of selective logging and thinning. When forested areas are clearcut, they become vulnerable to landslides and erosion. The steep Jellico Mountains are not suitable for this type of logging. Clearcutting, coupled with record breaking and catastrophic storms, has caused landslides on other recently logged Forest Service land in eastern Kentucky.
Credit: Jim Scheff and Chris Karounos, KYHW
Legacy impacts from coal mining, along with significant problems with invasive plant species, add to the challenges of protecting and restoring this unique area. The threat of flash flooding in the valleys is amplified under these compounding conditions. We have seen firsthand the devastation extreme weather events have caused across eastern Kentucky in the past few years. Protecting this forest also means protecting the people who live there.
Landslides not only erode the soil and damage the mycelial networks that the forest depends on to regrow, but they also have the potential to push endangered aquatic species to extinction through sedimentation of waterways.
Photo: Jim Scheff, KYHW staff ecologist. Used with permission.
Jellico Creek is one of the main waterways that curves through the bottom of these mountains. Along with its gorgeous blue-green color, it holds some of the last remaining critical habitat for the Cumberland darter (Etheostoma susanae), a fish only found in isolated populations in the upper Cumberland River system of Kentucky and Tennessee. Other endangered species like the Cumberland elktoe and blackside dace could also be imperiled by the project.
Our place in this place:
Kentucky Heartwood, where we work, has been exploring the Jellico Mountains for several years to locate rare plants and old trees, scope landslides from prior logging projects, and enjoy the beauty and scenery of the area. While there are no established hiking trails, there are old logging roads and gravel Forest Service roads that offer miles of enjoyable recreation by foot or mountain bike along with beautiful winter views into Kentucky and Tennessee.
Jellico Creek, with large boulders that make for perfect lunch spots and several pretty waterfalls, is a gem that should be preserved for all species in our ecosystem to enjoy.
Jellico Creek. Photo: Lauren Kallmeyer, KYHW executive director. Used with permission.
The lack of designated trails is one of our favorite features of this area. As you walk into the woods with no set path, it becomes a choose-your-own-adventure game. The things to discover open up to you when you explore off the beaten path.
The area’s forests rival some of the largest and most diverse we see in the region. Towering basswood, hickories and oaks are accented by yellowwood trees, among the rarest endemic trees in the eastern United States. North-facing slopes are filled with medicinal herbs like black cohosh. One fall day we discovered a rare Appalachian gentian flower tucked into the sandstone cliff line. Both the Appalachian gentian and black cohosh are on United Plant Savers’ “species at risk” list from overharvesting and habitat loss, reminding us of the richness that still exists here in Kentucky as well as the sensitivity of these populations.
Who’s protecting it now:
Kentucky Heartwood closely monitors Forest Service activity in the Daniel Boone and advocates for protecting and defending Kentucky’s public wildlands. Since 1992 we have proudly called ourselves “forest defenders,” but we aren’t alone.
The community at the base of the Jellico Mountains initiated an incredible public campaign to “stop the chop” in response to the Forest Service’s scoping analysis. The highlight of this public involvement was a town meeting that community members held with the agency. With over 100 people in attendance, the room was packed with local residents who oppose the project, from property owners who will be directly affected to career loggers who acknowledged the risks involved with logging on such steep slopes.
Jellico Mountains forest. Photo: Tina Camp Scheff. Used with permission.
As a result, more than 300 comments were formally submitted to the Forest Service in opposition to the project, including several highly respected environmental legal nonprofits (the Center for Biological Diversity, Southern Environmental Law Center and Kentucky Resource Council). This coalition is regrouping to prepare for the next phase of the project, the Environmental Analysis public comment period, which is expected in June 2023.
What this place needs:
A groundswell of well-organized community opposition has stopped logging projects on national forests in the past. The Jellico community will continue to rally opposition to halt this project as the Forest Service moves onto the next phase.
In order to get this project withdrawn we have to continue to engage local residents, news outlets, environmental law firms and politicians to take a stand.
The Daniel Boone National Forest is a place of refuge, beauty, abundance and adventure. We would like to see a focus on creating more recreation opportunities in this area instead of extractive projects like this one.
Every decision we make today will leave generations of people growing into adulthood with questions about why we chose profit and extraction over protection. We are running out of time to blame it on ignorance. The old-growth forests that used to dominate the landscape of eastern Kentucky are a thing of the past. With what little secondary old growth we have left, every measure to ensure its protection should be our utmost priority.
The climate crisis is nipping at our heels, and these forests are one of our greatest assets in combating climate change through the drawdown of greenhouse gases. The forest is our solution, and it is worth more standing.
Lessons from the fight:
While we may think that environmentalists gravitate toward a certain political orientation in reality, love for nature spans all political divides. The community-led effort to stop the Jellico logging project reflects a diverse coalition of people with common goals, which makes a “David vs. Goliath” effort more achievable.
Join the fight!
We know public participation in opposing projects like the Jellico Mountain logging project can stop them in their tracks.
There will be a second opportunity — tentatively June 2023 — for the public, regardless of where one lives, to make a comment on this project.
Recovering urban wildlife isn’t just about protecting a city’s parks and rivers, but also making its streets, homes and skyscrapers greener.
Wild boars roaming Italian towns. Goats on the streets of Wales. Egyptian geese wandering free at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. When humans retreated from busy streets during Covid-19 lockdowns, the wildlife emerged, bringing into sharp focus what conservationists have been saying for decades: In order to repair the environmental damage that we’ve caused, it’s imperative that we allow natural processes to restore damaged landscapes.
In many parts of the world, it’s beginning to. In the United Kingdom, a country that has lost almost half of its biodiversity since the 1970s, rewilding — the term used to describe the process by which parts of land or water are returned to a wild state — has entered the national lexicon.
Until now rewilding, which is by its very nature a large-scale effort, has been concentrated in the countryside and rural areas. More recently, however, there have been a number of projects and local movements pushing for more urban rewilding and at a smaller scale.
Experts call it microrewilding, and harnessing its potential comes at a crucial time.
By 2050 the United Nations estimates that more than two-thirds of the global population will live in urban areas and the resilience of cities will depend on a “fundamental climate transition,” according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme. “For years the story of cities has been a tale of attempting to carve a place for humans outside of nature,” the report notes. “But we are increasingly realizing that smart, sustainable and resilient cities need to harness the power of nature.”
It’s no surprise, then, that an opinion poll commissioned last year by the charity Rewilding Britain showed that 81% of Britons supported rewilding, with 40% strongly supportive and just 5% of people opposed.
“People are talking about rewilding parks and rewilding gardens,” says Richard Bunting, director of Little Green Space, a local nonprofit that helps to create spaces that benefit people, wildlife and the environment. “We’ve lost an awful lot of habits in Britain and many of the remaining have become extremely degraded. By taking more local action — microrewilding, if you will — you start creating connectivity and nature corridors in the landscape.”
Rewilding the City
In 2019 Mayor Sadiq Khan officially declared London the world’s first National Park City, defined as a large urban area that is managed and semi-protected, with the goal of making it wilder, as well as greener and healthier. Last year in May, those plans gained momentum.
Khan — who has described the UK as “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world” — has commissioned a group of rewilding experts to bring nature back to the British capital through new nature reserves, community initiatives, and microparks, which are small unused or underused areas that can be turned into inexpensive green spaces. The group includes Isabella Tree, who reintroduced beavers to her estate in the first large-scale rewilding project in England, as well as Nick Bruce-White from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the UK’s largest nature conservation charity.
While large-scale urban rewilding projects are increasingly being embraced by city governments around the world, such as the High Line gardens in New York City or the network of six biodiversity parks totaling nearly 2,000 acres in New Delhi, India, what will play a key role in the success of wildlife recovery efforts in cities, is not just protecting a city’s parks and rivers, but making its streets, homes, and skyscrapers greener.
The Highline in New York City. Photo: Cristina Bejarano (CC BY 2.0)
Siân Moxon, the founder of Rewild My Street and a climate change expert at UK Universities Climate Network, says microrewilding can offer many benefits such as reducing flood risk, improving air quality, and countering the urban heat island effect, particularly in cities like London. And it’s easily doable even at the individual level.
“It’s about adding greenery and thinking about every surface as a potential host,” Moxon says. “So the roof of a bin store or the wall of a house. Grow a climber up it or put an insect hotel on it.” Water in any form — a bee bowl or a bird bath — is great. So is planting trees or, if there’s no space, growing something in a large pot.
Gardens cover about a quarter of many cities, including London, and rows of gardens can form a habitat corridor, potentially linking up wider green spaces like parks, as well as allotments, school playing fields, cemeteries, and other places that can be of value to wildlife.
But in the UK, where the Victorian attitude of “neat and tidy” still prevails, an attitude shift needs to accompany the efforts. Because nature, as Bunting points out, is messy.
“There are often large swathes of areas managed by local councils, for example, that could be doing so much more for biodiversity.” he says. “But in fact, they’ve been over-mowed and sometimes sprayed with chemicals, to the point that they’re almost lifeless ecological deserts. Meanwhile, our insect populations are collapsing, sometimes quite catastrophically.”
Localized Efforts
In recent years a number of projects have not only looked at bringing biodiversity to the urban environment but made an active effort to build them from the bottom up, with community involvement.
The city’s Wild West End is one such project, in which over half a dozen of central London’s largest property developers are working together to create natural pathways in the city through a combination of green roofs and walls, planters and flower boxes, street trees, and pop-up spaces. Already, in heart of Britain’s capital city, sightings of the black redstart — one of the UK’s rarest birds — have gone up.
Graphic by Siân and Jon Moxon/Rewild My Street (with altered photos courtesy of Charles J Sharp, Pau.artigas, Super.lukas, Didier Descouens, Ninjatacoshell, George Hodan, Piotr Siedlecki, Peter Mulligan, Potapov Alexander/Shutterstock).
Elsewhere, London-based Citizen Zoo is trying to bring back the large marsh grasshopper — once a common sight across Eastern England’s wetlands but now locally extinct. The group came up with a “citizen keeper” project called A Hop of Hope, through which volunteers are given a crash course in grasshopper husbandry, helping them breed and rear grasshoppers in their own homes. Keepers can raise a brood every four or five weeks, after which they’re released at two secret locations. The project, which began in Norfolk in 2019, has seen tremendous success with several hundred of these grasshoppers now building self-sustaining wild populations.
When it comes to individual and street-level efforts, however, gardens remain the best bet, since 22 million people in the UK have access to a garden. The most significant thing residents can do for wildlife in their garden is to create a pond.
“Pound for pound, a pond delivers more wildlife than any other type of habitat in your home,” says Alastair Driver, the director of Rewilding Britain, the only countrywide organization in Britain focusing on rewilding. Having a natural pond without fish, he says, will attract all sorts of life — mayflies, water beetles, pond snails, dragonflies, damselflies, caddisflies, newts, frogs and toads. “We used to have millions of ponds in our landscape and we’ve lost the vast majority of them, so by restoring a pond, you are restoring a natural process. You are doing a little bit of rewilding.”
Ponds also help tie into the connectivity that’s essential for the rewilding process to work. When rewilding a bigger area, Driver explains, greater value comes from it being connected through a corridor to another area so that if a habitat is temporarily destroyed, the wildlife can migrate to other areas.
The same principle applies on a smaller scale. If your next-door neighbor also has a pond and you’ve got holes in your fence, you allow things that can’t fly to move through from one site to the other. Hedgehogs are a classic example, needing many acres of land for a viable population. “If you’ve got a whole street full of pockets of wildlife garden, then in effect you are starting to create a much bigger habitat and starting to move up that rewilding spectrum.”
As much as microrewilding is about nature, it’s also about our relationship to nature. In urban environments, largely due to a lack of access, many people have forgotten how to co-exist with wildlife. Through smaller and more local microrewilding efforts, that relationship can be restored. Indeed, studies show that when people are actively involved in restoring and enhancing green spaces, they feel both a connection to, and ownership of, those spaces.
The gravity of the biodiversity crisis underscores the need for big change. But it can start with small actions, too, that can be applied anywhere — no matter how small a space, in how densely populated a city. The declining population of bumblebees, for example, who can only fly for 40 minutes between feeding, can be massively helped by something as simple as a window box. Planting a nectar-rich plant is planting a crucial pitstop.
“These micro actions can be a lifeline to different species,” says Bunting. “And if enough of us do it, then you’re creating a mosaic of habitats for species across the country.”
We’ve got the latest on species rediscoveries, light pollution, right-wing posturing and more.
Do you ever feel as if the world is…unraveling? Well, let’s see what we can do to tie it back together again.
Welcome to Links From the Brink.
Lost and Found
The world lost dozens of unique species in 2022. You can find the full list here (call your therapist first), but meanwhile, here’s a counterpoint.
Even as we lose species, we’re also in the great era of species rediscoveries. Just look at the partial list of species scientists discovered again in 2022:
The black-naped pheasant-pigeon, last documented in Papua New Guinea 140 years ago, whose rediscovery made headlines around the world
Delissea argutidentata, a Hawaiian plant found teetering on the edge of a volcanic crater
The Batman River loach, a Turkish fish rediscovered by a “stroke of luck”
The Santa Marta sabrewing, a Colombian hummingbird only seen twice since 1946, spotted at last by a birdwatcher (how’s that for a life list achievement?)
Beddomeia tumida, a tiny Tasmanian freshwater snail — less than a quarter of an inch across — last seen more than 120 years ago
The “comical-looking” Hill’s horseshoe bat, thought to be extinct for 40 years (we think it’s kinda cute)
And Gasteranthus extinctus, an Ecuadorian plant species named after its own purported extinction but now potentially in need of rebranding.
Of course, none of these species are doing well. They survived by the skin of their teeth for decades, but now they need conservation help. In some cases they’ve been found just in the nick of time, which means conservation plans can be developed and put into action to make sure we don’t lose them again.
Are there more species yet to rediscover? Undoubtedly. But the number of places in which to search grows finite, as does the time to find them. And of course, locating both new and lost species takes resources that many organizations and governments simply don’t have. But every lost species found is an opportunity, and a reminder that even plants and animals unseen for decades can be saved if we have the will.
Give a Hoot, Let Elephants Poop
Breaking news: Elephants are good for the climate.
We already knew that elephants provided a host of localized environmental benefits. Now new research finds they help the whole planet. How, you ask? Simple: by eating the right kinds of trees, then pooping out the right kinds of seeds, which then grow into new trees that store more carbon than their vegetative neighbors.
The same research found that if elephants went extinct, it would dramatically reduce the carbon storage of African forests.
Somehow, we doubt this news will stop wildlife trafficking in its tracks — the mega-rich people who “invest” in elephant ivory aren’t exactly your typical climate champions. But the truth is that elephant poop is probably worth more than elephant ivory, elephant-foot umbrella holders and other ungodly “products” combined. That alone is another reason to invest (non-ironically) in elephant conservation.
We Are All Made of Stars (You Know, Those Things You Can’t See in the Night Sky Anymore)
Light pollution around the world just keeps getting worse and worse. A new study published in the journal Science this month found that the night sky increased in brightness between 7 and 10% every year between 2011 and 2022. This growth in ambient light, driven by the concurrent growth in LED lighting, increasingly blots out all but the brightest stars in the sky. The study was compiled from data by more than 51,000 citizen scientists, whose observations using their naked eyes revealed loss unseen by satellites.
LEDs are obviously great for lighting and saving energy, and they’re one of the best tools for reducing greenhouse emissions. But they use so little energy that they’re also overused and left burning for hours and hours on end, which has dangerous health effects on humans and wildlife.
So if you use LEDs — and you absolutely should — use them wisely: The International Dark-Sky Association offers a list of great options to help individuals, businesses and communities reduce light pollution. Check ‘em out and put them to work.
The Media Steps Up for Climate Media
Is the media starting to take climate change more seriously? That seems to be the case, according to a new survey by the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford, which found:
As the impact of climate change becomes more evident, the news industry has been rethinking how it covers this complex and multi-faceted story. Around half (49%) say they have created a specialist climate team to strengthen coverage, with a third hiring more staff (31%). Just under half (44%) say they are integrating dimensions of the climate debate into other coverage (e.g. business and sport) and three in ten (30%) have developed a climate change strategy for their company.
This is progress of course, especially for an industry that has given far too much attention and voice to climate deniers — telling “both sides” of the story doesn’t cut it when most deniers were paid to spread their lies about the science of climate. But it still needs to go a lot further. I mean, come on, only half of outlets have a dedicated climate team? It should be 100%. Less than half are integrating climate into other topics? Come on! Every business, crime, local government, entertainment, weather, arts and sports article or broadcast should mention climate in some way or another. Climate chaos affects every facet of our lives, and the media is key in spreading understanding of the threats we all face.
It can go further. It should go further. Every outlet should also refuse to accept advertising or other sponsorships from fossil fuel companies. And they should look beyond climate and hire a dedicated reporter or team devoted to covering wildlife issues, another team devoted to pollution, and one more committed to investigating cases of environmental justice. (I guess you’ll just have to keep reading The Revelator for all of that.)
The Wrong Direction
You know how California, Washington, and many other states are passing legislation to mandate electric vehicles in the next few decades? Well, trust the right wing to twist that as far as they possibly can. Look no further than Wyoming, where Republicans have introduced legislation to ban electrical vehicle sales by 2035 — the exact opposite direction of where things should be going.
By what logic are they making this push? It’s all, they say, about “protecting” the oil and gas industry, but you know that also translates into “owning the libs.”
Meanwhile, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has pulled support for a planned electric battery factory in his state, purportedly to be “tough on China.” Critics say he’s just posturing for a planned 2024 presidential campaign. Meanwhile the $3.5 billion Ford factory and its 2,500 jobs are up for grabs. The most likely new site: Michigan (which would be glad to have them).
Will electric vehicles now become the next made-up battlefield against the “woke mob?” Our prediction: This month’s controversy over “banning” gas stoves was just a warmup.
More Wrong Turns
While the growth in renewables continues to exceed expectations, oil is still, sadly, king in this country. According to new projections from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, crude oil production will increase to record levels over the next two years, hitting a shocking 12.8 million barrels per day in 2024.
How is this possible, with so much wind and solar in development and so many new electric vehicles hitting the road? One word: plastics. So much of the fossil-fuel-derived stuff is produced every day that it’s erasing gains we make in other areas.
Let’s End on a Good Note — or Five
Give five cheers for the previously endangered San Clemente Island paintbrush, lotus, larkspur, bush-mallow and Bell’s sparrow. These four plants and one bird species, all native to (and named after) San Clemente Island in California, have now recovered and will be removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Proof that conservation works when we give it a chance.
That’s it for this edition of Links From the Brink. Keep an eye out for further fallout from the Cop City shooting, the continued disappearance of the Great Salt Lake, more wild weather exacerbated by climate change, further presidential posturing for 2024, and some interesting work by activists around the world.
And of course, mark your calendars for World Hippopotamus Day on Feb. 15 and International Polar Bear Day on Feb. 27.
As with any estuary, it’s the properties of the brackish water that make the difference. The Ciénaga Grande serves as a node of interconnection in a complex hydrological network, linking Colombia’s principal waterway, the world’s highest coastal mountain range, and the Caribbean Sea. For millennia this system has existed in a dynamic balance that allowed life to flourish.
