Investors, foundations, universities and governments pulled their assets from fossil fuel companies in record numbers in October.
The decades-long push to get large investment funds to pull their money from destructive oil, gas and coal has made several major leaps forward in the past month. One of the biggest occurred Oct. 18 when the Ford Foundation, a nonprofit built on profits from the combustion engine, announced it would divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies.
The foundation also promised to invest in renewable energy companies and funds that “address the threat of climate change and support the transition to a green economy.”
Fossil fuels represented a relatively small percentage of the Ford Foundation’s total investment portfolio, but even a fraction makes a huge difference when you’re worth $16 billion.
That’s a point activists and community organizers have been making with increasing regularity over the past decade. And their growing success shows that collective voices for change can make a difference.
“Most people don’t have an oil well in their backyard, but everyone lives near some pot of money,” says climate activist Bill McKibben. “And so the climate fight has come to college campuses, to church denominations, to union halls with pension funds. It’s made the abstract very real for millions of campaigners.”
A report from the World Meteorological Organization on Oct. 25 revealed that greenhouse gases hit an all-time high last year. This follows a report from the UN Environment Programme that found world governments still have plans to blow way past their Paris Climate Accord commitments and keep extracting fossil fuels — “240% more coal, 57% more oil, and 71% more gas than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C,” the goal of the climate agreement.
At the same time, the number of fossil fuel company bankruptcies has soared — more than 100 in 2020 in the United States alone — and their access to capital has in some cases receded, although many banks continue to pour their money into oil and gas.
Still, it’s not bad for a movement many were ready to write off just a few years ago. Now, McKibben says, divestment has “turned into what’s probably the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history. It’s not only badly tarnished the social license of these companies but dented their access to capital so badly that Peabody Coal called it one cause of their bankruptcy and Shell Oil said it was having a ‘material adverse effect’ on their business. Since their business is having a material adverse effect on the prospects for life on earth, turnabout is fair play.”
The turnabout came from many fronts in October, including 72 faith institutions and several local governments. New York City pledged that its retirement fund investments would achieve net-zero emissions by 2040 while doubling its investments in clean energy, efficiency and climate solutions. Baltimore signed legislation to achieve the same goal by 2050.
Photo: Ric Lander/Friends of the Earth Scotland (CC BY 2.0)
Similar student-led calls to divest took off this month at California Polytechnic State University and the University of Virginia. They all follow the example at Harvard University, which announced plans to divest its $53 billion endowment in September following nearly a decade of protests.
How can other schools make similar progress? In an essay for Fast Company, a Harvard student organizer suggested using creative tactics such as emphasizing fossil fuel investments’ legal and financial risks.
Is the divestment movement just starting to warm up? The pressure and devolving social license have even started to influence business leaders’ decisions. This month five major investment groups with a collective $60 trillion in assets called for the utilities in which they have holdings to decarbonize by the year 2035.
All this forward motion proves the effectiveness of the divestment movement and the failing economics of fossil fuels, but not everyone is getting the message. This month a notorious climate-denial website called the divestment campaign “the dumbest movement in history.” That shows how much activists have gotten under the skin of those who still have the most to profit from oil, gas, coal and climate disinformation.
The slow-moving coup threatens not just democracy but meaningful action on climate, extinction and environmental justice.
When we talk about climate change, the extinction crisis and other environmental threats, the discussion usually focuses on science, national politics and corporate malfeasance.
We should also focus on local elections, disinformation and voter disenfranchisement.
Here in the United States, ongoing efforts at voter suppression and the slow-moving right-wing coup in the wake of the 2020 election are as bad as it gets for democracy. And consequently, for the planet.
You may not think of these as environmental problems, and they don’t get much press from environmental journalists or attention from activists and nonprofits. But the hard truth is that we’ll never achieve meaningful action against climate change, environmental injustice or the extinction crisis if we don’t also stay laser-focused on election reform to fight the GOP’s efforts to disenfranchise American voters.
With the 2022 and 2024 elections looming, the attempts to seize legislative control are steaming full speed ahead — from multiple directions. Fed by the baseless, repeatedly debunked Big Lie of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Republicans have passed restrictive voting legislation in Texas, Georgia and 17 other states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. They’ve also attacked and pushed out nonpartisan election officials around the country, gerrymandered their candidates into safe districts while discriminating against voters of color, performed sham “audits” (and called for more of them), and proposed legislation that would let them toss out election results if they don’t win.
Through it all, they’ve worked hard to discredit the election process and demonize progressive voters in ways that are literally tearing communities apart.
This is repressive at best; at worst it’s the rise of authoritarian fascism. And it all serves to make our nation more beholden to demagogic leaders, violent extremists, and power-hungry billionaires and corporate interests that care little about people, let alone nature.
If you want to protect the planet, you need to pay attention to this on every level.
That starts just a few days from now, with the 2021 election, which includes notable gubernatorial and congressional contests in Virginia, New Jersey and other states, as well as a lot of seemingly smaller local races. From coast to coast, people are running for school boards on platforms of “getting politics out of the classroom” — code words for eliminating education about topics like racism and climate change (not to mention mask and vaccine mandates). You may not think school board elections matter, but they’ve become a major flashpoint around the country as Republicans hope to use them to “lay groundwork for the 2022 midterm elections,” according to a recent report in The New York Times. It’s easy to see that in action from the footage of screaming, threatening parents at school meetings around the country.
Will the proposed Freedom to Vote Act, John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act or any other version of voting-rights legislation currently stalled in Congress and the Senate solve these problems? Right now that’s hard to say, because not enough of us have made our voices heard.
As Timothy Snyder writes in his essential book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, “Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.”
Handlers hope a mutt named Filson can sniff out a pollinator no one has seen in 15 years.
The quest to save a rare pollinator from extinction has just gained an unlikely ally: a mutt named Filson.
A six-year-old Australian cattle dog mix with black and tan fur and oversized ears, Filson will soon join the mission to find the endangered Franklin’s bumblebee (Bombus franklini). The fuzzy pollinator, which no one has observed in 15 years, became a federally protected species this summer.
Franklin’s bumble bee. Photo: James P. Strange, USDA-ARS Pollinating Insect Research Unit.
But before anyone can protect the tiny, underground-dwelling bumblebee, they need to make sure it still exists. That’s not an easy task for human eyes, but it could be a piece of cake for a dog’s nose, says Jennifer Hartman, Filson’s handler and a field scientist from Rogue Detection Teams. The Washington-based company rescues “fetch-obsessed” dogs and teaches them to help track wildlife and assist in conservation research.
“I feel like the sky’s the limit with detection dogs,” says Hartman. “We’re just scratching the surface of what they can do.”
Filson has already helped to survey populations of the endangered Sierra Nevada red fox in Yosemite National Park. Now Hartman hopes to turn his sensitive sniffer to the missing bee.
An Elusive, Endangered Pollinator
Entomologist Robbin Thorp first sounded the alarm about the Franklin’s bumblebee’s precipitous decline in the 1990s. He was the last person to spot the insect in the wild in 2006 and coordinated annual searches until his death in 2019.
The species likely fell victim to a European pathogen borne by bees imported to pollinate hothouse vegetables.
“Our bees just weren’t ready for this,” says Jeff Everett, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The pathogen’s arrival coincided with a dramatic increase in the use of certain pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids, which Everett calls “extremely bad news for our pollinators.”
Even before its decline, Franklin’s bumblebee was only found in the Klamath-Siskiyou region in Northern California and southern Oregon — the smallest range of any bumblebee in the world.
“Why they were so narrowly endemic was the big question [biologists] were exploring when [the bees] basically disappeared from landscape,” says Everett, who is leading search and recovery efforts for Franklin’s bumblebee.
Since 2006, agencies, NGOs, and landowners have joined the quest. Following Thorpe’s lead, they focus on high-quality habitat where the bee has been found before. The annual effort culminates with a “bee blitz” on Mt. Ashland in late July, when worker bees of many species are foraging in the flower-strewn meadows.
Even if Franklin’s bumblebees are still around, the odds of finding one are pretty low, says Everett.
“You’re looking for something that is small and rather cryptic and constantly on the move,” he says. “You could be looking in one direction at flowers right in front of you and [the bee] could be right behind you.”
That’s where the dogs come in.
Sniffing Out the Truth
Heath Smith, director and lead instructor at Rogue Detection Teams, believes dogs are only limited by our capacity to communicate what we want them to do.
“We’re not dog trainers,” says Smith. “It’s more about working together, learning how to communicate, and being there to lend support.” Smith seeks out so-called hopeless cases at animal shelters for his team of “Rogues.” After learning together at their facility in Rice, Washington, the dogs partner with human field scientists — called “bounders” because they’re bound to the dogs, the detection method and ecosystems — on field conservation projects from Africa to the Sierra.
These dogs have already proven adept at locating the inconspicuous larva of two endangered butterflies: Oregon silverspot (Speyeria zerene Hippolyta) and Taylor’s checkerspot (Euphydryas editha taylori).
Oregon silverspots, which inhabit coastal meadows from Washington to northern California, were first listed as endangered in 1980. Unlike Franklin’s bumblebee, their primary threat is habitat loss.
In the 1990s the Oregon Zoo and Woodland Park Zoo started a captive-breeding program to supplement wild populations. Researchers also began enhancing habitat by mowing meadows and removing plants that compete with the early blue violet, the caterpillar’s host plant. Yet populations kept declining.
Deanna Williams, a biologist for the U.S. Forest Service, wanted to know why. The first thing she learned: There were gaping holes in what entomologists knew about the species. Because they had only studied adults, they didn’t have basic information such as where caterpillars pupated or how they avoided predation.
An Oregon silverspot caterpillar. Photo: Deanna Williams/U.S. Forest Service
“How can we address this population decline when we haven’t been able to study 90% of their life cycle?” says Williams.
She had witnessed how effective dogs were at finding scat of the elusive Humboldt marten, so in 2015 she approached Smith about using Rogue’s dogs to find Oregon silverspot larvae.
The Secret’s in the Poop
Until then, the smallest animal the Rogue dogs had worked with was a Pacific pocket mouse. Young caterpillars are no larger than grains of rice. Adding to the challenge, Smith couldn’t use live caterpillars for training without a special permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service. In the meantime, the zoos provided him with frass, or caterpillar poop.
When Smith first offered the pepper-sized frass for detection dog Alli to sniff, she exhaled through her nose and the flecks puffed away. So Smith adhered frass to pieces of tape and stashed them around the training area “like little caterpillar latrines.” Soon after, he and Alli joined Williams on Mt. Hebo, in northwest Oregon.
That day was “insanely hot,” Williams recalls. In the first meadow, Alli didn’t indicate any frass. But at the second site, which was cooler and shadier, Alli signaled several times.
Humans investigate a Rogue’s find. Photo: Deanna Williams/U.S. Forest Service
Finding frass in the field is impossible for humans, so Williams studied the vegetation and found violet leaves that had been nibbled in a distinctive pattern. Alli signaled at several more sites that day.
“She would take us to the margins of shrubs and meadow edges, and the seaward side of these little knobs which receive a lovely cooling wind from the ocean,” says Williams.
The areas where Alli had indicated were the only places researchers saw adult butterflies that year.
“It really opened my eyes,” says Williams. “[I realized] we’re in a changing world, and we have to make sure we provide enough microclimates so they can survive and adapt to changes in the weather.”
Their work caught the attention of Karen Holtrop, a biologist for the Olympic National Forest who monitors for Taylor’s checkerspot. Though easier to spot than Oregon silverspot, the larvae are still tiny, their habitat steep and rocky, and the window for finding them short.
Holtrop obtained permission to use larvae to train the dogs. Rogue dog Pips found caterpillars in the field almost immediately.
“Pips even found a small larva curled up in the soil under some duff,” says Holtrop. “There’s no way we would have found that.”
Soon after, Williams finally obtained permission to work with live Oregon silverspot caterpillars, and in 2021 Pips detected larvae — the first scientific observation of the species’ larvae in the wild in 40 years.
Buzzing for Bees
The dogs’ success with butterflies prompted Everett to test them on bumblebee nests.
“If they can find something that is half the size of a grain of rice in their natural environment using just their nose, I bet they can find something as big and stinky as a bee,” he says.
Like many bumblebees, the Franklin’s bumblebee life cycle begins in the spring, when queens emerge from hibernation and start new colonies in abandoned rodent burrows and other depressions in the ground.
“We know they nest underground, but why they choose one hole from another is a mystery,” says Everett. “Part of the reason we don’t know much about queen ecology is because nest sites are notoriously hard to find. If we knew more we could do more to protect that habitat.”
Learning about one species could also inform their understanding of others. For example, rusty patched, western and Franklin’s bumblebees are closely related, and all have suffered declines.
Bounder Jennifer Hartman has partnered with Rogue dog Filson on the bumblebee project. It’s a bit of a “chicken or the egg” problem, she says.
“In order to teach Filson the odor, we need bumblebee nests in the wild,” she explains. But because they don’t know where Franklin’s bumblebee nests are, or if they even exist, they’re starting by introducing Filson to lab-grown Western bumblebee nest material. Next spring, Hartman will see if he can locate bumblebee nests of any species that people have flagged in their back yards or on public land. Once Filson links finding a nest with a reward — play time with his cherished red ball — Hartman will take him into the field.
“I think we can all agree that dogs can find the scat of myriad species in the wild,” says Hartman. “But when you start to think about caterpillars, or viruses on plants, or invasive species at different stages in their life cycle, that’s when you really start to see the power of the nose at work.”
If they can add endangered bumblebees to this impressive list, it will be a boon not only for the Franklin’s bumblebee, but pollinator conservation in general.
A climb in the Cascades to hear the voices of American pikas living at the edge of crisis.
What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.
Years ago, a long season of chemotherapy left me unable to hear high frequencies. How does one comprehend what one’s not hearing? I didn’t know.
The recovery kept me out of the mountains for a long time. But finally a grand day came: My partner and I hiked up into the talus slopes of the North Cascades in Washington state. Mount Baker stood before us and Mount Shuksan at our backs — a day of perfect heaven. Suddenly his face lit up: “Hear that? Eeeeep!” I strained my ears to listen and heard nothing. “You don’t hear that?” he cried in dismay. I felt divorced, absented from something that, even when I was far away, had made my world feel whole and alive.
Without the familiar sound of American pikas, I could see the mountain, but I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t sense the pulse of the mountain underfoot or its voice echoing across the rocks. It wasn’t home anymore; it was just scenery.
This premonition of their absence made me feel how much I would miss pikas if they disappeared, because when you hear them, you know you’ve arrived at a place not our own.
First there must be an ascent, perhaps from a lowland parking lot, a long climb from a roiling riverbed through close-trunked moss to widening skies; perhaps away from a trailhead bulldozed out of some mountain pass or high meadow. You must rise into those places where the horizon leans, where the earth falls away yet towers above, where the forests thin to clumps then draw tight into krummholzen sculpted by wind and snow, where lowland greens contract to heather slopes. You must crouch to taste the blueberries and step carefully through fairy gardens — lupine, paintbrush, bistort, hellebore and monkeyflower — until finally you round a rocky point and hear them: a high shrill whistle from somewhere, you can’t say just where, echoing across the slopes.
Eeeeep! You stop, and look. Where? It repeats — EEEEEEP!! — thin, tense, urgent. A flick at the edge of vision, and there she is, watching you. Alert as a hawk. Pika. “Pie-ka” we say today, but as it used to be pronounced, “pee-ka.” Peeeeeee-ka!
You have arrived. This is not your home, nor should it be. But it is theirs, and they’ve seen you, and put their whole world on alert: Watch out! It may be okay this time, but it may not. Humans. Perhaps a dog. You never know. Eeeee-ka!
The pika’s world intersects with ours only when we want it to, for it is we who visit them, never the other way around. I will never step out my door and spook a pika from my yard. And we visit them only in summers, for us a time to play — “recreation” we call it, or re-creation — but for them a time to work.
All pika futurity is at stake every summer, for the few weeks between the last snowmelt and the first snowfall are for them the pinch of the hourglass. If they make it through this season well, there will be another pika summer. But only if.
Worse, our world intersects with theirs even when we’re not intruding on their slopes. Pikas, adapted so well to alpine cold, cannot endure lowland heat. Above 78 degrees F., they must take shelter or move upslope to cooler air. As global warming intensifies, fears have grown for pika futures; while they can move up the mountain as temperatures rise, at some point they will run out of mountain. This has indeed been the fate of some low-elevation populations. Too many intrusions from us, too many curious dogs in tow, too many of our greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere we share, and our highland summer recreations will be a lot lonelier.
We’ll have, as we like to say, the whole place to ourselves.
Pikas fool us with their insane cuteness. They look like baby rabbits with lopped ears, no tails, and hardly any legs, for everything that could radiate heat has been trimmed and tucked in. Except for their eyes, which are large and alert and miss nothing. They look like rodents but aren’t. Their closest relatives are indeed rabbits, but unlike the floppy loners that casually nibble our backyard flowers, pikas are sociable. The one you’re looking at, who is looking at you, has just alerted the whole village, and her neighbors are on pause, scanning the airwaves.
Their village is hidden underground, knitted amidst the cracks and crannies sheltered by rocks that will twist your ankle if you tread them but are rock-solid to them, every turn and cavity mapped out in pika mind. They don’t hibernate but munch and scurry through the long winter under the mountain’s carapace of snow. The pika watching you — Ah! She’s just chuckled another signal and flickered away out of sight — spotted you because she left her shelter to venture after her food: alpine flowers, cut and gathered into haystacks curing on the sunbaked rocks. She’ll turn her haystacks as they cure and when they’re ready she’ll carry them by mouthfuls safe underground. While her back is turned, gathering more, some freeloading neighbor might filch a mouthful for their own provision. All winter long the village will live on summer sun, stored away under the snows.
Pika cuteness masks tough little souls. While researchers have documented pika declines, they have also documented remarkable resilience: So far, populations in many areas, including the North Cascades, are holding steady. As daytime temperatures spike, they adapt, sheltering in the rocks and foraging by night. Yet were pikas to become nocturnal, pika slopes would appear silent to human visitors, who can only climb safely by daylight. They might still be there, but not for us.
I felt that silence on my trip to Mount Baker years ago, a day when the life of the mountain seemed somehow smaller and poorer for their absence.
Mount Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington. Photo: Bob Wick/BLM
Years later, there was another such day. This time I had brand new hearing aids, a technological miracle. The sky was clear, the blueberries just turning sweet, the heady scent of lupine and the mountain like an angel rising before us —and Eeeeep!
I was again in pika country. This time I heard her. Not just the small bundle of energy eyeing us from below the trail, but the great volume of air she filled with a voice not our own, in a world not our own, a world of other voices and other urgencies that ask us for nothing more than to be left to their own ways.
We have yet to learn what Aldo Leopold taught us over 70 years ago, that mountains are fountains of energy. Pikas are distillations of mountain energy, trimmed down to bright sparks of life, declaring for nations beyond ours. Pikas are mountain thoughts, sparks of thought burning bright, arks that carry that light through the dark. Not until we hear what they are telling us will we have arrived.
Whether you’re into literary fiction, thrillers, sci-fi or comics, these new novels help us explore the complex geographies of climate change, pollution and the extinction crisis.
The collective unconscious is telling us something…
These days more and more artists are turning their feelings about climate change, environmental justice and the extinction crisis into powerful creative works. It’s easy to see why. These issues affect just about everybody — a new recent study found that about 85% of people on the planet already live with the effects of global warming — and that leaves us all with a lot of fear and grief.
That’s where fiction comes in. Whether it’s literature or pop culture, serious or satire, novels and short stories can help us investigate both our inner and outer worlds. Authors’ imaginations, meanwhile, can remind us of the beauty and mystery of the world we’re trying to save (or call out the ugliness of what’s destroying it).
We’ve pulled together 12 environmentally themed novels released so far in 2021, from a list that seemed to get longer every day. They include the latest from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, literary and mystery novels, a comics adaptation and even a horror story. (Well, they’re all horror stories, in a way.)
These aren’t full reviews — we’re still digging into this reading pile ourselves — but the descriptions should give you enough to pick the titles that speak to you, your communities and your rapidly changing world.
I’ll admit, I’m late to Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning and much-lauded Overstory, but I’m finally reading it right now (and it is, of course, stunning). His new one, which examines the broader world through the lens of endangered species, looks just as good. I’m not going to try to read them both at the same time — that’d probably be a Powers overkill — but I’ve already seen a preview of Bewilderment and I’m looking forward to diving into it as soon as I get a chance.
A novel about wolf reintroduction to Scotland from the author of Migrations. McConaghy looks at the complex relationships we have with predators and the awful things some people do rather than relearn how to coexist with nature — perfect components for drama.
An African village stands up against decades of colonialism and pollution wrought by an American oil company. The pain they suffer, and the corporate doublespeak they receive in response, should resonate with readers in any community struggling for environmental justice. We need more books like this (and more real-world equivalents, too).
An ambitious greed-vs-nature novel sprawled across the centuries. One part takes place in the 1700s, another 50 years from now, and the third follows a man who may be the last living human, 1,000 years in the future. Can the characters come back from this dystopia? Can we?
This surreal short-story collection, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, isn’t environmental from cover to cover (some of the stories are just weird), but it does feature nightmarish tales of havoc-wreaking invasive animals (the titular lagomorphs) and a critter returned from supposed extinction (who doesn’t appear very happy about its fate).
Yosemite Fall, an earlier novel in the National Park Mystery series, came out when public lands faced increasing threats from the Trump administration. The immediate threat may be gone for now, but the long-term dangers to public lands and wild spaces remain. Although there probably aren’t as many real-world murders as in this book, set at … well, you can probably guess from the title.
This month marks the start of breeding season for orange-bellied parrots, among the world’s most endangered birds, who migrate between Tasmania and mainland Australia. Five years ago, only 17 of these birds existed following decades of habitat loss, invasive species, pet trade depredations and multiple disease outbreaks. Today, thanks to captive breeding, that number stands at 192 — still perilously low, but it’s progress. Few of us will ever get a chance to see an “OBP” in person, which is why I’m looking forward to reading this magical-realism novel that uses the birds, the extinction crisis and last year’s Australian fires to examine the nature of grief and loss (as well as grief over the loss of nature).
What does it mean to live at the end of the world — and what’s it like when someone new suddenly arrives from beyond the walls? Originally published in German, this unique fable was translated by Jen Calleja.
A double-dose of nature-filled weirdness. VanderMeer’s horror/science fiction novel tackles wildlife trafficking, extinction and the climate crisis in predictably nightmarish fashion.
Nightmares of a different sort pervade Secret Life. Ellsworth, one of my favorite artists, adapts a surreal VanderMeer short story into graphic novel form. The tale takes place in a horrifyingly familiar office building, where human nature goes awry and plants and mice have a way of invading the narrative and the workers’ lives.
Something fungi this way comes… Just in time for Halloween we’ve got this new eco-horror novel about an invasive killer fungus disturbed from its underground slumber and ready to take over the world. I’m not sure if I’m emotionally prepared to read a novel about an outbreak after 19 months of the pandemic, but I’ll admit that I’m hungering for some good old-fashioned “Earth strikes back” horror, which reminds us that this planet can shake us off if it really tries.
The Hudson Bay Lowlands is a much different place in late spring and summer, when its big rivers are flowing — the Seal, Churchill, Nelson, and Hayes in Manitoba, the Severn, Winisk, Albany, and Abitibi in Ontario, and the Eastmain and La Grande in Quebec. On a field trip I did with a biologist from the Canadian Wildlife Service, I learned that the Hudson Bay Lowlands have the highest proportion of palm warblers and yellow rails, a chicken-like marsh bird that is rarely seen, little studied, and very mysterious. The bird, according to ornithologist Alexander Sprunt, is more like a “feathered mouse” than a bird because it seems to prefer to run and hide rather than fly.
During migration, few other places in the world have this many red knots, Hudsonian godwits, ruddy turnstones, black scoters, pectoral sandpipers, semipalmated sandpipers, white-rumped sandpipers, greater yellowlegs, and lesser snow geese. The Hudsonian godwit, which was once regarded as one of North America’s rarest birds, stands out among them because it has made a notable, if shaky, comeback. Two-thirds of these birds, some of which fly nonstop from their wintering grounds in southern South America, stop over in their migration along the Hudson Bay shoreline. Many of them breed in the Hudson Bay Lowlands. This is why the Audubon Society is in full support of the Mushkegowuk Council chiefs who are calling for the establishment of an indigenous-led Marine National Conservation Area to protect that breeding habitat, the denning grounds of the polar bears as well as the caribou that dwell in the peatland regions.
If there is a peatland outside Siberia that the Hudson Bay Lowlands can be compared to, it’s the labyrinth of fens, bogs, and swamps in Polesia, which stretches out from the riverbanks of the Bug in Poland, the Dnieper in Ukraine, and the Pripyat in Belarus. The comparison to Polesia is apt only because the mires there are also among the last refuges for globally threatened birds such as the aquatic warbler and also for wolves, lynx, bison, and other animals that are threatened throughout Europe.
Polesia’s Almany (or Olmany) Mires is one of the largest intact peatlands in Europe outside Scandinavia. But it has been degraded by power lines, border control infrastructure, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and a seventy-mile network of forestry roads that the government of Belarus has recently sanctioned.
In contrast, the Hudson Bay Lowlands are more than 10 times the size and largely unexploited except for hydroelectric dams and a handful of mine sites. The meltdown of the Laurentide ice sheet is so recent that land pushed downward by the enormous weight of that ice is still rebounding, reshaping the landscape and reconfiguring the drainage in ways that favor the growth of marsh communities of aquatic sedges before sphagnum and other mosses take over and turn them into a bog or fen.
Paludification is the hydrologist’s word to account for this kind of ecological succession. There is no other direction for rain, melting snow, and river floods to go but sideways on impermeable, finely textured silt and clay that is as flat and frozen as it is in this region. Peat not only continues to grow here, it insulates the permafrost below and stores vast amounts of carbon that would, if unleashed, warm the world much faster than it is already warming.
I never thought much about the implications of this until 1990, when I crossed paths with scientist Nigel Roulet. Roulet and more than two dozen other scientists were collaborating with NASA to sample the chemistry of the atmosphere above the Hudson Bay Lowlands. It didn’t occur to me back then that the carbon stored in peatlands could be a major driver of climate change if it was disturbed or thawed out of permafrost areas. Chinese rice paddies, belching cows, and dirty diesel trucks were getting most of the media’s attention in those early stages of the climate-change discussions.
Scientists now know far more than they did in 1990 about how much carbon is freed when permafrost thaws, when trees and shrubs growing on top of it burn, or when it is disturbed in other ways. Where that thawing is in high gear, as it is in Tanana Flats in central Alaska, and in the Scotty Creek area of the Northwest Territories, it is dramatically reshaping the landscape, reversing the succession in some cases from marsh to fen and forest and then back to fen, bog, and marsh.
At Tanana Flats, permafrost degradation increased the size of three large fens by 26% from 1949 to 2018. Torre Jorgenson, the lead author of a report on the degradation, says that the trend to warmer, snowier winters (snow traps warmth) has pushed the region past the tipping point where permafrost will no longer form and where the complete thawing of permafrost is inevitable.
Canadian scientist Bill Quinton and colleagues have seen the same thing playing out in the sub-Arctic region of Scotty Creek in the Northwest Territories. Scotty Creek drains about 60 square miles of fens and bogs. Where there is permafrost at Scotty Creek, it is warm and vulnerable to thaw. This is significant because snow acts like a blanket, trapping some of the heat that has thawed the ground in summer. Thick, long-lasting snow cover followed by a quick spring melt- down can hasten the thawing of the frozen ground in places like this. (In areas where permafrost is meters thick and rock-solid, it insulates the ice from the warming rays of the sun.)
Snow measurements at Scotty Creek began in 1994, five years before Quinton set up a semipermanent field station. It is rare to have long-term data like this in the Canadian North, one that underscores unequivocally what happens when winter snow is deep, spring runoff is significant, and the thawing of relatively warm permafrost switches into high gear. It’s why so many scientists have come knocking on Quinton’s door, asking to come in and participate. It’s also why the Dehcho First Nations, which will one day become the legal owners of the area, are keenly interested and actively participating in what he is doing.
The peat at Scotty Creek is typically nine to 12 feet deep, and 30 feet in some places. In the 1950s, permafrost covered nearly three-quarters of the region. It’s down to a third of that. The edges of those local patches of permafrost are receding by about three feet each year.
Trees are literally drowning in depressions created as the permafrost thaws and the ground surface collapses, and as melting snow and rain fill them up with water. The transition from land to water has been so dramatic that Quinton has had had to move base camp twice. “It’s crazy. There is water everywhere,” Quinton told me. “What we’re seeing perhaps more clearly than any other place in the world is ecosystem change occurring in fast motion. The implications for water quality, vegetation changes, biodiversity, and the people living in this part of the world are profound. Many of them are indigenous hunters, trappers, and fishermen. They tell me they have never seen anything like this.”
The best way to visualize what Quinton is talking about is to describe what occurred 200 miles to the northeast in the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary, where warming temperatures and wildfire have thawed and collapsed peatlands in and around the sanctuary so intensely that incoming water drove most of the 700 wood bison out of the protected area. Some 385 fires burned a record 3.4 million hectares (8.4 million acres) of the Northwest Territories in 2014. The exodus was so complete that Terry Armstrong, a biologist working for the government of the Northwest Territories, had a difficult time finding animals when he flew in to do a count in 2015.
There is some debate as to whether this thawing of permafrost in peatland ecosystems is, as Canadian scientist Antoni Lewkowicz describes it, “a long freight train moving slowly as it unloads its greenhouse gases,” or as others warn, a carbon bomb about to blow as the train careens off the tracks.
Even if this thawing of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is just a slow-moving freight train, as it no doubt is in most permafrost regions, it is still a major concern because there is so much carbon stored. Northern peatlands cover an estimated 1.4 million square miles, an area larger than all of the western United States and Texas combined. They have accumulated as much carbon as there is stored in all of the world’s forests combined, half of it stored in permafrost.
A one-degree increase in temperature has the potential to free up the equivalent of four to six years of fossil-fuel emissions. This is all spelled out in 2020 report produced by Swedish scientist Gustaf Hugelius and 13 scientists from around the world, who concluded that global warming may very well transform northern peatlands from landscapes that cool the climate to ones that will eventually warm it.
A new legal theory proposes granting property rights to wildlife to protect them from habitat destruction.
Humans share the Earth with billions of other species. We all need somewhere to live, yet only humans own their homes.
What if other species could own theirs as well?
That’s what Karen Bradshaw, Arizona State University law professor, proposes in her recent book, Wildlife as Property Owners.
Drawing on Indigenous legal systems and the ideas of philosophers and property law theorists before her, Bradshaw argues that wild animals should be integrated into our system of property law to prevent further habitat destruction — the leading cause of species extinction.
Under what Bradshaw calls an “interspecies system of property,” animals and people would co-own land through a legal trust. This would give animals, through their human representatives, standing in court, like other property owners.
The proposal may seem radical, but it fits into the more well-known concept of “rights of nature.” These Indigenous-led efforts to establish legal personhood for natural entities have seen expansive rights granted to ecosystems such as the Klamath River in Oregon and Te Uruwera rainforest in New Zealand.
In the latest development within the rights-of-nature movement, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe tribe in northwestern Minnesota filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the state on behalf of wild rice, called manoomin in their language. The tribe argued that allowing fossil fuel company Enbridge to divert billions of gallons of groundwater for the construction of the Line 3 oil pipeline violates manoomin’s rights, which tribal law recognized in 2018.
Could granting a more limited, and perhaps less controversial, right to property similarly help us to account for the interests of nature?
From Cats and Dogs to Cougars and Wolves?
Applying rights of nature to existing legal régimes “means you have to look to find places where that already exists or could exist,” says Bradshaw.
She finds one such place in some precolonial Indigenous legal systems that allowed animals to own property and resources. While some of these Indigenous laws were explicitly supplanted by colonial legislation, this was not the case for animal property rights. These laws, Bradshaw argues, are simply “dormant,” not dead.
But modern laws that can serve as a basis for turning wildlife into property owners also now exist, she says, having been unwittingly established by state lawmakers over the past few decades when they created “pet trust” laws. Trusts enable people to bequeath property to their companion animals, managed for the animals’ benefit by an appointed human trustee.
Few animal-law experts considered the implications of these laws at the time, says Bradshaw, but in theory they could be extended to wild animals as well.
“Attorneys can and should wield these laws creatively to create habitat-level solutions to solve biodiversity problems when possible,” she says, noting that property rights could be granted to all wildlife that depends on a piece of land, with the land managed at the ecosystem level by human trustees. She’s in the process of doing that on her property in Phoenix, which boasts populations of rabbits, bees, bobcats, javelinas and other wildlife.
In addition to private property, this approach can also work for public lands. In the United States public lands are at least partly managed for the benefit of wildlife by government agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management. But factors such as changes in political administrations or pressure from industry groups can affect how wildlife interests are weighed against other human stakes in these lands.
One example of this is the removal of gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act under the Trump administration in 2020. Since then, hundreds of wolves have been killed by hunters. The Biden administration recently announced it will consider a proposal to relist the species, but hunts continue in the meantime.
Gray wolf pups emerge from their den. Photo: Hilary Cooley/USFWS
Similar changes in political winds would have fewer effects on animals and their habitats if Congress formalized the preservation of property rights for wildlife habitat on public lands, Bradshaw argues.
Marking Their Territory
Underpinning Bradshaw’s proposal is the idea that the dominant model of property is too anthropocentric. This view of property law is also emerging in the work of other legal scholars, as a rights-of-nature movement challenges the anthropocentrism of the broader legal system.
For Bradshaw, our property system focuses narrowly on humans due to a mistaken assumption by colonial and modern lawmakers about the ownership capacities of other species.
“The argument is that we’ve wrongly excluded animals from the social contract of property,” says Douglas Kysar, law professor at Yale Law School. “We’ve wrongly assumed that animals are not possessive, but they are instead just possessed. And Bradshaw shows that’s empirically and philosophically wrong.”
The territorial behavior of many other species, Bradshaw argues, reveals that they have a sense of property ownership, demonstrated through how they establish, maintain and defend areas of land. Animals signal ownership through visual, scent-based and vocal boundary-marking behavior — not unlike how humans erect fences or other property lines.
A fiddler crab defends its territory. Photo: Marcia Pradines Long/USFWS
In a parallel to how the law functions for humans, animals often resolve territorial disputes nonviolently such as through “ritualized aggression,” or physical posturing. They even have ways of transferring property between generations. As humans are also animals, our property behavior has similar biological origins, Bradshaw says, dictated by environmental conditions such as the availability of resources like food and water.
This conception of the human property system as rooted in biology chimes with recent work by Australian law professors Margaret Davies, Lee Godden and Nicole Graham. They argue that although governments and developers tend to see property and habitat as separate and in conflict with one another, habitat is essential for both human and nonhuman life.
“Habitat is the organisms’ resource system,” says Davies. “And property is the system for sharing and distributing [resources].”
But habitats are changing as the climate crisis accelerates, and species are responding by moving to new regions. Can an interspecies property system accommodate these migrations?
“If we buy a piece of land for a specific vulnerable group today, what if we discovered that they need something else tomorrow?” Bradshaw asks. The answer, she believes, is to do what humans do: If somebody buys a house in a spot that later becomes unsuitable for some reason, such as worsening extreme weather, “they can sell it or take the insurance loss or potentially sell it for less money … One of the beauties, if you will, of the [wildlife property] model is it allows the trust to buy and sell land just like any other participant in a property regime.”
Animals won’t simply pack up a U-Haul and drive directly to a new territory. But several initiatives in different countries can support their movements across landscapes, such as the elephant Rights of Passage project in India, or the wildlife corridors provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which partners with landowners to provide safe passage from animals between wildlife refuges.
Adding to Existing Layers
Animals and humans typically use property differently. Humans tend to maintain rigid delineation of property boundaries, while a wild animal’s territory shifts and fluctuates depending on factors such as the seasonal availability of food, water and shelter.
In Bradshaw’s view, this means that an interspecies property system would be more flexible and pluralistic than the anthropocentric concept of property. Not only would it need to take account of how multiple nonhuman species use a space, but also how those uses intersect with human ones.
A badger pokes its head out of its den. Photo: Cindy Souders/USFWS
But property, Bradshaw argues, already functions in a more pluralistic way than people often assume, with competing interests overlapping on private property. Rights to airspace, water or minerals below the ground can all be subject to claims from different actors, including state and federal governments and corporations. Resources may be managed on an individual or communal basis.
“When you’re able to conceptualize a property as this layered bundle of rights instead of one person holding all the sticks in the bundle,” Bradshaw says, “what very quickly becomes clear is that there are ecological and biological interests to property that are nonhuman. We just haven’t made room for them in our narrow conception of property.”
Of course, a more ecocentric property system may be a hard sell in some quarters. Habitat and property are often pitted against each other, argue Davies and her coauthors, because of the close association between private property and the “right to exclude” non-owners from accessing it. This makes property ownership appear more absolute than it really is.
“People do have that idea that they have total control over [their property] and over who accesses it, and they can be very resistant to any incursions or changes,” says Davies. The ecological consequences of this conception of property are evident in a range of contexts, from the way Americans’ obsession with neat lawns creates ecologically barren monocultures to farmers’ extirpation of predators and native herbivores from agricultural lands.
Bradshaw anticipates the potential for such resistance by insisting that private landowners would grant property rights voluntarily. Meanwhile, recognizing wildlife property rights on public lands would not necessarily prevent activities such as recreation, hunting or sharing grazing land, since these rights are already more limited than those of personhood granted by the broader rights of nature approach.
A Moral Case
As calls grow for humans to understand that our fate and that of other species is intertwined, could wildlife property ownership present a potential way to alter the unequal dynamic that so frequently results in the subordination of wildlife interests to those of humans?
A standoff between two juvenile mountain lions and five coyotes in the National Elk Refuge. Photo: Lori Iverson / USFWS
“There’s something to be said for the symbolic value of saying, this land is not just land that’s set aside as a national park, this is land that’s owned by these other beings that we share the Earth with,” says Kysar. “That would maybe have a pretty significant cultural effect on how we regard other beings … rather than thinking of ourselves as the creatures with dominion over everything on the planet.”
This is, of course, what the rights of nature movement seeks to achieve. Bradshaw believes that integrating wildlife into the property system is another route into creating those more expansive natural rights. This, she says, is especially important as the interaction between Indigenous legal systems — many of which already have more ecocentric conceptions of rights — and dominant colonial legal systems is “really ill-defined.”
“Once you start down that pathway of incremental reform,” Bradshaw adds, “you eventually get to a place that looks much more like the rights of nature model, where we are envisioning ourselves as coexisting with other living beings.”
This fearless carnivore lives a secretive life and digs fantastic tunnels — but that can’t protect it from poachers and snares.
Badgers are often considered a symbol of grit and gallantry, characterized by their rare ability to hold ground when confronted by a larger threat — be it from people or from other predators. The greater hog badger, a small Asian carnivore, is no different. But grit can only get it so far: The species is a victim of rampant snaring, and very little is known about its ecology.
Species name and description:
The greater hog badger (Arctonyx collaris) is a terrestrial species with a fantastic ability to burrow underground tunnels. It looks like a miniature bear thanks to its stocky build, large head, sturdy legs, grizzled gray-to-tan coat, elongated white face profile, and black facial stripes. But unlike bears it has two remarkable features: a pinkish, piglike snout and massive foreclaws, both evolved to aid in digging and assisting its specialized vermivore (worm-eating) diet.
Although it rarely exceeds 3 feet in head-to-body length, the greater hog badger is the second-largest species of the family Mustelidae, just behind the wolverine (Gulo gulo).
Where it’s found:
Undisturbed lowland and hilly mixed-evergreen or deciduous forests are the greater hog badger’s primary habitat — and those are in increasingly short supply. The species is currently concentrated in the countries of Southeast Asia and Northeast India. Its presence is suspected in southern parts of China’s Yunnan and Guangxi provinces and peninsular Malaysia but is deemed extinct in Vietnam. In Bangladesh, the species has 6–8 valid and documented sighting records and is thought to be present only in the country’s dipterocarp-dominated, hilly southeastern forests.
A greater hog badger — one of the first camera-trap images from the forests of northeastern Bangladesh. Photo: Muntasir Akash/Northeast Bangladesh Carnivore Conservation Initiative.
IUCN Red List status:
Vulnerable across the species’ range, with a population decline of more than 50% over the past 15 years in Indochina.
Because of the sharp, continuous decline of forested habitats, the greater hog badger is also assessed as vulnerable in Bangladesh.
Major threats:
On top of the urgent threat of habitat loss, as forests shrink more with each passing day, the greater hog badger is also severely troubled in Southeast Asia due to hunting, illegal trade and the snaring crisis.
Notable conservation programs:
Countries of Southeast Asia are working to stem the tide of snaring, which will eventually benefit the greater hog badger. However, there’s practically no other concerted effort to conserve the species.
In Bangladesh the hog badger is protected by the Wildlife (Conservation and Protection) Act. But so far, in the country, there exists only one peer-reviewed study of the species.
Dec. 16, 2016. While watching the Harry Potter franchise film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, I noticed the use of badgers as a heraldic sigil. I did a little digging on the internet and found some riveting portrayals of badgers in literature.
Jan. 2, 2021. I was trekking a transborder forest in northeast Bangladesh, part of a reconnaissance survey to identify potential camera-trap stations to be deployed in the later months, when I came across some unusual footprints on a sand-bedded stream. The heel pad was wider than long and jutted out with five elongated but blunt toe marks, which, in turn, were trailed by faint claw dents. It was smaller than a bear’s footprint but unlike anything I’d ever seen before. “Could this be a badger?” I thought to myself, even though the forests of Bangladesh that are known for badgers were hundreds of miles away. Interestingly, back then, it had only been six months since the first discovery of the greater hog badger from Tripura, the Indian state that neighbors and separates my study area from the southeastern forests of Bangladesh. So I clung to the possibility and followed the way of the badger.
April 25, 2021. A greater hog badger popped up at one of the camera stations! They’d never been described in this region before, although the forests of northeast Bangladesh, the western cusp of Indo-Burma hotspots for the species, have suitable habitat characteristics.
Later two more of my camera-trapping stations turned positive for hog badgers. At last, my memories of badger footprints and the photographic discovery fortify my love for the fantastic beasts that call the northeastern forest networks home.
A greater hog badger — one of the first camera-trap images from the forests of northeastern Bangladesh. Photo: Muntasir Akash/Northeast Bangladesh Carnivore Conservation Initiative.
What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?
The northeastern forests of Bangladesh are traditionally described as “empty,” although such an assessment lacks systematic scientific investment. In fact these forests are unbelievably biodiverse. For example, all 27 of the country’s Carnivora species are believed to live there. A similar statement could be made about the forest stands of adjoining states of India (Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, etc). Together the region forms a “biological blank spot” — a major land area where we lack scientific knowledge of what lives there.
To protect and understand hog badgers — and several sympatric less-studied carnivores — these habitats need immediate conservation attention. That should involve thorough research, conservation education programs, and sustainable-yet-strict habitat-management practices.
Key Research:
Akash, M., Zakir, T. (2020) Appraising carnivore (Mammalia: Carnivora) studies in Bangladesh from 1971 to 2019 bibliographic retrieves: trends, biases, and opportunities, 15(12): 17105–17120
Chen, W., Newman, C., Liu, Z., Kaneko, Y., Omote, K., Masuda, R., Buesching, C.D., Macdonald, D.W., Xie, Z. and Zhou, Y. (2015) The illegal exploitation of hog badgers (Arctonyx collaris) in China: genetic evidence exposes regional population impacts. Conservation genetics resources 7(3): 697–704
Helgen, K.M., Lim, N.T. and Helgen, L.E. (2008) The hog-badger is not an edentate: systematics and evolution of the genus Arctonyx (Mammalia: Mustelidae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 154(2): 353–385
Zakir, T., Debbarma, H., Mahjabin, R., Debbarma, R., Khan, Z., Minu, M. R., Zahura, F. T. and Akash, M. (2021) Are north-eastern forests of Bangladesh empty? Insights from camera-trapping into spatiotemporal activity pattern of mammals in a semi-evergreen national park. Mammal Study 46(4), 1–17
Zhang, L., Zhou, Y.B., Newman, C., Kaneko, Y., Macdonald, D.W., Jiang, P.P. and Ding, P. (2009) Niche overlap and sett-site resource partitioning for two sympatric species of badger. Ethology Ecology and Evolution 21(2): 89–100
Zhou, Y., Chen, W., Kaneko, Y., Newman, C., Liao, Z., Zhu, X., Buesching, C.D., Xie, Z. and Macdonald, D.W., 2015. Seasonal dietary shifts and food resource exploitation by the hog badger (Arctonyx collaris) in a Chinese subtropical forest. European Journal of Wildlife Research 61(1): 125–133
Long Island residents and their allies seek environmental justice after decades of pollution.
As you drive down East Woodside Avenue in Brookhaven, New York, a green mountain seems to emerge from otherwise flat surroundings. Gulls and turkey vultures circle above its dark, sparkling peak.
Soon, as you pass South Village Drive, the breeze begins to carry an acrid stench. It’s strong enough to spark an immediate headache. Rolling up the windows only offers the slightest protection.
That’s because what rises ahead is not a mountain but the 192-acre Brookhaven Landfill. If you listen as you approach, you can hear a fleet of diesel-powered garbage trucks idling outside the entrance on Horseblock Road. Get near enough and you can taste the exhaust in the air.
Brookhaven, located on ancestral Unkechaug land, opened in 1974 as a dumping ground for municipal solid waste. That changed in 1991, when the landfill switched to accepting ash from garbage collected and incinerated elsewhere on Long Island, along with local construction, demolition and street debris.
Brookhaven landfill viewed eastbound on East Woodside Drive near leachate tanks and active ashfill shrouded by trees. Photo: Erica Cirino
Up close the 270-foot-high Brookhaven Landfill is shrouded by trees. But the pollution it spews spreads far beyond that green border, traveling through the air, soil and into groundwater.
Those toxins are not felt equally. Approximately 486,000 people live in the town of Brookhaven, but it’s the 12,000 or so residing in the landfill’s shadow — in a predominantly African American and Latino hamlet within Brookhaven called North Bellport — who bear the brunt of its pollution burden.
“Our community has the lowest life expectancy on Long Island,” says local activist Dennis Nix. CDC statistics estimate a person’s life span in the majority Black and Latino community of North Bellport at 73.2 years, 20 years less than the longest-lived census tract on Long Island, which is predominantly white. Nix used to work at the landfill and says he believes toxin exposure there left him disabled.
“This is a community that’s been looked over for many years,” he says. “We’re taking action into our own hands.”
Nix and many others have had enough.
“The problem is systemic, and racism on Long Island runs deep,” says Hannah Thomas, a longtime racial justice activist who has lived in North Bellport for more than 50 years.
“Our community has collectively been speaking out against the landfill before it even opened in 1974,” says another activist, Monique Fitzgerald.
Lately their case has been further reinforced by widespread calls to action on racial violence against people of color by Black Lives Matter and other activist groups in the United States and globally.
“When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, a group of residents decided to hold a Black Lives Matter protest in the North Bellport area to show that we’re opposed to this kind of violence against Black people too,” says Fitzgerald.
Inspired by the protests, Fitzgerald, Thomas and Nix organized the Brookhaven Landfill Action and Remediation Group, or BLARG, to address the community’s history of environmental racism and injustice.
“We felt we needed new action and conversation to bring attention to the disproportionate harm we face,” says Fitzgerald. They were quickly joined by Michelle Mendez, Abena Asare, Kerim Odekon and others who live in and around North Bellport.
The organization has made formal requests, in ongoing community calls and letters, for the town of Brookhaven and state of New York to immediately act to close and remediate the landfill, with the community’s involvement. To start, it has called for a public conversation led by affected communities and experts about how best to cope with Long Island’s abundance of trash, tapping into zero-waste solutions and prioritizing safety and health for communities like North Bellport that are affected by environmental injustice.
The town has announced it will close the landfill in 2024, but its plans remain elusive and unsatisfactory. No plans of remediating communities affected by the landfill, or efforts to implement zero-waste solutions, are known to exist. Meanwhile the group has uncovered records detailing a planned increase of waste-disposal operations in the area.
BLARG wants answers from the landfill’s stakeholders — the town of Brookhaven and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation; Winters Bros, which hauls waste and is the town’s contracted recycler; and Covanta, the incinerator company turning Long Island’s garbage into the ash. According to some in the community, these stakeholders have not been forthcoming in holding a dialogue; they say the town and state have long seemed to ignore most attempted calls for meaningful community engagement despite the clear consequences of inaction. The New York state environment department, town of Brookhaven, Winters Bros and Covanta did not reply to multiple requests for comment for this article.
Ashes to Asthma
The Brookhaven Landfill still takes in more than a million tons of incinerator ash every year from three Covanta-owned facilities on Long Island.
When incinerators burn trash, they release heavy metals, PCBs, particulate matter, climate-warming gases, and harmful chemicals like ammonia and benzene. That initial pollution occurs miles away from North Bellport, but the incinerator ash itself is also dangerous. It emits similarly carcinogenic, hormone-disrupting and irritating gases and toxic fine-ash particles easily carried by the breeze. North Bellport’s asthma-included ER visitation rate is the second-highest of any community in Suffolk County. Public health experts have identified the constant diesel truck traffic, gas flaring and landfill odors as harmful to residents’ lungs and found they play a role in the development of asthma.
“There are both physical and psychological impacts,” says Odekon. “You always have to wonder: Did I get sick based on where I live?”
Many members of the community say they were never fully informed about the landfill’s health risks. Less than a mile south of the dump sits a large shelter for unhoused families, and next door to the shelter is the Frank P. Long Intermediate School — where more than 30 staff members have been diagnosed with cancer since 1998, some of whom have died. A state lawsuit filed by teachers, parents and neighbors alleges the town of Brookhaven has failed to protect them from the harmful odors and chemicals emitted by the landfill.
While the New York State Department of Health has not determined the cases to be a “cancer cluster” of particular concern, the community remains alarmed.
“Environmental contamination is very difficult to prove in association with cancer, and it’s often multiple hits that contribute to illness,” says Odekon, a physician. North Bellport, he says, is exposed to a cocktail of chemicals associated with the landfill and its continued operation.
Sludge Compounds the Issue
Additional risks are buried beneath the ash, street and construction debris.
In June 2010 the landfill started accepting 10,000 tons of sewage sludge a month from New York City and elsewhere on Long Island — until the noxious odors led to an evacuation of Frank P. Long School in March 2011. This health crisis led New York state to revoke the town’s permit to accept sludge after just nine months.
The Frank P. Long Intermediate School. Photo: Erica Cirino
Prior to that the landfill accepted municipal solid waste, which releases climate-warming and toxic gases, for nearly 20 years. That only stopped in 1990 after the Long Island Landfill Law phased out such dumping of “untreated” trash on deep-flow groundwater recharge areas to prevent continued contamination. The law passed in 1983 following the discovery of landfill-related chemicals leaching into Long Island groundwater.
Brookhaven was — and remains — one of those leaching landfills. In the 1980s U.S. Geological Survey scientists detected a contaminant plume in the region’s shallow Upper Glacial aquifer containing an array of chemicals linked directly to Brookhaven Landfill and a leaking liner. North Bellport sits in the plume’s path, and tests have shown detectable levels of landfill-linked chemicals including iron, BPA, manganese, ammonia and 1,4-Dioxane in ground and surface waters across the hamlet for decades.
Another concern stems from the presence of PFAS, a class of chemicals commonly found in items made of plastic — and consequently in U.S. drinking water — that are linked to a wide range of health issues like cancer, reproductive problems and hormone disruption. According to Suffolk County Department of Health Services documents obtained by BLARG through the state’s Freedom of Information Law, seven of 20 households still using private wells in 2017 were tested for contamination with landfill chemicals. Water samples from two households tested positive for PFAS in levels exceeding New York State drinking-water standards, and two had levels of iron and manganese exceeding the state standards.
Money Matters
For years the town has argued that closing the landfill would affect its finances and therefore its abilities to continue serving as an endpoint for Long Island trash. The town’s annual revenues from the landfill top tens of millions a year.
“Importing trash is cash,” Odekon says.
Despite racking up around half a billion dollars in waste revenues over the past decade, the town has less than half the finances ready to cover the anticipated cost of closing the landfill, according to a memo from Supervisor Ed Romaine obtained by BLARG through the Freedom of Information Law. Romaine first estimated the cost at around $32 million. He and his office did not respond to our emails.
The town seems determined to make up for any lost revenue.
In late 2020 and early 2021, BLARG’s investigative and outreach efforts helped shed light on and avert a recently proposed landfill expansion — yes, despite the closure slated for 2024. It’s also currently monitoring the town’s hushed effort to “excess,” or rezone, and sell nearly 137 acres of land adjacent to the landfill — land that would have been used for its proposed ashfill — for “light” industrial purposes, such as an industrial park. BLARG organizers fear the move would only increase pollution and injustice.
And something else looms on the horizon. According to town records and waste hauler Winters Bros’ newly publicized plans for a 228-acre waste-by-rail hub near the existing landfill, it seems likely Long Island’s future ash and construction and demolition debris will be shipped to landfills upstate and out of state. Shipping it all first to and then from Brookhaven would create a whole new set of problems, the activists argue.
“We for sure do not need a railway, which would surely increase the amount of waste in our community,” says Asare.
The town’s idea of solutions following the landfill’s closure look, to BLARG, like anything but. “Slapping solar panels on the trash, building an enormous waste-by-rail station, and who knows what else — everything is under wraps,” Odekon says.
The Future: Can a Polluted Community Go Zero-Waste?
Even as those fights continue, BLARG has begun working on the problem from a different direction. Its members hope to reduce the amount of trash the community generates in the first place.
This summer the group organized a 90-day pilot community composting program, which collected and composted 1,300 pounds of food scraps from 20 families. The effort took place at North Bellport’s Chris Hobson and Bill Neal Memorial Community Garden, a project initially started more than a decade ago by a network of neighbors to address the lack of affordable, nutritional food available to the community.
“Diverting waste from a landfill is a radical action,” says Fitzgerald. “We need to show people that it can save lives.”
Community composting. Photo courtesy of BLARG.
BLARG has also started auditing the community’s waste, a crucial early step in making North Bellport as a zero-waste community, another of the group’s goals.
Problems like Brookhaven won’t go away easily. Industry experts project that plastic production will rise into the future, as will the pollution it creates at every step of its lifecycle. And like Brookhaven, the effects of this toxic pollution will continue to be felt unequally, often by communities of color, reinforcing systemic racism.
As it continues its fight, BLARG’s organizers invite North Bellport residents and allies to join in efforts for community-led landfill closure, remediation and transparency — to be a part of the solution.
“It’s amazing to see how our support has expanded out from the community into a constellation of allies speaking out together for justice,” says Mendez. “The people who have been harmed deserve to have their voices heard.”
The combined extinctions of Hawai‘i’s biodiversity and elements of Hawaiian culture represent the great unravelling of an eco-civilization.
Hawaiʻi, the most remote archipelago on the planet, possesses an exceptional richness of unique species but also has the dubious distinction of being the extinction capital of the world. Many of those extinctions, including scores of native bird species, are all too often directly blamed on Indigenous Hawaiians — a view that first emerged in the early 1980s and one that is still regurgitated in popular media.
Such conclusions, often drawn by scientists from neocolonial cultures, are done so in the absence of scientific evidence — and they hurt. The pain these statements inflict is compounded by the history of countless such insults visited upon Hawai‘i’s Indigenous people by settler colonialists. Directed toward us with an air of superiority from elevated positions of power and authority, these dismissals tell us our own beliefs are wrong — in this case, our belief that our ancestors were good stewards of these islands.
Mirroring numerous false assumptions about our ancestors that have previously been made by white colonizers to diminish Hawaiians’ cultural power, they reflect an institutional racism that permeates science and academia to this day. Examples range from the writings of Ralph Kuykendall, a ranking member of the Hawaiian Historical Society who believed that Hawaiians were intellectually inferior to Caucasians, to the musings of Thor Heyerdahl, who was convinced that Polynesians lacked the technical capacity to navigate Earth’s largest ocean to find the most remote landmasses on the planet 1,000 years before Europeans.
At the core of the notion that Hawaiians initiated the archipelago’s infamous extinctions are assumptions and biases founded in the neoclassical idea that humans are separate from nature. This social construct has morphed into a belief that humans are inherently bad for nature — a way of thinking that has infiltrated science so deeply that the default interpretation of limited data is often that any known extinction in the Holocene is directly attributable to human-induced ecocide.
Such biased interpolations add insult to the psychological injury of witnessing, across generations, the pulling of threads from the tapestry of Hawaiian culture until it resembles a tattered fabric. Hawaiian elders are mourning their losses while simultaneously grappling with both environmental and cultural grief.
Beyond the extinction crisis familiar to most, the reality is that Hawaiʻi has been experiencing a co-extinction crisis that not only affects biodiversity but the health and function of the Indigenous culture to which it’s intrinsically tied.
What We Lost
It’s often joked that if Charles Darwin had landed on the shores of Hawaiʻi instead of the Galapagos, he would instantly have dropped dead of shock.
That’s because all the key ingredients needed to catalyze rapid evolution are found in Hawaiʻi: isolation from founding populations (more than 2,000 miles away from any continent) and a broad range of ecological niches in a relatively small area (27 of 38 lifezones are found in the 6,700 square-mile land area of the Hawaiian archipelago). These conditions allowed for an evolutionary process called “adaptive radiation” to create a biome with more than 90% of its species endemic, or found nowhere else on Earth. Today, Hawaiian honeycreepers, fruit flies and a group of plants called the silversword alliance are textbook examples of adaptive radiation in colleges around the world.
A young i’iwi, a Hawaiian honeycreeper. Photo: Noah Kahn/USFWS
These extinctions affected more than global biodiversity numbers and compromised ecosystems. Each of these species was given a name in the Hawaiian language and played a role in shaping Hawaiian culture. Each contributed to the stories that elders would use to teach their grandchildren about how to be a good person. As such, with each extinction event there were mirrored extinction events in Hawaiian culture. With each species extinction there was an extinction of a word in our language, and quite often an extinction of a practice and a story that we used to teach our grandchildren. Thus the extinction crisis we face here in Hawaiʻi is really a co-extinction crisis that Hawaiians have been contending with for the past 200 years.
An Eco-Civilization
Hawai‘i has been described by scholars as one of only nine civilizations in history to independently develop into a state system, and it sustainably managed a population of over one million people.
At its height, Hawaiian society managed a complex knowledge system maintained and cultivated by institutions of higher learning. The Indigenous science within this knowledge system classified and named every plant, vertebrate and macroinvertebrate that existed in Hawaiʻi, as well as cloud formations, winds, rains and rainbows and associated meteorological phenomena. This Indigenous science informed Indigenous resource-management strategies that conserved biodiversity and ecosystem function within Hawaiian systems.
Some of us have described the Hawaiian civilization as an eco-civilization that wove biodiversity and society together in single system. Each of the named things in the biophysical realm had an embedded relationship with Hawaiian culture and a role in this eco-civilization.
Since Hawaiian civilization was not born out of a neoclassical worldview, concepts such as “nature,” “wildlife” and “wilderness” do not exist as words in its language and did not shape the thinking and philosophy of Hawaiian society.
To the contrary, Hawaiian creation chants account for the birthing of the islands, the biodiversity of its lands and seas, and the Hawaiian people — all in that order. As such, they convey the notion that the islands and their biodiversity are kūpuna (a word that means both elders and ancestors). True to the traditions of the Hawaiian family system, these kūpuna were once broadly loved and revered. This is because Hawaiian culture sees the land and its biodiversity as kin, with no need to separate the two.
Much of this began to unravel in the 19th century, shortly after contact. The Hawaiian population collapsed by 90% after the introduction of foreign diseases. The colonizing influences of Christianity and capitalism worked in concert to dissolve the Hawaiian laws that were in place to protect biodiversity and habitats, and ultimately transformed Hawaiʻi into an engine for the coalescing global economy.
Concurrently the introduction of mosquitos, mosquito-borne diseases, and predators such as mongooses, rats and cats attacked our bird populations. Introduced ungulates became feral and, together with newly introduced invasive plants, transformed forests, wetlands and other habitats that supported the Hawaiian eco-civilization. Extinctions shot through the roof, both in the realms of biodiversity, linguistics and Indigenous practices.
Javan mongoose in Hawaiʻi. Photo: Alex Schubert/USFWS
Thus began the co-extinction between Hawaiian culture and Hawaiʻi’s biodiversity, and the great unravelling of the Hawaiian eco-civilization was underway. Hawaiian language and knowledge systems started to fade, and the material culture that was built on Hawaiʻi’s biodiversity began to crumble. Hawaiians experienced an overwhelming sense of environmental grief that was compounded by cultural grief swirling around their families and communities, and thus began the intergenerational trauma Hawaiian communities struggle with today.
Through this dual conquest, Hawaiian society found itself nearly wiped out. Today, thanks to colonization by foreigners, Indigenous Hawaiians represent a minority in contemporary society — in both population numbers and political influence.
And colonialism is hardly a thing of the past. In the later decades of the 20th century, institutional education systems taught conservation as if it was a notion brought to Hawaiʻi as a gift of the “western civilization.” In this education system children like me were taught that the Hawaiians caused these extinctions by overhunting and deforestation, and presented conservationists born in another land as those who came to save Hawaiʻi from us.
While the inadvertent introduction 1,000 years ago of the Polynesian rat— Hawai‘i’s first invasive species — certainly altered ecosystem function, which then resulted in a handful of notable extinctions, research since the turn of the century increasingly points to the introduction of black rats, mosquitos (and mosquito-borne diseases) and cats (who have now gone feral) — all introduced by foreigners in the 19th century — as the major drivers of extinctions in Hawai‘i. As for the deforestation that was originally blamed on Hawaiian ecocide, that didn’t happen until the 19th century either, as the high demand for fuel for steam engines and the push to convert hundreds of thousands of acres to ranching and plantations spelled disaster for Hawai‘i’s forests and wetlands.
The Rise of Restoration
The 1970s was a pivotal time in Hawaiʻi. After generations of miseducation, cultural appropriation by the tourism industry, and the witnessing of sacred islands being used as target practice by the US Navy, efforts to revive the last vestiges of Hawaiian culture coalesced into a new Hawaiian renaissance. A growing sense of Indigenous agency — founded on the concept of aloha ʻāina (“love of the land”) — led to a revival of Hawaiian language, arts, material culture, philosophy and spirituality.
October 7, 2014 Hawaiian cultural practitioners, environmentalists, and activists gather to stand in solidarity against the groundbreaking ceremony for the Thirty Meter Telescope. Photo: Occupy Hilo
In the 21st century, Hawaiian-led conservation efforts across the archipelago have coalesced around the notion of “biocultural restoration” as an antidote to the influences of colonization that led to the collapse of the Hawaiian eco-civilization. Colonization is a process that severs relationships between Indigenous people and their language, their ancestral places, and the biodiversity that shaped their cultural identity. Biocultural restoration focuses on restoring relationships between Indigenous people and their places, as well as between them and the biodiversity that shaped the language and identities of their ancestors. Biocultural restoration is built on the notion that everything in the system is interconnected, as are the problems we perceive and the solutions to them.
Extinctions, collapses in species abundance, habitat degradation, disintegration of family systems and the disenfranchisement of communities all trace back to the imposition of the notion that humanity and nature are separate, and are exacerbated by the solutions promulgated by conventional approaches to conservation that aspires to save nature from humans.
To heal these scars, the world must accept the truth: We Indigenous peoples were not the cause of the mass extinctions witnessed by our ancestors. The reality is that Euro-American colonization, the animals and diseases they brought with them, as well as the philosophies and practices that have justified deforestation and the draining of wetlands — all of which are the antithesis of sustainability — caused more extinctions than Polynesian rats ever have.
After more than 40 years of the American approach not working, it’s high time we try something different. Now’s the moment for us to learn from our eco-civilizations of the past to ensure we can have a civilization in our future.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or its employees.
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