Environmentalists and journalists tend to describe beavers in the ways they benefit humans. It’s time to change that perception of nature.
Beavers are having a moment. After being hunted to near extinction, they’ve steadily made a comeback, and today both the scientific community and the public have become increasingly aware and appreciative of their profound influence on habitat.
But as environmentalists, journalists and others praise beavers and expound upon their many planet-saving virtues, a problem has emerged: Beavers are too often seen as a tool for humans, rather than animals with their own agency and agenda.
Even those of us who are closely involved with beavers through conservation organizations or habitat restoration have long defaulted to an innate personification of beavers, unfailingly objectifying them and the “ecosystem services they provide.” How many times have you read or said that beaver activities restore watershed health, provide wildfire breaks and refuges, regulate stream flows, and stabilize the water table?
That’s all true, of course. But at the same time, the inference that they’re doing it for anyone but themselves creates an imbalance, an unrealistic expectation of a species that has no interest in the issues of humans.
Beavers are not beholden to the human-caused issues of our planet, and it’s time to adjust our language to reflect that simple but profound fact.
A simple substitution of vernacular, conceptualization and attitudes toward beavers and their natural behavior is vital to creating a well-rounded understanding of the natural processes of wildlife. Endless messages — perpetuated by well-meaning journalists and others — of giving beavers a “role” or “putting beavers to work” can be explained more accurately by “attracting them to locations where they might be naturally successful.” Rather than creating a “collaboration” or “partnership” with beavers, we are simply attempting to “support beaver success” and “restore conditions needed for ecological success.”
The personification of beavers is understandable — and to a certain extent, it’s been useful. Beavers possess natural skills that the Army Corp of Engineers would envy, so the language of “utilizing,” “partnering” and “collaborating” with beavers has served as a vital bridge, as well as connecting us back to a pathway of Indigenous knowledge.
But this also perpetuates a destructive one-to-one relationship with the natural world. “What can it do for me?” has been the guiding question, instead of “How can I be a valuable part of interspecies connectedness?”
A gentle, intentional and more precise reshaping of language around beavers, and nature as whole, could help reconnect us with the origin of our knowledge of interspecies living — recognizing we are not at the “top,” and that human supremacy is a myth.
For those of us who are “beaver believers,” this is incredibly important — to signal through language a path forward in our work, where we work in relationship with natural systems.
Words matter. By placing ourselves side by side with beavers and other species, we can help cultivate and activate a gentle tidal wave that will influence our research, and our relationship to one another and the natural world — and ultimately help restore the natural balance. When we stop seeing and talking about beavers as tools and partners, and instead treat them as free agents with their own agenda completely unrelated to humans, we can collectively transition to the next phase in our conservation effort. We can reach a point where nature is not hierarchically divided in a Linnaean system but recognized as a dynamic organism in concert with itself.
The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
There’s still time to find out how to cast your ballot, even if you’re dealing with other recovery efforts.
Like the fires that displaced many Westerners two years ago, Hurricanes Ian and Fiona have left citizens in the Southeast with more than a few challenges — including finding out how and where to vote.
Puerto Rico got slammed hardest this hurricane season, but the territory doesn’t have any major races this November. That means the people of Puerto Rico can concentrate on recovery (again). For future reference, any disasters during voting periods could fall under “provisions of the Code on Early Voting (Article 9.37) and the power of the president to add categories when there is an emergency declaration (Article 3.4),” says Griselle López Díaz, director of communications for the Commission on Elections.
Georgia doesn’t anticipate any voting problems from the hurricanes, says Robert Sinners, communications director for the Georgia secretary of state. “However, we do have a number of mobile voting units which are on standby in case of emergency,” he adds. “We deployed them to Bryan County after a recent tornado in the May primary.” (It’s worth noting that state legislators previously proposed a bill to that would make it almost impossible to deploy mobile voting.)
Finally, South Carolina — whose official voting motto is “no excuses” — has an absentee ballot process that will work for any voters still facing problems. “They can apply up to Oct. 28, just like the normal vote-by-mail process for absentee, and can get the ballot anywhere,” says John Michael Catalano, who oversees voter education outreach for the South Carolina State Election Commission.
Regardless of which state or territory you live in, experts say it’s always a good idea to have voting contingency plans in place, especially with future disasters likely to get both worse and more frequent due to climate change.
Listen to new songs addressing the climate crisis by Julian Lennon, Midnight Oil, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, The Stop Shopping Choir and many others.
The protest song is alive and well — and oh-so-necessary in an age when the musical sounds of nature are quickly vanishing.
Here are eight new projects, ranging from singles by environmentally conscious singers to massive benefit projects encompassing hundreds of artists — all celebrating the natural world and protesting its destruction.
South African vocalist Anneli Kamfer brings new life — and more than a little bit of pain — to this stunning update to the classic 1960s protest song. Originally written by P.F. Sloan, the lyrics have been updated for the modern era by Daily Maverick climate journalists Branko Brkic and Tiara Walters. Read the backstory of the new production here and crank up the volume to watch the video below:
Perhaps best known for their track “Monsanto Is the Devil,” the Stop Shopping Choir is back with eight new songs prepared in time for their protests this past spring at the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow. Rev. Billy (a Revelator contributor) belts out preacher-style lyrics in many of these songs, while additional members of the environmental protest group take the lead on others. Produced by Savitri D, the album’s eight heavenly songs — like “Love With Extinction” and “The Great Outdoors” — will have you rising to your feet and ready to raise hell against ecosystem-destroying corporations.
The first time you hear it, the soft music and gently running waters on this album’s eight tracks sound like something playing in the background while you get a massage or take a yoga class. That’s before you realize the water sounds have been recorded on melting glaciers and that some of the musical instruments have been assembled from ethically collected penguin bones. If that sounds macabre to you, you’re right — but it’s also hauntingly beautiful. Listening to a dying ecosystem has never been so moving.
Frontman Peter Garrett knows his Earth-related issues. In addition to his decades of work with Midnight Oil, he served as Australia’s minister for the environment, heritage and the arts from 2007 to 2010 and logged many years of environmental activism on top of that. This new album, accompanied by the band’s farewell tour, carries the angry sense of urgency and rocking beats you might remember from songs like “Beds Are Burning” to new tracks like “Last Frontier,” “Reef” and “Rising Seas” — the video for which appears below:
Eno makes his first appearance on this list with an album dedicated to exploring feelings about the climate emergency. Unlike his ambient albums, Eno sings on this LP — and he does so with powerful, lyrical emotion.
Listen to a live recording of the song “There Were Bells” here:
EarthPercent x Earth Day Compilation Album
by 100 various artists
Sorry, you can’t listen to this one yet. EarthPercent — the Brian Eno-founded nonprofit dedicated to greening the music industry — has so far only made this 100-track album available during two separate 24-hour periods (one of which, you might guess from the title, was on Earth Day). If it becomes available for purchase again, you’ll find exclusive songs from Eno, Pater Gabriel, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, and many others, from a wide range of genres. Many of the songs, though far from all, cover environmental themes.
Although you can’t buy this specific album or sample any of its tracks, dozens of artists — including Anna Calvi, Death Cab for Cutie, Violet Skies and Wayne Snow — have other songs or albums available through EarthPercent’s Bandcamp page (which you can also follow for notifications of new releases). Proceeds from each download support organizations addressing the climate emergency.
Listen to Death Cab for Cutie’s song “Foxglove Through the Clearcut,” from their EarthPercent-benefitting album Asphalt Meadows:
“Change”
by Julian Lennon
This single — commissioned by a conservation marketing company called Everland — wraps up existential climate dread and positive inspiration in just under four minutes. It’s a welcome return from an artist who’s devoted much of his career to protecting the environment and supporting Indigenous peoples.
Produced by Grammy winner Randall Poster, this massive project of songs and spoken-word performances came out in 20 smaller collections over the past few months. The whole thing is now up on Spotify and other streaming platforms, and it will soon be available as a vinyl boxed set. Contributors include Esperanza Spalding, Elvis Costello, Jonathan Franzen, Jeff Goldblum, Mark Mothersbaugh, John Lithgow, Bette Midler and many others.
In addition to streaming, “Birdsong” tracks have migrated to YouTube. Here’s a great video of Yo-Yo Ma and Anna Clyne’s song “In the Gale,” which is accompanied by a flock of singing birds:
And for something completely different, check out Laurie Anderson’s fable/song “Before the World.”
A new book about efforts to save endangered snails in Hawai‘i provides valuable insight into threats to global biodiversity.
Perhaps you’ve heard of George. He died on New Year’s Day in 2019. A so-called “endling,” George was believed to be the last known individual of his species — Achatinella apexfulva — a kind of Hawaiian tree snail.
His passing generated a buzz of media coverage, but the plight of the world’s endangered snails wasn’t long for the limelight.
Van Dooren is a field philosopher and author, and his research and writing focus on the ethical, cultural and political issues around extinctions. While in Hawai‘i in 2013 writing about birds, the subjects of three of his previous three books, he met George and the small, but dedicated group of researchers working to protect Hawaiian snails.
He was hooked.
The Hawaiian islands, he learned, are home to staggering diversity of snails — with more than 750 species known to science. Sadly, though, at least two-thirds of those are already extinct, and some 50 more sit on the brink.
Van Dooren set out to learn why and what could be done to save the remaining populations. The result is the new book, A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions, which tracks efforts to save the islands’ imperiled snails — including the work of the Snail Extinction Prevention Program.
The book provides insight into not just struggling gastropods in Hawai‘i but our global biodiversity crisis.
The Revelator spoke to van Dooren about why conservation efforts overlook invertebrates, what we can do about that, and whether Hawaiian snails stand a chance.
Why have things gotten so bad for snails in Hawai‘i?
The decline begins with the arrival of Polynesian people and the clearing of lowland areas for agriculture and the introduction of the Polynesian rat, which we now understand was not just about rats eating snails, but about rats eating seeds and transforming the forest environment in a way that didn’t work out particularly well for snails.
Those initial processes drastically scaled up with the arrival of European and American colonists.
Oahu tree snails. Photo: David Sischo, USFWS – Pacific Region (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Then, in the beginning of the 19th century with the arrival of Christian missionaries, we began to see a global trade of species, which is about sandalwood being logged in Hawai‘i and exported elsewhere. It’s about the arrival of more rats, European rats and others, that are also snail predators and also impact the forests.
And then it’s about the arrival of plantations of sugar, especially, and pineapple and ranching in the islands. All of these things cleared a lot of forests and drastically transformed what was left.
Then we have the shell collectors who arrived with the missionaries in the 1820s. Most likely, although we don’t have good records, they drove some species very close to, or even over the edge, of extinction.
And then came more predators with the arrival of the rosy wolfsnail, a carnivorous snail that tracks the native snails with their slime, and is, as one of the biologists put it, “vacuuming up the remaining species.”
And all the while, going on through all of this, is habitat loss caused by the military and tourism.
There’s so much going on condensed into these relatively small bits of land that have been sought after by so many people in different ways. And so much has been squeezed from them. The snails are really a casualty of that. I don’t think that’s a completely unique story. Many contemporary extinctions are about multiple interwoven causes, and they’re causes that cut across these kinds of ecological and cultural processes.
There are a lot of fascinating — and endangered — snails throughout the world. Why focus only on Hawai‘i?
I think there is a bit of a tendency to think about extinction as broadly an anthropogenic crisis, rather than looking at more specific details around particular extinctions. If we just tell global stories about extinction, we end up not really being able to say anything more than that humanity is the problem.
But by zooming in on Hawai‘i, I think that enables us to think about how extinction is tangled up with processes of colonization, militarization, globalization, et cetera. It’s not something that’s caused by humanity in the general sense. But it’s a much more concrete process of loss that’s tied in with particular histories, particular ways of ordering human life, particular ways of generating profit and of valuing and understanding the world.
And snails are also a victim of an invertebrate bias in conservation?
Yes, and it’s something that I have been guilty of myself in writing about birds for so long.
But 99% of the animal kingdom is invertebrates. Most of them haven’t even been described by science, and they’re disappearing rapidly. A lot of them are disappearing without ever even being described or named. But even the ones that have been, we often know very little about them.
If we’re lucky enough to know that they are endangered, we often don’t know enough about their life histories or about their needs to really understand what to do about it.
We talk about the biodiversity crisis as though we know what it is, as though we know who some of the main actors are — and they’re all big mammals and birds — but there really is this whole other unseen extinction crisis going on that’s really not very well understood, let alone spoken about.
How do we overcome that bias?
We need to approach the biodiversity crisis differently. It’s not just a case of developing a new category of charismatic microfauna and trying to add the odd snail or beetle onto that list of charismatic species. What we really learn from invertebrates is that there are just too many species and there are just too many of them at risk at the moment for us to continue to entertain a kind of one-by-one approach to conservation.
Of course, we’ve known that for a very long time, and there have been many other approaches to thinking about biodiversity loss on an ecosystem level, for example. We need to continue to do that. We need to continue to be thinking about habitat and about large-scale processes and about protecting whole groups of species together rather than one by one.
I also think there’s fundamentally a kind of creative and imaginative element to this puzzle, a need to rethink how we value species and how we relate to them so that we can learn to care in new ways.
Exclosure to protect Oahu tree snails. Photo: Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resource Conservation (CC BY-NC 2.0)
We need new practices of imagination and storytelling. That’s about our educational programs and biases against invertebrates in films and schools and all sorts of things. It’s about the way in which we often instrumentalize biodiversity to — even in the case of invertebrates — focus on the beautiful ones like the butterflies, or the useful ones like the bees, instead of really trying to cultivate a sense of appreciation for all these relationships that are going on all around us.
What I’ve tried to do in this book, in part, is to think about how snails inhabit their worlds, how they navigate and make sense, about snail socialities and reproduction, and all these fascinating things that are going on as a way of trying to thicken our sense of who they are and to create a greater sense of appreciation.
I think that kind of cultivation of a sense of appreciation and wonder is a transferable skill. If we can do it with some species, it can ripple out from there to help us to appreciate the wider world.
One of the things you write about are the “exclosures” — these fenced refuges for rare snails that have been constructed to try and protect them. While that program has been largely successful, you also question what happens if they’ve created an ark where the passengers can never get off. How do you grapple with the success of saving species if they’ll remain in captivity?
I think we do have to sit with that, and we do have to acknowledge that some species, like Achatinella apexfulva, have been lost in the ark and in these fenced exclosures — and others probably will be too.
So even if life in the forest again becomes possible at some point in the future for these species, it won’t be for all of them. I think we should hold onto that. I think that’s about an honest reckoning with what’s going on in the world around us.
I think we should grapple with the complexity of the situations we’re in. The cultural pressure to always share some good news stories isn’t always helpful and can be very dismissive and alienating for people who are really struggling and living — like the scientists in this case — in the midst of this ongoing loss.
That’s why I end [the book] on this note of mournful hope that I think is really important. There are still possibilities here for a fuller sense of snail life, for getting snails back out into the world, but we really don’t know how that would be achieved at this stage.
There’s an element of bearing witness in this book and in a lot of my writing that’s about not trying to rush to the good news or to the solution but to try and honestly hold in our presence what has been lost so that we can learn from it, feel responsible for it. And also as an ethical obligation to those who have been lost, that they not be just forgotten.
The view of evolution as a process driven by competition and selfishness was thoroughly shaken up in the 1960s by evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. She was fascinated by the microbial world; her daughter Jennifer Margulis says that she called herself a “spokesperson for the microcosm.”
In a paper that was rejected by fifteen scientific journals before it was published, Margulis pointed back to the earliest days of life on Earth and argued that single-celled organisms (bacteria appeared some 3.8 billion years ago) made a dramatic leap into multicellular complexity via symbiosis some one and a half billion years ago.
In this hypothesis, two different microorganisms lived in community — as bacteria still do, forming slimes and mats in which millions live and interact with each other — and merged to form a new and more internally complex kind of cell called a eukaryote. Those eukaryotic cells themselves went on to form symbioses to become multicellular organisms.
Eukaryotic cells contain bundled structures outside the cell nucleus — mitochondria, which produce energy, and, in plants, chloroplasts, which drive photosynthesis — and Margulis argued that both are remnants of formerly free- living bacteria. This line of thinking stretched all the way back to the work of early twentieth-century Russian scientists who embraced both Kropotkin and Darwin but were ignored in the West at the time.
When Margulis presented her work, it took ten years for most of the rest of science to stop damning her as a heretic, but her arguments are now widely accepted. Every bit of our bodies, as well as those of other animals, plants, and fungi, are made of eukaryotic cells — these minuscule bundles of cooperation that transformed Earth more than anything except for the emergence of life itself.
A friend who heard I was working on this book sent me a marvelous essay by neuroscientist Kelly Clancy for Nautilus magazine called “Survival of the Friendliest,” which introduced me to the concept of “relaxed selection.” As Clancy points out in the essay, natural selection — the weeding out of members of a species that have traits that make them less likely to survive, and the resulting surge of others with more helpful traits — can be “relaxed” by events outside an organism’s control, like a drop in the number of predators or the sudden increase in a food source or a long spate of fine weather, and this relaxation allows organisms the freedom to change and grow in new ways.
But selection can also be relaxed by the actions of the organisms themselves. “Evolution isn’t just selecting for bodies,” Clancy explained to me. “It’s selecting for behaviors, postures, mating dances, habitats. It’s beavers making dams, and humans making cities. It operates on a cultural level.”
The ancient fusion of microorganisms that created eukaryotic cells was surely an example of relaxed selection: the two single-celled organisms struck a bargain in which one found a safe environment inside the other, and the host acquired an onsite energy source. “Here, evolution is not a weapons race, but a peace treaty among interdependent nations,” Clancy writes. The new eukaryotic cell was given the freedom by this union to expand its numbers and be more biologically creative — a creativity that ultimately led to greater complexities like us and all the animals, plants, and fungi in our world.
Relaxed selection goes on all around us, offering similar freedoms to other organisms. Clancy’s essay points to one fascinating example that goes on in oceans around the world. There, the cyanobacteria Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus live side by side in floating communities. Both feed themselves via photosynthesis, turning sunlight and carbon dioxide into a sugary fuel. But as they photosynthesize, they create a toxic byproduct and need to protect themselves by squirting an enzyme into the water to counter it.
It takes a lot of energy to produce the enzyme, and only Synechococcus has the gene to do it. But Prochlorococcus benefits all the same, as the enzyme Synechococcus produces wafts through their common soup and becomes a shared good. Prochlorococcus doesn’t need to waste any energy producing the enzyme and, instead, can focus more energy on reproduction. And it does a champion job of it, benefiting the entire ocean community. Researchers say the trillions of Prochlorococcus in the seas weigh as much as two hundred and twenty million Volkswagen Beetles, providing food to thousands of other ocean creatures and generating 5 percent of Earth’s oxygen.
Scientists theorize that Prochlorococcus once had the gene to produce the enzyme, but that living in a cooperative community where other cyanobacteria do the job for free allowed it to lose that gene. This theory is hilariously called the Black Queen Hypothesis, after the card game Hearts, in which players ditch cards trying to avoid getting stuck with the queen of spades. It counters another biological theory called the Red Queen Hypothesis, which suggests that competing organisms are involved in a constant evolutionary arms race — based on Wonderland’s Red Queen telling Alice that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Most of us assume that evolution tweaks organisms to become more complex in order to succeed, but scientists theorize that evolution works in the reverse way, too: when organisms obtain shared goods from others in their community, they can afford to become less complex. Reminds me of some marriages: he forgets how to do the laundry, she forgets how to fire up the grill, and they use the freedom granted by their union for something else. Gardening? Reading? Petting the dog?
We humans have prospered as a species for a number of reasons, but one is certainly the marvelous inventions that have allowed us to relax selection. Agriculture and medicine, buildings and heating systems, and traffic signals and bike helmets — all allow us to thrive. Our problem now is that many of these inventions and our resulting abundance increases the pressure on the rest of nature, rupturing ecosystems and driving other species to extinction. And the abundance itself doesn’t even nurture everyone within our own species, with some so wealthy they have gold toilets and others so poor they squat in ditches. We need to relax our pressure on the rest of nature, guided by new metaphors for our relationships with other species — metaphors that will hopefully spill over into our relationships with each other. We need to be sweeter.
Voting on election day is job one, but the planet needs your civic commitment every other day of the year, too.
Wolves and frogs can’t vote, a lake or river can’t call their elected representatives, and a polluted ravine can’t blow the whistle on a toxic coal plant.
But you can do all those things — and more.
The trouble is, not enough people who care about climate change, the extinction crisis or environmental justice make themselves known to the people who can make a systemic difference.
“The truth is the environmental movement needs more political power,” says Nathaniel Stinnett, executive director of the Environmental Voter Project. “We can’t rely on politicians doing the right thing. Instead, we need to get more political power so that they lead on our issues because it’s politically smart.”
So how do environmentalists get that power, especially in an age when so many feel powerless? One route starts by engaging in democracy — not just by voting in the midterms or general elections, but by participating in our civic systems year-round, at the federal and local levels, on an ongoing basis.
“Voting isn’t important just because you can elect the right people,” Stinnett says. “It’s also important because in between elections is when policy is made.”
Ocean Biology Processing Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, public domain
It’s hard to influence policy, though, if people don’t participate in the political system. And if people don’t feel they have a voice, it can create a feedback loop that makes them even less likely to vote.
“In certain states, the number of unlikely voters who list climate and the environment as their top priority is twice as large as the number of likely voters,” Stinnett says. “You can see that data and get frustrated, or you can see it as an enormous opportunity.”
That opportunity comes from getting more people who care about the environment to vote and otherwise engage — something those who are already active on those fronts can encourage by being public about their environmental concerns and what they’re doing about them.
That will help build support for issues that, ironically, people already care about but don’t speak of in political contexts.
“Human beings are social animals,” Stinnett adds. “One of the most impactful things environmentalists can do in the civic sphere and the political sphere is to be loud and proud about being an environmental voter and a political activist. Your friends and colleagues look to you for cues as to what is good behavior, and it’s up to everyone who cares about the environment to model that voting is part of what makes a good environmentalist.”
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, says the most important thing beyond voting itself is to speak proudly about your environmental commitments. “One of the ways in which we could increase the likelihood that we perceive that climate action itself is normative is for us to speak out more as individuals and find ways to represent our climate commitments as a form of almost personal witness.”
Our personal achievements and goals have another benefit: They work as an antidote to the feeling of helplessness that pervades society and erodes trust in our institutions.
“Your vote is an expression of your commitments to things, and that has an impact,” says Jamieson.
So let’s increase that impact. Here are 30 ways environmentalists can participate in democracy to better themselves, their communities and the planet throughout the year.
1. Vote. That’s job one, in every election, no matter how big or how small, and whether it’s national or local. Too many environmentalists don’t vote, and that means their voices get lost.
“The simple truth is that politicians don’t care about the priorities of non-voters,” says Stinnett. “Politicians don’t poll unlikely voters. They don’t poll the people who stay at home. So simply by voting, you become a first-class citizen. You make sure that your policy preferences and your policy priorities drive decision-making.”
2. Encourage others to vote. Are your friends, family members and neighbors registered? They can check their registration status at Vote.org, where they can also make a pledge to vote. Come to think of it, you can do that, too.
Earth Day voter registration event in Mill Valley, Calif. (Photo by Fabrice Florin, CC BY-SA 2.0)
3. Help others vote. Sometimes just getting to the polls can be an overwhelming challenge. You can help by freeing up peoples’ time — for example, by offering free babysitting — or volunteering to drive someone who lacks access to transportation or has health issues that prevent them from driving. Your community may already have initiatives you can volunteer through, or you can find people in need through Carpool Vote. (Need a ride? You can also find one there.) And of course, carpooling is always a greener option than each person driving.
4. Demand a plan and an accounting. Insist that political candidates and elected officials publish their proposed and current climate policies — then take that idea much further and make it broader. “I want everybody to have a climate action plan for themselves and for every community and organization,” says Jamieson. Each climate action plan, she says, should be “real and accountable, with demonstrated benchmarks.”
And this isn’t just about government. Jamieson says we should expect the same from our employers, our kids’ schools, our places of worship, and the companies with which we do business.
5. Keep track. Once people and organizations make their climate plans known, hold them to it. “We know when people make public commitments, you increase the likelihood they act on those commitments,” says Jamieson. “They’re going to be accountable.”
6. Learn how to sort fact from fiction during election season. The News Literacy Project and the League of Women Voters will host three webinars about disinformation over the next few weeks.
7. Be a good boss. Got employees? Give them paid time off to vote. Maybe close your business to the public for half a day so you can all go together. (Got a boss? Ask for time off yourself.)
8. Sign up to be a poll worker. Anyone can volunteer to do this essential job, not just retired folx (and unfortunately the need has never been greater due to ongoing threats against election workers). The website Stacker has compiled details on how to become a poll worker and what to expect from the experience.
“The people who are most likely to care deeply about climate and other environmental issues are young, lower income and people of color — and they also happen to be the three groups that are always the objective of voter-suppression efforts,” says Stinnett. Volunteering or donating to groups like Fair Fight, the ACLU, Voting Rights Lab or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund can help ensure everyone can always freely elect their representatives and shape environmental policy.
10. Support ranked-choice voting. As we discussed in a recent op-ed, this is a great way to weed out extremist candidates and balance bipartisanship.
A notable victory took place this year in Australia, where ranked-choice voting helped push coal-supporting politicians out of power — even with the country’s media dominated by notoriously climate-denying publications owned by Rupert Murdoch. “I really love that it made a difference in Australia,” says Jamieson. “They basically managed to defeat the Murdoch anti-climate agenda with ranked-choice voting.”
11. Support environmental groups. Whether you donate or volunteer, they’ll amplify the collective voices of people advocating for better environmental laws and policies.
Coastal redwood trees in Humboldt, California. (Photo by trevorklatko, CC BY-NC 2.0)
12. Advocate for or against specific regulations, either by yourself or as part of a broader grassroots environmental effort. Rules and opportunities vary by state, so check with the groups and experts in your area.
13. Run for office (or encourage a friend to run). You don’t need to run for president to make a difference. Local offices like city councils, parks commissions, utilities and school boards — a particular target of extremist takeover attempts — can have tremendous impact on a region’s environmental policies.
14. Volunteer for local positions. Nonelected government and community positions need climate expertise. Is there a role for you and your environmental perspective on your local planning commission, library board, arts council, parks and recreation committee, PTA, homeowners’ association, Rotary Club or other institution?
15. Write to elected officials. Your opinions matter year-round, so drop your senator, mayor, governor or other representative a line to discuss what matters to you or how they’re doing. (You can do this on social media or through their official phone and email channels, which tend to have more impact.)
16. Sign petitions. Amplify your voice through collective impact. Whenever possible, focus on petitions organized by groups that actively collect and deliver your signatures.
17. Submit public comments on proposed regulations and projects. You may be surprised how few people do this, and you don’t want anti-environmental advocates to have the only say. You can find open calls for comment on the federal level at Regulations.gov, or do a web search for your state or county for more local opportunities (which you may find listed under multiple agencies).
18. Join lawful protests.The bigger, the better. The media notices, and so do politicians.
19. Read banned and challenged books — and share what you learn from them with friends, colleagues and elected officials. Nothing scares authoritarians and corporatists more than independent thinking and dangerous ideas — well, dangerous to them, anyway.
22. Send local story tips to the media or share ideas for environmental coverage with the bigger outlets. Journalists depend on an active populace, and you should never underestimate the power of a good whistleblower. (Hint: We like tips.)
23. Have discussions. Not everyone fully understands the threats of climate change or biodiversity loss or comprehends the systemic causes of environmental injustice. Sometimes that means breaking through their sources of disinformation (Skeptical Science can help with that). Other times it requires some back and forth. The First Amendment Museum offers tips on having a civil conversation that will change someone’s mind, while Psyche magazine offers advice on how to have better arguments.
24. Avoid the cult of personality. Talk about issues and the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of specific environmental legislation rather than individual candidates. (And if your preferred candidate doesn’t win, don’t take it personally or get dissuaded.)
25. Show up and speak at town halls, planning board meetings, school board meetings — anywhere the public can help shape policy. The Earth can’t speak for itself, so someone needs to — especially since proponents of development or other destructive projects will certainly show up.
26. Propose ballot initiatives or their local equivalents. The process and nature of these types of initiatives, which allow citizens to vote directly on major issues, vary by state and municipality, so check with your local experts to see what you can do.
27. Self-advertise. Those ubiquitous “I voted” stickers on election day serve multiple purposes: They display our pride and remind others to get to the polls. But why limit that to one day a year? Buttons, bumper stickers, social-media icons and even memes can remind people year-round of the need to vote or otherwise participate — and hold you up as an example of someone who does.
Photo: Phil Roeder (CC BY 2.0)
28. Support libraries, museums, community centers and local organizations that themselves support an engaged, educated community. Encourage them to set up displays on environmental topics, organize speakers, conduct outreach efforts, or whatever best fits their mission.
29. Spread the news about the ways democracy is in peril. Attacks on voting, the right to protest, the media, LGBTQ+ rights and other freedoms are symptoms of the worldwide rise in authoritarian forces. And as authoritarian governments rise, environmental protections fall. (Nazi Germany and modern-day Russia are notable examples.) Keep track of these threats, especially the home-grown kind, and spread the word about the dangers they pose. (There’s no single source devoted to tracking this, so it may require keeping your eyes open. A good starting place, though, is these newsletters from Democracy Docket.)
30. Have (and share) a contingency plan. In our age of ever-increasing climate disasters, far too many people every year find themselves displaced by fire, smoke, flood or other kinds of crisis. Don’t let that interfere with your ability to vote and otherwise participate. Do your research early so you know how to contact your representatives or election officials in case something forces you to flee your community. And share what you learned with your neighbors so others aren’t disenfranchised.
And finally, keep going. You can find many more ideas for encouraging systemic change in our 30-day climate action plan.
Conservation groups rush to preserve camps across the United States as some properties sell to the highest bidder. Will they succeed?
Maine’s Androscoggin Land Trust just achieved a goal some thought it wouldn’t be able to achieve: It purchased the 95-acre Camp Gustin, located about 30 miles southwest of the state capital, for $415,000. The Trust, which solicited public donations to conserve the land, was able to complete the acquisition after it secured a loan from nonprofit The Conservation Fund and a grant from the state.
Camp Gustin was named after Charles Gustin, who donated the land to the Boy Scouts of America’s Pine Tree Council in the 1940s after his sons attended a scouting camp on the coast. Gustin’s descendants made a public plea last year to preserve the property, which the Pine Tree Council planned to sell to the highest bidder to contribute to its share of the Boy Scouts of America’s $2.46 billion victim compensation fund tied to its now-infamous child sexual abuse cases.
“It’s a very proud moment for them because they were very scared that the Pine Tree Council was going to sell to developers,” says Aimee Dorval, the Androscoggin Land Trust’s executive director.
The acquisition is part of a larger effort by the Trust to conserve hundreds of acres of land in Maine at risk of development. Dorval says it plans to open the camp to the public for camping and other recreational activities — and will also continue to allow Boy Scouts to use the land.
The ability to preserve land like Camp Gustin remains a source of worry for many conservationists — not just in Maine but around the country.
The Boy Scouts of America and their local councils intend to sell thousands of acres of land — including properties where some of the abuse took place — to compensate sexual abuse victims.
This September a judge in Delaware allowed the national organization to exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy and continue operating while settling decades of claims by more than 80,000 men who allege they were abused by troop leaders as children. The Scouts filed for bankruptcy in February 2020 amid declining membership and mounting legal costs from the lawsuits.
To help pay for the compensation fund, the Boy Scouts’ local councils are legally required to contribute at least $515 million.
Scouting Land
For more than a century, the Boy Scouts have acquired most of their land through gifts and charitable donations made by people who wanted these properties preserved.
It’s unclear how much land belongs to the national Boy Scouts, because some properties are owned and managed by the organization’s more than 250 local councils, which are separate nonprofits, “distinct and financially independent from the national organization,” the Boy Scouts of America says in a statement. By some estimates, the local Scout councils own 2,000 camp properties, worth billions of dollars.
The 377-acre Holcomb Valley Ranch went on the market in 2021 for $12 million. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Each local council receives a charter, much like a franchise agreement, from the national Boy Scouts organization. A local council’s charter can be revoked at any time by the national organization, according to the Boy Scouts bylaws.
Without a charter, a local council’s land would become the property of the national organization.
Environmental groups and government officials are trying to find ways to conserve this land before the Boy Scouts and councils sell it off to developers. They find themselves juggling the organization’s desires for quick turnover and maximum profit while also respecting the fact that some of these sites are places where horrific events took place.
If they succeed, it would further the better aspects of the Boy Scouts’ legacy: The Scouts have a long history of conserving land, some of which are highlighted in the organization’s Conservation Handbook.
Today the Boy Scouts’ conservation efforts are threatened by their own debt to the thousands of people they harmed. Critics say they’re selling off land to the highest bidder without consideration for the environment — or the tenants of the organization.
After months of emails and calls, Boy Scouts of America could not be reached for comment.
But other groups went on the record.
Close Calls
Conservation groups across the country represent one of the primary efforts to buy land from the Scouts’ local councils.
They don’t always succeed.
In 2019 the Michigan Crossroads Council of Boy Scouts sold Silver Trails Scout Reservation, a 270-acre campground near Port Huron. A nonprofit called Thumb Land Conservancy tried to buy it but lost out when the Scouts sold it to a gravel-mining company for $1.8 million.
More recently, in June, Seneca Waterways Council in New York voted to sell Camp Babcock-Hovey, a 293-acre campground on the shore of Seneca Lake that opened in 1937. The buyer of this $8 million property has not been disclosed, and calls to the national Boy Scouts press office remain unanswered.
The council will continue to operate the camp until October.
“The loss of Camp Babcock-Hovey is painful, especially for those who have spent treasured weeks of their Scouting careers there, or more than that, have dedicated significant portions of their lifetimes caring for that beautiful camp and providing leadership for its staff and campers,” wrote the council’s executive committee in June, explaining its decision to close the camp.
Other councils in New York face similar choices.
Camp Barton, which operated as a Boy Scout camp for more than a century, is among those on the chopping block.
Fred Bonn, regional director of New York state parks in the Finger Lakes where Camp Barton is located, says the state is working with three municipalities to buy 96 of the 130 acres of the former camp.
While the state parks department will buy the land, Bonn says the property — which will become a public park — will ultimately be managed by the cities of Covert, Ulysses and Trumansburg.
The remaining 34 acres of Camp Barton have been sold, says Bonn, adding that he doesn’t know if the buyer plans to develop the land or not.
Developers came close to buying the Deer Lake Scout Reservation in Killingworth, Connecticut.
After a yearlong battle, the Connecticut Yankee Boy Scouts Council agreed in September to sell Deer Lake, which was named in a 2012 lawsuit as a site where abuse took place, to Pathfinders, Inc., a local nonprofit that says it will maintain the property as a camp.
Deer Lake Scout Reservation. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal praised the move, writing on Twitter: “This precious natural treasure will be an enduring legacy for generations of nature lovers thanks to a great activist partnership. It’s a proud moment for the conservation movement.”
The council previously rejected Pathfinders’ offer to buy the land for $2.4 million.
Fearing the land would be lost to developers, Sen. Blumenthal told the press in June that he was looking into the possibility of using federal funds from the National Park Service’s Land and Water Conservation Fund to help buy Deer Lake and other Boy Scout properties that are up for sale around the country.
The Federal Role — and Challenge
But getting the National Park Service involved in the purchase of Boy Scout properties can be “pretty complicated,” says Joel Lynch, who runs the agency’s state and local assistance programs, which includes the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
The federal program, funded primarily by revenue generated from offshore oil and gas leases, supports projects to protect natural resources across the country.
Lynch says the Fund is driven by state governments, which submit outdoor recreation plans to the National Park Service every five years to help fund projects that could include the purchase of former Boy Scouts properties.
“I do see all the projects, so I haven’t necessarily seen an uptick, but I’m almost expecting to see something,” he says.
The only way for the National Park Service to step in, Lynch says, is if the Boy Scout property is within the boundaries of land owned by the agency.
But no one knows how many properties the Boy Scouts and their local councils own in general, let alone the amount within National Park Service boundaries.
Even if there were a list, Lynch says, all state-submitted projects still must go through an approval process to receive money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That can often take so long that the property they want to purchase goes off the market.
A way around that, he says, is for a state to collaborate with a land conservancy. In some cases, these local organizations will purchase properties using their own funds because it’s simply faster.
Ironically, the Boy Scouts themselves historically worked with land conservancies, like The Trust for Public Land, to purchase properties across the country. This was the case for the William H. Pouch Scout Camp on Staten Island, which was nearly sold in 2010 when the Greater New York Councils of the Boy Scouts of America, the camp’s owner, could no longer afford to maintain it.
The Boy Scouts have also worked with the U.S. Forest Service to preserve land when they couldn’t.
Since as early as 1937, the Forest Service has acquired almost 9,000 acres of land from the Boy Scouts.
The last time the agency acquired land from the Boy Scouts was in 2016. It has no plans of acquiring more, a Forest Service spokesperson wrote in an email.
Historic Atrocities
Some Boy Scouts property could be preserved from development thanks to a growing movement calling for the return of Native lands to Native nations so they can preserve it according to Tribal values. Most, if not all, of the property owned by the Boy Scouts and their local councils is on land stolen from Indigenous peoples.
“Landback is the literal reclamation of land of Indigenous peoples who’ve been forcibly removed from their lands on behalf of colonialism,” says Krystal Two Bulls, director of NDN Collective’s landback campaign. “But it’s also the reclamation of everything stolen from us.”
Two Bulls says Native nations are forming land conservancies to acquire ancestral lands. Many of these Native-led organizations don’t have the necessary funds to do this on their own, so they partner with government agencies or environmental groups to share costs — although even that is, in its own way, another element of colonization.
“I don’t think that we should have to purchase land that was stolen in the first place,” she says.
NDN Collective has a fund that lends money to tribes so they can buy their land back, including property currently owned by the Boy Scouts.
Because no one knows exactly how much property the Boy Scouts and their local councils own, it’s difficult to determine the land that’s been stolen and the Native nation it belongs to.
Reviewing records of treaties between the U.S. and Native nations is one way to try to find out, Two Bulls says.
“I think that’s how primarily we’ve been able to know that those are traditional territories, but I don’t underestimate Nations’ abilities to know through pre-colonial storytelling where they’re from because so many tribes have been displaced.”
At least one Native nation is trying to reclaim stolen land now for sale by the Boy Scouts.
The Esselen Tribe of Monterey County, in California, has put in a bid to buy Camp Pico Blanco in Big Sur from the Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council.
When the land went up for sale, the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy agreed to pay for the property and transfer it to the Esselen Tribe.
But despite the Tribe’s deep ties to the land, the Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council, as of September, has not yet chosen a buyer.
Eric Tarbox, the council’s deputy scout executive, told the Monterey Herald in April that Camp Pico Blanco was being sold not because of the sexual-assault judgments but due to damage caused by wildfires.
“Scouts are not able to use the camp and may not be able to for the foreseeable future,” Tarbox told the paper. “Most specifically, we are not selling it for financial need, but because Scouts can’t use it.”
Most of the listings for property owned by the Boy Scouts and their local councils, including Camp Pico Blanco, don’t mention anything about the land’s Indigenous history. They do, however, tout the organization’s conservation efforts at keeping the land pristine — although others dispute that characterization.
“These lands that national parks and public lands and conservation groups manage, they were not these untouched, pristine lands that need to be conserved,” says Two Bulls. “The reason they look the way that they do is because Native nations had been managing them and stewarding them since time immemorial. They are not untouched lands; they looked the way that they did because of us.”
The loss of Indigenous land led to the separation of families, loss of cultural identity, and genocide.
It’s only been since the end of the 20th century that Americans have started to confront the country’s violent history, says Amy Sodaro, author of the book Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence.
“These sites of atrocity have meaning and need to be dealt with more carefully,” says Sodaro. “I think there is starting to be a shift here, but I think in many ways we’re kind of behind much of the rest of the world, because we’ve been powerful enough to not have to face our past and to be able to kind of ignore these sites.”
The Boy Scouts of America and their local councils can no longer ignore the fact that children were abused on some of their properties. Conservation groups, scouting advocates and victims have mixed feelings about what to do with this land. Whether properties continue to operate as campsites or if they’re sold — which happens on a regular basis around the country — these locations will now remain shrouded in the darkness of historic pain.
In a stark contrast to recent election years, voters in just two states will decide on environmental issues this November. But there’s still a lot at stake.
Every election year a handful of statewide ballot initiatives carry high stakes for the environment. In 2020 there were four major ones, including Colorado’s Proposition 114 requiring a plan for the reintroduction of gray wolves. There were even more in 2018, including battles in Nevada and Arizona over how much renewable energy to require from utilities, while Florida debated an offshore-drilling ban.
This year the biggest story about environmental ballot initiatives is that there are only two.
Cost could be one reason.
“Typically initiatives are brought to the people because a policy can’t make it through the legislature,” says Nick Abraham, state communications director of the League of Conservation Voters. “But it’s extremely expensive and difficult to run a ballot initiative campaign, to not only get the signatures necessary but also to win at the ballot.”
Recent state wins on environmental issues and more action in Congress may have played a role, too.
“There’s much more work to do, to be sure, but I think often initiatives come out of frustration with the process,” says Abraham. “As more progress is made with lawmakers, people need initiatives less and less.”
This year just New York and California voters will take up environmental issues with ballot initiatives — but both could pack a big punch.
Transformational Funding for the Empire State
In New York, legislators hope their ballot initiative will put a lot of money on the line.
The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 would allow the state to sell bonds to fund $4.2 billion for environmental improvements that, according to the proposal, would “preserve, enhance, and restore New York’s natural resources and reduce the impact of climate change.”
That includes $1.5 billion for climate change mitigation, $1.1 billion for restoration and flood risk reduction, $650 million for open space conservation and recreation, and $650 million for water quality in resiliency infrastructure. More than one-third would also be earmarked to support disadvantaged communities.
In New York ballot initiatives need to be advanced by the state legislature before they can go to voters. This effort initially began with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2020 as a $3 billion bond, which was supported by the legislature. But it was withdrawn from the ballot that year because of economic concerns during the pandemic.
In April 2021 the legislature again passed the measure, but incoming Gov. Kathy Hochul asked legislators to add an additional $1 billion. In April 2022 the legislature cleared the way for $4.2 billion in the budget for the bond, which will now go before voters.
NY Gov. Hochul announces deployment of zero-emission buses. Photo: MTA (CC BY 2.0)
“It’s been a generation since we’ve done an environmental bond act,” says Julie Tighe, president of New York League of Conservation Voters, which has been advocating for the effort. If passed, it would represent “the largest investment the state of New York has ever made in the environment in a single tranche.” It would help fund electric school buses, the removal of lead pipes from communities, and addressing water contaminants, like PFAS and 1,4 dioxane, which can cause cancer risks.
The initiative is estimated to generate 100,000 jobs and an additional $4 billion in economic activity as both federal and local revenue will be leveraged for projects, too, she says.
“We’re really excited about helping to jumpstart this transition to protect our communities and make sure our infrastructure is in good shape,” Tighe adds.
Clean Cars in California
On the other side of the country, California voters will decide the fate of Proposition 30, the Tax on Income Above $2 Million for Zero-Emissions Vehicles and Wildfire Prevention Initiative, on the ballot following a push by a coalition of businesses and environmental groups.
That initiative, which unlike New York’s doesn’t need prior legislative support, would apply increased tax revenues from high-income earners toward funding zero-emissions vehicles, charging stations and related infrastructure, as well as training and hiring wildlife firefighters.
It’s needed to help combat climate change and its direct effects, says Oscar Garcia, the ballot initiative coordinator of California Environmental Voters, one of the groups supporting the proposition. It’s also needed, he says, to equitably meet the state’s new directive to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars and light trucks by 2035. That’s because half of the funds designated for vehicle and infrastructure investments in the ballot initiative will aid disadvantaged communities.
The initiative has been heavily financed by the rideshare company Lyft, which has tossed in $25 million in hopes of its passage.
In a break with his party, Gov. Gavin Newsom has come out against Prop 30, saying that rideshare companies like Lyft are using public tax money to help meet their own state mandate to have 90% of their miles driven in electric cars by 2030. He called it “one company’s cynical scheme to grab a huge taxpayer-funded subsidy.”
Rideshare companies don’t own passenger fleets themselves and won’t directly benefit from the proposition, says Garcia.
“We need a dedicated revenue source like Prop 30 to make headway in an equitable and fair way,” he says. “And this initiative goes toward combating catastrophic wildfires, bringing charging infrastructure into low-income communities, and to people who need vehicle rebates and subsidies to afford the transition to zero-emissions vehicles.”
Both approval and ranked choice voting put fire under the feet of elected officials to do the right thing for the environment — or risk being voted out.
I work on sustainability and political reform in Washington, D.C., but I still call the Pacific Northwest “home.” That’s why I’m heartened by the critical mass of electoral reform initiatives on ballots throughout the region this fall.
In Seattle, Initiative 134 would allow for a form of “approval voting” that empowers voters to choose more than one candidate per race in primary elections, preventing vote-splitting chaos in crowded primaries. Voters in Portland and various counties throughout the Pacific Northwest have opportunities to implement “ranked choice voting,” which asks voters to select their first choice, second choice, and so on down the line and determines the winner(s) through “instant runoffs.” Across the Cascadian hinterlands, Alaska conducted its first ranked choice election this August, and Nevadans will vote for statewide electoral reform in November.
It’s worth understanding how these reforms improve our elections — as well as our environment. They will allow voters to better express their true preferences when choosing elected officials and discourage political hacks from gaming the system. This generally leads to better policy outcomes.
In particular, ranked choice and approval voting help secure the policies necessary to build a sustainable future.
Larger Winning Coalitions
To understand how these reforms create better environmental outcomes, it helps to borrow some ideas from political science.
“Selectorate theory” helps explain political leaders’ strategic considerations for maintaining power. According to this theory, political leaders calculate the ratio of the “winning coalition” (the number of voters needed for a candidate to win) relative to the size of the “selectorate” (all eligible voters). When this ratio is small — for example, in autocracies — leaders retain loyalty by bribing members of their small coalition with private goods financed through government coffers. When this ratio is large and democratic, leaders earn voter loyalty through providing public goods that everyone enjoys.
Photo: Mark Dixon (CC BY 2.0)
Environmental goods are the classic example of a broadly appreciated public good. In a 2015 paper, political scientists Xun Cao and Hugh Ward measured the relative size of winning coalitions for thousands of elections worldwide against subsequent levels of air pollution. Their analysis showed that as a democracy experienced an increase in the size of the winning coalition, sulfur dioxide and other contributors to air pollution decreased.
By increasing the potential size of winning coalitions within a selectorate, electoral reforms contribute to a more sustainable future.
Now consider approval voting, where voters can choose multiple candidates. In our “choose-one” voting system, a winning coalition can be 50% + 1 of all voters. Every additional voter beyond this minimum threshold is expendable, so politicians are not motivated to earn their superfluous loyalty.
However, when an election uses approval voting, the size of the winning coalition equals the support of the second-place candidate plus one. For example, if 73% of voters are willing to “approve” of a popular challenger, then the incumbent needs 73% + 1 of voters to also “approve” of them to win the election.
In environmental terms, the best way to win the “approval” of a sufficiently large coalition is through protecting the many from pollution instead of allowing a few to enrich themselves through polluting.
By making candidates compete to be voters’ top-two or top-three pick, ranked choice voting similarly requires elected officials to pull together larger winning coalitions that prefer greener policies. When built on a preexisting foundation of voting rights and ballot access, both approval and ranked choice voting put fire under the feet of elected officials to do the right thing for the environment — or else risk being voted out.
Consider a hypothetical election to fill three seats, where multiple candidates from both major parties are running, and where 70% of voters prefer Republicans while only 30% prefer Democrats. In a ranked choice election for three-way representation, the threshold for winning is only 25%. Once the first-place winner — assumedly a Republican — is determined, the rankings of any voter required for that Republican to win first place are “locked” and any excess votes (in this case, more than the 25% threshold) are transferred to other candidates. The remaining votes are now 45% Republicans and 30% Democrats, meaning a Republican likely also wins the second seat.
However, the remaining votes for the final seat are 20% Republicans and 30% Democrats, assuring a Democrat will win. This result, where two Republicans and one Democrat represent an electorate that is 70% Republican and 30% Democrat, is a more balanced outcome than what would be expected from a “winner take all” election, where Republicans would win all three seats.
Proportional representation is a step toward environmental justice. Under our current “majoritarian” system of government, political minorities are excluded from representation, and in a racialized society like the United States they are too often synonymous with racial or ethnic minorities.
The only recourse for these groups to be systematically represented are as a byproduct of gerrymandering, where minority residents are “packed” into noncompetitive districts as a supermajority, or as an accident of vote-splitting, which can also backfire against minority candidates.
By contrast, proportional representation intentionally empowers minority voters with leverage to protest negative environmental conditions impacting their communities.
Because environmental concerns tend to be diffuse over widespread geographic areas, proportional representation also better secures general environmental outcomes. The larger multimember districts required for proportional representation are better scaled for evaluating the consequences of an environmental decision than smaller, single-member districts.
Political scientist Stephanie Rickard’s cross-national analysis of fishery subsidies gave this theory credence by showing how governments elected by proportional representation are more likely to pursue broadly appreciated environmental goods rather than serve centralized corporate interests.
(One caveat: Environmental interests do poorly under proportional representation if the voters are geographically concentrated as a strictly “urban elite” or “NIMBYs.”)
Better Stewardship of Resources
Electoral reforms are also good news for the planet for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.
By compressing multiple rounds of voting into one round, or two at most, electoral reforms reduce the environmental impact of an election while still securing the voters’ preferred candidate. This works because electoral reforms mitigate against vote-splitting, eliminating the need for runoffs to narrow the field of candidates or achieve a legally required threshold of votes.
Earth Day voter registration event in Mill Valley, Calif. (Photo by Fabrice Florin, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The environmental benefits are most significant when voting in-person. Every Election Day voters make an additional trip to their polling site, which often requires a fossil-fueled form of transportation, particularly in suburban and rural communities. For elections that yield hundreds of thousands of voters, citizens drive hundreds of thousands of extra miles.
Mail-in ballots leave less of a carbon footprint, but there’s a non-negligible environmental impact of printing paper ballots, envelopes, and other election literature for each voter. By reducing the number of election rounds, the environmental cost of electing government officials is reduced significantly.
The lesson is not that carbon-conscious voters should stay home. In fact, an analysis of the environmental outcomes of the 2019 Canadian federal election estimated that the median benefit of a pro-climate vote was equivalent to a 34.2 ton reduction in carbon dioxide, more than 14 times the reduction of choosing to live car-free for one year, and astronomically more than skipping a single trip to the polling place.
Neither does this imply a need to do away with paper ballots — having a paper trail is a crucial defense against the rising authoritarianism that casts doubt on the legitimacy of our elections. Rather, the lesson is a simple one: Ranked choice and approval voting are environmentally friendly because they eliminate unnecessary rounds of voting, in turn saving resources.
This matters because elections are among our most fundamental civic rituals. When we consciously decide our collective values through ballot measures and who we choose to send to elected office, we are also subconsciously internalizing other values about what we deem acceptable as a society.
From a strict emissions-accounting perspective, the environmental impact of a single election is only a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of other collective activities that occur daily. But what message does it send if we shun a simple reform that drastically reduces election emissions and waste? Through eliminating unnecessary voting rounds, we uphold sustainability as a civic virtue while fulfilling our democratic duty.
Thinking Ecologically about Elections
None of the reasons above are partisan. I did not suggest that we should game the system to elect more Democrats. That would go against the spirit of electoral reform. My advocacy for electoral reform has roots in my work building bipartisan pro-climate coalitions, where pro-climate candidates were routinely punished at the ballot box for their courage, and others became complacent without any competition on climate.
Photo: Pixabay
To stop this vicious cycle, we must reform our elections to reward courage, increase competition both within and between our two major political parties, and give third parties and independent candidates a fair shot in the process.
Rather than thinking in terms of “which party benefits,” it’s better to evaluate electoral reforms in terms of feedback loops and information flows. Feedback loops are the building blocks that create ecological systems — where a change in X leads to a change in Y, which in turn has either a multiplying or moderating effect back on X.
As we humans change our environment, we need a steady flow of information to make sure positive or “multiplying” feedback loops are not spiraling out of control and detect any weakening of negative or “moderating” feedback loops necessary for ecological stability. Because voting is a powerful way for individuals to make known their displeasure with how their local environment is being treated, election results themselves are a form of information flow, and voting bad candidates out of office can be a corrective feedback loop.
The voting methods we use during elections should acknowledge (rather than obfuscate) this ecological imperative.
Of course, electoral reform alone is not enough to save the planet. There’s a lag time, sometimes years or even decades, between when environmental degradation occurs and when humans become conscious of the impact on their lives. This gap is where movements for sustainability generally, and the climate movement specifically, draw attention to the imminent catastrophes awaiting us if we do not change our ways within the next few election cycles. Without these movements, electoral reform would only have a mildly positive effect on average and occasionally even a counterproductive effect.
But without these reforms, advocates within these crucial movements will grow frustrated and disenchanted with a political process that continues to fall short when addressing our ecological crisis.
For the sake of these movements, our planet, and democracy, I hope voters across the Pacific Northwest and beyond will choose to embrace a politics that has been reimagined for a more sustainable and just 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 their employees.
Human activities have put the ocean in serious trouble. A bold, Rights of Nature-based proposal aims to turn the tide.
Lisbon sits at the mouth of the Tagus River where it flows into the Atlantic. This confluence of waters welcomed thousands of people in June, who gathered in the Portuguese capital’s Altice Arena for the second United Nations Ocean Conference.
“Sadly, we have taken the ocean for granted, and today we face what I would call an Ocean Emergency,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the opening of the conference, which aimed to mobilize science-based solutions to the crisis. “We must turn the tide. A healthy and productive ocean is vital to our shared future.”
Altice Arena. Photo: James Fahn, Earth Journalism Network
Could granting the ocean inalienable rights help turn all of that around — and protect people who depend on the ocean in the process?
A United Ocean
Experts at the conference argued that a declaration of oceanic rights from the United Nations could recognize the ocean as a living entity that has its own inherent entitlements, such as those to life and health, along with the right to continue its vital natural cycles.
Ocean Biology Processing Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, public domain
Participants included representatives of the Earth Law Center, a Colorado-based nonprofit dedicated to the growing Rights of Nature movement. The organization has spent the past five years spearheading the concept of ocean rights.
In 2017 the center secured support from more than 70 nonprofit organizations in 32 countries for its Ocean Rights Initiative. That year, at the UN’s first ocean conference, then-executive director Darlene Lee explained that the initiative recommended “the United Nations governments, organizations and stakeholders, promote and adopt holistic and rights-based governance of the ocean, including incorporating the inherent rights of the ocean into law and policy.”
There’s historic precedent for establishing far-reaching rights principles through the United Nations. In 1948 the UN passed the groundbreaking Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrined certain rights and freedoms — such as liberty and equality — as basic entitlements of all people across the globe.
Although that declaration of human rights is not legally binding, Earth Law Center oceans campaign director Michelle Bender says it has served as a powerful tool for embedding human-rights principles in laws and policies, including international treaties, national constitutions, and legal codes around the world.
Similarly, this summer the General Assembly adopted a groundbreaking resolution declaring access to a clean and healthy environment as a universal human right. And in 2010 a resolution was passed on the human right to water and sanitation.
Activists hope to extend the notion to the ocean we all share.
The Shift Begins
The effort took a step forward at the UN Ocean Conference, where The Ocean Race — a round-the-world sailing contest that also advocates for a healthy ocean — organized a panel discussion where advocates could discuss ways to advance the declaration and raise awareness of its importance.
Speakers included Prime Minister Ulisses Correia de Silva of the Republic of Cabo Verde, Earth Law Center representative Callie Veelenturf, and Ocean Race chairman Richard Brisius.
Addressing a packed audience, speakers argued that establishing legal rights for the ocean could start a cascade of societal shifts in peoples’ attitudes toward, and understanding of, the ocean. They called on the public to urge their UN ambassadors to support ocean rights and get a declaration on the UN’s agenda.
Although these speeches were given in a dimly lit, hushed venue — one of two adjacent rooms where everyone had to listen through headphones so as not to disturb proceedings next door — the audience was enthusiastic. Many attendees clustered around the speakers as the event came to close, eager to hear more.
Fighting an Anthropocentric Paradigm
Experts and national leaders speaking at the panel, and those I talked to after the event, said the declaration would prioritize the ocean’s interests alongside those of people.
This is a fundamentally different approach from most of today’s ocean-related decision-making, which is typically “anthropocentric in nature,” says marine biologist Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, who attended the event. He’s not involved in the ocean rights initiative, but his research has involved scrutiny of management of the ocean. He says the current approach puts humanity at the center, valuing and protecting the marine environment based on the services it provides to people.
A wrecked fishing trawler believed to have been illegally fishing along the Skeleton coast of Namibia. (Photo by Pim GMX, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Crespo describes this anthropocentric paradigm as “a limited value system that psychologically removes us from nature.”
Other experts said a declaration of ocean rights could upend that value system by giving the ocean a voice. It would represent, in Bender’s words, “a fundamental shift in our relationship with the ocean.”
Granting the ocean legal rights would be a step toward “a more ecocentric value system,” Crespo says, “which is still upheld by innumerous coastal and Indigenous peoples across the ocean. These communities recognize the intrinsic right that the ocean and its many species and features have to exist and be protected.”
Sailing Toward the Declaration
The UN panel didn’t occur in a vacuum — the Ocean Race is also in the middle of a series of summits, running through 2023, examining ocean rights as a solution to restoring ocean health. The organization has held summits since 2015 to bring together country leaders, industry figures, ocean experts and others to discuss critical marine issues.
Johan Strid, director of Ocean Race Summits, says the race has a “unique and neutral platform to host a dialogue and drive this discussion in a constructive way.”
The summits and associated workshops, events and “action labs” are components of a strategic program that the Ocean Race, the Earth Law Center, the nonprofit organization Nature’s Rights and other partners ramped up earlier this year.
One major event took place in March in the Italian coastal city of Genova. There the partners started a consultation process to create a draft resolution. The consultation will “gather stakeholders from all backgrounds, regions and expertise to gain feedback on the process, partnership in outreach and raising awareness, as well as drafting of the principles themselves,” says Bender.
Moving forward, a series of workshops will allow consultation participants to analyze the ideas discussed in the ocean rights summits. The workshops will then feed into a working group that will finalize the resolution.
Go Big or Go Bust
The push for ocean rights resonates with other Rights of Nature efforts, but its scale is particularly ambitious.
“It would apply to the ocean as a whole, including in areas beyond national jurisdiction,” says Bender.
Photo: Susanna Pershern/Submerged Resources Center (via National Park Service, public domain)
But conventional safeguards for the ocean often exist in silos, piecemeal and poorly enforced. Provisions such as Marine Protected Areas only shield selected parts of the ocean, while frameworks currently under discussion like the UN’s proposed plastic treaty tackle individual issues affecting the marine environment.
Bender commends all these efforts as “great steps forward,” but contends that we also need a whole-ocean approach.
This is essential, she argues, because every impact in the ocean is interconnected: Pollution that originates on land enters the ocean and affects the entire planet. A declaration of ocean rights would provide an opportunity to encompass all ocean governance issues and align related frameworks under one overarching umbrella.
Ocean rights would be based on principles that reconnect humans “to the systems that sustain us,” she says. The application of these principles could help to put the brakes on activities like deep-sea mining, and potentially have ramifications for related issues like CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, the standards it upholds could be systems-based. For example, recognizing humans as predators could result in efforts to guide fisheries management.
Err on the Side of Nature
As discussions continue, organizers aim to have a draft resolution ready to present to the United Nations in September 2023.
Bender says deliberations so far have addressed principles such as intergenerational equity, connectivity and reciprocal responsibility.
Another principle in discussion boils down to “when in doubt, favor the ocean.”
This is similar to the in dubio pro natura standard adopted in Panama and elsewhere, which translates to “when in doubt, err on the side of nature.”
Strid says the resolution would be the starting point for a process within the United Nations itself, assuming the international body agrees on the concept in the first place. Even if that happens, he says, getting “all states in the world to agree on a matter takes time.” They hope that can be accomplished by 2030.
Strid accepts that the timeline is “highly ambitious,” but history shows it’s not impossible. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights took around two years from initial introduction to adoption.
The endeavor has some wind in its sails already, with committed support from the nations of Cabo Verde, the Seychelles and Panama, along with the city of Genova.
In the panel discussion, former Seychelles’ president Danny Faure argued that the support of nations like theirs — known as Big Ocean or Small Island Developing States — is important if ocean rights are to be achieved.
Strid agrees. “Small island states are significantly impacted by the issues concerning the ocean,” he says. Their participation, he adds, can raise awareness of these devastating effects.
Public support will also prove essential. The Ocean Race has launched a campaign called One Blue Voice through which people around the world can sign on to a petition that organizers will present to the United Nations.
Gathering Momentum
Strid stresses that “we are in the early stages of the work.” As the process of shaping the resolution develops, they will focus efforts on gathering formal support from relevant organizations and policymakers.
Despite the immensity of the challenge ahead, both Bender and Strid say they remain hopeful.
“The nature of our sport is to overcome the impossible,” Strid says.
Bender, meanwhile, finds optimism in the successes of the rights of nature movement and the fact that ocean rights have been featured for the first time this year at the Blue Climate Summit and other events. She sees all this as essential momentum that will eventually achieve planetary support for nature and the people who rely on it.
“Humankind is a part of nature, and we cannot realize human rights without a healthy environment to support them,” she says.
This story was produced as part of the 2022 UN Ocean Conference Fellowship organized by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch).
