Bird Flu Outbreaks: When Will We Learn Our Lesson?

Experts say previous outbreaks should have taught us how to avoid new ones, like the one that’s killing millions of birds right now.

Last month a man in Colorado became the first human known to have contracted a new, highly infectious strain of avian flu.

The man — a prisoner culling infected poultry while on a work-release program — only experienced a case of mild fatigue.

The birds contracting this new version of the H5N1 flu have not been so lucky.

Since it first turned up, this highly transmissible and lethal new strain of avian flu has circulated at high rates among domestic fowl on backyard and commercial farms, resulting in the deaths of a reported 37 million birds on farms in the United States alone. Some died directly from the infection, while many others were culled as part of the country’s response to the disease outbreak. Bird flu has spread to at least 176 commercial farms and 134 backyard bird farms, housing mainly poultry like chickens and turkeys, across 34 states. It has hit especially hard in the Midwest and Central United States, regions with intensive commercial poultry operations.

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The disease has also turned up in wild birds, with fatal consequences never previously observed. The first confirmed case was reported in a wild bird killed by a hunter and tested in January as part of routine U.S. wildlife-disease surveillance efforts. As of this month, more than 1,000 wild birds across the country have died after being infected.

Wild birds, including many waterfowl species, are often carriers of low-pathogenic or mild bird flu viruses. These viruses rarely cause severe disease in their natural hosts. But lethal bird flu viruses can and do kill wildlife, and this year’s hybrid H5N1 is proving especially deadly to wild birds in the United States and Europe.

It’s also spreading fast: While people have been busy navigating the second year of the global Covid-19 pandemic, this worrying bird virus outbreak has spread in more than 60 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Many European countries face record-high levels of lethal bird flu.

Repeat Offender

“This clade [family] of H5 viruses has been with us since 1996,” says Bryan Richards, emerging disease coordinator at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. Much of the government’s research on bird flu impacts on wild birds is done by the Geological Survey at the National Wildlife Health Center. “As with all viruses, it has changed over time, as have its relative impacts. Over the past two years or so, this specific H5N1 lineage has had increasing impacts in Europe and Asia. Now that this lineage of virus is here in North America, our experience is similar to that in Europe.”

As the virus rages and government workers deal with the gruesome task of killing infected birds and disposing of the corpses, experts have stood up with one key question:

Why have we allowed this to happen again?

Chicken close-up — Photo: Ella Mullins (CC BY 2.0)

The last time a bird flu epidemic hit this hard in the United States was in 2014-2015. That event, considered the worst-ever animal disease outbreak in U.S. history, struck 211 commercial farms and 21 backyard farms, mainly in the West and Midwest. The government responded by killing tens of millions of domestic birds to try to stop the spread, at huge cost to the federal budget and with no clear beneficial results — the same way it’s responding to the present lethal outbreak.

Then and now, bird flu proves that a reaction-oriented approach to serious viruses emerging at the intersection of human and nonhuman health is inadequate for stopping the spread of disease. Many animal-health and infectious disease experts now underscore the need to prevent rather than fight the next animal disease epidemic.

The Previous (But Not the Last) Outbreak

The 2014-2015 outbreak cost the federal government nearly $900 million to respond to and provide indemnity (financial security) to farmers forced to kill their flocks. Still, U.S. poultry farmers reported economic losses of $1.6 billion, and the poultry industry lost at least $3.3 billion from that single epidemic.

Government staff and scientists examined the outbreak and response strategy to see if they could shed any light to help the country avoid another epidemic. Their final report found that “despite” the government’s massive effort to stop the spread by killing all birds on infected farms, while also using quarantine and disinfection, bird flu continued to swiftly infect huge numbers of domestic birds.

Chickes laying eggs on a farm — USDA Photo by Preston Keres.

We’re now seeing a repeat of that failed strategy. During the current outbreak, government employees and contractors are again tasked with culling tens of millions of infected domestic birds, mainly poultry like chickens and turkeys. Paying for that plus indemnity to farmers for lost birds has cost the government $400 million in emergency funding since March.

One reason why this response doesn’t work is that wild birds spread bird flu but cannot be contained.

Research shows bird flu can live in the natural environment for extended periods, and healthy wild birds can become infected by living in proximity to those who are ill.

Watching for Danger

As a country we’re constantly on the outlook for warnings of possible new disease outbreaks.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Geological Survey, along with their state and Tribal partners, have for decades collaborated to test deceased, hunter-caught and live wild birds for bird flu, especially at areas popular for congregating birds like lakes and wetlands.

That kicked into overdrive this past year. When bird flu cases surged in Europe in 2021, these partners coordinated testing of thousands of additional birds outside their usual quota of about 3,000 samples per year.

scientist swabbing a duck to test for flu — USGS scientist Dede Goldberg swabs a pintail duck for avian influenza at Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado. Photo: Robert Dusek/USGS

“This year’s surveillance was extremely effective,” says Richards of the USGS. “It provided situational awareness, early detection and warning. We did a dramatic amount surveillance in fall and winter based on the increased activity in Europe. We’ve been watching.”

But watching for outbreaks is not the same as preventing them.

Failure by Design

Some lethal bird flu cases seem to spring from direct interactions between wild and domestic birds. This can happen in backyards and on poultry farms that have full or partial outdoor access.

On farms where birds are kept exclusively indoors, the movement of farmworkers and equipment outdoors and among farms — common practice on some of the biggest poultry operations — can allow lethal bird flu to enter.

While wild birds carry disease, large commercial farms act as super-spreaders and disease incubators.

Laying hens are housed with other birds in wire battery cages, each allotted a space with a footprint smaller than the width of a single sheet of letter-sized paper. Birds are stacked side by side and sometimes on top of one another.

Meanwhile chickens and turkeys raised to be slaughtered and sold for their meat can live in flocks of 10,000 or more birds, who spend their entire lives indoors.

The more birds on a farm, the less natural the living conditions, the lower the costs to keep each bird — and the higher the potential profits in today’s commercial-dominated food landscape.

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“As a general principle, once avian influenza outbreaks are present in farms, the disease can spread easily within and between farms when biosecurity measures are not applied properly,” said a spokesperson from World Organisation for Animal Health, an intergovernmental group focused on animal disease control. “On larger farms, where many birds are kept in close contact with one another, the virus can be amplified as more and more birds get infected. With more infections there is also greater opportunity for the virus to mutate.”

Sometimes the virus spreads beyond close contact, as scientists found when they studied the 2014-2015 outbreak in Iowa, which boasts the nation’s highest egg production and has a high density of commercial poultry farms. The researchers discovered a pattern of farm-to-farm spread within the state and possibly even to nearby states, with the virus carried from neighbor to neighbor through the air. It seems disease builds up in the air on large commercial farms, particularly those with poor ventilation and crowded animal conditions — suggesting these farms played a key role in the spread of avian influenza in 2014 and 2015.

All of this has taken avian flu to the next level in terms of infectiousness and time between outbreaks.

Lethal bird flu viruses arose alongside modern agriculture and globalization and continue to emerge at an increasingly rapid pace, along with animal-rearing rates and farm size. Globally, from 1959 to 1995, lethal bird flu viruses broke out at a rate of once every 2.6 years. From 1996 to 2008, outbreaks arose at a rate of once every 1.2 years.

“Industrial livestock production plays an important part in the emergence, spread and amplification of pathogens, some of which can be transmitted to people,” said Peter Stevenson, OBE, chief policy advisor at Compassion in World Farming, a global movement working to advance farm animal welfare and whose work has helped ban some industrial-farming practices seen as unethical and unhealthy, like keeping hens in battery cages, in Europe. He pointed out that the United Nations Environment and the International Livestock Research Institute identified “unsustainable agricultural intensification and increasing demand for animal protein as major drivers of zoonotic disease emergence.”

Unintended Consequences

In the wild, the 2014-2015 outbreak mainly killed waterfowl and birds of prey that had eaten waterfowl. This time around a much wider range of species — about 50 — has been affected, including many kinds of ducks and geese, birds of prey like eagles, hawks and owls, shorebirds like sanderlings and gulls, and vultures, crows and grackles.

When infected, wild birds typically exhibit neurological abnormalities such as lethargy or seizures before succumbing to disease.

“In 2015 there were no major ‘wild bird mortality events,’ ” or situations where masses of birds are found dead in one area,” says Richards. “But now we’ve seen a few: 1,000 lesser scaup dead in Florida, 50 Canada geese dead in New Hampshire; huge numbers of snow geese, Ross’s geese, and Canada geese in the Midwest.”

Wildlife scientists will continue to monitor lethal bird flu and keep track of its spread. What they’ve seen so far is unprecedented, but — having studied bird flu’s seasonal patterns — scientists expect at least somewhat of an ebb and flow of disease in the coming months.

“Now it is moving north, but we expect it will come back south in the fall with migration again,” says Richards. “It’s a safe bet there will be a lot of surveillance as they migrate south in the fall.”

An Uncertain Future

U.S. agencies and the international OIE reiterate in their lethal bird-flu communications that it’s essential farms and farm employees take disease-preventing precautions — termed “biosecurity” — to slow and ultimately help stop the spread.

However, biosecurity measures — including changing clothes before and after interacting with poultry and frequent disinfecting of boots, tools, and other equipment — are all voluntary and so not easily enforced, especially on large farms with many employees and many birds. That needs to be addressed, experts say.

Biosecurity operator — Biosecurity: USDA and contract workers wear personal protective gear that does not leave a premises without proper cleaning. USDA APHIS photo Mike Milleson.

Another lesson that’s come out of the past few outbreaks is this: We need to rethink our farms and food systems.

“A certain way to reduce risk of zoonosis and emerging infectious diseases globally … is to reduce dependence on intensive animal-based food production systems,” says Stevenson, pointing to findings in a recent report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

That involves eating less meat as a society, as well as using well-planned approaches to growing plants and raising domestic animals in ways that are considered ethical, ecologically sound, fair and humane. Experts also point out that it’s vitally important to protect nature so that wild animals stay healthy and aren’t forced to interact with people — a common effect of deforestation and development.

Reducing our dependence on industrial farms is not always cheap, but it saves major costs in the long run as farmers create life-sustaining systems that keep animals healthy and best prevent disease. According to an international team of animal disease and ecology experts, “Even a one percent reduction in risk of viral zoonotic disease emergence would be cost-effective.” In contrast, conventional commercial poultry farms are owned by major corporations that appear to give little thought to any tasks other than maximizing profits. On these major farms, which are prevalent in the United States, birds are commonly sick, crowded and in constant pain.

Besides causing major animal welfare concerns, industrial farming has hugely negative effects on the environment, creating serious pollution and contributing to the climate crisis through generation of greenhouse gases. U.S. farmworkers are often people of color and are often exploited.

Experts say shifting our ideas of what we accept as normal in our food system, both nationally and globally, could significantly transform the way we value people, nonhuman animals, and the planet, and in turn could prevent the next pandemic — to which we’re all vulnerable.

But is there hope for achieving that? The experts we spoke with aren’t too sure.

“These companies have immense political power, which they use to influence policymakers and to obstruct reforms,” says Stevenson. “They are able to shape the narratives that entrench the status quo.”

Until we learn from the lessons of this and other outbreaks, it seems the status quo will continue to involve lethal bird flu and devastating impacts on domestic and wild birds.

Previously in The Revelator:

Could Trump’s Government Shutdown Cause Outbreaks of Wildlife Disease?

Environmental Groups: Earn Your Place at Pride

You aren’t truly a “green” organization if you don’t support every color in the rainbow flag.

Pride Month, held each year in June, is coming up fast. It’s the time of year when environmental groups like to publish Pride stories written by their LGBTQIA and Two-Spirit staff, table at Pride events, and march in Pride parades. This celebrates the happy, “let’s party” part of Pride, and in past years it has felt good to see environmental groups claim us queers as part of themselves.

But 2022 is not an ordinary year. Before any environmental or climate groups celebrate Pride this year, they need to ask themselves if they’re also willing to embrace Pride’s tradition of resistance, most famously expressed in the Stonewall Uprising. Are these groups willing to publicly stand up for queer people — especially transgender and BIPOC queer people — against a nightmarish legislative backlash and increase in hateful bigotry that just keeps building?

Pride Progress flag flying beneath the American flag — Progress Pride Flag flying at the United States Department of Agriculture. Photo: Tom Witham/USDA.

In 2022, queer people are under attack even more viciously than usual, with the worst vitriol and violence directed at trans, nonbinary and BIPOC LGBTQIA people. In just the first three months of the year, state legislators proposed at least 238 anti-LGBTQ bills, with education and gender-affirming medical care for trans kids especially targeted. Attempts to ban books with LGBTQ subject matter from school and public libraries have increased dramatically in a trend that started last year. Bigoted language from the past that slanders all LGBTQ people as sexual predators and child molesters has made a big return. Hate crimes are up.

These aggressively backsliding trends aren’t expected to lessen any time soon. Just as Republican operatives and politicians have attacked environmental regulations, climate science, reproductive rights and wildlife protections, they’ve now declared open season on LGBTQIA — especially trans — children and adults as part of their 2022 midterm election strategy.

But anti-transgender views aren’t limited to state legislatures. The environmental and climate justice movements can also be transphobic, as shown in recent news coverage about well-established organizations.

Before you reflexively think, “Oh the environmental and climate groups I’m part of would never be associated with transphobia,” take a hard look at who your groups have aligned with through sign-on letters and other forms of support. For example, earlier this year environmental and social justice groups got an unpleasant surprise after they supported a mining protest camp without looking closely at the anti-transgender environmental group behind it.

Transphobia inside the environmental and climate justice movements won’t be rooted out unless movement leaders make doing it a priority. This is a matter of justice, since LGBTQIA and Two-Spirit people — especially those who are BIPOC — are disproportionately impacted by climate change and other environmental harms due to long-entrenched social stigma, lack of safe housing, underemployment and higher poverty rates.

Rejecting transphobia is also in the self-interest of environmental and climate justice organizations that want to attract younger participants, which most do. Far more people younger than 25 identify as LGBTQ than in past generations. Green groups that wish to remain relevant will need to demonstrate that queer people of all types are not only welcome but valued.

So if I could say just one thing to environment and climate groups about whether to participate in Pride this year, it would be this: Please come to Pride and join in the celebration, but also make sure you stick around to help once Pride Month is over. LGBTQIA and Two-Spirit people need your help — and you need our talent, creativity and energy.

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.

Previously in The Revelator:

Finding Your Way as an Environmentalist in Rural America — Even if You’re LGBT

Biodiversity Solutions Also Fight Climate Change

New research highlights ways to tackle our two greatest environmental challenges — at the same time.

Mass extinction lurks beneath the surface of the sea. That was the dire message from a study published in April in the journal Science, which found that continuing to emit greenhouse gases unchecked could trigger a mass die-off of ocean animals that rivals the worst extinction events in Earth’s history.

The findings serve as just the latest reminder that climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected crises — even if they’re rarely addressed in tandem by policymakers.

Toward that point, the Science study came with a dose of hopeful news: Action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius could cut that extinction risk by 70%.

Additional research published in Global Change Biology offers another encouraging finding. The study, by an international team of scientists, found that not only can we do better at addressing biodiversity issues — we can do it while also targeting climate change.

“Many instances of conservation actions intended to slow, halt or reverse biodiversity loss can simultaneously slow anthropogenic climate change,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Their work looked at 21 proposed action targets for biodiversity that will be the focus of this fall’s international convening of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China — a meeting delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found that two-thirds of those biodiversity targets also support climate change mitigation, even though they weren’t explicitly designed for that goal.

The best opportunities to work on these crises together were actions to avoid deforestation and restore degraded ecosystems. Of particular focus, the study found, should be coastal ecosystems such as mangroves, seagrass and salt marshes, which can store large amounts of carbon and support a diversity of animals.

Mangrove Galapagos — A pelican enjoys a perch in a mangrove stand in the Galapagos. Photo: Hans Johnson (CC BY 2.0)

Also important is restoring forests and woodlands, but doing so with native species is critical. Planting monocultures of nonnative trees won’t boost biodiversity, the researchers point out, despite such endeavors being incentivized as a climate change solution.

Another target is reducing runoff into rivers, lakes and coastal waters from excess nutrients — including nitrogen and phosphorus — that cause algal blooms and oxygen-depleted waters. This eutrophication, combined with warming, may increase greenhouse gas emissions in freshwater bodies, in addition to harming fish and other animals.

Expanding and connecting the network of protected areas is another mutualistic target. Globally, we’ve protected about 15% of land and 7% of marine habitats. But we need to bump those numbers up considerably. As the researchers behind the Global Change Biology study put it, “There is a substantial overlap of 92% between areas that require reversing biodiversity loss and the areas needing protection for enhancing carbon storage and drawdown.”

Working on these issues in tandem can help boost the benefits.

We’re also spending large sums of money in all the wrong places. The study lists the reduction or elimination of subsidies that are harmful to biodiversity and the climate as “one of the most important and urgent reforms.”

We spend 10 times more on subsidies for environmentally harmful practices than on biodiversity conservation, the researchers note. Brazil, for example, spends 88 times more on subsidizing activities linked to deforestation than on those that may help stop it.

Other target areas to boost biodiversity and climate work include recovering and conserving wild species; greening urban areas; eliminating overfishing; reducing food and agricultural waste; and shifting diets to include more plant-based foods and less meat and dairy.

And, the researchers say, we need to “mainstream” the issues together — embedding both climate and biodiversity targets and metrics into policy, business and consumer practices.

Understanding these issues should start early, too. A study of school curricula in 46 countries found that fewer than half addressed climate change, and a paltry one-fifth referenced biodiversity. Both these subjects should be covered more and integrated together, the researchers say.

It’s not possible, after all, to tackle one crisis without addressing the other.

To fight climate change, we need fully functioning ecosystems with healthy populations of native plants and animals.

“And climate change is damaging this capacity,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a study coauthor and climate researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. “Only when we succeed in drastically reducing emissions from fossil fuels can nature help us to stabilize the climate.”

Previously in The Revelator:

5 Ways Climate Change Will Affect Plants and Animals

What a New Jersey Creek Taught Us About How Animals Respond to Pollution

Decades of studying polluted Piles Creek led to advances in our understanding of how pollution affects crabs, fish and shrimp, including those that we eat.

It was the 1970s. The first Earth Day had happened, and there were new federal laws and a federal agency to protect the environment. Despite these important advances, a legacy of pollution still lurked in streams, marshes and other waterways. Stimulated by reports of terrible effects of mercury pollution in Japan, marine biologist Judith S. Weis, her husband, biologist Peddrick Weis, and numerous graduate students at Rutgers University set out on what would become a three-decade journey to understand how mercury and other chemical pollution affects estuarine animals, including those we eat.

They found that some species can tolerate mercury pollution, but that wasn’t entirely good news.

Weis, who taught for four decades at Rutgers, told The Revelator about the evolution of their ground-breaking research, what initially stumped them, and why pollution can change animal behavior.

How did your experiment start?

We decided to look at effects of methylmercury — an especially toxic form of mercury — on the development mummichogs, a small marine killifish. These fish, a few inches long, live in tidal creeks of salt marshes.

Our initial experiments, done at a marine lab in Montauk, N.Y., treated fertilized eggs with different concentrations of methylmercury over their two weeks of development. When they were getting ready to hatch, we examined all the embryos and saw a surprisingly large variation in responses of embryos that had been in the same concentration.

Embryos showed a variety of deformities, including abnormal head-and eye development. There were also problems in heart and skeletal development, which also ran the gamut from mildly affected to severely messed up.

Seeing such a huge variation was puzzling. What could cause such differences in response to the same concentration?

We considered ditching the project since the results were incomprehensible but decided to try to figure out why.

For the next experiments, we separated eggs from different females into different containers to see if the females might produce eggs with different susceptibility. Bingo! The variation in responses was because each female consistently produced eggs with specific susceptibility. (The male didn’t matter.) Females that produced susceptible eggs had different genetic traits from those that produced tolerant eggs.

Where did you go next?

We wondered how fish from an environment that was polluted with mercury might respond, and went to the polluted Newark Bay, N.J., area. There had been a lot of heavy industry there for a century, long before any environmental laws prevented them from dumping their wastes in the marsh and the water, so the sediments in the bay and creeks were highly contaminated with mercury, lead, cadmium and many other pollutants.

A billboard with signs for chemical and fuel companies in the area — A sign at Piles Creek in the early 1980s. Photo: Peddrick Weis

We chose Piles Creek, a small dead-end creek that enters the Arthur Kill in Linden. The sediments in the creek were highly contaminated, and the level of mercury was particularly high.

When we repeated the same studies with fish from the creek, practically all produced embryos that showed only slightly abnormal development, an indication that the population was tolerant to methylmercury.

This was the first study showing evolution of pollution tolerance in an estuarine fish. One can imagine that this evolution would have happened quickly since there were already females in the clean site that produced tolerant embryos. However, we surprisingly found that larvae and adults weren’t tolerant to the mercury and furthermore showed signs of ill health, didn’t grow as well or live as long as fish from the clean site.

We investigated two other species in Piles Creek for methylmercury tolerance: grass shrimp and fiddler crab. Adults from Piles Creek and Long Island were examined for effects of methylmercury on limb regeneration and molting. In all cases, methylmercury slowed the rate of regeneration and delayed molting, but the Piles Creek crabs and shrimp were more tolerant — their regeneration and molting in methylmercury was not slowed down nearly as much as animals from the clean environment.

We found an interesting adaptation in fiddler crabs, especially from Piles Creek: They moved much of the mercury and lead from their internal organs into their shell (exoskeleton) shortly before molting it — a very efficient way of getting rid of contaminants quickly.

Is tolerance to pollution a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, it’s certainly good for the species that can achieve it, since it allows them to continue to live in a habitat that might otherwise be lethal.

Does that mean we can relax pollution laws? No! Not all species are able to evolve increased tolerance as these three did. Estuaries like Piles Creek and Newark Bay have fewer species than cleaner places. One commonly used measure of environmental health is biological diversity — how many different species live there. The more species, the healthier the environment. These three species found in Piles Creek are the survivors.

What other changes did you find?

Through an accidental observation by a graduate student that Piles Creek fish didn’t seem to catch shrimp well, we were able to find an explanation for their shorter life span and poor growth: abnormal behavior.

In lab experiments, unfed fish were put in tanks with grass shrimp (and a rock for hiding). Piles Creek killifish captured far fewer shrimp than the “clean” fish. If we put “clean fish” in tanks with Piles Creek food (shrimp) and sediments, within six weeks their prey capture ability declined to that of Piles Creek fish, showing that the environment is responsible for the impaired behavior. We examined stomach contents of fish from the field: The Piles Creek stomachs contained mostly detritus — decaying plant material — which was known to be non-nutritious for them. The poor ability to catch prey and their eating of non-nutritious detritus (“junk food”) could explain the poor growth and survival.

six small fish in a tank of water — Mummichogs in a tank. Photo: Peddrick Weis

It’s not a big surprise that mercury would cause behavioral problems if you remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

But that also had an effect on prey.

Grass shrimp in Piles Creek were overall larger, and more numerous, than shrimp from the “clean” site. Since their major predator, killifish, are ineffective predators and less abundant, Piles Creek shrimp experience reduced predation, so more of them can live a long happy life, resulting in larger size and greater population density. That’s an important finding because it shows the importance of “top down” effects — if your predator is affected worse than you from the pollution, you can benefit.

Piles Creek fish were also more vulnerable to predation. We examined how many fish were captured by blue crabs in the lab. Over two weeks crabs from a seafood store, kept in an aquarium with Piles Creek fish, captured far more of them than crabs kept with “clean” fish. The greater likelihood of Piles Creek fish to be captured and eaten could account for their shorter life span. Impaired prey capture and predator avoidance can result from being generally “slow,” which we confirmed by studying overall activity levels.

We also looked higher up the food chain and studied bluefish. They spawn in the ocean, and the juveniles move into estuaries in the spring to grow over the summer, then return to the ocean in the fall. We collected early juveniles from a clean site and raised them in large tanks, feeding them frozen killifish or menhaden from either clean or polluted estuaries. We found that initially both groups grew comparably, but those fed food from the polluted estuary gradually ate more slowly, ate less, swam more slowly, and grew less. By the fall, they were much smaller and lighter than those fed clean food. Many fish collected from the polluted site had empty stomachs — highly unusual for this species. This would put them at a disadvantage in the fall when they go back to the ocean.

We found a similar result in studying blue crabs. Those from the clean site caught more active prey than those from the polluted one, and “switching” their habitats changed their prey capture ability. Like the killifish, the crabs in the polluted environment ate a lot of detritus, surprising for a “carnivorous” crab. The behavior changes in these species show that the killifish impairments (reduced activity, poor prey capture) aren’t unique to them but are seen in other species, including ones that are commercially important.

What did we learn from all of this?

In the years since these studies were performed, scientists have studied killifish from other polluted areas and have found tolerance to other pollutants such as PCBs and dioxin. Also “behavioral toxicology” has become a recognized field, studied mainly in the lab on animals exposed to selected concentrations of a chosen toxic chemical.

Our studies were with animals exposed naturally to the contaminants in their environment and focused on predator/prey behavior that is ecologically important. These real-world findings show that animals in nature can have their behaviors affected in ways that make their lives more difficult and shorter, and that altered behavior can change ecological relationships in the system.

Overall, in our work, it appears that the crustaceans are managing better than the fish.

We learned two major lessons through this: If data don’t make sense, don’t give up but try to figure out why, and accidental observations can lead to a new fruitful direction of research.

Previously in The Revelator:

What Happens to Wildlife Swimming in a Sea of Our Drug Residues?

Let’s Put More Effort Into Investigating and Prosecuting Environmental Crimes

Uncovering environmental harms and crimes, and holding those responsible accountable, has never received enough priority. We need to correct that problem.

“What the detective story is about
is not murder
but the restoration of order.”
—P. D. James

How do we protect communities — especially long-neglected communities of color — from environmental harms caused by corporate polluters, lax oversight, and poor enforcement of existing laws?

This country desperately needs new eco-detectives — trained employees and citizens who can identify and uncover pollution, poaching and other eco-threats that harm people, wildlife and the planet.

Like most nations the United States has never taken these types of crimes and assaults seriously. This was especially true during the Trump administration, which saw enforcement of environmental regulations fall to an all-time low. But that neglect built upon a systemic flaw, which sees the perpetrators of environmental crimes receiving punishments that amount to little more than a slap on the wrist — if they’re prosecuted at all.

It’s time to fix that, not just for the past administration’s four years of malfeasance but to correct a history of injustice.

Let’s start with the Environmental Protection Agency, which needs more investigators to detect and stop corporations from poisoning our air, water and bodies. Under Trump the EPA shed thousands of staff members and dramatically reduced its enforcement of existing laws. Those people need to be back on the beat. President Biden’s 2023 budget proposal aims to create the equivalent of more than 1,900 new full-time positions. That’s a start, but it barely makes up for the 1,500 jobs the EPA shed during the first year and a half of the previous administration. Let’s double that number of new hires.

EPA rally — American Federation of Government Employees rally outside of EPA headquarters. Photo: Chelsea Bland (CC BY 2.0)

But why stop there? We also need more investigators at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and other agencies to protect our wildlife and endangered species — our natural, cultural heritage — from poachers, corporate development and climate change. The Fish and Wildlife Service only has about 250 special agents probing wildlife crimes, many of which require multiyear investigations, while the BLM has just 70 people dedicated to criminal investigations. That’s hardly enough to serve a country our size.

Similarly, we need more inspectors at our chronically understaffed ports and borders to detect illegal wildlife trafficking and protect endangered species from exploitation and the rest of us from introduced diseases and invasive species. To accomplish this, the Border Patrol’s history of racism and brutality needs to be systematically transitioned into a future of science and service. And it’s not the only federal law-enforcement branch that needs reform — I’m looking at you, U.S. Park Police.

Centers for Disease Control staff inspect bushmeat being imported into the U.S. (Photo: CDC)

Of course, once we discover a crime, we need to do something about it. That’s why, on top of investigators, we also need more environmental prosecutors at the Department of Justice, to make sure these types of crimes are properly punished. That’s especially true now, when the DOJ is already stretched beyond capacity as it prosecutes the more than 700 individuals arrested during the Jan. 6 insurrection. Again, Biden’s 2023 budget proposes some of this, with an additional $6.5 million for DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, but that’s a long way from becoming official. The EPA and DOJ also announced several initiatives to address environmental justice on May 5, so hopefully that will kickstart some effort and action.

Meanwhile, it’s not just about the federal government. States also need more environmental crime-busters to address local crimes that federal laws don’t cover. If someone sells an endangered animal, pollutes a river, or chops down a forest but doesn’t cross state lines to do it, they still need to be found and punished.

All of this is essential, but we can go even further. In addition to addressing environmental crimes through the legal system, we need more environmental journalists, especially in underserved communities. We need these watchdogs to serve as eco-detectives more than ever — the United States has lost more than 2,000 local newspapers since 2004, turning many towns and communities into “news deserts.” Life in a participatory democracy depends on a vibrant free press, and studies have shown that as newspapers die the amount of local fraud and abuse soars — like in coal country, for example.

newspapers — Photo: Jeff Eaton (CC BY-SA 2.0)

We also need more scientists working at every public-health agency to better understand the crimes being perpetrated against the planet and its denizens. They can help find crimes — for example, by using satellites to detect unreported emissions — or push the legislatures to regulate threats we’re just uncovering, like the health risks from PFAS chemicals. Those researchers need to come from and live in every community, which means we need more commitment from academia to integrate the ivory tower, even as we all must commit to fighting systemic racial injustice wherever we see it.

And that gets us back to those affected by environmental crimes the most: the people. Since most environmental crime takes place in our communities, we need to train people as citizen scientists so they can look for signs of harm themselves. Volunteer efforts like this have a long and important history of detecting pollution, declining wildlife populations and other crimes or damage.

This also requires more citizen whistleblowers and activists, not to mention more laws to protect them when they tell the stories that wouldn’t be told without their eyes and ears. In recent years states around the country have passed a rapid succession of anti-protest laws related to fossil fuel projects, along with ag-gag laws to shroud factory farms in secrecy and other regulations designed to minimize public participation and knowledge. Those need to go, so that citizens themselves can study, monitor, publicize and stand up to the threats affecting their own lives.

And importantly, all these people — the detectives, prosecutors, scientists and whistleblowers — need to be listened to by those in power. Folks have been speaking up in “Cancer Alley” and other environmental justice communities for decades with no changes to public health regulations: Much of the environmental harm perpetrated against these communities is currently legal. That means we need yet one more level of new environmental crime-buster: politicians who will listen, act, and finally pass the tougher laws people have demanded for far too long.

Of course, nothing I’m proposing here serves to erase the sins of the past. But adding more eco-detectives to address environmental crimes at every level of society would improve our present and put us all on the path toward a brighter future. Without them we’ll remain locked in a polluted prison of our own making.

Previously in The Revelator:

‘We’re Taking Action Into Our Own Hands’ — A Community Stands Against a Landfill

Protect This Place: Lianyungang, an Underrated Pearl in the Yellow Sea

Shrinking tidal flat habitats in eastern China threaten critical stopover sites for migratory shorebirds.

The place:

The Linhong tidal flat in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, is on the east coast of China. Jiangsu is one of the wealthiest provinces in the country, so there has always been serious tension between economic development and environmental protection.

Asian dowitchers at Qingkou tidal flat, Lianyungang. The birds were in beautiful chestnut-red breeding plumage. Photo courtesy of Ziyou Yang.

Why it matters:

Every summer shorebirds on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway arrive at the Arctic tundra to attract mates, breed, and care for their young. Then they follow an inner biological clock and head south. They spend the winter in regions at lower latitudes, including East Asia and Southeast Asia. The journey is long and arduous, often covering distances of 3,000 to 5,000 miles.

Most shorebirds must take a break somewhere to rest and refuel during these travels. That’s why Lianyungang’s tidal flats, on the west coast of the Yellow Sea — located near the midpoint of many shorebirds’ migratory journey — are critically important stopover sites for many species. The tidal flats were previously fed by two of the longest rivers in Asia, making them rich in benthic organisms that serve as valuable fuel for the long-distance flights.

There’s one bird that relies most heavily on Lianyungang: the Asian dowitcher (Limnodromus semipalmatus), a shorebird about 12-14 inches in size. It breeds in steppe regions in Mongolia and northeast China and winters mainly in Indonesia. The current estimated global population of the species is 23,000 — nearly all of whom fly to Lianyungang’s Linhong and Qingkou tidal flats each year.

Asian dowitchers (center) congregate near the Linhong tidal flat during high tide. Photo courtesy of Ziyou Yang.

Unfortunately this makes them extremely vulnerable. Anything that threatens their habitat in Lianyungang could devastate the entire global population.

The threat:

The Linhong tidal flat is being reclaimed by a so-called “ecological restoration” project. The project is ostensibly aimed at restoring the natural environment of a “dirty” wetland, but in fact it converts nearly 6 square miles of natural muddy tidal flats into sandy beaches and deep water for human recreational activities.

The new habitat is completely unsuitable for the Asian dowitcher and many other seabird species. If the project goes ahead, it will destroy one-third of the Asian dowitcher’s foraging habitat here.

Meanwhile Linhong and Qingkou tidal flats are also being encroached upon by an invasive species called the smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora). The plant spreads quickly, turns mudflats into dense meadows, and kills most benthic organisms, so the area and quality of the remaining habitats for Asian dowitchers are also decreasing.

My place in this place:

I remember the day we first discovered the huge number of Asian dowitchers at Lianyungang’s Linhong and Qingkou tidal flats. Back then we split the waterbird surveyors into two groups and counted the number of Asian dowitchers at the two locations simultaneously. When both groups reported their count number in the radio, none of us could believe our ears. While we were still processing the record-breaking count result, the tens of thousands of Asian dowitchers were calling beside us as if cheering our discovery.

The moment felt so miraculous. We really hope more people will get to experience something like this in the future.

With its chestnut-red breeding plumage and sewing-machine like feeding behavior, the Asian dowitcher is beautiful in its own way. But it’s still unlike charismatic species such as giant pandas or spoon-billed sandpipers that can instantly catch people’s attention.

That hasn’t stopped my colleagues and me from dedicating a tremendous amount of effort to improving awareness about this species and its highly concentrated population in Lianyungang. For example, we made a series of outreach products, including an adorable plush toy.

We spent an entire year developing the design to ensure the toy is likeable while accurately mimicking the species’ key characteristics. We were short on funding at the beginning and unfortunately fell far short of the minimum order quantity. Luckily, our conservation work gained recognition from several foundations and companies, and they all helped contribute to the toy’s production.

After all the challenges we’d faced and conquered, the toy was finally launched at the end of 2021 and it was a hit in the market. The public — and I’m not only talking about us birdwatching people — absolutely love it.

The cute Asian dowitcher plush toy near its natural habitat in Lianyungang. Photo courtesy of Yongxiang Han.

While it’s exciting that more people will get to know the Asian dowitcher through this toy, my colleagues and I do have mixed feelings. With the project construction being carried out at a fast pace on the species’ most important foraging ground, we fear that the species’ population will decrease precipitously not long after people get to know these birds and their precious stopover site — and the foraging ground will deteriorate or even disappear.

Who’s protecting it now:

Friends of Nature is a Chinese NGO specializing in environmental protection using public-interest litigation. In early 2021, after several rounds of unsuccessful negotiation with the local government departments and the project construction company, Friends of Nature led an environmental litigation against the project construction company and the environmental impact assessment company. The judge is still processing the evidence. Meanwhile, the project construction is being carried out at an unprecedented pace and it’s looking likely to be completed by June 2022.

In addition, the nonprofit Spoon-billed Sandpiper in China (my employer) is dedicated to the conservation of waterbirds living on the Yellow Sea tidal flats. The team has provided valuable data to support the global importance and irreplaceability of Lianyungang’s Linhong tidal flat. These data serve as critical evidence for the public interest litigation case.

What this place needs:

We have enough data and solid science to prove that the construction project will cause considerable damage to the Asian dowitcher population.

Currently many self-proclaimed “ecological restoration” projects are being undertaken across China, and a good majority of them are doing more harm than good to the environment. We need better legislation and stricter project assessment standards to prevent similar tragedies elsewhere.

In 2020 the green peafowl case in China’s Yunnan province became the country’s first preventive public-interest litigation concerning wildlife protection. Our Asian dowitcher case is the second of its kind. Unlike green peafowl, who live in forests, Asian dowitchers inhabit coastal tidal flats. We hope our case can set a precedent for other coastal “ecological restoration” projects in China and draw people’s attention to gaps in the current legislation.

Lessons from the fight:

Take action early: It’s best to discover such projects early and nip them in the bud.

Try collaborating: It’s always helpful to talk to different stakeholders (e.g. media, politicians, chief scientists). They may help support your case from a different angle.

Follow the fight:

The Facebook page for Spoon-billed Sandpiper in China

The social media page of Friends of Nature (in Chinese)

Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: Kenya’s Kinangop Grasslands

Oil and Gas Industry Tries to Hold Public Schools Hostage

Fossil fuel interest groups are telling New Mexicans: Let us keep drilling or the state’s education system will collapse.

This story is part of “Climate Crimes,” a special series by The Guardian and Covering Climate Now focused on investigating how the fossil fuel industry contributed to the climate crisis and lied to the American public.

The oil and gas industry wants to play a word-and-picture association game with you. Think of four images: a brightly colored backpack stuffed with pencils, a smiling teacher with a tablet tucked under her arm, a pair of glasses resting on a stack of pastel notebooks, and a gleaming school bus welcoming a young student aboard.

“What do all of these have in common?” an April 6 Facebook post by the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association (NMOGA), asked. “They are powered by oil and natural gas!”

Facebook image promoting oil and gas funding of education — Source: Facebook

Here in New Mexico — the fastest-warming and most water-stressed state in the continental United States, where wildfires have recently devoured over 120,000 acres and remain uncontained — the oil and gas industry is coming out in force to deepen the region’s dependence on fossil fuels. Their latest tactic: to position oil and gas as a patron saint of education. Powerful interest groups have deployed a months-long campaign to depict schools and children’s wellbeing as under threat if government officials infringe upon fossil fuel production.

In a video spot exemplary of this strategy, Ashley Niman, a fourth grade teacher at Enchanted Hills elementary school, tells viewers that the industry is what enables her to do her job.

“Without oil and gas, we would not have the resources to provide an exemplary education for our students,” she says. “The partnership we have with the oil and gas industry makes me a better teacher.”

The video, from September of last year, is part of a PR campaign by NMOGA called “Safer and Stronger.” It’s one of many similar strategies The Guardian tracked across social media, television and audio formats that employs a rhetorical strategy social scientists refer to as the “fossil fuel savior frame.”

“What NMOGA and the oil and gas industry are saying is that we hold New Mexico’s public education system hostage to our profit-motivated interests,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center. “There’s an implied threat there.”

Last year New Mexico brought in $1.1 billion from mineral leasing on federal lands — more than any other state. But the tides may be turning for the fossil fuel industry as officials grapple with the need to halve greenhouse gas emissions this decade. Prior to mid-April, the Biden administration had paused all new oil and gas leasing and the number of drilling permits on public lands plummeted.

In response, pro-industry groups are pushing out what some experts have called “sky is falling” messaging that generates the impression that without oil and gas revenue, the state’s education system is on a chopping block. (NMOGA did not respond for comment).

Since February NMOGA has flooded its social media pages with school-related motifs like buses and books, but also with images of empty, abandoned classrooms accompanied by reminders about how the state’s schools “rely on oil and gas production on federal land for more than $700 million in funding.”

Elected officials have parroted this framing.

“This is a matter of critical importance to all, but especially to New Mexico’s schoolchildren, who have suffered greatly during the pandemic,” state representative Yvette Herrell co-wrote in the Santa Fe New Mexican in February.

But tax, budget and public education funding experts say linking the federal leasing pause to a grave, immediate risk to public education is deceptive.

“Any slight reductions stemming from pauses or other so-called ‘adverse’ actions would have zero immediate effect on school funding overall, much less whether students get the services they need to recover from the ill effects on their learning from the pandemic,” said Charles Goodmacher, former government and media relations director at the National Education Association, now a consultant. The sale of leases does not lead to immediate drilling, he said. Often, companies sit on leases for months or years before production occurs.

And as it happens, New Mexico currently has a budget surplus from record production.

Industry attempts to convince New Mexicans that the state’s public education system is wholly dependent on oil and gas are based on a tough truth: decades of steep tax cuts have indeed positioned fossil fuels as the thunder behind Democratic-led New Mexico’s economy. In 2021, 15% of the state’s general fund came from royalties, rents and other fees that the Department of Interior collects from mineral extraction on federal lands. Oil and gas activity across federal, state and private lands contributes around a third of the state’s general fund of $7.2 billion, as well as a third of its education budget.

Commissioner of public lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, herself a former classroom teacher, has been at the forefront of efforts to diversify the New Mexican economy since she was elected to manage the state’s 13 million acres of public lands in 2018.

“When I ran, in my first campaign, we talked a lot about how a schoolteacher really understands what every dime that this office makes means to a classroom.”

Garcia Richard takes pride in being the first woman, Latina and teacher to have been elected to head the office, which oversees around $1 billion in revenue generation each year. Since 2019 she’s launched a renewable energy office and outdoor recreation office to raise money from those activities, though Garcia Richard doesn’t believe that money will ever fully make up for oil and gas revenue. “I don’t want anybody ever to think that I have some notion that the revenue diversification strategies we’re pursuing right now somehow make a billion dollars.”

New Mexico attorney general Hector Balderas, a Democrat, is another top state official charged with managing the state’s energy and economic transition.

Given the same geographic features that make New Mexico the “land of enchantment,” the state is positioned to become a national leader in solar energy, Balderas said. But four of the state’s major solar farms are severely behind schedule.

Balderas, who has accepted $49,900 in campaign contributions from oil and gas over seven election cycles, said that a sudden disruption in new oil and gas leasing — such as the blanket moratorium the Biden administration originally proposed in January last year — would have an outsized impact on New Mexico’s most vulnerable.

“You would cut out nearly a third of the revenue that we rely on to fund our schools and our roads and our law enforcement community,” he said. “I don’t think environmental activists really think about that perspective: How progressives have cleaner air but then thrust original Americans like Native American pueblos into further economic poverty.”

Some on the receiving end of oil and gas revenue stress that not all educators and students embrace fossil fuel industry money in public schools. Mary Bissell is an algebra teacher at Cleveland high school in Rio Rancho, who cosigned a letter in November, along with more than 200 educators, asking NMOGA to “stop using New Mexico’s teachers and kids as excuses for more oil and gas development.”

Bissell says in spite of how cash-strapped schools may be, many of her colleagues don’t want oil and gas money.

“I’m not going to teach my kids how to find slope based on fracking,” she said of her math courses. Bissel characterized NMOGA’s attempt to portray educators as a unified force beholden to oil and gas funding as “disgusting.”

In some states, including Rhode Island and Massachusetts, state attorneys general have taken it upon themselves, as the leading law enforcement and consumer protection officials, to sue oil and gas companies for deceiving consumers and investors about climate change through their marketing. Balderas’s office said it is not actively pursuing that strategy at this time.

Seneca Johnson, 20, a student leader with Youth United for Climate Action, is from the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma. Johnson grew up in New Mexico and knows first-hand about the state’s underfunded schools.

“I remember in elementary school we would have a list: bring three boxes of tissues, or colored pencils,” she said, speaking of Chaparral Elementary School in Santa Fe. “As students and as teachers, [you’re] buying the supplies for the classroom.”

Johnson remembers being told as a child that the schools she attended ranked second worst in the nation. If New Mexico’s education system is indeed that bad, she said, how can officials continue to think that accepting a funding structure that delivers such a consistently poor result is a good idea?

“At the end of the day the system that we have now that is being paid for by oil and gas doesn’t work, and we know it doesn’t work,” Johnson said. “It’s the whole ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ kind of mentality,” she said, linking the industry’s patronizing messaging around its support for schools to a direct legacy of colonization.

“I don’t want to have to rely on this outside entity. I don’t want to have to rely on this broken system. I want better for my kids and their kids and my whole community.”

Kids and Climate Change: New Book Exposes Why Some Schools Fail to Teach the Science

Ukraine’s Nuclear Power Plants Caught in the Crossfire of War With Russia

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered fears of another nuclear power disaster in the region, 36 years after the world’s largest nuclear accident.

It took less than a minute after an unexpected power surge for one of the nuclear reactors at Chornobyl (Chernobyl in the Russian spelling) to explode on April 26, 1986, ripping the roof off and spewing dangerous chemicals into the air.

The event, and emergency cleanup that followed, left 30 workers dead, thousands exposed to cancer-causing nuclear material, and a legacy of radiation. Now, 36 years later and with war raging, Ukraine is desperate to prevent another nuclear disaster.

Nuclear reactors generate more than half of the country’s power. Ukraine is the first country with such a large and established nuclear energy program to experience war, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The country’s 15 nuclear reactors, housed in four power plants, have layers of safeguards to prevent core meltdowns like the one that happened in 1986, when Chornobyl was part of the Soviet Union. But wartime is far from normal conditions, and experts warn that Russian military action poses numerous threats to these facilities.

Andrey Ozharovsky, a Russian engineer turned anti-nuclear activist, said Ukraine’s nuclear infrastructure is “quite vulnerable” to the chaos surrounding military attacks.

Chornobyl, Again

Those attacks have already begun.

The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the 20-mile exclusion zone around it, set up to limit further spread of radioactive material following the 1986 disaster, were captured by Russian forces on Feb. 24. It was in their control until they withdrew from the site on March 31.

Although Chornobyl is not an active nuclear power plant, the massive cap covering the reactor that exploded decades ago still needs to be maintained to prevent further radiation leakage.

aerial view showing industrial facility next to water — Aerial view Chornobyl nuclear power plant with sarcophagus. Photo: Vadim Mouchkin / IAEA (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sensors put in place by the Ukrainian Ecocentre in case of an accident reported a spike in radiation levels shortly after the capture, likely due to Russian military vehicles stirring up radiation in the environment.

The IAEA said the rise wasn’t enough to pose a public health hazard.

Ozharovsky, who was one of the first to raise an alarm about the recent spike at Chornobyl, said he’s concerned that radioactive dust from the site could spread across the continent.

“The most dangerous thing is that they can bring radioactive particles in their hair, in their clothes and their boots,” he says.

Olga Kosharna, a member of the Ukraine Nuclear Society, urged experts to create an updated map of radioactive contamination in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and to restrict movement in the area.

Ukrainian officials released footage, recorded since Russia’s withdrawal, which appears to show that Russian troops had built trenches and other fortifications in parts of the exclusion zone. Those actions may have further disturbed radioactive material in the soil and plants.

On April 26 Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the IAEA, and a team of agency experts arrived in Chornobyl “to conduct nuclear safety, security and radiological assessments, deliver vital equipment and repair the agency’s remote safeguards monitoring systems,” according to a statement from the agency.

Grossi says radioactivity levels at Chornobyl have returned to “normal” after the “very, very dangerous” Russian occupation of the site.

Nuclear Plant Captured

Chornobyl isn’t the only concern. Ukraine’s active nuclear-power facilities are also at risk.

On March 4, Russian forces captured Europe’s largest active nuclear-power plant, Zaporizhzhia, located in southeastern Ukraine. During intense fighting one of the site’s buildings caught fire, but didn’t harm the plant’s six reactors, and no radiation was released.

Ukrainian technicians continue to monitor Zaporizhzhia, but the country’s regulators have claimed that Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear power company, has engineers at the plant who are giving orders to staff. Further, Ukraine reports that plant management actions require approval from the Russian commander, according to the IAEA.

“Who is now in charge of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant?” asks Ozharovsky. “The Russian army is around, but armies aren’t nuclear engineers.”

Rosatom released a statement on March 12 and denied that they’re managing the operation of Zaporizhzhia. They characterized their staff’s presence at the plant as “consultative assistance” that takes place “on a regular basis.”

Grossi expressed “deep concern” about the situation in a statement last month.

Man in a dark suit with white shirt — Rafael Mariano Grossi, IAEA Director General, holds a press conference as he briefs the international press and media upon his return from the South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant. April 1, 2022. Photo: Dean Calma / IAEA (CC BY 2.0)

Further Threats

Since then, there’s been more reason for alarm.

On April 16, three missiles flew over the South Ukrainian nuclear power plant, Yuzhnoukrainsk, according to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-run nuclear power company.

Then on April 26 Energoatom reported that two cruise missiles flew over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

“The flight of missiles at low altitudes directly above the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant site, where 7 nuclear facilities with a huge amount of nuclear material are located, poses huge risks,” says Petro Kotin, Energoatom’s acting president, in a statement released on the company’s Telegram channel. “After all, missiles can hit one or more nuclear facilities, and this threatens a nuclear and radiation catastrophe around the world.”

The day before, Energoatom reported that Russia fired missiles over the cooling pond of the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant in northwest Ukraine.

Pipelines running across foreground and power plant building with three stacks in backgrond — Khmelnitskiy Nuclear Power Plant, 2013. Photo: Rluts (CC BY 3.0)

Russia hasn’t commented on Energoatom’s claims.

Kosharna wrote in an email that if a missile would’ve hit one of the plants the consequences would have been “catastrophic” for the world.

A stray missile damaging the plant could cause an explosion that would disrupt the power supply. Power is needed to ensure continuous cooling of the fuel rods to prevent a meltdown.

Typically nuclear plants use back-up generators to maintain power with a grid disruption and keep the cooling systems functioning normally. In wartime fuel shortages are common, and this risks the stability of the generators. Ukraine’s current shortage is only getting worse, according to the Gas Transmission Operator of Ukraine, a gas pipeline operator.

If the grid goes down and the generators are out of fuel and the cooling systems fail, there’s a last resort to prevent radiation from spreading. Containment structures around the reactors are designed to block any release of radiation, but they’re also vulnerable to missile attacks.

Reactor failure isn’t the only significant risk to the operation.

Staff operating facilities under extreme stress also poses a problem, Ozharovsky says, because any mistake they make on the job could be calamitous.

There are also other onsite dangers. Spent nuclear fuel storage pools that are a part of the waste-disposal system contain radioactive material. If they’re damaged the liquid could be released from containment, causing a massive spread of radiation. Japanese scientists considered this to be the “worst-case scenario” of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which had a series of meltdowns after a tsunami struck the plant in 2011.

Ozharovsky said he doesn’t believe the Russian military would deliberately sabotage one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants because it would threaten their interests. But he added that even the possibility that the nuclear power plants could be harmed accidentally should trigger worldwide alarm.

“For me it’s scary,” he says. “All the other nuclear power plants, like Khmelnytskyi, like Rivne, like South Ukraine (Yuzhnoukrainsk); they can be damaged during this war. And the international community needs to take care of that.”

Any attack on a nuclear plant is a breach of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Convention’s Article 56 considers attacking a nuclear power plant a war crime.

“I hope that many other countries who still have nuclear energy on their territory will rethink physical safety, military safety,” Ozharovsky says. “That’s a challenge no one country can solve.”

Developing the Hills Won’t Solve the West’s Housing Crisis

Building millions of needed residential units could destroy vital wildlands. We can house people and protect the environment at the same time.

California was born in the valleys. Like a sheltered bay amid stormy seas, valleys drew the first inhabitants of this land of topographical upheaval. They remained the center of human habitation even as subsequent arrivals forcibly transformed existing settlements, from Miwok village to Spanish mission, cattle ranch to suburban subdivision. Because the surrounding hills were explored but rarely occupied, they largely retained their character. Today they provide the last remnant of wildness in most of the state, as in much of the West.

California’s housing crisis, with its soaring real estate prices and 160,000 unhoused people, threatens these hills. It also threatens the remaining marshes and wetlands, coastal bluffs and mountain meadows. Any open space not yet protected by park or preserve is at risk.

In three years as a California land-use attorney, I saw this crisis unfold due to market forces and outdated approaches. And I continue to observe from afar how current policies meant to solve the problem promote unsustainable development in the wildlands, beyond existing boundaries.

Eleven million Californians already live in this wildland-urban interface. Meanwhile the only solution to the housing crisis is building millions of residential units — 3.5 million by 2025, according to Gov. Newsom.

As the gap between demand and supply widens, shooting prices beyond affordability for so many, appetites for building in the wildland-urban interface grow — not just in California but across the West. You see it everywhere — new homes in the hills above Orange County, the desert beyond Phoenix, the woods of western Oregon and southern Washington.

Given the rapid rates of growth reflected in the latest census, the problem only stands to worsen. But building in the wildland-urban interface is not the answer to the housing crisis. It cannot be.

Wildfire is only the most visible of the many harmful repercussions of development. More people living in or near the forest means more sources of ignition and more fires. It also means more life and property are at risk when fires inevitably spark, requiring budget-busting resources to quench them. Letting a fire burn out naturally and consume what is often decades of tinder buildup ceases to be an option, raising the likelihood and intensity of future fires.

Thomas Fire in the hills — The Thomas Fire burns in the hills above Los Padres National Forest on December 20, 2017. (Forest Service photo by Stuart Palley)

Building farther out from population centers also strains other public resources. As demand expands for energy, emergency services and water, so must the infrastructure to provide them. Longer commutes increase both conventional air pollution and the atmospheric carbon responsible for climate change, while construction in the wild fringes inevitably destroys habitat for non-human life. And while some people acquire their own personal green space, one single-family parcel at a time, the rest of us lose the breathing room so fundamental to life in the West.

Savvy developers and their political supporters are now using the housing shortage to promote projects and associated policies in the wildland-urban interface, even as they resist more beneficial measures like affordable housing requirements and limits on short-term rentals. Yet their efforts to undo environmental protections — particularly the much-maligned California Environmental Quality Act — long predate the housing crisis. It may be hard to blame them for using the situation to their advantage — and there’s some logic, however cynical, in their positions — but the choice they present, between open space and housing, between sustainability and affordability, must be called out as a false one.

This is not to say that the status quo is acceptable, only that there are better, more equitable solutions. Among them are building on vacant or underutilized parcels in city centers. Another involves converting empty office buildings to mixed use, since remote working has emptied many of these locations. Suburban areas, especially those connected to public transit, can increase density through construction of apartments, condos and townhouses that are more affordable to middle-income households. Investment in additional public transit is essential because it allows for denser development in areas where parking is hard to come by. Upgrading parks and other green space amenities is also critical — otherwise it will be hard to attract new residents to these developments.

Colorful tiny houses for the unhoused — Youth Spirit’s Tiny House Village in Oakland in 2021. Photo: Daniel Arauz (CC BY 2.0)

These are hardly novel suggestions, but they remain the best way to close the housing gap while limiting environmental impacts. Only by making communities more centralized and connected can we relieve the pressure to build ever outward.

Enabling the market to produce solutions, rather than hurdles, requires significant policy change. A recent University of California study identifies zoning regulations and discretionary local review as the biggest obstacles to the kind of infill development California needs. And while the California Environmental Quality Act serves a vital function, adjustments could ensure the law does not discourage projects that ultimately benefit the environment. Of the many legislative fixes proposed in recent years, only the more modest have been adopted — including SB 9, the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (HOME) Act, which streamlined the process for subdividing single-family lots and allowed construction of up to four units in place of one. Proponents of more dramatic measures — such as mandatory upzoning of neighborhoods near public-transit stops or job hubs — still seek the public and political support needed to get over the hump.

The time for large-scale change is here. Our current course leads to a future where a home is a luxury good, where all but the wealthy live hopelessly distant from green space. California, long touted for the boldness of its policies, has the chance to show the rest of the West that there are solutions to this insidious crisis. It won’t be easy, but it must be done. There’s more at stake than just the wildness of the hills.

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.

Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: Tallahassee’s Towering English Forest Faces Imminent Destruction

Why We Need Slow Solutions to Solve Our Water Problems

A new book explains why “Slow Water” projects can help us tackle our climate, water and biodiversity crises.

The world got a reminder of the beauty and importance of going slowly with the advent of the Slow Food movement that kicked off in Italy in the 1980s and spread throughout the world. Ditching fast food for locally sourced meals comes with myriad benefits for people and the planet.

The same can be said for embracing slow water, although the concept hasn’t achieved the same international recognition just yet. As we face a future of climate worsened droughts and floods, of continuing water pollution and crashing biodiversity, rethinking our relationship to water is central to thriving — and even surviving.

Science journalist Erica Gies found that many innovative projects working to solve our most challenging water problems all have a central premise in common: slowing water down. She explains how that’s done in her new book Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (available to U.S. readers in June), which tracks the work of “water detectives” enacting these changes across the world.

The Revelator spoke with Gies about what’s required to make Slow Water projects successful, who benefits, and why we’ll need to rethink more than just our engineering.

What does Slow Water mean?

In our attempt to control water we’re often trying to eradicate the slow phases and move it a lot more quickly. We’re putting up levees so that it won’t settle on floodplains. We’re filling in wetlands so that we can build or farm on top of them. We’re cutting down mountain forests that act as water towers, generating water and releasing it slowly.

In all of the cases I looked at, the water detectives were trying to give water access to its slow phases again, whether that meant restoring or protecting wetlands, or reclaiming floodplains, or protecting wet meadows, or in a city, creating something like bioswales.

Slow Water is really giving water access to its slow places as much as possible within our human habitat or near our human habitat. It’s thinking of water as an entity with its own agency. It’s systems thinking.

How do we begin to do this? It seems like it’s about more than just changing engineering.

There’s a kind of a fundamental attitude shift behind the concept of Slow Water, which is instead of having this sort of hubris or human supremacist attitude, the water detectives are looking at water as an entity that has its own relationship with rocks, microbes, beavers and humans across the ages.

Erica Gies. Photo by Jill Beale

That idea is very common in many Indigenous cultures around the world. That’s why you hear water protectors say things like “water is life.” Some people will talk about water as a relative, as a grandmother. That kind of attitude has a real strength when it comes to interacting with water, because water is part of a very complex system. There’s the water cycle, of course, but also all of these relationships with the different ecosystems and animals, including us.

The problem with our control-of-water mindset is that we’re often focused on single-minded problem solving. If we live in a dry area and we want to have water for later, we build a dam and a big reservoir. Or if we want to stop a town from flooding, we build a levee.

But if you’re only focused on solving that one problem, you’re not considering the system in which it works. And that’s why you have a lot of these unintended consequences, like building a levee that then pushes the water to another community nearby that doesn’t have a levee. And dams are an environmental justice issue as well.

It’s also very place-specific. This isn’t a solution that you want to scale up and stamp out in a real cookie-cutter kind of way. There are definitely commonalities in different projects, but every single place is unique in its hydrology, its ecology, its rocks, its people, and what its people need.

Slow Water projects are bespoke and, ideally, they’re local. They are more like [distributed] renewable energy — like solar panels on everybody’s roof where a lot of panels add up to a meaningful amount of electricity.

You traveled all over the world for this book. What common threads did you see?

I think the common thread is that you have to try to understand water rather than just try to make water do what you want it to do. You have to understand what water was doing before we dramatically altered the landscape. What is water likely to want to continue to do?

And how can we accommodate that within this landscape?

One of the places I talk about is Chennai, which is on the southeast coast of India. The people who live there are Tamils. They have this incredibly innovative water system that they’ve been doing for at least 2,000 years. But in the last 40-50 years, they’ve really gone down the kind of mainstream development path, as their city has expanded massively.

They have three rivers that go through the city and wetlands, backwaters, salt marshes and a whole series of human-built ponds that were relics of the great Tamil water infrastructure. But as they expanded, they built over many of those, and the city has begun to flood more and more regularly.

I was there in December and there was a small rainstorm and it immediately started flooding. During monsoon season there is nowhere for the water to go. But like us, their impulse now is to move water away — we can’t have it lingering here. We can’t have it flooding.

That’s created another problem. After the monsoon season is a long dry season when they need water. Now they’re drilling lots of groundwater and their groundwater is dropping and they’re talking about building really expensive desalination. But Chennai actually gets one and a half times the amount of water it needs via the rain. It’s going to these extreme lengths to get more water when it doesn’t need to.

What are the ways in which plants and animals can benefit from Slow Water projects?

The biodiversity question is critical, and it comes back to systems theory. The thing about Slow Water projects is, if you’re doing it right, you’re restoring or recreating or mimicking to some degree a healthy ecosystem that’s doing all of the nutrient and pollution and food cycling that healthy ecosystems do. And what you need, to do all that, is critters and plants.

We’ve altered 75% of the world’s land area. That’s one of the reasons why we’re having a biodiversity crisis. There’s a lot less habitat for all of these critters. I believe it’s a moral issue that we continue to coexist with other creatures, but there is also a self-interest angle to it. The more that we can do to help restore these ecosystems that modulate the water cycle, the more we also have space for these critters. And then we also need these critters to perform the work of modulating the water cycle.

I go into that in some detail where I talk about the hyporheic zone, which is an area that’s not groundwater and not surface water. It’s an ecotone that’s in between and has a lot of unique critters. It’s a lot like our human gut microbiome. If we don’t have healthy collections of microbes, then we suffer from various illnesses. It’s very much the same with waterways. So that biodiversity is really a fundamental piece.

The main focus of the book is how Slow Water projects can be an adaptation measure to help buffer human communities from floods and droughts. But in fact, because these are whole systems, there’s also a lot of “blue carbon.” Wetlands store incredible amounts of carbon, as do peatlands and high-altitude forests. So they are also a mitigation measure.

Maybe we’re not going to measure exactly the amount of carbon that’s stored in this complex system. But maybe we don’t have to. Maybe we can say, “Look, our city’s not flooding, and our stream is running in the summer, even though we’re in the dry west.” Maybe that’s a good enough sign that this investment has been worth it.

What can people do to get engaged in this work?

As people see floods or droughts in their backyards, they’re beginning to understand that climate change is water change.

But the really empowering thing about Slow Water is that there are things that you can do to protect yourself from flood and drought as a city, as a region, as a watershed. It’s not easy, right?

You have to cooperate with people, you have to share a vision. But people are doing it. I think that’s a really hopeful message. Water is local and there are things that you can do locally to have a much better relationship with water.

Previously in The Revelator:

Let Rivers Flood: Communities Adopt New Strategies for Resilience