A Rare ‘Bird of Two Worlds’ Faces an Uncertain Future

Marbled murrelets could benefit from a unique research project that’s uncovering information to help better protect this endangered species.

One thing sets marbled murrelets apart from other seabirds: They forage at sea but nest inland in mature forests. That makes them a “bird of two worlds,” says Oregon State University animal ecologist Jim Rivers.

But this unique characteristic also increases their vulnerability. Climate change threatens murrelets’ food sources in the ocean, while on land, logging, wildfires and habitat fragmentation have diminished their nesting forests.

Although the birds received Endangered Species Act protection as a threatened species in 1992, their decline continued as logging chipped away at their forest habitats along the Pacific Coast of North America. Last year the results of a study by OSU researchers with the Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project analyzing 20 years of data revealed climate change and reduced prey populations as the additional factor in the murrelets’ decline.

The Revelator spoke with Rivers, principal investigator of the project, about the challenges of tracking murrelets and how their research is guiding conservation.

Jim Rivers. Photo: Oregon State University

Why was this project started?

There’s a lot of uncertainty about the steps that are needed to recover murrelet populations. That has led managers to not really be sure in some cases as to what they can and can’t do in a given area.

So what our project aims to do is uncover some of the breeding requirements for murrelets. In particular we want to know about where birds are nesting and how successful they are in their nesting. And then if their nest failed to produce any offspring, we want to know the limiting factors and whether or not those might be factors that can be managed.

There isn’t much known about murrelet nesting success in Oregon. There’ve been other large studies in British Columbia, California, Washington and Alaska, but nothing in Oregon. Prior to the start of our work, there were only 29 nests that were active when they were located.

Murrelets use older forests — late succession and old-growth forests — for nesting. They also use the ocean for all of their foraging. They’re a unique species in that sense, but from a research perspective, that means our project requires a lot of people on the ground, in the air and on the water.

We didn’t want to start in the forest and potentially bias where we’re searching for nests. So what that required us to do is to go out and capture birds on the ocean and then tag them and then follow them inland. We do that so that we have a hopefully unbiased sample of birds that could go into federal sites or private lands or state lands.

What’s the process like for capturing these birds in the ocean and then tracking them all the way back to a nest site in the forest?

We go out on the water with an 84-foot boat from the beginning of May to the first week of June when the weather conditions are OK. When we get out on the water, we have a Zodiac [inflatable boat] that’s offloaded just after nightfall. A group gets into that capture boat and goes out into the nearshore environment. They look for birds with a spotlight and a salmon net. It sounds funny, but that’s as simple as we need.

When a bird is caught, they bring it back to the main boat where we have a crew attach a radio tag that allows us to track its movements over the course of about three months. Then we take a measurement of the body, as well as blood and feather samples, which tell us about the health of the bird. Then it’s released back to the water.

The tracking part starts the next morning with our ground crew, who look for the birds along the water. What we want to find is a bird that’s on the water one day, then missing the next day. And then it’s on the water the third day and it’s missing the fourth.

That’s suggestive of a bird in the process of incubating an egg. Males and females share in that responsibility, and they take 24-hour shifts. When we find that, that’s when we send the plane up to look for that individual bird.

The plane flies around and looks for the signal. Once we find the location where the bird is likely sitting on a nest, the ground crew goes inland and starts looking for that individual bird in a given tree, which isn’t easy. These birds are nesting 200 feet above the ground — not even in a nest, but in just a scrape in the moss on a horizontal limb. So you can’t see the bird from the ground.

Once we narrow it down, we have a tree climber set up a video camera in an adjacent tree so we can zoom in and get a good idea of what’s going on at the nest site without bothering the birds.

Then we just run that camera for as long as the nest is active. Once the nest ends, we go out and take down the cameras and we take measurements of the nest tree itself. We do that whole process for as many nests we can find.

What have you learned?

We’ve learned that the ocean conditions appear to have a really big influence on whether these birds are nesting or not. The first year of the project that we went full-scale on our tagging effort was 2017 and we tagged 61 birds. And we waited and waited and waited. None of those birds ended up breeding.

researchers in the field — Oregon State University researchers monitor marbled murrelet movements as part of a multi-year study. Photo: Kim Nelson, Oregon State University, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

And that was a huge surprise to us. We really kind of scratched our heads. But one of the things that stood out during 2017 was that the coastal marine conditions in central Oregon were really poor for a bird like a murrelet that relies on forge fish to feed its offspring.

In 2018 and 2019, we went back with the same methodology. And we did have birds that were going in and breeding. We had about a dozen nests that we found, which is still not a very high propensity to breed and pretty uncommon relative to the number of birds that we tagged.

This year it’s been a very different story. The ocean has been quite a bit different in terms of the upwelling and the productivity and the forage fish availability. And what we’re finding is that we have the smallest number of tagged birds this year — just under 50 birds, but a third of those birds have bred.

We have 17 nests at last count for this season — much more than we had in all previous three seasons. We didn’t work last year because of COVID.

So we’re learning that you need to have good ocean conditions if murrelets are going to breed. And they have to have good nest sites in the forest. If you don’t have those, you’re not going to have healthy populations.

Have any of your findings so far been able to inform policy or conservation work?

Right now, the way that the regulations are written, at least for state lands in Oregon, is that if you go out to a site that might be murrelet habitat and you conduct a series of surveys and you don’t get any birds in the first year, and you go back the second year and you get the same result — no birds after a set number of surveys — that area can be harvested because it’s considered to be unoccupied habitat.

What our results showed was that you may have a couple of bad years of ocean conditions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an unoccupied habitat forever. It just means that birds are not using it because the ocean is not allowing them to, in a sense, because they don’t have the breeding resources.

Although our project really started as one that’s focused on nest ecology and breeding in the forest, we really can’t remove it from the ocean conditions too, because they’re tied together.

So we’ve done a little bit more work toward that marine side of things lately. And I think that’s where people are starting to really appreciate murrelets as a bird of two worlds.

What else are you hoping to learn?

The nice thing about this project is that we’ve had the latitude to ask questions that are related to our initial goal of understanding factors related to nest success. One of the questions is about ocean conditions and forage fish.

We’ve started to think about what the birds are eating, and we can get a sense of that from taking their blood and feather samples and looking at stable isotope values. Those give us a sense of how high in the food chain murrelets are eating. We can look at those values for different individuals and in different years. It will be interesting to see the potential difference in isotope values for birds that were captured this spring versus back in 2017 when none of them bred. I suspect they’ll be quite different.

We’re also getting interested in microplastics. It’s a threat to a lot of seabirds.

One of the things that we can do when we climb these nest trees and take measurements around the nest site is collect the fecal material from the chick. We can look through that and see what sort of plastics are there. And we have a woman on campus we’re collaborating with who does a lot of microplastics work. Her comment was, “it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of how much [microplastics] these birds are going to have.”

We’ve also been trying to understand where these birds are spending time on the coasts and whether or not their movements overlap with marine protected areas.

We’re kind of starting from the point of nesting ecology, but there’s lots of fun things that we can do that really broaden the work and help us understand the bird better.

Beyond Science: Art and the Environment

A journey to one of the most beautiful places on Earth — which sits next to one of the most polluted — reminds us that art can help conserve.

In 1871 photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran joined an expedition to the Yellowstone region of the United States, which they documented in a series of powerful and moving creative works. Soon after, Jackson’s and Moran’s images became the catalysts for Congress to designate the very first national park at Yellowstone.

This little-known detail, that artists played a major role in the formation of the world’s first national park, was at the forefront of my mind each day I spent as the artist-in-residence for Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park this summer.

My time in Hawaiʻi was made possible by the National Parks Arts Foundation, which offers select artists month-long fellowships to follow in the footsteps of Jackson and Moran, exploring the natural wonders within one of several U.S. parks, and connecting with the scientists and environmental protection specialists working to preserve the land.

For me, this meant days surveying one of the most geologically and biologically diverse places on Earth, traversing rainforests, volcanoes, fields of steam vents, lava tubes and endless vistas of unbroken Pacific Ocean. I was introduced to Sierra McDaniel, a 20-year veteran member of the Parks Service, who shared her work propagating and repopulating the critically endangered silversword plant. I visited the fishermen at Ka Lae, who cast lines from 50-foot cliffs as vaccinated revelers threw themselves into the crystal-clear water below. There were turtles sunning themselves on black sand beaches, waterfalls, and countless hikes in secluded wilderness teeming with some of the rarest plants and animals in the world. In the evenings, I would return home to the scent of frangipani and the charcoal of distant firepits, mixing on the trade winds that are responsible for Hawaiʻi’s idyllic climate.

During my visit I researched the formation of the Hawaiian archipelago and its current rate of change due to volcanic activity and the movement of tectonic plates. Using seismic data from the United States Geological Survey, I catalogued all earthquakes that occurred beneath the park and devised a system to convert parameters such as magnitude, depth and time of quake to musical parameters for the creation of a new score. The recording of this score is designed as a way of experiencing, in sound, the activity that is changing the shape, position and size of Hawaiʻi, and indeed the very face of the Earth. In the few solitary weeks I spent in quiet contemplation, marveling at the spectacular landscape laid out before me, I was surprised to learn that more than 750 local earthquakes were reshaping the ground beneath my feet.

Listen to a sample of Sam Nester’s composition:

Plastic Beach

All this raw beauty and natural power, along with the artistic opportunity to explore it, exists under the stewardship of the National Parks Service, which protects it for anyone wishing to venture that far out into the Pacific Ocean. And yet throughout my residency I was intimately aware that on this same island, a mere stone’s throw from the protected land of the national park, sat a place in stark contrast with what I was witnessing.

Kamilo Beach, commonly known as “trash beach” or “plastic beach,” is among the most polluted beaches on Earth. Plagued by the Great Pacific garbage patch – a vast area of floating rubbish in the Pacific Ocean – Kamilo’s sandy shoreline accumulates enormous swaths of garbage each day, mostly discarded plastic.

To truly comprehend the catastrophic scope of the Great Pacific garbage patch, imagine an area triple the size of France composed of approximately 80,000 metric tons of plastic. Kamilo, along with other Hawaiian beaches less travelled by tourists, is one of few places that this swirling vortex of ocean currents dumps its decades-old collection of debris.

Debris created by you and me.

Kamilo Beach plastic trash — Kamilo Beach trash. Photo: Gabriella Levine (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It’s almost certain that the turtles I saw sunning and the adventure seekers diving 50 feet from volcanic cliffs have contended, at some point, with the likes of the garbage that defaces Kamilo.

Even worse than the solid toothbrushes, bottles and toilet seats swirling around this patch of ocean are the microplastics they produce. The plastic from these discarded household objects breaks down over time into smaller and smaller particles. These microplastics are not only becoming increasingly difficult to remove from the world’s oceans but are ingested by marine life, causing potentially fatal harm.

Kamilo is not a national park. It is not protected by the everyday heroes that make up the Parks Service, creating and administering rehabilitation projects over the course of decades for the health and longevity of our fragile environment. Kamilo is a symptom of the Great Pacific garbage patch. This patch of ocean waste is unequivocally a mark of human carelessness and one that needs to be addressed on a global level if we are to prevent irreversible catastrophe.

Art and Awareness

Our world is in crisis, and it has been for quite some time now. Instead of addressing this, a movement has begun among the wealthiest of men to conquer space for individual private enterprise and avoid the responsibility we have to our shared wilderness here on the only planet we currently occupy. We cannot excuse our continued habits on the hope that a few modern robber barons might colonize a distant world and allow us the privilege of living there. Likewise, continuing to ignore our climate and environmental emergency here and now, or laying blame to previous generations, is reckless. It is our planet, it is our time, it is crucial that we consider our relationship to the magnificent natural world and how best to safeguard it.

Perhaps now more than ever, our wild places need artists. We need artists to know them, to feel connected to them, and to share their experiences as widely as possible.

Sea turtles at Punalu’u. Photo: Sam Nester

Depicting humanity’s relationship to nature is certainly not new. It is rare for someone to mention Beethoven’s sixth symphony without commenting on their own experience with the magnificence of a thunderstorm. Confronting Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is to gaze not only deep within oneself, but to observe a man confronted with the awesomeness of nature and his place within it. To stand in the shadow of Olafur Eliasson’s beautiful yet disturbing icebergs scattered and melting in the cities of Paris, Copenhagen or London, is to have a very real, very strong connection to our warming planet.

Indeed, artists can play a vital role in conservation and messaging. Data sets rarely move an audience, but the interpretation or representation of critical information through artistic forms is ripe for broader engagement. When I began my Arcadia project, converting the biodata of living plants to sound and light in real-time installations, I never expected that bioscience Ph.D. students would draw on this for their research. As I have worked with various departments across disciplines at George Mason University these past 18 months, I have seen first-hand that interdisciplinary collaboration can provide new perspectives and approaches to sharing issues of sustainability and climate change more widely, and that artistic work can contribute to scientific inquiry.

Similarly, my experiences at Volcanoes National Park have laid the foundation for additional data sonification work, in the hope of amplifying an enduring natural process that is occurring beneath us. A piece of music fully informed by earthquake data may not be everyone’s Friday night listening, and it is unlikely to inspire a new generation of musicological geologists. However, offering art grounded in a natural phenomenon, one that constantly adjusts our physical position on this planet, as we act powerless to the process, may allow for a fresh perspective and deepening of our relationship to the rhythms of the natural world.

Art and Influence

Artists can complement the work of climate scientists by making what all too often seems overwhelmingly grim more actionable.

Like Jackson and Moran, artists today can align themselves with government and nonprofit reports in the hope of influencing change on an institutional level. Collaborating with scientists, like those in the National Parks Service, or those at George Mason University, can allow for new insights into research and the presentation of technical material. Simply producing public events in galleries and concert halls that promote our wilderness helps to direct the most pressing conversation of our time to a broader audience.

Additionally, we can take this further, sharing our work on platforms such as social media, in newspapers, on television news shows and podcasts. This takes what can be an ephemeral moment, a performance or event locked in time, to a sustained experience — just like what we hope our natural spaces will enjoy.

To know the rainforests, volcanoes, and endless vistas of Pacific Ocean is enough to want to defend them. Similarly, to know the horrors of places like Kamilo and the Great Pacific garbage patch offers an opportunity to rage against them in creative ways.

Art inspires. It has the power to create change in a viewer, reader or listener, and reach vast audiences. So let the artists of today become the 21^st century versions of Jackson and Moran in the hope to inspire the protection of an even greater number of our natural wonders, to be loved, shared, and known by future generations.

Vanishing: An Augury of Antlers

What if moose, mighty and massive, went the way of bison and other once-abundant species?

What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.

I didn’t emigrate from Britain to Canada because of moose. Not exactly.

Imagine telling your family you’re abandoning them for another country because of a long-legged ungulate with a flap of skin hanging beneath the throat and a peculiar, stiff-legged gait.

But I’m not sure Canada’s pull would have been so strong if I hadn’t been sitting, one day, at the front of a Greyhound bus on the way to Hay River in the Northwest Territories and the driver hadn’t slowed down so we could watch a moose treading across a creek by the side of the highway. Or if a couple of years later, when I was cycling alone across Canada for almost 6,000 miles, I hadn’t stopped to watch a moose sauntering on the other side of the Blackstone River along the Dempster Highway.

Seeing a moose in person — they can be 7 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh more than a thousand pounds — is both shocking and mesmerizing. Where I’m from, badgers are the largest remaining wild animals, and they’re being culled by the tens of thousands to the point that they’re at risk of becoming extirpated in parts of England.

It was February when my British husband and I moved into our house in Whitehorse, Yukon, just over the 60th parallel in northern Canada. All the homes on our side of the street back onto miles of forest; the snow was still thick on the ground, and we were looking forward to discovering what was in our back garden when it finally melted.

Despite the snow, it didn’t take long to notice the moose antlers propped up against the fence beside an overgrown rhubarb plant and concealed by low spruce boughs and the open, snow-wedged gate. The antlers were still connected to a bloodstained section of skull. They hadn’t been shed by their living owner as male moose do each winter; they’d been hacked off a corpse by humans.

Every year people shoot moose, cut them up and put them in their freezers. Every year another batch of antlers is nailed to gates, garages and cabins, a custom that always makes me think of the medieval predilection for displaying decapitated heads on spikes.

Yukon is known for being home to two moose for every person. It’s the sort of fact Yukoners are proud of. Each year, though, that ratio becomes less true as the human population steadily rises. We’re currently at about 42,000 people to 70,000 moose.

Even though moose here aren’t considered endangered at the moment, that doesn’t stop me from lying in bed worrying about them. The truth is that we don’t know exactly how many moose live in Canada right now. There may be a million, or there may be 500,000.

But I do know this: We’ve taken abundant species for granted before, and they’ve paid a terrible price. Passenger pigeons once numbered in the billions and now there are none. As many as 60 million buffalo may have roamed North America and, after we hunted them to the brink of extinction, we had to rebuild their species from a population of just a few hundred.

I’m not a biologist. I’m a poet, so I tend to let my imagination run away with me. More and more, I’ve been thinking about what it will be like when so many of the animals we share the planet with are no longer here. In the forest behind my house, I imagine smooth snow, unbroken by the prints of any creatures other than humans and our dogs. No squirrel tail scuffs, no cute cartoony hare ovals, no scarpering coyote tracks. No deep postholes made by moose that my whole leg disappears into when I step.

I always thought one of the main reasons I love going into the forest was so that I could be alone, but I’ve realized I don’t actually want to be alone. I want to have to stop as I’m skiing along because I’m not sure if the movement I’ve sensed ahead is a branch shifting in the wind or a fellow mammal passing between tree trunks. I want to have to carry my bear spray, my whistle, my phone, just in case. I want to see three moose cross the trail ahead of me and have to grab my dog to put her on the lead.

We’ve lived here for 14 years now, and the antlers are still propped up against our garden fence. That first summer, I collected stones in the woods and arranged them around the skull. I said sorry to the moose and wrote a poem. I let the fireweed grow through the stones. In the autumn, I let aspen leaves and spruce needles cover the skull. Then the snow returned. An artist friend flew up to stay and we talked of freighting the antlers to her so she could carve them. We talked of separating the antlers for shipping, sawing them off the skull, how that would be a pity.

Lying in bed at three in the morning, when I fear that no species on this planet — including us — is going to make it, I worry about what to do with the antlers when all the moose have gone. Even though there must be hundreds of thousands of antlers hammered to gateposts and cabins all around the northern hemisphere, I’m convinced they’ll eventually become a sought-after commodity, like rhinoceros horns and elephant tusks. What if I get up to walk the dog one morning and discover they’ve vanished, stolen in the night, the arrangement of stones scattered?

I know what I’ll do with the antlers. I won’t nail them to a wall so nobody can take them. I’ll bury them in the garden, and I won’t mark the grave.

Explore the rest of the Vanishing series and discuss these and other #VanishingSpecies on Twitter.

13 New Books About Pollution — and How to Fight It

Pesticides, sewage, mining waste, air pollution and trash — these new books address the toxic elements in our society.

It’s a dirty world out there — but it doesn’t have to be.

That message rings out from a slate of important new books covering the fight against various pollutants around the world. They examine everything from pesticides to air pollution and from mining waste to the trash that accumulates all around us. Along the way these books shine a light on some bigger stories — like our food system and human effects on complex ecosystems. They also dive deep into the racism, indifference, greed and ignorance that allow these toxic compounds to flourish in our world and in our bodies.

One group of pollutants didn’t make it onto this list: greenhouse gases. We’ll look at them in September’s column, covering timely new books on climate change.

But for now, here are 13 new dirty books about filth for your perusal, along with their cover descriptions. Each title links to its publisher’s site, but you should also be able to order these from any local or online bookseller or your favorite library.

The World We Need: Stories and Lessons From America’s Unsung Environmental Movement edited by Audrea Lim

“…a vivid introduction to America’s largely unsung grassroots environmental groups — often led by activists of color and the poor — valiantly fighting back in America’s so-called sacrifice zones against industries poisoning our skies and waterways and heating our planet. Through original reporting, profiles, artwork and interviews, we learn how these activist groups, almost always working on shoestring budgets, are devising creative new tactics, building sustainable projects to transform local economies and organizing people long overlooked by the environmental movement — changing its face along the way.”

The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption and One Man’s Search for Justice by Carey Gillam

“Lee Johnson was a man with simple dreams. All he wanted was a steady job and a nice home for his wife and children, something better than the hard life he knew growing up. He never imagined that he would become the face of a David-and-Goliath showdown against one of the world’s most powerful corporate giants. But a workplace accident left Lee doused in a toxic chemical and facing a deadly cancer that turned his life upside down. In 2018, the world watched as Lee was thrust to the forefront of one the most dramatic legal battles in recent history.”

Breathless: Why Air Pollution Matters — and How It Affects You by Chris Woodford

“Take a deep breath. You’ll do it 20,000 times a day. You assume all this air is clean; it’s the very breath of life. But in Delhi, the toxic smog is as bad for you as smoking 50 cigarettes a day. Even a few days in Paris, London or Rome is equivalent to two or three cigarettes. Air pollution is implicated in six of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, including lung cancer, heart disease, stroke and dementia. Breathless gives us clear facts about air pollution in our everyday lives, showing how it affects our bodies, how much of it occurs in unexpected places (indoors, inside your car), and how you can minimize the risks.”

Pollution Is Colonialism by Max Liboiron

“Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) — an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada — to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron’s creative, lively and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.”

Playing With Fire: The Strange Case of Marine Shale Processors by John W. Sutherlin and Daniel Elliot Gonzalez

“This book examines the tale of Marine Shale Processors, the world’s largest hazardous waste company, and the women who fought to protect their community and their children. The lesson here is that a dedicated group of people fighting for what is right can win and it serves as an example for any community that wants to determine what their own environmental future.”

Herbicides: Chemistry, Efficacy, Toxicology and Environmental Impacts edited by Robin Mesnage and Johann G. Zaller

“A comprehensive overview of this complex topic, presented by internationally recognized experts. Information presented will inform discussions on the use of herbicides in modern agricultural and other systems, and their potential non-target effects on human populations and various ecosystems. The book covers these matters in concise language appropriate to engage both specialists in the research community and informed persons responsible for legislative, funding and public health matters in the community at large.”

Earth Detox: How and Why We Must Clean Up Our Planet by Julian Cribb

“Every person on our home planet is affected by a worldwide deluge of man-made chemicals and pollutants — most of which have never been tested for safety. Our chemical emissions are six times larger than our total greenhouse gas emissions. They are in our food, our water, the air we breathe, our homes and workplaces, the things we use each day. This universal poisoning affects our minds, our bodies, our genes, our grandkids and all life on Earth. Julian Cribb describes the full scale of the chemical catastrophe we have unleashed. He proposes a new Human Right — not to be poisoned.”

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh

“The David and Goliath story of ordinary people in El Salvador who rallied together with international allies to prevent a global mining corporation from poisoning the country’s main water source.”

Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything — and Endangered the World by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman

“Over the past few decades, palm oil has seeped into every corner of our lives. But the palm oil revolution has been built on stolen land and slave labor; it’s swept away cultures and so devastated the landscapes of Southeast Asia that iconic animals now teeter on the brink of extinction. This groundbreaking work of first-rate journalism compels us to examine the connections between the choices we make at the grocery store and a planet under siege.”

Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound by David B. Williams

“In conversations with archaeologists, biologists and tribal authorities, Williams traces how generations of humans have interacted with such species as geoducks, salmon, orcas, rockfish and herring. He sheds light on how warfare shaped development and how people have moved across this maritime highway, in canoes, the mosquito fleet and today’s ferry system. The book also takes an unflinching look at how the Sound’s ecosystems have suffered from human behavior, including pollution, habitat destruction and the effects of climate change.”

Plastic: An Autobiography by Allison Cobb

“Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives ― from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama ― the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.”

Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet by Chelsea Wald

“While we see radical technological change in almost every other aspect of our lives, we remain stuck in a sanitation status quo — in part because the topic of toilets is taboo. Fortunately, there’s hope — and Pipe Dreams daringly profiles the growing army of sewage-savvy scientists, engineers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and activists worldwide who are overcoming their aversions and focusing their formidable skills on making toilets accessible and healthier for all.”

Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai by Saumya Roy

“All of Mumbai’s possessions and memories come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. Towering at the outskirts of the city, the mountains are covered in a faint smog from trash fires. Over time, as wealth brought Bollywood knock offs, fast food and plastics to Mumbaikars, a small, forgotten community of migrants and rag-pickers came to live at the mountains’ edge, making a living by re-using, recycling and re-selling. Among them is Farzana Ali Shaikh, a tall, adventurous girl who soon becomes one of the best pickers in her community. Like so many in her community, Farzana, made increasingly sick by the trash mountains, is caught up in the thrill of discovery — because among the broken glass, crushed cans or even the occasional dead baby, there’s a lingering chance that she will find a treasure to lift her family’s fortunes.” (Available in September.)

Keep reading: Explore the Revelator Reads archives for hundreds of additional book recommendations.

Photo Essay: In the Company of Bison

Collaboration across thousands of miles provides a vision for a shared future for Yellowstone bison and the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor, Alaska.

Old Harbor, formerly Nuniaq, is the largest of six Alutiiq villages in Alaska’s Kodiak archipelago. People have lived here nearly 8,000 years, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied areas in the region.

Looking to its future, Old Harbor finds itself at a crossroads. While its long history of commercial fishing and industrial maritime activities such as whaling are now a fading way of life, the village has developed a strategic plan that combines the efforts of the city, the tribe and the corporation of Old Harbor to develop future-focused projects that benefit the community’s long-term growth and survival. This includes an alternative to their modern reliance on importing food at a now historically high expense from the town of Kodiak or the mainland.

With that in mind, in 2015 the residents of Old Harbor decided to release and manage a free-ranging herd of plains bison on the 120-square-mile Sitkalidak Island, located a short boat or helicopter ride across the water from the village. The private herd, acquired and relocated to the island in 2017, belongs to a community nonprofit, the Old Harbor Alliance, with support and representation by the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor, the city of Old Harbor and the Old Harbor Native Corporation. The herd will provide a locally available high-quality protein, as well as economic opportunity through tourism, hunting tags, local guiding and logistics services, and the sale of excess meat.

Decades of collaboration made this possible. In 2016 Old Harbor became a member of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, an organization of about 70 tribes across North America that has spent the past 30 years proliferating and growing bison populations on Indigenous lands. The council facilitates programs and resources to help educate tribes and the general public on the traditional benefits and relationships between communities and bison and provides assistance to help tribes start their own herds. The ITBC also partnered with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the organization I work with, in successfully advocating for bison as the national mammal of the United States.

The ITBC effort includes a program to rescue bison that leave the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone bison are the closest known relatives of plains bison that survived their near extinction in the 19th century. Bison leaving the park can be killed by locals through a Montana state effort to prevent contact between bison and livestock. The ITBC has been working to save every bison that stumbles past the park borders, and in 2020 sent three such pure-blooded bulls to Old Harbor. The bulls, in turn, will provide the herd with genetic material to avoid interbreeding issues and produce a healthy generation for over a century.

I’ve spent the past several months in Old Harbor filming a documentary around the bison herd, giving me the opportunity to see its importance up close.

Cold rain blows the morning I hop a ride in a helicopter headed toward Port Hobron on Sitkalidak Island. I’m joined by Nate Svoboda, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and Melissa Berns, chief manager of Old Harbor’s herd. We’re going to run physical exams on several bison, adjust tracking collars and apply what’s called a “cold brand” on the bison from Yellowstone to denote them from the rest of the herd.

As we fly over Sitkalidak, Berns stands on the landing skid, safety-hooked at the waist in a space where the door would normally be, a black tranquilizer rifle in her hands. She sees a small herd of bison, waits until they’re in range, and aims. “Dart is in,” she says over the intercom, and after five minutes of waiting says “Bison down. Bison down.” The helicopter lands and the team gets to work.

At day’s end we visit our fourth bison. Community volunteers exit two helicopters and approach the sleeping hulk of Siduuq, one of the three Yellowstone bison bulls we’d been searching for. By reputation and appearance, Siduuq is exactly how I imagined a “buffalo” — powerful, ancient, mysterious.

Keller, the pilot, collects blood samples while Dahlia, Berns’ 17-year-old niece, takes the bison’s temperature. His large tracking collar is adjusted to ensure it’s secure, and he breaths deeply from the oxygen tube inserted in his nostril. The workup is finished in about 30 minutes, then Svoboda administers a stimulant to reverse the tranquilizer.

A stir in the ears signal Siduuq’s waking. As he rises, I take several photos. I’ve done this throughout the day, about 20-30 feet distant. While the other bison quickly run off, Siduuq continues staring, the whole of his great face turned in my direction.

Everything feels quiet now. Bison will raise their tail if they feel threatened, but Siduuq’s is down, his body still. I stare into those giant eyes and feel as if I’m being appraised by an old wisdom. Then, as silent as his weighted gaze, he starts to walk away — not breaking eye contact until well on the other side of the clearing.

As we leave the bison and Sitkalidak Island behind, the view from the helicopter frames the remains of an old whaling station from the 1930s. The pilot circles it to give us a better look. A few old shacks, some long-rusted machinery and an old shipwreck sit idly in the rain. I contemplate the changing approaches to ephemeral industries and survival that have occurred in and around Old Harbor through the centuries. Piles of rusty drums, full of old fuel and whale oil, reflect a time long gone for the small fishing village. Now perhaps a new self-determined vision and species — bison — will guide its future.

We cross the strait and Old Harbor alights in the darkness, windows bright with warmth and welcome. Berns and Svoboda, though exhausted from the day, talk excitedly at length of the next trip out. I contemplate how the bison found their way here — from Kodiak, from Yellowstone, via tribal networks — from the brink of extinction to grow in another place, where they’re once again stewarded by an Indigenous tribe.

To Save the Planet, We Need to End Corporate Funding of Police

Those fighting to protect the planet face intense police repression that's funded by private corporations.

This summer, we’ve seen the Bootleg fire rage through Oregon. East Coasters have been breathing West Coast smoke. Massive floods have slammed towns from Germany to China. The town of Lytton, British Columbia burned to the ground.

These disasters give a new sense of urgency to transition away from the fossil fuels that are causing this climate chaos. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the movement fighting for this transition is running up against intense police repression — funded by private corporations as well as the federal government.

I saw some of this firsthand.

In June, I was one of the thousands who converged in Northern Minnesota for the Treaty People Gathering to protest the Line 3 tar sands pipeline. Tar sands are one of the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive fuel sources on the planet. The pipeline also violates the treaty rights of the local Anishinaabe people, threatening their water supply and sacred wild rice beds.

The Treaty People Gathering kicked off a summer of protests against the pipeline. Unfortunately, these nonviolent protests have been brutally cracked down on. Over 500 protestors have been arrested or issued citations so far.

While I was there, demonstrators were hounded by a Border Patrol helicopter flying close to the ground, kicking up dust and disorienting protestors. Police attacked protestors with a Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and built a physical barricade outside a pipeline resistance camp on private property, preventing vehicle access.

Although the police claim to “protect and serve” the communities they work in, these confrontational, militarized responses would indicate the opposite. It’s disappointing, but not surprising — Enbridge, the pipeline operator, is directly funding many Minnesotan police departments.

The Line 3 construction permit requires Enbridge to create a “Public Safety Escrow Account” that allows Minnesota police to seek reimbursement for “services” including “maintaining the peace in and around the construction site.”

This incentivizes more arrests, as the police can bill Enbridge for any activity related to suppressing Line 3 resistance. The escrow account provides funding for police “personal protective equipment, ” which includes batons, shields, and gas masks. Police have also submitted invoices for tear gas grenades, tear gas projectiles, and bean bag rounds.

“The level of brutality that was unleashed on us was very extreme,” says Indigenous lawyer and activist Tara Houska, who suffered bloody welts after she was shot with rubber bullets, then arrested and held in Pennington County” #StopLine3 @POTUS
https://t.co/vO2veSPcho

— Honor the Earth (@HonorTheEarth) August 4, 2021

Funding police violence against nonviolent protests should cross a line. But it’s not just corporations — the federal government does it, too. The federal 1033 program transfers surplus military equipment to local police departments, free of charge.

This equipment has been repeatedly used by local police departments to violently suppress racial justice protests in places like Ferguson, Minneapolis, and Kenosha. The 1033 program also likely supplied the helicopters, assault rifles, excavators, and the mine-resistant armor-protected vehicle that violently suppressed the Standing Rock protests in 2016.

Hubbard County, Minnesota, where hundreds have been arrested, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of military equipment from the 1033 program, including M16 and M14 assault rifles and a mine-resistant armor-protected vehicle.

The simultaneous occurrence of this summer’s intense climate-related weather events and this severe crackdown on anti-pipeline activists is deeply troubling.

The development of more fossil fuel infrastructure such as Line 3 will only worsen our climate catastrophe. But while the anti-pipeline movement is trying to save the planet, militarized, corporate-funded police forces are making that as difficult as possible.

In order to protect our environment, we must demilitarize the police. That means ending the 1033 program and getting corporate money out of police departments. The fate of our planet depends on it.

This op-ed was distributed by Other Words.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or its employees.

Species Spotlight: The Bobcat — Hunted for Its Beauty

Exploited for its pelt, the bobcat is a highly cryptic species that few have studied or monitored in any detail.

Easily confused with the larger Canada lynx, the bobcat is a close relative. In fact they’re known to hybridize at the southern extent of lynx range, where the two species overlap. Two subspecies of bobcat — the western and eastern, as supported by current science — live in North America. Across its range, the bobcat is subject to significant hunting and trapping for its fur and recreation that can threaten populations.

Species name:

Lynx rufus

Description:

Short and stocky, bobcats have dense facial ruffs and are known for their “bobbed” tails and pointed ear tufts, although the latter is often absent or short. While bobcats are much smaller than cougars or mountain lions, they’re considered medium-sized wild cats. Weighing between 8 and 40 pounds and reaching 49 inches long, bobcats are often two to three times the size of house cats.

Where it’s found:

The bobcat is widespread across North America, with a range extending from southern Canada through the contiguous United States into southern Mexico to the state of Oaxaca.

IUCN Red List status:

Least concern

Major threats:

Bobcats are widely exploited for their pelts, which primarily support international markets for spotted furs. Volatile fur markets can lead to unpredictable harvesting, making management of the species difficult and at times impossible.

The species is also killed for livestock depredation, both perceived and real.

In some places coyotes and domestic animals have reduced bobcat populations. Rodenticide poisons, which bobcats ingest with their prey, are also a significant threat in parts of the West.

Notable conservation programs:

Panthera director Wai-Ming Wong and I collaborate with researcher Kim Sager-Fradkin of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe on the Olympic Bobcat Project. Together we completed a collaborative camera trapping season across a grid of 180 cameras in collaboration with the Lower Elwha Klallam, Port Gamble S’Klallam and Jamestown S’Klallam Tribes. We categorized 500,000 images and organized them to train a machine-learning classifier (PantheraIDS), which when complete will be able to identify the animal in camera trap images at a rate of 1,000 images per minute, with an approximately 96%-98% success rate. This tool will be shared with First Nation collaborators to help them build capacity and monitoring tools, as they double the size of their sampling to encompass all sides of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.

A bobcat feeds at a kill made by a mountain lion in Washington state.

In partnership with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, Panthera is currently investigating puma-bobcat competition and coexistence on the Olympic Peninsula, as well as their economic benefits to people, including controlling rodents that affect timber production. John Livaitis at the University of New Hampshire and Clay Nielsen at the Southern Illinois University are among the veteran bobcat ecology researchers; Seth Riley and Laurel Serieys are among those contributing studies on the impacts of habitat fragmentation, rat poisons and disease on California’s bobcats.

The latest member of Panthera’s Global Alliance for Wild Cats — Jon Ayers — has just pledged $20 million over 10 years to wild cat conservation, with a focus on smaller cats. This represents the largest-ever commitment to small cat conservation in the world.

What else to we need to understand to protect these species?

Occasionally news reports surface of bobcat attacks on people, including a recent incident in North Carolina. As I explain here, such encounters are very much out of the ordinary and involve unique circumstances. Bobcats are not to be feared but instead admired for their beauty and critical contribution to maintaining healthy ecosystems benefiting our survival.

My favorite experience:

I once witnessed a bobcat kill a goose. The bobcat was so small and the goose so large that it had to walk slowly, straddling the bird between its legs. The bobcat was so consumed with its task of retreating into nearby woods that I was able to accompany it on this journey. We walked together perhaps five long minutes, the carcass dragging a trail through the duff, before the bobcat seemed to suddenly become aware of my presence. He dropped the bird, stared at me in shock for a moment, and then bounded away without a backward glance.

I assume he returned, though: When I checked on the site an hour later, the goose was gone.

Key research:

- Kitchener, A. C. et al. (2017). A revised taxonomy of the Felidae: The final report of the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group. Cat News 11: 38–40.
- Fedriani, J. M.; Fuller, T. K.; Sauvajot R. M. & York, E. C. (2000). “Competition and intraguild predation among three sympatric carnivores”. Oecologia. 125 (2): 258–270.
- Serieys LEK, MS Rogan, SS Matsushima, CC Wilmers. 2021. Road-crossings, vegetative cover, land use and poisons interact to influence corridor effectiveness. Biological Conservation, 253:
- Serieys LEK, Lea AJ, Epeldegui M, Armenta TC, Moriarty J, VandeWoude S, Carver S, Foley J, Wayne RK, Riley SPD, & Uittenbogaart CH (2018). Urbanization and anticoagulant poisons promote immune dysfunction in bobcats. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 285(1871), 20172533.

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

Wastewater exposes plants and wildlife to hundreds of chemical compounds. Researchers are learning about potential side effects and solutions.

Fish hooked on meth? It’s a catchy headline that made the rounds a few weeks ago, but it represents a serious and growing problem. Our rivers and streams have become a soup of hundreds of drugs — mostly pharmaceuticals — that come from the treated water released from wastewater facilities.

Conventional wastewater treatment can remove some, but not all, of the many chemical compounds we excrete from our bodies — or those we improperly dispose of — says Diana Aga, director of the RENEW (Research and Education in Energy, Environment and Water) Institute at the University at Buffalo.

One of the worst offenders, she says, are antidepressants, which are a real downer for wildlife health.

“Because [these chemicals] are persistent, they also tend to accumulate in fish,” she says. A study she co-authored in 2017 examined fish from the Niagara River and found the highest bioaccumulation of antidepressants occurred in the fishes’ brains, followed by their livers, muscles and gonads.

It’s not just fish at risk, either. Other aquatic species face the same contaminants, and new research shows it can influence their behavior. Spinycheek crayfish, for example, became bolder after being exposed to the common antidepressant citalopram. Bold isn’t a great trait for an animal low on the food chain.

That wasn’t the only side effect. “The accumulation of pharmaceuticals in aquatic invertebrates poses a range of potential impacts to the invertebrates themselves and their predators, including altered growth, reproduction and behavior,” the researchers wrote. Crayfish and other invertebrates play important roles in their ecosystems, so anything affecting them can cascade throughout a habitat.

Plants, too, can take up these chemicals. A study from False Bay, in Cape Town, South Africa found the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac in sea lettuce, an edible seaweed. The researchers also found traces of the drug, although in lower quantities, in marine invertebrates including starfish, mussels and sea urchins.

Learning Curve

Despites these studies, and another two decades of research that has identified more than 600 pharmaceutical residues in rivers and streams, there’s still a lot we don’t know about how the compounds affect biodiversity, says Aga. Part of the problem is that many studies have been done in the lab where animals are usually exposed to a single drug.

Outside the lab, there are a lot more variables.

“A lot of these pharmaceuticals may have either synergistic or additive or maybe even antagonistic effects when combined,” she says. The same thing can happen in humans taking multiple prescribed or over-the-counter medications, but the scope of drugs in the wild complicates the problem. “It’s very difficult to predict what happens in the wild when they’re exposed to hundreds of these pharmaceutical residues at once.”

There’s another obstacle. “A lot of times people only act when they think something is toxic or carcinogenic,” she says. That’s measured by tracking mortality or tumors. There’s less focus on how the compounds could affect animal behavior, which is more subtle, but also important.

“These are things that might affect biodiversity in the wild,” she says. “A population might decline because there’s less mating. Or if they don’t recognize predators, they more easily become prey.”

Water pipe over rocks and trees — Water is discharged from a treatment plant into the environment. Photo: MPCA, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Potential Fixes

We might not know all there is to know how drugs in our surface waters affect plants and animals yet, but we do know how to tackle the problem.

“In our study from 2020 we found that advanced treatment systems, like ozonation, can remove a lot of these pharmaceuticals,” she explains. Since using ozone to disinfect water can also lead to the formation of potentially harmful by-products, Aga says it’s best to use another method — granular activated carbon — or both in combination.

“Together they could completely remove these pharmaceuticals,” she says.

Granular activated carbon systems for wastewater treatment are like large Brita filters commonly used for purifying water at home. Both technologies, though, will bump up the cost of treatment. For smaller water systems that lack economies of scale, that can be cost-prohibitive.

But it might not be long before such treatment systems become the norm anyway.

Other emerging contaminants in water like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) also pose threats to human health and potentially wildlife. As we learn more about these so-called “forever chemicals,” we may see regulations to curb their use and to treat contaminated water.

“There have been a lot of discussions from the EPA and some of the regulatory agencies that might require regulation of those PFAS, which would be a good driving force to update wastewater treatment systems,” says Aga.

Climate change could also help push along better wastewater-treatment systems, she says, especially in areas with declining freshwater resources and as the need develops in some places to reuse wastewater for drinking, irrigation or other uses.

Those changes could benefit wildlife by removing more chemical compounds and other contaminants before treated water is discharged back into the environment.

While that would be good news, it’s already long overdue.

“There have been discussions about pharmaceuticals in water for a long time, but the response has been slow,” says Aga. “When I started looking at this awhile back, I’d hear people say that pharmaceuticals can’t be toxic or that bad because we take them. But we need to broaden our minds — it’s not just the people we should be thinking about, we should think about biodiversity.”

The Extinction Crisis in Watercolor and Oils: Using Art to Save Plants

“Weird Plants” author Chris Thorogood, a botanist and an artist, calls on us to see the marvels of plant life and the urgency of saving it.

Chris Thorogood is surrounded by plants — both around his office and on his drawing table.

As an evolutionary botanist, he serves as head of science and public engagement for Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum in the United Kingdom.

But when he’s not researching the genetics or taxonomy of plants around the world, he’s often drawing them. His stunning illustrations have appeared in scientific journals, magazines and books like 2018’s Weird Plants and 2020’s The Botany of Gin (the latter coauthored with Simon Hiscock).

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chris Thorogood (@illustratingbotanist)

We connected with Thorogood by video to talk about the fine line between science and art and how both serve to aid in conservation.

What’s your evolutionary story? Where did the science and the art combine for you?

Well, I think they go very well together. Often we can put subject areas into boxes. In school we think of everything as compartmentalized, whether, you know, it’s math or science or art, and whether you’re good at this or not so good at this one, or which one you like. And one of the things I love about my career is that all of those boxes disappear and everything starts to overlap.

Wow. That’s great.

It’s quite liberating. I work quite closely with physicists today in solving problems from an evolutionary point of view. And then art and science, they also cross boundaries as well, in more ways than one.

I teach undergrads biology here, and we get them to draw things. Some of them don’t like it, because “I hate drawing” or whatever, but it’s a means of examining something really closely. And sometimes it’s only when you take the time to draw and capture visually what it is you’re looking at that you really make sense of it. And so I think the boundaries between those two disciplines dissolve somehow.

Coming back to your question — how did that happen? — I was always fascinated by the living things that existed around me. And I also had an innate, sort of burning desire to capture what I saw on paper.

Just unearthed some drawings I did for Carnivorous Plant Society newsletters in the ’90s.
I guess that geeky kid who loved science and scribbling was destined to become a botanist? 🤷🏻‍♂️
Do what you love; love what you do 💚 pic.twitter.com/rbLfz8ayY7

— Chris Thorogood (@thorogoodchris1) April 4, 2021

A lot of the artists I’ve interviewed work in a particular medium. And I’ve seen that you’ve done pen and ink. You’ve done pencil, oil, watercolor. You’re doing the science, you’re teaching. I saw a video of you playing the piano. How on earth do you do it all?

Well, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I do a tiny little bit of everything, and I don’t spend enough time on any one thing. But you know, sometimes we can put ourselves in those boxes that I mentioned earlier. People say, “Oh, I only do watercolor” — but how do you know? Because if you’re good at those, you’re probably good at using the other things you just haven’t tried.

I’m a big advocate for just, you know, getting stuck in.

Every watercolour artist knows yellow is the hardest colour to match. Luckily I managed to find a late-flowering flag iris, which certainly helped things along this evening! pic.twitter.com/EImxnA2tr0

— Chris Thorogood (@thorogoodchris1) July 5, 2021

So, watercolor is the traditional medium for botanical illustration, which I do like, but it’s not a forgiving medium. With oil paints, I think they’re not always as precise and accurate, but they can capture the life of something, and you can get carried away and you can put your soul into it in a way that you can’t with watercolors. If I’m feeling in a mood where I want to be precise and particular and really concentrate and be focused, then watercolors are fine, but if I want to express what I’m doing more, I’d say oil paints are better.

Yeah, you can have those happy accidents with oil, but the watercolor must really play into, like you said, the scientific studying of an element of a plant. Which do use first, the scientific eye or the artist eye?

I think the scientific one, and I think it helps guide me in terms of the art. And as I say, I think these things overlap, but sometimes it can be a hindrance, particularly when I’m working with watercolor. I can’t sometimes see past an imperfection or inaccuracy, and sometimes it can be quite a difficult process for something that’s supposed to be very relaxing and enjoyable.

I’ve sometimes embarked on a very detailed watercolor and then fallen out of love with it. And it’s only if I come back to it six months later, it’s like, “Oh, that’s all right.” Maybe that’s the scientist in me, because we like everything to be sort of formulaic and I want it to be right and precise and sometimes art doesn’t work in that way.

How to paint a plant in 9 days:
1. Outline a vein with a rigger brush (size 0);
2. Blur it on one side with a round-tip (size 6);
3. Repeat 13,000 times. pic.twitter.com/Kl16KBhneK

— Chris Thorogood (@thorogoodchris1) March 28, 2021

Has being an artist improved your science?

Oh, I like that question… Yes, it has, because you’re always looking and being inquisitive and examining. I mean, if you think about art in terms of illustration or drawing or capturing something, and if you strip it back to basics, you have to look very closely at what it is. And you’re questioning it. Maybe not cognizantly, but you’re permanently asking questions and then you capture it on paper. And I think having that artistic side to sort of examine, scrutinize, make sense of, and seek to understand — that’s what a scientist does, asks questions and tries to find the answers to them.

The type illustration I produced of the new species of fairy lantern (Thismia sitimeriamiae) we’ve just described. Shout out for my collaborator Siti-Munirah, and to Dome Nikong for discovering this special plant deep in the Malaysian rainforest 🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/DsyayCSo3l

— Chris Thorogood (@thorogoodchris1) June 30, 2021

Right. And you’ve also got another unique role in that you’re a science communicator. So these things must all bleed together.

They do seem to do that, but I didn’t necessarily plan it in that way.

I’m very passionate about the importance of plants. I think they’re sometimes neglected, particularly when it comes to messages about conservation and the importance of biodiversity. People are excited by animals. They’re engaged and intrigued by animals, and often not so much with plants. You talk to people and that know, plants are beautiful or they’re great in my garden. But they see them as a backdrop for animals to exist against.

I like to find ways to gently challenge that notion and to help people to see plants in a different way so that we might get better at valuing them, understanding them, and then hopefully protecting them and conserving them. So I think that communication isn’t necessarily something that I ever planned to do, but I think like all things should come first from your sort of your compass and your passion. And I suppose that’s where it does for me.

Your book Weird Plants must tie into that.

Yeah. It’s funny because these “weird plants” — I sometimes feel like they almost sort of wrote themselves in a weird way. I didn’t set out to do it in that way, but I started a collection of paintings on these particularly strange plants. And then they suddenly made sense to me to fall into these groups — i.e., the “killers” and the “vampires” — and they started to take on almost characters and roles. And it was easy to tell stories about these plants, all the while explaining the science.

Because that’s what it’s about. It’s science and it’s obviously illustrating, it’s an artistic endeavor, but it sort of followed its own path. It was very much a journey rather than a preconceived idea that I then went out and did.

How do you expect the average person interacts with one of your pieces?

One of the things I hope it might do is to show plants in a way that maybe they haven’t seen necessarily before. I like to slightly shock that norm and to present a plant in a different way, I suppose.

Tell me about that shock. What are you trying to convey artistically or emotionally, or whatever the case may be?

I do want my artwork to be accurate, and I like to show it in its habitat. So when I did the collection for Weird Plants, I wanted to show them as they are. I like painting them to get the character of them. I like the dead bits, the blemishes on the plants, all of that. And I think the reader — if you will, the audience, the interpreter of your painting — I think you help them and do them a favor by doing that, because you help guide them into the picture and help them believe that that what they’re seeing is real. And that’s harder if you strive to make everything perfect, which is not how it is in nature. It’s chaotic.

I did a painting of a pitcher plant called Nepenthes extincta — which of course, the name says it all. What I set out to do was to bring something back to life that now sadly exists only as a squashed type specimen. And the mountain that it grew on in Mindanao, in the Philippines, has been razed to the ground, because it’s a nickel mine. It’s just gone forever. And I don’t wish to present that as token of doom or to depress anyone or to upset them. But I do think it’s important that people appreciate that there are lots of marvelous things still to discover and to understand, and in order to do that we need to protect them and conserve them.

Sadly my painting based on a dried specimen is as close as we will ever get to Nepenthes extincta, believed lost forever to nickel mining pic.twitter.com/tpJ59IsHXd

— Chris Thorogood (@thorogoodchris1) December 14, 2016

What do you think of the state of the art of scientific illustration? Is this still a growing vibrant field?

Yeah, I think it is. It’s difficult to get a sense of how many people are doing it, but on Instagram there’s quite a thriving community of botanical artists, and also some different age groups as well. So, so I have a lot of optimism there.

What’s your biggest challenge — as an artist, a botanist or both?

My biggest challenge is our biggest challenge, and that is to engage people to appreciate the importance of plant life. I mean, it’s not just plants, of course. It’s all life and ecosystems. But plant life specifically, because it doesn’t have as much traction as animals.

If you go out and ask someone, on my street or yours, what does conservation mean? You can have a conversation about protecting living things. And then you say, “well, what living things?” And they’ll tell you, “a tiger, or a rhinoceros.” They may even say “shark,” but they will not mention a plant. And why would they? Those messages about the importance of plants aren’t loud enough.

A watercolour I’ve been working on today featuring greater broomrape (Orobanche rapum-genistae). This jewel of a plant was once a common feature of the British countryside but it suffered a drastic decline in the last century. pic.twitter.com/9Bvro8FT7v

— Chris Thorogood (@thorogoodchris1) May 31, 2021

Sometimes I sit on these meetings, in a conservation remit, and you hear about certain plant species in Africa that it’s a fait accompli, we know that a certain species will become extinct by next year and there is nothing we can do about. And I sometimes wonder if that would be the case if it were animals.

So, whilst it’s not necessarily my job to sort of lobby and to bring about change in that way, I think what I am perhaps able to do is to bring about more awareness and appreciation for the importance of pants. And if I can do that in just a small way, and particularly with a younger cohort and a new generation, then I suppose I’ve done my job.

Vanishing: The Bleaching in My Backyard

A storm in Texas connects with the plight of corals around the world.

What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.

In February, winter storm Uri encased the Texas trees in thick sleeves of ice. Overhead frozen leaves jangled like chimes in the wind. When the weight got to be too much, the fibrous cedars splintered. The oaks simply dropped limbs like too-heavy barbells. Closer to the ground, agave and sago palms congealed beneath unfamiliar layers of snow and ice.

In Austin, where I live, winter dips below freezing once every 10 years. This time the temperature plunged not just below freezing but into the single digits. And there it sat, not just overnight or two, but for five long days.

When it warmed, finally, spoonfuls of ice rained down, one from each cupped leaf. Later, the ice-burnt leaves fell too. Tattered rags of grasses and cacti, bedraggled palm fronds and battered bamboos were all that remained on the ground. Everything was shades of beige; nature’s color faded with the snow melt.

Bleached in the backyard. Photo: Juli Berwald

As a science writer who’d been working on a book about coral for the two years before that winter, I felt the shift viscerally. This must be what it feels like when coral reefs bleach, I thought.

Because of Covid travel restrictions, I haven’t experienced a mass coral bleaching myself. Almost exactly a year before Uri, I’d had to cancel a research trip to the Great Barrier Reef just as a major heat wave approached. On Twitter, I followed Terry Hughes, an Australian coral scientist who performs aerial surveys of the reef. He posted videos, halos of white reefs surrounding low-lying islands, writing: “It’s been a shitty, exhausting day on the #GreatBarrierReef. I feel like an art lover wandering through the Louvre…as it burns to the ground.”

In the weeks after Uri, the rosemary that I’d nurtured since my teenage daughter was born turned brittle. The tangerine tree I’d planted as a memorial to my grandmother, which had just yielded its first crop, also died. The jasmine became sharpened straw that lashed my arms as I ripped it out.

When underwater photographer Richard Vevers dove on a bleached reef, he said, “I can’t even tell you how bad I smelt after the dive — the smell of millions of rotting animals.” Around my house in Uri’s aftermath, the agave and the prickly pears melted, their juices flowing down the streets in brownish streaks. The air filled with the smell of their fermentation and rot.

Acoustic scientist Tim Gordon spoke of the sound of a bleached reef. “When the coral dies, the fish and shrimp that make noise are gone. They are like the birds in the forest without the trees.” He measured a 75% decrease in sound on the Great Barrier Reef following a bleaching.

I don’t know where the doves that coo and the mockingbirds that chatter went, but I didn’t hear their calls after Uri. Flocks of red-breasted robins, birds I’d rarely seen, plucked the husks of just frozen insects. The frequent reverberations of woodpeckers sounded of easy purchase in sickened wood.

The poles have warmed almost four times faster than the rest of our planet, making its temperature difference less different than my temperate home. As a result, the jet stream is more likely to jump its bank and make an excursion. This year it meandered all the way to Texas, bringing Uri’s frigid air with it.

Coral bleaching occurs because of a temperature excursion too. Scientists studying climate change calculate the seas have absorbed heat equivalent to three nuclear bombs a second for the past 25 years. Already ocean temperatures have risen by almost 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Ocean heat waves have doubled with frequency, become more intense, and more extensive since 1982. Pile a heat wave on top of a warmer ocean, and you reach the limit where corals bleach. Recovery isn’t certain.

Since the 1980s, coral mass bleachings have increased in frequency from once every 25 to 30 years to once every six years. A multi-year mass bleaching from 2015 to 2017 affected 75% of the planet’s coral. The one I missed in 2020 was the Great Barrier Reef’s most widespread yet, blanketing all the regions of its 1,400-mile-long extent. Of all the animals in the sea, according to a recent report, coral is the species group most likely to go extinct.

And yet all the people I spoke to about what it’s like to dive on a bleached reef say this: It’s painfully grim, but never complete. Amid the skeletal fields, a few coral survive, always.

Likewise, in my yard, the destruction wasn’t complete. After cutting back its browned leaves, the iris sprung from the browned ground and unfurled its yellow bloom. Amid the dead rosebushes, one variety survived, its fuchsia inflorescence a beacon of hope. Green stripes of life emerged from the base of the bamboo. When the young shoots unfurled, they stole my attention. My mind very quickly began to erase the losses. I focused on the blooming and recovery. In nature’s resilience, we soothe ourselves with a balm of optimism.

Bamboo — Sprouts of life. Photo: Juli Berwald

The struggle for life on the reef is always intractable. Submerged, we’re buffered by gear, our senses muted by technology. Our time underwater is always short. Masked by the waves, distracted by recovery, it’s impossible to know what we’re losing on the reef the way we know our own backyard.

For both, the losses fade much too easily away. But only if we let them.

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