Map the Commons, Protect the Planet

Helping Indigenous peoples to protect forests and other shared resources will keep us all safer from climate change and other threats.

Saudamini Mohakud, the 65-year-old elder of her village, proudly calls herself the daughter and bride of the Eastern Ghats, the range of mountains that borders the eastern Indian state of Odisha. The mountains’ undulating wooded hills cradle her native village, Punasia, where she was born and wed. Saudamini says she could not have been happier growing up in its lap of lush greenery, which included about 50 acres of the community forests near her village.

“The forests were then a treasure trove of nature’s bounties, providing us with fruits, vegetables, tubers, medicines, and numerous other resources that sustained our households,” says Saudamini, now a grandmother to four children. “Our sacred grove, dedicated to our village deities, also flourished within these community forests.” The village cattle, too, grazed at the edge of the forest and community pastures.

But in the 1980s the forests began to disappear. The hills turned bare. According to villagers, loggers rampantly smuggled timber. Summers became hotter; dusty winds from the nearby hills hit the village. Rainfall became scarce and erratic. Agriculture, their primary means of livelihood, became uncertain. Depleted forest resources also hit their secondary source of income: collecting seeds, mushrooms, flowers, and other wild plants.

By the 1990s Punasia’s economy was as bare as the nearby hills. “This resulted in migration of men and youths from our village to find work outside,” rues Saudamini.

But over the past two decades, Punasia village has turned that around. A dedicated band of women led by Saudamini have nurtured nearly 50 acres of degraded forest patches and restored them to their former glory.

The formerly depleted forests have regrown with native trees such as sal, siali, mahua, tamarind, mango, and bamboo. Natural water bodies have also been revived with regular rainfall and rising water tables.

“It was hard work” that relied upon their traditional knowledge, recalls Mami Mohakud, now 35 and a member of Saudamini’s team. “We reared the reappearing saplings in the forests, created fences around them, and saved them from grazing cattle.”

Saudamini’s 20-year-old granddaughter, Nirupama, says these protected and restored community commons are an intrinsic part of Punasia’s existence, spiritual, cultural, and ecological heritage, as they are for other Indigenous communities. “They are not just forests or grazing land for us, but deeply connected with our feelings, sustenance, and day-to-day life,” she says.

Community commons also provide many ecosystem services that regulate the local climate, a process seen around the world, according to Sharat Kumar Palita, a professor in the department of biodiversity and conservation of natural resources at Central University of Odisha, Koraput.

“Different kinds of commons — including forest patches, water bodies, and grazing lands — play their respective roles in maintaining favorable microclimatic conditions,” says Palita.

Patches of community forests, he says, reduce heat and local temperature, bring rainfall, and help recharge the water table.

Pastures and grazing lands are also ecosystems on their own, explains Palita. The vegetation provides habitats for diverse pollinating insects such as grasshoppers, butterflies, and bees, and birds such as sparrows. The grass cover, meanwhile, checks rainwater runoff, binds the soil, and, most importantly, provides fodder to the cattle. “All these [benefits] enable the communities to develop a sustainable bond with natural resources,” he says.

Community commons also play an important planetary role by sequestering carbon, a necessary process in a world threatened by climate change. According to FAO’s Global Forest Assessment Report (2020), an average hectare of living forest biomass sequesters 72.6 metric tons of carbon.

But protecting the commons well enough to provide these benefits remains a challenge.

India’s Endangered Commons

Research shows that community commons, which constitute nearly a quarter of the Earth’s land, sustain the livelihood and fulfill the cultural and spiritual needs of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In India common lands constitute nearly 38% of the country’s landmass, spanning 308 million acres that provide critical subsistence and livelihoods for more than 350 million rural people.

Despite their significance, India’s commons have seen a 31-55% decline during the past few decades, in part due to a failure to acknowledge Indigenous practices and skills.

“Though the Indigenous communities have been historically managing and governing the commons for centuries, their time-tested systems are yet to be acknowledged or officially recognized in India,” says Swapnasri Sarangi, the head of gender, diversity, and inclusion at the Foundation for Ecological Security, a pan-Indian nonprofit that has been working with Indigenous communities on conservation and protection of commons and other issues since 2001.

Without any well-defined policy, Sarangi says community common lands are vulnerable to human encroachments and diversion for economic development, such as power projects, roads, industries, constructions, and other threats. The Indigenous communities, who suddenly feel thrown out of their age-old native resources, become impoverished and seldom enjoy the benefits of the “new age” developments. “The conservation and management of community commons is thus a global challenge today,” she says.

But a solution has emerged, and it’s helping villages like Punasia.

Community Mapping

In 2019 the Foundation for Ecological Security developed a mobile application it calls the Common Land Mapping tool, which can identify and demarcate community commons land and shared resources using GPS data. The application allows users to create images and maps of the common land and shared resources, check for encroachment on their territories, and develop collective economic opportunities.

The foundation has trained more than 8,000 community members across Odisha, 30% of whom are women. To date users have mapped an area of 450 square miles (11,7285 hectares). The organization says this work could potentially benefit up to 20,000 villages and millions of people in the state.

In Punasia village, for instance, the mapping tool has helped users to scientifically establish the village’s boundaries so they can protect the forests against unauthorized access. “Today, with sticks in hand, every household in the village regularly patrols and protects our community forest in turns,” says Mami Mohakud. Loggers pose less of a threat now, but the sticks serve as a symbolic gesture that they women are actively monitoring the forests.

Women on a forest path, sticks and mobile phones in hand
Women use the mobile-based Community Land Mapping tool to demarcate the boundaries of their community forest patches and guard them against unauthorized forest resource collections and tree felling from nearby villages. Photo by Biju Tudu

The protection has boosted Punasia’s ongoing efforts to restore its forests. Today the villagers are particularly excited to watch herds of migrating elephants pass through the forest patch from the nearby Dalma sanctuary. “Sometimes, they even stay in the forest for a day or two, until the forest department drives them to the nearby Simlipal forests,” says 15-year-old Namita from the village.

The revival of the community worship site within the forest makes her particularly happy. “The forest deity is our mother and ultimate savior of the jungles,” she says. “We do not allow anyone to pluck a single leaf from her sacred site.”

Protecting the Commons, Restoring Culture

“Integrating commons with local culture and traditions is the best way to conserve them,” says Sanjukta Basa, chairperson of Sangram, a state-based nonprofit that has worked with Indigenous communities to conserve forests and wildlife since 1995.

According to Basa, the organization has so far worked in 450 villages in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, reviving at least 350 acres of degraded worship sites. Today the dense growth of these sacred patches of forest (an average of 0.5-1 acre each) welcomes animals such as barking deer, sloth bears, jackals, and wild boars. These commons are also places for celebration, where the local communities dance and sing to the rhythm of their traditional drums.

A common place of worship in a tribal village surrounded by trees and forests. Photo: Moushumi Basu

Other communities have taken on their own restoration efforts. In the Koraput district, 30-35 families in the village of Nuaguda have revived about 10 acres of forest cover with various commercial varieties of native plants. They have also collectively restored natural water bodies in their village. The largest of them, with an area of 5 acres, is used by the community to cultivate native fish species such as catla, rohu, prawn, and puntius, among others.

Four other water bodies, each 1.5-2 acres, are used for rainwater harvesting. “During the dry season, we drain out the water from these smaller ponds to cultivate vegetables,” says Kamala Mathapadia, who heads a women-led self-help group in the village that determines the community marketing of fish and vegetables. “We ensure the earnings are distributed equitably among the community members,” she adds.

The weaving community from Kotpad village takes pride in rejuvenating their traditional art of preparing vegetable dyes from plants in their community forests. According to conventional weaver Kunti Mohont, their 20 acres of community forests have plants such as tesu, catechu, annatto, Indian mulberry, shikakai, and harada (chebulic myrobalan). “We use vegetable colors derived from the flowers, roots, barks, or fruits of these plants for long-lasting effects on the fabrics we weave,” she says.

These efforts protect the local ecology while providing value to local communities. According to field research conducted by the Centre for Youth and Social Development, the restoration of commons by the local communities has augmented the livelihood of the village households by at least 20-25% during the past 8-10 years. The organization has worked with Indigenous communities in the state since 1982, empowering them through sustainable livelihoods and conservation of community forests and other commons. According to their records, the effort has so far covered about 21,300 acres (8,617 hectares) in 1,183 villages.

“The correlation between the livelihood of the local communities and the commons is best understood through the positive impacts the latter has on the region’s microclimate,” explains Ashish Jalli, senior project manager at the Centre, who was part of the field research team.

He adds that it has resulted in adequate and timely rains, restored soil fertility, erosion checks, and other accompanying factors that have secured agriculture as the primary source of livelihood for the local communities. In addition, the sale of natural resources such as vegetable dyes, leaves for making containers or plates, wild grass, honey, incense materials, and medicines in local markets are substantially contributing to their secondary sources of income.

The efforts may help sustain the villages in another critical manner, by removing the incentive to leave home and work elsewhere.

“It is rewarding for me to see how the youths are choosing to stay back and work in their native village, thus strengthening the social fabric of their community,” says Jalli.

With these successes already boosting many local commons, efforts to protect the similar territories will continue to expand. Within the next three years, the Foundation for Ecological Security says it plans to extend its outreach to other states in India, including Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra. It also expects to expand partnerships with nonprofits and government agencies to enhance the capacities of local communities to identify and strengthen the governance of commons in the country.

The ongoing work will depend on combining traditional knowledge with new technology and high-quality, open source, accessible information. “Strengthening the community knowledge on commons — and adding scientific data — empowers and instills confidence within Indigenous communities,” says Sarangi. “When their skills and knowledge are acknowledged, their capabilities and confidence are also enhanced.”

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Previously in The Revelator:

How an Indigenous Scientist Studies Global Change

Protect This Place: The Andean Forests of Northeast Peru

Local communities strive to protect local forests and headwaters that include some of the Amazon River’s most important water sources.

The Place: Protect This Place

The communal reserves of the Pampa del Burro and Copallin Private Conservation Areas, and the Jardines Ángel del Sol Conservation Concession, are nestled in the forested Andean foothills of northeastern Peru. Their geographic splendor encompasses waterfalls, orchids, hummingbirds, amphibians, and other rare and endemic wildlife. Local communities are striving to conserve these areas to protect local forests and headwaters that include water sources of the world’s largest river, the Amazon.

Why it matters:

The formerly vast Andean forests of northern Peru have drastically declined in area due to rapidly increasing agriculture and livestock grazing that have reached unsustainable levels. These montane forests are known for their high diversity of wildlife and plant species, many of which are only found there. We still have a lot to learn about the amazing wildlife in this region. In just the past five years, many species have been newly described by science: at least 26 amphibians and reptiles, six orchids, and even a small wildcat (the clouded tiger cat, Leopardus pardinoides).

Local communities support the legal designation of their lands to prioritize conservation of Andean forests. When requesting official designation of their lands as a conservation area, a community must follow legal guidelines in a participatory process to develop a master plan for management of the community conservation area. Designation of the conservation area, with a developed master plan, makes them havens for the protection of headwaters and biodiversity, safeguarding the communities’ future well-being.

Each of these conservation areas is managed by a committee of community members. These residents focus on balancing sustainable agriculture, such as of coffee and cacao, with these forests’ water storage, potential for ecotourism, and intrinsic beauty and worth.

Since 2001 communities across Peru have been formalizing private and communal protected areas to prevent forest and habitat loss. The communities of Copallín, La Perla del Imaza, and Libano each have their own conservation area. Although they’re not close together, their protected areas face the same regional threats.

A conservation area of the Andean forest
A conservation area of the Andean forest. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero

The threat:

These montane hills have experienced an expansion of logging, legal mining, cattle grazing, and roads that facilitate further cattle grazing. In addition, lands in remote areas with little governmental presence here, and elsewhere in Peru, are sometimes illegally acquired by land speculators.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, people migrated to rural areas, expanding anthropogenic pressure and bringing beliefs — such as that burning fields will increase soil productivity or that smoke during the dry season seeds rain clouds — that increase the risk of forest fires.

To prevent those threats, local communities conduct patrols around their protected areas through the “minka” or “faena,” an Indigenous cultural practice of collaborative work among families for a common benefit. These activities are often organized through local civil structures called the Rondas Campesinas.

Local families want to do more for conservation, but their resources are limited. Without technical support, it is difficult for them to implement the master plans for their conservation areas, which include their vision, goals, and action items for the area. One goal of those master plans is to produce information about local biodiversity, and to promote biodiversity conservation in these important but vulnerable ecosystems.

My place in this place:

I realized during my first visit that this journey was akin to sailing toward new horizons. My team and I travelled 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the south of Peru, where we were based, to the north of the country. This involved long hours on the road while adapting to more tropical weather. Along the way new views of vast transformed landscapes, primarily dominated by rice fields, and extensive livestock pastures were common. It was shocking to observe the disappearance of the forest. However, as we moved deeper into the countryside, we enjoyed long hours of green mountain views.

In the communities families were eager to share stories of their lives and their motivations to create protected lands. In the community of Libano, the Fernandez family with Srs Eugenio, Armandina, and Arcadio created the Jardines Angel del Sol Conservation Concession because the protection of headwaters as a water resource is important for their future. In the community of La Perla del Imaza, the President Edilberto and Sr Benjamin shared with us the latest news of a newly discovered endemic orchid species, Epidendrum edquenii sp, and the newly named endemic monkey frog (Callimedusa duellmani). In the Pampa del Burro Private Conservation Area, Sr Llantoma from Copallin has been passionate since his youth about exploring the wild forest, watching primates like critically endangered yellow-tailed woolly monkeys (Lagothrix flavicauda) and other wildlife. All of them recognize the value of nature and their ecosystems and want to protect these lands. Highly motivated from our conversations, we explored the forest, following incredible animal trails, with a lot of evidence of Andean bears — clear evidence of the remarkable good health of these ecosystems.

In subsequent presentations at community meetings and school groups, we witnessed the emotional response to camera trap photographs of mammals that many local adults and children had never seen before.

As a biologist and conservationist, I’ve felt deeply rewarded by people who embrace a commitment to conservation.

A conservation area of the Andean forest.
A conservation area of the Andean forest. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero.

Who’s protecting it now:

The admirable work protecting these lands is managed by the committee of residents from each community, with the collaborative support of the NGO Neotropical Primate Conservation (NPC):

What this place needs:

To demonstrate the conservation importance of these communities’ lands, and illustrate the effectiveness of management of the reserves, we need to produce scientific information on local wildlife diversity to validate the master plan for each area.

Communities that believe in conservation need conservation biologists’ support. The Andean forest program of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and SDZWA-Peru has carried out conservation research in collaboration with national and local protected areas, NGOs, and private landowners, in other Peruvian landscapes since 2010, most recently in the Manu Biosphere Reserve of SE Peru. We’ve recently started collaborative research with NPC and the communities it supports in NE Peru. This expanded collaboration allows us to enhance our understanding of Andean bears and other wildlife in this region, in comparison to the results we’re obtaining elsewhere.

Because of its cultural and biological significance, and its conservation needs, research on the Andean bear can motivate broader interest in conservation and support conservation of less well-known species.

An Andean community working to protect the area.
An Andean community working to protect the area. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero.

Lessons from the fight:

The most important lesson for me has been that cooperative work between residents, students, and scientists can have a healing impact on the resilience of these lands.

Learn more:

Neotropical Primate Conservation: www.neoprimate.org

San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance: www.sdzwa.org

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Share your stories: 

Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight. 

 

Bluelining: Insurance Companies Leave Climate-Vulnerable Communities Without Protection

Insurers are pulling out of areas prone to climate risk — even as they continue to cover the fossil-fuel companies contributing to that risk.

In an era of climate disasters, Americans in vulnerable regions will need to rely more than ever on their home insurance. But as floods, wildfires, and severe storms become more common, a troubling practice known as “bluelining” threatens to leave many communities unable to afford insurance — or obtain it at any price.

Bluelining is an insidious practice with similarities to redlining — the notorious government-sanctioned practice of financial institutions denying mortgages and credit to Black and brown communities, which were often marked by red lines on map.

These days, financial institutions are now drawing “blue lines” around many of these same communities, restricting services like insurance based on environmental risks. Even worse, many of those same institutions are bankrolling those risks by funding and insuring the fossil fuel industry.

Originally, bluelining referred to blue-water flood risks, but it now includes other climate-related disasters like wildfires, hurricanes and severe thunderstorms, all of which are driving private-sector decisions. (Severe thunderstorms, in fact, were responsible for about 61% of insured natural catastrophe losses in 2023.)

In the case of property insurance, we’re already seeing insurers pull out of entire states like California and Florida. The financial impacts of these decisions are considerable for everyone they affect — and often fall hardest on those in low-income and historically disadvantaged communities.

Flooding in New Orleans in 2012. Photo: U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Bill Huntington (public domain)

A Redfin study from 2021 illustrated that areas previously affected by redlining are now also those prone to flooding and higher temperatures, a problem compounded by poor infrastructure that fails to mitigate these risks. This overlap is not a coincidence but a further consequence of systemic discrimination and disinvestment.

This financial problem exists no matter where you live. In 2024, the national average home insurance cost rose about 23% above the cost of similar coverage last year. Homeowners across more and more states are left grappling with soaring premiums or no insurance options at all. And the lack of federal oversight means there is little uniformity or coordination in addressing these retreats.

This situation will demand a radical rethink of how we approach investing in our communities based on climate risks. For one thing, financial institutions must pivot from funding fossil fuel expansion to investing in renewable energy, natural climate solutions, and climate resilience, including infrastructure upgrades.

 

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What about communities in especially vulnerable areas?

One strategy is community-driven relocation and managed retreat. By relocating communities to low-risk areas, we not only safeguard them against immediate physical dangers but also against ensuing financial hardships. Additionally, preventing development in known high-risk areas can significantly decrease financial instability and economic losses from future disasters.

As part of this strategic shift, financial policies must be realigned. We need regulations that compel financial institutions to manage and mitigate financial risk to the system and to consumers. We also need them to invest in affordable housing development that is energy-efficient, climate-resilient, and located in areas less susceptible to climate change in the mid- to long-term.

Meanwhile, green infrastructure and stricter energy efficiency and other resilience-related building codes can serve as bulwarks against extreme temperatures and weather events.

The challenge of bluelining offers us an opportunity to forge a path towards a more resilient and equitable society. We owe it to the future generations to do more than just adapt to climate change. We also need to confront and overhaul the systems that harm our climate. The communities most exposed to climate change deserve no less.

This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

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Previously in The Revelator:

The Burning/Flooding/Dying Season

 

 

There Is No Border Between Humans and Nature

What can Germany’s long-defunct Iron Curtain tell us about our place on Earth?

During the four decades of the Cold War, one of the world’s most highly militarized borders cut across the landscape of my home country. The 900-mile-long German section of the Iron Curtain, to use Winston Churchill’s metaphor, was a strip of land several hundred feet wide, enclosed by fences and filled with trip wires, dog runs, minefields, vehicle ditches and other obstacles designed to keep East Germans from crossing west.

It was a ghastly thing. Every day border guards had to rake a 20-foot-wide “control strip” of bare soil along the fence so they could see the footsteps of anyone trying to cross. Even outside the border fence (but still on East German soil), they regularly cut trees and shrubs to maintain a clear line of sight to target anyone in case of potential escape. Nearly 500 people lost their lives trying to flee. Others suffered grievous wounds or were imprisoned for committing the crime of Republikflucht — fleeing the republic. Countless families were separated, dreams dashed, professional lives derailed.

A lonely cross, sitting askew, in a field surrounded by overgrown vegetation
A memorial for a border victim. Photo: Kerstin Lange

The Berlin Wall, though less than one-tenth the length of the German-German border, came to symbolize the Iron Curtain and the Cold War division — perhaps never more strikingly than on Nov. 9, 1989, when it gave way to peaceful protesters. I watched the images, open-mouthed, on my TV in upstate New York, where I had emigrated two years earlier. I had never seen my fellow Germans so euphoric. If East Germans could simply walk into West Berlin, I thought, the longer border between the two German states had lost its purpose, too.

On visits over subsequent years, I reveled in discovering eastern Germany, connecting with those other Germans, walking in the footsteps of Bach and Goethe.

I didn’t think much about the border during those initial visits. It was gone, and that was good enough. It wasn’t until 20 years after Reunification that I finally wondered what had become of it — and then learned that it has become a long, skinny, bizarrely shaped nature preserve called the Grünes Band: Green Belt.

Lange’s book about the Grünes Band, Phantom Border, comes out in October 2024.

It’s nothing like the African Green Belt Movement, which focused on planting trees. Rather, the lack of commercial development and intensive agriculture allowed the border strip to serve as a refuge for plant and animal species that had become rare across the rest of the landscape. Bird species like European nightjars and northern lapwings, amphibians like moor frogs, plant species like western marsh orchids, and mammals like European wildcats and lynx.

Nature preserves don’t simply pop up in the landscape; they’re human creations. First, someone needs to notice and document species or habitats worth protecting. People need to do the unglamorous work of negotiating land purchases or trades, navigating legal protection categories, installing interpretive signs, and conducting biological inventories.

But first, someone has to notice.

What They Saw

Aside from the border guards, few people had paid much attention to the border while it stood. Most East Germans were not allowed within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of it. Many of the people who lived in what became the restricted zone were forcibly moved inland.

Though the human toll on the West German side was less drastic, the economic effects of the border were felt there, too. Businesses lost all customers and suppliers to the east. Jobs disappeared, and many residents moved away from what became known as the Zonal Borderlands. Granted, there was a certain degree of “border tourism.” But the West Germans and other foreigners who climbed onto viewing platforms to gaze at the border strip were generally more interested in the surreal grimness of the military installations than in the nearby flora and fauna.

One person who was paying close attention was a teenaged bird lover named Kai Frobel, who could see the border strip from his childhood home in Bavaria, in West Germany. It was the early 1970s — the height of the Cold War. During walks and bike rides, he noticed that he would see certain bird species only in the vicinity of the border strip.

He not only noticed but kept records of his observations, beginning when he was 13.

 

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On his rambles along the border, Kai was particularly taken with whinchats (Rubetra saxicola), small, brownish birds with orange-tan breasts and light eye stripes. From his forays along the borderline — careful not to step past the warning signs saying “Halt! Hier Grenze (Stop! Border here)” — he would often see whinchats perching on bushes, reeds, cabbage thistles, or the black-red-gold East German border markers. Like several other bird species that did well in the border strip, whinchats are ground breeders and need perches to survey their surroundings and see the insects they feed on.

“I learned to ID birds backwards,” Frobel said with a grin when I met him in the Green Belt for a walk recently. He’s now in his early sixties, with a gray-streaked beard. “The normal sequence is that you start with the common species and then expand your knowledge to the less common ones, and eventually you get to see some really rare ones. But growing up here next to the border, I practically stumbled onto rare and threatened species.”

A bearded man holding binoculars in a wooded setting
Kai Frobel. Photo: Kerstin Lange

Against all odds, he also made friends with a young East German birder named Gunter — through letters at first, and eventually through visits when 24-hour visas became available for West Germans.

When Kai was 17, he wrote up his whinchat records for a science contest and won first prize. The year was 1977. Winning was nice, he said, “but the important thing was that this was the first scientific documentation of the high biodiversity in the border strip.”

He followed it up a few years later with a more extensive survey conducted with a volunteer conservation group. “When the Berlin Wall fell and the border opened, we had very good data. We were well prepared to propose that this ribbon of land should be preserved as a feature in the landscape to protect that unusual biodiversity.

“Not that I ever expected that the border would actually open,” Frobel added. “Especially growing up here, seeing it every day — I really thought this monstrous thing was here for eternity.”

By the time the wall fell in 1989, he had gotten a Ph.D. in biogeography and begun to work for BUND, the German affiliate of Friends of the Earth.

As he and Gunter would later discover, their friendship had not escaped the attention of the Stasi, the East German secret police, which amassed hefty files on the two birders for their “subversive activities.” But their bond also helped them build a network of naturalists and conservationists — another critical factor in the story of the Green Belt.

A Movement Grows

The morning after the Berlin Wall fell, Frobel wrote postcards to all 24 contacts in their network, inviting them to a meeting to discuss the future of the border strip. When he arrived at the small restaurant where he had reserved a meeting room, the parking lot was nearly overflowing with Trabants, the basic-but-iconic East German car make. Just by word of mouth — these were the days before email and social media — his invitation had drawn 400 people to attend.

Convinced by the data Frobel presented, the group unanimously passed a resolution to call for the German government to protect the border strip as a feature in the landscape.

This, it turned out, was the easy part. Conservation, in Germany, is a matter of the federal states, nine out of 16 of which either include or abut segments of the former border. Consideration was due, too, to those people who had been forcibly removed from their homes in or near the border strip. They had received only minor indemnification from the East German state. At the same time, some who had chafed under the restrictions in the border zone felt that the Green Belt would be little more than another no-go zone, albeit without the military installations.

How, I asked Frobel, does one navigate a project that straddles conservation and historic preservation — and that aims to protect something that in the eyes of some should not be preserved at all?

“Right,” he reflected with a smile, “just imagine the atmosphere at the time, in December 1989. The border had been open for just a few days in some places, a few weeks in others. It was an amazing time. Everyone, myself included, was just elated that this border was finally gone. And then we conservationists come and say, folks, let’s preserve the border strip. That could really have backfired! We half-expected politicians to say: You guys are out of your minds.

“But we knew that there would soon be enormous pressure on this strip of land from agriculture and development,” Frobel said. “And fortunately, the resolution was well received, and the media did a good job explaining the significance.”

Karte Deutschland Grünes Band.png
By Lencer – “own work”, used: Germany2 location map.svg by NNW, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

No doubt the guided walks Frobel and his colleagues offered were helpful, too, as were the publicity materials BUND released. The message was compelling: “From Death Strip to Lifeline,” “Nature got a 40-Year Holiday,” “Borders Divide, Nature Unites.” The brochures made a point, too, of stating that the Green Belt could never retroactively justify the brutal border system. Frobel himself told me on our field walk that he thinks of the Green Belt as a landscape of both remembrance and renewal.

In the years after Reunification, a survey of the entire Green Belt documented 1,200 rare plant and animal species. It was a remarkable finding. Nature thrives when we humans leave it alone, seemed to be the lesson.

An Accidental Lifeline

The connection between military sites and biodiversity is not a rare phenomenon: Biological abundance has also burst forth in places like the Korean DMZ, the landscape around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and abandoned military sites in the United States. Does it take military sites, of all places, to show us that our ecological footprint does not have to be one of destruction everywhere we step but can promote natural abundance? Could the paradox in BUND’s “Death Strip to Lifeline” narrative contain a message about our confused relationship to the rest of nature?

I carried these questions with me as I made my way along the Green Belt by bicycle a few years ago. It was a sort of trifold expedition during which I hoped to reconnect with my home country after 30 years abroad, learn what the border had meant in people’s lives, and understand what legacies it had left in the landscape.

Those legacies, it turns out, were still unfolding.

Somewhere between segments of my expedition I became aware of a study by biologist Stefan Beyer. Combining bird survey data from 1990 and 2011 with photo documentation along sections of the Green Belt, Beyer had noticed a perilous drop in biodiversity. Two of the typical, and endangered, Green Belt bird species had completely disappeared from the study sites. Three other species had declined by 66-90%. In the same period, 60% of previously open habitat had become overgrown or forested.

This was not entirely surprising. As anyone who tends to even a small garden patch knows, nature takes over the moment you look away. After a storm opens clearings in a forest, the seedlings and saplings of the next generation of trees quickly emerge and eventually close the canopy. Ecological succession occurs.

Still, Beyer’s findings were significant enough to prompt BUND to take a closer look at the nature of the border’s impact and revisit its management guidelines.

There’s no question that the military infrastructure had serious ecological consequences, especially where swaths were cut through forests or the hydrology of wetlands was altered. Mine fields were just as deadly for deer and other wildlife as they were for humans.

A cross memorial, tinged green, sits in a forest
A memorial for a young man who was killed by a land mine in the attempt to flee the GDR. The plaque says “He wanted to go from Germany to Germany.” Photo: Kerstin Lange

But Beyer also concluded that through their maintenance activities, the border guards had — albeit inadvertently — fostered near-perfect conditions for biodiversity.

To explain, Beyer pointed to a much earlier chapter in the story of Central Europe’s landscapes, one that began some 12,000 years ago after the last continental glacier retreated.

Once the scraped-bare rock had weathered into enough soil to support a pioneer suite of flora, animals moved back in. Trees and forests started to grow. Thunderstorms sparked fires, creating clearings. Large herbivores — wild horses, mammoths, and a prehistoric-looking kind of wild cattle called aurochs — did their part to keep the forest from closing back in. Contrary to the long-held view that much of Europe was covered with dense forest, the landscape took on a semi-open, mosaic structure of meadows and woods. Humans eventually domesticated or wiped out the large animals, but for a stretch of a few thousand years, small-scale farmers and herders continued to support a wide range of flora and fauna — along with the varied structure of the post-glacial landscape. Patch dynamics, ecologists call this type of process, in which a certain amount of disturbance promotes a high level of biodiversity.

Over time, then, different types of human activity had mimicked the effects of natural disturbances. A key outcome was a landscape pattern characterized by a high degree of ecotones: transitional or edge habitats like hedgerows or the transition between a forest and a meadow.

 

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The balance changed, geobotanist Hansjörg Küster has written, when intensive agriculture came to dominate the landscape in the middle of the 20th century. Ever larger plows and combines required ever larger fields and fewer hedgerows. Pesticides not only killed the intended targets but compounded up the food chain, leading to the near-extinction of species like white-tailed eagles. By the mid-1970s, large swaths of the West German landscape consisted of vast monocultures. In East Germany collectivization of agricultural lands had produced giant expanses of farm fields even earlier.

The way natural scientists like Beyer and Küster see it, it was in precisely this chapter of the European landscape story that history, in the form of the Iron Curtain, threw an accidental lifeline to the beleaguered flora and fauna. The border strip — as deadly as it was for humans and other mammals — had created a semi-open, layered landscape beyond the reach of plows, fertilizers, and pesticides. In and along that narrow band were habitats that supported a wide range of different species. Not the aurochs or wild horses, but mammals like lynx and European wildcat and birds like the whinchat and black stork. All in all, BUND’s surveys documented 146 habitat types, from fens and bogs to nutrient-poor grasslands and alpine meadows. This was not a wilderness untouched by humans. And like all landscapes, it was not static but dynamic. To maintain the Green Belt’s remarkable biodiversity in the coming decades would require humans to take an active role. At a 2011 symposium, Beyer, Frobel, and other experts developed a set of management strategies based on the guiding principle of fostering a semi-open, layered landscape. Depending on the habitat type, that could mean measures like brush-hogging, sheep-grazing, or rewilding with semi-wild breeds of horses or cattle.

Human Hands

I once loved the idea of the Green Belt as a wild corridor in the middle of my densely populated home country, freed both from military installations and other human impact. I still love the idea of wilderness as something larger than our human selves and see an urgent need for places where ecological processes dominate the landscape, rather than human designs. But all too often in history the idea of wilderness has served to erase the human presence in a landscape, both in narratives and by actual removal of humans from the land.

Here, then, is the flip side of the border–Green Belt paradox. As environmental historian William Cronon puts it, “the notion of wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall.”

As if we humans actually could exist outside the natural world, I thought as I rode my bike along a stretch of the Green Belt, listening to the wild duetting calls of a pair of cranes.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote years before the Iron Curtain descended across the landscape. His words traveled with me as I tried to fathom the paradoxes of this time and place. Humans and nature. The frequent memorials for people who had died along the border, and the silver lining in the legacy of life it left.

And as the legacy became clearer over the past 30 years, we’ve seen biodiversity plummet on a global scale. The 2022 UN Biodiversity (COP15) report handed our species not only a dire warning for our own continued existence but also a large chunk of responsibility for the staggering loss of species.

What if we recognized the human-nature divide as an illusion? Could the glimpse into earlier cultural landscapes that the Green Belt provides help us think of nature as our ecological home?

Biologist Bernd Heinrich reminds us in his book The Homing Instinct that home is where what you do has consequences, and where you expect and get feedback — both positive and negative — from what you do. That feedback is perhaps the main, if not the only, mechanism that maintains balance with the environment that we deem relevant to us.

But homes are also places with which we are familiar. And that is exactly the challenge many of us face regarding our ecological homes: we are not familiar with what is around us. If we can’t tell one species from another, how can we even notice the loss of biodiversity? Author Robert Michael Pyle calls this the extinction of experience. One study found that children can recognize on average 1,000 different corporate logos but only a few plants and animals native to the area they live in.

This was disturbing. To cheer myself up, I recently arranged a visit at a Waldkindergarten — a forest preschool near the Green Belt. Groups of two or three children were scattered around a clearing. Some were balance-walking across a downed log, two were taking turns on a simple board-and-rope swing attached to a sturdy tree branch. Other kids were half-hidden by ferns and saplings, pointing to something I couldn’t see.

Then I noticed a little girl arranging leaves on a log. I walked over to her and told her my name. She glanced up at me, a look of concentration and contentment on her face. She couldn’t have been more than four or five years old.

“I’m Emma,” she said. “Do you want to help me collect leaves?”

“Sure,” I said. “What kind would you like?”

“I could use some beech leaves, and maybe some hazel. So far I have mostly oak,” she replied, then turned back to her log.

She’s at home right here, I thought, and she can tell one tree species from another.

Could it be so easy? Might we solve the crisis of biodiversity by sending our children to forest preschools and having adults take botany and zoology courses?

Ecological literacy and a connection with the natural world may not be the whole story, but they’re foundational. What we do with our ecological knowledge is the next question.

The spring 2023 BUND magazine reports that whinchats — the poster-child birds of the Green Belt — remain very endangered. But the article contains some silver linings, too. In a program adjacent to a northern segment of the Green Belt, not far from little Emma’s pre-school, BUND pays farmers a premium to mow later in the season so whinchats have time to get their broods off the ground — literally. Farmers are also asked to install perching posts. On the other side of the river Elbe (a 70-mile stretch of which overlapped with the Iron Curtain), a levee was moved inland to restore 400 hectares of floodplain forest and meadows. In both cases the number of breeding pairs of whinchat went up significantly.

Such programs speak directly to the question of how we humans relate to nature: How we produce our food and energy is about as fundamental as it gets.

What Kai Frobel’s resolution recognized in 1989 — the former border strip’s role as an ecological corridor across Germany and a landscape of remembrance — has increasingly found broader recognition. The Green Belt was anchored in Germany’s federal Law on the Conservation of Nature in 2009, and three federal states have, so far, designated it as a National Monument of Nature — Germany’s newest conservation category. As of January 2024, the Green Belt is a candidate for UNESCO’s natural and cultural heritage lists. All of this recognizes the former border strip’s natural, cultural, and historical significance within and beyond the reunited country.

And of course, it has immense, ongoing personal significance. That’s part of Kai Frobel’s vision for the Green Belt. “I dream of the Grünes Band,” he told me on our walk, “as an alternative Camino de Santiago, a kind of pilgrimage route that allows people to retreat from the noise of everyday life. A place to come for Besinnung” — reflection and awareness.

I nodded, moved by the arc of this man’s life and work. What better place than this path of loss and silver linings to find our home on this planet.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Final Frontiers? A Call to Protect the Biodiversity on the Borders

Summer Reads: Lost Birds, Pummeled Pumas and Climate Anxiety

We have the word on several great new books, including a look at how to fight climate disinformation and a satire of the extinction crisis.

I’ll admit it: sometimes I get anxious about climate change. Other times I get anxious about climate disinformation. And still other times I just want to look at birds or have a comedian make me laugh at the folly of humanity.

This month’s new environmental books support all those feelings and needs, and more.

The links below all go to publishers’ websites, but you should also be able to find any of them through your local bookseller or library (which may offer books in print, audio or digital formats).

Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World by Kate Schapira

I’ve been an admirer of Schapira ever since we profiled her in 2018. She’s spent the past few years setting up booths in public parks to help talk everyday people through their climate anxieties. Now she’s taken her experience — and the stories she’s heard along the way — to a broader audience with this insightful, easy-to-digest book. It’s full of expert thoughts on dealing with trauma and fear, and information to help you understand the reality of the climate crisis. It’s also packed with questions you can ask yourself to kickstart some useful self-examination — not just of your mindset, but of the systems in place around you. Importantly, each batch of questions is followed by a section offering guidance on putting your answers into practice. Along the way, you’ll realize you’re not alone in your anxieties — as Schapira notes, we’re all “part of an ecosystem.” That’s my favorite part of this book: You can use it to sooth your own anxieties or to work through them as a group. Because we’re all afraid, and we have a right to that fear, but we can turn our collective anxiety, grief and anger into positive action.

Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World by Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant

Wynn-Grant first came to my attention on recently rebooted Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the iconic wildlife TV show, where she serves as the first Black, female wildlife ecologist to host any major program of its kind. Around the same time, I devoured her PBS podcast Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, which is overdue for a new season. But those two multimedia efforts didn’t prepare for this powerful memoir, which follows her around the world and through the challenges of becoming a Black, female scientist in a world that often undervalues all of those. The book is full of valuable lessons; in particular, I keep returning to the chapter about the grief of losing her grandfather, how a Maasai chief helped her deal with that grief by letting her tears water a 1,000-year-old baobab tree, and how her experiences with both elders shaped her approach to life and career. “My grandfather and his generation left a better world for me and my Black peers, but by no means a perfect one,” she writes. “Through my work with animals, ecosystems, and humans, I want to leave the world a little better than I found it.”

Tales of the Urban Wild: A Puma’s Journey by Dr. Tiffany Yap & Meital Smith

This nonfiction graphic novel, told mostly in shades of yellow and brown, takes us on our own journey through the difficult life of a mountain lion in the modern world. We see how they hunt, breed, and face increasing pressures from human highways, vehicles and development (not to mention rat poisons and wildfires). The book also visits the scientists and other people trying to make life a little bit easier for pumas and the wildlife around them (and maybe ourselves in the process). In a rarity for books of this type, the creators manage to convey the big cats’ personalities and struggles without anthropomorphizing them; instead, they use the human characters to convey the seriousness of the situation. The result is a science-based book with heart and hope. (Full disclosure: Yap is a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, the publisher of The Revelator.)

On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy by Lee McIntyre

This slim book, published last year while I was on sabbatical, is obviously modeled on Timothy Snyder’s must-read On Tyranny, but it’s no pale imitation. This is an effective primer on how to deal with lies, propaganda, and the resulting deeply held (if inaccurate) beliefs that plague modern society, notably (for our purposes) when it comes to climate and election denial. You can probably read this book in an hour; the wisdom it offers will shape your communication for a lifetime. (Pair this with Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity by Sander van der Linden for even more tools and strategies.)

The Birds That Audubon Missed by Kenn Kaufman

What a fascinating book. Kaufman writes about, and paints, several bird species ignored, invented or overlooked by John James Audubon, while reassessing the complicated legacy of the famed 19th-century naturalist. At the same time, Kaufman asks several deep questions about what it means to be a naturalist or a birder in the 21st century. He draws upon the history of scientific “discovery” of species, along with the internecine rivalries between competing naturalists, many of whom don’t get the modern attention they deserve (the book could almost be subtitled “and the naturalists Audubon eclipsed”). He writes movingly about his own journey to becoming a nature artist and his travels around the country to observe more and more birds, which he ties into Audubon’s own historic travels. And of course, he writes about the extinction crisis, which early naturalists helped fuel through their practice of shooting the birds they would paint or collecting them for display. This history (and personal perspective) serves to put modern birding into a broader context and illuminates not just the birds themselves but their roles in our cultures. (Pair this with The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan, which just landed on my desk.)

Groo: In the Wild by Sergio Aragonés & Mark Evanier

For more than four decades, Aragonés (Mad Magazine) and Evanier (Garfield & Friends) have used their comic books and graphic novels about Groo — a fray-loving barbarian so stupid and destructive he can’t set foot on a boat without sinking it — to satirize capitalism, religion, politics, racism and other matters of human arrogance. This time Groo once again cluelessly slices and stabs his way through armies and cities while the creators smartly skewer the extinction crisis, destructive farming techniques, overfishing, dams, the ivory trade, deforestation, wildlife trafficking, forced Indigenous relocation and other tough environmental topics. I’ll admit, that doesn’t sound like much fun, but it takes a talented creative team to lampoon human-caused extinction while telling a story this laugh-out-loud funny. Along the way, Aragonés and Evanier show that even a brain-addled mendicant like Groo isn’t dumb enough to eat or exploit a species into extinction. That takes a special kind of stupid.

In Brief:

But wait, there’s more! Here are seven more worthy environmental books, including one horrifying novel, that recently crossed our paths:

That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Revelator Reads: 15 Random Books That Every Environmentalist Should Read

Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Block Progress Again — This Time on Plastics

Before the next global meeting on plastics, we need more transparency and disclosure around the corporate stakeholders wielding influence there.

The fourth session of the United Nations Environment Program’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, held in April in Ottawa, was intended to address one of the most pressing, widespread pollution problems of our time. But the influence of fossil fuel and chemical industries on the meetings stymied progress on efforts to protect human health and the natural world.

In seeking to disrupt meaningful progress to tackle plastic pollution, lobbyists used the same playbook as the thousands of fossil fuel lobbyists whose presence has become routine at critical global environmental conferences. At the most recent climate CoP in Dubai, for instance, the fossil fuel industry bloc was bigger than any country’s delegation save Brazil and the UAE.

In Ottawa industry exerted its power in numbers, but also in its infiltration of high-level meetings. Sixteen lobbyists registered across nine different country delegations, giving them access to Member State-only sessions and influence in key negotiations. In other meetings, some lobbyists adopted an aggressive approach, with independent scientists from the Scientists’ Coalition reporting acts of intimidation and harassment to the U.N.

Various oil-producing states fortified industry efforts by working to water down the ambition of the treaty. Certain states, including Saudi Arabia, India, Kuwait and Qatar, reportedly attempted to undermine the progress already made on definitions in the hope of restricting the scope of a full lifecycle of plastics to waste alone.

plastic litter
Plastic litter found on a beach in Norway. (Photo by Bo Eide, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Plastic production has increased nearly 230-fold in the past 70 years, with this persistent, mostly petrochemical-based material now found in ecosystems across the globe and the bodies of countless species, including our own. Fossil fuel and chemical companies have invested billions of dollars into large-scale plastic production projects over the last decade.

As a result, a staggering 196 fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists signed up for the most recent round of meetings in Ottawa, a 37% increase since the third wave of negotiations at the end of 2023. Their group was seven times larger than the Indigenous Peoples Caucus and three times larger than the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastic Treaty.

This power imbalance makes it all the more unjust that industry crowded out the voices of those most affected by plastic pollution. Despite ambitious efforts by states such as Rwanda and Peru, tactics of deliberate obstruction and delay by vested interests resulted in a draft text muddled with uncertainties. Proposed intersessional work also fails to address the critical issue of primary plastic polymer production and makes the role of observers — including frontline communities and Indigenous people — unclear.

With no first draft of the Global Plastics Treaty decided, lobbyists and oil-producing states continue to protect their right to produce plastic without cleaning it up — and communities around the world remain burdened by an escalating waste crisis.

It is patently obvious that progress is more difficult, if not impossible, when those profiting from the planetary emergency enjoy so much influence over how — and whether — we address it. The industry lobby too often gains a preferential platform due to its vast funds and position in government backrooms, and that needs to end.

Only complete transparency in international environmental conferences stands a chance of making a dent. Progress has been made by the U.N. in disclosing affiliations, but this remains largely voluntary and lacks the strength needed to end industry’s undue influence.

Ahead of the next session of the UNEP’s INC on plastics, scheduled to take place from Nov. 25 to Dec. 1, 2024, in Busan, Republic of Korea, the U.N. should implement its own version of the OECD recommendations on transparency in lobbying. This should include full disclosure of all lobbying and influence activities, producing a clear footprint of who lobbyists represent, how and what they are paid, and who they meet. To prevent industry lobbyists from dominating negotiations, there should also be a more selective process for assigning conference presidencies and sponsorships, and industry stakeholders should be banned from official delegations.

Vitally, we must prioritize the involvement of frontline groups such as Indigenous peoples and communities in the Global South. Representatives from some of the hardest-hit places often struggle to acquire badges and secure funding for travel and accommodation; often they can’t even access key negotiations. Their presence at conferences and access to the higher levels of negotiations must be guaranteed.

To secure a stable climate, protect global biodiversity, and support human health, we cannot delay systemic change any longer. We’re at a breaking point: Plastics are found from the deepest ocean to the highest peak; we’re set to blow past the targets of the Paris Agreement; and the U.N. has repeatedly sounded the alarm that the next few years will make or break our chances of a sustainable future.

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

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Help the Youth Believe There’s More: A Reflection on Higher Risk Environments and Climate Crisis in the Black Community

If we want to change behavior and protect our communities, we need to change belief. That requires mentorship — and embracing Black culture and history.

Adapted from the books Youth Change Agent by Keith Strickland and Before the Streetlights Come On by Heather McTeer Toney.

From Youth Change Agent by Keith Strickland

A change agent cannot free someone from something they won’t release. Before a change agent can work on changing youth behaviors, they have to change the youth’s beliefs. A person’s beliefs are much more deeply rooted than most of us realize. Our beliefs guide our actions, morals, ethics, and norms. Everything we do is motivated by something we believe.

Case in Point

Growing up, we had very few food choices in our community. We had a fast-food burger place at one point, but it closed after multiple people were killed in the parking lot in a short period of time. We also had a pizza chain restaurant, but it also closed after it was robbed over and over. We had a restaurant that sold fried chicken, which we all ate pretty much daily. When I was almost thirteen years old, a hot-wing restaurant opened. I was the first customer. Chicken was my favorite food because I ate mostly chicken. The thought of chicken served in more than a dozen flavors was like heaven to me. Now, after I’ve experienced food from around the world, I’ve come to realize I do not like hot wings or fried chicken nearly as much as I thought I did. In the hood, we are forced to eat certain foods because it’s all we have, but you never really know what you do or don’t like if you’ve only had limited exposure.

A few years later, I opened a barbershop in our neighborhood and a car detailing shop. A fish restaurant right up the street from both of my businesses decided to support me. The restaurant was a chain and very popular. I had flyers printed for my companies, one on each side. They put my flyer in every bag when someone ordered food. Because they supported me so heavily, I ate there at least three times a week. One day, I was in an upscale neighborhood out of town. I was slightly uncomfortable because I felt out of place. I saw the same restaurant as the one in my neighborhood, so I went there since it reminded me of home. I ordered the same exact side dish (broccoli) with my meal. However, I took it back twice because something was wrong. The second time, I had a slight attitude. I told them that the broccoli was hot, and everyone gave me a strange look. But actually, it was meant to be served hot. For years, I only had it from the restaurant in my neighborhood — it was never hot. I had grown so used to that, I had no idea it could be served differently or was being served incorrectly based on the restaurant’s own standards.

Most of our beliefs were given to us; we didn’t create them for ourselves. What we hear other people say influences our beliefs. If our parents say it, if our peers believe it, if our culture embraces it, we most likely will believe it as well. As a result, we have countless beliefs that we are not aware of, and many of these beliefs don’t serve us well. We do not see the damage our beliefs may be causing us because we aren’t even aware of them. Even if we are, we may not know anything else, so we think what we believe is the only way to think.

Creating a New Vision

Youth need exposure and visibility to a world outside of their own to be successful. Why did I keep doing the same things I saw that caused each of my friends to lose their life? Watching people just like me being murdered for doing the same exact things as me — it is the most hurtful and horrifying thing I have ever lived through. I felt hopeless and wanted a better life. I decided it would be better to be dead than to live trapped in poverty for the rest of my life. What was the point of being alive if I was forced to live a life where I was poor, hungry, and never had access to any of the things I wanted? So, why wasn’t losing my freedom enough motivation to change? Prison is only a threat when you feel like you are not already in one. When you are born into a toxic home, in a dangerous community, then forced to live around violence and crime, you are already in a prison. The only difference between hopelessness and a jail cell is one has bars and walls. If someone only knows one way to do something, that is what they are going to do. The odds of someone accomplishing a goal are very low if they cannot clearly see their goal or the route to success, which is why creating a clear vision and a thorough plan is critical. So, what did I need but didn’t have access to that kept me from being able to change my life? My vision was the beginning of my problems.

I saw the world as a negative place, that you have to do whatever it takes to survive and make your way in. What I needed more than anything was a positive vision I could believe in and buy into. A positive vision would have stopped the entire process before it started because all of the negative actions would not have aligned with the positive mindset built around my vision.

Exposure

The next thing I needed was exposure. Exposure reinforces what is possible. Without exposure, youth will believe the only thing that is possible is what they have seen. If they have only seen the world as hard and a place where you have to do anything to survive, that is exactly what our youth will do. If our youth can see a world outside of theirs, a place where people survive without having to commit a crime and are relatively happy, our youth will know they can live that way too.

What I’m not saying, is to take higher risk youth away from their homes. Instead, I’m saying we must show youth a way to live differently, so they can believe there is more and appreciate their interconnectedness and role in a big world. A vision their ancestors had.

In her book, Before the Streetlights Come On, author and environmental activist Heather McTeer Toney, writes about this intersection of the environment and the inner city, where many higher risk Black youth live, due to a history of racism, segregation, and redlining. She says:

From Before the Streetlights Come On by Heather McTeer Toney

In the Black community, we have other things to worry about besides climate change. The idea gets lost in the cloud of issues we muddle through daily. When listed next to job security, food insecurity, gun violence and the blatant racism faced daily by African Americans, climate change ranks low among problems competing for our attention.

But as African Americans, we are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change. Black people make up 13% of the US population, but breathe 40% more dirty air than our white counterparts. We live in areas four times as likely to be impacted by hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, and we are twice as likely to be hospitalized or die from climate-related health disparities. Surviving traumatic change is part of our lived history, not new to our experience.

Our history underscores the value of Black people’s role in the climate movement. We know how to adapt to change. I love the example of recycling and reuse. Recycling isn’t a “new” method to reduce plastics and waste in Black households. Enslaved Africans creatively recycled and reused every item they encountered. Our great-grandmothers repurposed leftover materials to create beautiful quilts, patterned with the stories of struggle and survival. They wrapped us in the warmth of their love and legacy. Scraps of meat and vegetables were turned into succulent dishes prepared with care and prayers for nourishment. A plastic bag from the grocery store was also a trash bag, hair conditioner cap, lunch box, Halloween bucket, stuffing for mailing breakable items and what you wrapped the lotion bottle in when traveling so it wouldn’t spill on clothes. For us, recycling and reuse isn’t just to protect the planet. It is a way of life, a nod to our memories, a way to protect what we had and keep what we have. Today, these recycle and reuse lessons remain in our culture regardless of how much money we have. While it wasn’t right, we managed to survive historical climate and environmental injustices while addressing the multitudes of social justice issues plaguing minority and often marginalized people. This is one example of the ways we have naturally responded to climate crisis.

Climate and environmental issues have always been intertwined with our struggles for justice. Trust me, making sure there are equitable climate solutions that speak to the experience of all people is tantamount. Black academics, community leaders and scientists who work in environmental and climate issues don’t get a break from other injustices that impact Black America. Working in climate doesn’t make us immune to the varied injustices that hurt our sons and daughters. After talking about climate change, I go home to concerns of my husband being pulled over by the police or my sweet five-year-old son being categorized as too aggressive when he’s playing. Before giving a speech on environmental justice, I worry that my daughter has to deal with bullying because she’s in a majority-white school and people either pick on her stunning African features or question her Blackness because of her brilliance. The multitude of social justice issues that weigh on Black people never gives way to one or the other, nor to environmental and climate injustice. Despite the myriad of persistent struggles faced by Black American climate advocates, we still press the focus on the environment and climate change. We do this because the science is clear—the climate has changed and continues to do so now. Devastation is taking place as we speak. Time waits for no one. Climate degradation and environmental injustice are deadly factors in Black communities, not unlike killer cops and uncontrolled access to firearms. The difference between mainstream majority-white environmental movements and minority-led Black, brown and Indigenous environmental movements is that the latter does not have the luxury of silo. Our issues coexist.

Our foremothers and forefathers made it the business of the village to ensure that the next generation understood the importance of doing our best to keep everyone safe. Our history serves as a clarion call to environmental consciousness. African Americans have always been molded or influenced by our environment.

Previously in The Revelator:

16 Essential Books About Environmental Justice, Racism and Activism

 

Cities Respond to Global Pollinator Decline

From pocket parks to large-scale projects, cities around the world are working to reverse a troubling trend.

Every June, cities around the globe celebrate Pollinator Week, an international event to raise awareness about the important roles that birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other small mammals serve in pollinating our food systems and landscapes. These crucial species are declining worldwide, with many on the brink of extinction.

Cities have responded to this crisis with a variety of urban initiatives designed to foster pollinator habitats and in the process transform once-stark cement landscapes — as well as pocket parks, curb strips, and highway dividers — into lush, welcoming areas for pollinators and humans alike.

In Washington, D.C., ambitious pollinator projects are abundant on rooftops of public, office, and private spaces, ranging from the renovated D.C. Public Library’s main branch to National Public Radio’s headquarters, which hosts an apiary. Throughout the District of Columbia, municipal code requires buildings to maintain the tree boxes and curb strips outside their properties. This often leads to creative landscaping on the smallest of scales.

A prairie meadow in Fargo, North Dakota.
Image by Sam DeMarais, Fargo Parks

In the city’s Golden Triangle Business Improvement District, a LEED-certified community, an annual competition to engage the neighborhood’s corporate residents in showcasing their tree-box gardening skills has evolved to focus on pollinator habitats.

“For the last four years, the theme of the competition has been ‘happy habitats’,” says Patrick Revord, the director of planning and urban design for the Business Improvement District.

The district published guidelines and scorecards, with specific requirements for pollinators. Building owners and tenants worked with landscape architects to design micro habitats, bee hotels, and other insect shelters.

“Now we have 200 properties who are all doing pollinators because we asked them to,” says Revord. “It’s a much greater reach than we’re able to do as an organization by ourselves.”

One advantage: Creating pollinator habitats is relatively easy. “A lot of places already put plants out in planters and in front of buildings nationwide,” he says. “It’s just a matter of giving people the tools to put the right plants in, and then deputizing them and enabling them to go and make those good decisions.”

A brightly-colored block-long parklet has pink and yellow seating and tables, a protected bike lane and bike racks, and large planters with pollinators plants and a tree.
A block-long parklet in Washington, D.C. incorporates pollinator-friendly plants into a seating area with protected bike lanes and racks. Photo by Molly McCluskey

It’s not just businesses. Parks and other public spaces also play an important role. For example, Fargo, North Dakota’s Urban Pollinator Plots Project aims to establish more than 50 acres of high diversity, forb-rich, native prairie plantings in urban parklands.

“I think some of the bigger challenges are just simply the establishment of the prairie,” says Sam DeMarais, a park forester in the Fargo Park District, who oversees the program. “It’s a skill set and a knowledge base that really takes a keen eye and some diligence on doing it properly. Everyone thinks you can just plant the prairie and let it go, but that’s not really the case.”

Fargo’s city council has a Sustainability and Resiliency Committee that has helped elevate the public awareness of the program. But for DeMarais it’s an ongoing challenge.

“We have to help people understand, you know, there’s an intent to letting these areas grow,” he says, even if some unexpected or unfamiliar plants pop up along the way. “They’re not just weeds. They’re important pollinator plants. Some weeds are going to come along with that, but a little bit of Canada thistle here and there along with the prairie restoration isn’t such a bad thing.”

Fargo’s Urban Pollinator Plots program. Photo by Sam DeMarais.

Fargo’s and Washington, D.C.’s programs are each over 10 years old, and time has brought knowledge of what works and doesn’t, and the ability to adapt. But less-established initiatives across the country could provide even more clues. A new project at the Port of Vancouver, in Washington state, aims to add a small native plant and flower pollinator garden in the port’s mitigation bank in the Lower Columbia River watershed. It could serve as a case study in introducing pollinators into industrial areas. In Michigan, the nonprofit organization Detroit Hives showcases how to transform vacant lots into pollinator-friendly habitat, a program that recently contributed to Detroit joining the Bee City USA program. Researchers in Puerto Rico are examining the relationships between animal and plant resources in urban areas on the island, and conducting interviews to learn more about public perspectives on plants and wildlife.

But why stop at the city level? Pollinator programs around the world can look to Ireland, where the entire island, north and south, has implemented the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, a program that brings together community groups, local authorities, councils, businesses, farmers, and others to create a pollinator-friendly landscape.

“We’ve got over 100 different types of wild bee in Ireland and a third of their numbers are going down,” says Kate Chandler, the communities and engagement pollinator officer with Biodiversity Ireland, which manages the program. “The idea is that there’s a series of actions that we can take to change the way we manage our landscape.” The program puts out a series of guidelines, all resources are free, and participation is voluntary. Not everyone has opted in yet, but Chandler is hopeful.

“What we are seeing is that in places where actions have been taken to help them, local pollinator populations are increasing, which is really encouraging,” she says. “Because it shows that what we’re doing is working.”

Getting Started, Avoiding Pitfalls

For communities wanting to start a pollinator project, large or small, Patrick Powell, the chief of staff at the Golden Triangle BID, recommends bringing teams together at the very start of the ideation process. “You have to develop the project in collaboration with your maintenance and planning teams,” he says. “You can’t have something built by your planning or construction department and then have it just dumped on the maintenance folks. And then they’re like, well, this isn’t going to grow here, or this tree is going to get too large and be in the roadway, or this type of drain system is impossible to maintain.”

With a fond chuckle, Powell stresses the importance of streamlining the number of plants used in any particular project for ease of ongoing maintenance.

“Landscape architects, it’s like they get paid by the variety, but sometimes they need some reality,” he says. “I think our initial design for our rain garden had like 60 different bulbs. We were like, we can’t even acquire these. Having construction, design, and maintenance working together, from the beginning, is the best for these types of projects.”

DeMarais also stresses the importance of choosing the correct plants for a restoration or pollinator project.

“A lot of state agencies do native restoration work, so use your local extension services and things like that, or Game and Fish or Department of Natural Resources, to gather information on some of the best practices,” he says. “Also, use true native plants that are local ecotype to your region or your specific area. Those plants are going to provide the best benefits and thrive in your area.” In their case, that meant avoiding prairie species that looked right but which might have functioned differently in their ecosystem. “You can get a common blanket flower, for example, but it may be a blanket flower and the seed came from Texas versus finding seed of a blanket flower that came from North Dakota.”

Chandler echoes that: “Whether you’re talking about different areas of the globe or different areas of the country or even different areas of the city, the habitats that you have in a particular local area will be unique,” she says. “And there will be a unique mixture of species, a unique diversity of flora and fauna, some of which will already be providing a service for pollinators and other biodiversity as well.”

In Fargo, DeMarais says he has seen an increase in pollinators, particularly monarchs, in areas where his team has implemented the program. It’s an encouraging sign that the work they’re doing to restore the prairie is having a positive effect.

“Prairie is being lost by tens of thousands of acres every year,” he says. “It’s almost disappeared from our landscape. And I think as stewards of the land, we need to do our part to make sure that our environments as healthy as possible.”

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Indigenous Artist Meryl McMaster: Lost In, and Crafted by, the Natural World

The Canadian photographer travels to remote areas to explore identity and our relationship with nature.

The first time I saw Meryl McMaster’s work was in the spring of 2022. The Ottawa-based artist was one of 12 Indigenous artists from the Arctic region exhibiting in the House of Sweden, the building on Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown waterfront that serves as the country’s embassy. Her contributions to the exhibit were enormous photographic prints — self-portraits, with dramatic costumes, set in vast, expansive and remote landscapes, the kind of art that can almost be stepped into, and the kind that leaves an impression even when they’re out of sight.

McMaster herself seems both lost in the environment, and crafted from it, which is the entire point.

Her photographs and sculptures — now on display at a solo exhibit at the Embassy of Canada and a group show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts — also strive to explore her conflicting sense of identity as a Canadian with Nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British and Dutch lineage.

In a conversation with The Revelator, McMaster spoke of her process, her connection to the landscape, and her evolution as an artist, as well as what advice she has for people pursuing creative paths that might scare them.

Your work has this very ethereal, visceral quality. It has both a very soft, dreamy edge, but also a sharp impact. What do you want folks to leave with the experience of viewing one of your exhibits?

I really welcome the viewer to engage with the work, sometimes just as simply as using their imagination to fill in the blanks, and travel in this quick moment that they have with the work, and this own storyline in their own head.

On a simpler level, it’s just also having this moment, to escape, and forget the outside world.

I’d want them to think about our connections to each other, and also our disconnections from our cultures, and explore in their head the wonderment of these really immersive landscapes.

I just think of our natural world, and just how in awe of it I am, and how small we are in this natural world, and how it’s so important to think about protecting these spaces that we all live in.

Also I’d like them to think about how I’m representing, in these photographs, the generations before us and what these previous generations have sacrificed, and went through, in order for us to be in these spaces, and places today.

These are vastly panoramic landscapes that you’re working in, with very elaborate designs. What goes into staging your photographs?

(laughs) It’s definitely a process that’s taken many years to nail down, because it’s tricky. In a lot of cases, I have to hike into some of these locations. I don’t have a huge team that works with me. It’s usually friends or family, depending on where I’m photographing. So with the help of one or two other people, I’m carrying in the objects you’re seeing in these photographs. I try to keep my camera kit very small. I’m not taking lights or anything like that.

I’m usually up early because I’m photographing a lot in the morning, or in those golden hours.

It’s a lot of research into these site-specific locations, looking at historical photographs. When I get to these sites, I’m usually there for a couple days, to allow for contingency, for weather. A lot of times, I’m dealing with some tricky weather, high winds especially, although you can’t see that in the photograph.

 

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It’s a lot to prepare for, even just mentally and physically. It’s physically draining afterwards. Sometimes I’m photographing in the middle of winter, so it’s quite cold. Being the photographer, being the one that’s thinking about all the technical aspects, as well as also being the subject, and thinking about how to kind of get across that narrative through the image — it’s definitely not easy.

You’ve spoken previously of the conflicts between your Euro-Canadian and Indigenous identities. Why do you focus on these issues, and how do they manifest in your work?

From a really young age, I was aware of my different backgrounds, and knowing about my ancestry, family history, and stories. I was really interested in getting to know, and imagine, who those families were. That grew into learning about our broader history and how it went from these smaller family stories to these broader, more complex relationships that my ancestors had. That got me really curious, and it started to create these questions about my belonging and identity to these very different histories and cultures. Then, when I was trying to figure out what was I going to explore as an artist, I really wanted to do something that I could relate to, and, coming from a very personal place, something that I could speak to from my own personal experience.

That’s where I really gravitated toward exploring this complexity of family, and kin, and looking at this bicultural heritage of mine. I was thinking about these fuzzy edges of these multiple histories and thinking about time and memory, and those complex questions. I’m trying to create, through this influence of storytelling, these magical moments, these narratives that look at actual events and experiences mixed with these imagined experiences, in order to draw the viewer in, in a different way, to start to think about these conversations, and these harder histories that we all share.

 

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Meryl, your first professional exhibit was in 2010. How has your work as an artist grown from your first exhibition to now, when you’re exhibiting across Washington and around the world? How do you see that evolution?

Well, I didn’t expect [to be] exploring personal and direct family stories. In my earlier works, I was working more broadly with historical events, not working with site-specific locations, partly just because of budget. I was working in and around where I lived, and the costumes maybe weren’t as elaborate as what I do now, or the objects. My abilities to create the different elements within the images has grown a lot.

You know, I still in a lot of ways feel like this emerging artist, and when I think back, it’s just amazing how time flies, and all the ideas that I have explored over my work, it’s interesting to see them evolve, and maybe become more deeper, more enriched through time.

Because of grants, I’m able to travel to site-specific locations that influence the ideas that I’m working with, to travel to these places, and also back to where my family’s from in Saskatchewan. And I can see how my work has grown as a result.

 

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What advice do you have for other artists as they’re choosing subjects and themes — things that maybe are a little bit more intimate than they want, or comfortable with, or a little bit scarier, a bit of a stretch — about stepping into that space?

To really inspire, I think it has to come from something that you’re really passionate about, and interested in exploring, and lending your voice to. If you’re just really interested and passionate about exploring certain questions and ideas, I think that will shine through in the works.

Try not to listen to too many outside voices. Follow your gut as much as possible. I think something that I’ve trusted more over the years, as I’ve evolved as an artist, is just when something doesn’t feel right, don’t be afraid to pivot. When an idea is not working out for me, or a sculpture’s not working out for me, sometimes it’s heartbreaking to have to start from scratch. But taking those risks and trusting yourself, that’s part of the creative process of an artist.

Letting there be that freedom for ideas to just change and evolve, I think, is something that takes a bit of the pressure off and also puts more kind of excitement and joy into that process. I think just as a young artist, just don’t feel like you have to finish the idea at the beginning. Start experimenting and let those ideas evolve.

As an artist you express yourself through your photography and your work, and you’ve been written about over the years in different capacities. What do you want people to know about you and your work that hasn’t already been put out there?

Within my work, it’s almost like this different side of me that you see that maybe you wouldn’t when we’re just talking normally. When I make these images, it gives me a different kind of confidence, or maybe kind of different outlook on the world. I take my time with these images to have these feelings, and even these insecurities, these harder questions, that I put into this work.

Meryl McMaster’s exhibit, “On the Edge of This Immensity,” will be on display at the Embassy of Canada’s art gallery through the summer. The National Museum of Women in the Arts’ “Women to Watch” exhibit will be on display through August 11. Additional events are listed on her website. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook.

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Species Spotlight: The Laguna Mountains Skipper Butterfly — What’s in a Name, Anyway?

These butterflies are no longer present in their namesake range, but a collaboration aims to bring them back.

Species SpotlightSince 2021 the San Diego Zoo Entomology team has reared larvae of Laguna Mountains skippers in the Butterfly Conservation Lab at the San Diego Zoo. Adult female butterflies collected from Palomar Mountain lay eggs in the lab each spring, and we release them as larvae or pupae at the reintroduction site in the Laguna Mountains Recreation Area. This process is called “headstarting.” Rearing the larvae in the lab allows us to protect them from threats at a vulnerable life stage and to gather life history and behavioral data — nearly impossible to capture in the field — that inform future efforts.

Species name:

Laguna Mountains skipper, Pyrgus ruralis lagunae (LMS for short)

Description:

This tiny butterfly has a wingspan measuring about 1 inch across, with a checkered white and grayish-brown coloration. Though it isn’t likely to draw much attention from non-lepidopterists, like many small butterflies it’s a critical component of its native ecosystem’s food web. Unfortunately only one such ecosystem remains in the United States.

Where it’s found:

Montane meadows of San Diego County in Southern California. Though it’s no longer found in the Laguna Mountains, a small population persists in the Palomar Mountain area. The Laguna Mountains skipper requires the presence of its host plant Horkelia clevelandii, a perennial herb in the rose family, to survive.

Laguna Mountains skipper eggs are laid singly on their host plant, Horkelia clevelandii. They are about the size of a pin head. © Michael Ready / San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

IUCN Red List status:

Like most insects Laguna Mountains skippers have not been assessed by IUCN for the Red List. However, they’re protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act and appears on the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s list of California Terrestrial and Vernal Pool Invertebrates of Conservation Priority.

Major threats:

Habitat destruction, drought, climate change, and related phenological mismatch between butterflies and host/nectar plants.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

These butterflies were protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1997. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA Forest Service, Wildspring Ecology, Osborne Biological Consulting and the Urban Wildlands Group have collaborated to coordinate head starting, release and monitoring of this species, in hopes of facilitating their recovery. As the result of this partnership, the Laguna Mountains skipper butterfly took flight in its former range in 2021 for the first time since the late 1990s.

My favorite experience:

Not many people get to bear witness to every life stage of an endangered species, especially one so tiny. I remember a newly hatched LMS larva that became entangled in webbing from a spider mite and needed help getting free, something that was only possible to detect under a microscope and required a tiny paintbrush to correct! We learned quickly that helping this species required getting small — really, really small.

Larva under magnification. © Michael Ready

What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?

As is the case for many endangered and threatened species, habitat loss is the main culprit in the decline of the Laguna Mountains skipper. Reintroduction efforts are nascent and adaptive, and progress is made each season to identify the best approach to recovery.

Key research:

Livestock Grazing Shapes the Vegetation Structure and Subsequent Habitat Use by the Endangered Skipper Pyrgus ruralis lagunae (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae)

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Share your stories: 

Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.