We know more than ever about the abundance of life in the soil. Now we have to step up to save it.
Look down. You may not see the soil beneath your feet as teeming with life, but it is.
Better scientific tools are helping us understand that dirt isn’t just dirt. Life in the soil includes microbes like bacteria and fungi; invertebrates such as earthworms and nematodes; plant roots; and even mammals like gophers and badgers who spend part of their time below ground.
It’s commonly said that a quarter of all the planet’s biodiversity lives in the soil, but that’s likely a vast understatement. Many species that reside there, particularly microorganisms such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and protists, aren’t yet known to science.
“Published literature has only just begun to unravel the complexity of soil biological systems,” a 2020 study by researchers from University of Reading found. “We barely know what is there, let alone their breadth of functional roles, niche partitioning and interaction between these organisms.”
But what scientists do know is that healthy and biodiverse soil communities support a wide variety of functions that sustain life on Earth. That includes nutrient cycling, food production, carbon storage and water filtration.
What happens belowground supports life aboveground. And not surprisingly, if that underground biodiversity is threatened, so are the important functions that soil performs.
“When soil organisms begin to disappear, ecosystems will soon start to underperform, potentially hindering their vital functions for humankind,” wrote researchers in a 2020 Science study.
Threats
Pesticides being sprayed at the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge in Calif. Photo: Don McCullough (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Unfortunately there’s evidence that soil biodiversity is decreasing today — how badly is still a matter researchers are working to determine. By just one metric, studies found that 60–70% of soils in the European Union are now unhealthy.
The threats there — and across the world — are numerous.
The Reading University researchers narrowed them down to five main areas:
Human exploitation, including intensive agriculture, pesticides, fertilizers and genetically modified organisms.
Land-use change like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and soil sealing.
Soil degradation from compaction, erosion, and loss of nutrients.
Climate change, which influences temperature and moisture.
The growing threat from plastic pollution.
“Land changes [like intensive agriculture] are right up there with climate change,” says Diana H. Wall, a biology professor at Colorado State University and director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. “Because what we’re doing is tearing up the soil. And that’s the habitat for all these species.”
When we lose biodiversity in the soil it leads to a decrease in the soil’s ability to withstand disturbances — that could cause a loss of important functions and even more biodiversity.
Knowledge Gaps
Much like new molecular tools have helped researchers understand the microbiome in people’s guts, scientists can now also learn much more about the tiny organisms living in the soil, says Wall. But while research about soil biodiversity is growing, there are still significant knowledge gaps.
A 2020 study on “blind spots” in global soil biodiversity and ecosystem function found that most research focused on a single sampling event and didn’t study how soil changed in the same area over time, which the authors say is “essential for assessing trends in key taxa and functions, and their vulnerability to global change.”
The research has also been geographically unbalanced, they found. Temperate areas, which include broadleaved mixed forests and the Mediterranean, have received more study than many tropical areas, tundra or flooded grasslands.
This is not a new problem: Another study revealed that we lack historical information on soil biodiversity that would make it possible to understand baselines on previous land cover and local drivers of biodiversity. Without understanding past conditions, it’s not clear how things are changing or why.
Knowledge gaps aren’t just limited to science, either. When it comes to policy, national and international bodies lack systematic ways to monitor and protect soil biodiversity.
“At the global scale, soil biodiversity is still a blind spot: most Parties of the Convention on Biodiversity neither protect soils nor their biodiversity explicitly,” found a study published in April in Biological Conservation.
CIAT researchers are collecting data on soil erosion as part of the Africa Rising Initiative. Photo: 2015CIAT/Georgina Smith (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Taking Action
Efforts to better study and protect soil biodiversity have begun to ramp up.
One is the Soil Biodiversity Observation Network (Soil BON), co-led by Wall, which is a coordinated global project to monitor soil biodiversity and ecosystem function to help inform policy.
Wall also leads the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, a volunteer scientific network of more than 4,000 researchers who are studying the vulnerability of belowground biodiversity. The group recently sent a letter to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity urging action to protect soil biodiversity.
“Knowledge of the importance of the vast diversity of fauna and flora that inhabit soil and sustain all life aboveground should be recognized and included in global policies for the protection, restoration, and promotion of biodiversity,” the group wrote.
And while soil health demands more big government efforts, there are a lot of changes at the local level and by industries that could help.
In urban areas, pavement that has sealed off soil can be removed and replaced by vegetation. The construction of green roofs and gardens rich in plant diversity can aid soil biodiversity, too.
Farmers, Wall says, have also expressed increasing interest in soil regeneration and carbon sequestration. “There are definitely things that you can do to return the organic matter to the soil,” she says. “What we want is good cover for soil so it doesn’t blow away or wash away. And we also want to make sure that we’re not just cutting vegetation down to bare ground.”
Scandinavian Green Roof Institute. Photo: International Sustainable Solutions (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Society also needs to be mindful of the chemicals that we use in our homes, farms and cities, she says: “Pollution in soil is very bad for the organisms that live in the soil, and it’s bad for any that may have a pupating cycle in the soil.”
Soil biodiversity can recover after industrial or agricultural sites are taken out of production, but it may happen slowly and require specialized restoration efforts. In those cases, “microbial transplants together with seeding of target plant species might help speed up these processes,” suggests a 2019 study co-authored by Wall. “Even small changes, which often come at little monetary cost, may increase soil biodiversity and ecosystem services.”
And an even smaller change is also important — getting people to notice and appreciate the role healthy soil plays in our lives and why it’s so vital we protect it.
“Something that we really ought to realize is that soil isn’t forever,” Wall says. “Soils are vulnerable, and we know that worldwide. Pay attention to the life beneath your feet — it’s fragile.”
Despite their reputation as destructive pests, new research reveals that armadillos support dozens of other species — including, possibly, humans.
When people encounter armadillos, they usually describe the armored mammals in derogatory terms.
“Pests” is a common word, as are “invaders” and even “speed bumps.” Many homeowners brag of “eradicating” them from their properties.
Why the hatred? Nine-banded armadillos (Dasypus novemcinctus) — the only armadillo species in the United States — have slowly expanded their range through the southern and midwestern United States over the past few decades, a process that’s sped up in recent years. Whenever they arrive, they start digging — either to find tasty insects or grubs to eat, or to carve out the large burrows they call home. Those holes can disrupt agricultural fields, backyard gardens and golf courses. And all too often, these incursions into human territory cost the cat-sized animals their lives.
Photo: Eileen Fonferko (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
“Some of my students are born and raised in Arkansas, and they’ve said that growing up, the prevailing thing to do when you see an armadillo is shoot it,” says Brett DeGregorio, a wildlife biologist and principal investigator at the USGS Fish and Wildlife Cooperative Research Unit at the University of Arkansas.
But people encountering nine-banded armadillos might want to reconsider their attitudes. It turns out their pesky burrows have a lot to offer local communities.
Home Is Where the Burrow Is
DeGregorio, his colleagues and his students study the shifting wildlife of Arkansas. “Fayetteville is a really fast-growing area, so I’m really interested in how the mammal community changes as we develop,” he says.
In their work, they spend a lot of time setting up wildlife cameras in various parts of the state and examining the images they find. Armadillos weren’t the initial targets of their research, but they proved hard to resist.
“The more cameras we put out, the more time we spent in the field, the more and more interested I got in the armadillos. And we started noticing these patterns.”
As patterns revealed new research questions, DeGregorio encouraged his students to point their motion-triggered cameras at armadillo burrows whenever they were in the field. And they found plenty of burrows to study.
“Each armadillo usually digs about ten of them within their little home range,” he says. “So even if you only have a few armadillos living in the area, you have lots of these holes, and they’re only using one at any given time.”
The burrows themselves are amazing structures. “There’s a perfectly round opening,” he says, “and they don’t go too deep into the ground — maybe three feet down — but they’re really long. If you were to stick your arm down one, you probably couldn’t get to the end.” Armadillos, he points out, don’t do very well in cold weather, and burrows help keep them warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
Ultimately, the researchers spent a year collecting images from burrows at 35 sites across Arkansas, including a woodlot in a suburban neighborhood, a heavily forested park in the Ozark Mountains, a national wildlife refuge, and a rural cattle pasture.
Along the way they documented plenty of armadillos — and a lot more.
A Community of Critters
The research, published this May in the journal Ecology and Evolution, found that nine-banded armadillo burrows were incredibly popular sites, used not just by their original architects but also by at least 64 other species. This included bobcats, foxes, opossums, raccoons, skunks, frogs, skinks, snakes, turtles and 40 bird species.
Some of these animals, like groundhogs and foxes, took over armadillo burrows and adapted them for their own use. The researchers documented one red fox giving birth in its new home, and several Virginia opossums spent long periods in burrows caring for their newborns.
Other animals used the burrows to store food. Cameras frequently caught gray squirrels hiding acorns near or on burrow entrances and later digging them up — if mice didn’t steal them first.
Still other species used burrows as hunting sites. Those acorn-seeking mice made great prey for red-tailed hawks, which appeared to stake out burrow entrances.
DeGregorio says he wasn’t surprised by what they found because similar behavior has been documented around the burrow of other species — notably, tortoises.
“Gopher and desert tortoises get a lot of credit for being these ecosystem engineers because they also dig these extensive burrow systems,” he says. “That’s one of the key talking points for conservation of the tortoises: that they benefit so many other species.”
He expected a similarly extensive list of species benefiting from armadillo burrows — and he found it: “They create a lot of refuges for other animals to take advantage of.”
That may provide a whole other layer of benefits.
“If you’ve got armadillos around, the general biodiversity in that area is probably higher,” DeGregorio says. “To turn this into a selfish, human-centric thing: We know that biodiversity is directly linked to many human health benefits. One of the species we saw using these burrows the most was the Virginia opossum, which are amazing tick predators. The more opossum we have around, the fewer ticks and the lower prevalence of Lyme disease and the other nasty stuff that keeps us up at night. If armadillos can contribute to that, especially in suburban and rapidly developing areas where they persist really well, I think we should embrace that.”
Shifting Patterns
But those rapidly developing areas come with costs for armadillos.
In another study stemming from the same research, DeGregorio and his team found that humans don’t always make the best neighbors for these armored animals.
It’s not just their perpetual persecution of armadillos as “pests.” It’s also the noise.
The study found that the further armadillos got from Fayetteville, the more active they were during the day. Closer to the city, though, the armadillos were more active in the quiet of the night, when humans wouldn’t disturb them.
Nocturnal activity may make armadillos safer from humans, but it creates other threats.
For one thing, moving around at night exposes them to nocturnal predators like great horned owls and cougars.
For another, it’s just colder at night.
“Armadillos have a really low body temperature,” DeGregorio says. “When we force them to be active during the coldest parts of the night, during the winter, we’re making them do something that they don’t want to do. There’s a real cost to that. It takes them days and days to recover.”
An armadillo under a facet near a campsite at Guadalupe River State Park, Texas. Photo: Corey Leopold (CC BY 2.0)
And yet, they persist. No one knows why they’ve expanded their range so much in recent years — some say it’s climate change, while DeGregorio theorizes human development helped pave their way. Whatever the reason, it keeps bringing nine-banded armadillos to other parts of the United States.
And they’ve accomplished this spread in spite of their other … challenges.
“They’re a puzzling species,” DeGregorio says. “One of the things that really strikes you when you start working in armadillo country is kind of how clueless they seem. They have poor eyesight, and when they’re out foraging, they’re so focused on the ground. If you just stand still, it’s not uncommon for them to bump into your legs and then, you know, panic, jump in the air, then run away.”
None of their shortcomings seems to stop them from surviving, thriving and contributing to their surroundings.
“Not only are they surviving in the wild — they’re also extremely adaptable,” he says. “They’re spreading their geographic range at a remarkable rate, and they’re really changing the environment to the benefit of other animals around them.”
Will this research help challenge people’s unfair attitude toward armadillos? “I would love to see that perception change a little bit,” he admits.
It has certainly shifted his own idea of the species, DeGregorio says. He used to see armadillos as “this kind of goofy, overlooked animal.” Now, he says, it’s changed to “Wow — they make a meaningful difference for the ecosystem.”
One man’s mission to remove trash from the polluted river in Baghdad has inspired a nationwide movement that shows how environmental efforts inspire peace.
The sun beat down on hundreds of Iraqis who met on the banks of the Tigris, in Baghdad, to clean the river.
They gathered this past April under the banner of “Clean Iraq,” a grassroot movement organizing weekly cleanups. It was founded in February by Murtadha Al-Tameemi, a software engineer who grew up in Baghdad but has been traveling the world for the past few years.
“When I came back to Baghdad after being away for a while, I wanted to enjoy the sunset by the river,” Al-Tameemi tells me. “But when I arrived, I could not help noticing the trash that ruined the beautiful nature.”
He started going to the riverbanks every day to pick up trash, and he spread the message on social media. Soon other Iraqis started getting involved. Now, every time there’s an event, several hundred volunteers participate.
Photo: Katarzyna Rybarczyk
He only expected to spend only a few weeks at home, visiting friends and family, but when his project took off he decided to stay longer to oversee it.
The April event, though it was hard work, carried a welcoming and friendly atmosphere. People got to know each other a bit, making a seemingly tedious activity enjoyable while making visible progress. With every hour I spent by the river, I saw garbage bags piling up at the water’s edge.
Photo: Katarzyna Rybarczyk
Similar cleanup events take place at rivers and creeks around the world, but in Iraq this initiative is something new. Al-Tameemi says he believes it has the power to drive positive change well beyond the environmental benefits — it could help transform the image many people have of Baghdad and Iraq as a whole.
But I couldn’t help but wonder: Is the movement making a real change, or is the destruction of the Tigris irreversible?
An Ancient River Suffers From Modern Pollution
For centuries the Tigris has been the lifeline of Iraq. Ancient civilizations settled around the river, boosting trade, urbanization and economic growth.
Historically it was also a symbol of the country’s prosperity. Iraq used to be one of the water-richest states in the Arab world.
Now, however, the pollution of the Tigris River has reached levels so high that those who rely on its water are at risk of contracting life-threatening diseases.
For decades Baghdad has produced more sewage than its three main wastewater-treatment plants can handle — about twice as much every day. A study published this April in the journalWater found that the Tigris in Baghdad contained unhealthy levels of fecal coliform bacteria — about three times what the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe for domestic water supplies in the United States.
A paper published in 2020 in the Polish Journal of Environmental Studies identified severe pollution of Tigris’s water as “one of Iraqis’ major sources of cancer.” And a 2017report published by Save the Tigris, a network of civil society organizations working together to ensure safe access to water for the people of Mesopotamia, found that “every 24 hours around 400 children were being admitted to Baghdad’s Sadr Hospital with diseases caused by polluted water.”
Inappropriate sewage treatment is just the tip of the iceberg, however.
After ISIS gained control over parts of Iraq in 2014, extremists would regularly demolish dams and poison wells to cut Iraqi forces off from clean water and coerce local communities into obedience. To contaminate groundwater, ISIS would release oil or metal debris into outlets such as the Tigris.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, ISIS fighters would also dump the bodies of their victims into the river. During the war and in months following, corpses washed up on the riverbanks downstream from Baghdad or Mosul. Hundreds of undiscovered bodies stayed in the water and decomposed, contributing to the pollution.
ISIS also targeted oil wells in towns close to the Tigris, spilling crude oil into the streets and river. Even when attacks did not directly target oil installations or water infrastructure, explosions would damage nearby sewage networks, pipelines and water-treatment plants.
It’s been five years since the war against ISIS officially ended, but more than 1 million Iraqis remain what’s known as “internally displaced persons” living in informal settlements. In Baghdad alone, there are more than 1,000 informal settlement areas that lack sanitation facilities and sewage disposal. These displaced people often have no choice but to dispose of their waste directly into the Tigris River.
And it’s not just these internal refugees. In a country that lacks proper strategy for waste collection and disposal, throwing trash into the river has become a common practice.
Can the Tigris and Its People Be Saved?
Experts say the Tigris is dying and requires urgent action.
Last November Cascades — a consortium established to examine how cascading climate change effects can cross international borders — published a study of the Euphrates-Tigris basin which found that ”the gradual deterioration of water quality is rendering a significant proportion of water unusable.” The researchers said Iraq urgently needs to reduce the sources of water pollution and use its water supplies more efficiently.
Unfortunately no government projects currently focus on putting an end to the gradual destruction of the river.
But the rapid growth of Clean Iraq suggests that at least some Iraqis themselves want to mobilize and work together to restore the Tigris’s glory. Already some 30,000 volunteers have contributed to cleaning the river. The first cleanups took place only in Baghdad, where they’ve managed to fill more than 24,000 garbage bags with trash found around the river and cleaned a stretch of three kilometers. As the initiative gained publicity, citizens of other governorates expressed interest in joining. With the permission of Al-Tameemi, they started organizing events in other parts of Iraq as well.
Despite their achievements, there’s a risk that the campaign could become stagnant, especially if people start losing their motivation to clean the river.
Abdul, a volunteer taking part in the cleanup campaign. Photo: Katarzyna Rybarczyk
That could happen if they fail to see any progress. Many of the volunteers I met told me that it’s not uncommon for Iraqis to throw their waste into the river without realizing the harms. Therefore, even as the campaign grows, there will always be people who keep polluting the Tigris.
Cascades’ paper confirmed that, saying Iraq is characterized by “low public awareness on environmental topics.”
And even if all the rubbish is removed from the river’s banks and people stopped adding new garbage, the water is still contaminated with toxins from trash that already broke down, oil spills and industrial waste.
Environmental Peace
Al-Tameemi, recognizing that gap, says he wants to not only clean the river but teach people about the importance of keeping the environment garbage- and pollution-free.
“It’s not just about cleaning the river,” says a videographer named Karrar, who creates content for the campaign’s social media accounts. “It’s about spreading awareness, making a change and bringing people together.”
Theoretically, it might achieve even more for Iraq.
According to a special issue of the journal International Affairs published in January 2021, environmental initiatives like this can play a major role in peacebuilding in conflict areas. Papers in the issue used cases from Colombia, Liberia, Yemen and other countries to show how working together on protecting nature reduces tensions, drives integration and unites members of society.
“Environmental challenges offer opportunities for cooperation,” the editors wrote, “because they transcend political boundaries, may be less sensitive politically than other topics, and may stimulate actors to consider longer time horizons… Cooperation on environmental challenges can be instrumental in building trust and understanding between social groups.”
After decades of tyranny, Iraq finally appears to be stable enough that people can focus on actions such as this. Environmental degradation is a major consequence of armed conflict, so cleaning the Tigris River could be a sign of the country’s cautious recovery.
As part of that, the Clean Iraq movement — which has received global news coverage — could show foreigners that Iraq is open to the world and that it’s no longer a war-torn country where people live amid horror and fear.
“We are always happy to see foreigners in Baghdad,” says Abdul, a participant at one of the cleanup events. “Not many people come here because they think the war is still happening. But Iraq is peaceful now, and it is a beautiful place.”
President Biden made waves with recent actions to boost solar manufacturing, but states have been busy, too.
This spring President Biden gave a shot in the arm to solar and other clean-energy technologies with a couple of important executive actions. The move comes at a critical time, since Congress has yet to pass comprehensive legislation needed to help fight climate change.
Fossil fuels still make up the largest share of electricity generation in the United States, but renewables have chipped away at dirty power and now represent the majority of new power sources coming online.
Wind is behind nearly half of all electricity generation from renewables, but a lot of solar is waiting in the wings. Berkeley Labs reports that solar combined with battery storage accounted for 85% of new capacity awaiting grid connection at the end of 2021.
The last decade has been a big one for solar, with a 40-fold increase in electricity-generation capacity between 2010 and 2021.
That has a lot to do with solar panel costs coming down and efficiency going up. In 2010 the price for residential solar was $7.53 per watt — that fell to $2.65 at the beginning of 2021. Over the same time, utility-scale solar dropped from $5.66 per watt to $0.89.
But not everything about solar is bright this year. The outlook dimmed a bit as economic and political forces squeezed the industry.
Solar modules manufacturing by Giga Solar. Photo: Solar Giga (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Federal Action
The first quarter of the year wasn’t a good one for solar — installations fell 24% compared to the first quarter of last year.
One of the biggest issues stems from a Department of Commerce investigation into whether China is skirting import duties by shipping solar components through a handful of southeast Asian nations. That’s led to a threat of new tariffs, which has put nearly two-thirds of planned U.S. solar installations in jeopardy, according to a report from industry researcher Rystad Energy.
It’s put the Biden administration’s climate agenda in peril.
To counter that, the administration in June announced a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam as a result of the Commerce investigation.
Those four countries account for about 80% of the U.S. supply of solar modules, which is why most U.S. solar companies welcomed the news.
“The 24-month tariff extension offers some certainty at a time when it is needed most, and it buys some time for industrial clean energy policies like long-term tax credits and manufacturing incentives to be put into place,” reported PV Magazine.
About two-thirds of solar industry jobs in the United States are in the development and installation of projects, with only 14% in manufacturing, according to Canary Media.
Of course, the companies that do manufacture in the United States, like Auxin Solar, weren’t excited by Biden’s action.
But the president also took action to boost domestic production by invoking the Defense Protection Act to kickstart manufacturing of solar-panel parts and other clean energy-related technologies, including insulation, heat pumps and materials needed for power-grid infrastructure.
Additionally, the administration hopes to spur more domestic solar-manufacturing capacity by using the federal procurement process to streamline government purchasing.
Now come a few more critical steps. Congress needs to get to work funding these initiatives, and homeowners and businesses need incentives to start buying the products.
Regional Growth
Action on solar hasn’t been confined to D.C.
Florida scored a defensive solar win, which came from a somewhat unlikely source: Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, not normally a pal to environmentalists. In April he vetoed a bill that would have set back the state’s burgeoning solar industry by reducing how much money homeowners with rooftop solar get from the extra power they send back to the grid.
In Puerto Rico residents are tapping solar and storage systems on their road to recovery and resilience after a duo of devastating hurricanes hit the island in 2017. There are now more than 8 times as many rooftop solar systems compared to 2016. Much of the growth has been spurred by grassroots efforts, though, and residents say more help from the government and utilities is still needed.
New York, meanwhile, is using the power of the sun to edge closer to its goal of getting 70% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. On June 2, state officials announced contracts for 22 large-scale solar and energy storage projects with enough capacity to power 620,000 homes. It’s the largest land-based procurement so far for the state and will add more than 2 gigawatts of solar and 160 megawatts of storage.
Siting Concerns
A significant advancement came from Maryland, where the state legislature passed House Bill 1039 to exempt solar projects from county and municipal property taxes if half of the electricity they generate goes to low-to-moderate income customers at a cost that’s 20% lower than the base rate of the local utility.
That’s good for climate equity. But the bill had another bonus. The same tax breaks also apply for projects that make use of marginal lands like rooftops, brownfields and landfills, as well as for “agrivoltaics,” in which land accommodates both solar and agriculture.
A rooftop solar project in San Pedro at the Port of Los Angeles. Photo: Eric Garcetti (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Maryland’s plan takes a critical issue into consideration: As solar installations increase, where the projects are sited has become paramount.
A 2020 Audubon report found that a quarter of land being developed in the state is for ground-mounted solar arrays. Additional research found that most of that development was razing farmland and forest, including in the ecologically important Coastal Pine Barrens.
If current trends hold, 150,000 acres of land will be lost to development for renewable energy in Massachusetts — land that provides other important functions fighting climate change.
The Audubon report suggests a different path forward: “We must encourage the continued growth of the solar energy sector while emphasizing rooftop and parking lot canopy systems rather than ground-mounted arrays that degrade wildlife habitat and other important values of natural land.”
Existing rooftops could meet up to 47% of the electricity needs in Massachusetts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A report from Environment America found that big box retail stores, shopping centers and malls across the country have a combined 7.2 billion square feet of rooftop space that could help generate 84.4 terawatt-hours of solar electricity each year — enough to power almost 8 million average U.S. homes. The states with the biggest potential, according to the study, are California, Florida, Texas, Ohio and Illinois.
California also has another opportunity beyond marginal land — marginal waters.
This fall, a pilot project to construct solar panels over irrigation canals will begin in Turlock Irrigation District near Modesto. The solar-water combo is expected to be a win-win. The canal water will cool the solar panels, increasing their efficiency, while the panels stretched over the canals will provide shade, lowering evaporation and reducing the growth of aquatic weeds.
If the test project is successful, California has ample opportunity to expand it. Research by University of California Merced found that covering the state’s 4,000 miles of canals with solar panels could reduce evaporation by 82%, save 63 billion gallons of water a year, and generate 13 gigawatts of power.
There’s another huge benefit. Building these arrays over California’s canals could prevent more than 80,000 acres of farmland or natural habitat from being developed into solar projects, according to UC Merced engineering professor Roger Bales, who’s been involved in the research.
“Solar canal installations will also protect wildlife, ecosystems and culturally important land,” he wrote in The Conversation. “Large-scale solar developments can result in habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, which can harm threatened species such as the Mojave desert tortoise.”
Desert solar development has also endangered desert plant communities, which play important ecological roles, as well as providing cultural resources to Tribes.
While we do need to build more solar, we don’t need to do it in sensitive habitats. If more states — or the federal government — follow Maryland’s lead and incentivize renewable development on marginal lands, we can advance clean energy while not further imperiling biodiversity.
And we’ll need to — we can’t fight climate change without thriving ecosystems.
The Supreme Court pushed its radical agenda this past month, while the threat from extremism grew. But all is not lost.
The United States took a hard, fast and dangerous turn during the last eight days of June, when members of the Supreme Court’s ultraconservative wing — emboldened and empowered by four years of the Trump administration and an even longer period of court-stacking machinations by Sen. Mitch McConnell — fulfilled their long-simmering mandate to cripple the federal government and reduce the rights enjoyed and depended on by Americans.
Their accomplishments included slashing reproductive rights, expanding gun rights, reducing Miranda rights, eroding the separation of church and state, whittling away at Tribal sovereignty and, in one last blow, partially dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate pollution — a decision that could have dangerous effects on the worldwide climate as well as the power of all other federal agencies.
“I cannot think of many things more frightening,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent of the EPA decision. “Today, the Court strips the Environmental Protection Agency of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’ … The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision-maker on climate policy.”
Meanwhile, thanks to the Congressional commission investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, we learned more about the insidious depths of Trump’s attempted coup. Apparently, democracy came close to ending not with a bang or a whimper but with the signatures of fake electors, the crash of fine China, and the sight of leftover ketchup dripping down the White House walls.
What does this momentous month mean for the future? We’ve collected some essential reads, context and commentary about these issues.
Abortion and Reproductive Rights:
Why are abortion rights an environmental issue? Kierán Suckling, executive director of our parent organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote this: “Without reproductive justice there can’t be environmental justice. People, wildlife and wild places across the world are threatened by the same systems of abuse and exploitation. Pregnant people are particularly vulnerable to the harms of pollution, and sexual and reproductive healthcare are critical to help people face the challenges of the climate crisis.”
Ms. Magazine made similar points back in March in an extensive piece by Katherine Gladhart-Hayes, who pointed out that climate change, wildfires, increased storms and pandemics make travel particularly dangerous for any people who need to travel to find abortion access.
For added context, Naveena Sadasivam and Eve Andrews wrote for Grist about how the Roe v. Wade decision would affect pregnant people in pollution hotspots.
And speaking of birth control, Thomas has an unlikely ally tangentially tied to the environmental movement: online natural-living influencers who promote a “glamorous version of femininity untarnished by modern chemicals,” as Keira Butler at Mother Jones wrote recently. By the way, these are the same types of people who often spread disinformation about vaccines and Covid-19.
On a related note, NBC News sent its producers to several crisis pregnancy centers, which don’t offer abortion services, and found them to be hotbeds of scientific disinformation — often from the same types of faith-based groups that have been known to spread climate disinformation and dissent.
One last added context: Some legal scholars also worry that the ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization narrows who could have standing in legal cases and therefore could limit which cases are heard — a problem that could stretch well beyond women’s health. “Dobbs can be read as a signal that the new conservative majority is poised to embrace a once-minority viewpoint on third-party standing, making it harder for environmental advocates and other public interests to pry open the courthouse door,” John Echeverria, a professor at Vermont Law School, told E&E News.
Insurrection and Extremism:
Will the Jan. 6 hearings make any long-term difference to those whose minds have already been poisoned by Trump’s lies? Cassidy Hutchinson’s bombshell testimony on June 29 made some inroads into the right-wing media echo chamber, but pundits like Tucker Carlson continue to diminish and disparage the commission’s work — all while spreading more lies and conspiracy theories. Death threats against the committee and their family members highlight this continued threat to democracy, which puts all other progress at risk.
Speaking of threats: Several dozen members of the Proud Boys have been convicted or remain in jail awaiting trial for their roles in the insurrection, but don’t count these far-right extremists out. Although their national leadership is currently in shambles, local Proud Boys chapters have grown since Jan. 6, and they’re increasingly showing up to cause trouble at events like town halls and school board meetings. At least 17% of these appearances have turned violent.
There is, of course, an environmental connection: As climate journalist Emily Atkin wrote in 2020, the Proud Boys and their ilk are driven by “the exact same type of masculinity that researchers have repeatedly shown to be a driving force behind climate denial.” Oh, and some of them are running for or have been voted into office.
That threat has grown in the American West, which journalist Leah Sottile calls “a de facto testing ground for the far right to see what it can get away with.” She points to militias summoned by the antigovernment Bundy clan to their infamous 2014 standoff in Nevada and the 2016 occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, adding that members of those militia groups later stormed the Capitol in 2021.
Finally, we also need to remember the link between the insurrection and corporate interests. This relationship is perhaps most closely embodied by one of the foot soldiers of the coup, Jeffrey Clark, who is often mischaracterized in the media as an “environmental lawyer.” But as Lawrence Tribe and many others have pointed out, he’s the opposite — “a hired gun for the fossil fuel industry.”
Pollution and Climate:
Why does the Supreme Court’s ruling against the EPA matter? Oddly enough, it doesn’t change any existing regulations, but it does place limits on future regulations from the EPA and other agencies. Basically, the court is saying that major policies and actions need to come from Congress, not a federal agency. Of course, given the current disfunction in Congress, how likely is that?
Adding further context, Cara Horowitz, the co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law, explained that the ruling “holds that it is unlawful for EPA to regulate existing power plant climate pollution by requiring generation shifting from dirtier sources to cleaner ones — which my grid expert clients and many others know to be the best, cheapest and fastest way to reduce climate pollution from this sector.”
How did this happen? Writing in The New Yorker, Bill McKibben gives some important historical context for the ruling, explaining how it’s “the culmination of a five-decade effort to make sure that the federal government won’t threaten the business status quo.” Echoing that, Emily Sanders of the Center for Climate Integrity wrote that Big Oil finally got what it paid for, and Coral Davenport of The New York Times wrote that the case was “the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.” We can be sure that push will continue now that they have this victory under their belts.
But all is not lost. Writing on the Legal Planet blog, environmental law professor Dan Farber calls the Supreme Court decision “more than a flesh wound” but emphasizes that “it didn’t hit any vital organs.” He continues: “Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion leaves EPA other options to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. It also gives a fairly narrow reading to a legal doctrine that could limit the fallout from the case in terms of other regulatory powers.”
On that note, climate journalist Amy Westervelt laid out several ways the EPA, the federal government (especially the Biden administration), state and local governments, and activists can still act on climate. It’s a great roadmap for change.
Looking to the future, this ruling isn’t the only legal threat to environmental protections. Umair Irfan and Neel Dhanesha at Vox highlight some concerning state actions and an upcoming Supreme Court case in October that will determine how the EPA is able to regulate pollution in our waterways.
A small circle of industry insiders controls crucial decisions about energy projects. New changes — if done right — can offer communities a seat at the table.
These days the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can no longer be described as a technocratic, under-the-radar agency that sets policies on energy infrastructure and market rules, rates, and standards.
As energy policy has become front-page news — driven by climate change and recent price volatility — FERC has begun updating its regulations to meet new exigencies. The agency has taken big steps this spring to support affordability and a transition to cleaner energy, including proposing updates to the way it permits natural gas pipelines and beginning to overhaul how regions plan and pay for the expansion of electricity transmission infrastructure.
In 2017 the residents of Union Hill, Virginia, a predominantly Black community settled by freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, witnessed this firsthand. Over their objections FERC approved plans by the developer of the controversial Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline to site a highly polluting facility known as a compressor station in their community.
Spurred in part by pushback from incidents like these, this past April FERC signaled a new approach when it released its Equity Action Plan, which aims to better account for how its policies affect structurally marginalized communities.
A protest march and calls for equity in Union Hill, Va. Photo: Caitlin Morris, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Fittingly, the plan casts the agency’s newly constituted Office of Public Participation in a starring role. As we document in a recent report, this office represents a crucial experiment in “energy democracy” — that is, making FERC’s policymaking actions more responsive to and inclusive of the public, particularly members of marginalized communities.
In removing barriers to public participation, the Office of Public Participation has the potential to bring a sea change to an agency that has historically been inhospitable to the views of anyone beyond a small circle of industry insiders. Our report offers several recommendations for how the new office can fulfill its potential and spur FERC to better engage with the public and incorporate their on-the-ground perspectives to inform policy — and ultimately make better, fairer decisions. Many of our recommendations closely align with three priorities outlined in FERC’s plan.
The plan’s first priority is building the office itself. We urge FERC to continue the progress it has made over the past year in establishing its institutional capacity, including identifying leadership and hiring staff.
To further advance this priority, we call on the Office of Public Participation to enact new internal policies like instituting an “intervenor funding” program that would set aside money to reimburse individuals for some or all costs incurred when participating in the agency’s policymaking processes, such as attorneys’ fees. Inadequate funds are one of the biggest barriers to participation that communities face. The Equity Action Plan singled out intervenor funding as a key objective for establishing the office.
A second priority in the plan calls for aligning natural gas projects with environmental justice principles. FERC’s tentative moves in this direction have garnered substantial industry pushback, but the necessary reforms are anything but radical — they merely update FERC’s longstanding statutory obligation to ensure that pipeline development is in the public interest.
The office can and should go further, though. Our report recommends that it take steps to revise procedural requirements for participating in natural gas project proceedings and identify opportunities for streamlining and simplification. These include instituting a new policy in which it serves as FERC’s main point of contact with communities affected by natural gas pipeline development. Currently pipeline developers themselves play this role, despite the obvious conflict of interest.
But it is not enough merely to collect views — FERC must integrate them into its decision-making. To this end, a third priority of its Equity Action Plan looks at whether it has the skills and cultural commitment to promote equity as part of its organization mission. It calls for surveying staff capacity to incorporate equity considerations into the agency’s decision-making and providing equity training for staff.
Internal agency capacity will play a crucial role in promoting equity. We call on the Office of Public Participation to reorient FERC’s organizational culture so it genuinely values and embraces public engagement. It must go beyond simple staff training and adopt relevant performance metrics that reinforce widespread commitment to this culture and incentivize the agency’s political leaders to nurture and sustain it over the long term.
Worsening climate-induced disasters disproportionately harm those who contributed the least to them. Our nation’s energy policy must incorporate the voices of those who pay the greatest price for our fossil-fueled energy prosperity. Communities like Union Hill must have a meaningful chance to shape the energy policy questions that affect them, including where they get their energy from and what, if any, energy infrastructure they will host. Indeed, while Union Hill was eventually able to block construction of the compressor station in their community, it was only after prevailing at a different agency under a different law.
As it scales up its operations, FERC’s Office of Public Participation has a historic opportunity to redesign public participation toward a goal of energy democracy. If successful it will not only bring greater fairness and equity to its work but stand out as a leader among agencies in advancing our constitutional vision of government “by the people.”
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.
New research highlights the benefits sanctions can provide to international cooperation, while proposed legislation would put them into action.
Over the past few weeks, the United States and other nations have slapped a series of new financial sanctions on the Russian Federation and its key officials and oligarchs. The hope is that those sanctions will put enough pressure on Vladimir Putin and associated powers in Russia to convince them to end their brutal war against Ukraine.
Could similar sanctions help protect the planet from countries that fail to meet their international climate obligations?
New economic and social-science research out of Germany and Russia puts that question to the test.
The study — conducted and submitted before the invasion of Ukraine — examined the potential of sanctions to improve international cooperation to address climate change. To accomplish this, the researchers designed an experiment to analyze the actions of individuals from Germany, where sanctions have historically paid off, and Russia, where historical sanctions haven’t been as effective. More than 750 people participated in the study, which assessed how they managed simulated funds devoted to collective risk under scenarios with and without sanctions.
The results were “very surprising,” says lead author Gianluca Grimalda, an experimental economist and social psychologist with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at Duisburg-Essen University.
Although the paper calls Russia an example of “low-cooperator groups,” the researchers still found that participants representing both nations improved their levels of international financial cooperation under scenarios that included climate sanctions.
“What I would have expected — and what surely many other researchers would have expected — would have been a drop in cooperation in the international interaction,” Grimalda says. “When one mixes high cooperators and low cooperators in a group, normally a ‘bad apple effect’ predominates. That is, high cooperators tend to become dissatisfied with the presence of free riders in their group, and they lower their own cooperation levels. The antagonism between different national groups makes things even worse.”
Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro/DoD
Grimalda credits their experimental results to two factors. First, they used sanctions, which are more active than you might find in other research into international cooperation. Second, they used a model that focused on avoiding collective losses, rather than one in which international cooperation would simply contribute to the public good.
That doesn’t mean there was no “public good” in their outcome. “This is a ‘positive sum’ game, where a surplus exists if everyone cooperates,” he says.
That makes it different from Russia’s war against Ukraine. “It would be tempting to apply our study to the understanding of the tragedy of Ukraine war, but the context is obviously very different,” he says. “A war is a zero-sum game, or probably a ‘negative-sum game,’ in which everyone loses.”
That said, their experiment showed that individuals from both Germany and Russia would be willing to cooperate with interests from outside their own nations.
Would political leaders follow? Not necessarily. “I often think that decisions made by political leaders do not really reflect the preferences of their citizens,” Grimalda says. “Politicians — especially in autarchies — often have a private agenda that clashes with citizens’ interests and wellbeing. I think there is more distrust and hatred among political leaders than among ordinary citizens of the countries they represent.”
Vladimir Putin speaks at the U.N. climate conference in 2015. Photo: United Nations (uncredited) (CC BY 2.0)
Perhaps that’s one reason why some past sanctions have done more environmental harm than good. “Fascist Italy, imperial Japan and Franco’s Spain all responded to Western energy sanctions by promoting self-sufficiency in fuel production, at tremendous economic and environmental cost,” historian Nicholas Mulder wrote in The Nation in 2019.
To increase their effectiveness, Mulder and other experts suggest that climate sanctions be levied against corporations, not nations.
Progressive Democrats in the United States are already thinking along those lines. Last year Sens. Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, along with Rep. Veronica Escobar, called on the Biden administration to levy sanctions against the government officials, individuals and corporations “that are perpetrating the worst climate damage.”
As the legislators wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, “Combined with additional climate diplomacy with key countries like China, financial sanctions would ensure that addressing the climate crisis remains at the center of U.S. foreign and national security strategy.” They urged the administration to employ the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to accomplish these climate goals — a new direction for both of those laws.
Air pollution in China. Photo: Nicolò Lazzati (CC BY 2.0)
That call built on ideas set forth in legislation proposed by Markey and Escobar. The Targeting Environmental and Climate Recklessness Act would “restrict access to the U.S. financial system for those individuals and companies most responsible for exacerbating climate change.” The bill was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in April 2021 but hasn’t moved forward since.
“The climate crisis is an existential threat to our planet, which is why the United States must exhaust all of the tools we possess to hold destructive companies and individuals responsible for contributing to the worst effects of climate change accountable,” Markey tells The Revelator. “I will continue to engage with the Biden administration to use the available domestic and foreign policy tools at our disposal to hold destructive companies and individuals responsible for contributing to the worsening effects of climate change.”
Of course, American companies, CEOs and legislators have in many cases also failed to rein in emissions in the United States, and the country has fallen way behind its climate goals. Democrats last year also proposed a $500 billion tax against big polluters — including U.S.-based companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron and international players with U.S. subsidiaries. And the European Union could soon vote on a proposal to tax imported goods based on their carbon emissions. Neither of these ideas quite fall into the realm of sanctions, but they could complement tariffs and other efforts.
Of course, the long-term effect of sanctions related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine remain to be seen, and this March Russia claimed sanctions will harm the country’s ability to meet its own (already inadequate) climate goals. Without a clear example of success, legislators may still have difficulty pushing sanctions as a solution to the climate crisis.
But Markey says they remain a viable option. “As the real-world impacts of climate change continue to grow,” he says, “we must urgently and strategically enhance our global strategy to prevent and mitigate harm to the environment, while working to protect those that advocate on the planet’s behalf.”
Climate sanctions may yet prove to be one more tool in the toolbox to help accomplish that.
Can state agencies ensure conservation when hunters pay the bills and ranchers determine wildlife policy?
In the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem of the northern Rocky Mountains, a century-old struggle for control of wildlife continues unabated. At its core are Yellowstone National Park itself, an untouchable icon of American conservation, and its younger sibling to the south, Grand Teton National Park.
For much of the past 50 years, state views and state politics played no part in conservation conversation about the importance of Yellowstone and its surrounding regions. Under federal conservation mandates, the recovery of the West’s most charismatic animals within the park’s borders flourished.
Yet now that wolves, grizzlies, and elk among others, have rebounded from their 20th century lows, Wyoming hopes to gain exclusive control of wildlife management — for the first time since protections were enacted.
Wyoming, the state in which 97% of Yellowstone lies, is the front line of an ongoing struggle to define what conservation looks like without federal oversight. It has recently petitioned the federal government to remove grizzlies’ endangered species protections, giving management of the bears back to the state.
There has long been a tug-of-war between federal and state wildlife managers over how to handle both predators and prey. Predators, like the wolves, were hunted to extinction in the 19th century; grizzlies nearly went extinct except for the population in the park. In times of crisis, the federal government took control of these species to avoid extinction, and imported Canadian wolves, creating new American packs.
Credit: & the West
When Wildlife Protections Create Unforeseen Problems
But the history of federal conservation in the region is often a story of what happens when strategies work too well.
When settlers moved into Jackson Hole, in the southern region of the Yellowstone ecosystem, they built the town and ranching operations in the wintering grounds of the Jackson Elk Herd. In the winter of 1908-1909, the mass starvation of the local herd led Congress to create the National Elk Refuge on a plot of land on the north side of town. Elk — a favorite prey of the state’s hunters — could be fed there throughout the winter to prevent die-offs.
In the 1940s, the Wyoming Game & Fish (WGF) recognized the refuge’s success in not only boosting elk populations for hunting, but keeping elk from damaging stored crops or spreading diseases to livestock. It added a system of 22 nearby winter feedlots offering supplemental food for many western Wyoming herds when snowfall makes natural forage more difficult.
In recent years, however, the feedlot system has been called into question as Chronic Wasting Disease, a deadly sibling of Mad Cow Disease, threatens to devastate local elk populations and limit the number of elk that hunters can harvest. By some models, the disease could eliminate all of the Greater Yellowstone elk population by the end of the century. The very system that saved elk 100 years ago may lead to their extinction in a matter of decades.
Members of the Jackson elk herd migrate off of the National Elk Refuge into Grand Teton National Park. Photo: Syler Peralta-Ramos
State Wildlife Managers Balance Population Control With Ensuring Enough Elk for Hunters Who Pay the Bills
Wyoming officials have twin goals in wildlife management. They need to maintain an appropriate number of wolves, grizzlies and elk — and their definition of “appropriate” is very different from that of their federal colleagues.
They also need to generate the revenue to pay for wildlife management.
Sustaining current populations and harvest numbers is essential to funding the Game and Fish Department. “Seventy to 80% comes from hunting and fishing licenses,” said Peter Dube, the president of the commission. Those revenues amounted to $83 million in 2021. Elk were the biggest money-makers, bringing in $25.8 million and making up about a third of hunting revenues in 2021. They were followed by deer and pronghorn, which are also susceptible to chronic wasting disease.
When it comes to management of ecosystems, differing state policies can result in an inconsistent system, making it extremely hard to achieve a common conservation objective. In 2017 wildlife commissioners in Montana, worried that migrating elk would bring the disease to their state, asked Wyoming to stop feeding the elk. The National Elk Refuge, under federal management, began to phase out the feeding program as the disease appeared.
But Wyoming wildlife officials wanted to keep it going. They launched an effort to determine how ending elk feeding would affect hunters and ranchers. Dube said the results of the initiative won’t come until later this year; any decisions on policy changes are still “down the line.” As decisions remain on hold, the disease continues to spread.
Elk remain central to Wyoming’s wildlife management. So do predators like wolves and grizzlies, but for different reasons. The attitude towards predators always focused on ruthless removal. Efforts to eliminate wolves and grizzlies in the 19th and 20th centuries were so successful that the pockets of the remaining animals were quickly put under the protection of the Endangered Species Act after it became law in 1973. Protections were strongest on federal lands, like national parks.
Grizzlies were fed and cared for until 1970; having lost the ability to forage on their own, they began to die out. In 1975, Yellowstone grizzlies were put on the endangered species list.
The Endangered Species Act Has Held Hunters — and State Governments — at Bay
In the ensuing decades, both grizzlies and wolves have bounced on and off the endangered species list. Successful resuscitation of some wolf packs and grizzly populations led to increasing conflicts with ranchers and outdoor recreationalists outside park borders. Most recently, a Feb. 10 court decision relisted wolves as an endangered species, though not in Montana, Idaho, or Wyoming. In 2012 Congress had preempted the courts, giving these states final say over wolf management.
Similarly, in 2017 grizzlies retained endangered species protection, but only after federal judge Dana Christensen blocked the federal Fish & Wildlife Service’s effort to delist them. Before it could be delisted, he ruled, the Yellowstone grizzly needed to connect with the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem — the area in and around Glacier National Park — to ensure the species’ genetic viability and its climate resilience.
The decision marked the third failed delisting attempt since 2007. Dube’s explanation: conservation groups feared state regulators’ decisions would “annihilate” the grizzlies. Meanwhile WGFD and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon are pushing to eliminate endangered-species protections for grizzlies. “It’s abundantly clear that we have to have some management authority over these grizzlies in areas that we don’t want them,” Dube said.
“I think it’s our increase in damage claims. We’re concerned about not only personal safety, but … people’s livelihoods and … when [bears] get into beehives and all kinds of different things, you know, we start seeing bears out in corn mazes… We don’t need that,” he added.
As federal conservation controls restored grizzly and wolf populations within the borders of Yellowstone National Park, state officials continued to fight to keep the two species from repopulating areas from which they had been eradicated.
“Felicia,” a well known grizzly-sow who lives just beyond the border of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, plays with her two cubs in the snow. The area where Felicia lives would likely be a location for trophy hunting if grizzlies lost Endangered Species protection. Photo: Syler Peralta-Ramos
Where Wolves Lost Protection, Extermination Efforts Followed
Like grizzlies, wolves are unwelcome outside of park borders. In a circle around Yellowstone, state wildlife officials allow trophy-hunting of wolves that venture outside of park boundaries. Beyond that region — in roughly 85 percent of the state — the Wyoming Department of Agriculture controls predators; they can be exterminated as agricultural pests.
This approach has fostered controversial wildlife-killing contests, often focused on coyotes and other species that prey on livestock. Management in these zones largely resembles the campaigns that eradicated large predators from much of the West 100 years ago.
Actions of state legislatures in Montana and Idaho recently led to the largest mass extermination of wolves since the early 20th century. More than 500 were exterminated in those two states this winter. Wyoming, whose wolf population is at the federally mandated minimum, could not follow suit — if they had, they would have triggered emergency federal controls. Nonetheless, inside Yellowstone, the Phantom Lake pack has now likely been eliminated by hunts that drew its members out by baiting with meat just beyond the park’s borders.
Yellowstone Park officials told the AP that this hunting season was, “a significant setback for the species’ long-term viability and for wolf research.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland recently condemned the escalating war on wolves. “We have communicated to state officials that these kinds of actions jeopardize the decades of federal and state partnerships that successfully recovered gray wolves in the northern Rockies,” she wrote in an opinion column in USA Today.
Haaland threatened to invoke an emergency endangered species listing, pending federal regulators’ formal findings that would support a request to Congress to reverse the judge’s 2012 ruling.
Dube takes pride in Wyoming’s ability to keep wolves at their mandated minimum population. “Do people think… there should be more [wolves]? Yes. Do people think there should be less? Yes. So I think we’ve done well within the constraints that we have,” he said.
State Controls Often Stand in Opposition to Federal Practices
At the heart of wildlife conflicts in the West is the perennial issue of state’s rights. In Wyoming, hunters and ranchers control the state’s wildlife and benefit financially from removing predators and providing elk with feedlots.
When it comes to elk, grizzlies, and wolves, the WGF commission is the primary governing body for conservation policy. Dube says his department is, “bar none, probably the best wildlife agency in the world.” He sees the funding structure, based on hunting and fishing, as the department’s greatest success. “We do not get funding from the state legislature, so I think that helps tremendously. Politics can somewhat stay in the background,” he said.
The best wildlife agency? Lisa Robertson, founder of Wyoming Untrapped, has her own view. “To stake a claim as the ‘best,’ we must move beyond the old status-quo goal of “grow ’em to hunt ’em.”
The commission, populated by gubernatorial appointments, remains highly political. Of the seven current commissioners, six are either avid hunters, come from multi-generation ranching families, or both. Dube spent most of his career running a hunter-outfitting business and raising cattle. Commissioners are not required to have any particular qualifications other than aligning with the governor’s vision of the state.
Kevin Bixby, a lifelong conservationist from New Mexico, worries about the lack of diverse representation and scientific knowledge on wildlife commissions. He founded the Wildlife For All initiative to push for greater diversity of priorities in wildlife management. He believes ranchers and hunters “should have a voice at the table, but they shouldn’t be the only voice.”
“Less than 20% of Americans hunt or fish, so they would be a minority,” Bixby said. He hopes to make wildlife management more democratic with both diversity of representation and funding that comes from the public generally. “The reality is hunters pay and they become the primary constituents of the agencies, and the agencies feel they need to serve their primary customers… It’s a terrible way to protect biodiversity,” he said.
The largest known grizzly bear in the Yellowstone ecosystem stands guard atop a recently killed bull elk along the Yellowstone River. Photo: Syler Peralta-Ramos
Nonprofit Organizers Seek to Add People of Different Backgrounds to State Wildlife Agencies
Bixby and other nonprofit organizers understand that federal control is unlikely to last over long periods, and want to see a more progressive, ecology-oriented view to take hold with state regulators.
Several wildlife advocacy nonprofits have popped up in the state in response to concerns over the prevailing wildlife management policies. Wyoming is among the worst “in archaic trapping regulations and the lack of animal cruelty protection laws. Non-consumptive voices don’t count at all,” Robertson said. Among a long list of her goals, keeping grizzlies and wolves on the endangered species list rises to the top. Many conservationists view the act’s role today as a stopgap until state wildlife policies change or additional federal policies are enacted.
“The Endangered Species Act can only go so far,” Bixby said. A species has to be in bad shape for it to be listed and then you always have efforts in Congress to undermine the act, to change it and to weaken it. Then you’re always at the mercy of the courts and their interpretation of what the [U.S.] Fish and Wildlife Service decides to do.”
Roberston and Bixby want to nominate representatives from diverse groups to fill three upcoming vacancies on the WGF commission, including Dube’s role. Whether their nominees are appointed, however, depends on a Republican governor.
The extreme differences between state and federal approaches make removing a species from the federal endangered species list highly contentious.
Robertson worked for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service for 10 years until 2008, running wolf-tracking flights to study the newly re-introduced animals in Yellowstone. But as she immersed herself in Wyoming’s wildlife policies, she became disillusioned by the disconnect between federal and state managers.
“What disappointed me the most at that time was the feds actually turned over wolf management to Wyoming, knowing that the cruelty factor was as bad as it could possibly be for 85% of the state where wolves are predatory animals,” she said. “They were tired of it. They were ready to move on and so they did.”
A cow elk wanders outside the gates of Yellowstone National Park in southern Montana at dusk. Photo: Syler Peralta-Ramos
Seeing Wildlife Managers as Trustees of the Future of Wyoming’s Lands
Why is changing Wyoming wildlife policy so hard? Kristin Combs, the director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, believes that ideas about conquering nature left over from the 19th century western expansion are still prevalent.
As long as permissive state policies take hold each time federal oversight ends, conflicts over endangered species listings will persist. “There’s just this very much this feeling of like, we have to be involved. Humans have messed the landscape up so much that we can’t just let nature play out right now,” Combs said.
Advances in conservation science over the past 50 years led to a whole-ecosystem approach and more hands-off management at the federal level. Wyoming’s approach remains unchanged. “Some animals were seen as good, others were seen as bad and that [viewpoint] is very much alive and well here today,” Combs explained.
From feeding elk to exterminating predators, Wyoming wildlife management is hardly hands-off. The agricultural sector dominates the state government. State legislators, who set the rules for WGF, work part time in the winter months, which suits farmers and ranchers. “Getting to the point where you can overcome the agricultural community that’s so embedded into the legislature is very difficult.…” Combs said.
When Combs works with conservationists in other states, “it’s no surprise to anybody that Wyoming is a tough state to work in when you’re dealing with wildlife issues and animal rights,” she said. “I just want to see [conservation] … be seen as part of a larger progressive agenda to bring justice to this country,” Bixby explained.
Bixby believes that “wildlife is a public trust and the government is a trustee, and [they have] a duty as trustee to manage and protect the public trust for the benefit of all.”
The Lorax taught us to speak for the trees. But what if we also learned to listen to them?
When trees are cut, they send out the same electronic patterns as a wound of human flesh. And when some are injured by insects, they tell the others: Produce the enzymes that will protect you.
In our Age of the Anthropocene, the talking and listening by trees echoes the communications of humanity. This is one of the messages I hear in the books of the German forester Peter Wohlleben, especially the bestselling The Hidden Life of Trees, What They Feel, How They Communicate, which has been translated into 11 languages. He has the touch of Wangari Maathai or Rachel Carson, making sense of the difficult (at first) idea that, in the ultra-slow actions of tree-time, they talk.
Listen. Photo courtesy Rev. Billy Talen.
The communications between trees are often practical messages, such as warnings of insect invasions or leaf-eating giraffes. Trees create most of their electric signals and “sounds” outside the range of human senses, but researchers have established these basics: Trees work in families; mothers send descendants nourishment through the connecting fungi and root filaments that interlace beneath forests. Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia heads a team of grad students who track the signals between trees in the root system networks underground and up in the open air too, where the communicating takes place through the medium of scented pheromones.
Yes, there is evidence that trees have a sense of smell, and even of taste.
In my layperson’s browsing of these studies on the expressiveness of trees, I didn’t find an observation of joy. As I write this the trees in Brooklyn are blossoming and full of ecstatic songbirds that sing late into the night and start again before dawn.
The question arises, are the trees singing along with the melodies filling their branches? “What do trees say when there is no danger, and they feel content?” Monica Gagliano of the University of Western Australia told Smithsonian in 2018. “This I would love to know.”
Coastal redwood trees in Humboldt, California. (Photo by trevorklatko, CC BY-NC 2.0)
From this thought, a sudden flood of possibilities. This changes our experience of the natural world. This is the revolt of the beautiful view. All the many things that lay down upon that view of nature are now confronted by a no longer hidden world. What we see is alive with language, conversations, meaning. Concepts of beauty, property lines, recreation are overwhelmed. The beautiful view has within it an emergent community, a world of feelings, intelligence, lived experience.
This means that your local wasteland is connected, and we don’t know what the messaging is and where it might go. No one can say at this point if the communicating jumps the border of subspecies or species, but like our mammalian howls, it must. The international collection of scientists now unearthing this buried Tower of Babel mostly tell visiting writers that they don’t know much about the content of the talk, but it sure is exciting.
Aided by the ancient desire shown in our mythology of anthropomorphizing trees, we must go right to the question, “Is the fungi wiring so general in the landscape that the Earth is like a brain? Is the maneuvering of life through extinctions discussed on the planetary level?” Very quickly we are in the creative territory of Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick.
Some of my readers must share the fantasy with me, when we reflect on the assault of fire and flood, virus and heatwaves. Doesn’t it sometimes seem as if the wave of natural disasters is a coordinated strategy? Is Earth the ultimate activist?
What does this tree-communicating mean for Earth-defending activists? If the landscape is fulminating everywhere with different flows of talk, isn’t this a good thing to discover at this moment when the environmental movement has allowed itself to sink into boredom? The big NGOs — you look at their websites and they don’t seem to like the Earth! They display the fear, the pain, but not the joy.
What do environmentalists say when there is no danger? What do they say when they feel content? When we fail to convey these emotions, when we miscommunicate our values, we fail to prevent the next round of chainsaws and cuts to our very flesh.
Photo: Rev. Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir / Facebook
This invisible miscommunication pervades our culture, as well. We have watched with growing horror as the possibility of a conscious Earth becomes the juicy plot point in commercial entertainment. The huge movies of James Cameron may be the most egregious example. The big blue aliens on Pandora, with their mother tree and Tinkerbell-like seeds raining down, use green politics as the storyline while depoliticizing the audience with special effects that leave us purged, hung-over, completely used. The Earth as blockbuster is diabolical. The Earth is dragged into Hollywood hegemony, against which “resistance is futile.” After we recover from the movie, we might remember that monetizing nature makes it impossible to defend nature.
Cameron masks the revolution that is possible with the acceptance of a talking and thinking Earth. This is a new reality, not a new product. (Well, the communication with the Earth is new to us, the Euro-Americans who have pushed the living Earth away by mediating it, mythologizing it, fearing it.).
The Earth as an alive being — that would be the one transformation that could successfully de-consumer-ize us. This is radical indeed.
The ultimate authority at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow were the Indigenous mothers who led the walkout, rejecting the negotiations, the whole corporate “net-zero carbon by 2050” that was on offer at that poker table. Now it is clear that the mothers were walking out of the language of death because they had the language of living things whispering and shouting inside them.
The talking trees take environmentalism out of that negotiation, out of our predictable motives for fighting for the Earth, the anger, ego, career, fear, bitterness — the emotions of futility as the rich keep drilling. The talking trees are whispering in their woody language a far deeper radical defense of Mother Earth.
Let’s keep listening. Our instructions are rising toward us from that beautiful view.
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.
Removing dams is one thing, but thousands of levees also restrict rivers in the United States — and they’re not working as intended.
A female duck rests in the water where Gibbons Creek meets the Columbia River in southwest Washington. The common merganser grooms her rust-colored head in a site that, until recently, didn’t flow freely. But now the fish ladder that blocked salmon from spawning for decades is gone, and so is the levee that had held the Columbia back from spilling onto its historic floodplain since 1966.
In the largest restoration project on the lower Columbia River, crews spent nearly two years removing 2.2 miles of levee, reconfiguring Gibbons Creek, and realigning two new levees at Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge. The new levees — which total 1.6 miles and serve as public trails — reconnect the river to 965 acres of floodplain. They sit perpendicular to the Columbia, rather than lining its banks, giving the river and Gibbons Creek room to flow messily across the refuge, which is located just east of Vancouver and northeast of Portland.
This May visitors started exploring the newly reopened U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge, considered the gateway to the Columbia River Gorge, after its intermittent two-year closure. Tractor tire imprints covered the muddied former levee. Hundreds of newly planted willows, cottonwoods and wapato grew nearby.
The project has already benefited local wildlife — and not just the ducks. Soon after the levee was removed last summer an American dipper visited the refuge for the first time. Salmon returned to spawn last fall in an unfettered Gibbons Creek.
“It’s a big chunk of new floodplain,” says Chris Collins of the Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership, a nonprofit that worked on the $31 million project. “But it’s also in a part of the river that’s important to try to reestablish what we can.”
Just upriver, where steep basalt cliffs border the water, migrating salmon have few places to rest and eat. Downriver, miles of levees line the Columbia’s banks from Portland to Astoria.
Now, at Steigerwald, salmon have 19% more floodplain habitat between Bonneville Dam and the Willamette River confluence, Collins says.
And the refuge is not alone.
Steigerwald Lake is among dozens of projects in the Northwest where levees have been realigned or moved back to give rivers room to meander unconfined by the artificial walls that have tightly lined their banks and transformed ecosystems since Europeans arrived. As debates continue around removing dams to restore salmon runs, experts say levee removals and setbacks help threatened and endangered species, among other ecological and community benefits.
Although similar projects nationwide are few, Northwest tribes, nonprofits and government agencies have been buying land, acre-by-acre, to piece together restored floodplains.
Despite many successes, these projects often face political barriers and involve costly and time-consuming private land acquisition, pitting agriculture and development against conservation.
Rethinking the Levee
Levees built throughout the 1800s and 1900s along the country’s major rivers blocked rivers from their floodplains and turned the ecosystems into farms or neighborhoods. Prior to levees, the once vast landscapes were messy, complex and full of food for birds, fish and invertebrates. Their slow-moving, shallow channels meandered through native grasses and willows and provided critical resting and rearing sites for young salmon before they headed to sea.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built levees close to rivers to turn braided waters into straight channels. They hoped to gain as much farmland as possible, but some early Corps engineers also believed that they could train rivers to run like canals, making them essentially flood proof, says Nicholas Pinter, a professor and associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Thousands of miles of levees nationwide restrict rivers, protecting millions of acres of farmland and cities. Across the country, Pinter says, new development and levee construction continue within floodplains.
“And that’s the challenge,” he says. “We have engineered enough of our river systems to within an inch of their lives, and now stepping back from that is difficult. It’s a political challenge more than an engineering or technical one.”
The Army Corps of Engineers partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore wetlands at the Julia Butler Hansen Wildlife Refuge in Washington in 2014. After constructing a new setback levee the Corps notched the original levee, allowing the Columbia River to flow in. The rest of the original levee was allowed to erode naturally.
When levees fail, the Corps typically rebuilds them higher, often at a steep cost, Pinter says. But his research shows that when levees are moved roughly half of a mile to a mile away from river banks, they require less maintenance and better protect communities. With more territory, rivers can rechannelize during floods, which slows their energy, spreads water across more land and moves sediment down river.
Levee setback projects in Northern California, such as those along the Cosumnes River, decreased flood risk to communities and helped recharge aquifers, Pinter says. Fish came back.
“If the water gets there, the fish will get there,” Pinter says. “Nature seems to be grateful for these little bits that we give back.”
Set It Back
Moving levees even 100 feet back benefits communities and ecosystems, says Ian Sinks, the stewardship director for Columbia Land Trust, a conservation nonprofit.
Since the early 2000s, Sinks has led more than a dozen levee removal and setback projects. He’s pieced together floodplains throughout the Columbia River estuary, especially along the Grays River in southwest Washington.
Columbia Land Trust acquired properties after some residents retired and couldn’t maintain their land. Other plots became too wet for farming, while some sat on the market, Sinks says. Over the years, the nonprofit purchased several hundred acres.
The organization preserved some of the last remaining Sitka spruce swamps that once covered large areas of the river’s estuary before levees destroyed the ecosystems. The habitats that remain, and which are now protected, provide abundant food for animals, lower water temperature, absorb floodwater, and give threatened chinook, coho, chum and steelhead safe rearing sites.
“You have to get the water back and the dynamics of the water back on the land,” Sinks says. “Once you do,” he adds, the ecological changes are “nearly instantaneous.” By the following spring, native plants and juvenile salmon return.
Piecemeal Projects
Although setback levees are cheaper to maintain over the long term than repairing existing levees, these projects are initially expensive. Organizations often must buy property, then remove and realign a new levee. Bonneville Power Administration paid most of Steigerwald’s $31 million cost as part of the agency’s required habitat mitigation under the 1980 Northwest Power Act for operating Columbia River Basin dams that have decimated fish runs.
Other regional projects are also largely funded by state and federal grants, but many grant programs fund restoration work project-by-project — a patchwork system that doesn’t view rivers and flood management from a broader watershed scale.
That’s somewhat changing in Washington, says Brandon Parsons, who leads floodplain restoration in the Puget Sound and Columbia River Basin for the nonprofit American Rivers.
Since 2013 Floodplains by Design, a state-run grant program in partnership with American Rivers, Bonneville Environmental Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, has secured $215 million to reconnect more than 7,200 acres of floodplains in 59 flood-prone communities across Washington.
Many of the state’s rivers begin in the alpine, descend thousands of feet quickly, and bring loads of gravel and wood that don’t flow well in confined, leveed systems, often causing flooding.
“We’ve fought the river system for so long that finally we realized it wasn’t working,” Parsons says. “We’re investing billions of dollars to straighten rivers, and it’s not working. So we had to change.”
Parsons and other experts say similar floodplain restoration projects would benefit ecosystems and communities elsewhere across the nation — if the politics align. The Atchison County Levee District in Missouri, for example, realized it needed a new approach after a devastating 2019 flood breached 100 levees along the Missouri River, forcing 278 people to evacuate and caused millions of dollars in damage. The district worked with landowners to buy their land and build new setback levees along a five-mile stretch of the river, reconnecting 1,040 acres of floodplain and better protecting the community.
Northwest tribes are also trying to bring floodplains back to pre-colonization conditions. For nearly two decades, the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians has removed levees and pieced together bits of floodplain along the Stillaguamish River in Washington.
When Tribal leaders first approached neighbors about salmon recovery, everyone asked how they could help, says Jason Griffith, the Tribe’s environmental program manager.
“So, you start going down the list,” he says. “You need to stop farming the land, you need to plant these natives, remove the levee, take out the bank armory, stop killing the beaver. And they were like ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not what we’re gonna do.’ ”
The Tribe then decided to purchase its own land. Once they buy a parcel, they place deed restrictions on it that prohibit any future development.
So far they’ve acquired 1,200 acres, mostly along the heavily farmed estuary north of Everett. Chum, Chinook and other fish can now use habitats that levees blocked for 150 years, Griffith says. Their goal is to restore about 7,000 acres, from spawning grounds to the estuary.
“The literature is pretty clear from across the range of Pacific salmon that these are the kinds of projects that will, in time and with enough of them, move the needle toward more abundant wild salmon,” Griffith says.
But it won’t be easy — or necessarily fast.
“It’s taken 150 years to get to this point,” he adds. “It’s going to take decades to get out.”
