What It’s Like to Study Endangered Killer Whales

Researcher Deborah Giles is on the frontlines of efforts to understand — and help protect — critically endangered Southern Residents.

You can learn a lot from poop.

Deborah Giles would know. As the research director of the nonprofit Wild Orca and a research scientist at the University of Washington, Giles has worked for years on a project collecting scat from endangered Southern Resident killer whales to better understand their health.

And there’s reason for concern. Southern Residents are a distinct population of orcas — known as J, K and L pod — that make their home in the waters around the Pacific Northwest. For the past 20 years their populations have trended dangerously downward. In 2005, with just 88 individuals remaining, they were federally protected as endangered. Today their numbers have dropped to 73.

The Revelator spoke with Giles about the biggest threats facing these killer whales and what can be done to save them.

With the help of specially trained dogs, you’re able to find Southern Resident killer whale scat in the sea. What can you learn from it?

Five people on boat watching whale breach — Researchers, including Deborah Giles (left), aboard the National Marine Fisheries Service vessel Noctiluca off San Juan Island, Washington in 2006. Photo: NOAA

Scat is a great proxy for blood or blubber. In the past we would’ve had to have taken a blubber biopsy to understand things like how much toxicants are stored or circulating through the whale’s body. But an analysis of one fecal collection yields things like nutrition status, stress hormones, pregnancy hormones. We can tell if a female is pregnant — and how pregnant — based on sex hormones associated with different stages of pregnancy. We can tell things about the gut microbiome, fungus and bacteria. Pretty much anything you can imagine health-wise that can be learned from a biological sample, you can learn from feces.

One of our papers showed that 69% of pregnant females are losing their calves either before they’re viable, meaning they miscarry them or the calves are born and die right away. And one-third of those are females that were pregnant into the last stages of pregnancy, and yet their babies died. Those females are the ones that we were also able to show were nutritionally deprived.

In addition, we can look at things like microplastics. We haven’t done any actual analysis on that yet, but that’s going to be a big one going forward. And we’ll be able to go back and analyze our past samples.

Chinook salmon are the preferred source of food for these killer whales. Is a lack of Chinook what’s driving their health problems?

That’s the biggest problem. Chinook are decimated in quality and quantity throughout the whales’ entire range. We Washingtonians like to think of these whales as ours, but they’re really Oregon’s and California’s whales, too.

Fish declines from Monterey Bay to southeast Alaska are at fault here. What’s causing the declines in salmon? Overfishing, fishing in inappropriate ways and in inappropriate areas, and using inappropriate gear. There’s a massive amount of bycatch from other fisheries.

Dams on rivers are also making the lives of salmon that much harder. So is habitat destruction in estuarine places — in areas that are the interface between the fresh water and saltwater. We’re filling those in with concrete and building condos in those areas that are vitally important for out-migrating salmon.

We’re also creating more fish that are inferior in quality by throwing more hatchery salmon into the mix. Wild salmon have a greater ability to withstand oceanographic perturbations in a way that hatchery fish don’t.

Another problem is with fisheries management. Salmon from much of Oregon, and all of Washington and British Columbia, exit their natal rivers and go up to Alaska to spend anywhere from two to five years in the ocean getting big. Then they leave Alaska return to their natal rivers to spawn.

But often, before they can do that, the Alaskan fishery takes a tremendous amount of the fish. Around 97% of Chinook caught in Alaska are non-native to Alaska. Those fish are bound for these rivers [in Oregon, Washing and British Columbia] and come from a huge number of runs that are on the endangered species list.

What effect is climate change having on Southern Residents?

Climate change is the largest elephant in the room. It’s the one that’s overshadowing everything, because everything that’s impacting the natural world will ultimately find its way to direct impacts to the Southern Residents. Killer whales occur in all oceans of the world, the warmest to the coldest waters. A several-degree temperature change isn’t going to impact the killer whales themselves, but it’s going to affect the fish that they rely on.

That’s another reason some of us are pushing for the Snake River dams to be removed. Those four dams on the mainstem of the Columbia and four on the Snake block some of the highest elevation, coldest water habitat needed for salmon. If we could remove those dams that would give those fish the biggest access to cold water habitat.

The salmon that these whales coevolved with used to be over 100 pounds. It makes sense that you would have these large-bodied whales that can live into their 80s when they were able forage on these incredibly large fatty-rich, lipid-rich fish. A full-grown killer whale or a pregnant killer whale needs 300-400 pounds of food per day.

So back in the day, even 100 years ago, they would have to forage on three or four Chinook and they would have enough to eat and be healthy and thrive.

Now, when the average size of a Chinook in Washington state is 12.5 pounds, killer whales have to forage a lot more to find the same amount of food. And when the prey that they’re looking for is less quality, smaller and more widely dispersed, these whales are having to exert so much more energy to try and get their daily caloric needs met. So it’s no wonder we’re seeing that 69% of females that get pregnant are not able to bring their calf to term.

aerial view of whale chasing fish — A young resident killer whale chases a chinook salmon in the Salish Sea near San Juan Island, Washington 2017. Photo: John Durban (NOAA Fisheries/Southwest Fisheries Science Center), Holly Fearnbach (SR3: SeaLife Response, Rehabilitation and Research) and Lance Barrett-Lennard (Vancouver Aquarium’s Coastal Ocean Research Institute)

What else can we do to help them?

I think we need to be getting dams down that we can do without. That includes the Klamath dams in California and others. We need to be doing habitat restoration on rivers to return healthy riparian corridors so that there’s shade to keep waters cool for salmon, and woody debris to create different habitats within the river system. We need to stop farming right up to the river’s edge. We need to be mindful of the inputs into the river, including industrial toxicants and those associated with agriculture.

We need to stop decimating that interface between the saltwater and the freshwater realm, which is an area that people seem intent to just completely pave over everywhere. We need fisheries management that focuses on maximizing a fish’s potential to get all the way back to its natal river.

We also need to change when, where, and how we fish. We can utilize fishing techniques that can significantly reduce salmon bycatch, like nets with holes in the sides that other species of fish don’t even seem to see, but the Chinook can exit. We need to be very mindful about what is returning, what is moving through an area. Just because you’re out for a pollock or a hake or some other sort of fish, if there’s salmon in the area, I’m sorry, you don’t get to fish there.

In terms of research, I think we need to see what the emerging toxicants are that are impacting these whales, like PFAS. We do need to be looking at how healthy the whales are at different times of the year and to be able to couple that with a knowledge of fisheries abundance. When these whales are getting enough to eat, what’s happening with fisheries there? What are we doing right there? We need to be tracking this throughout the year to be able to see change over time.

What is it like to be studying these animals that are perilously close to extinction?

I know these whales as individuals. I’ve been following them since I was 18, and I’ve watched

the majority of them grow up. I’ve watched them have babies of their own. I’ve gotten a front row seat to see their interactions with each other. I see how tightly bonded they are.

We saw what happens when a whale loses her calf, like with J35 [who carried her dead calf for at least 17 days in 2018]. That was the world’s opportunity to see what we researchers get to see anytime we’re with them. We see that they’re incredibly socially bonded. They care for each other. They cooperatively hunt and share food, even when they themselves are starving.

And we see that they’re not giving up, they’re continuing to get pregnant. It’s not necessarily a conscious thing — it’s who they are, it’s what they do. But they’re still here and I want to give them as much of a fighting chance as possible.

By continuing the work that we do, by continuing to magnify and highlight what’s happening with them — both the positives and the negatives — it gives the public an opportunity to get engaged and stay engaged.

But is it heartbreaking? Absolutely. Every day it’s heartbreaking to think about what’s happening with them. I think about them every time I get in my car. I ask myself, “Do I really need to take this trip? How is this impacting the whales?”

That’s what I try to impart to people that I’m teaching or getting to visit with: It doesn’t matter where you’re from, the things that you do have an impact on not only these whales, but all the other species on the planet.

It comes down to education, people learning about something that they care about and not just leaving it at that but continuing their education and passing that information onto their friends and family.

Wherever you live, get involved in groups that are doing good work. Don’t just give a thumbs up — actually participate.

Previously in The Revelator:

Whales Face New and Emerging Threats

Lessons for the Long Term: Tom Lovejoy’s Legacy for Life on Earth

As the world debates the need to protect 30% of the planet’s land and water, research in collaboration with the late conservation biologist shows the importance of long-term support for biodiversity.

The scientific consensus is clear: The climate and ecological crises are accelerating, converging, and putting humanity at risk. Stewardship of large, unbroken ecosystems can help alleviate these crises — by keeping carbon in the ground and sustaining the vast array of life on Earth, including ourselves.

No one knew this better than Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy, the legendary scientist who famously coined the term “biological diversity” (often shortened to “biodiversity”) and dedicated his life to its protection.

Thomas Lovejoy — Amazon Biodiversity Center

Starting in the 1970s, in the early days of the modern environmental movement, Lovejoy spearheaded an experiment in the Brazilian Amazon to answer a critical debate: Is it better to have a single large reserve or several small ones? In collaboration with the Brazilian government and locals, Lovejoy’s team created forest fragments of different sizes and tracked the ecological consequences. Its findings have unfolded over decades, showing that fragmenting forests leads to species declines or extinctions, affects the local climate, and hinders carbon storage.

The results are clear: While even small forest patches can remain strongholds of endangered species and should be conserved, when it comes to nature reserves, large areas are fundamental and provide unique, irreplaceable benefits for biodiversity.

In the decades since this forest experiment began, governments around the world have increasingly established and expanded nature reserves. These protected areas now cover about 17% of the world’s lands and hold the promise of safeguarding biodiversity within large, unbroken ecosystems for the long term.

But there’s an inconvenient truth for nature reserves that conservationists in the 1970s did not anticipate: Protected areas are not necessarily permanent. In fact, they’re increasingly subject to legal changes that roll back protections and can put ecosystems at risk.

Notably, not all protection rollbacks have negative consequences, as they may restore rights to the original Indigenous or local stewards or enable conservation planning. But many rollbacks to protections are not so benign and authorize new or expanded industrial-scale, extractive development. We’ve seen this happen several times recently:

“Australia to Open More Marine Parks to Commercial Fishing”

“Brazil Launches Plan to Expand Mining in Amazon”

“Environmentalists [in Kenya] Fear a Proposal to Allow Boundary Changes to Protected Areas Will Open the Door to Deforestation”

Nine years ago, as a prospective Ph.D. student who’d initially studied this phenomenon in the United States — and with a keen interest in the biodiversity of Amazonia inspired by a semester abroad in Ecuador — I audaciously approached Lovejoy with an idea. Could we look at the phenomenon of protected area rollbacks in the Amazon? Given increasing pressures from agribusiness, hydropower dams, mining and other industrial development, and the critical importance of large, unbroken ecosystems for biodiversity, the topic seemed ripe for study.

Kroner Lovejoy — The author with Tom Lovejoy at the 2017 Tyler Prize event. Provided.

Tom agreed to advise me through my Ph.D., and I also benefited from generous collaborations with Conservation International. Our study began in the Amazon but evolved to include data from around the world. In a paper published in Science in 2019, we showed that 73 governments enacted more than 3,700 rollbacks to protected areas. Although about one-quarter of these legal changes restored land or rights to communities, most allowed new extractive, industrial-scale activities. We found that Brazil, the home of Tom’s forest-fragment experiment, is a global hotspot of rollbacks.

In a separate study, my colleagues and I — working without Tom — found that protected areas with more deforestation are at higher risk of being rolled back, suggesting the importance of sound management and enforcement to keep protections intact.

Tom called the phenomenon of protected area rollbacks the “underbelly of conservation.” Rollbacks are largely hidden, as official statistics focus on net growth coverage of protected areas. As long as the total number grew, any shrinkages or adjustments to loosen restrictions could remain hidden.

Yet our research has driven new awareness. Protected area rollbacks have now been recognized in a motion by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and provisionally included as a “complementary” indicator in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. That’s expected to be agreed later this year in a “Paris moment” for biodiversity.

Even as rollbacks continue during the Covid crisis, donors are increasingly prioritizing long-term conservation funding. More comprehensive monitoring by civil society, reporting of information by governments, and financial support from public and private sectors could go a long way toward enhancing durable conservation. Targeted funding, for instance, can support better management. And beyond state-led protected areas, other land stewardship approaches — especially those led by Indigenous peoples and local communities — need more support.

Durable support for conservation is especially important as conservation groups and world governments debate 30×30, the goal of protecting and conserving at least 30% of the planet’s lands and waters by the year 2030. That’s just eight years away, and as governments rush to meet this goal, any lands lauded as protected by the end of the decade could be chipped away and rolled back without anyone being the wiser.

How can the world ensure that 30×30 goals are achieved in as effective and durable a manner as possible? Again, Tom Lovejoy had the answers.

Make Good Trouble — and Conservation Magic

Working on a bold research topic, I was, and continue to be, inspired by Tom’s wisdom. In the spirit of the late civil rights leader John Lewis, Tom often ended our regular meetings with a wink, smile and reminder to “make good trouble.”

Tom modelled good-trouble-making himself, strategically working along the science-policy interface to make a difference. For instance, with Carlos Nobre, he put pressure on the Bolsonaro administration by spotlighting the Amazon tipping point — a deforestation threshold that, if passed, could flip the tropical forest ecosystem into a savanna, with devastating consequences for the local water cycle, global climate, and irreplaceable biodiversity.

Despite daunting conservation challenges, Tom remained focused on how different stakeholders can safeguard large, unbroken ecosystems and their biodiversity. He took a systems and collaborative approach to identify and advocate for holistic solutions. To name a few: He championed Indigenous and local community stewardship, advocated for forest conservation as a pandemic prevention strategy, and promoted restoration before it was in vogue.

And Tom knew better than anyone that spatial protections alone are not enough to save the world. Scientists agree that transformative changes to address the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss are urgently needed. These changes could include redirecting environmentally damaging subsidies, enhancing nature-positive regulations and sustainable supply chains, accounting for diverse values and ways of measuring societal progress (e.g. beyond GDP), and ensuring equitable access to education.

Tom’s engagements on dozens of boards of organizations across sectors meant that he lived the words he penned in 1989: “Science must take on an advocacy role with respect to environment … indeed, it is our responsibility.” Tom modeled these values through his long-term research, engagements with governments around the world, and generous, legendary convenings. With these actions he created some of the conditions we need to save the world: knowledge generation, meaningful collaborations of scientists with decisionmakers, and political momentum.

In short, Tom Lovejoy made conservation magic happen.

What remains most inspiring is that he never faltered in his persistence and optimism. Despite his position on the front lines of conservation — witnessing ecosystem loss, unsustainable development, and political challenges like rollbacks firsthand — he remained steadfast in his belief that a better way forward is possible. That there’s always some opportunity to make progress.

Governments have an opportunity to do just that, later this year, by agreeing to and financing transformative goals and targets for the Convention on Biological Diversity, including the goal to inclusively protect and conserve at least 30% of the planet by 2030. This effort should be centered in a human rights-based approach with recognition of Indigenous and local community rights and ensure that extractive and industrial-scale activities — and the harmful rollbacks that would enable them — are avoided in protected and conserved areas.

These actions would not only honor Tom Lovejoy, the “Godfather of Biodiversity,” but also give humanity a chance at safeguarding our beautiful planet and its large, unbroken ecosystems for the long term. The future of life on Earth depends on it.

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Now Read This: Stop Doomscrolling and Save the Planet

Best Practices to Confront Pandemics at the Source

The international community must agree to end deforestation, close live-wildlife markets, and embrace a treaty to prevent future outbreaks.

The rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 made it clear: Emerging infectious diseases present global health and security threats to every home and family.

Like SARS-CoV-2, most new infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic, meaning they originate from other animals — and particularly from wildlife. The accelerating frequency and extent to which humans and domestic animals come into contact with wildlife due to land-use change and wildlife markets and trade, together with the lack of proper livestock biosecurity, have increased novel pathogen evolution and spillover.

Combined with ever-increasing global interconnectedness, these trends mean that future outbreaks will occur more often, and spread faster, if we don’t immediately eliminate the primary drivers. We have commonly understood “best practices” to avoid catching Covid-19 from our friends, coworkers, and neighbors: Vaccinate, wear a mask, and socially distance. We now need best practices to prevent pandemic spillover at the source.

1. Protect Habitat

Research shows that landscapes of high ecological integrity (those that are less disturbed and with full ecological function) are resilient in limiting spillover and spillback between humans and animals of the pathogens innocuously circulating and evolving among wildlife. Those un-degraded environments — areas with limited human penetration, encroachment and exploitation — maintain a wealth of proven complementary and cumulative natural barriers to the spread of pathogens with pandemic potential.

Sadly, however, human activities and exploitation now continuously erode and destroy these vital barriers. Twenty-five months into the present pandemic, we know we must put an end to deforestation and widespread agricultural conversion and land-use changes. These actions directly disrupt species composition, density and distribution, which in turn drives stressed species into new habitats with newly established behaviors and the potential for increased pathogen shedding.

2. Shut Down the Markets

We must also close markets in large urban centers that sell live wildlife for human consumption — a niche consumer extravagance that mixes a stupendous variety of live wildlife species from diverse sources, both legal and illegal. Animals are either trapped in the wild, come from unregulated captive wildlife farms, or emerge from a porous mixture of both.

The animals are also obtained locally, regionally and — for some species — internationally, then transported under horrendous conditions to market. There live animals are stacked on top of, or next to, each other and intermix with domestic livestock like pigs and chickens — and, of course, people. This allows for direct exchange and recombination of pathogens through respiration, excrement and blood.

Smuggled pangolin meat seized at Miami International Airport. Photo: USFWS (uncredited)

The trade in live wildlife patently violates wildlife-human-wildlife interface integrity and increases spillover and spillback opportunities between wildlife, livestock, poultry and ultimately humans. We can no longer tolerate these vast open-access, wholly unregulated, unsupervised market-based experiments in urban agglomerations and megapolises.

Let me be clear: Commercial urban wildlife markets primarily provide luxury products, do not contribute to nutritional needs, and are of negligible economic importance compared with the global economic devastation of a pandemic such as Covid-19.

3. Address Inequality

Beyond the health threat they pose, the live-animal trade perpetuates global inequities. By emptying forests and landscapes, it deprives vulnerable Indigenous peoples and local communities of their rights, food security and cultural needs. Eliminating the urban commercial trade in wildlife will directly benefit these communities, which are critically dependent on accessing food from intact, biodiverse and healthy landscapes.

It would also bolster the global economy. The costs of many individual recent major outbreaks such as SARS, MERS and Ebola are estimated in the tens of billions of U.S. dollars. When all is tallied, the economic devastation caused by Covid-19 will certainly be orders of magnitude greater: in the tens of trillions.

4. Plan Ahead

As governments and the global public health community ponder post-spillover pandemic preparedness, we must strongly advocate for prevention at the source — in other words, for stopping outbreaks where they’d start. Only prevention directly addresses the growing interfaces and barrier losses where spillovers — and more recently spillbacks — into wildlife occur can mitigate future zoonotic disease threats in an expedient, cost-effective manner.

Prevention has been largely missing in the global debates and approaches to future pandemics as the world attempts to learn from Covid-19. So far most conversations have focused on post-spillover preparedness, interventions and health system strengthening. While these steps are critical, they’re insufficient to protect against the coming pandemics.

Some steps have been taken in this direction, though. In the United States, the House of Representatives passed pandemic prevention provisions as part of the America COMPETES Act on Feb. 4. The bill calls on the U.S. government to work with countries to end the commercial live wildlife trade for human consumption. An alternate version of the bill passed the Senate on March 28, so the two chambers must reconcile their differences before it can go to President Biden’s desk. The key primary spillover prevention and One Health policies must be retained during the conference negotiations.

On a global scale, pandemic preparedness — and to a far lesser degree, prevention — has also been discussed in major multilateral forums, including the G7, G20 and the United Nations security council. Most importantly, the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, initiated a global process in December 2021 to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instruments under the WHO constitution to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

This was an essential step as it recognized the importance of pandemic prevention, which had previously been absent from the global agenda. However, a recent statement by World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in support of a global treaty on pandemic prevention omitted any mention of a prevention-at-the-source approach. This demonstrates that the concept of pandemic prevention has yet to be fully embraced. NGOs and civil society need to urgently inform and nudge governments and delegates at the World Health Assembly to focus efforts on pandemic prevention. At the same time, concerned citizens can engage their representatives to advocate and support funding for prevention.

This pandemic has made it blatantly clear that we can no longer view our health in isolation. We need to implement a One Health framework that recognizes the interrelatedness and interdependencies of all living things and acknowledge health as a tightly intertwined global common.

We know the best practices to avoid the next pandemic. Recognizing and valuing the foundational importance of intact and resilient environments, stopping deforestation, limiting land-use change, and eliminating the commercial live animal trade for consumption will be critical to our future health and wellbeing. Let’s make these our urgent priorities.

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Coronaviruses and the Human Meat Market

Protect This Place: Kenya’s Kinangop Grasslands

Saving these privately owned grasslands is the key to protecting endangered birds and other unique biodiversity.

The place:

Kinangop Plateau lies between the western border of the Aberdare Mountains and eastern escarpment of the Great Rift Valley, Kenya. It is 62 miles northeast of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

Why it matters:

The Kinangop Highland Grasslands are internationally recognized as an Important Bird Area. They’re home to approximately 200 bird species, many of which are threatened. These include the endangered and endemic Sharpe’s longclaw (Kinangop being its stronghold habitat), endangered grey crowned crane, vulnerable Aberdare cisticola and range-restricted long-tailed widowbird.

Sharpe's longclaw — A Sharp’s longclaw hides in the Kinangop grasslands. Photo: FoKP

The threat:

Despite their ecological importance, the Kingangop Highland Grasslands are privately owned and therefore not protected. We’ve seen a sharp decline in their extent and quality over the past 50 years. Now it’s estimated that less than 10% of the original 300 square miles (77,000 hectares) remains suitable habitat for Sharpe’s longclaw and other threatened birds in the region.

Kinangop grasslands — Intact grasslands. Photo: FoKP

Serious threats include the change of land use from traditional livestock grazing to crop cultivation, exotic tree plantations, weed invasion and overgrowing of tussock, along with habitat fragmentation as the local human population increases. This rampant decrease of suitable habitat is directly harming the Sharpe’s longclaw, a grassland specialist that completely avoids non-grassland landscapes like agricultural fields. If this trend continues, the birds are likely to become extinct soon.

My place in this place:

While growing up as a young, energetic and playful boy here in Kinangop, I vividly recall the great diversity of birds that I observed. My parents owned close to 50 acres of land, and almost all of it was intact grassland used for grazing livestock. This was the situation for most of Kinangop three decades ago.

Yet over the years I witnessed the collapse of the livestock-rearing support system. This led to a severely reduced income among grassland owners, who had to start cultivating vegetables — potatoes, peas, beans and cabbages — and fast-growing non-native trees to make a living. The change in land use dramatically reduced the extent and quality of the grasslands throughout plateau, which decreased the population size and diversity of the birds these habitats supported, including the Sharpe’s longclaw. This situation prompted action from conservationists at Friends of Kinangop Plateau.

FoKP, a community conservation organization, has been running for about two decades. We initially started working to understand the biodiversity in Kinangop Grasslands and create awareness among the local communities, but later we started helping local farmers earn an income sustainably.

Working for FoKP has added to my passion for species conservation and granted me the perfect opportunity to pursue research in Kinangop. In particular, I have monitored the habitats and the resident bird populations over the past two decades, and have found that bird numbers, diversity and habitats have significantly reduced, with less than 10% of the grasslands and fewer than 700 individual Sharpe’s longclaw remaining.

Who’s protecting it now:

The grasslands have received little conservation attention other than from FoKP. Our efforts have helped raise awareness about species and habitat conservation among a large proportion of local residents. Together with our strategic partner Nature Kenya and other partners, we have bought four grassland nature reserves, totaling over 200 acres, which provides suitable habitat for the Sharpe’s longclaw and other grassland biodiversity. We have also built a Resources Centre for training and creating conservation awareness among local communities. Finally, and most importantly, to complement sheep farming, FoKP established a Cooperative Society, an initiative that involves working with more than 30 local farmers who control over 600 acres of grasslands. FoKP buys their wool products at favorable prices, serving as an incentive for them to maintain the grasslands.

A woolen door mat produced at the FoKP workshop.

What this place needs:

There’s a need to incentivize livestock rearing amongst farmers — especially for those farms harboring high numbers of Sharpe’s longclaw — because it’s more compatible with bird conservation than continued conversion of grasslands to cropland. While livestock can still disturb or trample longclaw nests without the right precautions, the re-adoption of this economic model would lead to a positive impact for the biodiversity currently living on the edge of extinction.

A black-headed heron in newly cultivated grasslands. Photo: FoKP

In the past few years, a support system has revitalized livestock rearing in the region, which is good news for maintaining and hopefully increasing the extent of the grasslands. Research has shown that sustainable open livestock grazing can be beneficial to the endangered Sharpe’s longclaw, which requires short grass with tussock. This requires farmers to maintain the right numbers of livestock in each of these grasslands to avoid overgrazing and ensure optimum productivity of livestock and biodiversity sustainability.

A few challenges still hinder the wide adoption of livestock rearing, and solving them would mean significant success in saving the grassland habitat and its biodiversity:

1. Inadequate financial capacity of farmers and landowners is preventing them from shifting to livestock rearing, such as purchasing good livestock breeds and building good-quality sheds for the animals. We would like to see several demonstration farms established across the grassland for residents to learn from and adopt easily.
2. Inadequate skills in good livestock management amongst farmers, which could be addressed by training, workshops and exchange visits.
3. Difficulty in sustaining a biodiversity monitoring scheme that offers a comprehensive, up-to-date dataset to help inform decisions.
4. Fear of change by farmers due to insufficient knowledge about income rates, sustainability and markets. Socioeconomic research needs to be carried out, and the results effectively communicated to residents, to show them that open livestock rearing is more profitable than cultivation farming.

Follow the fight:

To see more of what we’re doing for the grasslands, visit our website: www.fokp.or.ke

grey crowned crane — Grey crowned cranes in Kinangop. Photo: FoKP

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: Burley Estuary, Threatened by Industrialized Aquaculture

Oil Development Is Changing the Rules of the Game for Wildlife

New research shows that oil drilling in Canada’s boreal forest is changing how wolves, caribou, bears and other species interact.

Major ecological changes are afoot in western Canada’s boreal forests, and they have scientists concerned. The most glaring problem is a steep decline in boreal woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou), listed as threatened under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.

“There are populations in Alberta that probably don’t have a couple years to live,” says wildlife ecologist Jason Fisher of the University of Victoria. “It’s bad. This is really something we have to address immediately.”

Some scientists and government officials have blamed wolves for caribou losses. And desperate times have led to desperate measures to protect the endangered ungulates, including culling wolves. But research published in 2020 showed that landscape changes like oil development and logging are ultimately responsible for caribou declines. Clearings in the forest, the researchers found, function like predator highways and aid the wolves in their hunting.

Now a new study in the journal Science of the Total Environment shows that development from the oil industry in Alberta is causing more than just a change in wolf-caribou relations. The research analyzed three years of camera trap data that also included other forest mammals, like white-tailed deer, moose, black bears, coyotes, lynxes and fishers.

Yes, the forests still hold a lot of wildlife, the study found. But not necessarily in a good way.

“What this paper showed is that these features are bringing animals together,” says Fisher, a study co-author, who also leads the mammal component of the Oil Sands Monitoring Program, which tracks the environmental impact of extraction in Alberta. “The industrial footprint changes the rules of the eternal game of hide-and-seek between predators and prey,” he adds.

Scientists are realizing this can have far-reaching effects across the ecosystem.

A Fragmented Landscape

Alberta, Canada sits above one of the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world. But it’s also “unconventional” crude known as oil or tar sands, which are much harder to get out of the ground than conventional oil that’s in liquid form between rock formations.

The fossil fuel industry extracts deposits closest to the surface by razing the boreal forest and digging massive open-pit mines. Much has been written about the great harms that process causes to the environment and human health.

But from a production standpoint, open-pit mines extract less oil than in situ development, in which wells are dug in the ground and the viscous bitumen pumped out (often after heating or adding other fluids).

That process doesn’t create the same decimated landscape as mines — or the arresting images that have garnered the world’s attention.

cleared land with bitumen, mud — An oils sands mine in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Kris Krüg (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But it’s still a significant industrial process.

First it requires cutting straight routes through the forest to run seismic machines that use ground-penetrating sonar to look for oil deposits. If producers find an area or “play” they think they want to develop, they use another type of seismic machine that requires felling more trees. These swathes are narrower, but are cut in a hashtag-like pattern, known as 3D seismic lines.

That maps out where in the play to start drilling exploratory wells, which then requires clearing larger patches of ground completely. If a suitable area is found, a wellhead is constructed.

“Once you have enough of those well sites in the landscape, you have to connect them up with pipelines,” says Fisher. “Then you need roads to service the pipelines, and all the pipelines go to a compressor station that gathers it all up and then sends it on down the line.”

All that development leaves industrial footprints of different shapes and sizes stamped across the boreal forest.

“Our job [as landscape ecologists] is to understand how that’s affecting what’s left, because the amount of forest removed is actually only about 10% of that land base,” he explains. “You might think that’s ‘intact’ — but it’s not, because in landscape ecology, shape matters.”

Predators and Prey

What happens when a forest is heavily fragmented? In the boreal, researchers found that larger mammals — especially predators — react more strongly to the disturbed areas when lots of deer and moose show up, which they usually do, because they’re attracted to the vegetation that grows after the trees are cut.

Moose and deer come for this new buffet, which attracts more wolves and bolsters their populations. The lines cleared through the forest also make it much easier to move around and hunt.

Along the way, caribou become an unintended target.

“Wolves encounter woodland caribou more often, which means they nail more caribou,” says Fisher. “And that’s one of the proximal mechanisms for woodland caribou decline.” Previous research found a similar scenario playing out in Ontario after large-scale disturbances like commercial logging.

Oil development in the boreal also enables coyotes, who thrive in human-disturbed landscape, to expand their ranges. And coyotes, the researchers found, were more likely to use roads when moose were around. That closer proximity allows for more coyote predation on moose — especially moose calves. And like, wolves and caribou, roads enable coyotes to run faster and hunt moose more effectively.

forest with series of lines cleared through and snow on the ground — Lines cleared through the forest in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Kris Krüg (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Another recent study found that rare and elusive wolverines could suffer as more coyotes expand into boreal forests, competing for similar resources.

As for the region’s biggest predators, bears often avoid the clearings from 3D seismic lines, but the study in Science of the Total Environment found they’re more attracted to those areas (or minimally less repulsed) when moose are present. Bears may even play an unseen rate in moose declines. Moose populations in Canada are “all over the map,” says Fisher, and are dropping in some areas, including neighboring British Columbia.

Bears will prey on young caribou, too. They don’t seem to gravitate toward oil and gas development like wolves, but they also don’t always avoid those areas either, says Fisher.

“They just sort of seem to go where they want, when they want,” he says. “If we drive wolves down, my worry is that things like coyotes will take their place, but maybe also bears.”

Then there are the smaller furbearers like lynxes, red fox and fishers. The picture there is less clear. Overall things aren’t great for those populations. “They’re tanking fast, but we’re not really sure why yet,” he says.

Changing Climate

Climate has a hand in amplifying some of these changes.

Warming temperatures are increasing insect infestations from mountain pine beetles and spruce budworm, which have killed large swathes of forest. Once that happens, any rules in place to ensure more responsible logging are out the window.

“If mountain pine beetles have killed it, [loggers can] take the wood,” says Fisher. “And so you end up with these big moonscapes, which probably has something to do with moose declines.”

Warming temperatures also means less severe winters with reduced snowpacks — and that has also opened the door for white-tailed deer to move into the boreal. The changes in vegetation from logging and gas development have lured them north in such great numbers that they’re now the most abundant ungulates in boreal.

And as we already know, that drives wolf numbers up, and woodland caribou down.

“This interplay between climate change and landscape change is almost like a perfect storm of problems that have beset the boreal forest,” Fisher says. “We’re only on the tip of the iceberg now — we’ve only really started looking at this in earnest over the last couple of years and realizing, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got a real brewing storm on our hands.’ ”

Solutions … or Lack Thereof

So what’s to be done?

The most time-sensitive problem is the decline of caribou, but killing wolves likely won’t provide a long-term solution. Fewer wolves may boost the number of coyotes, who also prey on young caribou.

Invasive white-tailed deer could also increase in numbers at a greater rate if wolf populations fall.

Another problem is that land is still being cleared at a rate that’s detrimental to caribou.

“We can do a better job at landscape protection,” says Fisher.

Not to mention restoration. All companies are required to do reclamation, but that’s often a far cry from real restoration. Reclamation focuses on making a brown area look green, usually by planting something quick-growing like grasses.

Some companies have gone beyond Canada’s federal mandates and replanted native shrubs and trees. But a lot more of that is needed, says Fisher. And it will be a long time before the newly planted vegetation grows up.

caribou eating in enclosure — A caribou maternity penning project in Revelstoke, Canada to aid southern mountain caribou. Photo: Revelstoke Caribou Rearing in the Wild (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In the meantime, research suggests that wolves can be slowed down in other ways. A 2021 study found that erecting obstacles along linear clearings reduced the ratio of wolf-caribou encounters by 85% and black bear-caribou encounters by 60%.

“By managing animal movements that regulate predator–prey encounters, risk to endangered species can be reduced without the disruptive trophic effects caused by intensive carnivore removals,” the researchers found.

Protecting caribou when they’re young also helps. In British Columbia the Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations have had success with a program that pens and protects pregnant woodland caribou and the calves until they’re a few months old.

“I think the evidence is really clear that using multiple strategies is far better than just throwing all your eggs into the wolf-kill basket,” says Fisher. “And we can’t do that either because people see that as lifting the weight of responsibility from oil companies and putting it on wolves as a scapegoat, and that’s just not sustainable societally.”

There’s still a lot that needs to be done to understand the changes that are happening, he says. But the world should take note.

As Fisher and conservation biologist A. Cole Burton warned in a 2018 study, “The Canadian oil sands provide an early warning: as oil and gas extraction continues to drive national and global economies, the biodiversity effects we observed are a precursor of the potential future of landscape change in unconventional petroleum regions around the globe.”

Previously in The Revelator:

What’s Really Behind Dwindling Numbers of Woodland Caribou?

In Austria the Government Pays to Repair Your Stuff

A Viennese repair bonus is keeping thousands of items out of the junkyard and inspiring other cities.

This story was originally published in Reasons to Be Cheerful. Read the original here.

Sepp Eisenriegler loves giving second chances: To the defunct electrical appliances awaiting repair or refurbishment, the hundreds of unemployed people he’s trained as skilled repairers over the decades and even the two rescue dogs that follow him devotedly around R.U.S.Z., the repair and service center he founded in Vienna in 1998.

It wasn’t always an easy road, but he’s noticed a sea change in the past couple of years. It started with Fridays for Future: “Attitudes started to change. We saw more and more young people in our weekly repair café and as clients at our repair shop.” When the pandemic hit, business increased again: “People were uncertain about the future and decided to save money by having things repaired instead of buying them new. At the same time, everyone had too much time and started cleaning out their garages and attics, finding all sorts of old things with sentimental value that they wanted to have repaired.”

And then came the Vienna repair bonus. The city of Vienna started the Reparaturbon as a pilot in 2020 as a way to promote repair and support local businesses. Through the scheme, which has since concluded, 50 percent of repair costs were subsidized by the city, capped at €100. The bonus, which covered anything repairable, from clothing and electronics to bicycles and furniture, was a success: Over 35,000 items were repaired through the scheme, saving 850 tons of CO2 emissions. Other Austrian cities had tried repair bonuses in the past, but the beauty of the Viennese model was in its simplicity: while previously customers had to pay for the repair in full and then jump through bureaucratic hoops for reimbursement, they can now simply pay half of the cost, with the rest reimbursed directly to the repair shop. In January 2021 Austria also reduced the tax (VAT) on repairs of bicycles, shoes and clothing.

Now a national repair bonus, which will kick off this month, will adopt the same approach focusing on E-waste, which is the fastest growing waste stream in the developed world. Eighty-three thousand tons of it land in Austrian landfills every year, of which only around 17% is recycled. The national repair bonus will subsidize 50% of repair costs for electronic and electrical equipment, capped at €200 per repair.

The price of repair is one of the biggest mental hurdles that prevent people from seeing it as a viable option, says Chloé Mikolajczak, a campaigner for Right to Repair Europe. “We find that if the cost of repair is 30% or higher than the cost of a new product, people don’t tend to repair.” Eisenriegler has often experienced this firsthand: “If we tell a customer that the repair of their washing machine will cost €152, they often say ‘sure, but for €250 I can buy a new one on sale.’”

Man leaning over desk in shop — Gasim, a R.U.S.Z. employee, prepares items that can’t be repaired for a trip to the recycling center. Photo: Kaja Šeruga

The repair bonus promotes a mind shift that will pay dividends once repair becomes the more accessible option. Since the Viennese repair bonus started, local repair shops have seen a rise in new customers, as well as a rise in the quality of repair, as people decided to splurge on better spare parts, says Markus Piringer from the eco-counselling NGO, DIE UMWELTBERATUNG, who also coordinates the Repair Network. “But I prefer the idea of changing the whole economic system — the repair bonus is just a single step,” he points out.

“The repair bonus is an excellent crutch to compensate for the failure of the market,” agrees Eisenriegler. A glut of cheap low-quality products combined with the high cost of repair due to expensive spare parts and labor have skewed people’s perceptions. A system change is needed in the long-term, including a right to repair on all products that are not limited to professional repair people, easy and affordable access to spare parts and environmental tax reform.

Until that day comes, the repair bonus model is gaining in popularity as a bridging measure. Both the German state of Thüringen and the city of Portland, Oregon, followed Vienna’s example with their own schemes in the spring of 2021. Eisenriegler, who has spent the better part of 30 years lobbying for sustainable solutions in Brussels, already sees the first signs of an EU-wide repair bonus. It is being discussed in connection with eco-social tax reforms, but he points out that the desired systemic change would make the repair bonus obsolete: “If we have a tax reform where labor is taxed less while resources become more expensive, we won’t be needing this crutch anymore.”

The Austrian repair bonus, which is expected to run until 2026, is financed by €130 million from the EU Covid-19 recovery fund, and is expected to subsidize 400,000 repairs. Piringer points out that Austria might have trouble meeting a steep rise in demand, since thereis a dearth of skilled repair professionals.

Luckily, Eisenriegler is already a few steps ahead. In September, 2021 he started a pilot program in cooperation with the Austrian Public Employment Service (AMS) and the Vocational Training Institute (BFI), in which 10 long-term unemployed people were trained in repair in a 6-month program. In a way, his story has come full circle: R.U.S.Z. started out as a work-integration social enterprise that turned about 400 people from marginalized backgrounds into repair professionals in its first decade. The plan is to extend this model to other Austrian states and abroad, and they are currently in discussions to add a repair specialization to the mechatronics course at the BFI.

He expects that the first graduates of this program might be entering the workforce in 5 years’ time, and they will find themselves in a very different world. The eco-design regulation that gave EU its first right to repair legislation in 2021 will soon include tablets and smartphones, and there are discussions about an EU-wide repairability index based on the French model, as well as several other policy initiatives regarding the right to repair. Coupled with a move towards environmental taxation, these changes could soon pave the way towards a world where repair, not replacement, is the first choice. Mikolajczak is looking forward to it: “I think it’s going to be a great year for repair.”

Hope for Coral Reefs

A new book tracks scientific research and restoration efforts around the world that are focused on saving this critical ocean ecosystem.

Juli Berwald’s love affair with coral began when she saw her first reef in college — and it changed her life. Mesmerized by the beauty of these underwater animals, she set out on a path to study marine biology, eventually earning a Ph.D.

But events took her away from the sea and ocean research. Living in landlocked Austin, Texas, she became a science writer. Years later, on a family trip to the Caribbean, she dipped beneath the surface of the water again. This time she wasn’t greeted by vibrant colors and teeming life but by the quiet horror of a dead reef.

All the news she’d read about bleaching reefs and the myriad environmental pressures facing coral came viscerally to life. The grief from that experience stayed with her — along with a renewed concern for the future of the world’s coral reefs.

She channeled all that into a new book, Life on the Rocks, about the search for solutions and the science that’s driving “nuggets of hope” even in the face of a grave prognosis for corals. Already three-quarters of the world’s reefs have been damaged by warming ocean waters. Climate change poses existential threats to corals, and so do other human activities.

The book is also firmly rooted in time. In the years that Berwald spent researching and writing, her own life was a bit on the rocks as well. The story of coral is interwoven with a narrative about Berwald’s daughter suffering from a mental illness, a global pandemic upending life around the world, and a nation erupting in outrage over the murder of George Floyd and ongoing violence against Black Americans.

Berwald at first hesitated to include all those threads, but realized that climate change, racial justice and health are firmly intertwined. And sometimes, she says, we forget that science isn’t separate from the rest of life.

“Scientists are affected by sick children and political events, and I think we do a disservice to science when we don’t see it as part of what it is to be human,” she told The Revelator.

We talked to her about whether restoration efforts can be scaled, why the ocean needs an advertising agency, and what gives her hope.

You’ve been interested in ocean life for a long time. Why a book about coral and why now?

I grew up in the Midwest, and the first time I really realized there was an ocean on this planet was in college. I went to Israel and I was miserable with the program I was on. There was a marine ecology course offered for a week in the Red Sea, so I signed up on a lark.

When I put my head in the water for the first time and saw coral, I couldn’t believe we lived on the same planet with these animals. And these were animals that were building these forests, but they were like fairy lands. The incredible diversity of shape and form and texture I saw — it just changes you forever.

I fell in love with the ocean because of the coral. And then, of course, your career doesn’t always take you exactly where you want it to go. I thought I would study coral biomechanics because I was a math major, but that didn’t work out. I instead studied satellite imagery.

Sometimes you have to leave something behind in your life. And so I did. But then after my book Spineless, about jellyfish, came out in 2019, I’d sort of found an audience. I decided with a lot of trepidation that I needed to go back to the coral because it’s really the first great ecosystem on our planet that is threatened by climate change in a very critical and existential way.

I really wanted to go back and see how these animals — these great ecosystems that I first fell in love — are doing. What is the hope and what is the reality of what they’re up against?

What did you find are the biggest threats facing coral reefs?

Climate change is definitely number one on the list. If we don’t deal with climate change, the coral reefs have really big problems in front of them. It’s worth saying, though, that geneticists are finding incredible amounts of genetic diversity on the reef, and we don’t yet know how much that will allow them to adapt to this future warmer world.

Another big problem is water quality. Coral evolved in tropical waters where there aren’t a lot of nutrients. But once we started fertilizing land and having more people creating sanitation issues, there’s more nutrients in tropical places now and that’s hard for the coral to tolerate. It has led to a whole flurry of diseases that have knocked out a lot of coral.

The other thing that’s been really bad is overfishing and illegal fishing, which destabilizes ecosystems. But practices like blast fishing and cyanide fishing and just dragging nets and anchors over reefs can also physically damage reefs.

Author facing camera — Juli Berwald. Photo: Madeleine Tilin

What is the role that algae play in coral reefs, and how is that changing with warming waters?

The reason that coral can exist and create these incredibly rich ecosystems in tropical places is because they form this amazing alliance with algae that live in their tissues. And those algae photosynthesize, and they feed up to 90% of the sugar that they make directly to the coral.

That gives coral this incredible power source, and with that they make the great limestone reefs everywhere.

But what happens is when the water temperature increases by a few degrees for a few weeks, that alliance breaks up. And that’s what bleaching is — the color of the coral comes from the algae, and without the algae the corals are just clear.

The question of why the alliance breaks up is a super-active area of research. We really don’t even know who throws the switch, which one goes first. Is it the coral kicking the algae out? Or is the algae saying, “See you, I don’t like being in this stressed animal”?

The cool thing is that it turns out the coral can make alliances with several different kinds of algae, and what the scientists are finding is that after bleaching sometimes a different species of algae will colonize the coral. And some of those species actually have higher thermal tolerances, so they can remain in the coral under hotter conditions. But some of these new algae are actually more selfish and they feed the coral less sugar. So there’s a lot of tradeoffs happening.

It could be that the coral can survive on these more limited energy supplies until we’re able to deal with climate change. It also may be that some coral can switch to these new algae and some can’t. There’s lots of possibilities, but it’s what scientists call a “nugget of hope.” It’s really an evolving story that’s fascinating.

white corals on reef — Coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, 2017. Photo: The Ocean Agency / Ocean Image Bank

You visited projects around the world focused on reef restoration. Which of those did you find particularly hopeful … and scalable?

The scalable issue is the hardest part because reefs are massive. The Great Barrier Reef is bigger than Italy. When we think about restoring a few acres, and you compare that to the size of Italy, you see what a massive issue it is.

But one place where I saw a lot of hope was in Indonesia with a project by Mars, the candy bar company. It’s right in the middle of the coral triangle, which is the place of the highest diversity of coral in the world. This is between the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. There’s about 400 or 500 species of coral that live in that region compared to in the Caribbean where there’s about 40.

The problem in this part of Indonesia is blast fishing, where fishermen, driven by poverty, use explosives to collect fish, and that destroys coral. Even though it’s illegal, I heard one or two bombs explode every time I dove. But Mars, which has chocolate factories there, wanted to do something to bring back the coral reefs in this region.

They came up with this really simple rebar structure that’s about as big as if you put your arms out in a circle. It has six legs on it and you tie broken pieces of corals to each of the legs in certain places. And then network a whole bunch of them, like 100 or 200 or 300 together underwater, and stake them down on these reefs that have become rubble.

Within 18 months the corals regrow, and within three years, you can’t even see the rebar structures at all. And it feels like a very vibrant, beautiful, intricate reef. The cost per coral planted is about $1 to $2. That’s a great number because you have to replant hundreds of thousands of corals in order to make a reef healthy.

Then in the Caribbean, a lot of the corals aren’t really reproducing like they need to sustain themselves. So there’s neat projects going on with massive in-lab fertilizations, like these huge orgies, where they collect the coral spawn. Then they mix them all together and you get these larvae that they plant on Tinkertoy-shaped ceramic pieces.

Then they protect the coral and let them lay down their little baby skeletons and get big enough to have a better chance of survival once they put them on the reef. They’re able to replant tens of thousands at a time. Those projects are still ongoing, but hopefully that will help bulk up the amount of coral out there.

In the past we’ve sort of just looked at conservation in the ocean, like “let’s just protect regions and the ocean will come back.” But scientists have realized that coral are in such dire conditions, and it’s such a critical time for them, that we have to actively go out there and do things to make the reef more healthy [while efforts are ongoing to fight climate change].

At the same time coral scientists are actively looking for genetic strains that are more resilient to the thermal changes that are happening.

It seems there’s more reporting and concern now about climate change — at least as it concerns what’s happening on land. Is the story about what’s happening in the ocean being conveyed well enough?

I would say no. In the book one of the people who I follow is Richard Vevers, who’s in the documentary Chasing Coral, which follows the terrible coral bleachings in 2016 and 2017. He’s an advertising executive who started an advertising firm — the Ocean Agency — to get information to people about what’s happening to coral.

As I’ve followed him, I’ve seen his frustration at trying to get people to understand just how dire things are, and also how important coral is as an ecosystem. The numbers are stunning. A quarter of all marine species depend on coral at some point in their life. And between a half a billion and a billion people depend on coral ecosystems for their primary source of protein.

He gets so frustrated that some see coral as a lost cause already and throw up their hands. And that politicians are just not taking climate change as seriously as they should be. I recently spoke to him about the next [international global climate meeting] COP 27, which will be in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. That’s on the edge of the coral reef where I first fell in love with corals.

These corals — their lives, their futures — will be decided just a few miles away up on land by people sitting in these convention halls. Richard wants to take the people from that meeting out onto this reef to say, “This is literally what’s at stake here.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Vanishing: The Bleaching in My Backyard

How to Stop Wildlife Trafficking in Its Tracks

The rich countries that fuel demand for wildlife products must step up to fulfill their enforcement responsibilities and support developing countries and vulnerable communities.

In 1973, when environmental consciousness was only just dawning in the international community, representatives of 80 nations gathered to finalize a new treaty called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which entered into force in 1975. As human-driven species endangerment and extinction became difficult to ignore, these states were driven to regulate the lucrative international wildlife trade to guarantee the survival of species involved. Such plants and animals were still seen as a resource to exploit, but not to the point of disappearance.

Extinction is, after all, bad for business.

The global environmental movement has transformed unrecognizably in the intervening years, becoming a glorious cacophony of diverse voices and priorities. Many of us no longer see the natural world as a reservoir of untapped wealth to be managed and exploited at will but recognize our responsibilities to all living beings who share this planet with us, even as we heat and pollute it.

Despite almost 50 years of CITES efforts, the global wildlife trade is booming, with the legal trade worth at least $107 billion and illegal trafficking as much as one-quarter of this figure.

Stored illegal wildlife products. Photo: Ryan Moehring/USFWS

Wildlife trafficking poses one of the most pressing global threats to biodiversity. It also devastates human communities by fueling organized criminal networks, armed conflict, and other environmentally destructive practices such as illegal mining. In addition, commercial markets in live wildlife — whether the trade itself is legal or illegal — present serious risks of pathogen spillover and epidemics and pandemics of zoonotic origin.

If CITES is to stay relevant in the global fight against the destruction of nature, the next big meeting of the Parties — COP19, scheduled to be held in Panama this November — must address the structural issues undermining its commitment to the protection of threatened and endangered species.

Currently the CITES framework presupposes that member states possess equal means to regulate the legal trade — and sanction the illegal trade — in wildlife products. This simply does not correspond to the reality of today’s deeply unequal world. Furthermore, national trade interests often hold sway over conservation imperatives. This is particularly problematic, given that the Parties (member states) together must vote on which species can come under CITES protection, with decisions often politically or economically motivated irrespective of the conservation imperatives. Among high-income countries — often the source of the demand for luxury wildlife products — we observe a culture of complacence, with widespread practices of underreporting trade in protected species and insufficient resources committed to shutting down illegal trafficking networks.

Looking at the trade in rosewood, the most widely trafficked wild product in the world by both volume and value, provides an example of many of these problems. Exported for the most part from Africa, Madagascar and Central America, much of the world’s rosewood is destined to become luxury furniture, including in China. Much less elegant are the implications of the trade — both legal and illegal — in funding armed conflict in Senegal, fueling corruption and organized criminal networks, and decimating forest habitats for local communities and wildlife.

Despite the inclusion of all rosewood on CITES Appendix II in 2016 — which allows international trade only if it’s determined to be legal and sustainable — the rosewood trade has continued to grow at an alarming rate. CITES does not have its own enforcement bodies, and the cost of regulating and enforcing wildlife trade falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the exporting country. All too often these nations lack sufficient resources to carry out necessary monitoring exercises and scientific activities. Furthermore, rampant corruption in some countries often undermines the entire system, with quotas and permits issued to traders based on commercial needs rather than conservation determinations.

The pattern repeats itself for many different species and wildlife products — from ivory to parrots, big cats to turtles — reflecting a complacency amongst CITES member states in the policing of trafficking. Some consumer countries that fuel the market in wildlife products are frequently not living up to their enforcement responsibilities, even as developing countries find themselves burdened with preventing illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade at its source and coping with the consequences.

While rosewood, ivory and other wildlife products are destined to be consumed by the world’s richest, the trade’s impacts tend to fall on vulnerable communities that depend on a healthy ecosystem for their livelihoods, food security and cultural identification. The rampant overexploitation of their wildlife and lands leaves such communities exposed to increased poverty and the violence of criminal networks as well as, in many cases, the worst impacts of climate change.

Wildlife trafficking reveals how the commoditization of living beings not only destroys the natural world, but also dehumanizes those who partake in it. In March the CITES Standing Committee made several encouraging decisions at a meeting in Lyon to enhance international cooperation, reinforce the potential of investigations, and improve the fight against trafficking of multiple species.

Seized wildlife products — Seized furs and other wildlife products. Photo: Catherine J. Hibbard/USFWS

It’s still not enough. If CITES parties are to stop wildlife trafficking in its tracks, there must be a commitment of resources and political will commensurate with the problem. High-income countries must recognize their responsibilities to support both vulnerable communities and overrun states at the front lines of the trade through financial and technical support. They must also face up to their role in markets fueling demand for illegally obtained animals, plants or their products. All actors must be mobilized in this fight, from customs workers to transporters to judicial services and the consumers of wildlife products who are fueling demand.

This concerted effort can only be achieved when CITES Parties change their perspective. Wildlife can no longer be reduced just to tradable goods in need of regulation. Governments must leave national interests at the doors of the negotiating rooms in Panama and, as the first line of the CITES treaty so poignantly reminds us, recognize “that wild fauna and flora in their many beautiful and varied forms are an irreplaceable part of the natural systems of the earth which must be protected for this and the generations to come.”

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Wildlife Trafficking: 10 Things Everyone Needs to Know

The Legacy of Lake Pedder: How the World’s First Green Political Party Was Born in Tasmania 50 Years Ago

A modern movement to restore the lake symbolizes the broader contest between unsustainable industrialization and challenges such as climate change.

Fifty years ago this week, the world’s first “green” political party was born in Tasmania after the state government purposefully flooded the magnificent Lake Pedder.

The flooding made way for a hydro-electricity scheme, transforming the nearly 4-square-mile lake into a reservoir spanning almost 96 square miles today. This damaged the surrounding wilderness — now recognized as part of Tasmania’s World Heritage Area — and greatly tarnished its natural beauty.

Gordon Dam. Photo: Ben Cordia (CC BY 2.0)

The controversial move sparked nationwide outcry. In an effort to save the lake, the United Tasmania Group was formed on March 23, 1972 by fielding candidates in the state election that year. The party was the forerunner to the Australian Greens and saw other green-oriented political parties soon follow worldwide, including New Zealand’s Values Party and Switzerland’s Popular Movement for the Environment.

Now, half a century later, environmentalists are upping their campaign to restore the lake to its former glory. It symbolizes the broader contest between unsustainable industrialization and a greener economy that addresses challenges such as climate change.

The Lake Was Once Beautiful

Before 1972, Pedder was a remnant glacial lake flanked by a spectacular, pink-quartzite beach and mossy rivulets.

Nestled amid a primeval mountain range 1,000 feet above sea level, the alpine lake had geomorphological significance as it was formed in the outwash of a glacier an estimated 1 million years ago, when ice sheets covered much of the planet.

And it was spectacularly wild. Prior to the flooding, Lake Pedder was difficult to access, known best to serious bushwalkers and tourists chartering light aircraft. These tourists and hikers brought the lake’s beauty and geological significance to a broader public when threats of flooding began to materialize.

The flooding saw heavy ecological losses. The massive hydropower dam drowned about 95 square miles of surrounding wilderness. This included a mosaic of diverse ecosystems including wetlands, temperate rainforest and buttongrass moorlands, along with several rare plant species.

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The Lake Pedder galaxias (Galaxias pedderensis), a fish once endemic to the lake, is now considered extinct in its natural habitat after 350,000 trout, a predator, were put in.

Four other species of invertebrate fauna, also endemic to the original Lake Pedder, have disappeared or dramatically declined due to the altered habitat.

The Birth of Green Politics

The loss of Pedder helped trigger the formation of the United Tasmania Group (UTG), which is generally credited as the world’s first political party with a foundation in environmental values.

While the UTG didn’t win seats in that or subsequent elections it contested during the 1970s, it was the forerunner to the Tasmanian Greens and, nationally, the Australian Greens.

But the UTG didn’t spring purely from the Lake Pedder controversy. As historian and journalist Paddy Manning identifies in his book on the history of the Greens, the UTG was part of broader global shift to greater environmental awareness in the 1970s. For example, the first Earth Day was held in 1970, and saw 20 million people in the United States demonstrate against the impacts of industrial development.

The name “Green” for environmentally minded political parties, however, came later. Indeed, it was derived from another Australian-first: the “Green Ban” movement in Sydney in the 1970s that united building workers and community groups to save cultural and natural heritage from destruction.

Restoring the Lake Today

The former Australian Greens leader Christine Milne is presently leading the campaign to restore Lake Pedder. This campaign actually began in the immediate aftermath of the damming for the hydropower scheme, when the Whitlam government appointed an inquiry in 1973 to advise on the area’s future, including possible restoration.

In 1994 the Pedder 2000 initiative was launched, which sought federal assistance to reinstate the lake by the start of the new century. A year later a federal parliamentary inquiry confirmed the scientific feasibility of restoring the lake.

However, the inquiry concluded that the most compelling reasons to restore the lake were aesthetic rather than for nature conservation. It said the economic costs and opposition by Tasmania’s major political parties meant restoration had “no real prospect of proceeding in the foreseeable future.”

Now, over two decades later, the campaign is once again gaining traction. The United Nations declared 2021-2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, calling for projects to replant forests, remove dams, rehabilitate wetlands and more. The 2021 Glasgow Climate Conference reinforced this message by affirming the importance of ecological restoration in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

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Restoring Lake Pedder would entail more than pulling the plug on the dams, and it would likely take several decades for the original ecosystems to flourish again. Yet, the major geomorphological features such as the lake’s iconic beach would quickly return as the waters retreated.

The arguments against Pedder’s restoration today primarily rest on its contribution to Tasmania’s electricity generation and its desire to be Australia’s “battery of the nation.”

But the economic advantages from Lake Pedder’s restoration may outweigh its value for electricity production, as new renewable energy projects step in to meet demand, coupled with the benefit of foregoing the growing cost of maintaining the ageing dams.

What’s more, once it is restored, the lake could become a major international tourist attraction. It truly was a scenic wonder on par with Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef, one we should fight to bring back.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

A Dam Comes Down — and Tribes, Cities, Salmon and Orcas Could All Benefit

Ukrainian Conservation Organizations Shift Missions to Humanitarian Support

Environmental groups fight Russia’s invasion by hosting refugees, delivering medical supplies and using drones to document war crimes.

Ukrainian conservation organizations have largely shifted their efforts to support refugees and other citizens in need, even as the environmental toll from the Russian invasion continues to loom over the country’s future.

“Almost all our projects are frozen now,” Bohdan Prots, CEO of the Danube Carpathian Programme, said March 17 during a webinar organized by Eurosite (the European Land Conservation Network). The event aimed to address the war’s effects on both people and nature. “After the first day… we changed from major conservation activity to mainly humanitarian support until the war is over,” he continued.

That includes raising money, as well as delivering medical supplies and other goods to hospitals, people in shelters and others in need.

Some conservation groups have put their existing infrastructure to good use. “Many of the [national] parks are also hosting refugees in their buildings,” said Ivan Timofeiev, head of the Ukrainian office of the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union. “They try to make the life of people as comfortable as possible right now.”

The Institute of Ecological and Religious Studies, meanwhile, has moved from its normal education efforts to hosting refugees and holding events for children to “make, for a few hours, more happy times, to forget this horror, this nightmare,” said Natalia Kluia, manager with the organization.

While some webinar participants live in relatively safe parts of Ukraine, the invasion has put many conservation professionals at direct risk. “Our colleagues in the northern part of the country are in the heart of the war,” said Yulia Bodarenko with the Ukrainian Society for the Protection of Birds. “One of them have no light or water. The roads also are not safe, so they cannot move out.” Bodarenko herself joined the webinar after escaping to Poland with her son.

Wherever they’ve ended up, their organizational skills and technical knowledge and systems have proven valuable to the resistance. Drones that would normally be used to track wildlife and photograph habitats are being redeployed to help refugees find clear escape route, locate wounded citizens, and even document evidence of war crimes — “which is quite often,” Prots said.

The evidence of damage to the environment, meanwhile, has yet to be fully collected — and the worst could be yet to come. “Most of Ukraine’s largest cites are next to rivers or wetlands,” said webinar moderator Tilmann Disselhoff, president of Eurosite. “So whatever happens there also affects the water system and can cause immense pollution.”

For now, though, “we cannot assess all these damages and pollution and ecological catastrophes,” said Bodarenko. “Our first task is to stop it, because each day it brings us more suffering, for people and environment.”

You can watch the full webinar below:

Previously in The Revelator:

10 Ways War Harms Wildlife