Some rivers and lakes wouldn’t be swimmable today without this critical law. But it could use a refresh to help meet our current challenges.
The Clean Water Act came to life the same year I did, kicking and screaming and full of promise. Now we’re both turning 50 — me and the law formally known as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972.
The half-century mark is a good time to take stock of one’s performance, and it’s fair to say that, like me, the Clean Water Act has some wrinkles and blemishes. As a longtime environmental journalist covering the Chesapeake Bay, I’ve seen the Act struggle as it reached middle age. At times, it hasn’t been all it could be, or all it should be.
It tackled the easy problems first, like factory pollution and sewage discharges, while putting off the harder lifts like agriculture and stormwater. And it’s become weak in the face of problems it doesn’t regulate, like manure runoff from small operations. It can seem, well, tired. As if it’s lost its fight, its verve, and it’s still following routines that don’t quite get the job done. We’re still wrangling over what waters fall under its jurisdiction, and what we define as a waterway. At 50, we should know what we are, right?
But I’ve seen major improvements that wouldn’t have happened without the law. So even if a blowout party is unwarranted (it’s still Covid times, after all), I think the Act is entitled to at least a nice glass of clean H20.
Fifty years after its passage, the Clean Water Act has restored fisheries in many rivers, lakes and estuaries. In Chicago, Pittsburgh, Chattanooga and Washington, D.C., residents can kayak on rivers that were once so fetid no one would dare go near them. Bostonians have taken clean water a step further; they can swim in the Charles. Musicians Randy Newman and Michael Stipe immortalized the burning smell of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River in their songs; today, largely thanks to the Act, the river has a state scenic river designation and has become a centerpiece of Cleveland’s downtown.
Kayakers on the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Photo: Erik Drost (CC BY 2.0)
With its cousin, the Clean Air Act, regulators forced polluters to stop emitting nitrogen, phosphorus, mercury and other pollutants into the air. Steel production, coal mining, oil and gas drilling, nuclear power generation — all these industries were put on notice. If they polluted the water, they wouldn’t be in business long. The government and citizens could file suit under the Clean Water Act. Not wanting to face the negative publicity or the fines, many industries worked with regulators to clean themselves up.
The Clean Water Act doesn’t celebrate its 50-year-milestone alone. It had help. On June 14, 1972 — the day I was born — the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of the pesticide DDT, which was killing eagles and ospreys in massive numbers. That October, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act to safeguard ocean mammals from poaching and other threats.
Thanks to these efforts, Chesapeake Bay now has more nesting pairs of bald eagles than any other place on the U.S. East Coast. The nation’s bird soars at Conowingo Dam, a power-generating station on the Susquehanna River, and at Aberdeen Proving Ground, which was once on the nation’s list of most hazardous sites for its legacy of pollution from munitions testing. Crabbers ply the waters from Baltimore to Norfolk; oyster dredgers work steadily in the Tangier Sound.
No species could thrive without clean water — nor could the fishers whose livelihoods depend on it. Aquaculture, too, has taken a hold in the Chesapeake. The most important consideration for where to locate an oyster farm or hatchery? The water’s salinity, and its cleanliness.
A bald eagle works on a mid-day fish along a dock pile at Mill Creek in Hampton, Virginia. Photo: Aileen Devlin/Virginia Sea Grant (CC BY-ND 2.0)
I’ve long admired the fortitude of the bipartisan Congress that overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto and passed the law to forever protect the waters of the United States. It wasn’t the first law to do it — the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 made it illegal to discharge refuse of any kind into navigable waters, and it later required federal permits to put structures in the water. But the Clean Water Act expanded protections to all waterways.
Monumental as it was, though, now the Clean Water Act at 50 needs a bit of a refresh, since the pollution it’s meant to stop has changed. In the Chesapeake Bay, our problem today is largely not industrial smokestacks but rather the detritus of how we live our lives. The Act doesn’t regulate these “nonpoint sources,” as we call them: the pesticides coming off our lawns, the motor oil and mercury in our stormwater, the nitrogen and phosphorus from the manure that farmers apply to their fields. We’ve made huge strides in sewage treatment, in standards for nitrogen emissions that end up in our waterways from cars, and in regulations for large animal facilities. But we have yet to figure out how to regulate the pollution that doesn’t come out of a tailpipe or a smokestack.
Another area that needs improvement: EPA officials regularly pass most of the Act’s enforcement to states, and states chronically understaff inspection units. Earlier this year Maryland Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles promised the legislature he would ramp up efforts, but only after lawmakers reviewed reports of how much the situation had deteriorated. If enforcement is lousy in a blue state bordering Washington, D.C., imagine how it looks in other states. All of them need to look at the teeth in their laws.
Laws like the Clean Water Act are good at stopping bad things, but they’re not always up to date for allowing good things. And that’s what we need now, whether it’s large-scale wind turbines in our oceans or manmade islands to protect crucial habitat for shorebirds. We need to eliminate barriers to beneficial uses of natural material, such as living shorelines, and not make the process of farming oysters so onerous. We need developers to understand that filling a wetland and creating another is nothing like no-net-loss; it’s a capitulation of everything we hold dear. Water ecosystems take decades to evolve and grow; laws that protect them must take into account the importance of legacy plants that hold roots together and protect land and water.
Despite the wear and tear, the Clean Water Act is holding up. The women’s magazines keep telling us 50 is still young and vibrant. And I hope that’s true for this law. There’s a lot more to do.
We can’t achieve a just clean energy transition if people are struggling to pay their bills and stay in their homes, says equity expert Carmelita Miller.
Carmelita Miller recalls the black cloud of smoke she saw in the sky the evening of Sept. 9, 2010, when she stepped out of the train station in South San Francisco. Her phone lit up with messages from concerned friends and family. She’d soon learn that a gas pipeline owned by the local power company, PG&E, had exploded in a residential neighborhood a few miles from her home, killing eight people.
Just two years later an explosion across the bay, at a Chevron refinery in Richmond, sent another black cloud of toxic chemicals into the air — and 15,000 people to the emergency room.
“It’s so easy to be cynical about climate justice when things like that are so close to your family,” she says.
Since then she’s seen a growing concern in California over wildfires and heatwaves, situations exacerbated by climate change and fossil fuels. At the same time, Covid hardships have pushed energy utility debt in California to nearly $3 billion, and many families have increasingly struggled to pay their utility bills.
And low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately affected — by both climate threats and energy debt.
A fire at Chevron’s Richmond, CA refinery in 2012. Photo: Nick Fullerton, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Miller, who was born in the Philippines and grew up in South San Francisco, has spent the past decade trying to get regulators and policymakers to address this burden, and make sure that these same communities aren’t left behind in the clean energy transition. After receiving a law degree, she joined the Greenlining Institute in 2013, eventually becoming the senior director of climate equity. Last month she was hired as the first director of energy equity strategies at the nonprofit RMI. The organization has spent 40 years creating global programs to help speed the transition to clean energy, and her new position will address equity across all of the institute’s programs.
The Revelator spoke to Miller about climate inequities, why the issue is personal for her, and how to best support communities.
You studied the classics in college, before getting a law degree. How did you get involved in climate equity issues?
I always knew that I was going to end up in a form of racial justice advocacy. Even in law school I focused on issues like immigration and employment. It was very natural for me to find programs that weren’t benefiting communities or were harming them.
At Greenlining I was energy counsel and then, eventually, director of the energy and climate team. I worked on low-income proceedings of the California Public Utility Commission and demand-side or customer programs.
It became very clear to me that not a lot of people were paying attention to the heavy financial burden that many community members — even my own family members — were carrying in terms of paying for their energy bills.
Energy equity is personal for you?
I’m way too familiar with it because I grew up poor. I grew up in a household where [making sure we had] housing was primary. But then everything else was a constant negotiation, every paycheck, and every month. Do you get to see the dentist this time around or do you pay your energy bills?
When I joined the Greenlining Institute we were seeing the energy burden in California was so high that many Californians were getting disconnected [from energy services]. That was exacerbated by the recession in 2007 and 2008.
When you overlay those people losing their energy services with those communities impacted by climate change, many are the same. They’re low income communities, vulnerable communities.
We saw people who were going to be disconnected from their power, which could cause them to get evicted, which could cause them to lose their children to Child Protective Services. And then at the same time, those same people are also at risk of being surrounded by wildfire and dealing with extreme heat. That was a very real scenario. It still is a very real scenario.
[A couple of years ago] we were advocating for decarbonizing buildings and transportation to plan for a just transition to clean energy. And then when Covid hit we saw that people couldn’t even keep their homes. California still has a lot of folks who are in debt for energy because Covid just devastated lives and finances.
It became so clear to us that we couldn’t really advocate for energy efficiency, electrification and all the components that will decarbonize our built environment if folks can’t even pay their bills.
What have you seen change in the last decade you’ve been doing this work?
When I started at Greenlining almost 10 year ago, energy and climate justice were separate issues. Now things look different.
We know that energy can be a contributor [to our climate problems], but also a source of benefit and solutions. Companies and governments are beginning to see that and act on it.
Even those who have been afraid to touch the climate issue — banks, the financial sector — we’re showing them that not only is it worth investing in [climate solutions], but we’ll soon be at a time when we won’t have a choice not to.
As RMI’s first director of energy equity strategies, what are your goals?
RMI saw that it had a gap in focusing on residents and particularly frontline communities. In bringing me in, our goal is to create strategies for RMI moving forward that embeds [climate equity] from the get-go.
We hope to lean into our partnerships with organizations on the ground, environmental justice and equity organizations, to ensure that we’re contributing and not taking on someone else’s role. We’re going to figure out what supporting environmental justice and BIPOC communities is for RMI, which focuses on energy transmission and the way we consume energy.
What would success look like?
In the past couple of years, especially because of Covid, it’s hard to feel hopeful and find silver linings. We had people stuck at home and surrounded by wildfire, but it also pushed them to speak out and say, “This ‘business as usual’ — that can’t continue. Let’s talk about what clean energy hasn’t done for me in the past. And let’s talk about what it should do for me and my family.”
Ten or 20 years from now, if I can see that community members are able to show up to whatever forum is happening with knowledge handy so they can advocate for whatever kind of future they want to have for the families, that would be huge.
What’s your advice for others interested in climate equity?
Let’s take the idea of self-determination very seriously. People know what they want for their families. What can we do as advocates, as think tanks, as governmental entities to support that?
Other forms of life are also under pressure, but they are harder to count and assess. Some scientists have warned of mass insect die-offs, although others say the case hasn’t been proved. And then there are fungi — microbes that often go unnoticed, with an estimated 2 million to 4 million species. Fewer than 150,000 fungi have received formal scientific descriptions and classifications.
As mycologists whose biodiversity work includes studying fungi that interact with millipedes, plants, mosquitoes and true bugs, we have devoted our careers to understanding the critical roles fungi play. These relationships can be beneficial, harmful or neutral for the fungus’s partner organism. But it’s not an overstatement to say that without fungi breaking down dead matter and recycling its nutrients, life on Earth would be unrecognizable.
Healthy Ecosystems Need Fungi
The amazing biological fungal kingdom includes everything from bracket fungi, molds and yeasts to mushrooms and more. Fungi are not plants, although they’re usually stocked near fresh produce in grocery stores. In fact, they’re more closely related to animals.
But fungi have some unique features that set them apart. They grow by budding or as long, often branching, threadlike tubes. To reproduce, fungi typically form spores, a stage for spreading and dormancy. Rather than taking food into their bodies to eat, fungi release enzymes onto their food to break it down and then absorb sugars that are released. The fungal kingdom is very diverse, so many fungi break the mold.
Fungi play essential ecological roles worldwide. Some have been forming critical partnerships with plant roots for hundreds of millions of years. Others break down dead plants and animals and return key nutrients to the soil so other life forms can use them.
Fungi are among the few organisms that can degrade lignin, a main component of wood that gives plants their rigidity. Without fungi, our forests would be littered with huge piles of woody debris.
Fungi growing on woody debris. Photo: ramendan (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Still other fungi form unique mutualistic partnerships with insects. Flavodon ambrosius, a white rot decay fungus, not only serves as the primary source of nutrition for certain fungus-farming ambrosia beetles, but it also quickly out-competes other wood-colonizing fungi, which allows these beetles to build large, multigenerational communities. Similarly, leaf-cutter ants raise Leucoagaricus gongylophorus as food by gathering dead plant matter in their nests to feed their fungus partner.
A Mostly Unknown Kingdom
We can only partially appreciate the benefits fungi provide, since scientists have a narrow and very incomplete view of the fungal kingdom. Imagine trying to assemble a 4-million-piece jigsaw puzzle with only 3% to 5% of the pieces. Mycologists struggle to formally describe Earth’s fungal biodiversity while simultaneously assessing various species’ conservation status and tracking losses.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species currently includes 551 fungi, compared to 58,343 plants and 12,100 insects. About 60% of these listed fungal species are gilled mushrooms or lichenized fungi, which represent a very narrow sampling of the fungal kingdom.
Asked what a fungus looks like, the average person will probably imagine a mushroom, which is partly correct. Mushrooms are “fruiting bodies,” or reproductive structures, that only certain fungi produce. But a majority of fungi don’t produce fruiting bodies that are visible to the eye, or any at all, so these “microfungi” go largely overlooked.
Many people see fungi as frightening or disgusting. Today, although positive interest in fungi is growing, species that cause diseases — such as chytrid fungus in amphibians and white-nose syndrome in bats — still receive more attention than fungi playing essential, beneficial roles in the environment.
Protecting Our Fungal Future
Even with limited knowledge about the status of fungi, there is increasing evidence that climate change threatens them as much as it threatens plants, animals and other microbes. Pollution, drought, fire and other disturbances all are contributing to losses of precious fungi.
A cedar-apple rust fungus in an Eastern red cedar tree. Photo: Matthew Beziat (CC BY-NC 2.0)
This isn’t just true on land. Recent studies of aquatic fungi, which play all kinds of important roles in rivers, lakes and oceans, have raised concerns that little is being done to conserve them.
It is hard to motivate people to care about something they do not know about or understand. And it’s difficult to establish effective conservation programs for organisms that are mysterious even to scientists. But people who care about fungi are trying. In addition to the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee, which coordinates global fungal conservation initiatives, various nongovernment organizations and nonprofits advocate for fungi.
Over the past two years, we have seen a surge of public interest in all things fungal, from home grow kits and cultivation courses to increased enrollment in local mycological societies. We hope this newfound acceptance can benefit fungi, their habitats and people who study and steward them. One measure of success would be for people to ask not just whether a mushroom is poisonous or edible, but also whether it needs protection.
Delegations from most of the world’s countries will meet in China this fall for a major conference on protecting biodiversity. Their goal is to set international benchmarks for conserving life on Earth for years to come. Mycologists want the plan to include mushrooms, yeasts and molds.
Anyone who takes their curiosity outdoors can use community science platforms, such as iNaturalist, to report their observations of fungi and learn more. Joining a mycology club is a great way to learn how to find and harvest fungi responsibly, without overpicking or damaging their habitats.
Fungi are forming important networks and partnerships all around us in the environment, moving resources and information in all directions between soil, water and other living things. To us, they exemplify the power of connection and cooperation – valuable traits in this precarious phase of life on Earth.
Sharks rarely bite people, so why are so many people afraid of them? It has a lot to do with the media, says shark scientist David Shiffman in a new book.
Shark bites are, statistically, so unlikely that in all functional reality you will never experience one. Chapman University conducts an annual Survey of American Fears in which they ask a random sample of Americans about things they’re afraid of. In 2017, sharks were the #41 fear of Americans, with more than 25% of respondents reporting that they are afraid of them. That’s tens of millions of people who are afraid of an animal that kills fewer people than being careless while taking selfies. So why are so many people so afraid of sharks?
As reported in a June 27, 2019, National Geographic article about the psychology of fear, people are afraid of sharks for a fairly simple reason: because sharks are large wild animals that can hurt or kill you. It makes sense to be afraid of potentially dangerous animals, despite the very small risk. The fact that they usually don’t hurt people doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t hurt you. Humans are hardwired to try and avoid being killed by wild animals, which also explains our fear of things like snakes, which are also extremely unlikely to harm you. In general, humans are really bad at conceptualizing relative risk, something that plagues not only the discourse surrounding sharks but also lots of political issues, including gun control, immigration, and the global war on terrorism.
Since that’s a relatively unsatisfying explanation, I’ll go into a little more detail.
Inflammatory Media Coverage of Sharks
Sharks are a frequent subject of popular press coverage, and are rarely covered in a positive light. A 2012 Conservation Biology article looked at hundreds of examples of sharks being written about in major U.S. or Australian newspapers. The authors found that the most common topic of these articles, by far, was sharks biting humans. More than half of all articles about sharks in major papers from 2000 to 2010 were about a shark bite; only 11% even mentioned shark conservation. The article pointed out that this focus on shark violence is likely to be a problem and suggested that experts make an active effort to speak with the popular press about shark research and conservation topics instead of shark bites.
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I’ve been using the phrase “shark bites” and not the term “shark attack,” which you may be more familiar with. When you hear the phrase “shark attack,” you picture the shark from Jaws, a malicious creature stalking the coast and killing intentionally simply because it’s evil. As we’ve seen, that’s just not what happens; the phrase “shark attack” is therefore misleading and inflammatory. A 2013 paper by Robert Hueter and Christopher Neff instead suggested a new typology of shark–human interaction terms, including “shark sighting,” “shark encounter,” “shark bite,” and “fatal shark bite”; I use their terminology here.
Due to the “if it bleeds, it leads” principle of some unscrupulous strains of journalism, whenever any shark bites anyone anywhere in the world, it’s headline news everywhere. This creates the false impression that these events are much more common than they really are, especially when very minor bites get inflammatory coverage. The same 2013 Neff and Hueter paper I mentioned above performed a content analysis of how shark “attacks” were covered in the Australian press, and found a startling statistic: in 38% of reported “shark attacks,” THE SHARK DID NOT EVEN TOUCH THE HUMAN. It simply swam near them in a way that the person found threatening or scary.
Sometimes inflammatory media coverage is pretty easy to identify: “Shark Research Makes Us No Safer,” “Blood in the Water But Experts Are Still at Sea,” “Conservation Policies Value Sharks Over Human Lives,” “Has Our Admiration For Sharks Gone Too Far?”, “Great White Shark: Endangered or Just a Danger to Humans?” These are all headlines from one columnist at one newspaper (Fred Pawle at the Australian) that date to the last couple of years. But even the regular language used by journalists who aren’t conspiracy theorists can be inflammatory and fear-mongering. Referring to the ocean, which is a shark’s home, as “shark-infested waters” suggests that there’s something wrong or bad about sharks being there. Referring to wild animals accidentally injuring people as “bloodthirsty” or “monsters” is incorrect and perpetuates public fear and misunderstanding. Similarly, a shark swimming normally and minding its own business is neither “lurking” nor “stalking” humans.
Sometimes popular press coverage is inflammatory even when it’s not talking about sharks that bite people. One particularly egregious example of this happened in January 2015, when some Australian fishers caught a frilled shark in their nets. This long and skinny deep-sea dweller has small but sharp teeth and a snake- or eel-like body. It can grow up to six feet long. Headlines about this incident included words like “Horrific” (NPR), “Terrifying” (the Independent), and “Like a Horror Movie” (Fox News). CNN asked, “What brought this deep-sea monster to the surface?” (It was probably the giant net that it got caught in.)
Sometimes this media coverage takes the form of misidentifying a species in a way that inspires public fear. Recall that, in addition to shark bites being vanishingly rare, most shark species have never killed a human. One outrageous example of inflammatory coverage appeared in a 2014 Daily Mail article, which asked “Is this a great white off the coast of Cornwall?”
Even a cursory glance at the image presented showed that it was clearly not a great white — a sometimes-dangerous and fear-inspiring species — but rather a harmless, plankton-eating basking shark. In an article I wrote for New Scientist analyzing this particular case, I pointed out a series of major flaws in this Daily Mail article. For one thing, the author, Harriet Arkell, didn’t interview a single qualified credentialed expert. She did, however, interview a fisher who wrongly claimed that the only large fish in UK waters were great whites.
A curious Galapagos shark approaches scientists. Photo: NOAA and Richard Pyle/Bishop Museum
Making a common but nonetheless grievous error, Arkell also interviewed a self-described “shark aficionado” (read: someone who thinks sharks are neat but doesn’t have any relevant credentials or expertise). As I wrote at the time, “Why quote a shark aficionado, a non-expert who thinks sharks are cool, for a story like this? Can you imagine if journalists did this for other types of story? The White House announced intentions to bomb Islamic State targets in Syria, but counterterrorism aficionado Steve said that he’s pretty sure the organization is actually hiding in Peru. Markets cheered the move to reduce interest rates, but finance aficionado John said that everyone should just buy gold and bury it in their backyards. It would never happen, because it’s ridiculous.”
Similarly, a much-hyped 2013 photo allegedly showed a SHARK IN THE WATER NEAR CHILDREN! Looking at this photo, though, it clearly reveals that the animal in question is not a shark, but a dolphin — which means that an entire week of fear-inducing news was about literally nothing at all. It’s perhaps worth noting here that several of the self-described shark experts who claimed this was a shark were non-scientists who regularly appear on Shark Week programming.
Sometimes, this fear-inducing media coverage could just as easily be dubbed “Fish Seen in Water,” as in the case of a November 2017 Facebook post by CBS Miami with the headline “Spine-Tingling Swim: Tiger Shark Swims Extremely Close to Miami Beach.”
The shark in question didn’t bother anyone, it was just swimming in its natural habitat. Similarly, a February 2018 article in the Charlotte Observer had the headline “A Dangerous Mako Shark Is Haunting NC’s Outer Banks and Won’t Leave.” This shark didn’t so much as smile at anyone. It was swimming through its home, but that particular newspaper headline is calculated to frighten. And it “won’t leave?” Where do you want it to go? It lives in the ocean! Sometimes these articles mention that a shark is “near a beach,” which is another way of saying “in the water, which is its home.” And while we’re talking about this, I’d like to inform Shark Week shows like Shallow Water Invasion that this behavior isn’t new. Sharks always feed near shore; what’s new is everyone has a camera with them all the time, whether it is an iPhone or a drone or a GoPro.
In recent years, particularly flagrant examples of inflammatory media coverage have featured drone footage that shows a shark swimming near humans without bothering them at all. The big story is apparently that the people had a lovely day at the beach without even knowing a shark was near them — isn’t that TERRIFYING?
This kind of sensationalist and inaccurate media coverage is a frequent source of frustration for shark scientists, educators, and conservationists.
I became a plaintiff in a lawsuit for the Clear Lake hitch — a fish I’ve never seen. As the species quickly disappears, how much longer will it swim the waters of California?
This spring, in response to reports of dead and dying fish, teams of government wildlife staff and Tribal environmental specialists grabbed their backpack electrofishers, dip nets, buckets, aerated coolers and rubber gloves. For weeks they searched along drought-stressed creeks to save what fish they could find. One by one, they gently stunned and netted 360 adults and fry (juveniles) in rapidly diminishing pools before transporting them for release into a nearby lake.
This was not the first such rescue — similar efforts to save the rare and rapidly declining Clear Lake hitch (Lavinia exilicaulda chi) took place in 2014, 2016 and 2018.
Dead hitch in a vineyard irrigation pond in 2019. Photo: Sarah Ryan.
The Clear Lake hitch is one of 13 species endemic to California’s largest, oldest and now most toxic lake. Known as chi to local tribes, the hitch teeter on the edge of extinction, a fate to which their cousins, two other formerly endemic lake species — the thicktail chub (last seen in 1938) and the Clear Lake splittail (last seen in the 1970s) — have already succumbed.
Clear Lake hitch are vanishing because of our unabated appetites for fossil fuels, sportfishing, irrigation water and wine. They face a seemingly unending series of threats, including climate change-exacerbated drought and rising lake-water temperatures, the introduction of non-native predatory fish, a legacy Superfund mercury site, water diversions to an adjacent county possessing historic water rights, over-appropriated and unmonitored groundwater extractions, and fertilizer and pesticide runoffs from lakeside vineyards causing eutrophication and toxic algal blooms.
It’s us. It’s all of us.
Hitch in a net, courtesy of Alix Tyler, Big Valley Rancheria EPA Office.
Hitch used to spawn in 10 Clear Lake tributaries. Now they’re found, intermittently, in two. California’s most prominent ichthyologist, Peter Moyle, has predicted the hitch’s extinction within this century.
These same forces affect other lake fish, their benthic and shoreline tule reed habitats, and the cultural core of the hitch’s first consumers and venerators: the Pomo. These Indigenous peoples, with whom I work as an ethnoecologist, have occupied the full extent of Clear Lake’s watershed since time immemorial, yet in contemporary times their federal allocated territories have shrunk to under five miles of a 120-mile shoreline.
State Protection, But Not Good Enough
In the summer of 2014, after the worst hitch spawning records at the time, the California Fish and Game Commission designated the hitch as a threatened species. This overdue action came in response to a Center for Biological Diversity* petition accompanied by the agency’s own reports of an 92% loss of hitch spawning habit. It also followed a meeting filled with a vanload of tribal members providing public testimony, including a short summary video I produced and thrust into their hands at the last minute.
* (Editor’s note: The Revelator is published by, but editorially independent from, the Center for Biological Diversity.)
While the threatened species designation was noteworthy, it remains a proverbial drop in the bucket.
The state has achieved some conservation advances in the past few years. The listing of the hitch, combined with Big Valley Rancheria’s pathbreaking water-quality monitoring program showing off-the-charts cyanotoxin events on Clear Lake, led to the passage of Assembly Bill 707 and the creation of the Blue Ribbon Committee for the Rehabilitation of Clear Lake, accompanied by a $22 million investment for research and restoration.
But it’s not enough.
Indignities
Where they remain, the hitch struggle to survive amidst all the indignities we heap upon our waterways: endless trash and pollutants, dams, barriers, and roadways, as if wild-flowing waters are dumpsters and construction zones instead of homesteads and nurseries that contain vulnerable, oxygen-dependent beings who swim, forage, mate, and raise their young.
Last year biologists didn’t spot a single juvenile hitch. We don’t know if this was due to infrequent monitoring during the pandemic, severely low counts of reproductive adults in 2017-2019, or creek-spawned fry prevented from making the journey to Clear Lake.
Given the hitch’s typical life span of 5-7 years, one field biologist compared this five-year juvenile recruitment failure to the equivalent of a regional human population going childless for 50 years.
The catastrophic decline of the hitch follows a familiar trope, one repeated for salmon, steelhead and sturgeon — all native fish intrinsically bound to Tribal lifeways. In each case, there were once millions upon millions of these fish, so abundant they overflowed every waterway, so many a person couldn’t walk across the creek without stepping on them. Then came Euro-American settlers, filled with greed for quick profits, ecological ignorance and cultural arrogance. Four generations later these magnificent fish have been extirpated from most waterways or approach single- or double-digit counts where they have managed to persist.
From Anger to Action
Scientists are not normally known for displaying rage, but we left normal several decades ago, the moment the Keeling Curve, measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, began its exponential climb.
Frustrated with the disconnect between several thousand pages of scientific reports and the urgent need for action, I joined the Center for Biological Diversity’s 2021 lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service challenging the agency’s failure to protect the hitch.
I became a plaintiff in a lawsuit for a fish I’ve never seen.
The lawsuit addresses decades of California Fish and Wildlife data showing the hitch’s precipitous decline, echoed by local volunteers’ (the Chi Council) and fishers’ ever-diminishing spring migration counts and researchers documenting ontogenic dietary shifts in trophic habitats for spawning hitch populations. Every piece of evidence pointed in the same direction: Pomo elders seeing flesh-eating parasites worming into hitch skin, middle-aged tribal members unable to find any hitch to show their children, and newly minted Tribal staff monitoring abnormal levels of dissolved oxygen, hazardous algal blooms, and cyanotoxins.
Sarah Ryan testing Clear Lake water samples. Photo: Jeanine Pfeiffer
Sarah Ryan, Tribal EPA director at Big Valley Rancheria, initiated the first interagency effort to formally track and respond to fish kills. Together, we set up an iNaturalist citizen science fish-kill monitoring project for Clear Lake that correlates with the Tribe’s water-quality monitoring data stream. To improve hitch habitat, lakeside Tribes have led efforts in cyanobacteria bloom tracking and mitigation, aerated shorelines to increase oxygen content, sent fish tissues off for toxins analysis, removed invasive species and trash, and replanted native tule reeds.
“[The Service’s failure to act] really hurt me because I worked all these years to help protect the hitch, and to find out that it wasn’t even considered or even halfway there, I felt bad for Tribal members who don’t have access to the fish to eat, as well as the fact that the hitch would no longer just be there for a food source. Just knowing that the system is broken is a sad thing.”
Irenia Quitiquit, Robinson Rancheria Tribal Council member and elder
A Culturally Important Species
The hitch belongs to the minnow family, reaching the length of an average hand span at adulthood. For a decent meal, you’d need to cook up three or four at least, a number I could easily eat straight from the frying pan — a habit I’ve indulged with surf smelt at a Tolowa Dee-Ni fish camp, another rapidly diminishing, culturally important species with associated traditions for Native California Tribes.
Another standing declarant in the lawsuit — Big Valley Rancheria tribal historic preservation officer Ron Montez, Sr. — shared this account of the importance of chi (hitch) and their decline:
“In the old days people used to come over from nearby areas like Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and the Sacramento Valley to camp out along the creeks, and there would be hundreds of Native people catching chi. People would shout, “The chi are running! Look at the fish over there! Chi! Chi!” and we would grab a bucket or a sack or even just our t-shirts.
There were so many chi. Everyone was excited because fish were jumping and flopping all over the place. I remember having so much fun — I would be soaking wet from diving after them, catching them, and throwing fish to the younger ones to put in the bucket — we were just laughing and having a great time.
Once we got enough fish, it was time to quit. After that we would take the fish back to the reservation, and then it was a community time where everybody would sit around and clean fish together. We would supply fish to the mothers and aunties and people cleaning them. I remember that everybody was happy because we knew we had fish — we knew we had some chi — and it brought a good feeling that we had food now.
Chi were still running back then — in the 1960s, 70s, even 80s — but it was getting less and less. You could still hear the call that “the chi is running” and everybody still did the same thing and took off to gather them. Now … every once in a while somebody tells me, “Oh yeah, the chi ran for a little bit over in this creek over here,” or “yeah, we got a few, but they are all gone now.”
The abundance is gone. The excitement and that cultural aspect of it is gone. It is a sadness now that we feel whenever we talk about chi because they are not like they used to be. That community relationship around them is not there anymore.”
These days, since the state listing of hitch makes fishing for them illegal, the primary ways local Tribes can get their hands on chi is through applying for scientific collection research permits or during urgent rescue operations — when local creek waters are too hot, too toxic, or have too little oxygen in them and a fish kill is imminent.
A Ticking Clock
In April 2022, in response to the lawsuit, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to “re-evaluate the conservation status of the Clear Lake Hitch” and develop a new 12-month finding to consider Endangered Species Act protection. Currently the agency is holding out until January 2025 to do so, treating the hitch as yet another species to be added to its National Listing Workplan for 2022-2027, which already contains 310 species out of 500 needing review.
This ruling brings to mind the several decades of parallel government heel-dragging on the decommissioning of four hydroelectric facilities on the Klamath River, dam removals essential to securing the future of salmon and orca. Two more devasting spring runs on Clear Lake’s tributaries without federal protection could prove fatal.
The Clear Lake hitch, and the peoples whose lifeways are intertwined with its existence, can’t wait until 2025. Reams of historical and contemporary data on hitch populations already exist, and there’s no statutory threshold definition or specific quantification of the level of data necessary — listing decisions always depend on “the best available science.”
Photo: Alix Tyler (used with permission)
There is one person who can order the Fish and Wildlife Service to step up before we no longer have a choice. Given the power of the secretary of the Interior to determine when a species is to be listed as endangered, the Honorable Deb Haaland could make a difference for this invisible species with the stroke of a pen — before it disappears into extinction like its long-lost cousins.
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.
This nature haven, an important area for marine mammals, is losing its luster as developments come at a price to the ecosystem and wildlife.
The Place:
Langkawi Archipelago, Malaysia, a UNESCO Global Geopark
Why it matters:
Langkawi is a place of geological significance, a cluster of 109 tropical islands sitting at the interface between the Straits of Malacca and the Andaman Sea. The archipelago’s natural history dates back more than 550 million years, making it the oldest part of Malaysia and the first landmass in Southeast Asia to have emerged from the seabed. The archipelago is celebrated for its ancient rock formations and geological structures, with plenty of minerals and fossils.
In appreciation of its geological heritage it was awarded the UNESCO Global Geopark status in 2007, the first place in the region to be accorded that status.
Sunset in Langkawi.
Langkawi consists of a wide range of productive habitats, from marine ecosystems, riverine landscapes and lowland forests to rainforest-covered mountains that are home to a plethora of wildlife. Some species are endemic to the area, including the bent-toed gecko (Cyrtodactylus langkawiensis) and Maxburetia gracilis, a type of palm. Ancient palm-like cliff cycads (Cycas clivicola) dating back 270 million years can also be found in Langkawi, making the area an evolutionary laboratory for some flora and fauna. Langkawi also has its famous flying five: the colugo (Galeopterus variegatus), the red giant flying squirrel (Petaurista petaurista), the flying paradise tree snake (Chrysopelea paradisi), the twin-spotted flying frog (Rhacophorus bipunctatus) and the flying dragon (Draco sp.).
Unknown to many, the coastal waters around Langkawi harbor at least five marine mammal species. It is one of the few places in the region that hosts relatively healthy populations of cetaceans. Some of the largest known group sizes of Indo-Pacific finless porpoises (Neophocaena phocaenoides) and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins (Sousa chinensis) have been observed and recorded in the area. Moving farther offshore of Langkawi, you may be greeted (if you’re lucky) by species such as Bryde’s whales (Balaenoptera edeni), Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) and spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris). Closer to the mainland you may find elusive and endangered Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris).
Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins leap from the ocean.
To top it all off, Langkawi is also a bastion of traditional Malay culture on this northwestern coast of peninsular Malaysia. The local legends and folklores, linked closely to old Malay culture, and traditional art forms provide a touch of color to Malaysia’s oldest corner. One such legend tells the story of Mahsuri, a young Malay woman falsely accused of adultery who, in the final moments of her public execution, cursed the island to be unable to prosper for seven generations. Many believe that her curse doomed Langkawi to a supposed late-to-bloom economic development. Other myths tell of fights and misunderstandings that led to the unique location names on the island.
Today locals practice paddy farming on the island while water buffaloes soak lazily in mud puddles among water hyacinth bloom, accompanied by cattle egrets. A drive off the tourist track reveals traditional wooden village houses, representing the local culture and Malay identity.
The threat:
As a tourist haven, Langkawi is constantly being developed. Over the past decade the island’s ever-changing landscape and coastlines have been rapidly transformed. Many coastal areas, mangrove forests and forests continue to suffer from land clearing and planned massive-scale land reclamation to make way for human activities. With more people settling here, more waste is generated, yet Langkawi lacks a proper and efficient waste management system and, in some areas, suffers from improper sewage management.
Unregulated tourism activities also pose a significant threat to Langkawi’s environment and wildlife: Increasing high-speed boat traffic from tour boats, ferries and jet skis erodes the banks of the mangrove forests and threatens marine wildlife with propeller strikes and noise pollution. Dolphins are sustaining severe wounds from interactions with marine debris and people; some have past traumatic injuries from propeller strikes.
My place in this place:
Chocolates. Duty-free shopping. Eagle feeding.
These are some of the most common words many would use when Langkawi is mentioned.
Conservation. Career growth. Friendships.
This is what comes to mind when we think of Langkawi. The island holds a special place in our hearts and has been a constant in our life-changing conservation journey.
Picture karstic formations dotting the landscape, with emerald waters so tempting that all you want to do is jump in — something we often did during our lunch breaks at sea while we were on survey for cetaceans. Our work in Langkawi often took us off the beaten path, and we were privy to parts of it that many people never get to see. Studying the dolphins here, it often feels like they’ve become our comrades, friends we see as we work. We have come to recognize many of these animals, calling them “the OGs” (short for the originals). We watch them grow and mature, some even becoming mothers, and watch their calves become adults. Our time with them fuels our passion and need to study and protect these animals.
A breaching humpback dolphin.
For us researchers there’s no shortage of truly unforgettable wild encounters. A near-death experience saw us cowering on the boat as we were caught in the middle of a feeding frenzy, with needlefish frantically leaping out of the water in attempts to escape the dolphins. The long, slender jaws of a needlefish can pierce skin and can even be deadly if you’re sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thankfully, everyone made it out without a scrape.
Less dangerous encounters have included moments like our first Bryde’s whale sighting, just minutes after one of the team members had remarked that finding whales in these waters would be near impossible. But the emerging dorsal fin, attached to a body way too big to be a dolphin, had every one of us either screaming in awe or stunned into a silent shock.
Bryde’s whale
Having Langkawi as a setting for work is a great privilege — which is why, off the boat and on land, we strive to bring our experience to the locals, especially the youth. Our work has taken us to schools and public events, where we’ve showcased our research and conservation in the hopes of inspiring ocean stewardship.
Langkawi’s marine environment is a perfect living laboratory for nature learning. The variety of micro-habitats around the archipelago make it possible for many marine species to thrive. We’ve been able to take students out on boat trips to see the dolphins and check out intertidal shores; we’ve told them about the cliff cycads growing off the rocky limestone outcrops — plants that have existed for more than 270 million years. These experiences are rewarding and humbling.
A field trip out to sea with local youth.
We’ve made friendships here and fostered camaraderie with the local community as well as the many volunteers and interns who have braved the sun, rain and waves on the boat with us. These friendships have been an unforeseen pleasure, making our long, strenuous days out in Langkawi’s waters more enjoyable.
Who’s protecting it now:
There is presently no law in place protecting Langkawi’s coastal areas and waters. However, efforts to lobby for marine environmental protection and preservation are underway. MareCet, a Malaysian NGO devoted to marine mammal conservation, has shared and contributed research findings and knowledge about marine mammals to several coastal development plans in Langkawi and across to the adjacent mainland coast. Other actions taken by MareCet include submitting open letters against massive reclamation projects in Langkawi and successfully nominating and acquiring international recognition of Langkawi’s waters as an IUCN Important Marine Mammal Area since 2019. Local NGO groups such as Trash Hero Langkawi also expend significant efforts in conducting cleanups around the island. The Department of Fisheries Malaysia manage the adjacent offshore Payar Island Marine Park and have ongoing efforts in restoring the coral reefs in the area.
What this place needs:
Langkawi requires more high-quality ecotourism and a better marketing strategy to promote and heighten the value of its natural environment and biodiversity. The mass tourism direction it’s been moving in over the past decade — despite the official tourism tagline that reads, “Naturally Langkawi” — is a problem. To that end, more capacity building for better-quality nature tourism activities should be provided to local tour operators, and local youth should be encouraged to participate.
In environmentally sensitive areas, tourism activities should be regulated with stricter enforcement. MareCet has planned efforts with local stakeholders to lobby for vessel speed-limit zones in some critical marine areas in Langkawi to safeguard the well-being of cetaceans and other marine wildlife. Langkawi also needs stricter laws, limits, restrictions and careful planning for developments on the island, especially those that involve land clearing and reclamation (sea filling). Protection should also be warranted for ecologically important areas.
Sewage and waste-management systems should be improved on the island, and efforts must be made toward Langkawi being a destination that reduces its consumption of single-use plastics. Scientific research on its biodiversity and ecosystems should be enhanced and continued in the long term to aid with conservation monitoring efforts that can inform management practices.
Lessons from the fight:
Island ecosystems are very hard to replace; they’re less widespread than mainland ecosystems, and endemism is often high. An island is a lot more frail, vulnerable and sensitive to disturbance. From MareCet’s experience, scientific research applied to conservation action and management is imperative to achieve more balanced development between geoheritage and nature conservation and local socioeconomic development.
As important as scientific research, conservation is more than protecting species or places; it involves human behavioral change. It’s vital to engage with the local community and stakeholders for promoting awareness and expanding the space for conservation dialogue across various stakeholders, essentially achieving socially relevant, economically productive, and environmentally sustainable outcomes in the area.
The dying tradition of weaving sea pandanus.
It’s equally important to integrate conservation education in schools to raise awareness and empower the local youth to be stewards of their island home. Innovative approaches to raising awareness are also an advantage in terms of outreach success — for example, field trips and thought-provoking games.
Follow the fight:
You can learn more about what we do and our updates in Langkawi through our blog, newsletter and social platforms on Facebook and Twitter.
If you are keen to know more about Langkawi Archipelago, here are some publications:
Leman, M. S., KOMOO, I., MOHAMED, K. R., ALI, C. A., & UNJAH, T. (2007). Geopark as an answer to geoheritage conservation in Malaysia – The Langkawi Geopark case study. Bulletin of the Geological Society of Malaysia, 53(February 2016), 95–102. https://doi.org/10.7186/bgsm53200715
Samat, N., & Harun, N. (2013). Urban Development Pressure: Challenges in Ensuring Sustainable Tourism Development in Langkawi Island. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 91, 385–394. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.08.435
Experts say previous outbreaks should have taught us how to avoid new ones, like the one that’s killing millions of birds right now.
Last month a man in Colorado became the first human known to have contracted a new, highly infectious strain of avian flu.
The man — a prisoner culling infected poultry while on a work-release program — only experienced a case of mild fatigue.
The birds contracting this new version of the H5N1 flu have not been so lucky.
Since it first turned up, this highly transmissible and lethal new strain of avian flu has circulated at high rates among domestic fowl on backyard and commercial farms, resulting in the deaths of a reported 37 million birds on farms in the United States alone. Some died directly from the infection, while many others were culled as part of the country’s response to the disease outbreak. Bird flu has spread to at least 176 commercial farms and 134 backyard bird farms, housing mainly poultry like chickens and turkeys, across 34 states. It has hit especially hard in the Midwest and Central United States, regions with intensive commercial poultry operations.
The disease has also turned up in wild birds, with fatal consequences never previously observed. The first confirmed case was reported in a wild bird killed by a hunter and tested in January as part of routine U.S. wildlife-disease surveillance efforts. As of this month, more than 1,000 wild birds across the country have died after being infected.
Wild birds, including many waterfowl species, are often carriers of low-pathogenic or mild bird flu viruses. These viruses rarely cause severe disease in their natural hosts. But lethal bird flu viruses can and do kill wildlife, and this year’s hybrid H5N1 is proving especially deadly to wild birds in the United States and Europe.
It’s also spreading fast: While people have been busy navigating the second year of the global Covid-19 pandemic, this worrying bird virus outbreak has spread in more than 60 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Many European countries face record-high levels of lethal bird flu.
Repeat Offender
“This clade [family] of H5 viruses has been with us since 1996,” says Bryan Richards, emerging disease coordinator at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. Much of the government’s research on bird flu impacts on wild birds is done by the Geological Survey at the National Wildlife Health Center. “As with all viruses, it has changed over time, as have its relative impacts. Over the past two years or so, this specific H5N1 lineage has had increasing impacts in Europe and Asia. Now that this lineage of virus is here in North America, our experience is similar to that in Europe.”
As the virus rages and government workers deal with the gruesome task of killing infected birds and disposing of the corpses, experts have stood up with one key question:
Why have we allowed this to happen again?
Photo: Ella Mullins (CC BY 2.0)
The last time a bird flu epidemic hit this hard in the United States was in 2014-2015. That event, considered the worst-ever animal disease outbreak in U.S. history, struck 211 commercial farms and 21 backyard farms, mainly in the West and Midwest. The government responded by killing tens of millions of domestic birds to try to stop the spread, at huge cost to the federal budget and with no clear beneficial results — the same way it’s responding to the present lethal outbreak.
Then and now, bird flu proves that a reaction-oriented approach to serious viruses emerging at the intersection of human and nonhuman health is inadequate for stopping the spread of disease. Many animal-health and infectious disease experts now underscore the need to prevent rather than fight the next animal disease epidemic.
The Previous (But Not the Last) Outbreak
The 2014-2015 outbreak cost the federal government nearly $900 million to respond to and provide indemnity (financial security) to farmers forced to kill their flocks. Still, U.S. poultry farmers reported economic losses of $1.6 billion, and the poultry industry lost at least $3.3 billion from that single epidemic.
Government staff and scientists examined the outbreak and response strategy to see if they could shed any light to help the country avoid another epidemic. Their final report found that “despite” the government’s massive effort to stop the spread by killing all birds on infected farms, while also using quarantine and disinfection, bird flu continued to swiftly infect huge numbers of domestic birds.
USDA Photo by Preston Keres.
We’re now seeing a repeat of that failed strategy. During the current outbreak, government employees and contractors are again tasked with culling tens of millions of infected domestic birds, mainly poultry like chickens and turkeys. Paying for that plus indemnity to farmers for lost birds has cost the government $400 million in emergency funding since March.
One reason why this response doesn’t work is that wild birds spread bird flu but cannot be contained.
Research shows bird flu can live in the natural environment for extended periods, and healthy wild birds can become infected by living in proximity to those who are ill.
Watching for Danger
As a country we’re constantly on the outlook for warnings of possible new disease outbreaks.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Geological Survey, along with their state and Tribal partners, have for decades collaborated to test deceased, hunter-caught and live wild birds for bird flu, especially at areas popular for congregating birds like lakes and wetlands.
That kicked into overdrive this past year. When bird flu cases surged in Europe in 2021, these partners coordinated testing of thousands of additional birds outside their usual quota of about 3,000 samples per year.
USGS scientist Dede Goldberg swabs a pintail duck for avian influenza at Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado. Photo: Robert Dusek/USGS
“This year’s surveillance was extremely effective,” says Richards of the USGS. “It provided situational awareness, early detection and warning. We did a dramatic amount surveillance in fall and winter based on the increased activity in Europe. We’ve been watching.”
But watching for outbreaks is not the same as preventing them.
Failure by Design
Some lethal bird flu cases seem to spring from direct interactions between wild and domestic birds. This can happen in backyards and on poultry farms that have full or partial outdoor access.
On farms where birds are kept exclusively indoors, the movement of farmworkers and equipment outdoors and among farms — common practice on some of the biggest poultry operations — can allow lethal bird flu to enter.
While wild birds carry disease, large commercial farms act as super-spreaders and disease incubators.
Laying hens are housed with other birds in wire battery cages, each allotted a space with a footprint smaller than the width of a single sheet of letter-sized paper. Birds are stacked side by side and sometimes on top of one another.
Meanwhile chickens and turkeys raised to be slaughtered and sold for their meat can live in flocks of 10,000 or more birds, who spend their entire lives indoors.
The more birds on a farm, the less natural the living conditions, the lower the costs to keep each bird — and the higher the potential profits in today’s commercial-dominated food landscape.
“As a general principle, once avian influenza outbreaks are present in farms, the disease can spread easily within and between farms when biosecurity measures are not applied properly,” said a spokesperson from World Organisation for Animal Health, an intergovernmental group focused on animal disease control. “On larger farms, where many birds are kept in close contact with one another, the virus can be amplified as more and more birds get infected. With more infections there is also greater opportunity for the virus to mutate.”
Sometimes the virus spreads beyond close contact, as scientists found when they studied the 2014-2015 outbreak in Iowa, which boasts the nation’s highest egg production and has a high density of commercial poultry farms. The researchers discovered a pattern of farm-to-farm spread within the state and possibly even to nearby states, with the virus carried from neighbor to neighbor through the air. It seems disease builds up in the air on large commercial farms, particularly those with poor ventilation and crowded animal conditions — suggesting these farms played a key role in the spread of avian influenza in 2014 and 2015.
All of this has taken avian flu to the next level in terms of infectiousness and time between outbreaks.
Lethal bird flu viruses arose alongside modern agriculture and globalization and continue to emerge at an increasingly rapid pace, along with animal-rearing rates and farm size. Globally, from 1959 to 1995, lethal bird flu viruses broke out at a rate of once every 2.6 years. From 1996 to 2008, outbreaks arose at a rate of once every 1.2 years.
“Industrial livestock production plays an important part in the emergence, spread and amplification of pathogens, some of which can be transmitted to people,” said Peter Stevenson, OBE, chief policy advisor at Compassion in World Farming, a global movement working to advance farm animal welfare and whose work has helped ban some industrial-farming practices seen as unethical and unhealthy, like keeping hens in battery cages, in Europe. He pointed out that the United Nations Environment and the International Livestock Research Institute identified “unsustainable agricultural intensification and increasing demand for animal protein as major drivers of zoonotic disease emergence.”
Unintended Consequences
In the wild, the 2014-2015 outbreak mainly killed waterfowl and birds of prey that had eaten waterfowl. This time around a much wider range of species — about 50 — has been affected, including many kinds of ducks and geese, birds of prey like eagles, hawks and owls, shorebirds like sanderlings and gulls, and vultures, crows and grackles.
When infected, wild birds typically exhibit neurological abnormalities such as lethargy or seizures before succumbing to disease.
“In 2015 there were no major ‘wild bird mortality events,’ ” or situations where masses of birds are found dead in one area,” says Richards. “But now we’ve seen a few: 1,000 lesser scaup dead in Florida, 50 Canada geese dead in New Hampshire; huge numbers of snow geese, Ross’s geese, and Canada geese in the Midwest.”
Wildlife scientists will continue to monitor lethal bird flu and keep track of its spread. What they’ve seen so far is unprecedented, but — having studied bird flu’s seasonal patterns — scientists expect at least somewhat of an ebb and flow of disease in the coming months.
“Now it is moving north, but we expect it will come back south in the fall with migration again,” says Richards. “It’s a safe bet there will be a lot of surveillance as they migrate south in the fall.”
An Uncertain Future
U.S. agencies and the international OIE reiterate in their lethal bird-flu communications that it’s essential farms and farm employees take disease-preventing precautions — termed “biosecurity” — to slow and ultimately help stop the spread.
However, biosecurity measures — including changing clothes before and after interacting with poultry and frequent disinfecting of boots, tools, and other equipment — are all voluntary and so not easily enforced, especially on large farms with many employees and many birds. That needs to be addressed, experts say.
Biosecurity: USDA and contract workers wear personal protective gear that does not leave a premises without proper cleaning. USDA APHIS photo Mike Milleson.
Another lesson that’s come out of the past few outbreaks is this: We need to rethink our farms and food systems.
“A certain way to reduce risk of zoonosis and emerging infectious diseases globally … is to reduce dependence on intensive animal-based food production systems,” says Stevenson, pointing to findings in a recent report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
That involves eating less meat as a society, as well as using well-planned approaches to growing plants and raising domestic animals in ways that are considered ethical, ecologically sound, fair and humane. Experts also point out that it’s vitally important to protect nature so that wild animals stay healthy and aren’t forced to interact with people — a common effect of deforestation and development.
Reducing our dependence on industrial farms is not always cheap, but it saves major costs in the long run as farmers create life-sustaining systems that keep animals healthy and best prevent disease. According to an international team of animal disease and ecology experts, “Even a one percent reduction in risk of viral zoonotic disease emergence would be cost-effective.” In contrast, conventional commercial poultry farms are owned by major corporations that appear to give little thought to any tasks other than maximizing profits. On these major farms, which are prevalent in the United States, birds are commonly sick, crowded and in constant pain.
Besides causing major animal welfare concerns, industrial farming has hugely negative effects on the environment, creating serious pollution and contributing to the climate crisis through generation of greenhouse gases. U.S. farmworkers are often people of color and are often exploited.
Experts say shifting our ideas of what we accept as normal in our food system, both nationally and globally, could significantly transform the way we value people, nonhuman animals, and the planet, and in turn could prevent the next pandemic — to which we’re all vulnerable.
But is there hope for achieving that? The experts we spoke with aren’t too sure.
“These companies have immense political power, which they use to influence policymakers and to obstruct reforms,” says Stevenson. “They are able to shape the narratives that entrench the status quo.”
Until we learn from the lessons of this and other outbreaks, it seems the status quo will continue to involve lethal bird flu and devastating impacts on domestic and wild birds.
You aren’t truly a “green” organization if you don’t support every color in the rainbow flag.
Pride Month, held each year in June, is coming up fast. It’s the time of year when environmental groups like to publish Pride stories written by their LGBTQIA and Two-Spirit staff, table at Pride events, and march in Pride parades. This celebrates the happy, “let’s party” part of Pride, and in past years it has felt good to see environmental groups claim us queers as part of themselves.
But 2022 is not an ordinary year. Before any environmental or climate groups celebrate Pride this year, they need to ask themselves if they’re also willing to embrace Pride’s tradition of resistance, most famously expressed in the Stonewall Uprising. Are these groups willing to publicly stand up for queer people — especially transgender and BIPOC queer people — against a nightmarish legislative backlash and increase in hateful bigotry that just keeps building?
Progress Pride Flag flying at the United States Department of Agriculture. Photo: Tom Witham/USDA.
In 2022, queer people are under attack even more viciously than usual, with the worst vitriol and violence directed at trans, nonbinary and BIPOC LGBTQIA people. In just the first three months of the year, state legislators proposed at least 238 anti-LGBTQ bills, with education and gender-affirming medical care for trans kids especially targeted. Attempts to ban books with LGBTQ subject matter from school and public libraries have increaseddramatically in a trend that started last year. Bigoted language from the past that slanders all LGBTQ people as sexual predators and child molesters has made a big return. Hate crimes are up.
These aggressively backsliding trends aren’t expected to lessen any time soon. Just as Republican operatives and politicians have attacked environmental regulations, climate science, reproductive rights and wildlife protections, they’ve now declaredopen season on LGBTQIA — especially trans — children and adults as part of their 2022 midterm election strategy.
But anti-transgender views aren’t limited to state legislatures. The environmental and climate justice movements can also be transphobic, as shown in recentnewscoverage about well-established organizations.
Before you reflexively think, “Oh the environmental and climate groups I’m part of would never be associated with transphobia,” take a hard look at who your groups have aligned with through sign-on letters and other forms of support. For example, earlier this year environmental and social justice groups got an unpleasant surprise after they supported a mining protest camp without looking closely at the anti-transgender environmental group behind it.
Transphobia inside the environmental and climate justice movements won’t be rooted out unless movement leaders make doing it a priority. This is a matter of justice, since LGBTQIA and Two-Spirit people — especially those who are BIPOC — are disproportionately impacted by climate change and other environmental harms due to long-entrenched social stigma, lack of safe housing, underemployment and higher poverty rates.
Rejecting transphobia is also in the self-interest of environmental and climate justice organizations that want to attract younger participants, which most do. Far more people younger than 25 identify as LGBTQ than in past generations. Green groups that wish to remain relevant will need to demonstrate that queer people of all types are not only welcome but valued.
So if I could say just one thing to environment and climate groups about whether to participate in Pride this year, it would be this: Please come to Pride and join in the celebration, but also make sure you stick around to help once Pride Month is over. LGBTQIA and Two-Spirit people need your help — and you need our talent, creativity and energy.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
New research highlights ways to tackle our two greatest environmental challenges — at the same time.
Mass extinction lurks beneath the surface of the sea. That was the dire message from a study published in April in the journal Science, which found that continuing to emit greenhouse gases unchecked could trigger a mass die-off of ocean animals that rivals the worst extinction events in Earth’s history.
The findings serve as just the latest reminder that climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected crises — even if they’re rarely addressed in tandem by policymakers.
Toward that point, the Science study came with a dose of hopeful news: Action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius could cut that extinction risk by 70%.
Additional research published in Global Change Biology offers another encouraging finding. The study, by an international team of scientists, found that not only can we do better at addressing biodiversity issues — we can do it while also targeting climate change.
“Many instances of conservation actions intended to slow, halt or reverse biodiversity loss can simultaneously slow anthropogenic climate change,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Their work looked at 21 proposed action targets for biodiversity that will be the focus of this fall’s international convening of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China — a meeting delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found that two-thirds of those biodiversity targets also support climate change mitigation, even though they weren’t explicitly designed for that goal.
The best opportunities to work on these crises together were actions to avoid deforestation and restore degraded ecosystems. Of particular focus, the study found, should be coastal ecosystems such as mangroves, seagrass and salt marshes, which can store large amounts of carbon and support a diversity of animals.
A pelican enjoys a perch in a mangrove stand in the Galapagos. Photo: Hans Johnson (CC BY 2.0)
Also important is restoring forests and woodlands, but doing so with native species is critical. Planting monocultures of nonnative trees won’t boost biodiversity, the researchers point out, despite such endeavors being incentivized as a climate change solution.
Another target is reducing runoff into rivers, lakes and coastal waters from excess nutrients — including nitrogen and phosphorus — that cause algal blooms and oxygen-depleted waters. This eutrophication, combined with warming, may increase greenhouse gas emissions in freshwater bodies, in addition to harming fish and other animals.
Expanding and connecting the network of protected areas is another mutualistic target. Globally, we’ve protected about 15% of land and 7% of marine habitats. But we need to bump those numbers up considerably. As the researchers behind the Global Change Biology study put it, “There is a substantial overlap of 92% between areas that require reversing biodiversity loss and the areas needing protection for enhancing carbon storage and drawdown.”
Working on these issues in tandem can help boost the benefits.
We’re also spending large sums of money in all the wrong places. The study lists the reduction or elimination of subsidies that are harmful to biodiversity and the climate as “one of the most important and urgent reforms.”
We spend 10 times more on subsidies for environmentally harmful practices than on biodiversity conservation, the researchers note. Brazil, for example, spends 88 times more on subsidizing activities linked to deforestation than on those that may help stop it.
Other target areas to boost biodiversity and climate work include recovering and conserving wild species; greening urban areas; eliminating overfishing; reducing food and agricultural waste; and shifting diets to include more plant-based foods and less meat and dairy.
And, the researchers say, we need to “mainstream” the issues together — embedding both climate and biodiversity targets and metrics into policy, business and consumer practices.
Understanding these issues should start early, too. A study of school curricula in 46 countries found that fewer than half addressed climate change, and a paltry one-fifth referenced biodiversity. Both these subjects should be covered more and integrated together, the researchers say.
It’s not possible, after all, to tackle one crisis without addressing the other.
To fight climate change, we need fully functioning ecosystems with healthy populations of native plants and animals.
“And climate change is damaging this capacity,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a study coauthor and climate researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. “Only when we succeed in drastically reducing emissions from fossil fuels can nature help us to stabilize the climate.”
Decades of studying polluted Piles Creek led to advances in our understanding of how pollution affects crabs, fish and shrimp, including those that we eat.
It was the 1970s. The first Earth Day had happened, and there were new federal laws and a federal agency to protect the environment. Despite these important advances, a legacy of pollution still lurked in streams, marshes and other waterways. Stimulated by reports of terrible effects of mercury pollution in Japan, marine biologist Judith S. Weis, her husband, biologist Peddrick Weis, and numerous graduate students at Rutgers University set out on what would become a three-decade journey to understand how mercury and other chemical pollution affects estuarine animals, including those we eat.
They found that some species can tolerate mercury pollution, but that wasn’t entirely good news.
Weis, who taught for four decades at Rutgers, told The Revelator about the evolution of their ground-breaking research, what initially stumped them, and why pollution can change animal behavior.
How did your experiment start?
We decided to look at effects of methylmercury — an especially toxic form of mercury — on the development mummichogs, a small marine killifish. These fish, a few inches long, live in tidal creeks of salt marshes.
Our initial experiments, done at a marine lab in Montauk, N.Y., treated fertilized eggs with different concentrations of methylmercury over their two weeks of development. When they were getting ready to hatch, we examined all the embryos and saw a surprisingly large variation in responses of embryos that had been in the same concentration.
Embryos showed a variety of deformities, including abnormal head-and eye development. There were also problems in heart and skeletal development, which also ran the gamut from mildly affected to severely messed up.
Seeing such a huge variation was puzzling. What could cause such differences in response to the same concentration?
We considered ditching the project since the results were incomprehensible but decided to try to figure out why.
For the next experiments, we separated eggs from different females into different containers to see if the females might produce eggs with different susceptibility. Bingo! The variation in responses was because each female consistently produced eggs with specific susceptibility. (The male didn’t matter.) Females that produced susceptible eggs had different genetic traits from those that produced tolerant eggs.
Where did you go next?
We wondered how fish from an environment that was polluted with mercury might respond, and went to the polluted Newark Bay, N.J., area. There had been a lot of heavy industry there for a century, long before any environmental laws prevented them from dumping their wastes in the marsh and the water, so the sediments in the bay and creeks were highly contaminated with mercury, lead, cadmium and many other pollutants.
A sign at Piles Creek in the early 1980s. Photo: Peddrick Weis
We chose Piles Creek, a small dead-end creek that enters the Arthur Kill in Linden. The sediments in the creek were highly contaminated, and the level of mercury was particularly high.
When we repeated the same studies with fish from the creek, practically all produced embryos that showed only slightly abnormal development, an indication that the population was tolerant to methylmercury.
This was the first study showing evolution of pollution tolerance in an estuarine fish. One can imagine that this evolution would have happened quickly since there were already females in the clean site that produced tolerant embryos. However, we surprisingly found that larvae and adults weren’t tolerant to the mercury and furthermore showed signs of ill health, didn’t grow as well or live as long as fish from the clean site.
We investigated two other species in Piles Creek for methylmercury tolerance: grass shrimp and fiddler crab. Adults from Piles Creek and Long Island were examined for effects of methylmercury on limb regeneration and molting. In all cases, methylmercury slowed the rate of regeneration and delayed molting, but the Piles Creek crabs and shrimp were more tolerant — their regeneration and molting in methylmercury was not slowed down nearly as much as animals from the clean environment.
We found an interesting adaptation in fiddler crabs, especially from Piles Creek: They moved much of the mercury and lead from their internal organs into their shell (exoskeleton) shortly before molting it — a very efficient way of getting rid of contaminants quickly.
Is tolerance to pollution a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, it’s certainly good for the species that can achieve it, since it allows them to continue to live in a habitat that might otherwise be lethal.
Does that mean we can relax pollution laws? No! Not all species are able to evolve increased tolerance as these three did. Estuaries like Piles Creek and Newark Bay have fewer species than cleaner places. One commonly used measure of environmental health is biological diversity — how many different species live there. The more species, the healthier the environment. These three species found in Piles Creek are the survivors.
What other changes did you find?
Through an accidental observation by a graduate student that Piles Creek fish didn’t seem to catch shrimp well, we were able to find an explanation for their shorter life span and poor growth: abnormal behavior.
In lab experiments, unfed fish were put in tanks with grass shrimp (and a rock for hiding). Piles Creek killifish captured far fewer shrimp than the “clean” fish. If we put “clean fish” in tanks with Piles Creek food (shrimp) and sediments, within six weeks their prey capture ability declined to that of Piles Creek fish, showing that the environment is responsible for the impaired behavior. We examined stomach contents of fish from the field: The Piles Creek stomachs contained mostly detritus — decaying plant material — which was known to be non-nutritious for them. The poor ability to catch prey and their eating of non-nutritious detritus (“junk food”) could explain the poor growth and survival.
Mummichogs in a tank. Photo: Peddrick Weis
It’s not a big surprise that mercury would cause behavioral problems if you remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.
But that also had an effect on prey.
Grass shrimp in Piles Creek were overall larger, and more numerous, than shrimp from the “clean” site. Since their major predator, killifish, are ineffective predators and less abundant, Piles Creek shrimp experience reduced predation, so more of them can live a long happy life, resulting in larger size and greater population density. That’s an important finding because it shows the importance of “top down” effects — if your predator is affected worse than you from the pollution, you can benefit.
Piles Creek fish were also more vulnerable to predation. We examined how many fish were captured by blue crabs in the lab. Over two weeks crabs from a seafood store, kept in an aquarium with Piles Creek fish, captured far more of them than crabs kept with “clean” fish. The greater likelihood of Piles Creek fish to be captured and eaten could account for their shorter life span. Impaired prey capture and predator avoidance can result from being generally “slow,” which we confirmed by studying overall activity levels.
We also looked higher up the food chain and studied bluefish. They spawn in the ocean, and the juveniles move into estuaries in the spring to grow over the summer, then return to the ocean in the fall. We collected early juveniles from a clean site and raised them in large tanks, feeding them frozen killifish or menhaden from either clean or polluted estuaries. We found that initially both groups grew comparably, but those fed food from the polluted estuary gradually ate more slowly, ate less, swam more slowly, and grew less. By the fall, they were much smaller and lighter than those fed clean food. Many fish collected from the polluted site had empty stomachs — highly unusual for this species. This would put them at a disadvantage in the fall when they go back to the ocean.
We found a similar result in studying blue crabs. Those from the clean site caught more active prey than those from the polluted one, and “switching” their habitats changed their prey capture ability. Like the killifish, the crabs in the polluted environment ate a lot of detritus, surprising for a “carnivorous” crab. The behavior changes in these species show that the killifish impairments (reduced activity, poor prey capture) aren’t unique to them but are seen in other species, including ones that are commercially important.
What did we learn from all of this?
In the years since these studies were performed, scientists have studied killifish from other polluted areas and have found tolerance to other pollutants such as PCBs and dioxin. Also “behavioral toxicology” has become a recognized field, studied mainly in the lab on animals exposed to selected concentrations of a chosen toxic chemical.
Our studies were with animals exposed naturally to the contaminants in their environment and focused on predator/prey behavior that is ecologically important. These real-world findings show that animals in nature can have their behaviors affected in ways that make their lives more difficult and shorter, and that altered behavior can change ecological relationships in the system.
Overall, in our work, it appears that the crustaceans are managing better than the fish.
We learned two major lessons through this: If data don’t make sense, don’t give up but try to figure out why, and accidental observations can lead to a new fruitful direction of research.
Langkawi is a place of geological significance, a cluster of 109 tropical islands sitting at the interface between the Straits of Malacca and the Andaman Sea. The archipelago’s natural history dates back more than 550 million years, making it the oldest part of Malaysia and the first landmass in Southeast Asia to have emerged from the seabed. The archipelago is celebrated for its ancient rock formations and geological structures, with plenty of minerals and fossils.
