5 Reasons to Love (and Protect) Freshwater Mussels

These aquatic heroes do so much to keep freshwater ecosystems healthy — and we’re killing them off at a record pace.

In September the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing 23 species from the federal list of endangered species — not because they’d rebounded, sadly, but because they are believed to be extinct.

News reports about the announcement highlighted some of the more well-known names among the group, including birds like ivory-billed woodpeckers and Bachman’s warblers.

Less mentioned, but no less important, were eight species of freshwater mussel: the flat pigtoe, green-blossom pearly mussel, southern acornshell, stirrupshell, tubercled-blossom pearly mussel, turgid-blossom pearly mussel, upland combshell and yellow-blossom pearly mussel.

The loss of these creatively named mussels is symptomatic of a much bigger problem.

North America has the greatest diversity of freshwater mussels in the world, with some 300 species, but they’re also among the planet’s most imperiled animal groups. More than 35 of the continent’s mussel species have already been lost, and 65% of those remaining are vulnerable to extinction.

Invasive species, pollution, and land-use changes such as dam building have taken a heavy toll.

That’s bad news because these unassuming mollusks, who often spend much of their lives partially buried in sediment, play a major role in keeping our rivers and streams healthy. When mussel populations decline, it’s an indication that our freshwater ecosystems are also in trouble.

Better protecting mussels will help protect rivers and streams. But first, it’s important for activists and policymakers to understand their value. Here are some of the important roles they play:

1. Water Purifiers

Mussels are like tiny water-treatment plants. They have an inhalant aperture, also called a siphon, that allows them to filter bacteria, pathogens and algae out of the water column. Mussels eat many of these particles as part of their diet, but some mussels have also been shown to remove pharmaceuticals, personal care products, herbicides and flame retardants. That can help clean our waterways, but it doesn’t mean it’s good for mussels. Pollutants can bioaccumulate in their tissues, harming functions like reproduction.

Filtration rates vary by species and conditions, but research has found that a single adult mussel can clean more than 10 gallons of water a day. And when they reduce the level of algae in the water and make it clearer, more light reaches plants below the surface, which in turn helps provide food for invertebrates, fishes, ducks and other aquatic organisms.

“There’s a lot of interest in restoring mussels so that it costs less money to treat water,” says Caryn Vaughn, a biology professor at the University of Oklahoma and an expert on freshwater mussels.

Improving water quality and curbing runoff would also help protect imperiled mussels.

One of the places at the forefront of this new field of research is the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, which runs the Mussels for Clean Water Initiative. The program propagates and outplants mussels in order to help support ecosystem health and clean water. The Partnership released its first 30,000 captive-raised mussels in 2018.

Freshwater mussel on the stream bottom. Photo: Gary Peeples/USFWS (CC BY 2.0)

2. Chefs and Pantries

It might not sound tasty, but what comes out of a mussel is good food for the ecosystem, too: Their fecal pellets nourish aquatic invertebrates at the base of the food chain.

“Because mussels excrete nutrients, they create little gardens of algae on their shells that other organisms eat,” explains Vaughn. “And with their feces — their biodeposits — they’re providing organic matter to the bacterial community in the sediment.”

Mussels themselves also become food for a variety of predators, including fishes, turtles, birds, racoons, otters and muskrats who, in due course, also return nutrients to the ecosystem. And the cycle continues…

3. Aquatic Architects

Mussels in healthy streams often cluster together, which makes them “a living part of the substrate,” according to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. The infrastructure created by these mussel beds — and the spaces between them — provide shelter to small fish, algae, insect larvae, aquatic worms and snails, and other invertebrates.

A 2019 study found that “both mussels and empty shells increase interstitial spaces in the substrate, which are important habitats for fish and their prey,” the researchers wrote. This even pays off after mussels die or get eaten, as “their spent shells might offer refuge from larger aquatic predators.”

The rivers and their banks also benefit, as additional research has shown that living mussels help to stabilize sediments and prevent erosion or species displacement. “When you have a good healthy mussel bed, that actually helps all the organisms stay in place during a flood event,” says Vaughn.

4. Refuge Creators

When times get tough for fish, being near freshwater mussels can help, according to a 2019 study. The researchers, including Vaughn, found that fish caught in drying pools along with freshwater mussels survive longer, likely because of the other organisms supported by mussels that fish can eat.

different sizes and colors of mussels in shallow water
Freshwater mussels of the lower Missouri River. Photo: USFWS (CC BY 2.0)

“The presence of adult mussels and the resources that increase in their presence potentially mitigate stress to fish in ‘ecological crunch times,’” the researchers wrote. “By conserving mussels, fish populations might withstand droughts more easily.”

That’s something that’s going to become even more important as climate change exacerbates drought conditions and reduces stream flows on which fish depend.

5. Historians

Mussels also make excellent recordkeepers of the natural environment.

“Freshwater mussels have the potential to serve as important sentinels or biomonitors of environmental change, revealing past conditions and monitoring future change,” Vaughn wrote in the journal Hydrobiologia.

That’s because many of these species are long-lived, some with lifespans of 70 years or more. They move very little and burrow into the streambed; they absorb nutrients and chemicals from the water. This means that their body tissue and shells become a record of water quality in a given spot over a long period of time.

“You can actually go back and look at mussel-shell rings and see what chemicals were in a river 60 or 70 years ago,” Vaughn tells us.

That’s not all. A 2019 study done in the U.K. found that the annual bands on mussel shells, much like tree rings, can also document seasonal water temperatures. This can help “establish baselines for understanding future climatic change and support conservation efforts aimed at protecting temperature-sensitive taxa,” the researchers concluded.

Other researchers are working on putting an economic value on the jobs that mussels play in freshwater habitats, but it’s not easy.

“Most people are worried that by doing that, we’re undervaluing them,” says Vaughn.

But it may also be necessary.

“Despite uncertainty about the precise value of freshwater mussels, it is clear that they have substantial value to humans, possibly many millions of dollars in individual ecosystems, which should be taken into account in environmental decision making,” wrote freshwater ecologist David Strayer in a 2017 research paper. “Mussel ecologists and biologists can play important roles in helping society better value freshwater mussels.”

The rest of us can, too.

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Previously in The Revelator:

This Unsung Aquatic Hero Could Get a Big Boost From Dam Removals

Gas Flaring Can Harm People 60 Miles Away, Study Finds

Researchers found that people don't have to be right next to oil and gas fields to experience respiratory distress from flaring.

This story was originally published by NM Political Report.

A new paper looking at the health impacts of flaring in the Bakken area of North Dakota found that people 60 miles away can experience respiratory distress because of flaring. The impacts have significant economic effects that should be considered in regulatory policy, the researchers said.

The lead author, Wesley Blundell, said these impacts could be even more pronounced in the Permian Basin in Texas, where flaring in 2020 was greater than the flaring in the Bakken during the study time period and population density, at least in west Texas, is greater than in North Dakota.

Blundell is an assistant professor at the School of Economics at Washington State University and said he approached the topic largely from an economic perspective, including placing a dollar value on the public health impacts of flaring. This estimated dollar impact is based on the amount of natural gas flared.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Economics. Blundell said he accessed proprietary hospital data and looked into the hospitalizations for respiratory illness. He and his co-author also gathered the GPS locations of wells and monthly flaring reports from those sites.

“We were able to start really digging into what the relationship was and how big the relationship was between the flaring of this unprocessed natural gas and all the contaminants that come with it and the respiratory health of the individuals who live up to 60 miles downwind,” he said.

They found that an increase in flaring of 1% can lead to a 0.73% increase in hospitalizations. In North Dakota, the study found an increase of 11,000 hospital visits. The time period examined was early in the Bakken boom from 2007 to 2015.

The New Mexico Oil and Gas Association states in a report that flaring is done in an “attempt to eliminate potentially unsafe, flammable vapors and to destroy unwanted emissions of methane and [volatile organic compounds.]”

The reason behind flaring is usually safety concerns or transportation constraints, the organization states. NMOGA further states that the alternative to flaring is often venting, which leads to more emissions.

Flaring also occurs after a well is completed because the natural gas that is initially produced can’t be handled by the production facilities as it includes flowback, or components from the fracking process like sand.

Lack of infrastructure capacity, including pipelines to transport the natural gas, can also lead companies to flare natural gas.

Blundell said his study did not look at why the companies were flaring natural gas, but he said that is something that needs to be examined.

New Mexico

Barbara Webber, executive director of Health Action New Mexico, said there is a lack of data in New Mexico, but that the state does have high asthma rates and the oil producing region in the southern part of the state has high rates of hospitalization due to asthma. She said she expects that the findings of the North Dakota study would hold true in New Mexico as well.

Respiratory illness is only one of the health impacts associated with the oil and gas industry, Webber said. She highlighted studies finding links to cancer as well as preterm and low-weight births, which tend to be more common in New Mexico than in many other states.

Under Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, regulations have been promulgated to address flaring and emissions from oil and gas.

“We’re excited to see that hopefully there’s going to be more oversight and inspection,” Webber said.

At the same time, the Legislature did not fully fund the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department’s request and New Mexico has a low ratio of inspectors to ensure that companies are complying with regulations, Webber said.

New Mexico has regulations in place to address flaring, including the natural gas waste rule adopted last year by the Oil Conservation Commission. This rule required companies to capture 98% of methane emissions by the end of 2026. The first quarterly reports were due Feb. 15. Just three days after that deadline, EMNRD’s Oil Conservation Division published a list of operators who failed to comply on its compliance website and provided notices to more than 400 operators.

flare
Gas being flared at a drilling site in Powder River Basin, Wyo. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

According to information provided by EMNRD, some of the operators notified reached out to the OCD and the division has worked with them to rectify problems and answer questions. As a result, 158 of those operators were able to file, thus achieving compliance with the requirements. EMNRD reports that the operators who have filed those reports represent nearly 99 percent of the produced gas in the state and 88 percent of wells.

On March 10, the OCD issued five notices of violation as well as civil penalties to operators who failed to file the report required by the new rules.

Clean Air Task Force Study

Another recent study done by the environment-focused non-profit Clean Air Task Force in coordination with Rice University found that flaring of natural gas contributed to between 26 and 53 deaths in 2019. This study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Atmosphere in late February, looked at black carbon, or small particulate matter produced through flaring.

Lesley Fleischman, a senior analyst at Clean Air Task Force and one of the authors, said that Texas, North Dakota and New Mexico had higher levels of mortality associated with flaring. She said the researchers used satellite imagery as well as modeling.

“The problem is pretty clear that there’s a health impact concentrated in areas where flaring is occurring,” Fleischman said, adding that the health impacts are unnecessary.

Clean Air Task Force is pushing for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to pass regulations ending the practice of routine venting and flaring. While New Mexico has regulations in place to address flaring, including the natural gas waste rule adopted last year by the Oil Conservation Commission, neighboring states like Texas do not necessarily have the same level of regulations. Having EPA rules in place would protect New Mexicans from health impacts from flaring that occurs out of state, she said.

“Flaring is a waste of a resource, a valuable resource and it’s causing pollution and there’s no reason for it,” she said.

Marginalized Communities

Marginalized communities, such as minorities and low-income households, often bear a larger share of the pollution burden. Webber gave the example of Native Americans in northern New Mexico who live close to oil and gas development.

These health impacts can lead to reduced work days, children missing school and increased medical expenses. Webber said these impacts can keep people in poverty.

Typically, Blundell said, people think that those most impacted by oil and gas are the people who are also getting the economic benefits from that development. But, in the case of the Bakken, he said that is not necessarily true. This is one of the things he said surprised him the most while doing the study. He said 50 percent of the impacts from flaring were in areas where 20 percent of the resources were extracted.

“Those who are bearing the environmental impact aren’t necessarily those who are getting the economic benefit,” he said.

© NM Political Report

Previously in The Revelator

States Take Action to Curb Oil Industry’s Most Glaring Problem

 

Now Read This: Stop Doomscrolling and Save the Planet

Seven new environmental books offer practical advice, lessons from successful conservation projects and inspiration in troubled times.

revelator readsThese are the times that try our souls — and our Facebook feeds.

So if you’re tired of the horrors unfolding hour after hour on social media and TV news, stop doomscrolling and point your eyes somewhere more useful: seven new environmental books that offer vital lessons on saving the planet and the creatures that live here.

Some of these books — all of which have come out since the beginning of the year — provide practical advice for people working in specific conservation areas. Others offer experience that we can put to good use in multiple avenues. All offer inspiration at a time when that’s all too fleeting — and important to hold on to.

Intersectional EnvironmentalistThe Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet

by Leah Thomas        

The Revelator’s take: If you’ve ever heard the term “intersectional environmentalism,” you have Thomas to thank. The writer-activist focuses on the relationship between social justice and the environment, and she has a lot to say and learn from in this vital new book.

From the publisher: “From the activist who coined the term comes a primer on intersectional environmentalism for the next generation of activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive and sustainable change. Thomas shows how not only are Black, Indigenous and people of color unequally and unfairly impacted by environmental injustices, but she argues that the fight for the planet lies in tandem to the fight for civil rights; and in fact, that one cannot exist without the other. An essential read, this book addresses the most pressing issues that the people and our planet face, examines and dismantles privilege and looks to the future as the voice of a movement that will define a generation.”

Ever GreenEver Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

by John W. Reid and Thomas E Lovejoy

The Revelator’s take: Lovejoy, a groundbreaking biologist, died late last year, but his ideas and influence live on. They’re also more important than ever, with deforestation increasing both in rate and climate impact.

From the publisher: “Megaforests serve an essential role in decarbonizing the atmosphere — the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of carbon in its deep soils and peat layers, 190 years’ worth of global emissions at 2019 levels — and saving them is the most immediate and affordable large-scale solution to our planet’s most formidable ongoing crisis. Reid and Lovejoy offer practical solutions to address the biggest challenges these forests face, from vastly expanding protected areas, to supporting Indigenous forest stewards to planning smarter road networks.”

Effective ConservationEffective Conservation: Parks, Rewilding and Local Development

by Ignacio Jiménez

The Revelator’s take: This book speaks to a specific type of reader — the people directly working on conserving parks — but shouldn’t that be all of us, anyway?

From the publisher: “Jiménez offers a pragmatic approach to conservation that puts the focus on working with people — neighbors, governments, politicians, businesses, media — to ensure they have a long-term stake in protecting and restoring parks and wildlife. This highly readable manual, newly translated into English after successful Spanish and Portuguese editions, provides a groundbreaking and time-proven formula for successful conservation projects around the world that bring together parks, people and nature.”

Endangered MaizeEndangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction

by Helen Anne Curry

The Revelator’s take: As we’ve written, agricultural crops face increasing pressure from climate change, pathogens and other threats, and the wild varieties of these common foods may provide the answer to avoiding mass hunger.

From the publisher: “Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world’s most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.”

Was It Worth It?Was It Worth It? A Wilderness Warrior’s Long Trail Home

by Doug Peacock

The Revelator’s take: I’ve been dipping in and out of this beautifully produced book ever since I received a review copy a few months ago. At 80 Peacock has a lot to say as he looks back in a way that helps us look forward.

From the publisher: “In a collection of gripping stories of adventure, bestselling author Doug Peacock — loner, iconoclast, environmentalist and contemporary of Edward Abbey — reflects on a life lived in the wild, considering the question many ask in their twilight years: Was It Worth It?”

Ecoart in ActionEcoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities

edited by Amara Geffen, Ann Rosenthal, Chris Fremantle and Aviva Rahmani

The Revelator’s take: Here’s another way to stop doomscrolling by breaking out your pens, markers and paint (or graphics software if you’re digitally inclined) and getting ready to make a difference.

From the publisher: “How do we educate those who feel an urgency to address our environmental and social challenges? What ethical concerns do art-makers face who are committed to a deep green agenda? How can we refocus education to emphasize integrative thinking and inspire hope? What role might art play in actualizing environmental resilience? Compiled from 67 members of the Ecoart Network, a group of more than 200 internationally established practitioners, Ecoart in Action stands as a field guide that offers practical solutions to critical environmental challenges.”

Bald EagleThe Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird

by Jack E. Davis

The Revelator’s take: The new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea feels especially timely, with several new bird extinctions announced last year and the need to counter those losses with tales of conservation success.

From the publisher: “Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves — monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world’s finest parents — The Bald Eagle is a much-awaited cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Hot Reads: Ten Essential New Books About Fighting Climate Change

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Wolves as Teachers

Community ecologist Cristina Eisenberg explains how we can use both Native and western science to help solve our toughest environmental problems.

When Cristina Eisenberg left the Central Coast of California in the 1990s looking for a wilder place to raise her children, she found it in a remote part of northwest Montana. The first night in their cabin — adjacent to more than 2 million acres of wilderness — she fell asleep to the sound of wolves howling.the ask

Over the years she watched newly arriving wolves transform the ecology of her backyard — and the trajectory of her life. Wanting to better understand how the presence or absence of wolves can change a landscape, she went back to school, earning a master’s in conservation biology and then a Ph.D. in forestry and wildlife.

“It was because of the wolves,” she says. “They’re teachers.”

Today she’s a graduate faculty member at Oregon State University and works as a community ecologist. Her recent efforts include a grassland restoration project with the Fort Belknap Indian Community and the Bureau of Land Management in Montana, and a study of bison, fire and wolf ecology with the Kainai (Blackfoot) First Nation in Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park.

The Revelator spoke to her about ecological restoration, her biggest surprise as a scientist, and the importance of using western and Native science to solve our toughest environmental challenges.

How did you end up becoming a scientist?

We were living in California in the mid-’90s on the Central Coast and all of a sudden it got super developed. I knew that I didn’t want to raise my kids there. So my family and I moved to this [remote] part of Montana.

We live in a funky, small log cabin and our backyard is 2.7 million acres of federally protected wilderness. Our first night in our cabin it was summer, so I opened the window and I heard this sound. I felt like I’d been hearing it all my life, but it was the first time I’d really heard it. It was the sound of wolves howling.

I knew they weren’t supposed to be there, but we started seeing wolves running through our land. They had come down from Canada. We had a big meadow, and the deer and the elk used to come and eat. We thought that was lovely. Little did I know that those animals were tame, because there were no wolves around yet.

But when wolves started denning near us, we saw everything on our land change. Within three years that meadow ceased to exist — it just filled in. And all these birds showed up that were never there before, and the deer and elk disappeared. Not because the wolves wiped them out — it was because they got rewilded in order to stay alive.

My kids said, “Mom, you should go back to school and study this.” So I did. I got my master’s degree and then I realized that in order to be able to help create change in terms of conservation, I really needed to get a Ph.D., and I needed to get it from a very conservative institution. So I got my Ph.D. at Oregon State University studying wolves and trophic cascades.

Cristina Eisenberg. Photo: Erin LaMer

What does it mean to be a community ecologist?

I’m Native American and I also have a background as a formally trained western scientist as a community ecologist. This is a field in western science that arose around 1980. It’s very different from the single species approach to doing ecology. It looks at how energy flows to the whole system and the relationships between the different components.

To do that you collect data on the plants, animals, birds. You look at what the trees are doing. I’ve used GPS collars on wolves and elks, for example. My research partner, Tom DeLuca, is a soil scientist, so we’re looking at soils, too.

What does all this look like in action?

One of my projects is working with the Fort Belknap Indian community, which is the Aaaniih and the Nakoda Tribes.

My work in Fort Belknap and on surrounding federal lands looks at how climate change is affecting the grassland there, focusing on culturally significant traditional plants. This is in response to the catastrophic fires that have been occurring as a result of climate change.

Part of what we do is we collect seeds of native plants. We assess the ecological conditions of tribal lands and federal lands, and we’re working on creating an ecocultural restoration plan for both federal lands and tribal lands.

I have at-risk tribal youth join me in the field, and I provide well-paying jobs for them as technicians. I train them, but really, we’re learning from each other because it’s their land. And nobody knows it better than they do.

These young people who have deep transgenerational trauma caused by all the stuff that came with settler colonialism — the genocide, the disease, the residential schools — they just thrive.

They blossom because their knowledge is being respected by me and others. And they’re collecting real data that are vital. They’re just completely engaged, and many of them go on to college. Some of them over the years have become major leaders.

What have you and your research partners found there?

Two technicians in high grasses collecting seeds
Technicians with the Fort Belknap grassland restoration project collecting sweetgrass seeds. Photo: Erin LaMer

Fort Belknap is a nearly 700,000-acre reservation that was created around 1870. It’s surrounded almost completely by federal lands managed by the BLM. Last summer we had a Category 4 drought, which is an extreme drought, in our study site. A top priority for us is to collect seeds of native plants for two reasons — to use them to restore areas and also to establish a bank of seeds that are genetically tied to certain areas, because they may go extinct.

We went out to collect seeds on the federal land last June, and in many sites there was nothing growing taller than my ankles. These are important prairie grasses that stabilize the soil and provide excellent food for wildlife.

In one place they had grown to as high as my knees, and it looked like they had bloomed and made seed pods. But when I looked at the seed pods, they were hollow. They had not formed a cotyledon, which is like a fetus.

Then I went on reservation land, and I found the prairie grasses were as tall as my shoulders. The populations of native species that had seeds in them that were suitable for collecting extended from horizon to horizon. We collected 23 pounds of seeds.

You couldn’t even tell there had been a drought on the tribal land. I’d never experienced anything so surprising in my career as a scientist.

These sites are adjacent. This is the same habitat, the same plant community, the same amount of precipitation, the same slope and aspect in elevation. What was the difference? We had trail cameras put into our plots because I thought maybe it has to do with cattle grazing on public lands. We found that on tribal lands, there were quite a few cattle grazing there, so it wasn’t driven entirely by cattle grazing. There’re also bison on the tribal lands.

What my colleagues and I have concluded is that it probably has to do with the tribal land being managed using traditional ecological knowledge, which includes things like use of prescribed fire.

But we’re going to figure this out using western science. We’re going to do a really intensive study of what goes on in the soil, because every time there’s a fire, it leaves a legacy of carbon in the soil, and you can measure that. We’re going to go back this summer and try to determine what it is that makes those tribal lands so much more resilient.

What have you learned looking at restoration with the wide lens of a community ecologist and also with traditional ecological knowledge?

What has become really clear to me is that in order to respond to the ecological crisis we’re facing — global warming and all of the implications of that, plus unsustainable use of natural resources and the extinction crisis — the ancient knowledge held by Indigenous people offers a lot of solutions.

As an ecologist, I don’t think we are capable of finding the solution [to our environment problems] using western science without incorporating traditional ecological knowledge or Native science.

Humans lived very sustainably on the planet. There was a large population of humans before colonization in North America, for example. And these ways of relating to the natural world were very much grounded in ethics and spiritual beliefs about the human’s role in the world. And those values are intrinsic to Native science.

If we’re going to save the world, we need to save ourselves. And that means we need to address things like racism and really come together because we need each other. All of the traditional ecological knowledge by itself can’t really create the change that we need, unless we partner with western scientists and vice versa. And in order to do that, we have to treat each other as equals.

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10 Ways War Harms Wildlife

Bombs and bullets are just the beginning.

As war and conflicts rage on in Ukraine, Yemen, South Sudan, Libya and other places around the globe, it’s important to look at the long-term effects of military strife, which can destroy the environment as easily as it destroys lives.

Here are 10 of the most dangerous ways war affects the animals and plants around us — many of which also harm humans in the process.

1. Bullets and bombs

The military may aim at people and infrastructure, but other life gets in the way. This can be hard to track, but a study published in Nature in 2018 found that even a one-year conflict can cause local wildlife populations to crash. And a 2013 paper from PLoS One speculated that the Barbary lion may have gone extinct when its last forest refuge was destroyed during the 1958 French-Algerian War.

2. Toxics and pollution

Heavy metals like lead can stay in the environment long after a bullet has been fired or a bomb exploded. Chemical agents like herbicides (often used in war to defoliate forested hideouts) can harm a wide range of species, either immediately or for decades after. The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam contaminated the soil for generations, affecting fish and birds before traveling up the food chain to humans.

Agent Orange
A U.S. helicopter sprays Agent Orange in Vietnam. Photo: Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr. (public domain)

Other damage can come from what gets destroyed during war. We see that on display in Ukraine right now, as hundreds of experts and organizations expressed their concerns March 3 in an open letter released through the Environmental Peacebuilding Association: “Russia’s military operations in a heavily industrialized, densely populated nation containing numerous refineries, chemical plants, and metallurgical facilities further compounds the threat of these hostilities for Ukraine’s people and their environment, both now and for years to come.”

3. Noise pollution

Those explosions, fighter jets, tanks and other weapons of war don’t have to hit you to hurt you. Firearms, missiles and vehicles make a lot of noise. This constant cacophony can disrupt the patterns of wild animals, affecting sleep, migration and the ability to hear and track prey. A 2016 study I covered for Audubon magazine found that owls could not hear their prey when manmade sound levels reached just 61 decibels. Many military rifles, by comparison, produce noise at around 150 decibels — and that’s quiet compared to some weapons or vehicles.

4. Habitat destruction and degradation

How would your home fare after a line of tanks rolled through your front yard? Not well, I presume.

And that’s true in war. A 2002 paper published in Conservation Biology documented the environmental damage from conflicts between 1961 and 2000, including deforestation, erosion, encroachment on wildlife reserves, pollution, oil spills, marshland drainage, the release of invasive species and more. The authors described many of these conditions as “severe.” Some nations have never recovered.

Flamethrower
Marines employ a to clear a path through what was once a thick jungle in Tarawa in 1943. (public domain)

5. Poaching, subsistence hunting, firewood collection and other ways of “living off the land” by hungry soldiers, locals and refugees

An army travels on its stomach — and, as we’re seeing in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, those soldiers aren’t always well fed, either through lack of planning or supply-chain disruptions. This can cause…problems. During World War II, stranded and starving Japanese soldiers ate a flightless bird called the Wake Island rail out of existence. Wars have also caused widely documented declines in elephants, gorillas, bonobos, a range of ungulates and hundreds of other species.

6. Domino effect

Let’s say those hungry soldiers eat all the local herbivores — what happens to the ecosystem after they’re gone?

In Gorongosa National Park, the disappearance of elephants and other large vegetation-eating species during the 1977-1992 Mozambican Civil War resulted in a 34% increase in tree cover, according to a 2015 study published in the Journal of Ecology. This might seem like a good thing, but as the authors wrote it’s a sign of an ecosystem out of balance:

“Woody encroachment is a significant conservation and management concern in savannas, grasslands and rangelands where it threatens native herbaceous plant species and the animals and ecosystem processes that depend on them. Further tree-cover expansion in Gorongosa could inhibit recolonization of some areas by species that prefer open habitats (including buffalo, wildebeest and zebra).”

7. Killing of civilian conservation workers and destruction of conservation facilities and infrastructure

Who will help species in need if trained and experienced professionals are killed or displaced? In 2012 efforts to conserve the okapi (a giraffe relative that looks like a cross between a zebra and a horse) suffered a devastating setback when a militia attack killed six people at the Okapi Conservation Project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The rebels also killed all 14 of the project’s resident okapi, burned buildings and looted supplies.

okapi
1909 illustration, via Biodiversity Heritage Library

More recently, six rangers protecting the DRC’s famous mountain gorillas were ambushed and killed last year by the Mai-Mai militia group — one of many such attacks. The Thin Green Line Foundation, which supports wildlife rangers, estimates that 100 rangers are murdered every year on average.

As wartimes threatens these conservation personnel, they become ever-more important, as the authors of the 2002 Conservation Biology paper wrote:

“It is local conservationists and field staff who must maintain continuity of presence during periods of political instability, establish lines of communication with local government officials and military administrators in rapidly shifting political landscapes, and provide much-needed material and moral support to besieged reserve personnel in regions beset by war and civil conflict. In instances where government institutions have been overthrown or ceased to function, local nongovernmental organizations and conservationists can help maintain continuity in conservation programs.”

8. Epidemics affecting people, livestock and wildlife

War has long been a breeding ground for disease (and the advent of bioweapons makes things even worse). Just last week health experts warned that the invasion of Ukraine could speed the spread of Covid-19 and other diseases. Historical wildlife disease outbreaks documented during wartime include rinderpest, anthrax, rabies, human monkeypox, bubonic plague and foot-and-mouth disease. Many of these diseases either directly threatened people or pushed them further toward starvation.

9. Resource extraction

Too many wars have been fought over gold, oil or other lucrative natural resources. War also makes illegal extraction easier, whether it’s mining in conflict zones or poaching in lawless zones. The militia that attacked the Okapi Conservation Center in 2012 was retaliating against efforts to restrict their illegal ivory trading and gold mining.

There’s another angle to this, of course: Oil and gas extraction are the heart of the Ukraine conflict, and that’s just making climate change worse. How many more conflicts over food, water and other scarce resources will this fuel in the future?

10. Disruption of government services, financial and human capital, and political instability

If you’re busy fighting for your survival, patrolling for poachers or polluters is the least of your worries. Meanwhile death, exhaustion and trauma take their toll at every level of society.

Those are probably the biggest messages of the 2002 Conservation Biology paper, which should ring true in this time of war two decades later.

And the effects, the authors warned, won’t be short term. War causes scarcity, which furthers social and political conflict, which begets more war. The loss of wildlife can have cascading environmental consequences, ranging from extinctions to outbreaks of disease and invasive species. Opportunistic corporations and criminals use the cover of war to increase their environmentally destructive activities. Conservation funding gets shifted to military and police operations — perhaps permanently. Wartime disruptions to sanitation and medical infrastructure can cause long-term epidemics, while destruction of waste facilities or oil, gas or nuclear operations can poison the landscape for generations.

So can the human trauma of war. Just ask the millions of people fleeing Ukraine today, many of whom are descendants of refugees of earlier wars and already carry their ancestors’ stories in their hearts, minds, history and culture.

Previously in The Revelator:

20 Endangered Species at Risk in Ukraine

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Listening to the Sounds of Extinct Birds

Digital audio recordings of species we've lost let us hear what the world used to sound like and could inspire efforts to protect what's left.

When people think of extinct animals, they may picture taxidermy, skeletons, 19th-century illustrations or perhaps grainy black-and-white photographs. Until very recently, these were our only ways to encounter lost beings.

However, technological advances are making it possible to encounter extinct species in new ways. With a few clicks, we can listen to their voices.

In September 2021, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recommended removing 23 apparently extinct species from the endangered species list. This group included 11 species of birds, as well as various aquatic creatures, a fruit bat and a Hawaiian plant.

Of the birds listed as likely extinct, six were recorded while they were still present: the Bachman’s warbler, ivory-billed woodpecker and four native Hawaiian and Pacific Island species: the bridled white-eye, Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, large Kauaʻi thrush (kāmaʻo), and poʻouli. Technology capable of recording bird sounds was developed only about a century ago, so these are some of the first now-extinct species whose songs have been preserved.

Bachman’s warbler on a tree branch
A photo from 1958 of a male Bachman’s warbler. Photo: Jerry A. Payne, USDA Agricultural Research Service (CC BY 3.0 US)

A Not-So-Silent Spring

These recordings are available on the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library website, a giant multimedia wildlife archive that holds more than 1 million audio recordings. It includes the sounds of 89% of all bird species on Earth as of 2020, along with photos and videos. The site includes modern sound recordings uploaded by hobbyists, professional sound recorders and scientists, as well as digitized historical recordings captured as long ago as 1929.

Scientists use these recordings to study questions such as how bird song evolved and how animals behave. The recordings are also accessible to the public. Macaulay Library director Mike Webster told me that he thinks of the recordings as time capsules: They let us hear what the world used to sound like and preserve our current sounds for the future.

In his view, all of the library’s recordings are precious. But sounds made by lost species are akin to priceless artworks, like a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh – the very definition of irreplaceable.

Sadly, this new genre of extinct animal sounds is expected to grow. Birds have been hard hit by the current ecological crisis: In Canada and the U.S. alone, threats including habitat loss, toxic pesticides and free-ranging domestic cats have reduced bird populations by nearly 3 billion since 1970.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” inspired a generation of American environmentalists by asserting that if humans continued the destructive behaviors Carson described, such as widespread use of pesticides, the nation could face a spring without birdsong. Sound recordings of extinct birds add a twist to this prediction by letting us hear what’s been lost.

To see the value of these recordings, let’s listen to two species: the ivory-billed woodpecker and the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō.

The Lord God Bird

The ivory-billed woodpecker, or ivorybill for short, is an iconic woodpecker species known as the “Lord God Bird” or “Holy Grail Bird” because of its striking appearance and extreme rarity. It was present in the southeastern U.S., with a subspecies in Cuba, but has dipped in and out of presumed extinction since the 1800s. The main causes of its decline are thought to be rapid large-scale deforestation after the Civil War and widespread culling by museum collectors.

This species is the most controversial on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service list. Some people believe that ivorybills still exist in southeast U.S. forests. The last universally accepted sighting was in 1944, but many others have since been reported, including some by scientists from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in the 2000s.

Sound recordings of ivorybills were collected in Louisiana in 1935 by Cornell ornithologists, who set out on a cross-country sound recording expedition to capture sounds and images of “vanishing birds” before they were gone. There have been several other claimed sound recordings of ivorybills over the years, including one in 1968 and some in 2006, but only the 1935 recording series is universally accepted by ornithologists and birders.

For those still searching for the ivorybill, the 1935 recording is an important tool, especially since it’s freely available online. People train their ears on the recording before their searches, and some even use it for “playback” – a technique where the recording is played in potential habitats in the hope that surviving ivorybills will respond. Scientists have also compared contemporary sound recordings they think might be ivorybills with the 1935 recording to suggest that the species is not extinct yet.

A Haunting, One-Sided Duet

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō (pronounced ‘kuh-wai-ee oh-oh’) is a small, dark-colored bird endemic to the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi and known for its intricate, flutelike “oh-oh” song. It is one of 11 Hawaiian and Pacific Island species on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service list.

Hawaii has been particularly devastated by environmental loss because of European and American colonizers who tore up delicate island habitats to plant sugar cane and other cash crops. Introduced predators, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and Hurricane Iniki in 1992 also contributed to the birds’ demise.

Ornithologist Jim Jacobi made a famous recording in 1986 of an individual male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō singing one-half of a duet – with no response. We have no way of knowing if this was the very last bird, but it’s hard not to listen as if it were.

A remix of a Kauaʻi ʻōʻō song was uploaded to YouTube by Robert Davis in 2009, with an added echo and what he described as “the shrill sounds of commercial exploitation.” This remix, which juxtaposes the bird’s haunting calls with the cause of their decline, has been viewed over 1.5 million times.

In my Ph.D. research about historical bird sound recordings, people frequently bring up their emotional connection to this species’ song. One scientist told me he finds it difficult to listen to the recording without crying. Another plays it in lectures to bring home the emotional dimensions of bird loss to students.

The Sounds of Saving the World

Sound recordings give a voice to animals. They help to demonstrate their unique spirits and personalities. They remind us that these beings are invaluable, and that humans have a duty to preserve them. I hope that listening to the voices of extinct birds will lead people to lament those that are already lost, and strive to keep other species singing.

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

Links From the Brink, Ukraine Edition

The connection between war and environmental destruction is on full display in Putin’s invasion. Plus, other news you won’t want to miss.

All eyes are on the war in Ukraine these days, and with good reason. The invasion is far from the only conflict in the world — Yemen, anyone? — but Putin’s actions could do a lot to destabilize much of Europe, if not the entire planet.

Much of the media coverage around Ukraine serves to examine what’s happening in the moment — bombs falling, tanks rolling and so on — so we’ve collected some important environmental reads about Ukraine, which also show how we can move forward. We’ve included some other news you might have missed while the war dominates the news cycles.

Vladimir Putin’s aggression and weapons of destruction would not be possible without Russia’s abundant supplies of oil and natural gas. That’s why, as Bill McKibben argues in The Guardian, this war should serve as an incentive to expand renewable energy sources as quickly as possible:

So now is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and wind power by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason — and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action — is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.

This change is past due, especially in Europe, as The Energy Mix pointed out recently (quoting energy analysts at IEEFA):

“Instead of diversifying the EU’s sources of energy to replace gas, Europe has spent a great deal of time diversifying gas supply routes, particularly pipelines from Russia.”

Russian gas pipelines
Russian gas pipelines, via Wikipedia (CC BY 3.0)

The move away from oil and gas needs to happen quickly, before more conflicts emerge, as Sammy Roth writes for Los Angeles Times:

It’s also important to remember that climate change poses a major national security threat, with the Defense Department and other federal officials warning last year that worsening climate-fueled hazards are likely to drive a surge in global migration, stoking political instability. That helps explain why the U.S. Army released its first-ever climate strategy this month, setting a goal of slashing its planet-warming emissions in half and powering all bases with climate-friendly electricity by 2030.

Of course, most news reports about the Russian invasion don’t mention the connection to oil and gas. Over at Neil Young’s Times-Contrarian news site, activist Rev. Billy Talen (a Revelator contributor) calls out media coverage of the war for omitting its environmental impact:

The Earth is the third party in this war by Russia on Ukraine. … How would the war’s violence look in the context of the great extinction of life that is now ongoing everywhere on the planet?

As many experts say, “Every story is a climate story.” Writing for Columbia Journalism Review, Covering Climate Now founder Mark Hertsgaard encourages journalists to put the Ukraine crisis in a climate context:

With heat-trapping emissions and global temperatures both continuing to rise, drought is bound to keep afflicting the U.S., Ukraine, and many other regions of the world. The consequences — for food production, social stability, and war and peace — are immense. News coverage should treat them accordingly.

Indeed, the need to expand our coverage of both the climate and extinction crises is broader than this one war, as Talen continued:

We have an obligation now, with what we know of the interconnectedness of all life, and with the high stakes of the great extinction, to bring the natural world to the foreground. We can’t afford to have any human drama that doesn’t mention the Earth, not now. We will have to discover a whole new kind of language — to foreground the Earth in sporting events, fashion shows or when Paul McCartney emerges from a limo.

While we’re calling out the media’s failure to link this war to environmental issues, we should also point out how badly last week’s latest United Nations climate report got buried in the “if it bleeds, it leads” news cycle.

Take CNN, for example. The climate report had an all-too-brief, yet prominent, placement on its website on Monday morning, but it quickly got shuffled down into far less important news:

CNN screenshot
CNN.com homepage screen grab, Feb. 28 at 10:30 a.m. PT.

That “crucial tipping points” headline deserved at least equal prominence as the network’s Ukraine coverage. But boy, how about that Derek Jeter news, huh?

Want to know more about the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report? Here are a few must-read links:

And if you want to dive even deeper, here’s the 3,500-page IPCC report itself. (Don’t worry, there’s a summary, too.)

Updates on previous stories:

Remember our recent op-ed about the need for an international treaty on plastic pollution? Well, the world listened, and one could soon be on the way.

And you know how plastic and other chemical manufacturers pose a threat to the climate? It turns out climate-fueled storms, wildfires and sea-level rise will bring threats to these very same hazardous chemical facilities.

florida panther
A Florida panther in the middle of a road. Photo: National Parks Service

In wildlife news, eight Florida panthers have died so far this year— compared to 27 in all of 2021. This year’s mortalities to date were all caused by motorists. At this rate, how much longer can Florida panthers survive?

What’s in a name? The spongy moth has the answer. Formerly known as the gypsy moth, a name based on a derogatory name for the Romani people, the change in moniker is one of two new steps in the move to decolonize species and place names. The other is an initiative by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to remove the offensive term “squaw” from an astonishing 660 sites in the United States — a welcome change, indeed.

One last thing:

Key deer
Photo: Garry Tucker (USFWS)

Could climate change kill off Florida’s beloved Key deer? Hurricane Irma wiped out 30% of the species in 2017, and although they’ve rebounded since then, the threat of more intense storms loom over both the tiny deer and the low-lying islands they call home. Noted conservationist Stuart Pimm told The Guardian that warmer temperatures, extreme weather events and sea-level rise “may not be quite as direct as someone going out with a shotgun and killing a bald eagle, but they are every bit as potent a factor in causing species extinctions.”

Something to think about as we celebrate Key Deer Awareness Day on March 11.

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Previously in The Revelator:

20 Endangered Species at Risk in Ukraine

Protect This Place: Tallahassee’s Towering English Forest Faces Imminent Destruction

Home to one of the city’s last intact forests, this privately owned gem could soon face bulldozers and construction.

The Place:

Protect This PlaceAn unprotected 740-plus-acre hardwood forest in southeast Tallahassee, Florida, called the English Property Planned Unit Development and PUD Amendment. This majestic upland hardwood forest, privately owned by the English family for a couple of generations, has withstood the test of time but has now become a figurative endangered species.

Why it matters:

This forest abounds with wildlife. According to a Biodiversity Matrix Report recently obtained from the Florida Natural Areas Inventory, a federally threatened flora species called zigzag silkgrass has been documented in or near this forest. The same report found a likely or potential presence of federally threatened and endangered fauna species such as the eastern indigo snake, wood stork, gopher tortoise and red-cockaded woodpecker, along with myriad other native flora and fauna.

English Forest
Photo courtesy midori okasako

This unprotected forest has been part of a crucial natural wildlife corridor that extends south into the Apalachicola National Forest. Much of the urban green corridor that still connects to this English forest is already protected, thanks to a privately preserved, sustainable conservation easement and an adjacent neighborhood with a conservation park maintained by the city of Tallahassee. Construction on the English forest would sever this wildlife corridor and add barriers for species roaming through these habitats.

In addition to featuring amazing biodiversity, this forest sits on a prominent geomorphic feature called the Cody Scarp, formed from an ancient shoreline. The land’s elevation significantly drops at the Woodville Karst Plain, an area characterized by active features such as sinkholes, karst lakes, a spring head, springs and underground streams. According to the Basinwide Management Action Plan, prepared by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, this site is in the Wakulla Spring Basin, a recharge area for the Wakulla Springs. This forest’s karst plain is a high-priority protection area uniquely vulnerable to runoff and stormwater containing nitrogen. Contaminants could easily seep into the Floridan Aquifer, which is connected to the Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park, and other sinkholes in the park located about 15 miles south of Tallahassee.

My place in this place:

As a youth, I spent many waking hours in a metropolis of sleek steel and glass, amid hordes of people, my day punctuated with pulsating sounds and lights. Yet at the end of the day’s sensory overload, an hour away by rail, a place of calm and silence always awaited me: this sylvan shelter in a valley nestled in small, forested mountains. Decades later, when driving by the English forest, I often reminisce about my childhood exploring those mountains, with city memories having long faded into hazy obscuration.

This city’s forests are also fading. Until the turn of the new millennium, lush greenery with majestic trees were ubiquitous at almost every corner of Tallahassee, our “Tree City.” Now our city is about to be engulfed by urban sprawl of short-lived, manmade constructions built without foresight or consideration of the environmental consequences.

The threat:

In 2012 the northernmost 245 acres of the English Property PUD were rezoned by the city of Tallahassee, and portions of the forest were completely clearcut. Construction soon began, resulting in the VA Tallahassee Outpatient Clinic in 2016, Lullwater multistory apartment complex in 2018, and Russell State of Florida Office Park (ironically housing the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission) in 2019. Builders still have plans for a 192-unit multistory apartment complex on a sloped 17-acre tract of this portion of the former forest.

English ForestBut that’s not all: In August 2021, developers submitted an amendment to the city to rezone the remaining 494 acres of the existing English Property PUD. This would allow the realtor, developers and potential buyers of the land to construct medium-density residentials (multistory apartment complexes, single-unit homes), mixed office/commercial complexes and “neighborhood village centers” (a euphemism for gas stations, convenience stores and fast-food places), leaving a mere fraction of the property as disjointed “open spaces” with no evidence of conservation easements.

If we don’t keep a watchful eye on the remaining 494-acre wilderness, it will be clearcut and broken up piecemeal into development parcels — an irreversible environmental disaster that would harm our communities. The area will see massive displacements and local extinctions of wildlife, including endangered and threatened species that have inhabited one of the last remaining intact ecosystems in the southeast area of the city.

Residents have fought similar proposed land-use plans for years, although pleas for preservation have mostly gone ignored.

Earlier this year, the developer abruptly revised the amendment, as a temporary measure, to only rezone 36 acres of the original PUD to expedite yet another multistory, 300-unit apartment complex. The realtor has made clear that they are still eventually going to proceed to have the remaining 494 acres rezoned — as a whole or piecemeal, as parcels — for construction, so this is not progress, merely a change in tactics.

The City Commission is scheduled to render a vote on March 23, 2022. If it’s successful, this would move the 36 acres into the 2012 PUD and rezone this parcel for construction.

Who’s protecting it now:

Regrettably, the forested English Property PUD is privately owned. Ironically, residents who live near this property appear to care more about the forest’s wellbeing than the owners.

In February, six individuals of different age groups and social standings presented during the City Commission’s public hearing. Their underlying appeals were to urge the city commissioners, as well as staff and the developers, to listen to them and to consider their concerns and suggestions. Shortly after the hearing, we finally coined our collective efforts Save the English Forest, or Save TEF. Having a united front will allow us to strive forward; we plan to meet with city staff, the developer and the realtor and propose modifications on the PUD. We also intend to request opportunities to meet with the city commissioners and the English family.

Meanwhile, the developer and the realtor who have been representing the English family have stated that the owners wish to do what’s best for Tallahassee, and they would like to “leave a lasting legacy.”

Ultimately, we’d like the real lasting legacy of this land to be preserved — along with its wildlife, its natural resources and its features. Allowing the forest to continue to thrive under public protection and conservation would be great investment that would endure for generations. We are currently collecting information on the how to have the remaining forest so it can be preserved by a local conservancy, the state, or a couple of other public entities. However, we know the final decision is up the owner of this forest.

What this place needs:

The bottom line is that the city of Tallahassee has become lax in permitting and rezoning constructions.

Prior to construction, it’s imperative that the city, the realtors, the developers and even the owner grant requested meetings with concerned members of the community whose homes neighbor the property and will be adversely affected. This will allow us to reexamine and modify the cookie-cutter land-use plan to significantly integrate more acres as conservation easements that will be connected so they can effectively function as permanent green corridors and sustainable wildlife habitats. Currently slivers of sloped, unbuildable and swampy, undesirable areas have been set aside as a “open spaces,” implying as conservation easements.

Since the southeast region of Tallahassee is currently deprived of a public-protected preservation area, designating a significant portion of the English property — specifically, areas that are considered vulnerable, buffering surrounding parcels and green corridors — could be acquisitioned by a national nonprofit organization and eventually handed over to the state of Florida or the Northwest Water Management District. For example, the 1,000-foot parcels adjacent to the city’s 52-acre Jack L. McLean Park could be publicly preserved and managed to promote passive nature-appreciation activities and to function as habitat for wildlife.

Lessons from the fight:

Since the initiation of raising residents’ awareness about the plight of the English forest, the first question I often encounter has been, “Can you win this fight?” All too often, it has become keenly obvious that most people only want to know the result, even before it happens. As with any undertaking, it is all in the laborious process. It has been one individual, one step, one voice, one flyer, one email, one small gathering, one commitment, one action at a time. There are no quick or easy shortcuts.

Not everyone supports our efforts — in fact, many have already made up their minds against them, believing there is nothing to gain from them. There have been oppositions to our efforts. Nonetheless, since time is of the essence, we strive to focus on the immediate task, with the responsive support and dedication of those who really care.

It is crucial to publicly address one’s concerns, make comments, and submit input on the record. Casual complaints, silence, complacency and inaction will yield nothing. One learns to become flexible in order to quickly react and adjust to sudden alternations and to last-minute meeting notifications.

It is a time-consuming, exhaustive endeavor. Yet, collectively, there is a chance to make a difference and to modify the course to save and to preserve much of the forest. We need to speak up for the forest and its wildlife — for they alone have no voice, no choice.

Follow the fight:

Save the English Forest

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Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: The Fragile and Enchanting Costa dos Corais

A Historic Chance to Protect America’s Free-Flowing Rivers

Ten bills in Congress would add conservation protections to 7,000 miles of river to safeguard drinking water, biodiversity and recreation.

Each year thousands of tourists who visit Central Oregon trudge up a steep half-mile path to see Tumalo Creek emerge from the pine forest and plunge 97 feet over lava rock into a narrow canyon. Tumalo Falls is the highlight for visitors who hike along the 20-mile creek. But for residents in nearby Bend, the creek is also a prized source of drinking water and a haven for wildlife.

Years-long efforts to protect the ecological integrity and scenic values of Tumalo Creek could be solidified with a bill now in Congress. The River Democracy Act would designate not just Tumalo but 4,711 miles of rivers throughout the state as part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

“This legislation will be good news for anyone who likes clean drinking water, fish and wildlife habitat, and public lands recreation,” says Erik Fernandez, wilderness program manager at Oregon Wild. “It will protect some of the most scenic rivers we have in Oregon.”

The National Wild and Scenic Rivers System was established in 1968 after passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Under the Act, rivers are classified as “wild,” “scenic” or “recreational,” depending on the surrounding development — or lack thereof — and are managed to maintain those values. In general, that usually means no new dams and mining claims, and a designation could also limit other kinds of developments, including logging and roadbuilding.

As of 2019 the nation’s Wild and Scenic Rivers System included 13,400 miles — less than one-half of 1% of the country’s river miles. But Congress has a chance this year to significantly expand the system.

There are currently 10 bills in Congress, including Oregon’s River Democracy Act, that, if passed, would add 7,000 miles to the national tally and an additional 5 million acres of protections of riverside land. Most additions to the system come by congressional legislation like this, but states can also make nominations to the secretary of the Interior.

In addition to Oregon’s River Democracy Act, the other bills in Congress include:

Proponents say the bills would help ensure clean drinking water, protect cultural resources, safeguard important habitat for aquatic and riparian species, and boost the recreational economy.

One way that would happen is by preventing harmful developments like dam building.

“It would be extremely helpful to get more and more of our free-flowing rivers designated under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, if for no other reason than to stop them from being dammed,” says Daniel Estrin, general counsel and advocacy director at Waterkeeper Alliance.

Building more hydropower dams “is a false solution to the climate problem and would really dramatically exacerbate problems for our rivers’ biodiversity,” he says. “And it would certainly make it much harder to reach 30×30 conservation goals where there’s an enormous amount of work that needs to be done.”

Oregon’s Historic Effort

snow along creek bank and log over creek
Tumalo Creek in Bend, Oregon. Photo: Meghan Nesbit

The River Democracy Act is by far the largest effort currently to add new Wild and Scenic designations, and it would go a long way in helping improve Oregon’s river protections. Only 2% of the state’s 110,000 river miles are protected as Wild and Scenic. The new legislation would triple that.

“Oregon hasn’t done a great job of protecting our rivers, so this is a pretty historic effort,” says Fernandez. “We’ve not seen this scale of effort here before.”

In addition to protections in Central Oregon, the bill includes tributaries of the Illinois River in the southwest part of the state, which he calls “some of the most biodiverse in the West,” as well as multiple coastal streams where protections have been lacking.

“If you want to protect salmon and steelhead, the coast range of Oregon is a great place to do that,” says Fernandez. “You have some potentially long-term viable runs that would be protected by this legislation.”

Protecting New Mexico’s Biodiversity

Compared to Oregon, New Mexico has even fewer river miles designated as Wild and Scenic — a measly 124 miles, which is less than one-tenth of 1% of all river miles in the state.

The M.H. Dutch Salmon Greater Gila Wild and Scenic Rivers Act — named after the late environmental activist, author of the book Gila Libre: The Story of New Mexico’s Last Wild River — would increase that number significantly by adding 446 miles of the Gila and San Francisco rivers in southwestern New Mexico.

“This bill seeks to currently protect the entire watershed of both the Gila Wilderness and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness as well as major tributaries that are outside of the existing wilderness areas,” says Nathan Newcomer, an organizer at New Mexico Wild.

Land protections in the region came nearly a century ago. The Gila Wilderness was the first designated wilderness area in the country. Aldo Leopold advocated for its protection as supervisor of New Mexico’s Carson National Forest in 1924.

River protections however are long overdue, says Newcomer. And they’re needed.

One of the biggest benefits of the bill, if passed, he says, would be ensuring that no dams are built.

Backpackers crossing a stream
Backpackers crossing a stream in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness. Photo: Bradley Lanphear / No Barriers (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

“People have been trying to dam the Gila River for over 100 years,” he says. “We’re constantly faced with threats for major dams and diversions on the Gila River and the Wild and Scenic designation’s main tenet is to prevent that from happening.”

Keeping rivers in the watershed flowing free would also help protect the area’s rich biodiversity.

“The Gila is in a really unique area in terms of ecological configuration where you’ve got the Colorado Plateau coming into the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts,” says Newcomer. The area includes forests of cottonwood, sycamore and ponderosa that are home to 250 bird species.

“The riparian habitat for birds alone is just immense,” he says.

The region is also home to threatened and endangered species like yellow-billed cuckoos, Chiricahua leopard frogs, northern Mexican garter snakes, southwestern willow flycatchers and Gila trout.

Legislative Action

The public often widely supports river conservation efforts. In New Mexico, for example, polling found that three-quarters of state residents support the new Wild and Scenic rivers bill. It also has the backing of local Tribes, faith and civic organizations, and more than 150 local businesses and conservation groups.

“This has been a community-driven effort,” says Newcomer. “The local communities have come together and asked Congress to get this into law.”

The situation is similar in Oregon where 50 breweries in the state announced their support of the River Democracy Act. Another 200 businesses added their approval in a letter last October. Clean and free-flowing rivers aid the recreation economy, which totaled more than $15 billion in Oregon in 2019.

“You’ve got this big cross section of everybody from hunters and anglers to trail runners and breweries all supporting protecting our rivers,” says Fernandez.

Even with support in home states, getting the 10 river-protection bills through Congress will be a fight.

“It used to be that provincial bills like this would pass with straight up or down votes back in the 60s, 70s and 80s,” says Fernandez. “But the last couple of times we’ve had bills [like this] pass nationally, it’s been part of what we call omnibus bills, where you need enough bills from around the country that there are enough senators who have something in it they want.”

Whether a big bill like that comes together in this election year remains to be seen. But Fernandez says that the pandemic has helped remind people of the benefits of protected public land and waters.

“The peace of mind for so many people these last couple of years has been safely getting outside,” he says. “I just hope that everybody who wants to can get out to a river or on public lands and enjoy it.”

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Previously in The Revelator:

Can Roadless Areas Help Stem the Extinction Crisis in the United States?

 

20 Endangered Species at Risk in Ukraine

Will Russia’s invasion threaten not just innocent people but the country’s unique wildlife?

The Russian bombs falling on Ukraine are putting millions of people and a vibrant culture at risk.

Vladimir Putin’s invading forces could also damage the Ukrainian landscape, home to dozens of unique and endangered species.

Here are 20 species that could find themselves further threatened by the invasion.

Russian desman (Desmana moschata) — The only member of its genus, this endangered semiaquatic mammal is related to moles (and like moles, it’s functionally blind). Found in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine — and recently extinct in nearby Belarus — the species faces declines due to poachers’ fishing nets and habitat loss. It went extinct in Ukraine in the 19th century but was reintroduced there in the 1950s — around the same time Joseph Stalin died.

Sandy mole-rat (Spalax arenarius) — A rodent unique to Ukraine, this endangered species has just one remaining stronghold, the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve, which may put it firmly in the path of Putin’s invading forces.

 

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Crimean rowan (Sorbus tauricola) — Native only to Ukraine, this rare plant exists in just 3-5 locations, where an invasive wasp called the mountain ash seed chalcide (Megastigmus brevicaudis) damages 99% of its seeds before they can become the next generation.

Vitrea nadejdae — This endangered snail is known from just five locations in Ukraine, each of which is (or was) a popular tourist destination.

Saker falcon (Falco cherrug) — This wide-ranging but endangered species faces a host of threats across its range. The birds don’t breed in Ukraine, but they do spend time there every year. The Ukrainian Birds of Prey Research Centre calls the population in the country “extremely vulnerable.” War won’t make the nation any more hospitable.

Zubowski’s plump bush-cricket (Isophya zubowskii) — Most of this endangered insect’s habitat is found in Romania, but its populations in Moldova and Ukraine are described as “very small and isolated.”

Idänvaskinen (Orthonevra plumbago) — This hoverfly was historically found in more than a dozen European countries, but according to the IUCN “all assumed 10 localities might be so small that they are at the risk of immediate extinction.”

Betula klokovii — Endemic to Ukraine, this birch tree remains in just two mountainous locations. Its population has declined to about 50 mature individuals, mainly due to mining and chalk quarrying.

Pontian shemaya (Alburnus sarmaticus) — This endangered carp may be extinct in Hungary and Romania, but it remains in Croatia, Slovenia and Ukraine. Its current population is unknown.

Crimean stone grasshopper (Asiotmethis tauricus) — This endangered insect is found in just a small portion of Ukraine, including Crimea. It also lived in Russia, but its continued presence in that country is uncertain. Most of its former habitat has been converted to farmland.

Melanogaster jaroslavensis — This fruit fly is known from just seven locations in Russia and one in Ukraine. Grazing, fertilizer pollution and river development have made it endangered.

Chornaya gudgeon (Gobio delyamurei) — This critically endangered carp is restricted to a 1 kilometer stretch of stream below Ukraine’s Chornaya Gorge. The IUCN, which hasn’t assessed the species since 2008, warns this tiny habitat “may totally dry up in the summertime” and adds that “the species is also susceptible to climate change as the severity of droughts is predicted to increase.”

Retowski’s tonged bush-cricket (Anadrymadusa retowskii) — Native only to Ukraine, this insect has become endangered due to habitat destruction. The IUCN warns that some of its severely fragmented populations “may go extinct.”

Retowski’s tonged bush-cricket
DDanMar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sorbus roopiana — Ukraine is one of the four countries in which this plant still grows, although according to the IUCN “the populations in Crimea are separated from the main part of its distribution.” Fewer than 100 individuals are thought to remain on Earth.

Merodon dzhalitae — An endangered hoverfly found only in Crimea, which has mostly been carved up by urbanization.

Medicago saxatilis — An endangered herb with no common name, known from just five locations in Crimea.

Andrena labiatula — This Ukrainian bee hasn’t been seen since 1963 and is only known from three specimens found on the Crimean peninsula. It’s officially listed as critically endangered.

Cobitis taurica — This poorly studied freshwater fish, a relative of Europe’s spined loach, exists in under one mile of a river below Chornaya Gorge.

Allium pervestitum — A garlic relative, this plant grows in just two areas of Ukraine. Limestone quarrying and urbanization put it on the endangered species list.

Фискомитриум песчаный (Physcomitrium arenicola) — This endangered moss grows in Russia and Ukraine, where it’s at risk from intensive livestock grazing and tree plantations. Scientists don’t know how well the species is doing — only that it’s rare. The IUCN says its populations are “considered to be severely fragmented since the subpopulations are small and isolated from each other.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Memorializing the Wake Island Rail: An Extinction Caused by War

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