Páramos at Risk: The Interconnected Threats to a Biodiversity Hotspot

The pressures of climate change and human land use could lead to the disappearance of unique biodiversity and vital ecological services.

On a recent, pre-pandemic journey to the High Andes of Colombia, I found myself surrounded by one of the region’s emblematic species, the flowering shrubs known locally as frailejones or “big monks.” These giant plants, relatives of sunflowers from the Espeletia genus, mesmerized me, their yellow buds and silvery hairs glistening in the intense, ephemeral sunlight.

Looking out over the vast, rolling landscape, I wondered how such a stunning, incomparable ecosystem can be taken for granted.

I’d accompanied National University of Colombia agricultural scientist Jairo Cuervo, that day, to Sumapaz — about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Bogotá — to better understand the impacts of an expanding agricultural frontier on rich páramo soils.

Sumapaz is the world’s largest páramo — a type of high-altitude moorland ecosystem found in the South and Central American neotropics that functions as a sort of sponge, efficiently absorbing and storing rainwater and moisture into its vegetation and rich soils. The water is then released slowly and steadily, which is particularly important in dry seasons. Sumapaz and the nearby Chingaza páramo, for example, provide most of the water for the entire Bogotá savanna.

Páramos, experts say, may also serve as a sort of buffer against climate-change-induced recession of tropical mountain glaciers and extended droughts — if we can protect them.

Cuervo pointed to a potato farm and some grazing cows in the distance, where they’d taken over from the native vegetation. “Despite the páramo providing us with water to live, they are largely forgotten, neglected and at terrible risk,” he says.

Agriculture is just one of many interconnected pressures threatening these unique ecosystems and the people and wildlife who depend on them.

High Risk in the High Andes

In an exquisitely diverse country, no ecosystem is as unique and directly integrated into the health and well-being of Colombian society as the High Andean páramo.

Some of Colombia and Ecuador’s major rivers also rise in the páramos, and large cities such as Bogotá, Medellin and Cali in Colombia and Quito in Ecuador are almost completely dependent on them for their water supplies. Tens of millions of people in the region rely on the páramo ecosystem for drinking water and a range of agricultural and industrial activities — including an estimated 70% to 80% of the Colombian populace.

Coconucos Páramo. Cauca, Colombia. Photo by D.H. Rasolt.
Coconucos Páramo. Cauca, Colombia. Photo by D.H. Rasolt.

These “water towers,” as they’re commonly known, are also one of the world’s most rapidly evolving ecosystems.

“Páramos are a hotspot within a global hotspot, as they’re located mostly within the threatened tropical Andes,” says Santiago Madriñan, a botanist from the Universidad de los Andes and an expert on páramos.

In an influential 2013 study, Madriñan and his team made the claim that páramos are the planet’s coolest and fastest evolving biodiversity hotspots, a conclusion established through genetic analysis of páramo plant species and comparison to other rapidly evolving biodiversity hotspots, such as the Mediterranean Basin, the Hawaiian Archipelago and the California Floristic Region. Some analogous processes being uncovered in parts of the Tibetan Plateau may give the páramos competition to this “hotspot of all hotspots” claim, but even so the páramos are undoubtedly special.

“The páramo, like the famed Galápagos Islands, are like a laboratory for studying the process of evolution,” Madriñan says. “We can learn how these species adapted to changing climatic conditions over a relatively short period of geological time. The páramo only came into existence within the last 2 to 3 million years, at which time uplift of the Northern Andes mountains rose above the tree line.”

For extended periods, especially during past glacial periods, páramo ecosystems remained more connected and evolved more uniformly at lower altitudes within mountain valleys due to a lower tree line. Since then, they’ve shrunk dramatically, while their evolutionary potential has practically exploded.

“The ensuing warmer epochs such as our present Holocene disconnected and isolated páramo complexes, creating ‘sky islands’ with very high species diversification and endemism,” explains Madriñan. “Most of the more than 3,000 plant species so-far discovered are highly specialized to the extreme conditions of the páramo.” These conditions include powerful ultraviolet radiation, drastic day-night temperature swings and abrupt changes in weather.

Paramo painting
“Páramo,” oil on canvas © Vannessa Circe. Used with permission.

And páramos are not only rich in plant life. They contain hundreds of endemic and threatened bird, reptile, amphibian, insect and mammal species, including the majestic Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) and spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus).

Rising Temperatures Threaten Páramos

While páramos serve as a buffer against climate change and water scarcity, they’re threatened by rapidly rising temperatures themselves — as are the plants and animals that live there.

The high altitude, isolation and specialization of many species limits their so-called “adaptive capacity” and ability to migrate upwards.

“There is no time or space to adapt to present trends of rising temperatures for many of the páramo plant species, including the Espeletias,” says Madriñon, who co-authored a recent study that showed Espeletias’ vulnerability to climate change. “They will be pushed out of existence.”

Rising temperatures in the páramo are also bringing some unwelcome guests.

“With climate change, insects often migrate upwards much faster than other species,” says Thomas Walschburger, a conservation biologist and science coordinator for TNC-Colombia. “There are some species arriving in the páramo ecosystem, such as beetles, caterpillars and other potential pests, that can have an unwanted impact, including on the frailejones. It’s unknown if the frailejones will have the time and ability to adapt to their presence.”

Climate change may also bring increased risk of fires within the páramos. Research has shown that fires in the páramo are mostly of human origin, sparked to clear vegetation and create open grassland. The higher temperatures and potentially drier conditions under climate change will make these fires both easier to start and harder to control. In February 2020 a massive fire burned at least 11 square miles (30 square km) in Sumapaz. The flames were bad enough to mobilize Colombia’s Disaster Risk Management Agency and cause air-pollution alerts in nearby Bogotá.

This isn’t just a local or regional problem. The waterlogged páramo soils are rich in organic matter and extremely dense in carbon, on the range of 0.2 – 1.4 tons per hectare, depending on depth. Scientists say the loss of the páramos’ carbon storage capacity will likely lead to a net-release of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change.

Encroaching Mining and Agriculture

Other threats continue to chip away at páramo ecosystems.

Legal loopholes are at the center of ongoing conflicts regarding hundreds of mining concessions granted within and around the páramos in Colombia. The ecosystems are supposed to be protected by law from such extractive activities, but that has done little to deter the ambitions of shortsighted corporations looking to exploit their mineral wealth.

Nowhere has this battle been more contentious than Minesa’s massive gold-mining concession within and around the Santurbán páramo, in Colombia’s Santander department.

Santurbán páramo
Lagunas Negras, Santurbán páramo circa 12,000 feet (3,800 meters). Santander, Colombia. Photo by D.H. Rasolt

In a 2018 letter for Science, Madriñan and 13 other highly regarded researchers from around the world emphasized that the protection of biodiverse páramos and Andean forests has been largely neglected in Colombia. They wrote:

“We urge environmental authorities to take the necessary action to stop the Santurbán [Minesa] goldmining project and instead promote the active preservation and restoration of the páramos and Andean forests, particularly in this biologically important area of the country.”

Today the decades-long struggle over Santurbán continues, thanks to strong local and national resistance fortified by researchers who enforce the socioecological importance of páramos.

Meanwhile the rapidly expanding high-Andean agricultural frontier, particularly for cow pastures and potato farming, poses perhaps the most tangible and immediate threat to páramos. Cow grazing requires large swaths of grassland and ruins páramo soil quality, while potato farmers drain bogs and often intensively deploy agrochemicals.

Cows
Cows grazing in the subpáramo, 10,000 feet (3,100 meters), in Cauca, Colombia. Photo by D.H. Rasolt

“With cattle, their weight compacts this naturally sponge-like soil, so if cattle grazing becomes even more extensive in the páramos, it could lead to the loss of the páramos’ vital function of efficient water absorption and slow release,” explained Jairo Cuervo while we were in the Sumapaz páramo. “There would also be increased runoff, soil erosion and flood risk, accompanied by decreased water quality that is exacerbated by agrochemical use for expanding potato cultivations in the páramos and subpáramos.”

The Challenge of Delimiting and Protecting the Páramo

The success of conservation efforts and attempts to limit the expansion of mining and agriculture into páramos will depend greatly on one critical element: maps.

But delimiting individual páramos and the entire global area of páramo, which exist at altitudes between the tree line and the snow line, is no easy task.

A widely cited statistic for the global páramo area estimates them at 13,500 square miles (35,000 square km), and within this estimate, more than half of the páramo area (7,300 square miles, or 19,000 square km) is within Colombia’s delimited páramo complexes. But that may leave a lot of these ecosystems unrecognized and unprotected.

“The most current accepted area of páramo in Colombia is around 3 million hectares [11,500 square miles],” said Brigitte Baptiste, a Colombian biologist and the former director of the Humboldt Institute, the entity responsible for delimiting Colombia’s páramos.

The remaining páramo is found in parts of Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Costa Rica.

What holds back efforts to draw more conclusive lines around the páramos? “I think the top challenges for the delimitation are not technical but social,” says Baptiste. “There are different ways of dealing with physical and biological issues by local people as well as by institutions and at other scales. Therefore it’s quite difficult to get an agreement about where to draw the line, and to get a science policy process in place which allows us to negotiate this definition.”

Regardless of the challenges, it is critical that the páramos’ limits be properly defined if they’re to be conserved. “The effects of páramo delimitation are clear: no mining, no agriculture, within the accepted legal area of páramo,” says Baptiste.

The Need for Socio-Ecological Balance

There are clearly conflicting interests among farming communities living within or around the páramo, mining companies looking to exploit the region, researchers enthralled by the unique ecosystem, and the multitude downstream who depend on páramos for water.

It wasn’t always this out of balance between humans and the páramo.

Indigenous peoples such as the Muisca lived in harmony with and worshipped the páramo for thousands of years, before their lands were stolen and cultures destroyed. Today some resilient Indigenous peoples remain and continue to protect the vital sacred páramo.

“The páramo is the originator of life and connects us to our ancestors. It should never be mined, burned, grazed or cultivated, as many shortsighted people do today,” Nasa leader Maria Pito told me in November 2019 from within the Pisxnu Páramo in Cauca, Colombia.

Pisxnu Páramo
Pisxnu Páramo. Cauca, Colombia. Photo by D.H. Rasolt.

Science is just starting to catch up with holistic traditional knowledge by providing data-driven socio-ecological reasons for protecting these ecosystems. For example, integrated modeling of the páramos’ complex and still largely unknown hydrological processes by the Stockholm Environmental Institute in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru has uncovered some important trends. It’s a difficult task, as researcher Cristo Pérez explained to me: “To properly model the páramos’ hydrology, one must account for the dynamic interplay between large amounts of groundwater, surface water, precipitation and the many rivers born in the páramos.”

But that complex hydrology is already suffering, and the problems are expected to get worse. In a 2016 SEI study of Peru’s Quiroz-Chipillico watershed, the authors concluded: “As expected, the model showed that rising temperatures and reduced precipitation would affect water availability. But land use change — specifically, the conversion of páramo to new uses and degradation of the páramo — had an even greater effect.” These projections further enforce that water availability will decrease not just for local communities and biodiversity, but for millions of people and ecosystems downstream.

The Time for Coordinated Action

The experts I spoke with all agreed that the interconnected pressures of climate change and human land use pose an existential threat to the páramos. Climate change will both directly affect specialized páramo species and will make the clearing of their vegetation by fire more common and efficient. As fires clear more land, cow pastures and potato cultivations will reach progressively higher altitudes within the páramos unless there are stronger efforts to limit their expansion. This, in turn, will further degrade soils and affect species’ ability to adapt and migrate.

Then there’s the question of water. Some research suggests that upward-migrating Andean forests may help to fill part of the dynamic hydrological function left by the disappearing páramos, but not if those lands are simply cleared for human activities.

“Maybe some of the water regulation can be made by High Andean forest, but we don’t know for sure as there would be changes to the structure and composition of water-retaining páramo soils,” says Walschburger. “Regardless, the impacts on biodiversity will be terrible if the páramo disappears.”

My own time in the páramos working with Indigenous peoples and a diverse spectrum of researchers has often given me the opportunity to venture alone to absorb the tranquility, complexity and breathtaking biodiversity of this neglected high-altitude paradise. These experiences have instilled in me that the páramos are an irreplaceable ecosystem in need of the highest levels of local, regional and global protection.

Whether they’re a vital source of water for tens of millions of people, megadiverse “sky islands” that can serve as a laboratory for the study of endemic species and evolutionary biology, buffers against climate change, or a sacred and awe-inspiring source of biocultural heritage, their loss would be an irreparable tragedy for both the region and the planet.

Creative Commons

Arbor Day — and Every Day — Should Be About Saving and Growing Trees

Planting trees is not a silver bullet. It’s time to change the narrative from tree-planting to tree-growing.

By Karen D. Holl, University of California, Santa Cruz and Pedro Brancalion, Universidade de São Paulo

For 149 years, Americans have marked Arbor Day on the last Friday in April by planting trees. Now business leaders, politicians, YouTubers and celebrities are calling for the planting of millions, billions or even trillions of trees to slow climate change.

As ecologists who study forest restoration, we know that trees store carbon, provide habitat for animals and plants, prevent erosion and create shade in cities. But as we have explained elsewhere in detail, planting trees is not a silver bullet for solving complex environmental and social problems. And for trees to produce benefits, they need to be planted correctly – which often is not the case.

Cartoon showing benefits and harms from tree-planting.
Planting trees can have both positive and negative effects, depending on how projects are planned and managed and where they are done.
Vanessa Sontag, modified from Holl and Brancalion 2020., CC BY-ND

Tree-Planting Is Not A Panacea

It is impossible for humanity to plant its way out of climate change, as some advocates have suggested, although trees are one part of the solution. Scientific assessments show that avoiding the worst consequences of climate change will require governments, businesses and individuals around the globe to make rapid and drastic efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Moreover, planting trees in the wrong place can have unintended consequences. For example, planting trees into native grasslands, such as North American prairies or African savannas, can damage these valuable ecosystems.

Planting fast-growing, nonnative trees in arid areas may also reduce water supplies. And some top-down tree-planting programs implemented by international organizations or national governments displace farmers and lead them to clear forests elsewhere.

clearcut
Clearcut forest. Photo: Sam Beebe (CC BY 2.0)

Large-scale tree-planting initiatives have failed in locations from Sri Lanka to Turkey to Canada. In some places, the tree species were not well suited to local soil and climate conditions. Elsewhere, the trees were not watered or fertilized. In some cases local people removed trees that were planted on their land without permission. And when trees die or are cut down, any carbon they have taken up returns to the atmosphere, negating benefits from planting them.

Focus on Growing Trees

We think it’s time to change the narrative from tree-planting to tree-growing. Most tree-planting efforts focus on digging a hole and putting a seedling in the ground, but the work doesn’t stop there. And tree-planting diverts attention from promoting natural forest regrowth.

To achieve benefits from tree-planting, the trees need to grow for a decade or more. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that reforested areas are often recleared within a decade or two. We recommend that tree-growing efforts set targets for the area of forest restored after 10, 20 or 50 years, rather than focusing on numbers of seedlings planted.

And it may not even be necessary to actively plant trees. For example, much of the eastern U.S. was logged in the 18th and 19th centuries. But for the past century, where nature has been left to take its course, large areas of forests have regrown without people planting trees.

Helping Tree-Growing Campaigns Succeed

Tree-growing is expected to receive unprecedented financial, political and societal support in the coming years as part of the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and ambitious initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge and World Economic Forum 1t.org campaign to conserve, restore and grow 1 trillion trees. It would be an enormous waste to squander this unique opportunity.

old-growth forest
Bob Wick, BLM

Here are key guidelines that we and others have proposed to improve the outcomes of tree-planting campaigns.

Protecting existing forests often requires providing alternative income for people who maintain trees on their land rather than logging them or growing crops. It also is important to strengthen enforcement of protected areas, and to promote supply chains for timber and agricultural products that do not involve forest-clearing.

  • Include nearby communities in tree-growing projects. International organizations and national governments fund many tree-growing projects, but their goals may be quite different from those of local residents who are actually growing the trees on their land. Study after study has shown that involving local farmers and communities in the process, from planning through monitoring, is key to tree-growing success.
  • Start with careful planning. Which species are most likely to grow well given local site conditions? Which species will best achieve the project’s goals? And who will take care of the trees after they are planted?

It is important to plant in areas where trees have grown historically, and to consider whether future climatic conditions are likely to support trees. Planting in areas that are less productive for agriculture reduces the risk that the land will be recleared or existing forests will be cut down to compensate for lost productive areas.

  • Plan for the long term. Most tree seedlings need care to survive and grow. This may include multi-year commitments to water, fertilize, weed and protect them from grazing or fire and monitor whether the venture achieves its goals.

We encourage people who support tree-growing efforts to ask where the money is going – to the organization’s managers, or to landowners who are actually growing the trees? Who is monitoring the effort and how long will they track it?

Growing trees can help solve some of the most pressing challenges of our time. But it is important to understand that planting seedlings is just the first step.

Karen D. Holl, Professor of Restoration Ecology, University of California, Santa Cruz and Pedro Brancalion, Professor of Forest Restoration, Universidade de São Paulo

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

Whales Face New and Emerging Threats

We’ve made a lot of strides in whale conservation, but climate change, plastic pollution and other dangers have emerged.

Humans and whales have a complex relationship.

We’ve hunted whales for food for centuries, celebrated them in our art and culture, admired their familial relationships and songs, and even worshipped them as gods.

But at the same time, we’ve overhunted multiple whale species to the brink of extinction, overfished their prey, poisoned their bodies and habitats, and scarred or killed them with our oceanic vessels.

While we’ve made great strides on many of those fronts, there’s still a lot to do and many reasons to worry. Here are some of them, followed by an archive of related stories from The Revelator:

1. We’re Still Discovering What’s Out There — and What’s Not

You’d think a large species like a whale would be easy to find.

Think again.

Several new cetacean species have been discovered in the past few years, most recently the rarely seen Rice’s whale in the Gulf of Mexico. Previously thought to be a subspecies of the Bryde’s whale, the newly recognized species was identified just in time. Scientists estimate that fewer than 100 Rice’s whales remain — perhaps as few as 60 — and say the species is critically endangered.

Similarly, it’s often hard to realize what we’re losing in the vast expanses of the ocean. In part that’s because whales are hard to count — especially dead ones. While many whale carcasses wash up on beaches, most sink to the bottom of the ocean or are consumed by scavengers. That presents a challenge to understanding how many whales are being killed or, if we do find a body, how they died. This has important conservation implications. For example, recent research suggests we’re undercounting the deaths of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales by 64% — and that’s one of the world’s most heavily monitored whale species, which all too often die after being struck by shipping vessels.

North Atlantic right whales
North Atlantic right whales. Photo: Sea to Shore Alliance/NOAA, under NOAA permit #15488

Speaking of which…

2. Ships vs. Whales

Globalization means more and more gigantic shipping vessels traversing the globe every day, where they can cross into whale feeding grounds or through migratory routes.

And when a ship strikes a whale, it’s not the ship that loses.

Shipping vessels
Photo: Kees Torn (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Most recently, necropsies revealed that at least two gray whales found dead near San Francisco Bay had been injured by ships, while an injured humpback whale was observed near Vancouver. Similar stories play out regularly around the globe.

And it’s not just big ships. Fishing vessels of all sizes pose threats, either directly or through lost fishing gear. This April a research drone captured footage of a baby gray whale entangled in fishing line, dragging a buoy behind it.

3. Climate Change Comes Calling

Warming oceans pose multiple threats to whales, some of which relate once again to the shipping industry. In recent years the industry has rushed to newly ice-free waters in the Arctic, bringing with them noise, pollution and other harmful changes.

Additional threats from climate change continue to emerge, and exactly what’s happening isn’t always clear. One recent study found that a population of bowhead whales failed to make its annual autumn migration away from solid ice in the Bering Sea, but the reason remains undiscovered. One theory is that warming waters could have resulted in an increase in their food supply. Another theory suggests changing temperatures could have allowed more killer whales to block the bowheads’ migration.

Similarly, climate change has resulted in decreased herring abundance in Quebec’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, and this loss of food has resulted in fewer humpback whale pregnancies coming to term.

Meanwhile, there’s a big reason to protect whales from climate change: their very existence helps protect us from climate change. Their feces help feed phytoplankton, which photosynthesize and absorb carbon dioxide before dying, sinking to the bottom of the ocean and sequestering that world-changing greenhouse gas. Whale bodies, similarly, also store an enormous amount of carbon that can be sequestered when they die.

4. Plastic: A Painful Threat

When whales accidentally consume plastic waste that they find floating in the ocean, the results can be deadly — either immediately or over time.

All too often, investigations into the cause of whale deaths find plastic to blame. One of the most recent examples occurred in Bangladesh, where two dead whales washed up near a resort town in April. “Primarily we think the two have died from consuming plastic and polluted objects,” Jahirul Islam, executive director of Marine Life Alliance, told AFP.

And remember that new whale species that was just discovered? One of the reasons we know the species exists is because a carcass washed up near the Florida Everglades in 2019. Scientists found that it was killed by a tiny, 2.5-inch piece of jagged plastic that lodged in its stomach and caused internal bleeding and necrosis.

Smaller plastic particles may also have health implications for whales in even the most remote locations. A study published in 2020 found that seven beluga whales harvested by Inuvialuit hunters all had plastic fibers and fragments in their digestive systems. All the particles were what’s considered microplastic, smaller than 5 millimeters in size. These may not be immediately fatal, but nearly half of the particles contained chemicals that could cause potential health problems, much like they could in humans. The risks whales may face from microplastics remains a field of active scientific investigation, with hundreds of papers published in just the past year.

Humpback rescue
A team of specially trained NOAA rescuers successfully free a humpback whale from a life-threatening tangle of fishing gear off the Kona Coast of Hawaii. Photo Credit: R. Finn/NOAA MMHSRP permit #932-1905

Larger plastic waste, such as lost or discarded fishing lines and nets, poses an even bigger threat. “Imagine walking around with weights tied to your ankles,” researcher Greg Merrill recently wrote in New Security Beat. “Whales struggle to get untangled from large nets and they end up dragging this weight along with them, expending extra energy they need to migrate and raise their young. An increasingly common tragedy is when whales become so overburdened by the weight of the plastic debris they cannot surface to breathe and drown.”

5. Public Perception Still Lags

People generally love whales and support their conservation, but how much do they really know about whales and the threats the face?

Not much, it turns out.

A recent scientific survey found that the majority of people cared about legislation to protect whales, but at the same time they didn’t know much about various whale or cetacean species. The researchers found that people thought common species such as bottlenose dolphins needed the most protection, didn’t know about some of the most endangered species such as the vaquita, and believed more countries actively engaged in whaling than really do today.

Perhaps most strikingly, the survey presented people with the names of several fictional whale species (like the “pygmy short-finned whale”), which respondents said they believed needed protection more than real at-risk species.

This might not seem like a huge problem at first, but the future of whale conservation may rely once again upon grassroots efforts from caring citizens. As the researchers concluded, “A lack of awareness of the conservation status of whales and dolphins and continued whaling activities suggests that greater outreach to the public about the conservation status of whale and dolphin species is needed.”

Let’s build that public awareness: Here’s a selection of additional articles about the threats that whales and other cetaceans face — and what’s being done to protect them.

Songs Whales Sing: The Peculiar History of Commercial Whaling

Cargo Vessels Are Killing More Whales — and a New Effort Aims to Save Them

What Would It Take to Save Southern Resident Killer Whales From Extinction?

southern resident killer whale
Photo: NOAA

Killer Whales Face Killer Toxins

Offshore Wind Power Is Ready to Boom. Here’s What That Means for Wildlife

Forests elephant blue whale
Forest elephant Richard Ruggiero/USFWS (public domain); blue whale Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Want to Fight Climate Change? Start by Protecting These Endangered Species

5 Reasons to Rethink the Future of Dams

Are Forever Chemicals Harming Ocean Life?

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

10 Things We’ve Learned a Decade After the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

5 Things You Should Know About the Earth’s Warming Ocean

A Gray Whale Washed Ashore in Alaska May Hold Clues to This Year’s Deadly Migration

The Unseen Threat: Noise in the Arctic Marine Environment

An Orca in Grief: Tahlequah’s Call to Arms

Something Fishy: Toxic Plastic Pollution Is Traveling Up the Food Chain

The Last Vaquitas: “I’ve Seen More Dead Than Alive”

How Did the Pandemic Affect Ocean Conservation?

 Creative Commons

How One of Australia’s Rarest Trees Was Saved From Wildfires

A new book reveals the harrowing attempts made to save imperiled plants and wildlife from Australia’s massive wildfires last year, including a daring scheme to protect ancient Wollemi pines.

The following is excerpted from Flames of Extinction by John Pickrell. Copyright © 2021 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

As Christmas approached in 2019, David Crust, a director of park operations with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, watched with trepidation as multiple fires crept their way across the vastness of Wollemi National Park, northwest of Sydney, Australia.book cover

In fact, fires were then ablaze right across the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, which Crust is responsible for. His entire team of 160 people battled to contain them and protect the townships they threatened.

As the disaster intensified, the fire closed in on the secret location of a tiny population of critically endangered trees; prehistoric plants so precious that just a handful of people are privy to their exact whereabouts.

The Wollemi pine, a conifer that grows to 40 meters [131 feet] and has unusually arranged, dark green foliage and bubbly bark, once flourished across the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, providing shade and sustenance for the dinosaurs.

But over the eons, the range of this “living fossil” has contracted until just 100 or so mature trees remain, spread over four small groves in Wollemi National Park. The majority are wedged into one sheltered gully, deep in the wilderness. Here, the oldest and largest of the pines, dubbed King Billy, is thought to be around 1,000 years old.

***

Prior to September 1994, this kind of araucaria pine (related to Norfolk pines, hoop pines and monkey puzzle trees) was only known from fossils. That was until NPWS field officer David Noble was on a canyoning trip exploring parts of the wilderness perhaps never infiltrated by humans. After abseiling into one uncharted canyon he stumbled across something puzzling.

“At the time, it was just another weekend canyon trip into the Wollemi wilderness. We were looking for new canyons, abseiling down waterfalls to places where no one had been,” Noble recounted in 2017. “We had completed the descent and sat down for lunch when I noticed a tree that I hadn’t seen before. Without thinking too much, I collected a small leaf sample and put it in my backpack.”

fossil with leaf on top
Wollemi pine fossil. Photo: Royal Botanical Garden Sydney, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

He couldn’t match the leaves to anything he knew, so later that week took the sample to Wyn Jones, a NPWS naturalist. Jones returned to the site with Noble, and quickly realized its significance. It was one of the greatest botanical discoveries of the century.

When Jones and Jan Allen, a botanist at the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, were involved in describing the species in 1995, they named it Wollemia nobilis in honor of Noble.

The discovery of the Wollemi pine as a living plant “was an incredibly significant botanical find,” says Crust. With a heritage spanning 200 million years, some said it was akin to having found a family of dinosaurs still surviving in one of the dark crevices of our planet.

***

This is why Crust was so concerned as fires engulfed much of Wollemi National Park in December. While fire has threatened the pines before, the lack of moisture here at the peak of the drought was like nothing on record.

“Right at the start of the season, we were concerned … there was the significant potential for large and intense fires,” he says. “We were watching the fires across the park very, very closely … and their behavior was erratic because of the incredibly dry conditions.”

Having had the “privilege” of helping manage the species since 1996, soon after its discovery, Crust wasn’t going to allow it to be lost without a fight.

In early to mid-December, about two weeks out from when the fire finally roared up to the lip of the canyon, it became clear Crust and his team needed to throw into action a previously-thought-out-but- never-implemented plan to save the trees, should the worst ever occur.

This extraordinary operation involved dropping fire retardant from air tankers and helicoptering in specialist firefighters each day, who were winched down into the canyon. From there, they pumped water into an irrigation system to increase the level of moisture in the environment. This daring plan was like nothing ever attempted before in the name of conservation.

But would it be enough to save trees? The Wollemi pine had survived the demise of the dinosaurs, the break-up of the supercontinents and a constantly shifting climate, but now its fate was in the hands of one small crew of dedicated NPWS remote area firefighters.

cluster of trees
Wollemi pines found in Australia are critically endangered. Photo: Royal Botanical Garden Sydney, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

***

On the night the blaze finally swept the grove, the atmosphere was tense in the fire operation control room, where Crust and his team watched its progress on the remote cameras. But so much smoke engulfed the grove that it was impossible to see if they had succeeded in saving the trees.

As dawn broke the next day, NPWS team member Steve Cathcart headed to the site in a helicopter. He was meant to remain in the air, directing the bombardment of water, but Cathcart could see fires burning below. A gum tree had fallen from the cliff above and was ablaze in the center of the grove.

Breaking the rules, he winched down solo into the grove, where he kicked burning coals away from the base of the Wollemi pines and jerry-rigged melted irrigation pipes so he could pump water up to douse the blaze.

“Given the importance of each and every one of those trees, I knew what I had to do,” Cathcart recounted to The Australian newspaper. “I just happened to be there at that time … I knew that we probably wouldn’t get another opportunity to organize a team [to go down] and that the smoke would probably close in. It had to be me.”

As he was flying out, another helicopter flew in to water-bucket the blaze. The trees had been saved.

Fire had scorched trunks and killed many smaller, juvenile trees, but the canopy of the mature pines escaped unscathed. If it had burnt, the results would have been catastrophic, Crust tells me.

Seen from above, the gorge containing the Wollemi pines was a welcome streak of green amid endless ridges of charred sclerophyll forest. When news of the pines’ survival and the effort to save them hit the press a few weeks later, jubilation broke out at another rare good news story amid all the horror of the past few months.

“We were relieved,” says Crust. “But, we’re still not sure exactly what the impacts will be. The trees have never been impacted by fire in this way since their discovery.”

Most of the mature trees already had some evidence of fire scarring on their bark when they were discovered, suggesting they have some tolerance to bushfires, but it may be many years before the longer-term effects of the 2019 fires on mortality can be determined.

For now, the pines are safe — the entire landscape around them has burned, so there won’t be any significant threat from fires for four or five years. But the challenge will come after that and Crust and his team must plan for managing the threat of fire here into the future.

Copyright © 2021 by John Pickrell. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Achieving Net-Zero Climate Targets Will Depend on Public Lands

To slow climate change, we’ll need to not just cut emissions, but sequester them. And for that we’ll need to protect healthy ecosystems, experts say.

Since the start of the Biden administration, federal climate policy seems to be waking up from a four-year slumber. But things are not as they were in 2017. The planet is hotter, 57 million acres of American forests have burned, and the global carbon budget is tighter than ever.

But there’s good news. Even while the Trump administration sought to dismantle national climate policies, a growing number of local, state and private-sector actors found ways to lead at home.

Our latest research, conducted at the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, shows how these “subnational” actors have kicked off a new era of climate action. As a result, the majority of Americans now live in jurisdictions committed to reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century or earlier.

But the push to net zero can only go so far without coordination from D.C.

In their current form, subnational targets have wide discrepancies in how states choose to pursue and measure their pathways to net zero. For instance, if Oregon buys electricity from a coal-fired power plant in Idaho, should Oregon count those emissions as its own? Should Idaho? What if the coal came from Wyoming? A lack of consistency could lead to double counting — or worse, not counting at all.

These targets are also unable to address a substantial gap in the fabric of subnational climate action: Emissions that come from the one quarter of U.S. land that is owned and managed by the federal government.

A stunning 23% of the nation’s greenhouse gases can be traced directly to public lands. Much of these emissions come from the extraction of fossil fuels under leases issued by the Bureau of Land Management. States have limited control over what takes place on federal property, even when that land is within their borders. The BLM and U.S. Forest Service set the terms for oil and gas leasing, mining permits and logging.

oil drilling
Oil drilling on BLM land in Utah. (Photo by Wild Earth Guardians, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

More recent attempts to regulate emissions from federal government leasing and permitting programs were stymied by climate obstruction by the federal government. The American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act would have required federal lands to reach net zero by 2040, but it never received a hearing in the Republican-controlled Congress in 2019. As a result, states — especially those in the West with large swathes of public land — remain limited in their ability to meet their own decarbonization targets.

But public lands offer an opportunity as well as a challenge. American public lands already sequester roughly 250 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. The restoration of forests and other native ecosystems plays the leading role in taking up this carbon, while protecting biodiversity and ecological resilience.

Today these carbon sinks give the United States the equivalent of a 4% rebate on the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. That might sound small, but it’s greater than the annual emissions from every commercial flight in the country.

Looking forward into the decisive decade, as emissions begin to decline, the amount of carbon sequestered by public lands will be determined by our actions as stewards of these landscapes. Ultimately, reaching net zero means ensuring that for every ton of CO2 emitted in a given year, another ton is put back into the earth. A large portion of those negative emissions has the potential to come from America’s public lands, but forests will not regrow in the course of a single night or even one election cycle.

Recognizing this opportunity will be important to communicating that public land is valuable for more than just extraction and logging. The more we can protect public lands to ensure they’re carbon sinks rather than sources, the easier it will be to reach net zero by 2050.

The Biden-Harris administration took a key step in this direction in January when it issued a temporary moratorium on new fossil fuel leases on public lands. But the administration has yet to issue guidance on whether this moratorium will continue or how it plans to deal with existing leases.

Even more recently, Congress began debating the CLEAN Future Act, which would commit the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050, in addition to setting a 50% emissions reduction by 2030. But the act doesn’t provide an explicit mandate to the Interior Department to align the actions of the BLM with the needs of a net-zero future. Unlike the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solutions Act, the CLEAN Future Act doesn’t require federal and state actors to come together and plan to reduce emissions and sequester carbon on public lands.

With this omission Congress risks making the common mistake of overlooking the federal government’s direct role in facilitating nearly a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Aligning ambition with action will require a new era of federal leadership. And if Congress is too gridlocked to act on climate, there’s every hope that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will be one of the nation’s most influential climate champions in the years to come.

Creating a net-zero strategy for the United States’ public lands would be an excellent place to start.

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

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Species Spotlight: The El Rincon Stream Frog Is in Hot Water

Invasive predators have cornered these endangered Patagonian frogs in the last remnant of their habitat.

Species Spotlight

The El Rincon stream frog only lives in hot springs at the headwaters of a small Patagonian stream. With just a handful of decimated populations remaining, the critically endangered frog is struggling to survive.

Species name:

El Rincon stream frog, also known as the Somuncura or Valcheta frog (Pleurodema somuncurense)

Description:

This small frog is almost entirely aquatic. Its coloration is green and brown with several dorsal spots, and some individuals can have a clear vertebral line.

Where it’s found:

The hot springs of the headwaters of the Valcheta Stream, in northern Patagonia

IUCN Red List status:

Critically endangered due to a continued decline in extent and quality of its aquatic habitat and the local extinction of some subpopulations

Major threats:

Invasive predator salmonids (rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss) have cornered these frogs in their last habitat. And even there, they also face habitat destruction by livestock.

Notable conservation program(s) or legal protections:

The Wild Plateau Initiative (Somuncura Foundation) is running an action plan framed on habitat restoration and population recovery of this species. The recovery program is based on ex situ breeding and reintroduction of individuals into restored habitat.

My favorite experience:

I was part of the first reintroduction attempt of this endangered species in the wild — in a restored habitat where a local population had become extinct. Releasing captive-born individuals into a wild habitat, where they will be protected and free of threats, makes me happy and confident about being able to do something for the sake of the wild.

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

Next steps include continuing with ongoing conservation activities, promoting the legal protection of the frog’s habitat, and engaging the local community in conserving it.

Key research:

  • Velasco M, Berkunsky I, Akmentins M, Kass C, Arellano M, Aguirre T, Williams J, Kacoliris 2019. Status and population dynamics of the Critically Endangered Valcheta frog Pleurodema somuncurense on the Patagonian Somuncura Plateau. Endangered Species Research, 40: 163 – 169.
  • Martinez Aguirre T, Calvo R, Velasco MA, Arellano ML, Zarini O, Kacoliris 2019. Re-establishment of an extinct local population of the Valcheta Frog, Pleurodema somuncurense, in a restored habitat in Patagonia, Argentina. Conservation Evidence. 2019.
  • Velasco MA, Berkunsky I, Simoy MV, Quiroga S, Bucciarelli G, Kats L, Kacoliris 2018. The rainbow trout is affecting the occupancy of native amphibians in Patagonia. Hydrobiologia, 817: 447 – 455.

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30×30: How Important Are Private Lands in Meeting Conservation Goals?

Experts say expanding public lands won’t be enough to achieve science-based calls for more protected areas.

Sagebrush bulldozed for a housing development. A pipeline carved through grasslands. Forest felled for a road. Every 30 seconds in the United States, a football field-sized swath of nature is lost to development, according to research from the Center for American Progress.

This troubling trend runs counter to calls from scientists to protect more natural areas to mitigate against the effects of climate change and better protect plants and animals from extinction.

Current goals to protect biodiversity simply aren’t good enough, scientists say.

Targets set in the international Convention on Biological Diversity called for protecting 17% of land and 10% of the ocean by 2020. “These are interim measures that are politically driven but not science based and are widely viewed in the scientific literature as inadequate to avoid extinctions or halt the erosion of biodiversity,” according to research published in the journal Science Advances.

If habitat destruction and warming don’t peak by the end of this decade, we won’t be able to keep rising global temperature below the critical threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius, the researchers said. “It has become clear that beyond 1.5°C, the biology of the planet becomes gravely threatened because ecosystems literally begin to unravel,” the authors wrote.

We need to aim higher. And quickly. Efforts are now coalescing behind “30×30” — a global goal of protecting 30% of Earth’s land and water by 2030.

“30×30 has been discussed in scientific circles for quite some time in acknowledgement of the multiple crises on our hands — the extinction crisis and the climate crisis — both of which are magnified by the rate at which we’re losing nature,” says Ryan Richards, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

In January the United States took a first step in moving the United States toward 30×30. A sweeping executive order from President Joe Biden on the climate crisis contained a mandate directing the secretary of the Interior and other relevant agency leaders to submit recommendations for how the federal government could conserve at least 30% of the United States’ land and waters by the end of the decade.

Initial findings are due later this month, but there’s no doubt that there’s much work to be done. Currently 26% of the country’s ocean waters are protected, but only 12% of U.S. lands.

“Nine years is not a very long time to protect essentially 440 million additional acres that still need to be conserved to reach that 30% goal,” says Erin Heskett, vice president of conservation initiatives at the Land Trust Alliance.

A big focus will undoubtedly be increasing the amount of federally protected public lands, possibly with a first step of restoring cuts by the Trump administration, which slashed more than 1 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah. National parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and national monuments are all important places that help protect biodiversity and sequester carbon to mitigate against climate change.

But there’s another important component, experts say: private lands. The Center for American Progress found that 75% of natural areas lost to development in the United States between 2001 and 2017 were on private lands, including farms, ranches and forests.

“That rate is five times higher than on federal or state lands,” says Richards. “So private lands are going to be one of the big pieces of the puzzle if you’re going to be successful in meeting those 30×30 goals.”

A Big Opportunity

When it comes to protecting private lands, there’s nowhere to go but up.

A mere 3% of protected areas in the country are on private lands, despite the fact that 60% of all land in the country is privately owned.

That’s bad news for biodiversity.

“Researchers have found that we’re losing habitat for threatened and endangered species twice as fast on unprotected private lands as we are on public lands, which is a big deal when you realize that a huge percentage of our threatened species live in places like the Southeast and areas outside of where we have a lot of federally protected public lands,” says Richards.

One way to begin protecting more private land is to ramp up existing programs that help local government agencies or land trusts buy private property outright or provide incentives for conservation easements.

Conservation easements, which are voluntary legal agreements where landowners are compensated for preserving — typically permanently — the conservation value of their property, already protect an estimated 40 million acres in the United States. And it’s proving to be a good investment of public money.

three grouse in snow
Gunnison sage grouse. Photo: Larry Lamsa, (CC BY 2.0)

In Colorado conservation easements have set aside 1.5 million acres of land considered “crucial habitat,” which includes areas for Gunnison sage grouse and wintering range for elk. A report from Colorado State University found that each conservation dollar invested by the state has delivered $4-$12 of public benefits. Those benefits, often called “ecosystem services,” include groundwater recharge, flood control, water purification, and habitat for fish and wildlife.

“They are already popular, especially in the West where many landowners have a strong ethic of stewardship,” says Tyler McIntosh, a policy and design associate at the Center for Western Priorities. “Since people are already motivated to do this work, there’s an opportunity to structure our policy such that their voluntary efforts are worth it for them financially.”

Funding Sources

Several existing Department of Agriculture programs already help to boost conservation. One is the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, which helps conserve wetlands and grasslands. Another, the Conservation Reserve Program, pays farmers to take land out of production and plant species to improve environmental health.

But McIntosh says interest in these programs exceeds most of their available funds.

That means Congress will need to allocate more resources to those programs and utilize other initiatives, such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which conservation groups fought last year to have fully funded by Congress.

Money from the fund — which is generated by offshore oil and gas leasing — can be used for acquiring new lands, such as through the Forest Service’s Land Acquisitions Program. But McIntosh says one important thing to remember is that most grants from the Land and Water Conservation Fund need to be matched at the state level. “It’s very important that states begin to set aside funds for conservation, too,” he says.

Exactly how much more money it will take to meet 30×30 conservation goals isn’t clear, says Heskett, but it will take efforts beyond the federal government.

“We’ll also need more from state governments, private philanthropy and conservation finance tools,” he says.

students planting
Philomath High School students plant trees, grasses and shrubs at the Marys River Natural Area owned by the City of Corvallis. This 74 acre site is also under the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Wetlands Reserve Program as a permanent easement. Photo: NRCS Oregon, (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Combining permanent easements with short-term incentive programs could also help, say Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares, professors in the department of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley.

“One such approach could be conservation leases with terms of 20 to 30 years that are palatable to landowners while providing meaningful protection,” they explained in an op-ed in The New York Times. “These programs would be less expensive than land purchases or easements, providing new ways for corporations and philanthropists to underwrite land protection at a scale much greater than can be achieved through the outright purchase of land.”

Additional Gains

Using private land to boost protected areas can also make nature more accessible and widens the geographic scope of where conservation happens.

The vast majority of federally protected lands are in the West, but by increasing protection on private lands in other parts of the country it can help conserve more plants and animals, as well as provide natural areas nearby millions more residents.

“Private land is often closer to communities than federal wilderness, national forests or even state lands,” found a report by the Center for Western Priorities. “For example, many city parks are protected by conservation easements. Additional benefits can include improved health, access to locally produced food, and opportunities for environmental education.”

But deciding which lands are conserved should also include identifying not just how much can be protected, but what kind of ecosystems.

“We feel that there’s an opportunity here to identify a significant portion of this goal that would invest in the lands and waters that are most resilient to climate change and would best allow animals and plants to find new places to thrive,” says Heskett.

One way to do that, he says, would be by using a tool developed by the Nature Conservancy called the Resilient and Connected Landscapes network, which identifies lands across the country that are expected to be the most resilient to climate change.

And any effort to improve conservation goals also need to be centered in equity.

“Native Americans and other peoples of color have been largely excluded from U.S. conservation policy, and many of them, living in cities, view public lands as remote and unwelcoming,” wrote Middleton and Brashares. “A successful 30 by 30 strategy must encompass needs as diverse as tribal priorities and urban green spaces in historically excluded communities.”

But if done well, a 30×30 conservation goal can help both diverse human communities and ecosystems.

“Our polling shows that the public is behind conservation,” says McIntosh. “And the question now is whether governments at state, local and federal levels are going to tap into that support and take advantage of this moment.”

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Hey Conservationists! Got Hope?

Hope is often touted as an important ingredient in conservation success. Our research found that it’s vital — but only if it’s combined with another key element.

Hope — it seems to be everywhere these days. Humans routinely hope for all sorts of stuff — easy-to-assemble IKEA furniture, vaccines against COVID-19, economically painless solutions to global warming. Some believe we’re born with an “innate” sense of hope, and according to positive psychologist Barbara Frederickson, hope is one of the “top ten positive emotions.” It’s even been said that “when hope dies in a person, physical death is not far off.”

Among conservation workers, activists and anyone concerned with the climate crisis, hope is called upon to do particularly heavy lifting. A recent Google search on the phrase “hope and conservation” returned a whopping 779,000 results. In the top result, conservation journalist Jeremy Hance asks “Has hope become the most endangered species in conservation?”

There’s a common narrative shared by Hance and other like-minded commentators. Hope, according to this line of thinking, is a bulwark against the despair that would be an all-too-natural reaction to torrents of environmental bad news. Ecologist Steve Morton calls it “the elixir of (environmental) action,” whereas, to feel hopeless, according to numerous sources, is to be numbered and paralyzed into inaction. Gregory Balmford and Nancy Knowlton, architects of the Earth Optimism movement, even argue that hopelessness among conservationists could become “a driver of extinction.”

flower
Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator

I’m an ecologist, not a psychologist, but I’ve long been struck by the centrality of hope in professional conservation discourse. Commentaries in the conservation literature extoll and debate the virtues of having “hope in hard times.” But are we, I asked myself, expecting hope to do too much?

To investigate this question, I teamed up with psychology Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Williams and sustainability expert Melanie Zurba to investigate the many dimensions of hope and to ask whether hope’s really a necessary prerequisite for people to engage in environmental action. Our resulting review, published last year in the journal Biological Conservation, reached back to the earliest definitions and psychological theories of hope and found that it has both benefits and pitfalls for people working on conservation and environmental issues.

Hope Status? It’s Complicated.

Strong claims for the power of hope in modern human affairs follow a long history in which hope was seen in a negative light. Ancient Greek writers, for example, often perceived hope as a refuge for wishful thinkers, the gullible and those who underestimated the gravity of their situations.

It was left to thinkers from the Enlightenment and later to reframe hope as a positive attribute with goals that can be actively pursued.

That brings us to contemporary positive psychology, which defines hope as “a positive motivational state” (not an emotion) that enables people to exercise agency (goal-directed energy) in the pursuit of objectives that are possible but not 100% certain.

hope
Photo: Justin Ried (CC BY 2.0)

This type of “active” or “authentic” hope is what conservation biologist David Orr had in mind when he described hope as “a verb with its sleeves rolled up.” Orr’s folksy definition capture the idea of hope as having pragmatic, achievable goals that demand conservationists take the actions needed to realize them. You may not know how to save the world, but you can hope to conserve a watershed.

However, don’t confuse hope — especially active hope — with four related but different states that have less positive implications.

First, there’s optimism. Unlike active hope, optimism’s objectives may be vague or even absent. Optimism is best thought of as a sunny expectation that “everything will turn out for the best.”

Then there’s passive hope, in which individuals hope for favorable but fuzzily defined outcomes such as “a solution” to climate change. Passive hope may actually be demotivational. For example, those who feel hopeful because they only expose themselves to positive visions of the future may fail to follow through on those feelings to make them real.

There’s also absolute hope, the refusal to despair in the face of an inevitably bad future, like a terminal illness. A patient may be terminal, but absolute hope allows them to maintain their sense of self and resist dwelling on the diagnosis.

Finally, at the extreme end of making the best out of bad times, there’s radical hope, which helps to makes unsatisfactory or disastrous present circumstances tolerable by maintaining hope for future deliverance. You can have radical hope without knowing what future deliverance looks like or when it will arrive. One individual often held up as an archetype of radical hope is Plenty Coups, last principal chief of the Crow Nation, who led his people through a period in which Crow traditions of hunting and warriorship were destroyed.

Though it may seem noble, radical hope can be a slippery slope to “positive reappraisal,” where negative outcomes are re-evaluated as opportunities or even as beneficial. Naturalist and blogger Phil Barnett appeared to be practicing positive reappraisal when he wrote: “…if only for the sake of our mental health, we can accept the reality of a globe, everywhere sullied by man’s footprints and perhaps even learn to love it.” In a real-world conservation example, I’d posit that both radical hope and positive reappraisal lie behind the “Hail Mary” plan to clone the functionally extinct northern white rhinoceros, now down to two individuals, both of them female.

To Hope or to Hope Not?

Not everyone buys into the hope agenda. Environmental writers Paul Kingsnorth and Derrick Jensen accuse environmentalists of buying into false hope. Echoing the ancient Greeks, they say that false hope leads to unattainable goals, illusory expectations, and inept action strategies. To Kingsnorth, “False hope is worse than no hope.” Jensen seems to be thinking about both false hope and radical hope when he says hope is a “longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”

clearcut
Clearcut forest. Photo: Sam Beebe (CC BY 2.0)

Furthermore, absence of hope doesn’t stop some people from acting in pro-environmental ways. Greta Thunberg doesn’t always come across as a fount of positivity, yet she continues to fight for the world she wants. Neither Kingsnorth nor Jensen feels hopeful, yet each continues to act in the world, albeit from outside mainstream environmentalism. To Jensen, removing false hope is a precondition for action: “When we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it.”

So, to hope or not to hope? Should we embrace and encourage hope because it is the “elixir of conservation”? Or should we avoid investing too much emotional and professional capital in hope? Because, let’s face it, while conservationists may try to save as many endangered species and populations as possible, disappointments are inevitable.

Right now, it seems as though most conservation-oriented literature is solidly on hope’s side. A sparse but growing body of psychological research supports a role for active hope in helping conservationists “stay in the game.” During the past six months two intellectual heavy hitters, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and science communicator Elin Kelsey, brought out books extolling the virtues of hope. Their titles: Commanding Hope (Homer-Dixon) and Hope Matters (Kelsey) leave little doubt as to where their authors stand on the importance of hope.

Personality, Leadership and Organizational Strengths Matter

At the end of our review, we concluded that active hope can be a powerful ingredient in conservation success, provided the complexities of hope as a motivational state are acknowledged.

We found that passive hope, radical hope and positive reappraisal seem to be unlikely motivators of success in most environmental battles. And optimism certainly won’t cut it, since optimists don’t typically feel obligated to act in the world to make their expectations real.

It’s active hope, we argue, that’s the gold standard. Only active hope provides the inspiration, agency and pathways to success that are needed for environmental action to succeed. Research in fields as diverse as athletic performance and psychotherapy has associated active hope with successful outcomes. Furthermore, active hope may provide environmental workers with a buffer of resilience against the repeated pain of environmental loss.

sunset
Photo: BLM (uncredited)

But hope on its own, we also found, is not particularly useful.

By themselves, expressions of hope are imperfect predictors of engagement in pro-conservation action. Nor is the direction of causation between hope and action always clear. Pro-environmental behavior may sometimes be a prelude to having hope rather than the other way round. And hope isn’t the only determinant of future action. Life goals, personality traits, cognitive biases, cultural values, childhood experience, age, gender, religion and cultural identity also influence pro-conservation attitudes and actions.

An important take-home message that emerged from our review is that conservation organizations must work to foster personal qualities and behaviors that turn active hope into action. Having a sense of personal agency, engaging in goal-directed projects, and developing clear roadmaps to the future enable conservation workers to be effective.

Leadership is also important. Strong conservation leaders inspire their troops with clear, long-term visions allied to pragmatic road maps of how to make those visons real.

And yet, as important as vision may be, it is often neglected. In a 2018 report based on interviews with 116 Canadian environmental leaders, Graham Saul, the executive director of Nature Canada, concluded that many environmental organizations lack a unifying vision around which forward-looking hopes could coalesce.

The bottom line is that having active hope helps to make conservation visions reality. But don’t expect hope to achieve good things unaided. Inspirational leadership and solid organizational scaffolding are needed to help hopeful conservation workers succeed. In the present environmental moment, conservation organizations may also need to cultivate resilience among workers and volunteers against the times when even active hope fails to pan out.

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‘There’s No Memory of the Joy.’ Why 40 Years of Superfund Work Hasn’t Saved Tar Creek

Residents of northeastern Oklahoma still suffer from the toxic fallout of shuttered mines. 

One of the first Superfund sites in the United States remains one of the most polluted.the ask

From the late 1800s through the 1960s, miners extracted lead and zinc from the ground beneath the Tar Creek area in northeastern Oklahoma. But 50 years after the mine was shuttered, the region’s toxic legacy still seeps from boreholes into the water and drifts in the wind from tailings piles. Even now, the unstable ground threatens to swallow up homes.

Neighboring residents — including those of the Quapaw Nation and Ottawa County’s other eight tribes — have paid a heavy toll. The mounting environmental and human health threats led the federal government to declare 40 square miles of the area a Superfund site in 1984.

Despite efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency and state and tribal governments, problems persist. One area of grave concern is the region’s watershed. Tar Creek, which flows through the towns of Commerce and Miami, runs orange with acid mine drainage. The contamination travels downstream to Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees, a major source of drinking water and recreation.

This year Tar Creek made the list of the 10 most endangered rivers in the country, an annual call-out from the nonprofit American Rivers.

tailings pile
Tar Creek Superfund site in Picher, Oklahoma. Photo: Michael, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The designation came as no shock to Rebecca Jim, who worked for 25 years as a counselor in the local school district and heads the nonprofit LEAD Agency (Local Environmental Action Demanded). LEAD Agency has been raising awareness about the environmental and health problems from the Tar Creek Superfund site.

The Revelator spoke with Jim about what decades of pollution have meant for area residents, why cleanup efforts have fallen short, and what else needs to be done.

What happened at Tar Creek to cause a toxic waste site worthy of Superfund designation?

standing by creek
Rebecca Jim of LEAD Agency. Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Jim

They mined down in some places over 300 feet deep. And they weren’t open-pit mines. They were random pillar mines. The pillars were left underground to protect the miners, but when the mines began to play out some of those pillars were mined and no record was kept of which ones.

That led to a series of collapses that occurred and continue to occur. Oklahoma Senator [Jim] Inhofe finally agreed to a study on the risk of subsidence under the towns of Picher and Cardin. The results [which led to a buyout for residents] showed that the people in those towns were at great risk — a cave-in could have been imminent. It still could.

Another problem is the water. Our water body, Tar Creek, is mine-water discharge — a million gallons have been flowing from the site every day for 42 years now. And all of that flows down our creek into the Neosho River. There are also two more Superfund sites in Kansas and Missouri with waste that flows down the Spring River. The Neosho River and the Spring River meet and form the Grand River, which is dammed. So it collects all those metals in Grand Lake, which is also a drinking-water reservoir and a fishing paradise.

What’s been done?

We were one of the very first Superfund sites in the nation and EPA came in with great ambitions, perhaps, to do something. They did something, but they didn’t do enough and what they did do didn’t work. They tried to put up a berm to keep the acid-mine water from entering Tar Creek, but the berm didn’t hold.

In that early work they did fill some mine shafts and some boreholes to try to keep water from entering the aquifer and filling back up. But then, bless her heart, [Love Canal activist] Lois Gibbs did what we didn’t do: She went on TV and made all these posters saying, “Love Canal really needs some help.”

historical photo of mile waste pile
A zinc mine in Picher, Oklahoma in 1936 that would later become a Superfund site. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information

When she did that, the media left us and then EPA did, too. We were an abandoned mine site and then we were abandoned by EPA.

How has that affected the community?

We probably still would be abandoned if it hadn’t been for the Indian Health Service discovering that our children were lead poisoned.

In the 1990s Don Ackerman [a researcher at the Indian Clinic] looked through [the Service’s medical records] and saw that 34% of our kids were lead poisoned and so EPA had to come in and respond. They found that it was true that the children were being lead poisoned, but in some of the towns it was even worse than Don’s findings.

I worked for 25 years as an Indian counselor in Miami, Oklahoma beginning the year before Tar Creek turned orange — 1978. I had worked with kids in other school districts before I came here, and our kids were different. They couldn’t sit still, couldn’t concentrate. They struggled, they failed, they cried, they felt bad about themselves and they would either act out or drop out. With a third of our kids lead poisoned, that’s a lot of children in every classroom with issues to work through.

But Don’s study led to action.

What EPA began to do was to remove contaminated soil. That started in 1995 and they’re still doing it. Initially it was in “the box,” which is what they call the line that designates the boundary of the Superfund site. But we didn’t think that was adequate. Now it’s the whole county. Any resident in Ottawa County can have a yard tested for lead and if it’s found to be high, EPA will fund replacing it.

aerial view of mine waste
An aerial view of Tar Creek running through part of the 40 square mile Superfund site in Oklahoma. Photo: Google Earth

At the same time they’re hauling away mine waste called “chat piles,” which are really like mountains of toxic tailings [200 feet high]. These are loaded with lead, cadmium, arsenic, zinc and manganese. And these are still blowing in the wind.

We know that it’s not just lead, it’s not just one metal, but it’s the cocktail of metals that hurt us. They’re all dangerous. I’ve seen some of my former students dying from kidney failure at young ages. That’s probably from the exposures they’ve had all through their lifetimes.

EPA has given the Quapaw Nation a contract for the cleanup work, but they’re not funded enough to do much at a time. It looks like a big operation, but at the rate they’re going it will be decades before they’re done.

What’s the current state of the creek?

Nobody’s doing anything about that water. It’s running unchecked. There’s always mine-water discharge coming down. It comes up from the aquifer through old boreholes, air vents and other cracks in the surface. It used to be one area, but now the whole property is bleeding. It’s just pouring into Tar Creek. Nobody’s tried anywhere at all to stop that discharge.

orange colored creek
Tar Creek runs orange with acid-mine runoff. Photo: Janice Waltzer, (CC BY 2.0)

I believe that if enough water was pulled out to lower the aquifer, we could get ahead of it and if we could keep pulling out enough water, we could add a wastewater-treatment system. That was in the original plan, but they rejected it because it cost too much money. It would have been safer than having that water discharge all these years and end up in a drinking-water reservoir, lowering the IQ of anybody that eats that fish or eats any plants that grow along the creek, any wild onion you dig up or any blackberry you pick. Anything along the creek bed should not be consumed.

When EPA first came in, we were all excited: “We’re going to get this fixed.” We all believed that they would do something, they would do it quickly, it would be resolved and we’d have fish in that creek again. And people could play in it again. But then they walked away and they did nothing and have still done nothing for that creek. Now you have 40 years of children not being able to play in it. Pretty soon there’s no memory of the joy. It’s forgotten.

What do you want to see happen now?

I’m hopeful of this new infrastructure bill that’s been introduced, which would put a tax back on polluters. We want Superfund funded. It ran out because Congress wanted proof it was doing something and so they set aside mega-sites like ours so that they could clean up the ones that were the size of a filling station. They did those first, so they could get their numbers up.

And a lot of sites got cleaned up. But not ours.

Another problem is that Senator Inhofe put in an amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act that will lead to Grand Lake being two feet deeper. But that means when it rains heavily, Tar Creek and the Neosho River will back up quicker and deeper, leading to more flooding and contamination of areas that have already been cleaned up or yards that have never had any exposure before.

We also hope the designation [from American Rivers] is a wake-up call. We’ve got a diagnosis here where we are in danger — somebody has noticed. I think it will be a rallying cry for our community to say that we want it to be better.

This is our moment of reckoning. Now is our turn, we’re going to love this creek again.

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How Did the Pandemic Affect Ocean Conservation?

Clickbait stories of happy animals returning to suddenly quiet habitats paint an overly rosy picture of COVID-19’s impact on the marine environment.

As we enter what’s hopefully the home stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s time to take stock of how it affected every aspect of our world, to consider what happened, what could be done different to avoid those problems in the future, and what’s next.

That might mean confronting some of our earlier conclusions. For example, at the start of the pandemic we were bombarded with often false stories about suddenly quiet cities and waterways experiencing animals reclaiming what was once their habitat. “Nature is healing” stories like this seem to have created an overly rosy picture of the pandemic’s impact on the natural world.

The reality is much more complicated, and I’m not just talking about things like the well-publicized millions of inappropriately discarded plastic bags and protective masks ending up in the ocean. Many other changes to the world’s waters, including some potentially harmful ones, are taking place beneath the surface.

“Protected and conserved areas and the people who depend on them are facing mounting challenges due to the pandemic,” says Rachel Golden Kroner, an environmental governance fellow at Conservation International. Indeed, for the past two decades a sizable chunk of global biodiversity conservation has been funded by ecotourism, a funding source that dries up when international travel slows down, as it did this past year.

While any global complex event has many impacts including some that we almost certainly can’t predict at this point, many of the medium and long-term effects are likely to be bad.

And You Thought Your Virtual Meetings Were Bad

It’s not just your workplace that’s been meeting online this past year. It’s every meeting, including international wildlife conservation and management meetings.

Some of these important events have been postponed, stalling critical political momentum that scientists and activists have been building for years. Others have met virtually, with notably less effectiveness.

The highest profile example of this was the December 2020 failure of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. The IATTC is an international gathering that governs a multi-billion-dollar series of global tuna fisheries, and meetings include representatives from all over the world who hammer out fishing quotas and other rules. The 2020 meeting closed without reaching an agreement on 2021 quotas. If allowed to stand, this would have meant that starting on January 1 of this year, a multi-billion-dollar global industry would have had absolutely no rules governing it. Imagine if your city council failed to agree on a policing budget, and this meant that “The Purge” was suddenly real — that’s what nearly happened in the world of tuna management this past winter.

bluefin tuna
Photo: NOAA (uncredited)

The pandemic didn’t create the problem of tuna management politics, but experts believe that the virtual meeting, which precluded “schmoozing” in the hallway during coffee breaks and added an element of multiple time zone chaos, contributed to this year’s unprecedented breakdown in negotiations.

“These meetings are often difficult to get through, but usually they keep working until they get it done, until there’s at least a decent solution,” says Grantly Galland, a global tuna conservation expert with Pew Environment. That’s hard enough in person, but this year “the meeting started at 6 p.m. for me in D.C., which was midnight in Europe, and early morning in Japan. People were often frustrated. As discussions dragged into the night the incentive to keep going disappeared, and the meeting ended without rules.”

Fortunately, after receiving intense pushback from environmental groups and the concerned public, the commission met for an emergency meeting a few weeks later and fixed this problem by just carrying over the 2020 rules to 2021 — hardly an ideal solution given existing problems with the 2020 rules, but a lot better than open ocean anarchy.

Still, this near-disaster shows how dependent our system of environmental management is on face-to-face meetings.

Industry Relief

Whenever there’s any economic crisis, industry will ask for a temporary (or even permanent) rollback of environmental protection regulations that they find economically burdensome. Marine and coastal protected areas, long a priority for science-based conservation and long opposed by elements of the fishing industry, have been no exception.

For example, a fisheries management council asked then-President Trump to allow fishing in currently protected areas, and the Trump administration did roll back fishing protections in the Atlantic around that time.

fish
Photo: NOAA OKEANOS Explorer Program, 2013 Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition

Marine protected areas also face other threats stemming from the pandemic. Golden Kroner says: “Key challenges for marine protected areas include budget cuts, declines in tourism revenue, disruption of seafood supply chains and challenges in implementing management activities.”

Golden Kroner shared examples of the near-collapse of the tourism-associated hospitality industry in Kenya, the Galapagos, Indonesia and Australia, noting that some of these industries employed former members of the fishing industry who had been persuaded to work in tourism instead.

While some coastal communities and protected areas face these serious issues, the good news is that this problem is far from universal.

“While the shutdowns, restrictions, and closures of coastal areas disrupted access and temporarily interrupted stewardship and harvest activities across Hawai’i, the connections between humans and nature forged over generations ensured that marine management actions never lost momentum,” says Ulu Ching, the program manager for community-based conservation for Conservation International’s Hawaii office. “Well-established community networks in collaboration with government resource management agencies continued to advance the work of mālama i ke kai (caring for the ocean) through the development and establishment of community-driven marine managed areas across the islands during the pandemic.”

seal under water
A young monk seal underwater in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. Photo: NOAA/PIFSC/HMSRP

Additionally, Golden Kroner points out that while some momentum for creating protected areas has stalled and some industry groups have called for rollbacks, there is good news in the form of expanded protected areas in a handful of places around the world. But it’s clear that despite some positive signs, momentum in creating new marine protected areas has stalled in many places, tourism that funded their operations has slowed to a crawl, and some industries have been successful in rolling back protections.

Threats Continue, But Monitoring Has Stalled

One of the primary tools in the conservationist’s toolbox for making sure that the commercial fishing industry follows the rules is observer coverage: independent people on board fishing vessels who monitor and record the catch. Due to COVID-19 safety regulations, observer coverage in much of the world has been reduced or eliminated — but fishing continues.

“For countries with fewer management resources, I can imagine that less observer coverage could lead to more rules being bent,” says Simon Gulak, a fisheries consultant with Sea Leucas LLC who used to coordinate fisheries observers for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Fisheries observers provide fisheries management with accurate information on all discards/bycatch at sea, not just the cuddly protected species,” he says. “They’re a bit like a fisher’s auditor and are liked about as much.”

The problem with a lack of observers means that we generally have no way of knowing if bad things are happening on the water, but there are certainly cases of fishing vessels who only follow the rules because they’ll get fined if they don’t.

Gulak notes that in fisheries subject to electronic monitoring — including GPS trackers and cameras that document all catch and bycatch — observers may be less important because all relevant data is recorded automatically and it’s harder to get away with breaking the rules.

Galland, the tuna conservation expert, also stressed the importance of ramping up electronic fisheries monitoring efforts. If the pandemic leads to an increase in e-monitoring, that may be a long-term good. In the meantime, we just don’t know what’s going on in many fisheries that were previously monitored by human observers.

It’s not just fisheries observing that’s stalled due to workplace safety concerns, but also fish market surveys, an important scientific tool for monitoring catch from boats too numerous and small to have observers or electronic monitoring equipment. In large parts of the world, fish market surveys are the only data we have on local catch composition. Without them, we wouldn’t know how many endangered species are caught, or if formerly common species started to disappear.

Monitoring of things like sea turtle nests has similarly slowed down. These nest surveys are a critical way for scientists and managers to keep track of population trends of iconic endangered species, and to protect the nests themselves by marking them so beach drivers of off-road vehicles know to not crush the hidden nests.

sea turtle hatchling
A recently emerged sea turtle hatchling. Photo: Becky Skiba/USFWS

So what does the pandemic mean for ocean conservation? Experts caution that it’s probably too early to tell. However, it’s not all stories of dolphins frolicking in suddenly quiet rivers. Environmental planning meetings, funding schemes for protected areas, and monitoring of fisheries and endangered species populations were all disrupted, giving us good reasons to fear that the story is far more complicated, and far less happy, than many of us have been led to believe.

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