Southern Africa’s Ivory Delusion

The values of Zimbabwe’s and Namibia’s ivory stockpiles have been grossly overstated, and their proposed sale would lead to another poaching epidemic.

Last year the world reacted in shock when Namibia announced plans to auction off 170 live elephants to the highest bidder.

Despite criticism, the plans have continued to move forward — and that may just be the start. Tucked away in a Feb. 1 press release justifying the auction was a rehash of the country’s oft-repeated desire to also sell ivory. The Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism’s stated:

“Namibia has major stockpiles of valuable wildlife products including ivory which it can produce sustainably and regulate properly, and which if traded internationally could support our elephant conservation and management for decades to come.”

Namibia is not alone in this desire to capitalize on its wildlife. In Zimbabwe’s national assembly last year, the minister of environment valued the country’s stockpile of 130 metric tonnes (143 tons) of ivory and 5 tonnes (5.5 tons) of rhino horn at $600 million in U.S. dollars. This figure, which would value ivory at more than $4,200 per kilogram, has since been seized upon by commentators seeking to justify the reintroduction of the ivory trade.

I’m an environmental accountant dedicated to ethical conservation, so I wanted to understand these numbers and how they motivate countries. In truth, I found not even full black-market value comes close to arriving at this figure.

Black-market values are, of course, often invisible to the general public, but the most recent data from criminal justice experts finds that unworked (or raw) elephant ivory sells for about $92/kg on the black market in Africa, while rhino horn is currently selling for $8,683/kg.

Therefore, a more realistic valuation of Zimbabwe’s ivory stockpiles, using an optimistic wholesale price of $150/kg, would give a potential income of only $19.5 million in U.S. dollars.

This is a 30th of Zimbabwe’s estimate.

And even then, those numbers fail to account for the disaster that would happen if ivory sales return — as we saw in the all-too-recent past.

The One-Off Sales

International trade in ivory has been banned since 1989, following a 10-year period in which African elephant numbers declined by 50%, from 1.3 million to 600,000. However, in 1999 and 2008 CITES allowed “one-off sales” of stockpiled ivory, to disastrous effect. The selling prices achieved then were only $100/kg and $157/kg, in U.S. dollars respectively, due to collusion by official Chinese and Japanese buyers.

Illegal ivory. Photo: Gavin Shire / USFWS

The intention of CITES in approving the one-off ivory sales was to introduce a controlled and steady supply of stockpiled ivory into the market. The legal supply, coupled with effective systems of control, aimed to satisfy demand and reduce prices. This in turn should have reduced the profitability of (and the demand for) illegal ivory. Poaching should have followed suit and decreased.

Instead, the sales led to an increase in demand and, consequently, an increase in elephant poaching. The 2008 ivory sale was accompanied by a 66% increase in illegally traded ivory and a 71% increase in ivory smuggling. An investigation in 2010 by the Environmental Investigation Agency documented that 90% of the ivory being sold in China came from illegal sources.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) comparison of elephant poaching figures for the five years preceding and five years following the sale showed an “abrupt, significant, permanent, robust and geographically widespread increase” in poaching.

The problem has not faded away. Most recently the two African elephant species (savanna and forest) were declared endangered and critically endangered due to their continued poaching threat.

Zimbabwe elephants — Photo: Regina Hart (CC BY 2.0)

Still, some African nations look fondly at the 2008 sale and have long hoped to repeat it. The Zimbabwe Ministry’s 2020 statement follows yet another proposal to the 18th CITES Conference of the Parties (COP18) by Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana to trade in live elephants and their body parts, including ivory. The proposal was not accepted by the parties.

Why Didn’t Ivory Sales Work?

The one-off sales of ivory removed the stigma associated with its purchase, stimulated the market demand, and increased prices.

The ivory that China purchased in 2008 for $157/kg was drip-fed by the authorities to traders at prices ranging between $800 and $1,500 per kilogram. This meant that the bulk of the profits went to filling Chinese government coffers — not to African nations — and in doing so, created a large illegal market which drove prices even higher.

Raw ivory prices in China increased from $750/kg in 2010 to $2,100/kg in 2014. The market had been stimulated, prices increased and the volume of legal ivory available was insufficient to meet demand as the Chinese government gradually fed its stockpile into the market.

Japan, the other participant in the one-off sales, has systematically failed to comply with CITES regulations, meaning that there were (and still are) no controls over ivory being sold, allowing the illegal markets to function in parallel to the legal one.

In a very short space of time, criminals ramped up poaching and elephant numbers plummeted.

What Has Happened to the Price of Ivory Since Then?

With no recent legal international sales, combined with the significant U.S., Chinese and United Kingdom domestic ivory sales bans, the price for raw ivory paid by craftsmen in China fell from $2,100/kg in 2014 to $730/kg in 2017. That’s when China closed all of its official ivory carving outlets and theoretically stopped all official ivory trade.

The price currently paid for raw ivory in Asia, according to an investigation by the Wildlife Justice Commission, is currently between $597/kg and $689/kg, in U.S. dollars. Ivory sourced in Africa and sold in Asia has additional costs such as transportation, taxes and broker commissions. The prices paid for raw ivory in Africa have decreased correspondingly from $208/kg to $92/kg in 2020.

Those numbers pale in comparison to a living elephant. A 2014 study found that live elephants are each worth an estimated $1.6 million in ecotourism opportunities.

Funding Conservation

One half-truth is that the money earned from the legal sale will be used to effectively fund conservation.

One of the CITES conditions of the 2008 sale was that funds were to go to the conservation of elephants. South Africa placed a substantial portion of the income from its share of the pie in the Mpumalanga Problem Animal Fund — which, it turns out, was well-named. An internal investigation found the fund had “no proper controls” and that “tens of millions” of rand (the official currency of South Africa) had bypassed the normal procurement processes.

Ironically, proceeds were also partly used for the refurbishment of the Skukuza abattoir, where most of the 14,629 elephant carcasses from culling operations between 1967 and 1997 were processed.

All the while, Africa’s elephant populations continued to decline.

How to Stop Poaching

In light of these deficiencies — and in light of elephants’ recently declared endangered status — the very reverse of actual conservation can be expected if any nation is again allowed to sell its ivory stockpiles. The cost of increased anti-poaching efforts required from the consequent increase in poaching will outweigh the benefit of any income from the sale of ivory stockpiles.

To stop poaching, all international and local trade must be stopped.

Zimbabwe elephant — Photo: John Culley (CC BY 2.0)

Repeating this failed experiment will send a message that it is acceptable to trade in ivory. Ivory carving outlets in China will re-open and demand for ivory will be stimulated. The demand for ivory in an increasingly wealthy and better-connected Asia will quickly outstrip legal supply and poaching will increase.

Meanwhile, the management of a legal ivory trade requires strong systems of control at every point in the commodity chain to ensure that illegal ivory is not laundered into the legal market. With recalcitrant Japan continuing to ignore CITES, “untransparent” Namibia “losing tolerance” with CITES, and Zimbabwe ranking 157 out of 179 on the corruption perceptions index, not even the basics for controlled trade are in place.

Therefore, aside from the strong theoretical economic arguments against renewed one-off sales, the practical arguments are perhaps even stronger: If international ivory and rhino horn sales ever again become legal, the cost to protect elephants will skyrocket and these culturally valuable animals will plunge into decline — and possibly extinction.

Species Spotlight: The Asian Small-Clawed Otter — A Victim of the Pet Trade

This vulnerable, fish-eating small carnivore still lives in stream-fed forests of northeastern Bangladesh and other countries. But it faces increasing threats.

The smallest of the planet’s 13 otter species finds its habitat shrinking every day. We know little about these mustelids — especially in Bangladesh, where I conduct my research — but they face a horde of threats.

Species name and description:

The Asian small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus) has a typical otter build with webbed digits, dark brown to blackish upper parts, and a pale vent. It can be distinguished from other otter species by its blunter muzzle, acutely arched back and a white neck devoid of any spots or streaks. Its claws are noticeably short and even often absent — a feature of its genus, Aonyx.

Where it’s found:

These otters live in the Himalayan foothills, Ganges Delta, Northeast India, Indochina, South China and Philippines, with isolated population in southern India. Their habitats range from forests and wetlands to coasts and mangroves. In Bangladesh they’re thought to be confined to the Sundarbans mangrove.

A small-clawed otter in Bangladesh. Via iNaturalist and © Guenther Eichhorn, some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC)

IUCN Red List status:

Vulnerable, with a globally decreasing population trend; endangered in Bangladesh

Major threats:

Poaching for fur and extraction to supply a recently spiked demand in pet trade is the number one threat to Asia’s most trafficked otter species. Habitat destruction, conflict with fishers, drying up streams, decreasing food supply and attacks by feral dogs are also affecting its already sharply plummeting population.

Otter pelts in India. © Ashwin Viswanathan, some rights reserved (CC-BY). Via iNaturalist.

In Bangladesh there exists no study on the species outside the Sundarbans, its known habitat in the country. Even there, only a handful of research has been undertaken to date.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

In 2019 the species shifted to CITES Appendix I from Appendix II to plug the illegal trade and trafficking.

The IUCN Otter Specialist Group and International Otter Survival Fund are the strongest voices for the species. Although the animals are protected by law, there is no conservation scheme so far in Bangladesh.

My favorite experience:

Watching camera-trap footage of not one, not two, but multiple otter families is unforgettable. Hearing the cooing of otter pups on screen was heart-melting and one of those now-I-can-die-in-peace moments. And all these images were from a region that has long been deprioritized in conservation, without any prior systematic study.

However, the joy comes with a caveat. In all existing anecdotes, northeastern forests are described as the home of the larger Eurasian and smooth-coated otters. Otters showed up, true. But to my extreme surprise, it was a species that has always been attributed to the Sundarbans — a forest hundreds of miles away from the study site. Although finding the Asian small-clawed otter here has sparked hope for the region, the apparent absence of the other two expected species has left me with an uneasy feeling: Do the larger otters really roam these forests? Or is the Eurasian otter, the rarest of the three, to become the next extinct carnivore in Bangladesh?

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

We need extensive studies on ecology and threats to the species in both known and newly discovered habitats in Bangladesh. Connecting otters with the exceptionally rich ichthyodiversity of riparian streams and mangrove creeks can strengthen conservation practices in the country.

Key research:

Akash, M., Zakir, T. (2020) Appraising carnivore (Mammalia: Carnivora) studies in Bangladesh from 1971 to 2019 bibliographic retrieves: trends, biases, and opportunities,s15(12): 17105-17120
Aziz, M.A. (2018) Notes on population status and feeding behaviour of Asian small-clawed Otter (Aonyx cinereus) in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest of Bangladesh. IUCN Otter Specialist Group Bulletin 35(1): 3-10
Duplaix, N., Savage, M. (2018) The global otter conservation strategy. IUCN/SSC Otter Specialist Group, Salem, Oregon, USA

Our Last, Best Chance to Save Atlantic Salmon

Atlantic salmon are perilously close to extinction in the United States. Taking down a few dams could go a long way to aiding their recovery, experts say.

Atlantic salmon have a challenging life history — and those that hail from U.S. waters have seen things get increasingly difficult in the past 300 years.

Dubbed the “king of fish,” Atlantic salmon once numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the United States and ranged up and down most of New England’s coastal rivers and ocean waters. But dams, pollution and overfishing have extirpated them from all the region’s rivers except in Maine. Today only around 1,000 wild salmon, known as the Gulf of Maine distinct population segment, return each year from their swim to Greenland. Fewer will find adequate spawning habitat in their natal rivers to reproduce.

That’s left Atlantic salmon in the United States critically endangered. Hatchery and stocking programs have kept them from disappearing entirely, but experts say recovering healthy, wild populations will require much more, including eliminating some of the obstacles (literally) standing in their way.

Conservation organizations, fishing groups and even some state scientists are now calling for the removal of up to four dams along a 30-mile stretch of the Kennebec River, where about a third of Maine’s best salmon habitat remains.

The dams’ owner — multinational Brookfield Renewable Partners — has instead proposed building fishways to aid salmon and other migratory fish getting around dams as they travel both up and down the river. But most experts think that plan has little chance of success.

A confusing array of state and federal processes are underway to try and sort things out. None is likely to be quick, cheap or easy. And there’s a lot at stake.

“Ultimately the fate of the species in the United States really depends upon what happens at a handful of key dams,” says John Burrows, executive director of U.S. programs at the Atlantic Salmon Federation. “If those four projects don’t work — or even if just one of them doesn’t work — you could basically preclude recovering Atlantic salmon in the United States.”

Prime Habitat

The best place for salmon recovery is in Maine’s two largest watersheds.

“The Penobscot River and the Kennebec River have orders of magnitude more habitat, production potential and climate resilient habitat” than other parts of the state, says Burrows.

The rivers and their tributaries run far inland and reach more undeveloped areas with higher elevations. That helps provide salmon with the cold, clean water they need for spawning and rearing. Smaller numbers of salmon are hanging on in lower-elevation rivers along the coastal plain in Maine’s Down East region, but climate change could make that habitat unsuitable.

“There’s definitely concern about how resilient those watersheds are going to be for salmon in the future,” says Burrows. “To recover the population, we need to be able to get salmon to the major tributaries farther upriver, in places where we’re still going to have cold water even under predictions with climate change.”

One of those key places is the Penobscot, which has already seen a $60 million effort to help recover salmon and other native sea-run fish. A 16-year project resulted in the removal of two dams, the construction of a stream-like bypass channel at a third dam, and new fish lift at a fourth. In all, the project made 2,000 miles of river habitat accessible.

Breaching dam — Veazie dam on the Penobscot River is breached in 2013 as part of a river restoration project. Photo: Meagan Racey, USFWS

While there’s still more work to be done on the Penobscot, says Burrows, attention has shifted to the Kennebec. The river has what’s regarded as the largest and best salmon habitat in the state, especially in its tributary, the Sandy River, where hatchery eggs are being planted to help boost salmon numbers.

“That’s helped us go from zero salmon in the upper tributaries of Kennebec to getting 50 or 60 adults back, which is still an abysmally small number compared to historical counts,” says Burrows. “But these are the last of the wildest fish that we have.”

The Obstacles

The Sandy may be good salmon habitat, but it’s also hard to reach. Brookfield’s four dams stand in the way of fish trying to get upriver.

At the lowest dam on the river, Lockwood Dam in Waterville, there’s a fish lift — a kind of elevator that should allow fish that enter it to pass up and around the dam. But if fish do find the lift — and only around half of salmon do — they don’t get far.

“It’s a terminal lift,” says Sean Ledwin, division director of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources’ Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat. “The lift was never completed. So we pick up those fish in a truck and drive them up to the Sandy River.”

That taxi cab arrangement isn’t a long-term solution, though, and was part of an interim species protection plan.

Only the second dam, Hydro Kennebec, has a modern fish passage system. But how well that actually works hasn’t been tested yet since fish can’t get by Lockwood Dam. As part of a consultation process related to the Endangered Species Act, Brookfield has submitted a plan proposing to fix the fishway at Lockwood and add passage to the third and fourth dams.

But federal regulators found it inadequate.

“Brookfield’s proposal was rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee [which oversees hydroelectric projects] and all the [federal management] agencies,” says Ledwin. The company now has until May 2022 to come up with a new plan.

State scientists aren’t convinced Brookfield’s plan would work either.

“We have really low confidence that having four fishways would ever result in meaningful runs of all the sea-run fish and certainly not recovery of Atlantic salmon,” says Ledwin. “We don’t think that it’s going to be conducive to recovery.”

In addition to considerations related to the Endangered Species Act, Shawmut Dam, the third on the Kennebec, is currently up for relicensing, which triggers a federal review process by FERC.

And at the same time the Maine Department of Marine Resources has drafted a new plan for managing the Kennebec River that recommends removing Shawmut Dam and Lockwood Dam. A public comment period on the proposed plan closed in March.

Brookfield isn’t happy with it and responded with a lawsuit against the state.

It was good news to conservation groups, however, which would like to see all four of the dams removed if possible — or at least a few of them.

“There’s no self-sustaining population of Atlantic salmon anywhere in the world that we know of that have to go by more than one hydro dam,” says Burrows. He believes that having Brookfield spend tens of millions of dollars on new fishways will just result in failure for salmon.

salmon in water — Atlantic salmon parr emerging from a stream bed in Maine. Photo: E. Peter Steenstra/ USFWS

It’s partly a game of numbers. Not all fish will find or use a fishway. And if you start with a low number of returning fish and expect them to pass through four gauntlets, you won’t be left with many at the end.

“If you’re passing 50% of salmon that show up at the first dam, and then you’ve got three more dams passing 50%, that means you’re left with only an eighth of the population you started with by the end,” says Nick Bennett, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “You can’t start a restoration program where you’re losing seven-eighths of the adults before they even get to their spawning habitat.”

And getting upriver is just part of the salmon’s journey. Juvenile salmon face threats going downstream to the ocean as well, including predation and warm water in impoundments. They also risk being injured or killed going through spillways or turbines. Only about half are likely to survive the four hydro projects.

Atlantic salmon, unlike their Pacific cousins, don’t always die after spawning, either. So some adults will also make the downstream trek, too.

“Just looking at our reality, at least two dams need to go, hopefully three, and it would be amazing if all four would go,” says Burrows.

Ecosystem Restoration

The fate of Atlantic salmon hangs in the balance, but so do the futures of other fishes.

The Pacific coast of the United States is home to five species of salmon. And while the Atlantic side has just the one, it has a dozen other native sea-run species that have also seen their habitat shrink.

“Those dams are preventing other native species like American shad, alewives, blueback herring and American eel from accessing large amounts of historic habitat,” says Burrows.

Ledwin says removing dams on the Kennebec could result in populations of more than a million shad, millions of blueback herring, millions of eels and hundreds of thousands of sea lampreys.

“The recovery of those species would actually help Atlantic salmon as well because they provide prey buffers and there are a lot of co-evolved benefits,” he says.

Salmon are much more successful at nesting when they can lay their eggs in old sea lamprey nests, explains Bennett. “But sea lamprey are not good at using fish lifts and we’ve essentially blocked 90% of the historic sea lamprey habitat at Lockwood dam. We need to get those fish upstream, too.”

Dam removal advocates don’t have to look too far to find an example of how well river ecosystems respond when dams are removed.

The removal of the Edwards Dam on the lower Kennebec River in 1999 and the Fort Halifax Dam just upstream on the Sebasticook in 2008 helped ignite a nationwide dam-removal movement. It also brought back American shad, eel, two native species of sturgeon and millions of river herring to lower parts of the watershed.

Alewives returned by the millions after the Edwards and Ft. Halifax dams were removed. (Photo by John Burrows/ASF)

“We’ve got the biggest river herring run in North America now due to the dam removals,” says Ledwin. “And the largest abundance of eel we’ve ever seen on the lower Kennebec.”

The resurgence of native fishes helps the whole ecosystem. When they returned, so too did eagles, osprey and other wildlife.

“When people see all those fish in the river and the eagles overhead, it just kind of blows their minds because they never realized what had been lost for so long in our rivers,” says Burrows.

Rebuilding key forage fish like herring also benefits species that live not just in the river, but the Gulf of Maine and even the Atlantic Ocean. The tiny fish feed whales, porpoises and seabirds. They’re also used for lobster bait and can help rebuild fisheries for cod and haddock, which has economic benefits for the region, too.

“We have to rebalance the scales if we want to have marine industries and commercial fishing industries and if we want the ecological benefits of what sea-run fisheries do for us,” says Bennett.

The Path Ahead

The process to determine whether any — or all — of the four Kennebec dams that stretch from Waterville and Skowhegan are removed will take years, a diverse coalition, financial resources and agreements to meet the concerns of communities and the dam owner.

“These things come down to compromise, so there may be situations where one of those dams might not be a candidate for economic or social reasons,” says Burrows. “But it will be interesting to see if in the next couple of years we can get to a place where we can have meaningful conversations with federal agencies, the dam owner and continue to engage the communities about the potential of removal at some of these sites.”

And if removal of the four dams did happen, it wouldn’t open up the river all the way to its headwaters. Another nine dams still lie upstream in the watershed that obstruct fish passage.

“Some of those are major dams in terms of power, production and economics,” says Burrows. “So we’re not calling for those to be removed.”

The four lower dams provide just 46 megawatts of power — enough to supply about 37,000 homes and 0.43% of the state’s annual electricity generation. It’s a small amount of power relative to the damage they cause sea-run fish, says Bennett.

“By comparison we expect to add 1,200 megawatts of solar generation in the next five years,” he says. “So these four dams aren’t particularly important in our climate fight.” And removing them would open up substantial amounts of habitat to aid salmon recovery that seem worth the tradeoff in lost power.

That’s not the case, he says, for the nine larger dams upstream.

“We need those dams. We need hydroelectric power in Maine,” says Bennett. “But we made big mistakes in our past use of our rivers. And we went way overboard in favor of hydroelectric power at the expense of fish.”

Outside of the rivers, Atlantic salmon still face a tough road. Climate change is warming ocean temperatures, changing salinity and altering food webs. But having so many unknowns in the marine environment in the coming decades provides more reason to focus efforts on restoring rivers where scientists already know what works, says Burrows.

And if that’s done right, the benefits will extend far beyond salmon.

“It’s not just about salmon — it’s about these other native fish, it’s about the wildlife, water quality, economic opportunity for ground fishermen and lobstermen, and more sustainable forms of recreation and community development,” says Burrows. “If we remove a dam or two here and rebuild these fish populations to pretty big levels that really impacts a whole bunch of different parts of society. That’s what we want to try to do here on the Kennebec.”

Help for Asian Horseshoe Crabs Could Start With a Substitute for Their Blood

Experts say tracking international trade and limiting biomedical use could turn the tide for Asia’s three overlooked horseshoe crab species.

Kevin Laurie had always been “a fossil nut.” He even courted his wife with outings to quarries to scout for fossils. Originally from the United Kingdom, he spent 30 years working as a police officer in Hong Kong and devoted his time off to fossil hunting around the world. Then, one day about 13 years ago, while walking a local Hong Kong beach, he spied a familiar shape among the shells and stones left by the retreating tide. It was a primitive-looking creature he had only seen in German fossil beds: a horseshoe crab.

In all those years in Hong Kong, he’d never seen one before.

Five decades ago, Laurie soon learned, Hong Kong’s shoreline had teemed with breeding horseshoe crabs each spring. Since then, many horseshoe crabs have been swept from the sea as the bycatch of industrial fishing trawlers. “Now, if I see ten mating pairs in a year, it’s an incredible year,” he says. “What’s happened in Hong Kong is so sad, and it’s a microcosm of what has happened all over Asia.”

A ‘Living Fossil’ Hangs On

What Laurie found that day was truly a living fossil. The four species of horseshoe crabs that exist today remain virtually unchanged from similar species found in 200-million-year-old fossils. They’ve been on Earth so long that the continents have shifted beneath them, says Mark Botton, a co-chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Horseshoe Crab Specialists Group and a biology professor at New York’s Fordham University. Today one species is found in North America, on the East Coast of the United States and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and three in Asia.

Laurie’s find that day changed the path of his retirement and may have changed things for Asia’s horseshoe crabs as well. He asked local and regional experts so many questions about horseshoe crab conservation that they invited him to the first international Asian horseshoe crab conference, held in Hong Kong in 2011.

At the time, the scientific information about Asia three horseshoe crab species — the tri-spine horseshoe crab (Tachypleus tridentatus), the coastal horseshoe crab (T. gigas) and the mangrove horseshoe crab (Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda) — was so scattered that the IUCN Red List, which tracks the extinction risk of species around the world, simply listed them as “data deficient.” Although experts recognized they had become rarer, no one knew how many remained or how they were faring. By the end of the 2011 conference, the attendees agreed that they should prioritize upgrading the listings for the three Asian horseshoe crab species to understand their conservation needs.

Laurie volunteered to gather the existing research and write a report on each species. The first species the group targeted was the tri-spine horseshoe crab, the largest and most widespread in Asia.

“I thought it would be easy, because I didn’t think there was much information available,” Laurie recalls. “It was more difficult than I thought.”

In fact, it took almost a decade.

Some Threats in Common

The plight of North America’s single horseshoe crab species has gotten more attention than concerns about the world’s other three, but all four face similar conditions.

The American horseshoe crab was once numerous enough that its eggs fed migrating waterbirds, particularly the red knot, all along the East Coast. The mass of horseshoe crabs coming to shore to lay their eggs each spring also created a pulse of food for fish, crabs and other animals.

“When horseshoe crabs are no longer abundant, you see a decline in all those species,” says Jennifer Mattei, a biology professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut and a member of the horseshoe crab specialist group.

Today the American horseshoe crab is struggling because of sea-level rise, beach erosion, sea walls and other methods of armoring the coastline, and harvest for bait.

It’s also heavily exploited by medical companies.

A horseshoe crab’s blue-hued blood contains a unique substance that coagulates in the presence of bacterial contamination, making it ideal for testing medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Anyone who’s received a vaccine — including the millions of people who have so far benefited from COVID-19 vaccines — has benefited from bacterial tests made from horseshoe crab blood.

A laboratory-made substitute was invented 20 years ago, but was only recently approved for use in Europe, Japan and China. In the United States, its use faces additional regulatory hurdles.

Blood Is Life (or Death)

The challenges faced by the American horseshoe crab, which is classified as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List, are small compared to those faced by the three Asian horseshoe crab species, according to the scientists who study these species.

In the United States, biomedical companies take about a third of a horseshoe crab’s blood and then return the still-living creatures to the ocean within days of being caught. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission manages American horseshoe crab harvests.

Asian countries take a different approach.

There, biomedical companies rent horseshoe crabs to bleed from industrial suppliers, says Glenn Gauvry, president of Ecological Research & Development Group, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Dover, Delaware. “If they survive, they are sold as food. If they die, they are ground up for fertilizer or Traditional Chinese Medicine,” he says. “The whole animal is used. It’s not going back to the wild.”

That adds up. “Even though Asian horseshoe crabs serve only 20% of the BET [bacterial endotoxin test] market, it leads to 100% mortality” for Asian species, says Akbar John, a molecular ecologist and horseshoe crab expert at the International Islamic University Malaysia in Kuantan, Malaysia.

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Whether the demand from COVID-19 research or vaccine manufacturing has increased the harvest of horseshoe crabs in China is difficult to tell.

“The data are only available to government officers,” says Kit Yue Kwan, a marine biologist with the Guangxi Key Laboratory of Beibu Gulf Marine Biodiversity Conservation, Beibu Gulf University, Qinzhou, China. “However, overharvest is still the most important threat to local horseshoe crab populations, apart from habitat destruction.”

With three species spread out over 15 countries — including Japan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam — everything about the horseshoe crab’s conservation status in Asia is more complicated than it is in North America.

Throughout the region, coastal development, including filling in the shoreline to create more dry land, wipes out horseshoe crab breeding habitat. Shrimp farms and other mariculture destroys the habitat of the mangrove horseshoe crab species. Horseshoe crabs are food in several countries. A salad of horseshoe crab eggs, served right in the horseshoe crab shell with a cold beer on the side, is a popular picnic dish in parts of Thailand, John says. Horseshoe crabs also are accidentally scooped up in fishing nets.

Moving Toward Conservation

When he started his project in 2011, Laurie found that there actually was extensive research on horseshoe crabs from both Indonesia and China — it just hadn’t been translated into English.

After a lengthy process of translating, compiling and revising the data, followed by evaluation by the IUCN, the tri-spine horseshoe crab was added to the IUCN Red List as an endangered species in 2019.

Of course, “simply listing something on the Red List doesn’t impose restrictions,” says Botton. “It’s not like a listing under the Endangered Species Act in the States, where it carries certain legal ramifications.” It’s more of a tool to help governments decide how to manage species.

Horseshoe crabs are already legally protected in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, India and specific regions of Japan. And on Feb. 5, 2021, the government of mainland China included the tri-spine horseshoe crab and mangrove horseshoe crab among more than 500 species newly protected under its National Key Protected Wildlife List.

Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda. Photo © jefvreys via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)

“It’s a significant development,” Laurie says.

China placed the crabs on the list’s second tier, which offers a lower level of protection than tier-one species like the giant panda, but it’s still a big step forward.

Solutions, Big and Small

With so many different countries, each with their own horseshoe crab management strategy and level of zeal for enforcement, range-wide protection for species would be more effective than the current country-by-country strategy. John, Botton, Laurie and others are working toward having Asian horseshoe crabs listed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species treaty, known as CITES, which could place limits on how many individuals a country could export or import — or even prohibit trade.

In the meantime, John says, it’s a lot easier to get a biomedical company to change what kind of bacterial endotoxin test it buys than to get people to stop eating a favorite food. He’d like to see governments use tax credits to encourage biomedical companies to buy the lab-made toxin test or have it count toward corporate environmental responsibility.

John says companies can also use less horseshoe crab blood by using sensitive instruments to measure the blood’s reaction to toxins instead of relying on the standard visual method of turning over a test tube and seeing if the gelled blood sticks to the bottom.

But there are solutions outside industry as well. Citizen science projects, such as a program in Hong Kong schools where students raise horseshoe crabs and release them, introduce the next generation to conservation issues, John says. Other citizen science projects engage fisherman, who can play a big role in horseshoe crab conservation through their actions and influence in their communities.

The fishermen help in other ways, Laurie says. In his Hong Kong neighborhood, they know that if they accidentally catch a horseshoe crab, they can call him to come and free it.

To Laurie, even small gestures matter.

Right now he’s gathering research for the report to update the Red List entry on the second of the three Asian species, the mangrove horseshoe crab. Once again, it’s no small task. So far he’s examined scientific literature in 11 different languages and dialects.

“I see a bright light at the end of the tunnel,” he says. “It’s just going to take us a long time to get there.”

Take Corporate Climate Pledges of ‘Net-Zero’ With a Healthy Dose of Skepticism

These plans sound ambitious, but what does it actually take to reach net-zero and, more importantly, will it be enough to slow climate change?

By Oliver Miltenberger, The University of Melbourne and Matthew D. Potts, University of California, Berkeley

Hundreds of companies, including major emitters like United Airlines, BP and Shell, have pledged to reduce their impact on climate change and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. These plans sound ambitious, but what does it actually take to reach net-zero and, more importantly, will it be enough to slow climate change?

As environmental policy and economics researchers, we study how companies make these net-zero pledges. Though the pledges make great press releases, net-zero is more complicated and potentially problematic than it may seem.

What Is ‘Net-zero’ Emissions?

The gold standard for reaching net-zero emissions looks like this: A company identifies and reports all emissions it is responsible for creating, reduces them as much as possible, and then — if it still has emissions it cannot reduce — invests in projects that either prevent emissions elsewhere or pull carbon out of the air to reach a “net-zero” balance on paper.

The process is complex and still largely unregulated and ill-defined. As a result, companies have a lot of discretion over how they report their emissions. For example, a multinational mining company might count emissions from extracting and processing ore but not the emissions produced by transporting it.

Companies also have discretion over how much they rely on what are known as offsets — the projects they can fund to reduce emissions. The oil giant Shell, for example, projects that it will both achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and continue to produce high levels of fossil fuel through that year and beyond. How? It proposes to offset the bulk of its fossil-fuel-related emissions through massive nature-based projects that capture and store carbon, such as forest and ocean restoration. In fact, Shell alone plans to deploy more of these offsets by 2030 than were available globally in 2019.

Environmentalists may welcome Shell’s newfound conservationist agenda, but what if other oil companies, the airline industries, the shipping sectors and the U.S. government all propose a similar solution? Is there enough land and ocean realistically available for offsets, and is simply restoring environments without fundamentally changing the business-as-usual paradigm really a solution to climate change?

Concerns About Voluntary Carbon Markets

Outside of compliance emissions markets, which primarily focus on government regulation in the energy sector, voluntary markets create most of the offsets that are used to reach net-zero.

Voluntary markets are organized and operated by a diverse range of groups where anyone can participate. Have you ever seen the option to offset your flight? That offset probably happens through a voluntary carbon market. The activities that produce the offsets include projects like forestry and ocean management, waste management, agricultural practices, fuel switching and renewable energy. As the name implies, they are voluntary and therefore largely unregulated.

Because of the wave of net-zero pledges and subsequent demand for offsets, voluntary carbon markets are under pressure to expand quickly. A task force launched by United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action Mark Carney, and involving several major companies, released a sweeping blueprint at Davos 2021 that predicts voluntary carbon markets need to grow fifteenfold over the next decade. It suggests that the net-zero surge represents one of the largest commercial opportunities of our time — prompting keen interest from investors and big business. It also identifies and proposes solutions to some persistent challenges and critiques of voluntary carbon offset markets.

Some critics of the blueprint argue that it overlooks deeper problems rooted in the overall reliance on and effectiveness of voluntary carbon markets as a solution.

Though there is historical evidence of misuse and plenty of criticism, voluntary carbon markets are not inherently bad or useless in the pursuit of climate targets. In fact, quite the opposite. Some voluntary carbon market projects, in addition to mitigating climate change, provide other benefits, such as improvements to biodiversity habitats, water quality, soil health and socioeconomic opportunities.

However, there are real concerns about the ability of voluntary markets to legitimately deliver what they promise. Common concerns include questions about the permanence of the projects for storing carbon long term, verifying that offsets actually reduce emissions beyond a business-as-usual scenario and confirming that credits are not being used more than once. These and other challenges expose voluntary carbon markets to potential manipulation, greenwashing, unintended consequences and, regrettably, failure to achieve their purpose.

It’s getting better, but over-reliance on this method for counterbalancing emissions does risk some entities’ using offsets as a right to pollute.

Can Global Ecology Meet the Demand?

Voluntary carbon markets can improve landscapes and help make up for unavoidable emissions. However, they cannot accommodate all of the developed world’s net-zero targets.

Most of these initiatives have not yet started, yet emitters from developed countries are already seeking offsets outside their borders. This is raising concerns that wealthier companies may be placing the burden of their emissions onto poorer countries that can produce offsets cheaply, begging the notion of a newfound climate colonialism. Local communities may benefit from some environmental improvements or socioeconomic opportunities, but should economically developed polluters be forcing that decision?

Beyond ethics, in statistical terms, there is simply not enough ecological capacity to offset the world’s emissions.

Take the interest in using forests as offset solutions. There are around 3 trillion trees on Earth today with room for about 1 to 2.5 trillion more. The Trillion Tree Initiative, 1T program, Trillion Trees, and the CEO of Reddit, among others, aim to plant a trillion trees each. From just a few examples, there is already a paradoxical impasse.

Offsets can realistically do only so much for reaching climate targets. That is why the focus must turn toward reducing rather than offsetting global emissions. Voluntary carbon markets serve a critical role as innovation sandboxes for creative offset solutions, and they are mobilizing the private sector to act; however, they must be limited.

While some prominent organizations are pursuing net-zero, most businesses and governments have not yet pledged, let alone developed, clear and plausible road maps to meet targets in line with a 2050 net-zero global economy.

The Needed Goal: A Negative Net

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the world can keep global warming in check if emissions are cut in half by 2030, compared to 2010 levels, and reach net-zero by midcentury. However, it also states a need for greenhouse gas removal beyond net-zero emissions targets.

The real act of climate cleanup begins at net-negative emissions for all greenhouse gases. Only then will their atmospheric concentrations finally begin shrinking. That feat will require more renewable energy, widespread infrastructure and transportation developments, improved land management and investments in carbon capturing activities and technologies.

While net-zero is a critical step toward addressing climate change, it must be achieved smartly. And, importantly, it can’t be the end goal.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Oliver Miltenberger, Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Economics, The University of Melbourne and Matthew D. Potts, Professor, S.J. Hall Chair in Forest Economics, University of California, Berkeley

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

Reclaiming Abandoned Mines: Turning Coal Country’s Toxic Legacy Into Assets

New legislation could help states and tribes clean up decades-old mining liabilities and restore the environment while creating needed jobs.

Mined lands reclaimed for biking trails, office parks — even a winery. Efforts like these are already underway in Appalachia to reclaim the region’s toxic history, restore blighted lands, and create economic opportunities in areas where decades-old mines haven’t been properly cleaned up.

The projects are sorely needed. And so are many more. But the money to fund and enable them remains elusive.

Mining production is falling, which is good news for tackling climate change and air pollution, but Appalachia and other coal states are also feeling the economic pain that comes with it. And that loss is more acute on top of pandemic-related revenue shortfalls and the mounting bills from the industry’s environmental degradation.

Local leaders and organizations working in coal communities see a way to flip the script, though. The Revelator spoke with Rebecca Shelton, the director of policy and organizing for Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center in Kentucky, about efforts focusing on one particular area that’s plagued coal communities for more than 50 years: cleaning up abandoned mine lands.

Shelton explains the history behind these lands, the big legislative opportunities developing in Washington, and what coal communities need to prepare for a low-carbon future.

What are abandoned mine lands?

Technically an abandoned mine land is land where no reclamation was done after mining. Prior to the passage of Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, coal-mining companies weren’t required to reclaim — or clean up — the land they mined.

What SMCRA did, in addition to creating requirements for companies to do reclamation into the future, was create an abandoned mine land fund to distribute money to states and tribes with historic mining so that they could clean up those old sites. The revenue for that fund comes from a small tax on current coal production.

The program has accomplished a lot. It has closed 46,000 open mine portals, reclaimed more than 1,000 miles of high walls, stabilized slopes, and restored a lot of water supplies.

It’s been a successful program, but the work is far from done. A conservative estimate is that there’s still more than $11 billion needed to clean up existing identified liability across the U.S. [for sites mined before 1977].

What are the risks if we don’t do this?

There are safety, health and environmental issues.

Just this spring we’ve already gotten calls from folks living adjacent to abandoned mine lands that are experiencing slides [from wet weather causing slopes destabilized by mining to give way]. People’s homes can be completely destabilized, and if they don’t get out in time, it can be really dangerous.

There’s also a lot of existing acid mine drainage across coal-mining communities, which is water that’s leaking iron oxides and other heavy metals from these abandoned mine lands. This is bad for the ecology of the streams, but heavy metals are also not safe for humans to be exposed to.

orange colored water — Acid mine drainage in a stream. Photo: Rachel Brennan (CC BY-NC 2.0)

There’s legislation in Congress now that could help deal with this issue. What are those bills?

One bill is the reauthorization of the abandoned mine land fund. That bill is absolutely critical because the fee on coal production, which is the only source of revenue for the fund, will expire at the end of September if Congress doesn’t take action.

If Congress fails to extend that, we may not see any more funding for the $11 billion needed to clean up abandoned mine lands. If passed, the bill would reauthorize the fee at its current level for 15 more years.

The challenge is that even if the fee is reauthorized, it’ll likely generate only around $1.6 billion — based on current coal-production projections — and that’s vastly inadequate to cover all of the liabilities that exist.

Also, when the abandoned mine land fund was first started, there were some funds that were not redistributed to states and tribes and have just remained in the fund — [about] $2.5 billion that’s not being dispersed on an annual basis.

So another bill, the RECLAIM Act, would authorize [an initial] $1 billion to be dispersed out of that fund that would go to approximately 20 states and tribes over the next five years. This money would be distributed differently than the regular funds in that any kind of project would have to have a plan in place for community and economic development.

So though the funds can only be used for reclamation, they need to be reclamation with a plan. There are so many high-priority and dangerous abandoned mine land sites that exist, and the RECLAIM Act funds would prioritize supporting community and economic development for communities adjacent to these lands.

How much support are you seeing for these bills?

We see momentum in this Congress, and there’s a lot of conversation around investing in our nation’s infrastructure. We see abandoned mine lands and their remediation as natural infrastructure that we need to invest in to keep our communities safe and prepare them for the future.

But we also see these bills as important pieces of an economic recovery package. COVID-19 has really exacerbated so many of the existing health and economic crises already in coal communities.

When we talk about economic stimulus and job creation, we also see reauthorizing the abandoned mine land fund as contributing to that because it takes a lot of work and creates a lot of jobs to do land reclamation.

steep slope — Abandoned mines can pose serious health and safety hazards, such as landslides, erosion and surface instability. Photo: USGS

We’ve talked about the legacy issues from lands mined before 1977, but what concerns are there from current or recent mining? Is that reclamation being done adequately?

That’s an area that also needs a closer look.

As the industry declines, we’ve seen coal companies file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy or reorganization. And when they do this, oftentimes they’re granted permission to get rid of liabilities that would affect their solvency. Sometimes those liabilities are reclamation obligations, pension funds or black lung disability funds.

And then what you see is smaller companies taking on these permits that the reorganizing company no longer wants. But many are under-capitalized and they sometimes don’t have the ability to even produce coal, or if they do they can’t keep up with the reclamation. And it’s dangerous for communities if there’s environmental violations that aren’t getting addressed.

I’ll give you a recent example. Blackjewel [the sixth-largest U.S. coal producer] went bankrupt in the summer of 2019. Since then there’s been very little done to address any kind of environmental violations existing on their permits.

Because of SMCRA, companies are required to have bonds in order to obtain their mining permits, but these bonds are not always adequate. The Kentucky Energy and Environment cabinet made a statement in the Blackjewel bankruptcy proceedings that it estimated that reclamation obligations on these permits were going to fall short $20 to $50 million.

What else is needed to help coal communities transition to a low-carbon economy?

That’s a big question. We have to address these legacy issues in order to help transition these communities into the future. And we have to address the problems right now of folks who are losing their jobs and need to be supported through training programs or through education credits.

But we also need to be thinking about the future more broadly. What will be in place 20 years from now for the younger generation?

There’s going to be a lot of gaps in local tax revenues because so much of the tax base has been reliant on the coal industry, which makes it really difficult for communities to continue to provide public services and keep up infrastructure as that industry declines. It’s going to be critical to think about that and invest in that.

I think the best approach is to find solutions that work for [specific] places. And to do that we need to listen to community leaders and folks in these communities that have already been working to build something new for many years. There are solutions that I think can apply to all places, but there also needs to be a targeted intention to create opportunities where communities can develop their own paths forward.

Are We Managing Invasive Species Wrong?

New research suggests that sometimes trying to completely eliminate a problematic non-native species may cause more harm than good.

European green crabs arrived on the eastern shores of North America in the early 1800s, likely as ship ballast stowaways or affixed to boat hulls. They found their way to the continent’s western shores by the 1980s, and they’ve caused trouble in every new ecosystem they invade.

Wherever green crabs (Carcinus maenas) land, scientists have documented them decimating food webs by devouring benthic invertebrates that provide nourishment for shorebirds, fishes and other species. Over the years, they have eaten their way onto a list of the world’s top 100 most unwanted species.

The economic toll of their appetite is large, too. European green crabs were estimated to have caused $22 million in damage a year to the East Coast commercial shellfishery alone.

Causing both ecological and economic harm has put green crabs in the spotlight, and a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis and other institutions have been studying how to best eradicate them. Along the way the scientists made a surprising discovery that they believe could change how managers deal with other invasive aquatic species.

Green Crab Revelations

In 2009 the researchers decided to see if they could eradicate the invasive species from a small area where the crabs had newly arrived — the Seadrift Lagoon in Stinson Beach, California, about half an hour from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

“We thought we could undertake this kind of proof of concept to determine how many bodies, how many traps and how much effort it would take to get rid of the green crab in a fairly small, contained area,” says one of those researchers, Edwin (Ted) Grosholz, a professor at U.C. Davis.

They were successful at reducing the population by more than 90% — from 125,000 crabs in 2009 to fewer than 10,000 by 2013. “We were feeling very good with ourselves,” he says, “But then suddenly the population exploded, and we were faced with even more crabs.”

holding a green crab — Catching invasive European green crabs. Photo: USFWS

By 2014 the number of green crabs in Seadrift Lagoon shot up to an alarming 300,000. Other nearby bays didn’t experience a similar population explosion, leaving the researchers wondering what the heck could have caused it.

It turns out that this rather counterintuitive ecological response — where removal efforts can trigger a steep population rebound — had been found in theoretical models, uncontrolled studies and anecdotal reports for decades. “But we were the first who showed in an experiment with controls that in fact, this can happen, it did happen,” says Grosholz.

The reason why they believe the population took off? Quite simply, green crabs are cannibalistic. Adults keep the population in check by eating some of the youngsters. But traps to eradicate the crabs caught only the adults, which left a slew of uneaten offspring ready to grow big and strong.

Given time things could have gotten even worse, as a female green crab that reaches maturity can produce up to 185,000 eggs.

These findings revealed important data for managing invasive European green crabs, which have now made their way to five continents, but the researchers believe the implications go far beyond one species.

“The results of this study provide an urgent warning to those involved in the management of invasive species,” they write in a new study in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Bigger Lessons

The factors that led to the population explosion — known as the hydra effect — aren’t unique to European green crabs. It could happen with other aquatic species, too, says Grosholz, including almost all crabs, lobsters, shrimp, and even a number of fishes.

And it’s not just species that eat their young, either. “You can see this response in any species where the adults consume a lot of the resources that their offspring might use,” he says.

Their findings, he says, suggest that ecologists and managers may need to rethink how they manage invasive species that fit these criteria.

“The bigger picture is that there are people all over the planet spending a lot of money trying to eradicate invasive species — in marine ecosystems in particular — and our message here is to stop, back away,” he says. “Let’s give up trying to fully eradicate these types of species.”

A better idea, he says, is to reduce the species down to a lower level where the harm they cause is eliminated or reduced, but not so low that the species have an opportunity bounce back.

Another recent study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, by Grosholz and University of Alberta biologist Stephanie J. Green, lays out how to undertake this strategy of “functional eradication.”

Grosholz and Green surveyed more than 200 aquatic invasive-species specialists about how they try to manage invasive species and whether they focus on eradication, containment or suppression. What was most interesting, says Grosholz, was that virtually none had specific population targets for the invasive species they were managing.

“It’s either ‘we’re going to go get them all’ or ‘we’re going to try to knock the population down,’ but they don’t have any specific number,” he explains. “So we actually provide a way of suggesting how managers who are undertaking these programs can use the data that they usually already have to come up with the best target.”

The goal is to determine the ideal range of population where managers can begin to recover the native species or ecosystem function that’s been harmed by the invasive species. And often the answer isn’t simply linear, he says. “It’s not like if you reduce the invasive species a little bit more, you can bring more native species back — there’s often a threshold you need to hit for recovery to begin.”

If the number is too low, the invasive species will still damage the ecosystem. If the number is too high, managers might be putting in more work than they need to.

Their research on functional eradication aims to help invasive species specialists more quickly find that crucial number.

lionfish on the seafloor — An invasive red lionfish in the Bahamas. Photo: James St. John, (CC BY 2.0)

For example, they calculate that reducing populations of another deadly invasive species, the red lionfish, to below 25 individuals per hectare in the tropical Western Atlantic “could prevent predation‐induced declines in native fishes and result in low rates of recolonization.”

Doing the Work

Having that data is a critical first step. But getting the work done on the ground is another issue. For managers working to control invasive species in aquatic systems it can be particularly challenging — and resource-intensive.

“With a lot of terrestrial invasions, especially involving things that don’t move like plants, it’s pretty easy to know when you succeed and when you’ve gotten them all,” says Grosholz. “But when you’re thinking about things in the water — in lakes or estuaries or oceans — you often can’t even see them. So in most cases, when the horse is out of the barn, it’s going to be very difficult to eradicate something in these ecosystems.”

That’s where community scientists can come in, he says.

“We have throughout this [work in California] relied on volunteers to help pull the traps and count the crabs. We put out 90 traps a day and pull in thousands of crabs a day,” he says. “Volunteers were really instrumental in reaching our goals for the project. And now they’re really instrumental in maintaining this low population level.”

The key to community science, though, is finding people who are concerned enough to do the work — and have the time.

When those two things align significant conservation work can be accomplished — and it’s work that will become increasingly important as climate change and other environmental pressures further threaten biodiversity.

Invasive species have contributed to many examples of loss of biodiversity, but driving species to extinction isn’t the only threat, says Grosholz. Invasive species can also cause “functional extinction” of native species.

“In other words, the role in the ecosystem — whether it’s exchanging energy biomass or contributing to trophic support — can be eliminated,” he says. “So we may not entirely lose the native species, but we may lose the function they provide to the ecosystem — and that’s really important, too.”

10 Environmental Books We’re Reading This Spring

From climate change to wildlife trafficking, these new books tackle the toughest problems of the day, along with vital solutions.

Spring has arrived, and while the rapidly improving weather begs us to spend more time outdoors and with friends and families, the ongoing pandemic also offers some good reasons to stay safe and indoors until most people have been vaccinated.

So let’s get out into the world virtually with the latest books about environmental issues we care about. Publishers have lined up a great set of new titles to read while you stay indoors during what we hope is the final phase of the pandemic.

We’ve collected ten of the best new books of 2021 to date. They cover climate change, the extinction crisis, environmental justice and a whole lot more. You’ll even find a cookbook to freshen up your mealtimes, a collection of comics to inspire the kids in your life, and some weird fiction to keep your blood pumping. Most are available now, with a few titles hitting the shelves over the next two weeks.

The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E. Mann

We’ve been played, but we can fight back.

“A renowned climate scientist shows how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change and offers a battle plan for how we can save the planet.” (Check out our interview about Mann’s previous book, The Tantrum That Saved the World.)

Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World by Kathleen Dean Moore

What does the extinction crisis sound like?

“At once joyous and somber, this thoughtful gathering of new and selected essays spans Kathleen Dean Moore’s distinguished career as a tireless advocate for environmental activism in the face of climate change.” (Read our interview with Moore.)

The Bears Ears: A Human History of America’s Most Endangered Wilderness by David Roberts

A relevant book as President Biden looks to undo the previous administration’s damage.

“…acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes readers on a tour of his favorite place on Earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he’s explored for the last twenty-five years.”

The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption and One Man’s Search for Justice by Carey Gillam

Will the pen be mightier than the poisoners?

“Lee Johnson was a man with simple dreams. All he wanted was a steady job and a nice home for his wife and children, something better than the hard life he knew growing up. He never imagined that he would become the face of a David-and-Goliath showdown against one of the world’s most powerful corporate giants. But a workplace accident left Lee doused in a toxic chemical and facing a deadly cancer that turned his life upside down. In 2018, the world watched as Lee was thrust to the forefront of one the most dramatic legal battles in recent history.”

#EATMEATLESS: Good for Animals, the Earth & All by the Jane Goodall Institute

Honor your tastebuds and the natural world at the same time.

“…nourishing vegan recipes crafted especially for curious consumers looking to incorporate healthier dietary practices, those interested in environmental sustainability and animal welfare, and for fans of Jane Goodall’s work.”

Mutts Go Green: Earth-Friendly Tips and Comic Strips by Patrick McDonnell

Laughs and eco-lessons for younger readers, but the comic strips speak to us all.

“…a special kids’ collection of the popular comic strip MUTTS, featuring themes of ecology, environmental friendliness and animal education.” (Available 3/30.)

Gonna Trouble the Water: Ecojustice, Water, and Environmental Racism edited by Miguel A. De La Torre

A challenging book for challenging times.

“With compelling contributions from scholars and activists, politicians and theologians — including former Colorado governor Bill Ritter, global academic law professor Ved P. Nanda, Detroit-based activist Michelle Andrea Martinez, and many more — Gonna Trouble the Water de-centers the concept of water as a commodity in order to center the dignity of water and its life-giving character.” (Available 4/1.)

Lessons From Plants by Beronda L. Montgomery

Look into the green world and learn.

“Lessons from Plants enters into the depth of botanic experience and shows how we might improve human society by better appreciating not just what plants give us but also how they achieve their own purposes. What would it mean to learn from these organisms, to become more aware of our environments and to adapt to our own worlds by calling on perception and awareness? Montgomery’s meditative study puts before us a question with the power to reframe the way we live: What would a plant do?” (Available 4/6.)

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh

An inspirational story that will echo around the world.

“The David and Goliath story of ordinary people in El Salvador who rallied together with international allies to prevent a global mining corporation from poisoning the country’s main water source.”

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Science fiction with a horrific real-world twist.

“Security consultant ‘Jane Smith’ receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control.” Sales benefit two organizations working to fight wildlife trafficking, the Wildlife Conservation Society and TRAFFIC. (Available 4/6.)

Songs Whales Sing: The Peculiar History of Commercial Whaling

The story of commercial whaling and the iconoclasts who opposed it offers hope for whales facing today’s new threats — and the future of our planet.

“Turning Points” examines critical moments in environmental history when change occurred for the better — or worse.

The origins of commercial whaling trace back to the Basques of the 11th century. It’s a bloody history, one emblazoned in many peoples’ minds by the later image of Herman Melville’s tortured Ahab relentlessly hunting the beleaguered Moby Dick.

Sperm whale — Plate from the 1839 book, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale. Public domain.

But this semi-Romantic image of 19th century whalers silently sweeping across the globe on unfurled sails in search of profit and adventure belies a truth.

The fact is that the decimation of whales occurred not in those days of the Industrial Revolution but in the mid-20th century. It was during the age of petroleum, not of kerosene, that whales were driven to near extinction by modern pelagic fleets that employed exploding harpoons, helicopters, sonar and stern-slipway factory ships.

International bodies, scientists, politicians and conservationists attempted to save whales from disappearing as early as the 1920s. Their orthodox efforts — employing diplomacy, science and reason — failed dismally. Instead, it took an unconventional troop of 1960s iconoclasts to rescue whales from the brink of annihilation.

With appeals to the heart, whales became a unifying symbol of not only a global environmental movement but also of a rejection of cultures of violence, war and death. It was a fleeting moment in time when traditional institutional hegemonies were vigorously questioned. By placing whales in the larger context of an antiestablishment appeal, commercial whaling effectively ended in 1986.

Perhaps the whale’s peculiar path to redemption offers a way forward for our planet.

The Whaling Club

To understand this, it helps to first understand how science and hard data failed whales, and that begins with the International Whaling Commission.

The International Whaling Commission was the first global body dedicated to the rational management and conservation of a biological species. Formed at the behest of the United States in 1946, the IWC was a governing authority made up of the world’s 15 major whaling nations. The commission’s objective was to regulate whaling to maximize “the interests of the consumers of whale products and the whaling industry.”[1]

Treating whales as a mere resource put the animals in a precarious position.

Despite the supplanting of whale oil as lamp fuel with the discovery of petroleum (1859) and electrical lighting (1879), human ingenuity kept finding new uses for whale “products.” Throughout the 1960s, nearly 70,000 whales were slaughtered annually for meat, margarine, soap, animal feed, fertilizer, ivory knick-knacks, perfume, liquid wax and high-end industrial lubricants.

Whale soap — 19th-century trade card for whale soap. Scan courtesy Boston Public Library (CC BY 2.0)

Emerging science made it clear that such butchery was unsustainable.[2]

Genuine concern for rapidly declining whale populations spurred Arthur Remington Kellogg, one of the earliest scientists to rigorously study whale biology, to become the force behind the establishment of the IWC. A master diplomat with many friendships and connections across governments, academia and industry, Kellogg understood that until that point legal norms treated any international common-pool resource as an open-access one. In other words, sovereign governments always enjoyed unhindered authority when making decisions about their use of these common resources, including whales, which mostly swam in international waters and therefore could be hunted without restrictions.[3] Kellogg organized the IWC so that whale science would nudge, not confront, nations to relinquish some of their freedom on the high seas. It would be difficult, but he believed scientific discourse would eventually help IWC members see the wisdom of maintaining a sustainable fishery.[4]

To accomplish this reasonable expectation, the IWC established two important yet contradictory permanent committees. The Scientific Committee, composed of leading cetologists from around the world, was charged with reviewing catch data and making recommendations on research needs, yield quotas and rates of stock depletion. The Scientific Committee then sent recommendations to the Technical Committee, which “consulted” and revised the report for final IWC approval. For the next 20 years the political appointees on the Technical Committee consistently ignored Scientific Committee recommendations in favor of the short-term interests of whaling nations. Promoting stable and resilient whale populations was of little concern.

Kellogg was not a Pollyanna. He and other prominent cetologists realized that science was never going to be the primary driver of the actions of the IWC. But they also believed that realpolitik compromises, like knowingly having the Scientific Committee recommend quotas that were too high, would eventually win them influence in the IWC.[5] Better to be insiders pushing the IWC toward reform, they reasoned, than scientific rabble-rousers causing recalcitrant reaction.

Unfortunately, the dream of being influential insiders would die hard as Kellogg and other well-meaning scientists were consistently politically outmaneuvered by cynical whaling states.

Enter the Pied Pipers of Whales

Without doubt the 1960s are mythologized. Yet the decade’s counterculture movement fundamentally changed the world in radical ways. Protests against capitalism, consumerism, authoritarianism, racism and war swept across the globe from Tokyo to Paris and Prague, and from Mexico City to Birmingham and Washington, D.C.

Coming out of this antiestablishment zeitgeist was neurophysiologist John C. Lilly. His role in the campaign to end international whaling cannot be overstated.

An LSD-dropping free-love practitioner, Lilly conducted pioneering bioacoustics research investigating cetacean intelligence and the possibility of interspecies communication. His ethically questionable and unorthodox experiments led to two hugely popular if scientifically dubious books, Man and Dolphin (1961) and Mind of the Dolphin (1967). Lillyists, as his disciples came to be known, believed that the weightlessness of ocean-dwelling mammals permitted them to overcome the terrestrial separation of the mind and body. This weightlessness, he wrote, allowed cetaceans to attain the highest level of consciousness, one free of alienation and violence. Bioacoustics would unlock the secrets of cetacean communication and, more importantly, would be the means by which cetaceans could then teach humanity to reach superior consciousness.

Ginsberg Leary Lilly — Lilly (R) with fellow counterculture figures Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary in 1991. Photo: Philip H. Bailey (CC-BY-SA)

Lilly’s message found a very receptive audience into the 1970s. In particular he influenced Scott McVay, a Princeton graduate in English. Trained in bioacoustics by Lilly, McVay, with the help of Roger Payne, became the first person to record the haunting and mysterious phonations of humpback whales in 1967.

These spectrograms soon captured the world’s imagination. They inspired music, cinema, literature, art — even NASA. It was a staggering achievement that eclipsed Lilly’s original ideas.

For better or worse the recordings effectively transformed whales into totems, dichotomizing humans into those who protected whales and those who did not. For the first time whaling nations faced real social condemnation. Empathy-driven boycotts, protests and violent confrontations with whalers produced tangible political pressure to not just maintain sustainable fisheries, but to ban whaling altogether.

Conflict With Science

The world of respected academic cetology rejected Lilly and his band of outsiders with prejudice.

In a 1961 review of Man and Dolphin, James W. Atz, an ichthyologist at the American Museum of Natural History, dismissed Lilly for not presenting a “single observation or interpretation that could withstand scientific scrutiny.” For Atz and other elite sages it was important for scientists “to have a rational view of animal life,” and he lamented that “Dr. Lilly … felt called upon to put himself so prominently in the public eye.”[6]

Nothing captures the disconnect between the conservative world of academic scientists and an increasingly sympathetic public ready to save whales more than Prof. G. Carlton Ray’s (an expert in cross-disciplinary coastal-marine research and conservation) hostile reaction to McVay’s whale recordings in 1971:

I don’t find it very relevant to hear that whales produce music. Cock-a-doodle-doo produces music too. Whales are smarter than chickens, but it is not relevant… Neither is it relevant to say that whales have a complex social life. So do all the animals, including cows that we eat. The point is to talk good international research and management sense.[7]

But here’s the reality: Hyperrational, data-driven quantitative science like that advocated by Ray simply failed to influence society, culture and politics, even at a time when humanity was ready to radically question authority. It took the scientific taboo of empathy-driven anthropomorphism to compel sovereign governments to surrender some of their authority to make unilateral decisions about the use of open-access resources.

By 1974, 17 anti-whaling environmental groups with millions of members organized an international boycott of Soviet and Japanese products.[8] World opinion and economic pressure was building on the two countries most committed to whaling. The Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972.[9] Then, in 1978, the United States enacted the Pelly Amendment, which mandated economically crippling restrictions on imports from countries that violated IWC regulations or any international endangered or threatened species program.[10]

At last, legislation like the Pelly Amendment provided the IWC with indirect yet real regulatory power, which it had always lacked. Because of these and many other grass-root and legislative efforts, the IWC (which still exists) was finally able to ratify a 10-year moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. Since then only Japan and Norway have resumed limited commercial whaling.

The whaling vessel Petrel, shipwrecked on South Georgia Island. Photo: Christopher Michel (CC BY 2.0)

Politics, Our Planet and Songs Whales Sing

As historians Michael Brenes and Michael Koncewicz have noted, the demands of many contemporary and 1960s activists have been rejected and “labeled extreme” by political and social centrists. Yet historically, it’s these “extremists” who have pushed “the ideological boundaries of liberalism,” and driven progressive political and social change.[11]

In these bleak neoliberal and authoritarian times of mass extinction, we desperately need new summers of love like those that inspired change in the 1960s. Today’s warriors fighting to stop our slide toward ecocide will find in the story of whales that it was outsiders/extremists and their uncompromising appeals to the heart that smashed flawed and immoral political structures.

And like Lilly and other nonconformists of the 1960s, today there are persons and groups who are ready to push the envelope of the status quo and test what is politically and socially possible.

For example, desperate protests forced the shutdown of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016/17 and captured media attention from around the world. People traveled for hundreds of miles to join the protest camps, often spending months there standing up for the cause. But timid centrists at the time, like Hillary Clinton who was running for president, declined to support the demonstrators.[12] As with whales, a disassociation existed between the public and policymakers who failed to recognize that American society was still capable of being roused into action because of basic human empathy. Clearly, the sight of brutal police violence against peaceful protestors from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their many allies aroused the public’s conscience against the project.[13]

Then there’s the tragic story of Tahlequah and her dead calf, of the endangered Southern Resident killer whale family, in 2018. Like McVay’s recordings of humpback whales, the spectacle of Tahlequah carrying her dead child for weeks emotionally galvanized the world.

In an overwhelming response to the Seattle Times asking readers to recount their reaction to Tahlequah’s heartbreaking story, the universal sentiment was one of staggering lachrymose devastation: “I can’t stop crying. I can’t sleep,” said one respondent.

“I have been deeply affected by this,” wrote another. “As a mother of young children, I find myself moved by her grief and behavior… I am now extremely concerned about her health and well-being. I have called our elected officials’ offices to plead for immediate action to help SRKW population.”[14]

southern resident killer whale — A young resident killer whale chases a chinook salmon in the Salish Sea near San Juan Island, Washington, in September 2017. Image obtained under NMFS permit #19091. Photograph by John Durban (NOAA Fisheries/Southwest Fisheries Science Center), Holly Fearnbach (SR3: SeaLife Response, Rehabilitation and Research) and Lance Barrett-Lennard (Vancouver Aquarium’s Coastal Ocean Research Institute). Photo courtesy Oregon State University (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This spiritual anguish also had concrete political repercussions. In March 2021 Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, a Republican, unveiled a proposal to breach the Snake River dams that have choked off the Southern Residents’ salmon food supply. His proposal is deeply flawed, but signals an awareness of the broad popularity of the deeply charismatic orcas.

Many other species of whales continue to be in grave danger of extinction. Today it’s not so much the cruel harpoon that threatens them as ocean warming and acidification, ship strikes, plastic, noise, trash, fishing nets and pollution.

Here’s what else has changed: Thanks to advances in whale science, we now know they have complex and highly evolved clan and family structures. Their sophisticated cultures give us even more reasons to cherish these Leviathans of ocean storms, tides and depths.

It may not pass orthodox scientific and political muster, but it’s time for us to try to imagine what whales and other living beings think of our stewardship of the natural world and to harness the noblest of human impulses — mercy. Modern Western civilization, born out of the Enlightenment, wedded to the notion of rational reform, dismissive of what it deems as “irrational,” and attracted to mechanistic problem-solving, must dare to be profoundly different.

It worked to end whaling. It can and must work again.

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

[1] International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling with Schedule of Whaling Regulations, December 2, 1946, Article V, Paragraph 2.

[2] 1956 IWC meeting: IWC/8/13, 108-9.

[3] Elliott, Gerald. “Fishing Control—National or International?” The World Today 28, no. 3 (1972): 133-38.

[4] D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 372-373.

[5] D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 372-373.

[6] D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 590.

[7] Grieves, Forest L. “Leviathan, the International Whaling Commission and Conservation as Environmental Aspects of International Law.” The Western Political Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1972): 721.

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/20/archives/japanese-and-soviet-whaling-protested-by-boycott-of-goods-85-of.html

[9] https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/topic/laws-policies#marine-mammal-protection-act

[10] https://www.fws.gov/international/laws-treaties-agreements/us-conservation-laws/pelly-amendment.html

[11] https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/left-history-democratic-party/

[12] https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/28/what-crock-clinton-breaks-dapl-silence-statement-says-literally-nothing

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/12/north-dakota-standing-rock-protests-civil-rights

[14] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/i-have-not-slept-in-days-readers-react-to-tahlequah-the-mother-orca-clinging-to-her-dead-calf/

5 Things to Know About the Fate of Wild Salmon

Historical pressures combined with new threats from climate change have pushed more than a dozen species close to extinction.

It’s not too hard to find salmon on a menu in the United States, but that seeming abundance — much of it fueled by overseas fish farms — overshadows a grim reality on the ground. Many of our wild salmon, outside Alaska, are on the ropes — and have been for decades.

Twenty years ago Pacific salmon were found to have disappeared from 40% of their native rivers and streams across Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California. In places where they remain, like the Columbia River system, the number of wild fish returning to streams is estimated to have plunged by as much as 98%. Today 28 populations of West Coast salmon and steelhead are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

New research is helping to put the problem — and solutions — into focus. But in some cases, policy to implement changes still lags.

1. Trouble in Washington

With 14 salmon and steelhead species listed as endangered in Washington, a new report by the state declared that “too many salmon remain on the brink of extinction. And time is running out.” Four key factors, the researchers say, have been attributed to their historical decline: habitat, harvest, hydropower and hatcheries.

2. Upstream changes

Along with historic threats, there’s another new factor making salmon recovery challenging for Washington and other West Coast states: climate change. Increasing temperatures are causing snowpack declines, resulting in warmer streams that can stress or kill salmon. Additionally, more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow causes rivers to run faster earlier in the season, which can wash away salmon nests and sweep young salmon out of their calm-water habitat before they’re ready — reducing their chances of survival.

3. Ocean woes

It’s not just freshwater habitat for salmon that’s changing. A recent study in the journal Communications Biology looked at how eight populations of wild spring-summer Chinook from the Snake River Basin fared during the ocean phase of their lives. And it’s not good. If ocean warming continues, by the 2060s mortality for Chinook could be as high as 90%.

4. Ripple effect

Pacific salmon are an integral cultural resource for Pacific Northwest tribes and provide thousands of regional jobs. But the fish don’t just feed people. They also nourish freshwater and marine ecosystems, along with more than 100 species.

And for one animal in particular, the critically endangered Southern Resident killer whale (Orcinus orca), the decline of Chinook is an existential threat. It’s been long known that Southern Residents feed primarily on Chinook — the largest Pacific salmon species — during the summer. But a new study published in the journal Plos One found that Chinook were also important year-round.

Two Southern Resident killer whales swimming — Southern Resident killer whales. Photo: NOAA

5. Implementing solutions

In an effort to help the recovery of Southern Residents and help boost salmon populations in the region, conservation groups have increased their calls to remove four dams on the Lower Snake River, a major tributary of the Columbia River in Washington.

While the science supports dam removal to save salmon, putting that into action has run into a wall of political opposition — mostly from conservatives. However, a recent plan proposed by Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson to breach the Snake River dams was a rare showing of Republican support, which could signal more bipartisan efforts ahead.

Other dam removals — both large and small — have proved beneficial for salmon in Washington and other states. In California a groundbreaking project to allow rivers to flood fallow farm fields in winter has helped provide both food and rearing habitat for salmon — and has helped prove that water managers don’t have to choose between fish and farmers.

There’s still a long road ahead to help keep our remaining salmon populations from the brink. For more on these issues, check out these stories from The Revelator’s archive to better understand the threats, what’s at stake, and what’s working to help save wild salmon.