I Know Why the Caged Songbird Goes Extinct

A rampant trade in Asian birds for their beautiful songs is emptying forests of sound and life.

The straw-headed bulbul doesn’t look like much.

It’s less than a foot in length, with subdued brown-and-gold plumage, a black beak and beady red eyes. If you saw one sitting on a branch in front of you, you might not give it a second glance.

But this Southeast Asian native stands out in one notable way: It sings like an angel.

“It’s arguably the most beautiful song of any bird,” says Chris Shepherd, executive director of Monitor Conservation Research Society and an expert on Asian songbirds. “It’s amazing,” he adds.

The bird’s beautiful voice serves a vital ecological purpose: Males use it to attract mates. The better the song, the greater the chance of finding a female and propagating the species.

But the song has also come with a terrible modern cost. Humans have come to value the bulbul’s calls so much that they’ve collected the birds from almost every inch of their habitat. Captured birds, quickly caged, have been shipped to markets throughout Southeast Asia. Due to this overwhelming commercial demand, the species has disappeared from most of its range and is now critically endangered. Only a few pocket populations continue to hang on.

And the straw-headed bulbul is far from alone in this decline. Practically every songbird species in Southeast Asia faces a similar predicament. Many birds face the very real risk of imminent extinction, leaving some forests in the region eerily silent.

Recent research finds that several songbirds have become perilously close to vanishing — if they haven’t been lost already.

One Indonesian bird, the Simeulue hill myna, has only just been described as genetically and morphologically unique from other lookalike species. It probably went extinct in the wild in the past two or three years, according to a paper published last spring in the journal Ibis. As the researchers wrote, “On multiple recent excursions to Simeulue, most recently in July 2018, we were unable to find the bird and learned from locals that there had been a great drive to catch the last survivors on the island in response to a wealthy person’s bounty on these birds.”

The paper calls this an “extinction-in-process” and warns that any remaining birds left in captivity may die without producing offspring. Even if they do manage to breed, the researchers fear they could be hybridized with other similar-in-appearance mynas, obscuring their genetic lineage.

That same phrase, extinction-in-process, has also been used to describe the Barusan shama, which according to a 2019 study published in the journal Forktail has become one of the most threatened of Asian songbirds due to rampant collection. It’s now gone from all but one island.

Like the Simeulue hill myna, the Barushan shama’s plight went virtually unnoticed for years because many taxonomists have classified it as a subspecies rather than a full species. Newer research finds that it’s a species with four subspecies, few of which may now survive.

Not that the species/subspecies disputes matter too much at this point.

“Taxonomic debates about the rank of these forms should not stand in the way of trying to ensure the survival of what is clearly an evolutionarily distinct lineage,” says Frank Rheindt, a biologist with National University of Singapore and senior or lead author on both of the papers.

So what happens to these birds once they’re taken from the wild?

That’s where the story gets even bleaker.

Disposable Love

Songbirds are an important element of culture and tradition for many peoples in Southeast Asia. In Java, for example, it’s almost assumed that every household will have at least one pet songbird. The more birds, the more prestigious the home.

But wild songbirds in captivity…well, they don’t tend to last long.

“We’ve often called the caged songbird trade like cut flowers,” says Shepherd. “The birds look nice. They’re often inexpensive. You bring one home. It sits in a cage for a couple of days and it dies just like a cut flower. They’re not expected to live.”

And because many Asian cities feature massive markets full of birds that have been easily snatched from the wild — usually illegally — any bird that dies is relatively easy and inexpensive to replace.

Even bird traders don’t put much value on their stock, since a new supply of wild-caught birds always seems to be waiting in the wings.

“I’ve seen some cages where the surviving birds are all sitting on top of dead birds in the cages,” Shepherd says. “You can’t see the floor of the cage. It’s covered with a few layers of dead birds, and then there’s some sick and half-dead birds perched on top of them. And they cost the dealers next to nothing. So, you know, even if they sell a few, they think they must be covering their costs or you wouldn’t have a business model like that.”

Although all of this seems to favor low-cost disposability, some species are captive bred by the thousands, and prices can soar for the right birds.

As with so many other groups of heavily traded species, the rarest birds fetch higher prices from collectors — a “better get them before they’re gone” collector’s mentality that pushes prices higher, drives further poaching and drives birds even closer to extinction.

The Simeulue hill myna, for instance, might have sold for about $100-$150, “certainly if a foreigner or non-Simeulue person asks,” says Rheindt. “This is easily 2-4 monthly incomes for rural people on the island.”

The Caged Bird Sings

Along with its rarity, a bird’s appearance is clearly a valuable trait to collectors. Some of the birds are strikingly beautiful, like birds of paradise and the Javan white-eye.

A kingfisher, looking a little worse for wear, in the Malang bird and animal market in 2016. Photo: Andrea Kirkby (CC BY-SA 2.0)

But the quality that typically drives up a bird’s market price?

That, of course, would be the song.

A good song can earn a bird owner a big payday. Entire competitions have sprung up that offer cash prizes for the birds with the best songs — up to $50,000, according to some reports. On Java these events are known as Kicau-mania (“kicau” is Indonesian for “chirping”).

The bird doesn’t get much for his work. Perhaps some food and a chance to sing again.

But it can take a lot of human effort to inspire them to sing for their suppers.

“People will keep the male birds in captivity for a long time,” says Shepherd. “Some birds don’t want to sing in captivity and take a long time before they adjust to the point where they’ll start to sing. Then they’ll train the bird. They’ll keep it near other males so it sings more frequently, because they naturally compete with their songs.”

This forced companionship changes the very nature of the song.

“Some birds pick up notes and sounds from other species,” Shepherd says. “Some of the species that are disappearing, they’re just training birds. They’re not even the ones used in competition. They just keep them beside other the species that compete so they have a more complex and unique song in the competition.”

After that, it’s a bit like a dog show.

“Everybody takes their bird in a cage and there are songbird judges. They walk around and listen to the song and there’s big cash prizes for the bird with the best.” (Most recently, these competitions have moved online due to COVID-19.)

Through all of this, the gift nature gave these animals to help propagate their species — song — ends up driving them toward extinction.

This makes the trade similar to trophy hunting, which values the biggest animals or those with the most beautiful features. “The strongest bird in the wild, the one with the greatest song, would be the one that would pass on his genes,” Shepherd says. “Those are the ones being removed from the wild. So, you know, only inferior birds are left behind.”

Unlike trophy hunting, however, where an elephant’s tusks can theoretically trade hands in perpetuity, a bird’s song is ephemeral — sung once, then lost to time.

Progress

Shepherd says the Asian songbird crisis went virtually ignored for many years. Relatively few scientists studied it, and funding for conservation remained scarce. That’s been a costly delay.

“One of the interesting and sad things is that lot of the species that I worked on in the early Nineties, the ones I tried to raise the alarm on, are now gone or almost gone,” he says. “And then the ones I was working on that were extremely common at the time are now the next wave that’s disappearing.”

Fortunately, that’s started to change. For one thing, scientific research about the trade and affected species continues to pick up. One of the most worrying studies came out last August and found that Java now has more songbirds in cages than in its forests. The study found that one species, the Javan pied starling (Gracupica jalla), now has fewer than 50 birds remaining in the wild, while 1.1 million live on the island in captivity.

Meanwhile governments, NGOs and other researchers have also stepping up their game. Conservation experts came together in 2015 to hold an event called the Asian Songbird Trade Crisis Summit. Two years later they formed the IUCN Asian Songbird Trade Specialist Group, which had its first official meeting in 2019. And over the past five years governments have started to take action, including seizing several large shipments of poached birds, although the trade remains mostly illegal and unsustainable.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by TRAFFIC (@traffic_wltrade)

Local groups have helped, too, which brings us back to the Simeulue hill myna and Barusan shama. A Simeulue-based organization called Ecosystemimpact set out to help the two birds at the beginning of 2020. Although their efforts were hampered by the COVID pandemic, they’re still trying to acquire any captive birds they can find to keep them out of the trade. If they do rescue any Simeulue hill mynas — such as four juvenile birds that reportedly recently turned up for sale on Facebook — they’ll need a permit from the government to breed them.

Even then, saving them from extinction won’t be easy.

“Hill myna are notoriously hard to breed, requiring large, tall aviaries with good vantage points over forested areas,” says program manager Tom Amey. “It’s not out of the question that hill myna will breed within our aviaries, but given their specific requirements, we feel it is unlikely.” They’re working on raising funding for new aviaries designed specifically for hill mynas.

They also hope to educate the community, to turn its love of captive birds into one that also supports wild populations.

“There is a distinct lack of bird song on Simeulue, especially within close to medium proximity of [human] habitation,” says Amey. “Our ambition is to bring the beautiful sounds of songbirds back to Simeulue’s forests and culture. Songbirds have played an important role in Simeulue culture and many members of the community wish to see them return.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Flight: Protecting Birds (@flight_protectingbirds)

As with everything in the past year, progress to protect Asian songbirds has slowed down of late. “Unfortunately, the COVID crisis has been a huge, but legitimate, distraction from the global fight against extinction, and very little attention has been paid to such issues in the last few months,” says Rheindt.

Once the pandemic recedes, Shepherd suggests that tourism may play an important role in keeping birds alive, uncaged and in their natural habitats.

“There’s a very big birdwatching community,” he says, “and I think working with the community and with the birdwatching tour guides to raise awareness of the benefits of having songbirds around is important. The birdwatching industry’s worth millions. I think we need to raise awareness of the fact that you can lose your birds, but also awareness of the facts that having birds around is good for the environment, it’s good for your mental health, it’s good for all kinds of things — but it’s good for the economy.”

Until those messages resonate more than the ka-ching of a cash register, however, Asian songbirds will remain in crisis.

Sounds of Silence: Extinction Is Erasing the Earth’s Music

Writer Kathleen Dean Moore turns her ear to nature’s sounds and what we’re losing as species disappear.

What does a biodiversity crisis sound like? You may need to strain your ears to hear it.

In the past 50 years, America’s bird populations have fallen by a third, and worldwide the average mammal population has dropped 60%, writes acclaimed environmental philosopher and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore in her new collection of essays, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World.

And with all that loss comes an unsettling silence.

“Unless the world acts to stop extinctions, I will write my last nature essay on a planet that is less than half as song-graced and life-drenched as the one where I began to write,” she explains in the book’s preface. “My grandchildren will tear out half the pages in their field guides. They won’t need them.”

Her book uses sound as a reference point to better understand what we stand to lose as extinction rates climb higher. But the essays are also a celebration of the natural world’s chorus and the joy of learning to hear what’s still there.

The essays are also being set to music in a series for Oregon State’s Spring Creek Project that will feature 20 4-minute-long concerts combining live musical performance with excerpts from Earth’s Wild Music.

“I’ve never been so excited about a project in my life,” Moore tells us. “It combines everything I care about with the cause that I believe in more than anything else.”

The Revelator spoke to Moore about the moral stakes of our environmental crisis, what it’s like to find a truly quiet place to listen, and what we lose as wild songs disappear.

You’ve been writing about nature for 50 years. During that time our environmental problems have become graver. Has this changed how you approach your work?

Kathleen Dean Moore. Photo: Frank Moore

At first I was a celebrant. I believed Mary Oliver when she said, “My work is loving the world … which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” And that went along fine for years and years, but then it became clear that what I was writing celebrations of were disappearing.

I was right in the midst of an essay on frog song, and bulldozers came and took away the marsh and put in a condominium. I was writing about a bald eagle nest, and the nest — and the tree it was in — burned to the ground in a forest fire. So it was starting to become clear to me that I was going to have to do more than celebrate. I was going to have to demonstrate. I was going to have to protect. I was going to have to defend the natural world.

Why did you decide to focus this collection on sound?

I started thinking about how I could open people’s hearts without breaking them. How I could point to the onrushing extinctions and not force people to turn away in absolute grief. I decided that I was going to have to write in a way that was like a wave — I would lift people and smash them at the same time.

What is it that reaches people without breaking them? What is it that goes straight into people’s hearts? What do they love about the world and will call them to action?

I decided that of all the things I loved about the world, what I loved the most was the music. What I loved the most was the sound. I’ve been writing about this for quite some time, so I had a couple of essays already under my belt, and I couldn’t think of a more wonderful writing assignment for myself then to go outside and listen.

Nature may be getting quieter. But people are getting louder. How is our noise affecting wildlife?

We are deafening. Noise that we create is causing extraordinary harm to the creatures. Think about the pain caused to the whales from the exploratory thudding of those machines that go through the ocean and stamp to try to find oil.

Think about the meadowlarks that lived in the fracking fields and had to endure endless noise of drilling and trucks. And as a result, the songs of the meadowlarks are fractured and abbreviated. They haven’t been able to hear their parents well enough to imitate them.

Many of us may be out of practice at listening. In fact, a lot of folks walk around with earphones on so we can’t hear what’s around us. How do we get better at both listening to and understanding the sounds of nature?

Listening is an art that we should practice because it does two things. It makes us shut up and it makes us open up. We stop listening just to the songs of “me, me, me”. When we set aside our own stories, it opens us up so we can listen to the stories of other beings. It’s a skill of empathy, isn’t it? Listening to other people’s stories and other creatures’ sounds is a way of understanding the world from their point of view. It’s a moral training.

When it comes to understanding what we hear, Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, and cared so much about bird song, took pains to tell us that it doesn’t matter if we know the names of what we see. That comes later. But the first thing that has to happen is love.

So I’m not so concerned about knowing which bird is calling. I’m surrounded by people who could do that in a majestic way. My husband can identify birds by their call. My neighbor can. I think it’s a beautiful skill that I don’t have.

But I do have the ability to catch a song. To hear it, which isn’t nothing. It can catch my attention and I can seek it out and I can listen to it. Knowing its name — maybe that’s not so important as knowing its tune.

How are people affected by this loss of nature’s song, and what’s the importance of preserving silent places where we can still experience what’s left?

We lose joy. Let’s face it — the sounds of the natural world are beautiful and they make us happy. I think we also lose a connection to the world around us.

In the book, I write about going with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton to One Square Inch of Silence, a small spot in Olympic National Park [possibly the quietest place in the United States]. It was a wonderful experience. At the time, we were in pouring rain. Nature itself was cacophonous, but we didn’t hear a human sound for 20 minutes, which is the definition in Gordon’s mind of a quiet place.

Gordon now is recording in a jungle somewhere that can only be reached by canoeing down a wild river, because it’s one of the last places on Earth he can find that’s silent.

He’s famous for these recordings called the Dawn Chorus that captured the outpouring of bird song that’s triggered by morning light. But he couldn’t do that anymore, because that music box is broken. We’re in the process of wrecking what we should be treasuring.

It’s hard to find a balance between grief and celebration. But you know, people often ask me, “What can one person do?” And I say, “Stop being one person.”

You don’t have to do it all. Other people are working all around the world on the same causes you believe in. Find them, join up with them. You’ll find your place in the choir. [Author and teacher] Joanna Macy says to choose what you love and devote yourself to it. That, she says, is enough.

Learning From the Struggle: Youth Participation in the Defense of Páramo Ecosystems

Organizers in Ecuador know that conservation efforts thrive when the next generation is informed and involved.

Jumandy Allauca, a resident in Ecuador’s Cotopaxi province, was 13 years old when I first met him. It was 2011 and he was participating in a day of collective work with other members of his community — performing maintenance work on a pipeline that carries irrigation water from high altitude wetlands down to their village, some 20 kilometers away. He and I had hiked up together, following the family donkey, Pepito, who was laden with a sack of sand and a pair of shovels.

Pipeline — Working on the pipeline. Photo: Tristan Partridge

“We have to do this work,” Jumandy told me. “The water here is for everybody.”

This was partway through the 15 months I spent living in the region to find out more about Indigenous politics and environmental activism. I returned in 2018 and had scheduled another visit to reconnect with friends there in 2020, but COVID-19 put an end to such plans. Instead, we have been spending more time talking via WhatsApp, Zoom and other online platforms.

The páramo always features in our conversations.

The Andean páramo moorlands are home to high-altitude lakes, countless mountain streams, and a host of unique plants and wildlife.

They’re also uniquely at risk in ways that threaten millions of people, if not the entire climate.

Efforts to protect the páramo overlap with Indigenous struggles for recognition and environmental justice. Local leaders know that the future of all these actions depend on one group in particular: young people.

As I first learned a decade ago, preserving the páramo ecosystem and sustaining its role in hydrological cycles is vital for ensuring that water continues to flow through the community irrigation pipeline, a project operative since 2009. Such work remains particularly important now, when the páramo faces increasing threats from industrialization and climate change.

I’m frequently told how jóvenes (young people) play a key role in this work.

Reflecting on his experiences in the páramo, earlier this month Jumandy told me, “We need the young people to be well trained,” and repeating the word concientizar, perhaps best translated from Spanish as “to raise awareness.”

Jumandy added, “We need to raise the awareness of young people — and of their parents too — so that everyone understands the importance of the páramo, so that everyone, including young people, plays an active part in these processes.”

In our recent conversations, local leaders have expressed an acute awareness of the need to keep young people engaged and active. Youth participation is essential to ensure that páramo conservation efforts continue — and this is something that has benefits for people not only across the Andes but also around the world.

The Páramo

An ecosystem unique to the Andes, the páramo moorlands are located mainly in Ecuador and Colombia, along with areas of Peru and Venezuela. This discontinuous belt of land covers roughly 36,000 square kilometers and represents a kind of high-altitude island archipelago. Found between 3,200 and 4,500 meters above sea level, these tropical alpine wetlands occupy a zone that typically lies above the agricultural frontier and upper tree line, reaching up to border areas of perennial snow.

The abundant flora and fauna found in the páramo make it the world’s most diverse high-altitude ecosystem. Even though weather conditions are harsh — varying from heavy rain and occasional snow to long daytime periods of intense sunshine — the páramo is home to an estimated 5,000 species, 3,000 of which are found nowhere else on the planet, including hummingbirds like the Ecuadorian hillstar and Buffy helmetcrest.

An Andean fox in the páramo. Photo: Alexey Yakovlev (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The particular soil systems and vegetation of the páramo mean it functions like a giant sponge in the hydrological cycle. Mosses and grasses absorb rainfall that is then stored in the soil before being slowly released into streams and rivers. Researchers analyzing these processes estimate that water supplies for 40 million people across the Andes depend directly on the páramo.

The wider world also benefits from a healthy páramo because its soils act as a carbon sink, helping to limit global heating. The páramo, like other lands in tropical alpine regions, stores carbon through a combination of its particular vegetation, low air temperature and atmospheric pressure, and soils that are frequently water-logged.

Today, however, the páramos themselves face rising temperatures and reduced precipitation, threatening their diverse flora and hydrological benefits.

Land-use change presents another range of grave threats. Recent modeling projects that by 2060, páramo areas will be reduced by 30% — its unique web of life being chipped away by cattle grazing, commercial pine forests and farming as a result of the upward expansion of agricultural frontiers — a process that’s already begun.

At the same time, many communities who live and work in close relation with the páramo are very much aware of these threats and are taking proactive steps to alleviate them.

Learning From Experience

As a young teenager, Myriam Allauca was a regular participant in activities organized by and for her community’s youth group. In Pujilí parish, in the heart of Cotopaxi’s highlands, the group would meet regularly and undertake endeavors such as learning to identify local species of trees and flowering plants or traveling as a group to visit a nature reserve in the lowland cantón of La Mana. At other times, they would collaborate with community leaders to join projects that were already underway, such as helping to build two thatched-roof huts for use by occasional conservation workers in the páramo.

By her late teens Myriam had taken on a leadership role in the group, at one point running a project to map the boundaries of the whole area of páramo owned by her community.

Alpacas on the mountainside. Photo: Tristan Partridge.

These were clearly formative experiences. By her mid-twenties, Myriam had been elected by the community to be their vice president.

“What we learn when we are young is so important,” Myriam tells me. “Our experiences at that age shape what it is we want to do, what we want to commit to, later in life.”

I suggest her own life illustrates that point very clearly. Now with two young children of her own, Myriam works as a local development partnerships facilitator for SwissAid — an international development NGO from Switzerland with a long history of working in Ecuador, although it plans to end operations there later this year.

Our conversation took place a few weeks after Myriam’s own community, San Isidro, secured a landmark victory — many years in the making — that helps pave the way for further páramo conservation efforts nationwide. At the end of November 2020 the national Ministry for Water recognized the area of páramo held communally by San Isidro as a “protected hydrological area” — one of the first in the country.

Land with this protected status still belongs to the community (rather than to the state) but is subject to stricter regulations that limit how the land can be used. Any activities that could alter the quantity or quality of local water supplies, for example, are prohibited. Achieving this status, Myriam says, was the result of decades of community organizing and campaigning, in addition to extensive on-the-ground research in the preparation of scientific reports.

Jóvenes played a key role helping to secure this protection for the San Isidro páramo, says Tannia Rojas, who also grew up in San Isidro and now works as a regional facilitator with SwissAid.

“Young people were super important in that process — things progressed much faster in San Isidro [than in other communities] due to all the information we had gathered,” she says. “We had a land-management plan, a water-protection plan; we had measured flow-rates of the different streams, documented the flora and fauna by taking photographs. And all that fieldwork, led by our council members, was made possible through the participation of young people.”

That participation enabled data gathering on a scale not seen before in the community. For example, the 73-page water-protection plan included photographs, hand-drawn topographical maps and updated flow-rate measurements for 17 páramo streams taken at 3,600 to 4,399 meters above sea level — and all of this information was gathered with assistance from young people. In part, this is because of the significant time and human energy requirements involved in such work — entire days spent hiking at high altitude, often encountering heavy rainfall while equipped with minimal, if any, waterproof gear. The final “protected area” report submitted to regional authorities was similarly detailed, including 25 maps that incorporate community-collected data.

Young people have also helped connect events in San Isidro with parallel efforts elsewhere in the region, sharing updates with other communities and members of the Indigenous Movement, and amplifying their own community’s achievements through social and legacy media. All of this has raised the profile of páramo protection. Even though the community faces ongoing legal threats from parties trying to seize ownership of the páramo for their own commercial ends, council members in San Isidro, including the current president, Porfirio Allauca, now receive calls from other communities asking their advice on how to achieve the same protective recognition.

Historic Struggles

In different parts of the country, communities have developed different strategies for páramo protection. Further south in Ecuador, in Azuay province, environmental activists from the People’s Council for Cuenca’s Water and allied groups successfully campaigned for a referendum to let city residents vote on whether to allow mining in the area — including in the Quimsacocha páramo. The “Yes” campaign in favor of banning mining scored a resounding victory in the vote, which was held on the same day as Ecuador’s first-round presidential election in February.

Since the referendum was approved by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court, a lawyer from the campaign told media that he received many calls from communities elsewhere in Ecuador interested in protecting the páramo and preventing mining.

Making sure these diverse campaigns have a future is something that Patricio Copara addresses daily. As director of youth work and culture with Ecuarunari, an Indigenous organizing body, Patricio works with communities and youth groups across Ecuador’s highlands. Visiting different provinces, he sees communities with widely varying experiences of campaigning and activism, some much more successful than others.

But a common theme cuts across them all: trying to ensure that the next generation are engaged.

“This last year, with the pandemic, has been very difficult,” he tells me. “We had to cancel so much of our program. We haven’t been able to mobilize as normal.”

They’re still active, though. In several provinces, they’ve helped communities set up “young leaders’ training schools.” In addition to providing young people with current information on Indigenous Movement actions, a core goal here is to connect different communities with agencies operating at the national level offering financial and legal support, depending on those communities’ particular needs.

“In any place, you find some young people who are not committed, or not working,” he says. “So we’re creating these [schools] as spaces to explore alternatives, to work on the things that people care about.”

For Patricio, successful activism is not only about fighting to defend the páramo and other Indigenous territories, although he dedicates much of his time to supporting people doing just that. Nor is it only about looking ahead and working collectively to create a viable, desirable future for the current generation’s children and grandchildren. He emphasizes that all his work, at home and with Ecuarunari, is part of a “historical struggle” and that must remain central to conservation efforts.

“We need to move forward valuing the struggle of our ancestors, our grandparents,” he told me recently. “We should never forget that our grandparents lived practically as slaves” — as bound laborers under the hacienda system. “They sacrificed, and so did our parents, and that work is reflected in the Indigenous Movement, in our struggle today. We cannot forget the past, and it is the youth who need to be aware and do that work of remembering.”

The páramo in San Isidro forms a central part of this kind of community commemoration. The hills are recognized as both a site of historical importance and as a symbol of solidarity. To mark the inauguration of the irrigation water pipeline, just over ten years ago, community leaders laid a plaque at the base of a flagpole beside two thatched-roof huts built by Myriam Allauca and her colleagues. The plaque thanks recent ancestors for their efforts in acquiring this land — the result of a long struggle following Land Reform in the 1960s and 1970s — and restates how the páramo is both a site of and a source of communal action. After listing the people who fought to secure this land for the community, the text describes the páramo as a “wellspring of life” that those alive today pledge to “look after forever and ever.”

Plaque — Reading the plaque. Photo: Tristan Partidge

Tannia Rojas hopes people everywhere will take this message to heart, especially young people who, she says, “are fundamental to the conservation process.” Protecting recent gains — which are always under threat, especially within judicial systems that have a history of discrimination against Indigenous people — is the responsibility of everyone, she says. “We need young people to sustain the achievements we have made, but some of them don’t realize the importance of the páramo — they think water just comes out of the tap! So our efforts continue, to involve them in political, environmental and community work.”

Páramo preservation, Tannia adds, is most successful when everyone in a community is connected to the work being done. And keeping those connections alive is something that everyone can contribute to.

“We have to ask, what kind of leaders do we want in the future? Then, we have to train young people well — by being good examples for them to follow.”

Given the global need to care for the ecosystems that sustain us — and to keep that work going well into the future — this collective approach sets a good example for all of us.

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.

Texas Blackouts Show Us How Electric Vehicles Can Help Solve Big Problems

EVs can help power homes and buildings in disasters — but only if automakers, utilities, local emergency planners and regulators start working on it now.

There were many lessons to be learned from Texas’ prolonged periods of lost power during its cold snap, which saw temperatures drop into the single digits. But one many people may not recognize is that electric vehicles, or EVs, can be part of a smart resiliency plan — not only in the case of outages triggered by the cold but in other scenarios caused by extreme weather events, from fire-related blackouts in California to hurricane-hit power losses in Puerto Rico.

car Dallas snow — A car driving in the snow in Dallas, Feb. 2021. Photo: Matthew Rader (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Experts recognize that electric vehicles are a central climate solution for their role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But EVs are also essentially batteries on wheels. You can store energy in those batteries, and if EVs are equipped with something called vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-building technology, they can also be used to keep the lights on in emergencies. The technology allows the energy being stored in an EV battery to be pushed back into the grid or into buildings to provide power.

There are hurdles: The technology is still developing, the vast majority of EVs currently on the road do not have this capability, and utilities would need regulatory approval before bringing it to scale. But done right it could be a great opportunity.

Electric car batteries can hold approximately 60 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy, enough to provide back-up power to an average U.S. household for two days. Larger electric vehicles like buses and trucks have even bigger batteries and can provide more power. The American company Proterra produces electric buses that can store up to 660 kWh of energy. Electric garbage trucks and even big-rigs, with bigger batteries, are becoming a reality too.

electric bus NYC — Photo: MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann (CC BY 2.0)

If equipped with vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-building technology, those cars, buses and trucks could prove invaluable during future blackouts. People could rely on their cars to power their houses. Municipalities, transit agencies and school districts could send out their fleets to the areas most in need. We could power homes, shelters and emergency response centers — and could keep people warm, healthy and comfortable until power could be restored.

But to add this great resiliency tool to our arsenal in times of extreme weather, we must significantly increase the number of EVs on the road. In 2019 electric cars accounted for only about 2% of all light-duty vehicle sales in the country. Electric buses and trucks are becoming more common in the United States, but still only represent a tiny fraction of the fleet. As it stands now, the EVs currently on the road, even if equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, would do little to help a broad swath of the population in need of power.

A line of electric cars at charging stations. Photo: Andrew Bone (CC BY 2.0)

There are some signs that this is changing. California and Massachusetts have both announced intentions to explore a policy that would require all new cars after 2035 be electric. General Motors is the latest major automaker to announce an intention to move toward producing only electric cars. Several major transit agencies, including in Texas, are starting to switch to all-electric buses.

But we must move faster. If we electrified the nation’s transit and school bus fleets by 2030, for example, we could have more than 500,000 large mobile batteries available across the country.

To support widespread adoption of electric vehicles, we need to invest in the charging infrastructure necessary to accommodate explosive growth. We also need to make sure that as EV adoption increases, the vehicles and infrastructure are set up to use the power-transfer technology. Nissan already does this with its Leaf-to-home system. Proterra offers transit buses equipped with the technology. Dominion Energy in Virginia is working with school bus manufacturers to develop and operationalize a large-scale school bus vehicle-to-grid program.

To standardize the technology and make it accessible to everyone, utilities should seek regulatory approval to implement programs and invest in vehicle-to-grid capable infrastructure, and automakers should make it easy for consumers to install chargers that can send power both ways.

As that happens, governments at all levels should work to incorporate electric vehicles into their emergency response plans. Shelters, hospitals, emergency response centers and other buildings critical to crisis management should be equipped with the infrastructure necessary to pull power from EVs. Heavy-duty fleets like buses and trucks present particularly promising opportunities to provide power to people in need, but all the electric buses in the world won’t do any good if we’re not prepared to have them charged and ready to deploy to the areas that need them the most.

A few Tesla owners in Texas were able to draw power from their cars to stay warm and keep the lights on this month, which is great. But this valuable resource shouldn’t be limited to a few select people on a one-off basis. With more EVs on the road and careful planning and preparation, we could have millions of mobile batteries available to help keep the power on for everyone in emergencies.

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.

As Extreme Weather Events Increase, What Are the Risks to Wildlife?

Last year the United States racked up nearly $100 billion in damages from weather and climate disasters. These events are starting to take their toll on wildlife, too.

A hailstorm in South Texas. Tornadoes in Tennessee. Wildfires across the West. A barrage of Gulf Coast hurricanes. Those are among the record 22 weather and climate disasters that each topped $1 billion in damages last year in the United States.

In all, the price tag for 2020 hit a whopping $95 billion — and that’s just in the United States. Reinsurance firm Swiss Re put global economic losses at $175 billion last year, including $32 billion for floods in China and $13 billion in damages from Cyclone Amphan across India and Bangladesh.

The worst news? Our profligate burning of fossil fuels means we’re in store for more.

Studies show that climate change is supercharging some weather and climate events and will lead to more severe and longer-lasting heat waves, stronger hurricanes, an increased wildfire risk and a longer wildfire season. We can also expect more heavy rain events and severe droughts, not to mention other extreme events like February’s polar vortex.

“You can’t attribute any particular storm to climate change, but what we do know is that climate change tips the odds of making many of these events more severe,” says Bruce Stein, chief scientist and associate vice president at the National Wildlife Federation.

While experts tabulate the economic losses — homes destroyed, crops ruined, businesses shuttered — ecosystems and wildlife can also sustain damage that’s harder to quantify.

Many plants and wildlife evolved with and have adapted to dealing with large-scale disturbances, but we’re beginning to see “megadisturbances” at levels beyond what we saw in the past, says Stein.

And that can take a toll. Extreme weather can kill animals directly — or indirectly, like by destroying food sources, contaminating water or altering habitat, forcing a species to move into areas where there may be more competition, fewer resources or a greater risk of predation.

“What we begin to find when you get some of these mega disturbances is that it’s beyond the ability of a species — or their adaptive capacity — to bounce back,” says Stein.

The Research

The effects of climate change on the natural world are being felt at two speeds. One is more gradual, referred to by scientists as “ramping” — shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels. The second is quick, like extreme weather events.

Both are problematic, says Sean Maxwell, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. But, he adds, “I think the changes to acute events have the greatest potential to devastate local populations or ecosystems, and the impacts of these events are often more difficult to plan for or avoid.”

Maxwell was the lead author of a 2018 study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions that examined how changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events affected wildlife. The researchers looked at 519 studies of ecological responses to extreme events — including cyclones, droughts, floods, and heat and cold waves — that took place from 1941 to 2015. They found that the response was negative 57% of the time. (And in those instances where species benefited, they were mostly invasive species.)

Manatee on land — A manatee stranded by Hurricane Irma in Melbourne, Florida. Photo: Bill Greer, FWC (CC BY-ND 2.0)

“Some of the negative responses we found were quite concerning, including more than 100 cases of dramatic population declines and 31 cases of local population extinction following an extreme event,” says Maxwell. “Populations of critically endangered bird species in Hawai’i, such as the palia, have been annihilated due to drought, and populations of lizard species have been wiped out due to cyclones in the Bahamas.”

Plant species, the researchers found, had the highest number of negative responses to extreme events, followed by reptiles and amphibians.

“Collectively, the studies in our review suggest that extreme weather and climate events have profound implications for species and ecosystem management,” the researchers concluded.

The Most Vulnerable

Species that are already threatened or endangered are of course especially at risk.

Take the Attwater prairie chicken. A million of these birds once ranged across the prairies of Texas and Louisiana.

Today fewer than 100 remain in the wild and scientists have sought to bolster their populations with captive breeding programs. But when Hurricane Harvey walloped Texas with 130-mile-per-hour winds and record rainfall in 2017, the birds were right in harm’s way.

“The Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge tracked 29 individual birds, mostly hens. Post-hurricane, staff confirmed only five of them still alive,” Texas Climate News reported. “The hurricane also killed roughly 80% of a prairie chicken population on private property in Goliad County.”

Other species with limited ranges, like those on islands, also face big threats.

“If a species is well distributed, then if one part of its range gets hit, there’s the ability for it to recover,” says Stein. “But if essentially all its eggs are in one basket, and that particular place gets hit by one of these big disturbances, that’s when you have a real concern.”

In 2017 Hurricane Maria cut the population of just 200 Puerto Rican parrots in half. The year before, Hurricane Matthew was believed to have wiped out the last Bahama nuthatches (Sitta insularis). It took two years before a few of the birds were found — and then Hurricane Dorian struck in 2019, making their survival unlikely, according to Diana Bell, a professor of conservation biology at the University of East Anglia.

“In fact, Dorian may have not only sealed the fate of the nuthatch but also severely impacted other birds endemic to these islands, particularly the Bahama warbler and the Abaco parrot,” Bell wrote in an essay for The Conversation. “Also known as the Bahama Amazon parrot, this subspecies uniquely nests in limestone cavities on the ground which are likely to have been flooded by the storm surge.”

damaged cars and trees — Damage in the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian. Photo: Seaman Erik Villa Rodriguez, U.S. Coast Guard

Compounding Crises

The risk to wildlife from extreme storms can be compounded by the ramping effects of climate change, too.

“If you have increasingly severe hurricanes where you’ve also got sea-level rise essentially providing a higher lodge point for the storm surge, then you start seeing impacts beyond the historical record,” says Stein.

In other places, extreme weather is an extra blow to species already struggling with other environmental pressures, like habitat loss, invasive species or pollution.

Last year the world watched in horror as land-use management, climate change and drought helped push Australia’s bushfires to a terrifying new level, killing 34 people and burning 37,500 square miles.

In the immediate aftermath, one expert put the death toll for wildlife at 1 billion animals lost. Since then the figure has been revised to 3 billion killed or displaced by the blazes.

A study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that the fire impacted the critical habitat of 832 native species, with 70 species losing more than 30% of their natural range. Twenty-one of those were already at risk of extinction.

Those that survived could find themselves hard-pressed in future climate disasters. “Multiple extreme events are likely to act in synergistic ways to exacerbate risk of species’ extinction,” wrote Maxwell and the other researchers of the 2018 study.

Australia already has one of the highest extinction rates, and the wildfires could limit the capacity of some species to recover — like the endangered Kangaroo Island dunnart and the long-footed potoroo — and threaten others. Australia’s record blazes last year could push the number of endangered species in the country up by 19%, the study in Nature Ecology and Evolution found.

Burned landscape — Kangaroo Island, the only habitat of the endangered Kangaroo Island dunnart, after the 2019-2020 Australia wildfires. Photo: StephenMitchell, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Solutions

When Hurricane Irma sacked the Florida Keys in 2017, the storm tossed boats ashore, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and left a trail of debris across the islands.

It also endangered one of the region’s beloved endemic species, the tiny Key deer, which today primarily live on Big Pine Key. Some deer were killed in the storm, and surviving animals faced threats to their already limited freshwater supply as the storm surge dumped saline ocean water into freshwater pools.

Island residents responded the way folks often do after a disaster — they offered help to their neighbors.

“What you saw during and shortly after Irma is that these Key deer were coming up to houses looking for fresh water,” says Stein. “And people were putting out kiddie pools of water for them.”

Key deer walking — Key deer after Hurricane Irene. Photo: Carol Lyn Parrish, (CC BY-ND 2.0).

Following Australia’s bushfires last year, the country’s government jumped to the aid of wildlife by dropping 4,000 pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes to starving brush-tailed rock-wallabies who lost their food source in the blazes.

“There’s a lot of things that we can do to help human communities as well as wildlife after these acute disturbances,” says Stein.

But beyond immediate food and water relief, there’s a much bigger task ahead: reducing greenhouse gas emissions to address the ongoing dangers of climate change and the ability of ecosystems to adapt. Key deer, for example, also face a long-term threat to their drinking water supply from rising seas, something no number of kiddie pools can repair. And more severe hurricanes are likely in their future, too.

“As climate change continues to ensure extreme climate and weather events are more and more common, we now need to act to ensure species have the best chance to survive,” says Maxwell. “Wherever possible, high-quality and intact habitat areas should be retained, as these are the places where species are most resilient to increasing exposure to extreme events.”

If such intact habitat doesn’t exist, ecological restoration efforts can be used to help species adapt, his study found.

And the more we know, the better.

“Incorporating extreme events into climate change vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans will be challenging,” the researchers of the 2018 paper concluded. “But by doing so we have a greater chance of arriving at conservation interventions that truly address the full range of climate change impacts.”

And that could give more species a fighting chance in a changing climate.

Texas Power Crisis: Three Causes, What We Can Learn

A power crisis in Texas caused by severe winter weather exposed the need for a climate-resilient system.

The rolling blackouts in Texas were national news. Texas calls itself the energy capital of the United States, yet it couldn’t keep the lights on. Conservatives were quick to blame reliance on wind power, just as they did last summer when California faced power interruptions due to a heat wave. What really happened?

It’s true that there was some loss of wind power in Texas due to icing on turbine blades. Unlike their counterparts further north, Texas wind operators weren’t prepared for severe weather conditions. But this was a relatively minor part of the problem.

The much bigger problem was loss of power from gas-fired power plants and a nuclear plant. The drop of gas generation has been attributed to freezing pipelines, diversion of gas for residential heating and equipment malfunctioning.

Texas faced a wave of very unusual cold weather, just as California faced an unusual heatwave last summer. What’s notable, however, is that in other ways the two systems are quite different. Texas has perhaps the most thoroughly deregulated electricity system in the country.

California experimented with its own deregulation, abandoned much of the effort after a crisis, and now has a kind of hybrid system. California and Texas are in opposing camps on climate policy. Yet both states got into similar trouble.

What happened in these states points to three pervasive problems.

The first is that we haven’t solved the problem of ensuring that the electricity system has the right amount of generating capacity. In states with traditional rate regulation, utilities have an incentive to overbuild capacity because they’re guaranteed a profit on their investments. Since there’s no competition, they have no incentive to innovate either. Iinstead, they have an incentive to keep old power plants going too long, contributing to air pollution and carbon emissions.

In other states, where utilities generally buy their power on the market, the income from power sales is based on short-term power needs and doesn’t necessarily provide enough incentive for long-term investments. That could be part of the problem in both California and Texas.

Some regional grid operators have established what are called capacity markets. At least judging from its record in the largest region (PJM), this has resulted in excess capacity and has encouraged inefficient aging generators to stay in the market. In short, we’ve got too little generation or too much, but we haven’t found the Goldilocks point of “just right.”

The second problem is that we haven’t made the power system resilient enough.

The heatwave that interfered with the California grid has been linked to climate change. It’s not clear whether the exceptionally cold weather in Texas was also linked to climate change, although climate change does seem to be disrupting the polar vortex that can contribute to severe winter conditions.

power lines and clouds — Power lines in Webster, TX. Photo: BFS Man (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In Texas, the weather didn’t just impact the electrical system: the natural gas system suffered from frozen pipes, reducing gas supply to power generators.

Climate change is throwing more and more severe weather events at energy systems from Puerto Rico to California, yet our planning has not come to grips with the need to adapt to these risks. Microgrids, increased energy storage and improved demand response may furnish part of the answer.

The third problem relates to the transmission system.

Among the causes of the California blackouts, a key transmission line to the Pacific Northwest was down for weather-related reasons. This is another example of the broad failure to make the grid resilient enough for an era of climate change. Texas has deliberately shackled itself by cutting the state off from the national power grid in order to avoid federal regulation.

This leaves it unable to draw on outside resources in times of crisis. This is all part of a much larger problem: The United States badly needs additional transmission, but political barriers have stymied expansion of the transmission system.

The term “wake up call” is over used but seems applicable here. If we don’t wake up to the need for a climate-resilient power system, we will face even bigger trouble ahead.

This story was reprinted with permission from Legal Planet. Read the original here.

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.

The Staggering Decline of Oceanic Sharks and Rays

New research shows that oceanic shark and ray abundance has declined by nearly three-quarters since 1970, and industrialized fishing is to blame.

Oceanic sharks and rays live so far from land that the average person is unlikely to ever see them. But these species, which live in the vast open ocean, are also among the most revered, and include the great white shark and the giant manta ray. For millennia, their remoteness has allowed these species to largely avoid humans. But since the early 1950s, industrial-scale fishing fleets have been able to reach distant waters and gradually spread to exploit the entire global ocean.

Rising demand over the same period for shark and ray meat, as well as fins, gill plates and liver oil, has caused catches of the 30 or so oceanic species to soar. Marine biologists have been raising the alarm for several decades now, but their warnings were often limited to what regional trends showed. Now, new research has brought together disparate threads of data into a single, global analysis of shark and ray populations in the open ocean.

Worldwide, oceanic shark and ray abundance has declined by 71% since 1970. More than half of the 31 species examined are now considered to be endangered, or even critically endangered. Compare this with 1980 when only one species, the plankton-feeding basking shark, was thought to be endangered. These are stark statistics, and they indicate that the future for the ocean’s top predators is fast deteriorating.

Nose Dive

To arrive at the first global perspective on oceanic shark and ray population trends, the study synthesized a huge amount of data. The researchers calculated two separate indicators of biodiversity, using indexes established by the Convention on Biological Diversity to track progress towards international targets. They used state-of-the-art modeling to estimate trends in the relative abundance of species. One of the indicators combined assessments of 31 species by the IUCN Red List over a 38-year period.

The results revealed huge declines in the abundance of sharks in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. Once abundant species such as the oceanic whitetip shark have declined by 75% globally in just the past half-century, while populations of the endangered shortfin mako shark — valued for its meat and fins — have shrunk by about 40%. Manta ray populations have suffered even greater losses.

The study attributes these declines to overfishing. The researchers documented a greater than twofold increase in fishing pressure from longline fisheries for instance, which use lines stretching 100km and bearing 1,200 baited hooks. These lines are deployed each day by any one of the thousands of longlining vessels worldwide, snaring sharks in the open ocean either intentionally or as bycatch while targeting other marine life.

The study also found increases in the proportion of sharks that are being fished beyond sustainable levels. But it’s particularly worrying that unreported catches weren’t included in the study’s analyses. This means the number of sharks and rays killed by fishing boats is likely to be an underestimate and the actual declines of these species may be even worse. Unlike most species of bony fish, sharks and rays produce few offspring and grow slowly. The rate at which they reproduce is clearly no match for current levels of industrialized fishing.

dead sharks at fish market — Shortfin Makos. Photo: José Antonio Gil Martínez, (CC BY 2.0).

Regulating the High Seas

Immediate and far-reaching action is needed to rebuild these populations. It’s clear that the rate of overfishing has outstripped the implementation of fisheries management measures and trade regulations. Since most oceanic sharks and rays are caught in the high seas — areas beyond national jurisdictions — agreements between fishing nations within management organizations are needed for conservation measures to work.

But, as this new study details, fishery limits imposed by management organizations of regional tuna fisheries — bodies tasked with managing oceanic sharks and ray populations — have been largely inadequate in following scientific advice. As recently as November 2020, the European Union and United States blocked a catch retention ban for North Atlantic shortfin mako sharks, despite scientific evidence clearly indicating that it was the first rung on a ladder to restoring this population of an endangered species.

To begin the recovery of oceanic shark and ray populations, strict measures to prohibit landings of these species and to minimize their bycatch in other fisheries are needed immediately. This must be coupled with strict enforcement.

Reducing the number of sharks and rays caught accidentally will be crucial but challenging, especially for longline fishing, which is not very selective and inadvertently catches lots of different species. This currently means that bans on intentional fishing are unlikely to be effective on their own. One solution would include modifying fishing gear and improving how fishers release sharks and rays after capture, to give them a better chance of survival.

An equally important measure, noted in the current study, would be banning fishing fleets from hotspots of oceanic sharks and rays. Research published in 2019 highlighted where these areas in the global ocean overlap with fishing vessels most. Led by the United N, negotiations are underway for a high seas treaty which would create no-take marine reserves to protect threatened species in the open ocean. This new study should urge the international community to take such action while there’s still time.

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Sharks: Imperiled, Maligned, Fascinating

The Rebuilding Years Begin

The Biden-Harris administration must act quickly to reverse and repair Trump’s environmental destruction. Here’s how to do it.

(Originally published Jan. 20, 2021. Updated.)

The period of the 45th presidency will go down as dark days for the United States — not just for the violent insurgency and impeachment that capped off Donald Trump’s four years in office, but for every regressive action that came before.

It’s been said that Trump was the worst environmental president in history, and that’s easy to see from his administration’s record. They rolled back decades of environmental progress by slashing protective regulations, strangled the agencies tasked with enforcing the regulations that remained, pushed corporate agendas damaging to wildlife, human health and the climate, and stoked the flames of right-wing extremists — including people whose radical agendas often attack public-land protections or climate science.

That barely covers it all, of course. It would take an entire book — a whole library — to fully convey the environmental damage done under Trump.

And now it’s up to a new administration — and the work of a lot of people on top of it — to undo the damage and hopefully make up for four lost years of potential progress.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, together with the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, have a tough task ahead of them.

Make that many tough tasks. They’ll need to rebuild the ranks of government workforces while reinforcing the trust in government and the trust in America on the world stage. They’ll need to pass and restore regulations that don’t just return us to the status quo but radically improve on it — taking the world forward at a time when the effects of climate change and the extinction crisis continue to worsen. 2020 tied for the hottest year on record, and Trump added fewer species to the Endangered Species Act than any other president while slashing protections for those already on the list. They’ll need to address environmental justice at a time when white supremacy is at its most vocal point in decades and firmly entrenched in some areas of government. They’ll need to resist the usual corporate influence that could slow things down along the way.

And they’ll need to do it all while helping the country stabilize and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump’s botched response to the crisis, not to mention the continued threat from seditious domestic terrorists.

That’s a lot on one plate, but they’re already off to a good start. Biden and Harris ran on a strong climate platform and have assembled an experienced climate team. Neither the platform nor the team is perfect — progressives think they can do much better — but they’re light years ahead of anything we saw under the previous administration.

And of course, now that the Democrats have won the Senate, Biden’s cabinet picks are more likely to be confirmed and the country will no longer face the obstruction ever-present under the majority leadership of Mitch McConnell.

But at the same time, Republicans have risen to power in cities and state legislatures around the country, and many of them are still fueled by MAGA Trumpism and unhinged conspiracy theories. The right-wing media, meanwhile, continue to shape and mold millions with their unique brand of misinformation and discord. Both trends will present a barrier to progress at every level.

So what’s the agenda for moving forward under the Biden-Harris administration? Below, you’ll find a series of articles and expert commentaries from The Revelator’s archives addressing key steps the incoming team can take to restore the EPA, protect key species, address the COVID-19 pandemic in a just and climate-focused manner, and more.

We’ll continue to add to these roadmaps as the administration gets its footing, and we invite any insiders and experts to contribute their own voices.

Reform the Bureau of Land Management: Biden Must Succeed Where Obama Failed

For a Path Forward on Climate, Let’s Learn From the Original New Deal

Gray Wolf Recovery and Survival Require Immediate Action by the Biden Administration

Biden Can Restore the EPA, But It Will Require Steadfast Effort

How Biden Can Do More Than Just Restore Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks

Biden-Harris Climate Plan: ‘Not Trump’ Is Not Enough

Biden Must Take a Leadership Role Against Wildlife Crime

Multisolving Our Way to COVID-19 Economic Recovery

Biden Can Leverage Larger Trends to Make Climate Progress

Biden Moves to Dial Down America’s Soaring Methane Emissions

And here’s a report from our parent organization, the Center for Biological Diversity:

50 Critical Environmental Reforms President Biden Can Enact Without Congress

The Extinction Crisis: Coming to a Dinner Table Near You?

Wild plants related to our main agricultural crops are important to future food security. But more than half are endangered, a new study finds.

For 10,000 years we’ve relied on domesticated plants for our staple foods. But it’s the wild relatives of those crops that are becoming increasingly important to our future food supply.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, these wild foods have adapted to pests, diseases, extreme climates and other inhospitable conditions. That makes their genes particularly important for plant breeding, especially when we’re looking for foods that can withstand a changing climate. Some varieties are still key food and cultural resources today, too.

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have taken stock of these wild foods and the conservation threats they face. They inventoried and modeled the distribution of 600 native wild taxa in the United States, including the relatives of barley, beans, grapes, hops, plums, potatoes and other foods.

What they found was concerning: More than half of the wild relatives are endangered in their native habitats. And that poses a threat to our future.

“The contributions of crop wild relatives to food security depend on their conservation and accessibility for use,” the researchers wrote. With mounting extinction threats, the researchers recommended that three quarters of the taxa be deemed an “urgent priority” for collection to boost conservation.

To do that we need a multipronged approach.

“Given the diversity of U.S. native crop wild relatives prioritized for action, ambitious collaborative conservation efforts are needed among gene banks, botanical gardens, community conservation initiatives, and organizations focused on habitat conservation,” they wrote.

So far ex situ conservation — in gene banks and botanical gardens — is insufficient. The study showed 14% of the plants were entirely absent from these repositories, and another 33% were found in fewer than 10 locations. That leaves us with “relatively limited genetic variation for research and education,” the researchers concluded.

drawer with seed packets — Crop Wild Relatives seed bank at the International Potato Center, Lima Peru. Photo: Michael Major, Crop Trust, (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Better collaboration with botanical gardens, hobby gardeners and citizen conservationists can help close that gap, they recommend.

Outside of seed banks and gardens, protecting the habitat where these species grow naturally is also important.

Based on the researchers’ mapping of the potential distribution of the plants, some are likely to be found in areas that are already protected — such as the Patuxent Research Refuge, the Grand Canyon, Olympic National Park, the Indiana Dunes, Gulf Islands, Yellowstone and other areas.

But more habitat conservation efforts are needed, and that may include the widening of current protected areas or the establishment of new protected spaces, they write.

That can be tough to do with competing demands on land, but it will also provide additional benefits.

Conserving these natural habitats, the study finds, will help safeguard ecosystems and other species, providing both “known as well as currently unrecognized benefits to society.”

Beyond the work of scientists and land managers, the fate of these wild foods may come down to better public awareness. And for that, botanical gardens could be the best champions.

“While all involved organizations will need to enhance their public outreach around native crop wild relatives,” the researchers conclude, “botanical gardens, which receive more than 120 million visitors a year in the United States, could play a particularly pivotal role in introducing these species to people, communicating their value and plight, and better connecting the concepts of food security, agricultural livelihoods, and services provided by nature for the public.”

Previously in The Revelator:

A Crop Pandemic Would Be as Devastating for Biodiversity and Food Security as COVID-19

Stormwater Could Become an Important Water Source — If We Stopped Ignoring It

Collecting runoff from rain and other precipitation to aid water supply has great potential, but its many benefits are often overlooked.

Climate change and other environmental pressures are already putting the pinch on water resources in California, the Southwest and other arid parts of the world. Over-tapped groundwater, rivers and lakes are forcing water managers to find new supplies.

Some of these can be costly, like treating wastewater for drinking water. Or they can come with a hefty price tag and outsized environmental footprint, like desalination or new dams.

There’s another option on the table, though: stormwater. If we do the accounting right, runoff from precipitation is a cost-effective supplementary water resource, experts say. But it’s often overlooked because we don’t know how to fully assess the economics of its many benefits, finds a report by Sarah E. Diringer, Morgan Shimabuku and Heather Cooley of the global water think-tank the Pacific Institute.

The water that runs off hard surfaces like streets and roofs has typically been considered a nuisance. It can result in flooding and cause water-quality concerns. Usually it’s directed into storm drains in urban areas and funneled to treatment plants or, in coastal communities, dumped into the ocean.

But in our water-constrained world, stormwater can be a benefit and not a burden. For example, a 2014 report found that urban communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California could get up to 10% of their water supply from stormwater.

Stormwater projects vary in size, scale and scope. Some can be small-scale harvesting projects that can collect rainwater from rooftops before it flows across city streets. Others are large aquifer-recharge efforts where stormwater (or sometimes floodwater outside urban areas) is infiltrated back into the ground to boost overdrafted groundwater.

stormwater storage pipes — Construction of the underground storage tanks at Edison High School in Minneapolis to capture stormwater runoff to irrigate the nearby athletic fields. Photo: Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Many stormwater projects can provide additional benefits besides just supplementing the water supply. Experts have found they can also reduce flood risk, improve habitat, reduce urban temperatures and energy use, create recreational space, and increase property values.

For their study, the Pacific Institute researchers looked at dozens of proposed projects in California. They found that properly accounting for all these additional benefits can be difficult and is often overlooked as water agencies and municipalities compare the economics of different options to boost water resources.

If stormwater doesn’t appear cost-competitive, it’s much harder to get the capital necessary to build and scale new projects. That can cause municipalities to miss out on a potential source of water — and its other associated benefits.

The researchers say including stormwater projects’ economic benefits in the way those projects are presented to community decision-makers could help make runoff capture and use more widespread.

“By including the economic value of co-benefits provided by stormwater capture, projects can be more fairly compared, and the full benefits of these projects can more easily be realized by water agencies and the public they serve,” the researchers wrote.

As climate change brings both bigger storms and bigger droughts, harnessing the potential of stormwater capture could become a crucial tool for resilience.