COP26 and Nature: Grizzly Bears Show Us the Connection Between Our Global and Local Actions

A window to the natural world reveals human–predator conflict and makes biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction and species extinction irrefutable and real.

Two subadult grizzly bears recently ventured into the public trash bins near my home.

The bears, already desperate from sparse nutrient sources due to this summer’s drought, were attracted to open bins of smelly food. As the bears fatten up for a winter of hibernation, they’re understandably enticed by an easy meal.

With climate change–induced weather extremes taking their toll — and the human footprint growing — apex predators like grizzly bears are having a hard time. Mountain pine beetles have killed many white-bark pine trees, aquatic invasive species have outcompeted native Yellowstone cutthroat trout, wildfires have decimated habitats. This means bear mortality has been at record highs in recent years, with most deaths related to human causes: trash, livestock, road kills and run-ins with hunters.

For perspective, there were more than 50,000 grizzly bears roaming from present-day Mexico to northern Alaska in 1800, before Lewis and Clark made their journey west. Now the population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem fluctuates around 700.

I am fortunate to call Paradise Valley, Montana, home. The traditional territories of the Apsaalooké (Crow), Cheyenne and Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) nations, the Yellowstone River meanders through the valley, undammed and unaltered by humans. Nestled in this ecosystem, species like grizzlies, black bears, wolves, bison, wolverines, pronghorn antelope, elk and bald eagles share this landscape.

It’s a privilege to live in a space that embodies such deep natural history, but it comes with responsibility.

Broadly speaking, it’s a responsibility to act in the interest of long-term preservation, to think in terms of system dependencies, and to consider the implications of our daily activities on the natural world.

It’s an approach humanity the world over must adopt. A window to the natural world simply makes biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction and species extinction irrefutable and real.

With these realities in mind, it’s understandable that policies determining how humans coexist with nature are under intense global deliberation.

From Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure bill in the United States, to the annual United Nations Biodiversity Conference held earlier this year in China, to the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow — never has more been at stake for our natural environment.

Robust commitments from global institutions set a necessary course and provide guiding principles. But we also need national, state and local policies that align with broad global climate objectives. Small and accumulated local actions, good or bad, should not be underestimated.

In many ways this describes the balance stakeholders in Glasgow set out to achieve. Fossil fuel and methane emission reductions, clean energy transitions, deforestation declines, nature-based solution investments — all must happen at a significant enough scale by nearly two hundred individual countries to have meaningful impact globally. From global to local, and local to global. That’s the needed give-and-take.

This brings me back to our local bears.

In Paradise Valley — as in many other places — we need to consider the complexity of issues leading to increased human–predator conflict. Most immediately, in our day-to-day lives, this means adapting human behavior to help an endangered apex predator survive, and along with it, a multitude of other species and ecosystems. Simple measures allow for coexistence, such as bear-proof trash receptacles, electric fence around chickens, thoughtful placement of livestock, picking up fruit from trees, and carrying bear spray in the backcountry.

grizzly scratches — Grizzly scratches. Photo: Suzanna Soileau/USGS

More broadly, our community must consider the underlying problem, adopt long-term solutions, and examine how city, county, state and national policies will aggressively mitigate climate change and the impact of human activity on wildlands and wildlife.

Be it through global climate change talks, state wildlife laws or citizen-led council meetings, humanity must consider the interdependencies of our actions now more than ever before. A community’s ability to understand the ripple effect of its behaviors is increasingly essential. Responses require us to avoid the pitfalls of short-termism and embrace sophisticated solutions — in our case, ones more nuanced than trapping a “problem bear” and euthanizing it.

It’s not surprising that the philosophy needed for humanity to thrive stems from Indigenous wisdom. In essence, that’s the notion of “collective obligations,” believing people were born to serve past, present and future generations — and the planet herself.

As a collective, we are faced with resolving a complicated predicament we’ve created for ourselves. This requires addressing tensions between preserving the environment and relying upon it, adjusting our behaviors with consideration of their broader impact.

COP26 has served as the first time that nature, biodiversity and Indigenous peoples have been integrated into the broader climate change negotiations. Understanding the implicit connection is a step in the right direction. It’s time to see ourselves as part of the landscape, not passing through it. Humans. Wildlife. Nature. We’re all in this together. What we do to our natural environment, we ultimately do to ourselves.

The grizzly bears in my backyard are sending a valuable sign about the borderless impacts of climate change. Let’s not ignore the connection between our local and global actions.

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Yellowstone to Yukon: Can a Model for Interconnection Save the Wild?

Say Goodbye to Your National Parks Road Trips?

Get your hikes and other recreation in while you can. A new study finds warming temperatures could mean big changes in how we use our public lands.

Climate change is already shaking up the natural world, changing the timing of seasonal snow melts, flower blooms and animal migrations. Now a new study from researchers at Utah State University suggests that, not surprisingly, it will also change when people interact with those landscapes.

The research, published in Global Environmental Change, projected how the use of state and federal public lands in the United States may change in the next 30 years under two different warming scenarios.

The biggest changes, they found, will come during the summer months. Their research showed that by 2050 it will simply be too hot to have fun outdoors in many places. As a result of these rising temperatures, they predict that outdoor recreation on public lands in the summer will fall 18% under medium emissions projections and 28% under a high emissions scenario.

As for the winter months, when current temperatures tend to keep people away from forests and woodlands, that will change, too. Warmer temperatures will result in more people looking to access public lands — a projected rise of 12-20%.

Springtime will only see a slight bump of 5-9%. They found no significant likely changes in the fall.

Those numbers reflect the United States as a whole, but there were also some significant regional variations. The researchers saw summer use declines in all locations, but the sharpest dip would occur in the South Atlantic-Appalachian region — where things are already hot. Public lands recreation there could fall as much as 79%.

When it comes to winter, the Great Lakes region is likely to see the biggest jump in use, with a 42% increase under the medium warming scenario. The only region expected to see a decline in winter demand is the Upper Colorado Basin, where skiing and other snow sports are a favorite winter pastime that just won’t be possible as often under higher temperatures.

Changing Operations

These changing patterns will come with costs, not just for those planning their annual summer tour of national parks but also for park managers and people living in communities near popular public lands.

“In many locations, land managers may want to consider preparing for an increased peak season length, and more visitors in the winter compared to levels observed in the past,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Managers may need to shift resources to accommodate these changes. A bump in traffic during previously slow “shoulder seasons” could require a change in staffing and maintenance. The corresponding shifts would also have financial implications for the communities surrounding public lands that may see typical summer crowds fall off and more visitors during current off-peak times.

That administrative burden comes on top of the challenges many parks already face. National park visitations jumped 15% in the past decade. At the same time budgets remain flat, and some parks are dealing with staffing shortfalls, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks reports. Rocky Mountain National Park, for example, saw a 58% increase in visitors between 2010 and 2019, but had 16% fewer employees to handle the rush of tourists.

To deal with crowds, national parks like Glacier and Acadia now charge fees for parking or driving in popular spots. Others, like Yosemite National Park and the Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon, have instituted an advance reservation permit system to limit use.

A drop in summer visits could help ease some of this strain, but warming temperatures will trigger other changes to public lands and bring different concerns.

An Incomplete Picture

In the Global Environmental Change study, researchers noted that they didn’t take into account any indirect changes from rising temperatures. In addition to the heat, climate change could remove many of the qualities people currently admire about our public lands — or make them more inhospitable.

For example, people may not want to plan their recreational activities in parks “with melted glaciers or in places that recently experienced wildfire.”

This isn’t hypothetical. Climate change has already triggered challenges to public lands’ access. In September high-wildlife risk forced California officials to temporarily close all the state’s national forests. And last year, during the height of the tourism season, Yosemite National Park closed because of dangerous air quality from the region’s wildfires. Climate change is increasing the severity of fire risk across the West, and shifting the annual fall foliage season in the northeast.

The National Parks Conservation Association has warned that rising seas, longer droughts, less snow, and more severe storms from climate change also threaten these prized ecosystems.

“Nearly everything we know and love about the parks — their plants and animals, rivers and lakes, glaciers, beaches, historic structures, and more — is already under stress from these changes, which together amount to a state of crisis for our public lands,” the organization reported.

Ironically, while public lands face big threats from climate change, many of those same lands are used for extracting the fossil fuels that drive the crisis. A 2018 report by the U.S. Geological Survey found that emissions from fossil fuel extraction on federal lands amounted to more than one quarter of national emissions. That’s led environmental groups to call for an end to fossil fuel extraction on public lands and for the lands to instead become a climate change solution.

“Given that wildlands on public lands are managed by the federal government, there’s a clear opportunity to ensure they act as carbon sinks and not carbon sources,” the Wilderness Society reported. “Protected wildlands on public lands could maximize the absorption of carbon dioxide and avoid unnecessary release of greenhouse gases that would hinder other efforts to slow down climate change.”

That would be welcome news to all who benefit from public lands — not just humans.

Human Rights Depend on a Thriving Natural World

Any work to achieve human-rights gains will be upended unless we address our climate and biodiversity crises.

In October the UN Human Rights Council voted to recognize the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a human right. Notable among the dissenting voices was the United Kingdom, which eventually begrudgingly voted in favor, while stressing the fact that no country would be legally bound to the resolution’s terms. Four member states — China, India, Japan and Russia — abstained.

This resolution was long overdue. Air pollution alone kills an estimated 7 million people every year, according to the World Health Organization. Yet the resolution doesn’t go nearly far enough: It’s not legally binding, as the U.K. was keen to point out, nor has it been incorporated into any of the 70-plus human-rights treaties that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has inspired.

Moreover, this issue goes beyond the concept of a safe, sustainable environment as a single human right. The fact is that all our most fundamental human rights rely on thriving natural systems — from the right to adequate food to a livelihood worthy of human dignity and even the right to life.

Speaking after the resolution was made, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said: “[This is] about protecting people and planet — the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. It is also about protecting the natural systems which are basic preconditions to the lives and livelihoods of all people, wherever they live.”

She’s right. And yet across the world, the twin biodiversity and climate crises are coming together to form a full-blown human-rights emergency.

Climate

Fires, floods and storms are ravaging the world, growing in severity as global heating escalates. Over the past two years, unprecedented fires in Australia, Canada, the Mediterranean, Brazil, the United States and other countries have devastated homes and communities, leaving destitution and death in their wake.

In the record-breaking 2020 hurricane season, Hurricane Eta was followed under two weeks later by Hurricane Iota, together affecting more than 7.5 million people in Central America and leaving at least 200 dead. Nor are the impacts restricted to sudden-onset disasters. After a fourth year of drought, Madagascar is currently experiencing world’s first “climate change famine” with more than one million people now in need of emergency food aid.

The climate crisis is already seriously undermining human rights around the world, directly destroying people’s homes and livelihoods, and taking lives. But it is also a threat multiplier, compounding existing economic, political, and social stresses and driving a rising likelihood of violent conflict.

residents lined up for aid — The Coast Guard supporting humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations in Honduras after Hurricane Eta. Photo: U.S. Coast Guard, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Ecosystems

Alongside this grim reality, the world is facing its sixth mass extinction — this time human-caused — with the rate of species extinction already at tens to hundreds of times higher than over the past 10 million years. In 2020, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity reported that we had missed all 20 targets set to bring biodiversity loss to a halt.

Again, this puts human rights at risk. For example, as we empty our ocean of marine life through destructive and illegal fishing, coastal communities are losing not only their livelihoods but also essential food security as vital protein becomes more and more scarce. In a recent investigation, we found that basic human rights of Ghana’s fishing communities, including the right to adequate food, adequate standard of living and just working conditions, are under threat because of the government’s failure to tackle overfishing and illegal fishing by foreign-owned industrial trawlers. Over half of the 215 canoe fishers, processors and traders we spoke to reported going without sufficient food over the past year.

And of course, the COVID-19 pandemic represents the latest tragedy to emerge from our rampant exploitation of the natural world. As ecological degradation accelerates, animals that wouldn’t mix closely in the wild are brought into close contact with other species — and with humans. These conditions are perfect for the emergence of new and deadly viruses.

Injustice

Weaving through these crises and tragedies is the fact that the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities invariably pay the highest price. This is an environmental injustice.Global heating has led to a 25% increase in inequality between countries over the past half century, as hotter, poorer countries tend to suffer the most from the actions of cooler, richer ones. The World Bank estimates that the COVID-19 pandemic pushed some 97 million vulnerable people into poverty in 2020.

At the same time, we’ve seen examples of initiatives, some perhaps well meaning, driving local communities, Indigenous peoples and the poor from traditional areas in the name of conservation or so-called protected areas. Such initiatives often completely disregard the importance of historic lands to the culture, history and well-being of communities. In our efforts to protect and restore our natural world, we must prevent this abuse of basic human rights and recognize the contribution that these communities have made and can make to genuinely effective conservation.

Equity and fairness are scarce in a world where the fundamental concepts of environmental justice are ignored, denied and circumvented.

Achieving true environmental justice and ending the twin crises of biodiversity and climate breakdown requires us to reassess our connection to nature and to recognize once and for all that humanity doesn’t exist outside the natural world.

We must make the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment a universal, legally binding human right, starting with the UN codifying this new declaration into existing treaties, then making it legally binding on the national and international level. We are entirely dependent on nature for our most basic needs and fundamental human rights, and we all have a role to play in nurturing and protecting it.

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

Links From the Brink: Trump Reversals, Tuskless Elephants, Methane and Giant Snails

The month’s best and worst environmental news, plus other stories, science and context you don’t want to miss.

October brought in more than its fair share of scares, but the arrival of autumn also carried good news on the wind. So warm up your favorite seasonal beverage and settle in for this month’s highlights — and a few lowlights.

Best News of the Month: With the process to pass the Biden administration’s infrastructure bills stretching out into apparent infinity, sometimes it feels as if nothing in Washington will ever move forward.

But there’s one area in which the Biden administration has a fairly good record: unraveling the Trump legacy.

And we’ve seen a lot of that unravelling over the past month. Among the most celebrated events was the reinstatement of Bears Ears National Monument, along with two others the previous administration had slashed in size and scope. This fulfills a Biden campaign promise and represents a major victory for conservation and Native American populations for whom Bears Ears is a sacred place.

road through red rocks — Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. Photo: Bob Wick, BLM

The Biden administration also finalized restorations to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and laid out plans to similarly restore National Environmental Policy Act rules, both of which were severely slashed under Trump. In addition, Biden announced plans to dramatically increase offshore wind power, which his predecessor partially banned by executive order a year ago.

Rivers, streams, wetlands could get some relief, too. The Biden administration announced it would change the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule that determines which waterways get federal protections. Trump gutted the regulation, which was enacted under Obama, putting wildlife and the drinking water of millions of people in harm’s way.

The new guys also restored and expanded climate.gov, the essential website that presents a wide range of timely, user-friendly data and articles on climate change. The site had languished under Trump, whose administration had a nasty habit of scrubbing information about climate change from government websites.

And before the month closed out, the White House also announced two big steps forward in restoring protections for endangered species.

Returning to the pre-Trump status quo isn’t exactly progress, but it does serve to slow or reverse environmental destruction wrought under the previous administration.

Unfortunately there’s still a lot of damage remaining to restore, and obstructionist Republicans (and a few Democrats) waiting around every corner. But after four years of deregulation and destruction, this may just lay the groundwork for progress in the future, depending on how the 2022 midterms go — and of course, the 2021 election isn’t looking like a great portent of environmental boons to come.

Worst News of the Month: Some elephants have started evolving without tusks due to rampant poaching for their ivory. C’mon, people: Evolution is supposed to be a slow process.

This Headline Made Our Brains Hurt: A melting glacier could mean a chance for Alaska’s biggest hydroelectric project to expand

Mind the Gap: A new United Nations report finds current national pledges for greenhouse gas reductions fall far short of what’s needed. Unless more stringent targets are put forward and met, the report found, the world is on track for a global temperature rise of 2.7 degrees C, which would lead to “catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate.”

Focus on Methane: Closing that gap will require, in many ways, focusing on methane, the potent greenhouse gas that traps 25-80 times more heat than carbon dioxide. That got a start at the COP26 UN climate conference, where 105 nations pledged to cut their methane emissions by 30% over the next nine years.

Flame from oil/gas flare — Flaring at oil and gas wells release methane into the air. Photo: WildEarth Guardians, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

We don’t take huge stock in pledges, which are largely non-binding, but these goals remain important, as we saw in the methane-related headlines from the past few weeks:

This new pledge won’t solve the problem — big emitters like Russia and China haven’t signed on, and it doesn’t address meat production — but reducing methane is a vital step if we have any hope of avoiding disaster.

The Extinction Crisis Hurts Us: One of the new international Covid-19 vaccines relies on bark from Chile’s quillay tree. There’s just one problem: The tree is an endangered species. As NBC News reported, “With no reliable data on how many healthy quillay trees are left in Chile, experts and industry officials are divided on how quickly the supply of older trees will be depleted by rising demand.”

Wild (and Icky): In invasive species victory news, Florida officials announced this month that the state has eliminated giant African land snails (Lissachatina fulica), a species that does just fine in its normal habitat but tore through the Sunshine State like a hurricane, eating everything from stucco to crops — and giving people parasitic nematodes.

This is the second time Florida has eradicated the species, which probably arrived in Florida after hitching a ride on a cargo vessel. Let’s hope we don’t have to go round three in the future, as the giant snails remain an invasive threat in far too many parts of the world.

What’s Next? News from the COP26 climate conference has already dominated the early days of November. Of course, the real trick will be if we’re still talking about results from COP26 in December and beyond.

The days and weeks ahead will see some fallout from the 2021 election, and we may finally achieve forward motion on President Biden’s infrastructure agenda (we’re paying particular attention to how much gets slashed out of it). Other stories we’re watching include both drought and flooding in different parts of Africa, the coup in climate-plagued Sudan, and pushes to protect more wildlife under the Endangered Species Act.

November will also bring World Fisheries Day, Remembrance Day for Lost Species and the anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

That does it for this edition of Links From the Brink. For more environmental news throughout the month, including bigger stories you won’t find anywhere else, subscribe to the Revelator newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Why We Need Environmental Justice at the Heart of Climate Action

The Global South and communities of color in Global North countries disproportionately face harms from climate change, writes Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate in her new book, A Bigger Picture.

In February 2013, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah had a fatal asthma attack in London after experiencing a seizure, the sort that had required her to be hospitalized twenty-seven times in the previous three years. She was nine years old. Ella’s death brought home to me the connection between racial justice and the climate crisis that’s one of the least recognized: public health.

I learned about Ella’s story in December 2020. That’s when the international media reported that a UK court had, for the first time in British history, allowed air pollution to be recorded as the cause of someone’s death. The coroner noted that the area of southeast London where Ella lived, Lewisham, had levels of nitrogen dioxide higher than European Union or World Health Organization guidelines. Nitrogen dioxide, which contributes to toxic ground-level ozone, is a by-product of car engines that run on diesel.

We’ve known for decades the visible damage done to the environment by fossil fuels. We’re increasingly familiar with the ever-upward trajectory of parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide: reaching 420 in April 2021, a level not seen in recorded history. But much of the climate crisis is invisible. We can’t see the planet warming or the GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions in the atmosphere.

The effect of invisible particulate matter on our health may be as severe as the visible pollution of oil spills and algal blooms. The particles are so small that they can affect the heart, lungs, and other vital organs, increasing the risk of strokes, heart attacks, and, of course, problems associated with the lungs, such as asthma. My mother suffered from bad asthma when I was younger. I remember the anxiety I felt and the pain in her face as she struggled to breathe. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to Ella and her mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah.

Air pollution doesn’t only come at a cost to human lives, but to economies in the Global North and South. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air has estimated that the cost to public health of air pollution is at least U.S. $8 billion a day (or 3.3 percent of global GDP).

Of course, the drag on the economy cannot mask the terrible consequences for Ella or anyone else of inhaling so much particulate matter. In Delhi, widely considered to be one of the most polluted cities in the world, more than 50,000 people died in 2020 due to air pollution, according to a report from Greenpeace Southeast Asia.

Some of the most damning research on fossil fuels and public health is in a report released in February 2021 by Harvard and three British universities. A team of researchers found that more than eight million people were killed by fossil fuels in 2018, much higher than earlier research estimates. Even the researchers were shocked by the results, which they called “astounding.” One of them, Eloise Marais, a geographer at University College, London, said, “We are discovering more and more about the impact of this pollution. It’s pervasive.”

Given the enormous costs to public health and economic activity, along with the tragic loss of individual lives like Ella’s, why haven’t we dealt with our addiction to fossil fuels in favor of clean, renewable sources of energy?

One reason may be that, like many victims, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah was Black. Neither powerful or wealthy, or well-connected, she and her family lived in an economically disadvantaged area of London. Her neighborhood is crisscrossed, as many low-income urban areas are, by highways packed with traffic. It’s important that we ask ourselves, if Ella had been rich and white, would she have had to live with and die from such severely polluted air, and would it have taken seven years after her death for the coroner to issue his report?

UK climate activist Elijah Mckenzie-Jackson told me that he doesn’t think people in the UK took on board the lesson from Ella’s death: “She was a young woman, a female, Black. The headlines weren’t enough,” he said. “If we had a middle-class white male who died from air pollution, everyone would know about it.”

The reason why I’m writing about Ella, and why the coroner was compelled to hear the case on which he produced his landmark ruling, is that Ella’s mother, Rosamund, wasn’t silent or resigned. She made extraordinary efforts to make sure her daughter’s death had a reason, a cause: that something or someone brought it about. She has become a clean air campaigner and has set up a foundation in Ella’s name to improve the lives of young people with asthma in South London.

Ella’s death — and the deaths of millions of others like her — are not simply accidents of fate, just as it isn’t accidental that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The inequalities we see and those we don’t — between South and North, wealthy and less wealthy, and people of color and white people — are stark.

Throughout the Global North, Black and other communities of color are more likely to live near sewage treatment plants, landfill sites, and chemical industries; and bus depots and toxic landfills will be located in their neighborhoods. Their residences will be more likely to be situated near slaughterhouses or factory farms that pollute nearby waterways, foul their air, can make them sick, and can cause respiratory diseases. Or they may inhabit low-lying areas, intensifying their exposure to floods, storm surges, and waterborne diseases.

Here, people may not be able to afford air-conditioners, or they may have jobs that require them to be in the street for long periods of time.

Too often, when some people think of environmentalism or climate change, they assume a color-blind or economically neutral perspective, Leah Thomas, a Black writer and intersectional environmental activist living in Los Angeles, told me. Over and over again, Black communities suffer from higher levels of air and water pollution. “Sometimes, when people think about environmentalism, they try to exclude the aspect of race or wealth, and how those things might play a role in who is experiencing environmental injustice.” This is a mistake, she says, “because the people who are currently being faced with environmental injustices the most are communities of color, and that’s going to continue to happen if we don’t address it.”

Leah offers a number of potentially transformational ideas for the U.S. government. In addition to declaring a climate emergency, she suggests establishing a council of youth environmentalists and a council for intersectional environmentalism to work directly with grassroots climate activists. She adds: “I want to see real-time environmental justice legislation that specifically addresses the fact that communities of color are plagued with these environmental issues and makes environmental racism a civil rights violation.”

Environmental justice is also at the center of the work of Veronica Mulenga, a climate activist from Zambia. “At first, I didn’t know about environmental justice,” she told me. “Then while I was doing the research on climate change, I also came across how disproportionately it affects us in the Global South. I was really shocked. We’re the ones that are causing and contributing the least to the climate crisis and then we’re the ones being affected the most.”

Veronica lives with persistent shortages of power. Rainfall in Zambia has decreased, leaving rivers low and dams without enough water volume for the hydroelectric power plants from which Zambia draws 95 percent of its formal energy capacity. “We experience power cuts from eight to fourteen hours or more every single day,” she says. People who can afford generators buy them, she adds, but they run on fossil fuels and emit carbon dioxide. Purchasing enough solar panels to power a whole house is expensive. “We’re saving to get a solar panel someday,” Veronica says of her family. “I would love the international community to help a lot of us here with financial aid and adaptation methods.”

5 Ways Climate Change Will Affect Plants and Animals

Warming temperatures, stronger storms and rising seas present a cascade of challenges that researchers are racing to understand.

Scientists have provided another reminder that, when it comes to climate change, we’re all in this together. A study published last month in Nature Climate Change concluded that at least 85% of the world’s population has already been affected by climate change.

“It is likely that nearly everyone in the world now experiences changes in extreme weather as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions,” Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College, told the Washington Post.

While we’re all in it together, not everything is equal. Wealthier countries like the United States play an outsized role in pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere, but less wealthy nations face the gravest risks. We also know far less about how climate change will affect poorer countries — much more research and resources have been dedicated to studying North America compared to Africa or South America, the study found.

These knowledge gaps don’t just affect people, either. Countless species of plants and animals face a warming world. Researchers have found that rising temperatures and related impacts can force changes in behavior, reproduction, migration and foraging. Biologist Thor Hanson wrote in a recent book that 25% to 85% of species on the planet are already on the move because of climate change. What happens when new neighbors interact in these novel ecosystems is something we know little about so far because the ripple effects are far-reaching and numerous.

But the more scientists uncover about how plants and animals — and their habitats — may change, the more effective conservation measures will be.

The Revelator has been keeping tabs on the growing field of climate change biology. Here are five new findings that scientists have made recently about wildlife and climate change.

Wisps of cottongrass blows in the wind — Cottongrass blows in the wind at the edge of Etivlik Lake, Alaska. The plant is a sedge with wind-dispersed seeds. Photo: Western Arctic National Parklands, (CC BY 2.0)

1. Pack your bags. Numerous bat species will need to move to find suitable habitat as their current homes are predicted to get hotter and drier. Some, like the Isabelline Serotine bat (Eptesicus isabellinus), could be forced to relocate 1,000 miles. The largest exodus will likely come from Coastal Europe and North Africa, which already support the greatest amount of species richness.

2. Not a breeze. While fish can swim to colder waters as the ocean heats up, plants may have a harder time finding suitable habitat in a changing climate. A 2020 study found that wind-dispersed or wind-pollinated trees in the tropics or on the windward sides of mountain ranges could face the biggest problems because the wind isn’t likely to move them in a climate-friendly direction.

3. Forest for the trees. Mangrove forests can help mitigate climate change and have been shown to store up to four times as much carbon as other tropical forests. They also help protect coastlines from hurricane damage. Nature-based solutions to help lessen the blows from climate change are good news, but researchers have also learned that mangroves themselves are threatened by rising seas. If we want help from mangroves, we’re going to need to cut our greenhouse emissions to help them, too.

4. Disasters abound. So far this year the United States has been walloped by 18 weather and climate disasters costing $1 billion each. An increase in the severity of extreme weather isn’t just an economic concern, though. Researchers say that such events can also take a toll on wildlife by killing animals or indirectly destroying food and habitat, contaminating water, or forcing wildlife to move to areas with greater competition or predation.

5. Taking the slow lane. Sometimes you just need a good place to hide. Last year the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment dedicated an entire issue to new research about how to identify and manage climate-change refugia — areas where the effects of rising temperatures are largely buffered because of unique local conditions. As one of the studies explained, “As the effects of climate change accelerate, climate‐change refugia provide a slow lane to enable persistence of focal resources in the short term, and transitional havens in the long term.”

The hunt for climate refugia is another reminder of the benefits research can have on conservation, and why such scientific efforts need geographic parity so that some regions — and their biodiversity — aren’t overlooked.

Want to know more? Here’s additional coverage from The Revelator’s archives:

Move or Change: How Plants and Animals Are Trying to Survive a Warming World

Will Climate Change Push These Amphibians to the Brink?

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

A Rare ‘Bird of Two Worlds’ Faces an Uncertain Future

Coral in Crisis: Can Replanting Efforts Halt Reefs’ Death Spiral?

Climate Change Really Gets This Researcher’s Goat

10 Species Climate Change Could Push to Extinction

Forests vs. Climate Change: Researchers Race to Understand What Drought Means for the World’s Trees

Climate Change Is Causing a ‘Catastrophic’ Shortage of Food for Birds in the Galápagos

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

The Race to Build Solar Power in the Desert — and Protect Rare Plants and Animals

The Divestment Movement’s Big Month

Investors, foundations, universities and governments pulled their assets from fossil fuel companies in record numbers in October.

The decades-long push to get large investment funds to pull their money from destructive oil, gas and coal has made several major leaps forward in the past month. One of the biggest occurred Oct. 18 when the Ford Foundation, a nonprofit built on profits from the combustion engine, announced it would divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies.

The foundation also promised to invest in renewable energy companies and funds that “address the threat of climate change and support the transition to a green economy.”

Fossil fuels represented a relatively small percentage of the Ford Foundation’s total investment portfolio, but even a fraction makes a huge difference when you’re worth $16 billion.

That’s a point activists and community organizers have been making with increasing regularity over the past decade. And their growing success shows that collective voices for change can make a difference.

“Most people don’t have an oil well in their backyard, but everyone lives near some pot of money,” says climate activist Bill McKibben. “And so the climate fight has come to college campuses, to church denominations, to union halls with pension funds. It’s made the abstract very real for millions of campaigners.”

McKibben first advocated for fossil-fuel divestment in 2012 as a way to “revoke the social license of the fossil fuel industry.”

Today that goal seems even more relevant.

A report from the World Meteorological Organization on Oct. 25 revealed that greenhouse gases hit an all-time high last year. This follows a report from the UN Environment Programme that found world governments still have plans to blow way past their Paris Climate Accord commitments and keep extracting fossil fuels — “240% more coal, 57% more oil, and 71% more gas than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C,” the goal of the climate agreement.

At the same time, the number of fossil fuel company bankruptcies has soared — more than 100 in 2020 in the United States alone — and their access to capital has in some cases receded, although many banks continue to pour their money into oil and gas.

Still, it’s not bad for a movement many were ready to write off just a few years ago. Now, McKibben says, divestment has “turned into what’s probably the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history. It’s not only badly tarnished the social license of these companies but dented their access to capital so badly that Peabody Coal called it one cause of their bankruptcy and Shell Oil said it was having a ‘material adverse effect’ on their business. Since their business is having a material adverse effect on the prospects for life on earth, turnabout is fair play.”

The turnabout came from many fronts in October, including 72 faith institutions and several local governments. New York City pledged that its retirement fund investments would achieve net-zero emissions by 2040 while doubling its investments in clean energy, efficiency and climate solutions. Baltimore signed legislation to achieve the same goal by 2050.

On the education side, the University of Illinois, Dartmouth College, Loyola University, Midwest University and the University of Toronto all announced new plans to divest after years of student organizing.

Similar student-led calls to divest took off this month at California Polytechnic State University and the University of Virginia. They all follow the example at Harvard University, which announced plans to divest its $53 billion endowment in September following nearly a decade of protests.

How can other schools make similar progress? In an essay for Fast Company, a Harvard student organizer suggested using creative tactics such as emphasizing fossil fuel investments’ legal and financial risks.

Is the divestment movement just starting to warm up? The pressure and devolving social license have even started to influence business leaders’ decisions. This month five major investment groups with a collective $60 trillion in assets called for the utilities in which they have holdings to decarbonize by the year 2035.

All this forward motion proves the effectiveness of the divestment movement and the failing economics of fossil fuels, but not everyone is getting the message. This month a notorious climate-denial website called the divestment campaign “the dumbest movement in history.” That shows how much activists have gotten under the skin of those who still have the most to profit from oil, gas, coal and climate disinformation.

Voter Suppression Is the New Climate Denial

The slow-moving coup threatens not just democracy but meaningful action on climate, extinction and environmental justice.

When we talk about climate change, the extinction crisis and other environmental threats, the discussion usually focuses on science, national politics and corporate malfeasance.

We should also focus on local elections, disinformation and voter disenfranchisement.

Here in the United States, ongoing efforts at voter suppression and the slow-moving right-wing coup in the wake of the 2020 election are as bad as it gets for democracy. And consequently, for the planet.

You may not think of these as environmental problems, and they don’t get much press from environmental journalists or attention from activists and nonprofits. But the hard truth is that we’ll never achieve meaningful action against climate change, environmental injustice or the extinction crisis if we don’t also stay laser-focused on election reform to fight the GOP’s efforts to disenfranchise American voters.

With the 2022 and 2024 elections looming, the attempts to seize legislative control are steaming full speed ahead — from multiple directions. Fed by the baseless, repeatedly debunked Big Lie of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Republicans have passed restrictive voting legislation in Texas, Georgia and 17 other states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. They’ve also attacked and pushed out nonpartisan election officials around the country, gerrymandered their candidates into safe districts while discriminating against voters of color, performed sham “audits” (and called for more of them), and proposed legislation that would let them toss out election results if they don’t win.

Through it all, they’ve worked hard to discredit the election process and demonize progressive voters in ways that are literally tearing communities apart.

Let’s not forget how that already led to the Jan. 6 insurrection and ongoing threats of additional violence to follow.

This is repressive at best; at worst it’s the rise of authoritarian fascism. And it all serves to make our nation more beholden to demagogic leaders, violent extremists, and power-hungry billionaires and corporate interests that care little about people, let alone nature.

If you want to protect the planet, you need to pay attention to this on every level.

That starts just a few days from now, with the 2021 election, which includes notable gubernatorial and congressional contests in Virginia, New Jersey and other states, as well as a lot of seemingly smaller local races. From coast to coast, people are running for school boards on platforms of “getting politics out of the classroom” — code words for eliminating education about topics like racism and climate change (not to mention mask and vaccine mandates). You may not think school board elections matter, but they’ve become a major flashpoint around the country as Republicans hope to use them to “lay groundwork for the 2022 midterm elections,” according to a recent report in The New York Times. It’s easy to see that in action from the footage of screaming, threatening parents at school meetings around the country.

Will the proposed Freedom to Vote Act, John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act or any other version of voting-rights legislation currently stalled in Congress and the Senate solve these problems? Right now that’s hard to say, because not enough of us have made our voices heard.

As Timothy Snyder writes in his essential book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, “Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.”

Defend voting. Defend the planet.

A Nose for Science: Conservation Dogs May Help in Search for Endangered Franklin’s Bumblebee

Handlers hope a mutt named Filson can sniff out a pollinator no one has seen in 15 years.

The quest to save a rare pollinator from extinction has just gained an unlikely ally: a mutt named Filson.

A six-year-old Australian cattle dog mix with black and tan fur and oversized ears, Filson will soon join the mission to find the endangered Franklin’s bumblebee (Bombus franklini). The fuzzy pollinator, which no one has observed in 15 years, became a federally protected species this summer.

Franklin's bumblebee — Franklin’s bumble bee. Photo: James P. Strange, USDA-ARS Pollinating Insect Research Unit.

But before anyone can protect the tiny, underground-dwelling bumblebee, they need to make sure it still exists. That’s not an easy task for human eyes, but it could be a piece of cake for a dog’s nose, says Jennifer Hartman, Filson’s handler and a field scientist from Rogue Detection Teams. The Washington-based company rescues “fetch-obsessed” dogs and teaches them to help track wildlife and assist in conservation research.

“I feel like the sky’s the limit with detection dogs,” says Hartman. “We’re just scratching the surface of what they can do.”

Filson has already helped to survey populations of the endangered Sierra Nevada red fox in Yosemite National Park. Now Hartman hopes to turn his sensitive sniffer to the missing bee.

An Elusive, Endangered Pollinator

Entomologist Robbin Thorp first sounded the alarm about the Franklin’s bumblebee’s precipitous decline in the 1990s. He was the last person to spot the insect in the wild in 2006 and coordinated annual searches until his death in 2019.

The species likely fell victim to a European pathogen borne by bees imported to pollinate hothouse vegetables.

“Our bees just weren’t ready for this,” says Jeff Everett, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The pathogen’s arrival coincided with a dramatic increase in the use of certain pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids, which Everett calls “extremely bad news for our pollinators.”

Even before its decline, Franklin’s bumblebee was only found in the Klamath-Siskiyou region in Northern California and southern Oregon — the smallest range of any bumblebee in the world.

“Why they were so narrowly endemic was the big question [biologists] were exploring when [the bees] basically disappeared from landscape,” says Everett, who is leading search and recovery efforts for Franklin’s bumblebee.

Since 2006, agencies, NGOs, and landowners have joined the quest. Following Thorpe’s lead, they focus on high-quality habitat where the bee has been found before. The annual effort culminates with a “bee blitz” on Mt. Ashland in late July, when worker bees of many species are foraging in the flower-strewn meadows.

Even if Franklin’s bumblebees are still around, the odds of finding one are pretty low, says Everett.

“You’re looking for something that is small and rather cryptic and constantly on the move,” he says. “You could be looking in one direction at flowers right in front of you and [the bee] could be right behind you.”

That’s where the dogs come in.

Sniffing Out the Truth

Heath Smith, director and lead instructor at Rogue Detection Teams, believes dogs are only limited by our capacity to communicate what we want them to do.

“We’re not dog trainers,” says Smith. “It’s more about working together, learning how to communicate, and being there to lend support.” Smith seeks out so-called hopeless cases at animal shelters for his team of “Rogues.” After learning together at their facility in Rice, Washington, the dogs partner with human field scientists — called “bounders” because they’re bound to the dogs, the detection method and ecosystems — on field conservation projects from Africa to the Sierra.

These dogs have already proven adept at locating the inconspicuous larva of two endangered butterflies: Oregon silverspot (Speyeria zerene Hippolyta) and Taylor’s checkerspot (Euphydryas editha taylori).

Oregon silverspots, which inhabit coastal meadows from Washington to northern California, were first listed as endangered in 1980. Unlike Franklin’s bumblebee, their primary threat is habitat loss.

In the 1990s the Oregon Zoo and Woodland Park Zoo started a captive-breeding program to supplement wild populations. Researchers also began enhancing habitat by mowing meadows and removing plants that compete with the early blue violet, the caterpillar’s host plant. Yet populations kept declining.

Deanna Williams, a biologist for the U.S. Forest Service, wanted to know why. The first thing she learned: There were gaping holes in what entomologists knew about the species. Because they had only studied adults, they didn’t have basic information such as where caterpillars pupated or how they avoided predation.

An Oregon silverspot caterpillar. Photo: Deanna Williams/U.S. Forest Service

“How can we address this population decline when we haven’t been able to study 90% of their life cycle?” says Williams.

She had witnessed how effective dogs were at finding scat of the elusive Humboldt marten, so in 2015 she approached Smith about using Rogue’s dogs to find Oregon silverspot larvae.

The Secret’s in the Poop

Until then, the smallest animal the Rogue dogs had worked with was a Pacific pocket mouse. Young caterpillars are no larger than grains of rice. Adding to the challenge, Smith couldn’t use live caterpillars for training without a special permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service. In the meantime, the zoos provided him with frass, or caterpillar poop.

When Smith first offered the pepper-sized frass for detection dog Alli to sniff, she exhaled through her nose and the flecks puffed away. So Smith adhered frass to pieces of tape and stashed them around the training area “like little caterpillar latrines.” Soon after, he and Alli joined Williams on Mt. Hebo, in northwest Oregon.

That day was “insanely hot,” Williams recalls. In the first meadow, Alli didn’t indicate any frass. But at the second site, which was cooler and shadier, Alli signaled several times.

Finding frass in the field is impossible for humans, so Williams studied the vegetation and found violet leaves that had been nibbled in a distinctive pattern. Alli signaled at several more sites that day.

“She would take us to the margins of shrubs and meadow edges, and the seaward side of these little knobs which receive a lovely cooling wind from the ocean,” says Williams.

The areas where Alli had indicated were the only places researchers saw adult butterflies that year.

“It really opened my eyes,” says Williams. “[I realized] we’re in a changing world, and we have to make sure we provide enough microclimates so they can survive and adapt to changes in the weather.”

Their work caught the attention of Karen Holtrop, a biologist for the Olympic National Forest who monitors for Taylor’s checkerspot. Though easier to spot than Oregon silverspot, the larvae are still tiny, their habitat steep and rocky, and the window for finding them short.

Holtrop obtained permission to use larvae to train the dogs. Rogue dog Pips found caterpillars in the field almost immediately.

“Pips even found a small larva curled up in the soil under some duff,” says Holtrop. “There’s no way we would have found that.”

Soon after, Williams finally obtained permission to work with live Oregon silverspot caterpillars, and in 2021 Pips detected larvae — the first scientific observation of the species’ larvae in the wild in 40 years.

Buzzing for Bees

The dogs’ success with butterflies prompted Everett to test them on bumblebee nests.

“If they can find something that is half the size of a grain of rice in their natural environment using just their nose, I bet they can find something as big and stinky as a bee,” he says.

Like many bumblebees, the Franklin’s bumblebee life cycle begins in the spring, when queens emerge from hibernation and start new colonies in abandoned rodent burrows and other depressions in the ground.

“We know they nest underground, but why they choose one hole from another is a mystery,” says Everett. “Part of the reason we don’t know much about queen ecology is because nest sites are notoriously hard to find. If we knew more we could do more to protect that habitat.”

Learning about one species could also inform their understanding of others. For example, rusty patched, western and Franklin’s bumblebees are closely related, and all have suffered declines.

Bounder Jennifer Hartman has partnered with Rogue dog Filson on the bumblebee project. It’s a bit of a “chicken or the egg” problem, she says.

“In order to teach Filson the odor, we need bumblebee nests in the wild,” she explains. But because they don’t know where Franklin’s bumblebee nests are, or if they even exist, they’re starting by introducing Filson to lab-grown Western bumblebee nest material. Next spring, Hartman will see if he can locate bumblebee nests of any species that people have flagged in their back yards or on public land. Once Filson links finding a nest with a reward — play time with his cherished red ball — Hartman will take him into the field.

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She’s confident Filson is up for the task.

“I think we can all agree that dogs can find the scat of myriad species in the wild,” says Hartman. “But when you start to think about caterpillars, or viruses on plants, or invasive species at different stages in their life cycle, that’s when you really start to see the power of the nose at work.”

If they can add endangered bumblebees to this impressive list, it will be a boon not only for the Franklin’s bumblebee, but pollinator conservation in general.

Vanishing: In the Mountains, It Need Not Be Lonely at the Top

A climb in the Cascades to hear the voices of American pikas living at the edge of crisis.

What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.

Years ago, a long season of chemotherapy left me unable to hear high frequencies. How does one comprehend what one’s not hearing? I didn’t know.

The recovery kept me out of the mountains for a long time. But finally a grand day came: My partner and I hiked up into the talus slopes of the North Cascades in Washington state. Mount Baker stood before us and Mount Shuksan at our backs — a day of perfect heaven. Suddenly his face lit up: “Hear that? Eeeeep!” I strained my ears to listen and heard nothing. “You don’t hear that?” he cried in dismay. I felt divorced, absented from something that, even when I was far away, had made my world feel whole and alive.

Without the familiar sound of American pikas, I could see the mountain, but I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t sense the pulse of the mountain underfoot or its voice echoing across the rocks. It wasn’t home anymore; it was just scenery.

This premonition of their absence made me feel how much I would miss pikas if they disappeared, because when you hear them, you know you’ve arrived at a place not our own.

First there must be an ascent, perhaps from a lowland parking lot, a long climb from a roiling riverbed through close-trunked moss to widening skies; perhaps away from a trailhead bulldozed out of some mountain pass or high meadow. You must rise into those places where the horizon leans, where the earth falls away yet towers above, where the forests thin to clumps then draw tight into krummholzen sculpted by wind and snow, where lowland greens contract to heather slopes. You must crouch to taste the blueberries and step carefully through fairy gardens — lupine, paintbrush, bistort, hellebore and monkeyflower — until finally you round a rocky point and hear them: a high shrill whistle from somewhere, you can’t say just where, echoing across the slopes.

Eeeeep! You stop, and look. Where? It repeats — EEEEEEP!! — thin, tense, urgent. A flick at the edge of vision, and there she is, watching you. Alert as a hawk. Pika. “Pie-ka” we say today, but as it used to be pronounced, “pee-ka.” Peeeeeee-ka!

You have arrived. This is not your home, nor should it be. But it is theirs, and they’ve seen you, and put their whole world on alert: Watch out! It may be okay this time, but it may not. Humans. Perhaps a dog. You never know. Eeeee-ka!

The pika’s world intersects with ours only when we want it to, for it is we who visit them, never the other way around. I will never step out my door and spook a pika from my yard. And we visit them only in summers, for us a time to play — “recreation” we call it, or re-creation — but for them a time to work.

All pika futurity is at stake every summer, for the few weeks between the last snowmelt and the first snowfall are for them the pinch of the hourglass. If they make it through this season well, there will be another pika summer. But only if.

Worse, our world intersects with theirs even when we’re not intruding on their slopes. Pikas, adapted so well to alpine cold, cannot endure lowland heat. Above 78 degrees F., they must take shelter or move upslope to cooler air. As global warming intensifies, fears have grown for pika futures; while they can move up the mountain as temperatures rise, at some point they will run out of mountain. This has indeed been the fate of some low-elevation populations. Too many intrusions from us, too many curious dogs in tow, too many of our greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere we share, and our highland summer recreations will be a lot lonelier.

We’ll have, as we like to say, the whole place to ourselves.

Pikas fool us with their insane cuteness. They look like baby rabbits with lopped ears, no tails, and hardly any legs, for everything that could radiate heat has been trimmed and tucked in. Except for their eyes, which are large and alert and miss nothing. They look like rodents but aren’t. Their closest relatives are indeed rabbits, but unlike the floppy loners that casually nibble our backyard flowers, pikas are sociable. The one you’re looking at, who is looking at you, has just alerted the whole village, and her neighbors are on pause, scanning the airwaves.

Their village is hidden underground, knitted amidst the cracks and crannies sheltered by rocks that will twist your ankle if you tread them but are rock-solid to them, every turn and cavity mapped out in pika mind. They don’t hibernate but munch and scurry through the long winter under the mountain’s carapace of snow. The pika watching you — Ah! She’s just chuckled another signal and flickered away out of sight — spotted you because she left her shelter to venture after her food: alpine flowers, cut and gathered into haystacks curing on the sunbaked rocks. She’ll turn her haystacks as they cure and when they’re ready she’ll carry them by mouthfuls safe underground. While her back is turned, gathering more, some freeloading neighbor might filch a mouthful for their own provision. All winter long the village will live on summer sun, stored away under the snows.

Pika cuteness masks tough little souls. While researchers have documented pika declines, they have also documented remarkable resilience: So far, populations in many areas, including the North Cascades, are holding steady. As daytime temperatures spike, they adapt, sheltering in the rocks and foraging by night. Yet were pikas to become nocturnal, pika slopes would appear silent to human visitors, who can only climb safely by daylight. They might still be there, but not for us.

I felt that silence on my trip to Mount Baker years ago, a day when the life of the mountain seemed somehow smaller and poorer for their absence.

Years later, there was another such day. This time I had brand new hearing aids, a technological miracle. The sky was clear, the blueberries just turning sweet, the heady scent of lupine and the mountain like an angel rising before us —and Eeeeep!

I was again in pika country. This time I heard her. Not just the small bundle of energy eyeing us from below the trail, but the great volume of air she filled with a voice not our own, in a world not our own, a world of other voices and other urgencies that ask us for nothing more than to be left to their own ways.

We have yet to learn what Aldo Leopold taught us over 70 years ago, that mountains are fountains of energy. Pikas are distillations of mountain energy, trimmed down to bright sparks of life, declaring for nations beyond ours. Pikas are mountain thoughts, sparks of thought burning bright, arks that carry that light through the dark. Not until we hear what they are telling us will we have arrived.

Explore the rest of the Vanishing series and discuss these and other #VanishingSpecies on Twitter.