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.

12 Environmental Novels We’re Reading This Fall

Whether you’re into literary fiction, thrillers, sci-fi or comics, these new novels help us explore the complex geographies of climate change, pollution and the extinction crisis.

The collective unconscious is telling us something…

These days more and more artists are turning their feelings about climate change, environmental justice and the extinction crisis into powerful creative works. It’s easy to see why. These issues affect just about everybody — a new recent study found that about 85% of people on the planet already live with the effects of global warming — and that leaves us all with a lot of fear and grief.

That’s where fiction comes in. Whether it’s literature or pop culture, serious or satire, novels and short stories can help us investigate both our inner and outer worlds. Authors’ imaginations, meanwhile, can remind us of the beauty and mystery of the world we’re trying to save (or call out the ugliness of what’s destroying it).

We’ve pulled together 12 environmentally themed novels released so far in 2021, from a list that seemed to get longer every day. They include the latest from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, literary and mystery novels, a comics adaptation and even a horror story. (Well, they’re all horror stories, in a way.)

These aren’t full reviews — we’re still digging into this reading pile ourselves — but the descriptions should give you enough to pick the titles that speak to you, your communities and your rapidly changing world.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

I’ll admit, I’m late to Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning and much-lauded Overstory, but I’m finally reading it right now (and it is, of course, stunning). His new one, which examines the broader world through the lens of endangered species, looks just as good. I’m not going to try to read them both at the same time — that’d probably be a Powers overkill — but I’ve already seen a preview of Bewilderment and I’m looking forward to diving into it as soon as I get a chance.

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

A novel about wolf reintroduction to Scotland from the author of Migrations. McConaghy looks at the complex relationships we have with predators and the awful things some people do rather than relearn how to coexist with nature — perfect components for drama.

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

An African village stands up against decades of colonialism and pollution wrought by an American oil company. The pain they suffer, and the corporate doublespeak they receive in response, should resonate with readers in any community struggling for environmental justice. We need more books like this (and more real-world equivalents, too).

Harrow by Joy Williams

The first new novel in 11 years from the brilliant author of The Changeling and The Quick and the Dead. Really, what more do you need to know?

Appleseed by Matt Bell

An ambitious greed-vs-nature novel sprawled across the centuries. One part takes place in the 1700s, another 50 years from now, and the third follows a man who may be the last living human, 1,000 years in the future. Can the characters come back from this dystopia? Can we?

Rabbit Island by Elvira Navarro

This surreal short-story collection, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, isn’t environmental from cover to cover (some of the stories are just weird), but it does feature nightmarish tales of havoc-wreaking invasive animals (the titular lagomorphs) and a critter returned from supposed extinction (who doesn’t appear very happy about its fate).

Canyonlands Carnage by Scott Graham

Yosemite Fall, an earlier novel in the National Park Mystery series, came out when public lands faced increasing threats from the Trump administration. The immediate threat may be gone for now, but the long-term dangers to public lands and wild spaces remain. Although there probably aren’t as many real-world murders as in this book, set at … well, you can probably guess from the title.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan

This month marks the start of breeding season for orange-bellied parrots, among the world’s most endangered birds, who migrate between Tasmania and mainland Australia. Five years ago, only 17 of these birds existed following decades of habitat loss, invasive species, pet trade depredations and multiple disease outbreaks. Today, thanks to captive breeding, that number stands at 192 — still perilously low, but it’s progress. Few of us will ever get a chance to see an “OBP” in person, which is why I’m looking forward to reading this magical-realism novel that uses the birds, the extinction crisis and last year’s Australian fires to examine the nature of grief and loss (as well as grief over the loss of nature).

Milk Teeth by Helene Bukowski

What does it mean to live at the end of the world — and what’s it like when someone new suddenly arrives from beyond the walls? Originally published in German, this unique fable was translated by Jen Calleja.

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Secret Life by Theo Ellsworth

A double-dose of nature-filled weirdness. VanderMeer’s horror/science fiction novel tackles wildlife trafficking, extinction and the climate crisis in predictably nightmarish fashion.

Nightmares of a different sort pervade Secret Life. Ellsworth, one of my favorite artists, adapts a surreal VanderMeer short story into graphic novel form. The tale takes place in a horrifyingly familiar office building, where human nature goes awry and plants and mice have a way of invading the narrative and the workers’ lives.

The Hungry Earth by Nicholas Kaufmann

Something fungi this way comes… Just in time for Halloween we’ve got this new eco-horror novel about an invasive killer fungus disturbed from its underground slumber and ready to take over the world. I’m not sure if I’m emotionally prepared to read a novel about an outbreak after 19 months of the pandemic, but I’ll admit that I’m hungering for some good old-fashioned “Earth strikes back” horror, which reminds us that this planet can shake us off if it really tries.

Climate Change Could Turn a Carbon Sink Into a Carbon Bomb

Warming temperatures are transforming northern peatlands — with potentially dire consequences for biodiversity and the climate.

The following excerpt is from Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat by Edward Struzik. Copyright © 2021 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

The Hudson Bay Lowlands is a much different place in late spring and summer, when its big rivers are flowing — the Seal, Churchill, Nelson, and Hayes in Manitoba, the Severn, Winisk, Albany, and Abitibi in Ontario, and the Eastmain and La Grande in Quebec. On a field trip I did with a biologist from the Canadian Wildlife Service, I learned that the Hudson Bay Lowlands have the highest proportion of palm warblers and yellow rails, a chicken-like marsh bird that is rarely seen, little studied, and very mysterious. The bird, according to ornithologist Alexander Sprunt, is more like a “feathered mouse” than a bird because it seems to prefer to run and hide rather than fly.

During migration, few other places in the world have this many red knots, Hudsonian godwits, ruddy turnstones, black scoters, pectoral sandpipers, semipalmated sandpipers, white-rumped sandpipers, greater yellowlegs, and lesser snow geese. The Hudsonian godwit, which was once regarded as one of North America’s rarest birds, stands out among them because it has made a notable, if shaky, comeback. Two-thirds of these birds, some of which fly nonstop from their wintering grounds in southern South America, stop over in their migration along the Hudson Bay shoreline. Many of them breed in the Hudson Bay Lowlands. This is why the Audubon Society is in full support of the Mushkegowuk Council chiefs who are calling for the establishment of an indigenous-led Marine National Conservation Area to protect that breeding habitat, the denning grounds of the polar bears as well as the caribou that dwell in the peatland regions.

If there is a peatland outside Siberia that the Hudson Bay Lowlands can be compared to, it’s the labyrinth of fens, bogs, and swamps in Polesia, which stretches out from the riverbanks of the Bug in Poland, the Dnieper in Ukraine, and the Pripyat in Belarus. The comparison to Polesia is apt only because the mires there are also among the last refuges for globally threatened birds such as the aquatic warbler and also for wolves, lynx, bison, and other animals that are threatened throughout Europe.

Polesia’s Almany (or Olmany) Mires is one of the largest intact peatlands in Europe outside Scandinavia. But it has been degraded by power lines, border control infrastructure, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and a seventy-mile network of forestry roads that the government of Belarus has recently sanctioned.

In contrast, the Hudson Bay Lowlands are more than 10 times the size and largely unexploited except for hydroelectric dams and a handful of mine sites. The meltdown of the Laurentide ice sheet is so recent that land pushed downward by the enormous weight of that ice is still rebounding, reshaping the landscape and reconfiguring the drainage in ways that favor the growth of marsh communities of aquatic sedges before sphagnum and other mosses take over and turn them into a bog or fen.

Paludification is the hydrologist’s word to account for this kind of ecological succession. There is no other direction for rain, melting snow, and river floods to go but sideways on impermeable, finely textured silt and clay that is as flat and frozen as it is in this region. Peat not only continues to grow here, it insulates the permafrost below and stores vast amounts of carbon that would, if unleashed, warm the world much faster than it is already warming.

I never thought much about the implications of this until 1990, when I crossed paths with scientist Nigel Roulet. Roulet and more than two dozen other scientists were collaborating with NASA to sample the chemistry of the atmosphere above the Hudson Bay Lowlands. It didn’t occur to me back then that the carbon stored in peatlands could be a major driver of climate change if it was disturbed or thawed out of permafrost areas. Chinese rice paddies, belching cows, and dirty diesel trucks were getting most of the media’s attention in those early stages of the climate-change discussions.

Scientists now know far more than they did in 1990 about how much carbon is freed when permafrost thaws, when trees and shrubs growing on top of it burn, or when it is disturbed in other ways. Where that thawing is in high gear, as it is in Tanana Flats in central Alaska, and in the Scotty Creek area of the Northwest Territories, it is dramatically reshaping the landscape, reversing the succession in some cases from marsh to fen and forest and then back to fen, bog, and marsh.

At Tanana Flats, permafrost degradation increased the size of three large fens by 26% from 1949 to 2018. Torre Jorgenson, the lead author of a report on the degradation, says that the trend to warmer, snowier winters (snow traps warmth) has pushed the region past the tipping point where permafrost will no longer form and where the complete thawing of permafrost is inevitable.

Canadian scientist Bill Quinton and colleagues have seen the same thing playing out in the sub-Arctic region of Scotty Creek in the Northwest Territories. Scotty Creek drains about 60 square miles of fens and bogs. Where there is permafrost at Scotty Creek, it is warm and vulnerable to thaw. This is significant because snow acts like a blanket, trapping some of the heat that has thawed the ground in summer. Thick, long-lasting snow cover followed by a quick spring melt- down can hasten the thawing of the frozen ground in places like this. (In areas where permafrost is meters thick and rock-solid, it insulates the ice from the warming rays of the sun.)

Snow measurements at Scotty Creek began in 1994, five years before Quinton set up a semipermanent field station. It is rare to have long-term data like this in the Canadian North, one that underscores unequivocally what happens when winter snow is deep, spring runoff is significant, and the thawing of relatively warm permafrost switches into high gear. It’s why so many scientists have come knocking on Quinton’s door, asking to come in and participate. It’s also why the Dehcho First Nations, which will one day become the legal owners of the area, are keenly interested and actively participating in what he is doing.

The peat at Scotty Creek is typically nine to 12 feet deep, and 30 feet in some places. In the 1950s, permafrost covered nearly three-quarters of the region. It’s down to a third of that. The edges of those local patches of permafrost are receding by about three feet each year.

Trees are literally drowning in depressions created as the permafrost thaws and the ground surface collapses, and as melting snow and rain fill them up with water. The transition from land to water has been so dramatic that Quinton has had had to move base camp twice. “It’s crazy. There is water everywhere,” Quinton told me. “What we’re seeing perhaps more clearly than any other place in the world is ecosystem change occurring in fast motion. The implications for water quality, vegetation changes, biodiversity, and the people living in this part of the world are profound. Many of them are indigenous hunters, trappers, and fishermen. They tell me they have never seen anything like this.”

The best way to visualize what Quinton is talking about is to describe what occurred 200 miles to the northeast in the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary, where warming temperatures and wildfire have thawed and collapsed peatlands in and around the sanctuary so intensely that incoming water drove most of the 700 wood bison out of the protected area. Some 385 fires burned a record 3.4 million hectares (8.4 million acres) of the Northwest Territories in 2014. The exodus was so complete that Terry Armstrong, a biologist working for the government of the Northwest Territories, had a difficult time finding animals when he flew in to do a count in 2015.

There is some debate as to whether this thawing of permafrost in peatland ecosystems is, as Canadian scientist Antoni Lewkowicz describes it, “a long freight train moving slowly as it unloads its greenhouse gases,” or as others warn, a carbon bomb about to blow as the train careens off the tracks.

Even if this thawing of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is just a slow-moving freight train, as it no doubt is in most permafrost regions, it is still a major concern because there is so much carbon stored. Northern peatlands cover an estimated 1.4 million square miles, an area larger than all of the western United States and Texas combined. They have accumulated as much carbon as there is stored in all of the world’s forests combined, half of it stored in permafrost.

A one-degree increase in temperature has the potential to free up the equivalent of four to six years of fossil-fuel emissions. This is all spelled out in 2020 report produced by Swedish scientist Gustaf Hugelius and 13 scientists from around the world, who concluded that global warming may very well transform northern peatlands from landscapes that cool the climate to ones that will eventually warm it.

Could Property Law Help Achieve ‘Rights of Nature’ for Wild Animals?

A new legal theory proposes granting property rights to wildlife to protect them from habitat destruction.

Humans share the Earth with billions of other species. We all need somewhere to live, yet only humans own their homes.

What if other species could own theirs as well?

That’s what Karen Bradshaw, Arizona State University law professor, proposes in her recent book, Wildlife as Property Owners.

Drawing on Indigenous legal systems and the ideas of philosophers and property law theorists before her, Bradshaw argues that wild animals should be integrated into our system of property law to prevent further habitat destruction — the leading cause of species extinction.

Under what Bradshaw calls an “interspecies system of property,” animals and people would co-own land through a legal trust. This would give animals, through their human representatives, standing in court, like other property owners.

The proposal may seem radical, but it fits into the more well-known concept of “rights of nature.” These Indigenous-led efforts to establish legal personhood for natural entities have seen expansive rights granted to ecosystems such as the Klamath River in Oregon and Te Uruwera rainforest in New Zealand.

In the latest development within the rights-of-nature movement, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe tribe in northwestern Minnesota filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the state on behalf of wild rice, called manoomin in their language. The tribe argued that allowing fossil fuel company Enbridge to divert billions of gallons of groundwater for the construction of the Line 3 oil pipeline violates manoomin’s rights, which tribal law recognized in 2018.

Could granting a more limited, and perhaps less controversial, right to property similarly help us to account for the interests of nature?

From Cats and Dogs to Cougars and Wolves?

Applying rights of nature to existing legal régimes “means you have to look to find places where that already exists or could exist,” says Bradshaw.

She finds one such place in some precolonial Indigenous legal systems that allowed animals to own property and resources. While some of these Indigenous laws were explicitly supplanted by colonial legislation, this was not the case for animal property rights. These laws, Bradshaw argues, are simply “dormant,” not dead.

But modern laws that can serve as a basis for turning wildlife into property owners also now exist, she says, having been unwittingly established by state lawmakers over the past few decades when they created “pet trust” laws. Trusts enable people to bequeath property to their companion animals, managed for the animals’ benefit by an appointed human trustee.

Few animal-law experts considered the implications of these laws at the time, says Bradshaw, but in theory they could be extended to wild animals as well.

“Attorneys can and should wield these laws creatively to create habitat-level solutions to solve biodiversity problems when possible,” she says, noting that property rights could be granted to all wildlife that depends on a piece of land, with the land managed at the ecosystem level by human trustees. She’s in the process of doing that on her property in Phoenix, which boasts populations of rabbits, bees, bobcats, javelinas and other wildlife.

In addition to private property, this approach can also work for public lands. In the United States public lands are at least partly managed for the benefit of wildlife by government agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management. But factors such as changes in political administrations or pressure from industry groups can affect how wildlife interests are weighed against other human stakes in these lands.

One example of this is the removal of gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act under the Trump administration in 2020. Since then, hundreds of wolves have been killed by hunters. The Biden administration recently announced it will consider a proposal to relist the species, but hunts continue in the meantime.

gray wolf den — Gray wolf pups emerge from their den. Photo: Hilary Cooley/USFWS

Similar changes in political winds would have fewer effects on animals and their habitats if Congress formalized the preservation of property rights for wildlife habitat on public lands, Bradshaw argues.

Marking Their Territory

Underpinning Bradshaw’s proposal is the idea that the dominant model of property is too anthropocentric. This view of property law is also emerging in the work of other legal scholars, as a rights-of-nature movement challenges the anthropocentrism of the broader legal system.

For Bradshaw, our property system focuses narrowly on humans due to a mistaken assumption by colonial and modern lawmakers about the ownership capacities of other species.

“The argument is that we’ve wrongly excluded animals from the social contract of property,” says Douglas Kysar, law professor at Yale Law School. “We’ve wrongly assumed that animals are not possessive, but they are instead just possessed. And Bradshaw shows that’s empirically and philosophically wrong.”

The territorial behavior of many other species, Bradshaw argues, reveals that they have a sense of property ownership, demonstrated through how they establish, maintain and defend areas of land. Animals signal ownership through visual, scent-based and vocal boundary-marking behavior — not unlike how humans erect fences or other property lines.

Fiddler crab — A fiddler crab defends its territory. Photo: Marcia Pradines Long/USFWS

In a parallel to how the law functions for humans, animals often resolve territorial disputes nonviolently such as through “ritualized aggression,” or physical posturing. They even have ways of transferring property between generations. As humans are also animals, our property behavior has similar biological origins, Bradshaw says, dictated by environmental conditions such as the availability of resources like food and water.

This conception of the human property system as rooted in biology chimes with recent work by Australian law professors Margaret Davies, Lee Godden and Nicole Graham. They argue that although governments and developers tend to see property and habitat as separate and in conflict with one another, habitat is essential for both human and nonhuman life.

“Habitat is the organisms’ resource system,” says Davies. “And property is the system for sharing and distributing [resources].”

But habitats are changing as the climate crisis accelerates, and species are responding by moving to new regions. Can an interspecies property system accommodate these migrations?

“If we buy a piece of land for a specific vulnerable group today, what if we discovered that they need something else tomorrow?” Bradshaw asks. The answer, she believes, is to do what humans do: If somebody buys a house in a spot that later becomes unsuitable for some reason, such as worsening extreme weather, “they can sell it or take the insurance loss or potentially sell it for less money … One of the beauties, if you will, of the [wildlife property] model is it allows the trust to buy and sell land just like any other participant in a property regime.”

Animals won’t simply pack up a U-Haul and drive directly to a new territory. But several initiatives in different countries can support their movements across landscapes, such as the elephant Rights of Passage project in India, or the wildlife corridors provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which partners with landowners to provide safe passage from animals between wildlife refuges.

Adding to Existing Layers

Animals and humans typically use property differently. Humans tend to maintain rigid delineation of property boundaries, while a wild animal’s territory shifts and fluctuates depending on factors such as the seasonal availability of food, water and shelter.

In Bradshaw’s view, this means that an interspecies property system would be more flexible and pluralistic than the anthropocentric concept of property. Not only would it need to take account of how multiple nonhuman species use a space, but also how those uses intersect with human ones.

A badger pokes its head out of its den. Photo: Cindy Souders/USFWS

But property, Bradshaw argues, already functions in a more pluralistic way than people often assume, with competing interests overlapping on private property. Rights to airspace, water or minerals below the ground can all be subject to claims from different actors, including state and federal governments and corporations. Resources may be managed on an individual or communal basis.

“When you’re able to conceptualize a property as this layered bundle of rights instead of one person holding all the sticks in the bundle,” Bradshaw says, “what very quickly becomes clear is that there are ecological and biological interests to property that are nonhuman. We just haven’t made room for them in our narrow conception of property.”

Of course, a more ecocentric property system may be a hard sell in some quarters. Habitat and property are often pitted against each other, argue Davies and her coauthors, because of the close association between private property and the “right to exclude” non-owners from accessing it. This makes property ownership appear more absolute than it really is.

“People do have that idea that they have total control over [their property] and over who accesses it, and they can be very resistant to any incursions or changes,” says Davies. The ecological consequences of this conception of property are evident in a range of contexts, from the way Americans’ obsession with neat lawns creates ecologically barren monocultures to farmers’ extirpation of predators and native herbivores from agricultural lands.

Bradshaw anticipates the potential for such resistance by insisting that private landowners would grant property rights voluntarily. Meanwhile, recognizing wildlife property rights on public lands would not necessarily prevent activities such as recreation, hunting or sharing grazing land, since these rights are already more limited than those of personhood granted by the broader rights of nature approach.

A Moral Case

As calls grow for humans to understand that our fate and that of other species is intertwined, could wildlife property ownership present a potential way to alter the unequal dynamic that so frequently results in the subordination of wildlife interests to those of humans?

two mountain lions on a fence — A standoff between two juvenile mountain lions and five coyotes in the National Elk Refuge. Photo: Lori Iverson / USFWS

“There’s something to be said for the symbolic value of saying, this land is not just land that’s set aside as a national park, this is land that’s owned by these other beings that we share the Earth with,” says Kysar. “That would maybe have a pretty significant cultural effect on how we regard other beings … rather than thinking of ourselves as the creatures with dominion over everything on the planet.”

This is, of course, what the rights of nature movement seeks to achieve. Bradshaw believes that integrating wildlife into the property system is another route into creating those more expansive natural rights. This, she says, is especially important as the interaction between Indigenous legal systems — many of which already have more ecocentric conceptions of rights — and dominant colonial legal systems is “really ill-defined.”

“Once you start down that pathway of incremental reform,” Bradshaw adds, “you eventually get to a place that looks much more like the rights of nature model, where we are envisioning ourselves as coexisting with other living beings.”