A new study looked at a group of forest lands that hold big conservation potential but aren’t adequately protected.
It’s a small world for relictual slender salamanders, who live only in California. Development has slashed their suitable habitat to just two small areas in the mountains of Kern County — so keeping those last vestiges wild is critical to the amphibians’ survival.
And there’s some hope for that, because half of the salamanders’ habitat is in what’s known as “inventoried roadless areas.”
The lands, designated under the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, are generally undeveloped areas that are 5,000 acres or larger and not already classified as protected wilderness. The roadless rule — which applies to 58 million acres of national forest lands in the United States — leaves these landscapes open to uses like hunting and camping, and even oil development, but limits most road construction and commercial logging. Some areas have been degraded by livestock grazing, which is permitted by the rule, but most are relatively intact wild lands that provide enormous conservation value.
But just how much?
A new study by scientists from the Wilderness Society, published in Global Ecology and Conservation, looked at the importance of national forest roadless areas for vulnerable wildlife species — like the relictual slender salamander — and more than 500 other mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles in the contiguous United States.
The research is time sensitive.
“One of the most pressing challenges facing the country right now is the looming extinction crisis,” says Matthew Dietz, lead ecologist at the Wilderness Society and lead author of the study.
For years scientists and conservation activists have been calling for the world’s governments to help halt the loss of biodiversity by protecting 30% of the Earth’s land and water by 2030 and 50% by 2050.
It’s not clear yet how the United States will hit that target. So Dietz and his colleagues decided to see what role roadless areas could play.
“We wanted to know how valuable they could be in stemming the extinction crisis in the United States,” he says.
Shifting Ground
It’s possible, the research shows, that focusing on conserving inventoried roadless areas would be a low-cost strategy with big ecological gains.
That’s because the lands are “already federally owned, they’re ecologically intact, and they have minimal current conflicting uses,” says Dietz.
But there’s one big catch: Their fate is a bit tenuous. Any administration can create exemptions or change the regulations with public process, and states can also petition to change the roadless rules, as both Alaska and Utah have both done in recent years.
The Trump administration stripped roadless protections away from 9 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest — a move that President Biden has sought to undo.
In 2020, roadless restrictions were lifted in the Tongass National Forest—areas previously determined by the @forestservice to be critical for protection—putting wildlife, communities, and the planet at risk. Now we have a chance to reverse this decision: https://t.co/Sn2BKDxP02pic.twitter.com/aLBjh8sRXk
But as Dietz’s study found, efforts to give stronger protections to roadless areas could go a long way in helping to reach conservation goals and slow extinctions.
The research found that of the 537 species identified as being of conservation concern, 57% had at least some suitable habitat in one or more of the inventoried roadless areas.
“That’s pretty surprising considering that these roadless areas make up just 2% of the lower 48 states,” says Dietz. “And especially since they tend to be concentrated geographically mostly in the West, mostly biased toward mountain ranges and almost exclusively of a single biome type — forests.”
Every roadless area, they found, provides critical habitat for at least two vulnerable wildlife species and in one case — Tumacacori in Arizona — up to 62 species. For some wildlife, roadless areas made up a significant portion of their habitat. There were eight that had 20% of their total suitable habitat in inventoried roadless areas and 45 species with more than 10%. The relictual slender salamander was the highest, with 50%.
“That’s a species for which inventoried roadless areas are very important,” says Dietz.
It’s important to strengthen protections for roadless areas to maintain suitable habitat for species that rely heavily on it now, he says. But these wild lands could also be vital in the future for some animals to recolonize — like woodland caribou, for example.
In 2019 the last member of the South Selkirk herd — the only population of woodland caribou left in the lower 48 — was moved into a captive-breeding program.
However, more than one third of the animal’s total suitable habitat in the contiguous United States remains in roadless areas. So there’s habitat for the caribou — but no caribou currently. That could change.
“If there’s any hope of bringing woodland caribou back to the contiguous United States, a lot is going to depend on preserving that roadless habitat,” says Dietz.
Stronger Protections
So what’s the best way to make sure roadless areas have enduring protections?
One strategy would be an administrative action. “During national forest land management planning processes, the agency can recommend any roadless lands to be designated as wilderness by Congress,” says Dietz. And until Congress decides on whether or not to act on that, the Forest Service would manage them as de facto wilderness. This definition would forbid almost all human activity on these lands, with the exception of research and non-mechanized recreation such as hiking or horseback riding.
The second way would be for Congress itself to pass a law designating all or some roadless areas as wilderness. That, says Dietz, is the gold standard for land protection. But Congress could also codify into federal law the protections that exist under the current roadless area conservation rule.
Kootznoowoo Wilderness, a federally-protected wildlerness area on Admiralty Island, Alaska. Photo: Forest Service/Don MacDougall (CC BY 2.0)
H.R. 279, the Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2021, would do just that, although the bill hasn’t moved forward since it was introduced a year ago and its fate seems uncertain in today’s partisan political environment.
Whatever happens, making sure protections endure for roadless areas wouldn’t get the country all the way to its 30×30 goal, nor would it be the only solution needed to halt the extinction crisis, says Dietz.
But it would be a big — and necessary — conservation step.
“As a nation, we have to ask ourselves this question,” says Dietz. “If we can’t protect these federal public lands that are some of the last of our country’s wild, ecologically intact and unroaded forests — that also provide habitat for the majority of our most vulnerable wildlife species — what can we protect?”
From plastic pollution to extreme weather and the extinction crisis, the year ahead promises tough fights, enormous challenges and critical opportunities.
A new year brings with it new opportunities — and more of the same environmental threats from the previous 12 months.
But as we see year after year, many environmental issues tend to fly under the radar. Sure, climate change has started to get wider coverage from some newspapers and TV networks, but a lot of important stories still get missed (or dismissed by partisan outlets). Meanwhile the media devotes precious little space or airtime to stories about endangered species, environmental justice, pollution or sustainability.
Maybe that’s why these issues also get so little attention from legislators or the general public.
We can work to change that. Here are six of the biggest but most likely to be ignored environmental stories that The Revelator expects to follow in 2022.
Biden-Watch and the Specter of 2024
Following last year’s difficult election, we proclaimed 2021 the start of “the rebuilding years.”
That has proved somewhat true: Under President Biden, many of the previous administration’s antienvironmental initiatives and deregulatory efforts have fallen like dominoes.
But in other ways, Biden has not lived up to his campaign promises on environmental issues. Most notably, the administration licensed new fossil fuel drilling rights at a breakneck pace in 2021, in stark contrast to the candidate’s promises (and even some of his early symbolic actions, such as his executive order to make the U.S. government carbon-neutral by the year 2050).
Photo: Dept. of the Interior
Although the Beltway press doesn’t dig into this as often, all eyes should be on Biden’s next environmental moves. Can he deliver on the real threats facing the planet? Or will this administration become yet another failure for climate and biodiversity?
We’re guessing it will be a combination of both, with some clearcut victories in need of amplification and a few partial or flat-out failures.
The real proof in the political pudding will come this November, when the 2022 midterm election could create long-term challenges for the planet. The increasingly authoritarian Republican party is doing everything it can to game both the 2022 and 2024 elections in its favor: voter suppression, redistricting, removing bipartisan election officials, and even passing legislation to allow it to throw out election results the GOP doesn’t like, all while perpetuating the damaging Big Lie of election fraud to discredit the entire process.
The media, other legislators, activists and voters need to make sure this stays a key component of the stories we tell in the year(s) ahead. Because if Trump or someone like him ascends again to the presidency in 2024, or if the Republicans take over the House in 2022, then it’s one step closer to lights out for the planet.
Tragically, we don’t expect any of this to slow down in 2022. We’ve already heard from sources about potential extinction declarations that could come in the months ahead, mostly for species that haven’t been seen in several decades.
As usual, few of these get widely covered in the media. We’ll do our best to bring you this news, as well as conservation success stories that tend to get overlooked in our “if it bleeds, it leads” media environment.
The pandemic will also continue to affect the conservation movement, and we need to keep these issues in the public eye. The past two years have seen a lot less on-the-ground research around the world, although some scientists have started to break through the need to stay at home and gotten out into the field.
Will the same thing happen with important international discussions? More than 190 nations are currently scheduled to meet in April to discuss global agreements to protect nature and biodiversity. The arrival of the omicron variant — one more reminder that vaccines still haven’t been equitably distributed around the world — has now put that meeting, and perhaps others like it, in jeopardy.
But life finds a way. Even if we can’t do work in nature or in person, there’s always Zoom. The work that concluded sharks’ extinction risk wouldn’t have been possible without today’s online communication tools. These types of events don’t generate as much media attention, but they will generate stories worth telling if we’re open to listening.
A Plastic Mess
Will this be the year the United States finally hears the message about the dangers of plastic pollution?
Let’s hope so, because a new report from the National Academy of Sciences, published in December, revealed that the United States is a top contributor to the problem. According to the report, U.S. residents generated more plastic waste in 2016 than any other country — a staggering 42 million metric tons. That’s more than all the European Union and twice that of China.
Plastic washes ashore with other marine litter. (Photo by Bo Eide, public domain)
The report, which was mandated by Congress, recommends the United States develop a comprehensive policy to reduce plastic waste in the environment. Of course legislators could get a jump on that if Congress passed the Break Free From Plastic Act introduced last March.
And there’s another strategy, too — turning off the tap on plastic production by halting the extraction of fossil fuels that provide plastic feedstocks and stopping the build out of massive new petrochemical facilities. The Army Corps of Engineers is in the midst of an environmental review of one such project now — a $9 billion project by Formosa Plastics in St. James Parish, Louisiana. That could set the stage for a lot of future progress.
No matter what happens, the focus needs to remain on this issue, which not only poisons communities but exacerbates the climate crisis. It’s time for leadership, not just in this country, but around the world.
Expect Extremes
There should be nothing surprising anymore about the fact that we’re in for a wild weather ride every year now, as climate change turns up the heat and supercharges many storms and wildfires.
From 1980-2020 the United States had on average about seven weather and climate events that topped $1 billion each. But from 2016-2020 that average has shot up to 16.
Researchers are increasingly able to show the fingerprints of climate change on specific weather events. A Climate Brief investigation into the field of “extreme event attribution,” pioneered by scientists at World Weather Attribution, showed that climate change made 70% of 405 extreme weather events either more likely or more severe. The media needs to make this connection more often.
So, we know it’s coming. Now what will we do about it? Expect to see more stories about climate change resilience and how states will spend the $50 billion earmarked to protect against droughts, heat and floods in the new infrastructure bill. And hopefully we’ll see ample coverage of how this money gets to the communities that need it the most.
Doing Renewables Right
We’re off and running — or at least jogging — on the race to decarbonize. Initial projections show that in 2022 the United States could see a record amount of new wind energy (27 gigawatts) coming online, as well as twice as much utility-scale solar (44 gigawatts) compared to last year, and six times as much energy storage (8 gigawatts).
Meanwhile 28% of U.S. coal plants are projected to close by 2035.
New solar panels. Photo: Glacier National Park/National Park Service
But don’t hold on too tightly to those projections for renewables. Rising costs and supply-chain problems could slow or halt some planned projects. On the other hand, renewables could get a big boost if Congress manages to passes the Build Back Better bill.
Ramping renewables will come with a few other challenges, too, that we should keep our eyes on: Can raw materials like lithium and cobalt be sourced without endangering human rights or terrestrial and marine ecosystems? Can projects be sited and managed in ways that don’t exacerbate biodiversity concerns? Can we ensure that poor communities and communities of color that have borne the brunt of the fossil fuel economy be the first beneficiaries in the energy transition and leaders in the process? These are the types of tough questions everyone should start asking as we make this vitally important transition.
Getting Direct
Even amidst the pandemic, dedicated environmental activists refused to let their voices be silenced.
And they’re just warming up. The Extinction Rebellion climate protest group has promised a return to direct action now that vaccination rates have increased — indeed, they’ve been quiteactive the past few weeks.
Extinction Rebellion activists blockade the exit to the Exxon-Mobil fuel terminal in Yarraville, Melbourne in Dec. 2021. Photo: Matt Mhkac (CC BY 2.0)
The protests and disruptions reflect societal anger at corporate and government resistance to reform. They present the world with dramatic images and powerful messages, many of which get otherwise ignored by the media and legislatures. These events might not achieve much individually, but collectively, given time, they work.
That’s also why such activism is so risky. Last month Chilean activist Javiera Rojas was murdered, the latest in an ever-increasing string of deaths and other violent attacks committed against environmental defenders around the world.
These are the stories we all need to watch — and the messages we should never forget.
2021 brought coverage of a wide range of amazing wildlife, along with the threats they face and the solutions to saving them.
From cats with spots to sharks with short fins, The Revelator covered some amazing animals in 2021 — including a few that are no longer with us and many more that people are determined to save.
Here you’ll find 12 of the species that struck us as we looked back at the year that was. They represent Earth’s incredible diversity, the harm the Anthropocene has done them, and the protective measures that could help them — and potentially us — to survive.
January: Monarch Butterfly
Lance Cheung/USDA (public domain)
One of North America’s most iconic species has had a few rough years, but we continue to learn more about how to (we hope) save them.
February: Townsend’s Warbler
Townsend’s warbler. Photo: Becky Matsubara (CC BY 2.0)
This beautiful bird represents the need to revisit the way we identify species and places as one element of healing the scars of colonialism.
March: Straw-Headed Bulbul
Photos: Michael MK Khor (CC BY 2.0)
Sometimes humans take something they consider beautiful and … well … ruin it.
April: Horseshoe Crab
Horseshoe crabs in Mispillion Harbor, Delaware, in 2006. Photo: Gregory Breese/USFWS
The surprising impacts a pandemic can have on wild species.
May: Gibraltar Funnel-Web Spider
Macrothele calpeiana. Photo: Gail Hampshire (CC BY 2.0)
Just one of the many arachnids conservation efforts all too often overlook.
June: Buffy-Headed Marmoset
Photo: Peter Schoen (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Quite possibly the cutest critter we profiled this past year, and one — like so many others — facing threats on multiple fronts.
July: Panamanian Golden Frog
Panamanian golden frog by Brian Gratwicke (CC BY 2.0)
This amphibian probably no longer exists in the wild, but its effect on human culture remains.
August: Marbled Murrelet
Marbled murrelets forage at sea. Photo: Kim Nelson, Oregon State University, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The “bird of two worlds” may benefit from research on land and at sea and represents the complex challenges of conservation.
One of 23 species that may soon lose their protection under the Endangered Species Act — because they’ve probably gone extinct. Their disappearance serves as a reminder of the extinction crisis taking out freshwater mussels, birds and other species around the world, as well as a clarion call to protect what remains.
November: Jaguar
Male jaguar in the Santa Rita Mountains. Photo courtesy of University of Arizona/USFWS
Life persists: This is one of three large carnivores, along with wolves and mountain lions, slowly returning to their native habitats in the United States, decades after their near eradication.
December: Shortfin Mako Shark
Shortfin mako shark. Photo: NOAA (uncredited)
One of the world’s most rapidly declining shark species — which won an important (if temporary) conservation victory in the last weeks of the year.
Our experts weighed in on hot topics ranging from plastic pollution to the extinction crisis.
This was a year a lot of stuff got done — and a lot of former President Donald Trump’s environmental rollbacks got undone. Congress also pushed forward a big bill on infrastructure, with benefits for wildlife.
The extinction crisis and efforts to protect biodiversity came into sharper focus — although we had to mourn the loss of 23 species. And while we should have been taking big leaps, we did at least inch forward with climate change solutions.
Our expert contributors — and your humble editors — weighed in with their thoughts on these issues and more this year. And we also kicked off a new occasional essay series called Vanishing, which explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.
As we look back at 2021, here are a dozen of our favorite essays, editorials and op-eds:
From wetlands restoration to conservation dogs and the decline of fossil fuels, these tales set the stage for the year ahead.
Writing about the environment these days can be tough. There’s more bad news than good. Climate-fueled disasters, new extinctions, science denial — we’ve covered some topics this year that will make your heart sink.
But there’s a lot of encouraging news, too. As we look back at 2021, we want to revisit the stories that gave us hope, introduced new solutions, and highlighted the people hard at work on some of the most challenging issues of our day.
Here are a dozen stories to fuel your fire for the year ahead:
Conservationists, activists, scientists and other experts offered their insight into the year’s most pressing issues.
One of the best parts of our jobs is talking to some of the smartest and most inspiring people working on environmental issues. Some of them share their expertise as sources for our reporting, but a few dozen allow us to take a deep dive into their work in our Q&A feature The Ask.
This year we learned a ton from these folks, which include frontline activists, scientists, policy wonks and writers. Here are a few of our favorite conversations, along with some quotes that still resonate with us.
“I started thinking about how I could open people’s hearts without breaking them. How I could point to the onrushing extinctions and not force people to turn away in absolute grief. I decided that I was going to have to write in a way that was like a wave — I would lift people and smash them at the same time.” —Kathleen Dean Moore
“When EPA first came in, we were all excited: ‘We’re going to get this fixed.’ We all believed that they would do something, they would do it quickly, it would be resolved and we’d have fish in that creek again. And people could play in it again. But then they walked away and they did nothing and have still done nothing for that creek. Now you have 40 years of children not being able to play in it. Pretty soon there’s no memory of the joy. It’s forgotten.” —Rebecca Jim
“I want people to get curious and begin to organize around a just energy future. And to also maybe even get a little upset about the deep injustice that is embedded into not just the fossil fuel system — because that’s a story we know — but into this clean energy transition, where we are not only replicating but in some ways exacerbating inequality.” —Shalanda Baker
“What the study of climate change biology allows us to do is not to cease worrying, but rather to worry smart. It puts us in a much stronger position in terms of how we allocate scarce resources to these problems. If you understand the species and the systems that are most vulnerable, if you understand the ones that have some natural resilience, you’re in a much better position to manage the crisis.” —Thor Hanson
“I try to push folks to think about direct action not just as being about getting arrested or something like that. To me, it’s about standing with the Earth in a real way, putting something at risk and being uncomfortable. I don’t think that we’re going to solve the climate crisis comfortably. I don’t think we’re going to solar panel or policy-make our way out of this massive existential threat we’re facing.” —Tara Houska
“I’m very passionate about the importance of plants. I think they’re sometimes neglected, particularly when it comes to messages about conservation and the importance of biodiversity. People are excited by animals. They’re engaged and intrigued by animals, and often not so much with plants. You talk to people and that know, plants are beautiful or they’re great in my garden. But they see them as a backdrop for animals to exist against.” —Chris Thorogood
“The petrochemical manufacturers knew the risks of these chemicals almost from the moment they started manufacturing them in the 1960s. Again and again, they buried that evidence. The ways that PFAS has made a mockery of our environmental regulations can’t be the end of our ability to prosecute these injustices.” —David Bond
“For me, I do feel finally that there’s space for my Native American identity and my Western science career to co-exist in the work that I do. Now it’s non-negotiable. Coming up in academia I didn’t see anyone like me, and I want to help with that.” —Danielle Ignace
“I think with all of the racial justice uprisings with George Floyd, with Black Lives Matter, with youth activists, there’s a moment right now where we need to pivot on plastics — and environmental issues in general — and really give the social justice piece the justice it deserves.” —Shilpi Chhotray
With a lack of regulations addressing toxic “forever chemicals,” students and professors at a Vermont college have taken their research skills into communities to spur action.
Wherever you look for PFAS, you’ll find them.
“They’re on Mount Everest; they’re in the Mariana Trench; they’re in polar bears; they’re in penguins; and they’re in just about every human population on Earth,” says David Bond, a cultural anthropologist and professor at Bennington College, who’s been investigating the “forever chemicals.”
PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a family of chemicals that includes PFOA and PFOS, are widely used in the manufacture of plastic products like non-stick pans, food packaging and waterproof clothing, and are also a component of firefighting foam.
Their non-sticky, nonreactive properties made them appealing to plastics manufacturers. But they’ve proved a nightmare for environmental health because they don’t break down quickly, if at all. They also travel long distances and bioaccumulate in plants, animals and people. Traces of the chemicals — many known to be harmful — are now found all over the world.
Seven years ago water tests revealed PFAS in Hoosick Falls, New York, just down the road from Bennington College. Bond, along with a small team of other professors at Bennington, began engaging students and community members in an effort to understand the extent of local PFAS contamination — which he later learned even included his own backyard.
They’ve since extended their work to other areas — helping to generate research that’s given communities a weapon to fight back against polluters and push for stronger regulations.
The Revelator spoke with Bond, who also serves as the associate director of the Elizabeth Coleman Center for the Advancement of Public Action, about the dangers of PFAS, why regulators have been slow to act and the power of a real-world education in environmental justice.
You’ve studied the effects of fossil fuels on communities for years. How did you get involved with PFAS?
PFAS came to us. In Hoosick Falls, New York, which is about seven miles from us at Bennington College, a resident discovered high levels of PFOA in drinking water in 2014. The state was unsure of what to do and actually put out a sheet for residents that said that PFOA was detected in the water over the level that the EPA had issued a health concern for, but residents could continue drinking the water and there was nothing to worry about.
So this caused a lot of alarm and residents reached out to me and asked if I would help them understand what was happening. I quickly enlisted a chemistry professor and a geology professor to join me.
We realized that one of the things that we do — teach — could be put in the service of this sort of unfolding toxic event. So we put together a classroom that was free for the community — anybody could come and take that class to learn about the contaminants, the health concerns, and what sort of things were available to help protect themselves.
What was the response from the community? And what did you learn together?
We had about half students and half community members in most of the classes. In 2015 [when we started] it was really just an emerging issue and there wasn’t a lot of reliable information. There were three plastics plants in town that were suspected and found to be the sources of the contamination. The state set up a perimeter around [them] and wasn’t willing to test beyond that perimeter.
But in our class people would say things like, “I live outside town, but every night for a few years, a truck would come up my road with a bunch of barrels and it would come back down the road in the middle of the night with no barrels. I wonder if there’s a dumpsite there.”
And so we would put together a little research question and go up and take some samples from surface water and groundwater where they had identified [potential problems] and see what we found. And a handful of times we came back with really high levels that we then turned over to the state and asked them to expand the perimeter. That perimeter kept expanding.
Eventually what we identified was an area of about 200 square miles that was contaminated with PFOA — way above what you’d expect in that area — that we could trace back to the plastics factories.
It took the state a very long time to start thinking at that scale. But we were able to because we were talking to people, listening to what they said. This is what anthropology is good at — listening to people. And [because we] partnered with a chemist and a geologist, we had all the tools you need to take people seriously and really test what they were telling us.
Former EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck and Bennington College faculty members Janet Foley and John Hultgren take PFOA community health questionnaires door-to-door in Hoosick Falls, N.Y. Photo: David Bond, Bennington College
What’s been the impact of this work?
The students have gotten really engaged with this issue. It’s not something that you study in a textbook yet. It’s an unfolding problem and it’s happening next door. We brought our neighbors into our classroom, and we got out and went into our neighbors’ houses and started working together with them. And the students have been really taken with this model of learning.
I’ve also just drawn tremendous inspiration from how the community has insisted on justice for them. I’m not just working with them, I actually live there. PFAS was found in my own garden.
With this class of chemicals there’s no going back to before — the contamination is so extensive. There’s no way to remediate 200 square miles of this contaminant. It means that people are going to be carrying a lifetime of medical worry.
We know that trace exposure to these chemicals on levels of parts per trillion — which is almost impossible to get your head around how small that is — is strongly linked to a number of developmental dysfunctions, immune issues, and a host of cancers. Folks know these chemicals are in our community. We were exposed to them for decades. That means we’re going to have a pattern of health impacts over the long haul. So they’ve been really proactive at insisting that medical monitoring be part of any settlement with the polluters.
That sets up a kind of infrastructure where all the local doctors and nurses are on the lookout for all of the health issues that are known to be associated with exposure to these chemicals. And most of these issues — if they’re caught early — they’re very treatable.
Folks have also insisted on filtration systems for everybody’s water — this stuff is probably going to be in the groundwater for millennia.
After working in Hoosick Falls, you’ve extended your work to other communities. What else have you found?
In the last few years we’ve gotten a number of requests, and each time we try to figure out what we can do to help and how we can put the scientific resources of a college to work helping the public understand the PFAS issue and equip them to be better citizens and pursue environmental justice.
The last one that we got involved in was the incineration of PFAS. As it’s becoming clear that they will likely be designated as a hazardous waste substance, those who are sitting on stockpiles of these chemicals will soon have a huge liability on their hands. So the Department of Defense and the petrochemical industry have all rushed to start trying to incinerate stockpiles of PFAS.
This is worrisome because there’s no evidence that incineration destroys these chemicals. They’re fireproof toxins and are used in firefighting foam extensively. It’s a bit of a harebrained notion that you can burn them to destroy them.
A public housing complex in Cohoes, New York got ahold of us two years ago. It’s next to an incinerator. They had gotten word that it was suspected to be incinerating a tremendous amount of what’s called AFFF [Aqueous Film Forming Foam], which is a firefighting foam that’s made mostly of PFAS chemicals.
We took some samples of soil and water around that incinerator and analyzed them. We found a fairly distinctive fingerprint that matched AFFF. And again, in the shadow of the incinerator stands the public housing complex that’s by and large poor people of color. And this incinerator was just torching away as much PFAS as they could get. There’s no evidence that incineration was breaking those toxins down and good reason to think it was just spreading them into the community.
Norlite hazardous waste incinerator sits less than 400 feet from Saratoga Sites public housing in Cohoes, N.Y. Photo: David Bond, Bennington College
We were able to document that and push that out and the town passed a moratorium on burning PFAS waste at that incinerator. And then the state passed a bill that banned this incineration in [parts of] New York. We suspect that hasn’t slowed down the burning of these chemicals nationwide, so I’ve been in conversation with a few folks trying to figure out how we can push a national ban.
There has been recent news that the EPA is finally moving to act on regulating some PFAS. Do you think the actions will go far enough?
I appreciate that the EPA is taking a step toward this crisis by announcing that they are going to begin to try to regulate PFOA and PFOS — two of the most prominent chemicals in the PFAS family. However, the step they’ve chosen to take is far too little and far too late. The EPA was made aware of the toxicity of PFOA and PFOS nearly 20 years ago.
If you follow that timeline out, it’s going to take about a century to go through all of the PFAS chemicals that are now in circulation, build up a data set on them, and begin to issue regulations for them.
And now that we’re discovering these chemicals in our drinking water, our farms and our bodies, [regulators are] almost throwing their hands up at the sheer ubiquity of the problem and saying, “What can we possibly do at this point, they’re everywhere”? It’s almost as if PFAS are becoming too toxic to fail.
The petrochemical manufacturers knew the risks of these chemicals almost from the moment they started manufacturing them in the 1960s. Again and again, they buried that evidence. The ways that PFAS has made a mockery of our environmental regulations can’t be the end of our ability to prosecute these injustices. This needs to be the starting point of fixing everything that went wrong, not a point of resignation.
While in lockdown, artist Mesa Schumacher took her fans around the world by drawing a new species every day.
You can accomplish a lot in a year.
Take artist Mesa Schumacher, for example. At the beginning of 2021 she set herself a lofty goal: Create and post illustrations for 365 species around the world.
With the final weeks of the year counting down, she’s accomplished what she set out to do and shared more than 300 digital illustrations of whales, reptiles, carnivores, birds, invertebrates and a host of other interesting creatures, many of which are threatened or endangered.
#Biodiversity is so important for our ecosystems to function. We barely scrape the surface in our knowledge of life and biostrategies that exist on our planet.
Her Project Animalia helped fill a void in her life in the middle of the worldwide pandemic, when she found herself spending a lot more time at home with two young children.
“I was kind of in the depths of Covid winter despair,” Schumacher says. “I thought, ‘I just want to do something this year that’s going to be positive and that I can share.’ I committed to it the night before 2021.”
The work also helped fill a gap in her creative and professional life.
“I have a master’s in biomedical and medical illustration,” she says, “but I just love drawing animals, and frankly, there’s not as much demand drawing species anymore. We have so many photographs of animals.”
It’s a bit ironic, then, that many of the images started with her own reference photos, collected during worldwide travels.
“I spent the last couple of years living in Katmandu,” she says. “I like visiting places where I can go searching for animals. I go out in the national parks and find some species that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”
That personal experience adds something special to her drawings, allowing her to capture a species’ personality, weight and the way it moves through the world.
“It’s always nice when I’ve had personal interaction with an animal, or I’ve gotten to see it in the wild,” she says. “Those drawings are kind special to me, and they often come out better.”
Schumacher draws each animal digitally, starting on an iPad in a program called Procreate and finishing in Photoshop. Some images she completes in less than an hour. “Some of them take, uh, many hours,” she admits.
Although she started posting the results on Jan. 1, before she had a backlog of drawings ready to publish, she quickly adapted and has had as many as 10 or 20 in the works at a given time.
“I can work on them based on my mood,” she says. “Maybe I just feel like drawing scales.”
As the year progressed, Schumacher says she’s drawn many species from her own personal checklist. “There are a lot of species that I have wanted to draw for years and years, and I’ve just never gotten around to it.” That includes a fair number of whales:
Hey, it’s my birthday!
Happy day, here is Project Animalia day #16 Beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas)
Some of the animals, meanwhile, come from suggestions by her social-media followers, including scientists and conservationists around the world.
“That’s been the fun, connected part of this whole thing,” she says. “I don’t love social media, but I do love that this year it’s been connecting me to people who are passionate about something that I love. And the best thing about this has been these mini-collaborations with people making great requests of animals that I didn’t know about, or didn’t know that much about, and sharing their stories.”
In a similar vein, Schumacher found she helped open viewers’ eyes to some amazing, new-to-them species — which is how I learned about Madagascar’s satanic leaf-tailed gecko, which looks more like a fantasy illustration than a real animal:
Someone left the hell-mouth door open for the most metal of animals…disguised as a leaf and hanging from branches, it’s…
“I love hearing it when people say, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know this species existed and I just went down a rabbit hole and learned all these new things.’”
That, she says, may be the ultimate message of Project Animalia.
“Biodiversity and conservation have such implications for so many things, including pandemic diseases, but if people don’t even know if things exist, well, the better something is known the more people want to see it continue existing.”
With Day 365 looming, Schumacher says she’s grateful for the yearlong project, which has challenged her artistically. “I’ve become a better painter,” she says.
It’s also offered relief during troubling times. “It’s been a real spark. I think it kept me motivated while we’re all kind of in this dreary time.”
And with so many species under her belt, does Schumacher know yet what she’ll post on Dec. 31?
“That’s a secret,” she says, returning to her iPad.
New research reveals that one third of sharks and their relatives are at risk. But the scientists say several clear policy choices can help.
Can you imagine an ocean without sharks? That’s a distinct possibility in some parts of the world, as new research reveals that one third of chondrichthyan fish species — that’s sharks, skates, rays and chimeras — are now threatened with extinction.
Sharks and their relatives face a lot of threats around the world, including the destruction of coastal ecosystems and pollution. But the research finds that one danger eclipses all the others: overfishing.
White cheek sharks slaughtered for the illegal shark fin trade. Photo: Interpol.
And that, in turn, speaks to a bigger problem: It’s not just sharks. We’re rapidly emptying the oceans of marine life around the globe, which experts say could lead to ecological collapse in the water and starvation for humans on land.
“Problems with sharks and rays forewarn of coming problems,” says Nick Dulvy, a professor at Simon Fraser University and lead author of the new study.
Dulvy says this research examines the problem through the lens of sharks and rays, but it “may be the most complete picture of the effects of fishing on the world’s oceans.”
Now that we understand the scope of the overfishing problem, what can we do about it — while there’s still time to save many of these species from extinction?
Start With the Science
“Overfishing can, and must, be tackled through the implementation of science-based catch limits, bycatch mitigation and behavior change,” says Ali Hood, the director of conservation at the Shark Trust.
We know this works. Science-based catch limits have been effectively established for around 10% of shark fisheries around the world, including most of the shark fisheries in the United States, and many currently unsustainable fisheries could be made more sustainable with relatively modest changes to management. Mitigation techniques such as fishing gear changes have helped reduce bycatch. Seasonal area closures and marine protected areas, when put in the right place, can play a huge role.
Fisheries for some species can be made more sustainable, but other species are so far gone that more extreme measures are needed.
“Vulnerable or near threatened species can be brought into sustainability through better fisheries management, but some species are so sensitive that strict limits on catch are needed,” Dulvy says.
Case in point: the shortfin mako shark, commonly caught as bycatch in Atlantic tuna and swordfish fisheries and experiencing catastrophic population declines.
“Perhaps the world’s clearest case for urgent conservation action is the North Atlantic shortfin mako,” says Sonja Fordham, the president of Shark Advocates International and a coauthor on the new study. “The advice from International Commission for Conservation of Atlantic Tunas scientists has been clear since 2017. A dramatic reduction in fishing pressure is urgently needed to reverse decline and the first basic step is a complete prohibition on retention.”
Shortfin mako shark. Photo: NOAA (uncredited)
The ICCAT finally listened to its own scientists in late November, when it agreed to ban fishers in the North Atlantic from landing any shortfin mako sharks, even accidentally. The move effectively bans any fishing for this heavily exploited species. While conservationists like Fordham celebrate the move, they also caution that the retention ban is temporary and in its current form won’t last long enough to allow makos to fully recover.
Engage Communities and the Public
Many experts say the way to solve overfishing is to work with the communities living near sharks to come up with solutions. Top-down solutions that don’t incorporate a region’s needs and voices are less likely to be followed by locals. For example, pressure from international environmental groups to reduce shark fishing led to the collapse of some fishing communities in Indonesia, which resulted in former fishermen turning to activities like human trafficking and drug and weapons smuggling to pay their bills.
In contrast, a model pioneered by the Shark Reef Marine Protected Area in Fiji takes revenue from international SCUBA tourists and pays former fishermen to not fish.
Public-awareness campaigns and initiatives can also generate support for sharks, influence consumer behavior, and even inspire legislative action.
“Concerned citizens are key to reversing shark and ray declines and can help a lot by just letting policymakers know that they support conservation efforts,” says Fordham. “They help build the political will necessary to ensure government commitments are followed up with concrete actions, such as limits on fishing. Whether it’s contacting policymakers and news editors or celebrating species through social media and art, everyone can help. Vocal public support for shark and ray conservation is not only meaningful. It’s essential for a brighter future.”
In the most recent example of this citizen engagement, public pressure persuaded the Canadian government to switch their position and support last month’s ban on retaining mako sharks in Atlantic fisheries.
Expand the Concept of ‘Sharks’
Although public support has certainly helped some shark species, the same can’t be said for lesser-known shark relatives like the sawfishes and guitarfishes.
“We need the public to not only broaden their concept of a ‘shark’ but also care enough to speak up on rays’ behalf,” says Fordham. “Rays are generally more threatened and much less protected than sharks, and the reasons why we worry about shark overfishing apply to rays as well.”
Fordham uses social media conversations like #FlatSharkFriday and #ElevateTheSkate to try to get members of the public to learn about and care about skates and rays (lovingly termed “the flat sharks”) as much as they care about sharks. She points out that the public is increasingly aware of especially famous species like manta rays and sawfishes, but lots of skate and rays (including “rhino rays”) still need our help.
Don’t Look for Silver Bullet Solutions
While the shark conservation crisis is often associated with demand in China for shark fin soup and some charismatic species like makos, it’s truly a global problem that can’t be solved easily.
“Almost every costal nation in the world catches sharks and rays, including many species now threatened with extinction, and all have a role to play in preventing the impending mass extinction,” says Luke Warwick, director of shark and ray conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who was not involved in this study.
Although some conservation groups advocate for simply banning all shark fishing to address the crisis, experience shows that the issues are much more complicated.
“The reality is that in many nations, sharks and their relatives play important roles in food security and livelihoods, and as a result, simply banning fishing will lead to significant social and economic problems,” says Colin Simpfendorfer, an adjunct professor of marine biology at James Cook University and a coauthor on the new study. “We need to ensure that communities that rely on sharks and rays can continue to do so.”
Simpfendorfer notes that this doesn’t mean that unsustainable overfishing must be allowed to continue, but that cutting off a vital food supply cold turkey is not the best solution.
Dulvy agrees. “Shutting down all shark fisheries means a billion-dollar hole in coastal economies, and a food security crisis,” he says.
Something Must Be Done
Unfortunately, in a pattern familiar to environmentalists, governments have made many great-sounding shark conservation commitments over the years and haven’t always followed through.
“These alarming population declines are the results of decades of indifference by many governments,” says Hood. “This situation is avoidable, and we need to move shark conservation beyond rhetoric and address reality. Will governments now listen to the calls of the shark conservation community and take concerted action?”
This crisis demands a response, in the form of more and stronger conservation policies tailored to each specific situation. Failure to act could have terrible ecological consequences for the ocean and the humans who depend on it.
“Without decisive action to reduce the take of sharks and rays in fisheries, the extinction crisis will worsen, and more species will go extinct,” Simpfendorfer says.
Author’s note: David Shiffman is a former postdoctoral research fellow in the Dulvy lab at Simon Fraser University, and a current senior research advisor to the IUCN Red List’s Tuna and Billfish Specialist Group. He has never worked directly on IUCN Red List Shark Specialist Group research projects.
The oil and gas industry has refined its techniques to stay a step ahead over decades. And it has no plans to stop anytime soon.
This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the oil and gas industry remains formidable. After all, it has made consuming its products seem like a human necessity. It has confused the public about climate science, bought the eternal gratitude of one of America’s two main political parties, and repeatedly out-maneuvered regulatory efforts. And it has done all this, in part, by thinking ahead and then acting ruthlessly. While the rest of us were playing checkers, its executives were playing three-dimensional chess.
Take this brief tour of the industry’s history, and then ask yourself: Is there any doubt that these companies are now plotting to keep the profits rolling in, even as mega-hurricanes and roaring wildfires scream the dangers of the climate emergency?
The John D. Rockefeller Myth
Ida Tarbell is one of the most celebrated investigative journalists in American history. Long before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, Tarbell’s reporting broke up the Standard Oil monopoly. In 19 articles that became a widely read book, History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, she exposed its unsavory practices. In 1911, federal regulators used Tarbell’s findings to break Standard Oil into 33 much smaller companies.
Standard Oil postcard from 1914. Scanned by Steve Shook (CC BY 2.0)
David had slain Goliath. The U.S. government had set a monopoly-busting standard for future generations. John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil’s owner, lost. The good guys won — or so it seemed.
In fact Rockefeller saw what was coming and ended up profiting — massively — from the breakup of his company. Rockefeller made sure to retain significant stock holdings in each of Standard Oil’s 33 offspring and position them in different parts of the U.S. where they wouldn’t compete against one another. Collectively, the 33 offspring went on to make Rockefeller very, very rich. Indeed, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that tripled his wealth and made him the wealthiest man in the world. In 1916, five years after Standard Oil was broken up, Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire.
Say It Ain’t So, Dr. Seuss!
One of the offspring of Standard Oil was Esso (S-O, spelled out), which later launched one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. It did so by relying on the talents of a young cartoonist who millions would later adore under his pen name, Dr. Seuss. Decades before authoring the pro-environment parable The Lorax, Theodore Geisel helped Esso market “Flit,” a household spray gun that killed mosquitoes. What Americans weren’t told was that the pesticide DDT made up 5% of each blast of Flit.
When Esso put considerable creative resources behind the Flit campaign, they were looking years ahead to a time when they would also successfully market oil-based products. The campaign ran for 17 years in the 1940s and 1950s, at the time an unheard length of time for an ad campaign. It taught Esso and other Standard Oil companies how to sell derivative products (like plastic and pesticides) that made the company and the brand a household name in the minds of the public. In its day, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was as ubiquitous as “Got Milk?” is today.
“Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was Dr. Seuss’s first famous catchphrase. He created ad campaigns for 17 years before he published his books! pic.twitter.com/O9gAdZfoob
At the time, the public (and even many scientists) didn’t appreciate the deadly nature of DDT. That didn’t come until the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. But accepting that DDT was deadly was hard, in part because of the genius of Geisel, whose wacky characters — strikingly similar to the figures who would later populate Dr. Seuss books — energetically extolled Flit’s alleged benefits.
Geisel later said the experience “taught me conciseness and how to marry pictures with words.” The Flit ad campaign was incredibly smart and clever marketing. It taught the industry how to sell a dangerous and unnecessary product as if it were something useful and even fun.
Years later, ExxonMobil would take that cleverness to new heights in its advertorials. They weren’t about clever characters. But they were awfully clever, containing few, if any, outright lies, but a whole lot of half-truths and misrepresentations. It was clever enough to convince the New York Times to run them without labeling them as the advertisements that they, in fact, were. Their climate “advertorials” appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America.”
Controlling Climate Science
Big Oil also saw climate change coming. As abundant investigative reporting and academic studies have documented, the companies’ own scientists were telling their executives in the 1970s that burning more oil and other fossil fuels would overheat the planet. (Other scientists had been saying so since the 1960s.) The companies responded by lying about the danger of their products, blunting public awareness, and lobbying against government action. The result is today’s climate emergency.
Less well known is how oil and gas companies didn’t just lie about their own research. They also mounted a stealth campaign to monitor and influence what the rest of the scientific community learned and said about climate change.
The companies embedded scientists in universities and made sure they were present at important conferences. They nominated them to be contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body whose assessments from 1990 onward defined what the press, public and policymakers thought was true about climate science. While the IPCC reports, which rely on consensus science, were sound, Big Oil’s scientific participation gave them an insider’s view of the road ahead. More ominously, they introduced the art of questioning the consensus science in forums where every word is parsed.
The industry was employing a strategy pioneered by tobacco companies, but with a twist. Beginning in the 1950s, the tobacco industry cultivated a sotto voce network of scientists at scores of American universities and medical schools, whose work it funded. Some of these scientists were actively engaged in research to discredit the idea that cigarette smoking was a health risk, but most of it was more subtle; the industry supported research on causes of cancer and heart disease other than tobacco, such as radon, asbestos and diet. It was a form of misdirection, designed to deflect our attention away from the harms of tobacco and onto other things. The scheme worked for a while, but when it was exposed in the 1990s, in part through lawsuits, the bad publicity largely killed it. What self-respecting scientist would take tobacco industry money after that?
The oil and gas industry learned from that mistake and decided that, instead of working surreptitiously, it would work in the open. And rather than work primarily with individual scientists whose work might be of use, it would seek to influence the direction of the scientific community as a whole. The industry’s internal scientists continued to do research and publish peer-reviewed articles, but the industry also openly funded university collaborations and other researchers. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Exxon was known both as a climate research pioneer, and as a generous patron of university science, supporting student research and fellowships at many major universities. Its scientists also worked alongside senior colleagues at NASA, the Department of Energy and other key institutions, and funded breakfasts, luncheons and other activities at scientific meetings. Those efforts had the net effect of creating goodwill and bonds of loyalty. It’s been effective.
The industry’s scientists may have been operating in good faith, but their work helped delay public recognition of the scientific consensus that climate change was unequivocally man-made, happening now, and very dangerous. The industry’s extensive presence in the field also gave it early access to cutting edge research it used to its advantage. Exxon, for example, designed oil platforms to accommodate more rapid sea-level rise, even as the company publicly denied that climate change was occurring.
Don’t Call It Methane, It’s ‘Natural Gas’
Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, yet it has received far less attention. One reason is that the oil and gas industry has positioned methane — which marketing experts cleverly labeled “natural gas” — as the future of the energy economy. The industry promotes methane gas as a “clean” fuel that’s needed to bridge the transition from today’s carbon economy to tomorrow’s renewable energy era. Some go further and see gas as a permanent part of the energy landscape: BP’s plan is renewables plus gas for the foreseeable future, and the company and other oil majors frequently invoke“low carbon” instead of “no carbon.”
Except that methane gas isn’t clean. It’s about 80 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is.
Flaring at oil and gas wells release methane into the air. Photo: WildEarth Guardians, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
As recently as a decade ago, many scientists and environmentalists viewed “natural gas” as a climate hero. The oil and gas industry’s ad guys encouraged this view by portraying gas as a coal killer. The American Petroleum Institute paid millions to run its first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2017, portraying gas as an engine of innovation that powers the American way of life. Between 2008 and 2019, API spent more than $750 million on public relations, advertising, and communications (for both oil and gas interests), an analysis by the Climate Investigations Center found. Today, most Americans view gas as clean, even though science shows that we can’t meet our climate goals without quickly transitioning away from it. The bottom line is that we can’t solve a problem caused by fossil fuels with more fossil fuels. But the industry has made a lot of us think otherwise.
There’s little chance the oil and gas industry can defeat renewable energy in the long term. Wind, solar and geothermal, which are clean and cost-competitive, will eventually dominate energy markets. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, GridLab and Energy Innovation have found that the U.S. can achieve 90% clean electricity by the year 2035 with no new gas and at no additional cost to consumers.
But the oil and gas industry doesn’t need to win the fight in the long term. It just needs to win right now so it can keep developing oil and gas fields that will be in use for decades to come. To do that, it just has to keep doing what it has done for the past 25 years: Win today, fight again tomorrow.
A Spider’s Web of Pipelines
Here’s a final example of how the oil and gas industry plans for the next war even as its adversaries are still fighting the last one. Almost no one outside of a few law firms, trade groups, and congressional staff in Washington, DC, knows what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is or does. But the oil and gas industry knows and it moved quickly after Donald Trump became president to lay the groundwork for decades of future fossil fuel dependency.
FERC has long been a rubber stamp for the oil and gas industry. The industry proposes gas pipelines, and FERC approves them. When FERC approves a pipeline, that approval grants the pipeline eminent domain, which in effect makes the pipeline all but impossible to stop.
Eminent domain gives a company the legal right to build a pipeline through landowners’ properties, and there is nothing they or state or county officials can do about it. A couple of states have successfully, though temporarily, blocked pipelines by invoking federal statutes such as the Clean Water Act. But if those state cases reach the current Supreme Court, the three justices Trump appointed — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney-Barrett — are almost certain to rule in the industry’s favor.
Oil and gas industry executives seized upon Trump’s arrival in the White House. In the opening days of his administration, independent researchers listened in on public trade gatherings of the executives, who talked about “flooding the zone” at FERC. The industry planned to submit not just one or two but nearly a dozen interstate gas pipeline requests. Plotted on a map, the projected pipelines covered so much of the U.S. that they resembled a spider’s web.
Dakota Access Pipeline being installed between farms, as seen from 50th Avenue in New Salem, North Dakota. Photo: Tony Webster, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Once pipelines are in the system, companies can start to build them, and utility commissioners in every corner of America see this gas “infrastructure” as a fait accompli. And pipelines are built to last decades. In fact, if properly maintained, a pipeline can last forever in principle. This strategy could allow the oil and gas industry to lock in fossil fuel dependency for the rest of the century.
In hindsight, it’s clear that oil and gas industry leaders used outright climate denial when it suited their corporate and political interests throughout the 1990s. But now that outright denial is no longer credible, they’ve pivoted from denial to delay. Industry PR and marketing efforts have shifted massive resources to a central message that, yes, climate change is real, but that the necessary changes will require more research and decades to implement, and above all, more fossil fuels. Climate delay is the new climate denial.
Nearly every major oil and gas company now claims that they accept the science and that they support sensible climate policies. But their actions speak louder than words. It’s clear that the future they want is one that still uses fossil fuels abundantly — regardless of what the science says. Whether it is selling deadly pesticides or deadly fossil fuels, they will do what it takes to keep their products on the market. Now that we’re in a race to a clean energy future, it’s time to recognize that they simply can’t be trusted as partners in that race. We’ve been fooled too many times.
This article is published as part of 
