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.”

Species Spotlight: The Greater Hog Badger, Cornered by a Hunting-Driven Extinction Crisis

This fearless carnivore lives a secretive life and digs fantastic tunnels — but that can’t protect it from poachers and snares.

Badgers are often considered a symbol of grit and gallantry, characterized by their rare ability to hold ground when confronted by a larger threat — be it from people or from other predators. The greater hog badger, a small Asian carnivore, is no different. But grit can only get it so far: The species is a victim of rampant snaring, and very little is known about its ecology.

Species name and description:

The greater hog badger (Arctonyx collaris) is a terrestrial species with a fantastic ability to burrow underground tunnels. It looks like a miniature bear thanks to its stocky build, large head, sturdy legs, grizzled gray-to-tan coat, elongated white face profile, and black facial stripes. But unlike bears it has two remarkable features: a pinkish, piglike snout and massive foreclaws, both evolved to aid in digging and assisting its specialized vermivore (worm-eating) diet.

Although it rarely exceeds 3 feet in head-to-body length, the greater hog badger is the second-largest species of the family Mustelidae, just behind the wolverine (Gulo gulo).

Where it’s found:

Undisturbed lowland and hilly mixed-evergreen or deciduous forests are the greater hog badger’s primary habitat — and those are in increasingly short supply. The species is currently concentrated in the countries of Southeast Asia and Northeast India. Its presence is suspected in southern parts of China’s Yunnan and Guangxi provinces and peninsular Malaysia but is deemed extinct in Vietnam. In Bangladesh, the species has 6–8 valid and documented sighting records and is thought to be present only in the country’s dipterocarp-dominated, hilly southeastern forests.

IUCN Red List status:

Vulnerable across the species’ range, with a population decline of more than 50% over the past 15 years in Indochina.

Because of the sharp, continuous decline of forested habitats, the greater hog badger is also assessed as vulnerable in Bangladesh.

Major threats:

On top of the urgent threat of habitat loss, as forests shrink more with each passing day, the greater hog badger is also severely troubled in Southeast Asia due to hunting, illegal trade and the snaring crisis.

Notable conservation programs:

Countries of Southeast Asia are working to stem the tide of snaring, which will eventually benefit the greater hog badger. However, there’s practically no other concerted effort to conserve the species.

In Bangladesh the hog badger is protected by the Wildlife (Conservation and Protection) Act. But so far, in the country, there exists only one peer-reviewed study of the species.

Northeast Bangladesh Carnivore Conservation Initiative has been working since 2018 to bring hog badgers and similar threatened, little-known carnivores into the conservation limelight.

My favorite experience (a tale in three parts):

Dec. 16, 2016. While watching the Harry Potter franchise film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, I noticed the use of badgers as a heraldic sigil. I did a little digging on the internet and found some riveting portrayals of badgers in literature.

Jan. 2, 2021. I was trekking a transborder forest in northeast Bangladesh, part of a reconnaissance survey to identify potential camera-trap stations to be deployed in the later months, when I came across some unusual footprints on a sand-bedded stream. The heel pad was wider than long and jutted out with five elongated but blunt toe marks, which, in turn, were trailed by faint claw dents. It was smaller than a bear’s footprint but unlike anything I’d ever seen before. “Could this be a badger?” I thought to myself, even though the forests of Bangladesh that are known for badgers were hundreds of miles away. Interestingly, back then, it had only been six months since the first discovery of the greater hog badger from Tripura, the Indian state that neighbors and separates my study area from the southeastern forests of Bangladesh. So I clung to the possibility and followed the way of the badger.

April 25, 2021. A greater hog badger popped up at one of the camera stations! They’d never been described in this region before, although the forests of northeast Bangladesh, the western cusp of Indo-Burma hotspots for the species, have suitable habitat characteristics.

Later two more of my camera-trapping stations turned positive for hog badgers. At last, my memories of badger footprints and the photographic discovery fortify my love for the fantastic beasts that call the northeastern forest networks home.

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

The northeastern forests of Bangladesh are traditionally described as “empty,” although such an assessment lacks systematic scientific investment. In fact these forests are unbelievably biodiverse. For example, all 27 of the country’s Carnivora species are believed to live there. A similar statement could be made about the forest stands of adjoining states of India (Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, etc). Together the region forms a “biological blank spot” — a major land area where we lack scientific knowledge of what lives there.

To protect and understand hog badgers — and several sympatric less-studied carnivores — these habitats need immediate conservation attention. That should involve thorough research, conservation education programs, and sustainable-yet-strict habitat-management practices.

Key Research:

- Akash, M., Zakir, T. (2020) Appraising carnivore (Mammalia: Carnivora) studies in Bangladesh from 1971 to 2019 bibliographic retrieves: trends, biases, and opportunities, 15(12): 17105–17120
- Chen, W., Newman, C., Liu, Z., Kaneko, Y., Omote, K., Masuda, R., Buesching, C.D., Macdonald, D.W., Xie, Z. and Zhou, Y. (2015) The illegal exploitation of hog badgers (Arctonyx collaris) in China: genetic evidence exposes regional population impacts. Conservation genetics resources 7(3): 697–704
- Helgen, K.M., Lim, N.T. and Helgen, L.E. (2008) The hog-badger is not an edentate: systematics and evolution of the genus Arctonyx (Mammalia: Mustelidae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 154(2): 353–385
- Zakir, T., Debbarma, H., Mahjabin, R., Debbarma, R., Khan, Z., Minu, M. R., Zahura, F. T. and Akash, M. (2021) Are north-eastern forests of Bangladesh empty? Insights from camera-trapping into spatiotemporal activity pattern of mammals in a semi-evergreen national park. Mammal Study 46(4), 1–17
- Zhang, L., Zhou, Y.B., Newman, C., Kaneko, Y., Macdonald, D.W., Jiang, P.P. and Ding, P. (2009) Niche overlap and sett-site resource partitioning for two sympatric species of badger. Ethology Ecology and Evolution 21(2): 89–100
- Zhou, Y., Chen, W., Kaneko, Y., Newman, C., Liao, Z., Zhu, X., Buesching, C.D., Xie, Z. and Macdonald, D.W., 2015. Seasonal dietary shifts and food resource exploitation by the hog badger (Arctonyx collaris) in a Chinese subtropical forest. European Journal of Wildlife Research 61(1): 125–133

‘We’re Taking Action Into Our Own Hands’ — A Community Stands Against a Landfill

Long Island residents and their allies seek environmental justice after decades of pollution.

As you drive down East Woodside Avenue in Brookhaven, New York, a green mountain seems to emerge from otherwise flat surroundings. Gulls and turkey vultures circle above its dark, sparkling peak.

Soon, as you pass South Village Drive, the breeze begins to carry an acrid stench. It’s strong enough to spark an immediate headache. Rolling up the windows only offers the slightest protection.

That’s because what rises ahead is not a mountain but the 192-acre Brookhaven Landfill. If you listen as you approach, you can hear a fleet of diesel-powered garbage trucks idling outside the entrance on Horseblock Road. Get near enough and you can taste the exhaust in the air.

Brookhaven, located on ancestral Unkechaug land, opened in 1974 as a dumping ground for municipal solid waste. That changed in 1991, when the landfill switched to accepting ash from garbage collected and incinerated elsewhere on Long Island, along with local construction, demolition and street debris.

Brookhaven shrouded — Brookhaven landfill viewed eastbound on East Woodside Drive near leachate tanks and active ashfill shrouded by trees. Photo: Erica Cirino

Up close the 270-foot-high Brookhaven Landfill is shrouded by trees. But the pollution it spews spreads far beyond that green border, traveling through the air, soil and into groundwater.

Those toxins are not felt equally. Approximately 486,000 people live in the town of Brookhaven, but it’s the 12,000 or so residing in the landfill’s shadow — in a predominantly African American and Latino hamlet within Brookhaven called North Bellport — who bear the brunt of its pollution burden.

“Our community has the lowest life expectancy on Long Island,” says local activist Dennis Nix. CDC statistics estimate a person’s life span in the majority Black and Latino community of North Bellport at 73.2 years, 20 years less than the longest-lived census tract on Long Island, which is predominantly white. Nix used to work at the landfill and says he believes toxin exposure there left him disabled.

Brookhaven Landfill. Screengrab via Google Maps. Map data ©2021 Google

“This is a community that’s been looked over for many years,” he says. “We’re taking action into our own hands.”

Nix and many others have had enough.

“The problem is systemic, and racism on Long Island runs deep,” says Hannah Thomas, a longtime racial justice activist who has lived in North Bellport for more than 50 years.

“Our community has collectively been speaking out against the landfill before it even opened in 1974,” says another activist, Monique Fitzgerald.

Lately their case has been further reinforced by widespread calls to action on racial violence against people of color by Black Lives Matter and other activist groups in the United States and globally.

“When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, a group of residents decided to hold a Black Lives Matter protest in the North Bellport area to show that we’re opposed to this kind of violence against Black people too,” says Fitzgerald.

Inspired by the protests, Fitzgerald, Thomas and Nix organized the Brookhaven Landfill Action and Remediation Group, or BLARG, to address the community’s history of environmental racism and injustice.

“We felt we needed new action and conversation to bring attention to the disproportionate harm we face,” says Fitzgerald. They were quickly joined by Michelle Mendez, Abena Asare, Kerim Odekon and others who live in and around North Bellport.

The organization has made formal requests, in ongoing community calls and letters, for the town of Brookhaven and state of New York to immediately act to close and remediate the landfill, with the community’s involvement. To start, it has called for a public conversation led by affected communities and experts about how best to cope with Long Island’s abundance of trash, tapping into zero-waste solutions and prioritizing safety and health for communities like North Bellport that are affected by environmental injustice.

Crowd at the Brookhaven Landfill protest. Long Island has a #GarbageCrisis pic.twitter.com/OgkwuYDV8F

— Suffolk DSA (@SuffolkDSA) October 31, 2020

The town has announced it will close the landfill in 2024, but its plans remain elusive and unsatisfactory. No plans of remediating communities affected by the landfill, or efforts to implement zero-waste solutions, are known to exist. Meanwhile the group has uncovered records detailing a planned increase of waste-disposal operations in the area.

BLARG wants answers from the landfill’s stakeholders — the town of Brookhaven and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation; Winters Bros, which hauls waste and is the town’s contracted recycler; and Covanta, the incinerator company turning Long Island’s garbage into the ash. According to some in the community, these stakeholders have not been forthcoming in holding a dialogue; they say the town and state have long seemed to ignore most attempted calls for meaningful community engagement despite the clear consequences of inaction. The New York state environment department, town of Brookhaven, Winters Bros and Covanta did not reply to multiple requests for comment for this article.

Ashes to Asthma

The Brookhaven Landfill still takes in more than a million tons of incinerator ash every year from three Covanta-owned facilities on Long Island.

When incinerators burn trash, they release heavy metals, PCBs, particulate matter, climate-warming gases, and harmful chemicals like ammonia and benzene. That initial pollution occurs miles away from North Bellport, but the incinerator ash itself is also dangerous. It emits similarly carcinogenic, hormone-disrupting and irritating gases and toxic fine-ash particles easily carried by the breeze. North Bellport’s asthma-included ER visitation rate is the second-highest of any community in Suffolk County. Public health experts have identified the constant diesel truck traffic, gas flaring and landfill odors as harmful to residents’ lungs and found they play a role in the development of asthma.

“There are both physical and psychological impacts,” says Odekon. “You always have to wonder: Did I get sick based on where I live?”

Many members of the community say they were never fully informed about the landfill’s health risks. Less than a mile south of the dump sits a large shelter for unhoused families, and next door to the shelter is the Frank P. Long Intermediate School — where more than 30 staff members have been diagnosed with cancer since 1998, some of whom have died. A state lawsuit filed by teachers, parents and neighbors alleges the town of Brookhaven has failed to protect them from the harmful odors and chemicals emitted by the landfill.

While the New York State Department of Health has not determined the cases to be a “cancer cluster” of particular concern, the community remains alarmed.

“Environmental contamination is very difficult to prove in association with cancer, and it’s often multiple hits that contribute to illness,” says Odekon, a physician. North Bellport, he says, is exposed to a cocktail of chemicals associated with the landfill and its continued operation.

Sludge Compounds the Issue

Additional risks are buried beneath the ash, street and construction debris.

In June 2010 the landfill started accepting 10,000 tons of sewage sludge a month from New York City and elsewhere on Long Island — until the noxious odors led to an evacuation of Frank P. Long School in March 2011. This health crisis led New York state to revoke the town’s permit to accept sludge after just nine months.

Frank P. Long school — The Frank P. Long Intermediate School. Photo: Erica Cirino

Prior to that the landfill accepted municipal solid waste, which releases climate-warming and toxic gases, for nearly 20 years. That only stopped in 1990 after the Long Island Landfill Law phased out such dumping of “untreated” trash on deep-flow groundwater recharge areas to prevent continued contamination. The law passed in 1983 following the discovery of landfill-related chemicals leaching into Long Island groundwater.

Brookhaven was — and remains — one of those leaching landfills. In the 1980s U.S. Geological Survey scientists detected a contaminant plume in the region’s shallow Upper Glacial aquifer containing an array of chemicals linked directly to Brookhaven Landfill and a leaking liner. North Bellport sits in the plume’s path, and tests have shown detectable levels of landfill-linked chemicals including iron, BPA, manganese, ammonia and 1,4-Dioxane in ground and surface waters across the hamlet for decades.

Another concern stems from the presence of PFAS, a class of chemicals commonly found in items made of plastic — and consequently in U.S. drinking water — that are linked to a wide range of health issues like cancer, reproductive problems and hormone disruption. According to Suffolk County Department of Health Services documents obtained by BLARG through the state’s Freedom of Information Law, seven of 20 households still using private wells in 2017 were tested for contamination with landfill chemicals. Water samples from two households tested positive for PFAS in levels exceeding New York State drinking-water standards, and two had levels of iron and manganese exceeding the state standards.

Money Matters

For years the town has argued that closing the landfill would affect its finances and therefore its abilities to continue serving as an endpoint for Long Island trash. The town’s annual revenues from the landfill top tens of millions a year.

“Importing trash is cash,” Odekon says.

Despite racking up around half a billion dollars in waste revenues over the past decade, the town has less than half the finances ready to cover the anticipated cost of closing the landfill, according to a memo from Supervisor Ed Romaine obtained by BLARG through the Freedom of Information Law. Romaine first estimated the cost at around $32 million. He and his office did not respond to our emails.

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The town seems determined to make up for any lost revenue.

In late 2020 and early 2021, BLARG’s investigative and outreach efforts helped shed light on and avert a recently proposed landfill expansion — yes, despite the closure slated for 2024. It’s also currently monitoring the town’s hushed effort to “excess,” or rezone, and sell nearly 137 acres of land adjacent to the landfill — land that would have been used for its proposed ashfill — for “light” industrial purposes, such as an industrial park. BLARG organizers fear the move would only increase pollution and injustice.

And something else looms on the horizon. According to town records and waste hauler Winters Bros’ newly publicized plans for a 228-acre waste-by-rail hub near the existing landfill, it seems likely Long Island’s future ash and construction and demolition debris will be shipped to landfills upstate and out of state. Shipping it all first to and then from Brookhaven would create a whole new set of problems, the activists argue.

“We for sure do not need a railway, which would surely increase the amount of waste in our community,” says Asare.

The town’s idea of solutions following the landfill’s closure look, to BLARG, like anything but. “Slapping solar panels on the trash, building an enormous waste-by-rail station, and who knows what else — everything is under wraps,” Odekon says.

The Future: Can a Polluted Community Go Zero-Waste?

Even as those fights continue, BLARG has begun working on the problem from a different direction. Its members hope to reduce the amount of trash the community generates in the first place.

This summer the group organized a 90-day pilot community composting program, which collected and composted 1,300 pounds of food scraps from 20 families. The effort took place at North Bellport’s Chris Hobson and Bill Neal Memorial Community Garden, a project initially started more than a decade ago by a network of neighbors to address the lack of affordable, nutritional food available to the community.

“Diverting waste from a landfill is a radical action,” says Fitzgerald. “We need to show people that it can save lives.”

BLARG has also started auditing the community’s waste, a crucial early step in making North Bellport as a zero-waste community, another of the group’s goals.

Problems like Brookhaven won’t go away easily. Industry experts project that plastic production will rise into the future, as will the pollution it creates at every step of its lifecycle. And like Brookhaven, the effects of this toxic pollution will continue to be felt unequally, often by communities of color, reinforcing systemic racism.

As it continues its fight, BLARG’s organizers invite North Bellport residents and allies to join in efforts for community-led landfill closure, remediation and transparency — to be a part of the solution.

“It’s amazing to see how our support has expanded out from the community into a constellation of allies speaking out together for justice,” says Mendez. “The people who have been harmed deserve to have their voices heard.”

The Fight Against Extinction Requires Biocultural Restoration

The combined extinctions of Hawai‘i’s biodiversity and elements of Hawaiian culture represent the great unravelling of an eco-civilization.

Hawaiʻi, the most remote archipelago on the planet, possesses an exceptional richness of unique species but also has the dubious distinction of being the extinction capital of the world. Many of those extinctions, including scores of native bird species, are all too often directly blamed on Indigenous Hawaiians — a view that first emerged in the early 1980s and one that is still regurgitated in popular media.

Such conclusions, often drawn by scientists from neocolonial cultures, are done so in the absence of scientific evidence — and they hurt. The pain these statements inflict is compounded by the history of countless such insults visited upon Hawai‘i’s Indigenous people by settler colonialists. Directed toward us with an air of superiority from elevated positions of power and authority, these dismissals tell us our own beliefs are wrong — in this case, our belief that our ancestors were good stewards of these islands.

Mirroring numerous false assumptions about our ancestors that have previously been made by white colonizers to diminish Hawaiians’ cultural power, they reflect an institutional racism that permeates science and academia to this day. Examples range from the writings of Ralph Kuykendall, a ranking member of the Hawaiian Historical Society who believed that Hawaiians were intellectually inferior to Caucasians, to the musings of Thor Heyerdahl, who was convinced that Polynesians lacked the technical capacity to navigate Earth’s largest ocean to find the most remote landmasses on the planet 1,000 years before Europeans.

At the core of the notion that Hawaiians initiated the archipelago’s infamous extinctions are assumptions and biases founded in the neoclassical idea that humans are separate from nature. This social construct has morphed into a belief that humans are inherently bad for nature — a way of thinking that has infiltrated science so deeply that the default interpretation of limited data is often that any known extinction in the Holocene is directly attributable to human-induced ecocide.

Such biased interpolations add insult to the psychological injury of witnessing, across generations, the pulling of threads from the tapestry of Hawaiian culture until it resembles a tattered fabric. Hawaiian elders are mourning their losses while simultaneously grappling with both environmental and cultural grief.

Beyond the extinction crisis familiar to most, the reality is that Hawaiʻi has been experiencing a co-extinction crisis that not only affects biodiversity but the health and function of the Indigenous culture to which it’s intrinsically tied.

What We Lost

It’s often joked that if Charles Darwin had landed on the shores of Hawaiʻi instead of the Galapagos, he would instantly have dropped dead of shock.

That’s because all the key ingredients needed to catalyze rapid evolution are found in Hawaiʻi: isolation from founding populations (more than 2,000 miles away from any continent) and a broad range of ecological niches in a relatively small area (27 of 38 lifezones are found in the 6,700 square-mile land area of the Hawaiian archipelago). These conditions allowed for an evolutionary process called “adaptive radiation” to create a biome with more than 90% of its species endemic, or found nowhere else on Earth. Today, Hawaiian honeycreepers, fruit flies and a group of plants called the silversword alliance are textbook examples of adaptive radiation in colleges around the world.

i'iwi — A young i’iwi, a Hawaiian honeycreeper. Photo: Noah Kahn/USFWS

These extinctions affected more than global biodiversity numbers and compromised ecosystems. Each of these species was given a name in the Hawaiian language and played a role in shaping Hawaiian culture. Each contributed to the stories that elders would use to teach their grandchildren about how to be a good person. As such, with each extinction event there were mirrored extinction events in Hawaiian culture. With each species extinction there was an extinction of a word in our language, and quite often an extinction of a practice and a story that we used to teach our grandchildren. Thus the extinction crisis we face here in Hawaiʻi is really a co-extinction crisis that Hawaiians have been contending with for the past 200 years.

An Eco-Civilization

Hawai‘i has been described by scholars as one of only nine civilizations in history to independently develop into a state system, and it sustainably managed a population of over one million people.

At its height, Hawaiian society managed a complex knowledge system maintained and cultivated by institutions of higher learning. The Indigenous science within this knowledge system classified and named every plant, vertebrate and macroinvertebrate that existed in Hawaiʻi, as well as cloud formations, winds, rains and rainbows and associated meteorological phenomena. This Indigenous science informed Indigenous resource-management strategies that conserved biodiversity and ecosystem function within Hawaiian systems.

Some of us have described the Hawaiian civilization as an eco-civilization that wove biodiversity and society together in single system. Each of the named things in the biophysical realm had an embedded relationship with Hawaiian culture and a role in this eco-civilization.

Since Hawaiian civilization was not born out of a neoclassical worldview, concepts such as “nature,” “wildlife” and “wilderness” do not exist as words in its language and did not shape the thinking and philosophy of Hawaiian society.

To the contrary, Hawaiian creation chants account for the birthing of the islands, the biodiversity of its lands and seas, and the Hawaiian people — all in that order. As such, they convey the notion that the islands and their biodiversity are kūpuna (a word that means both elders and ancestors). True to the traditions of the Hawaiian family system, these kūpuna were once broadly loved and revered. This is because Hawaiian culture sees the land and its biodiversity as kin, with no need to separate the two.

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How We Lost Our Eco-Culture

Much of this began to unravel in the 19th century, shortly after contact. The Hawaiian population collapsed by 90% after the introduction of foreign diseases. The colonizing influences of Christianity and capitalism worked in concert to dissolve the Hawaiian laws that were in place to protect biodiversity and habitats, and ultimately transformed Hawaiʻi into an engine for the coalescing global economy.

Concurrently the introduction of mosquitos, mosquito-borne diseases, and predators such as mongooses, rats and cats attacked our bird populations. Introduced ungulates became feral and, together with newly introduced invasive plants, transformed forests, wetlands and other habitats that supported the Hawaiian eco-civilization. Extinctions shot through the roof, both in the realms of biodiversity, linguistics and Indigenous practices.

Javan mongoose in Hawaiʻi. Photo: Alex Schubert/USFWS

Thus began the co-extinction between Hawaiian culture and Hawaiʻi’s biodiversity, and the great unravelling of the Hawaiian eco-civilization was underway. Hawaiian language and knowledge systems started to fade, and the material culture that was built on Hawaiʻi’s biodiversity began to crumble. Hawaiians experienced an overwhelming sense of environmental grief that was compounded by cultural grief swirling around their families and communities, and thus began the intergenerational trauma Hawaiian communities struggle with today.

Through this dual conquest, Hawaiian society found itself nearly wiped out. Today, thanks to colonization by foreigners, Indigenous Hawaiians represent a minority in contemporary society — in both population numbers and political influence.

And colonialism is hardly a thing of the past. In the later decades of the 20th century, institutional education systems taught conservation as if it was a notion brought to Hawaiʻi as a gift of the “western civilization.” In this education system children like me were taught that the Hawaiians caused these extinctions by overhunting and deforestation, and presented conservationists born in another land as those who came to save Hawaiʻi from us.

While the inadvertent introduction 1,000 years ago of the Polynesian rat— Hawai‘i’s first invasive species — certainly altered ecosystem function, which then resulted in a handful of notable extinctions, research since the turn of the century increasingly points to the introduction of black rats, mosquitos (and mosquito-borne diseases) and cats (who have now gone feral) — all introduced by foreigners in the 19th century — as the major drivers of extinctions in Hawai‘i. As for the deforestation that was originally blamed on Hawaiian ecocide, that didn’t happen until the 19th century either, as the high demand for fuel for steam engines and the push to convert hundreds of thousands of acres to ranching and plantations spelled disaster for Hawai‘i’s forests and wetlands.

The Rise of Restoration

The 1970s was a pivotal time in Hawaiʻi. After generations of miseducation, cultural appropriation by the tourism industry, and the witnessing of sacred islands being used as target practice by the US Navy, efforts to revive the last vestiges of Hawaiian culture coalesced into a new Hawaiian renaissance. A growing sense of Indigenous agency — founded on the concept of aloha ʻāina (“love of the land”) — led to a revival of Hawaiian language, arts, material culture, philosophy and spirituality.

October 7, 2014 Hawaiian cultural practitioners, environmentalists, and activists gather to stand in solidarity against the groundbreaking ceremony for the Thirty Meter Telescope. Photo: Occupy Hilo

In the 21st century, Hawaiian-led conservation efforts across the archipelago have coalesced around the notion of “biocultural restoration” as an antidote to the influences of colonization that led to the collapse of the Hawaiian eco-civilization. Colonization is a process that severs relationships between Indigenous people and their language, their ancestral places, and the biodiversity that shaped their cultural identity. Biocultural restoration focuses on restoring relationships between Indigenous people and their places, as well as between them and the biodiversity that shaped the language and identities of their ancestors. Biocultural restoration is built on the notion that everything in the system is interconnected, as are the problems we perceive and the solutions to them.

Extinctions, collapses in species abundance, habitat degradation, disintegration of family systems and the disenfranchisement of communities all trace back to the imposition of the notion that humanity and nature are separate, and are exacerbated by the solutions promulgated by conventional approaches to conservation that aspires to save nature from humans.

To heal these scars, the world must accept the truth: We Indigenous peoples were not the cause of the mass extinctions witnessed by our ancestors. The reality is that Euro-American colonization, the animals and diseases they brought with them, as well as the philosophies and practices that have justified deforestation and the draining of wetlands — all of which are the antithesis of sustainability — caused more extinctions than Polynesian rats ever have.

After more than 40 years of the American approach not working, it’s high time we try something different. Now’s the moment for us to learn from our eco-civilizations of the past to ensure we can have a civilization in our future.

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

Vanishing: Sawfishes Are Weird and Wonderful — But Important, Too

A conservation scientist would miss these delightfully bizarre fish if they went extinct, but there’s more to saving them than their looks.

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.

The natural world is so fantastically bizarre. Protecting and understanding its often strange-to-us biodiversity is one of the reasons I became a conservation scientist.

Over the years I’ve come to accept the fact that I probably won’t be able to see all the world’s wonderfully weird critters in person, especially those that are incredibly rare or found only in the farthest reaches of this world. It’s much harder to come to terms with the reality that I may never see many of these animals, not because they’re difficult to access, but because they’ll be extinct before I get the chance.

Sawfishes are at the top of that list. Although I’ve studied the five existing species — all of which are endangered, three critically so — and contributed to conservation efforts for the past few years, I’ve never seen one in the wild.

But what a sight that would be. Capable of reaching up to 22 feet in length, sawfishes were aptly named for the tooth-studded, saw-like snout that accounts for one quarter of their bodies. Beyond this snout, which is called a rostrum, they look like sharks, but they’re more closely related to rays, who are much flatter.

Sawfish rostrum. Photo: FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Historically these iconic animals were found around the world, often throughout the tropics and subtropics in shallow, coastal waters. Ancient sawfish symbology can be found worldwide, too, from Aztec temples in Mexico to the thousands of islands of Indonesia to countries in West Africa that don’t even have sawfishes in their waters anymore.

With their large size and peculiarity, plus the fact that they’re so easily catchable, it’s no surprise that sawfishes remain highly desirable. Fueled by international markets for shark products, sawfishes are among the most valuable traded wildlife in the world. Meanwhile, prime sawfish habitats are also under threat due to rampant coastal development. Together overfishing and habitat loss have driven sawfish populations extinct in 59% of their historical range — a conclusion my colleagues and I reached in a paper published earlier this year.

This research drove home a very painful fact for me: There’s a very real chance that some or even all sawfish species could become extinct within our lifetimes. Like the Caribbean monk seal or the golden toad in Costa Rica, sawfishes could join the list of species for which we did too little too late.

Conservation scientists from western nations, like me, devote much of their career to protecting species and preventing extinctions. Although many of us feel a personal connection to certain species, as I do with sawfishes, we also tend to be highly pragmatic. Despite the potential devastation of losing your study species to extinction, we’re trained to look at the bigger picture: There are many other species under threat of extinction that need protection. If we do lose one or more sawfish species to extinction in the years ahead, we will still be able to draw on the lessons learned and shift our focus to the next imperiled species.

In this regard, my career could carry on and sawfishes would forever be my reminder of a species I couldn’t save and never got to see in person.

But is that really all? I began to wonder: Would the extinction of sawfishes be nothing more than a sad footnote in my career — a lesson to inform my future conservation ventures? Surely the loss of a nearly globally distributed group of fishes would also have wide-ranging effects.

Taking a step back, I realized my privilege has shielded me from the true magnitude of the impact of extinction.

The real question should be, what would the extinction of sawfishes mean to someone from a coastal developing nation? The loss of sawfishes could mean a reduction in food security, the removal of an opportunity for financial stability through artisanal fisheries, and the vanishment of a cultural icon.

When seen through that lens, extinction is more than just losing a bucket-list, must-see species for someone like me. Extinction threatens the survival of some of the most vulnerable communities in the world and their cultural traditions.

This realization drastically changes how I approach conservation. Extinctions don’t affect everyone the same way, and conversely conservation efforts affect people differently too.

Despite what popular films like Seaspiracy would have you believe, conservation isn’t simply scrutinizing governments to enforce zero-fishing, marine protected areas in their waters. Marine conservation is much more complicated than that, especially in many countries where the livelihoods of entire families are dependent on fishing. Instead, conservation needs to be a collaborative process between local communities, governments, nongovernmental organizations and scientists to work together to create effective protection measures rooted in justice and inclusivity. Most importantly, putting conservation into practice should be centered around the local communities that would be most affected by the extinction of a species, as any loss would diminish the regional ecology in ways people experience directly.

As conservation scientists, we should protect sawfishes not only for their sake but for the human communities who rely on them, the roles they play in their ecosystems, and those of us who might one day see a sawfish in the wild with our own eyes.

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

How to Turn Off the Tap on Plastic Waste

Erica Cirino’s new book, Thicker Than Water, examines the plastic pollution crisis — and its solutions — from oilfield to landfill.

Thousands of tons of plastic waste, dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirl in remote ocean waters. The gyre of refuse, which contains everything from fishing nets to shampoo bottles, was first documented in 1997, but it’s still drawing researchers hoping to better understand our proliferation of plastic and how it harms ocean life.

Five years ago science writer Erica Cirino joined one such expedition to document the work of the Dutch nonprofit Plastic Change. But her journey through the world’s largest floating dump spurred her to begin chronicling not only where plastic waste ends up, but how it’s made, transported and disposed of — and who’s harmed along the way. She documents what she found in her new book, Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis.

We spoke to Cirino — a frequent Revelator contributor — about plastic’s toxic life cycle, how the Black Lives Matter movement inspired environmental activists, and what still gives her anxiety about the future.

When you were sailing across the garbage patch, what did it feel like to be in a place that’s so far from people and yet encounter so much of our waste?

It was certainly a shock. It made me a bit melancholy because it really hit home just how big the problem was. And it made me think, if there’s nobody around, how is the plastic getting out there? It made me want to understand the whole pipeline of plastic from this giant sink of plastic in the ocean to its source.

Erica Cirino on sailboat — Erica Cirino crosses the Atlantic Ocean with eXXpedition in 2019. © Sophie Dingwall

That’s how this book came about. And as you can see in the book, the problem is so much bigger than litter. It’s so much bigger than just a blight. It’s really insidious.

The ocean is huge — how do researchers measure how much plastic is out there?

What’s usually used to measure plastic in the ocean — a surface trawl — is actually not totally accurate. It’s a great tool for understanding how much plastic is on the surface of the water. But it tells you very little about the ever-changing composition of plastic in the oceans. And there’s also so much that sinks beneath the surface.

While we were out at sea, we did a few experiments that showed micro- and possibly nanoplastic all the way down to 200 meters (656 feet).

So it’s not just looking on the surface that’s needed. It’s looking all the way throughout the water column to the very bottom of the sea because there have been research endeavors showing plastic on the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

It’s also important to pinpoint where it’s concentrated to understand the impact on the planet. Is it harming animals, plants, people? Where is most of the plastic accumulating? Those are a lot of the big questions we were asking out at sea.

What did you learn about who’s bearing the brunt of the harm from our plastic waste beyond marine life?

From the front of the plastic pipeline to the end, people are harmed — mostly communities of color. Typically with the plastic production pipeline, we’re talking about the extraction, processing and refining, transportation, distribution, and then the disposal of plastic. So from the oilfield to the landfill communities of color and other minority communities are being disproportionately harmed by these impacts.

Near extraction, refining and processing there are a lot of air-quality issues. When I visited communities near these industrial sites, a lot of people complained of headaches, skin problems, nausea and asthma.

It is a very toxic process. Plastic is made out of fossil fuels. It contains a lot of additives. It contains plasticizer chemicals like phthalates and PFAS. These chemicals themselves are known to be harmful, and yet companies often have repeated environmental violations in a lot of these facilities with very little done other than paying fines. People continue to suffer as the industry continues to profit.

But communities have been fighting back, and I’ve started to see a change. In 2020 with the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement really brought attention not only to how Black people are treated by police officers, but also in terms of environmental racism.

People are beginning to take notice. Sharon Lavigne, who’s interviewed in my book, was named a Goldman Prize winner for her work against Formosa Plastics and dedication to fighting injustice. And in March 2021, the United Nations called for an end to environmental racism in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” which is about 85 miles along the Mississippi of industrial development in mainly communities of color.

So the world is saying that this is a huge problem, and people are now finally listening. A lot of these communities that I’ve been speaking to have expressed to me that they’ve been fighting these issues for so long, but it’s only really now people seem to be waking up.

entrance to facility — Shell Norco petrochemical manufacturing complex in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. © Erica Cirino

I think that really shows just how much of an impact the Black Lives Matter movement and other movements for racial justice have made. And it’s these small communities that are making these huge changes, which is deeply inspiring, but also expresses this need for allyship and this urgency of needing to get support from others around them.

What did you find most promising in terms of solutions?

There’s not one solution, but a major thing that we could do would be to hold the industry churning out this waste accountable. There are various legal means to do that.

But also, we can use our culture to force a change.

Communities are showing the way forward with zero-waste initiatives. Many communities, including those most disproportionately harmed, are making movements to reduce their own waste and to reduce reliance on plastic. I’ve seen communities starting their own gardens as a means to reduce waste.

It’s a cultural shift, but it’s also this big systemic shift that we need at the same time. And I think as we get more serious about climate change, we have to hold these major corporations responsible for what they produce and also for what they’ve done. So it’s not just that we have to stop the new plastic production, but we have to address all the plastic that’s now out there in landfills and the environment.

I also think we need to figure out how to completely circularize the way that we use plastic. If we use it at all. Can we use what’s all around us? Is there going to be a way to collect all the plastic?

And there’s a lot more we need to learn about the effects of plastic on human bodies. Because we do know now that it’s getting inside our gastrointestinal tracts. There is evidence that in other animals, such as fish, small plastic particles can go to the brain and actually change the fish’s behavior. Is this also happening to people? I think understanding that better is going to be a frontier in the coming years.

After immersing yourself in this problem and solutions for the last five years, how do you feel?

I feel anxiously excited. I learned about so many amazing efforts happening in communities all over the world. The communities that are focusing on the plastic pipeline by addressing climate change and the oil and gas companies behind fossil fuel extraction; the people fighting plastic bags and transportation of plastic; and those fighting landfills and also advocating for zero waste.

So there’s really an amazing effort going on to cut this addiction to plastic out of our lives and show us a new and healthier way forward. So I do feel hopeful.

But the anxiety is also there because it is urgent — lives are at stake and lives are being affected by this every day. And they have been affected since plastic was mass produced in the mid-1900s.

We have to also be aware that a lot of the communities that have been harmed are still being harmed, and they really need our help.

23 Gone, Countless More to Save

Are you angry about the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker and 22 other species? Good. Use it.

Many journalists have difficult beats — the specialized topics they cover exclusively or repeatedly. Some write about homicides, some cover local politics, others specialize in investigating sexual assault.

For the past 15-plus years, I’ve been on the extinction beat. I catalog the dead and the dying.

It’s important to me, but it’s not an easy assignment. It’s hard work, it’s emotional, it’s seemingly endless, and it doesn’t make me much fun at parties (well, the parties I still attended before the pandemic). My wife worries about me.

September 29 was a particularly difficult day.

That was the day the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared its intention to remove 23 long-unseen species — including the ivory-billed woodpecker and a mussel called the flat pigtoe — from the protection of the Endangered Species Act. The agency did this not because those species have recovered, but because they never will.

You can’t keep protecting what’s probably extinct.

These species haven’t been seen in decades, and most of their habitats have been damaged or destroyed. Sure, some dedicated people will probably continue to look for several of these species, especially the woodpecker, but the odds aren’t in their favor.

Lost species do turn up from time to time, even after they’ve been declared extinct, but in all likelihood these 23 are long gone. Many disappeared while waiting to be added to the endangered species list. Others were so rare by the time they were protected that their chances of recovery hovered somewhere between slim and none.

As they disappeared, as their habitats suffered, so did pieces of our culture, our interconnected environmental web, our safety nets, our souls.

I spent most of September 29 wrapped in a melancholy shroud.

September 30 was different.

I got up. I stretched. I took several deep breaths. And I got to work to see what species could still be saved.

That’s the hidden truth of working the extinction beat. I report on the dying and the dead, sure, but I also spend my days talking to the scientists, conservationists, activists, politicians and average citizens working hard to make sure that as few species as possible go the way of the flat pigtoe, the Molokai creeper, the Scioto madtom, the Little Mariana fruit bat, or any of the other 19 species the Fish and Wildlife Service just proposed as extinct.

Writing about extinction and endangered species is an intrinsically positive beat, because the lessons we gain from loss help to prevent further grief in the future.

Because everyday heroes are out there making a difference.

Because the more we learn, the better we can adapt.

Because the more we fight, the better off we’ll all be in the long run.

Those lessons aren’t always easy to get out there. Most extinction announcements sink like a stone in black water, disappearing without making a ripple. I’ve reported on hundreds of at-risk species and extinctions that no other journalists have covered. It’s hard to get people to care about rarely seen mussels, snails, insects, plants and faraway mammals when they’ve got daily struggles with work, childcare, aging parents, political strife and the pandemic.

But this time, I’ll admit, was different. Perhaps it was the iconic ivory-billed woodpecker; perhaps it was the fact that Fish and Wildlife presented a bulk list of extinctions. But reporters, editors and the public took notice. The story of the 23 presumably gone species appeared on the front pages of almost every major newspaper. The nightly news programs and 24-hour cable TV stations covered the loss. For a brief, shining moment, it even trended on Twitter.

And most of the coverage did a good job. The media discussed the causes of the extinction crisis, and what it costs both us and the planet. They dug up evocative old photos and videos. They spoke to scientists who choked up with emotion during interviews. They conveyed the pain of loss.

Hopefully they’ll do that the next time, too. Because there will be next times.

But let’s keep talking about the present. Did you see those news stories and feel that pain? Did you experience a sense of loss? Did the news, or the broader the extinction crisis, make you sad and angry?

Good — it should.

Use that pain.

Embrace that grief.

Be angry.

Commit.

Refuse to accept further declines.

Take a deep breath, stretch, talk to someone about the work they’re doing, and find out how you can support it. Act.

We can come away from this — the same way I do every time I write a species’ obituary — and promise to do better.

Otherwise, these 23 species died in vain. And that would be the ultimate tragedy.

The 23 species proposed for delisting due to their presumed extinction:

- Bachman’s warbler
- Bridled white-eye
- Flat pigtoe mussel
- Green-blossom pearly mussel
- Ivory-billed woodpecker
- Kauai akialoa
- Kauai nukupuu
- Kauaʻi ʻōʻō
- Large Kauai thrush
- Little Mariana fruit bat
- Maui ākepa
- Maui nukupuʻu
- Molokai creeper
- Phyllostegia glabra var. lanaiensis
- Po`ouli
- San Marcos gambusia
- Scioto madtom
- Southern acornshell mussel
- Stirrupshell mussel
- Tubercled-blossom pearly mussel
- Turgid-blossom pearly mussel
- Upland combshell mussel
- Yellow-blossom pearly mussel

Previously in The Revelator:

What We’ve Lost: The Species Declared Extinct in 2020

Picturing Extinction

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

America’s Freshwater Mussels Are Going Extinct — Here’s Why That Sucks

Links From the Brink: 8 Good Environmental News Stories You Might Have Missed

This month saw some great successes for wildlife and the climate — all made possible by decades of action and perseverance.

We’ve had a particularly brutal summer — not to mention spring and winter — so now that autumn has arrived, let’s take a break from all the awful environmental news to focus on a few good-news items you may have missed. These aren’t necessarily resounding successes — we still have a long way to go on all fronts — but they illustrate that hard work and persistence can pull us back from the brink just as greed and indifference can push us toward it.

Bandicoot Crash Reversed: This month the eastern barred bandicoot (Perameles gunnii) achieved an all-too-rare conservation milestone when Australia declared the species is no longer considered “extinct in the wild.” That’s a big change from 30 years ago, when invasive foxes and cats had eaten up nearly all these rabbit-sized marsupials. Since then captive-breeding programs and reintroduction efforts on predator-free islands have helped the species recover. The population hit 1,500 this year, enough to upgrade the bandicoots to merely “endangered” status. They have a long way to go to bounce back to their pre-fox levels, but we’ll still call this the best news of the month.

(PS: Hey, Australia, now do the same thing with your endangered frogs.)

Mercury Falling: We’ve known for a long time that burning coal harms human health — and now a new study shows that the cardiovascular benefits of reducing mercury emissions are at least 100 times more than previous estimates. The EPA has long pegged the annual value of mercury reductions at about $6 million in reduced societal and healthcare costs, but the new study ups that to “several billion dollars per year.”

Why is this dangerous revelation good news? It always helps to find out how things are harming us so we can make a change. This research has enormous potential to improve human health, and the researchers say it should offer further incentives for decarbonizing our economy.

Despite these conclusions, the study generated almost no media coverage outside the subscription-only E&E News. That’s a shame, so let’s hope the right people see it moving forward and the results are incorporated into plans for a just energy transition. They should also play a role in the EPA’s promise to revisit the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards weakened by the Trump administration.

Howling Good News: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a status review of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) in the western United States, which the Trump administration removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act two days before the insurrection. This move — which, full disclosure, stems from petitions by several conservation groups, including our publisher, the Center for Biological Diversity — comes just as Idaho and Montana plan massive wolf hunts. Tragically, the Fish and Wildlife Service has taken no action to stop those slaughters (which have already started), but it’s still welcome news that could eventually restore the species’ protection.

(As long as we’re talking about it, this on-again, off-again protection for wolves has grown expensive in both blood and treasure — for U.S. taxpayers and most of all for the hundreds of wolves that have been shot and trapped over the past few years. Maybe, if they get protected again, we can just keep it that way?)

Sirocco, the world-famous kākāpō. Photo: Chris Birmingham/New Zealand Department of Conservation (CC BY 2.0)

Kākāpō Code: In good news for one of the world’s rarest parrots (and one of my favorite species), new research finds that the last 201 kākāpō (Strigops habroptila) remain genetically healthy despite centuries of inbreeding. All of today’s remaining kākāpō have descended from just 50 birds rescued from extinction in 1995 and placed into a conservation breeding program, but the inbreeding started long before that — as much as 10,000 years ago, due to the island-loving, flightless birds’ extreme isolation.

This inbreeding, as odd as it may seem, could be one reason why the species has survived: It’s basically already bred mutations out of the system.

The other reason kākāpō have survived? People. Not only do the birds have a dedicated crew of New Zealand conservationists working to help them, they’re also beloved by the general public. This genetic work got its start with a crowdfunding campaign back in 2016, when there were only 125 kākāpō alive. The fact that the population has grown so much in the past five years while we continued to expand our conservation knowledge is a testament to both these groups.

Pahk the Electric Cah in Hahvahd Yahd: After years of activism by students and alumni, mega-rich Harvard University finally announced it has divested its $40 billion endowment from fossil fuels, except for a few “legacy” funds that will soon be liquidated. Harvard all but laughed at activists when they first brought up this issue a decade ago. Now it’s set the stage for other universities to follow.

BREAKING: After a decade of constant pressure by students, faculty, and alums, @HARVARD IS FINALLY DIVESTING FROM FOSSIL FUELS.

It’s a massive victory for our community, the climate movement, and the world — and a strike against the power of the fossil fuel industry. (THREAD) pic.twitter.com/56yESznMMY

— Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard 🔶 (@DivestHarvard) September 9, 2021

Coal’s Continued Decline: A report from a trio of climate groups finds that more than 75% of the world’s planned new coal plants have been abandoned since the 2015 Paris climate accord — a number that’s probably already even higher, since just a few days after the report came out China pledged that it would stop building new coal plants abroad.

Obviously, China itself remains a major consumer of coal within its borders, and critics say this pledge came with precious few details, but we’ll take what victories we can get.

(Let’s not forget the counterpoint to this story, though: U.S. coal production is up 8.4% this year, according to data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Sept. 23. Sigh…)

Billions for Biodiversity: A group of deep-pocketed philanthropists this month pledged a collective $5 billion over the next 10 years to protect the world’s wildlife — undoubtedly the largest-ever charitable pledge to save biodiversity. They’ve tied this “Protecting Our Planet Challenge” to the 30×30 initiative, which aims to set aside 30% of the globe for preservation by the year 2030.

No grantees have been announced yet, so it will be interesting to see how this develops and how the charities distribute their funds. One participant, the Bezos Earth Fund, drew criticism for ignoring grassroots organizations in its first round of funding late last year but promised to prioritize “the voices of Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities” with this effort.

buildings with a/c units — Photo: Pixabay

Cool News: The EPA this month finalized new rules to reduce the production and use of super-polluting hydrofluorocarbons by 85% over the next 15 years — a huge win for both the Biden administration and the climate. HFC chemicals, used in refrigeration and air conditioning, are extremely potent greenhouse gases that the international community has agreed to regulate but which got a big boost from the Trump administration (yeah, them again).

Next step: President Biden needs to make sure the United States finally ratifies the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which aims to reduce worldwide HFC use enough to avoid about 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming by century’s end. (And FYI, the Senate could ratify a few other environmental treaties while they’re at it.)

RIP to a Giant: This month scientists reported the death of Okefenokee Joe, an 11-and-a-half-foot alligator believed to have died of old age after a lifetime of swimming through Georgia’s swamps — since World War II.

Wait, why is the death of this massive beast in a list of good news? Easy: because he lived so long in the first place! It’s painfully rare for a megafauna predator in this country to achieve old age — let alone die of natural causes. Joe served to remind us what’s possible when we protect our habitats and the wildlife that live within them.

What’s Next? Will we see much more good news in October? Sure, but we may need to go digging to find it, as topics like the infrastructure debate will continue to dominate the beltway press in the month(s) ahead. Meanwhile we’re still in the middle of hurricane season, so we expect plenty of news about extreme weather events. We’ll also see a lot of buildup for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, which starts Oct. 31. We hope that won’t be a disaster, too.

On a more celebratory note, next month will bring World Migratory Bird Day, California Clean Air Day and the simply named Wombat Day, among other occasions and events.

What else are you watching or waiting for in the months ahead? Good news or bad, drop us a line anytime.

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.