‘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
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.

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.

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“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.

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.”

Community composting
Community composting. Photo courtesy of BLARG.

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.”

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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.

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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
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.

Occupy Hilo
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.

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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.

VanishingOver 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
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.

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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.the ask

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.

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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? book cover

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.

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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

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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.

eastern barred bandicoot
Eastern barred bandicoot (1863 illustration). Via Biodiversity Heritage Library

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.

wolf
Photo: Jim Peaco/Yellowstone National Park

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
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.

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.

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Infrastructure for Insects: Congress Should Invest in Bees and Butterflies

The new infrastructure bill would fund new habitat for pollinators — and help people and wildlife in the process.

The insect world’s version of the ultramarathon is now taking place across the United States. Monarch butterflies have started their journey to the groves where they’ll spend the winter. Monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains have a long trip to the California coast before them, while eastern monarchs have a hefty 3,000-mile trek to the forests of Mexico.

Despite their hardy nature, monarchs have suffered severe population losses. In the past several decades the eastern population has declined 80%, while its western counterpart has fared even more poorly. In the West, monarchs are at less than 0.1% of the population they had in the 1980s. Last year’s winter count fell short of just 2,000 butterflies. These numbers reflect a very real threat of extinction for this iconic species.

But there’s hope, and it comes from an unexpected place: the Biden administration’s infrastructure agenda.

In addition to supporting traditional infrastructure such as roads and bridges, the current version of the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act in Congress contains funding for pollinator-friendly roadsides, as well as provisions to revegetate areas devastated by invasive species.

Throughout the United States, there are 10 million acres of prime space for habitat along roadsides. Why not use it to rebuild populations for butterflies and bees? That’s the opportunity before us, and the infrastructure bill would provide $2 million annually to relevant agencies for pollinator-friendly plantings. Grants of up to $150,000 would go toward much-needed projects for “planting and seeding of native, locally appropriate grasses and wildflowers, including milkweed.” Other techniques to protect pollinators detailed in the bill — yes, it’s that thorough — are as simple as reducing mowing frequency, timing mowing to avoid disturbing pollinators, and using pesticides more judiciously.

Roadswide milkweed
Roadside milkweed. Photo: Katie McVey/USFWS

None of these concepts are new. Earlier this year, similar language appeared in the Monarch and Pollinator Highway Act of 2021, a bill introduced by Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore). Several years before that, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued best management practices for this type of roadside habitat. On a more local level, nine state departments of transportation — including those in California, Iowa and Florida — have led the way on these common-sense projects.

Another piece of the infrastructure bill would provide $50 million annually in grants to eliminate, control and prevent invasive plants, which throw native ecosystems out of balance. The Invasive Plant Elimination Program would prioritize funding to revegetation programs utilizing native plants and wildflowers, including pollinator-friendly species. This strategy offers a boon to pollinators and other wildlife in these healing ecosystems.

And they need the help. America’s pollinators face an imperiled future due to decades of exposure to toxic pesticides, disappearing habitat and a changing climate. In addition to monarchs, one report found that more than half of native bee species in North America are in decline, including the rusty patched bumblebee. We need infrastructure that prioritizes these creatures.

smooth coneflower
Smooth coneflower growing under transmission lines. Photo: Caroline S. Krom, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NC Sandhills Safe Harbor Coordinator

If we’re wise, we’ll invest in pollinator habitats for several reasons. First, given that insect pollinators contribute tens of billions of dollars of value to our agriculture, it makes economic sense to ensure they’re abundant and healthy themselves. Roadside habitats near farms can increase pollination services and boost crop yields while reducing crop pests in the process.

Second, losing pollinators — especially native species — can have permanent ecological repercussions. Tremors in the web of life caused by the extinction of our pollinators affect animals that depend on them for food and nearly 90% of all flowering plants, including those that have co-evolved with these pollinators.

Third, losing monarch butterflies and other pollinators would make our lives less rich and less beautiful.

mission blue butterfly
Endangered mission blue butterfly (Icaricia icarioides missionensis). Photo: Stuart Weiss/USFWS

Congress can help. While building roads and a more robust infrastructure system, Congress should also vote for the bill so we can build roadside habitats and increase the resiliency of pollinator populations. Providing diverse, healthy habitat will meet a long-neglected need for the thousands of native pollinators in the country. Along the way, it will help put these vital insects to work — for nature’s benefit and for our own.

The work to save our pollinators will not end with the infrastructure bill, but with this added to the protections already in place, we can halt the monarch’s flutter toward extinction.

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.

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

Thor Hanson’s new book explains the biology behind climate change and why some species may be better able to survive a quickly changing planet.

When it comes to climate change, nature hasn’t had the luxury of waiting for foot-dragging politicians or stonewalling corporations or science deniers. Countless species are already on the move.the ask

“Just as the planet is changing faster than anyone expected, so too are the plants and animals that call it home,” writes biologist Thor Hanson in a new book that explores the field of climate change biology.

In Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change, Hanson talks to scientists all over the world about how plants and animals are moving and changing, and why some are inherently better set up for success than others. Hanson also discusses evolution-in-action, what happens when hundreds of thousands of species hit the road at once, and what we can learn from scientists with a front-row view of the climate crisis.

Hanson’s own understanding of the climate crisis comes from decades of fieldwork where climate issues rose to the top, even when it wasn’t the intended area of investigation. “You’d go to the field expecting to study one thing and come home with a very different dataset because the conditions on the ground had changed so much,” he told The Revelator.

What have you learned about which species are most vulnerable to climate change and those that are better capable of adapting?

If you start to look for overarching themes in the field of climate change biology, one that comes out quickly is the difference between specialists and generalists in nature. And by that I mean the creatures or plants that are very flexible and general in how they can behave and adapt. Those are the ones that are particularly good at thriving under a variety of conditions. And there are many examples of this that we’re so familiar with, like dandelions, which can bloom any time of year. They can grow in the gravel of your driveway and be small and tiny. Or they can grow in the lush area of the lawn that you water and be gigantic. They’re just extremely flexible generalists.

Thor Hanson
Author and biologist Thor Hanson. Photo: Kathleen Ballard Photography

So animals or plants that are in that category are already well-suited to cope with change.

The ones that stand out as the most vulnerable oftentimes are the specialists that depend upon a particular type of habitat or relationship. For example, the very tightly co-evolved relationships between pollinators and the flowers they pollinate. Sometimes it’s one pollinator specializing on one particular flower. Those kinds of tight relationships are very much at risk from this kind of rapid environmental change.

Is it possible to quantify how many species are moving in response to climate change and how that’s changing ecosystems?

I spoke with a number of people about this, but one in particular, a scientist named Greta Pecl, said that we know that between 25% to 85% of species on the planet are moving already in response to climate change. But when it comes to what that means and how those novel ecosystems with all these new neighbors will get along in the future, she said “we haven’t really got our shit together on that.”

It’s extremely complicated to try to predict how these ecosystems will settle through this period of change. Animals, plants, pests, pathogens — all of these things are moving and recombining in habitats in ways that they never have before.

Are you surprised by how fast some of the change is happening?

Yes, the speed of the responses for some things has been almost instantaneous. One of the great examples of that would be the Humboldt squid in the Gulf of California. When the waters warmed, fishers and everyone there thought that the squid had moved on. It’s a mobile species and things had gotten too hot and they disappeared.

But when folks went out and did surveys, they found in fact that the squid were still there and more plentiful than ever. But the warm water or the stress from that heat had triggered a complete lifestyle change where they were maturing twice as fast, reaching only half their normal size and eating different foods.book cover

Their adult bodies were so much smaller and so different that they were too small to bite the hooks that people had been using for decades to catch these big squid. The few that they could hook, they assumed must be juveniles or maybe even another species, and they were throwing them back.

So that is an example of the inherent flexibility built into a species. We all have a bit of what they call in biology, plasticity. It’s built into your genome to be able to deal with a certain amount of environmental change. Some species, like this squid, have a lot of it. Some species have very little. So it’s the ones that lack plasticity that are more at risk.

That’s an example of what we see a lot in nature right now is these plastic responses that are already built into species’ genomes. But there are now a few examples of evolution taking place in response to climate change and taking place quickly.

One of these stories comes to us from a scientist named Colin Donihue, who did some work on a little anole lizard that lives in the Turks and Caicos islands in the Caribbean. Colin and his team were there surveying and taking all these measurements of the lizard because there was going to be a project to remove non-native rats that were eating the lizards. And they wanted to see the response to getting rid of those rats.

But two weeks after their field season, two category four hurricanes slammed across the island with extreme winds, uprooting trees and destroying structures and causing flooding. That took the rat eradication project off the books, but Colin and his team realized it was a rare opportunity to look at what impact the hurricane had on those lizards.

So they went back down there, repeated the same field measurements and learned that the surviving lizards had measurably larger toe pads and stronger front legs for gripping tight to the branches and tree trunks they were holding onto during those high winds. And the odd part was that their back legs were smaller.

To figure out why they simulated hurricane-force winds with a leaf blower and watched the behavior of the lizards. They learned that, in fact, they hold on tightly with those strong front legs and their back legs and tail flap out like a sail in the wind. So if you have smaller back legs, it’s less drag and you have a better chance of hanging on through the hurricane.

They documented all of this and then went back again later and showed that indeed these traits were being passed on to the next generation. And then they looked at a broad sweep of anoles across the Caribbean and found that this sort of selection — this evolution — has been going on in response to hurricanes all over the place. Wherever you have frequent, strong hurricanes, the anoles in those populations have these larger toe pads and stronger front legs.

So you can really see the effects of extreme weather playing out just over the course of a few generations.

Are you ever worried that when people read about the ways that some species are adapting it may make them think that climate change won’t be a problem for most plants and animals?

Yes, it’s a concern, I think, of anyone working in this field. They want to document what’s going on, but not give people the sense that everything’s going to be fine. In fact, it’s not going to be fine. There’s still a great cause for worry. This is still a crisis.

It’s always important in a discussion of climate change biology to call out that we have some very compelling and even inspiring examples of rapid change and response and survival. But those are counterbalanced by the many species that can’t respond quickly — that don’t have that flexibility — and that are at risk of perishing.

But 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.

And another thing that can be in short supply is emotional capital. I think it’s very easy to feel despair, to feel overwhelmed by such a large problem. So worrying smart also allows us to allocate our emotional capital, too.

On that note, did you come away from this research feeling more worried or hopeful?

When you think about all these scientists who’ve spent their whole careers studying species or ecosystems that might be really suffering, you’d think that they would have more reason to worry and lose hope than anyone.

Yet what I encountered, without fail, was people who remained passionate and committed to their research efforts really felt like what they were doing was making a difference. And I came away from that surprised and somewhat gratified by the power of curiosity as a response to this crisis. It’s a balance to the negative feelings.

I mean, despair, if you will, just leads to more despair. But curiosity leads to learning. And it leads to action. I really saw that across the board with the scientists that I spoke with. And I took that as a message of inspiration.

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Vanishing: A Bond Across Centuries

A trip to a remote Newfoundland island to visit one of the last strongholds of the extinct great auks.

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.

A few years ago, after traveling more than 1,500 miles by plane, car and boat, I finally found myself on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island. I was there to visit the great auk — or at least its memory.

VanishingA gentle and curious diving bird, much like a penguin, the great auk once thrived in the North Atlantic and numbered in the millions. Awkward on land, it was a strong swimmer capable of accelerating underwater, then shooting itself above the ocean’s surface onto an island ledge, where they would hop ashore to find a mate. The largest colony was at Funk Island, about 30 miles northeast of Fogo Island.

To know where certain animals thrive is to know something special about our world. I take comfort in thinking about the penguins in Antarctica, the blue-footed boobies of the Galápagos, the Tasmanian devils, and even the star-nosed moles that live in the eastern United States and Canada. It doesn’t matter that I have never seen these animals in person. What matters to me is that they have found their place in the world, somewhere they belong.

The great auk I went to visit was a five-foot-tall bronze sculpture created by artist Todd McGrain for his Lost Bird Project. He installed larger-than-life sculptures of five extinct North American birds at places where they last thrived. The others pay tribute to passenger pigeons, heath hens, Labrador ducks and Carolina parakeets.

On Fogo Island, at the eastern end of the village of Joe Batt’s Arm, a handmade sign pointed the way to the sculpture. It was an hour’s walk along a grassy trail, with a sound of terns calling in the wind and waves crashing against the granite rocks in the small bay. For millennia great auks would have swum here, catching fish, resting on the rocks.

The tragedy of the great auk was to breed — in the thousands — on Funk Island, not far from the abundant cod stocks in the Grand Banks. When European fishing vessels came to Newfoundland in the early 16th century, they saw the birds as a bonanza and seized on them as a source of fresh meat, as well as oil for lamps. Their feathers became pillows and mattresses, and their eggs were collected for food.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing fishermen guide the tame, penguin-like birds up gangplanks onto boats. It was a wholesale slaughter, and their numbers plummeted through the 1700s. In 1785, English explorer George Cartwright wrote about the crews of men who lived on Funk Island all summer to harvest feathers and warned, “If a stop is not soon put to that practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing.”

By 1800 no great auks remained on Funk Island. They were soon gone from Fogo Island, too.

When I arrived at the sculpture, I found myself struck by its elegance. I couldn’t help but run my hand over its smooth lines. The sculpture looked east across the ocean toward a similar sculpture in Iceland. I took photos and then sheltered in the crevice of some boulders to sit with the sculpture for awhile.

I thought about the facts that I knew: Great auk partners both tended to their single large egg laid on bare rock; they took turns going into the ocean to feed; eggs had unique marbled markings; the last pair of great auks was strangled off Iceland in 1844 while incubating an egg.

Here was a special moment alone with the sculpture, shielded from the wind, carved out of the long history of the area, where I could think why it was there in the first place.

Before we left, I felt I needed something to signify our visit, some sort of ritual. I grabbed my water bottle and approached the sculpture again. I poured some water into my cupped hand and let it drip onto its head. In that moment, the ritual caught me and suddenly felt significant. It was a moment of honoring the memory of the great auk and grieving its loss. As I thought about it afterwards, perhaps it wasn’t me blessing the sculpture, but the great auk blessing me.

It was strange for me to form a bond with a bird that has been extinct for nearly two centuries. That bond would undoubtedly be much stronger if the great auk still existed here, occupying its place in the world, rather than only in our imaginations. Our grief for lost animals is an expression of our love. It’s a reminder that the beauty and diversity of the tree of life should never be taken for granted, and that we, with all our strivings, ingenuity and empathy, still need to understand our own place on the tree.

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California’s Reliance on Dams Puts Fish in Hot Water

Water releases from dams aren’t that good at mimicking natural conditions, a new study finds.

As California’s prized salmon runs teeter toward extinction in another crushing drought, a new study highlights the need to rethink dams — a key part of the state’s water management.

For decades, water managers have released water from reservoirs in an attempt to mimic natural stream flows and temperatures, with a special eye on keeping water cold enough for salmon, which can’t tolerate temperatures above 72 degrees Fahrenheit. The belief was that California could dam most of its rivers to grow cities and food but continue to support wildlife if enough cold water was released from dams at the right time.

But the study, published in PLOS One, could call some of that management paradigm into question. Researchers from the University of California, Davis analyzed stream temperature data from 77 sites, including 27 dams. They found that only one site — Shasta Dam — created temperature patterns that resemble natural ones.

salmon under water
Adult fall-run Chinook salmon on the American River in Sacramento County, Calif. Photo: Carl Costas / California Department of Water Resources

The rest of the dams created artificial temperature patterns, some of which persisted for more than 100 miles downstream. In streams fed by mountain runoff, for example, the natural conditions are usually colder than what dams — which store heat along with water — can produce. These altered temperature patterns can stress or kill fish like salmon and alter cues and processes for a range of other aquatic species.

“The biggest takeaway from this study is the idea that we really can’t engineer ourselves into a better natural environment than what nature can produce itself,” says Ann Willis, a senior staff researcher at the U.C. Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and co-author of the study.

That may be tough news for water managers to hear in a state that has 1,500 dams. But the realization comes at a critical time.

If dam regulation can’t provide enough cold water for salmon and healthy ecosystems today, that’s likely to get even worse in the coming years. Climate change is expected to reduce by half the amount of cold-water habitat across the country. And warming temperatures mean California will see less water in its reservoirs from snow melt.

That’s bad news for species barely hanging on. Extinction is likely for three quarters of California’s native salmonids, the study reports.

“For dams that lack both the capacity to produce a stable or variable cold regimes and lack passage above the dam, these barriers may be insurmountable for species’ recovery,” the researchers wrote.

It’s also far more than salmon that will be affected.

“We know that healthy, functioning streams benefit everything, including people,” says Willis. “Temperature is really an indicator of how the whole system is doing. When a stream is not the right temperature, just like when you and I would get a fever or become hypothermic, that’s an indication that there’s a whole system collapse happening.”

Dams also affect the quality of the water — something that’s especially apparent with groundwater-fed springs that come to the surface loaded with important nutrients derived from the rocks underground. These nutrients flow downstream and help nourish the ecosystem. Water flowing through a reservoir, however, doesn’t have those same properties.

Willis says that while they found the outlet of Shasta Dam can mimic the temperature pattern of a spring-fed stream, it still lacks these nutrients needed for a healthy and resilient river.

The study, however, could help shine a light on that and improve how resources are spent in the state by helping to identify high-quality, cold-water habitats that could be prioritized for conservation.

“Thermal regime classification developed in this study can be used to identify areas where conservation investment will support the recovery and persistence of valued native species,” the researchers wrote.

Willis also hopes these findings help spur a change in thinking about California’s water portfolio. In the past, the answer to water woes has been to build more infrastructure. During California’s last drought the state passed a water bond allocating billions for new water storage projects, including potential new dams.

But if we double down on more dam building, it will come with a big environmental cost.

spider excavators removing dam
Spider excavators remove a dam on San Juan Creek in California’s Cleveland National Forest. Photo: Julie Donnell, USFS

“I think what this study really says is if we go down that path, we are unlikely to achieve any of the other conservation goals we have set for ourselves,” says Willis. That includes protecting species like salmon, but also creating resilient ecosystems as buffers against climate change and conserving 30% of our land and water — a target of both the Newsom and Biden administrations.

“I would really urge people to keep in mind that it wasn’t because we didn’t build enough dams that we’re in this mess,” she says. “It’s that we really underestimated our ability to influence natural processes that we were relying on for water security.”

Instead, she suggests, it’s time to begin looking at removing dams — like four on the Klamath River — and many others that have outlived their usefulness. There are other options for increasing water security, including recharging aquifers to utilize natural below-ground storage.

“Dams were never meant to be permanent,” she says. “And so now we have an opportunity to be very mindful and deliberate about where we start removing some dams to restore the natural processes that we all need to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

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