Demand for their scales (and their habitats) has pushed these anteaters to the brink. But why aren’t more conservationists working to protect them in the wild?
Species name:
Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), one of the eight species of pangolins.
The Sunda pangolin is a medium-sized mammal in the order Pholidota. Adults weigh 14-17 pounds and their bodies typically measure 15-26 inches in length, with a tail nearly as long.
Unique among mammals, pangolins are covered by rows of overlapping scales made of keratin. They use their long, sticky tongues while foraging for prodigious numbers of ants and termites; tens of millions of these insects are consumed by a single pangolin annually. They’re also skilled climbers; Sunda pangolins use their claws and semi-prehensile tails to navigate and rest in trees when not foraging on the ground.
Where they’re found:
Sunda pangolins are distributed across eight countries in Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The species is found in primary and secondary forests, preferring habitats at lower elevations.
Why they’re at risk:
Habitat loss for agricultural development and poaching for illegal wildlife markets are the main contributors to the Sunda pangolin’s precarious status. In some lowland areas of our study areas in Sumatra, they’re confined to marginal scraps of habitat in areas neglected by plantation developers because the land was too swampy to bulldoze.
Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in restaurants of Asia, particularly in China and Vietnam. Sunda pangolin scales are also used in traditional Chinese medicine, for which they fetch prices as high as $3,500/kg on the black market.
It’s unfortunate that Sunda pangolins, who were the subject of considerable debate as potential reservoirs of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, do not receive more attention in their native habitats from researchers. There are still very few comprehensive conservation efforts for the species and, until our surveys in Sumatra, they were infrequently detected during camera trapping that often focuses on larger animals such as tigers and clouded leopards. By placing some of our cameras closer to ground level, we’ve been able to accumulate 65 photographic records of Sunda pangolins at our study sites in northern Sumatra. This represents one of the most robust camera-trap datasets on the species collected to date.
What do we need to do to protect this species?
We need more pangolin champions, both local and international. In particular, there’s a strong need for greater awareness and enforcement of laws that ban their trafficking. If you think you may have seen a product made from pangolin scales, you can report it.
What you can do to help:
As long as pangolins are smuggled to international markets, they will require assistance from international sources. That’s tougher now that we’re in the midst of funding freezes and budget cuts for international conservation work, but you can send letters to elected officials urging them to reinstate support. You can also sign petitions from groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
In 2022 Carla Crossman was analyzing the genes of southern right whales when she came across something unexpected.
Decades earlier, in 1989, researchers had used special crossbows to collect small skin samples from 10 southern right whales in their calving grounds off Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula, as part of an effort to assess the species’ genetic diversity. Crossman, a graduate student at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was working with those historical samples when she found herself stuck on the DNA results for one whale in particular: Eau10b.
Scientists studying wild animals need a few key numbers to gauge the health of a population. How many individuals are there, for instance? And, of those, how many are female versus male? This sex ratio reveals whether a population is likely to grow.
After sequencing the DNA for each whale, Crossman had quickly scanned the animals’ chromosomes to guess their sexes. With whales, humans, and other mammals — as well as some fish and even plants like ginkgos and kiwis — males have one Y sex chromosome and one X chromosome, while females have two X chromosomes. Crossman’s data showed that Eau10b had two Xs.
“I had been fairly confident [Eau10b] was a female,” she says.
But when Crossman checked her guess with a routine sex determination technique, called the SRY test, the answer didn’t make sense.
Scientists use this test to determine whether an animal is carrying the SRY (or “sex-determining region Y”) gene, which helps trigger male development. Because the SRY gene only exists on the Y chromosome, testing for its presence is an easy way to deduce an animal’s sex.
Eau10b’s test showed the SRY gene. The whale was male.
Baffled, Crossman turned to a third technique — a test for a set of genes called ZFX and ZFY that show up on the X and Y chromosomes. In Eau10b, Crossman found both genes, confirming that the animal had a Y chromosome. But the whale’s DNA also contained a double dose of ZFX, the gene carried on the X chromosome. The result revealed that Eau10b had a Y chromosome and two X chromosomes, meaning the animal was neither male nor female. Eau10b was an intersex whale — the first of its species known to scientists.
This combination of sex chromosomes occurs when a cell receives an extra copy of the X chromosome during cell division. A similar event can lead to female offspring with three X chromosomes, or males with one X chromosome and two Y chromosomes.
Crossman doesn’t know how many southern right whales with XXY sex chromosomes might be out there. Even Eau10b’s fate is unknown, since the researchers didn’t identify the whale when they took the DNA sample in 1989. But southern right whales can live up to 70 years, so Eau10b may be wintering off Valdés Peninsula to this day.
In humans the XXY chromosome configuration is called Klinefelter syndrome and occurs in less than 0.1 percent of people — most of whom identify as male and may not even realize they have unusual chromosomes.
The terminology and definitions used to talk about intersex individuals have changed over time, especially when referring to people. But according to University of Pennsylvania historian Beans Velocci, who studies the history of sex classification, scientists use the term intersex to describe bodies that, regardless of species, cannot be easily categorized as either male or female. Not all intersex individuals have XXY chromosomes — the term encompasses individuals with a range of characteristics arising from differences in genetics, hormones, and anatomy. An intersex individual may have sex organs or a physical appearance that diverges from the norm. Some individuals, for instance, have a Y chromosome and testes but their cells don’t respond to male sex hormones so their external anatomy is more feminine.
While intersex animals are often infertile and unable to produce offspring to help a population grow, Velocci says that in social species such as whales, intersex animals likely play important nonreproductive roles that benefit the population in other ways.
Studying intersex animals has helped scientists better understand how genes and hormones shape individuals as they develop. Through the process of domesticating livestock, people have known about intersex cows for thousands of years. On Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, islanders nurture a unique strain of intersex pigs prized for their delicate spiraling tusks. More recently, researchers have also documented intersex horses, dogs, moose, sheep, fish, and many different types of invertebrates. Intersex animals are rare across species, Crossman says, but they’re “more common than we historically thought.”
Intersex whales swim below the radar, in particular, because cetaceans have internal genitalia.
“You don’t often get a good look at the genitals of a whale,” Crossman says. “Everything is up inside.” Yet scientists have previously found intersex fin whales, belugas, bowhead whales, short-beaked common dolphins, and True’s beaked whales.
“Every time [researchers] are in the field or looking at specimens, they just keep finding these exceptions,” Velocci says. Scientists “have seen over, and over, and over, and over, that sex is clearly not binary.”
But, Velocci says, scientific education has not adapted.
“XX and XY are [taught as] the foundation that everything else might deviate from, rather than one possible variation among many.”
For certain well-studied species, such as the endangered North Atlantic right whale — a close relative of the southern right whale — researchers guess an individual’s sex by observing behaviors, such as swimming with a new baby, or obvious external characteristics, like the size and color of the genital slit. But for most whales, DNA tests offer the only answer.
Yet Eau10b’s story shows that even the most routine sex tests are not perfect. By reducing sex to the presence or absence of a single gene, SRY, scientists risk overlooking animals that don’t fall neatly into a male-female binary. With recent leaps in genetic research, though, it’s now easier to identify intersex animals by comparing results from different tests.
“We can just start looking,” Crossman says.
When scientists identify the next intersex animal, that information likely won’t change how its species is managed or understood. But that individual, whether a guppy or a whale, will offer another challenge to rigid definitions of sex. What society deems normal is a box carefully drawn around a wild and messy world, and each individual who can’t be contained offers a fascinating glimpse at nature’s true diversity.
Getting started can feel like an insurmountable challenge. But the more you act, the better you’ll get at it — and the more of a difference you’ll make.
As a writer whose novels of suspense often take place in wild spaces around North America, it’s my job to thrill readers while showing them the beauty of nature and importance of biodiversity and preserving habitat and imperiled species.
As a researcher collecting wildlife data to help with conservation in many of those same wild places, I’m terrified about the changes and systemic destruction coming out of the Trump administration.
The author’s latest novel focuses on jaguars, the border wall, and other environmental issues.
Today we face an unprecedented attack on our public lands and environmental protections, and we’re seeing the steps we’d taken toward tackling the climate crisis stripped away. Everyone I talk with expresses fear about what these changes will bring.
Yet many of us still feel so overwhelmed by the steady stream of attacks that we don’t know how to take meaningful action and find ourselves frozen in inaction. We wonder how we can make a difference. In anger, disillusionment, and frustration we watch our elected officials either going along with the destruction or standing by mutely like statues, ineffective against the onslaught.
But we must understand what’s at stake. We must understand what we could lose if the actions of this administration go unchecked.
Parks and Wild Places Under Attack
The onslaught has been constant since the inauguration. The National Park Service was forced to lay off 1,000 probationary employees in February. Another 700 quit after a pressuring, threatening email from Elon Musk’s DOGE claiming they’d be paid through the summer.
DOGE took advantage of the term “probationary” to imply these employees had received poor performance reviews or were “low efficiency.” But DOGE doesn’t seem to understand — or respect — that “probationary” simply means they were new to those positions. Often this doesn’t mean the employees were new to the agency, either, but rather new to that specific position at the agency. Many of the people who were fired had been at their agency for more than 10 years, recently promoted to a new position.
As DOGE removes or forces out these employees, we’re losing valuable expertise. And for the ones who were new to the agency, many were recent graduates with up-to-date knowledge on methodology and technology, so we’re losing that expertise, as well.
This reduction in personnel means that places like Arches National Park had to shut down access to the beloved and popular Fiery Furnace hike due to staffing shortages. Sequoia and Kings Canyon had to suspend all ranger-led programs like nature walks and talks. Many people only visit a park once in their lives, and with rangers unable to reach visitors, vital opportunities to teach people about conservation, the importance of biodiversity, and the value and interconnectedness of nature are being lost. People who might have been inspired to take action for an imperiled species, say, or an environmental issue might leave the park not even knowing that such a problem exists.
During the first Trump presidency, the United States experienced the longest government shutdown in its history. Anyone visiting national parks during those weeks in the winter of 2018-2019 may remember overflowing bathrooms, vandalism, limited or nonexistent rescue and emergency services, closed visitor centers, and other obstacles. Some parks had to shut down entirely. We could very well be headed for these conditions as a norm, if not an even worse situation, where parks could be permanently closed or damaged beyond the ability for tiny, reduced staffs to fix.
And it’s not just the federal workers keeping our parks safe who are getting the axe. Trump has ordered 280 million acres of our national forests to be cut down, with orders to circumvent the Endangered Species Act by using unspecified emergency powers to ignore protections. This will not only eliminate habitat for imperiled species like wolverines, grizzly bears, spotted owls, salmon, and many others, but harm people as well. Intensive deforestation, for example, can pollute the drinking water of local communities.
Congress had appropriated more than $2 billion as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act for wildfire prevention and forest management, but the Trump administration’s funding freeze halted that work. With the additional layoffs of 3,400 Forest Service staff, that vital work has been severely curtailed. This affects ongoing forest-maintenance activities like prescribed burns, which must be done seasonally, at times of the year when fire spread threat is low; that window has now closed in many places.
This onslaught on our parks and forests is made worse by the administration’s desire to open more public land and waters up to mining and the fossil fuel industry, including greatly weakening a rule that protects migratory birds from unintentional killing.
Climate and Other Environmental Risks
And this upswing in the production of fossil fuels puts us in an even worse situation. The climate crisis is the greatest existential threat we face today. We’re already seeing devastating wildfires, hurricanes of unprecedented strength, disastrous flooding, swarms of tornados, sea-level rise, drought, and more. The administration wants to make all of this worse by flinging our country into even more fossil fuel production, despite the fact that we already produce more oil than any other country on the planet and are the biggest exporter of natural gas.
Additional efforts we’ve made toward combating the climate crisis are being ripped away. Trump left the Paris Climate Accord. His administration has frozen funds appropriated for clean-energy projects. It has halted leasing for wind-energy projects on public lands and in federal waters and even considered halting renewable-energy projects on private land. Trump told Congress to get rid of tax credits and subsidies for electric vehicles. Programs designed to research and combat climate change affecting marginalized communities have ended, and the very vocabulary addressing climate change has been expunged from many federal websites.
The administration even wants to interfere with state-run programs, such as California’s high speed rail project, its mandate to end the sale of gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035, and New York’s congestion pricing program.
To make matters worse, the new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, wants to roll back regulations that protect us from pollution and has moved to reject the pivotal 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to our health, referring to climate change science as a “religion.” He says that moving forward, the EPA will no longer account for the cost of resulting climate change-driven disasters such as devastating storm damage, wildfires, drought, flooding, and more.
None of this is remotely based in science. It’s not logical. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Zeldin claims that getting rid of EPA regulations will make cars less expensive and businesses cheaper to run. But that isn’t the EPA’s role: It doesn’t exist to make things cheaper. It exists because of situations like the Cuyahoga River being so polluted it caught on fire in 1969; it exists to prevent acid rain; it exists to clean up cancer-causing toxins like the Missouri dioxin contamination calamity, one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
The EPA exists to save lives and keep us healthy.
We Must Act
Some Americans believe the spin that’s being put on all these disastrous changes — that they’re somehow in our best interest. I don’t know how to get those Americans to see the truth behind the spin.
Other Americans, in fact most Americans, realize that all this is a calamity.
But many people still aren’t taking action. They aren’t writing letters or calling their representatives. They aren’t attending protests or sharing news articles.
Many aren’t reading the news at all. They’ve tuned out. They say it depresses them.
And I get that. But not reading the news and not doing anything aren’t going to make this magically go away. The only thing it’ll do is let these bad actors and bad policies win.
Think it’s depressing now? Imagine when our forests are decimated, when soot from smokestacks is choking the air, when our drinking water is polluted, when we can no longer escape to a national park because it’s been shuttered or permanently damaged, when a visit to a national forest is marred by strip mines and oil derricks that are leaching poison into the soil.
But these terrible events aren’t set in stone yet. Repealing EPA regulations, for instance, will require a period of public comment, and the time to act is now.
When I’m interviewed on podcasts and when I hear from my readers, people are always asking me what they can do to help wildlife and the environment. They say they feel hopeless and unsure of how to make a difference.
As I tell them, the key is to just start taking action.
It may seem insurmountable at first, like pushing an old, rusted car that has lain out in someone’s field for years. The first time you push against it, you hear the rusted wheels give a little squeak. It moves an inch. The next time you push it, the rust breaks free and you push it a foot. Taking just a small initial step will make you feel better. You’ll feel emboldened to do more. You’ll see that you can make a difference, and actions will come easier and more efficiently. Soon that car will be rushing down a hill— all you have to do is steer it.
We don’t have the luxury to simply tune out and turn away. Not if we’re going to protect our environment, our beautiful public lands, and the magnificent animals we share this planet with.
We’ve got to encourage individuals who care but aren’t speaking up to join us. We’ve got to impress upon them what’s at stake. So talk about what’s going on. Share easy ways people can act like 5calls.org, ResistBot, and No Voice Unheard. Encourage people to donate to nonprofits like the Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator), who are taking legal action to block these illegal orders.
If your friends or family are overwhelmed by the news, suggest sources like WTF Just Happened Today to get an encapsulated view of what’s going on. The Substack Chop Wood, Carry Water is a great resource for camaraderie, support, and convenient, laid-out actions people can take to speak out.
Speaking out works. Public outcry has made the Trump administration back down several times during its first term and again over the past two months. These victories give us time and breathing space to keep fighting.
In the meantime, just as we did during the first Trump administration, we need to urge our local and state governments to do the right thing — to protect our state and local parks and open spaces, to fund renewable energy projects, and to keep environmental regulations in place.
In the words of writer and conservationist Wallace Stegner: “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” These are our public lands, and we need to protect them.
We need to stand together. We need to resist as never before.
The cartoonist will shine a satirical light on some of the biggest environmental problems of the day, including the extinction crisis.
Tom Toro is among the rare cartoonists whose work has become an internet meme. His most famous cartoon, which you’ve probably seen more than once, shows some raggedy survivors huddled around a post-apocalyptic fire:
Toro has tackled other environmental issues in his cartoons for The New Yorker, Yale Climate Connections, and other publications, his own syndicated comic strip, “Home Free,” as well as his children’s picture books. Some of his cartoons will be collected later this year in his new book And to Think We Started as a Book Club…
Now he’s focusing his satiric lens on the extinction crisis — and The Revelator. Exclusive Tom Toro cartoons will soon appear in our newsletter every 2-3 weeks.
“I’m enjoying this too much,” Toro says. “I finally have an outlet for my lifelong love of animals and nature.”
Amidst a comeback for the red-cockaded woodpecker — the South’s not-always-welcome neighbor — a new legal status and presidential administration create uncertainty.
For decades I observed the paradox. The landscape around the coastal North Carolina home where my parents retired was being developed at a rate that I have never seen anywhere. Yet right across a frenetic, four-lane state highway from my parents’ house sat a 63,000-acre state refuge — a little gem of native habitat supporting a longleaf pine savanna and a unique wetland called pocosin or Carolina bay.
The Holly Shelter Game Lands are home to many species, including Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) and red-cockaded woodpeckers (Leuconotopicus borealis), a bird first listed as endangered in 1970 under a precursor to the federal 1973 Endangered Species Act.
When developers wedged a Dollar General between the game lands and the highway a few years ago, I trusted the Endangered Species Act to protect the red-cockaded woodpeckers living nearby.
Then, in October 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it had “downlisted” the red-cockaded woodpecker from “endangered” to “threatened” — still at risk, but in better shape thanks to ongoing conservation efforts.
That’s typically considered good news, but when I heard it, my heart sank. I could see the vise tightening on the red-cockaded woodpeckers of the Holly Shelter Game Lands.
Each time I visited North Carolina, acres of longleaf pines (Pinus palustris) had disappeared. Some were replaced by the looming piles of dirt that would become a highway bypass, meant to ease traffic and speed commuters between two of the state’s biggest cities, Wilmington and Jacksonville. Other acres of trees gave way to massive apartment complexes that turn their bland backs to the highway.
How could the species not need more protection than ever?
An Unpopular Bird
When I first told my parents, years ago, that their neighbors included a federally endangered species, the red-cockaded woodpecker, my dad waved his hand dismissively toward the birdfeeders in their backyard.
“Those woodpeckers are everywhere,” he said.
He wasn’t alone in that sentiment. In the 1990s a lot of people in North Carolina thought there were entirely too many red-cockaded woodpeckers around. The birds were, in some peoples’ minds, preventing development and logging on private property.
“They called it the woodpecker wars,” says Jeff Walters, a biology professor at Virginia Tech and a leading expert on red-cockaded woodpeckers. Rumor had it that property owners were killing the birds to avoid having their land tied up by conservation.
Peace came in 1995 with a new federal policy, the Safe Harbor Program, which allows voluntary agreements between the Fish and Wildlife Service and private landowners. The landowner promises to improve habitat for federally endangered species, and the government promises not to increase restrictions on the land, even if the population of endangered species grows.
Today they are called Conservation Benefit Agreements, and while they were created in North Carolina for red-cockaded woodpeckers, the popular program is used for many species across the country. “Even in Guam,” a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean, Walters says.
But even with this program, the woodpeckers continued to suffer and decline.
For Want of a Tree
Longleaf pine forests once blanketed over 90 million acres in the southeastern United States, from eastern Texas to southern Virginia, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service. This was the red-cockaded woodpecker’s empire.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers depend on longleaf pines and on a specific habitat — the longleaf pine savanna. They will build cavities in other species of pine, but they strongly prefer longleaf.
The woodpecker relies on the specific biology of the longleaf pine. It’s the only woodpecker to build cavities in living trees. The longleaf pine’s susceptibility to red heart disease, a fungus that rots a tree’s inner wood, makes it easier for the birds to carve out their homes.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers also depend on the longleaf pine forest’s unique ecosystem, which relies on frequent, low-intensity fires and lacks a midstory, that layer of trees in between the shrubby ground cover and the soaring pines themselves.
With these requirements met, the woodpeckers are resilient and thrive even on military bases. “I’ve seen a bird fall off a tree in the middle of artillery training. It just flew back up, not bothered at all,” Walters says.
But European settlers started cutting down longleaf pine forests almost as soon as they landed. Cut-down forests were replanted with faster-growing pine species. Longleaf pine seeds couldn’t sprout when wildfires were suppressed. The birds declined with the forests, and by 2006 longleaf pine forests had hit a low of just 3 million acres — about a 97% decline over their historic numbers.
Today longleaf pine savannas are one of the nation’s most endangered ecosystems, but conservation efforts across the Southeast have boosted the extent of longleaf pine forests to over 5 million acres, according to the Natural Resource Conservation Service. That increase is a success story — but it represents a mere splinter of the forest’s former glory.
Meet the Neighbors
I wanted to meet my parents’ threatened neighbors, so on a warm, sunny Saturday in February, I walked down a dirt road in the Holly Shelter Game Lands looking for them.
David Allen, a wildlife biologist who spent his entire professional career working with red-cockaded woodpeckers, including 28 years with the North Carolina Wildlife Commission, had given me a complicated plan that guaranteed a sighting.
But finding a red-cockaded woodpecker proved much simpler than Allen’s plan: I just looked around when I heard a gentle tapping.
As I walked along the road, I could see where the game lands staff had painted broad, white stripes on trees with woodpecker cavities. I kept walking and heard faint tapping. I could see a black-and-white woodpecker clinging to a pine trunk. But had I found the right bird?
Red-cockaded woodpeckers look a lot like their relatives, hairy woodpeckers (L. villosus), who are common and found all over North America. Both are robin-sized, have black wings with white spots and a white belly. The red-cockaded woodpecker’s belly has black spots. Allen told me to focus in on a woodpecker’s “cheeks” to tell them apart, looking for the broad white patch on a red-cockaded woodpecker’s head, compared to the two thin white stripes on the hairy woodpecker.
Focusing my binoculars on the correct pine trunk in a forest of identical pine trunks was the most difficult part. Then I located it. This bird’s cheek had a broad white patch.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers are average-looking, but their behavior is exceptional. They raise their chicks in family groups — mostly brothers, but also sisters — helping to guard the nest, keep the eggs warm, and bring food to the chicks.
This is rare among birds. Walters says the acorn woodpecker, a western species, does something similar. Crows also raise their young in family groups.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers drill sap wells around future and current nest cavities. It can take anywhere from several months to over a decade to get the dripping pine sap just the way they like it. The sticky sap protects the chicks inside from snakes.
A marked tree with woodpecker cavity. Photo: Madeline Bodin
As I walked through Holly Shelter, I saw lots of small, round cavities in trees. The helper birds roost in those holes. Two holes were surrounded by greenish-gray sap — potential nest cavities.
“Breeding territories are a patriarchy,” Walters says. Sons hang around to inherit a good, sappy nest cavity from their fathers. Sometimes a nest cavity may be started by a grandfather and first used by a grandson.
The combination of family breeding and multigenerational construction could make for telenovela-worthy drama, but on that warm February day, the bird was just theatrically flicking a piece of bark off the tree now and then as it searched for insects.
I looked for a long time. Then, with a flash of dark wings, the woodpecker was gone.
The Downlisting
Walters, who was an academic advisor on the Species Status Assessment that provided the scientific foundation for the downlisting of the red-cockaded woodpecker from endangered to threatened, believes the downlisting is warranted.
“We found that most populations, about 75%, have increased,” he tells me.
Holly Shelter is in the smaller group of populations that haven’t grown, he adds.
Why are red-cockaded woodpecker populations thriving in some areas and struggling in others? “It comes down to forest management,” Walters says.
A healthy forest for these woodpeckers starts with prescribed fire: intentionally set, controlled burns made by trained land managers. By preventing the midstory trees from growing, managers encourage red-cockaded woodpeckers to stick around. Without fire they tend to abandon an area.
Evidence of fire. Photo: Madeline Bodin
Walters says populations also tend to increase when wildlife managers create artificial nest cavities in appropriate habitat near existing family groups.
The Holly Shelter staff does both these things, says Alexander Parker, North Carolina Wildlife Commission’s species and habitat biologist for the site.
The federal government has provided most of the funding for this work. And it’s unclear, between the downlisting and executive branch spending cuts, what will happen with this funding in the future.
While Walters remains confident about the downlisting, the data included in the status assessment acknowledges that most red-cockaded woodpecker populations are small and have not reached their recovery targets.
Even the official announcement of the downlisting in the Federal Register said, “The current status of red-cockaded woodpecker partially meets the 2003 downlisting criteria.”
Partially? I emailed the Fish and Wildlife Service’s red-cockaded woodpecker recovery coordinator, John Doresky, for clarification. But I wasn’t allowed to speak with him, and I didn’t receive specific answers to my emailed questions.
The people at the Southern Environmental Law Center have some theories about the downlisting. An investigation by SELC and Defenders of Wildlife found documentation of a regional Fish and Wildlife quota to downlist, delist or not list 30 species a year as a “wildly important goal.”
“That cast a shadow over the proposal to downlist the species,” says Elizabeth Rasheed, a North Carolina-based staff attorney at SELC.
It’s bad news for the entire region, since the Southeast is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.
When the downlisting was proposed in 2020, in the waning days of the first Trump administration, SELC wanted to make sure it didn’t go too far. Rasheed says, “SELC was most concerned about the loss of protections against killing, harassing or otherwise harming the birds — by cutting down nesting trees, for example.” At the time the Trump administration had removed that protection for species classified as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.
SELC and other conservation organizations asked for these protections in their comments to the federal agency. When the woodpecker was officially downlisted in the waning days of the Biden administration, specific protections against harm were indeed added, even though the Biden administration had also restored the protections for all species listed as threatened.
Because the protections were specifically written into the downlisting, those protections will continue to protect red-cockaded woodpeckers even if, as Rasheed and others expect, the Trump administration removes protections from threatened species yet again.
There Goes the Neighborhood
There are at least two towns in North Carolina where red-cockaded woodpeckers live among people’s homes, but my parents’ town isn’t known to be one of them. With the downlisting, federal funding woes, and the local construction boom, I wanted to believe my dad when he said that “those woodpeckers are everywhere” in his housing development. In the face of so many threats, I hoped that red-cockaded woodpeckers could survive even in a place with streets, lawns, and houses.
But I also didn’t trust my father’s birding skills; he’s limited to the species that are also baseball team mascots. So we looked at photos. He pointed to a picture of a dark, crow-sized woodpecker with a bright red mohawk — a pileated woodpecker, a common backyard bird. I wonder how many of them were killed in the woodpecker wars.
Allen told me that even for the people who live among red-cockaded woodpeckers, 90% of the small woodpeckers in their yards are the common ones — hairy and downy woodpeckers, and sapsuckers.
Still, I stick by my idea of my parents’ neighborhood as a harbinger of the birds’ fate. This busy little corner of the North Carolina coast, with its road construction and boxy apartment complexes, is not exceptional. U.S. Census Bureau figures show that the Southeast — the red-cockaded woodpecker’s former empire — is the nation’s fastest-growing region. It’s not just the Holly Shelter red-cockaded woodpeckers who are being squeezed.
I’m concerned about that squeeze because I’ve learned that the conservation success of the red-cockaded woodpecker is delicate. It relies on things that are no longer certain, such as federal funding for prescribed fires. Also, nearly half of all red-cockaded woodpeckers live in national forests. An April 4 order targets national forests for timber cutting, even overriding endangered species protections — another uncertainty.
The future is tenuous for all of us, not just woodpeckers with a unique lifestyle. A red-cockaded woodpecker once picked itself up off the ground after being shaken off a tree by artillery fire. That kind of resilience is valuable, no matter what your conservation status or your species.
Protecting civilian and military firefighters — and the communities they serve — requires a comprehensive strategy, including disclosure of the chemicals in new firefighting foams.
Every week the lawyers at my firm talk to civilian and military firefighters whose health has been threatened by the very tool they relied upon to protect other peoples’ lives: aqueous film-forming foams.
For decades aqueous film-forming foams were the gold standard in fire suppression. But like many seemingly foolproof solutions, these fire extinguishers bear a dark legacy through the carcinogenic toxic chemicals called per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
Since its invention by the U.S. Navy and the 3M company in the 1960s, PFAS-based firefighting foams, especially aqueous film-forming foams AFFF, were promoted as “safe as soap” until PFAS’s hazardous nature came to light. AFFF is highly effective against flammable fuel fires, but the chemicals that make this foam a lifesaver also cause devastating health and environmental damage.
You’ve probably heard of the alarming nationwide problem of PFAS contamination of our drinking-water sources and their link to various types of cancer, including testicular and kidney, and altered immune and thyroid function.
While almost 97% of Americans are affected by the toxic chemicals, mainly through drinking water, firefighters are disproportionately affected. These hardworking, risk-taking first responders have found themselves directly exposed to PFAS chemicals for decades. The consequences are devastating. Firefighters have a 9% higher risk of developing cancer than the general population, mainly because of military and civilian fire departments’ extensive use of aqueous film-forming foam.
The ‘Forever Chemicals’ and Their Cost
PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” are a large family of human-made substances used in a variety of industries like firefighting and for the production of a wide range of household products. They do not break down naturally and can accumulate in water, soil, and even the human body.
The Environmental Protection Agency has made it clear that there is no safe level of chemical exposure — implying that even low amounts of these substances can pose significant risks over time.
The Environmental Working Group’s updated PFAS contamination map reveals that military installations and industrial facilities have the highest levels of PFAS in their groundwater. Due to the persistence of PFAS in the surroundings, contamination from these sites can easily spread to nearby water systems and endanger communities who rely on the same aquifers or water sources.
This makes PFAS a critical public health and environmental issue, especially for firefighters whose exposure is often unavoidable.
As the realization of the dangers of PFAS grows, so does the push to find safer and more sustainable alternatives. Yet the major question is whether these new formulations truly represent a breakthrough in safety or if they could merely be another regrettable substitution.
The Rise of PFAS-Free Alternatives
The market now offers a range of viable and biodegradable options that promise to reduce the environmental and health risks associated with traditional foams. Many of these formulations adhere to stringent international standards and have already been adopted globally. By April 2019 over 90 fluorine-free foams were produced and made available by 22 different manufacturers. These products vary in composition, but a notable innovation is the emergence of soy-based foams that are seen as more environmentally friendly.
Yet such promising benefits still warrant caution. AFFF was hailed not long ago as nonhazardous — a claim that has since been debunked with the discovery of severe long-term health risks. This may similarly happen with the alternatives, which are not completely guaranteed risk-free.
For instance, some solvent-laden formulations — though PFAS-free — still contain chemicals that can irritate the respiratory system, cause skin reactions, and lead to liver toxicity with prolonged exposure. Meanwhile, soy-based foams may trigger allergic reactions in some individuals, specifically those with sensitivities to the legume.
A study published in May 2023 discusses concerns about hydrocarbon surfactants and other non-fluorinated surfactants commonly found in fluorine-free foam formulations. A 2011 medical study demonstrated that long-term exposure to hydrocarbon surfactants leads to hypotension, mental deterioration, respiratory failure, acute kidney injury, and arrhythmia.
Such studies are necessary, and scientists call for more research to investigate the safety and efficiency of these alternatives.
What Should Be Done Next?
Certain states, such as Alaska, have already banned PFAS-containing firefighting foam. However, state laws do not apply to military bases. The Department of Defense planned to transition to fluorine-free firefighting foams by October 2024, but the deadline was extended. The DOD has been investing in studies to find suitable replacements that conform to its military requirements in terms of efficiency but do not pose environmental and health concerns.
A significant concern linked to the quest for a suitable fluorine-free foam alternative is that many products claim to be greener and safer for the environment and human health. But manufacturers are still not required to disclose all the chemicals they use. Without proper third-party testing, knowing what some foam products contain is hard. To address this, the Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization Clean Production Action in 2020 launched the first eco-label certification program for PFAS-free firefighting foams, the “GreenScreen Certified Standard for Firefighting Foams.” The program ensures that foams claiming to be PFAS-free are indeed free of these added chemicals and thousands of other chemicals of high concern. Several states have already turned to the GreenScreen certification program.
As thorough research and testing necessitate time and resources, we need a more comprehensive and collaborative approach involving all responsible parties, such as the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, research institutes, and firefighting foam manufacturers, to develop a suitable replacement foam that does not pose a risk to firefighter’s health and does not contaminate the environment.
Furthermore, finding a suitable replacement foam is only the first step. While there are guidelines, we need an overarching policy that fire departments can follow throughout the complex transitioning process, including training on handling the new foam, what kind of new equipment would be necessary, and how to decontaminate old equipment.
The rise of PFAS-free alternatives is a positive development, as they appear to be better and safer. But it’s crucial to remember that “safer” does not always mean “safe enough.”
As the world gets hotter and wildfires more severe and deadlier, firefighting foams — and firefighters — will become more important than ever. Let’s look out for their future — and ours.
Our minds can flip the script on climate change. Here are ways to reframe our perceptions and make us more resilient and empowered.
Are environmental and climate change problems overwhelming you? As psychologists my colleagues and I increasingly see the psychological and physiological effects of climate stress on our clients. These effects — including “fear of the unknown,” instability, catastrophizing, financial insecurity, and biophysiological alterations due to unseasonal weather events — create an ominous feeling of chaos, adversely affecting people’s emotional and mental equilibrium and making it hard to focus on clear actions, solutions, and effective pathways to fighting back climate confusion. This can leave us feeling deeply uneasy about the future.
How can we cope with these feelings of overwhelming apprehension or hopelessness? As individuals we can’t take on the world — that’s an impossible task. So do we just turn away and give up?
Of course not. Instead let’s look at more productive approaches to applying the brakes when anxiety, nihilism, and emotional shutdown leave us stuck in place.
There’s a new and growing field in psychology focused on addressing the increasing burdens on our psyches due to climate chaos. Climate psychology addresses the emotional, mental, and sociological processes that contribute to the climate crisis, and human responses and adaptations to that can make positive, proactive, and productive solutions to climate-change events.
As I’ve seen with my clients, friends, family, and community, the effects of climate change on mental and emotional wellbeing require a fresh approach to this lived experience challenge.
For many people the first step to addressing this psychological crisis starts in our own minds. Psychologically this is known as “taking back the power”: Choose to do something — something that will empower you, energize you, and heal the trauma of climate insecurity, ignorance, and willful destruction by the rich and powerful.
Before we do that, though, it helps to understand the psychological and physiological damage we’re trying to heal.
“Where Did the World I Used to Know Go?”
The word “solastalgia” describes the emotion of longing for a natural world that no longer exists. You’ve probably experienced this: The ongoing disruption of seasonal weather’s traditional timing makes us feel deeply disoriented, moody, depressed, confused, irritable, and uneasy on a subconscious level as our bodies’ biological, mind-affecting chemicals become unbalanced — much like what’s happening to our planet.
There are biochemical reasons for these emotions caused by climate disruption.
Climate trauma causes remarkable physiological — and therefore psychological — alterations to human biochemistry that significantly alter brain chemistry, leading to dysregulation of neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, and dopamine. This adversely affects normal stress response, memory, and emotional regulation.
Physiologically, increased heat and climate instability can even accelerate the aging process, new research suggests.
Examples of events that disorient and alter our minds include:
Plants bloom too early for the wildlife that depend on them, pushing them out of synch with the natural system.
Salt and freshwater wildlife migrate with warmer temperatures, disrupting our food systems.
Wildlife and plants become infected with disease or poisoned due to algae blooms or poisonous flood runoff.
Drought causes water insecurity, increases costs, and threatens livelihoods.
The loss of slow “transitional seasons” like spring and autumn causes deep temperature swings — and mood swings.
Warmer climates mean invasive species, whether planted by humans or caused by “species creep” out of inhospitable climates.
Diseases kill wildlife who historically have kept disease-carrying pest populations down.
These disruptions alter our behavior and affect some of our most significant life choices.
Climate Change Affects Life’s Biggest Decisions
People are now questioning important life decisions under an uncertain climate context. Should we have children? Should we buy a home? Where should we live? Can we afford children and a home mortgage? Will there be food and clean water? How secure is my job?
This is the psychological trauma and uncertainty of displacement, which leaves us feeling trapped, without agency or control.
We can’t look into a crystal ball and see the future, but climate anxiety and resource insecurity create a very difficult, confusing decision-making process when planning family, home, job, and community. The increasingly likely threats of displacement — loss of life and health, region, or country — are highly stressful and traumatic because they’re unpredictable.
Globally we see the increasing geographical relocation of individuals, cultures, and communities. Leaving behind generations of the family sense of “home” is highly traumatic as entire cultures must relocate due to resource insecurities caused by drought, floods, invasive species, or the extinction of native species.
These insecurities cause extreme and enduring stress. A few examples include the rising cost or unavailability of insurance for disasters, community dissolution, loss of a “home” or place, and friends and family scattering to new geographic locations because of better opportunities there.
Globally these events affect local, federal, and international government and political decision-making. Huge migrations of wildlife and humans to other geographical locations upset existing populations, which causes perceived cultural threats, so emigrants are demonized, segregated, and violence erupts, destabilizing societies and governments.
All of this creates a universal sense of helplessness: “There’s nothing I can do, so why bother?”
Take Back Your Power: Try This Psychology 101 Exercise
Exercise 1. Spend an hour enviro-dooming online.
It’s easy. Go for it with gusto: Furiously repost the bad things, “like,” and share — send the doom to all your groups and friends. The algorithms and AI will direct you to every negative environmental disaster online, because the scientists hired by Big Tech know what excites your brain chemicals and tickles your brain’s pleasure centers. It’s based on addiction science: Create exciting content, keep supplying more stimulation and agitation. Big Tech is a drug dealer for negative, aggressive, pleasurable chemicals. You’ll always get a fix, because Big Tech algorithms and AI now know your mind — and offers your brain maladaptive chemical and behavioral solutions.
Now stop and check yourself. Scan your mind and body. How do you feel?
Exercise 2: Turn off all your electronics.
Get up and go for a walk, stroll into town and see what’s happening. Art shows? Community events? Farmers markets? What’s new at the library and community center? Is there a park to kick back and enjoy nature? Smile and be nice to strangers and shop clerks, open a door for someone, help someone with directions, or help an elderly or disabled person reach that can of corn on the top shelf. Research shows that when we smile and act nice to strangers, we get a burst of serotonin and other happiness chemicals in our brains. And the people we help do too. It’s contagious.
Now how do you feel?
We can all take advantage of that reset. Whether we’re talking about climate change, civil rights, politics, or anything else, you control the mediums you expose yourself to. Use your critical thinking, set limits and boundaries, resist the manipulation of media.
It takes some practice to resist bad habits. But we can do it.
Let’s reframe your relationship with the world in its current health. Start with your mindset, then, using what you discovered above, branch out into your community. Get involved with others around you and you’ll soon find yourself making small local changes, then bigger ones as your positive engagement ripples outward to others. See how those positive brain chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins — which play crucial roles in regulating mood, promoting well-being, and fostering feelings of pleasure and satisfaction — are radiating out to others, and the world.
The Trump team has launched a three-pronged attack on the environment. We need to understand it if we hope to stand up to it.
On March 3 Randy Moore, the 20th chief of the U.S. Forest Service, stepped down after a lifelong career that started in 1981. A soil scientist and forester, Moore was also the first African American chief of the Forest Service. His resignation came on the heels of a widespread wave of mass firings of Forest Service personnel that amounted to approximately 10% of its workforce. In his farewell letter, Moore laid bare his frustration regarding the ongoing dismantling of the agency and the need for personnel to stick together and remain nimble, adding that for those in the Forest Service “feeling uncertainty, frustration, or loss, you are not alone.”
Moore was replaced by Tom Schultz, a timber executive with deep ties to the logging industry. Schultz is also the first chief in Forest Service history who has not previously worked in the agency. In his introduction letter, Schultz highlighted his 25 years of land management, focusing on his timber and mineral extraction directive roles in Idaho.
This change in leadership provides a clear example of what the Trump administration means to do to federal agencies and public lands: crush agency capacity, shift focus from conservation to exploitation, and bring private interests directly into public agencies whose mandate is to serve the public.
By weakening protections — and decimating the agencies in charge of enforcing those that are left — the Trump administration will ensure that economic activities have primacy over everything else, including, perhaps, the rule of law.
This shift is rooted in the ideology that nature should be commodified to the utmost extent allowable, and it’s part of a bigger strategy determined to withdraw the state from public life and toward a capitalist economy unrestrained from “unnecessary burdens” like public and environmental protections. Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for this presidential administration, includes detailed instructions to achieve these goals, primarily through diminishing the ability of the administrative state to fulfill its duties.
While much of this has been highly visible, just as much has not.
When austerity-minded governments cut services, often branded as “downsizing,” the costs end up in one of two places.
Or, if an agency is left resourceless and reduces its work, these costs become social and environmental externalities that fall first and foremost on frontline communities and affected ecosystems.
We’re already seeing the ground laid for both these outcomes, with dire consequences for our public lands and waters.
For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — a building block of the nation’s system for earth monitoring, climate research, and emergency preparedness and response — is preparing to lay off more than 1,000 employees — just ahead of hurricane season.
Even more concerning is the fate of the Department of the Interior, the agency responsible for managing more than 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf. All these resources are now up for grabs to the highest bidder. During CERAWeek, an energy industry meeting organized by S&P Global, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that “If the Interior Department was a stand-alone company, it would have the largest balance sheet in the world, bar none.”
Many of us feel overwhelmed by these changes, which was itself central to the strategy laid out by Project 2025.
We need an approach that allows us to make sense of this new reality. I believe we can understand this “war on nature” by grouping the administration’s actions into three main buckets:
Bucket 1: Fewer Legal Protections
The Trump administration is implementing a coordinated effort to weakening our entire system of public and environmental protections, including federal regulations, operational guidelines and policies, tools such as Resource Management Plans, emergency declarations to bypass environmental reviews, and others. These provide legal and policy guidance for questions of resource extraction, infrastructure buildout, and balancing different policy goals, like development vs. conservation.
In the Department of the Interior, for example, the Trump administration has initiated a push to revise all management plans finalized during the Biden administration. These plans govern the full range of activities that can occur on public lands, including off-highway vehicle use, wildland fire and wildlife management, mineral leasing, and livestock grazing. The revision of these plans was included in one of Trump’s first Executive Orders and a Secretarial Order that soon followed.
There has also been a push for broad deregulation, best captured by another EO called “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” which according to Sharon Block, former OIRA official from the Biden administration, has the potential to be destructive to the “system of rights and protections that our regulatory system has provided for the public since the New Deal.”
Additionally, the administration can misuse processes meant to act as environmental safeguards, as they did when they improperly used emergency declarations to fast-track the approval of pipeline construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The administration has also indicated a preferential or expedited permitting process for investments over $1 billion. This list is not exhaustive.
Bucket 2: Increased Leasing and Resource Extraction
Project 2025 calls for doing everything in the agencies’ power to facilitate resource extraction and leasing.
For example, it urges the Bureau of Land Management to expand onshore and offshore oil and natural gas lease sales to the maximum extent possible. It also urges the expansion of timber harvesting.
In an EO published March 1, the president directed Interior and Agriculture secretaries to issue new guidance to facilitate increased timber production on federal land, instructing agencies to remove as many barriers as possible to expedite permitting for timber harvesting. Similarly, the president has pushed for expanding timber harvesting and mineral extraction in Alaska by proposing to eliminate protections, modify land use plans, and grant permits across the Tongass National Forest and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
This announcement is part of a vast effort to hamstring the capacity of the Forest Service and other land-management agencies, which will likely affect their ability to enforce whatever protections are left and carry out vital work such as wildfire mitigation efforts.
This makes clear the ultimate goal of Project 2025 and this administration: diminishing the capacity of the administrative state and its agencies as much as possible, which is the third and final “bucket.”
Bucket 3: Less Agency Capacity
Under the guise of “downsizing” and “increasing efficiency” in government spending, the Trump administration has been taking a hammer to agency capacity across multiple fronts: constraining budgets and withholding grants, reducing personnel, and eliminating facilities and other resources.
This is where the impact of tech oligarch Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is being felt most strongly. Critically, DOGE is not a department of the U.S. government but an advisory body that was given vast powers to slash regulations and cut expenditures across the government.
Under DOGE around 2,300 employees of the DOI — including 1,000 National Park Service staff members — as well as more than 3,000 employees of the Forest Service were fired unexpectedly in February. Meanwhile another 2,700 Interior Department staff reportedly resigned as a result of Musk’s resignation pressure campaign, which included a series of FAQs regarding the benefits of private sector jobs.
Recently DOGE also assumed authority to review government expenditures. For example, a recent EPA issued a guidance stating that expenses over $50,000 now require DOGE approval. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the ranking minority member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, highlighted, this now means that a host of agency actions including routine contracts and grant awards will now face unnecessary bureaucratic delays.
This is an irony apparently lost on DOGE enthusiasts who take their mission at face value, though not to anyone familiar with Project 2025, which advocates for precisely this sort of reduction in needed government services.
Moreover, as Sen. Whitehouse wrote, allowing “unskilled, self-proclaimed experts … to have veto power over funding determinations is inappropriate and risks compromising the agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment.”
Finally, DOGE has been at the forefront of canceling leases for offices and work spaces used by employees at the National Park Service, EPA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Geological Survey, all of them critical for ensuring responsible land management and rule enforcement.
Now That We’ve Identified the Buckets, What Do We Do?
Although deregulation and the diminishing of agency capacity has been a hallmark of past Republican presidential administrations, the current cycle stands out for its brazenness and illegality — particularly in contrast to the Biden administration, This cycle also represents a departure from the Biden administration’s approach to public-lands management, which took conservation and restoration as explicit policy goals, at the same level as resource extraction, leasing, and grazing. This resulted in more protected lands and waters than any other in American history (a total of 674 million acres), created, expanded, and restored national monuments, and channeled an estimated $35 billion toward conservation efforts.
If we are to prevent Trump 2.0 from causing irreversible damages to the natural world, we must remain vigilant and take action. The administration’s policies have been met with public resistance and legal backlash, forcing the administration to reinstate nearly 25,000 federal employees (many of the reinstated workers, however, were immediately placed on administrative leave).
We are seeing a coordinated effort to upend the public-lands system and the role of federal agencies as we know them. It is now time to take stock, understand the Trump administration’s strategies, and develop responses that will allow us to keep swimming upstream — no matter how strong the current against us.
In a world that feels increasingly at odds, Kenya’s Baringo giraffes showcase how a common cause can unite communities.
On the shores of Lake Baringo in Kenya’s Rift Valley, an unusual common denominator has helped bring peace to two warring communities after generations of fighting: the love of giraffes.
Clashes between the two pastoral communities — the Pokot and Il-Chamus (also known as Njemps) — had ebbed and flowed over decades, with most of the conflicts revolving around access to land, water or cattle.
A cycle of droughts and floods, the spread of invasive plants that reduced grassland for livestock, and a surge of malaria made matters worse.
By 2000 the country was in the throes of its worst drought in 60 years. The impacts on the Lake Baringo region were devastating. People were displaced, and many lost much of their livestock. Already-existing tensions increased and spurred a steady stream of brutal skirmishes involving cattle raids, home invasions, attacks, and killings between the two groups.
“It was very bad,” recalls Rebby Sebei, a 35-year-old woman from East Pokot who now manages the Ruko Community Wildlife Conservancy in Baringo County. “It was based on who you were, if you had a different language.”
The violence continued to escalate. In March 2005 a series of armed attacks by Pokot warriors on the Il-Chamus resulted in several dead and more than 2,000 head of cattle stolen.
The brutality also pushed people from their homes.
“Women were forced to spend the night in the bushes and sleep there with their kids,” Sebei says. But the bush, too, was hazardous. “There were so many dangers, like snakes and scorpions.”
Families were often separated, including Sebei’s.
When she was around 15 years old, she came home for school break and found her family gone.
“At first I couldn’t find them,” she says. “I had to inquire, talk, get some good people to take me around. At that time, there were no mobile phones, no transport, no mobility. I needed to walk for long distances.”
When the family finally reunited, they stayed in the bush where it was safer.
“We spent many nights outside,” she says. “It was very memorable.”
A Big Idea
To stop the violence, elders from both communities sought common ground.
And they found it with giraffes.
By restoring these animals they both treasured to their ancestral land, they would work together toward a shared purpose. That, in turn, would build trust and increase understanding among the different communities.
Historically, the area was home to the rare Baringo giraffe (also known as Rothschild’s or Nubian giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis camelopardalis). A subspecies of northern giraffe, they’re known for a coat pattern that disappears down their legs so that it looks like they’re wearing white socks. According to the IUCN Red List, there are only about 2,000 left in the world, including fewer than 800 in Kenya.
Although Kenya has two other giraffe species (Masai and reticulated), this area was known for the Baringo giraffes who used to live here. But decades of conflict, expanding human settlements, and hunting had wiped them out. They hadn’t been seen there since the 1960s.
Even if more modern residents had never seen giraffes, both communities still revered them.
Charles Lekatai, a ranger commander for the Ruko Community Conservancy, told Northern Rangelands Trust in 2020 that he grew up hearing his grandfather’s tales about “a strange, long-necked, spotted animal that used to roam the rangelands around the village, feeding on trees and shrubs” and that it captured his imagination.
Sebei says the animals had a particularly important cultural relevance.
“Giraffe are associated with someone who plans, who sees far, because of their height,” she says. Like seeing into the future. “Elders equated that to the vision of people coming together and living in peace.”
Working Together
Based on that vision, the two communities came together in 2008 to establish the 44,000-acre Ruko Community Conservancy (so named because it brought together the Rugus and Komollion areas of Baringo County), with each setting aside part of their land for it and being part of the management board.
They also designated about 100 acres on the Longicharo peninsula as a special area for the giraffe. Not only was it lush with acacia trees — a giraffe favorite — but its geography (surrounded by water on three of its four sides) would make it easier to protect them from poachers.
In 2011 the communities worked with the Kenya Wildlife Service and others to move eight Baringo giraffes — two males and six females — to the conservancy.
The achievement, the first time that the animals had lived in this stretch of their native habitat in 70 years, received media coverage around the world.
“We sang, celebrated, and the elders blessed the giraffes,” conservancy warden James Cheptulel recalled to Northern Rangelands Trust in 2018. “Everyone, whether Il-Chamus or Pokot, came together to celebrate the return of the giraffe to Baringo.”
Both communities hoped that working together would not only help the giraffes but also ease tensions and make their own lives better by bringing in tourism.
And it worked.
By 2018 the conservancy had about 500 guests each year, with 40% of tourism revenue paying for conservancy operations and the rest split equally between the two communities for healthcare and education.
“In spite of our past differences,” Cheptulel said in 2018, “what matters to us now is the work that the conservancy has entrusted us with.”
Challenges
But it wasn’t all rosy.
“We were having all sorts of challenges,” Sebei recalls. Some giraffes died.
Calves did especially poorly. The first was strangled by a python, and others died shortly after birth, likely related to nutritional deficits.
“Calves couldn’t survive more than 14 days,” Sebei says. “There were constant attacks by disease and pests. And there wasn’t enough forage to sustain pregnancies.”
To address the problems, the conservancy started to explore moving the giraffes. Together with the American group Save Giraffes Now, they built a 4,400-acre sanctuary on the mainland.
But they had to accelerate their plans.
In 2020 intense rains caused the lake’s water to rise dramatically, cutting the peninsula off from the mainland and trapping the giraffes on a small, muddy 8-acre island.
While the conservancy and its partners figured out what to do, rangers ferried lucerne pellets and other food to the island to help keep the giraffes alive.
Giraffe Rescue
Eventually the community designed a special barge to bring the giraffes across a mile of open lake. In essence, it was a big raft, with tall, reinforced sides on 60 empty steel drums for buoyancy, towed by motorboat.
Asiwa, a giraffe who has become stranded on Longicharo Island, is moved off the flooded island by a barge December 2, 2020. Photo by Ami Vitale, courtesy of Save Giraffes Now
One by one, the community — together with partners Kenya Wildlife Service, Save Giraffes Now, and Northern Rangelands Trust — brought the giraffes across the lake, with the first moved on December 2, 2020, and the last — a mom and newborn calf — four months later, on April 12, 2021.
“One unique thing about this move was that the community tried training the giraffes to enter the barge voluntarily using food — acacia and mangoes,” said Susan Myers, CEO of Save Giraffes Now. “They were able to move three of eight giraffes successfully that way, and this model is now being tried elsewhere in Africa.”
Today the herd has grown to 30, up from 18 in 2023. Translocations and successful births drove the population expansion. In July 2024 Kenya Wildlife Service moved seven giraffes overland by truck from a farm in Eldoret and, in January 2025, another two from the Giraffe Center outside Nairobi.
2024 Ruko Translocation: Photo courtesy of Save Giraffes Now.
The partners hope the newcomers will improve the giraffes’ genetic diversity as they breed and multiply, which Kenya Wildlife Service notes will help “ensure the robust health in their offspring.” That, in turn, would eventually help them repopulate the entire region.
As before, the communities welcomed the arrival of the giraffes with singing and dancing. And they also recognized the burgeoning peaceful coexistence between them.
At the celebrations members of both communities expressed how the conservancy had brought them together. For example, James Parkitore, from the Il-Chamus community, told Agence France-Presse that he thought the conflict “is over now because we are interacting,” while Pokot farmer Douglas Longomo said “we can move freely without any fear.”
Kenya continues to experience devastating drought and floods — including a deadly flood in the capital city of Nairobi in May 2024. The constant flooding has doubled the size of Lake Baringo since 2010, which in 2022 inspired some residents to sue the government for not doing enough to address climate change. The region has also experienced outbreaks of malaria, exacerbated by the floods which leave pockets of standing water that act as breeding grounds for the mosquitos that carry the disease. And the people around Baringo have experienced an “endless cycle of displacement.”
But even amidst this stress, the giraffes and the most recent translocations remain “a game-changer to the community,” Sebei says.
“Giraffes have a symbolic meaning to the two warring communities and has united them,” she says. “When they see giraffes, they see peace.”
