16 Things to Do (for Yourself and the Planet) Before Summer’s End

Everyone needs time to recharge. Here are some new ideas to help finish the summer season right and come out stronger for the environmental challenges ahead.

This has been an epic year so far — and we expect the last four months of 2024 to be increasingly important and potentially world-changing.

With that in mind, we’re about to take our annual summer recharge break. We’ll be back with new articles and commentaries Sept. 3.

We’ll have plenty to keep us busy in the meantime — including researching, writing, and editing some great stories we have lined up for September and October.

But we’ll also devote ourselves to absorbing new influences and inspiration, experiencing nature, talking to friends and colleagues, and reflecting on where we’ve gone so far in 2024. We hope you have an opportunity, now or later, to do the same.

Meanwhile, we have an assignment (or 16) for you — things you can do over the next couple of weeks to help set the path for a powerful fall:

1. Go someplace new. There’s probably a park, wildlife refuge, beach, river, forest, or other natural place nearby that you haven’t had a chance to visit yet. Maybe it’s a place you’ve always meant to go or a new spot you’ve just discovered on the map. Don’t wait: Make a plan and go there.
2. Thank someone for helping the planet or those who live on it. Think about a scientist, activist, journalist, neighbor, business owner, or even politician who has made a difference in the past year. Too many good deeds go unrecognized, and even the briefest appreciation can do wonders to help someone keep moving forward.
3. Look at a bug. I mean really look at one. Get down on your hands and knees, if you’re able, and watch an ant or a butterfly or a slug (not a bug, I know, but any invertebrate will do). Watch how they interact with plants, the soil, and the rest of the world. You may come away with a new appreciation for the species around you.
4. Call your mayor and ask for stronger local environmental protections. In this season of national elections, it’s too easy for people to overlook their mayor, town councilmember, city manager, or other local leaders as potential environmental leaders or advocates. Assume they’re lonely during these dog days of summer and pick up the phone.
5. Set your environmental goals and strategies for the rest of the year. There’s an endless chain of opportunities to help make a difference. Look for upcoming events in your local paper or on Facebook, Meetup, or your local environmental groups’ websites. Or maybe pick a cause (say, cleaning up a neighborhood park or advocating for a faraway endangered species) and strategize five steps you hope to take before the end of the year.
6. Fix something, learn how, or teach someone else. In an increasingly disposable world, everything we keep out of a landfill is a victory. (Check with your local library; many of them offer free repair clinics a few times a year. Sign up to get your stuff fixed, or to volunteer and help others.)
7. Think about writing something for us. We’re always looking for local voices from around the world to pen op-eds or submissions to our Species Spotlight and Protect This Place features. Full details here. (Freelance journalists: We’ll reopen to pitches for your stories in November.)
8. Take a friend in need to a green space. Maybe you have an elderly neighbor or relative, a friend without access to transportation, a special-needs child, a coworker in grief, or a neighbor who’s lonely. Share some time and some outdoor experiences with them. Make some memories.
9. Read an environmental book. We have hundreds of recommendations to choose from. And you don’t have to read them at the beach — anyplace quiet will do.
10. Donate to or volunteer with an environmental group or disaster-recovery organization. Time, money, and expertise are all needed and valued. (An extra tip: Donating blood is often simple and always in need. That’s not a specifically environmental act, but in this age of ever-increasing disasters, it could save a life.)
11. Plan for the November elections. Start by checking your voter registration — it never hurts to make sure you haven’t accidentally fallen off the rolls. You can also volunteer for a get-out-the-vote initiative, help a campaign, sign up to be a poll worker, or plan to help other people vote. (We have a couple of dozen other ideas here.)
12. Start a nature sketchbook. Drawing nature is fun, and it gives you a new way to look at and appreciate the world around you. Use your journal to capture the details you might only see when you really look closely at a landscape, plant, or animal. Don’t get stressed out about the quality of your drawing, just pick up a pen, pencil, or marker and enjoy. This isn’t for publication; it’s just for you — like the nature you’re about to experience with fresh eyes. (Check out this video for some great tips on getting started.)
13. Plant some native vegetation. We don’t all have land to rewild, but even an outdoor flowerpot can make a difference to local pollinators. And if you can convince your local business, HOA, or park to replace nonnative species — even better. (Not sure how to start? Check out these great state-by-state lists from the Xerces Society.)
14. Put your feet in the water. A river, an ocean, a pond, a stream. Let it wash over you. Feel connected.
15. Write a protest song or an environmental poem. Be creative. Express your rage, anxiety, hope, aspirations, or passions. Then share your work. Submit it to a literary magazine, go to an open-mic poetry reading, post it to YouTube, or just share it with your friends.
16. Subscribe to our newsletter! Be prepared for the latest headlines as we return from our publishing break.

That’s it for now. We’ll see you on Sept. 3. Until then, stay safe, recharge, and stay connected.

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The Te Awa Tupua Act: An Inspiration for Communities to Take Responsibility for Their Ecosystems

The historic act, which recognized a river as a legal entity, deliberately moves away from litigation and places community decision-making at its center.

In 2017, after more than a century of legal struggles by the Māori people of the Whanganui River (Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi), the 292-kilometer Whanganui River — also known as Te Awa Tupua — became the first river in the world to be recognized as a legal entity, granting it the same rights and powers as a legal person.

The passage of the Te Awa Tupua Act has been a milestone for Aotearoa New Zealand — a name that reflects the country’s Māori identity and colonial history. It has also been read as an encouraging example for the granting of legal personhood to ecosystems in other parts of the world.

While Whanganui personhood is a good news story, we must recognize that the path to Parliament’s passage of the Te Awa Tupua Act was entrenched in colonial dynamics. Māori Iwi of the Whanganui region have long had to advocate against an often conservative and Western-minded government structure. Their relentless advocacy efforts have shaped the narrative of Te Awa Tupua, a story rooted in the deep connection between culture, land, and water.

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The clash between Te Awa Tupua and Western legal frameworks, alongside Indigenous law, serves as the backdrop for continuing political and cultural dynamics. More recently, with the inauguration of Aotearoa New Zealand’s new coalition government led by conservative Christopher Luxon, these challenges have become more conspicuous.

We believe that the Te Awa Tupua Act should not only be read by law- and policymakers as a legal framework, but also as an inspiration for communities to embrace a leadership model entrenched in Tupua Te Kawa principles, the system of principles underpinning Te Awa Tupua.

A History Steeped in Colonialism

To understand the future of Te Awa Tupua, we must first understand its greater context.

The historical background to the recognition of Te Awa Tupua as a legal entity is deeply intertwined with the colonization of Aotearoa New Zealand by the British and the subsequent conflicts and wars in the 19th century.

Since 1873 Whanganui Iwi have sought recognition of their authority over the Whanganui River, including by pursuing one of New Zealand’s longest-running court cases, the Native Land Court application of 1938 contesting the ownership of the riverbed. The case was finally settled in favor of the Crown by the Court of Appeal in 1962. Given the colonial nature of Iwi-Crown (government) relationships, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975 as a standing commission of inquiry to make recommendations on claims brought by Māori relating to legislation, policies, actions, or omissions of the Crown that are alleged to breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi. Ultimately, however, the tribunal has limited powers, especially in preventing treaty violations from happening.

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Ruruku Whakatupua, the Deed of Settlement for the Whanganui River (2014), is the culmination of more than a century of effort by Whanganui Iwi to protect and provide for the special relationship of Whanganui Iwi with the river. Ruruku Whakatupua settles the historical Treaty of Waitangi claims of Whanganui Iwi in relation to the river. While the Whanganui River Iwi view the river as a living being, it is in the context of a more-than-human being rather than a human person. The framing of the Te Awa Tupua Act as legislation concerning legal personhood is more for the appeasement and convenience of European sentiments than for the Māori.

The Te Awa Tupua Act

Te Awa Tupua is one of numerous cases in which a history of injustice exists. Its recognition as a legal entity is therefore a decisive event not only in the history of Aotearoa’s environmental legislation, but also in coming to terms with its own colonial past.

Te Awa Tupua is the longest navigable waterway in Aotearoa New Zealand. It has always been a source of sustenance, spiritual connectedness, and of course a main transport and trade route. There are numerous Māori tales that link the formation of the riverbed to a dispute between various North Island volcanoes. However, almost since the beginning of colonization, Te Awa Tupua has been abused. The destruction of eel weirs to make way for early riverboat service caused the loss of food sources for Whanganui Iwi. Furthermore, commercial forestry entities have planted all the way to the water line, and other irresponsible farming developments on marginal land have continually increased the sediment accumulation in the river and its tributaries. Since the 1970s a portion of the very upper reaches of the Whanganui River has been diverted and commercially developed to generate electricity. This has seriously affected the ability of the river to flush itself naturally.

In 2014 Māori communities and the Crown signed a deed of settlement regarding Te Awa Tupua. In 2017 a corresponding Act was approved by Parliament in which the river — including its physical and metaphysical elements — is recognized as having the “rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.”

In the Act, Te Awa Tupua is assigned two legal representatives: one representing the Māori Iwi and another representing the government. They make up a committee given the name Te Pou Tupua — the human face of the river — and represents its interests. Te Pou Tupua is supported by an advisory group (Te Karewao) and a strategy group (Te Kōpuka). In addition, Te Kōpuka has been entrusted with the task of developing a strategy plan, called Te Heke Ngahuru, the final version of which has recently been passed.

A Strategy for Implementing the Act

Embedded within Te Awa Tupua, Te Heke Ngahuru holds as a collective effort to develop a comprehensive strategy addressing the environmental, social, cultural, and economic aspects of Te Awa Tupua’s wellbeing. Te Heke Ngahuru establishes Te Pā Auroa — a legal framework that grants the Whanganui River and its catchment the status of a legal entity. This framework, understood to be synonymous with the First Autumn Migration of Eels in Māori tradition, is guided by the four Tupua Te Kawa principles, which emphasize the interconnection of the river’s elements:

1. Ko te Awa te mātāpuna o te ora: The River is the source of spiritual and physical sustenance.
2. E rere kau mai i te Awa nui mai i te Kahui Maunga ki Tangaroa: The great River flows from the mountains to the sea.
3. Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au: I am the River, and the River is me.
4. Ngā manga iti, ngā manga nui e honohono kau ana, ka tupu hei Awa Tupua: The small and large streams that flow into one another and form one River.

Te Heke Ngahuru imagines a future where Iwi assume full custodial rights of the awa (river) via efforts that protect the health and wellbeing of the Whanganui catchment. This requires a transition away from Western models of governance and toward a Te Awa Tupua-centric approach to decision-making, led by the Crown, local government, and Iwi. Through collaboration and strategic action, Te Heke Ngahuru offers a roadmap for innovation and opportunity, laying the groundwork for a sustainable and prosperous future for Te Awa Tupua and its people.

Te Awa Tupua Between Rights of Nature and Indigenous Law

Te Awa Tupua has been enthusiastically embraced by many Rights of Nature activists as a paradigm-shifting example.

At the same time, however, it’s easy to overlook how the Te Awa Tupua Act deliberately moves away from litigation and places community decision-making at its center. Shifting this power to the local level has profound implications for rebuilding Iwi-Crown relationships in light of centering kawa principles within Whanganui leadership.

There are two important reasons for this. The first is that the power shift strengthens Indigenous law and the Tupua Te Kawa principles. According to the third Kawa, the people and the river are intrinsically linked, so Te Awa Tupua isn’t merely the river but also includes the surrounding communities — which challenges Western notions of property and human-made law. The relationship between the Iwi and the river goes beyond mere geographical proximity and includes spiritual and affective care for each other.

The second reason is that the shift results in less dependence on state jurisdiction and the strengthening of Indigenous self-determination. Māori Iwi have a generations-long experience of changing governments, from left-wing to right-wing and back again, which encourages them to strategize wisely and cautiously. It’s therefore crucial to see the Te Awa Tupua Act and Te Heke Ngahuru as a decisive strengthening of Indigenous law and Māori self-determination.

New Challenges From a Right-Wing Government

Unfortunately, the new coalition government — consisting of the three National, Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, and New Zealand First political parties and led by Prime Minister Luxon — has shown clear intent to decrease the cultural and social standing of Māori and, by extension, the importance of the Treaty of Waitangi. For example, this government has attempted to deconstruct the use of Te Reo, the Māori language, within government departments that use Te Reo in their branding, messaging, websites, and front-office greetings.

That said, at this stage there’s little threat to Te Awa Tupua or its legitimacy. Of far greater concern is that future acts or legislation of parliament could overlap, dilute, or even supersede the 2017 Act.

This has happened before. In 1903 the Coal-mines Act Amendment Act provided that the beds of all navigable rivers “shall remain and shall be deemed to have always been vested in the Crown.” This national law was passed directly in response to Whanganui River Māori claims at the time.

Under current norms and sensibilities, such extremes are highly unlikely in Aotearoa New Zealand today. What will be of interest to Te Pou Tupua, Te Karewao, and Te Kōpuka, though, are any new laws coming into being that may affect and indeed overlap Te Awa Tupua in areas such as resource management or conservation.

Inspiration From Te Awa Tupua

Examining the Te Awa Tupua Act and Te Heke Ngahuru reveals that their focus isn’t limited to a legal framework and its implementation. Taking the Third Kawa and the corresponding interrelationship of ecosystems and surrounding communities seriously can motivate communities to defend and take care of the health and wellbeing of the ecosystems to which they relate. However, we don’t suggest that communities should copy or universalize the Te Awa Tupua Act.

The signing of Te Awa Tupua constitutes a narrative that can be read in the context of the Rights of Nature, but it can also be read in the context of decolonial law and communal self-determination. It can inspire local communities around the globe — including the global South and the global North — to take responsibility for the rivers, mountains, lakes, and other ecosystems to which they belong, which becomes vital at a time when right-wing governments around the world are beginning to challenge the previously established consensus on environmental and climate policy.

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

Seattle’s Sustainability Director on Successes, Failures, and Lessons for Other Cities

Former politician turned city official Jessyn Farrell, who still calls herself a “Save the Whales environmentalist,” tackles sustainability from all angles.

Jessyn Farrell is late meeting me at the Seattle Green Festival in early July — not because she’s late entering the conference, but because it seems she can’t walk through a crowd of sustainability and environmental experts without being stopped.

As the director of the Office of Sustainability & Environment for the city of Seattle, Farrell holds a position that, in other cities, might not be particularly high profile. But in the Emerald City, which regularly ranks as one of the most sustainable cities worldwide, it garners its own type of fame. That position — along with Farrell’s tenure on the Washington House of Representatives from 2013 to 2017, her decades of environmental and transit activism in the region, and her two (unsuccessful) runs for mayor — makes her a known figure.

We hadn’t met before, but once we began our interview, we found that our personal and professional experiences overlap in several key areas. We share a passion for sustainable buildings: She helped pass legislation to decarbonize residential buildings, and I’m a U.S. Green Building Council LEED Green Associate. We’re both dedicated to food security and creative solutions for urban gardening and farming. And we’ve also both spent most of our careers living in and working toward sustainable cities — she in Seattle, and me in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Jessyn Farrell at the Green Festival. Photo by Molly McCluskey

How did you get your start in environmental activism?

A lot of my environmental consciousness and love of this place started because it’s such a beautiful, amazing place to live in. When I was a child, my uncle was a researcher for orcas at the Ken Balcombe Center on San Juan Island, and we’d go out in his little boat and, like, hang out with orcas. That was magical and incredible.

And the thing that stuns me about living here is you still see whales. Even 40 years later, when my kids and I are on the ferry, we’re always scanning for whales, and they’re there.

I would say that I am literally a Save the Whales environmentalist. That’s where I got my start — as, you know, an ’80s bumper sticker.

Orca — An orca dorsal fin seen from Discovery Park with West Point lighthouse in background. Photo via Seattle Parks, Discovery Park Staff (CC BY 2.0)

How has that love of the environment translated into your urban activism?

Over time, I really came to appreciate how important it is to make cities wonderful places to live as a way of preserving our wild places. Growing up in Seattle — which, like San Francisco, is a place of really rapid change — I could really see the forests and the fields turn into suburbia over the past decade.

As a result, over my career, I’ve asked myself, how do we make these cities places where everyone can live? That’s where you get into the intersection of environmental justice and affordability and human health and social capital — by asking, how do you get people to live in a dense urban environment?

You do that by making it really wonderful. So that’s been the guiding principle for my career.

Why has transportation been such a core piece of your professional life, given the Save the Whales environmentalism that you come from?

I think one thing that all big, wonderful cities have in common is an amazing transit system. And Seattle didn’t. In the 1970s, voters [rejected] what was called Forward Thrust. Federal funding had been approved to build a system here. The voters voted against the local match, and so it never got built.

After law school, I went into transit policy and ran a small nonprofit called Transportation Choices Coalition. I had an amazing team of five. Our budget the first year I was there was $250,000. We didn’t get paid very much. But we fought the highway guys and the mall guys and the oil industry on their own turf in Bellevue and got the city council to support light rail, which it had voted down for decades. It was just a lot of fun, and it was a purpose.

What I love about [transportation] is that it helps address all these different issues — economic, race, and social justice, climate, livability, safety — just by building trains and having great bus service.

Whether you’re old or young or middle aged, transit is literally what connects us.

Why venture into politics?

I was voted “most likely to be a politician” in high school. I always dreamed of going into politics, but I think, like a lot of women, I felt I needed to be credentialed. I felt like I needed to have a lot of experience.

It wasn’t until I was working in a transit agency and lobbying these legislators who were five years younger than I was that I thought, if these guys can do it, I certainly can too. [That was] in 2012, [when] I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old. It was not easy by any means, but I jumped in and ran as an environmentalist and transit advocate.

We are very, very polarized right now. Climate is the unifying issue. We’ve passed this building emissions performance standard. We got the climate activists and the building owners to get — maybe if not on exactly the same page, [then] to a willingness to create space to do a heavy lift on a policy.

What’s your vision for Seattle?

My basic take is we actually know exactly what to do around climate change. This is not a mystery. It’s not a big research and science experiment. We have the solutions. The big challenge is: How do we scale and go big, fast? And how do we do that in a way that is community-centered and people-centered? Those two things have an inherent tension, because scaling requires speed, efficiency, and cookie-cutter approaches.

What we do at the Office of Sustainability & Environment is a lot of piloting and a lot of iterating, and then we package up our little fledglings and pass them on to capital departments that can really scale them. One good example of that is the Green Seattle Partnership, which started at OSC, which connects nonprofits to help steward our wild parts of our parks. We started small and learned how to run that well and then passed it on to the parks department.

Not everything can be a success right out of the gate. What are some initiatives that had some greater challenges or just haven’t worked out?

Well, one we’re really dogged about and not willing to give up yet is dredge truck electrification. Those are the diesel trucks that run between the port and logistic facilities.

Often environmental justice-impacted neighborhoods are right next to the port, and they have massive particulate impacts. There’s all of this [Inflation Reduction Act] funding, and there’s state funding, which is awesome for electrification. It offers tremendous potential, but getting there is challenging.

We’re not so worried about the really big entities. They’re going to figure out how to buy or finance $500,000 trucks.

It’s the small, 20-trucks-and-under, immigrant refugee-owned small businesses that can’t float loans, may not even have traditional banking. The price of these trucks is just really high. Then where do they charge?

Electrification has been a city priority now for several years. Our signature environmental justice program is in the Duwamish Valley, which is a port-adjacent neighborhood. In 2016 the Duwamish Valley Action Plan, which lays out the vision for that neighborhood, identified the need to electrify these trucks because this is really impacting people’s health. So we’ve been working on this for a long time, and we’re not ready to give up.

That’s one of those examples where we’re not there yet, but we’re learning a lot.

Climate Pledge arena with Space Needle in the background. — Climate Pledge arena in Seattle. Photo by Molly McCluskey

Seattle is implementing a multi-tiered approach for sustainability. Most cities have so many similar problems and solutions. What advice would you have for city officials in Fargo or Tempe, or smaller cities that maybe don’t have massive budgets but still want to do something to advance sustainability in their city and maybe feel overwhelmed? Where would you recommend they start?

We have the Buildings Accelerator Program. We passed the regulation, and that’s the stick. It says you have to decarbonize by 2050, and you have to meet benchmarks over the next 25 years. But one of the things that we really took very seriously is how we then partner and provide resources from the technical engineering side to meet the actual funding needs of under-resourced buildings to help them meet those targets.

We’re partnering first this year with affordable housing, just because there aren’t a lot of air-conditioned homes or air-conditioned multifamily homes, especially the older ones that tend to be more affordable.

So that’s a really fun project born out of many, many years of working with the building community and paying really deep attention to what they need and how we can show up best as government. Because at the end of the day, we want decarbonization to happen. We have an amazing staff that has expertise, but we’re also really reliant on community expertise to understand what the barriers are.

Washington shows up regularly on the top 10 states of U.S. Green Building Council LEED-certified buildings. But on that list, it’s ninth for number of credentialed LEED professionals. As Seattle moves to decarbonize its buildings, how are you fostering expertise in green buildings?

We passed legislation a decade ago that was our foundation for getting to emission performance standards and building benchmarking and tune-ups. We built in a certification program where we would help support people getting their credentials. We partner with South Community College to do that, which is really cool.

The feedback we received from building owners was to give them a long lead time. We’re in a downtown crisis, a commercial real estate crisis. We need time to make these big investments. And we’re willing to do it because we see the reason behind it. But they need time. That was one of the compromises, because the climate science obviously tells us we need to do this yesterday.

The activists wanted a 2030 deadline. But our role as the Office of Sustainability in negotiating this was, we don’t want a goal that’s impossible to meet.

We need you guys to actually decarbonize. And if that means having some flexibility around how we do it, [or] the deadlines, you have to do it. We built in a lot of flexibility because we want to have the end result.

In a year from now, what do you want the Office of Sustainability & Environment to be able to say it accomplished?

I would love within the next year or two to really have that sense of how we’re going to go the distance on decarbonizing our residential homes.

Then there are a lot of other really exciting projects that we’re doing.

One of them is creating a resilience hub strategy. Resilience hubs are trusted community facilities where people can go if there’s a heat event, but also throughout the year to build social capital. I would love to be in a place where the plan is launched, which we expect to do, and we have the political cohesion to start putting together the funding and the will to make sure that every single neighborhood in our city has these kinds of places where people can hang out when it’s too hot — or even in floods, [or if] your refrigerator goes out [and you need] a safe place to store your food.

With regards to climate, Seattle does have this ethos that’s still alive and well. I think it’s that issue that brings people together in a way that other issues don’t right now.

Is Public Transit A Bulwark Against the Climate Crisis?

The climate crisis demands swift and decisive action — like bolstering public transportation.

This article was originally published at Other Words, and is being republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license.

In June, we witnessed the earliest ever category 5 hurricane to form in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm caused more than 1 million people to lose power for more than four days and caused deaths as far away as Vermont.

In just the first 10 days in July, more than 28 people died from a record heat wave. And globally, July 22 marked the hottest day ever recorded.

The climate crisis isn’t coming — it’s here now. We see it all around us — in cities and rural areas, and on the coasts and in every state in between. It impacts everything, from our economy to our national security.

Each passing year brings unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires, and extreme weather events that wreak havoc on our communities in more ways than one. Rising temperatures strain energy resources, escalate health care costs due to heat-related illnesses, and displace vulnerable populations from their homes.

The climate crisis demands swift and decisive action — like bolstering public transportation.

The dirty secret is that the transportation sector is the largest source of U.S. climate pollution — and 80% of transportation emissions come from the cars and trucks on our roads. It’s one of the only major sectors where emissions are still rising.

Because of this, investing in public transit is one of the most sensible and impactful things we can do to address the climate crisis on the scale that’s needed.

First and foremost, public transit offers a direct solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike personal vehicles, which contribute significantly to carbon dioxide and other pollutants, public transit systems can transport large numbers of people efficiently and with reduced environmental impact per capita. Robust public transit networks decrease our reliance on fossil fuels, curbing emissions that drive climate change.

Moreover, investing in public transit promotes sustainable development. By prioritizing accessible, reliable transit options, cities can mitigate urban sprawl and reduce the need for expansive road networks and parking infrastructure.

Public transit also promotes more equitable access to opportunities.

In much of the country, transportation remains a barrier that limits access to jobs, education, and health care, particularly for marginalized communities. By expanding and improving public transit services, policymakers can enhance mobility options for all residents, promoting economic inclusivity and reducing disparities exacerbated by car-centric planning.

Investing in public transit also bolsters resilience against the impacts of climate change. As extreme weather events become more frequent, public transit can serve as a critical lifeline, ensuring that communities remain connected and functional during emergencies. From evacuations to disaster response efforts, a robust transit system enhances a city’s ability to respond swiftly and effectively to crises.

Despite this, for far too long, policymakers in Washington have prioritized highways and cars over public transit.

Luckily, there’s new legislation in Congress to fix this. Bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate to provide more money to states and municipalities to increase their transit options. Congress should pass these bills without delay.

The climate crisis necessitates bold and proactive measures. Investing in public transit isn’t merely an option — it’s a moral imperative and a practical solution to combat climate change while fostering equitable and sustainable urban development. By prioritizing public transit, policymakers can chart a course towards a more resilient, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable future for all.

The time to act is now. As this summer has shown, we don’t have a moment to spare.

Conservation of ‘Umbrella Species’ Works for Ecosystems — Especially in Southeast Asia

Science says many types of animals can serve as “umbrella species.” But donors and the public pay the most attention to tigers, orangutans and other charismatic megafauna.

Scientists have started to debate the long-held notion that conserving so-called “umbrella species” — typically charismatic megafauna — offers the best opportunities to protect ecosystems and the rest of their wild inhabitants. We see this in a new study published in the journal Biological Conservation titled “Selecting umbrella species as mammal biodiversity indicators in tropical forest,” which focuses on the 2.6 million hectare Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra, the last place on Earth where four classic umbrella species — orangutans, tigers, rhinoceroses, and elephants — are still found together in the wild.

The traditional idea goes like this: If species such as tigers and orangutans are protected, then all the smaller taxa beneath them enjoy protection as well. That approach still holds, but the authors of the study argue that smaller species — in this case Sunda clouded leopards and Sambar deer, as well as amphibians and invertebrates — are in fact better umbrella indicators because they tend to be found in areas with greater levels of species richness and ecological function.

As important as these “less charismatic” species are, there are several problems with the debate over broadening the definition of umbrella species.

As someone who has spent over a decade fundraising and doing fieldwork to survey and protect wildlife, and to develop ecotourism in Sumatra and Cambodia to get local community buy-in for conservation efforts, I can attest that charismatic megafauna are essential for habitats, particularly “protected areas,” to survive in Southeast Asia. It is surely no coincidence that the presence of these four charismatic species is why the Leuser Ecosystem, and the rest of its forest denizens, still exists.

A friend and I founded a small NGO called Habitat ID, and our first project was in Virachey National Park in northeastern Cambodia. At the time we started in 2012, it was the Kingdom’s largest national park but deemed a “paper park” — a term often used to describe protected areas that exist on maps but lack real protections. In this case poachers flooded into Virachey over the borders from Vietnam and Laos and from within Cambodia itself. The park was considered hopeless because its topography made it nearly impossible to patrol, and there were also allegations of mismanagement.

But an important question lingered over Virachey: Did it contain tigers?

Tigers had not yet been declared extinct in Cambodia (that happened in 2016), but at the time we held out hope that some of the big cats remained in the park. Having done my doctoral work studying the animist spirit mountains that form a pantheon along the Cambodia-Laos border, an area that had never been surveyed — and seeing that forest-smothered expanse of mountains from the panoramic Phnom Veal Thom Grasslands — I was willing to believe it was possible that a few tigers hung on there.

We held various fundraisers — actual in-person parties, as well as outreaches through online platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. We explained the vast remoteness to potential donors, and soon funding came through to buy camera traps, batteries, and protective cases, and provide money to pay the guides and porters (we paid for our own flights for this survey project, which spanned six years, and never earned a salary from it).

Tigers were never uncovered, but we did find a lost population of wild elephants; they hadn’t been confirmed in the park for well over a decade when we camera-trapped a herd of 17 in 2017. A paper about our elephant records appeared in The Cambodian Journal of Natural History, and today, largely thanks to our work searching for tigers, the long-established British NGO Fauna & Flora International is working in Virachey on a variety of programs, researching and protecting everything from frogs to the large-antlered muntjac to gibbons. Their involvement is set to be long term and to benefit the entire Virachey ecosystem.

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None of this would likely have happened had Habitat ID not gone looking for tigers who, unfortunately, weren’t there. Tigers, even in their absence, provided conservation investment, benefitting less-charismatic species.

Another case in point comes from Sumatra, the focus of the new study. Numerous conservation NGOs work in the famous Leuser Ecosystem, striving to preserve the Sumatran elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and orangutan species that coexist there and nowhere else, so we never felt the need to piggyback on whatever they were working on. Instead Habitat ID centered on a neglected landscape in a mountain range south of Lake Toba called the Hadabuan Hills. With just four camera traps, we quickly confirmed the presence of Sumatran tigers and Malayan tapirs.

After that we fundraised for a larger expedition; because of our quick tiger records, the funding came in and we launched successive expeditions. Today the People Resources Community and Forests foundation supports an ambitious conservation program in the Hadabuan Hills — again, because we went looking for a tiger — and that time, found.

This endeavor, which is today expanding under PRCF’s stewardship, is working not only protect the obscure area’s tigers, but also other species listed as critically endangered by the IUCN such as helmeted hornbills and Sunda pangolins, as well as endangered species such as the Malayan tapirs, Sunda clouded leopards, marbled cats, Siamang gibbons, and everything “beneath” them on the conservation radar.

Again, it took a charismatic megafauna species to make this happen. And this is only our work.

Around the world charismatic megafauna attract money for conservation. The millions of dollars required to pay rangers to patrol, remove snares, and combat illegal logging and agricultural encroachment are not going to be raised by advertising the need to save deer, hog badgers, and wriggly worms, as important as they are to an ecosystem and as accurate as they may be as overlooked indicators of ecosystem health. Clouded leopards are beautiful animals, but it’s doubtful they could pull in the tens of millions of dollars desperately needed in besieged critical landscapes like the Leuser. On the contrary, donors piled in millions of dollars to protect Leuser’s “big four” within the last few years alone. Without them, the ecosystem would almost certainly suffer severe neglect.

These umbrella species also motivate action against one of the most serious threats to all wildlife and their forest habitats: infrastructure development in form of roads, dams, and palm oil plantations. When development plans are announced (or even unannounced, as is the case with the thousands of miles of “ghost roads” carving up Asia’s forests), there has to be a call to action in an attempt to halt them. Such was the case with the Tapanuli orangutan in Sumatra’s Batang Toru Ecosystem, designated as a new species in an effort to draw attention to a Chinese-funded dam project that would level much of forest landscape. While that designation of a new charismatic megafauna species has not stopped the dam — or the construction of a gold mine in the area, either — it has forced the government to take a closer look at what is going on in this ecologically important region. The outcome remains uncertain; but the matter is, at least, very much on the conservation and government radar.

Other cases are easy to find. In Thailand it’s largely believed that camera-trap images of a tigress with six young cubs in Mae Wong National Park in 2017 stopped or postponed the construction of a large hydroelectric dam that would have had devastating effects on the ecosystem and its wildlife. Kaziranga National Park in India exists because it’s home to a highly successful (if controversial) conservation program to protect its astounding population of 2,400 Indian one-horned rhinos; the park is also home to tigers, elephants, and plethora of other species. Many more protected areas in countries across Asia follow similar patterns.

Exciting news: Recent camera trap footage shows the presence of a new female tiger in Mae Wong National Park. Learn more about what this means for tigers: https://t.co/aJJ67gOiQr pic.twitter.com/5hKKSW3yW1

— World Wildlife Fund (@World_Wildlife) June 29, 2021

And megafauna umbrella species have an oversized ecological impact. Protection and even reintroduction of umbrella species such as leopards in India and wolves in Yellowstone National Park in the United States have been proven to be scientifically successful, and highly so.

In his 2021 book Leopard Diaries, Sanjay Gubbi writes: “The kingly mammal, a symbol of a healthy ecosystem, effectively helps in the conservation of smaller, lower-profile predators as well as other species that live in and make up its home range,” and he lists jungle cats, rusty-spotted cats, civets, four-horned antelopes, chinkara, pangolins, and porcupines among the beneficiaries of the presence of leopards (who are certainly considered “charismatic megafauna” in Sri Lanka and increasingly in Thailand’s Kaeng Krachan National Park, one of the Indochinese leopard’s final strongholds). Gubbi explains that leopards are superb seed dispersers — much more effective than often-cited primates, as leopards have home ranges nearly 10 times that of the primates of India. As such, roaming leopards keep forests healthy and even expand them.

Likewise, the wolves of Yellowstone, reintroduced in 1995, have had a transformative impact on the ecosystem, essentially saving the park’s ecology. By keeping the elk population in check, wolves have enabled riparian forests to regrow, allowing fish and amphibians to flourish in landscapes that had been denuded by the explosion in herbivore populations that thrived when the wolves had been hunted to extinction. The elk that the wolves don’t kill are fearful of the apex predators’ presence and don’t breed as much, allowing willow trees to grow unmolested again, which has helped beaver populations bounce back, with a complex cascading effect of benefits to all manner of smaller species.

The same thing happened in southern India when leopards were reintroduced, writes Gubbi: “The elimination of leopards ‘had created a landscape of fearlessness,’ where herbivores browse freely, impacting local vegetation. However, as soon as the large predators were reintroduced the area began to regain its vegetation, as the carnivores controlled where the herbivores browsed, bringing back a balance in the entire ecosystem.”

Umbrella species also inspire the public. Tourists from around the world fly to places like Sabah, Kalimantan, Sumatra, Thailand, Nepal, India, and many more countries specifically because they want to have a chance to see orangutans, tigers, rhinos, and elephants. The authors of the study would do well to ask the guesthouse owners, jungle guides, and protected area officials in places like Bukit Lawang or Ketambe in Sumatra, the Kinabatangan River Wildlife Sanctuary in Sabah, or Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan if they think tourists would fly from halfway across the world and spend money on their services if they didn’t have a shot at seeing orangutans and other large species. Locals need tourism money, and it’s the megafauna that draws international tourists in.

Finally, a new study in the journal Science argues that conservation does work, and umbrella species are a big reason why that’s true. Titled “The positive impact of conservation action,” the authors posit, among other things, that the establishment of protected areas is key to long-term conservation success. Relevant to the case for focusing on megafauna, the authors write: “Even when conservation interventions didn’t work for the species or ecosystem that they were intended to benefit, other species either often unintentionally benefited, or we learned from the result, ensuring that our next project or conservation action would be successful.”

At the very least, smaller species are not neglected by the emphasis on megafauna, at least in the sense that efforts are made to protect the large natural habitats needed for megafauna to live in the wild, and this is especially true in Asia. From the protection of hawksbill sea turtles in Bangladesh to the preservation of fishing cats across Asia’s dwindling wetlands to the last rhinoceros in Java, a strong focus on the preservation of charismatic megafauna will continue to play in vital role in overall conservation well into the future.

A veteran conservationist once put it to me bluntly: If the forest doesn’t have tigers or other big animals, then it’s shit. Most conservation scientists would disagree with that, but donors, activists and ecotourists probably won’t. And without them on board first, we may never get around to protecting everything else.

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

Hope Blooms: A Tale of Two Manzanitas

A single Franciscan manzanita plant nicknamed Francie, the last of its kind from the wild, charts an unlikely comeback in San Francisco.

Most visitors to San Francisco’s famed Presidio have no idea they’re strolling through the latest setting in a most implausible botanical story.

The star of the tale is a shrubby, red-limbed Franciscan manzanita, nicknamed Francie, and the fate of its kind may well rest on a combination of protection, the latest science, and the whims of reproduction.

But don’t go looking for Francie or its offspring just yet. The plant’s exact location remains a secret, its very existence fragile and its future not yet guaranteed.

In October 2009 a botanist driving along a busy San Francisco freeway spotted something growing in a traffic island surrounded by ramps near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a “fairly ugly” bush, as Dan Gluesenkamp described it later, but he knew it was a manzanita — a genus of evergreen shrubs and small trees — and suspected it was the long-lost Franciscan manzanita, last seen more than 60 years earlier.

While California is home to 95 species and subspecies of manzanita, only two have been documented to live exclusively in the Bay Area. Both are exceedingly rare specialists adapted to that place’s soil configurations and fog. They are the Raven’s manzanita (Arctostaphylos montana ravenii) and the Franciscan manzanita (A. franciscana), named for the only city where it has ever grown in the wild and thought to have gone extinct in the wild in 1947.

Gluesenkamp was spot-on with his identification that day, and his timing couldn’t have been better: That section of Highway 101 was undergoing renovation. In fact, it was thanks in part to the project that Gluesenkamp could spot the bush at all. Before construction started, roadside trees had concealed the bush. Now those trees were being churned into wood chips, but a patrol car parked on the traffic island during the chipping operation spared the bush from being buried under the chip pile. For the first time in decades, the small island’s remaining vegetation had become visible from the road.

It was a little patch of serpentine substrate, caused by the state’s complicated geologic history. Serpentinite is California’s state rock, apple-green to black, often shiny and mottled with light and dark areas. Thanks to past earthquakes, San Francisco is laced with rocky outcrops of this unusual soil that stretch through the city. It’s rotten soil for most plants because it’s high in heavy metals, but manzanitas are adapted to it, thrive in it, and that’s where Franciscan manzanitas used to grow, on hills and ridges throughout San Francisco.

The traffic island had been disturbed just enough by earlier road crews that the single shrub was able to germinate and survive. But highway construction would soon doom its home to destruction. For this plant to survive, something had to be done — and fast.

Since they couldn’t build the new highway around the bush, the California Department of Transportation worked alongside conservationists to move it in 2010. Knowing that the last wild plant of its kind might not survive the ordeal, scientists took many precautions, including stem cuttings that could be rooted and cloned in a lab. The cuttings then went to six different institutions in the region, mostly botanical gardens. Scientists also took rooted branches that could be grown into separate shrubs. And the plant was in fruit, so they collected seeds and soil.

Then the last-known wild Franciscan manzanita was dug up and trucked about a mile away to a secret location in the Presidio, the old military post that had become part of Golden Gate National Park in 1994. The freeway-rescue was planted there and nicknamed “Francie.”

And the transplant was a success. Away from the freeway exhaust, the plant thrived. But could Francie reproduce?

Friends With Benefits

Michael Chassé is an ecologist with the National Park Service. He coordinates both the rare-plant monitoring program in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and weekly volunteer programs that engage the community in habitat restoration. At the time Francie was found, he was working on a master’s thesis about San Francisco’s two endangered manzanitas. “The existing Franciscan manzanita is one genetic individual,” he says. “You can clone it. But if you have a second genetic individual, you’re expanding the genetic capacity for the individual. When you have cross-pollination, you have genetic recombination.”

Each unique genetic individual is what’s called a genotype. Bringing different genotypes together allows for greater diversity.

Francie was already producing seeds before she was relocated in 2010. Manzanitas have both male and female reproductive parts, but they still need to cross-pollinate to produce viable seeds.

“You want to avoid inbreeding depression,” explains Chassé. “Some naturally rare species have the ability to exist with a small number of individuals, but with ecological restoration you want to maximize their ability to adapt to change over time.”

While Francie may have been the last plant of its kind in the wild, it was not the sole surviving Franciscan manzanita. Turns out there were others, salvaged during the Great Depression from a San Francisco cemetery slated for destruction.

“We’re fortunate in that folks back in the 1930s saw that habitat for these rare manzanitas was being lost pretty rapidly,” Chassé says.

Thanks to prescient botanists nearly a century ago, those salvaged plants still live in Bay Area botanical gardens. What’s more, they’re genetically distinct, meaning they can cross-pollinate with Francie. Park staff planted cuttings from the cemetery survivors nearby, hoping that in time cross-pollination would occur.

Franciscan Manzanita cuttings are taking root at the Presidio Nursery in hopes of growing our rare plant populations. pic.twitter.com/5sIDzSdrrJ

— Golden Gate NPS (@GoldenGateNPS) March 7, 2017

Genetic diversity is Chassé’s biggest concern for the survival of these endangered plants. “We face an uncertain climate future, so we need to maximize genetic diversity to adapt to changes over time. That’s true for a common plant like yarrow and true for a rare plant like the Franciscan manzanita.”

The Presidio is working with California State University East Bay, looking at the genetics of the Franciscan manzanita to determine how many distinct individuals there are in the world.

“It’s a small number. We think there are maybe four,” Chassé says.

So far, despite flowering and occasional fruits, staff have seen no reproduction, according to Lew Stringer, associate director of landscape stewardship at Presidio Trust. Along with Chassé, Stringer helped identify Francie in its original location. If Francie can’t reproduce, is there a different scenario that might constitute recovery?

Perhaps, Stringer says. In attempting to recover certain endangered plants, scientists may be shifting away from a focus on pure gene strains and shifting toward “gene flow,” allowing different but closely-related species — some nearly lost, some not — to cross and thus create new strains of manzanitas able to survive over time.

Enter a second endangered manzanita, even more hard-up than the last.

What Constitutes Survival?

The Raven’s manzanita is named after Peter Raven, who made botanical history at age 13 when he rediscovered the species. That was in 1952; not another living specimen of its kind has been seen since. Many a last-of-its-kind has perished over the past century, so the recovery plan for the Raven’s manzanita is still more challenging than the one for its kin.

The end goal here, Stringer says, is gene flow. For the Raven’s manzanita to carry on, scientists will intentionally cross its genes with those of its closest relative (not the Franciscan, although Raven’s has the potential to cross with that and other manzanitas). Next they’ll analyze the genes of those offspring and determine which crosses align best with Raven’s.

The blossoms of the Raven’s manzanita must be pollinated by another plant in order to produce berries and seeds. Photo: Michael Chasse/NPS

At this point in time, the genetic prospects for the Franciscan manzanita probably look brighter. But even if Francie manages to produce viable offspring, there remains the same challenge faced by so many recovering species: vanishing habitat.

Both manzanitas once cascaded down hillsides, growing out of rocky outcrops and ridges of serpentine substrate that stretch through the city. But in San Francisco, habitat is also real estate, and much of that land is now covered in buildings. Parks are the closest thing left to the wild, so that’s where Chassé and other staff are focusing their efforts, clearing out invasive plants to restore what habitat remains. So far they’ve placed more than 150 Franciscan manzanita plantings in six sites, all within the Presidio.

It’s a small world. But in the case of the Franciscan manzanita, it was a small world to begin with. The plant’s natural habitat probably never extended far beyond San Francisco. Compare this to bison, a species that once roamed most of the continental United States. Which recovery has further to go?

Some might argue that a plant that only lives within the confines of one park isn’t living in the wild. Yet Chassé, who leads efforts to recover both species, cites our love of national parks as one of the challenges to doing that. While the location of both plants is undisclosed, San Francisco is a very popular tourist destination, he says, and “the habitats are pretty sensitive. Keeping people on trails, making sure they’re not trampling rare plants like these, is a concern.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Rock and Roll Botany: An Endangered Plant Named After Legendary Guitarist Jimi Hendrix

Rediscovering the Legacy of Mary Elizabeth Barber, South Africa’s First Female Botanist

One species she discovered, a critically endangered plant, eluded modern researchers for decades but has recently been rediscovered — as has Barber herself.

As my “Extinction Countdown” column approaches its 20th anniversary, I’m revisiting some past stories that still resonate today. Here’s one that’s been adapted, updated and expanded from an article originally published in April 2016.

Mary Elizabeth Barber, South Africa’s first woman ornithologist and botanist and a correspondent of Charles Darwin, described dozens of birds, plants and insect species over the course of her lifetime. More than a century after her death in 1899, several of those species still bear her name.

Barber herself, however, has all but been forgotten, like so many pioneering women scientists whose accomplishments have been eclipsed by their male colleagues.

But one species Barber discovered in 1862 may help to change that.

The striking plant called Mrs. Barber’s beauty (Lotononis harveyi) has long been a bit of a mystery. Although the samples Barber collected can still be examined in museums, the living flowers eluded rediscovery for more than a century.

But flash forward a few decades, and the beautiful white flower with densely hairy petals was finally found once again and photographed for the very first time in 2014.

Vincent Ralph Clark of Rhodes University in South Africa actually rediscovered Lotononis harveyi in 2009 — 147 years after Barber’s description was first published — while conducting field work in the Great Winterberg mountain range for his Ph.D. At the time he didn’t realize exactly what he had seen. A sample he collected that year was reexamined in 2014 by University of Johannesburg botany professor Ben-Erik Van Wyk, who suggested the white flower could be the lost species.

With that encouragement, Clark returned to the Winterbergs later that year and extended his search. He not only found the individual plant he saw in 2009 but also located several others. The confirmed rediscovery was finally published in 2016 in the journal PhytoKeys.

Clark also found that Mrs. Barber’s beauty probably eluded rediscovery not just because of its remote location but also due to its slow growth rate and rarity. He found just six specimens, two of which had damaged stems, and no evidence of recruitment of the next generation of plants. This, along with potential threats from fire and livestock, led him to suggest that the flower should be considered critically endangered.

There could be more than just those six plants out there, of course, since the steep mountain does a pretty good job of keeping its secrets. Additional expeditions would be required to find them, as well as to learn more about the elusive Mrs. Barber’s beauty. The 2016 paper noted that we know “virtually nothing about its biology.” That means that although this rare flower has now finally been found once again, we don’t know what it would take to preserve it or its habitat.

Eight years later we still don’t know much. No additional scientific papers have been published about Mrs. Barber’s beauty, and no observations of the species have been recorded on iNaturalist. However, the South African National Biodiversity Institute officially declared it critically endangered in 2021, noting that it’s “potentially threatened by grazing, fire, and competition from alien invasive species, which occur at low densities in some parts of its range.” The assessment still noted just six known examples of the plant.

But at least it’s been found. That’s just one step toward reaffirming the legacy of Mary Elizabeth Barber, whose scientific writings and artwork have enjoyed a bit of a posthumous resurgence since the rediscovery of the plant that bears her name. Historian Tanja Hammel published a 360-page monograph about her in 2019, which notes:

She would ultimately paint many more than the one hundred watercolors of plants, butterflies, birds, reptiles and landscapes that remain to this day. Sixteen of her scientific articles as well as a volume of poems were published. To achieve the publication of her articles, she corresponded with some of the most distinguished British experts in her fields, such as the entomologist Roland Trimen, the botanists William Henry Harvey and Joseph Dalton Hooker, and the ornithologist Edgar Leopold Layard. In doing so, she contributed not only to botany but also to entomology, ornithology, geology, archaeology and paleontology.

Meanwhile a 303-page collection of Barber’s correspondence — edited by Hammel, Alan Cohen, and Jasmin Rindlisbacher — was published in 2020. The book, Growing Wild — titled to symbolize “how Barber emancipated herself both from her wider social environment and from the ideal of the Victorian ‘angel in the house’ in order to publish her work and have her research archived and her life and career remembered” — reveals her pioneering feminism and unflinching determination.

At the same time, these new examinations of Barber’s history and legacy also shine a light on her disturbing 19th-century colonialist attitudes. For instance, as Hammel wrote in a 2015 paper, Barber greatly benefited from traditional knowledge and labor from her African collaborators but “she silenced or obscured [their] share in her work as part of a tactic to keep her credibility among urban and metropolitan scientists and to stress her authority as local expert.”

This last aspect, which Hammel puts into a broader historic context in her monograph, darkens the legacy of Barber, as it does other naturalists of her day. That’s one reason why so many peoples’ names are being removed from the species they described.

Maybe Mrs. Barber’s beauty will one day also be renamed. For now, though, this rediscovered plant serves a reminder of a groundbreaking feminist naturalist history has all but ignored or forgotten — like so many other women in science — and who, like the flower that bears her name, should not be allowed to fade into extinction.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Decolonizing Species Names

We’re Protecting the Ocean Wrong

There’s never been more momentum for ocean conservation, but new research finds that many efforts fail to protect endangered species — or have barely gotten off the drawing board.

Ocean ecosystems and the marine wildlife that depend on them are under threat as never before. Between overfishing, climate change, plastic pollution, and habitat destruction, it’s a bad time to be a prawn, cod, seabird, or whale.

There’s no single silver bullet solution to the biodiversity crisis, but in recent years, many people in the environmental community have focused on the goal of “30 x 30”: protecting 30% of the planet by the year 2030. Many nations have made promises toward that goal, including the United States, which has adapted it into the “America the Beautiful” initiative.

Measurable goals like this provide nations with clear, quantifiable conservation goals that others in the international community can follow, verify, or use to identify shortfalls and push for more action.

At the same time, many experts warn that number-based targets like “protect 30%” lend themselves to incentives to arguably-kinda-sorta protect as much as possible, rather than protecting the most ecologically important areas. Governments, for instance, can use what’s euphemistically referred to as “creative accounting” — counting things as protected that probably should not be considered protected.

Two new research papers examine some of this creative accounting in the ocean. Together, they stress important things to keep in mind when creating protected areas and when assessing their usefulness.

To Protect a Species, Protect Areas Where They Actually Live

A surprisingly common issue in area-based conservation happens when a government declares a new protected area to help save a threatened species of concern…without first checking to see if the species actually lives within those boundaries.

It happens more often than you might think. A new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology looked at 89 marine protected areas in Europe that are supposed to protect diadromous fish species (those that migrate between ocean and fresh water, like salmon or some eels) of conservation concern.

Their findings are shocking: Many of these areas protect habitats where those fish species do not live, and very few of them protect the most important core habitat for any diadromous fish species.

“A marine protected area should be an area that protects part of the marine environment,” says Sophie Elliott of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, the study’s lead author. “I say ‘should’ because there are a lot of parks that don’t have enough thought put into them. Quite often things are done quickly without thinking or understanding the situation.”

Sometimes this happens because of limited resources for scientific study. In other words, according to Elliot, we simply don’t know enough about species’ habitat use to protect their key habitat, at least not yet. This is known as the rare-species paradox: Endangered species are often hard to find and study, especially in the vast ocean, so it can be hard to understand what habitat qualities they need to thrive, even if we can hypothesize that protecting certain regions will mitigate some of the threats the species face.

Other times government officials, in search of positive publicity, announce a new protected area that was studied but wasn’t intended to protect a species.

“We had a series of MPAs that were supposed to have measures in place to protect certain species,” Elliott says. “But then an extra species got tacked on to the stated goals of the MPA, and it wasn’t effective for that species.” She declined to identify examples, given the political sensitivities of some of these protected areas.

In addition to gathering more data and always basing protected-area design on the best available data, Elliott recommends a more holistic approach to designating future protected areas.

“When people think about putting MPAs in place, look at the whole range of biodiversity that exists within it, because there might be many endangered and protected species,” she says. “You need to know what’s in that MPA and do ecosystem-based management” — management focusing on the whole ecosystem and not just individual species. It’s the difference between protecting cod by establishing fishing quotas versus protecting cod by also managing their habitat and predators and food and other things that eat that food. “We’ve long been calling for that, but we aren’t really working toward it at all,” she says.

What Counts As ‘Protected’ Varies More Than You Think

Another key issue in marine protected area management is what should count as “protected.”

Some areas restrict oil and gas extraction but allow any and all fishing. Some allow swimmers and other recreation, while others say people can’t even go scuba diving.

In one glaring recent example, the advocacy group Oceana U.K. found evidence that the United Kingdom allows bottom trawling in many of its MPAs. Bottom trawling is a fishing method that’s extremely destructive to sensitive habitat types; it’s been compared to clear-cutting forests to catch rabbits.

“At the end of the day … there’s no one clear definition of what conservation means around the world,” says Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has studied the issue. “One of the negative externalities of the global push to protect 30% of the ocean is that some governments are more concerned with being able to say that they protected 30% of the ocean than they are concerned with delivering meaningful biodiversity protections.”

Villagomez and his colleagues have identified another big issue: According to their new analysis in the journal Conservation Letters, fully one-quarter of the 100 largest marine protected areas — as catalogued in the United Nations’ and IUCN’s world database of protected areas — are announced but not yet implemented. Many have no clear timeline of when they formal protections might be put into place, or what those regulations might look like.

For now, those areas exist on paper but remain unprotected in the real world. For example, the paper cites the OSPAR MPA network covering 7% of the Northeast Atlantic, which currently appears to have no concrete protections.

This wide range of rules and inconsistent protections makes it harder to protect the ocean — or to count it toward 30×30 goals.

Governments are not supposed to submit anything to the world database of protected areas until something is designated, “but they do, and that’s just the reality,” says Villagomez.

But here’s the biggest problem: The study found that many of the world’s largest MPAs lack the scientific knowledge, funding, and political support to be effective.

“We know that MPAs work when they are well designed and provided the funding to operate,” Villagomez told me. “But for about one-third of the MPAs we studied, based on everything we know about protected area science, they will never result in positive outcomes for biodiversity.”

The conclusions of these two papers are clear: Too many marine protected areas are poorly designed and sited in places where the species they’re ostensibly trying to protect do not actually live. Also, too many allow destructive extractive industries to operate, limiting the benefits of any protection.

Despite these setbacks Villagomez remains optimistic about the future of MPA-based protections.

“The good news is that this works really well about one-third of the time — if you play baseball and you hit the ball 300 out of 1,000 times, you’re going to the Hall of Fame,” he says. “There’s a ton of science that shows that well-designed well-implemented MPAs work, and for one-quarter of the MPAS we looked at, they’re well designed and are just lacking funding for implementation.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Marine Animals Are Feeling the Heat From Ocean Warming

Rwanda’s Inyambo: The Cows Who Are Treated Like Royalty — But Still Face Risks to Their Survival

The Inyambo’s importance to Rwandan culture can’t protect them from threats like diseases, international conflict, and inbreeding.

Visitors to the King’s Palace Museum in Rwanda can locate the nation’s prized cows by following the sounds of singing.

Called Inyambo in Rwanda and Bihogo in Uganda, these massive cattle are known for the white, symmetrical horns that stretch into the air several feet above their heads. They’re bred for ceremonial purposes — not milk or meat, like most cattle. The museum’s herd of 15 cows, each adorned in jewelry and ribbons, stand as symbols of their longstanding significance in Rwandan culture and history.

With crooning shepherds living on site at the museum full time and a dedicated veterinarian on call 24 hours a day, these cows have the best possible care. But, like many rare livestock breeds around the world, they face challenges to their survival, including climate change, habitat erosion, disease, and international conflicts. The United Nations estimates that at least 17% of worldwide livestock breeds are threatened with extinction, and it advocates for preserving genetic lines that may have a better chance of survival in a warming, pandemic-prone world.

Conserving culturally important breeds like the Inyambo in the face of these threats presents its own set of challenges. Planning for their future starts with understanding their past — as well as their present place in Rwandan culture.

It also requires answering a tricky question: Are Inyambo an endangered species?

A recreation of the King's palace at the museum in Rwanda. — A recreation of the King’s palace at the museum in Rwanda. Photo by Molly McCluskey

Counting the Uncountable

There are no monarchs in Rwanda anymore. Rwanda’s monarchy ended in 1962, when the country gained independence from Belgium. The King’s Palace Museum is a recreation of the last site of the formerly mobile monarchy, which previously moved around the country before settling in Nyanza in 1899 and establishing it as the first permanent capital of the kingdom.

The Inyambo — who roamed with the ruler until they, too, came to settle in Nyanza — are a subset of the long-horned Ankole, a breed of cattle found in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania. The Ankole themselves are a subset of Sanga cattle, indigenous breeds from southern Africa.

During the period of the traditional Rwandan monarchy, Inyambo were bred and trained for royal parades. They would be presented as dignitaries during ceremonies honoring the king.

They’re still treated like royalty today. Shepherds croon love songs to the animals to keep them peaceful and obedient. The cows, who each have a name and are tended to like members of the family, are trained to listen to their shepherds’ songs as a means of following their commands.

While the Inyambo at the King’s Palace arguably may be the happiest and most peaceful of their kind, they aren’t the only ones in existence. Small herds live in several places in Rwanda and Uganda. But calculating exactly how many Inyambo exist outside of this protected herd is difficult.

For one thing, Rwandan culture suggests that asking a shepherd how many cows he owns is akin to asking how rich he is. Boasting about the number of one’s cattle is seen as rude and puts a shepherd at risk of theft.

Beyond that, many shepherds have a deeply held cultural belief that counting animals leads to those animals’ death. Because of this, the Inyambo are not typically tagged. Recordkeeping can also vary greatly among shepherds, with some knowing the names of each animal like they’d know the names of their children and others taking a more relaxed approach.

A third challenge: With the exception of closed herds like the one at the royal palace, the cattle roam over large territories, often moving across international borders.

This makes knowing if Inyambo are endangered, or at risk of extinction, nearly impossible, although we do know they aren’t exactly plentiful.

Donald Rugira-Kugonza, an associate professor of animal sciences at Makerere University in Uganda, has attempted to count the Inyambo as part of his research. He says that in addition to the lack of recordkeeping and the reluctance to inventory the cattle, there’s a more fundamental challenge in knowing how many exist — a difference of opinion on what, exactly, constitutes an Inyambo.

“Part of the problem is we don’t have it well defined,” Rugira-Kugonza says. “This is what we are trying to do. Let’s document what makes this special animal, how tall should it be, how long should the horns be, at what angles, and so on.”

That’s a normal process for determining breeds — of everything from farm animals to dogs and cats — but trying to doing the same thing for Inyambo isn’t easy.

“The trouble comes when you bring one set of farmers and say, ‘Identify for me the animals that you say are Inyambo.’ They pick out two. Another person says, ‘No, all those ten,’” Rugira-Kugonza says. “So what we need really to conserve this breed [is] to have people agree, ‘This is it. That’s how it looks.’”

2 adorned Inyambo drink from a trough while a third, unadorned Inyambo looks directly at the camera. — Two adorned Inyambo drink from a trough while a third, unadorned Inyambo looks directly at the camera. Photo by Molly McCluskey

Descendants of the King’s Herd

Even carefully maintained heritage records can’t solve every problem for rare breeds. Rugira-Kugonza and his research team found evidence of inbreeding issues with the open herds they studied, and he expresses concern for closed herds, like the one at the King’s Palace.

“If you keep only the nucleus, like at Nyanza, it’s a small herd,” Rugira-Kugonza says. “And then it means any time there is a serious disease, it can easily bring down the whole herd. It’s likely to go inbred, and then it will disappear.”

And the threat of disease isn’t hypothetical.

“We have foot-and-mouth disease, lumpy skin disease, because of animals coming in across the borders,” Rugira-Kugonza says. Other health threats documented in Rwanda include anthrax, brucellosis, tuberculosis, East Coast fever, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, trypanosomiasis, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, and parasites, according to a report from USAID and the University of Florida.

Concerns about disease traveling from one herd to another across international borders have prompted Rwanda to conduct ambitious disease surveillance throughout the country. As a result, the country is allowing access to fewer cows from neighboring countries.

“Now Rwanda is becoming more closed because they’re also doing some disease surveillance,” Rugira-Kugonza says. “They have been almost closing the border with Tanzania. Between Uganda and Rwanda maybe no more animals are crossing.”

But the future of the Inyambo doesn’t necessarily rely on animals themselves traveling. The National Animal Genetic Resources Centre and Data Bank, a regional gene bank in Entebbe created under the African Union, makes it possible for countries to share genetic material while limiting the risk of diseases.

“The movement of live animals may become more restricted as we go forward, but there is opportunity now for genetic material moving in the form of embryos,” Rugira-Kugonza says. “South Africa has recently imported the Ankole by embryo,” he points out.

Parallels With Mountain Gorillas?

Although Inyambo don’t live in the wild, they have a lot in common with another of Rwanda’s famous species: mountain gorillas. Both species exist in very small numbers, face the risk of disease, and are culturally and economically important.

While Rwanda has had success protecting its mountain gorilla population by cooperating with its neighbors to protect their habitat, protecting the Inyambo comes with more logistical hurdles.

“The good thing with the gorilla is that there is already a geographically defined area at the border of the three countries,” Rugira-Kugonza says. “The problem with the cows is that they move.”

Inyambo conservation can take a lesson from the successful efforts to stabilize and grow the gorilla population. A combination of government subsidies, NGO grants, and tourism revenue made it more financially rewarding to protect the gorillas than to poach them, and the population increased. The same model can be applied to farmers raising large cattle without the usual economic stability of selling their milk and meat. There’s already a growing Inyambo tourism industry, with eco-lodges inviting tourists to see them, festivals celebrating them, and artwork depicting the revered animals.

But as the range of the cattle becomes restricted, the risk of inbreeding heightens. Combined with the many challenges of counting them or even clearly identifying the breed, it soon may be too difficult to know how many Inyambo are left.

But Rugira-Kugonza says the efforts of farmers along Uganda’s Cattle Corridor and elsewhere in the region indicate that Inyambo aren’t likely to become extinct anytime soon. While there may not be many opportunities for royal herds like the one at the King’s Palace, there are many farmers throughout the region — including the controversial president of Uganda — who are passionate about the Inyambo and remain committed to continuing to raise them.

That passion may be the key to their survival.

“The best way to say we can conserve them is to say they can stay outside royal hands by a group of passionate people, and then they are conserving it following a standard procedure,” Rugira-Kugonza says. “There cannot be just one group, but maybe 20, 30, 40 farmers keeping them gainfully, earning from them. Then we can conserve the Inyambo.”

Molly McCluskey traveled to Rwanda at the invitation of the Embassy of Rwanda in Washington.

Sparrow Spared, Cactus Extinct, and More Links From the Brink

This month’s best and worst environmental stories also include a rebounding lynx, a climate lawsuit boom, and a spa for frogs.

Earlier this month I visited some friends at their home on the banks of the Columbia River — a house that could soon be under the Columbia River due to climate change and sea-level rise.

That same week we got news about Hurricane Beryl causing destructive floods around the United States, along with devastating floods in Brazil, India, China, and Kenya. Other floods this month caused destruction and fatalities in Liberia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and several other U.S. states.

Is it any wonder that the sound of dripping water plunges me into a panic attack?

Welcome to Links From the Brink.

Best News of the Month:

When I last wrote about the Florida grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum floridanus) in 2018, the critically endangered bird species had experienced a devastating population crash, leaving fewer than 100 individuals in the wild. As one conservationist told me at the time, “This is going to be North America’s next extinct bird if we do nothing.”

Well, we did do something. Some of the last birds were brought into captivity before they could die out, and even since then they’ve been breeding like there’s no tomorrow. As a result, they have a tomorrow. This month the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission and partner organizations released their 1,000th captive-bred grasshopper sparrow into the wild. This seems to indicate that these rare birds have been saved from what just a few years ago seemed like an extinction in the making.

There’s a lesson in this amazing milestone: “These little birds represent a big beacon of hope that our commitment, partnership and holistic approach can save vulnerable wildlife from the brink of extinction,” as Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida president Andrew Walker told The Guardian.

Of course, all the captive breeding in the world can’t save a species if it has nowhere to live. Florida remains one of the most development-hungry places in the United States, and grasshopper sparrows’ habitat still needs protection and restoration. But 1,000 birds in six years is an amazing achievement, and it’s one worthy of celebration and emulation.

More Good News That May Have Fallen Through the Cracks:

Lynx from the brink: The Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), once critically endangered, has recovered thanks to decades of intense conservation effort. The IUCN last month reassessed the species as merely “vulnerable to extinction.” In 2005 the lynx population had fallen to an estimated 84 mature cats; the most recent count put them at a healthy (but still risky) 648.

The small predators benefitted from efforts to increase previously overhunted rabbit populations, which, once restored, finally gave the lynx plenty to eat and thrive. The IUCN warns, though, that another rabbit crash, a disease, or high mortality from roads could quickly undo this conservation victory.

Wolves: When wolves returned to Washington state in 2008, many hunters bemoaned that white-tail deer populations would suffer. Well, guess what — it didn’t happen. New research shows that wolves have had a minimal effect on deer in the Evergreen State — far below that of cougars (which also get a bad rap in WA) and habitat loss (i.e., development — the bane of communities throughout the West as people flock to this part of the country).

Meanwhile Washington rejected a push to remove state endangered-species status for wolves and lowered its previously lax cougar-hunting quotas to more sustainable levels. Conservationists praised both decisions. We imagine wolves and mountain lions were pretty happy, too.

Europe: After two years of debate, the European Union passed its Nature Restoration Law last month — which, according to news site Euractiv, “will set legally binding targets to restore 20% of the EU’s degraded land and sea ecosystems by 2030 and all ecosystems by 2050.” The bill got watered down a bit (farmers get a bit of a pass), but this seems like a good model for other 30×30 goals. (Speaking of which, six years is still a pretty tight deadline … )

Sued: A new report finds that the number of companies facing climate-related lawsuits keeps rising dramatically — and that most of these corporations are losing in court. Most of the recent lawsuits target so-called “climate-washing” — a willful misrepresentation of their progress toward promised climate goals. (The lessons: Lies cost you $$$.)

Fined: More losing: Marathon Oil just got socked with a $64.5 million fine for Clean Air Act violations at the Fort Berhold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, in the heart of the Bakken shale oil fields. The company must also pay another $177 million toward reducing its future emissions. General Motors, meanwhile, must pony up $146 million in fines because its vehicles emitted at least 10% more carbon dioxide than their compliance reports claimed. (Either of these items could actually go in the “bad news” category, since the spewing of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants went on so long before either company got caught and punished, but we’ll leave them in with the other wins for now as a warning to other gasbag corporations.)

Fined, part 2: French regulators this month fined conservative broadcaster CNews €20,000 (about $22,000) for allowing a pundit to spread climate skepticism (aka disinformation) without editorial follow-up or rebuttal.

I’ll admit, as an advocate of free speech and the free press, I have doubts about this approach to forcing balance from news outlets. For one thing, it seems the right wing could have weaponized this approach to water down good climate reporting if they’d come to power in France in this month’s narrowly won elections. Still, I’m intrigued and wonder if this could help stem the tide of further disinformation or if it will just cause pundits to double down on their lies. (Probably the latter, alas.)

Spa day: “Frog saunas” could help an endangered Australian species, the green and golden bell frog (Ranoidea aurea), recover from the deadly chytrid fungus, which has caused dozens of amphibian extinctions over the past few years. (This technique hasn’t proven helpful for other species, unfortunately.)

Frogs poke out of the holes in a wall of bricks — Frogs enjoy their day in the sun. Photo courtesy Macquarie University

Vroom vroom: Another new report finds that rural families are saving thousands of dollars a year with electric vehicles. (Yes, these are the same rural families who many people assumed would resist transitioning away from gas-powered cars, trucks, and farm equipment. Shows what the “experts” know.)

Renewables: China is building twice as much renewable energy (specifically wind and solar) as every other country combined. (How do you say “This should light a fire under everyone else’s ass” in a carbon-neutral manner?)

(Seriously though, I don’t want to blindly praise China for this; its environmental record is terrible. But so is ours, so c’mon folks, catch up.)

And finally, a peak: Even fossil-fuel companies predict the world will hit peak oil demand next year. They see the writing on the wall (and the lawsuits in the wings?).

Worst News of the Month:

Getting back to that theme of flooding, the United States just lost its first species due to sea-level rise: the Key Largo tree cactus (Pilosocereus millspaughii).

Despite its geographically based monicker, this rare cactus grows on a handful of scattered islands in the Caribbean. But it’s no longer found in its namesake Key Largo — storm surges inundated the limestone outcrop where it once grew, increasing salt levels beyond what the plants could tolerate. The storms also washed away a lot of soil, which is kind of a basic need for plants.

It wasn’t just the salt water that caused problems. These cacti stored fresh water in their bodies, which then became a source of hydration for thirsty animals when the coasts became inundated with undrinkable sea water.

The cactus declined quickly amidst this one-two-three punch. In 2021 the Key Largo population — previously described as “thriving” — had deteriorated to just six stands. This month scientists announced that even those last individuals had disappeared.

But the species still exists on other islands, and scientists harvested the last Key Largo plants’ flowers and fruits in 2021 to cultivate them in a greenhouse setting. So far they’re doing fine, but the chance of replanting them in their native habitat appears slim.

This isn’t a full-on species extinction, but it is a local extinction caused by sea-level rise, the first of its kind identified to date in the United States. And it could be a portent of things to come, as botanist Jennifer Possley said in a press release: “Unfortunately, the Key Largo tree cactus may be a bellwether for how other low-lying coastal plants will respond to climate change.”

That said, I’m going to nudge this back into the “kinda-good” category, because at least scientists recognized the problem in time, saved what they could, and took the opportunity to warn us about future threats. That’s the type of proactive conservation that we should all aspire to and celebrate, even if it’s a part of the ongoing extinction crisis.

Bad News Quick Hits:

(Sorry. Let’s not dwell, but let’s not look away, either.)

- Chevron
- The Supreme Court in general
- Fiberglass in oysters and mussels
- 10.3 billion people by 2084?
- Protestors jailed
- Bitcoin = crashed power grids?
- The last ‘akikiki? (This breaks my heart.)
- Coal consumption could go up next year?

Quote of the Month:

“Inside your trash can is the possibility to change the world if you apply some creativity and some love. All trash is treasure.” — Troll artist Thomas Dambo, in The Washington Post

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A post shared by Thomas Dambo (@thomasdambo)

That’s it for this edition of Links From the Brink. We’ll be back in a month or two with another roundup of under-the-radar news stories. Until then, keep an eye on the 2024 election, watch out for heat waves and wildfire smoke (not to mention floods), and check in on your neighbors in need (both human and wild).

Meanwhile, mark your calendars for International Owl Awareness Day on Aug. 4, World Krill Day on Aug. 11, Panamanian Golden Frog Day on Aug. 14, and (my favorite) International Orangutan Day on Aug. 19.

What will you be watching in the months ahead?