A new study shows that tens of millions of Americans could lose the chance to see their state bird due to climate change.
If you’re a U.S. resident, do you know the official “state bird” of where you grew up or currently live? If so, is it a bird you can easily see in your neighborhood? And if that changed, how would it affect your relationship with the place where you live?
Conservationists and wildlife biologists have been raising concerns for years about how wildlife species’ ranges will shift and contract due to climate change, but less consideration has been given to how that could damage humans’ relationships with the ecosystems we call home. A new study published in December examines this question through the lens of state birds and finds that tens of millions of American could lose the chance to experience their state birds in the decades to come.
The project got its start as lead author Abby Luna’s undergraduate honors thesis at Oregon State University. While searching for a topic, she connected with OSU faculty member Tyler McFadden, her mentor and coauthor, who was looking for students interested in bird research. “I was like, OK, birds sound cool,” says Luna.
McFadden’s original suggestion was to pick a single bird species and look at whether changes to its distribution driven by climate change would alter how many people in the United States were able to see it easily and whether that differed by race and ethnicity. However, the concept for the project expanded when Luna read a New York Times article describing eight official state birds who could vanish from their states entirely in the future.
Luna and McFadden decided to take that further and look at the entire country — well, most of it.
The resulting study examines how Americans’ likelihood of encountering their state birds in their neighborhoods is likely to change in 47 states. They didn’t include Delaware and Rhode Island because their state birds are domestic chicken breeds, and Hawai‘i didn’t make the cut because projections for bird range shifts in that state were not available.
Luna and McFadden drew from previous work projecting bird range changes under three climate change models: 1.5, 2, and 3 degrees Celsius of warming. They overlaid this with census data to calculate the human population within each bird’s range now and how that’s likely to change in the future.
Some state birds — such as the cardinal and mockingbird, who together represent no fewer than 12 states — are easy-to-spot backyard birds across large swaths of the country. A few, such as Colorado’s lark bunting, require specific habitats that are often far from population centers.
Most states saw only minimal changes in access along race and ethnicity lines. But the total numbers tell a grimmer story.
Currently around 86% of the portion of the U.S. population included in the study has access to their state bird. That drops to 79% with 1 degree of warming, 75% with 2 degrees of warming, and 71% with 3 degrees of warming.
Around 43 million people would lose the chance to easily see their state bird under the most extreme scenario.
If we hit 3 degrees of warming, of course, we’ll have much bigger problems to worry about. But lost access to state birds is one easy-to-grasp example of how climate change could eat away at people’s everyday opportunities to interact with nature, something that could have far-reaching implications for how we think about and care for the nonhuman world.
This is an example of what’s been called the “extinction of experience,” a term coined by naturalist Robert Michael Pyle in the 1970s. Luna and McFadden raise the possibility of a potential feedback cycle where people have fewer opportunities to engage with and appreciate nature in their immediate surroundings, leading them to care less about taking actions to preserve and protect nature, ultimately reducing their access to nature even further.
State birds are “a really good starting point” for thinking about this issue, according to the National Audubon Society’s Brooke Bateman, lead author of the study from which Luna and McFadden drew their data on projected bird range changes.
Some serious birdwatchers scoff at the concept of state birds, Bateman acknowledges, since so many of them are common backyard birds that might be considered “boring.” But “most people know what their state bird is, [and] that’s a great way to get people’s attention and have them thinking about the impact of climate change.”
Luna, who graduated from Oregon State University in 2024, is currently working seasonal wildlife-related jobs in preparation for pursuing a master’s degree. She hopes to continue studying birds and says that moving around the country for work and education has given her an even greater appreciation of how birds and nature can connect us to the places we call home.
“Sometimes I think you don’t notice it until you leave,” she says. But “if the whole species assemblage [where you live] is going to change under climate change, what does that mean for your sense of place, your identity in where you live and the nature that surrounds you?”
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The beautiful marine mollusks have international protections, but sale of their shells continues by the tens of thousands.
Wildlife biologist Vincent Nijman has studied the gorgeous marine mollusk called the chambered nautilus for years, but he’s never had the opportunity to observe one swimming in the ocean.
“I’ve never seen one,” he admits. “They’re very difficult to see. I know very few people that actually seen them alive. They swim quite deep. They come up a little bit higher during the night, but even most divers haven’t seen them.”
He’s seen plenty of empty nautilus shells, though. Thousands of them.
Chambered nautiluses (Nautilus pompilius) — one of at least nine related species — live in the south Pacific around Indonesia and other countries. Previous research has identified unsustainable levels of trade in their shells, often sliced in half to reveal their intricate patterns (which resemble, but don’t quite match, mathematics’ fabled golden ratio). So many nautilus shells have been sold over the years that in 2016 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species required permits showing they were sustainably harvested. A few years later the United States added them to the Endangered Species Act. They’re also legally protected in Indonesia.
On Bali the trade in whole or mounted shells continues in curio shops, art centers, airports, and other retail sites catering to tourists.
On Lombok the trade has taken an unexpected form. The shells are sliced up by the thousands to inlay into the surfaces of decorative furniture and handicrafts. A set of furniture, such as a table and four chairs, could require 60-80 shells. The craft receives heavy promotion from several government agencies, which call it “cukli” (a more generic word for “shell”).
Nautilus shells, handicrafts, and inlay furniture. Photos: Nijman et al. Used with permission.
According to their research, this trade uses at least 10,000 chambered nautilus shells a year, despite the species’ many levels of national and international protection.
The Revelator spoke with Nijman about this shocking level of trade and what needs to be done next to protect these elusive, charismatic animals — including how people can help.
You’ve been studying the nautilus trade for years. Why is it something you keep returning to?
Well, it’s one of many species I study. Where I do my studies, they offer them for sale. I first started looking properly into them when I was at a beach resort in the south of West Java where I initially went to look into the marine turtle trade. So they sell a lot of stuff, including marine turtles. I went quite a few times, and one of the other things they sell was nautilus shells and other large shells — horned helmets, Triton’s trumpet, all those amazing names. So I started collecting data on that as well. And then the last few years I’ve been doing all the work in Bali, and Bali and Lombok turn out to be the center for nautilus shell trade in Indonesia.
Right. And you mentioned Nautilus trade as part of your last contribution for us. So this is obviously a case where the science builds, you uncover one thing, and you’ll look for the next thing.
Yeah.
But were you surprised by what you found in this recent study? I sure was.
Yes, I was. I’ve been surprised a few times before, and I will be surprised, surely, in times coming.
With wildlife trade, often when people don’t pay attention to it, and nobody counts and nobody keeps track and nobody monitors, then it’s often very easy to think, “It’s a small-scale trade that doesn’t affect many individuals.” And if you start properly counting it — and crucially, talking to the people in the trade. That’s what I do a lot. I simply, surprisingly, talk to them and ask “what do you sell? What do you have?” And my experience is that they’re very open and give me the information that I need. And then you start triangulating: looking at official trade data, looking at what you observe yourself, looking at what traders tell you. If it all comes together and it comes to essentially something in the same order of magnitude, then I like to report on it.
So yes, it was surprising, but it’s true. The number of nautilus shells that we think are needed to sustain the trade in nautilus shell inlay furniture and handcrafts is indeed in the tens of thousands per year.
I think 20, 25 years ago in the U.S., it wasn’t uncommon to go into a store in the mall and see a nautilus shell cut in half to see that interesting pattern. You’re obviously still seeing that there in the home range, but this more decorative use, the inlay, it’s portrayed as a cultural thing, but it’s only like 50 years old.
Yeah, less even. Some people say it started in the late eighties, obviously in the nineties, but it’s fairly recent.
There are traditional wedding boxes in Lombok made from very light balsa wood and palm leaves. And they were often decorated with cowrie shells. These tiny little shells were basically stitched onto them. So it’s inspired by something that existed for a long time.
But what it is very novel is the massive furniture — these very bulky tables, seats, wardrobes and all those things. That’s much more recent, as in probably 20-30 years old. And for that, you require a lot of shells.
I sent you a photograph of a very large table. I put it up on my big screen I started counting, and I think I ended up at 10,000 pieces. It was especially elaborate one, but it takes eight months for them to make.
I admire the craftsmanship. The people that do it don’t make a lot of money.
It’s amazing to watch. It’s amazing to talk to these people. It’s amazing to see what they do. And it reminds me in a way, very much, of work I’ve done on ivory trade.
Some of the accounts I’ve read of the ivory carvers, they say their art doesn’t translate very well to other materials. Did anyone express that the nautilus shells have some special quality that makes them attractive to the artisans? Or would any shell do the trick?
I asked exactly that question because I knew it from the ivory trade. The answer is no, there is no alternative. And it has to do with the fact that nautilus shells are exactly the right thickness and the right strength. Some other shells are too thick, and others too thin and brittle. Nautilus shell is just about perfect. They couldn’t find an alternative.
Of course if we can find an alternative, then that will be the easiest solution.
Now, in your email, you equated this with the trade in orangutans and tigers, or at least the endangered status of those species. Can you speak about that a little bit more?
One point to compare them is basically looking at the legislation. Indonesia has very good legislation in terms of protecting some of its wildlife. It’s a fairly long list of legally protected species. Tigers are on there, orangutans are on there. A whole range of species are on there. And chambered nautiluses are on there as well. In that sense, legally, there’s no difference between a nautilus shell and a tiger.
Now, of course, society judges them differently and therefore I assume prosecutors will look at them differently and therefore judges will look at them differently. But the law is exactly the same. It’s a protected species. You can’t trade it, you can’t buy it, you can’t sell it.
Now what happens in reality is that this trade happens very openly in shops on the high streets in Bali. You can see them in the windows. You can see them for sale, easily recognizable, because they’re still whole.
This furniture is everywhere. In every government building I’ve been, there is this furniture. They all have it, but clearly nobody sees it as a problem.
The shell trade, generally speaking — are people even aware that they’re buying the remains of formerly living animals?
No. Of course, some of them know exactly what they’re doing. But I think by and large, what people don’t realize is that when they buy a shell, even if you’re on a beach somewhere, that these shells are not necessarily from that one beach. There’s a large network of trade in shells, and the shells you buy perhaps in a beach resort in China may actually come from India. The ones you buy from in Java were maybe fished in Eastern Indonesia.
What is different with nautilus shells compared to some other shells, especially the smaller ones, is that nautilus shells are not picked up on the beach. They’re not collected by people. The only way to get reasonable numbers of nautilus shells is to fish for them. And you do that with crates or with cages. You bait them with chicken meat or with other meat, and then you drop them to under 50 meters at night. The nautiluses swim in, you haul them up, and you have 3, 4, 5, 6 of those shells. And you repeat that a couple of times during the night.
That’s how you collect the numbers of nautilus shells. You can walk on the beaches for days and not come across a single nautilus shell.
When nautilus shells are on the beach, they are often dead because they’ve been preyed upon by octopus. Octopus produce a very distinct bore hole on the side of the shell, and that’s how they suck out the meat. I don’t see that in trade, so the ones that I see are not washed up.
There’s been a lot of work last in the last couple of years getting the chambered nautilus onto the Endangered Species Act here in the United States and on CITES. It seems like the scientific evidence suggests that this is in no way sustainable. Would you agree with that?
It’s difficult, because we don’t have any field data. We don’t know exactly where they’re being fished. It’s probably a large part of Eastern Indonesia.
What we do know is that people in Bali say “We used to catch them in the north of Bali. We don’t do that anymore. They’re no longer there.” In Lombok they say “We used to catch them from Lombok and Bali, but they’re no longer there. So now we get them from more from Eastern Indonesia or even further.” So that suggests that indeed overfishing is a problem.
In reality we don’t know exactly where they are being caught. But there are a few studies from other places where these nautilus shells have been monitored for long periods of time, and fishing very quickly leads to a depletion of their numbers. So it’s highly unlikely that it’s sustainable.
Also, we can turn it around: If you want a trade in them, it’s not the question whether the people who think you shouldn’t trade should say if it’s sustainable. It’s the other way around. If you’re trading them, you have to show that it’s a sustainable trade.
Who do you most want to be aware of this study? Would it pay to get the tourists to know, the store owners, the police, the judges? Who would make the most difference by knowing more about this and trying to make some behavioral changes?
I think when it comes to sheer numbers, it would be good if we could probably shut down this entire inlay trade. And that requires the local authorities in Lombok to take action. That’s going to be complicated because it’s seen as traditional Lombok, but as it stands now, it is illegal.
And I think it is very, very strange to have these workshops in the open. You have art markets in the open, you have everybody in their offices using it. I think that is something that needs to be fixed. And perhaps there’s a way where you can find some little ground, but something needs to be done.
I think what is happening now is simply not okay. And yet we have this large-scale trade where all kinds of governments or government-linked institutions are involved, including chambers of commerce, regional airports, the prison service, regional development groups, micro loans — all those things come together in Lombok. And that to me needs to be fixed.
What may actually accelerate that is if people from outside take an interest, and that can perhaps best be done in Bali, which is largely economically dependent on tourism. And now we’re talking about the whole shells, which are targeted at international and domestic tourists.
If we can get some leverage there, where international tourists basically speak out and say, “we don’t want this to be offered to us, we don’t want this to be openly offered sale, and we want people to take proper action against it,” that may help.
And on that same note, if countries that import nautilus shells from Indonesia take notice and stop that, seize the shipments that come in, if that’s possible within their own legal framework, then that would help as well.
I think what we need is multilayered and ideally at the same time action.
For the consumers, is there a communication channel that exists for them to say, “we don’t want this,” or would the best way for them to be there in person and say, “no, I can’t buy this.”
I think it’s always good when you see wildlife for sale — or when you see anything that you don’t like — is inform the person that sells it why you won’t buy it, but why you will buy something else.
It’s not that you don’t want to trade with them, but you don’t want that. You can even say, if you continue trading with this, I’ll go to your neighbor or your competitor and buy my stuff there.
I think it’s always good to explain why not to do something in a polite way. That helps.
What we see in Bali is there’s lots of curio shops, wildlife shops, art shops, that sell nautilus shells, but it’s one of more than 100 products they sell. If you take that one product out, no one is going to go bankrupt. So tell them why you want to buy this, but not that. I think that helps.
It also may help if you perhaps could inform perhaps tourism organizations. Slightly higher up, chambers of commerce would help. If you’re a foreigner, inform your embassy.
It’s always difficult to judge what helps. But I think it’s also true that unless you inform people that you are aware of it and that you don’t like it, it’s difficult to expect them to make change. It’s not to inform them because they don’t know. It’s to inform them that you know that they know. It’s not that the authorities are not aware of this — because it’s in the open, it’s completely out there. It’s not hidden, but there’s no reason to take action because there’s no societal pressure to do it. And I think that needs to change.
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In her new book Ghosts Behind Glass, historian Dolly Jørgensen takes us through dozens of museum exhibits about extinction — and examines the stories they tell.
To understand extinction, it helps to visit ghosts.
The shadowy remains of lost species are all around us — and you can see them in the world’s natural history museums, many of which display skeletons, bones, taxidermy specimens, digital recreations, or other embodiments of our loss, along with the stories about their disappearances.
It’s a haunting book, but it’s not really about grief. It’s an examination of how we tell stories of our recent losses — and how those stories can motivate action against ongoing environmental crises.
Jørgensen takes readers to distant museums — and maybe a few in their own neighborhoods — and brings their exhibits to life in words and dozens of full-color photos. She examines stories of violence and grief, but also uncovers how playful, engaging exhibits help to bring the dead to life.
The Revelator spoke with Jørgensen about her new book, what we can learn from extinction, the value of museums, and what still haunts her.
I’m glad to get a chance to talk to you, because this is just a marvelous and moving book. How would you describe this book to someone who’s just learning about it?
I would describe it as a walk through museum galleries with me. It’s a chance to encounter something that you can’t encounter. Recently extinct things, they’re not going to be in kids’ books, unlike dinosaurs. The only place you’re going to see a passenger pigeon or a Carolina parakeet is in a natural history museum.
I hope it’s me taking the reader by the hand and leading them to the galleries and standing in front of the cases and saying, “Here’s what you see” or ”Here’s what you don’t see.”
I’ve had the opportunity to compare a lot of different places — over 80 museums across the globe — so it’s also a way of thinking about broader patterns that you just wouldn’t notice otherwise.
I hope that once you read it, then when somebody visits their local place, wherever that is in Chicago or Shanghai, that you will think differently when you see the exhibition.
I think this book is for people who are interested in animals, people who are interested in nature, people who recognize that we’re losing things and want to think about what this means.
I think one of the messages that I hope comes out of the book is that we owe it to extinct species to not just forget about them, not just push them under the rug, but to engage with them as beings with stories that are worth telling, and worth holding onto that history. That’s what I want people to get out of it.
You have your own unique story, traveling around the world to see all these museums. You saw 28 thylacine remains. You saw Martha, the last passenger pigeon. You’ve probably encountered more extinct species than just about anyone on Earth. How does how does that make you feel?
Yeah, it’s true. I thought about that in end chapter of the book. I asked, what does it amount to, to look at all this death and destruction? But I think it matters.
Even though I’ve seen so many specimens, I remember them. I remember them all. If you say, “Oh, where was that one?” I’ll know: It was sitting in this case. It had this background and lighting.
In honoring their stories, I want to remember them.
Like seeing the last great auks. Their organs are in jars. That had a particular emotional response, because of seeing them disemboweled in that way, which of course is not the normal way that you encounter most things of natural history. We’re very sanitized, right? Things that look alive but aren’t alive. And these were very much dead. It’s their insides. That did stick with me, specifically on an emotional level.
But to honor or respect the fallen dead in this way, you can’t get hung up on being sorrowful about it, because then you can’t tell the story. You have to use it. You have to use engagement and emotion. I hope I faithfully tell these stories of my encounters and what another visitor might be able to encounter as well.
Is there an extinct species you’d hope to see that has eluded you so far?
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I had thought about trying to see the Falkland Islands wolf.
I think there’s a specimen in the Falkland Islands. I think there’s one in, like, New Zealand. And I was just like, well, this is not going to happen.
I got some funding from the National Research Council in Norway, and I had intended to do a lot of traveling in 2020 and 2021. I ended up not being able to do some of the big international things because of Covid.
I realize this is less about the intent of the book, but what do you think works about these exhibits, and what doesn’t?
Sometimes some of the exhibits don’t give enough of the relationship between animals and humans. They become very much about where it lived and how many babies it had at a time and how long it lived or what kind of nest it built or whatever.
I’m not saying that’s not important. It’s important to know what the species is and how it lived. But in essence, how it lived is also in relationship to humans, right? I mean, that’s the case why they’re not here anymore. I think sometimes that becomes very cursory and it’s not said enough.
There’s a couple of places where all the animals have a little geography label, showing you where they live in the world, which is a really nice thing when you just have a bunch of birds all together. People can say, “Oh, that bird lives in South America” or “That bird lives in Siberia.” And for the extinct species, all they did was put a big X on it. It bothered me because it means that nothing about where the species was prior to extinction is given to the visitors.
I also don’t think it works if people don’t call out things. Because while a person like myself knows to look for a particular thing in the cases, an average visitor won’t. For extinctions, I think you need, like, flashing lights, you know? You need a big font. You need to point out that this is gone, because people need to realize that this is something that they’re not going to see everywhere. This isn’t something they can just go to a zoo to see or look at a documentary film. It’s gone.
Good labeling calls out the extinct in a very clear way. And then tells the story of why this was lost.
Sometimes they just say something like, “Its habitat changed.” Let’s be more specific. If you want to say, “Commercial logging led to the downfall of the ivory-billed woodpecker,” that’s fine. But don’t just say like, “Oh, things changed.”
You tell these great stories about the species in the book, but ultimately, even though these are exhibits about extinct species, they’re about us. They’re about our violence. They’re about losing pieces of our culture. You say these exhibits enable grief. Can you talk about that?
I always think in terms of relations. It’s not just the animal. And in fact, I would say this about a lot of exhibits at natural history museums: There can be a lot more relational stories.
Back when I was doing reintroduction work, I had seen some exhibitions talking about the beaver in Scandinavia. And what I realized was that they didn’t talk about the fact that beavers had been extinct in all of Sweden and now were back because of reintroduction. They didn’t tell that story. And I was like, isn’t that a major part of its history of who the beaver is now?
It’s the same with these extinct species. I think that who they are, were, is about relations, right? And what happened to them and why. I think “why” is often completely left out. It’s those kinds of stories that I want people to recognize and that I’d like museums to tell.
There’s this kind of myth, and I’ve heard it from multiple people, that people don’t read labels. Well, let me tell you after going to 80 museums and walking through galleries and watching people … people read labels all the time. They’re always reading labels. And they read the labels and then they look at the thing and then they read the label again. They look at the thing. And so the stories they tell on those labels actually matter.
I’m not going to say they necessarily remember everything that they read. I don’t remember everything I read. But it matters in that moment. The label gives you the context. It tells you, “How do I interpret what I’m looking at?”
And that’s where I think it’s important to tell the kind of stories that help people to see that the things humans have done to the planet in the last 500 years was the reason all these things are disappearing. And we need to think, are we doing exactly the same thing now?
People need to have tangible stuff. One of the reasons that environmental messaging often fails is because it becomes too abstract. “It’ll save the world.” It’s like, what the hell does that mean? What am I supposed to do?
I think seeing the thing that’s lost can help. Because it’s something tangible. And that that can be like, “Oh, look at that bird. That was a really nice bird. But it’s not there now. Here’s why it’s not there.”
You write about that in the book. You say the value of displaying extinction is to engage with the ongoing environmental crisis. I kind of wish everyone would go to a natural history museum right now and see these exhibits and get their eyes opened.
Yeah. I mean, little steps, right?
One that I think is important to point out about museums: They’re really important culturally. We need to be investing in museums. And one of the main reasons we need to invest in them is that that’s where the kids go. Any museum I visit, there’s at least one school group there.
People don’t think about this, but it becomes kind of a standard thought in different age groups. You know, the fourth graders need to go see the dinosaurs or the first graders need to go see about biodiversity.
They have things they do in these museums. And it means that you’re hitting people when they’re at a very impressionable age, right? It’s going to change the way they think about the world.
The ghost story is intrinsic in the book. And ghost stories are so evocative in terms of fiction and our culture and our history, our legends, our tales. They remind us of the past. They remind us not to repeat the past. And I think employing some of those techniques, whether it’s from fiction or from our cultural narrative, is very effective.
Absolutely. There are different narrative styles, different kinds of stories you can tell, whether it’s a tragedy or a comedy. All kinds of things on all sides, whether it’s a farce or a very dramatic piece, there can be different registers that you speak on. And I think what I did want to say with this discussion of hauntings is that it does mean that these stories continue to be there, that they’re underlying, they’re being told. And that in fact, in many cases, being told with the bodies of those things.
And there are some cultures that do this, that keep the body of the deceased. And you tell stories of the deceased person in their presence of the body and the body does things. And it’s like that. They’re both physically present and present in narrative.
Those two things can work together, to remind us that they’re still there in essence.
This is one of the things that I’ve also wanted to get at: You think of extinction as the end, extinction as a finish. And it is a biological finish, but it’s not a finish of a story.
Yeah, the story echoes. Something is missing, it leaves a void. Other systems rush to fill it or can’t fill it.
Yes, exactly. And we have other mechanisms as humans. We do this with our storytelling, right? We’re still telling stories that Homer wrote down thousands of years ago. That’s a reason you can have allusions to The Iliad that people will understand, because they’ve heard it so much.
And I think you can do the same thing with extinct species. It’s not that it’s dead — it’s that it still has a story to tell. That story keeps them alive.
Speaking of ghosts, what haunts you?
I guess I’m just always wanting to see more. Even after the book was out, I’ve still gone to more museums. It’s not that I’m running around on purpose for it, but if I happen to be somewhere it’s like, “Oh, let me stop and see their local museum. What exhibitions are there?”
In a way, I guess I’m always haunted by all of them, because I’m always wanting to see more of their stories. They’re always on my mind. I just went to the Royal Ontario. I was doing some research for a completely different project, but I couldn’t resist going into the galleries with the extinct things.
So in a way, I guess I’m haunted by the idea of extinction, haunted by the idea of the encounter.
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Where are the safe havens keeping wildlife safe from climate change? New science offers guidance on how to identify, manage, and connect climate refugia.
The idea began in California’s Sierra Nevada, a towering spine of rock and ice where rising temperatures and the decline of snowpack are transforming ecosystems, sometimes with catastrophic consequences for wildlife.
The prairie-doglike Belding’s ground squirrel (Urocitellus beldingi) had been struggling there as the mountain meadows it relies on dry out in years with less snowmelt and more unpredictable weather. At lower elevations, the foothill yellow-legged frog (Rana boylii) was also being hit hard by rising temperatures, because it needs cool, shaded streams to breed and survive.
A Belding’s ground squirrel in the Sierra Nevada. Toni Lyn Morelli
As we studied these and other species in the Sierra Nevada, we discovered a ray of hope: The effects of warming weren’t uniform.
We were able to locate meadows that are less vulnerable to climate change, where the squirrels would have a better chance of thriving. We also identified streams that would stay cool for the frogs even as the climate heats up. Some are shaded by tree canopy. Others are in valleys with cool air or near deep lakes or springs.
These special areas are what we call climate change refugia.
Identifying these pockets of resilient habitat — a field of research that was inspired by our work with natural resource managers in the Sierra Nevada — is now helping national parks and other public and private land managers to take action to protect these refugia from other threats, including fighting invasive species and pollution and connecting landscapes, giving threatened species their best chance for survival in a changing climate.
Examples of climate change refugia. Toni Lyn Morelli, et al., 2016, PLoS ONE, CC BY
In New England, managers at national parks and other protected areas were worried about how species are being affected by changes in climate and habitat. For example, the grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum), a little grassland songbird that nests in the open fields in the eastern U.S. and southern Canada, appears to be in trouble.
We have been actively mapping refugia in British Columbia, looking for shadier, wetter or more sheltered places that naturally resist the worst effects of climate change.
The mapping project will help to identify important habitat for wildlife such as moose and caribou. Knowing where these climate change refugia are allows land-use planners and Indigenous communities to protect the most promising habitats from development, resource extraction and other stressors.
On the sweeping vistas of East Africa, dozens of species interact in hot spots of global biodiversity. Unfortunately, rising temperatures, prolonged drought and shifting seasons are threatening their very existence.
In Tanzania, working with government agencies and conservation groups through past USAID funding, we mapped potential refugia for iconic savanna species including lions, giraffes and elephants. These areas include places that will hold water in drought and remain cooler during heat waves. The iconic Serengeti National Park, home to some of the world’s most famous wildlife, emerged as a key location for climate change refugia.
In East Africa, climate change refugia remain cooler and hold water during droughts. Protecting them can help protect the region’s iconic wildlife. Toni Lyn Morelli
Combining local knowledge with spatial analysis is helping prioritize areas where big cats, antelope, elephants and the other great beasts of the Serengeti ecosystem can continue to thrive — provided other, nonclimate threats such as habitat loss and overharvesting are kept at bay.
The Tanzanian government has already been working with U.S.-funded partners to identify corridors that can help connect biodiversity hot spots.
Hope for the Future
By identifying and protecting the places where species can survive the longest, we can buy crucial decades for ecosystems while conservation efforts are underway and the world takes steps to slow climate change.
Across continents and climates, the message is the same: Amid our rapidly warming world, pockets of resilience remain for now. With careful science and strong partnerships, we can find climate change refugia, protect them and help the wild things continue to thrive.
There’s a lot going on to distract us from progress. But if you look through the noise, you’ll find encouraging patterns that no one can stop.
The Trump administration has a clear communication objective: Flood the zone with bad news to overwhelm us, keep us off-balance, and make us feel like we can’t stop their regressive and oppressive policies.
But even amidst this constant barrage, other patterns emerge.
They aren’t always easy to see — especially when the authoritarian objective is to convince you to close your eyes and ears. But when you do finally recognize these patterns, a hidden truth can begin to make itself clear.
For example, a few weeks ago I started to see a particular phrase in news headlines. And because I read hundreds of headlines and articles every day — the curse of working in the news business — I saw a pattern: The phrase “despite Trump.”
That feels a little less dramatic than the pattern of good news about renewables, but the core message remains: People and businesses continue to stand up against the Trump administration and succeed in many other ways, often by working together and demanding change — because change is inevitable.
Once you see the “despite Trump” pattern, you see it even when news sites don’t use the phrase: The protests in Minneapolis and other cities; the rapid growth of mutual aid networks; the handful of Republican legislators stepping across the aisle to vote their consciences; the journalists standing up for the first amendment; the election officials refusing to back down as the Trump administration tries to throw monkey wrenches into the midterm elections; the governments teaming up to rebalance international power dynamics; the millions of tiny actions taking place every day, around the country, around the world, to protect people, systems, the environment, human rights, and so much more.
That’s not enough, of course. It can never be in enough in an era where masked enforcers shoot people down in the streets, where the system systematically covers up the crimes of rich abusers, where anti-regulation extremism has crippled the federal government’s climate programs, and where the president constantly seeks revenge on his perceived enemies, fantasizes about nonexistent voter fraud, and threatens to take over elections.
Still, it shows that we’re making progress despite all of that (and more). And maybe the fact that the president can’t destroy renewable energy — no matter how hard he tries — tells us there are other things he can’t destroy and other progress we can keep making.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I understand the impulse to wrap yourself in a warm blanket and shield your eyes and ears and soul from the constant painful input.
But I encourage you: Let some of that information in. Process it. Look for patterns. Look for growth. Look for opportunities. Look for the signal hiding in the noise that can help you move forward — and maybe help us all move forward in the process.
And do all of that despite Trump.
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By focusing on reusable products, some organizations are helping to break our addiction to single-use plastic.
The global annual production of plastics rose to 400 million metric tons in 2022 and is projected to double by 2050 (a metric ton, or Mt, is 1,000 kilograms or about 2,200 pounds). As of 2015 some 6,300 metric tons (roughly 13.8 million pounds) of plastic had become waste. About 9% of it was recycled, 12% incinerated, and 79% ended up in landfills or the natural environment — rates that haven’t gotten much better in the ensuing decade. Current trends suggest that by 2050, we will put roughly 12,000 Mt of plastic waste in landfills or the environment.
Clearly the problem of plastic pollution in land and marine environments isn’t going away. This series looks at some approaches to dealing with it, such as efforts to replace disposable plastic items with reusables.
Order take-out and most likely your meal comes in plastic containers inside plastic bags with a set of plastic utensils — each item designed to be used just once. That beer you grab at a concert or basketball game is served in a plastic cup meant to be thrown away when empty. And at most stores, your purchases are tossed into a single-use plastic bag.
Replacing these disposable items with reusable ones could help address plastic pollution by reducing the amount of waste generated.
But what are the best ways to accomplish that? Should the responsibility — or the opportunity — to use less plastic come from individuals, large suppliers, or the government?
To help settle these questions, we looked at some organizations and businesses working to cut back on our addiction to disposable plastic.
Retooling Large and Small Systems
Events like concerts, festivals, football games, and conventions use tens of millions of disposable cups. An average-sized stadium will go through 5.4 million of them every year, according to Upstream, a nongovernmental organization supporting reuse efforts.
To break this endless chain of disposability, venues and events could turn to companies that deliver, pick up, wash, and return reusables. Most of these are made from polypropylene, a nontoxic plastic polymer that is tough, lightweight, heat-resistant, and does not absorb water.
Trial runs of reusable cups at major venues have been promising. A four-day After two 2024 concerts at the Los Angeles Crypto.com Arena kept 23,000 single-use cups out of the trash, the venue made the switch for good, r.World reports. As of Dec. 31, 2025, the company’s reusable service had diverted more than 23 million single-use items from landfills.
Photo courtesy r.World
Other sports venues, events, and teams currently working to switch to reuseable cups include the Los Angeles Coliseum, Red Rocks Amphitheater, Kansas City Chiefs and Arrowhead Stadium, Portland Trail Blazers, and Charlotte Hornets.
Another recent initiative — Protect Where We Play, launched by the Ocean Conservancy in partnership with Green Operations & Advanced Leadership — has provided reusables for several events, including two June 2025 Coldplay concerts in Las Vegas; a September Lumineers performance in Savannah, Georgia; and two October Billie Eilish concerts in Belmont Park, New York. The program plans new 2026 tour stops and hopes to replace a total of 1 million single-use cups with reusables managed by Bold Reuse.
Jenna DiPaolo, chief brand and communications officer for Ocean Conservancy, says the effort was inspired by data showing that the easiest initial action people can take is one related to the ocean (where much plastic waste ends up), plus evidence that many people don’t take action because no one they trust has asked them to do something specific.
A volunteer with Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup removes a plastic bag from Venice Beach in Los Angeles, California. Photo: Val Vega for Ocean Conservancy
“Protect Where We Play leverages the people that Americans trust most — athletes and entertainers — and shows them how easy it can be to take an action,” she says. A key to the effort is showing venues the value of switching to reusables.
“We’re banking on folks to make the right decision when we provide the data,” DiPaolo says.
Bold Reuse is analyzing how many times the products can be reused, says marketing manager Mya Manibusan (existing assessments suggest 300). She said the company had kept 6 million single-use items out of landfills before the end of 2025.
Cups are just part of the issue, though. Every year people in the United States use 1 trillion disposable food service products, Upstream reports, including cups, containers, bags, and utensils. The organization estimates that 840 billion of these items could be replaced by reuse services.
A reusable dishware program called Re:Dish — which serves public school and company cafeterias and events across communities in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia — has kept about 7 million products out of landfills to date.
“Fundamentally, we are an industrial washing operation that also has a line of reusable dishware,” says CEO and founder Caroline Vanderlip. “At the institutional level, most companies, schools, and other operations don’t have the labor, resources, or space to make reusable work. We’re an outsourced solution that provides the full gamut or just whatever pieces you need.”
At end of life, items are taken to a materials recovery facility to be packaged and resold.
“Our mantra is ‘never landfill’, which is really important to us,” Vanderlip says. “We don’t have enough landfill space in this country — and more importantly, plastic takes centuries to deteriorate.”
Switching to reusables at a more local level can make a difference, too. Brothers Kevin and Harrison Kay founded containers for food delivery services in the Washington, DC area.
During the COVID pandemic, they ordered take out a lot (as a lot of us did) and became frustrated with the volume of single-use containers.
“We started brainstorming a solution that would not only work in our lives but be scalable and help solve the problem for other people,” Kevin says. The idea of a shared network of reusable containers was born.
Restaurants that buy the reusable containers are listed on To Go Green’s online ordering platform. When individuals order through the platform, the restaurant places the order in those reusable containers, which customers return for washing along with the restaurant’s in-house dishes.
“We’ve been in business about a year and have 17 restaurant partners and around 700 reusable container uses so far,” Kevin says. “The biggest challenge now is visibility and customer awareness, since we are relatively new. We’ve had tremendous positive feedback from customers, but a lot of people don’t know about us yet.”
Increasing awareness is their biggest challenge.
“Ordering takeout and delivery has become very popular but spreading the word that reusable containers are an option is a hurdle,” Kevin says. The brothers are working on integrating with a third-party delivery app and other ordering channels to increase their reach.
Returning the containers can be cumbersome, Harrison says, so they offer an at-home return service integrated with Uber Direct.
“On a broader note, there are a lot of challenges to scaling up, but if big players in the food delivery field buy into these kinds of services, they can become much more mainstream. We think reuse has to be the future. The current culture of throwing things away is not sustainable.”
Making Reuse the Law
Globally people use 5 trillion plastic bags a year, or 160,000 per second. Americans use on average 365 per person per year. Most marine litter is plastic bags (an estimated 300 million end up in the Atlantic Ocean alone annually) and they cause a lot of damage, killing marine life through ingestion or entanglement, releasing toxic chemicals into the water, and negatively affecting tourism.
Cities, states, and countries have started to regulate their way out of the single-use plastic bag problem. Complete bans prohibit any sort of single-use plastic bag at store checkouts, while partial bans limit bags under a certain millimeter in thickness but allow thicker bags that hold up for multiple uses. Fee policies require customers to pay some amount for a bag, typically 5 to 25 cents.
Research shows that bans work. One study analyzed crowdsourced data from more than 45,067 U.S. shoreline cleanups and 611 local and state-level plastic bag regulations enacted between 2017 and 2023, finding that regulations reduced the proportion of plastic bags by 25 to 47%.
“What we see in places with policies is a decrease in plastic bags as a share of total items collected,” says Anna Papp, co-author and post-doctoral associate at MIT. “It’s important to emphasize that it is a relative decrease. Overall, bags are increasing in all areas. The policies are just slowing down the problem, not eliminating it. And we don’t find that these policies lead to reduction in other plastic items.”
Future laws and regulations could help address other single-use items.
Taking Individual Action
Each of us individually can help reduce single-use plastic waste. For example, we can advocate for adoption of reusable services in the places we work and play and take advantage of services like To Go Green where available.
“If you live in a city with a reuse provider, you can encourage more stadiums, venues, festivals to make the switch,” Manibusan says.
Individuals can join Protect Where We Play’s Team Ocean and receive information about scientifically vetted actions to take.
One study found that households in the UK on average tossed 23 plastic items per person per week, considerably more than 45% of participants expected. The researchers found a direct link between how often people shopped online and how surprised they were at their waste levels. They suggest that online retailers clearly show packaging impacts at the point of purchase and provide reuse or refill alternatives.
Taking an action is not as hard as people think, says Manibusan, and every reuse prevents waste.
“Single use was built for convenience,” she says. “Reuse is built for the future.”
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The recently enacted High Seas Treaty offers an opportunity to protect the ocean like never before.
30×30 — the global commitment to conserve at least 30% of the planet by 2030 through protected areas and other effective conservation measures — is arguably the most successful conservation slogan in history. Measured by global policy adoption, financial mobilization, and brand portability, the target has achieved unprecedented traction: It was formally codified by nearly 200 nations in 2022, has helped unlock some of the largest private philanthropic investments in conservation, and has translated a complex ecological threshold into a universal political “North Star.”
But has it done enough — especially for the ocean?
As an ocean conservationist, I’ve spent nearly four decades working alongside local communities, NGOs, and governments — from locally managed marine areas to seascape-scale conservation, and from species-specific safeguards to ecosystem-level planning — trying to turn conservation from an idea into something that holds up in the real world. I’ve helped advise, plan, and implement the unglamorous but essential machinery that makes protected areas durable: listening, building social license, strengthening governance that people will actually comply with, funding enforcement and monitoring, and ensuring conservation delivers tangible benefits to the communities asked to live with it.
So what follows isn’t a drive-by critique: It’s a practitioner’s look at what 30×30 was meant to deliver, why it’s falling short in the ocean, and how we move beyond 2030 without sacrificing credibility.
We have a great opportunity right now: January’s enactment of the High Seas Treaty (formally known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement). The treaty doesn’t magically solve 30×30, but it does remove one of the oldest excuses in ocean conservation: that the high seas are simply too complex to protect. If we’re serious about meeting the ocean side of 30×30 without resorting to accounting tricks, this treaty may be our clearest chance to implement protections more concertedly, at the scale the ocean actually demands.
The Promise Beneath the Slogan
The 30×30 premise sounds self-evident (“surely we should protect a big chunk of the planet”), and in its best form it has always meant more than drawing lines on a map. It implies networks that are ecologically representative, connected, and managed well — in plain terms: enough land and ocean, protected strongly enough, in the right places, for long enough to matter. But the slogan is a mash-up of science, negotiation, and politics. That matters, because slogans don’t protect ecosystems. Outcomes do.
But we also need to start saying the quiet part out loud: At the pace we’re moving, we’re likely to miss 30×30, especially for the ocean. Not because the ocean isn’t worth protecting — but because “30% protected” has become a deceptively simple headline standing in for hard questions about what counts, what works, and what endures.
If 2030 arrives with the dashboards still flashing red, the task won’t be to declare failure or pad the numbers. It’ll be to get strategic about what comes next: what the “30” was meant to achieve, why spatial targets keep underdelivering, and how we build an after-2030 playbook that prioritizes real protection over paper coverage.
And in a strange way, the High Seas Treaty only sharpened that urgency — it gives us occasion to look hard at 30×30 and sit with the uncomfortable truth that, on current trajectories, the world may be celebrating the tools of protection faster than we’re actually delivering protection itself.
It also offers something 30×30 has always lacked: a way to move the needle on ocean coverage without gaming the numbers — because for the first time, meaningful protection on the high seas can be legally built, not just rhetorically wished for.
How We Got to ‘30%’ and Why That Number Stuck
The immediate predecessor to 30×30 was the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 11, which set a goal of 10% ocean protection (and 17% of terrestrial areas) by 2020. In practice, it wasn’t met in a way that delivered consistent outcomes, and it fell far short of what science increasingly suggested was necessary to slow extinction and preserve ecosystem function.
The “30” gained momentum because multiple lines of evidence kept converging on a roughly one-third threshold for meaningful biodiversity persistence and spillover benefits — provided that protection is strong (not just nominal) and well-placed (not just convenient).
Following the IUCN’s 2016 push and the influence of papers like the Global Deal for Nature, the target was ultimately locked in at COP15 (2022) within the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. It is not a magic ecological constant. It is a “big enough to matter” milestone that became politically portable and, at least on paper, measurable.
The Integrity Gap: Which Dashboard Are You Reading?
This is where things get spicy, because “percent protected” is currently a math problem with two different answers. If you count any area reported as an Marine Protected Area — including weakly regulated multiple-use areas — global tracking lands around 9.6%. If you ask how much of the ocean is fully or highly protected — the level required to reliably deliver biodiversity outcomes — the number drops to roughly 3.2%.
That isn’t a methodological quibble. It’s an integrity gap. One version tracks lines on a map; the other tracks durable reductions in extractive pressure.
There’s another constraint baked into the geometry: National waters only cover 39% of the ocean. The remaining 61% is the high seas, where creating MPAs has historically been legally difficult.
That’s why the High Seas Treaty matters so much. It doesn’t guarantee we’ll hit 30×30, but it finally makes large-scale protection beyond national waters achievable without diluting definitions or padding the accounting. If 30×30 is ever going to be ecologically meaningful (rather than a coastal accounting exercise), the high seas cannot remain governance-lite.
Why Spatial Targets Produce ‘Paper Parks’
Spatial targets are a vital forcing function. They give governments a concrete benchmark, mobilize finance, and make inaction harder to justify.
But they also predictably invite shortcut behavior. The incentive is to designate what is large, remote, and politically cheap — especially if the protection can be labeled “multi-use” while still counting toward the target.
That’s how we end up protecting space rather than safeguarding function. Connectivity gets traded away for convenience. Equity becomes an afterthought, with top-down designations that ignore Indigenous governance or repackage dispossession as environmental progress. And the substitution myth takes hold: the idea that an MPA can stand in for the hard work of climate mitigation, pollution control, and fisheries reform.
Most of all, capacity lags behind ambition. Area is easy to announce. Management budgets, monitoring, surveillance, and enforcement are hard to build — and even harder to sustain.
The Post-2030 Roadmap: How to Fix the Target Without Faking the Math
If 2030 arrives and we’re short of the target, the worst move is to declare the idea dead. The better move is to treat 30×30 as the floor, not the ceiling, and shift the center of gravity from coverage to integrity.
This is the part where audience matters. For the general public, the ask is simple: Don’t settle for “protected” on paper. Demand protection that actually works in the water.
For practitioners and decision-makers, the challenge is equally clear: Build systems that can withstand politics, budgets, and time.
Here’s what “honest protection” can look like after 2030:
A) Track what matters: “How much is protected” and “how well it’s protected”
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are the ocean equivalent of parks and preserves: places where rules limit damaging activity to safeguard wildlife and habitats. The problem is that not all MPAs are created equal. Future reporting should lead with two numbers: Total MPA coverage (the political umbrella) and Highly Protected coverage (the ecological reality). This ends the incentive for “paper parks.”
B) Protect the right places, not just the easiest ones
Instead of asking “what percent of the ocean is inside polygons,” we should be asking whether we’re protecting the places that keep the ocean alive: nurseries, migration corridors, climate-safe havens, and biodiversity hotspots. This turns treaty poetry into operational science.
C) Make protection hard to undo
If a protection can be undone in one election cycle, it isn’t conservation — it’s a temporary zoning experiment. Post-2030 success should be measured by durability: legal stability, long-term funding, monitoring, and enforcement that can survive leadership changes.
D) Make the high seas count — because now it can
The High Seas Treaty has entered into force — but that’s the starting gun, not the finish line. The real constraint now is implementation: rapidly identifying and designating high-seas MPAs, funding monitoring and enforcement, and closing the participation gap of major ocean powers that still haven’t ratified (including the United States). Without that follow-through, 30×30 remains stranded in national waters by inertia, not math.
E) Stop treating protected areas as a substitute for everything else
Post-2030 success will come from the bundle: fisheries reform, ending destructive gear, shipping noise controls, and — nonnegotiably — climate mitigation. The MPA is one tool in a larger risk-reduction portfolio.
F) Confront the drivers — and rebuild trust
We can’t fence our way out of this. If we don’t deal with what’s driving the damage — climate change, relentless extraction, and policy that swings wildly every election — then even the best protected places won’t hold. In the U.S., that means owning the time we’ve lost, rebuilding trust with the rest of the world, and making sure climate and conservation work can’t be undone every four years. Protecting nature and cutting emissions aren’t either/or choices anymore. They’re both essential, and they need to happen together.
G) Treat equity as non-negotiable
“Equitably governed” must move from a buzzword to a pass/fail metric. If local communities and Indigenous peoples do not have a seat at the table and a share of the benefits, the protection will eventually fail.
The Post-2030 Workhorse
And there’s one more reality we need to admit: A lot of effective ocean conservation already exists outside the boundaries of formal MPAs. If we want post-2030 progress without creative accounting, we have to recognize and strengthen the protections that are already working in the real ocean.
MPAs aren’t the only way to protect the ocean. If 30×30 gets shaky after 2030, we need to lean harder on OECMs — “Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures.” In plain terms: places where rules already protect nature, even if they aren’t officially labeled a marine protected area.
The risk is that OECMs become the next loophole — an easy way to pad the numbers. But done right, they’re one of the most practical ways to lock in real protection in busy, contested waters where a formal MPA may be politically difficult. Good OECMs are simple to recognize: they reduce harm, they last, and they’re enforced. They also help us escape the false binary of “MPA or nothing.” Some places need full no-take protection. Others can still deliver real conservation outcomes through targeted rules that work.
Take Canada’s “marine refuges,” like the Eastern Canyons. They aren’t formal parks; they are fisheries closures designed to keep heavy bottom-trawls off fragile, cold-water corals. By protecting the seafloor for the sake of the fishery, they effectively safeguard the entire ecosystem.
That’s the OECM idea in real life: practical rules that stick and concretely reduce harm.
In practice OECMs can include seasonal closures that protect spawning, permanent bans on destructive gear in sensitive habitats, anchoring exclusions over seagrass and reefs, shipping measures that reduce strikes and noise, or Indigenous- and community-governed waters where stewardship is already strong.
These aren’t consolation prizes. They’re functional protection — often in precisely the places where it’s hardest, and most urgent, to get it right.
A Note for 2031: The Maturity of a Movement
We still have four years left in this decade. There’s time to surprise ourselves — and I genuinely hope I’m wrong about the current trajectory of protection. I hope enforcement tightens, quality accelerates, and the high seas finally starts counting in a way that matters.
And while this essay has focused on the ocean, the broader lesson isn’t uniquely marine. 30×30 was always a global commitment — land and sea — and the same integrity questions apply everywhere: what counts, what works, what lasts, and who benefits. If we get the post-2030 course correction right in the ocean, the framework can serve terrestrial practitioners too — not as a new set of loopholes, but as a shared standard for honest protection.
So what do we say out loud in 2031 if the dashboard isn’t green?
Something like this: “30×30 was the minimum milestone that got the world moving. We didn’t hit the deadline, but we finally stopped pretending that ‘protected’ means ‘safe.’ From here on, our benchmark is no longer the size of the map, but the health of the life within it.”
Missing a conservation deadline is a gut punch, especially with everything at stake right now. But hollowing out the definition of protection is a catastrophe. By refusing to settle for accounting tricks, we ensure that 30×30 isn’t just a failed slogan. It becomes the beginning of a more honest, more mature, and more durable relationship with the living planet.
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A staffing exodus at Olympic National Park has put salmon recovery efforts in jeopardy.
For centuries the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula supported some of the West Coast’s most impressive salmon runs. The river’s cold waters, fed by alpine glaciers on the surrounding mountains, flowed 45 miles from the heart of what is now Olympic National Park to the Salish Sea.
Ten distinct runs of salmon and oceangoing trout, including all five North American Pacific salmon species, spawned in the Elwha watershed — until a pair of dams built in the early twentieth century blocked salmon from 90% of the river.
More than a century later, advocacy by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and conservation groups led to the dams’ removal. With the Elwha flowing free again and other habitat restoration in progress, the Olympic Peninsula is regaining its status as a salmon hotspot. Olympic National Park lies at the center.
“Olympic is probably the greatest salmon sanctuary in the national park system outside of Alaska,” says Colin Deverell, acting Northwest regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association. “We’re talking over 3,000 miles of rivers and streams in an area bigger than Rhode Island — most of it wilderness.”
The future of salmon in this vast region is far from assured, however. In fact staff and funding cuts at the National Park Service have jeopardized habitat restoration work in the Elwha and other park watersheds at a crucial time. Olympic Park’s fisheries team has dropped from five staff at the beginning of the second Trump administration to one intern by the start of this year.
“There’s no way one person could possibly fulfill all the responsibilities the national park has toward its fish and communities who rely on healthy fisheries,” says Deverell.
This hollowing out of staff has meant salmon returning to the Elwha go uncounted, hindering work to establish sustainable fisheries. Efforts to end illegal fishing in the Quillayute River are languishing, while a restoration project on the park’s Ozette Lake is in danger of being put on hold. Tribal nations and nonprofits who partner with the Park Service are struggling to fill the gaps.
“The near obliteration of Olympic Park’s fisheries program means it’s all but impossible to do the science that supports restoration work,” Deverell says. “It makes managing fish for people and communities that much harder.”
Staffing Exodus
When Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act in 1992, it set in motion a long process meant to restore Elwha salmon to something like their former glory. The law authorized the Department of the Interior to acquire and decommission the river’s Elwha and Glines Canyon dams, a project completed in 2014. This was only the beginning for salmon recovery, however.
The newly freed Elwha transported sediment that had been trapped behind the dams for a century downstream, where it replenished the river delta. Restored river and estuary habitat supported not just returning salmon, but other species from Dungeness crabs to lampreys.
In 2023, for the first time since the dams came down, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe held a ceremonial and subsistence fishery for coho salmon on the Elwha. Supporting treaty-protected Tribal fishing rights is a major objective for salmon recovery. However, setting science-based parameters for fishing requires reliable data about salmon numbers — data the Park Service is best equipped to provide.
“There are now almost no fisheries staff left to do this work,” Deverell says.
The federal hiring freeze of 2025 put seasonal additions to Olympic Park’s fisheries staff on hold. Though the freeze expired in fall, uncertainty over possible future hiring directives from the administration continues to pose challenges. Budget cuts compound the problem.
“The freeze may be technically over, but there’s still very little hiring going on,” Deverell says. “Writ large, the reason comes down to budget issues and personnel directives from the Trump administration.”
Last year Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” cancelled $267 million in funding for staff at the already chronically underfunded Park Service. The departure of all Olympic National Park’s permanent fisheries biologists follows a larger pattern of staff exoduses caused by lack of funding and untenable conditions.
“These are experienced biologists we’re losing,” says Tim McNulty, a board member of Olympic Park Advocates, one of the organizations that pushed for removal of the Elwha dams. “They’re people who have spent years working with the park’s many important salmon streams.”
The void left behind may not be visible to most visitors, but it puts Tribal nations and others who collaborate with the Park Service on fisheries in a difficult situation.
“It’s a predicament, because we share the load of conducting certain salmon and steelhead surveys with the Park Service and Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife,” says Frank Geyer, natural resources director for the Quileute Tribe.
For centuries the Quileute have fished in the Olympic Peninsula’s Quillayute watershed, which includes the Sol Duc, Calawah, and Bogachiel Rivers. The watershed is one of the few places that supports year-round salmon and steelhead fishing, thanks to the Tribe’s sustainable stewardship.
“Going into last fall, we were trying to figure out how to cover work the park would normally do,” Geyer says. “Soon we’ll be starting winter steelhead surveys. If the park doesn’t have staff to help, it’ll be up to the comanagers — Quileute Tribe and WDFW — to cover the gap.”
With basic monitoring of salmon runs barely getting done, many habitat restoration efforts have fallen by the wayside. Most of these projects are far less visible than removal of the Elwha River dams. However, they are part of the same legacy of restoration — one that’s now in danger of faltering.
Struggling Restoration
For the past few summers, Liz Allyn has worked to restore the edges of Olympic National Park’s Ozette Lake, home to a population of Endangered Species Act-listed, genetically distinct sockeye salmon.
Logging near the lake in the 20th century caused erosion that led to sediment building up in the shallows, burying gravel beds where sockeye once made their spawning nests, called redds. Plants took root, further changing the environment in ways that made life harder for salmon.
“Huge areas that used be spawning sites are now covered in native vegetation,” Allyn says. “It’s not an invasive species situation, but it’s a human-caused impact that negatively affects salmon.”
Removing the vegetation would allow sediment to wash away, restoring spawning opportunities. It’s a relatively simple project with big payoffs that is currently being spearheaded by the Makah Tribe with support from the Coast Salmon Partnership, where Allyn works. However, with almost no park resources going toward it, the effort is in danger of collapsing.
“The park has been underfunded for a long time, so their engagement was always limited,” Allyn says. “But in the past, park staff were there to handle permits and certain logistics. Last summer we didn’t even have that.”
Throughout the park similar examples of restoration falling through the cracks amid short staffing abound. In a tributary of the Quinault River, efforts to remove a pile of rubble from a dilapidated bridge that impedes salmon swimming upstream have been delayed. Along the Sol Duc River, Tribal elders can’t access traditional fishing grounds because of a washed-out road.
Even more worrying, there’s often no one on hand when a crisis hits.
Disaster Response
On July 18 a petroleum tanker truck ran off U.S. Highway 101 on the northern Olympic Peninsula, overturning and spilling 3,000 gallons of diesel into a tributary of the Elwha. While the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and Washington’s Department of Ecology rushed to respond, the ability of the Park Service to assist was hamstrung by lack of staff.
Thousands of salmon fingerlings died in the disaster. A more robust initial Park Service response wouldn’t have prevented this, but it could have helped provide vital information as multiple agencies struggled to assess the damage and calculate penalties for the company involved. It’s yet another example of how Trump administration cuts are impeding continued salmon recovery in a dynamic landscape.
At more than 922,600 acres, Olympic National Park is a big place. Ninety-five percent is Congressionally designated wilderness, much of it consisting of steep mountains and valleys. Keeping tabs on salmon throughout such a vast area, let alone outside the park boundaries, is an enormous undertaking that requires deep understanding of the watersheds involved.
When long-time fisheries staff depart, they take years of valuable experience and institutional knowledge with them. This means any new hires will have a lot of catching up to do before they can fill the same roles.
“The decisions we’re making today are built on decades of science that’s given us a picture of how salmon populations are succeeding or failing over time,” Deverell says. “All of that is informed by data from the park. But now we’re at a point where the Park Service can no longer fill that function.”
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Climate change threatens species around the world. At the same time, many animals can help us in the fight against climate change — if we let them.
“Who the f*ck wants to kill penguins?” asks MI5 supervisor Jackson Lamb in the spy thriller Slow Horses.
It seems we do. Humans.
Over 60,000 penguins off the coast of South Africa, to be more specific.
Through a combination of human-induced climate change and overfishing, we caused sardine populations to collapse. Sardines who are vital for African penguins’ survival.
These penguins normally prepare for a brutal 21-day fasting period, during which they must stay on land to shed and replace their feathers by munching on sardines to build up fat reserves that allow them to survive the fast.
Instead we took their food, and then they starved. More than 60,000 in just eight years.
We’ve pushed them entre la espada y la pared — between a sword and a wall. On one side, a changing climate. On the other, an empty ocean.
And it’s not just penguins.
Late last year a study found that the November floods in Sumatra may have pushed the world’s rarest great apes, Tapanuli orangutans, even closer to extinction. Before the floods fewer than 800 remained in the wild, living in habitats already threatened by industrial activity and growing conflict with humans. According to reporting from Inside Climate News, those floods were “likely exacerbated by widespread deforestation, which stripped the land of its capacity to absorb rainfall and retain soil.” Much of this deforestation was caused by infrastructure development, mining, and palm oil expansion in and around the orangutan’s habitat.
The Tapanuli orangutan. Photo: Tim Laman (CC 4.0)
Between causing extreme heat events and making drastic changes to wild habitats, we’re narrowing the safe zone for animals, leaving them with nowhere to go. We may effectively be pushing nearly 80,000 animal species toward extinction in under 80 years.
And yet those same wild animals have a role to play in stabilizing the climate. If we give them a hand.
Wild Animals Are Our Allies
Late last year in Brazil, governments from countries that are parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met for the 30th time to negotiate a response to the climate crisis — a meeting called COP30.
In the midst of it, at an official event, scientist Dr, Ana Cristina Mendes-Oliveira talked about agoutis, small rodents who live in the Amazon and are responsible for the evolution of Brazil nut trees.
Agoutis, with their sharp teeth and strong jaws, are among the few animals able to crack the nut open. Because one nut can hold up to a couple of dozen seeds, more than a hungry agouti can eat at once, the animals have the habit of burying some of them to snack on another time. They also have the habit of forgetting where they buried them. And so many of those forgotten seeds survive and sprout into impressive trees that can reach heights of up to 160 feet and live for hundreds of years.
Through their hunger and forgetfulness, agoutis enhance carbon sequestration and storage in the Amazon.
Like agoutis, many other wild animals disperse seeds, pollinate, and help cycle nutrients in ecosystems, contributing substantially to the maintenance and restoration of key natural environments.
For example, take the tapir, another forest maker in the Amazon:
They swallow whole fruits and release thousands of seeds in their dung. Many of these seeds belong to species that grow into large, carbon-rich trees.
Since their movements can span miles, they’re long-distance seed dispersers who help connect fragmented habitats.
Beyond these two cases, there are manymore, including the American alligator. Studies show that ecosystems with more diverse animal communities are often associated with higher levels of carbon storage and sequestration.
The loss of wild animals in their natural habitats is a problem — not only for them but for our climate, sustainability, and wellbeing.
Animal-Washing No More
At UNFCCC COP30 in Brazil, governments spent two weeks talking about how to confront climate change, including in food systems, in relation to biodiversity loss and desertification, and through adaptation efforts. These issues are inseparable.
And one way or another, animal wellbeing sits at the center of them all.
And yet, despite the walls at the venue being draped with beautiful images of Amazon wildlife, animals themselves barely featured in the negotiations. Mitigation discussions largely sidelined food systems, even though they are responsible for at least a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. And when food systems were discussed, they were discussed without meaningfully addressing the climate, land-use, and biodiversity impacts of industrial animal agriculture or fishing, or what those systems mean for the animals trapped inside of them. Adaptation was debated without recognizing wildlife’s active role in stabilizing ecosystems.
That is animal-washing: celebrating animals in imagery while sidelining them in policy.
This matters not only because animals are on the frontline of the climate crisis, but also because they are ecosystem engineers, essential for effective climate action. Ignoring their contributions in climate policy is a missed opportunity.
Encouragingly, that logic is starting to reach policymakers.
At COP30, Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Environment announced that African leaders had agreed to back a Wildlife for Climate Action Agenda, paving the way for a Global Wildlife for Climate Action Declaration to be launched at COP31. This political commitment was formally endorsed weeks earlier at the African Union Biodiversity Summit in Botswana, where heads of state adopted the Gaborone Declaration on Biodiversity, including a pledge to promote wildlife as part of Africa’s climate response.
In a world that’s pushing penguins, orangutans, and thousands of other species between a sword and a wall, that shift matters.
Because if we stop treating animals as background scenery and start recognizing and protecting them as climate allies, we may yet give both them and ourselves a fighting chance.
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A growing field of research reveals that predators like alligators play an important — but little-recognized — role in protecting their habitats and the planet.
The Floridian I would one day marry went to college in Gainesville, where the University of Florida’s sports teams are known as the Gators. That nickname fits. This is Gator Country, as the song goes — home to countless American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis).
In Gainesville the reptiles cluster in places like Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, but they don’t stay confined there. They make use of the sewer system and sometimes stroll through the city streets.
For my future wife, alligators were simply part of the landscape. For me, with roots in a different part of the world, they were foreign. I’d never seen an alligator up close until adulthood, when I began visiting her in Florida.
Photo: Emil Siekkinen (used with permission)
The experience was awe-inspiring — and not just because of the reptiles themselves. In Florida I witnessed approaches to large carnivore conservation that reached beyond wilderness and protected areas into shared human landscapes, sustaining populations that remained both demographically and genetically viable.
Alligators teetered on the brink of extinction in the 1950s but recovered thanks to conservation work that took a broad approach: a federal ban on hunting, protection under the Endangered Species Act, wetland preservation, and an innovative management model that combined science, legislation, and local economies.
In Florida today there are about 1.3 million alligators, and altogether in the United States there are about 5 million — from smaller individuals in southern North Carolina to massive beasts in Florida, Louisiana, and eastern Texas.
Millions of people now live close to these big predators, who can weigh around 600 pounds. Around the southeastern U.S. they attract tourists to swamps, so they’re important to the local economy.
One autumn, when my wife and I visited Louisiana, we found ourselves in lush wetlands where heavy Spanish moss hung from cypresses that cast shade over some of the region’s momentarily sleepy alligators. A herd of wild pigs also moved through the swamp.
Wild pigs in the bayou. Photo: Emil Siekkinen (used with permission)
That surprised us, but what shocked us was seeing wetlands near the bayou drained to make room for suburban housing, asphalt, and concrete. That was hard to understand since Hurricane Katrina had visited the region in 2005 and showed how indispensable wetlands were when the waters rose.
These landscapes are certainly scenic, but they’re also a vital protective infrastructure.
Alligators belong to that infrastructure. Their presence, I learned, shapes wetlands in ways that extend far beyond what meets the eye — including how much carbon these places can keep out of the atmosphere.
Wetlands are among Earth’s richest — and most endangered — ecosystems. Between 60 and 70% of the wetlands that existed in preindustrial times have been wiped out. The wetlands that remain, however, store large amounts of carbon in oxygen-poor soils. When these ecosystems are drained, carbon dioxide is released. Today drained wetlands account for up to 10% of the world’s land-use emissions.
The draining and building we witnessed in Louisiana’s swamps were thus driving human-caused climate change.
But the United States can play an important role regarding wetlands’ significance for climate mitigation: North America harbors 42% of the world’s tidal-influenced wetlands.
Researchers speak of “blue carbon,” the carbon stored in marine biomes and coastal ecosystems such as mangroves, salt marshes, and swamps. These environments are particularly effective carbon sinks because they combine rich vegetation with slow decomposition.
For a long time, science mainly focused on the roles of plants and microorganisms in the carbon cycle. But researchers at Southeastern Louisiana University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium wanted to find out what role predators — in this case, alligators — might play. One of the researchers, Christopher Murray, who has worked with alligators for more than two decades, told me in an email, “I believe the value of a single animal can be quantified in terms of carbon stock.”
To test that idea, the researchers analyzed 649 soil samples from wetlands along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, drawing from the Smithsonian’s Coastal Carbon Network. They compared carbon levels in surface soils with maps of alligator distribution and density, focusing on samples collected over recent decades.
The pattern was consistent. Across alligators’ native range, wetlands stored about 0.16 grams more carbon per square centimeter in surface soils when alligators were present. In mangrove forests, the difference rose to roughly 0.20 grams per square centimeter — a trivial amount in a handful of mud, but a substantial gain when multiplied across thousands of square miles of coastline.
Louisiana offered even clearer insight. There, researchers had precise data on nesting patterns and population density. They found that carbon storage increased every time alligator numbers increased. More gators meant more carbon locked into the soil.
How does this work? The answer lies in chain reactions in the ecosystem — the ecological domino effects that occur when top predators influence whole habitats.
Alligators feed, among other things, on herbivorous mammals such as nutria (Myocastor coypus), as well as crabs, fish, and sometimes various kinds of wild pigs. By keeping these populations in check, alligators protect vegetation that would otherwise be trampled or devoured. More plants mean more photosynthesis — and therefore more carbon bound in biomass and soil.
Alligators also function as ecosystem engineers. When they dig dens, move through the muck, or create small pools, sediments and nutrients are redistributed. These processes can create pockets where organic material is preserved for longer.
And the animals can live for 35 to 50 years (or even longer). Their impact accumulates slowly but persistently.
Alligators affect both what is eaten and what the landscape looks like. In short, these enormous reptiles are living regulators of carbon flows, and the predator’s presence enhances nature’s own climate solutions.
The relationship between alligators and carbon storage is strongest in mangrove forests — tropical wetlands where tree roots stretch like braids into the tidal zone.
Mangrove forests are already recognized as outstanding carbon sinks. They store up to 10 times more carbon per acre than an average forest. That alligators can amplify that effect shows how a predator’s presence can improve nature’s own climate solutions.
Researchers have previously found similar patterns in the ocean. Where sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live, kelp forests flourish. But in areas without these predators, kelp forests are decimated by sea urchins (class Echinoidea), and much of the carbon-sequestration capacity is lost.
When top predators return, ecosystems’ structure and function change — including how they store carbon. A British study estimates that reintroducing wolves (Canis lupus) to Scotland — where they could prey upon vegetation-eating deer and other animals and allow woodland to expand — could lead to an additional 1 million tons of CO2 stored per year. Each individual gray wolf is estimated, through its ecological impact, to contribute to the absorption of 6,080 tons of CO2 per year. Each wolf is therefore worth about £154,000 ($202,763), using accepted current valuations of carbon.
In boreal Canada scientists estimate that recovering wolf populations to historical levels could allow forests to store 46 to 99 million additional tons of CO₂ every year — equivalent to the annual emissions of up to 71 million cars.
This new understanding also reveals that predator-control policies have a hidden climate cost. In many regions — from Scandinavia to the U.S. West — large predators are deliberately kept at densities far below what ecosystems can naturally sustain. These decisions are typically justified through concerns about livestock, hunting interests, or culturally ingrained fear. But the climate consequences are rarely counted.
In Sweden undersized predator populations have led to oversized populations of ungulates who consume enormous quantities of young trees, slowing natural forest growth. Forest ecologists estimate that this overgrazing reduces Sweden’s carbon sink potential by about 12 million tons of CO₂ per year. Allowing predator populations to recover to ecologically functional levels could restore roughly half of that capacity — a natural climate gain of about 6 million tons of CO₂ annually.
There are not yet precise figures for alligators’ influence, but the research already suggests that each individual, through its lifelong presence, contributes to increased carbon storage in wetlands.
That biodiversity and climate wins often go hand in hand is an established reality. Protecting top predators is therefore not just about saving species but about preserving an entire ecosystem’s ability to help stabilize the climate.
Conservation should therefore not only be about counting species and their populations, but also about measuring how much CO2 their presence helps to sequester. Nature itself, with its ancient networks and its interplay of life and death and life, shows that everything is intertwined. When balance is found here, it is also found in the atmosphere.
In parts of the Southeast, they have managed to combine climate work with industry. Alligator-related commerce, which partly relies on limited hunting and farming, requires viable wild populations. That means that, on a practical level, the economy favors the conservation of both predators and wetlands.
Generally speaking Americans accept alligators because people feel it’s possible to live with them, control the risks, and even benefit from their presence.
For my wife it was natural to grow up with alligators almost on her doorstep. She knows the folklore and believes that Floridians take pride in them as a natural part of both regional identity and environment. In the primordial creature that is the alligator, culture and nature are united.
Alligators may not care much about this as they go about their lives in the swamps. But these ancient beasts nevertheless do great good, and benefit life on our shared living planet.
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Historian 
