How Wildlife Rescuers Can Protect Public Health

A new surveillance system tracks trends in wildlife illness and death and could help keep people healthy.

An owl hit by a car, a bobcat caught in a trap, a sickened seal on a beach — wildlife rehabilitators are usually the first to provide medical care for injured or ill wild creatures. But their critical emergency services can also reveal bigger threats to wildlife — and potentially people.

That’s the findings of a new study about an early-detection surveillance system being piloted in California that’s designed to analyze near real-time information from hundreds of wildlife rehabilitators and trigger alerts when unusual patterns of illness or death are detected.

The Wildlife Morbidity and Mortality Event Alert System is the result of a collaboration among researchers from the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the nonprofit Wild Neighbors Database Project.

“There are so many disciplines that have come together to develop something unique,” says Pranav Pandit, a veterinary epidemiologist at One Health Institute at U.C. Davis. “We’re using machine learning, computer science, epidemiology and wildlife health.”

But the confluence of these multiple expertise wouldn’t have been possible without work that began years ago by Devin Dombrowski and Rachel Avilla, cofounders of the Wild Neighbors Database Project, who developed the Wildlife Rehabilitation Medical Database in 2012.

“They were working in the rescue centers and realized that there’s a need for digitizing all this data that the rescue centers have been collecting over the years,” says Pandit.

With their database now being used by more than 950 rehabilitation organizations in 48 U.S. states and 19 countries, it provided the groundwork for the new alert system, which has been up and running in California for a year.

pelican on exam table — Dr. James LaCour, LDWF State Wildlife Veterinarian, LSU Veterinary School student (right) and Dr. Erica Miller, Tristate Bird Rescue examines a brown pelican. Photo: (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Early results are encouraging, says Pandit.

During the pilot project, the system found several anomalies that signaled emerging health threats and triggered investigations by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. One of those was domoic acid, first detected in several species of birds in Southern California. The marine biotoxin can also affect shellfish — and sicken or even kill people who eat it.

“It’s bad for wildlife, as well as humans,” he says. “So when wildlife start showing the symptoms, having a very robust surveillance system is also good for public health.”

Making those connections between wildlife health and human health are a crucial part of the surveillance system. One of the things researchers look for are “sentinel species,” which can provide early warnings for diseases that also affect people.

For example, crows and other members of the corvid family can signal the presence of West Nile virus.

“They can show early signals of that outbreak even before the outbreak has happened in humans,” says Pandit.

There’s also the danger of infections jumping from animals to humans. As we all know too well with SARS-CoV-2 — and Ebola and others before that — infectious disease in wildlife can be serious threats to human health, too.

One antidote to that is better protections for wildlife. Another, of course, is not being afraid of animals that can be carriers of the diseases, says Pandit.

“If we really want to stay healthy, we need to maintain the ecosystem balance really well and we should nurture biodiversity in birds, bats and other mammals,” he says.

Furthering the reach of the WMME Alert System is also in the works. Pandit says they’re talking with other interested state and regional wildlife organizations, as well as some international ones that would like to see the system expanded.

“We are also constantly trying to find additional resources so that we can fund our servers, develop new models, make sure the data is secure and continually validate the model [when we go into a new region],” he says.

The other important component is continuing to recruit more rehabilitation centers to make sure the system provides the best representation of the population health of that region.

An expanded surveillance system, along with protecting biodiversity Pandit says, would be good for wildlife and people.

“We know that healthy ecosystems and healthy wildlife means healthy human beings.”

As the Climate Changes, Where Are the Safest Places to Live?

To stay or to leave in search of safer ground makes me wonder how we determine risk in a world that’s so rapidly changing.

Talent. King Mountain. Hugo. The town names — each the site of new wildfire ignitions following a lightning storm the day before — are all new to me. After I read each incident report, I head to Google maps to ask the same question that’s been on my mind for weeks: How close?

This is my first wildfire season — also known as summer — in my new home state of Oregon. I’m learning the geography by way of (potential) catastrophe.

After nearly two decades in San Francisco, my wife and I moved to central Oregon in May. We had been plotting our escape to a more rural location for years. While climate change wasn’t our reason for leaving the Bay Area, it was a consideration in where to go next.

We first looked at towns along the east and west flanks of California’s Sierra Nevada. But our searches mostly ended in frustration … and a bit of fear. We’d hear from locals about getting dropped from their fire insurance or the skyrocketing costs of keeping their policies. And then there were the actual wildfires — like the ones that reduced large swathes of Paradise, and now Greenville, to ash.

When we eventually settled on central Oregon as our next home, we were under no illusion that it would be free from wildfires: I’m an environmental journalist who covers fires and climate change as part of my beat. Wildfire risk, we knew, would come with our new territory.

And it has. As I write this, ash from multiple fires burning in the region dusts my patio furniture. Cascade peaks, usually visible on the horizon, have been smudged by smoke. The air quality has once again reached unhealthy levels.

Still, there are numerous reasons we’re glad to be here, even if we do have occasional pangs of doubt and wonder why we didn’t move out of the West entirely — out of the path of increasingly longer fire seasons.

Around the country, other families find themselves in similar situations, or may soon. As this summer so cruelly illuminates, climate change will present a barrage of challenges — including droughts, floods and hurricanes — no matter where you live.

Truck driving flooded street — Louisiana National Guard members in high-water vehicles work with St. John the Baptist Parish officials to rescue citizens stranded in their homes in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Photo: Louisiana National Guard, (CC BY 2.0)

Understanding the risks of different places isn’t easy. As we contemplated our move, I dug through state climate assessments and read scientific reports. But it was hard to match general findings with specific places, even for someone like me who gets paid to do that kind of stuff. Most people don’t have hours to read journal articles and try to decipher scientific lingo.

That got me thinking: Whether moving or staying put, how do we assess risk in a climate change world?

Where To?

Last summer the San Francisco Bay Area had a day when the sun never seemed to rise. The sky remained a darkened, calamitous gray-orange from morning till night as the August Complex fire burned, eventually scorching a record-breaking 1 million acres. I received more than a few texts from friends asking if it was time to move somewhere less “apocalyptic.” Was there a safer place to live in the coming years and decades as the planet continues to heat up?

It’s a question on a lot of people’s minds. The real estate website Redfin reports that the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters and extreme heat are factors in plans for about half of people considering moves in the next year.

Where to go may be a popular question, but it’s also a hard one to answer for a number of reasons, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA who gets asked that question multiple times a day.

“I don’t know what people’s motivations are, what their priorities are and what their lives are like,” he says. “It’s so personalized and individualized.”

The scientific factors, he says, are equally complex. For example, the difference between living somewhere with an extreme fire risk and a place with very little could be just a few miles in places like Los Angeles, he says.

And this summer has already shown that climate change is going to bring surprises.

“Most folks would have thought that Seattle or Portland would have been great places to escape extreme heat waves,” he says. “Well, clearly, that’s not always going to be the case. Seeing Death Valley-like temperatures in British Columbia in June, I think, really gave people pause. Climate projections suggest that all of these things and more are possible in the future, but I think it’s a particularly visceral recent example of how things are changing pretty fast.”

Climate change is likely to throw us other curveballs, too.

While most people are concerned with drought and fire in California, Swain says he’s more worried about how the state will handle the extreme flood risks that will also come with a warming climate.

“A lot of the risks, the physical hazards that are relevant in a changing climate, are not going to be obvious, and they’re not often going to be the ones that people are really hyper-focused on in a particular region,” he says. “What comes out of the woodwork in 10 or 20 years won’t necessarily be the same problems in the same places that we’re facing right now.”

Understanding the Science

So given what we know — and don’t — how do we go about figuring out where might be safe?

Historically, there haven’t been a lot of great resources to tap. Most climate models aren’t accessible to the general public. Or their raw data is taken out of context by others when trying to convey more localized impacts, which can be misleading, says Swain.

“I think a good example of this is California, where most of the state, according to climate models, is expected to see neither more nor less mean precipitation in the future with a few degrees of mean warming,” he explains. “And if you look at all of these downscaled products, it’ll say ‘great news, your water availability isn’t going to change,’ which of course is completely wrong for a variety of reasons.”

One reason is that rising temperatures will ensure that even if total precipitation doesn’t change, there will still be less available water supply because there’ll be more evaporation and thirstier soil, diminishing runoff.

But even a small change in annual average precipitation doesn’t catch the variability that California’s likely to experience with more extreme storm events and more droughts.

“So you get more really wet periods, but also more really dry periods,” says Swain. “In practical terms, it’s a really dramatic change. And so you might get a very inaccurate picture of what the future holds if you look at the wrong variables in the wrong context, even if the information is technically correct.”

Emerging Tools

So how do we find the right information in the right context? There are some new efforts attempting just that.

Redfin, for example, recently partnered with ClimateCheck to add a feature to their listings that provides the future climate risk of a particular property. It assesses the change in the risk of heat, fire, drought and storms over the next 30 years.

(EXCLUSIVE)

There are signs that more Americans may be starting to weigh climate -related risks when purchasing a home.@Redfin will announce tomorrow that it is adding local climate risk data to its site, the company told @USATODAY exclusively.https://t.co/gDy68FUUh1

— Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy (@SwapnaVenugopal) August 2, 2021

First Street Foundation has been doing something similar focused on floods.

Getting down to the address level makes sense because risk itself can be hyper-local. Whether your house survives a disaster may depend not on what state or town you live in, but on what side of the street.

But can these tools really be precise at such a fine scale?

Swain, who has done some consulting for ClimateCheck, says it’s possible to take regional climate data and combine that with very high-resolution spatial data at the parcel level. But he cautions, “I think it’s more important to get it right than to be first to put something out there.” After having seen it implemented poorly in the past, he says he now sees people today “who are trying to do a more thorough job of vetting and contextualizing everything.”

Do Everything

Having better resources to find places that may have less risk is great … for the people who can afford to move there. Or move anywhere.

I’m among those lucky enough to get to pick a place on the map and point the moving truck in that direction. But that’s not going to be a reality for a lot of other folks, as we saw last month before Hurricane Ida, when many people didn’t even have enough cash on hand to temporarily flee the impending disaster, let alone permanently uproot their lives.

“It’s a pretty extreme privilege in a global and even a national context to be able to choose where you want to live on the basis of your perceived comfort or safety from a climate perspective,” says Swain. “That’s not a choice the vast majority of people on Earth even get to make, even if there is good information to use for making that decision.”

And while some places may seem like the proverbial higher ground, climate change is not a problem we can move away from — even for those with more resources. If it’s not directly threatening our homes, it may endanger our food supply, water, jobs, health, neighbors, or the wildlife and wild places we hold dear.

That means making every place safer is a better bet — especially considering that the ground we’re starting from isn’t level. Many communities of color and low-income communities already face greater climate risks and climate-related health threats.

As far as I can tell, our best bet is to do everything — big and small. First and foremost, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and speed up the energy transition — equitably. At the same time, we’ll need to protect and restore critical habitats, green urban areas and increase resilience wherever we are — including curbing new developments in areas we know will flood and burn.

When I started this article, I wanted to ask what resources people could use to pick new places to live. I also wanted to ask: Who has access to them? But maybe, instead of focusing on where we should go, it would be better to ask, “What more can we do to stay in the homes and communities we already love?”

Mice, Hedgehogs and Voles Need Conservation Champions

A new paper finds that we’re failing these “small-bodied mammals” — and that comes with a cost to ecosystems around the world.

Rodents often get a bad rap.

Sure, some of them carry diseases or have become invasive pests — I’m lookin’ at you, Rattus rattus — but they’re also evolutionary marvels who have adapted to live in almost every region on Earth. They’re found in marshes, deserts, jungles and everything in between.

Along the way, these small-bodied mammals have become essential to their native ecosystems. They serve as prey for larger animals, while their own eating habits help to disperse seeds and spores, pollinate plants, cycle soil nutrients, and shape vegetation patterns.

Despite the ecological benefits they bring, smaller mammals don’t get much attention from the media or scientific journals. They also typically lack the same conservation attention received by more charismatic species such as wolves and tigers, even though they, too, face habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species such as cats and foxes, and human exploitation for their fur and meat.

A new paper may help to change that. The research examines the known species from the order Rodentia and another group of small mammals known as Eulipotyphla — hedgehogs, moles and the like — to determine their conservation risk and opportunities to save them.

The big conclusion: There’s a lot we don’t know.

“There is still a general lack of knowledge about the status, distribution and ecology of many small mammals,” the researchers write.

And that knowledge gap leaves a lot of the planet’s wildlife potentially at risk. Scientists have identified at least 2,231 Rodentia species, while Eulipotyphla adds another 454 to the list. Collectively they represent 48.3% of all known mammal species, and we don’t know how well a good chunk of them are doing. According to the paper, 452 rodent and eulipotyphlan species —16.7% of existing species — are currently classified as “data deficient” by IUCN, the international organization that assesses species’ conservation risks. As we’ve seen before, so-called “data-deficient” species have not been fully assessed by scientists but may, unknown to us, be threatened with extinction — or even already gone.

It’s easy to understand why that happens with Rodentia and Eulipotyphla. These animals hide easily, many live nocturnally, and they decay quickly when they die. That, combined with other human biases and a resulting lack of scientific funding, makes them hard or less attractive to study.

The new paper sets the groundwork to change that. The authors have identified 21 priority conservation regions — 18 for rodents and another three for eulipotyphlans — that would account for more than half of the data-deficient species. Locations include Cameroon, the Albertine Rift, Sri Lanka, Southwestern Ghats in India, Mexico, Sumatra and Java.

The researchers also identified five eulipotyphlans and 44 rodent species whose ranges exist completely outside any national protected areas. This includes the endangered Idaho ground squirrel (Urocitellus brunneus) of the United States, the possibly extinct emperor rat (Uromys imperator) of Guadalcanal, and the endangered Rumpi mouse shrew (Myosorex rumpii) of Cameroon.

So now that they’ve identified the knowledge and conservation gaps, what next? The paper recommends targeting the data-deficient species for field research and conservation assessment; continued evaluation of the effectiveness of protected areas (many of which are only protected on paper and need more on-the-ground help); and strengthening research networks to build better data for all species.

Perhaps most importantly, the authors call for researchers to address and prioritize Rodentia and Eulipotyphla separately from other mammals, so they don’t continue to get lost in the shuffle.

All this builds on recommendations and strategies established by the IUCN Small Mammal Specialist Group in 2017, which included promoting zoo-based conservation efforts and finding individuals and small organizations to serve as “champions” for these species.

Those champions do exist — Queen guitarist Brian May has helped save thousands of hedgehogs in the UK, and journalist Ben Goldfarb wrote the book on beavers — but sadly, they remain few and far between.

Let’s start to change that. I recently asked people to identify their favorite rodents on Twitter, and the responses are as wide and varied as this group of species. Join the conversation here, and then see what you can do to champion any species of mice, hedgehogs, shrews, moles, voles, squirrels, chipmunks or porcupines in your own communities and conservation efforts.

Photo: Preble’s Meadow jumping mouse (Rob Schorr/Colorado Natural Heritage Program), Tipton kangaroo rat (USFWS), hedgehog (Kalle Gustafsson CC BY 2.0), Amargosa vole (BLM California)

Previously in The Revelator:

Climate Change Claims Its First Mammal Extinction

Endangered Wildlife Are Getting Dosed With Rat Poisons

When This Rat Went Extinct, So Did a Flea

Can Wildlife Services Learn to Believe in Beavers?

The 301 Mammal Species Most Threatened by Overhunting

Links From the Brink: Focus on Rewilding, Climate and the Media, and Arctic Blues

The month’s best and worst environmental news also includes advice on reversing the “insect apocalypse” and more.

Life in these modern times: masks indoors for Covid, masks outside for wildfire smoke. Welcome to Links From the Brink.

Best News (and Worst) of the Month: The media is finally paying attention to climate change and, for the most part, covering it accurately.

This is an important shift, as journalism’s longstanding policy of presenting both sides of a story allowed too many climate deniers and industry hacks to get their disinformation out there and, in the process, confused the public about the nature and threats of global warming. This false balance undoubtedly served to delay concrete action for decades.

But the scientific evidence of climate change is now incontrovertible, while deniers’ arguments are anything but, and the media has taken notice. A new study examined more than 2,600 news articles published between 2005 and 2019 and found that 90% of them “accurately represented climate change,” and that this accuracy improved over time.

You can see this shift still taking place today, with outlets like The New York Times publishing articles asking “What role does climate change play in disasters like the Tennessee flooding?”

Of course, there’s an exception to this trend. Conservative media, the study found, publishes fewer articles about climate change, and only 71% of those articles reflected the scientific consensus.

The Newsmax home page the day of the IPCC report release.

We found this dichotomy in action on Aug. 9 following the release of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The major media I checked that day — including the Times, The Washington Post, CNN and the Associated Press — all carried this bleak news as their lead story. That wasn’t the case for right-wing news sites like Fox News and Newsmax, which both covered the IPCC report, but only by republishing a short AP article and posting it way, way, way below the top of the page. Readers could only find it if they scrolled past headlines designed to drum up fears about Antifa, immigrants at the border, the “left-wing media,” the Green New Deal, sports’ stars “anti-American” attitudes, vaccination mandates and violent crime.

That’s by design, not by indifference. Fox News and other broadcast outlets still gave airtime to “discredited contrarians and climate deniers to discuss, or tried to downplay the stark findings,” according to Media Matters for America, a nonprofit that monitors conservative misinformation, which also found that these right-wing outlets aired far fewer segments about the new IPCC report than they have in the past.

That lack of coverage itself is disinformation. By being quiet or devoting their scaled-back efforts to discrediting the IPCC report, they told readers and viewers that climate change is nothing to worry about or a left-wing hoax.

So, all things considered, we’ve made progress. But right-wing disinformation still plays a major in American public life, and that’s going to keep causing trouble — and delaying both understanding of climate change and action against it — for years to come.

Buzzworthy Science: A team of scientists this month provided a list of “eight simple actions that individuals can take to save insects” amidst the ongoing declines. Some of the recommendations are for individual action, like replacing lawns with native plants, but several aim to improve the conservation outlook for insects overall. They’re all backed up with the latest evidence and clear examples of how these actions have helped in cases around the world.

A Wild Fantasy: One of our favorite articles of the month came from The Guardian, which profiled Irish baron and death-metal enthusiast Randal Plunkett’s efforts to rewild his 1,600-acre ancestral estate, which his family has owned since 1402. Locals called him an “idiot” for getting rid of the estate’s traditional lawns, cattle and sheep, but now the property has grown so wild and hosts so much biodiversity that biologists frequently journey there to study its success. The official Dunsany Nature Reserve account on Instagram showcases the many species that live on the estate, including deer, foxes, hedgehogs, birds, butterflies and a wide variety of plants.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dunsany Nature Reserve (@dunsanynaturereserve)

What the article doesn’t mention is how Plunkett’s ancestry fits into all of this. You see, he’s the 21st Baron of Dunsany. The 18th baron, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), wrote hundreds of books, stories and plays under the name “Lord Dunsany,” through which he arguably created modern-day fantasy and horror fiction, much of which resonates with his descendant’s work today. “The need for human reunification with the natural world was the overriding theme that permeated all his works,” according to the website Irish Identity.

Here’s one of my favorite Lord Dunsany lines: “Ivy dreams sullenly and alone of overthrowing the cities.” Now his modern-day lineage has made that quote come alive.

More Rewilding: Irish aristocrats don’t have a monopoly on rewilding. Here are some related stories from the past few weeks:

Santa’s Gonna Be Pissed: Wildfire smoke reached the North Pole for the first time this month, thanks to the record-setting fires in Siberia. Meanwhile, new research finds the Russian Arctic is losing billions of tons of ice a year due to climate change, and so much ice is melting in Greenland (and down south in Antarctica) that the freakin’ Earth’s crust is starting to warp.

Speaking of Greenland, did you hear that it rained at the Greenland ice sheet’s highest point this month — for the first time in recorded history? And yes, that’s just going to make the ice there melt even faster.

As if the specter of resulting sea-level rise weren’t bad enough, all this melting creates other threats to people and wildlife, including landslides and the release of toxic pollution.

And this is only going to accelerate, as the Arctic’s oldest ice is now being pushed by excessive wind patterns into warming waters, where it too is melting. Eventually, scientists warn, the loss of sunlight-reflecting ice will cause more of the sun’s heat to be absorbed by the ocean, further speeding up the effects of global warming.

So yeah, Santa’s probably not in the best mood this year. Plan those holiday wish lists carefully.

Speaking of which, what do we put in naughty kids’ stockings now that coal needs to stay in the ground? Because I can think of a few fossil-fuel executives who don’t deserve any treats this (or any) year.

A Life in Beauty: Whenever we need to illustrate an article about the value of public lands, we’ve always turned to one man: Bob Wick. As a photographer for the Bureau of Land Management, Wick’s images have done more than just capture the beauty of wild spaces in the United States, they flat out inspired us.

Wick retired this month, but his photos will live on, as you can see in the video below.

What’s Next? August ended with some small but significant progress on the Democrats’ big infrastructure bill, which includes numerous climate-related provisions, and we expect that to dominate the discussion throughout September.

Our eyes will also be on California, were the upcoming gubernatorial recall election could have negative environmental consequences not just for the state but the whole world.

September will also bring World Cleanup Day on the 18th, World Gorilla Day on the 24th and World Environmental Health Day on the 26th.

(Wait, shouldn’t every day be environmental health day?)

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

That does it for this edition of Links From the Brink. For more environmental news throughout the month, including bigger stories you won’t find anywhere else, subscribe to the Revelator newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Species Spotlight: Baird’s Tapir, Our Allies Against Climate Change

This endangered mammal, known as the “gardener of the forest,” is related to rhinos and horses but has an elephant-like nose.

Baird’s tapirs are known as the “gardeners of the forest” because they eat a diversity of plants, fruits and seeds. They disperse the latter in their dung, helping forests regenerate.

Species name:

Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii)

Description:

Tapirs are the largest neotropical mammals, with females reaching up to 600 pounds. They’re from the taxonomic order Perissodactyla, or odd-toed ungulates, meaning that they’re related to horses and rhinos. Unlike their cousins they have a short trunk called a proboscis, which they can use to grab foliage, seeds and other food. The largest seeds in tropical forests tend to be associated with slow-growing trees with dense wood, precisely the species of trees that sequester the most carbon. Large mammals like tapirs are the only animals capable of dispersing these seeds, and the reproduction of these trees depends to a significant extent on tapirs. This means that tapirs are not only important due to their roles as “gardeners,” but are also some of our strongest allies in our fight against global climate change.

Where found:

From Mexico to Colombia, primarily in the remaining intact forests of the region.

IUCN Red List status:

Baird’s tapirs are classified as endangered. Experts estimate that the current population could contain as few as 4,500 mature adults.

Major threats:

Central America has lost massive tracts of forest during the past decade, much of it due to major roads that now bisect the range of Baird’s tapirs. The loss of habitat, combined with significant hunting throughout their range, has devastated the species and left the remaining tapirs in isolated subpopulations. It’s unclear if all these subpopulations are genetically viable, as the slow reproductive rate of tapirs makes it difficult for any population to rebound quickly.

Conservationists fear that they may lose even more habitat to climate change. Much of the species’ northern stronghold of the trinational Maya Forest has limited water during the dry season. Climate change may reduce the amount of available water in these areas even further and thus make the large, protected habitat unsuitable for tapirs.

Notable conservation programs:

The Baird’s Tapir Survival Alliance is an effort to build precisely the substantial, coordinated, long-term regional effort needed to save this species. BTSA members hail from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.

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A post shared by Bairds Tapir Survival Alliance (@bairdstapir)

My favorite experience:

One of my favorite personal experiences was while we were collaring tapirs in Indio Maiz Biological Reserve in Nicaragua. We were with a film crew that wanted to film tapirs, and we spent all day trying to track a tapir with a collar in order to film him, but somehow he kept evading us. At the end of the day, in frustration, I went in a canoe up the river by myself without any cameras, just to be 100% sure that the collar was working properly. I walked maybe 50 yards into the forest; there he was, standing in front of me, eating plants with the collar on. It was like getting home after a long absence and seeing my dog again.

I also had a recent sighting in Belize. We spent all day exploring a property we protect there. My colleague Jeremy Radachowsky and I set out alone to look around at some clearings we’d seen on a map and ended up finding a beautiful creek, filled with Morelet’s crocodiles and other wildlife. While we were watching the crocodiles, I saw a tapir head swim across the creek, some 50 yards away. We snuck up the edge of the creek to try to find it and ended up coming out behind a natural blind only about 5 yards from the animal. From that cover we got to watch him swimming around for at least 20 minutes. It was great to watch him like that, knowing we’d helped to protect his forest.

A Rare ‘Bird of Two Worlds’ Faces an Uncertain Future

Marbled murrelets could benefit from a unique research project that’s uncovering information to help better protect this endangered species.

One thing sets marbled murrelets apart from other seabirds: They forage at sea but nest inland in mature forests. That makes them a “bird of two worlds,” says Oregon State University animal ecologist Jim Rivers.

But this unique characteristic also increases their vulnerability. Climate change threatens murrelets’ food sources in the ocean, while on land, logging, wildfires and habitat fragmentation have diminished their nesting forests.

Although the birds received Endangered Species Act protection as a threatened species in 1992, their decline continued as logging chipped away at their forest habitats along the Pacific Coast of North America. Last year the results of a study by OSU researchers with the Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project analyzing 20 years of data revealed climate change and reduced prey populations as the additional factor in the murrelets’ decline.

The Revelator spoke with Rivers, principal investigator of the project, about the challenges of tracking murrelets and how their research is guiding conservation.

Jim Rivers. Photo: Oregon State University

Why was this project started?

There’s a lot of uncertainty about the steps that are needed to recover murrelet populations. That has led managers to not really be sure in some cases as to what they can and can’t do in a given area.

So what our project aims to do is uncover some of the breeding requirements for murrelets. In particular we want to know about where birds are nesting and how successful they are in their nesting. And then if their nest failed to produce any offspring, we want to know the limiting factors and whether or not those might be factors that can be managed.

There isn’t much known about murrelet nesting success in Oregon. There’ve been other large studies in British Columbia, California, Washington and Alaska, but nothing in Oregon. Prior to the start of our work, there were only 29 nests that were active when they were located.

Murrelets use older forests — late succession and old-growth forests — for nesting. They also use the ocean for all of their foraging. They’re a unique species in that sense, but from a research perspective, that means our project requires a lot of people on the ground, in the air and on the water.

We didn’t want to start in the forest and potentially bias where we’re searching for nests. So what that required us to do is to go out and capture birds on the ocean and then tag them and then follow them inland. We do that so that we have a hopefully unbiased sample of birds that could go into federal sites or private lands or state lands.

What’s the process like for capturing these birds in the ocean and then tracking them all the way back to a nest site in the forest?

We go out on the water with an 84-foot boat from the beginning of May to the first week of June when the weather conditions are OK. When we get out on the water, we have a Zodiac [inflatable boat] that’s offloaded just after nightfall. A group gets into that capture boat and goes out into the nearshore environment. They look for birds with a spotlight and a salmon net. It sounds funny, but that’s as simple as we need.

When a bird is caught, they bring it back to the main boat where we have a crew attach a radio tag that allows us to track its movements over the course of about three months. Then we take a measurement of the body, as well as blood and feather samples, which tell us about the health of the bird. Then it’s released back to the water.

The tracking part starts the next morning with our ground crew, who look for the birds along the water. What we want to find is a bird that’s on the water one day, then missing the next day. And then it’s on the water the third day and it’s missing the fourth.

That’s suggestive of a bird in the process of incubating an egg. Males and females share in that responsibility, and they take 24-hour shifts. When we find that, that’s when we send the plane up to look for that individual bird.

The plane flies around and looks for the signal. Once we find the location where the bird is likely sitting on a nest, the ground crew goes inland and starts looking for that individual bird in a given tree, which isn’t easy. These birds are nesting 200 feet above the ground — not even in a nest, but in just a scrape in the moss on a horizontal limb. So you can’t see the bird from the ground.

Once we narrow it down, we have a tree climber set up a video camera in an adjacent tree so we can zoom in and get a good idea of what’s going on at the nest site without bothering the birds.

Then we just run that camera for as long as the nest is active. Once the nest ends, we go out and take down the cameras and we take measurements of the nest tree itself. We do that whole process for as many nests we can find.

What have you learned?

We’ve learned that the ocean conditions appear to have a really big influence on whether these birds are nesting or not. The first year of the project that we went full-scale on our tagging effort was 2017 and we tagged 61 birds. And we waited and waited and waited. None of those birds ended up breeding.

researchers in the field — Oregon State University researchers monitor marbled murrelet movements as part of a multi-year study. Photo: Kim Nelson, Oregon State University, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

And that was a huge surprise to us. We really kind of scratched our heads. But one of the things that stood out during 2017 was that the coastal marine conditions in central Oregon were really poor for a bird like a murrelet that relies on forge fish to feed its offspring.

In 2018 and 2019, we went back with the same methodology. And we did have birds that were going in and breeding. We had about a dozen nests that we found, which is still not a very high propensity to breed and pretty uncommon relative to the number of birds that we tagged.

This year it’s been a very different story. The ocean has been quite a bit different in terms of the upwelling and the productivity and the forage fish availability. And what we’re finding is that we have the smallest number of tagged birds this year — just under 50 birds, but a third of those birds have bred.

We have 17 nests at last count for this season — much more than we had in all previous three seasons. We didn’t work last year because of COVID.

So we’re learning that you need to have good ocean conditions if murrelets are going to breed. And they have to have good nest sites in the forest. If you don’t have those, you’re not going to have healthy populations.

Have any of your findings so far been able to inform policy or conservation work?

Right now, the way that the regulations are written, at least for state lands in Oregon, is that if you go out to a site that might be murrelet habitat and you conduct a series of surveys and you don’t get any birds in the first year, and you go back the second year and you get the same result — no birds after a set number of surveys — that area can be harvested because it’s considered to be unoccupied habitat.

What our results showed was that you may have a couple of bad years of ocean conditions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an unoccupied habitat forever. It just means that birds are not using it because the ocean is not allowing them to, in a sense, because they don’t have the breeding resources.

Although our project really started as one that’s focused on nest ecology and breeding in the forest, we really can’t remove it from the ocean conditions too, because they’re tied together.

So we’ve done a little bit more work toward that marine side of things lately. And I think that’s where people are starting to really appreciate murrelets as a bird of two worlds.

What else are you hoping to learn?

The nice thing about this project is that we’ve had the latitude to ask questions that are related to our initial goal of understanding factors related to nest success. One of the questions is about ocean conditions and forage fish.

We’ve started to think about what the birds are eating, and we can get a sense of that from taking their blood and feather samples and looking at stable isotope values. Those give us a sense of how high in the food chain murrelets are eating. We can look at those values for different individuals and in different years. It will be interesting to see the potential difference in isotope values for birds that were captured this spring versus back in 2017 when none of them bred. I suspect they’ll be quite different.

We’re also getting interested in microplastics. It’s a threat to a lot of seabirds.

One of the things that we can do when we climb these nest trees and take measurements around the nest site is collect the fecal material from the chick. We can look through that and see what sort of plastics are there. And we have a woman on campus we’re collaborating with who does a lot of microplastics work. Her comment was, “it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of how much [microplastics] these birds are going to have.”

We’ve also been trying to understand where these birds are spending time on the coasts and whether or not their movements overlap with marine protected areas.

We’re kind of starting from the point of nesting ecology, but there’s lots of fun things that we can do that really broaden the work and help us understand the bird better.

Beyond Science: Art and the Environment

A journey to one of the most beautiful places on Earth — which sits next to one of the most polluted — reminds us that art can help conserve.

In 1871 photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran joined an expedition to the Yellowstone region of the United States, which they documented in a series of powerful and moving creative works. Soon after, Jackson’s and Moran’s images became the catalysts for Congress to designate the very first national park at Yellowstone.

This little-known detail, that artists played a major role in the formation of the world’s first national park, was at the forefront of my mind each day I spent as the artist-in-residence for Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park this summer.

My time in Hawaiʻi was made possible by the National Parks Arts Foundation, which offers select artists month-long fellowships to follow in the footsteps of Jackson and Moran, exploring the natural wonders within one of several U.S. parks, and connecting with the scientists and environmental protection specialists working to preserve the land.

For me, this meant days surveying one of the most geologically and biologically diverse places on Earth, traversing rainforests, volcanoes, fields of steam vents, lava tubes and endless vistas of unbroken Pacific Ocean. I was introduced to Sierra McDaniel, a 20-year veteran member of the Parks Service, who shared her work propagating and repopulating the critically endangered silversword plant. I visited the fishermen at Ka Lae, who cast lines from 50-foot cliffs as vaccinated revelers threw themselves into the crystal-clear water below. There were turtles sunning themselves on black sand beaches, waterfalls, and countless hikes in secluded wilderness teeming with some of the rarest plants and animals in the world. In the evenings, I would return home to the scent of frangipani and the charcoal of distant firepits, mixing on the trade winds that are responsible for Hawaiʻi’s idyllic climate.

During my visit I researched the formation of the Hawaiian archipelago and its current rate of change due to volcanic activity and the movement of tectonic plates. Using seismic data from the United States Geological Survey, I catalogued all earthquakes that occurred beneath the park and devised a system to convert parameters such as magnitude, depth and time of quake to musical parameters for the creation of a new score. The recording of this score is designed as a way of experiencing, in sound, the activity that is changing the shape, position and size of Hawaiʻi, and indeed the very face of the Earth. In the few solitary weeks I spent in quiet contemplation, marveling at the spectacular landscape laid out before me, I was surprised to learn that more than 750 local earthquakes were reshaping the ground beneath my feet.

Listen to a sample of Sam Nester’s composition:

Plastic Beach

All this raw beauty and natural power, along with the artistic opportunity to explore it, exists under the stewardship of the National Parks Service, which protects it for anyone wishing to venture that far out into the Pacific Ocean. And yet throughout my residency I was intimately aware that on this same island, a mere stone’s throw from the protected land of the national park, sat a place in stark contrast with what I was witnessing.

Kamilo Beach, commonly known as “trash beach” or “plastic beach,” is among the most polluted beaches on Earth. Plagued by the Great Pacific garbage patch – a vast area of floating rubbish in the Pacific Ocean – Kamilo’s sandy shoreline accumulates enormous swaths of garbage each day, mostly discarded plastic.

To truly comprehend the catastrophic scope of the Great Pacific garbage patch, imagine an area triple the size of France composed of approximately 80,000 metric tons of plastic. Kamilo, along with other Hawaiian beaches less travelled by tourists, is one of few places that this swirling vortex of ocean currents dumps its decades-old collection of debris.

Debris created by you and me.

Kamilo Beach plastic trash — Kamilo Beach trash. Photo: Gabriella Levine (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It’s almost certain that the turtles I saw sunning and the adventure seekers diving 50 feet from volcanic cliffs have contended, at some point, with the likes of the garbage that defaces Kamilo.

Even worse than the solid toothbrushes, bottles and toilet seats swirling around this patch of ocean are the microplastics they produce. The plastic from these discarded household objects breaks down over time into smaller and smaller particles. These microplastics are not only becoming increasingly difficult to remove from the world’s oceans but are ingested by marine life, causing potentially fatal harm.

Kamilo is not a national park. It is not protected by the everyday heroes that make up the Parks Service, creating and administering rehabilitation projects over the course of decades for the health and longevity of our fragile environment. Kamilo is a symptom of the Great Pacific garbage patch. This patch of ocean waste is unequivocally a mark of human carelessness and one that needs to be addressed on a global level if we are to prevent irreversible catastrophe.

Art and Awareness

Our world is in crisis, and it has been for quite some time now. Instead of addressing this, a movement has begun among the wealthiest of men to conquer space for individual private enterprise and avoid the responsibility we have to our shared wilderness here on the only planet we currently occupy. We cannot excuse our continued habits on the hope that a few modern robber barons might colonize a distant world and allow us the privilege of living there. Likewise, continuing to ignore our climate and environmental emergency here and now, or laying blame to previous generations, is reckless. It is our planet, it is our time, it is crucial that we consider our relationship to the magnificent natural world and how best to safeguard it.

Perhaps now more than ever, our wild places need artists. We need artists to know them, to feel connected to them, and to share their experiences as widely as possible.

Sea turtles at Punalu’u. Photo: Sam Nester

Depicting humanity’s relationship to nature is certainly not new. It is rare for someone to mention Beethoven’s sixth symphony without commenting on their own experience with the magnificence of a thunderstorm. Confronting Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is to gaze not only deep within oneself, but to observe a man confronted with the awesomeness of nature and his place within it. To stand in the shadow of Olafur Eliasson’s beautiful yet disturbing icebergs scattered and melting in the cities of Paris, Copenhagen or London, is to have a very real, very strong connection to our warming planet.

Indeed, artists can play a vital role in conservation and messaging. Data sets rarely move an audience, but the interpretation or representation of critical information through artistic forms is ripe for broader engagement. When I began my Arcadia project, converting the biodata of living plants to sound and light in real-time installations, I never expected that bioscience Ph.D. students would draw on this for their research. As I have worked with various departments across disciplines at George Mason University these past 18 months, I have seen first-hand that interdisciplinary collaboration can provide new perspectives and approaches to sharing issues of sustainability and climate change more widely, and that artistic work can contribute to scientific inquiry.

Similarly, my experiences at Volcanoes National Park have laid the foundation for additional data sonification work, in the hope of amplifying an enduring natural process that is occurring beneath us. A piece of music fully informed by earthquake data may not be everyone’s Friday night listening, and it is unlikely to inspire a new generation of musicological geologists. However, offering art grounded in a natural phenomenon, one that constantly adjusts our physical position on this planet, as we act powerless to the process, may allow for a fresh perspective and deepening of our relationship to the rhythms of the natural world.

Art and Influence

Artists can complement the work of climate scientists by making what all too often seems overwhelmingly grim more actionable.

Like Jackson and Moran, artists today can align themselves with government and nonprofit reports in the hope of influencing change on an institutional level. Collaborating with scientists, like those in the National Parks Service, or those at George Mason University, can allow for new insights into research and the presentation of technical material. Simply producing public events in galleries and concert halls that promote our wilderness helps to direct the most pressing conversation of our time to a broader audience.

Additionally, we can take this further, sharing our work on platforms such as social media, in newspapers, on television news shows and podcasts. This takes what can be an ephemeral moment, a performance or event locked in time, to a sustained experience — just like what we hope our natural spaces will enjoy.

To know the rainforests, volcanoes, and endless vistas of Pacific Ocean is enough to want to defend them. Similarly, to know the horrors of places like Kamilo and the Great Pacific garbage patch offers an opportunity to rage against them in creative ways.

Art inspires. It has the power to create change in a viewer, reader or listener, and reach vast audiences. So let the artists of today become the 21^st century versions of Jackson and Moran in the hope to inspire the protection of an even greater number of our natural wonders, to be loved, shared, and known by future generations.

Vanishing: An Augury of Antlers

What if moose, mighty and massive, went the way of bison and other once-abundant species?

What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.

I didn’t emigrate from Britain to Canada because of moose. Not exactly.

Imagine telling your family you’re abandoning them for another country because of a long-legged ungulate with a flap of skin hanging beneath the throat and a peculiar, stiff-legged gait.

But I’m not sure Canada’s pull would have been so strong if I hadn’t been sitting, one day, at the front of a Greyhound bus on the way to Hay River in the Northwest Territories and the driver hadn’t slowed down so we could watch a moose treading across a creek by the side of the highway. Or if a couple of years later, when I was cycling alone across Canada for almost 6,000 miles, I hadn’t stopped to watch a moose sauntering on the other side of the Blackstone River along the Dempster Highway.

Seeing a moose in person — they can be 7 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh more than a thousand pounds — is both shocking and mesmerizing. Where I’m from, badgers are the largest remaining wild animals, and they’re being culled by the tens of thousands to the point that they’re at risk of becoming extirpated in parts of England.

It was February when my British husband and I moved into our house in Whitehorse, Yukon, just over the 60th parallel in northern Canada. All the homes on our side of the street back onto miles of forest; the snow was still thick on the ground, and we were looking forward to discovering what was in our back garden when it finally melted.

Despite the snow, it didn’t take long to notice the moose antlers propped up against the fence beside an overgrown rhubarb plant and concealed by low spruce boughs and the open, snow-wedged gate. The antlers were still connected to a bloodstained section of skull. They hadn’t been shed by their living owner as male moose do each winter; they’d been hacked off a corpse by humans.

Every year people shoot moose, cut them up and put them in their freezers. Every year another batch of antlers is nailed to gates, garages and cabins, a custom that always makes me think of the medieval predilection for displaying decapitated heads on spikes.

Yukon is known for being home to two moose for every person. It’s the sort of fact Yukoners are proud of. Each year, though, that ratio becomes less true as the human population steadily rises. We’re currently at about 42,000 people to 70,000 moose.

Even though moose here aren’t considered endangered at the moment, that doesn’t stop me from lying in bed worrying about them. The truth is that we don’t know exactly how many moose live in Canada right now. There may be a million, or there may be 500,000.

But I do know this: We’ve taken abundant species for granted before, and they’ve paid a terrible price. Passenger pigeons once numbered in the billions and now there are none. As many as 60 million buffalo may have roamed North America and, after we hunted them to the brink of extinction, we had to rebuild their species from a population of just a few hundred.

I’m not a biologist. I’m a poet, so I tend to let my imagination run away with me. More and more, I’ve been thinking about what it will be like when so many of the animals we share the planet with are no longer here. In the forest behind my house, I imagine smooth snow, unbroken by the prints of any creatures other than humans and our dogs. No squirrel tail scuffs, no cute cartoony hare ovals, no scarpering coyote tracks. No deep postholes made by moose that my whole leg disappears into when I step.

I always thought one of the main reasons I love going into the forest was so that I could be alone, but I’ve realized I don’t actually want to be alone. I want to have to stop as I’m skiing along because I’m not sure if the movement I’ve sensed ahead is a branch shifting in the wind or a fellow mammal passing between tree trunks. I want to have to carry my bear spray, my whistle, my phone, just in case. I want to see three moose cross the trail ahead of me and have to grab my dog to put her on the lead.

We’ve lived here for 14 years now, and the antlers are still propped up against our garden fence. That first summer, I collected stones in the woods and arranged them around the skull. I said sorry to the moose and wrote a poem. I let the fireweed grow through the stones. In the autumn, I let aspen leaves and spruce needles cover the skull. Then the snow returned. An artist friend flew up to stay and we talked of freighting the antlers to her so she could carve them. We talked of separating the antlers for shipping, sawing them off the skull, how that would be a pity.

Lying in bed at three in the morning, when I fear that no species on this planet — including us — is going to make it, I worry about what to do with the antlers when all the moose have gone. Even though there must be hundreds of thousands of antlers hammered to gateposts and cabins all around the northern hemisphere, I’m convinced they’ll eventually become a sought-after commodity, like rhinoceros horns and elephant tusks. What if I get up to walk the dog one morning and discover they’ve vanished, stolen in the night, the arrangement of stones scattered?

I know what I’ll do with the antlers. I won’t nail them to a wall so nobody can take them. I’ll bury them in the garden, and I won’t mark the grave.

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

13 New Books About Pollution — and How to Fight It

Pesticides, sewage, mining waste, air pollution and trash — these new books address the toxic elements in our society.

It’s a dirty world out there — but it doesn’t have to be.

That message rings out from a slate of important new books covering the fight against various pollutants around the world. They examine everything from pesticides to air pollution and from mining waste to the trash that accumulates all around us. Along the way these books shine a light on some bigger stories — like our food system and human effects on complex ecosystems. They also dive deep into the racism, indifference, greed and ignorance that allow these toxic compounds to flourish in our world and in our bodies.

One group of pollutants didn’t make it onto this list: greenhouse gases. We’ll look at them in September’s column, covering timely new books on climate change.

But for now, here are 13 new dirty books about filth for your perusal, along with their cover descriptions. Each title links to its publisher’s site, but you should also be able to order these from any local or online bookseller or your favorite library.

The World We Need: Stories and Lessons From America’s Unsung Environmental Movement edited by Audrea Lim

“…a vivid introduction to America’s largely unsung grassroots environmental groups — often led by activists of color and the poor — valiantly fighting back in America’s so-called sacrifice zones against industries poisoning our skies and waterways and heating our planet. Through original reporting, profiles, artwork and interviews, we learn how these activist groups, almost always working on shoestring budgets, are devising creative new tactics, building sustainable projects to transform local economies and organizing people long overlooked by the environmental movement — changing its face along the way.”

The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption and One Man’s Search for Justice by Carey Gillam

“Lee Johnson was a man with simple dreams. All he wanted was a steady job and a nice home for his wife and children, something better than the hard life he knew growing up. He never imagined that he would become the face of a David-and-Goliath showdown against one of the world’s most powerful corporate giants. But a workplace accident left Lee doused in a toxic chemical and facing a deadly cancer that turned his life upside down. In 2018, the world watched as Lee was thrust to the forefront of one the most dramatic legal battles in recent history.”

Breathless: Why Air Pollution Matters — and How It Affects You by Chris Woodford

“Take a deep breath. You’ll do it 20,000 times a day. You assume all this air is clean; it’s the very breath of life. But in Delhi, the toxic smog is as bad for you as smoking 50 cigarettes a day. Even a few days in Paris, London or Rome is equivalent to two or three cigarettes. Air pollution is implicated in six of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, including lung cancer, heart disease, stroke and dementia. Breathless gives us clear facts about air pollution in our everyday lives, showing how it affects our bodies, how much of it occurs in unexpected places (indoors, inside your car), and how you can minimize the risks.”

Pollution Is Colonialism by Max Liboiron

“Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) — an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada — to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron’s creative, lively and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.”

Playing With Fire: The Strange Case of Marine Shale Processors by John W. Sutherlin and Daniel Elliot Gonzalez

“This book examines the tale of Marine Shale Processors, the world’s largest hazardous waste company, and the women who fought to protect their community and their children. The lesson here is that a dedicated group of people fighting for what is right can win and it serves as an example for any community that wants to determine what their own environmental future.”

Herbicides: Chemistry, Efficacy, Toxicology and Environmental Impacts edited by Robin Mesnage and Johann G. Zaller

“A comprehensive overview of this complex topic, presented by internationally recognized experts. Information presented will inform discussions on the use of herbicides in modern agricultural and other systems, and their potential non-target effects on human populations and various ecosystems. The book covers these matters in concise language appropriate to engage both specialists in the research community and informed persons responsible for legislative, funding and public health matters in the community at large.”

Earth Detox: How and Why We Must Clean Up Our Planet by Julian Cribb

“Every person on our home planet is affected by a worldwide deluge of man-made chemicals and pollutants — most of which have never been tested for safety. Our chemical emissions are six times larger than our total greenhouse gas emissions. They are in our food, our water, the air we breathe, our homes and workplaces, the things we use each day. This universal poisoning affects our minds, our bodies, our genes, our grandkids and all life on Earth. Julian Cribb describes the full scale of the chemical catastrophe we have unleashed. He proposes a new Human Right — not to be poisoned.”

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh

“The David and Goliath story of ordinary people in El Salvador who rallied together with international allies to prevent a global mining corporation from poisoning the country’s main water source.”

Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything — and Endangered the World by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman

“Over the past few decades, palm oil has seeped into every corner of our lives. But the palm oil revolution has been built on stolen land and slave labor; it’s swept away cultures and so devastated the landscapes of Southeast Asia that iconic animals now teeter on the brink of extinction. This groundbreaking work of first-rate journalism compels us to examine the connections between the choices we make at the grocery store and a planet under siege.”

Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound by David B. Williams

“In conversations with archaeologists, biologists and tribal authorities, Williams traces how generations of humans have interacted with such species as geoducks, salmon, orcas, rockfish and herring. He sheds light on how warfare shaped development and how people have moved across this maritime highway, in canoes, the mosquito fleet and today’s ferry system. The book also takes an unflinching look at how the Sound’s ecosystems have suffered from human behavior, including pollution, habitat destruction and the effects of climate change.”

Plastic: An Autobiography by Allison Cobb

“Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives ― from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama ― the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.”

Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet by Chelsea Wald

“While we see radical technological change in almost every other aspect of our lives, we remain stuck in a sanitation status quo — in part because the topic of toilets is taboo. Fortunately, there’s hope — and Pipe Dreams daringly profiles the growing army of sewage-savvy scientists, engineers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and activists worldwide who are overcoming their aversions and focusing their formidable skills on making toilets accessible and healthier for all.”

Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai by Saumya Roy

“All of Mumbai’s possessions and memories come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. Towering at the outskirts of the city, the mountains are covered in a faint smog from trash fires. Over time, as wealth brought Bollywood knock offs, fast food and plastics to Mumbaikars, a small, forgotten community of migrants and rag-pickers came to live at the mountains’ edge, making a living by re-using, recycling and re-selling. Among them is Farzana Ali Shaikh, a tall, adventurous girl who soon becomes one of the best pickers in her community. Like so many in her community, Farzana, made increasingly sick by the trash mountains, is caught up in the thrill of discovery — because among the broken glass, crushed cans or even the occasional dead baby, there’s a lingering chance that she will find a treasure to lift her family’s fortunes.” (Available in September.)

Keep reading: Explore the Revelator Reads archives for hundreds of additional book recommendations.

Photo Essay: In the Company of Bison

Collaboration across thousands of miles provides a vision for a shared future for Yellowstone bison and the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor, Alaska.

Old Harbor, formerly Nuniaq, is the largest of six Alutiiq villages in Alaska’s Kodiak archipelago. People have lived here nearly 8,000 years, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied areas in the region.

Looking to its future, Old Harbor finds itself at a crossroads. While its long history of commercial fishing and industrial maritime activities such as whaling are now a fading way of life, the village has developed a strategic plan that combines the efforts of the city, the tribe and the corporation of Old Harbor to develop future-focused projects that benefit the community’s long-term growth and survival. This includes an alternative to their modern reliance on importing food at a now historically high expense from the town of Kodiak or the mainland.

With that in mind, in 2015 the residents of Old Harbor decided to release and manage a free-ranging herd of plains bison on the 120-square-mile Sitkalidak Island, located a short boat or helicopter ride across the water from the village. The private herd, acquired and relocated to the island in 2017, belongs to a community nonprofit, the Old Harbor Alliance, with support and representation by the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor, the city of Old Harbor and the Old Harbor Native Corporation. The herd will provide a locally available high-quality protein, as well as economic opportunity through tourism, hunting tags, local guiding and logistics services, and the sale of excess meat.

Decades of collaboration made this possible. In 2016 Old Harbor became a member of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, an organization of about 70 tribes across North America that has spent the past 30 years proliferating and growing bison populations on Indigenous lands. The council facilitates programs and resources to help educate tribes and the general public on the traditional benefits and relationships between communities and bison and provides assistance to help tribes start their own herds. The ITBC also partnered with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the organization I work with, in successfully advocating for bison as the national mammal of the United States.

The ITBC effort includes a program to rescue bison that leave the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone bison are the closest known relatives of plains bison that survived their near extinction in the 19th century. Bison leaving the park can be killed by locals through a Montana state effort to prevent contact between bison and livestock. The ITBC has been working to save every bison that stumbles past the park borders, and in 2020 sent three such pure-blooded bulls to Old Harbor. The bulls, in turn, will provide the herd with genetic material to avoid interbreeding issues and produce a healthy generation for over a century.

I’ve spent the past several months in Old Harbor filming a documentary around the bison herd, giving me the opportunity to see its importance up close.

Cold rain blows the morning I hop a ride in a helicopter headed toward Port Hobron on Sitkalidak Island. I’m joined by Nate Svoboda, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and Melissa Berns, chief manager of Old Harbor’s herd. We’re going to run physical exams on several bison, adjust tracking collars and apply what’s called a “cold brand” on the bison from Yellowstone to denote them from the rest of the herd.

As we fly over Sitkalidak, Berns stands on the landing skid, safety-hooked at the waist in a space where the door would normally be, a black tranquilizer rifle in her hands. She sees a small herd of bison, waits until they’re in range, and aims. “Dart is in,” she says over the intercom, and after five minutes of waiting says “Bison down. Bison down.” The helicopter lands and the team gets to work.

At day’s end we visit our fourth bison. Community volunteers exit two helicopters and approach the sleeping hulk of Siduuq, one of the three Yellowstone bison bulls we’d been searching for. By reputation and appearance, Siduuq is exactly how I imagined a “buffalo” — powerful, ancient, mysterious.

Keller, the pilot, collects blood samples while Dahlia, Berns’ 17-year-old niece, takes the bison’s temperature. His large tracking collar is adjusted to ensure it’s secure, and he breaths deeply from the oxygen tube inserted in his nostril. The workup is finished in about 30 minutes, then Svoboda administers a stimulant to reverse the tranquilizer.

A stir in the ears signal Siduuq’s waking. As he rises, I take several photos. I’ve done this throughout the day, about 20-30 feet distant. While the other bison quickly run off, Siduuq continues staring, the whole of his great face turned in my direction.

Everything feels quiet now. Bison will raise their tail if they feel threatened, but Siduuq’s is down, his body still. I stare into those giant eyes and feel as if I’m being appraised by an old wisdom. Then, as silent as his weighted gaze, he starts to walk away — not breaking eye contact until well on the other side of the clearing.

As we leave the bison and Sitkalidak Island behind, the view from the helicopter frames the remains of an old whaling station from the 1930s. The pilot circles it to give us a better look. A few old shacks, some long-rusted machinery and an old shipwreck sit idly in the rain. I contemplate the changing approaches to ephemeral industries and survival that have occurred in and around Old Harbor through the centuries. Piles of rusty drums, full of old fuel and whale oil, reflect a time long gone for the small fishing village. Now perhaps a new self-determined vision and species — bison — will guide its future.

We cross the strait and Old Harbor alights in the darkness, windows bright with warmth and welcome. Berns and Svoboda, though exhausted from the day, talk excitedly at length of the next trip out. I contemplate how the bison found their way here — from Kodiak, from Yellowstone, via tribal networks — from the brink of extinction to grow in another place, where they’re once again stewarded by an Indigenous tribe.