To Save the Planet, We Need to End Corporate Funding of Police

Those fighting to protect the planet face intense police repression that's funded by private corporations.

This summer, we’ve seen the Bootleg fire rage through Oregon. East Coasters have been breathing West Coast smoke. Massive floods have slammed towns from Germany to China. The town of Lytton, British Columbia burned to the ground.

These disasters give a new sense of urgency to transition away from the fossil fuels that are causing this climate chaos. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the movement fighting for this transition is running up against intense police repression — funded by private corporations as well as the federal government.

I saw some of this firsthand.

In June, I was one of the thousands who converged in Northern Minnesota for the Treaty People Gathering to protest the Line 3 tar sands pipeline. Tar sands are one of the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive fuel sources on the planet. The pipeline also violates the treaty rights of the local Anishinaabe people, threatening their water supply and sacred wild rice beds.

The Treaty People Gathering kicked off a summer of protests against the pipeline. Unfortunately, these nonviolent protests have been brutally cracked down on. Over 500 protestors have been arrested or issued citations so far.

While I was there, demonstrators were hounded by a Border Patrol helicopter flying close to the ground, kicking up dust and disorienting protestors. Police attacked protestors with a Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and built a physical barricade outside a pipeline resistance camp on private property, preventing vehicle access.

Although the police claim to “protect and serve” the communities they work in, these confrontational, militarized responses would indicate the opposite. It’s disappointing, but not surprising — Enbridge, the pipeline operator, is directly funding many Minnesotan police departments.

The Line 3 construction permit requires Enbridge to create a “Public Safety Escrow Account” that allows Minnesota police to seek reimbursement for “services” including “maintaining the peace in and around the construction site.”

This incentivizes more arrests, as the police can bill Enbridge for any activity related to suppressing Line 3 resistance. The escrow account provides funding for police “personal protective equipment, ” which includes batons, shields, and gas masks. Police have also submitted invoices for tear gas grenades, tear gas projectiles, and bean bag rounds.

Funding police violence against nonviolent protests should cross a line. But it’s not just corporations — the federal government does it, too. The federal 1033 program transfers surplus military equipment to local police departments, free of charge.

This equipment has been repeatedly used by local police departments to violently suppress racial justice protests in places like Ferguson, Minneapolis, and Kenosha. The 1033 program also likely supplied the helicopters, assault rifles, excavators, and the mine-resistant armor-protected vehicle that violently suppressed the Standing Rock protests in 2016.

Hubbard County, Minnesota, where hundreds have been arrested, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of military equipment from the 1033 program, including M16 and M14 assault rifles and a mine-resistant armor-protected vehicle.

The simultaneous occurrence of this summer’s intense climate-related weather events and this severe crackdown on anti-pipeline activists is deeply troubling.

The development of more fossil fuel infrastructure such as Line 3 will only worsen our climate catastrophe. But while the anti-pipeline movement is trying to save the planet, militarized, corporate-funded police forces are making that as difficult as possible.

In order to protect our environment, we must demilitarize the police. That means ending the 1033 program and getting corporate money out of police departments. The fate of our planet depends on it.

This op-ed was distributed by Other Words.

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

Species Spotlight: The Bobcat — Hunted for Its Beauty

Exploited for its pelt, the bobcat is a highly cryptic species that few have studied or monitored in any detail.

Species SpotlightEasily confused with the larger Canada lynx, the bobcat is a close relative. In fact they’re known to hybridize at the southern extent of lynx range, where the two species overlap. Two subspecies of bobcat — the western and eastern, as supported by current science — live in North America. Across its range, the bobcat is subject to significant hunting and trapping for its fur and recreation that can threaten populations.

Species name:

Lynx rufus

Description:

Short and stocky, bobcats have dense facial ruffs and are known for their “bobbed” tails and pointed ear tufts, although the latter is often absent or short. While bobcats are much smaller than cougars or mountain lions, they’re considered medium-sized wild cats. Weighing between 8 and 40 pounds and reaching 49 inches long, bobcats are often two to three times the size of house cats.

Bobcat
Photo: Mark Elbroch/Panthera

Where it’s found:

The bobcat is widespread across North America, with a range extending from southern Canada through the contiguous United States into southern Mexico to the state of Oaxaca.

IUCN Red List status:

Least concern

Major threats:

Bobcats are widely exploited for their pelts, which primarily support international markets for spotted furs. Volatile fur markets can lead to unpredictable harvesting, making management of the species difficult and at times impossible.

The species is also killed for livestock depredation, both perceived and real.

In some places coyotes and domestic animals have reduced bobcat populations. Rodenticide poisons, which bobcats ingest with their prey, are also a significant threat in parts of the West.

Notable conservation programs:

Panthera director Wai-Ming Wong and I collaborate with researcher Kim Sager-Fradkin of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe on the Olympic Bobcat Project. Together we completed a collaborative camera trapping season across a grid of 180 cameras in collaboration with the Lower Elwha Klallam, Port Gamble S’Klallam and Jamestown S’Klallam Tribes. We categorized 500,000 images and organized them to train a machine-learning classifier (PantheraIDS), which when complete will be able to identify the animal in camera trap images at a rate of 1,000 images per minute, with an approximately 96%-98% success rate. This tool will be shared with First Nation collaborators to help them build capacity and monitoring tools, as they double the size of their sampling to encompass all sides of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.

A bobcat feeds at a kill made by a mountain lion in Washington state.

In partnership with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, Panthera is currently investigating puma-bobcat competition and coexistence on the Olympic Peninsula, as well as their economic benefits to people, including controlling rodents that affect timber production. John Livaitis at the University of New Hampshire and Clay Nielsen at the Southern Illinois University are among the veteran bobcat ecology researchers; Seth Riley and Laurel Serieys are among those contributing studies on the impacts of habitat fragmentation, rat poisons and disease on California’s bobcats.

The latest member of Panthera’s Global Alliance for Wild Cats — Jon Ayers — has just pledged $20 million over 10 years to wild cat conservation, with a focus on smaller cats. This represents the largest-ever commitment to small cat conservation in the world.

What else to we need to understand to protect these species?

Occasionally news reports surface of bobcat attacks on people, including a recent incident in North Carolina. As I explain here, such encounters are very much out of the ordinary and involve unique circumstances. Bobcats are not to be feared but instead admired for their beauty and critical contribution to maintaining healthy ecosystems benefiting our survival.

My favorite experience:

I once witnessed a bobcat kill a goose. The bobcat was so small and the goose so large that it had to walk slowly, straddling the bird between its legs. The bobcat was so consumed with its task of retreating into nearby woods that I was able to accompany it on this journey. We walked together perhaps five long minutes, the carcass dragging a trail through the duff, before the bobcat seemed to suddenly become aware of my presence. He dropped the bird, stared at me in shock for a moment, and then bounded away without a backward glance.

I assume he returned, though: When I checked on the site an hour later, the goose was gone.

Key research:

    • Kitchener, A. C. et al. (2017). A revised taxonomy of the Felidae: The final report of the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group. Cat News 11: 38–40.
    • Fedriani, J. M.; Fuller, T. K.; Sauvajot R. M. & York, E. C. (2000). “Competition and intraguild predation among three sympatric carnivores”. Oecologia. 125 (2): 258–270.
    • Serieys LEK, MS Rogan, SS Matsushima, CC Wilmers. 2021. Road-crossings, vegetative cover, land use and poisons interact to influence corridor effectiveness. Biological Conservation, 253:
    • Serieys LEK, Lea AJ, Epeldegui M, Armenta TC, Moriarty J, VandeWoude S, Carver S, Foley J, Wayne RK, Riley SPD, & Uittenbogaart CH (2018). Urbanization and anticoagulant poisons promote immune dysfunction in bobcats. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 285(1871), 20172533.

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What Happens to Wildlife Swimming in a Sea of Our Drug Residues?

Wastewater exposes plants and wildlife to hundreds of chemical compounds. Researchers are learning about potential side effects and solutions.

Fish hooked on meth? It’s a catchy headline that made the rounds a few weeks ago, but it represents a serious and growing problem. Our rivers and streams have become a soup of hundreds of drugs — mostly pharmaceuticals — that come from the treated water released from wastewater facilities.

Conventional wastewater treatment can remove some, but not all, of the many chemical compounds we excrete from our bodies — or those we improperly dispose of — says Diana Aga, director of the RENEW (Research and Education in Energy, Environment and Water) Institute at the University at Buffalo.

One of the worst offenders, she says, are antidepressants, which are a real downer for wildlife health.

“Because [these chemicals] are persistent, they also tend to accumulate in fish,” she says. A study she co-authored in 2017 examined fish from the Niagara River and found the highest bioaccumulation of antidepressants occurred in the fishes’ brains, followed by their livers, muscles and gonads.

It’s not just fish at risk, either. Other aquatic species face the same contaminants, and new research shows it can influence their behavior. Spinycheek crayfish, for example, became bolder after being exposed to the common antidepressant citalopram. Bold isn’t a great trait for an animal low on the food chain.

That wasn’t the only side effect. “The accumulation of pharmaceuticals in aquatic invertebrates poses a range of potential impacts to the invertebrates themselves and their predators, including altered growth, reproduction and behavior,” the researchers wrote. Crayfish and other invertebrates play important roles in their ecosystems, so anything affecting them can cascade throughout a habitat.

Plants, too, can take up these chemicals. A study from False Bay, in Cape Town, South Africa found the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac in sea lettuce, an edible seaweed. The researchers also found traces of the drug, although in lower quantities, in marine invertebrates including starfish, mussels and sea urchins.

Learning Curve

Despites these studies, and another two decades of research that has identified more than 600 pharmaceutical residues in rivers and streams, there’s still a lot we don’t know about how the compounds affect biodiversity, says Aga. Part of the problem is that many studies have been done in the lab where animals are usually exposed to a single drug.

Outside the lab, there are a lot more variables.

“A lot of these pharmaceuticals may have either synergistic or additive or maybe even antagonistic effects when combined,” she says. The same thing can happen in humans taking multiple prescribed or over-the-counter medications, but the scope of drugs in the wild complicates the problem. “It’s very difficult to predict what happens in the wild when they’re exposed to hundreds of these pharmaceutical residues at once.”

There’s another obstacle. “A lot of times people only act when they think something is toxic or carcinogenic,” she says. That’s measured by tracking mortality or tumors. There’s less focus on how the compounds could affect animal behavior, which is more subtle, but also important.

“These are things that might affect biodiversity in the wild,” she says. “A population might decline because there’s less mating. Or if they don’t recognize predators, they more easily become prey.”

Water pipe over rocks and trees
Water is discharged from a treatment plant into the environment. Photo: MPCA, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Potential Fixes

We might not know all there is to know how drugs in our surface waters affect plants and animals yet, but we do know how to tackle the problem.

“In our study from 2020 we found that advanced treatment systems, like ozonation, can remove a lot of these pharmaceuticals,” she explains. Since using ozone to disinfect water can also lead to the formation of potentially harmful by-products, Aga says it’s best to use another method — granular activated carbon — or both in combination.

“Together they could completely remove these pharmaceuticals,” she says.

Granular activated carbon systems for wastewater treatment are like large Brita filters commonly used for purifying water at home. Both technologies, though, will bump up the cost of treatment. For smaller water systems that lack economies of scale, that can be cost-prohibitive.

But it might not be long before such treatment systems become the norm anyway.

Other emerging contaminants in water like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) also pose threats to human health and potentially wildlife. As we learn more about these so-called “forever chemicals,” we may see regulations to curb their use and to treat contaminated water.

“There have been a lot of discussions from the EPA and some of the regulatory agencies that might require regulation of those PFAS, which would be a good driving force to update wastewater treatment systems,” says Aga.

Climate change could also help push along better wastewater-treatment systems, she says, especially in areas with declining freshwater resources and as the need develops in some places to reuse wastewater for drinking, irrigation or other uses.

Those changes could benefit wildlife by removing more chemical compounds and other contaminants before treated water is discharged back into the environment.

While that would be good news, it’s already long overdue.

“There have been discussions about pharmaceuticals in water for a long time, but the response has been slow,” says Aga. “When I started looking at this awhile back, I’d hear people say that pharmaceuticals can’t be toxic or that bad because we take them. But we need to broaden our minds — it’s not just the people we should be thinking about, we should think about biodiversity.”

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The Extinction Crisis in Watercolor and Oils: Using Art to Save Plants

“Weird Plants” author Chris Thorogood, a botanist and an artist, calls on us to see the marvels of plant life and the urgency of saving it.

Chris Thorogood is surrounded by plants — both around his office and on his drawing table.

As an evolutionary botanist, he serves as head of science and public engagement for Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum in the United Kingdom.

But when he’s not researching the genetics or taxonomy of plants around the world, he’s often drawing them. His stunning illustrations have appeared in scientific journals, magazines and books like 2018’s Weird Plants and 2020’s The Botany of Gin (the latter coauthored with Simon Hiscock).

We connected with Thorogood by video to talk about the fine line between science and art and how both serve to aid in conservation.

What’s your evolutionary story? Where did the science and the art combine for you?

Well, I think they go very well together. Often we can put subject areas into boxes. In school we think of everything as compartmentalized, whether, you know, it’s math or science or art, and whether you’re good at this or not so good at this one, or which one you like. And one of the things I love about my career is that all of those boxes disappear and everything starts to overlap.

Wow. That’s great.

It’s quite liberating. I work quite closely with physicists today in solving problems from an evolutionary point of view. And then art and science, they also cross boundaries as well, in more ways than one.

I teach undergrads biology here, and we get them to draw things. Some of them don’t like it, because “I hate drawing” or whatever, but it’s a means of examining something really closely. And sometimes it’s only when you take the time to draw and capture visually what it is you’re looking at that you really make sense of it. And so I think the boundaries between those two disciplines dissolve somehow.

Coming back to your question — how did that happen? — I was always fascinated by the living things that existed around me. And I also had an innate, sort of burning desire to capture what I saw on paper.

A lot of the artists I’ve interviewed work in a particular medium. And I’ve seen that you’ve done pen and ink. You’ve done pencil, oil, watercolor. You’re doing the science, you’re teaching. I saw a video of you playing the piano. How on earth do you do it all?

Well, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I do a tiny little bit of everything, and I don’t spend enough time on any one thing. But you know, sometimes we can put ourselves in those boxes that I mentioned earlier. People say, “Oh, I only do watercolor” — but how do you know? Because if you’re good at those, you’re probably good at using the other things you just haven’t tried.

I’m a big advocate for just, you know, getting stuck in.

So, watercolor is the traditional medium for botanical illustration, which I do like, but it’s not a forgiving medium. With oil paints, I think they’re not always as precise and accurate, but they can capture the life of something, and you can get carried away and you can put your soul into it in a way that you can’t with watercolors. If I’m feeling in a mood where I want to be precise and particular and really concentrate and be focused, then watercolors are fine, but if I want to express what I’m doing more, I’d say oil paints are better.

Yeah, you can have those happy accidents with oil, but the watercolor must really play into, like you said, the scientific studying of an element of a plant. Which do use first, the scientific eye or the artist eye?

I think the scientific one, and I think it helps guide me in terms of the art. And as I say, I think these things overlap, but sometimes it can be a hindrance, particularly when I’m working with watercolor. I can’t sometimes see past an imperfection or inaccuracy, and sometimes it can be quite a difficult process for something that’s supposed to be very relaxing and enjoyable.

I’ve sometimes embarked on a very detailed watercolor and then fallen out of love with it. And it’s only if I come back to it six months later, it’s like, “Oh, that’s all right.” Maybe that’s the scientist in me, because we like everything to be sort of formulaic and I want it to be right and precise and sometimes art doesn’t work in that way.

Has being an artist improved your science?

Oh, I like that question… Yes, it has, because you’re always looking and being inquisitive and examining. I mean, if you think about art in terms of illustration or drawing or capturing something, and if you strip it back to basics, you have to look very closely at what it is. And you’re questioning it. Maybe not cognizantly, but you’re permanently asking questions and then you capture it on paper. And I think having that artistic side to sort of examine, scrutinize, make sense of, and seek to understand — that’s what a scientist does, asks questions and tries to find the answers to them.

Right. And you’ve also got another unique role in that you’re a science communicator. So these things must all bleed together.

They do seem to do that, but I didn’t necessarily plan it in that way.

I’m very passionate about the importance of plants. I think they’re sometimes neglected, particularly when it comes to messages about conservation and the importance of biodiversity. People are excited by animals. They’re engaged and intrigued by animals, and often not so much with plants. You talk to people and that know, plants are beautiful or they’re great in my garden. But they see them as a backdrop for animals to exist against.

I like to find ways to gently challenge that notion and to help people to see plants in a different way so that we might get better at valuing them, understanding them, and then hopefully protecting them and conserving them. So I think that communication isn’t necessarily something that I ever planned to do, but I think like all things should come first from your sort of your compass and your passion. And I suppose that’s where it does for me.

Your book Weird Plants must tie into that.

Weird PlantsYeah. It’s funny because these “weird plants” — I sometimes feel like they almost sort of wrote themselves in a weird way. I didn’t set out to do it in that way, but I started a collection of paintings on these particularly strange plants. And then they suddenly made sense to me to fall into these groups — i.e., the “killers” and the “vampires” — and they started to take on almost characters and roles. And it was easy to tell stories about these plants, all the while explaining the science.

Because that’s what it’s about. It’s science and it’s obviously illustrating, it’s an artistic endeavor, but it sort of followed its own path. It was very much a journey rather than a preconceived idea that I then went out and did.

How do you expect the average person interacts with one of your pieces?

One of the things I hope it might do is to show plants in a way that maybe they haven’t seen necessarily before. I like to slightly shock that norm and to present a plant in a different way, I suppose.

Tell me about that shock. What are you trying to convey artistically or emotionally, or whatever the case may be?

I do want my artwork to be accurate, and I like to show it in its habitat. So when I did the collection for Weird Plants, I wanted to show them as they are. I like painting them to get the character of them. I like the dead bits, the blemishes on the plants, all of that. And I think the reader — if you will, the audience, the interpreter of your painting — I think you help them and do them a favor by doing that, because you help guide them into the picture and help them believe that that what they’re seeing is real. And that’s harder if you strive to make everything perfect, which is not how it is in nature. It’s chaotic.

I did a painting of a pitcher plant called Nepenthes extincta — which of course, the name says it all. What I set out to do was to bring something back to life that now sadly exists only as a squashed type specimen. And the mountain that it grew on in Mindanao, in the Philippines, has been razed to the ground, because it’s a nickel mine. It’s just gone forever. And I don’t wish to present that as token of doom or to depress anyone or to upset them. But I do think it’s important that people appreciate that there are lots of marvelous things still to discover and to understand, and in order to do that we need to protect them and conserve them.

What do you think of the state of the art of scientific illustration? Is this still a growing vibrant field?

Yeah, I think it is. It’s difficult to get a sense of how many people are doing it, but on Instagram there’s quite a thriving community of botanical artists, and also some different age groups as well. So, so I have a lot of optimism there.

What’s your biggest challenge — as an artist, a botanist or both?

My biggest challenge is our biggest challenge, and that is to engage people to appreciate the importance of plant life. I mean, it’s not just plants, of course. It’s all life and ecosystems. But plant life specifically, because it doesn’t have as much traction as animals.

If you go out and ask someone, on my street or yours, what does conservation mean? You can have a conversation about protecting living things. And then you say, “well, what living things?” And they’ll tell you, “a tiger, or a rhinoceros.” They may even say “shark,” but they will not mention a plant. And why would they? Those messages about the importance of plants aren’t loud enough.

Sometimes I sit on these meetings, in a conservation remit, and you hear about certain plant species in Africa that it’s a fait accompli, we know that a certain species will become extinct by next year and there is nothing we can do about. And I sometimes wonder if that would be the case if it were animals.

So, whilst it’s not necessarily my job to sort of lobby and to bring about change in that way, I think what I am perhaps able to do is to bring about more awareness and appreciation for the importance of pants. And if I can do that in just a small way, and particularly with a younger cohort and a new generation, then I suppose I’ve done my job.

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Vanishing: The Bleaching in My Backyard

A storm in Texas connects with the plight of corals around the world.

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.

In February, winter storm Uri encased the Texas trees in thick sleeves of ice. Overhead frozen leaves jangled like chimes in the wind. When the weight got to be too much, the fibrous cedars splintered. The oaks simply dropped limbs like too-heavy barbells. Closer to the ground, agave and sago palms congealed beneath unfamiliar layers of snow and ice.

VanishingIn Austin, where I live, winter dips below freezing once every 10 years. This time the temperature plunged not just below freezing but into the single digits. And there it sat, not just overnight or two, but for five long days.

When it warmed, finally, spoonfuls of ice rained down, one from each cupped leaf. Later, the ice-burnt leaves fell too. Tattered rags of grasses and cacti, bedraggled palm fronds and battered bamboos were all that remained on the ground. Everything was shades of beige; nature’s color faded with the snow melt.

Bleached
Bleached in the backyard. Photo: Juli Berwald

As a science writer who’d been working on a book about coral for the two years before that winter, I felt the shift viscerally. This must be what it feels like when coral reefs bleach, I thought.

Because of Covid travel restrictions, I haven’t experienced a mass coral bleaching myself. Almost exactly a year before Uri, I’d had to cancel a research trip to the Great Barrier Reef just as a major heat wave approached. On Twitter, I followed Terry Hughes, an Australian coral scientist who performs aerial surveys of the reef. He posted videos, halos of white reefs surrounding low-lying islands, writing: “It’s been a shitty, exhausting day on the #GreatBarrierReef. I feel like an art lover wandering through the Louvre…as it burns to the ground.”

In the weeks after Uri, the rosemary that I’d nurtured since my teenage daughter was born turned brittle. The tangerine tree I’d planted as a memorial to my grandmother, which had just yielded its first crop, also died. The jasmine became sharpened straw that lashed my arms as I ripped it out.

agave
Dead agave. Photo: Juli Berwald

When underwater photographer Richard Vevers dove on a bleached reef, he said, “I can’t even tell you how bad I smelt after the dive — the smell of millions of rotting animals.” Around my house in Uri’s aftermath, the agave and the prickly pears melted, their juices flowing down the streets in brownish streaks. The air filled with the smell of their fermentation and rot.

Acoustic scientist Tim Gordon spoke of the sound of a bleached reef. “When the coral dies, the fish and shrimp that make noise are gone. They are like the birds in the forest without the trees.” He measured a 75% decrease in sound on the Great Barrier Reef following a bleaching.

I don’t know where the doves that coo and the mockingbirds that chatter went, but I didn’t hear their calls after Uri. Flocks of red-breasted robins, birds I’d rarely seen, plucked the husks of just frozen insects. The frequent reverberations of woodpeckers sounded of easy purchase in sickened wood.

The poles have warmed almost four times faster than the rest of our planet, making its temperature difference less different than my temperate home. As a result, the jet stream is more likely to jump its bank and make an excursion. This year it meandered all the way to Texas, bringing Uri’s frigid air with it.

Coral bleaching occurs because of a temperature excursion too. Scientists studying climate change calculate the seas have absorbed heat equivalent to three nuclear bombs a second for the past 25 years. Already ocean temperatures have risen by almost 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Ocean heat waves have doubled with frequency, become more intense, and more extensive since 1982. Pile a heat wave on top of a warmer ocean, and you reach the limit where corals bleach. Recovery isn’t certain.

Since the 1980s, coral mass bleachings have increased in frequency from once every 25 to 30 years to once every six years. A multi-year mass bleaching from 2015 to 2017 affected 75% of the planet’s coral. The one I missed in 2020 was the Great Barrier Reef’s most widespread yet, blanketing all the regions of its 1,400-mile-long extent. Of all the animals in the sea, according to a recent report, coral is the species group most likely to go extinct.

And yet all the people I spoke to about what it’s like to dive on a bleached reef say this: It’s painfully grim, but never complete. Amid the skeletal fields, a few coral survive, always.

Likewise, in my yard, the destruction wasn’t complete. After cutting back its browned leaves, the iris sprung from the browned ground and unfurled its yellow bloom. Amid the dead rosebushes, one variety survived, its fuchsia inflorescence a beacon of hope. Green stripes of life emerged from the base of the bamboo. When the young shoots unfurled, they stole my attention. My mind very quickly began to erase the losses. I focused on the blooming and recovery. In nature’s resilience, we soothe ourselves with a balm of optimism.

Bamboo
Sprouts of life. Photo: Juli Berwald

The struggle for life on the reef is always intractable. Submerged, we’re buffered by gear, our senses muted by technology. Our time underwater is always short. Masked by the waves, distracted by recovery, it’s impossible to know what we’re losing on the reef the way we know our own backyard.

For both, the losses fade much too easily away. But only if we let them.

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

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Wildfires Ignite Mental Health Concerns

We know a lot about how wildfires can affect our physical health. New research shows there are mental health implications, too.

Alaska’s Swan Lake fire started with a lightning strike on June 5, 2019 in Kenai National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness. Drought and unusually hot temperatures fanned the flames as the fire moved toward communities, growing to 170,000 acres over nearly four months.

the askDuring that time, residents of the Kenai Peninsula and nearby Anchorage battled suffocating smoke. Roads and trails were closed. And some communities were told to prepare for evacuations.

That extended period of multiple stressors — over many months — took a toll on people’s long-term mental health, according to preliminary results from the Southcentral Wildfire Study, which examined the community’s experience of the Swan Lake fire.

As dozens of major wildfires burn across the American West, Siberia and other parts of the globe, we spoke with study coauthor Micah Hahn, an assistant professor of environmental health in University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies, about why there’s much more that communities can do than just prepare physically for wildfires in their communities.

Why did you decide to study wildfires and mental health?

I’m an epidemiologist and I try to understand more about how climate change is impacting the health of communities — particularly in Alaska, where I’m a professor. Previously I’ve done work looking at the cardiorespiratory impacts from wildfire smoke. That’s one of the very typical health impacts that we think about with wildfires.

Micah sitting in the grass
Micah Hahn, assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Photo: James Evans/ University of Alaska Anchorage

But through a colleague I got connected with my collaborators at Johns Hopkins University and McGill University, who come from a background in mental health research and disaster response. Together we honed in on wildfires in Alaska and thought about the mental health impacts because it overlapped with our areas of expertise and was a super understudied area.

We’re working on a literature review of wildfires and mental health to see what else is out there. And most of the other research is a little bit older and has come from Australia. There’s very little in the United States.

There’s been a pickup of research around mental health and climate change more broadly, including by a researcher in Canada who’s been working on climate change and ecological grief. But that’s not focused so much on a specific disaster or an acute event, but more on the concept of climate change itself and people having this feeling in their core about what’s going on. That’s been the main thread of climate and mental health work so far.

What were some of the top things you heard from people in your study?

One of the things people talked about was feeling trapped. They were feeling closed in and having feelings of isolation or claustrophobia. For some that was from the smoke, but for those that were in Kenai, there’s basically one road through there that accesses all of those communities. And when the wildfire was right next to the road and was even jumping it at times, that caused huge issues with traffic control and whether people were allowed to evacuate or not evacuate.

Many people were feeling really pinned in — like they couldn’t go anywhere.

They also felt prolonged stress. This fire was going on all summer. It was over three months long. And even people who weren’t stressed at the beginning were really stressed by the end.

Something else we heard a lot about was grief after the fire was over [because of the change in the forest]. We have a lot of wildfires in Alaska, but there’s also a lot of wild space so there aren’t very many wildfires that are as close to communities as this one was.

If you drove down to this area and you saw what the landscape looked like afterwards, it was like black toothpicks. If this was something that a person saw from their house every day or was an area where they spent a lot of time with their family and they have memories from that region, it was really sad.

Many people wondered whether it would ever look the same again. We heard a lot about feelings of loss and helplessness.

Another thing folks talked about was what they were calling “returning ghosts.” I won’t label it PTSD, but it’s a similar idea. The feeling that we’ve done this before. We have a lot of natural disasters in Alaska — wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis. And so people were just dealing with the reoccurrence of [trauma] and the uncertainty of all this, and being worried about what might be coming down the road.

Is climate change also a personal concern for Alaskans?

I feel like we talk about climate change every day. I think that’s for a few reasons. Climate change is happening faster here, compared to the lower 48, because we’re closer to the poles. And Alaskans generally are very close to the land — it’s a big part of people’s daily lives. There’s a lot of outdoorsy people, but a lot of Alaskans also harvest wild berries or hunt or harvest salmon to fill their freezers for the winter.

You’re just sort of in tune with what’s going on outside. When we see the salmon don’t return or there’s a huge die-off event because the water’s too warm, it doesn’t take a lot to impact people very directly.

Were there any solutions or changes that the residents thought could help in the future with wildfires?

Yes, an issue that came up was communication. People wanted to see one centralized place to find information and more thinking about specific demographic groups, like “end of the road people” — those who move to rural Alaska because they like to be away from people, but that also makes them hard to contact in an emergency.

They also wanted to see enhanced early communications and community-based preparedness programs. People who live in the communities near wildfire zones wanted to be more integrated into the planning and evacuation process before a wildfire. They wanted to see something that was a little bit more from the bottom up, rather than someone helicoptering in during an intense situation saying, “do this.”

Another thing was establishing formal or informal mutual support groups. We talked a lot about having a buddy system when you’re doing evacuation planning — doing the same thing for mental health during a wildfire, especially a prolonged event, so people have a preset group they can talk with.

And specifically, they were also wanting a video series showing people what to expect during a wildfire as a way of helping people to prepare mentally for what might be happening to them.

How can this research help other areas?

Obviously this work was done in Alaska, but I think that many of these things could apply in other places where we’re seeing wildfires. One of the things that people brought up was, in thinking about the context of Alaska, people here are pretty self-reliant and like to think of themselves as prepared. So one suggestion for interventions was to build on that preparedness and do the same thing that we do for physical fire preparedness, but instead focus on mental health.

How can you mentally prepare and get your family ready for these types of things before the event happens?

In public health it’s called a “strength-based approach,” which means starting from the strengths of the community and designing interventions using community-based approaches.

For people in California or Oregon or whatever town you live in, [find] what’s strong in your community that can be built on to help people prepare.

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4 Major Environmental Treaties the U.S. Never Ratified — But Should

Most of the world’s countries support these global agreements on conservation and pollution, but the United States is noticeably absent.

In one of his first acts in the White House, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to have the United States rejoin the Paris climate agreement. It signaled an important step in the country recommitting to action to tackle climate change after the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the accord and worked to roll back environmental regulations nationwide.

Biden’s move was hailed by world leaders and applauded by environmentalists at home. But the climate convention wasn’t the only global environmental agreement from which the country has been conspicuously absent.

Here are four international treaties that have been ratified by most of the world’s countries, but not the United States.

1. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

The 1982 Law of the Sea helped set an international framework for managing and protecting the ocean, including by delineating exclusive economic zones and creating the International Seabed Authority, which is currently tasked with drafting regulations for deep seabed mining.

“Originally the U.S. government was on board with the treaty when it was being finalized in the late 1970s, but when President Reagan came into office he called for a review of the negotiations, fired the State Department’s head of negotiations and appointed his own people who created a new list of demands,” says Kristina Gjerde, an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a senior high seas advisor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Global Marine and Polar Program.

When the treaty wasn’t reworked to meet those needs, Reagan’s team didn’t sign it. It would take until 1994 to get a U.S. signature, but the country still has yet to ratify it. To do so, would require a two-thirds approval in the Senate.

“The Law of the Sea has been uniformly supported by everything from the U.S. Navy to the Department of Commerce,” says Gjerde. “There’s nobody who’s really against it — other than those who don’t like the U.S. to be engaged in multilateral institutions.”

Unfortunately there are enough people in the Senate with that mindset to hold up this treaty, and many others. But that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to push for the United States to accede to the Law of the Sea.

There are numerous reasons why it would be beneficial for the country, but Gjerde says one of the most important right now is that the United States has to take a back seat while regulations are being drafted on deep seabed mining.

“The United States doesn’t have a voice in helping to make sure that the regulations are appropriately environmentally precautionary,” she says. “And the country has a lot of islands and waters that would be subject to potential environmental impacts from seabed mining by other states.”

2. The Convention on Biological Diversity 

The treaty, which garnered its first signatures at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, has been called the world’s best weapon in fighting the extinction crisis. It has three main stated objectives: the  conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the equitable sharing of benefits that arise from using genetic resources.

The United States was a big player in drafting the agreement, but when 150 nations stepped up to sign it, George W. Bush declined to do so. Bill Clinton signed the treaty after he took office in 1993, but it never received the necessary ratification vote by the Senate.

And it still hasn’t.

The United States is the only member of the United Nations that has yet to ratify it, “which is just a disgrace,” says Maria Ivanova, a professor of global governance and director of the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

This omission stands in stark contrast to the country’s history of commitment to conservation, she says.

“The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species was initially called the Washington Convention because the first meeting was in D.C.” says Ivanova. “The United States was a champion for that convention and the first to start national parks.”

But that commitment began to fade in the 1980s with “run-amok capitalism,” she says. “That means you can use nature with impunity without replenishing anything. “

The United States does still participate in the Conference of Parties that assemble for the Convention on Biological Diversity, but without having ratified the agreement, it’s relegated to “observer” status. This year it will get some extra muscle from a California delegation that will also be attending in the hope of ramping up the United States’ commitment to biological diversity.

podium and conference sign
Conference of Parties for the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2016. Photo: Biodiversity International, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

3. Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants

The Stockholm Convention, an effort to protect the health of people and the environment from harmful chemicals, was adopted in 2001. The treaty identifies “persistent” chemicals — those that stay in the environment for a long time and can bioaccumulate up the food chain.

Currently the treaty regulates nearly 30 of these chemicals, which can mean that countries must restrict or ban their use, limit their trade, or develop strategies to properly dispose of stockpiles or sites contaminated by the waste from the chemicals.

So far 184 countries have ratified the agreement. The United States signed it in 2001, but once again, the treaty has yet to be ratified by the Senate. That means that the United States is often behind the curve on banning harmful chemicals, such as the highly toxic pesticide pentachlorophenol.

4. Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal

The United States has also signed but not ratified the Basel Convention, which took effect in 1992. This international treaty limits the movement of hazardous waste (excluding radioactive materials) between countries. It was written to help curb the practice of richer, industrialized nations dumping their hazardous waste into less developed and less wealthy countries.

The convention is now taking on the global scourge of plastic waste, of which the United States is the largest contributor. A new provision went into effect this year that seeks to curb the amount of waste shipped to other countries that can’t be recycled and ends up instead being burned or escaping into the environment.

The Basel Convention has also worked to address electronic waste. The failure of the United States to ratify the treaty, experts say, has allowed companies to shift recycling of toxic computer components to developing countries. Outsourcing of plastic and e-waste recycling from the U.S. to developing countries has recently been linked to chemicals entering the food chain through eggs eaten by the world’s poorest people.

scrap heap of monitors
A pile of plastic casing for LCD screens near Sriracha, Thailand. Photo: Basel Action Network, (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Next Steps

If you’re seeing a pattern here of the United States signing — but not ratifying — treaties, you’re not wrong. “In the United States, the biggest hurdle is that ratification of a treaty has to go through the Senate,” says Ivanova.

Despite this roadblock, which has stopped the United States’ full participation in some international agreements for decades, some still hope for a different outcome. “I think it’s sort of the dream of most who are engaged in international action that the United States would join these important international processes,” says Gjerde.

When it comes to the Law of the Sea in particular, she says, “It’s an opportunity to show real, global leadership again in tackling the many challenges facing the ocean.”

There are others who might not agree.

“You hear the argument from a lot of the policymakers internationally that they’ve been doing fine without the United States in the negotiations,” says Ivanova. “So maybe it’s better that the United States doesn’t sign.”

That may be because the United States can object to a lot of things and be an obstacle as negotiations are worked out. Or because the country can negotiate from its own national interest point of view.

“The United States has disproportionate power in global governance,” she says. “Or it used to. It has to regain the credibility and the legitimacy that it lost.”

But, she says, there are likely more benefits to the United States ratifying the conventions and being a rightful actor on the world stage.

“All of these problems are global, and we need all countries engaged,” she says. “We need all hands on deck. And the United States is a powerful state and brings with it a lot of additional expertise and engagement.”

The United States, in addition to government representation, has top universities and NGOs that do research and advocacy. “And so when the United States is a part of an agreement, it brings with it all of the power that it has intellectually and financially,” says Ivanova.

Not participating leaves the country open to criticism, as well as reduces the likelihood some countries will improve their laws on their own. Most recently, the United States’ environmental shortcomings have been called out by China whenever its own record is questioned.

With this in mind, the best thing the United States can do to reestablish its environmental credibility internationally is to take action at home. The Obama administration got the narrative right, but it didn’t sufficiently match on action, Ivanova says. Now, it’s crucial to do better.

“A lot of people misunderstand the global part [of these international treaties],” she says. “You actually implement them at home — you don’t go and implement them in other states. To achieve those goals, you actually have to take action at home.”

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Species Spotlight: Will the Panamanian Golden Frog Survive?

These golden jewels have vanished from Panama’s streams, but there’s still hope for the critically endangered Panamanian golden frog.

Species SpotlightPanamanian golden frogs were once reasonably common but have disappeared from their entire range, largely due to the deadly amphibian fungal disease known as chytridiomycosis. They now exist only in conservation breeding programs.

Species name:

Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki)

Description:

These small, fluorescent-yellow harlequin toads bred along cold, fast-moving forest streams. As the deafening sounds of the waterfalls drowned out their mating calls, Panamanian golden frogs evolved a unique semaphore-like means of communication — a limb-waving behavior — to attract the attention of potential mates. Their vibrant colors, however, don’t seduce potential mates but instead warn predators of their tremendous toxicity.

frog research extinction
Panamanian golden frog by Brian Gratwicke (CC BY 2.0)

Where it’s found:

The species lived in the Central Cordilleran rainforests and cloud forests of western-central Panama.

IUCN Red List status:

Panamanian golden frogs are critically endangered, with a drastic population decline of more than 80% over a 10-year period due to chytridiomycosis combined with habitat loss and pressure from the pet trade. Currently, it is known to survive only in captivity. If a population does remain in the wild, it likely contains fewer than 50 mature individuals.

Major threats:

Panamanian golden frogs have faced a multitude of human-caused threats. Due to their bright colors and the belief that they bring good luck, the frogs were once illegally collected in large numbers for sale in local markets and the international pet trade. On top of that, they lost suitable habitat to housing developments and agriculture. The amphibian fungal disease known as chytridiomycosis only added to the threats. In 2006 Panamanian golden frogs started experiencing severe chytridiomycosis-related declines, and the last confirmed observation in the wild was in 2009. Panamanian golden frog habitats are still affected by land-use changes, and the chytrid fungus is still present in its range, which has led many experts to believe they are extinct in the wild.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

Recognizing the chytridiomycosis threat, the first efforts to establish captive assurance populations of amphibians began in 2000 when Panamanian golden frogs were exported to zoos in the United States to be managed as part of a species survival program. This conservation project, called Project Golden Frog, established a healthy breeding colony of Panamanian golden frogs at the Maryland Zoo and later at other zoos around the United States. Additional colonies are maintained in Panama at the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center and at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project.

The moment that gave me hope:

Few people living in Panama today have ever seen a Panamanian golden frog in the wild, yet images of the frog are displayed everywhere. The golden frog, or rana dorada, is found on lottery tickets, T-shirts and festival posters, and each year on Aug. 14 thousands of people celebrate Golden Frog Day.

La Rana Dorada
Kids pledging to protect frogs, La Rana Dorada festival. Photo: Brian Gratwicke (CC BY 2.0)

I never had the great opportunity to catch a glimpse of a wild golden frog, but I did come close at La Rana Dorada pub in downtown Panama City. Surrounded by hip golden frog artwork on the walls as I sipped an IPA adorned with another golden frog, I was reminded how this remarkable species has become such a huge part of the country’s culture. A flagship of Panama’s unique biodiversity, the golden frog is revered as a symbol of good luck and prosperity. I hope that good luck applies to them, too — that they’re still out there, waving their brilliant yellow limbs in the air, waiting for us to find them.

What else do we need to do to protect this species?

Fortunately for the Panamanian golden frog, its story may not be finished. The rediscovery of its sister species, the variable harlequin frog (Atelopus varius) in 2012 gave us hope that the Panamanian golden frog could still be out there, hanging on.

Meanwhile, captive populations of Panamanian golden frogs are doing well, and we’re optimistic they may be returned to the wild in the future. For any reintroduction program to be successful, however, there needs to be habitat for the frogs to return to. We need to take urgent action to conserve Panamanian golden frog habitat and to reduce the risk of chytridiomycosis infection to ensure they have the best chance of survival.

Key research:

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Here’s What Climate Change Will Mean for Bats

A new study identifies threats facing dozens of bat species in areas of the world that are predicted to get hotter and drier.

The Isabelline Serotine bat (Eptesicus isabellinus) ranges across areas north of the Sahara and into the southern portion of the Iberian Peninsula. But it may be time for the species to start packing its bags.

A new study in Global Ecology and Conservation found that dozens of bat species living in parts of the world predicted to get hotter and drier with climate change will need to shift their ranges to find suitable habitat. For Isabelline Serotine bats that could mean a big move — more than 1,000 miles, the researchers determined.

They won’t be the only ones.

The study looked at two areas with high drought risk — western North America and the Western Palaearctic, which stretches across North Africa and Europe. They studied 43 species using three climate models and three emissions scenarios to determine where bats could move to “climate refugia” to find more suitable habitat, and which species are at the greatest risk of population decline if that journey isn’t possible or easy.

The news isn’t great. “All future emissions scenarios led to an overall reduction in predicted bat richness in both continents by 2080,” the researchers found. “Areas projected to support high species richness in the current climate coincided with greatest predicted species loss and greatest future drought risk.”

Already numerous bat species face threats to their habitat from development and degradation. In North America things are particularly dire. White-nose syndrome, a fatal disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, has decimated cave-dwelling bats there, including killing more than 90% of some populations in less than a decade.

Now climate change and changes to water resources pose a risk, too. All bats need water for basic survival, but some rely on aquatic prey or forage near the surface of water. Many species also roost or select foraging sites near water. And previous research has shown that reproduction declines dramatically during drought.

researchers in water
Scientists conduct bat surveys in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest. Photo: USFS

“While many species have evolved to survive in water-limited landscapes, an increase in the frequency, duration and severity of drought conditions may result in conditions too harsh for bat populations to persist, and is a threat to the long-term survival of many bat species,” the researchers wrote.

For about half the species studied, the area with a suitable climate would shrink, they found.

Coastal Europe and North Africa currently support the greatest amount of species richness, but are likely to see the highest number of species needing to leave. In Western North America, the low-elevation regions of the southwest U.S. and Mexico were predicted to lose the most species.

Those that may be able to extend their range to find more suitable climates will need to move fast to keep up with the changing climate. Not surprisingly, bats that are adept at traveling long distances are apt to do better in finding new habitat.

The factors driving these relocations vary by region, too, with temperature being the biggest factor for the Western Palaearctic populations and precipitation changes driving changes for bats in Western North America.

As the planet warms, mountain and coastal areas where things will be cooler are likely to see an influx of species.

Higher-elevation areas are predicted to retain the most species, including the mountains of Portugal, northern Spain, northern Italy, Mexico’s Sierra Madre, and mountainous areas of Arizona and New Mexico. Populations in some coastal areas were also expected to remain suitable, including coastal California and Mexico, and western France and southern England.

But those places could see additional climatic changes, too.

“While our models predict montane and coastal areas in both regions to remain climatically suitable for the majority of bat species it should be noted that these ‘refugia’ may be influenced by additional climate effects such as sea level rise (coastal areas) and increased incidence and severity of wildfires (montane areas),” the researchers wrote. “At the highest emissions scenarios, very few lower latitude areas retained their full complement of species.”

When it comes to shifting ranges, the researchers found that on average, bat species in the Western Palaearctic will have to move farther and faster than those in western North America.

For some species, there won’t be a lot of options.

The study found that 4-6 species in the Western Palaearctic are likely to have little overlap between current and future suitable areas, which could lead to population declines or extinction. Two of them, Mehely’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus mehelyi) and the greater noctule bat (Nyctalus lasiopterus), are already identified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. In Western North American, 1-3 species face similar concerns, including Myotis thysanodes, which is likely to lose 44% of its range and for which models show population declines of more than 90% by 2086.

Specialized bats that feed on nectar may also face additional threats in a changing climate, including landscape changes from wildfire.

“Additional factors that may determine the ability of bats to remain in landscapes with changing climates or colonize new areas include dispersal barriers, competition between species, prey and food plant availability, roost requirements, habitat fragmentation, disruption of migration phenology and influence of pathogens,” the study showed.

There are some things that can help ensure greater bat conservation success. Areas of refugia and water sources need to be identified — and protected. We also need to continue to strengthen global efforts to protect biodiversity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers say.

“Land managers can prioritize conservation and management activities to enhance existing protected areas and promote connectivity between current and future bat habitats,” the authors wrote. “Therefore, a commitment by world governments to significantly reduce carbon emissions should be urgently sought in order to avoid further deterioration of bat communities and the important ecosystem services that they provide.”

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Links From the Brink: Trump Revoked, Confused Cougars and Wombat Butts

Plus what Maine did right (and wrong), billionaires in space, and rebranding invasive species.

Links — the connective tissue that binds us all together.

The brink — the edge of something you don’t want to fall over, or a tipping point we can be pulled back from just in the nick of time.

As the world burns (or floods), too many stories slip through the cracks. We’ve collected some of the most important stories you may have missed — and connected the dots to bigger trends and issues along the way.

Best News of the Month: Put down those chainsaws. The Biden administration this month proposed restoring protections to nine million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the latest in a thankfully long list of reversals of Trump-era policies. That’s great news by and of itself, but the Biden team went even further and moved to end large-scale old-growth logging within Tongass, while also adding $25 million to fund new sustainable development projects in Alaska. This would protect about 400 species in the region as well as people worldwide, since the forest serves as a one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. (That last part is especially important now that Amazon deforestation has flipped that region from a climate sink to a climate emissions source.)

owl
A grumpy Western screech owl in Tongass. Photo: Don MacDougall/Forest Service

I’m Gonna Wash That Trump Right Out of My Hair: Speaking of Trump policy reversals, the standard for low-flow showerheads that the previous president flushed away is now on its way back to our bathrooms.

Trump’s standard rollback in this case was the watery equivalent of “rolling coal” — it was purposefully wasteful and done just out of spite. Luckily, consumers and corporations never agreed with this approach. Virtually all showerheads currently on the market already conform to or beat the old standard, which we expect will officially be in place again in a few months.

Worst News of the Month: In the latest in a long line of what can only be described as systemic failures, the government of Mexico announced it will once again allow fishing within the critically endangered vaquita’s habitat.

This ends the six-year-old “no-tolerance zone” that blocked fishing with the waters necessary for vaquita survival. With as few as nine of these porpoises left in the Gulf of California, and a long history of the animals dying in fishing nets, this change in policy could amount to a death sentence and eventual extinction.

Of course, things have been dire for the vaquita for two decades, and the species still manages to hang on. We can only hope that remains the case long enough for international pressure to force Mexico to change its mind once again.

 

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This Contradiction Makes My Brain Hurt:

What’s in a Name? Mountain lion, puma, panther, catamount … these names — and 78 others — are all commonly used to describe the same species, the big cat known scientifically as Puma concolor. New research finds that those wide and varied names “can obscure or deflect conservation communication,” making it harder to generate and maintain public interest in protecting these important predators (whatever you call them).

mountain lion
Eric Kilby (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Speaking of Panthers: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed opening Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge to “off-road vehicles, mountain bikes, camping, fishing, drone-flying, commercial filmmaking, commercial tour groups, and, for three weekends a year, turkey hunting.” Journalist Craig Pittman (who literally wrote the book on Florida panthers) says the move is “not as bad as building golf courses in state parks, but it’s close.”

Gypsy moth
“Just call me Lymantria dispar.” Photo: August Muench (CC BY 2.0)

What’s in a Name, Part II: The push to decolonize species names made some key advances this month. The Entomological Society of America launched its Better Common Names Project to “review and replace insect common names that may be inappropriate or offensive.” Case in point: the gypsy moth, which is named after a slur against the Romani people.

Separately, Minnesota state Sen. Foung Hawj initiated an effort to rebrand the four species known as “Asian carp” plaguing the region to “invasive carp.” This is not a new idea, and it hasn’t been accepted in scientific circles yet, but it’s a welcome move in an era with so many hate crimes against Asian-Americans.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, an extinct saber-toothed cat species has been named Machairodus lahayishupup, with the second half of the taxonomic name using the words for “ancient wild cat” from the language of the Cayuse people, on whose ancestral lands the fossils were found. There are no fluent speakers of the Cayuse language today, so this name “gives the community an identity and recognizes the contributions of early generations of Cayuse people,” linguist Phillip Cash Cash, Cayuse-Nez Perce, told Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Richard Branson Can F*** Himself, and Jeff Bezos Can Put His Rocket Where the Sun Don’t Shine: It seemed like all the TV networks fell for the enormous PR stunts of rich people catapulting themselves into “space” this month. Few reported on the most shameful aspect of these missions: their terrible consequences for the planet.

“One Virgin Galactic launch produces >30 tons of carbon dioxide,” climate scientist Peter Gleick wrote on Twitter. “7x more than the average human produces in a year; twice what the average American produces in a year. Enjoy your 4 minutes of weightlessness.”

For the most part the true cost of these brief trips to our outer atmosphere did not attract much oxygen from the broader media. Heck, CNN even bumped climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe from a planned appearance in order to cover “breaking news” about Sir Richard Branson’s launch.

And it got worse from there. In the days after his flight, Branson himself doubled down on his excess, telling late-night TV host Stephen Colbert that critics calling for him to invest his billions into combatting climate change weren’t “fully educated” about space travel — a discussion the right-wing media leapt upon almost immediately as a way to criticize the “woke warriors” on the left.

Okay, culture wars aside, we agree with Branson on one point: Space travel and technology are — in many ways — essential to this modern world. We wouldn’t, for example, be able to monitor the damage we’re doing to the planet without space-based satellites and sensors. But do we need to do more damage along the way for a mission that accomplishes nothing scientific or practical? Even Jeff Bezos acknowledges that we don’t — not that that stopped him.

maine sealThe Maine Event: The Pine Tree State made innovative progress on three critical environmental issues recently. First, Maine required its pension system and state treasury to divest from the fossil-fuel industry over the next five years, a move that will put at least $1.3 billion of investments into more climate-friendly industries. Activists say other states should follow this model.

After that, Maine became the first state to ban PFAS “forever chemicals” in products (effective in 2030), a move strongly associated with the state’s famous/infamous paper mills. It also passed the first law extending producer responsibility law, requiring big corporations to pony up for the recycling of their own packaging.

Unfortunately Maine failed on two other major fronts. Gov. Janet Mills signed a law banning wind farms in state waters (forcing them further offshore) and vetoed legislation to shift its electricity networks to community ownership, a move proponents said would have further sped up the transition to renewable energy.

Unexpected Conservationist of the Month: Cartoonist Matthew Inman, better known as the mind behind The Oatmeal and books like How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, turned in a hilarious comic strip about wombats, focusing (rightly so) on their square poop and evolutionarily marvelous butts.

But that’s not all: When he published the strip, Inman also donated $10,000 to wombat conservation (that averages out to about $1k per poop joke) and provided resources for others to follow in his footsteps. With as few as 80 northern hairy-nosed wombats remaining, every dollar (and poop joke) counts.

What’s Next? August will undoubtedly see more tragic fires, floods and destruction. Will the month also bring any action on the infrastructure bill, which may or may not end up containing legislation to address climate change? We’ll be watching this topic closely.

We also expect the arrival of the next climate assessment from the IPCC, more action on voting rights (which strongly affect environmental legislative outcomes), and news about wolves. We’ll also celebrate Cycle to Work Day on Aug. 6 and World Elephant Day on Aug. 12.

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.

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