American environmentalism’s racist roots have shaped global thinking about conservation, and that has walled off Indigenous peoples from land they could most effectively steward.
The United States is having a long-overdue national reckoning with racism. From criminal justice to pro sports to pop culture, Americans increasingly are recognizing how racist ideas have influenced virtually every sphere of life in this country.
This includes the environmental movement. Recently the Sierra Club – one of the oldest and largest U.S. conservation organizations – acknowledged racist views held by its founder, author and conservationist John Muir. In some of his writing, Muir described Native Americans and Black people as dirty, lazy and uncivilized. In an essay collection published in 1901 to promote national parks, he assured prospective tourists that “As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.”
Acknowledging this record, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune wrote in July 2020: “As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must…reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”
This is a salutary gesture. However, I know from my research on conservation policy in places like India, Tanzania and Mexico that the problem isn’t just the Sierra Club.
American environmentalism’s racist roots have influenced global conservation practices. Most notably, they are embedded in longstanding prejudices against local communities and a focus on protecting pristine wildernesses. This dominant narrative pays little thought to indigenous and other poor people who rely on these lands – even when they are its most effective stewards.
Native Americans protest President Donald Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, July 3, 2020. Micah Garen/Getty Images
Racist Legacies of Nature Conservation
Muir was not the first or last American conservationist to hold racist views. Decades before Muir set foot in California’s Sierra Nevada. John James Audubon published his “Birds of America” engravings between 1827 and 1838. Audubon was a skilled naturalist and illustrator – and a slaveholder.
Audubon’s research benefited from information and specimens collected by enslaved Black men and Indigenous people. Instead of recognizing their contributions, Audubon referred to them as “hands” traveling along with white men. The National Audubon Society has removed Audubon’s biography from its site, referring to Audubon’s involvement in the slave trade as “the challenging parts of his identity and actions.” The group also condemned “the role John James Audubon played in enslaving Black people and perpetuating white supremacist culture.”
Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite National Park, California, 1903. Library of CongressThe predominant view is that Roosevelt’s love of hunting was good for nature because it fueled his passion for conservation. But this paradigm underpins what I see as a modern racist myth: the view that trophy hunting – wealthy hunters buying government licenses to shoot big game and keep whatever animal parts they choose – pays for wildlife conservation in Africa. In my assessment, there is little evidence to support such claims about trophy hunting, which reinforce exploitative models of conservation by removing local communities from lands set aside as hunting reserves.
Ecologist Aldo Leopold, who is viewed as the father of wildlife management and the U.S. wilderness system, was an early proponent of the argument that overpopulation is the root cause of environmental problems. This view implies that economically less-developed nations with large populations are the biggest threats to conservation.
Contemporary advocates of wildlife conservation, such as Britain’s Prince William, continue to rely on the trope that “Africa’s rapidly growing human population” threatens the continent’s wildlife. Famed primatologist Jane Goodall also blamed our current environmental challenges in part on overpopulation.
Local communities are often written out of popular narratives on nature conservation. Many documentaries, such as the 2020 film “Wild Karnataka,” narrated by David Attenborough, entirely ignore local Indigenous people, who have nurtured the natural heritages of the places where they live. Some of the most celebrated footage in wildlife documentaries made by filmmakers like Attenborough is not even shot in the wild. By relying on fictional visuals, they reproduce racialized structures that render local people invisible.
Fortress Conservation
The wilderness movement founded by Anglo-American conservationists is institutionalized in the form of national parks. Writer and historian Wallace Stegner famously called national parks “the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”
Similar injustices continued to unfold even after independence in other parts of the world. When I analyzed a data set of 137 countries, I found that the largest areas of national parks were set aside in countries with high levels of economic inequality and poor or nonexistent democratic institutions. The poorest countries – including the Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Tanzania and Zambia – had each set aside more than 30% of national territories exclusively for wildlife and biodiversity conservation.
Correcting this legacy can happen only by radically transforming its exclusionary approach. Better and scientifically robust strategies recognize that low-intensity human interventions in nature practiced by Indigenous peoples can conserve landscapes more effectively than walling them off from use.
Ecologists have shown that natural landscapes interspersed with low-intensity subsistence agriculture can be most effective for biodiversity conservation. These multiple-use landscapes provide social, economic and cultural support for Indigenous and rural communities.
Nonetheless, conservation institutions and policies continue to exclude and discriminate against Indigenous and rural communities. In the long run, it is clear to me that conservation will succeed only if it can support the goal of a dignified life for all humans and nonhuman species.
U.S. states hope to tap Canada’s network of large dams to meet low-carbon goals, but do better options exist closer to home?
Is renewable energy always sustainable — or just? Today we continue our series looking at the role of Canadian hydropower in helping the U.S. states meet their climate goals.
In 1999 a cheering crowd watched as a backhoe breached a hydroelectric dam on Maine’s Kennebec River. The effort to help restore native fish populations and the river’s health was hailed as a success and ignited a nationwide movement that spurred 1,200 dam removals in two decades.
The era of building large dams in the United States, which defined so much of the 20th century, is over. The prime spots for development were cemented decades ago, and the ensuing harm to fish and other wildlife has been well documented. Attention is now focused on removing obsolete dams and retrofitting existing hydroelectric dams to reduce ecological harm and increase energy efficiency.
Many other countries are in the same boat. Across Europe and North America “big dams stopped being built in developed nations because the best sites for dams were already developed, and environmental and social concerns made the costs unacceptable,” found a 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Canada appears to be the exception to that.
Large dams are still being built across Canada, from Muskrat Falls in Labrador to the generically titled “Site C” in British Columbia, despite cost overruns, outcry from some First Nations and even environmental concerns from the United Nations.
Hydroelectric power already supplies 60% of the country’s energy. But the dam building isn’t just to feed Canada’s power needs. It’s also become a hot export commodity.
As U.S. states look to meet new clean energy targets, imported low-carbon hydropower from across the northern border has become a larger part of the conversation — and the grid. New England already gets 17% of its energy from Canadian hydropower, Midwest states around 12% and New York 5%.
That number is likely to jump.
A new transmission project to bring 250 megawatts of Canadian hydropower to the United States just came online in Minnesota. Two more are in the works for Massachusetts and New York.
Proponents say we need large-scale hydro to grease the wheels of the clean energy transition. Others caution that it comes with a larger environmental cost compared to wind and solar and could open the floodgates for more dam building.
There’s one shared bit of common ground, though: We need to act quickly and wisely to tackle the climate crisis.
“This is the decade for getting 50% of the way there on renewables, but also proving out the pathway to get to net-zero by mid-century, if not before,” says Peter Rothstein, president of the Northeast Clean Energy Council.
How hydro figures into that process is still a complicated issue.
Clean Energy Demand Surges
The Northeast is one place where the energy transition is off and running.
All six New England states have pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80% over 1990 levels by 2050, and some are aiming higher.
Neighboring New York is also keeping pace. Last year the Empire State committed to achieving an 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and 70% renewable electricity by 2030.
How will those goals be achieved?
For some, imported Canadian hydropower looks poised to play a big role, and two new projects appear close to breaking ground.
Transmission lines from the Churchill Falls generating station in Labrador. Photo: Douglas Spott (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Champlain Hudson Power Express, a 330-mile-long transmission line, would deliver 1,000 megawatts of hydropower from Quebec to the New York metro area and could supply about a million homes — helping to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
The project — a joint venture of the province-run Hydro-Québec and Transmission Developers Inc., a subsidiary of the private equity firm Blackstone Group — has already received the necessary permits for construction, but no contracts for the power have been signed.
Construction, however, could still start next year, with the project scheduled to come online in 2025.
Massachusetts has an even bigger project in the works. New England Clean Energy Connect would bring 1,500 megawatts of capacity through a 145-mile-long transmission line running through Maine from Canada to Massachusetts. It too would come from Hydro-Québec, this time working in conjunction with Central Maine Power.
The project, which is projected to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 3 million tons a year in New England, has received its necessary permits from the state of Maine but still awaits federal permits from the Department of Energy and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Opposition groups, including some environmental organizations, are also challenging various aspects of the project in court. And a coalition of First Nations communities that have seen dams built on their ancestral lands have voiced their opposition. (You can read more about that transmission line in Part I of this series.)
More could be on the way. Nalcor Energy — the province-run hydro company of Newfoundland and Labrador — is nearing completion on its 824-megawatt Muskrat Falls hydro project on the Churchill (or Grand) River. Costs have just surpassed $13 billion — twice what was first estimated.
Some of the energy is already slated to be sent to other parts of Canada and then — hopefully, according to Nalcor — to New England.
Environmental Considerations
What’s the net impact of these planned projects? That’s hard to say. Tallying the environmental benefit or harm from large-scale hydro is complicated.
One of the biggest metrics of assessing environmental impact is greenhouse gas emissions.
The first phase of emissions comes just from building its infrastructure. Large-scale hydropower involves the construction of generating stations, and often accompanying dams and reservoirs. And then there are hundreds of miles of transmission lines that need to be constructed to move that power.
What comes next, once a project comes online, depends on multiple factors. Research has shown that hydropower emissions vary widely based on the location, climate and area of land flooded. Hydro emissions are also highest when a reservoir is first flooded and then decrease in the following years.
All told, over the life cycle of a project, most hydropower is cleaner than fossil fuels, although not always as clean as wind and solar. A study in Nature Energy on the projected life-cycle emissions of energy sources put solar at 6 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour and wind at 4. The researchers estimated typical hydro at 97, but there’s great variation between sites.
A 2014 report prepared by the research group CIRAIG on behalf of Hydro-Québec found the average life-cycle emissions of the company’s fleet of 62 generation stations was between 6 and 17 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour.
Alain Tremblay, Hydro-Québec’s lead scientist on greenhouse gas emissions, says tracking from their most recent complex of dams on the Romaine River shows emissions between 5 and 10 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour.
There are other environmental considerations beyond greenhouse gas emissions.
The nonprofit Natural Resources Council of Maine opposes the New England Clean Energy Connect, in part out of concern about fragmented habitat and critical wildlife populations, including brook trout. The transmission line would require clearing a 53-mile stretch of forest through the North Maine Woods.
In New York the nonprofit Riverkeeper reversed its earlier support for the Champlain Hudson Power Express and has now come out against that project, which would send its electrical cable down the length of the Hudson River.
“This sets a precedent that the Hudson is a conduit for extension cords from Canada or from anywhere,” says John Lipscomb, Riverkeeper’s vice president of advocacy. “It should be off limits to that kind of thing.”
The Hudson contains legacy pollution from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) dumped decades ago and other contaminants that could be turned up as the cable is dug in the riverbed. Over the years some of that pollution has been remediated, but not all. And plans to avoid putting cable in the areas of the worst-known contamination aren’t sufficient to protect the ecosystem, he says.
Atlantic sturgeon were brought to the brink of extension in the 20th century and are now are listed as an endangered species. Photo: NOAA
There’s also concern that imperiled fish species, like endangered shortnose sturgeon and Atlantic sturgeon, could be harmed by the electrical cable. The river was designated as critical habitat for Atlantic sturgeon, but no Endangered Species Act review has been initiated to assess if the cable could threaten fish populations.
“Both of these fishes have nervous systems similar to that of sharks, which are incredibly sensitive to electric signals,” says Roger Downs, conservation director of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter. “It’s a huge experiment to suddenly put an electrical signal down the backbone of this river.”
Lipscomb shares this concern. After all the work that’s been done in recent years to help restore the Hudson and its estuary, he says “it’s heartbreaking that we still think of this river as a resource.”
Hydropower may be renewable, he says, but from an environmental perspective it isn’t sustainable. “Unless a river’s value is zero,” he says. “If a river has any value as an ecosystem, as a host for life, then hydropower isn’t even a consideration.”
Upstream Justice Concerns
In 1990 a group of Cree and Inuit protestors paddled the Hudson River to Manhattan to ask New Yorkers to oppose a power purchase agreement between the state and Quebec and the construction of a second dam in the James Bay hydroelectric project in northern Quebec.
They were successful. Now, 30 years later, a different group of First Nations is making a similar plea.
On October 7 the First Nations of Pessamit, Wemotaci, Pikogan, Lac Simon and Kitcisakik sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy stating their opposition to the Massachusetts transmission line. The groups wrote that one-third of Hydro-Québec’s installed power is “produced in our respective ancestral territories from reservoirs, dams, power plants and various other installations, without prior consultation, without our consent and without compensation.”
Over the decades of hydropower buildout in Canada many First Nations communities — but not all — have been consulted on projects and struck agreements with power companies.
Major hydroelectric projects have altered the flow of rivers and in some cases, the food and cultural resources used by Indigenous communities.
There are also health concerns.
A 2016 study by Harvard University researchers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, found that flooding reservoirs for hydroelectric projects in Canada would increase the risk of mercury poisoning in Indigenous communities at 90% of the dam sites.
When land is flooded for a reservoir, the microbes in the soil convert naturally occurring mercury into more dangerous methylmercury, which then works its way up the food chain. That puts anyone who relies on local wildlife such as fish, birds and seals at risk. In the northern reaches of Canada, that’s largely Indigenous people.
The researchers looked at how three Inuit communities downstream of Nalcor’s Muskrat Falls project would fare. And they found that, on average, risk of exposure for community members would double after the area was flooded. That could translate to higher risks for cardiovascular disease and neurodevelopmental delays for children.
The more people rely on local food sources, the more harm they’re exposed to. And in this remote region where store-bought food is very expensive, that’s a serious concern.
Near Happy Valley-Goose Bay on the Churchill (Grand) River downstream from Muskrat Falls. Photo: Douglas Sprott (CC BY-NC 2.0)
“People have a very high prevalence of economic insecurity and that translates into insecure access to Western foods at the grocery store,” says Ryan Calder, a co-author of the study and now an assistant professor of environmental health and policy at Virginia Tech. “Traditional food systems account for a smaller and smaller fraction of overall calories, but a wildly disproportionate fraction of nutrient intake.”
Despite this, he doesn’t think their research should be taken as a commentary on whether hydroelectric power itself is good or bad. “We really just criticized [the company’s] risk assessment,” he says.
Earlier studies by Nalcor claimed the effect on the Inuit would be negligible as the mercury would quickly dilute in downstream waters.
“They had no basis for saying there was going to be no impact,” says Calder. “It was clear that they were trying to ignore their obligations — if not legal, then certainly moral — to Indigenous people.”
The researchers also found that about half of the other sites they studied would have equal or greater concentrations of methylmercury than Muskrat Falls.
Roberta Frampton Benefiel of Grand Riverkeeper Labrador, who lives near the Muskrat Falls project, says she wasn’t surprised by Nalcor’s position. “Aboriginal people don’t count to this government and so we have to make the Aboriginal people count,” she says.
She has spoken to environmental organizations in the United States to help raise awareness about some of the local effects of dam development in Canada.
“I want people in the United States to understand that when they flip their light switch, if they accept these power lines from Canada, they’re poisoning northern communities,” she says.
More Dams?
New York and Massachusetts have been eager for hydropower from Canada as long as it doesn’t mean the construction of new dams for the transmission projects.
Hydro-Québec says it has enough reserves for export to New York and Massachusetts without redirecting power from its existing United States or Canadian customers.
It’s nearly finished with the last dam in the complex of four generating stations on the Romaine River, which along with other projects, has added 5,000 megawatts of capacity over the last decade. Although it does has the lowest reserve margin of utilities in the region, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s 2019 assessment.
In previous years Hydro-Québec did preliminary work to explore the possibility of new dams on the Little Mécatina River, but company spokesperson Lynn St-Laurent says they currently have no plans for new dams and that project is no longer in their strategic plan.
Gary Sutherland, director of strategic affairs for northeast markets at Hydro-Québec, says that additional energy demand for export could be met with increased energy efficiency in Quebec and more wind projects. Quebec Premier François Legault tweeted last week that the province’s next addition of capacity, if needed, would be the 200-megawatt Apuiat wind farm.
Elsewhere in Canada, however, dam building continues.
Manitoba Hydro and four First Nations are in the process of building the Keeyask project, a 695-megawatt hydroelectric generating station on the Nelson River.
British Columbia also continues to muddle along on development at Site C, a 1,100-megawatt dam on the Peace River that has faced mounting problems and protests.
Construction of the Site C dam in British Columbia in 2017. Photo: Jason Woodhead, (CC BY 2.0)
This includes, according to a report in The Narwhal, legal challenges from “landowners and First Nations who oppose flooding 128 kilometers of the Peace River and its tributaries, putting Indigenous burial grounds, traditional hunting and fishing areas, habitat for more than 100 species vulnerable to extinction and some of Canada’s richest farmland under up to 50 meters of water.”
New research by energy analyst Robert McCullough, who runs a Portland, Oregon-based consulting firm, found that if the project continues its likely to have surplus energy that will need to be sold outside the province at a loss to ratepayers.
But a poor financial outlook doesn’t always mean the end of dam projects in Canada.
In Labrador Nalcor also has another large project planned — the 2,250-megawatt Gull Island dam, farther upstream from Muskrat Falls, which could be built if there’s a buyer for the power.
It’s a prospect Benefiel finds shocking, considering the company’s most recent project was so over budget that it prompted a provincial Commission of Inquiry, which found that Muskrat Falls put the financial health of the entire province at risk.
Is Hydro Needed?
Considering all the complexities of hydro projects and the related transmission infrastructure, is it necessary to move U.S. states off fossil fuels and toward clean energy goals?
That depends on who you talk to.
Despite investment in wind and solar, “hydro has a couple of things going for it,” says Rothstein of the Northeast Clean Energy Council. The first is that it’s able to compete on costs, and second is the “dispatchability.”
Thanks to decades of dam building, Canadian hydropower is ready to go — pending transmission capacity. It’s also seen as less variable than wind and solar, although hydropower does fluctuate by season and by year, depending on precipitation.
“I think hydro will play a role, but it’s not going to be the only resource,” says Rothstein. Offshore wind holds the biggest potential for large-scale projects in the region, he says.
New York has already awarded contracts to procure 1,700 megawatts of offshore wind and in July put out a call to solicit another 2,500 megawatts of offshore wind and 1,500 megawatts of land-based, large-scale renewables.
Massachusetts is making strides toward wind energy, too. In 2016 Gov. Charlie Baker signed an energy bill requiring the state’s utilities to procure 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind and could soon double that.
The Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island is the first U.S. offshore wind farm. Photo: Dennis Schroeder / NREL (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
All told around a half a dozen major projects now await a green light, pending permitting decisions by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
All down the East Coast, “there’s a whole constellation of projects close to breaking water,” says Rothstein.
In the past offshore wind has been stymied by NIMBYism, but he says both the public perception of wind has changed and so have costs. New projects being proposed are farther offshore and out of view. And more established, global wind developers are competing for projects, helping to bring down prices.
Sierra Club’s Downs thinks northeast states could meet their goals without imported hydro. Instead he’d like to see more focus on large-scale solar installations in upstate New York on brownfields or fallow farmland, and more offshore wind.
“And then we need to be doing more and more programs for smaller, community-based wind and solar,” he says.
Whatever mix of low-carbon power is secured, Downs hopes it doesn’t turn rivers into transmission corridors and does account for the full environmental and social costs of power generation.
“We have an obligation to protect cultural rights, Indigenous rights and also the vast Canadian wilderness,” says Downs. “We shouldn’t be exporting our environmental problems.”
Identifying the shocking number of birds killed when they collide into local buildings was just the first step toward saving them.
The early-morning air felt cool and refreshing on my skin. I glanced above my head at a towering maple tree and saw an enthusiastic American robin, his red chest puffed out proudly as he broadcasted his joyful song over the sprawling York University campus in Toronto.
But the cheerful spring atmosphere did nothing to ease the sense of dread creeping up into my throat. My palms were already damp, and my heart raced, as I walked briskly up the pathway toward the inevitable. I strode past the back entrance of the 14-story student residence and the transparent floor-to-ceiling glass panels of the Bethune walkway came into view.
Just short of the entrance to the walkway — a walled-in pathway connecting two buildings — I stopped and carefully scanned the ground in front of me. I almost didn’t see it, but I had done this dozens of times and had developed a sharp eye. Partially obscured by the greenery carpeting the unkempt garden, a rusty-colored bird struggled helplessly beneath the glass, unable to put any weight on its legs and too dizzy to fly. The morning’s victim was a wood thrush, a threatened species in Canada.
The thrush, like so many before it, had obviously collided with the windows, causing injuries that had, at the very least, incapacitated it.
Window collisions like this are one of the top ways that humans are directly, although unintentionally, killing and injuring huge numbers of birds. And this danger is not isolated to large metropolises like Toronto. Collisions can and do happen anywhere there’s glass, and glass is everywhere. In Canada alone, an estimated 25 million birds die from window collisions each year.
Every one of these birds has a story of risky travel and perseverance that has been cut short in an instant.
As a researcher studying the migratory ecology of songbirds like the wood thrush, I knew what this bird had gone through in its annual cycle before reaching this tragic point. And I would soon learn that a solution was within reach.
The Wood Thrush’s (Final) Journey
Kneeling beside the injured thrush, I couldn’t help but imagine what that bird had endured just to make it to York University.
Only weeks earlier it would have been skulking in the undergrowth of the steamy tropical forests of eastern Nicaragua, feasting and fattening up on insects and ripe fruit. It needed this fuel for what came next: a grueling 24-hour, nonstop flight over 600 miles of unforgiving open water, the Gulf of Mexico. I imagined the faint glow of city lights 3,000 feet below during the wood thrush’s nightly marathon flights; the only sounds in the chilly air were the faint chips of thousands of other little travelers taking advantage of the cover of darkness and a good tailwind. During the 2,500-mile race to its breeding grounds, it might have faced unexpected spring storms and escaped the deadly grasp of hawks and outdoor cats. The sheer strength and determination of this small bird, battling the exhaustion of flying over 150 miles a night, left me awestruck.
Wood thrush by Michael Schraam/USFWS (public domain)
All the risk was for one more chance to raise a family on the summer bounty of food in Ontario’s deciduous forests. Instead the bird lay quivering in a dense tangle of Virginia creeper, barely able to move, its amazing journey cut short by a panel of glass.
I reached into my backpack for a “rescue pack,” a temporary transport carrier consisting of an unwaxed paper bag with a rolled-up tissue inside, sealed with a paper clip. As I gently placed my hands around the helpless bird to transfer it to the paper bag, I noticed a thick bead of blood rapidly collecting on its beak. The clock was ticking.
Ten minutes later I was in the passenger seat en route to Toronto Wildlife Centre, the wood thrush in its paper bag on my lap. My partner, a fellow bird rescuer, was at the wheel and shot me a worried glance. We had made this same harrowing trip too many times to count.
Suddenly I felt a labored shifting of weight inside the bag, and the wood thrush emitted a startlingly loud, gurgling noise. Then the movement stopped.
We rushed through the entrance of Toronto Wildlife Centre just moments later, where the veterinary technician confirmed what we already knew.
The wood thrush was dead.
A Deadly Count, a Painful Mission
This wood thrush’s tragic fate was not unique.
Every spring and fall millions of birds migrate hundreds or even thousands of miles between their southern wintering areas and northern breeding grounds. As their migration routes slowly become clogged with urban development, the small pockets of greenspace, like the woodlots at York University, can be a welcome oasis to birds in desperate search of a place to rest and refuel. Little do these travelers know that they will have to navigate a labyrinth of invisible barriers and deadly reflections, where a single mistake can be fatal.
Since coming to York University in the fall of 2018 to study migratory songbirds, I had been horrified at the sheer number of dead and injured birds I encountered on campus. Seeing the carnage firsthand drove my partner and me to head out early every morning during spring and fall migration to document the lives lost and rescue those we could.
It felt as if we’d been left to pick up the pieces in the lethal aftermath of a destructive fire, but new blazes kept flaring up. Just as I was kneeling over a dead songbird to record my notes, a sharp thud beside me made me turn, where I saw yet another victim, its eyes glazing over as it took its last breath.
From the data we collected, we estimated that around 1,500 birds were killed or injured by buildings on campus every single year. As hard as we tried to rescue the survivors, many times we arrived too late.
What we needed was to prevent these “fires” from starting in the first place.
Our early morning patrols of the campus made it very clear that certain buildings and structures were deadlier than others. For example, the shrubs and fruiting plants in the secluded garden around the Bethune walkway drew birds in with the promise of a quiet, safe place to rest and refuel. Once inside the courtyard, the birds spotted new places to forage, or an escape route from predators, but they couldn’t see the large, transparent panes of glass between them and their refuge.
The layout of the walkway, combined with the large amount of glass and nearby vegetation, made it a death trap.
In contrast to many other conservation issues of our day, the solution to birds colliding with glass is quite simple. If we provide birds with visual cues that a barrier is present, they can avoid a collision. There are a variety of effective, aesthetically pleasing and economical methods already on the market to prevent birds from flying into windows.
But how could I, or anyone else, convince one of the largest universities in Canada, with countless competing priorities for funding, that this was an issue worth addressing? Does the life of a single bird matter enough to act? Do the lives of 1,500 matter? And with dozens of buildings on campus, where could York University even start in helping birds stay safe?
A Proposal — and Progress
Together with my research supervisor, renowned ornithologist Bridget Stutchbury, we offered York University a simple solution.
With the detailed records we had kept during our daily monitoring, we were able to identify which buildings, and specifically which facades of those buildings, caused the most bird deaths. If York University focused on treating these high-priority sites, we said, they could significantly reduce the number of casualties with only a modest investment. We reached out to other environmentally minded faculty and the voice to protect birds on campus quickly turned into a chorus.
The York University administration was sympathetic to our cause, yet no action was taken for months to treat the problem windows. I was heartbroken to be picking up more dead birds that could have been saved.
Then, out of the blue, the university called us in for another meeting. We went in prepared with more evidence to defend the cause. Instead we were met with the announcement that they would implement our plan.
On October 7, 2019, the Bethune walkway became a hive of activity as a group of contractors worked to cover the glass panels with a bird-friendly window treatment. Earlier that morning I’d found a tiny common yellowthroat that had been injured from a collision with these same glass panels. Unlike the wood thrush, this bird survived the trip to Toronto Wildlife Centre and was released days later to continue its journey. Now the closely spaced white dots alert birds to the presence of glass and prevent other birds from meeting the same cruel fate.
I found no more dead or injured birds at the Bethune walkway that fall.
A year has now passed since York University applied the first of several bird-friendly window treatments. Since then it has retrofitted five more high-priority locations on campus. The thousands of migratory songbirds passing through York University’s gardens and woodlots this October will have a higher chance of safely reaching their winter homes.
And other people can help them stay safe during the rest of their journey.
Make the Case for Change
Addressing the bird-collision problem in new construction — as Toronto and an increasing number of cities now require — is undoubtedly important, but we can’t forget the enormous toll of the millions of buildings already covering the landscape. Buildings like your home, your office, or the ones on your university or corporate campus.
Birds that collided with buildings in Washington, DC. Photo: USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab (public domain)
For anyone hoping to spark change in their community, collecting defensible data on bird collisions in an area is a good first step. Go out early in the day, when collisions are more frequent and before predators can snatch up injured or dead birds. Document the victims. Track where you found them so people can understand which buildings, or sides of buildings, pose the greatest risk. Work with a licensed wildlife-rehabilitation facility to give the survivors a second chance at continuing their journey. Concentrate your efforts during spring and fall, when migratory birds are passing en masse through our cities — and of course, do all of this while ensuring your personal safety.
Then put that information to use. A solid dataset, as we saw, provides fuel for effective advocacy and can help gather a coalition to support positive change. It also allows policymakers to identify the biggest bird-killers, and then to prioritize the right buildings for treatment.
My hope is that more people and institutions will follow this promising model and step up to address the deadly situations we unintentionally created decades ago, before we understood the immense effect buildings are having on bird populations. We all have a part to play in helping these amazing creatures arrive safely to their destinations.
In the meantime I’ll continue to carry around my rescue packs with me wherever I go. Because if my experience has taught me anything, it’s that you can never know when you’ll have the opportunity to save a life.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Smalltail shark populations have declined by 90% in Brazil, and new research finds that overfishing has pushed the species perilously close to extinction.
Oh what a difference a few decades make.
Back in in the 1980s and 1990s, a species known as the smalltail shark (Carcharhinus porosus) was one of the most common fish caught off the coast of northern Brazil.
That’s not the case anymore. A new paper by researchers from a trio of Brazilian science institutions calculates that smalltail shark populations in the country have declined by a shocking 90%. They say the species has now become critically endangered and is in need of “urgent conservation methods…to prevent its extinction in the near future.”
The problem, as with so many other declining oceanic species, stems from rampant overfishing.
In this case smalltail sharks face similar threats from two very different types of fisheries. Small-scale, artisanal fishers use gillnets to catch species like mackerel and weakfish, while industrial-fishing operations use trawl nets to catch shrimp and massive gillnets to scoop up catfish and other bottom-dwelling species. These industrial gillnets regularly reach up to 5.5 miles in length.
Each of these methods indiscriminately catches a wide range of species, including smalltail sharks, which swim in muddy coastal waters and estuaries. The sharks only reach 3-4 feet in length, so they’re easily swept up by these fishing operations.
2004 photo of smalltail sharks from the Gulf of Mexico. SEFSC Pascagoula Laboratory; Collection of Brandi Noble, NOAA/NMFS/SEFSC.
Amplifying the fishing threat, the paper reports, a majority of smalltail sharks caught by the fisheries have always been juveniles. In the 1980s sharks younger than six years accounted for 90.6% of catches.
The elimination of so many immature sharks from the population removed any chance they’d get to breeding age and perpetuate the species.
Brazil recognized the threats to these sharks a few years ago and declared them critically endangered in their waters. But the IUCN Red List still identifies the species as “data deficient,” meaning its extinction risk hasn’t been fully assessed on a global level.
To solve that, the paper also takes a deep dive into the shark’s biology and comes up with some startling revelations. Among them, the authors upend previous research suggesting the species had a fast growth rate and reveal that it actually “has one of the longest juvenile phases when compared to several species of small coastal sharks, thus taking longer to reach sexual maturity.” This makes the smalltail shark an “intrinsically low-resilient species” that is “highly vulnerable to fishing exploitation.”
Meanwhile a second study by some of the same authors looked at the sharks from a different angle: microchemistry. The researchers examined vertebrae from 17 sharks caught in the 1980s and in the past couple of years to determine their elemental compositions. Based on the levels of barium, calcium, magnesium, manganese and strontium in the bones and at various sites around the country, the researchers hypothesize that northern Brazil holds at least three major birthing sites for the species and that the country’s waters serve as important habitat for smalltail sharks throughout their lifecycles.
The fisheries study focuses on the threats in Brazil, but the authors point out that these same fishing threats occur throughout the smalltail shark’s range. They’re calling for the animal to be considered critically endangered not just in Brazil but on a global level.
The paper points out what could happen if conservation action isn’t prioritized. Another species from the same genus, Carcharhinus obsolerus, was declared extinct in 2019. Dubbed the “lost shark” by the researchers who discovered the species from decades-old museum samples, the shark was probably also wiped out by overfishing — before it was ever scientifically recognized.
Without protection the smalltail shark could soon join its fellow among the ranks of the lost.
Collisions between whales and ships have increased, but an effort to hear, see and predict whale behavior could help reduce fatalities.
A blue whale can weigh as much as 200 tons and consume 12,000 pounds of krill in a single day. But even the largest animal on Earth doesn’t stand a chance against a fast-moving cargo ship.
Collisions between whales and shipping vessels are especially prevalent in areas where whale habitat overlaps with busy port traffic, such as the Santa Barbara Channel. This 70-mile stretch of water between mainland California and the Northern Channel Islands is a thoroughfare for thousands of cargo ships going to and from the busy ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. It’s also a hotspot for endangered and threatened whales.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has instituted voluntary slow-speed zones, but whale-ship strikes have still been on the rise for the past few years.
To reverse that trend, a group of scientists from all over the country have collaborated on a new project spearheaded by U.C. Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative. Whale Safe, a technology-based mapping and analysis tool, provides near real-time data on whale activity in the Santa Barbara Channel in the hope of reducing fatal whale-ship collisions.
We spoke to Morgan Visalli, the science lead at the Benioff Ocean Initiative, about how the technology works and what the public can do to help hold shipping companies accountable.
Why is something like Whale Safe needed?
Many whale species thankfully are recovering from the days of intensive whaling, when they were hunted to the brink of extinction. But now they’re facing other threats from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements.
The Santa Barbara Channel, where we’ve launched Whale Safe, is a really important feeding ground for blue, humpback and fin whales — all species that are either endangered or threatened. Those three species are the ones that we’re focusing on with this first launch of the project.
The past two years were some of the worst on record for ship strikes off the West Coast of the United States. Even worse, the number that we actually see recorded in the data is likely a small percentage of the actual number of ship strikes that occurred.
Scientists estimate that only about 5% to 17% of whale carcasses are actually observed and recorded. So if we see 13 whale carcasses that wash up on the beach, as was the case last year on the West Coast of the United States, it’s likely that that could actually be closer to 130 ship strikes that occurred.
Container ship. Photo: Pixabay.
What’s the best way to reduce or eliminate whale-ship collisions?
One way to address this issue is to separate ships and whales. In some places it’s possible to actually move shipping lanes away from areas of known whale concentrations, which can help reduce the risk of these strikes happening.
In the Santa Barbara Channel in 2013 they did move the shipping lanes one mile away from an area that is a known blue whale feeding hotspot. But unfortunately, the Santa Barbara Channel is a constrained waterway, and so there’s really not too much more that can be moved. The next best option is slowing down.
Studies have shown that when ships slow down it reduces the probability of a strike happening by potentially giving the whale a bit more time to respond. And we’ve also found that slower speeds can reduce the lethality of the strikes.
How does Whale Safe work to try and alert ship captains to whales in the area?
Credit: Nicolle R. Fuller, Sayo Studio 1. Acoustic monitoring instruments identify whale vocalizations. 2. Observers record whale sightings with a mobile app. 3. Oceanographic data is used to predict where blue whales are likely to be. 4. The data streams are compiled and validated. 5. Whale information is disseminated to industry, managers and the public.
There are three main components.
One is an acoustic listening station. Out in the Santa Barbara channel, our collaborators at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Texas A&M University at Galveston deployed an acoustic buoy that has an underwater microphone near the seafloor. There’s a small computer that processes any audio that the microphone picks up.
It is able to automatically detect the calls of blue, humpback and fin whales. Then there’s a surface buoy with a satellite transmitter that sends that information back to shore. It’s then validated by a scientist on shore before it’s added to the database.
Then the second piece is a blue whale habitat model. We use oceanographic data like sea-surface temperature and current to predict where blue whales are likely to be on any given day. That was developed by our collaborators at U.C. Santa Cruz, the University of Washington and NOAA Southwest Fishery Science Center.
It’s a dynamic model that’s running every day in an automated fashion and producing maps that show us blue whale hotspots.
The third piece is data gathered by community scientists who are out on whale-watching and tourism boats nearly every day. They use mobile apps such as WhaleAlert and Spotter Pro to record whale sightings that are also added to the database.
I know you’ve just launched this database, but what are you hearing from people in the shipping industry that may be using it or want to use it?
We did some interviews as we were building the system to get information from industry in terms of what information would be most helpful, how frequently they would like to receive data and what pathway they would like to receive data through.
Now we’re working on building those relationships, making sure everybody knows that this information is available and also getting more feedback so we can continue to improve the system and tailor the data feeds to fit the needs of different folks within the industry.
One kind of communication pathway that could be really exciting to implement is getting the whale information piped into the charting system on the ship through the automatic identification system (AIS). It’s the navigation and collision avoidance system that all of these large ships have on board.
Deploying the acoustic detection system in the Santa Barbara Channel near the shipping lanes in 2019. Photo: Benioff Ocean Initiative
There are quite a few challenges, both on the technological side and just the bureaucratic side, of actually getting the data delivered that way. It’s their main safety and navigation tool, so you don’t want it to be crowded with too much data and information. That would need to be done really thoughtfully. But that’s a communication pathway that could really help get this data more easily adopted.
Right now there are voluntary slow-speed zones, but some ships aren’t abiding by those recommendations. How likely do you think they’d be to adopt technology like Whale Safe?
A few years ago there was actually a NOAA-led working group that brought together many stakeholders to try to develop solutions. One of the recommendations that came out of that process was actually a call for new technology and more real-time data on whale activity. And that was supported by many members of the shipping industry that were part of that working group.
That helped to inform the approach that we decided to take. Some of these companies expressed that time is money, and if they’re going to slow down, they want to make sure that they’re slowing down because there are actually whales in the area.
Our hope is that this data can really help to reinforce those slow-speed zones, especially when there’s high whale activity in the channel.
Whale Safe also provides data on how well companies are abiding by the slow-speed zones. But many of these shipping companies aren’t consumer-facing, so how can this information be used by the public to pressure companies to make changes?
Big companies like Walmart, Target and Home Depot import a lot of stuff and use these shipping companies quite often. We’re starting to have conversations with some of those retailers that are more public facing to see if there’s information about whale safety that could be helpful for them as they’re doing their planning around their sustainability portfolios.
And from the public standpoint, the more general awareness there is about the problem of whale-ship collisions, the more it helps public-facing companies know that this is something that they should prioritize in their sustainability planning.
We want people to know that whales are really important for global biodiversity and also as ecosystem engineers that help stabilize the food web. Whales are also important for coastal economies through whale watching and other tourism businesses. And they can help mitigate climate change. Studies have shown that they can actually help to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
Besides whales being incredible creatures deserving of protection in their own right, there are multiple benefits that we see from keeping these populations strong and healthy in our global ocean.
Heat, drought and water policy have created a slow-motion catastrophe at a refuge on the California-Oregon border.
Highway 161 carries me along the Oregon and California border as I head toward Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. I wish I were visiting it under better conditions. In better time this is a place where birds gather in abundance, feasting and fattening up as they continue their migration along the Pacific Flyway. Sadly, I’m here to witness a massive outbreak of disease — one that’s wiping out tens of thousands of birds.
The Lower Klamath refuge is a “must see,” especially at the start of fall migration. Designated as an “Important Bird Area” by the National Audubon Society, it’s one of a mosaic of refuges in the Klamath Basin that form an essential pinch point along the Pacific Flyway, causing waterbirds to congregate in huge numbers during migration. Birds coming south from Alaska stop to rest and refuel before continuing their journey south to estuaries along the coast, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California, and beyond that as far as the tip of South America. The birds can’t complete their journey without places like the Lower Klamath along their route.
This year, though, instead of broad sheets of water, green wetland stands, clouds of mosquitos and throngs of noisy waterbirds, what greets me is a dry, barren landscape baking in the hot summer sun. Throngs of birds cram together in the few pools of hot, stagnant water that remain. Different species and guilds gather in a motley collection of unlikely neighbors; American white pelicans waddle near elegant black-necked stilts and American avocets, rather than spreading out across the open water and mudflats. These are exactly the kinds of conditions where disease can spread rapidly.
Shrinking patch of water at Lower Klamath NWR Photo: Meghan Hertel, Audubon California
It’s not surprising, then, that an avian botulism outbreak is ravaging the birds of the Lower Klamath and some of the surrounding refuges. At last estimate 40,000 birds have died in the last month due to botulism, and thousands more are at an emergency “duck hospital” operated by staff from Bird Ally X, California Waterfowl Association and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Avian botulism is a waterborne bacterium, Clostridium botulinum, that occurs naturally in many wetlands but becomes activated when the water temperature rises. Overcrowding caused by insufficient water supplies have created ideal conditions for bacteria to spread rapidly through the birds in the refuge. Birds eat infected food sources, become paralyzed and die, and in turn transmit it to other birds in a vicious cycle that spreads quickly across the wetlands.
Overcrowding, combined with a lack of water supplies to maintain these wetlands and push clean water through their habitats, exacerbates the outbreak as water sits and concentrates.
Making matters worse, some species of waterbirds are molting and will be unable to fly to better habitat for approximately a month. A 2016 study by Point Blue Conservation Science (Barbaree et al.) showed that dowitchers rely on Klamath Basin as a staging ground during molting, staying there for roughly 32 days between July and October while replacing flight feathers. The length and timing of their stay and the lack of flight feathers makes dowitchers and other waterbirds particularly vulnerable to disease outbreaks in this region.
This combination of deadly circumstances for the birds in Klamath has left biologists and refuge managers scrambling for solutions.
To minimize the spread of the infection, biologists and volunteers are capturing thousands of sick birds every day and removing dead birds before they can infect others. They will have to keep this up until temperatures drop considerably, since it will take several nights of freezing temperatures to kill the bacteria.
Refuge managers are also looking for new sources of fresh water to flood more habitat and spread the birds out, a difficult challenge in a dry year like this one. Recent news of additional water being delivered by the Bureau of Reclamation offers some hope, but it may be too little, and it is definitely too late to help those birds that have already perished.
Broken eggshell at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Meghan Hertel, Audubon California
The only true, long-term solution is to ensure that wildlife refuge has secure, reliable water supplies to maintain sufficient wetland habitat for the hundreds of thousands of birds that rely on it. This is not an easy fix, since there’s rarely enough water in the Klamath to meet the needs of tribes, farmers, ranchers, endangered salmon and birds.
Stakeholders have been working for years to reach an accord to accommodate all these important needs, but a satisfactory solution remains elusive, and wildlife refuges have not been highly prioritized. The tens of thousands of dead birds at Klamath are a sign of the stakes and the need for a balanced solution now.
As I leave the refuge, I come across two birders standing in the heat, staring at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge sign. I want to stop and warn them to not travel any farther into the parched land — that there isn’t anything to see, at least anything pleasant. But I hold back. Perhaps it’s important for all of us to see and understand the tragedy occurring in this remote corner of California and Oregon.
It reminds us of how the refuges that make up the Pacific Flyway are the last, critical links in the long but fragile chain of the Pacific Flyway. We’re linked together through these birds and habitats, across borders, culture and time, and what we do at each of these places — such as our decisions about who does and doesn’t get water — has lasting consequences for our birds, our people and future generations of both.
The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Biodiversity loss threatens national security. We need to invest in technologies to preserve our vital food varieties.
As the impacts of climate change intensify — from water scarcity to raging fires and disease outbreaks — the ability to keep pace with demand for food will increasingly rely on crops adapted to new conditions. To achieve this crop breeders will need the full range of tools at their disposal.
So while conserving flora and fauna in their natural habitat remains an immediate priority, global food security in the long term must be futureproofed through continued investment in the preservation of plant genetic material.
Tomatoes affected by late blight in a garden near Hilo, Hawaii. Photo: Scott Nelson/Flickr (public domain)
A model for this futureproofing exists at my organization, the International Potato Center (Centro Internacional de la Papa, or CIP) in Lima, Peru. Here we host the world’s most extensive collection of potato and sweetpotato material, which conserves more than 15,000 samples of root and tuber crops. This genetic material can be drawn upon to minimize disruption to food supplies if one variety is lost to natural causes like disease or human-caused processes like climate change.
The threat is far from theoretical. Already more than a dozen varieties of native and wild potatoes are in danger of disappearing due to temperature changes or loss of habitat, while diseases are emerging in new places to endanger other popular crops, including varieties of wheat and bananas, and their wild relatives. In total two-fifths of the world’s plants are at risk of extinction, according to new research.
Resilient Genes
Wild potatoes and sweet potatoes are the cousins of the third- and sixth-most important food crops on the globe. These wild species, although inedible themselves, are rich with hardy genetic traits that can be used to breed more nutritious, disease-resistant varieties of crops that underpin diets and incomes around the world.
For example, researchers have found that wild species of potatoes contain genes that provide resistance to late blight, the most destructive potato disease, which causes an estimated $6.7 billion in yield losses worldwide every year. The loss of just one wild potato species could both set back progress toward reducing losses to late blight and hinder recovery from large-scale outbreaks in the future.
Varieties at the CIP genebank. Photo: Sara A. Fajardo/CIP (provided)
To provide defenses against such a future food apocalypse, collections of genetic material — not just of potatoes, but all crop species and their wild relatives — must be continually conserved, tested and renovated, requiring ongoing funding, research and innovation. With plant genetic material being a common good shared by and essential to all, it is in the interests of governments, development organizations and the private sector to make crop conservation a funding and policy priority.
Just as digital backups moved the world from storing information on floppy disks to the cloud, recent advances in genetic conservation techniques, such as DNA sequencing for digital catalogs and cryopreservation, offer new opportunities to preserve these staple crops for future generations facing new scenarios.
Frozen Value
The CIP genebank — one of 11 CGIAR genebanks protecting the planet’s crop diversity — began to cryopreserve crops in 1996 and now has the most advanced cryopreservation practices for potatoes.
Cryopreservation allows for the long-term storage of plant material in liquid nitrogen at temperatures of -320F (-196C). Among the advantages, for crop material, of cryopreservation over in vitro conservation are the time and resources saved — both in day-to-day maintenance of storage facilities and in the need to regenerate in vitro accessions, or plant material, every 1 to 2 years.
José Cardenas, right, works in the cryopreservation section at the International Potato Center’s genebank. Photo: Sara A. Fajardo/CIP (provided)
Scientists are currently in the process of cryopreserving all potato genetic material while developing ways to cryopreserve the more delicate sweet potato to help secure the availability of safe, nutritious crops into the future.
Maintaining diverse reserves of the widest possible variety of genetic material offers the greatest chance of protecting the public from potential food shortages. Indeed, breeders must screen thousands of potatoes over many years to identify only one or two that address the needs of farmers in terms of productivity and climate resilience.
Without a reserve of potential material to screen, important advances in new crop varieties would be stymied.
Meanwhile the cost-effectiveness of cryopreservation means more funds have been invested in other areas of research. In vitro conservation is incredibly labor intensive, requiring ongoing maintenance by specialized staff. But cryopreserved samples can remain in deep freeze for decades with little oversight necessary, freeing up more resources to dedicate to the conservation of greater crop biodiversity in natural habitats, the development of a generation of virus-free germplasm, and the repatriation and rediscovery of native varieties.
Now Is the Time
Despite their values, digital catalogs and the cryopreservation of crops and wild food plants remain under-appreciated, underfunded and underutilized by governments and international governing bodies.
Food security is national security, meaning genebanks could hold the vaccines needed for humanity’s survival of a food disaster. Put simply, bioversity loss weakens our defenses.
Native potatoes. Photo: David Duddenhoefer/CIP (CC BY-NC 2.0)
This makes conserving the rich and varied genetic material that underpins diets and human health one of our most important guarantees against devastating global shocks. Conservation efforts like ours should be treated as a matter of national and international security and investing in accordingly by the public and private sectors alike. Unless funding is secured, we at CIP may no longer be able to preserve the potato’s genetic diversity for future generations.
The value of these technologies is clearer now than ever. An outbreak of potato disease on the scale of Covid-19 could be as lethal for humanity as the pandemic itself has been.
Investing in the conservation of staple foods is a crucial investment in our collective resilience.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
A growing body of research finds the dangers to pollinator populations are greater than ever. But studies also point to some potential solutions.
Bees are facing a pandemic of their own.
A collection of threats — habitat loss, pathogens, pesticides, pollution and poor nutrition — have led to widespread decline in bee health and pollinator populations.
The threats add up: The number of commercial honeybee colonies declined by more than quarter million between April and June 2020, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Native bees are at risk, too, with 1 in 4 native species in North America at risk of extinction.
“Things are not going so well for bees,” says Arthur Grupe, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado. “There’s been a lot of research looking into the causes, and usually, humans try and look for the magic bullet — what is the one thing causing this problem that we can stop? And the research has shown that it’s actually a collection of things.”
A single-cell fungal pathogen called Nosema is one of the latest threats.
Nosema reproduces in the gut, where it ruptures, spreads out and then infects the cells of the digestive tracts. It leads to lethargy, reduced foraging ability, poor sense of direction and, often, death.
Although Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae — two strains of the fungi — have been regularly recorded in Europe, North America and Southeast Asia, the pathogen is now more widespread than ever, according to recent research published in the journal PLOS Pathogens. Grupe was the lead author.
Grupe notes that N. apis, once the dominant strain affecting commercial bee colonies, was observed to be seasonal, which helped protect against total colony collapse. The increasing export of commercial beehives from Europe, however, has expanded the distribution of the problematic pathogen.
USDA photo by David Kosling
At the same time, reports of N. ceranae have increased dramatically — and it infects hives all year long.
“Historically, it was thought that Nosema ceranae wasn’t so much of a problem because its spores can’t survive freezing or near-freezing temperatures,” he explains. “But as winters have become milder these spores are able to persist and then cause infection, and Nosema ceranae has overtaken Nosema apis as the predominant infect of European honeybees.”
Once a bee is infected with Nosema, it can contaminate entire colonies — where social distancing is not an option — and spread that infection to the wild. Infected honeybees can leave spores on flowers, transmitting the pathogen to other susceptible pollinators, including native bees. This “community spread” has led Grupe and his co-author C. Alisha Quandt to declare it a “pandemic” in their paper.
Research published this July in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution illustrates the threat. Field studies in update New York found that one in 11 flowers carried disease-causing parasites, including Nosema ceranae, N. bombi, Crithidia bombi, C. expoeki and neogregarines that were linked to declines in bee populations. Social bees, including honeybees and bumblebees, were more likely to be infected with parasites than solitary bee species.
“Bees visit hundreds of flowers a day and act as a ‘shared food source’ between the other foraging bees in the area which will feed from the same flowers,” explains study co-author Peter Graystock, now a research fellow at Imperial College in London. “If a bee has been in contact with parasites or is suffering from an infection, they may shed some contagious parasite cells on the flower when they visit it, and then when a subsequent bee visits the same flower, the bee may become infected by with those parasite cells or spores.”
An endangered rusty patched bumble. USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab
Air pollution might also contribute to bee declines.
To understand more about that air-quality risk, Barbara Smith, associate professor at the University of Coventry, is working with beekeepers in the United Kingdom to set up sensors in their hives to record the level of air pollution and incidents of disease to determine whether there is a correlation.
“We know that air pollution is bad for humans and mammals, and we’re interested to see if the same is true for invertebrates,” Smith explains. “We have reason to believe that it could have an impact, because we know that we can record air pollution particulates in honey.”
Smith hopes her research, funded through the British Beekeepers Association, will provide more data about the impact of air pollution on bee health and population decline. Even if the results are conclusive, she knows it’s just one of the issues that needs to be addressed to restore pollinator populations.
“I don’t think that these declines in pollinators are down to one thing,” she says. “It’s about a suite of things that are happening. It’s like a perfect storm.”
Addressing the Threats
The fact that bees are facing multiple threats to their health and survival means that coming up with a single solution is impossible, especially when researchers are still trying to collect data.
Grupe notes that most of the research on Nosema infections has focused on European honeybees. The pathogen also affects native bees, but few researchers have done environmental surveys to capture wild bees from native ecosystems and screen them for Nosema.
“There’s only a handful of studies that have documented Nosema infections in native bees and the problem that needs to be addressed in the future,” he says. “More work needs to be done to understand Nosema infections in native bee species and the potential consequences to native ecosystems, and if native bees suffer a similar fate as honeybees when infected.”
To complicate matters, the manufacturer that made a chemical control for Nosema, which the company called its “bread and butter,” went out of business in 2018, leaving beekeepers without access to a treatment. Grupe cites a mix of high prices and a complex supply chain that led to the discontinuation of the product.
But the cost for bees could be higher.
“All of a sudden we have these pathogens that are globally distributed, that are negatively impacting agricultural crops and negatively impacting native plant communities, and we don’t really have any way to treat it.” This could further imperil native bees if the pathogens continue to spread from commercial hives.
In the absence of treatment, Graystock promotes prevention. Increasing floral abundance and diversity, he says, could offer some protection against parasite transmission. His research showed that the incidence of parasites was higher when floral numbers were low and decreased as the number of floral resources increased.
Diverse plant communities may be especially important in urban areas where higher human populations are linked with fewer species of wild bees, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.
Rick Brohn/USFWS
Planting strips of native pollinator plants on farmland could even improve crop yields. Another study published this summer found that five out of seven crops in major crop-producing areas had lower yields and production due to pollinator limitations. Attracting wild bees and honeybees, especially in intensive production areas, could help bolster food security, the research showed.
All of this backs up Graystock’s points.
“It’s important to appreciate the vast diversity of our pollinator communities, not just in terms of bee diversity but also floral diversity,” he says. “Frequently in ecology we find the solutions for maintaining the health of our wildlife are simply to support and promote our native wild communities above others.”
A recent string of massive landslides in Alaska and around the world bears the fingerprint of climate change.
Six years ago Blacksand Beach stood out as one of the prettiest beaches in Prince William Sound, Alaska. You could picnic or pitch a tent on its flat mix of gravel and moss, near an alder thicket busy with warblers. The birds’ singing joined a chorus of falling water, including a small stream along the beach and cascades thundering down nearby glacier-capped mountains. Harbor seals drifted past on icebergs and mountain goats scampered on cliffs above. A short stroll led to the edge of the Coxe Glacier, a four-mile river of ice that flows from the mountains down to the ocean. You could walk up and kiss it.
The Coxe Glacier in 2008. Photo: Don Becker/USGS
But today much is changed. The Coxe Glacier has shrunk away from one mountainside, leaving a massive wall of loose rock perched above the beach. Almost every year sections of the wall collapse into the glacier’s river, temporarily damming it. When the river inevitably breaches the dam, a sudden flood rages down the beach, burying it in furniture-sized boulders and loose rubble. The few trees that remain have been slashed open by speeding rocks.
Many people now avoid the beach, including most of the eco-tour kayak and hiking companies that used to bring visitors here every year.
The events at the remote and relatively small Coxe Glacier require further scientific study, but experts say they reflect a rise in landslides near retreating glaciers in Alaska and other mountainous areas of the world.
As glaciers retreat with ever-increasing speed, ice that for millennia has held up potentially unstable mountainsides disappears, a process called debuttressing. Geologists debate specifics of the process, but they acknowledge it contributes to slides, some of which are big enough to block rivers or trigger deadly tsunamis in lakes or oceans.
Alaska’s Tyndall Glacier eight months after a landslide. Photo: Ground Truth Alaska (CC BY-NC 3.0)
It’s a potentially dangerous side effect of climate change that requires more research to fully understand, says Bretwood Higman, executive director of the nonprofit science advisory group Ground Truth Alaska. “It’s certainly an evolving field,” he says.
But Higman has studied Alaskan tsunamis and landslides for two decades and believes the evidence is strong that receding glaciers can destabilize mountain slopes.
And that can produce serious hazards. In May Higman and more than a dozen other geologists warned residents of the Prince William Sound community of Whittier that an even larger mountainside near Coxe Glacier appears vulnerable to collapse. This one, near the retreating Barry Glacier, could slide directly into the ocean, producing an initial wave up to 600 feet high and sending a potentially destructive tsunami toward the city, 50 miles away.
A Wide-ranging Threat
Higman says the potential Barry Glacier landslide carries markers similar to a massive 2015 event in the remote Taan Fiord in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, 150 miles southeast of Prince William Sound. It occurred near a similarly retreating glacier and was also associated with debuttressing. The slide sent a 633-foot wave up a nearby mountainside and triggered a tsunami that leveled eight square miles of forest.
A giant boulder moved by the tsunami that ran down Taan Fiord in 2015. Photo: Ground Truth Alaska (CC BY-NC 3.0)
Responding to this May’s warning, Chugach National Forest officials advised the public to avoid the famously scenic Harriman Fiord, a staple for recreation and tourism activity that provides revenue across south-central Alaska. State and federal geologists have spent the summer rushing to learn more, protect Whittier residents and maybe restore a sense of stability for local tour operators.
“I’m impressed by the response,” says Higman, who works with the Forest Service and other agencies to assess the danger.
He says the unpredictable nature of landslides presents a challenge, as some debuttressed mountainsides let loose catastrophically, while others remain precariously in place for decades or longer. This complicates public messaging and makes life hard for residents and tour operators, who want to know they’re taking people to safe locations.
Ninety miles from Whittier, on the eastern side of Prince William Sound, city officials in Valdez now warn that recent events at the Valdez Glacier may pose a similar debuttressing threat, albeit on a smaller scale. This summer two large “separation events” detached a half-mile section of the glacier, which may have undermined the stability of adjacent slopes and increased the risk of future landslides.
“It was wall to wall,” says the city of Valdez’s emergency manager Aaron Baczuk, describing how the ice broke away across the entire width of the fiord. “It completely severed and then floated out into the lake.”
Baczuk has teamed with local outfitters to release videos warning boaters about travel in the area, including the possibility of landslides traveling into the lake and triggering dangerous waves. They take the potential threat seriously: Three kayakers died in 2019 after ice fell into the lake.
The Permafrost Factor
Farther south safety concerns at Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park led to a 2017 report in which geologists described 24 landslides they believe were at least in part climate-related.
In a normal year, cruise ships carrying up to 4,000 passengers transit Glacier Bay’s steep-walled fjords hundreds of times. Park officials have acknowledged that landslides could strike the water and jeopardize these ships and tourists.
“Glacier Bay is characterized by a lot of steep slopes,” says Erin Bessette-Kirton, a geological engineering graduate student who has researched local slides. “The mountains go from sea level to high elevations very quickly, making them susceptible to landslides.”
A 2019 assessment mapping landslide hazards in Glacier Bay identifies retreating glaciers as a factor, but also points to thawing of high-elevation permafrost.
In this process frozen rock and water that have bonded mountain peaks together soften as temperatures rise, leaving slopes more susceptible to rainfall, snowmelt, earthquakes and other forces.
“The thawing causes changes in rock strength,” says Bessette-Kirton. “It allows water and heat to travel deeper into the rock. And it transfers freeze-thaw processes into deeper material, causing unstable conditions.”
Permafrost melting in the sun. Photo: Ground Truth Alaska (CC BY-NC 3.0)
Thawing alpine permafrost is suspected in a monster 2016 landslide high in Glacier Bay’s backcountry, which dumped over six miles of debris onto Lamplugh Glacier. Geologists estimate the pile is the size of 60 million mid-size SUVs. It flowed within a few miles of Johns Hopkins Inlet, a common destination for cruise ships. Researchers say that the slide would have been catastrophic for cruise ships and other visitors — including subsistence users, recreationists and park staff — if it had dropped directly into the water.
Back in the Prince William Sound region, five large landslides potentially linked to thawing permafrost have torn away from high peaks in the Chugach Mountains during the last two years. One on Yudi Peak, near the town of Girdwood, left a mile-long trail across an area frequented by a local helicopter ski company.
Higman agrees that the “big black splotches” that landslides increasingly deposit on high mountain glaciers — which are visible in satellite imagery — are consistent with thawing alpine permafrost, but he cautions that the story is not always that simple.
“There’s a lot going on in these mountains,” he says. Rainfall, snowmelt, rising temperatures, tectonics and earthquakes all exert their own pressures, along with debuttressing from glaciers and thawing of permafrost. “Climate change underlies several of those forces, but any one of them may act like the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to landslides.”
In this sense, just as it’s hard to blame any specific hurricane or wildfire solely on climate change, it can be hard to pin specific landslides to climate.
Yet thawing permafrost has been tied to a growing list of examples across the globe. Researchers speculate it factored in a massive 2017 landslide at Pizzo Cengalo in the Swiss Alps that killed eight hikers and destroyed parts of the village of Bondo. It has also been implicated in events in the Himalayas, Andes, Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, where thousands of landslides were recently linked to thawing permafrost. Recent work by Bessette-Kirton also links it to landslides in Alaska’s Saint Elias Mountains, north of Glacier Bay.
2019 photo of landslide activity in the Andes mountains at Metro Santiago, Chile. Oton Barros (DSR/OBT/INPE) (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Unfortunately, just as in instances of debuttressing near receding glaciers, the remoteness and wide distribution of alpine permafrost means landslides often occur in areas where no prior monitoring has been conducted.
“It’s often in really difficult terrain that is hard to access,” says Bissette-Kirton. “And it’s not visible at the surface, so you need temperatures gauges in place and a long-term record to detect changes.”
To address the dearth of hard data, U.S. Geological Survey researcher Jeffrey Coe recently proposed monitoring five “bellwether” sites in the Himalayas, Alps and other areas where the intersection of landslides and thawing permafrost seems most likely.
Compounding Factors
The swift changes being brought about by warming temperatures will always put multiple disruptive forces at play at the same time.
Take, for instance, the deadly 2013 ”Himalayan tsunami” in India. On the surface it appears to have occurred when record-setting rainfall, which has been tied to climate change, swelled the banks of the glacier-fed Chorabari Lake. When the water breached a moraine that formed the lake’s barrier, it washed away scores of villages and killed more than 6,000 people. But research shows retreat of the Chorabari Glacier may have also played a role in the disaster. When it melted it no longer buttressed the moraine, making its collapse more likely.
Chorabari Lake highlights yet another piece of the puzzle. Recent NASA research shows glacial lakes have expanded 50% worldwide due to the accelerating loss of glaciers. Changes to the lakes can cause dangerous instability.
As glaciers retreat, they can trap pools of water behind ice or piles of debris. These pools are called glacial lakes. As the planet warms, glacial lakes are growing — since 1990, the volume of these lakes has increased by about 50% globally. https://t.co/5ptHD06dUwpic.twitter.com/8i1TWb3tHR
Higman points out that these lakes form higher in mountain terrain, where they’re susceptible to landslides caused by shrinking glaciers or thawing permafrost.
There’s no clearer example than Lake Palcacocha, high in the Peruvian Andes, where in 1941 falling ice sent a tsunami across the lake, breaching its barrier and sending a wall of water into the city of Huaraz, killing 1,800 people. That was before the modern recognition of climate change, but today melting glaciers have expanded the lake to many times its 1941 volume, and tens of thousands more people now live below it. Today safety officials liken the specter of landslides or falling ice entering the lake to a devastating “timebomb.”
Such dangers drive Higman and others to continue probing for answers in places like Barry Glacier. He says that, in the past, studying glaciers and mountains required thinking on a time scale of thousands of years, but climate change has reduced the scale of events to decades or even years.
“It would be nice to get ahead of that curve and understand these processes better,” he says. “And maybe by putting in place mitigations we’ll be able to tell a positive story in the future.”
Erin Brockovich, E.O. Wilson, Jane Fonda and others deliver important new books addressing the fights against climate change, the extinction crisis and toxic pollution.
One of the best ways to feel better about the world is to do something to help the world.
That’s a lesson I learned a long time ago, and it’s one echoed in an impressive slate of new books addressing climate change, the extinction crisis and other environmental problems.
Most of the 13 books on this month’s list offer powerful advice and lessons from experience. Several authors tell us horror stories of things we should never let happen again, while a few offer stories of wonder that remind us of the natural world we need to save. All of them should help motivate readers and help keep them moving forward toward a better planet — even in these tumultuous times.
So take a break from the fires, pandemic and election rhetoric, curl up with a good book (or books), and then put what you’ve learned into action.
Quite simply, this is the climate book of the year. It includes contributions from dozens of scientists, journalists, activists and other experts, including Katherine Hayhoe, Mary Annaïse Heglar, Emily Atkin, Kate Marvel, Kendra Pierre-Louis and Naomi Klein — as well as a wide selection of poets — who collectively aim to build a community of women climate leaders.
The famous environmental activist returns with a new book to motivate action for clean water, using examples from around the country, including her long fight against PG&E in California.
Talk about standing up to giants. The kids at the heart of the Youth v. Gov climate lawsuit — officially called Juliana v. United States — took their right to a livable planet to some of the highest courts in the land over the past few years. Although the 9th Circuit dismissed the case earlier this year, the plaintiffs have appealed and continue undaunted. This excellent book tells the history of the case and the people behind it, while broadening the discussion to look at the political forces at play throughout the country. I had a chance to read an advance copy a few months ago, and it suddenly feels a lot more relevant now that the Supreme Court is up for grabs.
Even before the pandemic, this election season had a lot of issues on the table, including climate change, income inequality and systemic racism. This book offers critical guidance for motivating political action in a season where in-person contact feels extra-frightening. Contributors include Maria Teresa Kuma, Bill McKibben, Winona LaDuke and dozens of other experts from a variety of perspectives. The book’s website also provides a series of voter-registration tools.
How do humans perceive the nature of extinction, and how has that shaped how humans perceive each other and aspects of society? This thought-provoking book examines those questions and reveals how knowing that we can lose something forever — and the realization that extinction comes with cultural and ecological costs — motivates us to protect everything else.
You know all those pesky environmental regulations that have been repealed over the past few years? This deeply researched book examines the histories of two polluted U.S. communities to remind us why those laws and protections existed in the first place.
A true story from the 1940s that echoes today and should especially motivate environmental journalists and people who appreciate — and depend upon — their efforts.
Sit back for a trek to the Russian Far East as the author recounts his team’s perilous efforts to study, understand and conserve the Blakiston’s fish owl — an utterly massive bird he describes as looking like “a small bear with decorative feathers.” This is the type of book that reminds us how amazing the natural world can be and how much it deserves protection.
Essays from 18 experts discuss how our environmental risks often fall upon the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized peoples and address the issues through the lenses of science, law, culture, activism and a whole lot more.
The groundbreaking biologist best known for “Half Earth” call to protect 50% of the planet looks to the smaller details in his latest book. Wilson reflects on his decades-long career studying thousands of ant species around the world, and in the process shines a light on the magic and mystery of the natural world.
For more than a century, life in Arsenault’s hometown of Mexico, Maine revolved around the local paper mill, which dominated the economy but also poisoned the community so badly it became known as “Cancer Valley.” This book serves as both a personal reflection and vital history on that slow-moving tragedy. In the process. It also reminds us of the human and environmental costs of the toxins that flow through our society and so many American towns.
The demonization and criminalization of protestors, National Guard troops descending on American cities, armed citizens setting up roadblocks and rooftop sniper stations while looking for imagined outside agitators and anarchists. Does any of this sound familiar? It all happened in 1970, and it’s happening again in 2020. The massacre of students at Kent State was obviously not an environmental story, but this powerful work of journalism (in graphic novel form) is very much relevant to today, and it serves to remind us of the ever-present threat and human costs of authoritarianism.
Most of the 13 books on this month’s list offer powerful advice and lessons from experience. Several authors tell us horror stories of things we should never let happen again, while a few offer stories of wonder that remind us of the natural world we need to save. All of them should help motivate readers and help keep them moving forward toward a better planet — even in these tumultuous times.
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
Superman’s Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It
What Can I Do? My Path From Climate Despair to Action
As the World Burns: How a New Generation of Activists Is Leading the Landmark Case Against Climate Change
Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency
Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity From Darwin to the Anthropocene
Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl
Tales From the Ant World
Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains
Kent State