The Climate Flames Come for Us All

This month’s western megafires have burned millions of acres and upended countless lives. It’s a sign of things to come if we don’t start to listen and act.

Fire is the great equalizer.

Young or old, rich or poor, rural or urban, we’re all in the path of the flames these days. As I write this, tens of thousands of people in three western states remain under evacuation orders, more than a million acres of Oregon forest have burned, and entire towns have been wiped off the map. Meanwhile the residents of half the country find themselves cloaked in clouds of megafire emissions big enough to be seen from space.

My small town just north of Portland, Oregon, hasn’t seen much fire, but the smoke has hung over us for more than 10 days. At first it seemed like nothing more than a few stray wisps and the smell of burning wood. By last Friday things were so bad we stopped going outside for longer than a few minutes. Over the weekend our air contained so much particulate matter and carbon monoxide that the Air Quality Index shot well into — and beyond — the hazardous zone.

 

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Orange skies.

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A healthy AQI is in the 0-50 range. On Saturday ours reached nearly 600.

The official Air Quality Index stops at 500, meaning we’ve now gone well beyond what experts ever predicted when they created the index in the first place.

These levels of fire pollution pose potentially deadly health risks. It’s more than just difficulty breathing, headaches, nausea, watering eyes and irritated skin. The worst kinds of particulate matter — those smaller than 2.5 microns — can lodge in your lungs or even pass through them into the bloodstream, where they can cause heart attacks or other health problems.

It’s no wonder that one of the many websites tracking AQI used a cartoon skull-and-crossbones icon to indicate this weekend’s risk levels.

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Smoke mixes with fog on Sunday, Sept. 13. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator

All things told, though, my own family’s been lucky — much luckier than those to the south. Our town never even came close to an evacuation order. Our home is safe, we’re relatively well-stocked, we have two brand-new filters in our air purifiers, and we work at home. We don’t need to expose ourselves unnecessarily. Aside from taking our elderly dog into the backyard a few times a day, we haven’t had to go outside since Thursday.

But what if we’d been closer to the flames, like so many of our friends and colleagues? Quite frankly, we might have been in serious trouble. For one thing, we’re down to our last N95 mask — not good enough for two people. Although we’re well stocked on pandemic-style cloth masks, they won’t protect us from particulate matter. Bigger picture, we don’t have a go-bag ready or nearly enough medical supplies, let alone a family evacuation plan for emergencies like this one.

That will need to change.

There’s a lot of talk about “the new normal” when it comes to climate change. Being prepared to hunker down at home or flee for your life has now become a big part of it.

None of this destruction should come as a surprise. The warnings about climate change, overdevelopment and decades of wildfire suppression have been repeated and intensified over the years.

We need to start listening to those warnings — and doing something about them. The conditions we’ve created will affect us all sooner or later.

Fire and smoke, like the other effects of climate change, don’t discriminate. They flow where they flow, following the natural patterns that have defined them for millennia. Everyone and everything in their paths get affected equally.

But the sins that helped feed those fires — those are not equal.

Fossil-fuel corporations, science-denying politicians, and greedy developers are among the worst offenders — those who brought the climate crisis to our forests, landscapes, towns and lungs.

We know this to be true. And yet, how many of them pay the price for their misdeeds? It’s the people who can’t flee or hide from the problems the powerful have caused who pay the highest prices: choking air, lost homes and memories, trauma. Sickness, collapsed wages, pain, suffering and death.

Burned fire truck
A burned-out fire truck. Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation (CC BY 2.0)

But the corporations that caused this crisis made record profits for decades. They ruined entire landscapes, then moved on to the next areas to plunder. Along the way their executives took home big bonuses and moved their mansions to areas less likely to burn or suffer other unnatural catastrophes.

Even the politicians who claim to understand the climate crisis don’t always commit to actions that match their words. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters this weekend that the fires are fueled by climate change, yet his administration continues to approve new fossil-fuel extraction permits. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown called the fires ravaging her state a “once-in-a-generation event,” implying that they’re an anomaly, yet these mass catastrophes now seem to happen almost every year.

We don’t have time for government and corporations to waffle. The homes and towns and lives lost to flame tell us that the climate crisis is here, affecting us now. The smoke choking entire states tells us that things need to change, and quickly. This month’s destruction and the potentially record-breaking hurricane season building in the Atlantic that will follow tell us the threats we’ll face have become wide and varied, and already affect millions of people in this country alone.

Once our eyes stop watering from the smoke, will the powerful finally open their ears to listen?

As I write this on Monday morning, our air quality has shown marginal improvements. The AQI in my town slowly dropped — first to 520, then 500. That remains hazardous to human health, but at least it’s no longer literally off the chart.

Still, even indoors, I struggle a bit to breathe. My eyes continue to water, blurring out the sight of my monitor as I type. My skin itches as it never has on my worst allergy days. I’m tired from lack of sleep, yet wired from lack of exercise. And my hearts feels as heavy as it ever has.

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The COVID-19 Crisis: Our Pandemic Coverage

Articles, essays and videos discussing critical issues about zoonotic diseases — and what’s going on behind the scenes while we’re coping with this crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a harsh light on critical issues related to wildlife, the environment and our human systems. Here you’ll find The Revelator’s coverage of the crisis — both about the virus itself and what’s going on behind the scenes. Plus we’ve got some tools to keep you connected to the planet during these difficult times.

Zoonotic Diseases:

Where Pandemics Come From — and How to Stop Them

Coronaviruses and the Human Meat Market

How COVID-19 Took Hold and Why We Must End the Wildlife Trade

5 Ways Environmental Damage Drives Human Diseases Like COVID-19

Pandemics Aren’t Just for People: Five Disease Threats to Wildlife

The Global Pet Trade: An Overlooked Culprit Behind Pandemics

Antibiotics: Big Ag’s Can of Worms

Politics and Society:

Spending Time in Nature During the Pandemic? You’re Not Alone — and That’s a Problem.

In This Time of Crisis, We Need to Keep Our Eyes Open

Elephant Hunts for Sale During a Pandemic

Food Waste in the Time of COVID-19: The Real Reason to Cry Over Spilt Milk

Pandemic Shines a Light on Critical Water Issues — Will Congress Fund Solutions?

No Sacrifices of the Public Interest in Times of Emergency

Bear-ly on the Radar: Indonesia’s Illegal Trade in Sun Bears Could Worsen in the Pandemic

Hunting for Game Wardens: A Shortage of Conservation Officers Threatens Wildlife. COVID-19 Could Make It Worse

Pandemic Spawns Dangerous Relaxation of Environmental Regulations

Keeping an Eye on Nature:

Now’s a Great Time to Become a Backyard Naturalist — Here’s How

Beat the COVID-19 Blues With These Wildlife and Nature Livecams

14 Inspiring New Environmental Books to Read During the Pandemic

Speak Up for Bats — Even in the Pandemic

18 New Environmental Books to Help You Through COVID-19 Isolation

Wildlife Rehabilitators Are Overwhelmed During the Pandemic. In Part, That’s a Good Thing.

Moving Forward:

A Green Renaissance: Moving the Needle for a Gentler Society

COVID-19 Reveals a Crisis of Public Spaces

Working From Home During the Pandemic Has Environmental Benefits — But We Can Do Even Better

New EU Biodiversity Strategy Can Reduce Risk of Future Pandemics — If It Fully Addresses Wildlife Trade

Should Environmentalists Embrace Universal Basic Income?

Want to Design a Livable Future? Try ‘Multisolving’

Could the COVID Crisis Provide an Opportunity for Thailand’s Captive Elephants?

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Pandemic Spawns Dangerous Relaxation of Environmental Regulations

The EPA allowed polluters to stop monitoring or even preventing their emissions, and many states followed suit. Here’s what happened — and how to fix it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of worrisome and needless regulatory relaxations that have increased pollution across the United States. Recent reporting by the Associated Press and other outlets has documented more than 3,000 pandemic-based requests from polluters to state agencies and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for waivers of environmental requirements. Numerous state governments, with the tacit encouragement of the EPA, went along with many of those requests. All too often, those waivers — requested, ostensibly, to protect American workers from exposure to the coronavirus — were granted with little or no review, notwithstanding the risks the resulting emissions posed to public health and the environment.

EPA invited this wave of waivers back in March, announcing it would relax its enforcement upon request, under cover of COVID-19. The policy allowed polluters that asserted COVID-19 prevented them from monitoring and reporting their own pollution to refrain from doing so without penalty.

Many of the largest regulated polluters, such as refineries and chemical plants, were designated as essential businesses that were to keep operating during the pandemic. But EPA’s waiver policy allowed these companies to send home “nonessential” environmental and safety inspectors whose job it is to protect the public. Only to an agency that devalues pollution impacts and protecting the public does such a policy make sense.

This policy also left EPA and state officials in the dark about where and why polluter self-monitoring had been halted. Many in the oil and gas industry raced to suspend Leak Detection and Reporting, a critical protection against fugitive toxic gas leaks. Without self-measurements, even refinery owners and operators may have been unaware of any hazardous contaminants their plants were emitting.

Strikingly, more than 50 of the facilities that obtained rule exemptions had troubling pre-pandemic records of environmental violations. Waiver petitions from such recidivists should have received the most careful and exacting scrutiny. But in the frenzy to grant passes to polluters under cover of the pandemic, even that sensible safeguard went unobserved.

Following the EPA’s lead, numerous states adopted and implemented unduly lax pandemic waiver policies. Texas granted more than 200 waiver requests, but the Lone Star state was not alone:

  • Regulators suspended in-person self-inspections at a nuclear test site in Nevada.
  • North Dakota officials granted a request to suspend groundwater sampling at a natural-gas processing plant where 837,000 gallons of liquid natural gas had spilled from a leak over the preceding five years.
  • Arkansas granted a long-term blanket waiver of safety testing for abandoned oil and gas wells.
  • Wyoming granted (mostly very large) oil and gas companies a pass on air-pollution emission rules.
  • Michigan approved requests from several cities to delay testing for lead in drinking water and for replacing the sort of lead pipes that created the horrific public health disaster in Flint.

These regulatory failures have occurred against the backdrop of a steady decline in both federal and state environmental enforcement. The numbers of government scientists and attorneys whose work focuses on enforcing environmental laws has dropped significantly in recent years. There have also been substantial decreases in the numbers of in-person government inspections of pollution sources, the volume of enforcement actions pursued, the number of environmental criminal investigations, and the amount of money that polluters have been compelled to spend on pollution control as a direct result of enforcement activities. EPA has all but abandoned its longstanding oversight of state enforcement work. And the federal agency has cravenly deferred to state enforcement (or nonenforcement) priorities, even though quite a few states lack the resources and/or political will to effectively enforce environmental standards.

Howls of protest and a federal lawsuit prompted EPA to terminate its COVID policy as of Aug. 31. But too much damage has already been done.

How do we move forward, even as the pandemic continues? Several measures are urgently needed to reinvigorate environmental enforcement in the United States. Certainly any overtly fraudulent suspension applications must be identified and be the basis for strict enforcement measures. Though we may never know the full scope of the damage, any available data collected by the regulated entities or the public during the enforcement suspension should be scrutinized to ensure that harms aren’t continuing. More federal and state money must be allocated to environmental enforcement work — and the size of EPA grants to state agencies must be meaningfully increased. The EPA and the states must devote time and energy to recruiting new enforcement professionals and support staffs. And — importantly — environmental agencies must upgrade the training they provide for newly hired staffers so mistakes by inexperienced rookies will be minimized.

Protecting government and private-sector employees from disease is unquestionably a legitimate and worthwhile goal. However, employee protection should not be used as an excuse to suspend government enforcement of critical environmental safeguards. The health of all Americans requires nothing less.

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.

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What’s the Value of a Mountain Lion?

The new book Cougar Conundrum looks at the “ecosystem services” argument for convincing predator-wary people to appreciate big cats.

The following is excerpted from The Cougar Conundrum: Sharing the World with a Successful Predator.

One popular approach to increasing tolerance for large predators like mountain lions is to speak to people’s wallet–mind connection rather than their hearts. Ecosystem services are benefits provided by wildlife and other nature that specifically benefit people. Ideally, these services can be quantified to emphasize their importance. Brazilian free-tailed bats, for example, provide millions of dollars in pest control to the agricultural sector each year, both by reducing the need for more pesticides and by reducing pest damage across the United States and Mexico. Globally, animals provide more than $200 billion in pollination services to maintain and grow the most important food crops that feed the human population.

The general idea behind reporting ecosystem services is that everyday people unconcerned about wildlife perk up when they hear about their economic value; subsequently, they increase their tolerance for wildlife and begin to appreciate the animals around them.book cover

The ecosystem services strategy has only rarely been used for mountain lions. The best example is that presented by wildlife ecologist Sophie Gilbert and her team at the University of Idaho. They not only estimated the economic value of services provided by mountain lions by reducing deer–vehicle collisions in dollars, they also measured it in human lives.

To accomplish this, they completed two different analyses. First, they calculated the economic contributions of the nascent population of mountain lions in the Black Hills of South Dakota, by comparing the number of deer–vehicle strikes before and after mountain lions re-established a breeding population. Once in place, resident mountain lions reduced deer collisions by 9%, which translates to an annual savings of approximately $1.1 million for the people of South Dakota. That’s an impressive savings.

Second, Gilbert’s team conducted a predictive calculation of what mountain lions could save people should they re-establish in the East. They predicted that mountain lions would reduce deer numbers by 22%, after which the deer density would stabilize again at a reduced (and healthier) number.

Over thirty years, the effects of re-established mountain lions on deer populations would result in 21,400 fewer injuries to people and 155 fewer human fatalities, and it would avert $2.13 billion spent in damages and reparation. Contemplating these figures makes one’s head spin.

In another ecosystem services study, researchers followed nine mountain lions in Colorado and discovered that they were disproportionately killing deer infected with chronic wasting disease (CWD).   This is a debilitating and contagious neurological disease in which animals suffer slow deterioration of the brain, resulting in abnormal behavior, lethargy, reduced awareness of one’s environment, starvation, and death. Game managers are particularly worried about CWD as it spreads from deer to elk and moose. The only way to stop, or at least slow, the spread of CWD is to hire sharpshooters to prune sick deer from the herd. If it’s true that mountain lions target CWD-infected deer (and we’d need to replicate the study with larger sample sizes to be sure), mountain lions could save state agencies the costs of hiring sharpshooters, and, more importantly, save untold thousands of deer, elk, and moose from terrible deaths. This is something even deer and elk hunters can appreciate.

The counterargument to citing ecosystem services as a conservation strategy to convince people that large predators are good is that it may backfire for species for which we lack information. The ecosystem services argument lays the burden upon biologists to get their act together and document all the positive roles animals play in natural systems so that they can then collaborate with economists to estimate each species’ net value. For mountain lions, most research is dictated by state agencies with no interest in permitting or funding this sort of study, and so it’s unlikely we’ll have a repertoire of ecosystem services research upon which to draw.

Keeping with the theme of speaking to people’s wallets, some researchers and conservation organizations bypass the ecological research and go straight to providing a financial incentive to people who conserve mountain lions and other predators. For example, the Northern Jaguar Project in Sonora, Mexico, with support from the American NGO Defenders of Wildlife, pays ranchers for photographs of carnivores captured on their properties: $300 for a jaguar, $150 for an ocelot, and $100 for a mountain lion.

This is real money in that part of Mexico, and it provides incentive to ranchers to keep animals alive. Carnivores can also continue to pay out over time as they are photographed again and again. In addition, such a system provides an incentive for ranchers to see wild game flourish on their land, which might in turn attract more wild cats, generating additional income.

The problem becomes in ensuring that the pot of money never runs dry — what happens when the ranchers aren’t paid to maintain carnivores on their lands? It’s referred to as the “white elephant” phenomenon in some circles when an NGO with the best of intentions invests in a community for a few years. Then the money dries up, after which people return to the way they were living prior to the “intervention.”

In contrast, though, some ranchers come to value the photos of rare species more than the cash incentive — they are trophies of a sort, and many ranchers feel pride in knowing they support healthy ecosystems.

Nevertheless, the heart of the counterargument to ecosystem services and other wallet-based approaches is that they may discourage people from recognizing the intrinsic value of wildlife above and beyond what they can do for us. Isn’t it a better approach to improving tolerance just to get people to fall in love with mountain lions, rather than to invest the money and time needed to estimate their economic value to human communities and healthy ecosystems?

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Elbroch. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

An Antidote to Despair: New Book Shares Stories of Ecological Restoration 

In The Reindeer Chronicles, Judith D. Schwartz shows how badly damaged landscapes are being restored across the world — and why more of that work is deeply needed.

“That which has been damaged can be healed.”

It’s a quote from ecological design pioneer John Todd that opens The Reindeer Chronicles,  a new book from author Judith D. Schwartz.the ask

It’s a fitting quote for a time when we’re facing multiple crises and good news is in short supply — and an apt beginning for a book that takes readers across the world to learn about the ways nature’s being harnessed to help restore some of the most damaged parts of our planet.

With stops in Spain, Saudi Arabia, Hawaii, New Mexico and Norway (that’s where the reindeer come in), Schwartz writes about landscape-scale environmental-restoration projects and the restoration of community that often goes along with them.

It’s work that she calls the “inverse of apathy and an antidote to despair.” And it’s work in which we can all participate.

“We’ve been trained to believe that finding solutions is a job for the experts,” she writes. “But many unsung eco-restorers are doing the work, often drawing inspiration from clever creatures like ants, butterflies and dung beetles.”

Writing about the power of nature to heal isn’t new to Schwartz, who’s also written books on the importance of water and soil restoration. But her latest endeavor takes more of a big-picture approach — and offers a dose of inspiration.

We spoke to her about what she learned from looking at large-scale restoration projects and how to put best practices to work in any place.

Why did you decide to write a book about landscape-scale restoration?

Often environmental inquiries get focused on one component, whether it’s carbon or water, and I just felt that there was much to be said about the whole picture. Many of the problems that we look at from a narrower lens can be dealt with through the synergies that happen when we restore an entire ecosystem.

When we talk about climate, one thing that has been missing is the role of functioning ecosystems in climate regulation. And that to me is a huge gap, because a healthy landscape regulates climate via the water cycle and via land-plant-animal-soil dynamics.

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Author Judith Schwartz. Photo: Tony Eprile

I was also really compelled by the work of [filmmaker] John Liu, who I write about in the book. I felt that the restoration he filmed in of the Loess Plateau in China [that helped lift millions out of poverty] was this huge, amazingly successful, large-scale effort that is an inspiration. As he says, once we know that it’s possible to restore large-scale, degraded ecosystems or landscapes, that opens up huge possibilities.

If we can restore ecosystems, then we’ve got solutions that not only will help us address climate change but also deal with food security, water security, human health, and war and conflict.

When you think about regeneration or restoration of land, what does that look like and how is success measured?

I think of it in terms of function. Is this land functioning? How are the carbon, water, energy and nutrient cycles? Are they functioning or have they been distorted?

Land degradation, biodiversity loss and loss of climate regulation can be restored by restoring these cycles. And they work together. In restoring the carbon cycle you’re also restoring the water cycle, because by returning carbon to biomass and to the soil organic matter and deeper soil strata, you’re also enhancing the land’s capacity to hold water and therefore restoring the water cycle.

To know if it’s working, a lot of people talk about biodiversity. For example, Neal Spackman, whose work in land restoration in the Middle East I write about in the book, says he knew the land was returning when he began seeing ants again. Soil cover — less bare soil — is also a metric that people use, as is the land’s capacity to hold water.

One of the things I was struck by in the book was how many of the stories about land restoration were also stories about human relationships. What kind of overlap of community and ecological restoration did you find?

I think that we have gotten disconnected from how much our landscapes are part of us and how much we respond to the land that we’re in. I remember John Liu saying, “the state of our landscapes is a reflection of the state of our consciousness.” And so I think the act of healing land is in itself healing to humans.book cover

What we do, and have done, to the Earth is reflected in what we’ve done to other people. We see this with colonialism, in terms of erasing Indigenous cultures and a large part of those cultures was the relationship to the land.

And I saw that in very profound ways through the work in this book that in allowing those voices to come to the fore, there’s healing for all. And part of that healing is not trying to impose a vision of how landscapes should be and really listening to the wisdom of people who have a profound and long-lasting relationship with a particular landscape.

The projects that you write about are all over the world, under varying conditions. Are there any common best practices that can guide people wherever they live?

Yes, and again John Liu really boiled it down by explaining that when a landscape is moving in the direction of restoration, it follows three trends: increasing biodiversity, increasing biomass and increasing soil organic matter.

Those concepts can be applied anywhere.

Let’s say someone has a lawn and they have one type of grass that looks like a carpet. Even if you just add clover in there, just adding more diversity, which either will happen on its own or if you have a seed mixture, that’s one positive thing. And the implications of that are that those plants are then bringing different nutrients into the soil. They’re feeding different microbes.

For increased biomass, let’s take the lawn again, you can leave some patches of plants that can become a meadow. Let things grow higher. Add more plants. That’s more biomass.

For soil organic matter, use composting. You can also work to build your soil by making sure you’re not using fertilizers and allowing grasses to grow higher, which means that their roots are going deeper.

There are lots of different ways that you can measure that. I really like a term that my colleague Peter Donovan of the Soil Carbon Coalition talks about, which is the notion of “biological work.”

Another way to think about whether the landscape is on the path towards higher function or restoration is how much biological work is happening. Think of a ray of sun. If that ray strikes the earth, is it hitting asphalt? Is it hitting a monoculture grass where the soil is compacted? Or is it hitting a lot of different leaf surfaces? The more surfaces and the more opportunities that ray of sunshine has to be used in the process of photosynthesis, then the higher the level of function of that land.

Without biological work making use of this energy, if our ray of sunlight hits, say, an asphalt driveway, that becomes heat. That this scenario is being played out across large areas of degraded landscapes and soil sealed over by roads, buildings and parking lots is an important narrative thread within the story of climate change.

What do you hope this book accomplishes?

I guess the first thing is to open up our range of what we think of as possible. We’re told what the problems are, and it’s almost like everything is a fait accompli. But once you know that certain things are possible, or as John Liu says, once you know that we can rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems, that throws everything open.

And it’s not just that restoring landscapes is possible — it’s also happening. This goes from small-scale efforts to extensive initiatives. For example, the AlVelAl/Commonland project is across nearly 2.5 million acres in southern Spain.

There’s also joy in working toward embracing the possibilities and working toward the solutions.

I always tell my friends that the happiest and most fulfilled people I know are those who are working to restore landscapes. Healing the landscape is healing to oneself. And the wonderful thing is that the landscape rewards you really quickly. Our earth systems want to heal.

And once we understand that healing ecosystems is a possibility and will contribute to addressing many of the challenges that we have — well, there’s work to be done. So let’s invite people into that work. It’s not only providing jobs, but it’s also providing meaning, because what can be more valuable and more life-affirming than healing our environments?

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YouTube Videos Inspire Unsafe Mountain Gorilla Tourism, Study Finds

Videos of people getting too close to, and touching, the rare apes motivates other people to want to do the same — and that could spread diseases like COVID-19 to a critically endangered species.

When the coronavirus pandemic eventually lifts, a lot of things in our daily lives will finally go back to normal.

Some things, however, may need to change on a more permanent basis.

Take ecotourism, for example. Before the coronavirus hit, thousands of people a year travelled to Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the opportunity to see critically endangered mountain gorillas in the wild. This was not just a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most tourists. The visits also generated incredibly popular social-media posts, with some YouTube videos drawing millions of eyeballs.

mountain gorilla
Mountain gorilla in Uganda. Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)

But here’s the thing: Tourism is both a boon to conservation efforts to save these species from extinction and a potential threat. Mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) are one of our closest nonhuman relatives; they share about 98% of our DNA, which means we can also share the same diseases. With only about 1,000 mountain gorillas on Earth, all of which live in two restricted habitats, a novel pathogen could rage through and devastate their populations. Mountain gorillas frequently suffer from viral respiratory diseases, and wildlife vets often need to dart symptomatic apes with antibiotics to help them overcome secondary bacterial infections. Even with those efforts, infectious diseases account still for about 20% of the species’ deaths each year, according to the veterinary organization Gorilla Doctors.

Could these rare animals also catch a more deadly disease such as COVID-19? It’s not all that unlikely a scenario, given prior behavior by tourists. A recent scientific study published in PLOS One analyzed nearly 300 mountain gorilla videos posted by tourists to YouTube. More than 200 of those videos depicted humans and gorillas in the same shots, while 40% showed the two species within arm’s reach or even making physical contact.

In addition to this lack of respect for physical distancing, only 3.5% of the videos showed humans obviously wearing masks.

These videos were all shot and posted well before the pandemic, of course — long before masks became the health standard of the day — but tourism authorities have long known about the risk of conveying human pathogens to gorillas. All operations — which closed this past March to protect the animals — already had standards in place that require tourists maintain at least a seven-meter (23-foot) distance between humans and apes, and some require masks.

This research shows that not only did people tend to ignore these standards before the pandemic, the videos that displayed the riskier behavior — including physically touching the gorillas — were by far more popular than the ones that depicted safer activity. And as a result, the number of videos posted has increased every year.

The paper calls this a “negative spiral,” where the videos depicting unsafe behavior become popular enough to motivate other people to copy the same behaviors.

Lead researcher Ryoma Otsuka, a graduate student at Kyoto University, says he was inspired to examine this phenomenon after seeing these types of videos and his own experience working in mountain gorilla habitat.

“During my fieldwork in Uganda, I heard that some tourists said that they wanted to touch gorillas or get touched by gorillas, as they have seen such too-close human-gorilla interactions in some YouTube videos,” he recounts. He even witnessed several of these interactions while he was in the field.

Given that personal history, Otsuka says he expected to find some videos of unsafe behavior, but the quantity he and coauthor Gen Yamakoshi uncovered — and their popularity — astonished him.

“It was surprising that there are some videos illustrating very close interactions and they were getting a lot of views and likes,” Otsuka says. The most popular videos — some of which have racked up millions of views — showed humans and gorillas on screen at the same time, and often involved some manner of contact.

gorillas YouTube
Screen shots of YouTube search results. The study found that videos received more viewers if the preview images showed both humans and gorillas in the same shot.

Otsuka is quick to point out that we shouldn’t necessarily blame individual tourists for this. Mountain gorilla tourism isn’t like a safari, where visitors watch animals from the safety and seclusion of vehicles. Instead people make long treks by foot up the mountain through unfamiliar jungle, and gorillas can be waiting around just about any turn.

On top of that, gorillas are sometimes the ones who approach humans, not the other way around.

“Many gorillas have been visited by tourists every day since they were born,” he says. “Sometimes, some gorillas do come close to you or just pass near you. So field staff, such as ranger guides and trackers, and tourists must be very, very cautious about the distance,” especially since the apes are habituated to human presence.

A Time for Adaptation

Otsuka says this research reveals the need for mountain gorilla tourism operations to adapt for these uncertain times and beyond, when asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers may still be traveling around the world and carrying the virus with them.

“I don’t know if — or when — mountain gorilla tourism will start up again,” he says. “If it does, I think much stricter tourism regulations will be needed. After the pandemic, I think most people including managers, field staff and even future tourists will need to be much more concerned about the risk of disease transmissions.”

He adds that the current pause in operations “might be a good time to rethink the tourism regulations.”

mountain gorilla
Mountain gorilla in Uganda. Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Those regulations are currently inconsistent across the three mountain gorilla range countries.

“Wearing masks has been proposed for many years in mountain gorilla tourism,” Otsuika says. “It’s mandatory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but not in Uganda and Rwanda. I hope wearing a mask will be mandatory for anyone who visits if mountain gorilla tourism starts up again.”

This, he suggests, might require work to see how current regulations and standards break down in practice. For example, are there any factors that made it hard to maintain the seven-meter rule, and why did masks show up in so few videos if they’re required in some places? He’d like to see workshops with rangers, tourism companies, lodges and tourists themselves to see what kind of consensus can be achieved.  “It will also help us get a more complete picture of human-gorilla interactions,” he says.

Of course, the pandemic may have taught at least some of us the need to continue to wear masks in risky situations, but how that will play out in the years ahead, and how that will factor into tourism operations, remains to be seen.

The Rwanda Development Board, which is responsible for gorilla tourism in that country, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

But at least one other organization is already adapting to a post-COVID world.

“We’ve evolved our procedures since this pandemic began,” says Donna Gorman, communications specialist for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, which conducts research and conservation efforts for the species. “We were already quite cautious around the mountain gorillas, but we reduced the number of people in the forest — research was halted, but protection needed to continue. Masks and gloves, handwashing, larger distance from gorillas… After each individual gorilla in a family is accounted for, the team moves 100 meters away. Also, our tracker teams now stay in the forest for two-week rotations, reducing the chance they’ll come into contact with the disease or spread it to the gorillas.”

Social Media Responsibility? Or Just Human Behavior?

On top of changing individual behaviors, should social-media companies also adapt and discourage people from watching videos that display unsafe human-animal interactions and could inspire other viewers to do the same?

There’s precedent, as a push from advocacy organizations has already inspired one such action in certain cases.

“Instagram heard us and launched a new ‘wildlife warning’ page, where every time users search for hashtags like #koalaselfie, #elephantride and #slothselfie a message pops up, informing them about the animal suffering behind the photos,” says Nicole Barrantes, a campaign assistant with World Animal Protection, US, which has also published a Wildlife Selfie Code encouraging people to pledge to not take wildlife selfies if getting the shot means getting too close to a wild animal.

Instagram tiger selfie filter
Screen shot: Instagram’s #tigerselfie filter.

“Moving forward, we believe people will be less inclined to support or seek out wildlife selfies now that they’re aware of the consequences for the animals,” she says.

Google, which owns YouTube, did not respond to an interview request to discuss this new mountain gorilla research or how they currently handle videos depicting unsafe behavior with wildlife.

But they and other social-media platforms may want to take notice. While researching this article, I found similarly unsafe mountain gorilla photos and videos on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Otsuka concentrated on YouTube because it’s so heavily used, but he says he hopes to conduct similar research on other platforms. He also suggests that other researchers might want to investigate this topic for other vulnerable species, such as orangutans.

And then there’s the human element: What inspires this unsafe behavior in the first place? “I am interested in how and why some people want to get closer to wildlife,” Otsuka says. “If some humans — not all, of course, but there must be some — have desires to get close to wildlife for better photos, videos, selfies and so on, where did such desires come from? How were such desires or expectations created in the different social, cultural or economic backgrounds? What do we make of the differences between those who have such desires and those who don’t?”

All of this speaks not just to our new post-pandemic reality, but the ongoing desire for people to experience wildlife, often in unsafe ways — like the woman who recently got kicked by a bison after getting too close for a selfie, or the craze for posing with baby tigers or lions, many of which were raised in inhumane conditions.

While many of these interactions may be driven by altruism or admiration, these cases illustrate how peoples’ actions can cause unintended consequences for themselves, animals or both.

“People love animals, and sometimes they love them too much,” says Barrantes. “Remember the rule of thumb: If you can hug, hold or take a photo with a wild animal, chances are it’s cruel.”

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Looking Back at the Past Four Years

With about two months until the 2020 election, our time to reflect on the environment grows short.

As the 2020 election fast approaches, we’d like to take a moment to look back at the past four years and be transparent about our plans for the coming months.

Regular readers probably know that The Revelator is published by the Center for Biological Diversity, a 501(c)3 nonprofit devoted to environmental issues. We’re editorially independent from the Center — we choose what stories we tell and how we tell them — but as employees of the nonprofit we’re also bound by the same rules that govern its operations.

That’s why you’ll read less about the Trump administration in these virtual pages in the months ahead. Nonprofits like ours must follow rules set by the Internal Revenue Service that prohibit what’s known as electioneering — advocating for or against, directly or by implication, any specific political candidate or party. That includes the presidential race, as well as federal and state races all the way down the ballot.

For environmental journalists, this obviously puts a few limitations on the types of stories we can tell until after Nov. 3, but there’s still a lot that we can — and will — talk and write about.

For one thing, government agencies and their employees aren’t running for elected office, and they still need watchdogs. For another, people around the country will soon get the chance to vote on environmental ballot initiatives and similar legislation, and there’s a need to educate readers about these issues. And of course, there’s still plenty of new science coming out about endangered species, climate change, pollution and related topics that need coverage — perhaps more than ever as the election takes over the rest of the media landscape.

Meanwhile the work we’ve done covering the Trump administration since 2017 remains something that our readers can look back on to help educate themselves about critical issues.

And on that note, here are a few of our top related stories. We haven’t covered everything the Trump administration has done since taking office — who could? — but you’ll find an interesting cross section of articles that address both politics and broader environmental topics. And those are issues that will remain at the forefront until — and long beyond — the 2020 election.

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A Critical Fight for the Rights of Nature

Ecuador’s Los Cedros Reserve, one of Earth’s most biodiverse habitats, could be wiped out by mining. A court case could save it — and set a precedent for the planet.

Should nature have rights? That question is being put to the test right now in Ecuador.

In 2008 the South American country made history when its new constitution declared that nature had “the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” It was an unprecedented commitment, the first of its kind, to preserving biodiversity for future generations of Ecuadorians.

The constitutional change did not automatically protect nature, but it gave citizens  what the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature describes as “the legal authority to enforce these rights on behalf of ecosystems. The ecosystem itself can be named as the defendant.”

Rio Los Cedros
Rio Los Cedros. Photo by Michael Wherley. Used with permission.

The country could soon make history again when its Constitutional Court hears a case that seeks to apply these rights of nature to a protected forest, known as Bosque Protector Reserva Los Cedros, against large-scale copper and gold mining.

The threat stems from a 2017 change in government policy that allowed mining concessions on 6 million acres of lands, including at least 68% of Los Cedros — part of a hasty attempt to boost the mining sector and compensate for declining oil revenues. Experts say that policy appears to be unconstitutional, which has led to the present showdown.

“Mining in protected forests is a violation of Articles 57, 71 and 398 of the constitution: the collective rights of Indigenous peoples, the Rights of Nature, and the right of communities to prior consultation before environmental changes, respectively,” says ecologist Bitty Roy of the University of Oregon, who has conducted research at Los Cedros since 2008.

A Vital Reserve

Los Cedros is a remote, pristine, 17,000-acre cloud forest in northwest Ecuador and one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.

Conservation biologist Mika Peck, of the University of Sussex, describes Los Cedros as “a biodiversity hotspot within a hotspot — and of global importance in terms of conserving our natural history.”

He adds, “the reserve and all it maintains is priceless.”

The reserve has been protected since 1988 due primarily to the work of manager Josef DeCoux and Australia’s Rainforest Information Center.

DeCoux tells me he was one of the “hippies” who moved from the United States to Ecuador in the 1980s to help “save the rainforest.”

He chose well. Not only does Los Cedros protect at least 250 species from extinction, it safeguards four watersheds. That means the court case is not just about preserving a biodiversity jewel; it’s about guaranteeing a livable environment to local people as well as protecting the forest’s own right to remain undisturbed.

A 2017 letter from 23 international scientists, including Roy and Peck, argued that “the value of this intact watershed is far greater than that of any possible mineral wealth that lies beneath it.” Another letter, released last month, called for the protection of Los Cedros and other protected areas from mining and carried signatures from conservationists Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson and 1,200 other scientists.

banded ground-cuckoo
An endangered banded ground-cuckoo (Neomorphus radiolosus) © Murray Cooper Photo. Used with permission.

The remoteness of the reserve was one of the things that pulled me to it a few years ago.

Inaccessible by road, the final ascent up to Los Cedros is a nerve-wracking, two-hour mule ride on a muddy track with sheer drop-offs and awe-inspiring views. Once there you’re immersed in a biological paradise. You can walk among the shaggy, epiphyte-laden trees dripping from the frequent rain showers brought by the low-creeping clouds; listen to the cacophony of some of the 358 bird species that greet the dawn; seek out the six species of cats, including pumas and endangered jaguars; get to know some of the 970 species of moths; or look for 186 species of orchids, one-third of which are endangered. They include several species of Dracula orchids, named for their blood-red petals and haunting faces.

Dracula orchid
A Dracula orchid (Dracula Polyphemus) observed in Los Cedros. Photo: Nicola Peel via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Each day I explored the reserve’s trails — kept short to minimize disturbance to the ecosystem — its uniqueness became more evident. Nearly two dozen species of frogs, almost all endangered — including a species of rainfrog able to change its skin texture and a glass frog known for its transparent abdomen — occupy streams so clean you can drink directly from them. During my visit DeCoux told me he was particularly proud of that pristine resource.

The reserve is also home to the endangered spectacled Andean bear and three species of monkeys, also endangered.

On a morning hike with one of the guides employed by the reserve, I saw a troop of one of those species, the critically endangered brown-headed spider monkey, one of the rarest primates in the world, with a population of about 250 individuals. As most of the troop moved on, one monkey hung back to grab and eat some fruit. Although we watched from 30 yards away, it soon started hooting at us and shaking a branch to scare us off.

A clear message that we’d encroached on its personal space.

Brown-haired spider monkey
A critically endangered brown-haired spider monkey (Ateles fusciceps ssp. fusciceps) observed in Los Cedros. Photo: Bitty Roy. Used with permission.

The Mining Threat Looms

Yet in an encroachment of national and potentially devastating proportions, in 2017 the government put more than two-thirds of Los Cedros under a mining concession to the Canadian mining company Cornerstone Capital Resources, in conjunction with ENAMI, the state’s mining company.

mining concessions
Mining concessions in and around Los Cedros Reserve. Image credit: Rainforest Action Group

More than seven million acres across Ecuador are now under concessions. Additional concessions cover major portions of Indigenous territory, which threatens not only the people’s livelihoods but their lives. The permits, the majority of which are in the highly biodiverse Andean cloud forests, were issued without consulting the affected communities.

A year ago DeCoux’s legal team succeeded in getting a provincial court to revoke Cornerstone’s mining permit because of the lack of consultation. But that hasn’t stopped the company from continuing to operate, according to Elisa Levy of the mining oversight collective OMASNE (Observatorio Minero, Ambiental y Social del Norte del Ecuador).

“They have built roads to the edge of the reserve,” she says, “and broken new trails in Los Cedros” — actions that compromise the integrity of the presently intact ecosystem.

ENAMI appealed the provincial court’s decision, and in May the Constitutional Court decided to hear the case under rights of nature, probably by the end of the year.

The latest development was “very good news indeed,” DeCoux wrote in a blog post. Without rights people perceive forests, rivers and oceans as objects to be used; but with rights they become subjects to be valued on their own terms.

The case matters not just for Los Cedros — it could set precedent for the entire country.

Two of the Constitutional Court judges, Ramiro Avila and Daniela Salazar Marin, issued a written statement on May 18 that acknowledges the biodiversity of Los Cedros and explicitly mentions that it is the home of the critically endangered brown-headed spider monkey and the endangered spectacled Andean bear. They further argue that the case will allow the court to rule on the “content” of the rights of nature, and to “develop parameters to set the limits of protected forests and the scope of responsibility for the state to monitor and follow up on mining concessions.” (Translated from Spanish.)

The Call to Protect

Habitat loss, now exacerbated by climate change, is the leading cause of extinction around the world. With the high number of endemic species in Los Cedros, and their small range, allowing mining exploration to continue will undoubtedly result in extinctions. In a research paper published in 2018 in the journal Tropical Conservation Science, Roy and others argue that permanently protecting Los Cedros, the last uncut forest in western Ecuador, is necessary to ensure lower-altitude flora and fauna can migrate freely to the higher altitudes found to the north, where Los Cedros borders the enormous 450,000-acre Cotacachi-Cayapas Ecological Reserve.

Peck echoes that conclusion. “The move to rule in favor of Bosques Protectores such as Los Cedros is vital to ensure protection of vital natural habitats, and the species they maintain, in a world that is going to undergo major climatic shifts,” he says. “Natural habitat is key to maintaining ecosystem services that buffer these changes and allow species to migrate and survive.”

Emerald glass frog
An emerald glass frog (Espadarana prosoblepon) observed in Los Cedros. Photo: Niocola Peel via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Those species remain ever-present in my mind.

The sound I most remember from Los Cedros is the eerie call of the pastures frog: a high, slow electronic bleating that reverberated back and forth over the ridge — as if to warn that all this could be lost. Reserves like Los Cedros make up one-third of the protected lands in Ecuador, so a ruling in favor of rights of nature here would be a bold move that would protect other forests from mining and ultimately allow the establishment of new conservation corridors.

If ever there was a time for bold moves that will surely make history, it is now.

Peck calls a ruling in favor of the Bosques Protectores “the only rational response in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.”

Levy is encouraged that the case will be heard under rights of nature, but remains cautious. “We don’t want to be too optimistic,” she says. “We know what’s at stake.”

For more on Los Cedros and the threat of mining in Ecuador, watch this video from the Rainforest Action Group:

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Western Wildfires Will Be a Boon for These Native Species

As scary as wildfires are for people living near them, burned forests create some of the most biodiverse ecosystems.

Earlier this month a series of lightning strikes touched off dozens of fires across California, burning 1.5 million acres, choking cities with smoke and claiming at least six lives. Outside California, large wildfires are burning in Colorado and Oregon, too.

For people who live near the path of flames or the drifting smoke, wildfire season can be dangerous. And this year’s sudden eruption of multiple blazes is stretching resources thin, as firefighters — already facing restrictions due to the pandemic — work hard to protect lives and property.

Amidst the barrage of media images of charred homes and sweeping flames, it can be easy to forget that for some native species that live in western forests, wildfires are actually beneficial and necessary, creating valuable habitat and some of the most biodiverse forest ecosystems.

Burned forests may seem “gone” or “dead” following a severe fire, but if you look closely “there’s an absolute treasure trove of life thriving in there,” says wildlife biologist Monica Bond, principal scientist at the Wild Nature Institute.

Longhorn beetles and other wood borers are usually the first to arrive after a fire, when they follow the smell of smoke to feast on recently burned trees, still rich in sapwood but lacking the ability to secrete the sticky, toxic resins that would normally fend off the insects. Black-backed woodpeckers often arrive next, feeding on beetle larvae and carving out nest cavities in the trees that will provide habitat for other birds after the woodpeckers move on.

Woodpecker on tree
A black-backed Woodpecker attending a nest in a tree cavity in a recently burned forest in the Deschutes National Forest, Oregon. Photo: Skip Russell, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

As flowers and shrubs begin to grow back, that draws more insects and birds. Certain wildflowers, like fire poppies, emerge only from the ashes, and wildfires can create bumper crops of morels, a group of beautiful, delicious mushrooms.

Mammals, meanwhile, arrive in waves, looking for different types of food. “You have seeds that have been exposed by the fire that small mammals are eating,” says Bond. That entices larger predators. Studies have also shown that burned forests are beneficial for numerous bat species.

“Then, as long as you don’t cut down the standing dead trees, you can have species like spotted owls returning, too,” she says. The snags, as the dead trees are called, also provide shelter for a range of forest life, including bluebirds, flying squirrels and Pacific fishers.

Even the fallen dead trees become an important component, cycling their nutrients back into the soil.

It’s a process that’s been repeated across western forests for millennia, including the Pacific Northwest, Canada’s boreal forests, the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. All have historically burned with a mix of fire types, including severe wildfires, says Bond.

California’s coast redwoods — a big concern this month as fires burned through Big Basin Redwoods State Park in Santa Cruz — are resilient to fire because their thick bark insulates them from the heat.

“Even if fire consumes their crowns — lethal for most conifers — the trunk of a redwood can sprout back to life,” Kristen Shive, senior scientist at Save the Redwoods League, wrote earlier this month. “If this happens, they will look really rough for a while and it will take years for their crowns to fill out again, but the tree will have survived.”

And in rare cases when the main trunk is too damaged by fire, the tree can still sprout new life from its base.

The wildfires that have burned through the West over the decades have resulted in a patchwork of forest types that create rich biodiversity.

Bond’s research found that, one year after the 2013 Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park, the burned area boasted a higher occupancy of spotted owls than even in nearby comparable green forests. One reason: The snags give the owls a good place to perch before they pounce on small prey that also flock to these newly burned areas in search of food.

“Of course, not every single animal loves fire,” she adds. “There are some that do well, and then others that don’t do as well, but there’s plenty of the green unburned forests.”

As ecologically valuable as these burned forests are, they are especially important because this type of ecosystem is short-lived.

“The animals that like the fresh burn, they do have to leave at some point as the forest changes — usually it’s less than 10 years,” she says.

Cut trees on the ground
Salvage logging three years following California’s Rim Fire. Photo: Tara Lohan

Biodiverse habitat created by burned trees is also at risk of being cut in post-fire “salvage” logging sales by the Forest Service and on private land, which Bond says is “ecologically a terrible idea.”

“The Forest Service always proposes it as ecologically necessary to ‘restore’ the forest,” she says. “But if you think about it from the perspective of a black-backed woodpecker, the fire was the restorative process and the burned forest is what it needs.”

There’s much that can and should be done to limit development in fire-prone areas and help existing communities become more fire safe, she says. But logging trees in forests miles from towns won’t make people any safer.

“Wildfire is just a natural part of the dynamics, like the rain or the snow, that happens in the forest,” says Bond. “I would love to see the day when we give these severely burned forests the protections that they deserve.”

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Marine Heat Waves Are Getting Worse. What Can We Do?

Being able to forecast marine heatwaves could help minimize ecological and economic damage. But first, scientists need to better understand what's driving these events.

This story was originally published by Ensia.

In the summer of 2015, Laurie Weitkamp was walking on the beach near her coastal Oregon home when she saw something strange: The water was purple. A colony of tunicates, squishy cylindrical critters that rarely come to shore, had congregated in a swarm so thick that you could scoop them out of the water with your hand. “I’d never seen anything like it,” she says.

Weitkamp, a research fisheries biologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Newport, Oregon, knew that something had been afoot in the northeast part of the Pacific Ocean since the fall of 2013, which was unusually sunny, warm and calm.

A mass of warm water stretched from Mexico to Alaska and lingered through 2016, disrupting marine life. Tunicates weren’t the only creature affected; sea nettle jellyfish all but disappeared, while water jellyfish populations moved north to take their place, and young salmon starved to death out at sea, according to a report by Weitkamp and colleagues. Scientists dubbed this event “The Blob.”

Marine heat waves like The Blob have cropped up around the globe more and more often over the past few decades. Scientists expect climate change to make them even more common and long lasting, harming vulnerable aquatic species as well as human enterprises such as fishing that revolve around ocean ecosystems. But there’s no reliable way to know when one is about to hit, which means that fishers and wildlife managers are left scrambling to reduce harm in real time.

Now, oceanographers are trying to uncover what drives these events so that people can forecast them and so minimize the ecological and economic damage they cause.

Unprecedented Heat

The Blob, which lasted three years, is the longest marine heat wave on record. Before that, a heat wave that began in 2015 in the Tasman Sea lasted more than eight months, killing abalone and oysters. A 2012 heat wave off the East Coast of Canada and the U.S., the largest on record at the time, pushed lobsters northward. It beat the previous record — a 2011 marine heat wave that uprooted seaweed, fish and sharks off western Australia. Before that, a 2003 heat wave in the Mediterranean Sea clinched the record while ravaging marine life.

Heat waves are a natural part of ocean systems, says Eric Oliver, an assistant professor of oceanography at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. As with temperature on land, there’s an average ocean temperature on any particular day of the year: Sometimes the water will be warmer, sometimes it will be colder, and every once in a while it will be extremely warm or cold.

But greenhouse gas emissions have bumped up the average temperature. Now, temperatures that used to be considered extremely warm happen more often — and every so often, large sections of the ocean are pushed into unprecedented heat, Oliver says.

Pelagic ocean ecosystems, however, have not caught up to these hotter temperatures. Organisms may be able to survive a steady temperature rise, but a heat wave can push them over the edge.

When blue swimmer crabs started dying in western Australia’s Shark Bay after the 2011 heat wave, the government shut down blue crab fishing for a year and a half. This was hard on industry at the time, says Peter Jecks, managing director of Abacus Fisheries, but it managed to save crab populations. Not all creatures were so lucky — abalone near the heat wave’s epicenter still haven’t recovered.

crab underwater
Blue swimmer crab in Australia. Photo: Richard Ling, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

“If you don’t have strong predictions [of marine heat waves], you can’t be proactive. You’re left to be reactive,” says Thomas Wernberg, an associate professor of marine ecology at the University of Western Australia.

See Them Coming

After Wernberg saw his region’s sea life devastated by the heat wave, he recruited scientists from many disciplines in 2014 to begin studying these extreme events in what became the Marine Heatwaves International Working Group. The group held their first meeting in early 2015 and has since created protocols for defining and naming marine heat waves, tracking where they happen and measuring their ecological and socioeconomic impacts.

If we could see heat waves coming, aquaculturists, fishers and wildlife managers would have a better chance at saving money and species, Wernberg says. Seafood farmers could hold off stocking their aquaculture facilities with vulnerable species. Lawmakers could enact seasonal fishing closures or temporarily expand protected areas. Scientists could store animals or seeds of vulnerable plants.

That’s why scientists around the world are trying to understand what triggers extreme warming in the ocean. Oliver is one such scientist. He feeds ocean data gathered by scientists, satellites, buoys, and deep-diving robots into computer modeling software to identify the forces that drive marine heat waves.

It’s a relatively new field of research for which there are still few definitive answers. But past heat waves can be broadly classified into two categories, Oliver says: those driven by the ocean and those driven by the atmosphere.

For an example of an ocean-driven heat wave, Oliver points to the 2015 Tasman Sea heat wave. An ocean current that flows south down the East Coast of Australia normally veers toward New Zealand, but in 2015 it pulsed westward toward Tasmania, bringing a wave of warm water from the tropics that lingered more than six months. “Tropical fish were seen in water that is normally almost subpolar in temperature,” Oliver says.

On the other hand, a 2019 heat wave in the Pacific, the so-called “Blob 2.0,” was brought down from the atmosphere, according to Dillon Amaya, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Using computer models, Amaya found that this heat wave emerged when a weather system over the Pacific lost steam, leading to weaker-than-usual winds. Wind helps cool the ocean by evaporating surface water in the same way a breeze cools a person’s sweaty skin. But stagnant air above the Pacific locked more of the sun’s heat into the water that year.

Amaya is able to simulate heat waves thanks to recent technological advances. Scientists have known for decades that marine heat waves exist, he says, but “we have just begun to recognize these events as unique and deterministic — something we can predict — in the last five to 10 years.”

That understanding inspired researchers to build computer simulations capable of playing out complicated ocean processes by weaving together information about ocean and atmospheric currents, sea surface temperature and salinity. Creating these simulations helps them learn more about heat wave mechanics, which lays the groundwork for predicting future events.

Back in Oregon, Weitkamp is part of the group that manages the Pacific Salmon Treaty between the U.S. and Canada. As heat waves like The Blob and Blob 2.0 deplete fish populations, the group is trying to figure out how to create policies better suited to this new normal. Knowing when the next one might hit could help.

“These heat waves have been a good wake-up call,” she says. “People are trying to figure out how they’re going to adapt.”