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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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 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.
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.”
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
“Routine flaring” from oil wells produces emissions that harm the climate and human health. Two states have proposed new rules to reduce it, just as the true scope of the problem emerges.
A night time satellite image of the United States shows a few concentrations of glowing lights, but not in the places you’d expect. The brightest spots aren’t the big cities but are instead clustered over North Dakota, west Texas and eastern New Mexico.
That’s because this infrared photo, produced by the nonprofit SkyTruth, captures not the lights of urban centers but heat from oilfields burning, or flaring, natural gas in 40-foot-tall stacks.
It’s also capturing a big problem.
Satellite-detected natural gas flaring on August 12, 2020. Map by Skytruth
The United States is fourth in the world in the volume of gas flared, following only Russia, Iraq and Iran.
There are a number of reasons why drillers flare gas.
“The most benign reason for flaring is safety,” says Gunnar Schade, an associate professor in atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M. Flaring releases pressure so that highly combustible materials don’t explode as wells are being drilled and prepared for production. Sometimes gas is also vented, without combustion, directly into that atmosphere.
“But that’s actually the exception in the oil and gas field,” he says. “The bulk is routine flaring.”
And “routine flaring” isn’t done for safety; it’s done solely to save industry money. But it comes at a cost to public health and the environment instead.
It’s most commonly used in oilfields like North Dakota’s Bakken shale, the Eagle Ford shale in Texas and the Permian basin, which straddles Texas and New Mexico.
Companies in these fields are most interested in oil, but what comes to the surface is a mixture of hydrocarbons, including raw gas, which is largely methane. Some companies have opted to just burn off these gases in flares instead of spending money on capturing and transporting it to market or waiting until the infrastructure to accomplish that has been constructed.
“To drill an oil well with the intention of never acquiring pipeline capacity to get the gas that’s produced along with oil to market is just wrong,” says Thomas Singer, a senior policy advisor at Western Environmental Law Center. His research found that some companies in New Mexico have flared the same well for three or four years. One company, Ameredev, flared 78% of its gas.
Now, more than a decade after the routine flaring became a glaring problem, states are taking some steps to reduce the practice. And the news coincides with research that finds the practice is more widespread, and dangerous, than previously understood.
Passing the Buck
The most obvious problem with flaring is that it’s simply wasteful. The value of flared gas in Texas’ portion of the Permian in 2018 was estimated at $750 million, according to research by the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis. The state could supply its residents with all of their gas needs with what is burned off as “waste” each year, the Institute found.
But in the process of burning off the gas, flares also release smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas we need less of, not more.
“Although a single flare may be a relatively small source, the large number of flares and high variability of NOx production per flare can cause large-scale atmospheric impacts visible from space,” Schade wrote in an essay about his research in The Conversation.
Flares, especially when they’re aren’t burning properly, can also release a host of other harmful emissions, including volatile organic compounds such as cancer-causing benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and black carbon.
And when flares are partially or totally unlit, they also vent methane — a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term. In North Dakota researchers found that incomplete combustion of flares were responsible for nearly 20% of the methane emissions in the Bakken shale.
Partially lit or unlit flares aren’t an anomaly.
Helicopter surveys measuring methane emissions in the Permian basin found that about 11% were malfunctioning, with 4% being totally unlit and venting methane. The research was conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund and others.
This doesn’t make it into official numbers. When the EPA calculates the sources of air pollution, it uses previous studies to support an assumption that “properly operated flares achieve at least 98% destruction efficiency,” with 2% or less of the raw gas getting into the atmosphere uncombusted or partially burned. But this new research showed that emissions were likely 3.5 times higher than what would be calculated using the EPA’s methodology.
“What we found, based on our surveys, is that the efficiency — and this is conservative estimate — is probably closer to 93% based on the number of malfunctioning flares,” says Colin Leyden, the director of regulatory and legislative affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund.
These flares — whether fully burning, partially lit or unlit — “are just a massive source of climate pollution,” says Singer.
Flares don’t make great neighbors, either. Those who live nearby are subject to the roaring noise of the fire, light pollution and other harm from the emissions.
A 2019 study published in Environmental Science and Technology looking at flaring in the Eagle Ford shale in Texas found that between 2012 to 2016 a whopping 43,887 flares emitted an estimated 4.5 billion cubic meters of gas. And those flares were highly concentrated.
“Of the 49 counties in the region, 5 accounted for 71% of the total flaring,” the researchers wrote. “Our results suggest flaring may be a significant environmental exposure in parts of this region.”
Flares in the Eagle Ford emitted more than 15,000 tons of volatile organic compounds and other contaminants in 2012 — more than the pollution from six of the region’s oil refineries, an investigation by the San Antonio Express-News found.
The health implications may also be generational. Pregnant women living within three miles of frequent flaring had about 50% greater chance of giving birth prematurely, a study published last month in Environmental Health Perspectives found. Preterm birth ratchets up the chances of a baby developing chronic health problems or even dying.
“The fact that much of the region is low income and approximately 50% of residents living within 5km of an oil or gas well are people of color, raises environmental justice concerns about the potential health impacts of the oil and gas boom in south Texas,” the researchers concluded.
Gas flares at a well in the Powder River Basin, Wyoming. Photo: Tara Lohan
Understanding the Problem
The problem is a big one and much worse than officially reported, new research suggests.
Work by Schade and colleagues reviewing satellite images of Texas oilfields found that from 2012 to 2015 volumes of gas flared were double the amount that companies reported to the state. Other research has found discrepancies in North Dakota and New Mexico, too.
So it’s not surprising that a 2020 study in Science Advances found record high levels of methane emissions in the Permian that were double those found in previous studies at 11 other major oil and gas fields. The wasted emissions were enough to supply gas power to 2 million homes.
“The high methane leakage rate is likely contributed by extensive venting and flaring, resulting from insufficient infrastructure to process and transport natural gas,” researchers found.
In many of these booming oilfields drilling outpaces infrastructure — and regulators don’t seem to mind much. Or at least they didn’t. But growing backlash against routine flaring is forcing some states to take a harder look.
New Rules and Potential Solutions
During the Obama administration the Bureau of Land Management took a stab at trying to reduce methane emissions from oilfield operations on federal and tribal lands, including those from routine flaring.
The Methane Waste and Prevention Rule was enacted in 2016, but the Trump administration moved to roll back parts of the rule in 2018. A federal judge struck down that rollback in July. But it likely won’t be the end of legal challenges.
For oilfields not on federal or tribal lands, though, regulatory authority falls to the states.
“New Mexico has gone to great lengths to pass the Energy Transition Act and move its electric power sector from coal to renewables,” says Singer. Now the state has turned its focus toward reducing climate pollution from oil and gas operations.
Last month the state released two new draft rules for curbing emissions from oil and gas operations, including methane from flaring that would require companies to capture 98% of their gas by 2026 — one of the most aggressive proposed regulations in the country to date. The rules will need public comment and agency revision, but Singer is hopeful that the process could be completed this year or early 2021.
The proposed rule, he says, is a good improvement, but it could be stronger.
“We want the agency to just flat out, say, ‘if you don’t have a contract for a pipeline to get your gas processed, you just can’t drill,’” he says.
Of course, a rule is only as good as its enforcement.
“There needs to be a lot more transparency and accountability provisions so that the public knows how well the state’s doing and can let the state hear about it if they’re not enforcing the rule strongly,” says Singer. “We’re also pushing hard for third-party verification or auditing of company reporting.”
Texas has seen movement on the issue, too, but not nearly as extensive as New Mexico’s effort. This month the Texas Railroad Commission, the agency that regulates oil and gas operations, issued a proposed change to a form used by industry to request permission to flare or vent gas. Under the proposed changes, companies would need to more thoroughly explain why they need to flare and provide better data to assess their compliance.
This could cut down on the amount of routine flaring. But Leyden wants to see more. He says the Environmental Defense Fund is calling on Texas to end routine flaring in the Permian basin by 2025. Some companies are on board, and so are investors, he says.
“What’s really needed is leadership on the regulatory front to bring the rest of the industry along,” he adds.
But could reducing flaring end up just meaning more pipeline construction? That, too, would come with a steep environmental cost. Instead, Leyden says, companies can plan to build better facilities with centralized collection storage.
“If natural gas has any role in the future — whatever your opinion on that may or may not be — it’s going to have to get to a zero or near-zero emission profile in its upstream production,” he says. “And right now what we’re seeing in the Permian basin in methane emissions, as well as from flaring, is they have a long, long way to go for that.”
Singer says advocating for no drilling without adequate infrastructure isn’t a prompt to build more pipelines.
“Saying you can’t drill if you don’t know how your gas is getting to market isn’t saying to build a lot of pipelines,” he says. His organization hopes to see a transition to clean energy — and having more investment in networks of pipelines and processing facilities doesn’t align with that either.
Gas flaring and pipeline building, he says, are “both fights that need to be waged.”
After a half-century of failures, the recovery of the Connecticut River ecosystem hangs in the balance. Will authorities finally act to save it?
Rivers should not die in the dark.
On Aug. 31 FirstLight Power Resources is expected to file its final license applications with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to continue operating three hydro facilities profiting off massive water diversions from the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. The conditions written into FERC licenses can last up to 50 years.
These applications signal the beginning of the final chapter in determining the future of the four-state river at the heart of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, founded to protect a 7.2-million-acre watershed. Their rendering will decide the future of migratory fish, river flows and a host of embattled ecosystem conditions on New England’s longest river, some running counter to laws in place since 1872.
Holyoke Dam in 2018. Photo: By Simtropolitan via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
When decisions affecting a river for decades are being made, the public has a right to know of the stakes, the players and the key decisionmakers. In this case the public knows little of issues potentially affecting 2.4 million people in a sprawling watershed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service and Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife have been at the table in this FERC license-determining process since 2012. But three years back, all parties signed nondisclosure agreements with FirstLight — ostensibly to facilitate settlement discussions on flows, habitat, dismal fish passage and endless mortality cycles at these Massachusetts hydro sites. Those NDAs have kept these issues largely out of the media, even as initial settlement talks broke off a year and a half ago.
Since 2012 I’ve been a FERC-recognized intervener in the relicensing process. I chose not to sign the company’s confidentiality agreement in order to preserve the right to address and highlight the critical, long-term decisions being made about the Connecticut River in a process that remains largely out of public view.
FirstLight is part of the giant Canadian investment outfit PSP Investments, which arrived in Massachusetts four years back to buy up these facilities from GDF Suez. In 2018 it quickly reregistered the facilities as limited liability tax shelters in Delaware. Regardless of their state of incorporation, the licenses they now vie for will each be subject to current federal and state environmental laws, under terms mandated by the fish agencies and FERC.
Of more than 500 U.S. refuges, Conte is one of just three with “fish” in its name. Today hopes for the long-term protections of its fish and the river comprising its central artery rest heavily in the hands of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service and Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. They have “conditioning authority” in these relicensings — mandates to protect the life in this river system. FERC, the ultimate relicensing umpire here, is also mandated to ensure compliance with environmental laws. For the fish agencies this is their one chance to redeem some far-reaching mistakes made by their predecessors.
Forty-five years ago these agencies — operating on limited information and pursuing dreams of reprising a salmon not seen on this river since 1809 — signed agreements with different owners of these facilities. That hobbled, for generations, a four-state migratory fisheries restoration for American shad and river herring and a recovery for federally endangered shortnose sturgeon. They sanctioned the daily use of the massive river-reversing pumped storage facility still chewing through generations of migratory and resident fish today. Concurrently they left two miles of the river emptied downstream, its flow diverted into a turbine-lined power canal that all migrants must negotiate in order to access the next 50 miles of open spawning habitat. Just 5 shad in 100 have ever succeeded. Perhaps worse, the river’s only documented natural spawning habitat for the endangered shortnose sturgeon was left without life-sustaining flow.
A Tale of Two Salmon, a River Without Fish
The last wild salmon run on the Connecticut River was recorded in 1809.
Science later revealed the salmons’ end was likely a combination of warming temperatures following the unusually cold period known as the Little Ice Age coupled with modern dam building.
For 165 years there were no salmon. Then, in 1974, a single fish arrived at Holyoke Dam. Far from being a native of the Connecticut River, this was a new hybrid — a returning fish produced at one of several federal hatcheries completed five years prior. This salmon’s genes, like the genes of all the fish that would return in subsequent years, were cobbled together using salmon from several still-surviving runs in northern New England.
This past June 30 marked a different milestone on the river. It ended the first season in 46 years when not a single hatchery-derived Atlantic salmon returned past Massachusetts’ Holyoke Dam.
The unnatural history event passed with little fanfare. Its silent-spring absence marks the end of a half-century-old program that consumed hundreds of millions of dollars and ate up far too much room in a badly broken ecosystem. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service abandoned its hatchery program at the end of the 2012 migration season, but across its 43 years — which saw the annual release of millions of fry and smolts to tributaries in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire — so few adults returned that no one was ever allowed to catch one.
Salmon at hatchery in 2012, just before the program’s discontinuation. Photo: Catherine J. Hibbard/USFWS
This second salmon ending highlights the fish agencies’ last shot at returning ancient ocean connections to the river’s still-viable, age-old runs of American shad, blueback herring and federally endangered shortnose sturgeon in three states.
All these species have been guaranteed safe passage on U.S. rivers, going back to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Holyoke Company v. Lyman in 1872. That finding centered on the dam in Holyoke, Massachusetts and held that private dam owners operating on U.S. rivers must provide for the free movement, upstream and down, of migratory fish past their facilities.
Its implementation on New England’s river is now 148 years overdue.
A River in Reverse
What’s ultimately at issue here is flow.
Having taken a back seat for generations, wild runs of shad, herring and sturgeon remain in desperate need of passage and consistent, exponentially increased river flow in FirstLight’s hydro-complex dominated reach.
It’s literally the weight of water that matters most to FirstLight. It’s money in the bank. And where flow diversion is concerned, it’s been a pretty much a free ride for companies here for the past 50 years.
The 20 miles of river backed up into Vermont and New Hampshire behind Turners Falls Dam are massively suctioned for hours at up to 15,000 cubic feet per second to fill the 4-billion-gallon reservoir above the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station.
Northfield’s suction is so violent it literally reverses the Connecticut’s current for up to a mile downstream at times, erasing the essence of a living river system. The station kills everything it sucks in, from tiny fish eggs to full-size eels. In pumping mode it suctions the equivalent of 3,600 seven-bedroom mansions, each filled with the aquatic life of a river, vaporized every hour, for hours on end. Agency studies on America shad show tens of millions of eggs and larvae extinguished at Northfield annually, plus the deaths of over 2 million juvenile shad sucked in on migrations back to the sea. Five migrant species are subjected to Northfield. In all 24 species live here, most unstudied.
Northfield’s operations are nothing like classic hydro, operating to produce virgin electricity via a dam in or adjacent to a river. It’s actually an electric appliance, built to take advantage of excess, unused megawatts produced nightly at the nearby Vermont Yankee nuclear station. Northfield burns electricity to pump water from the river a mile uphill to into its reservoir tank, which was created by blasting off the top of a mountain. The company’s original owners would buy up Vermont Yankee’s cheap electricity to power its giant, reversible turbines. Later, during peak energy times, that now-lifeless river water would get sent back through the turbines to generate hours-long pulses of energy at peak market prices.
It’s a buy-low, sell-high operation, still running at the expense of a river system six years after Vermont Yankee shut down.
Northfield is a net-loss energy machine — a giant underground appliance consuming massive amounts of grid electricity, half of it now generated by the climate-scorching natural gas that dominates New England’s power grid today. The station consumes 25% to 33% more juice than the secondhand megawatts it sends back by dumping deadened river water back through its turbines. It and a smaller pumped storage station in Connecticut are responsible for gobbling up 1.4% percent of the region’s energy in order to reproduce the few hours of secondhand juice they regenerate. According to grid operator ISO-New England, they are the only facilities whose operations flush out as negative input in the regional power mix.
Northfield has never generated a single watt of its own electricity. And though it may be fine as blunt instrument for use during the occasional power grid slump or rare emergency blackout, its endless, river-crippling, pump-and-purge cycle of regenerated megawatts is unnecessary for the daily operation of the New England grid. While its owners brag of being able to power a million homes for a few hours, they never mention having already burned through the energy of 1.25 million homes to do so. After its daily flush, Northfield is virtually dead in the water and must begin pulling from the grid and sucking life from the river all over.
Past mistakes not only allowed for this massive upstream disruption, they sanctioned diversion of nearly all flow, as well as all migrating fish, into a downstream power canal that on average just 5% of shad have ever successfully negotiated. That left another two miles of New England’s river dysfunctional, with the company providing just a dribble flow of 400 cubic feet per second in the riverbed in spring, when fish are moving upriver. That riverbed remains emptied of all flow more than half the other days of the year.
The most critical time for sustaining flows and the river’s migrants is April through June, when New England’s energy consumption is at its low annual ebb. But federal and state studies and in-river findings show that spring flows will need to be increased by a factor of 20, supplying 8,000 cfs rather than the current brook-like drizzle of 400 cfs. That’s what it will take to guide shad and blueback herring upstream in the river past Turners Falls Dam. That will also provide this river’s only endangered migrant the consistent flows required to successfully allow the shortnose sturgeon to spawn and ensure its larvae can develop in the cobbles at an ancient river pool in that impoverished reach.
Back in 1967, when four New England states and these agencies signed the “Statement of Intent for the Cooperative Fishery Restoration Program for the Connecticut River Basin,” they projected some 38,000 salmon would return annually to this four-state ecosystem.
For salmon, a pinnacle of sorts was reached in 1981, when 592 were tallied passing Holyoke. But for a hybrid fish whose wild prototype disappeared 160 years prior, it was downhill from there. Most years fewer than 100 salmon returned to the river.
That 1967 agreement also set annual run targets of one million American shad heading upstream, with 850,000 shad passing Turners Falls and 750,000 entering Vermont and New Hampshire habitats above Vernon Dam. The highest shad return saw 720,000 passing Holyoke in 1992.
Sadly, they’ve never made it much farther. The run stops in Massachusetts.
Just 36 miles upstream of Holyoke, all semblance of a successful restoration ends when the annual shad run reaches Turners Falls Dam. Of the 537,000 shad that passed Holyoke in 2017, just 48,000 — a mere 9% — squeezed back into the river beyond Turners Falls.
Turners Falls Dam. Photo: Charles Fulton (CC BY 2.0)
The annual inversion at the next upstream dam in Vermont illustrates the perils on this broken river. In 2017 29,000 or 59% of the shad that survived the miseries of Turners Falls were subsequently counted passing Vernon Dam, 20 miles upriver. That inverted interstate ratio has been the case since 1975, with few shad managing to break out beyond the brutal ecosystem conditions in Massachusetts.
Why the Restoration Failed
The current restoration, congressionally authorized in 1967 and still operating today under the moniker of the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission, made their biggest blunder in 1975 when they signed off on new license requirements for upstream fish passage. They ultimately chose a design based on hydro project fish ladders on Washington State’s giant Columbia River, known for huge Pacific salmon runs. What got built was a three-ladder fish passage that forced all migrants out of their ancient river highway and into the byzantine maze of the company’s power canal, while leaving two miles of riverbed all but emptied of flow.
Scaled down and put in place at Turners Falls, it worked fine for the program’s few successfully returning hybrid salmon but failed immediately for 95% of the hundreds of thousands of migrating shad. No big run has ever passed that site, leaving three states without their promised bounties. Vermont and New Hampshire remain this river’s shad deserts today.
The Prescription
It’s now 2020. At this late date, corporate re-registrations can’t hide what’s legally required and a half-century overdue on New England’s river. The last opportunity to undo those festering mistakes for the Connecticut now rest in the hands of the National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife. They are the people’s gatekeepers, mandated to guard the public trust — agencies with the authority to change to the generations-old crippling conditions here in Massachusetts.
Across 45 years of tracking fish runs passing upstream at successive dams on the Connecticut, shad counts have averaged 315,369 at Holyoke, 17,579 at Turners Falls, and just 9,299 at the Vernon Dam in Vermont. But recently long-term federal and state studies on passage and juvenile survival for American shad have led to new minimum benchmarks for fish passage at each dam to ensure the long-term survival of the river’s runs.
Using those findings, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the four states have formally adopted new Connecticut River fish passage goals. They include annual minimums of 687,000 shad passing Holyoke, 297,000 passing Turners Falls, and 227,000 at Vernon Dam annually. Those federal and state targets are now part of the public record in the current FERC relicensings. Their implementation would also ensure the endangered shortnose sturgeon gets the flows needed to begin its recovery here.
The time has come for facilities operating and profiting off the life of New England’s river to come into compliance with the laws of the land, including the Supreme Court’s 1872 finding in Holyoke Company v. Lyman, the Anadromous Fish Conservation Act of 1965, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and a host of others. For the fisheries agencies charged with protecting a river’s bounty, standing up for their implementation is the sole prescription for success in a four-state restoration undertaken when back Lyndon Johnson was president.
By law, by right and by the public trust, the Connecticut River’s time has come.
Connecticut River. Photo: Rebecca Siegel (CC BY 2.0)
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.
Here’s what we know (and don’t know) about how dangerous PFAS chemicals travel ocean currents and harm wildlife — and what that could mean for humans.
In seabird after seabird, Anna Robuck found something concerning: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, lurking around vital organs.
“Brain, liver, kidney, lung, blood, heart,” Robuck says, rattling off a few hiding spots before pausing to recall the rest. Robuck, a Ph.D. candidate in chemical oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, quickly settles on a simpler response: She found the chemicals everywhere she looked.
PFAS — a group of synthetic chemicals — are often called “forever chemicals” due to their quasi-unbreakable molecular bonds and knack for accumulating in living organisms. That foreverness is less of a design flaw than a design feature: The stubborn, versatile molecules help weatherproof clothing; smother flames in firefighting foam; and withstand heat and grime on nonstick pans.
Through consumption and disposal, the chemicals seep into ecosystems and bodies, where they have been linked to cancers, pregnancy complications, and reproductive and immune dysfunction. Recent attention has focused on the prevalence of PFAS in drinking water.
“Over the past 10-15 years we’ve really developed this super negative picture of what PFAS do to humans,” Robuck says. “But we’ve barely scratched the surface of that in wildlife.”
One particular area of concern is the marine ecosystem. Long seen as a bottomless sink for pollutants, the ocean is a final stop for PFAS trickling into the ecosystem. Once in the ocean, PFAS can persist for decades or longer — and travel long distances. As a result, a growing body of scientific research suggests that marine wildlife are accumulating dangerous amounts of “forever chemicals.”
“If we continue to emit PFAS, then the capacity of the ocean to dilute them is going to be exceeded,” says Jamie DeWitt, an environmental toxicologist at Eastern Carolina University. “For all we know, oceans could be reservoirs that re-pollute the land.”
Journeying Across the Globe
Coastal environments seem especially vulnerable to PFAS seeping from the chemical plants and military bases responsible for heavy contamination. Charlotte Wagner, a researcher at Harvard University studying the global transport of pollutants, says it’s still unclear what fraction of PFAS pollutants remain contained at their source, and what fraction has already leached into other environments.
But the fact that they do spread — and far — is clear. They generally wind up in oceans, according to Wagner. And not just the ones nearby. Studies in the early 2000s showed that PFAS survived decades-long journeys from manufacturers to remote ocean basins without breaking down.
“The ocean is not this static pool or bathtub,” she says. Large-scale ocean circulation moves pollutants huge distances across the globe. Some varieties of PFAS may degrade slightly over the course of years, until they convert into one of the more stable “terminal PFAS” subgroups, including PFAAs.
“To the best of our knowledge PFAAs don’t degrade at all under natural environmental conditions,” says Robuck. Rather than diluting PFAS to infinitely low concentrations, oceans carry them to remote areas, like the Arctic and Antarctic.
Other pollutants that reach the ocean, like DDT and PCBs, will stick to algae and sediment that eventually fall to the ocean floor. “That is a really important removal process,” Wagner says. “For PFAS, that process is minor.” Plants, algae and sediment only remove a small fraction of PFAS from the water column. That leaves more to accumulate in animals, reaching concentrations thousands of times higher than surrounding waters.
And those chemicals could travel right back to humans. Eating a lot of seafood, especially fish high on the food chain like tuna, would be concerning, she says.
But it’s not just fish — and humans eating them — that are at risk. A study last year reported PFAS in seawater and plankton dozens of miles off the Mid-Atlantic coast. Other research has revealed PFAS compounds — even some that have been previously phased out of production — in manatees, loggerhead turtles, alligators, seabirds, polar bears, dolphins and whales.
The broad, flat back of right whale. Photo: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Measuring Harm to Ocean Life
In North Carolina’s Cape Fear River, striped bass carrying high levels of PFAS showed distinct signs of impaired immune and liver function. But in the vastness of ocean water, can PFAS levels be high enough to cause harm?
“In recent years there have been increases in immune-based diseases in turtles and dolphins,” says DeWitt. One of the most well-studied health effects of PFAS is immune dysfunction. Most experiments are limited to humans, rodents and chickens, but researchers are piecing together the role of PFAS in marine immune issues.
One study concluded that PFOS, a phased-out PFAS that still circulates today, triggers “chronic immune activation” in bottlenose dolphins. A similar link between PFOS and susceptibility to disease appeared in sea otters. Other research links multiple PFAS to hormonal changes in polar bear brains. But these aquatic wildlife health studies are few and far between.
“PFAS in wildlife is kind of the wild west,” says Robuck. “Wildlife are inherently difficult to study in a lot of ways.”
Zeroing on the health effects for individual species is tricky because scientists lack baseline data about stress responses and pollutant levels. They have no choice but to presume consequences in wildlife based on hormonal, immune and reproductive effects in lab animals. For Robuck, that means judging how a pelican will respond to its measured PFAS levels according to health data collected from a chicken. “That’s a really crappy comparison,” she says.
In one sense, the method is conservative: Lab animals are well cared for, so their health effects may be a best-case scenario compared to the stressful baseline of wild animals’ experience. But it also means we don’t have an accurate sense of what dangerous thresholds are for most aquatic life — despite a parade of red flags.
Endless Stream of Pollutants
Part of the problem is the sheer number of different compounds. Of the thousands of known PFAS, studies have only deduced health thresholds for a handful. Scientists screening their effects simply can’t keep up with the pace.
The chemical compounds that fall under the PFAS umbrella are also not all the same. Some are long, bulky molecules; others are smaller and more agile. Some forms tend to naturally convert into others; others don’t degrade whatsoever. Each molecule has the potential to be more toxic or bioaccumulative than the next. But for a lot of PFAS, Wagner says, scientists don’t even have standardized methods of detecting them.
To make matters worse, even as some of the most dangerous chemicals are being phased out, companies are making alternatives. But they may not be any safer than what they’re replacing. And scientists have found these alternatives are also accumulating in the bodies of fish and polar bears.
“It seems that we haven’t learned anything from the past,” says Belén González-Gaya, an analytical chemist at the University of Basque Country in Spain. “We keep on substituting compounds [for] others without any knowledge of biological effects.”
Sydney Evans, a research scientist for the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, suggests that researchers shouldn’t have to prove the health risks for thousands of similar compounds in order to warrant regulatory action. “The burden needs to be on these companies and manufacturers to prove their compounds are safe,” she says.
And while there is much we don’t know about the majority of PFAS, experts argue that we do know enough to assume they all share fundamental features: persistence, bioaccumulation and health risks. For this reason a group of scientists recently published a call for governments and companies to treat all PFAS, old and new, as a single hazardous group.
“It’s really the only way that we can be ahead of the curve,” says Wagner, who cowrote the article. “Rather than always realizing that a compound is toxic once it’s already everywhere and we measure it on a remote ice-site somewhere in Greenland.”
To shut off the flow of PFAS into the ocean, scientists say that manufacturers should phase out the chemicals and focus on proving safer alternatives.
With so many open questions, Robuck hopes to see research that more closely predicts threats to marine life — and by extension people, too.
“As humans, we rely on every natural resource under the sun,” she says. “When we undercut a healthy environment, we undercut our own health.”
