3,000 Shipping Containers Fell Into the Pacific Ocean Last Winter

A rise in container-ship accidents adds to the growing marine plastic pollution problem and poses risks to ocean health, wildlife and mariners.

You’re right if you think you’ve been hearing a lot about container ships lately. One off the coast of Sri Lanka that was carrying 25 tons of nitric acid and other cargo suffered an explosion after containers caught fire on May 20 and burned for more than a week, littering the beaches with plastic pollution. And in March all eyes were on the Suez Canal, where a 1,300-foot-long container ship turned sideways and gummed up international trade with a six-day-long traffic jam. Maybe you’ve also had your shoes, bike or other online purchases delayed because of backed-up ports near Los Angeles.

But less attention surrounded a spate of container-ship accidents in the Pacific Ocean this past winter. It included one of the worst shipping accidents on record, which occurred near midnight on Nov. 30 as towering waves buffeted the ONE Apus, a 1,200-foot cargo ship delivering thousands of containers full of goods from China to Los Angeles. In remote waters 1,600 miles northwest of Hawai‘i, the container stack lashed to the ship’s deck collapsed, tossing more than 1,800 containers into the sea.

Some of those containers carried dangerous goods, including batteries, fireworks and liquid ethanol.

“This is a massive spill,” says oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer, who has tracked marine debris from container spills for over 30 years. The ONE Apus lost more containers in a single night than the shipping industry reports are lost worldwide in an entire year.

More photos from the ONE APUS, set 4 pic.twitter.com/DAbmXln0hA

— Maritime Cyprus Intl news forum (@maritime_cyprus) December 8, 2020

It was also only one of at least six spills since October that dumped more than 3,000 cargo containers into the Pacific Ocean along shipping routes between Asia and the United States. They include the loss of 100 containers from the ONE Aquila on Oct. 30 and 750 containers from the Maersk Essen on Jan. 16. Both ships encountered rough weather while delivering goods to the United States.

Experts say these types of spills, which tend to fly under the public’s radar, put containers into the sea that pose potential hazards to the health of the ocean and put everything from mariners to wildlife at risk.

“They’re like time capsules of everything we buy and sell, sitting in the deep sea,” says Andrew DeVogelaere, NOAA research coordinator at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in California. Those lost containers may harm wildlife and ocean health, he says, by crushing aquatic habitats or introducing new seabed features that change biological communities or even aid the spread of invasive species. They can also release hazardous cargo such as the 6,000 pounds of sulfuric acid that went into the sea when the Maersk Shanghai lost containers off of the North Carolina coast in 2018.

Despite that potential for danger, no one is tracking the lost containers in the Pacific and opinions vary about where they will come to rest. Many are likely on the ocean floor, but an unknown number may have ruptured and disgorged their contents, which typically include many thousands of consumer items made of plastic. They could float for years in the ocean or wash ashore in Alaska, Hawai‘i or other locations.

To date, the only debris known to come ashore from this winter’s accidents are giant waterlogged sacks of chia seeds, which hit Oregon beaches in December following the loss of six containers from a ship near the California coast. Federal biologists were still cleaning smelly globs of the seeds from threatened snowy plover nesting habitat in April.

The accidents come at a time when the container shipping industry we all rely on is under unprecedented strain. In April the National Retail Federation reported a 10th consecutive month of record-high imports from Asia to the U.S. West Coast, driven by skyrocketing online shopping tied to the pandemic.

It’s led to backed-up ports, delayed deliveries, and shortages of empty containers, conditions that are forecast to continue. But in a trick of the pandemic tied to both U.S. shopping patterns and Chinese factory schedules, it also put more cargo ships on the water during fall and winter, the stormiest time of year in the Pacific.

Some experts say the changes may represent a new normal for trans-Pacific container shipping. If that’s true, more spills may lie ahead — prompting calls for greater transparency and accountability from shippers.

Decades of Debris

“I’m considered persona non grata by the shipping industry,” Ebbesmeyer says when asked if he knew anything about what was aboard the ONE Apus or where it might be headed. “They blackballed me years ago. They didn’t like me shining a light in a dark place.”

That dark place is the inside of a shipping container. Back in the 1990s Ebbesmeyer began applying his oceanography skills to tracking debris from what seemed like an ever-increasing number of container accidents. One year it was 28,000 rubber bath toys shaped like ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs that spilled from a single container lost in the North Pacific. Another year it was 61,000 Nike sneakers from a handful of containers, also in the Pacific.

With a friend at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, he calculated how far the flotsam would travel. Over close to a decade, beachcombers around the world confirmed their predictions with reports of debris from Texas to Australia to the United Kingdom.

“As an oceanographer, I want to know how the ocean works,” Ebbesmeyer says. Following the debris helped him understand ocean currents and the destination of the marine debris that even by the 1990s was on the rise. But as Ebbesmeyer’s work gained notoriety, he says the industry went mum. And what little light had been shed inside shipping containers flickered out.

But the accidents didn’t stop. In 1997 a single container lost from a ship in near England spilled 5 million Lego pieces, which still wash ashore today.

There were 8,100 of these Lego links or ‘axles with eyes’ in the shipping container that fell off the Tokio Express back in 1997. This one washed up on the North coast of Cornwall yesterday. It’s still in pretty good condition, though a little distorted. pic.twitter.com/Ev0HVzgUP9

— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) May 10, 2021

In the early 2000s, it was computer monitors landing on beaches from California to Alaska. Ebbesmeyer says the shippers seldom disclosed how many items were lost, and he suspects the same silence will surround the ONE Apus and other recent spills.

“If they’d share what’s in the containers,” he says, “we might predict where the debris will land and possibly organize a response.” Spilled goods travel the waters differently depending on their weight and materials; if the scientists know those details, they can anticipate where the products will eventually land. By tracking this trash, oceanographers could learn more about where currents and winds carry other debris, too. And, says Ebbesmeyer, it might compel shippers to help pay for cleanup, an expense coastal residents and agencies usually absorb today.

But shippers seem as tight-lipped as ever. Beyond reporting the presence of certain hazardous materials, they have not released details about the 3,000 missing containers.

Who’s Minding the Ship?

According to the industry trade group the World Shipping Council, 6,000 container ships traverse the oceans every day, moving 226 million containers annually. The ships sail a dizzying array of routes among more than 200 ports and are registered in countries around the world. But because they spend much of their time on the high seas outside any one nation’s jurisdiction, governance is a mix of regulations and voluntary best practices that don’t require tracking or recovering debris from lost containers. That only happens when losses occur in nearshore waters where the United States or another country claims jurisdiction.

Container ship on the open watern — The Panama-flagged Ever Given causes disruptions in the Suez Canal in March. Photo: National Ocean Service Image Gallery

“We usually read about it in the news,” says Catherine Berg, scientific support coordinator at

NOAA’s Emergency Response Division in Alaska. Berg says no formal mechanism is in place for reporting high-seas shipping container accidents like the ONE Apus to the U.S. government. And no funding exists for NOAA scientists to track the debris, although they occasionally perform informal modeling.

Officers with the U.S. Coast Guard Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, tell a similar story. They say shippers report container spills as a courtesy but that the agency lacks authority or funding to investigate, unless containers directly threaten U.S. shores. Instead, following the ONE Apus spill, the Coast Guard issued a notice to mariners about the hazard of floating containers, which some sailors call “steel icebergs” for their deceptively low profile on the water. The notice expired after a couple of weeks, with the assumption containers had sunk, ruptured or dispersed.

On the open seas, the shipping trade is primarily governed by the International Maritime Organization and other United Nations groups. Among their primary tools is the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) treaty, originally signed in 1914. It was last amended in 2016 with new rules on weighing of containers, intended to lessen spills.

In 2014 the IMO also endorsed an updated code of practice for cargo ships, which addresses packing, stacking and lashing of containers. Although shippers frequently blame losses on rough weather, as happened in each of last winter’s Pacific Ocean accidents, investigation often reveals underlying problems in lashing and other practices that occur before a ship even leaves port. That happened in May 2020 when the APL England lost 43 containers near Australia, forcing popular Sydney beaches to close as authorities cleaned a debris field of appliance parts, plastic boxes and face masks.

The updated code of practice is only voluntary and does not include provisions for tracking lost containers or revealing their contents. But continued cargo accidents may be forcing a change.

In 2019, when the MSC Zoe lost 280 containers in heavy weather between Portugal and Germany, volunteers and Dutch troops spent months cleaning Wadden Islands’ shores of toys, furniture and smashed televisions. Following the accident, which investigators also blamed on poor lashing, the Council of the European Union submitted a draft proposal for a new IMO rule requiring better reporting of containers lost at sea. If passed, and depending on the rule’s terms, it could one day address Ebbesmeyer’s decades-long concerns over shipper transparency.

Also following the MSC Zoe, the Dutch government commissioned a review of shipping practices and technologies that could aid in tracking containers, including equipping them with satellite tags. Echoing Ebbesmeyer’s experiences, the report said it is “hard to track down” what lies within lost containers and that improvement would require industry cooperation and investment.

Industry support may be gaining. The World Shipping Council, which has supported past amendments to SOLAS, is a cosponsor of the proposed new rule, according to the organization’s spokesperson Anna Larsson.

“We really support all and any fact-based measures to improve safety,” Larsson said in an email.

Environmental Cost

Although springtime’s calmer weather has replaced the winter storms that battered cargo ships, it’s likely whatever debris from recent spills that has not sunk to the bottom of the Pacific is still floating out there somewhere. But with so little known about the containers and their contents, it’s unclear where the debris is headed.

“Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s on the seafloor,” says Ebbesmeyer.

He gives the example of a container full of plastic telephones in the likeness of the comic-strip cat Garfield that spilled from a ship along the European coast in the 1980s. For decades, cables and shards of orange plastic mysteriously washed ashore from the phones. The mangled container that once held them was finally discovered in 2019, wedged deep in a French sea cave that’s underwater much of the year.

Thousands of other containers must lie on sea bottoms along the world’s shipping routes, says NOAA’s DeVogelaere.

In what is possibly the only study of its kind, DeVogelaere keeps his eye on a shipping container lying in 4,000 feet of water at the Monterey Bay sanctuary. It was one of 24 that toppled from a Taiwanese cargo ship in 2004 and was serendipitously discovered by one of NOAA’s remotely operated vehicles conducting unrelated research. Since 2011, DeVogelaere has monitored ecological change around the container, noting colonization by species not typically found in the immediate area. This year his team will investigate whether the container’s anti-corrosive paints, which can be toxic, may also have an ecological effect.

“We’re impacting an environment that we haven’t even begun to understand,” he says of the seafloor.

DeVogelaere’s container, which has so far remained latched shut, holds more than 1,100 steel-belted radial tires. He knows this only because it happened to land in a nearshore federal sanctuary, putting it under U.S. jurisdiction. Through a lengthy legal process, NOAA won a $3.25 million settlement from the shipper.

Such settlements take time but can occur when containers spill in nearshore waters. For instance, when the Hanjin Seattle lost 35 empty containers near Canada’s west coast in 2016, officials won a modest settlement to help pay for removal of foam insulation that littered wildlife habitat along miles of national park and First Nations beaches.

After the Svendborg Maersk lost 517 containers in the Bay of Biscay in 2014, French officials ordered the company to map sunken containers to identify commercial fishing hazards. And a settlement following the 2011 wreck of the MV Rena in New Zealand, which also caused an oil spill, included cleanup of tiny plastic beads that still wash ashore today.

Dead bird with plastic — Birds, fish, and mammals can eat plastic. Photo: USFWS

Those beads, like the Legos, computer monitors and Garfield phones, hint at the unknown contribution of container spills to marine plastic pollution, which is increasingly understood to harm birds, whales, fish and other animals through both ingestion and entanglement.

Although the World Shipping Council tracks cargo accidents, which it says lose an average of 1,382 containers annually, no one knows their true ecological impact.

But Ebbesmeyer remains concerned. He likens each spill to dumping a big box store into the ocean.

“That plastic never goes away,” he says. “It drifts around in the water or flies overhead in the stomachs of seabirds. It haunts you over time.”

When Did the Fabled Barbary Lion Go Extinct?

It wasn’t the Roman gladiators that did in this black-maned beast, but the exact date of its disappearance remains a mystery.

History books tell us that the last wild Barbary lion was probably killed in 1922 by a French colonial hunter in Morocco. But in repeating the story of this well-documented death, the history books may have left a chapter or two out of the story.

Barbary, or Atlas, lions once roamed throughout the deserts and mountains of northern Africa, ranging from Morocco to Egypt, far to the north of their sub-Saharan relatives. Previously thought to be the largest lion subspecies, they’re now considered a unique population of North African lions. Regardless of their species status, Barbary lions were once upon a time admired for their size and dark manes, although those two qualities have become more mythical over time. Many of these big cats were even kept by the royal families of Morocco and other North African nations.

It wasn’t just Africans who admired them. In Europe the lions famously battled gladiators in the Roman Colosseum, were displayed in zoos and parks, and even lived briefly at the Tower of London.

But that exploitation took a terrible toll. The Romans killed thousands of lions in their games, the Arab empire that followed squeezed the remaining animals into smaller territories, and the influx of European colonialists in the 19th century polished them off. Europeans hunted and killed so many of these animals that they quickly vanished from most of their remaining historic range. None were seen between 1901 and 1910. By the 1920s Western scientists assumed that they were gone.

Or were they? According to research published in 2013 in PLoS ONE, Barbary lions may have remained alive in the wilds of Algeria and Morocco — hidden and safe from most human eyes — for several decades, possibly as late as 1965.

The authors — including Simon Black and David Roberts of the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology in England and Amina Fellous of the National Agency for Nature Conservation in Algiers — combed through published and firsthand accounts of lion sightings in the years after their supposed extinction. They also spoke to dozens of people who said they’d seen or heard stories about living lions well after 1922.

“Our interview work was with old people from remote Algerian communities,” Black told me when the paper came out. “We are fortunate in developing a rich data set since several colleagues have been collecting this information over 10 to 20 years, so our sources are first- or secondhand accounts.” Some of the witnesses they interviewed recalled childhood sightings of the lions. Others recounted tales told by their parents or other family members.

With those sightings in hand, the scientists set out to infer when the lions really went extinct in the wild. That was tough, because the moment of extinction for any species is rarely, if ever, witnessed by human eyes. To develop their dates researchers turned to a 2005 paper published in Mathematical Biosciences that reviewed statistical models using a species’ last sighting to pinpoint when it had most likely gone extinct in the years after the final observation. Black and his co-authors calculated that the Barbary lion probably died out in Morocco in 1948 and mostly likely went extinct in Algeria in 1958. Because we’re talking about statistical probabilities, there’s a confidence interval on that number, suggesting that the extinction date could have been slightly earlier or as late as 1965.

Of course, statistics don’t always account for human behavior. The last sighting the team was able to uncover occurred in 1956 in a forested area in Algeria, when several people on a bus saw a lion just north of the town of Sétif. Black reported that the forest “was destroyed in 1958 during the French-Algerian War, so it is possible the last lions disappeared at that time.”

If ever confirmed, that would make the Barbary lion one of the few proven extinctions caused by the ravages of war.

Why does it matter exactly when Barbary lions went extinct in the wild? Black and his co-authors said this research has relevance for the conservation of the rest of Africa’s lions. Small, fragmented populations in certain regions — typical of lions in areas throughout their range — could require additional attention to ensure their survival. “The diminishing micro-populations of lions in West Africa today mimics the decline of the Barbary lion in North Africa,” Black wrote last year.

They also advocated against declaring any species extinct too quickly. Doing so, they say, could remove any incentive to keep looking for and conserving that species.

But the fate of Barbary lions, as it turns out, is not entirely decided. They may have gone extinct in the wild decades ago, but its genes persist within around 100 captive lions scattered across more than a dozen zoos. These animals, probably none of whom are pure Barbary lions, include descendants of the big cats once owned by Morocco’s sultans and kings. That makes them historically, culturally and genetically important, and they may yet have a role in the conservation of the North African lion, especially the animals in captivity. The lions in Morocco, Black wrote, “may represent nearly half of the captive collection of all northern lions. If we ignore these animals, it will be to our peril.”

(Adapted from an article previously published by Scientific American.)

As Tourism Returns, We Can’t Allow Cruise Companies to Destroy Coral Reefs for Profit

The COVID-19 pandemic put much of the tourism industry on hold. Once restrictions are lifted, we need to be wary of what comes next.

As summer approaches, reports of the return of leisure travel are beginning to emerge following the unprecedented shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the world’s most popular tourism destinations have begun to plan an eventual reopening, exploring what their “new normal” will look like.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused most of these sites to fall silent, including one of the world’s busiest cruise-ship ports: the docks on Grand Cayman Island. In April 2020, the global pandemic shut down the island’s port, which normally saw the arrival of dozens of cruise ships and thousands of tourists every month. The Cayman Islands was the only Caribbean nation to voluntarily halt its cruise economy, prioritizing the safety of its residents. Local businesses, hurt by the loss of tourism dollars, have already started going under; iconic local spots that make up much of the community’s social fabric, for tourists and locals alike, are being lost.

Soon, though, the ban on cruise ships will undoubtedly lift, and tourism will slowly return. And when that happens, the residents of Grand Cayman and nearby islands may find themselves worrying about another major threat posed by these cruise companies, one that runs the risk of being drowned out by the disruption caused by the pandemic.

In 2019 the Cayman Islands government announced a plan to move forward on a massive new port project in George Town Harbor, supported by two major cruise-ship operators. Without this project, cruise ships visiting the island must anchor offshore and shuttle passengers back and forth with smaller vessels — an important aspect of the local economy with historic roots in the coastal community.

The new project, estimated to cost $200 million, would allow cruise ships to come all the way to shore by building deep new docks capable of accommodating four cruise ships at a time, each of which could bring thousands of additional visitors to the island, according to the cruise companies and government supporters.

But getting to this point would require dredging 22 acres of George Town Harbor’s seabed, destroying 10 to 15 acres of fragile coral reefs in the process.

If that happens, another vital part of the fabric of Grand Cayman life would be lost.

Coral vs. Corporate Influence

Given its role in the global financial industry, the Cayman Islands may seem like the last place in the world where rule of law and good governance would be a problem. Yet even here, the ever-growing power of multinational corporations to transform environmental policy is starting to be felt.

It didn’t used to be this way.

As I wrote in my recent scientific study on the Cayman Islands, their effective marine park system has stood out as a model for coral-reef management since it was put in place in the 1980s. This area is known for its vibrant coral reefs, well-protected through the ever-expanding network of marine parks. The Cayman Islands have strict constitutional provisions and laws for protecting coral reefs, as well as international environmental policy commitments. Caymanian history and culture are also closely tied to the reefs. The first dive tourism spots in the Caribbean blossomed from Bob Soto’s little backwater dive shop on “Cheeseburger Reef” into today’s multimillion-dollar dive tourism trade.

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Despite the history and good governance, the cruise industry — notably Carnival and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines — had, prior to the pandemic, announced plans to move ahead with their plans to build the new docking facility on George Town Harbor.

Fragile Reefs, Questionable Science, Vague Promises

Those docks would devastate the local ecology. A 2015 environmental impact assessment estimated that the project would not just destroy 15 acres of reef but also negatively affect another 15 to 20 acres of adjacent habitat and pose risks to the 26 coral species in the harbor — two of which are critically endangered.

Coral disease and bleaching from elevated surface temperatures have already put the Cayman Islands’ coral reefs on the ropes; this could be the knockout punch.

The cruise companies pushing the infrastructure project have argued that there’s a way to mitigate this damage, but their proposed solution doesn’t hold much water.

They worked with the government on a plan that would pay an engineering company and a Florida-based NGO to relocate every coral lost or replant lab-grown corals in place of the ones they can’t relocate. By my estimation, the partners would need to replant and grow more than 3 million corals to make up for this destruction — triple the stated replanting goal.

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The government’s replacement goal is based on the absurd notion that a reef is simply an independent collection of corals humans can easily re-create — a bold assumption, and one yet to be supported at the proposed scale.

The reality is that reefs are slow-growing, highly complex assemblies of living and non-living things that take centuries to develop. This promised “replanting” technology is scientifically unproven at best and greenwashing at worst — meant to soothe the conscience of those troubled by the grave choice to destroy a beloved coral reef with deep meaning to its community.

The government has promised vague jobs and economic benefits if the project is built. And the CEO of Royal Caribbean, Michael Bailey, promises no taxpayer money will be used to pay for the dock.

This is not true. The Caymanian government will hand over $2.32 in tourism taxes per passenger to the cruise lines that it would otherwise collect for the citizens of Cayman. Caymanians are, therefore, paying for this infrastructure, despite mounting environmental problems on the island including a trash pile so large that locals call it “Mount Trashmore.”

Votes and Courts

There is some hope in this case, thanks to Caymanian community organizing.

Two years ago, Caymanian citizens successfully organized and secured a referendum through a robust people’s movement. Community groups like Cruise Port Referendum Cayman (CPR Cayman) implemented an aggressive ground campaign with no outside financial backing, organized only by volunteers. They focused on educating the public on the risks and uncertainties underpinning this project. Their efforts triggered a public referendum, originally scheduled for Christmas 2019, the first in Caymanian history.

The status of the referendum is currently being worked out in the courts, and it’s important that we pay attention. Currently, prominent members of CPR Cayman are acting as watchdogs to ensure the referendum, if it is ultimately held, will take place in a fair and impartial way. Before the court challenge, activists protested the original referendum, which was intentionally scheduled at the holidays, a time when many are simply not on the island — an incredibly cynical move, since under the Cayman constitution a missing vote counts as a de facto “yes” for the port.

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Despite community opposition, cruise corporation leaders are actively speaking out in support of this project’s resumption, with Michael Bayley, the CEO of Royal Caribbean, saying that they will make a decision to resurrect the pier project in the coming months.

That’s why it’s so important that we follow this ongoing case — CPR Cayman makes regular updates to their Facebook page — as local community activists continue to contest the project in court. Should our “New Normal” following the COVID-19 pandemic allow companies to break environmental laws for private gain?

Democratic Reefs

Why do these reefs matter so much? They’re what we would call “democratic reefs,” easily accessed from the shore by the public using free parking lots and open stairs. Multiple generations of Caymanians have taken the quick swim out and snorkeled with their children. One man who spoke up at a 2019 community meeting told the story of how his father, he, and now his son all took the name “Eden” after the iconic Eden Rock Reef, which will be wrecked by this project.

For people like Eden and his family, this isn’t just an environmental issue — this is about social justice. Coral reefs come with benefits for communities. They protect islands from hurricanes, provide food, attract tourism dollars and have deep cultural meaning. Lower-income people feel the loss of these services more intensely than those with more. Will the “replanted” reefs replace natural ones effectively? Or will low-income communities bear the consequences while foreign companies and scientists-for-hire sail home with increased profit? The losses for locals will stack up with eroding beaches erode, exposed homes, empty fishing grounds empty, and an end to their snorkeling trips with their children.

New Normal

The number of people standing up to this project continued to grow in 2020, even during the pandemic. This drew scorn of powerful government leaders such as McKeeva Bush, the speaker of the Legislative Assembly, who called community organizers “rascals” in public.

What happens next? Premier Alden McLaughlin hinted back in mid-April 2020 that he had grown weary of this dispute, suggesting that the vote will not happen during the current political term due to the pandemic.

That doesn’t mean the port project is dead. It’s just been pushed down the line for the next people who take office. “It will be another government that deals with that,” McLaughlin said. Given the support expressed by leaders in the cruise industry, many believe this project will resume when cruise tourism resumes.

It may seem odd to talk about this while the world is just beginning to emerge from the pandemic, but the attention we pay to COVID-19 may distract us from closely watching corporations that stand to gain from the proposed destruction of coral reefs. This may be the window of opportunity the government needs to quietly move ahead while we’re distracted with recovery.

We must unify as “rascals” to oppose corporations that continue to push their anti-environment agendas forward around the world. We must reject the false promises of scientists-for-hire.

If being a “rascal” means opposing the immoral destruction of coral reefs, consider me a rascal.

When and if the vote happens, I encourage the people of the Cayman Islands to vote no on the referendum. Likewise, I urge the people of the Cayman Islands to unite against companies violating their environmental laws. The returns are not worth the risks, namely the loss of their iconic reefs.

I encourage the U.S. public, and the wider world, to hold the cruise industry accountable for these types of immoral bypasses of domestic and international environmental policy. The industry’s shocking record of customer safety amidst the pandemic remains in the news, but this is hardly its only sin. You only need to look to the industry’s poor environmental record in the Bahamas to see what might happen in the Caymans moving forward.

If the reefs are destroyed and the restoration fails or even partially succeeds, the Caymanian people will be left to clean up, while the cruise industry continues to rake in record profits.

It is unethical to destroy coral reefs because they do not belong to us. They belong to everyone, and that includes future generations. If the project goes ahead, I hope that corporate leadership from the cruise industry will explain to young Eden, and other young Caymanians, why they cannot snorkel the reefs that their parents once did.

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

Debunking the Biggest Myth About Wildfires

A new book from ecologist Chad Hanson explains why misunderstanding fire is dangerous for communities, wildlife and fighting climate change.

Ecologist Chad Hanson calls his new book Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate, but it could just as well be titled Why We Should Love Dead Trees.

Hanson, director of the John Muir Project, uses the book to explain why wildfires are beneficial to forest ecosystems and why keeping fire-burned trees on the landscape creates a biodiversity-rich landscape that rivals old-growth forests.

Smokescreen, steeped in scientific details and personal stories, is written for the average reader — one who’s likely been primed by media and policymakers to regard wildfires as “devastating” and “catastrophic.”

The book examines why, from an ecological perspective, they’re neither. It also tackles the tough issue of why state and federal resources aimed at keeping communities safe from wildfires often do just the opposite.

The Revelator spoke with Hanson about how logging drives fires, what can be done to keep homes safe, and why protecting forests is crucial to fighting climate change.

In some ways it seems like your book is a PR campaign for wildfires, which get a very bad rap despite their ecological benefits. Why should we learn to value them?

Wildfires in our forests are villainized and vilified in many ways that are similar to how native predators like wolves and bears are villainized and vilified in the media, in movies, and by policymakers.

People have this tendency to think about fire in the forest in the same way they think about fire affecting their home. If their home burns, that’s devastating. And therefore, they think if a fire burns in the forest that must also be devastation. So they want solutions from policymakers. They want people to tell them that they’re going to fix the problem out there somewhere in the forest.

And I think we need to fundamentally shift that perception so that people understand that fire is a natural and beneficial ecological force out in the forest.

We actually have a deficit of fire in almost every forest ecosystem relative to natural pre-suppression levels. The real losses and harms that are happening in communities are almost entirely preventable if we focus our resources and attention near homes, but it’s going to take a 180-degree shift in direction from our current policies.

In the book I mentioned the example of a community that really focused on home fire safety and defensible space, pruning within 100 feet of homes. That made a difference in the 2017 Creek Fire in the mountains in Southern California.

There were 1,400 homes ultimately within the fire perimeter and only five burned. You can only see that kind of success when the focus is on home safety and community protection, as opposed to back-country vegetation management — removing trees, chaparral and other native vegetation — and thinking that’s somehow going to stop a weather-driven fire, which it doesn’t.

One of the things you cover extensively in the book is why logging after fires can be so ecologically detrimental. Why are these so-called “snag” forests of dead trees so important?

Fires, including mixed-intensity fires, have been burning in the forests of this planet for over 350 million years. We’ve had fires, including high-intensity fire patches, in our forests since 100 million years before the dinosaurs walked the Earth. These are deep evolutionary processes, and there’s a deep evolutionary history of dependence and relationships with ecosystems and wildlife species related to that.

And it’s not just fire that burns at low intensity and creeps along the surface. Some species like that just fine, but others like it hot and they need the areas where fire burns more intensely and kills most, or all, the trees in patches.

woodpecker in tree — Black-backed woodpeckers eat beetles on fire-burned trees. Photo: budgora, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It turns out that these places where fire or drought or other natural processes kill most or all the trees, these places are not destroyed. They’re not damaged from a biodiversity standpoint. They’re ecological treasures.

These snag forests are oftentimes areas that support the single highest levels of wildlife abundance and diversity in the entire forest ecosystem in a given region, provided that those areas are not subjected to post-disturbance logging — what they call “salvage logging” — which destroys all that wonderful rich complex habitat by taking away those dead trees that so many wildlife species need.

The Forest Service and other agencies engage in post-fire logging and thinning projects that they say will keep communities safer from fire. You point to science that says otherwise. Can you explain?

When people hear the term “thinning,” they think about workers out there with pruning shears and rakes. They don’t think chainsaws and bulldozers, which is the reality of thinning in the vast majority of cases. These are really just commercial logging operations.

“Thinning” is oftentimes a stand-in for what the agencies called “fuel reduction,” which is just another stand-in for logging. The reality is most of the time a thinning project will kill and remove upwards of 60 or 70% of the trees in a given stand. And that includes many mature trees, even oftentimes old-growth trees.

The other thing to understand is that thinning fundamentally changes the microclimate of the forest, and it changes it in ways that make the forest more susceptible to a wildfire, have a faster rate of spread, and a higher fire intensity most of the time.

That’s because thinning reduces the forest canopy cover. When that happens, it creates hotter and drier conditions on the forest floor, because it’s letting through more sunlight. Things are getting more desiccated during fire season.

By removing so many trees, thinning also reduces the windbreak effect that a denser forest has against the winds that drive the flames. So when areas are thinned, the fires can spread through faster.

In the first six hours of [California’s 2018] Camp Fire — between the point of ignition and reaching the town of Paradise and claiming 85 lives and over 14,000 homes — the fire burned through several thousand acres that had been heavily logged in the preceding decade. Some of that was post-fire logging where thousands and thousands of dead trees were removed under the guise of fuel reduction. Some of it was commercial thinning on national forest lands and also on private lands.

Those were the areas that the fire moved through by far the fastest and most intensely.

Outside of those areas, once the fire got into other forests that had no logging history or very limited logging history, it burned overwhelmingly at low and moderate intensity.

If weather and climate are the biggest drivers of fire, how should that inform our response to it?

Yes, weather and climate are definitely the primary drivers of wildfire behavior. In the largest scientific analysis that has been conducted on this question, we looked at the whole western United States — three decades of data, millions and millions of acres of fires — and what we found are two key things. Number one, weather and climate variables are dominant. That’s primarily what drives wildland fires. That means what you do with chainsaws is not going to stop these fires because essentially you’re trying to fight the wind and you can’t fight the wind with a chainsaw.

The secondary finding was that forest management, specifically logging, is also a relevant factor. A lot of people think if you have a denser forest, it’s going to burn more intensely. If you have a forest that’s protected from logging, and therefore it’s going to have more trees typically, then that forest has more fuel and it will burn more intensely. We found exactly the opposite.

Even though weather and climate were the primary factors, logging is a key secondary factor, and it strongly tends to make fires burn more intensely.

How do we better protect forests and value them as a tool for fighting climate change?

In order to really usher in an era of ecological management and climate-friendly management on our national forests and other federal public lands, we need to get the Forest Service out of the logging business. That means we’re going to need to enforce existing laws and we’re also going to need to pass new legislation to accomplish that.

There’s a broad consensus, among climate scientists and forest ecologists in this country and around the world, that moving away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible is absolutely necessary, but it is also not sufficient in order to overcome the climate crisis.

We need to draw down CO₂ that’s already in the atmosphere. And the most environmentally beneficial way to do that is to protect natural habitats, especially the carbon-rich ones like forests and wetlands.

That is an essential part of climate solutions. In fact, we cannot succeed unless we do that. And the United States must play a leadership role internationally on this, because more logging [by volume of wood removed] happens in forests of the United States than in any other country in the world.

That puts us in a position of culpability, but also potential leadership to turn the corner.

Nectar Thieves: How Invasive Bumblebees Threaten Hummingbirds

Buff-tailed bumblebees are robbing hummingbirds of nutrients — just one of several threats facing the tiny birds, a new book reveals.

South America has 24 known species of bumblebee native to it, but the buff-tailed bumblebee is not one of them. In 1998 the first buff-tailed bumblebees were introduced from Europe to Chile — nobody seems particularly sure why they were brought to the country, but one must assume that agriculture of one kind or another lay behind the decision.

Buff-tailed bumblebees are bred in vast numbers in Europe to be sold as fledgling colonies for seeding around commercial crops — for example, tomatoes — to assist with pollination. Inevitably, some bees have escaped into the wild and, provided they can find a source of nectar and a reasonably conducive climate, they go native, and spread. Chile is far from unique in this regard, as at least thirty countries worldwide now have buff-tailed bumblebees at large where they ought not to be.

One might think that having something as inoffensive as a pollinating insect introduced into an ecosystem would pose no significant risks, but it appears as if this is far from the case. Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex and preeminent bumblebee scientist, has suggested that the invaders may be contributing to the decline of native bumblebee species, through competition and, perhaps, through diseases they carry to which native bumblebees have little or no resistance.

Chilean scientists from the Universidad de los Lagos in Osorno have also been studying the invaders and quickly realized that the European bumblebees, in the temperate forests of Chile, were proficient and widespread nectar thieves. The bumblebees have learned to hack the usual pollinator and plant relationship, whereby a plant provides a pollinator—whether it’s an insect or a hummingbird — with nectar in return for pollination services rendered by the inadvertent transmission of pollen from one flower to another. Instead, the bumblebees bite the walls of a flower’s nectary and suck the nectar from within, bypassing entirely the effort involved in entering the flower via the petals in the usual manner evolution had intended.

The flowers examined in the study in question were those borne by bushes of hardy fuchsia — a plant that has evolved to be pollinated by green-backed firecrowns, hence its alternative English colloquial name, hummingbird fuchsia. Considering the possible impact of this nectar theft on the plants and their hummingbird pollinators, the scientists suggest that nectar robbing may trigger reductions in plant populations due to lowered reproductive success, and this in turn may impact upon the hummingbird populations associated with those plants. The very shape of the flowers may change in time as the bumblebees exert new evolutionary pressures upon the plants, with unforeseeable implications for the hummingbirds.

The study in question was only examining the incidence of nectar robbing in fuchsias, but, of course, there is no reason to suppose that buff-tailed bumblebees will not be robbing other species of flowering plant wherever they are found in the Americas as a whole. Given that hummingbirds are found throughout the Americas, it is not unfair to suppose that other species of hummingbird far rarer than the widespread and adaptable green-backed firecrown may, in time, find themselves the unwitting victims of nectar crime performed by an invasive species of bumblebee.

Meanwhile, the fates of bees and hummingbirds alike are colliding across the Americas with the continuing widespread use of neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides. These pesticides are widely used in agriculture, persist in water and soil for months or even years, and in plants are systemic — permeating everything from the tips of the roots to a plant’s pollen and nectar. They are highly toxic to insects — and to birds too.

The American Bird Conservancy has discovered that one seed coated with imidacloprid, a popular neonic, is enough to kill a songbird. Researchers are concerned that repeated ingestion of nectar laced with neonics will have the same effect it does on bees — a disruption of their brain function and, specifically, their short-term memory and their ability to navigate.

For many hummingbirds, both of those brain functions are critical. On a day-to-day basis hummingbirds, like bees, return to favored and remembered nectar sources time and again. Birders sometimes refer to this as “working a trapline,” a reference to the activities of fur-hunters in Alaska and Canada. Moreover, some hummingbirds, like the rufous hummingbirds I had searched for in Alaska, are long-distance migrants, and will rely on their brain function to navigate distances that seem unfeasibly long for such a small creature. The loss of this ability, in what is known as migratory disorientation, could lead to significant mortality.

Species Spotlight: The Gentle and Quirky White-Bellied Pangolin

This is not your regular anteater. It’s one of the world’s only scaly mammals, representing millions of years of evolution.

The white-bellied pangolin is one of eight evolutionary distinct pangolin species split equally between Africa and Asia. They’re among the very few mammals with scales and have a tongue that, when pulled out of its cavity, is longer than their entire body, which measures about 30 inches. These gentle and somewhat quirky animals should be celebrated, but instead they’re often killed for their unique scales, believed in some cultures to harbor medicinal properties.

Species name:

White-bellied pangolin, also known as the tree or three-cusped pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis)

Description:

White-bellied pangolins look like armadillos, except that they have scales, not rings. They get their name from the white patch on their bellies, one of the few areas not covered in scales. These scales are made of keratin and overlap each other, acting as the animals’ main defense against predation. With the help of their long tongues, these toothless mammals feed almost exclusively on ants and termites and roll into a ball when threatened. Adults usually grow to about 3-4 pounds.

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Where it’s found:

Tropical lowland forests and secondary forests in 23 west, central and east African countries make good habitat. These pangolins also live in savanna-forest mosaic and dense woodlands.

IUCN Red List status:

Although no formal population estimate exists for white-bellied pangolins across their range, the species was recently reclassified from vulnerable to endangered to reflect the increasing magnitude of threats to their survival.

Major threats:

Like all pangolin species, white-bellied pangolins are threatened by overexploitation for their meat and scales, which are consumed as food and in traditional medicine, respectively. However, the growing demand from Asia for the scales of African pangolins is disproportionately affecting white-bellied pangolins, since they’re the most common African pangolin species. In addition to poaching, white-bellied pangolins are threatened by habitat loss.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

The Convention on the International on the Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) restricts the international commercial trade in all pangolin species, including their derivatives. National laws in many white-bellied range countries also prohibit their killing, with anti-poaching patrols conducted in their habitats to deter poachers and enforce these laws.

My favorite experience:

Seeing my first living white-bellied pangolin after more than a decade of being a pangolin enthusiast filled me with excitement and hope. My challenging 11-hour hike into the heart of Nigeria’s Cross River National Park to monitor these mammals was a success, as I found and tagged about five of them. Seeing these animals in their natural environment was even more exciting, as I had only ever seen their carcasses and scales on display in wild meat markets.

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

While scientists are working to further understand the ecology and dynamics of the illegal pangolin trade to inform science-based conservation actions, governments of countries where pangolins exist and those involved in their trafficking should establish laws protecting pangolins (where they do not already exist) and uphold already-enacted laws. Governments and the public can also support pangolin conservation through increased anti-poaching patrols and the arrest and prosecution of poachers and traffickers, as well as campaigns to increase awareness of their plight.

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Key research:

Buckingham E, Curry J, Emogor C, Tomsett L, Cooper N. 2021. Using natural history collections to investigate changes in pangolin (Pholidota: Manidae) geographic ranges through time. PeerJ 9:e10843 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10843
Simo, F, Difouo Fopa, G, Kekeunou, S, et al. Using local ecological knowledge to improve the effectiveness of detecting white‐bellied pangolins (Phataginus tricuspis) using camera traps: A case study from Deng‐Deng National Park, Cameroon. Afr J Ecol. 2020; 58: 879– 884. https://doi.org/10.1111/aje.12762

5 Things to Know as Wildfire Season Heats Up

New research sheds light on how increasing wildfires are affecting ecosystems and communities.

In early May scientists discovered a plume of smoke wafting from a smoldering sequoia that ignited during 2020’s Castle fire, which set California’s Sequoia National Forest alight last August.

The fiery remnant is the result of another too-dry winter in California and an ominous marker for the beginning of the 2021 fire season, which experts say looks “grim” for California and across much of the West.

March and April were the driest in more than 126 years for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah, and the third and fourth driest for California and Colorado. Oregon, meanwhile, had its driest April ever. Things are predicted to continue to be both hotter and drier than normal across the West and Plains, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

That combination, driven by climate change, caused record-breaking wildfires last year. And this year could be similar.

“More frequent drought, hotter summers and warmer and drier autumns, tied to climate change, are stacking the deck for large and destructive fires during the heart of the fire season,” The Washington Post reported. “And this year, a lack of rain in spring could mean fires arrive early in some areas.”

An increase in the size and number of fires is also driving more research. Here’s what scientists have found recently about how wildfires are affecting ecology and communities:

1. California’s Troubling Trends

If it seems like wildfire danger is getting worse in California, that’s on target.

A new study published in Nature Scientific Reports found that the frequency and total area burned by wildfires in California have both increased significantly in the past 20 years. Wildfire season is now longer, and the yearly peak comes a month earlier.

The researchers also found geographic changes. “Hotspots” with severe fire risk — once limited to Los Angeles County — are now found in other parts of Southern California and across northern parts of the state. “Natural wildfires became more concentrated in Northern California,” the researchers found. But “human-caused wildfires have even emerged [in] new hot spots…along the west coast and the Sierra Nevada mountain range.”

Climate change and human land-use activities are the major drivers of these increases, but the expansion of the “wildland-urban interface” and continued development now also put more people and property in the way, according to the study.

2. Midwest Flames

The West isn’t the only part of the country battling increasing blazes. A state of emergency was declared in Wisconsin on April 5 as wildfire season there arrived two weeks early.

“Between 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin averaged 742 fires per year and lost 1,200 acres to fires,” The Guardian reported. But just four months into this year, there were already 365 fires, totaling 1,518 acres.

The state is expected to see its biggest fire season in five years.

3. Learning From Australia

Of course, everything is relative.

Last year 4 million acres burned in California wildfires. That’s dwarfed by the 46 million acres consumed in Australia’s 2019-2020 bushfires.

Wildfire is a natural part of many ecosystems in Australia and beneficial for some species. But research is beginning to show some of the short-term effects of Australia’s recent fires on plants and wildlife.

Koala in tree — A Koala in a tree near the Tambo Complex bushfire in Australia, Jan. 2020. Photo: BLMIdaho, (CC BY 2.0)

Recent research found that the critical habitat of more than 830 native vertebrate species was affected. Seventy species lost nearly one third of their range, with 21 of those species already at risk of extinction before the fires.

Another study found that more than 800 vascular plant species were “highly impacted.” The ranges for 116 species were entirely burned and another 173 lost 90% of their habitat.

“The megafires occurred within globally significant biodiversity hotspots with high richness and endemism across important plant groups,” the researchers wrote.

The good news is that many of the affected plants are resilient to fire, although the researchers say that some areas may not be able to recover. “The massive biogeographic, demographic and taxonomic breadth of impacts of the 2019–2020 fires may leave some ecosystems, particularly relictual Gondwanan rainforests, susceptible to regeneration failure and landscape-scale decline,” they wrote.

4. Landscapes Shifting

Landscape-scale changes as a result of climate change and wildfires are happening elsewhere, too. A study published in Ecosphere found that when a wildfire in southwest Colorado’s Rocky Mountains follows a severe bark beetle outbreak, Engelmann spruce trees are unable to recover.

The loss of conifers following that one-two punch is likely to lead to more quaking aspens taking root, and a possible shift in forest type — and the species that depend on those trees.

Changes are afoot in California too, particularly in chaparral. That ecosystem is made up of assemblages of native woody shrubs found along many of the state’s coastal foothills and inland mountain slopes. The natural interval for fire return to chaparral is between 30 and 150 years, but in some places that’s been shortened to just 10 years.

Not all species are able to adapt to that change. Some chaparral shrubs are being replaced by weedy annual grasses, which in turn drive more fires in an unfortunate feedback loop.

An increase in the frequency and severity of fires in chaparral also threatens an oft-overlooked part of the ecosystem: lichen, which play a key role in retaining moisture in the soil and providing food for wildlife.

A new study found that while most lichen don’t survive wildfires in chaparral, they can recolonize in the decades following. However, with fires happening more frequently, we’re likely to see “substantial lichen biodiversity losses in chaparral shrublands.”

5. Fighting Fire With Fire

Parts of California’s chaparral may be seeing too much fire, but other areas are still in fire deficits after a century of fire suppression policies. Land managers are beginning to see that bringing fire back to the landscape can be an important tool, though.

Of course, Indigenous communities already knew that and have employed cultural burning practices for millennia. Some of that Indigenous environmental knowledge is being shared by tribes like the Yurok, Hoopa and Karuk in Northern California.

But there are still many barriers to prescribed burns, including air-quality regulations and the capacity and funding to implement projects.

Want to know more? Below you’ll find a selection of stories on wildfire from The Revelator’s archive.

Here’s What Climate Change Means for Wildfires in the West

Western Wildfires Will Be a Boon for These Native Species

The Bad Seeds: Are Wildfire Recovery Efforts Hurting Biodiversity?

How Do We Solve Our Wildfire Challenges?

The Pantanal Is in Flames — We Mapped the Damage

Australia’s Bushfires: An Extinction Crisis Decades in the Making

Four Ways Alaska’s Unending Warming Impacts Everyone

California Tribe Hopes to Conquer Climate Woes — With Fire

How One of Australia’s Rarest Trees Was Saved From Wildfires

The Climate Flames Come for Us All

Four Years of ‘The Rev’

We’re just getting warmed up.

Well, that went by quickly.

Four years ago today, The Revelator launched into the electronic ether with a mission to bring new voices and ideas to environmental journalism.

Since then we’ve published more than 830 articles and commentaries, covering everything from the extinction crisis to environmental justice, the dangers of fracking and plastics, the science of dam removal and light pollution, and lesser-known topics like pop culture’s effects on conservation.

It wasn’t easy. Our publication was planned, in no small part, as a reaction to the election of the Trump administration. We knew we’d be looking at a period of intense environmental deregulation and turmoil. We just didn’t realize how intense or chaotic things would soon become.

But as we shined our lights into the darkness, we did our best to not stay focused exclusively on the pain. We spent equal time examining solutions, talking about how to achieve progress, and looking at the fun things that make conservation worth it.

That combination of revelation and celebration will continue. As we collectively emerge from the past four years, and as those of us here start year five of what we affectionately call “The Rev,” we have one big promise for you: We’re just getting warmed up.

Meanwhile, we’ve taken this anniversary as an opportunity for reflection. Here are 10 lessons we’ve learned from the past four years:

1. Surround yourself with good people. A strong community will keep you going on even the darkest of days.
2. But talk to anybody (and keep your cool when you do). Self-segregation by political ideology will tear the world apart if we let it. It’s among the greatest threats we face.
3. Broaden your inputs, support quality journalism at a time when it’s still under attack, and remain vigilant for disinformation. We’ve seen what happens when people limit their information sources or allow themselves to be manipulated.
4. Do your best, but don’t bear the entire weight on your shoulders. Individual action remains important, but we need to work toward systemic change now more than ever.
5. Prepare for the worst. We’re expecting another dangerous fire season here in the West, and that’s just one of the likely effects we’ll all feel from climate change and biodiversity loss in the months and years ahead.
6. Celebrate the best. There’s no better way to protect the natural world than to enjoy it, by yourself or with friends.
7. Share. Your positive experiences and wild encounters make a difference to others.
8. Listen. A lot of voices have traditionally been left out of the mainstream conversation. Let’s all vow to break that cycle and keep our ears open to each other’s experience and wisdom. We’re stronger together.
9. Trust the experts. The scientific process is our superpower.
10. Vote. In every election, no matter how small.

Thanks to all our readers for the past four years. We look forward to year five and beyond.

10 New Books About Wildlife and Our Relationship With Animals

From the majesty of our feathered friends to the cultural cost of extinction, these new books help us examine the natural world.

As I sat in a pharmacy chair for the required 15 minutes after my first vaccine dose, my mind turned to animals.

There weren’t any animals nearby, of course — the buzzing fluorescent lighting of the run-down drugstore wasn’t anyone’s natural habitat, including mine. And that very absence of visible sky and wildlife — a change from the past 15 months, much of which I’d spent watching the world go by through my home-office window — served to remind me how easily we can lose sight of it.

I returned home, rushed to the back window and the birdfeeders beyond, and randomly pulled a new book out of a pile of review copies. Sure enough, its subject was animals.

And it wasn’t alone. In recent months publishers have released a bevy of new books about birds, bears, koalas and other creatures. These hefty tomes do more than just celebrate our furry, feathery or chitinous friends; they also examine our relationships with them, for better or worse.

Here are publishers’ descriptions of 10 of the best new wildlife-related books of 2021 so far. The books come from a long list of celebrated authors, scientists and journalists and cover species from several continents. They’ll help give you a dose of the wild — and a window into other parts of the world — that will hold you over until it’s safe to travel again to see loved ones. Human and otherwise.

Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild by Barbara J. King

An uplifting new book from the author of How Animals Grieve.

“As people come to understand more about animals’ inner lives — the intricacies of their thoughts and the emotions that are expressed every day by whales and cows, octopus and mice, even bees — we feel a growing compassion, a desire to better their lives. But how do we translate this compassion into helping other creatures, both those that are and are not our pets?”

The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany by Graeme Gibson

Margaret Atwood provides the foreword to this new edition of her late partner’s classic book.

“In this stunning assemblage of words and images, novelist and avid birdwatcher Graeme Gibson offers an extraordinary tribute to the venerable relationship between humans and birds.”

Flames of Extinction: The Race to Save Australia’s Threatened Wildlife by John Pickrell

Signs of hope amidst and after apocalyptic wildfires.

“In the early months of 2020, the world’s attention was riveted on Australia, where the nation’s iconic wildlife fought for survival in the face of unprecedented wildfires. Images of koalas drinking from firefighters’ water bottles went viral and became the global face of a catastrophe that would kill as many as three billion animals. Known as the Black Summer, the fire season was responsible for more wildlife deaths and near-extinctions than any other single event in Australian history. Flames of Extinction, written by a journalist at the heart of this news coverage, is the first book to tell the stories of Australia’s record-setting fires, focusing on the wild animals and plants that will be forever changed.” (Read an exclusive excerpt.)

How to Talk to a Tiger … And Other Animals: How Critters Communicate in the Wild by Jason Bittel; illustrated by Kelsey Buzzell

A kids’ book that’s about a lot more than growling.

“Ever wanted to talk to a tiger? Or chatter with a cheetah? Or yak with a yak? This book brings together a babble of more than 100 beasties and explores the amazing ways they talk to each other. From fish that fart to alligators that dunk to fire worms that flash, you’ll discover that wildlife have the strangest ways of sending a message…”

The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds by Jon Dunn

A worldwide travelogue examining some of the world’s most charismatic and mysterious migrators.

“Hummingbirds are a glittering, sparkling collective of over 300 wildly variable species. For centuries, they have been revered by Indigenous Americans, coveted by European collectors, and admired worldwide for their unsurpassed metallic plumage and immense character. Yet they exist on a knife-edge, fighting for survival in boreal woodlands, dripping cloud forests and subpolar islands. They are, perhaps, the ultimate embodiment of evolution’s power to carve a niche for a delicate creature in even the harshest of places.”

The Grizzly in the Driveway: The Return of Bears to a Crowded American West by Rob Chaney

Can we relearn how to live with returning megafauna?

“Montana journalist Robert Chaney chronicles the resurgence of this charismatic species against the backdrop of the country’s long history with the bear. Chaney captures the clash between groups with radically different visions: ranchers frustrated at losing livestock, environmental advocates, hunters, and conservation and historic preservation officers of tribal nations. Underneath, he probes the balance between our demands on nature and our tolerance for risk.”

Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction by Michelle Nijhuis

An illuminating history of the conservation movement.

“In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.”

Florida Scrub-Jay: Field Notes on a Vanishing Bird by Mark Jerome Walters

A portrait of the last-ditch efforts to save the final few dozen birds of a critically endangered species.

“The only bird species that lives exclusively in Florida, the Florida scrub-jay was once common across the peninsula. But as development over the last 100 years reduced the habitat on which the bird depends from 39 counties to three, the species became endangered. With a writer’s eye and an explorer’s spirit, Mark Walters travels the state to report on the natural history and current predicament of Florida’s flagship bird.”

Empire of Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth’s Tiny Conquerors by Susanne Foitzik and Olaf Fritsche

An intimate portrait accompanied by amazing photographs.

“Inside an anthill, you’ll find high drama worthy of a royal court; and between colonies, high-stakes geopolitical intrigue is afoot. Just like us, ants grow crops, raise livestock, tend their young and infirm, and make vaccines. And, just like us, ants have a dark side: They wage war, despoil environments, and enslave rivals — but also rebel against their oppressors.”

Gone: A Search for What Remains of the World’s Extinct Creatures by Michael Blencowe

Examining the scars left behind on an emptying Earth.

“Inspired by his childhood obsession with extinct species, Blencowe takes us around the globe — from the forests of New Zealand to the ferries of Finland, from the urban sprawl of San Francisco to an inflatable crocodile on Brighton’s Widewater Lagoon. Spanning five centuries, from the last sighting of New Zealand’s upland moa to the 2012 death of the Pinta Island giant tortoise, Lonesome George, his memoir is peppered with the accounts of the hunters and naturalists of the past as well as revealing conversations with the custodians of these totemic animals today.”

Visit the Revelator Reads archives for hundreds of additional book recommendations.

How an Indigenous Scientist Studies Global Change

Dr. Danielle Ignace has found a way to unify her Native American and Western science identities to better understand big ecosystem changes.

All it took was one college research trip to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains for Danielle Ignace to know her intended career path in medicine was the wrong fit. After spending a month in the mountains, she quickly learned she wanted to study ecology.

“I was just kind of hooked,” she told The Revelator. “I really wanted to work on these big questions about how climate change and environmental issues impact our ecosystems.”

And she has. Trained as a plant physiologist, ecologist and ecosystem scientist, she’s been teaching at Smith College in Massachusetts and is also a research associate at Harvard Forest.

But this summer she’s taking a new position in the department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. For Ignace, the big jump across the continent is more than a geographic change. She’s a member of the Northwest’s Coeur d’Alene Tribe, and she says the new position is the first she’s found that allows space to incorporate her Native American identity into her work as a scientist.

We spoke to her about what she’s learned about our changing ecosystems and why understanding Indigenous voices is so important in that process.

What can you tell us about your research?

I study the impacts of global change, which can mean a lot of different things. In the case of my lab and my work, it really focuses on the impacts of invasive pests or plants and big changes in climate, including precipitation or drought. Those global change factors can act solely or interact with each other and do great damage or have really big impacts for ecosystems.

In particular, I work on ecosystems that are in transition in some way. That could be changing from a system that has high diversity to low diversity, or maybe they’re already invaded and they lost a lot of biodiversity in the system.

Most recently I’m looking at the eastern hemlock ecosystems that are transitioning to black birch ecosystems because of invasive pests. I try to understand everything about ecosystem function, but one of my main goals is to understand what’s happening with carbon, because that tells us a great deal about whether these ecosystems will be a source or sink for CO₂. And that has really big implications for whether they contribute to global warming.

What have you found?

Eastern hemlock forests in the northeastern United States are being destroyed by the hemlock woolly adelgid and the elongate hemlock scale. They have basically created eastern hemlock graveyards with these huge areas of declined or destroyed forest stands.

When this happens we lose out on this very special tree species that’s known as a foundation tree species, meaning that it has a very important role for structuring ecosystems and plant communities. Other organisms depend on the special habitat it has created. So there’s devastating implications when we lose this particular tree species.

owls in tree — Eastern screech owls in a hemlock tree. Photo: Matt MacGillivray, (CC BY 2.0)

But also, we find typically they get replaced by black birch trees. Eastern hemlocks are evergreen conifers and black birch trees are deciduous, and so they have very different composition in their leaf material. When that foliage falls to the ground, they decompose in very different ways.

With this change, everything gets decomposed a lot quicker. There’s faster turnover. We get more nutrients in the soil, but what that means is that we lose the carbon sequestration that was in the soil of eastern hemlock forests. They have a really strong and deep soil organic layer and lots of carbon goes in there. And so when you lose eastern hemlocks, it diminishes that ability to sequester carbon in those forests.

The change could take decades to manifest, but the ramifications are huge.

In your new position at the University of British Columbia, will you continue this line of research?

We did such great work with the eastern hemlock system, so I definitely don’t want to give that up. I will try to continue that in some way from afar.

I want to still think about how carbon gets stored in ecosystems or moves through ecosystems and what the implications are for climate change, but I also want to now work with Indigenous communities and help amplify or include their voices in the land-use history and land-management dialogues.

That voice has been either erased or excluded for so long and Indigenous communities have really sustainable methods of land-use management that I think need to be highlighted and that could help with communities being more resilient to climate change.

What has your experience been like as an Indigenous scientist?

I have had a very standard path in academia and science that didn’t really include my Native American identity or culture. Getting my education and research experiences, and then moving up in academia, I didn’t know it could be a thing where we could include Indigenous communities and we could work with Indigenous communities and that somehow, my Native American identity could co-exist with my Western science identity.

Dr. Danielle Ignace studies ecosystem changes. Photo: Sandra Costello

People in my science world didn’t really want to know the Indigenous perspective. They didn’t ask for it. And I felt like there wasn’t space to include both of those in my career. I almost left academia a year ago because of this issue.

Have you seen that change? Is UBC, which has also just launched the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries, a better space for that?

Yes, what was really attractive to me about UBC was that they hired all these Indigenous scientists. I think this is a long time coming for them. We have a really great local Indigenous community there and we have Indigenous students, and they wanted to see Indigenous faculty involved in research and serving in leadership roles.

Kudos to them, they’ve done an amazing job. But it’s not typical. Many institutions say it would be good to have more Indigenous faculty, but don’t necessarily put their money where their mouth is.

For me, I do feel finally that there’s space for my Native American identity and my Western science career to co-exist in the work that I do. Now it’s non-negotiable. Coming up in academia I didn’t see anyone like me, and I want to help with that.

I think what we’re seeing is to really have these kinds of solutions to what’s happening with Indigenous communities, who are so impacted by climate change, we need everyone to be involved in that. And that especially includes Indigenous scientists.