To slow climate change, we’ll need to not just cut emissions, but sequester them. And for that we’ll need to protect healthy ecosystems, experts say.
Since the start of the Biden administration, federal climate policy seems to be waking up from a four-year slumber. But things are not as they were in 2017. The planet is hotter, 57 million acres of American forests have burned, and the global carbon budget is tighter than ever.
But there’s good news. Even while the Trump administration sought to dismantle national climate policies, a growing number of local, state and private-sector actors found ways to lead at home.
Our latest research, conducted at the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, shows how these “subnational” actors have kicked off a new era of climate action. As a result, the majority of Americans now live in jurisdictions committed to reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century or earlier.
But the push to net zero can only go so far without coordination from D.C.
In their current form, subnational targets have wide discrepancies in how states choose to pursue and measure their pathways to net zero. For instance, if Oregon buys electricity from a coal-fired power plant in Idaho, should Oregon count those emissions as its own? Should Idaho? What if the coal came from Wyoming? A lack of consistency could lead to double counting — or worse, not counting at all.
These targets are also unable to address a substantial gap in the fabric of subnational climate action: Emissions that come from the one quarter of U.S. land that is owned and managed by the federal government.
A stunning 23% of the nation’s greenhouse gases can be traced directly to public lands. Much of these emissions come from the extraction of fossil fuels under leases issued by the Bureau of Land Management. States have limited control over what takes place on federal property, even when that land is within their borders. The BLM and U.S. Forest Service set the terms for oil and gas leasing, mining permits and logging.
Oil drilling on BLM land in Utah. (Photo by Wild Earth Guardians, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
More recent attempts to regulate emissions from federal government leasing and permitting programs were stymied by climate obstruction by the federal government. The American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act would have required federal lands to reach net zero by 2040, but it never received a hearing in the Republican-controlled Congress in 2019. As a result, states — especially those in the West with large swathes of public land — remain limited in their ability to meet their own decarbonization targets.
But public lands offer an opportunity as well as a challenge. American public lands already sequester roughly 250 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. The restoration of forests and other native ecosystems plays the leading role in taking up this carbon, while protecting biodiversity and ecological resilience.
Today these carbon sinks give the United States the equivalent of a 4% rebate on the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. That might sound small, but it’s greater than the annual emissions from every commercial flight in the country.
Looking forward into the decisive decade, as emissions begin to decline, the amount of carbon sequestered by public lands will be determined by our actions as stewards of these landscapes. Ultimately, reaching net zero means ensuring that for every ton of CO2 emitted in a given year, another ton is put back into the earth. A large portion of those negative emissions has the potential to come from America’s public lands, but forests will not regrow in the course of a single night or even one election cycle.
Recognizing this opportunity will be important to communicating that public land is valuable for more than just extraction and logging. The more we can protect public lands to ensure they’re carbon sinks rather than sources, the easier it will be to reach net zero by 2050.
The Biden-Harris administration took a key step in this direction in January when it issued a temporary moratorium on new fossil fuel leases on public lands. But the administration has yet to issue guidance on whether this moratorium will continue or how it plans to deal with existing leases.
Even more recently, Congress began debating the CLEAN Future Act, which would commit the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050, in addition to setting a 50% emissions reduction by 2030. But the act doesn’t provide an explicit mandate to the Interior Department to align the actions of the BLM with the needs of a net-zero future. Unlike the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solutions Act, the CLEAN Future Act doesn’t require federal and state actors to come together and plan to reduce emissions and sequester carbon on public lands.
With this omission Congress risks making the common mistake of overlooking the federal government’s direct role in facilitating nearly a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Aligning ambition with action will require a new era of federal leadership. And if Congress is too gridlocked to act on climate, there’s every hope that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will be one of the nation’s most influential climate champions in the years to come.
Creating a net-zero strategy for the United States’ public lands would be an excellent place to start.
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.
Invasive predators have cornered these endangered Patagonian frogs in the last remnant of their habitat.
The El Rincon stream frog only lives in hot springs at the headwaters of a small Patagonian stream. With just a handful of decimated populations remaining, the critically endangered frog is struggling to survive.
Species name:
El Rincon stream frog, also known as the Somuncura or Valcheta frog (Pleurodema somuncurense)
Description:
This small frog is almost entirely aquatic. Its coloration is green and brown with several dorsal spots, and some individuals can have a clear vertebral line.
Where it’s found:
The hot springs of the headwaters of the Valcheta Stream, in northern Patagonia
IUCN Red List status:
Critically endangered due to a continued decline in extent and quality of its aquatic habitat and the local extinction of some subpopulations
Major threats:
Invasive predator salmonids (rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss) have cornered these frogs in their last habitat. And even there, they also face habitat destruction by livestock.
Notable conservation program(s) or legal protections:
The Wild Plateau Initiative (Somuncura Foundation) is running an action plan framed on habitat restoration and population recovery of this species. The recovery program is based on ex situ breeding and reintroduction of individuals into restored habitat.
My favorite experience:
I was part of the first reintroduction attempt of this endangered species in the wild — in a restored habitat where a local population had become extinct. Releasing captive-born individuals into a wild habitat, where they will be protected and free of threats, makes me happy and confident about being able to do something for the sake of the wild.
What else do we need to do to protect this species?
Next steps include continuing with ongoing conservation activities, promoting the legal protection of the frog’s habitat, and engaging the local community in conserving it.
Key research:
Velasco M, Berkunsky I, Akmentins M, Kass C, Arellano M, Aguirre T, Williams J, Kacoliris 2019. Status and population dynamics of the Critically Endangered Valcheta frog Pleurodema somuncurense on the Patagonian Somuncura Plateau. Endangered Species Research, 40: 163 – 169.
Martinez Aguirre T, Calvo R, Velasco MA, Arellano ML, Zarini O, Kacoliris 2019. Re-establishment of an extinct local population of the Valcheta Frog, Pleurodema somuncurense, in a restored habitat in Patagonia, Argentina. Conservation Evidence. 2019.
Velasco MA, Berkunsky I, Simoy MV, Quiroga S, Bucciarelli G, Kats L, Kacoliris 2018. The rainbow trout is affecting the occupancy of native amphibians in Patagonia. Hydrobiologia, 817: 447 – 455.
Experts say expanding public lands won’t be enough to achieve science-based calls for more protected areas.
Sagebrush bulldozed for a housing development. A pipeline carved through grasslands. Forest felled for a road. Every 30 seconds in the United States, a football field-sized swath of nature is lost to development, according to research from the Center for American Progress.
This troubling trend runs counter to calls from scientists to protect more natural areas to mitigate against the effects of climate change and better protect plants and animals from extinction.
Current goals to protect biodiversity simply aren’t good enough, scientists say.
Targets set in the international Convention on Biological Diversity called for protecting 17% of land and 10% of the ocean by 2020. “These are interim measures that are politically driven but not science based and are widely viewed in the scientific literature as inadequate to avoid extinctions or halt the erosion of biodiversity,” according to research published in the journal Science Advances.
If habitat destruction and warming don’t peak by the end of this decade, we won’t be able to keep rising global temperature below the critical threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius, the researchers said. “It has become clear that beyond 1.5°C, the biology of the planet becomes gravely threatened because ecosystems literally begin to unravel,” the authors wrote.
We need to aim higher. And quickly. Efforts are now coalescing behind “30×30” — a global goal of protecting 30% of Earth’s land and water by 2030.
“30×30 has been discussed in scientific circles for quite some time in acknowledgement of the multiple crises on our hands — the extinction crisis and the climate crisis — both of which are magnified by the rate at which we’re losing nature,” says Ryan Richards, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.
In January the United States took a first step in moving the United States toward 30×30. A sweeping executive order from President Joe Biden on the climate crisis contained a mandate directing the secretary of the Interior and other relevant agency leaders to submit recommendations for how the federal government could conserve at least 30% of the United States’ land and waters by the end of the decade.
Initial findings are due later this month, but there’s no doubt that there’s much work to be done. Currently 26% of the country’s ocean waters are protected, but only 12% of U.S. lands.
“Nine years is not a very long time to protect essentially 440 million additional acres that still need to be conserved to reach that 30% goal,” says Erin Heskett, vice president of conservation initiatives at the Land Trust Alliance.
A big focus will undoubtedly be increasing the amount of federally protected public lands, possibly with a first step of restoring cuts by the Trump administration, which slashed more than 1 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah. National parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and national monuments are all important places that help protect biodiversity and sequester carbon to mitigate against climate change.
But there’s another important component, experts say: private lands. The Center for American Progress found that 75% of natural areas lost to development in the United States between 2001 and 2017 were on private lands, including farms, ranches and forests.
“That rate is five times higher than on federal or state lands,” says Richards. “So private lands are going to be one of the big pieces of the puzzle if you’re going to be successful in meeting those 30×30 goals.”
A Big Opportunity
When it comes to protecting private lands, there’s nowhere to go but up.
A mere 3% of protected areas in the country are on private lands, despite the fact that 60% of all land in the country is privately owned.
That’s bad news for biodiversity.
“Researchers have found that we’re losing habitat for threatened and endangered species twice as fast on unprotected private lands as we are on public lands, which is a big deal when you realize that a huge percentage of our threatened species live in places like the Southeast and areas outside of where we have a lot of federally protected public lands,” says Richards.
One way to begin protecting more private land is to ramp up existing programs that help local government agencies or land trusts buy private property outright or provide incentives for conservation easements.
Conservation easements, which are voluntary legal agreements where landowners are compensated for preserving — typically permanently — the conservation value of their property, already protect an estimated 40 million acres in the United States. And it’s proving to be a good investment of public money.
Gunnison sage grouse. Photo: Larry Lamsa, (CC BY 2.0)
In Colorado conservation easements have set aside 1.5 million acres of land considered “crucial habitat,” which includes areas for Gunnison sage grouse and wintering range for elk. A report from Colorado State University found that each conservation dollar invested by the state has delivered $4-$12 of public benefits. Those benefits, often called “ecosystem services,” include groundwater recharge, flood control, water purification, and habitat for fish and wildlife.
“They are already popular, especially in the West where many landowners have a strong ethic of stewardship,” says Tyler McIntosh, a policy and design associate at the Center for Western Priorities. “Since people are already motivated to do this work, there’s an opportunity to structure our policy such that their voluntary efforts are worth it for them financially.”
Funding Sources
Several existing Department of Agriculture programs already help to boost conservation. One is the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, which helps conserve wetlands and grasslands. Another, the Conservation Reserve Program, pays farmers to take land out of production and plant species to improve environmental health.
But McIntosh says interest in these programs exceeds most of their available funds.
That means Congress will need to allocate more resources to those programs and utilize other initiatives, such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which conservation groups fought last year to have fully funded by Congress.
Money from the fund — which is generated by offshore oil and gas leasing — can be used for acquiring new lands, such as through the Forest Service’s Land Acquisitions Program. But McIntosh says one important thing to remember is that most grants from the Land and Water Conservation Fund need to be matched at the state level. “It’s very important that states begin to set aside funds for conservation, too,” he says.
Exactly how much more money it will take to meet 30×30 conservation goals isn’t clear, says Heskett, but it will take efforts beyond the federal government.
“We’ll also need more from state governments, private philanthropy and conservation finance tools,” he says.
Philomath High School students plant trees, grasses and shrubs at the Marys River Natural Area owned by the City of Corvallis. This 74 acre site is also under the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Wetlands Reserve Program as a permanent easement. Photo: NRCS Oregon, (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Combining permanent easements with short-term incentive programs could also help, say Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares, professors in the department of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley.
“One such approach could be conservation leases with terms of 20 to 30 years that are palatable to landowners while providing meaningful protection,” they explained in an op-ed in TheNew York Times. “These programs would be less expensive than land purchases or easements, providing new ways for corporations and philanthropists to underwrite land protection at a scale much greater than can be achieved through the outright purchase of land.”
Additional Gains
Using private land to boost protected areas can also make nature more accessible and widens the geographic scope of where conservation happens.
The vast majority of federally protected lands are in the West, but by increasing protection on private lands in other parts of the country it can help conserve more plants and animals, as well as provide natural areas nearby millions more residents.
“Private land is often closer to communities than federal wilderness, national forests or even state lands,” found a report by the Center for Western Priorities. “For example, many city parks are protected by conservation easements. Additional benefits can include improved health, access to locally produced food, and opportunities for environmental education.”
But deciding which lands are conserved should also include identifying not just how much can be protected, but what kind of ecosystems.
“We feel that there’s an opportunity here to identify a significant portion of this goal that would invest in the lands and waters that are most resilient to climate change and would best allow animals and plants to find new places to thrive,” says Heskett.
One way to do that, he says, would be by using a tool developed by the Nature Conservancy called the Resilient and Connected Landscapes network, which identifies lands across the country that are expected to be the most resilient to climate change.
And any effort to improve conservation goals also need to be centered in equity.
“Native Americans and other peoples of color have been largely excluded from U.S. conservation policy, and many of them, living in cities, view public lands as remote and unwelcoming,” wrote Middleton and Brashares. “A successful 30 by 30 strategy must encompass needs as diverse as tribal priorities and urban green spaces in historically excluded communities.”
But if done well, a 30×30 conservation goal can help both diverse human communities and ecosystems.
“Our polling shows that the public is behind conservation,” says McIntosh. “And the question now is whether governments at state, local and federal levels are going to tap into that support and take advantage of this moment.”
Hope is often touted as an important ingredient in conservation success. Our research found that it’s vital — but only if it’s combined with another key element.
Hope — it seems to be everywhere these days. Humans routinely hope for all sorts of stuff — easy-to-assemble IKEA furniture, vaccines against COVID-19, economically painless solutions to global warming. Some believe we’re born with an “innate” sense of hope, and according to positive psychologist Barbara Frederickson, hope is one of the “top ten positive emotions.” It’s even been said that “when hope dies in a person, physical death is not far off.”
Among conservation workers, activists and anyone concerned with the climate crisis, hope is called upon to do particularly heavy lifting. A recent Google search on the phrase “hope and conservation” returned a whopping 779,000 results. In the top result, conservation journalist Jeremy Hance asks “Has hope become the most endangered species in conservation?”
There’s a common narrative shared by Hance and other like-minded commentators. Hope, according to this line of thinking, is a bulwark against the despair that would be an all-too-natural reaction to torrents of environmental bad news. Ecologist Steve Morton calls it “the elixir of (environmental) action,” whereas, to feel hopeless, according to numerous sources, is to be numbered and paralyzed into inaction. Gregory Balmford and Nancy Knowlton, architects of the Earth Optimism movement, even argue that hopelessness among conservationists could become “a driver of extinction.”
Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator
I’m an ecologist, not a psychologist, but I’ve long been struck by the centrality of hope in professional conservation discourse. Commentaries in the conservation literature extoll and debate the virtues of having “hope in hard times.” But are we, I asked myself, expecting hope to do too much?
To investigate this question, I teamed up with psychology Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Williams and sustainability expert Melanie Zurba to investigate the many dimensions of hope and to ask whether hope’s really a necessary prerequisite for people to engage in environmental action. Our resulting review, published last year in the journal Biological Conservation, reached back to the earliest definitions and psychological theories of hope and found that it has both benefits and pitfalls for people working on conservation and environmental issues.
Hope Status? It’s Complicated.
Strong claims for the power of hope in modern human affairs follow a long history in which hope was seen in a negative light. Ancient Greek writers, for example, often perceived hope as a refuge for wishful thinkers, the gullible and those who underestimated the gravity of their situations.
It was left to thinkers from the Enlightenment and later to reframe hope as a positive attribute with goals that can be actively pursued.
That brings us to contemporary positive psychology, which defines hope as “a positive motivational state” (not an emotion) that enables people to exercise agency (goal-directed energy) in the pursuit of objectives that are possible but not 100% certain.
Photo: Justin Ried (CC BY 2.0)
This type of “active” or “authentic” hope is what conservation biologist David Orr had in mind when he described hope as “a verb with its sleeves rolled up.” Orr’s folksy definition capture the idea of hope as having pragmatic, achievable goals that demand conservationists take the actions needed to realize them. You may not know how to save the world, but you can hope to conserve a watershed.
However, don’t confuse hope — especially active hope — with four related but different states that have less positive implications.
First, there’s optimism. Unlike active hope, optimism’s objectives may be vague or even absent. Optimism is best thought of as a sunny expectation that “everything will turn out for the best.”
Then there’s passive hope, in which individuals hope for favorable but fuzzily defined outcomes such as “a solution” to climate change. Passive hope may actually be demotivational. For example, those who feel hopeful because they only expose themselves to positive visions of the future may fail to follow through on those feelings to make them real.
There’s also absolute hope, the refusal to despair in the face of an inevitably bad future, like a terminal illness. A patient may be terminal, but absolute hope allows them to maintain their sense of self and resist dwelling on the diagnosis.
Finally, at the extreme end of making the best out of bad times, there’s radical hope, which helps to makes unsatisfactory or disastrous present circumstances tolerable by maintaining hope for future deliverance. You can have radical hope without knowing what future deliverance looks like or when it will arrive. One individual often held up as an archetype of radical hope is Plenty Coups, last principal chief of the Crow Nation, who led his people through a period in which Crow traditions of hunting and warriorship were destroyed.
Though it may seem noble, radical hope can be a slippery slope to “positive reappraisal,” where negative outcomes are re-evaluated as opportunities or even as beneficial. Naturalist and blogger Phil Barnett appeared to be practicing positive reappraisal when he wrote: “…if only for the sake of our mental health, we can accept the reality of a globe, everywhere sullied by man’s footprints and perhaps even learn to love it.” In a real-world conservation example, I’d posit that both radical hope and positive reappraisal lie behind the “Hail Mary” plan to clone the functionally extinct northern white rhinoceros, now down to two individuals, both of them female.
To Hope or to Hope Not?
Not everyone buys into the hope agenda. Environmental writers Paul Kingsnorth and Derrick Jensen accuse environmentalists of buying into false hope. Echoing the ancient Greeks, they say that false hope leads to unattainable goals, illusory expectations, and inept action strategies. To Kingsnorth, “False hope is worse than no hope.” Jensen seems to be thinking about both false hope and radical hope when he says hope is a “longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”
Clearcut forest. Photo: Sam Beebe (CC BY 2.0)
Furthermore, absence of hope doesn’t stop some people from acting in pro-environmental ways. Greta Thunberg doesn’t always come across as a fount of positivity, yet she continues to fight for the world she wants. Neither Kingsnorth nor Jensen feels hopeful, yet each continues to act in the world, albeit from outside mainstream environmentalism. To Jensen, removing false hope is a precondition for action: “When we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it.”
So, to hope or not to hope? Should we embrace and encourage hope because it is the “elixir of conservation”? Or should we avoid investing too much emotional and professional capital in hope? Because, let’s face it, while conservationists may try to save as many endangered species and populations as possible, disappointments are inevitable.
Right now, it seems as though most conservation-oriented literature is solidly on hope’s side. A sparse but growing body of psychological research supports a role for active hope in helping conservationists “stay in the game.” During the past six months two intellectual heavy hitters, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and science communicator Elin Kelsey, brought out books extolling the virtues of hope. Their titles: Commanding Hope (Homer-Dixon) and Hope Matters (Kelsey) leave little doubt as to where their authors stand on the importance of hope.
Personality, Leadership and Organizational Strengths Matter
At the end of our review, we concluded that active hope can be a powerful ingredient in conservation success, provided the complexities of hope as a motivational state are acknowledged.
We found that passive hope, radical hope and positive reappraisal seem to be unlikely motivators of success in most environmental battles. And optimism certainly won’t cut it, since optimists don’t typically feel obligated to act in the world to make their expectations real.
It’s active hope, we argue, that’s the gold standard. Only active hope provides the inspiration, agency and pathways to success that are needed for environmental action to succeed. Research in fields as diverse as athletic performance and psychotherapy has associated active hope with successful outcomes. Furthermore, active hope may provide environmental workers with a buffer of resilience against the repeated pain of environmental loss.
Photo: BLM (uncredited)
But hope on its own, we also found, is not particularly useful.
By themselves, expressions of hope are imperfect predictors of engagement in pro-conservation action. Nor is the direction of causation between hope and action always clear. Pro-environmental behavior may sometimes be a prelude to having hope rather than the other way round. And hope isn’t the only determinant of future action. Life goals, personality traits, cognitive biases, cultural values, childhood experience, age, gender, religion and cultural identity also influence pro-conservation attitudes and actions.
An important take-home message that emerged from our review is that conservation organizations must work to foster personal qualities and behaviors that turn active hope into action. Having a sense of personal agency, engaging in goal-directed projects, and developing clear roadmaps to the future enable conservation workers to be effective.
Leadership is also important. Strong conservation leaders inspire their troops with clear, long-term visions allied to pragmatic road maps of how to make those visons real.
And yet, as important as vision may be, it is often neglected. In a 2018 report based on interviews with 116 Canadian environmental leaders, Graham Saul, the executive director of Nature Canada, concluded that many environmental organizations lack a unifying vision around which forward-looking hopes could coalesce.
The bottom line is that having active hope helps to make conservation visions reality. But don’t expect hope to achieve good things unaided. Inspirational leadership and solid organizational scaffolding are needed to help hopeful conservation workers succeed. In the present environmental moment, conservation organizations may also need to cultivate resilience among workers and volunteers against the times when even active hope fails to pan out.
Residents of northeastern Oklahoma still suffer from the toxic fallout of shuttered mines.
One of the first Superfund sites in the United States remains one of the most polluted.
From the late 1800s through the 1960s, miners extracted lead and zinc from the ground beneath the Tar Creek area in northeastern Oklahoma. But 50 years after the mine was shuttered, the region’s toxic legacy still seeps from boreholes into the water and drifts in the wind from tailings piles. Even now, the unstable ground threatens to swallow up homes.
Neighboring residents — including those of the Quapaw Nation and Ottawa County’s other eight tribes — have paid a heavy toll. The mounting environmental and human health threats led the federal government to declare 40 square miles of the area a Superfund site in 1984.
Despite efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency and state and tribal governments, problems persist. One area of grave concern is the region’s watershed. Tar Creek, which flows through the towns of Commerce and Miami, runs orange with acid mine drainage. The contamination travels downstream to Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees, a major source of drinking water and recreation.
This year Tar Creek made the list of the 10 most endangered rivers in the country, an annual call-out from the nonprofit American Rivers.
Tar Creek Superfund site in Picher, Oklahoma. Photo: Michael, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The designation came as no shock to Rebecca Jim, who worked for 25 years as a counselor in the local school district and heads the nonprofit LEAD Agency (Local Environmental Action Demanded). LEAD Agency has been raising awareness about the environmental and health problems from the Tar Creek Superfund site.
The Revelator spoke with Jim about what decades of pollution have meant for area residents, why cleanup efforts have fallen short, and what else needs to be done.
What happened at Tar Creek to cause a toxic waste site worthy of Superfund designation?
Rebecca Jim of LEAD Agency. Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Jim
They mined down in some places over 300 feet deep. And they weren’t open-pit mines. They were random pillar mines. The pillars were left underground to protect the miners, but when the mines began to play out some of those pillars were mined and no record was kept of which ones.
That led to a series of collapses that occurred and continue to occur. Oklahoma Senator [Jim] Inhofe finally agreed to a study on the risk of subsidence under the towns of Picher and Cardin. The results [which led to a buyout for residents] showed that the people in those towns were at great risk — a cave-in could have been imminent. It still could.
Another problem is the water. Our water body, Tar Creek, is mine-water discharge — a million gallons have been flowing from the site every day for 42 years now. And all of that flows down our creek into the Neosho River. There are also two more Superfund sites in Kansas and Missouri with waste that flows down the Spring River. The Neosho River and the Spring River meet and form the Grand River, which is dammed. So it collects all those metals in Grand Lake, which is also a drinking-water reservoir and a fishing paradise.
What’s been done?
We were one of the very first Superfund sites in the nation and EPA came in with great ambitions, perhaps, to do something. They did something, but they didn’t do enough and what they did do didn’t work. They tried to put up a berm to keep the acid-mine water from entering Tar Creek, but the berm didn’t hold.
In that early work they did fill some mine shafts and some boreholes to try to keep water from entering the aquifer and filling back up. But then, bless her heart, [Love Canal activist] Lois Gibbs did what we didn’t do: She went on TV and made all these posters saying, “Love Canal really needs some help.”
A zinc mine in Picher, Oklahoma in 1936 that would later become a Superfund site. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information
When she did that, the media left us and then EPA did, too. We were an abandoned mine site and then we were abandoned by EPA.
How has that affected the community?
We probably still would be abandoned if it hadn’t been for the Indian Health Service discovering that our children were lead poisoned.
In the 1990s Don Ackerman [a researcher at the Indian Clinic] looked through [the Service’s medical records] and saw that 34% of our kids were lead poisoned and so EPA had to come in and respond. They found that it was true that the children were being lead poisoned, but in some of the towns it was even worse than Don’s findings.
I worked for 25 years as an Indian counselor in Miami, Oklahoma beginning the year before Tar Creek turned orange — 1978. I had worked with kids in other school districts before I came here, and our kids were different. They couldn’t sit still, couldn’t concentrate. They struggled, they failed, they cried, they felt bad about themselves and they would either act out or drop out. With a third of our kids lead poisoned, that’s a lot of children in every classroom with issues to work through.
But Don’s study led to action.
What EPA began to do was to remove contaminated soil. That started in 1995 and they’re still doing it. Initially it was in “the box,” which is what they call the line that designates the boundary of the Superfund site. But we didn’t think that was adequate. Now it’s the whole county. Any resident in Ottawa County can have a yard tested for lead and if it’s found to be high, EPA will fund replacing it.
An aerial view of Tar Creek running through part of the 40 square mile Superfund site in Oklahoma. Photo: Google Earth
At the same time they’re hauling away mine waste called “chat piles,” which are really like mountains of toxic tailings [200 feet high]. These are loaded with lead, cadmium, arsenic, zinc and manganese. And these are still blowing in the wind.
We know that it’s not just lead, it’s not just one metal, but it’s the cocktail of metals that hurt us. They’re all dangerous. I’ve seen some of my former students dying from kidney failure at young ages. That’s probably from the exposures they’ve had all through their lifetimes.
EPA has given the Quapaw Nation a contract for the cleanup work, but they’re not funded enough to do much at a time. It looks like a big operation, but at the rate they’re going it will be decades before they’re done.
What’s the current state of the creek?
Nobody’s doing anything about that water. It’s running unchecked. There’s always mine-water discharge coming down. It comes up from the aquifer through old boreholes, air vents and other cracks in the surface. It used to be one area, but now the whole property is bleeding. It’s just pouring into Tar Creek. Nobody’s tried anywhere at all to stop that discharge.
Tar Creek runs orange with acid-mine runoff. Photo: Janice Waltzer, (CC BY 2.0)
I believe that if enough water was pulled out to lower the aquifer, we could get ahead of it and if we could keep pulling out enough water, we could add a wastewater-treatment system. That was in the original plan, but they rejected it because it cost too much money. It would have been safer than having that water discharge all these years and end up in a drinking-water reservoir, lowering the IQ of anybody that eats that fish or eats any plants that grow along the creek, any wild onion you dig up or any blackberry you pick. Anything along the creek bed should not be consumed.
When EPA first came in, we were all excited: “We’re going to get this fixed.” We all believed that they would do something, they would do it quickly, it would be resolved and we’d have fish in that creek again. And people could play in it again. But then they walked away and they did nothing and have still done nothing for that creek. Now you have 40 years of children not being able to play in it. Pretty soon there’s no memory of the joy. It’s forgotten.
What do you want to see happen now?
I’m hopeful of this new infrastructure bill that’s been introduced, which would put a tax back on polluters. We want Superfund funded. It ran out because Congress wanted proof it was doing something and so they set aside mega-sites like ours so that they could clean up the ones that were the size of a filling station. They did those first, so they could get their numbers up.
And a lot of sites got cleaned up. But not ours.
Another problem is that Senator Inhofe put in an amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act that will lead to Grand Lake being two feet deeper. But that means when it rains heavily, Tar Creek and the Neosho River will back up quicker and deeper, leading to more flooding and contamination of areas that have already been cleaned up or yards that have never had any exposure before.
We also hope the designation [from American Rivers] is a wake-up call. We’ve got a diagnosis here where we are in danger — somebody has noticed. I think it will be a rallying cry for our community to say that we want it to be better.
This is our moment of reckoning. Now is our turn, we’re going to love this creek again.
Clickbait stories of happy animals returning to suddenly quiet habitats paint an overly rosy picture of COVID-19’s impact on the marine environment.
As we enter what’s hopefully the home stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s time to take stock of how it affected every aspect of our world, to consider what happened, what could be done different to avoid those problems in the future, and what’s next.
That might mean confronting some of our earlier conclusions. For example, at the start of the pandemic we were bombarded with often false stories about suddenly quiet cities and waterways experiencing animals reclaiming what was once their habitat. “Nature is healing” stories like this seem to have created an overly rosy picture of the pandemic’s impact on the natural world.
The reality is much more complicated, and I’m not just talking about things like the well-publicized millions of inappropriately discarded plastic bags and protective masks ending up in the ocean. Many other changes to the world’s waters, including some potentially harmful ones, are taking place beneath the surface.
“Protected and conserved areas and the people who depend on them are facing mounting challenges due to the pandemic,” says Rachel Golden Kroner, an environmental governance fellow at Conservation International. Indeed, for the past two decades a sizable chunk of global biodiversity conservation has been funded by ecotourism, a funding source that dries up when international travel slows down, as it did this past year.
While any global complex event has many impacts including some that we almost certainly can’t predict at this point, many of the medium and long-term effects are likely to be bad.
And You Thought Your Virtual Meetings Were Bad
It’s not just your workplace that’s been meeting online this past year. It’s every meeting, including international wildlife conservation and management meetings.
Some of these important events have been postponed, stalling critical political momentum that scientists and activists have been building for years. Others have met virtually, with notably less effectiveness.
The highest profile example of this was the December 2020 failure of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. The IATTC is an international gathering that governs a multi-billion-dollar series of global tuna fisheries, and meetings include representatives from all over the world who hammer out fishing quotas and other rules. The 2020 meeting closed without reaching an agreement on 2021 quotas. If allowed to stand, this would have meant that starting on January 1 of this year, a multi-billion-dollar global industry would have had absolutely no rules governing it. Imagine if your city council failed to agree on a policing budget, and this meant that “The Purge” was suddenly real — that’s what nearly happened in the world of tuna management this past winter.
Photo: NOAA (uncredited)
The pandemic didn’t create the problem of tuna management politics, but experts believe that the virtual meeting, which precluded “schmoozing” in the hallway during coffee breaks and added an element of multiple time zone chaos, contributed to this year’s unprecedented breakdown in negotiations.
“These meetings are often difficult to get through, but usually they keep working until they get it done, until there’s at least a decent solution,” says Grantly Galland, a global tuna conservation expert with Pew Environment. That’s hard enough in person, but this year “the meeting started at 6 p.m. for me in D.C., which was midnight in Europe, and early morning in Japan. People were often frustrated. As discussions dragged into the night the incentive to keep going disappeared, and the meeting ended without rules.”
Fortunately, after receiving intense pushback from environmental groups and the concerned public, the commission met for an emergency meeting a few weeks later and fixed this problem by just carrying over the 2020 rules to 2021 — hardly an ideal solution given existing problems with the 2020 rules, but a lot better than open ocean anarchy.
Still, this near-disaster shows how dependent our system of environmental management is on face-to-face meetings.
Industry Relief
Whenever there’s any economic crisis, industry will ask for a temporary (or even permanent) rollback of environmental protection regulations that they find economically burdensome. Marine and coastal protected areas, long a priority for science-based conservation and long opposed by elements of the fishing industry, have been no exception.
Photo: NOAA OKEANOS Explorer Program, 2013 Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition
Marine protected areas also face other threats stemming from the pandemic. Golden Kroner says: “Key challenges for marine protected areas include budget cuts, declines in tourism revenue, disruption of seafood supply chains and challenges in implementing management activities.”
Golden Kroner shared examples of the near-collapse of the tourism-associated hospitality industry in Kenya, the Galapagos, Indonesia and Australia, noting that some of these industries employed former members of the fishing industry who had been persuaded to work in tourism instead.
While some coastal communities and protected areas face these serious issues, the good news is that this problem is far from universal.
“While the shutdowns, restrictions, and closures of coastal areas disrupted access and temporarily interrupted stewardship and harvest activities across Hawai’i, the connections between humans and nature forged over generations ensured that marine management actions never lost momentum,” says Ulu Ching, the program manager for community-based conservation for Conservation International’s Hawaii office. “Well-established community networks in collaboration with government resource management agencies continued to advance the work of mālama i ke kai (caring for the ocean) through the development and establishment of community-driven marine managed areas across the islands during the pandemic.”
A young monk seal underwater in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. Photo: NOAA/PIFSC/HMSRP
Additionally, Golden Kroner points out that while some momentum for creating protected areas has stalled and some industry groups have called for rollbacks, there is good news in the form of expanded protected areas in a handful of places around the world. But it’s clear that despite some positive signs, momentum in creating new marine protected areas has stalled in many places, tourism that funded their operations has slowed to a crawl, and some industries have been successful in rolling back protections.
Threats Continue, But Monitoring Has Stalled
One of the primary tools in the conservationist’s toolbox for making sure that the commercial fishing industry follows the rules is observer coverage: independent people on board fishing vessels who monitor and record the catch. Due to COVID-19 safety regulations, observer coverage in much of the world has been reduced or eliminated — but fishing continues.
“For countries with fewer management resources, I can imagine that less observer coverage could lead to more rules being bent,” says Simon Gulak, a fisheries consultant with Sea Leucas LLC who used to coordinate fisheries observers for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Fisheries observers provide fisheries management with accurate information on all discards/bycatch at sea, not just the cuddly protected species,” he says. “They’re a bit like a fisher’s auditor and are liked about as much.”
The problem with a lack of observers means that we generally have no way of knowing if bad things are happening on the water, but there are certainly cases of fishing vessels who only follow the rules because they’ll get fined if they don’t.
Gulak notes that in fisheries subject to electronic monitoring — including GPS trackers and cameras that document all catch and bycatch — observers may be less important because all relevant data is recorded automatically and it’s harder to get away with breaking the rules.
Galland, the tuna conservation expert, also stressed the importance of ramping up electronic fisheries monitoring efforts. If the pandemic leads to an increase in e-monitoring, that may be a long-term good. In the meantime, we just don’t know what’s going on in many fisheries that were previously monitored by human observers.
It’s not just fisheries observing that’s stalled due to workplace safety concerns, but also fish market surveys, an important scientific tool for monitoring catch from boats too numerous and small to have observers or electronic monitoring equipment. In large parts of the world, fish market surveys are the only data we have on local catch composition. Without them, we wouldn’t know how many endangered species are caught, or if formerly common species started to disappear.
Monitoring of things like sea turtle nests has similarly slowed down. These nest surveys are a critical way for scientists and managers to keep track of population trends of iconic endangered species, and to protect the nests themselves by marking them so beach drivers of off-road vehicles know to not crush the hidden nests.
A recently emerged sea turtle hatchling. Photo: Becky Skiba/USFWS
So what does the pandemic mean for ocean conservation? Experts caution that it’s probably too early to tell. However, it’s not all stories of dolphins frolicking in suddenly quiet rivers. Environmental planning meetings, funding schemes for protected areas, and monitoring of fisheries and endangered species populations were all disrupted, giving us good reasons to fear that the story is far more complicated, and far less happy, than many of us have been led to believe.
The values of Zimbabwe’s and Namibia’s ivory stockpiles have been grossly overstated, and their proposed sale would lead to another poaching epidemic.
Last year the world reacted in shock when Namibia announced plans to auction off 170 live elephants to the highest bidder.
Despite criticism, the plans have continued to move forward — and that may just be the start. Tucked away in a Feb. 1 press release justifying the auction was a rehash of the country’s oft-repeated desire to also sell ivory. The Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism’s stated:
“Namibia has major stockpiles of valuable wildlife products including ivory which it can produce sustainably and regulate properly, and which if traded internationally could support our elephant conservation and management for decades to come.”
Namibia is not alone in this desire to capitalize on its wildlife. In Zimbabwe’s national assembly last year, the minister of environment valued the country’s stockpile of 130 metric tonnes (143 tons) of ivory and 5 tonnes (5.5 tons) of rhino horn at $600 million in U.S. dollars. This figure, which would value ivory at more than $4,200 per kilogram, has since been seized upon by commentators seeking to justify the reintroduction of the ivory trade.
I’m an environmental accountant dedicated to ethical conservation, so I wanted to understand these numbers and how they motivate countries. In truth, I found not even full black-market value comes close to arriving at this figure.
Black-market values are, of course, often invisible to the general public, but the most recent data from criminal justice experts finds that unworked (or raw) elephant ivory sells for about $92/kg on the black market in Africa, while rhino horn is currently selling for $8,683/kg.
Therefore, a more realistic valuation of Zimbabwe’s ivory stockpiles, using an optimistic wholesale price of $150/kg, would give a potential income of only $19.5 million in U.S. dollars.
This is a 30th of Zimbabwe’s estimate.
And even then, those numbers fail to account for the disaster that would happen if ivory sales return — as we saw in the all-too-recent past.
The One-Off Sales
International trade in ivory has been banned since 1989, following a 10-year period in which African elephant numbers declined by 50%, from 1.3 million to 600,000. However, in 1999 and 2008 CITES allowed “one-off sales” of stockpiled ivory, to disastrous effect. The selling prices achieved then were only $100/kg and $157/kg, in U.S. dollars respectively, due to collusion by official Chinese and Japanese buyers.
Illegal ivory. Photo: Gavin Shire / USFWS
The intention of CITES in approving the one-off ivory sales was to introduce a controlled and steady supply of stockpiled ivory into the market. The legal supply, coupled with effective systems of control, aimed to satisfy demand and reduce prices. This in turn should have reduced the profitability of (and the demand for) illegal ivory. Poaching should have followed suit and decreased.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) comparison of elephant poaching figures for the five years preceding and five years following the sale showed an “abrupt, significant, permanent, robust and geographically widespread increase” in poaching.
The problem has not faded away. Most recently the two African elephant species (savanna and forest) were declared endangered and critically endangered due to their continued poaching threat.
Photo: Regina Hart (CC BY 2.0)
Still, some African nations look fondly at the 2008 sale and have long hoped to repeat it. The Zimbabwe Ministry’s 2020 statement follows yet another proposal to the 18th CITES Conference of the Parties (COP18) by Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana to trade in live elephants and their body parts, including ivory. The proposal was not accepted by the parties.
Why Didn’t Ivory Sales Work?
The one-off sales of ivory removed the stigma associated with its purchase, stimulated the market demand, and increased prices.
The ivory that China purchased in 2008 for $157/kg was drip-fed by the authorities to traders at prices ranging between $800 and $1,500 per kilogram. This meant that the bulk of the profits went to filling Chinese government coffers — not to African nations — and in doing so, created a large illegal market which drove prices even higher.
Raw ivory prices in China increased from $750/kg in 2010 to $2,100/kg in 2014. The market had been stimulated, prices increased and the volume of legal ivory available was insufficient to meet demand as the Chinese government gradually fed its stockpile into the market.
Japan, the other participant in the one-off sales, has systematically failed to comply with CITES regulations, meaning that there were (and still are) no controls over ivory being sold, allowing the illegal markets to function in parallel to the legal one.
In a very short space of time, criminals ramped up poaching and elephant numbers plummeted.
What Has Happened to the Price of Ivory Since Then?
With no recent legal international sales, combined with the significant U.S., Chinese and United Kingdom domestic ivory sales bans, the price for raw ivory paid by craftsmen in China fell from $2,100/kg in 2014 to $730/kg in 2017. That’s when China closed all of its official ivory carving outlets and theoretically stopped all official ivory trade.
The price currently paid for raw ivory in Asia, according to an investigation by the Wildlife Justice Commission, is currently between $597/kg and $689/kg, in U.S. dollars. Ivory sourced in Africa and sold in Asia has additional costs such as transportation, taxes and broker commissions. The prices paid for raw ivory in Africa have decreased correspondingly from $208/kg to $92/kg in 2020.
Those numbers pale in comparison to a living elephant. A 2014 study found that live elephants are each worth an estimated $1.6 million in ecotourism opportunities.
Funding Conservation
One half-truth is that the money earned from the legal sale will be used to effectively fund conservation.
One of the CITES conditions of the 2008 sale was that funds were to go to the conservation of elephants. South Africa placed a substantial portion of the income from its share of the pie in the Mpumalanga Problem Animal Fund — which, it turns out, was well-named. An internal investigation found the fund had “no proper controls” and that “tens of millions” of rand (the official currency of South Africa) had bypassed the normal procurement processes.
Ironically, proceeds were also partly used for the refurbishment of the Skukuza abattoir, where most of the 14,629 elephant carcasses from culling operations between 1967 and 1997 were processed.
All the while, Africa’s elephant populations continued to decline.
How to Stop Poaching
In light of these deficiencies — and in light of elephants’ recently declared endangered status — the very reverse of actual conservation can be expected if any nation is again allowed to sell its ivory stockpiles. The cost of increased anti-poaching efforts required from the consequent increase in poaching will outweigh the benefit of any income from the sale of ivory stockpiles.
To stop poaching, all international and local trade must be stopped.
Photo: John Culley (CC BY 2.0)
Repeating this failed experiment will send a message that it is acceptable to trade in ivory. Ivory carving outlets in China will re-open and demand for ivory will be stimulated. The demand for ivory in an increasingly wealthy and better-connected Asia will quickly outstrip legal supply and poaching will increase.
Meanwhile, the management of a legal ivory trade requires strong systems of control at every point in the commodity chain to ensure that illegal ivory is not laundered into the legal market. With recalcitrant Japan continuing to ignore CITES, “untransparent” Namibia “losing tolerance” with CITES, and Zimbabwe ranking 157 out of 179 on the corruption perceptions index, not even the basics for controlled trade are in place.
Therefore, aside from the strong theoretical economic arguments against renewed one-off sales, the practical arguments are perhaps even stronger: If international ivory and rhino horn sales ever again become legal, the cost to protect elephants will skyrocket and these culturally valuable animals will plunge into decline — and possibly extinction.
This vulnerable, fish-eating small carnivore still lives in stream-fed forests of northeastern Bangladesh and other countries. But it faces increasing threats.
The smallest of the planet’s 13 otter species finds its habitat shrinking every day. We know little about these mustelids — especially in Bangladesh, where I conduct my research — but they face a horde of threats.
Species name and description:
The Asian small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus) has a typical otter build with webbed digits, dark brown to blackish upper parts, and a pale vent. It can be distinguished from other otter species by its blunter muzzle, acutely arched back and a white neck devoid of any spots or streaks. Its claws are noticeably short and even often absent — a feature of its genus, Aonyx.
Where it’s found:
These otters live in the Himalayan foothills, Ganges Delta, Northeast India, Indochina, South China and Philippines, with isolated population in southern India. Their habitats range from forests and wetlands to coasts and mangroves. In Bangladesh they’re thought to be confined to the Sundarbans mangrove.
Vulnerable, with a globally decreasing population trend; endangered in Bangladesh
Major threats:
Poaching for fur and extraction to supply a recently spiked demand in pet trade is the number one threat to Asia’s most trafficked otter species. Habitat destruction, conflict with fishers, drying up streams, decreasing food supply and attacks by feral dogs are also affecting its already sharply plummeting population.
In Bangladesh there exists no study on the species outside the Sundarbans, its known habitat in the country. Even there, only a handful of research has been undertaken to date.
Notable conservation programs or legal protections:
In 2019 the species shifted to CITES Appendix I from Appendix II to plug the illegal trade and trafficking.
The IUCN Otter Specialist Group and International Otter Survival Fund are the strongest voices for the species. Although the animals are protected by law, there is no conservation scheme so far in Bangladesh.
My favorite experience:
Watching camera-trap footage of not one, not two, but multiple otter families is unforgettable. Hearing the cooing of otter pups on screen was heart-melting and one of those now-I-can-die-in-peace moments. And all these images were from a region that has long been deprioritized in conservation, without any prior systematic study.
The small-clawed otter, a globally vulnerable small carnivore, can still be found in certain protected areas of northeastern Bangladesh. This is the first camera-trap image from the region. Photo: Muntasir Akash/Northeast Bangladesh Carnivore Conservation Initiative.
However, the joy comes with a caveat. In all existing anecdotes, northeastern forests are described as the home of the larger Eurasian and smooth-coated otters. Otters showed up, true. But to my extreme surprise, it was a species that has always been attributed to the Sundarbans — a forest hundreds of miles away from the study site. Although finding the Asian small-clawed otter here has sparked hope for the region, the apparent absence of the other two expected species has left me with an uneasy feeling: Do the larger otters really roam these forests? Or is the Eurasian otter, the rarest of the three, to become the next extinct carnivore in Bangladesh?
What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?
We need extensive studies on ecology and threats to the species in both known and newly discovered habitats in Bangladesh. Connecting otters with the exceptionally rich ichthyodiversity of riparian streams and mangrove creeks can strengthen conservation practices in the country.
Key research:
Akash, M., Zakir, T. (2020) Appraising carnivore (Mammalia: Carnivora) studies in Bangladesh from 1971 to 2019 bibliographic retrieves: trends, biases, and opportunities,s15(12): 17105-17120
Aziz, M.A. (2018) Notes on population status and feeding behaviour of Asian small-clawed Otter (Aonyx cinereus) in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest of Bangladesh. IUCN Otter Specialist Group Bulletin 35(1): 3-10
Duplaix, N., Savage, M. (2018) The global otter conservation strategy. IUCN/SSC Otter Specialist Group, Salem, Oregon, USA
Atlantic salmon are perilously close to extinction in the United States. Taking down a few dams could go a long way to aiding their recovery, experts say.
Atlantic salmon have a challenging life history — and those that hail from U.S. waters have seen things get increasingly difficult in the past 300 years.
Dubbed the “king of fish,” Atlantic salmon once numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the United States and ranged up and down most of New England’s coastal rivers and ocean waters. But dams, pollution and overfishing have extirpated them from all the region’s rivers except in Maine. Today only around 1,000 wild salmon, known as the Gulf of Maine distinct population segment, return each year from their swim to Greenland. Fewer will find adequate spawning habitat in their natal rivers to reproduce.
That’s left Atlantic salmon in the United States critically endangered. Hatchery and stocking programs have kept them from disappearing entirely, but experts say recovering healthy, wild populations will require much more, including eliminating some of the obstacles (literally) standing in their way.
Conservation organizations, fishing groups and even some state scientists are now calling for the removal of up to four dams along a 30-mile stretch of the Kennebec River, where about a third of Maine’s best salmon habitat remains.
The dams’ owner — multinational Brookfield Renewable Partners — has instead proposed building fishways to aid salmon and other migratory fish getting around dams as they travel both up and down the river. But most experts think that plan has little chance of success.
A confusing array of state and federal processes are underway to try and sort things out. None is likely to be quick, cheap or easy. And there’s a lot at stake.
“Ultimately the fate of the species in the United States really depends upon what happens at a handful of key dams,” says John Burrows, executive director of U.S. programs at the Atlantic Salmon Federation. “If those four projects don’t work — or even if just one of them doesn’t work — you could basically preclude recovering Atlantic salmon in the United States.”
Prime Habitat
The best place for salmon recovery is in Maine’s two largest watersheds.
“The Penobscot River and the Kennebec River have orders of magnitude more habitat, production potential and climate resilient habitat” than other parts of the state, says Burrows.
The rivers and their tributaries run far inland and reach more undeveloped areas with higher elevations. That helps provide salmon with the cold, clean water they need for spawning and rearing. Smaller numbers of salmon are hanging on in lower-elevation rivers along the coastal plain in Maine’s Down East region, but climate change could make that habitat unsuitable.
“There’s definitely concern about how resilient those watersheds are going to be for salmon in the future,” says Burrows. “To recover the population, we need to be able to get salmon to the major tributaries farther upriver, in places where we’re still going to have cold water even under predictions with climate change.”
One of those key places is the Penobscot, which has already seen a $60 million effort to help recover salmon and other native sea-run fish. A 16-year project resulted in the removal of two dams, the construction of a stream-like bypass channel at a third dam, and new fish lift at a fourth. In all, the project made 2,000 miles of river habitat accessible.
Veazie dam on the Penobscot River is breached in 2013 as part of a river restoration project. Photo: Meagan Racey, USFWS
While there’s still more work to be done on the Penobscot, says Burrows, attention has shifted to the Kennebec. The river has what’s regarded as the largest and best salmon habitat in the state, especially in its tributary, the Sandy River, where hatchery eggs are being planted to help boost salmon numbers.
“That’s helped us go from zero salmon in the upper tributaries of Kennebec to getting 50 or 60 adults back, which is still an abysmally small number compared to historical counts,” says Burrows. “But these are the last of the wildest fish that we have.”
The Obstacles
The Sandy may be good salmon habitat, but it’s also hard to reach. Brookfield’s four dams stand in the way of fish trying to get upriver.
At the lowest dam on the river, Lockwood Dam in Waterville, there’s a fish lift — a kind of elevator that should allow fish that enter it to pass up and around the dam. But if fish do find the lift — and only around half of salmon do — they don’t get far.
“It’s a terminal lift,” says Sean Ledwin, division director of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources’ Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat. “The lift was never completed. So we pick up those fish in a truck and drive them up to the Sandy River.”
That taxi cab arrangement isn’t a long-term solution, though, and was part of an interim species protection plan.
Only the second dam, Hydro Kennebec, has a modern fish passage system. But how well that actually works hasn’t been tested yet since fish can’t get by Lockwood Dam. As part of a consultation process related to the Endangered Species Act, Brookfield has submitted a plan proposing to fix the fishway at Lockwood and add passage to the third and fourth dams.
But federal regulators found it inadequate.
“Brookfield’s proposal was rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee [which oversees hydroelectric projects] and all the [federal management] agencies,” says Ledwin. The company now has until May 2022 to come up with a new plan.
State scientists aren’t convinced Brookfield’s plan would work either.
“We have really low confidence that having four fishways would ever result in meaningful runs of all the sea-run fish and certainly not recovery of Atlantic salmon,” says Ledwin. “We don’t think that it’s going to be conducive to recovery.”
In addition to considerations related to the Endangered Species Act, Shawmut Dam, the third on the Kennebec, is currently up for relicensing, which triggers a federal review process by FERC.
And at the same time the Maine Department of Marine Resources has drafted a new plan for managing the Kennebec River that recommends removing Shawmut Dam and Lockwood Dam. A public comment period on the proposed plan closed in March.
It was good news to conservation groups, however, which would like to see all four of the dams removed if possible — or at least a few of them.
“There’s no self-sustaining population of Atlantic salmon anywhere in the world that we know of that have to go by more than one hydro dam,” says Burrows. He believes that having Brookfield spend tens of millions of dollars on new fishways will just result in failure for salmon.
Atlantic salmon parr emerging from a stream bed in Maine. Photo: E. Peter Steenstra/ USFWS
It’s partly a game of numbers. Not all fish will find or use a fishway. And if you start with a low number of returning fish and expect them to pass through four gauntlets, you won’t be left with many at the end.
“If you’re passing 50% of salmon that show up at the first dam, and then you’ve got three more dams passing 50%, that means you’re left with only an eighth of the population you started with by the end,” says Nick Bennett, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “You can’t start a restoration program where you’re losing seven-eighths of the adults before they even get to their spawning habitat.”
And getting upriver is just part of the salmon’s journey. Juvenile salmon face threats going downstream to the ocean as well, including predation and warm water in impoundments. They also risk being injured or killed going through spillways or turbines. Only about half are likely to survive the four hydro projects.
Atlantic salmon, unlike their Pacific cousins, don’t always die after spawning, either. So some adults will also make the downstream trek, too.
“Just looking at our reality, at least two dams need to go, hopefully three, and it would be amazing if all four would go,” says Burrows.
Ecosystem Restoration
The fate of Atlantic salmon hangs in the balance, but so do the futures of other fishes.
The Pacific coast of the United States is home to five species of salmon. And while the Atlantic side has just the one, it has a dozen other native sea-run species that have also seen their habitat shrink.
“Those dams are preventing other native species like American shad, alewives, blueback herring and American eel from accessing large amounts of historic habitat,” says Burrows.
Ledwin says removing dams on the Kennebec could result in populations of more than a million shad, millions of blueback herring, millions of eels and hundreds of thousands of sea lampreys.
“The recovery of those species would actually help Atlantic salmon as well because they provide prey buffers and there are a lot of co-evolved benefits,” he says.
Salmon are much more successful at nesting when they can lay their eggs in old sea lamprey nests, explains Bennett. “But sea lamprey are not good at using fish lifts and we’ve essentially blocked 90% of the historic sea lamprey habitat at Lockwood dam. We need to get those fish upstream, too.”
Dam removal advocates don’t have to look too far to find an example of how well river ecosystems respond when dams are removed.
The removal of the Edwards Dam on the lower Kennebec River in 1999 and the Fort Halifax Dam just upstream on the Sebasticook in 2008 helped ignite a nationwide dam-removal movement. It also brought back American shad, eel, two native species of sturgeon and millions of river herring to lower parts of the watershed.
Alewives returned by the millions after the Edwards and Ft. Halifax dams were removed. (Photo by John Burrows/ASF)
“We’ve got the biggest river herring run in North America now due to the dam removals,” says Ledwin. “And the largest abundance of eel we’ve ever seen on the lower Kennebec.”
The resurgence of native fishes helps the whole ecosystem. When they returned, so too did eagles, osprey and other wildlife.
“When people see all those fish in the river and the eagles overhead, it just kind of blows their minds because they never realized what had been lost for so long in our rivers,” says Burrows.
Rebuilding key forage fish like herring also benefits species that live not just in the river, but the Gulf of Maine and even the Atlantic Ocean. The tiny fish feed whales, porpoises and seabirds. They’re also used for lobster bait and can help rebuild fisheries for cod and haddock, which has economic benefits for the region, too.
“We have to rebalance the scales if we want to have marine industries and commercial fishing industries and if we want the ecological benefits of what sea-run fisheries do for us,” says Bennett.
The Path Ahead
The process to determine whether any — or all — of the four Kennebec dams that stretch from Waterville and Skowhegan are removed will take years, a diverse coalition, financial resources and agreements to meet the concerns of communities and the dam owner.
“These things come down to compromise, so there may be situations where one of those dams might not be a candidate for economic or social reasons,” says Burrows. “But it will be interesting to see if in the next couple of years we can get to a place where we can have meaningful conversations with federal agencies, the dam owner and continue to engage the communities about the potential of removal at some of these sites.”
And if removal of the four dams did happen, it wouldn’t open up the river all the way to its headwaters. Another nine dams still lie upstream in the watershed that obstruct fish passage.
“Some of those are major dams in terms of power, production and economics,” says Burrows. “So we’re not calling for those to be removed.”
The four lower dams provide just 46 megawatts of power — enough to supply about 37,000 homes and 0.43% of the state’s annual electricity generation. It’s a small amount of power relative to the damage they cause sea-run fish, says Bennett.
“By comparison we expect to add 1,200 megawatts of solar generation in the next five years,” he says. “So these four dams aren’t particularly important in our climate fight.” And removing them would open up substantial amounts of habitat to aid salmon recovery that seem worth the tradeoff in lost power.
That’s not the case, he says, for the nine larger dams upstream.
“We need those dams. We need hydroelectric power in Maine,” says Bennett. “But we made big mistakes in our past use of our rivers. And we went way overboard in favor of hydroelectric power at the expense of fish.”
Outside of the rivers, Atlantic salmon still face a tough road. Climate change is warming ocean temperatures, changing salinity and altering food webs. But having so many unknowns in the marine environment in the coming decades provides more reason to focus efforts on restoring rivers where scientists already know what works, says Burrows.
And if that’s done right, the benefits will extend far beyond salmon.
“It’s not just about salmon — it’s about these other native fish, it’s about the wildlife, water quality, economic opportunity for ground fishermen and lobstermen, and more sustainable forms of recreation and community development,” says Burrows. “If we remove a dam or two here and rebuild these fish populations to pretty big levels that really impacts a whole bunch of different parts of society. That’s what we want to try to do here on the Kennebec.”
Experts say tracking international trade and limiting biomedical use could turn the tide for Asia’s three overlooked horseshoe crab species.
Kevin Laurie had always been “a fossil nut.” He even courted his wife with outings to quarries to scout for fossils. Originally from the United Kingdom, he spent 30 years working as a police officer in Hong Kong and devoted his time off to fossil hunting around the world. Then, one day about 13 years ago, while walking a local Hong Kong beach, he spied a familiar shape among the shells and stones left by the retreating tide. It was a primitive-looking creature he had only seen in German fossil beds: a horseshoe crab.
In all those years in Hong Kong, he’d never seen one before.
Five decades ago, Laurie soon learned, Hong Kong’s shoreline had teemed with breeding horseshoe crabs each spring. Since then, many horseshoe crabs have been swept from the sea as the bycatch of industrial fishing trawlers. “Now, if I see ten mating pairs in a year, it’s an incredible year,” he says. “What’s happened in Hong Kong is so sad, and it’s a microcosm of what has happened all over Asia.”
A ‘Living Fossil’ Hangs On
What Laurie found that day was truly a living fossil. The four species of horseshoe crabs that exist today remain virtually unchanged from similar species found in 200-million-year-old fossils. They’ve been on Earth so long that the continents have shifted beneath them, says Mark Botton, a co-chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Horseshoe Crab Specialists Group and a biology professor at New York’s Fordham University. Today one species is found in North America, on the East Coast of the United States and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and three in Asia.
Laurie’s find that day changed the path of his retirement and may have changed things for Asia’s horseshoe crabs as well. He asked local and regional experts so many questions about horseshoe crab conservation that they invited him to the first international Asian horseshoe crab conference, held in Hong Kong in 2011.
At the time, the scientific information about Asia three horseshoe crab species — the tri-spine horseshoe crab (Tachypleus tridentatus), the coastal horseshoe crab (T. gigas) and the mangrove horseshoe crab (Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda) — was so scattered that the IUCN Red List, which tracks the extinction risk of species around the world, simply listed them as “data deficient.” Although experts recognized they had become rarer, no one knew how many remained or how they were faring. By the end of the 2011 conference, the attendees agreed that they should prioritize upgrading the listings for the three Asian horseshoe crab species to understand their conservation needs.
Laurie volunteered to gather the existing research and write a report on each species. The first species the group targeted was the tri-spine horseshoe crab, the largest and most widespread in Asia.
“I thought it would be easy, because I didn’t think there was much information available,” Laurie recalls. “It was more difficult than I thought.”
In fact, it took almost a decade.
Some Threats in Common
The plight of North America’s single horseshoe crab species has gotten more attention than concerns about the world’s other three, but all four face similar conditions.
The American horseshoe crab was once numerous enough that its eggs fed migrating waterbirds, particularly the red knot, all along the East Coast. The mass of horseshoe crabs coming to shore to lay their eggs each spring also created a pulse of food for fish, crabs and other animals.
“When horseshoe crabs are no longer abundant, you see a decline in all those species,” says Jennifer Mattei, a biology professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut and a member of the horseshoe crab specialist group.
Horseshoe crabs in Mispillion Harbor, Delaware, in 2006. Photo: Gregory Breese/USFWS
Today the American horseshoe crab is struggling because of sea-level rise, beach erosion, sea walls and other methods of armoring the coastline, and harvest for bait.
It’s also heavily exploited by medical companies.
A horseshoe crab’s blue-hued blood contains a unique substance that coagulates in the presence of bacterial contamination, making it ideal for testing medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Anyone who’s received a vaccine — including the millions of people who have so far benefited from COVID-19 vaccines — has benefited from bacterial tests made from horseshoe crab blood.
A laboratory-made substitute was invented 20 years ago, but was only recently approved for use in Europe, Japan and China. In the United States, its use faces additional regulatory hurdles.
Blood Is Life (or Death)
The challenges faced by the American horseshoe crab, which is classified as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List, are small compared to those faced by the three Asian horseshoe crab species, according to the scientists who study these species.
In the United States, biomedical companies take about a third of a horseshoe crab’s blood and then return the still-living creatures to the ocean within days of being caught. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission manages American horseshoe crab harvests.
Asian countries take a different approach.
There, biomedical companies rent horseshoe crabs to bleed from industrial suppliers, says Glenn Gauvry, president of Ecological Research & Development Group, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Dover, Delaware. “If they survive, they are sold as food. If they die, they are ground up for fertilizer or Traditional Chinese Medicine,” he says. “The whole animal is used. It’s not going back to the wild.”
That adds up. “Even though Asian horseshoe crabs serve only 20% of the BET [bacterial endotoxin test] market, it leads to 100% mortality” for Asian species, says Akbar John, a molecular ecologist and horseshoe crab expert at the International Islamic University Malaysia in Kuantan, Malaysia.
Whether the demand from COVID-19 research or vaccine manufacturing has increased the harvest of horseshoe crabs in China is difficult to tell.
“The data are only available to government officers,” says Kit Yue Kwan, a marine biologist with the Guangxi Key Laboratory of Beibu Gulf Marine Biodiversity Conservation, Beibu Gulf University, Qinzhou, China. “However, overharvest is still the most important threat to local horseshoe crab populations, apart from habitat destruction.”
With three species spread out over 15 countries — including Japan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam — everything about the horseshoe crab’s conservation status in Asia is more complicated than it is in North America.
Throughout the region, coastal development, including filling in the shoreline to create more dry land, wipes out horseshoe crab breeding habitat. Shrimp farms and other mariculture destroys the habitat of the mangrove horseshoe crab species. Horseshoe crabs are food in several countries. A salad of horseshoe crab eggs, served right in the horseshoe crab shell with a cold beer on the side, is a popular picnic dish in parts of Thailand, John says. Horseshoe crabs also are accidentally scooped up in fishing nets.
Moving Toward Conservation
When he started his project in 2011, Laurie found that there actually was extensive research on horseshoe crabs from both Indonesia and China — it just hadn’t been translated into English.
After a lengthy process of translating, compiling and revising the data, followed by evaluation by the IUCN, the tri-spine horseshoe crab was added to the IUCN Red List as an endangered species in 2019.
Of course, “simply listing something on the Red List doesn’t impose restrictions,” says Botton. “It’s not like a listing under the Endangered Species Act in the States, where it carries certain legal ramifications.” It’s more of a tool to help governments decide how to manage species.
Horseshoe crabs are already legally protected in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, India and specific regions of Japan. And on Feb. 5, 2021, the government of mainland China included the tri-spine horseshoe crab and mangrove horseshoe crab among more than 500 species newly protected under its National Key Protected Wildlife List.
China placed the crabs on the list’s second tier, which offers a lower level of protection than tier-one species like the giant panda, but it’s still a big step forward.
Solutions, Big and Small
With so many different countries, each with their own horseshoe crab management strategy and level of zeal for enforcement, range-wide protection for species would be more effective than the current country-by-country strategy. John, Botton, Laurie and others are working toward having Asian horseshoe crabs listed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species treaty, known as CITES, which could place limits on how many individuals a country could export or import — or even prohibit trade.
In the meantime, John says, it’s a lot easier to get a biomedical company to change what kind of bacterial endotoxin test it buys than to get people to stop eating a favorite food. He’d like to see governments use tax credits to encourage biomedical companies to buy the lab-made toxin test or have it count toward corporate environmental responsibility.
John says companies can also use less horseshoe crab blood by using sensitive instruments to measure the blood’s reaction to toxins instead of relying on the standard visual method of turning over a test tube and seeing if the gelled blood sticks to the bottom.
But there are solutions outside industry as well. Citizen science projects, such as a program in Hong Kong schools where students raise horseshoe crabs and release them, introduce the next generation to conservation issues, John says. Other citizen science projects engage fisherman, who can play a big role in horseshoe crab conservation through their actions and influence in their communities.
The fishermen help in other ways, Laurie says. In his Hong Kong neighborhood, they know that if they accidentally catch a horseshoe crab, they can call him to come and free it.
To Laurie, even small gestures matter.
Right now he’s gathering research for the report to update the Red List entry on the second of the three Asian species, the mangrove horseshoe crab. Once again, it’s no small task. So far he’s examined scientific literature in 11 different languages and dialects.
“I see a bright light at the end of the tunnel,” he says. “It’s just going to take us a long time to get there.”
