Parasites play a vital role in a healthy ecosystem, yet modern conservation techniques often do more harm than good. We propose a solution.
The modern wave of species losses that scientists have dubbed the sixth mass extinction threatens to unravel complex ecosystems, irrevocably alter our biodiversity, and endanger the survival of humanity.
From the largest elephants to the smallest fleas, tens of thousands of species are now hurtling toward extinction.
Among the most vital of these, believe it or not, are parasites.
Although parasites are small and sometimes maligned, they’re incredibly important. A healthy parasite community is an indication of a healthy, balanced ecosystem, and many species play key roles in keeping their native habitats functioning properly. Some roundworms mediate competition between host species to help maintain higher levels of biodiversity. Certain tapeworms bioaccumulate toxic pollutants, such as heavy metals, and in doing so protect their hosts and wider ecosystems from harmful effects. New pharmaceuticals are even being developed from the saliva of ticks.
Clearly parasites have benefits to both humanity and nature, and their loss could have serious consequences.
But the first step in halting the global extinction crisis is determining which species are declining, and this can be tricky. The IUCN, which manages the Red List of Threatened Species, has established methodologies to determine a species’ conservation status, but this system works badly for parasites, largely because it wasn’t developed with invertebrates in mind.
One example is population size. Take a rare bird species that only has 500 individuals left, and a pinworm species that lives on those birds that consists of 10,000 individuals. Based on those numbers alone, the bird species would probably be viewed as more threatened. However, if those 10,000 pinworms only occurred in five of the 500 birds, then the pinworms would likely be much more vulnerable to extinction because the loss of that handful of birds could wipe them out.
Stelis subemarginata, a rare bee species and a nest parasite of the bee genus Osmia. Photo by Brooke Alexander/USGS
Another challenge of conserving parasites is that, due to their small size and high species diversity, they often need to be killed to be identified and monitored. Obviously, killing a declining species to monitor it isn’t an ideal conservation strategy.
As a parasitologist focusing on rare, threatened and potentially extinct parasite species, I’ve often been struck by these problems, especially the need to kill a parasite population. And, like others, I wondered if there was a solution.
My colleagues Allen C.G. Heath and Pedro Cardoso and I have now provided a solution to the problem of viably assessing and conserving parasites, which we’ve presented in our new study in the journal Biological Conservation.
Our framework — which we call the Conservation Assessment Methodology for Animal Parasites (CAMAP) — starts by acknowledging the potential for host-specific parasites to become co-endangered, or even go extinct, when their hosts decline.
After that it outlines seven key criteria scientists can use to determine whether a parasite species should be considered threatened, endangered or critically endangered. These include geographic range, the number of infected hosts, the decline of host species, the rate of decline, and the conservation status of host species.
Our model also establishes goals conservationists can use to collect the most important information to determine a species’ conservation status and outlines what they can do if that data is not yet available.
Most importantly, this framework allows conservationists to less obtrusively survey parasite populations without wiping them out completely. Now, instead of having to try and collect, kill and identify as many parasites as possible to work out what’s going on with the population, we can instead sample a designated subset of the host population to address a parasite’s conservation needs.
And those needs are stronger than ever. In recent times we’ve lost a range of parasites, from fleas to flukes, to factors as varied as invasive species and our growing appetite for seafood. Some, such as the New England medicinal leech, have been lost for now and may yet be found and saved. And some, such as the Manx shearwater flea and Heath’s tick, are certainly still with us and urgently need conservation action.
Heath’s tick. Photo credit: Mackenzie L. Kwak
Every extinction, including the loss of a parasite, is a species lost that we will never get back. With each extinction the carefully balanced tower of species that makes up our biome becomes more unstable and at risk of collapse. Yet until now conservationists have lacked the tools to assess Earth’s diverse parasite fauna and save it. Our model may finally provide the necessary mechanism to do so — and perhaps avert further extinctions before more of these vital, often ignored species vanish from the ecosystems that depend on them.
The authors have also made the paper detailing their framework available for download through ResearchGate.
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.
Scientists have rediscovered the endangered Mindo glassfrog, which hasn’t been seen in decades. And it’s just one of many remarkable species they’ve found in an at-risk habitat.
One of the world’s rarest, most beautiful and least-seen frogs has been rediscovered — thanks, in part, to a scientist’s parasitic infection.
Two years ago a team of scientists arrived in Ecuador’s Río Manduriacu Reserve, an astonishingly lush and biodiverse canyon that’s the only known habitat for the critically endangered Tandayapa Andes toad (Rhaebo olallai). The researchers had planned a series of night surveys in the hopes of documenting the breeding behavior for the rare toad, which had been rediscovered there in 2012.
But after the first few night surveys, one of the researchers — conservation biologist Scott Trageser, president of the Tucson-based Biodiversity Group — decided he needed to stay behind. He hadn’t been feeling well, he recounts, and was too fatigued to participate. Instead, he thought he’d look around a stream close to the team’s base camp, where the toads had previously been easy to observe.
He couldn’t find any toads, though. And despite his fatigue — which he later learned was caused by undiagnosed internal parasites that were “slowly ravaging my soul and body” — he continued his quest late into the evening, trekking over “some rather precarious waterfalls” in the process.
Soon an unexpected animal call reached his ears. He looked around and saw a tiny male frog of a species he didn’t recognize. It had yellow-green skin, bulging red eyes and a translucent abdomen. The calls continued: The frog was actively calling for mates.
The Mindo glassfrog. Photo: Scott Trageser. Used with permission.
Trageser carefully picked up the colorful, one-inch-long frog and placed him in a bag with some water and foliage, then continued looking for toads for almost the whole night.
He arrived back at base camp at 7 a.m., collapsed for four hours, then woke up and eagerly opened the bag and showed its contents to his colleagues.
And blew their minds.
They knew exactly what it was: a Mindo glassfrog (Nymphargus balionotus). The last time anyone had observed the species was 2005, when just a single male was found. Before that it had gone unseen since 1984.
They couldn’t believe their eyes.
“Upon opening the bag and realizing what species he had just found — it’s unmistakable, if you’re familiar with the few photos that existed at the time — our team exploded with excitement,” says biologist Ross Maynard, Ecuador program director for The Biodiversity Group. The team had already discovered another new-to-science species of glassfrog on the same expedition, so this made two amazing findings. (The team published its research on the other species, Nymphargus manduriacu, named after the reserve, last year.)
Three further surveys conducted in 2019 revealed more Mindo glassfrogs in three different streams within the reserve. The researchers observed several females — another scientific first, as all previous observations had been males. They also found metamorphs and two egg masses — proof that the frogs not only existed there but were actively breeding.
Photos from the paper showcase the Mindo glassfrog’s translucent skin, especially its abdomen, through which you can see its internal organs. Used with permission.
The researchers (including Trageser, who got over his infection) published the news of their rediscovery last month in the journal Amphibian & Reptile Conservation and say the species should be considered endangered.
And the entire reserve could use more protection.
A Hidden Eden
With less than four square miles of protected land under its wings, about 40% of which is owned by locals, the remote Río Manduriacu Reserve isn’t particularly large. But a heck of a lot of wildlife lives among its abundant vegetation, free-flowing creeks and cascading waterfalls.
“To highlight our findings on just the herpetofauna, the reserve can claim to harbor the only known extant populations of four frog species,” Maynard says. They’ve also now documented “two novel frog species that have been formally described, 24 total species listed by the IUCN as being threatened with extinction, and numerous records substantially expanding the known range of various species.”
The reserve also serves as important habitat for several previously unknown orchid, a variety of birds and numerous mammals, including six feline species and the critically endangered brown-headed spider monkey (Ateles fusciceps).
And that’s not all: Maynard reports that a team led by zoologist Jorge Brito has discovered a new mammal species on the reserve, which represents an entirely new genus. (That research is still working its way through the scientific publishing process.)
That’s not bad for a reserve that didn’t even exist until a few years ago.
“My family and I came across the property by chance,” says Sebastián Kohn, executive director of Fundación Cóndor Andino (the Andean Condor Foundation), which manages the reserve with the EcoMinga Foundation. “The previous owner of one of the plots is an old family friend. By chance we talked about the place and decided to take a look. At the time access to the properties was a lot harder — at least six to eight hours walking — so we didn’t even see them up close before purchasing. We knew they had good forest and immediately fell in love with the Manduriacu River. The price was so cheap that we decided we couldn’t pass on the opportunity to purchase and conserve the forest, even though we still had no idea of its conservation significance.”
That significance quickly became evident when Kohn and other researchers rediscovered the Tandayapa Andes toad there in 2012. The finding helped to inspire the formal push to turn the land into a reserve in 2017.
The many faces of the Mindo glassfrog. Used with permission.
But the land and its rare residents still aren’t completely secure. Cattle pastures east and south of the reserve have encroached on the forest, and miners have tried to illegally access the property. Mining and deforestation have boomed in Ecuador in recent years, spurred by 2016 deregulation that opened 13% of the country to mining exploration and made it easier for foreign companies to acquire concessions. An open-pit copper or gold mine situated in the canyon could easily send detritus and mercury flowing downhill, where it would pollute the watershed and harm wildlife, as has happened in other parts of the country.
“Sadly, this would all but guarantee the extirpation of the local populations of threatened species documented at the reserve,” says Maynard.
Luckily the local community of 200-300 people, living a couple of miles south of the reserve, opposes mining, in no small part because the researchers and EcoMinga Foundation have spent so much time developing personal relationships and financial-empowerment initiatives. As the researchers report in their paper: “During an attempt by the mining company to access [the reserve] in August 2019, community members came together to assert their position that mining personnel will no longer be able to bypass the necessary lines of communication and documentation to access either the reserve or their private property.”
International forces could also come into play. The mining company that illegally entered the reserve is a subsidiary of BHP Billiton, which has a local alliance with Conservation International and is part of the United Nations Environment Programme’s PROTEUS program, which supports the international development of biodiversity information. “Both partnerships demand that BHP has to protect endangered species and their habitats,” Maynard points out. “Therefore, in our view, if either of these relationships are to maintain credibility in light of the data we are reporting, BHP must abandon their interests within the canyon.”
The Protection of People
In addition to standing up against corporate interests, the researchers and community members have also developed a mutual appreciation for local wildlife.
“Much of the community is nearly as excited about the biodiversity of the reserve as we are, especially the kids,” Maynard says. The conservationists have even provided interested residents with cameras to document the wildlife they encounter. “There are already around a dozen amphibian and reptile species that we’re aware of in the canyon strictly from either community members or EcoMinga staff sending us photos — a perfect example of how science benefits from engaging and including the help of locals.”
Resisting the lure of mining jobs will probably remain an issue in a place that doesn’t have many other options for income. That’s why the foundations continue working to develop alternatives to the people around the reserve. “In the end, they want what most people want: to earn a living for their families and to appreciate the land around them,” he says. “The solution to protecting the reserve is by finding sustainable jobs for community members that serve as alternatives to destructive practices such as mining or cattle ranching.”
As part of that effort, Maynard says, EcoMinga has hired an aspiring naturalist from the community, Jimmy Alvarez, as part of its staff. “These are the types of actions that I believe will lead to long-term conservation success: training and hiring locals to be part of the solution while earning a salary.”
Work Still to Be Done (After the Pandemic)
The research team still has a few more publications and species assessments pending from their previous expeditions, and they’re getting ready for more — eventually.
“Once the pandemic has been tempered, we absolutely look forward to continuing our efforts at the reserve,” Maynard says. “Our data suggests there are plenty more species to be documented in the canyon, and we also hope to develop research projects in collaboration with our partners to better understand the mysterious life histories of these poorly understood species.” They still need to find out more about how the Tandayapa Andes toads reproduce and deposit their eggs, and they don’t know why the Mindo glassfrog is thriving in the reserve but not elsewhere nearby, or much about its behavior. For example: Why do they deposit their eggs on the underside of leaves, unlike all other glassfrogs in the genus that lay them on top, and do they engage in combat like other species in the genus?
“The questions one can ask are endless,” Maynard says. “As my wife often points out, I’d rather be in that canyon than anywhere else, any day, anytime.”
New research indicates a growing online trade in porcupine bezoars — a ball of inedible material that sometimes gathers in their digestive tracks.
A porcupine’s diet is wide, varied, and a little hard to digest. A lifetime of grasses, herbs, bark and other vegetation can leave little bits of indigestible matter behind in a porcupine’s digestive tract, where they occasionally congeal into a hard ball called a bezoar.
That sounds uncomfortable, but a porcupine’s health probably doesn’t suffer due to the presence of this undigested mass in its stomach or intestines — that is, not until humans come along.
For centuries people have valued these rare “stones” or “dates,” as they’re sometimes called, for their purported healing abilities. Bezoars have been used to “treat” everything from fevers to diabetes and even cancer.
Bezoar use even creeps into popular fiction: the stones are an ingredient for protective spells in the Harry Potter universe.
The medicinal claims are equally fiction: there doesn’t appear to be any veracity to bezoar use to treat illnesses. Yet despite the lack of evidence, the trade in bezoars has persisted. Not only that, it appears to be increasing.
A study published recently in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation tracked, for the first time, the online trade in old-world porcupines (those from the family Hystricidae in Asia and Africa). The researchers examined e-commerce sites in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for four months in 2019, where they found active for-sale listings for 443 individual bezoars and a large variety of powdered products. Based on the weight of the powders, and the assumption that they might have contained other ingredients, the researchers estimate this translated to at least 680 and as many as 1,300 bezoars. (The researcher ignored “out of stock” listings and more dubious sites, such as one that claimed to have 2,000 tons of product on hand.)
A bezoar and typical medical claims, posted to Instagram. Screen grab July 24, 2020.
Previous research has suggested that bezoars only grow in an incidentally small portion of the porcupine population, so the total number of animals killed to accumulate that quantity for sale could conceivably have been in the tens of thousands.
And since the study didn’t look at the e-commerce sites every day, it probably uncovered only a portion of the total trade.
This paper calls for more study about this issue and additional conservation actions to protect porcupines. Currently the various species enjoy some national-level protection but precious little on the international level, because they’re still perceived as relatively common. In fact, most old-world porcupine species currently appear on the IUCN Red List as either “least concern” or “data deficient.” Only the Philippine porcupine (Hystrix pumila) is listed as “vulnerable to extinction.” None are currently protected by the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species.
Should that change? While the authors acknowledge the limitations caused by their study’s short time frame and their inability to examine and verify the nature of the bezoars (some of which could have come from other animals or been counterfeits), they still uncovered an alarming level of trade. The authors warn that “current trade levels are likely unsustainable, and we predict that porcupine species may become threatened in the future should current trade levels continue.”
And while some porcupines are farmed, this study indicates pressure on wild porcupines, which also face threats from habitat destruction and the bushmeat trade, as well as persecution as agricultural pests. It suggests a need to protect certain populations which fetch higher prices due to their purported purity. The study quotes one popular website: “The most valuable for the porcupine bezoars are procured from … the rainforest of Indonesia or Borneo. The porcupines here eat unpolluted herbs that have high medicinal value causing the bezoars … to be of the rarest and highest value. The price is very high and has collection, medicinal and stockpiling value.”
In many ways this isn’t surprising. The bezoar trade has been around for centuries, and it isn’t restricted to southern Asia. The paper notes that Europeans in the 16th to 19th centuries, who sometimes wore the stones as jewelry, valued porcupine bezoars so much they priced each one “as high as forty times its own weight in gold.”
Bezoars today don’t fetch quite that amount, but the study still found them selling for around $151 a gram — two and a half times the current price of gold — all for a useless clump of congealed, inedible food.
Too bad we don’t value a living porcupine half that much.
More frequent, longer-lasting blooms can harm both wildlife and human health — and even kill. Can we learn to predict and prevent them?
From the fall of 2017 to the beginning of 2019, Florida endured a persistent and damaging algal bloom caused by the algae Karenia brevis, also known as red tide. The blooms formed in both Gulf and Atlantic waters, sickening people, killing birds, fish, dolphins, manatees and other marine animals, and driving visitors away from beach towns.
Scientists say it’s a problem that’s going to get worse — and not just in Florida. Harmful algal blooms, which can occur in both fresh and marine waters, are becoming more frequent, lasting longer, and occurring in more places. In recent weeks news reports have warned residents in western New York, Utah and California to stay out of rivers and lakes clouded with these microscopic organisms that can sometimes be fatal to people, pets and wildlife.
To be clear, not all algae are dangerous. In fact the vast majority are beneficial to ecosystems. They’re the base of the marine and aquatic food webs, providing nutrients for fish and shellfish, which in turn feed other animals — including people. They also produce half of our oxygen.
“But a small handful of these organisms are harmful,” says phytoplankton ecologist Pat Glibert of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
We spoke with Glibert about this tiny — but dangerous group — of algae, why they’re becoming more problematic, and what we can do to protect people and ecosystems.
When algae are deemed to be harmful, what is it that they’re harming and how?
University of Maryland phytoplankton ecologist Pat Glibert. Photo: Courtesy of Pat Glibert
Some algae can grow to levels that just create a nuisance. They can overwhelm the system and when they die, their decomposition uses up oxygen, causing dead zones in the sea or fresh waters.
In the case of red tides — named because they visibly color the water a red or sometimes brownish color — their growth reduces the light penetration in the water. So the organisms that live near the bottom, such as sea grasses, are harmed, and the organisms that depend on that bed of grass in the water are also harmed.
But some of these species actually make toxins that can cause fish kills or harm to other marine organisms. And they can also cause harm for humans when we consume the fish or shellfish that has consumed these organisms.
These harmful algal blooms can occur all over. What are the regional differences in the kind of algae and their potential harm?
In marine waters we are primarily concerned with a group of organisms called dinoflagellates. And in fresh waters, the major organisms of concern fall in a category called cyanobacteria. They make very different toxins and have very different effects both environmentally as well as with regard to human health.
The freshwater toxins are concerning for a number of reasons. On initial exposure one may have a skin rash or something uncomfortable that’s relatively mild. But they can get into drinking water and, over a long period of exposure, they are tumor promoters. We know liver cancer is associated with these toxins, and there’s increasing evidence that the freshwater toxins can also be associated with neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or ALS. There’s a lot of work going in right now to understand that relationship.
In marine waters we’re typically exposed to toxins through shellfish. The shellfish themselves are not affected by these toxins because a lot of them affect the nervous system and shellfish don’t have a nervous system. But shellfish can accumulate the toxin. One of the diseases that we are very concerned about comes from saxitoxin, which is most common if one is eating mussels. It’s from the dinoflagellate Alexandrium and it can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning. It results in respiratory paralysis. With a high enough dose people do die.
A different toxin is the Florida red tide. That toxin can become aerosolized. If people breathe that sea spray at the beach it can cause respiratory distress, including coughing. Many people can end up going to the hospital, but people aren’t likely to die from it. The other thing that many of the toxins cause is an upset stomach that may take a couple of days to get over, but people do recover.
What about the effects on wildlife?
That depends on the species of algae. But some things like Karenia brevis in Florida are indiscriminate killers. Fish, turtles, manatees are all affected.
Dead fish on the shore of Padre Island as a result of a harmful algal bloom. Photo: Terry Ross, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
In California there’s a toxic diatom species, Pseudo-nitzschia, and it seems to affect sea lions and other large marine organisms. They tend to show symptoms very similar to epilepsy and disorientation. Death is one end point, but there are many other impacts on these organisms as well.
What’s driving the growth of these harmful algal blooms?
We certainly know that blooms are increasing in frequency, in geographic extent, and in duration in many parts of the United States and the world. A lot of this is due to the fact that we are polluting these waters with nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from the land.
Nutrient pollution can come from wastewater, whether it’s discharged from municipal sewage treatment plants or from septic systems. We don’t always do an adequate job, in many places, of removing those nutrients.
That’s one source. A second is runoff from fertilizer application, particularly from agricultural use, but we use a lot of these fertilizers on our lawns, golf courses and gardens as well.
And then there’s the waste from concentrated animal feeding operations, whether it’s chickens or pigs or dairy. A lot of that waste is either held in lagoons and ultimately spread on land. Or it goes into the atmosphere and then comes down with rain. So these operations themselves are highly concentrated sources of pollution that end up in waterways.
The other issue is that the climate is changing. Waters are getting warmer. Many organisms grow better when waters are warmer. That’s true for some of these [algae] species.
But because of climate change we’re also seeing changes in precipitation. We’re having more storms in some areas, more hurricanes, and because the atmosphere is now warmer, when those hurricanes do develop, they are often holding more moisture. So hurricanes become wetter. That means that the rain that comes with these storms washes more of these nutrients into the sea.
What can we do to reduce these blooms?
This is a very difficult problem to solve. The ultimate solution is to try to reduce nutrients that are winding their way into our fresh and marine waters.
At a personal level, we can reduce the amount of nutrient fertilizer we put on our own lawns, but the pollution that comes from the concentrated animal operations, from municipal sewage and from crop agriculture are the big issues that we have to solve. And they’re going to be very difficult to solve because we have to continue to grow our food.
There are approaches that people are taking to try to address blooms at the time that they occur, methods to apply various products to reduce the bloom. There is some success in applying clay to the surface of the water that causes the dinoflagellates to fall to the bottom of the bay or estuary. But those are very localized solutions.
Aerial photo of an algal bloom in Virginia’s James River near the Monitor-Merrimack Bridge. Photo: Wolfgang K. Vogelbein, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The other approach that we are taking is to build mathematical models of when and why and where a bloom may occur and use that as an early warning system. So we may not be able to solve the problem, but at least we can protect human health or seafood resources before a problem occurs.
There are also a number of exciting areas of research. One is my own, which focuses on understanding these organisms from their physiology — how they obtain their nutrients, how they make toxins, why they make toxins. How is nutrient pollution related to not only growth of the algae but production of their toxin?
Also the other area that I think is so exciting is really pulling all of these factors together in building predictive models and using models to ask questions of “what if we did this, what would it show”? Or “what if we did that, what would be that effect”? We’re making great progress, but the problem is still a very large one.
Has our response to the problem matched the scale of what’s needed and the urgency of the issue?
It always seems to be in the forefront at the time there’s a bloom. And then as soon as that bloom subsides, the public interest and the interest in solving the problem go away.
Clearly we need more money to address issues of nutrient pollution. We need to upgrade sewage treatment plants. We need to address the fact that so much of the country still depends on septic systems or very small “package plant” [treatment systems] that do nothing to reduce nutrients.
The issue of concentrated animal waste is enormous because the animal waste isn’t treated and does make its way into the environment by land or sea or atmosphere, and ultimately gets discharged into waterways.
We need more attention on those issues. We need more attention on developing preventative measures. We need to have more approaches to protect human health from these events because they are going to be increasing.
The outlook is for more blooms and longer blooms in more places if we don’t address all of these problems of nutrient pollution and climate change collectively.
Caribbean corals sprout off Texas. Pacific salmon tour the Canadian Arctic. Peruvian lowland birds nest at higher elevations
In the past 100 years, the planet has warmed in the range of 10 times faster than it did on average over the past 5,000. In response, thousands of species are traveling poleward, climbing to higher elevations, and diving deeper into the seas, seeking their preferred environmental conditions. This great migration is challenging traditional ideas about native species, the role of conservation biology and what kind of environment is desirable for the future.
In a 2017 review for Science, University of Tasmania marine ecology professor Gretta Pecl and colleagues wrote, “[C]limate change is impelling a universal redistribution of life on Earth. For marine, freshwater, and terrestrial species alike, the first response to changing climate is often a shift in location.” In fact, Pecl says, data suggest that at least 25% and perhaps as much as 85% of Earth’s estimated 8.7 million species are already shifting ranges in response to climate change.
But when they arrive, will they be welcome? Traditional definitions classify species according to place. “Native” species arrived without human help and usually before widespread human colonization, so are likely to have natural predators and are unlikely to go rogue. Non-natives are newcomers and suspect. Though 90% cause no lasting damage, 10% become invasive — meaning that they harm the environment, the economy or human health. Last year a multinational report flagged invasive species as a key driver of Earth’s biodiversity crisis.
How we define species is critical, because these definitions influence perceptions, policy and management. The U.S. National Invasive Species Council (NISC) defines a biological invasion as “the process by which non-native species breach biogeographical barriers and extend their range” and states that “preventing the introduction of potentially harmful organisms is … the first line of defense.” But some say excluding newcomers is myopic.
“If you were trying to maintain the status quo, so every time a new species comes in, you chuck it out,” says Camille Parmesan, director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, you could gradually “lose so many that that ecosystem will lose its coherence.” If climate change is driving native species extinct, she says, “you need to allow new ones coming in to take over those same functions.”
As University of Florida conservation ecologist Brett Scheffers and Pecl warned in a 2019 paper in Nature Climate Change, “past management of redistributed species … has yielded mixed actions and results.” They concluded that “we cannot leave the fate of biodiversity critical to human survival to be randomly persecuted, protected or ignored.”
Climate change may push more American lobsters north into Canadian waters. Photo: Derek Keats, (CC BY 2.0).
Existing Tools
One approach to managing these climate-driven habitat shifts, suggested by University of California, Irvine marine ecologist Piper Wallingford and colleagues in a recent issue of Nature Climate Change, is for scientists to adapt existing tools like the Environmental Impact Classification of Alien Taxa (EICAT) to assess potential risks associated with moving species. Because range-shifting species pose impacts to communities similar to those of species introduced by humans, the authors argue, new management strategies are unnecessary, and each new arrival can be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Karen Lips, a professor of biology at University of Maryland who was not associated with the study, echoes the idea that each case is so varied and nuanced that trying to fit climate shifting species into a single category with broad management goals may be impractical. “Things may be fine today, but add a new mosquito vector or add a new tick or a new disease, and all of a sudden things spiral out of control,” she says. “The nuance means that the answer to any particular problem might be pretty different.”
Laura Meyerson, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island says scientists should use existing tools to identify and address invasive species to deal with climate-shifting species. “I would like to operate under the precautionary principle and then reevaluate as things shift. You’re sort of shifting one piece in this machinery; as you insert a new species into a system, everything is going to respond,” she says. “Will some of the species that are expanding their ranges because of climate change become problematic? Perhaps they might.”
The reality is that some climate-shifting species may be harmful to some conservation or economic goals while being helpful to others. While sport fisherman are excited about red snapper moving down the East Coast of Australia, for example, if they eat juvenile lobsters in Tasmania they could harm this environmentally and economically important crustacean. “At the end of the day … you’re going to have to look at whether that range expansion has some sort of impact and presumably be more concerned about the negative impacts,” says NISC executive director Stas Burgiel. “Many of the [risk assessment] tools we have are set up to look at negative impact.” As a result, positive effects may be deemphasized or overlooked. “So that notion of cost versus benefit … I don’t think it has played out in this particular context.”
Location, Location, Location
In a companion paper to Wallingford’s, University of Connecticut ecology and evolutionary biology associate professor Mark Urban stressed key differences between invasive species, which are both non-native and harmful, and what he calls “climate tracking species.” Whereas invasive species originate from places very unlike the communities they overtake, he says, climate tracking species expand from largely similar environments, seeking to follow preferred conditions as these environments move. For example, an American pika may relocate to a higher mountain elevation, or a marbled salamander might expand its New England range northward to seek cooler temperatures, but these new locations are not drastically different than the places they had called home before.
A marbled salamander. Photo: Richard Bonnett, (CC BY 2.0)
Climate tracking species may move faster than their competitors at first, Urban says, but competing species will likely catch up. “Applying perspectives from invasion biology to climate-tracking species … arbitrarily chooses local winners over colonizing losers,” he writes.
Urban stresses that if people prevent range shifts, some climate-tracking species may have nowhere to go. He suggests that humans should even facilitate movement as the planet warms. “The goal in this crazy warming world is to keep everything alive. But it may not be in the same place,” Urban says.
Parmesan echoes Urban, emphasizing it’s the distance that makes the difference. “[Invasives] come from a different continent or a different ocean. You’re having these enormous trans-global movements and that’s what ends up causing the species that’s exotic to be invasive,” she says. “Things moving around with climate change is a few hundred miles. Invasive species are moving a few thousand miles.”
In 2019 University of Vienna conservation biology associate professor Franz Essl published a similar argument for species classification beyond the native/non-native dichotomy. Essl uses “neonatives” to refer to species that have expanded outside their native areas and established populations because of climate change but not direct human agency. He argues that these species should be considered as native in their new range.
They Never Come Alone
Meyerson calls for caution. “I don’t think we should be introducing species” into ecosystems, she says. “I mean, they never come alone. They bring all their friends, their microflora, and maybe parasites and things clinging to their roots or their leaves. … It’s like bringing some mattress off the street into your house.”
Burgiel warns that labeling can have unintended consequences. We in the invasive species field … focus on non-native species that cause harm,” he says. “Some people think that anything that’s not native is invasive, which isn’t necessarily the case.” Because resources are limited and land management and conservation are publicly funded, Burgiel says, it is critical that the public understands how the decisions are being made.
Piero Genovesi, chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Invasive Species Specialist Group, sees the debate about classification — and therefore about management — as a potential distraction from more pressing conservation issues.
“The real bulk of conservation is that we want to focus on the narrow proportion of alien species that are really harmful,” he says. In Hawaii “we don’t discuss species that are there [but aren’t] causing any problem because we don’t even have the energy for dealing with them all. And I can tell you, no one wants to remove [non-native] cypresses from Tuscany. So, I think that some of the discussions are probably not so real in the work that we do in conservation.”
Indigenous frameworks offer another way to look at species searching for a new home in the face of climate change. According to a study published in Sustainability Science in 2018 by Dartmouth Native American studies and environmental studies associate professor Nicholas Reo, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Dartmouth anthropology associate professor Laura Ogden, some Anishnaabe people view plants as persons and the arrival of new plants as a natural form of migration, which is not inherently good or bad. They may seek to discover the purpose of new species, at times with animals as their teachers. In their paper Reo and Ogden quote Anishnaabe tribal chairman Aaron Payment as saying, “We are an extension of our natural environment; we’re not separate from it.”
The Need for Collaboration
The successful conservation of Earth’s species in a way that keeps biodiversity functional and healthy will likely depend on collaboration. Without global agreements, one can envision scenarios in which countries try to impede high-value species from moving beyond their borders, or newly arriving species are quickly overharvested.
In Nature Climate Change, Sheffers and Pecl call for a Climate Change Redistribution Treaty that would recognize species redistribution beyond political boundaries and establish governance to deal with it. Treaties already in place, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which regulates trade in wild plants and animals; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; and the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora, can help guide these new agreements.
“We are living through the greatest redistribution of life on Earth for … potentially hundreds of thousands of years, so we definitely need to think about how we want to manage that,” Pecl says.
At the heart of these questions are values. Genovesi agrees that conservationists need a vision for the future. “What we do is more to be reactive [to known threats]. … It’s so simple to say that destroying the Amazon is probably not a good idea that you don’t need to think of a step ahead of that.” But, he adds, “I don’t think we have a real answer in terms of okay, this is a threshold of species, or this is the temporal line where we should aim to.” Defining a vision for what success would look like, Genovesi says, “is a question that hasn’t been addressed enough by science and by decision makers.”
At the heart of these questions are values. “All of these perceptions around what’s good and what’s bad, all [are based on] some kind of value system,” Pecl says. “As a whole society, we haven’t talked about what we value and who gets to say what’s of value and what isn’t.”
This is especially important when it comes to marginalized voices, and Pecl says she is concerned because she doesn’t “think we have enough consideration or representation of Indigenous worldviews.” Reo and colleagues wrote in American Indian Quarterly in 2017 that climate change literature and media coverage tend to portray native people as vulnerable and without agency. Yet, says Pecl, “The regions of the world where [biodiversity and ecosystems] are either not declining or are declining at a much slower rate are Indigenous controlled” — suggesting that Indigenous people have potentially managed species more effectively in the past, and may be able to manage changing species distributions in a way that could be informative to others working on these issues.
Meanwhile, researchers such as Lips see species classification as native or other as stemming from a perspective that there is a better environmental time and place to return to. “There is no pristine, there’s no way to go back,” says Lips. “The entire world is always very dynamic and changing. And I think it’s a better idea to consider just simply what is it that we do want, and let’s work on that.”
A river-restoration advocate looks back at her family’s forgotten history to gain new insight into the history — and future — of our country’s rivers.
If you look at a map of a watershed, it branches like a family tree. Pennsylvania’s Cacoosing Creek flows into the Tulpehocken, which flows into the Schuylkill, which flows into the Delaware, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
My Great Aunt Kathryn (we called her Kaki) lived in a house on North Church Road in Robesonia, Pennsylvania. When you walked in the front door, arriving for a family reunion or a Fourth of July picnic, you were met by a wall of family photos — my mom’s cousins Hank, Mike and Andrea. Kaki and my grandmother Anita as girls.
And hanging among the photos of our own family tree was a little pen and ink drawing of a mill.
Nearly two years ago, I saw a story online in the Reading Eagle. It was about grants for river-restoration projects from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The organization I work for, American Rivers, was getting $275,441 “for the removal of the Paper Mill Dam on Cacoosing Creek and riparian corridor and stream bank restoration in Spring Township.”
After some quick emailing with my mom, we confirmed it’s the Van Reed Paper Mill Dam — the one in the picture on Aunt Kaki’s wall. While the picture had been there throughout my childhood, I’d never paid much attention to it, never registered the fact that my family had built a dam. American Rivers and partners are making final preparations, and the dam will be torn down in the coming weeks.
The Lenape were here first, hunting, fishing, traveling and living along these creeks and rivers. When my mom’s family, the Van Reeds, settled in Berks County around the time of the Revolutionary War, the Lenape had already lost all claims to their ancestral lands thanks to agreements broken by European settlers.
Around 1825 my great-great-great-great grandfather Henry Van Reed built the dam and paper mill at the confluence of the Cacoosing and Tulpehocken (the “place of owls” and “land of turtles” according to The Story of Berks County, published in 1913). My ancestors owned and operated the dam and mill for 70 years.
An 1872 painting of the view of Henry Z. Van Reed’s farm, paper mill and surroundings by artist Charles C. Hofmann. Image: public domain
The revolutions of our water wheel turned trees into paper, the creek into profit. All across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, dammed rivers spun wheels and turbines, powering the Industrial Revolution. Today there are more than 90,000 dams on rivers across our country. Many are outdated, unsafe, or no longer serve a purpose.
The defining characteristic of a river is that it flows — they’re meant to run free. Harnessing a river with a dam stops the water, backs it up, changes the water quality and temperature, prevents the movement of gravel and sediment, and blocks aquatic life from moving up and downstream. When rivers, the veins and arteries of our planet, are clogged and sick, it’s a health problem for all of us. So when a dam outlives its usefulness or its costs outweigh its benefits, American Rivers works to set the river free.
Removing a dam can restore river health and water quality, bring back fish and wildlife, eliminate public safety and flooding hazards, and create new recreation opportunities. American Rivers’ new report Rivers as Economic Engines details the jobs and other economic and community benefits that come from dam removal and watershed restoration.
Put simply, free rivers work better. It’s why American Rivers set a goal to remove 500 dams in five years, and why we are training local leaders, improving policy and pushing for additional funding to enable the removal of thousands more.
Removing the dam on Cacoosing Creek will restore more than seven miles of habitat for American eel, trout, blacknose dace and white suckers. It will revitalize the health of the entire ecosystem. Nationwide more than 1,700 dams have been removed to restore rivers, and Pennsylvania leads the nation in dam removal.
When I shared the news of the dam with my extended family, my cousin David summed it up well. He wrote, “I’m struck by the idea that the same ideals that motivated the Van Reeds to build the dam (e.g. improve their quality of life) are now motivating its removal.”
I don’t think Henry Van Reed would ever have dreamed there would be a massive movement to tear down dams like his and restore rivers in Pennsylvania and across the country. For him that would have been antithetical to progress. But what’s unimaginable can become reality. What’s impossible can become possible.
2020, this year of reckonings, feels like a good year to imagine new possibilities. It feels like a good year to question the things that no longer serve us — including the mindset that we can take from the natural world without giving back, without any responsibility or reciprocity. Personally, I’m recognizing the privilege wrapped up in the fact that for generations my family benefitted from a dam built on stolen land. One thing I’ve learned is that I need to go back to go forward, getting to know my own roots a little better.
This story may just be about one small dam on one small creek. One family’s story. But for me, firing up the yellow excavator to demolish my family’s dam and restore Cacoosing Creek is proof that it’s possible to put a little bit of the world back into balance. For me, it feels like coming full circle, a small but powerful revolution, turning toward something new, life-giving and free.
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.
Wolves often get the blame for killing caribou in Canada’s boreal forests, but the real threat is human activity, new research finds.
A logged forest is a changed forest, and for woodland caribou that could mean the difference between life and death.
A recent study in the Journal of Wildlife Management tracked the survival rates and population growth of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) across two areas of northern Ontario, Canada. In one area about a third of the forest had been logged 30 to 50 years ago. In the other, the only disturbances were from natural events.
The research found “substantial differences” in the survival of adult caribou between the two areas.
The animals, it turned out, fared considerably worse in the previously logged landscape — so badly that the researchers, led by John Fryxell, a professor at the University of Guelph and executive director of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, concluded it would lead to a dwindling population. The unlogged habitat, however, they found “should be considerably more capable of sustaining caribou.”
The high mortality rates for the caribou in the logged forest are mostly due to wolf predation, but human changes to the landscape help make that possible. Development has been a driving force behind declining caribou numbers throughout their range.
As a result of these human disturbances, the caribou population in North America is in a precarious position. Woodland caribou once ranged across half of Canada and the northern reaches of the contiguous United States. But they’re now gone from their southern range. In Canada’s boreal forests, the animals are listed as threatened under the federal Species at Risk Act, Canada’s version of the Endangered Species Act.
While woodland caribou have evolved to live with forests disturbed by wildfire, they haven’t fared well in forests disturbed by people. One of the biggest threats is habitat fragmentation from commercial logging, mining, oil and gas — and all the roads associated with those activities.
Tar sands mining in Fort McMurray, Alberta fragments habitat for caribou. Kris Krüg, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
But here’s the twist: Moose do better in these disturbed landscapes, and that puts caribou further at risk, albeit indirectly.
Previous research has found that moose prefer the vegetation that grows in these early successional forests that follow a large-scale disturbance, like commercial logging. And a higher density of moose attracts more wolves, which are also able to move faster and hunt farther by following linear clearings like roads and pipelines in these developed areas.
While moose are the primary prey for wolves, caribou that wander into these forests become another tasty target.
“The bottom line,” Fryxell explains, “is that the combination of vegetation changes, increase in road density, increase in moose, and consequent increase in wolves threaten long-term viability of woodland caribou in boreal landscapes of Ontario, in a similar fashion to many other parts of Canada.”
Last year provincial managers in Quebec floated the idea of killing wolves to protect caribou herds. Their idea met with public backlash, but wolves in British Columbia weren’t so lucky. During the winter of 2019-2020, a whopping 463 wolves were killed by the B.C. provincial government for the stated purpose of protecting populations of southern mountain caribou, another caribou ecotype.
Some of the money to pay for the kill came from Coastal GasLink, a company actively clearing land in caribou habitat for a pipeline, the Canadian news outlet the Narwhal reported.
And a recently published study in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation found that the culls were not likely to aid caribou and pointed out several shortcomings in previous research that called for such wolf-control measures.
There are other, and better, options — like habitat protection and restoration.
Fryxell’s study concluded that “the most secure conservation measure would be to set aside extensive tracts of boreal forest with natural patterns of disturbance to sustain viable caribou sub‐populations.”
Research shows that the animals need at least 65% of their range undisturbed to have a good shot at survival.
And helping caribou will come with other environmental benefits. Canada’s 2018 federal action plan to restore caribou stated, “Boreal caribou is also considered by many to be an indicator of the overall state of Canada’s boreal forest ecosystem.” So keeping forests intact or restoring habitat is a proposition that would benefit not only caribou but many other species.
For Swedish death-metal musician Peter Hauschulz, these are the sounds and emotions of the extinction crisis.
Hauschulz’s new solo grindcore project, Extinction, has just released an eight-track EP called “Smoldering Enfoulment.” The “eco-slam” songs tell the tales of recently extinct (or nearly extinct) species, such as the cryptic tree-hunter and the Miss Waldron’s red colobus.
The album was released July 21 on Bandcamp and is now available for download, with proceeds supporting several environmental organizations and social-justice causes. Physical copies are being distributed on old-school audio cassette — recorded over tapes found in thrift stores.
That recycling approach is echoed in the band T-shirts and other merch — and even in the music itself. The album was mostly recorded in an aluminum storage space about 30 feet away from a local recycling dump. Hauschulz played all the instruments and sang the main vocals, then mixed in guest vocals from performers based in Poland, the Czech Republic and Portland, Oregon.
We spoke with Hauschulz about Extinction (and extinction), and you can preview several songs below:
First up, what’s an “eco-slam”? And why death metal for such an already dark topic?
I’ve always been fascinated with the juxtaposition of extremes in death metal, which often takes lyrical concepts to an absurd degree of foreboding exaggeration, while the music itself is equally eager to achieve a kind of rhythmically visceral and disturbing impact. There’s a sub-genre of death metal called “slam,” which is often some of the most ridiculous and lowbrow of the style and is an excellent opportunity to combine Neanderthal-esque delivery with relevant factual concepts and content. The idea is to subvert the extreme metal expectation that the topics must necessarily be comically grotesque and therefore easy to brush off as gory escapism, while also adhering to the underlying spirit of death metal in plainly confronting the horrors of reality.
What were the origins of this project?
The idea for the project first took hold after I had read a National Geographic article sometime shortly after New Year in 2019. It was a small, touching story about how a tree snail (George) had been declared extinct just a few days earlier. Something about it just struck an unexpected nerve. I hadn’t really considered how many known species were going extinct every day.
Peter Hauschulz, photo by Smilla West.
It was a perfect fusion of a genuinely dark topic that really wasn’t being processed, either in the extreme metal community or at large, and therefore a ripe topic for deeper exploration.
For me, art and music are at their best when they seek to entertain, inform, inspire and connect with the listener. I felt that there was an opportunity to artistically energize the topic by connecting it to charity causes as well. It’s very easy to become discouraged or feel like one isn’t “doing enough” for the world, so I’m hoping to support the idea that we can all contribute in different ways according to our own needs and values and abilities, and not be held to an arbitrary standard of perfection that may be more discouraging than anything.
A few dollars here and there may not seem to be much, but it’s important for me to try to align aspirations and ideas with actions. I hope that doing so artistically may inspire others to find clever ways to bring their unique talents and ideas to the world.
What are your creative goals when developing music and lyrics about such a difficult subject, and what do you hope your listeners will get out of it?
My main goal with the project is to develop and foster connection between myself and the world, myself and other people, and hopefully inspire people’s connection with their world, too.
Of course, encased in that is my own impulse to continuously challenge myself and hone my craft, so I hope listeners experience a feeling of deep urgency as a result of the music, but also a sense of inspiration to harness that feeling for something positive.
What’s your writing process?
The process often involves a lot of iteration, bouncing from concept to experimentation on guitar or drums and back again, until it seems like it’s congealing into something unique and alive. My primary musical focus is on the rhythms first, since I’ve always loved the way that aspect of music can reach deep into the core of a body and electrify it and give it motion.
I try to set the lyrics together in such a way that they amplify the music and give it a conceptual direction for that movement. For instance, the lines “flames of greed lick their black boots, inferno of corruption boils the frog, our spirit croaking for release, from the hell of our own kind” in the song “Electile Dysfunction” are some of my favorites in capturing the wretched spirit of greed behind so much of our planetary destitution.
Why did you pick some of these species to profile? What drew you to the need to tell their stories in musical form?
I tried to represent a wide variety of species types, including those outside the more relatable ones that are cute or fuzzy, because things like mosses and trees are certainly just as important, but less often make it into headlines or story form. I also tried to focus on species whose extinction was more or less directly caused by human activity, whether by direct hunting or deforestation — something that highlights our essential relationship and the negative consequences of our actions and choices as a species on the planet.
You have a unique approach to merchandise and the physical distribution of your music. Where did the idea of recycled goods come from?
Growing up in largely DIY punk scenes, it was common for smaller bands to screen print logos on thrift-store shirts. That seemed to be the most appropriate way to minimize the band’s resource footprint while also opening the door to unique artistic opportunities. So far, the best result is when I can find an old novelty shirt from a vacation at Sea World or some other aquarium. Stamp a giant Extinction logo on top of a frolicking dolphin or killer whale and now it has become more than just a gift-store item.
— EXTINCTION (eco-slam) (@Capt_Grapefruit) July 14, 2020
What comes next? I know you already have a follow-up album in the works, and you were planning on touring before the pandemic hit.
Next for Extinction is a bit up in the air, like for many bands and people of all inclinations all over the world. I’ll be creating a music video in the coming months for one of these songs, continue writing a follow-up, which will be water-species themed, probably release a charity compilation single in a few months, and seek out like-minded collaborators of all types to start collecting a live lineup.
Environmental, economic and political forces have converged, threatening to finally upend fossil fuel dominance.
When Dominion Energy and Duke Energy unexpectedly cancelled plans to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline on July 5, environmental advocates throughout the Southeast cheered.
But even a few days later, Mark Sabath, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, still seemed a bit shocked by the victory. His organization worked for six years to stop the 600-mile-long pipeline, which would have transported fracked gas through West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.
“We were surprised in terms of it happening when it did,” he says of the companies’ decision. “But it was certainly something we were thinking for a long time should happen.”
Of course, should and would are often a world apart. In fact, just a few weeks earlier, the energy companies had won a substantial victory when the Supreme Court ruled that their pipeline could cross the Appalachian Trail.
So when the word came down that Dominion and Duke were throwing in the towel, it caught a lot of people off guard. And it wasn’t unique — the announcement came along with a wave of other bad news for the oil and gas industry, including bankruptcies and more stalled pipeline efforts.
In his weekly column for The New Yorker, Bill McKibben summed it all up: “It’s been a truly awful few days for the fossil-fuel industry, which is another way of saying that it’s been an unexpectedly good few days for planet Earth.”
Indeed, at quick glance, the industry looks like it’s on the ropes, but what does it all mean in the big picture? Here are some takeaways.
Cutting Corners Backfires
In a statement on the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which had ballooned in cost from an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion, the developers blamed “the increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States.”
But there’s much more to the story than that. One of the biggest factors, Sabath says, is that the developers — and their government boosters — didn’t follow the rules.
“Cutting corners — and pressuring the agencies to cut corners with their environmental reviews — certainly slowed things down and made it more difficult to finish the project,” he says.
Lorne Stockman, senior research analyst at Oil Change International, an anti-fossil-fuel advocacy group, explained in a blog post that federal agencies rubber-stamped eight permits without proper review.
“But none of these could stand up to scrutiny when challenged in a court of law, and all were eventually revoked or suspended,” wrote Stockman. “The fact that [the Atlantic Coast Pipeline] can’t be built without violating the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act or the National Environmental Protection Act should be an important and concerning lesson.”
This short-circuiting of environmental review is a common thread Sabath sees in two other pipeline decisions that came just a day after the Atlantic Coast announcement.
On July 6 the Supreme Court nixed an attempt by the Trump administration to jumpstart construction on the Keystone XL pipeline — stymied for a decade — that would carry 830,000 barrels of oil sands from Alberta, Canada to Nebraska. The effort had been halted, pending further environmental review, because the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t properly study how endangered species in rivers would be affected by pipeline crossings.
And that same day a U.S District judge ruled that the already-pumping Dakota Access pipeline, long opposed by the Standing Rock Sioux, needed to halt operations until the Trump administration properly conducted the review required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
“We certainly saw with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline there was evidence that political higher-ups, at the developers’ urgings, were sticking to the developers’ preferred timeline and urging staff not to conduct the kind of environmental review that should have been done,” says Sabath. “In the end, I think that backfired and it’s the same thing that’s now causing problems for Dakota Access and Keystone XL.”
Industry Clocks Some Wins
It turns out that the victory for tribes and environmentalists that halted the Dakota Access pipeline’s flow is now in limbo.
The company behind that project, Canada’s TC Energy, has appealed the ruling and asked for a stay on the decision to shut down the pipeline while that appeal is considered. On July 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a temporary stay — meaning oil can keep flowing — while it considers whether or not to make that stay permanent during the appeals process.
It’s too soon to say yet if this will indeed end up being a win for industry, but minimally it gets a tiny reprieve.
And despite some high-profile setbacks, like with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, oil and gas companies have also notched a few other victories.
The same Supreme Court ruling that blocked construction of Keystone XL will allow the continued use of Nationwide Permit 12 on dozens of other pipelines. This permit, issued by the Army Corps, is a general Clean Water Act permit that lets developers expedite permitting for projects crossing waterways by allowing the use of a general, instead of project-specific, permit.
Construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. Photo: Tara Lohan
And things could get even easier for pipeline developers after the White House issued a rule that would weaken the country’s bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act. The new rule would limit public review and speed up permitting for infrastructure projects like pipelines and powerplants.
This new ruling comes after the administration had previously issued three executive orders to help speed up pipeline permitting.
Murky Economics
While the industry has faced legal ups and downs, the news is mostly bad from a financial standpoint — especially for companies heavily invested in shale gas.
Chesapeake Energy, a pioneer in the fracking industry, filed for bankruptcy protection on June 28 with $10 billion in debts — although not before doling out $25 million in bonuses to executives.
Chesapeake may be one of the most well known in the business to falter, but they aren’t alone. Just a few months ago Whiting Petroleum, once the largest producer in North Dakota’s Bakken shale, filed for bankruptcy protection. So too did Denver-based Extraction Oil & Gas. And California Resources Corp, the state’s largest oil and gas producer, followed them into Chapter 11 in mid-July.
Many more are likely to follow. Rystad Energy, an analytics company, recently warned that 250 oil and gas companies could file for bankruptcy protection by the end of 2021 as demand continues to fall, renewables outcompete them in the energy market, and pressures mount to address climate change.
Even the majors are affected. Last year Chevron wrote down $10 billion in assets, mostly in shale gas holdings.
In many ways, the industry has been its own worst enemy.
Oil and gas wells in North Dakota’s Bakken shale. Photo: Tara Lohan
Fracking is more resource-intensive than conventional drilling. Companies drilled at a frenetic pace to try to recoup costs, but in the process they produced a glut of gas, further driving prices — and profits — down.
“The reality is that the shale boom peaked without making money for the industry in aggregate,” found a report from the financial advisory firm Deloitte. “In fact, the U.S. shale industry registered net negative free cash flows of $300 billion, impaired more than $450 billion of invested capital, and saw more than 190 bankruptcies since 2010.”
And while exports of liquified natural gas are rising, The New York Timesreported that “future profits may be meager.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered another huge hit, along with an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia that sent oil prices to record lows in March. Last month BP announced they would trim $17.5 billion off their assets as energy demand falls.
It’s a harbinger of things to come.
“BP said that the aftermath of the new coronavirus pandemic would accelerate the transition to a lower-carbon economy, in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” Reuters reported.
The Energy Landscape Shifts
For years environmentalists have warned that oil and gas reserves would end up being stranded assets for energy companies when a shift to a less carbon-intensive economy makes those fossil fuels unburnable.
We are beginning to see this taking shape with these recent pipeline decisions. All of these projects have been in the works for at least six years. And in that time the urgency of the climate crisis has come into sharper view and a number of states have decided to push ahead with clean energy commitments, despite federal opposition to action on climate change.
Some of these states are the same places where new pipelines have been proposed.
“We certainly saw that with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline,” says Sabath. “States like Virginia and North Carolina are moving quickly now toward clean energy and zero-carbon goals that are inconsistent with gas and oil infrastructure. It doesn’t make sense to have major projects that would lock you into carbon emissions that will not be permitted in your state in a couple of years.”
In March Virginia passed the Clean Economy Act to make the state’s electricity sector carbon free by 2045. And in 2018 North Carolina’s Gov. Roy Cooper signed an executive order to help spur a transition to a clean energy economy in his state.
People and Politics Hold the Power
Ups and downs in the oil and gas industry aren’t new. But the collision of crises in this current moment — the pandemic-induced demand reduction, the political and financial realities of climate change, surging clean energy, and legal reckonings on high-profile projects — are a steep challenge.
How well oil and gas companies rebound — if they do at all — may largely depend on November’s election.
But beyond politics, there’s one other big factor that will determine how this all plays out: the people.
Dakota Access Pipeline protest by the White House, Feb. 8th, 2017. Photo: Victoria Pickering, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Mounting public opposition and effective organizing against projects that risk environmental and human health have become big forces.
“The only reason that there were substantial legal challenges in the first place is because of the epic organizing that preceded the lawsuits,” McKibben wrote about the three recent pipeline decisions.
And the communities whose voices are rising to the top are ones that have historically been silenced. “People are starting to listen to communities of color, low-income rural communities and tribes,” says Sabath. “I think — and hope — that some of those groups who might have been marginalized in the past may be heard now.” The NEPA changes may reduce one of the primary tools those groups have for voicing their concerns, but the extremely vocal activist networks that have developed over the past few years will continue to protest and organize.
Those voices — in combination with a rising global chorus of opposition to fossil fuel dominance — could ensure that mounting economic and environmental crises instead become opportunities for change.
A new report concludes U.S. waters “have insufficient protections for a healthy future,” and that the problem has gotten worse under the Trump administration.
This argument is simple, eye-catching and undeniably true from a scientific perspective: if we want healthy populations of fish, crabs and shrimp, we need to protect key habitat where they live, breed and feed.
But do we?
The answer to that question, according to new report from the Center for American Progress, is a resounding no.
Not only that, things have gotten worse for fish habitats — and consequently, fisheries — since the Trump administration took office. And that puts fish populations, ecosystems, and part of the human food system at risk.
The heart of the problem, according to the report, lies the way we manage what’s known under U.S. law as an EFH, or “essential fish habitat.” These EFHs represent 800 million acres of habitat, including breeding and feeding sites for nearly 1,000 federally managed species, covering everything from coral reefs to rivers and wetlands.
Under the EFH regulatory structure, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration works with U.S. fisheries management councils — groups that consist of government managers and representatives from industry, academia and the environmental community — to identify and map these habitats.
The law also gives fisheries councils virtually all the power and responsibility to protect these critical habitats and the sensitive species that live in them from manmade threats, including destructive fishing gear.
Unfortunately, according to the new report, councils are largely not using their power to protect. Despite their designation as “essential,” most of these habitats have no additional protections at all — they’re not managed differently than any other kind of marine or river habitats. Much of the rest isn’t protected strongly enough, according to the Center’s examination.
Map of essential fish habitats overlaid with those that have protections in place. Source: NOAA
Ocean policy analyst Alexandra Carter, the report’s lead author, tells me they set out to understand the scope of the problem, but did not expect what they found.
“We were floored at how much identified EFH there is, but how little actual protections result from it,” she says.
In fact, the report concludes with an alarming warning, “The vast majority of U.S. waters have insufficient protections for ensuring a healthy future for American fisheries and oceans.”
The Weakest Link
Of the few areas that had protections, three-quarters had what the authors call “minimal protections” — usually just minor modifications to fishing gear that don’t accomplish much conclusive good.
One example of such a minor gear modification can be found in the Gulf of Mexico, where bottom-trawl nets dragged across the seafloor feature a heavy chain called a “tickler,” which improves catches by stirring up bottom-dwelling species like crabs, but which can also do a lot of damage to the habitat. In order to minimize the risk of damage, the EFH protection established by the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council requires the tickler chain to have one link weaker than all the others. This supposedly enables the chain to break, if necessary, rather than continue to damage habitat.
This sounds good in principle, but according to Carter, “There’s no rule about how weak the link is supposed to be. It just has to be weaker than the other links.”
In many cases, the requirements to protect identified these key habitats consist entirely of things that fishermen were already doing, such as gear modifications put in place because they improve fishing, not because they protect the habitat
“That means there’s little additional protection, if any at all,” Carter says. “A list of new rules that consists of things people were already doing is not really what we think of when we think of a new protected area.”
How can this be? Well, according to Gib Brogan, an Oceana senior campaign manager who wasn’t involved in this report, the process of identifying what counts as EFH is a scientific one with clear guidelines, but what’s supposed to be done to protect an EFH once it’s identified is a lot more flexible.
“There’s been a lot of latitude given to the fisheries management councils,” he says. “Fishery managers have to make rules to minimize the adverse effects of fishing, but there’s lots of discretion about what exactly that means. And it’d be tough to make the case that the councils are fully implementing and fully achieving the requirements of the law. Habitat protection is often treated as a nuisance by managers, addressed not because it’s a priority but because the courts say they have to after they’re sued.”
A Worsening Problem
While this is a longstanding problem, it, like many other environmental issues, has gotten worse during the Trump administration.
“Science-based management is the key to modern fisheries, and the current administration doesn’t value science particularly highly,” Brogan says.
The regulations and processes for identifying EFH haven’t changed, but Carter notes that there’s been a noticeable change in attitude among the councils as a result of the Trump administration’s anti-regulation agenda. It was pressure from the New England fisheries management council, for example, that resulted in recent news that an Atlantic marine protected area would lose its protections. And a recent Executive Order solicited recommendations from councils for ways the administration could reduce regulatory burdens on fisheries.
Source: Center for American Progress
There have also been other, non-EFH related cases where the administration ignored science when getting involved in fisheries management, including issues related to recreational fisheries management and issues related to marine zoning.
“If we just let the councils ask the president to allow fishing in all our MPAs and not have any protections in essential fish habitats, we’re just not doing the best we can for our ocean ecosystems,” Carter says. “The councils are poised to take advantage of any opportunities to allow more fishing. It’s my opinion that with the Trump administration these opportunities seem to be much more abundant than in previous administrations.”
Of course, most of the protected EFH areas aren’t what scientists typically talk about when discussing marine protected areas, especially in the context of a goal to strongly protect 30% of the ocean by 2030. But experts say establishing stronger protections in EFHs would contribute to the same goals.
The report also cites the administration’s trade policies and the continuing threat of climate change as elements that have worsened EFH protection over the past three and a half years.
Can We Solve This Problem?
The report includes two key suggestions for improving the way we use EFH regulations to protect the oceans.
The biggest is to introduce a new requirement that any identified essential fish habitat have at least some substantive protections, usually in the form of restricting what kind of destructive fishing practices can or can’t take place there. Just noting that a place is important and should be protected without giving it any kind of actual protection, the authors say, is not especially useful. And while there’s value in allowing the councils broad latitude to make solutions that work for local conditions, the fact that so much EFH remains unprotected or minimally protected is cause for concern and a reason for reform.
The report also suggests ways to improve the public consultation process for designating and protecting essential fisheries habitats. This is often used for other environmental regulations under U.S. law and has allowed for a more transparent and effective process.
“We should have EFH, but we should improve it so it’s meaningful,” Carter says. “If we’re not doing what we can to preserve the valuable resources we have in the ocean, we are failing the future fishing industry of America. Protecting the ocean is a promise to the future to maintain public resources for the benefit of everyone.”
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