New research has uncovered a forgotten species that went extinct under two centuries ago — probably due to colonialism.
Most tourism sites use a common word to describe La Désirade Island in the French West Indies: “pristine.” They rave about this 8-square-mile island’s beautiful beaches, abundant wildlife, snorkel-worthy waters and healthy nature reserve.
In truth, this small rocky outcropping in the Guadeloupe Islands has seen its fair share of human-driven change since colonial settlers arrived. Once a haven for pirates hiding out from the law, the island served as a colony for lepers and lawbreakers for two centuries. The land, despite its modern reputation and protected status, was heavily cultivated and disturbed for much of that time — much like the other islands around it.
“There’s no ‘pristine’ environment when it comes to the Guadeloupe Islands,” says Corentin Bochaton, a postdoctoral researcher with Université de Bordeaux in France and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, who conducts studies in the archipelago. “These islands were all strongly impacted by European colonization starting in the 17th century. La Désirade is nowhere close to what it was before this period.”
He points out that research published 15 years ago links that disturbance to several local extinctions — and now, thanks to his work, we can add one more to the list.
Hidden Biodiversity
According to a paper published last month in the journal Zootaxa, La Désirade was once home to a unique lizard, a relative of the curly-tailed iguana-like lizards common to the West Indies. The authors, including Bochaton, have dubbed it Leiocephalus roquetus.
Long forgotten by science and the residents of La Désirade, the evidence of L. roquetus was hiding under our noses — and La Désirade’s soil — for nearly two centuries.
The first line of evidence for this lost lizard’s existence has sat on a shelf for most of that time — since 1835, in fact. And like La Désirade, it was far from pristine.
“Around 2015 we consulted on a very old and rather poorly prepared stuffed specimen of Leiocephalus indicated as originating from Guadeloupe,” Bochaton recalls. The 10-inch-long taxidermied lizard came from naturalist named Théodore Roger, who deposited it at the Natural History of Museum of Bordeaux in France three years before his death in 1838. The original label has been lost to time, but a mid-20th century replacement identifies the specimen as Holotropis herminieri (a species named by scientists in 1837 and later moved into the Leiocephalus genus) from the vague location of “Guadeloupe.”
Bochaton points out that L. herminieri, another extinct species last seen in the 1830s, lived on the island of Martinique, also in the West Indies. Despite the “Guadeloupe” label the specimen did, indeed, bear external anatomy suggesting it was the Martinique species. “Because of that, it was never studied in detail,” he says.
Modern Evidence
It’s easy to see why the specimen was ignored for so long. While previous research had indicated a need to reassess the species in the Leiocephalus genus, at least seven of the 24 previously known species are long gone and the supply of specimens or bones to study were, until recently, slim.
A northern curly-tailed lizard (Leiocephalus carinatus) on Cat Island, Bahamas. Photo: Trish Hartmann (CC BY 2.0)
That’s where new archaeological evidence came into play. Bochaton and others have conducted numerous digs in the Guadeloupe Islands and uncovered hundreds of lizard bones from days gone by. The most successful excavation took place in 2018 at a cave on La Désirade, where they found what Bochaton calls “the largest assemblage of Leiocephalus bone so far in Guadeloupe.”
Like the museum specimen, which the researchers examined through CT scanning, those newly uncovered bones contained enough common morphological differences to declare it a new species, one that hasn’t been seen on La Désirade or any other Guadeloupe island since…well, no one knows when. Perhaps since Roger’s time.
Exactly how and when this species went extinct remains a mystery, but the paper suggests it could have been a combination of “introduced mammalian predators, human-induced changes to landscapes and intensive agricultural practices.”
And while we may not know what killed off the lizard, Bochaton says the evidence of its extinction has relevance to modern times.
“To me, this highlights the rapid damages modern societies and their agro-pastoral practices have caused to insular ecosystems and shows what might also happen in the long run in more resilient continental systems,” he says. This could help us learn to prevent more extinctions in the future.
Meanwhile, he hopes it will help to inspire more research and protection in the region.
“There are still several questions that remain poorly explored in the Guadeloupe islands regarding its past fauna, especially for the periods preceding the arrival of human populations,” he says. “I hope that this research will motivate the public and the government to do their best to save the remaining Guadeloupe and Lesser Antillean endemic reptile fauna by highlighting how fast and easy it is to lose and completely forget an endemic species that will never come back.”
And speaking of short-term memories, La Désirade’s official tourism site calls the island itself “The Forgotten” — a name that might now equally apply to the creatures we caused to vanish there before we even knew they existed.
Materials needed to make the batteries for electric cars and other clean technology is driving interest in deep-seabed mining, and scientists fear the cost to the ocean will be steep.
The internal combustion engine had a good run. It helped get us to where we need to go for more than a century, but its days as the centerpiece of the automotive industry are waning.
As countries work to cut greenhouse gas emissions, electrification is stealing the limelight.
While there’s still a long road ahead — electric vehicles only accounted for 3% of global car sales in 2020 — EV growth is finally climbing. From 2010 to 2019 the number of EVs on the road rose from 17,000 to 7.2 million. And that number could jump to 250 million by 2030, according to an estimate from the International Energy Agency.
The growing demand for electric vehicles is good news for limiting climate emissions from the transportation sector, but EVs still come with environmental costs. Of particular concern is the materials needed to make the ever-important batteries, some of which are already projected to be in short supply.
“Climate change is our greatest and most pressing challenge, but there are some perilous pathways to be aware of as we build out the infrastructure that gets us to a new low-carbon paradigm,” says Douglas McCauley, a professor and director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California Santa Barbara.
One of those perilous pathways, he says, is mining the seafloor to extract minerals like cobalt and nickel that are widely used for EV batteries. Extraction of these materials has thus far been limited to land, but international regulations for mining the deep seabed far offshore are in development.
“There’s alignment on the need to go as fast as we can with low-carbon infrastructure to beat climate change and electrification will play a big part in that,” he says. “But the idea that we need to mine the oceans in order to do that is, I think, a very false dichotomy.”
Supply and Demand
Tesla may have made owning an EV cool, but a slew of other companies now hope to make it commonplace.
Chevy Bolt charging beside a Nissan Leaf. Photo: Steve Rainwater, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The latest is Volvo, which announced at the beginning of March that it will make only electric cars by 2030. This follows news that Jaguar will be all-electric in 2025 and Volkswagen after 2026. General Motors says it’s aiming to make its cars and light trucks electric by 2035, while Ford is doubling its investments in EVs and plans to sell only electric cars in Europe by 2030.
There are a number of factors that will determine how quickly people adopt the technology — charging infrastructure, battery range, affordability — but top of mind for some is manufacturers’ ability to keep production pace, particularly when it comes to the lithium-ion batteries that are used in not just EVs but other technologies like cell phones and laptops, as well as energy storage for solar and wind.
A 2019 study by the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney found that demand for lithium could exceed supply by next year, which would drive up prices and interest in more lithium mining. Demand for cobalt and nickel, also key battery components, will exceed production in less than a decade.
“Cobalt is the metal of most concern for supply risks as it has highly concentrated production and reserves, and batteries for EVs are expected to be the main end-use of cobalt in only a few years,” the report’s authors found.
Vying for control of these crucial materials has geopolitical implications. Right now, many of the materials are concentrated in a few nations’ hands.
Most of the cobalt used in batteries today is claimed by China from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where extraction has come with human rights abuses and environmental degradation. Most of the global lithium supply is found in Australia, Chile and Argentina.
Supply-chain issues have also caught the attention of President Joe Biden, who issued an executive order in February directing the secretary of Energy to identify “risks in the supply chain for high-capacity batteries, including electric-vehicle batteries, and policy recommendations to address these risks.”
As pressure mounts to claim terrestrial minerals, commercial interest is growing to extract resources from the deep seabed, where there’s an abundance of metals like copper, cobalt, nickel, manganese, lead and lithium. Investors already expect profits: One deep-sea mining company recently announced a plan to go public after merging with an investment group, creating a corporation with an expected $2.9 billion market value.
But along with that focus comes increased warnings about the damage such extraction could do to ocean health, and whether the sacrifice is even necessary.
The Deep Unknown
The high seas are “areas beyond national jurisdiction,” and mining their depths will be managed by an intergovernmental body called the International Seabed Authority.
The group has already approved 28 mining contracts covering more than a million square kilometers (360,000 square miles). It’s still drafting the standards and regulations for operations, but when companies get the go-ahead they’ll be after three different mineral-rich targets: potato-sized polymetallic nodules, seafloor massive sulphides and cobalt-rich crusts.
But there’s also concern that we still don’t adequately understand the risks of operating giant underwater tractors along the seafloor.
“There are a lot of conversations about the real risks and unanswered questions about ocean mining,” says McCauley. “There’s now more than 90 NGOs that have come out and said that we need a moratorium on ocean mining and we shouldn’t be sprinting to do this until we are able to answer some of the serious questions about the impact of mining on ocean health.”
The deep sea is one of the least-explored places on the planet, but we know that these dark depths are teeming with life and are interconnected with other parts of the ocean ecosystem, despite often being 10,000 feet deep or more.
“These spaces out in the high seas, which include undersea mountain ranges, are really quite biodiverse and they’re full of very unique species,” says McCauley.
That includes “Casper,” a newly discovered, ghostly white octopus; the sea pangolin, a snail that lives on hydrothermal vents; and black coral, which can live thousands of years.
The deep seabed is also home to countless species we don’t even know exist yet and a large diversity of carbon-absorbing microbes that build the base of the ocean’s food chain.
Extracting minerals from the deep sea could put thousands of these species at risk from the direct impacts of the mining operations, as well as the associated light and noise. Plumes of sediment from discarded mining waste pose another danger.
“Those plumes could be quite large and persistent and could have a smothering effect on ocean life,” says McCauley.
That could even be bad for those of us onshore.
A report by the Worldwide Fund for Nature found that “the loss of primary production, for example, could affect global fisheries, threatening the main protein source of around 1 billion people and the livelihoods of around 200 million people, many in poor coastal communities.”
There’s also the potential that mining the deep seabed could affect our ability to cope with a changing climate. Currently the deep sea is what McCauley calls “a big bank of safely stored carbon.” He says “there’s a lot of unanswered questions about what would happen if you actually started redistributing that carbon back into circulation in the oceans. This isn’t the time that we want to be doing grand new experiments in an ecosystem like the ocean, which is our biggest ally in storing carbon.”
Another big concern is the ability of the deep ocean ecosystem to recover from disturbance.
“It’s such a special place biologically and physically,” he says. “It’s essentially a slice of the planet where life just moves slower and in a way that we don’t see anywhere else.”
Species at these depths tend to live a long time, take a while to reproduce and have low fertility rates. “And that means that life recovers more slowly than the other parts of the planet,” he adds.
A small-scale simulated mining experiment done in 1989 proved just that. “Scientists have returned to the site four times, most recently in 2015,” an article in Nature explained. “The site has never recovered. In the ploughed areas, which remain as visible today as they were 30 years ago, there’s been little return of characteristic animals such as sponges, soft corals and sea anemones.”
Alternatives
In order to keep heavy machinery off the ocean floor, McCauley says we can look to promising developments in battery technologies that are helping to reduce the amount of supply chain-constrained material, like cobalt.
Most of the people designing new battery technologies probably don’t have deep-sea biodiversity at the top of their minds, he says. “They’re designing it because these batteries are cheaper, more stable and have similar performance capabilities.”
Still, the end result could help make the case for holding off on plundering the ocean’s riches.
Cobalt has long been considered a key stabilizing component in lithium-ion batteries, but new chemistries have begun to whittle down the amount of cobalt needed. EV batteries containing the previous mix of equal parts nickel, manganese and cobalt in the cathode — or negatively charged electrode — can now be replaced with 80% nickel, 10% manganese and 10% cobalt. These batteries, known as NMC 811, are already being used in electric vehicles in China.
“So we’ve reduced the amount of cobalt from 33% down to 10%, but if you look at the projections of electric vehicles by 2030, it’s going to be hard to have even 10% cobalt in the cathode because of the limited cobalt reserves that are available,” says Matthew Keyser, a mechanical engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
That means that new developments are now trying to move away from cobalt entirely. But that may end up shifting demand to another metal — nickel, which is fast becoming the most valued mineral for EV batteries and could still put the ocean on the target list.
Batteries made with lithium manganese oxide or lithium iron phosphate are new alternatives that don’t require nickel, but Keyser says they’re still not ideal.
“They have lower energy densities and they don’t work as well in vehicles,” he says. “The ultimate thing that we’re all trying to [achieve] is a battery with lithium sulfur, because sulfur is widely available.”
Working out the kinks in that technology is still five or 10 years away, he estimates.
Beyond changing the chemical composition of batteries, we can also help reduce demand pressure on scarce minerals in other ways.
“Instead of mining the oceans we can do a better job of mining the wrecking yards where EVs will be, which is to say doing a better job with recycling batteries,” says McCauley.
Currently only about 5% to 10% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. In part that’s because the process is still more expensive than acquiring most of the raw materials. It’s also complex because the different variations of lithium-ion batteries on the market today each require a different recycling process.
But earnest efforts are underway to sort that out. One is Redwood Materials, started by Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel, which says it’s the largest battery recycler in North America and can recover 95-98% of elements in batteries like nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper.
There’s concern that recycling can’t meet short-term demand because there aren’t enough batteries ready for recycling yet, but researchers believe it will be useful as a long-term solution for reducing scarcity.
“Recycling is going to be key,” says Keyser. “It’s going to be very important in the future and we need to do better than what we’re doing right now.”
Research also suggests that demand for EV cars with higher driving ranges increases the size of the batteries needed and influences the materials chosen to make them. But we can shift our technology, personal expectations and driving behavior.
Fast charge stations for electric cars in Canada. Photo: Duncan Rawlinson, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
“The introduction of shared-mobility services and establishing thorough charging networks can … significantly reduce material demand from the transport sector,” the WWF report recommends. “Other technological developments that can reduce material demand are advances in widespread charging infrastructure to increase the range of small-sized battery EVs as well as improved battery management systems and software to increase battery efficiency.”
McCauley hopes that a combination of advances will help take the pressure off sensitive ecosystems and that we don’t rush into mining the seabed for short-term enrichment when better alternatives are on the horizon.
“One of my greatest fears is that we may start ocean mining because it’s profitable for just a handful of years, and then we nail it with the next gen battery or we get good at doing low-cost e-waste recycling,” he says. “And then we’ve done irreversible damage in the oceans for three years of profit.”
These crimes threaten tens of thousands of species around the world, causing extinctions, hurting people and spreading disease.
In August 2020 federal authorities charged a dozen people for illegally trafficking millions of dollars of shark fins in Florida and two other states over the previous seven years.
According to the indictment, the defendants and their two shell companies also smuggled marijuana across the country and laundered their ill-gotten gains into gold, jewels and other commodities.
Although the court cases could still take months, the arrests represent a rare victory in the world of wildlife crime.
Poaching and wildlife trafficking affect thousands of species globally and have caused hundreds of extinctions. Yet the issue rarely gets much media attention — let alone high-profile arrests or convictions.
Here are 10 things you should know about wildlife trafficking:
1. It’s big business. One study put the value of wildlife crime at up to $23 billion a year, and since that study was published more than a decade ago, the value today is probably even higher.
2. It puts tens of thousands of species at risk — and has caused more than a few extinctions along the way, including the western black rhino. From birds to pangolins, lions and tigers, and even orchids and hardwoods…you name it, someone’s probably killing it and shipping it across the world.
Southern white rhino, a frequently trafficked species, in Uganda. Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)
3. It also harms humans. The COVID-19 pandemic was likely a byproduct of the wildlife trade, which has been linked to numerous other disease outbreaks through the years. Poachers and traffickers have also been tied to murder, intimidation, bribery, organized crime, terrorism and a host of other threats that destabilize families, communities and national security.
4. It takes many forms. Wildlife trafficking can involve the transit of whole bodies, meat, scales and other parts — or live animals, sold for the pet trade or for later consumption. And when live animals are caught and shipped, few survive the process.
An illegally trafficked king cobra recovered in Los Angeles. Photo: USFWS (public domain)
5. It’s distinct from the legal wildlife trade and illegal poaching by subsistence hunters, but tied into both. Many hunters turn to the illegal trade for much-needed income, and trafficked products all too often get laundered through legal markets.
6. It often includes collateral damage. Elephant poachers, for example, frequently use poisons to eliminate nearby vultures, which would otherwise circle the dead pachyderms and alert authorities to kill sites. In Southeast Asia wire snares are placed to target “valuable” animals but kill indiscriminately.
Illegal wildlife snares in Laos. Photo: Bill Robichaud/Global Wildlife Conservation (CC BY 2.0)
7. It’s not just animals. Plants, insects, corals and other creatures are all heavily trafficked. That wood flooring your neighbor just installed may have come from a protected forest.
8. It’s often tied into other crimes like drug smuggling, human trafficking and terrorism, which use the same methods to transport cash and goods around the world. Customs agents frequently find shipments of wildlife products in the same containers as illegal drugs, firearms and other products.
9. The punishment rarely fits the crime. Most poachers and smugglers get off with a slap on the wrist — if that. Although some countries have started to take these crimes more seriously, the average jail terms and fines remain so small that they fail to act as a disincentive for future crimes.
10. Virtually all countries are complicit — either as sources or as buyers. And yes, that includes the United States.
The Revelator has always committed to shining a light on these crimes and the threats they create. Here are links to some of our most important articles and commentaries on these issues.
Pursuing unorthodox queries about smaller, “uncharismatic” species often comes with difficult hurdles, as one researcher found out.
Years ago I decided to focus my research and conservation efforts on the smaller carnivores of Bangladesh. It was not an easy decision, as there appears to be a bias against studying these smaller species. Researchers in my country seem to be focused on saving larger, iconic species like tigers, leopards, bears and striped hyenas.
Although the smaller carnivores that roam the forests of Bangladesh do seem to appear frequently in stories told among my colleagues, they remain more elusive in the wild and are seldom the subject of published research — difficult to understand and rarely surveyed.
But there’s a lot to study. One of the smallest countries in Asia, Bangladesh provides habitat to 127 different existing mammal species. Of these, 21 were newly recognized during the latest Red List assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Perhaps even more surprisingly, Bangladesh boasts nearly half of the entire carnivore diversity of the Indian subcontinent. The 28 extant carnivore mammals represent six different terrestrial families: Viverridae (six species), Felidae (eight species), Herpestidae (three species), Canidae (three species), Ursidae (two species) and Mustelidae (six species). That’s impressive for a country that has less than 7% natural forest coverage and a population density of more than 1,000 people per square kilometer.
Muntasir Akash and his team have recorded a variety of mammals in the national parks of northeastern Bangladesh using camera-traps. Pictured (clockwise, from top left): golden jackal, northern pig-tailed macaque, yellow-throated marten and leopard cat. Courtesy of Muntasir Akash
How the smaller carnivores are faring in a land so challenging and crammed has been an enigma. Like a moth to a flame, I was drawn to find more answers.
In 2018 I led a small camera-trap survey in a 2.5 square-kilometer national park in northeast Bangladesh. What we found amazed me. Nearly 600 days of camera trapping yielded 17 different mammals, including ten carnivores. The study showed that the Asiatic wild dog — a globally endangered apex predator with a wild population of only 2,215 known mature individuals — visits the park frequently, making it an important habitat for this rarely studied and little-understood carnivore.
In 2018 Muntasir’s camera-trapping survey in a national park in northeastern Bangladesh provided the first evidence that the Asiatic wild dog, or dhole, is a frequent visitor. Courtesy Muntasir Akash
I was thrilled that these often-overlooked carnivores seemed to be clinging to life in their ecologically uncharted habitats — and eager to find out more.
After gaining my first international grant last year, I’ve been able to continue my research on small carnivores in three of the six northeastern forest reserves. These semi-evergreen, undulating hilly swaths comprise 191 square kilometers of natural forests at the border between India and Bangladesh.
The wildlife here faces numerous threats, including conflict with people and loss of suitable habitat. Uncovering the secret lives of our country’s lesser-known and less-valued carnivores can therefore help protect them from these threats and engage others in vital conservation efforts.
However, pursuing unorthodox queries often comes with difficult hurdles. In addition to my ongoing studies in the parks, I recently co-wrote a manuscript reviewing the previous research on the mammalian carnivores of Bangladesh. This past August I received feedback from one peer reviewer who landed an unexpected blow, observing, “Small carnivores are rarely a subject of research, usually studied within the large-scale landscape-level projects.”
The idea that my research seemed to this reviewer as of little consequence hit me hard, and I sensed impostor syndrome creeping in.
I finally summoned enough confidence to defend the manuscript, mainly through support from my peers — many of whom are also working on species poorly known to the outside world that are rare and often very secretive. The manuscript is now published, and I’m continuing to try to shine a spotlight on the lesser-known carnivores in Bangladesh. I hope to push back against the apparent bias against them and encourage others to care about them through unique approaches. These include ongoing, systematic camera-trap surveys in my northeastern study areas, using scientific illustrations as a conservation tool, and sharing knowledge about camera-trapping with other aspiring researchers.
I feel even more compelled to act given the seemingly widespread belief that conservation of the smaller carnivores is somehow not viable or worthwhile.
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.
In fact I’ve realized that working to save less-understood species has a nobility of its own and has helped me to become a better scientist. In the coming years I dream of a generation of nature enthusiasts emerging from Bangladesh, represented by ecologists and citizen scientists acting as advocates for our lesser-known and less-valued species.
If those species are not “charismatic” according to the standards of conservation, they are nonetheless extraordinary to those of us who study them and critical to healthy ecosystem function. Every form of wildlife has its place in nature and must be appreciated without fear and treated with equal importance. There may be no group better poised to start that process than the lesser-known smaller carnivores.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
A new study reveals that certain kinds of fish are more likely to have ingested plastic — including hundreds of species people depend on for food.
Each year the amount of plastic swirling in ocean gyres and surfing the tide toward coastal beaches seems to increase. So too does the amount of plastic particles being consumed by fish — including species that help feed billions of people around the world.
A new study published in the journal Global Change Biology revealed that the rate of plastic consumption by marine fish has doubled in the last decade and is increasing by more than 2% a year.
The study also revealed new information about what species are most affected and where the risks are greatest.
The researchers did a global analysis of mounting studies of plastic pollution in the ocean and found data on plastic ingestion for 555 species of marine and estuarine fish. Their results showed that 386 fish species — two-thirds of all species — had ingested plastic. And of those, 210 were species that are commercially fished.
Not surprisingly, places with an abundance of plastic in surface waters, such as East Asia, led to a higher likelihood of plastic ingestion by fish.
But fish type and behavior, researchers found, also plays a role. Active predators — those at the top of the food chain, like members of the Sphyrnidae family, which includes hammerhead and bonnethead sharks — ingested the most plastic. Grazers and filter‐feeders consumed the least.
Blue shark at Cape Point, South Africa, 2016. Photo: Steve Woods, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“Overall, the likelihood of plastic ingestion decreases with depth,” the researchers found.
Although bioaccumulation of plastic and its associated chemicals can cause health problems, this isn’t causing noticeable fish population problems — yet. The research revealed that the majority of the species they found to have ingested plastic remain abundant.
But at the same time, 35 species were listed as threatened or near threatened. Another 26 species are vulnerable to overfishing. The authors identified the blue shark, Atlantic bluefin tuna and chinook salmon as “species of high concern due to their threatened status, vulnerability to overfishing and frequent plastic ingestion.”
Meanwhile the researchers found that three-quarters of commercially fished species ingested plastic, including ones common in recreational fisheries and aquaculture that “have the highest likelihood to be part of the supply chain.” Common sole was found to be “most worrisome.”
Even more troubling is that there’s still a lot we don’t know because some areas are better studied than others.
Some nearshore areas are among those where research is lacking. “Only four studies were conducted within the continental United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone, despite more marine plastic originating from the United States than any other developed nation,” the researchers wrote.
Oceanic gyres, those swirling eddies of plastic in the open ocean, are also a black hole when it comes to research. “We uncovered no studies from the Indian, South Atlantic or western North Pacific gyres though there is extensive knowledge of surface debris accumulation in these regions,” they found. “Similarly, there was a paucity of data from high‐latitude seas and none from the Southern Ocean, even though the polar oceans are a sink for microplastic debris with new fisheries developing in these regions as ice retreats and climate changes.”
By comparison, coastal waters — including estuaries — are well studied, as are the seas surrounding Europe. And they found a “recent flurry of studies” from East Asia.
Even with a growing amount of research, the scope and severity of the problem is likely still underestimated.
Filling in these knowledge gaps will be crucial to better understand the extent of the problem, but the researchers say we’ll also need to study top predators more to learn how plastic bioaccumulates in the food chain and how these mobile predators may redistribute plastic across the ocean as they travel.
Little is known about how ingested plastic affects fish and marine ecosystems, and even less about how human health could be affected when plastic-eating fish end up on the dinner table.
“Current evidence for humans ingesting plastic directly from fish remains scant, but there is growing concern,” the researchers wrote. “In particular, the continued aggregation and analysis of information on plastic ingestion by marine fish is vital as these data are inextricably linked to ecosystem and human health.”
A rampant trade in Asian birds for their beautiful songs is emptying forests of sound and life.
The straw-headed bulbul doesn’t look like much.
It’s less than a foot in length, with subdued brown-and-gold plumage, a black beak and beady red eyes. If you saw one sitting on a branch in front of you, you might not give it a second glance.
But this Southeast Asian native stands out in one notable way: It sings like an angel.
“It’s arguably the most beautiful song of any bird,” says Chris Shepherd, executive director of Monitor Conservation Research Society and an expert on Asian songbirds. “It’s amazing,” he adds.
The bird’s beautiful voice serves a vital ecological purpose: Males use it to attract mates. The better the song, the greater the chance of finding a female and propagating the species.
But the song has also come with a terrible modern cost. Humans have come to value the bulbul’s calls so much that they’ve collected the birds from almost every inch of their habitat. Captured birds, quickly caged, have been shipped to markets throughout Southeast Asia. Due to this overwhelming commercial demand, the species has disappeared from most of its range and is now critically endangered. Only a few pocket populations continue to hang on.
And the straw-headed bulbul is far from alone in this decline. Practically every songbird species in Southeast Asia faces a similar predicament. Many birds face the very real risk of imminent extinction, leaving some forests in the region eerily silent.
Recent research finds that several songbirds have become perilously close to vanishing — if they haven’t been lost already.
One Indonesian bird, the Simeulue hill myna, has only just been described as genetically and morphologically unique from other lookalike species. It probably went extinct in the wild in the past two or three years, according to a paper published last spring in the journal Ibis. As the researchers wrote, “On multiple recent excursions to Simeulue, most recently in July 2018, we were unable to find the bird and learned from locals that there had been a great drive to catch the last survivors on the island in response to a wealthy person’s bounty on these birds.”
The paper calls this an “extinction-in-process” and warns that any remaining birds left in captivity may die without producing offspring. Even if they do manage to breed, the researchers fear they could be hybridized with other similar-in-appearance mynas, obscuring their genetic lineage.
That same phrase, extinction-in-process, has also been used to describe the Barusan shama, which according to a 2019 study published in the journal Forktail has become one of the most threatened of Asian songbirds due to rampant collection. It’s now gone from all but one island.
Like the Simeulue hill myna, the Barushan shama’s plight went virtually unnoticed for years because many taxonomists have classified it as a subspecies rather than a full species. Newer research finds that it’s a species with four subspecies, few of which may now survive.
Not that the species/subspecies disputes matter too much at this point.
“Taxonomic debates about the rank of these forms should not stand in the way of trying to ensure the survival of what is clearly an evolutionarily distinct lineage,” says Frank Rheindt, a biologist with National University of Singapore and senior or lead author on both of the papers.
So what happens to these birds once they’re taken from the wild?
That’s where the story gets even bleaker.
Disposable Love
Songbirds are an important element of culture and tradition for many peoples in Southeast Asia. In Java, for example, it’s almost assumed that every household will have at least one pet songbird. The more birds, the more prestigious the home.
But wild songbirds in captivity…well, they don’t tend to last long.
“We’ve often called the caged songbird trade like cut flowers,” says Shepherd. “The birds look nice. They’re often inexpensive. You bring one home. It sits in a cage for a couple of days and it dies just like a cut flower. They’re not expected to live.”
And because many Asian cities feature massive markets full of birds that have been easily snatched from the wild — usually illegally — any bird that dies is relatively easy and inexpensive to replace.
Cages line the Malang bird and animal market on Java in 2016, Photo: Andrea Kirkby (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Even bird traders don’t put much value on their stock, since a new supply of wild-caught birds always seems to be waiting in the wings.
“I’ve seen some cages where the surviving birds are all sitting on top of dead birds in the cages,” Shepherd says. “You can’t see the floor of the cage. It’s covered with a few layers of dead birds, and then there’s some sick and half-dead birds perched on top of them. And they cost the dealers next to nothing. So, you know, even if they sell a few, they think they must be covering their costs or you wouldn’t have a business model like that.”
Although all of this seems to favor low-cost disposability, some species are captive bred by the thousands, and prices can soar for the right birds.
As with so many other groups of heavily traded species, the rarest birds fetch higher prices from collectors — a “better get them before they’re gone” collector’s mentality that pushes prices higher, drives further poaching and drives birds even closer to extinction.
The Simeulue hill myna, for instance, might have sold for about $100-$150, “certainly if a foreigner or non-Simeulue person asks,” says Rheindt. “This is easily 2-4 monthly incomes for rural people on the island.”
The Caged Bird Sings
Along with its rarity, a bird’s appearance is clearly a valuable trait to collectors. Some of the birds are strikingly beautiful, like birds of paradise and the Javan white-eye.
A kingfisher, looking a little worse for wear, in the Malang bird and animal market in 2016. Photo: Andrea Kirkby (CC BY-SA 2.0)
But the quality that typically drives up a bird’s market price?
That, of course, would be the song.
A good song can earn a bird owner a big payday. Entire competitions have sprung up that offer cash prizes for the birds with the best songs — up to $50,000, according to some reports. On Java these events are known as Kicau-mania (“kicau” is Indonesian for “chirping”).
The bird doesn’t get much for his work. Perhaps some food and a chance to sing again.
But it can take a lot of human effort to inspire them to sing for their suppers.
“People will keep the male birds in captivity for a long time,” says Shepherd. “Some birds don’t want to sing in captivity and take a long time before they adjust to the point where they’ll start to sing. Then they’ll train the bird. They’ll keep it near other males so it sings more frequently, because they naturally compete with their songs.”
This forced companionship changes the very nature of the song.
“Some birds pick up notes and sounds from other species,” Shepherd says. “Some of the species that are disappearing, they’re just training birds. They’re not even the ones used in competition. They just keep them beside other the species that compete so they have a more complex and unique song in the competition.”
After that, it’s a bit like a dog show.
“Everybody takes their bird in a cage and there are songbird judges. They walk around and listen to the song and there’s big cash prizes for the bird with the best.” (Most recently, these competitions have moved online due to COVID-19.)
Through all of this, the gift nature gave these animals to help propagate their species — song — ends up driving them toward extinction.
This makes the trade similar to trophy hunting, which values the biggest animals or those with the most beautiful features. “The strongest bird in the wild, the one with the greatest song, would be the one that would pass on his genes,” Shepherd says. “Those are the ones being removed from the wild. So, you know, only inferior birds are left behind.”
Unlike trophy hunting, however, where an elephant’s tusks can theoretically trade hands in perpetuity, a bird’s song is ephemeral — sung once, then lost to time.
Progress
Shepherd says the Asian songbird crisis went virtually ignored for many years. Relatively few scientists studied it, and funding for conservation remained scarce. That’s been a costly delay.
“One of the interesting and sad things is that lot of the species that I worked on in the early Nineties, the ones I tried to raise the alarm on, are now gone or almost gone,” he says. “And then the ones I was working on that were extremely common at the time are now the next wave that’s disappearing.”
Fortunately, that’s started to change. For one thing, scientific research about the trade and affected species continues to pick up. One of the most worrying studies came out last August and found that Java now has more songbirds in cages than in its forests. The study found that one species, the Javan pied starling (Gracupica jalla), now has fewer than 50 birds remaining in the wild, while 1.1 million live on the island in captivity.
Meanwhile governments, NGOs and other researchers have also stepping up their game. Conservation experts came together in 2015 to hold an event called the Asian Songbird Trade Crisis Summit. Two years later they formed the IUCN Asian Songbird Trade Specialist Group, which had its first official meeting in 2019. And over the past five years governments have started to take action, including seizing several large shipments of poached birds, although the trade remains mostly illegal and unsustainable.
Local groups have helped, too, which brings us back to the Simeulue hill myna and Barusan shama. A Simeulue-based organization called Ecosystemimpact set out to help the two birds at the beginning of 2020. Although their efforts were hampered by the COVID pandemic, they’re still trying to acquire any captive birds they can find to keep them out of the trade. If they do rescue any Simeulue hill mynas — such as four juvenile birds that reportedly recently turned up for sale on Facebook — they’ll need a permit from the government to breed them.
Even then, saving them from extinction won’t be easy.
“Hill myna are notoriously hard to breed, requiring large, tall aviaries with good vantage points over forested areas,” says program manager Tom Amey. “It’s not out of the question that hill myna will breed within our aviaries, but given their specific requirements, we feel it is unlikely.” They’re working on raising funding for new aviaries designed specifically for hill mynas.
They also hope to educate the community, to turn its love of captive birds into one that also supports wild populations.
“There is a distinct lack of bird song on Simeulue, especially within close to medium proximity of [human] habitation,” says Amey. “Our ambition is to bring the beautiful sounds of songbirds back to Simeulue’s forests and culture. Songbirds have played an important role in Simeulue culture and many members of the community wish to see them return.”
As with everything in the past year, progress to protect Asian songbirds has slowed down of late. “Unfortunately, the COVID crisis has been a huge, but legitimate, distraction from the global fight against extinction, and very little attention has been paid to such issues in the last few months,” says Rheindt.
Once the pandemic recedes, Shepherd suggests that tourism may play an important role in keeping birds alive, uncaged and in their natural habitats.
“There’s a very big birdwatching community,” he says, “and I think working with the community and with the birdwatching tour guides to raise awareness of the benefits of having songbirds around is important. The birdwatching industry’s worth millions. I think we need to raise awareness of the fact that you can lose your birds, but also awareness of the facts that having birds around is good for the environment, it’s good for your mental health, it’s good for all kinds of things — but it’s good for the economy.”
Until those messages resonate more than the ka-ching of a cash register, however, Asian songbirds will remain in crisis.
And with all that loss comes an unsettling silence.
“Unless the world acts to stop extinctions, I will write my last nature essay on a planet that is less than half as song-graced and life-drenched as the one where I began to write,” she explains in the book’s preface. “My grandchildren will tear out half the pages in their field guides. They won’t need them.”
Her book uses sound as a reference point to better understand what we stand to lose as extinction rates climb higher. But the essays are also a celebration of the natural world’s chorus and the joy of learning to hear what’s still there.
The essays are also being set to music in a series for Oregon State’s Spring Creek Project that will feature 20 4-minute-long concerts combining live musical performance with excerpts from Earth’s Wild Music.
“I’ve never been so excited about a project in my life,” Moore tells us. “It combines everything I care about with the cause that I believe in more than anything else.”
The Revelator spoke to Moore about the moral stakes of our environmental crisis, what it’s like to find a truly quiet place to listen, and what we lose as wild songs disappear.
You’ve been writing about nature for 50 years. During that time our environmental problems have become graver. Has this changed how you approach your work?
Kathleen Dean Moore. Photo: Frank Moore
At first I was a celebrant. I believed Mary Oliver when she said, “My work is loving the world … which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” And that went along fine for years and years, but then it became clear that what I was writing celebrations of were disappearing.
I was right in the midst of an essay on frog song, and bulldozers came and took away the marsh and put in a condominium. I was writing about a bald eagle nest, and the nest — and the tree it was in — burned to the ground in a forest fire. So it was starting to become clear to me that I was going to have to do more than celebrate. I was going to have to demonstrate. I was going to have to protect. I was going to have to defend the natural world.
Why did you decide to focus this collection on sound?
I started thinking about how I could open people’s hearts without breaking them. How I could point to the onrushing extinctions and not force people to turn away in absolute grief. I decided that I was going to have to write in a way that was like a wave — I would lift people and smash them at the same time.
What is it that reaches people without breaking them? What is it that goes straight into people’s hearts? What do they love about the world and will call them to action?
I decided that of all the things I loved about the world, what I loved the most was the music. What I loved the most was the sound. I’ve been writing about this for quite some time, so I had a couple of essays already under my belt, and I couldn’t think of a more wonderful writing assignment for myself then to go outside and listen.
Nature may be getting quieter. But people are getting louder. How is our noise affecting wildlife?
We are deafening. Noise that we create is causing extraordinary harm to the creatures. Think about the pain caused to the whales from the exploratory thudding of those machines that go through the ocean and stamp to try to find oil.
Think about the meadowlarks that lived in the fracking fields and had to endure endless noise of drilling and trucks. And as a result, the songs of the meadowlarks are fractured and abbreviated. They haven’t been able to hear their parents well enough to imitate them.
Many of us may be out of practice at listening. In fact, a lot of folks walk around with earphones on so we can’t hear what’s around us. How do we get better at both listening to and understanding the sounds of nature?
Listening is an art that we should practice because it does two things. It makes us shut up and it makes us open up. We stop listening just to the songs of “me, me, me”. When we set aside our own stories, it opens us up so we can listen to the stories of other beings. It’s a skill of empathy, isn’t it? Listening to other people’s stories and other creatures’ sounds is a way of understanding the world from their point of view. It’s a moral training.
When it comes to understanding what we hear, Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, and cared so much about bird song, took pains to tell us that it doesn’t matter if we know the names of what we see. That comes later. But the first thing that has to happen is love.
So I’m not so concerned about knowing which bird is calling. I’m surrounded by people who could do that in a majestic way. My husband can identify birds by their call. My neighbor can. I think it’s a beautiful skill that I don’t have.
But I do have the ability to catch a song. To hear it, which isn’t nothing. It can catch my attention and I can seek it out and I can listen to it. Knowing its name — maybe that’s not so important as knowing its tune.
How are people affected by this loss of nature’s song, and what’s the importance of preserving silent places where we can still experience what’s left?
We lose joy. Let’s face it — the sounds of the natural world are beautiful and they make us happy. I think we also lose a connection to the world around us.
In the book, I write about going with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton to One Square Inch of Silence, a small spot in Olympic National Park [possibly the quietest place in the United States]. It was a wonderful experience. At the time, we were in pouring rain. Nature itself was cacophonous, but we didn’t hear a human sound for 20 minutes, which is the definition in Gordon’s mind of a quiet place.
Gordon now is recording in a jungle somewhere that can only be reached by canoeing down a wild river, because it’s one of the last places on Earth he can find that’s silent.
He’s famous for these recordings called the Dawn Chorus that captured the outpouring of bird song that’s triggered by morning light. But he couldn’t do that anymore, because that music box is broken. We’re in the process of wrecking what we should be treasuring.
It’s hard to find a balance between grief and celebration. But you know, people often ask me, “What can one person do?” And I say, “Stop being one person.”
You don’t have to do it all. Other people are working all around the world on the same causes you believe in. Find them, join up with them. You’ll find your place in the choir. [Author and teacher] Joanna Macy says to choose what you love and devote yourself to it. That, she says, is enough.
Organizers in Ecuador know that conservation efforts thrive when the next generation is informed and involved.
Jumandy Allauca, a resident in Ecuador’s Cotopaxi province, was 13 years old when I first met him. It was 2011 and he was participating in a day of collective work with other members of his community — performing maintenance work on a pipeline that carries irrigation water from high altitude wetlands down to their village, some 20 kilometers away. He and I had hiked up together, following the family donkey, Pepito, who was laden with a sack of sand and a pair of shovels.
Working on the pipeline. Photo: Tristan Partridge
“We have to do this work,” Jumandy told me. “The water here is for everybody.”
This was partway through the 15 months I spent living in the region to find out more about Indigenous politics and environmental activism. I returned in 2018 and had scheduled another visit to reconnect with friends there in 2020, but COVID-19 put an end to such plans. Instead, we have been spending more time talking via WhatsApp, Zoom and other online platforms.
The páramo always features in our conversations.
The Andean páramo moorlands are home to high-altitude lakes, countless mountain streams, and a host of unique plants and wildlife.
They’re also uniquely at risk in ways that threaten millions of people, if not the entire climate.
Efforts to protect the páramo overlap with Indigenous struggles for recognition and environmental justice. Local leaders know that the future of all these actions depend on one group in particular: young people.
As I first learned a decade ago, preserving the páramo ecosystem and sustaining its role in hydrological cycles is vital for ensuring that water continues to flow through the community irrigation pipeline, a project operative since 2009. Such work remains particularly important now, when the páramo faces increasing threats from industrialization and climate change.
I’m frequently told how jóvenes (young people) play a key role in this work.
Reflecting on his experiences in the páramo, earlier this month Jumandy told me, “We need the young people to be well trained,” and repeating the word concientizar, perhaps best translated from Spanish as “to raise awareness.”
Jumandy added, “We need to raise the awareness of young people — and of their parents too — so that everyone understands the importance of the páramo, so that everyone, including young people, plays an active part in these processes.”
In our recent conversations, local leaders have expressed an acute awareness of the need to keep young people engaged and active. Youth participation is essential to ensure that páramo conservation efforts continue — and this is something that has benefits for people not only across the Andes but also around the world.
The Páramo
An ecosystem unique to the Andes, the páramo moorlands are located mainly in Ecuador and Colombia, along with areas of Peru and Venezuela. This discontinuous belt of land covers roughly 36,000 square kilometers and represents a kind of high-altitude island archipelago. Found between 3,200 and 4,500 meters above sea level, these tropical alpine wetlands occupy a zone that typically lies above the agricultural frontier and upper tree line, reaching up to border areas of perennial snow.
Photo: Tristan Partridge
The abundant flora and fauna found in the páramo make it the world’s most diverse high-altitude ecosystem. Even though weather conditions are harsh — varying from heavy rain and occasional snow to long daytime periods of intense sunshine — the páramo is home to an estimated 5,000 species, 3,000 of which are found nowhere else on the planet, including hummingbirds like the Ecuadorian hillstar and Buffy helmetcrest.
An Andean fox in the páramo. Photo: Alexey Yakovlev (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The particular soil systems and vegetation of the páramo mean it functions like a giant sponge in the hydrological cycle. Mosses and grasses absorb rainfall that is then stored in the soil before being slowly released into streams and rivers. Researchers analyzing these processes estimate that water supplies for 40 million people across the Andes depend directly on the páramo.
The wider world also benefits from a healthy páramo because its soils act as a carbon sink, helping to limit global heating. The páramo, like other lands in tropical alpine regions, stores carbon through a combination of its particular vegetation, low air temperature and atmospheric pressure, and soils that are frequently water-logged.
Today, however, the páramos themselves face rising temperatures and reduced precipitation, threatening their diverse flora and hydrological benefits.
Land-use change presents another range of grave threats. Recent modeling projects that by 2060, páramo areas will be reduced by 30% — its unique web of life being chipped away by cattle grazing, commercial pine forests and farming as a result of the upward expansion of agricultural frontiers — a process that’s already begun.
At the same time, many communities who live and work in close relation with the páramo are very much aware of these threats and are taking proactive steps to alleviate them.
Learning From Experience
As a young teenager, Myriam Allauca was a regular participant in activities organized by and for her community’s youth group. In Pujilí parish, in the heart of Cotopaxi’s highlands, the group would meet regularly and undertake endeavors such as learning to identify local species of trees and flowering plants or traveling as a group to visit a nature reserve in the lowland cantón of La Mana. At other times, they would collaborate with community leaders to join projects that were already underway, such as helping to build two thatched-roof huts for use by occasional conservation workers in the páramo.
By her late teens Myriam had taken on a leadership role in the group, at one point running a project to map the boundaries of the whole area of páramo owned by her community.
Alpacas on the mountainside. Photo: Tristan Partridge.
These were clearly formative experiences. By her mid-twenties, Myriam had been elected by the community to be their vice president.
“What we learn when we are young is so important,” Myriam tells me. “Our experiences at that age shape what it is we want to do, what we want to commit to, later in life.”
I suggest her own life illustrates that point very clearly. Now with two young children of her own, Myriam works as a local development partnerships facilitator for SwissAid — an international development NGO from Switzerland with a long history of working in Ecuador, although it plans to end operations there later this year.
Our conversation took place a few weeks after Myriam’s own community, San Isidro, secured a landmark victory — many years in the making — that helps pave the way for further páramo conservation efforts nationwide. At the end of November 2020 the national Ministry for Water recognized the area of páramo held communally by San Isidro as a “protected hydrological area” — one of the first in the country.
Land with this protected status still belongs to the community (rather than to the state) but is subject to stricter regulations that limit how the land can be used. Any activities that could alter the quantity or quality of local water supplies, for example, are prohibited. Achieving this status, Myriam says, was the result of decades of community organizing and campaigning, in addition to extensive on-the-ground research in the preparation of scientific reports.
Jóvenes played a key role helping to secure this protection for the San Isidro páramo, says Tannia Rojas, who also grew up in San Isidro and now works as a regional facilitator with SwissAid.
“Young people were super important in that process — things progressed much faster in San Isidro [than in other communities] due to all the information we had gathered,” she says. “We had a land-management plan, a water-protection plan; we had measured flow-rates of the different streams, documented the flora and fauna by taking photographs. And all that fieldwork, led by our council members, was made possible through the participation of young people.”
That participation enabled data gathering on a scale not seen before in the community. For example, the 73-page water-protection plan included photographs, hand-drawn topographical maps and updated flow-rate measurements for 17 páramo streams taken at 3,600 to 4,399 meters above sea level — and all of this information was gathered with assistance from young people. In part, this is because of the significant time and human energy requirements involved in such work — entire days spent hiking at high altitude, often encountering heavy rainfall while equipped with minimal, if any, waterproof gear. The final “protected area” report submitted to regional authorities was similarly detailed, including 25 maps that incorporate community-collected data.
Young people have also helped connect events in San Isidro with parallel efforts elsewhere in the region, sharing updates with other communities and members of the Indigenous Movement, and amplifying their own community’s achievements through social and legacy media. All of this has raised the profile of páramo protection. Even though the community faces ongoing legal threats from parties trying to seize ownership of the páramo for their own commercial ends, council members in San Isidro, including the current president, Porfirio Allauca, now receive calls from other communities asking their advice on how to achieve the same protective recognition.
Historic Struggles
In different parts of the country, communities have developed different strategies for páramo protection. Further south in Ecuador, in Azuay province, environmental activists from the People’s Council for Cuenca’s Water and allied groups successfully campaigned for a referendum to let city residents vote on whether to allow mining in the area — including in the Quimsacocha páramo. The “Yes” campaign in favor of banning mining scored a resounding victory in the vote, which was held on the same day as Ecuador’s first-round presidential election in February.
Since the referendum was approved by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court, a lawyer from the campaign told media that he received many calls from communities elsewhere in Ecuador interested in protecting the páramo and preventing mining.
Making sure these diverse campaigns have a future is something that Patricio Copara addresses daily. As director of youth work and culture with Ecuarunari, an Indigenous organizing body, Patricio works with communities and youth groups across Ecuador’s highlands. Visiting different provinces, he sees communities with widely varying experiences of campaigning and activism, some much more successful than others.
But a common theme cuts across them all: trying to ensure that the next generation are engaged.
“This last year, with the pandemic, has been very difficult,” he tells me. “We had to cancel so much of our program. We haven’t been able to mobilize as normal.”
They’re still active, though. In several provinces, they’ve helped communities set up “young leaders’ training schools.” In addition to providing young people with current information on Indigenous Movement actions, a core goal here is to connect different communities with agencies operating at the national level offering financial and legal support, depending on those communities’ particular needs.
“In any place, you find some young people who are not committed, or not working,” he says. “So we’re creating these [schools] as spaces to explore alternatives, to work on the things that people care about.”
For Patricio, successful activism is not only about fighting to defend the páramo and other Indigenous territories, although he dedicates much of his time to supporting people doing just that. Nor is it only about looking ahead and working collectively to create a viable, desirable future for the current generation’s children and grandchildren. He emphasizes that all his work, at home and with Ecuarunari, is part of a “historical struggle” and that must remain central to conservation efforts.
“We need to move forward valuing the struggle of our ancestors, our grandparents,” he told me recently. “We should never forget that our grandparents lived practically as slaves” — as bound laborers under the hacienda system. “They sacrificed, and so did our parents, and that work is reflected in the Indigenous Movement, in our struggle today. We cannot forget the past, and it is the youth who need to be aware and do that work of remembering.”
The páramo in San Isidro forms a central part of this kind of community commemoration. The hills are recognized as both a site of historical importance and as a symbol of solidarity. To mark the inauguration of the irrigation water pipeline, just over ten years ago, community leaders laid a plaque at the base of a flagpole beside two thatched-roof huts built by Myriam Allauca and her colleagues. The plaque thanks recent ancestors for their efforts in acquiring this land — the result of a long struggle following Land Reform in the 1960s and 1970s — and restates how the páramo is both a site of and a source of communal action. After listing the people who fought to secure this land for the community, the text describes the páramo as a “wellspring of life” that those alive today pledge to “look after forever and ever.”
Reading the plaque. Photo: Tristan Partidge
Tannia Rojas hopes people everywhere will take this message to heart, especially young people who, she says, “are fundamental to the conservation process.” Protecting recent gains — which are always under threat, especially within judicial systems that have a history of discrimination against Indigenous people — is the responsibility of everyone, she says. “We need young people to sustain the achievements we have made, but some of them don’t realize the importance of the páramo — they think water just comes out of the tap! So our efforts continue, to involve them in political, environmental and community work.”
Páramo preservation, Tannia adds, is most successful when everyone in a community is connected to the work being done. And keeping those connections alive is something that everyone can contribute to.
“We have to ask, what kind of leaders do we want in the future? Then, we have to train young people well — by being good examples for them to follow.”
Given the global need to care for the ecosystems that sustain us — and to keep that work going well into the future — this collective approach sets a good example for all of us.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
EVs can help power homes and buildings in disasters — but only if automakers, utilities, local emergency planners and regulators start working on it now.
There were many lessons to be learned from Texas’ prolonged periods of lost power during its cold snap, which saw temperatures drop into the single digits. But one many people may not recognize is that electric vehicles, or EVs, can be part of a smart resiliency plan — not only in the case of outages triggered by the cold but in other scenarios caused by extreme weather events, from fire-related blackouts in California to hurricane-hit power losses in Puerto Rico.
A car driving in the snow in Dallas, Feb. 2021. Photo: Matthew Rader (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Experts recognize that electric vehicles are a central climate solution for their role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But EVs are also essentially batteries on wheels. You can store energy in those batteries, and if EVs are equipped with something called vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-building technology, they can also be used to keep the lights on in emergencies. The technology allows the energy being stored in an EV battery to be pushed back into the grid or into buildings to provide power.
There are hurdles: The technology is still developing, the vast majority of EVs currently on the road do not have this capability, and utilities would need regulatory approval before bringing it to scale. But done right it could be a great opportunity.
Electric car batteries can hold approximately 60 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy, enough to provide back-up power to an average U.S. household for two days. Larger electric vehicles like buses and trucks have even bigger batteries and can provide more power. The American company Proterra produces electric buses that can store up to 660 kWh of energy. Electric garbage trucks and even big-rigs, with bigger batteries, are becoming a reality too.
Photo: MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann (CC BY 2.0)
If equipped with vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-building technology, those cars, buses and trucks could prove invaluable during future blackouts. People could rely on their cars to power their houses. Municipalities, transit agencies and school districts could send out their fleets to the areas most in need. We could power homes, shelters and emergency response centers — and could keep people warm, healthy and comfortable until power could be restored.
But to add this great resiliency tool to our arsenal in times of extreme weather, we must significantly increase the number of EVs on the road. In 2019 electric cars accounted for only about 2% of all light-duty vehicle sales in the country. Electric buses and trucks are becoming more common in the United States, but still only represent a tiny fraction of the fleet. As it stands now, the EVs currently on the road, even if equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, would do little to help a broad swath of the population in need of power.
A line of electric cars at charging stations. Photo: Andrew Bone (CC BY 2.0)
There are some signs that this is changing. California and Massachusetts have both announced intentions to explore a policy that would require all new cars after 2035 be electric. General Motors is the latest major automaker to announce an intention to move toward producing only electric cars. Several major transit agencies, including in Texas, are starting to switch to all-electric buses.
To support widespread adoption of electric vehicles, we need to invest in the charging infrastructure necessary to accommodate explosive growth. We also need to make sure that as EV adoption increases, the vehicles and infrastructure are set up to use the power-transfer technology. Nissan already does this with its Leaf-to-home system. Proterra offers transit buses equipped with the technology. Dominion Energy in Virginia is working with school bus manufacturers to develop and operationalize a large-scale school bus vehicle-to-grid program.
To standardize the technology and make it accessible to everyone, utilities should seek regulatory approval to implement programs and invest in vehicle-to-grid capable infrastructure, and automakers should make it easy for consumers to install chargers that can send power both ways.
As that happens, governments at all levels should work to incorporate electric vehicles into their emergency response plans. Shelters, hospitals, emergency response centers and other buildings critical to crisis management should be equipped with the infrastructure necessary to pull power from EVs. Heavy-duty fleets like buses and trucks present particularly promising opportunities to provide power to people in need, but all the electric buses in the world won’t do any good if we’re not prepared to have them charged and ready to deploy to the areas that need them the most.
A few Tesla owners in Texas were able to draw power from their cars to stay warm and keep the lights on this month, which is great. But this valuable resource shouldn’t be limited to a few select people on a one-off basis. With more EVs on the road and careful planning and preparation, we could have millions of mobile batteries available to help keep the power on for everyone in emergencies.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Last year the United States racked up nearly $100 billion in damages from weather and climate disasters. These events are starting to take their toll on wildlife, too.
A hailstorm in South Texas. Tornadoes in Tennessee. Wildfires across the West. A barrage of Gulf Coast hurricanes. Those are among the record 22 weather and climate disasters that each topped $1 billion in damages last year in the United States.
In all, the price tag for 2020 hit a whopping $95 billion — and that’s just in the United States. Reinsurance firm Swiss Re put global economic losses at $175 billion last year, including $32 billion for floods in China and $13 billion in damages from Cyclone Amphan across India and Bangladesh.
The worst news? Our profligate burning of fossil fuels means we’re in store for more.
Studies show that climate change is supercharging some weather and climate events and will lead to more severe and longer-lasting heat waves, stronger hurricanes, an increased wildfire risk and a longer wildfire season. We can also expect more heavy rain events and severe droughts, not to mention other extreme events like February’s polar vortex.
“You can’t attribute any particular storm to climate change, but what we do know is that climate change tips the odds of making many of these events more severe,” says Bruce Stein, chief scientist and associate vice president at the National Wildlife Federation.
While experts tabulate the economic losses — homes destroyed, crops ruined, businesses shuttered — ecosystems and wildlife can also sustain damage that’s harder to quantify.
Many plants and wildlife evolved with and have adapted to dealing with large-scale disturbances, but we’re beginning to see “megadisturbances” at levels beyond what we saw in the past, says Stein.
And that can take a toll. Extreme weather can kill animals directly — or indirectly, like by destroying food sources, contaminating water or altering habitat, forcing a species to move into areas where there may be more competition, fewer resources or a greater risk of predation.
“What we begin to find when you get some of these mega disturbances is that it’s beyond the ability of a species — or their adaptive capacity — to bounce back,” says Stein.
The Research
The effects of climate change on the natural world are being felt at two speeds. One is more gradual, referred to by scientists as “ramping” — shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels. The second is quick, like extreme weather events.
Both are problematic, says Sean Maxwell, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. But, he adds, “I think the changes to acute events have the greatest potential to devastate local populations or ecosystems, and the impacts of these events are often more difficult to plan for or avoid.”
Maxwell was the lead author of a 2018 study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions that examined how changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events affected wildlife. The researchers looked at 519 studies of ecological responses to extreme events — including cyclones, droughts, floods, and heat and cold waves — that took place from 1941 to 2015. They found that the response was negative 57% of the time. (And in those instances where species benefited, they were mostly invasive species.)
A manatee stranded by Hurricane Irma in Melbourne, Florida. Photo: Bill Greer, FWC (CC BY-ND 2.0)
“Some of the negative responses we found were quite concerning, including more than 100 cases of dramatic population declines and 31 cases of local population extinction following an extreme event,” says Maxwell. “Populations of critically endangered bird species in Hawai’i, such as the palia, have been annihilated due to drought, and populations of lizard species have been wiped out due to cyclones in the Bahamas.”
Plant species, the researchers found, had the highest number of negative responses to extreme events, followed by reptiles and amphibians.
“Collectively, the studies in our review suggest that extreme weather and climate events have profound implications for species and ecosystem management,” the researchers concluded.
The Most Vulnerable
Species that are already threatened or endangered are of course especially at risk.
Take the Attwater prairie chicken. A million of these birds once ranged across the prairies of Texas and Louisiana.
Today fewer than 100 remain in the wild and scientists have sought to bolster their populations with captive breeding programs. But when Hurricane Harvey walloped Texas with 130-mile-per-hour winds and record rainfall in 2017, the birds were right in harm’s way.
“The Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge tracked 29 individual birds, mostly hens. Post-hurricane, staff confirmed only five of them still alive,” Texas Climate News reported. “The hurricane also killed roughly 80% of a prairie chicken population on private property in Goliad County.”
Other species with limited ranges, like those on islands, also face big threats.
“If a species is well distributed, then if one part of its range gets hit, there’s the ability for it to recover,” says Stein. “But if essentially all its eggs are in one basket, and that particular place gets hit by one of these big disturbances, that’s when you have a real concern.”
In 2017 Hurricane Maria cut the population of just 200 Puerto Rican parrots in half. The year before, Hurricane Matthew was believed to have wiped out the last Bahama nuthatches (Sitta insularis). It took two years before a few of the birds were found — and then Hurricane Dorian struck in 2019, making their survival unlikely, according to Diana Bell, a professor of conservation biology at the University of East Anglia.
“In fact, Dorian may have not only sealed the fate of the nuthatch but also severely impacted other birds endemic to these islands, particularly the Bahama warbler and the Abaco parrot,” Bell wrote in an essay for The Conversation. “Also known as the Bahama Amazon parrot, this subspecies uniquely nests in limestone cavities on the ground which are likely to have been flooded by the storm surge.”
Damage in the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian. Photo: Seaman Erik Villa Rodriguez, U.S. Coast Guard
Compounding Crises
The risk to wildlife from extreme storms can be compounded by the ramping effects of climate change, too.
“If you have increasingly severe hurricanes where you’ve also got sea-level rise essentially providing a higher lodge point for the storm surge, then you start seeing impacts beyond the historical record,” says Stein.
In other places, extreme weather is an extra blow to species already struggling with other environmental pressures, like habitat loss, invasive species or pollution.
Last year the world watched in horror as land-use management, climate change and drought helped push Australia’s bushfires to a terrifying new level, killing 34 people and burning 37,500 square miles.
A study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that the fire impacted the critical habitat of 832 native species, with 70 species losing more than 30% of their natural range. Twenty-one of those were already at risk of extinction.
Those that survived could find themselves hard-pressed in future climate disasters. “Multiple extreme events are likely to act in synergistic ways to exacerbate risk of species’ extinction,” wrote Maxwell and the other researchers of the 2018 study.
Australia already has one of the highest extinction rates, and the wildfires could limit the capacity of some species to recover — like the endangered Kangaroo Island dunnart and the long-footed potoroo — and threaten others. Australia’s record blazes last year could push the number of endangered species in the country up by 19%, the study in Nature Ecology and Evolution found.
Kangaroo Island, the only habitat of the endangered Kangaroo Island dunnart, after the 2019-2020 Australia wildfires. Photo: StephenMitchell, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Solutions
When Hurricane Irma sacked the Florida Keys in 2017, the storm tossed boats ashore, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and left a trail of debris across the islands.
It also endangered one of the region’s beloved endemic species, the tiny Key deer, which today primarily live on Big Pine Key. Some deer were killed in the storm, and surviving animals faced threats to their already limited freshwater supply as the storm surge dumped saline ocean water into freshwater pools.
Island residents responded the way folks often do after a disaster — they offered help to their neighbors.
“What you saw during and shortly after Irma is that these Key deer were coming up to houses looking for fresh water,” says Stein. “And people were putting out kiddie pools of water for them.”
Key deer after Hurricane Irene. Photo: Carol Lyn Parrish, (CC BY-ND 2.0).
Following Australia’s bushfires last year, the country’s government jumped to the aid of wildlife by dropping 4,000 pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes to starving brush-tailed rock-wallabies who lost their food source in the blazes.
“There’s a lot of things that we can do to help human communities as well as wildlife after these acute disturbances,” says Stein.
But beyond immediate food and water relief, there’s a much bigger task ahead: reducing greenhouse gas emissions to address the ongoing dangers of climate change and the ability of ecosystems to adapt. Key deer, for example, also face a long-term threat to their drinking water supply from rising seas, something no number of kiddie pools can repair. And more severe hurricanes are likely in their future, too.
“As climate change continues to ensure extreme climate and weather events are more and more common, we now need to act to ensure species have the best chance to survive,” says Maxwell. “Wherever possible, high-quality and intact habitat areas should be retained, as these are the places where species are most resilient to increasing exposure to extreme events.”
If such intact habitat doesn’t exist, ecological restoration efforts can be used to help species adapt, his study found.
And the more we know, the better.
“Incorporating extreme events into climate change vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans will be challenging,” the researchers of the 2018 paper concluded. “But by doing so we have a greater chance of arriving at conservation interventions that truly address the full range of climate change impacts.”
And that could give more species a fighting chance in a changing climate.
In truth, this small rocky outcropping in the Guadeloupe Islands has seen its fair share of human-driven change since colonial settlers arrived. Once a haven for pirates hiding out from the law, the island served as a colony for lepers and lawbreakers for two centuries. The land, despite its modern reputation and protected status, was heavily cultivated and disturbed for much of that time — much like the other islands around it.
