Want to Design a Livable Future? Try ‘Multisolving’

Climate Interactive’s new online tool and its history of deep relationship building helps show that our international climate goals remain in reach.

Would you like to take a crack at solving climate change? Or at least creating a road map of how we could do it?

That’s possible now thanks to a new computer modeling tool called En-ROADS.

Created by the nonprofit think tank Climate Interactive and MIT’s Sloan’s Sustainability Initiative, the scientifically rigorous online tool lets you put your hand on the lever to figure out what mix of energy, economic and technological changes can get us to a livable future.

For example, what if we stop burning coal now and move to clean energy in the next 10 years? What if we curb deforestation? Or demand increased energy efficiency and the electrification of our vehicles? Put a tax on carbon? There are too many variables to wrap our heads around. That’s where computer modeling comes in: It can help us visualize the possibilities.

“We use computers to keep track of all of the feedback loops and interconnections and tipping points that exist either in the atmospheric or biological or economic or political parts of the system,” says Climate Interactive cofounder Elizabeth Sawin.

These kinds of high-level tools are usually reserved for scientists and other experts, but En-ROADS is available to everyone. Launched in 2019, it’s already been used by government officials, business leaders and educators, and local activists in dozens of countries. It helps people visualize that climate solutions are in reach, says Sawin.

Climate Interactive’s work extends beyond computer modeling. We talked to Sawin about the potential of En-ROADS to change communities and the organization’s practice of “multisolving” — employing collaborative solutions that work for climate change, health, equity and well-being — and how improving the social safety net can also help address the climate crisis.

En-ROADS Overview from Climate Interactive on Vimeo.

When you build a tool like En-ROADS, who are you hoping uses it?

The tools that we build are used by quite a range of people, which is one of the exciting things about them.

Before En-ROADS we had a tool called C-ROADS, which was used in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. During the negotiations in Copenhagen it allowed people to add up what each country was offering to do in terms of emissions cuts and calculate what that would mean for the global temperature at the end of the century. That was of interest to the U.S. State Department under President Obama and negotiating parties from other countries.

As a young bunch of scientists, it was fairly thrilling to hand our results to a colleague who took them to [science advisor] John Holdren, who took them to the president.

Today we find En-ROADS having quite a lot of traction in the upper levels of companies and governments, but one thing we’ve learned over the years is that those high-level leaders really can’t move further or faster than the civil society is ready to.

So we invest quite a lot in supporting teachers — university and high school — and advocates. We’re in the middle of a second round of webinars training around 1,000 people to use En-ROADS so they can teach others.

These are people all around the world. One is interested in going to her members of Congress with her laptop and using the simulation to advocate for a better future for her kids.

What does En-ROADS do differently from other computer simulations?

One thing we talk about is the democratization of this information. En-ROADS isn’t breaking new scientific ground that other computer simulations of climate change don’t do. In fact, often we’re relying on that cutting-edge research of other groups.

But we have paid attention to making it run fast and making it freely available online, where most of these other tools aren’t designed for those purposes. They’re doing scientific research for other scientists. Top leaders can often get the input of those academics if they have a question or a scenario, but it’s unlikely that a politically active mom who’s trying to influence her member of Congress would have access to those kinds of tools. Whereas if she puts in the time to learn, she can use En-ROADS.

I think more and more, and especially in the last few years, we come across people who have the impression that [the climate crisis is] pretty much hopeless. “It’s too late. We’ve left it too long.” And En-ROADS, for those people, is motivating because it shows that the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement to keep temperature increase well below 2 degrees [Celsius] is still physically possible. There’s a huge amount of social and political will needed to do it, but it’s within reach.

Your organization is guided by a practice you call “multisolving.” What is that?

Elizabeth Sawin, Climate Interactive cofounder. Photo: Courtesy

In the early years of working with models like C-ROADS and En-ROADS, we were really focused on tons of greenhouse gases and how to limit those. And clearly that’s the core of the problem. But what we found in Copenhagen was that, despite our group and a few others who were doing this analysis actually being heard, and being on the front page of top newspapers, it didn’t lead to more ambitious pledges from countries.

There was a soul-searching moment for me and for Climate Interactive in realizing that just being good scientists within this narrow bound of counting tons of carbon isn’t getting us onto the path we need to be on.

That got me interested in this question of what else would be different in a world that has gotten off of fossil fuels. This was around 2009-2010. I hired the best researcher I knew, and she went away and came back and handed me this report.

It said that the benefits of being off fossil fuels, when monetized — when you took all the lives saved, all the healthcare costs saved, all the jobs created — the savings were of the same order of magnitude as the cost.

I thought she had made a mistake. Because I had worked my whole career trying to convince people that it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be expensive, but we need to get off fossil fuels. And she was saying that if you just widened your scope and looked not just on the carbon side, but you looked at the lives and health and community well-being, we were going to reap all these benefits.

I felt like I had been spending my life on a problem that was framed in a way where we would never be able to solve it. But by expanding our view, the things we were missing — basically political will, political power and budgetary power — seemed like maybe they could be aligned.

After that, for a long time we talked about the “co-benefits,” and that that was kind of the word at the time. And many people still use it. We ended up dissatisfied with that word because it sounds like climate change is the main benefit, and then there are these other nice co-benefits.

That’s still putting CO₂ at the center of the world.

To a parent who’s been in the emergency room all night with a child with asthma, is protecting the climate 100 years from now the main benefit of closing the neighborhood coal-fired power plant? Or is ending asthma the main benefit and climate is a nice co-benefit?

So we made up the word “multisolving” to talk about how all these problems matter.

What does this look like in action?

We learned that by and large our systems are not set up to allow people to take advantage of these synergies. And just to give you one example, if a country is going to go on a low-carbon transportation plan, those are going to be costs that are felt by the ministry of transportation. But the savings are largely going to be felt by the ministry of health. There’ll be less hospitalization, fewer premature deaths, less cardiovascular and respiratory illness, less premature birth. But the way current governments are set up, no transportation minister is going to get much political appreciation or an incentive by saving money for the health ministry.

So for the last few years we’ve been working more and more on how to bring people together, to build the relationships that are needed to take advantage of these synergies because — until people can shift their systems around in a way where they can act together across these different silos and boundaries and jurisdictions — this will all just stay theoretical.

One place we have been doing this is in Atlanta with a group called Partnership for Southern Equity. We’re creating a community network, the Just Growth Circle, that can be mobilized to have influence, decision-by-decision, on the kind of pattern of growth and development that will eventually change a whole city.

That kind of deep-relationship building isn’t something that can be done quickly. How do you balance that kind of work to establish these interconnections with the urgency of the climate crisis?

Wendell Berry said, “To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.” But we’re in the kind of emergency that calls for patience. Time is very short and yet to make the kind of changes we need to make requires trust and relationships that can’t be rushed and can only be cultivated. All you can do is create the conditions for them.

If you have urgency — if you need to bring things to scale, if you’re looking for transformation and not incremental change — then actually this very slow and patient work of building trust and relationships is the way that you get to a very fast and transformative change.

Has anything shifted in your thinking in the last few months during this global pandemic?

There’s been a lot of talk about opportunities for transformation within the pandemic, especially about the need for low-carbon solutions. The other side is the social safety net. A lot of what we need to do to help people through the pandemic is also what the smart people behind the Green New Deal have said from the beginning needs to be part of the plan.

When they talked about universal healthcare, childcare, gender equity programs and the job training side of it, lots of people responded that they were way outside their lane. “What does this have to do with carbon?” But the pandemic is showing us that if you want a society to be able to pivot rapidly, you need a social safety net to support people.

If you want to pivot to green infrastructure, if you want low carbon infrastructure, you’re changing a whole workforce in a generation. The social safety net is the lubrication that allows that to happen with less friction.

The social safety net we need to build to get through the pandemic could be built to also carry us through the transition to a climate-safe economy. It’s not the technical side of this transition, but it is the taking care of each other through the transition. That may sound selfless, but it’s also highly practical because the transition isn’t going to happen if we can’t move a whole society very quickly.

The Shocking Number of Snakes Traded Internationally Each Year

A new study digs into the market for endangered and threatened snakes, revealing threats to both species and human health.

Nearly a million endangered and threatened snakes are legally sold on the international market each year, on average — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to the total number of living and dead snakes shipped around the world, according to researchers and other experts.

The trade not only puts many snake species at risk but also poses a potential danger to human health and even entire ecosystems, says Fleur Hierink, a researcher with the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva.

“The trade in live, venomous snakes can potentially contribute to increased risks of snakebite among catchers, traders and owners, and might have an effect on conservation through the introduction of alien species,” says Hierink.

To quantify that risk, especially concerning human health, Hierink and her collaborators examined 44 years of snake-trade records, covering an important subset of data from 1975 through 2018. The data was accessed through a database maintained by the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, the international body which regulates the trade in threatened plants and animals.

The results, published in June in the journal Biological Conservation, calculated that 6.2 million CITES-listed live snakes were traded during that period, along with 34.5 million snake skins (either whole or processed into products such as handbags and belts). The trade also included more than 48,000 snake bodies, and hundreds of skulls, heads and other body parts.

A wild Oriental rat snake (Ptyas mucosa). The researchers found that this species represented “27.8% of total snake exports.” Photo: Nipun Sohanlal (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The numbers, though striking, only cover a portion of the trade.

The snake species counted came from what’s known as CITES Appendix II, which restricts trade for “species not necessarily threatened with extinction, but in which trade must be controlled in order to avoid utilization incompatible with their survival.” Not every endangered species is protected on the CITES level, although new species are added regularly following what can often be hotly contested meetings.

That means the study includes data about just 164 snake species — out of around 3,700 known snake species — so a lot of other legal and illegal trade isn’t reflected in that already-high number.

“The CITES trade database is an incomplete picture of legal wildlife trade,” Hierink acknowledges.

Still, the data reveals some trends about where snakes are collected and sold, and that, in turn, can help us understand more about the big picture and the risks it creates.

“Having a better understanding of trade flows in wild-caught, live venomous snakes for example, increases our understanding of potential exposure to snakebite risk among catchers, traders, and owners,” Hierink says. “Additionally, following the movement of non-native snake species gives us insight into the potential introduction of alien species, pathogens and disease vectors, which can have implications for conservation and public health.”

Snakes on a Plane, Train, Boat, Etc.

The researchers say their paper provides the first snapshot of the worldwide snake trade.

Snakes, they found, get shipped around the world, with China and the United States receiving the most imports of CITES-listed species. In addition to leather goods, the U.S. imported more than 3 million live snakes.

The most heavily traded species in the database were pythons — mostly reticulated pythons (Python reticulatus) and ball pythons (P. regius) — which represented nearly half the trade. Pythons are highly valued for their skins, so much of that trade was in various leather goods. In addition, nearly 4 million live pythons were also shipped during the 44-year period (although many for were destined for slaughter in the importing countries).

python leather — A python watch strap. Photo: Guy Sie (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The most commonly traded venomous species in the CITES database included Indonesian and Indian cobras (Naja sputatrix and N. naja) and Russell’s vipers (Daboia russelii). “The large majority of live venomous snakes were traded within Southeast Asia, where they were mainly harvested from the wild,” Hierink says. “This shows a potential increased risk of snakebite in Southeast Asian countries where snake-catching and trade may contribute to the livelihoods of poor communities.”

Russell's viper — A captive Russell’s viper. Photo: Mike Prince (CC BY 2.0)

And although the researchers say captive-bred snakes have become increasingly prevalent in the trade, the data shows that more than 60% of the snakes traded between 2015 and 2017 still came from wild populations, according to CITES records.

Expanding the Picture

The data is also notable for what it doesn’t show — most obviously the snake species that are not regulated and tracked by CITES.

“There are many snake species not listed in CITES that are in international trade,” says Richard Thomas, head of communications for TRAFFIC, an international organization that monitors wildlife trade. “Those of current greatest concern would be species that have been assessed as at risk of extinction because of declining populations, with international trade considered a potential threat, although they are not listed in the Convention.” He points to several endangered or threatened species — the Sichuan rat snake (Euprepiophis perlacea), Moellendorff’s trinket snake (Orthriophis moellendorfi) and Truong Son pit viper (Viridovipera truongsonensis) — as heavily traded examples.

And then there are the species that aren’t endangered, like the puff-faced water snake (Homalopsis buccata) of Southeast Asia, which is also heavily traded. “Between 2010-2018, 3.1 million skins and 32,000-plus live snakes were reported as imported into the EU,” says Willow Outhwaite, a program officer for TRAFFIC. This data is in the CITES trade database, but the species itself isn’t regulated by CITES, so it wasn’t included in the current study.

An illegally trafficked king cobra recovered in Los Angeles. Photo: USFWS (public domain)

Then, in keeping with the paper’s main theme, there’s a human-health angle. The World Health Organization lists about 200 snake species as “medicinally important,” either because they can harm or kill people or because they can be used for antivenom production. Only 18 of those are regulated by CITES, Hierink says. “This leaves many dangerous snake species for which we have no idea on the extent of their trade.”

Complex Data

The data from the CITES database also differ widely from the information collected by importing and exporting countries, each of which have different rules, standards and data-collection methods.

“For example,” the paper recounts, “we found that in one case, the exporter reported 18 snake leather items, whereas the importer reported 36 snake leather items.” This discrepancy, the researchers wrote, could come if one country counted a pair of shoes as one item, while the other counted each shoe.

That difference in methodology is more common than you’d think.

“As soon as you start delving into CITES trade data, you start finding discrepancies over the figures exporters give and those given by importers,” says Thomas. “Often there’s perfectly plausible explanations as to why, but there are huge strides that could and should be taken to improve the accuracy and comparability of CITES trade data. One of the simplest would be to ensure the same units are used.” Exporters, he says, sometimes report the quantity of animals in a shipment, only to have importers track shipments by weight.

Technology — or lack of it — is also an issue, Thomas says. “It seems astonishing in this day and age that it took until earlier this year for a CITES Party — Sri Lanka — to become the first to introduce electronic permitting. Not only would universal use of such systems enhance reporting enormously, they also have the potential to help detect and curb permitting fraud and corruption.”

Despite the data’s limitations, both Hierink and Thomas encouraged other researchers to take additional deep dives into the CITES database to get a better picture of wildlife trade.

More Bites in a Pandemic World

Although the paper covers all CITES-listed snakes, the impetus behind it was needing to understand the global shipping of venomous snakes. Research it cites found that snake bites, though still relatively rare, have increased in recent years, possibly due to internet sales easing the barriers to snake ownership.

Beyond the primary venomous threat, the paper mentions, but doesn’t really get into, the risk some snakes pose as invasive species — Burmese pythons released in Florida have devastated native species, for example.

invasive python — USDA researchers train biologists to track and trap invasive Burmese pythons. Photo: Eric Tillman/USDA (public domain)

It similarly only briefly addresses how snakes can spread disease, such as the virus that causes a particularly nasty condition in pythons and boas called inclusion body disease. Pet snakes have been shown to transmit this virus to wild populations.

That element of the trade seems more relevant in our coronavirus world.

“Wildlife trade got a whole new meaning after the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic,” acknowledges Hierink. Their paper was submitted prior to the outbreak.

“An interesting angle for future research could be to analyze the global trade of mammal species that have the potential to harbor a high proportion of zoonotic viruses,” she suggests.

But the paper still illustrates both threats and opportunities. “Since our world is getting more and more connected, borders do not protect us from the introduction of public health and conservation risks that are not native to our countries,” she says.

She adds that stricter monitoring and data analysis — like that conducted for this paper — could help the planet to better anticipate and identify disease risks posed by the wildlife trade.

“The devil is in the detail,” says Thomas. “The more you can delve down into solid data to find out what’s really going on, the more you’ll be able to understand where things are going wrong. Knowledge is power.”

Should Environmentalists Embrace Universal Basic Income?

Cash payments from the government could help ease the transition to a climate-safe economy and weather the natural and economic storms to come.

If you had an extra $1,000 a month, what would you do?

It’s a question a lot of Americans started pondering after entrepreneur Andrew Yang proposed just that when he jumped into the 2020 presidential race.

Yang’s idea of a “freedom dividend” — a payment of $1,000 a month for all U.S. adults — lasted about as long as his candidacy. But the idea of a universal basic income (UBI), as it’s commonly called, is neither radical nor new. The principles behind the idea — periodic cash payments, with no strings attached — date back at least as far as Thomas Paine in the late 1700s and have been promoted by civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr.

Over the past 40 years, dozens of universal basic income programs have been tested across the world, in countries like Finland, Namibia, Brazil, India, Canada and Spain. Currently small pilot projects are running in the United States in Stockton, California and Jackson, Mississippi.

The motivations behind universal income programs vary, but broadly they aim to help ensure that everyone has a decent standard of living.

Yang predicted his program could ease the economic strain from the increasing automation of jobs that’s putting Americans out of work. Over the years other experts and politicians have espoused UBI as a way to address economic inequities and the growing wealth chasm. Most recently calls for a universal basic income have increased as a way of mitigating the effects of surging unemployment spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yang standing at podium — Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang helped popularize universal basic income. Photo: Marc Nozell, (CC BY 2.0)

But could it also be a useful tool for addressing another, larger problem? That is, climate change and related efforts to transition to a clean economy?

The Green New Deal, for example, proposes a just transition from a fossil fuel economy and a set of social programs to equitably support that transition.

Could universal basic income help grease those wheels? And if so, why aren’t more environmentalists backing UBI initiatives?

The Philosophy

A lot of people balk at the idea of giving out money for nothing. But Jim Pugh, cofounder of the Universal Income Project, an organization established to raise awareness about UBI, says it isn’t like other social-welfare programs, which base their determinations on a person’s perceived or deserved need.

“When you hear a politician say that no one who works full time should live in poverty, the unspoken statement is that if you don’t work full time, it’s OK you live in poverty,” he says. “What we’re trying to push is the idea that in a country with as much wealth as the United States has, no one should live in poverty.”

Proponents say the benefits of UBI are far reaching, and that a stable source of income could help lift folks out of poverty; allow people to better balance responsibilities like caring for family members or pursuing a degree; encourage personal freedom; provide security for the self-employed; and simply allow people to work less.

Studies analyzing pilot projects have shown that people “overwhelmingly spend [the money] on what they need,” says Pugh. “They may buy food, pay down debt or pursue some sort of education to be able to position themselves for a better career.”

Potential Benefits

How would UBI benefit the environment? There are many theories.

More income, some experts say, could help people purchase longer-lasting and eco-friendly goods, including sustainably produced foods, that are now financially out of their reach.

It could also free people from undesirable jobs in polluting industries or ones that involve long, smog-inducing car commutes, says Pugh.

And it could give people the resources to increase the energy efficiency of their homes or purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles.

“I think it’s incredibly hard to quantify, but if you actually can give people the financial freedom to have more options generally, then I think that there is, at the very least, the opportunity that you could get people to make more environmentally responsible choices,” he says.

One bit of recent evidence could support that. An anti-poverty program in Indonesia that provided cash payments to the poor resulted in a 30% drop in deforestation. Many people no longer had to resort to cutting down the forests around their communities to get by. And what surprised researchers the most was that “the drop in deforestation seen in Indonesia was about the same as those achieved by policies in other countries designed specifically for conservation,” explained a story about the program in E&E News.

large-scale street poster — Basic income street art. Photo: Michael von der Lohe, (CC BY 2.0)

On the Flip Side

One potential negative environmental consequence of UBI is that more income means more consumption, which in turns means more greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have found that the environmental ills rise with per capita income.

“If a UBI is implemented without any consideration of the environmental impacts caused by a surge in consumption from a sudden increase in aggregate demand, it is highly likely that environmental problems will worsen and that — without an innovative regulatory regime that protects critical ecological systems and promotes disruptive technological change — these may not decline over time,” wrote researchers in a 2019 study in MDPI led by Ralph Hall of Virginia Tech.

And then there’s the potential for using UBI to incentivize extractive industries, as we’ve seen from a large-scale U.S. program that’s been underway for decades. The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend provides residents with an annual cut of investments from the state’s oil revenue. In the past decade the payments have ranged between about $1,000 to $2,000 a year.

A Lack of Data

But when it comes to understanding whether UBI would, indeed, be good — or bad — for the environment, there’s not much concrete data yet.

While more than 1,000 studies have tracked various economic and social metrics of UBI, very few — less than 1%, in fact — have looked at environmental indicators, according to a study led by social scientists Timothy MacNeill and Amber Vibert of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

That’s likely because of the size of projects, the researchers surmise. “Since pilots tend to be very small and, by design, restricted to only some impoverished members of society, their overall environmental impact is difficult or impossible to measure,” they write.

Influencing Green Policy

There are still questions to be answered, but many have posited that basic income programs could be a necessary bedrock as we look ahead to the climate reckoning on our horizon.

UBI could play a particularly important role when it comes to threats from climate-amplified natural disasters, as reporter Sarah Lazare wrote for In These Times: “A guaranteed universal income would provide the means to survive droughts, floods and superstorms to the people most directly affected, in [the United States] where 11.1% of people are food insecure and 40% can’t afford a $400 emergency.”

And as we look to transition to a cleaner and more just economy, UBI could be a complement to the proposed Green New Deal. Overhauling the economy isn’t likely to be a seamless process. While new jobs will be created with the transition, some people may not be able to be retrained quickly enough to take advantage of those positions, and others may simply not be able to do the new work.

“If the radical changes of the Green New Deal aren’t supposed to punish workers in the current fossil-fuel dependent economy, giving these people, who most likely will lose their jobs, a guaranteed alternative would create support for the transition and make sure that those most vulnerable to the proposed changes don’t get left behind,” wrote political theorist Fabian Schuppert of Queen’s University Belfast in the Conversation.

And while all of this may sound good in theory, green groups aren’t doing much cheerleading for UBI programs.

Pugh says that’s likely because of political factors.

Many of the programs in the Green New Deal have public support, but politicians/organizers supporting the effort are still trying to amass widespread political backing. And until very recently UBI was relatively unknown and warily regarded. Adding UBI to the Green New Deal was likely deemed too risky, Pugh theorizes.

“I think that there definitely are political considerations and people have been fearful that including a basic income would make that push [for a Green New Deal] harder,” says Pugh.

Still, he hopes UBI could be part of long-term, broader discussions about Green New Deal proposals in the future.

“I think if you look at what’s actually going to transform our society into one where we have not just environmental justice, but also all the other forms of justice as well — racial, economic, social — then it does seem very, very natural to have UBI be part of it,” he says. “But that’s so far removed from day-to-day politics. I think it’s often tough to create the spaces to have those conversations.”

Hawaii’s Invasive Predator Catastrophe

Endangered seabirds can recover, but only if we control feral cats and other non-native predators, new research finds.

It takes a lot of effort and more than a little bit of luck for researchers like André Raine to get to the remote mountaintops of Kauai, where they’re working to save endangered Hawaiian seabirds from extinction.

First you need a helicopter capable of reaching sites more than 4,600 feet above sea level.

Then you need exactly the right weather to fly — and the hope that conditions don’t shift, as they frequently do.

“The weather’s not that great,” says Raine, the project coordinator for the Kaua’i Endangered Seabird Recovery Project. “We keep going and hanging out at the helipad, waiting and watching. And then it looks like it’s going to be okay but it gets fogged in, or you get up there and then you get stuck. The joys of working in a remote, inaccessible area.”

The seabirds — including Newell’s shearwaters (Puffinus newelli) and Hawaiian petrels (Pterodroma sandwichensis) — obviously have a much easier time getting up the tops of these mountains.

Andre Raine — Raine holding a Hawaiian petrel chick. Courtesy Kaua’i Endangered Seabird Recovery Project

So, unfortunately, do several species of invasive predators — including feral cats, black rats and feral pigs — that have put these ground-nesting birds, and so many other native Hawaiian species, on the fast track toward extinction.

“People are always really surprised by this,” Raine says, “but it doesn’t matter how remote the area, or how apparently inhospitable it is to predators like cats. You’re going to find cats and rats and pigs in these areas. There wasn’t a single site that we work in that doesn’t have all these predators, busy eating the birds.”

Like many island endemics, Hawaii’s bird species grew up without mammalian predators, so they’re ill-adapted to the teeth and claws that arrived with human society. The cats descended from housecats, while pigs escape from agricultural sites and rats descended from stowaways on ships.

That’s why the Kaua’i Endangered Seabird Recovery Project has spent the past nine years constructing fences and establishing other predator controls — work that is proving essential in giving these native birds a chance.

The first step in controlling predators is quantifying the threat.

According to a paper Raine and his colleagues published earlier this year in The Journal of Wildlife Management, introduced predators killed at least 309 endangered seabirds at six monitored breeding colonies between 2011 and 2017. That’s quite a blow for each of these endangered species.

“Newell’s shearwaters and Hawaiian petrels have suffered catastrophic declines over the last few decades,” Raine says. “Any chick that’s lost in the population is one that we can’t afford to lose.”

The researchers took on the sad task of collecting the dead and examining the wound patterns to determine which type of predator made the kill.

Rats, it turned out, killed the most — more than 50% of mortalities — usually from entering the birds’ rocky burrows and eating eggs and chicks. That dramatically slows recovery efforts, but the research shows that adult birds who’ve lost their chicks returned to the same burrows the following year to try again.

Pigs kill fewer birds — about 10% of all tracked mortalities — but they were the most destructive, digging up and taking out entire nests. “It’s literally like someone’s taken a hand grenade and stuffed it down the burrow and blown it up,” Raine says. “They just eat whatever’s inside.”

Cats were responsible for another 35% of known deaths, and Raine says the research shows those mortalities were the worst for the long-term health of the bird species. Cats target breeding birds, taking out not just the current generation but any hope of successive generations. The seabirds are very faithful to both their burrow sites and their mates, so if a cat takes out one parent the other might not breed again for several years, if at all. (Without predation, the researchers say an amazing 98.6% percent of breeding pairs matched up again and bred each year of the study.)

And while cats in general are the most destructive, some individual cats are downright scary.

“Every now and then, you get a sort of super cat, which is really good at finding burrows and killing the birds,” he says.

In one incident recounted in the paper, the seabird recovery team found images of a cat taken by nine out of 30 remote cameras on the same day. Each camera was trained at a different seabird burrow — which provided ready meals for the feral feline.

“It just shows that all you need is for a cat to get into an area for a very short period,” Raine says. “When the birds are sitting in a hole in the ground, they’re entirely vulnerable to predation. The cat can very easily wipe out a huge number of birds.”

Raine describes another incident as “quite horrific to watch.” It took place at a remote site the team can only visit about once a month during breeding season, “because it’s expensive and hard to get to,” he says. They arrived one day to review the site’s automatic cameras and the images revealed “this one cat just wreaking havoc across the site. It goes in and kills an adult Newell’s shearwater, and they next thing you know it’s emerging from the same burrow with four kittens. So it uses that burrow to raise the kittens, and then we get it on camera at another burrow with the kittens, basically training them how to kill more shearwaters.”

That’s a tough thing to see — especially when these researchers have followed the comings and goings at these burrows for years.

“You start to really empathize with these birds, because you’re watching them on the burrow cameras and you’re seeing all these amazing behaviors,” Raine says. “And we’re tracking them as well. We’re seeing that they make these incredible journeys to feed their chicks. Hawaiian petrels go towards the coast of Alaska, 11-14,000 kilometers on a feeding voyage, and then you go to the site and you find this bird that’s just been shredded by an introduced predator and the chicks left to starve to death. It’s quite hard to deal with.”

But as difficult and dangerous as these predators can be, the research also shows that the situation is far from hopeless.

Fence Me In

Over the past decade, the Kaua’i Endangered Seabird Recovery Project and its many organizational partners have concentrated on establishing predator controls at six of their seven regularly monitored seabird breeding sites.

Again, this isn’t easy to accomplish in these remote, rarely visited locations. Materials must be flown in, ungulate-proof fences built, other traps set, and pig-hunting expeditions organized. All of it must be accomplished and maintained in precarious territory full of wet vegetation, narrow ridgelines and steep canyon walls.

To make things even more difficult, the human visitors must leave the habitat as undisturbed as possible.

“If you start making trails in these areas, then you’re basically just opening them up to the hordes of predators that are out there,” Raine says.

But the hard work pays off.

According to the paper, fences and other controls not only keep the invasive predators out, they give the birds the opportunity to thrive.

The research team used seven years data from the six sites, from before and after predator controls were established, and projected striking results for the future of the two seabird species.

The first model looked at what would happen to each site without predator controls. It was a disaster — mostly due to cats. “We ran that for 50 years, and we found that all of the colonies dwindle toward extinction.”

The paper, in what Raine acknowledges as gallows humor, calls this the CATastrophe model.

The second modeling approach incorporated data from successful breeding that took place after more extensive predator controls (fences and traps) were put in place. “We found that the populations increased over those 50 years,” Raine says. Under the model, which was based on 2017 population growth rates at sites with predator controls, most sites would see a 50-60% increase over the 50-year projection, while one site more than doubled.

“It really does show that if you remove the predators, the birds will begin to recover.”

This isn’t the be all and end all. Hawaiian seabirds face a laundry list of additional threats, including climate change, collisions with power lines, reduced fish populations at sea, and invasive plants that change forest compositions. The models don’t address those threats, which also require mitigation.

There’s also another introduced predator: barn owls. Hawaii introduced barn owls in the 1960s to control rats, but — as we’ve seen in so many other similar examples — they quickly became a new problem. Owls only killed 12 seabirds during the study, but Raine says these newest invaders pose an increasing threat that’s proven harder to control. You can build fences to protect birds, after all, but you can’t prevent other birds from flying over those protections.

But this research does prove that current management techniques to protect Hawaiian seabirds from their most pressing threats — cats, rats and pigs — really do work, and that they can be applied to more locations, even by private landowners who have birds on their properties. “Although we’ve got seven managed sites, there are other sites on the island where the birds are still hanging on, and there’s no reason to expect that these techniques wouldn’t be effective at other colonies.”

That’s important, because some of those additional sites are on the edge.

“We’re finding that these other sites are just going silent,” Raine says. “With no management on them, the birds just flit away.” The paper recommends predator-proof fences at all sites, as well as dedicated year-round funding for both seabird monitoring efforts and predator-control operations designed to specifically target the composition of animals at each location. The authors also suggest additional port biosecurity to prevent more invasive species from arriving, and possibly the targeted use of landscape-level toxicants to remove rats and cats.

In addition, Raine says, these techniques can be applied to other species and other island locations where invasive predators threaten ground-nesting birds.

Perhaps most importantly, the research helps show these conservationists — whose work has continued as “essential” during the pandemic — that their efforts to fight extinction in these challenging, hard-to-reach habitats are paying off.

“I remember one of our sites in particular — in fact the one I was trying to get into today — the first time I went there I found within a five-foot area a burrow that had been predated by a cat, a dead chick that had been pulled out by a rat, and a burrow that had been destroyed by a pig,” Raine recounts. “Now you can go a month without even seeing predators at some of these sites because of the great work that the controllers’ crews are doing.”

And this raises one more issue: this work isn’t just about birds. It may help heal Hawaii — the extinction capital of the world — in the process.

“I think it’s really important that people understand the critical importance of seabirds as the architects of the island itself,” Raine says. “They bring all those ocean nutrients up into the mountains, and their partly responsible for the watersheds that we all rely on. It’s a whole ecosystem that needs to be addressed.”

Previously in The Revelator:

The Call of the Wild: Using Sound to Help Imperiled Species and Ecosystems

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

Two recent studies find different factors increasing wildfire risk across California and the Pacific Northwest, but the solutions in each location are similar.

Exploding saguaros in Arizona have signaled an ominous start to wildfire season. The Big Horn Fire outside of Tucson — just one of dozens of blazes underway across western states — has grown to more than 52,000 acres and may have killed at least 2,000 slow-growing saguaros, which usually don’t burn.

Western states have seen an increase in large fires in recent years, sometimes with devastating losses of human life and massive economic damages.

While there are numerous factors that can lead to increased wildfire risk, a growing body of scientific evidence finds that climate change is a wildfire “threat multiplier,” amplifying both natural and human risk factors.

But how climate will influence western communities and ecosystems varies considerably. Two recent studies in California and the Pacific Northwest help to bring some of this into better focus.

California’s Windy Problem

Climate change is already making the conditions in California that fuel wildfires even worse, according to a recent study published in Environmental Research Letters and led by Stanford University scientist Michael Goss and six other researchers.

They found that since the 1980s autumn temperatures have increased by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, while precipitation fell by 30%. The combination has meant a doubling in the number of days with extreme fire weather conditions in the fall.

Stretching the fire season into the later months of fall is especially dangerous because grasslands and forests are tinder dry at that time of year, and strong seasonal winds kick up — known as “Diablo” in Northern California and “Santa Ana” in Southern California.

Autumn wind-driven wildfires in the state in 2017 and 2018 caused the most deadly and destructive wildfires in its history, with 150 lives lost, 30,000 structures burned, and estimated economic losses topping $40 billion.

Worse still, researchers have found that both the north and south parts of the state are likely to face these threats at the same time, as occurred in November 2018 when the Camp Fire ripped through Paradise in the Northern California Sierra foothills and the Woolsey Fire erupted outside Los Angeles. That means the state could find itself short on necessary resources to combat large blazes simultaneously.

A satellite image of the smoke from the wind-driven Camp Fire in 2018. Photo: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC

The Wet Pacific Northwest

Fire regimes are changing in the Pacific Northwest, too, although seasonal winds aren’t the biggest factor there.

Washington saw its largest wildfire in 2014, Oregon in 2017. In 2015 the temperate rainforest of the Olympic peninsula had a rare wildfire. And in another unlikely occurrence, an area of southwestern Washington burned three times between 2008 and 2015.

What does the future hold for the region?

A study in Fire Ecology, by Jessica E. Halofsky of the U.S. Forest Service and David L. Peterson and Brian J. Harvey of the University of Washington, looked at how climate change will affect wildfires across the Pacific Northwest states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana.

While the researchers conclude that climate change will increase fire risk across the region, it won’t happen uniformly. The biggest determinant has to do with ecology.

Areas likely to fare best contain moist, coniferous forests dominated by Douglas fir and western hemlocks, such as those found on the western side of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington. Fire frequency there could increase some, but the fires aren’t likely to grow in size.

The next best-positioned sites are high-elevation forests, such as those dominated by mountain hemlock and lodgepole pine, which are likely to see an increase in frequency and a slight increase in severity.

The greatest increase in the risk of larger and more frequent fires will be in low-elevation ponderosa forests found on the east side of the Cascades, the researchers found. This could mean increased fire risk in tens of thousands of miles of biodiversity-rich locations.

black smoke — A single-engine tanker makes a water drop on a wildfire in central Washington as firefighters from numerous agencies watch and fight the blaze in 2018. Photo: Nick Pieper, BLM

Taking Action

Since a key factor in driving larger and more severe fires is climate change, action is needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. If we don’t, the authors of the California-based study warn, we can expect conditions to get much worse.

“Our climate model analyses suggest that continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century,” they wrote. But action to curb climate change consistent with the U.N. Paris commitments “would substantially curb that increase.”

And while the long-term plan should involve reducing greenhouse gases, other short-term options they cite that can help include “the use of prescribed burning to reduce fuel loads and improve ecosystem health, upgrades to emergency communications and response systems, community-level development of protective fire breaks and defensible space, and the adoption of new zoning rules and building codes to promote fire-resilient construction.”

The Pacific Northwest study authors also point to efforts to control invasive species that can increase fire danger. They suggest working collaboratively among land-management agencies, rural communities, private landowners, tribes and conservation groups.

There are a number of variables that will affect wildfire risk in these and other regions, including how vegetation may change over the years because of wildfires. And, of course, it will depend on what we humans do (or don’t) to change land-management policy, reduce ignitions and curb development in fire-prone areas.

But, they write, if we’re serious about reducing the risk of wildfires in our future, “Scientists and managers can work together to implement an adaptive management framework and ensure that the best available science is used to inform management actions on the ground.”

We’ll still need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, too.

Researchers Call for Rare Tree’s Conservation — Decades After Its Declared Extinction

Mistakenly presumed extinct for 22 years, the rare Wendlandia angustifolia tree now has an opportunity for priority preservation.

An extinct tree grows in India’s Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve.

Well, it’s not exactly extinct. But the small, flowering tree species, known only as Wendlandia angustifolia, has had a long history of going unnoticed.

Scientists collected the first specimen of the plant in 1867, then didn’t observe it again until 1917. After that no one officially saw it for another 81 years — possibly because the initial descriptions had placed it in the wrong location. But the observation in 1998 wasn’t published in the scientific literature until 2000 — two years after other scientists declared the long-unseen species to be extinct. It’s been listed that way on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species ever since.

In part that error has persisted for 22 years because rare plants don’t get much conservation attention or funding compared to charismatic megafauna like the reserve’s titular tigers. And because of that, no one took the effort to assess the potential conservation needs of the rediscovered species.

Meanwhile occasional sightings of the plant continued, including a fortuitous specimen collection in 2011 by Ladan Rasingam of the Botanical Survey of India. But the species’ categorization remained unchanged.

Recently, though, researcher Chellam Muthumperumal proposed a project to assess rare plants in Western Ghats. In response Rasingam suggested he look for Wendlandia angustifolia and finally determine its conservation status.

And now, 138 years after the species was first described, we finally know how many Wendlandia angustifoliaI exist in the world, how they’re doing, and whether they’re in need of protection.

The results, published recently in the Journal of Threatened Taxa, suggest we should have gone looking a lot earlier.

Muthumperumal and his colleagues found just 1,091 individual trees growing along seven gently flowing, rocky streams in the tiger reserve. That may seem like a decent number, but the majority — 862 trees — were seedlings and saplings, each under three feet high with trunks less than four inches in circumference. Only 54 trees were large enough to be considered “established individuals.”

While a few of those mature trees reached about 20 feet in height, most exhibited stunted growth. Some weren’t much taller than the saplings — likely a side effect of the region’s seasonal floods and droughts.

Despite their “dwarf” status, the mature trees seemed healthy.

“They are mature enough to produce flowers and fruits even in the dwarf condition,” Muthumperumal says. That probably explains why there were so many young trees nearby. But the floods and drought may prevent many of those young trees from growing up enough to also reproduce and help keep the species going. Disturbance by tourists visiting the reserve could also play a role, he notes.

As a result of the small population, low level of mature trees, and the continued threat from flooding and drought, Muthumperumal — who now hopes to assess more of India’s rare plants — says he and his colleagues are preparing a note to the IUCN to finally change the species’ status from “extinct” to “endangered.”

That, in turn, could inspire new conservation efforts to preserve this rarely seen tree. The paper mentions the importance of additional searches to see if the tree exists in other parts of the reserve, regular monitoring, and “an immense need to implement a restoration program to conserve this narrow endemic tree species.”

We hope that won’t take another 22 years.

Sink or Swim: Miami’s Perilous Future Facing Climate Change

Miami is on the front lines of the U.S. climate crisis. Journalist Mario Alejandro Ariza’s new book takes a critical look at the larger lessons for all of our hometowns.

With its white-sand beaches and glittery high-rises, Miami is still a vacation hotspot. But lapping at those shores is another reality. The city is also a “possible future Atlantis, and a metonymic stand-in for how the rest of the developed world might fail — or succeed — in the climate-changed future,” writes Miami journalist Mario Alejandro Ariza in his forthcoming book, Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe.

This may not be news to some. The city’s plight has been the subject of investigative reporting and even viral news stories after an octopus showed up in a parking garage following an especially high tide.

But Ariza takes a much deeper, more personal dive into the slowly unfolding disaster. Along the way he finds that the central question is whether South Florida — home to 6.5 million people — can equitably withstand what’s coming. To do so it will need to reckon with its past sins. “Miami is a damn beautiful city, and it rests on a sodden foundation of merciless racial and environmental exploitation,” he writes.

The first step is figuring out how much sea-level rise there may be and when it’s coming — but even that isn’t easy, and there’s no one definitive number. The regional climate change compact predicts two to six feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century; a NASA scientist has said eight to 10 feet.

One thing is certain, though: 20% of Miami-Dade County sits less than two feet above the sea. And by some estimates, the water could get that high in just 40 years.

The time to determine what future Miami may have is now.

After detailing that grim if uncertain reality, Ariza takes a detailed journey through South Florida’s vulnerabilities, what actions the region is taking, and those it isn’t. The first-person narrative follows Ariza through smelly, flooded city streets; a rigorous paddle to assess the risks to local infrastructure by kayak; and a day traipsing through thick swamps with two veterans to capture invasive Burmese pythons slithering amok.

This drives home a few points: South Florida’s environmental problems aren’t limited to sea-level rise — although the rising water could make much of it worse.

The draining of swamps, altering of water courses and brazen development have taken a mighty ecological toll. The Everglades are dying, and restoration efforts are painfully slow. The Miami River is choked by nutrient pollution — from leaking septic systems and fertilizer runoff — that’s killing seagrasses, a keystone species of shallow marine ecosystems, and an important buffer against storms.

Environmental collapse is just part of the problem, though. There’s also economic distress.

“If you expect to survive into the middle of the 21st century, you might just get to watch Miami die,” Ariza writes. “But not before the changing climate stretches the city’s already yawning gap between rich and poor past its breaking point.”

Miami-Dade is a majority-minority county with half its residents foreign-born. It also has an enormous wealth gap, with 6 in 10 residents spending more than one-third of their income on housing. And most of those who are struggling to make ends meet are black and Hispanic service-sector workers, Ariza explains.

It’s precisely those communities with the fewest resources that will be hardest hit by stronger storms, hotter temperatures and rising tides. These inequities “are as dangerous as the city’s low-lying topography and porous geology,” he writes.

Already a kind of climate gentrification is underway.

Flooded street — Flooding in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood in 2017. Photo: Phillip Pessar, (CC BY 2.0)

Ariza explains how decades of racist policies and real-estate practices have pushed communities of color away from the beach and the newly emerging suburbs. They ended up sandwiched in between, in an area of high ground that now looks enticing to developers.

This new pressure is increasing gentrification in communities already barely surviving. It’s liable to get worse, too, Ariza explains. Between $15-$23 billion worth of property may be underwater in 30 years. The market has yet to broadly reflect that, but developers are building on borrowed time, even as the lower-income communities are already feeling the pinch.

“Everything we know about climate change indicates that it pulls at society’s loose ends,” says Ariza. These cracks in vulnerability could become chasms if the right policies aren’t enacted as the city works to mitigate and adapt.

By the end of Disposable City, it’s likely readers won’t be wildly optimistic about Miami’s chances. But they will be armed with a deeper view of what’s at stake and the complexities of trying to solve an environmental and social challenge of this magnitude. Even if the city itself does everything right, it still needs the state of Florida to embrace climate reality and the rest of the world to meet science-based targets for greenhouse gas reductions. Efforts are underway, including a newly released draft plan from the Army Corps of Engineers to spend $4.6 billion on sea walls and other projects to protect businesses and homes from storm surges. But much more will be needed.

In Miami these next decades will be fight or flight. Or a combination of both. And he muses on what that would look like. And feel like. Ariza himself is an immigrant, having come to Miami from the Dominican Republic as a kid. He already carries the grief of having left a homeland — a feeling that half the city’s population also knows intimately.

“Now we have to face the fact that climate change may well force us to scatter again,” he writes.

The end of the book turns from this hard reality to a future vision as Ariza shifts to a fictional envisioning. No spoilers, but it’s safe to say Miami in 2100 will be a changed place. And that’s at least one thing we know for sure about this warming world — it is a changing one.

Ariza’s deep dive into Miami is an intricate look at his vulnerable city, but it’s likely to get readers thinking about their own. What will your hometown look like in 80 years? What do you want it to look like? What will you do to make that hope a reality?

An ‘Extinction Hotspot’ in Appalachia

The discovery of a lost plant species highlights the need to protect other endangered species in one of the most biodiverse regions in the United States.

Botanist Wesley Knapp has a reputation for finding lost plants.

In 2016 Knapp’s rediscovery of a rare Maryland flower called Solidago rupestris — last seen more than 100 years ago — resulted in headlines calling him “the Indiana Jones of botany.”

Now Knapp has contributed to a new discovery — the identity of a plant species that’s been hiding under experts’ eyes and noses for decades.

It’s probably been extinct for much of that time.

The lost plant, a three-foot-tall daisy called Marshallia grandiflora, grew in just two western North Carolina counties and hasn’t been officially seen since 1919, according to a paper published this month in the journal Phytotaxa.

Knapp says people have looked for this plant for years with no luck, and it’s something that would have been fairly easy to find at the right time of year. Grandiflora was (as you might guess from the name) “a showy plant, so it’s not the kind of thing that most botanists would pass by when it was in flower,” he says.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not out there,” he’s quick to add. “The phrase I like to use is ‘presumably extinct.’ I hope we’re wrong. I hope somebody goes out and finds it, because it will immediately become a conservation priority.”

In fact, Knapp and his coauthors say, the entire region may also need additional conservation attention. The paper calls Henderson and Polk counties, home to the presumably extinct M. grandiflora, “a previously unrecognized extinction hotspot” because two other plant species from the same region — Narthecium montanum and Orbexilum macrophyllum — have also gone extinct. The counties, Knapp says, have seen a lot of habitat degradation from agriculture and residential development, so there’s not a lot of room left for lost plants to hide.

A New Identity, an Opportunity to Protect

Knapp and his coauthors — Derick Poindexter and Alan Weakley of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — say this species eluded scientific description for so long because it had been incorrectly lumped in with a more widely ranging Marshallia species, commonly known as large-flowered Barbara’s buttons, which they’ve now renamed M. pulchra.

With too few botanists historically working to resolve confusing plant taxonomy, no one had ever noticed that the two species had noticeable differences in size and shape until Knapp commented that museum specimens of plants collected in North Carolina looked quite a bit larger than plants he’d seen in the field in other states.

The wider-ranging species has, for several years, been under review for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act, and is already listed as endangered on the state level in Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. With the North Carolina plants now considered their own species, the authors say the renamed M. pulchra may have an even smaller population than previously realized and require conservation. They recommend it be placed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as “vulnerable to extinction.”

They also recommend a third Marshallia species, M. legrandii, be listed as critically endangered. It’s known from just two sites in North Carolina and Virginia, with a total habitat under 4 square miles.

Although scientists are always cautious about declaring a species extinct, Weakley, the director of the UNC-CH Herbarium, calls the probable loss of M. grandiflora “a sad, likely truth. The chance to find it again seems low, maybe very low.”

But he also calls it “a kick in the pants — you know, a motivation.” He says North Carolina and the rest of the American Southeast remain rich in biodiversity, much of which is still being identified and named — even while the threats to these species increase.

“We’re behind the curve,” he says. “We still have a lot of novelties that are being discovered. Almost 500 vascular plant species, flowering plants, have been named in the southeastern United States over the last 50 years. That’s almost 10% of the flora, and most of those are specialized species in limited habitats.”

That makes them in need of greater attention. “A lot of these new species are super, super rare,” he says. “They’re actually more deserving of federal endangered status than many of the species that are actually on the list. And yet because of how broken the federal listing process is, they don’t get listed. I think we just need to document all of these species — the ones that haven’t been described and the populations of the ones that have been described — and really make the case for appropriate conservation and legal listing status for them.”

That could be easier said than done.

“The job has become increasingly difficult,” says Poindexter. “The plants that we’re working on are often cryptic, local endemics. The larger, more charismatic plants have already been done as low-hanging fruit. We’re dealing with the really hard questions now.”

Answering those questions about which species to protect might start with additional searches for M. grandiflora or protecting what little of its historic range remains.

“Let’s go look at any remaining habitat that we think might be there,” Weakley says. “Let’s try to identify that habitat, let’s survey it. And let’s use this as a reminder that we’re letting species go extinct on our watch. Let’s do our damnedest to prevent that from happening.”

16 Essential Books About Environmental Justice, Racism and Activism

These books provide insight into the problems that plague people and the planet, while also offering solutions for a more just future.

This year has brought us some brutal lessons so far, chief among them the fact that systemic racism drives or amplifies nearly all our societal and environmental ills.

Now is the time to listen to the people affected most by those problems of environmental justice and racism — and the activists working to solve them.

Here’s a good place to start: We’ve gathered 16 essential recent books on environmental racism and related topics from leading journalists and experts. Two of these are hot off the presses and scheduled to hit shelves this month, while the rest were pulled from previous “Revelator Reads” installments. All provide vital insight into the problems that plague people and the planet, while also offering solutions for a more just future.

Since we’re still in the middle of a pandemic — another problem made worse by racial injustice — it obviously remains challenging to visit local bookstores and libraries, so these links all go to publishers’ sites, where you can order hard copies or e-books. You can also find enough information to order any of these books from local stores, which may offer delivery or curbside pickup.

This list is hardly exhaustive and pulls mostly from books published over the past two years, and it weighs a bit heavily on Indigenous authors and protests like Standing Rock. So please feel free to recommend any insightful books we missed.

Engage, Connect, Protect: Empowering Diverse Youth as Environmental Leaders by Angelou Ezeilo

The founder of the Greening Youth Foundation provides a critique of the too-white environmental movement and a toolkit for engaging younger participants from African American, Latinx and Native American communities.

As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

The history of Indigenous resistance may offer all of us the strength we need to keep fighting, from the coauthor of “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans.

Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It by Jamie Margolin

An essential book by one of the country’s most engaging youth activists. Margolin, a queer Latinx, cofounded Zero Hour and helped energize 2018’s record-breaking Youth Climate March. Now she shares her experience and expertise — along with that of other young activists — and offers advice on everything from organizing peaceful protests to protecting your mental health in a time of crisis. Greta Thunberg provides the foreword.

Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger by Julie Sze

As we’ve seen many times over the years, activists standing up for environmental justice often face violent reprisal. This academic book examines the what Sze calls the “historical and cultural forces and resistance to violence, death, and destruction of lives and bodies” to reveal guideposts for future (and hopefully safer) action.

Climate Change From the Streets by Michael Méndez

Méndez argues that the climate crisis is also a crisis for public health, especially in lower-income communities of color, and that both problems can only be solved by addressing issues of environmental justice. His book — subtitled “How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement” — taps into Méndez’s own research into California communities and grassroots activism to show how the problems that plague us can also bring us together — but only if we invite everyone to the table.

Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra and Sarah Jaquette Ray

More than a dozen top minds come together to examine thoughts and cultural processes otherwise ignored by the environmental movement.

A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind by Harriet A. Washington

This book will open your eyes, make you angry, and then point you toward solutions for ending the plague of pollution-related health problems in marginalized communities of color.

Full Spectrum Resistance by Aric McBay

This two-volume series provides a powerful primer for activism on social-justice and environmental issues, using examples from more than 50 resistance movements around the world. The first book discusses how to build movements, while the second examines strategies for change.

Indigenous Environmental Justice edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen

When pollution harms your physical, financial and spiritual health, it’s more than an injustice. But that’s what happens time and time again in Indian Country. This book addresses situations ranging from Standing Rock to uranium mining on Navajo and Hopi lands through lenses of colonization, sovereignty and — perhaps most importantly — victory.

Poisoned Water: How the Citizens of Flint, Michigan, Fought for Their Lives and Warned the Nation by Candy J. Cooper with Marc Aronson

We’ve already seen several bestselling and powerful books address the Flint water crisis, but this is the first one specifically written for young-adult readers. When you consider that kids were among the worst affected by the Flint tragedy, that makes this a story they need to read and understand — so they can grow up and help prevent it from happening to anyone else.

Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community From the Mining Industry by Joan Kuyek

Covering everything from how to stop a new mining project to figuring out how to clean up an abandoned mine, this important book offers activists a primer for taking on all manner of extractive industries that can harm human health and the environment.

Whose Water Is It, Anyway? Taking Water Protection Into Public Hands by Maude Barlow

One of the world’s most notable water-justice activists provides a step-by-step guide to help communities keep themselves from going dry due to the actions of irresponsible companies and governments.

Standing With Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon

An essential volume to understand the history and significance of the famous resistance action, combining everything from essays and interviews to poems and photography.

One Earth: People of Color Protecting Our Planet by Anuradha Rao

This book for pre-teen readers delivers 20 short biographies of activists around the world who are working to save everything from trees to dolphins to people. In the process, it hopes to inspire the next generation of activists — especially those who might not have seen themselves represented in the still all-too-white environmental movement.

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman

A how-to guide for ending racism and injustice in our country’s food system, both on farms themselves and in nutrition-starved African American communities. Bonus: The same techniques improve the soil, treat livestock humanely, preserve rare plant varieties and provide benefits for the climate.

Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet by Nina Lakhani

Honduran indigenous leader and activist Berta Cáceres won the prestigious Goldman Prize in 2015 — one year before she was murdered for her work trying to stop a hydroelectric dam from destroying a sacred river. This powerful book tells the story of her life and death, a tragedy echoed in the murders and assaults committed against hundreds of environmental defenders every year.

Permafrost: The Hidden Climate Risk in the Arctic

A warming planet will unleash the carbon and methane locked away in frozen Arctic soils. How bad will it be? Researcher Christina Schädel explains the risk.

Happenings in the Arctic rarely make the news unless — as we saw this May — a heatwave strikes or a wildfire erupts. Both of those increasingly common events remind us that climate change is already transforming the region — and by extension, the rest of the planet.

But there’s another process underway in the Arctic that gets less attention but poses a looming threat: thawing permafrost.

A whopping 25% of the land in the northern hemisphere is underlain by permafrost — land that’s been frozen for at least two consecutive years, although some of it’s been frozen for millennia. Scientists estimate that there’s about twice as much carbon locked away in these frozen soils as is currently contained in the atmosphere.

Our burning of fossil fuels could further warm the Arctic and unleash that stored permafrost carbon — and set the planet on a dangerous course.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the “climate bomb” potential of melting permafrost. Christina Schädel, a biogeochemist at Northern Arizona University, believes it’s an urgent issue. She’s spent the last nine years studying permafrost carbon and its potential to exacerbate climate change.

We talked with Schädel, who also co-leads the Permafrost Collaboration Team of the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee, about the climate risks and whether we’ve passed a key tipping point.

How is the current level of warming affecting permafrost?

We have more than twice as much warming in the Arctic compared to the rest of the globe. And warming air also means warmer soil temperatures, so permafrost warms up as well and then it transitions from frozen to unfrozen. As it thaws, the microbes that live in permafrost wake up. They become active and start decomposing organic material that has been frozen, and that releases additional amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

What does this mean for the climate? Have we passed a tipping point?

This means more greenhouse gases and even more warming. Because the Arctic is already warming more, it creates a feedback loop that gets stronger and stronger. That’s a big issue for the global climate.

It’s something we should be worried about now, because any greenhouse gases that have been released will not go back into permafrost.

But if we stop warming now, we have a chance of keeping some of the permafrost frozen — that is the goal.

How much carbon dioxide could be released?

If current warming continues, an estimated 130-160 billion tons of permafrost carbon could be released into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases during this century. By comparison, it’s less than emissions from burning fossil fuels but similar to what’s expected from deforestation. The important thing to consider is that those emissions from permafrost are on top of human-caused emissions.

When we talk about the available carbon budget that countries can emit before we hit too much warming, we should account for permafrost carbon loss as well because it’s almost like its own country. It has a certain amount of carbon that will also be released and so on a political level, it’s something that should be accounted for, but it isn’t yet.

Are certain areas more vulnerable than others to thawing?

Circular lake — A thermokarst pond created by melting permafrost in the Blackstone Uplands in the North Ogilvie Mountains of the northern Yukon. Photo: Keith Williams, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Yes, one area is the region further south where the permafrost is already warmer. It’s hovering just below the freezing point, so the transition to unfrozen can happen very quickly.

The other areas that are vulnerable are those that have a lot of ice in them. If the ice melts, then you have the disruption of the soil structure. That exposes the soil to much warmer temperatures from the air, and that can enhance microbial decomposition.

So it’s not just the southern edges of permafrost that are vulnerable, it’s also the far North locations. If a wildfire happens, for example, that can cause permafrost to thaw because the insulating layer of mosses will burn away, and then much warmer temperatures will penetrate the soil.

And it’s not just carbon dioxide, but also methane that’s a potential risk, right?

Yes, methane is definitely a concern, too. It’s another greenhouse gas with a higher global warming potential [in the short term] than CO₂.

We have a hard time so far identifying exactly where methane versus carbon dioxide is going to be released, because it depends on the wetness of the soil. Under anaerobic conditions you have methane, and under aerobic conditions you have mostly carbon dioxide. Some permafrost contains a lot of ice. Other profiles contain much less ice. So it’s unclear which areas will become wetter and which ones will become drier, and that will influence the ratio of carbon dioxide to methane that’s released when the permafrost thaws.

What else are researchers still learning about permafrost and climate change, and why does that work matter when the world faces so many other climate threats?

We’d like to get better at identifying carbon stocks — how much carbon there is in the permafrost. We have a pretty good idea, but it’s such a vast area. And then we would really like to improve models that predict permafrost carbon loss and permafrost extent loss.

In addition, better quantifying abrupt versus gradual thaw is considered important and timely. Gradual thaw is mostly a top-down thaw, and abrupt thaw occurs more sporadically in places where ground ice is abundant. When it melts the ground collapses because there is empty space where the ice used to be.

What happens in the Arctic is so important because greenhouse gases mix really well [throughout the atmosphere]. So even if they are released in the far North, they can be measured here in Arizona where I live.

More greenhouse gases being released means more warming. It doesn’t matter where. We all share the same atmosphere.